“You know Will, Ben. He—” She broke off, realizing that was the first time she’d used his name to his face. First names with strangers could be fine. Same with friends. First names with a man she’d once been intimate with... It wove a disquieting feeling.
“He’s a nice guy. Everyone likes him. He likes everyone. He has a talent for dealing with people,” Ben finished for her. “And Lolly is the same. Kids love her, their parents adore her, everyone wants to be her friend. Theo’s a typical kid. The only time he gets aggressive is on the soccer field, and even then he’ll stop to help up the kid who falls.” He paused and his voice softened. “You know we need to consider everything.”
She nodded.
“What about financial issues? Do they owe money? Are they living above their means?”
Money was about as close a sacred subject to Yashi as anything got. She’d never had an abundance of financial security. Her foster parents had covered everyday expenses, she’d gotten loans and jobs for college and law school, and then she’d gone to work in the district attorney’s office. There’d been no big paychecks coming out of that office, not even for the DA himself. Livable wages that covered an occasional splurge. That was her life.
Of course Will had more money than she did. The house, the vehicles, the kids’ activities, not needing a second income, Lolly’s college classes and frequent passions. How much he made, how much they spent, how much they owed—none of her business. She edited all that down to a simple, “I don’t know.”
“What about other family?”
The steady question startled her into a blink. She was their family. The one who knew them best, saw them most, loved them dearest. But of course, they had other family. When their parents died, Yashi had had no one, but Will’s mother’s family had taken him in. He’d begged them to let her come, too, and his aunt had cried when she said she couldn’t. So had Will. So had Yashi.
Lolly had parents living in Maine, a brother in the army in Korea and another brother at sea on a Military Sealift Command ship. The soldier was married with a wife and daughters; the sailor was divorced but brought his two kids to visit every couple years. There was the full complement of aunts and uncles and cousins and in-laws, a good-size bunch that gathered every five years in Maine.
Enough to make Yashi’s world look empty.
“The ones she’s closest to are in her cell phone,” she responded, sitting straight and trying to unobtrusively press her shirt against her breasts to dry the trickles of sweat there. “Probably the biggest disagreement in their lives is whether lobsters are better boiled or steamed. It’s hard to imagine anyone traveling all the way to Oklahoma to duke it out over that.”
The sigh that escaped her was miserable. She was steaming, energy draining from her cells. She wanted to go inside—but not inside Will and Lolly’s house. She wanted to jump in her car and drive wildly around the county, searching for the specific one of the fifty million possibilities where someone was holding her family prisoner. She wanted to line up every person who had ever gotten cross with them, ever scowled or honked their horn or made a snide remark, and interrogate them relentlessly. To polygraph everyone who’d ever met them, every soul in Cedar County, and expand as necessary.
She wanted Will back. And Lolly and Theo and Brit, home where they belonged.
Ben’s cell signaled, and after a glance, he moved to stand up. He didn’t get far, though, before settling onto the step again. “Daniel’s waiting for me over at Kenneth Brown’s. Do you want to wait at my house or take the truck home or have Sam find a ride for you?”
The decision required no thought.
“I’ll wait at your house.”
With a grim nod, he stood and led the way back through the Mueller house and out to his vehicle. It seemed an extravagance to drive a few hundred yards, but with two of the media vans remaining on the shoulder of the road, she was grateful for it. Though cameras turned her way as they climbed out a moment later, she focused on Ben’s broad shoulders, following him onto the porch, blocking her from their view while he unlocked the door, then stepped back to allow her to enter.
He looked for a moment as if he was about to say something. Bathroom’s down the hall. Help yourself to whatever you need. Lock the door behind me. A shiver washed over her. Simple words, a threat or a promise depending on the circumstances. God, she wished these circumstances were better.
“Be careful,” she whispered, but the door was already closing behind him.
* * *
Though Kenneth Brown’s house sat no farther from the road than the Mueller house, his driveway was easily five times as long, snaking up the incline, following the path of the creek. Shrubs slapped against the sides of Ben’s truck while tall, thick stalks of johnsongrass brushed featherlight over the cab windows.
Halfway up, hidden from both road and house, Daniel was leaning against his car. He was in uniform—black tactical pants and polo shirt—with his badge and holster on his belt. For every notch that marriage had loosened him, impending fatherhood, wifely hormonal swings and one hot summer had ratcheted him back up. Though he should have looked casual, leaning there with his ankles crossed, he was visibly tense.
Granted, it could just be the prospect of another run-in with Brown.
Ben rolled down the window as he stopped and Daniel approached. Before the other detective could speak, he asked, “You want to get behind me when we go in? I only ask because the last time you went in first, you landed kind of hard when he threw you back out.”
Daniel’s responding look was flat. “I wouldn’t have landed so hard if you hadn’t stepped aside.”
“The guy heaved you like a javelin, and you wanted me to just stand there and wait for you to crash into me?” Ben snorted, swatted a fly that came too close and gestured toward the thick growth. “What do you think?”
Though his tone didn’t change, Daniel knew from years of working together what he meant. He scratched his jaw, then waved away a cloud of gnats that had found him. For a Los Angeles–born and-raised kid, he did okay in the country. Mostly.
