“Look into Mandy Terwilliger for me. See what you dig up. But do it so that no one knows you’re doing it, if you can.”
“Okay. What exactly do you want to know?”
“I’m interested in her finances for one thing. She works part-time, has two teenage boys at home, and she’s a single mother. She told us she got a small settlement when her husband died but implied it wasn’t much, so I’m curious as to how she is able to afford the sporty little convertible I saw her driving. And I’m also interested in any scuttlebutt you can dig up about the relationship between her and Derrick Ames. Some witnesses made it sound like the two of them were going to split up, but Mandy didn’t give us that impression at all.”
“I’ll let you know,” Alison said.
Trooper Grimes called Richmond back around five to report that the call I had received that afternoon had been made from an untraceable burner phone located in Florida. So it seemed the call might have been related to Schneider after all. This both frightened and disappointed me because it not only meant that I might still have someone out there hunting me; it also dashed my briefly resurgent hope that it was my father trying to contact me.
At the end of Monday’s workday, Junior Feller drove me back to the Sorenson motel and hung out for a while, taking Hoover for a walk and sharing my take-out dinner. Then he went back to his car and sat outside my room until his relief showed up at eleven. I had hoped that Hurley might be the one to do all these things, but he had to get back home for Emily. Hurley did, however, pick me up the next morning and drive me in to work.
“How was your night?” he asked, as soon as we were settled in his car. “Any more mysterious phone calls?”
“No phone calls. I didn’t get much sleep, though, because the mattress on my bed is as hard as a rock. I really want to get back into my own place.”
“Yeah, about that, I’ve arranged to have a security system installed on the cottage. I spoke to Izzy, and he’s okay with it. In fact, he wants me to have them install one on his place, too.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, it did seem like a nice security blanket to have, given the current situation. But it also seemed presumptive of Hurley to arrange it without talking to me first.
“Have the state guys said when they think they’ll be able to release my place?”
“Not that I’m aware of. I talked to Richmond about it last night, but he was kind of cagey about the whole thing. I got the sense that something was up, but if it is, he wasn’t talking. However, I do have some news on your car.”
“Good news, I hope.”
“I spoke to Marty about the window replacement and made a slight alteration. It means it will take a little longer to get the car back, but it will be worth it.”
“What kind of alteration?” I said, giving him a suspicious look.
“He’s putting bulletproof glass in all the windows.”
I gaped at Hurley, slack-jawed.
“What?” he said, glancing over at me. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit much? Hell, next you’ll have them reinforcing all the side panels.”
Hurley gave me a guilty look, followed by a cheesy grin.
“You didn’t,” I said.
“It didn’t cost that much extra, and I know you well enough to know that you’ll likely balk at being chauffeured around very much longer. Plus I know you don’t want to wear that vest, so I did what I thought was best to insure your safety.”
“You’ve turned my hearse into a popemobile.” I shook my head and tried to figure out if I was upset or simply amused.
“Speaking of the pope,” Hurley said, “what church should we use to have Junior baptized?”
Once again I was speechless.
“My parents were both practicing Episcopalians,” he went on, this time clueless to my stunned state. “And while I haven’t attended church much over the past decade or so, I went regularly when I was a kid. And I went a couple of times with Emily when we were in Chicago. That church was Catholic, but it’s very similar to the Episcopalian Church, and I kind of enjoyed getting back into it. If you don’t have a preference, I thought I might get in touch with the minister at the Episcopal Church over on Dunkirk.”
“Hurley, I don’t have any plans to take our kid to church, or to have him or her baptized. I’ve never been a churchgoer. In fact, I’m an agnostic.”
“You don’t believe in God, or some sort of higher power?”
“Not really. I’m open to the possibilities, the same way I’m open to the possibility of ghosts, or Bigfoot, or life on other planets. But until I have proof positive of such an existence, I remain skeptical. I don’t buy into the whole superior being idea. If I’m in trouble or really want something, I might throw a prayer out there, but I don’t actually believe it does anything or goes anywhere. I’m just covering all my bases. It’s no different than throwing a pinch of salt over my left shoulder if I spill some.”
“Huh.”
“Is that a problem?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you dead set against having our kid baptized?”
I thought about it for a few seconds. “I guess I’m not opposed to letting him or her go through the ritual if it means that much to you. But I don’t see myself attending church on any kind of regular basis, and I think the kid should be allowed to make his or her own decisions in that regard, once he or she is old enough.”
The rest of our trip was made in silence while I waited for a lightning bolt to strike me from above. When we arrived at the police station, I put in a call to Henderson to let him know where I was, fill him in on what Richmond had planned for the day, and see if there was anything in the office he needed me to do.
“I don’t have anything pending at the moment other than your case, and unless you need to do something on the Ames case, I’m fine with having you stick with the cops today while they do their searches and interviews. If a call comes in, I can handle the on-scene stuff, but I would like you to be available to assist me if I have to do an autopsy.”
