Whisper of Revenge (A Cape Trouble Novel Book 4) (10 page)

“Yes,” Hannah said.  “I’ll call as soon as I know
anything.”  Pause.  “Uh huh.  Goodbye, Grady.”  She set the phone down.

Elias put an arm around her and she sagged against him.

A  rap on the glass door had them all turning.

“Jack-Jack?” Hannah said, sounding disbelieving.

Of all people, it was the Realtor, Patrick Fletcher, who
stood just outside holding a brown-and-white puppy in his arms.  The sight was
incongruous, because Fletch dressed well.  Today’s suit fit his lean build as
if custom made.  He’d have a few dog hairs on that suit now.

Colburn let him in.  Jack-Jack squirmed and yipped.

“Fletch?”  Hannah half-rose to her feet.  “Where did you
find him?”

His gaze flicked to Elias and back to Hannah.  “I saw him
damn near get hit by a car over on Spruce.  I’d have taken him back to your
house and put him in the yard, but considering I wasn’t sure how he got out in
the first place…”  He shrugged, showing confusion as he looked around.  “Why
are you closed?  Is something wrong?”

“Ian…”  She swallowed.  “Somebody kidnapped Ian.”

“Hannah…  My God.”  Concern creased a face handsome enough
for a man in a profession where likeability was an issue.  “Are you…  No, I
won’t even ask.  Of course, you aren’t all right.”  He took a tentative step
toward her, then seemingly remembered he still held the wriggling puppy. 
“Ah…”  He lowered Jack-Jack to the floor.  Barking in excitement, the puppy
launched himself at Hannah, who lifted him to her lap and let the eager tongue
lap away new tears.  “Thank you.  I’m so glad he wasn’t hit.  I’d never be able
to tell Ian—”

Hearing her distress, Elias gathered her and the puppy
against him.  Squished between them, Jack-Jack still managed to get in a lick
and nip on Elias’s chin.  He’d have smiled if he hadn’t felt Hannah’s agony. 
She was right; when Ian came home, his puppy had to be there.

Elias was hardly aware of Fletch’s awkward goodbye or his
departure.  “Sweetheart,” he murmured, as she cried.

Elias had known Fletcher Realty was the dominant player in
home sales in Cape Trouble if not the entire county, but never thought much
about it.  Having parked Hannah’s aging Highlander in her driveway, he found
himself eyeing a red and white Fletcher Realty sign in front of a house across
the street from hers but a few doors down.

Still looking at the house for sale and wondering if it was
vacant, he circled to open Hannah’s door.  She hadn’t moved, and not, he felt
sure, because she was waiting for him to be chivalrous.  Instead, she stared at
her small house with such pain, he suspected she was finding unthinkable the
idea of going home without Ian.

Jack-Jack scrambled from her lap and leaped past Elias, who
reached over her to unfasten the seatbelt, then said quietly, “Let’s go in,
Hannah.”

He’d suggested to Colburn that she might be better off at
home.  The plate-glass windows fronting the bookstore and sweets shop allowed
passersby to gape at anyone inside.  Hannah didn’t need to be stared at right
now.  He hoped to talk her into lying down, but knew she wouldn’t sleep.

Surely, God, there’d be a break soon, he thought with sudden
violence.  How could she keep going if day after day passed, with no news?  Or
the worst kind of news?

But people did.  Hannah would, because she was a strong
woman.

She let herself lean on Elias as they crossed the yard,
however, for which he was profoundly grateful.

He heard the slap of a screen door closing and saw the
neighbor, Edna, descend her porch steps and hurry toward them.  Jack-Jack raced
to meet her, and he saw tears in her eyes when she bent to pet the puppy.

“Any news?” she asked as she neared them.

Elias shook his head.  “Except, as you can see, Jack-Jack
was found loose on a busy street.  Fortunately, a regular customer of Hannah’s
recognized him and brought him to the store.”

“Ian loves him so.  Oh, my dear.”  Edna held out her arms,
and Elias released her to go into them.  A head taller, Hannah had to bend to
press her wet cheek to the old lady’s, but the closeness, the sight of the two
united in fear and grief, was powerful.

Once Ian was safe, Elias thought, he might have to paint
this scene.  Edna, he suspected, was Ian’s grandmother in every way that
mattered.

“He’ll come home,” she was saying softly.  “You must have
faith.  Chief Colburn will find him.  Ian will be home before you know it.”

Hannah sniffed, thanked her, and straightened again, her
head turning immediately as if she had to reassure herself that Elias was still
there.  The pain and vulnerability in her big brown eyes wrenched something in
his chest.

Edna patted her a few more times and promised to bring over
some homemade soup in a few hours.  “I know you’re not hungry, but you have to
eat, and there’s nothing like a good, nourishing soup to keep you strong.”

Hannah smiled despite her tears and kissed Edna’s wrinkled
cheek.  “Thank you.”

“Would you like me to take Jack-Jack?” she offered.

