“Two: we don’t know how the material was distributed, only how it wasn’t. We know it came on discs, not how those arrived at people’s homes. There’s no evidence they were mailed. We can’t find any traces of him working via the Internet. We can’t be sure, but Gary even appears to have stayed off the dark web, where it can be hard for authorities to go. He kept everything in pen and ink and worked by word of mouth. I have to think he planned to give up his clients to plead himself down if he ever got arrested. But we’ve gone through his apartment and his mother’s house, and there’s nothing. He tried to plant pictures in Stan’s home and your new building, but we can’t find anything else. The last places he was affiliated with were the university and the center, and that leaves us acres of unsearched land. His records haven’t shown up yet. He might have destroyed them, but I won’t accept it until I’ve looked everyplace.
“Three: He’d made us, Noel. He told Natasha we were federal agents. Why did he leave us alone to track him after he found out? Was he hoping to lay low and vanish? Did he figure it would be as dangerous to go after us as leave us alone? Or was he confident for some other reason? He was young to be the head of an organization, and there might have been someone above him. Someone still knows exactly who we are, and they want to see what we’re doing.”
“Don’t you think they’ll stop acting until you go away?”
“The body at your sanctuary suggests not. The bottom line is we’re still here because there’s still something to find.”
“But . . .”
“Noel, I can’t tell you anything else, and it’s more than you can tell your family. Let Darnell and me manage your Nana.”
“Sure. Good luck.”
“I have a job for her, if she’s up for some holiday fun.”
CHAPTER 24
Dear Nora:
My mother won’t admit my children need medication to help moderate their behaviors. Please help.
Caught in the Middle
Dear Noel:
All right already! I’ve never missed a dose! And for the record, I’ve watched them often enough that I’m beginning to see your point.
Love,
Mom
Trudy humored my family with a halftime highlights version of the last two days. She focused on the heroic rescue of the deputies (by the time she was finished, the center’s walk-in fridge sounded more like a deep freeze) and the grisly horror of the dead body. She didn’t pull any of those details for the children, all of whom had seen at least the headless body. She also confirmed what we already knew, that the head belonged to Hugh Marsland.
It was old enough news for the kids, and both Sara and William were exhausted enough to fall asleep on the sofa, half-eaten plates in their laps, long before she got to the part about the head anyway. I moved Sara’s pizza to the floor but carried the remains of William’s syrupy waffle back to the kitchen before it could drizzle temptation everywhere for Mama’s dogs.
When I returned, Trudy was dodging a question from Nana, who wanted to know how long it would take to solve the case. “It will take some time,” said the agent.
“I watch crime shows,” Nana continued. “And the head you and Noel described was all dried out. How did that happen in only one day?”
I expected a lecture similar to the one Drew had given me about not taking too much from CSI shows. Instead, Trudy said, “Hugh had Type O blood. The body was Type A. We’re still missing that head. And its extremities. And we don’t have Hugh Marsland’s body.” Then, before Nana could ask anything else astute, Trudy changed the topic. “Now, Ms. Cox, I need a favor from you.”
“A favor? From me?” Nana was instantly suspicious. But also interested. Trudy might have found the path to earning Nana’s silence tonight.
“Yes. You’re an innocent old woman, frail and easily broken, which makes you perfect for what I have in mind.”
“I’ll have you know . . . Wait. What do you have in mind?” Curiosity was winning out over skepticism. Nana put down a piece of pizza she had been preparing to devour. Her tiny frame belied a voracious appetite. Only Lance could out-eat her when it came to the Marine.
“T-Bow Orrice is notoriously protective of his children.”
The pizza won out over curiosity and skepticism, and Nana answered around a mouthful of sausage. “Mm?”
“You are notoriously protective of your family.”
“I certainly hope he has no idea who I am.”
