by Flora, Kate;
Given the severity of the crime, they had a no-knock warrant. They weren’t required to announce their presence or ask for permission to enter.
At Burgess’s nod, the officer swung the heavy metal and the door burst open. The loud sound of the door shattering was echoed as the broken door bounced off the wall. Clenched with anticipation, the three of them stepped into the dark condo. Burgess found a light switch and flipped it on.
It was a pleasant, open kitchen-family room, painted pale yellow, with pretty furnishings. It probably was ordinarily neat. But not tonight. The place looked like someone had already searched it. Drawers were pulled open and their contents spilled everywhere.
They made their way through the two floors, clearing the rooms. Every room bore the same signs of a hasty search. The bed was unmade, with a man’s pajamas and a woman’s summer nightgown tossed on the floor beside it.
Although their cars were home, the McCanns were not. The condo was empty.
Thirty-Nine
Since they were here, they might as well search. Perry took the upstairs. Burgess and Kyle the downstairs. Then they would check the garage and the trash. They let patrol go. No sense in tying anyone else up. It was too late for a neighborhood canvass.
The kitchen smelled faintly of cooking and there was a carefully wrapped, partially eaten chicken in the refrigerator. That suggested the McCanns had spent a quiet evening at home and gone to bed. Crumpled napkins and chicken bones in the trash seemed to confirm this. People didn’t leave bones in their kitchen trash in this weather for long. The nightclothes on the bedroom floor suggested something had caused them to quickly dress and flee.
Burgess checked the dishwasher. Two water glasses. Two wine glasses. Two plates. Two sets of silverware. The TV was cold, the remotes neatly lined up on the coffee table. Aside from the disorder caused by a hasty search, the only thing out of place was a pair of small blue flats between the couch and the coffee table.
Did the hasty search and the fact that their cars were still there suggest coercion? Who leaves home in the middle of the night and leaves their car behind? Maybe the McCanns had lit out for the airport. They’d have to check with local taxi companies. And what did that hasty search mean? Were they trying to cleanse the place of any incriminating evidence? Had they been kidnapped? If so, how did that square with a messy search? Had the kidnapper stashed them somewhere while he searched the condo?
Burgess was so tired of questions without answers. And yes, he knew it was his job to find those answers. Most investigations were like putting puzzles together. This was like working with a box where the pieces from several puzzles had been jumbled together. It was still their job to figure out how the pieces fit together.
The contents of drawers and cupboards had been spilled onto the floor, except in the kitchen. Maybe whatever the searcher had been looking for wasn’t easy to hide among the silverware and cooking utensils and that was why those drawers hadn’t been emptied. Kyle began going through the piles in the living room, while Burgess took the kitchen. But while Kyle was coming up empty in the living room, Burgess had a find in the kitchen. At the bottom of a stack of neatly folded dishtowels, he found two disks, wrapped in a faded holiday towel. Remembering the hidden phones at the Dornan’s, he carefully checked the stacked pots and pans, but there was nothing there. Nothing in the flour or the sugar. But in a plastic bin that held gravy mixes and taco mixes and dried chilies and bags of nuts, he found two more disks. If the person who’d searched the house was looking for these, they hadn’t done a very good job.
Unless there had been many more and these last few were overlooked? Did overlooking any disks suggest someone other than McCann was doing the searching? Unless one of the McCanns was hiding these from the other?
He wondered if McCann’s wife, Annie, knew what her husband was into, and that the evidence was right here in their home? Could he have hidden these in their kitchen and not had them discovered? Maybe, if McCann did the cooking. Or was it possible that this was a shared deviance, and the couple got off on watching children being abused?
Leaving Kyle to finish the living room, he headed into the bedroom. On the dresser was the McCann’s wedding picture. Annie was petite and pretty, and stared up at her new husband looking gloriously happy to be marrying the man of her dreams. If she didn’t know about his sick predilections, what would it be like when she found out that the man she’d married liked to rape children, and collected videos of other men raping them? He couldn’t imagine anyone going into a marriage knowing this about a spouse, or staying in a marriage to such a man.
