by Laurel Dewey
Jane crept across the room, stepping over the chaotic mess and scanned the area.
“I found two phones,” Weyler announced, removing a rotary dial phone from the far corner of a kitchen cabinet along with a push-button model.
“Well, what do you know?” Bo screamed in Jordan’s face. “The man assured us he didn’t own a phone! How far are we gonna have to toss this place before we find the voice disguiser you used to leave the messages on my voicemail?”
Jane noticed a pair of boots tucked underneath the couch. She grabbed the right one and turned it over. As she feared, a nail had been driven into the sole. When Jane gingerly felt inside the boot, she easily detected the sharp point poking inside the sole. It was perfectly placed to press his toe down onto during the lie detector test in an effort to throw off the results.
Bo continued to verbally assault Jordan but it was eliciting nothing from him. Jane crossed to the bureau on the landing near the loft. As the chaos ensued behind her, she opened the top drawer and withdrew the leather diary. She wasn’t sure why she was doing it. The time for sympathy was over. On the surface, this was the possible starting point of a grisly kidnapping and murder. But even knowing that, Jane tucked the diary into her back waistband and covered it with her long shirt. When she turned around, she saw the rage swell around Bo and then erupt as he started pummeling Jordan mercilessly in the kidneys and across his neck, all the while screaming, “Child killer!”
Jordan never made a sound. It was as though he knew his fate was already sealed.
CHAPTER 34
After Bo threw Jordan into a holding cell in the small but airtight jail back in Midas, Jordan still hadn’t let one word escape his bruised lips. Weyler went with Bo to inform the Van Gordens of the death photo. Jane hung back with one of the deputies to root through the clutter at Jordan’s cabin in an attempt to uncover more damning evidence. But after several hours of coming up with nothing significant, she bagged the charred black T-shirt she unearthed from the fire pit and returned to Town Hall to drop off the evidence to Vi. She asked Vi for the death shot so she could take it back to her room and examine it more closely with her photo loupe. Perhaps she could decipher something in the shot that would help determine where the body might be located. A type of grass, a mark on the cement… anything that might help them unearth Jake’s body and the bevy of evidence that the remains would provide law enforcement.
Once Jane returned to the B&B, she wasted no time in her investigation. She dragged every light in the room to the desk to shed as much illumination on the grisly photograph. Digging her photo loupe out of her satchel, she held it tightly on the photo paper while aiming a light against the back of the shot. Inch by inch, she canvassed the blackened nude body. She was reminded of a comment one of her forensic professors made in school so many years ago. “All dead bodies look the same after three days in the heat.” It was true. Once the maggots started their feeding frenzy, it was often difficult to make an accurate visual determination between a male and a female victim. And the longer or faster the decomp, the trickier it became until dental records or DNA confirmed the identity. But having just a photo and not a body made the investigation exponentially more complicated.
Jane painstakingly scanned the edge of the photo with the loupe, searching for any indication of what the sheet under the body was lying on. Inch by inch, she slid the loupe across the film but nothing stood out.
Her eyes ached from the intense work and she sat back in the chair to take a quick break. Standing up, Jane stretched and then reached around to her rear waistband, releasing the leather diary of Jordan’s mother from where she hid it. She set it on the desk and dug her hand into her front pocket. She withdrew the handwritten note that Jordan had left on the door for her two days before. MEET ME NEAR THE BRIDGE, JANE, he wrote. She tossed it onto the desk and ignored it but then her eyes glanced back to it. Jane hadn’t paid it much notice before, but she looked at the way Jordan wrote the J in her name. It was obviously a first letter he was quite used to writing and, thus, the character he gave it was unique. Instead of striking the top line in a perfect horizontal stroke, Jordan made a point of arching the line dramatically toward the right and even including a purposefully pointed tip that resembled a backward, lower case L.
