C. Box - Force of Nature

She said, “I can’t think of a better place to get lost, can you? I don’t know anyone there anymore, and no one knows us. Maybe we can take the girls to Disneyland.”

“Disneyland…” Joe repeated, shaking his head.

“Do you have a better idea?”

Joe thought, Find Nemecek and take him down. But he said, “Nope.”

“Then let’s start packing. I’ve booked us into a Holiday Inn in Anaheim. It’s one of those places with a package deal that gives discounts to Disneyland and caters to young families. It’s so boring, no one will even want to try and find us.”

Joe cringed.

She said, “I’ll wake the girls up. Tomorrow, as we’re boarding that plane and not before, I’ll call the schools and let them know Lucy and April will be missing some classes. And I’ll tell Sheridan what’s going on. I’ve got some sick leave built up at the library I can take, and I know you’ve got plenty of time coming because you never take any days off.”

Joe screwed up his face and crossed his arms over his chest.

“What?” she asked, her voice rising.

“How are we going to afford this?” he asked.

“We’ll figure something out,” she said, and started to leave the room. “Don’t forget, my mother left us money for the girls.”

Joe groaned at the mention of Marybeth’s mother. “That’s for their college,” he said. After all, he’d negotiated the deal with Missy several weeks before, as her price for leaving without him revealing what he knew about her. Money had shown up in their college funds via wire transfer. It had been an act of pure extortion, and Joe was proud of it.

Marybeth said, “They’ve got to get to college first, Joe.”

He didn’t argue with that logic.

“I’m going now,” she said. “I’ve got to get the girls up and help them pack.”

When he didn’t follow, she turned back to him and locked his eyes with hers. “Joe, I know what you’re thinking.”

He didn’t say yes or no but let her continue.

“What I’m telling you is we need to leave,” she said. “All of us. I looked into that man’s eyes and I saw no empathy at all. Not even a spark. It was like looking into the eyes of one of Nate’s falcons. He’s capable of anything, and he’ll do anything to get to Nate. Our family means nothing to him except as bargaining chips. We can’t let him use us as bait to lure Nate here to his death. Do you understand me?”

Joe didn’t respond. It made perfect twisted sense, he thought. The man at the library had set the trap.

“I bought four tickets,” she said, opening the door. “Your name is on one of them.”

She started to reach for the door handle but stopped short. Turning, she gestured to a stack of books on Joe’s desk. He followed her finger. He hadn’t noticed them previously.

She said, “I don’t know if it means anything at all, but those are the library books he brought to check out. They could have been chosen at random for an excuse to engage me, but my intuition tells me they mean something to him.”

Joe picked the books up one at a time and frowned. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Falconry and Hawking by Phillip Glasier. And The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Joe felt his neck get hot.

“What?” she asked. “Do they mean something to you?”

“I’ve seen them all before,” he said. “At Nate’s place. They read the same books. It was our man, all right.”

Joe sat down heavily at his desk and reread the message from Nate on the screen. There was no other way to take it than Nate wanted them to hit the road.

He looked through the three books again. Both The Art of War and Falconry and Hawking seemed too specialized and unrelated to provide much insight. But The Looming Tower? Joe opened it and turned straight to the index, looking for the names Nemecek or Romanowski. He found neither. But he agreed with Marybeth: something in the book had meaning to them. But where to start?

He rubbed his face and tried to think of alternatives to leaving-some kind of action he could take to try to help Nate and protect his family-but there were simply too many unknown variables. He felt impotent, useless, and cowardly.

When Joe tried to figure out how White/Nemecek knew so much about his family, his whereabouts, and the investigation, there were few people he could rule out. There were dozens of people privy to the proceedings: deputies, dispatchers, reporters, administration, maintenance, visiting state and federal agents, even McLanahan’s coffee group that met every morning at the Burg-O-Pardner. He could rule out only the sheriff himself, because without solving either the murders or the missing-persons cases, the man was circling the drain of his own career. He’d do whatever he could to stop the spiral by making arrests, Joe knew.

He leaned back in his chair and sneaked a long look at Mike Reed in the other room. Reed thumbed through a hunting magazine and sipped the last of his coffee on the couch. The man was affable and good-natured. By all rights, he should be the next sheriff. And although he certainly wanted to win the election, could he possibly be predatory enough to assist a killer so his opponent would go down in flames? Joe couldn’t conceive it.

Who else would know?

Then he thought about the password-protected text thread on Brueggemann’s phone.

When Lucy entered his office rubbing her face from sleep, she said, “Mom said we’re going on a trip.” She didn’t sound happy about it.

“That’s the plan.”

“What about my play?” she asked. “I can’t let everybody down. I’m the lead. This really means a lot to me, and Mom doesn’t even want to talk about it. I mean, I could stay with Heather until you got back.”

Joe didn’t have a good answer. “Maybe we’ll all be back in time.”

“But I’m the lead,” she said again. “If I’m not here they’ll give the part to Erin Vonn or somebody else.”

“I’m sure they’ll take you back,” Joe said, not sure about it at all.

“Mom won’t even tell me why we’re leaving.”

“For your safety,” Joe said. Lucy rolled her eyes in response.

“I have a life of my own, you know,” she said, folding her arms in front of her and striking a pose very much like Marybeth had a few minutes before. “You and Mom treat me like your property.”

Joe said with some sympathy, “You’ve got to get a few more years on you before it’s otherwise.”

“You sound just like her,” she said, meaning Marybeth.

“We’re a team.”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes flashing. “An evil team trying to destroy my life.”

“That’s a little dramatic, isn’t it?” he asked, stifling a smile.

“I’m in drama!” she cried. “That’s the point!” But her anger was diffusing.

Joe said, “Before you pack, I need your help. I don’t understand how Facebook works, and I know you’re an expert. You spend more time on it than you do sleeping or eating.”

She rolled her eyes again, and said, “ Thanks, Dad.”

“Everybody around your age is on it, right?”

“Yes. Everybody.”

“Everybody in college, right?”

“Yeah.”

He said, “What I’d like you to do is use your laptop to find the page or the profile or whatever it is for Luke Brueggemann, my trainee. See if there are any comments from his girlfriend, if he has one. See if he’s sharing things about his new assignment.”

She asked him how to spell the name, and he did.

“I may not find much,” she said. “It depends on how much he’s got his profile set up to share. I’m not his friend or anything.”

“Just find whatever you can,” Joe said. “Let me know what you find.”