The house was in darkness downstairs and frankly I was glad when Ed insisted on coming up to my apartment and making sure nobody was hiding in the closet. I might joke about having an attack cat on the loose but the most help Bertie or Tory would provide was if one of them tripped the bad guy in an attempt to wrap themselves around his legs. Which they did to me as soon as I opened the door. I talked Ed out of stationing a patrol car outside and he left, assuring me he was as close as a call away. Sweet guy. It was ten o’clock by now and I was both exhausted and adrenalized, a bad combination that usually meant I wouldn’t be falling asleep any time soon. I put some cereal in a bowl, picked up Bertie, and went into the living room to see if some late-night TV would calm me down. Before that, however, I owed it to Nora to bring her up to speed. Ed had agreed to get in touch with Leo for which I was thankful.
The phone rang several times before she answered. She sounded breathless.
“Sorry. I was in the john. Any word? Have you found her?”
I decided, given all the uncertainty of who was complicitous with whom, to withhold some of what we now knew.
“Not yet. Nora, I’ve been going over this sequence of events over and over in my mind…”
“Me too,” she interrupted.
“The problem is the chancy nature of the whole thing. How would somebody know you were going to leave the house when you did? You said yourself it was a spontaneous decision.”
There was dead silence at the other end of the phone, then she said in a tight voice, “Yeah.”
“Yeah what? You told somebody?”
“Yeah… ”
I held on to my patience with difficulty. She finally went on. “Don’t get this all wrong, but yeah, when I think about it there is somebody who knew.”
Another silence and I could hear a deep prolonged intake of breath. She was toking up.
“Go on.”
“Don’t rush me. This isn’t easy for me to tell you… Fact is, I’ve been stressed out of my mind ever since Dee’s death, so I called this fellow I know to see if he could sell me some weed. I needed to relax big time. He called me back just after Joy went down and said he’d meet me on the corner in two minutes. So I nipped out like I said, got cigs and the weed, came back and went for a smoke in the shed. I can see the kid’s window from there and I knew I’d hear her if she was crying or anything. You’ve heard the pair of lungs she’s got on her.”
“Could you see anybody in the room?”
“No. Not unless they were standing right in the window. But I swear to you, I’d have heard. That kid can bellow when she wants to… I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I’ve already got a form for possession and I didn’t want to go there again.”
“I’ll need the name of your dealer.”
“Yeah, yeah. He’s a creep anyway.”
She gave me the name — Eric Jones — somebody, as they say, known to the police. I’d be glad to nail him. I had one more question before we hung up.
“Nora, you said a couple of times that you were hired. That’s not the same as pitching in for free rent. Which is it?”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know, I’m just curious.”
“He hired me. The doc.”
“Dr. Forgach?”
“Yeah. Dee wouldn’t have anything to do with him and he wanted to know what was happening. I was what you might call the mole.” She laughed. “Can’t you just see us meeting in underground parking garages so I could give him my report?”
“Is that what you did?’
“Naw, course not. I phoned him every so often. Not that there was anything to report, just domestic stuff, like you know, Joy had a cold, Dee had a new class at the institute. That sort of thing.”
“Did you know that Sigmund came to see her on Monday night?”
“No, that’s my night to go to my support group. But you know I’d had a suspicion she’d got somebody coming over. She primped up a bit and got Joy’s hair washed and cut. So it was the bro, was it?”
“It was.”
We hung up. I put Bertie down. I felt slightly queasy that I’d outed Leo. It seemed a sad way to have to know what was happening in the lives of somebody you cared about.
Back to the abduction.
Was this all one huge coincidence? Did Hannah just have incredible luck or had she known Jonesy was going to call Nora out of the house? What would she have done if that hadn’t happened? Knocked Nora over the head? Pretended she was taking Joy for a walk? I was inclined to believe she had a connection with the dealer and had set him up to phone Nora. Good. We could lean on the slimy bastard with threats of accessory to unlawful confinement charges. I picked up the phone and called Ed. Aileen answered and didn’t sound too pleased to have to bring him to the phone as he was having a late dinner. But hey, that was the policeman’s lot. And the lot of the policeman’s wife.
I told him the latest bit of news and he said he’d have a cruiser over to visit Jonesy right away. If there was anything else to tell me he’d call, otherwise, he suggested I get off to bed. Given our suspects, he still thought Joy would be unharmed and I agreed with him. I would just like to be absolutely sure we weren’t barking up the wrong tree and that Hannah Silverstein wasn’t just off doing what she said she was going do. Getting some R and R. Then the horror was, who had Joy?
