Night of the Juggler

Luther Boyd had been trained to face facts, and because of that discipline, he had already accepted his third scenario as the most logical explanation for Kate’s absence.

Barbara turned to him nervously when he let himself into their apartment. “Where is she?”

“Somewhere in the park.”

“Oh, God. Why would she do that?”

Boyd went along the hallway to his bedroom and kicked off his loafers, while Barbara hurried after him, her high heels sounding with a clatter of panic on the parquet flooring.

“Luther, what’s happening?”

He sat on the edge of the bed, putting on a pair of tennis shoes. “For some reason, she crossed Fifth Avenue. Harry Lauder got away from her and ran into the park.”

Luther Boyd stripped off his jacket and pulled on a black windbreaker.

“The wall is too high for Kate to manage, so she went up a block or so to an entrance.”

“But when? How long has she been in there?”

Boyd opened the top drawer of a highboy and removed a Browning 9mm automatic pistol, and after checking the thirteen-shot magazine and the safety, he slipped the piece under the waistband of his slacks.

From the same drawer he picked up a flashlight and tucked it into his rear pocket.

Barbara’s eyes were dark and haunted against the natural pallor of her face. “Goddamn it, are you trying to torture me? How long has she been in the park?”

“Forty minutes,” Boyd said, and went into the bathroom and from the medicine cabinet collected a compact but sophisticated first-aid kit.

Barbara’s voice was trembling, and her eyes were bright with tears.

“Did you call the police?”

“No,” he said.

“Why in God’s name didn’t you?”

“Hysterics won’t help Kate,” Boyd said, and put his big hands on her shoulders and shook her until the glaze of terror faded from her eyes.

“Now listen to me and understand me,” he said. “We aren’t calling the police. If she’s in trouble, the faster I get to her, the better her chances are. We don’t want a task force blundering around out there. This is a one-man job. And it requires speed. Whatever’s happened, I’ll find Kate. That’s a promise. This is the kind of shit detail I’m good at.”

And he was gone.

In less than three minutes, Luther Boyd had picked up Kate’s trail in Central Park.

His knowledge and awareness of his daughter’s character and habits were precise. And his tracking abilities and instincts had been honed to near perfection by decades of application and experience.

He knew Kate would head south on a straight line to where her Scottie had leaped a wall and scrambled into the park.

As he ran silently and effortlessly through the shadows of huge English oaks, his flashlight picked up the imprint of Kate’s small boot beside a drinking fountain where the earth was especially moist and soggy. When he reached the area where Harry Lauder had entered the park, he heard nothing but the wind high in the crowns of a quartet of gum trees and, above that, the muted traffic on the avenue.

Knowing Kate’s resilience and guts, Boyd realized she wouldn’t give up at this point; she had a dangerous conviction that the world was full of nice people, and she was just reckless enough to continue searching for Harry Lauder through this dark and dangerous jungle.

Luther Boyd, eyes tracking the ground, ran in slow but ever-widening circles until he picked up another imprint of Kate’s boot, this one pointing at right angles from her original course. She was traveling west now and running, which he determined by the length of her strides.

He thanked Providence for the drenching afternoon rain which had cleared the park of most pedestrian traffic. Normally, in fair weather, there would be a variety of footprints evident in this safe and attractive area of the park. But much of those signs had been erased by the rain, and the ground was fresh and pristine and so spongy and porous that he could follow the track of his daughter’s small boots as easily as if she were running across wet sand.

Directly ahead of Boyd, perhaps a hundred yards away, was a tall stand of dark trees. And it was toward these that Kate had been hurrying, obviously following Harry Lauder’s noisy trail. But when he entered the grove of trees (mulberries, he knew from the sandpaper-like touch of the leaves), there were signs of Kate but none of the Scottie, and this puzzled him. If the dog had been underneath these trees, there would be evidence of it, leaves and soil scratched and scattered in a half dozen places. But while he spotted the imprints of Kate’s small boots, he saw nothing to indicate why she had rushed so confidently toward this particular grove of trees.

He tried to sort it out. Two things would have drawn her here: sight or sound of Harry Lauder. Since she couldn’t see him at that distance at this hour of night, she must have heard him. From which it could be inferred that the Scottie had been among those trees. Then why no sign of him?

Suddenly, Luther Boyd was sickened by a conviction of what might have happened. He began looking for something else, and he found what he was looking for at the far edge of this stand of trees, the imprints of a huge pair of boots. He knelt and examined them closely under the beam of his flashlight. Wellingtons, he surmised, with stacked heels. And clearly defined in the mud were jagged notches on the bottom of those heels, V-shaped indentations that had been cut unevenly into the leather with some kind of sharp instrument.

He saw it all then. Someone had stood here waiting for Kate, watching her run across the open meadow toward the trees. A big man, a heavy man, to judge from the size of the Wellingtons and their deep imprint in the soggy earth, and he had stood here holding the Scottie in his hands, using the barking dog as a magnet to draw Kate to him.

Luther Boyd glanced rapidly in all directions, scenting the chill night wind like an animal. There was traffic on the East Drive, and there were probably couples strolling about somewhere in this reasonably safe area of the park.

So it was logical to assume the man wouldn’t make a move here.

Using the dog as a lure, he would try to draw Kate deeper into the park, across the East Drive, and probably north then to areas that were remote and isolated and silent.

Rising quickly, Boyd began tracking those Wellingtons with the V-shaped indentations in their heels, and his deduction was proved correct almost immediately, for those huge footprints led him toward the East Drive. When Boyd picked up the imprints of Kate’s boots on the same line he knew with certainty that his daughter was running headlong into the trap being set for her.

And because Luther Boyd had been reared by religious parents, words came to him from the verses of Matthew: “It had been good for that man if he had not been born.”

But because he had spent the majority of his life in barracks and on battlefields, the remorseless purity of that threat was accompanied by a thought of his own, grim and savage: I’ll find you, you big bastard, and when I do, you’ll wish to God you’d got your kicks from a madam with whips and leather.

Barbara Boyd paced the drawing room of their apartment, her nerves drawn painfully tight with tension, and while she tried to resist the impulse, she was drawn helplessly toward the windows to stare at the bleak and now- terrifying darkness of Central Park.

But with her fear and anguish had come a searing confusion. What was it he had said? That he was good at details like this. . She hadn’t thought of him in that way before, as a man so strong and competent that other men sought him out when there were dirty, dangerous jobs to be done. She wondered how grossly she might have misjudged him. What of her reason for her leaving him? Because he had always left her. But perhaps not always for the lure of excitement and danger, flags flying in stiff breezes. Maybe he had left her in the past as he had left her tonight, to do something that other men ordered him to do, something essential and perilous. But in this moment of terror, she was desperately grateful to him for leaving her.

She was given annealment and hope because it was her husband, Luther Boyd, who was searching for Kate. And with that thought came a guilty conviction that hundreds, maybe thousands of soldiers had been given hope, as she was given hope now, because there was a Colonel Luther Boyd to lead them into battle.

But it was too much to ask of any one man. Or any one woman, she realized miserably.