Molly squirmed into my lap, and I wrapped an arm around her. The intruder’s knife might not have broken the skin, but not all wounds bled.
“And my wife,” I added. “She might have had one with her when she disappeared.”
I wanted to tell him about the kidnappers. They certainly could have gotten their hands on her key. But even with the memory of the knife at Molly’s throat still vivid in my mind, I couldn’t risk telling him.
Just then I heard a car door slam out front. I got up and looked out the window to see who it was.
Hannah Montgomery was walking toward the house. Thankfully, Dallas wasn’t with her.
With Molly shadowing me, I went to the door to let her in. Dickey followed us.
“I heard there was an intruder,” she said.
She’d addressed me, but Dickey answered. “Call came in at”—he checked his notes—“at 15:06.” He filled her in on what had transpired, more or less repeating what I’d told him.
Detective Montgomery looked at me again. “Anything else?”
“That’s it. The whole thing probably lasted only a couple of minutes, although it seemed to go on forever.”
“It must have been terrifying.” She turned to Dickey. “Did you dust for prints?”
“Where am I going to dust? We don’t know where he got in.”
“I think he was wearing gloves,” I told them.
“Do the doors, just to be sure,” she said. “Even if he had gloves, he might not have put them on until after he was inside.”
Dickey went to his patrol car to get his equipment. Detective Montgomery asked me to repeat, in my own words, what had happened.
“It has be related to Maureen’s disappearance,” I said when I’d finished running through the events a second time.
“What makes you say that?”
It seemed obvious to me. “We lead a simple, low-key life, then suddenly my wife is ... missing, and a couple of days later an intruder breaks into the house. And not your common house thief either, but a masked man with a knife. Doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me.”
She nodded but didn’t voice agreement. “This Eric he mentioned—you’re sure the name doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“I’m sure.” Suddenly I saw a ray of hope and grabbed at it. “You think maybe it could be a mistake? Like he got the wrong house or something?”
“I suppose it’s possible, though not likely.” She turned to Molly, who was still cowering at my side. “You okay, honey?”
Molly gave a silent nod.
“You must have been very frightened,” the detective said. “I know I would have been. But the man is gone now. You understand that, don’t you?”
Another nod. Molly’s eyes filled with tears.
Detective Montgomery’s voice grew softer. “Did he hurt you?”
Molly rubbed her throat while shaking her head.
“Tell me what happened.”
“He had a knife,” she said softly. “It was really sharp. He held it right here.” Her hand stopped at a spot just under her chin.
“Can I have a look?”
Molly lifted her chin, and the detective stooped down so that they were at eye level.
I realized then that Dickey had completely ignored Molly. She might as well have been a family pet for all the attention he paid her. Detective Montgomery’s concern raised her several notches in my estimation.
She examined Molly’s neck, tracing a finger along the imaginary line Molly had indicated. The detective’s fingers were long and tapered, with short, rounded nails. No rings. Why I noticed wasn’t clear to me. Rings weren’t generally something that jumped out at me.
“I know it hurt,” she told Molly, “but he didn’t break the skin. You’re going to be fine. And we’re going to find him.”
Dickey returned and began dusting for prints. Detective Montgomery ignored him.
“What did you notice about the man?” she asked Molly.
“His shoes. They were heavy, with thick soles. Like boots.” She was no longer shivering or clinging to me quite as intensely, but she was still breathing hard.
“Anything else?”
“He smoked.”
“You saw him light a cigarette?”
She shook her head. “He smelled like it.”
The detective did a bit of a double take. “That’s good, Molly. You’re very observant.”
“You smoke too. But you’re not as stinky.”
A smile played at the detective’s mouth. “Well, that’s good, I guess. I’m working on quitting, so pretty soon maybe I won’t smell at all.”
Molly pursed her lips. “I didn’t mean you smell bad,” she offered diplomatically.
“How about I make some hot chocolate?” Detective Montgomery suggested. “You have some mix or cocoa powder in the house?” The question was so unexpected it took a moment for the words to register.
I wanted the cops gone. Both of them. But before I opened my mouth to decline, Molly said, “Yes, please.”
“I’m going to need some help,” she said to Molly. “You think you’re up to it?”
Molly nodded and left my side to get the cocoa from the cupboard.
With Molly helping her to find supplies, the detective busied herself with heating milk and measuring chocolate. “Do you think your wife knows Eric?” she asked me over her shoulder.
I was sure the intruder, and therefore Eric, were somehow connected to Maureen’s kidnapping. It was all I could do to keep from telling the detective about the ransom call. But I wanted Maureen home. I wanted her safe. I didn’t want to mess this up.
“She never mentioned him,” I said.
“Does she have a PDA or personal address book?”
“Our address book is the old-fashioned paper kind. The two of us share it.”
“What about e-mail?”
“We share an account there too.” I thought of the contact for Redhotsugarbear in our address book and wished there weren’t so many things I was afraid to mention.
Detective Montgomery opened the cupboard and took out three mugs. “Shall we take a look?”
So all this nice behavior on her part was nothing more than an end run around the warrant. “I’ll check it out later,” I told her. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
She gave me a hard look. “I’m interested in finding your wife, Dr. Russell. I should think you would be too.”
