Sara's Game Part 5

"You could've tailed her. Less chance of a lawsuit."

They had been through this at least three times already. "Like I said, she asked me not to follow her." He didn't mention that she had ordered him not to follow her.

"Since when do you listen to somebody who could be a suspect?"

"Since you taught me to trust my instincts. And she's not a suspect."

"People lie, DJ-"

"'Even when they think they're telling the truth.' I know that, Barker, but whatever it was, it had to do with that note and her kids. No question."

"She could be dead by now."

DJ didn't have a response for that, but he hoped it wasn't true. He looked down at his desk, at the note Sara had found on her windshield, safely contained in a plastic evidence bag.

Are you ready to play the game?

He held it up and asked, "So what do we have here? What is this?"

Barker took off his gla.s.ses, and began chewing on the earpiece. "Conundrum," he said. "It's a sign that we're dealing with something other than a run-of-the-mill kidnapper who's looking for some kind of ransom. What we have is a sociopath who's looking to toy with this woman. He's playing a game-for lack of a better word-and if it means what I think it means, he's smarter than your average wannabe who'll make mistakes."

"What do you think it means?"

"He created the game, he can change the rules. That, cowboy," he said, "does not bode well for us, nor for Mrs. Winthrop, I'm afraid."

"You think it's the husband? Is that why we're sitting here going through this useless report?"

"Patience, Speed Racer. What I know is that when it comes to cases like this-"

"'Coincidences put the bad guys behind bars and keep the paychecks coming.'" DJ huffed, and then laid the note back down on the desk. He stared at it, thinking about the interview with Sara, and the call that came for her. "One question."

"One answer."

"You keep saying he, but how do we know it's not a she? The receptionist at the school said a woman was calling for Sara."

"Mrs. Winthrop. Don't get too close. Could've been an accomplice. You should know that. And besides, the statistics say the ratio is something like eight-to-one, male to female. Numbers don't-"

"'Numbers don't lie, people do.'"

"And the sooner you learn that, the easier my job will get. Get back to Mr. Winthrop's file. We're missing something." He leaned back, repositioned his gla.s.ses, and resumed reading. The only way he could've looked more relaxed would be with the addition of a pipe, a smoking jacket, and a pair of expensive slippers. Throw in a roaring fireplace and a mahogany bookshelf for good measure.

Sniffing down the wrong path, Bloodhound. We're wasting time.

But he let it go. With zero solid leads and an absent mother who wouldn't answer her phone, they had nowhere to rush off to. He and Barker both complained about how unhelpful the interviews were with the staff at both schools. And the babysitter, Willow Bluesong, wasn't answering his calls, either, and hadn't been home when they'd stopped by on their way back to the station.

DJ resigned himself to giving the file one more pa.s.s and decided that when he was done, he was going to LightPulse. With or without Barker.

Brian Jacob Winthrop had just turned 38 at the time of his disappearance on a Friday morning in May. He was two years older than his wife Sara, and a father to twin girls and one boy. He'd worked reasonable hours as a financial a.n.a.lyst for a small investment company, operating his own storefront out of the east side of Portland, which was open from 8 to 5, every weekday. He ate lunch at the sub shop next door and played softball on the weekends, when the absence of familial obligations allowed for it. Athletic center records indicated that he swam for an hour each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and he hadn't missed a workout on those days in five months. The week he'd missed before that was the result of a conference in San Diego, according to his wife.

He had no prior record, except for two speeding tickets. Had no outstanding debts, no mortgage, and they were financially comfortable, if not well to do, in some respects. He'd struggled to gain new customers during the recession, but invested his existing clients' money wisely. No lost money, no bad blood to be found there, either.

No gambling addictions, no transaction records from strip clubs. No reason to be involved in the shadier side of society. His wife, Sara, had admitted that they'd smoked marijuana once, on their honeymoon, and hadn't touched anything since. Drugs weren't a factor, and they rarely drank, so alcoholism and its detrimental effects weren't a likely culprit. They had disagreements over finances and obligations like most couples, but none had been recent, and nothing that would've created the need to skip town.

From what DJ gathered, the guy had been a normal husband and father, completely clean.

He remembered another one of Barker's refrains. 'n.o.body's a whistle, DJ,' which he took to mean that n.o.body was as clean as a whistle. Sometimes his partner's attempts at being a wise old sage got in the way of the actual message.