I put that thought away as best I could. I munched on my granola, not the best meal in the world but the only thing to eat before bed. One more call. I had to see what was happening with Paula. I phoned and Mrs. Jackson answered.
“Chris, she’s gone to bed. She said to tell you if you called that she was doing fine and do you want to come over for breakfast tomorrow?”
“Yes, I do, and is she? Doing fine, I mean?”
Mrs. J. sighed. “It could be worse. I think she’s got so much to worry about that in a funny way, Craig’s buggering off like this has gone on the back burner. But not on mine it hasn’t. I intend to give that man a piece of my mind when he deigns to come back.”
“Hey, you’ve got to stand in line.”
“I mean, how could he do this to her, Chris?”
I had no answer and it was a plea I’d heard from heartbroken parents before. Those situations were far worse of course but it boiled down to the same thing, one human being who was incapable of empathizing with any other person. Which made me think of Joy. If Hannah and Zach had taken her, for whatever reason, they were revealing a serious level of callousness.
“How are you holding up?” I asked her.
“All right. It cheers me up to have time with Chelsea and the boys have been wonderful. They call me almost every hour on the hour.”
Paula’s brothers were all into their fifties by now but Marion always called them the boys.
“How’s the case coming along? You sound exhausted.”
How did she detect that? I’d made a point of putting on a chipper voice. I told her what had been happening since we last talked.
“I know what you mean about them being callous, Chris, but at least that poor little child will have somebody to communicate with her. Maybe that’s why they’ve taken her. She’s one of their own.”
I held that idea to my chest for comfort. We chatted a bit more, then hung up.
I got the cats and crawled into bed.
Before I even got over to Paula’s Sunday morning, there was a series of phone calls.
The first was from Leo.
“I know I’m supposed to be bonding with Sigmund and repairing the past, but I tell you, Chris, I’ve had it with the yin-yang. I don’t know how I spawned somebody whose values, interests, and appetites are the antithesis to mine.”
I risked a joke. “You mean he hates opera?”
That actually got a laugh out of him. “He loathes it. I wouldn’t mind that so much but he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t. It’s horrible. He’s got no spine.”
“You’re probably scaring him to death. Pretend he’s a patient, be nice.”
“My patients are all psychopaths. Surely you’re not saying my own flesh and blood is psychopathic?”
Now he was having a joke. We did an update. I had to tell him about Nora and the dealer. He was less upset than I’d thought he’d be.
“I suspected as much. So in other words, the window of opportunity has expanded somewhat?”
“Yes. I’d say we can tack on at least another twenty-five minutes before she actually went inside the house.”
“I suppose all we can do now is wait?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He invited me over for dinner, which I refused, saying I was spending the day with Paula, and I went back to finishing my shower. Not to be. Next call was from Katherine. Meeting tomorrow at nine. How was I? And so on.
I’d barely dried off when there was another call. Jessica reported no further word from Hannah, and all the circle of friends were pleading ignorance of her whereabouts.
Next was Ed reporting on the encounter with Jonesy. “He claims that Nora called him asking for weed and said she wanted it right away. He called back and arranged the drop like she said. The only problem is that Nora swears she didn’t call him at two o’clock. She says it was much earlier, maybe as early as one. Back to him and he said he makes a point of not recognizing voices. And yeah it might have been some other bitch but he gets a lot of calls, don’t he?”
“Good witness.”
“He’s going down with this one, Chris. I’ll make sure he does.”
“So it looks like we’re dealing with somebody who knew Jones and knew Nora’s connection with him. Which in my books brings us back to Hannah. Deidre might have told her.”
“That’s still our most likely scenario, and her partner is Zachary Taylor, who now cannot be found.”
“A camper is a good place to hide a child. It’d be a bit cramped but they can keep her inside most of the time.”
“We’ve warned all border crossings and the highway patrol guys but it’s my gut feeling they haven’t gone too far. It’s easier to hide if they’re not on the move.”
“Any progress on Deidre’s case?”
“None. We’re doing door to door but so far everybody was sealed up tight on Tuesday night, watching the Sopranos. Bad guys are fascinating if you don’t have to deal with them all day. Then they are the boring ignorant heartless pieces of shite we know them to be.”
“Copy that.”