Like there was anything else he could do. He kicked off the shoes and sat in one of the chairs for a moment. He was astonished that he still felt a bit disoriented, as if the world was not in complete sync with his head.
Memory of the attack still had not returned, although he’d had several violent dreams in which he faced a vicious confrontation. Unlike the first dream, there had been no spinning rooms, and he hadn’t felt fear or panic in the dreamed fights. In fact, he’d been so calm that he’d almost felt numb. Peaceful, as if he knew the outcome. He’d dreamed of Lindsey only once, a faraway figure caught in a storm.
Jeff stood up. He needed a plan for the day, especially if he was going to be deskbound. Solving most cases usually involved a lot of pure detective work anyway, lots of phone calls, online searches and interviews. But he needed a methodical plan.
He pulled his clothes from the closet and dressed, taking care not to catch his shirt on the IV still taped securely inside his elbow. Then he found a notepad and a pen in a drawer. First on the agenda would be to get those replacement part numbers from Troy, who had readily agreed to help him with the vendors, if it came to that. Those he could research online, find probable vendors. If he or Troy could get shipping addresses from them, he might come closer to finding the owner of that car.
A tap on the door, followed by a gruff, “Gage, you up?” announced Ray Taylor’s arrival. When Jeff told him the plan for the day, Ray nodded. “That could take most of the day. When did you plan to interview Lindsey again?”
Jeff hesitated. “I hadn’t planned to.”
Ray’s eyebrows arched in question.
“I thought it might be better if you did the second interview.”
The eyebrows didn’t move.
“I thought you might be more...objective. I’ve clearly made some errors on this case that may be emotionally based.”
Ray just waited.
Jeff cleared his throat. “Some of the mistakes I’ve made seem to be because I’ve focused more on Lindsey than on the events and facts of the case. She and I even talked about it yesterday. We agreed that we both needed to focus more on the case, so it would probably be better for her if you took over any further interviews with her.”
“Better for her.”
Jeff straightened. “And for the case. Better for the case, of course.”
“Hmm.”
“I can stick with the forensics. The research—that’s what I’m best at.”
Ray’s cell phone buzzed on his hip. He pulled it out and glanced at it. “That’s the fourth one today so far.” He replaced it. “You probably have just as many.”
“What? Messages?”
Ray nodded. “From Lindsey. Apparently your cell phone is off. A fact she informed me of about five o’clock in the morning. And every hour since.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Probably not, or Daniel would have notified me. Her last message mentioned that she’d found out some things about Karen.”
“What?”
“Guess I’ll find out when I interview her.”
Jeff’s eyes narrowed. “Cruel, boss.”
Ray barely cracked a smile. “Your call. You about ready to get out of here?”
“Waiting for a nurse to remove the IV.”
“I’ll go see if I can speed up the process any. In the meantime, think about the last time you ran away from something you needed to learn. How’d that turn out?”
Ray strode out, leaving Jeff annoyed and more than a bit confused. What kind of question was that? I wish he wouldn’t do that.
But the challenge was on the table. What else had he run away from? Jeff racked his brain, going over times in the past when they’d come up against something in a case for which no one on the team had the know-how. Jeff, by nature a puzzle solver, was the one who usually dug in and found what was needed or learned some new skill. It’s why he had wound up the sole forensic tech in the sheriff’s department.
Thanks for trying to make me feel even worse, boss. You know I don’t ever run from...
Oh. Lindsey.
“I really hate it when you do that,” Jeff muttered to the empty room.
Twenty minutes later, they left the hospital and headed for the station, where Lindsey waited, printouts in hand.
