Finnegan looked up at me. “I’m guessing she wasn’t calling for your Christmas-cookie recipe?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
What was Cody’s doctor’s name? Fray-something. Frazier. I found his number and called. Though it was 11:02 p.m., he answered.
“Is it possible to test an unborn baby for CIPA?” I asked.
“Yes. Most people wouldn’t get the test, because the condition is so rare. You’d need two parents with a defective NTRK1 gene, and even then not all such couples produce a baby with CIPA.”
“A couple like the Forrands, if they got pregnant, they could test the fetus?”
“Theoretically, yes. We’d test the amniotic fluid. It carries risks, but a couple like the Forrands would want such a test done. Not that they’d need to. Why?”
“Why wouldn’t the Forrands need the test?” I asked.
“Mr. Forrand had a vasectomy, shortly after we diagnosed his son. They asked me what the odds were of having another child with CIPA. I couldn’t be sure. No one can. They decided not to risk it.” He hesitated, and then asked, “Why are you asking? Did you find another couple with a CIPA child?” He sounded excited. Probably the way a hunter felt after spotting his second white elephant.
I didn’t answer, and he said, “There is no other couple. It’s them, the Forrands, isn’t it. I suppose the vasectomy could’ve failed.” His flat voice belied his own statement.
“Or not,” I said, knowing he considered the same possibility. That Mr. Forrand’s vasectomy hadn’t malfunctioned. That he hadn’t impregnated his wife.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I spoke before I thought.”
“Thanks for your time.” I didn’t promise to keep what he said between us. How could I? I was a cop. And my kidnapping vic’s mom was having an affair. I looked at my office plant and asked it, “Where did she find the time?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Wright went home around 2:00 a.m. when his cough worsened and I’d told him for the eleventh time to get some damn sleep. Finny stayed, chain-smoking, lost in the tip reports that said Cody had been spotted in Waterbury and Boston and New York and Colorado. Colorado? Had he been smuggled onto a plane?
At 2:45 a.m., my brain was fuzzy. Rather than go home, I showered in the locker room after I’d barred the door with a chair. The hot water woke me, though the stream was a pressureless trickle. When I exited the locker room, dressed in a fresh t-shirt and sweatshirt, Finnegan said, “Violating dress code.” I tossed a balled-up memo at his head. He didn’t evade it. It smacked his temple and fell to the floor.
“Uncle Greg is still MIA,” he said.
Maybe he was our guy. His car hadn’t been spotted since he’d left for work. But why would he use the Camry, only to abandon it on the street behind Cody’s?
Finnegan’s phone rang. “Please don’t be a nutter,” he said. “Detective Finnegan, Idyll Police. Who?” He straightened. “Yes. Okay. Now? You know how—. Okay. See you soon.” He swiveled his chair and said, “I’ll be damned. The FBI is coming.”
The station looked as though a hurricane had hit. We’d dumped stuff on desks to make room for maps and paperwork. There was snow gear under and near radiators. Fuck it. The FBI wasn’t coming to do a house-cleaning inspection. Still. We’d need to give them space. I walked to the front. Dix was at a desk, at work on the Camry timeline.
“Dix.” His head was tilted, eyes down on the sheets. I said, “Dix” louder. He snorted and jerked his head. “Dix, the FBI is coming. Can you clear some desks for them? Toss what we don’t need in the evidence area.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine. Go home after. You’re wiped. We’ll need you back here later.”
He looked ready to fight, but he stood and said, “A few hours would be good.”
I asked Finnegan to get status reports on all inquiries. He grunted and shuffled off to talk to Klein. I thought of the bank holdup story while I watched them talk. Had becoming a cop been anything like Klein thought it would? Or did he miss the bank? The regular hours, the holidays, the interactions with people who were, on average, pleasant?
