by Rose Beecham
“I’m not going to fight Vinnie.” Matthew looked her dead in the eye. He was pale and his mouth shook. “I’m going to do what you said. I’ll show her. I’ll take that job and get a decent car and my own place, and she’ll wish she’d never dumped me for that asshole Wade fucking Miller. And when you get home later, no goat. Okay?”
Before Heather could say thank you, he stalked out of the bar.
Chapter Two
Sheriff’s Detective Jude Devine untangled herself from her sheets, groped for the phone, and peered at her digital clock. 4:30 a.m. Normally, she got up at 5:30 so she could work out for an hour before she drove to work. A phone call this early meant she wouldn’t be bench-pressing anything bigger than a coffee mug.
“Get in here, Devine,” her boss demanded as Jude licked her furry teeth and tried to formulate a greeting.
Dragging herself upright, she located the bottle of water she kept on her nightstand. After two years away from Washington, D.C., she was used to dealing with the Colorado altitude. Anyone who didn’t drink plenty of water could expect a permanent headache.
“What’s up, sir?” she asked after a few protracted gulps.
“We have a situation.” Sheriff Pratt’s grim delivery made it clear she would not be staying in her nice warm bed much longer.
“How bad?”
Pratt coughed wetly into the phone. “Bad enough for me to be freezing my balls off down here instead of doing what the doctor ordered and staying in my goddamned bed for another week.”
“Bummer.”
Jude slid her feet into the chill air and groaned. She turned the heating down when she went to bed, so her room wasn’t even fifty degrees. Shivering, she stumbled across her cold floorboards to the window and twitched the curtain aside. It was still dark, but her yard glowed winter white with the first serious snowfall of the season.
No one could believe they’d had to wait until March to see the usual high country snowpack. Even the most earnest devotees of denial, of which the Four Corners had more than its fair share, were suddenly wondering aloud if global warming was not just a liberal fiction invented to destroy the American way of life. Hurricane Katrina and the cost of gas had unleashed a rare storm of doubt about the wisdom and pronouncements of the demigods on Capitol Hill.
“Snow’s coming down pretty heavy out here,” she told Pratt, gloomily resigning herself to shoveling her driveway in darkness so she could get her Dodge Dakota out.
“Weather report says we’re expecting another nine inches,” he said unsympathetically. “The sooner you leave, the less you’ll have to shovel.”
Jude hit the lights and squinted until she could relax her eyes. “I hear you. So, what have we got?”
“Hard to say exactly. Just do me a favor and haul ass, Detective.”
Surprised by this masterful directive, Jude juggled the phone as she located underwear and warm clothes. The sheriff seldom took that kind of tone with her. Although he had never wanted her on his staff and was antsy around her at the best of times, he usually managed to conceal his feelings behind a mask of professional respect. Whatever was going on had to be big for him to drag her in right off the bat.
Intrigued, Jude asked, “Sir, any special equipment requirements?”
No answer. She surmised Pratt had his hand over the phone while he was coughing. He’d caught a bad case of the flu a week earlier and was so feverish at work he collapsed on a bed in one of the detention cells. The staff panicked, imagining a terrorist attack, maybe anthrax in the mail. Homeland Security closed the office for a day and sent in a team in hazard suits while doctors ascertained the cause of Pratt’s symptoms. He’d been at home in bed ever since.
Jude could hear nose-blowing in the background. Finally her boss croaked, “We’ll be needing the K-9 unit. There’s a kid missing.”
“A kid. Now? In this weather?”
“Looks like it. And we have a felony animal-cruelty incident tied in, so you might want to prepare yourself before you get to the scene.”
What he really meant was for her to prepare Tulley. Her deputy at the Paradox Valley substation was stoic in the face of crimes against persons and property, but anything involving a four-legged friend derailed him.
Jude buttoned her shirt. “I take it we’re talking about a search-and-rescue op.”
“Yep, assuming we don’t find the little guy on the property. I got a team down there now combing the neighborhood, and I’ve called out the posse. Everyone’s asking for that hound.”
