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April, 2002, Oakdale. . . .

PROLOG

The girls had been playing on the swing hanging in the Taylor's front yard but they soon tired of sharing one swing among the three of them and decided that a doll party would be more fun.

Lisa seated her Christmas Barbie astride a pink motor scooter while Carla and Susan pranced their own creations. The girls were busily weaving stories of magic and excitement when a dusty brown Buick made its way down Avery Road and pulled to a stop in front of Lisa's house.

A man dressed in sneakers, jeans and a black T-shirt raced from the car and grabbed Carla. He had barely lifted her when he felt a stabbing pain in his shin as Lisa kicked him as hard as she could. She tried to kick him a second time but, muttering a startled "Ow!", he swung his leg out of the way.

At almost the same instant Carla bit his hand. Startled, the kidnapper let go and Carla tumbled to the ground. The man spun to grab her again and spotted Lisa only two feet away. In a flash Carla was gone and with barely a split second's hesitation, the kidnapper grabbed Lisa and ran back to the Buick which instantly sped away.

Five seconds later the car was around the corner and out of sight. Barely a minute and a half after that the Buick was hidden in the underbrush a hundred yards off the highway and the kidnappers had switched to an old Mustang and were heading for the county line.

The Mustang had already pulled onto the main highway by the time the first hysterical phone call reached the Oakdale Police Department, it having taken that long for an almost incoherent Susan and Carla to return to Mrs. Fisher's house and make themselves understood.

It was too late. The roads were watched but no car matching the Buick's description was seen. Posters were printed and distributed, announcements made hourly on the AM radio station but it was as if Lisa Taylor had been swallowed by the earth.

For the next two months Oakdale's sole detective, Carlos Ramirez, spent almost every waking moment trying to turn up some trace of Lisa's whereabouts. He failed. Every report was pursued but they all led nowhere. Still Carlos and Bill and Peggy Taylor persisted. Summer came and went. Then Halloween. Then Christmas. The phone calls dwindled, leads dried up and finally stopped.

How could a nine year old child be stolen from her own front yard and simply vanish? Hadn't anyone seen her? If she was still alive wouldn't someone notice her? Pictures had been printed, flyers distributed. She could talk. She could call for help. If she was still alive.

February came and went and with the approaching spring almost a year had passed since Lisa Taylor had been kidnapped, but she had disappeared as completely as if she had never existed.

March, 2003, Thursday Evening

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

Chapter One

She was only about four feet tall, not big enough to clear the tops of the shelves filled with pretzels and bottles of taco sauce and bags of sourdough dinner rolls. I noticed her at the last instant and dodged just in time to avoid running into her. She was around nine or ten, blonde hair turning to brown, almost long enough to touch her shoulders. I looked down and smiled.

"Sorry, miss, I didn't see you there. Are you okay?"

I don't know what I expected, a grimace, a laugh, a polite "I'm fine." Whatever it was, I didn't get it. Instead her face bore the look of someone who has been hit so often and so regularly that nothing registers any more beyond the thin appearance of pain and hopelessness.

I stared at her, transfixed by her wide gray eyes. She wore faded blue jeans, red tennis shoes, and an oversize T-shirt imprinted with the name of a Mexican beer. Although it was about fifty degrees outside, she didn't have a coat or a sweater. After a second she lowered her eyes and said dully, "You didn't hit me."

It was a voice that I would not have expected from a child, an even, emotionless monotone, not whispered, but set so low that the words barely reached me only a foot in front of her.

"What are you doin', Alice?" a man called from behind me. I turned and saw a pudgy white man with heavy, black-rimmed glasses, about five feet ten, standing at the far end of the aisle that ran in front of the frozen foods .

"She's okay," I told him. "I didn't see her. I almost knocked her down."

"She'll do that, sneak up on you. Won't you, Alice?"

"I'm sorry, Ken" the girl piped from behind me.

"What?" the man snapped. His face was a puffy, refrigerator white. Maybe thirty-five or forty years old, he had very short hair which reflected the fluorescents as if it was coated with Vaseline.

"I'm sorry, Daddy," the little girl repeated.

"You'd best get your stuff and pay attention to business if you know what's good for you."

"Yes, Daddy."

"She won't cause you no more trouble."

"There's no trouble. It was . . . ." but he had already turned away, back up the aisle toward the magazine rack at the front of the store. The little girl, Alice, wandered to the next aisle holding canned goods and bottles of cooking oil. I watched her for a moment and searched my memory trying to recall where I had encountered an expression like hers. I knew that I had seen it somewhere, in a photo or a movie. I stood there trying to remember, then peered over the shelves but her back was to me. After a moment's hesitation I turned away. The day was ending, I thought, as badly as it had begun.

That Thursday had started as one of those bleak mid-March days when the sun is little more than a vague glow behind overcast clouds that neither dissipate nor bring the relief of rain. I had spent the last half of the morning and most of the afternoon meeting with Bill Mansell, the Oasis Project Supervisor. Finally, after nonstop arguing and no lunch I fought my way through the afternoon traffic in a vain attempt to reach the only available software genius who had a prayer of salvaging something from the project's shattered development schedule.

Just because I had sold Orayis Corporation to NowSoft for a pile of cash and stock options didn't mean that I was going to sit on my butt and watch TV all day. I had started Orayis with a $25,000 loan from my dad, a BS from U.C. Berkeley, an MBA from Stanford, and about a million hours of my heart and soul. I was still the CEO, even though we were technically a division of NowSoft, nothing was going to keep the Oasis product from shipping on time and bug free. If it took a big check and personal plea to a reclusive software wizard ensconced in the wilds of eastern Contra Costa County, then that's what I would do.

By the time I put the San Francisco Bay behind me and was heading east on Highway 24 through the Caldecott Tunnel the nagging headache that had begun almost two hours before was well on its way to becoming a real skull breaker.

There is something about men and driving, I don't know what it is, but we hate to stop, as if pulling over is a personal failure, a signal of our inability to persevere until our goal is accomplished. Just a few more miles and we'll be home; a little longer and we can stop for the night; just one more bend in the road and we'll find the signpost we've been looking for.

I've been accused more than once of being stubborn to the point of intransigence. I like to think that I am just determined. I look upon perseverance as a virtue. I certainly hadn't gotten to where I was by giving up when things got difficult. As they say in the military, “See the hill, take the hill.”

On that dreary Thursday afternoon the little voice inside me kept telling me: "You can make it. Only half an hour more and you'll be there. Baumbach probably has a whole bottle of aspirin sitting there in his medicine cabinet. Besides, you're already late. Tough it out," and all the while my head was pounding and my shoulders felt as if the tendons were made of coiled steel.

Finally, when the vibrations from the seams in the road sent new jolts of pain through my skull, I reluctantly cut across the traffic and took the next exit, determined to find a drug store, a 7-11, a supermarket, any place that might sell me some pills.

It turned out that I had picked a particularly bad time to abandon the main road. The off-ramp ended at an intersection with a two-lane road. To the left it headed down a gray little valley and curved out of sight. To the right it climbed a low hill and disappeared over the top of the rise. Below and ahead of me was a small creek, clogged with bracken and manzanita. A few houses dotted the two-lane, all of them dark and deserted in the fading afternoon light. I mentally flipped a coin and turned right.

The road was edged with houses built in the 1950's before the advent of strict building codes -- all two-by-fours and sheetrock and clapboard siding. After a mile or so with no sign of what passes for civilization I began to take random turnings at crossroads, peering toward the darkening horizon as I tried to detect the glow of a Safeway or an ARCO or a 7-11.

Finally, more through luck than planning, I came upon a dilapidated store set back from the road on a flat dirt oval whose gravel surface had long since disappeared into the adobe topsoil. At the first hint of rain the ground would puddle up and assume the consistency of overworked pie crust.

Luckily, the rain had not yet started. I would be here just long enough to get a traveler's tin of Excedrin and a can of Coke to wash it down, and, I reminded myself, a map so I could find my way to Baumbach's house. By now all I knew was that I was somewhere east of 680 and south of Concord.

There was only one other vehicle in the lot, a faded VW Van with a dent behind the driver's door. The wheel covers were missing, which made the van seem especially aged and ill-treated. Inside the store I spotted the refrigerated soft drink case along the back wall and edged down a narrow aisle crowded with cans of soup, racks of Twinkies, bags of corn chips, and six-packs of beer.

My head was pounding when I reached the end of the row. I took a quick step toward the refrigerator door and that's when I almost knocked her down.

I grabbed a cold Pepsi and then went to the drugs and cosmetics section and picked up a small tin box of Excedrin. I downed two of the pills with a swallow of cola on the spot. Then, I thought about the little girl again.

Sometimes you do things that you can't consciously justify, can't explain, but you have a reason for doing them -- you just don't want to admit it to yourself. I could have walked past the allergy pills and the toothpaste and the hair spray, up to the cash register at the front of the store. But I didn't. Maybe it was the look in Alice's eyes. So, instead of leaving, I turned up the row holding the canned goods where she was diligently matching pictures of peaches and creamed corn with the items on her list.

When I got near her, I pretended to examine the prices on the jars of pickles. I had no conscious idea of what I was doing, but I knew, somewhere, what I was after, because just about the time that I was swallowing the Excedrin I remembered where I had seen the expression on Alice's face before.

It was in a book in my high school civics class. A book the teacher, Mr. Ida, a Japanese-American who had been locked up in an American concentration camp during the first part of World War II, had shown us. He passed it around and tried to explain things that were unexplainable to fifteen-year-old middle-class children, events which we had not yet seen enough evil to be able to comprehend.

The book contained pictures taken at Dachau, pictures of people waiting to die, people not sure any more if dying was, for them, a bad thing. Their images had that same hollow-eyed hopelessness, that look of desolation beyond pain that I thought I had seen in Alice's face. I knew that I should just mind my own business but I couldn't turn my back on her and walk away.

"Are you all right?" I asked softly as I stood next to her. "Are you in trouble? Do you need help?"

Furtively, she looked over her shoulder. The top of the Ken's head was visible at the front of the store.

"I'll get in trouble if I talk to you," she said softly without looking up.

"If you need help, tell me. I could call the police."

"No one can help me," she whispered and moved a few feet toward the front counter.

I put down the pickles and grabbed a jar of olives from the shelf next to her.

"Is he hurting you? Does he hit you?" She made no answer. "What's your name?" I asked, thinking that if I had her full name I could call Child Protective Services. Maybe that and the license number from the van would be enough to have someone start an investigation.

"Please," I whispered, "tell me your name."

"My real name?" she asked softly.

Real name? I turned to stare at her. For a moment longer she looked at the shelf, then peered up at me.

"My real name is Lisa, Lisa--"

"Are you bothering this man, Alice? Are you telling stories again?" Ken, I couldn't think of him as her father, had crept around the end of the aisle and now approached us with long strides.

"I'm sorry," I said, trying to smile but not succeeding very well. "I was telling your daughter about my goddaughter, Kristen. I'm afraid that I distracted her," I said making the story up as I went along.

