Light Before Day (41 page)

The map told me that from where we were standing, Highway 46 traveled a westward path through a whole lot of nothing, the town of Paso Robles, then the rolling vineyard country that met the Pacific Ocean. To the east, Highway 46 dead-ended into Highway 99. East of their intersection was the southern terminus of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.

"East or west," I said.

"Why not north and south?"

"It's a guess," I said. "LA is south and these guys aren't going anywhere near it. I suspect they're someplace isolated."

"Fine," she said. "East of here, you've got the Greenhorn Mountains. There's a lot of cabins along Highway 155. It goes straight up into the mountains until you hit Lake Isabella. There's not much up there. A few towns. The Kern River Valley. It's pretty isolated."

"And west?" I asked her.

"More nothing, but not much in the way of mountains," she answered. "Forty-six takes you through Paso Robles, then through the Coast Ranges. But the range is different down here. The peaks aren't as high, and the area close to the ocean has a lot of vineyards. Then you hit Cambria. Then you hit the Pacific Ocean."

She was being as patient with me as possible. "So what do you think, Adam? East or west?"

"These guys are stopping here for a reason," I said. "They're either coming down out of the mountains to the east, or through the hills so that they can take the 5 or the 99 to the north.

They're traveling at night, and they're driving a black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows.

That's not exactly inconspicuous, so I doubt they're sightseeing. Spinotta stole enough money to get them a more inconspicuous car, if they want to take a joy ride."

I had her full attention. "They're buying snack foods," I went on. "I bet they get their real provisions closer to home. They're also buying a full tank of gas. That means they're either real close, which I doubt, or they're low on gas by the time they get here."

"So they're close. But not that close."

From the look of the highway on the map, if the Vanished Three were picking this place to get onto Interstate 5, they didn't have a lot of other options close to their home base. From the east, several different freeways flowed down out of the Sierras and toward Highway 99 and Interstate 5. From the west, the options were fewer and far between.

"They're coming from the west," I said.

"A Suburban," she said. Now she was the one thinking out loud. "There's a lot of room in a Suburban, and there's only two of them. You said you thought they were picking up the kids at a drop-off point."

"That might explain one of the trips," I said. "But the attendant saw them several times over the past few weeks. You think those were all pickups? You think they've abducted two more kids since Caden McCormick?"

"No, I don't. I would have heard about it."

"These guys are traveling long distances at night," I said. "On a regular basis. I bet if we visited some more gas stations along this stretch we might find someone else who's seen them."

"So what the hell are they doing?" she asked.

"I don't know."

An eighteen-wheeler roared to life several feet away and then blasted past us as it pulled out of the gas station and headed west toward Interstate 5.1 watched it depart, its rim lights fading into the night.

"The boys," Caroline said. "They're out picking the boys." She turned to face me. "Maybe these road trips are about finding the boys, picking the right ones."

"You think they tell Reynaldo which kids to abduct?" I asked. "That shoots my whole theory to hell. That means they picked Corey's brother on their own."

"Maybe it was a coincidence," she said.

"I seriously doubt that, Caroline. If they keep ordering Reynaldo to abduct attractive young boys, then he's going to catch on sooner or later that their intentions aren't pure. I bet they give him as few orders as possible. The more requests they make, the more suspicious he might get.

And besides, Reynaldo's got to abduct these boys. Reynaldo has to decide whether the circumstances are right."

"You're guessing, Adam."

"We both are."

A silence fell. I got the impression that she was cutting me some slack for the first time that day. A light breeze lifted her hair under the back of her cap.

"Maybe Reynaldo knows," she finally said. "Maybe Reynaldo knows what they're going to do to these kids, and he thinks it's better than what might happen to them if they stayed with their parents."

It was a good explanation for why Corey couldn't go to Reynaldo for help once he

discovered what Joseph was really up to, because Reynaldo knew full well what was going to be done to Caden McCormick, and he didn't care.

