The Judas Child Page 18

  Sadie could do this; she could climb over that windowsill with no fear of the hard landing. In gym class, Sadie could fly.

  Gwen could not.

  Not in a million, zillion years could she lower her body out that window. The ground was farther away each time she looked at it with her mind’s eye. She was too much a coward even to peer at it through the glass pane one more time.

  The child edged along the wall and away from the window, listening to her own heart beating louder, faster, marking time at the speed of frenzy. Soon it would be light. She had to leave, but how? Gwen closed her eyes, and suddenly she was in free fall, dropping past all the dark windows, and the unforgiving ground was spinning, spiraling, rushing up to meet her.

  The child’s eyes snapped open, and she was staring at the chained hamper. It held less terror for her now. As she returned to this unsolved riddle, a calm settled over her, and she could think clearly again. She had used her birth date as the combination for her own lock, just as she had been instructed.

  But since when did her best friend ever follow instructions?

  What number did Sadie love the most? Thirteen? Not enough digits. Suppose she added the number 6 for Friday? Friday the 13th was a favorite movie title. But now this idea linked to another as she recalled the plot of a better loved film about a changeling demon.

  “And you shall know him by this mark,” she whispered, as she bent over the lock, moving the dial to the right, then left, and for the last digit, right again. The padlock came open in her hand with the mark of the beast, 666.

  How appropriate.

  At midnight, the boathouse was a swarm of activity. Village policemen and state troopers walked the grounds in close ranks, almost touching shoulders, their eyes trained on the earth. Beyond the glare of large floodlights on metal stalks, flashlight beams combed the grass at the water’s edge. Farther up the shore of the lake, another team was working over the rocky beach.

  Rouge stood on the wharf just outside the door. The old building had been searched days ago. But the troopers had been looking for two missing girls, not forensic evidence in the disturbance of dust. He made a note on the second broken lock, the one that belonged on the telephone box. He hadn’t noticed this in his first perusal of the building. Apparently it had also gone unnoticed by the person who had repaired the splintered door frame and cleaned up the damage of the broken exterior lock.

  Black lights and black dust were the tools used by the FBI technicians inside the boathouse. They were scrutinizing every pore of wood surface, and even opening old paint cans which had been undisturbed for years. One tech stood in the open doorway holding a shred of purple rayon by metal tweezers as he lowered it into an evidence bag.

  Buddy Sorrel and Arnie Pyle joined Rouge on the wharf.

  “Nice work—for a cop in training pants,” said Agent Pyle, surveying the crime scene.

  Sorrel clapped Rouge on the back. “Kendall, I think you found your niche. So what else did the kid tell you?”

  “He said there was a dog in there, and it didn’t belong to Gwen or Sadie. He never saw it—just heard it barking.”

  “Well, at least we know the bastard has a dog.” Captain Costello strolled toward them along the smooth wooden boards of the wharf. His eyes were on the plastic evidence bag Agent Pyle was holding. It contained a small electronic device. The plastic casing was smashed. “A pager. Expensive one, too. Is that a bloodstain?”

  “Probably,” said Pyle. “There’s no prints on it, but we think it might belong to our perp.”

  “It didn’t belong to either one of the kids,” said Sorrel. “The parents told me the girls never had pagers. Peter Hubble did have a transmitter sewn into his kid’s knapsack. Too bad Gwen didn’t have it with her when she was snatched.”

  Captain Costello held up a small address book with a wet and faded cloth cover. “A trooper found this on the rocks downshore. Looks like it’s been in the water for a while.” He handed it to Rouge. “It’s your crime scene, kid. What do you make of it?”

  Rouge stared at the tiny book’s purple cover. There was no doubt that it belonged to Sadie Green. He thumbed through the pages indexed by tabbed letters of the alphabet, and this was all the legible print to survive the water damage. Everything written on the pages was lost in smears of purple ink. “This backs up Ali Cray’s theory. Sadie wasn’t a mistake—the freak needed her to get to Gwen. He tried to force Sadie to call Gwen out, but the kid wouldn’t do it.”

  “How do you figure that?” Arnie Pyle was looking down at the address book, incredulous.

