Wild Storm

CHAPTER 5

HERCULES, California

The handkerchief in Alida McRae’s left palm had started the day dry, clean, and crisply ironed, but it had since devolved into a rumpled, sweat-soaked wad.

Sitting in the now-familiar waiting room at the Hercules Police Department headquarters, she pulled the cloth slowly from her balled-up left hand until it was straight. Then she repacked it into her right hand and pulled with her left. She had been repeating this nervous gesture for several minutes as she waited for her fourth — no, fifth — appointment with the police chief.

White-haired and sixty-seven, Alida was always nicely dressed and perfectly coiffed. She was what people liked to call a “handsome woman,” a phrase she quietly detested. Men were handsome. Dogs were handsome. Women were either beautiful or not beautiful, and if she had reached an age where she could no longer be described by that word, she could accept that. She just didn’t want to be patronized when it came to her looks — or anything else for that matter.

And patronized was the perfect word to describe what she felt like every time she came to the Hercules Police Department.

It had now been twenty days. Twenty days since her life had been turned upside down and shaken. Twenty days of worrying and wondering what had happened. Twenty days of dread.

Twenty days ago, her husband, William “Bill” McRae, a sixty-eight-year-old retired father of three grown sons and grandfather of seven, had gone for his daily jog. A creature of almost comically well-ingrained habits, he left either shortly before or shortly after seven o’clock each morning. He followed the same five-mile course each day, a long loop that began and ended at their house and typically took him anywhere from forty-five to forty-seven minutes, depending on how frisky he was feeling. Other than Sundays — and the occasional holiday — he had been doing it the same way for years.

Except for twenty days ago. He went out like usual, at 7:02 A.M. By eight, Alida had first noted his absence. By 8:15 A.M., she had decided to do something about it. Every now and then, when he hadn’t hydrated properly or had eaten too much salt the night before, his calves cramped. She once found him a half mile from home, crawling home rather than accepting rides from passing motorists.

As she drove his route, she had expected to find him doing something similar. Maybe limping along with a sprained ankle, or perhaps something even more stubborn and silly. Instead, she did not see him.

She returned home. He still wasn’t there. She called one or two folks she knew who lived along some of the roads he jogged. They were friends who had often joked about how the “Bill Train” was a minute early or two minutes late on any given day. But, no, they all said they hadn’t seen him.

By nine o’clock she called the Hercules Police Department in a state of high anxiety. Something horrible had happened to her husband. If it wasn’t a natural occurrence — he had suffered a heart attack or stroke somewhere and fallen into a ditch — it was an unnatural one. He had been beaten by wilding youths. He had been mugged. Something. She felt it deep in her bones.

How long has he been missing, ma’am? the dispatch asked.

He should have been back an hour ago, she heard herself say.

The young dispatch had been polite enough not to laugh, but just barely. Nothing to worry about, ma’am, I’m sure he’ll be back shortly.

They had treated her like an old hen who was pecking after her husband. And even now that the disappearance had stretched to nearly three weeks, she felt like their attitudes had not improved much.

Yes, they had made an effort to find him. Perhaps even a lot of effort. But in some fundamental way, she still felt as though they viewed her as a batty old lady.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. McRae,” the chief said, appearing in her line of vision just as she had the handkerchief balled up in her left hand again.

“Good afternoon, Chief,” she said.

“Why don’t you come with me? We can talk in my office.”

Alida rose and followed the chief, determined to stand her ground and get some results this time. She had done her homework on him. He had been one year away from retirement for four years now, but his wife kept saying they couldn’t afford it. He had moved to Hercules because it was near the wine country and he enjoyed trips up that way. He was, everyone kept telling her, a “good cop.” She just wished she had seen more evidence of it.

When she reached his office, she sat in the same chair she had the previous three times. He closed the door. She did not wait for him to sit.

“Have you heard anything?” she asked, hating the desperate quality to her voice but knowing there was nothing she could do to make it go away.

The chief said nothing as he crossed the room, rounded his desk, and settled heavily in the chair behind it. He put his elbows on the desk, crossed his hands, and fixed her with a sincere gaze.

