Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (17 page)

How about when he stopped for gas? He’d have to do it sooner or later, these big-boat SUVs were gas hogs. But he’d warned her about making any noise back here. Somebody’d get hurt if she did, he said. Meant it, all right—you could see it in his hard, light-skinned half-and-half face. Like that psycho last Christmas. Not as far off the hook, pretty much in control, but capable of using that gun of his if push came to shove.
Wasn’t worth the risk, not with Lauren in the line of fire.
Take care of my little girl
. Yeah, well, that was just what she would do.

The kid made a little whimpering sound. Tamara put her face down close, smoothed sweat-damp strands of hair off her forehead. “You doing okay, honey?”

“I feel sick.”

“Sick to your stomach?”

“Uh-huh. I hate throwing up.”

“You won’t. Take deep breaths and hold on. We’ll be stopping pretty soon.”

A short silence. Then, “Tamara?”

“Yes, honey?”

“I’m so scared. Are you scared?”

“Some. Don’t you fret. We’ll be all right.”

“Am I gonna see my mama and daddy again?”

“Sure you will. Sure.”

“Promise?”

She said, “Promise,” and bit her tongue and added a little silent prayer:
Don’t you make a liar out of me
.

M
iles unrolling under them. More signs: Roseville. Rocklin. Places she’d heard of but never been to. Whole lot of places she’d never been, places she wanted to go someday. Whole lot of life ahead of her, ahead of Lauren—

Pay attention to the signs.

Another one: Auburn. Highway 49, Grass Valley.

Lemoyne slowed down, swung out of the fast lane and on over into the exit lane. Auburn—Grass Valley exit. Tamara shifted position on the futon, sat up straighter. Some little town near Grass Valley was where Lemoyne’s second wife was from. Did she still live there, her and his real daughter? Like
maybe in a trailer in the woods? Going there to see them for some off-the-hook reason, introduce Angie to Angie? Dude was so weird, he was capable of just about anything.

Off the freeway now, onto a busy side road. And into a Chevron station. For some reason she registered the gas prices’ sign: $2.39 a gallon for regular. Goddamn oil companies, still screwing Bay Area drivers left, right, and back door.

They stopped alongside a row of pumps. Lemoyne hadn’t said a word since they’d left San Leandro, but now she heard his voice, the words muffled by the plastic partition, “You keep quiet back there, Dark Chocolate. You know what’ll happen if you don’t.”

Dark Chocolate. Second or third time he’d called her that. One of those half-and-halfs that hated the fact they were mixed race, wished they were all black or all white and wound up resenting both. Your equal opportunity racist.

She said, “Angie’s feeling sick to her stomach.”

“That’s too bad.” As if he meant it.

“Let me take her to the bathroom.”

“No.”

“You want her to throw up on herself?”

“We don’t have much farther to go. Another hour or so.”

“I don’t know if she can make it that long.”

“You better see she does or you’ll clean her up when we get there. Clean up back there, too. I hate the smell of puke.”

He opened the door on the last few words, slid out quickly, and shut the door behind him.

Lauren started to cry.

O
utskirts of Auburn on 49. Broad avenue lined with shopping malls and business parks and car dealerships and
fast-food places. Heavy traffic, endless string of stoplights. Then the lights got farther and farther apart, and the road narrowed into two lanes and climbed steadily into the foothills.

Lauren was quiet again. Still taking deep breaths to keep her gorge down, her face scrunched up with the effort it took. Afraid to throw up, afraid of what he might do. Good little girl. Smart, sweet-tempered. What’d she ever do to have a thing like this happen to her?

What’d I ever do? What’s deserving it have to do with shit happening to you?

Still climbing, still a lot of traffic. Pine woods—they were in the foothills now.

More signs: Grass Valley. Nevada City. Highway 20—Marysville.

Exit lane again. Swinging off onto Highway 20.

