A Child Is Missing (25 page)

But first he had to get back to Long Creek, or at least get to a phone. Ideally, he would get a ride back to town and use the time in the car to study his notes and do a rough outline.

It was no time to be shy. Will went up to Graham and said, “Jerry, I need your help one more time.”

“A ride back to town, right?”

“How'd you know?”

“They train us in press relations.” Graham chuckled ruefully. “Chief, do you have a chauffeur you can spare?”

Will winced at that, but embarrassment was a luxury he couldn't afford right now.

The chief looked at Will as though he was a nuisance. “What's wrong with the guy you rode out with?”

“I didn't say there was anything wrong with him,” Will heard himself say. “I'll take a ride from anyone who's willing.”

“Raines? Give our journalist friend here a ride back to town. Okay?”

“Whatever you say,” Raines said, scowling.

“I appreciate it,” Will said. He needn't have bothered with the thanks, because Raines had already started walking.

The way back to the snowmobile was shorter than Will had expected. Long before he thought he would, Will spotted the clearing. Of course: Raines had had no need to be cautious on the walk back; he'd been able to take the most direct route.

Raines started the machine, put on his amber glasses, and motioned for Will to get on.

There was a lot less activity back at the Rod and Gun Club that had been the base of operations. Will looked for the food truck but couldn't find it.

“What's wrong, Shafer?” Raines said impatiently.

“I was hoping to get a doughnut or roll to eat in the car. I'm famished.”

“You're out of luck.”

Prick, Will thought.

But when they got in the car, Raines said, “Want half a roast beef sandwich?”

“God, yes.”

“I got a thermos of coffee in the backseat. Extra cups in the glove compartment.”

They stayed put for a few minutes as Raines warmed up the engine. Will ate and drank as the heater kicked in. He'd been even more hungry than he'd realized. “I owe you,” he said.

“So buy me a beer sometime.”

“You got it.” It might be a chance to pick his brains about the police department.

The ride back was quick. The snow had been cleared from most of the main roads, and the salt spreaders had been out. Raines didn't say much for a while, and Will used the quiet to arrange his thoughts and his notes. High in the story, he would have to say something about the unanswered questions.

“A crazy case,” Will said. “What the hell would he want with a little kid?”

Raines snorted. “The old man is rich.”

“Right.” But Will wondered: How would this screwball woods hermit have known that? And what about the different postmarks on the ransom note? And where was the money?

“Do you have any theories?” Will asked.

“Off the record? Who the hell knows. People who do things like this don't think and act like real people, you know.”

“Why do you suppose he dug the boy up?”

“Got softhearted, maybe. Or needed the company. Or went soft in the head.”

“In the head?”

“Sure. Best thing to do would have been to leave the kid there. If he didn't want to get caught.”

“That's another thing,” Will said. “The FBI and cops had said no more money would be delivered until there was a sure sign the boy was safe.”

“So?”

“So doesn't it seem that if the kidnappers went to the trouble of digging the boy up, they would have taken his picture and mailed it in?”

Raines said nothing for a long moment, then replied, “Okay, suppose this guy in the woods was taking the kid somewhere for that very thing. To a new hideout, I mean.”

Will had no answer for that, but he couldn't help thinking that the hole in the ground was about the best hiding place imaginable. As he relaxed in the warm car, he thought about the research he'd done in the
Long Creek Eagle
's library. He thought about the two kidnappings in which the victims had been buried underground, how one of those cases had ended in rescue and the other in death. He thought about the 1950s kidnapping in the Midwest, in which a little boy had been killed and some of the ransom had disappeared. And he thought of two other cases from years before, one in central Pennsylvania, the other in Montana. Young women had been seized in the wilds by crazed men who lived in the woods and mountains. Both had been rescued.

Finally, he thought of two other kidnappings, one of a little boy in New York, the other of a youth somewhere in the South. The boy had been taken off the street, the youth dragged out of his home by a gunman as his parents watched. No ransom demand had been made in either case. Neither victim had ever been seen again.

It was true: The only “professional” kidnappers were full-time terrorists. But the amateurs were just as cold-blooded. God only knew what their motives were. And nothing was too strange or too horrible to be imagined.

All the same, when he got a chance he would corner Jerry Graham and ask him point-blank how he felt about this case. Too many things made too little sense.

Twenty-four

By the time they neared the outskirts of Long Creek, Will had changed his feelings about John Raines entirely. The cop apologized for having been curt—“It's just the pressure of the case, plus the bullshit of the department,” Raines said—and said again that maybe he and Will could have a beer.

Will sensed an opening. “Are you really that unhappy with the department?”

“Yup. Run by political hacks and brothers of political hacks, if you get my drift.”

Will did: the chief and his detective brother. “Why do you stay?”

“I don't plan to forever, believe me. That's off the record.”

“Of course.”

“I came to Long Creek because I wanted to get into police work. When I was first trying to break in, the state police weren't hiring because of the budget problems. So I figured, okay, I'd get a job in a small town while I waited for an opening with the state.”

“And you did.”

“And I did. That was a couple years ago, and I don't mind telling you it's been disillusioning. Nepotism, ticket fixing for politicians, you name it. Bastards…”

“I suspect that stuff goes on in most police departments.” Will paused. “Did you ever think it might go beyond ticket fixing?”

“Meaning?”

“Bigger corruption.”

“Such as?”

“Fixing accident reports.”

Raines looked straight ahead through the amber glasses. “You've been doing some digging,” he said quietly.

“A little. More than a little.”

“What got you started?”

Without getting specific, Will told him he was suspicious about Fran Spicer's accident, about the drunk-driving charge and the blood test. He told him about the confrontation with Carmine Luna and finding Luna dead in his apartment.

