Kidnapped ik-10

by Jan Burke

  The other calls, though fewer in number, were harder to take: parents who hadn’t seen their children in years.

  Most were people worn out by their hope. What would they have done with their energy, I wondered, if they hadn’t spent it looking for a missing child? The slight chance that I might be able to help them had led them to take time out of whatever else they had planned that day to contact me. They would patiently tell me the details of their misery, and I didn’t have the heart to cut them off.

  They weren’t all pleasant personalities, either. Jane Serre was clearly drunk when she called at ten in the morning. The booze didn’t make her story any less awful. On a Friday afternoon two years ago, her ex-husband, Gerry Serre, had stopped by a local day-care center and picked up their three-year-old son, Luke, as planned. They shared custody, and he was going to take the boy to San Diego for a week — to see the zoo, Legoland, and Sea World. They never returned. When she checked the hotel he said he would be staying at, they said no reservations had been made under his name. He had left everything — his house, his car, his job — even his band, apparently the one interest he seemed to have outside of work. Hadn’t touched his credit cards or bank accounts. Just disappeared. With Luke.

  “He always was a secretive bastard, you know?” she said, although it came out closer to “scheecretive.” I had been saying “Hmm” to the constant “you knows?,” which was enough to keep her going. I considered cutting the call short, but I knew that if I hung up, the phone would ring again, a call from someone else with another version of the same story.

  The picture she gave me of Gerry was that of an uncommunicative loner, estranged from his family. Jane claimed that she got most of the friends in the divorce, friends who had been hers to begin with, but a guy who worked with Gerry said her ex mentioned that he had been dating someone recently. No one in his office had the name of his new girlfriend, nor had any of them seen her, but Jane figured this gal had money and had helped Gerry to steal Luke.

  The guys in the band, she said, claimed they didn’t know the new girlfriend, either, but they had always hated Jane. The feeling was mutual, and the topic of the band was extensively explored. The name of the band was Snaggletooth, which she claimed he had cruelly named after her, but she had shown him by getting reconstructive dental surgery.

  Up to that point, I managed to jot down the details despite Jane Serre’s slurred delivery. With the dental surgery, I was at the too-much-information stage and ended the call. I wondered if her marriage had made an alcoholic out of her, or if her alcoholism had led, at least in part, to the end of the marriage.

  AFEW more worriers called, and then I got Blake Ives.

  Mr. Ives was a yeller. He wanted to let me know how unhappy he was that we had “glorified kidnappers,” meaning the couple in Mexico. Pointing out that I wasn’t the one who wrote that story seemed cowardly, so I just listened to him rant. I didn’t enjoy that much, but I suppose I half-admired him for still having the ability to yell about his missing daughter, Carla, eight years after his ex-wife and her new boyfriend had taken her. After eight years, no one with a missing child has forgotten that child for a moment, but most people are beaten down.

  So I asked for details. As it turned out, I had known his ex-wife — she had briefly worked at the Express. The yelling suddenly became even more understandable. I had never liked Bonnie Creci, as she was known before she married the unfortunate Mr. Ives.

  I remembered Bonnie as being both smart and sly, one of those women whose supposed concern is carried like a small poisoned dagger. She would take your colleagues aside, and if your name followed the phrase “I worry about…,” what followed your name was not genuine solicitude but something meant to undermine your reputation. Some people thought she was smug, but I didn’t believe she had the underlying self-confidence to carry that off.

  The main reason I had disliked her, though, was that she went out of her way to make trouble for Lydia Ames, who was then assistant city editor. Most of us figured Bonnie was after Lydia’s job. Lydia and I have been friends since grade school, so anyone who tries to mess with her makes two enemies. I wasn’t the only one who came to Lydia’s defense, though. Bonnie found out just how fast the temperature could drop in the newsroom, and she eventually decided it was a little too chilly at the Express.

  “She hasn’t worked here in a decade,” I said to Ives.

  “She stopped being a reporter after she left the Express,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “she stopped long before then.”

  He laughed, and after that, he stopped yelling.

  By the end of the conversation, his volume had come down to a whisper, harder to take than the shouts — but I still couldn’t help him.

  I couldn’t really help any of them. I pointed them to resources they’d already used and ended up telling them the same thing they had heard from everyone else they had turned to for help. I took down names and numbers, but I don’t think any of them thought I’d ever be in touch with them again.

  At around two o’clock, in an extraordinary gesture of mercy, John Walters ambled up to my desk and said, “I might need to send you out on a story.”

  I tried not to look too eager to escape the building, but I knew he saw through it because he laughed.

  “Mark Baker is tied up with the oil island story,” he went on. “You know about that one?”

  “Yes, some of it.” The oil islands were oil-drilling operations set up to look like islands, just off the shore of Las Piernas. Five bodies had washed up on one of them that morning, so Mark, our crime reporter, was out there trying to discover what was going on.

  “Kids who were rafting in the storm,” John said, “but they’re local, so I’ve already got other people helping out on that, and everyone else has his hands full, too. Lydia just got a hot tip at the City Desk. We need someone to go out to the old Sheffield place. You think you can take down some information for Mark without getting yourself in too deep?”

