“Jesus,” Bell said. “Why would he keep that from us?”

  “Because it doesn’t play nearly as well as a story about somebody trying to get him out of the race,” Molly said. “What he said about Laureltown was reprehensible. I’m sure even he knows that. He doesn’t want to drag it out into the open again, not when he’s in the middle of a campaign. So he plays the other angle instead, which makes him the good guy in the story. The heroic father standing up to the evil-doers.”

  “So you’re suggesting that his phone being off yesterday wasn’t an accident.”

  “Am I?”

  “You don’t have to,” Bell said. “I can connect my own dots. Did you tell the FBI what you just told me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I don’t like that guy Dugan.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir here,” Bell said.

  “Fact is, I wasn’t going to tell you either.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Maybe I don’t like Sam Jackson either.”

  “But you’re working for him,” Bell pointed out. “He’s your guy.”

  “I’m working for the Ford brothers,” she said flatly. “Sam Jackson is not my guy.”

  Bell drove to Pennsylvania that afternoon, to the town of East Stroudsburg. He knew that the FBI had already sent agents to the mall to check the phone for prints and to interview employees and anybody else who might have seen the woman. There was virtually no chance of raising a usable print from a public telephone handled daily by countless people and Bell knew that the woman they were after was too smart to leave hers anyway. She hadn’t left any prints in Greenfield or Elmira or Hershey. So far, she hadn’t left any sign at all.

  Things were slowly coming into focus for Bell after the conversation with Molly Esponda. He had watched Sam Jackson’s network interview the night before and he was left wondering just what he was seeing. Now he understood, or at least he was beginning to. He wondered why it had taken him so long, and in fact it bothered him that it had. He feared it was a sign of age; that his powers of deduction were slowing down. Not an encouraging thing for a cop to consider. Whatever the delay in his synapses, he now realized that Sam Jackson was determined not only to refrain from helping the investigation, but to outright hinder it if possible. There would be only one reason for that—he wanted to use the exposure to benefit his campaign. Molly had verified the fact. What her motives might be was another question altogether. There was something about her today that suggested she was being pulled in two directions at once. Bell could have asked her what was behind her decision to talk to him, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t tell him, just as he was certain that she was glad she did.

  Bell wasn’t traveling to Pennsylvania in search of fingerprints or DNA or security camera footage that didn’t exist. He wasn’t altogether sure why he was going. But it occurred to him that the stop in East Stroudsburg, and the phone call to Rachel Jackson, had been the first time the woman had gone off script. The calls from Greenfield and Elmira and Hershey had been planned, mapped out. It was no coincidence that the telephones were tucked away in places where the woman’s anonymity was all but guaranteed. But the mall in East Stroudsburg was different. The foyer where the pay phone was located was under video surveillance on the lookout for shoplifters. The camera was concealed in a lighting fixture; the woman wouldn’t have seen it. She had gotten lucky. If the FBI hadn’t had to wait for the warrant for Rachel Jackson’s server, they would have had the location yesterday, which meant they would have had the woman on the tape. She had serendipity in her favor. Bell doubted she would have known that the security tapes were erased nightly. She had been careless and gotten away with it.

  But why had she become careless? Up until that point, she’d been relentlessly careful, calling from safe pay phones in random towns––playing Keep Away. The call yesterday had been an impulse, Bell thought, a spur-of-the moment-decision. It was easy enough to guess what might have prompted it—the fact that Sam Jackson had his cellphone turned off when the woman tried to reach him earlier. Bell could imagine her frustration. It would have been natural to assume that there were two people in the world closest to the little girl. If one wouldn’t talk to her, she’d call the other. And that’s what she did.

  Bell’s mind kept going back to what Molly had told him, about the kidnappers wanting an apology for Sam Jackson’s Laureltown rant. What was the connection there? And who was to say there was one? People all across the country—the world even—were outraged by what Jackson had said. They didn’t necessarily need to be directly connected to Laureltown to want him to make amends.

  It was a two-hour drive to East Stroudsburg. When Bell arrived at the mall, he parked in the lot near the entrance to the Target store and sat there for a time. He could see the pay phones inside the entranceway. He imagined the woman there twenty-four hours earlier. The call had been quick, less than two minutes. Was she in the store before she called? Did she go inside afterward? Bell doubted that. She would have called and left. She might have been parked where Bell was parked right now. Not that he—or anybody else involved in the investigation—had any idea as to what she was driving.

  She’d been heading east after leaving Hershey though. Back to the hub, Bell surmised, wherever that was. If it was Bell, traveling those country roads, with a sudden impulse to make a phone call to the girl’s mother, he doubted he would stop at a shopping mall to do it. He’d find a phone in a rural store or gas station, someplace out of town, away from the public eye. But what if she had stopped at the mall for another reason and had a sudden urge to call when she noticed the phones? That could have been the case, especially if the call had been spur-of-the-moment, as Bell suspected it had. If so though, what would it matter? It didn’t tell Bell anything new.