Jane pulled her cell phone from her back pocket and located her short file of photos. She found the one she’d snapped of the Fuck You, Jane! written in deer blood on her trunk of her Mustang. This J was written completely differently and, in fact, had its own distinctive flair. It was tighter, with the bottom of the J’s lower hook exceptionally controlled and ending with a slight flourish that almost looked like a fish hook. Furthermore, the horizontal line at the top of the J was thick and compact to match the angular descent of the lower part of the letter. One could argue that writing in blood and writing with a pen impacts the graphology. Jane knew that while there might be slight variations, the pattern of the writer adding a hook to the bottom of the J was akin to their personal calling card. Yes, one’s handwriting could change throughout one’s life. But in the space of mere hours when these two samples were written, the drastic difference between the two signaled to Jane that Jordan was not responsible for defacing her car.
Jane paced back and forth in front of the clothesline of clues. She stopped at the first section of the line and stared at the bright green sheet of paper hanging there. It read, JACKSON JAKOB VAN GORDEN and it was penned at the request of Bo when he asked Bailey to write out his son’s full name. Jane held her cell phone image next to the page. There were two J’s on that green sheet of paper and they both displayed the same fish hook.
“What the fuck…” Jane murmured to herself. Her mind began racing again. It was written in deer blood. How do you get deer blood? You hunt the animal or you kill it accidentally. Jane flashed to her own high-speed accident due to avoiding a deer on the road. “Oh, shit,” she said, recalling the front-end damage she saw on Bailey’s SUV the previous afternoon in the ER parking lot. Jane played back the sequence of events over the last few days, paying special attention to what occurred between her and Bailey that could have inflamed him. It was the visit to their house when Bo, Weyler and she laid out the Ace of Spades, Chesterfield cigarette, note and knife with Jake’s severed ponytail. Bailey turned and threw a crystal vase across the room in anger and screamed, “Fuck him!” Bailey was supposedly on the phone talking to a “client” when they left which would mean he possibly had a scheduled dalliance at the Fourteen O-One Imperial dive that night. Based only on hypothesis, Jane deduced that Bailey could have easily been driving home later that night, hit the deer on the highway and in his anger over the day’s events and possibly in an attempt to confuse his son’s case, he drove into town, located Jane’s Mustang in front of the B&B and using the blood—still warm under the bumper of his damaged vehicle where the blood had pooled—wrote the three-word insult on the trunk of the car. While she had nothing but her gut instinct driving her at that moment, the knee-jerk reaction fit Bailey’s narcissistic personality to a T. Jane knew that when a narcissist feels anger or is cornered, he strikes out at whomever he feels has injured his tender ego. Because the narcissist believes that the world revolves around him, any perceived affront is in direct violation of his very existence and must be punished. And, often, the acts done to the offender can be ridiculously petty and even childish—both in keeping with the, Fuck You, Jane! assault.
As Jane considered this even further, it seemed just a tad coincidental that Louise’s last words on this earth were the same ones left on Jane’s car. And she said it with an evil smirk to boot. Was that the old broad’s way of warning Jane not to fuck with their lives?
Jane took another look at the bright green sheet of paper. JACKSON JAKOB VAN GORDEN. Her eyes focused on Jackson Jakob. She located the sympathy card that was included with the first clue, stuffed into page 243 of You Can’t Go Home Again. So sorry for your loss. JACKson sends his regards, the cryptic message inside the ca
rd stated. JACKson. JACK.
Jane walked down the line of clues, regarding them with fresh eyes. “Jack…Jack…” she repeated until she stood in front of the Chesterfield cigarette advertisement, featuring actor, Jack Webb.
Jane ripped the page off the clothesline. The story was building, just as she had believed from nearly the beginning of the case. Each clue built onto the next and told a story. Maybe it was a story within a story? Jane looked at the advertisement. “Jack Webb,” she said out loud. If Jack led to Webb, she figured, what did Webb lead to? Jane considered the Chesterfield cigarette in Jack’s hand. The next time a Chesterfield cigarette appeared again was with the Ace of Spades, the knife, the ponytail and the note. The only clues from that day that weren’t sent to CBI were the single cigarette and the note that read: Who Ever Believes Bad Eventually Resolves. Jane unpinned that note enclosed in plastic off the line and laid it on the bed. The sentence never made sense to her. There was no question mark at the end and the words Who Ever should have been one word. The author of the clues never made a grammatical mistake to Jane’s knowledge. She looked at the page again. Each letter of each word was initially capitalized. “Holy shit,” she muttered when she formed the first four capital letters of the first four words and spelled WEBB. Adding the E and the R, and the name WEBBER emerged.
