Abandoned: A Thriller (17 page)

“We’re wondering if Jeremy might show up soon too.”

The day is California-perfect. The sky is blue from horizon to horizon, and the sun shines down with a gentle warmth. It’s a day for T-shirts and blue jeans, sunglasses optional. Parents and surfers alike will be looking at this day and thinking about the weekend, hoping that this honey keeps on falling from the sky.

We’re on the way to see Douglas Hollister, and I’m excited about it. Not the excited of a kid going to the comic book store, but the excited of a meat-eater getting ready for a live meal.

I have developed a picture of Heather Hollister. Like me, she lost a parent early in her life. Like me, she was called to this job. To being a cop. Our reasons were different; she wanted justice for the world in exchange for the lack of justice for her father, whereas I was lured by an inner siren song.

By all accounts she was very good at her job. She hadn’t let her obsession destroy her. She found time to marry, to have children, and to care for the victims she ran across as a detective.

Now she’s lost her husband and her children. The life she knew is gone. Our stories couldn’t be more different and yet the same.

I feel a kinship for her that’s put an ache inside me, a longing that I
recognize. It comes when empathy with a victim crystallizes to a painful, sharp-edged clarity. I care about every corpse that becomes my responsibility. Each was a life, replete with hopes, dreams, boredom, laughter, tears, day to day. I know this about them all, but with some, I can see it like I can see the hills next to the highway through the window as Alan drives.

Paul Rhodes is a writer I like a lot. He can be a little uneven at times, but there was a passage he wrote in one of his books that summed up this idea for me, this encapsulation of the uniqueness that each of us exists as, even though the stories of our lives are the same stories that have rolled on forever:

They say any idiot can have a child, and that’s true. The biology is the same. The outline of the story is the same. But the real truth is, none of them is the same. People make every story different. Only the world-weary really believe otherwise.

Tommy and Bonnie will never be Matt and Alexa. That’s okay. They
are themselves. They are the same idea when viewed from a distance, but listen closer and you hear it: Both songs are sung in a different tone, both are rich and beautiful, both are extraordinarily themselves.

I see Heather this way now. I perceive her not as a female victim with some similarities to myself but as a unique individual who added more to this world than she took away. I believe that her husband, Douglas Hollister, murdered not her body but her life.

We’re on our way to see this man, and I’m hoping that our visit brings him sorrow.

“You think Burns will keep his cool?” Alan asks.

I turn my gaze from the passing hillside and my thoughts of Douglas Hollister’s doom.

“What’s that?”

“Burns. He seems a little amped up. I’m worried.”

It was true. Burns was practically licking his chops, just thinking about biting a nice big juicy metaphorical chunk out of Douglas Hollister.

“I think he’ll be okay. He’s been a cop for too long. It’s not like he’s going to kill Hollister right in front of us.”

Alan slides a look at me, then back to the road. “You hope,” he says.

Or maybe I don’t, I think but do not share with him.

Douglas Hollister lives in Woodland Hills, in a nice, newer two-story. The exterior is an off-white faux-adobe, with light wood accents at the windows. The front yard has a single adolescent tree. The rest is green grass, cut short. Attractive, cute even, but unimaginative. It has the look of any of a thousand homes that were thrown up during the housing boom. Hollister’s been here with his new wife, Dana, for only three years, so I’d guess they bought at the height of the market.

“What do you think about Dana Hollister?” I’d asked Burns.

“I think she’s clueless and that she loves the guy,” he replied, echoing our thoughts when we’d first viewed the black-and-white photograph of them coming out of the hotel room. “She cheated with him, so I hold that against her, but she always struck me as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer. Dumb more than malicious.”

He filled us in on the other facts. Dana Hollister had worked in real estate for a few years, a career she started not long after she and Douglas met. She’d done okay but had quit a year ago, after the housing bubble burst. Now she was trying to start up her own business.

“Keepsake store or something like that,” Burns said. He checked his watch. “She should be there now. She’s open every day, as a matter of fact. Hardworking, I’ll give her that.”

“You still keep pretty close tabs on them, then?” Alan asked.

“’Til he’s suffering in prison,” Burns had replied, his voice as flat as a machine.

Alan parks next to the curb in front of the house, pulling up so that Burns can ease in behind us. I notice a white Honda Accord in the driveway. We climb out and I wince at the sudden cold turn the air has taken during the short drive. February in Southern California remains capricious, as always.

“How do you want to work this?” Burns asks, coming up to us.

“He’s already going to be on his guard when he sees you,” I say to him. “That’s good. I’ll introduce us, and Alan and I will show him our FBI credentials. That should make him even more nervous. After that we’ll let Alan run things.”

Burns squints at Alan. “I heard rumors about you. You’re supposed to be some kind of ass-kicker when it comes to interrogation.”

Alan shrugs. “It’s all just science, really. Body language, eye movements. Anyone can learn it.”

“Anyone can play golf too,” Burns says, “but there’s only one Tiger Woods.”

“Putting him on the defensive is good,” Alan says, “but our vocal tones need to be soothing. Body language, nonconfrontational. Like we’re coming to give him some bad news, not as if we think he’s any kind of a suspect.” He glances at Burns. “You think you can handle that?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll try to look contrite.”

