Believe No One (21 page)

‘Was that a threat, Wee Willie Winkie?' Fergus leans far enough forward for him to see the burning light in his eyes.

He feels his heart pulsing in his throat. That hated name brings back all the misery of his young life.

‘Make a threat, you'd better be prepared to back it up.'

‘No, no,' he says. ‘I'm just saying, we go back a long way.'

Fergus eases back in his chair, chuckling softly, the software distortion giving the sound an eerie quality that makes his balls shrink and his legs turn to mush.

‘Here's what will happen next,' Fergus says. ‘Law enforcement will revisit dump sites, trace those bitches back to their trailer parks, talk to their neighbours, forensically examine every dusty corner of their little slice of mobile-home heaven. Are you following this? I hope to fuck you are, because your life depends on you paying attention to what I'm about to say. You need to go back and clean Sharla Jane's place down with bleach. You will dispose of the woman
and
the boy as instructed. Do it carefully and quickly.'

He doesn't know that Red got away!
Weak with relief, he's suddenly glad of the mask, hoping that what he's thinking doesn't show in his body language; there's still a chance he can make things right.

‘I'll be finished here, out of state in forty-eight hours.'

‘You FUCKING DIMWIT – can't you understand the urgency?' Fergus is screaming, out of control. He moves in to the monitor again, then dodges quickly back, realizing his mistake, and his face is a smear of red lips and bared teeth, like a tortured soul in a horror flick.

For a few seconds, all the man can hear is Fergus's breath, stuttering, unnaturally deepened by the voice distorter.

‘Get rid of the surveillance equipment, the cameras, the table, the apparatus – everything. And get out of there. Right now. And when you've done all that, find a hole to crawl into and lie low until I tell you it's safe to come out.'

Like I'm some kind of cockroach.
His impotent fury is replaced by cold, hard anger. He looks over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of Sharla Jane.

‘But I got her all wound up, ready to go,' he says with a slight slump of his shoulders to show how disappointed he is.

‘Ooo …
kay,
' Fergus says, as if he's indulging a small child. ‘But you'll need to hurry.'

He grips the monitor in his two hands and brings his face so close to the camera he must be a black blur. He feels a strange calm. ‘Let's get one thing straight – I don't
need
to do anything you say.'

He hears a sputter of shock; it sounds something like Sharla Jane's choked breathing, and the comparison gives him strength. Later, he sees this as the moment Fergus lost control and he gained it.

‘I'm sick of this circle, jerk. You want to play, get one of your own.' He breaks the connection.

Control. It was always there; he just had to figure out how to take it.

He turns to face the room, and there she is: Sharla Jane Patterson. There is no natural light, but the place is bleached with spot lamps, ready for the cameras to roll. She is tied to a raised pallet. Her eyes are bound with duct tape. Her torso, from her chest to halfway down her thighs, is weighted with a concrete disc. Her throat convulses in the effort to inflate her lungs against 130 pounds of pressure.

Red's fingers are sore from working on the trunk lock. He has tried pulling the metal bars and pushing on the levers, but it's hard when he can't see. He wipes the sweat out of his eyes and picks up the kitchen knife, works the blade into the mechanism. It gives a little. He applies more pressure, but the car hits a rock and he's jolted hard, hits his head on the trunk lid; his hand slips and the tip of the knife blade snaps. Cussing, he tries again, but when he works his fingers into the latch he feels a burning pain and screams, dropping the knife. He covers his mouth with his hand to kill the sound of his crying. He has sliced his finger – a fragment of metal must still be caught in the mechanism. He squeezes and squeezes his finger to stop the pain and the bleeding; he knows he should try again, but he is afraid and it hurts so bad.

‘You gonna just lay there bawling?' he says out loud. He can hardly understand himself, he's crying so hard. ‘Quit crying, you goddamn crybaby – you got to get
outa
here.'

But he can't help it, and for a while he gives way to the pain and the fear. When he is tired of crying, he shucks off his jacket, drags his T-shirt over his head. He wipes the snot and tears off of his face, then wraps the cloth around his hand, ready to try again.

