I rested against one of the large trunks and listened for anything. There was nothing but the infrequent distant rumble of a car, probably from the road that ran in front of Jessup’s home.
I looked down the hill. A brush of sunlight split the air between the trees and an ethereal ballet of dust motes danced in the air. The flitting bits disappeared as quickly as they had appeared when the sun drifted behind the clouds. What am I looking for? I hadn’t noticed any freshly broken tree branches—telltale signs that someone had traveled this way. Nothing, no shiny bullet casings or anything else, glinted up at me from the ground. Not even a boot print. I was indeed looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Standing there, I got paranoid. I began imagining things and expected to hear a bullet or arrow whiz by my head, but quiet prevailed. I walked down the slope a few hundred yards and found nothing. I had to get back soon, so I started up the hill. That was when I noticed the note, facing the direction of Jessup’s home, tacked to a trunk. It was a plain piece of blue-ruled school paper, like any sixth grader would have in class, anchored with a red thumbtack.
It read: I want the kids.
* * *
“Ruthie and John,” Tony said as he settled on the couch with coffee in one hand.
“Who is this guy? Why is he playing games?” Abby asked. “He’s one dangerous motherfucker.” Her face flushed red after the word came out.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’ve heard the word before. Something about investigative work brings out the potty mouth.”
“This means the kids have to be under watch twenty-four hours a day,” Tony said. “Carol is going to freak out. What bothers me is that the note was probably placed there this morning. The cops would have found it yesterday if it had been there.”
“The note wasn’t wet so it couldn’t have been left there yesterday,” I said. “Do you think those motorcycle tracks were from a particular bike?”
“I’m no expert,” Tony said, “but they looked like off-road tires to me. They seemed bigger than usual. Maybe a dirt bike. What do you think Abby?”
She nodded.
“It’s as if he anticipates our every move,” I said. “Scary.”
I had taken the note and thumbtack off the tree by using dead leaves as a makeshift glove, in case there were any fingerprints to be found. When we got home we carefully laid the note out on the coffee table, as if staring at it was going to give us some insight into the mind of the killer.
“This guy killed Rodney for revenge,” I said. “We don’t know why, but we do know this wasn’t a random murder. Now, if I had to guess, I’d say he wants the kids for an exchange of money, or blackmail leverage—some kind of ransom. I don’t think he wants to kill them.”
Abby nodded. “We have to let Carol in on this. She’s got to know her children are in danger.”
“They’re adopted aren’t they?” I asked. “I seem to remember Rodney telling me about them when we were having our little tête-à-tête in New Hampshire. Orphans from a fire or something?”
“Good memory,” Tony said. “Yes, they’re adopted. They were orphaned when their parents were killed in a fire in South Carolina four years ago. John was three and Ruthie was only a year old.”
“Rodney told me the press had a field day with him when they adopted the kids, as if the adoption was some kind of religious grandstanding to make him look good.”
“The more I learn about Rodney,” Tony said, “the more I realize he needed religion to make him look good. He was a seriously flawed individual.”
I laughed at Tony’s diagnosis. “No shit.” A thought bubbled into my head. “You know, not one of us seems to have been too broken up about Rodney’s death because he was such an asshole, but I feel sorry for the kids.”
Abby agreed. We had to consider what we were dealing with. I looked at my watch. It was going on four p.m. We were discussing the next steps to take when the front door opened. None of us had heard a car pull up.
Carol Kingman Jessup ushered Ruthie and John into the hall. From across the room, I could tell she had been crying—her makeup was smeared around her eyes. I assumed she had been to the morgue to identify the body. The three of them looked lost and forlorn, as if they had arrived in the new world from foreign shores. The home they had known for so long must have seemed strange and lonely, occupied by people they barely knew. Tony had told me they had been away for nearly a month.
