The Disappearance (4 page)

“Oh, God!” Glenna buries her head in her hands.

“Is that … what you expect?” Doug asks. He forces the words out. “What we should expect?”

The sheriff doesn’t mince words. There’s no point. “If it’s a kidnapping for ransom, yes.”

“When would …” Doug begins. He stops, unable to continue.

Williams shakes his head in resignation. “There’s no way of telling. It could be later tonight, tomorrow morning, a few days from now. Or …” He stops.

Doug says the unspoken: “Or never.”

“That almost never happens.”

Glenna breaks down crying, loud mournful sobs. Her husband puts his arm tight around her. “It’s okay, honey,” he whispers as soothingly as he can. “It’s going to be okay. We don’t know for sure yet what’s going on.” The sheriff’s card is burning a hole in his palm. He pockets it. “Thanks in advance for what you’re doing,” he tells Williams hollowly. “I realize we’re not handling this as well as we should be.”

“You don’t have to thank me for anything, Doug,” Williams says, calling the man by his given name for the first time since he’s been here: an attempt at making a consoling gesture. “And please, no apologies. Nobody should have to apologize for anything they say or do under circumstances like these. I’d be acting the same way if it were my daughter.”

On the books it isn’t an official kidnapping yet. Emma’s only been missing about nine hours (fourteen or fifteen if you believe Lisa’s story about the intruder). More important, there’s no ransom demand, and no evidence of foul play. But the police are busting their asses anyway; they don’t want to get behind in the count, to have this blow up in their faces if it turns out, as they’re increasingly fearful it might, to be the real thing.

Williams stands in a semicircle with his detectives. “Anything special?”

The men who tracked the girls’ footprints to the gazebo fill him in on what they found—the beer cans, the cigarette butts. Every item up there will be gathered and gone over with a fine-tooth comb.

“They were having a party. We’ll dust the cans. Hopefully they’ll have prints on some of them—besides the girls’ and people who have a reason to be there.”

The other one shows the roach in the Baggie.

Williams is dismissive, as the man’s partner was. “That doesn’t mean anything. Even if they were smoking that stuff, so what? It doesn’t have anything to do with this.” His arm sweeps the area. “And how are you going to get prints off a girl who isn’t here? She’s too young to have a driver’s license, she’s probably never been fingerprinted in her life.”

He’s getting antsy. This isn’t progressing the way he wants it to. Not that he expected it would, but he wants something, something he can take to this family, to the entire community, when they find out.

“Over here.”

Williams turns towards the voice. A woman detective named Jeri Bryan is standing about fifteen feet off the patio that’s outside the presumed kidnap victim’s room.

“We almost overlooked this,” Jeri says. “Be careful,” she warns, “there’s only one that I’ve found—so far. Don’t step on it,” she cautions.

Carefully, almost daintily, the sheriff walks over to her.

“Here.” She squats down, points to the edge of a gravel walkway that starts where the patio ends and leads around the house to a gate in the fence that surrounds the property. Sheriff Williams hunches down next to her. She shines her flashlight on the ground.

One footprint. A partial of the left foot. A man’s shoe, pretty large. Someone who was walking on the gravel, where he wouldn’t leave a track. But he misstepped slightly, this one time.

“See this?” She points to a mark in the tread pattern, in the middle of the print.

Williams gets down on his hands and knees in the damp grass, bending over so that his face is inches from the impression. Jeri points to the mark with the tip of her pencil. There’s a sharp, deep half-inch gouge that cuts across the connecting treads, all the way through to the foundation sole of the shoe.

“Probably caused by stepping on some sharp object,” she hazards. “Like a knife, the edge of a rake, or it could’ve come from digging with a shovel that penetrated the tread.” She looks up, catches the eye of the forensic detective who followed the girls’ footprints to their gazebo hideaway. “Take a look at this, Frank.”

The expert squats next to her and the sheriff. He stares at the footprint, then stands up. “This is good. It’s pretty fresh.”

Williams stands beside him. “Let’s cast it, yes?”

“Definitely.”

“Good work, Jeri,” Williams compliments Detective Bryan.

“Someone would’ve found it, sooner or later,” she says modestly.

