by Laurel Dewey
The surging suspicion reached levels that Jane had never experienced. Not in all her years of heavy drinking had she felt this exposed. She paced around the cabin, feeling like a trapped animal in a small, log cage. When she looked at the bedside clock, it was nearly five P.M. Paranoia makes time fly, she thought. Jane paced to the rear of the cabin by the bathroom. Suddenly, she heard the distinctive sound of Kit’s footsteps outside. The room was almost completely dark. Jane considered it an advantage. Having the upper hand would give her the edge she needed.
Kit unlocked the door, sending a gust of chilly night air into the cabin. She closed the door and carefully made her way around Jane’s bed to turn on the bedside lamp. She turned the switch, screamed, and dropped a large brown bag to the floor. Standing six feet away was Jane, Glock extended and pointed at Kit’s head.
CHAPTER 23
Jane’s heart pounded as she steadied her Glock with both hands. The searing look in her eye was unmistakable to Kit.
“Jesus, Jane,” Kit said, visibly shaken, “what in the hell’s going on?”
“You tell me,” Jane replied, all business.
“I had to go out....” Kit said, sounding like a confused child. “Tomorrow’s a holiday.”
“So what?”
“Stores are closed.”
“You know, Kit. I really hate it when people think they can play me.”
“Play you?” Kit’s tone became more indignant.
“What is it you hoped to achieve by getting me to the Stop ’n’ Save?”
“The Stop ’n’ Save?”
“Don’t act like a fucking idiot!”
“I’m not acting like a fucking idiot! I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about!” It was obvious Kit was pissed. It didn’t matter if a gun was pointed directly at her.
“You left the phone book turned to the number codes. The ones that tell you how to disguise your number when you call someone! And while it’s hard to distinguish a voice from a whisper, I knew it was familiar. ‘Let me help you.... ’” Jane whispered those last words with a sarcastic twist.
Kit shook her head. “The phone book.... I used it to call a store.... I was getting ready to go and I think I knocked it off the table—”
“Give me a fucking break!”
“Somebody called you? Regarding Lou?” Kit interjected.
Jane reestablished her hard-line stance with the Glock. “Stop playing me!”
“For Christ’s sake! I didn’t call you!” Kit recalled something. “Look in the goddamned phone book! I circled the name of the store!”
Jane’s head raced with possible strategies. Her back was up against the wall...literally. “I’m not checking the phone book, Kit.”
“Then I’ll show you,” Kit said, turning to find the phone book. Jane quickly trained the Glock on Kit, waiting for her to make a sudden move. Kit nervously found the page in the Yellow Pages section and held it up so Jane could clearly see it. “Right there!” Kit said pointing to a one-inch ad at the bottom of the page. “Circled in blue ink.” She cocked her head to the bedside table where a ballpoint pen lay. “There’s the pen I used. You want to check it for the blue ink? The store is The Herbal Haven. They sell bulk herbs. I told you I was nearly out of one of my formulas this morning, but you didn’t seem to care. You were too busy running off to your next...whatever. I didn’t know when you were coming back. So I called Barry at the front desk and asked him if he was going to town. He said he was and he’d give me a ride. But it was going to take him four or five hours before he was done and he could pick me up. So I made do with the time I had. And, no, I didn’t call you because I don’t know your goddamned cell number!” Kit angrily threw the phone book across the room. She picked up the bag she dropped. “You want to see what I got at the store?” She pulled out one plastic baggie after another of herbs and tossed them on her bed. “And here’s the last one!” Kit withdrew several packs of American Spirit cigarettes and tossed them with fervor on the bed. “Those are for you! I figured if you’re going to smoke, you might as well smoke all natural tobacco! You’re welcome!” Kit stared down Jane as an uneasy silence passed between them.
Jane still wasn’t sold. She calmly kept the Glock on Kit. “You haven’t been honest with me, Kit. I know you’re in the system and I know why.”
Kit’s face sunk. She swallowed hard as her eyes traced the carpet. “I...I didn’t know it was relevant.”
