by Brenda Novak
“Like I said, I jus’ want my sisters back.”
“Then heaven help Wesley Boss if Luther gets to him before we do,” she said and disconnected.
The man who walked into Jane’s office at precisely nine-thirty stood over six feet and weighed about two hundred and fifteen pounds. Somewhere in his mid-forties, he was wearing expensive jeans, a rugby shirt and a brown leather bomber jacket, but even dressed so casually he looked like a yacht owner or executive on holiday. Maybe it was his autocratic bearing—or his staggering good looks. He had an abundance of dark hair, currently on the long side, an olive complexion, brown eyes with thick sweeping lashes and the kind of muscular build that would’ve made the stylists in Jane’s last salon drool.
Hoping he hadn’t noticed her jaw hit the floor, she struggled to ignore his physical assets so she could concentrate on the purpose of his visit. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Costas.” She put out her hand and experienced a firm grip as his warm, dry palm met hers.
“Ms. Burke.”
Lisa, the volunteer who’d let him in, hadn’t left. She stood behind him, mouthing, “Oh my God!” while fanning herself.
“That will be all, Lisa,” Jane said, her smile pointed.
Blushing when he turned to look at her, Lisa ducked her head and moved on.
Jane motioned to the chair she’d placed across from her desk for Gloria yesterday and stepped back. She felt as if she was acting again, pretending to be a professional victims’ advocate instead of a mere trainee. But she instinctively knew Costas was the type of man who’d assume she didn’t deserve his respect if she didn’t demand it. “Please, have a seat.”
His lithe movements graceful yet extremely masculine, he did as she directed.
Jane cleared her throat. “Thanks for coming.”
“Hopefully, we’ll both be glad of this meeting,” he said. “What do you have on Wesley Boss?”
Jane didn’t sit down. She felt more in control standing. “Not much. Yet.”
“You said you have an address?”
“I have a P.O. box. Detective Willis is working on a street address.”
“Have you met Boss? Can you tell me what he looks like?”
“No. At this point, he’s only a name to me.”
He studied her so intently she felt the blood rush to her face. “How did he come up in connection with the two missing African-American girls?”
“One of them made a call last night using a cell phone that corresponds to his name.”
Costas folded his hands in his lap. “Interesting.”
“We think so, too.” Jane realized that standing might make her seem nervous, so she took her seat and tried to appear more at ease. “Tell me what you know about Boss.”
“As I explained to Willis, he’s really Malcolm Turner, the man who killed my ex-wife and son in New Jersey, then faked his own death.”
“Was he married to your ex-wife at the time of the murders?”
“Yes.”
Jane couldn’t help sympathizing. She also couldn’t help wondering if he’d remarried. She didn’t think so; he wasn’t wearing a ring. “I’m sorry. I know that must’ve been hard for you.” She could tell it was hard for him even now. “But what makes you believe Wesley is Malcolm?”
“In a roundabout way, I’ve been in touch with him via the Internet for nearly three months.”
“You…chat with him?”
“After setting up his new life, he sent an instant message to Mary McCoy, a former girlfriend who lives here in town. He claimed to be Wesley Boss, but some of the things he said reminded her of Malcolm, so she gave me a call. They’ve been e-mailing, with me sort of listening in, ever since.”
“How did she know to contact you?”
“After the murders, I spent months visiting every friend, family member and acquaintance Malcolm Turner’s ever had. They all know to contact me if they hear from him.”
“I see.” She straightened the objects on her desk. “You’re very thorough.”
“I’m determined to achieve justice for Emily and Colton,” he said.
“So you’ve made contact with Mr. Boss but don’t know where he lives?”
“Not yet. He’s getting more and more interested in Mary, though, and he has her address. That’s why I’ve got to find him, fast.”
“You think he might go to her house? That he might hurt her?”
“He’s a murderer, Ms. Burke. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”
Jane was afraid her inexperience was showing. “What did you mean on the phone, when you mentioned roommates?” she asked.
“Last night Mary gave me the password to her e-mail account and I posed as her while chatting with ‘Wesley.’ I wanted to press him for his location, or get him to identify himself as Malcolm. He didn’t do either, but he seemed more distracted than usual and blamed two roommates.”
The phone interrupted. Jane ignored its ringing because she knew one of the volunteers would pick up. “And?”
“He mentioned they were girls, as opposed to women. He even said they were sisters.”
Excitement and hope shot through Jane. “My kidnap victims.”
“Possibly.”
“He talked as if they were still alive?”
“Yes.”
Jane had no idea what shape they’d be in but, given the odds, this was welcome news. “So if Wesley Boss is Malcolm Turner, and Malcolm’s such a racist, why did he take them? Why these two? Why not two white girls?”
“I’m guessing it was a crime of opportunity.”
“Earlier you said he was having trouble with them.”
“He made it sound that way.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“He didn’t specify. But if he has these girls with him, it would certainly explain why he’s been so reluctant to see Mary.”
Crossing her legs, Jane toyed with a ballpoint pen. “She’s willing to meet with him?”
