Dying for a Clue

by Judy Fitzwater

  Her disappointment was understandable. Jennifer didn’t know what she’d expected from Beverly Hoffman, but it was a lot more than a flat metal disk. It hardly seemed worth getting killed over.

  A knock hit the door, and they could hear some familiar Muffy whimpers. Valerie was back.

  Diane shoved off from the chair, but Jennifer stepped in her way. “Don’t mention any of this to Valerie. Not the disk. Not the phone calls.”

  “Why?”

  “Trust me,” Jennifer insisted.

  “‘Trust no one’. I learned that from reruns of the X-files.” She brushed past and unlocked the door.

  Muffy nearly knocked them both down. She was soooo glad to see them.

  But Diane said nothing, not to Valerie and not to Jennifer. She went back to the chair, drew up her legs, and pretended to go to sleep.

  The computer screen glared in the darkness. The girls were both snuggled down in their sleeping bags, their breathing even and regular. Muffy lay next to her as Jennifer once again found the site for missing children. She skipped the one for Lori Jean Miller, the little girl from Philadelphia, and clicked on the poster for Cynthia Allison Turner, last seen in Bethesda, Maryland.

  Cynthia Allison Turner. She stared at that sweet little face. Round cheeks, baby nose, bright smile with tiny teeth, dark eyes, and a bow holding her wispy hair off her face. A beautiful child. If this were indeed Diane, the age-enhanced photo had left out one important element, something essential to make her recognizable. Attitude.

  Cynthia Allison Turner. She whispered the name aloud to herself. And then her hands began to shake. Her stomach suddenly felt strangely hollow. It had gone right past her the first time. CAT. Initials. CAT, not Cat. Why hadn’t she seen it?

  Born August 14. If she’d had any doubt before, it was gone now. Five thousand dollars deposited yearly in the Robbinses’ bank account on CAT’s birthday. Coincidence? She hardly thought so.

  But here was the kicker, the really bad part, the reason Jennifer had hoped that if Diane were one of the three, she wouldn’t be Cynthia: Not found at crime scene of parents’ murder/suicide.

  Chapter 28

  “Can’t this wait until morning?” Sam insisted, groggy and grouchy both. Most unattractive. Although he did look cute in his T-shirt and sweat pants, no doubt a concession to having ladies in the house.

  “What’s so important you have to wake me out of a sound sleep and drag me into the bathroom at...” He looked at his watch. “Good grief! Do you realize it’s almost one in the morning?”

  “But you don’t understand. I know who Diane is,” Jennifer told him in a loud whisper, bouncing on her heels. She couldn’t wait till morning. She couldn’t wait another minute.

  He shook his head as if to clear it. “Come again?”

  “Diane is Cynthia Allison Turner. C-A-T. It was initials. Not short for Catherine or Caitlin or anything. ‘CAT’. All caps.” She’d backed him up against the sink and was leaning forward. She was invading his space, but she couldn’t help it. The bathroom was only so big. Her news was bigger.

  He put his arms around her, resting them on her hips, but she broke away. She would have paced, but she had only three feet of floor space to work with.

  “It all fits. Her birthday is August fourteenth, not November first. The deposits made into her parents’ accounts were always on that date.”

  “What deposits?”

  That’s right. He didn’t know anything about what Johnny had found out. So she told him, about that and the pet ID that had come in the mail, about making the phone calls, and looking up everything on the Internet.

  That woke him up.

  “What have you told Diane?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think it’s premature. If other children came through the clinic like you’ve been suggesting all along, who’s to say the tag didn’t belong to one of them? You don’t even know for sure it’s what Beverly Hoffman had to give you. Or that she actually knew who Diane is.”

  He was good at bringing her down.

  “And the phone call? How do you explain that?” she asked, some of her confidence returning.

  “It rang through. So what? I bet if you tried a dozen or more area codes, you’d have a dozen or more possibilities for where that number was from.”

