Walt grinned.
“I told you it was silly.”
“That you did,” he said. “And I should have taken the warning.”
Teri smiled, slightly embarrassed, then slipped awkwardly into a change of subject. “Why so many papers?”
“Patterns,” he said. “The bigger the canvas, the easier it is to spot them.”
“What kind of patterns are you looking for?”
“I don’t always know. Sometimes it’s a disappearance or a kidnapping that sounds a little like it might be something similar to what I’m working on. And other times it might be a personal ad or a story about someone who doesn’t remember who they are. It all depends.”
She nodded. “Looking for anything in particular right now?”
“Not really. I’ve got a case where a father kidnapped his two children. The mother has custody and she hired me to see if I could track him down. That’s what’s taking me out of town tomorrow.”
“You think you’ve found him?”
“I think I might have a lead on him. How hot it is, I won’t know until I’ve checked it out.” Walt slipped the local paper off the stack, set it aside, and began to rifle through the pages of the San Jose Mercury News. “Like all of us, this guy’s a creature of habit. First of all, he’s a diabetic, so he needs insulin and he needs a prescription to get it. Second, he makes his living as a mechanic. So he’s still maintaining some of his old contacts. That’s what makes disappearing so difficult. In order to do it right, you’ve got to become a completely new person. You can’t carry any of the old baggage. You’ve got to give up everything. Very few of us are prepared to go that far.”
“How’d you track him to the Bay Area?”
“His social security number. I had a female friend call the IRS and talk to one of their female employees. My friend went into this long story about how she and this guy were in love once and how they’d lost contact with each other, and how she was trying to track him down to see if they could maybe start things up again.”
“Isn’t that illegal? Giving out that kind of information?”
“You bet. The woman could lose her job if anyone found out.”
Teri grinned appreciatively. “Clever.”
“Whatever works, as they say.”
They fell silent a moment, Walt lost in thoughts of his own, Teri thinking briefly about how difficult it must be to track someone down once they’ve made the decision to disappear.
“Did you quit because of me?” she finally asked.
“What?”
“The department. Did you quit the department because of me?”
“No. I quit because I needed a change, Teri. That’s all, just a change.”
“Burn out?”
“More like frustration.” He collapsed the newspaper and sat back in his chair. The expression on his face was almost identical to the one he had worn the first time she had met him. Not impatience, but a sense of wanting to get on with it. “Actually, you were an inspiration.”
She smiled self-consciously, a bit taken aback.
“You were my ghost of Christmas past, you might say.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“You remember when you called that press conference and made a big stink about how the department wasn’t doing anything?”
She remembered. She remembered all too well. That was before she’d really had a chance to know Detective Walter Travis. She couldn’t have called that same press conference today. In fact, there had been a number of times when she had worried that it might have cost him his career.
“Well, you were right,” Walt said.
“What?”
“You were right. The department was in the middle of a budget crunch and after a couple of weeks, with no evidence that Gabe had been kidnapped, we were told to write it off as a runaway and get on with our other cases. You were right. And that’s why I quit. Because I was always under pressure to get on to something else.”
“I always thought…”
“It was your fault?”
She nodded.
“It was,” he said brightly. “And I thank you.”
Teri took that as the compliment it was meant to be, then absently pulled the local paper across the table and glanced at the headlines. There was something about unrest in South Africa, long after the elections, and that seemed to take up the majority of the banner. She flipped the front page and came surprisingly face-to-face with a photograph of Miss Churchill. The slug underneath read: Nursing Student Found Dead. A shudder rose up from somewhere deep inside of her.
“Walt…”
“What?”
“This is her,” Teri said. She spread the front page out across the table and flattened the crease. “See this picture?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the woman from last night, the one with the boy.”
Walt began to read from the article. “Amanda Tarkett, age 26, was found dead this morning near the underpass at Blackmore and Vine after a mugging that apparently went awry. The police have not identified any suspects at this time, though they are following up on several leads, including a possible eye-witness. Miss Tarkett was out walking her mother’s dog when the incident occurred.”
“They killed her,” Teri said, her hands suddenly trembling.
“We don’t know that.”
“They killed her.”
[22]
The voices from the next room drifted lazily through the wall, muffled and barely distinguishable. The boy pulled the sleeping bag up around his neck, watching the shadows dance madly across the wall as a car passed by outside. He had always found it difficult sleeping in a strange place, and tonight was turning out to be no exception. He closed his eyes, surprised by the fact that every square inch of his surroundings, even the carpet fibers, smelled of Mr. Travis.
He listened to the voices wander toward the back of his thoughts, gradually falling into a deadening monotone.
Another car went by outside.
He shifted, and felt himself drawn into the warmth of his own little Never-Never Land, swimming peacefully at first, deeper and deeper, drifting into the dark, and then somehow finding his way out the other side, where the dream took him by hand and led him into the nightmare. In the nightmare, he was in a Hall of Mirrors. They were everywhere and nowhere, in front of him and beside him. There was a mirror with a huge spider-webbed crack that turned his face into a collage of noses and ears and eyes, all misshapen and overlapping. Another mirror that twisted and pulled at him until his reflection was a hideous Elephant Man with no mouth and eyes as large as his head.
Somewhere in the beyond, candles burned, the light dim and flickering. He turned, and over his shoulder, a thick black shadow swept through the maze like a thunderstorm through a mountain passage, dark and dangerous, coming after him. A pair of bright, fiery eyes stared malevolently out of the nothingness.
He turned and slammed into the cold, smooth surface of a mirror, turned again, slammed into another, and realized he was caught on all sides, face to face with his own reflections. To his left, a boy: thin and growing, maybe five or six years old, with hair more blond than brown. To his right, another boy: eyes dull, face drawn and weathered, flesh loose, somehow old and young at the same time. And behind him that dark, foggy wave slithering across the floor in his direction, a clock stealing time, the gap closing, no way out, everything closing in, the walls getting larger and thicker, his fists against the glass, his mouth wide, lungs burning, nothing coming out, until
…until
…until he finally woke up screaming.
[23]
Teri heard the scream and went running, her mind filled with horrible thoughts of what might have happened. She found the boy pressed into the corner, his sleeping bag pulled up around his waist, his forehead damp with sweat, his breathing shallow.