The pieces started to click for Jane, although, there were still a helluva lot of missing chunks. Her mind raced with the various connections. Jake obviously suspected his father was up
to no damn good and that’s why he ripped off Bailey’s monogrammed pad with the words,
1401 Imperial
. At some point, Jake decided to slide down the rope outside his bedroom and follow his dad furtively in Bailey’s second car to this remote location where he must have witnessed his dad’s sexual addiction. This also finally explained Jake’s last post on March 6
th
on the
secret revelations
website when he wrote,
I saw you but you didn’t see me, YOU FUCKING PERVERT! Which one of us will hang in hell???
Jane’s frantic mind jumped to the YouTube video simply titled,
Bailey Van Gorden
. She rewound the self-indulgent video in her head and recalled some of Bailey’s comments. More pieces fell into place. It wasn’t an advertisement for Bailey’s architectural services; it was a covert visual ad Bailey constructed to solicit men. Rather like, “Come check out my package before agreeing to sell me your skin.” The opening shot with him wearing that tight-fitting black T-shirt that exposed his muscular arms was an exemplary start. And the statements that Jane now understood with their double entendre meaning carried more weight. Bailey jabbered about how he loved to create “magic and passion,” how he had “enthusiasm for the lifestyle,” that it was important that clients “came to the table with that same passion” and that if they only “collaborated on one project together” he knew that it would be memorable. In the end, it was all an elaborate profile piece and the project
de jour
climaxed with a “collaboration” behind a grimy curtain at the
Fourteen O-One Imperial
no-tell motel. All the sundry asides—the shots of his unused Weber grill or his three-tiered Italian fountain, both of which he stupidly misspelled in the tags to the video—might have been there to either raise his profile in the eyes of prospective partners or create a look of legitimacy for someone who came upon the video and didn’t realize the audience it was intended for. Jane had to make the assumption that somewhere out there in the cyberworld of gay websites, Bailey inserted the link to his YouTube video. Just how many gay sites featured the
link was unknown. But he was certainly eliciting enough email traffic and follow-up phone calls to make it worth his while.
Phone calls
, Jane thought to herself.
Of course
.
Now it makes sense.
Suddenly, the implication of the two rings followed by a hang up on the Van Gorden’s phone was evident to Jane. That had to be a code Bailey gave his prospective partners to use to let him know they were on their way to the motel. As Jane recalled, he seemed to be more anxious to leave once he heard that phone code. Another thought crossed her mind. Bailey was eager to release the officers from his house who wiretapped his phone in hopes of receiving and tracing a call from Jake’s kidnapper. Of course he didn’t want them there! It was interfering with contacting his tainted trysts as well as receiving the ringing alerts that signaled when his conquest was ready to meet him. Yeah, that demonstrated a lot of heart on Bailey’s part, Jane deduced. Nothing like having your priorities straight when your only child has been taken and feared dead. That act alone warranted a new addition to the definition of
egoistic
.
Bailey had been unable to curb his sexual addiction throughout the entire case. Jane
was
on the right trail when she checked his SUV on the first visit to their home and found his rear view mirror flipped for nighttime driving. He’d probably been out the previous night knocking boots with an anonymous “Andy.”
Ah
, she realized, in a somewhat disgusted revelation. That funky odor she smelled in his SUV was sex.
She glanced at the curtained room where the two men were undoubtedly getting busy. Jane couldn’t care less what people did behind closed doors. What she
did
care about was the way some people manipulated their transgressions and wrongly projected them onto someone else when they got caught in an effort to take the spotlight off of themselves. That’s exactly what Bailey did to his own son. Jane felt the anger building within her. It was so clear now. Jake witnessed the sexual deception, confronted his father with it and his dad’s response was to project the flagrant indiscretion onto him. Maybe Bailey made the kid
believe that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree? Perhaps Jake looked, acted and dressed just
odd
enough to make him question his identity after his father laid a
gay
trip on him. Whatever happened, it pushed Jake over the edge and to a bridge where he intended to end it all. Jane prickled at the thought of how Bailey boldly told Aaron with impunity that his son was obsessed with gay porn and regularly snuck out of the house to meet with male prostitutes that he met online.
