As on my earlier visit, the back gate was open. No one lounged at the pool when we got there, though. The clear aquamarine water was as smooth as an untouched cup of Jell-O, and the CD player sat silently on the table.
“Where do you suppose she is?” Gigi asked, looking around as if expecting to spot Jacqueline crouched under the chaise lounge or hiding behind the barberry shrubs growing near the house.
That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I ground my teeth in frustration. Maybe Jacqueline and Olivia were seated in the first class cabin of a jet heading for Costa Rica or Tanzania. I didn’t know if you needed a passport for an infant. If so, maybe they were driving through Kansas or on a plane headed to Seattle or Sacramento or San Antonio. I had no way of finding out. Montgomery could do it with a few phone calls—check airline manifests and suchlike—but I knew he wasn’t going to.
Just as I opened my phone to call Stefan Falstow’s office, see if I could get a lead on Jacqueline there, I heard tires crunch on asphalt at the front of the house. Someone had pulled into the driveway. I trotted toward the gate in time to meet Jacqueline Falstow as she came through it, a bag of groceries in her arms, a puzzled look on her face. When she saw me, her brows drew together and she backed up a step.
“What are you doing in my yard?”
Was that fear in her voice, or only the natural irritation of a homeowner who finds unwanted guests in her backyard? I kept walking. “Where’s the baby, Mrs. Falstow?”
“What are you talking about?” Confusion mixed with the annoyance in her face.
“Olivia. Roberta. Whatever. Lizzy Jones’s baby. Where is she?”
One hand flew to her half-opened mouth, and the bag of groceries dropped unheeded to the ground. A carton of eggs oozed yolk onto the grass, and a bottle of olive oil shattered when it hit the flagstone walk, splattering Jacqueline’s legs with oily splotches. She didn’t seem to notice. “Roberta! What’s happened to her?”
“She was kid—taken from the house where she was staying,” I said carefully. It dawned on me that I might have been wrong about Jacqueline stealing the baby. Unless she was the best actress since Meryl Streep, she couldn’t fake the emotions chasing across her face.
“You let someone take her? What if they hurt her? What if she’s scared and crying? What will happen to my baby?” With each question, her pitch rose until she was virtually shrieking, and she rushed at me, mashing runaway blueberries underfoot, her hands curled into claws.
She was blocking access to the gate, so I retreated toward the pool. Despite the fact she was taller, I didn’t have much doubt I could take her down if I had to. I was uncomfortably aware, however, that I was standing on legal ground about as solid as quicksand. I was trespassing in her yard; if I hit her and she made a complaint, I was screwed. My backward progress had landed me on the decking around the pool. I held up my hands placatingly and cast a swift glance behind me, not wanting to end up wet.
Gigi, so far silent, piped up. “Look, Mrs. Falstow, we’re all worried about the little baby, but Charlie can’t get on with finding her if you don’t calm down. If you don’t have the baby, you need to let us get back to looking for her.”
“Who are you?” Jacqueline asked, slowing in her pursuit of me. Her head swiveled from me to Gigi, trying to keep an eye on both of us.
“Gigi Goldman, my assoc— my partner,” I said.
Gigi shot me a gratified look and beamed, and I realized it was the first time I’d used the P-word. It hurt, but not as much as I would’ve thought.
“I don’t have Roberta,” Jacqueline said, tears streaking mascara down her face. “I’ve never even seen her.” Her hands dropped to her sides, and Gigi approached her, throwing a comforting arm around her shoulders.
“There, there,” Gigi said. “It’ll all work out.”
I marveled at the way her presence seemed to calm Jacqueline, even though I thought it doubtful that it would all work out the way Jacqueline hoped. With relatives wanting the baby, and the father still unaccounted for, I held out little hope she’d be cuddling the baby in her expensive nursery anytime soon . . . if ever.
As Gigi led the sobbing Jacqueline to the back door, I headed out the gate, knowing Gigi would have better luck calming Falstow if I stayed out of sight. Determined to cover all the bases, I checked Falstow’s car. She’d left the doors open, and the scent of sun-warmed bananas drifted out. Nothing but groceries in the backseat—no sign of a safety seat or baby paraphernalia. Climbing into the Hummer, I waited for Gigi to appear.
