by Joel Goldman
“Did you get the name of the parent who complained?”
“Yeah. I’m going to see her later this afternoon. Where are you?”
“On Ellen Koch’s patio. Kate is inside talking with her. She told us that Adam was having an affair with Peggy. He left the house this morning, and she doesn’t know where he went. Peggy isn’t home either. I’m going to have a look around. If he killed the Montgomery boy, he may have kept souvenirs.”
“Timmy’s file says he was wearing blue shorts, a Harry Potter T-shirt and flip-flops when he was last seen. Any of those would qualify.”
Chapter Forty-four
When I came back in the house, Ellen and Kate were still at the kitchen table, Kate holding her hand, their heads bent close together, Ellen apologizing, Kate granting absolution.
“Mrs. Koch,” I said, “do you mind if I look around Adam’s room?”
She raised her head, red, puffy eyes popping with panic. “Why?”
“The police will want to talk with Adam. It will help if we can tell them we didn’t find anything to connect him with Evan and Cara disappearing.”
She hesitated, looking at Kate for reassurance. Kate nodded. Ellen surrendered with a weak shrug and quiet consent. “Top of the stairs.”
“Thanks. This will only take a minute. Kate will stay with you.”
Adam’s room looked like any other teenager’s, moguls built of dirty clothes, muddy jeans on top on one of them, rose from the center of the floor, his bed unmade, his closet a tangle. I sifted through his clothes and dresser drawers, flipped his mattress and looked under his bed without finding a thing.
The hallway outside his room led to a bathroom, which revealed nothing more incriminating than a brown bathtub ring. The other bedroom was Ellen’s. Unlikely as it was to yield anything, I did a quick search, coming up empty. I headed for the stairs until I noticed a pull-down panel in the hallway ceiling. When I opened it, a rickety wooden cross between a stairway and a ladder unfolded to the floor.
The stairs led to the attic, pink insulation stuffed between two-by-fours, plywood laid over floor joists, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I turned on the light, scanning the dim empty space. Straddling the joists, I lifted one of the plywood panels, finding a laptop computer half-buried in insulation.
There was enough juice in the battery to boot it up. I clicked on the Internet browser, not surprised that it wasn’t password protected, teenager logic dictating that a good hiding place beat a password every time.
I knew what I’d find even before I opened the hard drive, flashing back to a time too many years ago when Joy, Kevin, Wendy, and I were living in Dallas. A neighbor had offered to give Kevin a ride home from school. When Kevin didn’t come home, Joy went to the neighbor’s house to look for him. The door was unlocked, a treasure trove of child pornography spread on a table. He killed Kevin and himself as the police and I closed in on him.
Adam’s computer was loaded with hundreds of the same kind of images. I pulled up the other plywood panels. Lodged deep in the insulation beneath one of them was a soft package bound with yellowed newspaper. I unwrapped it, confirming what I felt in my bones. It was a child’s bloodstained Harry Potter T-shirt.
I set the T-shirt next to the laptop and called Adrienne Nardelli, told her where I was and what I’d found.
“I’m on my way. Put my evidence back where you found it and don’t touch another thing.”
Kate and Ellen had moved to a small sofa in a den cluttered with half-finished knitting projects, a crucifix on the wall above the television. Ellen was leafing through a family album, Kate oohing and aahing at Adam’s baby pictures, shielding Ellen a while longer from the storm about to rain down on her. They looked up as I walked in the room.
“Mrs. Koch, the police will be here in a few minutes. Do you have any idea where Adam is?”
She went pale, cradling the photo album to her breast. “Why are the police coming? What did you find?”
“Did Adam know a boy from your church named Timmy Montgomery who disappeared a couple of years ago?”
She melted into the sofa, the photo album sliding from her limp arms onto the floor, muttering. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”
Kate looked at me, eyebrows raised, her question obvious. I answered it with a quick nod. She turned toward Ellen, gently rubbing her shoulder with one hand, holding Ellen’s with the other.
