by Meg Muldoon
I leaned my sweaty forehead against the doorjamb.
“You nearly killed me,” I said. “Do you know that? I almost had a heart attack in here.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But that kind of thing happens when you break into a house, Freddie.”
I looked up at him for a long minute.
“If it was anybody but me out there watching the house, you’d be in handcuffs right now,” he continued. “I’d haul you in for questioning about what you’re doing here. And you’d probably get charged, too.”
I nodded.
“Point taken,” I said.
My heart felt tired. I’d been putting it through the wringer lately.
I leaned against the tile wall of the bathroom, trying to catch my breath.
Like me, Sam looked like he could use a few solid hours of sleep. But unlike me, that made him look even better somehow. He looked like a man who had put in a hard day’s work. And there was something alluring about that.
He glanced around the small room and there was a hint of familiarity in his eyes when he did. I realized that he must have been here already – that the cops must have already searched the house earlier.
I noticed the large manila evidence envelope tucked beneath his arm.
“So what are you doing here, Freddie?”
“You know why I’m here, Sam,” I said.
He let out a troubled sigh.
“Freddie, it’s not—”
“I can help, and you know it,” I said, jumping in. “The most important thing is to find Mindy, right? And if I can help you, then there can’t be any harm in telling me ab—”
“Departmental regulations are in place for a reason,” Sam said. “It’s an open investigation, and I can’t jeopardize that by—”
“I’ve known Mindy for a long time, Sam,” I said, my voice trembling slightly. “She’s a good person. One of the few really good people out there. And I’ll… I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand by while she could be out there suffering somewhere.”
I looked down, surprised by how emotional I was getting.
It wasn’t that I was heartless. But most of the time, I had a stoic, reserved personality. I tried not to become too invested in much. And I tried to keep my feelings bottled-up inside.
But I couldn’t be that way. Not with this.
“Okay, Freddie. Okay,” Sam said, seeing just how upset I was getting.
He let out a long, unsteady breath.
“I’m going to be straight with you, all right? I can’t tell you everything, but I’m going to be straight with you where I can be. I trust your instincts. And I trust you.”
He leaned in, lowering his voice.
“But Freddie: everything I say has to stay off the record. I don’t think I need to tell you that if anyone in the department catches even a whiff of this, then things could be bad. Really bad. You understand?”
“I know what’s on the line, Sam.”
He studied me for a long, long moment, searching my eyes, as if he was trying to gauge the truth in my words.
You can trust me, Sam, I thought.
Trust me.
Chapter 32
“We think she was most likely abducted in the same area where we found her dog wandering – on Lassie Lane. We think it happened shortly after you talked to her the night of the school board meeting. Her car’s missing, so our best theory is that someone stopped her while she was traveling on that road and made her drive somewhere at gunpoint. We know a gun was involved because of Bogey’s bullet wound and the number of shell casings discovered near where Bogey was found. We also discovered Mindy’s cell phone next to the shell casings.
“It was shattered.”
I swallowed hard, attempting to process the shocking news.
Any remaining hope that I’d had about Mindy going off on a road trip in her car and just not telling anybody crumbled into dust.
We were talking about kidnapping now. And I feared that that was only the tip of the iceberg.
“As you know, we’ve questioned Mindy’s husband, Phil Monahan,” Sam continued. “His alibi for the evening of Mindy’s possible abduction is airtight. We have phone records that place him in Los Angeles at the time, and we also have the wait staff from the hotel restaurant he was staying at vouch for the fact that he had spent most of that evening at the bar drinking cocktails. The bartender remembers him particularly well because he was seen hitting on several younger women who made it clear they were not interested in his advances.”
I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.
I wouldn’t have expected any less from Phil.
“But just because he has an alibi doesn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t have gotten somebody to do his dirty work for him,” I said. “I mean, it seems probable that Mindy might have been thinking about divorce. And that gives Phil motive. Right?”
“It’s possible,” Sam said. “And earlier today, I would have agreed with you completely. But as of yet, we’ve got nothing to suggest that Phil contacted anybody to kidnap or murder his wife. And aside from that, he’s claiming that his house was ransacked while he was gone. That somebody had gone through it at some point while he was in LA and tossed the place. But the funny thing is, they didn’t steal anything. Nothing that Phil could tell, anyway.”
I had noticed what a mess the Monahan house was when we’d been inside the other night, but I had just assumed that was part of Phil’s sorry state after Mindy had left him.
I suddenly felt my stomach tighten, remembering the way the curtain in the front window had moved when I’d visited the Monahan house shortly after the school board meeting.
If Phil was still in LA at the time, then who had been in the house?
“And aside from that, after talking to Phil for over three hours at the police station, my own assessment of the man is that he’s a weak-minded fool,” Sam continued. “He might be an adulterer, but I don’t think he has the guts to pull something like this off. All he talked about in the interview was how sorry he was about the affair with his receptionist and what a miserable person he was. The man lacks guts. And you need some sort of guts if you’re going to call a hit on your own wife.”