McCann said she was a teacher. Most teachers he knew cared deeply about their students. How could she spend her day working with children, and come home to him? Was she innocently blind or willfully blind? They needed to find her and ask.
What had he told Kyle once? We’re just the cotton pickers. Someone else has to spin it into cloth. Every time they got close to picking this cotton, a puff of ill wind blew it away.
He paused in his search as pain jacked through him. His stomach felt like he’d swallowed something hot and sharp. The monster was awake. Now it would clamor and gnaw until the case was over, and it would hurt. The only thing it wanted to be fed was solutions. Arrests. Justice.
He searched the bedroom drawers. The boxes on the shelf in the closet. The pockets of the hanging clothes. Nothing. He leafed through the books on the bedside table. Her bedside table. Neither of them had gotten to the McCann’s small study when Kyle stuck his head in.
“I got a feeling, Joe. Gonna go check out the garage.”
“Be careful.”
“Always careful,” Kyle said, which was pretty much the truth. When they said “Be careful” to each other, they meant especially careful. They meant they were dealing with a killer or killers who brutalized and murdered without compunction. Or hesitation.
The garage door opened, shut, then opened again. Kyle stuck his head in. “Come here,” he said, and disappeared again.
Burgess abandoned his search of the bedroom and followed Kyle to the garage. Kyle had the lift gate of the Mini up, and was staring at something inside. Burgess’s stomach flipped. Please, no, he thought. Not another body.
“Wink and Dani are not going to be pleased,” Kyle said. “He distinctly said no more bodies.”
“Oh, he always says that. I think he meant no more crime scenes until they catch up,” Burgess said. “I guess we have another crime scene.” He stared at the large duffle bag, unzipped to show the curled up form that was probably Annie McCann. “Is she dead?”
Kyle shook his head. “No. But she might have been if we hadn’t come tonight. Some kind of drug overdose, I think. I’ve got Medcu on the way. Help me get her out.”
They lifted the small woman whose wedding picture said she was Annie McCann out of the bag and turned her on her side. She wore shorts and a tank top. Her feet were bare. It was hot in the garage, but her skin was clammy.
“You check the other car yet? See if McCann is in there?” Burgess asked.
“Yes. And no, he’s not there.”
“I don’t get it,” Burgess said, hitting the button to raise the garage door. “I don’t get any of it. If those are McCann’s disks, he wouldn’t have to tear the house apart, searching for them. So that must have been someone else. Most likely suspect is our mystery man Lawrence. But where’s McCann?”
“Unless she hid them,” Kyle said, “and her husband was looking for them. Maybe in a few hours Mrs. McCann can tell us what happened here tonight. She might even know Lawrence’s last name, he being a good friend of her husband’s and all.”
Burgess went out to move the truck to make way for the ambulance. The rain was heavier now, and the night had the dusty smell of rain on hot pavement. It also felt heavy and ominous, like finding McCann missing and his wife drugged and left for dead was only the beginning of another long, awful night. He’d always liked nights, but this week was ruining that. He was going to sta
rt sleeping in the daytime. If he got a chance to sleep at all in a case Kyle had correctly called Whack a Mole.
They were standing in the shelter of the garage, watching the approaching lights of the ambulance, when Burgess’s phone buzzed. Too late for anything but an emergency. He pulled it out and checked the number. His sister Sandy.
Puzzled, he raised the phone to his ear and mumbled “Burgess.”
Without even a hello, Sandy’s terror poured into his ear. “Cherry is missing, Joe. She didn’t come home.”
A gasp for breath, then she said, “She wanted to help you with your investigation. She said she had an idea about someone who might be involved. I told her to call you. Tell you what she knew and let you follow up. That if she was right, this man is dangerous. But dammit, Joe! She wants to be a cop like you, and insisted she had to investigate it herself. Like this was all a fun adventure. And now she hasn’t come home. She always obeys her curfew or calls. But she didn’t and she’s not answering her phone. It’s going straight to voice mail.”