A sudden jolt. He braces himself against the roof of the trunk. The ground is real rough now, and the engine drone sounds different – a higher-pitched whine – and Red hears the whip of branches and underbrush against the car. They must've turned off the road.

After five or so minutes, the car stops.

The boy listens: in the distance he hears another vehicle. It has a low, throaty roar like an SUV, maybe, or a truck. The man gets out of the car and pretty soon the SUV comes up. The engine keeps running, but over the rumble of the engine he hears two voices, both men. Two doors slam, the second vehicle revs up and drives away. He is alone.

He starts on the lock again, but stops straight away. Something just tapped on the trunk of the car. He holds his breath.

Tap, tap-tap,
like code.

He gets to his knees, his shoulders hard against the trunk lid. They knew he was there all along – they was just playing with him, pretending to go off in the SUV, but one of them stayed. He grips the broken knife two-handed out in front of him, his hands shaking. The tapping becomes a drumming; he hears a distant rumble of thunder and starts to breathe again: it's rain – just rain. Soon a deluge is hammering on the trunk lid.

[P]aradoxically, we are more awake when we are asleep, than when we are not.

E
RICH
F
ROMM
, T
HE
A
RT OF
B
EING

Incident Command Post, Westfield, Oklahoma
Saturday, 2 a.m.

The rain was a solid grey curtain beyond the wooden walkway. It drummed on the shingle roof and bounced six inches high off the concrete of the car park. Fennimore turned up the hood of his waxed jacket, watching the rainwater sluice down the slope to the road. Abigail Hicks had woken him from a dream in which a girl wearing a sundress walked next to an older man alongside a high wall in a sunny street. A warm breeze riffled her hair, carrying an aroma of river water and flowers. The off-key two-tone of a police siren blasted nearby and, startled, she half turned and took a misstep.
Faux pas
, Fennimore thought, automatically. The man at her side caught her elbow and, as she straightened up, Fennimore strained to catch a glimpse of her face, desperate to find out if it was his daughter, but the man's shoulder obscured his view.

He woke, speaking Suzie's name in his dark hotel room, his mobile phone buzzing on the nightstand next to him, the rain a jet engine's roar outside his window. Hicks didn't say what it was about, just asked if he could be dressed and ready to roll in five minutes.

A lightning flash lit up a Williams County Sheriff's Department SUV as it turned in to the car park; more flashes in close succession, strobing the night sky so that the vehicle seemed to approach in a series of freeze-frames.

Hicks drew alongside the walkway and he swung the door open. Raindrops rattled like peas on the stiff fabric of his hood, and in the two seconds it took to open the door and climb in, he brought a bucketful of water with him; it streamed from his jacket onto the seat, soaking his trousers, and pooled in the foot well.

‘Buckle up,' Hicks said. ‘We got a body over at Cupke Lake, twelve miles south of here.'

‘Billy?' he asked.

‘I don't know, Professor. Call came in just after the storm hit. We got a location – a family camping up on the lake, but cell-phone reception's spotty up there even on a sunny day with a tail wind. With all this electrical activity, dispatch lost 'em before they could give much detail – small and naked is all I know. The deputy on night duty headed out just before me – they'll leave a marker at the roadside – that's if they find the place in this storm.'

Hicks drove slowly, ploughing through floodwater and bouncing over potholes, hunched forward at the wheel to try to catch a glimpse of road between sweeps of the wiper blades. A few miles from the lake, she turned on the light bar and the SUV's cabin was washed with alternating blue and red lights.

They would have missed the turning if it weren't for a Jeep Cherokee parked up at the end of the trail to the lake. The headlights flashed frantically as they approached, and Deputy Hicks slowed to a crawl and drew parallel with the driver's door with the storm crashing overhead. She rolled down her window, and the driver followed suit.

‘We couldn't stay down there, Deputy,' he apologized, raising his voice over the roar of the storm. ‘The kids were too scared.'

He looked harried himself, Fennimore thought. The entire family were huddled in the Jeep: parents and three kids – a teen and two younger boys who looked like twins.

