Vanished

by Kate Watterson

  “Yep.” Maybe he shouldn’t, but he actually felt sorry for the kid. Borderline geek, in love with the very pretty girl who only wanted to be friends …

  When Ellie turned back, she said in a much kinder tone, “Jeremy, look. We’ve figured out David Lambrusco was not a good guy without too much trouble. We’ve also figured out Nicole’s story has huge holes in it and she could not have gotten away with killing him by herself. You were conveniently there at every turn, and if you think that doesn’t raise a red flag, you’d be wrong. It will be a much easier path if you just tell us what happened.”

  Where before he’d been pallid, he was now positively pale. “We didn’t plan it.”

  Pay dirt.

  * * *

  The brutality of the crime bothered her. There had been no small amount of rage behind it, and that was just indisputable.

  Jeremy wasn’t the mastermind, she’d never thought that even when the first doubts crowded in, like shadows under the trees on an autumn evening, suggestive and disturbing.

  Ellie deliberately picked up her bottle of water, took a drink, and set it down. “But it happened.”

  Jeremy’s mouth trembled. “He was raping her.”

  Next to her, Santiago made an inarticulate sound. Ellie said evenly, trying to keep all judgment from her voice, “You’re sure? You walked into the foyer and he was raping her.”

  He gestured with his hands. “No, no, not right then, but he was forcing her to have sex with him or he’d tell her parents about the test. That’s rape, right? And blackmail.” With a shaking hand he pushed his hair back again. “She wanted me there so she could tell him that she wasn’t going to do it again, and when I stepped inside he turned and came after me and I … hit him.”

  “With?”

  “Baseball bat. I brought it with me. I wanted to just scare him off. I wasn’t going to use it, I swear. Just suggest I might use it if he didn’t leave her alone.”

  To her surprise, Santiago sounded empathetic. “You wanted to protect her.”

  Jeremy stared blindly at the table and nodded miserably. “Yes.”

  “And then she stabbed him. With what? Kitchen knife?”

  “No, I did that.” He wouldn’t meet their eyes.

  Santiago was relentless. “No, you didn’t. She did it. What happened next?”

  Like some witnesses, Jeremy rode the wave, confession, after all, being good for the soul. He said shakily. “You know the rest. We wrapped up the body and she drove off. I was supposed to let you know she called, and she’d call again so you could ‘find’ her.”

  What was startling was that it was close to the perfect crime. They would have had one hell of a time proving anything if they didn’t have Jeremy. Ellie said, “You’ve done the right thing for both you and Nicole, in telling the truth. Maybe you should call your mother and ask her to come here. She gave us permission to talk to you, but this is different. If she would like you to have a lawyer that is always her choice.”

  Jeremy nodded like a puppet, white as a sheet.

  It was dependent on the autopsy. If the blow killed David Lambrusco, Jeremy was in some very serious trouble. If Nicole stabbing him while he was unconscious killed him, then it was another story, but either way, he needed a lawyer.

  As they walked out, Santiago said under his breath, “This is bullshit.”

  “I like him, too. Nice kid. When he told us yesterday he was so scared, I assumed he meant for Nicole. Now I interpret it an entirely different way.”

  “If Lambrusco really was blackmailing Nicole and she was paying him off in sex, whether or not it was his idea or hers, I’d have taken a baseball bat to that fucker myself if given the chance.”

  Ellie stopped off at her desk and pressed a button on her computer to check her messages. “I agree, but only to a certain extent. If he was blackmailing her and coercing her into sex, he was maybe not asking for it, but culpable. Despicable, oh yeah, he fits the definition of that word perfectly, but did he deserve to die? The premeditation angle bothers me. I think he did have the power to destroy her dream of attending that perfect college, but let’s not forget she schemed to cheat in the first place, and my gut tells me his murder was planned. Maybe he was forcing her to sleep with him, and maybe she was giving it up all on her own to keep his mouth shut, but he was a wild card she couldn’t afford to have hanging around.”

  Her partner leaned a hip on her desk, his arms folded. “That’s pretty cold for a seventeen-year-old girl, Ellie.”

  “Oh,” she said, straightening, “I agree. Keep in mind, also, she could have gone to her parents at any time and stopped the whole thing. The autopsy is done, Let’s talk to Hammet.”

  He didn’t look delighted. “Yeah, can’t wait.”

  She’d always found his aversion to the morgue a little amusing. It was hardly a cheery place, she had to agree there, but he had had an almost adolescent repugnance like a teenager at a horror flick. She could swear she’d seen him look over his shoulder once or twice. The same man she knew had jumped out of planes into enemy territory during his time in the service, and whose profession involved dead bodies, set foot into the dissection area and saw those steel tables and drawers and got squeamish.

  “It won’t be that bad.” She said it in a deliberately condescending tone. “Remember our last case?”

  “Jesus, Ellie, how could I forget.” He shot her an irritated look.

  The killer had mutilated the faces of the victims in a ritualistic fashion, and it had been gruesome, to say the least.

