Текст книги "Thread of Innocence"

Автор книги: Jeff Shelby

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THREE

I left downtown, but instead of heading back toward Coronado, I pointed my car inland, toward Kearney Mesa. The midday traffic was non-existent and it was one of the few times that the time it took to get to Kearney Mesa was actually commensurate with the distance. Twenty minutes after leaving downtown, I was exiting the freeway and pulling up to a low-slung building near Montgomery Field that served as the San Diego field office for the FBI.

I took the elevator to the second floor and told the desk clerk that even though I didn’t have an appointment, I was hoping that Special Agent Dorothy Blundell might be inclined to meet with me. The clerk looked skeptical and asked me to have a seat. Three minutes later, Blundell was in the lobby.

“Mr. Tyler,” she said. “Nice to see you again.”

I nodded and we shook hands. She motioned for me to follow her and led me to the same conference room we’d used when we’d brought Elizabeth in after we’d rescued her from the warehouse in the south bay. Blundell took the seat at the head of the table and I sat down in the one to her left.

“Anything to drink?” she asked.

“No. Thank you.”

She nodded and swiveled back and forth in the large leather chair, finding an easy rhythm. “How is she?”

“She’s okay.”

She looked at me. “Really?”

“Probably not,” I said. “She’s in limbo, I think.”

Blundell nodded. She picked up a pen, twirled it between her fingers. “To be expected. You’re all getting along?”

“Well enough.”

Blundell nodded again. “Good.”

“She wants to go to Minnesota,” I said. “To see the family.”

She made a face like that didn’t surprise her. “I think that’s normal.”

“It’s hard to hear.”

“I’m sure. But her entire world changed in a matter of days. It may feel normal to you to have her home, but I’d venture that nothing feels normal to her right now.”

She was right. Elizabeth didn’t know what her normal was anymore.

“You think we should let her go?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I can’t make that decision for you.” She paused, eyed me carefully. “In the same way I couldn’t force therapy on her. Has to be her choice. Your family’s choice.”

“I’m asking your opinion.”

She smiled and set the pen down back on the table. “My opinion is that’s for you and her mother to decide.”

“Off the record then.”

“Off the record?” she said, then pursed her lips. “I think you have to give her some room. You’ve elected to keep her out of counseling at this point, so you’re already giving her some room and some say in what goes on. Might not be a bad idea to let her go back and close things up. I wouldn’t let her go alone, obviously. But she needs to say her goodbyes. And it might buy you some goodwill if you trust her.”

I knew she was right, but it was easy to be right when it wasn’t your kid.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” she said. “Now, tell me why you’re really here.”

“I wanna know what you know.”

She raised a thin eyebrow at me. “Regarding her abduction?” She shook her head. “Nothing, really. We’re still gathering information.”

“But you have some things.”

She didn’t say anything.

I stayed silent.

“What are you looking for here, Mr. Tyler?” she said finally.

“I’m looking to find out who took my daughter and why they did it,” I answered.

“Why?” she asked. “She’s home. You have her back.”

“Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“You aren’t a cop anymore.”

“Irrelevant.”

“Is it?” she asked. “I disagree. Your job now is to take care of your daughter. My job is to find out what happened to her. Those are very different things.”

A plane descended over the runway at Montgomery just outside the window, the sound of its engines muted. I watched until it disappeared from view.

“I found her because I refused to let anyone stop me,” I said. “I’m going to find out what happened to her. She may need closure in Minnesota. But I need closure here.”

“Understandable,” she said. “And when we learn what happened, I’ll share what I can.”

“Off the record again?”

She paused, then nodded.

“I’ve got leads I’m following,” I said.

“Like?”

I shook my head. “I’m not going to share unless you let me in.”

“I can’t do that and you know it.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

“But it would be in your best interest to share anything you might know,” she said. “I’ve got the resources to follow up and follow through.”

I nodded. “I’m sure.”

We stared at each other.

“I can’t let you in on an investigation,” she said, shaking her head.

“This isn’t just any investigation.”

