“Maybe he was one of the guys who got Gary. I saw him the day before Gary was—No! I saw him that same day!”
Reyn had to be blunt. “It doesn’t matter. Joan’s gone. Kara’s gone. Teri Lim’s dead. Gary was captured. They’re grabbing everyone. They’re not leaving any witnesses.”
“Witnesses to what?”
“I don’t know.”
She held him tighter. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said again.
Brian was with them, holding a steak knife, as they carefully opened the door to Reyn’s room. No one jumped out, and Reyn snaked his hand around the doorframe and flipped the light switch. The room was instantly illuminated. They saw right away that no attackers lay in wait, but it wasn’t until Reyn had quickly checked the bathroom that they finally relaxed.
Brian dropped the arm with the steak knife and sighed with audible relief.
“We need to get better weapons,” Stacy noted wryly, looking at him.
“I did the best I could on such short notice.”
Reyn was already at his laptop. “Let’s see what we can find out about that town he’s in. Larraine… Anybody ever heard of it or know how to spell it?” None of them did, so he tried a couple of spellings before he got a match. There wasn’t much information available on the town, but he was able to bring up a satellite photo of it, and with the tap of a finger the photo shifted fifty miles east, and he zoomed in on a gas station that must have been the one where Gary had almost been killed.
There were a lot of ranches and cabins scattered about the surrounding countryside, but he didn’t know enough to home in on the one where Gary had been held. A thought occurred to him while he was scanning the image, however, and he got out of the site and started accessing crime logs for Larraine and for the county of De Baca, in which the town was located.
Brian saw what he was doing. “I’ll take over here,” he said, pushing Reyn aside. “I type faster, anyway. You call that detective. Tell him what’s going on.”
“Williams?”
“Yeah.”
Reyn did, and though the detective didn’t have much of a response beyond, “Thank you for sharing that information,” Reyn had the sense that Williams was genuinely startled by Gary’s story. He asked Reyn to have Gary come into the station once he got back.
Reyn hung up the phone and sat on the edge of his bed next to Stacy, watching Brian type furiously on the computer. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but they’d fallen through the cracks to such an extent that, despite the fact that they were in the very middle of a series of druggings and kidnappings and even deaths, law enforcement was completely peripheral to them. The police were doing very little to help, and although for a brief fraction of a second the four of them appeared to have been suspects in Kara’s disappearance, they were not really being persecuted. Whatever was happening was occurring in a netherworld in which they were completely on their own, the sort of universe usually encountered only in movies, and he wondered for the first time in his life if he should buy a gun for protection.
“Found something,” Brian said excitedly, looking up from the screen.
Both Reyn and Stacy came over to look.
On the monitor was a month-old crime column from the weekly local newspaper, the Larraine Roadrunner. Brian was pointing to an entry in the center of the screen. On August 6, a woman, Paulette Gaffney, had registered a complaint against her ex-husband, Bill Watt. Watt, she claimed, had been stalking her since their divorce, and he had not only broken into her house but had threatened her with physical violence. She said it was his fault that they were now both “outsiders.”
Outsiders.
The word jumped out at them.
Reyn’s neck felt as though it had been tickled by the tip of an icicle.
Watt had been picked up but not arrested, and released on his own recognizance.
“That guy has the same last name as the sheriff,” Brian said, pointing to a boxed list of local government officials on the left side of the page.
“Could be a coincidence.”
“In a town of three thousand? I don’t think so.”
Reyn didn’t, either, and he said aloud, “If the sheriff and his brother are both Outsiders…”
Gary’s circumstances suddenly seemed much more ominous, and he cursed himself for not getting a phone number from his friend. “Quick,” he told Brian. “Can you get me a phone number for the Larraine sheriff’s office?”
Brian pulled up another page and began typing rapidly. “It’s the De Baca Sheriff’s Office in Larraine,” he said. “The number’s (575) 555-3109.”
Reyn picked up the phone on his desk and dialed the number. A woman answered. “Sheriff’s office, Maybelle speaking.”
He tried to keep his voice calm. “I’d like to speak to Gary Russell. He called me from your office about forty-five minutes ago. I think he’s still there.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Mr. Russell is with the sheriff. May I take a message?”
“I really need to talk to him now.”
“I’m sorry. He and the sheriff went out. I don’t expect them back for some time. Is there a number at which I can reach you?”
He and the sheriff went out.
A big ball of dread sank to the pit of Reyn’s stomach. “No,” he said. “That’s okay. I’ll call back later.”
Fourteen
Gary wanted nothing more than to go to bed. He was willing to sleep on a chair, on the floor, in a cell, pretty much anywhere. At this point he didn’t care. But he forced himself to remain awake and answer the seemingly never-ending series of questions put to him by Sheriff Watt. He had napped for a while on a cot in a back room—the sheriff’s office in Larraine was a lot more casual than the police station in Los Angeles—while Watt and a couple of deputies went back out to Tow-to-Tow Towing. They’d found the mechanic just where Gary had left him, on the concrete floor of the garage, and although he was seriously injured, he was still alive.
They also must have found something else in their search of the building because they did not for a second doubt Gary’s story, and when he asked if he should have a lawyer present during questioning and whether he’d have to stand trial for attacking the mechanic, the sheriff had shaken his head. “No, it’s pretty clear what went on out there. You did what you had to do. I don’t think anyone’s going to question that.”
But they did keep asking questions, and from the tenor of some of them, Gary wondered if they’d found bodies at the garage. Or some other sort of gruesome evidence indicating that the mechanic had done this before.
It was not his run-in with the psycho tow-truck driver that Gary wanted to talk about, however. It was his abduction.
And Joan’s.
He’d told the story several times, stressing the urgency of finding and capturing the group that had drugged and kidnapped Joan and done exactly the same thing to him. The three who had been in the crash with him were probably dead, but if they weren’t, they might be able to explain a lot. At the very least, the sheriff and his deputies could put pressure on their accomplices: the woman and man at the ranch.
Watt assigned a deputy to take a formal report, though to Gary’s eyes the sheriff seemed much more concerned with the mechanic and the events at the garage than anything that had happened prior to that. He could sort of understand the reasoning—the mechanic’s attack on him had occurred within the sheriff’s jurisdiction and quite possibly had not been an isolated incident—but the fact remained that there were three bodies in a wrecked car, either dead or injured, and they’d been involved in a crime just as serious. Which made the sheriff’s lack of interest seem not just strange but inexplicable.