The Rivers Run Dry (25 page)

At the parking lot by the nowhere stairs, I jumped inside the Barney Mobile, slamming the door and rolling up the windows. Rain beat like fists against the car's roof, producing a noise so loud that I didn't hear my cell phone ringing, only felt the buzzing sensation against my hip.

Shaking water from my fingers, I flipped open the phone. The ID was blocked. “Raleigh Harmon,” I said.

“Harmon!” barked Allen McLeod. “Where are you? I've been calling for an hour.”

I hit the volume button, barely able to hear him over the pounding rain. “My phone was on, sir.”

“Get to the VanAlstyne estate. Now. This thing's taken a bad turn.”

“I'm on my way.”

“They just got a ransom note,” he said. “The SAC wants to know why we didn't believe them in the first place.”

I backed out of the parking lot, throwing the wipers to full speed. “I'm on my way, sir.”

“Another thing, the note came with a finger.”

The circular driveway in front of the VanAlstyne estate held the sheen of heavy rain come and gone and now a mist rose from the pavement, shrouding the wheels of seven unmarked sedans, three Issaquah black-and-whites, and one state police cruiser. There was also a white panel van—Bureau surveillance.

At the gate, two deputies from Issaquah checked my ID. I walked toward the front door, where the lake beyond steamed like dry ice. The officer at the front door had his thumbs hooked through his gun belt. I flashed my ID, heading inside.

“What happened to you?” he said.

I turned. It was Lowell, the state trooper I'd met in the parking lot with Courtney VanAlstyne's vehicle. I told myself to keep walking, don't engage, but in the foyer the grit on my boots ground against the polished marble floor. I stepped to the side, kneeling to untie my boots. My socks were soaked.

“What did you do,” Lowell said, “take a shower with your clothes on?”

I rolled up my socks, placing them inside the boots, then set them to the side of the foyer.

“They let you walk around like that?” he persisted.

“Lowell,” I said, standing up, “I've never worn a uniform and I don't ever plan to.”

He cocked his jaw to one side.

I walked across the foyer, feeling cold marble against my bare feet, then came to the next room. The plush carpeting was soft as fur and the VanAlstynes were sitting on separate moss-green couches, facing each other over a coffee table. The table had scrolled wooden inlays that swept toward claw-footed legs. It was easier to look at the table. The pain on their faces was unbearable.

Mr. VanAlstyne's cool blue eyes gaped with fear, giving him the appearance of a man on the verge of sociopathic rage. His wife's face was even more distorted. Her glistening white teeth suddenly looked gray, anemic, her lips so pale they were indistinguishable from the skin on her face.

“I . . . I . . . ” she was stammering.

At her side, Lucia Lutini cradled one of the woman's skeletal hands. When Lucia met my eyes, I saw the depth in her brown irises, extending to the pit of hell and back.

I walked to the next hallway, where three SWAT agents conferred with Basker. I didn't see Jack but McLeod stood off to one side, in an alcove with an antique oak secretary offering photo-graphs framed in polished silver. Detective Markel stood next to him.

“Harmon, what the—” McLeod said.

“I didn't have time to change, sir.”

“Your feet are wet.”

“Yes, sir. You said to come right over.”

“Well don't drip on their carpet. They've got enough problems.”

I turned to Detective Markel. “I took Suggs's shoes to the mineralogy lab in Spokane. The state geologist linked the soil to the Clay Pit mine, up on Cougar Mountain. I searched for a direct trail to his house. I didn't find it. But I found a mine shaft.”

“I wish it worked,” Markel said. “But we've got a problem. Suggs was in custody when they got this note. If he's behind it, he's got an accomplice.”

I looked at McLeod. “What did you say about a finger?”

“We sent it to the state lab, downtown. They're running the tests.”

“What did the note say?”

The detective flipped open his small notebook. “‘We have your daughter. Orders will be issued. Obey the orders, she comes home.'”

“We?”

He nodded, then glanced over my shoulder.

Mrs. VanAlstyne was still seated on the couch but she was looking up at a thin woman who stood in front of her. The woman wore latex gloves and held a long cotton swab between her right thumb and index finger. Lucia wrapped one arm around Mrs. VanAlstyne's narrow shoulders and like a small bird in need of food, Mrs. VanAlstyne opened her mouth. The woman placed the swab inside, scraping the cotton against the inside of her cheek. She dropped the swab in a plastic bag, sealing the top.

She turned to the husband.

Mr. VanAlstyne watched the lab technician with a bleak realization. His fury was gone, and when he opened his mouth, it was a quick mechanical movement, something from a marionette.

“Harmon, go home and change clothes,” McLeod said. “We're setting up surveillance here on the phone and the house. Lutini's going to stay with the family. I need somebody to keep up with the lab evidence. If that DNA comes in positive for the finger, your first call is me. Got it?”

I made my way back toward the front door, picked up my boots and saw the lug soles had deposited wet clumps of clay on the marble. With nothing else available, I wiped the floor with my wet socks. But there was no getting rid of that clay, not without heavy mopping. It left a thin layer of pale dust.

Lowell watched from the door. “How're they doing?”

I stood, cradling the boots. “Devastated. How else?”

He nodded. Outside a man was approaching the house carrying a large black briefcase. More surveillance, my guess. Lowell checked the man's Bureau credentials, taking an extra-long time to examine the small card. He looked puffed up suddenly, as though he expected to follow this low level federal employee inside, into the action. But all he could do was force the man to acknowledge his presence, to treat him as a peer in law enforcement.

“You done?” the man with the briefcase said.

“You're clear.” Lowell handed back the ID. “Let me know if you need any help.”

The man gave a tight smile and walked into the house.

