South Of Hell lk-9

by P J Parrish

  “Where does Amy stay until then?” Louis asked. “If Brandt even suspects she’s remembering things, she’ll need to be protected.”

  “Fells knew that,” Shockey said. “Amy understood it, too. Fells told her she had two choices. She could stay in the juvenile jail, or he could order a cruiser to sit outside her new foster home twenty-four hours a day.”

  “What did Amy choose?”

  Shockey smiled. “It was the damndest thing I ever saw,” he said. “The kid stood up and said, ‘How come I can’t stay with Miss Frye? She can protect me. She has a gun.’ So the judge turned to Joe and said, ‘What about that, Sheriff Frye?’”

  “What’d Joe say?”

  Shockey laughed softly. “You should’ve seen her face, but I could tell she couldn’t say no to that girl. Joe said she’d stay until the next court date. Now all I gotta do is get the department to pick up the hotel tab, and we’re all set, at least for ten days.”

  The doors opened again. Joe and Amy came out. Amy was talking to her, excited about something, but he could tell Joe wasn’t listening. Her mind was three hundred miles away, in Echo Bay.

  “Look, guys,” Joe said. “I have got to call Mike. I don’t know how I’m going to explain this. Amy, would you stay here with Detective Shockey for me? For five minutes?”

  “Are you coming back?” Amy asked.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “You’ll be fine with Detective Shockey. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Joe hurried off to find a pay phone. Amy pushed her hair from her eyes and wandered to the bench to sit down. There was a woman sitting farther down the hall, nursing a baby. The woman’s breast and the baby’s face were covered with a cloth diaper, but still Amy watched them, fascinated.

  Shockey looked at his watch. “I gotta go. I have a meeting with my lieutenant at eleven. I have to bring him up to date on this stuff.”

  Louis looked at Amy. “Go ahead. We’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Shockey went over to Amy and explained to her that he had to go, then gestured to Louis. She gave him a small nod and watched him until he disappeared out the glass doors. Then she glanced around, probably looking for Joe. When she didn’t see her, her eyes came to Louis.

  He walked to her slowly. She watched him, but to his surprise, she didn’t look as if she was going to run. He sat down next to her and reached into his jacket pocket. Her eyes followed his every move, showing nothing but wariness until he withdrew the locket and held it out to her.

  “I’d like to give you this,” he said.

  Amy stared at it. “That belongs to her,” she said.

  “No,” Louis said. “It’s for you.”

  Amy picked it from his palm and opened it. “There’s nothing in it,” she said.

  “You can put anything inside you want.”

  Amy closed the locket and looked up. Her expression was no longer one of fear but of curiosity. She was staring at him so intensely that Louis had trouble sitting still.

  Behind him, he heard the familiar clip of Joe’s boots on the tile floor. Amy hid the locket quickly in her back pocket.

  “Where’s Jake?” Joe asked.

  “Went to report in.”

  Joe’s eyes went from Louis to Amy. “You guys ready?” she asked.

  Amy rose and walked to Joe. She wanted to take Joe’s hand, but Joe pulled gently away from her and started to the door. Louis rose to follow but stopped partway across the lobby, catching sight of an Ann Arbor uniform. Then he saw the face and the bald brown head of Sergeant Eric Channing.

  Channing came forward. “You got a minute, Kincaid?” he asked.

  Joe heard Channing’s voice, and she and Amy paused at the door and looked back. Louis waved them on.

  “You guys go ahead,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

  Channing waited for them to leave. He drew a hand from his pocket and gestured to the bench. “Have a seat.”

  “I’ll stand, thank you.”

  “Sit down. Please.”

  Louis dropped to the bench. Channing glanced to the doors, then down the hall, and finally took a place next to Louis. Louis braced himself, not wanting another confrontation. But if this was going to be another warning, Channing was approaching it far differently from the first time. His expression was not that of a combatant but of a man who needed something.

  “I told you I’d be watching you, and I have,” Channing said.

  “Look-”

  “Be quiet,” Channing said. “Let me have my say here. That girl you were talking to just now, is she the one I’ve been hearing about around the station? The strange one you and Shockey found at that farmhouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Word is you’ve fought like hell to keep her out of the system and convinced your girlfriend to take care of her.”

  “What’s that have to do with you?”

  “Just answer the question,” Channing said. “That true?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “I was standing over there, watching you a few minutes ago with her,” Channing said. “You surprise me, Kincaid. You handled that pretty good.”

  “What do you want from me, Channing?”

  “Five more minutes.”

  Louis shook his head and leaned on his knees. There was a trio of lawyers coming toward them, and Channing waited until they had passed before he spoke.

  “I have something to show you,” Channing said.

  Channing reached into his back pocket and withdrew a worn brown wallet. He opened it and flipped through the plastic sleeves. When he found the photograph he wanted, he held the wallet open to Louis. Louis took it and looked down at the picture.

  Her hair was a puff of cascading ringlets, light brown with streaks of gold, as if the sun had lightened them. Her small face was the color of caramels. Her lips were pink and full like Kyla’s. Her eyes were gray and somber — like his own.

