A Fool and His Monet

by Sandra Orchard

  I almost fumbled my teacup.

  Not seeming to notice my stunned reaction, Mrs. Landers added, “I was so sad to see them move soon after. Nothing would’ve made me happier than to be little Liam’s adopted grandmother. I’d hoped she’d keep in touch, come back to visit now and again.” Her eyes glistened with moisture. “But I haven’t seen her since.”

  I set down my teacup and struggled to make sense of this new information. “I didn’t realize Petra had a baby.”

  “They adopted.”

  Adopted. Was that the connection to the senator and his bill?

  “An adorable wee boy he was.” Mrs. Landers’s eyes shadowed. “Petra’s husband didn’t seem to take to him, though. They fought a lot after the baby came. And it wasn’t more than a month before they moved. Petra was in tears. She didn’t want to go. That’s why I was so surprised when she didn’t come back to visit, but a baby keeps you busy, I know.”

  I nodded, my mind still scrambling to put the pieces together. Petra had said they’d divorced because her husband didn’t want a baby. But had she given up the child too? Was he taken away from her? “Do you happen to recall the name of the adoption agency they used?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “No need to apologize.” I handed her my business card. “You’ve been very helpful. If you happen to hear from Petra, please call me, okay?”

  “Of course. She isn’t in any kind of trouble, is she?”

  “I’m afraid she might be, yes, which is why I’m so anxious to speak with her. Is there anyone else in town that she might’ve contacted? A close friend?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw her have friends over.” Mrs. Landers’s eyes widened. “Her husband wasn’t abusive, was he? I never thought of it before, but I’ve heard abused women will cut themselves off from friends to hide what their husbands are doing.”

  I patted Mrs. Landers’s hands. “No, it’s nothing like that.” She didn’t act like an abuse survivor, but I wasn’t discounting any possibility for what drove the pair apart eighteen months ago. My stomach dipped at another possibility—they’d moved to cover up the baby’s death.

  23

  “There are no birth, death, or adoption records for a Liam Horvak in the state of Missouri,” the analyst at headquarters reported back to me as I once again parked outside Horvak’s accounting firm.

  His BMW was still in the lot, despite it being Saturday, so nothing was going to keep me out of his office until I got some real answers.

  “It might’ve been a foreign adoption,” I said.

  “I’m way ahead of you,” the analyst responded. “I checked with customs. But the Horvaks haven’t left the country in the past five years. Do you want me to check immigration records for a Liam Horvak?”

  “Sure, it’s worth a shot, thanks.” I strode through the front doors of Horvak’s firm and waved off the secretary’s attempt to stall me. “I’ll see myself in.” As I reached Horvak’s door, I could hear the receptionist’s voice in stereo, from down the hall and coming from his intercom, warning him I was back.

  This was probably a waste of both of our time, but a niggling voice in the back of my mind said that what happened to their baby two years ago was somehow connected. Not to mention that I was sure Horvak was hiding something. Maybe Petra’s whereabouts.

  Horvak sprang to his feet as I darkened his doorway. “Special Agent, what brings you back?”

  I reclaimed my previous chair. “I had a nice long chat with your former neighbor Mrs. Landers.”

  “Oh?” His voice cracked.

  “Where’s Liam?” I said in my best you-better-come-clean-now-or-you’ll-be-sorry tone.

  “Uh.” To his credit, Horvak didn’t try to deny the boy’s existence. “The adoption didn’t work out. We returned him to the agency.”

  “Which agency would that be?”

  His ears reddened and he tugged at one nervously. “I don’t recall the name.”

  Spying a yellow pages directory on his side bar, I flipped it open to Adoption Agencies and slapped it onto his desk. “Which one?” I wasn’t sure why it mattered, but my gut told me it did. Big time.

  His gaze traveled down the list. “It isn’t in here. It must’ve shut down.”

  “Was it in another county?”

  “Uh.” He fidgeted guiltily. “Yeah, maybe. Do I need a lawyer?”

