The Single Staircase (6 page)

“What?”

“You know what should be happening that isn’t?”

“What?”

“Heat. Rich white couple has a baby kidnapped under their noses. This thing is tailor-made for press coverage. Then the mayor and the chief start getting nervous and we get heat. You gotten any nervous calls from the mayor’s office about how the search is going?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Any reporters calling?”

“Not yet.”

“Bloggers? Attorneys? The chief? Channel Eight? CNN?”

“Owl?” Just the one word, this time. A question. Unspoken were the words, “Where are you going with this?”

“Why aren’t we getting heat, Raccoon? Because here’s why. Heat would have to start with two disconsolate parents who won’t leave the goddamn station and who are screaming at anything that looks like a camera. Two attractive rich white folks who have lost their only child. Unfortunately these two assholes are doing shots in a hotel bar.”

Raccoon nodded. “Yeah. That’s not a mark in their favor.”

Owl shook his head. Raccoon wasn’t understanding because he was too young, too inexperienced, too much still a SWAT cowboy who was used to taking orders. Shoot, don’t shoot. Go, stand down.

“Right now, you and I
want heat, Raccoon. We want it.”

Raccoon shook his head, still not getting it.

Owl said, “
If the papers don’t pick this up soon, the whole thing starts to die down. We’re going to lose the state bureau guys, we’re going to lose our officer support, we’re going to lose Jefferson and Mateo. Eventually, we’re going to get other cases coming to us. Cases with clues and real suspects that can actually be solved, missing people that need finding. We need Sophia to make the papers. We can’t just let her drift away.”

“I’m not going to let her drift away, Owl.”

“Me neither.”

“So you’re saying we need to create some heat.”

“
Daphne
and David aren’t going to do it.

“OK.”

Owl’s phone rang. A quiet chirp. He looked at it. He sighed. “It’s the leash.”

“You got to go?”

“Yeah. She’s wondering where I am.”

Raccoon said, “See you here tomorrow.”

“Unless they find her tonight.”

“OK.”

“Later.”

Owl walked out of the room, going home to his waiting wife.

Raccoon had no date. Nothing to go home to tonight. He looked at the white board. It read:
Monica Peterson.

Sweep. Find the body!

Find mom’s phone.

To that list, in his mind, Raccoon added this:
Was there a note?

Chap. 43

That night Owl dreamt that he could hear S
ophia crying in the open space.

Sure she was surrounded by coyotes, he rushed the darkness, and it whistled around him as he searched for a cry that seemed to move to the right and then the left.
He kept running, at times in his boots, at times barefoot, listening to the cries, trying to track them as they were carried by the night wind.

Chap. 44

Owl woke up at 3 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep. He tossed and turned and finally he could feel his sleeping wife starting to toss and turn too, sensing he was awake. He got up quietly, rolled out of bed, walked out of the bedroom, down
the narrow hall to the kitchen.

O
n the counter
there
were two bottles of wine. One white, one red. Intended as a gift for a barbecue they were supposed to go to at a friend’s. Or a neighbor’s?
Or h
er cousin
’s
? Owl couldn’t remember.

He looked at the bottles and they looked back at him.

Don’t.

He walked into his TV room.

In
one hand he had a case folder and in the other
there was a
photo
of a little baby. A baby with a bit of dark hair, a light green onesie, on her belly on a blanket, back arched, eyes opening, focusing on things for the very first time.

He looked down at this
photo
in his hand and tried to remember how it had gotten there.

Chap. 45

One hour earlier. Outside the Grey’s condo. Raccoon was wearing tactical pants and a long-sleeved, black t-shirt. He had a black canvas responder bag slung over one shoulder and rope crossed over the other.

From the front, his only way up was to the balcony outside the Grey’s family room. Inside which they had been sitting, obliviously watching TV. In theory.

Strike one. But Raccoon was fast and a kidnapper could be too. He walked across the lawn and leaped upwards, pulling himself onto the balcony. He rolled over the railing and landed low in a crouch. Low enough that the Greys might not have seen him, had they been sitting
there.

He pulled himself slowly up against the wall and then, with a foot on the rail, jumped for the ledge of Sophia’s window. He caught it, lifted one leg and hooked a toe on the narrow wooden slat. He pulled himself up, took a breath, and then jumped for the roof.

Three stories above the ground, dangling from a gutter.

