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With love to my wife, Lynn Harnett, who gave me the story, and to my cousin FBI Special Agent James McCarty, who could be Randall Shane
Thanks to Sandra Aitken and Peggy Ruggieri, two of the best gown-makers in the known universe, for helping Jane Garner establish her business.
PROLOGUE Kids Like Balloons
Ricky Lang dreams of his three children. Sometimes they are dressed in white cotton nightshirts emblazoned with cartoons from the Magic Kingdom. Goofy and Mickey and various ducks. Sometimes the children appear to be wearing garments made of light, glowing with an intensity that makes his eyes hurt. Sometimes the two girls float above the ground, grinning like mischievous angels while his son, four-year-old Tyler, tugs at his sisters as if they are wayward balloons. Making a game of pulling them down. Sleeping or waking, it does not matter, he dreams of the children. For instance at this very moment he’s wide-awake, lounging in the hot, hushed shade of his tiki hut, staring at the glistening blue water in his brand-new swimming pool. Sipping on a tall iced tea and wondering why the water looks like Ty-D-bowl, the same bright color, and all the while his three children stand in a row on the far side of the pool. Dressed in their bathing suits, of course. All three of them waiting for his signal. His permission to enter the water. Waiting so patiently. The children can’t be there, he knows that.
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“Myla!” he bellows. “Get out here!” Myla hurries out of the house. Slim brown legs, wears little white shorts low on her slender hips and a Victoria’s Secret cami top he purchased online. She’s barefoot, balancing a tray laden with sandwiches and salsa chips. They’ve been together for two months, more or less, and she wants to please him. Nothing pleases Ricky, but she keeps trying. “Hurry up, woman!” Myla is barely twenty, has little experience with powerful men. Her big eyes always register a little fear at the sound of his voice, which is just the way he likes it. “Never mind the food,” he says. “Hit the pool.” “Pool?” “Swim,” Ricky says. “In the water.” “We’re going to swim?” asks Myla, confused. A few minutes ago he was demanding lunch at ten in the morning, not exactly lunchtime. “Not me. You. Go change.” Myla carefully sets down the tray. Smiles at Ricky and then licks a tiny daub of mayonnaise from the side of her hand, delicately, like a cat tonguing its pretty paw. “What should I wear?” “Whatever,” Ricky says. “Use the cabana. Hurry.” Without a word, Myla hurries away, heading for the striped cabana. She looks pleased and hopeful, as if of the true belief that obeying his command, this particular command, will make him happy. Ricky stares at the plate of sandwiches. Normally he’s a man of vast appetites, but not this morning. The faintly salty odor of albacore tuna and finely chopped celery makes him feel slightly queasy. “Myla!”
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“Coming, Ricky!” A few minutes later she emerges from the cabana wearing the latest itsy-bitsy-teeny bikini. Juicy, that’s what it says on her butt, in big white letters. Ricky likes the idea that he gets to read her ass—that’s why he selected this particular item—but at the moment sex is the furthest thing from his mind. Normally he can’t be around Myla for ten minutes without getting the urge, but today he has other things rattling around inside his head. Myla executes a lithe pirouette, showing off her new swimsuit. “You like?” “Yeah, baby. Get in the pool. Swim.” Myla lowers herself to the edge of the swimming pool, gingerly, because the tiles are hot. She’s not much of a swimmer, and this is how she enters the pool, by slipping cautiously into the chemical-blue water, no splashing. Ricky likes to dive, belly flop, get things wet. Not Myla. Very careful girl. Ricky isn’t sure if he really likes careful, not for the long term, but for the moment she’ll do. “Go on,” he urges. “Swim.” She smiles, bright and nervous, and then begins to dogpaddle. Carefully, so as not to wet her hair. Ricky waits until she’s halfway through the first lap before checking to see if the children have gone. He sighs. The muscles in his shoulders and his gut unclench. “Like this, Ricky?” Myla calls from the pool. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Good.” It worked. Myla pushed his children back into the dream. Wherever dreams are supposed to go when you’re awake, that’s where the children went. Which is good, because seeing them there all in a row, ready to jump in the pool at his command, it made him want to scream.
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He picks up a triangle of sandwich, eats. Delicious. The sense of relief pervades every fiber of his body. He begins to think clearly, and among the thoughts is the nugget of a plan. A plan of action. Something that must be done. Something long overdue. After a while Myla calls out from the pool. “Ricky? Can I stop now, Ricky?” “Nah,” he says, not looking. “Keep swimming.”
Part I Island Girls
1. The Girl On The Crotch Rocket It all starts to go wrong one perfect, early summer evening on the Hempstead Turnpike. That’s when something pulls on the secret thread that holds my life together, and starts the great unraveling. I don’t know it at the time, of course. I think all is well, that I’m holding things together, as always. Okay, Kelly and I have been fighting a lot lately, but that’s what happens with teenagers, right? All I have to do is stick to my guns, keep on being an involved parent, paying attention to my willful daughter, and everything will come out fine. Right? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Normally I try to avoid the turnpike at peak traffic hours, but this time there’d been no choice. Mrs. Haley Tanner wanted a third fitting for the wedding party, and when Haley calls, you drop whatever and respond. She and her new husband are hosting her stepdaughter’s very lavish wedding— nine tents, two bands, three caterers—at their Oyster Bay estate, and she’s worried the bridesmaids may have put on a pound or two. Despite her obnoxious habit of summoning people at the very last possible moment, Haley is actually sort
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of likable, in a nervous, insecure, please-help-me way. So worried she’s going to do the wrong thing, make a mistake, and demonstrate to Stanley J. Tanner that he chose the wrong trophy wife. Turns out she’s his second trophy wife. Stanley, CEO of Tanner Holdings, ditched the original trophy wife not long after Haley served him broiled cashew halibut at Scalicious, a trendy little fish café in Montauk. At the time Haley was “staying with friends” while she waited tables, which meant she was paying two hundred a week to sleep on the floor. So nabbing Stanley Tanner was a very big deal. Haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Tanner in person myself— he seems to live in his Lear—but just looking at Haley, you know he’s a breast man. Which is fine. A man has to focus on something, right? Why not something that reminds him, however unconsciously, of his mother? As my friend Fern always says, what’s the harm? Anyhow, poor Haley was melting down about the gowns not fitting and had summoned all five bridesmaids. Turns out two of them had actually lost weight and the very slight alterations were, to everyone’s relief, no problem. An hour later I’m thinking, as traffic inches along, that for all that money I wouldn’t trade places with Haley Tanner. I’d rather work my butt off as a single mom with a mortgage. Don’t get me wrong, it’s gorgeous, the newest Tanner mansion, tastefully furnished—one of five homes they own, by the way—but Haley never seems to have an unnervous moment or a peaceful thought. And no children, not yet. Maybe never, unless Stanley gets DNA approval. Second trophy wives aren’t about kids, they’re about decorating. Nope, I’ll stay plain Jane Garner, Kelly’s mom, the wedding lady. The go-to woman for custom gowns. The one driv-
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ing the very nicely detailed, seven-year-old Mercedes station wagon. Classy but reasonably priced, if you let the first owner take the depreciation. Anyhow, I’m cool with being a working mom who balances her own checkbook, who is socking college money away for her daughter, and who thinks she has, at this precise moment, no regrets, no regrets at all. Lying to myself, of course. Lying big-time. I’ve been lying for sixteen years, not that I’m counting. Thing about living a lie, if you do it really well, you sort of forget you’re lying. I forgot. That’s when the crotch rocket went by, scudding dirt and pebbles in the brake-down lane. Actually beyond the brakedown lane, right up on the grass. I know it’s the type of sleek Japanese motorcycle called a “crotch rocket” because Kelly told me. Pointed one out as it shot by us in, where was it, somewhere around Greenwich? Greenwich or Westport, one of those towns. See how they bend low over the fuel tank, Mom? That’s to reduce air resistance. And how did my darling daughter know this, exactly? Everybody knows, Mom. That’s her answer lately. Everybody always knows but you, Mom. It’s not like I’m ancient. I’m thirty-four. Kelly thinks I’m thirty-four going on fifty or sixty. Which drives me nuts, but there it is. What catches my eye isn’t the motorcycle—motorcycles cut and weave through traffic all the time—it’s the girl on the back, barely hanging on. One hand clutching the waist of the slim-hipped driver, the other hand waving like she’s riding a bucking bronco in the rodeo, showing off her balance. The girl on the back has no helmet, which is against the law in
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the state of New York, and also very stupid and dangerous, but that seems to be the whole point of motorcycles, right? Something about the girl reminds me of Kelly. Similar stylish mop of short dark hair, frizzed by the wind. Similar petite, gymnast-type figure in tight, hip-hugging jeans. Kelly has jeans like that, but not the tattoo just above the cleft of her buttocks. What Kelly calls a “coin slot.” Not the tattoo, but the cleft, you know? Anyhow, Kelly doesn’t have a tattoo of angel wings spanning the small of her back, because her totally square mom has forbidden tattoos until the age of eighteen at least. And then the girl on the crotch rocket, the wild and crazy girl on the crotch rocket, the girl who is undoubtedly destined to die in some horrible wreck, or from tattoo-induced blood poisoning, that girl turns her pretty head and looks directly at me as the bike careens back onto the highway. Looking a bit startled actually, the girl on the bike. A bit surprised as she makes unintentional eye contact. I scream. Can’t help it, I open my astonished mouth and scream like a girl. It’s Kelly. My daughter Kelly. No doubt about it. 2. Sleep With The Poodles My friend Fern, who knows most of my secrets—not all, but most—she says the only way to win an argument with a teenage girl is to shoot her in the head. That’s just how Fern talks, like she’s related to the Sopranos, very tough in the mouth but soft in the heart. Even looks a little bit like that crazy sister on the show, the one who shot her boyfriend. Not that Fern’s ever shot anybody, certainly not her own daughter, Jessica, who finally went off to college upstate and is doing great. A sweet kid, basically, even though she and Fern can’t
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discuss the weather without arguing. Jess had her moments— I’m thinking specifically of an all-night prom party in Garden City—and at times managed to put Fern over the edge, into psycho-mom territory. You know, threatening to chain her daughter to the radiator, things like that. My favorite was her plan to put a special collar on Jess, the kind for invisible fences. She wants to go Goth, wear those stupid spikes around her neck? Fine! She can sleep with the poodles! Sleep with the poodles. That’s my Fern. Always funny, even when she’s anxious or angry. Even so, she thinks I’m too hard on Kelly, that I am, in her words, projecting. Fern watches a lot of Dr. Phil. You’re projecting your own teen time on Kelly, Fern says, your bad old days.You gotta wrap your brain around the idea she’s not the same as you. She’s her own person and this isn’t the 1980s, this is a whole new century out there. Yadda, yadda. I know. Really, I know. But still I worry. Every day kids get in really bad trouble in this world. They do stupid things with their stupid boyfriends and ruin their lives. They take drugs, wreck cars, have unprotected sex, fall from speeding motorcycles. They think they’ll live forever and throw away the miracle that gave them life. Kelly got her miracle at age nine—actually on her ninth birthday—when all her tests finally came back clear. No more chemo, no more radiation, no more needles in her spine. After four years of pure hell, she was cancer-free. Unlike some of the less fortunate kids in her clinic, kids who never came back for the remission parties. Empty pillows, Kelly called them, or fivers, because one out of five didn’t make it. Is this why she survived and others didn’t, so she can risk her life showing off on Hempstead Turnpike? Riding without a helmet? One-handed? As you might guess, we’ve argued about risk taking a few
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times. More than a few. Last time she actually had the nerve to tell me I was being ironic. Ironic. What did that have to do with snowboarding at night, or hitchhiking? What did ironic have to do with deliberately disobeying my orders? Was ironic what made her roll her eyes, treat me with such withering contempt? No, Mom, ironic isn’t what you are, it’s what you’re afraid of. Sixteen-year-old cancer survivor killed crossing the street. That’s ironic. Stopped me cold, that one. Of course she’s right. But I do feel that she’s been given a gift and should treat it reverently. But Kelly doesn’t do reverence. Not for herself, not for me, not even for the dead grandmother—my own semi-sainted mom—she used to worship as a kid. Reverence would be so uncool, and for a sixteen-year-old being uncool is way worse than death. Despite being trapped in traffic for another twenty unbearable minutes, I still manage to get home long before she does, and I’m in the kitchen, waiting. Boy, am I waiting. Arms crossed, feet tapping, blood pressure spiking. I’m so anxious and angry at her out-of-control behavior that I don’t even dare leave a message on her cell. Can’t trust myself not to wig out and say something that can’t be taken back, something that will drive her further away. I’m working over all of this stuff, rehearsing, ready to let loose with major mom artillery. As soon as she gets her skinny, tattooed butt inside the door, there will be massive inflictions of guilt. There will be bomb craters of guilt. It isn’t just the boy or the motorcycle or the tattoo. That, unfortunately, has become typical Kelly behavior in the past year or so. What really whacks me is that my daughter is morphing into someone I don’t know. Someone who has no
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respect for me, who all too often doesn’t even seem to like me very much. It’s scary when that happens. Scary enough to make me want to cry, mourning my beautiful little girl. The one who was so strong for me when she was ill. The one who looked up from her hospital bed—she was so sick that night, so sick!—and said, Don’t worry, Mommy, I’m not going to die. I checked with God and he said not to worry, I’ll be fine. And she was. From that day on Kelly got better. Little by little, day by day, every test showed she was going into remission. Eventually, on that marvelous ninth birthday, that wonderful wonderful birthday, all the blood work, all the scans showed her cancer-free. I thanked God, I thanked the doctors and the nurses, but mostly I thanked Kelly, because she’s the one who never gave up, who never let the disease take over. Anyhow, so that’s my state of mind. We live in the house in Valley Stream I inherited from my mom, the one she bought after she and my dad divorced. A divorce I always figured was partly my fault. All the stress I caused for them when I was Kelly’s age. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The mortgage happened when Mom needed money for a hospice. I told her—promised her—I wouldn’t put a mortgage on the house, that was her gift to me and Kelly, but what can you do? My dad, a New York state trooper, he used to have a saying when he was about to deal with something important: I’m loaded for bear. Well, I thought I was loaded for bear, or at least loaded for Kelly. But when she finally did come home what did her mother do? Mom burst into tears. Because Kelly is smiling that impish smile, the one she first learned moments after being born. That smile I hadn’t
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seen for a while, not directed at me. A smile that breaks my heart because I miss it so. “Mom? Why are you crying? Did something happen?” I’m shaking my head. Can’t get the words out so I point to my lips, and then to her. “You want to talk,” Kelly says. “Sure, yeah. You saw me on the bike. It was really dumb, me not wearing a helmet. I know that and I’m sorry. Seth was wearing his helmet, did you notice? He gave me a hard time, said it was so retarded, not wearing protection for your brainpan. Isn’t it weird he’d say ‘brainpan’? But that’s Seth. And the tattoo, Mom?” Kelly swings around, lifts her little midi-blouse. “It’s a fake. Body art. Got it at this place in Long Beach, on the boardwalk.” I wipe my eyes, blow my nose, very nearly speechless. “Oh, Kelly.” My daughter plunks herself on the stool next to me. With her amazing eyes and her amazing smile, she looks five going on twenty. “You’ve got to get over this worry thing, Mom. I’m okay. Really. The helmet? Won’t happen again.” “People get killed on motorcycles,” I respond, my voice husky. “Yeah, they do. They get killed by lightning, too. And by worrying themselves to death.” “Who’s Seth?” Kelly looks at her fingernails. “You’re going to ground me, right?” “Absolutely.” “Then I better go to my room,” she says, and flounces away, as if it’s fun to be grounded. As if being grounded was her idea. She stops on the stairway, looking back at me in the kitchen.
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“Don’t worry, okay?” she says. “There’s just totally no reason to worry about me.” But there is. Big-time. And, as it turns out, for a much bigger reason than I ever imagined. 3. Man Of Steel The thing about a turkey buzzard is that it looks really ugly perched on a branch or hopping around next to roadkill. Looks less like a bird, more like feathered hyena with hunched shoulders and a hooked nose. But let the ungainly critter soar and it becomes unspeakably beautiful, rising on big and glorious wings. What an amazing transformation, from a hideous bag of cackling bones to an elegant dark angel, circling in the noonday sun. Ricky Lang envies the buzzard. He’s sprawled on the trunk lid of his BMW 760i, the twelve-cylinder sedan, staring up into the blinding blue sky. What he wants, what he really and truly wants at this very moment is to be that buzzard. Riding the updraft without effort, just the slightest windripple of white feathers marking the edge of his great black wings. White feathers like daubs of ceremonial paint. Not as valuable or potent as eagle feathers, he’ll grant you that, but Ricky prefers the buzzard to the eagle because buzzards love to fly for the sake of flying. Oh, baby, how they love to soar on the blurry heat rising from the vast casino parking lot. They soar over the malls and highways, anywhere there’s an updraft. Of course buzzards keep their eyes peeled for food, for something newly dead, that’s what they do, how they survive. But it isn’t just hunger that motivates the birds. Ricky has seen scores of turkey buzzards far out into the Florida Bay, circling miles from shore.
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Soaring like that, over water, a buzzard takes its chances. If it has to rest in the water it will be unable to launch itself back into the air. Feathers soaked, it will drown. Yet still it soars in dangerous places. There’s only one explanation for such behavior. The big ugly bird soars in dangerous places because doing so makes it beautiful. When the heat on the trunk lid finally becomes unbearable, Ricky Lang heaves himself upright. Five feet ten inches of hard muscle, small, fierce brown eyes flecked with gold, and the rolling, pigeon-toed gait of a sailor. Not that he’s ever been to sea, not really. Airboats don’t count— an airboat is more like skidding a slick car around a soft, watery track. Got the slightly bowed legs from his dad. That and hands like ten-pound hammers. First time Ricky ever saw the movie Superman he had to talk back to the screen because white-bread Clark Kent wasn’t the Man of Steel, no way. Tito Lang was the Man of Steel, everybody knew that! Fists like steel, head like steel, nobody messed with Tito, back in the day. Ricky, five years old, assumed Superman was stealing from his father. Thirty years later, the Tito of today—that doesn’t bear thinking about, it makes his head hurt. More like the Man of Mush than the Man of Steel. Brain gone soft, pickled with swamp whiskey, and his trembling hands formed into weak arthritic claws that can’t manage his own zipper. Thinking about his dad, Ricky clenches his fists so hard that his ragged fingernails draw blood. Feels good, the pain, keeps him focused. Unlike his father, Ricky doesn’t drink swamp whiskey, or any form of alcohol. He gets drunk on other things, on liquors that form in his own brain.
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Fear of the dead, rage at the living. That’s what keeps his heart beating. Lately he’s learned to sip at the rage, make it last. For instance today he’s been enjoying a prolonged confrontation with casino security. Started at, what, eight in the morning, and it’s nearly one o’clock in the afternoon, so he’s had it going for five hours, on and off. A marvel of sustain. He loves the push and pull of it, the way he makes the security guards all jumpy and sweaty. Their eyes bugging when they see him approaching the main entrance. Hurried yaps into their handheld radios, looking for guidance, calling in the reinforcements. They’re afraid of him and that makes it sweet, because he can savor their fear and use it to organize his own thoughts. Being in charge of his own thoughts is very important to Ricky. That when he says jump, his thoughts say how high? Because his thoughts have been all over the place lately, bouncing around in his skull like speeding pinballs. Each bounce inside his head resonates all the way to the balls of his feet, and makes him feel like he can leap buildings in a single bound. As Ricky approaches the entrance, shrugging his big shoulders like a linebacker, a size-large dude in a lime-green blazer hurries out to intercept him. “Am I a bird or a plane?” he asks before the guard can speak. “You decide.” The guard glances nervously at a charter bus unloading senior citizens. All those soft, Q-tip heads bobbing slightly as they head for the bingo halls and the slot machines. “Sir, I told you, sir. You are not permitted access.” “Bird or a plane?” “Sir, you are not permitted access to the casino or the casino grounds. You must exit the parking lot.” Ricky grins, passes his hand through the thick bangs of his Moe Howard hair. “Dude? I own this parking lot.”
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“I’m sorry, sir.” The guard is blocking his way, but not yet willing to lay hands on him. “I own the casino,” Ricky reminds him. “You get that?” “I don’t know who actually owns the casino, sir. I only know that you are not permitted to enter the premises.” “That was my rule,” Ricky says, pretending to be reasonable. “I made the rule, I can break it.” The guard grimaces, eyes swiveling for the reinforcements that haven’t yet arrived. Nobody likes dealing with Ricky Lang, they’re slow-footing it. “Tribal council makes the rules, sir,” the guard responds rather plaintively. “Members of the tribe are not permitted in the casino.” Ricky doing a two-step dance with the man, trying to get an angle on the entrance. “I am the tribe,” Ricky says. “I’m the sachem, the chief, the boss. This casino exists because of me.” The guard reaches out, places a tentative hand on the center of Ricky’s chest. “Sir, please.” Ricky looks down at the hand, amazed, and becomes very still. “I know who you are, Mr. Lang,” says the guard, as if desperate for him to understand. “Tribal council says you can’t come in, you can’t come in.” Ricky selects one of the guard’s fingers, breaks it with a twitch of his fist. Before the man can fully react to the convulsion of pain, Ricky rolls him across the pavement, where he flops, moaning, at the feet of the seniors entering the casino. “Help!” a Q-tip screams, an elderly woman, or maybe it’s an old man, hard to tell when they get that age. “Indians!” Ricky laughs all the way back to his BMW. Indians, what a
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riot. The old lady probably thought she was about to be scalped. As sachem of the Nakosha, an elected office that made him both chief and high priest, he could have explained that traditional warriors did not take scalps. Never had. Scalps were taken by white soldiers, as souvenirs and to collect bounties. Nakosha warriors took noses—the nose was the seat of dignity—and threaded them into battle necklaces. Some warriors used knives to harvest the noses, others used their teeth. If it ever comes to that, Ricky decides he’ll go with the knife. 4. The Sacred Rights Of Momhood Okay, putting your ear to your daughter’s door doesn’t look good, I’ll admit it. But Kelly is in her room for about ten minutes—door locked, of course—when her latest ringtone starts blasting away. Something from Snow Patrol, who are actually sort of cute. Anyway, I hear the cell go off, my mom-antenna reminds me of the Seth problem. As in who-is-Seth-and-how-did-he-get-in-Kelly’s-life withoutme-ever-hearing-his-name, let alone any sort of description or explanation? Very clever way my daughter has of not answering a simple question: she volunteers for punishment and then disappears into her room, locking the door. The mysterious Seth, the young man with the motorcycle, that’s probably him on the phone right now. And since Kelly has refused to give me any details, it’s within my rights, the sacred rights of motherhood, to determine who this kid is— all that stuff about how the boy really wanted her to wear a helmet sounds bogus to me. Besides, he was the one driving like a lunatic, right? Try as I might, I can’t hear a thing. They must be whisper-
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ing to each other. What I want to know—is he in her class, is he older, what? All I caught was a glimpse, but come to think of it, the minimum age to legally carry a passenger in NewYork is seventeen. So he’s at least a year ahead of Kelly, maybe more. Finally I work up the courage and knock. “Kel?” I ask through the closed door. “We have to talk. Who is this boy? Does he go to your school? Do I know his parents?” After a slight delay she calls out, “It’s late, Mom.” I picture her hand cupped over the phone, her eyes rolling. “It’s nine o’clock,” I remind her. “Since when is that late?” “I’m really tired, Mom. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? I’ll tell you all about it, honest.” She’s so polite that it isn’t in me to argue. And once again she’s right—by morning I’ll be thinking much more clearly. Not only less freaked about the whole scene, but also less likely to be manipulated into, say, letting her self-select her punishment. Maybe grounded isn’t the right call. Maybe what Kelly needs is a few months volunteering at an E.R. Let her see what happens to kids who risk their lives on a dare, or for the fun of it. Get her pushing wheelchairs, changing drool cups, all that good stuff. I picture a light going off over her head, an epiphany, how fragile life is. Kelly giving me a big hug, saying, Mom, you were right! I have to be careful! The fantasies of parenthood. As Kelly herself would say, there’s minus no chance of that. Minus no chance—in teentalk, that’s less than zero, with a sneer. Most of the women I know watch Letterman or Leno or Conan before they drop off. Tuning in to the mainstream can be reassuring, I guess. It helps us relax, reminds us that we all have our troubles, we’re all capable of Stupid Human Tricks. I’m not averse to a little tube before bed, but the only way
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I can get my head ready for sleep is to make a list. Putting the next day in order helps me feel less anxious about what’s expected of me. 1. check fabrics, ECWW 2. place Tanner order 3. check on second fittings, Norbert & Spinelli weddings 4. call Tracy 5. call Fred 6. lunch McQ 7. dry cleaners 8. grocery ECWW is East Coast Wedding Wholesalers, where I purchase ninety percent of the fabrics for my clients. The satin, silk and lace people. The company is normally very reliable, but they’ve got a new guy running the shipping department and he’s been messing up my orders. I have to do something about that. Last year my little one-woman company purchased over two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fabrics from East Coast—far from their biggest account but not insignificant. Number two, Haley Tanner, I’ve mentioned already. Norbert and Spinelli are upcoming weddings, nine bridesmaids and two bridal gowns between them, both slightly behind schedule because everything is slightly behind—see the problems at East Coast. Number four on the list, Tracy Gilardi, came on to assist with fittings three years ago, but she turned out to be so competent I tend to let her do her own thing—where I get excitable she always remains calm, which can be very helpful in nervous-making situations like weddings. Fred is Fred Grossman, my accountant. I want
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to check on quarterly tax payments. Alex McQuarrie is one of the top wedding planners in the area; he throws me a bone now and then, sets me up with a high-budget client. Or not. Sometimes all he wants is a companion for lunch, a sympathetic ear. We’ll see. Dry cleaners and grocery, self-explanatory. Business and personal, all in order, every item checked off. Lights out, time for bed. Worrying always exhausts me. So I’m out cold moments after my head sinks into the pillow. The only dream that sticks is something about being at the beach. It’s night and I’m a kid, my daughter’s age, looking for something along the shore. Is it my keys? How will I get home if I can’t find my keys? I search and search, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand. And then my alarm sounds and it’s a new day. Seven o’clock, lots of things to do, not least of which is a very frank discussion with Kelly over breakfast. Or maybe I’ll wait until we’re in the car. She’s got a job at Macy’s for the summer—the cosmetics counter—and that will give us twenty minutes or so to discuss the new boyfriend, see if I can figure out how serious it is. Kitchen or car, one way or the other we’ll sort it out. In my bathrobe, hair still damp, I knock on Kelly’s door. Part of my job, playing rooster. The unlocked door swings open. “Kel? Rise and shine.” At first I can’t comprehend what I’m seeing. Her bed is already made, throw pillows in place. Not possible, not at this hour. “Kelly?” That’s when I see the note. A note prominently displayed on her desk, held down by her South Park pencil holder. A
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note written in her usual florid felt tip, abbreviated as if it were e-mail. Don’t worry, Mom, it’s not what u think. Something came up. Will call u 2morrow at high noon. Luv u tigers and tons(really!), K. She’s gone. Run away. 5. Somebody Special The way Roy Whittle figures, there’s white man crazy and there’s Indian crazy. Both are bad, but Indian crazy is worse ’cause in his opinion Indians are all crazy to begin with. Your average swamp injun is a few shy of a load for starters. Add liquor and syphilis and crazy ain’t far behind. “You figure Ricky’s lost it?” Roy asks his brother. Dug is driving, bumping their brand-new Dodge Ram over the rutted road that leads to the old airfield. He shoots a puzzled look at his brother. “Huh?” Dug not being one to jump into conversation without prodding. “Acting weird,” Roy says. “The big chief. Ricky Lang.” Dug shrugs. “Can’t say.” They’re fraternal twins, but it’s always seemed to Roy that he got all the words, the conversational ability and most of the brains. You can’t say Dug is simple, exactly, not if you don’t want him pounding you, but he’s not a man given to speaking much, or expressing opinions. Or other normal stuff like reading a little and planning ahead—Roy does that for the both of them.
