Luanne frowned. “Why do you want to find Marvin? He’s as crazy at the rest of the Hatchers.”
“Sheriff McElroy seemed to think that Bobby Lee might be wherever Marvin is.”
“I don’t know where any of the Hatchers are, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“If Bobby Lee does make contact, you let us know.” Abby scribbled her home number on the back of her card and handed it to the woman. “Call me anytime, day or night.”
Luanne took the card, but she didn’t even glance at it. “If I thought there was any chance Bobby Lee could find me, do you think I’d still be here?”
A FEW MINUTES later, Dave dropped Abby back at the Brodie house before heading home. There was still a lot of activity inside, but some of the cops had left. Abby sought out Sheriff Mooney and briefed him on what she and Dave had learned.
“You run Marvin Hatcher’s name through the computer?”
Abby nodded. “If he drives a car, he didn’t register it.”
“Well, keep looking. This afternoon I would have put my money on the Wilder woman, but after this ransom call, I’m not so certain. This is one of the most frustrating cases I’ve ever worked on, Abby. I feel like I’ve aged twenty years since last Monday.”
Abby knew exactly what he meant. Every tick of the clock was starting to seem a little too much like a death knell.
ABBY FOUND Curtis Brodie alone in the living room. He’d poured himself a drink and stood staring out at the pool.
“Mr. Brodie?”
He turned at the sound of her voice. His gaze raked her from head to toe. “Well, if it isn’t Sergeant Cross. Bungled any more cases lately?”
She gritted her teeth and ignored the dig. “I wonder if I might ask you a few questions.”
“The FBI is in charge now. I don’t have to talk to you.”
“It’s a joint effort with the sheriff’s department.”
“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” he said sarcastically. “I’m glad you’re still involved.”
“I’d like to ask you some questions about your secretary, Luanne Plimpton.”
He looked mildly surprised. “Luanne? You don’t honestly think she had anything to do with Sara Beth’s disappearance, do you?”
“We’re not ruling out any suspects at this point.”
“Look,” he said, whirling on her. “Luanne had nothing to do with this. I’ve told you people all along where to look. You want to find out what happened to my daughter, take my wife down to that station house of yours and grill her. Make her sweat a little. Make her tell you what she did with Sara Beth. But you’re not going to do that, are you? Because you perceive her as the victim in all this, just the way she planned it.”
“Mr. Brodie, I understand your frustration, but we’re doing everything we can to find Sara Beth and bring her back safely.”
“Then you’re wasting your time.” He swirled ice in his drink. “Sara Beth’s not coming back alive. We all know that.”
Something curled in Abby’s stomach. “What makes you think that?”
“How many missing kids ever come back in one piece?” he asked harshly. He turned back to the window to stare out. After a moment, he said, “What was it you wanted to ask me about Luanne?”
“How did she come to work for you?”
“She has a cousin who used to work for me as a mechanic. He gave her a recommendation.”
“Did you have a background check run on her?”
“Hell, she answers my phones. It’s not exactly rocket science.”
“Did you know that Luanne was married ten years ago to a man named Robert Lee Hatcher? Has she ever mentioned him to you?”
The glass in Curtis Brodie’s hand shattered, but his facial expression never changed. Except for his eyes. Abby had never seen such fury.
“Married?” he said through clenched teeth. “Why, that lying bitch.”
ABBY DIDN’T GET home until after two o’clock in the morning. Exhausted, she tumbled onto her bed fully clothed and was already half asleep when the telephone roused her.
“Hello?” she muttered.
“Abby?”
Sam’s voice brought her immediately awake. She sat up, cradling the phone against her ear as she leaned back against the headboard. “What’s wrong? Is Karen all right? Did she get another ransom call?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I just got back to my hotel. Sheriff Mooney filled me in about Luanne Plimpton. I must say, I hadn’t anticipated that.”
“I don’t think anyone did.” Abby brushed back her hair.
“It certainly gives Bobby Lee a reason for being in Eden.” Sam paused. “But that’s not why I called.”
