The Truth About Comfort Cove (14 page)

A
beat
-
up woman
, age indeterminable because of the swelling and bruising around her nose, mouth and eyes, was standing outside the office door when Ramsey got off the elevator just after six on Friday morning. He had paperwork to catch up on, reports to write, and had been hoping to get it done before all hell broke loose for the day.

Or, if no new jobs came in, before everyone showed up and started yawing at each other or someone turned on the television.

Walking past the woman might have been his easiest course.
“Is someone helping you?” he asked, standing there like he had all the time in the world.
“They said I could come up here and wait for a detective.” Her words came through lips that were stiff and doubled in size.
“Sure. I’m Detective Miller,” Ramsey said, pulling his badge out of his brown suit-coat pocket. “What can I do for you?”
Who in the hell did that to you and where am I going to find him?
“I want to know what would happen to a kid if he beat someone up.” She sounded like her mouth was wired shut. But maybe it just wouldn’t open. If her jaw wasn’t broken it was a miracle.
“Is that what happened to you? A kid beat you up?”
Her chin lifted. Ramsey couldn’t tell if it stiffened or not because of the swelling. The woman looked grotesque. Worried.
But not scared to death. “I just want to know what would happen if a kid beat someone up,” she repeated, almost as if she’d been rehearsing the line during the time he’d taken to get to work and find her there.
“It depends on the circumstances, ma’am, and the age of the kid, too.”
She didn’t reply. She wasn’t shaking. Wasn’t looking over her shoulder, or panicking. He had a feeling she might just turn, get on the elevator and leave.
He couldn’t let that happen.
“You’re not in good shape, ma’am,” he said, stepping closer to her. “Have you seen a doctor?”
She started to shake her head and winced instead. “I’ll be fine. I don’t need a doctor.”
It had to hurt like hell to speak.
“What’s your name?”
“Lonna.”
“Lonna what?”
“Lonna Baker.”
Good. Even if she left, he’d be able to find her. And find out what happened.
“Are you married, Lonna?”
“No.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
The ante had just upped. “I need to know who did this to you, Lonna.”
“I don’t want to press charges.” She spoke carefully as though the process was becoming more painful.
“A crime has been committed here. The state could press charges.”
Now her gaze, little slits within puffy skin, darted. Now she was afraid.
But not for herself?
“What kid beat you up, Lonna?”
Tears pooled within her swollen eyes, and eventually trickled over the edges of her bruises.
“My kid.”
He should have expected that. He hadn’t.
He wanted to puke.

R
amsey called
K
im and then
sat with Lonna in an interrogation room until the female detective arrived. He didn’t offer her anything to drink, not certain that she should ingest anything. Instead, he called for emergency medical services. They arrived just about the same time Kim did.

Half an hour later, he was on his way to meet Randall Davenport, Jack Colton’s boss from twenty-five years ago. He took Ocean Drive across town, adding a good twenty minutes to his trip. He had to get out. To breathe fresh air. Comfort Cove wasn’t a huge city like Boston. It also wasn’t a small town like Aurora. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to Vienna, Kentucky.

Ramsey could process a dead body, male or female, without losing his appetite. Especially if it was a clean shot to the head that did the killing. He could handle guts and gore from bar fights and suicides just fine. Car accidents and even strangulations were part of the job. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to seeing women and children abused. It wasn’t death that bothered him. Suffering did.

And he had to make certain that Claire Sanderson, dead or alive, hadn’t suffered. He knew her family, had an invitation to her sister’s wedding. They needed answers—were suffering hugely without them—and it was his job to find those answers.

Randall Davenport, a portly man, invited Ramsey into his office and offered him a cup of coffee. Ramsey accepted the drink in the guise of politeness, of friendliness, not because he intended to drink a sip of it.

“I was not quite thirty when my old man hired Jack Colton,” Randall said, leaning back in the chair behind his desk. “Not all that much older than Jack was, which is why I remember him.”