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“Ricky pays us,” Dug points out, nodding to himself in satisfaction, having solved the question. “Yep, he does.” Roy sighs. Might as well be talking to himself. But he can’t let go of the idea that Ricky has been acting peculiar. For instance his recent Superman talk. Staring at Roy with his hard little eyes and saying he can see into his head, he’s got X-ray vision. Like he can read Roy’s mind. A scary thought indeed. When the big man first approached them, Roy thought it was strange, a Nakosha sachem wanting to hire a couple of local white boys. But when he’d explained the situation with his tribe, and what he intended to do about it, it sort of made sense that he needed outside help. Any reservations Roy had got erased by the offer of a new truck with a legal title, insurance paid for, the whole bit. Plus cash money in the very near future. But the last few days he had occasion to wonder if maybe Ricky wasn’t, when you got right down to it, batshit crazy. At the very least he was totally unpredictable, and that made him dangerous. Roy vows to be extra damn careful with Ricky Lang, truck or no truck, money or no money. They come around the last snaky turn in the old logging road. Ahead is the airfield, wide and clear. Not paved, because paving would draw too much attention, but scraped and leveled and hard-rolled, and suitable for everything but the very largest aircraft. Five thousand feet from end to end, straight as a string. A much improved version of the old, rutted clearing where, once upon a time, smugglers limped in, flying wheezy old DC-3 Dakotas loaded with bales of whatever, no runway lights to guide them other than a few pools of smoky kerosene set afire. Wild times that more or less ended before Roy and Dug were old enough to partici-
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pate. Unlike their poor pappy, who died in Raiford Correctional, basting in his own bitter juices. Don’t trust nobody, boys, least of all yur so-called frens. That was Pappy’s only song, for years before he died. How he was ratted by friends and associates and blood relatives. A long story, partly true, mostly bull. The sad fact was, the old man was the last in a long line of willing rats, with nobody left to rat out. Boys who started out jacking gators ended up rich, wrecking fifty-thousand-dollar Jaguars on backcountry roads for the sheer stupid fun of it, until they were spent out, broke, back in the cracker swamplands where they started. Roy, twenty-four years old and barely out of the same neck of the Everglades, has no intention of going back, not without a wad of cash in his pocket. Enough for him and Dug to live decent. And near as he can figure, Ricky Lang is the man to back, moneywise. That is, if he don’t go totally squirrel. “What we do?” Dug wants to know, gazing at the empty airfield. “Ricky wants us to wait,” Roy explains, patient as always. He’d started out life five minutes ahead, is still waiting for his brother to catch up. “Huh? Wait for what?” “Somebody’s coming,” Roy says. He opens the glove compartment, takes out his brand-new ten mil Auto Glock 20 with the fifteen-round magazine. “Somebody special.” 6. Worse Than Sex Fern has been my best friend since the first day of first grade. She sealed the deal by finding my shoes. Brand-new shoes strapped onto my pudgy little feet by my mother barely
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an hour before a group of marauding third-graders—big as invading Huns to me—knocked me down on the playground, pulled up my dress and threw my brand-new shoes into the woods behind the school. There must have been adults overseeing us, but I have no recollection of that. All I remember is being devastated. Destroyed. These were the shoes I’d insisted on when shopping for my new school outfits. Expensive, from the way my mom pursed her lips and looked worried, but I’d made a fuss and she’d given in. Now the precious shoes were gone. I couldn’t go into the school barefoot—mortal shame—and I couldn’t go home. I was lost. The new world of first grade had ended before it even began. I cried so hard I couldn’t see. And then this big girl came out of the fog of tears, a lovely girl three years older than me, with bright, beautiful, almond-shaped green eyes and wonderfully curly hair. She put her arm around my shoulders and helped me smooth down my dress and promised to find my shoes. She did find them, and helped me strap them on, and twenty-five years later whenever I get irritated with Fern, or find her wearisome, I think of the shoes, and that seals the deal all over again. So it’s Fern who gets the first distress call. “Kelly ran away,” I say, my voice breaking. “With a boy.” “Oh, Jane! No way! I have to sit down.” Fern has the wireless, carries it to her favorite chair, the soft leather recliner that belonged to her ex-husband. Poor Edgar. A sweet guy but no match for Fern, not in marriage, not in divorce, not in life. I know she’s using Edgar’s old chair because I recognize the sound of the squeaking springs as she settles in, pushes back, lifting her size-ten feet. “There,” she says. “Tell me everything.” I try, but naturally, Fern being Fern, she interrupts long be-
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fore everything gets told. “So you’re telling me Kelly stayed out all night and skipped out on her summer job? Welcome to the club, Jane.” “But she’s never—” “That you know of. Please. She’s sixteen. Everything but their name is a lie. Sometimes the name, too. I got these calls for Cheyenne? Frat boys looking for Cheyenne. Is that like a stripper name? Jessica was calling herself Cheyenne at some club, gave out her home number. Unbelievable. Jess has a tested IQ of one thirty-five, but at clubs it apparently drops to about sixty-five.” “So you’re telling me not to worry.” “No, no, no. Be very worried. Just don’t think you’re alone.” “But what if she’s having sex?” I ask plaintively. That gets a laugh out of Fern. Laughter so hearty it seems to warm the receiver on my phone. “If, Jane? Did you say if? Of course she’s having sex! Why else would she stay out all night with Smike?” “Seth. His name is Seth.” “He told Kelly his name is Seth and she told you. He could be Smike for all you know. Or Squeers. Or Snagsby. Probably something with an S. Like Sex.” Fern is riffing now, trying to make me laugh. I know what she’s doing, but I can’t help responding, and my heart unclenches. A big, tension-relieving sigh and anxiety begins to recede like the tide. It’s so much easier on the phone. If Fern was here I’d be worried she’d see the tears in my eyes and go all soft, and then we’d both be blubbering. “I hate it that they grow up,” I tell her, taking a deep breath. “No you don’t,” she responds. “Not so many years ago you
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were praying she’d get the chance to grow up. Your prayers were answered.” “True.” “The miracle kid. She’s a character. They broke the mold. What a personality she has! If the average person has a hundred watts, Kelly has five hundred, all of it beaming. One day she’ll make you proud, but right now all she wants to do is blow your mind. And maybe Smike’s little thingy.” “Fern! Please!” “His little mind, too.” Nobody enjoys her jokes better than Fern herself and that gets her laughing until she can barely breathe. After a while, after we’ve both enjoyed a few moments of silent communion, she goes, “So, you got a battle plan?” “Grounding doesn’t seem to mean much.” “Means nothing. Not unless you can lock ’em up and throw away the key. What you gotta do, you gotta scare some sense into her.” “And how do I do that?” “With Jess I used to grab my chest, make my face go all white. Make her think my heart was about to stop.” “You can do that, make your face go white?” “Years of practice scaring my own mother.” “I can’t fake a heart attack, Fern.” “A seizure then. That’s easier. All you gotta do is drool.” I’m crying now, but tears of laughter. “It’ll be okay,” Fern says, shifting to serious. “You’ll see. Kelly’s a good soul. She’ll know what to do, even if you don’t.” “You really think so?” “I really do. But just in case, can you fake a nosebleed?” I’m still smiling ten minutes later when I enter Kelly’s room. My intention is to rummage around, see if she left a
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contact number for Seth. No doubt it’s right there on her computer somewhere, but her computer is forbidden to me. The personal computer, Kelly has explained, is like a diary. Therefore no peeking, on pain of death. To which I agreed. Not the death part, of course, but the general idea. So in my mind her computer is off-limits until one second past noon. Until then I’ll stick to her address book, the handy little purse-size one I gave, assuming she hasn’t taken it with her. Can’t find the address book. What I do find, nestled way back in the drawer, very nearly gives me that seizure Fern was suggesting. A photo album I’ve never seen before. Quite new, very slick. Pictures of my daughter doing something really awful. Something worse than sex. Far, far worse. 7. When Sleepy Voices Make It Snow Once when Roy Whittle was a boy—just the one time— Pap took the whole family to a carnival in Belle Glade. Some kind of harvest jubilee thing, where they blessed the dirt and prayed for the sugarcane, or anyhow that’s how Pappy explained it, in the brief interval when he was sober and smiling. The thing about it was, the memory Roy savors, he and Dug got to pretty much run wild because Pappy was off doing whatever he did, and their momma went to the bingo, and the Whittle boys were left to their own devices. They didn’t have money for rides or cotton candy, so they took to sneaking into the sideshow tents. Crawling under the heavy canvas, flat on their bellies, the smell of wet grass in their faces. Saw Howard Huge, the blubbery fat man, big as a whale and sitting on a scale that proved he weighed a thousand pounds. Saw a boy using a hammer to drive big
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spikes up his nose, which Dug thought was funny—it was a rare thing, hearing his brother laugh out loud—and a skinny old woman with really disgusting scaly skin calling herself the Real Fiji Mermaid. What Roy remembers best though, is getting hypnotized. This man in a shiny black suit and western string tie, the Amazing Mizmar, had the ability to control minds not his own. Picking folks out of the little audience for his famous experiment in mass hypnosis, he’d pointed out Dug to his pretty assistant, but Dug wouldn’t have none of it. He wasn’t one for talking to strangers, or drawing attention. So Roy took his place up on the stage with the other victims, all of them looking pretty sheepish, and then the Amazing Mizmar produced this truly amazing device, a glittery little ball on the end of a wand. He clicked the wand and the glittery ball shot pulses of light. Alluring, rhythmic pulses that blended in with the Amazing Mizmar’s sleepy voice, urging Roy to stare at the wand and feel the light and then to close his eyes and still see the light through his eyelids, and in less than a minute Roy was really and truly hypnotized. It was like being awake but sleeping somehow, frozen in a half-dream, in-between state, and it felt good. Felt right somehow. When the voice suggested it was snowing, Roy looked around, delighted—he’d never seen snow—and then set about dusting the big wet flakes from his shoulders. The laughter of the crowd was like the sound of flowing water or the crying of distant gulls, and when the voice told him to wake up at the sound—a sharp hand clap—he tried resisting. Wanted to stay in the between world, where sleepy voices made it snow. Roy still has his “between” moments and this is one of them. Sitting in the air-conditioned cab of their new Dodge Ram, Dug nods off as they wait, and Roy studies the shimmer-
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ing waves of heat that rise from the white runway. Makes the air look like pulsing, transparent jelly. With that and the regular sound of Dug breathing heavy through his nose, Roy can almost hear the drone of the Amazing Mizmar’s voice, he can almost see through the heat-shimmered air into some other place. Almost but not quite, because Ricky Lang pulls him back into the big bad world. Yanks open the door and pokes Roy with an index finger that feels like a warm steel rod in the ribs. “Wake up,” says Ricky. “I wasn’t sleeping,” says Roy. “I’m keeping watch.” Ricky, studying him from behind his mirrored sunglasses. Nodding to himself. “Uh-huh. Whatever. What you watching for, Roy?” “Like you said. A plane.” Ricky’s face untightens, and he smiles with just his lips. “Good. The specific aircraft we’re expecting, that would be a Beechcraft King Air 350. Twin turboprops. Color, green and silver. Tail number ends in seven, my lucky number.” “Yes, sir,” says Roy. He’s tried nudging Dug, but Dug is deeply asleep, and he’s worried about how it looks, his brother snoozing while the boss is giving instructions. “Leave him be,” Ricky suggests. “Don’t matter if he sleeps through the end of the world. This is on you, not your retarded brother.” “Dug ain’t retarded.” “Whatever’s wrong with him, that’s not my concern. You got the Glock?” “Yes, sir.” “And you know how to fire it? How to get the safety off, rack a bullet into the chamber, all that?” Roy nods. He’s pretty sure he knows all that.
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“Good,” says Ricky. “Then you know how to leave the safety on, how not to fire it.” “What’re you saying?” Roy asks. “I’m saying the gun is for show. Don’t shoot nobody is what I’m saying.” “Okay,” says Roy. “I won’t.” “Good. Little while, the aircraft will circle the field. It will land from the east, over there,” Ricky says, indicating where the long runway blends into the low scrub pine. “It will taxi to us. First thing you do, when the engines shut down, you come around from behind and put the chocks under the wheels. Think you can do that?” “I guess.” “Make sure you come at it from the back of the plane, behind the wing, so you don’t get your fool head cut off by the props.” “Okay.” Roy files it away, the propellers are dangerous, watch out for the props. “You just follow my lead,” Ricky says. “Wheels chocked, okay? Next, we get the passengers out of the aircraft. There’s a little door unfolds in the tail, that’s where they’ll exit. Don’t show the gun till their feet’re on the ground.” “How many passengers?” Roy asks, just to show that he’s always thinking. “One or two,” Ricky says, indifferent to the question. “Whatever, you just hold the Glock on ’em. Don’t say nothing, just look like you mean it. Don’t let ’em go back in the plane but don’t shoot ’em. I’m doing all the shooting.” Roy follows Ricky to his BMW, parked nearby. Dirt adheres to the lower panels, fouling the hubs, probably messing up the brakes, too. Waste of a good car, Roy thinks, not
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meant for the backcountry. And then Ricky Lang, his scary new boss, Ricky the crazy damn injun who is going to change Roy’s life, he pops open the BMW trunk, produces an oversize, odd-looking rifle. Almost a crossbow look to it, fitted out with some sort of dartlike powerhead. “What’s that?” Roy wants to know. “Animal tranquilizers,” Ricky explains. Showing his white teeth in a killer grin. “Works on people, too.” 8. Jumping Into The Bare Blue Sky There are some things your eyes refuse to see. Sights unimaginable, or so out of context your brain can’t make sense of them. That’s how it is with Kelly’s secret photo album. I’m looking right at the pictures and still it doesn’t make any sense. What would my daughter be doing on a runway, near a small airplane? Why is she grinning so mischievously? What is she holding up to the camera, some sort of backpack? I know what it is but find it hard to even think the word, let alone speak it aloud. Parachute. Must be a joke. She’s kidding around. Like those old trick photos on Coney Island, where you stick your head through a hole in the canvas and pretend to be a cowboy on a painted horse. Like that. More photos. Kelly climbing into the little airplane, wearing a baggy jumpsuit and what looks like a crash helmet. Kelly crouching inside the plane, giving a thumbs-up. Kelly buddied-up with a handsome pilot, a young man with dark, soulful eyes, gorgeous hair and white, white teeth. I didn’t really get a good look at the guy on the motorcycle, but something about the way this young man holds himself erect,
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good posture even sitting down, something makes me think this might be Seth. If so, he’s way too old for a girl of sixteen. Old enough to be a pilot—how old is that? Has to be at least twenty-one, right? Or is it younger? Hard to say—they both look so pleased with themselves, and happiness makes you look younger. Whatever his age, no way is he in high school with my daughter. He’s not a school kid. No droopy drawers and skateboards for him. He’s into airplanes, motorcycles, highspeed machines. Have him arrested, that’s my first dark impulse. Send this handsome, grinning man to jail. How dare he take my daughter up in a small plane without my permission? How could he let her jump into the bare blue sky. What was he thinking? Because I know what comes next, even before I flip the page. A shot of Kelly waving bye-bye from the open door. Pale sky all around her. A wobbly, slightly blurred shot of an open parachute, a slim figure dangling beneath it. Then the reunion on the ground, with Kelly looking triumphant as she folds up her colorful parachute. A parachute that looks about as substantial as the silk scarves displayed next to her counter at Macy’s. It feels like I’ve been kicked by a mule. At the same time, in some weird way, everything has gone numb. How could I have been so stupid, not to have had an inkling of what was going on with this boy? Never knew he existed until yesterday, and yet he and my daughter have, obviously, been executing a series of death-defying stunts. No doubt there’s more going on than motorcycles and parachute jumps. Suddenly, whether or not Kelly has decided to have sex is a lot less important than the fact that she’s risking her life to impress an older, thrill-seeking boyfriend. Save that hogwash
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about skydiving being as safe as going to the supermarket. If my purse doesn’t open, I don’t end up embedded in the concrete, okay? When I make a mistake parallel parking, do I drift into the high-tension wires? No. Skydiving is about certain death being averted at the last possible moment, that’s what makes it exciting. I may be a stick-in-the-mud, the type who always fastens her seat belt, but I know that much. When Kelly calls with whatever lame excuse she’s cooked up, what should I do? What can I say that won’t make it worse? Fern’s idea of chaining her to the radiator is starting to sound reasonable. I’m at a complete loss here, but whatever I decide to do, it means clearing my calendar for today. No way can I meet with clients, or deal with Alex over lunch. First call is to Alex. Unfortunately, I get him, not the machine. “Janey doll,” he says, chipper as ever. “I have you down for Cholo’s at one.” “I’ve got to cancel,” I tell him. “My daughter.” “The divine Miss Kelly? Is she okay?” Just like that I spill the beans. Everything, more or less. Alex makes all the usual sympathetic noises, but he sounds slightly impatient. “So your daughter has a boyfriend, Jane. It’s not the end of the world.” “She ran away! She’s jumping out of airplanes!” “She left a note,” he reminds me. “She’ll call. And by the way, more people get struck by lightning than die while skydiving.” “She’s a child!” “No,” Alex says firmly. “Kelly is no longer a child.” I could strangle him. How dare he? “She’s a totally amazing woman,” Alex concludes. “Very much like you.”
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It’s a great relief when my accountant doesn’t pick up and I’m able to leave a message about the quarterlies. Ditto for my contact person at East Coast Wedding Wholesalers, imploring them to put a trace on the Norbert and Spinelli orders. Both calls seem to take a tremendous effort on my part, as if merely thinking about work is exhausting. Luckily Tracy has her schedule and can take care of herself, workwise, because I can’t bear the thought of another phone call. What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel so hollow and shaky? Food. Haven’t eaten since I got up and discovered Kelly gone. And I’m one of those people who simply must have something in her stomach in the morning—must be a bloodsugar thing. That’s probably why my hands are shaking when my cell phone rings. I’m thinking it can’t be Kelly—it’s not quite noon and she never calls early—but that’s her name glowing on the little screen. “Kelly honey? Where are you?” There’s a delay, a pause, long enough so I’m almost convinced the connection has been broken. Then her voice comes through. Not her bright, confident chatty voice. Her whispering voice, as if she doesn’t want to be overheard. As if she might be afraid. “Mom, I need your help. Please call—” That’s it. The call cuts off in mid-sentence. No static, no nothing. Just a final, overwhelming silence. 9. Watching The Detectives Kelly and I watch a lot of movies. Started out with kiddy stuff, of course. When she was hospitalized or enduring
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chemo, movies were an escape, a way to avoid the harsh reality of our situation. Early on I stopped worrying about how a violent or racy scene might affect her. When an eight-yearold stares death in the face every day, can you tell her she can’t watch a car chase, or cartoonish villains firing automatic weapons at infallible heroes, or someone saying a bad word? Some parents did. Not me. Kelly wouldn’t let me. If a movie had a kid with cancer in it—not many did, actually— she always insisted on seeing it. Even if the child died. As she told me, her face screwed up with righteous indignation, she knew plenty of real children who had really died. Okay, four or five at least, which is way more than the average kid. So a character dying in a movie was no big thing to her. It was pretend. Sometimes she’d cry, but that was because it was a sad story, not because she thought the actor really died. Movies were movies and life was life, and they were connected, but not in a scary way. Not for my Kel. And we’ve continued our habit of watching films together. Lately I’ve had to keep my comments to myself, so as not to endure her “please, Mom, give it a rest” reactions, but we still screen two or three movies a week, more if she’s in the mood. One of her favorites is The Usual Suspects. That comes to mind because I’m waiting in a Nassau County Police Department office, at the Fifth Precinct, in the Village of Valley Stream. My very first visit, although I’ve often driven past the building. From the outside it’s a blocky, innocuous kind of place, plain as a potato. Inside it’s all cop, purposeful and a bit macho—a banner declares “The Fighting Fifth”— though it’s a lot less frantic than what you see on TV. Detective Jay Berg has a cork bulletin board behind his desk and that’s what reminds me of The Usual Suspects. Kevin Spacey staring at the stuff on the bulletin board, using
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it to make up a story. Not that Detective Berg thinks I’m making up a story about a girl, a boy and a motorcycle. “We treat every missing minor report seriously,” he intones, tenting his fingers together as if in prayer. He’s a pleasant-looking guy, very earnest, with a thinning widow’s peak and jowls that make him look just a tiny bit like Kevin Spacey, which is probably what got me started, come to think of it. “Even when the minor may have left of her own accord, we take it seriously,” he says. “Runaways are still missing, however it started.” Not for the first time I remind him, “She didn’t run away. Something’s wrong.” “It’s always wrong when a minor leaves parental custody.” “She called. Said she needed my help. But when I called back her phone was off and I got her voice mail. That’s not like Kelly. She never shuts her cell off.” He nods sympathetically. Giving the impression that he’s counseled many an upset parent out here in the not-so-peaceful suburbs. “Very troubling,” he says. “Naturally you’re upset. I would be, too. As I said, that’s why we’re issuing a Be On The Lookout. Your daughter’s photograph and description will be circulated throughout the tri-state area. Local police, county police, state police, within the hour they’ll know to be on the lookout for Kelly Garner.” “What about TV news?” He leans back in his chair, touching his prayerful fingers to his plump and dimpled chin. “We can’t compel the media to run the story, but they will get the BOLO, and then it’s up to them. Absent any indication that she’s been abducted, they may or may not use it.” “What about an AMBER Alert?”