“To you, no. But to me, to the Bureau?” She smiled. “Every investigation matters. Catching the bad guys is the only acceptable end result. You were a cop. You know that.”

“I also know that doing it the right way isn’t always the best way,” I said. “The best way sometimes involves stepping out of the comfort zone.”

She tapped her fingers on the conference table. “If you’ve got solid info that will help me solve your daughter’s abduction, you should give it to me. That is the best way to help her and to catch whomever is responsible.”

I shrugged. “If I run across anything then, I’ll let you know.”

She leveled her eyes at me. I knew I was being difficult, but I wasn’t about to tell her what I’d told Lasko. She’d approach it differently. She wouldn’t sniff around. She’d barge right in. And if I was right, that might just chase everyone away. If she wasn’t willing to involve me in her investigation, I wasn’t willing to involve her in mine.

I stood. “Are we back on the record?”

She nodded.

I walked toward the day. “Have a nice day, then.”

FOUR

“She asked me about going to Minnesota this morning,” I said.

Lauren was stretched out on her bed, a book in her hands. I was sitting in the large leather chair in the corner of what used to be our master bedroom. I’d moved back into the house, but I was staying in one of the upstairs bedrooms while we figured out exactly what we were.

We’d eaten dinner, the three of us, some small talk in between bites of hamburgers from the backyard grill. It felt forced and yet completely natural, the mood shifting as quickly as the breeze. Elizabeth would smile one moment and then the smile would vanish just as soon as it appeared. She’d disappeared up into her room after we’d finished and, as hard as it was not to follow her up there, we’d reminded ourselves that giving her space was important for all of us.

Lauren set the book down in her lap. “What?”

“She asked if she could go back to Minnesota,” I said. “To talk to the Corzines. Probably to talk to her friends. I don’t know. But she asked if she could go back.”

“To visit?” Lauren asked, still not understanding. “Or to stay? Or to what?”

I shrugged. “To visit, I think. She needs some closure. She took off and then we found her. She was with them for a long time.”

“Illegally,” Lauren said, frowning.

“But she didn’t know that,” I said. “They were her family.”

“Bullshit,” she said, glancing at the door, then lowering her voice. “That’s bullshit, Joe.”

“It was bullshit that she was taken from us,” I said. “But was it bullshit that she thought they were her family?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so. From what we know, they took care of her and she was happy. Based on what she was told.”

Lauren looked as if I’d force-fed her a lemon. “Oh, what the fuck ever. They took our kid and kept her. End of story.”

“Not for Elizabeth it isn’t,” I said. “More like the middle of the story. You’re looking at it from your point of view. You need to look at it from Elizabeth’s.”

“No, I need to look at it from mine,” she said. “And my point of view is that our daughter is home and that’s where she’s staying.”

“Lauren, if…”

“Joe, I don’t want to hear it,” she said, tossing the book off her lap. It landed with a soft thud on the comforter. “And, honest to God, how can you even entertain it? You spent years of your life doing nothing but hunting for her. It nearly broke you. It killed our marriage.” She shook her head. “I mean, you found her. How can you even think of letting her go back there?”

I leaned back in the chair, my head against the cushions, my eyes on the ceiling. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the same knee-jerk reaction as Lauren. If I thought it was possible, I would’ve kept Elizabeth from ever leaving the house again without one of us. But that wasn’t possible. It wasn’t reasonable. And I feared that being unreasonable might drive Elizabeth away.

“I’m trying to think about what’s best for her, Lauren,” I said. “Not what’s best for us.”

“Staying with us is what’s best for her.” She narrowed her eyes. “Not going back to that other family.”

“We aren’t talking about her moving there.”

“No shit we aren’t.”

“Lauren.”

“Joe.”

I sighed. She wasn’t up for hearing it or trying to step into her daughter’s shoes. Pushing it was just going to lead to some unnecessary fight.

“How’d you feel this morning?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Shitty. I ate a bowl of cereal and half a banana and it stayed down for all of five minutes.”

“I remember how sick you were with Elizabeth.”

“The entire first trimester.”

