Nathan's Run (1996) (29 page)

"No, thanks," he lied. Actually, he'd have sold his arm for anything cold to drink.

Mitsy wasn't gone thirty seconds before she returned to her seat on the sofa. She stripped the cap from the bottle with an effortless twist and tossed it into the pile at her feet. She stared at the bottle for a moment as though reading the label, but she never took a sip. Her mind had traveled off again. As Jed watched silently, her mouth took an angry set, and she squeezed the bottle with both hands. It trembled in her grasp.

When she made eye contact again, she was angry. "I think he was planning something for a long time," she said. Her tone was one of discovery, her words carefully measured. "I never put it together until right now."

"I don't understand?'

"Of course you don't. You couldn't possibly. Beginning a couple of weeks ago, I noticed things missing from the house Ricky's things. When I'd do laundry, there'd be a few less underwear to fold. He'd take clothes out of the house, saying he was taking them to the laundry, but then he'd never bring them back. When I'd offer to pick them up at the cleaners, he'd say no. It was kind of like he was moving out of the apartment a little at a time. At first, I figured it was another woman, but then he always came home at night and he was always at the JDC when I called him. Finally, I just stopped worrying about it."

"Didn't you ever say anything?"

Mitsy smiled. "Over the years, I've come to realize that sometimes the mystery is less painful than the answer. No, I never said anything. And neither did he, but he started drinking again. Over the past few weeks, it got really bad. He was coming home drunk. I'd like to think he was doing his boozing after work with some of his supervisor buddies, but I'm not sure. I think he was getting drunk on the job. That's what worried me most. I just didn't want to go down that road again."

Jed was confused. As he scowled, his eyebrows nearly touched. "So you think that his drinking had something to do with a plan to kill Nathan Bailey?"

Mitsy scowled back at him. "No. Well, maybe. I don't know. He stopped talking to me is the thing. No conversation at all. Nothing. Looking back, putting it all together with the disappearing clothes and the plane ticket, I guess now I think he was trying to deal with something . . . "

"Whoa, whoa," Jed cut her off, making a waving motion with his hand. "What plane ticket?"

"Well, that's the biggest mystery of all. About a week ago, I found a plane ticket hidden in one of his shoes in the closet. One-way to Argentina, paid for in cash. Nine hundred dollars! I can't imagine where he came up with that kind of money. He must have been saving up, the son of a bitch. Here we go, month-to-month, barely able to pay the light bill, and he's saving for a trip! I never said anything about that either, because I kept telling myself that maybe he was planning some kind of surprise getaway for the two of us."

"Was there a second ticket for you, as well?"

Mitsy answered by looking away again.

"Where's the ticket now?" Jed pressed.

"No clue. The shoes and the ticket both joined the list of missing stuff."

Jed leaned back in the hollow chair and crossed his legs. His knees were nearly level with his shoulders. "Argentina," he thought aloud. "When was he supposed to leave?"

Mitsy shrugged. Her day was getting longer by the minute. "Best I could tell, it was an open ticket, no date on it. I didn't even know he had a passport."

"Do you remember the airline?"

She shook her head. "Not really," she said, her voice thickening. She finally took a pull on the beer. "It was an airline I've never heard of-something Spanish, I think."

Jed took a full minute to jot notes into his little book. The whole time, Mitsy faded further and further away. When he finally looked up, it was as though she had left completely. She just stared out the sliding glass doors into the blistering afternoon sky. Her eyes were so intense that Jed found himself looking to see what was so interesting.

A feeling of desperate frustration gripped his belly. Here he had all this new information, yet he didn't know what to do with it. Clearly, Ricky Harris was not the model employee that Johnstone had portrayed him to be, but so what? What did the Bailey kid have to do with any of this?

"So, Mitsy?" Jed spoke softly as he interrupted her thoughts. Her gaze returned to him and she smiled her humorless grin. "I'm sorry, were you talking to me?"

"I just need to clarify one last point, and then I'm done. You said you realize now that Ricky had been planning something for a long time. What, exactly, do you think he was planning?"

She shook her head and shifted her eyes back to the sky. "Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it was to kill that boy. Maybe it was to do something else. Whatever it was, I guess it was bad enough to make him leave the country. And me." In the end, her voice was only a whisper.

The Reischmann proposal had been flawless. Todd Briscow was 99

percent certain that they'd be awarded the contract within the month. He and his sales manager had spent the afternoon at the golf course, celebrating their impending victory. After the eighth hole, though, the heat had become too much, and they took their celebration into the clubhouse, where his boss was buying. As he navigated the winding turns approaching his home, Todd wondered if maybe he hadn't had a few too many. It wasn't that he felt drunk; he just had to work harder than usual to keep the Chevy between the lines on the pavement.

Todd hadn't so much as thought about the boy he'd seen until he heard the news on the radio on his way home from the party. Could it be that the kid they were looking for was the same one he had seen? The age was about right, and that would explain what he was doing wandering around so early in the morning, but Todd had trouble believing that the kid he had seen was a murderer. When he spoke to his wife from his car phone about his suspicions, she told him that the police had left a picture of the boy at the house. Once he saw the picture, he'd know for sure.

After pulling the car into the garage, he took a few minutes to set up the sprinkler in the front yard before going inside. It was getting dark, and he was convinced that the secret to their green lawn was nightly waterings. Patty handed him the flier with Nathan's picture on it before he had a chance to put down his briefcase.

"Is this him?" she asked anxiously. "I can't believe you haven't seen his picture on the news. It's all they talk about."