“Good. We get him to let us in. I’ll do all the talking. Let me sit closest to him. I need to be able to watch him when I tell him that his wife is alive. The most important reaction is the one he has right after I deliver the news.”

We walk up to the door. It’s a simple gray concrete walkway. The driveway, I notice now, had been redone. Laid with brick or something
like that. A number of the houses in my neighborhood have done something similar, but I hate the look. Paint your house, plant a tree, put in a beautiful garden. Driveways? They’re for getting your car from the garage to the street.

“Let me knock,” Alan says.

He raises a huge fist and pounds the door so hard it shocks me a little, and I was half expecting it. He waits a moment, winks at me and Burns, and then knocks again, practically bending the door inward.

More time passes than I would have expected. I’m watching the front windows; no one’s pulled back a curtain to see who’s knocking. I have no sense of anyone staring through the peephole.

Alan shrugs. “Nothing to do but knock again.”

I brace myself as I see him getting ready to really lean into it. He hammers the door so hard I almost laugh out loud, except that none of this is funny.

Alan lifts his fist again, but Burns holds his hand up. “Wait. You hear that?”

I don’t hear anything, but maybe Burns has bat ears. Then I hear it. The soft
swish swish
sound of socks against a wood floor. We all straighten. The sound stops and the peephole darkens.

“Yes?” It’s a man’s voice.

Alan glances at me. We want to make him nervous, but later, after he’s let us into the house. A woman’s voice will be better for now.

“Mr. Hollister?” I ask.

“Yes?”

“I’m Special Agent Smoky Barrett, from the FBI. We need to talk to you, sir.”

A long pause.

“Sir?” I query.

More silence. Then:

“Hang on.”

We hear the deadbolt turn. The door opens and Douglas Hollister stands before us. He has some gray in his hair now, and weight has settled into his face and around his middle, but not too much. If anything, he looks more fit than in the hotel photo. Perhaps, before today, he looked happier too.

But not right now.

Right now he reminds me of Al Pacino in
Scarface.
He looks like he just buried his head in a gigantic pile of pure cocaine and breathed deep. His eyes bounce from me to Alan to Burns, then back to me. There are bags under those eyes. He’s unshaven and, from the brief scent I catch, unbathed as well. I glance down and see something stranger: One of his feet is missing a sock.

He smiles, but it’s a parody, something hideous, as though it had been commanded at gunpoint.

“Can I help you?” he asks, his voice squeaking a little. He clears his throat, gives us the death’s head grimace again. “Sorry. Can I help you?” A little better this time, but he’s started to sweat. A line of small, fine beads has formed at the hairline.

I show him my ID, as does Alan. “My partner, Alan Washington. And you know Detective Burns.”

The slightest hint of a new emotion breaks through the barely suppressed terror. It shows only in his eyes, and only for a moment, but I catch it before it’s gone. Resentment, a brief petulance, the
this is all your fault
of a four-year-old child.

“What’s this about?” he asks, turning his attention back to me.

“We have some important news, sir. May we come in? I’d prefer if you were sitting down for this.”

His eyes widen, and he wrings his hands. For some reason, it seems contrived. “Is it Dana? Did something happen to her?”

I reassure him with my reassuring smile, well honed. “No, sir. Can we come in?”

The nonthreatening and deferential manner of my approach seems to be working. He’s relaxed a little. He runs a hand through hair that’s probably needed to be washed for days. “Sure. Sorry. Of course.” He steps aside so we can enter, which we do. “I’m a little out of it. I’ve been ill and I was napping. I thought the pounding on the door was from a dream.”

“Sorry about that, sir,” I say, giving him my “shrug” smile, the one that says,
What can you do?
“It’s a habit we develop. You see, if we knock hard enough and no one answers, we can assume they’re either hurt or dead or possibly drugged.” I’m making this up on the spot, but right now it’s all about feeding Alan’s observation machine. I know he’s watching every tic and eye movement Hollister makes.

Hollister stares at me, taking in the idea of needing to learn to knock hard enough to determine if someone’s dead or just sleeping. “Wow,” he says.

“Where can we talk, sir?” I ask, prodding him gently.

“This way,” he says, turning and walking toward the back of the house.

We follow, and I take in the surrounds. It’s a beautiful home in that SoCal way. Light-hardwood floors polished to a mirror sheen. Vaulted ceilings with no acoustic popcorn. Recessed lighting. A stairway with wood railing and beige carpeting leads up to a second floor. It’s a big house. I’d guess five bedrooms. Probably three up top, including the master, and two downstairs. Nice.

We pass the kitchen, which is spacious and gleaming; granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances shine. It’s not cold, though, I notice. There are knickknacks and plants and mismatched doilies. It’s not the kitchen of a neat freak. The refrigerator door is covered with various things held down by various magnets. A
God Bless This Home
plaque hangs on the wall.

We reach the living room, which matches the rest of the house. A fifty-inch plasma TV faces a large sectional couch. I see an Xbox and a stack of games. A DVD shelf is filled with DVDs stored in agreeable disarray. A fine layer of dust covers the coffee table, probably three or four days’ worth.

I recognize this house. It’s the home of busy people, doing their best to balance time in the fight against entropy, and not doing a bad job. Sloppy imperfection is everywhere, but it never overwhelms, and the place is never dirty. I find the same thing every night when I get back to my own house.