Okay, then how else could Mulch know if I’ve contacted Metro or the FBI? Then it hit me. Ali had said he’d smelled Mulch in here. Why would Mulch have taken a chance like that, broken into my house with two armed police officers inside?
To bug the place, I thought. So he could watch me right now, after he’d taken my family, after he’d told me he had them.
I began to look about slowly, as if the walls had eyes and ears.
Chapter
101
I suddenly wanted to tear my house apart, find the bugs and—
Stop!
Stop looking around! I yelled at myself silently. If Mulch has bugs in here, he’s watching you or hearing you. If you start an obvious search, who knows what he might do?
Your family dies, simple as that.
For many moments I just stood there in the television room, staring dully at one of the blue crabs as it crept into the darkness behind our couch. The whole situation suddenly seemed to have been designed with diabolical forethought.
Mulch shows himself to me through a letter, taunts me, and depicts me in a cartoon with a huge penis perched on by birds. Then he goes to give a motivational speech at my son’s school. How did that happen? Who arranged it? Then he kidnaps my entire family and threatens to kill them if I act to save them or bring in help. Crueler still, Mulch watches, or listens to me, as I wrestle with my demons. It smacked of sadism at some level. Mental torture, certainly.
My house became overwhelmingly claustrophobic at that point, and I craved fresh air the way a desert nomad seeks water. But I refused to grab a jacket and go out into the night. For reasons I couldn’t explain, fleeing the house felt like surrender, and I was not surrendering to this man, whoever he was, whatever his ultimate motives were.
I was going to fight for my family, but I was going to have to do it in a way that didn’t seem like fighting. So I did what any normal person would do: I went hunting for the crabs that had taken over the lower floor of the house, grabbing up the ones in the hallway and dropping them into a brown paper bag and then moving the furniture to track down the rest of the escapees.
All the while I looked for signs of electronic transmitters, but frustratingly found none. It occurred to me that Mulch might have put them high up where they couldn’t be easily seen, but where they might provide a wide-angle view of the room. But sure as I was that they were there, I couldn’t spot them.
I didn’t feel like eating anything, so I stuck the crabs in the refrigerator and sat at the dining room table, looking at the pictures Mulch had sent me using Jannie’s phone. At first I just looked at each of them, wondering bitterly if this would be the last image I’d have of my wife, my kids, the grandmother who’d raised me.
Then I thought: Jannie’s phone.
Trying not to act purposeful, I got up from the table and turned off the light. I turned off every light in my house and then eased off my shoes. In the pitch black I padded like a cat up the stairs to my office.
But hadn’t Mulch been in here? I stood in the doorway, thinking of how Damon’s Christmas penholder had been moved, feeling certain that Mulch had moved it, which meant he’d been behind my desk, possibly even monkeyed with the computer. Should I take the chance?
I wanted to log on to a website called PhoneSniffer.com. Two years ago, I’d installed an app from the company on Jannie’s and Ali’s cell phones. Both phones came with GPS chips in them that communicated through the app to the PhoneSniffer site. The last twenty-four hours of activity were visible at any given moment, and archival history was available on request.
But did I dare call up the website here?
No, I decided at last. I needed to be sure. I needed to get out of my house and
to a computer I knew was clean without being spotted by Mulch.
Reluctantly, I turned and left my office. I changed into dark clothes and forced myself to lie down on my bed, to avoid thoughts of my hostage family, and to doze until the blackest hours before dawn.
At three a.m. I made my move, exiting the house through Ali’s window on a bar-and-chain fire escape ladder we kept rolled up in his closet. I got off in the walkway between our house and the Hendersons’ place next door. Instead of heading for the street or the gate to the alley, I struggled over the fence into the Hendersons’ yard, grateful that their oldest son, Pete, had taken his Rottweiler, Knot Head, away with him to college.
I climbed the fence into the Olsons’ yard and another into the Lakes’, using my peripheral vision to navigate, not daring to flick on my Maglite. A lock hung in the gate mechanism, but the hasp wasn’t shut. I lifted it out and stepped into the alleyway, looking everywhere for a long moment before heading quickly north, keeping to the shadows. I walked ten blocks before I dared to hail a cab.
Terry Simmons, the cop on duty at the rear entrance to Metro headquarters, was surprised when I walked up at three forty and presented my badge.
“Kind of early, Detective,” he said, pressing a button to let me through.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said. “How long’s your duty?”
“Seven a.m.,” Simmons said. “Week’s over for me.”
“And it feels like mine’s just beginning,” I said, heading toward the elevators.