Despite all the foliage, Jo could see the extensive roofline of a two-story home with two chimneys and skylights. Hank was squinting at it, too.
“Did they tear down a ranch, or just add on?” he asked.
“Oh, the Magees razed the old place twenty years ago,” Mrs. Pearson replied. “I’m surprised there are as many ranches remaining as there are. Although the Raines have stuck with their original footprint,” she said and gestured to a house on their left. “I’m told they gutted the insides, though I haven’t been invited in. They have a son, but the mother and father travel a lot.”
“What are those?” Hank asked, pointing at three posts that dotted the landscape, like giant pushpins stuck into the earth. “Did they start to build a fence and never finish?”
He came to stand beside Jo.
“Only invisible fences are allowed around here,” Mrs. Pearson said. “The family originally came from West Texas, where they had a lot of land and no rules. But once the street association sent them a warning, they stopped work.”
“They left some posts, though,” Hank said.
“They did,” Mrs. Pearson said, and Jo heard the disapproval in her voice.
“Anything wrong, ma’am?”
“About a month back, I saw their boy tying a pup to those posts,” the woman said. “The dog was a sweetheart, a pit bull mix. He’d howl and whine for hours. I felt awful for him. The next time I saw they were home, I knocked on their door to suggest they take the dog in when the weather’s so hot. The boy answered, and I said my piece.” She screwed up her face. “He got this horrible look on his face and told me the dog was gone, that it ran off when they were at their house in the country.”
“Did they ever find it?” Jo asked, hoping there was a happy ending to the story.
“Not that I’m aware.” Mrs. Pearson’s eyes widened. “You don’t think it was stolen, too?”
Jo glanced at Hank. “We can check for a report,” she said. “Although if it disappeared somewhere outside of Plainfield . . .”
“It would have been beyond our jurisdiction, ma’am,” Hank finished for her.
Mrs. Pearson nodded, gazing toward the house next door. “They have a sheepdog now. He’s a bit of a growler, but at least Jason doesn’t stake him to the fence post when it’s a hundred degrees.”
“Jason Raine is the boy you confronted?” Hank bounced on his heels, doing a good impression of an overly excited puppy. “The center for the Plainfield Mustangs?”
A high schooler? Jo had been imagining an irresponsible ten-year-old.
“You could be right, I guess. He’s quite a big boy at that.”
“Most underrated player on the team,” Hank remarked. “Crispest snapper I’ve ever seen, and he rarely gets pancaked.”
Jo murmured, “Stay on target.”
Her partner cleared his throat. “What else were you about to say, ma’am?” he asked.
“Just that he drives a big, noisy truck with a Texas flag painted across his rear tailgate. I can hear him every time he comes and goes. The noise is enough to rattle my walls.”
“He’s got it modified, I’ll bet,” Hank said. When the woman wrinkled her brow, he explained, “You know, changed the muffler to make it louder? In these parts, noisy trucks are every teenage boy’s wet dream. They don’t fill ’em with gas. They fuel ’em with testosterone.”
Jo waited until he’d finished with his down-home Click and Clack routine. “Could you run through what happened after you let Duke out?” she asked Mrs. Pearson. “Anything could be of help.”
“Yes, of course. He went outside after dinner, like always,” the older woman said. “I’d cleaned up the dishes and went to the bedroom to put on my nightgown, getting ready for bed while he did his business and sniffed around a bit in the yard. Only last night, he didn’t come when I called him in. I put on my shoes and a robe, got a flashlight, and headed out. I found his collar with his tags in the street.” She stopped and touched her throat, as if that alone would quell her trembling voice. “It was like he’d vanished into thin air.”
“Did you see a car or hear anything?” Jo asked, because the street was kind of off the beaten track. She couldn’t imagine it got much traffic from outside the neighborhood, save for the postman or FedEx.
“Nothing out of the ordinary, no.”
