Shadow Image (24 page)

Brenna was watching him, suspicious, maybe startled that he and Haygood already were talking in such terms. But she didn't interfere.

Haygood considered her answer a long time. “Short of an exhumation order, which I don't think we'd get in this case, they may be the only way to prove it didn't happen the way they say. If they're conclusive, they'd suggest very strongly how it did happen. Having said that, let me just add that it would be very unusual for a deputy coroner to have material like that.”

“Unless he was part of it,” Christensen said. “Say he was bought off. Say he agreed to support the story, or just agreed to look the other way if any evidence conflicted with the horseback-riding story. He'd want some security. Maybe for his own safety. Maybe to blackmail the people who paid him off. Hell, maybe the guy's just got a conscience—that'd be a nice change of pace. But more than anyone else, he'd know the value of those photos and X-rays, wouldn't he? And just based on the message he left on my answering machine, I think he's got copies.”

In the silence that followed, Brenna's glare intensified. Christensen felt like a man in a vise. But everything fit. Bostwick was trying to tell him something with that business about insurance policies and getting himself out of hell a bit sooner.

“Way I see it,” Haygood said, “we've got to find out. Word's already out that we're looking into this thing. It's just a matter of time before they shut us down, maybe twenty-four hours. And I can't jeopardize my work here. There's too many other cases that need attention, Mr. Christensen. I can't let them pull the plug on the review team. I just can't.”

Christensen weighed her words, trying to understand. He felt more vulnerable than he had in years, utterly exposed in a way he hadn't been since the Primenyl case. He thought of Maura Pearson, of the Chembergos, of Annie and Taylor and the eggshell that insulated them from this unfolding nightmare. As of now, he was defenseless. They all were.

Brenna's eyes had softened into a look of pure anxiety. He covered the mouthpiece. “We should get the kids from school,” he said. “I want them with one of us.”

She nodded.

To Haygood again, he offered the only help he could: “I'll try to find Bostwick.”

He cut off a minivan, triggering a harsh hand gesture from an otherwise pleasant-looking mom, and bounced over another curb, onto the street. A block away, he found a too-small spot in front of a fire hydrant and wedged in. He'd pay a ticket, if it came to that, but right now he wanted, needed, to find Annie and Taylor.

Kids' Korner was the name given to two modular buildings set at a back corner of the school property. Far from the perfect after-school program, it was where the young children of the school's working parents could report between the end of classes at 3 p.m. and the arrival of parents by six. Christensen already was looking for an alternative. The staff was too young, kids themselves, really, probably earning minimum wage to make sure nobody got hurt or misbehaved. But that was about as constructive as the program got. After less than a week, he'd decided the facilities were inadequate, the staff was disorganized and apathetic, the kids bored. Annie was calling it “Kids' Cage” after just two days, but Christensen hadn't yet had time to find something better. He fought his way across campus, suddenly aware of how accessible the modular buildings were to the wide-open playground and public streets that ran along the school's unlocked back fence.

He opened the Kids' Korner door and stepped from bright sunshine into a dim room full of cross-legged pre-adolescent zombies, their eyes fixed on a glowing television screen to his right. Why weren't they playing outside? The group guffawed at a butt joke that Christensen recognized from
Ace Ventura, Pet Detective,
a movie he'd forbidden Annie and Taylor to watch at home. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he vowed to place the kids in another program within a week.

Faces emerged, upturned and lit blue by the television's glow. He recognized some among the thirty or so in the slack-jawed crowd, but didn't see Annie or Taylor. He scanned the group again, just to be sure. Christensen stepped lightly through the crowd of kids toward one of the program's afternoon supervisors at the back of the room. The woman, maybe nineteen and morbidly overweight, was flipping absently through an IKEA catalog and didn't look up.

“I'm looking for Annie Christensen and Taylor Kennedy,” he said finally. “Do you know where they are?”

His intrusion only seemed to intensify her concentration as she studied a page of $25 floor lamps.

“Excuse me?” he said, louder.

She scanned the group in front of the TV, then offered a noncommittal shrug. “Checked the other building?”

