Survival Clause, стр. 77

“I wouldn’t have either,” Rafe said, “if I’d known she’d been murdered.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Hard to prove a negative. He’d had sex with her. Who’d believe he hadn’t killed her, too?”

Not many people, I imagined.

“Right at the next intersection,” Rafe said. “So Drimmel left Daffodil Hill and started home. He ran across Yung a few minutes later. Somehow he convinced her to get in the car with him…”

“I’m sure he had a good story,” I said. “She might not have been suspicious. Not of an old guy on a quiet country road and with us so close.”

“Leaving for the moment the question of how he did it,” Grimaldi said, “he got her into the car or truck. I’m guessing she was unconscious at that point. Or got that way pretty quickly. If he gave her even half a chance, she would have taken him out.”

We drove another few seconds in silence.

“The question is where he took her,” Rafe said. “And it mighta been home, if he knew his wife was gonna be gone.”

“He’s friends with Uncle Sid,” I said, “but he wouldn’t have taken her there. I don’t care if he’s my uncle; I refuse to believe he knew anything about this. Any of it. Jurgensson or this other thing.”

The other two nodded. “Left down here,” Rafe said.

I continued, “He’s friends with Mullinax, but he isn’t there. And I didn’t get the impression Mullinax knew that his buddy Jacob has been killing women, or that he would approve of it if he did.”

“Would he have called Drimmel after we left?” Grimaldi wondered.

“If he did, we’ll deal with it when we get there,” Rafe said. “Right here. Go on, Savannah.”

“I don’t know that I have a lot more to say,” I answered. “Jurgensson’s dead, Jacob isn’t at Daffodil Hill Farm, and he wouldn’t have gone to Uncle Sid’s. His daughter’s dead, and he didn’t like his son-in-law. His granddaughter’s away at college—not that he’d be likely to involve her—and his grandson’s in high school, and would be there this time of day. If he spent his time working on trucks and traveling, he might not have any other friends.”

“So he’d take her to the house,” Grimaldi said. “And plan to be finished with her by the time his wife or Curtis comes home.”

“We’re close,” Rafe said. “Right here.”

Grimaldi took the right, and two minutes later the fields and woods gave way to the winding roads and large lawns of Sunnyside.

“Do you remember where to go?”

She nodded. “It’s just around the corner from here.”

It was just around the corner. Grimaldi took it like Jeff Gordon, narrowly escaped clipping the postman’s truck that was idling there, and gunned the engine up the street. Twenty seconds later we powered up the long driveway and came to a quivering stop outside the garage.

There was a moment’s pause.

“No vehicle,” Grimaldi said.

“Prob’ly inside the garage.”

Maybe. Although last time we’d been here, Jacob had been working on a different car inside the garage. “He wasn’t driving anything with fins when you saw him at Daffodil Hill, was he?”

“Fins?” Rafe repeated. “No, darlin’. He was driving a pickup. Blue and rusty.”

That might fit into the second half of the garage, then. “Go look,” I said. “See if the pickup and the car with the fins are in there.”

Rafe slipped out of the SUV and pulled his gun. Grimaldi got out on the other side and did the same, bracing her hands on the top of her open door to cover him as he made his way toward the garage.

“There are windows on the side,” I called out.

Unlike last time we’d been here, it was quiet. No big band music seeped out of the garage. But maybe Jacob didn’t like to rape and kill women to the standards. Maybe he needed something different, or the sound of silence, for that.

Rafe made it to the corner of the house and crept along the brick over to the nearest window, shoulders against the wall behind him. He did a neat a hundred and eighty degree turn, and looked in the window. And ducked back out of sight. After a second, when nothing happened, he leaned over and peered again. “I see the fins. The other bay is empty.”

“He isn’t here.”

It was Grimaldi who said it, as she holstered her weapon, and her tone hit somewhere between resigned and hopeless. I knew just how she felt. If Jacob Drimmel had taken Agent Yung, we were the only thing that stood between her and being murdered, and we didn’t know where he’d taken her.