The Step Between

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Then you’d better put it in your pocket. We’ve got enough explaining to do without that.”

  She straightened up to see themselves surrounded by Maryland State Patrol vehicles, bars flashing red and blue. Her eyes sought out Jake, and she ran to meet him, her right hand snugly in her pocket. She repeated what she’d just learned and watched the odd mixture of surprise and admiration spread across his face. “He is one crafty bastard, isn’t he?” he said with a rueful shake of his head. “He’s outsmarted us from day one. Stay close to Jocelyn while I go earn us some brownie points with the captain.” And he hurried off to confer with a Maryland state trooper who easily was six and a half feet tall. She stifled a giggle at the sight, the gigantic trooper bending almost in half to hear Jake, both of them looking, alternately, grim, animated, surprised, and mad.

  She turned to find Jocelyn arguing with two paramedics who were trying to load her onto a stretcher. “I can walk, you guys!” she tried to insist, and seemed not to realize that her voice held absolutely no strength or power.

  “Jocelyn, it would be better if you rode—”

  “And I’m not spending the night at some hospital in Cumberland, Maryland, and that’s the end of that,” she announced in a virtual whisper, almost completely out of steam.

  Carole Ann leaned in close to her. “I personally will call Sergeant Carpenter, and I will send someone to pick her up and bring her to the Cumberland Hospital.”

  “You promise?”

  “What’s the number?” And, using Jocelyn’s phone, she punched in the number as it was recited to her and then watched as Jocelyn closed her eyes and allowed the paramedics to lift her onto the stretcher. They snapped it into its upright and rolling position and hustled toward the rear of the medic unit.

  She completed her conversation with Betty Carpenter and looked around for Jake. She noticed that one of the state troopers was searching the pockets of the perp, now on his feet, hands cuffed behind him. The trooper triumphantly withdrew a ring of keys and she knew what that signified. “I’d almost like to meet Sanderson,” she said as she sidled up to Jake, who was standing alone, hands stuffed into his pockets, observing all the action from as great a psychological distance as a physical one.

  “I’d like to wring the bastard’s neck,” he said in a tone of voice that she’d never heard before.

  She took a step away from him so that she could study him, could see what was different.

  “The amount of misery that man has caused, and for absolutely no good reason. He’s killed people, he’s kidnapped people, he’s stolen and lied and . . . and . . .” He stopped himself, unwilling or unable to say more.

  Carole Ann needed information but Jake needed time to gather himself, so they stood silently observing the scene before them, at once familiar and bizarre. They were not strangers to crime or crime scenes, but something was irrevocably different for them now, and they both knew it. Her hand, holding the gun in her pocket, transmitted proof of that new reality. Her ability and willingness to elicit information from a not-yet-accused man, without concern or regard for his legal rights, was further proof, as if it were needed. And the new things she felt from Jake: the sadness, the vulnerability, the weakness—he never again would be the homicide detective whose mission was to apprehend the perp. Period. He now was a man who could marvel at the capacity that human beings have to harm each other. And to be frightened by it.

  “Is Annabelle—”

  He nodded. “She’s with her mother.”

  “Good,” she said quietly. “Good.”

  “But Islington is still missing.”

  The sense of shock that information produced was cut by the starting up of the siren on the medic unit as it roared off with Jocelyn Anderson, en route to the hospital in Cumberland, and Carole Ann was reminded to inform Jake of the arrangements she’d made on Jocelyn’s behalf. Then she returned her thoughts to Richard Islington’s whereabouts. She was past applying logic or rationality to any aspect of what Jake called “this mess,” yet she couldn’t make sense of a still missing Richard Islington. “I need to talk to Ruthie Eva,” she said.

  Jake shrugged. “Let’s go, then,” he said, and turned toward the truck. His shoulders remained hunched up around his ears and his hands were stuck in his pockets. He was walking rapidly, but his posture conveyed a sluggishness. Then he stopped and his face changed and he turned back toward the handcuffed man being led to a patrol car. “I’m going to see them arrest Sanderson in the same place where he held Grace. I need to see that, C.A.”

