Touch & Go (7 page)

So when the van had first pulled over, tucking into an old campground, where it was quickly obscured by walls of dense evergreens, Radar had administered a fresh round of sedatives. For the sake of napping, fishing and large-breasted women everywhere, he’d given an extra-large dose.

Radar had started packing up his gear, mentally skipping ahead to three hours’ sleep, when his internal sensor had once again begun to ping. The woman. Something about the woman.

He’d studied her closer. Noticed that her face had lost some color, was covered in a faint sheen of sweat. Her eyes were not open. In fact, her eyelids appeared squeezed shut, twitching even, as her breathing accelerated rapidly.

She didn’t look so good. Maybe from the sedative, though it was mild enough. He took her pulse, listened to her heart, then checked her temperature. Nothing. She just looked…wrong. Car sick? Flu? Shock?

Maybe she was dreaming, he’d decided. Judging by her heart rate, not a nice kind of dream.

And not his problem.

Radar packed up his bag, climbed into the back and within minutes was out cold.

Three men in a white cargo van, asleep.

Then the first man opened his eyes, sat up in his seat, started the engine and turned back onto the winding mountain road.

Eleven o’clock Saturday morning, one white cargo van headed due north.

Chapter 8

IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS, ever since That Day, I’d taken to avoiding sleep. There was a phase, maybe around the second or third month, where I was nearly phobic about evenings. If I just stayed awake, kept my eyes open, my body moving, somehow, I could keep tomorrow at bay. Because I didn’t want it to be tomorrow. Tomorrow was too scary a proposition. An unnamed deadline where I’d have to make major life decisions about my marriage, my family, my future. And maybe, tomorrow was just too sad. Tomorrow was loneliness and tenement housing units and Friday-night cockroach raids and every lesson I had learned in childhood and wanted so badly to leave behind.

So for a while I didn’t sleep. I roamed the house. Ran my hand across the granite countertops in the kitchen, remembered the day Justin went with me to the quarry, where we gazed at slab after slab of natural stone. At the exact same moment, we’d both pointed to this one, then laughed like two schoolkids, giddy to discover we shared the same favorite color or pet or sports team.

From the kitchen, I’d journey down to the wine cellar, housing bottles I’d meticulously researched and stocked to impress Justin, his business associates, even his crew. You’d be amazed how many drywallers, plumbers and other general contractors know their wines. With success, everyone cultivates tastes, until even the most rugged
dirt hauler can appreciate a well-balanced Oregon Pinot Noir or a more robust Spanish red.

Justin was sleeping in the basement apartment at that point. The au pair’s suite, people called it, except we’d never had a nanny, preferring to raise our daughter ourselves. The door was at the opposite end of the hall from the wine cellar. During my nightly roamings, I would stand in front of it, sheltered by the deep dark of a windowless basement. I would place my hand upon the warm wood and wonder if he was on the other side, actually asleep. Maybe he’d gone back to her. Or maybe, a thought so painful it bordered on nearly intoxicating, he’d brought her here.

I didn’t open the door. Never knocked, never tried to peer beneath it. I would just stand there, thinking that at one time in our marriage that would’ve been enough. My mere presence would’ve spoken to him, beckoned him like a magnetic force, until he would’ve thrown open the door, grabbed me into his arms and kissed me hungrily.

This is what eighteen years of marriage does to a couple. Minimizes the polar fields, mutes the laws of attraction. Until night after night, I could stand in a darkened hallway just eight feet from my husband, and he never felt a thing.

Inevitably, I would return upstairs, arriving outside my daughter’s bedroom. Again, no knocking, no entering, no disturbing of a private space where I wasn’t wanted anymore. Instead, I would sit on the floor in the hallway, lean my head against the wall and picture the white-painted shelving unit positioned on the other side. Then, by heart, I would systematically catalog each item that had been placed there. Her ballerina music box from the first time we took her to see
The
Nutcracker
. A jumbled pile of her most beloved childhood paperbacks,
Where the Red Fern Grows, Little House on the Prairie, A Wrinkle in Time
, placed haphazardly on top of her more neatly organized hardcovers such as the Harry Potter series and the Twilight saga.

