Pitfall (3 page)

To free the oppressed.

Figuring I still had some miles left on the chassis, I headed over to my office.

Since leaving the service I’d started my own industrial security systems training company, and business has been good, as people steal things and screw one another with disheartening regularity.

As I came in my phone was ringing. I picked it up. My cable bill was due, and I just can’t get along without the Animal Planet channel. Those chimps slay me. “Good afternoon.”

“Mr.  Brenner?”

The deep voice sounded familiar. “Speaking.”

“Jacob Cahill. I hope you remember me. You coach my son Billy on your football team.”

“Of course I remember you, Mr. Cahill. How can I help you?”

“Something’s … happened.” He paused, and I heard him swallow. “To my child.”

My blood instantly flashed cold. “You mean Billy?”

“No. Not Billy.” I heard another odd sound over the receiver, like a choke. Or a sob. “Can we meet? Please?”

“All right,” I told Cahill. “Why don’t you stop by my office?”

“I will.”

I gave him the directions, and made the appointment for within the hour. After hanging up I went out to get a sandwich at the little Art Deco diner up the street, figuring to bring my dessert back with me. When I returned I found him already standing in the hall outside my office door, waiting.

I recalled the man, but we’d never really spoken at length. He was in his early forties, tall, trim, and well dressed, with short salt and pepper hair crowning a narrow face. Gold, wire-frame glasses framed his deep-set brown eyes, eyes holding a faint sheen of desperation.

I shifted the white Styrofoam box containing a piece of chocolate cream pie to my left hand, offering my right. “Mr. Cahill. Sorry to have kept you.”

His reply was friendly enough as he stretched out his hand, but the words seemed forced. “No problem.”

We shook, my grip firm but brief. Fishing out my keys, I opened the heavy wooden door to my stark, gray and white linoleum-floored office. “Come on in.”

“Thanks.”

I walked around to the far side of my battered, old walnut desk and indicated the visitor’s chair in front of it with a tick of my head. “Have a seat, if you’d like. Or stand. Whatever suits. I’m not big on formalities.” 

“Okay.” Gingerly the man lowered himself into the old Shaker chair I’d picked up for a song at Goodwill. He was acting as if he was afraid it would break under his weight, but he’d be all right. I’d tried the chair myself when I’d bought it, and if it could hold my one hundred and seventy-five pounds, it would take his one thirty-five without strain.

Seating myself, I hooked a thumb toward my coffee maker perched on the small, scarred cherry table next to the desk. Next to it sits a small, glazed, painted porcelain French mantle clock with a sweet Westminster chime. It was a wedding gift for us from my late wife’s parents. Truth be told it’s a bit delicate for my taste, but she loved it. And I loved her.

The rich aroma of the Colombian brew saturated the air. Picking up the pot and pouring myself a cup I asked, “Would you like some? It’s fresh, and I made plenty.”

“No thank you.”

Cahill still seemed ill at ease, and I watched him surreptitiously while I put the dessert box on my desk.

This is always an interesting time, observing how a prospective client takes in my office. They need to trust me implicitly, and not ask a lot of questions or be overly concerned with appearances. The training I’ve received over the years has taught me how to read subtle eye signals and body language, and I’ve discovered something fascinating: how a person views my workplace very often determines how well we’re going to get along. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it works more often than not.

Roughly I’ve placed them into three categories: say-nothings, nodders, and thin-lips.

Say-nothings is self-explanatory. These types could care less whether we’re meeting in a dark-leather-and-plush-carpeted suite on the twentieth floor of a luxury high-rise, or a local bar. They’re all business and my kind of folks.

Nodders are a bit harder to read. You aren’t sure if they’re thinking, “Unpretentious office. The fellow that works here must be a straight shooter; surely he can help me get my pilferage problems solved,” or “Look at this place. I should have brought along a flea bomb.” You simply have to let them talk for a while to see which way they’re leaning.

