“He attended class regularly and had an above-average
GPA,” Ramsey added, almost morosely.
“If he’s not our guy, we’ll find out who is,” she said. “Any
word yet on the evidence?”
A few weeks before, Emma Sanderson had inadvertently
led Ramsey to the missing box of evidence from her sister’s
case. Completely unrelated to the child’s abduction, the box
had been stolen as part of a plot concocted by Emma’s mercenary ex-fiancé to sue the city of Comfort Cove for shoddy
police work. Ramsey had been through every thread of evidence with plastic gloves and a microscope. And then he’d
sent it to a forensics lab in Boston.
“I haven’t heard back from the lab. They’re backlogged
with current cases.”
“In point three miles, arrive at destination.”
Current cases had to take precedence. That was a given.
But waiting was frustrating as hell.
“Forensic science has come a long way in the past twentyfive years. Something significant might turn up.” Ramsey grunted. Keeping an eye on the road, Lucy glanced
toward him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
He was watching her. And soon, she’d be taking him home
with her.
“What?”
“Just…thank you.”
His tone had lowered. Warmed.
So had her insides. Her lips were dry. She licked them. “Arriving at destination.” Thank you, Bonnie.
“Yeah, I remember him.” Chester Brown wasn’t quite as old as Amelia, but the black man had to be pushing eighty. If he hadn’t already arrived. He glanced at Jack’s picture through a screen and without spectacles. “That’s Jack Colton.”
Ramsey’s radar went off. Why did Brown remember a man everyone else had forgotten?
“What can you tell us about him?” Lucy asked. They’d introduced themselves, shown their badges.
Chester had yet to unlock the screen door he stood behind.
Standing on the man’s front porch with Lucy, Ramsey sized up Chester Brown.
He lived in a small home, in an older, not so clean neighborhood. A home with a well-manicured, healthy yard, freshly painted black wrought-iron railing and clean window boxes. Chester had on old-as-the-hills brown polyester pants, but they were pressed and clean and without holes. As was his matching plaid button-down shirt.
“I can’t tell you anything unless I know why you’re asking.”
“We aren’t at liberty to divulge information from an open investigation, sir.” What did Brown have to hide?
Ready to stress the fact that Chester Brown could be found liable in any wrongdoing if he interfered with an investigation by withholding information, Ramsey heard Lucy beat him to the punch.
“We’re trying to help clear up a misunderstanding,” she said as he continued his scrutiny and saw wide-open, clear brown eyes gazing at him with the honesty of the cautious.
“Jack’s in some kind of trouble?”
“Not as far as we know.” Lucy’s nurturing tone was all for the older man.
Lucky man.
“I don’t know that much about him.” Chester Brown spoke slowly, but his voice was strong. Steady. “I managed the cafeteria at UC,” he said. “Been retired fifteen years now, but back then there were a certain number of student work positions held open for athletes as part of a scholarship program. Jack Colton came in on a baseball scholarship and was assigned to me.”
“You had a lot of kids assigned to you then?” Ramsey looked nowhere but at Brown. The man was a bug under his microscope and he wasn’t going to miss anything.
“Five to ten every semester.”
“But you remember Jack.”
He could feel Lucy staring at him. He brushed off the awareness.
“Yes, I remember him.” Chester Brown was frowning now, his tone more reserved.
“I—” Ramsey started in his sternest, don’t-mess-with-me voice.
“We’d like to know what made him memorable to you, and anything else you could tell us about him,” Lucy interrupted.
Chester looked at her as though searching for something, his expression still concerned.
Ramsey stared.
“He was a good kid—”
“Are you saying all the other athletes assigned to you weren’t good kids?” Ramsey interrupted, impatient now to get at the truth. He’d been waiting too long.
“No, sir, that’s not what I said.” Chester’s tone had lowered submissively. The speed with which he delivered the words was exactly the same.
“Jack was a good kid,” Lucy said.
“That’s right, ma’am.” The older man looked her in the eye. “The athletes were only required to work ten hours a week—games and practices excepted. Jack came in asking for extra hours. He was scheduled around baseball practice and class, and still worked twenty, twenty-five hours a week. Never missed a shift. Not once, all semester.”
Ramsey was familiar with Jack Colton’s work ethic.
“So that’s why you remember him?” Lucy asked.
“Partly, maybe, but no, ma’am, not really.”
“What, then?” Ramsey blurted. “What makes this guy stand out?”
Chester’s gaze didn’t move from Lucy. “The boy’s heart wasn’t really into baseball, not like most of the kids that come through there,” Chester explained. “He was good enough to have gotten the offer to try for the team, but he didn’t have the… Baseball wasn’t everything to him, you know?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, smiling softly.
Ramsey noticed. With a kick to his gut. And a realization that his coworker was handling this interview much better than he was.
He was too aware of her.
“What do you think was important to Jack?” he asked, making a point of softening his tone.
“He wanted to get a college degree,” the old man said simply. “He wouldn’t take no loans, though. Being in debt scared that boy to death. He figured baseball was the answer. And then he didn’t make the team. That’s why I remember him. The day they put up the names, and he saw his name wasn’t on it, the first place he came was to me.”
