“I just knew,” I say, getting my nerves under control.
There’s no sound for what seems a long time.
I am way out of my league here.
Please, Franklin, please finish up in there, and come back.
I’m afraid to ask Ray a direct question, because they tend to scare him off, or launch him into stories, lies, and fables. I want to ask him, “Why are you calling me?” I want to say, “What do you want? Where are you? Why did you hurt those people so bad?”
I don’t say any of that, because it would be a mistake.
Finally, I say, carefully, “So . . .”
“They’re lookin’ for me.”
“Yeah.” I pause, treading carefully like somebody on the edge of a crumbling volcano. “Are you . . . okay?”
“Tell them to leave me alone.”
“I don’t think they will, Ray.”
“I can take care of myself.”
This is so absurd that I just remain silent.
“There are five principles of survival in the wilderness.”
I blink, unprepared for what’s coming out of his mouth now.
“Protect yourself, be able to signal for help, know how to provide food and water, have a goal, and stay healthy.”
He sounds as if he’s parroting what he has learned from somebody else.
“Where’d you learn that?” Damn, a direct question! I didn’t mean to do that! This is hard, second-guessing every word before I say it.
As if I haven’t spoken, he says, still in that odd lecturing kind of voice, “Protecting yourself, that’s the first priority, and that means clothing and shelter. You don’t need much clothing in Florida, but you need some for camouflage, if you’re hiding.”
I take a chance and say, “So where do you get the clothes?”
“That’s what beaches are for.”
I try to think what he means. “You mean, for stealing stuff?”
“Yeah, or you can find a soccer field and grab some kid’s soccer bag, and get clothes out of there.”
“So clothes aren’t a problem.”
I’m careful to turn it into a declarative sentence, not a question. The second “principle” he listed, if I recall it correctly, was “signal for help in an emergency.” He’s in an emergency, all right. And then it hits me: I’m the one he is signaling. Does he seriously think I can tell the police to lay off, and they will?
“Don’t go hungry, and don’t go thirsty,” he says, breaking the silence, “‘cause they’re killers, they’ll sap your strength when you need it. A person could live a long time without food, but he wouldn’t think straight, he’d get nervous and angry and start making mistakes. He could find little bits of money, and buy stuff, but he’d have to be so careful, going into convenience stores. Better to steal it, if you can, although that’s risky, ’cause you can get caught.”
“Yeah,” I say, agreeably, feeling completely lost with this.
“You don’t ever want to get caught. Do anything you gotta do, but don’t get caught. And if you get caught, keep quiet and tell lies. Don’t ever tell anybody the truth about anything.”
I am fascinated by what I am hearing, horrified by who’s saying it.
“About food? Like I was saying? You’re better off hunting, fishing, eating seaweed if you have to. The stems, roots, and leaves of most grasses can be eaten raw, cattails are a great source of food, pine trees are full of edible shit, and green seaweed is good, as long as you get it out of the ocean or off of rocks, and don’t pick it up from the beach.”
I feel an hysterical urge to laugh.
“Why not the beach, Ray?”
“It gets all moldy.”
“Oh.”
“Some berries are okay, just not the white or red ones. Bugs, slugs, maggots, ants, earthworms, grasshoppers. Any snake, as long as you’ve got a blade to skin and gut it, and a fire to cook it. You got to know how to test a plant for edibility, how to snare a bird, improvise a club, or a slingshot, build a box trap for small game.”
He is using words—improvise, snare, edibility—that I would not have thought he knew. I’m guessing that somebody’s taught him this, and told him over and over again, and made him memorize it.
“And water?” he says, as if I have asked about it. “Look for lawn spigots, and public fountains. Or, you can build a beach well, or vegetation bags to trap the dew on the leaves of trees. And people are always leaving half-empty bottles of mineral water all over the place.”
I nod, and then feel ridiculous.
“What’s the next one?” he asks me.
“The next—”
“Principle of survival.”
“I don’t remember what you said.”
“It’s, you got to move toward something, not just run away.”
Oh, boy, do I ever want to ask, “Where are you going?”
“Remember the last one?”
“No, I’m sorry, this is all new to me.”
“You have to stay healthy, so stay away from doctors and hospitals. And that means fight if you have to, but not if that would get you so injured you couldn’t take care of yourself. It’s almost always better to run than to fight. Remember that. Don’t be a fighter, unless you have to. Don’t fight ’cause it’s usually not worth it, and you’re only going to get hurt if you do.”
“You fought today.”
“Couldn’t go back.”
“To prison.”
“Yeah.”
Suddenly I get it, it’s clear. “You’d rather die first, and if you didn’t die, then you’d fight to get away.”
There’s silence, and I think it means yes.
This is so strange, and I want to ask him so much else.
“You didn’t fight when they arrested you.”
“Fuck, I didn’t know they’d make me stay there forever!”
He sounds agitated, and I feel scared. Immediately, I attempt to calm us both down again. “You didn’t know they were going to put you in jail for so long.” I am trying so hard not to phrase things as questions, but more as agreements with what he is saying. With each silence, I sense his own agreement, and he’s silent now.
