Long Lost Read online

  19

  I vaguely remember going out to clear a drift from the smoke hole and to find more fuel. Otherwise, everything blurred. A couple of times when I woke, the flames had died out. On those occasions, all that kept me from freezing to death was the heat that the boulders had absorbed.

  When I noticed that the pressure bandage around my left forearm was completely pink from the bleeding under it, I didn’t react with dismay—the arm seemed to belong to someone else. Even when I saw sunlight beyond the branches and drifts at the entrance to my shelter, I felt oddly apart from it. Eventually, I discovered that an entire day had passed, but while I was trapped in the shelter, time hardly moved.

  Probably I’d have lain in a stupor until energy totally failed me, if it hadn’t been for water dripping through the roof. The cold drops struck my eyelids, shocking me. The sunlight was painfully bright. I moved my head. The drops fell into my mouth, tasting vaguely of turpentine from the resin on the pine branches. I gagged and spat the water out, sitting up to reach a dry spot.

  More drops splashed around me, raising smoke from the almost—dead fire. Coughing, I grabbed my knapsack and stumbled outside, kneeing through the branches and drifts at the entrance. The heat of the sun was luxurious. Snow fell from trees. Rivulets started to form. Standing in the melting snow, my feet and shins became wet again, but it was a different kind of wet, the sun warming me, so that I didn’t shiver. From the sun’s angle in the east, I judged that the time was midmorning. As much as my body didn’t want to move, I knew that if I didn’t take advantage of the improved weather, I might never have another chance.

  I took a long look back at the shelter. It was loose and flimsy, as if a child had put it together, and yet I’d never been prouder of anything I’d designed.

  I started down. Light reflecting off the snow lanced my eyes. By the time the sun was directly overhead, much of the snow had melted, the ground turning to mud as I crossed the first meadow. Still, the road remained hidden, and with little to guide me, all I could do was keep heading downward, aiming toward breaks in the trees where the road possibly went through them.

  I don’t remember reaching Highway 9, or collapsing there, or being found by a passing motorist. Apparently, that was at sunset. I woke up in a small medical clinic in a town called Frisco.

  By then, a state trooper had been summoned. He leaned over the bed and wanted to know what had happened to me. I later found out that it took him twenty minutes to get a coherent account from me. I kept screaming for Jason, as if my son was within arm’s reach and I could help him.

  The doctor stitched my left forearm. He disinfected and bandaged my hands, which he was worried might have frostbite.

  The state trooper returned from talking on the phone. “Mr. Denning, the Denver police sent a patrol car to your house. The lights were off. No one answered the doorbell. When they aimed a flashlight through a garage window, they saw your Ford Expedition.”

  “In the garage? That doesn’t make sense. Why would Petey have gone back to the house?” The awful implication hit me. “Jesus.”

  I tried to scramble out of bed. It took both the doctor and the state trooper to stop me.

  “The officers broke a window and entered your house. They searched it thoroughly. It’s deserted. Mr. Denning, do you have any other vehicles?”

  “What difference does …” My head pounded. “My wife has a Volvo.”

  “It isn’t in the garage.”

  That didn’t make sense, either. “The bastard must have taken it. Why? And where are my wife and son?” The increasingly troubled look on the trooper’s face made me realize that he hadn’t told me everything.

  “The master bedroom and your son’s room had been ransacked,” the trooper said.

  “What?”

  “Drawers had been pulled out, clothes scattered. It looked to the Denver officers as if somebody tore through those bedrooms in an awful hurry.”

  I screamed.

  Part Two

  1

  No matter how desperately I wanted to get home, the doctor refused to release me until the next morning. The state trooper drove me back to Denver. My right wrist ached from the IV the doctor had given me. After two days without food, I should have been ravenous, but the shock of my emotions killed my appetite. I had to force myself to chew slowly on a banana and take small sips from a bottle of orange juice.

  When we turned onto my street, I saw the maple trees in front of our Victorian, a van and a station wagon in our driveway, and a Denver police car at the curb. Farther along were other cars and two trucks from local TV stations.

  Getting out of the cruiser, I recognized the female television reporter who stalked toward me, armed with a microphone, a cameraman behind her. Her male equivalent from a rival station wasn’t far behind. Reporters scrambled from the other cars.

  “How the hell did they find out?” I asked.

  “Get in the house.”

  Holding out his arms, the state trooper formed a barrier while I limped across the lawn. The pants and shirt the doctor had lent me (my own had been rags) hung loosely on me, increasing my sense of frailty. I managed to get inside and shut the door, blocking the noise of the reporters shouting my name. But other voices replaced them. A police officer, several men in sport coats, and others holding lab equipment stood in the living room, talking to one another.

  One of the men, heavyset, with a mustache, noticed me in the foyer and came over. “Mr. Denning?”

  The motion of nodding made me dizzy.

  “I’m Lieutenant Webber. This is Sergeant Pendleton.” He indicated a younger, thinner man, clean—shaven.

  “We checked the attic, the basement, and the trees in back. There’s no sign of your wife and son,” Pendleton said.

  For a moment, I didn’t understand what the detective was talking about. The officers who’d entered the house the previous night had said that Kate and Jason weren’t home. If Petey had taken them in Kate’s Volvo, why would the police now have checked the attic and the … I felt sick when I realized that they’d been searching for well—hidden corpses.

  “You don’t look so good, Mr. Denning. You’d better sit down.” Webber guided me into the living room, where the other men shifted to the side. “I’ll get you some water.”

