Free The Abduction by John Grisham Page B

deli, in a wonderfully shabby old room with rows of untouched books on the shelves.
    Theo bounced up the stairs, knocked on the door as he pushed it open, and strolled into Ike’s office as if he owned the place. Ike was at his desk, one even more cluttered than his brother Woods’s, and he was sipping coffee from a tall paper cup. “Mornin’, Theo,” he said like a real grump.
    “Hey, Ike.” Theo fell into a rickety wooden chair by the desk. “What’s up?”
    Ike leaned forward on his elbows. His eyes were red and puffy. Over the years, Theo had heard snippets of gossip about Ike’s drinking, and he assumed that was one reason his uncle got off to a slow start each morning.
    “I guess you’re worried about your friend, the Finnemore girl,” Ike said.
    Theo nodded.
    “Well stop worrying. It ain’t her. The body they pulled from the river appears to be that of a man, not a girl. They’re not sure. DNA will confirm in a day or two, but the person is, or was, five feet six inches tall. Your friend was about five one, right?”
    “I guess.”
    “The body is extremely decomposed, which suggests that it spent more than a few days in the water. Your friend was snatched late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. If her kidnapper tossed her in the river shortly after that, the body would not be as decomposed as this one. It’s a mess, with a lot of missing parts. Probably been in the water for a week or so.”
    Theo absorbed this. He was stunned, relieved, and he couldn’t suppress a grin. As Ike went on, Theo felt the tension ease in his chest and stomach.
    “The police are going to make the announcement at nine this morning. I thought you might appreciate a little head start.”
    “Thanks, Ike.”
    “But they will not admit the obvious, and that is to say that they’ve wasted the last two days with the theory that Jack Leeper took the girl, killed her, and tossed her in the river. Leeper is nothing but a lying thug, and the cops allowed themselves to chase the wrong man. This will not be mentioned by the police.”
    “Who told you all this?” Theo asked, and immediately knew it was the wrong question because it would not be answered.
    Ike smiled, rubbed his red eyes, took a gulp of coffee, and said, “I have friends, Theo, and not the same friends I had years ago. My friends now are from a different part of town. They’re not in the big buildings and fine homes. They’re closer to the street.”
    Theo knew that Ike played a lot of poker, and his pals included some retired lawyers and policemen. Ike also liked to give the impression that he had a large circle of shady friends who watched everything from the shadows, and thus knew the street talk. There was some truth to this. The previous year, one of his clients was convicted for operating a small-time drug ring. Ike got his name in the paper when he was called to testify as the man’s bookkeeper.
    “I hear a lot of stuff, Theo,” he added.
    “Then who’s the guy they pulled from the river?”
    Another sip of coffee. “We’ll probably never know. They’ve gone two hundred miles upriver and found no record of a missing person in the past month. You ever hear of the Bates’s case?”
    “No.”
    “Probably forty years ago.”
    “I’m thirteen years old, Ike.”
    “Right. Anyway, it happened over in Rooseburg. A crook named Bates faked his own death one night. Somehow snatched an unknown person, knocked him out, put this person in his car, a nice Cadillac, then ran it into a ditch and set it on fire. The police and firemen show up and the car is nothing but flames. They find a pile of cremated ashes and figure it’s Mr. Bates. They have a funeral, a burial, the usual. Mrs. Bates collects the life insurance. Mr. Bates is forgotten until three years later when he’s arrested in Montana outside a bar. They haul him back to face the music here. He pleads guilty. The big question is—who was the guy who got fried in his car? Mr. Bates says he