No Way Out (2010)

by Joel Goldman

  “All because of the shrug?”

  “Partly. His lips also stretched horizontally. That’s a micro-expression of fear, and it’s involuntary, just like the half-shrug. These gestures and micro-expressions are universal. They show up in every culture, and they mean the same thing. By themselves they might not mean that much, but when they happen together when he’s talking about finding a dead body, it’s very likely that he’s not telling us everything he knows.”

  “So you’re like a human lie detector, is that it?”

  “More like a lie catcher, and I’ve got a better track record than any lie detector.”

  “Any judge ever let you testify in court that someone’s a liar?”

  Kate took a deep breath. “That’s not how I work.”

  Nardelli shook her head. “Course not. Why would you when you can catch people lying by watching how they shrug their shoulders?” She turned to Lucy and me. “I should have listened to Quincy Carter. I’m going back to the woods. You find something a judge will let into evidence, give me a call.”

  “Hang on a second,” I said. “Any chance there’s a connection between the Montgomery and Martin cases?”

  Nardelli hesitated, staring at me. “Ask your lie catcher. She’s the one with all the answers.”

  Kate waited until Nardelli was out of earshot. “I’m right about Jimmy Martin and Adam Koch.”

  “That’s good enough for me. We’ll talk to Adam again,” Lucy said.

  “Talk to his mother too,” Kate said.

  “Why?”

  “I watched her when she was helping Peggy to the pickup truck. She was flashing unilateral contempt the whole way. The right corner of her lip was tight and raised. That indicates arrogance or a feeling of moral superiority. Maybe she does that all the time, but I’d bet against it. She’s helping Peggy even though she doesn’t like her.”

  “Then why bother?” I asked.

  “And,” Lucy added, “why doesn’t she like her?”

  “All good questions,” Kate said, turning to Lucy. “What about Peggy Martin? Did she agree to let me interview her?”

  Lucy nodded. “She didn’t like the idea at first since you started out working for her husband, but I convinced her.”

  “How?”

  “I told her that you didn’t care who hired you, you’d do the same job, and that if we were going to find her kids, we needed your help.”

  “That’s all it took?” Kate asked.

  “That’s all.”

  “Did you tell her that I’d know if she was lying to me?”

  Lucy shook her head. “No. I didn’t want to put any more pressure on her. Besides, nobody tells the truth, or all of it, all the time or all at once.”

  “Then we’re all on the same page here.”

  “Chapter and verse,” Lucy said.

  “So let’s go talk to her,” Kate said.

  I looked at my watch. “Can’t. Not till later. I’m supposed to meet Roni Chase at her house pretty soon. Quincy Carter is going to interview her again. I don’t want him to have another shot at her alone, and I need some time to prep her. She doesn’t live far from here. It won’t take long.”

  “Kate and I can talk to Peggy while you go see Roni.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Take mine. I’ll ride with Kate. You up to driving?”

  The day was wearing on me, twitches and shakes coming and going like wind changing directions, but Roni’s house was close enough that I could make the drive.

  “That’s not the point. I need to be there when Kate talks to Peggy.”

  Lucy raised one eyebrow. “Needing and wanting isn’t the same thing, Jack,” she lectured. “Roni Chase may be your latest reclamation project, but she isn’t mine. Finding those kids is the only thing I care about. And you’re the one who told me I had to sit out the Jimmy Martin interview because three people were one too many.”

  “Don’t you hate that?” Kate said, grinning. “You raise them, and then they turn on you.”

  I stuck my hand out. “Keys.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  There was enough to tie the disappearances of Evan and Cara Martin together with the disappearance of Timmy Montgomery to ask whether it was possible. All three kids were of the same age and lived in the same part of town. Although they vanished two years apart, there was reason to look for other connections.

  Did the families know one another? Even if they didn’t, did they have friends in common? Did their kids go to the same schools? How else might they have crossed paths?

  Those questions focused on the possibility that the kids were taken by someone who knew them, but that theory didn’t suffer much scrutiny. If Jimmy Martin killed his kids to punish his wife for her real or imagined sins, it was unlikely he’d have had any reason to kidnap and kill Timmy Montgomery two years earlier. The same would no doubt be true of any member of the Montgomery family.

  If there was a connection, it was more likely that the kidnapper/killer preyed on small children, indifferent to whether his victims came from happy or unhappy homes, caring only whether he could have them. And that meant he probably lived in Northeast, probably hadn’t started with Timmy and wouldn’t stop with Evan and Cara. It was an incendiary conclusion that would terrify families from one end of Northeast to the other.

  Adrienne Nardelli had ducked my question about a connection, and that was enough to scare me. Regardless of why she had avoided answering me, it was clear she wasn’t going to share anything she had, at least not until I had something to offer her in return. Her lack of cooperation made my job harder but not impossible. I left a message for Simon Alexander describing what I needed and left another for the one friend I still had at the FBI, Ammara Iverson, asking for a favor, hoping I hadn’t gone to the well once too often.

