We had a good little crime-scene team, a regional group fresh off training at the FBI. I stepped back to let them do their work, and continued my line of thought. What was he doing in a motel anyway? He was married to a Wakefield, and the Wakefield mansion had plenty of room for guests. Like his wife’s room, to start with. There was no sign of a woman’s presence here in the motel room, and anyway, I’d seen Ellen in the grocery store a few days ago, buying perishables. No refrigerator here, just a bucket of melting ice. And Laura had sure made it seem like she and both her sisters were staying with their mom in the big house.
So why wouldn’t the husband be there too, sharing Ellen’s room?
In my experience, spouses were usually considered part of the family. I couldn’t imagine Michelle’s family relegating one of the spouses to a hotel room. Even since the divorce, her brother kept a guestroom for me when I came down to visit Carrie. (No hard feelings—Michelle and I were so different, no one expected the marriage to last a year, much less thirteen.)
Of course, Michelle’s family was way into togetherness—that was one of the problems we had; we had to live within a block of her parents and across the street from her sister, and I couldn’t miss the family dinner of a Sunday unless I was on duty. But even in my family—the felony-trash type of family, full of backstabbing and betrayal and turning state’s evidence—you were expected to crash at the parents’ house with the spouse, significant other, or current one-night stand.
That was really the sticker. Married couples in the same vicinity don’t usually sleep in separate places. Unless, of course, they’re on the outs.
From the first moment I talked to Ellen O’Connor, there in her mother’s parlor, I knew something was wrong. She was worried, but not distraught. She seemed more like a woman whose husband had gone missing than one who was pretty clearly abducted.
Then again, maybe she was just a woman not all that much in love with her husband, caring enough to worry, but not enough to fall apart. Even then, she’d likely be anxious about a possible ransom. It just didn’t . . . feel right. One of those cop-intuition things that aren’t worth squat in front of a judge. No, your honor, I don’t have any evidence, but it just felt like she was lying.
I didn’t come outright and accuse her of it. That would just shut her down, and she’d end up more cagey. But I sure thought Laura would be more honest with me. Looking back, I don’t know why. Because I was the law, and everyone was supposed to respect that? Nah. Couldn’t be that. I’d been on the force way too long to expect that. Because we’d just spent the night together? Yeah. And it was good, and warm, and it meant something.
Only it didn’t mean that—didn’t mean real trust.
She’d say, I’m sure, that I wasn’t being fair. Her primary loyalty was to her sister. And if Ellen O’Connor was withholding information about Tom O’Connor’s kidnapping, well, she must have a good reason.
Turns out the reason was the usual Wakefield family reason—that is, protecting the secrets. In this case, protecting the secret lovechild. The lovechild turned kidnapper. Well, you got to give it to the kid. Most of us start out with shoplifting, maybe a bit of random vandalism. Young Brian skipped several grades and went right to a major felony.
The second day after the abduction, I had officers out everywhere, cruising, looking for unfamiliar cars, unfamiliar faces. But I parked my personal vehicle, a deliberately anonymous pickup truck, down at the bottom of the hill, watching the Wakefield mansion through binoculars. Around noon, Laura and Ellen got in the Volvo and drove off, and I followed a few blocks back, out onto the highway. They went over a rise and disappeared from view, and I traveled a few miles along the river before I gave up and admitted I’d lost them. I did a U-turn, and started back towards town, and saw the Volvo parked in that crummy old house the former police chief used to live in—the one with the jail cell in the basement.
Instinct and training took over. I entered the house silently, went through the open basement door, down the stairs into the stone-floored cellar. It was cool down there, and dim, but I could see the cell, and the man inside, and the boy standing slump-shouldered near Ellen.
Laura was there too, looking scared—even more scared when she saw me. I still couldn’t quite believe what she had done, but put it away for a while. Time enough to deal with that later.
The kid was already pretty deflated when I arrived. I saw pretty quickly the resemblance to O’Connor, but couldn’t make much sense of it just then. First I needed to get him down and confiscate his weapon and release the hostage.
Went more or less like clockwork, something of a relief after a day and night of frustration. He obediently fetched the key, and didn’t yell too loud when his captive became his captor, shoving him into the cell and slamming the lock closed. Oh, well. It was the only jail the kid was likely to see here in Wakefield, since all my witnesses made it clear they weren’t going to be cooperative, and the victim looked like he wasn’t about to return for a trial.
I drove Tom O’Connor back to the motel he’d left unwillingly two nights earlier. I was trying to figure out how to spin this at the station, and I guess he was trying to figure out what to do with a wife who set him up like this. Hard to imagine Ellen being so ruthless, but there you have it. Women always surprise you in the end. All that being consistent and open and direct, that was just to lull you into having expectations they can later explode.
I didn’t care, at this point, what the whole story was. I just wanted shut of all of them.
Laura was sitting on my porch swing late that evening when I came home. The light was golden, and shone off her glossy dark hair, and I thought of how simple everything had seemed a few days ago. I could just, you know, ignore everything since, couldn’t I? Why not?
She scooted over on the swing as I came up the steps, gazing up at me with something like dread. “Hi.”