I nodded. “You couldn’t look at milk or cereal.”

Her expression softened. “It’s starting to feel that way again.”

“But dinner stayed down okay?”

She nodded. “So far.”

Lauren was pregnant. With our child. The result of a night spent in a hotel as we got closer to finding Elizabeth. We’d gotten divorced because our daughter’s disappearance had created a gaping wound in our relationship, but that didn’t mean that we’d stopped loving one another. Loving each other just became harder when Elizabeth was gone and when we’d reconnected, a lot of those unresolved feelings had surfaced. We’d been careless. Now, she was pregnant and neither one of us seemed to want to deal with that as our new reality.

“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she said.

“It’s alright.”

“But the thought of her going back there is…” She shook her head. “I can’t even fathom it.”

“I know.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her we’d talk about it. Me and you.”

“So does this count?”

“Sure.”

“Joe.”

I shrugged. “Look, she wasn’t unreasonable when we talked about it. I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it. I mean, her stuff is still there, you know? Clothes, books, whatever. That’s her stuff, no matter who we are or who the Corzines are. She had a life there. It may have been a false life, but to her it was real.” I paused. “She’s a kid who is probably pretty screwed up right now and I think we owe it to her to at least think about it. To talk to her about it.”

Lauren folded her arms across her chest, stared down at her lap. “Right now is excruciating.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s upstairs in her room,” she explained. “And all I want to do is go check on her every five minutes, make sure she’s still there. But I know we can’t. I know we can’t. But right now? Part of me is in panic mode, wondering if she’s up there.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.” It was the reason I got up every night, trying to be quiet as I stumbled down the hallway to peek into her bedroom.

“So I can’t even think about letting her go to Minnesota,” she said, glancing at me. “Because I can’t think about letting her go to the mailbox alone right now.”

“We have to start dealing with it,” I said. “We have to figure out school. We have to figure out a lot of things.”

“I can’t think about Minnesota yet, Joe. I just can’t.”

“Okay.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Will you lay with me for a bit?” she asked tentatively. I looked at her and saw the dark circles under her eyes, the pinched corners of her mouth.

I nodded and got up from the chair. I crawled on to the bed and lay down next to her. She turned to the side so her back was to me and reached for my hand, pulling my arm over her. She wiggled closer until she was tight against my body. She folded her fingers into mine.

It wasn’t a romantic or sexual gesture. It was one of comfort, one of familiarity. She didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t mind lying with her.

We did, in fact, have a lot of things to figure out.

FIVE

Elizabeth and I went for our run the next morning. She didn’t ask about Minnesota and I didn’t bring it up. Instead, we enjoyed the sun peeking through the clouds, the blue ocean and the white sand as she once again beat me to the finish. It was an easy morning, one that made it seem like she’d never been gone, one that I wished would happen more frequently.

We jogged home to cool down and as we came up the street, I saw a familiar frame leaning against a car, parked at the curb.

In a lot of ways, Chuck Winslow was the reason I’d finally found Elizabeth. I’d come back to San Diego, temporarily ending my nomadic search for Elizabeth in order to help Chuck. He was hospitalized, accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and I’d returned because he had been my best friend. Getting him out of the jam kept me in San Diego long enough to get the first clue to Elizabeth’s whereabouts; the clue that ultimately led me to finding her. If he hadn’t been in trouble, I wouldn’t have gone back to San Diego and I might not have gotten the picture of Elizabeth that had set everything in motion.

His six foot four frame was stretched out against the side of his black pick-up truck. He’d lost some weight after spending time in the hospital so he looked thinner than I was used to seeing him. His hair was buzzed short and he had on a gray T-shirt, corduroy shorts and flip-flops.

Elizabeth immediately went on guard and moved closer to me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s a friend.”

She nodded but stayed at my side.

“Lauren said you guys were probably on your way back,” he said, smiling. “I was about to get in the truck and saw you coming down the street.”

We shook hands and he smiled at Elizabeth. “It is terrific to see you, kid.”

She nodded timidly, then looked at me. “I’m going inside.”

