Blood Ties (John Jordan Mysteries Book 16)

by Michael Lister

  The other note is the ransom note that changed everything.

  “Ashley’s mom, Arlene,” he says. “Arlene Lafontaine was telling a story about the time Ashley ran away as a child when Nadine the nanny came running in the room screaming. She was holding a piece of paper in her hand, sort of flapping it around. As she’s bringing it over to me, Trace rushes into the room and snatches it out of her hand. ‘What is it?’ I asked. She said it was a ransom note she found in Mariah’s room. Trace, who was reading the note, lost it. Threw a glass ashtray through the glass top coffee table. Everyone else started panicking. The whole scene was pandemonium.”

  According to her statement, Nadine went into search Mariah’s room again and decided to make up the bed while she was there. As she did, a ransom note fell out of a fold in the bedspread.

  It read: I’ll make this simple so even an ignorant thug like you can understand. I have your daughter. If you want her back it will cost you $250,000.00. That’s a very small amount because I want to do this fast and easy. I know you have a lot more, but that’s all I want. I’m not greedy, have no desire to be nigger rich like you. I don’t want no gold teeth or spinning rims or any shit like that. Your song says you will never leave her again. Well, maybe not, but she’s left you. You say you will never hurt her again, never let her down. We will see if you really mean that. I don’t want to hurt your little girl. Don’t make me. Just gather the money and I’ll call you with where we’ll meet to make the trade. Don’t test me boy. Don’t call the police. Don’t tell anyone. You do and it’s lights out for the little mixed girl. Just get the little chump change together and wait for my call. Be smarter than you seem and don’t fuck this up. Your little girl’s life depends on it.

  “What’d you do then?” I ask.

  “Cleared the house,” he says. “Got everyone out, which wasn’t easy. Put the note in a plastic evidence bag—even though three or four of us had already touched it. And called the detective on duty, Arnie Ward. From that point forward, all I did was secure the scene and wait for the cavalry.”

  8

  Our home is visible from the Methodist church on Main Street.

  So the entire time I had been talking to Andy, I had not only been keeping an eye on our house, but missing Anna and the girls and wanting to be with them.

  After concluding my conversation with Andy, I swing by the Dixie Dandy and grab Anna’s favorite breakfast food from the deli and surprise her with it.

  While Daniel does physical therapy with Sam and the girls play in their room, Anna and I have a picnic on the floor of my library.

  My library is unlike any room I’ve ever had in any previous house. It’s in the converted formal living room in the front corner of the house. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line three of the four walls. The fourth has glass enclosed shelves of the barrister variety with my signed first editions in them. They are shorter shelves and stop about three feet from the ceiling. Their tops are filled with art objects and family pictures, behind them framed photographs hang on the wall.

  “This is so good,” she says, crunching on a piece of crispy bacon. “So sweet of you. Don’t you want some?”

  I shake my head. “Just want to watch you enjoy it.”

  Though there are a couple of chairs, we are as usual sitting on one of the two large rugs on the center of the hardwood floor.

  “How’d it go with Andy?” she asks.

  I smile and shake my head again. “No shoptalk,” I say. “Not now. Let’s just enjoy each other and the food. I do want to talk about the case with you—especially once I know more. Maybe tonight. I was thinking . . . I’d really like to get Sam and Daniel involved somehow.”

  She nods vigorously, finishes chewing and swallowing and says, “I love that idea. And I love no shoptalk right now too. But let’s extend that to no household or kid talk too.”

  “How’d you sleep?” I ask. “How do you feel?”

  “Slept great. Feel good. Even better now that my honey paid me a surprise visit with bacon.”

  “I told you when you married me there would be bacon.”

  “I guess I just took that to be sexual like most everything else you say to me.”

  “Sometimes bacon is just bacon.”

  “You sayin’ if I lock the library door and we manage to get a few more uninterrupted minutes, I won’t get lucky?”