He shrugged.
“That’s only my opinion, though,” he said. “It’s possible that I could be reading him all wrong. Some of the other cops at the station are convinced that he did it.”
“I trust your instincts, Sam,” I said. “But if he didn’t do anything to Mindy, then why’d you send me chasing down his secretary?”
“So you’d have a better picture of the whole situation,” he said. “You know, in case you did indeed pursue all this. Which knowing you, I would have bet a cool grand on.”
Sam was an enigma sometimes. Earlier, I’d been so sure that I wasn’t going to get any information from him about Mindy’s disappearance. But here we were, less than twelve hours later, and he was letting me in on crucial investigation details.
Sam was putting himself out there, breaking departmental regulations, all to help find my friend.
I knew plenty of people who wouldn’t take a risk that big for anybody.
I couldn’t help but admire him for it.
“Earlier, you said that it didn’t matter how much you loved me – you still couldn’t tell me anything,” I said.
In the red glow of the bathroom lights, I thought I saw his cheeks darken.
“Well, I lied,” he said. “At least about the second part.”
I suddenly felt the urge to kiss him. To feel his lips on mine, and fall away with him into a smoldering embrace. To leave everything behind – Mindy, the investigation, the stress and difficulty of the past week, everybody and everything – and to lose myself in him.
And as I gazed into his eyes in that moment, I had a strange feeling that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, either.
I felt my heart speed up.
But I finally pushed the urge away and tried to regain my composu
re.
Now wasn’t the time.
“So if Phil didn’t have Mindy kidnapped, then who did it?” I asked, quashing down the feelings. “Who shot Bogey? Who kidnapped her?”
“That’s the thing,” he said, clearing his throat. “Mindy was very well-liked in the community. She didn’t have any enemies, as far as anybody knows. She was a dedicated teacher who was loved by her students and their parents. There’s nothing obvious as to why somebody would want to hurt her.”
Sam was quiet for a long moment.
“But did you happen to notice the front lawn of the Monahan residence when we visited there?”
I shook my head.
“When I dropped Phil back at the house after questioning him, I saw that the front yard was covered with something,” he said. “Something that leads me to believe that somebody was highly upset with Mindy.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
Maybe this was the break we were looking for: the small detail in a sea of details that would prove to be the only important one.
“What was it?” I said. “What was out on the lawn?”
“Dog droppings,” he said. “And a hell of a lot of them. You know how I have about ten dogs at any given time living in my kennels out back? Well, it would take weeks of inattention before it looked like the Monahan’s front lawn.”
I bit my lower lip.
Mindy would have never let something like that happen to her lawn. Not after her crusade to clean up the fields of Tabor Elementary.
“So…”
I trailed off, trying to understand what that meant.
“So you think somebody dumped a bunch of dog poop on her front lawn?” I asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
He pulled the manila evidence envelope from beneath his arm and handed it to me.
I paused at first, surprised by the offering.
But after a moment, I dug in. My fingers nervously fumbled as I opened the brad and pulled out a stack of smooth and slick paper.
I quickly realized that the photos were the missing ones from the dark room here. The ones that had probably been strung up on the clothesline to dry. The ones that were now evidence.
“We found these photos in here. Given their subject matter, I believe Mindy took them during her stakeouts at the school field.
“And I’ve got a feeling that there’s something very important in them.”
The photos had been developed on thick stock paper, and felt heavy and dense in my hands. I judged the stack to be about thirty or so thick.
I carefully flipped through them in the red light of the room. My eyes scanning familiar scenes of dogs in the middle of their messy business and irresponsible owners looking around, hoping nobody saw when they didn’t pick up that messy business.
The black and white photos seemed to all have been taken at various stakeout points around Tabor Elementary School. The photos were mostly snapshots of the field, catching occasional houses in the background that bordered the schoolyard. They seemed to be taken mostly around dusk – probably the most popular hour for people getting off of work to take their dogs out on a walk.
And, as I flipped through the many images, I realized that something else was abundantly clear.
Mindy had been almost damn near obsessed with this issue. There had to have been at least forty different pet code violators she’d captured through the long-lens of her camera.
I glanced up at Sam.
“She’d probably make a really good private investigator,” he said. “She has a real knack for capturing the, uh, the moment.”
I nodded in agreement.
“It’s puzzling to me why she didn’t just use digital film for all of this,” Sam said, rubbing his chin. “Imagine the hours it must have taken to develop all these. Not to mention the time it took to digitize all of them.”
I shrugged.
“Mindy’s had that old camera since she was a photographer for the high school newspaper,” I said. “I think her grandfather might have given it to her or something – the one she inherited this house from. I remember her saying something about that in journalism class once. That he taught her everything she knew about photography.”
Sam nodded.
