The Cradle Will Fall

by Maggie Price

Harmon lazed back in his chair. “Don’t know where you got the idea I tried to kill you. My brakes failed and my van hit you from behind. It was an accident on a dark, rain-slick road. Nothing personal.”

  “Your van?” Mark asked. “That wasn’t your van, was it, Stu? Belongs to a friend of yours.”

  “Yeah.” Harmon shrugged. “Next time I see Iris, I’ll mention how she ought to keep her brakes maintained.”

  “Iris,” Grace murmured. “Why don’t you tell us about Iris?”

  “Sure. I met her nearly two years ago when she was a hospice nurse. My mother was dying, and Iris worked the night shift at our house. She and I would sit around and shoot the breeze.”

  “And after your mother’s death, you and Iris continued your friendship.”

  “The fact she let me borrow her van tonight ought to tell you that much.”

  “Why?” Mark asked. “Why did you borrow her van?”

  “The engine on my car started pinging. I didn’t want to be late for my meeting with the Calhouns, so I borrowed Iris’s van. Simple as that.”

  “And you left your Porsche in Iris’s garage.”

  Mark spotted a flicker of emotion in Harmon’s eyes. Grace’s comment was his first indication the police had been to Iris’s house and knew she was dead.

  “Yeah. Because it was raining, Iris suggested I pull the Porsche inside. Nice of her.”

  “It was,” Grace agreed. “Less chance of someone breaking into your car and stealing your coke out of the glove box.”

  “Coke?” Harmon shook his head. “Don’t know anything about that. You might want to check with Iris, since she’s the last person to have possession of the vehicle.”

  “Let’s get back to the meeting you set up with the Calhouns,” Grace said. “Where is Lori Logan?”

  Harmon wiped the back of his hand under his nose while giving them an incurious look. “You tell me. When she called and told me she wanted to meet the Calhouns, she said she would hitch a ride to the café. Maybe she’s still there?”

  “She’s not,” Mark said. “So, she called you and said she wanted the meeting. Meaning, there should be a record of that call coming in to your phone.”

  “Actually, I called her. Dad said she’d gone to see him this afternoon and was upset. I had to come to Oklahoma City on business, so I decided to call her while I was here.”

  “What sort of business?”

  Although Grace asked the question, Harmon shifted his gaze to Mark and gave him a knowing look. “I told Dad I had a date. Actually, I had some bar hopping on my agenda. Planned to pick up a friendly female, have a night of fun. You know how it is.”

  “Did you use your cell to call Lori?” Mark asked.

  “Tried. I couldn’t get good reception—must have been the storm. So I stopped at a pay phone and called Usher House.”

  “What pay phone?” Mark asked.

  “Outside some convenience store. Hard to say which one.” Harmon scratched his chin. “I live in Winding Rock, not Oklahoma City. I’m not real familiar with the streets here, so I can’t give you the phone’s specific location.” He pursed his mouth. “You could check the phone record for Usher House.”

  “We will,” Mark said evenly, although he suspected doing so would be futile. Harmon obviously knew that the homeless kids who stayed at Usher House didn’t have money for their own cell phones and pagers. Anytime they needed to call the shelter, they used a pay phone. Chances were, there’d be calls made most nights from various pay phones to Usher House.

  Grace leaned in. “Lori is due to give birth at any minute. We need to find her.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “How about trying to help yourself?” Grace shot back. “We already have you for overcharging fees for an adoption. A felony. Then there’s the two homicides Iris committed. DeeDee Wyman and Andrea Grayson are dead because your pal, Iris, injected them with an anticoagulant drug after they gave birth. Then Iris kidnapped their infants and gave them to you to sell. That makes you an accessory all the way around. Where are those two babies?”

  “Ask Iris. I don’t know anything about any murders or kidnappings. And I don’t overcharge anybody. I collect substantial fees for arranging private, upscale adoptions. Period.”

  “I’m not finished outlining your problems, Mr. Harmon,” Grace continued. “You now have counts of assault and the attempted murder of two law enforcement officers hanging over your head. My partner is an FBI agent, meaning one of those charges is federal. That alone will get you a life sentence in a federal trial. Then you’ll be remanded back to state custody and tried again.”