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Berg sighs. He’s been waiting for that question, and he’s ready with an answer. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Garner, the AMBER system has been effective precisely because it’s reserved for child abduction cases. Your daughter left home on her own accord. There’s no indication of abduction. I really do expect she’ll call you as soon as the excitement wears off.” “She did call!” I say, exasperated. “She’s in trouble, I could hear it in her voice. I’m sorry I don’t know the boyfriend’s last name—I feel really stupid about that, okay?—but that doesn’t mean this isn’t an emergency.” More sympathetic nods from the detective. “Of course it doesn’t. The fact is, we are treating this as an emergency. Believe me, all police officers take this kind of thing seriously. Many have daughters of their own. They know what you’re going through, Mrs. Garner. You can be sure they’ll study the BOLO and they will in fact be very much on the lookout. As I said before, if you had a probable destination, or a point of origin, or a make and model of a motor vehicle or motorcycle, we could start from there.” “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I feel so stupid.” No matter how hard I try, another spasm of weeping comes along every few minutes. Detective Berg has thoughtfully provided a box of tissues and my lap is full of wadded-up Kleenex. “You’re not stupid, Mrs. Garner,” he assures me. “Believe me, the parent is often the last to know. And if this guy your daughter is seeing is over eighteen, as you suspect, he might even face charges.” “I don’t care about that. I just want her back, safe and sound.” “Of course. But there are legal ramifications. Let me read you the statute,” he says, picking up a card from the desk. “If the victim is under fifteen and the perpetrator is at least eighteen, this constitutes a second degree sexual offense.
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However, if the defendant is less than four years older than the victim, this may constitute an affirmative defense.’” “What’s an ‘affirmative defense’?” Berg reads from the back of the card. “‘Affirmative defenses are those in which the defendant introduces evidence which negates criminal liability.’” “Meaning he gets away with it? Taking advantage?” The detective shrugs. “The legal age of consent in the state of New York is seventeen. Your daughter is sixteen, so it depends on how much older he is. If he’s thirty, he can and probably will be prosecuted. If he’s twenty or under, probably not, unless your daughter testifies that he forced himself on her.” “Oh God.” The whole thing feels like it’s spinning out of control. All this talk about criminal liability and prosecutable offenses, all I want is for Kelly to be okay. And I want every cop in the known universe out looking for my daughter. I want them a lot more proactive than Be On The Lookout. “I told you the boy is a pilot. Can’t he be traced that way? Can’t I look at pictures, pick him out?” “You already have a photo of the guy,” he reminds me. “We’ll post it with the BOLO.” “A picture but no name. Can’t you like run it through a computer or something?” Berg chuckles. “Like on TV? Face-recognition software isn’t that precise, not in the real world. Plus, you’d have to get access to the right database. But there might be someone who can help.” He rummages around in a desk drawer, hands me a card. “Never met this guy, but he comes highly recommended.” I check out the business card. Just a name, title and phone number. Nothing fancy. “Says here he’s retired,” I say, feeling stunned.
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The friendly, sympathetic detective is passing me off to some geezer. “He’s not a real cop,” I point out. “Don’t let him hear that, these retired guys get very offended.” Berg stands up. The interview is over. He’s palming me off, passing me along. “Get me a name, Mrs. Garner. A last name for this bad boy who ran off with your daughter. Give us a place to start and we’ll do the rest.” He shows me the door. 10. Girl Talk First thing I do when I get home is call Kelly’s best friend, Sierra Wavell. I’m thinking I should have called her first, before reporting Kelly missing. Call the girlfriend, that should have been obvious. If I’d been thinking straight. Which, admittedly, I’m not. I’m instantly bumped to her voice mail, which means her cell is already engaged, no surprise. “Sierra? This is Jane Garner, Kelly’s mom. Please call me when you get this. It’s an emergency, Sierra. Please?” I leave my number, enunciating slowly. Next task is Kelly’s computer. Seth will be on there somewhere. Name or number. Something to work with. Something to give the cops. My computer skills are, by the standards of your average ten-year-old, modest. I know how to work my spreadsheet software, how to send and receive e-mails, even, with Kelly’s coaching, how to download digital photographs from my little Nikon, which comes in handy for taking pictures of first fittings. I know how to search for stuff on Google, all of it business related—fabrics, suppliers, manu-
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facturers and so on. I have a pretty good understanding of how computerized cutting and sewing machines operate, how the information is fed in one end and the complete item comes out the other. That’s pretty much it. A recreational computer person I am not. I don’t game or chat or role-play. If I have an hour to myself I’d rather read a book, or, if my brain is really stressed, veg out watching one of my shows. So I don’t know how to write code or mess with the hardware or hack into encrypted programs. Which means I’m able to open Kelly’s e-mail program, but I can’t get into the files where she actually keeps her saved mail. Files marked with enticing names like Girltalk, Junk-o-la, Facers, S-man. Girltalk. Very clever, my daughter. This will be where she keeps all the gossipy stuff. And every time I click on the file it comes up File locked, enter code. Which I would gladly do if I knew the code. I try Kelly’s birthday. Log-in did not complete for the following reason(s): Log-in Information Is Missing Or Invalid I try her never-to-be-mentioned middle name. (Edith, my mother’s name—there I said it. Kelly Edith Garner. Live with it.) Log-in did not complete for the following reason(s): Log-in Information Is Missing Or Invalid I try the date when she got the all-clear from her cancer. Hit return, fingers mentally crossed.
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Log-in did not complete for the following reason(s): Log In Information Is Missing Or Invalid I try, what the hell, SETH. Banging hard on the keys, SE-T-H, take that! Log-in has timed out. Please exit program. Three strikes, I’m out, and it’s all I can do not to push the insolent little computer off her desk, thinking there ought to be an emergency button for mothers. Maybe it’s not being able to make the computer give up its secrets; maybe it’s having been more or less dismissed by the Nassau County cop. Whatever the reason, suddenly I’m having my first major meltdown. Heart racing, lungs gulping far too much air. Panic attack. It’s been years. Okay, weeks. Part of me able to make the diagnosis, the rest of me huffing like a fish pulled out of water. Paper bag. I’m supposed to get a paper bag, breathe into it so I don’t pass out. But the bags are in the kitchen, a million miles away. Can’t possibly make it down the stairs. Finally I put my head between my knees, and that helps. Constricting the diaphragm. Whoa, that’s better. Big sigh. I’m in the kitchen, uncapping a spring water, when my cell goes off. I flip it open, hoping it’s Kelly. No such luck. “Hi, Sierra. Thanks for calling back.” My heart instantly tripping again, hands so slick it’s hard to hold the phone.
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“You said it was an emergency,” Sierra says, adopting a tone of whiny accusation. “It is an emergency. Kelly is missing and I think she’s in trouble. I need to call Seth, do you know how I can do that?” After a pause she says, “Seth? Seth who?” “Her boyfriend, Sierra. She must have mentioned him.” “Uh-uh. Nope. There’s a Seth in my math class but he’s like fourteen. A freshman. Him?” The very idea of a freshman boy offends her. “This Seth is older,” I tell her. “He might be nineteen or twenty. Maybe even older.” “No way!” “Way,” I insist. “I can’t believe she wouldn’t mention a new boyfriend. You’re still best friends, right?” Another long pause, I can sense her fidgeting, imagine the face she’s making. “Not exactly?” “Not exactly? What does that mean?” “We’re, like, still friends and everything.” “You’re not sharing?” “Not exactly.” Not exactly. The adolescent equivalent of “that’s for me to know and you never to find out.” “Please, Sierra, I need your help. Kelly took off in the middle of the night. I assume with Seth. I’ve reported her missing but the police need somewhere to start. Like with the boyfriend.” Big gasp. “You’re going to have her arrested? Your own daughter?” “No, of course not. I’m trying to find her. She called me and said she needed help, but her cell phone got cut off before she could tell me where she is.” “Really?”
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“Yes, really. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.” “Mmm, okay, sure,” Sierra hems and haws for a while. “It’s like, Mrs. Garner, it’s like you’re not bothering me exactly. I just don’t know anything. Sorry.” I tell her about the photo album, the images of Kelly skydiving. “You don’t know anything about that, Sierra? She never mentioned skydiving?” “No way!” she squeals, excited again. “She really jumped out of a plane?” “I think her friend Seth was flying the plane.” “Oh. My. God.” And then, to whomever she’s with, a shout to the side. “It’s Kelly Garner! She jumped out of a plane! That’s so cool!” And so it goes. There’s probably no way to know for sure, not without hooking Sierra up to a lie detector—and maybe not even then—but I’m starting to believe she really doesn’t know anything. Not that she’d tell me if she did. At least not directly. We chat for another few minutes. According to Sierra, Kelly has been like out of the group, you know? An older guy makes like so much sense, because she never wants to hang with them anymore even though she’s been like superficial friendly and everything and one time Sierra went to Kelly, she went, what’s up with you lately? and Kelly gave her this like Mona Lisa smile thing that, I’m sorry, Mrs. Garner, but it really pissed me off. I know that silent smile, how infuriating it can be. “Sierra, can you do me a big favor? Can you ask around?” “I guess.” Sounding like she’d rather extract one of her own wisdom teeth with a pair of rusty pliers. “It’s very important. Please?” “Yeah, okay, whatever.” Then she breaks the connection. Not goodbyes, just a
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hang-up. Not that she means to be rude, or even knows what rude is. And I’m left with basically nothing, not a clue, or even a sense of where to go next. Kelly, Kelly, Kelly. Where are you, baby? 11. When The Scream Stays Inside Your Mind Kelly Garner wakes up dead. Dead and floating. That’s the feeling. Her body isn’t there; she’s left it behind. All that remains are a few dim thoughts flickering in the dark nothing. The sensation of flying, of falling through the air. His face, his voice holds her attention briefly, earnestly, then fades. Can’t think of his name. Name on the tip of her tongue, if only she had a tongue. Then gone, leaving nothing behind. It’s just herself alone now, the part of her that lives inside her mind, the dark, knotted core of her innermost self. Warm. There, she actually feels something, a physical sensation. Where is it coming from? Is death warm? No, no, she’s feeling the warm on her skin, on her forehead and scalp. That’s where the warm message is coming from. Beads of perspiration on her scalp. Sweat in her eyes. She blinks instinctively, feels her eyelids respond. How very strange. Her eyes are open but she sees nothing. And although she’s starting to detect the numbing tingle of a body beyond her face, it’s very distant, as if her limbs have been hidden over the next horizon. Not that she can see the horizon in the dark. Dark. That’s why she can’t see! It’s dark. The absence of light. With that realization—she’s alive, in the dark, and something is terribly wrong with her body—comes a wave of
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sheer terror. A flood of icy adrenaline that freezes her brain like an arctic blast. Why can’t she feel her hands, her feet, what’s wrong with her? Was there an accident? The memory floats up like a bubble through honey: she didn’t have an accident. There was an attack. Just as she and Seth are disembarking the aircraft. She has the cell to her ear, telling her mother something important. Something about trouble, about calling the cops. Before she can finish asking her mom for help, a man on the runway is pointing something at them—a gun, a weapon?—and there’s a sharp, needlelike pain in her abdomen, then darkness. Not a bullet, something else. A powerful drug. Was that the needle slamming into her abdomen? Is that what happened? Does that explain the vast numb tingling? The thickness of her thoughts? The sensation that her mind has been wrapped in a fluffy blanket? Kelly’s experience with drugs is somewhat limited. Beer and chronic at parties, and that one time she and Sierra dropped Ecstasy at a warehouse rave in Long Beach. The X was fun—she danced for hours and hours—but at the same time a little scary because part of her kept chanting, “Three! Four! MDMA, methylenedioxymethamphetamine!” She’d made the mistake of looking up the drug’s chemical name on the web, read what it did to the brain, the neurotransmitters, and couldn’t quite shake the uneasy feeling that little bits of her mind were frying like that stupid ad from the last century, your brain on drugs, sizzling like an egg in a pan. Whatever is causing this—it feels like her thoughts are slurring—it isn’t like ecstasy or marijuana or alcohol. It’s something much more powerful. So powerful it’s amazing that her body continues to breathe—she can feel the air in
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her nose and throat, the gluey dryness of her mouth—and her heart, yes, she can pick up on the slow thump of her pulse. Much too slow to keep up with her jittery thoughts, the panic that’s rising like a tide, or the burning sensation she’s just now detected in her abdomen. Seth, what about Seth? It was his plane, his flight plan, his delivery. What went wrong? What happened? Where is she? Is Seth okay or did they kill him?—three lines of a chorus that slowly rises into a scream of fear and confusion. She can’t make her mouth work, so for now the scream stays inside her mind. Silently screaming a heat-seeking name, over and over, endless loop. MOMMY HELP ME PLEASE HELP ME MOMMY PLEASE HELP HELP HELP MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY HELP HELP HELP Hot tears leak from her paralyzed eyes. She’s five again, terrified beyond endurance, and she wants her mommy. 12. The Man Called Shane It’s Fern who suggests trying the name on the card. Having called for an update and gotten an earful—anxiety makes me vent—Fern has agreed that the computer files are vitally important. “It’ll all be there,” she assures me. “These kids, they keep everything in their e-mail and blogs, or on MySpace.” “Kelly’s not on MySpace” is my instant retort. “Really? How do you know?” “She promised. We agreed it was too dangerous. All that stuff in the news about perverts.” Fern sighs, thinks I’m being ridiculous. Teens lie about everything, get over it. “Okay, fine, she’s the only girl in Valley
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Stream without a page on MySpace, whatever. What about her e-mail? Her address book files? Whatever whippy snippy thing the girls have going this week. You need to get in there.” “I need help, Fern. And it has to be fast. Today.” “Agreed. So call the consultant, see if he can recommend an expert.” “Consultant?” “You said the cop gave you a card. So call. What can it hurt? Takes you three minutes. Worst case, he can’t help. Best case, he looks like Johnny Depp.” “Fern!” “Admit it, when Johnny D’s on the screen you are stuck to the seat like a sticky bun.” Swear on a Bible, if I was lying in the wreckage of a major vehicular accident, gasoline leaking, wires sparking, Fern could still make me laugh. After decades, all the way from that first day in first grade, she knows where the laugh button is, and when to push it. Plus she’s right, I have to stop letting anxiety and panic get the best of me. I have to get my little house in order for my daughter’s sake. Get on the horn, Jane, start making some noise, get things rolling. The world is full of computer geeks, I just have to find one who can get started right now, no excuse, no delay. And if the old retired fogy from the FBI can’t help with that, then he gets crossed off the list of helpers, on to the next. Randall Shane Former Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation Consultant, Special Cases Special cases, what does that mean, exactly? Only one way to find out. Punching in the number, I rehearse my opening
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gambit. Try to sound cool, calm and collected. All of which vanishes the instant a thick male voice comes on the line. “Shane.” “Um, I need, ah, to speak to, ah, Randall, um, Shane?” “This is he.” Sounding more than a little gruff. Like, get on with it lady, what’s your problem? “It’s about my daughter,” I blurt out. “She’s gone. Missing.” His tone is no longer impatient. “Go ahead, I’m listening.” “They gave me your card,” I tell him in a rush, clutching the phone with both hands so it doesn’t slip out of my fingers. “I don’t know the boy, isn’t that stupid? I mean I do know his first name, it’s Seth. But not his last name, or where he lives. Nothing! I never heard of him until yesterday and by then it was too late. They can’t, the police, they need somewhere to start, I understand that, really I do, but I don’t know anything and now she’s gone and she was supposed to call and she did and she said she needed help and then the phone got cut off and something really bad has happened I can feel it in my bones a mother knows you know?” “Okay,” says the voice. “Take a deep breath. Hold it for a count of ten and then let it out slowly. Okay?” “’Kay,” I manage. “I’ll count. One. Two. Three…” As he counts I can feel my heart slowing, and I’m thinking he may be an old fogy, he might be a scam artist, but he’s got a great voice and would be calming and reassuring even if he was reading from the phone book. Or counting, for that matter. “Okay,” he says. “Good. Now, if you could tell me your name.” I tell him. “Jane Garner, fine. Here’s how it works, Mrs. Garner. I’m
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going to ask you a few questions and then we’ll decide if I can be of assistance, okay? We’ll start with the note your daughter left. What exactly did it say?” My brow furrows. “I mentioned the note?” “Not exactly. You mentioned a promise to call. I assumed that promise was in the form of a note, but I suppose it could have been a voice mail.” “It was a note,” I tell him. “I’ve got it right here.” As I read him Kelly’s note, part of me concludes that we’ve been in conversation for, at best, a few minutes, and already he’s established that he’s paying attention. Listening. Which is not what I carried away from my conversation with Jay Berg, the Nassau County detective, who let me run on more out of professional politeness than actual interest. As far as Berg had been concerned, my daughter took off with a guy, end of story. Whereas Mr. Shane seems to be taking me seriously. Or at least taking the situation seriously. “Okay,” he says. “Got it.” I can hear him taking notes, the mouse squeak of a felt-tip pen. He reads it back, and I agree he’s got it, word for word. “Now the call,” he says, “As best you can remember.” “‘Mom, I need your help, please call.’” “That’s it?” “Last word was cut off.” “And what was her tone? Excited, worried?” “She was whispering. Like she’d didn’t want anyone to hear. Whispering and worried and maybe a little afraid.” “Please call as in ‘please call back,’ or ‘please call for help.’” I think about it, Kelly’s voice replaying in my head. “Not please call back. It was like she had a lot to say and had to tell me in as few words as possible. So it was more like ‘please call for help.’”
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“Or please call someone specific?” “Maybe.” I rack my brains, reliving the call, but that’s all I get, a maybe. “You mentioned computer files.” I must have, but have no recollection. Unless, of course, he’s a mind reader. “That’s why I called. To see if you know anyone who can get into protected files.” “How protected?” he wants to know. “I don’t know her password.” “So not necessarily encrypted? Just password protected?” “I’m not really sure. All I know is I can’t into the files. So, do you know anyone who can?” The man called Shane chuckles, warming my ear. He says, “Matter of fact, I do.” 13. Bingo He Says Two hours later, Randall Shane arrives in a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows. Is it a cop car thing, or a retired FBI thing, or does he moonlight as a chauffeur? Or does he just prefer a car the size of a boat? As it pulls into my driveway, the big Lincoln looks like it could eat my little Mercedes wagon and spit out the chrome. Standing in the open door—I’ve been chewing my nails and watching the street for at least an hour—I give a wave of greeting as Mr. Shane unfolds himself from the driver’s seat. He nods in my direction—right place, obviously—and pops the trunk lid with his key. Retrieves a bulky briefcase and a laptop, secures the trunk, and strides up the walkway, all business. There’s a lot of him. Very tall, six feet four or five. Wide
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shoulders, long muscular arms, and a purposeful, nononsense way of walking. Not a walk exactly, certainly not a strut—more of a march. Fern’s joke comes to mind—can’t think of anyone who looks less like Johnny Depp. He could put Johnny Depp in his pocket and still have room for lint. No, there’s nothing wistful or soft or feminine about Randall Shane. More the Liam Neeson type, if you have to pick an actor. He’s all angles, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee that gives him a long, slightly gaunt face. Deep-set, utterly serious sky-blue eyes that are already studying me. Age, somewhere in his forties. Surely not old enough to be retired, and obviously not the elderly gent I’d been expecting, even if he does drive a car associated with seniors. His attire is less formal than I expected. Crisply pressed khaki trousers, a lime-green Polo shirt with a soft rolled collar, brown leather Top-Siders. On someone else it might be a preppy look. Not on Shane. On him it looks like something an NFL linebacker would wear on his day off. “Mrs. Garner?” he asks, with a slight, wary smile. Nice, even teeth. “Jane, please. Come in, come in. This is very kind of you.” “We’ll see,” he says, ducking slightly as he eases into the foyer. “No promises.” “Understood. I’ll pay for your time, whatever happens.” He shrugs, as if indifferent to the notion of payment. Towering over me in the little foyer, smelling faintly of Ivory soap and something like cedar. Manly cedar, though, not the perfumed version. “Show me to her room,” he says. “This way. Up the stairs and to the left.” “No calls?” I shake my head. No calls, no contact. My frantic calls
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are still going directly to voice mail, and my daughter is still in the wind. The summer days are long, so there’s plenty of light in the sky, but early evening has arrived, and as we traipse up the stairs, the host in me automatically offers this stranger something to eat. “Not right now,” he says, pushing open the door to Kelly’s bedroom. A step inside and he stops, checking out the walls, furnishings. The place is girly-girl, teenage girly-girl, but very clean and organized because Kelly is a neat freak. “Did you tidy up?” he wants to know. “She keeps it this way.” He nods to himself, as if registering a fact to be filed away. Sets his briefcase on the floor, his laptop on her desk, and then turns to look at me. More of a quick study than a look. “You didn’t have supper,” he says. A statement of fact. “Not hungry.” “Okay.” He nods to himself, registering another fact. “Do you drink tea?” What’s this about? I’m thinking, but admit that sometimes I do, in fact, drink tea. “Good. Then I suggest you make yourself a mug of strong, hot tea. Put sugar in it, for energy. Eat two pieces of toast, you’ll be able to hold that much down.” “What?” I say, thinking he’s been here less than a minute, already he’s telling me when and what to eat. “You look like you’re about to faint, Mrs. Garner. Time and efficiency are very important at this juncture, and I need you to be conscious and thinking coherently. In a crisis like this, many parents tend to fall apart. We don’t have that
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luxury. Tea, toast. Stay downstairs. I’ll let you know if I need help, or have questions.” I’m halfway down the stairs before I realize he just ordered me out of my own daughter’s bedroom. He may be brusque and bossy, but Randall Shane is right about my needing to eat. The toast settles my stomach and the hot, sweet tea gives me energy. Hadn’t realized how depleted I’d been, how close to passing out. Maybe even fainting, as he’d suggested. But “at this juncture”? Is the man a robot? Nobody says “at this juncture.” Cops do, I realize. They lapse into cop talk. And FBI agents are federal cops. They dress better but they have cop hearts. Not that I’ve ever met an FBI agent, retired or otherwise. All my thoughts on the subject of FBI agents come from TV shows, and muttered asides from my late father, so maybe I’m way off, reading too much into Shane’s formal manner of speech. Whatever, I’m not about to remain confined to the kitchen. With an extra mug of tea as my excuse, I slip upstairs, into Kelly’s room, and find him at her computer. Making her prim little swivel chair look small indeed. “You said tea, so I thought maybe you drank it, too.” Without looking up from the screen he says, “Thanks. Leave it on the desk.” “Any progress?” “I’ll know in twenty-six minutes,” he says, grunting softly to himself as he hits a key. “Make it twenty-five.” There’s a clock on screen, counting down. Shane swivels in the chair, picks up the mug, takes a cautious sip. He studies me with a good internist’s eyes. “You look better,” he says, rendering judgment.
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“I am, thank you.” “Proprietary software,” he explains, nodding at the screen. “If Kelly left her password anywhere on the hard drive, we’ll find it, and if need be the software will crack it. Preliminary search indicates numerous references to both Seth and S-Man, so once I get the files open, we should know a lot more.” “You found his last name?” I say. “That’s great. I’ll call the county cops. I mean police.” “Cops will do,” he says with a slight grin. “No, not his last name. Not yet. Just a search engine tracer showing there are references buried within the files. E-mail folders, HTML folders, chat room folders.” “I don’t understand.” “You don’t need to. It’s just the way computers organize themselves. Each folder has a name and a location. I was able to list the folders by title, but can’t open them without the password. If this particular software doesn’t get us there, I have other ways.” Making it sound almost ominous. Like no mere microchip would dare defy him. “So you’re, um, a computer expert?” “In a limited way, yes. As you say, I’m something of a geek.” He smiles, letting me know that geekness doesn’t offend him. “Actually, for the last several years before I left the bureau, that was my primary role, overseeing the development of software applications.” “You don’t look old enough to be retired,” I point out. “I resigned under special circumstances,” he responds, in a way that shuts down that particular line of inquiry. Retired or fired, gunslinger or geek, it doesn’t matter. If the big man manages to get a line on the mysterious Seth,
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and Kelly’s location, I don’t care what his specialty is or was, or why he left the FBI. “Have a seat,” he suggests. “I need to get some background.” There’s only one chair in Kelly’s room, so I perch on her bed. Amazingly enough, this stranger is offering me a seat in my own house. Not that he’s trying to be offensive—far from it. He’s focused on a task, on helping me, and for that I’m grateful. Still, I can’t think of the last time a single man has been in my home, let alone one of the bedrooms. No ring. I noticed. Not that I’m even slightly interested— every fiber of my being is focused on getting what I need to find Kelly. Shane glances at the clock on the screen, seems satisfied with the progress, then takes a small notebook from his briefcase. “First things first,” he begins. “Where is Kelly’s father in all this?” “Nowhere,” I respond, a little too fast. “I take it you’re no longer married?” “I’m a single mom.” He nods. Not a judgmental nod, just noting another fact. “Has the father been informed that she’s missing?” “There is no father,” I tell him, a flush rising into my cheeks. “Can we leave it at that?” “For now,” he says, conceding nothing. “So. How do you make your living?” “Weddings,” I tell him. “I design and make wedding gowns, bridal gowns, bridesmaids gowns. Or anyhow, that’s how I got into the business. I still do custom gowns when requested, but mostly we work with a couple of different gown manufacturers. Small specialized factories. We do the fittings, they do the sewing.” He makes a note. “So you’re in sales.”