“Not a problem. You have my cell number, right?”
“I do. I’ll call you if I need you.”
Then Hurley, Charlie, Richmond, and I had a planning meeting over coffee and donuts in the break room, mapping out our day. Richmond informed us that Blake Sutherland’s alibi had checked out, eliminating her as a suspect. Then he suggested another trip to Derrick’s house to make sure the laptop wasn’t hiding in a desk or had simply been overlooked, and if nothing turned up there to head to the Fitzpatrick house to see if Sean had it. If that didn’t produce anything, the next stop would be the high school to search Derrick’s desk and the teacher’s lounge, and talk to some of his coworkers. I then suggested that this would be a good time to take another run at Mandy Terwilliger.
“What useful information can we get out of Mandy at this point?” Richmond asked.
“I just feel like we need to cover all the bases. I’m bothered by Jacob’s claim that Derrick told him he was going to break up with Mandy. I want to know why, and I want to know if she knew about it.”
“I don’t see how it has any bearing on the case at this point,” Richmond argued.
“Just humor me,” I said.
Richmond rolled his eyes and let out a put-upon sigh, but he agreed to talk to her.
Once all the details of the schedule were laid out, Richmond turned to me and said, “What are you going to do today?”
I stared at him in confusion for several long seconds before I answered. “I’m going with you guys.”
“Not a chance,” Richmond said. “It’s too risky. You need to stay here. At least that way we know you aren’t a target.”
“You want me to hang here at the police station all day?” I said, my voice rife with skepticism.
“Bob’s right,” Hurley piped up. “It’s the safest place for you.”
“No way. Besides, you need to have someone
from my office overseeing things, remember?”
“We have a videographer with us for that now, remember ?” Richmond shot back.
Like I could forget Charlie’s ever-presence. And the simple fact that she was going to be hanging with Hurley all day made me even more determined to go with them. “If I have to stay here all day long, I’ll lose my mind. I might as well go home.”
Richmond shrugged, indicating that was a perfectly acceptable option as far as he was concerned. I turned and gave Hurley an appealing look. Then Hurley shrugged, too.
Seeing that I was outnumbered, I came up with a new strategy. “If I agree to wear that stupid vest, will you let me go with you?”
Hurley and Richmond exchanged looks. Charlie leaned back in her chair and folded her arms over her chest, looking amused.
Finally Hurley said, “We might as well let her come. Otherwise she’ll do something stupid.”
“Fine,” Richmond said. “But you have to wear the vest the entire time, and do everything we tell you to do.”
“Okay,” I said a bit petulantly.
“And before we head out,” Richmond added, “I need to speak with you. In private.”
With that, Charlie got up from her seat and said, “Come on, Steve. Let’s go over those panning techniques again.”
As Hurley followed Charlie out of the room like a dutiful dog, I glared at Richmond. “What now?” I said irritably.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. The concerned tone of his voice worried me. “I had a little chat with Trooper Grimes earlier. They did some background research on you and came up with something that’s a bit worrisome.”
I fought down a frisson of panic. What had they discovered? Was that package of gum I shoplifted when I was in high school going to come back to haunt me? Did they know about that bar charge I accidentally skipped out on when Desi and I went to Chicago for a weekend a couple of years ago? Had they found something horrible and incriminating when they searched my house? I thought fast, trying to remember if I had anything embarrassing hidden away at the cottage, but I came up blank.
“They dug up some information on your father,” Richmond said.
Now my mind was really spinning. I knew the state cops had scoured my cell phone records to try to trace the strange phone calls I’d been getting. Had some of those calls come from my father, as I’d originally thought? I felt a thrill of excitement, quickly followed by a throb of fear. Richmond’s face told me this news wasn’t going to be good.
“Do you remember the Quinton Dilles case?”
Remember it? The man’s name was burned into my brain. He was Hurley’s biggest enemy, and the reason Hurley lost his job in Chicago. In a way, that was a good thing since it brought Hurley to Sorenson and to me. But Quinton Dilles was also a deadly, vindictive, cruel man who had nearly cost both me and Hurley our lives.
“What does he have to do with anything?” I asked.
“There’s something about his past you may not know. About five years before Dilles met his wife, the one he eventually killed, he owned one of those mailbox stores in Chicago. Some narcotics guys were working a case on a big drug ring in the area, and they thought that Dilles’s mailbox store was a front for the group. They suspected Dilles was running both drugs and money through the place, shipping the stuff in packages that appeared to be from legitimate businesses. So one of the guys went undercover and started working to get proof by buddying up to the store manager, a guy named Cedric, who they thought was Dilles’s right-hand man. Eventually the undercover cop, a guy named Roy Gilligan, who, by the way, was Hurley’s partner at one time, let it be known that he was on the verge of getting the proof he needed. No one knows for sure what happened after that, but Roy ended up dead, shot once in the head and left in an alley. Cedric was the suspected hit man, but there was no evidence to pin it on him. Then Cedric disappeared. There were some reports of possible sightings down in Florida about a year later, but the cops down there couldn’t find him, and no one has seen or heard anything of him since then.”
