by Alex Kava
“We did find a stolen cell phone in the Dumpster,” Tully said.
“But it was wiped clean?”
“Right. But the phone records show a call to the pizza place earlier that evening.”
Maggie stopped and looked up at Tully. My God, could it have been that easy? “That’s how he abducted her? He simply ordered a pizza?”
“Initially that’s what we were thinking,” he explained. “We found the delivery lists in her abandoned car. When Cunningham recognized Newburgh Heights as your new neighborhood, we checked for your address. Found it right away. Likewise, all the addresses are residential. But most of the people I’ve talked to so far were actually home and did receive their pizza. I have only a few left that I can’t reach by phone, but I plan to drive to Newburgh Heights and check them out.”
He handed her two photocopies of what looked like paper torn from a notebook. There were almost a dozen addresses on both lists. Hers was close to the top of the list labeled “#1.” She leaned against the wall. The exhaustion was catching up with her. She had spent most of last night pacing from window to window, watching and waiting. The only sleep she had gotten had been on the flight back from Kansas City, and now she couldn’t even remember how long ago that was.
“Any trace inside Jessica’s car?” she asked as she glanced over the list of addresses.
“There was some mud on the accelerator. Not much else. Her blood and some hair—also hers—were recovered from the trunk. He must have used her own car to dump her body. No signs of a struggle inside the car, though. He had to have taken her someplace where he could take his time with her. Problem is, there aren’t many abandoned warehouses in Newburgh Heights. I was thinking he might have given a business address, knowing the offices would be empty at night. But nothing commercial shows up on either list.”
Suddenly Maggie recognized an address. She stood up straight. No, it couldn’t be this easy. She reread the address.
“Actually, he may have had someplace much more luxurious in mind.”
“Did you find something?”
“This address.” Maggie pointed halfway down the page. “The house is for sale. It’s empty.”
“You’re kidding? Are you sure? If I remember correctly, the phone is still connected to a voice-messaging service.”
“The owners may be forwarding their phone calls. Yes, I’m sure it’s for sale. My real-estate agent showed it to me.”
35
MAGGIE waited while Delores Heston attempted to find the right key. The sun was sinking behind the trees. She couldn’t believe how much time they had wasted trying to track down Tess McGowan. And although Heston had been accommodating, Maggie felt on edge. She knew this was where Albert Stucky had killed Jessica Beckwith. She could sense it.
Heston dug out another bundle of keys and Maggie fidgeted, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Heston noticed.
“I don’t know where Tess is. I’m sure she probably just decided to take a couple of days off.”
It was the same explanation the woman had given Maggie over the phone, but again she could hear the concern.
“One of these has to work.”
“I would think you’d have them labeled.” Maggie tried to contain her irritation.
“These are the spare keys. We do keep a labeled set, but Tess must have forgotten to return it after she showed the house yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” Maggie realized her voice must have sounded too shrill, too alarmed.
“Yes, I’m sure it was yesterday. I checked the show schedule before I left the office—Wednesday, April 1. Is there a problem? Do you think the house may have been broken into before that?”
“I really can’t say,” Maggie said, trying to sound indifferent when she wanted to kick in the door. “Do you know who she showed the house to?”
“No, we keep the names off the schedule for confidentiality reasons.”
“You don’t have the name of the person written down anywhere?”
Heston shot her a concerned look. “Tess would have it written down somewhere. I trust my agents. No need for them to have me standing over their shoulder.”
Maggie hadn’t meant to make the woman defensive. She simply wanted the goddamn door opened.
“This house has a security system.” Heston was still trying to find the right key. “Oh, here we go. Finally.”
The lock clicked as Tully bounded up the steps. Heston turned, startled by his sudden appearance.
“Ms. Heston, this is Special Agent R. J. Tully.”
“Oh, my. This must be important.”
“Just routine, ma’am. We tend to travel in pairs,” Tully said with a smile.
As soon as they entered Maggie noticed the security system had been disarmed. None of the lights flashed or blinked.
Heston punched several buttons and the box came alive. “I don’t understand this. Surely Tess wouldn’t have forgotten to set it.”
Maggie remembered Tess McGowan being very careful about activating the alarm systems of the houses she had shown, this one included. Security systems had been one of Maggie’s priorities, and she knew this one had not been anything out of the ordinary.
“Mind if we look around?” Tully asked, but Maggie was already halfway up the staircase. She reached the landing when she heard Heston’s panicked voice.
“Oh, good Lord!”
Maggie leaned over the railing to see Heston pointing to a briefcase in the corner of the living room.
“This belongs to Tess.” Until now, the woman had been incredibly professional. Now her sudden panic was unnerving.
By the time Maggie came down the steps, Tully had taken the briefcase and started extracting its contents with a white handkerchief.
“No way that girl’s gonna leave this and not come back for it.” The panic rushed her words, reducing her previous crisp dialect to a slang version she obviously found more comfortable. “There’s her appointment book, her pocketbook… Good Lord, something’s just not right here.”
