by Karen Leabo
Into Thin Air
Karen Leabo
For Carla Cassidy,
who knows how to motivate me.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Prologue
The screams lasted long into the night.
Terri Zamasko curled her knees up against her grossly swollen abdomen and stuck a thumb into her mouth, something she hadn’t done since she was five. But she wasn’t just scared now; the fear was about to swallow her up. For the first time since she’d been brought into the home five, or maybe six, months ago, she’d lost hope that someone would find her, would rescue her.
She had also stopped believing anything Odell said. If the old witch really cared about anyone but herself, she wouldn’t have let that girl—whoever she was—keep on screaming.
Marcy. Yeah, that’s who it sounded like. Marcy was the blond girl with the chubby face who cried a lot. She lived in the room directly below Terri’s. Marcy was the only one who had been here longer than Terri herself, and she was as big as a house. Yeah, the screamer had to be Marcy.
The ruckus had started right after dinner. Terri didn’t know what time it was now, but she could tell from the passage of the moon outside her tiny, barred window that it must be late.
She wondered if she would scream like that when her time came.
How much longer did she have—a month, maybe two? Odell was some kind of nurse or something, and she did cursory physical examinations of the girls every so often, but she never answered any questions. Terri had come here in July, that much she knew, and it was getting close to Christmas. So she had two more months at the most. She had only that much more time to figure a way out of here. But she’d been racking her brain ever since she got here, and she’d exhausted every possibility, or at least the obvious ones.
Even before her body had become big and unwieldy, she hadn’t possessed the strength to overcome Odell. Terri had tried more than once to tackle the mountain of a woman, hoping to wrest the shotgun out of her grasp. It was like running at a brick wall. She had earned herself bruised knuckles, several painful slaps and uncounted days in the “dungeon” for her trouble.
Even if she could overpower Odell and clear the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, Terri had little chance of making it to freedom. Odell had two dogs, a bloodhound and a vicious German shepherd, with the deceptively gentle names of Phoebe and Bella. One could track a mosquito through the woods, and the other could bite. They served their mistress well.
Obviously Terri couldn’t outsmart Odell by herself. But there were only two on Odell’s team—herself and that creep, Henry— while there were ten or twelve girls at the home at any given time. If they could coordinate their efforts, they could take Odell by surprise and overpower her.
Terri’s thoughts had followed this path before, and always to the same depressing conclusion. To coordinate, the girls needed to plan, and planning was an impossible task when even the simplest communication was forbidden. Odell kept the girls separated most of the time, and when any of them were in the same room, they weren’t allowed to talk to one another.
Occasionally a few whispered sentences were possible in the exercise yard. Terri had tried to summon some support for her idea to conspire against Odell, but the other girls always shied away from Terri. No one wanted to risk Odell’s wrath by associating with a known troublemaker. They believed Odell when she told them that if they just behaved until after their babies were born, they would be released.
At one time Terri had clung to that belief, too. It was the only thing that had kept her sane. She didn’t believe anymore. Three girls had already had their babies and were gone. If they’d been released, why hadn’t they brought the police down on Odell’s head? Anyway, Terri’d been watching out the window when Henry had put Jennifer’s body—dead?—into the back of Odell’s Suburban and driven away.
Marcy’s screams reached a crescendo, then degenerated into a series of pitiful moans and sobs, followed by a sudden, frightening silence.
Chapter 1
Carolyn Triece sat at her corner desk, nursing a cold cup of tea and reviewing her cases—and she had a pile of them. The holidays, with their incipient anxiety and depression, always brought with them an onslaught of disappearances. This year was no different.
One case, at least, Caro could mark closed. She’d found Helen Shepherd in a women’s shelter, sporting a black eye and a missing tooth. The woman had begged Caro not to tell her husband where she was. Two days earlier, the same idiot husband had stood before Caro straight-faced and told her he couldn’t imagine why his wife would leave him. He’d been positive Helen had been kidnapped.
It would give Caro great pleasure to inform Mr. Shepherd that his wife was safe and sound, and that she never wanted to see him again. Caro could only hope that Helen would go through with her plans to divorce the SOB and take him to the cleaners. He deserved worse.
Caro looked at the long list of phone calls to be made and sighed. Sometimes she felt like the receiver was growing out of her ear. Figuring she might as well get started, she reached for the phone, then halted. She felt someone looking at her.
“Yo, Caro.” It was Tony, who occupied the desk in front of hers. After working four years together in Missing Persons, she and Corporal Tony Villaverde had developed a finely tuned sensitivity to each other. As he strode across the room toward her, the worry lines in his forehead said a lot. He didn’t have good news.
“What’s happened?” she asked as he slapped a stack of folders onto his desk, directly in front of hers.
He turned to face her, lacing his fingers through his thick salt-and-pepper hair. “The body they found by the dam at Cedar Creek?”
“Yeah?”
“She’s been positively identified—she’s your Marcy Phelps.”
As Caro absorbed the blow, her gaze wandered to the bulletin board on the wall next to her desk, decorated with the photographs from every unsolved case that had crossed her desk. There weren’t too many; most cases solved themselves in a matter of days.
