The Codebook Murders

by Leslie Nagel

  Carter opened the door and waved her in with a courtly bow and a sardonic smirk. She quashed her fears, lifted her chin, and marched past him. Cool air dried the sweat that coated her body. The door closed with a sharp click, making her jump.

  “I’d leave you an escape route,” he drawled with heavy sarcasm, “but the AC is running. Got to keep those energy bills in check.”

  Moving fast, Carter led her around the ground floor. The circular floor plan took her through a series of well-appointed rooms: living room, den, home office, kitchen, dining room. The dogs lay on a pair of beds under the kitchen table. They raised their heads when she passed, beady eyes tracking her movements.

  Charley took it all in, but of course, there was no sign of PJ, no boots coated with mud from Berkeley’s crime scene, no incriminating letters lying around confessing to kicking down the door of her house—nothing, in fact, that seemed the least bit out of place.

  The second floor and basement were equally lacking in smoking guns of any description. Carter was a grim tour guide, opening and closing doors, silently inviting her to peer into closets, under beds, even pulling back the shower curtain to reveal an empty bathtub. The attic was accessed by a set of pull-down steps that had clearly not been used in months. Dust and bits of insulation rained down onto spotless carpet that bore no crush marks. Charley demurred, but Carter insisted, handing her a flashlight and waiting in the hall while she poked her head above the joists and glanced around at dusty rafters and floorboards.

  When their inspection of the house was complete, he led her back outside and around the house toward a three-car garage. In the garden Charley glimpsed several metal sculptures in the shapes of fantastic birds and beasts.

  Carter opened the side door and flipped a switch. Charley blinked as four banks of brilliant fluorescent tubes blazed into life. Two of the bays were taken up by custom-built workstations. Shelves and countertops held various hand tools, welding equipment, and boxes of supplies. A partially completed sculpture of a huge flower—a sunflower—took up most of the floor space. She tasted the tang of hot metal on her tongue. The third bay was empty, but an oil stain on the concrete suggested it habitually held the family ride.

  Carter waved a hand. “Kendall and I both work out here, sometimes together. She creates wall art and jewelry out of metal, leather, cloth, wire, all kinds of stuff. I do my thing.”

  There was nowhere to hide a teenage boy, and Charley’s heart sank. The empty parking bay prompted her to ask, “What kind of car do you have?”

  “It’s Sawyer’s. A black minivan. Don’t ask me the make or model.”

  “Does Kendall ever drive one of the school SUVs?”

  “All the teachers do, if they’re a field trip leader or advisor for a team or club. She’s even brought one home a few times, if an event runs late. My father—”

  “Yes?” she prompted when he stopped speaking.

  He shrugged. “Nothing. Just that he’s driven her to the school once or twice to swap vehicles.” He stepped around one of the workbenches and started up a flight of wooden steps she hadn’t noticed. When Charley hesitated, he smirked again. “Still don’t trust me?” She squared her shoulders and climbed after him. At the top of the flight he unlocked a plain wooden door. “No one goes in here but me.”

  Charley followed him into a small loft furnished as a combination sitting room and bedroom. Glancing around, she felt a sudden sense of déjà vu, as if she’d stood in this spot before. Even as she groped for a memory that couldn’t possibly exist, she saw that the room had been preserved as a sort of shrine, and, with a small jolt of comprehension, she understood that this must have been where Carter and Regan held their secret assignations.

  On a small table sat a framed photo of the two posing in tuxedo and long gown. Their formal prom portrait, Charley realized, recognizing their clothing from the yearbook photo. A small vase held a single desiccated sunflower, its brittle petals looking as if the slightest breath would turn them into dust. The twin bed was tucked under a hexagonal window covered with a gauzy curtain. On the wall opposite the bed hung an enlargement of Regan’s senior class portrait. A dozen candid snapshots of Regan and Carter had been thumbtacked in a ragged circle around it. The bed was neatly made, a stuffed bear with a tiny blue and gold cheer outfit centered on the pillow.

