Walking Shadow (15 page)

It was deep black when we came. And cold. Vinnie stayed with the car, parked out of sight off the road behind some scrub white pines and beach plum bushes. Hawk and I walked to the island with Mei Ling between us. There was no moon. The island was only about a hundred feet from shore, but the steady wash of the ocean against the causeway and the cold press of the darkness made it seem remote. It was our fourth night of watching, and the first in which there was no moon. We reached the little gazebo. It offered a vantage point but very little in protection from the cold wind off the water. Hawk leaned against one of the columns that held the gazebo's roof up, and Mei Ling stood very close to him, her hands pushed as deep as she could get them into the pockets of her down coat. I began to look at the ocean through a night scope.

"How can he see?" Mei Ling said to Hawk.

"Off a nine-volt alkaline battery in the handle," Hawk said. I glanced at him. Like that explained it. He grinned. And Mei Ling looked at him as if now she understood. I went back to looking at the ocean. The sea sound was loud where I stood. But in the surreal circular imagery of the scope, the waves moved silently. If they came once a month and this was our fourth night, our chances were about one in seven. Maybe better since there was no moon.

"What does he expect to learn here?" Mei Ling said.

She didn't address me directly because in her view I was busy, and shouldn't be interrupted. The result was that she talked about me as if I weren't there.

"Won't know," Hawk said, "till we see it."

"But to come out here every night and watch the ocean. They might not come for weeks."

"They might not," Hawk said.

"They might have showed up the first night," I said.

The surface of the water was never still, alternately engorged and prolapsed, smoothing, ruffling, cresting as it came to shore, until the waves fragmented on the rocks, and yet always waves forming and coming on, always changing, always the same… Maybe two hundred yards out on the dark ocean, dark against the dark sky, was the opaque silhouette of a ship. There was no arrival. It simply appeared in the lens and sat motionless. I took the scope down and handed it to Hawk.

"On the horizon," I said, "about one o'clock."

Hawk looked, swept the scope slowly along the horizon and stopped and made a small adjustment and held.

"Yessiree bob," he said in a flat, midwestern twang. Hawk could sound like anyone he wanted to. He handed the scope to Mei Ling.

"On the horizon," he said.

"Around where one o'clock would be if it were a clock face."

Mei Ling looked. It took her a minute, but she found it. She seemed thrilled.

"Doesn't have to be smuggling immigrants," I said.

"No, it doesn't," Hawk said.

We waited in the darkness and the wind and the cold with the waves moving below us. We took turns looking through the glass, and then, finally, we heard the soft thump of an engine. We couldn't find it until it was close and then we picked it up. It was a wide flat launch open to the elements with the engine housing in the middle of the boat. Crowded tight into it were people. The engine thump was the only sound the boat made. The people were silent. The boat bumped in close to the rocks, so close that I could see the buffer bags that the crew tossed over to fend off the rocks. The boat motor kept running, and the boat stayed headed in against the jumble of granite that helped form the breakwater below us. The people scrambled off, most of them carrying nothing, a few carrying small suitcases or paper bags, or small bundles. It looked dangerous.

We stayed motionless in the gazebo, watching the dark figures in the night, only a few yards away. They were barely visible. No one spoke. They moved in a single file along the rocks and up onto the causeway. Someone led them across the causeway. There might have been a hundred of them. When the last of them scrambled up the rocks, the launch backed away and moved slowly parallel to the shore, south around the point opposite Brant Island and out of sight. I looked through the scope at the horizon. The ship was gone. I glanced at the causeway. The people were gone.

The cove below Brant Island was empty and soundless except for the ocean, which was ceaseless.

All of us were quiet as if in the aftermath of a somber ritual we neither sought nor understood. The ghostly procession drifting soundless and phantasmagoric through the near-lightless night seemed more than merely illegal immigrants, though surely they were that. There was something antediluvian in the spectral progress from the sea to the shore and into the darkness that all three of us must have felt though none of us spoke of it.

"The last boat from Xanadu," I said.

Vinnie and Hawk were there. Vinnie was cleaning his shotgun.

"Fucking barrel's going to rust through, we don't stop going to Port City," Vinnie said. Hawk was reading his book. He nodded without taking his eyes from the page.

"What's the name of the book," Vinnie said. He wasn't wearing his Walkman and he was restless.

"On Race," Hawk said.

"Yeah. How come you reading that?"

"The brother's a smart man," Hawk said.

"That racial shit bother you?" Vinnie said.

I was done with the throw-away mail and turned to the package.

The envelopes that might have checks, I saved for last.

"You got a problem with me being black, Vinnie?"

"No."

"Me either. So at the moment I got no racial shit to be bothered by, you know? I try to work on that level."

