Sketch Me If You Can Read online

  “Hold on, Frank, just hold on,” the marshal said. “You all saw the tracks headed this way. You never saw any doublin’ back, did you?”

  There was a moment of silence as they all chewed on that thought. “Those tracks played out more than an hour ago,” Jensen came back. “Ground around here’s so dry, it just won’t hang on to tracks for long.” This met with a chorus of grumbled agreement.

  “I’m going to Goose Flats,” he added with finality. “The rest of you can come with me or not.” He wheeled his horse around and dug in his spurs. One by one the others turned to follow him, leaving Ezekiel Drummond alone in the shade. Muttering about fools and idiots, he retied the bandana around his neck and continued westward alone.

  It was late afternoon by the time he reached the creek. An hour earlier, he’d given his horse the last of the water from his canteen, even though he knew the chestnut would slop more of it out of his cupped hand than he swallowed. So when he saw that the creek still carried a few inches of spring runoff, he closed his eyes for a moment and said a quick “thank you” to whatever angel was watching over them.

  Once he and the horse had quenched their thirst, he filled up his two canteens and they set out again. They’d gone only a few yards when he pulled the chestnut up sharply and jumped down. A scrap of blue and white gingham was impaled on the needle of a barrel cactus off to his right. He tugged the fabric off, and clasping it in his fist, mounted the horse again. Eight-year-old Betsy Jensen had been wearing a blue and white gingham dress when she was abducted. His instincts hadn’t failed him. Somewhat heartened, he pressed on.

  As darkness crowded daylight from the sky, he stopped at another small spring. His eleven-year-tenure as federal marshal for the southern Arizona Territory had etched in his head a pretty fine map of the region and it was serving him well this day.

  Under any other circumstances he would have made camp there for the night, but the most he could do was allow the chestnut an hour’s rest before moving on. And even that was time they didn’t have. On the other hand, running the animal into the ground would only prove to be his undoing as well, since his own two feet were hardly adequate for the journey ahead. He unsaddled the horse and hand fed him the oats he’d brought along, since the desert scrub couldn’t provide any real nourishment for him.

  The time passed with agonizing slowness. He checked his pocket watch often, squinting at the dial in the pale glow of the gibbous moon and wondering at times if it had stopped altogether. To distract himself, he took out the beef jerky he’d stowed in his saddle bag and gnawed off a piece. But he found that he had no stomach for food and ended up spitting the dried meat onto the desert floor.

  Finally the hour passed. He hoisted the saddle back onto the horse. Surprised to feel the familiar weight again so soon, the animal did a little backward dance. But trusting the man, he quickly accommodated himself to the situation. Drummond promised him a full two days’ rest and an apple once their journey was over. The chestnut twitched his ears as if he were listening and seemed to move forward with a lighter step.

  With only the moon to light the way, their progress was frustratingly slow and searching for tracks pointless. The marshal had no choice but to rely on gut instinct coupled with his years of experience crisscrossing the desert landscape. Trask most likely had a crude lair tucked away in the lee of a sandstone cliff or in a natural cave. A man kidnapped a little girl for only one of two reasons—to collect ransom or to satisfy some perverted pleasure. Since the Jensens were not people of great means, ransom wasn’t likely to be Trask’s purpose any more than it had been with the other girls he’d killed. As Drummond rode, he ran his hand over the vest pocket that now held the gingham fabric as well as his watch. It seemed like a talisman. He was going the right way. He was going to find her.

  Weary as he was, he remained alert for movement of any kind, rattlers and scorpions being fellow travelers of the night. If the chestnut were bitten by either one, their trip would be over.

  The first rays of dawn were peeking beneath the curtain of night when Drummond saw another piece of blue and white gingham sticking out from behind a good-sized boulder. Perhaps luck was with him after all. Had he passed this way any earlier, he would never have been able to distinguish the cloth from the other features of the desert. With a burst of renewed energy, he jumped down and ran over to it. What he saw when he came around the boulder caused him to sink to his knees. The breath left his body as if he’d been trampled by a herd of cattle.

  Before him Betsy Jensen’s small body lay broken and battered. Drummond drew the child into his arms, cradling her, a cry of outrage caught deep in his throat.

  Chapter 9

  After Zeke’s vanishing act, Rory stormed through the house, trying to whittle her own anger down to a manageable size. “How on earth is this insane arrangement ever going to work?” she muttered, circling through the first floor as if she were doing laps at a track meet. What could Mac have been thinking?

  When she wasn’t feeling any calmer by her fourth pass through the entry, she grabbed the keys from her purse and stormed out of the house to vent her frustration outside. Having forgotten that the roads in the area formed a maze of sorts, she didn’t make it back to the house for forty-five minutes. By then she was winded and thirsty and feeling less self-righteous. At some point in her impromptu marathon, she’d started to realize that Zeke had not been entirely at fault. She’d pushed him too far under the guise of trying to be helpful, condemned him for overreacting when she had no way of knowing the true depth or nature of the pain he so clearly carried. She knew nothing about him beyond the brief words in Mac’s letter, and yet she’d fooled herself into thinking that she could judge him.