  “Why would you ask that? We’re just talking.”

  “Oh.” His gaze dropped to his desk.

  “Whose idea was it to return the baby to the adoption agency?”

  “That was over two years ago. How’s it going to help you find Petra?”

  “Is there a reason you don’t want to answer the question, Mr. Horvak?”

  He did the hair raking routine again, this time accompanied by some serious sighing. “Because giving up that baby shattered her. She was inconsolable for weeks afterward. But it had to be done.”

  “Why?”

  He clasped his hands together on his desk, wringing them so tightly they turned white. “Because it was wrong. And she knew it. Of course, she accused me of not wanting a baby as much as she did.”

  “Wrong how?”

  Horvak’s hands fisted. “Why are you doing this to me? Look, I didn’t know it was a black market adoption agency until after she brought the baby home.”

  Whoa, Mom’s jest about needing to buy grandkids from a mobster suddenly seemed uncomfortably not far-fetched.

  “As soon as I found out, I insisted we give him back. Yeah, I probably should’ve reported them to the police, but you know what the mob does to people who snitch on them. You can’t blame me. And you didn’t read me my rights, so you can’t use what I said against me, right?”

  Oh boy.

  “And I won’t testify against them. Did Petra say I would? Is that why you came? She sure wouldn’t. She’d adopt again in a heartbeat if she was given half the chance. That’s why I insisted on a clause in the alimony agreement that would terminate payments if she pursued another adoption.”

  Okay, this conversation was veering into a whole other investigation. “I’m not investigating the adoption agency, Mr. Horvak. I need to find Petra. Where is she?”

  “I already told you. I don’t know.”

  Now that I understood the misapprehension he’d been under earlier, his shifty responses made perfect sense. Unfortunately, that also meant that I’d just wasted half the day tracking down dead ends.

  The receptionist knocked on his door.

  “Not now,” he shouted at her. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”

  “But”—she held a small envelope in her hand and fluttered it in my direction—“a letter from Petra came in today’s mail. I—” She swallowed, looking as if she was seriously doubting her decision. “I thought it might help.”

  Horvak rounded his desk and snatched it from her hands. “Yes, thank you, Tracey.” He returned to his desk chair, muttering once more about Petra being certifiable. “I didn’t say it when I mentioned the articles before, but I know why she sends them. They always come with a letter. After the divorce, she became obsessed with proving to me that buying a black market baby was brave, not unethical. She claimed that anyone with backbone would skirt the law if something was truly important to them.”

  I thought of my hesitation to manipulate a teller into giving me Linda’s banking information. Maybe it hadn’t been so cowardly. “Everyone has their price,” I mumbled in Petra’s own words.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  Okay, if Petra had orchestrated the kidney donor scheme and threatened the senator to somehow prove her “thesis,” she might be certifiable after all.

  Horvak reached inside his desk drawer.

  I drew my gun. “Freeze.” I don’t know what I expected him to pull. Well, yeah, clearly I’d assumed he was going for a gun. Why on earth I thought he’d suddenly turn on me, I don’t know. Maybe some remnant effect from the head bonk Cook gave me.

  Horvak’s hands shot i
nto the air. “I was just getting my letter opener.”

  “Sorry.” I kept my gun trained on him as I eyeballed inside the drawer. “You wouldn’t be the first interviewee who pulled a gun on me.” Yeah, it was bravado to cover my paranoia, but I don’t think he could tell. I returned my weapon to its holster. “Okay, go ahead.”

  He slit open the envelope and spread the newest clipping on his desk. “It seemed that whenever she found an article about a guy who’d done something she figured I’d deem wrong—self-righteous so-and-so that I was . . . her words—she clipped it out and mailed it to me. I’m not sure if she was trying to appease her own conscience for the baby-buying attempt or if she figured this stuff proved I was the one with the problem. Maybe a little of both.”

  The article was about the senator’s vote.

