The Goliath Run, page 15
He looked at her darkly. “There are worse ambitions.”
“I suppose,” she said. “But to the matter at hand. You need to apologize. For once in your life.”
He reached for the glass. “I can’t.”
That was his answer. He’d arrived there seeking her counsel but he’d already gotten himself to a place where he was only going to listen to her if she told him what he wanted to hear. He’d tried and failed. They both had, she realized.
“I’m tired,” he said then. His eyes went to the hallway. The bedroom. “Why don’t we go and lay down?”
“Go ahead,” she told him. “I’m going for a run.”
THIRTY-SIX
After leaving the Red Lobster, Jo stayed off the turnpike and drove the back roads home. It was early evening, still daylight, when she got there. Henry wasn’t in the fields or the barn or the warehouse either when she backed up the truck to unload. As she lifted the rear door though, he came wandering out of the house. Jo gave him a look and began hauling the vegetables out of the truck. They had to refill hampers and bags and six-quart baskets for the next day, when she’d be heading for Hershey. She didn’t say anything until they were finished. Then she indicated the house.
“What were you doing?”
“Oh, just talking.” He flicked his hand toward the goats, pastured in the field behind the barn. “She can see the goats from her cell, and the pony too, and she was asking about them. She’s a smart kid, you know.”
“It’s not a cell, Henry.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not locked up.”
Jo started for the house. “What a pain in the ass.”
Henry was on her heels. “She’s not a pain in the ass.”
“I was talking about you, Henry.”
In the kitchen, Jo got a beer and a wedge of cheese from the fridge. She sat down at the table and drank the beer from the bottle and ate the cheese with some crackers. Henry remained on his feet.
“She was asking about you,” he said, his voice dropped to a whisper.
“Yeah?”
“Why you don’t like her.”
“Christ, Henry.”
“Think about it.” He came over to sit across from her now. “She’s already terrified. She thinks she’s going to be harmed and she’s convinced you hate her. How’s she supposed to feel?”
“She’s working you, you know that.”
“Kids that age don’t think that way.”
“When I was that age, I had you wrapped around my little finger,” Jo told him. “We all did.”
The old man gave her a slow look of reproach. “It’s not her fault she’s not Grace. You can’t hate the child for that.”
“I don’t hate her. I just don’t want to like her.”
“I’m surprised at you,” Henry said. “She’s a child. And someday you’ll have children of your own.”
“No,” Jo snapped. “That will never happen. This fucking world does not deserve children.”
Henry leaned in, his voice low. “This girl did nothing to you.”
“All right,” Jo sighed after a moment. She took a drink of beer and put a piece of cheese in her mouth as she walked down the hallway. When she unlocked the door and went into the room, the girl was sitting on the bed, her back to the headboard. She had a book in her lap, one with a giraffe named Gerald on the cover. Jo remembered it from years ago.
“Hey,” Jo said.
The girl looked at her and then back at the book.
“You doing okay?”
She put the book down. “I want to go home.”
“It’s going to be a couple days.”
“That’s what you said before.”
Jo walked over to look out the window. From there she could see the side wall of the old wooden barn, and the goat pasture in behind. The nannies were picking at the grass along the rail fence and the billy was standing on a little knoll in the center of the field. The pony was grazing alone, down toward the creek. From the window that was all that could be seen. Jo had chosen the room because the other buildings, particularly the warehouse where the produce was loaded and unloaded, were out of sight. She didn’t want the girl to identify any vehicles afterward. Specifically, she didn’t want to give her the chance to memorize any plate numbers. She’d seen the GMC van in Williamsburg, the rear of it anyway, but presumably she’d been too freaked out at the time to remember any details.
“Did you talk to my father?” the girl asked.
Jo didn’t turn. “Why do you think that?”
“The old man with the ponytail said you were going to talk to my father and then I’d be going home.”
The old man with the ponytail. At least Henry hadn’t given her his name and social security number. Not yet anyway. Jo kept her eyes on the goats in the field. She hoped the man with the ponytail had remembered to milk them today, preoccupied as he was with their boarder.
“I have talked to your father and we’re working things out.” Jo turned to her now. “You’re okay here. You have enough to eat and drink, right?”
“Did you ask my father for money?”
“You don’t need to know any of this.”
“Oh—because it doesn’t concern me?”
Jo was right about the kid working Henry. She knew it because now the kid was working her. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah, I’ll try not to worry about things,” the girl said. “What if my father won’t give you money?”
Jo started for the door. “I said not to worry about it, okay?” She glanced back and realized that the girl had been wearing the same clothes for three days. Shit. “What size are you?”
The girl fell silent, petulant that Jo had changed the subject.
“What size are you?”
“Nine.”
“Okay.”
“You could call my mother,” the girl said. “I can give you her number.”
Jo hesitated in the doorway. “I have her number.”
