The Edge of Sleep (38 page)

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“As a matter of fact, Lyle, the closest motel from here is mine.”

“Oh, no,” said Edgar. “We’re not going to your motel.”

“Why not? We could start working things out in five minutes.”

“Because your gorilla boyfriend will be there.”

“Oh, Ash isn’t at the motel.”

“He isn’t, huh?” -

“No.”

“How do I know that?”

“I just told you. Don’t you believe me?”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“Yes, Lyle, I certainly do.” She smiled so brightly at him that Edgar thought he had misunderstood her because of the noise of the train.

“I promise you Ash isn’t at the motel,” she said.

“Why should I believe that?”

“Because he’s right here,” she said. She took hold of his tie and pulled him toward her. For a second he thought she was going to kiss him, but then he saw the movement in the back of the car. The whole seat seemed to rise up, then an arm flashed out. Edgar jerked away reflexively, but Dee held him within the car by his necktie. He felt the crushing hand on his throat before he saw the face and enormous bulk of Ash emerge from under the blanket.

Jack heard the voices dimly, all sounds being muffled by the blanket and the body of the man on top of him. The motion of the car had stopped, there was a roar and a clanging which he knew to be a train crossing, then the voices of a man and a woman talking above the clamor of the train. The man’s body was not really on him; he felt no weight from it, just the shape of it, like a huge shell holding him down, or, oddly, protecting him.

Suddenly the shell was torn away as the body vaulted upwards. Jack saw light and lifted his head, blinking. He saw the man’s arm stretching over the seat back, heard a man gargling dryly as if something was caught in his throat.

Jack saw the car door, clawed at the handle, then crawled out from under the blanket, out from under the man’s body. The man seemed to have forgotten him. Then Jack was on the road and he began to run without seeing where he was going, just away, as fast as he could, off the road so the man and the nurse couldn’t follow him. For a second he heard the gargling sound grow louder, more desperate, but then Jack had sprinted beyond the sound. He leaped into the shallow dry ditch next to the tracks and ran. The train slammed by him, dangerously close, and Jack recoiled, amazed that he hadn’t noticed it before.

Almost at once he knew he had made a mistake. The ditch grew deeper, trapping him in its recesses. He had no choice but to continue straight ahead; climbing the bank to flatter ground would take him too long and he knew he had to flee as if hotly pursued even though he had not yet looked back to see if he was being chased. He didn’t dare to look back; he knew that he would be paralyzed by fear if he saw someone coming.

He could hear nothing; there was nothing to hear over the roar of the train. The wheels clattered against the steel rails and the cars swayed overhead as if they must surely topple into the ditch and crush him.

The ditch ran parallel to the tracks, around a curve, seeming to sink almost directly under the wheels of the train that never stopped, and then it began to rise again, growing shallower by the step. At the end of it he could see first one, then another house. Within a few steps he could be able to leap out of the ditch, into the adjoining field, then straight to the houses and people and safety.

He made the leap and felt something catch at his T-shirt. He hung on the lip of the ditch, teetering there, flailing his arms to keep his balance as something tried to pull him back down. He saw a girl in the backyard of a house staring at him from her swing set. She raised a hand tentatively, not certain if he was rotating his arms in a greeting.

Jack’s weight was thrown to the side and he spun around, still atop the edge of the ditch. He ducked his head and found himself face to face with the nurse who was panting hard, her lips curled into a snarl. Jack pulled backwards and she peeled the T-shirt off his body like she was skinning a rabbit. Suddenly released, he stumbled and sat down abruptly, still looking straight at the nurse in the ditch. Before he could get up, she had him by the ankle. It occurred to him to yell as he was being dragged back into the ditch, but it seemed he needed all his breath to resist the nurse. Jack saw the girl on the swing watch in amazement as he disappeared, inch by inch, into the ditch. He managed to scream very briefly before he sank out of sight entirely and a hand clapped over his mouth.