  “Her name is Lily,” Channing said. “She’s eight years old, and she’s yours.”

  Louis stared at the picture, everything numb but the hard pounding of his heart.

  “Kyla lied to you, but she was only trying to protect Lily,” Channing said. “Don’t hate her for that.”

  Louis finally pulled his gaze up and looked at Channing. “What changed her mind?” he asked.

  “Kyla didn’t change her mind,” Channing said. “If she had her way, you would’ve left here and never known. It was my decision to come here and tell you. When I leave, I’m going to go home and tell her what I’ve done.”

  Louis looked back at the photograph. It was a long time before he was able to bring his gaze back up to Channing. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you jeopardize your marriage to tell me this?”

  Channing let out a breath. “About a year ago, Lily started asking questions about her real father. Kyla and I gave her the standard stuff about how some parents aren’t grown up enough to be parents, and eventually, mostly because she could see how much it bothered her mother, she stopped asking.”

  Louis was staring at the photograph again.

  “But I know she hasn’t stopped wondering,” Channing said. “Kids who don’t know their fathers never stop wondering. And things like that leave a hole in a little girl’s heart. And I love Lily enough to admit it’s a hole I can’t fill.”

  Channing rose and held out his hand for the wallet. Louis stood up and looked down again at the photograph of Lily, reluctant to let her go.

  “Can I see her?” Louis asked.

  “I figured you’d ask that,” Channing said. “I would’ve been real disappointed in you if you hadn’t.”

  “But I don’t want to make a mess of it,” Louis said. “And I don’t want to make things harder on you and Kyla.”

  “I appreciate that,” Channing said. “But I’ll handle Kyla. You just…”

  His voice broke, and he cleared his throat.

  “You
just sit tight and let me find the right time and place. I’ll get back to you, okay?”

  Louis gave Channing the wallet. It took him a moment to find his voice, another moment to find any words.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  They had driven less than a mile when Louis asked Joe to pull over. He needed a quiet, empty space for this conversation. When he saw the Law Quad, with its open courtyard, he decided it was as close to a park as he would get.

  Joe didn’t ask why they were stopping. She didn’t question him when he led Amy to another bench about fifteen feet away and asked her to sit there and read her book. And Joe didn’t say a word as he sat down next to her and let almost a full minute pass before he pulled his eyes from the stained-glass windows of the Law Library and met hers.

  “I have a daughter,” Louis said. “Her name is Lily.”

  Joe stared at him, not in shock at the news but in a tenuous kind of control.

  “Channing seemed to feel that no matter what Kyla thought, it would be better for Lily if she knew about me.”

  “Kyla doesn’t know he told you?” Joe asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think that’s rather unfair of you two?”

  Louis hadn’t thought about that, and Joe was probably right. But whatever had compelled Channing to tell Louis, it did not change what needed to happen now.

  “How do you feel about this, Louis?” Joe asked.

  “I’m…”

  He paused.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I only know that when I looked at her picture, I wanted to know her. And I was glad she exists.”

  “Why? Does it ease your guilt?”

  He heard something in Joe’s voice that gave an edge to the question.

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t ease anything. Like I said, I just want…”

  “Her forgiveness?”

  He didn’t like that question, either. “Joe, I’m trying to share something with you here,” he said. “I don’t need you to heap more shit on me over this.”

  Joe turned away, her shoulders stiff, her sharp profile even sharper with the tight set of her lips. He looked beyond her to Amy. She was examining the locket, opening it and closing it.

  “Why do I have to know exactly how I feel about this right now?” he asked.

  “Because you’re about to turn a little girl’s life — and her mother’s — upside down,” Joe said. “You can’t walk into that not knowing if you have what it takes to see it through.”

  “I understand that once I walk in, I can’t walk back out. I know that.”

  Joe met his eyes. “You walked out once.”

  “I was twenty and scared to death.”

  “And you’re not scared now?” Joe asked.

  He pushed off the bench and stepped away from her. Then he stopped, knowing he was doing the one thing he just said he wouldn’t do, walking away when it got tough. And this was only a conversation with the woman he loved. If he couldn’t answer her questions, how was he going to answer Lily’s?

  He turned to face Joe. “Of course I’m scared.”

  Joe’s expression softened.

  “But now that Channing has opened the door, for me not even to acknowledge her existence would be worse for her than if she met me and hated me.”

  Joe nodded.

  He had never told her much about his own father, Jordan Kincaid, just the fact that the man had left long before Louis had a notion of what a father was. Maybe this would somehow help her understood why he had never talked about him. But still, as Louis watched Joe now, she seemed to be struggling to summon the emotional support she knew was expected.

  “I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time,” she said softly. “I only wanted to offer an objective perspective. There are a lot of emotions at stake here, and sometimes we can’t see through our own.”

  “I know.”

  She looked over to Amy. “We’d better get going,” she said. “We’re going to be late to meet Shockey.”

