by AR Simmons
“Adam’s has got to know that if the second baby’s death is related, then that pretty much rules out Molly,” he said aloud. “But that takes away his only suspect.”
Of course, the three crimes could be indirectly related. The two babies’ could be victims of a pedophile, and Katie could have been killed because the perpetrator feared she could identify him. Speculation. He not only had nothing to back it up; he had no idea of how to find anything to back it up.
Richard had not yet learned what Adams, and every experienced investigator, knew: most crimes are solved because criminals are foolish. They let other people know what they have done, or let themselves be seen committing the crime. Then someone comes forward. So far, no one had, and the longer it continued that way, the less likely anyone would.
•••
“Have you told Molly that you’re through with the investigation?” asked Jill before she had even buckled her seat belt.
“I haven’t seen her today,” he said. “But I’m wrapping things up.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s not going to give up easily, Jill. I’ve got to show her that I’ve done all I can. I’ve interviewed just about everyone I can think of, and now I’m canvassing the neighborhood to make sure that no one saw anything suspicious. After I draw a blank with that, I’ll just tell her I can’t think of anything else to do.”
As he turned down the block they lived on, Jill said, “You’ve paid the electric bill, right?”
“I forgot. I put my check in the bank, though. I’ll pay it tomorrow.”
“I want it paid today,” she said as he pulled to the curb. “Good grief!”
The reason for Jill’s exasperated remark was coming across the lawn toward the car.
“Get out and talk to her,” said Jill. “Give me the checkbook. I’ll pay the electric bill.”
•••
5:00 PM
Richard had fully intended to keep his promise to Jill, but Molly had swamped his resolve. Consequently, he ended up delaying telling her that he was going to quit, vowing instead to do so as soon as he had finished his canvassing.
Jill was not pleased. “You continue feeding her delusions—and your own,” she had said before walking away from him.
He knew that the chances of Mancie being alive were almost nonexistent, and he knew that Molly needed to come to terms with that, but he balked at being the one to take away her hope.
•••
Richard went to bed angry at the situation. He’d asked for none of it, didn’t want it—and yet, like Molly, he couldn’t let it go. He desperately wanted Mancie Allsop to still exist.
•••
October 17
He awoke in the night with the vestiges of a vivid dream receding rapidly. All he could remember of it was that it involved Katie Nash and the unidentified baby.
Right, he told his subconscious. Connect the parts that are most likely to have nothing to do with each other. If you’re going to bother me, tell me something useful.
He lay awake for the remainder of the night, wishing to forget it all and be finally rid of Molly and the burden of her desperate hope.
Let it go, Molly. Let me go, he thought tiredly as he rolled from bed and went to make the coffee.
He intended to let Jill sleep, but she came into the kitchen just as he was about to crack eggs into smoking oil. Taking over, she removed the pan from the burner to cool. Over a breakfast devoid of references to Molly, they discussed plans. She would drop him off at work, spend the day at the library, and pick him up when he got off. After breakfast, she packed them both a lunch. The mood was decidedly upbeat, which he attributed to his promise of a disengagement from Molly and his gainful, albeit penurious employment. At bottom, it was just Jill being who she was.
As they approached the corner, the gamer called “Boots” recognized Richard and stepped into the street to wave them down. Richard stopped and opened the window.
“Say man, Coomer thinks he saw something hinky going on over there.” he nodded toward Molly’s house. “Maybe around the time you said that kid disappeared. He might’ve seen a guy carrying a kid out to the car.”
“That’s interesting,” said Richard, wishing Jill weren’t with him. “I’d like to talk to him. It’d have to be tonight, though. I’m working until seven.”
“He’s not here anyway. Might be back tonight, I don’t know. I’ll call if you give me your number.”
“I don’t have anything to write with,” said Richard. “And I’ve gotta get to work.”
“Me too. Just tell me. I hold numbers.”
Richard gave him his phone number. When they were back on their way to his work, Richard explained the living arrangement of the gamers.
“What he just told me probably doesn’t mean anything,” he added.
“You should tell Mr. Adams,” Jill replied. “Let him speak with them.”
“Well, there probably isn’t anything to it. These guys aren’t well-grounded in the real world. Most likely, this Coomer won’t have any idea of what night it was that he saw whatever he saw.”
“Let the police do it,” she repeated.
“I intend to as soon as I find out if there’s anything to it.”
He felt her tense.
“Look, Jill. Adams and guys like these don’t mix real well. They may not even talk to him if he comes on the way he does with me. Right now, they’ll open up to me, so I’m going to find out what they know and then turn it over to him.”
She nodded without saying anything or even looking his way.
•••
2:20 AM
The three of them stood in the street. “We know exactly when it was,” continued Boots. “It was the night that the kid disappeared.”
