The Last Family

16

“The car thing’s a wash,” Sherry said as she placed a folder on the conference-room table. She drummed her nails on the table surface for emphasis. “No abandoned or towed cars near where the Rover was taken. No speeding tickets we can connect. Nothing on surveillance tapes of outgoing air travelers we can connect.”

Paul opened the report cover and grazed over the information. “So he probably had an assistant,” Paul said. “You did a thorough job, Sherry.” He smiled at her, memorizing details about her the way he committed a favorite view to memory. She was a beautiful woman, and more intelligent than he had figured at first. Not that brains and beauty couldn’t reside in the same place. Laura had proved they did.

Paul had studied the surveillance pictures from the Nashville airport’s cameras until they had become teasingly familiar, yet he hadn’t seen anyone who looked like a newer model of Martin based on the old Martin Fletcher frame. It was an impossible task, though. Paul’s mind had wandered as he’d scanned the shots for something familiar, waiting for a bell to ring.

“Martin’s game on Martin’s turf in Martin’s time,” Paul said out loud.

“Vengeance is mine thinketh Martin,” Rainey said.

“Why leave the opening for you to thwart him? Why didn’t he get Laura and the kids sooner?” Sherry asked. “The challenge?”

“I’m afraid he is saving the best for last,” Paul said.

“Why don’t you… I mean, why did you decide to stay here instead of being in New Orleans?” she asked.

“I’ve got a good team in New Orleans. They’ll know what to do if Martin comes.”

“Sure, but what I was really asking-wouldn’t you rather be there? In New Orleans?”

Paul noticed Rainey turn to look at him, waiting to hear what Paul would say.

“Look, we need to try to get a description of Martin, hopefully to track him from where he was last seen. Maybe we’ll narrow the variables somehow. I’m better off doing that here. Also, Martin believes he’s superior to the rest of us. He’ll want his final action to gain him maximum satisfaction. He wants to kill…” Paul stopped for a second and took a deep breath. “Unless our intelligence and mental profiles are way off, he’ll want to kill the family while I’m on the scene. We know he’ll meet his mother somewhere around the third of October to get his mind retwisted, or whatever the visits do for him, and go for the family after, when he thinks we aren’t paying attention. So it’s imperative we get him with Eve.”

Paul thought about the A team, his carefully selected hunting team sitting at an East Texas air base, anxiously waiting for a direction to run in. Freelancers, and expensive ones at that. T.C. Robertson had agreed that he needed men like that to meet Martin. He hadn’t quibbled about costs.

“There’s no room for error,” Paul added, more to himself than to her.

“I see,” she said. And she did. Paul’s family was meant to lure Martin Fletcher to strike, and Paul wasn’t ready yet. The question was, Would he ever be?

Rainey turned away.

Paul thought about Martin’s plan. Or plans, more likely; he’d have alternatives. He had had years to think and rethink his options. There was a trigger, and Paul wanted to keep from hitting it as long as he could. Being in Nashville was a way of playing for time. Maybe it was futile. Was he fooling himself? Was he wasting his time? Was he just afraid to get closer to the action, to Martin or the family?

Paul had never been consciously self-analytical until he had taken to the cabin. He knew now that he had suffered an emotional breakdown, a collapse of his self-esteem, a loss of his sense of place in the universe. His emotions, the strings that held his being together, were not something he had needed to, or cared to, inspect in the years before the Miami incident. Everything had just seemed to fall into place for him. He couldn’t recall ever having asked himself what made him the way he was. Then he had become haunted by himself, a stranger.

After the accident he had felt overpowered with the darkness of guilt. For the first time in his life he had failed others and himself. He had been plagued with self-doubt until his fears finally spiraled out of control. As he had explored his own depths, he had been consumed by the thought that he was less than others thought he was; that he was just an illusion, a man behind a curtain, playing a wizard. No one else, not even his wife, had been allowed to have a naked look-see inside him. It was more than the fact that he had never been able to vocalize his inner feelings. Laura had said he sold himself short. Maybe, maybe not.

Laura. The name was a powerful emotional wedge. He had been in love only once in his life, and if he had had the ability to open up to her, maybe it all would have been different. Maybe he could have told her what he felt after he was shot and she would have helped him deal with his demons. Or maybe not, for he had been raised in a world of people who didn’t touch each other much physically nor open up emotionally. So much was left unsaid or hinted at rather than attacked from the front. His role was to be strong, to shield his family from the unpleasant realities he saw every day in the world. Now he had to live with the fact that his weakness had put Laura and his children in the worst sort of peril. He had never loved her more than at this moment, had never missed her more. And she had never been further away.

He refocused on Sherry, took in Rainey.

“Martin had an accomplice in the mountains, so I assume he or she was supposed to check on the kids-follow the van. Martin was in place when the scouts got to the rock, and the parents didn’t see him come out at the upper parking area. Maybe one of the kids saw someone else. It is a fairly isolated area, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Rainey said.

“We need to go see the kids ourselves,” he said. “Contact the parents of the Cub Scouts who were in the van with George. We’ll need to interview those few again. Rainey?”

“I can do that,” Rainey said.

“Get on it. You want Sherry to help you?”

“I can handle it,” he said.

