Blue Heaven Part 21

The third said, "How could they have enough help? It's that a.s.shole Singer, I'd bet. I heard stories about that guy."

The first man looked up while stuffing his wallet back into his pockets and saw Jess waiting for them to come through the security check.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to make you wait."

"Are you fellows here to volunteer?" Jess asked. "Are you policemen, too?"

"Retired," the second man said. "LAPD. But the sheriff didn't even meet with us. He had his secretary come out and tell us to leave our names, but he didn't need our help right now. Can you believe that s.h.i.+t, with two missing kids?"

Jess thought it was more than interesting.

THE RECEPTIONIST told him the sheriff was in, but not available. Before Jess could ask why, she said, "He's sleeping at his desk. The poor man's exhausted. He just held a press conference to announce the Amber Alert. Now everybody in the country is looking for Tom Boyd and those poor children. You've heard what happened, I a.s.sume. Is this an emergency?"

Was it? He wasn't sure.

Tom Boyd. He'd heard the name. "The UPS man?" Jess asked incredulously.

"That's him," she said.

Across the room he recognized Buddy Millen, a sheriff's deputy who had once worked on a hay crew on the Rawlins Ranch. Buddy waved, and Jess waved back, then went through the batwing doors on the side of the counter and took a seat at the deputy's desk.

"I was just thinking about you," Buddy said. "I've been on a search team not far from your ranch, looking for those little kids. Every time I see those hayfields of yours, my back starts to hurt."

Buddy looked tired, and Jess noted that his uniform was dirty from the search.

"Why were those men out there turned away?" Jess asked. "They were retired police officers volunteering to help."

"They're not the first to be turned away," Buddy said. "Half the retirees up here have been in."

"So why did the sheriff say no?"

Buddy shrugged. "Singer's call. He had enough people out there already, I guess. He's calling the shots. Personally, I think it's bulls.h.i.+t. We ought to have hundreds of searchers out there."

"That's what they thought, too," Jess said.

"Look, I'm just finis.h.i.+ng up here, then I'm going to go home and crash. I've been up for thirty-six hours."

"No luck, huh?" Jess asked.

Buddy shook his head sadly. Then he glanced around the room, and leaned forward to Jess. "I shouldn't be telling you this, but things are moving fast. We're on to something. A local guy confessed on camera."

Jess sat back. "Really? The UPS guy?" The videotape.

Buddy nodded. "Unfortunately, we're changing our mission from looking for lost kids to looking for bodies. It's awful. But please keep it confidential. There won't be an announcement until tomorrow."

Jess tried to keep the confusion off his face, tried to stanch his impulse to say, They're okay, Buddy. But what did this mean that Tom Boyd had confessed? To what?

Okay, Jess thought. Buddy is a good guy. Buddy can be trusted. Maybe he can help sort things out.

"Buddy ..."

The telephone rang on the desk. Buddy held up one hand, palm out, and s.n.a.t.c.hed the receiver with the other. Jess waited, trying to form his words, wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea to take Buddy outside somewhere, away from the office, to tell him. Maybe feel him out a little bit, maybe get more information about the confession that had now changed everything and made a confusing situation even more confusing.

Buddy made rea.s.suring sounds to the caller and jotted down an address on a pad.

"Okay, ma'am. Does he have a cell phone? Have you tried his hotel?"

Buddy looked over at Jess and wiggled his eyebrows while the caller talked.

"We can't really file a missing person's case until he's been gone twenty-four hours," Buddy said. "I'm sorry. In 99.9 percent of these situations, everything turns out all right. But I'll make a note of it and give the information to the sheriff. I'll personally follow up with you first thing tomorrow morning. But when he shows up, please remember to call us and let us know right away, okay?"

Buddy cradled the phone and scribbled some more on his pad. "A wife says her husband was supposed to be back from a steelhead fis.h.i.+ng trip last night, but he hasn't shown up. She wants us to go out and search for him, as if we don't have enough on our plate right now. I'll bet he's back by tonight. He probably got stuck in the mud or broke down, or more likely he had a little too much fun in some honky-tonk or strip club. And I'll lay you odds she forgets to call us and tell us he's back."