  “I am not now, nor I have I ever been, saying anything of the dang kind.”

  “We are still on our honeymoon, aren’t we?”

  I nod emphatically. “Least for another fifty years or so.”

  “So we’re sort of duty bound, wouldn’t you say? Sneak in and check on the kiddos without them seeing you while I savor these last bites and when you come back, lock the door.”

  Johanna and Taylor are playing happily and intensely, and when I return to the library and lock the door, Anna and I do the same.

  When we are finished, I say, “Why thank you, Mrs. Jordan.”

  “My pleasure, Mr. Jordan. You know how much I love to score on the library floor.”

  9

  Once Mariah’s body had been discovered, Arnie Ward, the investigator who caught the case, had been partnered with an African-American FDLE agent named Lakeisha Colvin, but when Andy Finch first called in the cavalry, Arnie alone rode in.

  Arnie is in court today, so we meet during his lunch break.

  Arnie Ward is a decent man and a solid detective. Conscientious and hardworking, he plods along checking the boxes, filing the reports, crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of each case. He has a small, limited tool box—one without creativity or intuition—but the tools he has he uses often and efficiently.

  There are people in this world who do not look like what they really are. Arnie isn’t one of them. His average build, clean shave, clear eyes, barbershop haircut, drugstore aftershave, sensible shoes, and utilitarian clothes offer no conflict or contradiction to the soul or mind of the man beneath them.

  “Sure wouldn’t’ve hurt my feelings any if you’d’ve caught this one instead of me,” he says.

  We’re sitting on the tailgate of his white F-150 on the side of the courthouse beneath the only shade we can find, taking advantage of a few moments without rain.

  “To be honest,” he says, “I’m glad you’re lookin’ into it now.”

  Unlike many of the men I meet in law enforcement and virtually every other field, Arnie isn’t egotistical or interested in recognition, and I know he won’t be defensive as we discuss the case.

  “Case like this . . .” he says, “is too important, too complicated to be left to just one detective. I’m glad we have agent Colvin and I’m glad we have you.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I appreciate that. And I’m not here to second guess or be critical of anything that’s been done. Just trying to gather and evaluate the information, not the investigation.”

  He nods.

  Between us, a series of plastic Tupperware type containers hold a wide variety of homemade dishes that appear far too fresh and sophisticated to be simple leftovers.

  Arnie is also the kind of man who brings his lunch every day.

  Each morning, his wife prepares a full, large meal for him and places it in a complex array of plastic containers, and each day at lunch, Arnie sits at his desk and eats every bite.

  “Sure you don’t want some?” he asks.

  The container he’s holding and eating from now appears to have some sort of Salisbury steak with a thick brown gravy and mashed potatoes. A smaller container with the lid off balances precariously on his lap and has steamed vegetables that he stabs and eats in between bites of the meat and potatoes.

  I nod. “Thank you.”

  “Okay, so . . . I’ll make this quick ’cause I don’t have much time. Judge wants to finish the case today, which is all right by me. I drove out there, wondering what was really going on and if I should call in the FBI or FDLE or what. No reason to if she was still in the area, but if she had be
en taken out of the state and this thing was going to involve several agencies and jurisdictions, we’d need them. The call I made was to wait until I got out there to see what we had. I should have called Reggie at that point, but I thought Andy Finch had, so I didn’t. But I should have anyway. She’s right to be mad at me about that. Hell, I shoulda called Langston at least and he would’ve called her, but . . . I was so focused on what I had to do, on what I was going to be dealing with.”

  Langston Costin is the Chief Deputy, who has been in charge since Reggie has been out on medical leave.

  “Turns out . . . I didn’t make the wrong call exactly,” he says. “We didn’t need the FBI because we really didn’t have a kidnaping, but . . . if I had called Reggie sooner—or Langston—they would’ve probably called in FDLE crime scene lab from the beginning. Would’ve been helpful to have them there sooner.”

  I nod.

