by Joel Goldman
I studied Rice, not saying anything, waiting for her to volunteer something. She tugged at her top again and then checked her watch.
“Can I go now, Detective? I really am in a hurry.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
I moved my car to the curb, watching her drive away, wondering if I would know the truth if it bit me in the ass. Colby’s story that Jill Rice had called our office looking for a buyer didn’t stand up against her version. That didn’t make Colby the liar but it did mean one of them wasn’t telling the truth. Thomas Rice had offered his alternate reality, that his wife had gotten everything in the divorce and that what she did with the property was up to her. He was careful enough to tell a story that was at least technically true even if it wasn’t the whole story.
I called Grisnik to see what he’d found out about who had visited Thomas Rice and who Rice had talked to on the phone.
“His ex-wife came to see him a few weeks ago. Only time she shows up on the visitor logs,” Grisnik said.
“That fits with what she told me. Score one for her in the truth sweepstakes.”
“Rice have any other visitors?”
“He is one unpopular guy. His lawyer came to see him once right after he started serving his sentence. No one after that until his wife.”
“What about phone calls? Did Rice call anyone after we left?”
“One call to a cell phone.”
“Whose was it?”
“Phone belonged to an eighty-five-year-old man lives in an Alzheimer’s unit.”
“Why would Rice call him?”
“He didn’t. Phone was stolen. We don’t have any idea who Rice called.”
“Let’s go back and ask him,” I said.
“Too late. He hanged himself in the prison laundry. Happened last night. I just heard about it an hour ago.”
“Shit. I just talked to his ex-wife. She didn’t say anything about it. She must not have gotten word yet.”
“She’s the ex-wife, not the wife, which takes her off the next-of-kin list.”
“Someone should let her know before she reads about it in the paper.”
“You want to volunteer,” Grisnik said, “be my guest. Telling the family, even the exes, is the worst part of this job. You can have it.”
I hung up and shook. It was a mild ripple, a reminder of the condition my condition was in. I wondered if the news of Rice’s death had triggered the tremor, a reaction to guilt over the possibility that my visit had literally scared him to death. If that was the case, I must not have felt too guilty since the tremors were short-lived. I didn’t feel responsible for Rice’s death. On that, I agreed with his wife. Rice had chosen his road. I was doing my job.
On a purely statistical basis, Rice’s death should not have been a surprise. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in prison, which sounds pretty grim until you realize there aren’t a lot of other ways to go. The rate is not as bad as in jails, where suicide is the leading cause of death. People don’t stay in jail long enough to die for other reasons. They either get out or graduate to prison.
Despite the numbers, Rice didn’t strike me as suicidal, even though he ran the gamut of human emotions when I saw him. He was a wheeler-dealer, the kind of person who would never throw in the towel, and the prison laundry was an unlikely place to give up unless he had help.
Of all the emotions Rice had displayed, it turned out that the most honest one had been fear. The only time he was afraid was when I asked him about the sale of his house and car. Though neither of us mentioned him by name, Colby Hudson had hovered over our conversation like a curse that had now come true.
I hadn’t learned anything that would convict Colby of a crime, but I doubted that the truth, whatever it was, would set him free. He’d gone on a buying binge that he couldn’t afford on his FBI salary. He was the one person who knew about the surveillance camera in Marcellus’s house and who matched the description of the man I thought I’d seen running from the murder scene, and who had been sitting at the right hand of Javy Ordonez, late of this world. I didn’t know whether he was Forrest Gump, who managed by sheer coincidence to show up at every pivotal moment in the history of this case, or whether he was the man behind the throne, but my litany of suspicion was enough to give any Internal Affairs investigator a blue-diamond woody.
I couldn’t separate my suspicions of him from my knowledge that he was cheating on Wendy. Tanja Andrija had neither admitted nor denied having an affair with him. That didn’t matter. Colby was having an affair with her even if she wasn’t having one with him.
On that score, I realized that Wendy had me dead to rights about my relationship with Kate. I had been unfaithful to Joy. I shook again, this time from shame. I was judging Colby more harshly than I had judged myself. Truth and righteousness had become silent casualties in my rationalized world.
My cell phone rang. Caller ID said it was Ammara Iverson. I was anxious to talk with her, hoping that she’d been able to get me copies of Thomas Rice’s file.
“Hey,” I said, “great timing. Any luck with the Rice file?”
“Sorry. I’ve been jammed up.”
“I know you’re busy, but the sooner the better. How’d it go with the polygraph?”
“I’m guilty of having sexual fantasies about Denzel Washington. Otherwise, I’m in the clear.”
“Good to know. What’s up?”
“Have you heard from Colby lately?” asked Ammara.
“Not since I saw him at lunch yesterday. Why?”
“He didn’t show up for his polygraph.”
“Did you try to reach him?”
“Troy tried his cell and his home phone. When he didn’t answer, Troy told Ben Yates. Yates sent two agents to Colby’s house. He wasn’t there. The lock on the back door had been jimmied. They went inside, where they found some cash and drugs. The U.S. Attorney is getting a search warrant.”
