Lisa Gardner - Touch & Go

It was during the second month of forced sleep deprivation that I opened my medicine cabinet and found myself staring at a bottle of painkillers. Justin’s prescription, from when he hurt his back the prior year. He hadn’t liked the Vicodin. Couldn’t afford to feel that fuzzy at work. Besides, as he put it bluntly, the constipation was a bitch.

It turns out, walking all night will not keep the future at bay.

But the right narcotic can dull the edges, steal the brightness from the sun itself. Until you don’t have to care if your husband is sleeping in the basement beneath you, or your teenage daughter has locked herself in a time capsule down the hall, or that this house is too large and this bed too big and your entire life just too lonely.

Painkiller, the prescription promised.

And for a while, at least, it worked.

Chapter 9

WALKING INTO THE THIRD-STORY STUDY, Tessa immediately recognized the detective sitting at the computer as the final member of D.D.’s three-man squad. An older guy, heavyset, four kids was her memory. Phil, that was it. He’d been at her house, too, that day. Then again, most of the Boston police and Massachusetts state cops had been.

Apparently, he remembered her, too, because the moment he spotted her, his features fell into the perfectly schooled expression of a seasoned detective, seething on the inside.

She figured two could play at that game.

“My turn,” she announced crisply, heading toward the computer.

He didn’t address her, turning his attention to Neil and D.D. instead.

“It’s okay,” Neil, the lead officer, proclaimed. “The owner of the house, Denbe Construction , hired her to assess the situation.”

Tessa could tell Phil got the nuances of that statement loud and clear, because a vein throbbed in his forehead. If Denbe Construction owned the house, then in theory, Denbe Construction owned the contents of the house, including the computer, which this fine Boston detective had been searching without permission.

“File a missing person’s report?” Phil asked Tessa, voice curt.

“Based on what I’ve seen here, I’m sure that will be the company’s next move.”

Another investigative quandary. For the police to become involved in a missing person’s case, a third party must first file a report. Even then, the standard threshold was that the family hadn’t been seen for at least twenty-four hours.

Meaning at this stage of the game, without a report filed, without twenty-four hours having passed, D.D.’s squad was stuck responding to a call, but not yet handling a case.

“Any contact…?” Phil again, voice less certain, more searching.

“From the family, no.”

“Kidnappers?”

“No.”

A fresh tic of the vein in his forehead. Like Neil and D.D., Phil understood lack of contact was not a good thing. Ransom situations generally involved keeping the victims alive. Whereas in an abduction case with no financial demands…

“Anything good on the computer?” Tessa gestured to Phil, who was still seated at the keyboard.

“Been looking at the Internet browser. Family liked Facebook, Fox News and Home and Garden . Already guessing the iPads will be more personal. Not enough activity here for a family of three. I’m assuming they each do their own thing on their individual devices.”

Fair assumption, Tessa thought. She gestured to the keyboard. “May I?”

Grudgingly, he stepped aside. Tessa reached into her inside coat pocket and withdrew a small notebook. She had written the name and manufacturer on it. Now she started scanning computer icons until she found the desired program.

“Justin Denbe has a new toy,” she explained as she double-clicked the icon. “His crew gave it to him in the fall, partly as a joke, but he loves it. Apparently, these job sites—prisons, hospitals, hydroelectrical plants—are quite large. And Justin, as the hands-on owner, inevitably holds the answer to every question. Meaning his guys spend a fair amount of time searching for him. Sites are also often in rural areas with shitty cell-phone coverage, making it hard to snag him by phone when they can’t locate him physically. So”—she paused a second, scrolling through the directions that had just popped up on screen—“his guys bought him a coat.”

“A coat?” D.D. asked with a frown.

Neil, however, was already ahead of her. “A GPS jacket. They got him one of those fancy outdoors never-get-lost-in-the-woods kind of jackets.”

“Bingo. Not cheap, either, like nearly a thousand bucks. So apparently it’s a really nice outdoors jacket, and Justin loves it. Wears it everywhere. Including, hopefully, out to dinner last night.”

“Scampo is a nice restaurant,” D.D. commented.

“Navy blue fabric with tan leather trim. He could wear it to Scampo. Hell, from what I’m told, this is a guy who wore his work boots everywhere. Why not a nice outdoors jacket?”

They fell silent, watching Tessa work the keyboard. “The jacket’s GPS device is built into the back liner,” she explained. “There’s a slot for removal, as the battery is good for only fifteen hours, then has to be recharged.”

“Do you have to activate it?” D.D. asked. “Or is it just always on?”

“This particular device must be activated. From what I’m reading here, that can happen two ways: The wearer manually activates it at the beginning of his hike or, say, day on the job site. Or it can be activated remotely using this software, which can also be installed on a cell phone. Kind of wild,” Tessa muttered to herself, fingers flying over the keyboard. “Turns any smart phone into a digital search dog. Find Justin Denbe.”

A map had just opened up on the computer screen. She eyed it carefully. Saw nothing.

“Is it activated?” D.D. again, voice impatient as she moved to stand behind Tessa, peering intently at the screen.

“In all of the US, we have nothing. So I’m guessing Justin hasn’t turned it on.”

Neil looked at her. “Then you do it. Ping it.”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

She moved the mouse to a green button in the lower right-hand corner of the menu. “Activate,” it read. Like a bomb. Or a hand grenade. Or the key to saving a missing family’s life.

She clicked the icon. The colored map of the US shifted, zooming in, focusing left until it was no longer the entire US map on the computer screen but just the eastern seaboard. There, due north of them, a red dot suddenly pulsed to life.

“I’ll be damned.”

In front of her, she heard a small beep. She glanced up, to see Phil setting a timer on his watch. “Fifteen hours,” he said. “Battery life, remember?”

“Yep.”

“Zoom in, zoom in, zoom in.” D.D. hit Tessa on the shoulder to hurry her along. Since Tessa was sitting closer than D.D., and could already make the distinction the Boston crew hadn’t been able to see yet, she did just that.

The East Coast became New England. Massachusetts expanded in front of their eyes. Then, New Hampshire. Until right there, definitely over the border, definitely crossing state lines into central New Hampshire, the GPS device in Justin Denbe’s fancy outdoor jacket blinked back at them.

Tessa pushed back from the computer, turning around till she met D.D.’s eyes. “Assuming Justin Denbe has been abducted wearing that coat, he’s no longer in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…”

“I was right at the start,” D.D. grumbled.

“Not your case,” Tessa agreed.

Neil put it more succinctly. “Damn feds.”

THE BOSTON DETECTIVES did not pack up their toys and go home.

Jurisdiction was a legal distinction. Basically, federal laws carried stiffer penalties than state laws, meaning the US Attorney’s Office packed a bigger punch than the Suffolk County DA when prosecuting suspected kidnappers.