Could that be it? Was he too clean? Is that what Barker's looking at? I'm not seeing a d.a.m.n thing.

DJ flipped to another page.

Winthrop had packed up his workout gear that morning, kissed his wife goodbye, and then left for the gym. That was the last time Sara had seen him, and three days later, his BMW hatchback had been located in a grocery store parking lot. There were no odd fingerprints: only his, his wife's, and those of their three children. No secondary DNA traces, no blood, no out of the ordinary hair samples. No signs of forced entry on the car. No signs of foul play whatsoever.

The only strange thing that Detective Wallace had noted was the fact that the car was so clean on the inside, and it looked like it'd been washed as recently as that day. He'd reasoned that the car of a father with three young children should be filled with cracker crumbs, errant french fries, and enough dirt to cover a baseball diamond. Wallace had checked credit card transactions for any car wash visits in an effort to set up a timeline of his whereabouts, but came up empty.

No money was ever removed from their bank accounts, and no additional pings on credit card usage had ever turned up. His side of the closet contained every bit of clothing he owned. Wherever Brian had gone, the only things that went with him were his keys, his wallet, his gym bag, and the sweat suit he was wearing when he walked out the door.

Except for a number of unreliable sightings, Brian Winthrop had evaporated.

"Barker," he said.

His partner looked up from his copy of the report.

"I got nothing. The guy's a ghost, man. Poof...gone."

Barker said, "You're partly right."

"How so?"

"He's gone."

"Gone where?"

"Anything in those reported sightings look fishy to you?"

"Other than the fact that they're unreliable?"

"Take another look."

DJ hated it when Barker made a point of testing him, but he played along. He checked the list again. "Outskirts of Portland, the day after they found his car. Somebody thought they saw him in Eugene after that. Grants Pa.s.s. Eureka. The last one was in San Francisco, three weeks after he disappeared. Who'd remember to be looking for some guy three weeks later?"

"And?"

"And what, Barker? Six feet tall, brown hair, brown eyes. Great, we just narrowed our options down to half the male population in the US. It could've been anybody. You say it all the time-what people see and what they think they see are two completely different things."

"We're supposed to question their reliability, JonJon. That's what we're here for, but you gotta understand that the mind makes connections," Barker said, pointing at his temple. "It's a dang complex computer. What sticks out to me-and what you should be seeing, too-is that if these sightings were real, he might've been heading south. Why was he hightailing it south? That means something."

DJ shoved himself up from the desk, grabbing his badge and gun. "This is pathetic," he said. "When the real Barker shows up, the one that doesn't make a.s.sumptions based on complete nonsense, let me know. I'm going to look for this woman's children that are missing right now, not some guy who vanished two years ago."

"The signs are there, DJ. It's connected somehow. Why? Why would he be going south?"

"Because that's how the news traveled, Barker. People saw his picture on television, it created an image in their brain, and then they thought they saw him at a gas station the next day, when in reality it was some random guy on his way to work. You keep chasing your tail. I'm going to LightPulse."

The approaching Sergeant Davis blocked DJ's dramatic exit. He said, "Barker, you and the cowboy here need to get up to the Rose Gardens. Report just came in about some crazy naked woman there that fit Sara Winthrop's description."

DJ thanked him, then said to Barker, "Well?"

"Sounds like the game's already started. Okay, you head over to her office, I'll go check out the Gardens. But this doesn't mean the mister is off the table, got it? And drop that note off at the lab on your way out, see if they can find some prints."

He nodded, and offered a curt salute.

Naked at the Rose Gardens? What kind of game are you playing, Sara?

CHAPTER 8.

SARA.

Sara's feet pounded the pavement. She ran as fast as she dared down the hill, away from the Rose Gardens, away from her humiliation, cutting through the trees. The shortcut was more dangerous than taking the winding, looping road all the way to the bottom, but it would save her valuable time as long as she managed to keep from rolling an ankle. A sprain would be disastrous, but it was a risk she had to take.

She reached Sherwood Boulevard and found the opposite side blocked by a chain link fence, topped with barbed wire. "s.h.i.t," she said. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h."

She turned left and sprinted down Sherwood, controlling her breathing on a 3-2 count. Inhale on three steps, exhale on two. Inhale on three steps, exhale on two. Cars crept past and she examined each one, looking for someone that might be watching her, keeping an eye on her progress. Not a single driver gave her more than a pa.s.sing glance. She risked a look over her shoulder, examining the road behind her for the white sedan with tinted windows. Her only tail was the Gray Line trolley with wooden seats and pink trim.

