Authors: Nichole Christoff
When she was satisfied Barrett hadn’t stuffed himself into a barrel, we returned to the house. Shelby expressed an interest in the basement and the attic. Between one and the other, she got a good look at the first floor, too. That left only the second, and it was my pleasure to show her Barrett’s boyhood room, where all the belongings were frozen in time. He hadn’t spent the night there recently and Shelby knew it.
I pointed her toward the bathroom, Mrs. Barrett’s room, and the linen closet. She inspected each one. At last, we ended the tour in Elise’s old room.
“This is where I’m staying,” I said, and watched with satisfaction as Shelby noted the toiletries and castoff clothing were distinctly mine.
Just as I was about to invite Shelby downstairs and out the door, she drifted to the room’s sunny window and took a look into the yard.
“Is that a garage I see?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I think it is.”
“I’ll have to check it.”
And my heart stopped cold.
I didn’t think Barrett was hiding out in the garage’s second-story apartment at the moment. He was too smart for that. But the clutter littering the space was a dead giveaway that he’d been there recently.
And if the towels beside the shower were damp and the kitchenette’s coffeepot warm, Shelby would know he’d been there that morning.
I said, “You’ve met Barrett’s grandmother. You don’t really think that sweet old lady would make him sleep in the garage, do you?”
Shelby softened a little. “No, I don’t suppose she would.”
I could’ve kissed her on the spot.
We went downstairs. Shelby collected her corporal, thanked the lady of the house and Elise. But at the door, she turned to me.
“Ma’am, the lieutenant colonel’s in a good deal of difficulty, I won’t lie. His best bet is to come back to his post with me. Please tell him that when you see him.”
“When I see him?” My blood pressure skyrocketed. “Shelby, I think you misunderstand….”
But Shelby’s mouth twisted in a sardonic smile.
I wasn’t fooling her.
“I’ll see you around, Ms. Sinclair. I’ve got orders to stay in Fallowfield until I’m satisfied the lieutenant colonel isn’t here.”
And with that, she and her sidekick left.
I’d never been the kind to scare easily. And as a general’s daughter, soldiers never intimidated me. But as I closed the door behind the master sergeant and the corporal, my knees turned to water. Because the man I loved was in trouble up to his neck. And I didn’t see any way of getting him out of it.
Chapter 27
I left Barrett’s sister and his grandmother to hash out what Shelby’s appearance meant for him—and what, if anything, they needed to do about his disappearance. In the meantime, I retreated to my borrowed bedroom. Along the way, I snagged the phone book from a shelf in the kitchen. Like the one in Barrett’s garage apartment, it was skinny. But the list of McCabes was just as long.
It had crossed my mind that since Shelby crashed his family party, Barrett might be hiding out with his old pal Vance. And I told myself that that was fine with me. Barrett could do as he pleased.
But I needed to stay busy.
Regardless of Barrett’s opinion that Vance didn’t have the gumption of a billy goat, I wasn’t willing to give the guy a free pass. His mini conference with Llewellyn might’ve landed him on Marc Sandoval’s radar, but he’d been on mine from the moment he’d held that gun to Mrs. Montgomery’s head. So armed with the phone book, I donned my jacket and snatched up my car keys. I’d find Vance McCabe if it was the last thing I did. And I’d find out why he’d been in contact with an alleged drug trafficker—and whether he’d been in another kind of contact with Dawkins, Kayley, or even Pamela Wentz.
Before I could make my exit, however, I heard the telltale tread in the stairwell groan. It was a warning that someone was on their way up. And sure enough, a moment later, Elise appeared in the bedroom doorway.
She’d caught the tail of her honey-blond braid between her thumb and forefinger, and was rubbing it back and forth as if it were a set of worry beads.
“Jamie?” she asked. “How bad is it?”
I assumed she meant Shelby’s showing up. And what that meant for Barrett. “Well, being absent without leave carries serious consequences—”
“No. I mean, not just that. I mean, how bad is
all
of it?”
I looked at her—a skilled doctor, a dedicated mom, a loving wife, a supportive sister, and a devoted granddaughter—and I debated what to tell her.
“I think you’d better have a seat,” I said.
In the end, sitting cross-legged against Elise’s old footboard while she sat against the head and hugged a throw pillow to her middle, I told her everything. I started with Dawkins’s death and worked my way backward to Vance’s forcing his way into my house. It felt good to get all the death and doubt and drug abuse allegations off my chest.