  “This was hers.” Carter picked up the bear and sank onto the bed. His hands smoothed the toy as if it were a live thing that needed comforting. “It’s all I have left.”

  Charley heard the desolation in his voice. She sympathized with Carter, but at that moment, she had bigger problems. A turquoise plastic Princess phone sat on a desk. She picked it up and felt a rush of relief at the sound of a dial tone.

  “I need to make a phone call.” When Carter didn’t protest or even look up, she quickly punched in a number from memory. Marc’s cellphone went straight to voice mail. Charley frowned. That was odd. Even though he wouldn’t recognize this phone number, her ex-detective wasn’t in the habit of screening calls, especially in the middle of a dangerous investigation, when team members were in the field facing a host of unknowns. Swallowing her anxiety, she left a brief message confirming she was all right, disconnected, and dialed again.

  “Hello?” Vanessa sounded breathless and irritated.

  “It’s Charley. Are you and Heddy okay?”

  “Charley! Where have you been?”

  “I’m with Carter.” She cut off the flurry of exclamations and questions. “No time to explain. Has anyone found PJ?”

  “I wish,” Vanessa replied with evident frustration. “Harding was lying on the sofa, drowning his sorrows in a gallon of cookie dough ice cream. Executed an impressive midair jackknife when Heddy and I walked in, but we’re pretty certain he doesn’t know anything—you don’t kidnap someone for information, then leave them and go home to watch reruns of The Simpsons. Your sweetie got a team to sweep the school buildings, but I haven’t heard anything beyond the fact that Merritt Vance seems to be missing.”

  Charley straightened. “Merritt is missing?”

  “Yep,” Vanessa confirmed. “The custodial staff knocks off at five, but Paul Brixton contacted all of them, and nobody’s seen Merritt since lunchtime. And,” she added, “a school SUV is unaccounted for.”

  “We know Merritt was driving one earlier,” Charley reminded her.

  “That’s what I told Mitch. It’s still too soon to get PJ elevated to an official missing person, but Mitch convinced Chief Prince to put out an APB on the vehicle.” She sighed. “Isn’t he amazing?”

  “He’s wonderful. Girlfriend, I need you to keep calling Marc until you get through. Tell him I’m following a lead. I’ll call him as soon as I can.”

  “Wait, what are you—”

  Charley hung up. She didn’t have time for Twenty Questions right now. Shadows were lengthening, and she felt time slipping away. PJ, she thought anxiously. I’m trying to find you. Despite the desperate need for speed, she needed answers even more, answers that might tell her where he was. Everyone else had struck out; it was up to her.

  And so she took a deep breath and prepared to do the thing she did best, the thing the police couldn’t do, because more often than not, people simply wouldn’t—or couldn’t—share their deepest secrets with the cops.

  She would ask her own questions, and she certainly had a boatload of them. But mostly, Charley would listen.

  Chapter 21

  Marc moved silently through the darkened halls of Oakwood High School, his heart pumping, adrenaline flowing through his veins and sharpening his senses.

  “A couple of months,” he’d said to Paul, as if it were nothing. It had, in fact, been precisely eleven weeks and four days since he’d dropped his badge on the former chief’s desk and walked away from the job. The job he’d trained to do, one that he was damned good at. The job that, until he�
��d met Charley, had been his entire life.

  As he slipped around another corner, ears straining for any hint of his quarry, he bared his teeth in a feral grin. This was it, the thrill of the hunt, and until this moment, he hadn’t allowed himself to admit how much he missed it.

  He’d been marking time, pouring his empty days and considerable mental energies into the house renovation. While he’d enjoyed the opportunity to work with his hands for a change, he needed to finish up and move on, to chart a course for his future. Once again he thought of Charley, and his heart beat a little faster. Their future.