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I shrug. “Bridal design, we like to say.” “Dissatisfied customers?” “It happens. But no one has been upset enough to take it out on my daughter.” Duly noted. “You’re sure about that?” he asks without looking up from his notebook. “Last time it happened I refunded their deposit, simple. That was more than a year ago.” Mrs. Hampton-Barlow of the Sag Harbor HamptonBarlows. The bridal gown arrived on time, but the bridesmaid gowns were lost in transit, and no time to make them again. We arranged for perfectly good store-bought versions. No fault of mine, but I couldn’t really blame her for being upset. We parted with a formal apology on my part, and a promise to return her deposit, which I did. The Hampton-Barlows had their wedding and moved on. Me, too. “Okay,” he says, ticking that off. “Ever been involved in a lawsuit?” “Small-claims court, does that count?” “Depends on the circumstance.” “Collecting an unpaid bill. The marriage was annulled and the couple walked away from their debt.” “You never collected?” “There was nothing left to collect. That’s what they told me.” “And this was when?” “Three or four years ago. Cost of doing business. Happens every now and then. You try to cover your outlay with the initial deposit. In that case, I got stuck on the wrong side of the estimate. My own fault, you might say.
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They upgraded an order, I failed to upgrade the deposit. Live and learn.” “Uh-huh.” Scribble, scribble. “Personal animosities?” “Excuse me?” “Does anybody hate you, Mrs. Garner? Hate you enough to hurt your daughter?” What a question. And yet it has occurred to me, of course. Is there someone out there in the world who is angry enough at me to lure Kelly away? After a moment, I say, “No one I can think of.” “No personal vendettas? How about angry boyfriends? Stalkers?” That’s easy. “No boyfriends, period. No stalkers that I know of.” Shane’s eyebrows lift. Men always seem to think that any reasonably attractive single woman under the age of forty is being hounded by suitors. Guys with flowers constantly ringing the doorbell, begging to sweep you off your feet. If only. “Has Kelly complained of unwanted attention?” he wants to know. “Mentioned someone following her or watching her, or exhibiting menace?” “No,” I say with a quick head shake. “But to be honest, over the last few hours I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And I’m not sure she’d tell me. Yesterday I’d have sworn on a Bible that Kel would share the important stuff, but today I’m not so sure.” At that moment her computer chimes. Shane’s eyes snap to the screen. Beneath his trim, neatly cropped beard his lips turn up in a slight smile. “Bingo,” he says.
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14. Flygirl My mother put up with a lot. It wasn’t that I was a surly adolescent, not like Kelly, because my pathological shyness extended to the family. We had learned, Mom and I, never to raise our voices in the presence of my father. How to hide in plain sight. But I had my silent, secretive ways, and that probably bothered Mom more than surliness or back talk. What are you thinking? she would ask me, as if she really wanted to know, and I would never say, or mutter something and go hide in my room, or have long phone conversations with Fern where we said nothing much at great length. Poor Mom. All she wanted were a few clues, a guidepost or two, and I couldn’t or wouldn’t oblige. Now I know my punishment for letting her down, all those years ago. It’s right there on the computer screen: Kelly has a secret life. Or, more accurately, a life she has kept from me, and apparently from her friends as well. Her user name is flygirl91. The number is, of course, the year of her birth and the “flygirl,” well, to this mother’s ears it sounds slutty somehow. Wild and crazy, at the very least. “But she swore she didn’t have a page on MySpace!” I wail, staring in horror at all the messages and responses in the files she calls “Facers” and “S-man.” “She doesn’t,” Shane explains, manipulating the mouse as we scroll through the files. “You don’t have to post a Web page on MySpace to have access to the site. It appears Kelly logged in as a member but never set up an accessible Web site. She seems to have been deeply involved in searching categories for particular types of individuals.” “Oh my God,” I say, hand to my mouth. “She was trolling.” Shane chuckles and shakes his head. “I believe it’s called
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‘browsing,’ Mrs. Garner. Simply a way to search through the millions of entries for someone you might find interesting. The folks on MySpace often affiliate themselves with groups or common interests. Just like people tend to do in real life.” The Facers file contains dozens of images of young men, mostly posing with their computers or leaning against their cars. One has his shirt off, showing tattoos on his arms and chest. Another, his new nipple ring. There are several motorcycles and a hang glider proudly displayed by boys who look ready to die at a moment’s notice. All of it heart attack material for the mother of a teenage girl. “This is interesting,” Shane says, clicking on the photo of the kid with the nipple ring. “It must have hurt,” I say, wincing at the very thought. “No, I mean what’s missing. Your daughter saved this image, but there’s no indication she ever messaged this particular individual.” “Thank God for that.” “It’s true for most of these images,” Shane says, making eye contact. “She was culling pictures but not necessarily making herself known to the subjects.” “But what does it mean?” I ask. Shane shrugs. “Hard to say. Might just means she liked the pictures. Maybe because they fit her definition of a Facer, whatever that is. Kind of a wise guy, out-there type, maybe? Any thoughts? Have you heard her use the word?” “I’m not sure. Maybe. The cool words change from day to day, you know?” “We can Google it later, if it seems to be pertinent. Right now I’ll concentrate on the file contents.” Shane scrolls through my daughter’s secret life, or her fantasy life, all of it reduced to thumb-size snapshots. I’m
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standing over his broad shoulders, close enough to smell his deodorant—kind of a pine scent—aware that under normal circumstances this level of intimacy with a stranger would be, for me, uncomfortable. But these are not normal circumstances. Far from it. “You think that’s how she met this Seth person?” I ask “Because she saw his picture—his Facer—on the Web site?” “Yet to be determined,” says Shane, manipulating the keyboard with all ten fingers, a level of typing skill never mastered by yours truly. “Ah,” he says, as another folder opens. “Here we go. This is linked to a message Kelly mass-mailed to forty-six recipients.” He deftly places the e-mail in the center of the screen, enlarges the font so we can both read. Young, aspiring pilot looking for flight instruction. Willing to help with cleaning, maintenance of aircraft. Ready to learn.
I’m too stunned to speak. “You notice she doesn’t mention her age or gender, other than to say ‘young.’” “I never knew. Never had any idea.” “That she wants to learn how to fly?” “Any of it. Willing to help with cleaning? I can’t even get her to vacuum the hallway! She takes care of her own room, that’s it.” Ready to learn. The question is, and it breaks my heart to think it, was she ready to learn more than flying? Was this her very clever way to make herself interesting to grown men? “Four,” Shane announces. “Four?” “Responses to that particular e-mail.”
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The first response comes up with a snapshot of a guy who has to be in his thirties. Deep in his thirties, with crinkled eyes and a jaunty handlebar mustache. Wearing a distressedleather flight jacket as he poses in the open cockpit of an oldfashioned airplane. Two wings, like Snoopy used to fly. “That’s a Waco,” says Shane. “Famous stunt biplane. Big bucks.” “Stunt plane? You mean like loop-de-loops?” “Yup,” says Shane. “If you like flying upside down, Waco will provide.” I almost say, I’ll kill her, then bite my tongue. The guy may have a leather jacket and a big mustache, but he’s not the young man from her photo collection. As it happens, the second response is from our mystery boy. There’s no photo, and not much of a message, just a succinct more details, please, but it does include a name, Seth Manning, and his e-mail address,
[email protected]. “This is dated six weeks ago,” Shane notes. “S-Man,” I say. “The folder. Can you open it?” “Already there.” The S-Man folder contains over a hundred e-mails, messages from S-Man and responses from flygirl91. “She didn’t have to mention gender,” I point out. “Flygirl kind of gives it away.” “Good point. If you don’t mind, I’d like to print these out,” Shane suggests. “It’ll be faster and easier than opening each e-mail.” Maybe he’s not that comfortable having me hover over his shoulder. Fine. Whatever, Kelly’s printer starts spitting out pages at a rate of twenty per minute. I sit on the edge of her bed, devouring her correspondence with Mr. Seth Manning, flight instructor and seducer of teen girls. Or maybe not.
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From the tone, right from the beginning, my darling daughter seems to be the aggressor. What have u got 2 lose? Flygirl will make it worth yr while. Hw old r u? Don’t lie. Will b 18, all legal and tender, on 4th of July.
Two lies, actually. Her sixteenth birthday was in May, a few weeks before flygirl started trolling for flyboys. By the time Shane hands me the next batch of pages, I’m feeling physically ill. Partly its residual guilt, for violating her privacy, but mostly what’s making me ill is righteous, motherly anger. How dare she take such outrageous risks with her life and well-being! There’s scarcely a broadcast of the local evening news that doesn’t include mention of Internet predators. It’s not like Kelly didn’t know the danger. She just didn’t care. Or worse—and this might be what’s really making me sick—danger is precisely what she’s looking for. All legal and tender. Cool, oily sweat suddenly pours from my scalp into my eyes, and I barely make it to the bathroom before heaving. On my knees, gagging, emptying my stomach. Shane makes me sit on the closed toilet as he applies a cold cloth to my forehead. “Guess I was wrong about the toast, huh?” “Dummy.” “Well, it’s not the first time I’ve been dumb,” he says kindly, wringing the cloth out. “No, me. I’m the dummy. Should have known. Should have been checking her e-mail.”
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“Here, hold this,” he says, pressing the cold cloth to my forehead. Gets a dry towel, pats the moisture from my neck. “You couldn’t check her e-mail, remember? And if you could, she’d have found another way. Your daughter is obviously a very willful young woman.” “Obviously.” He folds the towel, slips it back on the rack. Most of the men I know, they’d drop it on the floor, because that’s where used towels go. Not Randall Shane. He’s different. Been in my house for an hour or so and I know that much. “You feeling better?” he asks, standing tall, very tall. “Good. I just got a hit on Seth Manning.” “A hit?” “His address. I know where he lives.” 15. Seven Finds A Wall Time is squishy. Sometimes the seconds tick by in a reasonable, almost ordinary way, and Kelly counts her heartbeats, the pulse in her neck. One, two three, and so on. The highest she gets is seventy-six and then the overwhelming darkness seems to bend around her, a kind of dim gravity, and the clock in her head stops ticking and gets all squishy. No other way to describe it. Squishy. Because she can’t measure the passage of time, Kelly has no idea how long it takes for the paralysis to dissipate. All she knows is that at some point she can wiggle her toes, raise her languid arms and let them droop across her chest like melted bones. Could be hours, days, eternity. Thoughts slowly surface out of the inky black, like a die rising inside a Magic 8-Ball. The usual 8-Ball answers, too: Outlook not so good. Ask again later.
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She manages to place her tingling palms on the floor, detects the familiar roughness of concrete. Not bare ground, concrete. Is it night outside, is that why the darkness is so absolute? Wait, how does she know she’s inside rather than outside? Sluggish thoughts, and then she knows the answer. Because it feels inside. The closed silence, the still air, a kind of muffled feeling. Definitely in, not out. Enclosed. On impulse she flails, looking for a wall. Wanting to find an edge, a shape to the world. Nothing. You’re a baby, she thinks. Lying on the floor like a baby, flailing around. Get up. Do something. Learn something. Find a way back to the world. It takes forever, and she has to endure a violent swirl of dizziness, but Kelly eventually turns over, manages to get on her hands and knees. Huffing the thick air because the effort makes her feel faint. Hot, stuffy. Wherever she is, that place can’t be very large. The darkness is close, pressing. Slowly, very slowly, she crawls, struggling to keep her balance. Not wanting to fall over like some cheesy mechanical baby toy. Boink, I fall down, Mommy! Counting as she crawls. One two three, four five six. Seven finds a wall. A very solid wall. Slippery smooth surface. Steel, like the cafeteria counters in school. Now we’re getting somewhere, she thinks, and the thought becomes a giggle. Now we’re getting somewhere? As if! Hilarious. Ironic. Whatever. Keep going. Orient yourself. You wanted to learn to fly, flygirl? Seth’s first flight lesson pours into her brain, and it helps, hearing his gentle confident voice. First rule, know where you are. Find the horizon. Very good, keep your wings level. Trust your balance, but trust the
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instruments even more. It’s all about perception, judgment, making choices. The choices you make keep you alive. I choose to crawl, she thinks. Another giggle. But her body keeps trying, keeps moving. She nudges along the wall, counting as she crawls. One two three four five. Six smacks her head. Not hard enough to see stars. She’d love to see stars, love to find the sky, locate a constellation, but all she’s located is a corner. Ninety degrees. Steel walls intersecting. Still, it means something. The world has a corner. The shape of it begins to form in her mind. A small shed? A big steel box? Where is she and why is she here? What about Seth? What about her mom? What about the beautiful airplane, and the fantastic flight that somehow turned out wrong? What happened? Why? Thoughts starting to click along as the drug wears off. Suddenly the air moves. And then she sees the light. Shocking, blinding light. Light that stops her heart. Almost in the same instant, the sound of a door closing. A vault door, heavy and solid and forever. The light scares her. The light makes her want to pee her pants. She has to pee anyhow and this makes it worse, much worse. She starts to cry because she hates, she really really hates being afraid. Long ago she decided that being afraid is what makes you start to die. She’s been there, done that, doesn’t want to go back. With all the courage she can muster, Kelly forces her eyes open. Sees her hands on the concrete floor—she got that part right. Turns her head, willing herself to look directly at the light. Lamp. Someone has shoved a small, portable lamp inside the
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door. The kind of battery-operated lamp you might use while camping. The light it throws is actually pretty feeble, but it reveals a steel-walled room, maybe eight feet by ten feet, and a solid steel door so closely fitted that the seams are barely visible. A room with no way out, she thinks. Steel box. Trapped. 16. Where The Sacred Waters Flow Most high school students have more limo creds than I do. Proms, mitzvahs, sweet-sixteeners, and parents who hire a livery service rather than risk precious little junior denting the Lexus. Here on Long Island a certain class of teens ride hired cars like we used to ride buses. They know chauffeurs like we used to know school custodians. Although its unlikely that any of the chauffeurs look like Randall Shane. Who insists that I ride in the back—seat belt mandatory. He driver, I passenger. “Personal quirk of mine,” he says. “Safety first.” Actually we’re still in my driveway, with the big Lincoln Town Car in Park and the emergency brake engaged. Can’t think of the last time I set an emergency brake, but with Shane, you guessed it, standard procedure. We’re idling there while he makes a few calls on his car phone. It’s not a cell or Bluetooth, but an old-fashioned heavyduty car phone mounted in the console, equipped with a hardwired receiver.Years ago, I recall, it was a very big deal to have a car phone. Now it’s an anachronism that nevertheless seems to fit the driver, who nods at me as he rings Detective Jay Berg with the news, letting Berg know that Kelly’s hard drive sat up and begged for mercy before giving a full confession. “Suspect’s name is Seth Earl Manning, age twenty-one. M-A-N-N-I-N-G. Correct, with a g.” From the front seat
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Shane gives me a tight smile. All part of including me in the loop, apparently. “Yes, sir, I have an address in Oyster Bay.” He nods to himself as the conversation continues, goes uh-huh for a while, then locks eyes again with me as he says, “So you’ll add him to the BOLO, and any vehicles registered in his name? Thank you, Detective Berg. Yes, she’s right here with me. Oh, and before I forget, there’s evidence that this could be an Internet crime. Correct, in my judgment it could fall under the 2252 statute.Yes, sir. Excellent idea. I will, absolutely. I’m sure Mrs. Garner will be very grateful. Thanks again, sir.” He returns the receiver to the neat little cradle built into the dash. “Stroking the locals,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Unpleasant, but somebody has to do it.” I shake my head, not really sure what he’s talking about. “This means they’ll look for his car?” “Absolutely. Goes to the top of the list.” “What’s a 2252?” I want to know. “Is that like an AMBER Alert?” “Let’s roll,” Shane suggests. “I’ll fill you in on the way.” As drivers go he’s solid, cautious, and, by my standards, maddeningly slow. Hands on the wheel at ten and two, eyes on the road, checking the side and rear mirrors. On the other hand the ride is silky smooth and I do, in fact, feel almost absurdly safe. A meteor the size of Texas could strike, devastating all life, and we’d survive somehow, me and Randall Shane and his sturdy Lincoln Town Car. I feel—and this is pure craziness—that if I can get this man close enough to Kelly, she’ll be safe, too. Like the opposite of kryptonite, radiating strength and safety. Like I said, crazy. Hours of anxiety and worry have addled my brain.
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Once he’s on the thruway, Shane clears his throat and explains, “Statute 2252 is a federal law, Internet Crimes Against Children, ICAC for short. There’s an ICAC Task Force headquartered in Albany, under the state police, and Detective Berg indicated he would contact them.” “Crimes against children?” Just saying it makes my stomach clench. “He can be arrested for crimes against children?” “Probably not,” Shane concedes. “I made a point invoking the statute in hopes that he’d go on the watch list. ICAC has a nationwide reach, and that may be useful. But it doesn’t mean that if apprehended he’ll necessarily be prosecuted. Mostly the law concerns soliciting sex by transmission of indecent images. We didn’t see anything like that on Kelly’s computer. But there’s another part of the statute that covers endangering child welfare. Acting in any manner that is likely to be injurious to the physical, mental, or moral welfare of a child.” “You’re saying he could be prosecuted, maybe.” “Very tough to make that case,” Shane cautions. “Your daughter is technically a minor, but the courts are loath to invoke the law in teen romance situations.” “He’s not a teenager!” I snap. “He’s grown man. Also he’s a flight instructor, that makes him like a teacher, right? With a teacher’s responsibility?” “Agreed,” says Shane. “Absolutely. He had no business responding to a sixteen-year-old girl. The fact that she was, ah, somewhat deceptive about her revealing her age might or might not be a mitigating factor.” I fold my arms across my chest, feeling stubborn. “They always say that, don’t they? ‘She said she was older. Showed me a fake ID.’ Or whatever.” “They always do,” he agreed. “But let’s keep our priorities
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straight. The important thing is to locate your daughter. That’s our goal. After that, let the law take care of itself.” “You think he’s in Oyster Bay? That he took her home?” He glances at me in the rearview. “It’s a place to start. The Nassau County Police will make a drive-by, checking tags. I figure we’ll get a jump start, actually ring the doorbell.” “A private investigator can do that?” I ask. “Ring a doorbell?” He chuckles. “Most of them. But just so we’re clear, Mrs. Garner, I’m not a licensed P.I. I’m a consultant. And we consultants can ring doorbells like nobody’s business.” An hour or so later—would have taken me forty-five minutes, tops—the big Lincoln finally rolls into Oyster Bay, heart of the so-called Gold Coast. North shore of the island, facing the Sound. Heading for the village, not the city. We’re not far from the inner bay, the local claim to fame, but it’s midnight and all I can see is a swath of the shore road illuminated by headlights. That and the moonless silhouettes of majestic trees and huge, estate-style homes nestled along the cove. Randall Shane, clever devil, has an on-board navigation system. “Teddy Roosevelt used to live out this way, did you know that?” he asks. “I heard.” “You do business here?” “We’ve done a few weddings on Cove Neck. Amazing affairs, believe me. Twenty grand for a bridal gown, every stitch by hand. Two thousand just for the pearl embroidery. Anyhow, if you’re lucky enough to live out here you probably call it ‘the Neck’ or ‘the Village.’ That area to the west, along
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the shore, that’s ‘the Cove’. All very different from the city, where the working stiffs live. Out here on the Neck some of the residents tend to talk about Teddy like he lives next door. Like you might run into him at the next catered barbecue.” “No kidding?” He glances at the navigation screen, slows for the next intersection. “So this area we’re heading into, the Mannings are likely to be wealthy, is that correct?” “On the Neck? Super wealthy. Megabucks.” “They may have security,” he points out. “They all have security,” I tell him. “Could be a problem this time of night.” He reaches into the glove compartment, takes out a small leather case. “Gun?” I ask. “Cell phone,” he says, deadpan. “In case some gung ho rent-a-cop picks us up.” The navigation screen bongs gently. Shane applies the brakes, bringing the Town Car to a full and complete stop. “This is it,” he announces. Headlights pick up a locked, black-iron gate and a long, curved driveway beyond, paved with finely crushed oyster shells. Appropriate, given the location. Costs a fortune but makes a nice, satisfying crunch when the Rolls rolls up the driveway. Or the Bentley, or the Ferrari. Whatever the vehicle of choice on any particular day. Shane presses a button and the windows slide down to the smell of the sea, a whiff of cut grass coming to us out of the dark. For some reason I think of a song my mother used to hum, or maybe it was a poem she’d had to memorize for school. All I get are fragments from childhood memory: by the shore of something-or-other, where the sacred waters run. Xanadu, not Oyster Bay. But “sacred waters,” that has
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to be right. Any place this expensive, it has to be sacred, at least to the wily gods of real estate. “How do we get past the gate?” I ask. “Don’t you remember?” says Shane, grinning as he reaches a long arm out the window. “We ring the bell.” 17. The Man In Black The gate never opens. Shane keeps pressing the button, speaking into the lighted intercom, announcing our presence. “This is in regard to Seth Manning. Seth is in legal jeopardy, please respond,” and so on, never varying his authoritative tone. Sounding very much like a federal agent. Legal jeopardy. Up to me, I’d say Seth Manning is in deep shit. We’re both out of the Town Car, stretching our legs and checking out the heavy gate. In movies the hero simply mows the gate down, but this one has electronic locks that slip into a sturdy concrete footing and I’m not at all sure even the mighty Lincoln could get through. Plus we’re under surveillance by at least three cameras, one of which is night vision equipped, according to Shane. Try to monkey with the security gate and the local cops, rented and otherwise, will be on us long before we pry it open. I know this because I’m the one who advocated the mowit-down theory of making ourselves known. “Can’t help you if I’m under arrest,” Shane points out, nixing the idea. “Antagonizing the authorities won’t help.” Very rational, but I’m not feeling particularly rational. I’m exhausted, anxious and cranky. I’m acutely aware of wearing the same skirt and cotton top donned for my visit to the county cops, hours and ages ago. Clothing that now
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smells sour. I need a hot shower. I need a warm meal and a good night’s sleep. I need to brush my teeth. I need my daughter home, my life returned to normal. “Doesn’t this just prove that he’s gone?” I fret, gesturing at the locked gate. “Or that he’s in there with Kelly and won’t come out?” Shane studies me, runs a hand over his neatly trimmed beard. “Seth Manning is in his early twenties,” he says. “I’m assuming this is the family home. The property is listed under the name Edwin Manning. Could be the father.” “Right, of course.” I’d been concentrating on the cradlerobber himself, hadn’t given a thought to his parents. “His parents may not know what’s going on. If you were his age, planning to run off with a minor, would you inform your parents?” “Doubtful.” “For all we know, Seth may in fact live elsewhere,” Shane reminds me. “But this is the address on his driver license, so we start here.” “Okay fine,” I concede. “So Mom and Dad are on vacation. They own other homes. They’re in Gay Paree, or the Ukraine, or touring the moon.” “Yes, quite possibly they could be elsewhere,” he concedes, nodding in agreement. “You want to leave?” “No! That’s not what I’m saying! I’m saying if nobody answers the damn bell, I’m climbing the damn fence!” “There could be dogs.” “Then the dogs better watch out. Woman bites dog, that’ll be the headline. And you can’t stop me!” Not sure how it happened, exactly, but suddenly I’m seething, lashing out, and Randall Shane is a convenient target.