Tulley would be ecstatic. He’d taken their bloodhound, Smoke’m, on a course recently to learn new techniques for tracking in snow. Pratt had bitched about the cost.
“Is it an abduction?” Jude asked.
“Too soon to say for certain. We’re not getting a whole lot of sense out of the mother. I don’t want to guess at her blood-alcohol level.” His voice became a thin, breathless rasp as he added, “Of course, if you want to call your buddies in right now, I can’t stop you.”
Jude sighed. If a nonfamily child abduction was indicated, the Feds would have to be involved and Pratt would want her to make that call, given what he liked to refer to as her “secret goddamn identity” as an FBI agent working undercover. Jude had been gathering intelligence on domestic terrorist groups based in the Four Corners region for two years now, and Pratt seldom let her forget her “real mission.”
For some reason her masters at the Bureau had thought that sending her into the area as a sheriff’s detective was a stroke of genius. They hadn’t bothered to consult Pratt about their brilliant plan, but had simply converted a schoolhouse in Paradox Valley to a substation, hired a secretary, and ordered Pratt to appoint Jude to head up this remote outpost.
The Valley was not even in Pratt’s jurisdiction, so he was forced to enter into an unwelcome joint arrangement with the Montrose sheriff, who knew nothing about the real rationale but was happy to score some extra guns in the canyon region. In most of the surrounding counties, the big preoccupation for local law enforcement was the annual Telluride Film Festival. As long as Jude didn’t start busting celebrities, no one cared what she got up to. But Pratt never missed a chance to whine about the invidious position he was in, thanks to her. He clearly expected her to unearth a vast conspiracy at any moment, one that would play right into the hands of his chief opponent in the forthcoming elections.
“I’ll see you in an hour, sir. We can discuss other agency involvement once we know what we’re dealing with.” She slid her belt through the loops of her black wool pants. “We’ll probably want to go the CBI route right off, then bring in the Bureau. That would be diplomatic.”
Pratt audibly released a breath. Like a lot of local sheriffs, he was queasy about bringing federal agents into any investigation in his jurisdiction. Even aside from his personal gripe with the Bureau, Jude knew he pictured the usual scenarios—slickly dressed Feds take over, state and local law enforcement get cut out of the loop, the Feds claim the credit for any success and blame the locals for every failure. Jude had heard the same complaints time after time when she worked in the Bureau’s Crimes Against Children Unit. But when a child went missing there was no gain in playing politics. Most serious cases went multi-agency from day one.
In recent times, the Amber Alert system had helped iron out a few problems, giving state and local response a higher profile and more media attention. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation coordinated the system statewide and worked closely with all the national and local clearinghouses for missing-children information. They would send in a Major Crimes Unit, if requested, and once they knew what they were dealing with, they could call in the FBI. The simple fact was no small regional police or sheriff’s department could fully resource a major investigation, and everyone knew it.
Jude was about to end the call when Pratt asked, “Detective, would it be fair to say you’re familiar with tactical interrogation techniques?”
Cautiously, Jude said, “Federal agents get some
extra training.”
These days, the “tactical interrogation” methods employed by the military and intelligence communities were gaining traction in law enforcement, and the term was being tossed around by training providers like it was a magic bullet. Forget the standard time-consuming behavior analysis and interrogation techniques that had worked for decades—there was now a shortcut, a fast-food approach to getting confessions. Jude wasn’t sure what was new about police officers beating information out of a suspect; it had been a pretty popular “tactic” until the eighties. But Iraq had breathed new life, and new euphemisms, into disgraced ideas, and all of a sudden departments could send their staff for training so they would know how not to drown a prisoner or leave DNA all over an interview room. No one used the word “torture” for any of this; it made a poor impression.
Sheriff Pratt got to the point. “Can you tell when a subject is lying?”
“No one can be sure about that, sir, and I doubt my instincts are any better than yours.” She pulled on two layers of socks and shoved her feet into snow boots. “Got a subject in mind?”