She did, five minutes later, her cheerful face drawn down with empathy. “That poor woman,” she said, starting the car.
“Any sign of the baby in there?” I asked.
She shook her head. “None. She took me up to show me the baby’s room—”
“Of course she did.”
“—and it’s clear there’s never been a baby in there. I feel sorry for her.”
“Me, too, but there’s nothing we can do to help her.” I was pissed at myself for wasting so much time. We were that much farther behind the kidnapper now, all because I’d been sure I knew who had taken the baby, and I was wrong. My phone rang as I was mentally flagellating myself. Montgomery.
“Did you get anything?”
His voice singed the line. “Not even the admission that a kidnapping took place.”
“What!”
“Your Melissa Lloyd denies that a baby is missing. If you’d told me she had the baby in the first place, we might have been able to force her to produce it, but the way it is . . .”
“I don’t frigging believe this!” I hit the dashboard with frustration. The Hummer wasn’t fazed by my fury. “I did not make this up! She called me not an hour ago, panicked. She told me—”
“Chill, Charlie.” Montgomery’s voice was calm. “She’s lying to us. I’ve never met anyone who lies so badly. She’s nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but we can’t budge her on her story. She kicked us off the property. Maybe if you came out here and had a go at her . . .”
“On my way.” I hung up and told Gigi where we were headed. I occupied the drive imagining the various tortures I’d use on Melissa to get her to admit the truth. Not only was she slowing down our hunt for Olivia, she was making me look like a fool in front of Montgomery.
As Gigi wove in and out of the traffic on 1-25, my brain finally kicked into gear. Unless this was a totally random kidnapping—a coincidence I just couldn’t buy—Olivia was taken by someone who knew she was at the Lloyds’ house. Who knew that Melissa had the baby? Not the Falstows. Not the Sprouses. Not Linnea or Jack or Seth Johnson. I did. Melissa did. Her husband did. I punched in Melissa’s number. “Where’s your husband?” I asked when she picked up the phone.
“Ian?”
Did she have more than one? “Yes, Ian,” I said.
“Arizona. I told you. Why do you . . . ?” Her voice petered out, then came back at a higher pitch. “Oh, no! He wouldn’t! When I told him I want to keep Olivia, he . . . Even though he’s never wanted kids, I’m sure I can talk him into . . . He’ll be a great father.”
He wasn’t winning any prizes so far. “Look, when he and Elizabeth met, what did—”
“They didn’t know each other,” Melissa cut in, confused. “Ian doesn’t hang at the store very often.”
No, they had met when Elizabeth hung the drapes at the Lloyd house. I remembered Ian’s unease when I stopped by, the dropped paintbrush. I wondered at what point he’d realized he was sleeping with his wife’s daughter. Surely he hadn’t known when he seduced her. Or had she seduced him? I mulled it over, barely conscious of Melissa sputtering in the phone and Gigi casting me anxious looks. On the whole, I was inclined to think Elizabeth had initiated the affair. Everyone from Linnea to Aurora Newcastle to Frieda Vasher suspected Elizabeth’s motives for trying to locate her birth mother. No one thought she was looking for a lovey-dovey reunion. What, then? I thought I knew: revenge.
I didn
’t have time to figure it all out or explain my thinking to Melissa. Every minute we wasted gave Ian more time to . . . I stopped myself from imagining what Ian might want to do with the baby whose DNA could tie him to a murder victim. “Melissa! Try to get hold of Ian. Try his cell phone, his office, his hotel. If you get him, say—” What could she say?
“His truck has one of those theft-tracking GPS systems.”
It took me a moment to process the words Melissa had whispered. “It does? Great. Call the company and tell them the truck’s been stolen. Then you can tell Lieutenant Montgomery, and he’ll—”
“No police.”
“Melissa, you have to tell the police. This is kidnapping. Olivia’s in danger. Ian might—”
“He’d never hurt a baby.”
Right, and he’d never have an affair with a teenager, or kill said teenager. What did she think—he was taking Olivia to the park to feed the ducks? “You’ve got to—”
“No.” Her voice was implacable. “He’s my husband. I’ll find out where the truck is, and you get Olivia back.”
