Sketchy Behavior (16 page)

Maybe it was better that he wasn’t talking.

Deputy Slalom took another deep breath and simply shook his head.

Right then, his secretary came in and gave him a manila folder. She looked at me and gave me a sad smile before she left.

He opened the folder and nodded at the contents. “Kate, you’re going into official witness protection.”

I thought I was in official witness protection. I opened my mouth to ask.

“And not just at your house with a couple of cops there.” He peered over at Detective Masterson. “You’re going with her.”

The detective nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“And Kirkpatrick?”

DJ finally spoke. “Yes, sir?” His voice was hard.

“You’re staying here. I’ll need all the manpower I can get. Kate, you and your parents are being shipped to an undisclosed location in the next four hours.” He waved at his secretary through the window facing the room filled with cubicles, and she stood from her desk, walked over, and poked her head into the office.

“Yes, sir?”

“Have a car go pick up Kate’s parents.” He looked at me. “I assume they are both working?”

I nodded.

He looked back at his secretary. “The info is all in their folders. I want them back here in thirty minutes.”

She nodded. “Yes, sir.” She closed the door and walked back to her desk.

Deputy Slalom looked back at me. “Kate, when your parents get here, you’ll have one hour to pack. Pack lightly and pack the essentials.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

He started shaking his head. “I can’t tell you that.” He squinted at the clock. It was almost one in the afternoon. “You will be headed to your location by three. Is that understood?” Then he
looked at Detective Masterson. “I want confirmation that you are there by five tonight.”

I could see a muscle jumping in Detective Masterson’s cheek. He nodded stiffly. “Yes, sir.”

“Kate, you are not to take any cell phones, computers, or whatever the latest gadget that starts with
i
is. No communication devices at all. Anything that could be traced to you, I want left here. Is that understood?”

I nodded.

He picked up the phone on his desk and started dialing. I sat there, numb, my fingers still woven together.

“Daniels? It’s Slalom. I need you to get a forensics team over to Clayton and see if they can’t find how in the blazes a level-four criminal escaped from there without anyone seeing him.” Deputy Slalom listened for a minute. “Thanks.” Then he slammed the phone down.

“I’m going to get any and every picture of John X that we have out there circulating. If he so much as even peeks out of his little gopher hole, I want someone there to slam him over the head with a mallet and some handcuffs. And no way in …” He looked at me briefly. “No way in
heck
am I letting him go back to Clayton. Fool me once, shame on you. They aren’t fooling me twice.”

I was assuming that Deputy Slalom had been referring to the old arcade game where you had to whack the little groundhogs on their heads when they popped out of the holes before they went back in.

I was never very good at that game.

Thirty minutes later, almost to the second, both of my parents ran in, looking panicked.

“Kate!” my dad shouted when he saw me. “What happened? Are you okay? Did they catch the parade shooter?”

Apparently, no one had informed my parents why a policeman had demanded that they go with him in a squad car in the middle of the day.

Detective Masterson stood and offered my mom his chair. Deputy Slalom had spent the last few minutes before they got here trying to get the media relations guy to send out bulletins about John X to all the news stations in and around Missouri.

“I want his picture as far as he can drive in one day, you got that? And at every airport, bus station, and train depot around.” Then he’d slammed down his phone so hard it probably left a resounding ring in the media guy’s ear.

I was starting to worry about the structural integrity of his desk with the beating it was taking today.

Mom sat down in Detective Masterson’s vacated chair and reached over for me. “Are you okay?” she asked, smoothing my hair away from my face.

“What is going on here?” Dad demanded.

Deputy Slalom was back to shaking his head. “They caught the parade shooter.”

“Oh yay!” Mom said.

“Yeah. Yay. And then the idiots down at the Clayton prison seemed to have somehow ‘misplaced’ our friend John X.”

I immediately jumped up out of my chair so Dad could drop into it, since he didn’t look like he’d be able to stand for much longer.

Both he and my mom just stared at the deputy.

“They what?” Dad finally said.

