Blind Pursuit (19 page)

34

Annie was silent as Walker escorted her out of the community center. He wondered if he’d been wrong to ask about the fire. She had been upset to begin with, and reliving those memories might have served only to traumatize her further.

They crossed the street together. At the curb Annie abruptly turned to him and whispered, “It wasn’t luck.”

He blinked. “What?”

“I told you we were lucky to escape the fire. But it wasn’t luck.”

“What, then?”

“Erin saved me.”

Their shoes clacked on the sidewalk. A robin burst out of the branches of a mesquite tree and shot into the clear, warm air. In the near distance, the bells of San Agustin Cathedral chimed ten o’clock.

“I panicked,” she went on softly. “I mean, I lost it. Totally. I could hear our mother shrieking, and the flames crackling, and I started to yell and yell and yell. I couldn’t stop.”

He heard bitter self-recrimination in her voice, and frowned at it. “You were seven years old.”

“So was Erin.”

“Anyone would panic in that situation.”

Annie stopped walking and looked up at him, her face flushed, candescent in the harsh sunshine. “
She
didn’t.”

Walker took that in. A first grader, and she had kept her cool in an arson fire.

“How did your sister save you?” he asked after a thoughtful moment.

“First she got me to calm down. She grabbed hold of me, put a stuffed animal in my hands, a koala bear. My favorite bear. I’d named her Miss Fuzzy.”

Walker felt his throat catch. The mention of the doll brought it home to him—how little those two girls had been. Small enough to still cling to teddy bears for comfort.

“That shut me up,” Annie went on. “It wasn’t just the bear; it was Erin’s attitude, her ... decisiveness. Then she took me by the hand and led me into the hall.”

“Which was soaked with gasoline,” Walker said, “and ablaze.”

“It was the only exit. We were on the second floor, with a concrete patio twenty feet below. To jump out the window would have been suicide, and there was no time to improvise any sort of ladder, even if we’d thought of it. We had to get out fast.”

Standing on this quiet tree-lined street, listening to birdsong and the rustle of leaves. Walker tried to visualize what it must have been like inside that house.

He had seen a few fires, though he’d never been in the midst of one. A house fire out of control was a waking nightmare, a riot of churning smoke and hellish flames, of windows and walls blown apart by combustible gases, of spinning clouds of soot like fallout from a bomb blast.

Even to stand outside such a spectacle could be unnerving. To be at the center of it—his imagination failed him. And to be at the center of it and only seven years old ...

“Our mother was quiet by then,” Annie said softly. “There was no sound except the fire—I can still hear it—roaring and bellowing like a dragon, and that’s what I thought we were walking straight into. A dragon’s open jaws.”

“But you went anyway.”

“Because Erin led me,” Annie said simply.

Slowly, Walker nodded.

“Our end of the hall wasn’t on fire yet—he hadn’t poured any gasoline there, for some reason—but there was a sheet of flame across the staircase landing. Like a wall, a wall of heat, only not a wall, because it was moving, it was ... alive.”

“How’d you get through?”

“Between the fire and the banister was a narrow gap. Barely enough clearance, but we had to chance it. Erin went first, and I followed.” The memory winded her; she drew a shaky breath. “It was like a circus act, you know? Like jumping through a flaming hoop.”

“And you made it.”

“Almost didn’t. My pajamas caught fire. Erin snatched the bear out of my hand and beat at the flames till they were smothered. I was crying again, because I knew the dragon had almost gotten me, and because I’d lost Miss Fuzzy. She was all charred and mangled and ... well, I just left her there.” She hugged herself and managed a faltering smile. “Sometimes I still think about that bear. Still wish I hadn’t lost her.” Her voice was a whisper. “Isn’t that silly?”

Walker didn’t think so, and he knew she didn’t, either. “Go on,” he said gently.

“We got down into the living room, and God, such an awful smell, gasoline everywhere. The fire was still after us—I saw it marching down the stairs. We ran for the front door, but the fire was too quick; it beat us there. Then the whole room went up—everything flame and smoke, orange and black—whirling sparks like the dragon’s eyes.”

In the belly of the monster
. The string of words ran through Walker’s mind, a random fragment of thought.

“It was hard to breathe.” Annie gazed into the distance, her face in profile, moisture glistening on her cheek. “Erin pulled me to the floor, where the air was cleaner. We crawled into the kitchen. No flames there yet, no gasoline trail. She helped me up on the counter, opened the window and punched out the screen, then pushed me through and followed.”

Her shoulders lifted in a shaky shrug, and abruptly all the breath seemed to sigh out of her.

“Anyway, that’s it,” she finished. “That’s how we survived.”