  She nodded, caught the keys that he tossed to her, and watched him trot toward the Maryland troopers. She stood watching and waiting, feeling what it was that was fueling him at that moment as much as making certain that the authorities would permit his presence. He climbed into the backseat of one of the patrol cars and she climbed into the Explorer and turned the key, and backed up along the shoulder until she was clear to make a U-turn and head in the opposite direction. She floored the gas pedal and within seconds was in sight of the staging area.

  She and Petrocelli saw each other as soon as she wheeled into the crowd of vehicles at roadside, and he jogged toward her. “How far back in the woods is Williams’s place?” she asked before he could say anything.

  “Quarter mile at most,” he replied.

  “Describe it,” she demanded, and he did, describing a cross between a chalet and a ski lodge—most definitely not a shack. She told him about Ruthie Eva’s “shack” and wondered if such a structure could have existed on the Williams property and gone unnoticed.

  “Let’s go find out,” he said, intrigued, and knowing exactly what she was thinking without her having to verbalize it. “By the way, where’s Jake?” And he whistled when she told him, then he said they should hurry and find Williams before he was taken away and ask him if he had another property.

  Remembering the perfect camouflage that the fishing shack was, and remembering what a disingenuous liar Bill Williams was, she looked around for Ruthie Eva; asking her would be a much simpler proposition. There were several distinct groups of people huddled about, the majority of them comprised of law enforcement personnel from three different organizations: the Maryland troopers wore blue and black; the West Virginia State Police wore solid black; and the sheriff’s deputies were clad in khaki. She was able to distinguish one GGI representative in two of the huddles; and in a third, there were two women surrounded by uniforms. Ruthie Eva and obviously Annabelle, who resembled her mother closely enough that at a distance, had the two of them not been standing together, Carole Ann easily could have mistaken daughter for mother.

  She approached that group slowly, Paolo following, hoping that Ruthie Eva would notice her. And she took the opportunity to study Annabelle Islington. She was slightly taller than her mother, and thinner, and like probably every young woman of her age, she wore jeans and Timberland boots and a down jacket and beneath it Carole Ann could see the top of a thick, natural-colored cable knit sweater. And her body language screamed out her ambivalence toward her mother: Annabelle stood so close to Ruthie that their shoulders touched, and Ruth’s arm was around the girl’s waist. But Annabelle’s arms were crossed tightly across her chest. She was listening to one of the police officers and she turned to look at Ruthie, as if to solicit her mother’s advice or opinion. And Ruthie leaned in and touched her daughter’s head with her own. Annabelle moved away, breaking contact first.

  Ruthie turned her head slightly and noticed Carole Ann, who beckoned, and she slowly detached herself from the group, leaving her daughter with obvious reluctance, and striding down the incline toward them. As soon as she was close enough, Carole Ann posed her first question: “Have you talked to John? Is he all right?” And Ruthie Eva knew, as had Patty Baker on that morning that seemed like years ago, that her only possible responses were truth or lie.

  She stole a quick glance at Paolo, then nodded.

  “Does he know where Richard is?”

  T
his time she shook her head.

  “Does Bill have a fishing shack?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise. “Sure. He had his first and that’s why I built mine.”

  “Tell me exactly where it is, Ruthie Eva,” she said with increasing urgency, remembering that Richard Islington hadn’t been seen in more than twenty-four hours.

  “Two and a half miles due east of his cabin.”

  “How does Williams get there?” she asked, still urgently but with some skepticism thrown in; she couldn’t imagine Bill Williams making a two-and-a-half-mile trek through dense forest carrying fishing gear.

  She described yet another cut-through trail leading from the road deep into the woods toward the river and Bill Williams’s fishing shack.

  “Who’s in charge here, Paolo, and how’s he feeling about GGI?” Carole Ann queried, looking around at the clusters of law enforcement personnel.

  The left corner of Paolo’s mouth lifted in an obviously forced grin and he shook his head. “There’s considerable discussion about who’s in charge, since we’ve ventured in and out of at least three jurisdictions this morning. And their feelings about GGI are mixed, to be kind about it.” He stopped and looked around. “You see the stocky guy smoking the pipe?”

