Stop Me (10 page)

‘Of course.’ THEY DON’T.

‘I’m not going to drive you anywhere remote. There’s plenty of people about and we’ll be in two separate 
cars.’ Bookwalter pulled his foot out of one of his
flip-flops
and picked at a piece of dirt embedded in his sole. While he stood on one foot, he waggled precariously on the spot and a fold of skin appeared under his chin to block his breathing. ‘It’s what you came for, Leo.’ It was the first time he’d heard Bookwalter utter his name but he wasn’t meeting his eye now. ‘You can come now or I can give you some time to think about it.’

Bookwalter was right. Whatever deception had been prepared, Leo wasn’t going to be able to dismiss it as such until he’d seen it with his own eyes. He’d envisaged all sorts of intricate scenarios; selecting a meeting place that he could monitor from a safe distance to make sure that Bookwalter didn’t have any accomplices, moving him from one venue to the next via telephone calls and meeting him on moving public transport – but it was all a product of having watched too many movies. Bookwalter wanted to show him something and Leo had to go. ‘OK.’ DON’T GO. DON’T GO.

Bookwalter used the action of dialling his cell to keep his eyes from Leo’s but a suggestion of a smirk folded his moustachioed top lip over his lower one.

‘I’ll call the cabs.’ Leo pulled out his own cell.

Bookwalter looked up and raised one eyebrow. ‘O…K.’ But his expression said it didn’t make any difference.

‘I’ll call them now and meet you outside. I have another call to make to another party after that. I’ll be 
having a running commentary with them throughout and reporting where we go.’

Bookwalter raised his hands in compliance. ‘However you want to run things…I’ll be outside.’ 

When the cabs arrived Bookwalter walked back into the restaurant and gave Leo another stained smile and the thumbs up. It felt like they were going away on a fishing trip together. Luckily for Leo he was in the middle of leaving a message for Ashley so Bookwalter registered this fact before slopping back out of the restaurant.

‘Ashley…pick up if you’re there. Ashley? I know this is weird but I’m in…I’m on holiday. Just need some time on my own at the moment. I’ll call you as soon as I get back.’

Leo terminated the call but kept his handset open. How could he tell Ashley he’d come to meet Bookwalter? He knew exactly what she’d say and she’d have been right. The last thing he needed was the voice of reason to persuade him to take his cab straight back to the 
airport. He kept the phone pressed to his ear and walked to the exit.

Outside Bookwalter was sitting in the back of a car wiping his face and Leo walked up to his window and gestured for him to open it. The glass dropped and Bookwalter raised his eyebrows.

‘Where are we headed?’

‘Just follow me to Crescent City. Your cab driver will tell you exactly where you’re going.’

Leo got into the back of the cab behind Bookwalter’s. ‘Could you follow the car in front?’ His black driver looked at him in the rear-view mirror and nodded almost indiscernibly. He was bald and Leo couldn’t tell how old he was. Bookwalter’s car eased out of its parking space and Leo’s did the same, entering the sluggish traffic and rolling only a few yards before it stopped behind the tailback of Chevys and Outlanders heading for home. Leo could see the back of Bookwalter’s head but kept the phone to his ear. Nobody knew where he was going. Nobody knew he was even in the States.

They crawled along Route 90 and eventually crossed the Mississippi into Bookwalter’s neck of the woods. Leo tried to take in the scenery while he listened to the dead phone rub against his ear.

The name Romain Street seemed familiar to Leo but both cars already started to slow down before he realised that he recognised it from the details Bookwalter had emailed him. This was their 
destination and he was surprised to find himself in front of a block of white-fronted, modern houses with a stretch of green separating them from the sidewalk, the individual gardens delineated only by low rows of ornamental bricks angled out of the grass. A handful of children were playing noisily out front and Leo waited as Bookwalter got out of the car and paid his cab driver. The car pulled away and Bookwalter gestured with both hands for Leo to follow him up the drive to the end house.