“You didn’t think that supplying the goods to a militant bomber who killed four innocent people was relevant?”
“Wait! Supplying the goods? Where’d you hear that?”
Jane recalled the single article that Cousin Carl had found on the shoe factory bombing. “That’s how it was reported.”
“In the beginning, yes. But that’s before they knew all the facts of the case.”
“So enlighten me!”
Kit took a shaky seat on Jane’s bed. The memory clearly troubled her heart. “Please...put the gun down, Jane,” Kit said, her eyes still focused on the floor. Her voice was weak and deeply distraught.
Jane gradually lowered the Glock. She wasn’t about to drop her guard completely, so she braced her back against the wall.
“As you know, I’ve made a few bad judgments in my life. I believed that a group of dedicated people could make a big difference in this world. And I thought that anyone who wanted to make a difference was someone who had an honest heart. It never occurred to me that misinterpretations of what was said could lead an unstable person to commit acts that were never intended.” Kit let out a hard sigh. “I belonged to a group of like-minded individuals in the mid-eighties. We called ourselves ‘The Lightkeepers of Peace.’ We met weekly at our various homes and talked about liberal causes. Migrant farm worker reform, decent wages for blue-collar work, the disgrace of the little man being usurped by the powerful corporate conglomerate. We were adamantly a pacifist organization and nonviolent to the core! We marched. We protested peacefully. We draped signs over highways to spread our message. We wanted people to be aware of how the corporate structure was destroying the fabric of our country. We’d been together as a group for five years when a man named Nelson Pudell started attending our meetings. In retrospect, Nelson was different from the get-go. He had an edge. A fever. When his eyes flared and his veins bulged, we encouraged what we took for passion. Looking back, it was so obvious that he wasn’t like the rest of us....”
“You’re stalling, Kit. What happened at the factory?”
Kit gathered her thoughts. “We received credible evidence from one of the Latino workers that the conditions inside the shoe factory were unsafe. We were told that a man on the assembly line lost the use of his hand; another lost a finger. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Kapp, didn’t care. We wanted the press and the community to know how this factory was treating its people. It was supposed to be a normal protest: stand at the gate with signs and let the owners know that what they were doing to their Latino employees was not acceptable. When we arrived, we noticed that Nelson wasn’t there. We figured he’d overslept. We started our march and our chants. And then it happened. The explosion lifted us off our feet. It blew apart the front offices and started a huge fire. People ran out of the place screaming for their lives. Some of them were burned pretty badly. I saw body parts fall out of the sky. We thought it was a natural gas explosion. But then we saw Nelson emerge from the rubble, his fist in the air, yelling ‘I am a savior for the Lightkeepers of Peace!’ His rationale was that the Kapps had turned their back on two employees who had lost the use of a hand and were missing a finger. So he was going to place a bomb near the front offices where the owners worked and make them feel the suffering that they wouldn’t acknowledge their employees had suffered. The old eye for an eye.”
“Did he kill the Kapps?”
“He killed Mr. Kapp. The other three were Latino factory workers who happened to be in the front office when the bomb exploded.”
“How did you get linked?”
“We were all linked by virtue of our association with Nelson. They booked every one of us and then did the sorting out later.”
“The article said you provided Nelson with the materials for making the bomb.”
Kit shook her head. “He came to my house a few times. Once he asked if I had any copper wire hanging around. I said I did and gave it to him. The next time, he asked me for a clock. Finally, he was at the house and asked to borrow some books from my library. I didn’t know what he took. It turns out, he grabbed some pamphlets I’d picked up at an anti-war rally years before. I didn’t know what was in them. But I found out! It was a bunch of articles written by angry, ex-military men from Vietnam that made a brief reference to how we should ‘bomb the sons of bitches into oblivion who perpetrated the Vietnam War.’ It was a single line, but to Nelson it was the trigger...the acknowledgement...the motivation he needed to validate his destruction.” Kit looked at Jane, her eyes sad and weary. “I learned the hard way that the message you give someone may not be the message they hear. So in the end, the responsibility is equally shared between the one who gives that message and the one who acts on what he thought he heard. And most importantly, the responsibility of not recognizing the tenuous nature of someone’s mind and heart begins with the one who incites.” Kit let out a long sigh. “Whatever article you found, it must have been one that was written early in the case, because after they sorted everything out, the charges of aiding and abetting were dropped. My lawyer got it down that I was guilty of lack of judgment. Got a mug shot out of it and my name in the system... and memories that will haunt me forever.” Kit got up and headed into the bathroom. She turned on the bathroom light. “You want to hear the sad irony?”
