Caught (2 page)

I didn't like that either. A lot I didn't like here.

As a kid, I watched a lot of horror movies, which was strange because I hated them. I hated things jumping out at me. And I really couldn't stand movie gore. But I would still watch them and revel in the predictably moronic behavior of the heroines, and right now those scenes were replaying in my head, the ones where said moronic heroine knocks on a door and it opens a little and you scream, "Run, you scantily clad bimbo!" and she wouldn't and you couldn't understand it and two minutes later, the killer would be scooping out her skull and munching on her brain.

I should go right now.

In fact, I will. But then I flashed back to Chynna's call, to the words she'd said, the trembling in her voice. I sighed, leaned my face toward the opening, peered into the foyer.

Darkness.

Enough with the cloak and dagger.

"Chynna?"

My voice echoed. I expected silence. That would be the next step, right? No reply. I slipped the door open a little, took a tentative step forward. . . .

"Dan? I'm in the back. Come in."

The voice was muffled, distant. Again I didn't like this, but there was no way I was backing out now. Backing out had cost me too much throughout my life. My hesitation was gone. I knew what had to be done now.

I opened the door, stepped inside, and closed the door behind me.

Others in my position would have brought a gun or some kind of weapon. I had thought about it. But that just doesn't work for me. No time to worry about that now. No one was home. Chynna had told me that. And if they were, well, I would handle that when the moment came.

"Chynna?"

"Go to the den, I'll be there in a second."

The voice sounded . . . off. I saw a light at the end of the hall and moved toward it. There was a noise now. I stopped and listened. Sounded like water running. A shower maybe.

"Chynna?"

"Just changing. Out in a second."

I moved into the low-lit den. I saw one of those dimmer-switch knobs and debated turning it up, but in the end I chose to leave it alone. My eyes adjusted pretty quickly. The room had cheesy wood paneling that looked as if it were made from something far closer to vinyl than anything in the timber family. There were two portraits of sad clowns with huge flowers on their lapels, the kind of painting you might pick up at a particularly tacky motel's garage sale. There was a giant open bottle of no-name vodka on the bar.

I thought I heard somebody whisper.

"Chynna?" I called out.

No answer. I stood, listened for more whispering. Nothing.

I started toward the back, toward where I heard the shower running.

"I'll be right out," I heard the voice say. I pulled up, felt a chill. Because now I was closer to the voice. I could hear it better. And here was the thing I found particularly strange about it:

It didn't sound at all like Chynna.

Three things tugged at me. One, panic. This wasn't Chynna. Get out of the house. Two, curiosity. If it wasn't Chynna, who the hell was it and what was going on? Three, panic again. It had been Chynna on the phone--so what had happened to her?

I couldn't just run out now.

I took one step toward where I'd come in, and that was when it all happened. A spotlight snapped on in my face, blinding me. I stumbled back, hand coming up to my face.

"Dan Mercer?"

I blinked. Female voice. Professional. Deep tone. Sounded oddly familiar.

"Who's there?"

Suddenly there were other people in the room. A man with a camera. Another with what looked like a boom mike. And the female with the familiar voice, a stunning woman with chestnut brown hair and a business suit.

"Wendy Tynes,
NTC News
. Why are you here, Dan?"

I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I recognized the woman from that TV newsmagazine . . .

"Why have you been conversing online in a sexual manner with a thirteen-year-old girl, Dan? We have your communications with her."

. . . the one that sets up and catches pedophiles on camera for all the world to see.

"Are you here to have sex with a thirteen-year-old girl?"

The truth of what was going on there hit me, freezing my bones. Other people flooded the room. Producers maybe. Another cameraman. Two cops. The cameras came in closer. The lights got brighter. Beads of sweat popped up on my brow. I started to stammer, started to deny.

But it was over.

Two days later, the show aired. The world saw.

And the life of Dan Mercer, just as I somehow knew it would be when I approached that door, was destroyed.

WHEN MARCIA MCWAID FIRST SAW HER daughter's empty bed, panic did not set in. That would come later.

