by Anne Frasier
“I want to show you something.” Jude let go to reach into her messenger bag. She extracted the pile of papers she’d tucked inside earlier, most of them photos she’d printed from the internet. “I have some pictures for you to look at.”
He slid off the couch to stand next to her, pressed the palms of his hands together in a paused clap, and waited, shaking a little in excitement and expectation.
Like in a police lineup, Jude deliberately included several different images and faces in hopes of getting a truer response. “What’s this a picture of?” She showed him the first one and waited.
“Lady,” he said, pointing.
“That’s right.”
She pulled another from the stack.
“Dog!”
Another image of another woman.
“Lady.”
From the kitchen came sounds of cupboards slamming. The boy looked away from Jude, distracted.
“And another,” she said, pulling out a fourth photo. He was watching the kitchen, probably thinking about food and maybe the chance to eat a cookie. “Boy?” She’d never called him that before.
He reluctantly looked back at the paper in Jude’s hand. And his face changed. “Nana! Nana!” he shouted. He jumped up and down, knees and elbows bent. “Nana!”
His reaction left no doubt that Nanette Perkins was his “Nana.” It was heartbreaking to see how much he’d come to life upon seeing the face of the woman who’d abandoned him to die in a blizzard, the woman who was indirectly or even directly responsible for his abuse. He was a child and Jude was an adult, but she recognized the bond that formed between a victim and the person who inflicted the pain and suffering. On the surface, even for her, it was impossible to understand that pull. She knew only that it was real.
She started to put the photos away, then paused. “Would you like to keep this one?” she asked, indicating the image of Perkins. He nodded and jumped from one foot to the other.
She handed the photo to him, and he pressed his face against it, giving it a kiss.
“Let’s go get a cookie.”
In the kitchen, the boy waved the photo in the air. “Nana! My Nana!” he said in excitement and what might have been his first real interaction with the other children.
Jude’s mobile buzzed. She checked the screen. Uriah, telling her to unsilence her phone. He was following a lead and might be calling soon.
“I’m going to have to go,” she told the foster mom. Then she picked up a homemade oatmeal cookie from a plate, crouched down in front of the boy, and handed it to him. “I’ll see you later,” she said, even though there was a chance she might never see him, and she might have been saying the same thing Perkins had told him a few days earlier. She straightened, feeling a tightness in her throat, anxious to get away from the child munching on the cookie, watching her.
“You should take a treat for yourself.” Lori held out the plate. Jude grabbed one, mumbled a quick thanks, and left. Outside, cookie in her mouth, she started the car, turned on the heat, felt the same cool air she’d felt earlier, and headed for the hospital to visit Nanette Perkins again.
CHAPTER 21
Five years earlier . . .
Doctors said it was the cigarettes and heavy drinking that caused Lyle’s cancer. Funny, the thing they’d bonded over was the thing that was now breaking them up forever. Lyle had just been given a week to live, and Nan wasn’t ready to tell him good-bye. Their life together hadn’t been all puppies and kittens, but they’d quit child trafficking after the fiasco of that night fifteen years ago. He’d convinced her to stay in Minnesota, and she’d almost gotten used to the winters. They went to church on Sundays, and they’d made a few friends. Not close friends, because they could never have that, not with their secrets. The friends were farming, salt-of-the-earth people who’d even helped with the harvest when Lyle was in Rochester having surgery and radiation. But the cancer had come back, leaving him unable to speak and ready to go.
Their secret had become another kind of bond.
Right now they were lying in bed together, watching the small television on the dresser. Nan was drinking a beer and eating chips; Lyle was clicking through channels, stopping on anything that looked a bit religious.
Funny how that happened too. How he used to cuss and never go to church, but suddenly, once the cancer hit, he was all God this and God that. So together they watched some woman with big blond hair tell them they needed to repent, needed to ask for forgiveness.
Lyle tapped a pen against the tablet in his hand, and Nan read what he’d written.
Maybe I should go to confession.
“But you aren’t Catholic.”
I want to confess my sins.
They’d never talked about the night they lost the kids, and they’d been good people since then. Wasn’t that enough?
I want to confess. I want to tell somebody.
“You mean the police?”
Maybe.
She shook her head. “Don’t you dare do anything like that. It’s fine for you, because you’ll be dead anyway, but I have to live and I’ll have to go to prison for the rest of my life.”
I can’t die without telling somebody.
“How ’bout this? You write it all down, and I’ll get it to the police somehow so they won’t know where it came from or who it came from.”
That seemed to satisfy him a little, but not completely. Hopefully he’d forget about it because he was on a lot of morphine. He’d forgotten things before. But the next day he started in on his confession again, so she turned the tablet to a fresh page and handed it to him so he could write everything down. When she read it, she had to reach for a chair.
They’d done bad things. Really bad.
Later, she folded the paper and stuck it in an envelope she addressed to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. She wasn’t sure why she chose them rather than the FBI or some such. It just seemed kinda local and more important somehow. And she hoped it would get Lyle to quit going on about confessing. It made her mad that he thought he could confess and leave her with all the damage.