Not the Marcy Phelps case. Marcy, blond and chubby-cheeked, smiled back at her, showing a mouth full of braces.
“Cause of death?”
“Preliminary guess is that the fall broke her neck.”
Oh, God. “Any idea when?”
“The ME says the body’s no more than a week old.”
“A week!” Caro’s mind reeled. Marcy Phelps had been missing for more than six months, and yet she’d been dead only a week. Where had she been? Was she just another runaway who’d succumbed to the evils of life on the street, or was there more to the story?
“There’s one other weird thing,” Tony said. “Apparently the girl gave birth only days, maybe hours, before she died.”
Caro’s stomach turned. She’d already had to get Marcy’s dental records from her parents for purposes of identifying the body. Their reaction hadn’t been pleasant. Now it would be up to her to tell them their fifteen-year-old daughter had been pregnant, too.
“I suppose CAPERS wants the file,” she said.
“You got it. Whether Marcy jumped or someone helped her along, there’s a baby somewhere. Austin Lomax is taking over the case.�
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Caro grimaced. Although she’d never met Marcy, she felt as if she knew the girl, and giving up her case wouldn’t be easy. It galled Caro to think that some stranger would be the one to solve the mystery surrounding Marcy’s disappearance and death, if it could be solved. And Lomax, of all people. He’d been working with homicides for, what, two weeks? His specialty was missing cars.
“You don’t like Lomax?” Tony, as always, read her body language.
She shrugged, feigning indifference. “Don’t even know him. It just strikes me as odd that they’d give a tricky case like this to a greenhorn.”
“He’s been working in Homicide for a couple of months now, partnering with Frank Feldman,” Tony said as he propped his lean hips against the back of his chair and stuffed a piece of purple bubblegum into his mouth. He chewed gum almost constantly since he’d quit smoking almost a year ago. “Besides, after seven years in Auto Theft he’s not that green.”
“Cars aren’t the same as people.”
Tony narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “I think maybe you’d be pissed no matter who took over the case.”
Caro straightened her spine. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that maybe you’re getting tired of teenage runaways and deserting husbands, and you wish you could investigate Marcy’s death.”
Caro reared up, almost out of her chair. “That’s a crock. I’m perfectly happy doing what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, okay. Then why are you coming at me like a snapping turtle with PMS?”
She didn’t dignify his accusation with an answer. Instead she reached for the phone and swiveled her chair so that she faced the wall.
“Chicken,” Tony said under his breath. “You won’t even argue with me.”
“Buzz off, Villaverde.” She angrily jabbed at the telephone keypad.
Okay, maybe she was feeling overpossessive about Marcy Phelps, but that didn’t mean she wanted to actually investigate the murder. She’d already given the case everything she had, and it hadn’t been enough. The girl had been somewhere near Dallas, right under their noses, for the past six months, and yet Caro hadn’t turned up a single, solid lead during the entire course of her investigation.
She had to let it go. For all his inexperience, Lomax was reputed to be sharp, if a tad self-absorbed. He would go over every inch of ground Caro had covered, and more. Maybe a fresh, enthusiastic mind would spot something she had missed.
The phone on the other end of the line rang ten times before she hung up. Better not to waste any time, she decided. She pawed through her file drawer until she found the pitifully thin Marcy Phelps file. Caro had three-day-old cases with fatter folders than this one. The folks in CAPERS would think she hadn’t lifted a finger.
No, of course that wasn’t true. Until four years ago, she’d worked in CAPERS—the Crimes Against Persons division—in the Sex Crimes Unit. Most of the investigators over there knew her, and she would like to think they respected her work. They would know she’d tried. But had she tried hard enough?
“I’m heading downstairs, anyway, so I’ll take that over for you,” Tony offered, totally unaffected by her attempted brush-off. That was one nice thing about Tony; it was impossible to hurt his feelings. “Lomax’ll want to talk to you, of course, after he reads the file.” There was a pause. “Uh, looks like you have a new case.”
“I do?” She saw him then, the man lurking near the doorway, an uneasy expression on his face.
“I heard Sergeant Quayar giving him your name as I came in,” Tony said before taking the Phelps file and sauntering away.
Caro knew the newcomer was trouble before he’d even opened his mouth. He had that haunted look around the eyes, the one that said he’d already been through hell. He was dressed in a conservative suit, but the tie was slightly askew, like he hadn’t quite cared to get it right. He clutched a foam cup as if the coffee inside it was the only thing keeping him from diving over the edge.
Someone he loved had abandoned him, and he was looking for a way—any way—to explain it. It always amazed Caro that some people would rather discover their loved one was the victim of some heinous crime than face the fact that the person had simply walked away.
The man cast a glance around the busy, impersonal room with those tragic eyes, which eventually settled on her desk, her nameplate. She met his gaze squarely. Although she wanted to give the man a smile of encouragement, she couldn’t do it, not when she knew the odds were against his finding out something to his liking.
