Listening, he heard a man’s voice, hard and insistent, the old woman’s protesting. Then the man being taken to a room, before the old woman climbed the stairs above his head. Danny waited in the dark, hearing another conversation upstairs, followed by two sets of footsteps descending.
He pressed himself into the shadows beneath the stairs as the old woman passed on her way back to the kitchen. A few more seconds as he listened again, voices in the room along the hall. Then Danny slipped out of the alcove and moved to the foot of the stairs. He climbed the two flights to the landing above, checked each of the doors.
All but number three were locked. He went inside and waited.
More than twenty minutes passed before he heard Audra approach her room.
29
AUDRA SHOT TO her feet.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’
The man put his hands up, the brown paper bag still held in his left. ‘I’m sorry for sneaking in like this, it was the only way I could—’
She pointed at the door as she backed into the far corner. ‘Get out!’
‘Ma’am … Audra … please just let me talk to you.’
‘Get out,’ she said, still pointing. ‘Get out of here.’
‘Please just listen.’
‘Get out!’ Audra ran through her few remaining possessions in her mind, wondering which might serve as a weapon.
‘My name is Danny Lee,’ he said.
‘I don’t care what your name is, just get out.’
‘What you’re going through now,’ he said, ‘I went through the same thing five years ago.’
Anger outran Audra’s fear. ‘You don’t know shit about what I’m going through.’
He took a step forward and she grabbed the empty vase from the windowsill.
‘Just listen,’ he said, his hands up, his head down. ‘I think I know what they’re doing with your children. It might not be too late for them. Maybe I can help you get them back.’
She moved the vase from hand to hand. ‘You’re full of shit.’
‘Will you at least hear me out?’
Audra pointed to his hand. ‘What’s in the bag?’
‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘A sandwich from the diner. Are you hungry?’
Without thinking, Audra’s free hand went to her stomach.
‘Take it,’ he said, and tossed it onto the bed.
Audra left the corner, dropped the vase on the blankets, and lifted the bag. She opened the top and the smell of bacon and warm bread billowed out. Her stomach growled.
‘It’s good,’ the man said. ‘I had one earlier. Eat.’
Audra knew she shouldn’t. He could have put anything in it. But the smell. And she was so hungry. She reached inside the bag, pulled out half a sandwich, took a bite.
‘Why don’t you sit down,’ he said. ‘Give me five minutes to explain.’
She perched on the edge of the bed, chewed, swallowed. ‘You’ve got till the end of this sandwich,’ she said. ‘Now talk.’
30
DANNY AND MYA had fought before she left. Sara had asked, what’s wrong? Danny had stroked her hair and said, nothing, honey. But Sara was smart, and she knew. She saw the tears as she looked at her mother’s reflection in the rearview mirror.
Neither of them had called it a separation. Simply a couple of days away, Mya driving the few hours north to her parents’ place between Redding and Palo Cedro. She would be back after the weekend, she’d said, and neither of them had believed it.
Two hours into the drive, she had pulled off the interstate to find somewhere to eat. Outside the small town of Hamilton she was stopped by a police officer named Sergeant Harley Granger for a minor traffic offense. Something so trivial Danny couldn’t even remember what it was. According to the officer, Mya was agitated and uncooperative, so he radioed for another car to come and assist. Two of Hamilton Police Department’s six-strong fleet of cruisers at the scene. According to Granger and the other cop, Lloyd, Mya had no child in the car with her. She had a booster seat and a bag of clothes, but no sign of Sara.
By the time Danny got to the station in Hamilton, Mya was in a state of near-hysteria.
‘They took her,’ she said, over and over. ‘They took her.’
The FBI arrived the next morning. They questioned Mya for three straight days. On the fourth day, Mya tried to hang herself in her cell. After that, they let her go, and she and Danny drove back to San Francisco. The story made the regional news, and Mya’s photograph became a fixture on the evening bulletins. People they knew, old friends, stared at them in the street. The story held the press’s interest for about a week before the reporters moved on. But Danny’s and Mya’s friends did not. They kept staring, kept refusing the couple’s phone calls. All the while Danny and Mya voluntarily attended interviews at the FBI field office, while Hamilton PD compiled evidence.
What Danny didn’t know was that on that last morning the Hamilton Chief of Police called to tell Mya to surrender to them within twenty-four hours, for arrest in connection with the murder of her daughter. If she failed to do so, a warrant would be issued, and SFPD would execute it.
Danny had embraced her before he left for that evening’s Youth Outreach meeting, placed a kiss on her cheek. If he had known the finality of it, he would have held her longer, kissed her harder.
Five years ago, almost to the day. Danny arrived home from the meeting, feeling weary and worn. He called Mya’s name as he entered their darkened house, the silence telling him something was wrong. No sign of her in any of the downstairs rooms. As he climbed the stairs, he saw the closed bathroom, and the buckle of one his belts trapped between the top of the door and the frame.
He had to shoulder the door open, and he heard the buckle spring free, and a sickening weight hit the floor on the other side. An age passed as he stood there, knowing what he would find when he finally gathered the courage to look. But he did look, eventually, and he pulled the belt from Mya’s neck and sat cradling her for an hour, howling and blinded by tears, before he thought to call an ambulance.
Two months after Mya’s suicide, Danny drove back to Hamilton. Through his contacts in the SFPD, he had learned that Sergeant Granger had taken a leave of absence due to the stress of dealing with the case. He had gone to Mexico to recover. No one knew when he would return.
But Lloyd was still around, drinking in the town’s one small bar every night. Lately he’d been generous with his tips, bought lots of drinks for his friends. He’d even bought a new car. Nothing too fancy, an Infiniti, but upmarket enough to be noticed by those he drank with.
Lloyd was also known to be an idiot.
Danny waited and watched outside the bar. Lloyd lived only a twenty-minute walk away and would usually leave his new Infiniti parked on the street outside, to return for it in the morning. He was pissing in an alleyway when Danny snatched him.
An hour later, Lloyd was tied up, suspended by his wrists from a roof beam in an abandoned storage shed Danny had found a week before. No one for miles around to hear him scream. Danny took his time with the knife. Lloyd didn’t know much, only what Granger had told him. When Lloyd told Danny they’d received less money than they wanted because the little girl was mixed-race, Danny lost the sliver of control he had, and Lloyd died too quickly for his satisfaction. No matter, he would make up for it with Granger, and find out how to get to the buyer.
When he found the buyer, he would keep him alive just long enough to find out what they’d done with Sara. Whether they’d let her live or not. His higher mind knew the answer to that question, but he would ask it anyway. He would ask it hard.
Danny had a flight booked for Cabo San Lucas two days later, but when he arrived in Mexico and asked around, he discovered Granger had been stabbed to death in a bar fight a week earlier. On a beach, sand burning hot on the soles of his feet, Danny mourned for his wife and daughter, knowing he might never find the men who had destroyed his life.