"Have you ever had sexual relations with Amy Walker?"
He tamped down his anger. "I've never met her," he answered.
"Did you send your daughter off somewhere because she knew you were stalking Amy Walker? And did you fabricate a kidnapping charge?"
"No, I didn't do that." Struggling now to stay calm, to stay helpful. Really struggling. He looked at the doorway through which the other cop had disappeared. Were they sending a hostage rescue team to Matthews's house? Or just patrol officers? Matthews could trick them. He could lull them into complacency--oh, yes, he had the gift too. Tate now understood.
You can't negotiate with someone like Matthews. You need to act--immediately.
The silence of the deed.
"Did you kill Amy Walker?"
"No, I did not."
"When was the last time you drove your daughter's car?"
"A month or so ago, I think."
"Is that how your fingerprints got on the door handle of her car?"
"It would have to be."
"Could we run through the events just prior to her disappearance once more?"
"Prior?"
"Say, for the week before."
Tate glanced out the door, squinted. Looked again. The second detective came back into the cubicle. Tate asked, "Did you send a team to his house? I should have told you to send hostage rescue. Not regular officers. And don't listen to him. Whatever he says, Megan's there, in the house. Tell whoever's on their way not to listen to him."
"He wasn't home."
"What?" Tate asked. He didn't understand. The officers couldn't have gotten there so quickly.
"I called him. He wasn't home."
"You called him?" Tate's heart stuttered.
"Relax, sir, I didn't tell him anything. Just asked him to give us a call about some parking tickets." The slick young cop seemed proud of his cleverness.
"Jesus Christ, you don't have to tell him anything. Are you crazy?"
"Sir, we don't have to pay any attention to your story at all, you know. We're doing you a favor."
Tate sat back, glanced into the hall again.
After a moment he looked back at the officers again. Closed his eyes and sighed. "You win. Okay, you win."
"How's that, sir?"
"I'll waive my rights and tell you everything I can think of. No confession but a full statement about my daughter and Amy Walker. But I want some coffee and I've got to use the john."
They looked at each other and nodded.
"I'm coming with you," the first detective muttered.
Tate laughed. "I was a commonwealth's attorney for ten years. I'm not going to escape."
"I'm coming with you."
Tate gave a disgusted sigh and walked into the scuffed halls, which resembled a suburban grade school. He ambled to the men's room and pushed inside. The detective was directly behind him.
He stood at the urinal for an inordinately long time. When he'd finished and washed his hands he stepped to the door and pushed it open, bumping into the woman who was juggling three large law books and several pads of foolscap, which tumbled to the floor.
"Sorry," Tate said, bending down to pick up the books.
Bett McCall glanced at him, said, "No problem." And slipped the pistol out of her purse and into his hand.
Tate didn't even pause to think--he simply spun around, shoved the Smith & Wesson into the belly of the shocked detective and pushed him back into the men's room as Bett calmly retrieved the books.
In one minute Tate had gagged and cuffed the furious cop and relieved him of his gun. He tossed it in the wastebasket.
"The cuffs too tight?" he asked.
The detective stared angrily.
"Are they too tight?"
A nod.
Tate snapped, "Good."
And stepped out into the corridor as a faint rumble arose in the john, like a low-Richter earthquake. The detective was trying to pull down the stall.
When he'd looked into the hallway from the interrogation room he couldn't believe that he'd seen her standing there, motioning with her head down the hall. "How did you get in here?" he asked as they walked briskly toward the exit.
"Told them I was a lawyer."
"You cite a case or two?"
"I could have." She smiled. "I memorized the names of a couple on your desk. I was going to tell the desk sergeant I had to see my client because these new cases had just been put down."
"It's 'handed down,' " Tate corrected.
"Oh. Glad he didn't ask."
"I don't know if we can get out that way. I came in under my own steam but the desk officer might know I've been arrested." He looked back down the corridor. "Five minutes, tops, till they come looking."
She rearranged the books she was carrying so the cover showed. A school hornbook, Williston on Contracts.