The front door opened thirty-five minutes later. A Latina woman led the group. She extended her hand. “I’m Agent Teresa Waters. You must be Chief Thomas Lynch.” I assumed she’d noticed my uniform. Realized I had a sweatshirt on. Damn. We shook hands. Her palm was cool and dry.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
She indicated the men behind her. “Agents Dennis Mulberry and Matthew Cisco.” They waved their hellos. Mulberry was white and older than Cisco, who was Latino and looked like a bodybuilder. When did the FBI start hiring muscle? He maintained the ramrod posture of a fed. That, plus his hyper-vigilant gaze were a dead giveaway.
“Come on in. Detective Finnegan will bring you up to speed,” I said.
“We’d like to ask some questions first,” she said. They approached the big map, peering at the X that marked the Forrand house. We’d run out of space for the ever-widening circles. Cody had been gone too long. Agent Waters looked at the piles of cigarette butts and coughed. “You guys still smoke indoors.”
“I do.” Finnegan waved his lit butt in one hand. “Detective Michael Finnegan.”
Agent Waters stared at the cigarette like it was a deadly snake. “I’m going to have to ask you to extinguish that. I have asthma.” She strode to the nearest window and opened it. “I can’t be around secondhand smoke.” Cisco lifted another window frame six inches. Cold air rushed in. Papers rustled.
“Okaaaaay.” Finnegan extinguished his butt and slid a pile of ash and filters into the nearest trash can. “Work must be hard. I thought feds smoked nonstop.”
“President Clinton passed an executive order in August prohibiting smoking in federal buildings that report to the executive branch. Maybe you heard?” she asked.
Things were off to a great start.
“When was Cody taken?” she asked.
“Approximately 2:30 p.m.,” Finnegan said. “It appears he exited via the basement doors to the backyard. Whomever took him must’ve opened the doors. They’d be too heavy for Cody.” Mulberry took notes.
“So the kidnapper was outside the house?” she asked.
“Looks that way,” Finnegan said.
“You dusted the door for prints?” she asked.
Finnegan and I looked at each other. “No,” I said.
“No.” She didn’t ask why. She waited us out. I’d have respected that move if it didn’t make me so damn angry. We’d fucked up. She’d caught us.
“We assumed the person wore gloves. It’s cold out,” I said.
“Get a unit to dust the doors,” she told Cisco. “We’ll need exclusion prints from you or whoever was there.”
“I wore gloves,” I said. Had Yankowitz? Fuck.
“From the basement door, Cody went where?” she asked.
I kept my mouth shut and looked at Finnegan. He said, “Our dog tracked his scent to a car parked on Weymouth Avenue. Cody wasn’t in it. Techs processed the car. The dog followed the scent down the road toward Route 74.”
“Could’ve hopped from there to Route 84 easy,” Mulberry said as he scribbled in his notepad.
“When did you find the car?” Agent Waters asked.
“6:50 p.m.,” I said. “We interviewed neighbors. It appears to have been parked there, disappeared, and then reappeared, but the reports conflict.”
“Cisco will take a look,” she said. “There’s been no ransom? No demand?”
“None,” Finnegan said.
“Detective Finnegan, please give Agent Mulberry everything you have. I’m going to speak with the family.” I thought of the Forrands, at home, waiting. They’d be happy they got the FBI’s attention, and a female agent to boot.
“There’s something you might want to know.” I told her about Mrs. Forrand’s pregnancy and her husband’s vasectomy.
She pursed her lips. “Interesting. They know you know?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Any idea who the father is?” she asked.
“No.”
She cocked one brow. “Anything else I should know before I meet the family?”
Finnegan shared his hypothesis that the father might be in the frame. She asked questions. “It’s a theory,” he said, one step from angry. She left to confer with her men.
Maybe they’d lift prints from the basement doors. Maybe they’d find who took Cody. I didn’t care if they got the glory. If they found Cody, they could have it all. I didn’t want a dead kid on my conscience. A flash of Cody’s smile and his hand dangling an animal cracker before my face came to me. I tried to blink it away. Not now.