Throwing his shoulders back, he strode purposefully toward her. “Are you Corporal Triece?”
She stood and extended her hand, well accustomed by now to the look of incredulity that went with the question. At five foot two and a hundred and five pounds, with long, curly brown hair that she wore in a single braid, she looked more like a high school cheerleader than a police detective. She had long ago given up on being defensive about her looks. “Yes, I’m Carolyn Triece. And you’re...”
“Russell Arkin.” He gave her hand a perfunctory shake. His hands were ice cold.
“Have a seat, Mr. Arkin,” Caro said crisply as she reclaimed her own chair, pushing thoughts of Marcy Phelps to one side for the moment. “Are you here to report a missing person?” As if she had to ask.
He nodded. When he didn’t jump into his story, she busied herself with opening her notebook and laboriously printing his name at the top of the first blank sheet, giving him time to collect his thoughts.
“My daughter,” he finally said.
Caro winced. Whether they were runaways or nabbed by non-custodial parents, missing children were the hardest. “I’m sorry,” she said automatically. “Her name?”
“Amanda. Amanda Lee Arkin.”
“Age?”
“Eighteen.”
That surprised Caro. Russell Arkin didn’t look old enough to have an eighteen-year-old child. She’d pegged him at about her own age, which was thirty-three. “Mr. Arkin, you do realize that your daughter is no longer a minor. If she left of her own accord, there’s—”
“She didn’t.”
He sounded so positive. But then, they all did. Parents had a hard time facing a child’s voluntary desertion.
“All right, let’s start at the beginning,” Caro said, all business. “When did you last see her?”
“Yesterday—that would be Wednesday, December 21.” He watched to see that Caro recorded the date, which she did. “She left the house for a doctor’s appointment at around eight-thirty,” he continued, “just as I was leaving for work, and she just...never came home.”
“Did she make it to the appointment?”
“No. She was supposed to meet with a psychologist, Virginia Dreyfus, at the...” His words trailed off. “Anyway, I talked with Dr. Dreyfus first thing this morning. Amanda never showed.”
“Why was she seeing a psychologist?”
“Is—is that important?”
“Her emotional state is very important.”
He pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling, then down at his hands. “Dr. Dreyfus works at a family-planning clinic over on Harry Hines—I think it’s called the Women’s Services Clinic, or something equally euphemistic. Amanda was...is pregnant, and she was supposedly receiving counseling about her options.” His words had a certain bitter twist to them.
“You don’t sound as if you approve.”
He emptied the coffee cup in one gulp, then began systematically shredding the foam. “That clinic is nothing but an abortion mill, pure and simple. I can’t imagine that Dr. Dreyfus would do anything except sell Amanda on the clinic’s services.”
“You definitely don’t approve.” A picture was forming in Caro’s mind, and not a pretty one. “Did you and your daughter disagree over this issue?”
He flashed her a look of pure hostility. The silence between them was punctuated only by the sound of his busy fingers shredding the cup.
“Mr. Arkin, I’m not asking out of morbid
curiosity. I need to know as much as possible about Amanda’s state of mind at the time of her disappearance. Anything you can tell me about what was going on in her life would be helpful.”
“If I tell you we disagreed about abortion, you’re going to automatically assume that Amanda and I had a fight and that she disappeared of her own accord.” He slammed his hand on the desk. “But, damn it, that’s not what happened!”
Caro felt for him, she really did, but she wasn’t in the mood to be second-guessed. Her job would be a hell of a lot easier if people would just answer her questions. “I don’t intend to jump to any conclusions or dismiss any possibilities at this point. Now, did you and Amanda disagree on the issue of abortion?”
He gritted his teeth, but he answered this time. “We discussed it. She was seriously considering it. I advised her not to. But I made it clear that whatever she decided, I would support her. Amanda and I have always had a very close relationship.”
Yeah, right. Caro had heard that one before. “What was her mood like yesterday morning?”
He shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary. We were both on our way out the door, and she said she was going to look for a Christmas tree after her appointment at the clinic. She’d been giving me a hard time because, with her away at school, I hadn’t done any decorating. But that was always her department. She gets such a kick out of it.” He looked around the room at the pitiful excuse for holiday decorations Caro and her co-workers had managed—an anemic-looking tree in the corner, only half decorated, and some lopsided paper snowflakes on the windows, courtesy of Tony’s seven-year-old twins. “She used to make snowflakes like those.”
“So, Christmas was generally a good time for Amanda?”
As Russell Arkin began to open up a bit, a portrait of his daughter emerged. Amanda had been a straight A student at a private Catholic high school—a state spelling-bee champion, no less—and had just completed her first semester at University of North Texas in nearby Denton.
“How were her grades in college?” Caro asked.
Arkin smiled wistfully. “She’s no Rhodes Scholar, but she did all right. She didn’t flunk anything, at least. I figure once the newness of college life wears off, she’ll settle down and study. She wants to be an electrical engineer. She’s really into building stuff—radios, televisions, you name it. Had her ham radio license when she was sixteen.”
