'Just a little longer, hon. I promise. I promise.'
Outside, the day continued to brighten. Already it was warm. The temperature inside the small car began to climb.
Vic got home at twenty past five. At the time his wife was pulling his son's tongue out of the back of his mouth, he was walking around the living room, putting things slowly and dreamily to rights, while Bannerman, a State Police detective, and a detective from the state Attorney General's office sat on the long sectional sofa drinking instant coffee.
'I've already told you everything I know,' Vic said. 'If she isn't with the people you've contacted already, she's not with anybody.' He had a broom and a dustpan, and he had brought in the box of Hefty bags from the kitchen closet. Now he let a panful of broken glass slide into one of the bags with an atonal jingle. 'Unless it's Kemp.'
There was an uncomfortable silence. Vic couldn't remember ever being as tired as he was now, but he didn't believe he would be able to sleep unless someone gave him a shot. He wasn't thinking very well. Ten minutes after he arrived the telephone had rung and he had sprung at it like an animal, not heeding the A. G.'s man's mild statement that it was probably for him. It hadn't been; it was Roger, wanting to know if Vic had gotten there, and if there was any news.
There was some news, but all of it was maddeningly inconclusive.
There had been fingerprints all over the house, and a fingerprint team, also from Augusta, had taken a number of sets from the living quarters adjacent to the small stripping shop where Steven Kemp had worked until recently. Before long the matching would be done and they would know conclusively if Kemp had been the one who had turned the downstairs floor upside down. To Vic it was so much redundancy; he knew in his guts that it had been Kemp.
The State Police detective had run a make on Kemp's van. It was a 1971 Ford Econoline, Maine license 641-644. The color was light gray, but they knew from Kemp's landlord -they had routed him out of bed at 4 Am. - that the van had desert murals painted on the sides: buttes, mesas, sand dunes. There were two bumper stickers on the rear, one which said SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and one which said RONALD REAGAN SHOT J.R. A very hinny guy, Steve Kemp, the murals and the bumper stickers would make the van easier to identify, and unless he had ditched it, he would almost certainly he spotted before the day was out. The MV alert had gone out to all the New England states and to upstate New York. In addition, the FBI in Portland and Boston had been alerted to a possible kidnapping, and they were now running Steve Kemp's name through their files in Washington. They would find three minor busts dating back to the Vietnam war protests, one each for the years 1968-1970.
‘There's only one thing about all of this that bothers me,' the A.
G.'s man said. His pad was on his knee, but anything Vic could tell he had already told them. The man from Augusta was only doodling. 'If I may be frank, it bothers the shit out of me.'
'What's that?' Vic asked. He picked up the family portrait, looked down at it, and then tilted it so the shattered glass facing tumbled into the Hefty bag with another evil little jingle.
'The car. Where's your wife's car?'
His name was Masen - Masen with an 'e', he had informed Vic as they shook hands. Now he went to the window, slapping his pad absently against his leg. Vic's battered sports car was in the driveway, parked to one side of Bannerman's cruiser. Vic had picked it up at the Portland jetport and dropped off the Avis car he had driven north from Boston.
'What's that got to do with it?' Vic asked.
Masen shrugged. 'Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Maybe everything. Probably nothing, but I just don't like it. Kemp comes here, right? Grabs your wife and son. Why? He's crazy. That's reason enough. Can't stand to lose. Maybe it's even his twisted idea of a joke.'
These were all things Vic himself had said, repeated back almost verbatim.
'So what does he do? He bundles them into his Ford van with the desert murals on the sides. He's either running with them or he's holed up somewhere. Right?'
'Yes, that's what I'm afraid -'
Masen turned from the window 'to look at him. 'So where's her car?'
'Well -' Vic tried hard to think. It was hard. He was very tired.
'Maybe -'
'Maybe he had a confederate who drove it away,' Masen said. 'That would probably mean a kidnapping for ransom. If he took them on his own, it was probably just a crazy spur-of-the-moment thing. If it was a kidnapping for money, why take the car at all? To switch over to? Ridiculous. That Pinto's every bit as hot as the van, if a little harder to recognize. And I repeat, if there was no confederate, if he was by himself, who drove the car?'
'Maybe he came back for it,' the State Police detective rumbled.
'Stowed the boy and the missus and came back for the car.'
That would present some problems without a confederate,' Masen said, 'but I suppose he could do it. Take them someplace close and walk back for Mrs. Trenton's Pinto, or take them someplace far away and thumb a ride back. But why?'
Bannerman spoke for the first time. 'She could have driven it herself.'
Masen swung to look at him, his eyebrows going up.
'If he took the boy with him -Bannerman looked at Vic and nodded a little. 'I'm sorry, Mr. Trenton, but if Kemp took the boy with him, belted him in, held a gun on him, and told your wife to follow dose, and that something might happen to the boy if she tried anything clever, like turning off or flashing her lights -'
Vic nodded, feeling sick at the picture it made.
Masen seemed irritated with Bannerman, perhaps because he hadn't thought of the possibility himself. 'I repeat: to what purpose?'
Bannerman shook his head. Vic himself couldn't think of a single reason why Kemp would want Donna's car.
Masen lit a Pall Mall, coughed, and looked around for an ashtray.
'I'm sorry,' Vic said, again feeling Iike an actor, someone outside himself, saying lines that had been written for him. 'The two ashtrays in here were broken. I'll get you one from the kitchen.'
Masen walked out with him, took an ashtray, and said, 'Let's go out on the steps, do you mind? It's going to be a bitch of a hot day. I like to enjoy them while they're still civilized during July.'
‘Okay,' Vic said listlessly.
He glanced at the thermometer-barometer screwed to the side of the house as they went out ... a gift from Donna last Christmas.
The temperature already stood at 73. The needle of the barometer was planted squarely in the quadrant marked FAIR.
'Let's pursue this a little further,' Masen said. 'It fascinates me.
Here's a woman with a son, a woman, whose husband is away on a business trip. She needs her car if she's going to get around very well. Even downtown's half a mile away and the walk back is all uphill. So if we assume that Kemp grabbed her here, the car would
still be here. Try this, instead. Kemp comes up and trashes the house, but he's still furious. He sees them someplace else in town and grabs them. In that case, the car would still be in that other place. Downtown, maybe. Or in the parking lot at the shopping center.’