“I guess that might explain it,” he said. “A few days before she disappeared, she sent digital copies of the last ten in that stack to all the school board members along with an explanation about what her presentation was going to be at the board meeting,” Sam said.
I shuffled through the last ten, finally getting to the final one.
And that’s when I understood why Sam thought these photos might be pertinent to the investigation.
Under normal circumstances, the last picture in the stack would have been a throwaway. Something unusable. It was blurry and bright and had been exposed too long to see much of anything.
But what was there in that photo could have been everything.
Mindy had taken the picture through the driver’s window of her car. But it was different than the other photos in the pack. Because unlike the unsuspecting irresponsible pet owners who were oblivious to the fact that their dirty deed was being caught on film, this offending owner was looking dead at the camera, the sharp, burning look in his eyes the only thing clear about the image.
It looked as though he’d caught Mindy catching him violating dog code. And it looked as though he was about to approach her.
In his hand, he was holding what looked to be a dog leash. He held it out in a menacing manner. There was some sort of dog in the background as well, but it was too dark and too blurry to tell what kind it was.
The blurriness and unsteadiness of the shot spoke volumes about Mindy’s reaction to the man coming her way.
“It might be nothing,” Sam said. “And maybe it’s a little farfetched. But between this and the Monahan’s vandalized lawn, it seems possible that Mindy might have made someone angry with these stakeouts she was doing. And maybe this picture holds the key to what happened to her.”
I studied it for a while longer, peering at the hazy face of the man and those sharp, hateful eyes, wishing I could somehow see past the fuzziness enough to catch a glimpse of some defining feature.
“Can I have a copy of this?” I asked.
Sam paused, obviously grappling with the request.
“Look, I won’t show it to anybody else,” I said. “I just… I feel like it could help me figure out—”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll get you a copy.”
He looked deep into my eyes then.
“I trust you, Freddie,” he said.
The words meant almost as much to me as the three-worded sentence he’d said earlier.
“C’mon,” Sam said, nudging me toward the door after a minute. “I’ve got something to show you outside.”
I was glad to get out of that house.
Chapter 33
A loud yip rang out from the back seat as I slid into the passenger’s side of Sam’s off-duty car, parked a couple of blocks away from the house.
I turned, looking in the back.
His big oafish eyes shone at the sight of me, and I could have sworn that his little wrinkled face turned up into a smile.
My heart melted right then and there.
“Bogey!” I said.
The injured bulldog let out another little yip when I called his name.
I turned in my seat and reached back, petting his short, soft fur and rubbing the loose skin around his head. He lifted his wet little nose up to my hand and licked it.
His right front leg was bandaged, and his eyes were bloodshot. But the pooch was looking so much better than when I’d seen him in Dr. Barrett’s vet office, it could have almost been a different dog altogether.
“I’m just taking care of Bogey temporarily,” Sam said, buckling up his seatbelt in the driver’s seat. “Phil Monahan said he wasn’t up for caring for the dog, so he needed a foster home. The shelter just took in that big shipment from
Portland the other day, so they didn’t have room. And anyway, Bogey needs a quiet place to heal. I figured my house would be as good as any.”
“Jeez, that’s really nice of you.”
He shrugged.
“Well, I couldn’t in good conscience turn away a dog named Humphrey Bogart,” he said.
I laughed.
Sam was a good man.
“Hey, what do you say to some dinner?” I said. “I mean, I’m not making it. Lou is. But I’m sure she wouldn’t mind setting an extra space at the table. Seeing that I brought you might make her a little less angry at me for showing up so late.”
“Well in that case, I’m your man, Freddie.”
I smirked.
“See you two handsome gents back at the house in a few?” I asked, glancing back at Bogey.
“You bet,” Sam said in a deep, muffled voice, not moving his lips, pretending like it had come from Bogey’s mouth.
I slapped Sam’s arm playfully. Then reached back, giving Bogey a soft pet on the head before getting out of the car.
“Sam?” I said, right before closing the door behind me.
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
The words, which had been so hard to say these past few weeks, felt so natural now.
“I love you, too, Freddie,” he said.
He smiled. Then started up the car.
It had been a long, hard day.
But it had been a really good one, too.
Chapter 34
The darkness of the room pressed down on me like the tires of a semi-truck.
My eyes flung open and rapidly scanned the ceiling above me. I gasped for air as a stream of sweat let loose down my temple and back onto the pillowcase. With tightened fists, I clutched the soft folds of the comforter cover.
It took me a few long seconds to realize that I wasn’t alone in my bed.
And that in fact, I was a minority.
The majority of the bed’s square-footage was claimed by one happily-snoozing mutt, and one space-greedy 20-pound orange cat.
I blinked my bleary eyes a couple of times. My chest burned – a side-effect of eating such a rich and delicious meal as Lou’s butternut squash lasagna at such a late hour. Not to mention the glass of red wine I’d had after Sam brought over a bottle.