by AR Simmons
“He did that while you were strangling him?”
“It takes a long time to strangle someone,” said Richard woodenly. “Can I put my shirt back on now?”
“Why didn’t you leave him to the police?”
“Police aren’t all that good at doing things before a crime is committed.” said Richard, buttoning his shirt.
“I’m going to cut you lose, but don’t go anywhere. We’ll try a polygraph again when you calm down.”
“No we won’t,” said Richard. “I’ll talk all you want me to, answer anything you ask. Tape it, analyze it, do anything you want, but I’m not getting hooked up to one of those damned things again.”
“You know what that makes you look like?”
“Like a liar. I’m not. I’m entitled to my privacy. Your man asked questions that had nothing to do with the case you’re investigating. Besides, you know as well as I do that I should have been apprised of all the questions to be asked during the test.”
“What do you have to hide?”
“Nothing criminal, just things that are none of your damned business. Tell me that you have nothing in your past that you don’t want to share with strangers.”
“I’m not a suspect in a murder investigation,” Adams reminded him.
“Neither am I, at least not for long.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
“Because you might be an overbearing jackass, but you’re not a stupid one.”
•••
She might as well have been up. After nearly an hour of readjusting position, Jill softly threw out a question, hoping for his sake that Richard was asleep and wouldn’t answer.
“Are you angry with me?”
“Why would I be angry,” he asked, turning toward her immediately.
“For telling that man what happened to you.”
“No. He already knew some of it. He assumed the worst, and the damned lie detector confirmed it. The operator went fishing, and I lost it. He asked if I had ever harmed a woman intentionally. He was referring to Katie Nash, of course, but I immediately thought of what I put you through on Bonne Femme. I heard the machine respond, and after that I panicked because I knew they would read it as guilt. I even felt guilty.”
“If he takes you in again, you should have a lawyer present.”
“No. I’m going to cooperate. Besides, maybe Adams will tell me about the murder.”
She rose on her elbow to look at him. “Why do you want to know that?”
“It could be related to whatever happened to Molly’s little girl.”
Jill rolled over and turned on the lamp.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I can’t sleep. I’m going to catch up on some work.”
“Are you mad at me?”
She didn’t answer.
“I didn’t go looking for this,” he said, sitting up. “But I’ve got to do it. Molly needs to find out what happened. This has destroyed her life.”
“I just don’t want it to destroy ours,” said Jill.
“It won’t. I can handle this.”
You couldn’t even handle a lie detector, she thought. “Just be careful, Richard. The truth could be terrible.”
“And how terrible will it be for Molly to go on not knowing? I’ve got to try.”
“You aren’t even a policeman. She had no right to ask.”
“But she did,” he said as he gingerly swung his feet off the bed.
“And now you are committed,” she said wearily.
“I’ll quit if you tell me to,” he said in a strained voice.
“You know I want you to quit, but I won’t demand it.”
•••
Feeling guilty to be lying in bed while depriving Jill of sleep, Richard figured that he would spend the remainder of the night awake. There was nothing to do if he got up. Jill would be using the computer, and the TV would only bother her, besides which there would be nothing on worthy of attention.
He awoke three hours later to the smell of breakfast cooking. When he came into the kitchen, he found Jill ready for school and looking as if she had enjoyed her full quota of sleep.
One of the advantages of youth, he thought.
“Sorry about last night,” he said.
“It could not be helped,” she said, putting a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him. “How is your ankle this morning?”
“Stiff, but better,” he said, taking the hint that she preferred not talking about the evening’s ordeal. “Did you manage to get much work done?”
“Quite a lot actually.”
He noticed that she hadn’t set a plate for herself. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I’m running late.”
She picked up her valise from the floor, bent down to kiss him on the cheek, and headed for the door. Molly knocked at the back door before Jill could have gotten around the corner at the end of the block.
“I told them that I took you over to talk to Katie,” she said as soon as he let her in.
She chewed her lip nervously. “Who could have done that to her, Mr. Carter?”
“Molly, you said earlier something about a boyfriend. Do you have any idea who that might be?”
“Not really. I just thought she might have one because of the way she acted when you asked, but she’s real shy. Maybe just you saying it embarrassed her.”
“No one’s been hanging around her?”
“Not that I know of. She’s not real social, so if she met a man, it was probably somebody while she was babysitting or cleaning.”
“She did housework as well as babysitting?”
“She worked with shut-ins.”
“I wonder if she kept an address or appointments book,” he said.
“Are you going to start trying to find out what happened to her instead of trying to find out about Mancie?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the table as if she knew his answer.
“Why would you think that?”
“It’s more interesting,” she said. “Adams told me that’s what you would do. He said it was like a hobby for you. That you was doing it for fun.”