She showed him the stamped, addressed envelope. “I’m going to drive into the city to mail it,” she said. “So it won’t be postmarked from here. But I’ll be back in an hour and a half.”
He nodded from the bed and picked up the remote.
It was nice to get away and not be a caretaker for a while. While she was gone, she stopped in an antiques shop and just browsed, and she went to a café that overlooked a river. She had tea and a sandwich and a scone. For some reason it felt perfect, like something her soul needed. Back at the farm, she parked the car, and as she headed up the sidewalk, she braced herself for everything.
Cancer had an odor. That had surprised her, but now she got how those cancer-sniffing dogs could identify it. Hell, she’d be able to sniff it out after this.
She stepped inside to the sound of the television coming from the bedroom. Shades were pulled down tight, and the place was dark and sad. Lyle was in bed where she’d left him. He appeared to be sleeping, but something about him said otherwise. She dropped her purse with the confession she’d never really mailed and ran to the bedside. With fingers on his jaw, she shook his face and waited for his eyes to open, waited for him to smile up at her. But his skin was already cold, and his eyes never opened. He must have been hanging on for that confession.
They’d said a week.
Her legs buckled, and she collapsed to the floor and cried until she didn’t have any more tears left in her. When she was done, she pushed herself to her feet and crawled into bed beside him. It was then she noticed writing on the tablet lying across his stomach. Another confession, this one just for her.
I lied to you. I never buried the bodies. They’re still in the locker.
CHAPTER 22
When Jude arrived back at the hospital, Ms. Perkins’s leg hammock and IV pump were gone, a sign that she’d be going home soon. At the very least, they liked to leave a p
lugged IV port until release. It was gone too. On the wheeled table in front of the woman was an empty medicine cup and a glass of water with a bent straw. The curtains had been reopened. Was that a rule nurses were required to follow? Lights on, curtains open? Jude crossed the room and reclosed them, blocking all sunlight except for a sliver that fell across the floor and foot of the bed.
“The child has identified you as the person he’s been living with,” she told Ms. Perkins. Ms. Perkins. The name now seemed awkward. Jude was used to thinking of her as Nana. “Which means you’re the one who left him at my door.”
Without waiting a beat, the woman let out a wail, like some bad actress executing her reaction too soon. Or had she been lying there, emotions smoldering?
Jude closed the door, grabbed a box of tissues, and placed them on the hospital table. “I’m going to have to ask you some questions. The first: Are you the child’s mother?”
“Yes. God, yes.” Perkins pulled a tissue from the tiny box and dabbed at her eyes as if afraid to smear makeup she wasn’t wearing. “My husband died and I couldn’t take care of him anymore, so I left the boy at your house because I knew you protected young people, and I knew he’d be safe and you’d do what you needed to do.” She looked at Jude with red-rimmed eyes and what appeared to be real tears. “He was supposed to go inside. I don’t know why he didn’t. He was supposed to.”
“You have to be buzzed in.”
“I didn’t think about that. A car was coming. I panicked and pulled away. I didn’t know he couldn’t get in the building. I would never have left him to freeze. I brought him there to give him a better life. When I think of what could have happened to him . . .”
“You could have put him up for adoption.”
“Kids that age aren’t picked. And I didn’t know what I was doing, wasn’t thinking straight. I was overwhelmed. I thought maybe he would get more attention if you found him. Like those dogs with tragic stories that everybody wants to adopt.”
“Where was he born? Child Protection Services will be following up, but they’ll be looking into his birth records.”
“There aren’t any.”
Not totally unexpected.
“He was a surprise. I sure didn’t expect to get pregnant at thirty-nine. It was a home birth. I never reported it.”
Hmm. Could be true.
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s concern when or where or how my kid was born,” Perkins said. “That’s nobody’s business but mine.”
“You didn’t file a birth certificate?”
“Nope.”
Jude watched as she tossed the tissue on the floor and pulled out a fresh one. There were thousands of undocumented American citizens in the country. “If you’re his mother, then I’m sure you won’t mind taking a DNA test to prove it.”
Perkins shrugged. “Bring it on.”
“That’s something else Child Protection Services will want to be in charge of and follow up on once I report this new information to them. We’ll need to make sure he’s who you say he is. And when the results come back, we’ll have another issue on our hands. What to do with him.”
“I want him back.”
Jude blinked in surprise. “That’s not up to me, but personally I’d rather he never live with you again. CPS might also be sending someone here to serve papers on you for child endangerment. You’d have to appear before a judge.”
“I deserve it. It was a stupid thing to do.”
“What’s his name?”
“I never named him.”
Jude wasn’t surprised about that either, and his lack of a name underscored a disconcerting level of neglect.
“It’s not what you might think. I’d read about how some cultures let their kids name themselves when they get old enough. It seemed like a cool idea at the time, but then I just let it slide. He became Boy. We tried a few different names, but nothing worked.”
Jude’s phone rang. The call Uriah had promised. She had to take it. Without further conversation with Perkins or an explanation of her departure, she answered as she stepped from the room.
