“My… my son?” King repeated blankly.
“For the last time, we got your son Bobby. Is that clear?”
“But that’s…that’s impossible.”
“What is it, Doug?” Diane shrieked.
“Your son was in the woods, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, but—This isn’t a joke, is it? If this is a joke…”
“This ain’t a joke, King.”
“Doug, will you please, please tell me what…”
He motioned for her to be silent as the voice on the phone droned on flatly. “Now listen and listen hard because I’m only going to say this once. The kid’s safe. He’ll stay that way as long as you do what we say. We want five hundred thousand dollars in unmarked—”
“Just a minute, I want to take this down.” He reached over for a pencil and pad, snaring them from the desk top, the phone’s wire extended to its outermost limits. “Five hundred thou—”
“In unmarked bills,” the voice said, “small denominations. You got that?”
“Yes, yes. I’ve… Are you sure you haven’t harmed him?”
“He’s okay. No consecutive serial numbers on those bills, King. Get the money by tomorrow morning, understand. We’ll call you then with further instructions. Don’t call the police, King.”
“No. No, I won’t.”
“You understand?”
“Yes, dammit. I understand you completely.” Desperately, King’s mind searched for a means of trapping the caller. When the idea finally came to him, he executed it swiftly and suddenly, as if he were consummating a long-awaited business deal.
“Okay then,” the voice said, “five hundred thousand dollars in…” and King brought his finger down on the receiver bar, cutting off the connection. He whirled from the phone and shouted, “Pete, get on the kitchen phone. Call the police first. Tell them Bobby’s been kidnaped and we’ve had a five-hundred-thousand-dollar ransom demand.”
“No!” Diane screamed. “No!”
“Then call the phone company. Tell them I hung up on the bastard—”
“Why did you do that? You hung up on the man who has Bobby? You hung up on… ?” She could not complete the sentence. She rushed to the front door again and screamed into the gathering darkness, “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!”
“I hung up on the off chance that he’ll call back,” King said. “The phone company may be able to trace it—and in the meantime, I can think. I can…” He paused. “Reynolds, get my address book upstairs. There’s a private detective we used once, when Diane’s pearls were missing. Di Bari, something like that, his name is in the book. Call him and get him out here right away.”
“Yes, sir.” Reynolds raced for the steps.
Diane slammed the door and ran to where King stood in the center of the room. “Five hundred thousand, you said. All right, call the bank. Right away! Call them this minute, Doug. We’ve got to get the money to them. We’ve got to get Bobby back!”
“We will get him back. I’ll give them whatever they want, a million if they want. I’ll raise it.” He took Diane into his arms. “Don’t worry, darling. Please, please, try to stop trembling. Try to…”
“I’ll…be all right. It’s… it’s…”
Cameron rushed in from the kitchen. “Police are on their way over, Doug,” he said. “Phone company standing by. Says to contact them on another line as soon as he calls again.”
“Okay, get in the kitchen. When this phone rings, get the operator to work right away.”
“Right!” Cameron said, and he rushed out of the room again.
Reynolds came down the steps, a defeated expression on his face. “I can’t find that address book anywhere, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry. I looked through the telephone table, but…”
“I’ll get it,” Diane said. With a visible effort, she pulled back her shoulders, moved away from King, and started for the steps. As she passed the front door, it burst open suddenly, startling her.
“Were you calling me, Mom?” Bobby King said.
She blinked her eyes in disbelief. “Bobby?” she said. And then the name bubbled into her throat with certainty—“Bobby, Bobby, Bobby!”—and she ran to him and dropped to her knees and pulled him close.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” Bobby said.
King looked at his son in puzzlement. “How…” he started, and then he turned toward the phone and pointed a menacing finger at it and shouted, “Why, that rotten lying…”
“I don’t want to play with Jeff any more, Mom,” Bobby said. “I went up a tree like Daddy told me, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t see him anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” King said and there was sudden fresh alarm in his voice. He glanced at the phone sharply. “What do you mean, you couldn’t see him? Where is he?”
“I’ll bet he left the woods,” Bobby said. “I looked all over, behind every rock. I don’t want to play with him any more. He’s not anywhere around. I don’t know where he is!”
There was a moment of stunned silence. The name was on everyone’s lips, the truth was in everyone’s mind, but it was the boy’s father who finally spoke the word, the single word, the name that summed up simply and explicitly everything that had taken place in the woods outside, the name that explained the phone call from a stranger.
“Jeff,” Reynolds said, and the name emerged from his lips as a thin whisper.
In the distance, they could hear a siren coming closer and closer to the cloistered sanctuary that was Smoke Rise.
* * * *
5
If there were two things that gave Steve Carella the willies, those two things were cases involving extreme wealth and cases involving children. He was not a product of the city’s slums and so he couldn’t attribute his money willies to a childhood of deprivation. His baker father, Antonio, had always earned a decent living, and Carella had never known the bite of a cold wind on the seat of a pair of threadbare pants. And yet, in the presence of luxury that screamed of wealth, in the drawing rooms and sitting rooms and studies to which his work sometimes took him, Carella felt uneasy. He felt poor. He was not poor, and he’d never been poor, and even if he’d had no money at all, he still wouldn’t have been poor, but sitting in the Douglas King living room, facing the man who could afford a layout like this one, Steve Carella felt penniless and destitute and somewhat intimidated.
And to top it all off, this looked like a bona fide kidnaping. Even if Carella were not the father of a pair of twins which his wife Teddy had delivered to him this past summer, even if he were not experiencing the first joys of fatherhood, a kidnaping was a damn frightening thing and he wanted no part of it.
Unfortunately, he had no choice.
He sat in the King living room, intimidated, troubled, and he asked his questions while Meyer Meyer looked through the window facing the River Harb, his back to the room.