“If one of us hadn’t stepped on it first and obliterated it.” He turns to his troops. “We may have caught a break here, people. Let’s capitalize on it.”

The detectives intensify their search, looking for similar prints. Within minutes, now that they know what they’re looking for, two more are found—one near the gazebo, almost hidden in some tall grass, and another closer to the gate.

While they’re carefully making impressions of the shoe prints, like paleontologists sifting for dinosaur bones, another detective comes out of the house and says something low into the sheriff’s ear. Williams looks up. Then he follows the detective back into the house, into Emma’s bedroom.

Doug and Glenna Lancaster are in the room. They both look stricken. “I think we figured out what happened to the alarm,” Doug says, his voice forlorn. “Follow me.”

He leads them out of the room into the hallway. On the wall, right outside the door, is an alarm panel.

“This panel is for this wing of the house,” Doug explains. He points to the lights that are flashing green. “The alarm’s been turned off.”

Williams looks at the panel soberly. The girl did it herself. She turned off her alarm when she and her friends went outside for their little fun and games. Then she forgot to turn it on when she came back in. What teenager who’d been smoking grass and cigarettes and drinking beer would remember?

“Maybe the abductor turned it off,” Glenna mumbles, hating that word: “abductor.”

“That’s possible,” Williams concedes. “But if he did, he’d have to know about it, and the code. Which brings us back to this being an inside job, if in fact she was kidnapped, which we shouldn’t jump to, not yet.”

He’ll tell them about the partial footprint and the girls’ tracks leading to the gazebo later, after his people have left. Right now they need a breather.

Doug Lancaster, standing behind his wife, starts shaking his head.

“Yes, sir?” Williams asks.

“No one turned this off,” Doug says. “No one except Emma.” He looks at Williams. “She was outside, wasn’t she? She and her friends—after she said good-night to her mother. They went outside, didn’t they?”

Williams looks at the man. There’s no point in being indirect now.

“Yes, Mr. Lancaster,” he answers. “We believe they did.”

The police photographer takes infrared pictures of the floor of Emma’s room to see if the unique footprint they found outside might have left a mark in the carpeting that would be invisible to the eye but discernible to high-tech photography. Outside, the casts of the potentially case-breaking shoe prints are bagged. Then the deputies load everything into their cars and vans, and leave.

The sheriff puts a tap on the telephone, with a direct connection to FBI regional headquarters in Los Angeles. If anyone calls regarding Emma’s disappearance—a kidnapper with a ransom demand, an anonymous tipster, or anything else—they’ll be ready to jump into action. Doug and Glenna are instructed how to handle this—keep the caller on the line as long as possible, and don’t do anything that will spook a prospect into hanging up prematurely or, even worse, running away from the situation altogether. If a ransom demand is forthcoming, the sheriff’s people, with FBI and state police assistance, will come back and set up a command post in the house. For now, though, that isn’t necessary or advisable. If (again
if
) it is a kidnapping, whoever did this might be watching the house, or having it watched. The police don’t want to spook him.

The abduction (
potential
abduction, everyone hopes) is under wraps for now, but that will change, maybe as early as tomorrow morning. A reporter from the
Santa Barbara News-Press
, the local daily, picked up the incident from the open police lines and was outside the mansion earlier in the evening, hoping to find out if there was a story. Doug refused the reporter’s request to come out and give him anything, and the sheriff was similarly mum. “No comment” was his only comment as he got into his car and drove away.

Sitting in his oppressively quiet house, Doug Lancaster thinks about how to handle this. He has to do something—this is news, it can’t be stonewalled, he won’t be able to keep the lid on for more than a day. If anything, that it’s happening to his family makes it all the more newsworthy. He’s going to have to deal with it, even though that’s the last thing he wants to do.

