A knock on the door startled him. Villatoro rolled off the bed, used his palms to flatten the wrinkles on his shirt, and tucked his shirttails into his trousers. There was no peephole, so he opened the door a crack.
It was the receptionist from the front desk with a bucket of ice.
“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t order any ice.”
She looked up and smiled conspiratorially. “We could put some in a glass, and pour some bourbon over it, and we’d have a cocktail.”
He could feel his face flush. Even though he was blocking the door, he could see her look into the room, making sure he was alone.
“You seem like a very nice man,” she said.
“A nice married man,” he said.
She laughed huskily. “I’m not asking you to get a divorce. I just thought you might want to have a drink with me. I just finished my shift.”
He didn’t know what to say. She was so open, and so bold. And she wasn’t as unattractive as his first impression of her had been, now that she was off duty.
She read his face, and smiled. “Some other time, eh?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“You know where I am,” she said, handing him the bucket. He watched her walk down the hallway. Nice walk, he thought. He found himself wondering what she had looked like twenty years before. She paused at the end of the hall, looked back at him over her shoulder, and winked. He waved with a flutter of his fingers and shut the door.
He carried the ice bucket into his room and placed it absently on the desk, his mind spinning.
After pacing back and forth, he made a decision: He would sleep in the other double bed tonight. Maybe it wouldn’t be as lumpy.
He lay in the dark, flustered, but a little excited. It had been years since a woman…
Clicking on the bed lamp, he addressed the photo of his wife and daughter. “Sorry, Donna. Don’t worry,” he said, before turning the light off.
Real sleep was still hours away.
Saturday, 10:23 P.M.
NEWKIRK WAS in the backseat of Singer’s white Escalade, looking between the heads of Singer and Gonzalez at the sweep of headlights in the trees. They were on a well-graded dirt road, climbing a series of S-turns in the timber, en route to Gonzalez’s home. Singer suddenly tapped the brakes to let a doe and fawn run across the road, and Newkirk lurched forward, grasping at the front seat for support.
“Didn’t see her,” Singer said. “Sorry, Newkirk.”
Gonzalez said, “I saw her eyes reflect back, but it was too late to say anything. Why don’t they just cross the road when they hear you coming? They wait until you’re right on top of them to decide to run. Fucking deer.”
“There’s a lot of them,” Singer said.
After a beat, Gonzalez said, “You notice how every animal has different-colored eyes when light hits them? Deer are green. I seen a coyote up here, and his eyes were blue. Rabbits are yellow. I seen some orange eyes a couple of nights ago up here on my road, but I still don’t know what the animal was.”
“Badger,” Newkirk said. “My boys and I spotlighted a badger once, and his eyes were orange.”
“Fucking badger,” Gonzalez said.
GONZALEZ LIVED on a hilltop, in a home that perched over a cliff and afforded a vast, breathtaking view of a dark forest valley and the moonlit mountains eighty miles away. From the deck, Newkirk could see a kidney-shaped lake far below that mirrored the stars and moon. Like all of them, Gonzalez lived in a home that would have been unattainable ten years before, something beyond their dreams. The house alone would have cost 7 or 8 million in L.A., and that didn’t include the eighty acres that went with it.
Singer stepped out through the open sliding glass door and handed Newkirk a beer as he joined him at the rail.
“You know the name of that lake?” Newkirk asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“There are so many lakes up here. I’ve tried to learn their names.”
“Gonzo’s Lake,” Singer said. “We can call it that.”
Newkirk took a sip of the beer. It bothered him, once again, that Singer and Gonzalez had no real interest about where they lived.
“You know what the deal is when we go downstairs,” Singer said. “You and I don’t talk. No matter what happens or what’s said, we don’t talk. We don’t want him to know how many of us there are, or who we are. We don’t want him to hear our voices again, or he’ll put things together.”
“And Gonzo is okay with that?”
“Sure he is.”
Newkirk took a deep breath, looked away.
“Yes,” Singer said, acknowledging Newkirk’s concern, “we’re taking a calculated risk here. We’re using Boyd to create a plausible diversion that will pull the search teams out of the woods. We need to get them out before they find something, and we need to change the story from missing kids to finding Tom Boyd. With the sheriff’s office and community attention on Boyd, the odds go way down that the Taylor kids will be found by law enforcement and put into protective custody-or be interviewed on network TV, for Christ’s sake. And if the focus is on Boyd, we can use the time we just bought on doing good police work to locate those kids. Just good, solid, professional police work, meaning chasing up every lead, interviewing every possible witness, using our training. It always works, Newkirk, it always works. This way, we’ll find them before some idiot deputy does.”
“What if a citizen finds them?” Newkirk asked.
“We’ve set it up so we’re the first responders,” Singer said. “We’ll get there first. Then we’ll deal with it.”
“But Boyd…”
“Don’t worry,” Singer said. “We’ll keep him alive. We might need him again.”
Newkirk felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air.
THEY WENT down the stairs into the basement, Gonzalez in front of them, clomping loudly. Newkirk followed Singer down, replicating Singer’s gentle steps. The man in the basement would probably sense there was more than one of them, but he wouldn’t know how many for sure. As he followed, Newkirk heard his stomach gurgle. The dread he felt grew stronger. So did the odor. Urine, feces, sweat, fear.
At the landing, Singer turned and made a face at Newkirk, then drew a handkerchief out and tied it over his nose and mouth. Newkirk didn’t have a cloth, so he raised his arm and pressed his face into his sleeve.
Gonzalez snapped on a light, a bare bulb in a fixture attached to the upper floor joists. The basement was unfinished except for a framed-out spare bedroom and bathroom on the north wall. The floor was bare concrete.
Tom Boyd shouted, “Who’s there?” His voice was muffled because of the cloth sack tied over his head. Burn marks from a Taser stun gun, like snakebites, could be seen just under the collar of Boyd’s light brown uniform shirt. Newkirk was glad he couldn’t see the man’s face.
“Remember me?” Gonzalez said in a fake voice. Newkirk recognized it as what Gonzalez called his “whitey-white” voice, the one he’d used to mock supervisors and politicos back on the force. Gonzo was a great mimic, master of eight or nine dialects. He used to read departmental memos in the locker room in that whitey-white, just-returned-from-a-weekend-in-the-Hamptons voice, and always got big laughs. But it was horrible now, Newkirk thought.
“You probably thought I had forgotten about you down here, Mr. UPS man. But I was busy all day.”
“I know who you are,” Boyd said. “You’re those cops.”
Singer and Newkirk exchanged glances.
Boyd was in a stout straight-backed wooden chair. His hands had been triple Flex-cuffed behind his back, to assure that the heavily muscled man couldn’t break free. His thick torso was tied to the chair with tight bands of climbing rope, his bare ankles Flex-cuffed to the chair legs. Newkirk could see where the cuffs dug deeply into Boyd’s skin. The seat of the chair and the inside of Boyd’s dark UPS uniform shorts were sodden where he’d been forced to foul himself. For some reason, Gonzalez had removed Boyd’s shoes. When Newkirk saw why, he almost retched.