She had woken up at six AM, early for Saturday morning, feeling pretty terrific. Ted, her husband of twenty years, slept in the bed next to her. He lay on his stomach, his arm around her waist. Ted liked to sleep with a shirt on and no pants. None. Nude from the waist down. "Gives my man down there room to roam," he would say with a smirk. And Marcia, imitating her daughters' teenage singsong tone, would say, "T-M-I"--Too Much Information.

Marcia slipped out of his grip and padded down to the kitchen. She made herself a cup of coffee with the new Keurig pod machine. Ted loved gadgets--boys and their toys--but this one actually got some use. You take the pod, you stick it in the machine--presto, coffee. No video screens, no touch pad, no wireless connectivity. Marcia loved it.

They'd recently finished an addition on the house--one extra bedroom, one bathroom, the kitchen knocked out a bit with a glassed-in nook. The kitchen nook offered oodles of morning sun and had thus become Marcia's favorite spot in the house. She took her coffee and the newspaper and set herself on the window seat, folding her feet beneath her.

A small slice of heaven.

She let herself read the paper and sip her coffee. In a few minutes she would have to check the schedule. Ryan, her third grader, had the early Hoops Basketball game at eight AM. Ted coached. His team was winless for the second straight season.

"Why do your teams never win?" Marcia had asked him.

"I draft the kids based on two criteria."

"That being?"

"How nice the father--and how hot the mom."

She had slapped at him playfully, and maybe Marcia would have been somewhat concerned if she hadn't seen the moms on the sideline and knew, for certain, that he had to be joking. Ted was actually a great coach, not in terms of strategy but in terms of handling the boys. They all loved him and his lack of competitiveness so that even the untalented players, the ones who were usually discouraged and quit during the season, showed up every week. Ted even took the Bon Jovi song and turned it around: "You give losing a good name." The kids would laugh and cheer every basket, and when you're in third grade that's how it should be.

Marcia's fourteen-year-old daughter, Patricia, had rehearsal for the freshman play, an abridged version of the musical
Les Miserables
. She had several small parts, but that didn't seem to affect the workload. And her oldest child, Haley, the high school senior, was running a "captain's practice" for the girls' lacrosse team. Captain's practices were unofficial, a way to sneak in early practices under the guidelines issued by high school sports. In short, no coaches, nothing official, just a casual gathering, a glorified pickup game if you will, run by the captains.

Like most suburban parents, Marcia had a love-hate relationship with sports. She knew the relative long-term irrelevancy and yet still managed to get caught up in it.

A half hour of peace to start the day. That was all she needed.

She finished the first cup, pod-made herself a second, picked up the "Styles" section of the paper. The house remained silent. She padded upstairs and looked over her charges. Ryan slept on his side, his face conveniently facing the door so that his mother could notice the echo of his father.

Patricia's room was next. She too was still sleeping.

"Honey?"

Patricia stirred, might have made a noise. Her room, like Ryan's, looked as if someone had strategically placed sticks of dynamite in the drawers, blowing them open; some clothes sprawled dead on the floor, others lay wounded midway, clinging to the armoire like the fallen on a barricade before the French Revolution.

"Patricia? You have rehearsal in an hour."

"I'm up," she groaned in a voice that indicated she was anything but. Marcia moved to the next room, Haley's, and took a quick peek.

The bed was empty.

It was also made, but that was no surprise. Unlike her siblings' abodes, this one was neat, clean, anally organized. It could be a showroom in a furniture store. There were no clothes on this floor, every drawer fully closed. The trophies--and there were many--were perfectly aligned on four shelves. Ted had put in the fourth shelf just recently, after Haley's team had won the holiday tournament in Franklin Lakes. Haley had painstakingly divided up the trophies among the four shelves, not wanting the new one to have only one. Marcia was not sure why exactly. Part of it was because Haley didn't want it to look like she was just waiting for more to come, but more of it was her general abhorrence of disorganization. She kept each trophy equidistant from the others, moving them closer together as more came in, three inches separating them, then two, then one. Haley was about balance. She was the good girl, and while that was a wonderful thing--a girl who was ambitious, did her homework without being asked, never wanted others to think badly of her, was ridiculously competitive--there was a tightly wound aspect, a quasi-OCD quality, that worried Marcia.