  “That won’t be a walk in the park,” Mark observed. “Oklahoma juries don’t like scum who murder young women, kidnap their babies and try to kill cops.” He paused, then looked at Grace. “Don’t forget the possession of cocaine charge.”

  “Right. There’re so many that one must have slipped my mind.”

  Mark noted Harmon’s red-rimmed eyes now tracked between Grace and him like a spectator at a tennis match.

  Grace tapped a fingernail on the table, pulling Harmon’s gaze back to her. “Andrea Grayson,” she said. “Mr. Harmon, did you pick up on the last name of one of the girls Iris murdered?”

  “I don’t know anything—”

  “Maybe you’ve heard of U.S. Senator Landon Grayson?” Grace persisted. “Andrea was his daughter. Iris killed her, then you sold his granddaughter. The senator is a powerful man, used to getting what he wants. Right now he wants his grandbaby.”

  Mark gave Harmon a scalpel-sharp smile. “Let’s cut to the chase here, Stu. Grayson’s involvement makes this whole case political. You’re smart. You know what that means. Everybody’s got to look good, and the only way that happens is if someone pays the big price. Right now, that someone is you.”

  Harmon’s mouth compressed. “I told you, I don’t know jack about what Iris has done. As for tonight, the brakes on the van went out. It was raining. The road was slick. I lost control of a vehicle I’m not used to driving. What happened was an accident.”

  “It’s no accident Lori Logan is missing,” Mark said. “Tell us where she is. We find her alive, I’ll work with you on this. See you get a deal.”

  “I don’t need a deal,” Harmon shot back. “Logan told me she was going to hitch a ride and meet us at that café.” He clenched his hands on the edge of the table. “The girl is a runaway, known to hitchhike. Maybe her luck ran out tonight. Could be she stuck her thumb out and some pervert picked her up. Did something awful to her. Who knows? We might never hear from her again.”

  “Bastard’s lying,” Grace said after she and Mark finished with Junior. As they walked along the hallway back toward the E.R. where they’d left their coats, she flexed her fingers, unflexed them. Anxiety over the young girl’s welfare curled in the center of her chest. “He knows where Lori Logan is. I can feel it.”

  “Yeah, he knows,” Mark agreed. “He’s just never going to tell us.”

  When they rounded a corner, Grace spotted Harmon Senior and another man, standing at the nurses’ station, waiting to be helped.

  “There’s Senior,” Grace said. “Is the guy with him the FBI agent who picked him up?”

  “Yes.” Mark slid her a look. “Ready to conduct another interview, Sergeant McCall?”

  “Ready, Agent Santini.”

  After a brief private meeting between father and son, the uniformed OCPD cop put Junior in a scout car and headed for the Oklahoma County jail. Grace and Mark resumed their seats at the table in the hospital’s interview room, this time with the elder Harmon seated across the table.

  “I understand your reasons for obtaining a warrant to search our home and office,” Harmon, Sr. told them after Grace and Mark advised him of his rights, then ran down the evidence they had. “And a subpoena to view our records. You don’t need those documents to gain my cooperation, however. I will tell you what I know. Try to help you in any way I can.”

  Grace stu
died the silver-haired man, clad in an impeccably tailored suit. Although he sat in the chair ramrod straight, she sensed an air of defeat around him. Sadness. It took her a second to realize it wasn’t the attorney she was seeing, but the father whose child was in desperate trouble.

  “We appreciate your cooperation,” Mark said. “We’ve already explained the fees your son planned to collect from the Calhouns in order to adopt Lori Logan’s baby. We need more than just your word you were unaware of that amount. We need proof.”

  “All I have is my word, Agent Santini. I’ve been semi-retired for several years. I deal with the people part of the adoption process—meeting the birth mothers, the adoptive parents. I’ve left the legalities and paperwork to my son. From what you’ve told me tonight, that was a mistake.” Harmon lifted a hand speckled with liver spots. “To say that Stuart has been a disappointment to me would put it mildly. I’ve bailed him out of trouble all his life. Another mistake on my part. He’s my child, and I’ll continue to stand by his side. But it’s time for him to answer for his own actions.”