Webber? Jane wondered. That was the last name of the main character in Wolfe’s novel. Jane recovered the novel from the line and turned again to the dog-eared page 243. She’d damn near committed the single page to memory as she attempted to uncover any significance. She’d been so focused on the more metaphorical passages that she had completely ignored the bottom of the page and the sentences that now stood out like a beacon:
That fellow there, for instance! With his pasty face and rolling
eyes and mincing ways, and hips that wiggled suggestively as he
walked—could there be any doubt at all that he was a member
of nature’s other sex?
Four lines below, she read,
Was it something in the spirit of the times that had let the homo-
sexual usurp the place and privilege of a hunchbacked jester of
an old king’s court, his deformity become a thing of open jest and
ribaldry?
Jane read it over and over. Was this a direct attack on Bailey’s secret homosexuality? Surely, this whole nightmare wasn’t solely driven by disgust for a man’s sexual preference. The high intellectual capacity Jane garnered from the kidnapper’s clues seemed to infer, at least for now, that the ultimate goal was not to judge Bailey’s sexual bent, but to reveal it.
Uncover. Reveal. Expose. Bring into the light that which has been hidden in the darkness. The words crashed against each other in Jane’s head. Yes. What hung in front of Jane on the clothesline was a series of revelations, possibly long buried but now thrust into the light in order to be dissected with the skill of a surgeon’s blade. “A story of revelations,” Jane said out loud. “A story of a man named Jack Webber?”
There was another place she’d seen the word, Webber—on Bailey’s misspelled tags from his YouTube video. Was it just a misspelling? Jane wondered. Or was Jordan right when he mentioned that a secret has a life of its own and wants to be revealed through the unconscious actions of those who are trying to keep the secret buried? “As much as we work to hide our secrets,” Jordan stressed, “the unconscious mind prods our soul to reveal all.”
So, the question begged, was it just a strange coincidence that Bailey included the word Webber in his video tags and that the kidnapper hid Webber in a character’s name of a classic novel and in the cryptic note left with the Ace of Spades? The only thing Jane could figure was that the name resonated somehow with Bailey. Could it be that Bailey Van Gorden was actually Jack Webber? If that was the case, why did his mother continue to go by the name of Van Gorden? Unless… Van Gorden was Louise’s maiden name… Jane had certainly run into enough people in this town who had either changed their name… Aaron and Sara Green… or had kept their mother’s maiden name… Annie Mack… Was it stretching the seam of possibility that in a town known for attracting people who had secret lives or blemished pasts that they would operate under an assumed name?
If Bailey Van Gorden was really Jack Webber, what kind of hell did Jack Webber instigate to create a situation where his son was kidnapped? Was it a spurned male lover of Bailey’s? That thought didn’t seem to hold water with Jane as the tone of the clues seemed to indicate a feeling that leaned toward both exposure of a sin and, within that revelation, a chance for revenge from the person who was hurt. Since the name Webber was featured so prominently, perhaps, Jane thought, it had something to do with Bailey’s past.
Jane re-read the transcripts of the two voicemail messages. Both talked about a child and how, “He cried like a baby and will never be a real man.”
The first transcript grabbed Jane. “Do you know what it’s like to feel as if you’re two seconds from your last breath? DO YOU? It feels just like this…” This was followed by the whimpering of what sounded like a child crying and then the words, “He pounds on the window and you do nothing.”
Jane wasn’t certain, but she wondered if the kidnapperturned-killer was talking about someone else besides Jake in that clue.
