“The very the one. She left work, heading for the daycare, and vanished without a trace. It was all over the news for days—especially after they found her car abandoned in that parking deck in downtown three days after she went missing.”
“Why in the world was he asking you about her?”
Jeff shrugged helplessly. “Hell, I don’t know. I never knew any woman by either name—I sure as hell didn’t know those two. That’s what I told the cop.”
“You know,” Janice mused, “now that I think about it, I’ve heard the name Tanya Harris before, too. I was in the car, on my way here Monday morning, when I heard a piece on the radio news about her. They say she went missing sometime Friday night from the bus station.”
That was news to Jeff; it shook him and left him feeling a little cold inside. He didn’t like the way this was suddenly shaping up. Not at all.
“Damn, this is crazy,” he breathed. “First they seem to think that I could’ve hurt Angela—or worse, and now it looks like they may be thinking I’m some kind of serial kidnapper or killer.”
“You’re right, it’s crazy,” Janice declared. “Jeff, what are you going to do?”
He shrugged. “The first thing, I guess, as soon as they spring me from here, is to call my lawyer and see what he thinks about all of it. I haven’t talked to him since he called to tell me the cops wanted to look the house over and that he was going with them when they did it, and that was Monday.”
“Any idea when you’re getting out?”
“From what the doctor told me, sometime today.” Jeff gave her a sheepish grin. “Even though I gave you a bit of a hard time about it, I’m glad you’re here, because I’ll need a lift home. You don’t mind waiting for them to let me go?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“One other thing, too. I hate to ask this of you, but I’ll need something to wear when I leave here. Do you mind running out to the house and getting me some clothes?”
“Of course, I don’t mind. You want me to go now?”
Jeff thought about that and shook his head, his eyes on Janice. She had really been great; he was touched by all the trouble she had gone to for him. More than that, he had suddenly realized that he really didn’t want her to leave. “No, I think there’s plenty of time yet for that. How about we just…talk some more?” Talking to her had a way of calming him down; he judged that to be the best medicine for him at the moment.
Without hesitation, Janice reached for the chair next to the bed and pulled it closer. “You got it, hon.”
Chapter Eighteen
About twenty minutes later a woman walked to the door to Jeff Taylor’s room and hesitated. She was a tall, slender and imposing woman wearing a black skirt and jacket and a white blouse, her skin the color of milk chocolate. Her brown eyes were intent and inquisitive. Her reddish-brown hair was styled short and lightly gelled, and she wore only a trace of makeup; mostly a touch of deep red lipstick. What made her an imposing figure was the automatic tucked into a black nylon holster that road on one hip, just visible beneath her jacket, and the gold shield pinned above her left breast.
She stood at the door to Taylor’s room, one hand still poised to push it open, listening to the voices from inside. She wondered who the lady was. A nurse? She quickly dismissed that; the talk in the room wasn’t right for that. It was more the kind of talk between a man and a woman who were comfortable, at ease with each other. Taylor didn’t have any sisters or aunts or female cousins. Her partner, Leo Ross, didn’t mention anything about seeing Taylor with a lady visitor. A new factor? Someone else in the picture?
Hearing nothing of interest in their idle chitchat, the woman pushed the door open and strode inside. She moved in a well-practiced way that made her heels crack resolutely against the tile floor.
“Good morning, Mr. Taylor,” she greeted brusquely. “Detective Yolanda Jarvis, Sheriff’s Department.” Her eyes cut to the visitor and leveled. “And you are?”
“Janice Mills.” The Detective found the woman’s frigid tone interesting.
“She works for me as my office manager and she’s a friend,” Taylor supplied.
“I’ll have to ask you to leave. I need to speak to Mr. Taylor in private.”
The blonde woman uncrossed her legs and rose to her feet, in no particular hurry. She looked down at Taylor. “I’ll run on out to your place and get you something to wear.” Her eyes moved to the Detective. “If that’s okay?”
“Of course. We’ve looked the place over and we’re finished with it.” She paused a moment for effect, then added matter-of-factly, “For now.”
“My keys are in that drawer behind you,” Taylor said to the woman. “The key to the front door is the big gold one with the round head. Go through the living room and down the hall; you want the last door on the left. You’ll find everything in the bottom two dresser drawers and in the closest. There should be a pair of white sneakers on the left side of the bed.”
“Have you got some kind of light jacket? It’s been raining off and on and it’s turned off a little cool this morning.”
“In the closest. Be sure to get my phone, too. Thanks again, Janice.”
“Don’t mention it, hon. I’ll be back soon.”
The woman walked past the Detective without a word or a glance, her white sandals snapping against her feet. As soon as she was out of the room, Detective Jarvis moved to the foot of the bed and fixed Taylor with her best no-nonsense glare. The one that never failed to get the message across that the gloves were about to come off.
“I compared notes with my partner this morning,” she began, “and he tells me that you were not very helpful or cooperative when he talked to you last night. In fact, he said that you seemed to get more agitated the more he talked to you. I find that a little odd, considering that your wife is missing. Seems to me she’d be the foremost thing on your mind and that you’d be willing to do anything and everything to help us find her.”