Jesus
, Jane concluded, Bailey used
his
story to sully his kid’s reputation after Bailey got caught with his bum in the
nookie
jar.
Jane’s visceral reaction to Bailey’s treatment of his only child was to bound across the parking lot and kick in the door on the illicit love shack and bring all kinds of hell raining down on Mr. Van Gorden. The more she thought about literally catching Bailey with his pants down, the more she realized the kind of ass-kicking leverage she could finally have with the SOB.
Yes
. This could be the ticket she needed to finally get Bailey to answer her questions. Jane reached under the front seat and pulled her Glock out of the holster. Getting out of the Mustang, she shoved the gun in the back waistband of her jeans, covering it with the dressy shirt. The closer she got to the door, the more satisfaction she felt. But fifty feet from the room, her cell phone rang out. “Shit!” she whispered, ducking behind a parked truck to ensure she wasn’t seen by anyone. Checking the number, it was Weyler.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Jane, where are you?”
“Out and about. Why?”
“All hell’s breaking loose here. Carol Van Gorden called Bo about half an hour ago. She found another note from the kidnapper in their mailbox. He cut letters out of magazines and pasted them on the page to form words.”
Jane sprinted back across the parking lot to her Mustang. “What does it say?”
“
Listen to me now. If you don’t, it’ll be so sad, too bad
.”
Jane stopped in her tracks. “’So sad, too bad?’ Those words exactly?”
“Yes. Why?”
“That’s the same fucking term Louise Van Gorden used when I talked with her.”
“Good God. That’s worth noting given the second part of my news.”
“What?”
“When Carol showed the clue to her mother-in-law, Louise became highly agitated and collapsed. She’s in the local ER and it doesn’t look good, Jane. To cap it off, Bailey’s gone and not answering his cell.”
Jane put the pedal to the metal and barreled back to Midas. It was as if the veil had been ripped off her eyes and she was quickly seeing what had been staring her in the face all along. All the nervous eye shifting, all the hesitations, all the excuses that didn’t make sense, and all the obscure comments were suddenly making a little more sense to Jane. But there was no way she was going to let one of the players leave this world without gleaning vital information that could save Jake’s life.
Jane got directions to the local hospital from Weyler and squealed to a halt in front of the place in less than half an hour. She blew through the doors of the ER and into the wide hallway where curtained partitions separated the wheeled cots. The only area curtained off was at the far end. Jane strode in that direction as the beeping sound of a heart monitor and a doctor’s urgent voice rang out from behind the cloth wall. She slipped between the sliver of curtain and stood behind Carol who nervously tugged on her sweater hem as the doctor and nurse hovered over Louise’s face, attempting to rouse a verbal response from her. “Louise! Louise!” they kept repeating. Her eyes were open and alert, but she seemed unwilling or unable to speak.
“Louise!” the doctor yelled. “Can you tell us what occurred before you collapsed?”
Louise pursed her thin, wrinkled lips and looked as if she
would spit nails at the good doctor.
“Louise?” the nurse interceded, “did you eat anything that may have caused an allergic reaction?”
Again, Louise eyed the nurse with venomous intent and remained taciturn.
Out of sheer desperation, Carol managed a breathy interruption. “We’ve been extremely stressed…”
“
Carol
!” Louise growled, sounding like her vocal chords had been dragged across the pavement. “
Shut up
!”
Carol turned and jumped when she saw Jane behind her. “How did you…”
“You gonna shut up, Carol?” Jane whispered to her. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Get…
out
…” Louise said, struggling for breath.
Jane quickly crossed to the nurse’s side. “Don’t take it to the grave, Louise,” Jane urged. “Tell me what you know!”
“Who are you?” the doctor asked with a tinge of anger.
“Do you know where your grandson is, Louise?” Jane asked, her voice rising an octave.
The nurse glanced down at Jane’s Glock still tucked into the waistband of her jeans. “She’s got a gun!”