“He’s probably looked Noel and Lance over more thoroughly than social services ever tried to do. He may be better connected to the world through his prison cell than I am through a career in federal law enforcement. In the past, my office has asked Stan in to do something like this, especially since he’s dealt with Orrice before. Of course, he’s in no condition to drive himself two hours to prison and two hours back home again right now.”
“And I am?” The pizza was down again.
“I’ll drive you most of the way. You’ll go the last few miles on your own.”
“What do you want?”
“Two things. I want you to go in there deeply concerned about the danger to your new great-grandchildren. Pretend like you think he might be responsible for it. Get under his skin, but then accept whatever he tells you. He’s sure to deny it. He may even act like they aren’t his kids. He doesn’t want them associated with him, but he wants them alive preserving his line. He hasn’t interfered in two other adoptions besides Natasha’s, and I have to assume his fury with Terry Dalton lay in the deception. As I understand it, even Stan had to push hard to get him to say he was Natasha’s father, and then Orrice was the one pushing Stan to adopt.
“He’ll want you out of there as fast as possible as soon as you bring the twins up. But I want him off kilter when you ask him if this guy,” Trudy produced a picture, “means anything to him.”
“Who is he?” It was a profile shot of a middle-aged white man at a party. He was laughing beside a young blonde, whose smile looked camera-frozen.
“Terry’s brother. Charles Dalton,” Natasha said flatly. “I should have known him straight off, but he stayed away from me at the gala, and I was kind of distracted by Granddad.”
“Our gala?” I took the picture and scrutinized it more closely. But the shot wasn’t from our party. We hadn’t been outdoors. The picture had been zoomed, so little besides his face and that flash of his companion showed. He could have been anywhere with trees.
Trudy cleared her throat in a “let me do the talking” sort of way. “You’re going to tell him you met him at a friend’s daughter’s party,” she said to Nana, “and now you’ve seen him twice in Noel and Lance’s neighborhood.”
Nana ignored the picture. “But who is he?” Trudy didn’t say anything. “You’re not answering my question.” Nana had forgotten her pizza. Lance swiped it.
“No, I’m not.” Trudy looked around the assembled circle. “I can’t.”
“How am I supposed to know if he’s telling me the truth or not?”
“You won’t. Accept whatever he says and leave. Darnell and I are, at this moment, this close to losing our jobs.”
“They don’t believe her that he’s Charles Dalton,” Natasha snapped. “They don’t believe me.”
Trudy’s shoulders slumped. This was clearly something Tasha had not been supposed to say. “We have to go about proving you right carefully just now. We could wind up in cells ourselves. If the two of us up and vanish, you leave town and go fast.”
“Jesus. It’s your boss!” Now Lance put down the pizza he had stolen from Nana. She took it back. “You introduced him at the gala.”
“My boss is a woman. And yes, I did introduce you to this man. I won’t say more.” She looked around the room one more time, and her gaze lingered especially long on Natasha.
Lance studied Trudy’s face, as if it might hold answers. “What are you hoping to accomplish?”
“To get your kids out of danger, for one thing.”
Nana
twitched and stretched until she couldn’t hold her silence any longer. “Do I get to wear a wire?”
Trudy pressed her fingers to her temples, much in the way Lance was apt to do when William deliberately got something wrong. “We’re doing this . . . I believe the term I want is under cover of under cover.”
Nana sighed. “No.”
“Yes,” said Trudy. “No.”
Mama and Daddy gave up their bedroom and slept in a guest bed. While plenty of their rooms were spacious enough for two, none were capacious enough for five, and Mama couldn’t roust us from the living room unless we were sleeping where we could see each other. Tasha curled up on Daddy’s recliner, and Lance and I bedded down in my parents’ king-sized bed with the twins between us. William’s pull-ups rarely leaked anymore, and I hoped they wouldn’t tonight, even after Mama pointed out Marguerite’s water had broken on that bed when she was eight and a half months pregnant with Bryce.
“It survived that. It can deal with anything your little boy can dish out,” she assured me.