  Carole Ann looked where he pointed and nodded. His name, Paolo said, was Topping, and he was the highest-ranking Maryland State Police official present, and he and Jake had some kind of past that had allowed them to be almost friendly with each other, while the other cops had wanted to start taking big bites out of Jake’s hide. Before he could say more, she was striding toward the group huddle that included Topping—and GGI’s Bob—Paolo and Ruthie trailing.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said, and introduced herself to him. A range of emotions traversed his weathered face before he removed the pipe from between his teeth and returned her greeting.

  “Well, Miss Gibson. I might live to regret asking, but what can I do for you?”

  She told him about the fishing shack and it took him less time than it had taken Paolo to process the possibilities. He ran toward one of the other groups of cops and she saw him speak animatedly for a few seconds, and the group dispersed as quickly as if a stink bomb had been released in their midst. Four of them took off running back up the path toward Williams’s cabin and they would, Carole Ann knew, charge into the woods heading due east. Four more, two Maryland troopers and two West Virginia troopers, ran down the road toward a big GMC Jimmy with tires the size of Ruthie Eva’s little truck. It sounded like the roar of a jet when it was started, and it was a fearsome sight as it rumbled off down the road, gaining speed quicker than should have been possible for something so massive. It would traverse the underbrush like a BMW on the autobahn.

  Carole Ann was aware that Ruthie Eva was clutching at her arm. “You think Richard is in Bill’s fishing shack?”

  “I hope he is, Ruthie. Because if he’s not, I don’t know where else to look.” Then, as an afterthought, “Have you asked Annabelle if she’s seen her father in the last few days?”

  “No, I didn’t have any reason to ask, but she did tell me that she hadn’t talked to him—or to John—since she found out what a louse Sanderson was. She blamed them.” Ruthie Eva emitted a wry laugh. “Kids always blame grown-ups when their world falls apart. And they never understand that if we had the kind of power they think we have, we’d never let anything bad happen to them. Never.” The sadness in her voice was painful to hear.

  “How will it be between the two of you?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t know,” the woman wailed. “She still thinks I didn’t want her and she still doesn’t believe that I didn’t know back then how to fight Richard. And now she thinks that John, instead of being her friend, is a spy. Oh, God, it’s just a mess!”

  Carole Ann could not begin to imagine the depth of the woman’s pain. The entire time she spoke, she stared directly at Annabelle, her eyes boring a hole in the girl’s soul, pleading for understanding and forgiveness.

  “The one straw we’re grabbing at,” Ruthie said, wiping away a tear from her cheek, “is that she’s confused about being kidnapped by Bill Williams. She thought he was her friend. And she knows that John risked his life looking for her. She knows I hired people to find her.” She wiped some more tears, using both hands this time. Then her head jerked up and her jaw tightened. A handcuffed Bill Williams was being led down the path, encircled by state troopers. He walked with surprising agility, and he looked directly ahead of him, seemingly oblivious to the gathering in what could be considered his front yard. If he noticed Annabelle, he gave no sign. The same for Ruthie Eva. But he stopped when he saw Carole Ann and something happened in his eyes and was transmitted throughout his body. He stiffened, then a shudder coursed through his body, but his recovery was quick and masterful.

  “Miss Gibson,” he called out in his booming voice. “May I have a word?” It really was more of a demand than a request but she needed to know what he wanted more than she needed to display her ownership of the upper hand, so she walked toward him.

  “Mr. Williams,” she said.

  “I do believe I underestimated you, little lady,” he boomed in his country bumpkin voice, the one he’d used when she first met him. “You’re even better than your notices,” he said, a definite edginess creeping into the tone now.

  “How long do you think it’ll take for Sanderson to give you up?” she asked him in a light, conversational tone.

  His eyes narrowed and grew cold. “I’d like to hire you to represent me,” he said, in a flat, even voice. “Money is no object.”

