A Face at the Window (20 page)

"Poor thing," she murmured. "I sure wish you could talk."

Wade stood over her. "Listen, do you think Campbell's still around somewhere, watching all this?"

Watching you,
he meant. "I don't know what to think."

The food had helped, and the hot whiskey made her blood feel less like iced sludge. "I know he was in the gravel pit. Where he might be now, though…"

She let her voice indicate uncertainty. "I don't know," she repeated, and saw Wade take that for what it was worth.

Torn between going and staying, he knew her too well. But there was a four-hundred-foot container vessel full of cargo and fuel out there in the bay right now, and if it didn't get back under way very efficiently it would be floating around like a bathtub toy, soon.

A large, potentially very destructive bathtub toy…"Maybe I should ask a couple of fellows from the marine terminal to come over," he began.

"No!" At her tone his eyebrows arched interestedly. "Please don't," she added more quietly "I'll be fine," she assured him.

Lonely as hell. And scared; no denying it. But there was an astringent comfort to be had in such solitary anguish, and at the moment it was the only sort of comfort she could tolerate.

"Okay," Wade relented. "Need anything from my shop?" Bigger guns than she already had access to, he meant, from among the ones he had stored under lock and key up there.

"No. I've got the Bisley and the twenty-two in the lockbox in the cellar." Her own guns, which she took care of herself: The .22 was only a target pistol but the Bisley was a .45-caliber six-shot revolver that Wade had given her and taught her to shoot.

She stepped into his embrace. "Which I won't. Need them, that is. You just go on and get the job done out there, and come home."

Safe,
she didn't add aloud. Because to anyone who worked out on the water you never even whispered the idea that it might turn out otherwise.

You
just didn't. "She'll be okay, Jake," he reassured her. "Both of them will: everyone in town is working on it, and now the feds.…They'll find Lee. Helen, too, I know they will, even if…"

Even if you're right and Campbell's got her.
She swallowed hard, held him another moment, and stepped back.

"Sure. Sure they will," she managed to reply.

In the hall she watched him pull on his windbreaker and grab his duffel bag; waving him out, she waited for him to go down the porch steps, then locked the door behind him. When the knock came a few minutes later she thought he'd forgotten something and returned for it, and hurried to answer.

But it was Bob Arnold, holding a flat, rectangular object in his hand. A VCR tape.

"Hey," she said. "What's—?"

Before she could finish he stepped inside, closing the door and waving the tape at her.

"You need to see this," he said, but what he really meant was that
he
needed her to see it.

She slotted the
tape into the VCR in the living room, in the big TV where Wade watched sports, usually. But there was nothing sporting about what this tape showed: gray and grainy, shot from a high angle, like a security tape from a store camera.

Only it wasn't from any store. Instead it had been made outside Helen Nevelson's house. "Do you recognize either of those two?" Bob asked.

"No." The action was difficult to watch, first as Helen was
muscled roughly into the driveway, her wrists bound. Next Lee was carried out struggling and tossed into a car behind Helen.

Then one drove away in Helen's car while his accomplice took the one the kidnappers had come in. "Where'd you get this?" Jake asked.

The worst part of the tape was the last few moments, Lee's small, white face pressed for an instant to the car window.

Scared. Frantic, even…

Bob looked grim. "It was on my desk when I got downtown. I'd just stopped in to check with the state cops on my way home, see if there were any new developments. Which there weren't."

He waved at the TV in disgust. "Look again." He hit the rewind button on the remote.

"Stop," she said. He paused the tape; she squinted hard at the men on it. One was smaller, with dark, curly hair, wearing a leather jacket… a cocky-looking guy with a strutting walk.

"Bastard," she whispered. The other one, tall and beak-nosed with a pointy Adam's apple and big ears, wore a jacket with…

"What's that?" Bob asked, pointing. "Some kind of a logo?"

"Yes." Excitement seized her; she leaned toward the screen. "It's the logo of the New Jersey Devils. Supposed to be a linked N and J. Plus a stylized pair of horns and forked tail…"

"A hockey team," she added; Bob wasn't a sports fan. "Run the tape again, will you? That's right, keep it going until—there. Watch the car, now. When it goes around the circle on its way out you can see…oh, my God. Did you get it? Run it back."

"The plate," Bob said, but not happily. He'd seen it before, she realized. "You can almost read the tag number."

He ran it back and forth a few more times, but with the same result. The license plate on the old blue Monte Carlo was unreadable. "You want to see it again?"

She felt her shoulders sag. "No. You're right, it's just not there, and looking at it over and over won't make it be."

If the numbers weren't visible, they weren't. "But why would Jody and Jerrilyn Pierce want to be taping their…oh. On account of Tim Barnard?"

Bob nodded. "Jody worked on video gear sometimes. I'll bet he set this camera up. Figured like we did, that even with Tim out of commission his buddies might be trouble."

Jake recalled Jody Pierce's workroom, the electronics in it. "So once Jerrilyn calmed down, she remembered it?"

"Nope. I already asked, she says she never even knew about the camera."

He rolled his head around, trying to work the kinks out of his neck. "I think Jody must've slipped into town while we were all out at the gravel pit, left the tape for me, and vamoosed."

He ejected the tape from the player. "So I couldn't arrest him for assault, not to mention those state boys'd like to talk to him, too. Anyone else, I would not believe it was possible."

Jody sneaking into what Sam would've called the cop shop, he meant, right under everyone's nose. But Wade had gone out hunting with Jody once and when he came back he'd said Jody Pierce was so smooth in the woods, he could've walked right up to a moose and pinned a target on its hide, and the moose wouldn't have noticed.

"So what're you going to do with it? The tape, that is?" she asked.

