by S. E. Harmon
“But he wanted to find her anyway,” I said.
“Yes. I gave it my best shot, but the trail was ice cold.” He shook his head. “She left in a time when it was easier to disappear.”
Yes, it is easy to disappear when someone feeds you cyanide-laced honey and crams you in a deep freezer. “So how did you get around to figuring out Delilah was Joey’s birth mother?”
“I checked Valerie’s hospital records. She had a serious car accident in her midtwenties and suffered major pelvic and abdominal injuries. It left her unable to have children,” he said. “I talked to her ex-husband and he confirmed that she already had Joseph when they married.”
“What made you suspect Delilah was his mother?”
He shrugged. “What better catalyst to get you moving from your crazy ex than finding out you’re pregnant? She wouldn’t leave Kane for herself, but maybe she’d leave for her unborn child.”
“How did Joey feel about that theory?”
Rex snorted. “He fired me.”
Yeah, I’d fire someone too if they told me Thomas Kane was my father. “Did he confront Valerie with that information? Is that why they hadn’t spoken the few months before his death?”
“Probably. Joey rehired me a few months later. I assumed he wanted me to start looking for his real mother again, but he had other ideas.”
“Like what?” Danny asked.
“He became obsessed with Thomas Kane. He wanted me to track down the family members of the victims, so he could ‘make it right.’”
I grimaced. “You didn’t think to tell him that wasn’t a great idea? I thought you said you were his friend.”
“I was his friend,” he said fiercely. “I told him that no amount of restitution could fix what Kane did to those families. But Joey felt like he needed to do something.”
“Something like what?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “I gave him everything I could find on a thumb drive. Names, addresses, and numbers of people who’d been affected by Thomas Kane’s crimes. It wasn’t a short list.”
“We’re going to need a copy of that,” Danny said grimly.
Rex bobbed his head in agreement. “Of course. I’ll send it to you by email.” He reached for his glasses, and I moved them farther away. He got the picture pretty quickly. “Right now?”
“Wow, how nice of you,” I said with a sweet smile. “Right now would be fantastic.”
He grumbled a little as he searched through his phone, casting anxious glances at the couple across the room, who had called for their check. Tersely, he asked for my email and pecked it in as I gave it to him.
He tried to stand, and I waved him back down. “Not that I’m not enjoying this trip down memory lane and all, but I’m trying to earn a living here, guys. If this past week is anything to go by, they’re headed to a hotel on South Beach. I need to get some pictures. We square?”
“Almost,” I murmured. We waited in tense silence as I refreshed my email a few times. When the file finally popped up, I gave him a nod, and he popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box.
Danny’s face was stern. “Make sure that license gets renewed, Walker. Immediately.”
He nodded and hustled out the door. A few moments later, a blue Acura pulled out of the parking lot followed by Walker’s Silverado. I started downloading the file, which was ominously large.
“More suspects,” Danny grumbled. “This case is starting to feel like an onion. One of those bloomin’ kinds they have at the Outback that's way too big.”
“You mean the one you complained about and then ate the majority of yourself?”
He sent me a dirty look. “At least I didn’t start doing the accent.”
“It’s a wonderful accent.”
“Yeah, when it’s done well,” he said meaningfully. “Which you do not do.”
“Look, if they didn’t want me to call it shrimp on the bah-bie, they wouldn’t put it on their menu.”
“You said crikey when the waiter forgot our straws. That is not on the menu.”
It was my turn to send him a dirty look. “If you keep it up, I’m going to do that accent all night. Maybe even all week, depending on how Aussie I’m feeling.”
That was incentive enough for him to shut his crepe hole. The file finished downloading, and I opened it eagerly. I scrolled… and scrolled… and scrolled. “Christ,” I muttered. “We need a cleanup of Pandora’s box on aisle six.”
“That many?”
I handed him the phone silently. After a few moments, he whistled. “And here I was wondering what we were going to do after retirement.”
“I’m usually a little more jazzed at the idea of new suspects, but this is… daunting.”
His fingers worked busily as he tapped something on the screen. “I’m sending a copy to the rest of the team. Since Kevin is home, he can see if all this information is current. Maybe even filter out who’s dead, who’s been locked up, who’s….” He stared at me as I plucked a menu off the table and snapped it open. “And just what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m ordering breakfast.” I sent him an arch look. “I know you didn’t think I was leaving a place that makes world-famous crepes without getting a taste.”
“We have an entire list of people to cover.”
“And they’ll still be there after I have a fucking crepe. Strawberry or blueberry?” I tilted my head thoughtfully. “Of course, I could just power through the morning without food. I’d probably just complain about it a lot. I know how you like hearing me complain.”
“Blueberry,” he growled.
“Excellent choice.”
I never got to eat my crepes. The waitress had just delivered an artfully decorated plate in front of me when Danny murmured, “Interesting.”
“What’s wrong?”
He handed me back my phone. “Take a look at entry number sixteen. That name look familiar to you?”
I cast my plate one longing look before I scrolled down. “Bee Williams. Disappeared from fairgrounds when she got separated from her friends. Worked as a real estate agent for—”
“Skip to the end.”
