Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

Gone Fishing by Jeffery Deaver

© 1995 by Jeffery Deaver

Like his stories for EQMM, Jeffery Deaver’s latest novels for Viking books are explorations of psychology as well as crime stories. The recently published A Maiden’s Grave (Viking) which takes a look at the Stockholm Syndrome (victims’ identification with their captors), has already been optioned for film, and another of his novels, Speaking in Tongues, will be released in 1996.

“Don’t go, Daddy.”

“Rise and shine, young lady.”

“Please?”

“And what’s my little Jessie-Bessie worried about?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

Alex sat on the edge of her bed and hugged the girl. He felt the warmth of her body, smelled the peculiar, heart-swelling smell of a child just waking.

From the kitchen a pan clattered, then another. Water running. The refrigerator door slamming. Sunday morning sounds. It was early, six-thirty.

She rubbed her eyes. “I was thinking... What we could do is we could go to the penguin room at the zoo. You said we could go there soon. And if you have to go to the lake, I mean really have to, we could go to Central Park and go rowing like we did that time. Remember?”

Alex shivered in mock disgust. “What sorts of fish do you think I’d catch there? Icky fish with three eyes and scales that glowed in the dark.”

“You don’t have to go fishing. We could just row around and feed the ducks.”

He looked out the window at the dim gray horizon of New Jersey across the Hudson River. The whole state seemed asleep, and probably was.

“Please, Daddy? Stay home with us.”

“We played all day yesterday,” he pointed out, as if this would convince her that she could do without him today. He was of course aware that children’s logic and adults’ bore absolutely no resemblance to one another; still he continued. “We went to F.A.O. Schwarz and Rockefeller Center and I bought you two, count ’em, hot dogs from Henri’s à côté de la subway. And then — Rumpelmayer’s.”

“But that was yesterday!”

Youngsters’ logic, Alex decided, was by far the most compelling.

“And what did you eat at Rumplestiltskin’s?”

When logic failed, he was not above diversion.

The eight-year-old tugged at her nightgown. “Banana split.”

“You did?” He looked shocked. “No!”

“Did too, and you know it. You were there.”

“How big was it?”

“You know!”

“I know nothing, I remember nothing,” he said in a thick German accent.

“Thisssss big.” She held her hands far apart.

Alex said, “Impossible. You would’ve blown up like a balloon. Pop!” And she broke into giggles under his tickling fingers.

“Up and at ’em,” he announced. “Breakfast together before I leave.”

“Daddy,” she persisted. But he escaped from her room.

He assembled his fishing tackle, stacked it by the door, and walked into the kitchen. Kissed Sue on the back of the neck and slipped his arms around her as she dribbled pancake batter into the skillet.

Pouring orange juice for the three of them, Alex said, “She doesn’t want me to go today. She’s never said anything before.”

His wife stacked the pancakes on a plate and set them in the oven to warm. Then she glanced down the hall where their daughter, in her purple Barney slippers, wandered sleepily into the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

“Jessie was watching the tube the other night,” Sue said. “I was doing homework and wasn’t paying attention to what. Next thing I knew, she ran out of the room, crying. I didn’t see the program but I looked it up in the paper. It was some made-for-TV movie about a father who was kidnapped and held hostage. The kidnapper killed him and then came after his wife and daughter. I think there were some pretty graphic scenes. I talked to her about it, but she was pretty upset.”

Alex nodded slowly. He’d grown up watching horror flicks and shoot-’em-up westerns; in fact, he’d ironically found the Saturday matinees a placid sanctuary from his abusive father. As an adult he’d never thought twice about violence in films or on TV — until he became a father himself. Then he immediately began censoring what Jessica watched. He didn’t mind that she knew death and violence existed; it was the gratuitous, overtly gruesome carnage lacing popular shows that he wanted to keep from her.

“She’s afraid I’m going to get kidnapped while I’m fishing?”

“She’s eight. It’s a big bad world out there.”

It was so difficult with children, he reflected. Teaching them to be cautious of strangers, aware of real threats, but not making them so scared of life they couldn’t function. Learning the difference between reality and make-believe.