Jane spoke to the nurse. “I’m a cop!” Turning back to Louise, Jane leaned closer. “Louise…tell me what you know! Help me save your grandson’s life!”
“Officer,” the doctor intervened, “I’ve got to ask you to leave!”
Jane was undeterred. “
Louise,
for God’s sake, don’t sacrifice Jake!” The heart monitor rang with a code alert.
Louise arched her back in pain and turned her dying, steely eyes to Jane. “
Fuck you, Jane
!” she snarled with a chilling sneer.
The nurse pushed Jane outside the curtain, leaving only a few inches of an opening for Jane to watch the final tortured seconds of Louise Van Gorden’s miserable life.
They called her death at 12:12 pm. Jane left the ER and walked outside into the suddenly chilled spring air. Within
twenty minutes, she saw Bailey’s black SUV speed into the parking lot. He raced to the doors of the ER but stopped when he saw Jane.
“What in the fuck are you doing here?” he asked, fighting a severely congested nose and wearing a flushed face.
“I’m like the wind, Bailey. I’m everywhere you don’t want me to be.”
“
Get the fuck away from us
!” he yelled before crossing through the automatic doors.
Jane sniggered, realizing that Bailey’s classical symptoms of flushed skin and stuffed sinuses coincided with his
client meetings
. It wasn’t the little blue flowers that made him wheeze; it was the original
little blue pill’s
side effects. She sauntered back to her Mustang but took a detour toward Bailey’s SUV after she spotted something amiss from across the parking lot. While she couldn’t be certain, Jane hadn’t previously noticed the striking front-end damage to the vehicle’s front bumper.
Jane sat in her Mustang, her head spinning and her body exhausted. She glanced down to the thin book on the passenger seat and turned to the inside back cover with Jordan’s handwritten name. She opened the book and found various passages highlighted in yellow. Was it Jake who did that or Jordan? One particular line caught Jane’s eye:
You don’t come from your parents, but rather, through them.
She turned back toward the ER, thinking about the woman Bailey passed through and realized that, now, another ghost would remain tethered to generations not even born. In that same jarring moment, Jane spied the envelope Edward Butterworth had mistakenly dropped and that she rescued. She leaned across the seat and swept it up, figuring she’d gain a few points in heaven and mail it for him.
But when she turned it over and read the name on the front, two words fell from her stunned lips. “Dear God…”
She carefully opened the envelope and withdrew a letter written on gold-embossed parchment letterhead from Butterworth’s legal firm.
I’m sorry to hear about your recent health scare
, Butterworth handwrote.
I understand that you are doing much better and that you are back in the swing of life. Until next time, Edward Butterworth.
Attached was a personal check for $10,000 made out to the addressee.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Jane whispered.
CHAPTER 33
Jane felt a need to lay low the rest of the day. She returned to The Gardenia Room at the B&B and sat in silence on the bed as the clothesline of clues continued its daily taunt. Weyler called three times to check in, the first time after getting wind of her dramatic confrontation with Louise Van Gorden. “We’re going to be blacklisted from every joint in town if you keep this up,” he warned her. When she told him that she’d followed Bailey to the no-tell motel and what she witnessed, there was a long pause on the other end of the line, followed by “What in the hell are we dealing with here?” Given the day’s events, Weyler felt it was best that Jane stay where she was so she wouldn’t risk running into Bo. She agreed, although, it would be difficult for Jane to strike back at the man, knowing now what she did about him.
She stared back to the clues. The person behind these mystifying messages wasn’t just clever, he was driven by a need that overwhelmed his reason—
Control
. The word had already come up twice and now it rang like a siren in Jane’s ears as she committed the pages to memory again. It first arose when Jane hypothesized to Bailey and Carol that the M.O. of the kidnapper
was about control. “It’s kind of connected to revenge, but it has its own flavor,” she remembered telling Bailey. “Such criminals have lost their ability to feel validated, and so their action, whatever that might be, seeks to control a situation that they feel they are powerless to contain.” Jane recalled how Bailey swallowed hard and turned away—a visual
tell
that he deeply related to what he heard.