Dead Time Read online

  The cops had stopped firing. They were waiting for Oden either to die or to channel Rasputin and refuse to die. All the cops’ weapons stayed trained on the man standing wounded, stunned, and defiant in the road.

  Five seconds became ten before he dropped to his knees.

  The .38 slipped from his fingers and clattered to the ground. I didn’t hear it clatter. I did see it bounce.

  Blood was streaming from the end of the pinky of Oden’s right hand in a dark rivulet, like a shot of espresso dripping into a cup.

  He swayed for a few seconds before he fell onto his face with a splat that I heard clearly. He didn’t thrust out either hand to break his fall.

  The cops swarmed forward, guns ready. They were barking commands to a dead man, still wary about Rasputin.

  My eyes caught motion on the near horizon. On the rise beyond the bridge, a half dozen vehicles stormed over the ridgeline in formation, three abreast. Reinforcements for the ambush.

  I tried to turn my head back far enough to check on Amy. I saw a bullet hole in the windshield. Low, passenger side. Right where I would have been had I not crossed the console to find the brake pedal.

  I said, “Amy, it’s over.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Amy, wake up. It’s over. Come out of it.”

  She didn’t say a word.

  Despite popular misconceptions, hypnotic trances are typically not hard to break. My normal speaking voice could have done it.

  The screaming and gunfire should have done it.

  I resorted to cliché. Even though I hadn’t given her any suggestions on exiting the trance, I said, “On the count of three, open your eyes. One…two…three. Now say something. Amy?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  Come on, girl, give me a good eeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaa. It’s safe now.

  I used my teeth to rip at the duct tape that was tethering me to the GPS. When I finally ripped through the tape some of it stuck to my teeth and lips. I contorted my position so I could rotate my head and swing my bound hands to Amy’s face.

  I saw blue below her nostrils. I touched her neck with eight fingertips. I couldn’t find a carotid pulse.

  Amy wasn’t breathing.

  “Help here!” I screamed, spitting at the damn tape. “Help here! She’s not breathing.”

  Help came in the next few seconds.

  I hoped there was a real paramedic someplace in the phalanx of vehicles that had crested the hill behind the arroyo.

  The Camry chose that moment to start rolling forward, not back. I strained to find the brake with my toe.

  SIXTY

  Sam helped me onto the stretcher. He leaned over me so that his big head blotted out the radiance from the sun. From my perspective it was like looking up at a solar eclipse.

  “You know who he is?” Sam asked.

  I said, “Yeah. You do too. Lincoln Oden.”

  “He kidnapped you in Tarzana?”

  “I think. He knocked me out.”

  “The girl?”

  “That’s Amy.”

  “Ah,” Sam said. “The fucking beguiler. The paramedics have her—a chopper’s on the way. I’ll catch up to you again in a minute. Alan, you did good.”

  A few minutes later Sam joined me in the back of the ambulance that had been the primary prop in the ambush of Oden. He made himself at home beside me. At my request the ambulance doors were wide-open despite the heat. I didn’t want to feel confined again. Even a little. Sam took over the job of cutting and yanking the tape off my wrists and ankles. A paramedic—a real one, not a cop pretending to be one—was on the other side of me. She had a catheter prepped and ready, waiting for Sam to finish clearing my wrist of tape so she could start an IV.

  I said, “Amy?”

  Sam explained that she was being loaded into the medical evacuation helicopter some distance down the road, out of my sight, on the far side of the rise in the highway. I’d heard the chopper arrive moments before. Sam said that Amy was breathing. That was all he knew about her condition. He asked me to tell him what happened.

  I gave him the highlights of what I recalled from the moment I first heard Oden’s voice in the garage in Tarzana. He listened to my choppy tale without any questions. When I was all done he said, “Wait. You’re telling me you hypnotized the poor girl and then she stopped breathing? I don’t know whether that makes you the second coming of Franz Mesmer or a complete quack.”

