A Child Is Missing (32 page)

“You okay, Shafer? We gotta move.…”

Will felt Raines's hand on his arm, lifting him up.

“Stay with me, Shafer. I need—”

Will could not resist looking into Raines's eyes, and he saw the glint of recognition behind the amber glasses. And then Will saw the flash of fury, and panic, behind the glasses. For just an instant, as he stood chest-to-chest with Raines, Will had the advantage of surprise.

What happened next was heaven-sent. Raines started to grab Will, who stepped back. Then Raines was caught in indecision: He could either grab Will physically and try to wrestle him to the ground or he could cover Will with his rifle. But Raines had the rifle slung over his shoulder, and in his anxiety he made a clumsy motion instead of what should have been a simple deft one.

Still looking right at Will, Raines tried to get the rifle into position. But his footing wasn't right, and in his awkwardness he arched his back as the sling caught on his coat for just a moment, and in that moment Will stepped forward and pushed as hard as he could on Raines's chest. And Raines's feet slipped on the leaves and went out from under him, and Will could see the surprise in the eyes behind the amber glasses as Raines took a hard fall on his back.

The fall was made harder by the rifle getting in the way. Will rejoiced in the
whoof!
that came out of Raines's chest, a sound Will heard as he bolted and ran back the way they had come, or at least the way he thought they had come—it was so hard to tell in the woods. Not that it mattered, because Will was running, running.…

“Shafer? Shafer!”

The voice told Will that Raines would have trouble getting his wind back. The sound of branches snapping back there and Raines's curses meant he was even having trouble getting back on his feet. Will wasn't sure where he was going, but he was running, running.…

“If you don't stop, I'll shoot you in the leg, Shafer. Then you'll stop.…”

Will was running, running, even as he heard the explosion from Raines's deer rifle. He would not stop, would not stop, no matter what. He would not let Raines get him.

Another shot from behind, and this time Will heard a bullet go
splat
into the ground, but way off to one side. Raines didn't really know where he was shooting.

“Shafer! If you don't come with me, I'll shoot you so your wife won't love you anymore. I can do that, Shafer. I'm that good a shot. Trust me.”

Thorns, vines, leaves, twigs went slap, slap, slap at Will's face. He didn't care; he would let all the skin on his face and his hands be ripped away if he could keep on running—

Rock, log, it didn't matter. For an instant, Will felt something hard and slippery under his left foot before he went down like a large, slow stag. His right arm came under him, but instead of breaking his fall it came up into his chest, knocking all the breath out of him and filling him with a blinding pain.

“Shafer? Don't move, Shafer.”

Will tried to crawl. He moaned in pain, then tried not to moan. Raines was coming up on him.

“If you come with me, we'll both walk out of these woods, Shafer. I promise.”

Will got to his knees, supported himself on his good arm, crawled a few yards. He was dizzy-sick from nausea but he would not pass out, would not. He thought he heard dogs, shouts of men, helicopters. Or were they just the sounds a man hears before he faints? He crawled.

“I know I'm close, Shafer. They're no match for me, and neither are you. I can leave you so your wife will love you, or I can … you know. Let me find you.”

Will got his good arm around a tree, managed to stand up. He didn't think Raines could see him yet, and he didn't hear footsteps. He did hear the dogs and the helicopters and the shouts; there was no mistaking them.

“Still your choice, Shafer. I'll do what I need to do. You know that. I can kill. You know that. Whatever I need. They'll never execute me. Shafer?”

Raines's voice was from a different direction now, and closer. Slowly, Will maneuvered himself around the tree, away from where he thought the voice had been.

“There's still time, Shafer. I can tell you where the money is, tie you up, and be on my way. They'll never know, Shafer. I offered your friend a deal. I did. He said yes, but he was a lousy actor. Ran away. Come on, Shafer. Let's be a sly dog.”

Sure, Will thought. Fran ran away because he knew you'd kill him. He wasn't stupid, wasn't drunk.

“John Raines! John Raines! We have you surrounded. Lay down your weapon at once. We have you surrounded.”

