he’d wanted to start over, then they’d let him.
All of that changed when one sunny July afternoon a young man hired to clean the pool next door heard cries coming from the Getz house. At first it sounded like a wounded animal.
A coyote? Maybe?
Jorge Martinez knocked on the door, but no answer. He noticed a stack of Tacoma News Tribune newspapers heaped up on the steps, indicating that whoever lived there hadn’t been home. The cries were so loud that he let himself in the side gate and wound his way around the house. At the back of the house was a bedroom with its windows covered with aluminum foil from the outside.
The sound was unrelenting.
“Hello?” he said.
The noise stopped. It was sudden. Just off.
“Hello?”
Jorge heard the sound of something moving beyond the aluminum-covered window. He rapped on the glass, a dull thud rather than the clear sound of a fist against glass.
Then he heard a sound that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise.
“Help,” the voice cried.
It was no coyote, but the sound of a very scared child.
It didn’t take Jorge much time at all to do the right thing.
“Move back,” he said. “Move away from the window. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” the voice said.
Jorge pulled the concrete top off a bird bath and pushed it hard into the window.
From the opening he could see her. She was small. Pale. Frightened. Candee had been found.
The neighbors did what they always did. They told the police, the reporters, even Oprah Winfrey, that they’d had no idea she was held captive. No idea that the ideal family unit next door was nothing as it had seemed.
Grace ran the story through her mind. She knew that people like Don and Patty Getz existed. They had jobs. They put up Christmas lights. They attended the annual block watch meeting. And yet inside their beautiful home, with its stunning gardens and views of Commencement Bay, was a dark secret. No one could have seen it coming. No one would have ever guessed in a million years.
Grace looked over at Paul as he started to drive. They’d both worked the Candee Getz case. It was one of those cases that stayed with everyone a long, long time. Probably forever. That wasn’t true of most cases. Most came and went. A good detective knew that when his work was done, it was done. To dwell on something terrible, as most such cases were, was to invite nightmares and regret.
“I heard from Geneva’s sister. Candee’s doing great,” she said.
“Great or as great as could be expected?”
Grace looked out the window. “No, great. Really. She’s going to be okay.”
“Let’s go see if Palmer Morton’s kid is home,” Paul said.
“Sounds good.”
Emma Rose woke with a jolt. The clicking sound and the sense that someone was watching her had become familiar. She looked up, then over at the door. The hatch opened and a sandwich, American cheese on white bread with the crust trimmed, was presented on a paper plate. Alongside it was a can of cola. Emma took the items from the tray and watched it pull away, disappearing on the other side of the door. The hatch snapped shut. She turned away and started for the mattress when the hatch opened again.
That was unusual. The creeper normally waited about an hour or longer before the tray was submitted for the paper plate and the cola can.
Emma went back to the door and looked down at the tray. It was empty except for a single Hershey’s Kiss candy, its shiny silver foil wrapping caught the light from the reading lamp by the mattress. There was a long list of things that she missed by then-her mother, her friends, her sense of feeling safe. Free. On the list, somewhere past everything else, was chocolate.
Had she said something about it to the creeper? She wasn’t sure. In those first days of captivity, Emma had sputtered out a flurry of things amid her protestations that she didn’t deserve this. She’d said over and over that she would do whatever he wanted if he only let her go. She’d screamed into her thin pillow how much she wanted to go home and how she never wanted to see an American cheese sandwich again. She might have mentioned she wanted some coffee or candy or something along those lines.
Had he given her the Kiss for any reason other than to be kind? Had he given it to her so that she would do something for him? To him?
In that moment, she didn’t care. She unwrapped the foil and put the candy into her mouth. The first bite was silky, creamy, so wonderfully sweet. Then it tasted slightly chalky. She disregarded the texture of the candy. She wanted something that gave her a little bit of pleasure. Something that tasted good.
As she walked toward the mattress she felt a strange sensation. Her knees began to weaken.
CHAPTER 28
The Morton mansion sat defiantly on the edge of the bluff overlooking Tacoma’s sparkling, but decidedly working-class, Commencement Bay. It was, arguably, the most magnificent setting for any home in the City of Destiny, as Tacoma boosters had nicknamed Seattle’s stepsister to the south. It wasn’t just a large home, but a true mansion with seventeen rooms, including a ballroom. The house had come with a bit of history, too. It had been the site of a famous kidnapping of a doctor’s son in the 1930s-a crime that had never been solved. The home was painted an eggshell white with black shutters and was set off by a circular drive that wound around a fountain that was a replica of some Italianate antiquity that the original owners had sculpted on the spot. Before Palmer Morton bought the place, the home had been a regular on the historic homes tour. The incontrovertible diamond of the tour, patrons of the annual event agreed.
Grace suppressed the urge to roll her eyes when a servant dressed in a uniform of black and white answered the heavy, ten-foot door. Who but a jerk like Palmer Morton would make the help look like they came with the historic home?
“May I help you?” asked the dour man with a shiny pate and razor-thin moustache.
“Yes, I guess you could,” Grace said. “We’re looking for Alex Morton. Is he home?”
The servant studied the detectives, first Grace, then Paul. “I’m Richard Mathias, the butler. What is your business with Alex?”
Grace spoke up. “We’re investigating the disappearance of a friend of his.”
“Ms. Rose?” the man said.
“That would be right. Yes, Emma Rose. Did you know her?”
“I’d seen her a few times. Plus I saw her picture on KING’s news this morning. A lovely girl.”
“May we come in?” Paul asked, asserting himself into the conversation.
“No,” he said, backing off a little. “Floors were just waxed. Besides, no one is home. Just me and the housekeeper.”
Housekeeper, too. Morton has it pretty good, Grace thought. She was lucky to get Shane to spring for a Merry Maid before Thanksgiving the previous year.
“How come you didn’t tell us right away that Alex and Mr. Morton weren’t here?”
“Sorry,” Mathias said. “I made an assumption.”
The remark interested Grace. “What kind of an assumption?”
Mathias rolled his shoulder a little; it was somewhat sheepish gesture done more for the effect of it than for any real feelings he had about offending anyone. “I thought you were collecting for the library or something,” he said.
Grace was annoyed, but didn’t show it.
The butler must be taking asshole lessons from his boss, she thought.