“Call me right back, as soon as they get a position on the truck,” I said without explicitly agreeing not to tell the police. She might be crazy, but I wasn’t. As I dialed Montgomery’s number again, I filled Gigi in on my thoughts and told her, “At the next exit, get off and head south.” My instincts told me Ian would be headed back to Arizona. He’d need to establish an alibi for himself there, regardless of what he did with Olivia.
“I can do better than that,” Gigi said.
Before I could guess what she planned, she wrenched the Hummer’s wheel to the left, and the heavy vehicle wallowed onto the median. The tires spun on the grass, and I jounced forward, stopping myself with a hand on the dash. “Gigi!” The word was torn from my lips as she engaged a lower gear and the Hummer lurched into a depression, careened over a boulder at an angle that almost tipped me onto Gigi, and slammed into the southbound lane of traffic, broadside to the oncoming cars.
“Oops!”
I shut my eyes, waiting for the crash, the grinding of metal ripping into metal, hoping the Hummer had side-impact airbags. Gigi stepped on the accelerator, and the vehicle shot across all three lanes of traffic and onto the verge as two cars and a semi flashed by, all the drivers leaning hard on their horns. Before I could recover my breath, Gigi spun the wheel again and merged into the southbound flow of traffic.
“That was close.” She gave me a sunny smile.
I looked at her with something approaching awe. Before I could say anything, Montgomery’s voice squawked, and I bent to recover my cell phone from the floor. I filled him in, and he cursed. “Damn the woman. I need to contact the FBI. Call me back when you get the coordinates for Lloyd’s vehicle. I’m going to persuade the Lloyd woman to tell me the truth so we can get in on this properly.”
The way he ground out “persuade” had me envisioning an iron maiden or a waterboard. My phone emitted a low-battery beep. Uh-oh. “Gotta go,” I told Montgomery.
“Where are we going?” Gigi asked.
“Hell if I know.”
We lapsed into silence, barreling south down 1-25 for two long minutes until my phone rang again. The caller ID told me it was Melissa. “Where is he?” I said in lieu of “hello.”
Catching my sense of urgency, she read out a set of coordinates without any small talk or tears. I scribbled them on the back of a Jiffy Lube receipt tucked in the sun visor. “The truck’s been there for ten minutes, the technician told me,” Melissa finished.
“Tell Detective Montgomery—” My phone died. “Shit!”
Taking three deep breaths, I turned to Gigi. “Does this thing have a GPS?”
She chuckled, sounding very southern. “Honey, this thing has every kind of navigating device short of sonar. Les is really into gadgets. We even have a weather station—”
“How do I use it?” I cut her off, examining the box she gestured at.
She shrugged her soft shoulders and overcorrected as the Hummer drifted into another lane. Horns blared. I held on to the dash and poked the coordinates into the GPS device. It lit up, and a velvety female voice began issuing instructions. We were just fourteen miles from our destination. Hallelujah!
“It’s just like geocaching,” Gigi said, steering around a Hyundai that was only doing twenty miles an hour over the speed limit.
“Geo what?”
“Geocaching. It’s a game. You get coordinates from some site on the Internet and use them to find a treasure, only usually the treasure’s not anything to write home about. Anyway, Dexter’s really into it, and we went—Les and Dex and Kendall and me—one time last fall, and, well . . . never mind. Anyway, it’s just like this”—she nodded at the small display—“following the map to a treasure.”
Only in this case the treasure was a baby.
18
As we drew closer to the blip representing Lloyd’s truck, I began to wonder if he’d dumped it. He could have switched cars, caught a taxi to the airport, hopped a bus. I was willing to rule out Jet Skis and gondolas, but any other form of transportation was still in play. I clenched and unclenched my hands as Gigi, following the directions of the sultry GPS voice, swung off 1-25 and trundled along a service road. “There.” She pointed.
A couple of acres of cars, trucks, and vans of all descriptions surrounded the twenty-first-century shopping mecca: Walmart. Sun glinted off chrome, mirrors, and highly polished paint jobs, bumping the temperature at least five degrees. The heat rose off the asphalt and vehicles in a visible, shimmering wave. Maybe it was all a mirage? I groaned at the prospect of locating Lloyd’s truck in the huge lot. I felt like Horton trying to find the thistle with the Whos on it in the thistle field. My hope dwindled because I was sure Ian had abandoned the car, assuming no one would notice it. I just couldn’t imagine a kidnapper stopping off to pick up groceries at discount prices.