I did, scanning the rest of her bio data. I widened my eyes as I neared the end. “Survived by her husband, Keith Wakefield, and son… Milo.”
Danny’s expression was grim. “Now, what are the odds Joseph would wind up dating the son of one of his father’s victims?”
“Milo told me Joey came to the grooming shop three or four times. He thought Joey was trying to work up the courage to ask him out.” I frowned as I stared down at the phone. The screen had gone dark and I hadn’t even noticed. “Maybe he was trying to work up his courage to do something else.”
“Cancel the crepes,” Danny said, pushing back from the table. He pulled out his wallet long enough to toss a few bills on the table and headed for the door.
I had no choice but to get up as well. Of course, I snagged a blueberry from my plate before I did. And an orange slice. A pinch of crepe. A little blueberry sauce got on my finger, and I gave it a lick. God, that was fucking delicious—
“Christiansen,” Danny called, without turning around.
I sighed and dropped my fork. “Right behind you.”
Chapter 26
A couple of hours later, Milo was in interrogation room two, dressed in ripped jeans and a blue shirt with a glittery paw print on the front. Underneath the paw, it read: Adopt a friend for life. Judging from the amount of dog hair on his shirt, they’d probably picked him up at work. A lock of curly blond hair fell into his eye, but he didn’t bother to brush it back.
It was hard to believe that this man, with the perpetually blushing cheeks, had shot his boyfriend, execution-style. And yet, here we were. He watched my every move as I took the seat across from him and got organized. My pen and legal pad went next to my coffee cup, and a folder labeled Wakefield, C. next to that.
I slid a sweating can of Mountain Dew across the table. Milo stopped i
t with his hand and murmured, “Thanks.”
“No problem.” I could feel his gaze on me as I wrote the time, date, and his name on the top of the legal pad. “You should know that your uncle came forward at the news of your arrest.”
He swallowed. “Is that so?”
I nodded slowly. It wasn’t a bluff. Danny was in the next room with good old Uncle Greg. As someone who’d been on the receiving end of a Danny interrogation, I knew the process wasn’t going to be pleasant. Or quick.
Apparently, Milo’s uncle had suspected him for years. Two weeks before the murder, Greg’s gun had disappeared from a shoebox in his closet. He didn’t report the gun missing because he’d been on parole. The gun had reappeared two months later, right back in the shoebox.
“He surrendered the Berretta, and we sent it down to ballistics,” I informed him. “He was afraid it was a murder weapon, so he hasn’t used it since, not even for target practice. We’re hoping to pull a print.”
He didn’t have anything to say about that. Instead, he flipped the top on the soda and took a couple long swigs.
“A lot of people remember to wipe down the gun. Not a lot of them remember to wipe the bullets.” I paused to give him a chance to think about that. “It’s hard to commit a perfect murder, Milo.”
“I’m sure it is,” he said. “I don’t know how that concerns me, though.”
“Don’t you?” I flipped open the folder and pulled out an eight by ten of a lovely woman with the longer version of Milo’s curly blond hair. “Let’s talk about Bee Williams.”
He stiffened. “You leave my mother out of this.”
“Why should I? She’s the catalyst for you shooting Joey, is she not?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I put both elbows on the table and leaned in. It was a simple but effective tactic to enter the suspect’s zone of intimacy, to crowd his personal space and make him overly aware of my proximity and less concerned with any information he might reveal.
“Joey’s father abducted your mother when she got separated from a group of her friends at Zappa Fair. He lured her into his car, promising to take her home.” I kept my voice level and matter-of-fact. “He never had any intention of taking her anywhere but that little shop of horrors in his basement.”
“I know the story, Detective.”
“He tortured her for six fucking days, for no reason other than to sate his sick appetites. Then, he killed her and sent your father a dozen roses.”
“I think that’s enough.”
“You were young at the time, but not young enough to avoid the fallout.” I’d done a lot of research since we’d left the café, and most of it was heartbreaking. “Your father became a raging alcoholic and shipped you off to live with your grandparents, who died a year later. Your father passed two years after that.”
“My childhood sucked,” he said defensively. “So what?”
My throat tightened as I thought of Milo as a small, curly-haired, pink-cheeked little kid, methodically losing everyone who meant anything to him. “You went to live with your aunt, who had six kids of her own and not enough time or attention to go around. Her eldest got pregnant when you were fifteen, and they decided the house was getting too crowded. That you had to go.”
“I said that’s enough!” his voice rang off the walls of the interrogation room. His eyes were a little glassy as he sat back in his chair. “That’s more than enough.”
“And it all started with Thomas Kane.” I shook my head. “When Joseph started coming to the shop, it wasn’t to get Walter groomed, was it?”
“No,” he said quietly. “He’d gotten that list, that stupid fucking list, from the PI. In vintage Joey fashion, he wanted to make amends. To make everything right. But how do you make something like that right?”
“When did he tell you who he really was?”
“On our sixth date. I could tell he’d been holding something back, but I never imagined that.” His brows drew together as he remembered. “Here’s this amazing guy that I have so much in common with, and he’s telling me that his father murdered my mother. It was almost… surreal.”