Walker shook his head. Seven years old, hardly more than babies—yet so incredibly brave, both of them.

For although Erin clearly had taken the lead, Annie had needed courage, too, more courage then she gave herself credit for—the courage to leave the imagined safety of the bedroom and face the dragon’s scorching breath.

“So you see?” She looked at him, desperate intensity shining in her eyes. “You see why I have to help her? She saved me. Now she’s in trouble, and it’s my turn to rescue her.
It’s my turn
.”

He tried to be gentle. “You’ve done all you can.”

“I haven’t done anything,” she snapped, turning away.

In the parking lot, watching her unlock her car, he looked for words of reassurance. “From everything you’ve told me, I’d say your sister can take of herself.”

“She needs me now.”

“How can you be sure?”

“SOS,” she said hotly.

“Annie ...”

Her eyes flashed at him, hard and angry. “I know you think I’m overreacting. 1 know you think I should forget about it. I know you think Erin is fine, just fine. But you’re wrong.”

“I just hate to see you so worked up over—”

“You’re wrong,” she said again, and then she was behind the wheel, slamming the door, revving the engine, racing out of the lot and down the street at twice the posted speed limit, daring him or any other cop to ticket her.

He stared after the car until it hooked around a corner with a shriek of tires. Then he sighed. He supposed he would never see her again.

Or perhaps he would. Once Erin turned up unharmed, sheepish about her temporary abdication of responsibility, Annie might drop by the squad room to fill him in. He hoped so.

A new thought made him frown. The seven-year-old who had kept her presence of mind in a blazing house didn’t sound like the type to ever abdicate responsibility. A fire hadn’t rattled her; how likely was it that she would fall victim to the pressures of work?

Standing very still, feeling the steady heat of the sun on the back of his head. Walker wondered if Annie could be right.

He abducted her
, she’d said,
and forced her to write this phony letter, and then later he returned for the Tegretol because, without it, she could die
.

Was it possible?

Oh, hell. Of course not.

What did he have to go on? An incorrect street address on an envelope? A letter that was oddly terse and impersonal?

There was nothing to justify any further investigation. Nothing.

“Sorry, Annie,” he said to the silence around him.

Before entering the station, he remembered to straighten his tie. His neck, he noticed, was damp with sweat.

The temperature must be ninety-five already; low hundreds by afternoon. Summer weather, coming early.

A real scorcher, he thought grimly, opening the lobby door.

35

Hot.

The sun blazed like a klieg light, painfully bright, branding a blurred red circle on her vision even through her closed eyelids.

Waves of heat radiated from the ground under her. She thought of a griddle, of sizzling meat.

Through the gag still clogging her mouth, Erin let out a choked, plaintive noise, too indistinct to be a moan.

She turned her head first to one side, then the other, trying to avert her face from the sun. The sand planted searing kisses on her cheeks.

Somewhere in the world there was shade. A cool breeze, a rustle of green leaves ... She remembered Muir Woods near San Francisco. She remembered Sierra Springs.

No shade here, not anymore. The walls of the arroyo had cupped her in shadow for only a precious hour after daybreak. As the sun climbed higher, the shadow had rolled back slowly like a receding tide, exposing first her legs, then her upper body, and finally her face.

Her eyes fluttered open briefly. From the sun’s position in the eastern sky, she estimated the time at ten o’clock. She would not again be sheltered from the burning rays until evening, countless hours away.

By then it might not matter. By then, if her abductor had not returned, she might be dead.

She had been sure he meant to burn her last night. As he climbed the embankment, she struggled fiercely with the ropes, knowing that it was futile, that soon he would splash gasoline over her body and then ... and then ...

At a restaurant years ago she’d watched the chef prepare a flambeed dish at the next table. The flare of the match, the breath-stopping burst of flame—

That was how it would be. An eruption of agony, a final surge of terror, and then, mercifully, nothing more, ever.

He had disappeared into the night. After that, a long interval of waiting. She’d lain paralyzed, watching the rim of the arroyo, listening for his return.

The sound of hammering, distant and inexplicable, had reached her. Sometime later, the cough of an engine.

His van, pulling away. The motor fading, fading ... Gone.

He’d left her. She would not burn tonight.

For a few giddy minutes the intensity of her relief had blinded her to the full implications of his departure.

Then gradually she’d begun to ponder his motive. Clearly he had been furious with her. He’d called her a bad girl, told her that he regretted what he was doing, but that it had become necessary.

He must have been planning to burn her, then had changed his mind. Yes, that was it. Somehow, at the last moment, he’d made contact with the better part of himself, the embryonic conscience that had taught him about remorse.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps she had misinterpreted his purpose all along. Perhaps his intention had never been to kill her, only to inflict punishment. To leave her here, staked supine at the bottom of the wash, exposed to the night chill and, later, to the heat of a desert day ...