  Before us, the courthouse is busy—citizens coming and going, conducting their business with the court, the clerk, the property appraiser. Out on 71, as vehicles pour into town, most of them with Georgia and Alabama tags on them, they slow as the road widens and the two lane highway becomes the four lane parkway. They slow, but not nearly enough.

  “By the time I got out to the scene, Andy had it taped off and everybody out,” he continues. “The parents and their staff and family and friends were at a neighbor’s house next door. It’s funny to think of them as neighbors—they’re all just renting these places for the holiday, but . . . you know what I mean. It was the house of Mariah and Brett’s little friend, Caden. Andy hands me both notes—the runaway and the ransom. I read them both. And I was just . . . overwhelmed. Honestly, I was like . . . this is beyond me. Thankfully, the K-9 unit got there just before me and were already at work. I knew I needed to get with the dad, Trace . . . and make sure he had his phone, get the recording device attached to it, see who his wireless provider was so I could contact them about a trace on the call when it came. As I walked over to the house next door to talk to him and do that, I started to call Reggie, but I got a call and then I was there and talking to the dad and . . . it was a while before I called her.”

  “Was Trace cooperative?” I ask.

  “Extremely,” he says. “Respectful. Helpful. Anxious to do anything he could to get his daughter back.”

  “That’s interesting,” I say. “Think Andy had a very different experience with him.”

  “He was upset and intense, but . . . just what you’d expect.”

  “So you get the recording device hooked up and contact the cell provider,” I say.

  He nods. “And there was no call,” he says. “For a ransom, I mean. He got other calls, of course. Some of them . . . You should listen to them. Some sounded pretty suspicious to me, but . . . no ransom call.”

  He pauses a moment to eat the final bite of the container he’s working on, close the lids, and open the final one—some type of cobbler with a crunchy top layer on it.

  Dark storm clouds gather out over the Gulf to our west reminding us that this briefest of respites from the rain can’t last much longer.

  “I wait with the family for a while,” he says after a few bites of the dessert, “but there’s no timeframe on the note, so we have no idea how long before the call will come, so I go back outside to check on Andy and the K-9 unit and to call Reggie. But once again . . . things happen fast and I don’t call Reggie right away, so even more time passes. Nearly the moment I walked out, the correctional officer in charge of the dogs—I forget his name—”

  “Ronnie Wyrick?” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Ronnie. He comes over to me and says there’s no scent outside. He doesn’t think the little girl ever left the house.”

  “What was he using for scent?” I ask.

  “Pair of shorts and a t-shirt she had worn just the day before,” he says. “The stepmom—Ashley, I mean, picked it right up off the floor of Mariah’s bedroom. It was fresh. Ronnie said the dogs . . . I don’t know . . . he could tell by the way they reacted that there was plenty of her scent on it.”

  I nod and think about it.

  “He said his dog keeps going to the back door—the one on the first floor that leads out to the pool deck and he wanted to know was it okay for him to let the dog go inside. On the lead, of course, he’d be right there with him. I said sure. And he said he wanted me to go with him . . . in case . . . he found something. I said sure, okay. And instead of calling Reggie, I went back in the damn house with Ronnie and the dog. But letting the dog go in the house and not calling Reggie were the least of my mistakes at this point. See, with Andy over at the entrance guarding the perimeter and me going with Ronnie . . . there was no one with the family over at the neighbors’. And evidently Trace was watching us from a window ’cause . . . I didn’t know it at the time, but . . . he must’ve seen us around the back door and then go in. Like I say, I didn’t know it at the time. So we go in and . . . and remember we’re talking a big ass house. It’s built up on stilts with parking underneath like most houses that close to the water and then there are three levels above that. Hell, the pool isn’t in the ground. It’s on a platform so that it’s level with the first story deck. Anyway . . . huge house, but the dog doesn’t spend much time in the living room or kitchen—a little, but then he’s off, climbing the stairs, Ronnie on the lead behind him and me behind him. There’s a guest bedroom on the first floor with the living room and kitchen and game room and all. The manager was staying in it. The second floor held the master suite. Trace and Ashley were staying in it. The third floor had three rooms—a kids room and two guest rooms. Mariah was in the kids room, Brett was in one of the guest rooms and Nadine the nanny was in the other. You could tell the dog was alerting on her scent sort of all over the house, but it went straight up to her room. Which, I mean, that’s what you’d expect, right? So I didn’t think much of it. I . . . I searched the house personally. Every room. I knew the . . . I knew she wasn’t in the house. I just figured her scent was the strongest in her room so that’s why he was going there. But when he got in there . . . he alerted on her bed. The bed she slept on. There was her bed—just sort of a regular bed with a big pink comforter on it with pillows beneath it and a set of bunk beds on the other wall. The bunk beds were made up, looked like no one had been on them at all, but her bed was unmade, the comforter hanging half off down to the floor. This is the bed where both notes were found—the runaway note on her pillow and then the ransom note in the fold of the comforter.”

