The Goliath Run, page 22
He sat slumped at his desk, looking at the results of the license plate check on his computer screen. He knew what he had to do next. He had to drive to the farmers markets in Greenfield and Elmira and Hershey, to ask if anybody had seen a woman Bell couldn’t even describe.
While he was sitting there the captain walked in and headed for him.
“You working on Vanessa Jackson?”
“Yeah.”
“You can stop,” Gardner said.
Bell sat up. “They found her?”
“Hell, no,” Gardner said. “Sam Jackson wants you off the case. And the FBI’s backing him up.”
“Why?”
“The FBI says you’re a distraction,” Gardner said. “They claim the kidnappers don’t know who they’re dealing with or who they should contact. You’re muddying the water. Their words, not mine.”
“The FBI hasn’t found the water yet.”
Gardner hesitated. “There’s also been a suggestion that you’re too close to the wife. And that you’re a glory hound.”
“That it? Nobody’s saying I grabbed the kid myself?”
“Not to me, they’re not,” Gardner said. “But you’re out. It’s theirs now.”
Bell indicated the screen with the bogus plate number. “I might be onto to something here.”
“Give it to the feds,” Gardner said.
He walked into his office. A couple of minutes later, Bell followed him.
“I’m taking a week’s holidays.”
Gardner looked up. “Starting when?”
“Now.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
The little girl Vanessa was frightened of the hens at first and Jo had to show her how to shoo them away in order to get the eggs. They’d taken a walk out into the pasture field earlier. Vanessa had tried to pet the goats but the goats were having none of it, particularly the billy, who didn’t like people in general and definitely didn’t like to be touched by them. The pony—Grace’s pony—was of a more affable nature and Vanessa had patted her neck and run her hand over the stiff bristles of her mane.
They walked to the pond to look at the fat bullfrogs where they rested in the mud, and the turtles lined up on the fallen log where the creek flowed into the pond. The grass there was knee-deep and the cattails growing in the pond were five feet tall. At one point, Jo realized that Vanessa was on the opposite side of the pond from her. As Jo started walking toward her, the little girl gave her a look of indignation.
“I’m not going to run.”
“Good,” Jo told her.
“I know you can catch me.” The girl reached out to run her fingers across the fuzzy top of a cattail. “This is sort of like a field trip.”
“You go on field trips for school?” Jo asked.
“We went to the zoo in Washington last year. It was pretty awesome.”
“What was your favorite animal?”
The girl didn’t hesitate. “The pandas. They were amazing.”
“I’ve never seen a live panda,” Jo admitted.
“You should go.” Vanessa looked around at the farm and sighed. “My mom would like it here.”
Jo watched her a moment as she stood by the pond in her jeans and muddy runners. “Do you and your mom do lots of things together?”
“Not really. She’s busy all the time.”
“What does she do?”
“She always has meetings, with charities and stuff. We’ll probably do more things together when I get older.”
Jo didn’t know what to say to that. “She misses you,” she told the girl after a few false starts.
Now they were collecting eggs. Jo showed the girl the various places where the hens sneaked off to lay, beneath the old seed drill in the barn, or in a musty corner of the haymow. When they had all they could find, the two of them sat on a bench outside the brood house. The rooster strutted over to them, gave them a quick look and kept on going.
“That’s Buster,” the girl said. “He’s like an alarm clock.”
“You’ve been listening to Henry.” Jo let the name slip before she could stop it.
The girl caught it, of course. She looked up at Jo and smiled. She didn’t say anything.
That night Jo sat on the porch, drinking tea and listening to the farm. Henry came out, bottle in hand, and sat down. It was nearly ten o’clock, well past his bedtime. He poured wine into a jam jar and had a drink. Jo waited for him to ask but he didn’t say anything.
“Did she have her bath?” Jo asked.
“Yes.”
“She asleep?”
“She is.”
Jo took a drink of tea, grown cold. “I’ll call the mother tomorrow from Cooperstown. If they agree to the demands, we’ll let the girl go the next day.”
“And if they don’t?”
“We’ll let her go anyway. We can’t win, Henry. All we can do is make sure she doesn’t lose.” Jo rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. “I had it in my mind that she would be a spoiled brat. I actually thought she might be as reprehensible as her father. What is wrong with me that I would think that, Henry?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you. And if there was, it was only temporary.”
Jo shook her head. “You know, when we were gathering the eggs—do you know who I was thinking about?”
“You were thinking about Grace.”
“I wasn’t though,” Jo said. “I should have been thinking about Grace. But I was thinking about Susan. What she would say if she knew what we were doing.”
Henry watched her as he drank from the glass.
“And what she would say,” Jo continued, “is that Vanessa needs to be home with her mother. And she would cuss me out royally while she said it.”
“And what would you tell her?” Henry asked.