Leo opened his door still with the phone to his ear and put his finger in his other as if the noise of the kids was drowning out the conversation he was having. He nodded and mumbled into the phone while Bookwalter beckoned him again as if he were directing a reversing lorry. Leo’s cab driver rolled down his side window and frowned at the phone conversation that had only begun since his passenger had got out of the car.

‘Do you mind waiting? I’ll be three minutes. If I’m not back in that time I’ll pay you an extra hundred dollars to come in and get me.’

The cab driver’s frown deepened and Leo turned to where Bookwalter had stopped halfway up the drive, turning his hands upwards in a gesture of ‘what’s the delay?’ He turned back to the cab driver and looked into his eyes. He was younger than he thought. ‘It’s nothing illegal. I just need you as a witness. Two hundred dollars?’ 

The cab driver nodded and reluctantly turned off his engine. Leo walked to where Bookwalter was, cutting the corner of the lawn and stepping over the barrier of bricks. He snapped the phone shut and Bookwalter showed him his teeth again.

‘Come on, Leo. There’s somebody who can’t wait to see you.’

Bookwalter’s house smelt of baking. It hit Leo as soon as he walked in through the glass front door and he again wondered if it was another of his host’s devices for putting him at his ease.

‘Mind if I leave this front door open?’

Bookwalter kicked off his flip-flops and turned, a look of bemusement on his face. ‘Whatever makes you comfortable, Leo.’

He’d had the same smirk on his face when Leo had reluctantly agreed to accompany him. Leo was beginning to think it was because Bookwalter recognised the fear in him – and that, he had long surmised, was what his host thrived on. The expression also seemed to suggest that Leo was in no danger and that it was comically entertaining for Bookwalter to witness Leo being so hyper cautious. DON’T EVEN BEGIN TO THINK THAT.

He took in the interior of Bookwalter’s home. Not only was its populated location unexpected – the sounds of children playing and suburban bustle following them 
through the door – but it seemed genuinely warm and welcoming. Leo had envisaged him living in a trailer or a single apartment, but the hallway that stretched in front of him had terracotta walls and immaculate yellow Aztec design carpets indicating an owner who was fiercely house proud.

Bookwalter padded down the hallway and walked into the first door on his left. Leo looked back out of the front door and could still see the cab driver glancing at his watch.

If I’m not back to the car in three minutes it means Laura is here
.

He dismissed the thought and followed; he could make out the sound of an oven door opening.

Leo found himself in an equally spotless, spacious and modern kitchen, all washed out blue cupboards and chrome and the baking smell twice as inviting. A slim woman was standing at the central breakfast bar with her back to him: long dark hair, black T-shirt, denim shorts and bare feet. Her hands were slipped inside two huge oven gloves which she was using to rest a baking tray on the black marble-effect counter.

It couldn’t be Laura. She was the right build, the right height but her legs were too tanned, her hair too different.

‘Pumpkin, say hello.’

The woman turned with a slitted smile at the ready. She was barely a woman, probably only in her late 
teens. Her features were Hispanic, her nose hooky but her young face still quite beautiful. Large hooped earrings looked as if they counter-balanced her head. ‘Hi,’ she said shyly and it appeared to be more than she was used to saying. She turned back to the counter.

‘She’s a little busy. Her name’s Perfecta. I don’t know how I’d survive without her.’ Bookwalter snaked a finger into the crook of her neck and her shoulder lifted and crushed it there.

She giggled. Unlikely as it was, she appeared to be Bookwalter’s girlfriend. Or perhaps he had a very intimate arrangement with his housekeeper. What was she, eighteen…nineteen?

‘Looks like she’s baked some bizcochitos in your honour. We didn’t eat out so we might be needing some of your pot roast.’ Bookwalter leant against her back so he could take one from the tray, his hefty body weight crushing her against the counter. Bookwalter turned, tossing the biscuit into his mouth before gesturing for Leo to follow him out. ‘You’ll stay for dinner, right? Come on, there’s somebody else you should meet.’

Bookwalter led Leo through the hallway and up a flight of stairs carpeted in the same yellow. Bookwalter puffed and panted in front of him and Leo briefly glanced back down the hallway to the waiting cab at the end of the drive before he followed.

