The Truth Seeker

by Dee Henderson

  “Quinn . . . keep talking,” Kate said softly.

  “She couldn’t wait to get out of the neighborhood, she didn’t want to stop and talk to people who might have known the victim, made an excuse not to enter the bakery where Marla had worked.”

  “She shut down.”

  “Hard. It took me three hours after we left the neighborhood to get her out of that quiet . . . despair, for want of a better word. I don’t like it.”

  “She never lived at Knolls Park.”

  Quinn looked at her.

  And the silence stretched.

  Kate’s eyes darkened. “I’ll check,” she agreed quietly. In her voice was the firsthand experience of knowing what secrets in a childhood often meant.

  Quinn could only nod. If Kate found what he feared . . . Quinn hoped Lisa would be in a forgiving spirit when she learned what he had done.

  Thirteen

  “It’s a reach.”

  Lisa turned at his words, frustration written all over her face, and Quinn just waited it out. He was right, she knew it, but she didn’t want to accept it. Her supposition over how Marla might have broken the bones in her hands was a very long reach. Even if true, it didn’t prove her hands had been bound that way. It only was a hypothesis that fit what they hoped to find.

  “It’s not that far a reach.” She dropped into the chair by the desk, winced at the jarring impact of the movement, and stared with frustration at the whiteboard. “And we need something to fit.”

  It was late Saturday, they had been debating the merits of the evidence in the four cases nonstop for the last few days. They were both tired enough it had come down to sniping at each other.

  She was pushing herself too hard; he was pushing himself too hard. It wasn’t worth it. For the first time Quinn was ready to admit solving something twenty years old wasn’t worth what it was costing him in the present.

  Lisa leaned her head against the back of her chair and looked at the map on the wall as she absently rolled her chair back and forth with her foot. “I can’t believe all these dead ends. We can prove Grant knew Rita when she was sixteen—but he’s already been convicted of killing her. We can’t find any connection between Amy and Grant; we can’t find any connection between Grant and these victims. I know all these cases are related, I can feel it, but I can prove only Heather and Vera are linked.”

  The map with red dots marking gravesites, blue dots marking victims’ homes, and green dots where they had worked showed no discernible pattern. They were all over the Chicagoland area. Yesterday morning Lisa had proposed that maybe it was like the I-45 cases in Texas, a common interstate running within a short distance of all the sites, but there was nothing obvious on the map. No cluster of dots, no common thoroughfare.

  “Go home. Get some sleep. We’ll look at everything with a fresh perspective on Monday.”

  She turned in her chair at his words. “You want to give up.”

  There was accusation in her voice. She was a fierce little thing, and it pleased him, but at the same time one of them had to face reality. And in this case he appeared to be the one who had reached that conclusion first.

  “I’m not saying these four cases might not be linked, I’m not even ready to rule out Grant as the guy who killed them. But I think we can rule out the idea of trying to match them to anything having to do with Amy.”

  He sighed when he saw her expression.

  “Lisa, we may well be chasing something that is not there. Yes, Rita and Amy knew each other. But it’s time to consider the reality that that may be the extent of it. They were friends when they were sixteen, kept in sporadic touch, and that is all that’s there. We’ve found no trace that Amy ever came back to Chicago.”

  “Rita’s diary for that period of time is missing.”

  “Lost, not missing,” Quinn corrected. “It’s frustrating because that is one thing that would rule in or out the hypothesis that Amy came here, but you have to admit, there would be other evidence too. Two weeks with four of us looking for that link and we haven’t uncovered a thing. My idea is cold; I can feel it.”

  He had learned a long time ago how to be a pragmatist. If there was any more evidence to undercover regarding Amy, they would have found something by now. Lincoln had as much as indicated that was his conclusion over lunch but hadn’t said it outright.

  “You think Amy’s buried somewhere out in Montana?”

  “It’s always been the most logical explanation for her disappearance, even if it is the most difficult to confirm.”

  “This is so frustrating.”

  “Go home. Forget about this for the rest of the weekend.”

  “I want to read through the Treemont case again.”

  “It wasn’t a suggestion. I’ll call Kate if you’re going to be stubborn.”

  She scowled. “It’s not nice to go behind my back.”

  The words stung, with an implication she wasn’t aware of. “I only do it when it’s necessary,” he replied quietly.

  Quinn walked through the front doors of the hotel into the near-empty lobby at eleven-thirty that night, tired—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It had taken another hour to convince Lisa to go home. She would live in that lab if someone didn’t take away her building keys.

  Two more days, then he was going to call this search ended. Lisa needed her life back, she was working too many extra hours on a problem that was going nowhere. And he needed to release it rather than hold so tight he lost his perspective.

  The day couldn’t get worse than this.

  Kate was sitting in a plush chair among the general seating across from the check-in counter, choosing the one chair that would put her back to the wall and watching those who entered the hotel. Tension coiled through his spine; he changed course to meet her. She got to her feet as he came over. He took one look at her expression, settled his hands gently on her forearms, and nodded toward the lounge. “You need a table or a walk?”

  “Let’s walk.”