“Hi.” I gave up and took the seat beside her. Waited.
Eventually she sighed. “So . . . what happened after you took Tom back?”
I shrugged. “Went back to the stationhouse. Released a statement. Missing man restored to family. No injuries. Case closed.” It felt like a forfeit. Like I’d surrendered without a struggle. But that’s what the victim wanted.
“The newspaper accepted it?”
“Sure. The editor. Civic booster. Fraternity brother of your father. Indebted to your mother. Freedom of the press ranks pretty low compared to all that.”
I could see her shoulders sag just a bit—relief, I guess. But she wasn’t about to admit to it. She’d always been the rebel, the one who stood against her mother, not with her. She said, “I guess you want to know everything, right?”
“Doesn’t matter, if we don’t get to prosecute.” But I was trained as a detective, and an unsolved case would eat at me forever. “Go ahead. Start from the beginning.”
So she started way back. The year after we’d been married and unmarried, she was driving to New York to initiate her journey to stardom, and she stopped to see one sister and then the other . . . “They were both pregnant. It was so weird. Ellen was happy about it, and Cathy wasn’t, and Cathy said she was going to get an abortion. She swore me to secrecy. And I never told anyone. Not until today.”
She sighed and moved a little closer to me. But if she thought I was ready to do the comfort thing, she was wrong. I said, “That was the kid, I gather? The kidnapping kid?”
“Yes. I guess she decided to have the baby after all. And gave him up for adoption.”
“So . . . how’s this relate to your brother-in-law?” I had a notion, but thought I’d better hear it out loud.
“I guess—well, I know—that it was his child. I’m not sure how it happened. I mean, how they got together. Whether each knew who the other was. But I do know it happened while Tom and Ellen were broken up. Which doesn’t make it right, but—”
I contemplated this for a bit. It’s the sort of thing that happens here in the mountains occasion
ally, one man knocking up two sisters within a couple months. It’s just usually the sisters aren’t Wakefields. And usually the man doesn’t survive long enough to be kidnapped by his grown son. It was sort of impressive.
“So the kid wanted to punish his dad?”
“I don’t know. What he said he wanted was the name of the mother. And Tom wouldn’t say. And we couldn’t figure it out. What could the big secret be, you know? And then I remembered Cathy, five months along, still not sure what she was going to do. And I still couldn’t understand. But Cathy’s name would be the one Tom would risk anything to hide.”
“Yeah, I can see that. So . . . how did you and Ellen come in on the side of the kidnapper, huh?”
She looked a little shamefaced. “I didn’t know anything at first. I never meant to deceive you. But once I realized that Ellen was holding something back—”
“You decided you had to help her.”
“I decided that this was Ellen,” she said, with a bit of defiance. “And she’d have a good reason for whatever she did. And I was right. She needed to know, as much as the boy did, who Tom’s lover had been.”
“Guess she might have gotten more than she counted on, huh?”
Laura sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. But at least it’s out in the open.”
“Out in the open? The Wakefield secret? I don’t think so. You going to explain it all to your mother?”
“She’s out of town now. Thank God.”
“She’ll be back. Who’s going to tell her?”
“It’s Ellen’s decision, not mine.”
“Coward.” Here she was, pretending this was all about getting the truth out, and yet she’d been lying to me. “You could have told me.”
“I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. What if you would have charged Ellen with a crime?”
“Oh, right. Haul the lady reverend downtown in handcuffs. That would go over well with the City Council.”
“Well, you might have arrested her. I didn’t know. All I knew at first is that she had covered something up, and that was a crime.”
“So you decided to commit it with her?”
Laura didn’t answer.
“You figured I wouldn’t arrest you, didn’t you? So then I couldn’t arrest her either?”
“I don’t think I thought through that far. It was just . . . automatic. I mean, that’s what sisters do, right? Cover up for each other?”
When they’re not sleeping with each other’s boyfriends, I guess. Call me perverted, but I couldn’t quite get past that thought. I never thought the Wakefields were as proper as the Mrs. pretended, but I didn’t figure them as Jerry Springer material.
“It’s not like she’d have gotten convicted,” I said. “Here’s a guy who slept with his wife’s sister and gets his comeuppance handed to him by the bastard son. The women on the jury would probably vote to hang him, not his wife. And the men on the jury would be too scared of their own wives to vote against your sister.” I wasn’t all that cynical about juries, but I’d seen more than a few act on emotion instead of evidence. And emotion would be high against a straying husband—so yeah, the straying happened before he became a husband, but points off for doing it with her sister. “Wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t his fault.”
Laura tilted her head to the side. It was a cute gesture I remembered from back when. She wasn’t quite smiling. “I think you’d forgive a bit of female solidarity, since you’re right on Tom’s side here, when it really is his fault.”
“Oh, right. His fault? How was he to know that his ex’s sister was going to track him down and seduce him? I mean, that would be like Ellen coming after m—” Hey, I’m not stupid. I’d been married for a long time, and I knew women pretty well, and it only took one look at Laura’s face to make me decide maybe it wasn’t worth pursuing that line of inquiry. “Anyway, what if he’d killed Tom? He had a gun. Didn’t seem all that opposed to violence. And it looked like the man was going to hold out forever. Did you ever think of that?”