“Tell me everything she said.”
Sandy’s incoherent words filled his ears, a jumble of statements, worries, and speculation. Beside him, the ambulance was pulling up, its engine roar drowning out her voice. He moved back inside so he could hear.
“Slow down and take it step by step,” he said.
“What’s there to tell? Since she saw the photo that fell out of your briefcase, the one of the girl who was murdered, the girl she knew from school, she’s been trying to figure out how she could help.”
The words ‘it’s all your fault’ were implied, if not spoken, and she was teetering on the edge of hysteria. He had to get her focused and answering his questions before she became totally incoherent. “She thinks the person who killed Shelley Minor may be connected with her school?” he asked.
“She didn’t say that, but she did say ‘It could be him.’ Only when I asked her who he was, she said never mind and went in her room and shut the door. I think maybe she’s talked to Dylan about this. About her suspicions.”
Nothing that Dylan had mentioned to him. Unless this was what Dylan had been referring to when he asked about helping a friend. He wondered if Dylan was home, or off helping his cousin play detective. But if Cherry had a lead on the bad guy they were looking for, there was no playing about this.
He pushed away an image of holding Cherry when she was an infant. Her wise eyes and the little curious moons of her eyebrows. Her smooth, perfect forehead. The way her tiny hand curled around his finger. “When did you last talk to her?” he asked.
“Around nine. She said she was at her friend Eliza’s house and they were going to watch a movie. I reminded her about curfew and she said not to worry. She’d be home.”
“Did you call Eliza?”
“Of course I called Eliza. Dammit, Joe, do you think I’m an idiot?”
He thought she was the hysterical mother of a missing child. Sister of a cop or not, they were difficult people to get information from. “What did Eliza say?”
“That Cherry isn’t there. That she was on and off the phone with someone all evening. It sounded like they were arguing. Then someone she referred to as a ‘friend’ picked her up around ten.”
“You know the name of that friend?”
“I don’t because Eliza didn’t.”
“Eliza wasn’t surprised? Suspicious? She didn’t wonder what Cherry was up to?”
“She was surprised. She said Cherry had been acting weird all evening, and then she’d called someone to come and get her and off they went.”
“Does she know anything about who Cherry called? Male? Female? Anything?”
“She says she doesn’t.”
“Did she see the car?”
“Dammit, Joe! I am not a detective. You can call her yourself.” She rattled off a number.
His sister sounded like she was at the end of her rope. He dealt with people in distress all the time. The fact that she was his sister didn’t make it easier. Sandy wasn’t good at answering his questions at the best of times, which this was not. She always wanted to turn things into an argument, even when it was the most unproductive thing she could do to help her daughter.
“Did you ask her if she saw the car?” he asked again.
“She didn’t.”
“Do you have a school yearbook there?”
“Somewhere,” she said, sounding puzzled. He knew. She wanted him to get out there and move heaven and earth, not ask questions like a detective or proceed in a methodical way. She just wanted him to fix it. But he couldn’t move heaven, or earth, without some idea what part of it needed moving.
“Go find it. I’ll hold on.”
Heart pounding with anxiety for his missing niece, he rocked from foot to foot while he waited for Sandy to come back to the phone.
“I’ve got it,” she said.
He’d been going to direct her to look for the mysterious Lawrence, but it would be too hard to explain. He needed to do that himself. Look at the yearbook. Ask more questions. Take a look at Cherry’s room. Her computer. “I’m on my way,” he said.
Stan Perry appeared, looking excited. “I found his production studio,” he said. “Cameras. Computers for editing. Machines for copying disks. Stacks of blank disks. He’s even got a program for making cute little inserts for the jewel cases to hint at the contents. What’s up down here?”
