Goodbye Sister Disco (6 page)

Hastings said, “I'll miss you too.”

“But we'll see each other before that. Tonight?”

“Tonight sounds great.”

*   *   *

Matt Lauer was standing next to a young black man wearing baggy pants and thick black shoes, cap worn backward. Matt in a suit, the other guy in his uniform. Matt asking him a question about his refusal to change his shoes for the television show where celebrities waltzed around with professional dancers, the guy responding that his refusal to change his shoes somehow put him on the same level as Rosa Parks.

The interview was drowned out as a woman in her late thirties turned on the kitchen sink and rinsed milk and orange juice out of cups. She set the cups upside down on a towel, close to the small television set.

The woman was wearing sweats and a white T-shirt. She had blond hair, cut short, and she had an athletic build. Her name was Terry McGregor.

Outside, a Jaguar XJ6 rumbled to a stop. The rumbling cut off and Hastings got out. He walked to the front door of the house and knocked.

He was holding a bag of coffee. Terry McGregor came to the door and let him in.

“Hi,” Hastings said. “I brought this for you.”

“Oh,” Terry said. “You didn't need to do that.”

“Well, I appreciated you taking Amy in. Especially on such short notice.”

“Forget about it. Anytime you need to drop her off, she's welcome. Come on in and have a cup of coffee. The girls are upstairs getting ready.”

He followed her back to the kitchen and took a seat at the table.

Terry said, “You take anything in it?”

“A little milk.”

She poured enough milk in the bottom of his cup to cover the bottom. Then poured the coffee on top of it. She set the cup of coffee on the table in front of him.

Terry and Chet McGregor had moved to St. Louis a few months ago. They were from Knoxville, Tennessee. Chet was a big fellow, military-looking with his hair cut high and tight. Talked big too, and often. He was a sales engineer. Hastings did not like Chet much, when he gave it any thought. But he liked Terry well enough. She had been a teacher and a girls' basketball coach for some time, but had given that up when she had Randi.

She went back to the kitchen sink, turning to George as she conversed with him.

“Were you out all night?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You must be exhausted.”

Hastings shrugged. “I'll get a nap later today. Chet gone already?”

“Yes,” Terry said. She still had her Tennessee accent. Hastings thought it was pleasant. “He left at six thirty. He's flying to Cleveland today. He should be back late tonight.”

Hastings felt some relief. Chet McGregor made more money than Hastings, had a sweet wife and a lovely daughter, and was not a bad-looking dude. But he was one of those guys who always had a need to compete with other men. He would speak often of his days as a champion football player. Not pro or college, but high school. And when Randi told him that Amy's dad had played baseball for the college team, he had looked at Hastings and said, “Really?” Finding it funny that Hastings had never mentioned it. The close friendship between the men's daughters made social contact unavoidable. Hastings found himself being very quiet when he was around Chet McGregor. Hastings found Chet not irritating so much as tiresome. Chet liked to talk a lot.

But Chet's being a bore was a small thing to Hastings. Chet's wife after all had been a great help to him and Amy. Her offer to put Amy up at any time had been entirely sincere. And the generosity had been extended without a moment's thought as to whether it would inconvenience her. It was what people like Terry McGregor did.

Had the McGregors moved to St. Louis, say, one year earlier, a friendship with them would probably not have come about. Eileen was an unregenerate snob and the likelihood of her taking up a friendship with the McGregors would have been slim indeed. She would have found Chet an unbearable oaf and would have dismissed his wife as a southern sorority yokel. And this conclusion would likely have been based on a five-minute encounter. Or a quick look at the woman's clothes.

Hastings himself was a bit of a snob. Indeed, that trait had in part drawn Eileen to him in the first place. But as Eileen would learn after marrying him, his snobbishness was of a different kind.

Terry McGregor said, “Amy says you have a girlfriend now?”

Hastings smiled. “Does she.”

“You been seeing the woman long?” Her tone was pitched just about right. Curious and friendly, though not prying.

“A few months.”