I would pay for my aspirin, I decided, leave the store and call the police. They would sort it all out. Something was wrong here, but what? Her real name? What if she was just telling stories? This was a situation for the police. I nodded to Ken and headed for the counter.

Nicotine stains yellowed the tips of the clerk's fingers. Her eyes held the half-vacant, half-bored expression of someone who is waiting for each minute to slip by in hopes that the next one will be better and knowing that it won't.

I hurried outside, took out a ballpoint pen and wrote the VW's license number on the back of one of my business cards, then pulled out my cell. No signal. I noticed a battered payphone at the side of the store and shoved a quarter into the slot. It made one dull clank, then bounced through the mechanism and into the coin return. I tapped the hook twice and fished it out. A splash of light illuminated the booth as the front door opened and Ken and Alice, no, Lisa, came out. It started to rain.

Ken walked with his heavy right hand pinching the back of her neck.

"What'd I tell you about talking to people? What'd I tell you!" At first, she didn't answer, just looked straight ahead. Angrily, he spun her around, grabbed her shoulders in his pudgy fists and began to shake her, all the time shouting: "What'd I tell you? What'd I tell you?" Suddenly, he slapped and pushed her to the ground. Lisa's shoulder splashed in a shallow puddle.

"I'm sorry," she said and cautiously crawled to her feet. "He just asked me stuff. I didn't talk to him. I didn't!" She was frightened, but trying, I could tell, not to cry.

"I'll show you to mind me! Just wait till we get home."

I stood there next to the dead phone and watched him drag her into the van. I wanted to run over and punch him in the face. I had been a boxer in college. I mentally rehearsed the combination of blows. But that was insanity. Thoughts whirled in my head, none of them coalescing into any plan or decision. There had to be a phone in the store. I could still call the police, give them the license number.

But what if it wasn't his van? Maybe he had borrowed or had not given the DMV his right address. Jesus, he could have stolen it for all I knew.

It was now about five-thirty and almost fully dark. A car passed and, for a moment, its headlights illuminated the VW. I glimpsed Lisa's face pressed against the passenger window, and was struck again by how much she looked like those black-and-white images staring out from the pages of Mr. Ida's book.

But now there was terror in her eyes. And I had caused it. God only knew what he was going to do to her and it was my fault. I had said that I would help her, but when it came time for me to do something, I had just stood there. I dropped the phone and sprinted to my car. In the few minutes that I had been inside the rain had formed a patchwork of puddles on the lot. The van was already a hundred yards down the road, its taillights beginning to fade into the rain-soaked night.

I pulled out after them and my tires slipped on the slick ground. A minute or two later I caught up. I decided to follow them home, then knock on some neighbor's door and use their phone to call the police. Once the cops were on their way I would ring Ken's bell and tell him to leave the little girl alone, warn him that the police were coming and that there would be serious consequences if he hurt her.

With the dark and the rain, God knew where we were. All I saw was the occasional house set back from the road, a closed gas station, then empty stretches of highway bordered by the silhouettes of live oak and eucalyptus. Ken seemed to know where he was going as he stopped, then turned, first onto one road, then another. I followed, making sure not to lose his taillights around some blind curve. I knew that if he got away from me I would never find him again.

Ken's brake lights flashed suddenly, then disappeared around a sharp right turn. I turned after them, and almost smashed into the van parked a few feet down a narrow driveway. I saw a torn, partially legible decal on the bumper's right side: "____n City Police Reserve." Was he a cop? Maybe the decal was a relic from one of the van's prior owners. What was I getting myself into?

I had barely come to a stop when my door was yanked open. The rain had slackened to little more than a heavy drizzle. Ken's skin glistened like wax in the glow of my headlights. I released my seatbelt and lurched from the car.

"What are you doin' following me?" he demanded.

"I was worried about the little girl." Already the adrenalin was singing in my blood and I couldn't seem to catch my breath.

"She's none of your business. You stay out of my family's affairs."

"I'm not going to let you hurt her."

"Who says I'm going to hurt her?"

"I heard you when you came out of the store. I saw you slap her. You told her you were going to teach her a lesson. That sounds threatening to me."

"You've been watching too much television or reading too many books, or something. I'm her daddy and she's got to learn to mind."

We stood there for a heartbeat, staring at each other. My mind was whirling. I couldn't leave and I didn't want to stay. The night was leaden. The sound of the water dripping from the leaves was soft and distant as if heard through cotton wool. Maybe it was sheer stubbornness, I don't know, but I realized I couldn't leave her there with him.

"We're going to call the police and they're going to straighten this all out," I told him almost as if someone else were speaking with my voice.

"Mister, are you crazy? You get back in your car and get the hell out of here while you still can."

"Not without the little girl. Both of you can get in my car and I'll stop at the next house and call the police. I'm not leaving until they arrive."

"This is the last time I'm going to tell you," he said and then reached into the pocket of his windbreaker. "Stop interfering in my business." When Ken's hand emerged his fingers were wrapped around the butt of a revolver that seemed so small in his pudgy fist as to be almost a toy. But it wasn't a toy. It was a .25-caliber pistol, about the same type as the gun that had killed Senator Robert Kennedy.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"You've got five seconds to get back in your fancy car and get out of here. I'm not telling you again." For a heartbeat I stood there frozen. Against that silence the click of the van's door was unnaturally loud. The little girl's tennis shoes squeaked against the wet asphalt.

The glare from my headlights caught her almost in profile, her eye sockets dark hollows against the flat white of her face, a face that seemed, simultaneously, to have lost all fear and all hope. Ken and I both turned toward her.

"Lisa, go back," I shouted and knew, instantly, that with the use of her real name a boundary had been crossed. Ken knew I had discovered his secret. His face passed through several stages, like the movie special effect in which an animal shape-shifts from one form to another in the blink of an eye, first surprise, then fear, then anger, then determination, all in the space of a heartbeat.

"You messed in where you don't belong one time too many, mister. I can't have you spreading lies about me and Alice here."

"The police--"

"--Ain't gonna do nothing, even if they believed you, which they wouldn't, but I ain't gonna take that chance." For an instant he turned back to Lisa, glared at her and shouted: "Alice, you see! You see what you've gone and made me do!" Then he turned back to me and his finger tightened on the trigger. It was mostly reflex, that and my old boxing training. I shifted my shoulders, faking a move to my left. He flinched and jerked the gun to follow.

In a split second he recognized his mistake but in that instant I lunged forward. The gun made a small "pop" followed by a crash as the bullet smashed into my fender. Then I kicked him right in the balls, as hard as I could.

He groaned and leaned forward, still holding the gun but not trying to aim it anymore. I kicked him again in the solar plexus, then I kicked him one last time, with the sole of my shoe flat in his face.

He collapsed, groaning, blood pouring from his broken nose and on down onto the asphalt. I stomped on his hand hard enough to break bones, and the gun slipped free. I caught it with the side of my foot like a soccer-style kicker and sent it flying off into the dark.

For a moment I stared at him bleeding and retching on the ground, then shouted: "Lisa! Get in the car. We're getting out of here. Hurry!"

For a moment she hesitated there in the glare of my headlights, then, as if recovering from a trance, she ran to my passenger door and tugged on the handle. As soon as she was inside, I backed onto the highway and took off. It didn't matter where I drove, just so long as it was away from there.

It was surreal, a scene out of nightmare. As soon as the adrenalin stopped pumping I began to shake. I had almost been shot. I turned at the first crossroad, then turned again at the next one. After a mile or two more I pulled over and doused the lights.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Is he going to find us?"

"No, Lisa, he won't find us. Don't worry, I promise, I'll take care of you. I won't let him hurt you." She said nothing, just sat there, a dark form next to me, her silhouette barely visible in the glow from the instrument panel.

"Let's get our seat belts on," I said as if that was the most important thing in the world. I heard her belt unroll and then click as the buckle slid into the connector. I waited a moment, not wanting to ask too many questions, not wanting to upset her, but I knew that I couldn't pretend that nothing had happened.

"He called you 'Alice'," I began, "but you said your name was 'Lisa.' Is Lisa your real name?"

"He told me that now my name was Alice but it's not!"

"Is he your father?" She was quiet for a moment, then a soft whimper escaped her lips. "Is 'Lisa' the first name you ever had?" I asked.

"Yes," she said after a moment.

"Did your real father, your first father, give you that name?"

"Uh-uh," she whispered, paused for a second, then said: "My Mommy."

"Your mother gave you that name?"

"Uh-huh."

"What was her name?"

"Peggy. Daddy called her 'Peggy.' I called her 'Mommy.'"

"What about your daddy, your real daddy? What's his name?"

"'Bill. Mommy and Uncle Jack called him 'Bill.'"

"What's your last name? Everyone has two names. My name is Peter Howard. Your name is Lisa . . . ?"

For a moment it seemed that all her strength had evaporated. She hunched down in the corner between the seat and the door and hugged herself as if she believed that if she could make herself small enough all her problems would disappear and that when she opened her eyes she would find herself at home and safe and that all this would be just a bad dream. The rain had let up and the only sound now was the low throbbing of the engine. Finally, she opened her eyes and turned toward me.

"He said that if I told, if I told that he wasn't really my daddy . . . ." Not since my father had died had I seen anyone grieve that way, silently, as if the sound of their tears would make the pain real, as if they might be able to turn back time if only they didn't cry out loud.

I waited until her little gasps had subsided. "Everything he said was a lie. Don't believe anything he told you. I said I would help you and I will. I promise I'll get you home. But you have to help me. I can't get you home if I don't know where you live. You want to go back to your real mommy and daddy, don't you?"

"Yes, but he said that if I told, they would kill mommy and daddy. That I could never tell."

"Lisa, he's a very bad man, and bad people lie to get their way. No one will hurt your parents. I'm sure they're looking for you and that they want you to come home more than anything. Your mommy and daddy would do anything to have you back. That man doesn't scare them or me. You saw how I knocked him down and got you away from him, didn't you?"

I was rewarded by a sniffle and a nod.

"So don't give a thought to what he said. You leave him to me. What's your second name?"

I held my breath. Lisa twisted the fabric of her T-shirt and finally said "Taylor."

"That's great! Your name is Lisa Taylor. Now, we need your address. I bet your parents taught you your whole address. I know you're a smart girl and I bet you memorized it, didn't you?"

"Uh-huh."

I already had my ballpoint poised above the back of one of my two remaining business cards. "So, your full name and address is: Lisa Taylor . . . ?"

There was another long pause, then she completed the sentence: "Lisa Taylor, 749 Avery Road, Oakdale."

"Do you know your phone number?"

"8647, I think."

"Do you know the rest of it?"

"I forget....I'll never get home."

"Don't worry. I promise, I'll get you home. I just have to find a police station," I paused and glanced at my instrument panel, "And get us some gas." Lisa stared at me, unsure whether or not to believe me. I reached out to caress her face, then pulled my hand back and slipped the car into gear.

