Bell arrived at the Jackson house a little past noon. He’d been off the past two days and wasn’t scheduled to work until the weekend but after the phone call from Rachel Jackson he’d driven over. He wasn’t doing anything anyway, other than procrastinating. He had a gallon of stain by his back door, ready to refinish the deck outside. It had been sitting there all summer long, only moving when Bell tripped over it. After talking to Rachel he’d tried to get in touch with the FBI guy Dugan but it was obvious that the man was ignoring him. Bell left two messages, waited an hour for a return call that never came, and headed to the house.
The door was wide open when he got there so he walked in. Dugan, in the big open family area, gave him a look bordering somewhere between pointed disregard and pure contempt. Bell smiled at him and kept walking, toward the sound of Sam Jackson’s voice. The man was in a large study that had been turned into an ersatz TV studio. He was doing a phone interview, leaning back in a swivel chair behind a large wooden desk, hands clasped behind his head as he held forth. The phone was on speaker; the person on the other end was a frustrated and stammering woman, bent on trying to squeeze a word in here and there. There were two other people in the room—a tall woman with dark eyes and black hair, wearing boots and a long skirt, and a blond guy who was changing the lens in a video camera. The ongoing interview spared Bell any introductions. The guy ignored him while the dark-haired woman gave him a look of blatant appraisal. Bell, in jeans and a sweatshirt, suspected that he looked nothing like a cop. He smiled at her and went looking for Rachel Jackson.
She was in an expansive rock garden behind the house on a swing, staring at a brick wall at the back of the property. She was sitting ramrod straight, motionless, zoned out, and she obviously didn’t hear Bell as he came out onto the flagstone patio. He watched her for a moment; he had an urge to leave her there in her solitude. But then, she had called him. Which meant that the solitude wasn’t working for her.
“Hey,” he said.
She wasn’t startled. She turned her head toward him and nodded, as if agreeing to something. Maybe she had seen him all along and was waiting for him to speak. Her silence but his to break.
“What’s going on?”
She indicated an Adirondack chair, green with yellow flowers painted on the slats. The flowers looked as if they’d been done by a child. They probably had been, Bell realized.
“Do you want coffee or something?” she asked.
Bell shook his head as he walked over to sit down.
“Have you had lunch?”
“I’m good,” he told her. “You wanted to talk to me.”
She began to rub the fingers of one hand with the other, as if she had a sudden itch. She wore no rings today, Bell noticed. The first time he’d met her she’d had on a half-dozen, silver and turquoise. But no wedding band.
“I’m feeling kind of shut out,” she said. “I turn on the TV and Vanessa’s picture is everywhere. There’s all these theories about what happened to her. Who did it and why they did it. Where do they get their information?”
“I wouldn’t pay any attention to that if I were you,” Bell said. “The media isn’t any better-informed than the police. Less, in fact. They have a different agenda than we do. With them it’s all about ratings and so they speculate. We don’t.”
“I know how TV works,” Rachel said. “I’m all too familiar with it. I guess that’s why I called you. I was hoping you had something new.”
“If we did, I would have told you,” Bell said.
“What about this Driscoll guy?”
“We have nothing on him,” Bell said. “We have hair and fibers from the limo but nothing that matches anything in the DNA base. There were a lot of people in the car in the past month or so. Not just passengers. Other drivers, the mechanics who service it, car jockeys at the lot. We got nothing on Driscoll, or whatever his real name is.”
“Somebody must have him on a camera somewhere,” Rachel said. “What about the bar where he met McIlroy?”
“The bar has security cameras that haven’t worked in months. We’re still looking at different street videos, in and out of the city that day. But we’re talking thousands of cars and we don’t know what we’re even looking for. Needle in a haystack.”
“If I hear that phrase once more, I’m going to scream.”
Bell nodded. “We’ve actually picked up the limo on a couple of cameras but the locations haven’t helped us. One was near Vanessa’s school. Well, we already knew that. We have a few frames of similar limos where we can’t make out the plates. That doesn’t do us any good. A lot of limos in the city.”
“But she didn’t leave the city in the limo,” Rachel said.
“No,” Bell agreed. “Like I said, we don’t know what vehicle she left in. We were hoping to see the limo stopped somewhere. You know, meeting someone. The exchange.”
“How do you even know she left the city?”
“We don’t.”
“I mean,” Rachel said, considering it now for the first time, “the assumption was that she was around Greenfield. At first anyway. But then we got the call from Elmira. Maybe she’s still here in the city and they’re out there leading you guys on a wild goose chase. She might be a few blocks from here.”
“We can’t dismiss that possibility,” Bell said. “That’s why we need to keep in contact with them.” He paused. “What happened yesterday?”
Her mouth tightened. “Sam says he doesn’t believe this woman. Doesn’t believe she has Vanessa. So he hung up on her.”
“That’s what I heard. I have to say, I had trouble believing it. How did the FBI like it?”
“They were pissed. And so was I.”
“What are they saying now?”
“Not much of anything,” Rachel said. “Not to me anyway. That’s why I called you. I need to know that something is happening. I need to know that somebody is trying to find my baby. I think about her, locked up somewhere, or tied up, and she’s all alone, and she’s telling herself that we’re out there looking for her, that’s how she’s holding it together, and yet it doesn’t seem as if we are. We’re sitting around, looking at computers and maps and waiting for phone calls. And my husband’s in there with his stupid fucking campaign. If that’s what you want to call it.”
Bell was quiet for a time. When he felt her eyes on him, he glanced at her then indicated their surroundings. The garden. The house. All of it.
“What is this?” he asked.
“What is what?” she repeated, her voice sharp.
He looked at her steadily and she looked away. Bell thought that he’d overstepped his bounds. Her marriage was none of his business; it really didn’t factor into the situation at hand. He was about to apologize when she spoke.