“That must have made you feel good.” Lucy leaned forward as she spoke.
“Heck, no!” There was fire in Chester’s voice. Honest fire. “It was horrible! I couldn’t do nothing to help him. Next day he drops out of school, packs his bag and catches a bus back to the place he come from. Never heard from him again. Never forgot him, neither. I hope he found a way to get his schooling.”
He hadn’t. Not as far as Ramsey knew. He was not at liberty to divulge as much.
Probably just as well. No harm in letting the old man hope. “Can you remember anything else about Jack?” Lucy asked.
“Anybody he was friends with? What he did in his spare time? Any enemies?” Ramsey was back on his game.
“What spare time?” Chester said through the door. “The boy was taking eighteen credit hours, doing homework, practicing and working out six days a week and working for me. He barely had time to sleep.”
“What about Friday nights?” Ramsey remembered being eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. “Were there any girls he had his eye on?”
“There was a girl… .” Chester drew out the word, like he was calling up a distant shadow from his memory bank.
Good. Now they were getting somewhere. If there’d been a girl, with a name they could pursue, they’d have someone else to question. Guys tended to get a little sloppy around their girls.
“He never told me about her, but I overheard one of the other guys, one who later made the team, ragging on him for not bringing a girl to the Friday-night mixer. The guys wanted as many girls there as possible and each guy was expected to do his part.”
Chester’s tone left no doubt as to his opinion of that preference.
“I heard Jack tell the guy th
at his girl wasn’t from UC. I didn’t even know he had a girl, and I asked him about her later. He said she wasn’t a student, that she was really sweet, but that he wouldn’t be able to continue seeing her.”
“Because he didn’t make the team?”
“No, it was before that. At least a month. He never said anything more about her, and I didn’t ask again, but I always figured she was older. And maybe married. Jack was more mature than the rest of those guys. I pictured him with someone older.”
“Do you think it’s possible that he was seeing one of his instructors?” Lucy asked, frowning.
“I have no idea about that, ma’am. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I guess it makes sense. The boy sure didn’t have time to be out meeting folks in the community.”
Ramsey thought back to the list of Jack’s classes, a copy of which was in a folder in Lucy’s car. Instructors were listed by last name only, but they had a staff directory from 1985.
“Well, listen, thanks for your time,” he told Chester Brown, pulling a card out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”
The man hesitated, but a few seconds later opened the screen door and took Ramsey’s card. He shook his hand, too.
“If you see Jack, tell him I said hello,” the older man called as they headed down the walk and back out to the curb where Lucy’s white Rendezvous was parked.
“Will do,” Lucy called back, turning to smile at the old man.
“Jack Colton’s a saint, isn’t he?” Ramsey muttered.
He wished he could blame his sour mood entirely on the continual dead ends he was up against in the Sanderson case. While the frustrating lack of a break in the case wasn’t helping his demeanor any, it was the fact that he kept picturing Lucy Hayes without clothes on that had him most on edge.
He never had trouble separating work from pleasure. Never had trouble keeping pleasure impersonal, either.
Or keeping mental clothes on women.
His captain might just have been right about him working too many hours without a break.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I f Ramsey had been a female visiting detective, Lucy would have shown him around Aurora, maybe driven him by the schools she’d attended, taken him down by the Ohio River, perhaps even stopped for a glass of wine and some steak at her favorite riverside bar—not that any of it compared to the unique coastal town on the Atlantic Ocean where Ramsey lived, but apparently hadn’t grown up in.
If he’d been female, she’d have taken him to the office to meet Davis, the fourth member of the Aurora Police Department detective squad. He’d already met Lionel and Locken the day of the first Wakerby interrogation.
If he’d been female, she’d ask him straight out where he was born instead of letting her curiosity as to why he wouldn’t tell her get the better of her.
If he’d been female, she wouldn’t need to lick her lips so often in his company.
“You want to order pizza for dinner?” They were still on the highway—three lanes each way—that was also the main street of Aurora.
“I’d have figured you for salad. Or a frozen entrée.” Ramsey’s smile eased her tension a bit.
She was making too much of this—bringing him home with her. Everything was going to be just fine.
“I’m not much of a cook,” she admitted. “After the day we’ve had, I’d go for a steak at this little place I know on the shore of Ohio River.”
“It’s a lot bigger than I pictured,” Ramsey said, looking out at the river as they drove.
“It used to be a major tributary, back when all of the coal mines and tobacco farms were using barges to ship their goods. It’s actually the largest tributary on the Mississippi River. It runs from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois.”
“How long is it?”
“Nine hundred and eighty-one miles. It was on the edge of the Mason-Dixon Line and was a dividing line between the North and the South during the Civil War. But its history dates back to the seventeenth century and beyond.”
“You know your history.”
“I paid attention in school,” Lucy said drily. If they were going home, her right turn was in less than a mile and she had to get over. If steak was their destination, she was fine right where she was.
