by Sarah Graves
In the wastebasket she found the unopened pack of pajamas and the toothbrush that she’d bought for Jane at the dollar store on the way here yesterday. In the desk was nothing but a few sheets of paper with the Treetops logo on them, a silhouette of a fancy cart with two high-stepping black ponies pulling it.
Nothing else; no shred of evidence to say what the pill-popping not-Jane Crimmins had been doing in here, or what had led to this scene of carnage. Then, just as Lizzie dropped to her knees again and spotted something she’d missed, a voice interrupted.
“Can I help you?” In the doorway stood a tall, pear-shaped man with a receding forehead, droopy eyes, and a ratty mustache. He wore baggy tan slacks with sneakers and a plaid collared shirt. The small button pinned to his frayed gray sweater-vest read LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.
He leaned forward, his eyes avid, taking in the scene of past violence like it was vital oxygen. “I’m the manager. What’s going on?”
Lizzie stood up. “I’m a cop. This is a crime scene.”
Unlike Peg, the motel manager seemed unfazed by the blood. But then who knew what he got used to, working here; all it had taken to give Lizzie a permanent motel-room phobia was a single demonstration of a forensic device that made body-fluid stains glow in the dark.
“I checked a woman in here yesterday,” she said. “By the name of Jane Crimmins. Now she’s gone, and I find this.”
She waved at the mess. “So was there any disturbance? Did anyone complain about noise, a fight, anything like that?”
But probably that loud compressor next door had muffled it, she thought. The manager drew himself up primly.
“Now, Officer, I’m very sure this motel has no responsibility whatsoever for what any of our guests may choose to—”
Lizzie’s patience for fools, never well supplied anyway, fizzled out abruptly. “Hey, dickwad, how about you just answer my question and save the legal opinions for later, okay? You had any complaints for anything at all, like maybe a visitor from the Planet Vulcan you haven’t felt like mentioning? ’Cause it looks to me like somebody got all of the blood let out of ’em here. You sure you don’t know anything about how that happened?”
The plump hands pressed together in a praying gesture. “No! I most certainly don’t—”
Peg stepped past the motel manager. She looked as if she had managed to calm herself somehow, and sure enough those were booze fumes on her breath; the bar here opened early, apparently.
“Detective Hudson’s coming,” she said. “Ten minutes.”
Lizzie turned back to the manager, whose ghoulish eagerness had evaporated. “Go on back to the front desk and stay there,” she told him.
A flash of rebellion at being told what to do showed in his glance, but he went. “Peg, d’you want to go get the yellow tape from the Blazer?”
Kneeling once more, she peered under the desk chair. Taped under the seat was a large tan manila envelope. Dry-mouthed, she pulled the envelope out, opened the loose flap, and peered inside.
Pill bottles, the small orange plastic pharmacy kind like the one the supposed Jane Crimmins had taken from her purse earlier, filled the envelope. Without touching them she could see that the labels were of two kinds: Some said diazepam, which was the generic name for Valium, and others were for methylphenidate.
Which Lizzie knew was pharmacy-speak for Ritalin, an often-abused stimulant used for attention deficit disorder. Emily had said it could cause false positives on tests for amphetamines.
There were perhaps a dozen small bottles labeled for each drug in the envelope. Uppers and downers, in other words; a mental picture of a woman who was so badly agitated that she couldn’t take questioning from Dylan popped into Lizzie’s mind.
“What are you doing?” Peg stood in the doorway again, yellow tape roll in hand.
Jane had taken pills from a bottle like one of these back in Lizzie’s kitchen, she recalled, saying they were for a headache.
“Just making sure we haven’t missed anything.” Lizzie caught the tape Peg tossed at her and laid the envelope casually on the dresser.
Maybe Jane had crammed all of her pills into just a few bottles so they’d fit in her purse, then put the emptied bottles in the envelope and hid it; speed freaks were compulsive that way sometimes, Lizzie knew. Jane would have meant to get rid of the bottles more permanently, but whatever went on here had happened before she could.
