Cry Mercy

THIRTY

Needle in a haystack time.

Susanna took the exit from the turnpike Beth Magellan was believed to have taken the morning she disappeared. There'd been an accident eastbound between two exits that had resulted in the first one being closed and all the traffic diverted. Beth may have been one of the first cars to encounter the detour after the road was blocked off, and may have been directed off the turnpike before all of the detour signs had been put in place. That would have left Beth to figure out on her own how to find her way back to the turnpike with some twenty miles between where she got off and where she should have gotten back on.

Over the past two years, Susanna had considered most of the possibilities and traveled most of the roads that would have been the most logical choices, as had the state police and the private investigators Robert had hired. But Susanna figured she had one advantage over all of them: She'd known Beth fairly well for several years, knew how the woman thought.

The scenario that played out in Suse's mind had Beth finding herself in a line of traffic that was not moving. She'd have been in a hurry to get home. Maybe Ian was fussing in the backseat, maybe she was frustrated at not having her phone with her. She was always talking to someone when she was driving. It was the one thing Robert consistently criticized her for.

What would Beth have done under these circumstances?

Might she have decided not to wait patiently for the police to direct the cars off the turnpike? To Suse's way of thinking, she'd have driven on the shoulder of the road and slipped off the turnpike exit as quickly as she could. With no signs to direct her, perhaps Beth might have done what Suse could see herself doing under the same circumstances: she'd have asked the person in the tollbooth. There was a good chance she'd have been directed to the main road, and hopefully that would take her around the mountain.

The main road off this stretch of highway was a two-lane affair that went through one small town after another, and at first glance might have appeared to be the most logical, took her down the mountain, not up. There were signs that pointed toward this town or that, one state or county road or another, but for a stranger, the signs meant nothing. The last time Susanna had followed this same road, she'd taken the route that led her down the mountain. Today, she'd go in the opposite direction, and see where that would lead.

It wasn't long before she noticed that the road narrowed around those hairpin turns, and that some of the guard rails at several of the turns bore numerous scrapes, battle scars from vehicles that may not have fared quite so well as she had so far. She had to slam on the brakes several times to take the turns on all four wheels, and on more than one occasion, opposing traffic had caused her to hug the right side of the road a lot closer than was comfortable. On an icy road, drivers could find themselves one misstep from disaster.

The sudden blast from the horn of the SUV behind her startled her and caused her to jump, and she swerved even closer to the guard rail. The driver of the SUV was right up to her rear fender and made no effort to back off. As she rounded the curve, her foot on the brake, she saw a driveway up ahead on the right, and she practically slid into it to get out of the SUV's way. The driver laid on the horn as he passed her, his middle finger in the air, and she watched him disappear down the next hill at a speed she couldn't even imagine on a road like this.

That's how it happens, she thought as she caught her breath. That's how cars get pushed off the road. If this had been winter, any accumulation of snow or ice on these roads would have been deadly.

And then she recalled that Beth and Ian had disappeared in the dead of winter.

She checked her rearview mirror for oncoming cars, then drove back onto the roadway. Several hundred yards ahead was a slight clearing. She pulled over and parked. She stuffed her bag under the front seat and locked the door after she got out. She walked back to the curve where the SUV had crowded her and studied the metal guard rail. It was dented and bore the scrapes of many a passing car. She stepped over it and walked downhill a short distance. The bottom of the ravine was littered with old tires and plastic trash bags holding God knew what. From somewhere below she could hear the sound of a stream, but there was little else to break the silence.

It would have been a place like this where Beth went off the road, she thought, only higher up the mountain, maybe. Someplace where a car could go over and be hidden from view by trees or thick undergrowth that even in February would prevent it from being seen from the road.

She walked back to her car, knowing she was right, in theory. All she had to do now was find the right road, on the right mountain.

Three hours later, she stood behind a guard rail that did its best to wrap around an exceptionally narrow turn. On the opposite side of the road, a huge piece of rock jutted out from the side of the mountain and hung partially over the left lane. A driver coming uphill in the right lane, unfamiliar with the configuration, might well overcompensate if a vehicle was coming too quickly from the left. Susanna found a safe place to park and again set out to explore, the fourth or fifth time she'd done so that day.

