The Judas Child (31 page)

In Rouge’s experience, it was always a good idea to keep one eye on the end of a fuse—so a man could pull back before his balls were ripped off by the blast. All women carried dynamite; it was issued to them at birth, along with many packs of matches for lighting fuses.

“I think you
know
who took the kids.”

“So now
I
planned it? You moron. What do you think I did with the extra kid?”

Pyle obviously didn’t hear the tension in her voice, a woman’s only warning that she was striking the matches. The agent settled into a chair next to hers and leaned back, folding his hands behind his head. He was entirely too comfortable with what he was doing to her. “Lady, you made—”

“You’re so smart, you little bastard? You try making a baby from scratch materials.”

Rouge could smell sulfur and smoke in the air.

“Okay,” said Pyle, so glib he annoyed her even more—another error. “Let’s talk about your enemies. Senator Berman really wanted to knock you off the governor’s ticket. But you managed to stay on for another election. So I gotta wonder what kind of leverage you used. You must’ve considered the mob as a possible—”

“I know your background, Pyle. I mean
after
you left the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.” She ripped off the lie detector wires, one by one, with great deliberation and no hurried motions. “I understand you received a commendation for your work on New York crime families.” The last wire was gone; the lady was unbound and rising. “You would use my little girl to build a damn mob case against Berman?”

Rouge thought her voice was entirely too calm as she hovered over Arnie Pyle. The FBI man never blinked. Rouge wondered if Pyle simply lacked the good sense to move away from her before—

“You son of a bitch!” Her closed fist connected with the agent’s right eye, hard enough to rock Arnie Pyle on the rear legs of his chair, to tip him backward and send his head slamming into the wall as the chair slid out from under him.

The civilian polygraph technician was stunned, and then his mouth widened in a boy’s grin. “Nice one, ma’am.”

She had quit the room by the time Arnie Pyle had risen from the floor. His hand went to the back of his head. “She acts like a bitch, but she’s got those humongous balls. I’m so confused.”

“And so full of yourself.” Becca Green was standing on the threshold. She entered the room, followed by Captain Costello. “I don’t know what you did to Gwen’s mother, but if you do it again, I hope she beats the crap out of you.” She advanced on him and put one pointing finger into the middle of his chest.

Pyle backed up a step. He had suddenly learned some measure of respect for mothers. “I’m not her enemy, Mrs. Green.”

“Damn right you’re not. You’re just something she bumped into in the dark. So, you wanna tell me about the ransom note
now
, or do I call that woman back in here to finish you off ?”

Arnie Pyle was reaching inside his jacket. “I was going to share this with all of you when—”

“Sure you were. Cut the bull, okay? Give it to me.”

He pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and she ripped it from his hand. She read the scrawl of lines on the page and looked up at Captain Costello. “You’re right, it’s a fake. Sadie doesn’t wear purple underwear.” She crumpled the paper into a tight ball and delicately held it between her thumb and forefinger as she placed it in the breast pocket of Pyle’s suit. She patted down the bulge in the material. “I do have
some
control over my daughter. Not everything in her life is purple.” She smiled at the agent with overdone sympathy. “I guess you just got demoted back to the B team.” She turned to Captain Costello. “Right?”

Captain Costello was smiling. Marsha Hubble put a stop to that when she walked back into the room.

“Get a car to take me home.
Now
.”

Rouge knew the lieutenant governor’s tone would have been more polite had she been talking to a taxi dispatcher. Captain Costello let the insult slide. “In a few minutes, Mrs. Hubble. There’s something I have to discuss with—”

“I haven’t got time for this,” she said. “I have press interviews and citizens groups waiting to—”

“No you don’t,” said Costello. “I’m sorry about the press command post—that’s over. I’m shutting it down. From now on the media will be channeled through my office.”

“You can’t tell me what to—”

“Well, yes I can—if you’re obstructing the case. And you are.”

“This is ridiculous. You have no idea how to use the media. I do.”

Captain Costello turned to Mrs. Green. “Is that how you feel too, ma’am?”

“I wouldn’t know about any of that,” said Becca Green. “I wasn’t invited to the command post. That’s at Marsha’s house, isn’t it?”

