There was no reason for Molly to return to the Jackson house the next day but she went anyway. She woke with the image of Sam Jackson in her head, his face as he’d lunged at her, his hand on her breast. How strange was it that she was feeling guilty about the situation, when she was certain that he was not?
She arrived at the house, hoping to find the New York cop Bell there, but he wasn’t on the premises. Sam Jackson was in the den-turned-studio with the cameraman Greg. Sam was texting on his phone while Greg was in the process of dismantling things. In the living room, the FBI was doing the same.
Molly was the fifth wheel. She was about to leave when Bell arrived. Molly watched as he asked Dugan what was going on and the agent ignored him as if he was not there. Moments later Rachel Jackson came downstairs. Molly assumed she had heard Bell’s voice. Rachel nodded to Molly when she saw her and then addressed Bell.
“They’re heading back to Wyoming,” she said. “The show must go on.”
“And the Bureau is going with them?” Bell asked, knowing full well that Dugan was within earshot.
“What the FBI does is none of your business,” Dugan said.
Rachel stared Dugan down as she answered Bell. “Yes, the Bureau is tagging along on the campaign trail. It appears they are at the beck and call of my husband.”
Dugan turned on his heel and walked away. He was smart enough that he wouldn’t get into a pissing contest with the mother of a missing child. Bell watched him go before turning to Rachel.
“Did they get a trace on yesterday’s call?”
Molly pretended to be busy on her iPad while Rachel gave Bell the update. It turned out that the call had come from a mall pay phone in a town called East Stroudsburg in Pennsylvania. The FBI had already determined that the entrance to the Target store, where the phone was located, had security cameras on timed loops, which erased every night at midnight. If the woman who had called had been caught on camera, or had been in the store itself, it wouldn’t have mattered. The tape was gone.
“I assume the FBI sent agents to the store?” Bell asked.
“Jesus Christ,” Dugan said from the other room.
Rachel nodded. “They didn’t find anything. Or if they did, they didn’t tell me.”
Bell asked a few more questions, mainly just to further aggravate Dugan, and then left, telling Rachel that he would be in touch. Molly caught up with him outside as he was walking to his car.
“You’re heading out?” she asked. “You just got here.”
“Looks to me as if everybody’s heading out,” Bell said.
“What if the woman calls back?”
“The woman won’t be calling back,” Bell told her. “Not today anyway. She would have to be stupid to do that, and I have a feeling she’s not.”
Molly shrugged. “Yet one could say that a person, expecting a call like that, would have to be stupid to have his phone turned off.”
“You might think that,” Bell said. “But he’s not stupid either. Is he?”
“No.”
Bell waited for her to elaborate, or offer some theory on what had gone down the previous day. She did neither.
“You have time for a coffee?” she said instead.
“I suppose I do.” He glanced toward the house and then back to her, just then realizing she’d been waiting to talk to him. “I thought you had a plane to catch.”
“I have time.”
They went to a place that Bell knew, a few blocks away, a diner that featured breakfast all day and comfort foods like meat loaf and fried chicken with dumplings. They both ordered coffee, carrying their cups to a booth near the rear of the place.
“Did you know his phone was off?” Bell asked.
Molly stirred milk into the coffee. “No. It would never have occurred to me that it was.”
“Is it typical of him?”
“I’ve known the man five days,” she said.
Bell was surprised. “Really? I just assumed the two of you went back a ways.”
“Why would you assume that?”
Bell took a sip of the scalding coffee. “In the movies, the candidate always hires his most trusted friend to be his campaign manager. You know—Walter Brennan or Ralph Bellamy.”
“I look like Walter Brennan?”
“You do not. Bellamy neither.”
“Good to know,” Molly said. “Technically Sam didn’t hire me. Bill Ford did. I’m a fourth-generation Wyomingite. Yes, that’s what we’re called. I’m a registered Republican and I know a lot of people there, party-wise and media-wise. Sam does not. That’s why I’m his campaign manager.”
“But now you find yourself in the middle of all this,” Bell said.
“No, I find myself on the periphery of all this. But you’re right—it’s not what I signed on for. And in case you’re wondering, I believe that an abducted child is a hell of a lot more important than a Congressional race.”
“Do you think the candidate feels that way?”
“I would hope so.”
“Because he doesn’t act that way.” Bell tried the coffee again. “Do you have kids?”
“Two.”
“Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I know exactly what you’re saying,” Molly replied. “But I don’t know what’s going on in his head. Maybe it’s eating him up inside but he won’t let it show. He’s got this tough guy image to maintain.”
Bell looked around the diner. It was mid-afternoon and the place was nearly empty. “It has occurred to me more than once that he’s behind this.”
“It occurred to me too.”
“Do you think he is?” Bell asked.
“No.”
“Then what is he doing?”
She drank and then put the cup on the table. “He’s trying to get elected.”
“And what about his daughter?”