She didn’t wait for an answer and headed up the drive to the front door.

I looked at Chuck. “She’s still adjusting.”

He nodded. “Rightfully so. But it is good to see her.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“It’s good to see you, too,” he said.

“Same here. You look pretty good.”

“Better than in the hospital bed you mean?” he asked, grinning. “Yeah, I’m better. I’m good.”

“How’s Gina?” I asked.

“We’re good.”

Gina helped me figure out how and why Chuck had been wrongly accused. They’d been together years ago, back in high school, and had broken up and then reconnected. She’d been instrumental in helping me clear him.

“That’s good,” I said.

“How are things here?” he asked, jerking his head in the direction of the house.

I shrugged. “Just trying to settle in.”

“You and Lauren back together?”

I took a deep breath. “I honestly have no idea.”

He nodded, like he’d expected that answer. “Fair enough. Can’t be easy.”

“It’s not. But we’ll figure it out.”

We stood there awkwardly for a moment. It was weird. He’d been my best friend for years and now I wasn’t sure how to make conversation with him.

“I wanna help,” Chuck said.

“With?”

“With whatever you’re planning.”

I tilted my head, confused. “What?”

He chuckled, leaned back against the truck. “How long have we been friends?”

“I dunno. Since high school.”

“Right. So you think I don’t know what’s going through your head right now?” He folded his arms across his chest and stared at me. “No way you’re content just to have Elizabeth back without knowing what happened to her.”

“I have a pretty good idea what happened to her.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I meant without knowing who was responsible for whatever happened to her.”

I didn’t say anything, just watched an older couple stroll by on the other side of the street. They were a pair I didn’t recognize and I wondered how many of the neighbors who’d lived there when I’d still been in the house were still around.

“I don’t know any of the story, other than what I’ve read in the paper,” he said. “But it doesn’t sound like they arrested anyone responsible, other than the guys you found her with in that warehouse. So I’m just assuming you’re biding your time, waiting for the right time to figure out who took her.”

I wasn’t biding my time. If I’d known right then who took Elizabeth, I would’ve had my hands wrapped around their throat, choking the life out of them. The problem was I wasn’t sure who was responsible and I had to be patient in order to make sure I got the right person. I didn’t want to be wrong. I wasn’t going to be wrong. I would find the right person.

“I’m looking,” I said.

He smiled. “I knew you would be. And I want to help.”

“You don’t have to. And to be honest, it might get ugly.”

“You think I care?”

I shrugged. “I’m just telling you. The stuff I’m starting to put together, I think it’s going to be bad.”

“Again. You think I care?”

I didn’t say anything.

He uncrossed his arms and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Look, Joe. I’d be offering to help no matter what. But you saved my ass. You believed in me when no one else did. No one. And that was after you hadn’t seen me in awhile and everyone else was telling you I was guilty.” He paused. “You were the only one. If you hadn’t come back, I’d probably be sitting in a cell somewhere, waiting for my trial, where I’d be virtually assured of some good old-fashioned jail time. But you made sure that didn’t happen.” He looked me in the eyes. “I owe you.”

“You don’t owe me,” I said. “We’re friends. That’s what friends do.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “Most of my so-called friends left me for dead and didn’t come near me. But not you. So that isn’t what friends do. It’s what you did.” He smiled at me. “I’m here to return the favor, brother.”

I nodded slowly. The smart thing to do would’ve been to tell him, no, his help wasn’t necessary, to not involve him in anyway. Because I had this feeling in my gut, a feeling that was growing by the day, that whatever I turned up in Elizabeth’s disappearance was going to be worse than I thought. And that was probably going to lead to even worse consequences, something I didn’t want to drop in Chuck’s lap.

But I knew Chuck. He meant what he said. I wasn’t going to scare him off and if he thought he owed me he was going to stand there, holding his breath, until I let him help.

“Alright,” I said, grateful that I had at least one person I knew I could trust without question. “I’ll let you know.”