Rouge thought Marsha Hubble smiled with a bit too much condescension as she put one hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Becca, I know what an ordeal this has been for you. That’s why I made a deal with the press. They get access to me anytime they want it, and all the FBI bulletins—as long as they leave you in peace. I didn’t want you and Harry to put up with those jackals calling day and night.”

And perhaps she didn’t think Sadie’s mother would know how to use the media, either. Rouge watched the anger in Costello’s eyes as the politician went on with her performance, flashing her best public relations smile, her eyes radiating warmth all over Mrs. Green. Marsha Hubble’s tone could not have been more solicitous. “I can handle everything myself. You can trust me to—”

Her mouth closed softly, and her eyes were quizzical as she stared at her husband. Peter Hubble was seated close to Sadie’s father on a bench facing the door. The two of them were poring over a road map heavily scored with pencil lines and ink. “What are they doing?”

“They’re planning their day,” said Becca Green, matter-of-factly. “You didn’t know? They drive around all day long, looking for the kids. They used to do that at night, but I convinced them they could see more when the sun was out. In my experience, men often miss little details like that. They need direction.”

“And what about you?” The concern in Marsha Hubble’s voice had the ring of the genuine article. Her arm circled Mrs. Green’s shoulders. “How do
you
spend the days?”

“Me? Oh, early in the morning I make up sandwiches for the guys to take on the road. I’m afraid they’d forget to eat if I didn’t. Men—they’re children. After that, I make breakfast. I like to send them off with a good meal. And then I spend hours waiting for the phone to ring. It never does, but you never know.” She nodded toward the men and their maps. “When it gets dark, I start cooking a hot dinner for those two. I spend the rest of my time crying for the kids. And sometimes I cry for their fathers. It’s a lot of work, but it fills up my day.”

The politician’s arm fell away to hang limp at her side. “I didn’t know—” Softer now, in the smaller voice of a mechanical doll, “Oh, God, no.”

“So you don’t think God is moved by tears?” Becca Green seemed to be weighing this misunderstood opinion. “Well, maybe you’re right. But you gotta try everything—crying—everything.”

The lieutenant governor was not standing very straight anymore, and Rouge worried that she might fall to her knees, for every bit of her energy was gone; the fight was finally over. A wet streak of mascara marred the careful mask of her makeup.

“That’s the spirit.” Mrs. Green enfolded the taller woman in her big arms and held her close. The golden head slowly bent to Becca’s shoulder. “Then, later on,” Sadie’s mother whispered, “if crying doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

 

Gwen sat in the dirt a safe distance from the dog circle. She was surrounded by small stacks of journals and shaded from the bright light by the boughs of an oak. The journals were arranged by the order of their dates. She picked up one after the other, leafing through the pages, scanning the maintenance entries penned on the first day of every month. And now she understood why the cellar thermostat was registering 79 degrees, though no heat was coming from the steam radiators along the rear walls.

“Sadie, the pipes aren’t for watering the trees—there’s an underground irrigation system for that. The rain lowers the temperature of the room. All those bulbs make it too hot, but oak trees need fabulous amounts of light. So she installed the—”

“
She?
The Fly isn’t a woman. You saw him, you heard him.” Sadie broke another biscuit in half and yelled, “Sitting Bull!” When the dog backed away from the stuffed felt head, she threw him the piece of biscuit. Then she reached down to touch Gwen’s forehead. “You’ve got a little fever. So what is this
she
business?”

“Okay, I’m not sure it’s a woman. That’s just a feeling, but whoever writes these journals is a
different
person.”

Sadie seemed skeptical.

“It’s the way she treats the dog.” Gwen picked up another journal and opened it to a page marked by a turned-down corner. “Here,” she said, one hand moving down the lines of writing. “She bought him from a kennel that was going out of business. Oh, and it turns out he
is
good at tracking scents. He digs up her truffles.”

Gwen riffled through another journal, passing by all the entries for experiments on new cultures, until she found another turned-back corner. “Listen to this. ‘The dog was mean as they come, but in time, I taught him to be gentle. Now he licks my hand a hundred times a day and never leaves my side.’ ” She closed the notebook and pointed to the cart containing the dog’s food. “All those cans and bags are very expensive. This person doesn’t mistreat animals. This is someone
else.”