“She is the foremost thing on my mind,” Taylor told her flatly. “But she didn’t seem to be that to your partner. So when he came in here and started asking me these ‘Have-you-stopped-beating-you-wife’ type of questions, I found the whole thing to be upsetting and insulting…both to me and Angela.”
“I see. I’d much rather be having this little talk in an interview room at one of the Sub-Stations downtown, but we can’t do that right now, can we?”
“Sorry for the inconvenience, Detective, but I didn’t have a whole lot of say about my present situation or how long they’ve kept me here.”
Detective Jarvis pulled a small notebook from a pocket of her jacket and flipped it open. She studied several pages before speaking again.
“You told officers Sunday morning, then Detective Ross again last night, that something made you feel uneasy and that it convinced you that you had made a mistake leaving your wife alone in your car when you went to find help. What, exactly, was that something, Mr. Taylor?”
“It was just a gut feeling that I was doing the wrong thing. That’s not exactly the kind of place where any man would willingly leave his wife alone at night.”
“A gut feeling,” Jarvis said in a monotone. “So when you decided to go back to your car, as you say you did, it was this gut feeling that made you do that?”
“Before I started back to Angela,” Taylor said slowly, “I thought I heard what sounded like a car horn, but I wasn’t sure about it. I’m still not sure that’s what it was.”
“So it was this sound you weren’t sure about at the time and still not sure about now that made you run back to your car like a maniac, as it appears that you did?”
Taylor sighed audibly. “Detective, I had a really bad feeling—the worst I’ve ever felt—that I had made the biggest mistake of my life when I left Angela behind. All I could think about was getting back to her as fast as I could.” He paused, swallowed hard, and added, “As things stand now, I’d have to say it was the biggest mistake of my life.�
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Detective Jarvis stared at Taylor for a long moment, then looked down at her notes. “You stated that it was a coyote in the road that caused you to lose on control of your car. Is that correct?”
A thoughtful look crossed Taylor’s face, a look that came and went in the blink of an eye. Yet Detective Jarvis caught it and she quickly and correctly surmised that it meant one of two things, possibly both: Either he’s just remembered something, or this is a point he’s not at all comfortable with.
“It looked like a coyote to me. I had looked away from the road to say something to Angela, and when I looked back, there it was. Right in the middle of the road.”
Detective Jarvis waited for Taylor to say more, but he merely stared back at her calmly, evidently comfortable with his answer. So it’s like that, is it? Well, Leo, looks like you’re right about this guy. She studied her notes again.
“What kind of jewelry was your wife wearing Friday night, Mr. Taylor?”
“Her wedding ring—she never took that off. It’s a silver band with a diamond shaped setting. She was wearing a silver bracelet, silver hoop earrings, and a thin silver necklace with a small red heart.”
“Were any of these pieces particularly valuable or expensive?”
“I’m still paying for the ring, if that’s what you mean. I gave her the bracelet for her twenty-ninth birthday a few months ago; it set me back about three hundred. The rest of it, though, wasn’t anything expensive, just things she liked to wear.”
“Was she carrying a purse?”
Taylor nodded. “A little black one that she could carry under her arm.”
“A clutch,” the detective said. “Do you, by chance, know what she had in it?”
“A tube of lipstick, her hairbrush, her wallet with her driver’s license and her Visa card, her phone, and she had her debit card to our bank account.”
The Detective feigned a frown. “You seem to know exactly what she had in her purse. Most men don’t have a clue about that kind of thing.”
Taylor’s eyes narrowed slightly. “It’s not a purse she carried all the time. I saw her put everything I told you about into it when we were getting ready to leave.”
“I see,” Jarvis replied. “Tell me, did she still have all that in her purse and was she still wearing all of her jewelry the last time you saw her?”
Taylor’s eyes narrowed a little more. “When I left her at the car, she was wearing all of her jewelry and the only thing that came out of her purse was her Droid, but there wasn’t a signal, so the phone was useless to us.”
The Detective had dropped her eyes to her notes, casually flipping pages. “Any idea what become of all of it?” she asked off-handedly, glancing up at Taylor.
Taylor was silent for a long moment, his eyes unblinking. “Why are you asking me a question like that, when there’s no way I could know the answer to it?”
The Detective’s face hardened, her eyes flinty and fixed on him. “Because, at this point, I think you do know what happened to all of it. Detective Ross came away from his little talk with you feeling like you were holding something back. Frankly, I think you are, too. So, Taylor, what do you say we cut straight to it, right here and right now? Believe me, it’ll not only make you feel better, but it’ll go a whole lot easier for you if you talk to me now, instead of later.”
Taylor’s face turned dark and ugly. “What are you talking about?”
“Where is she, Taylor?” Jarvis demanded brusquely.
“If you mean my wife,” Taylor replied slowly, clearing trying to control himself, “I don’t know. That’s what I was hoping you people would find out and tell me.”
