I almost threw up.
Pendleton seemed to sense my panicked thoughts. His tone suggested an attempt to distract me. “You don’t happen to have a photograph of him, do you?”
“No.”
“With the excitement of the homecoming, you didn’t take any pictures?”
“
No.
” I wanted to scream. If only I hadn’t let a stranger into my house …
But he isn’t a stranger, I tried to tell myself.
What the hell’s the matter with you? I thought. After twenty—five years, Petey
is
a stranger!
“Mr. Denning?”
I looked over at Pendleton, realizing that he’d said my name several times in an effort to get my attention.
“If you’re able, we’d like you to walk through the house and tell us if anything’s missing.”
“Whatever I have to do.”
They handed me latex gloves and put on their own. Unsteady, I began in the downstairs rooms, and immediately I noticed that the silverware Kate had inherited from her grandmother was no longer on the sideboard in the dining room. A silver tea set was missing also. In the TV room, the DVD and videotape players were gone, along with an expensive audio/video receiver.
“He’d probably have taken the T V, too,” I said bitterly, “except that it’s forty—six inches and wouldn’t fit in the Volvo. I don’t understand why he didn’t keep the Expedition. It’s got more room. He could have stolen more things.”
Webber looked uncomfortable. “We’ll talk about it later. Finish checking the house.”
The microwave and the Cuisinart food processor were missing from the kitchen. Numerous compact power tools were gone from the garage. My laptop computer wasn’t in my office.
“What about firearms?” Pendleton asked. “Do you have any in the house? Did he take them?”
“No guns.”
“Not even a hunting rifle?”
“No. I’m not a hunter.”
I made my way upstairs and froze at the entrance to Jason’s room, seeing his drawers pulled out, his clothes scattered on the floor. It took all my willpower to step inside and look around.
“My son saves his loose change in a jar on his desk,” I said.
It wasn’t there.
I had an even harder time going into the chaos of the master bedroom. Stepping over some of Kate’s dresses on the floor, I stared toward the back of the walk—in closet. “Four suitcases are gone.”
As the implication hit me, my knees weakened so much that I had to lean against the doorjamb.
I’d assumed that Petey had ransacked the bureaus and closets because he was in a rush to find things to steal. Now, daring to hope, I took a closer look and realized that Kate’s and Jason’s clothes weren’t just scattered—some of them were missing.
“If they’re dead, he wouldn’t have packed clothes for them,” I told the detectives. “They’re alive. They’ve got to be alive.”
In a daze, I followed Webber’s instructions and kept looking. Some of
my
clothes were gone, too. My emergency stash of five hundred dollars was no longer at the back of my underwear drawer. Kate’s jewel box was missing, along with a gold Rolex that I wore on special occasions. None of it mattered; only Kate and Jason did.
Throughout, the technicians kept photographing the chaos in the bedrooms and checking for fingerprints. To get out of their way, the detectives took me downstairs. Again I had the sense that the house no longer belonged to me.
“Why the Volvo?” I managed to ask. My voice seemed to come from far away. “You said we’d talk about why he took it. The Expedition would have allowed him to steal more things.”
“Yes.” Pendleton spoke reluctantly. “But the Volvo has something that the four—wheel—drive vehicle doesn’t.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“A trunk.”
“A …” Understanding forced me to sit.
“Maybe it isn’t a good idea to go into the details.”
“Tell me.” My bandaged hands ached as I clutched the sides of the leather chair. “I need to know.”
Webber glanced away, as if he couldn’t bear to see my eyes. “The way it looks, he came back here with your son and then subdued your wife. We have to assume they were bound and gagged.”
A rope seemed to cut into my wrists.
“He wouldn’t have risked driving with them scrunched down in the backseat. Sooner or later, someone would have noticed,” Pendleton said.
“So he put them in the …”
“With the garage door closed, nobody would have seen him do it.”
“Jesus.” Imagining the stench of gasoline and car exhaust, I felt nauseated. “How could they breathe?” I suddenly remembered Petey’s haunted look when he’d described how the man and woman had forced
him
into a trunk.
A shrill beep startled me. Webber reached beneath his blazer and unhooked his cell phone from his belt. As he turned his back and walked toward the piano that Kate enjoyed playing, I barely heard his muted voice.
