So there it was. The man who’d claimed to be my brother had told the truth. The FBI had been wrong. Lester Dant hadn’t assumed Petey’s identity.
Petey
had assumed
Lester’s .
But that disturbing discovery settled nothing. The reverse. It prompted far more unnerving questions to threaten my sanity.
This
was clear. After Petey had tricked the police into thinking that he was heading west through Montana, he’d taken Kate and Jason in the reverse direction—back to Woodford. Because he no longer had to lay a false trail by abandoning vehicles that he’d carjacked, it wouldn’t have been hard to avoid capture. All he had to do was carjack a vehicle that had a license for a distant state. The driver wouldn’t have been expected for several days. By the time he or she was reported missing, Petey would have reached Mrs. Warren’s property and hidden the car. Meanwhile, he’d have switched license plates several times and hidden the car owner’s body somewhere along the interstate.
Mrs. Warren. Petey had been confident that he could intimidate her, because that’s what he’d done a year earlier. At the church where I’d learned about Petey and Mrs. Warren, the minister had mentioned that Petey was Mrs. Warren’s handyman, that she never missed Sunday service except for an uncharacteristic absence one Sunday two years earlier,
one
year before Petey took Kate and Jason from me. Petey must have done something so dismaying to Mrs. Warren that she found it impossible to go to church that Sunday. When the minister phoned her, certain that only something dire would have kept her away, she’d claimed that she had the flu. The next Sunday, she’d been in church again. Meanwhile, she’d said, Petey had left the area.
The minister’s phone call had probably saved Mrs. Warren’s life. His concern for her must have made Petey think that the minister was suspicious, must have driven Petey away. But when Mrs. Warren felt safe, why hadn’t she confessed the horrors that had happened out there? The answer wasn’t hard to figure. Like Mrs. Garner in Loganville, she’d been ashamed to let the other church members know what Petey had done to her. What’s more, Petey had no doubt terrified her with a threat to return and punish her if she caused trouble for him.
Maybe she started feeling secure again, but then, to her fright, Petey came back a year later. He might have found a way to hide Kate and Jason from her. No mat—ter—her torment resumed. He intimidated her severely enough to make her put him in her will. “He feels like a son to me,” she’d have been forced to tell her lawyer, coached to sound convincing. Petey would have stood next to her in the lawyer’s office when she signed the document, a reminder of his warning that if she turned against him, he’d make sure that she spent her remaining years in agony. Then he’d have kept her a prisoner at the house while he dropped a word here and there among the congregation that she hadn’t been feeling well lately. That way, people would have been prepared when she died. After all, as the minister had said, Mrs. Warren was elderly. Maybe one night she passed away in her sleep— with help from a pillow pressed over her face.
As I sped back to town, I used my cell phone to call Special Agent Gader, but his receptionist told me that he wouldn’t be in the office for a couple of days. I phoned Payne’s office but got a recording that said he wouldn’t be in the office for the rest of the week. I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me his wife’s biopsy hadn’t been good.
That left getting in touch with the local police, but when I parked outside the station (the same brick building from years ago), I had a disturbing image of policemen piling into squad cars and rushing out to Mrs. Warren’s. I feared that their arrival would be so obvious that if Petey
was
in that house, he’d notice them coming and escape out the back. I might never learn what he’d done with Kate and Jason. Even if the police
did
manage to capture him, suppose he refused to answer questions? Suppose he denied knowing anything about where Kate and Jason were hidden? If they were still alive, they might starve or suffocate while he remained silent. Think it through, I warned myself. I needed more information. I couldn’t trust the police to go after him until I knew exactly how they should do it.
The pilot said something that I couldn’t quite hear amid the drone of the single—engine plane.
I turned to her. “Excuse me?”
“I said, Woodford’s over there.”
I glanced to the right, toward where she pointed. The sprawl of low buildings, old and new, stretched toward the interstate.
She put so much meaning into the statement that I shook my head from side to side. “I don’t understand.”
“You told me you wanted to see how the old hometown looked from the air.”
“More or less.”