I opened the package. It was a videotape cassette. It was labeled "Jocelyn Colby." I turned it over. There was nothing else. I didn't have a videotape player.

"Either of you got a VCR?" I said.

Hawk shook his head.

"Already seen "Debbie Does Dallas,"

" he said.

"I had one," Vinnie said.

"Old lady took it with her when she split."

Hawk said, "Didn't know you was married, Vinnie."

Vinnie grinned.

"I didn't either," he said.

"Probably why she split."

I picked up the phone and called Susan.

"I have a video tape that I would like to view on your machine," I said when she answered.

"If I brought an elegant lunch, perhaps you'd like to take a break from healing the loony and watch it with " me.

"It's not one of those disgusting porn thingies, is it?"

"I don't know, it came in the mail and it says Jocelyn Colby on it."

"I have a two-hour break," Susan said.

"One to three."

"You disappointed it's not a disgusting porn thingie?" I said.

"Yes," she said and hung up.

Hawk and Vinnie dropped me off and waited out front. I went in her side door and had fed some of the elegant lunch to Pearl while I waited. When Susan came up the front stairs from her office at five past one, I had the tape in the VCR. And the elegant lunch laid out on one of the upper shelves in her book case, to discourage Pearl. Susan kissed me, kissed Pearl, and looked at the lunch.

"Is this a submarine sandwich I see before me?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"No onions."

"Elegant."

When she was working she was much less flamboyant in her makeup and clothes.

"I am not the focus of the therapy," she said when I once asked her about it. Today she wore a dark blue pants suit with a white blouse and pearls. Her makeup was discreet."

"Even if I were sane," I said, "I'd spend $100 an hour just to come and look at you."

"It's a hundred and a quarter, but I could get you a rate," she said. She went to the kitchen and came back with two place mats, knives and forks, and cloth napkins. She laid out our lunch on the coffee table.

"There's napkins with the subs," I said.

Susan looked at me pityingly, and then turned to glare at Pearl, who was stalking the sandwiches. Pearl seemed at ease with the glare, but she didn't get closer. I pointed at the cassette in the VCR.

"Do you know what's on it?" Susan said.

"Nope, I was waiting for you."

Susan slipped a sliced pickle out of her sandwich and took a bite of it.

"Roll 'em," she said.

I pressed the play button on the remote control and there was a moment while the VCR cranked up that the tape ran for a while with nothing on it, then suddenly there was Jocelyn Colby tied to a chair with a white scarf over her mouth. She squirmed against the ropes, her eyes, above the scarf, wide with fear. And that was it.

The tape ran for about five minutes. There was no sound except the muffled noise she was able to make through the scarf, no message, merely the picture of Jocelyn struggling in captivity. The screen went blank though the tape continued to roll. After it had rolled blankly far enough to persuade me it contained nothing else, I stopped it, and rewound it.

"There was someone," Susan said.

"We were wrong."

I nodded.

"How will you find her?" Susan said.

"Let's run the tape again," I said and pressed the play button.

Jocelyn was wearing a black slip and black high-heeled shoes, or more accurately one black high-heeled shoe. The other shoe lay on the floor in front of her. The strap of her slip was off her left shoulder. There was no bra strap. Her ankles and knees were bound with clothesline. Several loops of the same rope around her waist held her in the chair. The white scarf appeared to be silk. It covered her face from nose to chin. Her dark hair had fallen forward and covered her right eye. In the background of the picture was the corner of a bed. The light seemed natural and seemed to come from Jocelyn's left. Her hands were out of sight behind her back, but from the way she squirmed in the chair it appeared that they were tied to the chair. The chair itself was a sturdy oak straight chair, the kind you find in libraries. The wall behind her was a sort of neutral beige. It was blank.

I ran the tape maybe five more times while Susan sat forward, her chin on her hands, studying it. There was nothing else to see.

I shut it off.

"What does he want," Susan said.

"If it's a man," I said.

Susan shook her head impatiently.

"He or she. What does the kidnapper want? Why did he send you this tape?"

"I don't know. It lets me know he's got her."

"There was no letter with the tape?"

"No. Maybe we'll hear something in a while."

"I don't get it," Susan said.

"I think that's my mantra," I said.

"Will you notify the police?"

"Have to. I'll get a copy made of this tape and go to Port City and give the original to DeSpain."

"What else will you do?"

"I'll look into Jocelyn's background a little more. Rummage through her apartment."

Pearl came and put her head in Susan's lap. Susan stroked Pearl's head and turned toward me again.

"I know you value restraint," Susan said.

"And I know when you work you try to work with what you know, not what you feel.

But it is human to feel bad about this, and it's okay to."