Ramsey, with his portfolio resting on his thigh, settled back into the armchair on the opposite side of Davenport’s desk.
The room was clean. Organized. With family photos and local awards on the walls.
“You service all of eastern Massachusetts,” Ramsey said, reading a sign on the wall.
“That’s right.”
“Have you always?”
“Yes. My father bought the business from East Coast Meats. They’d started with two brothers. One who processed meat and the other who delivered it. When the one brother died, the one who processed the meat sold off that part of the business. My father bought it—I was ten at the time—and we’ve distributed for them, exclusively, since day one.”
He’d heard of East Coast Meats. They provided beef to all of the restaurants in the tourist district of Comfort Cove. And to places in Boston and surrounding cities, as well. He’d also already known what Davenport had just told him.
He was there to find out what he didn’t know. First thing being whether or not Davenport was being straight up with him.
“How serious was your father about the work logs you gave me?”
“Very,” Davenport said without a moment’s pause. “Reliability is what built East Coast Meats, both in the quality of the meat and the timeliness of its delivery. Meat isn’t something that can sit outside and wait for someone to get home. People plan their schedules around the time their meat will arrive so that they can be there to take it in and get it in the refrigerator. If we’re late, we make them late. We could ruin an entire day by upsetting someone’s schedule, which is not convenient. If we aren’t convenient, our customers might just decide to stop in at the local butcher to buy their meat. Even today, if a man doesn’t log in, allowing us to verify every delivery, he doesn’t work for us.”
Amelia Hardy had led him to believe that Jack’s job depended on his timeliness.
“Jack Colton made an unscheduled stop for gas the day that Claire Sanderson went missing. I can find no record of him making that stop at any other time that he worked for you.”
Frowning, Randall Davenport stood to his full five-footeight and reached for the book that was still on his desk from the previous day when Ramsey had been there to collect copies of the twenty-five-year-old records.
Randall turned the pages with the ease of someone who was completely familiar with them. Ramsey recognized the page when Randall found it. There was a scribble in the upper left-hand corner. Like someone had been trying to get an ink pen to write.
With his pudgy finger running down the page, line by line, Randall appeared to read every bit of information there. He turned back a week and forward a week. Ramsey had done the same thing.
Then he went for another book. For the next fifteen minutes, Randall Davenport spot-checked time pages for all Wednesdays in 1987. And then he went to the basement and came back fifteen minutes later with another book of records.
“I’m looking at finance records, here,” Davenport finally told him. “Colton’s unscheduled gas stop is logged, with a request for reimbursement. There is no request for gas reimbursement at the end of the day, which was usual for him.”
Davenport turned the book around.
“He probably got a truck that hadn’t been filled the night before,” Davenport said. “We frown on guys turning in trucks before filling them, but it happens sometimes. A guy has somewhere to be, a function that he’s rushing off to…”
Ramsey was impressed with the man’s record keeping. It rivaled the department’s evidence room.
And he was pissed, too. There went his prime suspect. Most likely. Unless he could figure out how the man could steal a two-year-old child, stop for gas, get rid of the child and make all of his usual deliveries, too.
Or…steal the child, stop for gas—a well-planned alibi— make one more delivery with the child in the car and then get rid of the child during his lunch break in time to make all his afternoon appointments on schedule.
Colton would only have to have kept the two-year-old quiet and hidden long enough for one delivery.
Was it so hard to imagine that he’d done so?

T
he box wasn
’
t that big
. Maybe two feet square. A little bigger than a book-size moving box. It had the name of a popular kids cereal on the outside. Probably picked up free from a grocery store. It was not a box that someone went out and bought.

“You ready?” Amber Locken stood on one side of the island countertop in the evidence room at the station house. Lucy, in black wool slacks and jacket and her power red blouse, stood on the other.

“Yes,” Lucy said, staring at the strip of brown packing tape sealing the box.
The handwriting on the top, addressing the box to their care, was obviously feminine. Flowery. Young.
Wakerby was fifty-five. He’d said he didn’t go for babies.
Just women young enough to be his own baby?
Pulling a utility knife from a drawer in the island counter, Amber handed it to Lucy. “This one’s yours,” she said.
Surprised, Lucy glanced at the woman who’d brought her up in the business—back when Lucy had been a cop on the beat. Amber was watching her.
“It takes a special woman to be a cop, Lucy. Where men are natural tough guys, we’re nurturers. Think of little boys. They figure cutting up worms is cool. They laugh at bodily functions, and consider blood and gore entertainment. Girls, on the other hand, stereotypically, play nurse and house, where they’re taking care of people. They like movies with animals in them—preferably horses—and happy endings. They’re embarrassed by bodily functions.”
Lucy got the point.
“You’re a natural at this job. And you deserve this,” Amber said, nodding toward the box.
Taking the knife from the other woman’s hand, Lucy put the tip of the blade to the tape and sliced with one sure motion.
She was a good cop. She could do this.