* * *
“His name is Todd Lawson. Karen’s husband.” Lindsey stood at one end of the conference-room table and handed duplicate printouts to Ray and Jeff. “Aunt Suke remembered the case, so it gave me a place to start.” She pointed to the copy of Catcher in the Rye, which lay on the table between the two men. “That confirms that June was correct about the book being a message. The name of Karen Lawson’s teenage son inside the front cover connects it to the Lawson family and the GTO. If that is, in fact, the book I carried around, it probably means that my father had an affair with Karen Lawson.” She paused, swallowing hard. “One of my father’s strangest cruelties was to take me along when he was sleeping around, just to torment my mother.
“See, it’s all starting to make a weird kind of sense.” Lindsey tried to keep the excitement out of her voice, without much success, as she summarized what she and Aunt Suke had found in the wee hours of the morning. “Todd Lawson has been missing since the mid-1990s. Disappeared sometime after his wife and daughter did. When those bones turned up and it was determined they belonged to Karen and Sasha Lawson, the police reopened her case as a possible homicide, even though there wasn’t enough evidence with the remains to indicate murder. He and his two sons had already moved to Mexico. He claimed it was to escape the publicity about Karen’s disappearance. The police went down to interview him, but he and the boys were gone, along with a truck and most of their cash.”
“Never found?” Jeff asked.
Lindsey shook her head. “The Nashville police still consider it an open case, but a cold one. They don’t expect to solve it unless new evidence turns up. If you read between the lines, most people think Todd did it.”
Jeff kept taking notes, not looking up even as he asked questions. “Did you talk to anyone on the force?”
Lindsey hesitated. “No. This was all from reports I found online. I thought y’all would have to contact the NPD.”
“We do.” Ray’s clipped words matched his unmoving, military posture.
Lindsey looked from one man to the other, her confidence wavering for the first time. Jeff refused to look at her. Ray never took his eyes off her, but he might as well have been watching a post for all the emotion he revealed. Didn’t they want this info? She took a deep breath and handed each of them another printout of a picture that took up most of the page.
“This is Todd Lawson’s last DMV photo.”
Ray looked at the photo briefly, then added it to his stack. Jeff pulled it closer but barely glanced at it.
Lindsey’s confusion gave way to frustration, and she tapped the table. “Guys, I know it’s old, but if you look closely, you’ll see it looks a lot like the sketch I did. Same bone structure, same creepy blue eyes.”
Jeff picked up the photo, focused on it, then his eyes widened and he sat very still, staring.
“What is it?” Ray asked him.
Jeff muttered something Lindsey couldn’t understand, then stood and went to the other end of the table. “Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Humor me. Close your eyes a minute.”
Lindsey crossed her arms.
“Please.”
Finally, she relented and closed her eyes. When he spoke, Jeff’s voice was even, almost comforting, hypnotic.
“Clear your mind. You’ve been focused on this all night. You’re tired. Think about something else. Aunt Suke. Polly. June at her wedding. Remember? She was beautiful. You were meeting a lot of people from here for the first time. Moving around. Ev
eryone was new to you. Think about all those faces, looking among them for the ones familiar to you. June. April. Ray. Daniel.”
Jeff’s words had the desired effect. Lindsey’s mind drifted back to June’s wedding. It had been a beautiful day, but her hands had been ice cold, she was so nervous. So many new people. The sisters she hadn’t seen in far too many years. Lindsey found her mind wandering among them, the ones she’d known then, the ones she’d gotten to know since.
He fell silent for a few minutes. “Now open your eyes and tell me what you see.”
Lindsey opened her eyes. At the end of the table stood the young man who’d tried to kidnap her. She gasped and stepped backward, fumbling for a chair, falling heavily into it.
Jeff moved the picture from in front of his face. “You see it, don’t you?”
Lindsey fought to catch her breath. “Don’t do that!”
Ray stood, concern etching his face for the first time. “What’s wrong?”
Jeff turned the picture toward his boss, tapping it excitedly. “The guy who attacked Lindsey that first night. The one in the hospital in a coma. He has to be Todd Lawson’s son. Has to be.”
Lindsey felt numb. “Why didn’t I see it?”