SIX

After Chuck left, I went inside, showered, dressed and checked the news. Finding Elizabeth had completely detonated the routine I was used to. I would wake up, run, eat and then spend the day surfing the Internet, checking message boards, looking for any nugget of information that I might be able to cull that would point me in her direction. I’d spent years doing exactly that in cities all over the country, chasing down leads and helping other people in the process, searching for their loved ones who had gone missing. It had become my job, my vocation, my mission. Now that I had her home, though, I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I knew that if I opened up my email there would be at least two messages from people looking for help. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to go back to that.

Elizabeth ambled down the stairs as I sat in the kitchen, perusing news sites on my laptop. Her hair was wet from her shower and she had on a pair of orange basketball shorts and a yellow T-shirt. I had to pinch myself that it wasn’t a dream, that she really was coming down the stairs.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey. Who was that guy?”

“Chuck Winslow. You don’t remember him?”

She walked to the cabinet near the sink, pulled out a coffee cup and filled it from the pot on the counter. She brought it over and sat down across from me at the table. She blew on the surface of the cup, then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“He’s been a friend of mine for a long time,” I said. “Since high school. I came back to San Diego a few weeks ago to help him, which actually helped me find you.”

She took a sip from the coffee and said nothing.

“Do you want cream for that?” I asked. It was the first time I’d seen her grab a cup and I didn’t want to admit the surprise, the weird sense of melancholy I felt, to see my daughter drinking coffee.

“No.”

“You drink black coffee?”

“Yeah.”

I shuddered. “That’s gross.”

She cracked a small smile. “No, it’s not.”

“Is to me,” I said, smiling back at her.

“What’s gross is drinking it when it’s already so warm outside.” She swiveled in her chair and looked out the living room window, at the now-cloudless sky. “Don’t you people drink iced coffee when it’s hot?”

“Now that’s gross,” I said, teasing her, enjoying the back and forth.

Her smile grew a little bigger, then disappeared. She took another sip of the steaming beverage. “What do you mean you came back to San Diego?”

I closed the laptop. “I wasn’t living here.”

“Where were you living?”

“I wasn’t really living anywhere,” I said. “I was looking for you.”

She cupped the mug between her hands. “So, what? You just, like, traveled all over the place, hoping you’d see me?”

“It was a little more organized than that.”

“Tell me. Please.”

I explained to her how I’d follow leads that would show up on message boards and go wherever I needed to in order to follow up. I told her how that had led to a semi-professional career as an investigator, helping to track down other missing people because I’d learned so much looking for her. And I told her that I’d stayed away from San Diego because it was too hard to come back without her.

She stared into the coffee cup. “Is that why you guys got divorced?”

I thought for a moment. “In part, yeah. I couldn’t focus on anything else until I knew what had happened to you.”

She shifted in the chair. “But she could?”

I shook my head. “No. Absolutely not. But your mom needed to handle it differently. She couldn’t spend every waking moment chasing down what almost always ended up being dead ends. It was too frustrating for her. Too painful. It nearly broke her. She had to create some separation. We each had to handle it our own way and that led to us being apart.”

“You guys don’t seem like you hate one another or anything.”

“That’s because we don’t. We don’t. But sometimes when…things happen…it’s hard to be together.”

She nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure if she understood or not. I wasn’t sure that I understood.

She looked around the house, like she was trying to see things she’d never seen before. I wondered what it was like for her, to be brought into a home and told it was your home, only to have it feel completely foreign.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“You wanna go get some lunch?” I asked. “Get outta here for awhile?”

“Yeah. Maybe you could show me where she works, too?”

I nodded. “I can show you where your mom works, sure.”

“Gimme a minute,” she said, standing.

“Gonna put on some clothes that actually match?”

She looked down at her clothes, then looked at me. “Very funny. I look fine.”

“You look like you got dressed in the dark.”

She started to say something, then realized I was kidding and let another small smile crack her stoic expression. “Ha. Ha. I’ll be back down in a minute.”

I watched her walk up the stairs and disappear down the hall. I couldn’t stop smiling. Joking around with her during our conversation was something new. Something I’d missed. And something I wanted to be able to do without thinking about it.

It was a start.