The Rivers Run Dry (28 page)

Las Vegas authorities searched the casino for a woman described as being in her late twenties, early thirties, brown hair, nice smile. The mark said her name was “Kitty” and he had met her in the casino bar, where Kitty reluctantly agreed to play poker, insisting she wasn't much of a player. Sure enough, Kitty played badly, she lost every hand. But the man later identified as Bill Johansen sat at the table too. And he cleaned up.

When police finally found Kathleen Carson, she was boarding an Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle. She claimed Bill Johansen was blackmailing her with naked photographs, that she was a victim, that she was new at poker and didn't realize the seriousness of her participation in the scheme hatched entirely by Johansen. For her total and complete cooperation with authorities, Kathleen “Kitty” Carson was banned from the Las Vegas casinos for life. She received no jail time.

William Johansen, meanwhile, spent two years in a federal penitentiary and was forced to repay the mark every last dollar. And while he was in prison, Kit Carson began her climb up the poker ranks in Seattle.

“What did you offer him, so he'd take the fall?” I asked.

“Your problem, Agent Harmon, is you see life as black and white. Life is gray. All gray. But if you knew that, you wouldn't work for the FBI,” she said. “You want to know about Bill. I'll tell you. I doubt he had anything to do with Courtney's disappearance.”

“Why's that?”

“He's her father, for one thing. And I can't see him doing anything to hurt her.”

“How do you know she's hurt?”

“You wouldn't be here otherwise.” She paused, pretending to think. “I said I hadn't seen Bill in years. I lied. The truth is I saw Bill this summer. He was standing on the corner of First and Pine. He handed me one of those dreadful tracts about the Bible. I thanked him, then rushed home to call my bookie. I laid ten grand on Bill's conversion. Six months, outside odds, in case he actually believes the garbage he's spewing.”

“How did that bet work out?”

“I lost that particular wager,” she admitted. “But I plan on winning. I always win.”

“And you had no other contact with him?”

“None. We have nothing left in common. Bill won't indulge in sins of the flesh anymore. And that's the only kind I'm interested in. The man lives like a hermit these days. A regular St. Augustine.”

“St. Augustine wasn't a hermit.”

“No?” She raised one perfectly painted eyebrow, then stifled her yawn.

Twenty-five minutes after leaving Seattle, I came to the small town of Snoqualmie, driving five miles past the casino until I came to the main street of town. Tiny lights, like white pin pricks, outlined an old railroad station, antique club cars resting on the iron tracks that divided the center of town.

I turned right on Fir Street, into a neighborhood of older bungalows with the spare and purposeful appearance of company houses. Short porches, no window trim, no affectations. The road ended at an unfinished cul-de-sac shaped like a question mark. My headlights rested on a thicket of bamboo as dense as an Asian jungle, the yellow leaves concealing the last house on the street.

When I climbed out of my car and closed the door, a chorus of dogs started barking. The breeze kicked up, shivering the bamboo leaves as I followed a gravel path through the forest. The barks sounded closer with each step. It was mad, crazed hounding, and when I came through the thicket, security lights strapped to trees lit up a wide brown lawn scraped to suede dirt. Black mutts, yellow labs, snarling German shepherds, each chained to separate cedar trunks. I stayed on the gravel path, walking toward a one-story rambler. The dogs leapt, choking at the end of their chains.

The house's screen door bowed off its frame. Lights were on inside. When I knocked on the wooden jamb, a voice yelled, “Come in!”

An orange cat darted out, snaking between my ankles and setting off a fresh round of hostile barking. The cat darted around the side of the house, disappearing into the bamboo.

“You here for Barnabas?” the man inside said.

He was thin and tall—at least six-four—and his ragged hair was the color of pennies left at the bottom of a purse. In one hand he held a telephone. The other cupped his ear, as if trying to hear.

“Barnabas?” he said again. “That who you want?”

I shook my head.

He lifted the phone, speaking to whoever was on the other end. “No, they're not taking Barnabas. You get here with the money, he's yours. But you'd better hurry.”

He continued listening to the phone, pacing the small kitchen, where the appliances were the color of dried mustard and the pine cabinets held black knots the size of fists. A plastic box on the ceiling framed fluorescent lights, and Bill Johansen ducked his head every time he passed under it.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it already,” he said. “You don't have to tell me again.”

He was glancing toward me, but looking from the side of his face. His eyes were set so deeply that I couldn't see the color clearly. Blue? Green? The barking madness continued in the yard, a sound that seemed to jump directly on my eardrums. Then I heard him say, “Listen, you want Barnabas, come get him.” He hung up, then turned to me. “So you're here for Joseph.”

I shook my head.

“Those two are the only dogs I got ready. The others, I can't guarantee they won't bite.”

When I handed him my card, his mouth compressed into a thin line. He read it carefully, then threw back his head and yelled, “Dr. Strangelove strikes again!”

The barking took off again, invigorated, the metal chains snap-ping, claws striking hollow stainless steel bowls.

I raised my voice, but he couldn't hear my question.

He stepped across the kitchen in four long strides and whipped open the screen door.

“Zip it!” he yelled.

The dogs fell silent.

Letting the door close softly, he continued to face the animals, his deep-set eyes inches from the aluminum screen. I heard a faint whimper from the yard. Followed by a quick, defiant bark.

Bill Johansen pointed his finger at the screen. “I heard that, Saul.” He kept his eyes on the yard. “That old gasbag across the street,” he said, “whoever gave her a PhD is insane. You know how she makes a living? Studies people's sex lives. She's worse than a fornicator. That's why I call her Dr. Strangelove. Took me to court twice about these animals. Both times I told the judge, ‘The only animals you got to worry about are the ones she calls patients.' I got my permit, nothing wrong with what I'm doing. Even the cop who comes out here, he's on my side.”