Ramsey was analyzing the town the same way she’d seen him analyze case files, his eyes focused, his gaze everywhere at once. He wasn’t missing anything. His scrutiny felt far too personal. Like he was seeing a part of her that he shouldn’t be seeing.
And he was far too impersonal. Like he wasn’t fazed a bit about spending the night with her.
Had he ever wondered, even once, what it would be like to kiss her? Or was she the only one losing her mind here?
“Wakerby agreed to meet with me without his lawyer present.” She’d had a voice mail from Locken.
The statement won her Ramsey’s full attention. “No kidding.” He sounded impressed, and she flushed with warmth again. “Let’s hope this means something,” he said.
Lucy concurred.
“What did you decide on for dinner?” She had to know where they were going.
“That steak you mentioned sounded great.”
A table for two on the river, coming right up, she thought, pleased with his choice. And worried about her pleasure, too.
“We can go over the faculty list while we eat,” she said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Trouble was, he probably had been. While Lucy was busy wondering if there was any chance at all that the coming night might bring more carnal knowledge of him.
“H ow old was Jack Colton when he was at UC? Eighteen? Nineteen?” Lucy was driving again—toward her house, for sure this time. She’d managed to use up a couple of hours of the evening at the restaurant on the river, managed to delay her arrival at her place until after dark.
“About that. He was there twenty-seven years ago and he’s forty-six now.”
Sandy should already be out for the night with the help of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed for her. Just for this first week.
“And already he was fixated on money,” she said. Focusing on Jack Colton at dinner had helped center her. Ramsey wasn’t going to try anything with her. He wasn’t going to kiss her.
She didn’t interest him in that way.
She should have thought of Sandy before she’d invited Ramsey to stay with her. She should have thought, period.
“Colton was an only child of older folks who gave him no financial or emotional security. I can understand why providing for himself was important to him.” Ramsey was continuing on with the dinner conversation as though they were talking on the phone, not getting ready to have a sleepover.
“Yes, I can, too,” she managed, in spite of sweaty palms. “But Jack seems to exhibit more than a normal drive for money. He worked in place of fun, but also in place of sleep— at college and, from what you said, back in Comfort Cove, too.”
Headlights came at them, illuminating Ramsey’s face as he looked at her.
“Right. Where are you going with this?”
Lucy signaled the turn onto her street, and slowed down. “Motive. What if working all the hours in a day still didn’t provide Jack with enough money for him to feel secure? Because if, as it sounds, he suffered from scarcity mentality, then no amount would have been enough. It’s not like he was saving for something in particular, right? Or supporting anyone. A single guy, living alone, could certainly have lived on what Colton was making.”
“Especially as frugal as he apparently was,” Ramsey added. “As you said, he worked all the time, but he didn’t own anything of value.”
“I’m guessing he had a nice bank account. People with scarcity mentality fear that there will never be enough. No matter how much is there.”
“He somehow makes a connection with the black-market baby business and Claire Sanderson becomes another consequence of Jack Colton’s fears.” Rams
ey went with her theory.
Was she off base here? Lucy pulled into her drive and straight into the attached garage, closing the automatic door behind her, trying to get more completely into Jack Colton’s mind-set, to let her instincts speak to her.
Her work instincts.
“What do you think?” she asked him, turning off the car. Think Jack. Talk Jack.
“It’s just the garage, but so far, it’s nice.” Ramsey smiled.
“I meant Jack’s motive.” She swallowed.
“I think you could be right.” He was all cop again as he looked at her and she wondered if she’d imagined the personal moment. Or conjured it out of an embarrassingly desperate, sudden longing for his body. “I’ve already looked for blackmarket baby connections and found nothing,” he continued, clearly unaware of where her thoughts had been heading.
“What about Gladys? Jack was in Cincinnati to go to UC. My mother heard about Gladys from an unsavory crowd hanging out by the riverfront in downtown Cinci. Maybe Jack heard of her then, too? And maybe that’s why Claire’s hair ribbon was at Gladys’s house.”
Her heart rate was double-timing, and not just because of the man sharing the front seat with her. She was on to something. She knew it.
Ramsey’s intent stare told her he felt it, too.
“When the baseball thing didn’t work out, he’s on a super downer, losing all hope of ever getting out of the poor man’s life because he thought his only chance at a degree was the baseball scholarship. He wouldn’t go into debt to pay for college, and he thinks he’ll never get ahead legitimately without the degree, so he returns to Comfort Cove. He gets the job as a delivery man, which provides him with an easy means for kidnapping and transporting children, and then he sells them.”
“If not all to Gladys, then to someone else.”
“I’ll see if I can get a warrant for Colton’s current bank records. Chances are there won’t be any dated back twentyfive years.”
“Still, a victim of scarcity mentality is often a hoarder, and if we’re right about Colton, if he has money that can’t be explained, we’ll be one step closer.”
“And then I need to have another meeting with Jack. I have to make him talk to me.”
“And we should speak with Gladys, too. Maybe she’ll remember something once she knows that we’ve made the connection and are going to find out what went on.”
The Truth About Comfort Cove Page 10