“Don’t hand me that, because we both know better,” Jarvis snapped. “There’s been no activity with the credit card or your bank account. The same goes for her phone. The last time anyone used it, as far as we can tell, was late Friday, a little while before the two of you made it to that restaurant. There’s no evidence of a kidnapping at the scene—the FBI and the State have come up with absolutely nothing. Granted, it’s been raining pretty much since Saturday morning, but that doesn’t change the fact that some of the best techs in the country have been over that whole area, blade of grass by blade of grass, and for two miles in every direction. If there was anything out there, they would’ve found it. They also came up empty-handed with your car: no blood or fiber evidence, no signs of a struggle, and the only fingerprints they could lift belonged either to you or your wife. Because of that, in case you haven’t yet heard, both agencies are already talking about pulling out of this investigation—probably by the end of today, in fact. So that mean’s your butt belongs to me and the County.”
The Detective paused, letting her words sink in. “There’s no evidence to support your claim that she was even still in the car with you when you got out there. So cut the crap, because that’s not what I want to hear out of you. My guess is that you dumped her body somewhere long before you got out there because the last time that anyone can put the two of you together is when you left that restaurant. My guess is that it must’ve been quite a blow to the old male ego when you found out what your wife had been up to.”
The Detective wasn’t impressed by the shocked look that leaped into Taylor’s eyes. In her experience, that kind of look could mean several possible things.
“Are you saying that Angela was screwing around on me, or something?”
“Like I said, Taylor, cut the crap. You know she was and you found out about it, didn’t you? Just as you found out that she’d had, not one, but two affairs? That the first time it was with a man and the last time it was with a woman? That she was with this woman while you were at work only two days before she disappeared? You had to feel that and right where it hurts—and after all the money you spent on that ring and bracelet for her? Then there’s the matter of that little life insurance policy that you have on her. So tell me, Taylor, what did you do to your wife?”
The reaction she got from Taylor was, frankly, the last she had expected, but she wasn’t surprised by it. Not in the least. She had good information that Taylor possessed a temper and could be quick to lose it when properly provoked. She watched his face turn to stone and his eyes suddenly blaze. When he spoke, his voice was so low and so filled with rage that it was all she could do to hear his words.
“God only knows where my wife is right now or what may be happening to her this very second. Instead of trying to find her, you’re in here busting my balls with this kind of bullshit? The door’s right behind you, Detective. Get the hell out.”
“I beg your pardon?” she demanded indignantly.
“I said get the hell out of here,” Taylor hissed at her like a snake. “And, for the record, I don’t appreciate your goddamned Gestapo tactics. And, when you walk out that door, you damned well better keep three words in mind.”
“What words?”
“Defamation of character. You push this bullshit and I find out that something happened to Angela that you could’ve saved her from, and I’ll sue you, your partner, your Department, the County, the State, the damn Feds—I’ll have that badge of yours in my back pocket when I get finished with your ass. So you go back to your partner and you two clowns come up with something better than this shit. Now get the fuck out.”
The Detective didn’t move. Nor was she in the least perturbed; she had heard this kind of angry talk before and had never been impressed or intimidated by it. She crossed her arms over her chest and returned Taylor’s glare with equal intensity.
“We’ve checked you out, Taylor, and we took a close look at your wife, too. We know there’s a history of violence that runs in your family. We know that because you have a brother who went to prison for beating a woman senseless because she insulted him, and I’m sure you know he was released only a few weeks ago. Also, when you were brought in here, your blood alcohol level was still high—just barely under the limit, in fact, which means that you were driving drunk when you left that restaurant. I s
uspect that getting loaded like that was necessary for you to get up enough nerve to do the deed.
“As for your wife,” she went on, “we learned even more about her. For example, we know she had an affair that lasted almost six weeks with one of the attorneys at the firm where she worked, and it was during the time you were starting your new business. It seems that she initiated the affair with the idea of getting a better position for herself because she didn’t think your new business was going to make it. Only it seems that things didn’t work out the way she undoubtedly hoped or planned. For one thing, she got pregnant; for another, she had an abortion, which I understand the attorney paid for. Then, after she had recovered, the attorney dumped her and took a position with another firm out of state.
“We also know that when she lost her job, she was offered a chance to transfer to another firm, but that she turned it down because it was in another city. We also know that about a month ago, she contacted the firm to ask if the position was still open. It wasn’t, and she was extremely upset about that—we know this from the woman she was involved with. We also know from this woman that your wife was growing increasingly unhappy with you, as well as afraid that you were going to find out about her. It seems she was afraid because she was more and more convinced you would turn out to be just like your brother. We also have reason to believe that your wife was planning to leave you at the first and most promising opportunity. So if she didn’t use that little incident Friday night as a way of covering her escape…well, figure it out for yourself.”
The Detective uncrossed her arms. “So don’t talk to me about Gestapo tactics or defamation of character, Taylor. You’re going to have to do better than that—and I mean a whole lot better.”
There was a very long silence in that hospital room. Taylor neither moved or blinked his eyes and his stare never wavered from hers. His face, as it had all during the time she detailed what the County’s investigation had so far uncovered, bore no readable expression. Only the glare in his eyes betrayed his obvious anger.
The Evil Returned Page 7
