Sins of the Father (Book 2, The Erin Solomon Mysteries)

by Jen Blood

  Copyright © 2012 by Jen Blood

  ISBN: 978-0-9851447-3-9

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Design by Travis Pennington

  www.probookcovers.com

  For Mike

  “There’s no other love like the love for a brother.

  There’s no other love like the love from a brother.”

  – Terri Guillemets

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are quite literally too many people to thank here, for the success of All the Blue-Eyed Angels, assistance with research, spreading the word about Erin Solomon, and providing encouragement as I continue on the indie path. But I’ll try. My deepest gratitude to Jan Grieco for inviting me to the Northern Maine Community College and introducing me to such wonderfully supportive, enthusiastic new friends; to my mom for the endless list of things she’s done to help me achieve this writing dream; to my dad for his consistent cheerleading and occasional harassment of every bookstore owner and mystery lover in a hundred-mile radius; to the rest of my family for excusing me from family functions and understanding when I’ve vanished in the middle of birthday parties, weddings, and graduations to jot down a random plot point; to my fellow fangirls—Alanna, Liz, Sherry, Cheryl, Jillian, Biba, Philippa, Jenn, Jess, Liz, Amy, Katie, Heather, and so many others—for their unflagging enthusiasm, support, and humor; to Bonnie Brooks for featuring Angels in her store, and for her phenomenal support throughout this wild ride; to Heidi Vanorse, Chuck, and the whole gang at the Loyal Biscuit for opening their store to me and helping me find the perfect face for Einstein; and to the wonderful writers I’ve met as I’ve embarked on this indie publishing journey—DV Berkom, Pamela Beason, Joanne Lessner, Susan Russo Anderson, Tonya Kappes, Liz Schulte, Darcy Scott, Elizabeth Wilder, Lola James, and Desmond Hall—for their willingness to share their knowledge, contacts, and empathy. To my phenomenal old friends here in midcoast Maine—David Mills, Nikki Demmons, Rick LaFrance, and an endless slew of others… Having you in my corner truly means more than I can say.

  A very special thank you to Jan Grivois for her critiquing power, francais, and her invaluable input on all things northern Maine. Anything that rings true about that area in this novel is entirely thanks to her. If it doesn’t ring true, of course, it’s all on me.

  SINS OF THE FATHER

  An Erin Solomon Novel

  Jen Blood

  Part I.

  Littlehope

  Chapter One

  I first met Hank Gendreau at the Maine State Prison in Warren, twenty-five years into a life sentence. It was hotter than hell in midcoast Maine, and I was damp from the humidity and cranky from spending an hour and a half in summer traffic, crawling along a bottle-necked stretch of Route 1 that ran the full thirty miles from Bath to Waldoboro.

  When I finally hit Warren, I parked Einstein—my faithful canine compadre—with a sympathetic neighbor I knew from back in the day, thus saving him from baking in the hot car while I went about my business. Then, I drove another half-mile up Route 97 and turned right at a section of brick wall taken from the original state prison in Thomaston, before it was replaced by the fifty-thousand square foot “Supermax” I was about to enter.

  According to the official prison visitor’s rules of conduct, shorts and a tank top are too much for the average lifer to handle, so I opted for khakis and a button-up blouse. The ensemble was cooler than jeans, but still too warm for the dog days of summer. Once inside the building, it took forty-five minutes to get through the metal detector, a lengthy list of questions, and a thorough frisking more intimate than any date I’d been on in recent memory, before I was allowed into the belly of the beast. The sun was blazing outside, but that light didn’t make its way into the stark visiting chamber where Gendreau waited for me.

  A few other inmates were already scattered throughout the room, visiting with friends and family. Gendreau sat behind a wood-veneer table with his hands folded and his eyes on the clock. Unlike movies or TV, there was no protective glass between us. He wore a blue denim shirt with faded jeans. No shackles. His hair was graying at the temples, and his brown eyes were clear and soulful. At first glance, they didn’t look at all like the eyes of a man who’d tortured and killed his seventeen-year-old daughter in a hallucinogenic frenzy.

  I sat down in a plastic chair on the opposite side of the table. He smiled, his teeth even and surprisingly white. In another life, he would have been an attractively innocuous sixty-year-old man living out an attractively innocuous life. Someone you might remember for his good manners, but not much else.

  I introduced myself and managed a good two minutes of small talk—a personal record—before I got down to business. The guards had confiscated my bag before I was allowed inside, but they let me carry a letter in with me once they’d assured themselves I wouldn’t pull some kind of Ninja death-through-origami stunt.

  “I know your final appeal was just denied. I’m not sure what you expect me to do about that,” I said. I tapped the letter with my index finger. “What did you honestly think you’d get by writing me?”

  He didn’t seem ruffled by my tone. “You came. That’s something.”

  I opened the envelope and took out the blurry photo I’d received with it two days earlier. Someone had scrawled the words Jeff, Will & Hank, Summer 1968 in sloping penmanship on the back. In the photo, three boys mugged for the camera. Two were dark-haired, the other a redhead, probably between fourteen and sixteen years old. The picture was too out of focus to tell much beyond that, however.