When it came to real-world affairs, Richard figured any date beyond payday involved more concentration than the gamers were likely to spare. They seemed to have a different concept of time, hence the call he had just received rousting him from bed at two in the morning.
“How can you be certain of the date?” he asked.
“E-mail,” the kid replied without hesitation. “I remember Coomer went outside just as I was dropping a buddy of mine the news that I’d just crossed the third threshold of Sardis. I checked the dates and there it was, two fifty-four. Then I pulled up the … a file … Anyway, it was the night the kid disappeared, May fifteen.”
As cyber-challenged as he was, Richard knew that Boots had hacked a file rather than looked through old newspaper issues. He decided that he didn’t want to know which files he had broken into.
“Tell him what you saw, Coomer,” prodded Boots.
“I saw a guy carrying a bundle. It could have been a kid. He put it in a car.”
“Could you recognize the guy if you saw him again?”
Coomer shook his head. “Dark, and I don’t got exactly twenty-twenty. It was a dude though.”
Richard wanted to get the story in context. “Why did you go outside?” he asked.
“To leak. The crapper was stopped up.”
“Could you show me where you were and explain it from there.”
Boots tagged along as Coomer led over to the right side of the house where the street light cast deep shadow.
“I was taking a whiz right here,” he said. “The car was parked in front of that house there.” he pointed in the general direction of the third one down on the far side of the street, Molly’s.
“The one with the light-colored roof?” asked Richard, estimating the distance at seventy-five yards.
“No. It was parked back there by that one with the lights on.”
“That’s the wrong house,” said Richard.
“Yeah, but he came from that house, the one with the light roof. The car was parked over there though. That’s why I remember it. It seemed kind of odd, you know.”
Richard realized that the boy really could have witnessed the kidnapping. “Why didn’t you go to the police w
ith this?”
“Man, I didn’t even know a kid was missing until Boots said something.”
“And no one came by to ask you guys if you saw anything?”
“They asked me,” said Boots. “But they didn’t say anything about a kid. I thought they were trying to get something on the dudes that lived in the meth house. I didn’t mess with that. Bad to even know anything about that garbage.”
Richard turned his attention back to the potential witness. “Can you describe the car?”
“Dark. Four wheels.” he shrugged. “It was dark, like now. Maybe a little foggy—I mean not real foggy, but kind of milky, you know?”
“Which way was it pointed.”
“That way,” he indicated the far corner of the block.
“Tell me what the man did.”
“He came across the yard walking right at me carrying something held to his shoulder, kind of hunched down like he was protecting a baby from the rain or something.”
“It was raining?”
“No, man. I was just telling you how it looked.”
“Did you get a look at his face?”
“He kept his head down and just opened the door and put it inside, and then he came around, got in, and drove off.”
“Did he lay it on the seat or hand it to someone?”
“He didn’t bend in real far. I didn’t see anybody else, but I think he handed it to someone. I remember thinking maybe they were taking their kid to the emergency room. He forgot to turn on his lights until he got to the corner.”
“He drove away with the lights off?”
“Yeah, but I’ve done that myself. The street light is so bright that you can forget, especially when you’re tired. That’s what I thought happened that night.”
Richard’s pulse raced. Finally, he had stumbled onto concrete evidence that Mancie had been abducted just as Molly had claimed from the beginning. “But you didn’t see anyone in the car when the dome light came on?”
“I don’t think it did. I didn’t see anyone else.”
“One other thing. Do you happen to remember what time it was?”
Boots shook his head, smiling. “I sent an e-mail, man. It was as two fifty-four.”
“Coomer, how certain are you of the details you just told me?”
“Absolute,” he said seriously. “Details is what I do. It’s how I win all the time.”
•••
“Why didn’t they say something at the time?” demanded Adams.
“They don’t live in the real world. Besides, according to them when they were asked about seeing anything that night, no one bothered to tell them about the missing baby.”
“But this—what was his name?”
“Coomer?”
“Yeah. This Coomer saw something suspicious, why didn’t he say something?”
“I don’t think he was there when your officers questioned them. And the gamers just assumed it had something to do with the people living in the house Jill and I rent. Apparently, it was a meth lab. They didn’t want to know anything about that.”
Adams looked as if he were about to growl.
“I appreciate you bringing this to me, Carter. It doesn’t change anything though. I still think your little friend killed her kid. This just confirms that she probably had a boyfriend help her get rid of the body.”
“Yeah right! They probably did it right after they killed the other kid and threw it in the city dump. What was the motive for that one? You know what this looks like, but you won’t admit it. This was an abduction pulled off by two people.”
“So how does the baby in the city dump figure into that?” countered Adams.
“I don’t know,” Richard admitted.
“Welcome to my world. Theories are fine, Carter, but you got to deal in fact. What I know is that your friend was higher than a kite, she was the last one known to be with the kid, and she was out looking for love that night. The kid was an obstacle. Tinsley told me that he cut it off with her as soon as he found out she had the kid.”