He put away the phone.
“Something?” I straightened, nervously hoping.
“The Volvo’s been found. At a rest stop off Interstate Twenty—five.”
“Kate and Jason? Are they—”
“Not with the car. He left the state. Wyoming troopers found the Volvo north of Casper.”
“
Wyoming?
”
“For all he knew, he had plenty of time, and the Volvo wouldn’t have been missed for several days,” Webber said. “But suppose your wife was expected somewhere Saturday night, or suppose friends were going to arrive, and no matter what he did to persuade her, she wouldn’t tell him about it?”
My skin turned cold at the thought of the pain Kate would have suffered.
“His best choice was to get your wife and son away before anyone suspected something was wrong,” Webber said. “The nearest ATM for your bank has a record of a six—twenty—one P.M. withdrawal of five hundred dollars, the most that the machine is allowed to take from an account on any one day. The videotape shows a man making the withdrawal, but his head’s bowed so his face is hidden.”
Sweat chilled me when I realized that Petey had forced Kate to tell him our ATM number.
“It looks like he drove until nightfall, then used the cover of darkness to carjack another vehicle at the rest stop outside Casper. The likely target would have been someone traveling alone, but the driver wasn’t found near the rest stop, so we assume that he or she is in the car with your wife and son. Until the driver’s reported missing, we won’t know what kind of car to search for.”
“Three people trying to breathe in a trunk? Jesus.”
Something in the detectives’ eyes made me guess what they were thinking. As dangerous as Petey was, it might be only
two
people trying to breathe. He might not have let the driver live.
“Wyoming? But why in hell would he have gone to Wyoming?” At once, I remembered something Petey had said. “Montana.”
“You sound like that means something to you,” Pendleton said. “What are you getting at?”
“
Montana’s north of Wyoming.
”
They looked at me as if I was babbling.
“No, listen to me. My brother said that when he saw me on the
CBS Sunday Morning
show, he was having breakfast in Montana. In a diner in Butte. Maybe that’s why he’s heading north. Maybe something in Montana’s drawing him back.”
For the first time, Webber was animated. “Good.” He hurriedly pulled out his phone. “I’ll send descriptions of this guy, your wife, and your son to the Montana state police.”
“We’ll contact the Butte police department,” Pendle—ton quickly added. “Maybe they know something about this guy. If he’s been arrested, they’ll have a photograph of him that we can circulate.”
“Assuming he called himself Peter Denning up there.” I stared dismally down at the floor.
“There are other ways to investigate. Kidnapping across state lines means the FBI will get involved. The feds will do their best to match the fingerprints we find with ones they have on file. If this guy ever used an alias, we have a good chance of learning what it is.”
I tried hard to believe what they were saying.
“Have you a recent photograph of your wife and son?”
“On the mantel.” I looked in that direction. The beaming faces of Kate and Jason made me heartsick. I’d taken the photograph myself. Normally, I hardly knew which button to press on a camera, but that day, I’d gotten lucky. We’d been to Copper Mountain skiing, although falling down was more what Kate and I had done. Jason had been a natural, however. He’d grinned all day. Despite our bruises, so had Kate and I. In the photo, Kate wore a red ski jacket, Jason a green one, the two of them holding their knitted ski caps, Kate’s blond hair and Jason’s sandy hair glinting in the sun, their cheeks glowing.
“We’ll return it as soon as we have copies made,” Pendleton said.
“Keep it as long as you have to.” The truth was, I hated to part with it. The empty place on the mantel reinforced my hollowness. “Anything else—anything at all—just ask.”
What they need more than anything, I thought, is for God to answer my prayers.
Throughout, the phone had rung frequently. I’d been vaguely aware that a policeman had answered it. Now he handed me a list of who’d called, mostly reporters wanting an interview—TV, radio. What had happened would be all over the state by evening.
“Jesus, Kate’s parents.” Hurrying, I left Webber and Pendleton in the living room. In the kitchen, my bandaged hand shook when I pressed numbers on the telephone.
“Hello?” an elderly man said.
“Ray …” I could hardly make my voice work. “Sit down. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.”