  “I’ve had that for a long time,” he said. “But it didn’t click for me ‘til last week, when I was reading a story about the Payson fire in the Globe. They had a picture of you and your father in there, when you were younger.”

  I’d seen the article; it was one among many these days. Three months earlier, I’d bungled my way through an investigation that had ultimately proven the alleged cult suicide by fire of the Payson Church of Tomorrow—the religious community where I spent the first nine years of my life—hadn’t been suicide at all. In the process, I’d learned that my father had been harboring a secret that, for reasons I still didn’t understand, had inspired him to fake his own death ten years later. For the past three months, I’d been searching for some hint as to what that secret might have been… And where, exactly, my father was now. Gendreau’s letter was the first lead I’d gotten with any real potential in months.

  “And you recognized him after all those years?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been in the picture with him. But you looked just like him when he was younger.” I didn’t care for the way he was looking at me: Like I was some ghost of Christmas past, come calling in the dead heat of summer.

  “I don’t know how you think this picture would convince me of anything—I can barely tell these kids are kids, much less that one of them might have been my father forty-five years ago. Besides which, my father’s name was Adam, not Jeff.”

  I waited to see if he took the bait. I knew full well my father wasn’t born Adam Solomon… I just needed to know if Gendreau did.

  “Maybe he was when he had you—after he joined that church,” he said evenly. “But when we were kids together, it was Jeff. He had a birthmark
behind his knee shaped like South America, and a scar on his left forearm. You remember?”

  I nodded, but said nothing. I reminded myself to keep breathing.

  “He got that scar when we were out fishing one day—we were about fifteen,” Gendreau continued. “There was this pond with some of the best trout in the County, but we had to climb over a fence to get to it. Somebody saw us. While we were trying to get away, Jeff got his arm snagged on the barbed wire. I’m telling you the God’s honest truth: the boy in that picture is your father.”

  I’m not above taking the word of a crazed psychopath, but I try not to make a habit of it. Facts don’t lie, though: My father did have a scar on his left forearm, and he’d told me almost exactly the same story about how he’d gotten it. And while as a kid I’d always thought the birthmark behind his knee looked more like a dancing hippo than South America, I could see where someone might get confused.

  “In your letter, you said you could give me answers.” I hesitated. There were a couple of prisoners at a neighboring table seemingly lost in their own conversations, but I’d learned the hard way that there was a very determined, as-yet-unidentified faction out there who’d go to great lengths to keep me from finding the truth about my father. I leaned in closer and lowered my voice, comforting myself with the knowledge that it’s only paranoia if there’s no one out to get you.

  “How did you know him? Where did you two grow up?”

  He pushed the letter and photo back toward me and wet his lips. Like that, his eyes changed. Either thirty years in prison had made that pleasantly innocuous sixty-year-old a hell of a lot harder than he would have been otherwise, or I was getting a rare glimpse into the true Hank Gendreau. He never took his eyes from mine.

  “I’ll make a trade,” he said.

  “What kind of trade?”

  “I don’t have any money left to hire anyone. My last appeal’s been denied. But I read about what you did with the Payson fire—how hard you worked to find the truth.” He looked like he expected me to argue the point. I kept quiet. “If you’ll look into my daughter’s murder, I’ll tell you about your father. Whatever you want to know.”

  “What was his last name?”

  “Not until you bring me something. Will you look into that day?”

  I’m not an idiot—I knew he could be lying. Maybe he and my father had known each other when they were kids, and that was the end of the story. Maybe he’d never known my father at all.

  “What if all I uncover about your daughter’s murder is that you did it?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. His eyes hardened, but he didn’t flinch and he didn’t look particularly offended by my words. He looked around for the guards, then waited a second or two, until he’d assured himself they weren’t listening. “There’s something else,” he said. “Something I didn’t mention in the letter.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “Did you hear about the bodies they found up at the border last week?”

  “In Canada?” I asked. “Sure, who hasn’t?”

  A week before, a couple of hunters had gotten off track in the deep woods along the border between Maine and Quebec. In the process, they stumbled on a shallow grave… And then another one. And another. By the time they made it back to civilization, they reported that they’d found half a dozen of these unmarked graves. It turned out that all six belonged to high school and college girls who’d gone missing sometime in the ‘80s. There weren’t a lot of details beyond that yet, but the story had been getting plenty of air time ever since.

  “You’re telling me that whoever killed those girls is the same one who killed your daughter,” I said. I didn’t actually come out and say he was full of shit, but it was certainly implied.

  “They were all Ashley’s age. All tortured. Strangled.” He stopped. The hardness vanished from his eyes. “They all died the same way,” he said softly. “Five of the bodies have been identified as girls who’d gone missing from central and northern Maine at around the same time Ashley was killed.”

  “According to the stories I’ve heard about this case, you’d taken three tabs of acid the day your daughter was killed,” I said, unmoved. “They found you with the body, covered in her blood. And correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s the little matter of a confession that keeps cropping up in all these appeals you’ve been filing.”