  A chill ran down my spine. If she orchestrated the senator’s about-face on his proposed bill, did she induce the actions reported in the other clippings as well?

  “The other articles you received, were they also from a St. Louis paper?” I asked.

  “No, from different newspapers around the state.”

  Papers from towns where she’d been living at the time? According to her file she’d lived in four locations in the past eighteen months. I scanned the letter that accompanied the clipping. She claimed the near death of the senator’s daughter just before Christmas had been a scare tactic to induce the senator to vote against his bill. Something only the perpetrator or those closest to the senator would know. “In the other letters you mentioned, did Petra give you the impression that she was somehow connected to the events?”

  Horvak frowned. “Now that you mention it, she did seem to know a lot more details about what happened than what the newspapers reported. Although she probably just made the stuff up to prove her point.”

  “Hmmm. Have you received any letters about a theft from the museum where she works?”

  “No, but I’m sure it won’t be long before she weaves that into some fantastical underdog-defying-the-government-to-feed-his-family story.”

  Except it wasn’t a story that would make the papers.

  As I headed back to the city, Tanner called. “We’ve got a dead body in a dive motel three quarters of a mile from where we fished Petra’s car out of the river.”

  “Is it Petra?” I changed course to that direction.

  “No. A male. No ID. Paid cash for the room. But he fits Cook’s description. I’m on my way there now.”

  “Do you have any other details?”

  “Just that the maid found him when she went to clean his room. The coroner is on his way.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” I said and prayed it didn’t make the 6:00 news. Reports I’d had to deal with a dead body, on Valentine’s Day no less, would send my mother into heart failure.

  When I arrived at the motel, the kind of place that people usually paid for by the hour, Tanner was talking to an oily-haired male clerk at the front desk. “Did the deceased check in alone?”

  “Yeah, although I’m sure he had company for part of the night.” The guy winked at me. “Our clients usually do.”

  “Was he wet?” I interjected.

  The clerk blinked. “What?”

  “Were his clothes wet? When he checked in.”

  “I don’t know. Not that I noticed.”

  If Cook had just hauled himself out of freezing cold river water and hiked almost a mile to find a place to warm up, surely the clerk would’ve noticed. Then again, he didn’t look like the type that noticed much, certainly not the grime caking his lobby. “Did the deceased drive here?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention. He didn’t have his own car, but he might’ve come in a cab or hitchhiked.”

  “Okay, thank you for your time.” Tanner steered me back outside and around the corner of the building. Two cruisers, an ambulance, the coroner’s car, and the evidence response team’s van dominated the side lot, centered around a room halfway down.

  The coroner was finishing up his initial assessment by the time we reached the room.

  “Cause of death?” I asked after introducing myself and explaining my interest in the victim.

  “Looks like a heroin overdose.”

  Tanner directed my attention to a sopping pile of clothes in the bathtub. “Looks like he went in the river with the car, shed his wet clothes after he checked in, and soothed his grief over losing Petra by shooting up.”

  I scrutinized the carpet just inside the door. It was dry, as were his boots sitting by the door. I picked one up and examined the tread. “Be sure to check whether this tread matches the print left outside my apartment last Saturday.” Next, I edged back the blanket concealing Cook’s naked body and checked his arms and between his toes. There were no tracks from habitual drug use that I could tell. “Doctor, did you find any evidence of previous drug use?”

  “No.”

  I turned to Tanner. “If he wasn’t a user, he wouldn’t have been carrying heroin, so where did he get it? How did he pay for it? There was no wallet in the room”—I turned to the police officer finishing up processing the scene—“was there?”

  “No.”

  I met Tanner’s gaze. “So we’re supposed to believe he went into the river with the car, somehow survived with money to pay for his room and drugs, even though he’s not carrying a wallet, and then in his grief, accidentally OD’d?” I pitched my voice skeptically to ensure Tanner got how unbelievable I thought it sounded. “And he just happened to know where to buy heroin around here? A guy who rarely ventured out of St. Louis’s south end.”