Flat on her back, gazing at the cold spray of stars, she had felt relief fade, supplanted by a new dread.

He might not ever come back. Might leave her to suffer a lingering death.

Anger had made her strong, as it had in the cellar.

Her wrists twisted. The rope binding them was knotted tightly, too tight to be worked free.

Straining, she’d reached out to run her fingertips over the metal stake above her head. The edge was sharp.

Shrugging her shoulders, extending her arms a few extra inches, she had pressed the loop of rope hard against the stake. Slowly she’d begun to rub in a monotonous sawing motion. Up, down. Up, down.

Within minutes, pain had radiated from her shoulder blades and neck. It had started as an ache, then sharpened rapidly to a series of electric twinges, each one contracting her facial muscles into an agonized wince.

She’d kept working. The constellations had wheeled toward dawn, and the night chill had settled deeper into her bones.

From time to time she had rested, hoping to revive muscles strained by fatigue. The worst torture was not pain or weariness, but uncertainty. She couldn’t see the binding on her wrists, couldn’t know if her efforts were showing results or merely wasting irreplaceable reserves of energy.

Pink dawn had congealed into a red sunrise. Astonishing how quickly the day had warmed up.

Now, at roughly ten in the morning, the temperature must be ninety degrees. By the calendar it was April, but this was August heat. Heat that killed.

Already she was severely dehydrated. Her mouth was dry; her throat ached. Cramps tightened the muscles of her abdomen and thighs. Since daybreak, sweat had been streaming off her skin; she wondered how much more moisture she had left to lose.

When perspiration ceased, her body’s natural cooling mechanism would be disabled. Her temperature would rise. She would pass from heat exhaustion to heatstroke.

Untreated, heatstroke would be fatal.

And still, after hours of excruciating labor, the goddamned rope had not split. It had started to fray—when she craned her neck, she glimpsed wisps of fiber curling from the loop like uncombed hairs—but her hands remained tightly bound.

Though she kept working, she rested often now. The agony in her shoulders was unendurable for long periods, and the weakness of her arms made any movement difficult.

Perhaps she ought to give it up, conserve her strength. But she was haunted by the thought that one more try might unravel the remaining strands and set her free.

One more try. The words were a magic formula, summoning new strength. Again she lifted her shoulders to attack the rope.

A sudden wave of dizziness rippled up her spine. The world began to slide away, down a long, greased tunnel, leaving her behind. Wind chimes sang in her ears. Such pretty music ...

With a teeth-grinding effort she retained her hold on consciousness.

When her head was clear, she locked her jaws, biting down hard on the gag as if it were a bullet, and continued rubbing the stake.

As she worked, the bad thoughts came again, the thoughts that had been her tormentors for hours, eating at her like the vultures sent to prey on Prometheus when he, like her, had been bound to a barren expanse of sand and rock.

If only ...

If only she had made it onto the interstate. If only the service station had been open. If only she hadn’t set off the van’s alarm.

Broiling in the sun, eyes shut and lips sealed, she pictured herself escaping from the cellar into an empty house. Swiftly she finds her way to the front door. Outside, she explores the grounds, first examining the gate and perimeter fence, then entering the barn, where she discovers her car, alone in the musty dark. The barn doors swing wide, the Ford’s engine catches, and she backs out into the night, pursued by no one; and as she roars toward freedom and safety, she takes a last look at the ranch, memorizing its layout and appearance for the report she will file with the police.

Her mind lingered on that image—the ranch receding, stark in the moonlight.

Padlocked gate. Barbed-wire fencing. Horse barn and paddock. Wood-frame house with a gravel court.

Familiar.

Yes. She realized it now, for the first time.

Something about the ranch was familiar to her. Strikingly familiar, in fact.

She was almost certain she had seen the place before.

But that was crazy. How could she? And where? And what would it mean if she had?

The rush of questions brought on another slow comber of light-headedness.

Couldn’t think now. The sun was too strong, the ache in her muscles too sharp.

She rested her arms and shoulders once more. Rotating her wrists, she detected perhaps slightly more give in the rope. Or maybe not. She couldn’t be sure. She was tired. So tired and so very hot.

The sun beat down. The sand reflected back its heat in shimmering waves.

Water. Oh, Christ, she wanted water. Water and shade.

Her tormentor had not set her on fire. Yet in a different way, a slower and perhaps crueler way, he
was
burning her.

Burning her to death.

Though she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, she could not erase the sight of the sun’s red disk, climbing relentlessly toward noon.