“I think he’s convinced himself that these people are not going to harm her. That they’re trying to make a statement here. So he’s safe sticking to his message.”
“I have two sons,” Bell said, “and I couldn’t convince myself of that.”
“Neither could I. But then neither of us is Sam Jackson.”
Bell sat quietly for a moment. “It seems that you and I have access to all the same information and that we’ve pretty much come to the same conclusion about the man.”
“I suppose so.”
“Then why did you invite me for coffee?”
She nodded slightly, as if conceding a point. “I feel as if I’m violating some sort of professional code here. But there’s something you should know.”
“What’s that?”
“It has to remain confidential,” she said. “Otherwise I might never work again.”
“All right.” Bell was reluctant to make the promise but he felt he had no choice.
“You should know that this theory that the kidnapping is some diabolical plot to drive Sam out of the race isn’t quite true.”
“How do you know that?” Bell asked. “Better yet—how can you know that?”
“He hasn’t been forthcoming about that first phone call,” Molly said. “Apparently the woman never even mentioned the election. She wants an apology for what Sam said about Laureltown.”
“Jesus,” Bell said. “Why would he keep that from us?”
“Because it doesn’t play nearly as well as a story about somebody trying to get him out of the race,” Molly said. “What he said about Laureltown was reprehensible. I’m sure even he knows that. He doesn’t want to drag it out into the open again, not when he’s in the middle of a campaign. So he plays the other angle instead, which makes him the good guy in the story. The heroic father standing up to the evil-doers.”
“So you’re suggesting that his phone being off yesterday wasn’t an accident.”
“Am I?”
“You don’t have to,” Bell said. “I can connect my own dots. Did you tell the FBI what you just told me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I don’t like that guy Dugan.”
“You’re preaching to the choir here,” Bell said.
“Fact is, I wasn’t going to tell you either.”
“Why did you?”
“Maybe I don’t like Sam Jackson either.”
“But you’re working for him,” Bell pointed out. “He’s your guy.”
“I’m working for the Ford brothers,” she said flatly. “Sam Jackson is not my guy.”
Bell drove to Pennsylvania that afternoon, to the town of East Stroudsburg. He knew that the FBI had already sent agents to the mall to check the phone for prints and to interview employees and anybody else who might have seen the woman. There was virtually no chance of raising a usable print from a public telephone handled daily by countless people and Bell knew that the woman they were after was too smart to leave hers anyway. She hadn’t left any prints in Greenfield or Elmira or Hershey. So far, she hadn’t left any sign at all.
Things were slowly coming into focus for Bell after the conversation with Molly Esponda. He had watched Sam Jackson’s network interview the night before and he was left wondering just what he was seeing. Now he understood, or at least he was beginning to. He wondered why it had taken him so long, and in fact it bothered him that it had. He feared it was a sign of age; that his powers of deduction were slowing down. Not an encouraging thing for a cop to consider. Whatever the delay in his synapses, he now realized that Sam Jackson was determined not only to refrain from helping the investigation, but to outright hinder it if possible. There would be only one reason for that—he wanted to use the exposure to benefit his campaign. Molly had verified the fact. What her motives might be was another question altogether. There was something about her today that suggested she was being pulled in two directions at once. Bell could have asked her what was behind her decision to talk to him, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t tell him, just as he was certain that she was glad she did.
Bell wasn’t traveling to Pennsylvania in search of fingerprints or DNA or security camera footage that didn’t exist. He wasn’t altogether sure why he was going. But it occurred to him that the stop in East Stroudsburg, and the phone call to Rachel Jackson, had been the first time the woman had gone off script. The calls from Greenfield and Elmira and Hershey had been planned, mapped out. It was no coincidence that the telephones were tucked away in places where the woman’s anonymity was all but guaranteed. But the mall in East Stroudsburg was different. The foyer where the pay phone was located was under video surveillance on the lookout for shoplifters. The camera was concealed in a lighting fixture; the woman wouldn’t have seen it. She had gotten lucky. If the FBI hadn’t had to wait for the warrant for Rachel Jackson’s server, they would have had the location yesterday, which meant they would have had the woman on the tape. She had serendipity in her favor. Bell doubted she would have known that the security tapes were erased nightly. She had been careless and gotten away with it.
But why had she become careless? Up until that point, she’d been relentlessly careful, calling from safe pay phones in random towns––playing Keep Away. The call yesterday had been an impulse, Bell thought, a spur-of-the moment-decision. It was easy enough to guess what might have prompted it—the fact that Sam Jackson had his cellphone turned off when the woman tried to reach him earlier. Bell could imagine her frustration. It would have been natural to assume that there were two people in the world closest to the little girl. If one wouldn’t talk to her, she’d call the other. And that’s what she did.
Bell’s mind kept going back to what Molly had told him, about the kidnappers wanting an apology for Sam Jackson’s Laureltown rant. What was the connection there? And who was to say there was one? People all across the country—the world even—were outraged by what Jackson had said. They didn’t necessarily need to be directly connected to Laureltown to want him to make amends.