“I did. But—”
“But that wasn’t as important as protecting the family, huh?”
“Not the family. My sister. And I never really thought he’d do anything bad. He’s just a boy.”
“Yeah, and boys are all so peaceful. Especially those who kidnap by force.” I was getting mad again. I’d never been any good at suppressing my emotions. I could hide them, but I couldn’t make them go away. And here this kid came to my town and made this mess and wasted all that money and officer time and endangered every last volunteer who went searching down those caves and in those hills— and he left me with this stupid PR problem, having to release a not-quite honest statement about the lost guy being found and returned to his family. Yeah, the local newspaper editor was the civic-minded type, and the last thing he wanted was anyone thinking that there was a dangerous felon loose in town, or something rotten in the family Wakefield, so he printed what I told him. But that felt like a sellout to me, a sellout to this family that wanted to keep its secrets.
But the alternative was worse, I supposed. It was a family matter, weirder than most, but no one ended up dead, and that was a better ending than most family matters in this county. I gave it up.
Except . . . Laura, my Laura, who trusted me with her body and spirit, didn’t trust me with those secrets.
“So we’re okay?” Laura’s voice was hopeful. Her face was luminescent in the golden late afternoon light.
“Sure. Case closed.”
“Can I stay tonight?”
I got up off the swing, and went to my front door. “I don’t think so, Laura. You go be with your family. That’s what’s important. Everything locked up tight. No tabloid’s going to be investigating the TV star’s family secrets, don’t need to worry about that. No headlines about your man-trading sisters. No research into your past, turning up that teenaged marriage, right?”
She was regarding me warily, but reached out her hand as if to draw me back. “Jack, let’s—”
“No need. You got what you wanted from me the other night, and you got what you wanted today. I think our case is closed too.”
I walked into the house, closed the door behind me, went to the kitchen and poured myself a shot of JB. Listened hard. The window was open, and I could hear the porch swing creak, and then a car door slam. She’d given up. Good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When I got to the station the next morning, my secretary Sheri rolled her eyes and mouthed, Trouble. In a normal tone, she said, “Mrs. Wakefield is waiting for you.” She inclined her head to the little waiting room off the lobby, outfitted with cable TV and Kleenex boxes, as it was used mostly by those waiting for their husbands or sons to be released from the drunk tank.
Ho-kay. I didn’t waste any time speculating about what information she would demand I reveal or conceal in regard to her son-in-law’s abduction. I just called her into my office.
She was weighted down not just with the usual old-lady big handbag, but also a laptop case. I reined in my speculations again as she sat down, and just waited for her to speak.
Finally, once she’d gotten the laptop case arranged on her lap, she did. “Chief McCain. I was hoping you had the result of that DNA test.”
Hmm. Not what I expected. “Sure,” I said, getting up and locating the file in the cabinet. I didn’t bother with the caveat about how I shouldn’t be doing this for a private citizen, and all that. This was the town, after all, that let the previous police chief smuggle heroin for ten years. I figured I was okay spending $50 on a city-councilwoman’s vanity DNA research. “Not sure what you’re going to make of it, without another sample to match it to,” I said as I handed the VNTR sheet over.
“Thank you,” was all she said. She read through the text as if it made sense to her. Maybe it did. Even when she finished scanning it, though, she didn’t stand up.
She didn’t ask about her son-in-law. She’d been out of town, I recalled.
“Have you been home yet, Mrs. Wakefield?”
She slid the report into the pocket of her laptop case. “No, not yet. I’ve just come back from a visit. Now can I show you something?”
“Sure,” I said, hoping it wasn’t more dental floss.
She pulled out her laptop, set it on the case, and booted it up. “I saw you on the news, that interview, when you spoke of Internet predators. I did some of my own research . . .” She rose and with an unexpected awkwardness, shuffled with the open laptop to my desk. She set it down on the edge then turned it around so I could see.
What I saw was an Instant Messenger dialogue box, the type I used to keep in touch with my daughter during the week, you know, so how was school today; did you finish your math project; oh, dad, come on, that’s not due for a week. I found myself unwillingly impressed that Mrs. Wakefield, of all people, would know about this technology.
The cursor was blinking beside the user name: justinfan222.
Mrs. Wakefield had resumed her seat, and was regarding me expectantly.
“Okay,” I said. “You did some research on Internet predators. And?”
“And I learned that they approach teenagers in chat rooms. And then they approach them using this Instant Message program.”
I told myself to be patient. She had a point. She must have a point. And even if she didn’t have a point, she would soon be out of my office and I could get back to my own Internet research— cheap last-minute flights to New York. “Yes, that’s one way they approach the kids.”
“So I got an account. Those technical support people are really quite helpful.”
I didn’t know what was going on, but I felt dread. “So what did you do with this account?”
“I went to some of those chat rooms. I pretended to be a teenage girl. Successfully. It is,” she added, “more a matter of poor punctuation than anything else.”
The year She Fell Page 37