“He’s an ill-tempered pain in the ass, but I don’t buy him for this. Kidnapping three people, stashing them somewhere... Brown’s too lazy. And the last time his wife saw his attention wandering to another female, she took a baseball bat to his head.”
Ben agreed. Plus, by the time the sun went down on any given night, Brown was settled in for a long evening of drinking, arguing—even if it was only with the TV—and more drinking. Chances of him having seen or heard anything of value were slimmer than slim.
Daniel stiffened his spine. “Let’s get on with it. I’ve got reports to write.”
Daniel went back to his car, and they continued the drive to the clearing at the top of the hill, parking behind Brown’s vehicle. The house was older than dirt, a simple square with no porch, no identifiable color. A chicken coop off to one side had collapsed in on itself, and a workshop of corrugated tin leaned precariously on the other side. There was hard-packed dirt instead of grass, and the woods surrounded it all with a claustrophobic margin of about ten feet.
A person might think the people who lived there were poverty stricken, but Ben knew that wasn’t quite the case. He had no clue about their debts, but Brown’s current vehicle was a luxury SUV still bearing the showroom shine, and Pamela Brown drove a Mercedes. A satellite for television and another for internet sat side by side on the roof, and stacked outside the workshop were empty boxes that hadn’t been out long enough for the weather to disguise their contents: a sixty-inch television, two laptop computers, an espresso machine.
When Ben joined him, Daniel murmured, “Deputy was telling me about a house out in the county that looks about like this from the outside. Inside there’s a $5 million art collection. Me, I’d rather find a nice balance.”
“Bet the art collector doesn’t have a fallen-down chick
en coop. But then, maybe he could call it modern art and slap a price tag on it.” Ben drew a breath and started toward the front door. The stoop consisted of fiberglass steps that had been hauled to within a foot of the house and called good. When he set his foot on the bottom step, the door above opened.
“Ain’t nobody called you.”
Brown stood in the doorway, arms crossed, fingers of one hand clasped around the neck of a beer bottle. Drink of choice, weapon of choice, all in one. He’d never grown taller than five-seven and had spent most of his sixty years trying to convince everybody he was a six-four badass son of a bitch. He was wiry, tough, his blue eyes faded and squinty, and his hairline had receded to the back of his head.
He reminded Ben of his grandmother’s old bantam rooster.
Brown’s second weapon of choice—an old-fashioned .38 caliber revolver—was holstered on his belt.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Brown.” Ben called a lot of people by their first names. As long as Little Bears had been in Cedar County, he knew a lot of people. “Put the gun down and step outside, please.”
Ben could see the thoughts running through the man’s mind. He had a right to be armed on his own property, but he’d learned to be cautious of law enforcement officers whom he’d thrown ten feet through the air. Daniel hadn’t been the first.
With a scowl, Brown set the pistol down nearby, stepped out and closed the door behind him. “’Bout what?”
“Were you home last night?”
“Yep.”
“Was Mrs. Brown here?”
He took a long drink from the bottle, draining it, then tossed it to the ground. It bounced on the hard dirt before settling. “She went out to dinner with her sisters. Come in about eleven and went to bed. Why? Who’s saying it and what are they saying?”
“Did you see or hear anything unusual last night? Any time from sunset on?”
Brown’s jaw jutted forward. “Look around. We don’t see nothing, and the only thing we hear is the train going past. We don’t even hear traffic most the time.”
“You know Will and Lolly Mueller?” Daniel asked from a spot a few feet to Ben’s left.
“Know who they are. Don’t really know them.” Brown smirked. “We don’t sit down to dinner with them. They’re not really our kind.”
Lolly would have tried to befriend them, Ben knew, because that was the kind of person she was. She’d probably shown up one day with a basket of vegetables or fresh-baked bread to say hello and been turned away rudely. It had probably happened several times, because Lolly was a big believer in second chances.
“Do you know their kids?” Daniel asked.
“I know they got some. Can’t say as we ever met. Why? Did something happen to them?”
Ben shifted to gaze in the direction of the Mueller house. Back in the day, the trains, with their cast-iron brake shoes striking sparks on the steel rails, had been a regular source of wildfires, clearing the deadfall and keeping the woods fairly neat. Then they’d gone to composite brake blocks, which minimized the sparks, and left years of dead leaves, debris and new sprouts to form a virtual jungle. He doubted even blazing lights at the Mueller house could penetrate the growth.
He tuned back in to hear Daniel speaking again. “So you didn’t hear any noises at all last night? No shouts? No screams? You know how sound carries at night.”
There had been nothing to alert Ben to trouble, neither before he left to pick up Morwenna nor after they’d returned, and his house was much closer.
Brown’s eyes lit up, and his posture straightened. “Screams? Something did happen, didn’t it? What was it? Did he go crazy and kill them all? Or was it the kids? Did they stab their parents in the night and take off? Was there a home invasion?”
