Chapter 24
Detective Charles Waters took a sip of his Coke, picking up the phone. Resting his hand on his chin, he listened to the ringing. Once, twice.
"Hello?"
"This is Detective Waters. Did you manage to reach the Danvers boy?" Daniel Teague let out a long breath.
"Yes. I spoke to him. He didn't know anything."
"What did he say?"
"He said that neither he nor any of the rest of Kat's friends had heard from her."
"Okay," Waters said slowly. "Can you give me a transcript of the conversation?"
"What?"
"Tell me, as close as you can, what he told you. Word for word."
"Why?" Waters reached for a pen and a notepad from his desk, putting down the soda. Beside the pad, an open file folder lay. Inside the folder was a blown-up school ID photo of a teenaged boy, name: Danvers, Caleb. On the inside flap was a photo of a barn; rather, the burned, gutted remains of a barn, interposed above another profile shot of the Danvers boy. A large Sharpie arrow connected the two pictures.
"Just helps me do my job," Waters replied amiably. No reason to get the father paranoid. After all, there was nothing but circumstantial evidence connected Caleb Danvers to the fire at Putnam Barn. No reason to tell an already worried parent that his daughter was connected to a dangerous arson suspect.
"All right. He was driving. I mean, he was in a car."
"How do you know?"
"Well, when he was telling me that he hadn't heard from Kat, he interrupted himself to tell someone else- Tyson? Tyler? – anyway, to tell the driver that he'd missed the street. So he told me that Kat hadn't contacted any of them, and then interrupted himself again. This time, he was talking to a girl, Karen. And he offered to help out, but I told him there was nothing he could do, and that you might be calling him."
"Right. Ok. Anything else? Anything strike you as odd about his tone?"
"Um… nothing, really. Oh, he did stumble over the girl's name, but it sounded like they were fighting over something, so he could have just-"
"Stuttered it. I understand. I'm going to go talk to Detective Anderson, the one who was covering the kidnapping case. I'll be in touch."
"Okay. Call me."
"I will. Oh, and Mr. Teague? Do you, by any chance, recall the name of the street Caleb told his friend to turn onto?"
"I think it was… Knight St."
"All right. Goodbye, then." With that, Waters hung up the phone and uncapped his pen.
Caleb DanversKnight StTyson/Tyler Tyler Simms? Karen? '
As he wrote the second name and jotted a question mark, Waters' pen suddenly jumped, leaving a tiny black dash to the right of the mark. Oh, he did stumble over the girl's name…
Karen…
"Karen," Waters said aloud. "Kat. Karen. Ka- Karen." Brow furrowing, he bent back to his pad.
Karen/Kat- similarKaren Kat? In hiding, kidnapped?
"Hmm." Standing, Waters checked his watch. It was late, almost 9:45. He should be getting home. Sighing, he thought about his wife. She would already be in bed by now. She'd wake
up when he walked in, though, and then it'd start. The yelling, the hurt looks, the guilt. "No harm in checking out Knight Street," he said aloud, capping his pen with a sharp, decisive motion. Ripping off the piece of paper, he stuck it in the file on his desk, closed the file, and tucked it under his arm.
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"So we have, like, three and a half hours."
"Right."
"To figure out how to break through this shield."
"Right."
"Which we've already been trying to break for a couple hours."
"Right."
"Ok, then. Just making sure we were clear." Slamming his hand against the hood of his truck, Tyler shook his head. "Do we just keep pushing at it, or what?"
"I don't know," Pogue answered. "We don't seem to be getting anywhere." Sarah, Kate and Kat sat on the hood, eying the house on Knight Street as if they could break Mary's barrier by force of will alone. Caleb hissed out a sigh through his teeth.
"You're right," he spat. "This is getting us nowhere. There's got to be some frailty in here, somewhere! She can't have made it so goddamn perfectly that all three of us, plus Reid inside there, can't break through!"
"She did," Pogue said in disgust. "Fuck. I don't know how long we can keep this up, guys."
"As long as we need to," Tyler cried angrily, his narrow, handsome face contorted with determination and worry. Kat reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. She wished she could do something, anything.
Useless. I'm useless to them, to Reid.
"We're gonna save him, Ty," she murmured.
"Again!" Caleb reached out his hands, and Tyler and Pogue took them. Connected, the three Sons of Ipswich focused their power, once more, on the old house in front of them. A ripple went through the air, taking the breath away from the three girls on the hood of the truck. The fence wavered, rippling like molten steel, and the house seemed to shimmer like a mirage as the power swept across it and was deflected away.
"Damn it!" Caleb was shaking, rage tightening his shoulders and making a muscle in his jaw jump reflexively. Pogue was breathing through his teeth, long hair whipping around his hard, chiseled features in a wind born of the darkest kind of magic. Even so, it was Tyler who turned and flung out a hand towards the ancient, rusted mailbox that teetered between standing straight and falling into the road. With a shout, he watched the mailbox explode into fiery debris, scattering across the pavement. A chunk of wooden post fell into the ditch between the overgrown lawn and the street.