“I’d tell her she was right.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
The call came from a pay phone in Cooperstown in upstate New York. Molly had been in the Jackson house since eight that morning, trying to keep the momentum going in Wyoming. There were only so many TV and radio shows in the state, and she was dredging the river now, trying to get repeats. Sam was once again in his makeshift studio. He’d just finished a live hook-up with some TV show from Casper, a lowbudget current events program hosted by a man who’d gotten rich selling mining equipment to the coal industry and now was on television just because he wanted to be. Sam had spent the past five minutes informing him that—at the current rate of immigration—in ten years Muslims would outnumber Christians in the country. Sam claimed that Frank Barton opposed the necessary changes to immigration policy that would prevent that from happening. Neither claim was true but the host—who knew a little about marketing—was buying everything that Sam sent his way.
The call came in on Rachel’s phone. The FBI was on site, the usual crew. When the phone rang, Heyward opened the link to the server while Dugan yelled for Sam to come out of the den. Molly followed.
“Is your husband there?” Jo asked when Rachel answered. Her voice, coming from Heyward’s computer, was calm.
“Yes, he’s here,” Rachel said. She had been upstairs when the call came in, and hurried down as the phone was ringing. Molly watched Sam as he moved to sit at the island off the family room. He poured a cup of coffee.
“You got the package?” Jo asked.
“Yes,” Rachel said.
“So your husband now believes we have your daughter?”
Sam, spooning sugar into the coffee, smiled as if someone was telling an old joke, one he’d heard so many times it wasn’t funny anymore.
“Yes, he does,” Rachel said. “Absolutely.”
“Okay,” Jo continued. “You tell him this is what he’s going to do. He’s going to pay one million dollars to an offshore account. You’ll get the info when the money’s ready. And then he’s going to drive to Laureltown and he’s going to tell the parents of the children who were killed how wrong he was. He’s going to tell them it was not their fault that their babies were murdered. He’s going to ask them to forgive him. Then he’s going to go on TV and tell the country the same thing. I would very much like him to be sincere when he does it but I’ve come to the conclusion that he might not be capable of sincerity. But maybe he can fool the people who listen to him. He obviously is capable of that. Okay, you have that?”
“Yes,” Rachel said quickly. “Can I talk to Vanessa? Is she with you?”
“Get your husband to do what I say and you can talk to her in person,” Jo said. “I’ll call you in twenty-four hours.”
The line went dead. Dugan looked at Heyward.
“Cooperstown, New York,” Heyward said.
“We should have asked her for a memento or two from the Hall of Fame,” Sam said.
Molly stared at him in disbelief and then looked at Rachel, who was still holding the phone to her ear, as if trying to extend the contact by sheer will. She seemed not to have heard Sam’s remark. When she finally lowered the phone, she turned to him.
“Okay,” she said, her voice rising. “How do we set this up?”
“Set what up?” he asked.
“We only have twenty-four hours,” Rachel said. “We can go to Laureltown this afternoon. Somebody has to contact the parents, get them together. You can do the TV thing tonight, right? The network will give you air time.”
Sam smiled again, then glanced at Dugan, who was not looking at either of them. He was staring at the floor, like a man who’d stumbled into an embarrassing situation and wished he was someplace else.
“What the fuck are you smiling about?” Rachel demanded of Sam.
“Am I smiling?” he asked.
She turned to Dugan. “Your guys have to coordinate this. Somebody has to talk to the parents in Laureltown.” Her mind was in overdrive now. “What if they won’t agree to meet? But some of them will. We can only talk to the ones who will. They have to understand that, right? The kidnappers, I mean.”
Dugan nodded and glanced at Sam, who took a slow drink of coffee before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Nobody’s going to Laureltown,” he said. “You need to slow down, Rachel. We’re one step closer to finding these people. And when we do, we’ll get Vanessa back, and they’ll go to jail.”
Rachel approached him. “No. We give them what they want and we can have her back tomorrow. Detective Bell even said that. Give them what they want.”
“That scenario would require me to go on television and eat shit,” Sam said. “I’m in the middle of a political campaign that has positioned me as the one man in this country who doesn’t eat shit. Do you know what the term No Surrender means?”
“Do not tell me that, Sam,” Rachel said desperately. “We have to do this. We have to do this and then you can get back to campaigning. I’ll help. I’ll even go to Wyoming with you if you want. I’ll do anything you want me to do. But we have to do this. Please, Sam.”
Molly watched Rachel Jackson as she crumbled, there in her own house, in front of strangers, her hands shaking, her voice cracking. Molly turned away and walked out of the room, going back to the den, where she had a radio interview scheduled for two o’clock. From there she heard Sam Jackson answer his wife.
“No,” he said.
FIFTY-NINE
Bell, driving his twelve-year-old Ford Taurus, traveled nearly nine hundred miles over a day and a half and by the time he arrived back in New York he knew that the impulse tapping at his brain at the Williamsburg market wasn’t the static electricity in the air.