  Grace’s cop’s sixth sense told her the man was telling the truth. That he was just another victim on a growing list. “Mr. Harmon, while you were meeting with your son, Agent Santini and I received a phone call from the OCPD lab. Lori Logan’s fingerprints were found in Stuart’s Porsche. Lori is missing. She’s due to have her baby any minute. Do you have a lake house Stuart might have taken her to? A vacation place? A relative or friend who owns a house or some other structure Stuart has access to? Something private.”

  “No. I’m sorry.” Harmon closed his eyes. “She’s a sweet girl. Told me I remind her of her grandfather. If I could help you find her, I would.”

  Half an hour later Mark and Grace stepped onto an elevator at OCPD headquarters. Grace stabbed the button for the third floor where the juvie division was located. She felt as if it had been a hundred years since the day Mark showed up in her lieutenant’s office. For a moment her heart ached for the man she loved. The man whose life simply would not meld with hers.

  With regret washing over her for what they would never have, never share, she glanced across the elevator. Mark was shuffling again through the photos taken earlier at Iris Davenport’s house.

  “Something just hit me,” he said, his eyes sharpening on one of the photos.

  Putting a choke hold on her emotions, Grace stepped beside him, saw the photo was of Junior’s Porsche, parked in Iris’s garage. “What just hit you?” she asked, looking up.

  “It’s a long shot.”

  “Right now we don’t have any shots.”

  “Okay, go with me here. Senior told us he and Junior talked after we left the law firm. At that point, Junior still believed we were the Calhouns.”

  “Right.”

  “So, Senior tells Junior that Lori Logan drove there in one of Usher House’s vans to tell him she’s having second thoughts about giving up her baby. Senior tells Junior to hold up on the adoption. He doesn’t want to do that because he needs the money. My guess is for cocaine. He asks Senior how long it’d been since Lori left to drive back to the city. Junior then claims he has a date and rushes out.”

  “Junior lets the Porsche’s engine out of the box,” Grace says, picking up Mark’s thread. “He gets to Oklahoma City in time to waylay Lori. Since the van she drove was back at the shelter, he must have gotten to her there, in the parking lot.”

  “She knows him by sight. Wouldn’t think twice about getting into the Porsche with him. So she goes willingly, doesn’t make a scene that would draw anyone’s attention.”

  Grace nodded. “Junior takes her to some out-of-the-way place where he can lock her up. Keep her there until she gives birth.”

  “He needs Iris to deliver the baby.”

  “He goes to her house,” Grace said. “For some reason they fight, which is probably when he got those scratches on his cheek.” Grace frowned when her thinking hit a snag. “Iris would have gone along with the plan so she could collect her part of the fee they’d get for selling Lori’s baby. Iris has killed twice already. Why should delivering Lori’s baby, then killing Lori matter?”

  “Shouldn’t.” Mark scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “We’ll figure that out later.”

  Grace looked back down at the photo of the Porsche. The sleek, silver body was streaked with dirt, the expensive wheels caked with mud. She thought about it, then realization hit her. “You’re thinking about the mud, right?”

  “Right. Senior said Junior is a stickler about keeping his car clean. That he washes the Porsche weekly, more often if it needs it. Senior thinks he glanced at the car this morning when he got to the office and didn’t see any mud.”

  “That might mean Junior picked up the mud when he drove Lori to wherever he has her stashed.”

  “Let’s hope to hell that’s what happened.” Mark pulled out his phone, stabbed a button. “And that a forensic geologist can analyze the mud and give us an idea where it came from.”

  Chapter 16

  For Grace, the following hours sped by in a blur of activity.

  Luck smiled on the investigation in the form of the FBI forensic geologist who had been in Dallas, winding up his testimony in a criminal trial. With thoughts of Senator Landon Grayson watching over the Bureau’s shoulder, the FBI director dispatched his jet to pick up the geologist for transport to Oklahoma City. Upon examination of the mud on Junior’s Porsche, the geologist determined the soil contained traces of paint, bits of concrete and asphalt, and a chemical used exclusively in the tanning of hides.

