Seeds of Evidence (9781426770838)

by White, Linda J.

  “Evenin’,” a man’s voice said, startling her. An elderly man with a bald head and a big potbelly sat in the wicker rocker on the dark front porch.

  “Hi,” Kit said, cautiously. “Is David inside?”

  “Yep. Alone with my wife.”

  Just then, David came to the door, and Kit felt a rush of emotion. Her eyes were captured by his arm, held in a sling. “What happened?”

  “The doc said to rest it.”

  “What doc?”

  “The guy who put me back together after I got shot. I went back to D.C. for a while.” David’s eyes were searching her face like a rock climber searching for a handhold. She looked away to break his gaze. “Come in,” he said, suddenly. “I’m sorry … I … uh …”

  She stepped past him into the familiar room. She could feel his presence. The smell of his aftershave, the brush of his arm against hers, the look in his face all sent emotions surging inside her. She wanted to tell him about the cop. She wanted to tell him about farm and the man with the scar on his face. She wanted to tell him about Connie and her mother and all the stuff that churned inside her. She put her hand to her forehead to calm down.

  “Go into the kitchen,” David said.

  Kit threaded her way through the living room. A gray-haired woman sat at the kitchen table, photographs spread out before her.

  “Kit, this is Alice Pendleton,” David said. There was a quiet tension in his voice, like a taut wire vibrating. “Ms. Pendleton, Kit McGovern.”

  “Good evening, young lady.” Alice Pendleton had a mass of gray hair caught up in a bun and held in place with a tortoiseshell barrette. Her gray eyes were sharp but the wrinkles around their edges made her look kind. She wore khaki pants and a long-sleeved green L. L. Bean shirt with an egret pin on the collar.

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs. Pendleton,” Kit said. “I’ve admired your work for a long time.”

  “Nothing to it,” Alice responded, “long as you’re willing to tromp through a marsh.”

  David picked up a photo from the table and handed it to her. “Look at this,” he said.

  In the photo, Kit saw a dock. On the tops of three pilings sat three seagulls, all looking the same direction. In the background, she could see what looked like the corner of a building and the edges of a parking lot. She looked at David, puzzled.

  “Now check these out.” He handed her three more photographs. Each was a progressive enlargement of the background of the first shot, which grew fuzzier with each frame. “What do you see?”

  “The edge of a building. A car or truck, three people … wait, what is this, David?” Kit looked up at him. “Is someone forcing the woman into that truck? Abducting her?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  Kit’s stomach tightened. She studied the pictures carefully, using light and angle to see every square inch, holding them close and then at arm’s length.

  “I never did see it the day I got those shots,” Mrs. Pendleton said. “I was just taking pictures, like I always do. But when I looked at them on my computer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. So I thought, I’ll have this nice young man look at them, since he’s a police officer.”

  “Where did you take them?” Kit asked.

  “Behind that motel across the street. At their dock. I went out there to get the sunset. But I saw these seagulls and, well, something made me take that shot.”

  Kit looked at David. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that’s Maria, the desk clerk. I know her. Well, I talked to her sometimes. I recognize the dress.”

  Kit felt an odd twinge. Of course, he’d be attracted to other women. And they to him. She closed her eyes momentarily, trying to refocus. “When did you last see her?”

  “The day before Mrs. Pendleton took those shots.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Thursday, three weeks ago,” David and the photographer said in unison.

  “Look, Kit,” David said, running his hand through his hair, “here’s what I want. Can you run those tags for me?” Kit looked at the photographs again. Visible beside the building’s edge was the front of a truck, and a partial license plate.

  “It’s a Ford Super Duty,” David said. “I can tell by the grill design. Not too many of those around, compared to the 150. So if we looked up the model and the vehicle color …”

  “What are these numbers?” Kit became aware of a growing tension in her shoulders and her neck.

  “Those last three digits? 5-3-9. That’s what I’m seeing, anyway.”