Christensen squinted as he stepped back outside and made his way down the ramp to the adjacent building. He opened its door into a riot of fluorescent light, the smell of school glue, and a flash of pride that Annie and Taylor apparently would rather work on art projects than watch mindless videos. But his stomach knotted as he scanned the two dozen faces there. Where were they?

Another fat supervisor was applying a Band-Aid to the forehead of a teary boy whose torn jeans and crumpled shirt suggested he'd recently lost a fight. “Have you seen Annie Christensen or Taylor Kennedy? They're not in either building.”

The woman looked up. She was older, maybe twenty-five, but with a world-weary look that made her seem ten years older. “Who?” she said.

Christensen tried, for a moment, to keep his anger in check. He failed. “I wonder if there might be someone here who gives a shit?”

The injured boy's head shot up. The woman glared. She handed the kid an ice pack and stood, snapping off her latex gloves and dropping them into a nearby wastebasket.

“No need to get hostile, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I'm looking for my kids. They're not in either building.”

“You checked the playground?”

“No.”

“The handball courts?”

Christensen shook his head.

“If they're here, that's where they'd be. What were their names again?”

Like it mattered, Christensen thought. He turned and stalked out, headed for the nearly empty playground. A group of maybe ten kids were scrimmaging with a football. Annie might be among them, Christensen thought, but not Taylor. But he didn't recognize either of them among the players as he drew closer. Three other kids, all boys, all unfamiliar, were taking turns tossing a playground ball toward a netless basketball hoop, playing Pig. The handball courts were empty.

With a flash of daylight, he burst into the dim room where
Ace Ventura
was playing, the door propelled by his angry shove and righteous indignation. Still, most of the kids' eyes never left the screen. The supervisor waddled across the room and met him halfway.

“I'm having a little trouble finding my kids here,” he said, struggling for control, “and I'm not getting a hell of a lot of help from your staff.”

“You checked the crafts room?”

“And the playground.”

Something in the woman's eyes told Christensen everything he needed to know: She had no idea where Annie and Taylor were.

“Let's check the sign-out sheet,” she said.

He dutifully signed the clipboard every morning and evening, logging the times he dropped off and picked up the kids each day. Other than occasional reminders to parents that a full signature was required by state law, he had no idea what practical use the Kids' Korner staff found for the logs. No one seemed to notice or care who came and went, but he followed the bovine woman across the room anyway and watched her scan the rows of names and signatures.

“What were their names again?”

“Christensen and Kennedy,” he said. “Annie and Taylor.”

The woman pointed to a spot in the middle of the top page. “Here's the problem, then. Your wife or somebody else picked them up half an hour ago.” She handed him the clipboard with a smug smile.

Christensen snatched it from her hands, looking for familiar handwriting among the blur of scribbles across the page. The names of enrollees were printed in alphabetical order along the left edge of the chart, last names first. He'd signed both of them in that morning at 7:36. His scrawled signature was beside each name, but there also was a signature in the space to sign the kids out. He looked closer, trying to decipher handwriting that definitely wasn't his or Brenna's.

He thrust the clipboard back at the supervisor. “Can you read this name?”

She scissored open two slats of a closed miniblind and squinted into the wedge of daylight. “Somebody named Robbins. Tony, maybe? Tony Robbins?”

Christensen swallowed hard, tried not to think the worst as he grabbed the clipboard back. “Could that be another parent? Maybe they signed on our lines by mistake.”

“I don't recognize the name, but we have over fifty kids here,” she said.

Christensen didn't find a single Robbins on the list. “Did you see who signed them out?”

The woman shook her head.

“Did you even check to see if this person was authorized to sign them out?”

She looked as if she might cry.

Christensen pushed past her and jabbed the power button on the television. The room went dark, so he reached between the set and the window and yanked the cord of the nearest miniblind. The
Ace Ventura
fans protested as one, shielding their eyes like cave dwellers prodded into daylight.

“Does anybody here know Annie Christensen or Taylor Kennedy?” he demanded.