“But there’s one more thing you ought to know,” I said. And saying this to Barrett’s sister turned out to be the hardest thing yet. “Your brother and I are through.”
“No.” Elise tossed her pillow aside. “While you’ve been here, you’ve probably heard people say a lot of things about Adam—”
“I know about Pamela Wentz. I’ve got a bootleg copy of the sheriff’s case file.”
“Then you know Adam didn’t hurt her.” Elise scooted over to me, seized my hand in both of hers. “Jamie, please, don’t break his heart.”
“Actually,” I told her, extricating myself from her grasp, “he’s the one who’s breaking mine.”
“Oh!”
That took the wind out of Elise’s sails. And in a perverse way, I was glad. I didn’t want to discuss my breakup with her brother. My wound was much too raw. It threatened to drag me down into darkness with every breath I took.
I knew how to handle it, however. Action would save me. More doing. Less thinking. So I hopped off the bed, grabbed up the phone book again.
“I’ve got to go check into a few things. If you can convince your grandmother to leave, that would be wise. I’ll move into the motel in town tonight.”
But Elise said, “You don’t know Gram. She’s refusing to budge. She says she didn’t turn tail when people harassed us after Pamela died, so she’s not going to turn tail now.”
Well, that didn’t surprise me.
But it didn’t please me, either.
“Try again,” I suggested. “Dawkins’s death was a warning. And neither Kayley’s nor Pamela’s deaths were pretty.”
“Unnatural death rarely is,” Elise said tersely. And being a doctor, she would know. “Jamie? You said you have a copy of Pamela’s file. Can I see it?”
Why not?
I thought.
I pulled out my phone, fired it up, and handed it to her so she could view the photos I’d taken. Elise skimmed the reports. But she slowed when she came to the pictures of the field where Pamela had been found.
“Did you know her well?” I asked.
“No.” Elise sighed. “I played with her a few times when we were little. Before our dad died, we sometimes saw her—and Eric, too—when we visited our grandparents in the summer. By the time we started high school in Fallowfield, we were too cool for a freshman like Pamela.”
Elise grew quiet. I let her be. And her flicking thumb slowed even further when she came to the photographs of Pamela swinging by her neck in the Wentz’s barn.
“No one should die like this,” she whispered.
She cleared her throat, and with the demeanor of a doctor, she moved on to the autopsy photos. Gruesome as they were, I myself hadn’t been able to look too closely at those. But I watched Elise as she looked at them—and as her brow knitted with a question.
“What is it?” I asked.
But Elise didn’t reply. She flipped to another pic, compared it to one more. These were ones I’d taken of documents.
The first was the emergency room report, completed during Pamela’s ER exam.
The second was the coroner’s report.
I perched on the edge of the bed beside Barrett’s sister, tried to puzzle out what she’d noticed that I hadn’t.
“See Pamela’s throat?” Elise asked.
She called up a close-up of Pamela lying on the medical examiner’s stainless steel table and handed the phone to me. At her neck, a cluster of black bruises stained her lily-white flesh. A dark, linear groove marked where the rope had jerked beneath her jaw. But below it were more, oblong bruises.
“According to the documentation,” Elise said, “she didn’t get these bruises during the sexual assault. These happened afterward. Now, I’m not a forensic specialist, but in a hanging, I’d expect to see the bruise beneath the mandible. But see how there’s a long bruise on either side of her throat? That’s abnormal. They could be from the rope. Like maybe she tightened the noose at the base of her neck, not realizing gravity would yank her down and the rope would ride up. If that were the case, though, I’d think I’d see rope burns. Instead, these marks look like—”
“—the bruises on Dawkins’s windpipe,” I said, recalling the deputy’s throat much too clearly.
“I don’t know about that,” Elise said, “but they do look like manual strangulation. I’d recommend a forensics expert take another look at this, because it could mean Pamela Wentz was unconscious when that rope was slipped over her head.”
“That’s murder,” I said. “Not suicide.”
Elise nodded.
“Dawkins had bruises on his throat just like those,” I said. “What are the chances someone strangled Pamela two decades ago and someone
else
strangled Dawkins in the same manner last night?”
“I wouldn’t say that’s coincidence.”
