“So you were expecting her to resist?” asked Emily. “Wouldn’t it be just as likely she would see him and want to come home?”
“If she did, she knew the phone number. And if she wanted to surprise him, she knew the way home.”
“But to take her against her will-“
“You know better than that, Emily. In this state, a sixteenyear-old doesn’t have a will, legally. She does what her parents tell her.”
“I’m not talking about legal fictions.”
“Neither am I. You know any success stories about runaway girls in L.A.? We weren’t sure how she had gotten that far, but neither of us could think of any possible future for her that wasn’t a disaster. I mean, she’s got one thing to trade. We were convinced that we were saving her life.”
Emily was silent.
“So we did it. One night we happened to be in the sweet spot. The van had a sign on it that night that said TWENTY FOUR-HOUR PLUMBING. We parked it right off Hollywood, halfway up on the curb with orange safety cones behind it. We had the back door open so you could see one of those rooter machines Phil had rented that day, and the effect was great. I mean, what fake has one of those things?”
“And?”
“Along comes Allison. It’s around midnight. She comes right along the sidewalk from the direction of those old apartments around Fountain. I don’t know if she was crashing there with somebody she had met, or she just happened to like the route. I came from the building side and Phil came from the truck. We scooped her up and packed her into the back of the truck. Phil went in after her, and I drove off.”
“Didn’t she fight or scream or anything?”
“For a couple of seconds, I could hear her kicking and stuff. But then Phil handcuffed her and put a plastic restraint on her ankles. All the while he was reciting the Miranda warning. It’s a great way to calm somebody down. It intimidates them, but persuades them in a deep way that nothing freaky is happening to them. They’re still in a world where if everything goes wrong, they’re going to court. It also tells them that you think what you say to them matters-that the truth matters. So she went limp and stayed quiet for a long time. We were on the freeway nearly to Camarillo before she figured out we weren’t taking her to the station. She got really agitated, and we had to give her a little something to keep her quiet.”
“You drugged her?” Emily was horrified. “With what?”
“Phil gave her a little shot of something. I think it was that stuff that the doctors give you to put you down before they anesthetize you. Thiopental sodium or something.”
“Where in the world did he get it?”
“You know how Phil was. He had connections with everybody. People did things for him.”
“I know he cheated on me, Sam. I think we can assume he talked some woman pharmacist or nurse he knew into giving him the drug.”
Sam looked at her sadly. “He felt bad, Emily. He always felt like hell after. He really loved you.”
“Just tell me the story.”
Sam’s eyes didn’t move from her face. “It sometimes helps to forgive people for things like that. People have weaknesses.”
“They sure do,” she said. “Phil got some nurse to risk a prison term to give him a needle full of a sedative, and he risked killing the client’s daughter by shooting it into her in the back of a van. Is that about it?”
“That’s about it. For the rest of the trip she was okay and didn’t fight or feel scared. He stayed in the back with her to keep an eye on her pulse and breathing. He had been trained to handle battlefield first aid, and I had been a cop for twenty years.” He paused. “I can see that look on your face, and you’re wrong, Em. If there had been a bad reaction or something, he would have told me, and we would have rushed her to the nearest hospital, even if it meant the next stop would be jail. We were doing a job, taking a young, misguided girl back to her family, which had the resources to help her. If it was drug rehab, or psychiatric help, or just sending her a check for a few thousand a month, she was going to be better off.”
“How did it end?”
“We delivered her to her father at a ranch in the Central Valley. I recognized it from some of the pictures he had given us. There was a sign at the front gate that said ESPINOZA RANCH. There was a big living room he called the `great room,’ with beams made from tree trunks, and a stone fireplace and Tiffany chandeliers and oriental rugs.”
“Odd,” said Emily. “Why there? Why not the family home?”
“He had his reasons. He seemed to feel that it was likely she was going to make a scene about being snatched off the street like that, and that she would probably raise hell and fight. He didn’t want the house staff and visitors to know all about it. He said he couldn’t think of a way it would do anybody any good, and he didn’t want her to become the staple of local gossip. I could agree with that.”
“Were there other people there?”
“I didn’t meet them, but there certainly were. This was a big place. When you got past the gate, there was a gravel road that wound a bit to get around a hill and past some old oak woods. The house was there. And beyond it there was a stream that looked as though it might have some trout in it. You need people to keep a house that size from turning musty and dusty. It was just private. He wanted to spend time with her and talk to her and see where he had messed up, and begin to fix it. He had always planned to have her go east to an Ivy League school. He said that running off in her junior year had probably blown that for good. But he said he had learned that it didn’t really matter. She was home and she seemed to be all right, and that was all that mattered.
“We were still there when she started to come around. She was healthy, all right, and strong. She started to struggle right away, and make sounds. She was beginning to swear at him, but he said she would calm down as soon as she didn’t have an audience. Phil and I offered to stay or fetch help, or whatever, but he said he was already in touch with a psychiatrist who’d had lots of success with runaways-he’d deprogrammed kids who had joined cults, and was part of some institute that helped kids get off drugs and so on. The doctor and three or four members of his staff would be there within a couple of hours. He said he didn’t care what it cost or how long it took, he was going to save Allison. We drove home feeling pretty good about what we had done.”
Emily waited. Sam seemed to leave her for a moment, his eyes staring out at the wall of mist that was moving into the sound from the open ocean. “It goes to show you,” he said.
“To show you what?”
“Everything I just told you was a lie.”
“A lie?”
“That’s right.”
“Everything?”
“All of it. Nothing was true.”
“I don’t understand.”
Sam lifted the box with the maroon cover, pulled out a file folder, and set it on the table between them. Emily picked it up. It was a packet of plain sheets of paper, typed in single-space paragraphs with a line skipped between them. “Read that.”
She began to read. “My name is Philip R. Kramer, and I am the owner and principal investigator of Kramer Investigations, Van Nuys Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. I swear on penalty of perjury that everything in this statement is true …”