That was one theory, anyway. “On second thought, let’s just let the state cops handle it,” Lizzie added, glancing around a final time at the bloody mess. “It’s their department.”
Outside, she moved the Blazer around to the front parking lot so Dylan would see it when he arrived. Getting out, Peg pulled a cigarette from her purse and managed to light it.
“Did Tara get hurt in there? Do you think—?” She blew out a plume of smoke.
“I don’t know.” Lizzie punched her phone’s buttons again. Time to give her own boss a call, assuming Mister Magoo out there at the front desk hadn’t done it already.
But then from the corner of her eye she caught sight of something odd in a car parked by the motel’s restaurant. There was someone inside it, small fists hammering at the window of the midsized sedan.
Hurrying toward the car, she shoved her phone back into her bag. “Help!” the child in the vehicle cried as Lizzie assessed the youngster: female, moderate distress, no obvious injuries, maybe ten years old. Her hair, pulled into a ponytail, was light blond.
Nicki’s hair was blond, too. And she’d be the same age…
“Help, they locked me in here! Let me out, help!”
The little girl wore a white blouse and navy vest, like part of a school uniform. Scanning the child’s face, Lizzie looked for the tiny birthmark Nicki had just in front of her right ear.
A fairy’s touch, Cecily had called the mark. But through the tinted glass Lizzie couldn’t see well enough to tell for sure if it was present on this child.
“Peg, go on inside the restaurant,” she said. “See if someone there left a kid out here in the car.”
The vehicle’s doors were all locked. “Hang on, kiddo,” she told the little girl, “I’m a police officer, I’ll get you out.”
She knew the odds of this being her own long-dead sister’s missing child were heavily against. Still, stranger things have—
Peg returned shaking her head. “Nobody in the restaurant at all.”
Or in the parking lot, either. “Okay, then, go on back to my vehicle. Inside you’ll find a windshield hammer under the driver’s seat, you know what one looks like?”
Peg nodded briskly and obeyed at once, about-facing yet again back toward the Blazer despite her own ongoing distress. Under other circumstances, Lizzie thought—ones in which Peg was not lying her head off, for instance—the Bearkill woman would make a good team member.
“Help!” the little blond child cried hysterically. “I can’t unlock the doors! They left me in here, I’ve been here for hours and I’m suffocating, help me!”
“Calm down, I’ll get you out.” The girl wasn’t suffocating, clearly. But she seemed thoroughly frightened, and besides, Lizzie wanted—needed—a better look at her.
Peg returned with the hammer. “Okay, now,” Lizzie told the child, “you cover your head with your arms and close your eyes.”
The car’s door locks were electronic. She raised the hammer. “Wait!” A man strode hurriedly out of the restaurant. “Wait, what are you doing, that’s my car!”
Sport coat and slacks, white knit polo shirt, wristwatch. Behind the man hurried a woman in a navy pantsuit, wearing a lot of jewelry and a heavily sprayed platinum hairdo.
“Wait, wait, what’s going on?” she cried anxiously.
Lizzie lowered the hammer. Inside the car, a fleeting look of thwarted malice crossed the little girl’s face and was gone.
The man rushed up, pressing his key fob. The car’s window lowered: no birthmark, and the girl’s eyes were hazel, not blue.
<
br /> So: not Nicki. Lizzie quashed disappointment; after all, what had she been expecting?
“What the hell?” the man demanded as the door locks popped. The woman yanked the rear door open and seized the little girl’s arm firmly.
“What did you do?” she demanded of the child. “For heaven’s sake, I leave you here for five minutes and when I come back—”
Lizzie produced her badge and identified herself while the woman dragged the unwilling child out of the car. When the kid’s feet hit the ground she started yelling again; close up, she did not look so angelic.
“Liar! They left me for hours!” She jerked from the woman’s grasp. “You hurt me! Help! These aren’t my real parents!”