  He went into the Target and asked for the manager. He was a young guy, beanpole thin, with a large Adam’s apple and stylish narrow glasses. He told Bell that he’d already spoken to the FBI, and that they had interviewed all of the employees who’d been working the previous afternoon. Nobody remembered seeing the woman who made the call. How could anyone remember seeing a woman they had no description for?

  Bell walked around the store, and then out into the mall. The place was older, and showed its years. Water stains on the ceiling, worn tiling on the floors. There were dollar stores and an Ace Hardware. A food court. A main entrance faced the road out front, with another bank of pay phones. If she stopped only to make the call, why hadn’t she made it from there?

  Bell went back to the Target store and found the manager again. The man was less polite than the first time.

  “I assume you have receipts for all of yesterday’s purchases?” Bell asked.

  “Well, it’s computerized,” the man said. “We don’t save paper receipts.”

  “But you have them?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bell checked the notes he’d taken earlier that day, when talking to Heyward. The woman had called Rachel Jackson at two minutes past three. “I want to see the transactions from yesterday afternoon,” he said. “Say, two o’clock to four.”

  “All of them?” the manager asked.

  “Why would I just want to see some of them? And print them out, if you don’t mind.”

  “It will take some time.”

  “Take it,” Bell told him. “I’m going to grab some lunch.”

  Bell ate a hamburger and fries in the food court and then sat there for a half hour, watching the people. At a table a few feet away three men, all in their seventies he would guess, were discussing a golf trip they were planning to Scotland. They were as excited as school children. Good old boys, they’d probably lived here their entire lives. They were small-town guys, Bell thought and, to a certain extent, this was becoming a small-town case. It may have started in New York City but it had definitely moved to the boonies.

  When Bell had gotten word earlier that the latest call had come from Hershey, he’d spent an hour at his computer, searching for information on the three towns the woman had called from, looking for a common denominator. All three had chamber of commerce websites, which offered considerable information. All had Lions Clubs, all had Rotaries. Horticultural societies, church bazaars, farmers markets, youth groups, baseball and soccer leagues. If there was a reason the woman had chosen those towns, it wasn’t evident to Bell. Maybe she had a personal connection to each—relatives or friends. Bell looked for a common manufacturing link for the three and came up empty. A shared cultural interest—a theater group or writers’ retreat—again nothing. He’d even looked at the three towns on Google Earth, hoping to find some distinguishing characteristic that might tell him something. Nothing there, nothing anywhere. In the end he concluded that maybe the woman had chosen the towns at random because that’s precisely what they were—random picks—and Bell was looking for something that didn’t exist.

  When he went back to the store, the manager had the receipts printed out. Bell sat in the Target lunchroom and went over them, again with the familiar feeling of not knowing what he was looking for but hoping to recognize it when he saw it.

  When he did see it, he told the manager he needed to talk to the cashier in question. She was a black woman, short and wide, with a bubbly manner.

  “I sort of remember her,” she said uncertainly.

  “What do you remember?”

  The woman looked up at the ceiling, as if there might be a clue printed on the tiles there. “Oh, she paid cash. Cuz, like, I remember I said nobody pays cash anymore. She’s the last one. Making a joke, you know.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “I kinda remember but not really. She had a hat on, I think. Like a baseball cap.”

  “What team?”

  The woman shook her head. “I don’t know the teams.”

  “Was she tall, short?”

  “Maybe kind of average.”

  “What was her hair like?”

  “I couldn’t really tell,” the cashier said. “Account of the hat and all.”

  “Anything else you can remember? Any tattoos or piercings? What she was wearing besides the hat?”

  The woman showed an expression of fierce concentration before finally shaking her head again. “I’m sorry. So many people go through, you know?”

  Bell nodded his understanding. “One more thing. When she left, did you see her use the pay phone on her way out?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “That’s okay,” Bell said. “I can.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Back in the city Bell drove to the Jackson house and found Rachel Jackson there alone. No Heyward with his laptop, no radio interviews in the den, no Dugan with his snotty comments. She let him in. She was looking more worn with each passing day, her hair hanging loosely, her eyes swollen. Bell doubted she was sleeping much. When she offered to make coffee, he accepted, more to give her something tangible to do than any need he had for caffeine.

  “What size clothing does your daughter wear?” he asked as she put the cup in front of him.

  “Size?” she repeated. “She’s a nine.”

  Bell pulled the photocopy of the receipt from his pocket. “We know that the call yesterday came from a Target store in Pennsylvania, at two minutes past three. Well, at exactly three o’clock a woman in that store bought clothes for a little girl. Size nine. She paid in cash.”

  Bell handed the slip over. Rachel grabbed it like it was a winning lottery ticket.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  Bell poured cream into his coffee. “I can’t sit here and tell you that the clothes were for Vanessa.”

  “But they were.”

  “I would say there’s a good chance.”

  Rachel sat down, still looking at the paper. Bell glanced around.

  “So—the whole lot of them packed up and headed for Wyoming?”

  “It’s the most important thing, isn’t it? I mean, this other matter, the fact that my daughter has been kidnapped, it’s just a minor annoyance. We can deal with it at some point down the line. First we need to send Sam to fucking Washington.”