“That’s all very interesting—and tragic—but what does it have to do with my father?”
“Cedric’s last name was Novak. Does that ring a bell with you at all?”
It did, but it was a very vague and distant bell. “Maybe. Why? Should it?”
“Cedric Novak was once married to a woman named Jane Obermeyer.”
“That’s my mother’s maiden name.”
Richmond just stared at me, waiting for me to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I did, and it shocked me to my core. “Cedric Novak is my father?” I said.
Richmond nodded. Then he opened a file he had on the table in front of him, a file I had thought was part of the Ames case. He slid out a rap sheet and handed it to me. On the sheet, which listed a number of crimes—mostly robberies—was the name Cedric Novak and a picture.
“That picture is about ten years old,” Richmond explained. “But I think you can see the resemblance.”
Indeed I could. The picture on the rap sheet was the spitting image of the man in Emily’s drawing, the man who had been peering in my cottage windows one night, the man my mother identified as my father. The picture also fit with the vague image I had in my head from my childhood memories.
I stared at the picture, my brain spinning. If what Richmond said was true, Cedric Novak was my father, and he was responsible for killing a cop. And not just any cop, but Hurley’s former partner. Plus he did it while working for Hurley’s archenemy: Quinton Dilles.
“Does Hurley know any of this?” I asked.
Richmond shook his head. “He had already moved on to homicide by the time Roy was killed, and while he knew that this Cedric guy was suspected of killing Roy, he also knew that the order to do so had likely come from Dilles. That’s one of the reasons he was so determined to nail Dilles for the murder of his socialite wife. I don’t think Cedric has ever been high on Hurley’s radar. He was just the henchman, and Hurley wanted the ringleader.”
“You’re not going to tell him, are you?”
“I don’t have to. But Grimes knows. He was the one who made the connection. He was researching your background, which led him to your mother and her husbands. Cedric was her first. Grimes knew about the Chicago case and remembered the name. Once he discovered the connection, he felt he had to look into your past a little deeper.”
“Is that why they aren’t releasing my place yet?”
“Probably. He wants to make sure he’s thorough.”
“Does he think I’m in cahoots with my father or something? Because that’s ridiculous. I didn’t even know the man’s name. I must have heard it mentioned at some point, because the name does stir some buried memory in my head, but I had no idea who it was or what it meant. My mother has always refused to talk about my father, and if she has any paperwork or pictures that mention or include him, I’ve never found them.”
“I’m guessing that’s because she figured out what he was and didn’t want him connected to you in any way.”
I stared at the rap sheet, which was three pages long. “You mean he was a criminal even back then?” I said, flipping to page two. My question was answered for me when I saw a handful of cons dating back to the late 1970s. I tossed the rap sheet aside and started massaging my temples. I had a sudden, throbbing headache. “It makes sense,” I told Richmond. “Whenever I asked my mother about my father and why he left, she said he was nothing more than a vagabond gypsy with a black soul. I always thought she was merely venting her anger over the fact that he left us, but now I’m starting to think that every word of it was true.”
“I’m sorry,” Richmond said.
I stopped massaging my head and looked Richmond straight in the eye. “So am I. It is what it is, I guess. But Hurley can never know any of this. Please.”
Richmond frowned, and I could tell he didn’t want to agree with this, so I pleaded some more.
“If he knows that my father killed
a man who was not only a cop, but also Hurley’s ex-partner, and he was working with Dilles at the time, he’ll hate him. He’ll hate me. And what will it do when he looks at our kid? Please, Bob. He can’t know.”
“The information is out there. If he digs around hard enough, he’ll find it.”
“He has no reason to dig around if no one says anything to him.”
“I think you’re missing the bigger issue,” Richmond said.
I looked at him, confused, unable to imagine anything bigger than the relationship-destroying information he’d already dumped on me.
“You thought your father was the one making the phone calls,” Richmond said. “We now know that Roscoe Schneider made the calls that came before the shooting, but what about the one you got yesterday? Who made that call?”
“Are you suggesting that yesterday’s call was from my father?”
“Schneider’s calls all came from a burner phone that was purchased in Florida. Grimes looked into yesterday’s call, and it also came from a burner phone that was purchased in Florida. And the last suspected sighting for Cedric Novak was in Florida.”
Once again Richmond waited for me to make the connections. I did, and realized he was right. There was a bigger issue. It was starting to look like my long-lost father might want me dead.
Chapter 31
I asked Richmond if he could give me a few minutes before we left. He agreed, and I headed for the women’s bathroom and locked the door so I could have a little privacy. Then I called my mother.
She answered with a cheery, “Ah, you finally found some time to spare your poor mother before she dies.”
Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery) Page 25