“That's good,” Terry said.

That could have meant anything. Perhaps Amy had worried aloud that he was lonely. Or that it meant that he had stopped thinking, even in small ways, that Eileen would undergo a full-scale character change and come back to him. Maybe the woman was glad to know he had a lover and companion. She wouldn't be the only one.

Hastings said, “I can drop the girls off at school.”

“You have time?” Terry said.

“Sure.”

*   *   *

A half hour later, Hastings was motoring down I-64 toward the police department, Forest Park on his right, downtown and the Arch coming into view in front of him. It was catching up with him now, the lack of sleep, and he decided that he would go to the cot room and get a quick nap as soon as he got in. It was that or set his head on his desk, because he could only fight it for so long.

But then his cell phone rang and he answered it, and it was Klosterman on the line, canceling that nap stat.

Klosterman said, “Now it's official.”

Hastings said, “You mean an official kidnapping?”

“Yeah, we got a ransom note.”

“How?”

“It's on television. The Internet, too.”

“I don't understand.”

“The kidnappers gave a tape to a local news channel.”

“So the media got it before us?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, shit,” Hastings said. Feeling really tired now. “Have you contacted the feds?”

“Yeah. Their ASAC—Assistant Special Agent in Charge—is coming here with a couple of special agents. Show us how this shit works.”

“Great,” Hastings said. He'd known it would come to this. FBI moving in, trying to take over, talking to all the metro cops as if they were shaved bears.
You see this thing here? This is what we call a “recording device.” Can you say that?
That sort of bullshit. Only this time, there would be additional axes to grind. Unless they had forgotten about what Hastings did. And feds aren't high on forgetting. Few law enforcement officers are.

Hastings said, “What about the ransom note? Or message?”

“I gotta say,” Klosterman said, “it's pretty well done.”

TEN

The terrain flattens as one crosses the Mississippi River west to east. Gone are the steep hills of the Ozarks and the bluffs of eastern Missouri. The land remains even all the way up I-55 to Chicago. Ronald Reagan was a native of Quincy, Illinois, and being a natural politician, he was adept at exploiting his rural roots for those “It's Morning in America” campaigns. But privately, he was a man content to live the rest of his days in California, presuming he could not be president. Privately, he would express pity for those who had never managed to escape the Quincys of this world. “There's nothing to
do
in those places.”

It could make you anxious, out there in the heartland. A place where your mailbox might be a good mile away from your house. Long dirt roads that stemmed off cracked roads that could go for miles before hooking up with State Highway 9. The nearest place to buy cigarettes and milk was White Hall. It
was
isolated. Even though St. Louis was only an hour's drive away.

At the end of one of those long dirt roads sat an old white clapboard two-story house. There were two rusted vehicles, skeletal remains, sitting in the unkempt front yard. Behind the main house was a barn, rusted red now and leaning forward like the prow of a ship. Propane tanks were off to the side of the house. They were filled for the winter.

The house had belonged to Ray Muller's grandfather, the descendant of the original German immigrant who had come to southern Illinois before the First World War. The grandfather had died two years ago.

There were about a half-dozen people there now, including Ray and Terrill and Lee. Some of them had to share rooms. Privacy was discouraged. So were monogamous relationships.

Their new guest had her own room though. For now. She was locked in a room in the basement.

*   *   *

By the time they finished preparing the videotape, the sun was coming up. Jan and Toby were in the kitchen preparing breakfast for all of them. The others were attending to their daily chores. There was a television in the living room, among the sparse and run-down furnishings. The television was off. If you wanted to watch television, you had to have Terrill's or Maggie's permission. The same went for listening to the radio. Even if you were in the car just driving to town. Music was okay, though. But no news or talk radio.

Terrill and Maggie sat at the table in the dining room. The table was covered with papers. On top of the papers were assorted weapons: a couple of automatic rifles and handguns. On the wall behind the table hung a poster that had a picture of an arm holding a rifle and the caption “
PIECE NOW
!”

