Hellbox

11

Broxmeyer was at the substation to take my call and showed up on the logging road, alone in his cruiser, within fifteen minutes. He examined Kerry’s sun hat, looked over the area where I’d found it, looked at the marks on the ground where the vehicle had been parked, poked around elsewhere in the vicinity. Accommodating, professional, sympathetic up to a point, his expression carefully neutral the entire time. But he was too young, too inexperienced, too detached to share my place sensitivity, or my fears. None of it seemed to add up for him the way it did for me.

“Well, those tire impressions don’t necessarily mean anything,” he said when he was finished looking. We were standing next to his cruiser, me leaning against the rear door because my legs were still a little shaky. “Kids park up here sometimes. One of the other deputies caught a couple last year… you wouldn’t believe what they were doing-”

“I don’t care what they were doing. All I care about is finding my wife.”

“I understand that. But I think you’re jumping to conclusions. There’s no evidence here to support the idea that she was abducted.”

“What about the other marks on the ground?”

“Anything could’ve made them. No clear signs of a struggle.”

“The hat,” I said.

“Not damaged in any way. Nothing on it but some pine needles stuck in the straw.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t forcibly knocked off her head.”

“It indicates she was here, but-”

“Indicates? The hat wouldn’t have been if she wasn’t.”

“On this road, yes. She could have lost it walking along.”

“No,” I said. “I told you, it’s her favorite. If she’d been able to go get it, she would have.”

“Maybe she tried, and couldn’t find it. You said so yourself you missed seeing it the first time you went down the slope.”

“I wasn’t looking for it. It wouldn’t’ve been all that hard to spot if I had been. Besides, there wasn’t any sign that she’d been down there. I told you that, too.”

“There might’ve been some that you missed. You were excited, you moved around down there calling her name. You could’ve accidentally covered up any she made.”

“Except that I didn’t. There was no sign. I’d’ve found it if there was. I’m not an amateur when it comes to situations like this, Deputy.”

“But you are the woman’s husband. Concerned, upset-”

“There was no goddamn sign.” Frustration made me snap the words at him. “Not down there, not anywhere else around here. Just what I showed you.”

“All right, take it easy,” Broxmeyer said. “I’m not saying it’s not possible somebody else was here when she came along. Just that it isn’t likely there was… an encounter. We’ve never had anything like that happen in Green Valley. Not a single incident along those lines.”

“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.”

“No, but all I have to go by is what I see and what evidence tells me.”

I said between my teeth, “So what are you going to do?”

“The only thing I can do under the circumstances. Get a search team out here, enough volunteers to scour the entire ridge, if necessary. If your wife is still somewhere in the area, they’ll find her.”

“When? How soon?”

“ASAP. Meanwhile, I’ll run you back to the Murray place.”

“No. I want to be part of the search.”

“Not a good idea. You’re unfamiliar with these woods, the terrain gets pretty rugged higher up-”

“She wouldn’t’ve gone that far.”

“-and you’ve worked yourself pretty hard already. The best thing you can do is wait at the house and let us do the job we’re trained for.”

Distraught old man, tired old man-I could almost see the thoughts reflected in the deputy’s steady gaze. Other thoughts, too, the speculative kind I might be having myself if our positions were reversed. I resented what he was thinking, but I couldn’t blame him for it. Stubborn argument meant delay, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway. He had that ridged-jaw look law officers get when they’ve made up their minds to go by the book.

“All right,” I said. “Your way.”

In his cruiser as we rode, Broxmeyer radioed his dispatcher to contact the list of search team volunteers. Neither of us had anything to say to each other until we pulled up in front of the house. One look was enough to tell me it was as deserted as I’d left it. I’d expected it would be, but I felt an inner wrenching just the same.

He switched off the engine, turned toward me, and said with his eyes fixed on mine, “Mind if I come inside with you, have a look around?”

I’d expected that. Good at his job, but not very subtle and pretty easy to read. It wasn’t that he necessarily disbelieved what I’d told him about Kerry’s disappearance or finding her sun hat; but even if he’d run a check on me, and he probably had, he didn’t know me or what I might be capable of. Without anything concrete to back up my story, he was inclined to be just a little suspicious, and careful, thorough, as a result. When a husband or wife goes missing under unexplained circumstances, there’s always the chance domestic foul play is involved. There’d been any number of high profile cases to make even a rural cop aware of the possibility. The bitter irony here was that Broxmeyer had retained that false suspicion and dismissed the much more likely one I’d given him.

I didn’t call him on it. Or question him. Counterproductive; I needed him on my side. All I said was, “Come ahead,” and swung out. He was right behind me as I climbed onto the porch and used my key.

Already muggy inside the house. I left the door standing wide, went to open a couple of windows while Broxmeyer poked around the living room. Kerry’s purse was on a burl wood coffee table; he stopped when he saw it, then glanced at me.

I came close to telling him no, he couldn’t look through it. I’d have been within my rights if I had-invasion of privacy. But there was nothing in the purse he shouldn’t see, and the more cooperative I was, the sooner he’d get the hell out of here.

