Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2)

by Susan McBride

  “All right, we’ll go,” Jo said, managing to sound far calmer than she felt. She pulled a card from her pocket and held it out to Trey. “If you end up remembering anything more from that night—anything else about Kelly—call me, please.”

  But Robert Eldon interceded, plucking the card from Jo’s fingers. “Get out,” he said, as if she hadn’t heard him the first time.

  Jo tried to catch Trey’s eye, but he turned away.

  Okay, she told herself. She’d get what she needed some other way.

  As she preceded Hank from the living room, she spied a host of photographs on a strip of wall between floor-to-ceiling windows. All of them were sports photos, every frame dominated by red and white, with one figure at the center of it all: Trey in his Plainfield Mustangs jersey. Number twelve.

  It must be good to be king, Jo mused. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because it wasn’t going to feel very nice when Trey got that pedestal yanked out from under him.

  After they’d buckled themselves in and Hank started the engine, he paused with his hands on the steering wheel. “I don’t think the Mustangs will take state this year,” he said, “not unless their backup QB is a ringer. Because this kid’s not gonna make it through the season.”

  “Not if he had something to do with what happened to Kelly Amster,” she agreed. She’d felt the truth hovering there in the living room with them, dangling like the proverbial carrot. Except Robert Eldon had yanked it back before she could grab it.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  Jo was sure Trey Eldon knew something. But as long as his dad was around, she wasn’t going to get a meaningful word out of him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jo hadn’t been back at her desk more than five minutes when her cell phone rang. When she saw the number, her body tensed. She considered letting the call go to voice mail, but that would only delay the inevitable.

  She answered with a muted, “Hello?”

  “Hey, hon,” a familiar voice said in response. The two words were spoken so warmly, it should have made Jo’s shoulders relax. Instead, the muscles tightened all the way into her neck, gearing up for whatever bad news was to come. Because it always did.

  “Hi, Ronnie,” she acknowledged her mother’s best friend—more like, her only friend—and the woman who’d helped take care of Verna well before she had to be placed in full-time memory care.

  To be honest, she still took care of Mama and visited her more often than Jo did. With Ronnie’s blessing, Jo had added her name to all the paperwork for Winghaven, listing her as Mama’s sister, even though she wasn’t really, not legally. But she was as close to family as it got. More often than not, the nursing home called Ronnie, not Jo, when they needed a hand with Mama.

  “What’s up?” she asked, willing her heart to stop pounding as it did every time anything came up concerning her mother.

  “Something’s happened at the facility, and if you haven’t heard from them already, I think you should know about it.”

  Well, hell.

  “No, I haven’t heard,” she admitted.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Look, Ronnie, I’m in the middle of a case,” she tried to protest, feeble though it was. “I’m pretty tied up at the moment . . .”

  “You always are,” Ronnie chided. “Doesn’t stop the rest of the world from turning, does it?”

  No, it didn’t. But Jo wished that, in Mama’s case, it would.

  “Is she okay?” she dared to ask.

  “I don’t know how to answer that exactly.”

  Oh, God, here we go.

  Jo sighed as Hank glanced across his computer monitor, watching her from his desk. He gave her a quizzical look, and she shook her head to let him know it didn’t have a thing to do with him.

  “What’d she go and do this time?” was the only question Jo could think of asking, since Mama’s problems at the home always had to do with Mama.

  There’d been the Great Fork Battle, where she and a fellow patient kept poking at each other with utensils during dinner until the other had ended up with a bloody hand. And then there was the Great Shoe Theft, where Verna kept wandering into random rooms and stealing everyone’s orthopedic sneakers. Oh, and pretty much weekly, she did battle with her caregivers, struggling as they tried to undress and bathe her, all the while spewing racial epithets and hitting them with her fists.

  Jo braced herself for the worst, praying that Mama had not been kicked out.