  “But what about ‘CAT’?”

  “It could still be short for Catherine or some other name. Or a pet name. It’s not all that unusual.”

  He took her by the shoulders. “The truth is we still don’t know. Not for sure.”

  Every instinct she had was telling her she was right. “But...” She waited for him to interrupt, only he didn’t. “So you think I should forget about it?”

  As if she would.

  “Of course not. I’m saying let’s check it out first, find out what the story is with the Turners, how and why they died. If—and please note the if’—we can find a link between them and the clinic, then we may have something.”

  It was like Cinderella going to the ball. If she scrubbed the floors and beat the rugs, if she.... but he was right. They couldn’t tell Diane what she’d found without more proof. It would be devastating. She was just getting used to the idea she was adopted. They could hardly add, “By the way, we think your natural parents may have died in a murder/suicide.” At least not until they were sure. Diane was fragile, even if she didn’t act like it. What’s more, she trusted them. Jennifer wanted to keep that trust.

  “Okay, so where do we go from here?” she asked.

  “I’d vote for back to bed.”

  He nuzzled her neck. She would have swatted him, but he’d probably yelp and wake up the girls. And that’s why she’d dragged him into the bathroom in the first place, so Diane and Valerie wouldn’t know what was going on.

  “Quit it!” she ordered, pulling his face up nose-to-nose with her own. She had to avoid those eyes. They’d be her undoing yet. So she looked at his mouth. Another not-so-safe area. Maybe if she concentrated on the stubble on his chin...

  But she didn’t have to. He turned his back on her and splashed water all over his face. She handed him a hand towel from the rack behind her, and he ran it over his skin.

  “Tell you what,” he said, turning back. “First thing Monday morning, I’ll get in touch with—you said it was in Maryland?”

  “Bethesda. Montgomery County.”

  “Right. And I’ll see what they’re willing to tell me. Then we’ll decide whether or not I need to go up there.”

  “We,” she said.

  “We who?”

  “We, as in you and me. Whether or not we need to go up there.”

  “What would we do with the girls?”

  “Dee Dee has a spare room.”

  “You want to bring her into this?”

  Not really.

  “Anne Marie, then,” she suggested. “She’s staying at the Residence Inn. I’m sure she has room for two more, at least for a day or so. Besides, surely if they were going to try something, they would have done it by now. The first few days, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for someone to find us, break in, at least search the place. But now...”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Sam agreed. “Doesn’t mean Diane’s safe. Sometimes danger simply takes another form.”

  Great. Just what she needed: a morphing threat. It’d be nice if for once Sam would tell her what she wanted to hear. Even if it wasn’t true.

  “Could you at least call the police in the morning?” she asked.

  “On a Saturday? We want their cooperation, not their wrath. This is an old case. If this child’s been missing for fourteen years, I doubt they’ll think we constitute an emergency. We can wait two days. We don’t exactly have a smoking gun.”

  It had looked smoking to her, right up until he threw cold water on it.

  “Okay. Monday morning, then.” She turned to him. “Sam?”

  He
yawned. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  He blinked and raised an eyebrow at her as if he felt sure there was a catch. “For...”

  “For taking Muffy and me in. For putting up with Diane and Valerie. For letting us take over your place and disrupt your life. For buying ice cream.”

  He nodded and one side of his mouth curled upward. “It hasn’t been quite what I’d had in mind when I brought you home.”

  She put a finger over his lips. It wasn’t wise to go there. Moments pass. Whatever might have been was long gone.

  He blew out a puff of air through his nose, shook his head, and hugged her tight. “Sometimes you’re more trouble than you could possibly be worth.”

  She shrugged in his embrace. “I know.”

  Chapter 29

  Calling a person a leech was not nice. Sam should be ashamed of himself. Besides, no one—except Sam—seemed to mind having her at the Telegraph offices. She was quietly minding her own business, perched on the front edge of his desk, waiting for him to finish his phone call to Bethesda. Besides, who was awake enough at eight-thirty in the morning to notice her?