One boy stood up. “ ‘Do
not
go in there,' ” he said, waving away an imaginary odor, pantomiming one of the movie's sillier bathroom jokes. Peals of laughter.

“I need some help here before I turn it back on,” Christensen said. “How about it? Anybody?”

A tiny blond girl with pink-framed eyeglasses raised her hand. “I know Taylor,” she said.

Christensen bore in with an intensity that seemed to frighten the girl. He tried without success to keep his voice even. “He left a little while ago. Did you see who he left with?”

The girl shook her head.

“It's okay, thank you,” he said, eyeballing the supervisor. “It's not your job, sweetheart. Anybody else?”

“Annie has red hair, right?” asked the boy who stood up earlier.

Christensen shook his head. “Sort of blondish brown.”

The kid shrugged. “Never mind.”

Christensen couldn't waste any more time. He shoved the door open and ran out onto the playground, toward the pile of kids on the football field. “I'm looking for Annie Christensen or Taylor Kennedy. Do any of you guys know either one of them?”

The players, all boys, untangled themselves and stood up, a riot of denim and grass stains. “Annie was here a while ago,” said one freckled ruffian. Christensen recognized him from Howe Street, but didn't know his name. “She left.”

“Where'd she go?” he said.

The boy pointed to a gate along the school's back fence. “Over there.”

“Do you know why?”

The kid shrugged. “That other kid was talking to some guy through the fence.”

“Taylor?”

“I don't know his name. Is it her brother?”

“Are they in trouble?” another kid said.

Christensen ignored the questions, focusing on the kid from their neighborhood. “How long ago?”

“A half-hour, maybe.”

“What did the guy look like?”

“Just some guy. Why?”

“How was he dressed? Did he have a car?”

Christensen's tone was sobering up the freckled kid, fast. “A suit, like dark blue or black. White shirt, I think. Black car. He was pretty far away.”

“Did it seem like Annie and Taylor knew him?”

“Dunno.”

“How long did they talk?”

“A while. We were playing Steelers.”

“Did he come onto the playground?”

The boy shuffled his feet. “I think so, but I don't know.”

Christensen hesitated before asking the next question, as if speaking the words might make it true. “Did they leave with him?”

The kid looked around, suddenly aware that all eyes were on him. “We were playing Steelers,” he said.

“So you didn't see?”

A black-haired boy stepped around his teammate. He wore his untucked shirt like a badge of honor. “I was over playing basketball. They had their packs and lunchboxes and stuff, headed that way.” He pointed to the gate again.

Christensen felt sick. Annie and Taylor knew better than to leave with a stranger. But what if the stranger knew their names? Or knew enough about Brenna or him to make a convincing case? He couldn't outrun the possibilities as he sprinted across campus toward his car.

He dialed his home number as he lurched into traffic. Maybe he'd misunderstood Brenna. Maybe. But no. Even before she answered, he knew. There was no other possible explanation. Someone had taken their kids.

“Bren?”

“Where are you?”

“Tell me you have the kids.” He squeezed the steering wheel tighter during the long silence.

“What are you saying?”

“So you don't have them?”

“Don't fuck with me, Jim. This thing is too—”

“Jesus.” How to tell her? “Bren, someone signed them out of Kids' Korner. Used a fake name, and apparently they left with him.”

“Him?”

Christensen ran a stop sign a block from the school. The crossing guard in his rearview mirror stood defiantly in the middle of the intersection, apparently taking down his license plate number. “Couple of the other kids saw them talking to some suit at the fence about thirty minutes before, then whoever it was signed a fake name and they left. I looked everywhere. The goddamned staff didn't have a clue.”

“The kids wouldn't do that, Jim,” Brenna said, clinging to a faded possibility. “Taylor wouldn't.”

“Bren, I'm pretty sure they did.”

Christensen cradled the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he worked the Explorer up through the gears on Penn Avenue. Traffic was mercifully light; rush hour hadn't yet started. “I'm five minutes from the house,” he said. “You call the police.”

“I don't … There's … You're sure?”

“They're not there. No one I talked to saw them leave, but
someone
signed them out and I couldn't find them. They're gone, Bren.”