  A cold chill swept over Kit. “Could they be 5-8-9?”

  David squinted at the photographic blow-up. “Well, yes, yes, I think so. Why?”

  “Because if those are the numbers, I know that truck.” She glanced toward Mrs. Pendleton, then back to David. “It belongs to the company that owns the farm where the live oaks are.”

  “The oaks? You got an identification?” David asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yes.” Then, because she didn’t want to reveal anything else, she said, “Mrs. Pendleton, may we keep these photos?”

  “Of course!”

  “Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention.”

  Mrs. Pendleton waved her hand. “Say no more, young lady. I’ll be getting on out of here.” She rose. “My work is done.”

  David rubbed his left arm, still in a sling, with his right hand. “What do we have?” he asked Kit, when the Pendletons had left.

  We? Kit took a deep breath. “The forensic botanist identified the acorns in the boy’s pockets as coming from the same tree as our sample D6.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “Do you remember the farm with the long lane, and the old house with all the windows broken out? The tomato fields were in front of the house, stretching out quite a ways.”

  “Yeah. I remember.” David paced. “So who owns it?”

  “C&R Enterprises. Same company that owns the truck.” She gestured toward the photo on the table.

  “You want to go take a look? In the morning?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “With who?”

  “By myself.”

  His frown conveyed his disapproval.

  She told him about the farm, then asked, “What’s Maria’s last name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right. That’s the first step: I need to check with the motel and get all the info on her I can.” She tossed her head. “Thanks, David. I’ll take it from here.”

  “No, I’ll go to the motel.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” He rubbed his arm. “Kit, I knew this girl. I spoke with her many times. I can’t just pretend she’s a stranger.” The tendons in his jaw were popping. “You have pictures of the farm?”

  She nodded.

  “I want to see them.”

  Her resistance lasted two seconds. “OK. Go talk to the motel manager, then … then come to my place. I’ll fill you in.”

  Why did I invite him to my house, Kit wondered as she drove back to her place. She hit the steering wheel with her hand. “I hate this!” she said out loud, but a large part of her didn’t hate it at all. A large part of her couldn’t wait until he showed up.

  “The guy’s not right,” David said half an hour later when he walked into Kit’s kitchen.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jackson Montgomery. The motel manager. He’s hiding something.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe he’s part of the abduction. Maybe he was using her. Maybe he smokes dope. I don’t know yet.”

  “Did he give you the information?”

  David held out a paper. “He said it was everything he had on her.”

  Kit took it and read Maria’s name, “Maria Allessandro,” her Social Security number, address of record, and a phone number.

  “I tried the phone number on the way over here. It’s not in service. You look up the social and I’ll bet you find
the same thing.”

  Indeed, the Social Security number traced back to one Maria Allessandro of Philadelphia, an 85-year-old widow. “False identity,” Kit confirmed to David when she hung up the phone. “The ‘home address’ is an abandoned warehouse in Salisbury.”

  “All right. So she’s illegal …”

  “Not necessarily,” Kit said, pacing. “If she’s a trafficking victim she might have been brought into the country on a valid six-month visa. Most victims don’t even know their visas will expire in that time. The trafficker, who provided them with the visa, keeps the passport, and the victim is then trapped. They don’t go to the authorities because they’ve been told they’ll be in trouble. Or the trafficker threatens their family back home. So she could be using a false identity because the trafficker has her legal papers.” Kit looked at David. His deep brown eyes were fixed on her and in them she saw the emotion she was trying to resist. She took a deep breath. “You want to see the whole slide show? The presentation I gave my boss and the AUSA?”

  “Absolutely.”

  David sat beside her at the table. Slide by slide, they went through her presentation. She could hear him breathing, feel his leg when he moved, smell the Irish Spring soap he’d showered with. She fought to stay focused on her work.

  When they finished, he said, “I’m impressed.”

  Kit smiled.

