David Morrell - Long lost

"My son saves his loose change in ajar on his desk," I said.

It wasn't there.

I had an even harder time going into the chaos of the master bedroom. Stepping over some of Kate's dresses on the floor, I stared toward the back of the walk-in closet. "Four suitcases are gone."

As the implication hit me, my knees weakened so much that I had to lean against the doorjamb.

I'd assumed that Petey had ransacked the bureaus and closets because he was in a rush to find things to steal. Now, daring to hope, I took a closer look and realized that Kate's and Jason's clothes weren't just scattered-some of them were missing.

"If they're dead, he wouldn't have packed clothes for them," I told the detectives. "They're alive. They've got to be alive."

In a daze, I followed Webber's instructions and kept looking. Some of my clothes were gone, too. My emergency stash of five hundred dollars was no longer at the back of my underwear drawer. Kate's jewel box was missing, along with a gold Rolex that I wore on special occasions. None of it mattered; only Kate and Jason did.

Throughout, the technicians kept photographing the chaos in the bedrooms and checking for fingerprints. To get out of their way, the detectives took me downstairs. Again I had the sense that the house no longer belonged to me.

"Why the Volvo?" I managed to ask. My voice seemed to come from far away. "You said we'd talk about why he took it. The Expedition would have allowed him to steal more things."

"Yes." Pendleton spoke reluctantly. "But the Volvo has something that the four-wheel-drive vehicle doesn't."

"I don't know what you mean."

"A trunk."

"A…" Understanding forced me to sit.

"Maybe it isn't a good idea to go into the details."

"Tell me." My bandaged hands ached as I clutched the sides of the leather chair. "I need to know."

Webber glanced away, as if he couldn't bear to see my eyes. "The way it looks, he came back here with your son and then subdued your wife. We have to assume they were bound and gagged."

A rope seemed to cut into my wrists.

"He wouldn't have risked driving with them scrunched down in the backseat. Sooner or later, someone would have noticed," Pendleton said.

"So he put them in the…"

"With the garage door closed, nobody would have seen him do it."

"Jesus." Imagining the stench of gasoline and car exhaust, I felt nauseated. "How could they breathe?" I suddenly remembered Petey's haunted look when he'd described how the man and woman had forced him into a trunk.

A shrill beep startled me. Webber reached beneath his blazer and unhooked his cell phone from his belt. As he turned his back and walked toward the piano that Kate enjoyed playing, I barely heard his muted voice.

He put away the phone.

"Something?" I straightened, nervously hoping.

"The Volvo's been found. At a rest stop off Interstate Twenty-five."

"Kate and Jason? Are they-"

"Not with the car. He left the state. Wyoming troopers found the Volvo north of Casper."

"Wyoming?"

"For all he knew, he had plenty of time, and the Volvo wouldn't have been missed for several days," Webber said. "But suppose your wife was expected somewhere Saturday night, or suppose friends were going to arrive, and no matter what he did to persuade her, she wouldn't tell him about it?"

My skin turned cold at the thought of the pain Kate would have suffered.

"His best choice was to get your wife and son away before anyone suspected something was wrong," Webber said. "The nearest ATM for your bank has a record of a six-twenty-one p.m. withdrawal of five hundred dollars, the most that the machine is allowed to take from an account on any one day. The videotape shows a man making the withdrawal, but his head's bowed so his face is hidden."

Sweat chilled me when I realized that Petey had forced Kate to tell him our ATM number.

"It looks like he drove until nightfall, then used the cover of darkness to carjack another vehicle at the rest stop outside Casper. The likely target would have been someone traveling alone, but the driver wasn't found near the rest stop, so we assume that he or she is in the car with your wife and son. Until the driver's reported missing, we won't know what kind of car to search for."

"Three people trying to breathe in a trunk? Jesus."

Something in the detectives' eyes made me guess what they were thinking. As dangerous as Petey was, it might be only two people trying to breathe. He might not have let the driver live.

"Wyoming? But why in hell would he have gone to Wyoming?" At once, I remembered something Petey had said. "Montana."

"You sound like that means something to you," Pendleton said. "What are you getting at?"

"Montana's north of Wyoming."

They looked at me as if I was babbling.

"No, listen to me. My brother said that when he saw me on the CBS Sunday Morning show, he was having breakfast in Montana. In a diner in Butte. Maybe that's why he's heading north. Maybe something in Montana's drawing him back."

For the first time, Webber was animated. "Good." He hurriedly pulled out his phone. "I'll send descriptions of this guy, your wife, and your son to the Montana state police."

"We'll contact the Butte police department," Pendleton quickly added. "Maybe they know something about this guy. If he's been arrested, they'll have a photograph of him that we can circulate."

"Assuming he called himself Peter Denning up there." I stared dismally down at the floor.

"There are other ways to investigate. Kidnapping across state lines means the FBI will get involved. The feds will do their best to match the fingerprints we find with ones they have on file. If this guy ever used an alias, we have a good chance of learning what it is."

I tried hard to believe what they were saying.

"Have you a recent photograph of your wife and son?"

"On the mantel." I looked in that direction. The beaming faces of Kate and Jason made me heartsick. I'd taken the photograph myself. Normally, I hardly knew which button to press on a camera, but that day, I'd gotten lucky. We'd been to Copper Mountain skiing, although falling down was more what Kate and I had done. Jason had been a natural, however. He'd grinned all day. Despite our bruises, so had Kate and I. In the photo, Kate wore a red ski jacket, Jason a green one, the two of them holding their knitted ski caps, Kate's blond hair and Jason's sandy hair glinting in the sun, their cheeks glowing.

"We'll return it as soon as we have copies made," Pendleton said.

"Keep it as long as you have to." The truth was, I hated to part with it. The empty place on the mantel reinforced my hollowness. "Anything else-anything at all-just ask."

What they need more than anything, I thought, is for God to answer my prayers.

Throughout, the phone had rung frequently. I'd been vaguely aware that a policeman had answered it. Now he handed me a list of who'd called, mostly reporters wanting an interview-TV, radio. What had happened would be all over the state by evening.

"Jesus, Kate's parents." Hurrying, I left Webber and Pendleton in the living room. In the kitchen, my bandaged hand shook when I pressed numbers on the telephone.

"Hello?" an elderly man said.

"Ray…" I could hardly make my voice work. "Sit down. I'm afraid I've got bad news."

It made me sick to have to tell them, to hear their lives change in a minute. Neither of them was in good health. Even so, they immediately wanted to drive the three hundred miles from Du-rango through the mountains to Denver. I had a hard time convincing them to stay home. After all, what were they going to accomplish in Denver? Kate's father was breathing so fast that he sounded like he was going to have a heart attack.