Chapter Two

I formulated a simple plan for getting my bearings: keep driving west until I ran into Highway 680, then use the map in my glove compartment to plan things from there. I didn't know what to say to Lisa, or if I should say anything at all. For a while I just drove. As it turned out, I didn't need the map after all.

A few minutes later I encountered one of those strip shopping centers with seven or eight stores, a taco stand, and a gas station on the corner.

"Do you have to go to the bathroom?" I asked as soon as I had pulled up to the pumps.

"No, I'm fine," she said softly in a half-dead voice.

"Are you hungry?"

"I'm fine," she said quietly without turning her head.

"When was the last time you had something to eat? Did you have lunch?"

"I had cereal, Rice Krispies."

She hadn't eaten all day. I knew she was upset, had to be upset, but enough to have no appetite at all? Then I thought about it for a moment. If every time you asked for something you were hit, you learned not to ask. If every time you said you were hungry, you were hit, you learned not to say you were hungry. If everything you said or did was wrong, then you learned not to say anything or do anything except what you were told to say and do, when you were told to do it.

Her bladder could be bursting and she wouldn't volunteer that she had to go to the bathroom. She could be starving and she wouldn't admit to being hungry.

"Well, I'm hungry. I think we should get something to eat before we go to the police." Lisa just glanced at me, then looked away. "Is that all right with you? You'll eat something, won't you?"

"Okay."

"Okay, you wait here. I'll be right back and we'll get some dinner."

I glanced back at Lisa then walked over to the office. A weathered Toyota was hoisted on the lube rack. The Corolla's right rear wheel and brake drum had been removed.

The mechanic's back was to me but when he turned around I revised his job description. Mechanics were technicians trained in the intricacies of complicated mechanisms. This was just a kid, about twenty years old, hatchet-faced and holding a pair of pliers. I looked past him and saw bright metal where the pliers had rounded the edges from one of the nuts, turning its original hexagonal shape into something resembling a Cheerio.

"I need some gas," I said as he looked me over. "The pump has to be reset."

"Sure, give me a second." The boy, the name "Charlie" was monogrammed on his coveralls in red thread, turned back to the wheel and clamped the pliers down in a two-handed grip. As the pliers slowly rotated a metal shaving fell to the floor.

"Shoot!" Charlie swore, dropped the pliers, and rummaged through his toolbox, finally emerging with a pair of Vice Grips that he clamped to the recalcitrant nut. Next he wrapped a foot of electrical tape around the Vice Grips' handle. One final trip to the tool chest produced a hammer which he whacked against the Vice Grips with great energy. On the fourth blow the nut broke loose and the pliers flew off, smashing down only inches from my foot.

"Always works," Charlie said proudly. "Okay, let's get that gas for you. You want anything else? Check your oil? Need any anti-freeze?"

"No, just the gas."

We walked back to the island and Charlie inserted his key. The old fashioned pump's tumblers spun around to zero. As I maneuvered the nozzle into the tank I asked Charlie over my shoulder, "Any restaurants around here?"

"What you looking for?"

"I don't care. McDonald's would be fine."

"One of them a couple of miles north up the freeway. There's a nice place just down the road and a couple of blocks over, Marty's Rib Pit. Steaks, salads. Real nice place. Little girl ought to like it." Charlie stared at me expectantly. What did he expect me to say?

"How do I get there?"

"Huh?--Oh yeah, sure. Okay, first you go down here about a quarter of a mile, then turn right on Slawson . . . ."

"What a minute. I better write this down. Do you have a piece of paper?" I asked, nodding toward the office next to the bay and hoist.

"Uh, sure." Charlie trotted off and I followed him. He gave me a three-part form that said "We Care About Your Car" at the top and "Payment Due Before Release Of Vehicle" at the bottom. I turned it over and took down Charlie's directions.

"Thanks, we'll give it a try," I said after an awkward silence, and then handed him my credit card.

"Where you from?" he asked as he set the digits on the imprinter.

"Los Altos Hills, near Palo Alto."

"That's a ways off. How'd you hear about this place?"

"What do you mean?"

"Uhhh, nothing, just an expression," he said quickly. Then he paused and tapped the card machine nervously. "Look, nothing personal, but we've had some problems with these cards. If the boss gets one more fraud claim they're going to shut us down, you know what I mean?"

"What? Look that card is fine. You can . . . ."

"No, I mean, I have to write down your license number and see some ID. Sorry, but, you know how it is."

Something should have clicked right then but I was tired and I'd been in business long enough to know that credit card companies have a rule that if a merchant reports more than a certain percentage of fraudulent transactions in any month they yank his credit card privileges. Since credit transactions are anywhere from thirty percent to eighty percent of a small business's sales that can be a sentence of instant bankruptcy. I showed him my driver's license and he wrote down my name and plate number.

I had just returned to the pump when a black and white patrol car passed the station and pulled up in front the taco stand about fifty yards away. A neon cactus reflected from the cruiser's windshield. A seven pointed star above the gold and black words, "Crown City Police" were painted on the driver's door. I remembered the Police Reserve sticker on Ken's bumper. Had it been 'Crown City Police Reserve'? I gave my head a little shake and decided that paranoia was getting the better of me. With a brief glance back at Lisa, now almost invisible in the front sear of my car, I jogged down the slight incline to the cruiser. The cops had just gotten out when I reached them.

"Excuse me, but . . . ."

The cops definitely weren't happy to see me. I guess they hadn't eaten either.

"Is this an emergency?"

"Well, I . . . ."

"Because if it's not, the station's only about six blocks that way." The cop pointed across the highway and to my left. "The officer on duty can take your report."

These guys didn't want to hear my story. They were beat cops who were looking forward to dinner. Ten to one, they'd just send me back to the station anyway. "Uhh, to the left, down there?"

The cop smiled, pleased that he was going to get rid of me so easily. "Okay, you go back that way, to the light, then turn left--"

Suddenly, the cruiser's radio came to life and both cops turned toward the sound. "All units, we have a 207 on Wanderly Road near Jackson. Suspect is a Caucasian male, thirty-five to forty years old, driving a dark blue or black new four door sedan, no make, no license number. The victim is Alice O'Neill, the Chief's niece. Unit 10, see the man, Kenneth O'Neill at the scene."

The cops jumped into the car. "Gotta go," the driver shouted as he slipped it into reverse. "The Chief's niece's been kidnapped! Just take a left at the light and you'll find the station all right."

Red lights flashing, the cruiser backed up, slammed into drive, then tore off down the highway. I glanced at my car then followed the path of the cruiser as it disappeared into the night. I thought about the Police Reserve decal on Ken's bumper and remembered what he had told me:

The police ain't gonna do nuthin', even if they believed you, which they wouldn't . . . .

Maybe the cops were in it with him, maybe his brother, the Chief, was a pedophile too. At the very least they would believe him and not me. I had a vision of us walking into the Chief's office.

"She's been kidnapped," I would tell him.

"She sure has, but she's safe now."

"Not me! I took her away from the kidnapper."

"You think I don't know my own niece?"

Suddenly I'm pressed against the wall and handcuffs are slapped on my wrists.

"He pulled a gun on me!"

"If somebody jumped me on a back road I'd pull my gun too."

"We've got to get Lisa back to her real parents . . . ."

"Don't you worry about her. Her daddy'll be here in a few minutes. . . . . This must be pretty frightening to you, Alice, but don't worry. We'll get you back home with your daddy real soon now."

I began to shake. It wouldn't be the first time something like that had happened. The police gave one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims back to him. I had heard the tape of the 911 call. The cops thought it was a big joke. They grabbed the kid, he was fifteen years old and naked when they found him on a public street, and just gave him back to Dahmer.

If the police in a major city could do that, what would some small town cop do with Lisa? How could I take that chance? On the other hand, I had found Oakdale on my map. It was a small town near the edge of the Central Valley, maybe a two or three hour drive east of here. I had made her a promise, taken on a responsibility. Start a job, finish a job. I had promised that I’d see to it that Lisa was safely returned to her parents. I could get her home tonight, home where Ken and his Police Chief brother would never get their hands on her again. All I had to do was put the car into Drive and find the freeway. By nine or ten o'clock tonight she would be home, safe and sound.

I went back to the car. Lisa was still sitting there quietly, thinking about God knows what. When I pulled into the street I checked the rear view mirror and noticed Charlie standing by the pump and watching me drive away. Did I look that much like a crook?

"The man at the gas station said there's a good restaurant just down the road. We're going to stop there for some dinner and then I'm going to take you home."

"I don't like him."

"Who?"

"The man at the gas station."

"Why not?"

"He looked at me, you know."

"How did he look at you?"

"He looked at me, you know, the way they do. Not like you look at me."

"How do I look at you?"

"You look at me the way daddy did. Not like them. I don't like it when they look at me that way. I don't like the man at the gas station."

"Lisa,--" I began, then caught myself. What was I going to say? Tell her that she was wrong? That she was being silly?

"I don't blame you, Lisa," I said finally. "I don't like him much either. I'll tell you what: I'll buy a big steak and some French fries and a big salad. I'll give you part of it and if you're not hungry, you don't have to eat it. Sometimes we think we're not hungry until the food comes, then we find out that we are. What do you say? Is that okay with you?"

"Sure, I mean, yes."

Behind us, Charlie picked up the phone and made a hurried call.

* * *

From the outside, Marty's Rib Pit would not have excited Julia Child. The building was wood, single-story with fake brick trim. Spelled out in neon to the left of the front door was the motto: "Just Good Eats."

Inside, it was dark. Fake kerosene lanterns were mounted on the rims of wagon-wheel light fixtures and tuned to a dull orange glow. Vinyl booths lined the front with the kitchen straight back and the bar to the left behind a small dance floor. The tables were about half filled and a waitress carrying a tray stacked with white platters of beef and baked potatoes called out, "Sit anywhere, Hon." I picked a booth along the front wall next to a window. Through the smeared glass I could see a few feet of the parking lot illuminated by the flickering glow of a neon sign mounted on the roof.

Lisa stared nervously around the room, her eyes briefly focusing on the shadowed tables and the vague shapes outlined by the light spilling from behind the bar, then she quickly lowered her head, afraid that her glances might draw attention. Once or twice I started to talk to her, but each time stopped, fearing that my questions would only upset her.

"Are you cold?" I asked when I thought I noticed her shiver.

"I'm fine," she answered quietly, her eyes still lowered. I was convinced that she had been taught, through methods that I did not want to imagine, never to ask for anything, never to complain.

A moment later the waitress's jeans made a scratchy, rustling sound as they rubbed against the burgundy apron that seemed to be the extent of Marty's employees' uniform.

"What can I get you folks?" she asked brightly. It was still early. In an hour or two, her eyes glazed and the thousandth step on the uncarpeted floor ringing against the soles of her feet, her welcome would become perfunctory, her attention diverted to the ache in her shoulders as the assistant manager of the Wash-N-Spin and his spandex-clad wife pored over the menu and tried to decide between the baked potato and the French fries.