Parents’ worst fear is that something horrible will happen to their child. They cannot imagine the flip side of the nightmare, how much worse it would be if their child committed a terrible crime, especially against another child. Ellen’s response spoke to the suspicion, guilt, and fear she harbored about her son, worries she had spent years tamping down with denial, unable to face them and her own failings as a mother. Her world, built on thin reeds of self-deception, was collapsing.
I understood now why she had led the neighborhood search efforts for Evan and Cara and raised the money to hire Lucy. Knowing that Adam was sleeping with their mother, suspecting him in Timmy Montgomery’s disappearance, she had to find them, if only to hold on to her sanity. Hating Peggy Martin was her last lifeline, giving her someone else to blame for the child she could face only in her darkest moments.
“Adam hid something in the attic that might have belonged to Timmy. What do you know about that?”
She folded forward, rocking slowly back and forth, shaking her head without answering.
“Ellen,” Kate said. “Adam is in trouble, and he needs our help. It will be easier for him if Jack finds him before the police do.”
She sobbed and shuddered, forcing deep breaths into her lungs until she could speak.
“He was out all night and wouldn’t tell me where he’d been and wouldn’t tell me where he was going when he left again.”
“There’s a pair of muddy jeans on top of a clothes pile in his room. Is that what he was wearing last night?”
“He tracked mud all over the house. I cleaned it up this morning, but I told him I wasn’t going to wash his clothes.”
If Adam had spent the night digging in the dirt I had a good idea what he was doing and where he was doing it.
“Kate, I need the car keys.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find Adam. I need you to stay here with Ellen until the police come. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She straightened, ready to argue, but let the moment pass and handed me her keys.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I get lucky every now and then.”
Chapter Forty-five
It was easy and irresistible to convict Adam of Timmy Montgomery’s murder. The church connection, the parent’s complaint to the church, the child porn, and the bloody T-shirt marked a straight line from delinquency to a death sentence. But resisting the irresistible is what separates good cops from sloppy cops.
I would wait until Timmy and the rest of the evidence that was buried with him was unearthed. I would wait until Adam confessed or didn’t, until he pled guilty or not and a jury extracted the truth from the witnesses and exhibits.
If Adam had killed Timmy, the chances that we would find Evan and Cara alive had all but evaporated, a child predator’s habits one of life’s sad and predictable patterns. His affair with Peggy Martin may have been nothing more than an escalation of his perverse sexual fantasies: screw the mother, then kill the kids. And, if it was, their bodies wouldn’t be far from Timmy’s.
Adam had lied to Kate about having been in the woods above North Terrace Lake before yesterday. If that’s where he’d buried Timmy Montgomery, he couldn’t take the chance that crime scene investigators would find the body, and there was no way for him to know whether they’d be back today for another pass. They were careful and thorough, the odds of them finding something they weren’t looking for too great for Adam to risk.
It was a problem with a simple solution. Dig up Timmy’s remains and find them a new home before the police did it
for him, meaning he had to dig in the dark when no one was looking. But there would be proof: fresh dirt where it didn’t belong, trampled undergrowth, overturned rocks, the sort of thing a disorganized, immature teenage killer would ignore.
I found Adam’s pickup on Cliff Drive in the same spot where he’d waited for his mother and Peggy Martin the day before. He hadn’t made any attempt to hide his truck, making it virtually certain that someone would see him going into the woods and coming out with a bag of bones. Either he was an innocent kid going for a hike or he was in full-blown panic, oblivious to risk, and, if the latter was true, there was another possibility. He wasn’t planning on moving Timmy’s body. He was planning on joining him.
I parked behind his truck and made my way down the bike path, around the lake and to the edge of the woods. Flecks of crime-scene tape clung to a few tree trunks. CSI had finished its work, leaving a trail of flattened grass and rutted gurney tracks leading to the spot where the dead woman had been found buried beneath rocks on a rugged slope midway between the tree line and a ridge above the site.
