Vanishing Act Read Free Page A

then he turned around again. "How did she come to assault you?"
    So that was it. The little bastard was so sure Killigan was weak—that it couldn’t happen to him. "I was escorting her to the van, and she surprised me. She must have taken one of those courses."
    "Were the handcuffs yours?"
    "Yes."
    The detective pulled a chair close to the bed and sat on the edge of it. "Mr. Killigan," he said. "You’re in a dangerous business. You must have some idea of how to pull this kind of thing off without getting yourself in trouble. I think you made a mistake."
    "It would seem so," said Killigan. "Now, where the fuck is Rhonda Eckerly?"
    The detective stood up, walked to the door, and opened it. A uniformed cop came in with his hand on the arm of a woman. She was about thirty. She was tall and slender and olive-skinned, with large eyes and black hair. Then Killigan realized that she was wearing Rhonda Eckerly’s clothes. "No," he said. "No. That’s not the one."
    "This isn’t Rhonda Eckerly?"
    "No!" he shouted. A pain gripped him from his hairline to his jaw. It was as though his whole face had been peeled and a cold wind blew on it. "You got the wrong one!"
    "No," said Detective Coleman evenly. "You did."
    The sanctimonious little cop hadn’t needed to say that because, even distracted by pain and half paralyzed by the dope they’d shot into him to make him lie here, Killigan had been able to figure out that much. She was a ringer. The clothes, the amateurish way Rhonda Eckerly had tried to do things—it had all been planned so they could change in the bathroom.
    The woman said, "Can I talk to him?"
    "I guess so," said the cop.
    "Alone?"
    "No," said the detective. "Not a chance."
    She didn’t look surprised. She walked a little closer to the foot of the bed, and the uniformed officer stayed at her elbow. "Do you know anything about Rhonda Eckerly?"
    "Enough," said Killigan. "She’s a fugitive. Fair game."
    The woman turned to the cop. "Thank you." She took a step toward the door.
    "That’s it?" Killigan asked. "Aren’t you going to laugh at me and tell me how easy it was?"
    ’No."
    "Why not?"
    "I understand you now. Telling you anything would be a waste of time. You’re the walking dead."
    "You both heard it," Killigan said with glee. "She threatened to kill me."
    The detective stared at him again, his head tilted to the side a little. "We’ll discuss that later." He took the woman by the arm and ushered her out the door.
    When the door closed behind them, Coleman walked Jane Whitefield down the hall, past the emergency room desk and the waiting area, across the black rubber mat. The doors huffed open and outside, in the hot night air, he led her past a couple of ambulances to his plain blue car.
    "You got into this intentionally?" he asked.
    "Yes," she said.
    "Why?"
    Jane Whitefield took a deep breath and let it out, then said, "Robert Eckerly married a girl. She was about twenty, he was about fifty. He’s a rich man in a small town. He’s charming. He’s also a sexual sadist."
    "Whose diagnosis?"
    "She ran away once before, and he managed to have her caught, like this. I don’t know if he thought of the theft charge by himself or if he called somebody like Killigan and that person told him that was how it was done. She was released into his custody. He didn’t just beat her up. He chained her by the neck in a room and invited a few like-minded friends to come and help." She looked at Detective Coleman.
    He nodded. "Go on."
    "Nothing shocks a cop? This would have. When they got too drunk and tired to just keep raping her in some ordinary way, they started trying to think up ways to make her beg them to stop hurting her, because that turned them on." She looked up at him. "What are you thinking? That you don’t want to hear the rest?"
    "Will it do her any good?"
    "No."
    "Where is she now?"
    "If I told you I don’t know, you wouldn’t believe me."
    "No."
    "Then I’ll just say she’s far away."
    Coleman leaned