Maybe I'm too jaded, too single-minded someone had once said . Maybe before Janet left me . . . . At the end when I, foolishly, wanted reasons from her, explanations, a blueprint for a quick fix, Janet told me that I was stubborn, obsessive, rigid, and unemotional, and that I should get professional help.

There it was, the final insult, "You're no fun. You need a shrink." Sure, I was working eighteen-hour days. I was building a business so that when we were ready to start a family we could afford to spend time with our kids, send them to college, do everything right. I wasn't unemotional, just organized. You have to plan ahead in life if you want things to work out. I did my best for her. I wanted kids. She was the one who--, damn, I was doing it again, thinking about a failure that was long over. You can't argue someone into loving you. They always have a reason why they don't love you any more, and they never have a reason. Damn, let it go. I pushed Janet's image from my mind.

"Would you like a drink while you look over the menu?" the waitress, Candace, according to her name tag, asked as she handed us huge cardboard menus with strings down the centers and a tassel at the top.

"Bring us a New York steak, medium; green salad with blue cheese; baked potato; side order of fries; side order of Salisbury steak; lots of bread and butter; a Sprite and a glass of milk." For a moment I thought about asking Lisa if that was all right with her, but I knew that she would just say that it was "fine."

"Bring an extra plate and we'll share everything."

"Sure thing," Candace said, her mind already on her next customers who were coming through the door. As she hurried off I looked at Lisa. For a moment her eyes brushed my face then she looked down and pushed herself into the corner between the wall and the end of the booth.

When our food arrived, I carefully divided it between us. After a bit of prompting Lisa ate the fries and bread and butter but didn't seem to like the beef. And she would eat only those portions of the salad that were untouched by the dressing. I finished before she did and put the remaining food on her plate.

"I've eaten all I want, Lisa. Please try to finish as much as you can. It's a sin for food to go to waste."

"A sin?"

"That's an expression. It means something that's wrong."

"I know what sin is," she said with a hint of determination in her voice. "Sin is when you break God's laws." Lisa paused for a breath, then continued with a catechism that she had obviously labored hard to memorize: "God's laws are written in the Bible," she said in a singsong voice, "and those who break them are sinners who will be cast down into Hell." When she ended her recital, she smiled, fleetingly, displaying a flicker of pride that she had successfully completed her lesson.

I hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to say. I realized the horror that lay behind that recitation, what Ken must have put her through to learn it. Confronted with my silence the smile fled from her face.

"That's very good, Lisa," I said hurriedly. "I bet you worked hard to learn your lessons, didn't you?"

She raised her head briefly, then nodded. "I'm impressed," I continued. "I didn't realize what a smart little girl you are." I paused for a moment, then, more to change the subject than anything else, asked: "Can you eat any more?"

For the next few minutes Lisa picked at the remnants of our dinner, then announced, "I'm full."

"Okay, you ate a good dinner. Let's go wash up then we'll get out of here and I'll get you home."

I left a pile of bills on the table and helped Lisa from the booth. The restrooms were at the end of a hallway that ran between the kitchen and the bar. I walked Lisa to the door marked "Gals."

"Go to the bathroom and wash your hands. Stay inside until I knock on the door. Okay?" Taking her silence for assent, I waited until she had closed the door, then, for a moment or two I stared at the pay phone at the end of the corridor. I thought about calling information and getting Lisa's parents' phone number, but what would I say?

"Hi, you don't know me, but I'm out here in the middle of nowhere and I have your kidnapped daughter. I'll bring her home in a few hours. Trust me."

And after they had recovered from their hysterics or accused me of being the worst kind of crank, I would be right back to turning her over to the local police. No, in a few hours I would have her home, safe and sound, another three hours wouldn't make any difference. I went into the men's room. The door had a plastic "Guys" plaque in the shape of a cowboy hat.

When I came out a tall man with long gray-black hair was waiting in the hallway. "You all wait for me in the van," he called to two men just leaving the bar, then he pushed past me and into the men's room. I gave Lisa an extra minute then knocked on the door. She emerged just as the tall man left the men's room. He paused for a moment and looked down at her.

"Did you wash your hands?" I asked her and was rewarded with a nod. "With soap?" This time no reply. "Why don't you go on back in and wash them again real good with soap, okay?" Lisa looked up at the man, paused for a moment, then hurried back into the rest room.

"Cute kid," the gray-haired man said. "Are you a friend of Ken's?"

Confused, I just stared at him. Was this gray-haired guy part of some molestation ring or had he just seen Lisa around town? I had to get her away from this place as fast as I could. I looked at the stranger carefully. His hair was like a net of black and gray threads twisted tight and pulled into a cue. Though in his late-forties his frame was spare and his skin looked like old leather stretched over wrought-iron bones.

I just stared at him, afraid that whatever I said would make things worse. The door opened and Lisa slipped out, hugging the wall. I nodded to the man then hustled her out the front door. Once in the car, I got Lisa buckled up and we headed for the freeway. She was as animated as a rag doll.

"Do you know that man?" I asked her. "The one in the hallway. Have you ever seen him before?" Other than a soft noise like a sniffle she made no response. "Is he one of the bad men? Is he one of the men who came to Ken's house?" I asked her in a rush.

"He's bad!" Lisa said suddenly, her words already mingled with silent tears. Who was bad, Ken or the gray-haired man, I wondered.

"He did bad things. He told me God said he was supposed to do those things but it's a lie! He hurt me," she said, her voice cracking then her words dissolved into low sobs but without tears. "I'm not supposed to cry," she said sniffling again and wiping her face with the ragged sleeve of her T-shirt.

"It's okay to cry, Lisa. Sometimes it's good for you. I'm sorry, but I have to ask you, it's important. Are you talking about Ken?"

"He said to call him daddy." She paused for a long moment, then added, "The other man, the one who took me, Ken, called him 'Eric.'" This last sentence was uttered with a vehemence that I would not have thought her capable.

"Did Eric hurt you?"

"He told me that he had friends who would kill mommy and daddy. I saw them. They're bad men. They scared me."

"It's going to be all right. I'll have you home soon where he won't be able to hurt you. Was the man in the restaurant Eric?"

Lisa shook her head. "I don't know him," she said finally. "What if they come back again, like the last time?" Lisa asked struggling to hold back her tears.

"The last time? What about the last time?"

"I was in my front yard. We were playing with our dolls. The car stopped and a man got out, Eric, and then he grabbed me and pulled me inside. Then he hit me. Maybe he's a friend of that man with the gray hair. Now he's seen me and he'll just come and get me again."

Was the gray-haired man one of the kidnappers? Lisa didn't recognize him but he acted like he knew something. Ever since Ken had tried to shoot me, my brain seemed to have stopped working. If they caught Ken he probably could lead the police to the rest of them. Tomorrow, after she had had a good night's sleep, her parents and I would call the FBI and they would track these guys down. I still had Ken's license number. I could identify both Ken and the guy from the restaurant.

Maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe if I stopped, turned around, found a phone . . . . But then in front of me I saw the on-ramp for 680 south. Hell, the guy must be gone by now. Anyway, it was too late to turn around and go back, and those cops were still looking for me. If they found me, they would give Lisa back to Ken who, I suddenly realized, couldn't afford to leave any witnesses. Once Ken got his hands on her no one would ever see Lisa alive again. Hell, they'd probably frame me for her murder. Whatever mess I'd gotten myself into, lives were at stake.

Almost of its own volition my car turned right and I accelerated up the grade and into the thinning evening traffic. I pressed harder on the gas. Trees slid past on either side, gray-black humps in the darkness as we headed toward Lisa's home.

Chapter Three

"Don't get too close to him," Jimmie Devries ordered.

"Relax, he hasn't got a clue. The way he's going, I could drive right up his bumper and he wouldn't notice. Why are we following him anyway? Why didn't we just grab the kid back there."

"In Marty's parking lot? Jump this guy in a public place in a town small enough to have bored cops who are just waiting for something to do? Is that your plan?"

"I've done it before. We'd be long gone before the cops got there."

"Eric, who's this van registered to? Do you have a nice legible license plate on the back? And when the cops come around looking for you, you won't give them my name, right?"

Eric made no reply other than to move closer to Howard's Lexus as it headed for the freeway on-ramp.

"Are you sure Charlie doesn't know this guy? Where's he think he's going?"

"That's why we're following him. I checked out the name Charlie got off his driver's license. He's some high-tech executive. None of this makes any sense. I wish I could get a hold of Ken and find out what this Howard guy's doing with the kid. If he's a citizen, why hasn't he called the cops? If he's a player, where the hell is he taking her?"

"Maybe he's got a secret place out in the boonies somewhere," Ray suggested from the backseat. "You know how those sickos are. Gacy had that secret room. Maybe Howard's got some cabin or something all set up with video cameras and handcuffs and all that stuff. Maybe he bought her from Ken and he's taking her up there to do her," Ray said, excitement creeping into his voice.

"I hope you're right. If he's a freak, we've got nothing to worry about. In fact," Jimmie paused while he considered the possibilities. "In fact, that might work out real good. I got a call yesterday from the guy in Texas. He's got a buyer who'll give us $50,000 for a kid like her, some South American freak who's into it big time. This kid would be perfect. It would be a lot safer just to take her from this Howard than to grab a new kid. If this guy's in the game he can't complain to the cops."

"So, when are we gonna do it? I don't want to follow this guy all night."

"Eric, don't try to think. Just drive. If he was straight, he would have called the cops, but it doesn't feel right. The freaks give off an odor. I can smell it on them. I don't get that from him. Something doesn't fit. Just follow him. Let's see where he goes. When he stops, I'll call Ken and find out what the story is."

"Yeah, then what?"

"Then we grab the kid and sell her again."

"What about this Howard guy?"

"He wouldn't be the first guy to disappear," Jimmie answered. "He won't be the last."

Chapter Four

I took 680 south to 580 then headed south and east until we reached Interstate 5. I had forgotten what it was like to drive I-5, but the cars roaring past me out of the darkness jogged my memory. Here the speed limit was a fantasy. It would take an army of CHP cruisers to slow down the traffic on this road, a goal that practically no one wanted to achieve.

I-5 was laid out ruler straight along the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley. In many places it was only two lanes in each direction. Slow drivers stayed in the right lane and kept their cruise control on seventy. Occasionally these timorous individuals would encounter an aging semi or a cattle truck with a couple of bad cylinders plodding along at sixty or sixty-five.

After a few minutes of cars roaring up behind them, then whipping around and accelerating past, they would cautiously pull into the next opening in the fast lane and scoot by, but God help the driver who perched permanently in the left lane doing anything less than seventy-five. When that happened a car or a pickup truck would line up a few feet behind them, then another, then another, all the time the gap between the lead car and the slower vehicle shrinking until the urge to escape would drive the law-abiding motorist back into the right lane with the other "slow" drivers.

To the east, the flat valley floor stretched to the horizon, its far edge at the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas fully 70 miles away. To my right the ground rolled away in swales to the low hills and on to the coastal mountain chain that separated the interior of California from the ocean.