  “All right, here goes,” Ronnie said, seeming to gather up the breath to share the sordid tale. “She pushed a woman and knocked her down, although I can’t say your mama wasn’t provoked. Every time I visit, this lady invades her space. She sits in her chair, takes naps in her bed, stands with her nose two inches from your mama’s, and Verna had just had it with her.”

  “Oh, boy.” Clearly, Ronnie was taking Verna’s side in the matter, though Jo recognized her bias.

  “Verna’s only mistake was in shoving the nutty old bat right in the TV room where every danged human in the whole wing is always sittin’ and drooling, so everyone could see.”

  Like it would have been better if Mama had knocked the lady down out of sight of spectators?

  Jo rubbed her forehead, sensing a headache coming on.

  Verna Kaufman couldn’t do anything quietly, could she? It was all about the drama. When Jo was a kid and Mama drank like a fish, everything Verna did reminded Jo of Blanche DuBois, fanning herself and moaning about the heat, gussying herself up and leaving Jo home alone so she could play the Southern belle and get a man. Nothing was ever sane or rational. Though Mama was off the booze now, she couldn’t even do Alzheimer’s gracefully. Apparently, she was going to kick and scream through every stage of the disease until it killed her, which, eventually, it would.

  Jo figured that would be a blessing.

  “What are they going to do to her? Please don’t tell me they’re tossing her out.” It had been hard enough finding a place for Verna that wasn’t financially or geographically out of reach. Winghaven had better marks for memory care than most of the for-profit places, and Jo liked the fact that the management didn’t seem to turn over every month. “She’s still there, right?” Jo tried again when she didn’t get an answer.

  Her mother’s friend sucked in a loud breath while Jo held hers.

  “They’ve admitted her to the psych ward at the hospital,” Ronnie said, sounding cross. “They claim they need her to be evaluated by a shrink. They said it’s part of their procedure when a patient is violent, since they don’t have a psychiatrist on staff.”

  Jo felt her lungs expand. She tried hard not to laugh.

  Violent? Mama was well over sixty and weighed about a hundred fifteen pounds soaking wet. She could hardly walk more than five yards without getting short of breath. She was a pain in the ass, yes. She could engage in a mock sword fight with her fork and curse up a storm when the mood struck. But shoving someone to the ground? Jo had a hard time envisioning it. Mama had never laid a hand on her. Instead, she’d used words as her weapons of choice, usually along the lines of, stupid little girl and ungrateful liar.

  “Did you hear me, Jo?” Ronnie raised her voice. “I said she’s been committed.”

  “Yes,” Jo replied. “I heard. I’m not surprised. They have to cover their asses.”

  That was how it worked everywhere these days, even at the department. Nobody wanted bad press. Nobody wanted to get sued.

  “So what can I do? Do I have to sign some paperwork to bail her out?” Jo asked, and Hank looked over.

  “Not unless you want to take her home with you.”

  Jo couldn’t tell if that was a statement or a question. Just to be safe, she uttered, “Not really, no.”

  “They’ve got her locked up in the hospital mental ward until the psychiatrist can test her and tell the danged nursing home that she’s not going to attack anyone else.”

  “What are they testing for?” Jo asked. “She doesn’t even know her
own name.”

  “Agreed,” Ronnie said. “It’s a boatload of crap.”

  That was as harsh a cuss word as Jo had ever heard Ronnie utter, and Ronnie’s affection for her mom pinged Jo’s guilt.

  “Do I need to go visit the psych ward?”

  “Do you want to?”

  No. That was pretty much the last thing Jo wanted.

  “I should, shouldn’t I?” Jo said grudgingly, though Ronnie didn’t answer. Because both of them knew what Jo should do, no matter if anyone said it outright.

  She decided to man up, or woman up, as the case may be.

  “Maybe I can go after my shift,” she offered, though it took more strength than it should have to say it.

