She bowed her head for a moment, then continued: “Right now, we can only speculate as to who is responsible for this senseless act. We can only guess as to what ideology or religion compelled them to murder innocent hundreds and what goals they hoped to accomplish with this slaughter. Perhaps soon we will have more details, but already — in our shattered hearts — I am sure we all understand the root cause of this tragedy.
“It is us. It is our desire to live as petty, warring tribes rather than as citizens of the world. It is our tendency to focus on the tiny streams of our differences rather than on the great oceans of our similarities. It is our corrosive belief that one country or one God or one belief is greater than another. It is our governments, which focus on their narrow agendas rather than on peace and prosperity for all.”
Her voice was rising now. “We cannot continue in this reckless manner. It remains my fervent hope that someday, the wrongheadedness of our twenty-first-century thinking will perplex schoolchildren in the same way we today are bewildered by ancient astronomers who believed the world was flat.”
She paused, lowered her gaze to the desk in front of her, then looked back at the camera. “But I am not speaking to you today simply to offer meek words. The wolf has snatched our children, our husbands, our mothers. It is time to find the wolf and destroy it. Toward that end, I would like to offer a bounty of fifty million dollars to any individual or group who captures the person or persons responsible for this attack.
“To the perpetrators of this horrible act, I say: you will be found. You will be brought to justice. There is no hole you can hide in, no tree that is tall enough, no den my wealth cannot penetrate. I will personally spare no expense to see that you are found. And I will aid any corporation, government, group, or individual who requires my resources or assistance to achieve this goal.
“I do this for Brigitte. And for all the shattered hearts in the world.”
She offered the camera one more steely glance.
And then it melted. The Amazonian warrior princess — the woman whose toughness and determination had built an empire — bowed her head and wept.
CHAPTER 5
HERCULES, California
he handkerchief in Alida McRae’s left palm had started the day dry, clean, and crisply ironed, but it had since devolved into a rumpled, sweat-soaked wad.
Sitting in the now-familiar waiting room at the Hercules Police Department headquarters, she pulled the cloth slowly from her balled-up left hand until it was straight. Then she repacked it into her right hand and pulled with her left. She had been repeating this nervous gesture for several minutes as she waited for her fourth — no, fifth — appointment with the police chief.
White-haired and sixty-seven, Alida was always nicely dressed and perfectly coiffed. She was what people liked to call a “handsome woman,” a phrase she quietly detested. Men were handsome. Dogs were handsome. Women were either beautiful or not beautiful, and if she had reached an age where she could no longer be described by that word, she could accept that. She just didn’t want to be patronized when it came to her looks — or anything else for that matter.
And patronized was the perfect word to describe what she felt like every time she came to the Hercules Police Department.
It had now been twenty days. Twenty days since her life had been turned upside down and shaken. Twenty days of worrying and wondering what had happened. Twenty days of dread.
Twenty days ago, her husband, William “Bill” McRae, a sixty-eight-year-old retired father of three grown sons and grandfather of seven, had gone for his daily jog. A creature of almost comically well-ingrained habits, he left either shortly before or shortly after seven o’clock each morning. He followed the same five-mile course each day, a long loop that began and ended at their house and typically took him anywhere from forty-five to forty-seven minutes, depending on how frisky he was feeling. Other than Sundays — and the occasional holiday — he had been doing it the same way for years.
Except for twenty days ago. He went out like usual, at 7:02 A.M. By eight, Alida had first noted his absence. By 8:15 A.M., she had decided to do something about it. Every now and then, when he hadn’t hydrated properly or had eaten too much salt the night before, his calves cramped. She once found him a half mile from home, crawling home rather than accepting rides from passing motorists.
As she drove his route, she had expected to find him doing something similar. Maybe limping along with a sprained ankle, or perhaps something even more stubborn and silly. Instead, she did not see him.
She returned home. He still wasn’t there. She called one or two folks she knew who lived along some of the roads he jogged. They were friends who had often joked about how the “Bill Train” was a minute early or two minutes late on any given day. But, no, they all said they hadn’t seen him.
By nine o’clock she called the Hercules Police Department in a state of high anxiety. Something horrible had happened to her husband. If it wasn’t a natural occurrence — he had suffered a heart attack or stroke somewhere and fallen into a ditch — it was an unnatural one. He had been beaten by wilding youths. He had been mugged. Something. She felt it deep in her bones.
How long has he been missing, ma’am? the dispatch asked.
He should have been back an hour ago, she heard herself say.
The young dispatch had been polite enough not to laugh, but just barely. Nothing to worry about, ma’am, I’m sure he’ll be back shortly.
They had treated her like an old hen who was pecking after her husband. And even now that the disappearance had stretched to nearly three weeks, she felt like their attitudes had not improved much.
Yes, they had made an effort to find him. Perhaps even a lot of effort. But in some fundamental way, she still felt as though they viewed her as a batty old lady.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. McRae,” the chief said, appearing in her line of vision just as she had the handkerchief balled up in her left hand again.
“Good afternoon, Chief,” she said.
“Why don’t you come with me? We can talk in my office.”
Alida rose and followed the chief, determined to stand her ground and get some results this time. She had done her homework on him. He had been one year away from retirement for four years now, but his wife kept saying they couldn’t afford it. He had moved to Hercules because it was near the wine country and he enjoyed trips up that way. He was, everyone kept telling her, a “good cop.” She just wished she had seen more evidence of it.
When she reached his office, she sat in the same chair she had the previous three times. He closed the door. She did not wait for him to sit.
“Have you heard anything?” she asked, hating the desperate quality to her voice but knowing there was nothing she could do to make it go away.
The chief said nothing as he crossed the room, rounded his desk, and settled heavily in the chair behind it. He put his elbows on the desk, crossed his hands, and fixed her with a sincere gaze.
“Mrs. McRae,” he said. “I hope you know by now that if I had heard anything about your husband, I would have called you immediately.”
“So you’ve said, but I—”
“Mrs. McRae,” he said again. And there it was: that patronizing tone. He continued, “I know you don’t think we’re doing anything, and I know you think we don’t care. But the fact is, we’ve dedicated an incredible amount of resources to this case. We’ve done everything I know how to do. We filed a missing persons report with the feds. We did the canvass. The dogs. The media.”
She nodded. “The canvass” had started the afternoon after he disappeared, after Alida had made her first foray down to the police station and managed to impress on them the strangeness of what had occurred. The chief had sent four officers out to cover Bill’s entire jogging route, knocking on doors, showing his picture, and asking if anyone had seen him. They all had. A thousand times. Just not that morning.