Bermuda is a twenty-one-square-mile island. While the British colony is small, we soon discovered that there are more than twelve hundred roads on the island. Sampson and I split up and covered as much ground as we possibly could. For the next two days we went from six in the morning until ten or eleven at night, without a break. I didn’t want to stop, not even to sleep.
We didn’t do any better than the locals, though. No one had seen anything. We’d reached a dead end. Christine had disappeared without a trace.
We were bone-tired. After we finished at the station house on the third night, Sampson and I went for a late swim at Elbow Beach, just down the road from the hotel.
We had learned to swim at the municipal pool in D.C. Nana had insisted that we learn. She was fifty-four at the time, and stubborn. She made up her mind to learn and took lessons with us from the Red Cross. The majority of people in Southeast didn’t know how to swim back then, and she felt it was symbolic of the limiting inner-city experience.
So one summer, Sampson and I tackled swimming with Nana at the municipal pool. We went for lessons three mornings a week and usually practiced for an extra hour after that. Nana herself was soon able to swim fifty or more laps. She had stamina, same as now. I rarely get into the water without flashing back to those fine summer days of my youth, when I became a reasonably good swimmer.
Now, Sampson and I floated on the calm surface, out about a hundred yards or so from shore. The sky above was the deepest shade of evening blue, sparkling with countless stars. I could see the curving white line of the beach as it stretched several miles in either direction. Palm and casuarina trees shimmied in the sea breeze.
I felt devastated, totally overwhelmed as I floated on the sea. I kept seeing Christine with my eyes open or closed. I couldn’t believe she was gone. I teared up as I thought about what had happened, the unfairness of life sometimes.
“You want to talk about the investigation? My thoughts so far? Little things I learned today? Or give it a rest for the night?” Sampson asked me as we floated peacefully on our backs. “Talk? Or quiet time?”
“Talk, I guess. I can’t think about anything else except Christine. I can’t think straight. Say whatever you’re thinking. Something bothering you in particular?”
“Little thing, but maybe it’s important.”
I didn’t say anything. I just let him go on.
“What
puzzles me is the first newspaper stories.” Sampson paused and then continued, “Busby says he didn’t talk to anybody the first night. Not a single person, he claims. You didn’t, either. Story was in the morning edition, though.”
“It’s a small island, John. I told you that, and you’ve seen it yourself.”
But Sampson kept at it, and I began to think that maybe there was something to it.
“Listen, Alex, only you, Patrick Busby, and whoever took Christine knew. He called it in to the paper. The kidnapper did it himself. I talked to the girl at the paper who got the call. She wouldn’t say anything yesterday, but she finally told me late today. She thought it was just a concerned citizen calling. I think somebody’s playing with your head, Alex. Somebody’s running a nasty game on you.”
“We have her.”
A game? What kind of nasty game? Who were the nasty players? Was one of them the Weasel? Was it possible that he was still here in Bermuda?
Chapter 48
I COULDN’T SLEEP back at the hotel. I still couldn’t concentrate or focus, and it was incredibly frustrating. It was as if I were losing my mind.
A game? No, this wasn’t a game. This was shock and horror. This was a living nightmare beyond anything I had ever experienced. Who could have done this to Christine? Why? Who was the Weasel?
Every time I closed my eyes, tried to sleep, I could see Christine’s face, see her waving good-bye that final time on Middle Road, see her walking through the hotel gardens with flowers in her hair.
I could hear Christine’s voice all through the night—and then it was morning again. My guilt over what had happened to her had doubled, tripled.
Sampson and I continued to canvass Middle Road, Harbour Road, South Road. Every person we spoke to in the police and the military believed that Christine didn’t simply disappear on the island. Sampson and I heard the same song and dance every day for a week. No shopkeepers or taxi or bus drivers had seen her in Hamilton or St. George, so it was possible that she’d never even arrived in either town that afternoon.
No one, not one witness, remembered seeing her moped on Middle or Harbour roads, so maybe she never even got that far.
Most disturbing of all was that there hadn’t been any further communication with me about her since the e-mail on the night she disappeared. An agent at the FBI had investigated the e-mail address and confirmed that it didn’t exist. Whoever had contacted me was a skillful hacker, able to conceal his or her identity. The words I’d read that night were always on my mind.
“She’s safe for now.”
“We have her.”
Who was “we”? And why hadn’t there been any further contact? What did they want from me? Did they know they were driving me insane? Was that what they wanted to do? Did the Weasel represent more than one killer? Suddenly that made a lot of sense to me.
Sampson returned to Washington on Sunday, and he took Nana and the kids with him. They didn’t want to leave without me, but it was time for them to go. I couldn’t make myself leave Bermuda yet. It would have felt as if I were abandoning Christine.