Then he turned to look at me. His eyes sparkled, a prismatic blue. “So now she wants the Feds involved. I say, bring it on.”

“Sir, I'm here about your daughter, Courtney.”

“What about her?” he said.

“She's missing.” I watched his face.

He stared at me for a moment, then looked out at the yard again. The security lights shone on the dogs that stared at the house with stiff expectant postures, chains taut. Underneath the chains, the tree bark had shredded into ribbons of orange raffia.

I kept watching him. “Do you know where she might be?”

He shook his head. “She doesn't talk to me anymore.”

He had shut down. I took a different tack.

“Do you breed the dogs?” I asked.

“Breed?” He whipped his head toward me, his eyes filled with sudden disgust. “Breeding outta be outlawed, all the dogs getting gassed every day. I get my dogs from the pound. They're on death row. I train them, sell them on the Internet. Girl called this morning wanting Barnabas. He's that lab over there. The black one? I got him in Yakima. Face was full of porcupine quills, welts all over his body. They were about to put him down. Now look at him. A new creature.” He barely paused. “What do you know about Courtney?”

“She went missing on Sunday—”

“I was in church, praying for her.”

“Which church is that, sir?”

The blue eyes burned. “You a believer?”

For some reason I hesitated. “Yes, sir.”

The leathery skin on his neck was braided with tendons, and when he raised his hand, the forearm revealed a tensile strength, a shadow of his visceral self, the masculinity that seduced a lonely wealthy woman into bearing an illegitimate daughter.

“On the third day, God told the earth to bring forth grass,” he said. “The biggest grass God ever planted is that bamboo. And I admit, I first planted it so Dr. Strangelove couldn't spy on me. Five years later, the stuff hadn't grown an inch and I thought something was wrong with it. But then,
BAM
!”

His hand hit the door, the dogs barked.

But his eyes stayed on mine, his pupils narrowing into black shards in an aquamarine sea. He opened the screen door, never taking his eyes off me, and slammed it closed.

It sounded like a shotgun.

The dogs fell silent.

“That was my life,” he said. “I sat in dirt and filth and people took me for dead. But one day God touched me. I was delivered; I was lifted out of my sin; I grew. The old things passed away. I shot out of the ground, a new man in Christ Jesus.”

I construed my face into a smile, but he was speaking with-out need of response.

“No more gambling, no more drinking. All I needed was God. And that bamboo grew five feet in one month. And the next month and the next, until I realized how much I'm . . .”

Bill Johansen continued to talk but I wasn't listening. I stared at the gray roots of his coppery hair, the true color pushing for-ward like sea foam taking the beach of his scalp. And his eyes, his eyes were filled with manic electricity, that steep and narrow passion that swallows a convert.

“I told her, I said, ‘God wants your life, Courtney. God wants you to quit gambling, just like me.' But she wouldn't listen. And then, and then, she stopped talking to me. Oh, Lord, how I prayed for my girl. I fasted. Forty days. I repented. I cried out. It was my fault, I led her into that den of iniquity—I did that, to my own child! And now, now what's happened to her?”

I watched his hands puncturing the air, his arms lifted in agony. Bill Johansen was a man bearing so much guilt and shame and remorse that his repentance snapped with the sound of a tight banner whipped by torrential winds. The light had chased dark away, but darkness never went quietly. It always tried to return, appreciating nothing so much as a clean place to begin again.

“It's because I didn't answer God right away,” he went on. “I found the truth but—” He stopped. “You have a question?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, may I use your restroom?”

He frowned, confused. “You have to go to the bathroom?”

No. “Yes,” I said.

He lifted one long lean arm, pointing. “Down the hall.”

I walked slowly, sweeping my eyes left and right. Stacks of newspapers were piled in the hallway, gray stalagmites covered with cat hair that collected on the inked plateaus. What accumulated news did Bill Johansen find so essential, I wondered. Evidence of conspiracies. Proof of some kind. Three white doors lay open ahead of me, like dove wings folded back. I passed the bathroom.

“On your right,” he said,

I nodded and turned inside, locking the door. The white porcelain sink was stained. The toilet bowl held a jaundiced pool of urine. I opened my cell phone and dialed Lucia.

“Do we have a profile for the perp?” I whispered.

“We've been trying to call you,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Give me the profile.”

“Raleigh, where—”

“I need it, now,” I growled.

“We think he wants to teach them a lesson,” she said. “It's not just about money. He's torturing her, torturing them. Raleigh, you have to—”

I heard a knock on the bathroom door.

“You all right?” Johansen asked.

“Yes, I'm fine.” I pressed the phone to my shoulder and reached down, flushing the toilet.

I heard the floorboards creak, his footsteps falling away.

I lifted the phone. “I'll call you later.”

“Tell me where you are.”

“I'm in the birth father's house.” I turned on the faucet. The pipes squealed.

“And?” Lucia asked.

I let the water run full blast and opened the medicine cabinet above the small sink.

There was a tube of Neosporin, one pink bottle of Benadryl, some generic-brand aspirin with the childproof cap missing, giving the bottle a headless appearance.

“He's crazy.” I closed the medicine cabinet, turning off the faucets. When I looked at my reflection in the mirror, it was flecked with opaque drops from the mineral-hard water. Dark circles hung under my eyes, and I was about to look away when I saw the small white card wedged into the mirror's rusting edge. Water drops had melted some of the ink, making the letters look like blue tears.