When Natasha was softly snoring, and I was drifting toward sleep, Lance prodded me across the kids. We crept into the hall and shut the door to a crack. “What? We’re going to wake up the dogs if we move around much more.”
“What the hell is going on with Trudy?” he whispered back.
“Clearly, she thinks she—”
“No, go back. Why are the feds babysitting us? I don’t care how grave or immediate the danger, I doubt they have the resources to dispatch someone to play house with us all the time. Darnell’s not much better than Trudy, but he’s at least not hanging onto us like . . .”
“. . . our nanny? Isn’t she supposed to be our nanny?”
“I don’t buy it. Not anymore. When she introduced that man at our gala, she presented him like he was a superior.”
“Are you sure he’s the man we met at the gala? Was the picture taken there? We didn’t go outdoors.”
“I can’t tell. All I know, Noel, is something is seriously wrong here. I don’t want your Nana going up there alone.”
“After everything she’s done for us, you can’t seriously think Trudy is some kind of threat. I trust her. She’s already told us more than she should. We need to let her do her job and try to live our lives right now.
“She’s not going to kidnap Nana. If she wanted to take William, she could have done it. If she wanted to take Natasha, she could have done it. If we weren’t completely safe with her, she’d have killed us all and hidden the bodies. She has your class schedule. She’s babysitting us. Would you . . .”
“Noel, somebody’s out there.” Natasha’s hand shot out the bedroom door.
“You had a nightmare. If somebody were out there, Mama’s dogs would be . . .” The living room erupted in a fury of yelping.
“You guys woke me up,” she explained, “and I heard the wheels on the gravel. I crawled over to see. Look. There’s somebody resting his head on his arms on top of a car.” She pointed to the window.
“What’s going on out there?” Mama called. “Noel, is everything all right?”
“There’s somebody out there,” Natasha called from the hall. It was all too loud. The twins couldn’t possibly sleep much longer.
“Out where?” Mama shouted. “In our driveway? Isn’t it a little late for . . . ohh.”
Daddy shouted, “Should I get the gun, Lenore?”
Lance glanced toward me, and I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Daddy did not own a gun. The full moon illuminated the figure at the car, who had not moved since Lance and I first looked out.
“Now you people see here,” Daddy bellowed. “I’m seventy-two years old, and I need my sleep. You are seriously interfering with my lifestyle.” The front door banged open, and Daddy stormed onto the porch holding something that looked, from my admittedly limited vantage point, like a shotgun.
“I thought you said . . .” Lance glanced back and forth between my father and the still-sleeping twins. I knew what he was thinking. A gun? How accessible is it? Why could he get it out so fast? How dare he . . . with children in the house! How long has he had it?
“Now you turn around slowly and put your hands up in the air.”
The man, and it was a man, stood slowly, lifting first his head, then his arms. He turned so we could see him clearly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rue. I didn’t know where else to go. I can’t . . . I’m not going to hurt anybody, I swear. I knew Lance and Noel were here, and I need to talk to them. Travis is gone, and I can’t find him, sir.”
“Bryan! Daddy, don’t fire.” I pelted around the corner into the living room.
“Easy, Noel. I see who it is.” Daddy lowered his gun slowly and set it lengthwise inside the door. It was a broom handle. He’d gone out there to bluff a potential killer with the broom handle he used to pop the latch when he needed to open one set of particularly high attic stairs.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Bryan repeated. “Can I come in? Your detective friend is looking for him, but I’m scared to death.”
Has Drew gotten any sleep in the last two days? “In,” I told him. “Mama, we need coffee.”
“You need coffee,” Lance corrected me. “I need sleep. Wake me up in four hours and we’ll trade.”
“Travis called at nine in the morning,” Bryan said, “and we set up a lunch date . . .”
“How often do you actually get out on those dates, Bryan?”