  Grace’s thoughts instantly shot to a hulking warehouse once used as a tanning factory. Abandoned years ago, the structure was a dilapidated, rundown eyesore where drug dealers conducted business.

  Dark, dangerous and forbidding, the warehouse was the perfect place to imprison a kidnap victim.

  Grace, Mark and a team of heavily armed cops descended on the dank, rodent-infested warehouse. Minutes later they found Lori Logan. Her ankle was chained to a heavy metal table, and she was in the throes of labor. Grace gripped the teenager’s hand, whispering encouraging words while two EMT’s delivered a healthy, wailing baby girl.

  Huddled with her baby on an ambulance stretcher, Lori identified Stuart Harmon, Jr. as her kidnapper.

  “That’s all the evidence we need to nail Junior,” Mark said, small rocks from the warehouse’s crumbling parking lot crunching under his feet as he moved to Grace’s side.

  Shoulders hunched beneath her heavy coat, she stood in the freezing wind that carried the smell of snow. Shadows oozing from the abandoned, hulking warehouse made the night seem even darker. Metal grated as the EMTs quickly loaded Lori’s stretcher into the ambulance.

  “Yes,” Grace agreed. “We’ve got Junior.”

  “You and I make a good team, McCall.”

  A short-lived one, she thought. The ambulance’s siren whooped to life and the red-white light bar flashing from its roof performed a dazzling show across the faces of the cops who’d taken part in the teenager’s rescue.

  Grace met Mark’s gaze, not wanting to think about how few hours remained until he walked out of her life forever. If she remained aloof, she could cope. Get through it. Survive.

  “Time for us to pay Junior a visit,” she said levelly. “Maybe he’ll be more willing to talk when he hears we’ve got him cold on the kidnap.”

  Emotion flared in Mark’s eyes, then was gone. “Our early Christmas present to him.”

  Upon hearing Lori Logan had been found alive, Junior began cooperating in hopes of avoiding a cell on death row. He admitted working in tandem with Iris Davenport. Her job at the clinic had been the perfect setting to meet pregnant girls wanting to give up their babies. Iris had collected a fee from Junior for each of the mothers she’d referred to the Harmon law firm.

  Things had run smoothly until DeeDee Wyman had gone into labor and changed her mind about giving up her child. Iris, desperately needing money to pay off heart-stopping gambling
debts, had killed the girl and kidnapped her baby. Six months later Andrea Grayson had become Iris’s second victim.

  Acknowledging he’d been at Iris’s house when she fell, Junior insisted her death was an accident—she’d panicked after spotting FBI Special Agent Mark Santini on television. Junior then revealed the location of hidden files on the adoptions of the two kidnapped infants.

  Senator Landon Grayson had wasted no time in dispatching his attorney to begin proceedings to obtain custody of his granddaughter.

  Now, with the investigation wrapped and her final report written, Grace shut down her computer. With the squad room nearly deserted, she glanced at the clock on the wall. It was nearly noon on a snowy Christmas Eve.

  She’d missed a night’s sleep, skipped a few meals, and her system was buzzed on cop-shop caffeine.

  On top of it all, she felt like a coward.

  Too bad, she thought as she pulled on her coat and grabbed her purse. Mark was in an office down the hall on a conference call with the FBI director and Senator Grayson’s top aide. The director’s jet was waiting at the airport to whisk Mark to Anchorage so he could take up where he’d left off, tracking Alaska’s current serial killer.

  Grace headed out the door and down the stairs. Nothing between her and Santini had changed. For all intents and purposes, they had already said goodbye. She couldn’t hang around this time and watch him walk away forever.

  You can run, but you can’t hide, Mark thought an hour later when he wheeled a loaner FBI cruiser into the driveway behind Grace’s car.

  He hadn’t been surprised when he finished his conference call and walked into the juvie division to find her gone. After all, she’d expected him to leave town and had opted to pass on saying goodbye.

  Mark set his jaw. If things turned out the way he hoped, he was never going to say goodbye again.

  He shouldered open the car door against the wind and stepped out into snow falling in white, wild, wicked sheets. Popping the trunk, he pulled out Grace’s suitcase and debated whether to leave his own behind. Deciding to go for broke, he snagged it, then headed up the porch steps.