“There’s a boyfriend in the picture. Wade Miller. One prior for misdemeanor assault. Had a protective order served on him a couple of years back.”
“And he’s not the missing kid’s biological father?”
Jude automatically ran the odds as she loaded her duty revolver, a Glock 22. The statistics were all too familiar from her years in the CACU. Eighty percent of violent crimes against young children were committed by a parent. If a baby made it through the first day of her or his life without being murdered by the mother, the father then posed the greater risk. A stepfather was about fifty times more likely to kill a small child than a biological father. Missing-baby-plus-mother’s-boyfriend was an equation well-known to anyone in law enforcement.
“The real dad is on an oil rig,” Pratt said. “We put a call in to his employer as soon as the missing-child report was filed.”
“How’s the boyfriend acting?”
“Like he got lobotomized at birth.”
“Keep them apart.” Jude stated the obvious. “And get his clothes off him and bag them. I don’t care what you have to tell him. Get him clean ones and make him change.”
She felt bad telling Pratt his job, but small town law enforcement sometimes tried to be human in cases like this. A panicky mother could be left with her partner for comfort. If Pratt was expecting any reliable data from interviewing this couple, she didn’t want them getting their stories straight before she talked to them.
“Don’t worry.” Pratt sounded pleased with himself. “We’ve had Miller in his own interview room since they walked in the door with their bullshit story. I’ll see about his clothes.”
Jude holstered the Glock and gazed out into the lethal cold once more. “How old is the kid?”
“Not even two. A baby.”
“So, we’re looking for a body.” She spoke her immediate thought aloud.
“Worst-case scenario, yes.”
She started assembling her blizzard gear. “I’ll be in as soon as I can. Don’t let the boyfriend use the bathroom.”
“You got it.” Pratt hung up.
Jude collected her car keys and called Tulley on her cell phone. “Harness that hound of yours,” she instructed, “and get down to Cortez.”
Tulley’s voice came back fuzzy, and something crashed in the background. He said, “Hang on, Detective. Knocked the lamp over.”
She heard him mumble something to whoever was in bed next to him. It sounded like: How many times I gotta tell you? Don’t slobber on the phone.
“Hurry it up,” she said. “There’s a toddler that’s missing.”
“You got it.” Jude could make out the sounds of drawers opening and closing. “I’ll take Smoke’m out hungry. That’ll make him keen.”
“Good thinking. Oh, and something else. The sheriff says we have an animal-cruelty issue, but I’ll handle it. Okay?”
“Have they arrested someone for that?” Tulley’s voice went up a few notches.
“I don’t have any details. I’m just warning you.”
“I want five minutes alone with the guy that did it,” her subordinate said darkly.
Jude picked up a snow shovel from next to the garage door. “We both know that isn’t going to happen. See you down there, Deputy.”
*
“The seductively clad female is the boy’s mother,” Sheriff Pratt informed Jude as they both observed several people seated in the beige waiting area at the recently built Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office.
Unlike most mothers of missing toddlers, Tonya Perkins was not pacing the floor, weeping uncontrollably, or verbally abusing cops who could not join the search for her baby. She had discarded her black high-heel pumps and was lolling back in her chair, snoring. Someone had draped a blanket over her lap.
“Where’s the boyfriend?” Jude asked.
Pratt indicated the interview rooms along the hallway. “Locked up and pestering to use the facilities.”
“What’s he been saying?”
“He claims he collected Ms. Perkins from a party at the home of her sister, Mrs. Amberlee Foley, at two and some time after that discovered the boy was missing.”
“He reported this when?”
“Four fifteen. Just before I called you in.”
“What took him so long?”
“Good question. He said he couldn’t wake Ms. Perkins up. He also said he thought the kid had wandered out of his bed, at first. Maybe fallen asleep somewhere in the house. Later, he notices the front windows have been vandalized and the boy is missing.”
“He didn’t hear this vandalism happening?” Jude marveled.
“He claims it must have transpired earlier in the night when he was picking Ms. Perkins up from the sister’s place, but he didn’t see the damage when they arrived home. Too busy getting the mother of the year into bed after her drinking binge.”