“Maybe he’s a split personality—
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

“Conrad Veidt, 1920.” There were many films by the same title, but this German version was a favorite because the butler was played by Bela Lugosi. “No, that doesn’t work for me. I think it’s two different people.”

Sadie shrugged. “Find anything on the lock?” Turning back to the dog, she yelled, “Geronimo!”

“Not yet.” Gwen raised her voice to be heard over the snarling. “But I know why there’s no ladder for changing the lightbulbs. There’s a crawl space between the ceiling and the top floor. She replaces the bulbs from up there, about three feet under the first floor.”

“Sitting Bull!” Sadie tossed another biscuit. “So that’s why you can’t hear his footsteps when he comes into the house.” She turned away from the dog and hunkered down on the ground near a pile of dark clothing.

“Right. So then she crawls around up there replacing the bulbs. And it really hurts her to do that. She has arthritis—that’s what all those pain pills are for—but she keeps going into that crawl space on her hands and knees.” Gwen bowed her head to read from the page, “ ‘All doubled up in agony, not caring about the pain, always for the love of the trees.’ ”

Sadie looked up from her project of stuffing shredded magazines and plastic bags into a large black sweater, filling it out in the shape of an adult-size torso. She held up half a biscuit and yelled, “Geronimo!” And once again the dog attacked the stuffed mask, so like a human head.

“Don’t let him chew on it anymore. He’s going to demolish it.” The dog had ripped away some of the stitches shaped like fangs. Part of the felt mouth hung open. With each biscuit, the dog grew a little more violent, more powerful.

“Cool.” Sadie smiled her approval as he whipped the mask in a particularly vicious frenzy. “Sitting Bull!”

The dog backed away and sat down, his eyes fixed on Sadie’s hand, from whence came all food.

Gwen bit into a shiitake mushroom from the stand of logs by the wall. She had been tempted to eat the beautiful mushrooms that grew on the log bundle next to it, but she hesitated out of respect. According to the journals, she had guessed right about those gnarly logs; they had come from the dead tree with stumps for arms. The tree had a name like a person.

Sadie knotted loosened threads from the sweater’s hem into the belt loops of the stuffed pants. Now she laid the headless body out on the floor. “Well, what do you think?”

“Looks good, but you need his shoes.” Gwen put her thumb in the book to mark her place as she closed it. “The shoes have the strongest scent. Maybe you can tie them to the pant legs with the laces.”

“Too bad Mark isn’t here. I bet he could make blasting powder with the chemicals in the white room. Then we could just blow the door open.” Sadie bent over the torso again. “You think Mark and Jesse ever got the gun to work?”

“No way.” Gwen resumed her reading. She had found a pattern in the written lines, and now she reached into the stack of journals and went to the same dates in each one. “It was pretty dumb of Jesse to encode all the gun designs from the Internet. It was like flagging the file for Mr. Caruthers. He was the one who
bought
them the encryption program.”

“Stupid boys.” Sadie had succeeded in fastening the shoes to the pant legs. All that remained was to attach the head. She turned to the dog, who seemed to like the head more than she did. He was holding his Sitting Bull pose, but drooled as he stared at the round dark object. “But suppose they do get the gun to work?”

“Never happen,” said Gwen. “They always talk big. Make the dog hold that pose for a while. I want to see how long he’ll keep it.” In journal after journal, the same dates were panning out.

Sadie’s eyes wandered from the dog to the head and back again. He really coveted that head.

Gwen opened another book, scanning for a reference to the lock. “I think the boys are full of it—all talk.”

“I don’t,” said Sadie. “I think they make Mr. Caruthers really nervous.”

“Jealous?”

“Yeah.”

“I found the door problem.” Gwen looked up from the journal. “I know what’s wrong with it. The metal was too thick for a regular lock, so she had a special one made. But it broke down after twenty years. The knob on the other side will open the bolt. But the inside knob won’t turn at all—it’s fused. Whenever she’s down here working, she props the door open with that block of concrete by the wall. The door is set on an angle. That’s why it closes by itself.”