I stood at the foot of her open, empty grave, doing a slow turn. A lot of people had been in these woods yesterday, poking and prodding the surrounding area, scooping up soil, rustling through deadfall. Separating out CSI’s effort at discovery from Adam’s effort at recovery was beyond my outdoor forensic skill set, but the extent to which the ground in the immediate vicinity had been disturbed convinced me that if there had been a child’s body buried nearby, CSI would have found it.
That didn’t mean Adam hadn’t buried Timmy here; it just meant that he hadn’t buried him right here. I began walking back and forth across the face of the slope, working my way up to the top of the ridge until I reached the outer perimeter CSI had established, marked again by fragments of crime-scene tape, the grave a hundred yards or so below me.
The ground on the other side of the ridge fell away into a ravine, a thin creek running along the bottom, cutting through muddy banks. I scrambled down the slope, crouching close to the ground along the creek, finding a trail of muddy footprints.
Adam Koch was younger, stronger, and faster than me, a probable killer who may also be suicidal, operating on little sleep and running on fear, someone who would flee if he could and attack if he couldn’t. I was unarmed and had to assume that he wasn’t, that whether he had a gun, knife, or sharp-edged shovel, he was more of a threat to me than I was to him.
All of my training and all of my experience in the FBI screamed at me to wait for backup, but I was deaf, though I knew why. I missed the man I used to be too much to listen. Mine was a phantom pain, only instead of reaching for a lost limb I was searching for a missing person last seen with steady hands and a badge, hoping to redeem him by a grand gesture in a moment such as this.
But I had no trouble hearing the voices of Timmy Montgomery and the Martin kids, all the justification I needed for pretending not to know any better. It was enough to make me shake, and I did, a full torso, neck, and head, knee-bending twister, putting me on the ground, my hands grasping the soft earth.
I’ve heard it said that losing one of your senses sharpens another, acute hearing compensating for failing sight. I was about to find out what happened when you lost all your senses.
The footprints ran along my side of the creek for twenty yards before jumping to the other side, a crossing made with the help of a large rock in the middle of the stream, before disappearing in the underbrush. Adam had left the creek and, unless he’d backtracked, had to have gone up the slope I was facing, a gentler hill than the one behind me. I stood still, listening, letting the woods tell me which way to go, the sharp sound of steel slamming into rock answering my question.
The sound came from the other side of the rise in front of me, the elevation enough to blind me to what was there. Not wanting to reveal myself too soon, I skirted the rise, moving to my right slowly and carefully, stealth more important than speed, stumbling when I stepped into a shallow depression, going down on one knee, my hands planted at my sides. The dirt was fresh, the edges of the hole well defined, the length sufficient for a child’s body.
Brushing my pants off, I stood, certain I’d found Timmy’s empty grave until I scanned the surrounding area and saw three more just like it scattered amongst the trees, shrubs, and vines. The first grave plus two others would have been enough for Timmy, Evan, and Cara, but I’d found four, raising mind-numbing possibilities, the continuing metallic clang renewing my alarm.
Sidestepping the graves, I climbed through the brush, emerging into a small clearing, Adam’s back to me, a short-handled shovel raised over his head. It was the kind you could carry on a camping trip to dig a fire pit and cover ashes, not the kind you’d use to dig graves. The short handle made it easier to wield as a weapon, though he would have to get closer to me than he would like to do real damage.
Shirtless and mud-stained, he speared the ground with the shovel and sank to his knees, hanging his chin, gulping for air, his shoulders heaving. The ground around him was pockmarked with half a dozen shallow graves, all of them empty, jagged edges of rock aimed skyward.
“Adam.”
He jumped to his feet, snatched the shovel, and whirled around, cocking it like a baseball bat.
“Put the shovel down, Adam. It’s over.”
He took a step toward me, sweeping the air with the blade. “Go away! Leave me alone!”