“I am and you kn—”
She leaned close so Molly couldn’t hear her. She did smell of cigarettes, but she smelled of apricots too. A very nice smell.
“If you’re hiding anything,” she whispered fiercely, “we’ll find it eventually.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.” She sounded like she meant it.
She dumped the hot milk and cocoa into the blender and frothed it, then poured it into the mugs. “Do you like cinnamon in yours?” she asked Molly.
“I’ve never had it that way.”
“It’s good.” She found ground cinnamon in the cupboard, sprinkled some into all three mugs, then set one in front of Molly and handed me another. “You look like you could use this,” she told me.
I felt momentarily dizzy and took a breath. The ransom call, my blackout, the dinner reservation we’d failed to make, the single shoe in my trunk. I was hiding so much, I was afraid the truth would spill out of its own accord.
“How long have you been in Monte Vista?” I asked suddenly. Anything to turn the focus away from Maureen’s disappearance. And myself.
“A little over a year. I was in LA before that.” She moved to the sink and began washing the pot. “You’ve been back how long?”
“Almost four years.”
“And you were in Boston before. That’s where—” She looked at Molly and stopped. Our eyes met.
Where I’d stood trial for the murder of my first wife. I was sure that’s what she’d started to say. I appreciated her not pursuing the matter in front of Molly.
“I w
as born in Boston,” Molly said, wiping the milk mustache from her lip. “We moved because my mother died and we couldn’t live with the sad memories.”
Words from my mouth to hers. I dreaded the day I would have to give her a fuller explanation.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the detective said and didn’t push the matter. Again, I was grateful to her.
“I’m finished here, ” Dickey said, brushing the knees of his trousers where he’d been kneeling while dusting for prints.
“Did you get anything?” Detective Montgomery asked.
“Some partials. No saying they came from the intruder though.”
“Call me as soon as you’ve got them run.” She turned to me. “Might be smart to have your locks changed.”
I nodded. “I’m planning to.”
We walked toward the door. The detective gave me an appraising look. “You haven’t asked me if there’ve been any new developments in your wife’s disappearance.”
“Have there been?”
She pinned me with her gaze. “We’re pursuing every lead.”
It was, I thought, an oddly oblique response. But I focused on the fact that if all went according to plan, Maureen would soon be home safely.
CHAPTER 17
Hannah found Dallas in the break room, pouring creamer into his coffee. “There was an intruder at the Russell house this afternoon,” she told him. “A man in a ski mask.”
Dallas looked up. “What?”
She gave him the details she’d gleaned from her interview with Sam and Molly. “Joel Dickey took the call. He’ll get us a copy of the report.”
“Anything taken?” Dallas had slopped coffee from his mug onto the counter and hadn’t even made a swipe at wiping it up. No wonder the place was always a mess.
“It doesn’t appear that way,” Hannah said. “Sounds more like he was making some sort of threat.”
Dallas frowned. “Nothing taken, no sign of forced entry. All we’ve got is Sam’s word that it happened.”
“Come on. You can’t be suggesting he made the whole thing up.”
Dallas leaned against the counter and took a gulp of coffee. “What’s so far-fetched about that?”
“The daughter was pretty upset, for one thing.” Hannah had wanted to fold the girl in her arms. She picked up a cup, eyed the sludge at the bottom of the coffee pot, and poured herself water instead. “The daughter was the one who noticed the guy’s shoes and that he smelled of cigarettes. I doubt Sam would enlist her as a co-conspirator.”
“It wouldn’t be hard for him to have a friend play the part.”
“But why—”
“No one was hurt, right?”
“Not hurt, no.” But Molly had been traumatized. Would a father use his own child in that way? Some fathers, no doubt about it. But Sam? Hannah had trouble wrapping her mind around that one.
“What about this Eric?” she asked as they wended their way back to their desks. She nodded to Carla in passing and got only a stony glare in return. “Sam claims he doesn’t know any Eric.”
“That’s another reason the whole thing raises red flags,” Dallas said. “Sam’s probably hoping we’ll go off on some wild-goose chase instead of staying focused on him.”
“It’s Maureen Russell we should be focusing on,” she pointed out.
He dismissed the distinction with a sweep of his hand. “One and the same.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Dallas looked at her over the top of his coffee mug. He offered a smug smile and slid a sheet of paper onto her desk. “This came in through the tip line.”
He’d been following up on the calls that had come in. They were pitifully few in number, and it was clear right off the bat that most of them weren’t going to lead anywhere. But they needed to follow up on all of them. Too often, the one that was overlooked turned out to be critical.
“Guy runs a flower stand along the highway,” Dallas said. “He says he thinks Sam stopped by Sunday morning and bought a bouquet.”
Hannah couldn’t find much sinister in that. “I saw a vase of tulips on the table Sunday evening. It was their anniversary.”
“Saturday was their anniversary, not Sunday,” Dallas pointed out. “He says Sam was acting antsy, and his appearance was disheveled. He also remembers seeing what could have been a spot of blood on Sam’s shirt.”