“Yeah, I heard the scuttlebutt about that Luna guy,” Raines said. “Goddamn junkie. Working for a hospital, too. And you think he framed your friend.”

“Let's just say I have my strong suspicions.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I was afraid you'd ask that. I don't really know. Maybe so someone else who flunked his DWI test that night wouldn't get hit with a charge.” Will offered that as an opener, knowing full well that it didn't explain what had happened to Fran in the first place.

“What kind of driver was your friend?” Raines asked. “I mean, do you have any notion why he cracked his car up if he wasn't loaded?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Not yet. You're not done looking, I take it.”

“I don't think so.” Will told Raines as matter-of-factly as he could about Spicer, how their relationship had changed over the years: first, Spicer the seasoned newsman and Will the cub reporter learning from him; later, Will the assistant city editor dealing with Spicer as an equal; later still, Will the executive editor, taking care to be respectful and solicitous toward his aging and not altogether reliable subordinate.

“And then you wind up making his funeral arrangements,” Raines said.

“Yes.”

“Sad. But was he ever DWI before?”

“Yes.” Will thought back to a night in Bessemer several years before, when Fran had clunked three parked cars and registered .19 for blood alcohol. Will had been relieved when the publisher, worried about the paper's being ashamed, had ordered him not to run the story, even though holding it out of the paper had gone against Will's ethics.

“So he might have done it again,” Raines suggested.

“I don't know.” Now Will told him some of what he'd found out about Fran's stop at the liquor store, the time of the accident, what a doctor had said about the blood-alcohol level.

Raines seemed to digest all of it before saying, “You may be dealing with more than just a crooked hospital technician. You know that.”

“It occurred to me.”

“So watch your ass while you're around here.”

“I'm doing my best.”

“You seem to have the FBI on your side.”

“I told you, Jerry Graham and I go way back. I think he'll solve this kidnapping before he's through. Solve the rest of it.”

“The other kidnapper?”

“Yes.”

They pulled up to Will's hotel. Just before he got out, Will said, “As long as we've been talking off the record, isn't there something that smells about this whole hermit thing?”

“In what way?”

Will told him the thoughts he'd been turning over: The newspaper-pasteup ransom demands, the different postmarks, and the abduction of the boy by a pair of shotgun-toting thugs on the highway didn't seem to fit in with a strange duck who lived alone in the woods.

“Okay, Shafer,” Raines said grudgingly. “But how did he wind up with the boy? And if he didn't have something to hide, why did he take a shot at that hunter who first spotted him?”

“I admit, those are good questions. Here's another: Where's the ransom money?”

“With the other kidnapper, no doubt. Assuming there's only one more.”

“Maybe. I'm assuming Jerry Graham has you guys keeping your eyes and ears open for anyone departing the area in a hurry without a good reason.”

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

Will dashed inside, changed into dry socks and shirt, called his office, and told the city desk that he had story material no one else had, that he would write about fifteen hundred words for the first edition (he had about two hours to do it), and that he'd polish it up in time for the second edition, which was distributed in the immediate Bessemer vicinity.

“Will,” a fretting Tom Ryan said, “are you sure you can do it, or should I get together a wire story in case?”

Count to ten, Will told himself. “I'll do what I said I would, Ry, and I'll do it on time. I'm going to police head-quarters now.” He picked up his portable computer and dashed out the door.

As Will got back in the car, Raines said, “You look pissed off.”

“Office bullshit.”

“Sounds familiar. We'll have to talk some more.”

“It'll be off the record.”

“Your word's good enough for the FBI, so it's good enough for me.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“I mean, I assume Graham's been talking to you, confidential-like, about whatever hunches he has.”

Will's warning light went on. “Jerry's pretty cautious, actually.”

Raines just nodded. “Okay. I respect a man who keeps his confidences.”

Ignoring the flattery, Will let a little time pass. Then he said, “Let's be hypothetical for a minute, as well as off the record. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Hypothetically, if there was a cop or two who were fixing accident reports, would you have any notion at all who they might be?”

“And would I find out who investigated the accident your friend was in?”

“You're way ahead of me.”

“I'm not stupid, after all. Tell me, Shafer, have you asked anyone else in the department who it was?”

“Not yet.”

“My advice is, don't. The reports aren't kept too carefully, if you get my drift. You wouldn't get a straight answer, anyhow. Why don't I nose around.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Nothing to appreciate. Because we never had this little chat.”

There was pandemonium at the police station as reporters, photographers, and camera crews shouted questions at police officers and insults at one another. Several Long Creek officers tried to herd the gathering into the briefing room.

“I heard that someone who wasn't picked for the pool got to go along, anyhow!” one angry young reporter shouted.

“I know nothing about that. Talk to the chief.”

“I'm going to, believe me!”

Will could barely suppress a smug smile. At the same time, the commotion embarrassed him. He recalled what a politician of yesteryear had said about reporters: “They're like children—easily fascinated by color and motion, but not to be taken seriously.”

A police whistle echoed loudly in the corridor, producing a stunned silence. “Listen, folks,” a policeman said. “It won't do any good to push and shout. Please go to the briefing room and wait for Chief Howe and Special Agent Graham. They'll be along shortly. We'll have coffee and doughnuts sent in to you.”

“Cold and stale, probably.…”

Will hung around the fringes of the gathering. Then he approached the officer and said quietly, “Can you help me? I'm too old to compete with these jerks. If you can give me a place—any place—to plug in my computer and think, I'd greatly appreciate it.”

The officer studied Will for a second. Like Will, he was on the wrong side of forty. “In there, behind that empty desk. If anyone asks, I didn't give you permission. You just sat there on your own.”