The words. .h.i.t Jess like a hammer blow. He knew he flinched. Luckily, Buddy hadn't seen it.

A man was missing.

He decided to invite Buddy for a cup of coffee.

Buddy said, "She said he's a retired police officer, and he'd never be late without calling."

"Was he one of those L.A. cops?" Jess asked, his mouth suddenly dry.

"That's what she said. Why?"

Jess couldn't think of a lie. He wasn't good at them. Instead, he glanced at the pad Buddy had scribbled on. He memorized the name that was written on it.

"No matter," Jess said.

WITH HIS STOMACH in turmoil, Jess found the men's room. He splashed cold water on his face and dried off with a paper towel. He felt weak, and his legs were rubbery, his wounded hand throbbed.

He heard the splas.h.i.+ng of a mop in a bucket and saw the janitor behind him. Jess closed his eyes for a moment. It was too much for him right now.

The janitor swirled his mop, kept his head down with his long hair covering his face and his shoulders hunched like a man who wanted not to be noticed.

"J.J.?"

The mop stopped. Slowly, the janitor looked up. Eyes looked out through the strings of hair. Jess thought of how he had observed earlier that you could see the characteristics of the future adult in the photographed face of a child. Not that he'd recognized it at the time, but when he looked at the old photos, the grade-school photos, he could see it now. The boy was disconnected early, already on a destructive path. He was born with a form of sickness that was always there, lurking, but didn't show itself until he was in his late teens, and it hadn't erupted until his first year of college. The doctors said it was paranoid schizophrenia, and other names Jess couldn't recall. The boy had always had quirks-talking to himself, brus.h.i.+ng his teeth until they bled, refusing from age twelve on to be touched. Then it got worse: hallucinations, rages, the drowning of a litter of barn kittens because the mother cat supposedly had tried to smother him while he slept. He opted to use chemicals to try to change the world around him, to bring it into line with what he perceived it to be. He had succeeded, to some extent. J.J. had never been meant to join the ranchers at the breakfast table.

"Jess Junior, do you recognize me?"

His son stared at him dully. The medication he was on that allowed him to work while incarcerated rendered him pa.s.sive and emotionless. But without it, he would hurt himself and others.

"Dad."

"How are you doing, son?"

A slight, simple smile. "Not good."

"You're working hard, it looks like."

J.J. nodded. "Jes' moppin'."

Jess tried to sound encouraging. "Are things going all right?"

It took a moment, but J.J. began to sweep his woolly head from side to side. Jess stepped forward, but J.J. held the mop out to keep him back. "Don' you touch me."

"I won't, son. I remember how you hate that. What's wrong?"

Jess waited a full minute for his question to penetrate and for J.J. to form an answer. His struggle to put thoughts together to speak broke Jess's heart.

"There's some bad men here, Dad."

"In the jail, sure."

"No," J.J. said, making his eyes big, shaking his head from side to side in an exaggerated way.

"Do you mean the ex-cops?" Jess said, and withdrew the sketch Annie had made and unfolded it, showing it to J.J. "Is this them?" Jess asked, already knowing the answer by the look of alarm in his son's face.

J.J. gave an exaggerated nod. "They're really bad."

"Son," Jess said, feeling his eyes mist, "I believe you."

"Don' touch me."

"I won't, son."

AFTER RETRIEVING his possessions, Jess found a pay telephone in the lobby of the county building. He tried to shove aside his devastation from seeing Karen and their damaged son on the same morning. He dug Villatoro's card out of his pocket while he dialed, and was transferred to the motel room. The line was busy, so he left a message.

"Mr. Villatoro, this is Jess Rawlins. I don't know what it means yet, but maybe you should check on another name. It's another ex-cop. I've got his name here...."

As he spoke, Jess thought things had become much more clear and much, much worse. He knew for sure now which side he was on.

Sunday, 11:40 A.M.