An almost impossible position for anyone who wasn’t Raccoon, much less a kidnapper who planned on exiting holding a living infant. Strike two.

Once he was on the roof, Raccoon took his rope o
f
f his shoulder, looped it, and attached it to a metal pipe that seemed sturdy enough to
hold his weight and then some.
T
hen he slowly
lowered himself back down in the direction he’d just come until he hung outside Sophia’s window.

Her closed, locked window.

From the sidewalk, he looked like a black spider crawling across the face of the Grey’s townhome.

H
e
slipped
a wire from his responder bag and painstakingly pushed it between the window slats, twisted it until it hooked upwards and scraped against the latch. He pulled. Nothing. The wire slipped away. Slowly he pushed it in again, caught the latch and pulled. It went nowhere. He pulled again, more firmly this time.

Crack. The pressure was too much for the window glass. It splintered. Strike three.

Raccoon pulled himself back onto the roof.

He crawled on all fours across the roof and then rolled off into the night, lowering himself again, this time over the broad outer wall to the side of the Grey’s condo. There were no windows here, but there was a tiny grate w
here he could access the attic.

He got out his screwdriver and went to work. One screw, then a second. It was taking too long. Sooner or later, a neighbor would have walked by, out to get some fresh air or walk the dog, and see
n
a kidnapper clearly clinging t
o the side of the Grey’s condo.

Strike one, but Raccoon persisted.

Eventually he got the grate off. He put it in his bag and hoisted himself through the tiny hole, into the attic. Quietly he pulled himself through the insulation, across the wood slats. He opened the attic door, and dropped into the Grey’s third floor hallway. His bag shook, the contents in it shifting. Too noisy. The Greys would have heard. Strike two.

Raccoon headed down the hallway, paused in Sophia’s room and picked up a bear that was lying there. A pink teddy bear. A carefully selected gift for a baby who didn’t know the difference between a tedd
y bear and a dragon.

Holding the bear, Raccoon headed back for the attic. It took effort to get back into it one-handed, and once he was there, he sized up the grate and realized that he couldn’t possibly make through while holding the bear. It was too tight a fit. And he needed both hands.

He dropped back down into the dark hallway and descended the single staircase. Slowly. One step at a time. Holding the bear like a living being in his arms – a breathing, murmuring, theoretically still sleeping baby.

On the seventh step, he peered down into the living room. He could see the couch. It was facing directly at him. He thought and thought.

How could they have gotten her out of here?

He took the pink bear upstairs, imagined
Daphne
Grey walking by him to go to the nur
sery and finding an empty crib.

What’s the first thing she does?
She calls for David.

Together they search the upstairs and work their way down. The only doors from the house were in the garage and the front door. Assuming they worked their way to those last, making it out of the house past them would have been tricky
.

Almost impossible.

But if a kidnapper waited for them to get down to the first floor, waited 30 minutes or more, waited until after they’d lost their minds and weren’t thinking clearly, he could make it to the second floor balcony, hurdle it and as long as he didn’t roll an ankle on the grass, he’d be off into the night.

Raccoon thought back to the first time he’d been in the Grey house. He searched his brain and found the memory – unlocking the doors and walking out onto the balcony. He remembered the feel of the deadbolt handle on his fingertips and the warming morning sky greeting him
.

Strike three.

Chap. 46

Raccoon turned on the hallway light and
suddenly he was no longer part of the darkness. He
sat on the top step of the single staircase. The Grey’s condo was
quiet and still
all around him.

He sat there for a very long time, staring at the bear, staring down the staircase.
How do you kidnap a child from a locked
home
?

Raccoon
got up,
trudged back
into Sophia’s room,
placed the bear in her crib.

“Maybe someday you’ll be back here and you’ll need this,” he whispered. “But probably not.”

THURSDAY

Chap. 47

8:00 a.m
. at the station. Owl and Raccoon, both of them unshaven, tired eyes, slouching, older somehow.

“What did you do last night?”

“Nothing. You?”

“Nothing.”

They decided to go across the street to the coffeehouse.

Chap. 48

They sat across a small table, each c
lutching a large cup of coffee.

Around them, people were gassing up to go off to their careers in what? Something Owl could barely imagine. Advertising, maybe. Girls in jeans and blouses, girls that didn’t look any older than Owl’s children, were meeting, pulling out laptops, peering into screens. A young man came in and ordered coffees for an office of particular people. A triple this and a no-foam that.