She looked, actually, like a world-class brat. Lizzie turned back to the man, whose flat, sad expression said this wasn’t the first such scene he’d endured. “Sir, I’ll need to see some—”
“Identification,” he finished for her. “Sure.” He produced a driver’s license, handed it over with an air of resignation. “My daughter,” he added quietly, “is disturbed.”
Meanwhile the woman spoke evenly but furiously to the child. “We were in the restrooms, for heaven’s sake. And I warned you when we got here, if you made a big fuss in the restaurant you’d have to sit out in the car. Didn’t I?”
Lizzie handed back the man’s license, about to tell him that she hoped he understood but she would have to check further.
Because she was pretty sure she understood the situation now, but that wasn’t enough when a kid was involved.
“It’s okay. I know them,” Peg said quietly. The man looked gratefully at Peg. “He works for the highway department, based out of Houlton, and the little girl goes to a—”
“Walthrop School,” the man put in. “It’s a residential place for emotionally disturbed girls. In New Hampshire.” He glanced over at his wife and their child. “We were bringing her home for a visit.”
Then he looked down at his shoes. “I guess maybe that wasn’t such a good idea,” he added. “I’m very sorry for the trouble.”
On the other side of the car, the little girl stamped her feet, then hauled off and took a solid swing at her mother, who sidestepped it expertly. “I hate you!” the girl shrieked.
“Excuse me,” the man said, hurrying over. Moments later he had his arms wrapped tightly around the child, restraining her while she kicked and struggled; with his wife’s help he at last got the girl back into the car and her seatbelt fastened.
As they drove away, Lizzie watched with a mixture of painful emotions. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder what she would do if she found Nicki and the child had significant problems.
But now it did. “She was hurt in there, wasn’t she?” Peg quavered, pulling Lizzie back to the present. “All that blood in the room. It’s Tara’s, isn’t it?”
Lizzie finished leaving a message on Sheriff Cody Chevrier’s voicemail. “We don’t know that.”
But Peg wasn’t having any. “Oh, come on. You think I’m that stupid? Somebody bled to death in there, bled like a—”
Dylan’s car pulled in. Lizzie turned to Peg. “Okay, then. You’re right. Someone’s dead, probably. Or nearly dead. I don’t know who or why.”
Dylan parked and got out, sliding on his dark glasses as he crossed the parking lot.
“But what I do know is that this whole morning, you’ve been trying to feed me another load of horsecrap about your daughter.”
Caught, said the sudden expression on Peg’s face.
“Not only that, but I don’t know where you were or what you were doing when whatever happened in there went down.”
Peg looked shocked. Too bad, Lizzie thought. She took a deep breath to calm herself, let it out slowly.
“You know, Peg, everyone working on this case has their own reasons. Things that they want, besides finding Tara.”
Watching Dylan stride toward her, his black topcoat swinging open over his dark wool suit and his oxblood wing tips glinting in the morning sun, she added: “Maybe it’s good for their career, or they just want a perfect case-clearing score, whatever.
“All but me,” she went on. “I can’t benefit from Tara’s case. I’m not even assigned to it.”
She plucked the cigarette from Peg’s fingers and dragged on it. “I’m just a lowly sheriff’s deputy, so all I’m in it for is to try to help.”
The smoke was like a kick to the head; another drag and she’d be hooked again. Some primitive self-preserving instinct stopped her from taking it.
“So when you decide to stop lying to me, give me a call. Otherwise—”
Dylan was near enough now so she could smell his cologne, like vermouth with a twist of lime.
“Otherwise,” Lizzie finished, dropping the cigarette and crushing it decisively with the toe of her boot—
“Otherwise, go fly a kite.”
—
“What’s she doing here?” Dylan asked. Across the parking lot, Peg Wylie hoisted herself up into the Blazer’s passenger seat.
“Blowing smoke at me,” Lizzie replied. “And not just from her cigarettes, either.”
The aftertaste of the drag she’d taken was disgusting. “Don’t ask me why, though,” she added, “because I still have no idea.”
She angled her head at the motel’s main entrance. “Meanwhile there’s a room with a lot of fresh blood in it in there, a real horror show. Also—”
She told him about the pill bottles. “I’ll bet that’s why she flaked out on your interview, too.”