“What was that?”
“A month later we discovered that the credible evidence about the injuries to the Latino workers was false. No one lost a finger or the use of his hand. In fact, the factory’s safety records were impeccable.” Kit walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
Jane holstered the Glock and stood silently for several minutes, the waves of paranoia extinguished. All that was left was a bone-tired ache. A half truth is as good as no truth, she thought. Half a story equaled none. Now with her senses back, she felt a sense of shame that she so readily jumped to misguided conclusions. To pull a gun on someone...Jane winced at her overreaction. She would have liked to blame her knee-jerk behavior on the lingering psychological aftereffects of her whiskey binge. But that argument seemed like a lame justification. She screwed up because she screwed up. No excuses. The only thing she craved now more than taking the last two hours back was a cigarette. She knocked gently on the bathroom door. “I’m going outside for a smoke.”
Outside, the night air cut through Jane like an icy dagger. She lit her cigarette and hugged the side of the cabin to keep warm. The faint sound of New Year’s Eve revelers starting their party early was heard in the distance. Jane had her own name for New Year’s Eve: Amateur Night. Half in the bag before midnight and puking in the bushes. There was no style. No class. Just piss drunk, part-time party animals who waited all year to act insane when the clock struck midnight.
Her cell phone rang. Jane checked the number. It was Sergeant Weyler.
“Hey, Boss,” Jane answered.
“There’s that Boss word again. Hello, Jane.” His voice was smooth and rich.
Jane couldn’t help but smile. “I wasn’t expecting you to call me back so soon. Being New Year’s Eve....”
“I got the impression you were in a rush.”
“What’d you find out?”
Weyler revealed that both Shane Golden and Trace Fagin were clean. Regarding Fagin, Weyler learned he was a sales rep for a restaurant equipment supplier. He was returning from the Ahwahnee Hotel when the cops picked him up on Highway 41. He’d parked his blue Chevy on the side of the road and walked into the woods to take a pee. Since the cops were on the lookout for his make of sedan based on the information from Leann Hamilton, they treated Fagin with greater suspicion. “They say Fagin acted suspiciously,” Weyler noted, “and so they asked if they could pat him down. He said sure and that’s when they found a girl’s bracelet in his jacket pocket. It had silver hearts that spelled out CHARLOTTE.
“Oh, Christ.”
“That was good enough for them to take him in. He swore up and down that he found the bracelet in the woods as he was walking to take his piss. Claims he thought it was pretty and that maybe his daughter would like it.”
“Don’t tell me he’s got a daughter back home named Charlotte.”
“No. But he does have a daughter named Charlene who he calls Char. He reasoned that he could remove the separate silver hearts that spelled LOTTE and she’d never be the wiser.”
“The sheriff isn’t buying that, is he?”
“He sure isn’t. Fagin’s got nobody to vouch for his whereabouts on December 25. He called his wife and kids once during the day, but said he was on the road alone the whole time. He claims he didn’t even know about Charlotte’s kidnapping. The sheriff finds that odd as the news was splashed across every news station. But Fagin maintains he doesn’t watch TV. He reads books at night when he stops at a hotel. When he drives, he listens to books on tape instead of the radio. And these are inspirational books, by the way. Stuff like how to empower your life and think yourself rich. They’re wearing Fagin down. Hard. My source tells me that Fagin can’t take much more of it and he’s probably going to cop to something soon.”
Jane fell silent, feeling into her gut. “He didn’t do it, Boss,” she quietly stated. “His only crime was taking a piss in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Driving the wrong car?”