His host waited for him at the top of the stairs and then stepped to one side as he reached the last stair. 
Leo found himself on a similarly carpeted landing and Bookwalter cautiously used his knuckles to knock one of the bedroom doors open.

‘Permission to enter,’ said a voice from within. Bookwalter cringed and squinted his eyes as if expecting his presence to be unwelcome and then relaxed his features as he pushed it wider. ‘Got a visitor for you.’

Bookwalter’s frame blocked Leo’s view through the doorway. From the angle of his head, Leo could see that whoever was being addressed seemed to be somewhere immediately inside the room. Bookwalter shuffled and shimmied his body forward and around the edge of the door to allow Leo to enter behind him. Inside the small room sat a man in front of a computer.

Man? Perhaps not quite. He had the same moustache as Bookwalter that curled down to the edge of his chin, but his was black. However, even though his facial hair suggested otherwise, he looked no older than sixteen. Dark hairs sprouted from his neck and threw a shadow over the bottom half of his face and only a small area around his eyes seemed without follicles. The hair on his head had been raked and braided into a black ponytail but that failed to rein in all the stray wiry hairs around it. Other than that he was the spitting image of Bookwalter although his paunch was even broader than his father’s. A large bag of tortilla chips lay beside his keyboard and beside that a bottle of 
Sprite that had been sucked inward. The room smelt of bubblegum and BO. ‘This is Toby, in-house designer of my website.’

‘Hey.’ Toby leant forward slightly and Leo grasped the moist fingers that had been extended to him. He maintained eye contact with Leo.

‘He’s never away from his post and monitors the traffic 24/7. He’s just updating the profiles pages which is why your visit is such good timing.’ Bookwalter drawled.

‘We’re giving the Laura page a major makeover. Soon she’s going to be more popular than the other UK victims.’ Toby’s voice sounded like it hadn’t quite broken and his higher pitched twang sounded like a speeded-up version of his father’s. Leo was aghast; he wasn’t sure which was more tragic: what Bookwalter did to earn money or the fact that he’d involved his son. It was time to leave, time to re-enter reality.

He suddenly wanted to be home, wanted to see Ashley and let her dissect his misguided visit. Leo looked around the room at the posters on the wall. At first he’d assumed they were the usual collage of rock idols and movie images but every one of them had an ecological conscience – images of petrified forests and dead seabirds with slogans of outrage underlining them.

Twenty-four/seven? Then
this
was the boy he’d been talking to – this teenager. No wonder Bookwalter had 
no time for the desalination protest – it was his son who had brought it into their dialogues. Suddenly Leo felt marooned from Laura and any last vestiges of leading a life that dignified her memory. 

What was Laura doing right now? It was a question he asked himself umpteen times a day. What was Laura doing at this precise moment? Sleeping, eating, crying, breathing? Was she imprisoned, was she in pain? Leo usually managed to stopper what lay beyond those possibilities – was she dead, was she buried, wrapped in bin liners, decomposed – but his desperate journey here had now removed it.

This signified the end of the slimmest of chances of ever finding Laura alive. It was why he’d resisted taking Bookwalter up on his offer for so long. However unlikely it seemed, Bookwalter had always been a last option. Now that had been extinguished as quickly as he’d suspected, Leo had to face up to doing what Ashley wanted him to do – to let go of Laura. 

Toby clicked his mouse and the Laura page Leo had visited so many times filled the monitor – her beautiful face stared out at them and Leo had never felt less worthy of her.

‘We’re overhauling the whole site,’ Bookwalter continued. ‘It’s a continual battle with the search engines so we want to beef up the content and intensify the detail on the click-through pages. That’s where you come in.’ Leo could smell Bookwalter’s acrid breath when he spoke. It was like stale parmesan.

Leo’s only thought was of leaving but, momentarily, he couldn’t remember how he’d got there.

‘Show him what he needs to see, Toby.’