Over the course of thirty-six hours, he learned that there had been a woman selling produce out of a green cargo van at the Greenfield market the day that Sam Jackson had received the first call, and a woman doing the same at the markets in Elmira and Hershey on the days of the follow-up calls. All three markets were within a five-minute walk to the pay phones used by the caller, phones that were tucked away in inconspicuous places. Bell further learned that the woman had vended at each of the markets just once previously. Scouting missions, no doubt.
Bell now had his pattern, and he was partway to understanding the logic behind the woman’s actions. She was too smart to use a cellphone or a computer; he’d figured that out early on. She knew that a pay phone was traceable but wouldn’t care, as long as she wasn’t caught in the act, and by keeping the calls limited to a couple of minutes, that wasn’t a real concern. Placing the calls hundreds of miles apart made it impossible to anticipate where she would call from next.
However, in order to travel relatively undetected from town to town, she required a cover. The truck full of vegetables provided that. None of the markets Bell had visited required a plate number from their vendors, and the number the woman had written down at Williamsburg had proved to be a fake. In spite of that, Bell doubted the woman had been driving across three states with false license plates. It would have invited a cop to pull her over and it would have been particularly risky on that day in Williamsburg, the day that she had used the truck to transport the abducted girl out of the city. Because Bell was now convinced that that was how it had gone down. Why else would she have been at the market, five blocks away from the abandoned parking lot where the limo was found?
He got home at three in the morning and before he went to bed he sat down and made notes of all he had learned on his circuitous trip through Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania. He rose at nine and drank coffee while he tried to make sense of what he had written.
He had considerably more information than two days ago, but all that data merely raised more questions. For one—was the woman actually a farmer who decided on a whim to get into the kidnapping business? That seemed a stretch to Bell. It was more likely that she was somebody with an agenda who bought or leased a truck and then filled it with vegetables as part of the act. She couldn’t very well pose as an organic farmer without some produce to display. Then again, maybe she was a farmer first and a kidnapper second. Selling at small-town markets could have inspired the plan to travel about undetected. Who knew which came first? It was the chicken and the egg, an apt reference for someone posing as a farmer.
Bell had attempted to get a description of the woman and in that he had been given a lot of information, all of it useless. According to the people who claimed to have seen her, the woman driving the truck was either in her late twenties or mid-forties or early sixties. She was blonde or brunette or redheaded. She was dark, possibly African-American. She might have been Asian, or had a Swedish accent and she weighed somewhere between one hundred and three hundred pounds.
Sitting at his kitchen table with his coffee, Bell knew what he needed to do next. Now that he had a description of vehicle, he needed to go through all the available street videos from the day of the abduction to try to find it. And hopefully pick up a valid plate number. And he would have to do it while supposedly being on vacation, and without the blessing of Sam Jackson and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Or his own boss at the NYPD.
While he was considering the delicate nature of the task, his phone rang. He looked at the display and then answered. Rachel Jackson was on the line.
“Why are you calling me from Whitman’s Diner?” Bell asked.
“I can’t use my cell,” she said. “Unless I want the FBI listening.”
“And you don’t want the FBI listening?”
“Can you meet me?”
They met in the park a half-hour later. She was waiting for him, by the bandshell she’d mentioned. It was cool and damp and she was huddled in a blue windbreaker, a cap pulled low over her eyes. Bell joined her on the bench and listened while she told him about the phone call she’d received earlier, the call from the woman he’d been following, albeit a few days behind. Apparently she had called this time from Cooperstown. It was a pretty good bet that Cooperstown had a farmers market, and that today was market day. Not that it mattered, Bell knew, because the woman wasn’t in Cooperstown anymore.
When Rachel told him what the woman had asked for, Bell sat quietly for a long time, relieved that it was finally out in the open. He didn’t have to feign ignorance anymore.
“An apology,” he said then. “That’s what this is about?”
“Seems that way,” Rachel said. “More than the money. I always wondered about the money. A million dollars. Sam’s worth fifty times that, probably more. Why are they asking for peanuts?”
“You and I have different definitions of peanuts,” Bell said, “but I see what you mean.” He looked across the park. The place was full of people, in spite of the weather. There was a dozen or so guys playing touch football, teenagers it seemed, and a few had their shirts off. The foolishness of youth. After a moment he turned to Rachel. “Did the woman say she’s from Laureltown? Is she connected somehow to the shooting?”
“I thought about that,” Rachel said. “What if she’s one of the mothers? What if she took my kid because she lost her own? Maybe she has no intention of letting her go.”
“If that was the situation, she wouldn’t be contacting you at all,” Bell reminded her. “You said she promised she would let her go. Don’t you believe that?”
Rachel took a few seconds then nodded. “I do.”
“Why did you call me?”
“Because Sam won’t do it,” Rachel said. “He won’t apologize to those parents. He won’t even consider it. And he sure as hell is not going to go on TV to say he’s wrong.” She laughed, quickly and bitterly. “He’s the man who doesn’t surrender. Don’t you know that?”