“Why? They’ve already searched the place.”
“Colby not showing up, together with the jimmied back door justified the entry into the house. Make sure he was okay and all that.”
“Are you telling me that the cash and drugs were sitting out in plain sight?” I asked.
“All I can tell you is what was found inside the house. Now that we can’t find Colby and there’s evidence of a crime, we’ve got to do a full search that no one can complain about later, if there is a later.”
Ammara let her last words hang, reminding me of our conversation yesterday.
“And what?”
She paused. I could hear her take a deep breath. “I called Wendy before I called you. Just in case Colby was at her place and had overslept.”
I started to shake, worse than from guilt, worse than from shame. My heart raced out in front of the tremors. I stumbled over my words.
“Has she heard from Colby?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her. She didn’t answer at home or on her cell and her boss said she didn’t show up to work. I’m sorry, Jack, we can’t find either one of them.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
There are things we know and things we don’t want to know. When what we know is too hard to handle, we convince ourselves that we can box it up, stick it someplace we can forget about, and then, magically, we won’t know it any longer. Then we protect ourselves with a lie—what we don’t know can’t hurt us.
I have never forgotten the pain of losing Kevin. It had hardened into a callus around the unhealed hole in my heart. But I had put away the unspeakable immobilizing fear and the cold rush of primal panic that swept over me when I first learned that my neighbor had taken him. That’s what I had hidden in the box that Ammara had just opened and it reentered my system as swiftly as snake’s venom.
Wendy wasn’t a young child and Colby Hudson wasn’t a sexual predator. She might have gone shopping and he might have gone fishing. They might have eloped. Someone might have planted the drugs and cash in Colby’s house. Anything was possible and n
othing was certain except that I was scared, as frightened as I’d been that day in Dallas.
The disappearance of a child always mobilizes action. Everyone can identify with the child’s vulnerability. There are no gray areas, only outrage and a secret, shameful gratitude of those who join in the search that it wasn’t their child.
It would be different with Wendy and Colby because no one knew whether they were victims or suspects, though Ammara’s unspoken subtext implied that the Bureau believed that Wendy might be the former while it was more likely that Colby was the latter. Colby’s status would be confirmed when the paperwork for his purchase of Jill Rice’s car and house was discovered in the search of his home.
It wouldn’t take long for Troy Clark to run the same traps I had. He’d find out that I had used a phony ID to visit Thomas Rice and that Rice died less than twenty-four hours later. He’d trace my Detective Funkhouser alter ego to Marty Grisnik, who could only give me so much cover without getting his tit caught in the wringer. And he’d find out that I had braced Jill Rice. He’d lock up Thomas Rice’s file before Ammara could copy it and I’d end up answering questions about withholding information and obstruction of justice, shakes or no shakes.
While all that was happening, Wendy would be slipping farther away. She would be only one of several priorities, probably at the bottom of the list until there was hard evidence that she was a victim of something.
When Kevin was taken, I had had the full resources of the federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies in one of the biggest cities in the United States. They and I did everything we could as fast as we could and it still wasn’t enough. This time I was alone and relegated to the sidelines, unable to control the investigation or, for that matter, my own body.
I tried to dial Joy’s phone number, but I was shaking so much I couldn’t get it right. I slammed the phone onto the car seat, cursing all that was holy and more that wasn’t. I hinged forward, smacking into the steering wheel, anchoring my arms around it until the worst had passed.
I raised my head. The street in front of Jill Rice’s house was deserted. It was small consolation that my outburst had gone unnoticed. My breathing slowed, keeping pace with the decreasing aftershocks in my torso. When my hands steadied, I tried Joy’s number again, searching for a way to tell her that our nightmare was back.
She answered on the first ring, her voice light, almost playful.
“Jack,” she said. “I guess you survived the radiologist.”
“Perfect attendance. Do you have a key to Wendy’s apartment?”
Joy always said I had two voices, with and without my badge. She hated the badge voice, said it was indifferent.
“What’s the matter?”
“Wendy didn’t go to work today,” I said, taking it one step at a time.
“Did you call her apartment or her cell?”
“I didn’t. Ammara Iverson did.”
“Why was she calling Wendy?”
Intuitive anxiety had elevated her pitch half an octave, her voice quivering. I imagined her sitting up, spine stiff, running one hand through her hair before grabbing on to something solid.
“She was looking for Colby Hudson. He didn’t show up to work, either.”
Joy forced a laugh. “Oh, you don’t think they ran off and got married, do you?”
My answer caught in my throat, held there by another spasm, escaping with a stutter. “I wish they had, but it doesn’t look that way. When Troy couldn’t find Colby, Ben Yates sent a couple of agents to his house. They found some things that didn’t belong there and now they’re looking for both Colby and Wendy.”
“Oh, my God, Jack! If Colby did anything wrong, the Bureau can’t think Wendy had anything to do with it! That’s absurd!”
“No one is saying that she did.”
“Then what are they saying?”