  The bones dug out of the woods above North Terrace Lake would distract Nardelli, not because one victim was more important than the other but because the job demanded that she work the cases at the same time. A housewife had disappeared from her Northeast home a few months ago, her husband refusing to cooperate with the police in their investigation. Without a body or other evidence of a crime, the husband had gone on with his life, raising their kids. Maybe the bones were hers, or maybe they were those of a prostitute who’d gone with a john into the woods for her last trick. Regardless, missing kids and bleached bones would divide and subdivide Nardelli’s time and attention.

  I was no better off than Nardelli. I’d spent last night at Truman Medical Center worrying and wondering about Roni Chase, her relationship to Frank Crenshaw, and the possibility that her boyfriend Brett Staley had killed Frank, with or without Roni’s help.

  The murdered and missing don’t take a number, waiting their turn, hoping people like Adrienne Nardelli and me can work them into our schedule. No matter how long they have been silenced, they scream for our attention, refusing to take no for an answer, and I never stop hearing their voices. Lucy may have shut out everything except the voices of the Martin kids, but Nardelli and I couldn’t. We’d keep doing the same thing: press on. Because that was the only thing we knew how to do.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  When I pulled up in front of Roni Chase’s house, I double-checked the address, wondering how a bookkeeper afforded a mansion, even one that had to be at least a hundred years old. The three-story asymmetrical design was topped with eyelid dormers on the third floor, set beneath a steeply pitched roof offset by a two-story turret on the northeast corner that was capped by a witch’s-hat roof. An ornate wooden rail framed the porch extending across the front of the house.

  It wasn’t quite as impressive close up. The exterior paint was faded and chipped in places, wood rot evident around the windows, the floorboards of the porch creaking and sagging. The house needed a lot of work.

  Roni answered when I rang the bell and led me inside through a set of double doors into a small foyer, through another set of carved wooden doors and into a wid
e space with a high vaulted ceiling, a white flagged floor, and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing leading to the second floor. I raised my head at the ceiling, rotating my gaze. Yellow watermarks and spidery cracks in the plaster were more evidence that the house would soon turn into a money pit if it hadn’t already.

  “They call this the receiving area,” Roni said.

  “Who does? The tour guides?”

  She laughed. “The people who put this place on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a Queen Anne–style house. A rich lumberman built it in 1886 for his new wife who was living in Europe, but she died before she ever set foot in it.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Do you ever stop playing the cop?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head. “It must be weird to live like that, to wonder if every bad thing that happens is a crime.”

  “I never thought it was weird.”

  “How do you think of it?”

  “Me? I wonder what happens when things go wrong, especially when people think no one is watching. Sometimes it’s a crime, and sometimes it’s just life.”

  “That’s pretty depressing. I’d rather wonder what happens when things go right, like falling in love.”

  “Well, Brett Staley will be ready when you do. Can’t get more romantic than wanting to buy your funeral dress?”

  She gave me a wistful, uncertain smile. “It’s his way of saying he wants to spend the rest of our lives together, but I’m not sure. We grew up together. I was five years old the first time he told me he loved me.”

  “But you’re not in love with him?”

  “More comfortable than in love.”

  “Don’t settle for comfortable. You can get that with an easy chair or a dog from the pound.”

  “I know what you mean, but he’s all I’ve got.”

  “You don’t strike me as someone who’s afraid she can’t do any better than the boy she grew up with. You’re smart enough to run your own business, pretty enough to turn heads, and ballsy enough to carry a gun and use it. That’s a powerful combination.”

  She blushed, dipping her chin. “I guess we don’t always see ourselves the way others see us.”

  “And a philosopher to boot. So what went wrong with the wife who never saw the house her husband built for her?”

  “The ship she took to America sank. The husband lived in the house for a couple of years, but he was too heartbroken to stay. He set up a charity named after his wife, Rachel, and turned the house into a home for unwed mothers and orphan girls called Rachel’s House for Women.”

  “How did you end up with it?”

  “It’s Grandma Lilly’s, not mine. She was one of the girls who lived here. Her mother left her some money, and Grandma hung on to it and used it to get an education. She got into selling houses and did well enough to buy this place twenty years ago when the charity went broke. My mom and I lived in a duplex off of Lexington, but we moved in here after she had her stroke so Grandma could help me take care of her.”

  “This place is big, but it doesn’t look big enough for very many unwed mothers and orphans.”

  “There was a dormitory attached to the back, but Grandma had it torn down.”

  “You haven’t said anything about your grandfather.”

  “I never knew him. Grandma won’t talk about him. She got pregnant with my mom while she was a teenager living here, but she never got married. Whenever I asked her why, she said that she’d give up a lot for a man, but the one thing she wouldn’t give up was her name.”

  “Did you mention that she could have gotten married and kept her last name?”

  She laughed. “Yes, and when I did she said the moon is pink.”

  “The moon is pink? Why?”

  “It’s what she always said if she thought I wasn’t listening or didn’t understand what she meant, like she just as well have said the moon is pink for all the good it did.”