The nurse was calling him “precious” and her “darling boy” as she dragged and carried him back to the car, but Jack was too frightened to make any sense of her words. A huge man waited by the car, another man hanging limply from his hand. The big man looked puzzled, still clutching the other by the throat, holding him as if not quite certain what to do with him, like a toy rendered useless now that the game was completed. Jack had seen a cat look like that, baffled and no longer interested, embarrassed to explain how the mouse had gotten in its mouth in the first place.

Chapter 22

T
HEY RULED OUT THE LAKE
quickly enough. It was shallow and easily searched for a distance of forty feet out from the dock, and the severity of the hills surrounding the lake elsewhere made entry any place other than the dock difficult. It seemed very unlikely that Jack, with his limited skills, would have, or even could have, swum farther from the shore.

The combined search party of Karen, Becker, Blocker, and Reese—the two local policemen—and two dozen camp volunteers found no trace of Jack in the mountain forest, and by mid-afternoon both Karen and the locals agreed it was time to summon the state police. She also summoned elements of the Bureau forces from both Albany and Boston, who would not be able to reach them before the following morning.

Throughout the day Karen acted like a woman very much in control of herself as well as her circumstances while she ordered and organized the searches, conferred politely with Blocker and Reese, consulted Becker with the same diplomatic inclusion, made her decision and the phone calls. Becker saw no signs of either the frantic mother or the hysterical, guilt-ridden woman of the night before. She did not meet his eye directly all day long, but that was a clue to her inner turmoil that only he would recognize. To the world about her, she was a brisk professional set on accomplishing her task. He marveled at her, at the strength she found in her work. Even her skirt and jacket looked as if they had been freshly pressed. It was only when he stood close to her that he smelled the sour odor of her fear. She had showered first thing in the morning, but the stench had already worked deeply into her clothes.

Following her decision to call in the state police, Karen pulled Becker aside, away from the local cops and the counselors.

“I’m biased, John, so I need your perspective. If this were anybody else’s child who was missing—would I have enough to declare it a snatch?”

“I’m biased, too,” Becker said.

She waved his protest aside with a flick of her hand. No one else’s concern could approach hers.

“Am I justified in thinking Jack has been kidnapped?” She faced him but her eyes roved somewhere over his shoulder.

“Does it matter? Do it anyway. He’s your boy; who cares if it’s technically justified or not?”

She grew very quiet and Becker watched the color slowly drain from her face, then gradually return. Her eyes stayed so steadfastly fixed in the distance that Becker turned to look. A squirrel climbed halfway up the trunk of a tree, then appeared to notice the humans for the first time and skittered around to the other side. Becker studied the squirrel’s antics for a moment, giving Karen time to recover herself. He wondered how many times this day she had gone through the same crisis, battling with all of her inner resources to fight off the powerful surge of despair.

“You are a very experienced agent,” she said at last, her words measured too precisely. “For the record, I am asking if, in your opinion, I am justified in calling the state police into the case on suspicion of kidnapping. This is an official question. I would appreciate an official answer.”

“What are you worried about, charges of abuse of power? Just go ahead and do it; if anyone questions you later, to hell with them. It’s Jack we‘re talking about.”

“I am aware who we’re talking about,” she hissed.

“Sorry. But don’t worry about it, everyone will understand.”

For the first time she looked directly at him, her eyes burning with anger. “I don’t give a fuck what they understand! I’m asking you a simple question. Stop being such a contentious bastard and just say yes.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Becker said. “You are fully justified in calling in the state police on suspicion of kidnapping. That makes it a federal case for the Bureau as well.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? What did you have to be such a prick about it for?”

“You’re just upset ...” he said.

“No shit.”

He reached for her shoulders, but she pulled away and started toward the others.

“Do you want me to make one of the calls?” he asked.

“I called them both ten minutes ago,” she said. “Now we have to decide what to do when they get here.” Blocker and Reese looked on as Karen spread maps of Massachusetts and the adjoining area of New York on the hood of one of their squad cars.

“At least it’s less populated here than in New Jersey,” Karen said. “That should help some.” Her minor explosion at Becker had been contained. She was now the working professional again.