  Despite the fluids the doctor had given me, I still felt parched. When the detective came back with a full glass, I had a moment’s disorientation, as if this were his home and I were a guest. I held the glass awkwardly between my bandaged hands and took a swallow. My stomach protested. I managed to ask, “You’ve no idea where my wife and son are?”

  “Not yet,” Webber said. “The state police relayed what you told them, but we need to ask you some questions.” He looked at the scrapes on my face. “Do you feel strong enough to answer them?”

  “The sooner I do, the sooner I’ll get my family back.”

  A look passed between them, which I understood only later—they weren’t as confident as I was that I’d get my family back.

  “It would help if …” Pendleton glanced at where my fingertips projected from the bandages on my hands. “We need to take your prints.”

  “Take my … But why would …”

  “So we can separate yours from the man who kidnapped your family. Which bedroom was his?”

  “Go to the left at the top of the stairs.” I felt out of breath. “The room’s at the end of the hall. On the right.”

  “That’s the one with the baseball glove on the bed,” Webber told a technician.

  “Baseball glove?” I tensed. “On his bed?”

  Pendleton frowned. “Yes. Is that important?”

  “The glove was Petey’s a long time ago.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s saying he doesn’t want the damned thing anymore. Because he’s got something better.”

  “Slow down, Mr. Denning. We’re not following you.”

  As a technician pressed my fingertips on an ink
y pad and then onto a sheet of paper that had a place for each digit, I tried as hard as I could to make them understand.

  2

  “Long—lost brother?”

  “God help me, yes.”

  “But how did you know he really was your brother?”

  “He told me things only my brother could have known.”

  The detectives gave each other that look again.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just a thought,” Webber said. “Maybe you heard what you wanted to hear. Some con men are good at making general statements sound specific. The people they’re trying to fool fill in the gaps.”

  “No. I tested him. He got every detail right.”

  “They can be awfully clever.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense. A con man’s motive would have been robbery. All he’d have needed to do was wait until Kate and I went to work and Jason was at school. He’d have had all day to loot the house. He wouldn’t have needed to try to kill me. That was personal. That was Petey getting even!”

  Pendleton made a calming gesture. “We’re just trying to get a sense of the man we’re after.”

  “For God’s sake, a con man wouldn’t be stupid enough to add murder and kidnapping to a burglary charge.”

  “Unless he enjoyed violence.”

  The direct look Webber gave me was dizzying in its effect. All along, I’d worked to assure myself that Jason and Kate were alive. Now, for the first time, I admitted to myself that Jason might be dead in the mountains, that Kate’s body might be lying in a ditch somewhere.

  I almost threw up.

  Pendleton seemed to sense my panicked thoughts. His tone suggested an attempt to distract me. “You don’t happen to have a photograph of him, do you?”

  “No.”

  “With the excitement of the homecoming, you didn’t take any pictures?”

  “No.” I wanted to scream. If only I hadn’t let a stranger into my house …

  But he isn’t a stranger, I tried to tell myself.

  What the hell’s the matter with you? I thought. After twenty—five years, Petey is a stranger!

  “Mr. Denning?”

  I looked over at Pendleton, realizing that he’d said my name several times in an effort to get my attention.

  “If you’re able, we’d like you to walk through the house and tell us if anything’s missing.”

  “Whatever I have to do.”

  They handed me latex gloves and put on their own. Unsteady, I began in the downstairs rooms, and immediately I noticed that the silverware Kate had inherited from her grandmother was no longer on the sideboard in the dining room. A silver tea set was missing also. In the TV room, the DVD and videotape players were gone, along with an expensive audio/video receiver.

  “He’d probably have taken the T V, too,” I said bitterly, “except that it’s forty—six inches and wouldn’t fit in the Volvo. I don’t understand why he didn’t keep the Expedition. It’s got more room. He could have stolen more things.”

  Webber looked uncomfortable. “We’ll talk about it later. Finish checking the house.”

  The microwave and the Cuisinart food processor were missing from the kitchen. Numerous compact power tools were gone from the garage. My laptop computer wasn’t in my office.

  “What about firearms?” Pendleton asked. “Do you have any in the house? Did he take them?”

  “No guns.”

  “Not even a hunting rifle?”

  “No. I’m not a hunter.”

  I made my way upstairs and froze at the entrance to Jason’s room, seeing his drawers pulled out, his clothes scattered on the floor. It took all my willpower to step inside and look around.

  “My son saves his loose change in a jar on his desk,” I said.

  It wasn’t there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.” Pendleton spoke reluctantly. “But the Volvo has something that the four—wheel—drive vehicle doesn’t.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “A trunk.”

  “A …” Understanding forced me to sit.

  “Maybe it isn’t a good idea to go into the details.”

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

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

  A rope seemed to cut into my wrists.

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

  “So he put them in the …”

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

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

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

  He put away the phone.

  “Something?” I straightened, nervously hoping.

  “The Volvo’s been found. At a rest stop off Interstate Twenty—five.”

  “Kate and Jason? Are they—”

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

  “Wyoming?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Three people trying to breathe in a trunk? Jesus.”

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

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

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

  “Montana’s north of Wyoming.”

  They looked at me as if I was babbling.

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

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

  “We’ll contact the Butte police department,” Pendle—ton quickly added. “Maybe they know something about this guy. If he’s been arrested, they’ll have a photograph of him that we can circulate.”

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

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

  I tried hard to believe what they were saying.

  “Have you a recent photograph of your wife and son?”

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