Carol was still as pretty as I remembered, but her blonde hair looked darker than it was when we last met; her face showed a few more creases around the mouth and eyes. She was wearing a long navy coat and black gloves. She pulled off her gloves and tossed them on the hall credenza. Ruthie and John, both brunettes, walked slowly to the living room. The driver brought their luggage inside. Carol opened her purse and paid the fare for the car service.
When she turned back to us, her eyes narrowed and focused on me.
She scowled. “What’s he doing here? Or should I say, ‘she?’”
Tony was quick to answer. “He was hired by your husband to help track down the person who was threatening him.”
“Really?” she said—not in the form of a question, but in a condescending tone that made me feel dirty.
Carol took a pack of filter 100s from her purse and lit up. The smoke breezed past her as she strode into the living room.
“Ruthie, John, go to your rooms. Mommy needs to talk business with the grown-ups.”
She waited while the children grabbed their suitcases and headed down the hall. When they were gone, Carol took off her coat and draped it over the couch. “Abby, make me a vodka stinger. On second thought, make it a double. I hope the goddamn drunk didn’t sop up all the liquor. I can only pray there’s some booze left in the house.”
I had thought that Carol was the most pious of the lot when I’d had the bad fortune of meeting her the previous summer. My, how the worm had turned . . . .
Abby started to object—resentment blazed in her eyes—but Tony gave her a look that was clear in its message: Play along for a little while longer until the right moment came along to break the news that she wasn’t a servant.
Abby skulked off to the kitchen.
The lady of the house drew herself up on the couch like Cruella de Vil. Obviously, I was encroaching in her space, so I excused myself and moved to a chair closer to Tony. She reached into a drawer underneath the coffee table and took out a crystal ashtray. She crossed her legs, placed the ashtray in her lap, and tapped off the ashes.
“At least he didn’t smoke all my cigarettes,” she said.
I was starting to think Carol should be suspect number one in Rodney’s murder. Nothing would have surprised me in this house. I felt sorry for Ruthie and John, and hoped there was plenty of money put aside for their later years—psychotherapy and rehab clinics were expensive. I sat across from Carol, my back to the large picture window. She studied me from head to toe, clearly taking note of the bandages on my face.
“So, who are you again?” Carol asked. She rocked a little on the couch as if she’d already had a drink or two. “You’ve got some fag drag name.”
Tony cringed, but I was more than up for the challenge.
“My fag drag name, as you so poetically put it, is Desdemona,” I said. “My friends call me Des but don’t let that stop you from addressing me by my Christian name, Cody Harper.” I wanted to mention the tidy little sum Rodney paid me to get involved in this mess, but thought better of it.
Carol smirked. “Touchy, touchy. There’s hardly anything Christian about you.” She waved her hand at me before I could reply. “But who am I to cast the first stone?”
She looked around the room and then gazed out upon the darkening lawn. She drew in one last drag of her cigarette before stabbing it out in the ashtray.
“This house hasn’t exactly been a Rock of Ages. I think God left quite some time ago. I counted Him absent a while back.”
Abby, her eyes like sl
its and her lips tighter than a one-day surgical lift, came back into the room with the vodka stinger. She placed a white napkin on the coffee table and deposited a large highball glass filled to the rim with the cocktail—vodka and crème de menthe, as I recalled from my drinking days.
Carol reached for the drink, took a gulp, and licked her lips. “You do know how to make a good drink. I think I’ll keep you.”
“Mrs. Jessup, there’s something I think you should know,” Tony said.
“No need for formality here,” Carol answered. “We’re just one big happy family. Right? Just one big happy family.” She looked into her glass and a loose smile formed on her lips.
“Abby works with me,” Tony said. “She and I were working with your husband—”
“Bodyguards? Private investigators? You did a fucking piss-poor job. I know—I saw the body.”
“We were on the trail,” Tony said. “Cody was driving the car, and could have been killed too. Rodney was going to tell us something he had discovered, but we were too late.”