As I worried, and tried to gin up another plan for finding Lloyd and Olivia, Gigi cruised down the aisles, keeping one eye on the GPS display. “It should be in the next row,” she said, her voice breathless with excitement. “What kind of car are we looking for, anyway?”
“A maroon F-150 with a camper top,” I said, pulling up an image of the truck from my visit to the Lloyd home. “Maybe there’ll be a clue in it to tell us where he’s headed,” I said with faint hope. “It’s—”
“Look!”
My eyes followed Gigi’s outstretched arm. I couldn’t believe it. The maroon truck, its door ajar, squatted between a yellow Mini Cooper and a rusted-out El Camino that was once red. A man who might have been Lloyd had his head and torso inside the passenger compartment, apparently trying to load something into the seat.
“Park him in,” I ordered Gigi, grasping the dashboard.
She bounced on her seat, tore down the aisle like a drag racer, and stopped with a lurch directly behind the F-150. Due to the size of the Hummer, she was also blocking the Mini Cooper’s exit, but that couldn’t be helped.
“Perfect,” I said, unbuckling and jumping to the ground. I hesitated for a moment; if Lloyd was armed, I might be putting the baby in danger by confronting him. Maybe now that we had him cornered, I should wait for the police to show up. I was sure Montgomery had talked Melissa into cooperating by now. A baby’s wail jolted me forward. Relief tingled through me at the auditory evidence that Olivia was alive. I felt Gigi’s bulk crowding me from behind.
“Hey, you can’t put that baby in the front seat,” she said indignantly before I could motion her to silence. “It isn’t safe!”
With a muffled “Damn,” Ian Lloyd pulled his head out of the front seat, banging it on the roof. His cursing escalated; a passing shopper hauled her toddler into her arms and cupped her hands over his ears.
Rubbing the bleeding gash on his forehead, Lloyd looked from me to Gigi, wild-eyed, as Olivia continued to screech.
“Let me have that baby,” Gigi said, elbowing past Lloyd to reach into the truck. “There, t
here, honey, it’ll be okay,” she soothed, working mother magic on the car seat straps and gentling the squalling infant against her bosom. “Phew, you’re a stinky, aren’t you? No wonder you’re so unhappy.” She shot an accusatory look at Ian. “Diapers?”
“In the bag.” He nodded toward a Walmart bag on the pavement at his feet. A scowl twisted his face. “That’s why we stopped. Well, for that and the car seat. She couldn’t sit up so I couldn’t use the seat belt on her and she was rolling around on the seat so I had to drive with one hand holding her so she wouldn’t fall. Then she pooped and I don’t know what Mel’s been feeding the kid, but it stank like a herd of pigs had crowded into the cab, I kid you not, and then—”
“You mean you drove that poor baby all the way from Monument to here without a safety seat?” Gigi’s horrified voice brought stares from interested shoppers.
“That’s illegal!” piped up a skinny woman holding a snotty-nosed toddler of indeterminate gender by one hand.
“Enough.” I made shooing motions, and the bystanders who seemed inclined to linger proceeded reluctantly toward the store. “Take the baby to the Hummer, Gigi,” I suggested. The unrelenting caterwauling was driving me insane. Even Lloyd looked like he thought it was a good idea. Gigi scooped up the bag with the Huggies peeking out the top and stalked to the car muttering, “The stupid man’s got the car seat in backwards, and I’ll bet he didn’t even get wipes or powder for your sweet little bottom.”
I put a hand on Lloyd’s arm as he started to inch away. “Uh-uh. You and I can sit here and have a nice conversation while we wait for the police.”
“The police!” He looked around as if searching for SWAT personnel behind lampposts or under the plastic swimming pools displayed by the store entrance.
“Kidnapping’s a crime, in case you didn’t know, and so is murder.”
“It was an accident.”
“Which? The kidnapping or the murder?”
Swift Justice: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Books) Page 23