If the goons in the white sedan were trying to track her, they probably hadn't expected her to cut straight down the hill, and thus they hadn't been able to catch up yet.

She pa.s.sed a parked, City of Portland work truck and then the chain link fence to her right melded into a wrought iron one, painted black. Below it, and on the other side, was one of the many reservoirs stationed around the hill. Once she reached Washington Way, she turned right onto the sidewalk and picked up her pace.

A paved walkway carved a path through the trees to her right. She wasn't sure where it went, and rather than risk an avoidable delay, she held her course through the mossy pines.

The rhythm of her breathing began to deteriorate as her lungs burned and her quads strained to keep up. A st.i.tch crawled its way into her left side. She backed off her pace, enough to get her breathing under control fifty yards later.

I should ease up. Can't crash so soon.

No, no whining. Think about what the kids are going through. Push harder, d.a.m.n it, push harder.

She increased her speed and thought about a video that Brian had shown her about a year before he had gone missing. She'd been suffering through a bout of depression for at least two months. Work wasn't going well, Jacob was going through his Terrible Twos, she wasn't sleeping, and many, many more things that she couldn't remember. A variety of factors had lined up to take their shot at pounding on her and then everything had coalesced at once after a good reaming from Jim when her team didn't make a hard deadline.

The video itself, the one Brian had dug up on YouTube, was Jim Valvano's speech from the ESPY awards, back in the early '90s. She couldn't remember all of it, other than the fact that he was dying from cancer and the message he wanted to convey. "Don't give up. Don't ever give up."

Those words carved themselves into her memory like a commandment on a stone tablet, and they would resurface whenever she needed them the most, just as they were doing right then. Sara could see the images of Valvano being helped up the stairs to the podium. His smile. His tuxedo. His slicked back hair. Pleading to the crowd.

Don't give up. Don't ever give up, Sara.

She picked up her pace another notch, and figured she had to be somewhere around an eight-minute mile. Her usual speed on the treadmill was around nine and a half or ten minutes, but she had always known she could do more.

Sara took another look over her shoulder.

No white car. Maybe they weren't following. Maybe she'd lost them.

She reached a junction in the road and crossed over to read the street signs. Straight ahead, the road wound back up into the trees on Lewis Clark Way, so she turned right and ran down Park Place until she reached an intersection she recognized. She made another right on Vista and headed toward Jefferson, which would lead her directly down to the park beside the Hawthorne Bridge.

I could stop, call the police. Tell Johnson where I am.

She looked down at the phone in her hand, now slippery from her sweaty palm.

Teddy said it was being monitored. I could leave it somewhere, run into a store. Should I risk it? If I'm caught...the kids...

Sara pa.s.sed parked cars and shrubbery. Staircases leading up to nice homes and hand-laid rock walls. When she reached an intersection that had Kings Court on her left and Madison to her right, she realized she'd made a costly mistake.

The Vista Bridge crossed over Jefferson below, where she needed to be.

She stopped and looked up the incline of the bridge, dreading the uphill trudge that would lead her across it. She tried to slow her ragged breathing, wiped the sweat from her face. Cursed herself for forgetting. Every wasted second costing her, keeping her from Lacey, Callie, and Jacob.

She sprinted to the bridge's edge and looked down the hillside.

I'll break my ankle.

The phone rang in her hand, startling her so much that she almost dropped it.

"What?" she said, and almost added, 'Teddy,' to the end of it.

The voice said, "Why are you stopping?"

"Stopping?"

"Yes, you are stopped at the bridge on Vista, Sara, and I want to know why. You wouldn't be trying to inform someone of your...situation...would you?"

The creepy sensation of being watched hovered around her. She scanned the area and saw no white sedan, nor anyone that looked like they might be keeping tabs on her position. Looked up into the trees nearby, half expecting to see someone perched on a limb holding a camera. Instead, a squirrel twitched its tail and then scampered further up the trunk as a cyclist zipped by.

"Answer me, Sara."

"I'm just trying to figure out the quickest way. That's all."

"I sense some tension in your voice," it said. "You wouldn't be lying to me, would you?"

"No, no, I'm not. I swear."

"Because if you are, I have some pliers in my hand that haven't pinched anything in a while."

"Don't!" she screamed, scaring another pa.s.sing cyclist so much she almost ran into the curb. "If you put one more motherf-"