* * *
When they got downtown he led Stanley to an unoccupied interview room. Gordon had carried his case file in from the car, because he kept it in the trunk. It was more up to date than the version in the office, and he could check it whenever he wanted to. Also, he was allergic to desks. They made his balls itch. Someday medical science would back him up on that one.
This time, though, he was glad to meet Stanley on CCPD turf. “Fine,” he said, dropping the file on the table in the center of the room. He grabbed a chair, leaned back in it, and put his feet up. “What’ve you got on the kidnapping?”
Stanley’s lips quirked as he looked at Gordon’s feet. He pulled back his own chair and sat with an erect posture Gordon would never be able to duplicate. He removed his glasses. Gordon saw an ironic amusement in his eyes, and snorted to himself. Stanley was consciously playing a role, the same way he was, and probably for the same reasons. And enjoying it, too. Gordon began to feel a little better about working with the Feeb.
“Kate Bradshaw,” Stanley said. “Twelve years old. Called ‘Katie’ by her family. Blonde hair, blue eyes. We have pictures, height, weight, et cetera.” He handed Gordon a thick file from his briefcase. “Abducted Saturday night from Whataburger on North Shoreline Boulevard. Across the street from this building, I believe.” He paused. Gordon said nothing.
Blandly, Stanley continued. “Daughter of Pete Bradshaw, Member At-Large of the City Council. Was in the company of Bradshaw’s sister and brother-in-law, who saw nothing, and their two children, descriptions and pictures in the file, who also saw nothing. She went outside to get a book from the car, and never came back. Police were called approximately one hour after she was last seen, when the car keys were found in the parking lot. The book was still in the car. Some of the other customers, statements in the file, were helping to look for her, but by the time anyone noticed she was gone the family were the only people who remembered her at all. None of the employees noticed her. We’ve got tapes from inside the restaurant, and we’re looking at them, but the kidnapper probably didn’t go inside. Spots will be airing tonight on TV to try to connect with any potential witnesses who were in the area, but we don’t have a lot of hope for that.”
“You check the tapes from this building?” Gordon asked. After some recent vandalism, security cameras had been set up to cover the immediate area surrounding Police Headquarters. Gordon figured they’d only last until people found out about them and started hollering about privacy, but the cameras should have been running Saturday night.
“We looked. Too dark, and they weren’t really pointed in the right direction.”
Gordon nodded. So much for that. He hefted the file. “You have a lot of information here.”
“We aim to please. There was already a team here.”
“Yeah? Here for something else, or have other kids disappeared recently?”
“Both, actually. Four other kids within the last year, all in the Corpus Christi area. Also blonde, eye color varies, ages ten to thirteen. Details in the file, but so far,” he laid out his hands, palms up, “nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“The kids were grabbed at various times and places. Details in the file. Every time it happened, it was close to a road. I figure this guy probably has a license to drive. That’s about it.”
“Hold on a second,” Gordon protested. “You guys are supposed to be the experts at this stuff. You have those profilers, supposed to be able to find a hair and tell you all about how the guy’s bad haircut when he was a kid traumatized him and sent him over the edge, so now he has to grow a full beard because he can’t stand to use a mirror to shave. Or whatever. Where’s that in this file?”
Stanley sighed. “We have nothing. It’s in the file, if you want to read it.”
Gordon looked at him. “Okay, I’m the hick cop. Want to tell me what that means?”
Stanley shook his head. “Sorry. It’s not about you, or you and me. I have a problem with the way we handle these cases.” He tapped a finger on the file. “If you read what we have, it’ll tell you the perp is male, probably twenty to forty years old, intelligent, probably single and a bit of a loner. Plus a lot of other crap that may or may not be true. The thing is, I just summarized the actually useful information in any of our profiles of a probable sexual predator. The, ah, experts don’t get any better than that, just more creative. Especially in a situation like this, where the only thing we really know is that the kids disappear and are never found. But read it if you want to.”
Stanley reached across the table and tapped the file. “I may be overstating the case a bit. There are some other things. Panel vans are favorite vehicles, these guys frequently gravitate toward jobs working with kids, stuff like that.”
Gordon nodded slowly. “Got it. Sounds like you’ve been doing this for a while.”
“Yeah,” Stanley said without expression.
“Okay. But now we know something new. He’s mixed up in a murder, maybe two or three.”
“Uh huh. And his name’s probably Owen Tremaine.”
“How do you figure?”
“Too many coincidences. His résumé on the computer. The missing woman is supposed to be his girlfriend, the body on the beach is the third in their little love triangle. The other guy, Purvis, gets killed on Tremaine’s boat. Tremaine has no alibi to speak of.”
“You listen to the tape?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Let’s take it one thing at a time.” Gordon started counting off on the fingers of his left hand. “He’s got no record. No arrests, no speeding tickets, nothing. His alibi is just dumb enough that it sounds real to me. A creep generally has either nothing or something he thinks is airtight. Tremaine’s GPS was on his kayak. I checked out the course before I left. According to the mapping software it would have to be done by a guy in a small boat, because the route goes through places with only a few inches of water. Or a guy who swims really well, I guess. I haven’t checked with the friend who gave him the GPS to find out if the course was already on it, because the friend’s a reporter. But anybody smart enough to have that kind of half-assed alibi isn’t going to slip and forget to have his buddy back him up.” He held up his right hand to forestall Stanley’s rebuttal. “Hold on, I ain’t done.”