“We might have an ID on the first body from the lake,” Uriah said. “Someone who worked the case years ago was following a conversation about it on Reddit, where all the armchair detectives hang out. Name’s Paul Savoy. Kid’s name, Billy Nelson. Savoy recognized some of the details, saw the police sketch we submitted to the press, and thought it might be his old case.”
She tried to mentally shift gears from the child with no real name, to another child, a dead child.
“These retired detectives just can’t stop following the stories and trying to solve them, even from the comfort of their own homes,” Uriah continued.
“I’ll be right there. Let’s go talk to him.”
“That could be a little tough. He lives in California.”
“Oh, okay. Guess I don’t blame him for wanting to get out of here if he lived through any winters like this.”
“That’s where the crime took place. California. And where he lives. Orange County. And get this. The case is twenty years old.”
She let that sink in.
A body from Orange County, California, turning up in Minneapolis twenty years later. “How reliable is our source?”
“He’s legit. He called, hooked me up with someone working on updating and streamlining some of Los Angeles County’s antiquated databases.”
Accessing crime data was still a problem due to databases around the country that weren’t linked, and the need for much of the information to be entered manually into the new systems. County level, state level, federal, all had issues. They were getting there, transitioning, but there still wasn’t one database to plug into that would pull up everything you were looking for, especially when dealing with cold cases. Or a way to just magically sync everything. So the backlog of cold cases was pushed aside as a lesser priority.
“They didn’t have any DNA on file,” Uriah continued, “but they had fingerprints taken of the missing kid when he was still in school. A fifteen-point match.”
Some departments in the US required a twelve-point match, but Jude tended to agree with the UK and preferred something closer to sixteen or seventeen. “That’s fairly indisputable.” Her adrenaline pumping from the news, she moved quickly down the hallway, updating Uriah on the child found in her apartment, avoiding carts and nurses and the occasional person shuffling past with an IV rack.
“You believe her about being his mother?”
“I don’t know.” She pushed the elevator button. “She didn’t balk at taking a DNA test.” Back to the cold case. “I think we should Skype with this detective.”
“No need. He’s on a plane right now and should be here shortly. I’m sorry to dump this on you, but Valentine is working a case, and we got a report of a shoot-out in North Minneapolis. One dead. McIntosh is at the scene, but I need to be on the ground too. I want you to swing by and pick up the detective from the airport. I’ll follow up this call with a text. His flight, cell phone. I know you probably aren’t crazy about collecting a stranger and giving him a ride.”
“I can handle it.” But it wouldn’t be pleasant.
CHAPTER 23
At the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, Jude parked in the short-term ramp and went inside the terminal. Meeting Paul Savoy face-to-face seemed the polite thing to do. Awkward, but not as awkward as simply inviting a stranger into her car before even saying hello. And he was flying halfway across the country to help them.
Before heading to the airport, she’d called Kim Tharp at Child Protection Services to give her the information about Perkins.
“Good. We have a parent,” was the reaction. Not Let’s make sure to keep that monster away from him. Jude hadn’t liked that. She’d strongly suggested they run a DNA test, and Kim had agreed.
Checking the arrival board, she noted that Savoy’s flight had just landed. She could have used her badge to gain access beyond the security checkpoi
nt. Instead, she sent a text to his mobile to let him know she’d meet him at the bottom of the escalators, near the luggage carousels and Starbucks.
While waiting, she Googled him, pulling up headshots that covered a large span of time. Paul Savoy with brown hair, Paul Savoy with a beard, Paul Savoy with a mustache, Paul Savoy with salt-and-pepper hair, even though she’d determined he was only fifty-seven.
Along with headshots were articles on cold-case interviews with Savoy, conducted after his retirement. Curious to think he would have been about Jude’s current age when the child went missing, and Jude would have been about sixteen at the time of the abduction. Back before the internet and social media and all the multitude of news outlets available today.
She recognized him immediately through the glass doors that separated travelers from nontravelers as he rode the steep escalator to street level. Tall, fit. Beige jacket over one arm, maroon tie, briefcase, small carry-on bag. He had that old-school California detective vibe about him. Confident. Tan. Very tan. Maybe he golfed.
He spotted her and lifted his hand in recognition, but not a full-blown wave. The automatic doors opened, a gust of diesel-tainted air entering with him as he approached.
“Thanks for coming,” Jude said. They shook hands.
“I wouldn’t have missed this.”
“Do you have a hat and gloves?”
“I didn’t bring winter clothing. Don’t own any and I’m only going to be here until tomorrow. I’ve got an event to get back to in California.”
“That’s a quick turnaround.”
“A wedding. My daughter.” He continued with details he didn’t need to share and were none of her business. “Second marriage.”
“You might want to put that on.” She indicated the jacket over his arm. It was a suit jacket, nothing that would do much to keep him warm, but better than nothing.
They started walking, and she pointed wordlessly in the direction they should go, taking another set of escalators down, past the boarding area for the light rail, and up another escalator to the parking area.