A screeching yellow-light left turn onto Fifth. Had she responded? “Bren?”

“I'm here.”

“Just call. I'm on Fifth Avenue, so I'll be right there.”

He wished he hadn't hung up. Alone in the car, he searched for some trace, any trace, of the optimism that usually sustained him. He wanted to believe it was a misunderstanding, that Annie and Taylor had simply made other arrangements, that some kindly uncle was driving the carpool and simply confused the days. But there were no local relatives, no carpool. What made sense, the only thing that did, was a scenario that could pass for a flop-sweat nightmare: They'd blundered into something bigger than they ever imagined, and now it was too late to back away. On their first try, the Underhills had found the fleshy pink chink in his armor, then shoved to the hilt. Nothing else made sense.

Howe Street was a jumble of cars. He could see their house two blocks away, but had to wait excruciating minutes as two amateurs tried to parallel park, then tried and tried again. Brenna was pacing the front porch, arms folded across her chest, when he wedged the Explorer sideways in the alley entrance. It was probably the only opening for blocks. He left it unlocked with the emergency lights flashing. Brenna watched him take the porch stairs in a single bound, but even from the street he thought he saw muted panic in her eyes. Could she see the anger in his?

Brenna turned and walked back into the house.

“What'd they say?” he said.

She stopped in the front hall, her back to him.

“Bren?”

He expected tears, terror. But when she turned, she had the look of someone well in control.

“We're not calling the police, not right now,” she said, refolding her arms. Her voice was defiant, certain, even.

“The hell we aren't. Enough, Bren. You're too close to this. You can't see what I see, and I see your goddamned clients completely out of control.”

He knew he'd swung wildly, exorcising the doubts he'd had about the Underhills, and her, since this all began. He respected the role of a criminal-defense attorney, but he could no longer abide Brenna's defense of the indefensible.

Brenna absorbed his words like body blows, not surrendering, but not defending herself either. “They're not my clients now. Look, we can deal with my stupidity later. But we've got some decisions to make right now, and I just think we need to be smarter than calling the cops.”

“Because you still don't think the Underhills are capable of this, do you?”

She waited, ignoring the bait.

“And you don't think we should call?” he said.

“No.”

If she'd wavered, if he'd heard even the slightest hitch in her voice or seen a flicker of doubt in her eyes, he might have pushed it. But the way she stood, the way she spoke, he knew Brenna was somehow two steps ahead of him.

“You don't trust the police?” he said.

“Do you?”

He thought of Bostwick, of the coroner's odd clerk, of the politicians of both parties whose fealty to the Underhills was unquestioned and unchallenged. Brenna put his thoughts into words.

“Think about it, Jim. This is a family that demands loyalty, even pays for it. If they could buy a deputy coroner, who else could they buy? Cops would be easy, probably cheap. Who else? The sheriff? Even the D.A.? What if their feud with Dagnolo is just a cover?”

“There's nobody down there you could call? Somebody who wouldn't just blow off this whole story as paranoia or fantasy?”

“Maybe, but they'd be starting from zero. We don't have time to start someone at the beginning and bring them up to speed. Are you ready to take the chance they'll buy it and follow up?”

She hugged him, holding on like someone whose fingers had found a rock in roiling white water. He wished he still trusted her instincts.

“What, then, Bren? I'm scared.”

“Me, too. But—” She pushed him away.

“But what?”

“What would they accomplish by hurting the kids?” Her voice was analytical, wrung of emotion. “They wouldn't.”

“You're pretty damned sure,” he said. “I don't get it.”

She stared. “They hurt the kids, they've got nothing on us, nothing to keep us quiet. They play that card, they've got no hand. And I think they're smarter than that.”

Christensen couldn't stand it. “Bren, this is Annie and Taylor we're talking about. They're not—”

With a brusque sweep of her arm, she cut him off. “Think
logically,
goddamn it. We have to now.”

After two weeks in the new house, boxes still littered the front hall. Those that hadn't been unpacked were shoved against walls, out of the way. Brenna knelt beside one labeled B. K. DOWNSTAIRS STUDY and popped the tape that kept it closed, oblivious to the dust she was grinding into the hem of her skirt.