I held my ground. “Can’t do that. I found your laptop, and I found Timmy Montgomery’s T-shirt. Your mother told us about you and Peggy Martin. The police are at your house by now. It’s over.”
His eyes billowed. “My mom told you about Peggy?”
“Yeah. She’s worried about you. She wants you to come home.” I glanced at the empty holes he’d dug. “Where’s Timmy’s body?”
He bounced on the balls of his feet, a slight bend to his knees, twirling the shovel’s blade, panting, nostrils flared.
“You see a body here? If there’s no body, there’s no crime. You can’t prove I done anything!”
“The police won’t need Timmy’s body. They’re going to find your DNA on Timmy’s clothes, and that’s all they will need.”
“Then what do you care about his body?”
“I don’t care, but Timmy’s mother does. Now put the shovel down and tell me where you buried him.”
He narrowed his eyes, his face turning red as he screamed at me. “They’ll put me away, maybe even give me the death penalty!”
“You’ll go to prison, that’s for sure. Whether you die there depends on what happens right now. This is your last chance to help yourself.”
He took a deep breath, lowering the shovel. I took two steps toward him when he raised it over his shoulder and swung it at me in a wide arc. I ducked beneath the blade, diving at his feet. His momentum spun him around out of my grasp. Before I could scramble to my feet, he slammed the shovel between my shoulder blades, flattening me on the ground.
My back felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was cover my head with my arms and curl my knees to my chest, waiting for the next blow, but none came. I raised my head, made it to my knees, and looked around. I was alone.
Chapter Forty-six
Adam could have run in any direction, but the only one that made sense was back toward his truck and he had enough of a head start to get there before I could catch up to him. He’d left the shovel, his shirt, and a denim jacket lying on the ground. I searched the jacket pockets, finding the keys to his truck. Time was on my side again.
I was wobbly and my back was throbbing, but my limbs were working. Using the shovel as a walking stick, I leaned forward, retracing my route, stumbling through the woods. When I got to the edge of the woods overlooking the open ground and the lake, I saw Adam, his head under the hood of his pickup. He darted back and forth from the cab to the hood, trying to hot-wire the truck, kicking the tires when he couldn’t make it happen.
If he saw me, he’d run. St
aying inside the tree line, I skirted the lake, staying below his line of sight until I reached Cliff Drive. I’d parked my car behind his truck. That gave me additional cover. I ran, the shovel tucked under my arm, stopping behind my car as he slammed the hood of the truck and jumped into the cab.
The truck’s engine rolled over. Adam gave it gas, revving it, making certain it wouldn’t fail him. I sprinted toward the truck. He saw me in his side mirror, throwing the truck in gear as I pulled even with the driver’s door.
He yanked the wheel hard left as I swung the shovel at the driver’s window, glass exploding. The blade caught him on the chin, knocking him sideways on the seat, his foot still on the gas.
I swung the door open, climbing into the cab and shoving him aside. A minivan swerved around us, rocking and skidding past, the driver laying on the horn and giving me the finger. I hit the brakes, stopping the truck in the middle of Cliff Drive. Adam raised his head and grabbed my arm, letting go when I elbowed him in the throat.
I backed the pickup onto the shoulder, cut the engine, and took a closer look at Adam. He was conscious, glassy-eyed and bleeding. He’d need stitches, but he wasn’t going to bleed to death. There were rags on the floor of the truck. I put one in his hand and pressed it against his wound. When his eyes focused, I pulled him from the truck, setting him on the ground, crouching down at eye level.
“Last chance, Adam. What happened to Timmy Montgomery?”
His mouth quivered. He spit blood and began to sob.
“It was an accident. I never meant to kill him. Things just got out of hand. He started yelling. I told him to shut up, but he wouldn’t. He just kept yelling and I had to make him stop so I put my hands over his face, and the next thing I knew, he wasn’t breathing. If only he’d have shut up like I told him, none of this would have happened.”
“And that’s what you’ll tell the police, but I need to know. Where’s Timmy’s body?”