It made me sick to have to tell them, to hear their lives change in a minute. Neither of them was in good health. Even so, they immediately wanted to drive the three hundred miles from Durango through the mountains to Denver. I had a hard time convincing them to stay home. After all, what were they going to accomplish in Denver? Kate’s father was breathing so fast that he sounded like he was going to have a heart attack.
“Stay put,” I said. “All we can do now is wait.” I had a terrible mental image of Kate’s father rushing to get to Denver, losing control of his car, and plummeting down a gorge. “You can wait just as easily at home. I’ll let you know the instant I learn anything.”
Setting down the phone, I took a deep breath, then noticed Webber and Pendleton at the entrance to the kitchen.
“What?” I asked.
“We just got a call from the Wyoming state police,” Webber said.
I braced myself.
“A woman from Casper’s been reported missing. Saturday evening, she was en route from visiting her sister in Sheridan, which is about a hundred and fifty miles north of where she lives.”
“You think my brother carjacked her?”
“The timing fits. Just after dark, she would have approached the rest stop where the Wyoming state police found your wife’s Volvo. If the woman had to use the rest room …”
Inwardly, I flinched as I imagined Petey coming at the woman and how terrified she must have been.
“She was driving a 1994 Chevy Caprice,” Pendleton said. “Apart from the fact that she was driving alone, her abductor probably singled her out because that type of car has a large trunk. He kept heading north. The Wyoming police gave the license number to the police in Montana, who found the Caprice at a rest stop on Interstate Ninety near Billings.”
“Were my wife and son …”
“With the Caprice? No.”
Something about Pendleton’s tone made me suspicious. “What about the woman who owned it?”
He didn’t answer.
“Tell me.”
Pendleton glanced at Webber, who nodded as if giving permission.
“Her body was in the trunk.”
“Dear God.” I didn’t want to know, and yet I couldn’t stop from asking, “What did Petey do to her?”
“Tied her hands and covered her mouth with duct tape. She”—Pendleton’s voice dropped—“had asthma. She choked to death.”
Thinking about the woman’s desperate struggle to breathe, I could barely concentrate as Webber explained that Petey could have driven the Caprice from Casper, Wyoming, to Billings, Montana, that same night. He’d presumably carjacked another vehicle at the Billings rest stop. As the driver got out of the car to go to the bathroom, Petey would have lunged from the shadows.
I imagined how horrifying it would have been for Kate and Jason, pressed next to the dying woman in the dark, the air foul, feeling her thrash, hearing her muffled choking sounds, her frenzied movements, her strangled gasps slowing, getting weaker, stopping.
“It’s never going to end,” I managed to say.
“No, we could be close to boxing him in,” Pendleton said. “You predicted right. He was headed to Montana. Probably back to Butte. Billings is on the interstate that leads there. The local police don’t have any criminal record for someone named Peter Denning. But they’researching for a man who matches this guy’s description, especially that scar on his chin. The driver of the most recent vehicle he carjacked will soon have somebody report him or her missing. Once the Butte police get the make and license number of the vehicle, they can narrow their search. Meanwhile, they’re checking motels and any other places they can think of where your brother might be able to hide your wife and son. Butte’s not a big city. Believe me, if he shows himself, he’ll be spotted.” “But what if Petey senses the danger and leaves?” “We thought of that. The Montana state police have unmarked cars along the interstate, watching for any white male in his thirties who’s driving alone. As soon as the FBI processes his fingerprints, we’ll have a better idea of who we’re dealing with. The way he operates, he’s had practice. He’s probably got a criminal record, in which case the feds will come up with a recent mug shot we can distribute.”
One of the callers on the list the policeman had handed me was from my office, so I had to phone and again explain what had happened. Saying it out loud reinforced the nightmare. Several times, I heard the buzz of call waiting. Twice, I switched to the incoming call in case it had something to do with Kate and Jason, but both times it was a journalist, and after that, I didn’t pay attention to call waiting.
The moment I hung up, the phone rang again. We had caller ID, but most times I’d found it was useless, a lot of the calls listed as UNKNOWN CALLER or, in this case, BLOCKED NUMBER. But I answered anyhow, and of course, it was another journalist; after that, I let the policeman answer the phone.