Abby moistened her lips. “It isn’t?”
“I wanted to tell you—” He broke off.
“Yes?”
Another pause. “Earlier, at your place—”
Abby’s heart started to flail like the wings of a caged bird. “We don’t need to talk about this,” she said quickly.
“I think we do.”
“We both agreed it was a mistake. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
“I never said it was a mistake. In fact, I can’t remember when I’ve had such a pleasurable evening.”
Abby felt her cheeks burn even though she was completely alone in her darkened bedroom. But Sam’s voice, his words, conjured up such powerful images. Such pleasurable images…
And it had been pleasurable for her, too. Abby couldn’t deny that. She’d lost herself in Sam’s kisses, his embraces, and no amount of guilt and remorse were ever going to change that fact.
“Abby? Are you still there?”
She clutched the phone. “I’m here.”
“I should let you get some sleep.”
They both needed to rest. Tomorrow the media would descend on them in droves. It would take a lot of patience and fortitude to deal with the frenzy, but at the moment, all Abby wanted to do was lie back on her bed and talk to her lover on the phone.
But Sam wasn’t her lover, she reminded herself. They’d made love once. That didn’t make him her lover.
Then what did it make him? A one-night stand? A mistake?
Suddenly, it didn’t seem like so much of a mistake to her anymore. And Sam didn’t seem like a stranger. He seemed more like a colleague. A friend. And, yes, a lover.
“Good night, Abby,” he said very softly.
The intimacy in his voice sent a shiver up her backbone. She pressed the phone against her ear and closed her eyes. “Good night, Sam.”
ABBY COULDN’T get back to sleep. She tossed and turned, and then finally gave it up. Getting out of bed, she walked into her grandmother’s sewing room and sat down in the rocking chair by the window. Staring out at the darkness, she went back over the events of the past few days, trying to sort it all out in her mind.
Vickie Wilder remained a strong suspect. For one thing, she’d apparently fled. That always looked bad. A Be-On-The-Lookout had been issued for her car, but so far she hadn’t been apprehended. Secondly, the unknown woman claiming to be Vickie’s sister was seen in a white car that might or might not match the description of the vehicle spotted near the crime scene. And the woman might or might not be Vickie’s college roommate who was on the lam.
Then there was Vickie’s confession to Willa Banks, the school nurse, about a baby Vickie had given up for adoption. Alleged confession, Abby amended. They only had Willa Banks’s word that Vickie had given up a baby who would now be the same age as Sara Beth and Emily. However, if the claim was true, then Vickie fit Sam’s profile. She was between the ages of twenty and forty-five. She was familiar with Eden and with the school. She could move about freely without arousing suspicion. And she had experienced a loss in her life, a child she might have tried to replace.
The fly in the ointment, of course, was that Sam thought Sadie and Emily’s kidnapper were one and the same. Which would rule out Vickie Wilder because she would have been too young at the time of Sadi
e’s abduction.
Bobby Lee Hatcher. He’d spent nine years in prison for aggravated assault and kidnapping, having gone into the slammer after Sadie disappeared and been released a month before Sara Beth and Emily went missing. And now Abby could tie him to Eden through Luanne Plimpton.
Had Luanne’s fear of Bobby Lee been genuine tonight, or had she been afraid that her involvement in the kidnapping was about to be exposed? Sara Beth had been with Luanne at the time of the kidnapping. They’d stopped at a drugstore off the beaten track, one that never had many customers. Once inside, Luanne had let Sara Beth go off on her own to look at coloring books while she went to the back of the store where the pharmacy was located. She claimed she hadn’t heard the bell over the door ring. She claimed she hadn’t seen anyone else come into the drugstore. But was she telling the truth? Had she and Bobby Lee cooked up the scheme together? Had one of them made the call tonight from the phone booth near Alma?
And what about Karen and Curtis Brodie? They had still accused each other of harming the child, even in the face of a ransom demand.
Karen’s accusation rang in Abby’s ears. You did this! You did this just to torment me! If you hurt her, I swear I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!
