Hellbox (Nameless Detective) (9 page)

The painful cramping forced her down onto her side again. She was sweating from the exertion, the tension, but the sweat had an icy feel. She shivered, shivered again, her skin crawling with gooseflesh. Cold in there … she hadn’t realized just how cold until now. All she had on were the knee-length shorts, the thin summer blouse. She’d freeze in this godawful place before morning.

No, she wouldn’t. The canvas … it was large enough to cover her. Filthy, bug-ridden, but it would keep her warm enough if she had to resort to rolling herself into one end of it. If she had to. Only if she had no other choice.

She worked her body upright, gritting her teeth, and began sawing again at the rough-edged wood.

9

Four
A.M.
Still an hour until first light, but I was all through sleeping. I hadn’t slept much, anyway. Mostly just dozing, snapping awake whenever a noise intruded or there was a spasming in my mind. Waiting in a twilight world for the footsteps that hadn’t sounded, the call that hadn’t come.

The first thing I did was check my cell to make sure it was charged, and a good thing I did. Low battery. I got the charger and plugged it in.

I killed a few minutes with a hot-and-cold shower and a shave (cut myself twice, the hell with it), and then dressed in clean clothes. In the kitchen, I brewed coffee, poured orange juice, made toast. I had no appetite, but I hadn’t eaten since yesterday noon—the sandwiches Kerry had made for me, alongside one of the trout streams. I had to put butter on a piece of toast to get it down. The coffee was too strong and the juice had a sticky, too-sweet taste; a couple of swallows of each was all I could manage.

The house’s cold, silent emptiness had a charged atmosphere, like a place haunted by ghosts. Time seemed to have slowed down to a stutter. I kept staring at the darkness beyond the windows, willing it to fade into dawnlight. The need to get out of there, get moving, start the search was so strong it began to have a claustrophobic effect. Tension, strain, lack of sleep. There was some Xanax in Kerry’s purse that she used occasionally as a sleep aid; I thought about taking one to calm myself down, but I didn’t do it. I don’t trust drugs, even prescription drugs. I was afraid even half a tablet might make me drowsy, impair my ability to function.

But I had to do something to take the edge off. Deep breathing and aerobic exercises … Kerry’s methods to relieve stress. They helped some. And used up more dragging minutes.

Finally, the darkness beyond the kitchen window began to show a grayish tinge. I went outside. Chilly. And it would be chilly and damp in among the pines, too. Back inside to put on a light jacket, then down off the porch and around past the shed to where I could see the eastern sky above the pine and fir along the ridgetop. From there, I watched the gray spread and lighten, faint pinkish streaks appear. A few more minutes and it would be light enough to find my way around in the woods.

Into the house one more time. My cell phone wasn’t completely charged, but the battery should have enough juice now to last most of the day. I thought about taking Kerry’s cellular with me, too, just in case—she always made sure to keep hers fully charged—but it would be better to leave it here, with a voice message on it asking for an immediate callback. That way, I’d know if she returned on her own or with help from somebody else.

When I finished doing that, it was time to go.

The woods along the northern perimeter fence first. Down past the car, across the weedy yard. The fence was made of waist-high redwood stakes; no gate, but the stakes were old and there were gaps here and there large enough to pass through. I picked one, and a few seconds later, I was into the forest gloom.

The ground cover was damp with morning dew, the footing slick enough so that I had to be watchful of where I walked. Pretty soon I found what looked to be a deer trail, but it petered out after a short distance and if it continued at another point, I couldn’t find it. It was slow going, the shadows still long in places, the uncertain footing and bushes, fern brakes, and deadfalls impeding my progress. At intervals of a minute or so I yelled Kerry’s name at the top of my voice. The close-packed pines caught the shouts and threw them back at me in dull, empty echoes.

I plowed ahead, changing direction now and then, looking for other trails or some sign that Kerry might have passed this way—and still not finding any. Wasting my time … I accepted that, finally. She wouldn’t have gone on into woods like these with no path to follow. I found my way back to the fence, turned uphill to the long section of timber that stretched from the property line all the way up and over the ridge.

An hour slogging along a barely discernible maze of animal trails to the north and east. No sign of her.