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Oddly enough, the big man doesn’t react. It’s as if he’s been expecting me to flip out, and braced himself for it. “What makes you look so smug!” I demand. “The lights,” he says, pointing at the heavy foliage obscuring the curve of the driveway. Are there lights twinkling through the leaves? Hard to say. “The house lights? Are you sure?” “No,” he says. “Not to a certainty. But moments after I first pushed the button, lights shifted.” “The wind? A timer?” He shrugs. “Maybe. My gut says somebody is home. And ignoring a buzz from the gate, that tells us something.” “What?” I ask, embarrassed for teeing off at the guy. “What does it tell us?” Before he can explain, a figure emerges from the bushes and takes a position several paces behind the locked gate. Surprising the hell out of me but not, apparently, Randall Shane. In the darkness the figure resolves into a small, slender man dressed from head to toe in black. He has thinning hair, raccoon eyes, and seems to have rubbed dirt on his face. The small man raises something that could be a gun and points it at us. Before I can duck, the beam of light makes me flinch. Flashlight, not gun. “Who are you?” he demands in a shaky voice. “What do you want?” “Mr. Manning? I’m Randall Shane and this is Mrs. Jane Garner.” “I don’t know you.” He backs away, looks ready to slip back into the foliage. “What do you want?” His voice sounds like a speaker with a loose wire, like he’s on the verge of laryngitis, and fighting it.
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Shane raises both hands, as if in surrender, and takes a step closer to the gate. “We have reason to believe that Mrs. Garner’s daughter, Kelly, has run away with Seth Manning, who is listed as living at this address. Are you Seth’s father, sir? Are you aware that Kelly Garner is a minor? Can you help us find them?” At each statement of fact the man in black seems to shudder, as if receiving a series of thudding body blows. Shaking his head, no, no, no. “Never heard of the girl,” he responds, voice cracking. “You’ll have to leave. I demand that you leave immediately!” Shane slips closer to the gate. His own powerful, compelling voice becomes less demanding, more conciliatory. “Where’s your son, Mr. Manning? Can you help us, please? Mrs. Garner is worried sick. This isn’t about pressing charges, it’s about getting her daughter back.” “Go away! You must go away!” “Why is that? Has something happened?” The man in black retreats, blending into the foliage. Only his eyes showing, like the Cheshire cat. “Nothing happened,” he says softly. “Go away.” Shane takes a business card from his wallet, slips it through the iron bars. It flutters to the ground like a small, white leaf. “My card, sir. I can help you.” The eyes vanish. The voice has been reduced to a pleading whisper. “You can help by going away.” Then the leaves shiver and he’s gone. Shane pulls the Town Car over in a shallow turnaround a few hundred yards from the Manning estate. He kills the engine. On the other side of the road, seemingly close enough to touch, the water is black, glistening. A few miles away, visible along the shore, the snug little cove exudes life. Docks, homes, street-
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lights. A familiar, clustered warmth that seems alien out here on the Neck, where many of the homes are hidden from view. Shane shifts himself in the driver’s seat, facing me. “Your reaction?” he asks. “Messed up,” I admit. The feeling of dread has returned, nagging at my guts. Getting into the car, my knees had been weak. “That was Seth’s father, wasn’t it?” Shane nods. I can’t quite make out his eyes. He’s a handsome skull in the dark. “Almost certainly,” he agrees. “I addressed him as ‘Mr. Manning’ several times and he failed to correct me. Probably used to people knowing who he is.” “His face was dirty,” I say, mouth as dry as sandpaper. “Smeared on the dirt so we wouldn’t see him,” Shane says. “I’m almost certain he was hiding in the leaves, listening to us for a while before he revealed himself.” “But why?” The big man sighs. “This is pure speculation, but I assume he wanted to know who we are. Or more importantly, who we aren’t.” “Why?” I repeat. “Why not call the security guards to run us off? Or call the cops? Why come out to the gate at all? People who live in houses like that, on estates like that, they don’t run around at night, dressed all in black, faces smeared with dirt.” I’m unaware of clutching the back of the leather headrest until Shane gives my hand a reassuring pat, as if preparing me for bad news. “In my estimation Edwin Manning is desperate,” he says carefully, gauging my reaction. “He’s making it up as he goes along.” Desperate, frightened, lost. That was my impression, too. “I’ve seen parents behave like that, many times.” Shane
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says. “Not the sneaking-around part, exactly, but the frightened-out-of-their-wits part. He’s sick with worry, just like you.” “Because his son took off with my daughter?” I ask, dreading the answer. Shane says, “Or because his son has been abducted, and he’s been warned not to contact the police.” 18. Calling All Fathers It’s after midnight and Ricky can’t sleep. Lying a foot or so from Myla on the custom king, he just can’t make it happen. Too many things going on. His sleep button is stuck and the pills no longer work. White man’s medicine, all it does is slow his thoughts a few miles per hour, not nearly enough to let his mind rest. Only thing to do when this happens, he decides, is get up, keep moving. Forward motion pushes all the crazy thoughts to the back of his head, prevents them from bouncing. Saved by gravity or momentum, or whatever the hell it is. Ricky slips out of bed, leaves Myla sleeping like a curledup kitten, a slender hand draped over her eyes. He prowls his new house in the dark, naked. Bare feet cool on the tiles, walking a circuit that takes him through the kitchen, into the hallway, past the three bedrooms he furnished for his children, around through the entertainment alcove, and back into the dining room. Sodium lights coming though the slats like knife-cuts on the tile floors. Step on a crack, he’s thinking, break the motherfucker’s back. On his third circuit Ricky leans into Tyler’s room. Disney World poster, bed like a race car, brightly painted. No Tyler tonight. Sometimes there’s a shape in the bed that might be
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his little boy, but not tonight. Decides not to check on Alicia and Reya because the girls will be with Tyler, all three together, forever and ever, amen. The new house, big as it is, is too small to contain him. In the laundry room he slips into a pair of elastic-waisted, cotton gym shorts, heads into the four-bay garage. No shirt, no shoes, he loves the feeling of air on his skin, believes he can soak up oxygen, make himself stronger. He decides, on impulse, to leave the Beemer and take Myla’s new convertible Mini Cooper. Pushes the driver’s seat as far back as it will go, his big arms cocked over the sides. Thinking he must look like one of those Shriners driving a toy car for the kids. All he needs is the funny hat. Ha, ha, ha, he laughs all the way to the airstrip. Not quite to the airstrip, actually, because the ruts and potholes on the final approach are bigger than the Mini. So he parks the little car in the brush, goes the last couple of miles on foot, snorting great drafts of muggy, night-swamp air though his flaring nostrils. The odor of ancient muck, animal scat and the thin, delicious scent of slow-moving water. Thinking, this is how the old-timers did it, hunting more or less naked, alive to the world, paying attention with all the nerves of their bodies. Ricky feels power flowing into him, and a soothing calmness that slows his brain, stops it from spinning like an off-kilter gyroscope. When he emerges into the clearing he instantly clocks the beautiful Beechcraft exactly where he left it, wings glinting with the light of distant stars. Not far away the jacked-up, fat-wheeled Dodge Ram lurks next to the camouflaged hangar. The toothy front grill makes the truck look like a shiny steel cougar ready to pounce. “Roy!” Ricky bellows, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Dug! Roydug! Roydug! Roydug!”
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Amused by putting their names together, the swampcracker twins who have sworn him allegiance in exchange for the new truck and whatever crumbs may dribble their way. Roy is the brains of the family, meaning he doesn’t drool overmuch. Whereas Dug, his very name apparently misspelled by his illiterate, white-trash mammy, young Dug seems to be missing about half his puzzle. Ricky always deals with Roy, for obvious reasons, but this time it’s Dug who comes lurching out of the truck, swollen eyelids crunchy with sleep. Upon seeing Ricky he stammers, “Um-um.Yeah hey what?” Bare chested, bare-legged Ricky Lang coming out of the dark, chanting his name, it’s like being awakened by a hard slap in the face. An experience not entirely unknown to Dug, whose late and unlamented pappy was notoriously illtempered and free with his hands. “Where’s Roy?” Ricky wants to know. Dug is looking around, wondering how the man got here. A little segment of his brain wondering if maybe the crazy Indian really can fly without benefit of aircraft. Materializing like a ghost with Dug’s name in his mouth. “Um-um,” says Dug. “Um-um, where’s he at?” Ricky demands. Standing close so the stammering white-bread can smell the feral stink of him, the swamp and danger on his breath. Dug is afraid of Ricky—any sane individual smaller than King Kong would be afraid of Ricky Lang, who exudes a kind of steroid strength from the top of his bowl-cut hairdo down to his splayed feet—but Dug is even more afraid that he’ll react the wrong way, ruin everything for Roy. Not knowing what to do, fearing the wrong reaction, he’s reduced
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to stammering, making um-um noises while his brain sorts out the options. Strangely enough, Ricky seems to understand what’s going on with Dug—the obvious strain of having to think— and steps back, giving him room to work it out. “Roy,” Dug finally says, savoring the name. “He gone to check on the girl. I’m guardin’ the airplane.” Giving it the swamp-cracker pronunciations, two words, era plane. “Left you the truck,” Ricky observes. “What’s he driving?” Dug has to think about it, then carefully assemble the words. “Four-wheeler. One in the shed?” That sets Ricky back on his bare heels just a little, because he has always intended the four-wheeler to be a present for his children, eventually. Purchased on a whim months ago, with nobody’s birthday pending anytime soon, he’d decided to store it at the airfield until they were old enough to drive the thing. Picturing Tyler gleeful as he guns the engine, spins the fat wheels. Tyler screaming. Ricky takes a deep breath, swallows his rage, saving it for later. “Took the wheeler, did he?” he says pleasantly, showing his teeth. Dug nods deliberately and with enthusiasm, as if grateful for any question that doesn’t require a verbal response. “Where’s that cell phone at, Dug? The one the girl had. Did Roy leave it with you?” Dug nods again. Two in a row. “Give it over, I need to make a call,” says Ricky, holding out his big fist, opening his blunt fingers. Dug hurries to the truck, returns with the sporty little Razr
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cell phone, places it carefully into the palm of Ricky’s hand. Takes a step back, waiting. “Battery, Dug,” says Ricky, ever so softly. “I need the battery, too.” Back to the truck like a two-legged retriever. Actually Ricky’s pleased that the twins remembered to remove the battery, as instructed. Ricky knows all about surveillance and triangulation, and how an active cell phone can be a homing device. He assembles the phone, fires it up, waits until the signal bars are glowing. Then thumbs the redial button, watches the familiar number march across the little blue screen. “Yo, Edwin,” Ricky says jovially, his free hand slipping into his gym shorts, adjusting his genitals. “You still up. Me again, yeah. What’s a matter, can’t sleep? You call the cops yet? No? FBI? CIA, Wackenhut, Pizza Hut, whoever? No? You swear? Oh that’s good, I believe you. You’re pretty smart for a white dude. Yeah, I’m down with you, bro. We can figure a way out of this, we put our brains together and think real hard. Uh-huh, uh-huh. I know you’re worried about your son. I know that. You should be worried. If we can’t work this out, if you can’t help me, I’ll be forced to cut off your boy’s ears and his nose and his fingers and little white pecker, and then FedEx him to locations around the world.” The FedEx stuff is pure improvisation, something he heard in a movie or on TV. Ricky has already decided that when the time comes the body will go into the swamp, clean and simple and forever. But who knows, FedEx might work for the smaller appendages. Ricky loves this part, deciding who lives, who dies, who gets the power, who shrivels like an earthworm in the sun.
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“Calm down, Edwin,” he says. “Concentrate on figuring out how to get me what I want. You’ve got twelve hours before I start cutting.” 19. The Taste Of Dirty Pennies Men, most of them, seem to think that when a woman cries she’s signaling weakness, falling apart. But sometimes crying is just what you do to relieve the tension. Guys scream or sweat or kick the cat. We cry. There’s this old movie with Holly Hunter, she’s the producer of a TV news show, and she starts the day by sitting at her desk and crying her eyes out for about thirty seconds. Then she’s good to go. I’m having a Holly Hunter moment. The forbidden word abducted is spoken and I’m a fountain, sobbing so hard it hurts in my ribs. Give him credit, Randall Shane doesn’t try to comfort me or offer a shoulder to cry on. He sits back and gives me time, and when I’m finished blowing my nose he simply continues where he left off. “It’s a theory and therefore by definition it could be wrong,” he says. “But I think we have to proceed on the assumption that Edwin Manning believes his son is in peril. Therefore we have to assume your daughter is also in peril, until we hear otherwise. Does this make sense to you, Mrs. Garner?” I nod miserably. “Unfortunately, yes. I was thinking the same thing myself. Guess I didn’t want to admit it.” “Then we’re in agreement?” “I guess,” I say. “Does that mean we go to the cops? Tell them what we suspect?” Shane shakes his head. “We’re not quite there. We need to know why Manning hasn’t called in the Feds. Why he’s so
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terrified that he’s prowling his own yard in camouflage. Once we’ve resolved that, once we have an indication that your daughter is in danger, we’ll notify the local authorities and they’ll contact the FBI. That’s how it’s done.” “How do we find out? He won’t talk to us.” In the dark his smile is tight, resolute. “I’ve got an idea,” he says. Second time around, getting inside is easy. Shane’s idea is to push the button on the intercom and say, “Let us in, Mr. Manning, or I’ll call my colleagues at the FBI. The assistant director in charge of kidnapping is Monica Bevins and I have her on speed dial. Count of three. One…two.” And just like that, the gates slid open. As we roll up the long, curving driveway, I ask Shane if he really has a Monica Bevins on speed dial, and if she’s really an agent-in-charge. “Yes to both,” he says. “And yes, I’m fully prepared to make the call.” “And they let you assist clients like me? The FBI?” “Can’t stop me. I’m a civilian.” “But you’ve got, like, all these connections to the agency, right?” “Some useful connections, yes.” “And this is what you did before you retired, you found missing children?” His eyes find mine in the rearview mirror. He gives me an odd look, like I’m a kid asking too many questions at the wrong time. “No,” he says, “not exactly. I assisted with a number of kidnap cases as an agent on general assignment. At the time it wasn’t my specialty.” At this point I’m too numb to be shocked by this revelation. “No? What did you do?” “Electronics, surveillance gear, mostly hardware stuff.
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Gear and gizmos. Later I helped develop a software program for rapid fingerprint recognition.” “You really were a computer geek? That’s what you did in the FBI?” “Pretty much,” he admits. What was I thinking, that he’d shot John Dillinger and smoked out terror cells? “So how’d you get into this line of work?” “Long story,” he says. “Maybe later.” Secrets. Apparently Randall Shane has a few of his own. We’ve arrived at what appears to be the main building, having passed several low, modern outbuildings. Carriage house, guest cottage, maintenance shed, all very Long Island estate. Lush, illuminated landscaping that looks au naturel but isn’t, believe me. It’s all very tastefully planned, very big money. The main structure is an artful arrangement of steel beams and smoked glass and daring architectural angles. Must be a million precisely weathered cedar shingles keeping out the rain. The property taxes probably exceed my yearly income. No wonder the owner has, apparently, been targeted for extortion—he’s got a lot to give. Kelly’s boyfriend or flight instructor, whatever the hell he is, how did this happen? How did she find herself in this particular world? Shane sets the parking brake and we get out. Lights come on, illuminating a wide, elaborately shingled portico. The oversize door opens—opaque green-glass panels set in a brushed-steel frame—and Edwin Manning staggers out, dressed more or less as we last saw him, with the exception of his face, which has been recently washed. “Who are you?” he wants to know. Then he adds, in a
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voice so faint it seems to fade away, “Leave me alone. Just please leave me alone!” He trips, falls to his knees, his skinny chipmunk face slick with tears. The poor man is a mess. Shane and I help him to his feet, each taking a black-clad arm. He doesn’t weigh all that much and I can feel his pulse pounding, as if his whole body is being struck like a gong. He is, I realize, scared nearly to death, and that makes me even more frightened. “My daughter,” I tell him urgently. “That’s all we want, my daughter back. Whatever else happened, I don’t care.” Manning staggers like a drunk but there’s no smell of alcohol. He’s exhausted and stressed to the point of falling down. Not quite there yet myself, but I can see it coming if Kelly isn’t home by, say, this time tomorrow. Once when Kelly was about ten, a year or so after her last treatment, she accompanied me on a house call, what I call a catalog call because it’s all about looking at photos of designs and fabric samples—satins, silks, laces and finishes. Lots of catalogs, lots of possibilities. Long drive to Montauk, a very successful novelist’s waterfront “cottage.” Won’t mention her name because I don’t want to be sued, but the bride-to-be (marriage number three) made all of her money writing sexy stories about rich divas and had either become one herself or started out that way. A very unpleasant person to deal with, unless you happened to be a fellow celebrity, in which case it was kiss-kiss-oh-Imissed-you-so-much. Anyhow, Kelly’s eyes got big when she saw the house and the beautiful setting on the grassy dunes, and I could tell she longed to live in a place like this rather than in boring old suburban Valley Stream. Couldn’t blame her.
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The writer’s cottage looked like a Laura Ashley catalog cover, the one where Ralph Lauren is visiting, and all the children are perfectly chic. Not that there were any children present other than Kelly. The rich bitch had kids from earlier marriages, but they were all grown-up and not speaking to her. Kelly wandered from room to room as the bride-to-beagain checked out flattering designs and bosom-enhancing brocades. As I soon discovered, the lady liked to vent on the “little people,” meaning employees or contractors, and she included me as one. Contractors were scum, painters were scum, plumbers and electricians were scum. Everybody who worked on her house was scum or stupid or worthless. She said so on David Letterman. Failing to mention that she changed her mind every other minute, made ridiculous demands, then complained when it took longer, cost more. I had already decided that I’d have a scheduling conflict that would prevent me from adding her to my client list, but didn’t quite know how to get out of there without having my head bitten off. So I went along, going through the motions, suggesting possible ensembles that might work—most every suggestion dismissed as “stupid”—absorbing abuse from a woman I’d just met and hadn’t said boo to. When we finally escaped, a mile or so down the road, Kelly touches me on the hand and asks why that lady is so horrible. All I can do is shake my head and tell her that for some people money is like a poison. It makes them sick in the head. Kelly, ten years old, she looks me in the eye and goes, “That woman was always horrible, Mom. She was born that way. Tell her to take her wedding gown and put it where the sun don’t shine.” Ten. I laughed till I cried. Right now, exhausted and shaky
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and ready to fall apart for at least the third time, I’m wondering if she ever set foot on the Manning estate, and if so, what she thinks of it, of them. “Are you alone, sir?” Shane wants to know. We’ve entered something like a glass hut with a high, cathedral ceiling vented with skylights. Canvas-bladed ceiling fans hang like monstrous white bats. Manning staggers to the right, bringing us to a living space. Cherry floors set in a herringbone pattern, stark leather couches, steel-and-strap chairs, lots of bookcases filled with books. Look like real books, too, not designer touches. “Anybody here?” Shane asks, persisting. “Family, staff? Anybody at all?” Edwin Manning has collapsed into one of the custom designer chairs, buried his face in his hands. When he looks up again he seems to have gained some resolve. His voice is hoarse, froglike, as if an invisible hand is gripping his throat. “Nobody,” he croaks. “Sent everyone away. I’m entirely alone.” “Where’s your wife? Seth’s mother, where is she?” The little man snorts, shakes his head. “Dead. Died when he was twelve. I never remarried.” “Other children?” Shane asks. “Just Seth.” He looks up, focuses on Shane. “If you call the FBI, or anyone else, he’ll die. Is that understood? He’ll die quite horribly. That’s really all I can tell you.” Shane indicates that we should both sit. Put us on a level with Edwin Manning. Have a look into his sad, red-rimmed eyes, see what we can see. “Has your son been abducted?” Shane asks, point-blank. “Is he being held for ransom? Is this about money?” Manning shakes his head, clears his throat. “I can’t talk about it, not to you and not to anyone,” he says, as if reciting
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from a script. “That was made crystal clear. I have to do exactly what they say or he’ll die.” Shane sits back, digesting Manning’s strangely laconic response. So far, almost every sentence ends in “die,” or contains the word “death” or “kill,” and yet the big guy doesn’t look the least bit discouraged. To the contrary, he has the slightly satisfied expression of a man whose assumptions have been confirmed. “Okay,” Shane says. “We’ve established there is an abduction in progress, and that you believe your son’s life to be in danger. Have you received proof of life? An indication that Seth is still alive?” Manning breaks eye contact, such as it is. His small, delicate jaw juts forward. “Stay out of this,” he says. “I read your card. If you’re former FBI you know what can happen.” “What about Kelly?” I demand. Somehow I’m on my feet, trembling with anxiety and agitation. “Is she with your son? Is that what happened? Has she been kidnapped, too?” Manning rubs his temples, avoids looking at me. “Never heard of her,” he says. “Seth never mentioned anyone by that name.” For the first time I get a strong sense that he’s lying. He may not have met my daughter—what adult male brings home an underage girl to meet his daddy?—but he’s heard of her for sure. Mos def, as Kelly would say. Shane leans in closer. His whole body seems to come into sharp focus, as if to demonstrate that he could, if provoked, crush the smaller man like bug. “Are you aware that your son originally made contact with Mrs. Garner’s sixteen-year-old daughter on the Internet? That he took her skydiving, and apparently gave her flying lessons, all without her mother’s consent?”
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Manning shakes his head. “I can’t discuss this.” Shane leans closer still. His voice becomes softer, but somehow no less forceful. “You are in deep trouble, sir. You are out of your depth. Let me help.” “I can’t do that. Leave my house at once, both of you.” “Tell me what happened,” Shane suggests. “I’ll take it from there.” Edwin Manning suddenly erupts, shaking his head so hard he almost spins out of the seat. “Go away!” he insists. “I don’t know about your daughter,” he says, turning to me, meeting my eyes for the first time. “If she’s with Seth, they’ll kill her, too. Do you understand? You have to let me handle this. You must. It’s the only way.” Shane’s hands are suddenly gripping my upper arms, pulling me away. Anticipating, almost before I quite know it myself, that I’m about to launch myself at Manning, scratch out his lying eyes. “We’re leaving,” Shane announces. “If you change your mind, call me. I can help.” Couple miles down the road, heading out of the millionaire enclave, Shane pulls over so I can throw up. Kneeling in the darkness by the side of the road, the taste of dirty pennies in my mouth. Shane keeping back, not tempted to hold my head, because he knows what’s going on, why this has happened. It’s not fear that’s makes me sick. It’s anger. 20. In The Bunker Twelve hundred miles to the south, Ricky Lang heads for the bunker. A concrete cube, ready-made and then buried under a load of dirt and gravel long before Ricky was born. Supposedly it dates from the Cuban missile crisis. Some crazy white
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man shit, blow the whole world to pieces. The way he heard, a Cuban contractor buried the thing, all in a panic, convinced Fidel was coming to town on a rocket. Kept his family there for a few weeks, then walked away, never looked back. Whatever, Ricky’s been familiar with the bunker since he was a kid, when he used to play hide the weenie with some of the trailer girls down there. The trailer park is long gone, but the bunker still exists and you never know when a secure location will come in handy. Especially one that cannot be detected from the air. Ricky is keenly aware that any fool with a computer can Google a satellite image these days, check out your backyard, see if you mowed the grass. He’s made sure the Beechcraft is concealed in a hangar, that activity in and around the airfield is kept to a minimum. The place is probably still under some sort of minimum DEA satellite photo surveillance from the bad old days. Nothing to draw their attention now—he made it his personal business to clean up the tribal drug trade. Couple of the stubborn old farts thought it was still a going concern, had to be fed to the gators. The others soon saw the error of their ways, agreed to live on tribal income and whatever they’d managed to hide in the ground. Gator bait was usually ripe chicken, but like they say, everything tastes like chicken once you take the skin off. “Smells bad down there,” Roy warns him, approaching the bunker. Ricky stops, looks Roy in the eye. “White shit smells different from people shit, you ever notice? One sniff, I can tell.” “Oh yeah?” Roy responds, glancing away. “The boy don’t know whether he’s coming or going, or where he’s at.” “Uh-huh,” says Ricky. “Dug, you bring them loppers?” “Yeah, Chief,” says Dug, bringing up the rear, letting the big-branch loppers bump against his trouser leg. Seems to
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think carrying the loppers is some sort of game he can win, if only he can figure it out. Ricky holds out his hand, stops Dug in his tracks. “Ain’t no chief to you,” he says. “I am chief to my own people, only to them.” No surprise, Dug looks confused, seeking help from his brother, who shrugs as if to say Roll with it. “You got the key?” Ricky asks. “Open says me.” Ricky’s laughing as Roy fumbles with the key. Neither brother registering the humor in “open says me,” puns and wordplay not being their thing. Which, in Ricky Lang’s febrile mind makes the Whittle twins more amusing than the usual swamp crackers, a tribe he has made use of, and thoroughly mistrusted, for his entire life. Started out helping his father, Tito Lang, swap tanned hides for the whiskey the crackers made in their hidden stills. Saw the contempt in their colorless eyes— drunk Indians selling their birthright for the poison that would surely kill them. A poison self-administered, and no different in its outcome than the hot bullets so many of the people fired into their own brains as punctuation to their defiled lives. “Wait,” says Ricky, cocking an ear. “You hear that?” Strange noises emanating from the bunker. Sounds like children keening. In his mind it feels like the transmission has slipped, can’t get in gear to the next thought. Stuck on children keening, eee eee eee. “That’s the ventilation pipe,” Roy reminds him. “Wind goes across the top, makes a weird noise.” Keening becomes wind and his mind moves on. “Open the door,” he says. Out comes the nasty smell. To Ricky a white smell. “Need to empty the bucket,” he points out. “He kicked it over.”