Driving this road in full night was like sailing a dark tunnel. The pastures and road signs and occasional crossings over the All-American Canal were vague shapes that disappeared behind me almost unnoticed in the gloom. With no turns and no structures on the horizon by which to gauge the distance, my speed became illusory, merely a number on the dashboard; seventy-five or forty-five, it was all the same.

For the first twenty minutes Lisa didn't speak. She was only a silent shape barely discernible in the glow of the instrument panel and the rhythmic strobing of the oncoming headlights. How much did she understand of what had happened to her? How could a child comprehend the motives of the people who had abducted her, and then, apparently, sold her like a washing machine or a used car? What could she make of Ken who had performed acts upon her that I refused to allow myself to contemplate?

Did she think she was being punished for something? Did she believe that she had done something bad, that she was bad, that she had in some way been the cause of all that had happened to her? And if she did cause it, how could she avoid believing that it might happen again?

Children do not think the way we do. To them cause and effect can be mysterious events connected by threads invisible to our grown-up eyes. They are suckers for "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" logic. I prided myself on remembering that long-ago bit of Latin, which is liberally translated as: "If a second event occurs after the first one, then the second event was caused by the first one." Every morning the rooster crows, then the sun rises. Therefore, the crowing of the rooster causes the sun to rise.

"I made a noise and Daddy yelled at me. Then Daddy yelled at Mommy. Then Daddy hit Mommy. Therefore, when I made the noise, I caused Daddy to hit Mommy."

I remembered an article about a little girl who had been raped by one of her mother's friends. She told her mother about it and a few days later the rapist was found shot dead. The child's uncle was suspected of the crime. When the little girl heard that her attacker had been murdered she was desolated and thought that by revealing what had happened she had caused the man to be killed. From this she concluded that if she continued to talk to people, she might again, inadvertently, cause other people to be killed as well, and so she resolved never to speak again. It was three years before she uttered another word.

Where was the justice in that? I couldn't find any but personally, I do not deal in justice. I deal in rules. Maybe that's why I was in that car that night, speeding across the new Promised Land with a wounded child huddled in the seat beside me. Perhaps I was trying to practice, if not justice, at least a measure of consolation, generosity, compassion, in an indifferent world. Someone had to help her.

I glanced at the horizon and, without planning, wondered, how old would . . . . well, we had never named her. How old would she be now? Almost against my will my mind slipped back to that forbidden topic. She'd be seven or eight by now I guessed. I could do the math if I tried, but I didn't want to. I had trained myself not to think about her. It had all been over before it even began. By the time I found out it was a fait accompli.

I had come home that day late, as usual. The bank had turned down our application for an extension of our line of credit. I had spent hours trying to find some financing that would keep the company out of bankruptcy. All I wanted was to get something to eat and crawl into bed. It was also a Thursday, strange how I remember that so clearly, about nine o'clock, and Janet was already in bed. She looked awful.

I asked all the usual questions: Are you sick? Is it the flu? Did something happen? All I got were a few monosyllables, but I kept at her. And at her. And at her. Finally, she shouted, "I had an abortion today. Okay! Are you happy now?"

"But, what? . . . . I don't under--"

"Look, Peter, it's my body. This isn't the right time for us, for me. I don't want a baby now."

"But, why didn't you tell me? Talk to me?"

"Because I knew you'd start making lists, planning options, figuring out budgets, telling me what we were going to do. I didn't want to argue about it. I made up my mind. It's my body. It's my decision."

I was stunned. Who was this person who killed our child? Was this my wife, the woman who had said that she loved me? We were going to have children. We had talked about it. As soon as the business was going. Soon, that's what she had said, had promised. Hadn't she? I didn't know what to say. Then the question slipped out, one that I wish I had never asked.

"What was it? The baby."

"Peter, it's not important. Let's just forget--"

"What was it, God damn it!" I screamed at her. I had never raised my voice to Janet before and she cringed away. I must have looked as if I was ready to hit her.

"A little girl," she whispered, and then she began to cry. I stood there for a minute, two then I left her sobbing in our bedroom. After that we started counseling. I tried to fix things with attention, discussions, shrinks, and money. About that time we released Nexus 2.0 and our stock tripled. I bought a million-and-a-half-dollar house figuring that might patch things up. I thought a house would signify security and commitment. Of course none of it worked. She just didn't love me anymore. I don't know, maybe she never did. Maybe what she felt for me was something else. I am sure of one thing. I'm sure why she did it. It wasn't that she didn't want to have a child. She didn't want to have a child with me. Janet remarried a year later. Someone told me he raced motorcycles. Janet used her half of the divorce settlement to bankroll his racing team.

If our daughter had lived, little Karen or Jennifer or Christy (or Lisa?), how old would she be now? Eight, I realized, my mind doing the arithmetic automatically, almost the same age as the child beside me. What would she have looked like? Would she . . . ? I clenched my teeth and forced all such pointless questions from my head.

I glanced at Lisa as these thoughts chased through my mind and, by some psychic pressure, I felt forced to try to engage her in conversation.

"Lisa, do you know anything about where we are, about this valley? Did you ever go to Sunday School? Did you ever hear of the Land of Milk and Honey?"

"That's in the Bible. I know the Bible. Ken made me read it every day."

What a fool I was! The last thing I had wanted to do was to remind her of Ken. I tried to go on, to gloss over my mistake.

"That's right. I remember how well you recited your lesson. Well, the Land of Milk and Honey was the Promised Land, the land where the children of God would find rest and salvation. It was a place from which all good things sprang. In a way, this," I motioned to the darkened landscape around me, "is the Land of Milk and Honey."

"It is? Where?" Lisa turned in her seat and pressed her face against the window, peering into the formless darkness beyond.

"Over that way," I said, pointing ahead of us. "They grow everything here. When you drive down old Highway 99 you'll think you're in Galilee."

"What do they have?"

"Milk, of course, and honey. Olives and oranges, dates, walnuts and almonds, peaches and plums, apples, cherries, kiwis, pistachios, grapes, wine. Everything out of the Bible and lots more, all grown within a hundred miles of where we are right now." Lisa stared out of the windows with more interest than she had displayed since I had met her. Had that been only two or three hours ago? About an hour and a half after we left the restaurant we reached the Highway 152 turnoff that would take us east to U.S. 99 which runs down the center of the valley like a stream bed following the low point in a valley.

Having at last found something to catch Lisa's interest, I expounded on every fact I knew or imagined I knew about the country through which we were traveling. Rather than being inhibited by the darkness I was stimulated by it as if I could paint a picture of the countryside with my words that might be more interesting than the real landscape when seen in the light of day.

When we turned east on Highway 152 I described the huge San Luis Reservoir which provided a substantial part of the vast amount of water which was required to make the valley bloom. I described the lake as expanse of clean water rippling under cloudless skies and dotted with fishermen and water-skiers and high-powered motorboats.

I thought she enjoyed my ramblings, but who could tell? Perhaps she was just humoring this strange man who seemed to have taken control of her life. I pretended, at least, that making her listen to me was preferable to letting her mind roam back over recent events.

I pointed out each irrigation canal that we crossed, the San Luis Canal, the Delta Mendota Canal, the Highline Canal, and tried to explain the massive irrigation network which comprised hundreds of miles of artificial rivers and stretched the length of the Valley. I told her that not even the Romans in their prime had built such a system, then I tried to explain who the Romans were. Anything to keep her interest. Not once did she let me down. She never nodded off, though certainly she must have been tired. She didn't retreat into a welter of "uh-huhs" and phrases like "isn't that interesting?" the way an adult subjected to such a boring monologue might have.

We passed through Los Banos, "A Friendly City," the sign at the edge of town proclaimed, and continued east, toward Highway 99. Here and there I could make out isolated farmsteads scattered across the Valley, each surrounded by a stand of eucalyptus, valley oak or bay laurel. Crossroads flashed by, Box Car Road, Turner Island Road, Road 15 3/4 . Who would name a street "Road 15 3/4"?

At one point we passed a sign depicting a sailfish leaping from the sea. Above it were the words, "Red Top Cafe" and below it, "Red Top World Famous Fish Museum." What wonders did it contain, I asked myself. As we approached the overpass for Highway 233 I could see, silhouetted against the night sky, the spindly stalks of hundreds of palm trees marching north and south along as if they were giant dandelions that had sprung up at the edge of the concrete. From their height I guessed they were coconut palms. Who could have planted them here, I wondered, and why? In an instant they were behind us, invisible again in the darkness.

Shortly we came to Chowchilla, a small town that everyone who has lived in Northern California for a while remembers. It was here in the 1980's that a couple of rich kids from Portola Valley, a wealthy suburb out behind Stanford University, kidnapped a school bus full of children, then buried the bus with the children still inside while the kidnappers tried to extort ransom for the youngsters' safe return. It felt somehow appropriate that we had to pass through it on our way back to Lisa's home.

Miraculously, the children and their bus driver were able to dig a passageway through the emergency hatch and escape. They made a TV movie about it, I recalled. The kidnappers are still in prison, though not teenagers any more. I seem to recall that they had recently asked for parole on the grounds that they had made a youthful mistake, were sorry, and had learned their lesson. As yet, the California prison system had not seen fit to release them.

Just past Chowchilla we joined Highway 99 south, down past Madera and Fresno, Kingsburg and Visalia. Farmersville and Goshen slipped behind us. As we neared Pixley I began to watch for the cut-off to Oakdale. I had ended my travelogue some miles before and Lisa was curled up in her seat, drowsing. The towns to the east now had names like Woody, Fountain Springs, and White River.

I remembered Oakdale because of jazz. I had a friend in college who was crazy about classical jazz and one weekend he talked me into taking a drive with him up to Three Rivers in the Sierra Nevada foothills to attend a jazz concert. After the concert we drove to the Sequoia National Park. I had noticed Oakdale on the Kern River south of the park. It was one of the larger towns in the area, maybe three thousand people, mostly financed by the summer tourists attracted by the Sequoia National Forest.

I left Highway 99 for Kings County Road which disappeared into a maze of orange groves. The trees, heavy with fruit, lined the two-lane like green walls. Roadside stands offered ten-pound bags of oranges for three dollars. In the winter, farmers take out burn permits to dispose of the agricultural detritus that has collected after the fall harvest but, as I drove deeper into the groves the scent of smoke was overpowered by the fragrance of the orange blossoms.

In March, as the farmers harvest one crop of oranges, the blossoms are already starting to form for the next cycle. This evening the sweetness of the flowers and the fruit was almost magical.

I passed through a village, barely more than a crossroads, Brier. Appropriately enough, the cross street was named Orange Belt Drive. Thirty seconds later Brier was only a memory and fifteen minutes farther still the orange groves vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. Now I entered mile after mile of rolling pasture land interspersed with grass-covered hummocks one to two-hundred feet high.

Maybe my sense of smell had been stimulated by the groves, or perhaps I was simply more aware of the odors that drifted in on the night air, but now I could smell the fresh grass covering the pastures. In the daytime herds of Holsteins would crowd the water troughs at the base of the windmills which dotted the landscape. Palm trees became more and more common, springing out of the night and appearing in my headlights at unpredictable intervals.