Owl tried to stop himself from thinking, “These people have no idea how easily all this can be taken from them.” He tried not to imagine how each of them could be killed or
raped or robbed for no reason.

Instead, he tried to see them all as babies, happy little babies with deliriously happy eyes and no teeth. Babies who had managed to escape into the light and we
re getting to live their lives.

Babies never
grabbed by
the darkness.

Chap. 49

Raccoon could operate on no sleep if he had to. Cut down on activities requiring fine
motor skills and quick reactions
. Focus on one thing at a time. Take a drink of coffee, formulate a sentence, take another drink, say the sentence.

“You got a plan to turn the heat up?”

Owl nodded. “I do. We talk to Harrison, our
PIO
. Know him?”

“No.”

“We tell him we need a little press conference tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“Yep. That’ll give us enough time to let the mayor’s office know what’s going on. If we can get the mayor there, we’ll get another six or eight detectives.”

“What do we say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope. Harrison is a good man. We tell him we need the public’s help solving a major crime. We’ll get him details after we get through today.”

“And he’ll do the rest?”

“Most of it.
We need to try to build some buzz with the mayor. And w
e still need to go talk to
them. To
the Greys.”

Chap. 50

Jefferson had come through with a transcript of
Monica
’s call to David. Raccoon read it out loud as Owl drove:
Hi, David. It’s me.

Hi.

The police were here. They said, they said, they said that Sophia has been kidnapped.

She’s missing.

David…

It’s going to be OK.

Are you sure?

No.

Is
Daphne
OK? [Pause] David?

Yes, she’
s OK.

David?

Monica
, it’s just
. [Pause]
I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Will you call me soon?

Yes. Promise. I’ll let you know what happens.

OK.

[Pause]

I’ll call you,
Monica
.

OK.

[Pause]

Bye.

David. [Pause] OK. Goodbye.

Chap. 51

David Grey answered the door to the suite at the Marriott. He looked at Owl and Raccoon and said, “Good morning.”

“Is it?” Owl asked.

To that, David Grey said nothing.

Owl went on. “Nice room. Got a whole little office space in there, yeah?”

“It does.”

On the way to the Marriott, Raccoon and Owl had gone by yet another coffeeshop and bought four cups
of
coffee. Owl held one up. “We thought you might need some coffee, seeing as you went on a bender yesterday.”

David Grey didn’t know what to say. He took the coffee and took a drink. “Do, um, do we need to go back to the station again, detective?”

“Nope,” Owl said. “This time,
David,
we talk and you listen. Because I still think you killed your daughter. Sophia. That’s what I think. But on the very slight off-chance you didn’t, I have some good news.”

David Grey turned around so that Owl and Raccoon couldn’t see his face. He said, “Why don’t you come in, then?”

The suite was expansive. A desk with a swiveling chair. A doorway leading to a bedroom with a queen sized bed. And a red cloth couch, upon which curled
Daphne
Grey, wearing nothing but one of her husband’s dress shirts.

“The detectives brought us coffee.”

Daphne
smiled. Perhaps she was hungover. Maybe not. She seemed relaxed, even younger, her skin seemed softer somehow, her long pretty legs curled up under her. Raccoon handed her a cup and she said, “Thank you.”

“
Y
ou going to ask if we have found Sophia?”

Daphne nodded. “Have you?”

“No, we haven’t. We do have some good news, though. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to have a press conference to ask for help locating your daughter.”

Silence.

“And what do you think of that?”

“It’s great,” David said. And
Daphne
nodded.

Raccoon said, “Good, glad you feel that way. Because it’s not like there was a ransom note.”

Nothing. The Greys looked down, looked at their hands, looked at the table, looked at their coffee.

Raccoon continued. “A note. It’s not like a kidnapper took Sophia and is now holding her for ransom.”

David Grey spoke up. “Yes, of course a kidnapper took her. Out of her room. She’s missing.”

“But there has been no ransom demand? No phone call? No note?”

Silence and then, “No.”

Owl snorted. “Hm. You’ll both have to come, of course. To the press conference. We need you on camera.”

The Greys both nodded.

“Anything that will help,”
Daphne
said.

Owl and Raccoon turned to go. And then Owl turned back around.

“Hey
Daphne
, where’s your phone?”

“I lost it,” David Grey said and almost in unison
Daphne
Grey said the same thing. “I lost it.”

Owl and Raccoon looked at each other and then back at the Greys. The Greys were also looking at each other. “Who lost it?”