  I was shocked that Sam knew anything about Franz Mesmer—Mesmer was a nineteenth-century German physician whom many consider the father of hypnosis. But, I also had enough of my wits to know that I lacked sufficient brainpower to engage in any repartee with Sam about nineteenth-century mental-health practitioners.

  “Where are we?” I asked him.

  “Couldn’t tell you exactly. The cop I’ve been hanging with is from Randsburg.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said, as though it were important that I had.

  Sam turned to the paramedic. “Where you from?” he asked her.

  “California City,” she said.

  I’d never heard of California City, either.

  Sam said, “This piece of paradise you’re looking at”—he gestured outside—“is the Mojave Desert. Not too far from Death Valley. You might have noticed it’s a little warm.” He paused. “But at least it’s a dry heat.”

  What a friend I have, I thought.

  “How the hell did you find us, Sam?”

  “The girls. Chloe and Ramona.”

  The paramedic from California City was finally content that my wrist was antiseptic. She gripped a needle and leaned over my arm. “Little stick coming,” she said. I winced as the point pierced my skin.

  A blast of thwop-thwop-thwop-thwop-thwop from the revving blades of the departing helicopter intruded, providing cover for the involuntary “ouch” I squealed as she adjusted the positioning of the catheter.

  “It’s in,” she said. “We’ll have you hydrated lickety-split.”

  “I didn’t know you were such a wimp,” Sam said.

  I said, “I don’t like needles. I don’t understand what you’re saying. Chloe and Ramona? Come on, tell me.”

  Sam opened his mouth and then closed it as the pulsating popping of the helicopter blades grew louder. I watched the chopper speed past us a hundred yards away at about ten o’clock. It was only fifty feet above the ground when it banked, climbed, and disappeared from view as though it had been yanked away by the gods.

  “I wish I knew how to do that,” Sam said.

  The EMT from California City taped the catheter in place.

  Sam opened his mouth again to tell me about Chloe and Ramona. Again, he closed it. The intrusion the second time was the roar of a Highway Patrol cruiser blasting past the ambulance. The cop car was demonstrating a show of speed worthy of a street racer on a Friday night. The howl of the car’s big engine exploded in my ears for only a second before the driver jammed hard on his brakes and squealed the car to a stop five feet from the Camry.

  Sam was on the move before I could make any sense of what I was seeing.

  The Camry was baking in the sun right where it had stopped rolling. It looked like a wounded animal dying slowly in the desert heat. All four doors were open. The right front tire was deflated.

  I sat up. “What’s going on?” I said.

  Sam was jumping down from the ambulance. He hit the ground running toward the Camry.

  I yelled at his back, “What is it?”

  Two Highway Patrol troopers hopped out of the cruiser. One ran to the back of the Camry, the other to the driver’s door.

  “Pop it! Pop it! Pop it!” the cop at the trunk yelled.

  “Where the hell is the—Got it! Got it! Go, go!”

  The trunk flew open. Both cops disappeared from my view.

  One yelled, “Medic! Now! Oh Jesus. Now!”

  A second paramedic appeared in the open doorway of the ambulance. He said, “The other rig’s gone. We’re i
t. Is he stable?”

  He was asking about me.

  The woman who had started my IV looked at him, then back at me. I could tell she was as baffled as I was. The male paramedic didn’t get agitated. In a calm voice he said, “Kathy? We have a critical. Is he stable?”

  “I’m stable,” I said. I slid onto the jump seat Sam had vacated. “Take the stretcher.”

  Kathy got with the plan. Together the two paramedics yanked the stretcher from the rig, piled equipment onto the sheets, and sprinted toward the half dozen law enforcement people clustered behind the Camry.

  I unhooked the saline bag from above me and climbed down from the back of the ambulance, suspending the bag above my head with my left hand. The asphalt felt soft beneath my feet, as though it were padded. The heat radiating up from the black macadam was, literally, breathtaking.

  I started to jog toward the Camry.

  Sam had backed away from the car to give the local cops and the paramedics room to work. He saw me approaching. He held up a hand to keep me from edging any closer.