Another slam on the desk, which made both Mom and Dad jump. “Look, I don’t have the strength to tell it again,” Deputy Slalom said, almost growling as he looked around the room. “Kent, tell them what’s going on.”

In short, precise sentences, Detective Masterson quietly informed Mom and Dad of the situation. “So, the four of us are going to be leaving in the next two hours for an undisclosed location,” he finished.

Mom sat there, mouth open.

Dad jumped up from the chair and started pacing back and forth behind it, in front of DJ.

I stood quietly against the window.

“Obviously, our primary concern is for Kate’s safety,” Detective Masterson said to Dad. “So, we need you guys to go home and pack only the essentials. No cell phones, computers, or any other communication device that could trace someone back to Kate.”

“What about our family?” Mom started fretting. “Our son, Mike. He’s in school. What am I supposed to tell him? What about my work?”

“What about our dog?” I asked.

“How often do you talk to your son?” Deputy Slalom asked Mom.

We all just looked at Mom, wondering if she’d actually admit how little she talked to him. She sighed and shrugged. “It varies.”

It did vary. It varied on how often Mike needed something.

“Don’t tell him anything then,” Deputy Slalom said. “Here’s the thing, Mrs. Carter. I don’t want another person outside of these four walls to know where Kate is, whether that means lying your tail off to your work or your son.”

Mom nodded and I saw the tears building.

Dad must’ve seen them too, because he reached down and put both hands on her shoulders. “We’ll tell work that we got offered the use of a vacation house and we decided to take it. Considering everything that has happened, I don’t think anyone’s going to doubt our need of a good vacation.”

Mom nodded again and sniffed. “And Mike?” she asked quietly.

Dad sighed. “We’ll tell him we won’t be able to answer our phones for a while and if he needs to get ahold of us to have him call …” Dad’s voice trailed off and he looked at Deputy Slalom. “I guess giving him Kent’s number wouldn’t be the wisest, would it?”

“Tell him to call your friend Gene,” Deputy Slalom said. He tapped a nameplate I hadn’t noticed before on his desk. It was gold and engraved.

Deputy Gene Slalom
.

Dad nodded. Mom nodded. Detective Masterson nodded.

I was too busy feeling sorry that the deputy had to go through life with a name like Gene Slalom to nod. No wonder he went into law enforcement.

“Make your calls,” Deputy Slalom said. “And then you’ve got an hour to pack. I want every one of you gone by three.”

“And Lolly?” I asked.

Deputy Slalom sighed. “What kind of dog is she?”

“Lab, sir.”

He sighed harder. “My wife and I will take her for a few days.”

Mom immediately pulled out her cell phone and pushed the speed dial. She waited for a while, her expression growing bleaker and bleaker with each passing second. “Hi, honey,” she said, finally, and I could hear her holding back the tears as she talked. “It’s Mom. We’re going on something of a last-minute vacation and our cell phones won’t work there, so if you need something, call our friend Gene at 555–8711.” She paused. “Love you, Mike.”

Dad was on the phone with his work. “We got offered a fabulous vacation rental for a little while, and we think that we of all people deserve a vacation,” he said. “My cell won’t work, so just hold all my calls and I’ll return them when I get back.”

I opened my cell phone and looked at it. Who did I need to call? Who did I want to call?

I sent Maddy a text message.
We are going out of town for a few days. No cell reception. Talk later.

Then I called Justin. It was almost two, which meant last period had started a little over thirty minutes ago. I was expecting his voicemail.

Just so I could tell him not to bother with the homework.

“Hi, Kate,” he answered.

I frowned at the phone. “Justin?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you answering your phone?”

He paused. “Um. You called me on it.”

“No, I know, but aren’t you in school?”

“I’ve got study hall the last period. I went out to the hallway.”

I shrugged. “Oh.”

“So, uh, did you need something?”

Mom was calling her secretary, Madge, to tell her to hold all of her appointments.

“Yeah, Justin,” I said, quietly. “I need you to not pick up my homework anymore. You see, there was this great vacation house that opened up, and Mom and Dad decided we needed a little bit of family time away from everything. And since I wasn’t going to school anyway …” I let my voice trail off. “But thanks for helping me out these last few weeks.”