She’d gone through a horse-crazy phase, which would explain the herd of Breyer horses now relegated to the back corner of the lower shelf. Like her mother, she had an eye for beauty and an urge to create, hence the random collections of polished seashells and artfully strung sea glass she still added to each time we visited our second home on the Cape.

The top of her dresser held two vintage china dolls, one brought back by Justin from Paris, another she and I had found together at an antiques store. Both had been expensive, and once, both had been treasured. Now, their sightless blue eyes, glossy ringlet hair and frothy lace dresses served as makeshift jewelry stands for piles of beaded bracelets and long snarls of nearly forgotten gold necklaces. More piles of silk-wrapped hair bands and decorative hair clips adorned their feet.

Sometimes, when I entered the chaos of my daughter’s room, I wanted to toss a match. Scorched-earth policy and all that. Other times, I wanted to take a photo, draw a map, to somehow immortalize this complex web of toddler dreams, young girl obsessions and teenage desires.

In the dark of the night, however, I simply sat and named each treasured item over and over again. It became my rosary. A way to try to convince myself the past eighteen years had had some value, some worth. That I had given love and that I had been loved. That it hadn’t all been a lie.

As for the rest of the days, months, weeks currently unfolding ahead of me… I tried to tell myself I had not become the clichéd middle-aged woman, abandoned by her cheating husband, alienated by her teenage daughter, until she now existed as a mere shadow in her own life, with no identity or purpose of her own.

I was strong. Independent. An artist, for God’s sake.

Then I would get up and wander out to the rooftop patio. Where I would stand in the faint ambience of city lights, my arms wrapped
tightly around my body for warmth, taking step after step closer to the edge…

I never managed to stay awake an entire night.

Five thirty A.M. was probably the longest I made it. Then, I’d find myself curled up once more on top of the king-size bed in the master suite. And I’d watch the dawn break, tomorrow forcing itself upon me after all. Until I closed my eyes and succumbed to a future that happened whether I wanted it to or not.

It was during the second month of forced sleep deprivation that I opened my medicine cabinet and found myself staring at a bottle of painkillers. Justin’s prescription, from when he hurt his back the prior year. He hadn’t liked the Vicodin. Couldn’t afford to feel that fuzzy at work. Besides, as he put it bluntly, the constipation was a bitch.

It turns out, walking all night will not keep the future at bay.

But the right narcotic can dull the edges, steal the brightness from the sun itself. Until you don’t have to care if your husband is sleeping in the basement beneath you, or your teenage daughter has locked herself in a time capsule down the hall, or that this house is too large and this bed too big and your entire life just too lonely.

Painkiller, the prescription promised.

And for a while, at least, it worked.

Chapter 9

WALKING INTO THE THIRD-STORY STUDY, Tessa immediately recognized the detective sitting at the computer as the final member of D.D.’s three-man squad. An older guy, heavyset, four kids was her memory. Phil, that was it. He’d been at her house, too, that day. Then again, most of the Boston police and Massachusetts state cops had been.

Apparently, he remembered her, too, because the moment he spotted her, his features fell into the perfectly schooled expression of a seasoned detective, seething on the inside.

She figured two could play at that game.

“My turn,” she announced crisply, heading toward the computer.

He didn’t address her, turning his attention to Neil and D.D. instead.

“It’s okay,” Neil, the lead officer, proclaimed. “The owner of the house,
Denbe Construction
, hired her to assess the situation.”

Tessa could tell Phil got the nuances of that statement loud and clear, because a vein throbbed in his forehead. If Denbe Construction owned the house, then in theory, Denbe Construction owned the contents of the house, including the computer, which this fine Boston detective had been searching without permission.

“File a missing person’s report?” Phil asked Tessa, voice curt.

“Based on what I’ve seen here, I’m sure that will be the company’s next move.”

Another investigative quandary. For the police to become involved
in a missing person’s case, a third party must first file a report. Even then, the standard threshold was that the family hadn’t been seen for at least twenty-four hours.

Meaning at this stage of the game, without a report filed, without twenty-four hours having passed, D.D.’s squad was stuck responding to a call, but not yet handling a case.

“Any contact…?” Phil again, voice less certain, more searching.

“From the family, no.”