The next day was Hershey, Pennsylvania. Jo ran into a detour that hadn’t been there the previous week, when she’d scouted the site, and she got lost taking it. She arrived at the market just past eight o’clock. Everyone else was set up and selling. She found her stall and went to work assembling the tables, keeping her head down, trying to avoid undue attention to herself. She’d vended there a week earlier and had kept her own counsel, but not to the point of being rude. That, too, would have been conspicuous. After Hershey, she had one more town on the list. She had assumed, going in, that she wouldn’t need any more than four days to get things resolved.
Now she wasn’t sure.
THIRTY-SEVEN
When Molly arrived at Sam Jackson’s house by the park at ten the next morning, the place had already been transformed. The FBI was set up in a front room, with an intense and abrupt agent named Dugan running the show. There were computers and phones and various other electronic devices Molly couldn’t identify. When she introduced herself to Dugan he merely nodded and kept talking to one of the other agents, a pudgy guy in his shirtsleeves, sitting at a laptop.
Sam Jackson was in a room that appeared to be an oversized den, giving orders to a young guy with fuzzy blond hair, apparently some sort of video technician. There were two digital cameras mounted on tripods, trained on Sam’s desk from different angles and some lighting bounces on the wall behind them. The blond-haired man was doing something with microphones when Molly entered. Sam was behind the desk, stapling a banner to the bookshelves there. The banner read NO SURRENDER. No one bothered to introduce Molly to the guy fumbling with the mikes so she did it herself.
“Greg Chalmers,” he responded, shaking her hand quickly before going back to his work. His palm was sweaty.
“All right,” Sam said, stepping back to look at the banner. “We’re going to be ready to roll here shortly. We’ll use the land line for radio and press interviews. This video hook-up goes to the network feed so we can go live anywhere, anytime.”
Molly glanced about the room, the room in New York City from where Sam Jackson intended to run for Congress for the state of Wyoming. She wanted nothing to do with this. Fucking Bill Ford and his deep pockets, luring her in. She could have said no though, and knowing that made her weary to the bone.
“What have we got lined up?” Sam asked.
“What do we have lined up,” Molly said slowly, shaking herself from her malaise. “Well, everybody wants to talk to you. No surprise, you’re a public figure whose daughter has been kidnapped. Do they want to talk to you about your campaign? That’s another question.”
“We’ll talk about both,” Sam said. “That’s how it works. That’s the beauty of it.”
The beauty of it, Molly thought. The beauty of having your daughter abducted.
“What about The Press Box?” Sam asked.
“They turned us down. You know that.”
“That was before. This is human interest now. Does that prick Rutherford have any kids?”
“It’s a political show, Sam,” Molly reminded him.
“Try him again.”
“Okay.” Molly pointed her chin toward the FBI presence in the other room. “And all that?”
“They need to be close, so they say,” Sam said. “I’m sure as hell not going to spend my day at FBI headquarters so I told them to set up here. Let’s get started. Just so you know—I’m doing my old show again tonight.”
“You are?”
“I called there and offered an update on the kidnapping,” Sam said. “I need to get No Surrender out there.”
“They’re okay with that? It smacks of political bias.”
“Not when a man has lost his daughter to terrorists,” Sam told her.
“You like that word.”
“When the shoe fits,” Sam said. “Now what do we have first?”
Molly took her phone from her pocket and scrolled through the itinerary. “Talk radio from Casper. I have to send them your land line.”
“Let’s do it.”
Once the connection was made and Sam was talking to the radio host in Wyoming, Molly wandered back into the main room where she sat on the arm of a sofa and emailed a producer she knew from The Press Box. The reply came back in less than a minute. Tim Rutherford wasn’t interested in sitting down with Sam Jackson. Everybody knew that by now. Everybody but Sam Jackson.
Molly put her phone away and looked up to see a woman, standing just inside the open kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand, dressed in jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. She was around Molly’s age, tall and blonde, and she looked like shit standing there, glancing back and forth to all of the activity around her. Her hair was lank and her face puffy. Molly knew at once who she was. She walked over and introduced herself.
“Hi,” Rachel said. Nothing more. She was watching the FBI guys, huddled over their equipment.
“Quite a production here,” Molly said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter. I hope they find her soon.”
Rachel looked at her. Pale blue eyes rimmed with red. Something defiant behind the sadness. Molly waited for her to say something but she wouldn’t.
“We’ll try to stay out of your way,” Molly said. “I know this isn’t ideal, running the campaign from here. Apparently there was no other way.”
“There was one other way,” Rachel said.
Molly took a moment. “You mean he could have dropped out.”
“Yeah.”
“I suggested that.”
“My husband doesn’t take suggestions well. Why would he— when he’s always right?”
Molly wasn’t sure what to think of the woman. Given Sam Jackson’s pomposity, she’d been expecting somebody subservient or detached, maybe even dimwitted. This woman seemed angry and tired and hurting. But of course she was hurting.
“What do you think of No Surrender?” Molly asked.
Rachel exhaled, like a swimmer surfacing. “Do you have kids?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think of it?”
“I think,” Molly said slowly, “that I would try to find another way to address the situation. A more conciliatory tone, to begin with.”
