Текст книги "Thread of Suspicion"

Автор книги: Jeff Shelby

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SIX

“What’s your cell number?” Isabel asked, opening the door to her car.

I told her.

She fished her phone from the console in her car, punched some numbers on it, then looked at me. “I just sent you a contact.”

My phone vibrated in my pocket.

“She works at DCFS,” she said. “If she can’t get you information on Bailey, she’ll know who can. Call her tomorrow morning. I’ll call her tonight and give her a heads-up that you’ll be contacting her.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And maybe we could meet up at some point tomorrow?” she said. “Talk a little bit more about Marc?”

I lifted my chin in the direction we’d just come from. “Maybe tell me about those guys?”

She played with the zipper on the jacket. “Don’t worry about them. But thanks. For what you did. You didn’t need to, though.”

She was clearly uncomfortable talking about them and I didn’t want to push her. It was none of my business. But there was more to it than she was willing to tell me.

“Sure. Tomorrow,” I said.

“And I’m guessing you need a place to stay,” she said.

“I’ll find a place.”

She reached into her bag and fumbled around a bit, the pulled out a key and card. “Here.”

“I can find a place.”

She frowned. “My little endeavor doesn’t exactly pay the bills, so I’m a property manager for a small complex. Over in Linden Hills. It’s not far from here. We’ve always got empties.”  She thrust the key at me. “If you feel like you have to pay me, we can work it out later. But you’ll have more space than in a hotel room and you’ll have a kitchen. It’s not furnished, but I should be able to get my hands on some furniture and other things tomorrow.”

I hesitated, then took the key and the card. “Okay. Thanks.”

She nodded. “Address is on the card. Call me if you have trouble finding it. Otherwise, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She got into her car and drove off.

I stood there at the curb for awhile, letting the snow fall around me, watching cars crawl up and down the street as the sky moved from gray to black.

I wasn’t sure where to go, what to do. I’d come to Minneapolis because of a picture and an address. The address, thus far, had led to nothing. Yeah, I’d found Jacob Detwiler, but that hadn’t done me much good. Maybe it would, but I wasn’t very good at being patient. I wanted something immediately.

I pulled the picture out of my pocket, unfolded it.

I traced Elizabeth’s face.

For the millionth time, I wondered where exactly she was.

SEVEN

Linden Hills was about a twenty-five minute drive from downtown, out to the west, near an area called Chain of Lakes. The drive was wet and messy and crowded, but the road crews were already out in force, sanding and salting the streets in preparation for the overnight temperatures.

In a lot of ways, Linden Hills reminded me of Coronado. It was a small, walkable area, with tiny Mom and Pop shops surrounded by funky old homes and buildings that had been turned into apartments. In the summer, I imagined people in their twenties zipping around on bicycles and filling the outdoor patios on the streets, sipping coffee and eating ice cream. Suburbia, with a whole lot of urban.

I found Isabel’s complex atop one of the rolling hills, a rectangular brick building that housed about twenty units. The key was stamped with a “188” and I found the unit at the end of a hallway on the first floor.

It was a one bedroom with a small kitchen and bathroom and not a single piece of furniture. But it was clean and smelled of fresh paint and new carpeting. I opened the slider off the living room and stepped out onto the patio that looked back and down toward the small, downtown area, the snow having tapered off against the black sky. The streets were wet with slush and the few souls out walking huddled under the collars of their coats, moving between the light of the streetlamps.

I took a deep breath and watched the air from my lungs billow out like a small cloud.

Isabel had been nice to set me up and it was more space than I needed. I knew I could be comfortable here for as long as I needed to be.

As comfortable as I could be, anyway.

A bus roared down the avenue, spewing dirty slush from the street onto the sidewalk.

I knew I would help her try to find Marc. She probably knew it, too. Probably knew she was locking me in as soon as I took the key from her hand. Again, you leveraged what and when you could.

I didn’t mind. I knew I couldn’t focus entirely on Elizabeth. I needed distractions when there was nothing to do but wait. Helping Isabel locate Marc would provide those distractions.

The snow started to fall again, small, white dots cascading from the dark sky.

I stood there awhile longer, hoping Elizabeth was warm, wherever she was.

EIGHT

I slept decently on the new carpeting, using my jacket as a pillow. Sunshine poured in through the window and I squinted into the morning light. I washed my face in the bathroom sink, ran a hand through my hair and went outside.

