Sandy snapped her head up as if this was very good news. “Really? Did he know anything? When did he see her last? What did he say?”
“I don’t believe he’s in on it,” Jack said, running a hand through his hair. “He said he was with Twyla until about five o’clock at Lenox Square. They were supposed to go to the movie at midnight. She was a no-show.”
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
Jack picked up Twyla’s phone and scrolled through her texts. He wasn’t surprised to see Ethan’s texts there. Twyla’s phone indicated they’d been received and read. There were no responding texts.
“I do,” he said, putting the phone back down. “As a cop, you develop a knack for being able to tell when someone’s lying. My gut tells me he’s telling the truth. At least mostly.”
“It’s just as well,” Sandy said with resignation. “It doesn’t fit with Eugene being the kidnapper.”
“Can I ask you both a few questions while we’re waiting for Eugene or whomever to contact us?”
“Of course. Anything that might help bring her home,” Sandy said, wringing her hands.
“What do you want to know?” Vernetta asked.
“Would Twyla have gone willingly with Eugene?”
Vernetta and Sandy looked at each other. Sandy shrugged. “Maybe,” she admitted. “She loved him. She was hurt by how he reacted to the whole DNA thing, but yes, if he opened a car door and said get in, I think she would, don’t you, Mama?”
Vernetta nodded. “I don’t mean to be too hard on Eugene. That was a kick in the stomach to find out after fifteen years that your wife done went and had a baby with some other man.”
Jack saw Sandy wince.
“And I thought Eugene did his best as a daddy,” Vernetta continued. “Or as well as most men do.”
“He doesn’t drink,” Sandy said reluctantly.
“That’s saying a lot,” Vernetta said. “You can’t say that about your own daddy.”
“Which just means he’s clearheaded enough to pull this off,” Sandy said. “All the more reason to believe it’s Eugene. He could easily have lured Twyla into a car.”
Jack reached over and tapped the phone in front of them. “Could he have done that? Could he have tied her up and terrorized her to the point of what we saw in that video?”
Vernetta frowned but Sandy spoke up. “He’s done much worse to me. He has an ugly side he doesn’t often show in public. Could he do this to Twyla? If it meant I would be going out of my mind in fear? Damn straight he could.”
“Do you expect a ransom demand in that case?” Jack asked.
Sandy sucked in a quick breath. “I pray he asks for money. He can have every dime.” She buried her face in her hands and broke down. Vernetta patted her daughter on the back but held back from outright embracing her.
“I’m sorry, Sandy,” Jack said, feeling the exhaustion of not having slept the night before wash over him. “At this point, all we can really do is wait.”
“And pray,” Vernetta said firmly, as she patted Sandy’s back.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack said. “Goes without saying.”
An hour later, they ate delivery pizza and put the television on to distract them. Jack went upstairs to Twyla’s bedroom. It wasn’t a missing person or a runaway case. With a kidnapping there was often not a whole lot to be discovered by the victim’s belongings, but Jack knew it couldn’t hurt to look. Besides, there was little to nothing else for him to do before the kidnapper contacted them again.
What in the hell must Mia think? He was sure he was handling this all wrong. Should he lie to her? Tell her he was called back out of town? Tell her the truth and pray she doesn’t try to jump into the middle of it? Just imagining the confrontation with Mia and her insistence that she could help settled the question in his mind.
He sent a brief text to her:
He didn’t love how cryptic that sounded—and outright false—but it was the best of a lousy situation.
Twyla’s room was tidy, which surprised Jack. Usually, kids playing around with drugs and alcohol—and sex if that little dirtbag Ethan was telling the truth—kept their bedrooms in a constant state of filth and chaos. You’d think they’d want some part of their lives to be in their control, Jack thought, but evidently that’s not how it typically played out. But Twyla’s room was tidy. One wall was lined with a bookcase filled with a few books—not many, as her mother said Twyla typically read on her tablet or smartphone—framed photographs and plastic souvenirs from Disney World.
Jack picked up each of the framed photos to scrutinize the people in them. Did Sandy put these here or were they Twyla’s choice? One showed Sandy, Eugene and Twyla standing in front of Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World. Twyla looked to be about ten years old. It was obviously taken before Eugene got the DNA test results.
Another photo showed Twyla sitting on Eugene’s lap, a Christmas tree in the background.
How did Twyla process these photos after everything had happened? Did she look at them longingly? Is that why she kept them, or did she not really see them anymore?
Another photo showed Twyla walking into church with Vernetta. The look on Vernetta’s face was stern, but Twyla was laughing at whoever was taking the picture. Eugene? Sandy?
She was a pretty girl, he reflected, looking completely like a miniature version of Sandy with none of himself that he could see. What had made Eugene suspect she might not be his?
Jack went to the bed—a flouncy pink full-size four-poster with a frilly canopy. Really little princess kind of stuff. Only about ten years too late. He opened her dresser drawer and found an ashtray and a hash pipe. In the back of the same drawer was a box of condoms. Jack felt his stomach clench.
Hardly a little princess life, no matter how badly Sandy wanted to pretend it was.