“Why did you continue to date him?”
“Because I thought I could get over it. It wasn’t his fault, after all. He never even knew his father.”
“But Thomas Kane’s blood runs through his veins and you couldn’t forget.”
He blew out a shaky breath. “I tried. But then I found the letters in the false bottom of his drawer.”
“What letters?” I asked.
“Letters from his father. They’d been writing each other for a few months.”
Fucking Kane. From the start, he’d given me nothing but half-truths and false leads. I wasn’t surprised in the least. “Did you read any of them?”
“Of course, but they weren’t what I expected.” He pitched his voice deeper. “Good to hear from you, son. What do you like to do in your spare time? Oh wow, social work is such an important job. What do you like to watch on TV? Have you met anyone special, son?”
I nodded in perfect understanding. “Like everything was perfectly normal between them. And that was wrong.”
“Of course it was,” he exploded. “Joey told me that Thomas Kane disgusted him as much as he disgusted me, and fool that I was, I believed it.”
“What did you do then?”
“I stewed about it for a little while. I decided….” His gaze skittered away from mine as he hesitated, clearly debating on whether he should say the rest.
“Decided what?” I prodded.
When he met my eyes again, it was with a cold look that made him seem a lot older than he was. “To let the sins of the father be the sins of the son.”
“Tell me what happened,” I urged.
“Joey picked me up for a date, and I got in the back seat. He laughed and made a joke that he’d chauffeur me around like a big shot. I went along with it.” Now that Milo had crossed the hump of admitting the crime, the words seemed to flow easier. “I told him I’d planned a special picnic and gave him directions.”
“Was he suspicious?”
“Maybe. I think he could tell I was in a strange mood,” Milo said quietly. “He kept looking back at me in the rearview mirror and asking if everything was okay.”
“And then you took him to the place your mother disappeared.”
“I took him back to the place where my mother lost her life,” he snapped.
He wasn’t wrong. She may have died in Kane’s basement, but the moment Bee Williams got into that car with Kane, she was a dead woman. “Zappa Fair,” I said softly.
He gave me a short, jerky nod. “He knew the moment he drove past the sign. When he looked in the rearview, I already had the gun out. I told him not to turn around unless I said so.” He scrubbed damp palms down his jean-clad thighs. “I expected him to plead for his life, but he didn’t. He just gave me this slightly sad look. It was almost like… he wanted me to.”
“He felt a lot of guilt for what his father was,” I said softly. It was probably why he’d communicated with Kane in the first place. “Did he say anything?”
“He said… if it’ll make you feel better, go right ahead.” Milo’s voice was soft as well. “So I did.”
I sat back in my chair, feeling a little sick to my stomach. I could almost picture Joseph sitting there, eyes squeezed shut, head bowed, knowing he was about to die at the hand of someone he loved.
“Well, did it?” I asked, my voice a little gruff. “Did it make you feel better?”
It was a few minutes before he answered, so long that I thought he might not answer at all. When he spoke, his voice a little hoarse. “Not as much as I’d hoped.”
There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I sighed as I pushed the pad and pen across the table. “Write it all down.”
He stared at me for a long moment before he picked up the pen.
*
Evidence plus a full confession wa
s the investigator’s holy grail. Hoping our ballistics expert, Sven, would give me some good news on the uncle’s gun, I hung around the precinct for a while. By the time he finally called me down to the ballistics lab, I was running on fumes and bitter coffee that I couldn’t be bothered to warm up.
Sven relished the opportunity to drone on about using vacuum metal disposition technology to pick up latent fingerprints. I let him prattle on until my eyes started to cross. I finally interrupted, asking him to bottom-line it for me. With an indignant sniff, Sven confirmed that he’d found Milo’s fingerprints on the unspent bullets. The striations of the fired shell casing matched his uncle’s weapon as well.
I should’ve been elated to see the forensic evidence and the confession merge so seamlessly. Instead, I was in a pensive mood on the drive home. From the numerous glances Danny sent my way from the passenger seat, I gathered he felt my strange vibes as well.
I wasn’t sure why I felt the way I did. This was the moment we worked for. We moved mountains to solve long-forgotten crime. To bring justice to victims whose lives had been reduced to whatever we could fit inside a dusty cardboard box. It didn’t usually feel so… hollow.
My last glimpse of Milo disturbed me the most. He’d been sitting on a bench, shoulders slumped, hands cuffed, waiting for transport. His paw print T-shirt had been discarded for an oversized jumpsuit.
“You all right?”
I glanced over to find Danny looking at me again. I offered him a reassuring smile that probably fell short. “Yeah, why do you ask?”
“Because I was hoping not to rear-end that F-150 in front of us.”
I chuckled and eased off the gas a bit. “I know how to drive, McKenna. Just keep your ass in the seat, and I’ll get us home safely.”
He started to say something else when his gaze caught around my neck area. I glanced down, only to see my pendant had come out of my shirt again. The engagement ring glinted on the cord, slightly behind the black stone. He looked away without a word.
