Pied Piper

CHAPTER 45

With the volleyball tossed and hanging in the air, awaiting her open palm, Carlie Kittridge suddenly worried over having left Trudy with a sitter. She knew this stemmed from the pregame discussion about the kidnapper called the Pied Piper that had focused on news stories warning parents not to leave their children in the care of others until the kidnapper was captured.

Carlie caught the ball rather than serve it. Her husband shouted back at her, “Let’s go! Serve ’em up a beauty.”

Instead, Carlie bounced the ball toward Jenny, their weakest player but the only woman on the bench. Conference rules required gender-balanced teams.

Her husband chastised, “What the hell?”

She felt no need to have to explain herself. A mother’s prerogative. She searched for the car keys in the pocket of David’s warm-ups. Possession of those keys lent her a great sense of freedom and relief. “Have Danny drop you off,” she told him.

Her husband’s expression conveyed a sense of treason. “Danny?” he croaked incredulously.

Jenny stepped up to the service line, having little sense of her own inability to play the game. A member of the opposing team complained loudly about the substitution taking too long and demanded a serve.

“At least serve out the game,” David pleaded.

Jenny called out the score and served a lofting floater to the opponent’s backcourt. The resulting bump was a perfect set for the front line. The spike came right at David, who failed to block it. Side out.

Carlie hurried out of the gym.

A stunned and defeated David Kittridge shouted after his wife, far too late to be heard, “Don’t forget it’s damn near out of gas.”

Carlie Kittridge had forgotten. She ran out of gas eleven blocks from home, at the corner of 42nd and Stoneway. Blinded by her fear for her baby, she failed to pull the truck entirely off the roadway, leaving it dead, angled toward the curb and blocking traffic, the lights still on.

She came out of the truck’s cab at a full sprint, already warmed up from her volleyball, came out running like a thoroughbred from the gate. Seattle traffic being what it was, she left most of it behind as if it were standing still, blowing through intersections without looking, without slowing her pace in the slightest, her hysteria feeding off her charged system. The harder she ran, the more convinced she was of the trouble that lay ahead.

Ironically, it was the disabled pickup truck abandoned midlane that brought the police into it, not the abduction of Trudy Kittridge. Fearing a car-jacking, an abduction or simply a vehicle stolen for a joyride, the reporting motor patrol officer requested a black-and-white do a drive-by inquiry at the Kittridge residence-the name and address lifted from his wireless computer terminal that accessed DMV’s mainframe.

As Carlie Kittridge rounded the corner of 35th and Stoneway she was in abject horror and running faster than she had ever run in her life.

She approached the kitchen door already calling out for Gena, a neighbor’s fourteen-year-old daughter in whom Carlie had placed an enormous amount of deserved trust. Gena was fourteen going on thirty. She loved Trudy like a member of the family, and her own mother-a fantastic friend-lived just four houses down the block.

“Gena, it’s me,” she called out loudly, swinging open the kitchen door. Gena lay there on the floor, her clothes torn, her fourteen-year-old body exposed.

Carlie Kittridge’s scream was heard for several blocks.