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. She 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 her 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 close, 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 like 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.”
“Wouldn’t someone have tagged it in the middle of the night?” Vic asked.
“Probably,” Masen said. “Do you think she herself might have left it somewhere, Mr. Trenton?”
Then Vic remembered. The needle valve.
“You look like something just clicked,” Masen said.
“It didn’t click, it clunked. The car isn’t here because it’s