South and east then, over some of the same terrain I’d covered yesterday. When I reached the rocky meadow, I found another trail that skirted it on the uphill side and took that until it vanished in thick underbrush. No sign of her.

Across the grassy open space and into the trees on the other side. No sign of her.

Back over the far end of the meadow and up the slope beyond. I hadn’t climbed up there yesterday and I should have, because partway up there were indications of recent passage—a trampled fern, a slide mark on the needled ground. The marks weren’t distinct enough for me to tell if they’d been made by a human or a large animal like a deer. I hunted for more signs, didn’t find any except for another unidentifiable ground scrape. I shouted Kerry’s name until my voice began to go hoarse.

At the top of the slope was an unpaved, rutted road that appeared to be little used—the old logging road I’d been on yesterday when I heard the explosion, I thought. Yes: I walked down it to the right, and after a couple of hundred yards I was at the intersection with Skyview Drive. No sign of her.

I turned back to follow the logging road in the other direction. Fifty yards or so after I passed the place where I’d climbed onto it from the slope, I came to an area along the far verge that caught and held my attention. Broken branches, crushed vegetation, faint tire tracks in the soft earth that hadn’t been there long. Kids parking for sex or drugs, maybe. I walked around, studying the ground. No other tracks. A slope fell away below the road on that side as well; I moved along the edge, looking down among the trees and underbrush.

A short distance from the tire tracks, there were more signs of what seemed to be recent passage. But again, I couldn’t tell who or what had made them. There was no trail, so I had to make my way down the incline using pine trunks and boughs for leverage. Toward the bottom were more marks in the soft, needled earth, one that might have been a footprint.

The terrain leveled out through heavy timber. A couple of faint scuffs in the carpeting of needles, then nothing. I kept going, winding through the trees until they thinned and the ground angled downward again. Another fifty yards and I could see through the trees to open daylight.

I could smell something, too, sharp odors that overpowered those of pine resin and leaf mold and moist earth.

Burnt wood. Smoke residue.

I groped ahead to where the treeline ended near the bottom of the slope. The open space I was looking at was the long, wide section spanning the bottom of Skyview Drive. And straight ahead, the burned-out remains of the Verriker house.

VFD firemen were still on watch, a single truck parked at the edge of the driveway. Quick action and luck had prevented the blaze from spreading into the surrounding timber. If there’d been any delay, a strong wind, they’d have had a holocaust on their hands. Scorched grassland extended partway up the rear hillside to where the firefighters had dug long, irregular firebreaks; half a dozen trees and the remains of the upended passenger car spread out like charred skeletons. The smaller outbuilding had been destroyed, the front wall and one side wall of the barn blackened, and the roof burnt through.

Difficult looking at what was left of a home where a woman had been alive one minute, incinerated the next. I turned away, back into the trees.

As shaky as I was, the climb up to the logging road seemed interminable. Two steps forward, one sliding step back, like one of those slow-motion dream sequences where every step you take feels as if you have fifty-pound weights strapped to your legs.

But then, near the top of the rise to the logging road, I found the hat.

Spotted it out of the corner of my eye as I was climbing, a pale blob caught behind a moss-covered tangle of broken tree limbs. That was why I hadn’t seen it on the way down. I veered over there, caught it up.

Wide-brimmed straw hat. Kerry’s sun hat.

Recognition brought a rush of relief. If the hat was here, then she had to be somewhere close by.

But neither the deadfall nor the vegetation that stretched out around it had been disturbed. No marks in the grass, no trampled ferns, no torn boughs or trunk-bark scratches. Just the hat.

I plunged along the slope to the west, stumbling, sliding, pawing through the ground cover, shouting her name. A hundred yards, two hundred, until I could see Skyview Drive through a break in the trees. Nothing to indicate that she’d come this way. I dropped down lower, groped my way back past the faint animal trail to search and call in the other direction.

Still nothing.

I must have gone another four or five hundred yards, up and down the slope, before I gave it up and dragged myself onto the road. And then along the road to where it began a steep, curving climb up toward the ridge. And then back along the slope on the other side.

No Kerry, no other sign of her.

