Jude Devine Mystery Series

by Rose Beecham

  “So, you saw these men parked outside Ms. Perkins’s home before or after you called her at the bar?”

  “After.”

  “Was Corban still crying then?”

  Miller frowned like he was straining to remember. “Can’t say exactly. He calmed down after I gave him the Jim Beam.”

  What would it take to put a two-year-old in a coma—a few ounces of 80 proof? Jude’s mind ran with the scenario. Corban crying relentlessly after burning his hand. Miller dosing the child with bourbon a few times until he falls asleep. Eventually he realizes Corban is unconscious. He panics…

  “How much bourbon did you give him?” She kept her tone bland.

  “Dunno. A few spoonfuls.”

  “When was the last time you saw Corban?”

  “I told the other deputy.”

  “And now you can tell me.”

  Miller looked restless. “Right about when I phoned Tonya.”

  “Which makes it around ten?”

  “If you say so.” He didn’t lift his voice to reply, but Jude sensed it was a close thing.

  “How was he then?” she asked.

  “Asleep.”

  “You sound very sure about that. A moment ago you couldn’t be certain if he was crying at ten thirty. Yet now you’re telling me he was asleep at ten, when you called Tonya. Which one is it?”

  Again a brief flare of anger sharpened his dopey stare, and his mouth compressed. “He was asleep.”

  Jude produced a slightly puzzled smile. “You seem tense with this line of questioning, Mr. Miller. Is there something you’re not telling us?”

  “No.” A belligerent glare.

  “Mr. Miller,” Jude prompted softly. “We know things can go wrong with kids through no fault of the adults caring for them…tragic, unintentional accidents. If something happened to Corban, now is the time to tell us.”

  Miller stared down at the desk for several seconds, and when he lifted his head Jude could not read his expression. Blank blue eyes met hers and Miller said, with disingenuous confusion, “Are you accusing me of something? Do you think I hurt him?”

  “Did you?” Jude asked, watching for the fleeting, quickly suppressed microexpressions that could betray what Miller was really feeling.

  “Why would I do a thing like that?”

  “You tell me,” Jude said mildly. “I heard you don’t like him much.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  Jude growled softly, “Let’s not play games, Mr. Miller. You live in a small town. You think people don’t notice things? We have Brittany Kemple in the next room giving us a statement right now. Telling us all about your violent temper and how you once told her the only thing Corban Foley was good for was feeding to your dogs.”

  Miller lurched to his feet. “Brittany Kemple’s a fucking crazy woman and so are you if you believe anything that bitch tells you.”

  Jude rose instantly and ordered him to sit down. For a few seconds it seemed Miller might actually take a swing at her. If he’d had a gun in his hand, he’d have used it. Or tried to.

  She almost hoped he would try to land a punch, but if Brittany Kemple was any indication, the women he liked to slap around were former cheerleaders who weighed 100 pounds soaking wet. At 5’ 10” with muscle she didn’t bother to hide, a badge, and a large colleague standing a few feet away just waiting for a nod from her, Jude was a whole different ball game.

  She stared him down, noting with interest that all trace of dopey innocence had left his eyes. Miller looked downright menacing when he let the harmless hick veneer slip. But, apparently, he could control his hotheaded impulses when he needed to.

  His mouth twisted faintly, and he dropped his butt back onto the seat. “Hey, dude, I get it,” he announced. “You’re the cop and I’m the witness. You gotta know if I’m for real, so you wind me up and wait and see what happens.”

  “He watches TV,” Jude commented to Koertig. It was her cue for him to join the interrogation. Facing Miller again, she set up the topic. “That goat’s head. When did you first see it?”

  “After I noticed Corban was missing.”

  “You went outside at that point?” She gave Pete Koertig a nod.

  He read ponderously from Miller’s earlier statement, “I walked around the house looking for him, but he likes hiding in places. I thought he’d gone to sleep in a cupboard or something, so I went back to bed.”