The icy air stung my lungs and the sun was brilliant against the snow-coated sidewalks. I knocked as much snow off of the rental car as I could and navigated my way out of the parking lot, the wheels spinning a few extra times against the asphalt before they caught.

Patience had never been a strength of mine and after Elizabeth disappeared, it was almost as if every ounce I’d had was surgically removed from my body. Isabel asked me to call her friend before going to see her, but I didn’t want to wait until mid-day. If I had to wait once I got there, that would still be better than pacing and waiting to leave.

The DCFS office was in downtown Minneapolis and after thirty minutes and a few wrong turns, I located the building. I parked in a garage situated between the tall buildings and found my way to a large stone structure that looked exactly like every other government building I’d ever seen. I stepped into the waiting area where a bored-looking woman peered at me from behind thick gray eyeglasses.

“Help you?” she asked with a tone that indicated she didn’t want to.

“I’m looking for Tess Gorman,” I said, reciting the name Isabel gave me.

“You have an appointment?”

“No.”

“You need an appointment to see her.”

“Is she in?”

The woman sighed, tugged at her glasses. “You need an appointment, sir.”

“Okay. I’d like to make an appointment for right now.”

“She’s two weeks out.”

I glanced at the beaten chair to my right. “I have to sit in that for two weeks?”

The woman sighed and folded her hands on her desk. “Sir, if you’d like to make an appointment, I can make one for you. It will be about two weeks from now. If you’d like to play games and mess with me, I’ll have to call security.”

She looked like a woman who was used to calling security.

“I’m from out of town,” I said. “Is it possible you could call her and tell her that a friend of hers sent me to see her?”

“Who is your friend?” she asked, raising her eyebrows above the glasses. “Oprah?  Madonna?

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I was rude. Isabel Balzone referred me.”

A flash of recognition ran through her face. “Ms. Balzone referred you?”

“She gave me Tess Gorman’s name, yes.”

“Your name?”

“Joe Tyler.”

She stared me down for a moment, then picked up the phone. She turned away from me and her voice was muffled as she spoke. She turned back to me and hung up the phone.

“She’ll be down in a moment,” she said. “You can have a seat.”

I nodded and sat down.

“How do you know Ms. Balzone?” she asked.

“We actually just met yesterday,” I said. “I’m helping her with something. And she’s helping me.”

“One of her lost souls?” she asked. “You helping with that?”

“Yes.”

“That girl never sleeps, you know,” she said, resting an elbow on the desk. “Never. Nighttime, she’s out handing out blankets and food and love. Daytime, she’s just preparing for nighttime.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Must be part vampire or something,” she said. “But if you’re helping her, you can’t be all bad.”

“I like to think I’m not.”

“A lot of people like to think that about themselves, but most people are full of crap.”

I smiled. “That is extremely true.”

She studied me for a long moment. “You look tired, Joe Tyler.”

I shrugged. I always felt tired. I never felt rested, never felt like I slept or cleared my head.

Elizabeth was always there.

“Isabel will help you,” she said. “Tess will, too, if she can.”

“How do you know I need help?”

She tugged on her glasses again, readjusting them. “You got that look.”

“What look?”

Her eyes softened for the first time since I’d walked in. “That look that says you’re hurting, Joe Tyler.”

NINE

“Isabel said she asked you to wait,” Tess Gorman said to me.

“I’m not great at waiting.”

I was sitting across from her in a tight, cramped office on the third floor. Her desk was littered with stacks of paper and manila folders, and the bookshelf behind her was filled with the same. Two metal filing cabinets had drawers pulled halfway open and the trashcan overflowed with food wrappers and large Styrofoam cups.

“I called her,” she said. “When Marsha called up and said you wanted to see me and that Isabel gave you my name. She said you were legit.”

“Okay,” I said, not knowing what she was looking for from me.

She leaned back in her chair. She had short blond hair, cut even with her chin, and small green eyes. Long, beaded earrings hung from her ears, almost down to the collar on her red turtleneck sweater. She was small, compact and she’d shook my hand with the grip of a middle-aged man, despite the fact that I put her somewhere in her twenties.

“But she wouldn’t tell me what you wanted,” she said. “She said you should do that.”

“I just met her,” I said. “She doesn’t know everything about…my situation.”

She puffed up her cheeks and let out a long, loud sigh. She folded her arms across her chest. “Okay. Tell me why you’re here.”