  Finally, he hung up. “Do you mind?” he asked, obviously irritated. “You didn’t have to come down with me. I told you I’d call you when I had something.” He looked around the office and added, “It’s hard for me to pretend to be working when you’re sitting on my desk like a hood ornament.”

  She stood up, pulling down her short skirt. “My. Aren’t we testy this morning.”

  “Could be from lack of sleep this weekend.”

  And could be from what he learned, or more likely, didn’t learn in that phone call. “Want to share?”

  “Only if you’ll agree to go home and let me work.”

  “I can live with that.”

  Sam took up his notes. “I spoke with Detective Lou Myers of the Montgomery County Police. Robert Turner and his wife, Colette, were found dead at their residence after a neighbor reported hearing gunshots at their home in the late evening hours. When police arrived, they found what appeared to be a murder/suicide with Robert having shot Collette and then turning the gun on himself. The child was discovered missing only after a relative, Mrs. Turner’s mother, was informed, and she asked about her. Myers repeated the information you’d already learned over the Internet, the description of the child and so forth. And that’s all he would tell me over the phone. He said he might be able to make some time to see me early next week if I wanted to fly up.”

  She harumphed. “That wasn’t worth the price of the phone call.”

  “I’ll get in touch with Tim Donahue and see if he can find out anything else. And I’ll check the library. Maybe they have copies of the Washington Post on microfiche that might have carried stories about the murder.”

  “That’s a major newspaper. Why would they carry it?”

  “Bethesda is close to D.C. Some people would call it a suburb, although I expect the people who live there wouldn’t appreciate it.”

  “And they’d run stories like that?”

  “Sure. Actually, it would be local news. The infamous Beltway around D.C. runs across northern Virginia and circles on around through Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland. Doesn’t even touch the D.C. line. Bethesda’s inside the Beltway, right on the D.C. border.”

  “So the nearest airport would be...”

  “Reagan National in Arlington.”

  “Fine,” she said, and turned to leave.

  “Where ya’ going?” he asked.

  “To find a way to finance a trip to Maryland,” she called over her shoulder. “I know you don’t have the money, and I certainly don’t.” She suspected that was why he wasn’t so hot to take off up north in the first place. He didn’t get paid until next week.

  “Jennifer...” he said, with that warning tone in his voice.

  At the door she turned back and blew him a kiss. He looked none too happy. He could talk to Donahue if he wanted to, he could even fly to the moon, for all she cared, but she wanted answers. Now. And she intended to get them.

  Johnny had to be in there. He wasn’t at his office, even if the hours on the door did read nine to five. She continued to hammer the door of the condo a few blocks off the downtown part of Riverside. It wasn’t one of the more affluent areas of Macon, but it looked like someplace Johnny would choose to live.

  After several minutes, he jerked open the door, rubbing his eyes and squinting in the light. He had on a pair of dress trousers, no belt, and a T-shirt that barely covered the bandage on his chest.

  “Oh, it’s you.” He turned and walked away without another word, leaving the door open. She took that as an invitation to come in, closing the door after her. When she turned around, he’d disappeared into the darkness. Sounds of running water came from the hallway.

  She opened the blinds over the sink. It was a kitchen/living room combination, with a breakfast bar marking where one ended and the other began. She looked around. The kitchen tile had chipped, leaving black patches of tar to peek through, and the bright, mustard-colored Formica on the countertops had several burn marks on it. She turned to the stove and lifted the lid of a pot that held the remains of what must have been last night’s dinner, some kind of tuna noodle mixture. Yuck.

  After a minute or two Johnny emerged from the hallway, running a towel across his face which he then draped over one shoulder as he joined her near the sink. He must have been drinking the night before because the light from the window made him wince. He reached up and tilted the blinds to reduce the glare. If she’d had a cigarette, she would have offered it to him. He looked like he was in the final stages of nicotine withdrawal.