  Koertig bent down next to Miller and said with mocking disbelief, “Now you’re telling us you went outside and saw that goat’s head, then you went back to bed?”

  “No. I saw it after I got up again.” Tiny beads of perspiration gathered across their subject’s forehead.

  “What time was that?”

  Miller pointed at the statement Koertig was holding. “I already told you.”

  “I want to hear it again.” Koertig spoke slowly and patiently, like he was talking to the learning-challenged.

  He did pleasant menace very well, Jude reflected. Koertig was a stocky, well-scrubbed, Nordic-looking man whose youth and single-minded preoccupation with his wife’s marathon training program prevented him from declining into the pink and white chubbiness that seemed to prevail in his family. Two of his siblings ran a local bakery Jude patronized. Both looked like they sampled the wares too frequently.

  Most days Koertig ran at least six miles with his wife before he showed up to work. This feat engendered awe at the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office, where folks found something odd about any guy organizing his life so he could throw wet sponges at his spouse during the Bolder Boulder race. Certainly if Jude had to pick from among the MCSO officers the man most likely to be his wife’s chief coach and support crew, Pete Koertig would have been at the bottom of her list.

  Miller had reverted to whiny defensiveness once more. He said, “Guess it must have been around four when I saw it.”

  “What were you wearing?” Koertig asked.

  With a bemused frown, Miller said, “T-shirt and shorts.”

  “So, what you’re saying is you woke from a deep sleep and decided maybe the kid wasn’t hiding in a cupboard after all. You went outdoors in minus twenty degrees wearing your Jockeys, walked around to the front of the house, and saw the goat’s head?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now see, that doesn’t make any sense to me.” Koertig glanced toward Jude. “How much snow did we have last night, Detective?”

  “Here in Cortez, it must have been a foot. Enough to cover that goat’s head.”

  “So you saw a lump in the snow,” Koertig concluded. “You went out there and dug the snow away with your bare hands. Is that how it went down, Mr. Miller?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I saw the broken windows, and I went in the house and woke Tonya up.”

  “You left the goat’s head where it was?” Jude asked.

  “Yeah.” Miller’s eyes flickered. Smugly, he said, “I knew it was evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “That fucking Matt Roache and Gums Thompson were there and they did something.”

  “Something to Corban?” Jude prompted.

  “What else? He’s gone, isn’t he?” Miller grabbed a tissue and blew his nose, overwhelmed with emotion all of a sudden.

  The tears could easily be genuine, Jude conceded. He could be feeling sorry for himself, aware he was in deep and seeing no way out. Or he was innocent, exhausted, and genuinely distressed over the child’s disappearance and the stress of being interrogated for hours. But she doubted it. Although Miller presented as an emotional subject, she had a sense that he was much more calculating than that.

  She deliberated on his reply for a few seconds. They had just caught him out in a lie. The blood evidence from Tonya Perkins’s living room showed that the goat’s head had been in the room, probably hurled through the broken window. Someone with Miller’s foot size had subsequently removed it and covered the bloody area with a ru
g. Trace suggested that the rug was previously situated in front of the dresser in Tonya’s bedroom. The head was then transported outdoors and placed in the middle of the yard.

  No one could have gained access through the broken windows, and the doors showed no signs of forced entry. Who else but Miller could have moved the goat’s head and rearranged the scene? Jude concluded he’d staged what he hoped would come across as sinister and symbolic. Did he imagine the police would speculate that Devil worshipers killed a goat and stole a baby for some kind of sick ritual?

  She decided to hold back what they knew about the goat’s head and see how many more lies Miller would tell. Signaling Koertig to work with her, she softened her tone and said, like she was buying the Satanic angle, “It sure sounds like these individuals are mixed up in something nasty.”

  She watched Miller closely and caught a faint relaxation in the line of his mouth and jaw. He tapped a name on the list he’d written. “Talk to him first. He’s the ringleader.”

  “Gums Thompson. Do you know him, Detective?” she asked Koertig.