  “I didn’t know what I was saying—I was out of my mind by then. The drugs were still in my system. And even if they hadn’t been, finding Ashley that way…” His eyes filled with tears. If his grief was an act, Hank Gendreau deserved an Oscar. “I was out of my mind,” he repeated.

  “So, what changed?” I asked. “How are you so sure of what happened now, twenty-five years later? How do you know you didn’t stumble across your daughter on a path in the woods that day in the middle of some epically bad trip and just lost control? And then when you came to, the reality of what you’d done was so horrifying you just blocked it out.”

  “I didn’t kill my daughter,” he said. “You don’t have to believe me—take a look at the evidence. The DNA and blood samples as much as prove it.”

  I’d heard rumblings about this, but I wanted to hear the details from him before I formed any opinions. “If you have DNA evidence proving you’re innocent, why are you still in prison?”

  “The judge says it’s tainted; he ruled it inadmissible. But I had tests done. There were blood and skin cells under my daughter’s fingernails. They weren’t mine.”

  “They can’t tell whose they were?”

  “There wasn’t enough to come up with a match—most of the evidence got tossed after the first trial. But it didn’t come from me; that much has been proven. Someone else did this. I couldn’t do something like that…”

  I took a few seconds to think about that. The room was hot and overcrowded. There were sweat stains at the neck of Gendreau’s denim shirt and under his arms. A little boy with dark hair played with a plastic truck in one corner of the room, a rail-thin, dark-haired woman not far from him. She chewed gum and held hands with a built blond guy with some seriously disturbing tats extending from his upper arm all the way up his neck. He caught me staring and met my eye. Smiled. I looked away.

  “I’m not a detective,” I said, my attention back on Gendreau. “I’m a reporter. Which means whatever I find, chances are good that I’ll shout it from the rooftops. You’re prepared for that?”

  “That’s part of the reason I contacted you. You think if I had any doubt about whether or not I’d done this, I’d call a reporter to investigate? Would I order DNA tests if there was any question in my mind that I might’ve just blacked out? I’m telling you.” He leaned in so close that I saw one of the guards take a step toward us. “Find the man who killed those girls and buried them in Canada, and you’ll find Ashley’s killer. He did this.”

  “Look, Mr. Gendreau—” I began.

  He held up a hand to stop me. “Whoever murdered my little girl is still out there. I have two other kids I watched grow up from behind prison bars. They won’t speak to me. My wife filed divorce papers an hour after I was convicted. I lost everything the day my daughter died.”

  I glanced at the photo again, not sure how to respond. It took maybe fifteen seconds before I’d made up my mind. “If I do this, I’m doing it my way.”

  “That’s what I expected,” he assured me. “And for every piece of information you bring me, I’ll answer anything you want about your father.”

  “I won’t do anything until you give me at least one scrap about my dad,” I insisted. “Last name. Where he was from. Something.”

  “Black Falls,” he said. “That’s where I met him. You want to know more, you’ll need to work for it.”

  I got the same sweet-as-sugar rush I always get when I have a lead, and stood. Black Falls. “Fair enough. I’ll be back in a few days.”

  He nodded. Something about his story still bugged me—aside from the fact that if Hank Gendreau real
ly was innocent, the wheels of justice had skidded horrifically off course. Or maybe it was just something about him that bugged me. At the very least, I didn’t trust him. The guard who’d been about to intervene on my behalf a minute or two earlier flashed me a smile as I left the room. When I looked back over my shoulder, Gendreau was sitting where I’d left him, his gaze fixed once more on the seconds ticking by.

  ◊◊◊◊◊

  After I’d retrieved Einstein, my next stop was to the Downeast Daily Tribune, where I cut my teeth as a reporter way back when I was still wearing combat boots and too much eyeliner. That meant returning to Littlehope, of course—the hometown I’d been avoiding since the aforementioned horrifically bungled Payson investigation in the spring. The second we crossed the town line, Einstein was on his feet, whining at the window. He darted past me as soon as I opened the car door in the Trib parking lot, made a quick rest stop at a nearby shrub, and headed straight for the front door without me.

  I wasn’t feeling quite so eager. I wiped my sweating palms on my khakis, checked my reflection in the glass door, and did what I could to wrangle my red hair into some kind of discernible style. That never actually panned out, so I eventually gave up and pulled it back into a ponytail, straightened my top, took a breath, and went inside.

  The Trib is a no-frills operation; most days, you’re just grateful the plumbing works, so A/C is out of the question. The concrete walls were sweating and the linoleum was slick with humidity as I headed down the hall to the newsroom. Not a soul was in sight.

  I was still a few feet from my destination when the newsroom door opened and Daniel Diggins, editor-in-chief, stepped outside. He had his head down, focused on some paperwork in his hands. Einstein gave a hysterical yelp of joy and was off like a bolt of furry lightning as soon as he caught sight of him. Diggs looked up from his papers, then just stood there for a split second, like he wasn’t sure I was actually there. Once he’d assured himself I was no mirage, a smooth, slow grin touched his lips.