Paul watched Sherry as she wrote. A shaft of sunlight bisected her, illuminated her left side. She was like a delicate porcelain doll with jet-black hair that cascaded to her shoulders, and red lips that looked as if they had been painted on by a Japanese artisan. He felt himself becoming aroused as he watched her. He thought about the way she was always staring at him when his face was turned away from her. It didn’t just happen every once in a while, but with great regularity, and it made him nervous. He was a freak, and he couldn’t imagine a woman like her finding him anything but repulsive. It made him uncomfortable and was distracting, and he would have asked for another secretary, but time was growing short-Martin’s birthday was a few days off. Then there was the other thing. She was a thinker, a self-starter, and he was growing to appreciate her abilities. So what if she stared at him?

He had been impressed with how efficiently she had put together the report on the car search in a very short time. The report had covered all the bases Paul had wanted covered, and a few he hadn’t thought of. A cab driver had picked up a fare at the airport and dropped him within two blocks of the house where the Rover was stolen, but he thought the passenger had been a one-armed man with white hair. Probably in his fifties. Paul thought the missing arm might well be a misdirection device, like the crutches. Paul wondered how Martin Fletcher had known the Rover would not be missed for the two days he had needed it. That was one of the loose ends that might never be tied up. “Sherry, where are we with the Rover info?”

Rainey stood. “I’ll call the parents and set up interviews.”

Sherry didn’t move until after Rainey had closed the door. Then she looked out the window and turned and sat on the edge of the table.

“Something on your mind?” Paul asked.

“He’s better,” she said. “It’s good he’s getting to work on this. Gives him something to occupy his mind. It’s all he can think about anyhow.”

“We’re all thinking about the one thing.”

“It’s different. Because Rainey is totally obsessed and channeling every thought toward the end of this, stopping Martin Fletcher. I don’t think he sees anything beyond that. I think Joe and Thorne lost people they loved and they want revenge, but what Martin did to them is in the past, and they see a future after next week.”

Paul nodded his agreement.

“How long have you been with Rainey?” he asked.

“A month before Eleanor… you know. I took the job out of school until I could find a job in my field. But I’m getting hooked on the atmosphere. The excitement. Think he’ll ever be the same?”

Paul shrugged. “What’s your field?”

“Anthropology,” she said.

“That’s interesting.”

“That’s why I studied it. Forensics and social science rolled into one.”

“No, I meant it’s interesting that you studied it. You don’t look like an anthropologist.”

“Oh?” She smiled. “Not the Margaret Mead type, you mean.”

Paul searched his memory for a picture of Margaret Mead and remembered a small woman in gold-rimmed glasses seated behind a desk cluttered with tribal masks and other African artifacts. “Not at all.”

Sherry was flipping through the file folders on the table, searching for the information on the Rover’s owner. “Well, my father is a biologist. Teaches at Memphis State. I hate slimy things, but I’ve always liked antiques and trying to put puzzles together. Finding out how people did things before they could do them the way we do. And learning by finding clues-a pot here, a utensil there, something you have to identify, then figure out how it was used. And all the pieces of the puzzle put together tell a story about things that happened in the past.”

Paul was pleased to discover this previously unknown side of Sherry. “Did you know Rainey’s family well?”

“I just saw George once and Doris twice. George was a sweet kid. Bright eyes. Would have been handsome and tall, like Rainey. They were all very close, you know. He was a good father, worshiped his family. I never met Eleanor, but I understand they were all very happy before Martin Fletcher.”

I wasn’t, Paul thought. I was in limbo.

Sherry found the name and number of the vehicle’s owner and dialed it.

“Mr. Theodore Reardon owned the Land Rover,” she told him after she had hung up the phone. “He won a free trip from Discover card to Epcot.”

“A fraud.”

“Some man called and told him he had won a five-thousand-dollar prize. The cash was credited to Rear-don’s Discover card, and airplane tickets were delivered.” She arched her eyebrows. “Four first-class tickets delivered overnight express. He had to take the trip during those four days.”

“Sounds like Martin made sure he’d have those wheels ready and waiting.”

“Seems a lot of trouble to go to for a car.”

“No trouble for Martin,” Paul said. “Planning is just part of the game. Another layer for us to have to unravel, waste time on. Obviously he studied the Reardons, and there may be no reason at all for the selection. Knew the guy had kids, knew he could take the vacation when Martin said he had to. Reardon is likely the sort of man who would win a prize and not look a gift horse in the mouth. Martin sent a five-thousand-dollar payment to Discover in Reardon’s name, bought some tickets, and sent them. He probably knew Reardon, but Reardon almost certainly didn’t know him. We’re not going to play his game, chase this ball into the thicket of how he did what. We can’t waste time looking back at his techniques. Fact is he’s moving forward, we have to do the same thing. At some point either we pull even and pass him or…” We bury my family.

Rainey rushed in, an angry expression on his face. Paul looked at him questioningly; then he turned to Sherry and dismissed her with a nod.

“I spoke to Ed Buchanan. Timothy Buchanan-George’s best friend-was there that day. His parents don’t want him disturbed further.”

“Where’s Timothy’s composite?” Paul asked as he opened that file and flipped pages. “I don’t remember seeing it.”

“It seems nobody had Timothy do a composite. His parents said he didn’t see the man. The Buchanans are… they have big money. And they’re acting really funny. Might be they don’t believe we can protect the kid.”

“Was he with George on the way up?”

“Yes. In the van and by his side from the lower lot until-”

“Then we get a court order and bring him in.”

“I’ll drop over and reason with Buchanan,” Rainey said. “Court orders take time, and Buchanan could tie it up if he has warning.”

“Okay, Rainey. You do it your way. But do it.”