“Great job, Stan,” he said. “Looks like we need patrol to sit on this.”
“Patrol is going to hate us,” Kyle said.
There was so much more to do here, but Burgess had a family emergency. He brought Kyle and Perry up to speed.
“We’ll finish up here. Call us if you need us,” Kyle said.
He headed out to his truck, cursing himself every step for the foolish enthusiasm he’d displayed when he told his niece about his work. He should have told her horror stories instead. Now, given what he’d learned about the people he was dealing with, a sweet sixteen-year-old girl he loved might have set herself up to become his next horror story.
Forty
Acting on a hunch, he swung by his house on the way to Sandy’s. Unfortunately, he was right. Chris’s car was gone. His worry level, already amped up to the point where it was hard to breathe, went into the stratosphere. His foolishly chivalrous son had just broken both family rules and the law, and helped put himself, and Cherry, in grave danger. He could be pissed and disappointed later. Right now, he had to find them before something awful happened. If it wasn’t already too late.
He drove to Sandy’s house at speeds far in excess of what was safe in the city, even in the middle of the night.
His sister opened the door before he could knock, looking so much like their mother, in their mother’s ratty old green bathrobe, that it took him a minute to focus. He followed her into the living room, where her husband and Maddie perched anxiously on the edge of the sofa.
“You’ll find her, Joe, right?” his sister said.
He nodded. Part of the cop’s job. Be reassuring, not matter how strong your doubts. “Do any of you have any idea what Cherry might be up to? Is there anything she’s said or done that suggest where she’s gone?”
“I heard her talking on the phone to someone,” Maddie said. “I couldn’t make most of it out, she was kind of whispering, but I did hear the words ‘past Westbrook.’ Does that help?”
“It may,” he said. The child looked so terrified that he added, “It may help a lot.”
He turned to Sandy. “Got that yearbook?” he said. “And did Cherry’s school give you a staff directory?”
“I’ll look,” she said, thrusting the yearbook at him.
Trying to ignore their frightened faces, he sat down and opened the yearbook, turning the pages slowly, studying any pictures that had faculty or staff. He found the man he was looking for way in the back, in a group photo labeled “Counseling Staff.” A big man, fifties, hard face, and there on the lapel, a tiny pin with the number
fifteen.
He got out his phone. Called Dispatch and asked for a driver’s license and address for Lawrence Cashman. In case they couldn’t locate it, and because Cashman and his pal Dornan liked to play games with their identities, he also asked for contact information for the principal, a woman named Rosetta Pinette. While he waited, he asked if he could look around Cherry’s room. Sandy hesitated a moment, and he watched the mother’s protective instinct to guard her child’s privacy war with the reality of the situation. The mother who wanted to say “I trust my child” recognizing that she couldn’t.
At last she said, “Sure,” and led him to Cherry’s room. It was a pink extravaganza, a decorating choice he was sure was more Sandy compensating for the leanness of their childhood than Cherry, with a big desk made from a door on two sets of legs. The bed was piled with stuffed animals. The desk was more serious and adult, with neat piles of books, her drawing materials, and her music. He opened her laptop and looked at Sandy. “What’s her password?”
His sister shrugged. This was where parents so often went wrong. In the interest of showing their kids that they were trusted, parents took a hands off approach, one that prevented them from checking their children’s on-line activity and monitoring where their searches went. “I trust you” sounded good, but these were still children, with developing brains, and it was easy for them to get into conversations with the wrong people, visit the wrong websites, and get bullied, or be bullies, on social media without parental oversight.
Sandy read his disapproval and got defensive. “We trust her,” she said, and then turned away at the ridiculous sound of her own words.
“Do you think Maddie knows?”
“Why would she—” Sandy began, then headed for the door. “I’ll ask her.”
She was back a moment later, just as his phone rang. He wrote down the address for Lawrence Cashman, and the contact information for Rosetta Pinette, then looked at her expectantly.