The concrete wall around Carol began to fracture. Tears formed in her eyes. She took a tissue from her purse and swiped at her cheeks.
“I wish I could be sad. I wish I could be sorry that he died, but I can’t. That’s the part that hurts the most. I really loved him long ago. Then politics took over his life and he changed. Nothing was the same after that.” She took another swig of her drink.
Ruthie appeared in the hallway. “Mommy, I’m hungry.”
“Just a few more minutes, darling,” Carol replied, and she actually sounded civil, as if there was a slim thread of a maternal instinct clinging to her battered soul.
Ruthie turned and walked away.
Tony told Carol about the note I found tacked to the tree. “We don’t think it’s safe for you and the children to stay in the house,” he said. “We all believe a kidnapping attempt is imminent.”
“Well, by god, where are we supposed to go? We’ve been on the run far too long. We’ve got to stop running sometime.”
I asked Carol if I might join her in a smoke. She nodded.
“Someone very dangerous—someone who is familiar with this area and knows what he’s doing when it comes to serious weaponry is out there,” I said. “He killed your husband and now he’s after your kids. Can you think of anyone who would be so intent on destroying your family?”
For an instant, it seemed as though Carol might have had an answer to that question. Something registered in her eyes—a brief flash that seemed to indicate she might know who the killer was. Then the look disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
“I don’t know,” she said. “So many people loved Rodney, but so many others had their own reasons to hate him.”
“We need a place to start,” I said. “Even a name would give us something to go on.”
John appeared in the hallway with his sister. “Mom, we’re bored. Can we play in the backyard for a little while?”
“No,” Carol said. “It’s too dark and it’s not safe out there.”
John’s shoulders slumped. “You mean we’re prisoners here just like we were on the ship? We can put the yard lights on. Mom, please?”
Carol took another swig of her stinger and said, “I know it’s hard to understand, but we have to be careful. You can go outside in the morning.”
The kids were about to return to their rooms when Abby said, “I’ll go with them so they can get some fresh air. I’m sure we’ll be all right.”
I knew there was more on Abby’s mind than just wanting to go outside. She cared about the kids and wanted to reintroduce some normalcy into their lives to blunt everything else that was going on. It had been a rough afternoon for Ruthie and John knowing they had lost their father. I admired Abby for having the courage to speak up, but I also thought it would have been a better idea for everyone to stay inside for the evening.
“Take my gun,” Tony said, and pulled it out from where it was buried under his coat.
Carol gasped.
John’s eyes went wide, “Wow, a real gun!” He ran to get a closer look at the weapon.
“This is getting out of hand,” Carol said.
Tony helped Abby strap on the semiautomatic. “They’ll be okay with my sister,” Tony said. “You can watch them from here. Cody and I will rustle something up in the kitchen.”
“We will?” I wasn’t a whiz in the kitchen but with Tony as my partner I was willing to learn.
“Yes,” Tony said. “We have hamburger meat and fixings for tacos.”
“How multicultural of us,” I said.
Tony shot me that “shut up” look, which he had developed a fondness for doing.
Carol was absorbed in her drink.
Abby and the kids disappeared down the hall toward the bedrooms in the left wing. In a few minutes, they were all out back, coats on, playing kickball on the wide lawn. Underneath the lights, they looked as if they were having fun. Their breaths turned into puffs of steam in the chilly November evening as they ran after the ball.
Tony and I went to the kitchen and began working on the meal. He poured himself a glass of red wine and I grabbed a chilled bottle of water. Tony instructed me to chop onions and soon my tears were flowing.
“So, what do you think?” I asked, wiping away my tears with the back of my hand.
“Carol’s scared shitless. Wouldn’t you be?”
“I have to admit, I was spooked after Rodney visited me in New York. I kept wondering if someone was going to knock me off. Whoever this guy is, he knows too much.” I scraped the onion skins off my knife onto the cutting board. “Where are they going to go?”