Five minutes later the family was sitting around the table, Alex and Sue flipping through the Sunday Times, reading aloud portions of stories that seemed interesting. Jessica, accompanied by Raoul, a stuffed bear, methodically ate first her bacon, then her pancakes, and finally a bowl of cereal.

The girl pretended to feed Raoul a spoonful of cereal and asked thoughtfully, “Why do you like to fish, Daddy?”

“It’s relaxing.”

“Oh.” The bits of cereal were in the shape of some cartoon creature. Ninja Turtles? Alex wondered.

“Your father needs some time off,” Sue said. “You know how hard he works.”

As the creative director of a Madison Avenue ad agency, Alex regularly clocked sixty- and seventy-hour weeks.

Sue continued, “He’s a type-A personality through and through.”

“I thought you had a secretary, Daddy. Doesn’t she do your typing?”

Her parents laughed. “No, honey,” Sue said. “That means somebody who works real hard. Everything he does has to get him closer to his goal or he isn’t interested in it.” She rubbed Alex’s muscular back. “That’s why his ads are so good.”

“The Cola Koala!” Jessica’s face lit up.

As a surprise for the girl, Alex had just brought home some of the original art cells of the animated cartoon figure he’d created to hawk a product its manufacturer hoped would cut large chunks out of Pepsi’s and Coke’s market shares. The pictures of the cuddly creature hung prominently on her wall next to portraits of Cyclops and Jean Grey, of X-Men fame, Spiderman, and, of course, the Power Rangers.

“Fishing helps me relax,” Alex said, looking up from the sports section.

“Oh.”

Sue packed his lunch and filled a thermos of coffee.

“Daddy?” Moody again, the girl stared at her spoon then let it sink down into the bowl.

“What, Jessie-Bessie?”

“Were you ever in a fight?”

“A fight? Good grief, no.” He laughed. “Well, in junior high I was. But not since then.”

“Did you beat the guy up?”

“In junior high? Whupped the tar out of him. Patrick Briscoe. He stole my lunch money. I let him have it. Left jab and a right hook. Technical knockout in three rounds.”

She nodded, swallowed a herd, or school, of Ninja Turtles, and set her spoon down again. “Could you beat up somebody now?”

“Adults don’t have to fight, sweetheart. They talk out their disagreements. Fighting’s only for kids.”

“Oh.” She pushed her cereal around. “Does that mean you don’t remember how to fight?”

“Honey—”

“What if somebody, like a robber, came after you? Could you knock him out?”

“Look at these muscles. Is this Schwarzenegger, or what?” He pulled up the sleeves of his plaid Abercrombie hunting shirt and flexed. The girl lifted impressed eyebrows.

So did Sue.

Alex paid nearly two thousand dollars a year to belong to a Midtown health club, which he actually worked out in three times a week.

“Sweetheart.” Alex leaned forward and put his hand on the girl’s arm. “You know that the things they show on TV, like that movie you saw, they’re all made up. You can’t think real life is like that. People are basically good.”

“I just wish you weren’t going today.”

“Why today?”

She looked outside. “The sun isn’t shining.”

“Ah, but that’s the best time to go fishing. The fish can’t see me coming. Hey, pumpkin, tell you what... how ’bout if I bring you something?”

Her face brightened. “Really?”

“Yup. What would you like?”

“I don’t know. Wait, yes, I do. Something for our collections. Like last time?”

“You bet, sweetie. You got it.”

Last year Alex had seen a counselor. He’d come close to a breakdown, struggling to juggle his roles as overworked executive, husband of a law-school student, father, and put-upon son (his aging father, usually drunk and always unruly, had been placed in an expensive mental hospital Alex could barely afford). The therapist had told him to do something purely for himself — a hobby or sport. At first he’d resisted the idea as a pointless frivolity, but the doctor firmly warned that the relentless anxiety he felt would kill him within a few years if he didn’t find something to help him relax.

