“Know anyone who drives a car like that?” I asked.
“Uncle Dexter,” she said quietly.
“Could he be the one who set the alarm off?”
She nodded. Tears started rolling down her face.
The garage door closed again. The tears fell faster.
“Carrie?”
“I hate her. I hate her!” She started running toward the house again.
I followed, not trying to catch her this time. She sped up the front walk and into the house. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, or even what I could do, let alone what legalities might be involved. Could I legally take a minor back to the custodial parent? Should I just call the Orange County Sheriff’s Department or the Department of Child Protective Services and let them handle all the details? Call Blake Ives? Maybe Frank would know.
No matter what else happened, I didn’t want to lose track of Carla Ives. Blake Ives would be so happy and relieved to know she was alive and well, but he’d never forgive me if she disappeared again.
I also didn’t want her to have to face Bonnie alone.
I moved faster, running up the front walkway and pushing the unlatched door open.
I came to a halt in the entryway and let the door close behind me. There was blood on the beige marble of the foyer, and as I looked up the stairs, I could see blood and bits of scalp and hair marking the wall and railings. Someone had come downstairs the hard way. Who? And where was he or she now?
To my left, I heard a little sound of distress.
“Carrie?”
I turned to see her being held tightly by a man who had a gun lodged against the underside of her chin.
“Lock the door!” he shouted at me.
I did as he said.
“Drop your purse on the floor and kick it away!”
I obeyed again, doing my best to avoid the blood spatter. Praying none of Carrie’s blood or my own would be added to it.
“All right.” He drew a harsh breath. “You have a choice, Ms. Kelly. You can die knowing that you caused Blake Ives’s daughter to be delivered to him in a body bag, or you can do exactly as I say.”
CHAPTER 45
Tuesday, May 2
12:06 P.M.
ANTELOPE VALLEY
SOMETIMES a man with a gun gets to have things his way.
When we first got on the San Diego Freeway, I started saying that I thought this was a bad idea, that I would be missed.
“Just shut up and drive,” he said.
He had a gun and I didn’t, so I stopped talking about what a big mistake he was making. I held tightly to the steering wheel and tried to make myself think clearly, but strategies about survival weren’t coming to me as quickly as they might have if I had been given a little time to mull things over.
The man with a gun was in a big hurry.
He wasn’t sitting within reach, so even if I had summoned the nerve to try it, I couldn’t take the gun away from him. He was in the back of the van I was driving. The van was some sort of working van, although it looked as if it had been adapted so that it could be used for either passengers or cargo. The middle section of seats had been taken out, but a bench seat in the back was in place. That’s where he was.
I glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
He wasn’t a big man, or a young man. That didn’t matter. More important, and not so good for my own chances of a future, were the three A’s-he was anxious, angry, and armed. No, there was a fourth. He was an asshole.
The sweat that had stained his shirt at the armpits an hour ago now drenched the front as well, dampened his forehead, and plastered his hair to his head at the temples. The stench of his fear reached me, masking the scent of my own. Knowing he was afraid did not comfort me at all.
I could have taken chances with his aim, tried to escape, or driven the van in a way that would throw him off balance, then jumped out while he stayed in it to crash. After all, his gun wasn’t pointed at me.
It was pointed at Carrie.
Although he had bound her wrists and ankles with duct tape, and placed a fat strip of it over her mouth as well, he seemed to think she would yet escape him, and never let her move more than a few inches away. Most of the time, he clutched one of her slender, pale arms in a bruising grip.
Her blue eyes were dilated almost to black with fear. Blue eyes that caught mine in the mirror, pleading.
I looked away, to the off-ramp just ahead. I couldn’t think clearly about much at that moment, but I knew that I couldn’t sacrifice her life in an attempt to save my own.
So I got off the freeway just like he told me to, driving this van, which would shield anyone’s view from what was going on in back. They could only see me, and no one seemed to notice I was terrified.
Terror never stays at the same level over time, though, and the initial adrenaline rush had passed off even before we were ordered into the van. But the cold knot of fear in the pit of my stomach seemed to have amazing staying power in this situation. After over ninety minutes of it, I was having a hard time not driving erratically, or in any manner that would displease him.
I did not want him to be any angrier, any more nervous than he already was.
Sometimes a man with a gun gets to have things his way. I didn’t even object when, on one of the slow stretches of Interstate 5, he began going through my purse, which he had picked up off the floor of the foyer. He pulled out my cell phone and pocketed it.
As time passed, I began to wonder what had happened to Bonnie. To wonder where Carrie’s “dad,” Roy Fletcher, and the other three children were right now, and how long it would be before they missed Carrie. To wonder how long it would be before I was missed by anyone.
I followed his curtly delivered directions, and now we were in the high desert area north of Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley. The valley lies on the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains. He told me to exit the freeway in Palmdale and made a call on my cell phone.
“It’s me,” he said.
After a pause he said, “Palmdale, but-”
He sighed. “I know, I know. Yes, I know I’m late! Listen to me…Yes, there are…”
He glanced at me and lowered his voice. “Things are a bit complicated. Carrie wasn’t alone when I found her.”
I could hear someone cussing him out.
He hung up. He gave me another series of directions, so that we were headed east.
A few minutes later, my cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID display and pressed the button that answered the call, but didn’t speak.
He was getting cussed out again, but this time he said, “Shut up or I’ll hang up again and do as I damned well please.”
He looked more nervous than he had been five minutes earlier. He glanced constantly between Carrie and me. He still held the gun on her. I had formulated plans to throw his aim off if he actually looked as if he was going to lose it and squeeze the trigger. Unfortunately, almost all of them seemed just as likely to result in my own death, if not also causing her life to be lost in a crash.
“She was with that reporter. Yes, Irene Kelly. I-I-I didn’t know what to do… Of course not. Not there…no. Oh really? Well, you weren’t there, Cleo, so I had to come up with something, right? So she’s driving. By the time I got everything arranged, we hit traffic.”