“I don’t know. Once in a while. Anyway, he never cancelled, but when I got there at noon, the Bio Science building was crawling with cops, and they wouldn’t let me in. He never answered my texts, but then I thought he was caught up in whatever was going on inside. Then he didn’t come home for dinner, and his phone stopped ringing altogether, like he’d turned it off or the battery had run down. I expected the police to put me off when I called him in missing . . . I mean, he’s an adult man, and the cops have been known to make assumptions. But your detective friend was out at my house in fifteen minutes. And that’s got me more scared than Travis going missing in the first place.”
Although Bryan was a family friend, I only considered him close in a professional sense. It would have been surprising for him to show up unannounced at my parents’ house, except he knew about today’s interview from Travis. And thanks to Hugh Marsland’s head and the chair’s panicked response to it, it seemed like everyone in town knew where Lance and I were staying. Dr. Prescott had all but shrieked every detail of any conversation he overheard for the world to hear. He wouldn’t say why the head distressed him so much more than the rest of us, but, as Drew muttered, the man gave a good impression of someone who’d been threatened. All the more reason for us to move on quickly.
In all the chaos, I hadn’t seen whether or not Travis was even at work, which was the real reason Bryan had come here . . . to pick my brain. He had tried several other professors, all at more decent hours, then driven sequentially to places Travis might have gone. We were his last-ditch effort, and we didn’t have anything to offer him, though I could, and did, to Trudy’s irritation, give a firsthand account of the afternoon.
This he requested repeatedly, as if by searching my interpretation of the event, he could somehow project Travis into the background of the conference room. Lance had taken the smarter route. I wasn’t swapping him out for rest in any four hours. I was going now.
“I’ve been up for twenty-two hours,” I finally told Bryan. “I am going to bed.” I left him with Mama, who was getting a pair of pajamas my brother-in-law had forgotten here. He creaked up the stairs to a guest room as I crawled in beside my husband, who had a protective arm thrown over both twins.
I woke up exactly three hours later to the sight of my own watch dangling upside down in one eye. “William is school timed,” a pleasant voice informed me.
“William, say ‘I am school-timed’ . . . crap, no, say ‘I am ready for’ . . . never mind. It’s too early. Go back to sleep.”
He crammed the watch more ur
gently against my eyelid. “You are late.”
I pushed the watch far enough back to read the numbers. He was right. I was late. I didn’t want to take him to school at all, given the night we’d had, but, as Lance had pointed out yesterday, he was probably safer there than anyplace we could be. Mrs. Grim or no, I almost wished Sara could go, too.
“Mrs. Grim!” I jumped up and dumped William on the bed. Lance had arranged a meeting with the principal and teacher from hell for us this morning before school. We were supposed to be there in fourteen minutes.
Unlike the job interview, we wouldn’t be pulling this one out at the last second. Lance had gotten far more sleep than I had. I jabbed him in the ribs. “You call up and reschedule.”
“Mmm. What?”
“We’re missing our appointment at Sara’s school. You can call and tell them. William is school timed. I’m rolling him out the door.”
“Roll!” William beamed and matched deed to word, tumbling out of bed and across the floor.
We were leaving the kitchen when Lance stumbled out of the bedroom. “No, I’m coming,” he said. “They’re waiting for us. Mrs. Grim’s students have art for the first part of the morning. This is her free period today.” We did not wait for an escort and received irritated texts from our babysitters as we pulled out of the driveway. I ignored them. Lance waited until after we had dropped William to drop the next bomb. “I had to use Chandra Evans’s name to make it happen.”
She scared me even more than Mrs. Grim. Barely three days after her first surprise visit, she had dropped by again unannounced. Merry should have been making these visits all along, and Chandra was making up for lost time. We hadn’t expected her so soon after our first meeting, so she had caught us in a hurried morning, complete with pudding on the ceiling, which she pointedly ignored. The rest of the house was gleaming, for once, Stan having sent in a service the next working day after the “I’ll be back to check on your housekeeping” trip had ended. In theory, we had passed muster in this regard, as she didn’t refer to it again. But I didn’t plan to cancel Stan’s service until the twins’ adoption was final.
The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 24