I recounted how and why I was in Minnesota. Her eyes flickered as I told her about Elizabeth’s abduction, but otherwise she remained impassive as I spoke. I told her about Jacob Detwiler and how Isabel had given me her name.

“So, what?” she said, when I was done. “You want to know where the Detwiler girl is?”

“That’d be a start.”

“I can’t share info with you,” she said, shrugging. “Privacy laws.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Anything that might’ve happened with the family would be protected unless you were a principal,” she said. “Which you clearly aren’t.”

“I don’t care what happened,” I said. “I wanna know why Bailey Detwiler was sitting with my daughter.”

“I’m not going to have that info.”

“But the girl might. Bailey.”

“She was young then,” she said. “Maybe she won’t remember.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’d like to ask her. Or at least know where to look for her. Or find out anything I can about her.”

“I’m not sure I can help you.”

“Then why did Isabel say you could?”

She looked away from me. I couldn’t read her. She was uncomfortable having me there, that much was clear. But I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t asking to look at files or for privileged information. I just needed some basic info that I would probably be able to dig up on my own. It would just take me more time.

“Look, I don’t know what went on with the Detwiler family and I don’t care,” I said. “I can make some guesses since Isabel said you might be able to help. It wasn’t some simple divorce and custody case if DCFS can help. I’m not dumb. I look for kids for a living now. I can put two and two together.”

She stared at me, her expression blank.

I took the picture out of my pocket and held it out to her. After a moment, she took it.

“Think it’s from about six or seven years ago,” I said. “The girl with my daughter is Bailey Detwiler.”

“Where’d you get the photo?” she asked, her eyes still on the picture.

“Cop in San Diego,” I said. “From some file. All I got with it was Detwiler’s name and address.”

She handed the photo back but didn’t say anything.

“I’m not asking you to turn over the case file,” I said. “But give me something. Some place to start. I know you can do that or Isabel wouldn’t have sent me to you.”

She drummed her fingers on her desk, staring at the wall for a long minute. “Anyone other than Isabel, I’d tell you to get lost.”

“Glad it was Isabel then.”

She smirked. “I honestly don’t remember much about the family and even if I did, I wouldn’t share it with you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Sure you would. If you thought it would help you.”

She was probably right.

She grabbed a sticky pad and pen. She scribbled for a moment, tore the sheet of paper off and handed it to me.

“That’s the name of someone who might be able to help you,” Tess said. “I stress might.”

The name Rodney was written on the sticky along with a phone number. “This is it?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yep.”

“Isabel couldn’t have given me this name?”

Something rushed through her eyes that I couldn’t read and she glanced away before I could figure it out. “No. She actually couldn’t have.”

I didn’t understand. It wasn’t much and I was hoping for more. But I’d learned that even the smallest things could point in the right direction and to take what I could get.

I folded up the small piece of paper and stuffed it in my pocket. “Alright. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Can I ask you one other thing?”

She sighed and shrugged. “Sure.”

“Any way you could just look in some drawer and pull out a file on Bailey Detwiler and let me look at it?” I asked.

Tess Gorman folded her arms across her chest and shook her head, a less than amused smile on her face. “Absolutely none.”

TEN

“She gave me a name,” I said to Isabel. “That was it.”

I’d driven back to the apartment and found her dragging a twin mattress into the place she’d loaned me. I’d helped her carry it into the small bedroom and we dropped it on the box spring she’d apparently already brought in.

She brushed a long wisp of hair from her face and fiddled with the pushed up sleeves of her T-shirt. “I thought she might.”

“I thought she might give me a little more.”

“I didn’t,” she said, smiling. “She’s tough and she plays by the rules.”

“So you couldn’t have saved me the drive and just given me the name she gave me?”

She looked around the room. “I think there’s a small dresser in storage.”

“Isabel?”

She looked at me. “It wasn’t my place to recommend him.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Means what it means,” she said. “Wasn’t my place to recommend him. And maybe if you’d called her, like I told you to, she might’ve just given you the name and saved you the drive. But I also thought there was a slim chance she might give you more. It was worth a shot.”

Had me there and I didn’t have a response.

“Just call him,” she said. “He’ll probably be able to meet you today. And I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Be better if I’m there,” she said. “Just to break the ice.”

“Who is he?”

She pushed down her sleeves, shaking her arms until they dropped to her wrists. “Someone who can probably help you. I wouldn’t have suggested you go to Tess if I thought otherwise.”