  He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, reversed course, and pushed open the doors for them both. The night was warm but there was still a breeze. Kate shoved her hands in her pockets and they headed down the wide downtown sidewalk toward the river bridge.

  “You got a page.” He knew the signs. Kate could walk into tense situations and negotiate through them, apparently bored, transferring her lack of excitement to those emotionally charged scenes, calming them down, finding a resolution that was peaceful. Afterward though, all the emotions she suppressed discharged far away from work. He could see her burning through it.

  “A drug warrant arrest went wrong. A cop got tangled in the middle of it, and two kids. It was a long afternoon.”

  He rubbed his thumb against the knot in her shoulder. “Everybody okay?”

  “Yeah. I feel like punching something, but that’s nothing new. The emotions will pass. I sat in the hall on the other side of a busted apartment door for six hours. Hot as blazes, I went through about a dozen water bottles, but not as bad as most cases lately.”

  “Keep drinking a lot of water tonight or your muscles will cramp.”

  “I will.”

  She would typically have called Marcus when she needed to unwind about a case, but she’d taken the time to track him down instead. She hadn’t paged—because she knew he’d been with Lisa? The case she’d worked wasn’t the reason she had come to find him.

  “There was something waiting for me when I got back to the office tonight.” She looked over at him. “You’re not going to like this, Quinn.”

  They were at the river bridge. He turned her toward one of the benches where they could sit and watch the boats. Quinn braced his forearms against his knees, not looking at Kate because he had a feeling he knew what subject was coming and that his first reaction was not going to be worth seeing. “What did you find?”

  “I had to call in nearly every IOU I had to find someone who could check Lisa’s foster care files. If they had been court se
aled like mine, I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere, but they were still available in the archives. I found a caseworker who had the clearance to look. Lisa was seven when she was placed with the Richards.” Her tone of voice had reverted to fact mode, the cop was taking over, but he could feel the tension that she couldn’t mask.

  “They were a couple in their late thirties, had two children of their own, and cared for two foster kids. Their oldest boy Andy was two years older than Lisa. At that age Lizzy was a tomboy; she and Andy apparently got along great together, tagged around with each other from the start.” Her voice went flat. “Preliminary adoption papers got filed.”

  Kate stopped talking. Quinn looked over and saw she was almost crying. He reached over to squeeze her hand. “What happened?”

  “Andy drowned.”

  Quinn closed his eyes, absorbing that pain.

  “A swimming pool. He hit his head doing a dive. Lisa couldn’t swim. Almost drowned herself trying to help him.” She scrubbed her hands down her face. “I followed up on a couple names I was given who knew what happened. I wish now I hadn’t. She’s going to hate me.”

  He rubbed her back. “No she won’t. I started this. Lisa is above all else fair.”

  “Quinn, I found the minister of the church the family attended who did Andy’s funeral, spent about an hour talking to him; he remembers them, remembers Lisa. Maybe I touched a guilty conscience, but he was pretty open once he knew who I was, why I was asking. The Richards were solid Christians; Lisa had been going with them to church, had even talked to the minister about salvation and being baptized. The Richards turned their grief over Andy toward Lisa, blamed her, sent her back into the system. She went through a couple more foster homes, then ended up at Trevor House.”

  He didn’t say anything. It hurt too much.

  “She never said anything to any of us about the Richards. I know something about the other foster families, but she never mentioned any of this. To yank preliminary adoption papers out from under a seven-year-old after she’d just watched her best friend die . . . I’m ready to be sick. The things I asked Lisa . . . I didn’t know but still it’s inexcusable. The comments must have cut like glass.

  “The more Lisa expressed disinterest in church, the harder I pushed. Christians were the ones who had told her they loved her, gave her the most hope she’d ever had of having a family, and then tore her to shreds. She’s got a right to want to have nothing to do with the subject.”

  “Have you told Marcus?” Quinn asked softly, hurting for Lisa, worried about Kate. She had obviously come to find him straight from learning the news. Kate’s heart was to protect people, and when it was someone she cared about—this news was devastating to her.

  “Not yet.”

  “Tell him. Lisa has lived with it for years. Let her have some room for now. And give yourself some space.”

  “No wonder Lisa is so convinced the Resurrection doesn’t make sense, that people don’t come back from the dead. She watched them do mouth-to-mouth and try to get Andy to breathe again and he never did.” She pulled in a deep breath. “I’m so mad at what they did to her. As if it were her fault.”

  Kate wiped at tears now falling. Quinn turned her face into his shoulder, let her cry, absorbed her tears. He knew exactly what she meant.

  Lisa had always longed for a place to belong, thought she’d finally found it, and tragedy had ripped it away. Even if he could understand the Richards’ pain and grief, other Christians in the church had seen what was happening to Lisa, and no one had stepped forward to at least be another foster family and stop her from being sent back into the system. She’d had to deal with what happened on her own. He hated what it said. Adults should have known better.

  Kate had had it no easier, but at least for her the system had been a relief, getting her out of a horrible situation. “You survived and got past the pain; Lisa will too. And this explains the independence, why she makes it so hard to get close.”