“I've dealt with people like this before,” she said. “The Underhills move in a subtler world, but they know the same thing any Blood, Crip, pimp, or mob guy knows: It's all just control. It's like judo. To control someone, you have to know their pressure points.”

Brenna pulled a handful of books out of the box and set them on the floor. She probed the remaining contents of the box, refolded the top flaps, then opened another one that was marked the same way.

“They're showing us they know how to control us, but they understand the deal. They lose their advantage the second something happens to the kids. At that point we'd have nothing to lose.”

More books. Brenna made a face as she peered into the box.

“I want to believe that, Bren, but I don't think it's that simple. I mean, Maura probably had pressure points. They didn't exactly work those before—”

Brenna waved him off. She sat back on her feet, brushed the dust from her knees with a chop of her hand. He could tell the comment had thrown her off stride. “With us, they're showing what's possible,” she said. “That's all. Jim, I believe that. I have to. Otherwise—”

Her eyes drifted, caught suddenly on another box. She moved two small boxes to get to it, then popped the tape that held it closed.

“So, what then? If you're right, Bren, if we play by their rules, they've got us, forever. Say we don't call the police, and the kids come back safe and sound. Can we live with that threat the rest of our lives? Can we live … hell, could we look ourselves in the mirror every morning knowing what these people are capable of?”

Brenna stopped digging through the box, but didn't turn around. “I can,” she said.

“You're a lawyer. You're used to it.”

She wheeled on him, a familiar gun in her right hand, a small yellow box in the left. Her eyes were like jade-green lasers, searing straight through to the back of his skull. “Look, fuck you. You've never made a mistake? You've never misjudged anybody? Jesus God, Jim, save the sanctimony for sometime when it matters what you think about me. Right now, let's just deal with what's happened and sort the rest out later. Deal?”

Christensen felt sick as she set the box on a nearby plant stand and released the pistol's clip. She opened the box and, one by one, pushed the bullets inside. She must have noticed the color drain from his face. “You just never know,” she said.

“I'm not … Bren, don't. We need help. We're in over our heads here.”

She shoved the loaded gun and the box of bullets into her purse. “We can swim,” she said, looking up.

“But we're not the only ones in the water now. They've got the kids.”

Neither wanted to linger too long on the thought.

“Right now, the worst thing we could do is panic,” Brenna said. “The worst thing. They're going to play this out their way. We just have to let them and assume they won't panic, either. That's all we've got.”

Christensen ran a hand through his hair, brushing away the few strands that hung over his forehead. “For now,” he said.

“Meaning?”

He closed his eyes, wishing his head were clearer. But from the murky snarl of theories and hypotheticals that defined the Underhill mess from the beginning rose a single, certain truth. “There still may be a trump card out there somewhere,” he said.

When he opened his eyes, he knew he had Brenna's full attention.

“The autopsy photos. The X-rays. I think Bostwick has them. Carrie Haygood thinks so, too.”

Brenna's eyes narrowed as she considered the possibility. “You don't know that. And even if he does, we're nowhere near getting them.”

Christensen shook his head. “I could try.”

“If we
did
have something like that—”

He nodded. “Pressure point.”

Something crashed behind the closed door of their downstairs office, a thunderous sound preceded by nothing, the sound of sudden and uncontrolled violence. He turned toward the door at the end of the hall, but felt Brenna's firm hand on his arm. She held a finger to her lips, then reached into her purse.

Christensen pulled away, headed down the hall. The sound was too big, too outrageous to be an intruder, even a clumsy one. He opened the office door into a nightmare of ruined electronics and water trickling from a yawning hole in the ceiling above his desk, at the exact spot where he'd noticed the moisture stain. He knew that beneath the pile of soggy plaster his printer would never print again, and that his computer was dead.

“Holy shit,” Brenna said, lowering her gun. “The leak.”

Christensen turned and urged Brenna back out, then closed the door on a disaster that couldn't have seemed more trivial.