Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

“Yes, she sure was.”

“I neglected her and didn’t do the things I should have… I dated, I left her alone. I did the basics, sure. But kids know. They know where your heart is. Here I was, running after Joe or Dave or Brad and leaving my daughter. Time for that to stop. I’m just praying it’s not too late.”

“We’ll find her.”

The roads were deserted here and the air aromatic with smoke from wood cooking fires, common in this poor part of the county; The Volvo streaked through a stop sign. Tate skidded into a turn and then headed down a bad road.

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” she asked.

“We sure are. They don’t put out all-points bulletins anymore. But if they did we’d be the main attraction in one.”

“They don’t know my car,” Bett pointed out.

He laughed. “Oh, that took all of thirty seconds for ‘em to track down. Look, there. That’s his place.”

Matthews’s small bungalow was visible through a stand of trees some distance away. A rusting heating-oil tank sat in the side yard and the stands of uncut grass were outnumbered by patches of red mud. The house was only two miles away from Tate’s farm. A convenient staging point for a break-in and kidnapping, he noted.

“What are we going to do?” Bett asked.

Tate didn’t answer her. Instead he took the gun out of his pocket. “We’re going to get our daughter,” he said.

Thirty yards, twenty, fifteen. Tate paused and listened. Silence from inside Matthews’s house.

He smelled the scent of wood smoke and pictured the kidnapper sitting beside the fireplace with Megan bound and gagged at his feet.

The shabby house chilled his heart. He’d seen places like it often. Too often, When he was a commonwealth’s attorney he’d always- unlike most big-city prosecutors-visited the crime scenes himself. This was what detectives dubbed a section-sixty cottage, referring to the Virginia Penal Code provision for murder. Shotgun killings, domestics, love gone cruel then violent… There were common elements among such houses: they were small, filthy, silent, brimming with unspoken hate.

The Mercedes wasn’t in the drive so it was possible that Matthews hadn’t heard the message from the police. Maybe Megan was here now, lying in the bedroom or the basement. Maybe this would be the end of it. But he moved as silently as he could, taking no chances.

He glanced through the window.

The living room was empty, lit only by the glow of embers in the fireplace. He listened for a long moment. Nothing.

The windows were locked but he tested the handle on the door and found it was open. He pushed inside, thinking only as he did so: Why a fire on a warm night?

Oh, no! He lunged for the doorknob but it was too late; the door knocked over the large pail of gasoline.

“God!”

Instinctively Tate grabbed for the bucket as the pink wave of gas flowed onto the floor and into the fireplace.

‘What?” Bett cried.

The gas ignited and with a whoosh a huge ball of flame exploded through the living room.

“Megan!” Tate cried, turning away from the flames and falling onto the porch. His sleeve was on fire. He slapped out the flames.

“She’s in there? She’s in there?” Bett shouted in panic and ran to the window. Scrabbling away from the flowing gasoline, Tate grabbed Bett and pulled her back. He covered his face with his hand, felt the searing heat take the hairs off the back of his fingers.

“Megan!” Bett cried. She broke the window in with her elbow. She peered inside for a moment but then leapt back as a plume of flame burst through the window at her. If she hadn’t leapt aside the fire would have consumed her face and hair.

Tate ran around the back of the cottage, broke in the window in one of the bedrooms, which was already filling with dense smoke.

No sign of the girl.

He ran to the other bedroom-the cottage had only two-and saw that she wasn’t there either. The flames were already burning through the bedroom door, which, with a sudden burst, exploded inward. In the light from the fire Tate could see that this wasn’t a bedroom but an office. There were stacks of newspaper clippings, magazines, books and folders. Maps, charts and diagrams.

Sirens sounded in the distance.

Bett came up behind him. There was a burn on her arm but she was otherwise okay. “Tate, I can’t find her!” she screamed.

“I don’t think she’s here. She’s not in either of these rooms and there’s no basement.”

“Where is she?”

“The answer’s in there,” he shouted. “He only set the trap so nobody could find any clues to where he’s got her.”

He picked up several bricks and shattered the glass-and-wooden grid in the window. “Oh, brother,” he muttered. And climbed inside, feeling the unnerving pain as a shard of glass sliced through his palm.

The heat inside was astonishing, smoke and embers and flecks of burning paper swirling around him, and he realized that the flames weren’t the worst problem-the heated air and lack of oxygen were going to knock him out in minutes.

He raced to the desk and grabbed all the papers and notebooks he could, ran to the window and flung them outside, crying to Bett, “Get it all away from the house.” He went back for more. He got two more armfuls before the heat grew too much. He dove out the window and rolled to the ground heavily as the ceiling collapsed and a swell of flame puffed out the window.

He lay, exhausted, gasping, on the ground. Dizzy and hurt. Wondering why on earth Bett was doing a funny little dance around his arm. Then he understood. The file folder he held had been burning and she was stamping out the flames.

The sirens were getting closer.

“Great,” he muttered. “Now they’re gonna add arson to our rap sheets.”

Bett helped him up and they gathered all the notebooks and files he’d flung into the backyard. They ran to the car. Tate started it and skidded out of the drive, passing the first of the fluorescent green fire trucks that were speeding toward the house.

They turned north and drove for ten minutes until Tate figured there was no chance of being spotted. He parked near a quarry in Manassas. A grim, eerie place that looked like it should have been a serial killer’s stalking ground though to Tate’s knowledge there’d never been any crime committed here worse than pot smoking and drinking beer and sloe gin from open containers.

Tate and Bett pored over the singed files and papers, looking for some due as to where Matthews might have taken Megan.

The files were mostly articles, psychiatric diagnostic reports, medical evaluations. He also found surveillance photos of Megan. Dozens of them. And of Tate’s house and Bett’s. Matthews had been planning this for months; some of the pictures had been taken during the winter. In one notebook Megan’s daily routine was described in obsessive detail.

More patient notes.

More articles.

More diaries. With shaking hands Tate and Bett read through them all but there was no clue as to any other buildings, apartments or houses where he might have taken the girl.

“There’s nothing,” Bell barked in frustration. “We’ve looked at everything.” Tears on her face.

Tate gazed at the mess of scorched papers and files on their laps. His eye fell on a patient diagnostic report. Then another. He flipped through them quickly. Then read the name and address of the hospital where the patients had been evaluated.

He snatched up his cell phone and, eyes on one of the reports, made a call to directory assistance for Calvert, Virginia. He asked for the number for the Blue Ridge Mental Health Facility.

“Please be out of order,” he whispered.

“Why on earth?” Bell asked.