Pretty soon they were heading down a long, steep grade. Day was clear and warm, sunlight hitting the windows and making it muggy inside the prison cell. Air was bad, too, from the goddamn cigarettes Lemoyne kept smoking. She called to him to turn on the air conditioner, they were suffocating back here. He ignored her.

At the bottom of the grade the freeway ended at a stoplight and another sign. Left: Penn Valley. Right: Rough and Ready. Rough and Ready—that was the name of the town Lemoyne’s ex-wife was from. He turned right at the intersection, onto a narrow secondary road that climbed and twisted through thick forestland.

She tried to remember exactly where Rough and Ready was, how isolated. No use. Must’ve looked at a California map two or three hundred times the past five years, but always for specific counties, cities, roads; you just didn’t notice all the other names,
the hundreds of small towns and secondary roads that covered the state. Not if you were a confirmed urbanite, you didn’t.

The constant flicker of sunlight and shadow hurt her eyes. The sharp twists and turns bounced her and Lauren around even more. Seemed to go on a long time like that, but it couldn’t’ve been much more than five minutes before Lemoyne slowed down and Tamara saw they were in Rough and Ready. Old-fashioned little place, must’ve been a Gold Rush town—they passed an ancient building that said Blacksmith Shop on the front of it. Then they were out of the village and Lemoyne picked up speed again.

But not for long. Less than a mile. Another slowdown, then a left turn past a country store onto a lane hemmed in by woods, then a right turn onto another lane with an uneven surface that rattled her teeth and shook a few more whimpers out of the child.

One more twist, and they were onto an unpaved surface—driveway, also hemmed in by trees—and finally, after maybe a hundred jolting yards, the SUV bucked to a stop. Tamara lifted up onto one knee so she could see better through the side window, out front through the partition.

Appalachia.

That was her first thought. Meadowlike clearing surrounded by forest, a creek or something running through on the right side. And a trailer at the far end. Junky and about half a century old, one of those silver jobs that looked like giant sow bugs—all spotted with rust and half-buried in weeds and grass, dry pine needles and cones from a tree behind it spread over its top like dead hair. Fifty or sixty yards to the left was an old barn in better shape than the trailer, the corpse of a car angled in alongside. Off to the right, sitting in more weeds, was one of those
molded plastic kids’ playsets, slide and teeter-totter and climbing bars; the colors on it were bright, as if it’d been repainted not too long ago. A narrow shed leaned sideways in that direction, too, ready to fall down. Or maybe it was an outhouse. Didn’t have a half-moon in the door, but it sure looked like one. An outhouse!

Wasn’t anybody around, not now and not for a long time. Lemoyne’s ex-wife and daughter didn’t live here, if they ever had. Only one who came here was that sick bastard when he was in a mood to have fun.

Her skin began to prickle and crawl, the last of her small hopes to crumble away. Middle of nowhere. Nobody was going to find them in a primitive hole like this, not soon, probably not ever. If she couldn’t find a way to save Lauren and herself, they weren’t gonna be saved. Not in this life.

Lemoyne was out of the SUV, unlocking the hatchback. In spite of herself she jerked when he threw the hatch up. The Saturday night special was in his hand again; he waved it at her. “All right, come out of there. You first, and be careful with my little girl.”

She obeyed, scooting out on one hip and leg, lifting the child when she was on her feet. Lauren whimpered and clung to her, blinking in the sunlight. He patted the kid on the head with his free hand, smiling down at her almost tenderly.

“Here we are, Angie,” he said. “Home.”

Now what?

W
aiting for Runyon, I couldn’t sit still. Up and down, shuffle papers, make yet another call to Tamara’s cell number, make yet another call to her apartment, hunt through her desk and paper files again, pace around all three offices, stare out the front windows at the narrow expanse of South Park. Enforced inactivity in this kind of situation is the worst kind. I needed to be doing something, and there was nothing to do yet. Dead time, wasted time,
Where was she, what happened to her?
repeating over and over like song lyrics you can’t get out of your head.