I hated that she was talking in circles and keeping me in the dark. But I didn’t really have any other choice but to trust her.

“I don’t need the dresser,” I said. “I didn’t bring anything with me.”

“Okay. I think I might have a chair, though, so you’ve got something to sit on.”

“That would be good. Thanks.”

She nodded. “Yep.”  She stared at me for a moment. “Just call him. Trust me. He can help. Not trying to be obtuse here, alright? It’s just…” She waved a hand in the air. “Just call him, alright?”

It was going to have to be because it was all I had.

ELEVEN

I glanced at my watch. “He said he’d be here at one.”

Isabel made a face. “It’s five minutes after. Chill out.”

We were sitting in a cafe not far from the apartment. I’d called Rodney after we talked and got no sense of him over the phone, only that he was happy to meet us for lunch. As soon as we sat down in the booth, Isabel began asking me questions about Elizabeth, which I answered truthfully and which brought up the normal pain and anxiety for me.

It was never easy talking about her. I could start out removed from her, but the more details I spoke of, the more I missed her and the more painful it became to wonder about where she was and what happened to her. I could compartmentalize those things on a daily basis, but talking about them was like going from dipping my toe in scalding hot water to submerging my entire body into it.

“If anyone can help you, it’s Rodney,” she said. “He’ll be here. Just don’t judge.”

“What is there to judge?”

She smiled. “Just don’t judge.”

The waitress came, dropped off our menus and iced water, and we told her we were waiting for one more.

“Where is Elizabeth’s mother?” Isabel asked, redirecting me back to the conversation about my daughter.

“She’s still in San Diego,” I said.

“You’re divorced?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “She and I, we’re…okay. I think. I don’t know.”

She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she really understood. Our divorce had nothing to do with how I felt about Lauren and everything to do with losing a child. I was certain that my feelings for Lauren had never changed, only that other things had gotten in the way of showing them. Seeing her the previous few weeks had been cathartic, but I wasn’t sure anything had really changed. She was still trying to move forward and I was still stuck in neutral, still stuck on Elizabeth.

“You married?” I asked, looking for any excuse to turn the conversation away from me for a moment.

She shook her head. “Always a bridesmaid, not interested in being a bride.”

“Ever?”

“Never say never,” she said. “But right now? I like my life. I saw my parents make a mess of their marriage. I’m not sure I’m good marriage material.”

“How so?”

She sipped from the Diet Coke the waitress had delivered. “I’m independent. I’m stubborn. I like my work. Not sure I want kids. I’m selfish. And those are just the reasons at the top of the list.”

She was attractive. She was smart. She had her own career. Someone would break her down, eventually. Make her feel like she couldn’t live without them. Which was a good thing.

“And I don’t like the complications of dating relationships,” she said, twirling the straw in her glass. “So I’m pretty sure I’d suck at marriage.”

There was something in the twirling and the way she said it that made me think maybe she’d been burned or hurt in the past. Something that made her gun shy and defensive. And something that would eventually give way for the right person.

Her eyes shifted from me toward the front of the diner. “There he is.”

An old man using a walker pushed his way through the door while a massive man weighing well over three hundred pounds held the door open for him.

“Wow,” I said. “He’s big.”

“Yeah, he is,” Isabel said. “But that’s not him.”

The man with the walker paused, scanning the restaurant. Isabel held up a hand and he nodded and began moving our way.

“Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“You’ll see,” she said. “Don’t judge.”

The old man’s eyes moved to me as he pushed toward us. He wore a flannel shirt beneath a thick wool coat that hung below his waist and gray slacks over bright white walking shoes. His thin white hair was brushed back over his pink scalp, sticking up in several different directions.

He reached the table and cleared his throat. “Hello, Isabel.”

She slid out of the booth and hugged him awkwardly as he wrapped one arm around her. She helped him extricate from the walker and slide into her side of the booth.

He extended a hand across the table and stared at me with clear eyes. “Rodney Gorman.”

“Joe Tyler.”  I thought for a moment. “Gorman. You’re related to Tess?”

He nodded and kept his eyes on me. “I’m her father. And I’ve heard of you.”

I wondered why no one told me he was Tess’s father. “Really?”

He glanced at Isabel, then moved his eyes back to me. “Yes. A friend of mine in Kansas City told me about you.”

I thought for a moment, but couldn’t pull anything up. “I’m sorry, I don’t…”

“A family from Topeka,” he said. “You found their daughter. Four years ago. They had relatives in Kansas City that knew my friend.”

