Silenced lk-4

by Allison Brennan

  The day before Lucy was supposed to graduate from high school, she’d never thought much about privacy. She wanted to do something special with her life, have fun doing it, and share it with the world if she had the chance. She was friendly, talkative, almost carefree-at least as carefree as possible with her military and law enforcement family. She’d wanted to study languages, which came naturally to her, to swim competitively and maybe earn a place on the Olympic team. She wanted to someday raise a family and travel around the world. She thought the world was her oyster, the cliche so appropriate to growing up as the youngest in a large family of seven who doted on her.

  She’d been sheltered and protected, knew it and didn’t care.

  Then every dream she’d ever had was stolen from her the day she should have walked down the aisle in her gown and cap to accept her diploma.

  She’d never go to the Olympics; though she swam in college, her heart wasn’t in it. Instead, she became certified in water search and rescue where her strength as a swimmer helped her find and retrieve people both dead and alive.

  She’d never study language, because how could she help people and appease her need for justice if she was a diplomat or a translator? But her language skills helped her understand people from different backgrounds and lifestyles, both spoken and unspoken.

  And she’d never have children of her own because she no longer had a womb to carry a baby.

  Worse, her pain and suffering, all of the evil that had been done to her, was part of the public record. She had no privacy and never would. Though she’d accepted it, there were days she wanted to scream at the unfairness of life.

  But she didn’t. She went on. Because there were no other options.

  Her family protected her, and she loved them for it, but sometimes it was too much.

  Her eye caught the simple silver picture frame on Cathy’s desk, the one Cathy had glanced at several times during their conversation. She leaned forward and tilted her head so she could see who was in the photo.

  Cathy Hummel, much younger, with a man Lucy presumed was her husband, and Jocelyn.

  Except Jocelyn was much younger as well. Eighteen? Nineteen? Long before she was working here.

  Cathy Hummel stepped back into the room. Her eyes were rimmed red, but dry, and her hands grasped several pieces of crumbled tissues. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled. She sat back down. “I don’t know what else I can do for you.”

  “How long have you known Jocelyn?” Lucy asked.

  “I told you, she came to work for me when she was twenty-four, out of college-”

  “Did you know her before she worked for you?”

  “Why?”

  “I saw the picture on your desk.”

  Cathy stared at the picture. “That was taken the day Jocelyn got her GED,” she said quietly. “She was nineteen, but she hadn’t been in school since she was sixteen.” She shook her head. “This is all sealed, and I’m not going to share it with you. I’m sorry.”

  “It may have something to do with her death.”

  “It doesn’t.” Cathy’s voice took on an edge of hostility.

  Genie spoke up. “Was Jocelyn working with Maddie? Was Maddie in trouble?”

  “I told you, Jocelyn wasn’t in the office this week.”

  “But you would know why,” Genie said. She leaned forward. “I understand you want to protect Jocelyn. I’m not going to drag her reputation through the slime. I’ll do my best to keep anything not directly related to the case off the books.”

  Genie continued. “We haven’t released this information to the press, but we believe that the Taylors and Maddie were killed by the same person or people who killed a known prostitute, Nicole Bellows. Do you know her?”

  Cathy’s shocked expression revealed the truth.

  “Nicole was the murdered prostitute I read about in the paper this morning?” she asked weakly.

  “Yes.” Lucy watched the director closely. “Anything you know, anything that could send us in the right direction, we’d appreciate.”

  Tears streamed down Cathy’s face. “I told Jocelyn not to get involved. Not with those girls.”

  That surprised Lucy. An organization like MARC always got involved. To them, no one was beyond help.

  Cathy continued. “Six months ago, we were hired by the mother of a fourteen-year-old girl who had run away with her boyfriend, a nineteen-year-old high school dropout. She filed a missing persons report and went through proper channels, but the police couldn’t find her.

