“How desperate is he?” he asked Anne.
She moved a stray braid out of her eyes. “He’s obsessed with a former student,” she said. “An affair that ended ten years ago. I would say that he’s very desperate. If you’re asking me if there’s a possibility he’ll kill himself, I’d say there’s a strong one.”
A woman in one of the lofts across the street turned on a TV. “So you don’t think he’s killed her already?” Archie asked.
“No.” She paused. “But I could be wrong.”
“So where would he take her?” asked Henry.
Anne considered this. “He’ll take her somewhere where he feels safe. Where did he take the others?” she asked rhetorically.
“The boat,” answered Archie.
“McCallum’s boat,” Henry echoed. “But it’s gone.”
Archie considered this. Below them, on the street, someone in an SUV was attempting to parallel park. “Unless he’s got another boat.”
“No,” Claire said, joining them. “We checked the state marine board for all faculty and staff at the schools who fit the profile back in November. And again in February. And March. McCallum had only one boat registered. And he was the only one with a captain’s license.”
“He said he bought this boat a few years ago,” Archie said. “Maybe he kept the old one but let the registration lapse.”
“Can you do that?” asked Claire.
“Call the people,” Archie told her.
Claire pulled her phone off the waist of her pants. “Yep.” She stepped away to make the call.
“You okay?” Henry asked Archie.
Archie realized that he was standing with his hands on his hips, staring at the wood floor. Susan Ward was being held by some crazy jackass who was going to kill her, if he hadn’t already, and Archie wasn’t sure that he could save her. “I just need a minute,” he said.
Archie stood in Susan Ward’s bathroom. He could feel Henry’s worry wrap around him like a shroud. Keep it together , Archie thought. Then he said it out loud: “Keep it together.” He splashed some water over his face from the faucet and dried off with a hand towel that hung next to the sink.
He checked his watch. It was almost nine. An hour of reading and then lights-out.
He stopped himself. Don’t think about her. Not now. He had to focus on Susan. His nose itched. It was a nervous-system response to the Vicodin that his body had mostly quashed, but still occasionally surfaced. He gave it a vigorous rubbing. Great. Now on top of everything, they were all going to think that he was a cokehead. And there was Gretchen again, clear as day in his mind, lying in repose on her prison cot, propped on one elbow, The Last Victim in her hands. His wedding photograph was in that book.
“Boss?” Henry knocked gently at the bathroom door.
Archie blinked a few times at his bleary reflection and opened the door. Henry and Claire stood outside the bathroom.
“What do we have?” Archie asked.
Claire checked her notebook. “He registered the boat that burned down five years ago. Before that, he had another boat registered, a 1950 Chris-Craft Catalina. That registration lapsed eight months after he registered the new boat. But if he’d sold it locally, it would have been registered by someone else. And it hasn’t been.”
“So maybe he sold it to someone across the river,” Archie said.
“Maybe,” Claire agreed. “But according to the nice lady at the OSMB, until they clarified the rules in 2002, you didn’t have to keep current registration on a boat that wasn’t ‘in the water,’ which is to say, if you had a boat moored at a marina but weren’t actually taking it out, you could save having to pay the state fifteen bucks a year.”
Archie nodded. “The cheap bastard kept the boat.”
Henry crossed and uncrossed his arms. “That’s the one Reston would have used, because it’s the one that McCallum would have been less likely to notice was amiss.”
“‘Amiss’?” Claire said.
“I can’t use a fancy word?” Henry said.
Claire continued: “If we’re right, the boat would be at the same marina, right? I mean, most likely?”
“Let’s go,” Archie said.
Anne had walked up beside Henry. “Be careful. Because if you send in the cavalry and spook him, he’s likely to hurt her and himself.”
“If we’re right and he’s even there and she’s even still alive,” Archie said.
Anne nodded a few times. Behind her, out the window, in the loft across the street, the woman shut off her television set. Nothing on. “I need a diet Coke,” Anne said.
Then there was a sound from behind them, a sort of gasp, and every cop in the room turned to look at the front door. A middle-aged woman stood there. She wore a ridiculous handmade hat and a leopard-skin coat and tall lace-up platform boots. Her hair was a tangle of long blond dreadlocks. Her dark red mouth was open in a sort of surprised grimace.
“Who are you people?” she asked. “And where is my daughter?”
CHAPTER
45