“Webber,” Jane said to herself. If she was going to link that name to the Van Gordens, she needed something solid to prove it. Her mind flashed on a very solid item—the silver cigarette case in Bailey’s office. The ornate VG lettering on top seemed very elaborate to Jane when she first saw it. While she didn’t have a perfect memory of the engraving, she now realized that it was in actuality a flamboyantly carved W. And the way that Carol grabbed the cigarette case, holding it to her chest and not wanting Jane to see it? Jane thought it was because of what was inside the case, not what was written on the outside. For whatever reason, when Bailey assumed a new identity, he couldn’t let go of that silver cigarette case. Maybe when you willingly lose so much of who you were, you need something tangible from the past—especially if killing that past wasn’t of your own making. Jane glanced to the lone Chesterfield cigarette protected in a plastic evidence bag. “Of course,” Jane realized. You have cigarettes, you need a place to put them. Chesterfield was a brand closely associated with the 1960s and before, and it was quite common back then for the upper class to serve cigarettes to their guests out of a case rather than the pack they came in.
But Bailey was forty-eight, which meant he was born in the early 1960s. The specific Chesterfield cigarette featured in the clues was the 101 brand. And Jane’s research showed that that specific brand was launched in late 1967 and then faded into obscurity years later. In fact, the person behind the clues made a point of carefully outlining each cigarette with a black pen exactly one millimeter from the tip to stress that 101 brand. As Jane regarded the cigarette with new eyes, it was as if the kidnapper was also pointing with authority to either 1967 or 1968 when the 101 was first marketed. And since Bailey was born five to six years prior to that, Jane highly doubted that he was the one puffing on the Chesterfields.
Jane stood back and checked out the line of clues. She looked at the stack of pages she’d copied off the microfiche viewer from the Millburn Township Register. Unpinning the pages from the line, she checked the date on the first article—January 5th, 1968. The headline, SEARCH IS ON FOR MISSING BOY appeared beneath the date. Why in the hell was the year 1968 continuing to show up? It was the year Jordan was arrested, when David Sackett moved into the house across from the Copelands, when an eight-year-old boy went missing in the area and when Chesterfield 101 cigarettes had their first wave of popularity. The serendipitous dovetailing was far too much to ignore. The question for Jane was where did Jordan Copeland fit into it?
Jane carried the stack of pages copied from the Millburn paper to the bed and thumbed through them, in search of the second article. Page after page of advertisements fell to the floor and Jane kneeled down to collect them. On
e advertisement caught her eye. It was a quarter-page ad, bordered by a thick black line. At the top was a mock-up of a playing card—the Ace—but instead of the traditional symbol for the spade suit, there was a drawing of a digging spade in its place. The line below read,
Ace Builders
Family Owned and Operated Since 1926
Let Ace Builders design your dream home.
And their slogan? It’s in the cards that we’re the right builder for you!
There was a phone number listed. Jane dialed the number, expecting to get a message that it was no longer in service. But instead, a man answered. “Holgate Construction, John Holgate speaking.”
“Hello,” Jane said, not sure how to approach this. She introduced herself and gave her title, which instantly seemed to make Holgate take notice. “We’re working a cold case out here and your phone number looks like it’s associated with a company called Ace Builders that operated there in Short Hills in the late 1960s?”
“Ah, hang on, would you?” Jane heard Holgate close a door and sit back down. “I thought that was all behind us. We did our best to distance ourselves from the Ace name.”
“Could you please elaborate, Mr. Holgate?”
“We had to keep the number in order to maintain the customer base, but it took years to bury all the gossip…”
“Sir, I need you to be more specific. What gossip are you referring to?”
“I’d have to assume your cold case has something to do with Jack Webber.”
Jane felt her mouth go dry. “Yes,” she quickly recovered. “That’s exactly it. But I need you to tell me what you know before I proceed.”
“Shit,” he whispered, clearly uncomfortable. “I bought Ace Builders back in ’68 from the Webbers after they left the area…”
“Could you please verify for me the names of those family members?”