  “According to Ashley and Nadine,” I say.

  “Yeah. Ashley said she found the runaway note on her pillow that morning and Nadine said she found the ransom note in the comforter when she was making up the bed.”

  “Sounds like she didn’t get very far in making up the bed,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Not at all. I assumed she saw the note and just dropped the covers, but I shouldn’t be assuming anything, should I?”

  “We all do it,” I say. “That’s why it’s so helpful to talk it through and ask and answer questions.”

  He nods, licks the last of the cobbler from his fork, and replaces the lid.

  “So,” I say, “the dog alerts on the bed . . .”

  “And I think of course because the little girl slept there, spent more time there than any other single place. But then I realize . . . the dog isn’t alerting on the bed so much as under the bed. And I start asking myself did I look under the bed earlier and . . . I know I did, I had to. There’s no way I wouldn’t look under her bed while searching the house, but in that moment I couldn’t remember for sure and started doubting myself. Ronnie turns to me and says, ‘She’s under that bed. I’d bet $250,000.00.’ And I’m . . . just . . . I’m about to tell him to clear the room, take the dog out, and I’d lift the comforter with my gloved hands and look again, this time with a flashlight . . . but before I can do any of that Trace rushes in, slings back the covers, drops to his knees, and pulls the bound body of his
lifeless little girl out from beneath the bed.”

  10

  Later that afternoon, as I’m driving home from the prison, I get a call from Randa Raffield’s father, Jerry.

  In addition to being an investigator at the Gulf County Sheriff’s Department, I’m a part-time prison chaplain at Gulf Correctional Institution, and I had an afternoon shift of conducting crisis counseling, facilitating support groups, and attending meetings.

  Though being an investigator with the sheriff’s department gives me plenty to do, I enjoy being a prison chaplain and can’t let it go. Each job is fulfilling and rewarding in a way the other is not, and I’m grateful I have the opportunity to do both.

  “John?” Jerry says. “Can’t believe I got you.”

  He has called several times since Daniel’s return, but this is the first one I answered.

  “I’ve been away,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “I heard you got married. Congratulations.”

  Jerry Raffield, a psychologist living in Seaside, has stayed in touch with me since I first interviewed him about his missing daughter. Though she had vanished and cut off all communication with him, with everyone, he has expressed nothing but love for her and a desire to find her and be in her life again.

  “I’m sure you know why I’m calling,” he says.

  “I bet I can guess,” I say, “but why don’t you tell me.”

  “I heard Randa returned Daniel safe and sound,” he says.

  “We got Daniel back,” I say. “It’s not entirely clear how.”

  “Surely she—”

  “I think she drugged him the entire time she had him,” I say.

  “I truly believe she returned him,” he says. “Unharmed. I take her at her word that she only took him for a little insurance. Think about what all she’s been through. I’m sure she was just trying to protect herself.”