T
he beaten mother was gone
by the time Ramsey made it back to the office. Kim was nowhere to be seen, either. Ramsey sat down to write up his suicide from the day before while he ate the cold fried-chicken sandwich he’d bought from the shop downstairs.

Even stale, it was better than the nothing he’d brought from home that morning.
As if on cue—because he was eating bad—his cell phone rang and his father’s number appeared on the screen. His first instinct, to push the end-call button and send Earl Miller to voice mail, almost saved him.
“Yeah, Dad, what’s up?” He answered the call just before it switched over.
“You busy, son? I waited until lunchtime, hoping I wouldn’t be interrupting a meeting or something, but I know that when you’re on a case time of day means nothing.”
Ramsey bit into his sandwich. Chewing just to be stubborn in response to the voice inside of him that was telling him that he shouldn’t eat that stuff.
“I’ve got a minute,” Ramsey said. “What’s up?”
“Thanksgiving’s next week.”
The last swallow of his sandwich stuck in his throat. “I know.”
His father always asked. He never nagged.
Or pushed.
“We’d really like for you to come home and celebrate it with us.”
His mother must be getting worse. Did Earl think this might be her last Thanksgiving with them?
Heart racing, Ramsey tried to corral his thoughts. His mother was losing her mind. Not her physical health. She wasn’t even seventy yet. And she’d always been healthy.
“I can’t, Dad.”
“I told your mother that’s what you’d say. But think about it, would you, Ramsey? It’s really important. To both of us.”
“I have a wedding to go to that weekend.” Until that moment, he’d been dreading the event. Partially because he wasn’t sure he could spend any more personal time with Lucy Hayes without her figuring out how much she turned him on.
“A wedding?” Earl’s tone changed. “Anyone we know?”
“No. A…victim’s sister is getting married. She invited me and another cop.”
“Did you get the guy?”
He blinked, fighting against the knot in his chest. If something was wrong with his mother…
“What guy?”
“The one who victimized the sister of the girl getting married.”
An image of Jack Colton flashed in his mind’s eye. As far as his father knew, the “guy” could have been a “girl.” “Not yet, but I’m closing in on him. Hopefully I’ll be able to wrap it up this next week.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“Saturday.” Time enough between Thanksgiving dinner and the wedding to make it back from Vienna. “But I’m on call Thanksgiving Day,” he said. He’d volunteered. Just like he did for every other holiday. Everyone else, including Kim, had family to be with over the holidays. “Holidays seem to make crazy people crazier,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. They made his mother worse, too, but she wasn’t crazy. And he didn’t want Earl to think he thought so.
There was a pause on the line. Ramsey could make out the distinct tones of his mother’s voice, but he couldn’t make out the words. Then Earl said, “How about the week after Thanksgiving? Can you get away then?”
“What’s wrong, Dad? Is Mom sick?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“No. We’re both healthy, Ramsey. We just had our annual physicals last month. We miss you, son.”
And he missed them, too. He just didn’t miss the emotional turmoil that coiled around them every time they got together. Even worse was the state his mother was always left in any time he’d been home.
Missing each other was far healthier for all of them.
“I’ll see what I can do. If not then, soon,” he said, and realized, when he heard Earl’s sigh, that his father knew Ramsey wasn’t going to be home anytime in the near future.
“How are you otherwise?” Earl asked, and Ramsey felt like more of a heel than ever. His father never called him on his lies, his false promises. He’d never said a word about the fact that it was Ramsey’s fault that Diane was dead, either. Not once.
But they all knew that it was.
“I’m fine, Dad. Busier than ever. In addition to my regular homicide duties, I’m working some cold cases. Child abductions.”
At least Earl would know that his son was spending his time doing good work, helping people.
Maybe even bringing families back together to make up for having blown his own apart.