Double

What about sex? What would Nyland have considered bizarre? Homosexuality. But no less an authority than Karyn Sugarman had been certain Elaine’s orientation was heterosexual. So it couldn’t be that either.

“Admiral Nyland—” The young man with the floppy hair stuck his head into the cubicle. “Admiral, we’ve only got half an hour before we have to tape that show for Channel Eight.”

Nyland had been staring at the blotter, and it took a few seconds for him to rouse himself, He looked at the young man as if he had forgotten why he was taping a show.

The aide held up his wrist and pointed to his watch.

Nyland stood up slowly. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” To me, he added, “I’m sorry, Miss McCone, but I must keep to my schedule.”

I got up and followed him across the large room to the door. “You run a tight campaign ship, Admiral.”

He looked at me curiously. “Were you a Navy brat?”

“Yes, sir. My father was a chief. Thirty-year man.”

He looked around the room — at the envelope stuffers and the phone canvassers, and at the red, white, and blue banner. Something seemed to have gone out of him, as if my visit had recalled images of Elaine too vividly. He stared blankly at the banner, then shook his handsome gray head. “Then you know what we’re trying to do here,” he said with an effort. “The godlessness we’re dedicated to fighting.”

“Yessir, I do.”

And although I wouldn’t put it on religious terms, I knew far better than he, for all his years and experience. I’d been out there in the middle of the filth and the crime and the violence, while Henry Nyland had only viewed it from his lofty and protected perch. Unlike him, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to fight it, except on a slow, day-to-day basis. But I did know his way wouldn’t work.

28: “Wolf”

I stared at the television screen, at the woman named Ruth Ferguson. She was talking about her son again, her son Timmy. An unidentified woman in her mid-thirties with short dark hair had enticed him away from his school in Bloomfield Hills — probably someone hired by her ex-husband, she said. The ex-husband was named Carlton Ferguson and he was a design and structural engineer who had divorced her two years ago and then vanished after a bitter custody fight that had left Timmy in her charge. She thought he might have gone to South America, where he’d once spent a year “building bridges or something,” but investigators she herself had hired in the Detroit area after Timmy’s kidnapping had thus far been unable to trace him. She was offering a five-thousand-dollar reward, she said, for information leading to the whereabouts and safe return of her son — money she had been prepared to pay to Jim Lauterbach.

Then she was gone, and the newscaster said that anyone with any information on either the death of Lauterbach or the whereabouts of Timmy Ferguson should contact the San Diego police or the channel’s newsroom. Then he went on to something else, and I reached over and shut him off.

I sat there. Five thousand dollars. If I was right about where Timmy was, all I had to do was call the cops or the TV station and the money would be mine — half mine, because McCone was entitled to fifty percent of it. All the investigating we’d done wouldn’t be for free after all. And I’d have done my good deed for the year.

But I didn’t move. I kept seeing Ruth Ferguson’s beautiful, cold face, kept hearing that voice of hers, emotionless except for the bitter edge, as if, instead of her son, she’d been talking about a piece of rather valuable property that had been stolen from her. She hadn’t seemed to care much about whether or not Timmy was all right; she hadn’t seemed to care at all that Lauterbach was dead, only that he’d died before he could tell her what he knew. And all I could think of was what Timmy had said to me about his mother — not the woman I knew as Nancy Clark, but his natural mother, Ruth Ferguson.

I don’t like my mother. She makes me afraid

Why? I thought. Why does she make him afraid?

I got up and paced the room for a time. But I needed more space than that, more activity. I took the elevator down to the lobby, went outside, and walked along the edge of the beach.

Maybe I ought to go talk to Ruth Ferguson, I thought, see what kind of impression she makes in person. But I had no idea where she was staying and I couldn’t get to her through the police or through the TV station without telling them why I wanted to see her. I could try canvassing the hotels in the area by phone, but that was a tall order; and even if I did find her that way, and I saw her and didn’t like her any better face to face than I had on television, she’d know right away that I knew something about Timmy’s disappearance.