"Copy it, show it around to everyone. And when the feds get here, maybe they'll be able to enhance it enough to…"

Maybe. But probably not. The numbers weren't just blurred, they were absent, as if someone had deliberately smeared them up heavily with mud.

Bob slid the tape into its cardboard holder. "Listen, Jake. I'm sorry about before. I mean, the way I…"

"What, that you didn't treat my story like it came on stone tablets? Forget it."

She got up. A few months earlier when Sam was deep in his most recent troubles with the bottle, Bob could have arrested him any number of times. Drunk and disorderly, public nuisance, all sorts of things—But he hadn't. Again and again he'd delivered Sam into the care of his family.

Sometimes he'd even sobered him up first. She thought for a moment. "This tape doesn't get me off the hook, though, does it?"

"Nope. It does not." He zipped his jacket; the earlier rain had dragged a cold front in.

"Just the opposite, ‘cause a guy from New Jersey that you think's got a grudge against you either has showed up, just the way you say. Or he hasn't, and you're putting yourself in the middle of this for some reason. Putting a story together."

A story some bits of which now had confirmation, courtesy of a videotape and a guy in it wearing a Devils jacket. Because Campbell was from New Jersey, too, so there was a link.

But it was still a flimsy one. At the door Bob asked, "Jake, have you given any thought to who might be helping this fellow?" He moved his shoulders around in his jacket. "I mean, if Campbell is here and he is doing these things like you say, somebody's got to have shown him around. So have you given any thought to that at all?"

He looked out to the silent street, where one by one all the neighboring houses were going dark. "Somebody local, giving him a place to stay and so on. Or suggesting one. You thought of that?"

"Sure, I have."
When I wasn't busy thinking about getting crushed to
death in a buried car,
she added silently "But I haven't come up with anything. It's hard to imagine anyone from around here doing that knowingly."

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is." He stepped outside. "All right, then, but if you get lonesome, later, come on down to the house. Never mind what time it is. Meanwhile, if you get any more calls, you call me up right away on Clarissa's line."

It was the only phone their household answered twenty-four seven. "But if I get yanked back here tonight for anything else," he finished, "there'd better be a burglar coming in the window. You got that?"

"Yes. Thanks, Bob," she said again as he made his way under the maple tree to his car at the end of the blockaded sidewalk.

She waited until he'd driven away, then closed and locked the door and returned to the kitchen. She was spooning in the Maxwell House—if Bella were here now, she'd be grinding fresh beans and rubbing the already sparkling carafe with a suds-laden scrubber—when the telephone rang. Dropping the coffee scoop, her heart clamoring painfully in her chest, she scrambled to answer.

"All right, now," said a voice. "You better freakin’ listen to me ‘cause I ain't sayin’ it twice. Got it?"

Not Campbell this time. Someone else. Her throat closed with fright. "Yes. Are they all right?" she whispered.

"Shut up. You do this thing the way you're supposed to, you won't have to worry about that."

The voice told her where to be and when. Alone, of course. "Don't be early, don't be late. You tell anybody, I'll know. Had a chat with your dad, today? And your kid? That was your husband, I guess, with the cop there, tonight. Both of them gone now."

He paused to let it sink in, that he knew who'd called and who'd been at the house.

And that she was alone. "So, you understand?"

Before she could reply, a shriek of mingled pain and fear erupted from the phone, so terrible it forced a sob from her.

"No! Stop, please don't hurt her—"

"Do. You. Understand?"

"Yes
," she replied dully. "I understand."

Click.

A
nthony Colapietro had eaten an oyster once, on a
dare. One of the working guys had taken some kids from the ju-vie home out on a job, to a restaurant out by the airport. To work on the air-conditioning, the job was, and while they were in the cellar the joint's owner came down with a platter of raw oysters.

White fluted paper cups full of the hot sauce that went with
them were on the platter, and some lemon slices. "Don't just gulp it," the HVAC guy had told Anthony. "Bite in."

So Anthony had, finding that a raw oyster tasted like what he imagined would happen if he fell facedown on a beach like the ones he'd watched dreamily on TV shows, and let the water roll into his mouth. The rich, somehow primitive-tasting saltiness of it seemed to explode in his head, scouring it from the inside.

He'd laughed in surprise, and the working guy had laughed, too. But Anthony wasn't laughing now, in the doorway of the small room with the empty kid's bed in it.

No kid. Not under the bed, or in the closet…Well, he'd told her to hide, hadn't he? But he'd thought she'd do it in the room, not—

"Check the boat," Marky yelled. He'd started yelling it as soon as he hung up from making the call, on the cell given to him to use just for this by the guy who had hired them.

"What boat?" Anthony called back to Marky, playing for time, Marky pacing back and forth in front of the sliding glass door he'd broken earlier. Marky didn't know the kid was missing yet; Anthony had only just now discovered that worrisome fact.

Anthony moved to the hall, peeked out just as Marky pulled the cell phone from his jacket, glowered at it, and answered. He listened briefly, saying, "Yup. Yup. Got it. Okay." Snapping the phone shut, he shoved it back into his pocket.

"Nobody told me anything about a boat," Anthony said.

"Yeah, well, now I'm tellin’ you." On the earlier call it had been Marky doing all the talking. It hadn't sounded as if whoever was on the other end gave Marky any argument, either.

Which was, Anthony thought, smart. He hoped whoever it was went on being smart. But all the brilliance in the world wouldn't save this situation if he couldn't find the kid.

"Down by the water, there," Marky said now, "tied up to a freakin’ rock. The life jackets and oars, too. We'll be needin’ ‘em on our voyage."

Marky's mouth twisted viciously on the word, causing Anthony further alarm. "Now? We're going on a boat in the…?"

Dark.
"Got a problem with it?" Marky inquired. " ‘Cause if you do…"