He laughed. "That'll fool 'em." Then asked, "You got my message?"
She nodded. "I called Konnie and his assistant told me you'd been arrested. I couldn't decide whether to get a lawyer or the gun. I figured we didn't have time to wait for public defenders. My car's outside."
The old Bett McCall might have meditated for days, hoping for guidance. The new one went right for the Smith & Wesson.
They paused just before they turned the corner beside the guard station. He took a breath. "Ready?"
"I guess."
"Let's go."
Tate started forward, Bett at his side. The guard glanced at them but out they strolled without a hitch, signing the "time departed" line in the logbook scrupulously--one a phony prosecutor and one a phony defense lawyer and both of them now felons.
*
Aaron Matthews was driving, seventy, then eighty miles an hour.
Anger had given way to sorrow. To the same piercing hollowness he'd felt in the months after Peter had died in prison. Sorrow at plans gone wrong, terribly wrong.
Matthews had been at his rental house, off Route 29, waiting to see if he'd finally stopped Tate Collier. He believed he had. He'd given up on the subtlety, given up on the words, given up on the delicious art of persuasion. Stiff with anger, he'd dragged the Walker girl, screaming, from the trunk of his car. Said nothing, convinced her of nothing--he'd just slashed and slashed and slashed . . . All of his anger flowing from him as hot and sudden as the blood from her body. He'd called from a pay phone to report seeing a body then had sped home.
There the phone had rung. He hadn't answered but listened to the message as the officer left it. Some bullshit about traffic tickets. "Give us a call when you get home. Thank you."
It meant, of course, that they knew about him. Or suspected, at least.
How had it happened? Why hadn't they just tossed Collier into the lockup and ignored him? Maybe he had actually convinced them that he was innocent and that Matthews had kidnapped the girl. The fucking silver-tongued devil! An angry, sorrowful mood exploded within Matthews like napalm.
It was only a matter of time now before they found Blue Ridge Facility. They knew his name, they'd find out his connection there, and they'd find Megan.
He stared out the window for a moment. Then closed his eyes.
In a perfect world, moods don't burn you like torches, juries work pure justice and revenge befalls sinners in exact proportion to their crimes. In a perfect world Matthews would have kept Megan McCall as his child forever, a replacement for Peter. And Tate Collier would have lived in despair all his life, never knowing where she was--knowing only that she'd fled from him, propelled by undiluted hate.
But there was no chance for such symmetry now. All his hopes had unraveled. And there was only one answer left. To kill the girl and leave. Flee to the West Coast, New England, maybe overseas.
He'd lost his son, Tate Collier would lose his daughter.
A kind of cure, a kind of justice, a kind of revenge . . .
He spent a few minutes preparing some things in his house then hurried to his car. He sped out onto the highway, toward the dista
nt humps of mountains, a sensuous dark line above which no stars became stars and the moon showed as a faint, white crescent of frown.
*
Cleaning the deep wounds was the hardest part.
She'd found a cheap sewing kit in the bedroom and a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet.
He took the stitches bravely (even though she cringed every time the needle pierced his skin). But when Megan poured a capful of alcohol on the wounds he shivered frantically at the pain.
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"No, no," came his garbled voice. "Keep at it, Ms. Beautiful . . ."
Her eyes teared when she heard the nickname he'd used the night he picked her up.
"Even if you get out, you'll never get past 'em. The dogs. He's got four or five of the big fuckers."
"You're sure you can't walk?"
"I don't think so," he gurgled. "No."
"Okay, you stay here. I saw a door going to the basement. I think I can break it open. I'm going to see if there's a door or window down there. Maybe it'll lead outside."
He nodded, breathed, "I love . . ." and passed out.
She stacked the cinder blocks around him so that if Matthews glanced this way he wouldn't see the young man.
She listened for a moment to his low, uneven breathing. Then, knife in one hand, she started down the corridor.
Megan was almost to the intersection of the corridors when she heard the creak of a door opening. Then it slammed.
Aaron Matthews had returned.