  They’d already swept the two elementary school buildings and found no sign of Merritt Vance or the missing boy. Marc hadn’t expected to. It was this building—with its labyrinthine corridors, numerous storerooms and closets, empty classrooms, and multiple exits: Vance’s HQ—that was the logical choice to stash a kidnap victim. It also meant Vance had home-field advantage, which was why Marc, Paul, and the small team of officers they’d recruited were in stealth mode. They couldn’t risk panicking the old man into doing anything that might jeopardize PJ’s safety.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he muttered as he tried a classroom door. Locked, as was the next one, and the next. They were all dark. Vance could be hiding in any one of them. Elsewhere Paul and another officer were armed with a master key, checking every room in a methodical, but necessarily slow, process. Marc hadn’t had the patience for that. He preferred to hunt alone.

  His cellphone vibrated in his pocket, but he ignored it. He reached the end of the corridor and hesitated. Very faintly, almost at the edge of hearing, came the whisper of a sound. He turned left and picked up his pace as, up ahead on his right, he saw a door slightly ajar. Light from within spilled into the shadowed hallway. As he drew closer the sound grew louder, resolving itself into a man’s voice. Marc pulled his Glock nine-millimeter from the waistband of his jeans and began creeping forward.

  “—two outs, runner on second, and a full count for Hamilton. Ramirez is on deck, but the switch-hitter’s season hasn’t been very—”

  In the same instant that Marc realized the man’s voice was a radio broadcast of a baseball game, he felt a rush of air behind him. He started to whip around, but something heavy and hard connected with his skull. Stars exploded across his vision. He dropped to his hands and knees, his gun skidding across the tiles, as the sound of pounding feet faded away behind him.

  More running feet, this time from beyond the open door, accompanied by shouted orders, and then Paul Brixton was crouching beside him.

  “You all right, son?”

  “Was that Vance?” Marc squeezed his eyes shut against a monster headache.

  “I expect so.” Paul helped him to stand and handed him his gun. “We haven’t found the lad, but we did solve another mystery. We unlocked a metal half door tucked under a staircase. I nearly missed it.”

  “What’d you find?” Marc gingerly fingered a growing lump on the back of his head.

  “Lab equipment, computers, kitchen gear.” Paul grinned. “All items from the latest round of thefts. Looks like we caught the ghost of Oakwood High School. And that’s not all.” He held aloft an evidence bag containing a fat spool of rough twine. “Look familiar?”

  Chapter 22

  Charley picked up a wooden desk chair and placed it in front of Carter. She sat facing him, hands clasped loosely between her knees.

  “Why did you decide to run away that night?” She didn’t bother to specify what night she meant. For this man, there was only one night that would ever matter. “Regan was going to graduate in a few months. You could have been together openly, without the conflict and parent drama.”

  Carter stared at the stuffed bear, turning it over and over in work-roughened hands. “It was all Regan’s idea. The sneaking around and pretending—she’d had enough. Then she told me about the money.”

  “What money?”

  “Regan had a trust fund from her maternal grandparents that came to her under a couple of different conditions: either when she turned twenty-one or when she married, whichever came first. Her folks had been super-careful never to disclose the full terms, just showing her the annual earnings statements and discussing how nice it would be to pay off student loans or use it for graduate school one day.”

  Charley frowned. “There’s nothing in the files about a trust fund. Why didn’t the prosecution introduce it at trial? Wouldn’t it have provided you with motive?”

  He shook his head. “The Fletchers couldn’t prove I knew about it. Besides, their side didn’t think they needed any more ammo to get a conviction. Turned out they were right.”

  “Who got the money in the event of Regan’s death?”

  “Probably Doris. The money came from Regan’s maternal grandparents.”

  No motive for murder there, Charley thought. “So, Douglas and Doris concealed the details, but Regan found out the truth?”

  He nodded. “She overheard them discussing it one night a few weeks into fall term. She went ballistic, calling me at Ohio State and demanding I drive down and pick her up right then. It was all I could do to calm her down enough to make a decent plan.”