  “It’s a crime scene?” Since I’m married to an LPPD homicide detective, the paper doesn’t allow me to cover stories that involve the police.

  “Looks like it. Unless whoever left a severed hand in the woods up there has some reasonable explanation for it. I’m leaning toward crime scene, myself.”

  “Not one of Frank’s cases?”

  “No, I checked. Harriman is out on the oil island case, I’m told. But the hand in the woods is a possible homicide story, which is why it won’t be yours. Still, I need someone to get some basics for Mark to work with. I’ll need photos, too. A waste of your talents, but imagine what’s happening to my own while I work here. You want it?”

  “Just get me off the damned phone.”

  He smiled conspiratorially.

  Guilt kicked in. I talked to him about the calls that were bothering me. “Do you think we could run photos of these kids as a kind of follow-up?”

  “Those kids are nowhere near here, and you know it. The spouse who took them is not going to hang out in the town he or she took them from.”

  “I guess not,” I said glumly.

  He called the switchboard from my phone and told them to take messages for me. “Go on, Kelly,” he said. “You need some fresh air.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Monday, April 24

  2:40 P.M.

  THE SHEFFIELD ESTATE

  THE area known to most locals as the “old Sheffield place” is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and has been since the house on the old estate burned down. I pulled up to a gate normally used by construction crews, where I was recognized by a friend of Frank’s, an old cop who was close to retirement. He regularly angered his bosses, which is probably why he drew this duty on a cold, wet day. He gave me the usual set of warnings about not wandering onto the crime scene itself, and made me sign in — an old hand, he gave me a fresh sheet.

  “Trying to keep me from knowing who else has been here?” I asked.

  “You already miss
ed the meat wagon,” he said with a wink, and told me my friend Ben Sheridan was the forensic anthropologist on the case. He shook his head. “I don’t know how that guy gets up those slopes with one leg.”

  “He’s in better shape than you,” I said, “and with the prosthesis he has, he can manage just about anything he could do before the amputation.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Frank says,” he said, but he was still shaking his head. He took the sheet back, radioed his coworkers to warn them I was on the way, and told me to go slow because the road down to the site was “slicker than owl shit.”

  His comment about the meat wagon was not lost on me. The coroner had already removed the body. And there had been a body, not just a hand, or they wouldn’t have needed the full-on “wagon.”

  I passed what had once been the main road into the estate. As I went by, I caught a glimpse of new construction, rising over what had been charred ruins. The lost structure, the grand Sheffield home, had been owned by one of Las Piernas’s oldest and richest families, and built above the leg-shaped cliffs that gave Las Piernas its name. The Sheffields had once owned vast amounts of land in Las Piernas, and although most of it had been sold off, about six hundred wooded acres remained around the family home at the time it burned down.

  The heir donated half of the property to the city on the condition that it be developed into a park. He had worked with the city to create a specific plan before finalizing the donation. Legal and budgetary problems had led to delays, but the mayor was ensuring that development of the park went forward as quickly as possible now.

  The rain wasn’t helping.

  I eased around a curve in the muddy construction road and thought of something Ben Sheridan once told me: Rain brings the bodies out.

  In the forests, in fields, and in vacant lots; in open desert spaces, on mountain slopes, near riverbeds, near creeks. Once in a while, in a backyard. A good rainstorm would reveal the secrets of a shallow grave, wash away whatever hid a body from view, or carry remains to a place where discovery was more likely, if not inevitable.

  In the days after a storm, Ben often got calls from sheriff’s departments and coroners, police departments and forest rangers. On this April morning, it had been the Las Piernas County Coroner’s Office.

  I negotiated another turn on the access road and was just heading past a turnout when a huge SUV came roaring toward me. I swerved hard to the side to avoid being hit head-on, sliding into the turnout with less-than-perfect control before I came to a halt. The SUV didn’t slow, the driver didn’t so much as glance back.

  I had only caught a glimpse of her, but I knew who she was. She was a person who always made sure she stood out in a crowd. She was in her late twenties, but there was a hardness in her features that made her look much older. Chain-smoking probably didn’t help her skin, either. Her hair was cropped close to her skull and was the kind of orange you sometimes see on tigers. It looks better on tigers.

  I wouldn’t have minded driving Sheila Dolson off the road, but I would have felt damned bad about harming the other passenger — her search dog, Altair.

  I sat in my Jeep Cherokee at the side of the road, a little shaken. I’m sure Sheila, who had been courting my attention from the moment she learned I worked for the newspaper, would have been appalled to realize that she had just missed killing the goose she hoped would lay the golden PR egg — she had been urging me to write about her and her wonder dog.

  If I could have written about Altair and not his handler, I might have gone for it.

  Sheila had returned to Las Piernas after living in Illinois. In the short time she had been back, she had all but taken over the Las Piernas SAR — search-and-rescue — dog group. Ben and his dogs were in the same group, and Sheila’s presence in it was a source of irritation to him. Ben’s girlfriend — no, recent ex-girlfriend, I reminded myself — was also in the group, and apparently she thought Sheila could do no wrong. I wouldn’t say that Sheila caused their recent breakup, but she definitely hastened it.

