Gone The Next (3 page)
Authors: Ben Rehder
“This guy won’t be modeling for GQ anytime soon,” I said.
“Be nice.”
“What’s his story?”
“A week ago yesterday, he slipped on a wet floor and injured his wrist when he broke his fall. Supposedly. Nobody saw it happen. They heard glass break, but he could’ve tossed a stack of plates in the air.”
“Which wrist is it?”
“Right.”
“Is he right handed?”
“Yep.”
“Seen a doctor?”
“Of course, but you know what that’s worth. Even the legitimate docs can be fooled.”
I nodded, continuing to scan the file. “Thomas Springs Road,” I said, noting the street address.
“You know where that is?” she asked. “Out in the boonies, between Oak Hill and Bee Cave.”
“Yeah, I know the area. My grandparents used to live on Thomas Springs.”
“You had grandparents?” she said. “I figured you were hatched.”
I went back to my apartment and took a two-hour nap. When I woke, I had a voicemail waiting.
Ballard, it’s Spence. Just a heads-up that Wade Gruley is getting out tomorrow. Call me if you have any questions.
Duly noted.
Then I sat at my computer and began to do some research on Brian Pierce. In my line of work, Google is your friend.
Say, for example, a subject claims to have a foot injury. Say also that he’s on a men’s softball team, and you’d like to attend the next game, in case he decides he is miraculously healed and can run the bases after all. So you Google his name, sort through the results, and there you go. A complete schedule for the Austin Assassins. Just show up with your camera and hope the guy does something stupid.
Google Maps can also be helpful. When the subject lives out in the country — as did Brian Pierce — satellite shots of the property can tell you all sorts of things. The position of the house and any outbuildings. Is there a pool or a creek on the property? How about livestock, or farm and ranch equipment? Sounds irrelevant, but think about it. If a man is faking an injury, and he’s sitting around the house all day, bored to tears, and he owns a horse, what’s he going to do? Eventually, on a nice day, he’s going to get cabin fever. He’ll ride that horse, mow the back forty, or take a swim.
Maybe that’s a bad example, because Pierce didn’t own a horse. Or, if he did, I didn’t see any evidence of it. What he did own was twenty acres of heavily wooded Hill Country land west of Austin, a good thirty-minute commute to downtown. The land had been deeded to him five years earlier, when he was twenty-one, so I was guessing it was an inheritance. Didn’t matter. I didn’t need to know.
The house was in the center of the property, ringed by cedar and oak trees. To the left of Pierce’s property was a home on seven acres. To the right, a home on ten acres. Behind him, to the northwest, was nothing but raw land, with no buildings or paved roads for at least a solid mile. That chunk of land, I knew, was part of a nature conservancy. Four or five thousand acres of pristine beauty, free of man’s clumsy footprint. Or, from a different viewpoint, filled with rocks, thorny things, and rattlesnakes.
Obviously, working a case in a sparsely populated area can be a challenge. The big question is: Where do you set up? How can you keep tabs on the subject without being obvious? Thomas Springs is a narrow two-lane blacktop with no shoulders. If you pull off the road, onto the grassy right-of-way, you look like you’ve broken down, and that’s the furthest thing from being discreet. You can’t park in a neighbor’s driveway, even if the house is half a mile off the road, because eventually someone’s going to wonder what you’re doing there.
In this case, fortunately, there was a possible solution. About one hundred yards southwest of Pierce’s driveway, on the other side of the road, was an old clapboard church with a caliche parking lot. I’d even set foot in that church on a couple of occasions, way back when, because my grandparents had been parishioners there.
I slapped together a couple of ham sandwiches, stuck them in an ice chest with three bottles of Gatorade, and headed out.
My grandfather, who’d been a professor at the University of Texas, had the foresight to buy fifty-seven acres off Thomas Springs Road in 1954. The tract included one of the highest points in Travis County, and at the top of that hill stood a home like a bomb shelter. Rock walls, concrete ceiling, a flat roof of tar and gravel. Back then, many of the locals lived in crude shacks tucked in the woods. Goat herders. Cedar choppers. Rednecks whose forebears had run whiskey during Prohibition.
The area west of Austin still had a rural feel to it — or parts of it did. But as I drove out Bee Cave Road, then waited for the light at Highway 71, I realized how much things had changed in the past decade. To my left was a strip center that included an HEB, a Starbucks, and a bunch of other chain shops. To my right was a retail shopping complex — massive in size — named the Hill Country Galleria. The developers called it a “lifestyle center,” as if that would disguise its true nature. It had a Dillard’s, a Barnes & Noble, a fourteen-screen movie theater. Yippee. Who needs trees and cattle when you can replace them with a Banana Republic? I suddenly felt guilty that I hadn’t driven out this way in so long. My grandparents’ old stomping grounds were being razed, paved, and homogenized.
The one bit of solace came five minutes later, four miles down the road, when I turned right on Thomas Springs and saw many of the same old homes that had been there since I was a kid.