Maggie watched as Tully brought out the last item—a labeled set of keys. Maggie knew they were for this house. Suddenly she felt nauseated. Tess McGowan might have shown this house yesterday, but she certainly didn’t leave of her own free will.
36
“WE DON’T know that Stucky had anything to do with this.” Tully tried to sound convincing. It was obvious he needed to be the objective one. Ever since Ms. Heston had left, Agent O’Dell seemed to be coming apart at the seams. The calm, controlled professional now paced, quick long steps, back and forth. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. Several times they slipped into her jacket, and he knew she was checking her revolver.
“I think it’s time we leave,” Tully said. The house was spotless. Though the master bedroom smelled strongly of ammonia, there was no evidence that anything suspicious had occurred in the house. Least of all, a brutal murder and a violent kidnapping.
“Tess McGowan was the real-estate agent who sold me my house,” O’Dell repeated. “Don’t you see? Don’t you get it?”
He refused to fuel O’Dell’s panic. “Right now there’s nothing substantial to prove Ms. McGowan was abducted. And there’s nothing more we can do here. We need to call it a night. Maybe we can track her down tomorrow.”
“We won’t track her down. He’s taken her.” The quiver was there though she did her best to hide it. “He’s added her to his collection. She may be dead already. Or if she’s not dead, she may be wishing she was,” she added in almost a whisper.
Tully didn’t want to think about Stucky adding to his collection. Buried on his desk he had a bulging file of missing women from across the country. Women who had disappeared in the five months since Stucky’s escape.
The volume wasn’t that unusual. It happened all the time. Some of the women left and didn’t want to be found. Others had been abused by husbands and lovers and chose to disappear. But too many were gone without any explanation, and Tully
knew enough about Stucky’s games to pray that none of them in his file were in Stucky’s new collection.
“Look, there’s nothing more we can do tonight.”
“We need to do a luminol test. We can have Keith Ganza bring it and the Lumi-Light, so we can go over the master bedroom.”
“There’s nothing here. There’s absolutely no reason to believe anything happened in this house.”
“The Lumi-Light might show any latent prints. And the luminol will show any blood left in the cracks, any stains we can’t see. He obviously tried to clean things up, but you can’t clean enough to get rid of blood.” It was as if he weren’t there and she was talking to herself.
“We can’t do anything more tonight. I’m exhausted. You must be exhausted.” When she started for the stairs again, he gently grabbed her arm. “Agent O’Dell.”
She wrenched her arm away, turning on him with eyes flashing anger. Then without warning she marched to the door, snapping off lights in her path.
Tully followed her cue before she changed her mind. He ran upstairs and shut off those lights, and when he returned O’Dell was activating the security system. It wasn’t until he locked the door and walked alongside her to his car that he saw her revolver in her hand, dropped at her side but in a tight grip.
Suddenly Tully realized that the hysteria, the frustration, the anger he had witnessed was actually fear. How stupid of him not to have seen it before now. Special Agent Maggie O’Dell was scared to death, not just for Tess McGowan, but for herself, too.
37
TESS jerked awake. Her throat was so dry it hurt to swallow. Her eyelids felt like lead shutters. Her chest ached as though some massive weight had pressed against her. There was nothing on top of her now. She lay on what appeared to be a narrow, lumpy cot. The room was dimly lit, forcing her to squint. The smell of mildew surrounded her.
She started to sit up, and immediately her muscles protested. The room began to spin. Nausea washed over her. She was used to hangovers, but this was much worse. Then she remembered the dark-haired man and the needle. Where the hell had he taken her? And where was he?
The nausea forced her to keep her head on the pillow as her eyes darted around the small space. She was inside some sort of wooden shack. Rotted wood allowed faint light to seep in between the slats. Boards were nailed over a small area that might have once been a window. Other than the cot, there was nothing else except a tall plastic bucket in the corner.
Tess’s eyes searched and found what looked like a door. Of course, it would be locked, maybe even bolted from the outside, but she needed to make an attempt.
She sat up slowly and waited. Again, the nausea sent her head to the pillow.
“Damn it!” she shouted, and immediately regretted it. What if he was watching, listening?
She rolled onto her side to assuage the nausea. A sharp pain pierced her side, and for a brief moment she thought she had rolled onto a spike. But there was nothing there, only the lumpy mattress. She moved her fingers up under her blouse, noticing the hem had already been pulled out from her waistband. A button was missing and the rest were off a buttonhole.
“No, stop it,” she scolded herself in a whispered rush.
She had to focus. She couldn’t think about what he might have done while she had been unconscious. She needed to check if she was okay.
Her fingers found no open wound, no sticky blood, but she was almost certain one of her ribs had been broken or badly bruised. Carefully, her fingers probed the area under her breasts while she bit down on her lower lip. Despite the stabbing pain, she guessed bruised, not broken. That was good. She could function just fine with bruised ribs. Broken could sometimes puncture a lung.
She slipped a foot out from under the covers and dangled it close to the floor. She was barefoot. What had he done with her shoes and stockings?