“Help yourself,” I said. “Just don’t make a mess.”

“Women’s purses are always a mess.” Trying to keep things friendly, but it didn’t come off. I just looked at him. “Well, my wife’s is, anyway.”

He got Kerry’s wallet out, opened it to her driver’s license, read what was on the license, and to his credit closed it again without examining any of the other contents. Her cell phone next. He turned it over a couple of times in his fingers, aimed another glance at me; I took it from him, opened up voice mail so he could listen to the string of frantic messages I’d left on it. He seemed almost embarrassed when the last of them played out. A quick sifting through the rest of the items, and he was done with the purse.

He made a fast tour through the other rooms, lingering only in the bedroom and then for just a minute or so, all without touching anything. Back in the living room, he said, “Sorry about this. But I guess you understand my reasons.”

“I’d’ve done the same in your place.”

“Situations like this…”

“Just find her, okay? That’s all that matters.”

“Do our best. Might take most of the day to cover all the timber up along the ridge. You’ll be here?”

“I don’t know where I’ll be. You’ve got my number.”

“You look pretty worn out. Better get some rest.”

“Sure. Rest.”

Broxmeyer seemed to want to say something else, chewed his lip instead, and finally turned on his heel and left me alone. I stayed put until I heard the sound of his cruiser heading down the driveway. Then I went into the kitchen, slaked my thirst with a couple of glasses of ice water from the fridge. From there into the bathroom, where I washed my hands and splashed cold water on my face. The image that stared back at me from the mirror was that of a lookalike stranger: drawn, hollow-eyed, tattooed with an assortment of nicks and scratches. A face to scare little children with.

Children. Emily.

Thank God she wasn’t here to go through what I was going through. What would I say to her if Kerry wasn’t found or wasn’t found alive? So much tragedy in her young life already. Birth father and mother both victims of violent deaths. And the time in Daly City, shortly after she’d come to live with us, when a jammed pistol was all that had saved me from a violent end… she’d been there that night, and the narrow escape had freaked her out for weeks afterward. No telling how devastating an effect losing her adoptive mother would have on her.

Yes, and there was Cybil, too. Pushing ninety, fragile health, the two of them so reliant on each other. Lose her daughter, her only child, and the shock was liable to end her life For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you? Cut out that kind of thinking!

I went back into the bedroom. The burbling ringtone on my phone brought me up short, started my heart racing. But it was only the real estate agent, Sam Budlong. He’d just heard the news, he was so sorry, was there anything he could do? I asked him if he knew of anybody who had reason to be hanging out afternoons on the old logging road off Skyview Drive; there was a little silence before he said no in a puzzled voice, but he didn’t ask why I wanted to know. Instead, he said he hoped my wife would be found safe, and paused, and added another hope-that this unfortunate incident wouldn’t change our feelings about buying a second home in Green Valley. I hung up on him. Bastard. That had been the real reason for his call, not to offer aid or express sympathy.

What I wanted to do then was to get in the car and start another canvass of area residents, this time to ask the same question I’d asked Budlong, and one more: Had anybody seen a vehicle in the vicinity of the logging road yesterday afternoon? The search party was not going to find Kerry anywhere in the woods up there. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself they would, I couldn’t make myself believe it. What I’d felt on that road was neither an irrational fear nor a figment of an overwrought imagination.

But weariness held me in the house. I was in no shape to go anywhere without some rest first.

Dark in the bedroom with the curtains closed over the windows. I stripped off torn and dirty and sweat-soiled clothing, stretched out with an arm draped over my eyes. I felt so damn alone. And plagued, too, by a feeling that Kerry and I must be the victims of some monstrous, long-term cosmic conspiracy. Paranoid reaction, but justified. How else to explain that both of us now, husband and wife, had been subjected to separate kinds of kidnap horror in the same general part of the state? Crazy coincidence? What were the odds?

Eventually, the warmth and the darkness dragged me into the kind of sleep that lies just below the surface of awareness. Kerry’s face haunted a ragged series of druglike dreams, so vivid that I once jerked awake, thinking for a few heart-pounding seconds that she’d come back, she was in the room with me. I tried to keep awake, but my eyes wouldn’t stay open. And I drifted back into the half-world of peripheral consciousness and streaming dream images.

A burning thirst and a swollen bladder pulled me out of it. Another dousing with cold water chased away the sleep fuzz. My body ached and there were itching red rashes on both arms-poison oak, probably-but I didn’t feel quite so beat. My watch told me how long I’d been down and out: more than three hours. Almost one-thirty now.

The silence in the house seemed deafening.

I checked the voice mail on my cell, even though I was sure the ringtone would have wakened me if there’d been a call. Then I put on clean clothes-I couldn’t talk to people looking like a refugee from a hobo camp-and ran a comb through my hair and hurried out into the midday heat.

