Т Паркер - The Fallen

The house was a wood and glass two-story. The wood was stained almost black and the windows were darkly smoked. The angles were sharp and concealing. In the middle of the front yard stood an enormous magnolia tree, its leaves waxy and sleek. The house seemed to be hiding behind it. A detached garage sat to the right.

“Ethics pays about the same salaries that we do,” said McKenzie. “How’d he afford that?”

“Maybe he rents it.”

“It looks a lot like him. Tight-assed and grim.”

I unsnapped my holster strap and got out.

We kept an easy pace down the sidewalk. Two Coronado PD uniforms and two plainclothes fell in with us. A newspaper sat on the driveway. I picked it up — Friday’s Union-Tribune — and checked the mailbox, but it was empty.

“His name is John Van Flyke,” I said to the others. “He’s abducted a woman and he’s probably armed.”

“Who is he?” asked one of the plainclothes. “What’s he do?”

“He’s with the San Diego Ethics Authority,” I said.

“No shit?”

“None. Be careful, guys,” I said. “He’s a capable man.”

We walked past the big magnolia tree toward the dark angles of the house. There was a planter by the front porch but it had no plants or flowers in it, just a private security sign poked in and leaning at an angle. The porch was shaded and the front door was solid wood except for a peephole. There was no welcome mat.

I dropped the paper near the planter, knocked twice, and stood to the side. A moment later I rang the doorbell. I heard a distant chime but that was all. I knocked again, harder, and waited.

I stepped forward and to the right and peeked quickly through one of the sidelights that ran up either side of the front door. I made out the foyer, a coatrack, a high-backed bench, and a mirror before pulling my face out of there. Too good a target. I went to the other side of the door and did it again. I saw that the foyer opened up to a room diagonally divided into shade and sunlight. I saw a sofa and a chair.

I tried the door but it was locked. Then I drew my sidearm and turned to the Coronado cops.

The four men drew their weapons. McKenzie’s was already out and ready.

“We’ll take upstairs,” I said. “You guys get the ground.”

I kicked the door open on my first try. An alarm wailed to life. I spun away and the officers went in yelling. Then McKenzie and the plainclothes. I went last, my vision clear and my muscles buzzing with adrenaline.

The light inside was good. I followed the barrel of my Colt through the foyer and down the hallway, then right. I climbed the stairs through a slant of sunlight. I made the landing and swung the gun left to right while everything jumped at me: a doorknob, a wall sconce, a tree limb wavering just beyond a smoked window. The alarm was screaming in my ears as I pivoted into the master bedroom.

Empty. Bed made.

McKenzie barged in behind me. I heard the breath catch in her throat, watched the steady sweep of her barrel across the room. “Shit,” she said quietly. “That would have been nice.”

“Too easy.”

A few minutes later one of the Coronado detectives called the security company and got the alarm turned off. Twenty minutes after that we had searched the house and the garage and the grounds and found no one and no evidence that Van Flyke had committed even the smallest crime.

“Where did he go ?” asked McKenzie.

I’d been asking myself that question since Miranda had confirmed Van Flyke as the man who’d gotten into the car with a woman who was almost certainly Stella Asplundh.

Where had he taken her? Why hadn’t our patrol cars and ABLE come up with such an obvious car? It had been approximately two and a half hours since the abduction, and the white Crown Victoria, so punctually pinpointed by Miranda of Higher Grounds, had vanished.

I didn’t think he’d made it out of San Diego County — not in a law-enforcement vehicle that could be spotted easily from the air or ground.

I didn’t think he’d even made it out of the city. He’d simply parked the car out of sight, where it wouldn’t seem too unusual, and let us scurry around all night looking for it.

He had chosen someplace close. Someplace private. Someplace he could take and conceal Stella and the car.

“What about Garrett’s apartment?” I asked.

The front door of Garrett’s apartment was unlocked. An empty bottle of scotch lay in the middle of the living room floor. There were fast-food wrappers on the kitchen table.

The bed was torn apart, and the sheets were marked with blood. An empty syringe and needle lay on the nightstand by the clock. A piece of wadded duct tape stuck with long brown hair lay in a corner of the bedroom, in full view of the scores of images of beautiful Stella and Samantha looking out from the walls.

The garage was empty.

So we drove, radio up loud and windows half open and my optimism following the gas gauge down from full. It was a slow Friday night so far: minor collisions, a domestic call on Banker’s Hill, a possible assault at a bar on Front Street, a drunk and disorderly in Hillcrest. One of the ABLE choppers cut across my field of vision on its way over the dark baseball stadium. I wondered if Stella Asplundh would be able to withstand what was happening to her now.

We flashed the patrol units and got flashed back. We pulled over and talked a couple of times. Some unmarked Deltas joined us. The ABLE choppers drifted overhead. A frustrated irritability sets in when an entire metropolitan police force is looking for one vehicle, one man, and can’t locate either. We were understaffed and underfunded but doing what we could. Everybody was griping but nobody was throwing in the towel.

Ten became midnight. Midnight became two. Two became four, and I realized that in just a couple of hours the sun would be rising on Saturday morning. I gassed up the Chevy while McKenzie washed the windshield. We got drive-through breakfast sandwiches, then candy bars from a convenience store.

We cruised in a slow, expanding circle through the many beautifully named parts of San Diego: Mission Bay and Midway, Loma Portal and Uptown, Linda Vista and Old Town, Middletown and Centre City. Then through Sherman Heights and Logan Heights, Golden Hill and Grant Hill, South Crest and Shelltown. Then up through Rolando to Tierrasanta and Allied Gardens, Grantville and Kensington, Crown Point and Mission Valley. As a child I had traced my finger and read these names on my father’s Thomas Guide, intrigued and impressed. I had loved Shelltown and Logan Heights and Rolando long before I could tell them apart.

I even showed McKenzie the place in Normal Heights where the dog had cornered me in the juniper bush when I was a boy, and the cop had run off the dog and taken me home. That was twenty-three years ago. I still remember the officer’s name — Bob Hoppe. The juniper bush was still there, bigger and even more twisted than I remembered it.

The sun was rising on Normal Heights when Captain Villas called on my cell phone.

“Robbie, ABLE just picked up your car north on 79, out in east county. It’s Van Flyke’s Ethics sedan, no doubt. Our guys made a pass, nailed the plates, and backed off. You can have it if you want, but the Sheriffs will get there a lot faster than you will.”

“Get the Sheriffs on alert and in position,” I said. “If Van Flyke stops, take him. Until then let him think he’s alone and let him get to where he’s going. We’re rolling now.”

“He’s alone,” said Villas. “No woman.”

“She might be in the trunk,” I said. Or dumped somewhere on the long trail from downtown to east county.

“You want Emergency Negotiations Team?”