He telephone-conferences with Jane Bluestine, his station manager, Wes Cobb, the head producer of his news team, and his top anchorman, Joe Allison. They decide to put out a short, innocuous announcement on tonight’s eleven o’clock news: there was an incident at the home of a prominent Montecito resident, involving a possible missing juvenile. That’s all. Overnight they’ll polish the story, hope for more details—a phone call or other communication from the kidnapper, some kind of breakthrough on the evidence (flimsy as it is) that was discovered at the site, a possible profile by the police psychologist who’s been called in to go over the known facts and come up with the kind of person who might have done this. Already the police are all over their computers, checking for known sex offenders who might be in the region, anyone recently released from a prison in any of the western states, anyone missing from parole, anyone who could plausibly be the abductor. Maybe by six o’clock tomorrow morning, when the early local news hits the air, they’ll have something, more than they have now.

Regardless of what they have, they’re going to have to go with it. And then, Doug Lancaster knows, he and his family will be living in a glass house.

Glenna and Doug are bunkered in the smaller of their two studies. Doug has his drink now, a healthy shot of Laphroig. Glenna’s on her fourth glass of chardonnay. They stare at each other, at the phone, but they don’t talk.

Doug makes one call, to Fred Hampshire, his lawyer. Hampshire is shocked at the news. He offers to cut out of the dinner party he’s hosting and come over immediately, but Doug demurs. There’s nothing Fred can do. There’s nothing anyone can do right now, except hope and pray. They’ll get together tomorrow, after the police have sifted through the evidence they’ve collected and come up with a plan of action.

Occasionally the telephone rings, in a normal fashion. None of these calls are about Emma; no one outside of the immediate parties knows what’s happened. The police discussed the situation with Lisa and her mother, and Hillary and her parents. This is a very delicate matter; if word were to get out prematurely, or the wrong way, it could have disastrous consequences.

Among the few people who have heard about Emma’s disappearance are their household employees. Shortly after the police arrived in force, Doug called Maria Gonzalez, their house manager, at her home, and asked her to return immediately. When she did, he told her what had maybe happened.

She immediately started rounding everyone up. They’re all here now, whether or not they have the weekend off. They move about the house unobtrusively, quiet as phantoms. They have talked about this with each other, professing to each other that it’s a mystery to them. Emma is precocious and headstrong, they all know that, but she’s never been in any real trouble—no brushes with the law, even for ticky-tack stuff, never been known to take drugs. The word that there was marijuana found in the gazebo is a mild hiccup, nothing more, and finding it there doesn’t mean Emma or her friends were indulging.

If anyone was out there smoking, the majority of the staff think, it would have been Glenna. They know she indulges with her artistic acquaintances from the growing film and television colony that’s migrated up here in the last decade.

Maria raps lightly on the door to the study, pokes her head in. “Would you like something to eat?” she asks solicitously. She’s been with them for more than ten years; they’re almost as important in her life as her own family, Emma as much a daughter to her as her own children.

Glenna, rooted to her spot on the sofa, shakes her head. Doug gets up and walks to the door. “We’re not hungry, but thanks, Maria.” He pauses. “Make sure no one uses the first two phone lines, okay?” he reminds her for the umpteenth time.

He doesn’t have to say why. They all know to stay off the phones.

“Of course, Mr. Lancaster. Let us know if you need anything.” She closes the door behind her.

He comes back and sits next to his wife. “This could be completely different from what we think.” The bullshit sticks in his throat, even as he speaks it.

Her eyes are bloodshot as she stares at him. “How?” she asks hoarsely. “She’s never done anything remotely like this.” She swigs the last of the wine in her glass. “Lisa saw it, for Christsakes!” she rants. “Has everyone forgotten that? She saw Emma being carried out of the room!”

Doug nods. That’s irrefutable, however the police want to spin it. The girl was only half awake and she didn’t actually see Emma in the blanket, that’s the only straw they can grasp at for now.

If there was someone in there—and all the evidence is pointing to that and only that: a missing girl, an awakening but still lucid witness, the disturbing footprint on the pathway that leads to one of the outside gates—what else could this be?

Nothing else. Emma’s gone. Someone took her.

N
EITHER OF THEM SLEEPS
all night. Until about eleven, the telephone rings intermittently, normal social calls from friends. Not the call they’re awaiting, hoping for, dreading. Doug fields these calls; Glenna’s in no shape to talk to anyone. He gives the same rote answer to each caller: “Glenna’s asleep, and I’m expecting an important long-distance business call, so I have to keep the lines open.”