For more than four hours I drove around and around and around, showing Kerry’s photograph and asking my questions. Residents of a dozen or more houses on Ridge Hill Road and Skyview Drive. Campers and RVers at the campsite. Picnickers in the park down on the valley road. Shopkeepers and customers in the stores in Six Pines. Men and women stopped at random on the sidewalks.

Nobody had anything to tell me.

Sorry, can’t help you. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

The only part of the valley I avoided was the logging road. If the search team had found anything, I’d have been notified right away. And the entire time, the phone was a silent weight in my shirt pocket.

The heat, the constant frustration finally took their toll. I drove back to the house, where I sat limp and listless on one of the chaise lounges in the porch shade, nursing a cold beer and fending off mosquitoes. Trying not to think too much, worry too much-like trying not to breathe.

Broxmeyer showed up at 6:55.

It was cooler then with a light breeze, the tops of the nearby pines gold-lit and the shadows among their trunks as black as ink. Fading sunlight threw glints like mica particles off the cruiser’s top as it turned in off Ridge Hill Road and climbed up into the parking area below. Going slow, which confirmed what the cell phone silence had already told me. The deputy’s grave expression and his first words when he joined me on the porch were an anticlimax.

“I wish I had good news,” he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t. The searchers didn’t find her.”

“Or any sign of her.”

“Not yet. I’m sorry.”

Sorry again. But sorry was a meaningless word. As Kerry had said to me once, quoting one of her agency’s clients, sorry don’t feed the bulldog.

I said, “What now?”

“The search will go on tomorrow morning.”

“In other wooded areas, you mean.”

“Everywhere within a three- to four-mile radius.”

“You’re not going to find her that way.”

Broxmeyer took off his cap, sleeved sweat from his forehead, and ran fingers through his lanky blond hair. Delaying his response so he could frame it in his mind first. “You still think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Up there on the logging road.”

“That’s what I think. What do you think now?”

“The same as before. Possible, but unlikely.”

“So you don’t intend to investigate.”

He was uncomfortable now. I hadn’t invited him to sit down, and he didn’t take the liberty on his own; instead, he moved over to the railing, leaned a hip against it. “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Those tire impressions are too faint to make identifiable casts. There’s just no way to determine what kind of vehicle made them, let alone who it belongs to.”

“You could check on known sex offenders in the general area.”

“I could, and if I had reason to, I would. But there aren’t many, and as far as I know, none has a violent history.”

“As far as you know.”

“Look,” Broxmeyer said, “nobody guilty of the type of crime you’re suggesting is going to admit it. I’d have to have some kind of strong evidence to do anything more than ask a few polite questions. You were a cop once, you know how the system works.”

Or doesn’t work. “It isn’t the questions you ask,” I said, “it’s the kind of answers you get. Most felons aren’t very smart-they make little slips, show their guilt in other ways.”

His mouth tightened a little; he didn’t like being lectured. “Let’s say your idea has some validity. The person or persons responsible don’t necessarily have to be sex offenders, or have a record of any kind. Could be anyone who lives in the valley or is here on a visit, somebody who acted on a crazy impulse. How do you propose I go about finding a needle in a haystack?”

“By doing what I did this afternoon. Legwork. Look for somebody who saw something, knows something, and move on from there.”

“But you didn’t find anybody, did you?”

“No, but I’m only one man.”

“That’s right,” Broxmeyer said, “and I’m only one deputy. We’re short-staffed in Six Pines and the rest of the sheriff’s department… damn budget cuts. Fourth of July weekend coming up and that means drunks, fights, idiots misusing fireworks-extra work for everybody. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t spare the time or the manpower to mount an investigation based on a distraught husband’s unsubstantiated theory about his missing wife.”

“And you don’t want to.”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.” He pushed off the railing, slapped his hat back on and straightened the brim. “All I can do is what I said I would… keep a team of volunteers out searching for as long as it takes to find your wife. You’ll just have to rely on us, be patient. Okay?”

I kept silent.

He said “Okay” to himself this time, then moved on down the steps and got into his cruiser and drove off with a little more speed than he’d used arriving.

Rely on us, be patient. Bullshit. The danger to Kerry was real, her life in jeopardy, and urgent action was necessary.

I thought about calling the FBI. Yeah, sure-another exercise in futility. I had no contacts in the Bureau, and contrary to a television show like Without a Trace, the FBI has no task force that deals with missing persons cases unless there is substantial evidence that a kidnapping has taken place and federal laws violated. The chances that I could convince an agent to come up from Sacramento were slim and none; with the threats of homegrown, as well as foreign, terrorism and the social and political unrest that seemed to be amping up, manpower in the Bureau was stretched thin, and low-priority cases received short shrift as a result. What I’d get was a polite listen on the phone and the same kind of brush-off I’d gotten from Broxmeyer.

Forget the FBI for now, forget the county law. But the conversation with the deputy had convinced me that I could not go on depending on hope, strangers, myself alone. I needed help, which meant it had to come from a known quarter I could rely on. And I needed it fast.