“In the desert, of course. Near Indio.”
Indio. The snapshot in Casey’s stash: “V. and me, Indio, 7/03.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have the address.”
“I don’t remember the address. I haven’t been there in a dozen years. When I go to the desert, I go to Palm Springs.”
“Could you look it up for me?”
“No, I don’t think so. When he goes there, he doesn’t like to be disturbed.”
“Not even for a real estate deal that involves a lot of money?”
“Not for any reason. Why don’t you talk to someone in his office? All of his people are perfectly competent.”
“I’d rather deal directly with-”
He broke off because he was talking to her back. She was already on her way to the house in long, stiff strides, her hips barely moving inside her white dress as if they, too, had been tightly nipped and tucked.
She must really hate him, he thought. The kind of hate that happens in some marriages when people stay together for the wrong reasons. The kind of hate he was glad Geena had never come to feel for him, or he for her.
The nearest Internet cafe was in a shopping center a few miles away. It might have been quicker to call Will Rodriguez and ask him to run a property search, but Fallon had bothered him enough as it was. It wouldn’t take him too long to do the job himself. Property searches are simple enough because the information is readily available, no fees required.
Indio was in Riverside County, in the desert twenty-some miles east of Palm Springs, but it seemed likely the tax bills for Young’s date ranch would be sent to his primary address. So Fallon did a search of the San Diego County property records, typing Young’s name and the Wildwood Road address into the rented computer.
Right. The ranch’s address was 5900 San Ignacio Road, Indio.
PART VI. INDIO
ONE
THE DISTANCE FROM San Diego to Indio was better than a hundred and sixty miles, a straight-through drive that should have taken no more than two and a half hours. It took Fallon three because he got hung up, as he had coming in, in the damn stop-and-go commute traffic. He was wired up tight, gritty-eyed and functioning on adrenaline and a simmering anger, by the time the Jeep’s GPS took him onto San Ignacio Road.
It was some miles outside of town, in the part of the Coachella Valley that was still primarily agricultural. Indio had once been surrounded by date-palm groves that produced a large percentage of the country’s date crop, but residential and recreational development had gobbled up all but sections on the south and southeast. More desert land forever lost. One day, sure as hell, there wouldn’t be any more of the Old World agricultural staple that had once been the region’s lifeblood. Just as there weren’t any more orange groves in the San Fernando Valley.
Now, though, geometrical rows of date palms still dominated sections of the sandy desert soil, their crowns swaying in a warm evening breeze. He passed several small ranches, then a Spanish adobe ranch store that looked as if it might be a century old, its illuminated sign claiming it was the home of the finest Medjool dates in the Coachella Valley. Darkness had settled when he reached the access lane marked with the number 5900.
The lane was paved, wide near the entrance, then narrowing somewhat as it led in among the close-packed palms. A shallow drainage culvert ran along the left-hand side. Once Fallon made the turn, he could make out a whitish glow beyond where the lane jogged to the left. Lights from the ranch buildings, he thought. But the guess was wrong.
When he cleared the jog, he was looking at a pair of headlights ahead on his left, a high-beam glare that illuminated the trees in the rows nearest the lane.
Automatically he slowed, eased over to the right. But the other car wasn’t moving; it had been drawn up at the edge of the lane where the culvert was. And somebody was in the grove over there-somebody using a not- verypowerful flashlight in erratic, bobbing sweeps that created weird light-and-shadow effects among the tall, straight palm trunks.
The sidespill from the Jeep’s headlamps picked out movement in the grove to Fallon’s right-just a brief, sliding-past impression of a darting shape. A few seconds later, as he neared the parked car, he could see that its right front wheel was on the edge of the culvert, that the driver’s door stood wide open.
He swung the wheel, slewed the Jeep to a stop close to the car’s front bumper. He yanked the keys out of the ignition, unlocked the storage compartment. The Ruger was in there; so was his six-cell flashlight. He hesitated over the weapon, left it where it was, slammed the compartment shut, and flicked on the torch as he jumped out.
Above the lane you could see the starlit sky, but the crouching masses of palm crowns created a solid ceiling; in among the trees, except on the side where the flashlight continued to move in restless arcs, it was pitch-black. A faint breeze rustled and rattled in the fronds, carried the sound of a voice raised high and shrill-a woman’s voice, calling something he couldn’t quite make out.
The other car was a BMW, silver-gray, a twin to the one Vernon Young’s wife drove. Fallon ran around to the open driver’s door, threw light inside front and back. Empty. The keys still dangled from the ignition. On impulse he reached in for them, shoved them into his pocket.
The woman was still calling, louder, the shift and sway of the flash beam coming nearer. Now he could make out what she was shouting.
“Kevin! Where are you?
Casey’s voice.
He aimed his flash, more powerful than hers, toward the sound. The nearby palm boles and the sandy ground around and between them leaped into stark relief. A few seconds later she appeared, running and stumbling in his direction, still crying the boy’s name in a voice that throbbed with the accents of terror.
She saw him, but at first only as an indistinguishable shape behind the six-cell. Now she was saying, as if to a stranger, “Help me, please… my son…” Then her light shifted, came up to wash over and then steady on him. He lowered his so she could see him clearly.
She staggered to a halt; the sharp intake of her breath was audible in the stillness. “Oh my God! Rick! Where’d you come from, how did you-”
“Never mind that now. What’s happened?”
She stood panting, poised as if to turn and run. He fixed her with the six-cell again. Her face was white, her eyes like black holes thumb-punched in powdered dough. “Kevin,” she said then. “He… ran away. He’s out here somewhere, hiding…”
“Why? Why did he run away?”
Mutely she rolled her head from side to side.
“You’re sure he’s out here?”
“Yes! I saw him, that’s why I got out of the car. Oh God, Rick, help me find him! Please!”
Fallon pivoted away from her, ran across to the edge of the grove on the opposite side and back down the road toward where he’d seen the darting shape. Behind him he heard Casey shout, “Not over there, he’s on this side…” Then the only sounds were the cry of a nightbird, the thin rasp of his breathing.
After fifty yards or so, he cut in to one of the narrow paths between the palms. He’d had the light aimed low as he ran; now he raised it and swung it in wide, sweeping arcs. Trunks, broken fronds, irrigation troughs, a stack of packing boxes burst into sharp relief, vanished again. He tried to make as little noise as possible, didn’t call out Kevin’s name. If the boy wasn’t responding to his mother’s voice, he’d be even more frightened by a