“Mrs. McRae,” he said. “I hope you know by now that if I had heard anything about your husband, I would have called you immediately.”

“So you’ve said, but I—”

“Mrs. McRae,” he said again. And there it was: that patronizing tone. He continued, “I know you don’t think we’re doing anything, and I know you think we don’t care. But the fact is, we’ve dedicated an incredible amount of resources to this case. We’ve done everything I know how to do. We filed a missing persons report with the feds. We did the canvass. The dogs. The media.”

She nodded. “The canvass” had started the afternoon after he disappeared, after Alida had made her first foray down to the police station and managed to impress on them the strangeness of what had occurred. The chief had sent four officers out to cover Bill’s entire jogging route, knocking on doors, showing his picture, and asking if anyone had seen him. They all had. A thousand times. Just not that morning.

“The dogs” came the next day. The chief had his own K-9 unit, plus one that had come from nearby Richmond. They let four German Shepherds sniff some of Bill’s jogging clothes, then sent them running along his route, their hypersensitive noses leading the way. They left, barking and full of energy, did the entire circle, and came back an hour and a half later with their tongues dragging. Because he had done the route so many times, they never lost his scent. But they also never found any deviation from his course. As far as the dogs were concerned, they had done a bang-up job tracking the man along five miles of sidewalk and roadway. It was just their human partners who remained mystified.

“The media” was the final step. The chief had held a press conference, holding a blown-up picture of a smiling Bill McRae for all the local stations to put on the air. It was a story that played well: a genial grandfather who simply vanished one day. The Hercules Express had run two articles about it. Millions of people in the Bay Area had been told to alert authorities if they saw him. None did.

“I know we’ve done a lot already,” Alida said. “I just feel like…there must be something else we can do. I heard about a kidnapping case in Oregon where they issued an Amber Alert. Maybe we could—”

“Mrs. McRae, Amber Alerts are for children. Your husband was a grown man.”

Was. The last two or three visits, the chief had mistakenly slipped into past tense when talking about her husband.

“You don’t understand, Bill is—”

“I know, I know. He is just not one to just disappear,” the chief said, echoing the words Alida had apparently said too many times now.

The chief fiddled with something on his desk, keeping his head down for a moment.

“Mrs. McRae, this is difficult for me to say. But with everything happening on the East Coast today with those airplanes, we’re going to be on terrorism watch for the next couple of days at the very least, and I don’t have the resources to…”

He let his voice trail off. He was shaking his head. He finally looked up. “Mrs. McRae, we checked everything on that jogging route ten times and we never found the slightest hint that anything was out of place. We interviewed more people than I can count. We haven’t heard a whiff of anything resembling a ransom demand. We haven’t found any bloodstains or anything suggesting foul play. We’ve got those notifications on all his credit cards and bank accounts. There’s been no activity. I think you’re going to have to seriously consider the possibility that your husband has simply wandered off, for whatever reason, and he won’t be found until he wants to be found.”

Alida squeezed the handkerchief tightly. The chief had hinted around this several times. This was the most direct he had been about it.

“I know, I know, you think that’s impossible,” he continued. “And this is hard for me to even suggest. But there was a man down in Van Nuys a few years ago, same thing. Damon Hack was his name. A gentle family man who liked to play fantasy football with his buddies. He lived quietly, no enemies, no debts, never a hint of dissatisfaction with his life — just like your husband. And it turned out he had been squirreling away cash for years, twenty, forty bucks at a time until he had enough to flee. They found him in Las Vegas a few months later, living on the street, having blown through all his cash but still with no plans to go back. And there was nothing anyone could do. He was a grown man who had made a decision to live a different life, which was his choice.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. Bill was the most reliable man who ever lived. He was like sunrise in the east. He was a scientist. Life was logical and orderly with him. He was not just—”

She stopped. She realized she was repeating herself. She had slipped into past tense, too.

She had been relying on this police chief too much. A police chief who had clearly given up. And that was fine for him.

She would not give up. Not as long as her Bill was out there and in danger.