Chapter Twenty-six
They drove in silence through destitute parts of Prince William County. They passed tilled fields, where the taproots of corn were reaching silently down into the dark, red-tinted earth. Barns long ago abandoned. Decaying tract bungalows, where postwar dreams had withered fast--tiny cubes of vinyl--and aluminum-sided homes. Shacks and cars on blocks.
Through Manassas, where the fearsome Rebel yell was first heard, then through the outlying farms and past the Confederate Cemetery.
"It was him, Tate," Bett said, breaking a long silence.
"Who?"
"A man came to see me. He said he was her therapist but he wasn't."
"It was Matthews?"
"He called himself Peters."
"His son's name was Peter," Tate mused. "That must be why he picked it." Glanced at her. "What happened?"
She shook her head. "He seduced me. Nothing really happened but it was enough . . . Oh, Tate, he looked right into my soul. He knew what I wanted to hear. He said exactly the right things."
You can talk your way into somebody's heart and get them to do whatever you want. Judge or jury, you've got that skill. Words, Tate. Words. You can't see them but they're the most dangerous weapons on earth. Remember that. Be careful, son.
She continued, "He'd called Brad. I think he pretended he was a cop and told him to get to my house. We were together on the couch . . . I was drunk . . . Oh, Tate."
Tate put his hand on her knee, squeezed lightly. "There was nothing you could've done, Bett. He's too good. Somehow, he's done all of this. Dr. Hanson, Konnie . . . probably Eckhard too, the teacher. Just to get even with me." They drove on in silence. Then Tate realized something. "You got here too quickly."
"What?"
"You couldn't have been in Baltimore when you got my message."
"No, I got as far as Takoma Park and turned back."
"Why?"
A long pause.
"Because I decided it had to stop." Instinctively she flipped the mirror down and examined her face. Poked at a wrinkle or two. "I was running after Brad and I should have been going after Megan." She continued, "I realized something, Tate. How mad I've been at her."
"At Megan? Because of what we heard at the Coffee Shop?"
"Oh, Lord, no. That's my fault, not hers." She took a deep breath, flipped the mirror back up. "No, Tate. I've been mad at her for years. And I shouldn't've been. It wasn't her fault. She was born at the wrong time and the wrong place."
"Yes, she sure was."
"I neglected her and didn't do the things I should have . . . I dated, I left her alone. I did the basics, sure. But kids know. They know where your heart is. Here I was, running after Joe or Dave or Brad and leaving my daughter. Time for that to stop. I'm just praying it's not too late."
"We'll find her."
The roads were deserted here and the air aromatic with smoke from wood cooking fires, common in this poor part of the county. The Volvo streaked through a stop sign. Tate skidded into a turn and then headed down a bad road.
"We're in trouble, aren't we?" she asked.
"We sure are. They don't put out all-points bulletins anymore. But if they did we'd be the main attraction in one."
"They don't know my car," Bett pointed out.
He laughed. "Oh, that took all of thirty seconds for 'em to track down. Look, there. That's his place."
Matthews's small bungalow was visible through a stand of trees some distance away. A rusting heating-oil tank sat in the side yard and the stands of uncut grass were outnumbered by patches of red mud. The house was only two miles away from Tate's farm. A convenient staging point for a breakin and kidnapping, he noted.
"What are we going to do?" Bett asked.
Tate didn't answer her. Instead he took the gun out of his pocket. "We're going to get our daughter," he said.
Thirty yards, twenty, fifteen. Tate paused and listened. Silence from inside Matthews's house.
He smelled the scent of wood smoke and pictured the kidnapper sitting beside the fireplace with Megan bound and gagged at his feet.
The shabby house chilled his heart. He'd seen places like it often. Too often. When he was a commonwealth's attorney he'd always--unlike most big-city prosecutors--visited the crime scenes himself. This was what detectives dubbed a section-sixty cottage, referring to the Virginia Penal Code provision for murder. Shotgun killings, domestics, love gone cruel then violent . . . There were common elements among such houses: they were small, filthy, silent, brimming with unspoken hate.