Also on the table was a videotape. It was a copy of the master, which was now upstairs in a cabinet next to Maggie's bed.

Maggie and Terrill knew the effectiveness of video. The Western powers—America and their kowtowing British—had viewed videotapes of the capitalist simps being murdered by Al Qaeda. Pleas for mercy delivered from a grainy background, poor sound quality … “Please … please…” All of it stupid and weak, virtually ignored by that war criminal Bush and his poodle Tony Blair.

But the effect it had on the masses. At least in England. After Kenneth Bigley was decapitated, his family blamed not the Arabs but Tony Blair, going so far as to say that Blair had blood on his hands.

Terrill sat listening to Maggie as she explained all this, nodding his head at the appropriate times. But he was unsure of something. He said, “Are you saying we should decapitate her?”

Maggie looked at him, briefly, before shaking her head. She was only three years older than Terrill, but she felt much older. Which was what Terrill needed.

Terrill was a beautiful boy. Maggie had thought so from the time she first met him. With his thick, dark shaggy hair and his sensitive, almost feminine mouth and eyes that hypnotized. He was a panther made man. A beautiful, beautiful boy. But he needed guidance.

“No,” Maggie said. “We won't do that. We'll kill her if need be. But not that way.”

“Okay.”

A boy, Maggie thought. She said, “The objective here is to expose. Expose Gene Penmark for what he is. Him and his kind. We're not out to horrify people.”

Terrill said, “Okay.” Like he'd understood that from the beginning.

“But,” Maggie said, “it helps. The way things are, people have already been conditioned to
expect
a decapitation. If they expect it, if they fear it will happen, we'll get results.”

After a moment, Terrill said, “Right.” He said, “You've read Lee's statement?”

“Yeah, I read it.”

“And?”

“I worry about her,” Maggie said. “She reminds me too much of those coffeehouse liberals.”

“She's one of us now,” Terrill said. “And she knows it.”

“How was she last night?”

“She was fine. Didn't bat an eye.”

“She's a schoolgirl.”

“She's of value to us. She knows how to turn a phrase. And she's loyal.”

“To what?” Maggie said. “You, or us?”

Had it been someone other than Maggie, he might have said,
What difference does it make?
But it was Maggie he was sitting with. And without Maggie, he would be nothing. He said, “It's us. I just helped her understand her priorities, that's all.” Terrill got a little back then. “Are you sorry that I recruited her?” he said.

“No,” Maggie said. “I'm not sorry. If we are to grow, we'll need people as well as money. It's not a social club. It's not camp. Make sure she knows that.”

“She knows it,” Terrill said. “So you're okay with the statement.”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Have Ray and Mickey drop the tape off in town this morning.”

“Why don't we let Ray stay here,” Terrill said. “I'll go with Mickey.”

Maggie lifted her hand in conciliation.
Suit yourself.
She had to give Terrill something once in a while.

*   *   *

Judy Chen was not a native St. Louisan. She had come to Missouri from Boston to go the state university's journalism school in Columbia. As cow town a place as ever they made, but it was the right place to start if you wanted this sort of career. She got out of there at the age of twenty-one and took a job in Amarillo, Texas. Which was a dump, but it was a job and it put her in front of the camera. She was there when Oprah came down with all her minions because the cattle ranchers had sued her for libel. Covered the trial to the degree her station would let her, hoping that national exposure would move her onward and upward.

After Oprah won the trial, Judy put out feelers to the major networks and CNN and MSNBC, but none of them gave her any positive feedback. Nor did any of the major eastern cities express interest. But she did get word back from a St. Louis affiliate who asked if she could overnight a résumé and some professional photos.

That got her out of Amarillo.

St. Louis wasn't too bad. But Judy Chen was as ambitious as she was cute, and she had no long-term plans to stay.

On this morning, she got out of bed when her alarm told her to and packed her stuff to go to the gym. She'd had the same trim waist she'd had when she graduated high school, but it didn't come easy. She would ride the exercise bike for one hour before showering and changing into her professional clothes.