He heard a noise in the hall and turned to see Vernetta standing in the doorway.
“I know someone,” she said. “A psychic. Sandy thinks I’m nuts but it’s better than just sitting around.” She looked around the room, stopping on the photographs on the bookshelves. “I can’t believe she’s gone,” she said, her voice cracking.
“We’ll get her back.”
He realized she was still wearing her housedress.
“What a mess,” Vernetta said. Jack had the impression she meant Jack and Sandy, and Sandy’s hopeless attempt to overcome the circumstances of Twyla’s birth—born of deceit, betrayal and lies.
All of which put Jack right at the center of this “mess.” His gut felt twisted with guilt and failure. He put down the statue of Cinderella’s slipper he’d been holding.
“I know it’s early but I’m taking a pill and going to bed,” she said. “Wake me if you get her back somehow tonight. Otherwise, please God, just let me sleep.”
He watched her go down the hall. An old woman who’d aged at least a decade in the last ten hours. He turned to look in the mirror over Twyla’s dresser, where a postcard stuck in the corner read, Hang in there! He shook his head.
You didn’t need to be a psychic to know there was a very real possibility Twyla was never going to see this room again.
Chapter SEVEN
It was a long day and Mia spent most of it in the saddle. When it started to rain—a cold mid-autumn misting that made her long for a fireplace and woolen throw across her knees—she trotted back to the center of the feedlot only to have Sam come out and toss a poncho slicker to her.
The whole facility—barns, offices and pens—covered sixty acres. Since Sam had asked her to ride the perimeter—not the pens as the three other riders she saw were doing—she spent most of the day alone. After the first quarter of an hour, she and Beckett came to a meeting of minds and Mia figured they both taught the other something about riding during the rest of their time together.
Grateful not to have to interact or even see the penned cattle,
she concentrated on finding the portion of Pine Valley Lake that intersected with the feedlot. She knew it was at the farthest point of the fenced in demarcation of the Hooker property, which was stripped of trees but rolled with dips and valleys like an undulating moon surface. When she found the lake, Mia took several photos of it from atop a slight knoll where she had a view of the feedlot behind her and the lake in front of her.
Using only her smartphone camera because of its discrete size, she dismounted, tied the horse to a bush and approached the lake bank. It was remote and overrun with weed bushes. She imagined the fringe of bushes and reeds at the banks would be thick with water moccasins in the summer, but this far into fall she didn’t worry about them. She could clearly see tire marks at the verge of the lake, and deep ones, suggesting a vehicle with a heavy load.
She photographed the tread marks from as many angles as she could think of and then turned to look into the lake itself. Unsure of what exactly she was looking for, she squatted on the bank, her camera in her hand, and watched the water ripple below her. It was peaceful here. She could see the far side of the lake was lined with virgin pine. A loon called in the distance. She imagined young Sam with his grandfather fishing on the far shore, pulling out carp and bluegill onto the banks.
Mia’s own father had loved to fish, but he’d always brought her brother, Dave, with him.
She stood and looked over her shoulder to make sure Beckett was still nibbling grass and not thinking about returning to the barn without her, then pried a small test tube out of her jeans pocket and leaned over the bank as far as she could to reach the water without falling in. After she filled it, she stoppered it and tucked it back in her pocket.
While the rain never amounted to much more than a relentless drizzle, she was glad to get back to the barn at the end of the day and pull Beckett’s saddle off him. She noticed a few Hispanic barn workers watching her from the shadows near the stalls. She didn’t know if they were pen riders or just stable hands. She smiled at them as she dragged the heavy saddle to the tack room.
After she’d rubbed her horse down, one of the men approached with a feed bucket and hand signaled that he’d take it from here. Mia thanked him, patted Beckett and left the barn.
Outside, she saw Sam talking with JJ, who stood with his back to Mia. She put her hand to the side of her face to mime that she would call him later, then climbed into her car.
She hadn’t thought about him all day. Not once.
Well. Not much.
When she received the text, she just sat in her car staring at the words, rereading them, as if they would somehow start to mean something else.
I thought his daughter was leaving for a mission trip? What’s with this “few days” crap? And why not just call me?
She took I-20 east, feeling even more tired than before she’d read the text, and was trudging up the steps to her condo in a little over an hour.
As she put her key in the lock, and in spite of Jack’s text message, she fought an irrational surge of hope that he might be inside even though she hadn’t seen his car in the parking lot.
She opened the door to a quiet apartment and felt the disappointment of her expectations settle into her shoulders. She dropped her keys into a large bowl by the door and went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out a cold beer, which she brought with her to her bedroom. She stripped off her muddy and extremely foul-smelling jeans, t-shirt and sweatshirt, took a quick swig off her beer, and turned on a hot, steaming shower.
An hour later, she’d had two more beers and was falling asleep over her Lean Cuisine chicken and rice meal when her phone rang. She congratulated herself for not knocking chairs over to snatch it up—the beers and her own pessimism had effectively curbed any kernels of anticipation she might still have.
It was Jessie.
“Hey, Mom,” Mia said, sinking back onto the couch and closing her eyes.