And then we come to the thin-lips; you know the type. They enter a room and start staring around, gauging, measuring. It’s obvious they’re not happy with what they’re seeing, and then, count on it, like clockwork the eyebrows lower and the shoulders tighten and the lips … grow thin. Airs and appearances are all-important to these people, and I know from the start we aren’t going to get along.

It’s at this point I usually say something to discourage them from wanting to do business with me, something on the order of, “I trust I can do you some good, Mr. Jones. You’re my first client since I’ve gotten out of prison.” A swirl of wind and they’re gone. Using this arrangement is the reason why I haven’t dressed the place up more. It seems to work fine as my very own people barometer.

But Jacob Cahill’s reaction was unique. As he began looking around, I saw him giving the area the fish eye. His mouth grew taut.

Here it comes. I was about to give him a variation on the line about prison when he sighed, and smiled weakly. “Mr.  Brenner, your place isn’t quite what I expected. But that’s irrelevant. You see, I’ve heard about … your other job.”

I kept my face blank. “Is that right.”

“I believe I can trust you.”

Yes you can, I started to say. But before I could … the oddest thing happened. I can’t explain it, but the air around me abruptly seemed to crystallize, the atmosphere growing still and dead. Hard after it a weird fluttering, almost like the wings of a moth, began vibrating around the walls of my heart, and a sudden icy dread gripped me, horn to hoof.

And didn’t let go.

Like the sulphorous, blackstrap molasses I remembered enduring as a kid, a dark conviction slowly started pouring into me, the grim assurance that this man with the sad eyes was bringing something huge into my life, something more than a promise to be kept or a problem to be solved. A lot more.

Something terrible.

I suddenly knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that whatever Jacob Cahill was about to involve me in was going to escalate uncontrolled into a nightmare neither of us could have ever conceived, and it would change my life forever. And I had no choice in the matter, none at all. Events had been put into motion that could no more be changed than I could alter the rotation of the earth.

My Granny used to say that some mountain-bred people have “farsight” to one degree or another. I never really understood the term; as I kid I thought maybe it had something to do with Indians. Which was pretty cool.

But one day she told me farsight meant foreknowledge. As far back as anyone could remember, she said, every now and then mountain people simply know beforehand what’s going to happen, before it happens. Some things have no rational explanation but exist just the same.

By way of illustration, Granny related a story about her sister Ferdie’s youngest son, Uncle Jimmie Ray, and what happened to him as a little boy of eight. While at a friend’s Saturday afternoon birthday party, Jimmie Ray had grown inexplicably morose. Nothing could console him. The cake went bitter in his mouth, he said, and the milk tasted sour. An awful wrenching sadness had seized him. Somehow he knew it was a sorrow that couldn’t be turned but had to be faced. He went home sobbing, and from there straight to bed. 

It was the very next day that a Western Union man on a motorcycle wheeled into the farmyard, where the party had been held, bearing an official notice in his battered leather satchel telling the old man there that a week earlier his oldest boy had been killed in a fierce battle on some faraway island called Iwo Jima.

And here, at long last, “farsight” had happened to me. And this wasn’t the same as a psychic vision, a hunch, or a gut feeling. It was altogether different. I was almost forty years old, a world-weary, card-carrying cynic, a man light-years beyond hill country legends. Or so I thought, as I’d never experienced anything even close to what my aunt had described.

Until now.

I suppressed a shudder. An unwelcome thought had stolen its way into my mind, the certainty that of my own volition I’d just entered a dark carnival on a far bleak shore, and the mad barker had strapped me in for one hell of a ride.

Chapter Three

“A
re you all right?” Leaning forward, Cahill regarded me with alarm. If the pictures caroming across my brainpan were transmitting themselves to my expression, I couldn’t blame him.

Overwhelmed, my answer was a croak. “Yeah.” I blinked, cleared my throat, and tried it again. “Yes.” My lopsided smile felt loose. “My Granny might have said I had a sudden attack of the vapors. I’m fine, though.”