After considerable thought Alex had taken up freshwater fishing (which would get him away from the city) and then collecting (which he could pursue at home). Jessica, with no interest in the “yucky” sport of fishing, became his co-conspirator in the collecting department. Alex would bring home the objets and the girl would log them into the computer and mount or display the collectibles. The father-daughter team specialized in match-book covers, wrist watches, kitschy jewelry, and — naturally Jessica’s favorite — stuffed animals. Raoul was the addition he’d brought back from his most recent fishing trip.

This morning he asked his daughter, “Now, young lady, is it okay for me to go off and catch us dinner?”

“I guess,” the little girl said, though she wrinkled her nose at the thought of actually eating a bite of fish. But Alex could see relief in her blue eyes — though she probably wished that he’d take a ninja sword with him for protection.

When she’d wandered off to play on the computer, Alex helped Sue with the dishes. “She’s fine,” he said. “We’ll just have to be more careful about what she watches. That’s the problem — mixing up make-believe and reality... Hey, what is it?”

For his grim-looking wife continued to dry what was already a very dry plate.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just... I never really thought about you going off to the wilderness alone before. I mean, you always think about somebody getting mugged in the city, but at least there’re people around to help. And the cops’re just a few minutes away.”

Alex hugged her. “This isn’t exactly the Outback we’re talking. It’s only three hours north of here.”

“I know. I never thought to worry till Jessie said something.”

He stepped back and shook a stern finger at her. “All right, young lady. No more TV for you either.”

She laughed and patted his butt. “Hurry home. And clean the fish before you get back. I’m not dealing with another mess like last time.”

“Yes’m.”

“Hey, hon,” she asked, “were you really in a fight in junior high school?”

He glanced toward Jessica’s room and whispered, “Those three rounds? They were more like three seconds. I pushed Pat down, he pushed me, and the principal sent us both home, crying, with notes to our parents.”

“I didn’t think you and John Wayne had anything in common.” Her smile faded. “Safe home,” she said, her family’s traditional valediction. And kissed him once more.

Alex turned off the highway, snapped the Pathfinder into four-wheel drive, and made his way along a dirt road toward Wolf Lake, a large, deep body of water in the Adirondacks. As he progressed farther into the dense woods, Alex decided that he agreed with his daughter: The day needed sunlight. The March sky was gray and windy and the leafless trees were black from an early-morning rain. Fallen branches and logs filled the scruffy forest like scattered petrified bones.

Alex felt the familiar anxiety twisting in his stomach. Tension and stress — the banes of his life. He breathed slowly, forcing himself to think comforting thoughts — of his wife and his daughter. And the pleasure of casting a heavy spinner into the smooth water and feeling the first tug of a fish on the line.

Come on, boy, he told himself, I’m here to relax. That’s the whole point of it. Relax.

He drove another half mile through the thickening woods.

Deserted.

The temperature wasn’t cold but the threat of rain, he supposed, had scared off the weekend fishermen. The only vehicle he’d seen for miles was a beat-up pickup truck, mud-spattered and much dented. Alex drove fifty yards past it, to the point where the road vanished, and parked.

The cool, airy smell of the water drew him forward, his tackle box and spinning rod in one hand, his lunch and thermos in the other. Through the white pine, juniper, and hemlock, over small moss-covered hummocks. He passed a bald tree with seven huge black crows sitting in it. They seemed to watch him as he walked beneath their skeletal perch. Then he broke from the trees and climbed down a rocky slope to the lake.

Standing on the shore of a narrow cove, Alex looked over the water. Easily a mile wide, the lake was an iridescent gray, choppy toward the middle but smoothing to a linenlike texture closer to shore. The bleakness didn’t make him feel particularly sad but it didn’t help his uneasiness either. He closed his eyes and breathed in the clean air. Rather than calming, though, he felt a surge race through him — a fear of some sort, raw, electric — and he spun about, certain that he was being watched. He couldn’t see a soul but the woods were too dense, too entangled to be certain. Someone could easily have been spying on him from a thousand different nooks.

Re-lax, he told himself angrily. You’re paranoid. Relax. Relaxrelaxrelax...

And he grew angrier yet when he couldn’t.

For an hour he fished with a vengeance, casting spoons, then jigs. He had no luck. He switched to a surface popper and had a couple of strikes, but the fish never took the hook. Once, just after he launched the green froglike lure through the air, he felt a painful chill down his back, turned quickly once more, and studied the forest. No one.