  Dr. Hammet, slender and dark-haired, was in scrubs, and the body was still on the table. She was professional, always, and had a very dry sense of humor that was difficult to catch unless a person was paying attention. She nodded at them briefly as they came into the room, the odor of disinfectant heavy in the air. “Detectives. How is the ankle, Ellie?”

  “I’m not supposed to do any downhill skiing right now or anything, but the cast is off and it has been pronounced essentially healed.” She pointed at the corpse. “This case has broken open, but what happens next is going to hang on your summary. We know manner of death is homicide, but cause of death will determine how the prosecutor decides to charge.”

  She thought she already knew the answer, but Hammet’s written opinion was what they’d take to the prosecutor.

  “Our victim took a blow to the head here.” Hammet pointed to the left side of the skull at the temple. “I am going to guess it knocked him down, because it was a pretty decent hit with a blunt object. It broke the skin and he probably had blood pouring down the side of his face. It also broke his nose and cracked his cheekbone.”

  “Baseball bat,” Santiago supplied laconically.

  “That would do it.” Hammet moved around the table. “But it didn’t kill him. His heart was still beating when someone kindly stabbed him in the stomach. There’s a third wound on the chest, as you can see, but it was deflected by the rib cage. If I was asked to envision the scenario, I’d say that on first try, the person who killed him didn’t have the strength to stab him in the heart, which appears to be the initial goal, so they went for the much more vulnerable soft tissue of the abdomen. He bled out.”

  That would account for the all the blood on the wall and on the floor. “Was he unconscious?”

  “Impossible to tell. Maybe, maybe not. I’m going to say the attack was very swift.”

  Nicole Remington had killed him.

  They took the stairs back up, because they usually did. “I guess we’ll hold them both.” Santiago wasn’t nearly as happy as usual to leave the morgue, hands in his pockets, his expression remote.

  “Look at it this way, they are both still juveniles.” Ellie was reflective as well, the stairwell echoing their steps. “It’s a little hard to remember what was so important at that age that it seemed like this might be a reasonable course.”

  “I was busy smoking weed and drinking beer. The high-achieving types were not my best friends. Let me guess,
Ellie MacIntosh graduated at the top of her class.”

  She skimmed over it since they’d had very different childhoods. “I’m trying to decide if we should interview Nicole again and see if she’ll break. She’s smart, and if she stays smart, she’s going to stick with that it was a spur of the moment decision and in self-defense or something like that.”

  “It’s hard to defend stabbing a man in the stomach twice when he is unconscious, and it sounds to me like she was very ready to do it.”

  True.

  They rounded a corner and started up the next flight. “They could plead it a couple of ways,” Ellie countered. “With a talented lawyer, he or she could use the sexual angle and say Nicole was under duress. There isn’t a member of a jury with a child that wouldn’t sympathize.”

  “So … premeditated murder or self-defense?”

  “She planned it.”

  Jason Santiago looked at her. “I can’t say premeditated. That means Jeremy St. Joseph understood what he was walking into, and I don’t think he did. I don’t want to take that road.”

  She didn’t either. It didn’t seem fair that while the law was black and white, law enforcement just was an infernal world of gray. All she said was, “If Nicole cooperates, I’m with you.”

  Epilogue

  Sioux Falls, South Dakota

  The house was surprisingly modest.

  Brick, two story. Not fancy, but still totally unlike the house Jason had grown up in, which been a square of cinder block with a weedy driveway. This one had tidy pots of flowers on the steps to the porch and the trim was neatly painted.

  All that was fine. He really didn’t care. He didn’t. In an odd way, he felt more centered because his childhood had been less than perfect. It meant everything he’d achieved as an adult, all alone, was sweeter and more of a mark of honor.

  His mother answered the door.

  He recognized her. That set him back. It was an assumption he wouldn’t, that she would be a shadowy figure from his past, but he actually recognized her—not so much her person but her voice when she said pleasantly, “Yes?”

  That voice. Yes. All doubt it wasn’t her vanished.

  Since when did he not have something—usually smart-ass—to say? He managed, “I’m a detective with the Milwaukee police department. Could I have a word?”

  Her reaction was resignation. “Yes, of course. Please come in.”

  She was, on first impression, worn. Pretty in a way that he remembered vaguely, like a faded photograph in a yellowed album. Short blond hair going gray gracefully, lines by her mouth, and those were the eyes he looked into in the mirror every day, a certain shade of vivid blue. She wore a summery dress with cap sleeves, and it occurred to him that as a child he’d never seen her in slacks, the memories rushing back like a floodgate opened. It was surreal, and as he took a seat on a sofa that was brown with light blue flecks, he wondered just what the hell he was going to say next.

  He looked around. It was a nice room, a little generic maybe, like something picked out of a showcase window at a furniture store. Floor lamps, a couple of chairs that matched the couch, a polished coffee table. All very low key.

  As he’d headed out, he’d thought about bringing Ellie. She’d come with him, he knew that, and somehow, that was enough.

  He could rely on her, and maybe that was part of the puzzle of how he felt about their relationship, but at the moment, he wanted to handle this meeting in the right way on his own. His past, his problem. “I’m here because—”

  “Of my husband.” His mother’s smile was tremulous as she finished the sentence for him. “I understand he has a past. What is it now? We have lived here a very long time.”