Since she had been following possible routes Beth might have taken, Susanna assumed that Beth would have approached this particular curve on the right side. She walked along the road and climbed over the barrier, noting that there was ample room at the end of the guard rail for a car to slip between it and a tree that had apparently not only stood witness to a number of accidents, but had itself been a victim on numerous occasions.

“Everything from a Mini Cooper to one of those big mean pickups must have bounced off you,” she said, taking note that the gashes on the trunk were of varying heights.

She stepped around the tree and looked down. The hill dropped off sharply and the trees grew in dense clusters, their branches and leaves forming a green wall. Now, in the summer, the foliage could hide just about anything down there. In midwinter when the trees were bare, however, she was pretty certain any car that might have gone over on this side of the road would have been visible. She started back to her car, then on a hunch, walked across the road and stepped over the guard rail, which was much lower on this side of the road.

“Oh, come on, Beth,” she said aloud. “You could help me out here.”

She stood at the top of the incline and studied the topography. Beneath her feet was solid rock, and looking down the mountainside, there were mostly rocks below for maybe fifty yards. Beyond the rocks an overgrowth of shrubs disappeared over a ledge. Susanna crossed the road to the place where the curve began, and thought back to the impatient SUV that had come up behind her earlier and startled her with a loud blast of its horn. What if she'd been driving into a curve like this one, on so narrow a road, and had been surprised by such a blast. Would she have swerved to the right, or to the left? If to the right, she'd have bounced off that tree, wouldn't she? But if she'd swerved to the left…

If she'd swerved to the left, might she have gone into the curve in the opposing lane? And if she had, she'd have looked up to see that rocky overhang right there. If she'd tried to overcompensate, if she'd hit ice… what might have happened to the Jeep? Might it have scraped through between the rock and the railing?

She stepped over the rail and made her way down the rock as far as the ledge and looked over. She almost missed it, but the sunlight bleeding through the clouds caught on something down below and sent a beam back up through the trees.

It could be nothing, she told herself as she made her way around the rocks and down into the ravine, or it could be chrome, or a mirror. She made her way down as far as she could safely go, but it wasn't necessary for her to go any farther. Through the thick growth she could see the back quarter panel of a brown vehicle, and she knew.

Susanna's heart all but stopped in her chest. She was torn between going down there, to the Jeep, and running back up for her phone to call for help. She took two steps down and three steps back. For as many times as she'd made the trip in search of this place, now that she was here, she was barely able to think. Most likely Beth and Ian were in that car, and if they were, they were dead. Should she know this before she called for help?

She eased her way down to the Jeep. It had apparently come straight down the mountainside until it smashed nosefirst into a rock that had held it in place for more than two years on the far side of the ledge. Suse crept forward sadly, her heart in her mouth. Robert's family had been found, after all this time, and now she'd have to tell him. The thought made her sick.

Almost against her will, she peered inside. Stunned, she blinked, not certain that her eyes weren't playing tricks on her. She cleared dross off the window with the front of her T-shirt and looked again.

Beth Magellan's remains lay across the front seat at an angle to the steering wheel. Ian's car seat was, as always, directly behind his mother's, but incredibly, Robert's son was nowhere to be seen.

A white-faced Robert sat on the hood of the car parked at the side of the road, numb with disbelief. After he'd gotten Susanna's call and her words actually sank in, he'd hired a helicopter to bring him and Kevin as close as possible. Once they landed, Susanna picked them up and drove them to the mountain where the Jeep had been found. He'd had trouble putting words together in a sentence since they arrived.

“What kind of person would take a child from a wreck and leave its mother there to die?” he asked the trooper who met them at the accident scene.

“Sir, we don't know what happened here. We're trying to find out.” The trooper, Captain K. Carlson, had tried to calm Robert. “If you'd just wait over here-”

“I want to see my wife,” Robert had protested.

“Sir, your wife has been removed from the vehicle and is no longer on the scene.” Carlson had blocked his way.

“Where is she? Where did you take her?”

“To the medical examiner's, sir. He'll need to determine the cause.” It wasn't necessary for him to add, “of death.” It was understood.

“What are you doing to find my son?” Robert demanded.