“Ray?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you mind if I ask . . . I mean . . . all these things you know about how to survive . . .” I don’t know how to say this any way but as a question. “How’d you learn all that? Did somebody teach you?”
He doesn’t answer, and the silence grows very long.
“Fuck,” he says, sounding agitated again, only worse this time.“It’s happening again. I hate it when this fucking happens.”
“What, Ray?”
“It’s like I get all stupid, like my brain goes all numb, and I can’t think or remember anything. Shit, it’s like I’m going to pass out, and I hate it, I hate this!”
And then he hangs up, just like that.
“Franklin!” I shout, and keep shouting until he appears in the doorway. “Ray just called me! What do I do? What should I do?” Without even waiting for him to answer, I pick up my telephone receiver again, and press the star button then six and nine to activate call return. If I don’t do it now, it won’t work. Call return only works on the last incoming call. Ray might still be there, if I can get him back on the line . . .
But the phone rings and rings and nobody answers.
Franklin is shouting, “Call Anschutz or Flanck!”
I look up Robyn Anschutz’s home number. The detective picks up before the second ring.
“Robin? It’s Marie Lightfoot. Ray called me.”
I tell her what just happened. Her response is jubilant.
“Hot damn! Why would he call you?”
I tell her about killers sometimes mistaking me for a friend.
“How nice for you,” she jokes. “Can I ask a favor? Would you put on some coffee? We’ll be right over.”
I hang up and say to Franklin, “You’ve got to leave.”
We can think of no go
od reason for him to be there, waiting for the cops to arrive. If they want to call him, and bring him into this, they will. But that’s not my decision to make. For the first time, I wonder if we have made a mistake, and maybe there is a potential conflict of interest here, even if I can’t quite work out what it might be. He gives me a quick kiss, and he’s gone, and he even leaves the kitchen sparkling behind him.
“Hi, Robyn,” I say as I open my front door.
It is at exactly this moment that I realize that I’m not going to be able to keep myself out of this book. Ray’s life is now intersecting with mine. This is an odd sensation for someone who prides herself on being a detached observer of crime, but never a participant in its effects. Like it or not, I’m part of his story now.
“Cell phone,” are the first, triumphant words out of the detective’s mouth. “In this county. North and west of here. We’ve got him now. We’ll have that location under surveillance and that whole area cordoned off before he can call you back.”
“Cell phone? Where would Ray get a cell phone?”
And I wonder: Can it really be this easy?
“Come on in,” I invite, only to discover that means admitting half a dozen uniformed and plainclothes officers into my home.
I haven’t made nearly enough coffee.
6
Raymond
It doesn’t matter how much coffee I prepare, or how much the cops drink, because Ray Raintree never calls me back. The calls are tracked to a cell phone on board a residential trawler on a branch of the New River. The owner of the boat, an elderly hippie with a private number, is missing and presumed murdered. Ray’s fingerprints are all over the place.
And he is long gone.
I am sickened by the thought that he may have killed the man to get the phone to call me. Hurting people in a desperate attempt to escape a death penalty is one thing, horrible, but understandable in a sick way. But killing a man to steal his cell phone?
My comprehension of Ray’s psyche stops at that barrier.
One day later, the local newspaper accusingly trumpets, “One lone suspect, wounded, unarmed, and allegedly not even very bright, has thus far managed to humiliate three counties’ worth of law enforcement by slipping through the noose they futilely tightened around the northern neck of Howard County. Unfortunately, they are the ones who choked on it.”
Considering the nature of the murder case that started all this, I find that an appalling choice of metaphors.
It isn’t clear how Ray has evaded capture all this time. It is possible, says Detective Paul Flanck, “that Ray swam out to sea and did us all a favor and drowned himself.”
“I wish,” says his partner, Robyn Anschutz.
On the third day, having been deluged by frightened and furious phone calls from the mothers and fathers of Florida, the governor calls out the Army National Guard. They are assigned to assist in the search for the escaped convict, who is “considered extremely dangerous.” A one-million-dollar reward is posted by a coalition of private donors and nonprofit organizations devoted to helping missing children. Internet sites spring up overnight, rife with feverish and morbid speculation. One of them, called Sightings, posts an average of one hundred new “Ray sightings” per hour. Cranks and other people genuinely wanting to help swamp 911 and the other police phone lines.
News of the developments in the case goes out over the national wires, and networks and CNN, spreading a far wider net of communication than the abduction and murder case have produced up until this time. On the popular television show Entertainment Tonight, they even report that Ray Raintree is a main character in “a true crime story soon to be published by best-selling author Marie Lightfoot.”
Almost as soon as ET goes off the air, readers begin posting computer E-mail messages to me about the book-in-progress. I answer them in clumps, trying to keep up with them as they come in. There are always a few to which the only appropriate reply is no reply at all, but most of them are from fans, and I am grateful for the chance to express my appreciation to them. Scrolling down a dozen of them, I am unprepared for the surprise that awaits me, eleven messages down the line.