  “Okay, what’s your theory?”

  “Petra wanted to make his death look like an accidental overdose, only she failed to account for the things that didn’t fit, such as where’d he get the drugs? Why are his boots dry if he went in the river?” I picked up the shirt from the tub and sniffed it. “Why do his clothes smell like chlorinated water instead of river water?”

  “Maybe he took them off to rinse them so they’d be clean in the morning,” a police officer offered.

  “Then why leave them in a pile in the tub? Wouldn’t he hang them to dry?”

  “Good point,” Tanner conceded, although I doubt he’d really bought in to the theory he’d been fielding anyway. “So you think Petra masterminded this elaborate plan to sink her car and then off Cook—why?”

  “To make it look like she’s dead and he’s guilty, so we’ll stop looking for her.”

  “You really think she’s that calculating?”

  “Yes. But I doubt she’d be careless enough to leave her fingerprints in the room. We’ll need to canvass the other occupants and residents between the river and the motel. Hopefully someone saw her.”

  A call came in from Petra’s ex. “Yes?”

  “You said you wanted me to call if I heard from Petra?”

  “Did you?”

  “You know I don’t have anything to do with whatever trouble she’s caught up in, right?”

  “Is she there?”

  “No! No. She phoned. And that’s another thing. She’s never called me before today. Not since the divorce. Well, other than a couple of times in the first few months. That’s the truth.”

  It was pretty clear he didn’t want to go to jail for his wife’s crimes. Not two years ago. And not now. “What did she want?”

  “She’s talking crazy.”

  “What did she say, Mr. Horvak?”

  “She’s delusional.”

  “Mr. Horvak,” I growled impatiently.

  “Okay, okay, she brought up that art theft you asked about.”

  “What did she say about it?” I held the phone so Tanner could hear the response too.

  “That one of the security guards stole a painting to bribe a down-and-outer into donating a kidney for his wife.”

  Tanner met my gaze. “If she wanted us to believe she died in the river, why’d she call her ex? She had to know we’d question him. And that her kn
owledge of Burke’s motives would corroborate his claims.”

  Yeah. With every new piece of information Petra’s motives were looking more and more like an untangleable web. I covered my phone with my palm. “When I interviewed her ex, he said she was obsessed with proving everyone has a price. Or, as in her baby buying attempt, anyone would do something wrong for the right payoff.”

  Tanner’s gaze darkened. “Then if the payoff has become silencing anyone who could testify against her, she might take out her ex next.”

  My heart jumped and I snapped the phone to my ear. “Mr. Horvak, where are you?”

  “Did you hear what I said? She’s crazy if she thinks this would win me back.”

  Whoa, back up the train. I clearly missed something. “Can you repeat exactly what she said?”

  “She said she was doing it for us. So I’d see she was right. So things could go back to the way they were . . . when she was happy, with the baby.”

  “Did she say she was coming to see you?”

  “No, do you think she will? I told her she was crazy.”

  Okay, not a smart thing to tell a delusional woman. “Listen, Mr. Horvak, Petra has shared information with you that incriminates her. If she thinks you’re not on her side, she might feel compelled to silence you so that you can’t testify against her.”

  “What?” His voice pitched up a thousand decibels.

  “If you see her, call the police. If you receive a suspicious package or see anyone acting suspicious around you, your office, your car, your home, call the police.”

  “Did your wife call you on her cell phone?” Tanner interjected.

  We’d tried to trace its location last night but hadn’t been able to.

  “I don’t know. It came up on call display as a private number.”

  I took down the number on which he’d received the call so I could try to locate where the incoming call originated. “Okay, thank you, Mr. Horvak. We’re doing everything we can to track her down. In the meantime, please be careful.” I quickly phoned the sheriff’s office in Horvak’s town and alerted them to the potential situation and gave them my contact information as Tanner attempted to have the number run down.