‘That's all right, sir,' Hicks shouted. ‘Is the other deputy down there now?'

He shook his head, rainwater dripping from the brim of his baseball cap. ‘They drove by ten minutes ago, missed our signal.'

She nodded. ‘Could you maybe get in my vehicle, show me where—'

His eyes darted right to his wife in the passenger seat. ‘I think I should stay with my family. It's straight down the trail, maybe fifty yards – you'll see our tent where the stream comes in at the edge of the lake.'

‘All right.' Hicks thought she understood. ‘But, sir?' She lowered her voice and beckoned for him to lean out of the car. ‘Are you sure you saw what you think you saw?'

His eyes hardened. ‘I was in Iraq. I know a body when I see one.' He glanced back into the Jeep, and then leaned out of the Jeep across the gap between the two vehicles, so his family couldn't hear. ‘I think …' He hesitated, and it was as if something cracked and broke behind his eyes. ‘Deputy, that body is so small …' The look on his face said he knew he should go with them, but he just couldn't bear to pull a child out of the water.

‘Would you do me a favour, sir?' Hicks yelled. ‘Would you stay here, direct the deputy to where I'm at when he comes back along the road?'

He nodded, eager to help, and Fennimore realized she was giving him a way to save face. ‘Yes, ma'am. Yes, I will.'

The track was thick with mud, but they didn't have far to travel, and the SUV was built for the terrain, so they pulled up at the lakeside in under a minute. Hicks killed the light bar and switched to a spot, taking in the small spit of land where the family had set up camp between an inlet and what must have been a small stream. Now it was a raging torrent. Their tent was intact, but water was lapping at the door flap.

‘I don't see it,' Hicks said. ‘Are we too late?'

‘Try again,' Fennimore said. ‘Take it slowly.'

She swung the beam right to left, tracking across black choppy water, sweeping in to the little inlet ahead of the driving wind; the rain was so heavy you could barely see five yards. There was no sign of a body.

‘Damn light is bouncing right back off the rain,' Hicks said, reaching into the seat console for a flashlight. ‘I'm going out to take a look.'

As she reached for the door handle, a prolonged series of lightning flashes lit the entire inlet and the light flared off something white tangled up in a broken tree branch.

They were both out of the car and down to the water's edge in a second. Another bolt of lightning, and the white object glowed electric blue in the static flash. It was a body, face down in the water, and the family man was right – it was tiny.

For a moment, Hicks stood, frozen, her flashlight centred on the body, but she made no move.

‘Abigail?'

She stared at the body, rising and falling, working free of the branch that held it.

‘Deputy Hicks.'

She looked at him, water streaming down her face, her hair plastered to her head, her confidence all but gone. ‘What do I do, Professor? I don't want to mess this up all over again.'

Fennimore glanced behind him: the stream had taken down one side of the tent; the polyester flapped and whipped in the wind like a loose sail. In minutes the whole thing would be sucked into the rising waters. He yelled to warn Hicks, but the wind caught his words and hurled them into the storm. He tapped her on the shoulder and pointed towards the tent and she immediately began stripping off her jacket and shoes.

Fennimore yelled, ‘You should wait for the deputy.'

She grabbed his jacket lapels and pulled him close, shouting in his ear. ‘
Cupke
is from the Creek language – means “long”. By the time he figures out he missed the turn and heads back, that body will be gone.' She waded into the lake without even a glance backwards.

‘Bloody hell, Abigail!' Fennimore splashed into the water behind her and she looked over her shoulder. The gravel shifted under his feet and the torrent tugged at him, and Fennimore nearly lost his balance.

Hicks yelled, ‘Stay back.'

Fennimore watched from the water's edge as Hicks seized the lower branch of a cottonwood tree, now part submerged in the encroaching lake. She leaned out and gripped one ankle of the corpse. ‘Go fetch a rope from the trunk of the vehicle.'

He ran with the wind at his back, returning more slowly in the face of the punishing gusts. He threw Hicks one end of the rope, and she laced it around her own waist. Fennimore threaded the rope through the crash bars of the SUV, then looped it around his own back.