Dear Ms. Lightfoot, I am a retired sheriff’s deputy who investigated a missing child case many years ago. I have good reason to believe it is connected to the case of the man you know as Raymond Raintree. Please call me collect as soon as possible. Yours truly, Jack L. Lawrence, Olathe, KS.
That one gives me pause. I read it twice, looking for clues to what it means, but find none. The fact that he suggests I call “collect” is a good sign that at least he means well, even if his informtion’s no good. Still, I hate to get stuck on the phone with kooks, so I E-mail my message, rather than calling as he asks me to.
“Dear Mr. Lawrence,” I type, “I’m intrigued by your message. What is the connection between your case and Ray Raintree? Sincerely, Marie Lightfoot.”
The response reaches me within minutes, as if he is sitting at his computer waiting to hear from me. And this time, what I read on the computer screen makes my pulse race. He writes:
Twenty-two years ago, I investigated a tragic case of a little boy named John Kepler who went missing from his parents’ front yard. We never found any trace of him. But Johnnie Kepler had an imaginary playmate, as children do, and his imaginary friend’s name was Raymond Raintree. Please contact me as soon as possible. Yours truly, Jack Lawrence.
This time, I call him, and not collect, either.
“I’m just a retired old codger from Kansas.”
I hear a gravelly, authoritative voice, and I can well believe that Jack Lawrence was a law enforcement officer.
“I’m nobody important,” he tells me over the phone. “What big city cop down there where you are is going to listen to a retired deputy from a county they never heard of? I called their TIPS line, but they just wrote down my information like anybody else’s, and I suppose they must have gotten a thousand different calls. It could be weeks before they get far enough down the list to call me. I imagine you know how it is. I used to know a couple of Florida cops, one over in Sarasota and another up in Naples, but they’re as old as I am, nobody knows them now.”
He says he got his local sheriff to contact the Howard County sheriff, who hasn’t been available to talk to him personally but whose secretary has promised to get somebody on it right away.
“I recognized the runaround when I heard it,” he says.
Forty-eight hours later, he still hasn’t heard anything back.
“I got our sheriff to call again, and I’ve tried to make a pest of myself.”
But it appears that law enforcement in Florida is otherwise occupied this week with the search for the escapee.
“You’re kind of our last-ditch hope,” the retired deputy tells me. “Kimmie got your name off the TV show, and she’s read your books, and she’s a big fan of yours.”
“Kimmie?”
“Kim Kepler. Sister of the missing boy. She seems to think you’ll pay some attention to us.”
“I certainly will.”
“Now listen,” he says in a way that sounds stern and kind at the same time, “these people, the Keplers, they’ve been through a hell of a lot, and they don’t want a big fuss, if they can help it.”
“I gather they’re hoping that Ray Raintree can lead them to information about their boy? I’d hate to get their hopes up, Mr. Lawrence. Maybe Ray just heard the name somewhere, and he can’t help them at all. I’ve got to tell you, it’s next to impossible to get information out of him. Or, at least truthful information. Sometimes he’ll talk your ear off, but you can’t believe a word he says.”
There is a silence on the other end, in Kansas.
Then the retired deputy says, “I don’t think I’ve made myself clear. When I said there might be a connection between John Kepler and Raymond Raintree?”
“Yes?”
“What did you think I meant?”
“Well, that maybe he knew the kidnapper. Or ma
ybe he saw the boy sometime, and picked up the name to use for himself.”
“No. Hell, maybe this is why nobody paid any attention to me down there. My wife—I’m a widower—always used to tell me nobody can understand a thing I say when I try to explain something. What we’re saying is, Ray is John. It’s not that he may have seen Johnnie, or heard about him. He is Johnnie Kepler.”
A shock of electricity runs through me, leaving me literally gasping.
“Ray is the boy you’re looking for?” I can hardly take this in. I am flabbergasted. This is the miracle I have been looking for, and it might never have happened if the judge hadn’t shot Ray, and Ray hadn’t escaped. “My god, Mr. Lawrence. You’re saying you think that this man who abducted a child was himself abducted when he was a child?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”
“How many years ago?”
“Twenty-two.”
“That would make him—”
“Twenty-eight.”
That was right for Ray, who said he was twenty-eight, but never seemed sure of it. Ray Raintree was a missing child? My mind is bouncing off its own walls at the cruel twist of this. Can it be true? It would make sense of so many things about Ray that don’t make sense. “Oh, my god,” I say again, feeling breathless. “But what is there, besides the name? Is that all you’re basing this on?”
“No, ma’am, this isn’t wishful thinking, and it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t a guess. We know. We know. That’s why the Keplers want to talk to somebody, and if the cops won’t talk to me, we’ll talk to you. We’ve got to get connected to this business down in Florida, just as soon as we can. They’re scared to death he’s going to get electrocuted, and they’ll never get to see him alive, now that they’ve finally found him. You understand?”
“Oh, yes.” I’m trying to think fast, to come up with solutions for him. “I can get through to the prosecuting attorney for you, Mr. Lawrence, shall I do that? Or, how about the two detectives who arrested Ray?”