Jude went over to Tonya Perkins and woke her up. The woman smelled like a bar.
“What am I doing here?” Perkins gazed at her dully. “I want to go home.”
“Ms. Perkins, you’re here because your son Corban is missing.”
Perkins began to laugh. The sound was slurred and uneven. “No, he’s not. Ding dong’s just playing games. Where is he?” She cast a wavering glance around the room.
“Where is who?”
“Wade.”
“Your boyfriend is being interviewed.”
“Tell him I want to go to bed. This is stupid.”
“Do you know where your son is?” Jude asked.
Perkins squinted at her like she was a figment of a bad dream. “Isn’t he at home?”
Jude summoned patience. There was no point getting frustrated with a confused, drunk woman. “No, he’s not, Ms. Perkins. If your boyfriend was playing a trick on you, where do you think he might take Corban?”
Slowly an idea registered on Tonya Perkins’s face. “He’s in the hospital,” she announced.
“Why would he be in the hospital?”
“He burnt his hand. Wade took him to the hospital last night.”
“First we’ve heard,” Pratt murmured from a few feet away. “Which hospital?”
Perkins shrugged. “I don’t know. Hey, where can I get a cup of coffee round here?”
Pratt waved a deputy over and ordered the refreshment. Jude glanced at the wall clock. 6:30 a.m. Corban had been missing for at least three hours, maybe longer, depending on whether this woman or her boyfriend were telling the truth or covering up a crime.
“I’ll call the hospital,” she said.
Pratt met her eyes. The doubt in his own was transparent.
*
Southwest Memorial had no record of Corban Foley. It had been a slow night, and no one could remember a man coming in with a small child. A couple of deputies were analyzing the security tapes.
So far, there was no sign of the toddler in his own neighborhood, e
ither. The preliminary canvass had generated only a few leads worth a dime. At 2 a.m. when Wade Miller claimed he’d left to pick up his intoxicated girlfriend, the residents of Malafide Road were tucked in their beds sound asleep. No one could say with any certainty that they’d heard a vehicle drive past their home.
Earlier that same evening, they’d been snugly ensconced in front of their TVs watching Nancy Grace and Deal or No Deal while the snow came down outside. No one had noticed Wade Miller’s truck arrive or leave the Perkins house. Everyone whined about the price of gas and the amazing March snowfall that had terminated their dry, warm winter. An elderly man several doors down shared his unflattering views on Tonya Perkins’s appearance and morality. And Tonya’s next-door neighbor, a single mother of three, said Tonya had “bad taste in men.” She’d seen “that loser she’s dating” shouting at the missing child, calling him names like “retard” and telling him to shut up.
According to her, they’d been out in the yard one day just before Christmas playing with Miller’s big dogs, and Corban was howling up a storm and trying to escape from the animals. Miller kept calling him a “dumb little faggot” and looked like he was going to start belting the kid. The neighbor went to the fence and made her presence known. Miller called off his dogs then, and took Corban into the house.
The woman concluded her comments with the statement, “If anything’s happened to that poor little kid, he did it.”
“Only problem is,” Pratt told Jude as they approached the Perkins house, “her sister was dating Miller before he took up with Perkins, and there’s some bad blood there. Girl named Brittany Kemple. We’re bringing her in.”
Jude crunched her way through a foot of fresh snow to Tonya Perkins’s driveway. The Perkins house was a fixer-upper no one had bothered to fix up. It stood out, even among the surrounding low-priced real estate, as the one house in its street with paint so badly flaked that the timber beneath was exposed. It also stood out because the front yard was secured by crime scene tape and in the dead center the snow had been blown aside to reveal a gory crimson halo surrounding the decapitated head of a goat. Compounding this macabre spectacle, the goat wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan Don’t Blame Me! I Didn’t Vote For Him. Someone had tried to cross out “For Him” with a black marker pen. The goat’s ears were fed through a couple of holes cut in the cap.