When the telephone went off I was all over it like a bear on a honeypot, but it had nothing to do with Tamara. And that was almost as much a relief as a disappointment. Too often the worst news comes by phone.

“I decided there’s no reason you shouldn’t know what was in the envelope,” Cybil’s voice said without preamble.

“Yes?”

“It’s the manuscript of an unpublished novel Dancer wrote a long time ago,” she said. “It’s about a group of New Yorkers,
mostly writers and artists, and what happens in their home-front lives and relationships on a single day—June 6, 1944. The idea being that it’s a kind of D-Day for them as well. He called it
Remember D-Day
. Not a very good title, but then it’s not a very good novel. An interesting idea poorly developed.”

“Where does amazing grace fit in? Or does it?”

“One of the female leads is named Grace Cutter. Known as Amazing Grace to the male narrator.”

“Patterned after you?”

“Obviously, yes. And the narrator, Donovan—Russ himself, of course. There’s an ongoing and rather steamy affair between the two, graphically described. I wasn’t surprised and I don’t suppose you are, either.”

“No. You think that’s why he wanted you to have the manuscript?”

“A tribute to me and what might have been. So he said in a long, rambling cover letter.”

“You going to let anybody else read the manuscript?”

“No. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. Destroy it, most likely—it’s worthless as fiction or nostalgia or memento.”

“Your choice. What else did he put in the letter?”

“Nothing to concern anyone but me,” Cybil said. “I’ve shared and discussed this matter as much as I’m going to. Russ Dancer is dead, the past is dead, from now on suppose we just let it stay that way.”

“. . . Okay with me.”

“And with Kerry. It’s settled then.”

She didn’t have anything more to say, which saved me the trouble of having to prod her off the line. I put the receiver down, stood, went away from my desk a couple of paces, came
back and sat down and picked the receiver up again and called Bates and Carpenter. Kerry was out of her office; her secretary went to find her. I got up and took a couple of turns around the desk until I heard her voice.

“Did Cybil call you? About Dancer’s manuscript?”

“Couple of minutes ago. Kerry—”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m relieved. I kept imagining all sorts of nasty things he might’ve given her—that’s why I was so bothered. You know how weird Dancer could be—”

“Kerry, listen, I don’t want to talk about that right now. That’s not why I called. There’s a problem here and I’m not going to be able to pick up Emily. Can you do it, or make arrangements with the Simpsons?”

She caught the tension in my voice. “I can do it. What problem?”

“It’s Tamara. She’s gone missing.”

“Missing? For heaven’s sake, what—?”

“No idea yet. She hasn’t come in or called in, she’s not home, her cell phone’s out of service, and nobody’s talked to her since last night. May or may not have something to do with a surveillance she’s been on in San Leandro the past couple of nights.”

“Have you called the police yet?”

“Not yet. Too soon. Jake Runyon and I are on it.”

“You don’t think she—?”

“Trying not to think anything yet. I don’t know when I’ll be home. I’ll call if I’m going to be late.”

“Or if there’s any word.”

“Soon as I can.”

“Find her, you and Jake,” she said. “Find her safe.”

L
ess than a minute after Runyon switched on Tamara’s computer, he said, “Yeah, I was afraid of that. I can’t get in. She never gave you any idea of the password?”

“No. That kind of information is wasted on me.”

“Write it down anywhere that you know of?”

“I’ve been through her desk a couple of times. I didn’t see anything that looked like a password.”

“She’s too security conscious to leave something like that in her desk,” Runyon said. “Probably didn’t write it down at all. A person her age doesn’t worry about forgetting things like that.”

“Or about something unexpected happening to them.”

“Yeah.”

He looked through her desk anyway, didn’t find anything, and then we brainstormed a couple of dozen possible words, phrases, dates that she might’ve used for a password. None of them worked.

“Dammit,” I said, “we could sit here all night and not come up with the right one. The only lead we’ve got, and it’s a dead end.”