The Bodies Left Behind

nearby. They were at a beach, which at this time of night, around here, would be completely deserted.
    One of the car doors opened and closed. And a second opened. The clank of metal from the backseat.
    Torture . . . tools.
    The door slammed shut, hard.
    And Tammy Foster broke. She dissolved into sobs, struggling to suck in more lousy air. “No, please, please!” she cried, though the words were filtered through the tape and came out as a sort of moan.
    Tammy began running through every prayer she could remember as she waited for the click of the trunk.
    The sea crashed. The seals barked.
    She was going to die.
    “Mommy . . .”
    But then . . . nothing.
    The trunk didn’t pop, the car door didn’t open again, she heard no footsteps approaching. After three minutes she controlled the crying. The panic diminished.
    Five minutes passed, and he hadn’t opened the trunk.
    Ten.
    Tammy gave a faint, mad laugh.
    It was just a scare. He wasn’t going to kill her or rape her. It was a practical joke.
    She was smiling beneath the tape, when the car rocked, ever so slightly. Her smile faded. The Camry rocked again, a gentle push-pull, though stronger than the first time. She heard a splash and felt a shudder. Tammy knew an ocean wave had struck the front end of the car.
    Oh, my God, no! He’d left the car on the beach, with high tide coming in!
    The car settled into the sand, as the ocean undermined the tires.
    No! One of her worst fears was drowning. And being stuck in a confined space like this . . . it was unthinkable. Tammy began to kick at the trunk lid.
    But there was, of course, no one to hear, except the seals.
    The water was now sloshing hard against the sides of the Toyota.
    The ghost . . .
    Somehow she had to pull the trunk release lever. She worked off her shoes and tried again, her head pressing hard against the carpet, agonizingly lifting her feet toward the glowing pull. She got them on either side of it, pressed hard, her stomach muscles quivering.
    Now!
    Her legs cramping, she eased the ghost downward.
    A tink . . .
    Yes! It worked.
    But then she moaned in horror. The pull had come away in her feet, without opening the trunk. She stared at the green ghost lying near her. He must’ve cut the wire! After he’d dumped her into the trunk, he’d cut it. The release pull had been dangling in the eyelet, no longer connected to the latch cable.
    She was trapped.
    Please, somebody, Tammy prayed again. To God, to a passerby, even to her kidnapper, who might show her some mercy.
    But the only response was the indifferent gurgle of salt water as it began seeping into the trunk.
    —
    The Peninsula Garden Hotel is tucked away near Highway 68—the venerable route that’s a twenty-mile-long diorama, “The Many Faces of Monterey County.” The road meanders west from the Nation’s Salad Bowl—Salinas—and skirts the verdant Pastures of Heaven, punchy Laguna Seca Racetrack, settlements of corporate offices, then dusty Monterey and pine- and hemlock-filled Pacific Grove. Finally the highway deposits those drivers, at least those bent on following the complex passage from start to finish, at legendary Seventeen Mile Drive—home of a common species around here: People With Money.
    “Not bad,” Michael O’Neil said to Kathryn Dance as they climbed out of the car.
    Through narrow glasses with gray frames, the woman surveyed the Spanish and deco main lodge and half-dozen adjacent buildings. The inn was classy though a bit worn and dusty at the cuffs. “Nice. I like it.”
    As they stood surveying the hotel, with its distant glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, Dance, an expert at kinesics—body language—tried to read O’Neil. The chief deputy in the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office Investigations Division was hard to analyze. The solidly built man, in his forties, with salt-and-pepper hair, was easygoing, but quiet unless he knew you. Even then he was economical of gesture and expression. He didn’t give a lot away kinesically.
    At the moment, though, she was reading that he wasn’t at all nervous, despite the nature of their trip here.
    She, on the other hand, was.
    Kathryn Dance, a trim woman in her thirties, today wore her dark blond hair as she often did, in a French braid, the feathery tail end bound with a bright blue ribbon her daughter had selected that morning and tied into a careful bow. Dance was in a long, pleated black skirt and matching jacket over a white blouse. Black ankle