And Curtis Brodie, answering her, She’s crazy. You saw the way she came at me. Thank God she didn’t have a knife this time.
What did you do to Sara Beth, you crazy bi—
Sara Beth’s not coming back alive. We all know that. How many missing kids ever come back in one piece?
Abby massaged her face, trying to rub away the tension and the terrible dread Curtis Brodie’s words had conjured. There was only one way he could be that certain his daughter was dead.
“No,” she whispered in the darkness. “Please, no.”
Don’t let us be too late, she silently prayed.
She forced herself to go back over that conversation with Curtis Brodie. Something, aside from his assertion about Sara Beth, niggled at Abby. What was it? What was she missing?
And then she had it. She stared out the window in dismay. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Why hadn’t she made the connection before? They’d assumed that Luanne Plimpton had divorced Bobby Lee Hatcher during his nine years in prison. But what if she hadn’t? What if, in spite of her protestations to the contrary, she’d kept in touch with some of Bobby Lee’s family—namely, Bobby Lee’s cousin, Marvin, an auto mechanic.
How did she come to work for you?
She has a cousin who used to work for me as a mechanic. He gave her a recommendation.
Chapter Fourteen
Sunday
Abby slapped at a mosquito on her neck as she gazed at the old farmhouse. It wasn’t unlike the Hatcher place down in Palisades, but at least there wasn’t a swamp within miles, and, she hoped, no cage full of snakes.
Curtis Brodie had provided them with an address for the man who had given Luanne a recommendation: one Marvin Hatcher, who resided in Alma. Curtis had put it together almost immediately, his fury boiling over at the thought of an ex-employee being involved in his daughter’s kidnapping. “I’ll kill him,” he vowed. “I’ll kill that scumbag myself.” And then he’d raged at the sheriff’s department, taunting them that the kidnapper had been right under their incompetent noses the whole time.
Then he’d gone down to the command center and made a statement to the press.
“Jerk,” Abby muttered, remembering Curtis’s angry tirade against her, against Sheriff Mooney, against the whole lousy FBI, as he’d put it. At least he hadn’t discriminated, she thought, but thanks to him, the media knew they had a new lead. The reporters who’d set up camp outside the sheriff’s station and the command center were in a feeding frenzy, and Abby wouldn’t have been surprised to see a news van pull up beside her now, courtesy of Curtis Brodie.
The house was a shotgun-style, accessible only by a narrow gravel road that would be nearly impassable in the winter or after a good hard rain. Two deputies accompanied Sheriff Mooney and Abby, along with two FBI agents and Special Agent Carter. They all wore Kevlar vests since they couldn’t predict what they’d find at the house, or how volatile the situation could turn out to be. If Sara Beth was inside, they had no idea what her condition might be or if force would be required to get her out. What they did know was that time was of the essence.
Before they started across the weed-infested yard, Sheriff Mooney grabbed a twelve-gauge shotgun from his trunk. At Special Agent Carter’s nod, they moved in. He, Abby, Sheriff Mooney, and one of the deputies took the front, while the other deputy and the two agents slipped around back. At the porch steps, Abby and Sheriff Mooney separated, covering the windows while Special Agent Carter strode up the steps, flanked by his own man.
He knocked on the door. “This is the FBI! Open up! We’re here to talk to Robert Lee Hatcher!”
No answer. Nothing stirred. The countryside was eerily silent. Abby turned and scanned the woods that surrounded the house. So many places to hide. For all they knew, Bobby Lee Hatcher could be out there somewhere now, watching them.
“We have a search warrant!” Carter called out. “Open up, now!”
“Don’t look like he’s home,” the deputy remarked.
Carter turned toward the sheriff. “You got a battering ram in your trunk?”
“Yeah, but we don’t need one.” He nodded toward the deputy beside him. Randy Selway was a bear of a man who moonlighted on weekends as a bouncer at a particularly rowdy roadhouse on the outskirts of town. “See what you can do.”