It was a two-hour drive to East Stroudsburg. When Bell arrived at the mall, he parked in the lot near the entrance to the Target store and sat there for a time. He could see the pay phones inside the entranceway. He imagined the woman there twenty-four hours earlier. The call had been quick, less than two minutes. Was she in the store before she called? Did she go inside afterward? Bell doubted that. She would have called and left. She might have been parked where Bell was parked right now. Not that he—or anybody else involved in the investigation—had any idea as to what she was driving.
She’d been heading east after leaving Hershey though. Back to the hub, Bell surmised, wherever that was. If it was Bell, traveling those country roads, with a sudden impulse to make a phone call to the girl’s mother, he doubted he would stop at a shopping mall to do it. He’d find a phone in a rural store or gas station, someplace out of town, away from the public eye. But what if she had stopped at the mall for another reason and had a sudden urge to call when she noticed the phones? That could have been the case, especially if the call had been spur-of-the-moment, as Bell suspected it had. If so though, what would it matter? It didn’t tell Bell anything new.
He went into the Target and asked for the manager. He was a young guy, beanpole thin, with a large Adam’s apple and stylish narrow glasses. He told Bell that he’d already spoken to the FBI, and that they had interviewed all of the employees who’d been working the previous afternoon. Nobody remembered seeing the woman who made the call. How could anyone remember seeing a woman they had no description for?
Bell walked around the store, and then out into the mall. The place was older, and showed its years. Water stains on the ceiling, worn tiling on the floors. There were dollar stores and an Ace Hardware. A food court. A main entrance faced the road out front, with another bank of pay phones. If she stopped only to make the call, why hadn’t she made it from there?
Bell went back to the Target store and found the manager again. The man was less polite than the first time.
“I assume you have receipts for all of yesterday’s purchases?” Bell asked.
“Well, it’s computerized,” the man said. “We don’t save paper receipts.”
“But you have them?”
“Yeah.”
Bell checked the notes he’d taken earlier that day, when talking to Heyward. The woman had called Rachel Jackson at two minutes past three. “I want to see the transactions from yesterday afternoon,” he said. “Say, two o’clock to four.”
“All of them?” the manager asked.
“Why would I just want to see some of them? And print them out, if you don’t mind.”
“It will take some time.”
“Take it,” Bell told him. “I’m going to grab some lunch.”
Bell ate a hamburger and fries in the food court and then sat there for a half hour, watching the people. At a table a few feet away three men, all in their seventies he would guess, were discussing a golf trip they were planning to Scotland. They were as excited as school children. Good old boys, they’d probably lived here their entire lives. They were small-town guys, Bell thought and, to a certain extent, this was becoming a small-town case. It may have started in New York City but it had definitely moved to the boonies.
When Bell had gotten word earlier that the latest call had come from Hershey, he’d spent an hour at his computer, searching for information on the three towns the woman had called from, looking for a common denominator. All three had chamber of commerce websites, which offered considerable information. All had Lions Clubs, all had Rotaries. Horticultural societies, church bazaars, farmers markets, youth groups, baseball and soccer leagues. If there was a reason the woman had chosen those towns, it wasn’t evident to Bell. Maybe she had a personal connection to each—relatives or friends. Bell looked for a common manufacturing link for the three and came up empty. A shared cultural interest—a theater group or writers’ retreat—again nothing. He’d even looked at the three towns on Google Earth, hoping to find some distinguishing characteristic that might tell him something. Nothing there, nothing anywhere. In the end he concluded that maybe the woman had chosen the towns at random because that’s precisely what they were—random picks—and Bell was looking for something that didn’t exist.
When he went back to the store, the manager had the receipts printed out. Bell sat in the Target lunchroom and went over them, again with the familiar feeling of not knowing what he was looking for but hoping to recognize it when he saw it.
When he did see it, he told the manager he needed to talk to the cashier in question. She was a black woman, short and wide, with a bubbly manner.
“I sort of remember her,” she said uncertainly.
“What do you remember?”
The woman looked up at the ceiling, as if there might be a clue printed on the tiles there. “Oh, she paid cash. Cuz, like, I remember I said nobody pays cash anymore. She’s the last one. Making a joke, you know.”
“What did she look like?”
“I kinda remember but not really. She had a hat on, I think. Like a baseball cap.”
“What team?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know the teams.”
“Was she tall, short?”
“Maybe kind of average.”
“What was her hair like?”
“I couldn’t really tell,” the cashier said. “Account of the hat and all.”
“Anything else you can remember? Any tattoos or piercings? What she was wearing besides the hat?”
The woman showed an expression of fierce concentration before finally shaking her head again. “I’m sorry. So many people go through, you know?”
Bell nodded his understanding. “One more thing. When she left, did you see her use the pay phone on her way out?”
“I can’t say.”
“That’s okay,” Bell said. “I can.”