Drawn Into Darkness(79)

A siren.

Sounding progressively louder. Heading toward us.

Ambulance, fire truck, police car? There was no way to tell, and no particular reason to pay attention, yet I listened intently. So did Stoat. I suppose I should have been relieved that something had distracted him from fussing about his dinner for the moment, but I felt only apprehension.

More so when the siren bleeped to a halt just short of passing my house.

Stoat threw down his ice pack, jumped up, reached me in two strides, and put the gun to my head.





TWENTY-THREE





By the time the first police car arrived, Quinn had led the way into the blue house, where he and Forrest had put their mother’s purse and her letter back in their original positions. Quinn felt as taut as the wires on a snare drum, but he had himself under steely control now. And as far as he could see, so did his brother.

He glanced outside as the siren bleeped to a stop and the officer, a state trooper, got out of his cruiser. “It’s Willet,” he reported.

Sitting on the sofa, stony calm and quiet, Forrest nodded. Quinn stood in the shadows near the front window and watched as Willet swaggered over to the shack’s crude wooden steps. Muscular, with no paunch, but a bit short for a cop, Willet showed every indication of having a Napoleon complex, from his extremely erect posture to his scowling face to his shining boots. He did not merely open the front door; he subjugated it, whamming into the shack without knocking. Nor did he bother with a greeting. “I ordered you people to clear these premises.”

As calmly as possible Quinn said, “If we’d left, you wouldn’t be here to look at evidence now.”

“Which said same evidence is no damn good since you two done tampered with it.”

“We haven’t touched the bed with what may be our mother’s blood on it.” He tilted his head toward the room. “Go see.”

“You don’t tell me how to do my job!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Quinn, utterly toneless.

Willet glared at him. Quinn stared back with his heartbeat drumming in his ears but, he hoped, with no expression on his face. He didn’t hear the second cruiser pull in, but Forrest got up and walked to the front window to see. “Somebody from the Sheriff’s Office is here.”

Immediately, Willet barged into the room with the bare bed and shackles. Wanting to get ahead of the other cop, probably.

Quinn wished the sheriff’s deputy might be Bernie Morales. But in a moment he could see it wasn’t; that would have been entirely too helpful, Quinn thought bitterly. The law officer who came in was the detective they’d met earlier, Deputy Kehm, a tall, rawboned, sad-eyed man with a bald head but a robust white walrus mustache that made his leathery face look very tan. “Quinn, Forrest,” he greeted them, shaking hands. Quinn fretted over his use of their first names; was the cop being condescending or just friendly? “What’s this about?”

Quinn led him to Mom’s note, pulled it out, and watched him read it. Forrest put a tape into the VCR and turned it on. As it started to play, Quinn noticed it was not the same one as before, but contained much the same content, except that this one added bondage.

Kehm’s head jerked up. “Jeez!” he exclaimed, staring. “Are all them tapes like that?”

“This is only the second one we’ve watched,” said Forrest.

Quinn asked, “Is that old goat Stoat?”

“I don’t know.”

“The answer is yes,” said a ponderous voice; Trooper Willet had reentered the room to watch the video from behind them. “Yes, I recognize that man as Steven Stoat, which means we can issue a warrant for his arrest for sexual misconduct with a minor.”

Quinn heard this and turned sharply. “To hell with his sex kinks!” The minor would be Stoat’s so-called nephew Bernie had mentioned, and if he had lasted this long, he could wait. “What about issuing a warrant for the bastard on suspicion of kidnapping my mother?”

Trooper Willet faced him belligerently. “So you found her purse, so she was here in this house, that don’t prove—”

“You need to see this,” Kehm interrupted smoothly, handing him the letter.

After reading the sheet of tablet paper, Trooper Willet demanded of Quinn, “Where’d you find this?”

“On top of her purse.”

“How do I know you didn’t write it yourself and plant it?”

For the first time in his life Quinn actually saw red. A haze of that color obscured his vision as sheer rage suffused his body. As he tensed to attack Willet, he felt hands grabbing his arms hard enough to hold him back: Forrest and Deputy Kehm.