Gazing past Dylan at the distant hillsides, she wondered yet again how she’d gotten herself stuck in a place where there were more trees than people. On the other hand, at least trees didn’t look you in the face and lie.
“Peg’s still hiding something,” she said. “Like she thinks the truth is even worse than Tara being AWOL, somehow.”
Dylan’s eyebrows went up. “And you know this because?”
It had hit her while she was looking at the child in the car: the obvious reason why Peg’s most recent story was unlikely to be true.
“Okay, so you saw Tara’s missing person flyer, right? The description on it?”
He nodded. “Teenager, brown hair, brown eyes…so what?”
“So Peg says she’s on the run from Tara’s dad. But he’s got a sheet, and I got his description from the New Haven cops earlier. Hair brown, eyes blue…”
“So? What’s your point?”
“So Peg’s eyes are blue, too,” she said, then watched as he got it and shook his head ruefully.
“Oh, man. High school biology, huh? Two blue-eyed parents, a brown-eyed kid, small chance.”
He grimaced, thinking about it. “So, what, do you think Tara’s not really hers, like maybe she stole the kid or something? Maybe that’s why she didn’t want any publicity about it?”
“I don’t know what to think. But somebody needs to go at her again ’cause so far I’m getting zilch.”
She filled Dylan in on Emily Ektari’s blood-type mismatch discovery, which meant Jane Crimmins wasn’t who she said she was.
“So even though she’s got the right ID, she’s also lying. And now she’s in the wind, on top of it,” Lizzie added.
“Great,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “That’s just what we need. But listen, there’s something else. A fire crew was out in the puckerbrush early this morning getting the jump on some embers.”
Finding and dousing any smoldering bits that might blaze up later was a part of the crews’ morning routine.
“And they found a freshly dug hole in the ground out there,” he said.
“Like, a hole with someone in it? As in buried in it?”
“Yeah. Looks like it. The thing is, whoever was in the hole isn’t in it anymore,” he said.
—
“Grave-sized hole, wooden box like a coffin in it,” said Dylan. “Wooden top, couple short nails sticking out of it, lying on the ground by the hole.”
“Fire crew’s chief says there’s a busted-up cell phone in the hole,” Dylan added. “I don’t know whose it is, yet, but I’ll bet I can guess.”
“Yeah,” Lizzie agreed. “Tara maybe used it once somehow to send that text message to her mom?”
He nodded. “Yup. That’s my thought, too. And then it got noticed, and broken. Although it could still be that someone else sent the text,” he added.
“To what, torment Peg? Yeah, I guess that’s a possibility.” Either way, Lizzie refused to let herself imagine being buried in a box in an active fire zone. Vehicles, voices…
But no one to hear you scream. No rescue. “And you found out about the cell phone and the rest of it how, exactly?”
Dylan watched the crime-scene tech climb out of the van and start across the parking lot toward them. “Fire crew’s team leader called Cody Chevrier. Cody must’ve figured this’d end up being mine, so he called me.”
And that in a nutshell was Aroostook County sheriff Cody Chevrier, who felt no need to visit a crime scene just for ego-boosting purposes, or God forbid to create a photo op. Your job, you do it, was his motto, though if you needed any backup he was there in a heartbeat.
“Cody got me up to speed on what the fire guys found and I was on my way up to that scene when you called,” Dylan said. “The county’s so strapped for personnel right now with the fires going on, he doesn’t have anyone else to send.”
Which was why there weren’t volunteers out searching for Tara Wylie. The battle against the brush fires was a holding action and every available man or woman who wasn’t tied down somewhere else was busy battling to keep it that way.
The crime-lab technician strode toward them. She was in her late twenties, Lizzie estimated, tanned and athletic looking with bright, smart eyes and wavy auburn hair tied up in a scarf.
“Hi,” said Lizzie, not sticking out a hand because the tech was already all gloved up. Besides, she didn’t feel like it.