I got ready to hang up.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “You’re just leaving?”

“Yeah.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” I said. It didn’t seem like the people on the other end of Mom and Dad’s calls were having this much trouble believing them. I must not have been a very good liar.

Justin paused like he didn’t believe me and he had more questions, but I jumped in before he could start. “Anyway, good to talk to you, thanks for everything, bye!”

I closed my phone quickly, feeling bad for hanging up on him, but I would have felt worse if I’d let something slip.

Twenty minutes later, I was throwing as many belongings as I could into my suitcase that I hadn’t used in two years.

I didn’t even remember what my suitcase looked like. Dad had to get it out of the garage for me because I couldn’t find it.

“Maybe we need to go on ‘vacations’ more often,” Dad said, rolling his eyes.

We both knew why we hadn’t gone anywhere for so long. Mom couldn’t stand the thought of us going on a family vacation without Mike.

And Mike was never here.

So we never went.

I put in socks, T-shirts, long sleeves, jeans, and shorts, just so I was prepared for any type of weather, though if we were driving and Deputy Slalom was planning on us getting there — wherever there was — by five, then we weren’t going very far away.

I grabbed a few books, found a couple of DVDs that I hadn’t seen in a while to throw in there, and reached over for my sketchpad.

It wasn’t on my desk.

Actually, it wasn’t anywhere in my room.

“Mom, have you seen my sketchpad?” I asked her as she ran down the hall, hauling an armload of whites that were fresh from the dryer.

She shook her head. “Sorry, Katie-Kin. Did you check the family room?” She disappeared into her bedroom. I could see Dad in there packing ammunition beside his clothing.

I looked in the living room, the kitchen, and had DJ go look in the black Tahoe. Detective Masterson was home packing, and he would bring back the car we were going to take.

“You can’t be too careful,” he’d said.

DJ came back inside shaking his head. “Sorry, Kate. It’s not there.” He had a helpless look on his face, and he’d had it on there since we’d gotten back to my house.

I figured he was probably wishing he was coming with us. He’d spent the past three weeks living with us, after all.

“I’m sorry you aren’t coming with us,” I said.

He just nodded at me. “Me too.”

I went back to my room to finish packing. Suddenly I remembered where my sketchbook was. I’d left it underneath my chair in Deputy Slalom’s office.

I heard Detective Masterson come into our house then. He stuck his head in my room. “Time to go, Kate.”

“I left my sketchpad and pencils at the station,” I told him.

He shrugged. “We don’t have time to stop for it. I’m sorry, Kate. Do you have another one you can bring?”

I had one from last summer that still had a few empty pages in it. I sighed and packed that one instead alongside a bunch of pencils that weren’t my favorite brand, but weren’t awful.

Detective Masterson had brought a white GMC Yukon and parked it in the garage. We quietly piled into it while the garage door was still closed. DJ was still at our house when we left.

“Hope we see you again soon,” I said as we climbed into the Yukon.

He nodded. “Drive safely.” He closed my door and walked quickly back inside, shutting the door behind him. The goal was to leave as unnoticed as possible. There was no telling whether there were still camera crews watching my house.

Detective Masterson instructed all of us to duck down in our seats for the time being. He wanted whoever was watching — if anyone was watching — to think that he’d driven up alone and left alone. I think Dad had the hardest seat to do that since he was sitting in the passenger seat.

Mom and I laid down on the backseat. All of our bags were behind us and I started thinking about where we were going. Was it a hotel? A cabin? I’d seen movies where the people had to be put in protective custody, but I’d never ever thought it would happen to me.

Finally, Detective Masterson said we could sit up again. We were on the highway, headed west.

“Can you tell us where we’re going now?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You’ll be able to tell the basic area soon, but it’s best if you don’t know details, Kate.”

“Is it a hotel?”

“I can’t tell you.”

I looked out the window. “Is it a camping site?”

“Kate,” he said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “No details, kid. Sorry. You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Detective Masterson?”

He sighed. “Yes, Kate?”