She turned to the two cops, who were watching her with curiosity. “The state police should be here in a few minutes,” she said. “Now you know how they are, they’ll want to take over.”

“Pretty much assholes,” Blocker said. Reese nodded confirmation.

“Well, exactly,” Karen agreed. “They’ll want to push you guys right out of the case even though it’s your case, your territory, your right to be involved.”

Reese kept right on nodding agreement.

“Well, I hate that,” she said. “I want to keep you involved, for my own benefit. You know the area better than anybody, you’ve been in on the case since the beginning. I want you on my team and I don’t want any state cop pushing you aside.”

Becker watched Karen’s manipulations work their effect on the cops. He knew she would later apply much the same kind of flattery to the state people. It was good policy to keep everyone happy, but in the case of the local cops, he knew she had a further motive. It may have been true that they knew the area better, but it was also true that they were much easier to bend to her will than the state police. Karen was oiling them up now so that later she could twist them into whatever shape she needed. And coming from an attractive woman, this kind of blandishment was even easier to believe. Both cops harbored a secret hope that she really wanted them around because of her ardent desire to tear their clothes off. They were not fools enough to do anything about it, hoping as they did that this sort of passion would blossom spontaneously without any particular nurture on their part, but Karen was aware of their fantasies, perhaps more objectively than they were, and if she made a point of smiling at each of them as she appealed for their help, it seemed to Becker just good police work.

“So I think it’s a good thing if we can get you actively working before they get here, don’t you?” She continued without waiting for their response. “What we’ll need is a list of all the motels or houses for rent within a thirty-minute drive. Any place a transient could get a room and have some degree of privacy. A boardinghouse with a separate entrance even. Any place this guy might have taken a child to hole up if he wasn’t a local resident.”

“Thirty-minute drive?”

“It’s not that far. It takes a good fifteen minutes just to wind down off this mountain, and there’s a lot of empty territory around here. If thirty minutes isn’t enough, we’ll go farther out, but let’s start with that.”

Blocker said. “It’s going to take us a little time to think about that.”

“Well, yes. That’s why I think you want to get started before the state guys show up.”

“We can do more.” Becker said when the cops had moved off to start their list.

“Tell me.”

“I think we got lucky this time ... I mean because of where Lamont—or Ashford; I still think of him as Lamont, I’ve been calling him that so long—because of where he chose to go. There aren’t nearly as many places to hide in the first place and not many to run to.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve spent a day walking through these woods. How many rabbits did you see?”

“Rabbits? None.”

“And how many do you think live in there? Dozens? Hundreds? More? The reason we didn’t see them is because they were just sitting still, hidden. But how many do you think we’d see if we went through there beating the bushes and getting them to run?”

“Go on.”

“Lamont has made it to his hiding place. All he has to do is stay very still, and we won’t find him unless we step directly on him. He’s had practice at this; he chose his own spot, he’s got the advantage. But if we can make him run, the advantage is ours. And this is the kind of country where we can do it. There aren’t that many places to run to once he’s flushed out of cover.”

Karen studied the map, her mind racing.

“How do we get him to run?”

“We’ve got to scare him, make him think we’re coming right at him. That’s the only thing that will make him break from his hiding place. Announce on the local radio and television that we’re starting a house-to-house search, that we’re concentrating on transient housing. Maybe he’ll run.”

“Maybe. But we couldn’t possibly get the manpower to do a house-to-house unless we knew where he was.”

“He doesn’t know that. If he hears it on the radio he’ll believe it. Why shouldn’t he? Can he afford to take the chance?”

“So he runs. He’s not a rabbit; he’ll be in a car, he can go anywhere.”

“We’ll funnel him. Say the search starts along a line from here to here ...” Becker jabbed at two dots on the map. “He’ll run this way. Once he’s running we can funnel him even further. Look, there aren’t that many roads through the mountains. Put a cop car at this intersection, another one here, and you force anyone trying to avoid the cops to Route 21. Put a roadblock”—he studied the map for a second more, his forefinger hovering over it like a bee above a blossom—“here. A real one, full search of every car that goes through it. We can get enough men for that.”