For once, what my father said made some sense. Why couldn’t I sit outside on my porch with a shotgun across my knees and keep the world away from my family?
I couldn’t stay home, but I couldn’t leave Melissa and Angelina, either, so I threw on my parka and went outside. As I approached Sanders, he slid his window down and held out his hand, palm out.
“That’s far enough, Jack.”
“Why?”
“The sheriff didn’t like our Thanksgiving dinner together. He told both of us to stop fraternizing with you and your family. You know what’s happening tomorrow.”
“And what would that be?” I said, angry.
“Jack, just stay back.”
I turned around and stomped back to the house. As I did I whipped out my cell phone and called Cody.
Out of ser vice range.
I called detective division again, and the receptionist said she’d put my message on his desk on top of the pile of my other messages.
DURING ANGELINA’S AFTERNOON NAP, I went into the kitchen as Melissa pulled more loaves of bread from the oven and put them on the counter to cool. I couldn’t even count the number of loaves she’d baked during the day-maybe twenty-five, maybe more. The kitchen was overwhelmed with the smell of yeast and flour and golden crust. There was more dough on the table, and it was obvious she was going to keep baking bread until she ran out of ingredients. I took a cursory look around the hiding places in the kitchen and didn’t see the bottle.
“You don’t have to keep looking,” she said. “I’m not drinking.”
“JACK, IT’S DETECTIVE TORKLESON,” Melissa said, shaking me awake. I’d fallen asleep in my chair in the living room out of exhaustion, and it took me a second to register what she’d said. When it did, my heart revved like a racecar motor, and I grabbed the phone and bounded up the stairs into our bedroom and shut the door.
He said, “I’ve been up all night since we talked. I hijacked our best tech gal and made her stay up all night with me in the basement of the building with her computers. We’ve been going over all of the evidence Scotland Yard and Interpol sent over…”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. “Jack, we can’t make any links at all between either Harris and Moreland or Coates and Moreland. We’ve got nothing to connect them.”
I nearly blacked out and had to reach for the headboard to steady my legs.
“Can you keep looking?” I said. My voice was weak. I’d staked everything on this. “Maybe Garrett has a secret computer? Maybe they know how to mask their telephone numbers and IP addresses somehow? Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that there has to be a connection.”
Torkleson sighed. “Jack, I’m not saying there isn’t a remote possibility. I’m not saying that. But the electronic trail between Coates and Harris is like a freeway. There’s nothing like that with the judge-not even an old cow trail, if you know what I’m saying. There are some IP addresses my tech gal can’t isolate, but nothing substantial, and nothing we could go to the DA with. It’s a dry hole, Jack.”
“It’s got to be there,” I said.
“Look, we’ve done all we could. It’s an interesting theory you had that plays into your situation, but nothing we can pursue in any way, shape, or form. Maybe somewhere down the line Harris will say the judge is a known associate, or give up his name for leniency. There’s always that.”
“It will be too late,” I said.
“I know,” Torkleson said.
I found myself looking out the window at Sanders’s cruiser. It was dusk and getting colder. Exhaust puffed from his tailpipe.
I said, “When you lose all hope, what have you got left?”
“I can’t answer that, Jack.”
“Neither can I,” I said, before thanking him and hanging up.
“HAVE WE DONE IT all wrong, honey?” I asked later that afternoon, as the sun dropped behind the mountains.
She stopped and looked at me, her eyes blinking oddly. “What do you mean?”
I shook my head. “Maybe we played it all wrong, because look where we are. Tomorrow they’re coming to take her. Maybe we should have hired a new lawyer, tried to take the judge to court to stall this at least. I know everyone said we’d lose in the end, but at least we’d have had more time. Instead, we tried to get Garrett to sign the papers, and he never signed them.” I didn’t even want to mention all that had happened, all that had gone wrong.
I said, “We could have done that or we could have hit the road right away and decided to go out with guns blazing. Maybe we could have created a media spectacle, gotten the press and the public on our side. Maybe that would have scared the judge and Garrett away.”
She took in a deep breath. “I’ve thought of those things. Believe me, Jack, I’ve never once stopped thinking of what we could do. Neither would have worked. I think you know that.”
I wasn’t so sure. “At least we could have tried.”
“We did try,” she said, her eyes tearing up. “We tried with the help of our best friends, and we did everything we could do. And I want you to stop speculating right now. All I’ve got in the world is the knowledge that we did all we could.”
I sat down heavily at the table. She came over and put her hands on my shoulders, leaving flour handprints.
“And we still don’t know why they really want her,” I said.
But I had an inkling, a thought so dark I still couldn’t share it, despite what Torkleson had said. And when I looked up at my wife, I could see by the emptiness in her eyes and expression that it had crossed her mind as well.
Sunday, November 25
TWENTY-THREE
AND IT WAS OVER.
Even now the events of that morning are wispy and sharply painful and disconnected in my mind. I remember everything, but I have trouble putting the events in order. Even now, as I recall them, my heart palpitates and my breathing gets shallow and irregular and I find myself reaching out to steady myself.
It was early in the morning when the doorbell rang, I remember that clearly. The sun hadn’t yet percolated through the clouds and, with an inch or two of fresh snow on the ground, it seemed ice blue outside. I remember my eyes shooting open and being instantly awake and thinking: It’s them.
A BLAST OF WINTER as I opened the front door to find Sanders, Morales, the sheriff with his big gut and gunfighter’s mustache, plus a female deputy I hadn’t seen before. All of them crowded on my front porch wearing identical sheriff’s department dark coats, condensation like smoke from their mouths haloing around their heads as they stood there like a small black army from hell. They stamped snow from their boots as they came into the living room.
Outside, parked in my driveway with the motor running, were Judge Moreland and Garrett. Waiting.
Behind me, Melissa came down the stairs holding Angelina. When she saw the cops she said, “Oh my God.”
The female deputy was introducing herself, talking in I’m sure what she thought as competent and soothing tones. I didn’t hear a word she said.
I can’t recall if I lost it as she held out her arms for our daughter or when the sheriff said the Morelands “just want the child. They aren’t interested in the boxes.”
Something white-hot exploded behind my eyes and I was on them-punching, kicking, gouging, trying to get through them to the door so I could get outside and pull Moreland and Garrett from their car into the snow and kill them with my bare hands. Sanders went down with a surprised look on his face, and his fall took down the sheriff. The female deputy shouted while she unclipped her pepper spray and threatened me with it. Either Sanders or the sheriff clipped me hard in the jaw with a frozen fist and my teeth snapped together and my head snapped back and for a second I was staring at the ceiling. Then my arms were pinned to my sides and my feet left the ground as Morales picked me up in a bear hug and slammed me face-first into the couch. I saw spangles and little else for a moment. There was a knee in my spine and my arms were wrenched back. I heard the zip sound of flexcuffs being pulled tight around my wrists.