  “That mealymouthed director at Winghaven promised they’d send someone over to check on her every day, not that I believe them.” Ronnie harrumphed. “They also said they’d take her back as soon as she’s cleared, although I just left the hospital, and the nurse said the shrink couldn’t see her till tomorrow. They’re not thrilled to have Verna there. They don’t have room to keep her for long. They have people with real troubles they need to tend to, and they don’t want to be babysittin’ a woman with dementia.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Verna couldn’t stop herself from acting like a crazy person because she is a crazy person.”

  “Amen,” Jo said, because Ronnie was right about that.

  Everyone on Mama’s floor at the nursing home was nuts. The handful of times she’d visited, she’d seen just about everything: folks wandering around in bathrobes or in nothing at all; a woman in a wheelchair who uttered “help me” nonstop; people asleep in the dining room with their heads on the tables; patients dancing to music that only they could hear. She’d told Adam it felt like being in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for real, and she felt such sadness and pity for the afflicted and their families. The caregivers—the good ones—were a godsend, and Jo believed that, no matter what they were paid, it wasn’t near enough.

  “The aides on the floor, now they do the hard work,” Ronnie said, exactly what Jo had been thinking. “But sometimes I think the people who run those places don’t know what the heck they’re doing.”

  “They probably don’t,” Jo said. Half the time, she didn’t know what she was doing, either.

  “Once they make the sales pitch and get you to sign up, they figure they’ve got you for good, because ain’t no one going to want to have to start looking and filling out the piles of paperwork all over again.”

  “Yep,” Jo told her, because she was dead-on.

  “That’s all I have to say on the subject.” Ronnie didn’t even pretend to be cheerful. “If you get over to the psych ward, would you take her a toothbrush? They have plenty of those Depends, so she doesn’t need any kind of underpants.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you don’t get out there, tell me that, too. I can go see her after dinner for a spell.”

  “Thanks, Ronnie.”

  “Now you go on back to catching bad guys, and I’ll try not to bother you too much.”

  “Until the next time,” Jo said.

  Ronnie laughed. “Until the next time.”

  Jo didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye before Ronnie hung up.

  For a moment, Jo held the phone in her hand, tempted to dial Adam’s number, wanting to hear his voice, to tell him that Mama was locked up like a madwoman in the psych ward at Presbyterian Hospital; to confide about getting another case with a victim who had so much life yet to live, who did not have to die.

  She pulled up his name on speed dial, then changed her mind and sent him a text instead:

  Mama’s at the psych ward. Stopping by tonight before I head home.

  Within seconds, her phone pinged.

  So I should make dinner?

  She smiled and returned, Sounds good.

  ILY, he replied.

  Ditto.

  She’d barely sent off the text when the phone at her desk trilled. She picked it up.

  “Jo Larsen,” she said.

  “Hey, Detective, I’ve got a woman calling about a missing dog,” the front desk officer told her. “Been gone since last night.”

  “I know,” she said, rubbing at her right temple, trying to erase the dull throbbing that had started with Ronnie’s phone call. “Amanda Pearson’s golden retriever. We went over and met with her first thing this morning—”

  “No, it’s not Amanda Pearson. It’s someone else entirely. You want to talk to her? I’ve got her on the line.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jo picked up the phone and found herself listening to a woman named Jill Burns, who could barely hold back her tears as she spoke. She’d been vacationing in California for the past ten days and had returned earlier that morning. She’d engaged a local pet sitter recommended by someone at her vet’s office. The pet sitter had been paid to feed and walk Tucker, an eight-year-old German shepherd, three times a day, and Ms. Burns claimed the sitter never mentioned anything was wrong in all the times that she’d checked in.

  But when Ms. Burns arrived home, she couldn’t find Tucker, and after numerous calls and texts to the pet sitter, she’d finally heard back. The sitter had sounded anxious, admitting that she’d left Tucker out overnight with water and food because, according to an incredulous Jill, “She claimed he couldn’t ‘hold it’ long enough until she arrived in the morning and let him out to do his business.”

