The Competition - [70]

Cutter spotted us. “This is all your fault! You come here, you disrupt my house, you harass my son. I’m going to sue you and your whole useless department!”

Bailey took a deep breath and spoke slowly in her Jedi voice. “Mr. Cutter, I am very sorry that this happened. It is your absolute right to file a complaint if that’s what you choose to do. But right now, we need to gather the evidence as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can find your son. We’ll need your cooperation. I’d like you to talk to a police officer and give all the details you can about where Evan might’ve gone. Can you do that?”

Cutter was still breathing hard, the veins in his neck stretched taut as piano wire, but he stopped yelling. Bailey stood and waited for him to respond to her question. Finally, he gave the barest of nods. As many times as I’ve seen her do it, it never ceases to amaze me the way she can calm anyone, no matter how rabid. Bailey asked one of the unis to sit down with John Cutter; then we moved down the hall to Evan’s bedroom, where crime scene techs were already at work. That was about as fast as I’d ever seen a team arrive.

The sergeant joined us. “The father said he didn’t hear anything last night. Didn’t know the boy was gone until he came down for breakfast and knocked on his door.”

I hadn’t noticed there was an upstairs when I was here before. “Where’s the staircase?” I asked.

The sergeant pointed to our far right. I walked in that direction and saw a short hallway that led to a flight of stairs. It looked like an add-on. I went back to Evan’s doorway-no one but the techs were allowed in right now-and craned my neck to get a glimpse of his room. The only thing that looked out of place was the window screen, which seemed to be missing. The window was cranked open. I pointed to it and asked the sergeant, “That how he got out?”

“Seems so. Mom says he always slept with it open.”

The window was fairly large, four feet by three feet, and it gave easy access to the backyard, which was encircled by a high, whitewashed wooden fence. Which meant Evan’s escape was perfectly shielded from view. And of course, it had been dark and too early for anyone to be out and about. The unis would door-knock everyone in the vicinity, but the odds of finding any witnesses in a quiet neighborhood like this were lousy. “Is there a side gate that lets out to the street?” The sergeant nodded. “What happened to the screen? Did you find it?”

“Outside on the ground,” the sergeant said.

“Did you call Dorian?” I asked Bailey.

“First thing,” she said. “Said she’d be here to make sure they didn’t miss anything.”

“They won’t,” the sergeant said. “These guys are the best in the business.”

“You haven’t met Dorian,” I said.

“Sure I have. Who do you think trained ’em?” The sergeant headed back to the front of the house.

I scanned the bedroom again. “I can’t imagine they’ll find anything of use, but I guess we’ve got to try.” I heard the rumble of approaching news vans. “This is going to hit the airwaves in three, two, one-”

“Probably already has.”

“Maybe this time we’ll luck out and get better tips than ‘Justin Bieber did it.’”

Bailey sighed. “Yeah, maybe this time they’ll tag Taylor Swift.”

44

We found Mikayla Cutter on the front porch shivering under her long down coat, her face swollen and blotchy with grief. I’d expected her to be holed up in her bedroom, where she wouldn’t have to see the swarm of cops and reporters, but she was staring past it all, into the farther reaches of the Valley. Mikayla glanced at us, then turned back to her vigil. “He can’t be far, can he?” Her voice was small and far away.

“No,” I said. I reached out and squeezed her arm. “We’re going to do everything we can to get him home as soon as possible, I promise.”

Mikayla bit her lip and nodded as tears leaked out of the sides of her eyes. We wove our way through the police line toward Bailey’s car. By the time we hit the freeway, the fog had lifted and left behind a fresh, clean blue sky. “We’d better get our shrinks in on this.”

Bailey nodded. “And we need to tell Dr. Malloy about the letter.”

I stared down the freeway at the sea of red taillights. We’d hit a nasty traffic snarl dead center. With the threat of another shooting hanging over our heads, no clue where to find the killers, and now Evan’s disappearance, being trapped in traffic was so agonizing it made my stomach churn. “Can this goddamned case get any more bizarre?”

Bailey winced. “Must you? Really?”

She was right. I definitely should know better than to tempt fate with a question like that.

As we inched along, I thought about where Evan might have gone. “Are the unis digging into Evan’s background?”

“Of course.”

“God, if anything happens to him…”

“Don’t go there. We’ll find him. We have to.”

“But when Logan hears he’s running-”

“I said, don’t go there.”

Logan knew Evan better than we did, which meant the odds that he’d find Evan before we did were pretty damn good. And he’d never have a more risk-free chance to kill Evan. By running away, Evan had managed to put himself in a thousand times greater peril.