  “Jocelyn tracked down the boyfriend and he was more forthcoming, because she wasn’t a cop. He dumped Amy, left her in Baltimore, and didn’t think twice about her. She wouldn’t ‘pull her weight,’ he said.

  “Jocelyn has cultivated a lot of contacts in the tristate area. She traced Amy from Baltimore to DC, and finally to this group of girls who lived in a house on Hawthorne.”

  “That’s a nice area,” Genie remarked. “Not where I’d expect prostitutes to live.”

  “Jocelyn had met Ivy, the woman who ran the group of call girls, a year ago. She didn’t talk about her much, but they had an understanding, I suppose. Jocelyn claimed Ivy wasn’t like other madams, but in my experience, anyone running prostitutes is a criminal.”

  “Ivy?” Lucy asked. “Do you have a last name?”

  Cathy shook her head. “I never met her. I told Jocelyn I wanted to, to assess her sincerity, but Ivy wanted no help whatsoever.”

  Lucy started to see what the problem was. “And that’s why you and Jocelyn started having problems.”

  “No,” Cathy said, without conviction. She shredded the tissue clasped in her hands. “I told her to go to the authorities. The girl, Amy, was fourteen; if we knew where she was, we had a responsibility.” She bit her lip. “I should have done it myself. Jocelyn convinced me to do it her way.”

  “What happened to Amy?” Lucy asked, fearing the worst.

  “Jocelyn reunited Amy with her mother. A happy ending. I’ve talked to Amy’s mom-she’s doing great. She’s going back to school in the fall, getting her life back. Because Jocelyn didn’t give up.

  “Jocelyn had it in her head that she had to save all the girls in Ivy’s house, but some of these girls-like Nicole-had been on the streets for years,” Cathy said. “They were nineteen, twenty, maybe older. There’s a point where you have to focus on your best hope for success. Jocelyn wanted to help those whom no one else would. The hardest cases.”

  That’s why Senator Paxton was involved. He was helping those hard cases, the lost causes. Because that’s what he did.

  Lucy’s stomach twisted with her conflicted feelings about her former mentor.

  “We had an argument about Ivy,” Cathy said. “Jocelyn stopped talking to me, spent more time with that girl, and then on Tuesday morning she called me on my cell phone, early-five A.M. Said Ivy’s house had burned down and she was helping the girls find a place to stay. Nothing else. I came into the office yesterday, and she’d cleaned out her desk. I’ve been trying to call her-” Her voice caught. “How long? How long has she been dead?”

  “She was killed late last night.”

  “Why didn’t she call me back? She knows I would have done anything for her! I loved her like a daughter.”

  Lucy didn’t have the answer to that question. This situation was far more complex than she’d originally thought. But finally, they had a solid direction. It should be easy to find the house on Hawthorne Street that had burned down in the early hours of Friday morning.

  “Was Maddie one of the girls in Ivy’s house?” she asked Cathy.

  The director nodded. “I don’t know the others, or how many-six, eight, ten.” She put her hands up, then they fell limply to her desk. “Jocelyn was very protective of them. She was driven. And now she’s dead!”

  Lucy suspected she knew how many girls had been in the house.

  Six blind mice. See how they run.

  Cathy unlocked her bottom drawer. She hesitated a m
oment, then pulled out a file and handed it to Lucy. “I shouldn’t be giving you this. It’s all I have on Ivy. I’m sure Jocelyn has more; I don’t know where, if it’s not at her house.”

  The file was thin. Lucy opened it. Inside were two pages of handwritten notes apparently taken by Cathy Hummel. Time Jocelyn was spending with Ivy, observations. The third page was a photograph. It wasn’t a sharp picture, but it showed a young brunette with an aristocratic bone structure and attractive face.

  It was the same girl who had taken Jocelyn’s car from the hotel the night the Taylors had been murdered. The same girl who’d returned, presumably found the bodies, but ran instead of calling the police.

  “This is Ivy?”

  “Jocelyn gave me that a few months back, wanting to know if she’d been reported missing. I ran her picture through our database; she didn’t come up.”