But Hannah shook her head.  “I think…seeing him might help
me believe…”  She couldn’t finish, but nobody expected her to.

Elias laid a hand on her back and gently propelled her in. 
The front door stood unlocked, as a young Cape Trouble officer had been let in
earlier to wait for a phone call.  He jumped up from the kitchen table as soon
as they entered, looking startled at the puppy who yapped fiercely at the
intruder.

Once Jack-Jack had been calmed, he said, “Not a single
call.”  Young and cursed with a baby face, he added awkwardly, “I’m real sorry,
Ms. Moss.  Ah – I’m Officer Kreiger.  Aaron Kreiger.  Chief Colburn said I
should stay in case…”  He didn’t want to look at Elias.  “Well, someone calls.”

Elias gritted his teeth.  This twenty-something kid was here
to keep an eye on him, and that enraged him even as he grudgingly understood
Colburn’s caution.  Apparently, suspicion was the price he now paid for his
habit of solitude.

At his suggestion, Hannah collected a change of clothes and
went to take a bath or shower.  Jack-Jack sniffed at the crack beneath the
bathroom door, then abandoned her in favor of flopping down at Elias’s feet. 
Elias knew he couldn’t – shouldn’t follow her, but he wanted to.  He didn’t
like the idea of her alone with fear so huge.  More, he didn’t like not having
her where he could see her, touch her.

It was the shower he heard moments later; he imagined her
using the rush of water to ensure no one heard her crying.  He closed his eyes
and sat in silence, waiting for the ringing of a telephone.  News might come to
any of their phones.

*****

Daniel stood just outside a strip of yellow crime scene tape
and watched the evidence technicians from the Oregon State Crime Analysis Unit
comb the alley for anything useful.  He’d had reason to be grateful before for
the services the state police offered local jurisdictions in Oregon.  The
Burris County Sheriff’s Department was sizeable enough to have their own, modest
crime scene unit, but the Cape Trouble P.D. wasn’t.  Having one officer trained
in fingerprinting had been the best Daniel could do with the existing budget. 
He had a good relationship with people at the sheriff’s department – he
considered the sheriff himself, Alex Mackay, to be a friend, as was Sean
Holbeck.  They wouldn’t have hesitated to send their investigators.  But, as
dirty as an alley tended to be, this was a difficult scene.  Daniel didn’t want
to take the slightest chance anything would be overlooked.

Garbed in white, wearing booties, latex gloves and hair
coverings, a woman and a man were crouched, studying something invisible from
this distance.  A little farther away, a camera flashed, the lens aimed at the
scrape on the dumpster.

Daniel had watched that damn video so many times, he could
re-run it in his head.  That swerve had been deliberate.  The driver had wanted
to transfer paint between dumpster and Land Rover.  Just as he’d parked as if
he had calculated the perfect angle to be sure the camera took in the license
plate.

Daniel did not like being played.  His job demanded
impartiality, which meant he still had to take seriously the possibility that
Elias Burton was the secret admirer and had abducted Hannah’s little boy.  But
instinct and reason both said Elias had been set up, most likely because the
artist had interfered in the secret admirer’s romantic plans.  But the effort
it had taken to steal Elias’s Land Rover and impersonate him had Daniel
wondering whether this guy had something against Elias himself.  The kidnapper
had magnified the risk of getting caught many times over by adding in the steps
of first stealing the Land Rover, then returning it.  Too much risk, too much
trouble, unless Elias was a big part of the end goal.

Daniel frowned.  Abbot Grissom hadn’t wanted to share
whatever it was he’d heard to Elias’s detriment, but he might be more willing
now.  In fact…  Daniel reached for his cell phone.

It rang before he could dial.  Sean Holbeck.

“One of my deputies found someone who remembers seeing
Burton this morning, but it’s not much help.  The guy was walking his dog.  He
says he didn’t get more than a few hundred yards past Burton before he decided
he’d gone far enough and turned back.  Says it was about nine – when he got
back to his car, he noticed the time on the dashboard clock.  Nine thirty-two.”

“The Land Rover?”

“Right where Burton parked it.  Says it and his Tahoe were
the only two vehicles there.”  Restraint in Sean’s voice told Daniel what he
was thinking – Elias would have had plenty of time after being seen to jog back
to his car, snatch Ian and stow him somewhere, then return to the old resort. 
A stranger might have stowed the boy in the old lodge, long-abandoned and
marked No Trespassing.  Any local knew the resort’s history, however.  In fact,
the minute Sean told him the Land Rover was parked there, Daniel had driven
over himself long enough to search the lodge top to bottom and check out the
remains of the cabins, falling down from long neglect and the unending winter
rain.

“Okay,” he said.  “Keep everyone on it.”

“Will do.”

Daniel called Grissom, who was just leaving the Surfside, an
old-style “resort” that had only a distant resemblance to the fancy inn Randall
Bresler had built on the other side of the point separating Cape Trouble from
the neighboring cove and community, Jasper Beach.