“I did,”
Daphne
Grey said. “I lost my phone.
On Monday. Or m
aybe on the way to
the
station or something? I’m not sure.”

“Tried to find it yet?”

“Oh, it’s probably time for a new one anyway,” she answered.

Chap. 52

Owl’s phone rang almost before he’d settled into his car seat. “Yes?”

“David Grey just sent another text message to that Indiana number. Wanted to let you know.”

“Copy that,” Owl said. He considered this for a minute and then told Raccoon. “Dad just texted his parents again.”

“He does that a lot.”

“Probably telling them about the press conference.”

“’Hey, mom. I’m gonna be on TV!’”

Owl nodded and started the car.

Chap. 53

It was lunchtime. And Owl and Raccoon knew a sandwich shop where the night patrolmen liked to go. High and tight tables. Italian sandwiches and chips. They had just sat down when Owl’s phone rang again. It was Mateo this time.

“Mateo, what do you have?”

“David Grey just got another call. New number. Short conversation. Grey just cut him off. Said, ‘I can’t talk right now. Things have changed.’”

“Interesting. Did you run down the number?”

“Main line of a business. David A. Davidson, attorney
-at-law
.”

“Attorney?”

“He’s a divorce attorney
, Owl
.”

“Huh. Well, what do you know?”

Chap. 54

To get to the offices of David A. Davidson, Owl and Raccoon had to
go
just past Black Door Advertising. Raccoon pointed at the turnoff to the building as they drove past.

Chap. 55

“How do you know David Grey?”

David A. Davidson wasn’t sure what to do or say. He mashed his hands together, put them in his pockets, put them on his desk. He looked out the window and then from Owl to Raccoon and back.

“I talked to him once.”

“In what capacity?”

Silence. Drumming fingers on a chair arm.

“When
you say you talked to him once, a
bout what?
What did you talk about?
”

Davidson
chewed his lip, looked at his desk, the glass desktop protector spreading out over the dark wood.

Owl pushed,
“About football? About girls?”

“
Oh,
I got it,” Raccoon
interrupted
. “About
Monica Peterson
. About how hot she is. You sat down and talked about how hot
Monica
Peterson
is.”

The name got no reaction.
D
avidson only said, “I’m not sure I’
m supposed to answer these questions?” And that itself was a question, as if Owl and Raccoon were his lawyers and they’d advise of him of his rights.

“Sure you are,” Raccoon said. “You and David are buddies, right? You were talking about fishing or something.”

“No,” Davidson said.

“So he was a client, then.”

“I can’t talk to you about clients.”

“You just did. You told us he was your client.”

“I didn’t.”

“Sure you did.”

Again with the silent treatment.
Davidson staring at a pen on his desk.

Owl looked at Raccoon and Raccoon shrugged.

Go for it.

Owl leaned across and almost whispered, “Mr. Davidson, David and
Daphne
Grey’s daughter has been murdered. We need your help.”

Davidson’s eyes flew up from his desk, but only for a minute. Finally he said, “I don’t think I can.”

Raccoon
raised a fist
, towering over the room, the desk, everything. “
You won’t help us find out who murdered a baby
?”

Davidson said, “Because I don’t know anything. He called my office once. We talked on the phone about, you know.”

“About what?”

“Divorce. About divorce. Then he had me set up an appointment for them. They never showed.”

“Them?”

Davidson shrugged.

“David and
Daphne
? Together?”

“Yes. I guess. The appointment was made for both of them. I never talked to her.”

“When?”

“Oh, two weeks ago. I don’t know anything.”

Chap. 56

Owl started the car.

“
Monica
?” Raccoon said.

Owl nodded. “Downtown this time. I’ll call it in, have a patrolman pick her up. We’ll see how she feels after a ride in the cage.”

Chap. 57

This time Raccoon sat in the interview room. With
Monica
. And in another world, a world where the most important person in Raccoon’s life wasn’t
always the one who was
missing, they were kissing.

Monica
was wearing the long black skirt and the tank top with flowers on the shoulder that she was wearing when the patrol car had showed up at Black Door A
dvertising. She looked so good.

For a second, they were just a tall girl and a taller boy, a boy trying to say the right things, and those things were things that would make her laugh and then fall in love.

Chap. 58

The thing Raccoon actually said was, “Were you sleeping with David Grey?”

“No.”

“Did you ever sleep with David Grey?”