Topeka rung the bell for my memory, but he got part of it wrong. “I found their son, I think.”

He blinked several times. “Yes. Their son.”

I couldn’t recall the family’s name, but I remembered finding their nine-year-old son. The parents had divorced and managed to do so on amicable terms but their extended families had not. The father’s parents decided that the mother wasn’t taking care of the boy and tried to turn a weekend with their grandson into an abduction. They’d run to Florida and stashed him with other relatives, claiming the boy had been taken in his sleep.

It hadn’t required much work. Nothing added up when I spoke to them and the dissension within the family was easy to see. The police knew, too. They just thought it was the mother’s side of the family and placed their focus on them.

The grandparents had cracked quickly.

I just happened to be the one to crack them.

“They were very grateful for your work,” Rodney said. “They said you were…determined.”

I shrugged because I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“So I asked around a bit more.”  He paused. “Turns out you’ve helped a lot of people.”

“I try. I hope so.”

“But Isabel here tells me you’re here for you,” he said. He cleared his throat. “For your daughter.”

“Yes, sir. I am. I’m chasing a lead that found its way to me.”

He chuckled. “Mr. Tyler. Please don’t call me sir. It makes me feel older than I already am and I’m still strong enough to lift up that damn walker and smack you in the face with it.”

I smiled. “Okay. Please call me Joe then.”

He nodded.

“Rodney was in Minneapolis PD for years,” Isabel said. “Then with BCA. He was a state investigator.”

“That was a long time ago, Izzy,” he said.

“They kept him on an extra ten years because he was so good,” she said, ignoring him. “His solve rate was nearly perfect.”

“And you know what nearly perfect means, right?” he said, narrowing his eyes.

I nodded. “Left a couple on the table.”

“Damn right, I did,” he said, his face darkening. “There was nothing near perfect about not getting those cases closed.”

I’d heard that before from cops. It wasn’t about the cases they solved or managed to close. It was the ones that stayed open, that they couldn’t figure out, that remained with them until they were dead. It was why Mike Lorenzo still worked Elizabeth’s disappearance. Yes, we were friends, but the cop in him couldn’t let it go.

“Still,” Isabel said. “He was the best. He knows everyone.”

The old man shook his head. “I’m not near what she says I am, Joe. But I might be able to give you a little direction.”

“Anything you can do, I would appreciate,” I said.

He folded his hands on the table and cleared his throat again. “When I said I’d heard of you, I wasn’t kidding. Did I mention the Topeka case?”

An awkward silence settled in at the table and I glanced at Isabel.

“Yes, you mentioned Topeka, Rodney,” she said, touching his elbow.

He frowned as the waitress came. She took our orders and wandered off.

“Anyway, when your name kept popping up, people saying you’d helped them, I starting seeing what I could learn about you,” he continued.

I knew information was out there. Old media coverage, message-board stories, and I kept Elizabeth’s profile alive in communities that involved missing children.

“I laughed when I read about your leaving the department in San Diego,” he said, a corner of his mouth turning up. “I assume they had a problem with all of the attention your daughter was bringing them? Pushed you out the door?”

“More or less.”

He shook his head. “Cops are great until things go wrong inside. Starts to make them look bad. They’ll turn on anyone and anything, even their own.”

I nodded. I couldn’t have put it any better.

His thin lips came together. “But I started digging. Nothing extensive, mind you. But just reading.” The corner of his mouth turned up again. “When you’re an old retired cop, there isn’t much else to do.”

Isabel rolled her eyes, indicating she didn’t buy the old man act. I didn’t either, really. His body may have been aged and frail, but there was something alert and vibrant about him.

“And I think I learned something about your daughter,” he said.

The familiar heart tremor started and I grabbed the glass of ice water in front of me, taking a long drink.

“If I knew for certain, I would’ve gotten in touch,” he said, quickly. “Please don’t think I was holding information back. It was my experience that one of the worst things you can do to a parent is give them a glimmer that isn’t there.”

Again, he was right. It was the worst. Getting one’s hope up and then having it crushed. I’d experienced it on both ends and I did my best to avoid it on both ends.

I set the glass down, let the cold water run down my throat. “What do you think you learned?”

Isabel sat rock still next to him, eyes fixed on the old man.

Rodney cleared his throat again and set his bright eyes on me. “I feel certain your daughter is alive.”