By then, my breathing was so labored I began to feel light-headed. Muscles quivered all through my body. If I didn’t quit moving, rest a while, I was liable to keel over.

I found a rotting log, sat with my legs splayed out and my head lowered until I had control of my breathing again. The dial on my wristwatch swam into focus through a blur of sweat. Christ. Not even nine o’clock. It seemed as though I’d been out here half the day. Three-plus hours gone, and already I was low on stamina. Sixty-four years old, not in prime physical condition … I could not keep making unreasonable demands on my body, or I’d end up having a stroke or a coronary, and then what good would I be to Kerry?

The straw hat was still clenched in my hand. I turned it over and over again, staring at it. If her hat was here, she’d been here. So why hadn’t I found her? Lost the hat, then somehow got herself lost? No. If the hat had fallen or been knocked off and she wasn’t hurt, she’d have been sure to retrieve it. Favorite of hers, she wouldn’t just abandon it.

Hurt somehow … but please, God, not too badly? She might have managed to walk or hobble a distance away from here, trying to get back the house, looking for help or shelter. Maybe she had made that trail I’d followed down to the Verriker property after all—

No, no, you couldn’t see the property from up here; she wouldn’t go downhill through heavy timber to an unknown destination. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Verrikers’ house when it exploded, or somebody would have found her by this time. I’d already settled that in my mind.

If she had been hurt, it had to’ve been up here on the trail—there’d been no evidence of a fall down the slope anywhere near where I found the hat. In that case, logic said she’d have stayed on the road until she reached Skyview Drive. Made no sense she’d have gone the other direction, up that long steep incline toward the ridge. Besides, there was no evidence on the road to support that explanation, either.

Something else had happened here.

The grassy place across the road, where a vehicle had been parked recently … suppose the vehicle had been there when Kerry came along, suppose whoever owned it had been there. The spot wasn’t far from where the hat had lain.

I went over there, walked around carefully so as not to disturb any of the signs. Look closely, and you could see the tire indentations in the grass, the slide marks on the needle-covered earth that had been left when the vehicle backed up and turned around. One of the indentations was clear enough and deep enough to indicate that the vehicle had been heavy and broad-beamed—SUV, van, pickup. I could make out other marks, too, less distinct, that might have been made by shuffling feet.

A coldness moved through me, tightening my gut, stiffening the hairs on the nape of my neck. Negative vibes, hypersensitivity, sixth sense—call it whatever you wanted to. I’d had it before and I’d learned to trust it, and in this place, it scared the hell out of me.

Something had happened here, all right.

Something bad.

10

PETE BALFOUR

First thing, before he did much of anything else, he went out to check on the woman.

He felt snake mean this morning. She was one reason, and his pounding head and sour gut from all the booze he’d sucked down last night was another. But Verriker still alive was the main one. Nobody better give him any shit today, or they’d regret it.

The shed was up on a little rise next to the garage. Built it and fixed up the whole place himself, with the only help a couple of spic illegals he’d hired for the grunt work. Good with his hands, the best carpenter, best builder, best repairman in the valley. But did anybody appreciate what he could do? Hell, no, they didn’t. Carped at him about cutting corners, doing shoddy work, that was all they ever did. Miserable bastards.

Balfour unlocked the shed door, toed it open, and clicked on the overheads to see where she was before he went in. Still on the canvas where he’d put her, but rolled up in it now, lying on her side, staring at him with round, scared eyes. Part of one bare leg was out where he could see it. Pretty nice leg for an old broad. She must be more than fifty, but well preserved. Good body, slender, the way he liked them.

He had the notion again, looking at that bare leg, same one he’d had after he stopped himself from strangling her yesterday. That was part of the reason he’d stopped—a small part. Just a notion that slipped into his mind and slipped out again pretty quick. He liked his women young, the younger the better. Never had a whore over twenty-five. Never had any woman over twenty-five except for Charlotte, and she hadn’t been much more than that when he married her. Pigs, all of ’em. Never had a good-looking woman in his life, not old ugly Pete Balfour. This redhead, she must’ve been some sweet piece when she was young. Now she was just too damn old to bother with.