“I’ll be the one doing that.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
The intercom buzzed. “Jane?” It was Lisa, the volunteer who’d shown Sebastian into the room.
Jane hit the button that would let her respond. “Yes?”
“Detective Willis on line one.”
“Thank you.” Standing, because she had too much energy to remain seated, no matter how much more relaxed it made her seem, she picked up line one. “David?”
“Jane, I’ve only got a second. I’m on my way to perform a search. But I had someone else get the address associated with Wesley Boss’s P.O. box. Are you ready?”
Her eyes connected with Sebastian’s; then she grabbed a piece of paper from the holder on her desk. “Ready.”
He rattled off an address in Ione, a small town in Amador County about forty-five minutes away.
“Got it,” she said.
“I’ve already called the sheriff’s department. A deputy will join you there, but I’m betting he’s closer than you are, so you’d better hurry.”
“I understand. Thanks for letting me know.” She hung up and grabbed her purse from under the desk. “We’ve got to go,” she said.
Sebastian came to his feet. “You know where he is?”
“I have an address. What we’ll find when we get there is anyone’s guess.”
Eight
Could it really be over? After all the time he’d spent searching?
Sebastian almost didn’t dare hope. But as he drove Jane Burke to Ione—her car didn’t have GPS and he hadn’t yet sacrificed his Lexus—he called to share the news with Mary. He doubted he’d be able to reach her this early. She was at the hospital working in admissions until four. But he could leave a message she might get on her break. With those flowers showing up at her house this morning, he wanted to alleviate her fears as soon as possible.
The voice-mail recording he’d expected came on. He waited for the beep. “Mary, this is Sebastian. I think we have him. Don’t worry about anything, okay? I’ll be
back in touch when I know more.”
As he hung up, he felt Jane watching him and glanced over. He wasn’t quite sure what to think of her. She seemed like such a contradiction. She dressed like a typical professional, in conservative business casual, but her hair—dark at the roots and jagged and bleached on the ends—was anything but conservative. Her low-pitched, raspy voice suggested she smoked and yet she was obviously in great physical shape. Then there were the tattoos. She had one on her breast. The V of her sweater came up too high for him to see what it was, but when she moved, he occasionally glimpsed the edge of it. The other was the word survivor written on the curve between the thumb and finger on her left hand.
The fact that she was working at a victims’ charity led him to believe that tattoo had nothing to do with being a fan of the popular reality show.
What had she been through?
The scar on her neck, noticeable when she turned her head, posed some frightening possibilities….
“You really think we’ll find Malcolm Turner?” she asked, shifting her gaze to a point outside the car, as if uncomfortable with his perusal.
“If this is the right Wesley Boss, I do.” Sebastian signaled so he could make a left onto Jackson Road. They were heading toward a string of historic gold-rush towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Since coming to Sacramento, Sebastian had studied the whole area. According to what he’d read, Ione wasn’t a mining town, but it had been a staging and agricultural center for the mining towns around it.
Jane braced herself with a hand against the door as he took the corner a little too fast. “DNA evidence is pretty reliable.”
“I know. Malcolm’s certainly been able to rely on it.” He passed the vehicle in front of him. They’d only left the office fifteen minutes ago, but his impatience made the drive seem interminable. “He was a cop. He knew the men who’d be taking the samples, how they’d go about it, where they’d store them after they were collected, where they’d be tested.”
“You think he traded them out or something?”
When she stated it that way, it sounded far-fetched, even to him. But stranger things had happened. He’d once read about a UCI professor who found that DNA evidence as evaluated by a certain police lab had resulted in a young man’s wrongful conviction of rape. Sloppiness, sample corruption, dishonesty, human error, overstatement of the odds—all of it could potentially “prove” the wrong thing. “He could have. They were bone-marrow samples. But it might not have been necessary to go that far. He had half a mil to buy the help he needed.”
She whistled softly. “I can see why the police might not have bought your accusations. If what you say is true, they have a bigger problem than one bad cop.”
“Definitely not a possibility they want to consider. I would’ve been happy just to convince them to take a new sample. But by the time I realized something wasn’t right, it was too late. Malcolm’s family had already cremated the remains of whoever was in that car.”
“Do you have any idea who that person was?”
“No.”
“No one else in the area suddenly went missing.”
“No. I’m guessing it was a homeless person or a corpse he dug up. Or he paid off some mortician who had a body awaiting cremation.” That was part of the reason the police were so convinced by the DNA match. There’d been no corresponding missing-persons report or disturbance of a cemetery plot—at least, that had come to their attention. They hadn’t bothered to look very carefully. Sebastian had tried, but he’d come up empty.
“So what tipped you off?” she asked. “How’d you figure it out?”
The Prius ahead of them was traveling more slowly than Sebastian would’ve liked, but it was only a two-lane highway and traffic streaming in the opposite direction wouldn’t let him pass at the moment. “There were too many unanswered questions.”
“Such as?”
“Why didn’t he shoot himself? He used his firearm to kill Emily and Colton. He could easily have turned it on himself and ended his life right there in the house with them. Instead, he ran his car off a steep embankment, after which it burst into flames.”