  I wondered what Sheila was doing here, then remembered that one of the things Ben didn’t like about her was that she didn’t wait to be invited to search scenes.

  I carefully pulled out again and slowly made my way to a gravel parking lot at the end of the road. The lot lay at the bottom of a slope. Another small access road ran along the top of the slope. Ben and a young man who looked vaguely familiar to me were studying an area along the slope itself — steep, uneven, and muddy terrain covered with trees, rocks, wet leaves and vines. A scattered set of little flags formed a spill of artificial color down one of the gullies in the face of the slope. Evidence or possible evidence had been found at each of those points along the spill.

  Despite my bragging about him at the gate, I wondered if the slope had given Ben any trouble. I worry like this even though it pisses him off.

  I noticed that the six men at this site all had some of the landscape on their clothing — although Ben and his assistant had been smart enough to don coveralls. I also noticed that the only person who didn’t have mud stains all over the seat of his pants was Ben. He was being careful. I let go of my concerns for his safety.

  They had all looked up when they heard the Jeep approach. Vince Adams, one of the homicide detectives who had caught this case, was standing not far from where I parked, going over some notes. A couple of guys in uniform were present, one standing at the very top of the slope, the other down in the lot, having a cup of coffee from a thermos. Ben glanced up at me, then went back to work with a look of resignation on his face.

  From what I could see, things were winding up. Several of the flags were near places along the slope that had been dug out — the remains were already on their way to the coroner’s office, and most of what was happening now had the appearance of the end of an initial search.

  Vince greeted me warmly. I hid my surprise. Vince and my husband both work in Homicide, and are friends, but Vince is usually fairly tight-lipped around me. I didn’t take his cordiality to mean I was his new best friend. The police were in need of help from the public on this one.

  “Your partner not around?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Back at headquarters, getting some of the paperwork started.”

  “So you drew the short straw.”

  He laughed and said I must have, too. I explained that I was just here to get some notes together for Mark Baker, who would be writing the story. “He’ll probably call you a little later today.” That was fine with Vince, who began to give me a basic idea of what had gone on before my arrival.

  A pair of workers, beginning the task of setting up a jogging path through the woods, discovered that someone had used this slope as a dumping ground — seven mud-coated green plastic trash bags lay scattered down it. As they drew closer, they noticed a strong smell of decay. The nearest bag had torn open, and some of its contents spilled out onto the damp ground — the workers were horrified to see a decaying human hand lying among some leaves not far from it. The hand was not attached to an arm.

  “One of them said he almost puked right then and there,” Vince told me. “And I’m glad he didn’t, ’cause I’ve fallen in every other damned thing on this slope.”

  Luckily, the workers had called the police without trying to touch or further examine the bags. Training sessions by the police department’s new lab director had paid off as well — the first officer on the scene didn’t do any exploring, either. This meant the search for the remains and evidence could take place with little disturbance to the scene.

  The coroner was tied up on the case out at the oil island, but Ben probably would have been called in, anyway. All of the bags contained body parts. Ben thought they were from one adult male victim.

  “That’s not for publication,” Ben said, walking up to us. “I haven’t verified that yet.”

  “At least one adult male?” I asked.

  He hesitated, but Vince said, “Yes.”

  “Found his head,�
�� Vince went on, earning a frown from Ben. “We’re hoping a forensic artist will be able to get a drawing out for us. You think the paper would run it?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. Always a safe answer.

  “We may not need to do that,” Ben said, in a tone that told me his patience was worn thin. “We may be able to match dental records with a missing-persons report.”

  “Got any other identifying information on him? Age range? Height? Weight?”

  “That will all have to wait,” Ben said firmly.

  “What else have you recovered up here?”

  “Nothing I’m telling you about.”

  “Any clues about the killer?”

  “Who says there is a killer?”

  “I suppose this guy just chopped himself up, stuffed himself into bags, rolled out here, and buried himself?”

  “It could be death from natural causes. People have been known to dispose of remains in worse ways.”

  Vince, concerned that he was about to lose the paper’s cooperation, said, “Ben’s just joking with you. There’s always a chance it’s as he said, of course, but we are treating this as a homicide. Too early to talk about suspects, though. If we can identify the victim, that will likely take us a lot closer to figuring out who put him here.”

  I wanted to ask him more about that, but his cell phone rang and he moved off.

  Ben started telling me that I might as well go back to the office.

  I looked up at the slope. The young man working there was focusing on something, digging carefully. He was a little taller than Ben, with dark brown hair. “Is that your new graduate assistant?” I asked.

  “Caleb—” He caught himself. “No, I don’t think I’ll tell you his last name.”

  “For God’s sake, you think I couldn’t find out if I wanted to?”

  He considered this, then said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t include his name in any stories about this case.”

  “Not up to me. Not my story. Like I told Vince, Mark Baker will be writing it.” I watched his assistant for a while. Ben wouldn’t be acting like this unless his helper was someone who had already been in the news. It took me only a few minutes to connect the name Caleb to a story that had been big news in Las Piernas a few years earlier. “Jesus. Caleb Fletcher. So he’s one of the powerful Fletcher clan, eh?”