“I don’t know, but this house is like a bar at closing; ‘I don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here,’ as the saying goes. They can’t stay here. Do you get the sense that we haven’t even scratched the surface with Carol?”
“Definitely. I’m sure the police will want to interview her, too.”
We talked as Tony sautéed the onions and hamburger meat and I chopped lettuce. We were getting out the sour cream and salsa, when we heard screams.
And then a shot.
Tony and I ran to the living room and found Carol in hysterics, racing toward the back door. Tony yelled at her to stop.
“Stay here with Carol,” I said to Tony as we grabbed hold of her.
Abby was kneeling in the grass, the semiautomatic pointed to the back tree line. The kids were crouched behind her.
I ran down the hall and found the back door. The lights were on timers and there was no way to quickly disable them. I was unarmed, but I opened the door and dropped to the ground. Abby and the kids were about fifty feet away. I crawled, elbow to knee, until I got to them.
Abby was sweeping the trees with the gun.
“I saw this gray and black blur and then a white bag came hurtling out of the darkness,” Abby said.
I instructed Ruthie and John to lie flat on the ground. I looked over Abby’s shoulder and saw the bag, lying on the far edge of the lawn. “He could have easily done major damage if he’d wanted to. He’s trying to make this as excruciating as possible. You fired into the trees?”
“One shot,” Abby said, and then added, “I don’t think it was a man.”
I was astounded that another person might be involved.
“It didn’t run like a man. I think it was a woman, dressed in camouflage.”
I looked back and, through the window, I saw Tony dialing the phone. The police would arrive soon. Carol was huddled on the couch—her hands covering her eyes.
I shielded the kids with my body to get them inside. Abby ran cover, still sweeping the tree line with her gun. We drew the drapes and collapsed in the living room.
Carol was a mess. She hugged Ruthie and John, cried and fussed over them, and then asked me to fix her another drink. I declined, not wanting to enable her habit or get too close to booze even though I did feel sorry for her. Tony relented and fixed her another vodka st
inger.
About ten minutes later, three police and two sheriff’s patrol cars arrived in the circle drive. There was no mistaking their arrival. One of the officers was in full bomb-squad regalia, holding the leash of a German shepherd sniffer. We didn’t see what happened next because we gathered in the kitchen at the front of the house, in case the bag happened to contain explosives. A few officers came inside and questioned Abby. They were all friendly to Tony and his sister. Apparently, the law enforcement brotherhood was tight in Buena Vista tonight.
One tense hour later, an officer showed up at the front door with the mysterious, white bag, holding it delicately in his gloved hands.
“Want to see what’s inside?” he asked Tony.
Tony nodded, of course, and the officer pulled the drawstrings on the bag to reveal its contents. Tony peered in and scowled. We were all gathered around the door in anxious anticipation.
“Well, what is it?” I asked.
“Not a bomb,” Tony said, with a disturbed look on his face. “It’s a naked, rubber baby doll covered in what appears to be blood—or something that’s meant to look like blood.”
“Not again,” Carol said, referring to the pig fetus that had been thrown over the front gate about a month before. She lit a cigarette and said, “That’s it—we’re getting out of this house as soon as we can. Ruthie, John, don’t even bother unpacking.”
The kids moaned. I looked at Tony.
“Did you find anything in the woods?” Abby asked the cop.
“Nothing,” he said. “We’ll come back tomorrow when it’s light enough to do a thorough search. I’m leaving now, but a few officers will stick around for a while to make sure you’re safe.”
“We’ll be gone first thing in the morning,” Carol said to Tony.
“Where will you go?” I asked. “What about the funeral?”
Carol burst into tears.
“I’ll take the kids to their rooms,” Abby said. “I think they’ve had enough excitement before dinner.” She enclosed Ruthie and John in her grasp and walked away with them.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Carol. “I didn’t mean to upset you, but you can’t just run out of here without thinking about what to do next.”
An Absent God Page 8