Warped Page 5

  Back in the motel Blaze had rubbed his skin raw and red and drained the tub. It made my heart go sideways to see the ring of dirt and bits of stuff around the tub and Blaze sitting naked and shivering in the middle.

  I ran the tub two more times and washed my husband more gently than he’d washed himself. He slowly came back to me. It wasn’t from one moment to the next, but like he was waking up from a flu dream, grabbing hold of consciousness and pulling himself out.

  I toweled him off as well as I could and got him fresh clothes and a pair of sandals.

  “I’m still going,” he finally said, gently, holding my arm in his big hand.

  I nodded. I didn’t want to cry. He didn’t ask if I was coming; he knew I would. We were like that with each other.

  #

  The sun was already hot by the time we made our way down the street from the motel. Mornings in Papeete weren’t very pretty, with men carrying big metal kegs and racks of sandwich rolls out of trucks, and hung-over travelers leaning over their plates of eggs. Even the market stalls—with their bright scarves and flip-flops and earrings—in the morning you could see that stuff wasn’t much different from what you could get at Wal-Mart back home.

  I was a little scared of the plane, because I’d seen them out over the water, tiny things that looked like toys.

  But I was more afraid of Tematangi.

  Blaze said that when we got there, when he put his feet on the beach and dipped his hands in the warm, still water of the lagoon, he would know. And once he knew for sure, maybe we would be able to get back on that plane and go back home to Missouri and find us a little house and plant a tree to mark our first year married and I would go off the pill and see if there was enough left inside me to start a baby with.

  I didn’t want to think of the other. When Blaze would stand in the sand under the same sky where the explosion had blocked out the sun and the clouds had floated on the wind to a hospital room where black-haired women attended Hanriette as she screamed and heaved him into the world. If he discovered that the thing he breathed into his lungs with his first breaths was there forever, he meant to walk into the water until it was up to his chest, and then he would slip under and I would hold him there until the life left him.

  I knew I could never drown a man as big as Blaze on my own. But it would be both of us, working together. He was strong, and I would be strong too, and we would do what needed to be done.

  ##

  IT BUILDS SLOWLY

  On Hatcher Sproul’s last good day, he turned a lascivious eye toward Collette Lance. The occasion was the O’Sullivan’s annual Bastille Day party, and Hatcher waited until twilight to weave unsteadily around the pool, dodging tables festooned in red, white and blue bunting. Most of the guests were inside listening to some French accordion shit on vintage vinyl, eating profiteroles.

  Hatcher burped discreetly behind his wrist. The boozy aftertaste of a meal of oysters, cassoulet, and champagne caused him to frown in disgust.

  This is what happens, he thought darkly, when a Brentwood girl goes to Europe for junior year—a lifetime of reminding everyone around that she’d drunk from the fountain of culture, even as she spent the next couple of decades lounging around the club and keeping her pedicure fresh.

  Hatcher found Collette sitting glumly in the spot where he’d noticed her earlier, on a pool chair pulled over by the play structure. The kids, who were still too young to drive themselves somewhere better, were all inside looking at Internet porn and filching liquor.

  “Bonsoir,” Hatcher said, gripping the swing set for balance and sucking in his stomach. “Vous êtes jolie. Très jolie.”

  Collette glared at him for a moment before releasing a long, thin stream of smoke through her narrow nostrils.

  Hatcher had always found Collette’s contempt provocative, and he might have gotten around to this moment sooner, except he was more than a little afraid of her. But the pickings in the neighborhood had finally grown sufficiently slim that he had little choice.

  Not that the other women at the party were unappealing, at least not physically. The ladies of Haskins Ranch—or more precisely the gated community that had sprung from the ranch’s ruined bosom—gave no quarter to the ravages of age. But he had already slept with four of them and been turned down by two, and the others—too religious, too talkative, too eerily reminiscent of his college girlfriend—were out of the question, at least until his desperation reached new heights.

  “Not much of an accent,” Collette finally said without inflection.

  “Not much.” Hatcher lowered himself to the ground. It took several careful stages, given his inebriation; when he finally sat, his knees were tiled with bark. “Collette’s a French name, isn’t it?”

