Gone(32)

How did you take an entire family? You’d need a few able bodies. How did you steal a child, kicking and screaming, from her bed?

The place was remote. But at night voices carried. You could hear the wind in the trees. A dog might bark a mile away, and the sound would travel. That’s how it was at his house, and he lived in a pretty isolated part of the area, too.

He could make out the vehicles in the driveway from where he was. Where had the abductors parked? It was not a place you walked, unless they’d come through the woods. But with a family of four in tow, in the dark, the woods would be chancy. You’d need a van or a large SUV.

Still standing by the window, he took out his notebook and jotted down a few notes. He circled: Big vehicle, unmarked.

And it had probably happened at night. Lily Kemp’s shifts were mostly daytime. There was a nursery at the hospital where the baby boy, William sometimes went. Or, the hospital had told them, little William stayed home with Hutch. The girl, Maggie, attended a part-time private preschool along with Peter King’s niece. Stokes had checked in with the school — Maggie’s last day had been the previous Tuesday. No one there thought Maggie or the parents had been behaving unusually, though they’d been growing concerned about the girl’s increasing absences.

He held onto his notebook, staring into the dark. He imagined the crying kids. The parents terrified. They’d be fighting for dear life. Knocking over a lamp, leaving some kind of drag marks, finger smudges on the wall, something. Kemp wasn’t necessarily a big man — forensics had him at five foot ten, a hundred and fifty pounds, but that was enough. If your family was in danger, you were going to be a force to be reckoned with.

But, nothing. No traces of a struggle. It was meant to look like the family just disappeared into thin air.

Nothing disappears.

They had been sedated, he decided. The only way you took two parents and their children without signs of a struggle was if they were unconscious. But how did you do that?

Rondeau descended to the basement. To get the best picture of a man, if his laptop and files were gone, you checked out his basement.

The basement was half remodeled. In the finished section, he saw the bowl of popcorn. Bits of that popcorn had been bagged and taken to the lab. He walked to the part of the basement which was still plain concrete. He checked out the boiler — in good condition. There was a work bench with neatly arranged tools. He found a pack of cigarettes, with a few left inside. He sniffed them.

There was a door that opened onto the side yard. He stepped out. A small roof covered the entryway. On the ground was a tin can with a few cigarette butts inside.

This was where Hutchinson Kemp came to smoke, Rondeau concluded.

It occurred to him that if you have kids, and you’re pushing forty, and you’re wife’s a nurse, and you’re a “very nice” family — how does the father get in his vice? Answer, he sneaks out the side door. Probably he’s not trying to conceal it from his wife — she’d smell it on him — but he’s being respectful to her and keeping out of the kids’ sight.

And if you were an abductor who’d been watching him for a while, learning his habits, you knew he probably had a smoke to end the day. He’s watching TV, eating his popcorn, wife and kids have gone to bed, maybe. Then he steps out, lights up . . .

And that’s where you got him.

Rondeau paused, thinking, maybe you chloroformed him?

You had to get behind someone for that. Hutch might’ve taken a couple of steps out from beneath the awning . . . and that’s when they pounced. And wrapped a cloth around his mouth. Or, maybe they’d stuck him with something. Plunged a syringe into his carotid. A few frantic pumps of his heart, and he collapsed.

Rondeau crouched and ran his fingers through the grass beside the entryway, hoping for a syringe, something forensics could have overlooked. What did you inject a man with that would take him down in a few seconds? He wrote the question in his pad.

He drifted back inside. Perhaps just one of the captors goes upstairs into the wife’s room. It’s dark. She senses someone enter the room, but of course she just assumes it’s her husband. She mumbles and rolls over. That’s when the captor gets into bed right beside her. The bed springs creak. She murmurs again, “Good night, honey,” and he reaches out and clamps a hand over her mouth. As she struggles, he sticks her with the same stuff.

The husband and wife are now incapacitated. The children will be a cinch.

Rondeau felt something cold pass through him and tried to shake the gruesome vision. He knew he was right, or at least punching around the center of the bag. He stopped by the tool bench, eyes lingering over the hammer and drill, the coiled extension cord, and a stack of manuals.

Kemp was the sort who liked to keep his instruction manuals on hand. He was tidy and organized. Rondeau blew some dust off the stack and went through them. Not just tool manuals, but kitchen appliances, too: a manual for a Cuisinart, one for an expensive food processor from the Culinary Institute. He slid them off the stack one after another, and paused when he came to a large envelope.

He hesitated. An envelope, brown and worn, the kind tied with a string. He unwound it, slid the papers carefully out, so as not to tear anything, and flicked on the overhead fluorescent.

There were handwritten notes, and a couple of computer printouts. The notes referred to something called “cradle to grave.” He’d heard the term before, in business contexts. Kemp — presumably — had written: From creation through disposal, throughout the life cycle. Unsustainability. Also: responsibility for dealing with hazardous waste and product performance.