“Darling, you’ve been so hard to get a hold of these days.”
“I got a new case. A really interesting one.”
“Bill told me,” her mother said. “Some poor man is worried about his wife stepping out on him?”
“Oh, yeah, that. No, that case has been…solved.”
“Goodness, that was fast. So this is a new one?”
“Yeah, and it’s really fascinating. I’m doing something for the greater good with this one.”
“I’m sure you are, dear.”
“No, I really am, Mom. I’m helping a whistleblower get the goods on a guy who’s polluting one of our state park lakes.”
“Is it safe?”
“Oh, totally. But do me a favor, Mom, and don’t mention it to the chief, will you?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want him to know how quickly I’m chugging through these cases all on my own. He really gets off on mother-henning me, you know?”
“Jack isn’t working with you on these? I thought he was home by now.”
“Yes, he is.” God, why do I have to process this all over again? “But he’s got some issues he’s having to deal with, plus his chef business was all backed up and he’s trying to get on top of that.”
“I see. Well, all right, darling, if you’d rather I not mention it to Bill, I won’t. But you need to promise me that you and Jack will come to dinner this weekend. We haven’t seen him in nearly a month now.”
“Yeah, sure, Mom. I will. As soon as his schedule lets up a little, you are at the top of my list. Listen, another call’s coming in. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Of course, dear.”
Mia disconnected and accepted the incoming call from Sam.
“Hey,” she said.
“What did you find?”
“Tire tracks leading up to the bank. And I took a sample. But the lab won’t have results back on it until next week.”
“It would be better if you could catch them doing the actual dumping.”
“Do you know when they do it?”
“I think they’re going to do it again tonight.”
*****
Jack came downstairs. He’d briefly examined the whole top floor—five bedrooms, four bathrooms all connected by one long hallway. He’d need to call Ethan’s mother to see if she had, in fact, been with him last night. He needed to do it in a way that didn’t tip his hand that Twyla was missing. He’d already called Twyla’s nail salon when he got back to confirm that she’d missed her six o’clock mani-pedi appointment yesterday.
He knew he needed to do a better job of convincing Sandy to involve the police. In his experience, kidnapping differed in one major way from abductions or random grabs—the kidnapper had all the power and all the control right up to the point of the drop. Then they either went down in flames—or the victim did.
Or both.
He heard Sandy on the downstairs phone in the kitchen and he frowned and hurried his pace. The conversation couldn’t be related to the kidnapping; she was practically psychotic over her insistence that nobody know. He stepped into the kitchen and saw her standing by the sink, looking out over the backyard, her face streaked with tears.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” she said angrily into the phone, turning to look at Jack as he walked in.
He made a questioning gesture with his hands. Who?
“Eugene, you bastard,” Sandy said, her voice choked with tears. “I’ll never let you get away with this. I promise you, I won’t.”
Holy shit. Jack looked around for a second phone where he might listen in but there was nothing.
“No, I told you I won’t go to the police. If you hurt her, I swear I’ll—”
She looked at Jack in shock and then pulled back and transferred the look to the phone. She sagged into a heap on the floor, the phone in her lap, her shoulders shaking with sobs.
Jack knelt next to her and picked the phone out of her fingers. The
call was disconnected.
“He called?” he asked, pushing her hair off her face and tilting her chin to look at him. “I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“I called him,” she said, hiccoughing and wiping her face with the back of her hand. “I knew it was him.”
“He admitted it?”
“Yes, he admitted it!”
Jack took her hands and pulled her to her feet, leading her to the kitchen table.
“He said he only wished he could see my face tonight.”
“Sandy, this is good news, trust me. He can’t be so stupid as to not know he’ll burn for this if he hurts her.”
“What if he doesn’t care? What if it’s not money he wants?”
“Did he mention money?”
She shook her head, her face pinched into indescribable pain. “No,” she whispered. “He didn’t.”
In that case, Sandy calling Eugene and confirming it was him probably wasn’t a good thing. Now Eugene would know he had nothing to lose. Now there was just the question of how badly he’d go down for it: for kidnapping or for murder? There was no way to track the call. Not without getting his hands on Eugene’s phone. He pushed redial and waited. The call went to voice mail. He disconnected.
“I thought we were working together?” Jack said to her gently. “What made you call him?”
“I just…couldn’t stand waiting any longer.”
“Tell me exactly what he said.”
She took in a long breath and closed her eyes, as if dreading having to relive the conversation.
“He said he has Twyla someplace where she’ll only survive if he returns to her. He said he’s working alone and that if I try to call the police or come after him, she’ll die.” Her eyes flew open and she searched Jack’s face. “I can’t take that chance, Jack.”
She must be a mind reader. His first urge when he knew it was definitely the ex-husband was to go after the bastard and beat the crap out of him. Sandy grabbed his arms, her fingers pinching into his flesh.
“He knows you’re here, Jack,” she said. “He…he must be watching the place.” Her face crumpled in another attempt to hold back her hysteria. “He told me he’s just looking for a reason to make sure I never see her again.”
Complete Mia Kazmaroff Romantic Suspense Series, 1-4 Page 47