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“Then mop it up. Use Pine-Sol.” Roy gives him a little look, like are you serious? gets it that Ricky is deadly serious, and looks away. “Okay, sure. Pine-Sol it is.” Inside the fetid bunker Ricky clicks on his lantern flashlight. The beam finds a frightened face, hollow eyes, a handsome mouth distorted by a gag. “Hey, Seth, I talked to your dad. He sends his love.” Ricky jams a tranquilizer dart into the white boy’s thigh, sees his eyes registering a higher level of fear. “Nothing to worry about,” Ricky says soothingly, watching the tranks hit him hard, making the eyes dull, the rigid limbs relax. “Won’t take anything you’re gonna miss.” 21. We All Scream As young moms go, I was clueless. For instance, I’d never seen an infant nursed until Kelly started playing patty-cake on my left nipple. Never, for that matter, held a newborn baby. Worse, I had no concept of what really happens to the female body during pregnancy and after. Not to be gross, but for a couple of weeks we both wore diapers to bed, me and Kelly. I was a child raising a baby. That’s one of my secrets. Kelly can do the math, but she has no idea how young I really was at seventeen, mentally and emotionally, or how much she frightened me. It’s true. I was scared of my own baby. Terrified I’d do something stupid and she’d either be taken from me, or die. All that stuff about maternal instincts, it wasn’t working for me. Yes, I loved the little bean from the very first moment, but that didn’t stop the fear or ease the anxiety. My mother, bless her soul, carried little white paper bags
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in her purse, unfurled whenever I hyperventilated. Passed them to me like you might offer a Kleenex. Later she told me the bags came from the candy store, which somehow seems fitting. What’ll you have today, Janey, a quarter pound of nonpareils or a panic attack? Baby Ruth or a real baby? Poor Mom. To this day I’ve no idea how she managed it. Somehow she worked full-time, taught me how to care for a baby, dealt with my father’s terrifying temper, navigated the divorce minefield, and made plans for my future. When Kelly was six months old she assumed the baby-care duties and more or less forced me to get my GED and then take design courses at Nassau Community College, where I eventually discovered my inner seamstress. Looking back, it may have been that she actually thought being a single mom was a good thing for me. One less complication, not having to deal with a man. No doubt a result of her own failed marriage, but at the time I appreciated that she never once made me feel ashamed for the strange circumstances of Kelly’s conception. The big secret we never spoke of. Whereas it poured through my father like acid, corroding whatever love he’d had for either one of us. Why is Mom so much on my mind? Because I’m wondering what she’d make of Randall Shane. For that matter, what do I make of him? The big guy has been in my life for less than a day, but already I’m letting him influence decisions that could determine whether my daughter lives or dies. For instance, his decision to stop for breakfast. “It’s two in the morning!” I rant. “Are you crazy? Are you insane? We should be notifying the FBI or the media or both, not eating waffles!” “I’m more of a scrambled eggs person,” Shane says, very calm and matter-of-fact. “Can’t notify my friends at the agency without protein. Preferably in the form of bacon.”
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I know what he’s doing. He’s using gentle humor to calm me down. Just like he’d gently but firmly discouraged me from throwing rocks at Edwin Manning’s big glass house. Like he’d prevented me from grabbing the rich little weasel by the throat and shaking the truth out of him. “If I thought that would work I’d do it myself,” he explains, coaxing me out of the place, back into the Town Car and away from the Manning estate. “The man believes his silence will keep his son alive. He’s clinging to that hope. Physical intimidation won’t change his mind. You could hook him up to a battery, he still wouldn’t talk.” “You’d do that?” Shane shrugs his big shoulders. “Whatever a given situation requires. As a rule I try to avoid torture.” I’m pretty sure he’s kidding about torture. He’s not kidding about scrambled eggs. Shane heads for this all-night diner in Wantagh, gets us there with a minimum of fuss. Says you’re never more than ten miles from a diner in Long Island and he knows them all. The place in Wantagh is the real thing, the shiny metal kind, with a gum-chewing waitress in a starched uniform, a tattooed short-order cook in a white undershirt, overhead lights bright enough to dissolve your eyelids, the whole bit. When we’re seated with thick white china mugs of steaming coffee, Shane explains, “I can’t start making calls until seven a.m. Call in the middle of the night, you need a situation.” “My daughter missing, that’s not a situation?” “Not without further information, no. Nothing we can give them tonight requires an immediate response. If for instance we knew she was being held against her will in a certain location, that’s a call can be made at any time.”
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“But we tell the FBI, right? Once they’re up and showered, had their coffee, whatever.” He ignores my sarcasm, sips his coffee. “Yes,” he says. “We’ll tell them what we know, what we suspect.” “And they’ll take over? Get Manning to talk?” He shakes his head, smiling faintly. “That’s not how it works. Agents can only be assigned to a specific case upon request of the local authorities. Mr. Manning would have to call in the police, the police would in turn notify the FBI, and then the wheels would start to turn.” “So we tell your old friends what we know and they do nothing?” There are about six people in the diner, including the waitress, and they’re all staring at me. Apparently I raised my voice. “Order something,” Shane suggests quietly. “You need fuel, Mrs. Garner. Keep running on empty and you’ll crash.” “Can’t handle eggs. Not hungry. Answer my question, please.” “I’ll have the Wake-up Special with whole wheat,” he says to the waitress, who has ambled over to take the order and also, from her eagle eyes, to check me out. Shane points his thumb at me and says, “She’ll have the same thing, hold the eggs.” The gum-snapper likes his style. “Coming right up.” She smiles at him, flutters her false eyelashes and marches away on sturdy legs. When she’s gone, Shane quietly continues where he left off. “I’m sure my, um, old friends in the agency will be as helpful as the law allows.” “Helpful? Great. And we just wait until I get a ransom note?” Shane leans across the table, more or less forces the cup of coffee into my hands. “Mrs. Garner? There may never be
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a ransom note. Ransom notes are actually quite rare. At this point, we don’t know what happened, or why your daughter hasn’t contacted you again. All of our efforts must be directed toward locating her. We concentrate on that. Finding her. The law can sort out the rest.” The only reason I’m not crying is because I’m too exhausted for tears. “What do we do?” I ask, feeling faint. The tray arrives, loaded. “Eat,” he says. Home fries, sausage, cinnamon toast, applesauce, I’m gorging like a lumberjack. Instinct taking over, making me eat. And as Shane promised, the calories start to have a calming effect. When I’ve become more or less human, he explains that his next move—and our best shot—involves Kelly’s cell phone. “She’s a minor, so the account will be in your name, correct?” I nod. “As the account holder, you have a right to know where and when the phone has been used. If you know the approximate time when you received her last call, we can find out where she was when the call originated, roughly.” “Roughly?” “What cell tower was accessed to route the call. Narrows it down to about twenty square miles or so. Again, not like on TV. But it could be very helpful.” “But we have to wait until morning?” He nods. “Afraid so. And even then it usually requires several hours to get through channels. We’ll be lucky to have the location by noon.” “Noon?” Seems like a century away, a future hard to fathom. “Here’s what I suggest,” he says, as if ticking off a list.
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“We get you home. You shower, put your head on a pillow, get some rest. Meanwhile I’ll be riding my laptop, see what I can find out about Edwin Manning. I’ll bring the Nassau County Police Department up to speed. At the appropriate hour I’ll contact my friend in the FBI, report what we suspect, and initiate the cell phone search.” “I can’t sleep.” “Take a pill,” he suggests. “Later in the day I need you fully cognizant, Mrs. Garner. Firing on all cylinders.” “What about you?” He squints, genuinely puzzled by the question. “What about me?” “Don’t you need to sleep, too?” “No,” he says, as if taken aback. “Oddly enough, I don’t. Not when a case is active.” I stare at the guy, forcing him to look at me with his pale blue eyes. And notice, for the first time, evidence of something he’s hiding. Something he keeps dark and deep and does not want to share. “It’s a form of stress-induced insomnia,” he explains, studying the saltshaker. “I’ve been the subject of at least two papers on sleep disorder.” “You’re serious,” I say, astonished. He shrugs his big shoulders, trying to make light of it. “I’ve learned to live with it. To use it to my advantage.” By way of ending the conversation, obviously very uncomfortable for him, he waves the waitress over. She’s been hovering at a polite range, waiting for him to beckon. “Yes?” she asks brightly, basking in his presence. “Anything else? More coffee?” “Ice cream,” he says. “Vanilla, one scoop.” “Apple pie under that? It’s good here.”
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“I’ll try it next time,” he promises. “Dessert for you, miss?” I shake my head, staring at him. “At this hour? Ice cream?” “We all scream for ice cream,” Shane says without a trace of irony. 22. Her Own Personal Black Hole A liter water bottle, a bucket, a lamp. These items have become the center of her universe. The bottle for hoarding and drinking. The bucket for bathroom business. And most precious, a small, battery-operated lamp that she also hoards, not wanting to run it down. That’s the only power she has now, the ability to click the little switch, push the darkness back for a few moments. Not that there’s much to see. Four walls, floor, ceiling, all made of thick sheet metal. She’s being held in some sort of walk-in cooler, she surmises, although the cooler part is clearly not functioning. The air is hot as hell, syrupy thick, getting staler with every breath. Using the lamp, Kelly has located an air vent. Unlike in the movies, this particular vent can’t be utilized as an escape hatch. It measures no more than four inches by twelve inches—too small for a human, although there are signs of a rodent infestation. She’s hoping squirrel or chipmunk, but it’s not like mice or even rats would really freak her out. Kelly’s personal gross factor is more attuned to slimy creatures like worms or snakes. Her friends think Snakes on a Plane is a laugh riot, especially the scrotum-chomping vipers, but Kelly has to avert her eyes whenever they crank up the DVD. Funny how fear works. Until what, yesterday—has it been that long?—she’d thought of herself as basically fearless.
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Death defying. She’d faced down the black monster when she was a little girl, so aside from shrieky-fun things like wiggly worms or stupid movies, there was nothing in real life that truly frightened her. Until now. The hot steel box changed everything. Now she’s really and truly terrified. Having to deal with the adrenaline shakes, an unfamiliar weakness that seems to spread from her knees into her guts, making it hard to hold her pee. Hard to hold the lamp without her hands shaking. Hard to resist screaming. Hard to think coherently. Thinking clear, that’s something to cling to, something to strive for. All she has to do, be as brave as her nine-year-old self. Back then she actually visualized herself in a coffin, and the hot steel box is not a coffin, not yet. Has to be a way out. There’s always a way out, right? “Right? Right? Right?” Kelly’s not too sure, but she may actually have said that out loud. Shout or a whisper, she can’t tell—the darkness makes it hard to distinguish words from thoughts, and her volume control is totally whacked. Let there be light, she thinks, switching on the lamp. Holding it up to the grate, she can see where the narrow vent takes a ninety-degree turn. There are no fans blowing or circulating air, but to Kelly it feels as if the air is fresher at the vent, and she decides to linger in the vicinity. If the air is fresher it must be coming from the outside, right? “Right! Right! Right!” Weird, but it’s like she can see herself screaming into the vent. Only she’s not screaming help! she’s screaming, “Right!” Which is pretty mental, when you think about it. What would someone think? They’re walking down the street, minding
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their own business, and a voice shouting “right!” comes out of a vent? They’ll think crazy person, mind your own business. Kelly gets a grip, puts a different word in her mouth. “Help! Help! Help!” she screams, shouting into the vent. Shouting into her own personal black hole. Black hole sucking in her fear, making it part of the darkness. Black hole where the little girl inside her still lives, visualizing coffins, facing the monster. 23. Snow Bunnies In Heaven Randall Shane stands in the doorway, watching her sleep. Keenly aware that not all sleep is quiet or restful. Example: Mrs. Garner moaning softly, fingertips quivering against the pillow. Her large and lovely eyes move fitfully beneath her eyelids, indicating an active dream state—they won’t be good dreams, either, not with a daughter missing, presumed kidnapped. Interesting woman, Jane Garner. Interesting not only because she’s strong willed and self-reliant, traits he admires, but because she’s an accomplished liar. Deftly pulling the curtain to hide a significant portion of her life, a crucial something having to do with the identity of her daughter’s biological father. Rape? Shame? Some dark variation on family tragedy? What, exactly, makes her hold tight the secret, even at a time like this? Shane backs away, closes the door, walks to the daughter’s bedroom in his stocking feet, holding his Top-Siders lightly in his left hand. Moving as quietly and purposefully as a big jungle cat, with the athletic balance and grace of a much younger man. Grateful as always that he had the sense to quit football after a single high school season, while his knees were still uninjured. Lots of big men his age, early forties,
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were already limping from joints damaged long ago, when size and agility and adolescent adrenaline had put them into violent collisions with young men of similar size and agility. The human knee is a marvelous feat of biological engineering, but it is not meant to endure the sideways force applied suddenly by a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound tackler running at full speed, leverage enhanced by cleats. As Shane had determined on his own, at age fifteen, disappointing every coach who’d ever seen him move. Guy your size and speed, they’d say, what a waste. I’m fine, his shyly proud, teenage self would respond. Coaches would come back with promises of athletic scholarships, unaware that the big, rangy kid was an actual scholar, top of his class academically, that he’d read and understood medical research papers on sport-damaged joints and made a rational decision not to participate. Not because he was afraid of pain or injury—as an adolescent he had been totally fearless—but because he liked the feel of his large strong body, what it was becoming, and wanted to keep it that way. He’d had plans, big plans. All of which changed one remarkably cold day in Rochester, New York. Enrolled in the tough-as-nails engineering school at R.I.T., Shane maintains a perfect 4.0 average, despite working several part-time jobs. His job as a library assistant includes returning books to the higher shelves—they call him the human ladder—and keeping the pathways leading to the library clear of snow. That’s where it happens, outside in the wickedly crispy cold. One minute he’s leaning on his shovel, daydreaming about the Nobel Prize he will one day be given for his work in chemical engineering—astonishing discoveries that will change the world—the next minute Jean Dealy walks by in her arctic survival suit, armored and padded and insulated
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against the fierce winter wind roaring in from the Genesee River. This on a campus where students routinely go hatless at ten below, and the truly foxy coeds wear thin little miniskirts, or less, no matter how cold it gets. And yet this young woman has chosen a genderless arctic survival suit that covers her from toes to nose, obscuring every feature but her marvelous eyes, peeking out of the padded suit. Eyes that floor Randall, stopping his heart as she passes by, the snow squeaking merrily under her fur-lined boots. The squeak of his big plans grinding to a halt because in that moment Jean Dealy becomes his new big plan, even before he knows her name or sees himself reflected in her amazing eyes. Twenty-some odd years later, the thought still makes him smile. Strange how the physical act of smiling sets off a pang of loss that closes his throat, as powerful as a fist to the larynx. Mother and daughter connections, that’s what does it, that’s what gets him in the secret place where he tends his memories. Because, like his new client, Randall Shane has secrets of his own. Snow bunnies in heaven, that’s just one of his many secrets. He sits sideways at Kelly Garner’s computer because his knees are too big to fit under the desk. He scans the teenager’s files, makes a few notes and then carries the notebook to the front door, where he dons his Top-Siders. Out in the driveway he manually unlocks the Lincoln Town Car because the woop-woop of the remote key might awaken his sleeping beauty. In the hush of the big sedan he picks up the clunky car phone, presses a key for an oft-called number, leaves a message. “It’s me. Any and all information regarding the following
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individuals—Jane S. Garner, her daughter Kelly Garner, no middle initial.” He gives the address, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, then concludes, “Particular attention to any information regarding Kelly’s birth father. Soonest. Thanks.” Shane hangs up, glances at his wristwatch—too soon for the next call, the crucial call. The call that just might find the missing girl, or at least point him in the right direction. He powers the seat, lays it back as far as it will go. Closes his eyes, tries to rest, willing his mind to blankness. He thinks: Superman has his Fortress of Solitude, Randall Shane his Lincoln Town Car. The self-comparison to a comic-book character makes him smile again, and this time the smile does not hurt. 24. Janet Reno’s Dance Party In the dream my bed lies on a train, a swaying commuter train, and a giant peers in an open door, watching me sleep. Part of me knows I should wake up, search the train for Kelly, but I can’t keep my eyes open. It’s the train’s fault, because trains make me sleepy. “Mrs. Garner? There’s someone to see you.” Shane in the hallway, making his voice big enough to be heard through the solid panel of the bedroom door. One moment I’m asleep, dreaming, the next I’m up, a cold thrill in my blood. Stepping into linen Capri pants, shrugging on a top and calling out, “What? What happened? Is it Kelly? What do you mean ‘someone to see me’?” Shane waits until I open the door. Hands me a mug of hot tea. His cheerful smile has to be a good sign. “My friend from the agency,” he says. “She was kind enough to drop by.”
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There’s a stranger in my kitchen, talking on her cell as I enter, bleary-eyed and clutching my mug of tea. Remember the famous Saturday Night Live routine where Will Ferrell impersonates Janet Reno, the former Attorney General? Which was all the more convincing because Reno was such a tall, big-boned woman that at certain angles, under bad TV lights, she really did look like a man in drag. The FBI agent waiting in my kitchen has Reno’s masculine build—big swimmer’s shoulders—but a much more feminine face. A quite pretty face, with a delicate mouth, big, thicklashed brown eyes, and a narrow, slightly freckled nose. The combo of large but delicately beautiful is unusual, and I find myself staring, a form of rudeness the agent is apparently used to, because she smiles a greeting and offers her hand. “This is Monica Bevins,” says Shane by way of introduction. “Good morning, Mrs. Garner,” she says. “Sorry to wake you so early, but I’m on my way back from the Long Island field office, so it was now or never. Hope you were able to get some sleep.” “No problem.” “Back in the day Monica and I were in the same class at Quantico,” Shane adds. “Difference is, I eventually resigned and she eventually got promoted. And promoted. And promoted. Monica is now an assistant director. Affectionately known as an ‘A-Dick.’ And duly expected to rise to the D.D. That’s deputy director. As high as you can go without a presidential appointment.” “Randall, stop gushing.” “Sorry, ma’am.” The big woman rolls her pretty eyes, but the irritation is feigned. She’s basking in his admiration. Truth is, given her size and forthright personality, she and Shane look like they
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could be brother and sister. And that’s the vibe between them—old, trusted friends who have endured bad times and good. “I understand this big galoot is going to help locate your daughter,” she says. “Mrs. Garner, are you okay?” My legs are still wobbly and I feel weirdly on the verge of tears and don’t want to unleash that particular fountain. So I nod and sit down, clutching at the counter. “You took a pill,” Shane reminds me. A sleeping pill, right. No wonder my brain feels muffled in cotton. “Randall has requested a shadow investigation,” the big woman says. “Are you in agreement?” “Shadow investigation?” I ask, puzzled. “What’s that?” “It’s what we sometimes do in a situation like this, when we haven’t been officially brought in. Despite what you see on TV, the agency almost never imposes on a local investigation if the parents are uncooperative. We follow very specific guidelines governing abduction or kidnapping cases. Bottom line, without a request from the parents or the Nassau County Police, we can’t take an active role.” “What about me?” I ask. “I’m a parent.” “Indeed. And we’ll put your daughter on our missing persons list, and alert all of our local offices. If evidence develops that your daughter has been abducted—a ransom call or note, or some other indicator—this will automatically become a full-on, agents-in-place investigation. Meanwhile, we’ll very quietly take a look at Edwin Manning, see what we can determine. As I say, what we call a shadow investigation.” “Okay, I get it.”
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“You understand we are constrained from an active role, unless and until you get a ransom demand?” “Yes,” I say. “I wouldn’t authorize this if Randall hadn’t assured me that your daughter is not a typical teen runaway, in which case you’d have to rely on local police efforts to locate her.” A sudden flush warms my cheeks. “Kelly’s in trouble and it has something to do with Manning’s son. We know that. We were there.” The big woman nods. “So Randall said. He’s almost always right about these situations. His track record is nothing short of amazing. That’s why I’m responding, and why the agency will take a look. I’m leaving the legal paperwork that will enable us to pen register your telephone lines, have it on the record if a kidnapper calls. You okay with that?” “Yes, of course. Whatever it takes.” “Let’s hope Randall got it wrong this time and your daughter is just acting out. Believe me, hard as that is to deal with—I have two grown daughters, so I know—hard as that is, any sort of abduction scenario is much, much worse.” She hands Shane a legal-size envelope, the paperwork for the phone tap. “Sign and fax to the Melville office, they’ll get the ball rolling. Are we clear?” “Yes, ma’am, all clear,” says Shane. She ignores the taunt, turns to me. “Mrs. Garner?” “Find my daughter. That’s my only concern.” “We’ll do everything we can. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to be in Washington by noon.” She shakes my hand again, gives Shane a sisterly peck on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” she assures me on her way out. “You’re in capable hands.”
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*** The capable hands come through an hour or so later. I’m drinking too much tea and trying to clear my head. Checking my cell for messages that haven’t been left, generally working my anxiety up to higher and higher levels. Desperately wanting something, anything to happen, to convince me we’re going forward, making progress. The phone rings. My office phone. I enter at a run, find Shane with the phone already up to his ear, saying, “Yes. Yes. Got it. Thank you very much.” He hangs up. With my permission, Shane has cleared a space on my worktable for his laptop, one of those sleek, turbocharged things, with a wide screen and a titanium case. A spiral notebook lies open, filled with neat, legible handwriting, some of it emphatically underlined. The phone has been repositioned nearby. He’s been busy, obviously, and I feel a little twinge of guilt for getting much-needed sleep while he worked the phones and the Web, set up the meeting with his high-ranking friend. “Anything I should know?” I ask, indicating the phone. “Seth Manning’s car has just been located.” “His car?” I say, excited. “What about Kelly?” “Let’s take a break, I’ll bring you up to speed.” He grabs his notebooks and I follow him back into the kitchen. Shane takes a stool at the far end of the counter, helps himself to coffee. I cling to the mug of tea like it’s a grenade that might go off if released. “Couple of interesting things,” he begins. “Background on Edwin Manning. The name was vaguely familiar and now I know why. He started a very successful, very private hedge fund, Manning Capital. Big money. Listed assets of five
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billion dollars, over which he has more or less total control. Which makes him a juicy target.” “I’m not even sure what a hedge fund really does.” “It makes money for people with money. Or that’s the idea.” “What about the car? You said they found his car?” Shane nods. “Correct. Seth’s vehicle has been located in the long-term parking lot at Island Executive Airport in Farmingdale. Just the vehicle, locked. The police have impounded it. We’ve agreed it will be given a full forensic search.” “We?” Flashing a quick, almost furtive smile, he strokes his trim little beard, as if embarrassed to have been caught doing something naughty. “Um, Detective Berg and I. That’s the ‘we.’ The way it played out I, ah, happened to suggest a full search and he agreed it made sense. The idea being that the case may fall under the 2252 statute.” Takes a moment for my brain to slip into gear and put together airport and car in the long-term parking lot. “Are you saying they flew somewhere? Kelly and this man? Where did they go? Does this mean they really did run away, they weren’t kidnapped?” Shane consults his notes. “This doesn’t contradict our abduction theory. A car registered to Seth Manning entered the lot at 5:13 a.m., almost six hours before your last contact with Kelly. The I.E. is not a major commercial facility—it’s a small, private airport—but it has charter flights to all the metropolitan airports. LaGuardia, Kennedy, Newark and, by helicopter, to Manhattan. There are regular flights to Atlantic City. So theoretically your daughter could have been almost anywhere when she called you.” Despite all the caffeine, my head is still thick with Ambien-induced sleep, so I’m having trouble processing.