“Making it impossible to visually identify the body.”
Finding an opening in the traffic, he floored the accelerator. “Convenient, don’t you think?”
“What about dental records?” she asked.
He eased back into the right-hand lane. “What about them?”
“They’re often used to identify burn victims.”
“Not in this case. The police didn’t see any reason to go to the extra trouble. As far as they were concerned, they already had a positive ID. The car they found was Turner’s. They had a bone-marrow sample. They even had a suicide note he’d e-mailed to his sergeant saying that he’d lost a huge sum of money in an investment and his wife was having an affair with her ex.”
She held on to her seat belt as he swung out to pass again, but she didn’t complain about the aggressiveness of his driving. He suspected she was too preoccupied. “Wait, you’re the ex.”
“I’m the ex.”
“Was it true? Were you involved with Emily?”
He’d faced that question a million times. Just because he and his ex-wife had been able to maintain some mutual respect, a friendship, everyone assumed they were intimate. “She was very important to me—she was the mother of my kid. But I wasn’t sleeping with her. Malcolm’s claims were merely an excuse, a way to garner sympathy.”
They flew past an SUV before Sebastian had to move over to avoid a head-on collision with a Dodge truck. “You’ll get a speeding ticket if you don’t slow down,” she warned. “And getting pulled over will waste more time than you’ll save by going so fast.”
Evidently, she was paying more attention than he’d thought. And she was right. Grudgingly, he let up on the gas.
“What does Malcolm look like?” she asked as they slowed.
“Average. Five foot nine, hundred and seventy-five pounds. Irish background. Red hair. Blue eyes. Why?”
“Just curious.”
She might be seeing him in a few minutes. Until then, Sebastian had a picture he could show her. Leaning across the seat, he opened the jockey box and fished around inside, eventually coming up with the photograph he’d been using in his search. “That’s him,” he said, handing it to her. “Emily and Colton, too. It’s what they sent in their last Christmas card.”
She studied the photograph.
“So?” he prompted. “Have you ever seen him before?”
“No.”
“Is he what you expected?”
“Not really. He’s losing his hair.”
“You can tell in that picture?” he asked, surprised.
“I used to be a hairstylist.” She held the photograph closer. “He seems to have a nice physique, though.”
“Classic short man’s complex, trying to compensate with muscle mass for what he lacks in height.”
She didn’t respond to his comment. “Emily is beautiful.”
Bitterness overwhelmed him. “Was beautiful,” he corrected.
Jane hadn’t said anything about Colton, but Sebastian guessed she was studying the similarities between them. His son had looked so much like him, except he’d had his mother’s light-colored eyes.
Grabbing the photograph before she could mention it, Sebastian shoved it back in the jockey box. He didn’t want to talk about Colton. Not with a virtual stranger. And not with anyone who was close to him, either. That was the real reason Constance was moving on. He hadn’t been able to include her in what he was suffering. He’d withdrawn.
Fortunately, Jane said nothing. She watched the green rolling hills between Sacramento and Ione fly past her window—or stared at nothing, he couldn’t tell which—but she gave him some space and for that he was grateful.
Several minutes later, she resumed the conversation, and her question had nothing to do with the photograph he’d shown her. “What about the five hundred thousand dollars
you mentioned? Where’d that come from?”
The money he could talk about. He’d been talking about it since Malcolm’s escape. It was the strongest proof that Malcolm was still alive. “That was Emily’s. She’d gotten an insurance settlement a few months before and cashed the check. She was saving it to build a new life for her and Colton. At least, that’s what she told me. But after the funerals were over and we went to clean the house, the key to the safety-deposit box was there but the money wasn’t.”
“Maybe she moved it.”
“Where? There was no record of it ever going into any of their accounts. And if she was ready to invest it, she would’ve asked for my help. I’m an investment banker. She mentioned doing something with it once, but Malcolm put a quick stop to my involvement. He said he didn’t trust me, and he accused us of having an affair.”
“More smoke and mirrors?”
“A way to make sure the money wasn’t tied up when he made his getaway.”
“Malcolm traded his profession, his family, his whole life for an amount that might last him five years—if he lives modestly?”
“People have killed for much less,” Sebastian said quietly.
“Usually those people are on drugs or looking for the money to get high. They’re not thinking straight. This was planned. Was he in debt?”
For someone who’d seemed a little out of her element when they were at the office, Jane was actually pretty savvy. She came across as sort of tough, certainly more streetwise than the typical middle-class white woman. Sebastian respected that. “Deeply. He probably wanted her to bail him out, but she wouldn’t do it. As I said, she planned to use her money to leave him and start over. Not only would he lose her, he’d have no insurance settlement to avoid financial ruin.”
“A major embarrassment, to say the least.”
“Exactly. But if he killed his wife and stepson and faked his own death, he could take the money, escape punishment and evade his creditors without ever having to face the people he’d hurt.”
“A good plan, provided you’re a monster,” she said. “So what kind of debts did he have?”