By eleven o'clock Lisa had fallen into a deep sleep. The pastures gradually grew more crowded with rounded hills and the road wound its way between them. Ahead of me the edge of the Sierra Nevada Mountains appeared as a distant, vague black wall. The road turned north and paralleled the Kern River for five miles or so, then turned into Oakdale's main street.

The majority of the town stretched along the highway. It was an ordinary sort of small town: a liquor store, video rental, gas station, Mexican restaurant, pizza parlor, post office, antique shop, church, school, hamburger stand, City Hall/Police Station, mini-mart. Only the mini-mart showed signs of life.

The manager was an older Hispanic man, maybe fifty, with luxuriant black hair and a full mustache just beginning to show an edge of gray. When I entered he looked up sharply, sized me up, then seemed to dismiss me as not an immediate threat. I didn't blame him. His was an occupation statistically more dangerous than that of FBI agent or professional soldier.

"Excuse me," I said when I reached the counter, "do you have any local maps for sale?"

"Harmony Realty had these fliers printed up," he said, handing me one. "You can keep it if you want."

The flier was a three-fold brochure showing the river with exaggerated sketches of fish and out-of-proportion buildings representing the principal commercial and civic locations: restaurants, the City Hall, and, of course, Harmony Realty. Four or five streets were labeled, none of them the one I wanted.

"What you looking for?" the clerk asked.

"Do you know where Avery Road is?"

The man, Al Guiterez, according to the label pinned to his shirt, thought for a second, then shook his head.

"Never heard of it. You sure it's around here?"

"This is Oakdale isn't it?"

"Sure is, but I don't know any Avery Road. There's an Alvy Road about five miles up the highway. Who you looking for?"

"Bill Taylor. Ring any bells?"

"Hmmmm, no. There's a Jerry Taylor who owns the Laundromat."

"Is his wife's name Peggy or Margaret?"

"Sandra. You sure you want Oakdale?"

"Is there anyone else I could ask? Someone who's lived here longer than you have?"

"Not likely. I was born twenty miles down the road. Been here all my life. Never been out of the state even. Hell, the farthest I've ever gotten is when the wife and I took the kids to Disneyland when they were small. Boy's a senior in high school now," he added proudly.

"No Avery Road?"

Mr. Guiterez shook his head.

"No Bill or William or Will Taylor or Peggy Taylor?"

"Nope ."

"Lisa Taylor?" I asked finally after a long pause, then held my breath. If I expected any sign of recognition, I was disappointed. Guiterez shook his head and his face showed no surprise or interest. Now what was I going to do? I must have made some simple mistake. I just needed a little time to correct it.

"Maybe I got the address wrong. Look, is there a motel or something around here? I'll try to figure this out in the morning."

"Sure," Al said, smiling now that I had asked a question he could answer. "Keep on up the road the way you're going, about a mile. Belair Motel. Nice place. Cable, HBO. Lots of room this time of year."

"Thanks," I said, suddenly tired, as if all of the energy that had kept me going for the last five hours had unexpectedly leaked away. I paid for a couple of bottles of apple juice and a packet of granola cookies and then got back into the car. Lisa was still asleep.

A few minutes later I pulled into the Belair Motel, a single story "U" with a very cold-looking swimming pool in the center. The neon "vacancy" light was flickering and most of the units appeared empty. A girl of about twenty watched me through the glass front door. After noting my rumpled suit and loosened tie she released the deadbolt.

"Help you?"

"Yeah, I need a room, make that two single rooms for tonight."

"Two rooms?" She looked over my shoulder but could not see Lisa slumped down in the front seat.

"Two rooms."

"How many people?"

"One person in each room."

"Two single rooms?"

Yes, you moron, I wanted to shout, two single rooms! Of course I didn't say that. My upbringing succeeded in containing the comment firmly within the confines of my skull.

"Yes, two people, two rooms, one person in each room."

"Okay, fill this out," she said as she handed me a three-by-five registration card.

"How much?" I asked without looking up.

"$45.50each, but that includes a continental breakfast from eight to ten." She sounded worried that I might decide to argue that such rates in the off-season were barely less than highway robbery. There was no danger of that. I just wanted to get Lisa safely to bed and get eight hours sleep. Tomorrow I would figure out where I had gone wrong and straighten things out. I had money in the bank, my credit cards, my Lexus, my PDA, my cell phone, my education, my position, my organized mind, and my determination. I was sure that whatever mistake I had made that I could fix it. What a fool I was.

Chapter Five

"Now, it starts to make some sense," Jimmie said when he saw the Lexus pull up the convenience store.

"I'm glad you understand it," Eric snapped. "The guy drives the kid out here in the middle of nowhere, then leaves her alone while he makes a quick trip to the 7-11. He couldn't get a microwave burrito back in the East Bay?"

"What's the name of this town, Eric?"

"Hey, I got it!" Ray broke in. "This town's named Oakdale. He thinks he's taking the kid home!"

"Give the man in the backseat a cigar."

"So he's a citizen after all," Eric concluded.

"Not just a citizen, Eric, a romantic, a hero in the making. It's not enough for our Mr. Peter Howard to have rescued the damsel in distress. He's planning on taking her home all by himself. He can already hear the applause. Don Quixote had nothing on him."

"Don who? Is that the customer in South America?"

"Jeez, Eric, don't you ever watch TV? He's a Spanish guy who was crazy about windmills. Right Jimmie?"

"I couldn't have said it better myself, Ray."

"Let's just cut the crap. So he's a citizen after all. What are we going to do?"

"We're going to follow him until he stops for the night. We cover up your license plate and wait until we're sure he's asleep. Then we grab him and the girl and we find out how much he knows and who he's told."

"And then?"

"And then we do our magic act."

"What?"

"We make him disappear."

Chapter Six

I followed the gravel drive to the far side of the motel and parked in front of unit 19.

"Wake up, Lisa. We have to get you into your room."

Lisa opened her eyes a crack and muttered sleepily, "Are we home? Are we there?"

"Almost. We're in Oakdale but it's too late to take you home tonight. We'll find your folks first thing in the morning. I've got you a nice motel room all to yourself."

I got out of the car and motioned for Lisa to follow me. After what had happened to her, I was afraid to pick her up, to carry her, even to touch her. I didn't want any contact, even of the most innocent sort, to cause her to classify me with the men whom I was sure had abused her. After a moment's hesitation, she cautiously joined me at the door. I went in first, turned on the lights, and checked out the room.

"I'm sorry I don't have any clean clothes for you," I called to her from the bathroom where I unwrapped a bar of soap then unfolded a clean towel and left them on the Formica counter next to the sink. When I returned to the room I saw that Lisa was still standing a few feet inside the doorway and staring fixedly at the bed.

"Look," I said, kneeling down so that our faces were on the same level, "this room is all yours. Why don't you go into the bathroom and wash up, then go to bed and get a good night's sleep."

She just stood there, her expression unreadable.

"It's going to be fine," I told her. "Tomorrow we'll find your parents and this will all be over." She stood there frozen for a moment longer, then walked slowly toward the bed. When she reached it I noticed how small she was next to it, her head less than two feet above its surface. I pulled back the blanket and sheet where they had been tucked in under the mattress.

"After I leave, lock the door," I said, pointing to the deadbolt. "Just twist it to the right. Then get washed up and go to bed. Don't open the door for anyone except me. I'll knock on your door tomorrow morning at eight o'clock." I pointed to the digital clock on the dresser opposite the bed. "Do you need anything before I leave?"

"Where are you going?"

"My room's right next door. If you need anything, just pound on the wall."

"Why are you leaving me alone here?"

"You need your privacy, Lisa. Don't worry. Everything will be fine. I'll only be ten feet away. Just remember, don't open the door for anyone but me." She didn't say anything, just stared at me with an expression that I found unreadable, opaque. I thought for a moment about the man at Marty's Rib Pit.

"So, no matter what anyone says, no matter who it is, you keep the door locked. You only open it for me. Understand?"

"How will I know it's you?"

"I'll knock like this," I said after a moment's pause, and tapped my knuckles on the night table three times, "knock," pause, "knock, knock."

"Here, let me show you again. Knock, then knock, knock. Okay?"

"Okay," she answered with a brief, uncertain smile.

I walked to the door and turned to look back at her. She had not moved from the turned-down bed. She seemed smaller and more vulnerable than she had appeared only a few minutes ago.

"Don't worry, Lisa," I said smiling. "Everything will be fine. You'll see." I held up my hand and waved to her. She hesitated a moment, smiled again, almost painfully, and waved back. Watching her through the narrowing opening, I slowly closed the door.

"Turn the lock, Lisa," I called through the door. I waited five seconds, ten, then heard the deadbolt click home. I let myself into unit 20 next door, an exact duplicate of Lisa's room down to the picture of the rainy Paris street scene on the wall over the bed. I pulled off my rumpled clothes and dropped them onto the vinyl chair. Wearing only my underwear I washed my face and then climbed into bed. I was sure that as soon as I turned off the bedside lamp that I would sink into a dreamless sleep like a stone dropped into a deep, still pond, but I didn't.

When I closed my eyes Ken's face floated through my mind. Ken in the mini-mart. Ken getting into his VW. Ken pulling his gun, his face edged with the glare from my headlights. Ken staring at Lisa with a hungry look as he undid his pants. I tried to will the image away and it vanished, for a moment, then reappeared. "Think about something else," I told myself.

I replayed the events of the day and tried to figure out how I had come to be here in this deserted motel in the Sierra Nevada foothills with a ravaged child. Step by step each event seemed to make sense, to have a logical connection with the one before it and the one after, but the chain of circumstances, as a whole, was tangled and confused and out of place in my normally well-ordered life.

Why was I here? Why hadn't I just taken my chances and called the police, given them the child, and had done with it? I could have made her someone else's problem. But that would be treating her like a lost sweater or suitcase.

"Lost and found? Yeah, I found this kid. Here, you take care of her. I'm a busy man. I have things to do." How could I abandon her like that? Like Janet had done to our daughter. I kept thinking of the words to "Amazing Grace."

"I once was lost, but now I'm found."

I could get her home as well as the police, better, I was sure. I would return her back to her parents as fast as the cops would. And I wouldn't call in the reporters. I wouldn't ask her a lot of painful questions. I wouldn't frighten her as they surely would. I could protect her from all that. This was something I could fix. Almost anything can be put right if you just work hard enough. Besides, it was almost certainly too late for me to call the police.

"If you were only going to take her home, Mr. Howard," I could imagine the detective asking me, "why did you take her to that motel? What did you really have in mind, Mr. Howard?"

"Are you crazy? Do I look like a child molester?"

"What does a child molester look like, Mr. Howard?"

"You said you were taking her home, Mr. Howard, but how is it that you took her somewhere that no one knows her?"