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Can it only be yesterday that Kelly vanished? Doesn’t seem possible. Seems like weeks. “Theoretically?” I ask, seizing on the word. “What does that mean?” “Means her name was not listed on the manifest of any charter flight leaving yesterday morning,” he explains. “Nor was it listed on any private flight plan filed with the tower.” “The FBI told you that? Your friend Monica?” “Not Monica personally. People who work the Long Island office.” “So Kelly didn’t fly? She and this man were kidnapped in the airport parking lot? Is that what you’re saying?” “No,” he says. “My apologies. I’m not making myself clear. I’m not saying she and Seth Manning didn’t fly out of Island Executive, just that they didn’t leave on a chartered flight. It’s a very busy airfield, lots of private and corporate aircraft use it. Hundreds. Civilian pilots are encouraged to file a flight plan, but not all do so.” “Somebody must know what happened to them.” “Somebody does,” he agrees. “We just have to find out who.” 25. Surprise, Surprise The Lincoln Town Car is starting to feel like a sturdy old friend. Keeping just below the speed limit, we cruise into Island Executive Airport in less than forty minutes door to door. More like door to long-term parking lot. Out over the runways, small planes teeter like fragile kites, looking much too slow to stay aloft. The same trick of the eye that makes you think a 757 is barely moving, and these little jobs are way smaller. And yes, I’m one of those who’ve never really under-
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stood how a squat little box with stubby wings can make itself fly. My ninth-grade science teacher, Mr. Polanski, tried his best, but it still doesn’t make sense. Only one of the reasons that the idea of Kelly and small planes freaks me out. Parachutes? Skydiving? Forget about it. Safely parked on the outer rim of the lot—Shane likes an open space on either side—we head for a blocky-looking building near the lone tower that overlooks the runways. The building is divided into bays with separate entrances. There are signs for Flight Instruction, Maintenance, and Flight Operations. Shane heads for door number three. It’s all I can do to keep up without breaking into a run. He notices, apologizes and shortens his stride. “Long legs,” I say. “And big feet,” he points out. A blast of cold air greets us inside Flight Operations. Temperature control is low enough to keep polar bears frisky, and I find myself hugging my bare arms. “Sorry, miss,” says the man behind the counter. Older guy in his sixties with the hanging jowls and the soulful eyes of a faithful bulldog. “Thermostat is out of whack. Grab a jacket.” He points to a row of hooks inside the door and a selection of bright orange jackets, all with Ground Crew stenciled on the back. The jacket is big enough for three of me, but it helps. “Now,” says the man behind the counter, rubbing his hands together. “Bob Cody, what can I do ya?” Bob has a thinning white flat-top, radar-scoop ears, and the kind of deeply creased, leathery skin that’s seen way too much sunlight over the years. But his smile is friendly enough and he seems genuinely interested in helping. “This is Jane Garner,” Shane begins, laying his business card down on the counter. “Her daughter is missing.”
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“Oh my God,” Bob says, glancing at the card. “That’s terrible.” “You were on duty when the police tow truck snagged the Boxster this morning?” Bob nods eagerly. “Seth’s Porsche. Yeah, I saw that. The old man’ll be pissed. Excuse me, miss. I mean missus.” Shane looks pleased. He sort of relaxes his big frame on the counter, leaning on his elbows to make himself appear smaller, less imposing. It’s a conversation between equals now, two men of the world helping out a lady. “This is going to be our lucky day, Mrs. Garner,” Shane says to me. “Bob knows the Mannings. I’ll bet he’s seen Kelly with Seth, right, Bob? Pretty girl, slender and athletic. Dark hair. Taking lessons?” On cue I produce Kelly’s photo, the one that shows her in the cockpit of the little airplane. Bob studies the photograph, shakes his head. “I’m sorry, no. But Seth has quite a number of students, I do know that, because he’s always careful with the flight plans. Not all the pilots are, but he is. That’s mostly when I see him nowadays, when he hands in the paperwork.” While Bob studies the photo, Shane studies Bob. Nods to himself, as if satisfied that the jug-eared gent is being truthful. “Recognize the aircraft?” Bob nods eagerly, which makes his jowls jiggle slightly. “Yep. Cessna Skylane. That’s the plane Seth uses for flight instruction. Took delivery just last year. Beautiful piece of machinery, just beautiful.” He pauses, looks from me to Shane. “Is Seth in some sort of trouble?” “No trouble,” Shane says firmly. “Kelly is the one in trouble, because she neglected to tell her mom where she and Seth were headed.”
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No trouble. First time I’ve heard Randall Shane lie, and it’s a more than a little unsettling to know how good he is at it. “Yeah, well, kids do that sometimes,” Bob says, sounding a little uneasy. “Detective Berg called earlier,” Shane says. “Apparently Seth forgot to file a flight plan.” Bob is shaking his head. “I don’t know who the detective talked to, but Seth Manning, he’s like clockwork. He’s been flying out of this facility since he was sixteen, and he never misses.” “You seem very certain.” Bob nods emphatically. “I was his original flight instructor. Seth was one of my best students. Not just because he had a feel for it—lots of students have that—but because he’s meticulous and organized. A good pilot is always prepared, always checking, that’s as important as any of the physical skills. Some students I had to drum that in, but not Seth. I kid you not, he enjoys working through the checklists. Which is part of what makes him an excellent flight instructor.” “Uh-huh,” says Shane. “So you passed the torch.” “You could say that.” “Mind if I ask why?” Bob gives him a wary look. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I developed cardiac problems a couple years ago. Persistent episodic tachycardia, which is doc talk for bum ticker. Flunked the physical.” Shane nods. “Some guys cheat on that, find a friendly doctor.” “Not me. It was time to retire, before I killed some kid.” “So you’re absolutely sure that Seth didn’t fly out of here yesterday?” “Positive,” Bob says, getting a bit huffy. “You know why
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I’m positive? Because that’s his Skylane right there. Got a prime tie-down right by the flight school.” Shane looks out the window, spots the plane, seems satisfied. “Any aircraft missing or stolen in the last few days?” Friendly Bob has had about enough of us. I can tell because his big ears have reddened. He backs away from the counter, putting space between himself and Shane. “What kind of crap are you talking, mister? Why would Seth Manning steal a plane when he has one of his own?” “For thrills? To impress a pretty girl?” “That’s bull. The kid is no thief. What is this really about? Who sent you here?” Shane drums his fingers lightly on the Formica, rat-a-tattat. “It’s like I said, Mrs. Garner is trying to locate her daughter.” Bob looks sick, puts his hand to his chest. “Seth must have friends at this airfield,” Shane persists. “Maybe he borrowed a plane.” Bob sits down, massaging his chest. His face has drained, leaving him pale as a paper napkin. I’m worried he’s going to keel over, but Shane isn’t backing off. “Same answer,” says Bob, sounding faint. “He’d file a flight plan.” “Charter flights?” Shane says. “Could Seth have chartered a plane?” Bob sounds pissed. “You don’t give up, do you? Anybody can charter a flight, but why would he? His father’s company has a King Air 350. Take you anywhere in North America, at altitude and in style.” Shane smiles, winks at me, as if we’ve just won something special. “A King, huh? Pricey.” Bob snorts. “Not compared with a Lear, it ain’t.” “Couple of million though, right?”
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“More.” “And you know it’s out there in the hangar because there’s no flight plan on file.” Bob looks like he wants to spit. His color has improved and he’s stopped rubbing his chest. Maybe the bad spell has passed. “Exactly right,” he says, jutting out his chin. Shane nods, satisfied. “Mr. Cody, here’s the deal. Show us the King, we’ll get out of your hair.” “I’m not showing you anything, mister.” “Fine. Then give me the tail number, I’ll check it out myself.” Shane doesn’t say anything, but something tells me he wants me to chime in, make myself heard. “Please?” I ask him. “It could be really important.” Five minutes later we’re approaching the hangar, one of three in this particular row. Condos for airplanes. Sort of like really wide storage units, with big roll-down doors. In the end poor Mr. Cody more or less surrendered, handed Shane the keys to the lockup. According to Cody, each unit can hold two aircraft, with openings on either side of the corrugated steel buildings, but Edwin Manning’s corporate airplane has a hangar all to itself. “You think they took off in daddy’s plane, got in trouble somewhere else?” I ask. “Working theory,” Shane says, fitting the key in the appropriately numbered door. “Subject to change.” Inside the hangar our footsteps echo against the metal sides of the building. It’s so dim and darkly shadowed that I can’t see much of anything until Shane finds a switch and trips the overhead lights. “Surprise, surprise,” he says.
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The hangar is empty. “What do we do now?” I ask. Behind us the door swings open, shifting the light. Before I can turn, a ragged, high-pitched voice says, “Keep your hands where I can see ’em.” Standing behind us is a hefty, big-bellied man in a baggy black tracksuit. He has a shaved head, a boxer’s flattened nose, puffy eyelids and scar-thickened lips. In his hand is a shiny black gun. 26. The Man From Wonderbra My first mugging was in Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue, to be exact. About four months after Kelly was born, my mother decided I needed a day off. A chance, she said, to be a grownup for a little while, on my own. Bless her, she gave me a hundred dollars and told me to take the train into the city, have lunch at the Museum of Modern Art—they had a great little Italian café she loved—and buy myself something pretty. “Window-shop on Fifth Avenue,” she said. “I mean really look. There might be something there for you.” A hundred dollars was a lot for my mother, but I thought it would go further at, say, Macy’s, than some upscale boutique, and since part of me was still a bratty seventeenyear-old, I said so. “I don’t mean to buy,” she told me, squeezing my hands. “To learn from. Look and learn.” Look and learn. Truer words and all that. The only class I’d ever really excelled in was home ec, and that was because of sewing. Having watched my mother stitch my little dresses together, and most of her own clothing, as well, I knew how the
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machine worked, wasn’t afraid of the flashing needle, and that put me ahead of the other girls. Plus I was interested in how clothes were designed and cut out and assembled. So there I was, looking and learning, and loving every minute of it. I was a grown-up in the big city, studying retail fashion. Not just style and quality of the clothing, but how it was presented. The design and execution of the window display, the whole look of the thing. I wasn’t taking notes, but my eyes were soaking it all in and my brain was thinking, why does Mom want me to do this, what does she have in mind? It was intriguing, exciting. It might, just might, be a clue about what I should do, how I might live. And that, of course, is when I got mugged. I had my best leather bag securely slung over my shoulder and around my neck, right hand on the strap. I didn’t see the gang of boys coming, but they saw me, and the biggest of them snaked his arm through the strap—he never stopped moving—and the next thing I was being carried down Fifth Avenue by five or six boys. White boys with low-rider attitudes, laughing and cackling and being so outrageously boisterous that my muffled shouts went nowhere. It must have looked like I was part of the gang, if you didn’t happen to notice that my feet weren’t connected to the sidewalk. They carried me for most of one block, worked the strap free of my neck, yanked my hair so hard it felt like they’d torn my scalp, and then dumped me on the sidewalk, scraped and bleeding from both knees. Bag gone, money gone, day ruined. All in broad daylight, with hundreds of pedestrians within arm’s reach, every last one of them looking away, studiously avoiding the noxious teen spirit. Without the fare to get home, and barely enough for a phone call, Mom had to pack up Kelly, come into the city and rescue me. Found me angry and red eyed in Penn Station,
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cursing Manhattan. Could happen anywhere, she said, comforting me. Don’t blame it on the city and don’t let it get you down. That was her other mantra. Don’t let it get you down, baby doll. A constant refrain to herself as well as me, and it got us through a lot. My father leaving, me dropping out of school to have a baby, me getting my GED, me eventually graduating from the Long Island Fashion Institute, me getting my first real job. A whole lot of me, and not much Mom. That was her gift, of course, the road she willingly took from the moment I finally confessed to the pregnancy I’d been hiding and denying for months. Secrets. Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. The man with the shiny black gun. My second mugging. Guy with a gun, he must want my handbag, right? “You and your boyfriend, stop right there,” he demands, in a voice that seems a little too high and scratchy for his bulk. “Keep your hands where I can see ’em.” His oddly protuberant eyes are darting between me and Shane, like he’s playing eenie-meenie in his head. Is it a thyroid condition does that to the eyeballs? Or high blood pressure? Anyhow, he has eyes like boiled eggs and his closeshaved skull looks like a chunk of hard, lumpy wax glistening under the overhead lights. A drop of sweat congeals at the tip of his flattened nose. An ugly-looking customer for sure, but what bothers me even more than the gun—is it real or a toy, how would I know the difference?—what really bothers me is this: the man is very, very nervous. “Listen real careful,” says the egg man, pausing to wipe the sweat from his nose with his free hand. “Stay away from Edwin Manning. Stay away from his home, his family, his
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business, his airplanes, everything to do with him. Stay away, you’ll be okay. Don’t stay away, bad things’ll happen. Capiche?” “Understood,” says Shane, sounding utterly reasonable. “You happen to know where the King Air was headed?” The man’s forehead furrows. Beads of sweat seep from his forehead, making his egg-shaped eyes blink even more rapidly. “The what? I told you—shut up!” “The Beechcraft that’s supposed to be in this hangar. Where’d it go? We’re assuming Seth was at the controls. He never bothered to file a fight plan, why was that?” The man with the gun looks confused, unsure of how to respond, and he looks at me with a beleaguered expression, as if he wants me to intervene, stop all these complicated questions. In that moment, as his buggy eyes shift, Shane glides in front of me, blocking my view. Next thing I know, the egg man is lying sideways on the concrete, groaning and holding his shoulder, and Shane has the gun. Which on second glance—or tenth—isn’t all that shiny. Just black and deadly. With an air of icy calm Shane says, “Lock the door, please, Mrs. Garner. There should be a thumb latch on the knob.” I hurry to the door. Set the lock before it hits me— shouldn’t we be running away? But it soon becomes apparent that Randall Shane has other plans. “Wallet?” he says to the burly, big-gutted man on the floor. A nasty scratch on the side of the man’s shaved head oozes a little blood, just above the ear. “Fuck you, Jack!” he says in his high, scratchy voice. “Why’d ya do that, huh?” Shane says, “Very prudent, leaving the safety on. Which means whoever sent you issued specific instructions. In the future, you want to menace someone with a Sig Sauer, and
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do it safely, don’t try ‘cocked and locked.’ Empty the chamber. The safety slide is a tip-off.” “Yeah, thanks.” The man grimaces, baring his teeth. “You broke something, you fuck.” “Your right collarbone,” Shane informs him. “It’ll heal eventually. Now kindly produce identification or I’ll break your left collarbone. That means an upper-chest cast. Very awkward and you’ll be laid up for six weeks.” The man angrily slips a fist into his baggy tracksuit, flings a wallet at Shane, who lets it drop to the concrete in front of him. “Please pick that up,” he asks me, very polite, never wavering with the gun. “Let’s see if this nice gentleman has a name.” The billfold is a quality piece, Italian made. Dyed ostrich skin, hand stitched. Inside, a New Jersey driver’s license identifies our would-be assailant as Salvatore J. Popkin, residing on McKinley Avenue in Atlantic City. “Says he’s six foot, two hundred pounds,” I note. Shane chuckles. “More like five-nine, two-fifty,” he says. “Didn’t your mother teach you to always tell the truth, Sal?” I keep rummaging through the billfold, hold out another identification card for inspection. “Interesting,” Shane says. “Sal is a security crew supervisor at Wunderbar Casino. That’s the one they call Wonderbra, right Sal? On account of the chip girls?” “I ain’t talkin’ to you,” Sal responds sullenly. “Sure you are,” Shane cajoles. “You were sent here to talk to us, right? Try to scare us? Why else have the gun on safety? You want us to leave Mr. Manning and his various toys alone. Anything else?” Sal thinks about it. While he’s mulling it over his fingers probe the scratch above his ear and he inspects the seeping blood. His expression becomes even more malevolent. If his
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swollen, oddly protuberant eyes were laser beams we’d both be burned to a crisp. But they’re not, and he’s on the floor with a broken collarbone, and something tells me Randall Shane doesn’t need a weapon to reduce Salvatore Popkin to a whimpering puddle, and Sal knows it and hates him for it. “Just keep the fuck away,” he says grudgingly. “That’s it.” “Or else? Threats of physical harm and so on?” “Yeah, big-time.” Shane considers this. “So Edwin Manning tells you keep an eye on his empty hangar? Or is it more like, if certain people come sniffing around, looking for Seth, run them off?” Sal looks away, purses his sweaty lips. Clearly wishing himself elsewhere, on a planet that didn’t include big rangy guys who can take away his gun, break his bones. “Got it all figured out, huh? If you’re so smart, why’d the FBI get rid of you?” This elicits a dangerous-looking smile from Shane. “I left in good standing,” he says softly. “Not that it’s any of your concern. But thank you for confirming that your boss read my business card.” “Concrete is killing me,” the fat man protests. “I’m gonna get up.” “Not quite yet,” Shane tells him, emphasizing with the gun. “Couple of ways to play this. I can notify the authorities—and that will include the Feds—and we can press charges. Assault with a firearm, threat of deadly force. Serious felony charge, especially if you don’t happened to be licensed to carry this particular weapon. Or, and I’m hoping Mrs. Garner will indulge me in this, we can go a different route. You with me so far?” Another grudging nod from the floor. “How about this?” Shane suggests. “You report back to Mr. Manning, tell him the threat worked. You waved a gun around and talked tough and we’re frightened out of our
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minds. We begged for mercy. We promised to keep out of Manning’s personal business and we’re way too scared to go to the cops. Does that work for you, Sal? Can you sell that?” The man stares up at him. “You serious?” “It’s the smart move.” “What about my piece?” he says, pointing with his chin. “The Sig? You get it back.” “And this?” he asks, indicating his crippled shoulder. Shane grins. “You smacked me so hard it fractured a bone. You don’t know your own strength. Bruise your knuckles on something, make it convincing.” Sal has a strange look on his face. Takes a moment for me to decipher it as a smile. “I could bruise it on your face,” he suggests. “Make it real.” “Trust me,” Shane says. “You don’t want to do that. Now take off your shoes and socks.” 27. Call For Edwin Manning Funny how life changes in a blink. One day your five-yearold is happy and healthy, the next she’s got cancer. The day after that she’s flying off with a boyfriend you never heard of, and two minutes later you’re holding a Nike sneaker with a pistol shoved into a white cotton sock. Or that’s how it seems, everything rushing by so fast I can’t get a grip, can’t make sense of what’s happening. And oh, I really do have the gun in the sneaker, sock and all. “Here it is,” Shane says, indicating a new Chevy sedan in the rental car row. I place the loaded Nike beside the rear left tire, as promised. Shane’s rather clever means of hobbling our assailant, who will be limping along behind us, trying to keep his fat
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and tender feet from burning on the hot tarmac. One assumes he will retrieve his shoes and his socks and his weapon, although not the actual bullets, which Shane has thoughtfully removed. By then—I picture bad-boy Sal jumping up and down with rage, his belly jiggling furiously—we’ll be long gone, melting into traffic. Or that’s the plan. “Hope you know what’s going on, because I sure don’t,” I protest, scooting gingerly into the hot leather seats of the big Lincoln. “What if that creep helped kidnap Kelly? Shouldn’t we have him arrested? Or torture him or something?” That elicits a full-throated chuckle from the man in the driver’s seat. “Torture? You wouldn’t object?” “If he knows where Kelly is, I’ll torture him myself!” Shane eyes me in the rearview as he fires up the engine, adjusts the AC. “I’ll take care to remain on your good side,” he says thoughtfully. “Let’s get rolling, then I’ll explain.” The expressway is clotted but steady—my ever-cautious driver has no trouble staying well under the speed limit, unfortunately. Must admit I do keep checking out the back window, fighting this weird idea that our bent-nosed assailant will come running down the median in his bare feet, waving his gun, seeking revenge for his humiliation. Once we’re well clear of the airport, Shane says, “Okay. Remember I mentioned that Edwin Manning made his fortune with a hedge fund? It’s called the Merrill Manning Capital Fund. Merrill was his wife’s maiden name, and that’s where the money originally came from.” “So he’s loaded. We already knew that.” “There’s rich and there’s superrich,” Shane points out. “Manning Capital is a private hedge fund, as private as the law allows. It has five billion dollars in assets. Management
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fees on a fund like that would be something like thirty million a year, plus twenty-five percent of the profit. So Edwin Manning is probably pulling down two or three hundred million a year, maybe more.” “Wow.” “Yeah, wow.” “And what, he gambled it all away? That’s why he knows that creep from Atlantic City?” “Not exactly. The fund he runs—the fund he owns, for all practical purposes—is the single largest private investor in the gaming industry. That’s their specialty. Online gambling, casinos, real estate associated with casinos. If someone is wagering money, chances are Manning Capital has a piece of the profit.” I’m stunned. It’s hard to imagine the frightened little man, cowering all alone in his empty house, as some sort of gambling mogul. “You mean Manning’s a gangster?” I ask. “Like the godfather or Tony Soprano?” “Not a gangster,” Shane says, shaking his head. “An investor.” “What’s the difference?” Shane laughs. “One goes to prison, the other doesn’t.” My friend Fern likes the slots. Not me. I hate the idea of putting money in a machine that doesn’t stitch things together, so I never participated. Truth is, I’ve never actually been in a casino, not in New Jersey, not in Connecticut, not anywhere. I don’t buy lottery tickets. With me it’s not a religious or moral objection, it’s about years of being careful with every penny, apportioning this much for groceries, that much for a car payment, medical insurance, so many dollars
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for school expenses. Plus, you win a game of cancer, roll the bones with death, everything else pales. Heading back to Valley Stream, Shane does his best to bring me up to speed. All the things he was doing while I slept, and after Monica Bevins came by. How Kelly’s prints may be present in Seth’s Porsche, and that’s why it was important to have the vehicle impounded—it will help build a case for intervention. How, exactly, the FBI runs a so-called shadow investigation. No agents will approach Edwin Manning directly, but in all other ways the full investigative weight of the agency will come to bear, with a special emphasis on the financials. Financials being the money that flows to and from Mr. Manning. According to Shane, the financials are the key. “He withdraws a large amount of cash, we’ll know it before the teller stops counting. If he wires money to, say, an offshore bank, we’ll know that, too.” “You think this has something to do with gambling? That’s why his son was kidnapped? Or is it just because Manning is rich?” “Dunno,” says Shane. “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe we’re completely off base about a kidnapping and Seth and your daughter hijacked daddy’s private plane and are out there sightseeing.” “You believe that?” “Unfortunately, no,” Shane admits. “Edwin Manning isn’t worried about his boy borrowing the company plane. Somebody scared the hell out of him.” “So what do we do? How do we find Kelly?” “I suggest we leave the determination of abduction up to law enforcement for the moment, and concentrate on locating the Beechcraft. Make sense?”
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“Yeah, but the man at the desk, he made it sound like that plane could go anywhere,” I say, discouraged. “Range of fifteen hundred miles,” Shane admits. “That means with fuel stop or two it could be anywhere in North America. But it’s not just anywhere, it had a specific destination. A destination yet to be determined.” “You make it sound hopeless.” “No, no,” he protests. “My bad. Not hopeless at all. We’ve got the tail number. Airports, even small local airports, pay attention to tail numbers. We’ll find it. And once we find the plane, I promise you, we’ll find your daughter.” Shane sounds so confident, so sincere. I would be more comforted if I hadn’t heard him lie so convincingly earlier. The big break is waiting for us at my house, on the kitchen counter. On Shane’s laptop, to be exact, in the form of a message from my cell phone company. “What does it say?” I ask eagerly. “Have they found her?” The big guy hunkers down, scrolling through a PDF file of the current bill. “Here we go,” he says softly, clicking on a line. “You have relatives in Florida? Friends? Does she?” “Kelly’s in Florida?” “Her phone is. That last call you received, it originated somewhere within range of a cell tower in western Dade County.” “Dade County?” “Miami,” he says. And then his finger touches the screen, “Hey, look at this. Several more calls have been made from her phone, accessing the same cell tower. The most recent was about ten hours ago.” “She tried to call me?” I say, my heart slamming. “Why
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didn’t I get the call?” Then it hits me. “Oh! I was asleep! What an idiot!” Fumbling for my cell phone, wondering how I could have missed it—I checked for messages first thing and there’d been nothing. I’d been compulsively checking every fifteen minutes all morning, still nothing. Stupid phone! “No, wait,” Shane says, sounding intrigued as he switches between windows on the screen. “The calls weren’t placed to you. See this? The calls went to a number in Oyster Bay, New York.” He looks at me, eyebrows raised. “Oh…my…God,” I say, as the implication slowly sinks in. Can’t be true, no way. “Interesting,” Shane says, easing back on the stool. “Your daughter’s in the Miami area and she’s been calling Edwin Manning. Now what do you suppose that means?” 28. The Man With A Plan They say everybody has falling dreams—that’s why they call it falling asleep. Trouble is, I’m wide-awake in my own kitchen, but it feels like somebody shoved me out of a plane without a parachute. Falling into the truly terrifying idea that my beautiful daughter has become someone I don’t recognize. Someone complicit in an extortion scheme, stealing money from her boyfriend’s superrich dad. And if that’s true, if I don’t know my own child, then nothing makes sense. In the end it’s Randall Shane who reaches out with his long arms and snatches me just before I hit the ground. Not that he knows it. “There’s another, even more plausible explanation,” he says, stroking his chin, lost in thought. “Maybe it wasn’t your daughter who called Edwin Manning.”