  “What do you want, Hatcher?” Collette asked. To Hatcher’s hopeful ear she sounded more curious than annoyed.

  Hatcher took a steadying breath, then laid a cautious hand high on Collette’s thigh, just below the hem of her short white skirt. “The pool house locks from inside. Why don’t we, uh—” he cast around the depths of his high school French, but finding nothing, improvised with a suggestive gesture.

  Collette lifted his hand off her thigh with distaste and let it drop. She flicked her cigarette a mere inch from his Cole Haan flip-flops and stood.

  “Damn it, Hatcher, when was the last time you had anything resembling a noble thought?”

  She ground out the butt with her sandal. Hatcher watched, finding even this small act arousing.

  “You’re gorgeous,” he said indignantly. Surely that was a noble thing to say?

  “Not half as gorgeous as your wife,” Collette snapped as she strode away. Hatcher kept his eye on her muscular buttocks under the tight skirt.

  #

  Rosalee Sproul materialized as Collette searched the pile of expensive handbags in the study for her black Prada.

  “Let me guess,” Rosalee said, a forlorn note in her voice. “Hatcher grabbed your ass.”

  Collette found her bag and straightened, sighing. “No, I headed him off before it got that far.”

  Rosalee nodded. “I’m not sure if I should thank you, or apologize for letting him out of his cage tonight.” She laughed unconvincingly, running her neatly manicured fingers along the ribbed hem of her sleeveless cashmere sweater. Eighty-five degrees, and still Rosalee looked as cool and perfect, in a fragile debutante sort of way, as if she were still doing those Saks ads a decade earlier. Back when leaving it all behind to marry an ink tycoon still probably seemed like a good idea.

  Collette, though cynical and cheerless by nature, was also kind. “Listen, the twins are at tennis camp all afternoon tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s you and me have a girls’ day out.”

  #

  Hatcher spent an uneventful day at the office, once he shook off enough of his hangover to manage the commute.

  Doris called at four-fifteen while Hatcher was browsing speedboats online.

  “What’s up?” Hatcher demanded, already irritated. The housekeeper only called him at home when Rosalee went AWOL, having lost track of time at the tennis club or late lunch or whatever the hell else she did all day.

  “I’m going to miss my bus,” Doris said accusatorily.

  “They run every damn twenty minutes,” Hatcher protested, but Doris waited him out.

  “Fine, fine, fine.” His irritation was as real as if he’d been doing actual work. Since the recycled printer cartridge business pretty much ran itself these days, or at least that’s what the management team allowed him to believe, the demands of the job were few.

  At home, he took over reluctantly, walking the boys outside so they could wave goodbye as Doris trudged up the street toward the bus stop. As he mixed himself a drink and sat down to watch a game he’d recorded, he wondered where his wife was.

  He was able to keep the kids calm enough with a bag of Doritos to watch seven innings. The phone rang as Hatcher was trying to ignore Cooper’s shrill demands—“I poop, I poooo
ooop!”—for a new diaper. Hatcher decided to take the call in the den, and picked up his sweaty vodka tonic for fortification.

  “Hy-elllllo,” he hollered in his best Jimmy Stewart voice, part of the country-gentleman-about-town persona he was considering adopting, now that even he had accepted the fact that his career had run its course.

  “We have your wife.” The voice was indistinct, hoarse and remote, so Hatcher jammed the phone closer to his skull.

  “You what?”

  “We have…taken…your wife.” There was shuffling in the background and the voice returned. “Listen.”

  “Hatcherrrr!”

  If the man’s muddied voice hadn’t gotten Hatcher’s attention, his wife’s wail certainly did. It was earsplitting, and the way she leaned on the ‘r’—how many times had she yelled it just that way when she was bent out of shape about one thing or another—unmistakable.

  “Is this a joke?” he demanded. Nothing. “Rosalee?” he said, this time in a whisper. Instinctively he groped for his drink, wrapping his fingers around the cold glass. “What the hell?”