  “The H page is missing,” said Rouge. “You know Sadie wouldn’t tear it out. This was the one with her best friend’s phone number. Even if she knew the number better than her own, this was probably the most important page in her book. He ripped it out—the pervert. It fits with the broken lock on the phone box. He had to use this address book to get Gwen’s number. Sadie wouldn’t give it to him. I wonder if he killed her for that?”

  Of course he did.

  The other men stared at the little purple book, then turned their eyes away, not wanting to see it anymore, nor all the images that fastened themselves to it. The idea of the child standing up to this man was inconceivable, and the violence that must have followed was unthinkable. Yet no one ventured a contrary theory; they had all been struck dumb and sorry, a small troop of four armed men, mourners every one, standing in silent tribute to a ten-year-old girl who was most certainly dead.

  Ali Cray had been right about everything.

  Costello took the bag with the broken pager from Pyle. “I think we might’ve overlooked something.” He seemed to be weighing this bit of high technology in his right hand. “It’s just possible a security freak like Peter Hubble has a trap on his phone line.”

  “A wiretap?” Rouge thought he had misunderstood the word. “But didn’t you—”

  “No, a trap,” said Sorrel. “I asked about wiretaps first thing. Hubble said no, but I’m not sure I believe him.”

  Ah, but Sorrel believed no one.

  “Anyway,” said Costello, “a phone trap would be better than nothing. No conversation, but it would fix local calls, times and numbers.” He turned to Sorrel. “Buddy, check it out.”

  The men turned back to the shore at the sound of a woman’s angry voice. Marsha Hubble was trying to force her way past the state troopers on the periphery of the crime scene marked by yellow tape.

  Costello put one hand on Rouge’s shoulder. “You’re the family liaison. You wanna handle the lieutenant governor? I think she likes you.”

  Rouge was silent, only staring at the woman. She wore a flimsy blazer over her pajamas. Her feet were clad in wooden mules with no socks, no protection against the cold night air. People made such odd choices when they were terribly frightened.

  “No?” Costello was taking Rouge’s silence for reticence. He turned to his senior investigator. “Okay, Sorrel, you’re with me.”

  They walked up the wharf toward the shore. Rouge and Arnie Pyle trailed behind them. Gwen’s mother had broken the yellow tape, passing through it like a marathon runner, and now she bore down on Costello with ferocity, pointing one finger at him as though it were a gun. “I heard about the baseball game!” she yelled. “Did your boys have a good time tonight?”

  Costello put one hand on her arm. “If you’ll just come with—”

  “I’m not going anywhere!” Marsha Hubble shook off his hand. “I saw that damn ball game on the news. Everyone saw it. Where in hell do you bastards get off playing silly kid games while Gwen is still missing, and God only—”

  “And Sadie,” said the captain, ungently reminding her that there were two children missing. “It was the damn baseball game that led us to the crime scene, lady.”

  That closed her mouth for the moment. The captain spoke quickly, before she could make a recovery. “Ma’am, you wanted to take over all the public relations crap—fine. I don’t give a shit what the press thinks. And now tha
t I qualify for a pension, I don’t care what you think you can do to my career. That was your next line, wasn’t it? The threat?”

  Costello was smiling, but not in any kindly way. In the broad sweep of one hand, he included all the law enforcement officers on the grounds. “Every single one of these cops is working overtime. You think they might work better if you threaten their jobs too?”

  The lieutenant governor backed off a few steps, but Rouge didn’t read this as retreat. The lady’s eyes narrowed as she shifted the balance of her body; it was almost the dancing stall of a boxer. And now she rallied new anger in a sudden burst of energy for another round with Costello, the only enemy she could identify. “Somebody has to handle the press. You certainly don’t—”

  She fell silent as Costello held up the plastic bag containing the broken pager.

  “Mrs. Hubble, do you recognize this? It’s an odd brand, isn’t it? And very expensive.”

  “It’s not my daughter’s pager. Gwen’s has a brown leather case.”

  Costello turned to Sorrel. “Buddy?”