  Louis nodded and walked to Amy. She had the locket in her lap, pushing something into the heart-shaped space. He thought for a moment that maybe she had found a small picture somewhere or ripped one from a magazine. But it wasn’t a photo she was placing in the locket; it was strands of what looked like her own hair.

  She closed the locket quickly as he neared. “Is it time to go see Detective Shockey?” she asked.

  “Yes. Are you ready?”

  Amy stood up, hid the locket in her back pocket, and followed him and Joe back to the Bronco.

  They met Shockey in a downtown cafe. All of the tables inside were full, and they were forced to sit outside under an umbrella that did little to protect them from the cool breeze and the cloudy skies.

  Louis turned up the collar of his jacket and watched Amy. She wore a hooded UM sweatshirt. The hood was down, and her cheeks were pink, but she didn’t seem cold. She seemed to like being outside, interested in the bustle of students and traffic around her, and he found himself again wondering how isolated her life must have been in Hudson with only a sick aunt for company.

  Joe ordered Cokes for herself and Amy. Shockey ordered a beer, and Louis asked for a club soda.

  “This is the deal,” Shockey said, leaning over the table. “My boss says we can’t get any judge to sign a search warrant for the barn based on Amy’s dream.”

  “We knew that,” Joe said.

  “So I called the Livingston County tax assessor this morning,” Shockey said. “Brandt’s farm is in tax foreclosure. It’ll go up for auction in less than two months.”

  “So?” Joe asked. “Until it does, it still belongs to him.”

  “Yeah, but it helps,” Shockey said. “My boss thinks between that and the fact that Brandt hasn’t lived there for nine years, we can make a good case to search the farm on the premise that Brandt abandoned it and forfeited his rights to consent.”

  “Abandonment takes ten years in this state,” Joe said.

  “But we’ve also got the fact that Amy was living there, and that makes her a legal resident. She can give us permission.”

  They all looked at Amy. She was listening intently.

  “Amy’s consent might hold up to cover the day we found her there,” Joe said. “She was the only occupant at the time, and we had no reason to believe Brandt was even in the state. But now that he threw us off the property, her consent for a new search means nothing.”

  “Brandt’s the one who said it’s her home, too, Joe,” Louis said.

  “Even if they had been living there together for the last ten years, she’s a minor,” Joe said. “She can’t give consent over the adult owner’s objection.”

  “Yeah, but all that would be fought out months from now by the lawyers,” Shockey said. “Right now, Brandt wouldn’t know what his rights were or what the abandonment laws say.”

  “Do they have pizza here?” Amy asked.

  “No,” Joe said. “Here, look at the menu. Pick something else.”

  Amy took the oversized laminated menu and stared at it. Louis watched her. He knew she could read, and there were plenty of pictures, but still she seemed upset.

  “So,” Joe said, “you’re going to lie to Brandt and do an illegal search and hope his lawyer isn’t smart enough to figure it out six months down the road?”

  “The place won’t even belong to him six months down the road,” Shockey said.

  “Then why not wait until it goes up for auction and then ask the new owners for permission to search it?” Joe asked.

  “And what if Brandt somehow pays the taxes?” Shockey asked. “And even if he doesn’t, what happens to Amy? If we don’t find something to put Brandt back in jail, he’ll get custody of her.”

  “Miss Joe…” Amy said.

  “No judge is going to give this girl back to an abusive ex-con who can’t even support her,” Joe said.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Louis said.

/>   “Miss Joe…” Amy said.

  “Besides,” Joe said to Shockey, “what makes you think she’s even strong enough to take you back out there and show you where she thinks…” Joe glanced at Amy and lowered her voice. “Do you have any idea what that could do to her?”

  “She doesn’t actually have to go with us,” Shockey said. “She can tell us where to look.”

  “She’ll have to go through another session with Dr. Sher for that,” Joe said. “That’s not easy for her, and she might never remember any more than she already has. Then what are you going to do? Dig up the whole barn floor?”

  “Yeah, maybe we will.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” Joe said. “You and Judge Fells just appointed me Amy’s guardian for ten days. Whether she is allowed to undergo more hypnosis or visit that farm is totally up to me. And I won’t give my permission.”

  Louis and Shockey stared at Joe.

  “Miss Joe…”

  Joe finally heard Amy and looked to her. “What is it, Amy?”

  “I don’t see any of the things on my list on here,” she said.

  “This is a new list,” she said. “The whole menu is a list. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Joe sat back and crossed her arms. She was staring at something across the street. Amy lowered her menu. The soft brown eyes moved from Joe to Louis to Shockey and back to Joe. Louis watched her. Like all kids, she didn’t need to understand the argument to feel the tension.

  And he knew Joe was right. At this moment, Amy was a happy young girl, nothing like she had appeared in the cupboard at the farm. He couldn’t ask her to go back there, not in person and not in her dreams.

  Amy caught his eye. “I know you’re fighting over my mother,” she said. “You think she’s dead, and you think that’s what my dream was about.”

  “Amy, we’re sorry-” Joe started.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Amy said. “I know in my heart my mother’s dead, or she would have come back for me. But I’m not afraid to go look for her.”