“We're almost finished processing the car, then we'll-”

“I don't give a damn about the fucking car,” Robert shouted. “I want to know what you're going to do to find my son.”

“Sir, someone removed your son from the car,” Carlson replied calmly. “The only way we have to figure out who that was is by processing every bit of trace evidence from that vehicle. We need to develop the fingerprints we've lifted so we can run a search through every database we have access to. I promise you that we'll do this as quickly as possible, but right now you're going to have to let my people do their jobs.”

“Robert,” Kevin touched his arm. “Let them work. Go sit with Susanna for a while.”

“Standing around… sitting around… while Ian is…” Robert waved an arm to take in the scope of the entire mountain. “I feel like I should be doing something.”

“What you should be doing is thanking God that there is a damned good chance that your son is alive somewhere,” Kevin told him calmly. “What you should be doing is thanking Susanna for doing what no one else has been able to do.”

“Didn't I thank her?” Robert frowned. “I thought I said thank you.”

“Not sufficiently, no.”

Robert walked to the car where Susanna sat on the hood watching the buzz of activity.

“I owe you an apology,” he said when he reached the car. “Kevin has pointed out that I haven't thanked you enough.”

She put a finger to his mouth and said, “You did thank me, and once was enough.”

“But Kevin is right, Suse. I can't thank you enough.” He sat next to her on the hood of her car. “I owe you an enormous debt. I still can't believe you spent every weekend searching for them.”

“It wasn't quite every weekend.” She smiled weakly. “But it was many.”

He took her hands and held them between both of his. “You know, in my heart, I think I've known all along that Beth was no longer with us. I was surprised, but not shocked that she's been found. But Ian… I've never felt that Ian was gone. I kept telling myself it was just because I didn't want to believe that my son's life had been cut so short. But honestly, deep inside, I felt he was still here, in this world. Now I don't know what to think.”

“Want to know what I think?”

“Of course.”

“I think that someone stumbled across the car. Either they saw the accident, or heard it, or were walking through those woods and found it. They looked inside and saw that Beth was most likely already gone. The car was old, Rob. There were no airbags that could have cushioned that fall. I don't know if the medical examiner can determine how she died at this point, but I think she probably did not survive the crash.” She watched the crime-scene techs load their black bags into the back of a car. “But Ian… you know, there was no blood on the car seat. No blood on the backseat.”

His head snapped up to look at her.

“I opened the door when I first found the car. I probably should not have done that. Now my fingerprints are on the door handle and the car seat. And yes, I did tell Captain Carlson, and he did take my prints for comparison, so I didn't really compromise things too much. I hope. And I hadn't meant to open the door. But when I looked through the window and I didn't see Ian in the car seat, I thought how strange that was. Trula and I bought that car seat, remember? We went online and found the one that had the highest safety rating, the one that was supposed to be able to survive a nuclear blast.”

When he raised an eyebrow, she added, “Okay, that was an exaggeration. But the point is, it's supposed to be the best on the market. So why didn't the straps hold him in the seat? That's what I was thinking when I opened the door. But then he wasn't there at all. His diaper bag was gone. Beth's sister said she strapped Ian in herself, and that she put the diaper bag on the floor behind Beth's seat.”

She paused. “There's only one logical conclusion, Rob. Someone took him, and he was alive.”

He stared at her for a long minute. “Because a dead child won't need a diaper change.”

She moved closer and put her arms around him. “So the next order of business is to find him.”

“Someone's had my boy all this time,” he said, his voice choked with emotion. “At least one person has known all this time where he was, and didn't tell. What kind of a person does that, Suse?”

“I don't know, Rob.”

“All this time, he's been growing. Learned to walk, probably. Learned to talk, too. Someone else got to be with him for all those important things.”

She rocked him gently, side to side.

“He doesn't even know me,” he said. “If we found him tomorrow, he wouldn't know me.”

She stroked the back of his head, too choked up to speak.

“I want my son, Suse.”

“We're going to find him, Robert.”

They sat together quietly for a while, Susanna still holding him.

“You're the best friend I ever had, Suse,” he told her, breaking the silence.

“I know, Robert,” she whispered. “I know…”