Toby closed the window they were looking at and opened another that had been minimised in the task bar. A disturbing image filled the screen: a darkened room with somebody spotlit and tied to a chair. The figure’s shaved head was bowed but Leo could tell that the bound, emaciated body – dressed in an ill-fitting boiler suit – was female.

The room was silent except for Bookwalter’s nasal breathing. ‘And I’m expected to believe that’s my wife?’ Leo didn’t take his eyes off the monitor.

Neither Bookwalter nor Toby spoke.

The figure moved her right shoulder slightly and Leo looked at the time display below it. He didn’t need to look at his watch to know that it would coincide. Suddenly, from downstairs came the sound of voices. 
His cab driver had been as good as his word and it sounded like Perfecta was doing her best to placate him.

‘Looks like my time’s up, guys. Anything else to say before I put this into the hands of the police?’

Bookwalter briefly closed his eyes as if trying to keep his patience in check. ‘What do you see, Leo?’

‘A woman who could be anybody tied to a chair.’

‘Exactly. So what crime has been perpetrated here exactly?’

Leo still hadn’t moved his eyes from the screen.

‘What if I told you she’s willingly tied to that chair and, even if you didn’t believe that, do you think she’d really come to any harm when she’s currently being watched by 722 people.’

Leo found the counter at the bottom of the page.

‘Johnny!’ Perfecta obviously had her hands full with the cab driver but Leo’s attention darted back to the image.

‘Toby, help out downstairs.’

Toby grunted reluctantly while he unstuck himself from his leather swivel chair and squeezed past Leo.

‘There are a hell of a lot of worse things being done legally to people on the internet… Subscription services for members like ours are so that consenting adults can watch or participate. You’ve only got to do a quick search of the BDSM sites to get a flavour of what’s permissible…even within our own shores.’ Bookwalter 
reeled it off like a carefully rehearsed sales pitch. ‘I bet a lot of those people don’t care if it’s Laura or not. What pops people’s corn is their own business. Fact is, the law enforcement of this community is more than familiar with John Bookwalter and, however much it displeases me, it would take a hell of a lot more than this for them to ever perceive me as any kind of real threat.’

‘You really expect me to believe that this is Laura?’

‘Depends on how much you want her to be Laura. You must at least acknowledge it as a possibility, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘You think that’s the reason I’m here?’ Leo wondered if he really had another excuse. Whatever it was he’d fantasised about doing to Bookwalter when he met him in the flesh, however – his desire to punish him for living off Leo’s misery and the pain of the other victims – seemed unthinkable in this environment. ‘You know nothing of me or of my agenda. What exactly is yours?’

‘If I had on my Vacation Killer head I’d say I want to trap you like I did her. But with this business head on I’d say all I want is a little of your time. In exchange for that I guarantee I’ll prove to you whether she is or she isn’t Laura beyond a shadow of a doubt.’

‘I think we could prove that now.’

‘Not with my consent.’ Bookwalter clicked the window shut and Leo suddenly resisted the urge to laugh. He couldn’t see how Bookwalter could possibly juggle the reality of family life with his world of 
selective and lucrative delusion. Standing face-to-face it was virtually impossible to summon the rage he felt towards him for using Laura and the other victims to populate his commercial fantasy. ‘Sounds like there’s somebody downstairs who’s very insistent on seeing you, Leo.’

Leo left Bookwalter breathing over the computer and headed downstairs.

Toby and Perfecta were blocking the progress of the cab driver who was now halfway up the hallway.

‘Your three minutes is up. Tell these people what I’m doing here.’ Sweat was pouring from his face which was set determinedly.

‘Thanks for waiting but I think we’re OK…’

The cab driver’s shoulders sagged backwards but Toby and Perfecta’s hands remained against his chest. ‘You won’t be needing me to stay?’

‘No. Thank you.’

‘OK then…’ The cab driver remained where he was and raised his eyebrows.

‘Oh…’ Leo fumbled his wallet out of his jeans and pulled the cab fare plus the two hundred he owed and passed it through Toby and Perfecta.

The cab driver snatched the notes, turned on his heel and left Leo alone with the family.