“Seems like less. You’ve barely looked in that direction. What you’re interested in are those farms up ahead.”
We flew closer to the eighty—acre section of woods and underbrush. Although the day was sunny, there was a touch of wind. Once in a while, the plane dipped slightly.
“You’re a developer, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“We’ve had our share of development the last five years. Seems like every time I look, there’s a new subdivision.”
It was an easier explanation than the truth. “Yeah, too much change can be overwhelming.”
I stared down at the large dense section of trees. I saw the lane leading into it from the gravel road. I saw a clearing about a hundred yards into it where a brick house was surrounded by grass and gardens.
I’d bought one of those pocket cameras that had a zoom lens. Now I pulled it out and started taking photographs.
Back in my motel room, I spread out the eight—by—tens on a table. I’d paid a photographer to stay open after hours and process them. Now it was after dark. My eyes ached. To help keep me alert, I turned on the television— CNN—and as an announcer droned in the background, I picked up a magnifying glass and leaned down over the photographs. They were slightly blurred from the plane’s vibration. Nonetheless, they showed me what I needed.
One thing was immediately obvious. No one would have noticed it at ground level, where the front, sides, and back of the house couldn’t be viewed simultaneously. But when seen from above, the grass and gardens in back of the house looked different from those at the sides and the front. They seemed to have had work done on them recently. The area seemed slightly lower than the others.
Sunken? I wondered. As when ground settles after it’s been dug up and then refilled?
In the background, the CNN announcer explained that a distraught man with a gun was holding his ex—wife and his daughter prisoner in a house in Los Angeles. A police SWAT team surrounded it. With greater intensity, I stared through the magnifying glass at the photos, confirming that a section of grass and garden in back of the house did appear slightly lower than what was around it.
I noticed a blue pickup truck parked next to the house. I studied a stream that wound through the middle of the woods in back. But what I kept returning to was that area behind the house. The grass seemed greener there, the bushes fuller, as if they were getting more attention than those at the front and the sides.
I set down the magnifying glass and tried to calm myself. There was nothing sinister about relandscaping, the police would say. A blighted lawn and old bushes had been replaced with healthy ones. But what if the lawn and bushes had been replaced because something had been built under them?
On the television behind me, the announcer reported that the hostage situation had ended badly. As the police tightened their circle around the building, the man had shot his daughter and his ex—wife, then pulled the trigger on himself.
I stared at the television.
When I’d driven past Mrs. Warren’s property, I’d made the mistake of using Kate’s Volvo. Petey might have recognized it. This time, I drove only to the outskirts of town, where I left the car among others at a shopping mall. I put on my knapsack and hiked into the countryside.
As in most midwestern farm communities, the road system was laid out in a grid that contained squares or rectangles of land. Avoiding the road that fronted Mrs. Warren’s property, I took an indirect route that added several miles, coming at the wooded eighty acres from the road behind. Under a bright, hot sun, I hiked past fields, past cattle grazing, past farmers tending their crops. I adjusted my baseball cap and moved my fanny pack to a more comfortable spot on my waist, trying to look as if I didn’t have a care in the world, that I was merely out for a pleasant day of walking. In truth, I wanted desperately to run. The adrenaline burning through me needed exertion to keep it controlled. If I didn’t do something to vent the pressure swelling inside me, I feared I’d go crazy. To my right, across a field, the woods got larger. Nearer. Kate and Jason. They’re alive, I told myself. They have to be.
Worried about being noticed crossing the field toward the woods, I waited until a car went by and there wasn’t any other traffic. The stream that I’d seen in the photographs crossed the field and went under the road. I climbed down to it. Its banks were high enough that I was out of view as I walked next to the water. In contrast with the stark sun, the air was cool down there.
After five minutes, the stream entered the trees. I ducked under a fence, climbed the slippery bank, and found myself among maples, oaks, and elms. The noise I made in the undergrowth troubled me, but who would hear me? Petey wasn’t going to be patrolling his fences, guarding his property against intruders. The logical place for him to be was at the house. Or maybe he’d be off somewhere, committing God knew what crimes.
