C Box - Blue Heaven

Hearne made the conditions right. Singer delivered. Hearne was promoted personally by the chairman of the board. But it haunted him still.

He knew too much, as The Banker. He wished he didn’t. But it was too late for that kind of thinking.

Despite the disapproving look Laura was giving him, Hearne put the empty glass on the bar and ordered another.

THE COMMAND CENTER for the disappearance of the Taylor children had been established in a modern conference room off the Kootenai Bay City Council chambers, down the hall from Sheriff Ed Carey’s office. Off-duty dispatchers had been called in to help set it up with telephones, computers, a fax machine, along with a coffeemaker and mini refrigerator. The straight-backed chairs surrounding the long table had been replaced with the comfortable, ergonomic chairs used by council members for their meetings. Ex-Lt. Eric Singer, the volunteer in charge of the effort, had long since used his sleeve to wipe the white-board clean of past council business. He stood at the board with a fistful of different-colored pens.

Ex-Officer Newkirk was slumped at the foot of the table, looking vacantly away from the whiteboard through a window at the city council chambers, at the nameplates of each absent council member. He felt ill, his skin gritty. His stomach was acting up, and despite the fact that he hadn’t had breakfast or lunch and there was a cold-cut tray in front of him, he wasn’t hungry. The scenario that was playing out in front of him was the last thing in the world he wanted to be involved in. This was the situation that had kept him awake at night for years. This, right here, was the reason he had ulcers.

“Are we ready?” Singer asked, pulling the cap from a green pen.

“Ready,” Gonzalez said, adjusting a legal pad filled with scribbles in front of him. He began to read, and Singer started writing on the whiteboard. The marker squeaked as he wrote, and it filled the room with a watered-down airplane-glue smell.

“When we’re done here, I want you to go get the sheriff,” Singer said, pausing and looking over his shoulder. “Newkirk?”

Newkirk wasn’t paying attention, and Gonzalez leaned over and whapped him on the arm with the back of his hand, saying, “Wake the fuck up.”

Newkirk wheeled in his chair, startled. “What?”

“The lieutenant was talking to you.”

“I asked you if you would go down and get the sheriff when I’m done here,” Singer said quietly, enunciating every word in an exaggerated way. “We need his approval to proceed.”

“Okay.”

“Are you okay, Newkirk?” Singer asked, his ice-blue eyes unblinking. “You with us here?”

Newkirk nodded, then looked to Gonzalez and nodded again.

“You better be,” Gonzalez said.

Singer lifted the marker to his nose. “Ah, it smells like a briefing room in here, doesn’t it?”

They were in control.

AS NEWKIRK entered the Pend Oreille County Sheriff’s office, he noticed a paunchy man in a brown suit waiting in the reception area. Newkirk nodded at the man, then told the receptionist that Singer was ready in the command center.

“The command center, Officer Newkirk?” the receptionist asked.

“The conference room,” Newkirk said, an edge in his voice. “We’re calling it the command center now until we get those kids back.”

The receptionist flushed, turned in her chair, and walked back toward the sheriff’s office.

“It’s a good thing you are doing,” the man in the brown suit said to Newkirk. “Very community-minded.”

“What?” Newkirk turned, adjusted his ball cap, and studied the man. A man wearing a suit in the sheriff’s office on a Saturday evening. He looked out of place, enough so that Newkirk’s antennae went up.

“I heard your name. You are among the volunteers who have come forward. You used to be with the LAPD,” Villatoro said pleasantly, a statement more than a question.

“That’s no secret. You a lawyer?”

“No.”

“You have some kind of interest in this case?”

The man shook his head. “I’m here on another matter.” The man stood and extended his hand. “Eduardo Villatoro.”

Newkirk didn’t reach out immediately. It grated on him when Latins gave their names with Spanish pronunciation, rolling the “r’s” and playing up the accents. Gangbangers would do that, even though most of them were second- or third-generation American. He felt his street cop dead-eye stare take over. Usually, when he did that, the other person in the situation would reveal himself, talk too much.

“I’m here to see the sheriff as well,” Villatoro said. “But it’s after six. I was wondering how long you might be with him before I can talk with him.”

“About what?”

“Another matter.”

Newkirk continued the dead-eye. “Fine, don’t tell me. I doubt it’s as important as this one.”

“I have no doubt of that,” Villatoro said, holding his hands palms up and widening his eyes to try and clear the air. Newkirk liked that.

“What is this other matter?” Newkirk said, letting sarcasm creep into the question.

Villatoro smiled. “You are right. It isn’t as important as the community service you are performing here. I was just wondering if I should wait for the sheriff this evening or come back tomorrow. That’s why I was asking.”

This dark guy made Newkirk uncomfortable, and he wasn’t sure he knew why.

“Come back tomorrow,” Newkirk said.

Villatoro nodded and seemed a little cowed. Good, Newkirk thought. He needed to be knocked down a peg.

The receptionist came out of the sheriff’s office, and said to Newkirk, “He’s finishing up a call and will be with you shortly.”

“I’ll wait.”

He watched Villatoro dig for his wallet and approach the receptionist. “I would like to leave this card,” Villatoro said. “I’ll be in early tomorrow morning to see the sheriff.”

The receptionist took the card without looking at it and placed it on her desk. She watched the light blink out on her handset.

“He’s through,” she said.

Sheriff Carey came out of his office a moment later, looking haggard. His eyes were deep-set, his hair mussed. He was a worried man, Newkirk realized. Cops were one way or the other, he knew. Men like Singer got a case like this and were energized by it like it was new, fresh blood pumping through their veins. But for people like Carey, and Newkirk himself, it was just the opposite. It wore them down.

“That was the FBI in Boise,” Carey said. “They want to know if we’re ready to call them in. I told them to give us a day or two since we should have things wrapped up by then. I hope.”

Newkirk nodded. Singer would be interested in that, since he had advised the sheriff early on to keep the Feds at bay.

“So you’re ready for me?”

“Yes, we are. In the command center.”

Newkirk noticed that Villatoro had slipped out during the exchange.

“Okay, then,” Carey said, heaving a weight-of-the-world sigh.

“Sheriff…” the receptionist called after him.

“Yes, you can go home now, Marlene.”

Newkirk waited a moment while Marlene cleared her desk and the sheriff strode down the hall toward the conference room. When Marlene turned around, he reached over and plucked the business card from her desk and slipped it into his back pocket.

ON THE WHITEBOARD, in green, Singer had written TIMELINE. Under the heading, each fact of the case was bulleted next to the military time it had occurred. The children had left school the day before, Friday, at noon on early release. Between noon and 15:35, when the mailwoman Fiona Pritzle had picked them up on the road and dropped them near Sand Creek, they had presumably gone home, taken the fishing rod and vest, and set out on foot. Monica Taylor became concerned about their absence at 17:30. Her fight with Tom Boyd had occurred at 18:00. She called the sheriff’s department at 19:00, after first contacting friends and neighbors. Boyd staggered from the Sand Creek Bar at 23:30 and hadn’t been seen since.