Like I have the time to watch the news, Todd didn't say. The flier displayed two pictures of Nathan Bailey. One looked like a school picture, a smile and combed hair. The other one looked like it had been lifted off a videotape. Feature for feature, there was little resemblance between the boys in the pictures, and nothing in either reminded him of the kid from this morning. Until he noticed the eyes in the grainy picture. Those eyes bore the same deer-in-the headlights look as the kid he had seen. And the hair was the same.

"This is him," Todd said. "We've got to call the police."

"Are you sure?" Patty pressed. Todd couldn't tell from her tone what she wanted the answer to be.

"No, I'm not positive," he answered honestly. "But I think we ought to call."

Chapter
24

At last it was dark, and time for Nathan to continue his journey. Finding the keys this time had been a much more difficult task. It took him nearly an hour of frantic hunting before he finally found a single Honda key among a clutter of loose change in an ashtray stashed in the back of a dresser drawer.

In a flash of inspiration, Nathan had killed the last thirty minutes in the steamy garage, using electrical tape to change the ones on the Honda's license plates to fours.

The Honda started up on the first turn of the key. He took care to make sure that the transmission was in neutral, but kicked out the clutch nonetheless. If there was one thing he'd learned in the past two days, it was that you couldn't be too careful. With the engine running, he searched for the button to the garage door opener, but found none.

"Oh, man," he grumped, turning the engine off. "Something's got to go right tonight." He groped under the seats and searched in the glove compartment for the opener, but found nothing. He'd have to use the button on the wall, an option he feared because it would bathe him in light while he was completely unshielded. His decision made, he walked to the door between the garage and the kitchen, but again found no button.

Could it be?

Sure enough, for the first time in his twelve years, Nathan Bailey had to manually lift a garage door. He was surprised by how little effort it took.

Once out of the garage, he set the parking brake, shifted back into neutral, and manually closed the overhead door again. Back in the driver's seat, he fastened his seat belt, coasted down the slightly inclined driveway, shifted into first, and gently engaged the transmission. His acceleration wasn't exactly smooth, but it wasn't anything like he'd feared.

His heart jumped as he approached the end of Little Rocky Trail. Three police cruisers, traveling bumper-to-bumper with their blue lights flashing, slid the turn into the neighborhood, speeding off down the street he'd just traveled.

Nathan figured that the guy from that morning had finally made his phone call.

"Are you sure it's him?" Greg pressed. His tone was urgent and abrupt, making Todd wonder if he had done something wrong.

"How sure do you want me to be?" Todd retorted, exasperation showing through in his own voice. "You left a picture of the kid at our door, and I'm telling you that the kid I saw for about five seconds fifteen hours ago looked like the picture." Patty, Peter and the dog had all joined him at the kitchen table to witness the inquisition.

Greg took a deep breath and let it out. Clearly, his anxiety was showing, and he was telegraphing the wrong message to his witness. As the investigating officer for this portion of the Bailey case, he faced a difficult dilemma. If he reported to the state police that the Bailey kid had been sighted in Jenkins Township, the whole law enforcement world would descend upon them, perhaps to the exclusion of where the kid actually was:Just as surely as his discovery this afternoon could be a career-maker, a mistake could sentence him to life as a beat cop.

There had been hundreds of Nathan sightings over the past twenty-four hours, some as far away as California. None of them had panned out. Greg needed some additional proof before he cried wolf. There had to be a way to verify Mr. Briscow's story.

"Tell me again what he was wearing when you saw him," Greg said, straining inside to sound patient.

Patience, however-real or pretended-was not Todd's long suit. "I already told you, Officer, that I don't remember. He had shorts, I know that, and some kind of sports team shirt. I don't recall which team."

According to the reports from Virginia, Nathan Bailey had taken a Chicago Bulls shirt from the Nicholson house.

"And where was he headed when you last saw him?"

"When I first caught sight of him, he was coming toward our house, crossing the street."

"From where?"

"Like he was coming from the Perlmans' house."

Not knowing who the Perlmans were or where they lived, that information was less than helpful. "Could he have been coming from St. Sebastian's Church?" Greg asked.

Todd considered the question for a moment, calculating the map directions in his mind. At length, he nodded. "Yes. If he'd cut through the woods, that's the general way he would have come from."

Greg clapped his hands together. "I think that's enough to call it an official Nathan sighting," he said with a smile. Turning to the other police officers who had gathered in the front hallway, he said, "Sounds like the real thing, guys. Let's go door-to-door and find him."

It was always this way in police work. What you're looking for always showed up in the place you'd already searched. Greg thanked the Briscows for their assistance and rose from the kitchen table to assist the others in the search. As he approached the front door, he realized that he hadn't asked the most important question of all.

"Mr. Briscow?" he said, turning around to face the family again.

"Yes?"

"Do you know if any of your neighbors are on vacation this week?"

Todd winced as though he had a sudden toothache. "Jeeze, Officer, I don't know," he said. "I really don't know that many people in the neighborhood yet. We haven't lived here long enough."

Greg nodded through his disappointment. He supposed there'd be no shortcuts on this one. "That's all right, sir. Just thought I'd ask. Thanks for your help."

"Sorry."

"No problem." He turned again for the door.

"Wait a minute!" Todd exclaimed before Greg could take a step. Todd had the look of a man who had just discovered something important. "The Grimeses up the street are on vacation," he said. "I just remembered that the kid next door's been picking up their newspapers all week."

At Greg's request, Todd walked the police officer up the street to the Grimes residence at 4120 Little Rocky Trail. To Greg, the house looked no different from the others in the neighborhood, except he remembered this as the one at which he had been compelled to look through the front window, having seen-no, sensed, really-motion through the sheer curtains.