He was always tightly controlled, always buttoned up. He knew from the fifth grade on that he was going to somehow get through college and become a lawyer. Lawyers made a lot of money. Lawyers worked with logic. Logic was Andy’s God.
He saw each event as a point from which a finite number of possibilities radiated. At the end of each possibility line was another event point. And so on. This point-to-point blueprint of life had served him very well. He made straight A’s through grammar school and high school, got a Merit Scholarship, and could have gone to college almost anywhere. He decided on the University of Maine, throwing away his chance at Harvard because he had already decided to start his career in Augusta, and he didn’t want some piney-woodser in gumrubber boots and a lumberman’s jacket throwing Harvard in his face.
On this hot July morning, things were right on schedule.
He put Vic Trenton’s phone down. There had been no answer at the Camber telephone number. The State Police detective and Bannerman were still here, waiting for instructions like well-trained dogs. He had worked with Townsend, the State Police guy, before, and he was the sort of fellow Andy Masen felt comfortable with. When you said fetch, Townsend fetched. Bannerman was a new one, and Masen didn’t care for him. His eyes were a little too bright, and the way he had suddenly come out with the idea that Kemp might have coerced the woman by using the kid . . . well, such ideas, if they were going to come, ought to come from Andy Masen. The three of them sat on the sectional sofa, not talking, just drinking coffee and waiting for the FBI guys to show up with the trace-back equipment
Andy thought about the case. It might be a tempest in a teapot, but it might well be something more. The husband was convinced it was a kidnapping and attached no importance to the missing car. He was fixated on the idea that Steven Kemp had taken his people.
Andy Masen was not so sure.
Camber wasn’t home; no one was home up there. Maybe they had all gone on vacation. That was likely enough; July was the quintessential vacation month, and they had been due to hit someone who was gone. Would he have taken her car in for a repair job if he was going away? Unlikely. Unlikely that the car was there at all. But it had to be checked, and there was one possibility he had neglected to mention to Vic.
Suppose she had taken the car up to Camber’s Garage? Suppose someone had offered her a lift back? Not a friend, not an acquaintance, not Camber or his wife, but a total stranger. Andy could hear Trenton saying, “Oh, no, my wife would never accept a ride from a stranger.” But, in the vernacular, she had accepted several rides from Steve Kemp, who was almost a stranger. If the hypothetical man was friendly, and if she was anxious to get her son home, she might have accepted. And maybe the nice, smiling man was some kind of freak. They had had just such a freak here in Castle Rock before, Frank Dodd. Maybe the nice, smiling man had left them in the brush with their throats cut and had hied on his merry way. If that was the case, the Pinto would be at Camber’s.
Andy did not think this line of reasoning likely, but it was possible. He would have sent a man up to the Cambers’ anyway—it was routine—but he liked to understand why he was doing each thing he was doing. He thought that, for all practical purposes, he could dismiss Camber’s Garage from the structure of logic and order he was building. He supposed she could have gone up there, discovered the Cambers were gone, and then had her car conk out on her, but Castle Rock’s Town Road No. 3 was hardly Antarctica. She and the kid had only to walk to the nearest house and ask to use the phone in that case, but they hadn’t done it.
“Mr. Townsend,” he said in his soft voice. “You and Sheriff Bannerman here ought to take a ride out to this Joe Camber’s Garage. Verify three things: no blue Pinto there, license number 218-864, no Donna and Theodore Trenton there, no Cambers there. Got that?”
“Fine,” Townsend said. “Do you want—”
“I want only those three things,” Andy said softly. He didn’t like