I hoped Finnegan was doing better with Mulberry than he had with Waters. She could’ve gone easier on him about the smoking. Ah, well. She probably had to be aggressive to get to where she was. Some poky small-town detective wasn’t going to get in her way.
Timelines, photos, and Captain Hirsch’s arson report got moved aside. Under them, I spotted a list of names. My graffiti suspects. I’d been too busy with Cody. Looking at the names, I almost wished the feds hadn’t come. I would have to devote time and attention to this list. My spine ached, a reminder of the time I was pushed down the stairs by some scumbag back in New York. Sometimes I swore it predicted trouble. And yet it hadn’t hurt earlier, when I’d been sipping nog and opening presents and someone had put Cody Forrand into a silver Toyota Camry.
I looked at the list of names again.
Fuck.
Even my pain was unreliable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I drove through the snow, the flakes like feathers. The radio reminded me that there were only two days until Christmas. Not that it mattered. I’d had my Christmas, yesterday at Marie and Johnny’s. It had been one of our better family holidays. It would’ve been nice to see what they’d got Mom and Dad. To tease Johnny if, for once, his gifts fell short of mine. I cracked my driver’s window. The chill air kept my eyes open. I’d snatched three hours sleep at home. I could’ve slept longer, but wondering what the feds were up to and if any leads had broken had tortured me until I threw my blanket aside.
Instead of cigarette smoke and burnt wool, the station smelled like the air after summer rain had fallen hard. Then I noticed the machines. Two hip-height gray-and-white columns that hummed in the detectives’ pen. A third stood in the hall outside my office. Klein gave me a good morning. When he saw my frown and followed my finger, he said, “Oh, those are air purifiers. Agent Waters said they’ll get rid of the stink and the secondhand smoke.”
“Did she?” I wondered how the machines had gone over with Finnegan. He wasn’t around to ask. He’d gone home to sleep and maybe to smoke and say out loud exactly what he thought of Agent Waters and her air purifiers.
“Where are the feds?” I asked.
“Out,” he said. “They brought donuts and bagels this morning. You want one?”
The feds were playing nice. Sort of. They disapproved of our housekeeping, but they brought us baked goods. Hell, I liked the smell here. If they wanted to leave the purifiers behind when they wrapped up the case, I wouldn’t complain.
“Is Wright in?” I asked.
“He left with Agent Waters, to meet with the Forrands.”
“Again?” Agent Waters had gone there last night.
Klein said, “Something about fingerprints.”
They’d brought bagels from New Haven. I took an onion bagel to my office. Sat and wondered what to do next. I could call stores about Cody’s bedsheets, but maybe that had been completed. I needed a status update before I wasted time redoubling efforts. The bagel was tough and a little eggy. I liked it. I was contemplating a second one when Finnegan knocked on my door. His eyes had pouches that could double as bookbags.
“Can we talk?”
“Sure.” Was he going to complain about the feds and their air purifiers? I hoped not.
He closed the door. “I contacted a handwriting expert about the graffiti on your car.”
“A handwriting expert? It was spray paint.”
“He said it didn’t matter. Writing is writing. With one word to go on, he couldn’t be positive, but he thought it likely the person was left-handed.”
I saw Wright, scratching out a note with his right hand. Right-handed Wright.
“Why left-handed?” I asked.
“Something to do with the way the letters were formed and the spray-paint droplets. The concentration of the paint splatter at certain points. I can give you his number if you want to talk to him.”
“No, it’s okay.” I exhaled. It wasn’t Wright. “Good thinking,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought to ask a handwriting expert.”
“It’ll still take time to whittle down the list. We’ll have to come up with some pretense to visit people and see which hand they write with.”
“Visit people?” I asked. Why would we need to visit our men at home?
“Yeah. It’s not like they hang out here,” he said.
We stared at each other, trying to figure out what the other was thinking.
“Who’s on your list?” I asked.
“Mostly callers to the station, but I included people who called you at home. Why are you giving me that look?”
“Is Burns left-handed?” I asked. His name had moved to the top.