“Kidnappers?”

“No.”

A fresh tic of the vein in his forehead. Like Neil and D.D., Phil understood lack of contact was not a good thing. Ransom situations generally involved keeping the victims alive. Whereas in an abduction case with no financial demands…

“Anything good on the computer?” Tessa gestured to Phil, who was still seated at the keyboard.

“Been looking at the Internet browser. Family liked Facebook, Fox News and
Home and Garden
. Already guessing the iPads will be more personal. Not enough activity here for a family of three. I’m assuming they each do their own thing on their individual devices.”

Fair assumption, Tessa thought. She gestured to the keyboard. “May I?”

Grudgingly, he stepped aside. Tessa reached into her inside coat pocket and withdrew a small notebook. She had written the name and manufacturer on it. Now she started scanning computer icons until she found the desired program.

“Justin Denbe has a new toy,” she explained as she double-clicked the icon. “His crew gave it to him in the fall, partly as a joke, but he loves it. Apparently, these job sites—prisons, hospitals, hydroelectrical plants—are quite large. And Justin, as the hands-on owner, inevitably holds the answer to every question. Meaning his guys spend a fair amount of time searching for him. Sites are also often in rural
areas with shitty cell-phone coverage, making it hard to snag him by phone when they can’t locate him physically. So”—she paused a second, scrolling through the directions that had just popped up on screen—“his guys bought him a coat.”

“A coat?” D.D. asked with a frown.

Neil, however, was already ahead of her. “A GPS jacket. They got him one of those fancy outdoors never-get-lost-in-the-woods kind of jackets.”

“Bingo. Not cheap, either, like nearly a thousand bucks. So apparently it’s a really nice outdoors jacket, and Justin loves it. Wears it everywhere. Including, hopefully, out to dinner last night.”

“Scampo is a nice restaurant,” D.D. commented.

“Navy blue fabric with tan leather trim. He could wear it to Scampo. Hell, from what I’m told, this is a guy who wore his work boots everywhere. Why not a nice outdoors jacket?”

They fell silent, watching Tessa work the keyboard. “The jacket’s GPS device is built into the back liner,” she explained. “There’s a slot for removal, as the battery is good for only fifteen hours, then has to be recharged.”

“Do you have to activate it?” D.D. asked. “Or is it just always on?”

“This particular device must be activated. From what I’m reading here, that can happen two ways: The wearer manually activates it at the beginning of his hike or, say, day on the job site. Or it can be activated remotely using this software, which can also be installed on a cell phone. Kind of wild,” Tessa muttered to herself, fingers flying over the keyboard. “Turns any smart phone into a digital search dog. Find Justin Denbe.”

A map had just opened up on the computer screen. She eyed it carefully. Saw nothing.

“Is it activated?” D.D. again, voice impatient as she moved to stand behind Tessa, peering intently at the screen.

“In all of the US, we have nothing. So I’m guessing Justin hasn’t turned it on.”

Neil looked at her. “Then you do it. Ping it.”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

She moved the mouse to a green button in the lower right-hand corner of the menu. “Activate,” it read. Like a bomb. Or a hand grenade. Or the key to saving a missing family’s life.

She clicked the icon. The colored map of the US shifted, zooming in, focusing left until it was no longer the entire US map on the computer screen but just the eastern seaboard. There, due north of them, a red dot suddenly pulsed to life.

“I’ll be damned.”

In front of her, she heard a small beep. She glanced up, to see Phil setting a timer on his watch. “Fifteen hours,” he said. “Battery life, remember?”

“Yep.”

“Zoom in, zoom in, zoom in.” D.D. hit Tessa on the shoulder to hurry her along. Since Tessa was sitting closer than D.D., and could already make the distinction the Boston crew hadn’t been able to see yet, she did just that.

The East Coast became New England. Massachusetts expanded in front of their eyes. Then, New Hampshire. Until right there, definitely over the border, definitely crossing state lines into central New Hampshire, the GPS device in Justin Denbe’s fancy outdoor jacket blinked back at them.

Tessa pushed back from the computer, turning around till she met D.D.’s eyes. “Assuming Justin Denbe has been abducted wearing that coat, he’s no longer in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…”