“Let me grab some fast food and I’ll come by Sweet Ideas,”
Grissom agreed.  “If you’re still there?”

Fifteen minutes later, Daniel let him in the front door and
locked again immediately.  He was currently alone here, except for the CSI out
in the alley.  Once Elias took Hannah away, Sophie and Emily went home.  Too
bad, in a way; despite the grim circumstances, Daniel had liked having his wife
close.  Just exchanging glances, touching her shoulder in passing, studying the
curve of her belly, kept him centered.

Grissom took a seat at one of the small café tables on the
sweets side, probably uncomfortable with having greasy food anywhere near the
books.  Unwrapping his cheeseburger, he said, “Sorry, I’m starved.”

Daniel brought him up to date.  “Given Burton’s potential
involvement, I’m hoping you’ll tell me why you didn’t like the idea of him with
Hannah.”

“What I heard…it was just rumor.”  He didn’t appear happy. 
“That’s why I don’t like to say anything.”

“People talk to you.”

Appearing approachable was probably Abbot Grissom’s greatest
gift.  That, coupled with the fact that the old-timers trusted him because he
was one of them.

Grissom chewed, swallowed and nodded.  “Stuff has been
floating around for years.  The first time I heard about it, the woman he’d
been linked with up and moved right away, which tended to substantiate what was
being said.  Even so, I wouldn’t have taken the rumors as seriously if they’d
died out.  But two or three years later, people started talking again.”

Trying to hide his impatience, Daniel said, “And what were
they saying?”  Grissom liked to meander to his point.

“That he has a temper,” he said, finally blunt.  “Hits the
women he’s involved with.  What I heard was, he got really rough with a high
school girlfriend.  The father wanted to bring him up on charges, the girl
begged him not to but broke up with Burton.  This supposedly happened right
before they graduated.”

“Was the girl taken to the hospital?  A doctor?”

“Don’t know.  There was never a criminal complaint.  I had
no reason to follow up on it.

“What’s your gut say?”

His officer chomped down a French fry as if needing a moment
to think.  “The guy has a checkered past with women, anyone can tell you that,”
he said, in his slow way, brow knit.  “I know of several women he’s dated who
moved away.  Another one died, got herself trapped when the tide came in.” 
Doubt came through, even if Grissom didn’t know it.  “Least, that’s what they
assumed,” he added with a shrug.  “Her body had been battered on the rocks.”

“Where?”

“The rocks leading out from Cape Trouble Point.”

Daniel frowned.  A buoy warned boats to stay away from the
point.  When the tide was in, the rocks were submerged, but the rough surf
warned off anyone with brains.   “Was she a local?” he asked.

People who’d grown up on the Oregon coast knew better than
to be careless when it came to tides.  Visitors were warned, given tide tables
before they ventured to the beach.  County residents all knew how treacherous
that point was.  Daniel had only been in Cape Trouble for two years, and he’d
been part of a couple rescues over there as well as one body recovery.

“Don’t think so.”  Grissom sounded as if he was making a
concession.  “I didn’t know her, but heard she was an artist who’d recently
moved over here to paint.”

“Holbeck says when he found Elias this morning, he was damn
close to being knocked over by incoming waves.  He had an easel set up so he
could draw tidepools on those rocks leading out to the Needle.  Apparently he
was determined to finish whatever he was working on.”  The Needle was a stack,
one of many along the coast, but an unusually skinny one.  Undoubtedly once
more sizeable, it had been eroded by thousands of years of pounding waves down
to a core of harder rock.  Could be next winter, could be fifty years from now,
but a winter storm would eventually topple it.

“Guess artists can block out a lot when they’re working,”
Grissom agreed.  “I wasn’t meaning to suggest the woman’s death was anything
but an accident, although you know how it is.”

People talked.  A good thing for law enforcement, but the
speed news and rumors flew in a town this size still disturbed Daniel.  Some of
it was well-meant, but plenty of the gossip fell somewhere between
sour-tempered and malicious.  He’d come to appreciate Grissom’s unwillingness
to pass on anything he couldn’t be sure was accurate.

“All right,” Daniel said with a sigh.  “Thanks.  I’ll be
honest – I don’t believe Elias is behind this.  My suspicion is that a lot of
the talk is because he keeps to himself.  When he and a woman part ways, it
doesn’t happen on the public stage, which frustrates our gossipmongers.”

A smile twitched at the corner of Abbot’s mouth.  “Can’t
think who you’d be talking about.”

Daniel’s tension released in a chuckle.  Either of them
could name eight or ten Cape Trouble residents who lived to be the first to
hear a juicy nugget that could be embroidered before being sent on its way. 
Human nature, he knew, but too often a  destructive form of it.

“Those rumors,” he said.  “Any hint where they started?  An
angry woman?  A domestic violence call made by a cop who didn’t keep his mouth
shut?”

Appearing troubled, Grissom shook his head.  “By the time I
heard anything, it was general knowledge.”