“Okay,” Gordon went on as Stanley crossed his arms, “that’s all indicative but not conclusive. I also like the refusal to tell me who his friend was he spent the day with on Sunday. Again not what a guilty guy would say. And his story had to be at least partly true, because he had both filleted fish and ice in a cooler. Somebody caught and cleaned the fish, and they don’t sell ice out in the Bay.”
Stanley still looked stubborn. Gordon quirked an eyebrow at him. “Tremaine’s shark story is just unbelievable enough it almost has to be for real. Might be worth checking with his friends to see if he’s told that story before, though, ‘cause if he was talking about something from a while back I doubt this is the first time he’s mentioned it. Still, it’s not evidence either way.”
“Here’s the clincher, for me at least. When I told him about his girlfriend being missing it hit him hard. I don’t think he cared one way or the other about Bentley, but I didn’t get the sense he was trying to convince me of anything there. A creep in a situation like that is an actor whether he did the particular thing you’re accusing him of or not. He tries to sell you on his story. Tremaine just sat there and didn’t give a damn what I thought.”
“Is that it?” Stanley asked.
“Pretty much. Also I figured I’d give him a chance to do something stupid if I was wrong. We didn’t have enough to convict him of anything anyway. I could have let the DA tell me that, but I knew it. If we pushed, and he got lawyered up, his lawyer would tell him to sit tight. He wouldn’t talk to us anymore. We’d be nowhere. This way he’ll talk to me, because he knows I listened to him before.”
Stanley nodded. Finally. Nothing wrong with his questions—th
e Feeb was pretty sharp—but Gordon preferred to trust his own judgment until he had a reason to change his mind.
“So you thought,” Stanley said, “it was the best play whether he was guilty or not.”
“Yeah. In my hick cop sort of way.”
Stanley didn’t react. “And the clothes you gave him? They were from a crime scene. And speaking of crime scenes…no, the hell with getting his buddy’s dog out of the other boat. I kind of admire him for that. But the clothes?”
Gordon laughed, trying to make it look real. Who the hell had told Stanley about them? That hadn’t been on the tape. “Sure, they were from a crime scene. But we weren’t going to do anything with them. We don’t have anything to look for—well, Bentley’s blood, maybe, but we weren’t going to go through this stuff for that. I found some clothes that had been dry-cleaned and were still wrapped up, with a slip dating the cleaning before any of this happened. Threw in some socks and underwear. Safe enough, and again, it helped to build a rapport. A cop I respected told me about that little trick twenty years ago.”
“What do you think now?” Stanley asked.
“Now I wish Tremaine was in here so we could ask him some more questions. I want to know where he was when these girls disappeared. But,” he hesitated, “here’s the thing. I still don’t like him for it. How many sexual predators, who go for kids, have steady girlfriends? And how many also kill their friends, and their ex-bosses, and maybe their girlfriends? While we’re at it, how many guys who can grab four kids without leaving a trace would put themselves in a situation like this? I guess it’s possible, but it’s just too weird for me to assume it’s all this one guy, you know?”
“He might be fairly weird,” Stanley said seriously. Then he smiled. “Okay. You’ve convinced me he’s not the obvious candidate I thought he was. But let’s bring him in. You know where he is?”
“Yeah, sort of. He called me this morning and told me where he’s staying. He’s probably not there right now, but we can go get him tonight if we need to.”
“All right. Let’s go talk to the coroner and see what we’ve got on Purvis.” Stanley pushed his chair back and was straightening up when somebody knocked on the door. He looked inquiringly at Gordon.
Gordon shrugged and leaned back to open it. Sergeant Peabody, theoretically retired but still hanging around doing office work out of boredom, stood in the hall. It wasn’t supposed to work like that, but a lot of people owed him favors, and he was useful.
“Hey, found you,” Peabody said. “Guy out at Randall’s Towing called. Said he’d picked up a Jeep that had been in the Wal-Mart parking lot out at Flour Bluff for a couple of days. He saw what looked like dried blood. Smelled funny, too. Maybe a bloody handprint on the seat. He figured we should know. Anyway, the Jeep’s registered to a guy named Tremaine. I would have just logged it, but Ramirez was hanging around when I ran the plates and he got all excited. Said you’d want to know.”
“Thanks,” Gordon said. “Jeep’s at Randall’s?”
“Yeah, it’s still there. This important?”
“Could be.” Gordon glanced at Stanley, who had frozen half-out of his chair. “Thanks. We’re on it.”
“Sure.” The door closed. Gordon glared at it.
“Never mentioned his Jeep,” he said. “I didn’t have a reason to ask about it. Funny how he didn’t say it was gone, though.” He shook his head. “You suppose we’re gonna find out he loaned the Jeep to a friend and wasn’t expecting it to be around? Just a coincidence that the friend left it in a parking lot with a fucking bloody handprint on the seat?”
“Shit,” Stanley said. “No offense, Gordon, but—”
“No, you’re right, I agree completely. Shit.”
After a moment of contemplation, Gordon shrugged. “Let’s go take a look, get a team out to Randall’s. Then let’s go get this guy and talk to him some more.”
They headed for the door.
***
Shiver on the Sky Page 11