  What secrets are you hiding, Ivy?

  Cathy continued, “Trust me when I tell you this: Ivy is bad news. Why else would Jocelyn keep things from me?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “It looks like these murders are connected to Jocelyn’s work,” Genie said as she drove across town to Hawthorne Street. “I want to talk to the neighbors, check the house.” She got on the phone with her team to get the details about the fire.

  Lucy sent Noah an e-mail through her phone about what they had learned, growing increasingly frustrated with the small keyboard. She wanted to talk to him about Wendy James and the message left on her body, along with the idea to show both Wendy and Maddie’s pictures to Cora Fox, but she didn’t want to do it over messaging.

  And she especially wanted to talk to him about Senator Paxton. She wanted to talk to Jonathon one-on-one, but she wouldn’t do it behind Noah’s back. He wasn’t involved in killing Chris and Jocelyn Taylor, but she had no doubt that if he knew who had killed them, he would seek his own vengeance.

  He’d done it before.

  But she could put none of that in e-mail. And she couldn’t tell Noah that, because he would ask her why she hadn’t come forward with the information she had on the senator. And she would have to say she didn’t have proof, she had no evidence, she just had her intuition and a theory and her masters degree in criminal psychology.

  Plus the fact that she understood Jonathon Paxton better than anyone else.

  She closed her note with a request to talk to him as soon as possible about a theory. She hoped he’d call her immediately, and waited for her phone to vibrate the entire drive over to Hawthorne. It didn’t.

  Genie pulled up in front of the burned remains of what appeared to have been a large, Craftsman-style home-though it was hard to tell as every wall was black from soot and smoke.

  Caution tape surrounded the crumbling structure.

  What was left of the house was on a quiet, tree-lined street with well-maintained, stately, older homes. It was only blocks from a main thoroughfare, but the blocks surrounding it were equally attractive. It wasn’t what most people think of when they think “Washington, DC,” but Lucy had lived here long enough to know there were many pockets like this in the city.

  “I talked to the lead fire investigator,” Genie said. “They believe it started in the basement. The house was on an old furnace system, but the owners”-she looked at her notes-“George and Karen Schwartz, currently of Satellite Beach, Florida, said they have maintenance records that the furnace had a clean bill of health as of March.”

  “Any fatalities?”

  “No, though two firefighters were injured fighting the blaze. The renters haven’t come forward.”

  “And the house was rented to Ivy? Do we have a last name yet?”

  “The owners don’t know-they use a property management company.”

  “And?”

  “And no one has talked to them yet. The fire started before dawn Tuesday morning, the owners were contacted later that day. By this morning, it got buried under eight more investigations. They’re sending me a copy of the file.”

  They walked around the property, but found nothing of interest. Everything inside the house had been destroyed by fire or water from the fire suppression. There seemed to be little left. Lucy wasn’t an expert on fires, but this one must have burned hot and fast.

  “Was there any accelerant?” she asked.

  “That’s inconclusive as well-they’re awaiting lab results.”

  “It’s highly suspicious that the house where two of our victims lived was burned down this week,” Lucy said.

  “You’re thinking that the killer tried to take care of all of them at once.”

  “But they got out-or maybe they weren’t here.”

  “Then why burn it down?” Genie asked. “As a warning?”

  “We should talk to the neighbors.”

  “I’ll take left and right, you go across the street,” Genie said.

  The first house Lucy approached was a white, two-story, clapboard-style home with an inviting covered porch. She knocked and an elderly woman answered the door. After identifying herself, she learned that Mrs. Patricia Neel was a retired federal employee. She was shriveled with age, but had all her faculties.

  Lucy said, “I’m looking for the young women who lived in the house.” She gestured toward the remains across the street.

  “A tragedy,” Mrs. Neel said. “What happened?”

  “The arson investigator is looking into it, but we think they may be in danger. They haven’t come forward since the fire.”