Damn, he had to calm down. Again, he closed his eyes and tried to will the anxiety away. No effect. His anger continued to grow. He reeled in the lure, actually hoping that no fish would interrupt what he now felt compelled to do. He dropped to his knees and dug through his tackle box. At the bottom he found the old knife he used for cleaning fish. It wasn’t much of a weapon — only about seven inches long — but it was very sharp. Holding the knife he had a fleeting memory of his father, years ago, pulling off his belt and wrapping the end around his fist, telling young Alex to pull down his jeans and bend over. “You left that screwdriver outside, boy. How many times I gotta tell you to treat your tools with respect. Oil the ones that rust, dry the ones that warp, and keep your knives sharp as razors. Now, I’m giving you five for ruining that screwdriver. Here it comes. One...”

He’d never known what screwdriver the man had been talking about. Probably there wasn’t one. But Alex the boy and Alex the man had always oiled, dried, and sharpened.

He now slipped the scabbard into his back pocket, feeling somewhat better. Even a foolish weapon gives solace. He cast a few more times halfheartedly then hooked the lure into the bail of his reel and began walking along the shore, heading east. He stepped from rock to rock carefully, looking down the whole time, mindful of the slippery surfaces. Once he nearly tumbled into the cold black water when his attention wandered and he found himself staring too intently at the reflections of the fast-moving strips of clouds, gray and grayer in the pools at his feet.

Because he was gazing at his footing, he didn’t see the man until he was only ten or twelve feet from him. Alex glanced up and stopped. The driver of the pickup truck, he assumed.

He was in his fifties, dressed in filthy jeans and a torn work-shirt. Gaunt and wiry, his face was foxlike, an impression accentuated because of a two- or three-day growth of beard. His right hand held a galvanized pipe high over his head. His left gripped the tail of a walleye pike, holding the thrashing, shimmering fish against a rock. He glanced at Alex, took in his expensive, designer-label outdoor clothing, and then slammed the pipe down on the fish’s head, killing it instantly. He pitched it into a bucket and returned to the lakeside.

“Morning,” Alex said. “How you doing?”

The man nodded, unsmiling.

“Having any luck?”

“Some.” The fellow eyed the clothes again and began casting.

“Haven’t caught a thing.”

The man said nothing.

“What’re you using?”

“Mepps. On a twelve-inch leader. Fifteen-pound line.”

“I tried a Mepps before. And a popper.”

The man snorted. Alex felt his anxiety crawl back. Fishermen were usually among the friendliest of sportsmen, willing to share their intelligence about lures and locations. It wasn’t as if they were competing for the only fish in the whole damn lake, he thought.

Alex stood on the rocks, not saying anything, feeling more and more the fool — and angry at what he was sure was a snub. No way was he going to be driven away. This was public land and he had every right to be here.

“Mind if I have my lunch here?” Alex said coolly.

“Suit yourself.”

What the hell’s so hard about being polite? he wondered. If people behaved the way they ought to, the decent way he’d told Jessie they behaved, the world would be so different — no hate, no anger, no scared little girls.

No anxiety.

He sat on a rock, opened the bag, and pulled out his sandwich and apple. His hand touched something else — a piece of drawing paper, folded in quarters. Opening it, Alex felt a rush of emotion. Jessica had drawn him a picture with the colored pencils he’d bought for her birthday last month and hidden it inside the bag. The drawing was of him — a square-jawed, clean-shaven man with thick black hair — reeling in a shark about ten times his size. The fish had a terrified expression on its face. Beneath it she’d written:

He laughed out loud, thought fondly of his family once more, and his anger dissipated. He ate the meatloaf sandwich slowly. Then opened the thermos. He called out, “Hey, mister, would you like some coffee? My wife made it special. It’s French roast.”

“Coffee ain’t good for you,” the man grumbled, turning and studying the interloper once again.

Alex thought: This fellow probably doesn’t have anyone at home waiting for him. The man wore no wedding ring. Who’d put up with his disgusting clothes and appearance? It looked as if he hadn’t washed his hair for a week.

