When it was as deep as she could make it, she placed her right foot in it, raised her body up, and placed both her hands at the rim of the grave. She tangled her hands in the thick weeds, pushed off with her foot, and got her chest up to the surface. She used her hands to grasp other clumps of weeds as they came within her reach, dug her toes into the earth, and pulled herself out onto the ground. She lay there for a time, recovering her strength and her wind. Then she lifted her head to look around her slowly and carefully.
She could see the little house where she had spent the day and night handcuffed and in terror. It seemed harmless and empty now. She rose to her knees and took a long and careful look in every direction for some sign that the man had come back. She got to her feet and looked again, and then began to walk toward the distant road.
After a few minutes, Emily heard the sound of car engines in the distance, then saw a row of headlights coming up the dark road. She walked toward it, then began to trot, then broke into a run. As the lights approached, she could see that they were all too close together, too regularly spaced to be normal traffic. They were coming at a very high speed. When the cars reached the entrance to the long gravel road into the farm, they all pulled to the shoulder of the highway. Two men jumped out of the lead car in the glare of the headlights behind them, and she could see their car was a police car. The two men opened a metal gate, running with it to make it swing out of the way. The other cars all moved around the lead car. Four of them kept going, accelerating along the road past the farm, but the others all made the turn onto the gravel road.
Searchlights on the police cars swept across the weedy fields. When they crossed the gravel drive, they illuminated clouds of dust that their tires had kicked up. One of the beams swept across her, stopped, and came back to settle on her. Then the other beams joined it, and made it so bright that she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She just stood still and held her arms over her head.
She heard a man’s voice amplified electronically: “Are you Emily Kramer?”
“Yes,” she shouted, and nodded her head dramatically so they could see it from a distance.
She heard the sounds of running feet now, heavy footsteps and the whipping of weeds against their legs. A closer voice said, “Where is the man who took you?”
“He left. I don’t know how long it’s been. I had to dig myself out of a hole. At least half an hour or forty minutes, maybe an hour.” The lights seemed to dim a bit, so she opened her eyes. There were tall black silhouettes around her. One caught up with the others, and suddenly wrapped its arms around her.
“Emily,” he said.
“Hi, Ray. I knew if anybody looked hard enough for me, it would be you.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. He just kept me handcuffed and asked me questions. I’m just really tired.”
“You’ll be able to rest. They’ll take you to the hospital and clean you up and make sure you’re all right.”
A big new silhouette appeared. “You’re safe now, Mrs. Kramer.” It was the voice of Detective Gruenthal. “Mr. Hall, I’d like you to ride with Officer Daniels here, and we’ll take Mrs. Kramer with us. We need to talk.”
Emily made a decision at that moment, and she was not even certain why. It was possible that it was simply the “You’re safe now,” which she had heard before and no longer believed. She would tell them all about the kidnapping and the man in the ski mask. But somehow the other part-the part she had figured out and kept from telling the man in the mask-didn’t belong to the police; at least not yet. It belonged to her.
34
The police kept Emily talking until seven in the morning. Ray Hall was sitting in the hallway when they released her, waiting to take her home. They drove through the heavy morning traffic to his house, and when they were inside, she said, “Ray, do you have Sam Bowen’s phone number?”
He looked at her for a moment, then went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, and pulled out an address book. He found the page and handed the open book to her.
“Thanks,” she said. She dialed the number and waited. “Hello, Sam? This is Emily Kramer. Oh, things haven’t been so hot around here since the funeral, but it’s a long story, and I don’t have the energy right now.”
She listened for a few seconds, staring at the floor and nodding her head, then said, “Why haven’t you opened it?” She listened for a few more seconds. “Well, open it now, and read it. I’ll be up there as soon as I can get a flight. I don’t know the schedule. I’ll call you from the airport.”
When she had hung up the phone, she said to Ray, “I know you won’t agree with what I’m doing. You’ll notice I haven’t asked you.”
“I assume what you were saying means Sam has the evidence. You haven’t told the police?”
“He has a package. I’m going up there, and we’ll see what’s in it.”
“That guy is still out there. He must have ditched the SUV within ten minutes after he left you, or they would have caught him. And he’s nuts. He could be right outside waiting for you.”
“If so, then the best way you can protect me is drive me to the airport and watch me leave.” She picked up the telephone again.
THE HOUSE WAS a two-bedroom cottage with brown clapboards outside Seattle overlooking Puget Sound. There was a wooden deck lodged in the space between two pine trees, and a hot tub. On a cool day, Sam Bowen could step from the tub into the warmth of his house in two steps.
Sam wore a pair of blue jeans and a green flannel shirt with buttoned flaps over the breast pockets. He sat on an Adirondack chair staring out at the water. An empty glass was on the table, and beside it was the stationery box with a maroon top and gold print.
“I never opened it until you called, Emily,” Sam said. “It arrived a couple of days ago, but the handwriting on the label was Phil’s. I figured it had to be just another one of those housekeeping things that Phil did sometimes. He would have something he didn’t want lying around the office, or maybe he even wanted to be able to tell somebody truthfully that he didn’t have it. He would stash it somewhere, sometimes with someone like me.”
Emily said, “Weren’t you even curious?”
“Shit, Em. I’m seventy-three years old. I was a cop for twenty years, and then a private investigator for about as long. I’m cured of that. I’m not interested in getting hit in the face or staying up late anymore, and there aren’t any secrets I haven’t heard.”
“But now you’ve read it, haven’t you?”
“Yes. It’s about a case we had.”
“What kind of case?”
“A bad one. It was one of those jobs that you hesitate to take, and you probably wouldn’t take at all, except that by the time you hear about it, the client is already sitting in your office. He’s so distraught that you can barely stand to look at him, and he’s there only because he’s already tried everything that had a reasonable chance of success.”
Emily said, “So it was a man who came to see you.”
“Not me, Phil. I wouldn’t have heard about it at all, except that Phil called me into his office to listen. He introduced me and said, `I want my associate Mr. Bowen to hear this.’ That was a bad omen. He never called anyone his associate unless that person was about to do something painful.”
“What did you say?”
“I sat down and shut up and listened. The man was rich. I could see it by looking at his shoes. They were Mephisto walking shoes, handmade. That was a telling thing, to me. What it said was that he had enough money to buy whatever he wanted, but that he wasn’t interested in impressing people. They don’t look like anything. He had a good haircut, a watch that looked expensive, but with a French name I hadn’t seen before. I could tell Phil had seen the same signs, and so I stopped thinking about what we were going to make, and listened to the story.”