  “It used to hurt, at Trevor House, when Lisa would stand off to the side and decline when I’d invite her to do something. I thought she didn’t like me, that it was something I had done. She’d spend her time instead with her pets, as if they were more important. And even now—she takes most of her vacations alone, trekking off into the world as if she doesn’t need anybody.”

  “She probably tells herself that still,” Quinn said quietly.

  “It’s not right.”

  “She trusts you, Kate. Even if you wonder about it, I’ve watched her, listened to her. She waits to see what you think before she makes major decisions. You really matter. You’ve stuck for twenty years. That’s the best healing you could have given her. She loves you, even if she finds the words hard to say.”

  “I love her too.” Kate looked at him. “What are we going to do?”

  “Think. And do a lot of praying.”

  “She’s gone to scientific reasons why the Bible isn’t true, will argue the point from logic, rather than admit the emotional reason she’s not interested. There are so many layers that would have to be stripped away just to get to this hurt.”

  “Jesus can heal it.”

  “Do you really believe she’ll ever trust Him enough to risk getting close again? She started to believe once before and watched her life crumble.”

  “She’s not a coward. And something that has to hurt this bad—she’s thought about it, Kate. She’s probably thought about it so much it’s become a boulder in her past she can’t move.”

  “There has to be a way to help.”

  “We’ll find it. Go talk to Marcus. He needs to know.”

  Quinn paced his hotel room, picked up some of the clutter to avoid sitting down. He didn’t know what to do. Yes, he did. He was just trying to talk himself out of it.

  He tossed his hat on the bed, realized what he had done, and scowled. Wonderful; he’d just given himself three months of bad luck. He moved the hat to the table. The old rodeo superstition died hard. Throw a hat on a bed, the only way to get rid of the bad luck was to kick it out a door. The hat had been beat up enough as it was.

  Quinn picked up the soda he’d sacrificed a dollar for at the vending machine down the hall, opened it with a snap, sat down on the edge of the bed, and pulled the pillows over to pile behind him against the headboard. He reached over and picked up the phone, punching in a number from memory. He needed to know.

  It wasn’t answered until the fifth ring. “H’llo.”

  “Lizzy, it’s Quinn.”

  There was a momentary pause. “Hey. Hi. You told me to get some sleep. I was.”

  He leaned back against the headboard and smiled. “I can tell. Your words are wandering. Sorry I woke you up.”

  She yawned and her jaw cracked. “You’re forgiven.” He heard her shift the phone around. “What’s up?”

  She even used Kate’s words. Quinn wondered if Kate realized that. Kate wondered about how close she and Lisa were, while someone else from the outside could see it so clearly. “No reason, I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Oh.”

  The silence lengthened. “Longer words, Lizzy. I didn’t call to hear you breathe, as pleasant as that is.”

  “Quinn,” she chided, even as she chuckled. “At least choose a topic. I seem to remember you were the one who started this conversation.”

  “I called to talk about the wedding,” he temporized in place of what he really wanted to say.

  “Did you?”

  “It’s next weekend.”

  “Please don’t remind me. The last dress fitting is Monday.”

  She sounded worried. “What?”

  “I can’t wear the dress.”

  He thought for a moment, then winced when he understood. “Too tight?”

  “Only if I want to breathe. It’s not a dress that gives much leeway.”

  “I bet she’s a brilliant seamstress.”

  “I hope so. But I’m not looking forward to it.”

  “If
you need to pass on standing up at the wedding, Jennifer would be the first person to understand.”

  “If she can make it, I can.”

  “It’s still on for her to get out of the hospital tomorrow afternoon?”

  “If the doctors try to change their minds, she’s going to leave anyway,” Lisa replied, amused. “She’s flying back to Houston on Monday.”

  “Marcus has our travel arrangements set for noon Friday.”

  “Good. Want to carry my luggage?”

  “Do you pack like Kate or like Jennifer?” Marcus had just laughed the first time Quinn mentioned he was doing Jennifer a favor and taking her to the airport. He’d learned.

  “No one travels with as much stuff as Jennifer. But I guarantee I’ll have more than Kate.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Quinn promised.

  “Thanks.”

  “I think I should wake you up more often. You’re awfully polite tonight.”

  “I want a favor.”

  “Ask away.”

  “My first music lesson. Jack is already three good deeds up on me and I can’t even get the scales to come out right.”

  “I forgot to warn you about one thing regarding choosing the harmonica as your instrument.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You have to be able to breathe.” If she’d been able to strangle him through the phone she would have done it. “There will be time during the trip to Houston,” he offered.

  “Dave’s flying us down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nice.”

  “It sure beats having your flight get delayed and then canceled.”

  “Very true.”

  The topic had worn down and a silence crept in. He wasn’t accustomed to being the one keeping a conversation going. He turned serious. “I’m sorry I threw cold water on your idea about Marla.”

  “Don’t be. You were right.”

  “If the cases are linked, something else will show up.”

  “Let’s not talk about work. Even if that means we have to talk about the weather instead.”