  “No, really. I’m impressed. Cops don’t do stuff like that, not at my level, anyway.”

  “I had to make the case to get approval to continue. I just kept thinking that I couldn’t leave that boy on the beach, all by himself. Remember what you told me? A homicide case is a sacred trust. I owe him a fight for justice in his case. And now … now I think we may also be fighting for some living people. The boy is pointing us to them, you know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Kit turned back to the photos on the table. “I need to go to Norfolk. I want to look at the financial records of this C&R Enterprises. I want to talk to Immigration. My partner,” she saw David’s eyes flicker, “my partner needs to see these photos.”

  “Your partner?”

  “Yes. Chris Cruz. You remember him? He helped pull you out of the channel.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “He worked a prostitution trafficking case up here a couple of years ago so our boss thought he might be helpful to me.” Kit reminded him about Patricia’s panicked phone call, which Kit had outlined in the presentation. “Chris is checking out that couple. I think we need to compare notes. Plus, I need to recruit some more help. We need to set up surveillance, find out the identity of the guy I saw driving that truck …” She looked at David. “We can take it from here, David.”

  He set his jaw. “I’m going to the farm.”

  “No, don’t.”

  “I’ve got to see it.”

  “Stay out of it, David.”

  Kit saw something—anger?—ignite in his eyes. “Maria’s in trouble, Kit. There’s no way I can just sit in Chincoteague like some … some cripple waiting for the FBI to fix it.”

  “It’s not your case.”

  “I may not have jurisdiction, but I can go to a farm in Glebe Hill. As far as I know, common citizens are still allowed there.”

  “By yourself?”

  His face reddened. “If this is the same guy that killed that boy, he didn’t kidnap Maria to take her to a baseball game. Somebody’s got to find her. Now. Without waiting to put together a PowerPoint show.”

  She felt a surge of anger. “So go talk to the police!”

  “And say what? Some girl whose name probably isn’t Maria didn’t look happy when she got shoved into a truck? The Chincoteague cops will say they don’t have enough to go on. And do you think the state police … fired up because they just lost one of their own … are gonna care?”

  “OK, David. Go where you want. Do whatever!” She waved her hand in the air. “That’s always worked for you before, from what I understand.”

  On the drive down to Norfolk the next day, Kit tried to characterize David’s reactions. Bullheaded came to mind. Stubborn. Insistent. Impulsive. When “loyal” and “courageous” tried to sneak in the lineup, she thrust them aside. Likewise the guilt from her own sarcasm, which rose in her throat like bile.

  Why were things so complicated?

  16

  SLIDING ON JEANS AND A CHAMBRAY SHIRT, DAVID O’CONNOR PUT A snub-nosed revolver into the sling he was wearing. Leaving the house, he got into his car and put his automatic pistol under the seat. He had armed himself as well with dozens of pictures of Maria—he’d convinced the motel manager to give him one from her employment files—with his cell phone number written on the back. David had concocted a story—Maria had ripped him off for 1,000 and he swore he’d find her. And although he didn’t have a lot in his savings account, David had pulled out 400 in twenties. Information cost money, and he wasn’t going to let money keep him from finding Maria. Or whatever her name was.

  To cover his bases, before he left the island, David stopped at the Chincoteague Police Station, reported what he knew about the missing woman, and, as he suspected, the officer on duty wrote out a report but didn’t offer a lot of encouragement. Leaving the station, he turned his Jeep toward the bridge, and left the island.

  Driving over the causeway, David looked out over the marshes and felt a momentary twinge of regret. He saw cattle egrets, a great blue heron, two great egrets, a dozen or more fishing gulls, a few terns, and one osprey. He wished he were kayaking, a human invader quietly slipping through the salt marsh world, smelling the stands of cord grass, fending off mosquitoes, and watching as the natural world unfolded before him. Crabs, minnows, fish, turtles, birds, and insects, living together, dying together. He was a long way from the stress of his D.C. job. But he was walking right back into it. Intentionally. That struck even him as a little crazy.