“Are we hinging this guy’s guilt on a sixteen-year-old girl’s description of a car?”
“She’s their only valid witness.”
“Is she?”
“You want to tell me what you’re thinking?”
“I got to ruminate on it. They’ve checked the woods where they found Fagin?”
“Yeah. Twice. But the rain is playing havoc with the job. They took bloodhounds out there with a piece of Charlotte’s clothing. Supposedly, they picked up some kind of scent of the kid but lost it.”
“They picked up her scent?” Jane let that information absorb for a second. “How’d the media not report that one?”
“The sheriff asked them not to talk about it in order to preserve the integrity of the scene.”
“Where is this spot?”
Weyler fished through his notes. “Right near mile-marker forty-four.”
Jane’s throat stung. She contemplated mentioning that she saw Shane Golden parked in that same spot during the early afternoon of that day, but she wasn’t ready to formulate any clear accusations of the boy yet.
“Now, this Lou Peters fellow?” Weyler continued. “Apparently, the sheriff’s deputies didn’t have to track him down. Peters showed up himself at the sheriff’s office to declare his whereabouts on December 26.”
Jane recalled Kit mentioning that Lou made a conscious point of following the stated rules. From checking in ahead of time with his bondsman to alerting the guards at Chino Prison that his cell door was not locking properly, Kit felt it was Lou’s premeditated way of endearing himself to those in power. Look honest and people will treat you as an honest man. “How can Lou prove his whereabouts?”
“Receipts,” Weyler stated. “One from a Shell gas station that is time coded and located about an hour north on Highway 41. The other two are receipts for later in the day from the dining room of a motel called....” Weyler shuffled his notes. “It’s called The Hummingbird Motor Lodge.”
“The Hummingbird?” Jane was stunned. “Holy shit.” As much as Jane didn’t want to believe it, the odd sequence of bird names that had followed her these last few days and mirrored the legend of Pico Blanco was uncanny and downright frightening.
“Is that significant?” Weyler asked.
“I don�
�t know, Boss. Maybe it’s just a...strange coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” Weyler sounded intrigued. “You know how I feel about coincidences.”
“Yeah. A coincidence is two steps away from a lucky break that solves the case,” Jane said, repeating one of Weyler’s many pithy sayings. “So, does the sheriff’s office have a copy of these receipts?”
“Yes. And I just happen to have a fax copy of those receipts in my hand.”
Jane stood dumbfounded. “Who do you know in this tiny town?”
“Can’t tell you. I promised I’d keep their anonymity. You got a fax nearby?”
Jane remembered the business card she swiped from the front office and dug it out of her jacket. She rattled off the fax number to Weyler and told him to address it to “Melody Clark,” the pseudonym Kit made up.
“One more thing,” Weyler quickly added. “Charlotte went missing over Thanksgiving weekend. Friday to Saturday. Almost thirty-six hours.”
“They have a police report on it?” Jane took a nervous drag on her cigarette.
“No. Her mother was about to call it in when Charlotte came home. The reason I’m telling you is the media got hold of it and they’re going to report it tonight.”
“Where does that lead us? She’s a runaway?”
“Maybe. But she may be a dead runaway because of that bracelet Fagin’s got.”
“No, no, this is not adding up, Boss.”
“What’s your gut telling you?” Weyler asked respectfully.
“Layers. There are layers upon layers. It’s not a straight shot. I can’t say it any better way than that. All I know is Trace Fagin is innocent.”
“You better figure it out soon because the way they’re wearing Fagin down, he’s about to cop to something he didn’t do.”
Jane knew that would be a death sentence for Charlotte. The authorities would curb their search for the girl, plodding along for a few weeks, hoping to find her body buried somewhere in the woods. The magic window of time had long since passed—those first forty-eight hours after a kid went missing. Statistics showed that the odds of finding a child alive after that initial forty-eight hours decreased substantially with each passing day. Her mind flashed to Rachel Hartly. Jane gave Weyler the condensed version of what occurred at Hartly’s house that morning. The odd newspapers with the missing sections. The guesthouse. The rifle pointed at her head.