“It wasn’t always this way,” she said. “I met him when I was working at Pendleton Press. He was a history prof then at Duke and he’d written a book about the Revolutionary War. A good book. I was his publicist. He was a typical first-time author, green as grass. Very polite, always wanting to pick up the tab for lunch or dinner. Writers never pick up tabs. He wrote another book, about the relationship between Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet.” She shook her head. “If he stayed with the writing, maybe things would have been different. But he started doing guest spots on Fox, and you know—voicing his opinions. Believe it or not, he was middle of the road, politically, back then. But he knew what Fox wanted, what worked for them, what kept them inviting him back. Then ABN offered him the show, and that was it. It was as if the exposure triggered something in his brain that had been lying dormant. He’s been erupting ever since.”
“And you have to live with it,” Bell said.
“Don’t feel sorry for me, detective.”
“I don’t,” he said. “Not about that.”
She nodded, not saying anything else. He suspected she felt she’d said too much already.
“I’m going to talk to Dugan,” he said. “He should not be shutting you out. Who’s in there with Sam?”
She’d been near tears and now she wiped her eyes. “Some woman from Wyoming and the guy with the cameras and stuff.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“Molly something, I forget. She’s the campaign manager.”
“Did you know her before?”
“No. She says that Bill Ford hired her. Do you know who he is?”
“I’ve read about him.”
“Well, he’s the reason that Sam’s running,” Rachel said. “Him and his brother, pair of fucking oligarchs. They never gave him a second glance until he started singing Trump’s praises on a nightly basis. All of a sudden, they’re big fans. And when he started raving about the school shooting, they came calling.” She paused for a moment. “Those poor kids in Laureltown. How’s that for irony? Those parents lost their babies and now I’ve lost mine.”
“No, you haven’t,” Bell said. “Your daughter’s still alive, Rachel.”
She nodded quickly at that, wanting so badly to believe him. Bell noticed that she had a habit of referring to the little girl as her daughter. Not theirs.
“Okay, I’m going to talk to my colleague from the Bureau,” he told her.
Inside the house the Bureau was collectively having lunch. A young agent, a black guy with bulging muscles and a shaved head, had arrived with a large pizza and a bag of hoagies from a local deli, the name of the establishment emblazoned on the box in fiery red lettering. Bell knew the place and he knew it didn’t do much business because the food was lousy. He also knew that the proprietor had been busted a few times for selling grass and hash to college kids. Bell doubted that the FBI knew that.
He walked over to Dugan, who was sitting on a couch, legs spread, eating a slice of pizza, with a second slice on a coffee table in front of him. He glanced up at Bell, his mouth full, his look somewhat amused.
“Your guys get anything from the toll booth cameras?” Bell asked, stopping a few feet away to look down at Dugan.
Dugan chewed his food sloppily and at length, making Bell wait. Bell smiled at him, resisting the urge to tell him to shove the second slice up his ass. Dugan swallowed and took a drink of soda before he replied.
“We’re still looking at a hundred thousand cars running through a dozen or so toll booths, hoping we find a few that did the New York City to Greenfield to Elmira route. Did you want to double-check our work? I’d be happy to send the tapes to your desk downtown.”
“I’ll defer to the Bureau’s expertise,” Bell said.
“You have no idea how much that means to us.” Dugan reached for the second slice.
“No movement from the limo driver?”
“Yeah,” Dugan said. “From his house to the bar and back again. Turns out he’s got a girlfriend in Yonkers too, or a booty call anyway. We paid her a visit but she’s almost as dumb as he is. But again, if you want to check it out…”
Bell ignored the jibe this time. He looked around at the equipment in the room. The young guy with the biceps had disappeared. Out in the yard doing push-ups, Bell guessed. The tech guy Heyward was leaned back in his chair beside his laptop, enthusiastically attacking a hoagie. Bell watched the assault for a moment before turning back to Dugan. “So we wait for another call.”
“We wait for another call,” Dugan said. “I’m not sure why you’re here.”
“Working a case, same as you.”
“You’re the definition of redundant,” Dugan said. “You do realize that?”
Bell was looking past him now, at two maps on the wall there. He hadn’t noticed them before and he walked over for a closer look. The first map showed the city, and the route that the limo had taken, at least as much of the route that they knew. The second map was of a much larger area, and it displayed the various ways to get from the city to the town of Greenfield, and from there to Elmira, with the locations circled in red. The secondary roads were countless, the potential routes that a person could take impossible to compute. Bell’s gut told him that the woman—and whoever she had with her, if anybody—had stayed away from the thruway. And while it was true that she might be traveling on her own, with the little girl still in the city somewhere, Bell doubted it. The girl was stashed somewhere in a rural area, although it was very unlikely she’d been in Greenfield or Elmira either. Smoke and mirrors, he thought. Then he heard Heyward’s voice, muffled by the hoagie.
“Shit!”
He was looking at the laptop screen, sauce from the hoagie dripping from his bottom lip. He set the messy sandwich aside and wiped his hands quickly before typing something. “They called,” he said. “Three times.”
Dugan was on his feet. “What do you mean they called?”
Heyward pointed. “Three times in the last four minutes.”
Dugan looked at the info on the screen and turned and headed for the room where Sam Jackson was. Bell followed. They found Sam sitting at the desk, with the tall woman standing beside him, showing him something on her iPad.
“Where the hell’s your phone?” Dugan barked.
Sam looked up, not happy with the agent’s tone. “What?”
“Your phone—where is it?”
Sam glanced around the desk. “My phone is right here.”
“They called,” Dugan snapped.
“Oh,” Sam said calmly, looking at the screen. “I must have turned it off.”