“Does the dog have a microchip to identify him?” Jo asked.
“He does, but that counts only if someone takes him to a vet and they scan for it. Otherwise, it’s useless.”
Jo saw the woman’s trembling hands and pulled out a nearby deck chair, in case she wanted to sit. But Mrs. Pearson waved her off.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“Do you live alone, ma’am?” Jo asked.
“My kids are grown with children of their own. They’re out of state. My husband is in a memory care facility. He has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know who I am half the time, so I guess I’ve lost him, too, haven’t I?”
“I’m sorry,” Jo said instinctively, thinking of her own mother, who’d suffered a similar fate; she brushed off a familiar twinge of guilt.
Mrs. Pearson sucked in a deep breath and seemed to steady herself. “Ted and I built this house when Plainfield was mostly pasture. It was one of the first real subdivisions out here. I always felt safe, like nothing could touch me or my family. Now I can hardly read the news for all the tragic headlines. Makes me think my husband has it easy, being so unaware. Everything’s a goddamned mess.”
Hank coughed, like he’d swallowed down the wrong pipe.
“It’s a big mess, for sure,” Jo agreed, ignoring him.
“Duke was a godsend,” Mrs. Pearson went on, “such a gentle creature. He never wanted anything from me but love.” She reached for the arm of the deck chair Jo had pulled out for her earlier, sinking into it. “He must be scared to death. I can’t even imagine what he’s feeling,” she said, choking on a fresh round of tears. “Why would anyone take him?”
“I don’t know,” Jo said and pulled up a chair. “We’ll try to help as best we can, okay?”
“Okay.” The woman nodded, wiping at her tears.
“If y’all don’t mind, I’m gonna take a look around,” Hank said. “I won’t get shocked by the fence, ma’am, will I?”
“Not unless you’re wearing an electric collar,” Mrs. Pearson told him. “No need to worry. It’s turned off.”
“Much appreciated.”
“Be with you in a minute,” Jo said, earning her a loose salute before Hank ambled down the deck stairs and disappeared around the side of the house.
“I don’t know what else I can do,” Mrs. Pearson told her, plucking a tissue from her cardigan pocket to dab at her eyes behind her specs. “My kids want to help out, but they’re so far away. They promised to get on social media and post messages and pictures, for all the good that’ll do.”
“It can’t hurt,” Jo assured her.
“Should I offer a reward?”
“You can try,” Jo said. Money was as big a motivator as any, probably better than relying on kindness or character these days.
Not much else she could do but collect a photo of Duke and the dog’s collar, which Mrs. Pearson put in a zippered baggie.
Then she went after Hank, figuring he hadn’t gone far. With his bum knees, he never traveled very fast. And she was right. He hadn’t come close to reaching the mailbox near the street where Mrs. Pearson had found Duke’s collar. Instead, he’d benched himself behind the steering wheel of the old Ford. He had the door open and a leg hanging out.
As she got closer, she opened her mouth to give him hell for sitting down on the job, but then she heard him talking to Dispatch.
She caught a “Roger that” before he gestured at her to get in the car. He quickly pulled his leg in and slammed the door.
The engine coughed to life as Jo rounded the hood, inhaling the stink of exhaust as she scrambled inside.
“What’s up?” she asked, grabbi
ng for the shoulder belt.
“Someone took a dive off the old water tower.”
“Who?”
“A kid,” Hank grimly replied. “The human kind.”
CHAPTER THREE
Hank said little during their drive across Plainfield. His craggy face had been pensive to the point of looking pained, and Jo understood why.
Dispatch had informed them that a young woman had been found dead on the grounds of the old water tower. A dog walker cutting through the weed-infested acreage had stumbled upon her body. The fire department had dispatched EMTs, but the girl had been deceased long enough for rigor mortis to set in. They’d nixed transporting her to the local hospital, calling the PD instead.