The FBI agents gave him some room, and Randy gave a powerful kick against the door. The whole thing went crashing inward, landing with a loud whack against the floor. He looked at Special Agent Carter and flinched. “Sorry.”
“We’re in, at least,” Carter muttered.
He entered first, weapon drawn, and the others came in behind him, stepping around the ruined door. The way the house was built, Abby could see the back door from the front of the house.
Sheriff Mooney held the shotgun at his side and gazed around. “This is a regular little crap hole, ain’t it?”
Abby had to agree. The house was filthy and stank to high heaven. Flies buzzed around dirty dishes stacked in the sink and on containers of food that had been left sitting out for no telling how long. It gave her a sick feeling to think of one of those children being held in such a place.
The house was tiny with one room serving as a living and kitchen area, and the bedrooms and bathroom straight back. No hallways. No closets. No place much to hide.
The floorboards creaked as the large deputy moved to the back of the house. Abby walked around the living room. There was a couch, a TV and not much else. Sunlight poured in through a narrow window, and dust motes danced in the brilliance. Something glinted underneath the TV, and Abby knelt to fish it out with a pen she pulled from her pocket.
She snagged it on the end of her pen and held it up. A child’s hair clip glistened in the sunlight. Pink plastic with kittens peeking over the edges. The kind that Sara Beth had been wearing in her school picture.
Abby’s heart gave a painful thud. She started to call out to the sheriff, but just then, Selway’s voice boomed from the back bedroom.
“Oh, God. Oh, my God! Sheriff! You better get back here quick.”
SAM WATCHED as the forensics team scoured the house for trace evidence. He wasn’t allowed inside the room where Luanne Plimpton’s body had been discovered, but Abby had shot Polaroids of the crime scene and the body, and Sam had spent several minutes studying them while forensics finished their work.
Actually, photos of the crime scene and victim, along with the police reports and witness accounts, were usually all he ever had to work from. It was rare for a profiler to witness an actual crime scene, to be involved in a case in the early stages. Most of the time, the Investigative Support Unit wasn’t called until a case had gone unsolved for months, sometimes years. And even then, the local authorities often approached the
m with a fair amount of skepticism. How could someone unfamiliar with the case, who hadn’t spent untold man hours tracking down leads, look at photos and reports and be able to tell a seasoned cop who he was looking for, sometimes right down to the kind of clothes the suspect would be wearing when the cop apprehended him?
But it had happened. More than once, and there was nothing like the rush that came with nailing an UNSUB so accurately. Sam felt that same rush of excitement now, and for a moment, he forgot about the dark side of profiling: the hundreds of suspects who were never apprehended, who continued night after night to feed their gruesome appetites.
He gazed down at the photos. This was not the kind of crime he normally dealt with. No serial killer was at work here. Luanne Plimpton had been murdered by someone who knew her. Someone in a terrible rage against her. She’d been stabbed and beaten, her face battered so badly it was almost unrecognizable. When the body was damaged so severely around the facial area, it almost always meant that the victim knew her assailant. The attack was personal. But there was no mutilation of the breasts or genitals which suggested to Sam that sex hadn’t been a motivation.
Then what was the motivation? Who had hated Luanne Plimpton enough to kill her?
Bobby Lee Hatcher?
Curtis Brodie?
Another possibility presented itself to Sam. He remembered clearly Luanne Plimpton telling him that Karen could be violent. That she had tried to kill Curtis once with a butcher knife.
And he also remembered how Karen’s hands had balled into fists when Abby had asked her about Luanne.
She couldn’t have done this, Sam thought. In such an act of rage, the perpetrator was almost always a man.
But Sam could think of a few exceptions, and he knew he couldn’t afford to overlook any possibility. The suspect had to be apprehended, and quickly, because if the hair clip that Abby had found was any indication, the killer had Sara Beth.
WHILE FORENSICS did their thing inside, Abby and several deputies scoured the immediate area around the house. The FBI agents held back and let the sheriff’s department conduct the search because a homicide was under the jurisdiction of the locals.
The Innocent Page 17