  Once she was back inside, she called out to him in what she deemed a friendly, white-flag kind of tone. When there was no response, she tried again. Still no sign of him, no indication that he had even heard her. She wanted to apologize for her part in the argument, but she wasn’t going to apologize to an empty room.

  She drank a cold glass of water without coming up for air. Then she heated a frozen mini pizza in the toaster oven and ate it standing over the sink, too unsettled to sit down. She followed that with half a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream straight from the container, which somehow always tasted better that way. Her resolution to adopt a heart-healthy diet was failing miserably.

  She tried calling Zeke’s name again later that evening as she clicked through all the channels that cable television had to offer—a couple hundred of them and not a single thing worth watching. At midnight she gave up on the television and on him. If he wanted to ignore her and stew in his anger, she couldn’t stop him. Unfortunately he had a distinct advantage over her. He could be watching her at any given moment, while she had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Like a suspect in an interrogation room, she felt as if she were on the wrong side of a giant one-way mirror. Well, she was not going to let him wage psychological warfare against her. It had been a long day and she was tired. She was going to bed. He could go about his haunting in whatever way he pleased.

  Since she’d always slept in the guest room when she’d stayed overnight with Mac, she’d already decided to use that room until her new mattress arrived. She kicked off her shoes and slid between the covers without undressing. Zeke had promised to abide by her rules, but that had been before their argument. She couldn’t deal with that issue now. It would have to wait till morning. Right now all she wanted was the luxury of sleep. She closed her eyes and settled into the familiar comfort of the bed. But even as her muscles relaxed, her imagination kicked into overdrive and she couldn’t stop thinking about how far she was from the front door. She didn’t actually believe that Zeke would harm her, but lying there in the dark, the creative side of her brain was conjuring up one disturbing scenario after another.

  At three a.m. she trudged down the stairs with her pillow tucked under her arm to try her luck on the living room couch. Although it wasn’t as comfo
rtable as the bed in the guest room, it had the distinct advantage of being closer to the door. Only now she found herself constantly checking to make sure that Zeke hadn’t returned to occupy the chair across from her. She was on the verge of giving up and turning the television back on when exhaustion finally claimed her and pulled her into a deep but dream-tossed sleep.

  As her eyes blinked open to the daylight, she made a mental note to buy some room-darkening shades in case she spent any more nights on the couch. She took a quick shower and changed her clothes. If the marshal was spying on her, he’d have himself a dandy show. She hoped it brought him a bushel of frustration.

  Rory was ready for work two hours early, which was fine since she’d been wanting to take a look at the evidence in Gail Oberlin’s file at a time when she was less likely to be disturbed or questioned about her interest in it. That morning seemed like the perfect opportunity. Not only would she be glad to focus on something other than her enigmatic housemate, but she also knew that Jeremy was waiting anxiously for news about his sister’s death.

  When she reached police headquarters, she bypassed the main building with its long, deep-set windows that had once seemed avant-garde and now just reminded her of an enormous accordion. She drove on until she reached the property unit where evidence from closed and inactive police files was stored. It was a large, featureless building with the charm of a concrete box. Due to the earliness of the hour and the fact that the repository wasn’t open to the public, the only car in the parking lot was a white and blue police cruiser. She pulled into the spot next to it and went inside.

  The officer behind the desk was drinking coffee from a 7-Eleven cup and leafing through the newspaper. Since Rory didn’t know him, she produced her ID and badge. Once he’d checked them and she’d signed in, he buzzed her through the inner door.

  She’d been there only a few times before, but it was as depressing as she remembered. Metal shelves reached from floor to ceiling on either side of the narrow aisles that stretched to the back wall of the repository. These were intersected by other aisles so that the layout was like a grid. Scarred wooden tables with mismatched chairs were situated at several of the intersections. Although the materials stored there were called files, what actually filled the shelves were storage boxes, each holding the evidence related to a single case. The paperwork that went with each closed case was stored in another facility out in West Hampton. To request a copy of those records required the filling out of paperwork as mandated by the Freedom of Information Act, followed by the inevitable wait associated with any bureaucratic transaction. Thankfully Mac had taken care of that before he’d passed away. A copy of the police report on Gail Oberlin was in the file that Rory already had. What she was interested in today was the evidence.

  Since the boxes were arranged chronologically, with the oldest at the rear of the facility, Rory had no trouble finding the aisle marked “2008.” As she scanned the shelves for Gail’s name, it struck her that the place resembled a huge cemetery crypt with cardboard boxes instead of coffins, and names written in indelible marker instead of being etched in stone. In spite of the bright fluorescent lighting, the silence and stillness of the room only served to reinforce that perception, and she found herself thinking again about the murder of Marshal Ezekiel Drummond and wondering what had become of the evidence in that case. The odds were that it no longer existed; otherwise Mac would have found it. She shook her head as if that could dislodge the marshal from her mind. He was not the reason she was there.

  She found the box marked “Oberlin, Gail” and carried it to one of the tables. When she lifted the lid, she thought the box was empty. Then she saw the ragged two-inch piece of plastic wrap curled in one corner. Although Mac’s notes had mentioned only this one item, she’d somehow expected to find more in the box. With recent advances in forensic detection, it was hard to believe that nothing else had been discovered.

