Lisa Gardner: Gone

A muscle ticked in Quincy’s jaw. “Not at the moment.”

Kincaid cocked his head to the side. “Care to elaborate?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Well, okay, if that’s how you wanna play it, but see here, Mr. Quincy-”

“Sergeant, please.” Quincy held up a hand. “If you really want to make me dance like a puppet on a string, then by all means, you can spend the next few hours putting me through my paces. But right now, I’m asking you, investigator to investigator, where’s my wife?”

“You don’t know?”

“Honestly, Sergeant, I don’t.”

Kincaid considered the man for one more minute, then caved with a faint shrug of his shoulders. “A local deputy found her car shortly after two a.m. No sign of her, however, here or at her residence. I’ll be honest-we’re concerned.”

Kincaid saw the profiler swallow and then, just slightly, sway on his feet.

“Would you like a moment?” Kincaid asked sharply. “Can I get you anything?”

“No. I just… No.” Quincy took a step. Then another. His face appeared pale in the glow of the searchlights. Kincaid started to notice the details he’d missed earlier. The way the London Fog coat hung on the profiler’s gaunt frame. The way the man moved, jerky, tight. A man who hadn’t slept well in days.

As grieving husbands went, the former feebie put on a pretty good show.

“Maybe you’d like a cup of coffee,” Kincaid stated.

“No. I’d rather… May I see the vehicle? I can help you determine… maybe some things are missing.”

Kincaid considered the request. “You can look, but don’t touch. Lab hasn’t been here yet.”

He led the way to the abandoned Toyota. He’d closed the driver’s-side door after photographing and recording its original position. Now he opened it back up.

“You’ve checked the local establishments?” Quincy asked. He sounded clearer now, an investigator turning to task.

“Not really much around here to check.”

“And the woods?”

“Have some deputies going through the surrounding area right now.”

“All the vehicles, of course,” Quincy murmured. He gestured toward the glove compartment. “May I?”

Kincaid went around to the other side of the Toyota and, with his gloved hand, opened it. He already knew the contents from checking it before: half a dozen McDonald’s napkins, four maps, and the owner’s manual for the vehicle, with the vehicle registration tucked inside. Now he watched Quincy intently study the contents.

“The purse?” Quincy requested.

Kincaid obediently held it open. Quincy peered inside.

“Her gun,” Quincy said at last. “A Glock forty, semiautomatic. Rainie generally kept it in her glove compartment, if not on her.”

“She always travel armed?”

“Always.”

“Where were you tonight, Mr. Quincy?”

“I turned in after ten. You can ask Mrs. Thompson, who runs the B amp;B. She was downstairs when I first came in.”

“She man the door?”

“No.”

“So you could have gone out later without her knowing it?”

“I have no alibi, Sergeant. Just my word.”

Kincaid changed tactics. “Your wife often go driving in the middle of the night, Mr. Quincy?”

“Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep.”

“Along this road?”

“It heads to the beach. Rainie likes to listen to the ocean at night.”

“Is that what she was doing September 10, when she got the DUI?”

Quincy didn’t seem surprised Kincaid knew of the arrest. He said simply, “I would check the local bars.”

“Your wife have a drinking problem, Mr. Quincy?”

“I think you’d have to ask her that.”

“Things don’t sound like they’re going too well.”

It wasn’t a question and the profiler didn’t answer.

“What are we going to find in the woods, Mr. Quincy?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’d you think happened here, on this road in the middle of the night?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Come on, Mr. Quincy. Aren’t you the hotshot profiler, the supposed expert on human nature?”

Quincy finally smiled. It made his face appear bleaker than Kincaid would’ve expected. “Obviously, Sergeant,” he said quietly, “you’ve never met my wife.”

Tuesday, 4:45 a.m. PST

QUINCY WANTED TO MOVE. First instinct: plunge into the dark underbrush, scream frantically for his vanished wife. Second instinct: attack Rainie’s car, tear it apart, look for… anything. A note. Signs of struggle. The magic clue that would say: Rainie is here. Or maybe, Your wife still loves you.

Of course, Sergeant Kincaid held him at bay. Professional courtesy only went so far when you were the estranged husband of the missing person. Instead, Quincy was forced back outside the crime scene tape, where he paced for a bit, getting wetter, dirtier, angrier.

Finally, he retreated to his car. He sat on the black leather seat, staring at his state-of-the-art dash, with its beautiful, wood-grained details, and hated everything about his vehicle.

Rainie was missing. How could he be sitting in a luxury sedan?

He tried to follow the efforts through his windshield, but the rain beat too hard, obscuring his view. Best he could make out was the occasional wink of a flashlight as the searchers bobbed and weaved in the neighboring woods. Four deputies. That was it. Local kids, according to Kincaid, experienced in searching for lost hunters, and the best they could deploy given the current conditions. Come daylight, of course, they would summon volunteers, get the full search-and-rescue effort grinding. Set up a command post, bring in the dogs, break up the surrounding woods into an elaborate network of grids.

Assuming Rainie was still missing. Assuming that four deputies, stumbling around blind in the middle of the night, didn’t magically find the needle in the haystack.

Rainie was gone. So was her gun.

He should think. That was his forte. No one anticipated the warped human mind quite like Pierce Quincy. No, other people had a talent for, say, juggling. He got this.

He tried to force his scattered thoughts into order. He thought of past abduction cases. He thought of various schemes used to lure unsuspecting women to their deaths. Bundy favored faking an injury, wrapping his arm in a cast in order to entice young college coeds into helping him carry his books. The Virginia Eco-Killer trailed women from bars, planting a nail behind their rear tire. Then it was a simple matter of following their vehicles until the tire went flat. Hey, lady, need some help?

Others went the blitzkrieg-style approach. Ambush the victim, catch her unaware. So many methods, so many ways it could be done. Middle of the night, middle of a deserted, heavily wooded road. It wouldn’t be hard.

But Rainie was armed. Rainie knew better. Rainie had seen the crime scene photos, too.

His train of thought broke down again. He tried to develop a theory, tried to picture what had happened here sometime after two a.m. His mind simply refused. He didn’t know how to be the trained death investigator just yet. He was too busy being the shocked, overwhelmed husband.

Rainie was missing. So was her gun.

And in those two sentences, Quincy discovered his real, genuine fear. The one he couldn’t put into words yet. The one he really, truly couldn’t face.

Rainie was missing. So was her gun.

Quincy closed his eyes. He rested his forehead against the steering wheel. And he wished, as he had wished too often in life, that he didn’t know all the things that a man like him knew best.

Thursday, three weeks ago, 5:45 p.m. PST

“YOU’RE QUIET THIS EVENING.”