Doctors and blood kind of went hand in hand. “So Sam stopped to pick up flowers on his way home from the hospital,” she said, flipping through message slips on her desk. Maybe he hadn’t thought to get flowers on Saturday.
Dallas leaned across the desk. “The flower stand is on the other side of town from the hospital.”
She looked up, messages forgotten. “Not on his way home, in other words.”
“Not even close.”
Hannah felt a prickle of irritation. She wanted to believe Sam had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance, but he was making it damn difficult. “Why would Sam buy flowers for his wife if he’d just killed her?” she asked after a moment.
“Maybe it was another thing to throw us off, like the supposed intruder this afternoon. Anyway, it undermines his story about spending the morning at the hospital. Where, I don’t need to remind you, we have yet to find a single soul who remembers seeing him.”
Hannah’s perspective on hospitals was different than Dallas’s. He hadn’t been inside one since the day he was born, except on police business. Hannah, on the other hand, had spent way too much time in hospitals, both as patient and visitor. She knew that faces blurred and days blurred and that you might know you’d seen someone and not be able to say for certain whether or not it was on a particular day.
“The fact that no one remembers seeing him doesn’t mean he wasn’t there,” she pointed out once again.
“Sam lied to us, Hannah. And here’s something else. Sam and Maureen were no-shows at the restaurant Saturday night.”
“Didn’t even call to cancel?”
“Right.”
It might not mean anything, Hannah reasoned. Maybe they’d decided on a romantic evening at home. Or indulged in frenzied afternoon sex that left them exhausted. Or maybe Hannah was just looking for excuses because she didn’t want Sam to be involved. And that annoyed her as much as his fishy behavior.
Dallas drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I say we bring him in for questioning.”
She looked up. “Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “I guess we should.”
Discrepancies usually fueled Hannah’s optimism about a case. They were like chinks in a wall that could be worried and picked at until the entire structure crumbled. Sometimes inconsistencies were all cops had to work with. But instead of excitement, what Hannah felt this time was a dim ember of disappointment.
Dallas stood. “Let’s go then.”
She hesitated. “Sam’s upset about the break-in. The little girl’s upset. Talking to him now wouldn’t be productive.”
“All the better if he’s upset.”
On this point, Hannah felt strongly. It was better to wait. She looked at her watch. “You going to put in for overtime,” she asked Dallas, “or do it on your own time?”
“You are such a pain in the butt sometimes,” Dallas said, but he said it with a smile. “Tomorrow it is.”
Hannah parked her Camry in the gravel driveway, grabbed the mail from the box, and went inside. Despite the new coat of paint, the cottage still had the musty smell of age she’d noticed when she first looked at the place. It had been dark and dim then. The previous tenant kept the drapes pulled and the house closed up tight. But Hannah liked the setting with its southern exposure and sunny patio, and the rent was right. The landlord had painted and put in fresh carpeting, and Hannah had pulled down the draperies—there were no neighbors close enough to see in anyway.
Now the house had a nice, light feel to it. And also the stark bareness of someone yet to fully move in. She had the necessities: bed, dresser, table, and couch, all new. She’d sold
her old furniture in Los Angeles along with the house. Most of her boxes, however, were still stacked along the wall of the spare bedroom. Initially, she’d put off unpacking until the painting and cleaning were done. Then she’d gotten busy, first with a rape case and after that a string of residential burglaries. Now she wondered if it wouldn’t be wiser to simply leave the boxes where they were. If she wasn’t going to stay in Monte Vista, she’d only have to pack everything up again.
Hannah dumped the mail on the kitchen counter.
“Yes, yes, I know you’re there.” She addressed her comment to the tabby cat circling at her feet then put out food and fresh water for him.
He’d come with the house. Not that taking on the cat had been part of the rental agreement. But he was there. The landlord thought the animal probably belonged to the prior tenant but took no responsibility for getting rid of the creature. What else was she to do but feed it? She hadn’t, however, got around to naming it.
She checked her phone messages. One wrong number—didn’t people ever listen to the announcement that gave her name?—and a message from her mother. Hannah’s niece, Melissa, Claire’s daughter, would be celebrating her sixth birthday in a month. It would be really nice, her mother said, if Hannah would make an effort to come to the party.
She felt a pang of regret. In cutting Claire from her life, Hannah had lost Melissa too. And Melissa was the closest thing Hannah had—would probably ever have—to a child of her own.
But even that couldn’t make her forgive Claire.
Hannah flicked on the television, hoping to catch the local news, and noted with smug satisfaction that it was half an hour past her permitted smoking break. A real milestone.
But only a very small one because as soon as she thought of the cigarette, she was overcome with the urge to smoke. As soon as she lit up, she felt the tension ease from her body. Times like this she wondered why she’d ever decided to quit.
The lead story involved a tragic drowning in the river. A young child who’d wandered in too deep and been caught up in the current. It was followed by a story about a big-rig accident that closed the Interstate and another about a wildfire near Placerville. Nothing more about Maureen Russell. Not that Hannah was surprised. Without some newsworthy twist, it was rare that a missing adult generated extensive public interest.
The Only Suspect Page 12