“Shafer? I can see you, Shafer.…”

Raines's voice was much closer, and Will could hear his steps. But a tremor in the voice told Will that Raines was lying, desperate, that he couldn't see him yet.

“John Raines, we have you surrounded!” A voice through a loudspeaker. A familiar voice?

“Please, Shafer. We can be partners. We're both better than they are. Don't you see that, Shafer?”

Will slid around the tree a little more.

“These people aren't even professional cops, Shafer. Don't you see that, you sly dog? Where are you?”

Something made Will turn his head slowly around the tree. Raines was standing about fifty feet away but looking away from him.

“Raines, drop your weapon.” The loudspeaker voice was familiar.

The sensation was like watching a movie. Will saw Raines drop to one knee, saw him bring the rifle to his shoulder, this time in a sure, deft shooter's motion, and begin to aim in the direction of the voice.

Another rifle shot, and Raines was knocked back. His head rolled to the side, toward Will, who turned away when he saw the steam rising from the brains on the wet leaves.

“Will? It's all right, Will.”

Something cool and wet being held to the side of his face. Still in the woods.

“It's all right, Will. You're safe. You just fainted, that's all. You're going to be fine.”

Will was aware of blankets across his back and gentle hands on his shoulders, He tried to say something.

“Relax, Will. It's all right.”

Will recognized the voice, and he summoned all his strength to say, “Thanks for coming back.”

“I never left,” Jerry Graham said.

Thirty

Will thought he was dreaming. Then he felt the bruises from the fall, and he knew that the noises were those of the hospital waking up. Then he remembered everything that had happened, and he wished he could go back to sleep.

“Mr. Shafer? Mr. Shafer, good morning.”

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and looked into one of the loveliest faces he could remember. Copper skin, crow black hair, eyes deep and dark, like ponds. From India or Pakistan, he thought dully.

“Mr. Shafer,” she said. “I need you to wake up for me, please. I need to draw a few bloods.”

Damn; he hated needles. “I was just here for the night,” he said. “I should be going home today.”

“I still need a few bloods, please.”

He lay on his back, endured the needle with his eyes closed, relaxed.

“You can sleep again if you want to, please.”

“You're lovely. Do you know that?”

She was gone. Had she heard him? Lord, what kind of drugs did they give me to loosen my inhibitions? Am I going home?

He closed his eyes again, and when he next opened them a tray was on the table next to his bed.

Breakfast.

He sat upright, saw that he was alone in the room, although there was an empty bed on the other side. He wheeled the table arm around so that the tray was over his lap, then removed the plastic covers from the dishes. Coffee, orange juice, bacon, soggy pancakes. He was famished. After a couple of painful starts, he figured out what moves not to make with his sore arm. He ate everything.

“Good morning. How're you feeling?” The doctor was no more than thirty, at least six four, powerfully built.

“Linebacker?” Will said.

The doctor chuckled. “Tight end. Holy Cross. Tore my knee up senior year. Nothing wrong with your appetite.”

“Am I going home?”

“We'll see. Probably. Do you hurt much?”

“Here and there. Guess I'm lucky to have a room to myself.”

“The guy who was in it died just before you got here.”

“I hope that isn't bad luck.”

“He was eighty-six. Your blood pressure and heart are fine. You're up to having some company.”

The doctor went out. A moment later, Jerry Graham came in. He was wearing casual slacks and a sweater. “How are you, Will?”

“Alive. Lucky to be, I guess. You?”

“Hanging in there. I needed a heavy sedative last night, though. I wanted to thank you again, Will.”

“For what?” Feelings had welled up inside him; Will was surprised at the anger he felt toward the FBI man.

“Everything. For being honest. For being such a digger and helping us get at the truth.”

“Sometimes we get lucky, Jerry. Even when we're groping in the dark. Which I was. Far more than I realized.”

“Right. Right. I'm sorry, Will, but I didn't have a choice. Or I didn't think I did. Maybe we can square things.”