  Sorrel was shaking his head and flipping back through his notebook. “I talked to Peter Hubble the day the kid disappeared. I asked him—did the kid have a pager or a beeper? He said no.” Now Sorrel held out the notebook’s scrawled lines to Costello so he could see it in black and white.

  The captain waved the notebook away. “What about the other kid?”

  “Harry Green told me the same thing,” said Sorrel. “Sadie never had a pager or a beeper. And the kid’s mother was there when I talked to him. No pager.”

  “Sadie has one, too,” said Marsha Hubble, “with a black case like that one. I gave pagers to the kids so they could keep in touch when Peter wouldn’t let them play together. Peter was always putting Sadie on probation. It was—”

  Costello raised a hand to cut her off. “Any reason why you didn’t let us in on this?”

  “No one asked me. I wasn’t thinking—I’m sorry. I gave them the pagers last year. I paid the service a large deposit, so I haven’t even seen the first bill yet. I swear I just forgot—there was so much to do—”

  “Buddy, forget the phone trap and check out the pager service.” Costello’s voice had lost its edge when he turned back to the lieutenant governor. “Did anyone else have access—the pager codes, the service number? Maybe you wrote it down somewhere, in a Rolodex or an address book? Could one of your staff—”

  “No,” said Marsha Hubble. “It was just for the two of them. No one else had access.”

  Sorrel jotted a quick note and shrugged out of his topcoat. “So if Gwen got a printed message on the pager, she’d assume it was from Sadie. Mrs. Hubble, I think we should go over everything one more time. There might be a few other things you’ve forgotten.” And now he draped his coat around her shoulders. “Sometimes weeks go by before people remember things.” Sorrel removed his scarf and tied it about her neck with surprising gentleness. And it was this last small gesture, a little gallantry on a long cold night, that finally broke the woman.

  Marsha Hubble only mouthed the words of thanks. Wrapped in Sorrel’s coat, she seemed so much smaller now, making no protest when he put one massive arm around her shoulders and guided her back up the slope toward the parking lot. They had not gone far when she stopped. Sorrel’s hand dropped away as she turned quickly to stare at the boathouse strung with lights and yellow crime scene tape. Her mouth went slack, and Rouge knew she had finally put it all together: Gwen could not have been lured from home by a stranger with an adult voice. The little girl had been tricked by a line of electronic type on her pager—a secret gift from her mother. One white hand drifted up to the woman’s mouth.

  To stifle a scream?

  Sorrel put his arm around her again, tighter now, clearly supporting her weight as he all but carried her the rest of the way up the hill.

  Costello turned to Rouge. “I want you to hang around for a while. Check out the kid’s story about the lock on the boathouse door, and find out who cleaned up the mess.” The captain inclined his head toward the director, Eliot Caruthers, standing on the periphery of the crime scene. “Have another chat with that old bastard. He’s holding out on us.”

  The technician’s van was pulling away, and the troopers’ cars were heading back to the station house. All the evidence that could be collected had been bagged and tagged. And then the lights went out, one by one, all around the crime scene, as they were disconnected from their battery packs and loaded into a truck. Within twenty minutes, there was not even one uniformed officer to guard what they had left behind. All that marked the activity of the night’s work was the yellow tape rippling in the wind as it stretched from tree to tree, from boathouse to wharf post.

  And Mr. Caruthers had disappeared.

  “Rouge?”

  The voice came from the spot where he had parked the old tan Volvo, and now he made out the shadowy form of a small boy hiding behind it. “You should be in bed. It’s late.”

  “There was something I forgot to tell you.” David stood up straight to look around in all directions. Satisfied that they were alone, he came out from behind the car. “Mrs. Hofstra reminded me. She heard it too.”

  “Heard what?”

  “There was a gunshot. It was out on the lake, or maybe on the other side. I’m not sure. But it was days afterwards, so I didn’t think it meant anything.”

  “That’s fine, David. I’m glad you told me. Are you sure it was a gunshot?”

  “Mrs. Hofstra was sure. She thought it might be poachers in the woods again. I know she called Mr. Caruthers. He’ll know what it was. He told her he’d take care of it.”