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“You said it was her phone!” “Exactly. But let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that she and Seth were detained.” “Detained?” He flashes a grim smile, studies me with his sad and handsome eyes. “I thought detained might be a nicer word than abducted or kidnapped. And you look like you could use a nice word. I had no idea a living person could look so pale. Anyhow, let’s assume Kelly has been detained, okay? They take her purse. They use her cell phone to call Manning. Simple as that.” Simple as that. Something to cling to, and also it makes sense. I’d been stuck on the fact that Kelly’s phone is practically an appendage, and that therefore any calls from it would originate with her, but that’s just stupid. No self-respecting kidnapper would let a victim keep her phone. Victim? What am I thinking? The idea of Kelly being a victim—first time I’d put that horrible word and her name together—sends a shudder through me. At the same time there’s no denying that I’m vastly relieved that she need not be complicit just because her phone has been linked to a crime. Then it hits me again, the double whammy, would it be better if she’s a victim or the criminal? Missing or runaway? Dead or alive? The whole world spinning, demanding that I choose. “You better sit down,” Shane is saying from a great distance. He hands me a white paper bag. Where on earth did he find this particular bag? Did he know it was left there for exactly this purpose? I recognize it by the scent of the mint chocolates it once held. Mint chocolates Kelly and I pretended to fight over, sneaking them out of the bag when the other wasn’t looking, a lovely game we like to play. Shane
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is insisting that I breathe into the bag, and it’s a while before I’m back down to earth, breathing at a normal rate. “Sorry,” I whisper, feeling ashamed. “Anxiety attacks are allowed,” he says, pressing a glass of water into my hands. “Drink this slowly. No gulping.” “Happens,” I say. “Yes, it happens,” he agrees. “Drink.” I drink. Slowly my heart stops slamming. Whatever triggered the episode fades into my bloodstream or back into my brain, wherever it comes from. Truth? I’m no stranger to hyperventilating. Started when I was about twelve, just entering adolescence. Had my first period and fainted dead away. My mother thought it was the shock of seeing my own blood, but it was more than that, because for a while it happened several times a month. Our family doctor gave me some pills—mild tranquilizers—but the funny feeling they gave me actually made me more anxious and so I stopped taking them. I used to carry a paper bag in my purse for emergencies. Nurses would find me puffing on the things in the hallways while waiting on Kelly’s latest test results. Got to be routine, almost. No big deal. ’Scuse me, Doctor, while I huff into this for a while. Okay, what were you saying, another course of radiation? More chemo? No problem, puff-puff-puff. Oddly enough, the longest time ever without an anxiety attack was while pregnant. All kinds of stress in my life— denying the pregnancy, then hiding the pregnancy, then dropping out of school, parents breaking up, money problems—but it never triggered an attack. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe it was Kelly inside me, calming me down. Whatever, the hyperventilation episodes came back with a vengeance when Mom got sick, and continued right through the day of her funeral. But for the past couple of years,
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months go by without a problem, and when it does happen it’s not so severe as in the past. Until now. Shane, the man who never sleeps, it figures he’d understand. “Not a problem,” he says. “We’ll keep a bag handy.” “Thanks.” In my present condition a few kind words make me weepy, which he’s kind enough to ignore, which in turn makes me more weepy, until finally he has to find a box of tissues, tell me to blow my nose. Feels like I’m three years old, making a scene in day care. Honk, honk. “You sound like a duck,” he observes. “Or maybe a goose.” That gets me laughing and then crying and then both at the same time. More tissues, more honking, until finally the tears dry up and all that’s left is the gentle laughter. “Good,” he says. “Better?” “Yeah, thanks.” He fiddles with a pen, making doodles in his notebook. Waits a beat and says, “Maybe from here on out, you could stay by the phone, sort of guarding the home front, and I’ll take care of the fieldwork.” My head shakes before my response is fully formed—an instinctive, powerful rejection of his offer. “No way. Don’t you dare. She’s my baby, I need to be there.” Shane nods like he expected me to object. “That’s okay, too. You realize we have to go to Florida?” To be honest my brain hadn’t got that far, but of course he’s right. “So this man, this boy, whatever, he flew them to Miami in his father’s plane? And they got in trouble there?” “Looks that way,” Shane says. “It’s the best lead so far. Theoretically a Beechcraft King Air 350 could make it to
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southern Florida without even a pit stop. Aircraft like that could fly there and back in a day, easy.” “But they didn’t make it back.” “No indication of that, no. Evidence suggests that Seth and your daughter have been detained in Florida. Something happened down there.” “They were kidnapped. That’s why Seth’s father is so scared,” “Yes, but kidnapped for what purpose?” Shane wants to know. “Money. All that money makes him a target.” “Yeah,” Shane says carefully. “But Edwin Manning has hundreds of millions, so the big question is why hasn’t he taken charge of the situation? Guys like that, hugely successful, they’re alpha dog personalities. They assume they can use power and wealth to fix just about anything, and usually they’re right.” Hand to my chest, I say, “You trying to give me another attack?” “No. But you need to know what we’re facing. This isn’t a typical abduction or extortion. And that means I have no idea what we’re up against.” “I thought you had a plan,” I protest, sounding plaintive. “Oh, I do have a plan,” he says, utterly confident. “My plan is to find your daughter.” 29. The Truth Almost When I finally admitted I was pregnant, and failed to name the father, Fern joked about my immaculate conception. She called me the swollen angel and talked about my unborn child as the baby Jesus. And always it made me smile because that was just Fern being Fern. Think of a white
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Queen Latifah except slightly taller and without the celebrity diva glitches. A big beautiful woman who can enter a room, size it up and make it her own. No matter what the occasion, wedding, funeral, or lunch with the posse, she’s out there, a wild girl with a wicked sense of humor. Words that on another person’s lips would be rude or insulting are, coming from Fern, an invitation to laugh at yourself, at her, at the whole crazy world. First thing she says when seeing Shane, “Get a load of Mr. Big Hunk. So, is everything in proportion?” “Fern! Be nice!” “Bet you get that all the time,” she continues, ignoring me. “Girls checking out your hands and feet, wanting to know if the rest of you is built to the same scale. Am I right?” “Randall Shane,” he says. “Care to shake my big hand?” Fern takes the hand, draws him close, gives him a smooch on the neck, which is as high as she can get on tiptoe. “Keeper,” she says to me, with a wink. And then back at him, “You’ll have to make the first move. Janey has the shy bug.” “Fern, stop it.” “She hasn’t had a date since the Clinton administration. So here’s the deal. Help her find the kid, then I’ll treat you both to dinner at a schmantzy bling hotel. A big juicy steak and then big juicy you. Let nature take its course, what do you say?” Shane chuckles, carefully disengages himself from Fern. “You lost me at schmantzy.” “Ha! Fat chance! So dish, darlings. What’s the haps? Where’s Flygirl and how do we get her home? Tell me all before I read it in the tabloids.” The big guy gives her what I’ve come to think of as the Randall Shane eyeball. Not an accusing kind of look, exactly. More careful, studied, but still the sort of serious look that
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makes you not want to play him. A look that reminds you that despite the good manners he can, under the right circumstances, be dangerous. “Jane warned me about you,” he says, more or less affably. “She also said she’d trust you with her life.” “She said that? Janey, that’s so sweet.” Shane bears down, insisting on serious. “She’s about to do just that, Mrs. Cabella. Trust you with information that could put Kelly’s life at risk. Or hers, or mine, for that matter.” “Mrs. Cabella?” Fern looks shocked, eyes getting bigger. “You told him my name was Mrs. Cabella? I haven’t been Mrs. anything since I traded Edgar for his Barcolounger, and his last name was Fineman. Cabella is my father’s name, so I guess technically you could call me Mr. Cabella’s daughter, but see, Mrs. Cabella? That’s my mother.You want a date with my mother? She’d love you. Can’t remember her own name, or who I am most of the time, but she always loved big, handsome men. Janey, I ever tell you she once propositioned Burt Lancaster in the lobby of the Waldorf? She was married at the time, too. My aunt Nancy told me all about it, they were having drinks in the bar and she wrote her number on a napkin and gave it to Burt Lancaster. And you know what he did? He thought she wanted an autograph, so he signed the napkin and handed it back. Isn’t that a riot?You know who Burt Lancaster was, Randall? Do you like old movies? I’m like plugged into AMC, that’s my default channel, all day long I’m watching these good-looking dead people. I like the noir. Can’t be too noir for me. You know what noir is, Randall? That’s French for ‘the bitch is going to shoot you in the end, you big dumb moron.’” Fern is still going when I walk her to the couch, persuade
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her to sit down. She’s always a talker. But this is something else. Like she feels she’s made a fool of herself and has to keep yakking to cover the embarrassment, which is really strange because Fern doesn’t do embarrassed, it’s not part of who she is, and then I realize, hearing her babble on about old movie stars, that she’s nervous, maybe even frightened. She goes dead quiet when she learns that Kelly has gone missing in Florida and has possibly been abducted, and that I’m leaving immediately. “All you have to do is answer the phone,” I say. “Tell people there was a family emergency, I’ll get back to them in a few days. If it’s a fitting or some sort of fabric crisis that absolutely has to be handled, Tracy can take care of it. She’s good with nervous clients.” “You really think Kelly has been kidnapped? Oh my God. What do I do if the kidnappers call?” “You tell them I’m not here, you give them my cell number and tell them to call me. And Fern? We don’t know for sure that she’s been kidnapped, okay? All we know for sure is that she’s missing. No one has called to demand anything.” Shane and I previously agreed not to share all of our information with Fern. I desperately need her to mind the phone, take care of business, but he’s says it’s better if she doesn’t know about Edwin Manning, or the FBI phone tap or the shadow investigation. No sense alerting any bad actors, he says—cop talk for bad guys. The less she knows the less they’ll know, if someone does call my landline and speaks to Fern. Which makes sense. I’d trust Fern with my life, I really would, but she does love to talk and doesn’t always know when to stop.
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Still, it’s hard not to be completely straight with my oldest and dearest friend. “There are things I can’t tell you right now,” I caution her. “Are you okay with that? Can you do this for me?” “More secrets, Janey?” “Not for long. All we have to do, establish what’s really going on, then the police will take over. The police and the FBI.” “But don’t mention the FBI,” Shane warns her. “Not over the phone. Very important. You don’t know where Jane is, or what she’s doing.” “You don’t know anything,” I urge. “You’re just answering the phone for a friend. Mostly it’ll be business calls. Vendors and clients. Use your best judgment, make excuses, whatever. Anybody calls about Kelly, what do you say?” Fern shakes her head, exhales sharply. “Okay, okay, I get it. Jane isn’t here, try her cell. Other than that I’m like Colonel Schultz—I know nothing.” “Perfect,” says Shane. “Cell will be off for a couple of hours while we’re en route, but I’ll get any messages. And I’ll call you as soon as I can. Love you, Fern,” I say, hugging her. “You’re a lifesaver.” “Go,” she insists, waving me away. “Find her.” We’re heading for the door. “I mean it about the bling hotel!” she reminds us. Thanks to small miracles, our flight departs on time. An added bonus, it’s only three-quarters full, so the middle seat is empty. Shane has a real problem with his long legs, so he takes the aisle and I snuggle up against the window, hoping the hum of the engines will be calming. Trying not to obsess on what might be happening to Kelly at this very minute, or
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what might already have happened to her, or if she’s suffering or terrified or just plain lost. Too much to think about. I have to find a way to put it aside, concentrate on the here and now, and whatever the next step may be. Get to Miami, then worry about Kel. Once we’re airborne and at altitude, Shane opens his laptop. No Internet connection, but he’s downloaded what he describes as scads of data, and he starts sorting through the files. Catching up on paperwork, he calls it. “Mostly I’m treading water until I can get back on the Net,” he admits. “My advice, put your head back, close your eyes, get some rest.You’re going to need it when we get there.” “But you never sleep,” I say reprovingly. “Not on a job.” “How is that possible?” He makes a rueful face. “Never got a satisfactory answer. I’ve been brain scanned, studied by sleep deprivation specialists, checked into insomnia clinics, examined by neurologists, shrinks, fortune-tellers, you name it.” “Fortune-tellers? Really?” “No,” he admits, “but the rest, yes. They never found any organic brain disorders, nothing they can point to.” “Sounds terrible.” “It can be,” he admits. “The brain requires sleep—being deprived of it can actually kill you—so when my brain doesn’t sleep for too long it compensates by sending me into a fugue state for short intervals.” “Fugue state? How does that work? Do you mind my asking?” “No, it’s fine,” he says. “Basically I sleep with my eyes open, but don’t know I’m asleep. I can be up, moving around, unaware of my condition. Sort of like sleepwalking. When
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it gets really bad I tend to hallucinate. They call it wakeful dreaming or sleep state misperception.” “And that’s why you left the FBI?” “Pretty much, yes,” he says, sounding evasive. “You had this all your life?” “No,” he says, glancing away. “It’s a result of trauma.” “You got shot? And that caused it?” Shane turns to face me in his narrow seat. Not easy because his long legs are jammed. His eyes are as deep and as blue as the sky around us and they’re searching mine, as if looking for a clue. “No, I wasn’t shot,” he says. “You want to know exactly what happened?” I nod, but there’s something in his manner that tells me I’ll regret asking. “I propose a fair trade,” he begins. “I’ll tell you what happened to me if you’ll tell me about Kelly’s father. Who he is, where he is, and why you don’t want to talk about him.” I turn to the window, gaze at the cotton clouds, the wavelaced sea below. “Mrs. Garner? Jane?” “Can’t,” I say. “Does it have to do with what’s happened to your daughter? Is her father part of this? I have to know if I’m going to help.” He waits for an answer, patient but insistent. “I really can’t tell you about her father,” I say in a small voice, “because I have no idea who he is.” And that’s the truth, almost.
Part II Screams In The Night
1. Let Him Sizzle There’s nothing like a dry martini at thirty thousand feet to set the mood. Edwin Manning, normally not much of a drinker, sips the icy vodka and decides that he has, finally, taken charge of himself, if not the whole nightmare situation. His twenty-four-hour emotional meltdown has left him deeply ashamed. The way he showed weakness in front of the former FBI agent and the girl’s mother was despicable. For the first time in his adult life he’d been unable to cope, immobilized by fear of what might happen if he makes the wrong decision. He didn’t snap out of it until the package arrived. At that moment it became obvious that if he failed to get it together and act like a man his son would surely die. Demands have been made, outrageous demands. As a father he has to find a way to fulfill those demands, impossible as they may be. It all starts with Edwin getting his ass in gear, transporting himself and a few burly associates to the scene of the crime, as it were. The associates, those with him on the chartered Gulfstream, include Mr. Salvatore J. Popkin, borrowed from the Wunderbar staff, where he is not-so-affectionately
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known as Sally Popeye or Sally Pop. Whatever juvenile, wannabe-wise-guy name he uses, at this moment he’s staring longingly at Edwin’s perfectly chilled martini with his egglike eyes. “Have a beer if you like,” Edwin suggests, “But I want you sober when we arrive, understood?” “I’m fine, Mr. Manning.” “Really?” says Edwin, feeling a slight buzz. “You look like shit.” “Ha-ha. You should see the other guy,” Sally responds, wincing as he readjusts his arm sling. With his thick bulk and his shaved head and the weird eyes, Sally has the look of a guy who can’t be stopped, but Edwin figures he got in trouble with the other big man, the former special agent, himself no slouch in the art of intimidation. It doesn’t matter how it really went down, Edwin finally has a plan, of sorts, and Sally Pop still figures into the mix. “At most we’ve got forty-eight hours before the FBI steps on my neck,” Edwin reminds him. “So we need to roll as soon as we land. Thirty minutes to the condo, pick up a few things, another forty-five to the destination.” “No problem,” says Sally. “No problem?” Edwin responds, voice rising. “You think this is no problem?” His eyes well with tears as he indicates the red plastic cooler nestled under his seat. “I mean, ah, no problem with transportation,” Sally says uneasily, trying not to glance at the cooler. “That other thing, Mr. Manning, I don’t know what to say.” Edwin finishes his martini, good to the last drop. He’s not even slightly ashamed of the tears. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a good cry. He’s aware that the other associates, the new
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guys Sally Pop brought on board, already have a nickname for him. Weepy. Nice, but Edwin doesn’t care. They’re so far down the food chain he’s barely aware that they live, breathe or think. Nothing like thinking or higher reasoning, but they do have functioning nervous systems, brain stems and so on. Temporary employees. Disposable, if it comes to that. Their thoughts and opinions are of no import. At the moment his sole concern is his beautiful son, a young man worth ten thousand of the bent-nose rope-a-dopes who will be acting as Edwin’s personal security detail until he gets this all sorted out. It’s a new thing, the need to surround himself with hired muscle. But he knows the mad bastard on the phone, the one who threatens to shake his world to pieces. Knows the man to be intelligent, unpredictable and highly dangerous. Capable, as he has demonstrated, of the most unimaginable acts, not the least of which sloshes in the red plastic cooler beneath his seat, in a solution of saline and chipped ice. Flesh of his flesh. Seth’s little finger, still wearing the ring Edwin gave him when he graduated from flight school. FedExed to him as promised in a cheery little ice pack. A well-known replantation surgeon has already examined the severed finger, pronounced it too damaged to reattach, even if Seth is located in the next few hours, but Edwin isn’t ready to give up on that. He’ll find a more daring surgeon. He’ll get Seth back, make him whole again, no matter what it takes. And then he will make sure that the man who damaged Seth will cease to exist. Edwin Manning, a slightly built, intensely driven man who has never deliberately caused physical harm to another human being, now dreams of slowly immersing his adversary in a vat of bubbling acid.
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Let the bastard suffer as I have suffered, he’s thinking, tears in his eyes. Let him sizzle. 2. The Twenty-four Hour Rule When Kelly was eight years old, my mother got it in her head that we needed a vacation. Partly it was to celebrate Kelly having finished a successful course of chemo, partly because Mom thought we ought to do something as a family that didn’t involve hospitals. It was a two-part holiday extravaganza, financed entirely out of her personal savings. The first part was a four-day package tour of Disney World. Included, a perfectly nice motel in Orlando with shuttle service to the park, where Kelly, frankly, went totally bonkers. Loved it to pieces. The rides, the actors in the goofy costumes, the food—she even claimed to love waiting in line. It makes Space Mountain so much better, Mommy, having to wait! She was so happy to be alive and healthy, so glad to be doing things other kids did, that nothing could temper her joy, not even ninety minutes in a line of squirming brats. My own mother was so pleased that I’d catch her smiling and humming songs to herself. It was a rare event for Mom, to have everything work out as planned. So as far as the Garner clan is concerned, Disney World was the greatest family vacation of all time, a glorious childhood memory for Kelly, for all of us. And then it got even better, at least for me. The second part of the trip, which Mom kept a big secret, was a three-night stay in South Beach, coinciding with Fashion Week. How she managed it I’ll never know, but she got us a room at a great little boutique hotel right there on Ocean Drive, in the heart of the Art Deco District, and tickets to one of the runway shows. On the short flight from Orlando to Miami she kept looking at me sideways, to see if I was
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loving the idea, and I kept bursting into tears and hugging her, and Kelly kept wanting to know why grown-ups cried when they were happy. When I miss Mom the most, those are the days I want to experience all over again. The South Beach Caper, as she called it. How proud she was to have pulled it off! All her life she sacrificed for her child—me—and this was the payoff, those few precious hours when she could be mentor and mother and grandmother and confidante and best friend and tour guide. She especially loved the runway show, the exotic models strutting wild little dresses and fake furs that made them look like skinny éclairs on high heels. The designers orbiting the stage like nervous satellites, one of them literally tearing out tiny clumps of his bizarrely coiffed hair. Mom would have loved it if I was one of those designers—not the tearing-out-the-hair part, of course—and she’d done everything she could to give me the opportunity. Maybe I wanted it, too, at one time, in the excitement of first discovering I had some talent in that direction. But then Kelly had gotten sick and healing her became the center of my life, and when we came out the other side, all three of us, I was more than happy to earn a good living being my own boss, selling elaborate wedding gowns to people who have more money than sense. Anyhow, that was my one and only visit to Miami until now, and stepping into the tropical sunlight without my mother and my daughter brings on a hollow pang of loneliness so overwhelming it hits my guts like a physical blow. “You okay?” Shane wants to know. “I’ll be fine. Let me sit for a minute.” The big guy finds me a seat on the lower level, says he’ll keep me in sight while he arranges a car rental. Sure enough I can spot his head above the crowd, see him glanc-
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ing back from the Hertz counter, signaling that it won’t take long. Fern has left a number of messages on my cell, all of them variations on “hope you’re okay, call me soonest.” She answers on the first ring. “Thank God!” she begins. “I was worried if the plane crashed.” “The plane didn’t crash. I’m here, we made it, we’re renting a car. Any calls?” “Any calls? Are you kidding? The phone hasn’t stopped ringing! Who is this Haley person? Seems kind of sweet but also seriously whacked. She actually started weeping when I said you were out of town for a few days. I’m telling people your great-aunt Hilda died. She was ninety-three, by the way, and a former Ziegfield girl. The one with the diamondstudded tiara and the peacock feathers. There are rumors she had a fling with Bugsy Siegel. Or was it Warren Beatty?” “You made her up?” “Background details are important, Jane. I have to believe in Aunt Hilda. Amazing woman. Too bad you were estranged for all these years.” “Fern, I don’t know what to say.” “Not to worry, I’m taking care of business. Mrs. Norbert was very nice, she said no problem, she’ll see you when you get back. Ditto the Spinellis. There was inquiry for an estimate, a ten-member wedding party in Bellport, they want you to coordinate the tuxedos with the gowns, whatever that means, but they’ll wait until next week. Let’s see, what else. Oh, Fred is filing the tax quarterlies, he said to let you know there were no surprises. And Alex McFairy suspects something is going on, but he didn’t push.” “McQuarrie. His name is McQuarrie.”
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“Whatever.” Something I’ve never really understood, Fern not liking my friend Alex. It’s not that he’s gay—Fern has more gay male pals than Cher and Madonna combined. She thinks Alex is a terrible snob, and of course that’s true, but if I don’t find his snooty attitudes offensive, why should Fern? One of those unfortunate things about life—no matter how hard you try, not all your friends are friends. “The detective called,” she’s saying. “Jay Berg? He sounds full of himself. Nothing to report from his end, just checking in—wanted to know if Kelly had made contact. I said no, was that okay?” “That’s fine. I don’t want to start lying to the cops, not if we can help it.” “Any news?” “We just got here. How could there be any news?” “You sound so stressed! Janey, listen to me, you need a shoulder to cry on, cry on his. Those are good shoulders.” “Got to go. Thanks, Fern, you’re a saint.” “Not if I can help it. Bye-bye. Love you, Janey poo.” Janey poo. Fern is the only person in the world who can get away with calling me that. My playground name. I’m seven years old, fall on my bum in the mud. All the kids laughing, saying I pooed my pants, which seems so utterly unfair, since I haven’t even wet the bed in years and years—or months, at least. Fern, who loved being the playground hero, swooping in like the wonderful wicked witch, saying she’ll poo on them if they don’t shut their dirty mouths, and from then on it’s her secret sister name for me. A name that says we’re in this together, blood of my blood, best friends forever.
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Thank God for Fern. Having her on my side makes an impossible situation just a little bit easier to take. Randall Shane returns from the counter disappointed. No Lincoln Town Cars available. “I settled for a Crown Vic,” he says, handing me the paperwork. “You drive.” On the short bus ride to the car lot he explains that he’s into his twenty-seventh hour without sleep and doesn’t trust himself behind the wheel. “Are you sure you’re okay with the rest of it?” I want to know. “Can you do this?” “I’m fine,” he insists. “Never felt better. The twenty-fourhour rule is my own