Will tried to empty his face of emotion. He felt like a fool, and the presence of the man who had made him feel that way didn't help.

“Will, would you like me to lay it all out for you?”

Ah, the big test. Will's pride wanted to say, Shove it, Jerry. His curiosity said something else.

“Will?”

“Only if you give it all to me, Jerry. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to be treated like a kid again. If you can't give it to me straight, I don't want it.”

“Understood. So here's the whole thing. All of it.”

Graham told him that suspicion had focused early on the chauffeur, Tony Musso, despite official denials to the contrary. But an exhaustive check of Musso's background had turned up nothing unsavory.

Still, Graham had continued to interview the chauffeur, on the theory that the kidnappers had obviously known a good deal about the boy's going back and forth between father and mother. After tentatively ruling out other present and former employees of the Brokaw household, Graham theorized that the chauffeur had somehow brushed against the men who would become the kidnappers.

“At some point, Will, we learned that Musso had stopped one day at the Santos brothers' garage. It was almost by chance. He needed a fuse in the car replaced.”

The Santos brothers had engaged Musso in friendly conversation, finding out soon enough whom Musso worked for—“There aren't that many chauffeurs around here, Will”—and more than a little about Richard Brokaw, his ex-wife, and their son.

“When I told Chief Howe that the chauffeur had stopped at the Santos brothers' garage not long before the kidnapping, he suspected them at once. The chief doesn't pretend to be a genius, but he does know the community, and the brothers had a bad rep.”

“Why weren't they arrested right away, Jerry?”

“Because we didn't know where in God's name the boy was. Then came the fire at the Santos brothers' garage. We didn't know what was going down, still didn't know where the boy was and whether he was alive or dead.”

“But it was too much of a coincidence that the Santos brothers would get killed like that after you'd begun to suspect them.”

“Way too much of a coincidence, Will. Especially after I got some expert advice. From you.”

“Me?”

“I didn't have time to bring in a semanticist or an outside expert on newspaper typefaces, Will. I had to go with what I had. Someone I could trust totally. You, Will.”

Will closed his eyes and suppressed a laugh. Ah, yes; Jerry Graham could still charm.

“Your instincts about the ransom notes were dead-on, Will. About their having been written by different people, and what that meant.”

“That was so obvious.”

“To you, maybe. You're a word person. But have you ever digested a sheaf of police reports? Anyhow, the chief and his detective brother figured the Santos brothers didn't have a full deck of cards between them. So if there was a so-called ‘brain' involved in the kidnapping, it had to be a third party.”

Graham paused while Will adjusted the height of his bed.

“Another thing, Will. The first ransom demand, fifty thousand, was such peanuts. I mean, why kidnap a millionaire's son and ask for fifty grand?”

“Unless you're a petty nickle-and-dime kind of crook to start with.”

“Exactly. The kind of crook who burglarizes a place and steals the coins from the vending machines. Which the Long Creek cops think the Santos brothers did now and then.”

Will asked him why he began to think that a cop might be the third party in the kidnapping. Graham said the ease with which someone had picked up the ransom money from the drop site along the road at the edge of the woods had made him think the “smart” kidnapper might be someone on the inside of law enforcement, someone who knew who would be where, and when, on the stakeout—including which cops would be most likely to be careless.

“In a way, Raines had already drawn attention to himself, Will. From his first day as a Long Creek cop, just about everyone found him a pain in the ass. Show me a person who can't make friends with anybody—anybody—and I'll show you a nut.”

“He was making friends with me, Jerry. Or I thought he was.”

“Now you know better. I'm sure a psychiatrist could explain it in fancy language, but the bottom line is that Raines was totally amoral, incapable of compassion or empathy, absolutely self-centered and selfish. Everything he said—everything—was for effect, to gain something for himself. And damn everybody else.”

“It sounds like you knew him.”

“In a way, I did.” Graham said he'd spent a lot of time on the phone with the bureau's experts on criminal behavior, particularly sociopaths and psychopaths. “Will, are you up to hearing all this right now? I can come-back.”