“That they can’t find her.”
Joy let out a low, wailing moan, understanding at last what I was saying. The woman who’d left me two months ago would have hung up, asking the rest of her questions in private, getting the answers from a bottle. She didn’t, gathering herself and asking, “What do we do?”
“The Bureau is tied up at Colby’s house. I don’t know if they’ve sent anyone to Wendy’s yet. I want to get there before they do. But I don’t have a key.”
“I do. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”
“I’m on my way.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Wendy lived in an apartment complex on the east side of the Country Club Plaza, a shopping, eating, and drinking district in midtown on the Missouri side of the state line. Her balcony looked west toward the public library and north up Main Street. I could see it as I approached along Ward Parkway, the library to my right, Brush Creek to my left. Her unit was on the northwest corner. The drapes facing the balcony were closed.
Searching her apartment was another calculated risk. If there was evidence of a crime, I might contaminate it without even knowing it. In that event, I’d be adding another count to an indictment for obstruction of justice. Good intentions wouldn’t save my career or mitigate my sentence. None of that mattered as much as the precious minutes that would evaporate while Troy Clark allocated his limited resources to finding Colby Hudson. Waiting was not an option.
Joy met me in the parking lot. Her jaw was set, her eyes stony, a thin purse stuck under her arm. She was wearing jeans, a lavender short-sleeved jersey under a tan jacket, and no makeup, her hair pulled back and held in place by a black band. She was bouncing slightly on the toes of her running shoes. She had never been a runner. The shoes were as new as she was. She gave me a hug. I held on until she pulled back.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Wendy’s apartment was a small one bedroom, one bath. The carpet was a rich cream, one pale wall set off by an array of four vibrant prints, each of two women, sitting at a café, strolling on a sidewalk, reclining in a drawing room, and lingering in a garden, their faces blank, featureless, their personalities expressed in their posture. There were prints on the other walls of a fanciful jungle filled with oversized tropical birds, a framed poster from the 1972 Montreux Jazz Festival and another celebrating Shakespeare in the Park. The furniture was modern, spare, and comfortable.
Two dinner dishes caked with uneaten spaghetti, dirty silverware on the top plate, were stacked in the sink alongside two wine glasses, a swallow of red left in each. A colander half filled with pasta sat on the kitchen counter next to an open jar of marinara sauce and an uncorked bottle of wine. Damp towels filled the washing machine, underwear in the dryer. The queen-size bed was unmade, the pillows spread out for two. Wendy’s suitcase was under the bed; her clothes still hung in the closet. There was no sign of a struggle or of forced entry.
The stuffed animal from her childhood, Monkey Girl, sat on her dresser. I remembered when I had given it to Wendy.
“It looks like she didn’t finish dinner and left in a hurry,” I said.
Joy surveyed the kitchen. “Dinner for two.”
“This has to be from last night’s dinner. Not the night before. That’s when she met me at Fortune Wok. As angry as she was, I doubt that she came home and made dinner. When was the last time you talked to her?”
Joy paced the living room, arms folded over her chest. “Wednesday night, after I talked to you. I called her back so she’d know that we had talked about your doctor appointments.”
“Did she say anything about going away?”
Joy shook her head. “No. Remember, I told you that she insisted on going with you to see the neurologist on Monday. She would have told me if she had changed her plans.”
“Did you talk about anything else?”
“I told her what you’d said about Kate Scranton. You were right. She was furious with you, but she was too upset about your shaking to deal with that. I told her to give you a break, that you were weak and pathetic like all newly single middle-aged men who had no idea how to live a
lone.”
Joy said it like she was reciting material learned for a test, the humor of her last comment lost until she realized what she’d said, looking at me, covering her mouth.
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
I waved off her concern. “You’re both right. I screwed up. Did she say anything at all about Colby either in that conversation or anytime in the last week or so?”
“Only that they had argued.”
“When? About what?”
“After your scene at Fortune Wok. Wendy didn’t say what they argued about.”
“Did she say anything about Colby buying a car and a house?”
Joy nodded. “She mentioned the house. What’s that got to do with all of this?”
I ran through a quick summary of the Thomas Rice case and the con?icting stories I’d gotten from Rice, his ex-wife, and Colby. When I told Joy that Thomas Rice had apparently hanged himself, the little color in her face vanished.
“Are you saying that Colby had something to do with that?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to tie all this together and I can’t make it work. There’s too much I don’t know.”
Wendy’s desk was on the wall opposite the balcony. A computer sat on it.
“Go through these papers on her desk,” I told Joy. “I’ll look at her computer.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything about Colby, anything about going away, anything that will help us find her.”
Fortunately, Wendy had ignored everything that I’d taught her about security and hadn’t protected her documents, e-mail, or bank records with passwords. Nothing jumped out at me, but I didn’t have time to read much of it.
“I’d take her computer with us, but that’s the first thing Troy will look for when he gets here.”
“No problem. Back it up with this.”
Joy tossed me her key ring. It had a ?ash bar on it with four gigs of memory.