Molly obviously thought it was true. In fairness to Adams, Richard understood how he might come to that conclusion. What he couldn’t understand was Adam’s motive for saying such a callous thing to her.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Here’s the way it is, Molly. Katie Nash was the last person, besides you, who was with your daughter. We’ve got to consider the possibility that whoever killed her may have had something to do with your daughter’s disappearance. Her death might have nothing to do with Mancie, but we can’t just assume that.”
“And that’s the real reason you’re interested?”
“Of course.”
Molly looked at him intently. “You think Katie knew who took Mancie?”
“Could be. But it also might be that whoever it was just thought she might have seen him hanging around or looking at Mancie, something like that. She told us that she didn’t see anyone, but maybe the guy didn’t know that she didn’t see him.”
Assuming that the two crimes were connected violated a basic tenet of investigation he had learned from his favorite professor: the best explanation is the one requiring the fewest assumptions. Richard decided to probe in another direction until he knew more. Not that he had a choice, inserting himself so soon in the murder investigation would cause more trouble with Adams.
“Molly, what are the chances that your ex-husband took Mancie?”
She snorted contemptuously. “I wish! Pat never cared about her. He wouldn’t even send the support payment like he was supposed to, and he sure didn’t want her! She’d cramp his style. When we was married, I kept hoping he would grow up some, but he never did—never will.”
He thought about that. So Molly’s ex doesn’t love his daughter. Kids still get used as chips when marriages fall apart.
“How contentious was your divorce?” he asked.
A sizeable child support payment might be a motive for killing one’s own child, but two hundred dollars a month seems kind of inconsequential.
“Was he vindictive, Molly?” he asked.
“I never done nothing for him to be vindictive about. I was your basic doormat. Only after I had Mancie, he didn’t even bother to wipe his feet on me no more. But I guess Pat was always like that,” she said listlessly. “I just never saw it until I got pregnant. At first, I thought it was my fault because I gained so much weight. He kept telling me I was fat, and then he just started staying away from home more and more at night. He was sleeping around, but I didn’t want to let myself believe that.”
Richard found nothing appropriate to say.
“I shouldn’t have let it happen, I guess. I thought we needed a baby, but I guess I knew better than to talk with him about it first. Funny how I just knew. Why didn’t I understand that it wouldn’t work out? A baby don’t solve no problems. They’re not supposed to.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I had Mancie for all the wrong reasons, but she wasn’t no mistake.”
“I don’t think most babies are planned,” he ventured.
She shrugged, heaved a sigh, wiped her eyes, and then raised her chin. “Do you and Mrs. Carter plan to have children any time soon?”
He realized with a shock that he and Jill hadn’t even discussed the possibility.
It hasn’t even crossed my mind. Maybe I’m no more grown up than Molly’s ex husband.
“We haven’t … decided,” he said. “We’re waiting until we get more settled.”
“Oh. She wants to get her career started first. That’s good thinking. I wish I’d been that smart.”
She pushed her cup around the table. “Pat never even came to the hospital. Mancie was two days old before he ever laid eyes on her. ‘She’s real pretty,’ he said. As far as I can remember, that’s the only thing he ever said about her. And I thought, ‘Yeah, Pat. That’s all you ever said about me too.’ And it was. It was the only thing he ever thought about me. I might as well have been a car or a horse. He likes horses. It don’t make you feel real good about yourself when the only thing someone can say about you is that you’re pretty.”
“Well, I think that you’re … more than that. You’re a hard worker.” Realizing how that sounded, he hurried on. “And I think you’re pretty smart—and I know you’re conscientious. I’m sure you were a good mother. I mean, you worked two jobs, didn’t you?”
Tears filled Molly’s eyes again.
“I thought I was, but if I hadn’t come home—I was drunk! It happened while I was passed out drunk! Someone came in and took my baby, and I didn’t even know about it. I was supposed to latch the door and I didn’t do it.”
“Katie locked the door,” he reminded her. “If someone could get past the deadbolt, they could have gotten by the chain too.”
Perhaps thinking about the details made it all too clear for her.
“Why did they take her?” she wailed. “Why? What’s happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” he said softly, reaching across to lay a comforting hand on hers.
She flinched away. Then both tried to act as if his clumsy gesture had not occurred.
“Molly,” he said, clearing his throat. “How well did you really know Katie?”
Her face turned white. “You do think she had something to do with Mancie’s disappearance. No! She loved Mancie. She would never do nothing to harm her.”
“I didn’t say that I think she harmed her, but she was the last one to see Mancie that night.”
“No. I saw her too.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I told you I looked in on her. I saw her on the bed, Mr. Carter. I remember it real good.”
“Did you see her?” he asked gently. “Or bedclothes that you assumed were her?”