I wouldn’t, either.
“I’m going to call the sheriff,” I told her. Thinking of Marc, I added, “I’ll phone a federal agent I know, too. You try to convince your grandmother to leave town.”
“What about Adam?”
“I’ll text him,” I promised, feeling certain he wouldn’t take my call. Whether I liked it or not, he was on his own. Because on his own was where he wanted to be.
Chapter 28
From the privacy of my Jag, I called Rittenhaus. Or, at least, I tried to. He was out of the office and the deputy on the desk tried to coax more out of me when I said I had possible information about Dawkins’s killer. But I made it clear my info was for the sheriff’s ears only. And I left instructions for him to phone me back anytime, day or night.
Marc picked up on the second ring. And he swore like a sailor after I explained Elise’s tentative link between a twenty-year-old supposed suicide and last night’s killing.
“Where are you now?” he wanted to know.
“On my way to stick my nose into Vance McCabe’s social history. You don’t have an address for him, do you?”
“No. The guy lived with Mama until she passed away last year.”
Calvin Mead had told me as much.
“He bailed on his utility bills,” Marc said, “and the Department of Motor Vehicles has no new address in their database.”
“That figures.”
“What does the jarhead say?”
“As little as possible.”
“Well, if you need backup, babe, you call me. I mean it.”
I knew he did, and I appreciated it.
With those calls made, I couldn’t delay contacting Barrett any longer. But contacting him meant thinking about him, and anytime I tried to do that, thinking touched off a dull ache in the center of my soul. Still, I’d promised Elise I’d text him. So that’s what I did. And I kept it short.
GOT POSSIBLE LEAD ON DAWKINS’S KILLER
, I typed as fast as my thumbs would fly. Carefully avoiding any mention of Pamela Wentz, I added,
ELISE WILL EXPLAIN. CALL HER
. I hit
SEND
and, tossing my cellphone onto the passenger seat, I snatched up the phone book, got started looking for Vance McCabe’s home base.
At the front of the directory, the publishers had kindly included a rudimentary map of Fallowfield’s grid-like streets and surrounding environs. With a mechanical pencil I snagged from my glove box, I used the map to cluster the addresses as well as I could before loading each into my GPS. Three hours later, I had nothing to show for my effort except a better knowledge of the county’s layout—and a deep sympathy for Vance’s many cousins.
I’d met a number of them when I stopped at duplexes, condos, and farmhouses with phone listings under the name of McCabe. Debt collectors, bail bondsmen, and even a car repossession posse on the hunt for Vance had visited these fine folks long before I did. And his relatives were sick of it.
Some warned me off in no uncertain terms. But one young woman with a toddler on her hip suggested I try his mom’s old house. She knew the tale of how his brothers had thrown him out.
“Still,” she said, frowning, “I wouldn’t put it past him to break in and camp there.”
I thanked her for the tip, made the house my next stop.
Not far from the desolation of Fallowfield’s rail yard, where the two hikers passing through town had reportedly died of exposure, I found the place. It was a 1960s brick ranch set among identical brick ranches. Each house had a juniper hedge marking the boundary of its postage-stamp-sized yard, and each had sprouted a carport on the right-hand side. The McCabe house, however, sported the added attractions of a hanging rain gutter, a dying sycamore that was shedding its bark, and a lopsided
FOR SALE
sign standing in the yard.
I parked behind a Jeep Wrangler and got out of my XJ8. Looking both ways, I crossed the street, jogged up to the house. Behind the storm door, a month’s worth of pizza parlor flyers lay on the aluminum threshold. A realtor’s lockbox dangled from the knob. I tried a combination or three, but it didn’t cough up its key.
Stepping into the overgrown shrubs that shrouded the single-pane windows and made them the dream of every burglar with time and a pry bar, I cupped my hands around my face and peered inside. The living room was bare. Wide swathes in the shag carpet indicated it had been shampooed recently. And that Vance wasn’t camping there.
In the carport, I circumnavigated an oil stain that had attracted several seasons of dirt. The hem of my turtleneck over my hand, I tried the side door. It was locked, too. Peering through the sidelight, I spied a sliver of brown-and-goldenrod kitchen. But there were no crumpled bags from fast-food joints or empty Chinese takeout containers on the countertop to say anyone had been secretly living inside.