Jeff sat down next to her. “Because we haven’t been focusing on the guy in the coma. After all, he was a blank slate. No evidence. No prints in the system. Nothing to look at. We’ve had our minds on the second guy, who was clearly the larger threat. When you looked at this picture, you naturally tried to see in it the outline of the guy you sketched. And you’re right, it’s there. But Todd at this age looks a lot more like the kid in the hospital than the man in the mask.”
Lindsey looked at him, recovering her excitement. “Now what do we do?”
Jeff rubbed his hands together. “First, I’ll call NPD, see if they have anything on the Lawsons that could be tested. Karen and Sasha disappeared before DNA was in wide usage, but NPD has a good rep for the quality of their preserved evidence. They recently solved a murder from the ’70s with DNA extracted from carefully preserved evidence from the scene. I’ll ask the lab to run a familial match on the kid in the coma. They’ll also have the most recent whereabouts on Todd Lawson.”
Lindsey frowned and pointed at the printouts. “These say that he disappeared into Mexico and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Yes, but reporters get tired and move on. Cold case detectives are like snapping turtles. They never let go. Just because it didn’t make the papers doesn’t mean they haven’t known where he’s been.”
“So now we just need to find Todd Lawson.”
Jeff nodded. “Before he finds you.”
* * *
They made the call to Nashville from the speakerphone in the conference room, agreeing that Jeff would do the questioning. Once it started, Detective Mark Bradley let them know right away that they’d hit a sweet spot. He hungered to solve the Lawson murders. Jeff took lots of notes and tried to maintain a professional demeanor. And he could tell the NPD detective, a twenty-five-year veteran of the force, did, as well. But it was hard to fight the idea that this might be the lightning strike that solved one of the highest-profile unsolved murders in Nashville’s history. Harder still with Lindsey hovering over him, leaning against his shoulder as they listened to the detective on the speakerphone.
“Absolutely right. We never stopped tracking the guy.” Detective Bradley took a deep drag on a cigarette and blew out the smoke slowly. The sound was so distinct, Jeff thought he could smell smoke. In the background, Bradley’s car engine idled smoothly. “Todd Lawson is scum, lower than a snake’s belly, even when he was a practicing attorney. Sleaziest of the sleaze. The neighborhood where they lived was known for its domestic abuse calls, and there was more than one visit from the local guys to that address.”
“Any other possibilities for Karen and Sasha’s deaths?” Jeff asked.
“None.” Mark’s voice was firm, but then he paused. “There’s evidence we never released to the press.”
“Anything that you could pull DNA evidence from?” Jeff asked.
Bradley hesitated. “Possibly. You have something to compare it with?”
“Our suspect. The lab already has his DNA.” Jeff paused and cleared his throat. “We think he may be Lawson’s son.”
Bradley muttered a curse under his breath. “We’ve got fairly recent shots of the boys from their place down in Mexico. I’ll pull those, as well. This could be huge. Our current evidence is close but no cigar. Not enough to convict Lawson but enough to rule out the only other suspect we were looking at. Not enough for Mexico to extradite but enough for a judge to give me a standing warrant for his financial records. I pull ’em whenever I have time, at least monthly, just to make sure he’s stayed on the southern side of the border.”
“Recent activity?”
“Nope, but it’s been hinky for a while, so we’ve been watching a little more closely. For the past four months, he’s been pulling larger amounts of cash from his bank accounts, taking out advances on the credit cards. We thought he might be up to something, but had no clues as to what it might be. Then all credit cards, phone records, everything, went silent about three weeks ago. That’s when we figured he’s back in the country.”
“He’s done this before?”
“About once every other year or so. Two years ago we think he met his parents in Laredo for money and some family time. By the time we discovered it, he was back in Mexico. He’s careful, and he does it so seldom that I’ve only recently spotted a pattern in his purchases right before he goes off the grid.”
“He doesn’t get caught at the border?”
