"Disappeared. Last week. He must have been making some headway." Will let out a grumbly sigh. "That's when we decided to go to Tannino."
"We've had no word from Leah at all since she left," Emma said.
Will said, "I keep writing letters, hoping, but nothing."
"How can you send her articles and letters when you don't know where she is?"
"She left a P.O.-box number on our answering machine right after she first disappeared, so we could forward her mail – probably so she could keep getting her financial paperwork. We figure it's a holding box for the entire cult."
"Do any of your letters get returned?"
"No," Emma said. "They go through. To somewhere."
"Where's the post office?"
Will said, "Someplace in the North Valley. We tried to look into it – do you have any idea how difficult it is to squeeze information out of the United States Postal Service? We talked to some postal inspector, he acted like he was guarding the recipe for Coke or some horseshit. We finally sent Katanga to stake out the box, but the post office crawled up his ass about invasion of privacy, so he had to watch from the parking lot. He sat in his car for a few days with binoculars, but she never showed up. The cult's wise to it – they probably send someone different each time to pick up the mail. If they pick it up at all."
"I'll need that address."
"I'll have my assistant call Marco with it first thing tomorrow. Watch yourself with that postal inspector – I'm not kidding. He'll open you up a new one."
Tim jotted a few notes. "Did you record any of the threatening phone calls?"
"No. We managed to trace the second call back to a pay phone in Van Nuys. Nothing came of it."
"I'll want that information, too." Tim flipped through his notes. "What's Leah's last name?" Off the Hennings' blank stares, Tim added, "You said she was from Emma's first marriage?"
"She has my name. I adopted her legally when she was six. She's my stepdaughter, but I make no distinction between her and my own daughter." Will cleared his throat. "I may have progressed a bit foolhardy out of the gate. Wasn't sure what we were dealing with, so I came out swinging. In retrospect that may not have been the best plan of action." He had a habit, Tim observed, of holding his own conversation, undeterred by interjections. "I had my men post these around town. We got nothing but a bunch of nowhere leads." He pulled a flyer from his back pocket and smoothed out its folds on his knee before handing it to Tim. The same photo of Leah, beneath which was written $10,000 reward for information on the whereabouts of this girl, Leah Elizabeth Henning. Persons wishing to remain anonymous should tear this flyer in half, transmit one half with the info submitted, and save the remaining half to be matched later. Leah's identifiers and contact information followed.
Tim thought he detected the faint tracings of pride in Will's face, probably from the Dragnet wording on the flyer he and his men had cooked up.
Tim turned the flyer over, unimpressed. "So now everyone in the cult knows you're after her, that you're the enemy. That's quite a mess."
"That's why we need you to clean it up. And why we'll pay you well to do it." Will enclosed one large fist in his other hand, bringing them to rest against his belly.
"We have to back off now." Emma shot a loving look at Will, which he returned. "We just had our first baby together. I won't have her be put in harm's way."
"And we're very concerned for Leah," Will said. "Who knows what they'll do to her? If they let her go, she can reveal secrets about them, maybe even try to get her money back. They need her either loyal or dead." He rubbed his eyes, wrinkling the skin around them. "They've convinced me they mean serious business. That's why we need you to poke around, quietly. Someone who can't be traced back to us or to her this time."
"What made Leah take off? When she came home that day?"
Emma rustled uncomfortably, and Will looked sharply away. "They're inside her head. She was insane, convinced we were persecuting her. She played around on my computer and managed to find all the e-mails I'd been sending out to cops and the like."
"She's a whiz with computers." Profound sadness undercut Emma's proud smile. "She was studying computer science. A straight-A student before she…" The scattering of pale freckles across her cheeks was visible only if the light hit her the right way. "To go through something like this, as parents, you have no idea."
Dray stiffened. Taking note, Emma shifted, noticing the framed picture of Ginny on the mantel. Mortified, she flushed, her eyes moistening. "Of course you do. I am…so terribly sorry."
She dug in her purse for Kleenex, tears running. Tim located a box and offered it to her. Will laid a thick arm across her shoulders and gathered her in. He kissed the top of her head gently. The two couples sat quietly in the room as Emma dabbed her eyes.
"It's terrible for me to cry here, after what you've been through," she said. "It's just so awful knowing she's out there, with these people. She wasn't herself when we saw her. It was like she'd been replaced by another person. She wore a filthy T-shirt, and she had a rash across her chest, bruises up the backs of her arms, open sores around her ankles. God knows what they've done to her. God knows what they're doing to her. Day after day." She pressed the balled tissue to her lips to still them. "How are we supposed to live with that uncertainty? As parents?" She made a strangled noise deep in her throat, something between a gasp and acry.
Dray's face reddened with emotion; she looked away.
Will gazed tenderly at Leah's photo before leaning forward and setting it on the coffee table. "She was a damn good kid."
Dray said, "Maybe she still is."
Tim studied the picture, noticing for the first time it was worn around the edges, one corner faded by Will's thumb from being removed countless times from the billfold.
"I'll help your daughter," Tim said.
Dray lay curled beneath the covers, facing away, the sheet hugging the dip of her waist. Through the bedroom window, the moon threw a patch of light that angled along the floor and climbed the edge of the bed like a kicked-off blanket. A light rain spit at the glass – the first three weeks of spring had been unusually wet.
Tim slid into bed beside her, resting one hand on her hip and flipping through his notepad with the other. Dray was incredibly fit at thirty-one, her body tuned from self-defense drills and weight training. Three years older, Tim could no longer rely on his work to maintain his lean build; he'd started running early mornings and lifting nights with Dray.
"What a character, that guy." Her voice was slow, tired. "He's mostly frustrated that he hasn't got the upper hand. Typical Hollywood asshole. Thinks he can buy everything. You, the Service, his daughter. 'Her two – million – dollar future.' 'A forty – thousand – dollar car.' I felt like I was on The Price Is Right."
"He's hurting, though. You see how he looked at that picture of her?"
Dray gave a little nod. "My heart goes out to her, and to them as parents, but…" She twisted, regarding him across the bulge of her shoulder. "Call me callous, but if some girl wants to join a cult and fuck herself up, so what? It's not being forced on her. She chose it."
"During Ranger training, they put us through some paces in Psy-Ops. There are ways to break people down, play around in their mind. They don't always have a say in it."
Dray made a noncommittal noise of acknowledgment – the one that meant she needed to give something more thought. "What if she's already dead? What if they killed her and dumped her body somewhere?"
"Then I'll find it and give the parents a burial. End their uncertainty – that's something we were spared."
She nodded slightly and turned back over. "I want Sleep Hold."
Tim slid down in bed, spooning her, and she responded with a lazy arch of her back. She raised her head, and he maneuvered his left arm beneath her neck. His cheek rested against her hair, his lips just touching her ear.