“I saw her face, Mr. Carter. I can still see it. It’s the last picture I got. I’m sure.”
He still thought that Mancie might have been gone before Katie left the house that evening. It would have been a simple matter for the sitter to see Molly to bed, and make a quick trip back into the bedroom to pull a bundle of blankets apart, whereas taking a child Mancie’s age out of bed could have easily awakened Molly.
“Katie didn’t have nothing to do with it,” she repeated. “She was a friend of mine, and she loved Mancie.”
“But someone killed her just as we’re starting to look into the disappearance, right after we talked to her.”
“It wasn’t about that,” blurted Molly. “It was a sex thing.”
“What?”
“Adams told me that someone did something to her. I’m not sure what, but it was a sexual attack.”
“Maybe they’ve got DNA material,” he muttered. “Not that Adams will tell me.”
He heard the front door open.
“Your wife’s back,” said Molly, standing up abruptly. “Look at the time. I’ve got to go.”
“You don’t have to rush off.”
“I … was supposed to take some medicine at ten.”
She went out the back door just as Jill came through from the living room.
“How long as she been here?” she asked.
“She came over right after you left. Did you forget something?”
“Research notes. I picked up the wrong ones,” she said, holding up a blue manila folder. “These are yours.”
“So, are you in a hurry?”
“I’m late,” she said. “Richard, I noticed that you have a list of names and addresses. You’re going to talk with those people?”
“I’d like to.”
“But they’re out of town, one of them out of state. Before you go, please consider the expense.”
“It’ll only be gas money.”
“And food. I’m taking my lunch to college, you know.”
“Then I won’t eat,” he said.
She looked as if she were about to say something, and then closed her eyes in exasperation. “I’ve got to go. See you when I get back.”
“I’ll be here if I’m not in jail,” he said, trying lamely to lighten the mood.
She didn’t smile.
Chapter 4
September 8
Molly thought it unnecessary, and Jill objected to the expense, but no investigation of a missing child could omit the father, which was why Richard was heading east on highway 60 toward a construction site two hundred miles from James Mill. Molly had given him the name of the construction company, and a helpful secretary had shown him the site on a wall map. It was at the intersection of the highway he was now traveling and the highway north of Poplar Bluff, meaning that he literally couldn’t miss it.
He parked behind orange construction barrels narrowing northbound traffic to one lane, drawing questioning stares from a cluster of men in hardhats sitting on stacked concrete forms and eating lunch from fast food bags evidently brought from the town some six miles to the south. One look at the soft ground made him decide to leave the crutches in the car.
“We’re not taking on additional crew,” called out a man in clean coveralls sitting with the others.
Richard waved off the comment without slowing his pace.
“I’m looking for a guy I think is working here.”
“How bad you need a guy, sweetheart?” cracked a short, rawboned oaf in a sleeveless sweatshirt that may have been yellow at one time.
“I need to talk to Pat Al
lsop,” he said, ignoring Yellow Shirt. “He here?”
“You here to serve him?” asked Clean Coveralls.
“You mean a subpoena? No, I’m not an officer of the court. I want to talk to him about his daughter. Can you tell me where to find him?”
“Something wrong?”
“Yeah, there is.”
“He’s down yonder at them trucks.”
•••
The trackhoe sat two-thirds of the way down a looping off-ramp being chewed away and loaded onto five-ton dump trucks to be carted off. A thin, shirtless man with cycler’s body, flawless golden tan, and surfer’s blond hair sat dangling his legs from the open cab, smoking as he watched Richard limp toward him. Pungent wood smoke from a dozed up tangle of pine trunks and rootwads smoldering in the median hung in the still air.
“You Pat Allsop?” called Richard.
Startlingly blue eyes stared down at him blandly. “Maybe. Who are you?”
“Richard Carter. Your former wife said that—”
“Hold it right there! I don’t owe her no damned child support. She ain’t got the kid no more.”
“This is not about money,” said Richard calmly, trying to hide his indignation. “We’re trying to find out what happened to Mancie. I thought it would be a good idea to see you. I’m sure you’re worried about her.”
“Well, yeah,” said Allsop unconvincingly.
“Any idea about what might have happened?”
“I don’t know nothing about it. Are you a cop?”
“Just a friend.”
Allsop looked Richard up and down, made an evaluation, and smirked. “A friend, huh?”
“Well, like I said, I don’t know nothing,” he repeated, looking up as a large piece of equipment fired up off to his right.
He flicked away his cigarette. “I got to get back to work.”
“Do you think you’d have time to talk about—”
Allsop cut him off. “Ain’t got nothing to say,” he tossed out as he climbed into the cab.
“Let me ask you a few questions, and then I can get out of here and leave you alone. I need to get back to James Mill.”
“Not now. I’m on the clock.”