  But it was the other voice, the muffled, strangely affect-less man, who answered.

  “I think you screwed up, Hatcher.”

  #

  Detective Tom Plovcek looked around discreetly. It wasn’t the first McMansion he’d had occasion to enter in his eight months on the job, but what struck him every time was how predictable they were. Much as every tidy bungalow in his own hometown, twenty miles to the north, could be counted on to feature a row of oleanders out back, a Glade Plug-In in the powder room, and Sears portraits of the grandkids on the mantel, he noticed that the wealthy also feathered their nests with depressing predictability. Sproul, for instance, wore the same hundred-dollar golf shirt, the same loose-fitting canvas shorts on his ample ass as every other corporate exec or physician in the neighborhood. The kitchen had the same acreage of granite and stainless steel, the same industrial juicers and latte machines and, no doubt, the same skinny wife who subsisted on Luna bars and Crystal Light.

  Except Sproul’s was missing, which, admittedly, made this call more interesting than the standard break-in or teen vandalism call. Too bad his partner had made it clear he could just watch and learn this time.

  “Excuse me.”

  Tom turned; the neighbor lady was eyeing him coldly, hanging onto one of Sproul’s kids by the hand.

  “This child needs to be changed.”

  Well, yeah, that much had been clear since they arrived; the air was heavy with the stink of a soiled diaper. “Umm,” Tom said uncertainly. What exactly did she want him to do about it?

  “I need to take him upstairs and clean him up.”

  Tom nodded, that worked for him.

  “But your colleague said I was not to leave the room.”

  “Oh, I’m sure…” Tom gauged the process of the questioning. Kate, his partner, sat in a large, curvy armchair that would have dwarfed most women, holding her notepad loose in her powerful hands and drilling Sproul with an unblinking stare and a barrage of questions. For his part, Sproul seemed to be diminishing into the couch, his trembling hand clutching a dented box of Kleenex as though it were a teddy bear.

  Tom cleared his throat. “Mrs. Schaefer has offered to change the kid’s diaper upstairs.”

  “Both boys,” Ginger Schaefer added frostily.

  Kate, however, met her icy gaze head-on. “Why don’t you take the kids home and do that,” she said. “I’m sure it would be a great help to Mr. Sproul if you took care of the kids for the time being.”

  “But I need supplies. Diapers, wipes.”

  Kate shrugged. “I’m sorry, but the techs haven’t been up there yet. Maybe you could try a drug store.”

  Mrs. Schaefer opened her mouth to protest, but then changed her mind. She walked regally across the length of deep-pile rug and placed a hand on Hatcher’s shoulder. “We’ll be praying,” she said, then collected the two silent toddlers, who barely glanced at their father before following her.

  Tom felt Kate had been out of line. He and his wife had a four-month old at home and Tom knew only too well what a circus it was to get the kid anywhere: a fifty-pound diaper bag and then the damn car seat.

  But he wasn’t about to voice this opinion. Kate was tough, but she was also good. She had a way of getting people to talk, to remember things, even little details, and Tom was willing to shut his mouth and learn.

  Kate was just finishing up with Sproul. She had the information on the wife’s friend and the housekeeper. They would be here soon, in that curious mixture of fatigue and horror and excitement that seemed to affect people when they received bad news late at night. She folded her notebook and slid it back in her pocket.

  “Okay, Plovcek, Kane and Mentz’ll be here in a few minutes. You assist—and the word there is assist—them in the search. Mr. Sproul, you get that photo for me, and then I’d like you to think about getting some rest.”

  “But you’re going to do that phone tap thing, right? I mean, in case they call?”

  Tom met Kate’s gaze before it flicked back to Sproul; it seemed to him that she hesitated. Of course, he knew the same statistics she did, how fast the missus’ odds were going down the toilet the longer she was gone. Though he still had a hard time believing that something real was actually happening on his shift.

  Tom tried to ignore the shame that nipped at the heels of his excitement: an abduction would be the biggest thing to happen to the department, let alone to him, in years. Yeah, he felt for the poor schmo trembling in front of him. But this could turn into the kind of case that would knock the wind out of his academy pals—no more traffic cop jokes, while they busted gangs up and down the Figueroa Corridor. As if that was something to write home about.