  When the sitter went over that morning before Jill was due to return, Tucker wasn’t there. The backyard gate was supposedly closed but not locked. When the sitter couldn’t locate him, she wrongly assumed Jill had gotten back earlier and taken Tucker to the park or for a walk.

  “Is she sure she didn’t leave the gate open?” Jo asked.

  “She swore she didn’t, but it’s hard to believe anything she says at this point.”

  “Did anyone else check on Tucker while you were away?”

  “No!” Jill Burns yelped into Jo’s ear. “How could she have not called me when she realized Tucker was gone? How could she be so neglectful? Now I’m a mess. I can’t go to work. I can’t function. I don’t know what to do . . .”

  “Did you call Animal Services to see if he’d been picked up?” Jo asked, not afraid of being rebuked this time, as Hank had been when he’d mentioned the same thing to Amanda Pearson.

  “Yes, of course,” the woman said, her voice shaky. “They aren’t holding any German shepherds at the facility, and they hadn’t gotten any calls about anyone finding one wandering the streets.”

  “Is he chipped?”

  “Yes. I had my vet chip him years ago.”

  “Did you talk to your neighbors?”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing for the past hour, walking up and down the street, knocking on doors. No one’s seen Tucker, and I can hardly breathe not knowing what’s happened to him,” she got out before she started bawling in earnest.

  Oh, man.

  Jo hardly knew what to do except to tell her, “I’m going to give you my e-mail address, Ms. Burns. If you’ll send me a JPEG of Tucker and give me your address and the number of the pet sitter, I’ll do my best to see what I can turn up.”

  Hank must have overheard her conversation. He mouthed from across the way, “Another lost dog?”

  She nodded as she gave Jill Burns her e-mail address. She was about to wrap up the call when the woman told her one last thing.

  “I found Tucker’s collar,” she said, “when I was going up and down the street. It wasn’t far from my house, maybe three down near a stop sign. It’s like someone tossed it out a car window. Would it help you to have it? To check for fingerprints or something?”

  “Hold on to it, okay?” Jo told her. “Just try not to handle it too much. Drop it in a baggie or a paper sack, and I’ll send an officer by to pick it up.”

  “Please help me find him.”

  “We’ll do what we can.”

  Jo heard the pain in the woman’s voice.
She sounded as heartbroken as Amanda Pearson had been over her missing golden retriever. Come to think of it, both women had shown more despair at finding their pups gone than Barbara Amster had at hearing that she’d lost her teenage daughter.

  Hank must have read the distress in her face as he scooted around his desk and pulled his chair up to hers. “Seriously, have we got another missing dog case?” he said, rubbing a hand over his jowls. “Is something in the air?”

  “It’s a German shepherd named Tucker,” Jo told him. “The owner went on vacation and left him at home, in the care of a pet sitter. The sitter put the dog out overnight, and it disappeared.”

  “Is the yard unfenced?”

  “No, there’s a fence,” she told him, “and the sitter swore that she didn’t leave the gate open. I’d say it’s coincidence, except that the owner found the collar up the street, left behind at a stop sign a few houses away.”

  “Kind of reminds you of Amanda Pearson’s situation, doesn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Both on the same night?”

  Jo nodded.

  “Damn.” Hank paused to scratch his jaw. “Either we have a bona fide dog thief running around Plainfield, or else there’s a full moon rising.”

  “What does the moon have to do with it?” Jo squinted at him like he’d lost his mind, which he seemed to do at regular intervals. “Have you been watching those midnight infomercials for psychics again?”

  He waved her off. “No, just wondering if there’s something freaky brewing, like a full-moon gathering of a cult that needs sacrificial lambs . . . or dogs . . . whatever.”

  “Let’s hope that’s not it.”

  Though if someone was going around Plainfield stealing dogs from their backyards, Jo couldn’t imagine anything but ugly reasons. Her brain liked to jump to worst-case scenarios, and it was doing that now, envisioning some creep using the dogs for target practice or as training bait in dogfights.