"My mother did some research," Caroline said, "about what happens to these kids growing up. How they live, how they can die. Their parents keep acetone in the freezer. Sometimes the children drink it by accident. When they die, the parents just get rid of the body. This one woman, she thought her kids were possessed by Satan, so she made them drink bleach every morning. Another one used her daughter—"

"Enough, Caroline."

To my surprise, she stopped giving me the gory details. Yet she had made me question what was a better fate for the four young boys who had been abducted, being abused and killed at home or nursed back to health and molested in a state of near catatonia. I forced myself to recall the video I had seen the night before.

Caroline seemed to be reading my thoughts. "You said the boys are drugged. Maybe they never know what happened to them. Maybe they have no memory of it." Her voice sounded hollow and her eyes fell to the pavement at her feet.

"You think Spinotta doesn't visit them when they're awake?" I asked sharply. "And we still don't have the slightest clue what happens to these boys when they're too old for Spinotta's liking. Billy Hatfill told me he was never young enough for Spinotta, and they met when Billy was eighteen."

'Teah, well," she whispered, "at least with Spinotta, their parents aren't hogging all the drugs." She grunted, pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead for a few seconds, then ran her hands down her face. "Fine!" she snapped. "So what do we do? We get a room nearby?

Wait for them to come back?"

"All their stops have been at night," I said, folding up the map.

"Yeah, so?"

"Tomorrow night, we get a room nearby. Check in with the attendant and wait for them to come back." I grabbed the car door handle, but she didn't move.

"That's your best plan?"

"Until something better comes along."

"I sure fucking hope something better comes along."

"So do I," I replied. "Tomorrow we'll go see Claire Shipley. She obviously doesn't want to talk to us. That means we want to talk to her."

I was chasing a young boy through an endless shimmering field. I jerked awake and felt something heavy fall on my legs. I kicked it to the floor and saw that it was a patchwork quilt. I was in Caroline's cabin, on Caroline's sofa. The only light came from the desk lamp. The photos of the four young boys who had been abducted were spread out on Caroline's desk. I had meant to study them when we had returned, but I had collapsed in exhaustion.

Now I had been awakened by a shrill series of beeps that sounded like they had come from a giant microwave. Caroline's sleeping loft was an empty mess of comforters. The front door of the cabin was open. Caroline was gone.

In the galley kitchen, I opened a cabinet door and found a rack of long-bladed knives just like the one Caroline had used to cut Eddie Cairns's restraints. I pulled one from its sheath and was struck by its light feel. It was perfectly weighted, with a five-fingered rubber grip, perfect for swinging, perfect for striding out into the dark when you didn't have the slightest clue how to wield a knife.

At the front door, I saw Caroline squatting at the entrance to the clearing. At first it looked like she was conversing with a friendly deer, only there was no deer. Her back was rigid, her head still. I approached slowly.

She had slipped into a man's shirt and pushed her hair back over her head. In the darkness, it looked like a solid plate against her back. The gun she held in both hands was larger and meaner than the pistol Billy Hatfill used to take his life. It was black with a squared-off barrel and butt.

The sinking half moon sent vague light across the empty expanse of field beyond. I could just make out the fence posts in the distance. "This place has a perimeter alarm?" I asked under my breath.

She got to her feet and locked the gun's three safeties with practiced speed.

"Did you see anything?" I asked.

"No," she answered. "Probably just a wayward cow."

My palm had greased the knife handle with sweat. I threw the thing to the dirt as if it had taken a bite out of me.

"That's a Glock field knife, in case you're interested. Strong enough to break a window or an ammunition box," she said. "The gun's a Glock too."

"You feel like telling me why your dad needed a hideout with a perimeter alarm?" I asked.

"I told you," she said. "He was an activist."

"Maybe he got a little too into his work."

Instead of taking the bait, she returned her attention to the moonlit field beyond the tree line.

"You've been asking a lot of questions about Reynaldo Reyez," I said. "Maybe he's onto you."