And oddly, I was. Fine, that is. The tickling fingers of farsight, or whatever it was, were beginning to remove themselves joint by bony joint from my mind. And that was okay with me. It would be great if they never came back. The whole weird thing I’d just gone through had to be nothing more than superstitious hillbilly claptrap from another world and a different era. I just needed to keep telling myself that.

He started again. “Mr.  Brenner, I—”

“Mr. Cahill.” I’d interrupted him more gruffly than I’d intended. “I don’t mean to be rude, but could you please cut to the chase and tell me why you’re here?”

For a second he began to bristle, and then he composed himself. “Okay, fair enough.”

Clasping his hands in his lap, he settled his weight, and for the first time I noticed how big his mitts were. The meaty wrists, the smooth hands themselves, the manicured nails, the knuckles, all seemed to belong to a much larger man. Truth to tell, Cahill appeared to be a rather tightly constructed gent all over, as if he spent an inordinate amount of time at the gym too. Maybe he had an understanding boss. Maybe being an idea guy only took a couple of hours of office time a day. Maybe a lot of things.

“You see …” He leaned forward, looking me straight in the eye, sudden pain filling his face. “My daughter Sarah is missing.”

I gave him a sharp look. “Missing? How old is she?”

“Twenty-one.”

With that, I relaxed. She wasn’t a child, but an adult. “How long has she been gone?”

He swallowed. “A week.”

“A week? And you’re only now trying to finding her?”

“Yes. We contacted the Milford police as well as the state troopers the first night she was gone. By then my poor wife was a wreck, and I wasn’t much better. They all said they’d keep their eyes open, but they see this quite a bit, and that we couldn’t file a missing person’s report until Sarah had been gone for twenty-four hours.”

“They’re right.”

“And now it’s been a week!” His voice cracked. “She could be anywhere by now!”

“I know,” I said quietly. “So the following day did you and your wife file the report?”

“We did.” Cahill sounded as desolate as the back side of the moon. “But the officer said since Sarah’s of legal age, and with no evidence of foul play, we should just wait for her to contact us. They don’t get serious about it until at least seventy-two hours have passed. He said they’d just add her name to the list. And that’s been the end.”

“Okay, did—”

“Let me get this out, please.” He scooted toward the edge of his seat. “You see, we hoped her disappearance might be just a romantic fling or something, but now…” He gulped, and tried it again. “But now, based on something we found in her room, we think maybe she’s joined a cult or something.”

Something they found in her room.
I glanced down into my coffee mug. Not one of these again. Finding missing loved ones who have aligned themselves with cults usually isn’t difficult; convincing them to leave is, especially when they’re adults. In every case they were perfectly happy sitting at the feet of Swami Rubadub, and strongly resented my efforts to make them see the light. As it were. And unless the person in question was a minor, or the victim of foul play, the cards I held were few. Plus, there was always the possibility she didn’t want to be found. Experience has taught me the monsters aren’t always “out there.”

Sometimes the monster is called dad.

Reaching into his breast pocket, Cahill pulled out a piece of paper and slid the ragged edged scrap across to me. It was an ad, obviously torn from a newspaper. Picking it up, I saw the pitch was for something called Brighter Day Clinic, out on the west side of town. The gist of it went,
Men and women, if you’re eighteen to twenty-five, single and in good to excellent health, here’s a chance to do some good for the world, and get paid for it. Discretion always. Free screening done at our facility.
There was an address listed at the other end of High Street, along with the phone number.

“It sounds like a medical clinic. Why do you think it’s a cult?”

His voice tightened, and he held my gaze urgently. “Because I’ve heard sometimes cults use free clinics for recruitment.” So had I, but didn’t reply. I began to hand the advertisement back, but he held his hand up and nodded at it. “Keep it, please; I’ve made copies. I called the place the day as soon as I found it.”