Susan's eyes seemed bottomless. I always felt when I looked at them that my soul could plunge into hers through those eyes and be in peace forever. I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, and we held the kiss until Pearl reared her head up from Susan's lap and wedged it in between us.

"I have promises to keep," I said and started for the door.

As he watched, the lines around his mouth deepened. He played the tape twice, and then shut it off. When he looked at me there was something around his eyes that made him look tired.

"You came to me earlier," DeSpain said, "maybe this wouldn't have happened."

"Maybe," I said.

"I'm the Chief of Police in this goddamned town," DeSpain said. His voice was flat. He sounded tired.

"I'm supposed to know when a criminal investigation is taking place."

"Didn't want to distract you from your hot pursuit of the theater killer."

DeSpain nodded, tiredly.

"You think there's a connection?" he said.

"Why ask me?" I said.

"I didn't even think there was a stalker."

DeSpain nodded again.

"You got the packaging this came in?" he said.

I had it in a big manila envelope. I put the envelope on his desk.

"We'll let the scientists take a look," DeSpain said.

"They'll study it and tell me it was mailed in Boston. But that's what we do.

We let the fucking crime lab study things." DeSpain shrugged.

"Spreads the blame around."

"I was out on Brant Island the other night," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Saw about a hundred Chinese come ashore in a small boat from a big boat."

"You got a subcontract with INS?" DeSpain said.

"Know anything about that?" I said.

"Nope."

We looked at each other. Neither of us spoke. There were no lights on in DeSpain's office. The gray afternoon light came weakly through the rain-streaked window.

Finally I said, "You were a good cop, DeSpain. What the hell happened to you?"

The lines in DeSpain's face got deeper. The eyes got tireder.

"How about you, Sherlock? How good a cop are you? What have you done since you showed up here, except fuck up."

We were silent again. DeSpain didn't seem angry. He seemed sad. There seemed no power left in him, only tiredness.

"So far," I said, "we're about even. Maybe we can recoup by finding this woman."

"I'll find the woman," DeSpain said. Suddenly there was force in his voice as if a switch had been turned on.

"You just stay the fuck out of my way."

I stood.

"Sure," I said.

But I didn't mean it. And he knew I didn't, but the force was gone from him as quickly as it had come.

I left and drove over to the theater in my car with Hawk and Vinnie trailing along behind in Hawk's car. There was a light mist coming down, perfect fall weather in Port City. I had the wipers on slow intermittent. I was thinking about Hawk's reaction when I'd told him about Jocelyn. There was no one following that broad, he had said. I felt the same way, and it bothered me. I was wrong sometimes, and Hawk was wrong sometimes, but we weren't usually both wrong about this kind of thing. Something else bothered me, and I couldn't find exactly what it was. There was simply something nibbling at the far corner of my consciousness. If I turned toward it, I lost it. If I thought of other things, it was back nibbling. DeSpain was a puzzle too. His reaction was all off.

DeSpain was a straight-ahead guy. He wasn't a remembrances-of things-past kind of guy. He was a get-out-of-my-way-or-I'llthrow-you-in-the-street kind of guy. And then there was the matter if we'd been wrong about Jocelyn's stalker, had we been wrong about Christopholous' stalker. And maybe I hadn't seen illegal Chinese immigrants being smuggled ashore, and maybe this was not Port City I saw but only Asbury Park.

I parked on a hydrant in front of the theater and got out with my duplicate tape and went in. Christopholous didn't have a VCR in his office. He took me to the conference room to view the tape.

The VCR and monitor were on a two-level wheeled deal table pushed against the far wall. We sat on a couple of folding chairs in the big empty room under the bright ceiling fixtures with the stylized theater posters marching in endless gallery around the walls and watched, me for about the fifteenth time, as Jocelyn sat helpless in her chair.

"For God sake," Christopholous said when the tape went blank.

"What is this?"

"You now know what I know," I said.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Came in the mail this morning," I said.

"Postmarked Boston."

"Well, is she what, a hostage? Do they want a ransom? What?"

I shrugged.

"Got any thoughts?" I said.

"Thoughts? Jesus Christ, Spenser, this is your work, not mine.

How would I have thoughts. Have you called the police?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's all I can think of. The theater has no money. If there's a ransom, we have no money to pay it."

"Be nothing left for those nice board member parties if you paid a ransom," I said.

"That's not fair, damn it."

"No, probably isn't," I said.

"I'm feeling kind of grouchy about things. You got any kind of personnel file on Jocelyn?"

"I imagine we have her head shot and resume, Social Security number, that sort of thing."

"Get it for me, will you?" I said.

"Why… oh, of course, certainly. Be glad to."

"Now," I said.

"Surely. Excuse me."

Christopholous hustled off and left me alone to sit and stare at the empty room and the myriad posters of things past, without seeing anything.