Jo knew Hank was thinking of his own girls. They were still in grade school, not close to being old enough to visit the water tower on their own, much less try to climb it. She could see in his eyes the gut-wrenching empathy, no doubt wondering about the girl’s parents and what hell they’d go through once they heard the news.
“It’s like a beacon, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “Kids hit puberty, and they feel compelled to climb.”
Jo pushed aside the sun visor and saw what he meant.
With no tall trees to block the view, the sky seemed to widen, and the water tower came into full view.
“If I’d grown up in these parts, I would’ve done it. You would have, too.”
“Maybe,” Jo said, never having been much of a daredevil, at least not while she’d been a kid, living with Mama. She’d been in survival mode then, enduring chronic abuse from her stepfather while her mother drank herself numb.
But Hank was right that the water tower beckoned the young. Since she’d joined the Plainfield force three years ago, every season without fail, they’d ended up on the tower grounds, following reports of kids bypassing the decrepit chain-link fence, throwing beer bottles off the widow’s walk, or shooting at the tower with paint guns.
“I heard they’re taking it down soon,” she said.
Hank snorted. “They’ve said that for a year, since they got the new one up across town.”
“Demolition’s expensive,” Jo said.
“They could charge money for tickets to see that relic fall. It would pay for itself.”
“I’ll bet they end up bringing it down in the dead of night so they don’t risk anything going wrong and someone getting hurt.”
“Did you know it’s a hundred and thirty feet high?” Hank remarked, his gaze fixed ahead, whether on the road or the tower, Jo couldn’t be sure. The latter grew taller and taller the nearer they got. “It only pumped fifty thousand gallons in its prime. The new one’s closer to two hundred fifty feet high and pumps two point five million gallons.”
“That’s a lot of water,” Jo said, surprised by the detail, or maybe not. Hank didn’t sleep much. He stayed up watching bad TV, or else he trolled the internet, reading articles about esoteric information on sites Jo had never heard of.
What she did know, because City Hall had made a point to inform the whole department, was that the new tower had a ladder on the inside and no widow’s walk tempting kids to go up. It was bigger and better and safer, and it looked like an enormous round chimney.
“One hundred thirty feet,” Hank repeated. “Nobody’s ever survived a fall higher than eighty-five feet. Nobody. Okay, maybe, one in a billion people, like that Czech flight attendant on the plane that exploded some years back. She fell from the sky, broke a couple dozen bones, and was in a coma for, like, three weeks, but she lived to talk about it.”
“Thanks, Ripley.”
“I’m just sayin’. They could have prevented this.”
“I hear ya,” Jo said, because there was nothing else to add.
Two blue-and-whites were already parked in the graveled lot adjacent to the water tower grounds. The gate to the chain-link fence hung wide open. Jo was relieved not to see any signs of reporters. That was another plus of living outside the big city. It took a while for the Dallas media to get to the scene after they’d picked up chatter from the police scanner or from social media.
She didn’t see the white van from the county medical examiner’s office yet, either, but she wasn’t surprised. The suspected suicide of a teen in what amounted to the distant northern suburbs didn’t rate the urgency of homicide victims within the city limits. If the wait looked too long, the Plainfield PD had an arrangement with a local mortuary, which had ample refrigeration.
She couldn’t help wondering what ME would be assigned to the case, and if it would fall to Adam McCaffrey, the man she’d been seeing for months. She’d fallen in love with him years earlier, when she was with the Dallas PD and he was married, making their relationship both ill-timed and impossible. Except he wasn’t married anymore. He’d come to find her when he’d split with his wife, once Jo had stopped wrestling with her conscience, knowing she was better off alone than involved in an affair.
“Time to make the doughnuts,” Hank said, as he released his seat belt and grabbed the keys from the ignition.
The car rocked gently as he got out and closed the door with a solid slap. Jo followed suit, rounding the hood to catch up to him as he headed toward the gate.