No, it was way too late to call the police, even if they weren't already looking for me. Too many questions would be raised. I would become a suspect. And then what would happen to Lisa, assuming they didn't give her right back to Ken? Oh, sure, eventually, the truth would come out, but would Lisa still be alive when that happened? She was the only witness to Ken's abuse. If he got the chance to get rid of her he could claim that he had found her, that she had told him that she had no family and that, as a good Christian, he had taken her in and cared for her. Too bad she had that terrible accident and now she's dead. I knew it sounded paranoid but should I gamble Lisa's life on it? Not when it wasn't necessary. By tomorrow night, I'd have her home again, safe and sound.

"You've got no alternative now," I warned myself. "You're stuck. It's too late to call the cops. You're just going to have to take her home and then no one can accuse you of anything."

Yes, that's the logical reason I gave myself. But the emotional reasons held more sway over me. I had found something that needed to be done and about which I had no moral doubts. As contrasted with every other aspect of my life, this was not about rules, this was about justice. I had faced down a man with a gun, for her. How she had come into my life was unimportant now. I had taken on a job that I was not about to give up---I would not give her up. I was determined that I was going to be the one who put her into her parents' arms.

I thought about the gray-haired man and tried to remember his face, the color of his eyes, the sound of his voice. If he was one of her kidnappers I had let him get away.

I rolled over and opened my eyes. The digital clock showed 2:14. I must have slept, but I didn't feel like it. I put a pillow over my head and tried to concentrate on some restful scene that would wash the events of the past eight hours from my mind. A few moments later I threw off the pillow and looked at the clock again: 3:08. I was exhausted but I couldn't sleep and I realized that I had to use the toilet. I rolled out of bed, stumbled to the bathroom. A minute later I was just about to crawl back between the sheets when I heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive. I eased back the curtain but didn't see any headlights. I pulled the drapes a few more inches apart. The sound of the car drew closer. I rested my forehead against the glass. After a second or two I caught a glimpse of a dark van creeping up the drive with its lights off.

Sometimes the thing that frightens us most is the prospect of looking foolish. The urge to conclude that the noise downstairs is just the house settling, that the commotion next door is just the TV, that the "bang" from across the street is just a car backfiring. When I was a boy we lived next door to an old lady, Mrs. Schlosher. One day while I was watching television I heard her voice, calling. I paused and listened, heard nothing, and assumed that I had been mistaken. I found out later that she had fallen and needed help. I had ignored what I had heard because I didn't want to appear foolish. Sometimes looking foolish is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Now, I didn't hesitate.

I pulled on my pants and slipped my bare feet into my shoes. I heard the van stop outside my door. What if it was Ken or maybe the gray-haired man? What if they had followed me from the restaurant?

"You're paranoid, Peter," I told myself. "You've got the middle of the night heebie-jeebies. Tomorrow morning you're going to feel like an idiot."

"Fine," I argued with myself. "I'd rather be a healthy idiot in the morning than a rational victim tonight."

I needed some kind of a weapon. I heard the van's door slide open. I looked around the darkened room. Everything was built-in or bolted-down except the lamp on the bedside table. Most motels had abandoned freestanding lamps in favor of wall fixtures, which were harder to steal.

The lamp had a ceramic base topped with a cylindrical shade. I unscrewed the wing nut and discarded the shade. Footsteps crunched across the gravel outside. At first the electric cord refused to come loose, then, finally, I managed to pull the plug from its socket. Hurriedly, I wrapped the wire around the shade support then grabbed it with my hand on top of the coil of wire. The base was weighted and I held the lamp like a club.

I heard a faint scratching at my lock. In a minute they would be through the door. If I stood behind it, it would slam into me when they threw it open. If I stood anywhere else I would be an easy target. I needed something to keep the door from swinging all the way back. I put down the lamp and set the chair against the wall behind the door. The knob rattled but the deadbolt held.

I picked up the lamp and squeezed flat against the wall. The scratching stopped and the night was absolutely still. The lamp dangled from my right hand. For half a minute nothing happened and I wondered if the deadbolt had defeated them. I let out the breath that I had been holding and, at that instant, the lock shattered and the door flew back, crashed into the chair and rebounded only to be thrust aside as several shapes raced into the room.

It looked as if there were three of them. When the last man passed me I pushed the door out of the way and clubbed him with the base of the lamp. I don't know what I expected. I suppose that I thought it would feel like hitting a rock or that it would make a dull thud as if I had pounded on a side of beef. But it wasn't like that at all. At first there was resistance, a brittle snap, then a sickening release like the edge of a spoon breaking through the eggshell.

My victim collapsed without uttering a sound. The second man started to turn and I swung a poorly aimed blow that bounced off his shoulder. So much for the element of surprise.

I began shouting at the top of my lungs: "Police! Call the police! Burglars! Help! Call the police!" I backed out of the door, leaving the intruders alone in the room. Once outside, my cries echoed off the stucco face of the motel. Between my shouts I heard voices from my room.

"Grab Ray, we've got to get out of here."

"Check the bathroom!"

Suddenly a light showed in the manager's apartment and I heard a man's voice call: "What's going on out there?"

"Burglars!" I shouted again. "Call the police! Call the police!"

"You out there," the manager shouted back. "The deputies are on their way. I've got the cops coming!"

"Grab Ray's shoulder."

"Leave him!"

"If he talks, we're all finished. Now grab him and let's get out of here."

It suddenly occurred to me that I was standing there half naked, holding a broken lamp, and about to confront two men who might well be armed. I ducked past the end of the motel and hid around the corner. They dragged out the man I had hit and threw him through the van's open door, the door that Lisa and I would have disappeared through had things gone differently.

The unconscious man's heels dug furrows in the gravel and he landed on the floor like a sack of grain. Had I killed him? Was this one of the men who had abducted Lisa? One of Eric's gang?

The van's engine roared to life and they tore through the gravel, across the grass between the motel's two "arms" and then out onto the highway in a thunder of pistons and spinning tires.

When the van reached the road its tires screeched and I could smell the stench of burning robber. Its headlights flickered and it headed north, up the highway.

Once they had gone, the owner, a skinny, balding little man somewhere between fifty and seventy, came running over. I reached inside the shattered doorway and flicked on the light. The glow spilling from the room painted his features with a pale yellow cast. He wore a brown wool bathrobe that looked like it had been cut from an old blanket belted over white cotton pajamas which were short above his ankles and baggy at his wrists. Round, steel, wire-framed glasses made his eyes seem too large for his head.

"What the hell's going on?" he barked when he reached the gravel drive in front of my room. He strutted past my car and stared at me as if I were some vandal who had decided to single-handedly destroy his motel. His gaze focused on my right hand which still clutched the fractured table lamp. "What do you think you're doing?" he demanded when he noticed its cracked base. "You know, you're going to have to pay for that!"

I was about to explain that I was the victim here when I heard the wail of the sheriff's cruiser. "Why don't we wait until the police get here so I don't have to say everything twice," I told him, then leaned back against the stucco wall. The patrol car turned into the drive and the siren slowly spun down into silence.

God, where do they get these guys, I asked myself. Are they stamped from some genetic cookie cutter? Caucasian; between twenty-one and thirty; short hair: one blond, almost crew cut, the other's hair medium-length brown; one with blue eyes, one with gray; high school graduates; ten or fifteen weeks, if they were lucky, in a physical fitness-based training course, then given a badge, a gun, a club, and told to enforce a set of laws that not even lawyers, judges, or the Supreme Court itself pretended to understand.

"George," the blond one said, nodding to the manager. "What's this all about?"

"Ask him," he said pointing at me. "Sally checked him in. First thing I know I hear a crash and he's shouting for the police. I look out the window and see a van tearing up my lawn, racing out of here like a bat out of hell and him standing there holding a busted-up lamp. Now you know as much as I do," he grumbled and stared at me accusingly.

"What happened is--" I started to say but was cut off immediately.

"Just a minute, sir," the blond one interrupted. He said "sir" the way most people would have said "ax murderer."

"Name please."

"Peter Howard."

"Address?"

I gave him my address, my work phone number, my home phone number, my fax number, my driver's license, and then he confirmed that the car in front of unit 20 was, in fact, registered to me. I finally gave him one of my business cards which identified me as the CEO of the Orayis Division of NowSoft Corporation.

"Okay, Mr. Howard, why don't you tell us what happened."

Tell us what happened. And my answer was . . . ? I glanced, briefly, toward Lisa's room. The lights were out. It appeared deserted. If I was going to tell them the whole story, now was the time. I looked at the deputy and, incongruously, remembered my high school history class. When Caesar had returned to Rome against orders, he became a criminal. Once he crossed the Rubicon River it was too late for him to turn back. When Caesar reached that point of no return, he is supposed to have said, "The die is cast."

"I was in bed," I began. "I woke up and had to go to the bathroom. When I came back to bed I heard a car out here on the gravel but I noticed that its headlights weren't on. That seemed strange to me. I heard it stop in front of my room. I got scared. I thought that since I was from out of town that I might be the target for some crime.

"I heard them approach the door and they started fooling with the lock. I unplugged the lamp and stood behind the door. They kicked it open and ran in. I hit one of them with the lamp and knocked him down. Then I swung on the second one but only landed a glancing blow and I ran out of the room, and shouted for someone to call the police. They grabbed their friend, the one I knocked down, and drove away. That's all I know."

The blond cop glanced briefly at his partner and turned back to me. I knew that look. It was an expression that said: "Sure, that's all you know. I believe that. Now tell me the one about the Three Bears." The deputy stared at me a moment longer, daring me to tell him what this was really all about. I kept my mouth firmly shut. If I started talking about kidnappers and lost children, they'd want to put me in the loony bin, until they saw Lisa. Then, they would check their computer and tag me as a kidnapper and child molester. They would just love to arrest some Bay Area executive on a nice juicy felony. "Geraldo" here we come. And what would they do to Lisa?

I knew the answer to that. They would try to make her to confess that I had molested her. They would keep at her and at her, trying to make her tell them what they wanted to hear. I couldn't take the chance, not with Lisa's life, not with my own. Ken and his police chief brother and those cops in Crown City had already stacked the deck against us. The die was cast.

"Tell me, Mr. Howard," the blond officer began overly politely, "do you have any drugs in your room or your car?"

"No, I don't."

"Would you mind if we took a look in your room?"

"Help yourself."

"Bob," the blond cop said, turning to his partner, "why don't you check the car. That okay with you, Mr. Howard?"

"Sure."

Yes, I could have told them to go to hell, to get a search warrant, but that would only convince them that I was a co-conspirator in a drug deal gone wrong rather than an innocent traveler targeted by a band of thugs. Since I didn't have any drugs it was easier to let them search.

"May I have the keys, please?" the dark-haired officer asked.

"When you finish searching my room," I told him. "One thing at a time. I want to watch you."

"Are you implying that you think we might plant some drugs on you?" the blond asked.

"I'm not implying anything. I don't know you. You don't know me. I've been the victim of a violent assault and you're acting as if I'm the criminal. That makes me very uncomfortable. You mistrust me. That makes me mistrust you. So we'll do this together. You can start with my room. Help yourself. You won't need a key to get in."