  Based on all she’d learned about the dead girl, Charley could imagine Regan throwing a five-alarm tantrum. “It was her idea to use the Homecoming game as cover for your escape?”

  “She refused to wait any longer than that. Regan could be very…persuasive.” Carter looked almost sheepish. “The game was a week after her birthday. I’d planned to propose after she finished high school, but Regan said that, once she was eighteen, we could go to a no-wait state and marry without parental permission. With the money from her trust we could get an apartment, maybe even buy a small house.” His face glowed with the memory of those happy days, the castles in the air he’d built with his true love. “She’d finish high school in Columbus, then enroll at OSU. I was set to graduate the following year. With my marketing degree I figured I’d find work in the Columbus area easily.”

  “It sounds nice,” Charley encouraged.

  “It was reckless and stupid,” he snapped, startling her. “I never should have agreed to it. A thousand things could go wrong, and sure enough, they started to.”

  “Like what?”

  His heavy black brows, such a startling contrast to his white hair, drew together in a deep frown. “You mentioned the feud between our parents. Douglas Fletcher was an arrogant jackass, but Doris was no fool. I think she knew all along that we were still seeing each other; she just couldn’t catch us in the act. Anyway, as the big day grew closer, Regan’s sudden sweet-and-obedient-daughter act made her mother more suspicious than ever. The Fletchers curtailed Regan’s car privileges. Her curfews were rigidly enforced. They monitored her phone calls, so she had to use a friend’s landline to reach me at my dorm. Her parents had her on almost total lockdown.”

  His scowl deepened. “We figured we’d need at least a twelve-hour head start to drive to Nevada and get married before we were caught. Even though she’d be of age, we’d have to pass through states where the authorities might give us plenty of hassle, depending on what old man Fletcher told them. I thought we should wait until the holiday break, when schedules and routines would be much looser. But when Doris gave Regan permission to attend a cheer squad sleepover after that game…”

  Charley forced herself not to fidget, torn between a desire to hurry along this trip down memory lane and fear that if she pushed too hard, Carter would toss her out on her ear. So far, he’d told her nothing that might lead to PJ’s captor. With a sinking heart, she wondered if he could.

  “So you two made a plan,” she suggested when Carter remained silent.

  “She made one.” He sighed. “Each day leading up to the game, Regan packed a few clothes for our trip into her school backpack and smuggled them out of the house. She’d swiped ano
ther backpack from the school’s lost and found, so her folks wouldn’t notice hers was missing and suspect anything. She moved her stuff into the stolen one and kept it in her locker. When it was full, she hid it in the maintenance tunnel.”

  “I wondered about the blue backpack. Hers was yellow?”

  “It was her favorite color.” His eyes grew misty; he shook himself. “She wanted to take her yellow one on our honeymoon, so she planned to swap her stuff again on her way through the tunnel.”

  “And in her haste and in the dark,” Charley murmured, “she missed the journal. It was left behind in the blue backpack.”

  “She was like that: willful and headstrong. If she wanted something, she took it.” Carter said it with a strange pride, but all Charley could think of was that Regan’s selfishness and arrogance had caused one man’s death and put PJ’s life in danger.

  “Admission to Oakwood games is free after halftime,” he continued, “so they close the ticket office and leave the gate open. Regan got a set of keys from somewhere. She planned to ditch the game, slip through the hatch in the office, change out of her uniform, make her way along the tunnel, and emerge inside the school. She’d exit through the main doors facing Far Hills Avenue, walk to Smith Gardens just a few blocks away, and wait for me. That way she’d run no chance of being spotted. The whole thing was just so damned complicated!” His voice rang with a renewal of his earlier bitterness. “Stupid, in fact. But as I’ve mentioned, Regan got off on the cloak-and-dagger shit. Putting one over on her folks was one thing. Doing a disappearing act in front of the entire town? That was icing on the cake.”

  “Tell me about that night. The game, and what happened after.”

  “You’ve read the files,” he said dully. “You know what happened.”