  “There’s another woman,” he said. “In the trunk.”

  I blinked. Another woman? My mind settled on Jaana. My heart sank.

  “Alive?” I said.

  He swallowed. “Maybe. Not very.”

  I heard the distant thwop-thwop-thwop of the evacuation chopper.

  This time the helicopter was getting closer. Coming back.

  “Eeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaa.”

  Oh no, I thought as recognition landed on me softly, like a mosquito alighting on my nose. Oh no.

  L—eeeeeeeeeeeee S—aaaaaaaaaaaa.

  Li—sa.

  Amy’s screams from the backseat of the Camry had been her way of trying to tell me that Lisa was in the damn trunk. I’d missed it.

  Over and over again, I’d missed it.

  “It’s Lisa?” I asked Sam.

  “When Amy regained consciousness in the chopper, the first thing she wanted to know was if we got Lisa out of the trunk.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  The Canyon

  Lincoln Oden knew Jaana Peet. During the time they both worked on the North Rim, Oden had talked with Jaana whenever he could manufacture a reason to do so. He had invited her out on dates three different times. Each invitation was more awkward than the one before.

  She had turned him down all three times.

  Oden fantasized that his assignment to coordinate the search left him an opportunity to be heroic. He would find Jaana. Save her. She would be grateful. They would go out. They would fall in love. They would marry. In his fantasy, Oden didn’t seriously consider the possibility that Jaana wouldn’t be grateful to him.

  But once he finished interviewing Nicholas Paulson, Oden began to consider the possibility that Jaana hadn’t disappeared into the Colorado River at all, but rather that she had chosen to disappear, period.

  Two additional facts helped confirm his suspicion. Jaana’s hiking boots had not been recovered along with her other belongings. And the amount of water that could have been carried in the containers found at her campsite was barely sufficient to accommodate two people making a rim-to-floor journey in the August heat.

  He concluded that Jaana had worn the boots and carried the missing water bottles, probably in a daypack she’d stashed inside her backpack. She had hiked out, probably on the Bright Angel Trail, the route to the South Rim, in the dark.

  Based on his investigation, Oden thought he had a pretty good idea where Jaana had gone.

  On his first day off after the search was called off because of the flash flood, Oden staked out Jaana’s Estonian friend’s rented home on the outskirts of Bullhead City. He watched Jaana’s friend leave for work. Less than an hour later, he spotted Jaana. She was hanging laundry in the fenced backyard.

  Another day and a half of observation convinced him that Jaana was in hiding. For Oden, that was good news.

  He returned and watched her on his days off during the next two weeks. She never left the property.

  The third week, he waited for her friend to leave for work and for Jaana to step outside. Late morning she rolled a trash can to the street. She didn’t raise her eyes as he stepped out of his car, but she spun to get back inside the house as fast as she could.

  “I can help,” he said to her back from thirty feet away. “I can help you.”

  She took two more steps before she turned to see who had spoken. Her hand flew to her mouth to cover her gasp. She recognized him.

  The fact that she had recognized him felt like a gift to Oden.

  “I can help,” he said. “I’d like to help. I know what he tried to do to you. I understand what you did. Why you did it.”

  She invited him in. She didn’t feel she had a choice.

  To Oden, the little house where she was living looked like it was begging to be scraped from the earth. In its thirty-five years of existence, too much maintenance had been deferred. The desert hadn’t been kind.

  “You can’t stay here,” Oden said to Jaana. “Your friend is already in trouble. If you’re discovered here with her…you’ll both be deported.”

  “She has a green card.”

  “It won’t protect her if she’s helping you hide.”

  “I stay inside,” she said.

  “I found you. Someone else will find you too. You can’t stay here with her.”

  “I have no money.”

  “I can help.”

  Jaana couldn’t resist the urge to place a hand on her belly.

  “You have a baby to consider,” Lincoln Oden said, his eyes following her hand. Oden had calculated that he had about five months to get Jaana Peet to fall in love with him. “If I can keep you hidden until the baby is born, your child will be a U.S. citizen. That changes everything.”