Again, one of those looks, those, Doesn't this guy think he's soooo cute expressions passed between the deputies, then they went inside. The search didn't take long.

"Where's your bag?" the blond asked.

"I don't 'have one."

"Shaving kit?"

"Don't have one."

"Clean underwear?"

"Don't have any."

"Where'd you say you were from?"

"Los Altos Hills, between San Jose and San Francisco."

"That's what, three, four hour drive from here?"

"Something like that."

"And you drove all the way down here and you didn't bother to bring even a razor or a change of clothes?"

"That's right."

"Sounds like a rush trip. What's the emergency?"

"I have to interview someone in connection with a major project for my company. It came up at the last minute."

"Who are you here to see?"

"William Taylor."

"Never heard of him," the blond one said. "How about you, Bob?"

"News to me. Where does he live?"

"Avery Road."

"What city?"

"Oakdale."

The blond cop looked at his partner who shook his head. "George?"

"I don't know what he's talking about."

"You sure it's Avery Road?"

"That's my information."

"Mr. Howard, there is no Avery Road in Oakdale, or anywhere else around here."

"Are you sure? Couldn't there . . . ?"

"Mr. Howard," the brown-haired deputy, Bob, cut in, "I've lived here all my life. Jack and I drive these roads eight hours a day, every day. If there were an Avery Road within twenty miles of here, I would know it, or Jack would, or George would."

"But my client was very sure. Avery Road, Oakdale."

"Oakdale, California?"

"What?" Of course it was California. It had to be California, didn't it? But wait. Lisa hadn't told me the state. She just said "Oakdale." I assumed it was Oakdale, California. But young children sometimes have a spotty understanding of geography. When I was four or five my parents told me that we were going to Canada for a vacation. They explained that Canada was a foreign country. I remember asking them what the people in Canada looked like. Did they have two heads, four arms? Maybe Lisa probably didn't know what state Oakdale was in.

"Is there another Oakdale?" I asked, embarrassed.

The deputies looked at each other with an expression that seemed to say: Boy, you're a real smart executive!

"You'd have to check with the library on that one, Mr. Howard," Jack said overly politely.

"Hell, there are probably ten or twenty of them," George said, glaring at me. "Jeanette at the post office told me that she gets mail for one Oakdale or the other all the time. Boys, am I done here? Do you need me anymore?"

"No, George. You can go on back to bed."

He started to leave, then turned back. "You're going to have to pay for that door, you know!"

"Why should I pay for it? I didn't kick it in. Those burglars did. Talk to your insurance company."

"It's your room. You're responsible. Besides," he said, looking at the deputies, "there's more to this than you're telling. I think you're mixed up with those guys. It's going to cost a hundred, two hundred dollars to fix up this mess. I'm not going to take the loss! Jack, you see that he pays!"

"George, go on back to bed and let us do our jobs," the blond cop ordered. The manager paused a moment, snorted, and stomped off across the torn-up lawn. Jack stared at me for a moment but I didn't say anything.

"Let's take a look at your car now, Mr. Howard, if that's still all right with you."

"Fine," I said, and walked over and opened the trunk. That search didn't take long either. Except for some CDs, an umbrella, a few tools, six road maps, and the usual odds and ends that collect in a glove compartment, the car was empty. "Satisfied?" I asked when they handed me back the keys. The blond cop pursed his lips in a sour expression and turned away. The brown-haired deputy, Bob, hesitated, then took a step toward me.

"Look, Mr. Howard, let's stop playing games here. We're not idiots. We've been on the job long enough to have learned a few things. Here you are, hundreds of miles from your home, no bag, no change of clothes, the only guy in this whole motel and out of nowhere three guys, not one guy or two guys, but three guys kick in your door in the middle of the night?

"If that's not enough, you're waiting for them with a lamp in your hand? You just happened to wake up? You just happened to put on your pants before they broke in? They don't stay to steal anything, even if you had something to steal? And you tell us you're here looking for someone we've never heard of who lives on a street that doesn't exist. Give us a little credit, Mr. Howard. You're no innocent victim here. There's a lot more you're not telling us. Why don't you level with us and we'll see what we can do."

What could I say? Trying to explain this would only make things a hundred times worse. And they might give Lisa back to Ken.

"I'm sorry you don't believe me. I don't know what else I can tell you."

"Okay, Mr. Howard, have it your way. We'll file a report. If you think of anything else, give me a call. Here's my card. Jack, let's get out of here."

"Right behind you," the blond deputy called and followed his partner back to their patrol car. I returned to my room, pushed the door closed and turned off the light. I put on my socks and shirt and gathered up my coat and tie then sat on the bed. I waited ten minutes until I was sure they were really gone, then I slipped out and knocked softly three times on Lisa's door.

"Lisa, it's me. Open the door." There was a pause of a few seconds, then I heard the lock turn. She opened the door a crack and peeked out. I slipped inside and closed the door behind me.

"Don't turn on the light," I said softly.

"What happened? Was it them?" she asked, her voice tight with fear. She's not crying. Why isn't she terrified, sobbing? Because they probably punished her every time she cried, I thought. Because they tried to kill everything alive and normal inside of her. I sat down on the floor about two feet in front of her.

"It's all right, Lisa. They're gone. There's no need to be afraid," I told her. You're lying, Peter, I told myself.

"They said I would never get away," she said, frightened but still not crying. "They said that if I tried to run away that they would catch me and kill me. They'll never let me go."

"They'll have to stop me first."

"They said they would kill anyone who helped me."

"They're liars and cowards. You mustn't believe anything they say. They'll say anything to frighten you, but it's just talk." I didn't know if she understood what I had said, or, if she did, if she believed me. "It's all right to be afraid," I said softly. "There's nothing wrong with that. But that doesn't mean we have to give in to our fear. Tell me, could you go back to Ken again? Could you?"

Lisa looked down, then after a moment's pause, raised her eyes. "No," she said quietly, and shook her head.

"Then there's no point in getting upset. You can't go back and I won't let them take you back. Look, sometimes the things that frighten us the most, that make life really, really hard are figuring out what to do.

"But we don't have that problem. You know that you can't go back to Ken and I know that I have to take your home. We don't have any decisions to make. So, in a way, that makes it easier for us. It's okay if you're a little afraid, but only a little."

"You could leave."

"No, I have to take you home."

"Why?"

"I gave you my word. I made a promise. A deal is a deal."

"But they might kill you."

"If you don't go home, I don't go home. It's both of us, together, no matter what."

"You're not going to leave me?"

"No."

"Never?"

"Not until you're home safe."

She stared at me for long a moment, her eyes clouded and confused. She didn't understand this. How could she? I wasn't sure that I understood it myself. For a moment I thought about Janet and our nonexistent daughter, then pushed the vision aside. In the end, that didn't matter. Understanding is often overrated. I had told her that I would not abandon her, no matter what, and that was more important to her than all the logic in the world. She clung to me, then rested her head against my shoulder, and, in a few minutes, was asleep.

Chapter Seven

How did I get into this business, Jimmie sometimes asked himself. But not often. He was not a contemplative man. Jimmie Devries rarely thought about the past, leastwise questioned it. He had no regrets and no long-term goals, other than a vague desire to become rich enough to be able to drink Cuba Libres beneath palm trees all day and screw compliant women all night. Not that he really planned on ending up that way. The fact was that he never thought about how he would end up at all.

Growing up on the Texas Panhandle Jimmie decided early on that there had to be better places to live than a dried-out truck-stop town surrounded by sand and cactus and fields of creosote bush. He escaped Stone Flats, Texas with a stint in the Army. Jimmie caught the tail end of Viet Nam and didn't know why people complained about it so much. Lots of excitement, money, if you knew the angles, and more women than you could screw in a lifetime. And the Army liked his work.

Jimmie got more information, more "cooperation," from suspected VC sympathizers than anyone else in his unit. It was a good life, until the war ended. Jimmie figured he would make a career out of the Army then he got home and all the bullshit started. Rules, rules, and more rules. It got so you couldn't take a piss without written permission. And nothing to do all day but push papers and salute officers. The stateside Army had become boring, stingy, and offered little chance of advancement or reward for someone with Jimmie's talents.

By '74 Jimmie was looking for a new career and he was still just a kid, if you didn't look too deeply into his flat gray eyes. But the Army had taught him valuable lessons: the benefits of planning, organization, and adopting a sound strategy tailored to your mission's objectives.

For a while Jimmie worked odd jobs, a payroll stickup here, a jewelry store take-down there, but his first arrest cured him of any inclination to remain a hired hand. One of the morons he went into the jewelry store with pistol-whipped the clerk. This encouraged the police to look a little bit harder than might otherwise have been the case, which meant paying one of their snitches a hundred bucks for information on who was spending too much money and who was trying to sell women's watches out of the trunk of his car. Jimmie's partner was soon picked up and he instantly fingered Devries.

In spite of dire threats by the detectives coupled with vague promises of "consideration" if he cooperated, Jimmie kept his mouth shut and the case against him was eventually dismissed when the police could find no evidence to corroborate his partner's claims, the testimony of a co-conspirator being legally insufficient, standing alone, to convict.

Jimmie learned his lesson. From then on, he was the boss of his own scores. Just to make sure that he wasn't ratted out again, nine months later Jimmie's former partner was found dead on the sidewalk outside the Gray Bar Tavern, with his tongue cut out. The police could never prove anything, but the message was clear: it wasn't healthy to roll over on Jimmie Devries.

For a while after that Jimmie worked as a "professor," planning jobs for a percentage of the take, but seldom participating directly. His Army training stood him in good stead in organizing the details of the crime and in making sure that he wasn't denied his share of the loot.

As the years went by, Jimmie diversified: occasional drug smuggling, one or two big-score robberies each year, and a growing reputation as a specialist. If the money was right and the target wasn't too hot, Jimmie would get rid of someone for you, permanently. Since he never paid taxes, Jimmie was able to squirrel away a good chunk of cash, until he met Linda.

It was as if he had been saving all of his stupidity for one big jerk binge. By the time it was over, he had lost $50,000, most of which vanished when Linda did. Jimmie often amused himself with thoughts of how he would kill her and how long it would take her to die, if only he could find her. But Linda was now Debbie, living in Miami, and married to a successful orthopedic surgeon. It was unlikely that their paths would ever cross again.

So, in need of money and too old to be taking down check cashing parlors, Jimmie hit on the child-stealing racket. The right kid would bring twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars, maybe more if you could find a "motivated" buyer. Plus, you could turn them over. When the buyer got bored and wanted a new toy, if he hadn't killed the kid, you could re-sell the merchandise to someone else. If the kid made it until twelve or thirteen, you could get another ten or fifteen thousand from a pimp who would turn them out. Of course, there wasn't much left of them by the time they were nineteen or twenty, if they lived that long, but that wasn't Jimmie's problem.

And, until now, things had worked out. Still, his current problems were solvable. Ray's body would disappear into the woods. No one would miss him. Lisa and Peter Howard were still on the loose, but Jimmie was confident that he and Eric would soon remedy that.