  “I do think I am here because of your husband, but not in the way you mean. Do you like it here?” He rested his hands on his knees and asked because he really wanted to know the answer. “Better than Milwaukee, I mean.”

  She hadn’t really looked at him before, just his badge. At that moment, she focused on his face and knew. Her lips parted, but no sound escaped, she just sat there, staring at him incredulously.

  Finally she whispered, “Jason?”

  “Did you think I’d never try to find you?” he asked mildly, his tone deceptive. “As a kid I wondered all the time why you just left me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, and then as I got older, I kind of just set it aside in a compartment labeled: Don’t Worry About This Anymore. I think I pretty much took my own advice, but my partner is on the stubborn side and she decided maybe I needed to resolve it.” He smiled, thinking about Ellie. “She’s kind of an immovable force.”

  “I … I can’t believe you’re here.” His mother definitely looked as if she didn’t know what to do, those blue eyes suddenly luminous.

  The tightening in his throat was something he fought off.

  “I’m surprised myself. When Ellie found you, I debated whether or not I should just leave it alone. After all, you never tried to find me.”

  “I couldn’t.” Her voice was very thin. “It killed me, but I … couldn’t. You don’t understand.”

  “Now, that’s true. Explain it to me.” He gazed at her expectantly. If there was something he knew about, it was questioning people on unpleasant subjects.

  She got up then and walked slowly over to the picture window that faced the front lawn. She stood looking out, her back to him. Her voice was calm. “You are a detective, so maybe you understand something about organized crime from the perspective of law enforcement, but you know nothing about it from the inside.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Thanks to me you know nothing about it.” She turned then, looking him in the eyes. “It’s impossible to get out. Look at what happened to me. The minute my ex-husband was released from prison he was after me to go away with him. Said he didn’t believe in divorce, that we were still married. I was very young, but even then I knew he wouldn’t give up, and truthfully, it wasn’t all him. I wasn’t happy where I was either. But if I had taken you with me, you would not be a police officer but on the other side of the fence. It would be all you knew, how you were raised. I didn’t want that for you.”

  Then she added softly, “I have missed you every single day.”

  Her decision, on a scale of one to ten, still just rated about a five. “You had more children.”

  “There you go. I didn’t take you but I missed you so badly. They are going to want to meet you.”

  Oh hell, he was going to strangle Ellie. He’d had a simple life.

  “Is Lawrence Degas my father?” He asked it flat out since walking around tough subjects was just not his way of expressing himself.

  She nodded, the slight trembling of her mouth making her look vulnerable. “If he knew, he would never have left you behind, but I lied about your age. He didn’t want another man’s child. It isn’t in him to compromise, I’m afraid. I know this sounds cliché, but he really isn’t a bad man. Stubborn? God yes, but not cruel or unfair. Perfect? No, but who is? I was young, Jason. I made a series of bad decisions, but then tried to fix them as best I could.”

  It was a little far-fetched to call a criminal who persuaded another man’s wife to run away with him a good man, but when Jason thought about Jeremy and Nicole and the desperate actions that they rationalized in their minds as necessary, and that involved the death of another human being, he doubted the logic of the universe in general. The prosecutor decided to charge Nicole with second-degree murder and Jeremy with accessory to murder and assault. Jason suspected that if they both got a decent lawyer, a self-defense plea might be a valid argument, though in Nicole’s case he really couldn’t see a judge forgiving stabbing an unconscious man.

  It was a perfect example of how in trying to avoid what she perceived as a catastrophe, Nicole Remington had caused much worse damage to her life.

  Jason wasn’t sure his mother wasn’t guilty of the same thing. He’d spent a bewildered childhood abandoned by his mother and living with a ma
n who didn’t like him. It was a relief to know the dislike wasn’t personal, just part of the untenable situation. He’d spare her the knowledge that he’d been headed down a dark path before he decided to join the military. As he sat there, in his mother and father’s house, he wondered if he’d had a choice in the matter, if he would have had it the other way. A loving family versus a lot of hard knocks and painfully learned lessons, but apparently that would also have come with a price.

  “I’m sure he’s a paragon,” he said dryly. “Are you ever going tell him the truth?”

  “Do you want me to?” she asked simply. “You are past his reach now, and more than that, a police officer. For all I know, he’ll respect my choice. He was never given it.”

  Jason rose to leave. “Let me think about it.”

  She turned back toward the window and Jason heard a car door slam. “It’s too late. He’ll be in the door in a minute, and one look at you, and he’ll know. You look exactly like him.”

  Timing, as they say, is everything. If I’d just left two minutes ago …

  Jason squared his shoulders and braced himself to meet his father.

  READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF

  Fractured

  Kate Watterson

  Available in hardcover and e-book from Tom Doherty Associates

  A TOR BOOK

  Copyright © 2014 by Katherine Smith

  Chapter 1

  January in the north was bitter cold.

  Homicide Detective Ellie MacIntosh stepped off the plane from Florida and walked with a queue of other passengers up a generic ramp and reminded herself that while she loved her mother, it was okay to be glad she was back in Wisconsin.