  Not that she needed further proof, but the ability of “this mess” to continue to surprise and confound was startling. She hadn’t known what to expect from the old lawyer, but certainly it wasn’t this. “I don’t think so,” she managed to reply calmly.

  His mouth curled. “Don’t you still believe in those basic legal concepts, Miss Gibson: an accused is innocent until proven guilty, and every accused has the right to the best possible defense?”

  She nodded. “Indeed I do, Mr. Williams. I just no longer believe that I’m obligated to provide that defense or to wait for the jury to pronounce guilt.” And she watched as he was propelled forward, down the slope and toward the waiting vehicle.

  “I’ve known that man for a dozen years.” She turned to find that Captain Topping had returned. “How do good people go so bad?” It wasn’t the kind of question that allowed for or required an answer, so they both stood and watched the old lawyer as he bent himself and struggled to get his bulk into the back of the trooper vehicle. He turned toward Carole Ann. “Can you give me the short version of this mess?” he asked.

  “That’s what we call it at GGI: ‘this mess.’ ” She sighed and started talking and when she was finished, he sighed, his deeper and longer than hers had been. But then she’d been sighing about it for the better part of the past three months.

  “Drugs,” he spat out. “All this ugliness and destruction for drugs.”

  “For money, really,” Carole Ann responded, for that was the truth of the matter: millions of dollars annually, brought in by truck, packaged, and shipped out again, an exquisite production perfected and orchestrated by Bill—or Archie—Williams, and carried out by Jimmy Sanderson, under the identity of his older brother.

  “But what did they want with the Islington girl? Or her father?” And then he realized that Ruthie was still there and he apologized. She brushed it off; she, too, wanted to hear the answer.

  “Insurance,” Carole Ann postulated, because she didn’t know for certain. “The master plan was unraveling, coming apart at the seams, and they needed some way to maintain control. But—and I’m guessing now—when John MacDonald refused to help his brother, Sanderson retaliated by abducting Annabelle. He knew that would buy him MacDonald’s cooperation as well as Islington’s. But GGI kept getting in the way, even though we didn’t know it; we didn’t know what the hell was going on. But we were getting an
grier every day.”

  “Don’t get mad, get even,” Ruthie said quietly and Carole Ann laughed gently.

  “That’s Jake’s motto. Mine, too, now.”

  Topping shook his head in wonder, his gaze holding steady on Carole Ann. “I quite frankly don’t know whether to yell at you or invite you to dinner,” he said, his face revealing true confusion.

  “I respond better to being fed,” she said dryly, adding, “especially since I’ve not eaten yet today.”

  The big, grizzled state trooper reached into one of the half-dozen zippered pockets on his jacket front and withdrew two packages. “Protein bars. Carob and peanut. Take your pick,” he said, graciously extending them toward her.

  “I’ll take them both,” she said with equal grace and a wide smile, snatching them from his hand. “And since I expect you’ll want to keep me out here probably until sometime well past sundown, answering the same questions over and over, I’ll be looking forward to dinner.”

  His face wanted to laugh but too many of his youthful subordinates were standing too nearby, observing and hearing in open-mouthed amazement. So he grunted, turned on his heel, and stalked away. She ripped open the peanut butter protein bar and took a bite. “Not bad,” she said, chewing gratefully, wondering whether she should offer the other bar to Ruthie or Paolo, and deciding that she was hungrier than she was well bred.

  13

  “YOU ALL CAN WHINE AND complain all you want.” Donald Smith, the GGI business manager, wagged his head first at Jake and then at Carole Ann. “You can rant and rave about ‘this mess’ from now until the cows come home. But from a bottom-line point of view, it was a case made in heaven! Both Islingtons paid us for finding their daughter, and Mr. Islington paid us a bonus for foiling an extortion plot that could have cost him millions. Mrs. Childress paid us for finding out who killed her husband, and she also paid the balance owed on the OnShore contract. And I didn’t have to mail a single invoice—they just sent the checks. And every single one of them cleared.” He sat back and folded his hands in his lap as if he were in church, his satisfied demeanor daring any of them to challenge his pronouncements.