"Put your hands above your head!" The shout took them all by surprise, even Kat, and the teens spun around to see what Tyler belatedly recognized as a plainclothes cop standing in front of a nondescript Subaru, a gun in his hand. "Drop any other explosives you're holding and put your hands above your head!"
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Waters pulled onto Knight Street slowly, not expecting much more than an underage party held in one of these musty old homes. So when he saw the truck parked in front of one of the abandoned houses, he wasn't surprised. It was the sudden, violent explosion that made him jump out of his car and pull his standard issue .38, yelling a warning.
"Drop any other explosives you're holding and put your hands above your head," he repeated loudly as the six teenagers standing and sitting around the truck turned to face him. Waters felt an unexplainable chill run up his spine, tension making the cool night air thick and tasteless.
He approached the kids, gun still in hand. Three girls jumped down off the truck and went to stand with the boys, creating a row of teens that made him think, aptly, of a line of convicts waiting for the firing squad. This thought struck Waters as amusing, but there was nothing funny about the way these six teens were staring at him. He frowned, eyes falling on the girl on the far right. She was dressed oddly, in just a large button-up jacket and shorts, and there was a white streak in her hair…
"Kat? Kat Teague?"
"Get out of here," one of the boys said strongly. It was Caleb Danvers. His voice did not waver. Waters ignored him.
"You got any idea how much trouble you're in, young lady?"
"You need to go," the girl replied, not seeming to notice his words. "Now." There was something in her voice, something hard and threatening that did not match the Kat Teague her father had described. Nor did it match the idea of a frightened, hurt young girl.
"Please," another girl added. This one was tall and slender, with beautiful blond hair. Her face, like the others', was solemn. Scared, almost.
"You," Waters said, gesturing at the boys, "are under arrest for the willful destruction of private property."
"No one owns these houses," the Danvers boy answered.
"Public property, then," Waters adjusted. "I said, put your hands above your heads. Miss Teague, you'd better come over here with me."
"She's not going anywhere," the long-haired boy snapped. "They're right, man. You need to get out of here."
"I don't need to do anything but throw your destructive teenage butts in jail," Waters replied sharply. The last boy, the one that hadn't yet spoken, shook his head angrily.
"We don't have time for this," he said, and Waters noticed that it sounded more like he was talking to Danvers than to him. So Caleb was the ring-leader, eh? He couldn't say he was surprised.
"You should have thought of that before you blew up a mailbox," Caleb told the other boy, who Waters vaguely recognized from his files as Tyler Simms. Kat, the 'missing' girl, clicked her tongue in annoyance and stepped forward.
"Look, Officer-"
"Detective. Waters."
"Look, Detective Waters, I'm sure you're just trying to do your job and all. I know my father called you after I talked to him," she added softly. "But you don't know what's going on, and you can't do anything but get hurt here. So you need to go home."
"Are you threatening me?" She let out a short, disbelieving breath and took another step forward. When she spoke again, the softness was gone. The hard, sharp glint to her eyes returned.
"If that's what it takes, then-"
"Kat," Caleb interrupted. "Shut up. We don't have to do this the hard way." She turned to him, completely disregarding Waters.
"Well, what do you suggest? He's made it pretty damn clear he's not going to leave, and Tyler's right! We can't afford to stand around chatting with the nice detective, and we sure as hell can't go with him!"
"Threatening me would be a very bad idea, Miss Teague," Waters interrupted angrily. He wasn't sure what was going on here, but he didn't like it. Not one bit. He didn't like the way these teenagers, these children, were talking as if he had no effect on them whatsoever, or the way they all teemed with something stronger, something deeper, something darker than any pettily illegal underage party. Most of all, though, he didn't like they way they looked at him, as if he were in their way, but could be, very easily, removed from it.
"Hear that? We can't deal with this, Caleb!" The dark-haired boy sighed and waved a hand.
"Fine. But don't hurt him."
"I won't," Kat assured him, turning back to face Waters. "Much." Narrowing his eyes in disbelief, Waters raised the gun again. None of this was making any sense. He'd come out here to rescue this girl, and now she was threatening him as if she could actually hurt him!
"Don't move," he told her. "I'm calling this in."
"No, you're not." And then, before his eyes, she snarled at him, actually snarled… and the teeth that showed were long, and sharp, and deadly. Her eyes were suddenly amber-gold. Waters gasped and stumbled back, horrified, his gun hand shaking. Then, before he even registered the movement, her fist was swinging towards his temple.
Blackout.
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"Did you really have to do that? Scare him like that, I mean?"
"Well, he had a gun trained on me! What was I supposed to do, pull a Neo and dodge the bullets?"
"Yeah, yeah. Shaved a few years off his life, though, I bet."
"It worked, though, right? He's out cold. Come on, let's put him in the truck and keep trying. No more blowing stuff up."