  “Local mental patient,” he confirmed.

  This seemed to please Miller, who got cocky all of a sudden and announced in the manner of a man who’d just added two and two, “Come to think of it, he made some threats a while back. I told Tonya to ignore him. But now…”

  “Could you be more specific?” Jude asked like she’d taken the bait.

  “He told her to stop seeing me or she’d be sorry, and so would her kid.”

  “When was that?”

  “Dunno. Three weeks ago, maybe.”

  Jude nodded sagely and told Koertig, “Get these individuals brought in. I want them dragged out of their beds and scared shitless.”

  Miller seemed to be trying to keep the glee off his face as Jude and Koertig got to their feet and made a show of losing interest in him.

  “We’ll continue this interview later, Mr. Miller,” Jude said, moving toward the door.

  “Can I get a burger or something?”

  “No problem.” Like it was an afterthought, she added, “One more question. We have a report from state patrol that your truck was seen on Highway 666 at around eleven last night. Care to explain that?”

  She waited for an outright denial, but Miller said, “Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot about that. Tonya was out of disposables so I went to pick some up from the late-night gas station.”

  “You needed to change Corban?”

  “No, but Tonya would have been pissed at me. She asked me to get some at the supermarket before I came over to her place, but I forgot.”

  “Why travel so far?”

  “Couldn’t find anything open in Cortez, so I thought I’d try Dove Creek.”

  “I see. And did you find the diapers in the end?”

  He shook his head solemnly. “No, but I tried. That’s gotta count for something.”

  Jude managed to keep her tone completely bland. “Would you mind if we searched your truck?”

  “Sure. Corban rides with me all the time. He loves that truck.”

  Jude smiled faintly. Miller was letting them know that any evidence they found would mean nothing. All the same, Jude was amazed he’d agreed to let them take a look. If he had something to hide, the guy was either genuinely stupid or arrogant enough to believe he’d covered his ass.

  She wondered if arrogance had factored into his acknowledgement about the Triple Six. Whatever the motivation, if they uncovered anything in the vicinity of Cahone, Miller had just put himself there by his own admission. It was probably his biggest mistake yet. She could tell Koertig was thinking exactly the same thing as they left the interview room.

  He said, “Ate a bowl of stupid for breakfast.”

  “We need to know everything about this guy,” Jude said. “Interview all his buddies. I want behavior patterns, a full history of acts of rage, a record of every word he ever spoke about Corban. And find out if he’s ever had a girlfriend with kids before Ms. Perkins. If he has, bring her in.”

  Pratt collared her as she and Koertig exited the hallway into the main office area. “What do you think?”

  “Opportunity and motive,” Jude mused. “Plus statistical likelihood and odd behavior. And Cahone…that’s in close proximity to several bodies of water. ”

  “I got three teams lined up to search the Dolores and the reservoir up there first thing in the morning,” Pratt said, hot on the case. “Your boy and his hound ready to start in again at first light?”

  “No problem. Are you considering divers?”

  “Not if I can help it.” Pratt pulled a man-sized tissue from the box beneath his arm and grumbled, “Ka-ching, ka-ching.”

  After he’d turned aside and blown his nose, Jude asked, “Think there’s any chance he’s alive?”

  Pratt chewed it over for a few seconds. “Times like this, I get to thinking what the job does for your mental outlook.”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  “You jump to negative conclusions.”

  “It’s hard not to.”

  “What’s wrong with people?” Emotion altered Pratt’s voice. “He’s just a baby.”

  “Do you want me to arrest Miller, sir?” It had crossed Jude’s mind that the pressure of charges being filed could net a confession. It often did with domestic offenders who hadn’t been in the system. They tended to believe what they were told about getting a better deal if they came clean, and the guilt-stricken ones were usually desperate to unburden themselves.

  “What have we got on him?” Pratt asked.

  “It’s all circumstantial so far.”

  “I don’t want him lawyering up.”