Marcia wondered what time Haley had gotten home. Haley didn't have a curfew anymore because there had simply never been a need. She was responsible and a senior and never took advantage. Marcia had been tired and gone up to sleep at ten. Ted, in his constant state of "randy," soon followed her.

Marcia was about to move on, let it go, when something, she couldn't say what, made her decide to throw in a load of laundry. She started toward Haley's bathroom. The younger siblings, Ryan and Patricia, believed that "hamper" was a euphemism for "floor" or really "anyplace but the hamper," but Haley, of course, dutifully, religiously, and nightly put the clothes she'd worn that day into the hamper. And that was when Marcia started to feel a small rock form in her chest.

There were no clothes in the hamper.

The rock in her chest grew when Marcia checked Haley's toothbrush, then the sink and shower.

All bone-dry.

The rock grew when she called out to Ted, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. It grew when they drove to captain's practice and found out that Haley had never showed. It grew when she called Haley's friends while Ted sent out an e-mail blast--and no one knew where Haley was. It grew when they called the local police, who, despite Marcia's and Ted's protestations, believed that Haley was a runaway, a kid blowing off some steam. It grew when, forty-eight hours later, the FBI was brought in. It grew when there was still no sign of Haley after a week.

It was as if the earth had swallowed her whole.

A month passed. Nothing. Then two. Still no word. And then finally, during the third month, word came--and the rock that had grown in Marcia's chest, the one that wouldn't let her breathe and kept her up nights, stopped growing.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

THREE MONTHS LATER

"DO YOU PROMISE to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"

Wendy Tynes said that she did, took the stand, looked out. She felt as though she were onstage, something she was somewhat used to, what with being a television news reporter and all, but this time it made her squirm. She looked out and saw the parents of Dan Mercer's victims. Four sets of them. They were there every day. At first they'd brought photographs of their children, the innocent ones of course, holding them up, but the judge had made them stop. Now they sat silently, watching, and somehow that was even more intimidating.

The seat was uncomfortable. Wendy adjusted her position, crossed then uncrossed her legs, and waited.

Flair Hickory, celebrity counsel for the defense, stood, and not for the first time, Wendy wondered how Dan Mercer had the money to afford him. Flair wore his customary gray suit with thick pink stripes, pink shirt, pink tie. He crossed the room in a way that might be modestly described as "theatrical," but it was more like something Liberace might have done if Liberace had the courage to be really flamboyant.

"Ms. Tynes," he began with a welcoming smile. This was part of Flair's style. He was gay, yes, but he played it up in court like Harvey Fierstein in leather chaps doing Liza jazz hands. "My name is Flair Hickory. Good morning to you."

"Good morning," she said.

"You work for a lurid tabloid TV program called
Caught in the Act,
is that correct?"

The prosecuting attorney, a man named Lee Portnoi, said, "Objection. It's a TV program. There has been no testimony to support the allegation that the program is either lurid or tabloid."

Flair smiled. "Would you like me to present evidence, Mr. Portnoi?"

"That won't be necessary," Judge Lori Howard said in a voice that already sounded weary. She turned to Wendy. "Please answer the question."

"I don't work for the show anymore," Wendy said.

Flair pretended to be surprised by this. "No? But you did?"

"Yes."

"So what happened?"

"The show was taken off the air."

"For low ratings?"

"No."

"Really? Why then?"

Portnoi said, "Your Honor, we all know the whys."

Lori Howard nodded. "Move along, Mr. Hickory."

"You know my client, Dan Mercer?"

"Yes."

"And you broke into his house, didn't you?"

Wendy tried to hold his gaze, tried not to look guilty, whatever the heck that meant. "That's not really accurate, no."

"It's not? Well, my dear, I want to make sure that we are as accurate as humanly possible, so let's back up, shall we?" He strolled across the courtroom as though it were a catwalk in Milan. He even had the audacity to smile at the families of the victims. Most made a point of not looking at Flair, but one of the fathers, Ed Grayson, stared daggers. Flair seemed unfazed.