Ben’s nerves clenched. How had everyday people developed such a taste for violence? He hated what people did to their children, their families and total strangers, and detested how so many otherwise normal people salivated over every grisly, gory detail. Just the possibility of something bad nearby had brightened Kenneth Brown’s day.
“Come on,” he cajoled. “If it was anything serious, it’ll be on the internet. If someone’s running around here killing people, I’ve got a right to know. I have to protect me and my wife.”
“So you didn’t hear anything unusual,” Ben said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Brown.” He turned his back on the man and headed back toward the truck.
Daniel fell in step beside him. “You feeling a little twitch between the shoulder blades right now?”
“Nah,” Ben lied. He was never eager to turn his back on trouble. “He wouldn’t want to risk damaging his new truck. I assume you got the same thing from the other neighbors.”
“Without the beer, the gun and the sick excitement.” Daniel stopped next to his car. “Sometimes I hate people.”
“Sometimes they deserve to be hated.”
Including the one waiting back at his house?
No. There was a saying: the opposite of love wasn’t hate; it was indifference. He’d loved Yashi more than he’d known he was capable of. She’d hurt and betrayed him. He’d stopped loving her and now felt pretty much nothing for her. He’d gone months, maybe even years, without ever thinking about her. She was nothing to him.
Until this day from hell had brought her back front and center.
* * *
Ben’s house was the only Craftsman bungalow Yashi had ever set foot in. Despite the coziness of the word bungalow, it was easily four times the size of her house, with oak flooring, airy spaces and exposed beams. The outside was deep gray with white trim and a burgundy door. Inside were creamy tones, white walls with a touch of peach above mahogany cabinets and bookcases, solid furniture and rugs woven in rich earthen tones. It had belonged to a great-aunt of his, and when she’d died, he’d been fortunate enough to work a deal with the family.
Yashi had paced from living room to kitchen and back again so many times, she thought she could see a trail emerging on the carpets and flooring. She’d gotten water from the refrigerator and gone to the bathroom to wash the sticky remains of sweat from her face and arms, and she’d resisted peeking into the master bedroom. She’d helped Ben paint that room, a lovely barely green hue, and had picked out the shades for the broad windows and the linens for the bed. She didn’t want to see that Morwenna’s influence had replaced her own. Lime green? Neon orange?
After Yashi banished herself back to the public spaces, a knock had sounded at the door, and she’d rushed to it, only to catch a glimpse of the red-haired photographer standing on the porch with his reporter. Quietly, as if they didn’t know she was there, she had scuttled to Great-Aunt’s library, a tiny nook off the living room, with built-in shelves all around, shared between books, baskets, beadwork and pottery. It held one cushy chair, one table, one good lamp and no window to allow the outside world—or reporters—to intrude.
Now, long after the knock, she stopped handling the art, quit trying to pretend interest in reading and returned to the living room. She was cold, so she wrapped herself in a quilt from the sofa. It was Lolly’s work, a geometric pattern in rust and brown, mossy green and dusky blue, and it brought tears to Yashi’s eyes. She was counseling herself to be strong—there would be plenty of time to cry when everyone was back where they belonged—when she heard footsteps on the porch.
Another knock came, followed almost immediately by a deep, quiet voice. “Son, trust me, you don’t want to be trespassing on a police officer’s property.”
She sidled closer to the window and saw the photographer again, with Ben behind him on the steps, looking unimpressed by the guy’s status as media. He made a shooing gesture, and the redhead shooed. It was so easy to be intimidating when you had presence, Yashi reflected with a sigh, and Ben had it in spades.
He had everything she’d ever wanted. But she’d been stupid
enough to think she could have both her ambition and his trust, and she’d ended up losing everything.
She sank into the nearest chair as he turned the key in the lock. By the time he opened the door, she probably looked as if she’d been huddled there the whole time.
“I didn’t hear your truck.”
“It’s across the road.”
Of course. He’d had to check in with Sam after talking to the cranky neighbor. He looked hot, and sweat dampened his black hair, but he didn’t bear any bruises or scraped knuckles. “I take it Mr. Brown was in a good mood.”
Something dark and fierce passed through Ben’s eyes, but it disappeared immediately. “He was.”
Finally he moved from his spot in front of the door, passing her with long strides, trailing a scent of sun and perspiration. She was focusing on shallow breaths and restraining old memories when he came back with a bottle of water and a plastic container of cookies. He pried off the lid and offered her a choice of chocolate chip and oatmeal. She chose a chocolate chip cookie, as he’d known she would, and he took an oatmeal, as she’d known he would. She’d just bitten into hers when he spoke again.
“Where were you last night?”
Her breathing stopped, her chewing, the beating of her heart. In her whole life, no one had ever asked her that question with anything more than minor curiosity. Her foster parents, a friend who’d had a last-minute change of plans and no one to hang with, a vaguely jealous boyfriend.
She tried to swallow, realized she’d forgotten the cookie and choked it down with a swig of water. “I was in the office until six, then I went home. I finished my work there, ate dinner, watched TV with Bobcat and went to bed about eleven. I didn’t have any visitors or any phone calls, but my cell was on, so you can verify that it was there.”
Dangerous Reunion Page 6