Gone The Next (11 page)

Okay, actually, I would have to sit and wait at first, which is what I did, in the same old spot in the church parking lot. Another eight hours in the van, in the summer heat, watching Brian Pierce’s gate. And nothing happened, except for an occasional vehicle passing by. No county deputies. No Jetta. No Emma Webster.

The sun set, but I waited another thirty minutes for good measure. Then I stepped out of the van and began walking toward Pierce’s place. There was just enough moonlight to make the landscape easy to navigate. I covered one hundred yards in just over a minute.

I stepped over to a cedar tree about twelve yards from the driveway itself. Perfect. There, at the base of the trunk, I placed my rock camera. That’s right, a camera that looks like a rock. Not a fancy rock, just a rock. About eight inches tall. Totally self-contained. Records up to eighty hours of video on a 32 gig SD memory card. The battery can last up to a solid year. Is technology great or what?

There were other rocks in the area, and this “rock” looked enough like those rocks to make it virtually invisible. Which was good, because if someone walked off with it, that was a loss of seven hundred bucks, not to mention whatever was on the memory card.

I would have preferred to place the camera across the road — for a better chance of capturing license plates of any vehicles coming or going — but the camera was motion-activated, meaning every vehicle passing on the road would have set it off. This way, the camera would only activate when someone was coming or going from Pierce’s place.

I walked back to my van, started it up, and pulled onto Thomas Springs. Drove the hundred yards to Pierce’s driveway, plus a few yards past. Then I backed into Pierce’s driveway.

No traffic coming from either direction.

So I hopped out, popped open the back of the van, and wrestled my recently acquired non-working dryer out onto the ground. Better a dryer than a washer. Dryers are much lighter, but this one was still heavy enough for my purposes.

Had to move quick. You never know when a car might come along. Every second counts. Which is why I had situated the camera before unloading the dryer. Even those extra few seconds, with my van sitting there as plain as day, could’ve screwed me.

I maneuvered the dryer close to the gate, so that a vehicle couldn’t squeeze around it. Then I jumped back into my van and took off. Total time spent in Pierce’s driveway: about thirty seconds.

Here’s something most people know if they’ve driven enough rural county roads: Every now and then, some pinhead who needs to get rid of a large item will simply abandon it on the side of the road. A worn-out couch. A busted refrigerator. A soiled mattress. An old stainless steel sink. Rather than taking it to the dump or a recycling facility, or giving it away, the idiot just pulls over and leaves it. Now it’s not his problem. Eventually, someone from the county comes and removes it. Not quickly, though. So it would be up to Pierce to move the dryer himself, with my rock camera recording the action. Would be difficult for him to do it if his wrist was really injured.

I felt pretty good about the arrangement, so I went home, went to bed, and crashed for a solid nine hours.

The next morning, I slept late, had a big breakfast, then went out to my van, where I saw that all four tires were flat again.

Gruley. That son of a bitch.

This was getting old fast.

“Haven’t heard from anybody.”
But you are free to ask them.

“Has this guy Gruley contacted you?”

“Not since he got out.”

“Before that?”

“Yeah, he called a couple of times when he was a guest of the county. Made some vague promises to come see me.”

“But no outright threats.”

“No, he’s just this side of being that dumb.”

“Did he say he was gonna flatten all your tires?”

“Nope.”

“So there is no actual evidence that he did this.”

“Well, it’s just a hunch, but my hunches are so eerily accurate, they are admissible as evidence in most courts of law. Except in Arkansas. Those guys are really strict.”

He got the joke this time and gave me a halfhearted grin. “You know, without a witness...”

“Yeah, I know. And I know you have better things to do. I really do. I just need the report for the insurance company.”

So he finished it up, handed me a copy, then whipped out a business card with his numbers on it. “If you hear from Gruley or see him hanging around, give me a call.”

It was like bad dialogue from a cable-channel cop show.

“You can count on it,” I said, because that would’ve been the next line from the script.

I went back inside and planted myself on the couch. The tow truck driver would call my cell when he pulled up outside. I’d been going at it pretty hard for the past week, so I figured it was time to just take a break, even for a few minutes. I tuned the TV to a Texas Longhorns baseball game.

But my break didn’t last long.

A newsflash — in the form of a crawl across the bottom of the screen — caught my eye in the bottom of the third. The disappearance of Tracy Turner had grabbed the nation’s attention so absolutely, every new detail was disseminated via every possible media outlet as quickly as possible. The crawl said that a source in the case had revealed that, just last week, Kathleen Hanrahan had met with a divorce attorney.

Whoa.

That was big. Another bombshell, really. The circumstantial evidence continued to look really bad for Patrick Hanrahan. First he failed two polygraph tests, or at least he hadn’t passed them, then he cut off communications with police, and now this. His wife had been planning to leave him, or had been considering it.

I flipped to CNN, knowing they’d be on it, which was an understatement. At this point, the Turner case was probably eating up half of their broadcast day. At the moment, one of their legal experts was conjecturing on the implications of the latest news.

“...can only imagine how Patrick Hanrahan might’ve reacted upon hearing that his wife was thinking about a divorce. He has a lot to lose, because even though he is not Tracy’s biological father, as we’ve learned in the past few days, he is as close to her as if she were his own flesh and blood. He has been in her life, acting as her father, since she was one year old. One can only guess what — ”

I flipped to MSNBC. They were interviewing one of Kathleen Hanrahan’s friends, but they were concealing her face and altering her voice for anonymity. The woman — at least, it sounded like a woman — was saying that Kathleen had been unhappy for several years and had spoken about divorce on many different occasions. Then the woman said that Kathleen had recently seemed even more troubled than before — like something traumatic had happened. I listened for a few minutes, but the woman never gave any actual reasons why Kathleen was unhappy, and it became obvious that there were no hard facts beyond what I already knew.

I flipped to Fox News. They were doing a segment on how the secular left was taking God out of school and simultaneously pushing the radical homosexual socialist agenda.

I went back to the baseball game just as my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. I answered anyway, expecting the tow truck driver, but what I got instead was a woman with a very nice voice asking, “Is this the Texas Restaurant and Innkeepers Association?”

I’ll admit that, for maybe a full second, I had no idea who it was. Too distracted. But I recovered before it became obvious.

“It is indeed. This is Roy Ballard, assistant vice president of the hospitality appreciation division. Who’s calling, please?”

“Jessica Klein.”

“Let’s see. Klein, Klein, Klein. Oh, Klein! As in the award winner.”

“That’s me.”

“Are you calling to schedule your acceptance dinner?”

“Uh, that sort of depends.”

“Oh? Depends on what, Miss Klein?”

“Well, Mr. Ballard, let me ask you something. Are you asking me to dinner because you actually want to go out with me, or are you asking because you want me to snoop around about Brian Pierce?”

“Wow. You cut right to it, don’t you?”

“I think it’s a legitimate question.”

“You know what? I do, too. The bottom line is I’d love to go to dinner with you, regardless of this thing with Brian Pierce. If you don’t want to talk about him, we won’t talk about him.”

“Good answer.”

“Honest answer.”

“Okay, but if I
had
heard something about Brian, you’d want to hear it?”

“Well, sure, yeah, I’m not gonna lie.”

There was a pause, then she said, “I’m off today. Why don’t we meet for a drink later and I’ll tell you what I know. We can get that out of the way, and then, if you really do want to go out — ”

“I do.”

“One step at a time. A drink first. And don’t forget my trophy.”