"You think he's looking for me now?" she asked. She sounded excited by the prospect. I didn't share her enthusiasm. "If that was the case, we would both be dead."

"You really think you know this guy, don't you?" I asked her.

She turned to face me, then slid the Glock into a holster hidden underneath her shirt. I figured she had been wearing it all day, but her baggy T-shirt had concealed it. The open cabin door threw a weak spray of light onto her face.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You called Reyez a crusader," I said. "That's the same as an activist, right?"

I saw the insult in her eyes. "Are you judging me?"

"I guess," I said.

Caroline shifted from one foot to another. "Your friend Corey wanted to know where Joseph Spinotta was. He used you to try to find out, and you're still doing his work for him. Even though he's dead. You must have really loved this guy."

"Corey didn't use me," I said. "That's the whole point. He used a body double. He didn't do what Billy asked him to do."

"Yeah," she said. "Have you stopped to think that maybe Corey believed in Billy's plan?

That maybe Corey wanted you to believe it was you on that tape, even if it wasn't. That Corey wanted to send you out here to find Spinotta."

"What does it matter?" I asked sharply. "He's dead."

"Exactly," she said. "And you're still doing what he wants. You're going to save his little brother, right?"

She had my mother's special way of pressing words into your chest with the flat of her hand, and I was confident that if I shared that with her she would only press harder.

"You made your point, Caroline," I said.

I walked back inside the cabin. She didn't follow me.

I sat down at Caroline's desk and examined the photo assemblages of the four young boys who had been abducted. I tried to memorize their names and faces. There was no pattern to the dates of the abductions that I could discern.

My eyes kept drifting back to Jim Clark, the first boy to have been abducted. He looked familiar to me. He looked familiar to me because I had seen him before. I picked up the sheet containing his photos. He wore an angry glower in most of his pictures, but his eyes were big.

Huge. They looked like each one could use its own pool man.

A little more than twenty-four hours earlier, I had watched Jim Clark cut Martin Cale's throat. His name was Everett now. When I had asked Everett about his parents, where he had come from, rage had flickered in his big blue eyes. He had been fourteen at the time of his abduction, and the physical transformation he had undergone was so total that I hadn't recognized him when I had first looked at this picture. He had ended up in Billy Hatfill's care, following Billy Hatfill's orders even when it meant murder.

Billy had been grooming Everett for a life as a potential trophy boy, he said. Were the other three boys in front of me supposed to meet the same fate?

Everett had been fourteen at the time of his abduction. That made him sixteen now, around the same age as Brian Ferrin, the young man Spinotta had drugged and raped years earlier.

Everett was physically beautiful and still of an age to be desirable to Spinotta, but for some reason he had been sent away in his prime.

Had Spinotta rejected Everett because the boys desires for sex and murder couldn't be controlled? I wondered if the pathologies of the young man I had met were a product of the time he had spent with Joseph Spinotta or of the abuse visited upon him before his abduction.

C H A P T E R 20

We made it back to Visalia by ten o'clock the next morning. The rising temperatures had stretched a layer of brown haze across the valley that stole the definition from the mountain backdrop. Caroline pulled to the curb two blocks away from the tiny aluminum box where Claire Shipley lived.

"You said she was waiting us out last night?" Caroline asked.

"A security light went on over the back door right after we left," I said. "Then the light in the kitchen went on, too."

"So what are we going to ask this woman?" she said.

I repeated the story Martin Cale had told me, that Reynaldo Reyez's father had tried to leave the meth-running business behind because his wife had become addicted to the stuff. When his boss got wind of this, he ordered the murder of Reynaldo's grandmother down in Mexico.

Reynaldo's father had responded to the news by turning a gun on his wife and then himself. Some people claimed they saw Reynaldo being driven out of town by his father on the morning of this murder-suicide.

"You think Claire Shipley actually knows something?"

"I think she doesn't want to talk to us."

"You didn't answer my question."

"I don't have an answer."