Just out of curiosity, I drove the length of Thomas Springs Road — past the entrance to my grandparents’ old place, past Pierce’s driveway, with its No Trespassing sign on the locked gate, past the volunteer fire station, all the way down to Circle Drive, where I made a U and came back to the church, which hadn’t changed a bit. I pulled into the parking lot, backed into a patch of shade, and killed the engine.
Sometimes I wonder about what happened next. Maybe it was fate.
Normally, when you start surveillance on a subject, you’re prepared for the long haul. At least a day or two. Sometimes a week. Sometimes you have to cry uncle and give up. Hell, sometimes the subject really is injured, and the entire effort — watching him, and following him around — is a waste of time.
But considering where Pierce’s house was located — and the privacy it afforded him — I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least see what I could see from the roadway. Take a quick walk along the shoulder and determine whether his house or even his yard was visible from the road. It was unlikely that would help me much, because it would be difficult to set up anywhere along the shoulder, but I wanted to know if it was even a possibility, in case Pierce didn’t leave his property for several days.
So a quick wardrobe change was in order. I switched from jeans and a polo shirt to gym shorts and a ratty T-shirt. Put on some running shoes. Slipped an elastic iPod holder around my bicep. Now I looked like a guy out for a jog. The only giveaway would be the very small pair of binoculars I’d carry along.
I left the Caravan where it was and walked along the edge of road as if I belonged there, past mailboxes and gravel driveways. At one point, a truck drove past; the driver raised two fingers off the steering wheel, and I gave him a nod in return, hands on my hips, like I was catching my breath in the middle of my jog.
I came to the near corner of Pierce’s acreage and it didn’t look promising. Thick cedar all along the property line formed a natural barrier. I kept going, and after about thirty yards, I caught a glimpse of blue — probably the siding on his house, well over a hundred yards away. I raised the binoculars and took a quick peek, but I couldn’t see much. I needed a bigger gap in the tree line. I kept walking, hoping there wasn’t a neighbor somewhere watching me through a window, wondering what I was doing. Maybe this was a stupid move.
I was thinking about retreating to the van, but I’m glad I didn’t, because I took a few more steps and suddenly I had it. A small but very useful gap in the brush. A sliver of unobstructed view to Pierce’s house. I could even see a white truck parked in front.
And movement.
Someone was beside the truck, with the door open. There was no traffic coming from either direction, so I quickly raised the binoculars again and took a look. I saw the person leaning into the truck, as if he’d just come outside to grab something from the vehicle. When he emerged, I saw him in profile, and I was fairly sure it was Pierce. No bandage around his right wrist, but that didn’t mean anything.
He closed the door to the truck and bounded up the porch steps to his house — and there, behind a screen door, like an apparition, was a little blond girl wearing denim shorts and a pink top.
The girl was scared at first, he could tell, but she didn’t cry. That was a good sign. If she’d been a crier, he wasn’t sure what he would’ve done about it. But she was quiet. Meek. Shy.
“When am I going home?”
Barely loud enough for him to hear.
“First thing in the morning.”
A lie.
“I don’t want to stay here. I want to see my mommy.”
“I know you do, honey, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. You can do that, can’t you? Spend the night away from home? Like a big girl?”
And tomorrow he’d tell her the same thing. Just one more day. Tell her that her parents wanted it this way. In fact, it was their idea. Because they needed some time to themselves. So they’d asked him to watch her. See, he was a friend of the family. Like an uncle. Eventually, she would trust him. Even start to like him. Baby steps. Much better to build a relationship on affection rather than fear.
“Are you hungry? I’ve got a pizza in the freezer. We could make a pizza together. How about that? Wouldn’t that be fun?” Trying to make it sound like a big adventure. “Do you like pepperoni, Emily?”
“I already told you, that’s not my name.”
“Oh, I know. But that’s what I’m going to call you, okay? It’s a little game we’ll play. Emily is a pretty name, don’t you think?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll make a deal with you. If you’ll let me call you Emily, I’ll let you make up a name for me. That’s fair, isn’t it? Anything at all. Steve, Ted, Henry, Albert. I don’t care. You pick one. You can even call me Spongebob Squarepants if you want.”
And finally, he saw the faintest trace of a smile on her face. Like she wanted to pout, or to continue being homesick, but she couldn’t resist this silliness, the very idea that a grown man would let her make up a name for him.
“I bet you have a name in mind, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Jimmy.”
“Oh, that’s a good name. I like it. From now on, I am officially Jimmy. And you’re Emily. That’s the deal. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now, back to the original question. Do you like pepperoni?”
Emily nodded her head again. She had an appetite. Another good sign.
“Well, then, let’s go make a pizza!”
He took her by the hand and led her into the kitchen. There were windows on either side of the door to the backyard, but he’d closed the curtains and safety-pinned them together, like all of the curtains in the house. He’d disconnected the telephone line, out at the box. He’d also installed deadbolt locks on all the doors — the kind that need a key even from the inside. He’d done that when he was still in the planning stages. The same day he nailed the windows into place. He had a computer on a table in the bedroom, but he’d changed the settings so nobody could log on without his password. Couldn’t be too careful. Kids her age knew how to use computers nowadays. And cell phones. That’s why he was keeping his cell phone on top of the refrigerator, out of reach. Just in case she wanted to call mommy.