And then he saw why. Mounted into the inside of the smokestack’s wall were rectangular rungs, like large staples, protruding about eight inches from the brick: a ladder for daredevil workers climbing to the top to replace aircraft warning lightbulbs, he guessed.
She was thirty feet up and climbing. A fall from there would kill or paralyze her.
“Sophie, I’m a friend of your father’s. I’ve been looking for you.” Shaw saw a glint and jumped back fast as something she’d flung fell toward him.
It was what he’d guessed—the shiv—and it just missed him, shattering at his feet. He glanced toward the entrance to the furnace room. No sign of the kidnapper. Yet.
Her voice was unsteady and she was crying. “You killed him! I saw you!”
“I was there. But the shot came from whoever kidnapped you.”
“You’re lying!”
“We have to be quiet! He could still be here.” Shaw was speaking in a harsh whisper. He remembered her father’s nickname for her. “Fee! Please.”
She stopped.
Shaw added, “Luka. Luka’s your poodle. A white standard.”
“How do you know . . . ?” Her voice fading.
“You named yourself Fee when you were a baby. Your father offered a reward to find you. That’s what I’m doing.”
“He did?”
“I went to your house. Alta Vista Drive. Luka sat next to me on the couch with the gold slipcover. The ugly gold slipcover. In front of the coffee table with the broken leg.”
“What color is Luka’s collar?”
“Blue with white rhinestones,” Shaw said, then added, “Or maybe diamonds.”
Her face went still. Then a faint smile. “He offered a reward?”
“Come on down, Fee. We’ve got to hide.”
She debated for a moment.
Sophie began the climb to the floor. Shaw saw that her legs were trembling. Heights could do that to you.
More rungs. When she was about fifteen feet above the brick floor, Sophie released the grip with her right hand and wiped her palm on her thigh, drying the sweat.
Before she could take the rung again, though, her left hand slipped off the one she was gripping. Screaming, she made a desperate lunge for the rung but missed. She pitched backward, headfirst, tumbling exactly toward the spot on the brick where the glass knife had shattered into razor-sharp splinters.
17.
Unlike at San Miguel Park, the law had arrived fast and en masse. Ten official cars, a carnival of flashing lights.
The medical examiner technician had just finished with Kyle Butler; that team had been the first to get to work. This always seemed odd to Shaw. You’d think corpses could wait—once you’d confirmed they were indeed corpses, of course—while evidence might dry up or blow away or change in composition. But they were the experts.
The heart and brain of the investigation seemed to be the Task Force, specifically Dan Wiley. The imposing man was conferring with others, some local, some Santa Clara County, and a few plainclothes who, Shaw overheard, were from the Bureau of Investigation—California, not federal. Shaw was mildly surprised the FBI was not present. As he’d reminded Wiley, kidnapping is a federal crime as well as state.
Shaw was standing near the loading dock, where he’d been directed to wait by Wiley. He had told the detective about Kyle Butler’s words and suggested that X—though using the preferred police term unsub, for “unknown subject”—had fled south on Tamyen Road.
“At Highway 42 and Tamyen, there might be CCTVs. I don’t know the make or color of the car. He’ll be driving carefully. Stopping for red lights, not speeding.”
Wiley had grunted and wandered off to deliver this information to minions—or not.
He was now barking to a young woman officer, her hair in a constricted blond bun, “I said to search it. I meant to search it. Why would I not mean for you to search it?”
The woman reluctantly deflated her defiant gaze. She walked away to search it, whatever it was.
Shaw glanced at the pair of ambulances, forty feet in front of him. One of the boxy vehicles held the deceased Kyle Butler, the other Sophie Mulliner, whose condition he didn’t yet know. He’d managed to avert her landing on the glass-strewn floor by leveraging her into the ash pit—disgusting but softer than brick. He’d felt a bone pop with this maneuver—hers, not his—and she’d veered into the unpleasant soup. He pulled her out immediately as she moaned in pain and retched. The cleanest water he could find was standing rainwater, more or less clear, and he scooped up handfuls, draining it into her mouth and telling her, like a dentist, to rinse and spit. The chemicals in the pit could not be good. The fracture was bad, both radius and ulna, though not a through-the-skin fracture.
Shaw had not heard her account of the kidnapping; their time together in the smokestack had been devoted to first aid. He now saw the medical technician who’d been attending to Sophie walk away, speaking on his cell phone.
Shaw pushed off the loading dock wall and started toward the ambulance to speak to the young woman.
Wiley saw him. “Don’t wander too far, Chief. We need to talk.”
Shaw ignored him and continued toward the ambulances. To his right, on the far side of the chain-link, he could see a gaggle of news vans and maybe thirty reporters and camera operators. Some spectators.
He found Sophie, sitting up, groggy, eyes glazed. Her right arm, the broken one, was in a temporary cast. She’d be on the way to the hospital soon. Shaw was familiar with breaks; surgery would be involved. The medics had apparently used an emergency wash to clean off what chemicals they could.
She blinked in Shaw’s direction. “Is he really . . .” Her voice was harsh and she coughed. “Kyle?”
“He’s gone. I’m sorry.”
She lowered her head and cried, covering her eyes. Catching her breath, she asked, “Did they . . . Have they found him?”
“No.”
“Jesus.” She tugged a tissue from a box and used that to wipe her eyes and nose.
“Why Kyle?”
“He saw the kidnapper’s car. He could identify it.”
“Did he come with you?”
“No. I told him to go to your house, to see your father. But he was worried about you. He wanted to help me search.”
More sobbing. “He just . . . He was so sweet. Oh, his mom. Somebody’ll have to tell her. And his brother.” Eyes easing into and out of focus. “How did you . . . How did you find me?”