Brannigan was no genius, but he was careful and restrained enough not to call out a SWAT team and act like the commander of a tank corps at the Battle of the Bulge when he heard kidnap. Brannigan was capable of finesse and would not get Eve killed if she were still alive.
Then Latovsky stabbed the key before it started to ring. He didn’t have a scrap of evidence that Fuller even had her, much less had taken her to Raven Lake. Brannigan was too careful to break into a house without a warrant or a better reason than Latovsky could give him... or permission.
Latovsky ripped his notebook out of his pocket, tore through it to Mrs. Rodney’s number, and dialed again.
“Of course, Lieutenant,” she said, when he told her what he wanted. “If you think it’s necessary.”
“I do, ma’am. They may have to break in but we’ll cover any damage.”
“Can’t say fairer than that,” she said.
They hung up and he called Echo Lake.
It was Brannigan’s show; if the house on Raven Lake was empty, Latovsky was heading for Sawyerville and Raven Lake was an hour in the wrong direction.
They went back to the station to wait, leaving Harris watching from his open front door, looking oddly abashed.
They drank coffee and tried not to stare at the phone; when the coffee was gone, Latovsky broke chunks off the rim of the Styrofoam cup.
It was after four, ten hours since he and Pete had beached the rubber dinghy on the shore of Chalice Lake and lifted the kids out to shore so they wouldn’t get any wetter than they already were.
Brannigan and his men were in place by now; Brannigan would have at least five cruisers and maybe another couple from Echo Lake if the town was big enough to have its own force. They’d park down on the road and block the drive so Fuller couldn’t get out.
Latovsky snapped a big piece out of the Styrofoam, ground it into squeaky rubble between his fingers, and let it fall on his desk.
One unmarked car would pull up the drive with a lone man wearing a sport jacket, baggy trousers, a light-blue Oxford-cloth button-down shirt, mostly polyester, and a polyester tie that the cop’s kid had given him for Christmas. Must be some kind of given that all cops’ kids bought atrocious ties. Last Christmas Jo gave him one that had what looked like blue and purple maggots rampant on a field of a color he thought was called teal.
The lone cop parks and goes up the steps of the porch. The house is silent, looks secret and hooded, a pretty cabin on the lake turned into the Wolfman’s lair, with windows like blind glass eyes, a door that you know will creak like the lid of a coffin that’s been in the ground a hundred years. He rings the bell, clears his throat, and stares expectantly ahead, trying to look like an encyclopedia salesman.
Latovsky’s imagination failed him about what happened next. He threw the crushed cup into the wastecan, then swept the bits of it into his palm and threw them after it.
He rested his head on his hands and Lucci said, “Want a Milky Way?”
He nodded, Lucci stood up to go to the vending machine, and the phone rang on Latovsky’s desk. Latovsky grabbed it and Brannigan said, “No dice.”
“She’s dead!”
“She’s not there. No one’s there, but they were. We found paper cups with dried coffee in the bottom and damp towels in the can. It’s a damp day so the towels would take a while to dry. I’d say we missed ’em by an hour, maybe two. No more.”
“Them?”
“Them: two cups, two balls of cellophane that they wrap doughnuts or sweet rolls in, two packets of instant coffee used... definitely them.”
“Body,” Latovsky choked.
“No. Looked in the basement—floor’s packed dirt, undisturbed for years. Grass out back’s still wet from the rain so it would hold footprints, or tracks of dragging a body. No one’s walked on that grass to the lake since before the rain started.”
Brannigan was good and careful and smarter than Latovsky had thought.
“We started combing the woods,” Brannigan went on. “Nothing right around the house, but there’s lots of woods and we might find her yet, only I don’t think so. Just a hunch, mind you. But I think he took her with him, wherever he went.”
Sawyerville.
They hung up. Latovsky put out an all-points on Fuller’s car, then went across the bullpen to Meers’s office. The door was closed but a light showed under it. He took Bunner’s tape out of his pocket and opened the door without knocking.
The house was dreary, like the other houses on the street, and Eve got a sense of deep-down decay as she went up the stairs to the scrap of a front porch. She imagined dry rot in the sill and post beetles chewing at beams and joists. The front steps were cracked and crooked. She stumbled and he grabbed her arm reflexively. It was the first time he’d touched her since he’d given her the shot last night.
He yanked his hand away as if he’d touched burning metal, but not before she got something from him; not a picture—she didn’t see any more of what that bitch had done to him—or anything else about him. But she got a sense of spiraling darkness that was like looking down the throat of a roaring animal into a gullet that burned with rage.
Not at her, or she’d be dead. He had no more feeling about her than he would for a hammer or saw, or anything he used. See Meg, I’m being useful, she thought.
He opened the door with a key on a loaded ring: keys to here and wherever else he lived, keys to doors where he worked.
He held the door open with the gun on her. It was still light but it was Sunday afternoon and people must be having after-church dinners or watching TV, because the street was empty.
They went inside, he shut the door, and smells of old carpeting, dust too deep to be vacuumed up, and musty upholstery surrounded her. “Down the hall,” he said. At the end was a shut door she knew was the kitchen.
“Open it.” He prodded her with the gun. His voice sounded harsher than before and she tried to see his face, but it was too dark in the hall.
“Go on, open it.”
She pushed it open and entered a kitchen with tarnished-looking light coming through a smeared window, giving everything a hazy gray aura.
He turned on the light and she saw the second kitchen.
In her vision it had been spotless, with shining windows, polished cabinets and appliances, and blinding white starched curtains. It wasn’t dirty or clean now, just faded. The cabinets were dull, the refrigerator door had turned dull yellow and was covered with broken, fruit-shaped magnets holding money-off coupons and dry-cleaning tickets. She didn’t know how she knew what they were, since she’d never used a coupon or taken or picked up dry cleaning in her life, but she did.
The curtains were yellowed and limp and milky water in the sink hid dirty dishes. It smelled of neglect, with the sour mustiness of that rot eating away at underpinnings. The bitch would be sorry to see her sparkling torture chamber come to this, and Eve wished she could see it because she hated her. It was the first time in her life she’d ever hated anyone.
“Same room?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It happened here too?”
“Yes.”
“Same woman, same kid. You couldn’t be wrong.”