He scratched the corner of his right eye. “I don’t know. Wait. You think it was one of us?”
“Did you exclude everyone here?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I didn’t put them at the top of my list. Why do you assume it was us?” He was on high defense now. Arms crossed, brows low.
He needed convincing? Fine. “Two cans of spray paint went missing from Evidence before my car got tagged. One of ’em was orange.”
He blinked. “That’s not proof.”
“No, it isn’t, but neither is making a call to the station,” I said.
He lowered his arms. “Might’ve been nice to tell me what you were thinking.”
“Ditto.”
“You’re gonna feel bad when you’re wrong,” he said.
I wished that were true.
He said, “I’m still gonna work my list.”
“Fine.” He left. I felt sure that whether he believed me or not, he’d be watching Burns’s hands today.
Only half the men on my list were on duty. I walked around, checking which hand they used to answer the phone, to write notes, to grab their radios. Burns, left hand. Dix, left hand. I watched Klein for fifteen minutes without seeing him use his damn hands. He talked to other guys, waiting for a call to go pull someone from a snowbank. When I did see him use his hands he held a magazine with both. I was about to intervene, but John Miller called to him. He set down his magazine with his right hand, and then picked up his radio with his left. Fucker. Was he ambidextrous? He picked up his coat with his left hand and his hat, a second later, with his right hand. I’d get him to write something down for me later. That ought to determine what was what. Agent Waters and Wright came in as Klein walked out. My handedness survey could wait.
“Good morning, Chief,” Agent Waters said. She looked tired.
“Updates?” I asked.
“Plenty,” she said. “Let me grab coffee first.”
She left and I hissed, “Everything okay?” to Wright.
“Yeah,” he said. Offered nothing more. Sometimes, I longed to shake him.
Waters returned, sipping coffee from a navy-blue mug with the FBI seal on it. She said, “I never use other people’s mugs. I’ve seen too much stuff.” She pointed to a mug on Finnegan’s desk, half full of coffee, with a suspicious bloom on top of the gray-brown liquid. “Like that.” She took another sip of coffee and glanced at the map.
“I hope you don’t mind, but we’ve got more people coming in to help. They won’t all be in your space here, but some will.”
“You need anything? Gear, radios?” I asked, predicting she’d say no.
“No.”
I could hardly object to more manpower. More brains, more bodies, meant a better chance of finding Cody. Though as long as he’d been gone, the chances of finding him alive were slim. She set her mug on the corner of Wright’s desk and said, “The prints on the basement doors were smudged partials.”
Wright said, “Mr. Forrand said he’d been down there a few days ago, hiding Christmas presents.”
“He used the outside doors?” I asked.
“Didn’t want the kids to see him with bags of gifts, so he parked on Weymouth Avenue, walked up to his backyard and opened the basement doors.”
“Which were unlocked?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. People in Idyll didn’t lock their front doors, much less their basement doors. They lived in an imaginary world where burglaries never happened to people like them.
“If he had bags of presents, why did his wife go shopping yesterday?” I asked.
“They still had shopping to do for the kids. Some of his gifts were for his wife.” Entirely plausible. I wondered if anyone had checked the hidden stash.
Agent Waters said, “There were gifts for her in the pile. We checked. A cashmere sweater and some lingerie.”
“I’m guessing he doesn’t suspect she’s cheating, then,” I said.
“Seems that way,” she said.
“Does he know she’s pregnant?” I asked.
Wright said, “He’d have to be dense not to, unless she doesn’t get sick. My wife got sick, a lot. Like having food poisoning for four months.”
“Weaker sex, my foot,” Agent Waters murmured. “Cisco called in from Sturbridge. We’d had a call that a young boy was crying in a car parked outside a drugstore in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The age and description fit. The drugstore manager says that kid and his mom come in regularly. Cisco stopped by the house. Think it’ll be a while before that kid pitches a fit in public.”
“I didn’t realize we were aiming Scared Straight at the youngins,” Wright said.
Idyll Fears Page 18