  She picked up the thin scrap of plastic. It wasn’t as soft and flexible as the kind of wrap sold by the role in grocery stores and used in homes all over the country to store leftovers. It seemed thicker, less flexible, like the outer wrapping on a manufactured product. Rory was sure that she’d handled something similar to it in the past, but she couldn’t remember what it might have been. There were so many products covered in so many forms of plastic wrap these days, that without more information it would be impossible to find a match.

  She turned it over in her hand, looking for the fine black line described in the report. She found it on the very edge of the plastic. It had probably been part of a label or a UPC code, but there wasn’t any way to know for sure. Either Gail had fallen as the ME concluded, or her killer had executed the perfect murder. Even though it was unlikely that the CSI team had missed anything of importance, Rory felt that she had to get back into the house and take a closer look. And she had to do it when she wasn’t being watched or escorted. Since she’d already crossed breaking and entering off her list, she’d have to come up with another plan.

  She put the piece of plastic wrap back in the box and returned the box to its final resting place on the shelf. Then she went to the front desk to sign out. The officer on duty swallowed the last of his coffee and crushed the cup before tossing it into the wastebasket beside him. He told Rory to have a good day

  Once she was back in her car, she drove out of the complex to the nearest Starbucks. If she didn’t have a decent cup of coffee herself, she was never going to make it through her workday and perhaps more important, the appointment she’d made to see David Oberlin that evening.

  Chapter 10

  At six fifty-seven Rory turned onto Oak Tree Lane. The road was narrow, winding and entirely too close to the edge of the heavily treed cliff for her liking. From time to time the wind would stir the branches of the massive old oaks for which the street was named, affording her a glimpse of the Long Island Sound glinting like a puddle of liquid pewter far below. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the road for more than a second for fear that she’d be viewing the Sound up close and personal through the windshield of her plummeting car. How on earth had the Oberlins ever managed to leave their house in the winter? Not even a snowplow and sanding truck on twenty-four-hour retainer would be able to make that road safe enough to travel during the blizzards and ice storms that were standards of a Long Island winter. Of course, for all she knew, they had an elaborate sled and a dozen Alaskan huskies just straining in their traces for some Iditarod action. In any case, Rory was grateful that it was summer.

  She’d also been surprisingly lucky as far as David Oberlin was concerned. When she’d called him to request a meeting, she’d expected it to be a hard sell. She couldn’t identify herself as a police officer, and being a private eye didn’t actually entitle you to harass people, in spite of what passed for realism in the world of television. Given that Oberlin had already dealt with the police and with Mac, she knew she was pressing her luck by contacting him.

  “My wife’s death is a closed case, Ms. McCain,” Oberlin had said stiffly after Rory identified herself, “and I’d prefer not to keep reliving it.”

  “I understand completely,” Rory replied in the lilting, slightly addled tone she usually reserved for babies and puppies. “You have every right to refuse to see me, Mr. Oberlin, but I was hoping maybe you’d be willing to help me out.” As much as she hated to play the damsel in distress, in this situation she needed to sound as nonthreatening as possible. If she’d thought she could pull off a southern belle drawl, she would gladly have used it.

  “And how on earth can I be of help?” Oberlin asked, sounding perplexed but less wary.

  “Well, you see, my uncle died recently and I’ve been trying to close down his private detective agency and send all of his files back to the people who hired him. Unfortunately my uncle had the absolute worst handwriting, so I’ve been typing up the notes in each file. I can’t begin to tell you how hard that’s been.” She produced a small, self-conscious hiccup of a la
ugh.

  “I’m afraid I still don’t understand how I can help,” Oberlin repeated impatiently, but at least he hadn’t hung up on her.

  “If I could just stop by and ask you a couple of questions—it might be enough to help me decipher the notes. It’s been a huge help with some of his other case files,” she added to assure him that he wasn’t being singled out. “I promise I won’t take up much of your time.”

  “I assume these notes you’re typing are for Jeremy?”

  “Well, yes, is that a problem?” she asked, throwing a little naiveté into the mix.

  There was a long pause before Oberlin answered, and for a moment Rory thought she’d lost him after all. “No, I suppose not. You can come by Tuesday evening.”

  “Oh, that’s so gracious of you. Thank you so much. Are you still at the Forest Hills address?”

  “No, I’m at five Oak Tree Lane in Cold Spring Harbor.”

  Apparently the grieving widower had already moved back into the house that Gail had thrown him out of when she’d discovered that he was cheating on her. Rory was careful to keep any surprise out of her voice. “Would seven be okay?”

  Now here she was, four minutes past the appointed hour, wondering how much farther the Oberlin home could possibly be. She rounded yet another curve and finally saw a brick driveway parting the trees on her left, the number five written in black script on a huge boulder that stood to one side. She turned into the driveway and followed it around to a large, white clapboard house, which, from her prospective, seemed to be hugging the edge of the cliff.

  Carrying her pocketbook and the leather folio she’d bought for the occasion, she locked the car and walked up to the front door. She rang the bell—show time.