“You called them?” Crap. It wouldn’t serve any good purpose to tell Cahill that if that clinic had Sarah, or knew who did, that call had been a mistake.

His voice tightened, and he held my gaze urgently for a moment. “They told me they’d never heard of her.”

Settling back, I steepled my fingers, looking at him.

He swallowed. “Since then I’ve called the authorities every day, but I just keep getting the runaround. It’s like—” His words hung as he looked past me. “Like she’s ceased to exist.”

I leaned forward and placed my hands on the desk. “So now you’re here.”

He met my eyes. “And now I’m here.”

My tone was even. “Mr. Cahill, I’m not sure I’m the one who can help you with this. After all, as you said, your daughter’s an adult.”

“Yes, but—” A hint of panic colored his tone. “If it’s a matter of money—”

“Money’s not the issue. I think you’re confusing what I do with what a private investigator does. But I’m not a PI.”

Cahill didn’t respond, and I could see the burgeoning hope leaving his sunken, bloodshot eyes.

I went on, “Staying with the authorities might give you faster results than you could get with me. They have the resources and the manpower.” Of course Cahill couldn’t know that over the years I’ve developed my own network of discreet resources I can call on if the need arises, but I try to play those cards infrequently.

Because some of them I can only play once.

He shook his head, his reply a rasp. “That won’t work.”

My patience was running out. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t trust them to give it their best effort. And … well, I’ve heard you get results when no one else can.”

“That’s the second time you said that. Who told you this?”

He paused for a moment, then said, “You recall two years ago, when you rescued that old, Japanese man the Yakuza had targeted?”
I course I remembered
. “I met that man, last year when I had to go to Kyoto on business. He told me what you did. How you saved his life because you wouldn’t give up. That’s what we need now, someone who simply won’t quit. Someone who … can help our daughter …”

He hung up then, his face gone gray with despair. Wearily Cahill slumped back in his chair, like all this was putting him through uncounted misery.

I felt terrible for him, and softened my tone. “Okay, before we get too deep in the weeds here, give me a little background on her.” I pulled over a five by seven pad of paper and a pen. I waited for a moment while Cahill composed himself.

“Yes, of course,” he said at last. “Her full name is Sarah Michelle Cahill.”

I wrote that down. “Pretty.”

“Yes. My wife Ruth named her, after her grandmother. Ruth’s I mean. Not Sarah’s.”

“What’s her height, weight, eye and hair color?”

“Five two, brunette, brown eyes I don’t know, maybe a hundred pounds?”

I was writing as he spoke. “Go on.”

He smiled a little now, his heart not in it. “She still lives with us, until this fall that is, when she starts classes at the University of Cincinnati. This whole thing is killing her by inches … Ruth, I mean. And Billy’s really too young to know what’s going on; we just told him Sarah’s with friends.”

“Are he and his sister close?”

“Very. We—” He stopped and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees, and dropped his face into his hands. “I’m really jumbling this up, aren’t I?” he mumbled.

“Take your time.” I felt increasingly worse for him. I’d seen pain like his before. Every day, in the mirror. “Are you sure I can’t get you some coffee? I always keep a pot going.”

“No thanks.” Pulling his hands away from his face, he stared at the floor. “I guess I’m kind of a mess.”

“You’re doing fine. So about Sarah. Has she been acting differently than normal?”

Looking up, he shook his head. “Not really.”

“How about her private life? Is she open with you and your wife? Does she keep secrets?”

He spread his hands. “How would I know?”

He had a point.

“Our daughter has always been headstrong. Somewhat immature. Even rebellious at times.” He rushed on, “Not in a bad way, you understand, but Sarah has her own way of looking at things. And sometimes it’s caused problems between us. Her changing her name, for instance—”

“She changed her name?” That would complicate things.

“Yes. Not legally. Last year she started singing at some open-mike nights at places around the area, and she began calling herself Raven. She thought using a single name was classy. Like Cher. Or Sting.”