NEWKIRK ROOTED through Monica Taylor's refrigerator not because he was hungry but because he knew he should eat. His body was starved for something besides Wild Turkey. His hands shook as he pushed a half-full gallon of milk aside on the shelf and looked for something he could warm up. He checked the freezer. Aside from containers of juice and ice trays, there was only a large, aluminum foilcovered pan. He tapped it: frozen solid.

He was unsettled from a telephone conversation he had just had with his wife. She was coldly furious with him when he told her he likely wouldn't be home for a while. She reminded him of their son's spring baseball practice, and of previous plans to spend the day preparing her vegetable garden. It all sounded so trivial, he thought, given the situation right now. It reminded him of the bad old days on the force, when he was on a high-stakes a.s.signment and she would be angry with him because he wouldn't be home to watch television with her. Now, it was happening again. It was exactly what he thought he had left behind in L.A., the tension, the resentment, the fights. Everything was back again. As for his wife, who was showcased in a home she could have only imagined years before, who didn't have to work outside the home, whose idea of a tough day was to take an exercise cla.s.s at the gym or turn over the soil in her vegetable garden, well, f.u.c.k her. She didn't know what he was going through-she couldn't see any farther than her own false eyelashes.

Monica Taylor was in the living room, sitting alone and alert on the couch, staring at who-knows-what. She seemed frustratingly serene. There was something wrong with her, he thought, to be that way, given the circ.u.mstances. She was also more attractive than he thought she would be. Now that she was so sure that her children were alive somewhere, she was intolerable. Plus, he didn't trust her. It was almost as if she knew what they were up to, but there was no way she could know that.

He slammed the refrigerator door shut so hard that he heard a bottle break inside. "Don't you have anything here to eat?"

"Excuse me?"

"I'm starving," he said, charging into the living room. "I haven't had a normal meal in two days. All you've got in the refrigerator is milk, salad, and eggs. Do you have something I could eat?"

She said, distracted, "I think there are some cans of soup in the pantry."

"What's that in the freezer? There's something in a ca.s.serole dish. Is it something I can thaw out?"

She turned and looked directly at him. "Leave that alone. It's lasagna I made yesterday and froze. Lasagna is Annie's favorite, and I'm saving it for when they're back. The first one got burned up Friday night."

Newkirk snorted, "Jesus, lady."

His cell phone burred and he drew it out and looked at it. Singer calling. He went back into the kitchen and closed the door.

"How is it going there?" Singer asked.

Newkirk sighed. "Okay. She's nuts, though. She insists her kids are coming back."

A pause. "They aren't."

Newkirk felt a flutter of both terror and relief. "Did something happen?"

"No, not yet. But I have confidence that you and Gonzo will find them. The more I think about it, the more I agree with Monica Taylor. Those kids are somewhere hiding out. We've got to find them."

"I thought for a second there ..."

"No. But we're in control. I just heard from Gonzo. The package was delivered to Swann, and Swann is overseeing disposal. He should be heading back to the house within an hour or so to relieve you."

Newkirk tried not to think of what Swann was disposing of.

"I told Gonzo to start on the house-to-house. He's got a couple of good maps from the sheriff's office, with every residence and building in the county. He's going to start visiting people one by one, working out from Sand Creek. When Swann gets back, I want you to recon with Gonzo and do the same."

"Do you want us to work together or separately?"

"I'll leave that call up to Gonzo," Singer said. "My guess is you'll split up but stay in the same vicinity. That way, you'll be able to cover twice as much ground, but you'll be close enough to each other to provide backup if necessary. I think it's just a matter of time before we find them."

Newkirk didn't need to ask what would happen if they did. As he listened, he cracked the door to check on Monica Taylor. She was still sitting there, hands in her lap, relief on her face.

"I'm kind of looking forward to getting out there," Newkirk said. "This lady is creeping me out."

Singer laughed softly. "Swann can handle her. Don't worry."

"I wish this thing was over with," Newkirk said, immediately regretting he had confided in Singer. "You know what I mean."

A long pause. "Are you still solid?"

"Sure, it isn't that." But it was.

"Stay tough, Newkirk. We're only as strong as our weakest link."

"Believe me, I know."

"It'll be over when we find those kids," Singer said. "So let's concentrate on that."

"Yes, sir."