The forest cast a shadow. A spongy layer of dead leaves smelled damp and moldy. I wiped my sweat—gritted face, took off my knapsack, and pulled out a holster that I’d bought that morning. It was attached to the right side of a sturdy belt. My spare fifteen—round magazine was in a pouch to the left, along with two other newly purchased magazines. A hunting knife went next to it and a five—inch long, thumb—width flashlight called Surefire, which the clerk in the gun shop had shown me was surprisingly powerful for its size. I took the pistol from my fanny pack and shoved it into the holster. The weight of the equipment dug into my waist.
Thirsty from nervousness, I sipped water from one of three canteens in the knapsack. I ate a stick of beef jerky and several handfuls of mixed peanuts and raisins. Uneasiness made me urinate. Then I put on the knapsack and pulled a compass from my shirt pocket. Unlike a year ago, I’d taken the time to learn how to use it. Remembering the photographs, estimating the angle that I needed to follow in order to reach the house, I took a southeast direction, making my way through the trees.
All the while, I listened for suspicious noises in the forest. The scrape of a branch might have been Petey creeping toward me, but it turned out to be a squirrel racing up a tree. The snap of a twig startled me, until I realized that it was a rabbit bounding away. Birds fluttered. Wary, I scanned the undergrowth, studied my compass again, and moved cautiously forward.
The next time I stopped to get a drink, I checked my watch, surprised to find that what had seemed like thirty minutes had actually been two hours. The air felt thicker. Sweat stuck my shirt and jeans to me. I took another step and immediately dropped to a crouch, seeing where the trees thinned.
On my stomach, I squirmed through the undergrowth, the moldy smell of the earth widening my nostrils. I crawled slowly, trying not to move bushes and reveal my position. From having designed homes for wealthy clients, I was familiar with intrusion detectors. I watched for anything ahead of me, motion sensors on posts or a wire that might be attached to a vibration detector. Nothing struck me as unusual. In fact, now that I thought about it, an intrusion detector would be useless in the woods. The animals roaming about would trigger it.
Animals? I suddenly realized that for a while I hadn’t noticed
any
animals. Nor a single bird. The sense of barrenness reminded me of what I’d felt at the Dant farm.
Snakes? I studied the ground ahead of me. Nothing rippled. Taking a deep breath, I squirmed forward. The trees became more sparse, the bushes less thick. Peering through low branches, I saw a clearing. A lawn. A flower garden.
In the middle was the redbrick house. I’d come at it from its right side. The two—and—a—half—story wall had ivy. White wooden lawn furniture and a brightly colored miniature windmill decorated the lawn.
I took binoculars from my knapsack and made sure that the sun wasn’t at an angle that would cause a reflection off the lenses. Then I focused them and studied the downstairs and upstairs windows. All had lace curtains. Nothing moved beyond them. In the photographs I’d taken, the pickup truck had been parked on the opposite side of the house, so to find out if it was still there, I’d have to crawl around to that side.
I stayed as flat as possible while I shifted through the undergrowth. When I came within view of the back of the house, I still didn’t see movement in any of the windows. I stared at the open area behind the house, which from ground level seemed to have a natural slope, its slightly sunken outline no longer apparent. An unsuspecting visitor would have noticed nothing unusual about it, except that the lawn and gardens were attractive. If there was indeed a room beneath it, I assumed that Petey watered and fertilized that area frequently to compensate for the shallow roots that the underground structure would cause. If so, today wasn’t his day to work in the garden. He wasn’t in sight. The place seemed abandoned.
I dared to hope that I’d gotten lucky, that he wasn’t home. But as I crept through the bushes toward the other side of the house, my stomach soured when I saw the pickup truck where it had been the previous afternoon. Angry, I continued through the undergrowth on that side of the house, coming to a view of the front, where a roofed porch had a rocking chair and a hammock, homey and inviting.
But no one was visible there, either, and I retreated to a sheltered spot that gave me a view of the side, part of the back, part of the front, and all of the truck. Bushes enclosed me. I eased out of my knapsack, sipped from one of the canteens, ate more beef jerky, peanuts, and raisins.