  “Thanks. Now you go back to bed and get some sleep, all right?” He watched David’s retreat until the boy was safe home behind the door of Mary Hofstra’s cottage.

  He turned back to the main building and the single lighted window. The dark rotund shape of Eliot Caruthers was backlit by a bright lamp. The man lifted one hand in salute as Rouge walked across the lawn, keeping his eyes to the window until the director moved away from the light.

  Rouge was about to ring the bell beside the rear entrance, but then he tried the knob instead. The door was unlocked, and this irritated him, for he knew it was no oversight; his visit was clearly anticipated. Mr. Caruthers was expecting a report, as though school days had never ended.

  Well, this time, everything would be quite different.

  He crossed the lush red carpet of the lobby and walked up the familiar grand staircase and down the hall. The door to the director’s office was also open; he knew it would be. Mr. Caruthers was comfortably ensconced behind a desk in his own element of wood paneling, first-edition books and works of art, all the trappings of wealth and power. He was smiling warmly at his young visitor—his collaborator. In the shadows of a far corner, a bust of Voltaire bore a similar smile—arrogant, superior. Caruthers nodded toward the wooden chair before his desk, granting the young man permission to be seated.

  Rouge declined. He stood close to the desk, looking down at the director, wanting this advantage of height. “There was a break-in at the boathouse. You must have ordered the repair work on the door frame. Were you ever going to mention that?”

  “Actually, I only learned about the broken lock two days ago. It was hardly a secret. The groundskeeper—”

  “Tell me about the gunshot on the lake. David heard it, and so did Mrs. Hofstra. I have to wonder when you were going to tell me about that little detail.”

  “Not a related matter, Rouge. We’ve had trouble with poachers before. You know there are deer in these woods.”

  Rouge looked down at the empty chair beside him. He dragged it around to Eliot Caruthers’ side of the desk and sat down only inches from the old man’s chair. “I’ve got all night.”

  And now they engaged in an uncomfortable staring contest which threatened to escalate into a pissing contest, the time-honored method of men, boys and dogs to establish who was boss of the world. Aft
er ten seconds had elapsed, Mr. Caruthers only shrugged, but it was a surrender of sorts. He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a black plastic gun.

  “A bit clumsy, isn’t it, Rouge? Hardly a lethal weapon. I’m surprised the boys managed to break a window with it. Chief Croft didn’t even see fit to report the incident.”

  “Or maybe you asked him not to.”

  “It was only a prank of twelve-year-olds. So, I’m afraid this is a dead end for you.” Mr. Caruthers looked down at the gun in his hand. “I doubt that it makes a very loud noise, probably not the shot Mrs. Hofstra heard, but I assure you, this is the only gun I’m aware of. Talk to the village police chief and the medical examiner—they’ll tell you the same thing. Two little boys with a toy gun. Hardly a sinister event. However, when rumors get started in a small town—” He waved one hand in an expansive gesture that drew ugly pictures of the villagers storming the castle with flaming torches in hand.

  “Where did this event happen, and what was a medical examiner doing there?”

  “Just across the lake. An old house. The occupant had died some days before—in her sleep. Nothing sinister there either. So when the boys broke the window, they actually assisted the village police in finding the body. In fact, Dr. Chainy even thanked them for their help.”

  “How did the boys get across the lake? By canoe?”

  “Yes.”

  “The lock on the boathouse door was broken with a rock. But you already knew that. You saw the rock by the door, didn’t you, Mr. Caruthers?”

  “I can’t imagine what that has to do with your investigation. You know how boys are, just—”

  “Just boys playing games—with guns.” Rouge looked down at the piece of black plastic lying on the desk blotter.

  “Hardly a gun.” Mr. Caruthers was smiling again, as though he found this laughable. “A plaything made by two little boys in their free time.”

  “Right.” Rouge picked up the gun. It did look rather like a badly made toy, except for the barrel—too large for ordinary bullets, much less pellets. Only one shot had been heard on the lake, and the crude revolving chamber was made to hold two rounds. He looked at the heavy marble bust of Voltaire perched on its pedestal in the corner. “So the pellet should just bounce off most any surface, right?”