The Mercedes wasn't in the drive so it was possible that Matthews hadn't heard the message from the police. Maybe Megan was here now, lying in the bedroom or the basement. Maybe this would be the end of it. But he moved as silently as he could, taking no chances.
He glanced through the window.
The living room was empty, lit only by the glow of embers in the fireplace. He listened for a long moment. Nothing.
The windows were locked but he tested the handle on the door and found it was open. He pushed inside, thinking only as he did so: Why a fire on a warm night?
Oh, no! He lunged for the doorknob but it was too late; the door knocked over the large pail of gasoline.
"God!"
Instinctively Tate grabbed for the bucket as the pink wave of gas flowed onto the floor and into the fireplace.
"What?" Bett cried.
The gas ignited and with a whoosh a huge ball of flame exploded through the living room.
"Megan!" Tate cried, turning away from the flames and falling onto the porch. His sleeve was on fire. He slapped out the flames.
"She's in there? She's in there?" Bett shouted in panic and ran to the window. Scrabbling away from the flowing gasoline, Tate grabbed Bett and pulled her back. He covered his face with his hand, felt the searing heat take the hairs off the back of his fingers.
"Megan!" Bett cried. She broke the window in with her elbow. She peered inside for a moment but then leapt back as a plume of flame burst through the window at her. If she hadn't leapt aside the fire would have consumed her face and hair.
Tate ran around the back of the cottage, broke in the window in one of the bedrooms, which was already filling with dense smoke.
No sign of the girl.
He ran to the other bedroom--the cottage had only two--and saw that she wasn't there either. The flames were already burning through the bedroom door, which, with a sudden burst, exploded inward. In the light from the fir
e Tate could see that this wasn't a bedroom but an office. There were stacks of newspaper clippings, magazines, books and folders. Maps, charts and diagrams.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
Bett came up behind him. There was a burn on her arm but she was otherwise okay. "Tate, I can't find her!" she screamed.
"I don't think she's here. She's not in either of these rooms and there's no basement."
"Where is she?"
"The answer's in there," he shouted. "He only set the trap so nobody could find any clues to where he's got her."
He picked up several bricks and shattered the glass-and-wooden grid in the window. "Oh, brother," he muttered. And climbed inside, feeling the unnerving pain as a shard of glass sliced through his palm.
The heat inside was astonishing, smoke and embers and flecks of burning paper swirling around him, and he realized that the flames weren't the worst problem--the heated air and lack of oxygen were going to knock him out in minutes.
He raced to the desk and grabbed all the papers and notebooks he could, ran to the window and flung them outside, crying to Bett, "Get it all away from the house." He went back for more. He got two more armfuls before the heat grew too much. He dove out the window and rolled to the ground heavily as the ceiling collapsed and a swell of flame puffed out the window.
He lay, exhausted, gasping, on the ground. Dizzy and hurt. Wondering why on earth Bett was doing a funny little dance around his arm. Then he understood. The file folder he held had been burning and she was stamping out the flames.
The sirens were getting closer.
"Great," he muttered. "Now they're gonna add arson to our rap sheets."
Bett helped him up and they gathered all the notebooks and files he'd flung into the backyard. They ran to the car. Tate started it and skidded out of the drive, passing the first of the fluorescent green fire trucks that were speeding toward the house.
They turned north and drove for ten minutes until Tate figured there was no chance of being spotted. He parked near a quarry in Manassas. A grim, eerie place that looked like it should have been a serial killer's stalking ground though to Tate's knowledge there'd never been any crime committed here worse than pot smoking and drinking beer and sloe gin from open containers.
Tate and Bett pored over the singed files and papers, looking for some clue as to where Matthews might have taken Megan.
The files were mostly articles, psychiatric diagnostic reports, medical evaluations. He also found surveillance photos of Megan. Dozens of them. And of Tate's house and Bett's. Matthews had been planning this for months; some of the pictures had been taken during the winter. In one notebook Megan's daily routine was described in obsessive detail.