  “That’s what you told Frank Crenshaw after you shot him.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I picked up a few things from my Grandma.”

  “How about your mother? How did she feel about not knowing anything about her father?”

  Roni took a breath. “She said everyone is entitled to their own mysteries and that was Grandma’s.”

  “Did she ever try to solve it?”

  “No. She said she didn’t want anything to do with a man who wasn’t good enough for Grandma. My mom never got married either, except she waited until she was a lot older to have me.”

  “What about your father? Is he in the picture?”

  She shrugged. “Almost the same story as Grandma. Mom says they dated for a week between Christmas and New Year’s. He took off before Mom knew she was pregnant. She didn’t know how to reach him, so he never knew about me. Mom said it was just as well because he wasn’t the kind to stick around.”

  “You ever try to find him?”

  “No. Half of my friends’ parents were divorced, so it was no big deal living in a one-parent home. One of my friends was adopted and made a big deal about finding her birth parents. When she did, they didn’t want anything to do with her. That’s when she realized her real parents were the ones who raised her. I know that there’s a piece of me that’s missing, but I don’t see how a stranger who doesn’t know I exist can fill it in. Grandma likes to say you can’t fix your past but you can make your future.”

  “So where does the funeral dress figure into the family tradition.”

  She chuckled. “You’ll be glad to know it starts with a criminal, my great-grandmother Vivian Chase.”

  “That’s okay. Everyone has at least one relative that climbed out of the wrong side of the gene pool.”

  “She was a robber back in the 1940s, banks, drugstores, anyplace with cash. She left Grandma at Rachel’s House when Grandma was eight years old because she knew she couldn’t raise her and rob banks too. But, whenever she could, she came to see Grandma, and she always gave some of the money she stole to Miss Moore, the lady who ran the home, to make sure they took good care of Grandma. One night after she dropped off some money, her partner showed up. They got into a gunfight right out on the curb and shot and killed each other. Miss Moore used some of the money to pay for my great-grandma’s funeral and for the dress. Grandma named my mother after her. And this,” she said, fingering the gold chain and cameo around her neck, “belonged to my great-grandmother.”

  “That’s a nice keepsake.”

  “She left it to my grandma, who gave it to my mother, and she gave it me. It keeps us connected.”

  “You must have told that story to Brett Staley a hundred times when you were growing up.”

  “Didn’t have to. His grandfather Bobby Staley drove my great-grandma Vivien to the hospital the night she died and dropped the dress off at the funeral home the next day. He and I grew up hearing the same stories.”

  “And you ended up with the house.”

  She did a slow turn, one arm extended, fingers tracing a pattern on the wall. “Sometimes I think we’re trapped in this house.”

  “It’s just bricks and mortar. You can always sell it.”

  She shook her head. “Grandma says it would never sell, not in this economy and not with all the things that need to be fixed that we can’t afford to fix.”

  “Can’t you borrow against the house to pay for the repairs and pay the loan back when you sell it?”

  “Not now. Grandma borrowed against it to pay my mom’s medical bills. There’s not much equity left, if any, the way home values have dropped.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll have to ride it out until the economy gets back on track.”

  She shivered, wrapping her arms across her chest. “I hope we can. Sometimes this place feels like ivy wrapped around my ankles, creeping up my legs, and one day it’s going to strangle me if someone doesn’t take me away from here.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to be rescued.”

&nb
sp; She tilted her head to one side and loosened her arms, a sad smile capturing her ambivalence. “I don’t, but if that’s the only way out, I wouldn’t turn it down.”

  “Why not just leave?”

  “And go where? Do what? I’ve got to take care of my mom, and sooner or later, I’m going to have to take care of my grandma, and they will never leave. I’m stuck, so I’ve got to find a way to make it work, one way or the other.”

  The doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. Quincy Carter wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes.

  Roni left me in the receiving area, returning with an older man, his eyes beaming, grinning like a pauper who’d been invited to see the prince. He was tall, his hair sand and silver, his features fine and handsome. He was missing the top third of his right ear, his only visible defect. Roni made the introduction.

  “Terry Walker, say hello to Jack Davis.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  “Lilly didn’t say anything about other guests,” Terry said.

  “That’s because she didn’t invite me,” I said, extending my hand.

  “I invited Jack,” Roni said. “Grandma and Mom are in the morning room. You can go on back.”

  He brightened again, his smile stretching his face. “Nice to meet you,” he said, giving my hand a quick, firm shake, turning to Roni. “I’ll find my way.”

  I waited until Terry Walker had disappeared into the house. “Who’s he?”

  “An old friend of my grandmother’s. They knew each other when they were kids. He moved away. He’s in town on some kind of business. They haven’t seen each other in years.”

  “Quincy Carter is on his way here to question you in a murder case, and your grandmother is having a reunion?”

  “It’s not a reunion, and I didn’t tell her about Detective Carter until I got home a few minutes ago. I didn’t want her to worry. Besides, it’s a big house. Anyway, you might as well meet the rest of my family.”