  Still, what could he do? Ignore a woman in trouble?

  It took him about an hour to get to Glebe Hill. He had the farm’s position marked in his GPS. At 9:00 a.m., the workers were in the field as David drove past, well aware he had one shot at making an initial reconnaissance. He looked for the pickup, but it was nowhere in sight, so he swung back around the loop he’d marked on his map, found a place to stow the Jeep, and walked through the woods to watch the place from a hill nearby. He took notes, standing under the oaks and poplars, counting the workers, watching their progress, noting the other buildings he’d seen while driving.

  Then, around noon, he saw a van pull up and the workers get in, and he watched as it left the property and drove west on the small road abutting the farm. He was about to leave himself, when he saw the dust trail of a vehicle approaching. He waited, saw a white truck pull into the lane, and watched as a man got out and walked behind the house, disappearing as he did.

  Where was that man going? David ran through the woods to get a different angle so he could see better. He stumbled down a hill, slammed his hurt shoulder into a tree, and, out of breath, stopped at the edge of the forest. He still couldn’t quite see. But the corn in a field nearby stood about six-feet tall, and that gave him an idea.

  David made his way down to the cornfield, and ran quickly across the twenty-foot grassy border around the field, an action which left him momentarily exposed. He ducked into a row of corn, began moving through the plants. The leaves rustled around him like paper. It felt eerie, not being able to see further than a row or two away—he realized in the middle of the field, surrounded by tall corn, that a churning harvester would never see him, or hear him, for that matter, and he could easily be killed in there. He wondered exactly when the corn would be taken down. Not today, he hoped. Please, not today.

  His own words surprised him.

  Near the end of the row, David crouched down in the dirt. He was a good twelve feet in from the edge of the cornfield and he hoped that that was enough to hide him. From there he could see that there was an old shed of some sort behind the h
ouse, and while he watched, the man he had seen driving the truck emerged, a package in his hand.

  He looked Hispanic, about 5’8” or 5’9”, cowboy hat … as David scribbled notes he saw the man glance over his shoulder, looking straight at the cornfield, and David froze.

  But he must not have seen him, because the man turned and walked to his truck and drove off. That’s when David noticed his slight limp.

  What was in the package? Was the shed a drop zone? Why was the guy limping?

  David waited five minutes, by his watch, and then walked quickly from the cornfield to the shed, which stood about twenty yards away.

  Built of weathered boards, the shed was about ten by ten, with a roof which had a rudimentary chimney in the middle of it. David knew that on old farms, people smoked their meat, hams in particular, to preserve them. This building would fit that use.

  The door was padlocked. David pulled it, but the lock didn’t give. He peered through a crack in the boards, but the interior was dark. Walking around the shed, he used his free hand to feel for a loose board that would give him access. Nothing. The second time around he noticed a place on the back of the shed near the top where some boards had rotted just under the roof.

  The sweat poured off of him as he paused to consider his next move. Looking through the rotting boards would mean jumping, and pulling himself up with both arms, despite his bad shoulder.

  He took a deep breath. Carefully pulling out the revolver hidden in his sling, he removed both it and the sling and put them on the ground. Then he took out his small flashlight, turned it on, and put it between his teeth. He jumped up and reached for the hole created by the rotten boards, missed the first time, and tried again. This time he caught it. Tears came to his eyes and he groaned as his shoulders caught his weight. He used his legs and hoisted himself up, stuck the flashlight into the opening, and looked down.

  David could see the beams of the old smokehouse. He could see hooks where the meat had been hung. On the right were shelves, like pantry shelves, filled with jars. But what was in the jars? It was dark, and brown.

  Acorns. The jars were full of acorns. Shining his flashlight down to the left, he could see a large metal trunk—just the kind of thing you’d use to keep varmints out of whatever you were storing. The open lid revealed that it was empty.