  She asked, “Why should I trust you?”

  He flipped open his badge wallet. “Because I could take you into custody. I should take you into custody.” He put the wallet away. “The question is, can I trust you? If I don’t put you in the car right now and take you in, I will be as vulnerable as you are. Maybe even more.”

  “Why would you help me?”

  “I think what he did was wrong. The baby deserves a chance. So do you.”

  Three days later, Oden found the little ranch outside Kingman, Arizona. Two days after that, he moved Jaana from Bullhead City. He helped her write a good-bye note to her friend. In the note, she said she’d met someone who would help. She would be in touch.

  The arrangement in Kingman worked fine for a few months. Jaana was relieved that she could go outside—the closest neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away. Oden arranged for Jaana to receive prenatal checkups at a free clinic for migrants. Her pregnancy was uncomplicated. He visited the ranch on his days off. When he was there, he doted on her, but he slept in the second bedroom.

  Jaana enjoyed her new home. She was as wary of seeing strangers as Oden was. Unlike her friend’s decrepit shack, the ranch house was relatively modern, and airconditioned. She had a television. Other than the isolation— Oden refused to let her have a phone or a computer—she convinced herself that she was better off in Kingman than she had been in Bullhead City.

  Her baby would be a citizen.

  A month before Jaana was due, Oden quit his job with the Park Service so he could be with her. He moved into the house in Kingman. He convinced himself that she was warming to him. He used his free time to take courses to become an insurance agent.

  Jaana gave birth to a son with the aid of a midwife.

  Almost immediately after the child was born, Lincoln Oden knew that everything had changed for Jaana.

  He had conversations with himself. They all ended with him telling himself he should walk away. That his plan hadn’t worked.

  He didn’t walk away.

  The day that Jaana’s friend arrived to rescue her from her captivity in Kingman, Oden was parked out of sight, waiting. Jaana thought he was in town, on errands. He’d parked in the same spot down
the road every time he’d left the ranch for five days, expecting that the Estonian girlfriend would come.

  When Oden drove away from the little ranch an hour later, the baby was asleep in his infant carrier in the middle of the backseat of the car.

  Jaana and her friend were in the trunk.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Her Ex

  The ambulance transported me to an ER in Tehachapi, another town I hadn’t heard of. After a local cop finished interviewing me, Sam loaned me his phone. I tried Lauren in Holland. She didn’t answer. I left a message letting her know I’d lost my new cell phone, and that I would try to reach her again soon. Sam had already tried to reach Merideth to update her about Lisa.

  He’d gotten her voice mail. Told her to call him immediately.

  He couldn’t get any medical updates about Lisa or Amy.

  While we were waiting for my turn with the ER doc, Sam finally began to answer my question about Chloe and Ranger Ramona. He was in a storytelling mood.

  “Okay,” he said, “I get a call at some awful hour. I’m sound asleep in the comfiest bed I think I’ve ever slept in my entire life. All I know is, it’s too early. That was this morning. I manage to get the phone to my ear and before I can even curse at whoever’s calling, I hear some guy I don’t know saying, ‘Kick them this way,’ then ‘I got a gun.’ Then nothing.

  “From my perspective, not necessarily a good thing to wake up to. ‘Kick them this way. I got a gun.’ I check caller ID. It says it was you, but I was ninety-nine percent sure it hadn’t been you talking. I admit I’m confused—it’s early, I’m foggy, and I’d been thinking you should be asleep in the other room. But if it’s really you calling me that early in the morning, I’m guessing the ‘Kick them this way. I got a gun’ is something important. That, or you’re feeling suicidal and you’re hoping I’ll put you out of your misery.

  “I stumble out to the living room for a reality check and sure enough you’re gone. The note you left out on the counter said there was a psych emergency with Mel’s friend. You remember that much?” I told him I did. “And that you’re heading to Tarzana. You leave nice notes, Alan. Lots of detail. Lauren’s trained you well.