“We think he has friends, partners in the illegal-alien underground. A guaranteed way into the country without getting caught, but dangerous. Those thugs sometimes shoot people just for the fun of it. I know a woman who’s here legally, but her brother tried to come over illegally. One of the cartels stopped the bus in the middle of the desert, demanded two grand from everyone on board. Right then. This is after they’d already paid a small fortune for a seat on the bus. If you couldn’t wire it by cell phone or give over the cash, they shot you, left your body for the buzzards. Rough stuff.”
“I’ll say. Any sign Lawson has ever been beyond Texas?”
“A few years ago, there was a sighting in Wichita. Couldn’t confirm it.”
Lindsey stiffened. “Wichita?”
Jeff nodded, remembering the exchanges with June about the GTO car parts. “Any idea what he was doing in Kansas?”
“None. We can’t even confirm he was there.”
“So you have no idea if his trip would have anything to do with car parts.”
Mark Bradley fell silent so long, Jeff thought he’d lost the connection. “Mark?”
“You have to tell me why you asked that.” Bradley’s voice had changed, dropping into a gruff bass level.
Jeff and Lindsey looked at each other, and Jeff took a deep breath. “There’s a classic GTO involved in the crime. A 1968 model. We’re thinking some of the replacement parts might have come from the Wichita area. We haven’t traced them yet, but that’s the direction we’re headed.”
“Title?”
“Scrubbed.”
Bradley let out a long whistle. “I’ll be a—” He broke off. “If I ever get my hands on that...”
“What is it?” Jeff asked.
“Back when he was practicing, Lawson’s main business was getting car thieves off. We figured he also had a side business of cleaning titles, but that’s not easy to prove. For a while, though, we had a lot of cars with salvage titles vanish off the face of the planet. They were supposed to be destroyed, but they had a habit of disappearing from the salvage yard. We baited a few, were able to prove they didn’t go into the crusher, but never could track them after that. There’s a huge m
arket for American cars in Mexico. That’s how he’s making money down there. That slimeball is still at it. You know the topper? Our eyes on his place tell us he has a fleet of classic cars in a barn. Restores them as a hobby, then auctions them off.”
“He’s got to get those parts somewhere.”
The excitement in Bradley’s voice escalated. “You track those parts, Gage. You get us a connection between those parts and Lawson. With that, we’ll have enough to bring him back to stand trial for theft. You’ll have enough to charge him with kidnapping. That’ll give you a chance to tie him to the murders.”
“We’ll do the best we can. Get me that DNA, would you?”
“You got it. Keep me posted.”
Jeff pressed the button to end the connection. Lindsey leaped from her chair with a squeal and threw her arms around Jeff. Jeff’s eyes widened as he awkwardly returned the hug, but she didn’t seem to notice.
She broke away and gave a little happy dance. “Thank You, God! Thank you, Nashville! And thank you, June!”
Ray nodded in agreement. “It does take a village sometimes.”
Jeff shrugged. “Now we just have to catch him. And have enough evidence that something sticks.” He looked at Lindsey. “And we still don’t know why he’s targeted you. Why he wants you dead badly enough to put his life at risk.”
Lindsey’s mood changed suddenly, from giddy to morose. She sank into one of the chairs. “He thinks I saw something that day. The day Karen disappeared...the day she died. I remember during the attack at RuthAnn’s house, he called me a snoopy kid. Said I always had been.”
Ray’s brows furrowed. “So why wait all this time to come after you? Where’s he been?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then fell silent, her gut twisting painfully as she realized where this was headed—somewhere she didn’t want to go. Someplace she hadn’t been in over fifteen years.
“Lindsey?” Jeff prodded. “Let the memories come.”
She shook her head.
“Lindsey?”
Every muscle in her back tensed, an automatic reaction to memories she wanted left buried. Maybe...maybe she could stop before it went all the way....
Memory of Murder Page 14