  “You want some coffee?” he offered, holding up a pot half filled with dark liquid, in her direction.

  She started to answer, but he’d already turned his back on her, dumped it in the sink, and was refilling it with water. When he turned back, he had a cigarette hanging from his lips. Must keep them where most people keep soap. She hoped none of the ash had fallen into the pot. Not that she planned to drink any of that coffee anyway.

  Johnny pulled the coffee tin out of the freezer and filled the basket, then turned on the coffee maker, and leaned back against the counter. He looked more or less awake, although he still couldn’t quite get his eyes open. He yawned, one of those puff-out-the-belly yawns. “So what’s up, doll? I’m sure you didn’t get me out of bed at the crack of dawn to tell me you love me.”

  “It’s ten-thirty, and no, I didn’t.”

  She handed him the disk along with a printout of the information she’d found on the Internet.

  He rubbed his eyes with the heel of the hand that held his cigarette and then shoved it back at her. “Just fill me in. I don’t focus so good this early in the morning.”

  She told him about Robert and Colette Turner. “Diane needs to know. Is it them?”

  He seemed to be studying her. Or maybe he was simply thinking.

  “Sam says we need a link between the Turners and the clinic,” she went on.

  “You been talkin’ to Sam about this case?” he asked.

  “Diane is living at his place—where you sent her,” she reminded him. “Look. Here’s the problem: we don’t know how or why a three-year-old could have gotten from Bethesda, Maryland, to Macon, Georgia. I say we go there. Check it out in person. It’s more complicated than the police think it is. This isn’t a matter of a child wandering off somewhere. The child wound up over seven hundred miles away from the crime scene.”

  “Assuming Diane is Cat Turner.”

  What was it with these guys? Why couldn’t they couldn’t cope with a tiny leap of logic?

  Johnny continued to stare at her and draw on his cigarette. Then he took her by the elbow and shuffled her toward the door. “Go home,” he said. “I got somethin’ to check out.”

  “No,” Jennifer said, pulling back out of his grip and turning to face him. “You said we were partners. True or not, I want
to know—”

  “I’ll call you,” he said, pushing her out the door and pulling it shut, right in her face.

  She stood there, blinking at the wood. Fine, then. If Sam was spinning his wheels, and Johnny didn’t have time for her, she’d take care of it without them. And she knew exactly who would be willing to help her.

  Chapter 30

  “I know you didn’t hire our firm,” Jennifer told Anne Marie, playing with a napkin that was tucked into a stemmed glass, as she balanced on a stool in Unit 207 at the Residence Inn. “But your daughter did, and the only way I see that we can break this case is to fly to Maryland. Immediately.”

  Anne Marie turned the shiny disk over in her hand. “Maryland,” she repeated as though it were a foreign country. She sank onto a stool next to Jennifer.

  “Have you seen the disk before?” Jennifer asked.

  The woman shook her head. “She had a little, pink stuffed cat when we got her. It had a collar on it, a real one, like you would buy in a pet store. Did she tell you?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “It was her only possession. She clung to it. Wouldn’t let anybody take it from her, not even when she took a bath. I had to put it in a Baggie right up to its neck. She wouldn’t let me cover its head. Said it had to be able to breathe.”

  She looked up at Jennifer. “So you think her parents are dead?”

  “Yeah, I do. She doesn’t know.”

  “Good. Don’t tell her until you’re sure. And please, please let me be there.”

  “Of course,” Jennifer assured her. What she really wanted to do was walk away from this whole situation. Tell Diane to go home with her mother and be thankful for her blessings. Let the past stay buried. But until they knew why Hoffman was killed, Diane could never have a normal life.

  “I hate to ask you,” Jennifer began. She hated money all together, but it was a necessary evil. And she hated asking anyone for it even when she was doing them a service. Still, she had to be realistic. She wasn’t getting to Maryland without it. “We don’t have any operating funds. Diane didn’t give us a retainer, and—”