  “So he crooks his finger and the FBI tags along?”

  “That’s how it went,” she said.

  Bell looked at his watch. Four-fifteen. “And no calls today? She’s called every day.”

  “Not that I’ve heard,” Rachel said. She indicated her own phone on the counter. “She hasn’t called me. Somebody down at the FBI is tapped into my phone server, just in case. They wanted to leave an agent with me but I said no. They can monitor it from there.”

  Bell drank the coffee, looking at the phone.

  “This means she’s looking after her,” Rachel said, meaning the receipt. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Kinda suggests that.”

  “Maybe they’re not bad people,” Rachel said, going with it now. “I mean, I’ve been assuming they were evil but maybe they’re not. If they’re looking after her. Maybe they—I don’t know. I wish I knew what they wanted. She said three things and hung up. Why would she do that?”

  Bell was caught now. He’d given his word to the campaign manager, Molly, that he wouldn’t reveal what she’d told him. He couldn’t go back on that, as much as he wanted to.

  “Whatever it is,” he said, “I think we can assume it’s about your husband. Not you.”

  Rachel nodded. Apparently she’d come to that conclusion on her own. “Still, I wish she would have told me.”

  Bell was still looking at the phone, trying to figure a way.

  “Maybe you could ask her,” he said.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Jo watched Sam Jackson’s performance on the Rivera show from the living room, the sound turned down so the little girl in the back room wouldn’t hear. She wondered if the girl was aware of what her father was. It seemed unlikely; little girls looked up to their fathers, didn’t they? Jo never had, but then her father had walked out of her life when she was six and moved to L.A. with his new wife. The fact was that she’d seen him rarely before he left, and almost never afterward.

  After the show, she and Henry sat on the porch out front, Jo drinking tea and Henry into his wine. The weather station was calling for rain and the wind was up from the west, the night sky black.

  “How are we going to convince him we have her?” Henry asked. “If those phone numbers didn’t do it—”

  “He knows we have her,” Jo replied.

  “Then what is he up to?”

  Jo remained silent, drinking her tea.

  “What are we going to do, Jo?” Henry persisted. “None of this has gone like it was supposed to. We can’t keep her forever. I mean, what are we doing here?”

  “Helping him get elected,” Jo said resignedly.

  “Well, that wasn’t the idea, was it?” Henry said.

  “No. That wasn’t the idea.”

  Henry sighed and had more wine. He could drink bottles of it, it seemed, and not show any effects other than getting sleepy. He was like that with his pot too, although Jo had noticed he’d refrained from getting high since the little girl had arrived, at least in close proximity to the house. A hell of a time for him to become a role model.

  “Do you call again tomorrow?”

  “No,” Jo said. “We have the market in Monticello. Too close to home. And I don’t know that we’re accomplishing anything anyway. We need a new plan, Henry. The problem here is the guy doesn’t care about his daughter. Who the hell would ever have imagined that?”

  “But the mother cares,” Henry said.

  “The mother doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He never told her our demands.”

  Henry paused in the act of taking a drink. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “I’m guessing because he knows she’ll meet them,” Jo said. “But I doubt she or anybody else is going to be able to talk him into apologizing to anybody for anything. Especially not when he’s running for office.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Jo got to her feet and looked out over the field of cabbages and acorn squash in front of the barn. “It leaves us in a bind, Henry. And I have no fucking clue how to get out of it.”

  FORTY-NINE

  The rain came during the night and continued all morning. Jo took a truckload of produce into the market stalls at Monticello, and set up under the awnings there. The storm continued, the wind slashing at the canvas overhead and tipping baskets over. By eleven o’clock, having not made a sale in almost an hour, she decided to pack up and head for home.

  When she got back to the farm, the rain hadn’t abated and the wind was still up. The creek had expanded, overflowing the pond and encroaching on the pasture field. The goats and the pony had taken shelter under the overhang of the shed and were standing in a row, watching the drizzle beyond. Jo parked the truck and climbed down and then heard Henry shouting at her from the house, where he was leaning out of the screen door. He was waving, beckoning her.

  When she went into the front room, the TV was on and Rachel Jackson was standing before a large bank of cameras, alongside a dark-haired man of about forty-five, the man wearing a suit and loosened tie, his hair unkempt. Somebody else, a woman, was talking over the footage.

  “…looks as if we’re just about ready to go here,” she was saying. “All that we know at this point is that the Jackson family has called this press conference. You’re looking at Rachel Jackson on the right and the man beside her, we are told, is Detective Derek Bell of the NYPD. It is unclear if Sam Jackson will be taking part in the press conference. As we have stated, this has been hastily arranged. Oh, here we go—”

  Rachel Jackson stepped to the microphone and began to read from a sheet of paper. “I have a statement. I was recently contacted by a woman who claimed to have knowledge of the whereabouts of my daughter. We spoke only briefly. I am here today to request that this woman call me back at the same number. I very much would like to talk to you again. Please call me.” She hesitated. “Please.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25