  “Of course they’re in danger, their house burned down. That was no accident.”

  “You know for a fact it wasn’t an accident?”

  “I didn’t see anyone toss a match on the place, if that’s what you mean. But houses just don’t burn down like that. There was an explosion, everyone on the street heard it, and my hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Just after four in the morning, it woke me up and I looked at my clock. It wasn’t a big explosion, and I think there were two, and I heard the second. You know how that is, where you think you hear something, but aren’t quite sure. I thought they all died in the house.”

  “The fire department said there were no fatalities.”

  “I know, but it burned so fast, and when I went out on the street I didn’t see any of the girls. I told the fire chief the same thing, and they inspected the building, didn’t find anyone inside.”

  The girls had to have been at the fire-the CSU had found clothing that reeked of smoke. Maybe they had some kind of a warning and got out quickly. Or they had been involved. But why would Ivy or any of the other girls burn down a rental house?

  Unless they wanted someone to think they were dead.

  “Do you know the girls?”

  “Some of them. They’re very quiet, keep to themselves. But I went over there a couple of times-kept my eye on the place, you know. Karen Schwartz-she and her husband moved to Florida when they retired-asked me to let her know if there were any problems. They were good girls. All in college. Except for Mina.”

  College? “Who’s Mina?”

  “Sweetest girl. Very sad, though. Her sister was upset she kept coming over here to talk to me, but Mina was lonely, and with her sister and the other girls taking night classes, she was scared being alone in the house. She’d come over for tea after dinner and we’d chat or watch television. Nothing important-she was very quiet, just liked company.”

  “Do you know her sister?”

  “Ivy.”

  “Does Ivy have a last name?”

  “Hmm, Harris, I think.” Lucy made a note, and Mrs. Neel continued. “After the second or third time Ivy found Mina here, she told me that their parents were killed in an accident, and she was taking care of Mina, but that she worried that social services would separate them because Ivy was only eighteen. At least she was eighteen then. It’s been nearly two years. I told her as long as Ivy was as responsible as she seemed, there didn’t seem to be any reason to notify
anyone. Mina loved her sister. I think they had a very rough childhood.”

  “Do you know how old she was?”

  “Oh, I don’t know-she’s been here for nearly two years, I think she was thirteen when they moved in. Beautiful young woman. Ivy agreed to let Mina visit me when she wanted, but I haven’t seen them much the last few weeks.”

  “How many girls were living there?”

  “They came and went, no more than eight, I don’t think. I didn’t keep tabs on them. They probably had changes in roommates with each semester.”

  Lucy wondered whether that was true or not, or if Mrs. Neel didn’t want to seem to be a busybody.

  “They probably liked that someone in the neighborhood was looking out for them, especially if they were from out of the area and not familiar with DC.”

  Mrs. Neel smiled. “I try. I love this little street.”

  “Do you know how many girls lived in the house right before the fire?”

  “Six or seven.” She thought. “Ivy, Mina, I didn’t know the others. There was a new girl-young, I couldn’t imagine she was in college, but my eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  “New girl? How new?”

  Mrs. Neel closed her eyes, counted silently, her lips moving. “About a week before the fire. It was a Wednesday, garbage day, and I had forgotten to take mine out. I got up early, and couldn’t go back to sleep. Saw a car drive up, a girl and a man get out. I assume her father. They went in, and a while later the man drove off.”

  Mrs. Neel sat down on the porch swing. “Please excuse me, I’m getting old.” She sighed as she relaxed. “They really kept to themselves, and I don’t think Ivy would have spoken to me if her sister hadn’t wanted to visit. It must have been hard on them, but I’ll admit, I liked seeing how they looked out for each other. Families get torn apart these days, living everywhere around the world. I have three children, all of them more than a day’s drive!” She shook her head.

  Lucy took a chance. She pulled Jocelyn’s driver’s license photo on her phone and said, “Have you seen this woman around lately?”