Useless old guy...

But not so old, actually, Alex thought. And gaunt, yes, but not so scrawny either. The man had taken off his shirt and wore only a sleeveless T-shirt. It revealed strong muscles beneath his leathery skin. He looked back once more and Alex was sure he saw brimming hostility in his eyes.

Alex held his gaze for a minute, then looked away.

It was then that he noticed a piece of paper tacked up on a tree nearby. He couldn’t make out the words from where he sat, but at the bottom was what looked like an official seal of some sort. He wondered if it had to do with new fishing regulations. He rose and read it. It was not from the Fishery and Game at all. It was from the county sheriffs office.

He frowned and read it again.

Alex took a breath and began to call to the fisherman but found that the man was no longer by the lake. He’d set his rod down and was walking toward Alex. He stopped close-by, at a tree stump, sawn off smooth about three feet above the ground, like a table. It was darkly stained. He set down the bucket he carried and pulled a fish out, flopped it down on the stump with a smack. He beheaded it fast with a long, sharp knife and slit open the slick belly, scooping out the entrails with his fingers. He pitched the head and the guts ten feet away into a cluster of waiting crows and they began to fight noisily over the wet, sticky flesh. The cleaned carcass the man tossed back into the bloody bucket.

“You readin’ ’bout that fellow?” he asked, not looking up.

“I never heard about it,” Alex responded uneasily.

The notice offered a reward of ten thousand dollars for information about the killer or killers of five individuals in and around Wolf Lake State Park over the past six months.

The man shook his head. “Three men and a woman and her little girl.” He drew the knife along the pink-gray flesh of another walleye. “Sometimes cut their hands off. Cut off other stuff too. Sometimes. Then they was robbed.”

He threw more guts to the crows.

Alex watched the blade slice through a pike’s neck. His anxiety wouldn’t go away. It was like a premonition, like the certain knowledge of a tumor before the CAT-scan results are in. This was the worst he’d felt in months. His heart was beating with deep, quick thuds. He stared at the notice. There was no description of the killer.

He glanced up to see the fisherman pitch more guts to the crows.

“Doesn’t make much sense to rob fishermen.” Alex said the first thing that came to mind.

“Doesn’t make sense to kill nobody either, but killed they was. And robbed too. Whatever makes sense to you or don’t.”

Alex was disgusted to see him wipe his hands on his jeans, leaving streaks of cold black blood. The man seemed to revel in painting himself with viscera. It occurred to Alex that he was doing this for the shock value alone.

The man took out a pair of old wire-rimmed glasses, put them on, and looked at Alex once more, studying him. Oddly the glasses didn’t make the man look weaker, as you’d expect, but more ominous, more dangerous, colder — the image of a Nazi doctor slipped into Alex’s mind and wouldn’t leave.

“You a rich boy, are you? Come up from the city?”

“That’s right.”

“I was to New York once,” he said and gutted another fish.

Silence fell between them.

“Well,” Alex said, “it’s getting late. You have the time?”

The man shook his head.

“I think I’ll be heading back home. I’m not having much luck.”

“Fishing ain’t luck.”

Alex gulped down coffee he had no taste for and took a deep breath. Calm down, he instructed himself harshly. Calm, calm, calm...

“Don’t go, Daddy... please.”

He screwed the thermos back together, watching his hands shake fiercely. He smiled uneasily and walked in a wide circle around the man to collect his tackle box and rod.

“I can get up to the road that way?” Alex asked, pointing along a rocky trail.

“Yep.”

“Take care,” Alex said.

The man nodded. For the first time a smile seemed to cross the man’s face.

Feeling engulfed by anxiety, Alex started quickly along the path.

He got only a few yards.

He cried loudly as his three-hundred-dollar L. L. Bean boots slid off the rock path and he tumbled into a shallow ravine. He landed on his feet but pitched forward into a rock and rolled onto his back, cradling his leg. He gasped and moaned loudly. “Oh God, it hurts.”

The fisherman appeared slowly above him, wiping his bloody hands on his jeans.