The floor was colder than she expected, but she kept the foot there, forcing her body to grow accustomed to the temperature before she tried to stand up. The air in the shack felt damp and chilly.
Then she heard the beginning tap-tap-tap, soft against the roof. The sound of rain had usually been a comfort to her. Now she wondered how badly the rotted roof leaked and felt a new chill. She knew the bucket in the corner hadn’t been placed there for leaks. Instead, it was meant for her. He obviously intended to keep her here for a while.
She pushed herself out of the cot and stood with both feet flat on the cold floorboards while she bent at the waist and held on to the bed. Again, she bit her lip, ignoring the taste of blood, fighting the urge to vomit and waiting for the room to stop spinning.
She tried to concentrate on the tap-tap-tapping of the rain. Maybe she could find some level of comfort in its natural, familiar rhythm. A sudden rumble of thunder startled her like a gunshot, and she spun around to the door as though expecting to see him there. When her heart settled back in her chest, she almost burst out laughing. It was only a little bit of thunder. That was all.
Her body began shivering. She grabbed the blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders and knotted it at her neck, keeping her hands free. She checked under the cot, hoping to find something, anything to aid in her escape, or at least her shoes. There was nothing, not even furballs or dust. Which meant he had prepared this place for her, and recently. If only he hadn’t taken her shoes and stockings. Then she remembered she had worn pantyhose under her trousers.
Oh, God! He had undressed her, after all. She mustn’t think about it. She had to stop remembering. Stop feeling aches and bruises in places that might remind her of what he had done. She needed to focus all her energies on getting out of here.
Again she listened to the rain. Again she waited for its rhythm to calm her, to regulate her raspy breathing.
When she could walk without the nausea crippling her, she made her way to the door. The handle was nothing more than a rusted latch. One more time, she looked around to see if she had missed anything that could be used to help pry open the door. Even the corners had been swept clean. Then she saw a rusted nail swept into a groove in the floor. She pried it out with her fingernails and began examining the keyhole. The door was indeed locked, but was it bolted as well?
She steadied her fingers and inserted the nail into the keyhole, jingling and twisting it expertly. Another talent acquired in her not so illustrious past. But it had been years, and she was out of practice. The lock groaned in rusted protest.
Something gave way with a metallic click. Tess grabbed the latch and gave it a yank. The door swung open freely, almost knocking her over in her surprise. It hadn’t been bolted. She waited, staring at the open doorway. This was too easy. Was it a blessing or another trap?
38
TULLY knew O’Dell was wound so tight that controlling her could be impossible. Maybe it had been a mistake asking Cunningham to let her help on the Stucky case. Last night might have been proof that she simply couldn’t handle the pressure. But then her phone message this morning telling him to meet her back at the Archer Drive house made Tully realize that he was in for an even more difficult task. But he wouldn’t talk to Cunningham. Not yet. He needed to handle this. He needed to settle O’Dell down so they could move forward.
They had found nothing at the house to warrant a further search. Yet O’Dell had told him she had written permission from Ms. Heston and the owners to do so. Now he wondered if she had gotten them out of bed. How else had she been able to obtain written permission between last night and early this morning?
Tully glanced at his watch. Today the damn thing was slow, according to the car’s digital clock. It wasn’t even seven o’clock. O’Dell had left the message on his machine at about six while he was in the shower. He wondered if she had gone to bed at all last night.
He had only three blocks to go. When he turned onto the street, his tension turned to anger. Parked in the driveway were O’Dell’s red Toyota and a blue van, the kind the forensic lab used. She hadn’t bothered to wait for his okay. What wa
s the use of being lead in an investigation if no one paid any attention? He needed to put a stop to this now.
The front door was unlocked, the security system silent. He followed the voices upstairs to the master bedroom. Keith Ganza wore a short lab coat, and Tully wondered if the man even owned an ordinary jacket.
“Agent Tully,” O’Dell said, coming from the bathroom, wearing latex gloves and carrying jugs of liquid. “We’re almost ready. We just finished mixing the luminol.”
She set the jugs on the floor in the corner where Ganza had set up shop.
“You two know each other, right?” O’Dell asked as though that was the reason for Tully’s frown.
“Yes,” he answered, trying to restrain his anger and maintain his professionalism.
Ganza simply nodded at Tully and continued loading and preparing a video camera. A camera on a tripod stood in the center of the room, already assembled. Several duffel bags, more jugs and four or five spray bottles were carefully set on the floor. A black case leaned against the wall. Tully recognized it as the Lumi-Light. Each of the windows was covered with some kind of black film taped to the frames so that light couldn’t filter in from the outside. Even now the room required the ceiling light. The bathroom lights were on, too, and Tully wondered what, if anything, they had used to block out the skylight. This was ridiculous.
Agent O’Dell began filling spray bottles with the luminol, using a funnel and steady hands. There seemed to be no sign of the jumpy, nervous, frazzled woman he had seen last night.
“Agent O’Dell. We need to talk.”
“Of course, go ahead.” She didn’t look up and continued to pour.