  “We’ll have someone here in an hour, Mr. Sproul. They’re already getting the records. But you have to be realistic. Until they let us know what they’re after, we’re in a waiting game here.”

  Damn, Kate was good. She sounded like she did this all the time, Tom thought with admiration. He busied himself with his own notepad and waited for the evidence guys to arrive.

  #

  Hatcher stared into the darkness for what seemed like several nighttimes. It seemed odd to him that his eyelids refused to close. He tried the relaxation exercises he learned in physical therapy after his ski accident, but images of Rosalee kept crowding out his thoughts.

  He would have liked to pour himself one last drink. In fact he would like to have had several drinks to sustain him through the rest of the questioning: Doris’s frantic chatter and, especially, Collette’s taut claim that, after the half-day at the spa, she’d had to get back to pick up the kids at camp, but Rosalee had decided to stay for a drink in the bar. He felt the accusation in Colette’s gaze even as the woman detective dispatched more troops off to the hotel to see what they could find there.

  At least the Ambien he found in the medicine cabinet were beginning to blur the edges a bit. That ball-buster downstairs would probably have had a fit. Or maybe not—she seemed pretty anxious to get him out of the way, practically ordering him up to bed as the cops gradually took over the kitchen, making coffee and doing things to the phones.

  Hatcher had earplugs in now. The prospect of morning terrified him, and maybe if he could just shut down, he’d be better prepared for what was to come. He rolled from his back to his side, grabbing Rosalee’s pillow and clutching it to his gut. He was wearing the Brooks Brothers pajamas that had been folded in his dresser unworn since Rosalee gave them to him for Christmas; he preferred to sleep in his boxers and undershirt. Or nothing, if Rosalee could be talked into it—she hated locking the bedroom door, even for half an hour, in case the boys needed something.

  With a jolt he remembered the boys, and in the next second remembered that Ginger had them, his heartbeat doing a crazy race-and-skip before settling down again. He was grateful for Ginger, even more grateful that he’d never tried to sleep with her.

&n
bsp; Unaccustomed guilt seeped up into his brain. He’d never managed much remorse over his dalliances; Hatcher firmly believed that monogamy was unnatural at best and counter-productive at worst. Hell, getting his urges out of his system let him concentrate fully on Rosalee when he was with her. He loved his wife. Loved her cool elegance, her sly humor, the firm hand with which she was raising his boys. She was beautiful, sure, but it was different with her; Hatcher felt something like reverence when he made love to his wife.

  Had he unwittingly done something to cause this horrible thing to happen? Who the hell would take another human being—a woman, for God’s sake—and terrify them, their whole family, all for money? At least he assumed it was money, and he could tell the cops did too, though they didn’t come out and say so. “Demands”—what else could that mean? And it wasn’t exactly a secret that they were rich.

  How much would they ask for, anyway? A million? Two? Ten? Hatcher forced himself to abandon that line of thought; it was bound to get him all riled up again, and anyway, that was a matter for the bean counters. Right? The kidnapper would call, name a number, and all that would be left for Hatcher to do would be to call the accountant, the lawyer, whoever could move money around like that. And it would be done.

  But as Hatcher squeezed the pillows and sweated and tugged on the sheets and tossed back and forth, dipping in and out of horror-tainted slumber, it was his own powerlessness that caused the bile to churn and poison him from within.

  #

  “Mr. Sproul.” The knocking on his door increased in pitch, jerking Hatcher into groggy wakefulness, and it took him a second to remember it all.

  A small, thin moan escaped his throat, sounding nothing at all like himself. It was the ball-buster at the door, her voice as firm and commanding as it had been last night. Didn’t she need to sleep too?

  Outside, it was still dark, and Hatcher snapped on the bedside lamp before untwisting himself from his sheets and opening the door. He ran a hand through his hair, aware that it must be sticking out, and tried to breathe out the corner of his mouth so as not to force the detective to breathe his foul odors.