  “Then we’ll have to send him home some time soon, and we need for Perkins to play ball. I want her to wear a wire.”

  Pratt looked startled. “Can we do that?”

  “He’s a suspect in a child abduction and possible homicide. If he’s going to confess anything to his girlfriend, it’s probably going to happen as soon as they’re back together alone.”

  “Think you can talk her into it?”

  “Let’s give it twenty-four hours,” Jude said. “He’s told enough lies for us to hold him a while longer.”

  “He’s going to ask for a lawyer,” Pratt warned.

  “I’m not so sure.” Jude was still trying to get a fix on Miller’s psychology. “I think he’s holding off so he can paint himself as a poor dumb schmuck caught up in events outside his control. He’s arrogant enough to believe he can pull off an act like that. Maybe he thinks a lawyer might make him look smart. And guilty.”

  Pratt barked a hoarse laugh. “Like he isn’t.”

  Chapter Five

  “Are you going to join the search?” Debbie Basher asked the woman at the opposite end of her sofa.

  Lonewolf, whose real name was Sandy Lane, took a break from cleaning her twelve gauge to reply, “I thought about it.”

  “I’ll come, too, if you want.”

  “I’m not sure what the point is. My money says the kid’s dead.” Lonewolf set the shotgun aside and returned her attention to the evening news. “Check out the boyfriend. That’s one guilty sonofabitch.”

  Debbie tried to imagine how she would feel in his shoes. “He must be a wreck. I mean, he was supposed to be looking after the baby and now this.”

  “My point exactly. Two-year-olds don’t just up and wander off in the middle of the night,” Lone said. “And when something like this happens it’s almost always the stepfather or the boyfriend.”

  “He doesn’t seem very bright.”

  Lone’s eyes came to rest on Debbie, and her expression softened. “Do you always think the best of people?”

  “I try to.”

  “That must get pretty disappointing.”

  “Sometimes.” Debbie looked away, wanting to hide the emotion she knew was written on her face. Lonewolf could read her with disturbing accuracy. It had been that way since they first met.

  Debbie liked
to think about that early fall day because it reminded her that life could deliver gifts as unexpectedly as blows. She had been hiking in the LaSal Creek Canyon, on the Utah side of the state line, stopping every so often to take photos of the astonishing red rock formations. When she first heard the terrible screams, she panicked, running this way and that, trying to fathom their direction. She wanted to persuade herself she’d only heard the shrill delight of a young woman cavorting with friends along the trail, but another more bloodcurdling shriek pierced the still mountain air, and this time the woman was screaming for help.

  Debbie threw off her backpack and started running. The sound was close, just past a rock formation and down into a gully off the track. Terrified, her mind swapping one scenario for the next—a bad fall from the rocks, a rape in progress—Debbie almost tumbled over a mountain bike lying across the track. At the same exact moment she saw a sight she would never forget as long as she lived. A mountain lion was dragging a woman by one foot up toward a rocky overhang.

  Debbie had been warned about wilderness hazards like this before she’d moved to the Southwest, but she’d never expected one to happen to her.

  The woman saw her, too, and they shared one frozen instant of horror before she sobbed, “Help me! For God’s sake, help me. Oh, Jesus.”

  Debbie grabbed the bike and plunged down the slope, yelling at the top of her lungs, “Get off her, you monster. Go!”

  She struck the big cat a clumsy blow across the head with the front wheel of the bike. It growled at her from deep in its chest, but kept hold of the woman’s foot. Debbie hit it again as hard as she could and started yelling for help in case anyone could hear her.

  The woman was sobbing and begging her not to leave. The lion’s mouth was red with blood.

  Debbie threw the bike down and was looking frantically around for something that would make a better weapon, when a low, emphatic voice commanded, “Stand where you are and don’t move.”

  Adrenalin and terror made it almost impossible for Debbie to do as she was told, yet the sight of a figure in army fatigues, standing atop the outcrop, a rifle trained on the lion, rooted her to the spot.