The sun had moved a few notches higher in the sky, and Jo felt its heat on her head and the back of her neck. Septembers in North Texas weren’t very forgiving. They were less a prelude to fall than the end of an asphalt-frying summer, viciously hanging on by its toenails.
A trickle of sweat slid down the curve of her back.
She could make out at least one officer in the grass at the base of the tower, taking photographs and measurements. Jo thought of all the rules she’d learned about unattended deaths in her years on the force, and the first was to investigate as though it was a homicide. When cops assumed suicide right off the bat, they missed things. Jo didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to ever let down victims or their families, because she knew how it felt to be marginalized, to not be believed or validated. Her own victimization at the hands of her stepfather never left her mind, not entirely. It was the scab that wouldn’t heal and ran far deeper than the chicken pox scar on her brow.
She paused and glanced up at the tower hulking above them. She saw another officer climbing the ladder. He was about halfway up.
A sour taste filled her mouth.
Had the girl simply fallen? Was it an accident, like something from one of those teen horror flicks? A group of friends climbs the tower, drinks themselves into a stupor, and one of them falls over the guardrail while the others watch in shock.
The other option wasn’t any less tragic.
Had the girl jumped? Had she come out alone and climbed up with the sole intent of ending her life?
Jo had considered it herself once or twice, back when she’d felt emotionally abandoned, stuck in a bad situation and wanting to escape. It was all too easy to go to that place in your head where making all the hurt go away sounded reasonable, even enticing, particularly when you felt alone and trapped and saw no other way out.
She hoped that hadn’t been the case for this girl.
“Hey, partner, you comin’? Or are you gonna stand there all day and stare?” Hank called out, gesturing for her to hurry and catch up to him.
She didn’t tell him what had been going through her head, but he seemed to read her mind anyway.
As they walked together through shin-high grass, he said, “It’s a bad world for raising a girl, and I’ve got two of them. Between social media and reality TV, it’s a constant gauntlet of piss-poor role models, body shamers, haters, and bullies. I wish to God I knew how to keep them safe.”
“It was a bad world for girls even before social media and reality shows,” Jo replied. “It was just easier to pretend it didn’t exist when it wasn’t in your face twenty-four seven.”
Hank gave her a look, the kind that made her wish she could explain herself fully. But even if it had been the right time—and it wasn’t—she would have b
een interrupted.
“Morning, Detectives,” Officer Charlotte Ramsey said, nodding at them as she let them pass through the gate. She pulled it closed behind them, though it wouldn’t likely deter anyone from getting in, not when it didn’t even latch properly, and chain link was missing entirely in spots, leaving gaps between metal fence posts.
“What happened here?” Hank asked, his frown rumpling up his whole face. “Some teenage party gone bad? Are there witnesses?”
“No, sir. None that we’re aware of, anyway.”
“You know who she is?” Jo asked. “I don’t see a car, so she must be local, right?”
“We know now.” Ramsey’s brown ponytail bobbed as she wagged her chin, eager to share. “We got a call not five minutes ago from a woman looking for her daughter. She had no clue the girl wasn’t home last night.”
“She what? How could she not know something like that?” Hank’s voice rumbled.
“She’s a home health care nurse,” Ramsey explained as she led them toward the body in the grass. “She was with a family whose baby is dying. Some kind of cancer or something. She stayed with them until about three a.m. Went home and straight to bed. She woke up a bit ago and . . .”
“No daughter,” Jo finished for her, as they stopped short of the victim.
Ramsey nodded. “Yep. The woman’s name is Barbara Amster,” she continued, while next to Jo, Hank simmered. “The girl matches the description she gave for the kid, down to the shoes on her feet.”
The kid, aka the mess of tangled limbs lying in the grass.
Jo had to remind herself that what she saw was a person, a real human being still a few years shy of full grown, not a life-sized marionette that had been cut from its strings, limbs at all angles, neck unnaturally bent.
Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2) Page 2