“That rock,” Alex groaned. “It’s loose, somebody loosened it! Be careful, it’s a trap.”

“A trap, you say?” The man’s dark face was no longer smiling.

“It’s my ankle. I sprained it.”

The man’s gaze took in Alex’s spotless down vest, the rich flannel shirt, the many-pocketed slacks. And the supple leather boots. What’s in his eyes? Alex wondered. Smugness, pleasure at seeing someone else in pain?

“Here now, mister,” the man called. “Don’t you move. I’ll come and get you.”

But rather than climbing down the short distance Alex had fallen, the man disappeared behind a tall outcropping of rock.

“Hey...” Alex started to say, then stopped. He listened carefully and heard nothing. Had he gone to get a weapon? A gun? His long, black-bladed fishing knife?

A moment later the man’s footsteps began to approach, from behind — he’d climbed down a hill and was walking toward Alex through a narrow alley between two huge rocks.

Still clutching his leg with one arm, his heart pounding, Alex slid around so that he’d be facing the man when he approached. He backed against the steep hill he’d tumbled down. He reached behind him and unsnapped the restraining thong on the scabbard of his knife. He felt the reassuring coldness of the stag’s-horn handle.

The footsteps grew closer.

“Hello?” Alex called.

No response.

“Hey?” he shouted again.

The sound of boots on sand became boots on rocks as the disheveled man approached. He carried a small metal box in his left hand.

He paused, standing directly above Alex.

He opened the box. Alex tensed.

Have you ever been in a fight, Daddy?

The man said, “Gotta apologize for lookin’ at you like you was a fish in a tank. Since them killings started I check out everybody comes here pretty close.”

No, pumpkin, I always catch them by surprise.

As the man pulled an elastic bandage from the first-aid kit Alex rose quickly, stepping behind the surprised fisherman, and caught him in a neck lock. He smelled unclean hair, dirty clothes, and the piquant scent of fish entrails. He jammed the stag’s-horn knife into the man’s belly. The fisherman’s scream would have been quite loud, but Alex kept his strong hand over the man’s mouth until the sound became a choked moan.

As he worked the blade leisurely up to the man’s breastbone, Alex was pleased to find, as with his other five victims, that the anxiety that’d been boiling within him vanished immediately.

Ah, sweet peace...

He slowly eased the man to the ground, where he lay on his back quivering. Alex glanced toward the road, but the park was still deserted. Smiling, he bent low and examined the man carefully. No, he wasn’t quite dead yet, though he soon would be, perhaps before the crows started to work on him.

Perhaps not. The birds seemed particularly hungry today.

Alex wiped the blood off his knife, climbed back up to the path, and had a second cup of coffee. This one he enjoyed immensely; Sue truly was a master with the espresso maker.

Later that night Alex returned home to find Sixty Minutes on, Jessica and Sue sitting on the couch in front of the tube sharing a huge bowl of popcorn. He was pleased that the show was about a government contractor’s malfeasance, and not murder or rape or anything that might upset the little girl. He hugged them both hard.

“Hey, Jessie-Bessie, how’s the world’s best daughter?”

“You okay, Daddy?”

“Right as rain.”

“Missed you!”

He winked at Sue and could see in her face that she was pleased to find him in such a good mood. She was more pleased still when he told her that all the fish he’d caught were below size and he’d had to throw them back. She was a sport, but fish, to her, was a dish brought to your table and deftly boned by a waiter.

“Did you bring me something, Daddy?” Jessica asked coyly, tilting her head and letting her long blond hair hang down over her shoulder.

Alex thought, as he often did: She’ll be a heartbreaker some day.

“Sure did.”

“Something for our collection?”

“Yep.”

“What is it? Is it a watch? Or a friend for Raoul?”

“No watches and no stuffed bears,” he said. “Look at this.”

“Oh, wow, Daddy,” she whispered. She carefully took the old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses in her hand. “These are totally neat.”

“I thought it was time we started a new collection,” he told her.

“I’ll make a special box just for glasses,” she said. “I’m glad you’re home, Daddy.”

His daughter hugged him hard, and then Sue called to them from the dining room, saying that dinner was ready and could they please come and sit down.