“What about the fact that she is the only one who wants to keep the investigation going?”
“Who knows what she’s convinced herself of since she killed the kid? Carter, I hate to break this to you, but drugs disorganize a person’s thinking. She may not even have a good grasp of what she did that night. If you want to get psychological about it, she might have repressed the memory. She may even be crazy as a loon. The fact is, she’s the only one with a motive for killing the kid.”
“An assumed motive that the second baby doesn’t fit with. How does that work?”
“Hell if I know. Maybe it doesn’t. Even in small towns there are such things as coincidences.”
“Two homicides and a kidnapping?”
“Three homicides,” corrected Adams. “I’m beginning to think you may be right about Katie Nash. She may have been killed because she knew who helped Molly get rid of her baby.”
Richard’s surprise must have shown.
“The scene may have been staged as a sexual attack. If it was, then the question is, ‘why would anyone do that?’ And the answer is ‘to conceal the real motive.’ People are killed for money, revenge, rage, and occasionally to cover up another crime. If it wasn’t a sex thing, then that last motive seems most likely.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Right now I’m going over there to interview this Goomer, or Coomer, or whatever, and then I’m going to put it in the book with everything else that isn’t leading anywhere.”
Adams got up from behind the desk, wincing as if he had a bad headache. “Come on. You’re going with me,” he said as he limped toward the door.
“Something wrong?” asked Richard.
“Besides a retarded woman and two babies being dead, everything is just great.”
“I meant with you. You hurt yourself.”
“I got old knees,” grumbled Adams. “Takes a while for them to loosen up. Don’t get the idea that I’m making you like a consultant or something. I just want you to introduce me to your new buddies.”
•••
Richard felt conspicuous waiting in the cruiser. He had worked as a deputy sheriff in Michigan, although his duties had been restricted to those of a road deputy, running the rural roads on night patrol. Adams’s vehicle bore a city logo, but lacked a complete police package, having only a shielded dash light and radio. He noted with approval, however, a GPS system mounted below the dash.
Adams came out in less than ten minutes. Richard assumed that he would have Coomer run him through what he had witnessed the night of the abduction, but the door shut behind him with no one following.
“Wasn’t he there?” asked Richard when the pasty-faced Adams got back in the cruiser.
“He was there, and I got his story.”
“And?”
“Nothing to it. He can’t identify the man or the car, and he has no idea what the man was carrying.”
“Come on now,” objected Richard. “What do you carry clutched to your shoulder like that but a baby?”
“He says maybe that’s what he saw,” said Adams sourly. “The car blocked his view.”
“That’s not the way he told it to me.”
“People change their stories when you try to pin them down. They assume stuff, and tell you that’s the way it was. Then you ask them what they actually saw, and it suddenly isn’t so clear anymore. The guy saw something. Who the hell knows what?”
“So it won’t pass muster for court. Still, him seeing anything like that on the night Molly’s baby disappeared means something, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not so convinced the date is right.”
“It’s not just the date. Boots sent an e-mail while Coomer was outside. That pins down the time exactly. It was at two fifty-four in the morning.”
Adams dismissed it with a snort.
“Your guy isn’t even sure of the date. He sent about a dozen of those e-mails out over about a two-m
onth period, most of them in the early-morning hours. You want to believe that one cinches it. It’s too damned convenient. What happened was you started asking questions, and this guy, Boots, wanted to be helpful, and both of you got carried away.”
“He’s sure that he sent that particular one at a time when Coomer was outside, and Coomer remembers seeing the guy carry something across Molly’s yard to the car,” objected Richard.
“Why would he remember that? Think about it? You call someone up in the middle of the night to tell them something important, Carter, not just to crow about winning a video game.”
“You were in the house. You think games are unimportant to these guys? Sure. They’re overgrown kids, but that’s the point. Their whole lives revolve around gaming or whatever you call it. It’s about all they think of. That call was important to him. That’s why he remembered it.”
“There’s a big difference between finding a lead and drumming one up, Carter. This was real entertaining, but I’m tired. I don’t want to play anymore.”
•••
Richard told Jill about passing along to Adams what the gamers had told him.
“Good,” she said. “Now maybe Mr. Adams can find out what happened.”
Before he could tell her that Adams had rejected the gamers’ story out of hand, there was a knock at the back door. Jill let Molly in.
“Hi, Mrs. Carter,” she mumbled, looking around Jill in search of Richard.
“Come in,” said Jill. “My husband has something to tell you, I think.”
“About Mancie?” she blurted excitedly. “What is it?”
“Just about the night that she disappeared,” Richard said quickly, seeking to limit her expectations. “Someone who lives down the block may have witnessed her being taken. Mr. Adams is looking into it.”