Rachel turned to her. Until now, she’d been standing stiffly to the side, her body language armored against Molly. Against anybody. “Why are you working for him?”
“For money,” Molly said. “Bill Ford’s paying me to try to get him elected.”
“Whether you approve of his methods or not?”
“Nobody likes their job all the time,” Molly said. “That’s the nature of work. Politics is all about compromise. Nothing would ever get done otherwise.”
“So you’re a person who has learned to look the other way,” Rachel said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I suppose.”
“And you’re good at it?”
“We both are, I’m guessing.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Bell arrived at the Jackson house a little past noon. He’d been off the past two days and wasn’t scheduled to work until the weekend but after the phone call from Rachel Jackson he’d driven over. He wasn’t doing anything anyway, other than procrastinating. He had a gallon of stain by his back door, ready to refinish the deck outside. It had been sitting there all summer long, only moving when Bell tripped over it. After talking to Rachel he’d tried to get in touch with the FBI guy Dugan but it was obvious that the man was ignoring him. Bell left two messages, waited an hour for a return call that never came, and headed to the house.
The door was wide open when he got there so he walked in. Dugan, in the big open family area, gave him a look bordering somewhere between pointed disregard and pure contempt. Bell smiled at him and kept walking, toward the sound of Sam Jackson’s voice. The man was in a large study that had been turned into an ersatz TV studio. He was doing a phone interview, leaning back in a swivel chair behind a large wooden desk, hands clasped behind his head as he held forth. The phone was on speaker; the person on the other end was a frustrated and stammering woman, bent on trying to squeeze a word in here and there. There were two other people in the room—a tall woman with dark eyes and black hair, wearing boots and a long skirt, and a blond guy who was changing the lens in a video camera. The ongoing interview spared Bell any introductions. The guy ignored him while the dark-haired woman gave him a look of blatant appraisal. Bell, in jeans and a sweatshirt, suspected that he looked nothing like a cop. He smiled at her and went looking for Rachel Jackson.
She was in an expansive rock garden behind the house on a swing, staring at a brick wall at the back of the property. She was sitting ramrod straight, motionless, zoned out, and she obviously didn’t hear Bell as he came out onto the flagstone patio. He watched her for a moment; he had an urge to leave her there in her solitude. But then, she had called him. Which meant that the solitude wasn’t working for her.
“Hey,” he said.
She wasn’t startled. She turned her head toward him and nodded, as if agreeing to something. Maybe she had seen him all along and was waiting for him to speak. Her silence but his to break.
“What’s going on?”
She indicated an Adirondack chair, green with yellow flowers painted on the slats. The flowers looked as if they’d been done by a child. They probably had been, Bell realized.
“Do you want coffee or something?” she asked.
Bell shook his head as he walked over to sit down.
“Have you had lunch?”
“I’m good,” he told her. “You wanted to talk to me.”
She began to rub the fingers of one hand with the other, as if she had a sudden itch. She wore no rings today, Bell noticed. The first time he’d met her she’d had on a half-dozen, silver and turquoise. But no wedding band.
“I’m feeling kind of shut out,” she said. “I turn on the TV and Vanessa’s picture is everywhere. There’s all these theories about what happened to her. Who did it and why they did it. Where do they get their information?”
“I wouldn’t pay any attention to that if I were you,” Bell said. “The media isn’t any better-informed than the police. Less, in fact. They have a different agenda than we do. With them it’s all about ratings and so they speculate. We don’t.”
“I know how TV works,” Rachel said. “I’m all too familiar with it. I guess that’s why I called you. I was hoping you had something new.”
“If we did, I would have told you,” Bell said.
“What about this Driscoll guy?”
“We have nothing on him,” Bell said. “We have hair and fibers from the limo but nothing that matches anything in the DNA base. There were a lot of people in the car in the past month or so. Not just passengers. Other drivers, the mechanics who service it, car jockeys at the lot. We got nothing on Driscoll, or whatever his real name is.”
“Somebody must have him on a camera somewhere,” Rachel said. “What about the bar where he met McIlroy?”
“The bar has security cameras that haven’t worked in months. We’re still looking at different street videos, in and out of the city that day. But we’re talking thousands of cars and we don’t know what we’re even looking for. Needle in a haystack.”
“If I hear that phrase once more, I’m going to scream.”
Bell nodded. “We’ve actually picked up the limo on a couple of cameras but the locations haven’t helped us. One was near Vanessa’s school. Well, we already knew that. We have a few frames of similar limos where we can’t make out the plates. That doesn’t do us any good. A lot of limos in the city.”
“But she didn’t leave the city in the limo,” Rachel said.
“No,” Bell agreed. “Like I said, we don’t know what vehicle she left in. We were hoping to see the limo stopped somewhere. You know, meeting someone. The exchange.”
“How do you even know she left the city?”
“We don’t.”
“I mean,” Rachel said, considering it now for the first time, “the assumption was that she was around Greenfield. At first anyway. But then we got the call from Elmira. Maybe she’s still here in the city and they’re out there leading you guys on a wild goose chase. She might be a few blocks from here.”