Or Quasimodo, I thought irreverently. Or Beelzebub. Or—

He was speaking again. “We figured her abandoning her family name was a phase, although it hurt Ruth’s feelings.”

“Is she any good?”

That question produced a wry grimace. “She’s good enough to have gotten a job at The Embers dinner theater in Milford, so the raw material is there, but frankly she needs professional training. We offered to pay for some lessons, but she insisted she already had her own style, and was insulted.”

When you’re immature, it doesn’t take much to do that. With an attitude like that, I wondered if she hadn’t just gone to New York or somewhere to get discovered.

Which prompted me to ask, “Did she quit her job?”

“No. She didn’t. My daughter’s had all the standard angst. School, dating, varying career choices, you name it. She has a tender side and has even spoken once or twice about someday becoming a doctor in a Third World clinic. She hates suffering in all its forms.”

I nodded once. “Maybe you’d better give me the chronology of what happened.”

His expression brightened a little. “You’ll help us then?”

“We’ll see. Let’s just say I’m keeping an open mind.”

“Thank you.” Unconsciously he began rubbing his hands together.

Below, down on the street the Madison city workers picked that exact time to start in with their jackhammers, the noise sounding for all the world like combatants in a World War II firefight.

His voice grew louder over the din. “As I said, Sarah works as a server and performer at The Embers. She loves the fact she can sing and work in a place like that, and she gets along well with her co-workers. She gets along well with everyone, she always has…”

He must have realized he was beginning to wander again as he trailed off. With that infernal racket, I couldn’t blame him. Rocking back, I peered at the workers out the window through the slats of the ivory miniblinds.

With an effort he got himself back on track. “Last Monday morning she left earlier than normal. The place was launching a new menu, and they told her they needed her there by eight to familiarize herself with it. Then after that she had a rehearsal with the cast. She said she’d be home by four to get cleaned up because later that evening she and Ted were going to a club.”

“Who’s Ted?” I faced him again. “And what club?”

“Ted Larch is just a friend. He and Sarah have known each other since childhood. He’d like to be more than a friend, I’m sure, but Sarah’s not interested. She said she really isn’t ready for a deeper commitment. But as far as the name of the club … I’m sorry.”

The street noise suddenly ceased. Maybe they’d struck oil.

I began writing again. “So four o’clock came and went and no Sarah?”

“That’s correct. Ruth and I figured it was just afternoon traffic. Milford is really starting to grow. But by five we were getting worried, and Ted was due to pick up Sarah at six.”

“Surely somebody called her.”

“I did. I rang her cell, wondering if she was stuck in traffic or had stopped at a store. Then I phoned the restaurant, thinking maybe she’d worked overtime, but the manager said she’d clocked out at three forty-five. Really agitated now, I emailed her, text messaged her, everything I could think of. But there was no answer. We wondered if she might have been in a wreck and checked with the police and local hospitals. Nothing. Then we called all her friends. They hadn’t heard from her either.” Cahill grew more agitated. “By that time we were becoming frantic. Where could she be? When Ted showed up at six, we sent him right back out to see if he could spot her car on the road.”

“He didn’t have any luck?”

“None. He traveled the route twice and didn’t see a thing. So I went out to look for her too. That’s when he called and said he’d found her car parked in a municipal lot not six blocks from here. It was locked. She was gone. Vanished.”

I don’t care how immature she is, nobody abandons their car for no reason. 

He went on, “And I know she didn’t take a trip or something because all her luggage and good clothes are still at home.” He dry washed his face with his hands. “We called back at her work number then. They hadn’t seen or heard from her. Then we contacted the Milford police as well as the state troopers again.  We told them we’d located her car. But we still didn’t get very far with them.” Fresh anguish twisted his countenance. “Please, Mr.  Brenner. We’re at the end of our rope. We know we can trust you. And …” His eyes grew moist. “I don’t know any other way to say it. You’re our only hope.”