I sat on the wide slate steps outside, slipping my bare feet into my boots. They felt cold.

“Amazing,” Lowell said behind me.

I didn't turn around. “What's that?”

“It looks like this picture-perfect life. All the money, the big house, nice cars. And then,
poof
. There's this flash and you can see how they don't have everything after all.”

I stood up and walked away.

There was nothing to say.

chapter twenty-one

E
xcept for the cats, who ignored me, my aunt's house was empty. I quickly showered, changed, scrawled another note for the fridge, and rummaged for food again. My stomach was so empty it had ceased growling.

But the cupboards were bare—not even a bag of flaxseed—and when I opened the pantry door, the painted white shelves held nothing but ragged scratches from where the canned goods should have been. In the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, I found a bag of brown rice cakes two weeks past their expiration date. I ate them in the car. They tasted like dehydrated tree bark.

Just south of downtown Seattle, I turned on a narrow road near Boeing Field and parked outside a squat building with reflective window panes. The building was sandwiched between a hangar containing airplane propellers and a commercial laundry operation where white steam curled from aluminum stacks, melting into the gray clouds overhead.

While the Spokane branch of the state crime lab concentrated on evidence produced by its rural setting—minerals, flora, fauna—the Seattle branch was buried by urban decay. I walked through the materials analysis lab with my temporary ID from the front desk and saw evidence of the city's most obvious enemies: drugs, DNA, drugs, firearms, drugs. And finally, forgeries.

The Department of Questioned Documents was on the second floor, its south-facing windows framing a view of the laundry operation next door. The room had a hushed quiet, the kind of absorbed silence that penetrated reference libraries, and it prompted me to whisper my introduction to the examiner, a woman named Mary Worobec. She was petite with skin the color of sunbathed sandstone, and when she turned her head, her blonde hair swung like a hammock. The ransom note was resting on the light table in front of her, near a microscope and several magnifying glasses. She wore latex gloves.

“Short and sour,” she said in a loud voice, pointing to the ransom note.

The words were written in black ink on white paper. Ordinary notebook paper, with two inches of white space at the top and thin horizontal blue lines running across the page. The handwriting was block style, all capitals.

“WE HAVE YOUR DAUGHTER. ORDERS WILL BE ISSUED. OBEY THE ORDERS, SHE COMES HOME.”

“What do you make of ‘we'?” I asked.

Mary Worobec shrugged. “In twenty-seven years, half the ransom notes I've examined say ‘we.' Then it turns out it's one guy trying to throw us. Or he has delusions. Either way, I don't put that much stock in ‘we.'”

On the wall above her every letter of the Arabic alphabet, all the calligraphic bends and curls, was laid out on a poster, along with the Hebrew alphabet, similarly inscrutable. Then Turkish. Chinese, French, Japanese . . .

“How long has she been missing?” she asked.

“The last time anybody saw her was ten days ago.”

She nodded, grim. “My immediate take is you're looking for a man.”

“Why?”

“First these simple declarative sentences. Any time you have an abduction or a kidnapping, it's an emotional situation. Women tend to go on and on when they get worked up. They advise, hector, nag, so forth. And women tend to make it personal. But look at these sentences, see how they line up? Verb-noun, verb-noun, verb-noun. And then, there's the block lettering.”

“What's special about that?”

She lifted a jeweler's loupe from around her long neck, pressing it against her right eye before leaning toward the document. “The terminations of these letters are solid. No trailing off. It's aggressive, forceful handwriting. I can smell the testosterone from here.”

“Maybe it's a woman being careful.”

“Always possible,” she agreed. “But the way people construct their sentences reveals how they think, what pattern their thoughts follow. Psychotics ramble because their thoughts are confused and disorganized. But this note shows the exact opposite, some-body with extremely linear thought patterns. Obsessive. Always in control. I'd hazard another guess.”

“What's that?”

“He's enjoying the suffering he's inflicted on her. And on the family.”

“A sadist?”

“Yes. He believes she deserves this,” she said. “Look at the words again. ‘Orders' . . . ‘issued' . . . ‘obey.' It has the ring of armed services, maybe something in his background. He might have been discharged for some kind of insubordination. I realize I'm hazarding speculation here, but I heard a fingertip came in with this.”

I nodded.

“Solid speculations won't hurt, if this is as urgent as it sounds. Just realize what it is.”

“I'll make a note. Go on.”

“He's dangerous. Very dangerous. And part of what makes him so dangerous is that he presents himself to the world as perfect. That's what this precise handwriting is about. It's presentation; everything is in order. But when you look at the content, what he's saying . . . it's chilling, cold.”

She was staring at the note, tapping her finger against her cheek.

“What else?”

“He works in a position of authority.”

“Management?”

“Management is a possibility. He needs rules, wants the rules obeyed. But then he breaks those same rules—because they don't apply to him, because he's above rules. That's his secret life.” She shivered. “I wouldn't want to be at this guy's mercy.”

My mind was trying to recall if I'd seen any handwriting from Suggs. And then, almost unbidden, I wondered about Jack, realizing everything he'd given me had been typed on the computer, then printed out.

I left my card, asking her to call me as soon as she finished checking the note for fingerprints and DNA. Then I walked down the sterilized white hallway to Trace Evidence, located on the other side of the building, where the windows faced the mammoth concrete belt of Interstate 5. Afternoon traffic was already backed up to Boeing Field and along the windowsill were sample plants: marijuana, peyote, poppies.

At one of the long black counters, a middle-aged man stared at a series of photographs wtih the fractured dimensions of crime scene pictures. He glanced at my ID, then looked back at the photographs. The most prominent picture showed the interior of a black minivan, the middle seat ripped out, replaced by a hot plate and scorched pans.