Finding Jessica

by Parker Riggs

  And then Rocky barreled around the corner, gun drawn, big feet slapping the grass, grinning. “Good job, Chandler.” Rocky approached the man. “You got him.” He took the handcuffs out of his pocket and put the guy’s hands together.

  Rose felt a sweep of relief. Her senses returned, and she realized with a feeling of slight nausea that she’d been on the brink of something horrible. “You okay?” He clicked the cuffs on. She felt weak. She nodded. “Well,” Rocky said. “Before I read him his rights, you wanna do the honors?”

  Rose swallowed. Something about Rocky standing there in his Haven pie-eating contest baseball cap, still smelling of Emily’s dinner, his clothes rumpled and a handkerchief sticking out his back pocket, took the fight out of her. “Sure,” she said. She felt suddenly very, very tired. Stepping forward, she reached for the bottom of the man’s ski mask. And then she pulled it off his head.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Rocky couldn’t have been more surprised when Chad Connor’s pink face appeared from under the ski mask, his hair a storm of static. “I can explain,” Chad said immediately, licking his lips and looking from Rocky to Rose and back again. “I have a good explanation.” He was sitting against the house now, and they’d checked him for weapons.

  “Explain breaking and entering.” Rocky could hear sirens on the lake road.

  “First I have a right to an attorney.” Chad’s tone was defiant. His face was shiny with sweat. “And she tried to kill me.” He nodded at Rose.

  “Explain stealing a painting from a locked house.” Rose was circling him as a tiger might a mouse.

  “I’m not talking without my attorney,” Chad said. Rocky saw tears swelling in his eyes again.

  “No attorney is going to save you.” Rose’s voice was stone.

  “You can’t …” Chad started to get to his feet.

  “Not so fast,” Rose said quietly. “You are now under investigation for the murder of Hal Cappodecci on the night of June the twenty-first. Hal was an innocent man, and you killed him in cold blood.” Rocky heard the sirens turn toward them. “You’re going to go to prison for the rest of your life.”

  “I did not kill anyone.” Chad squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, please,” he said, “orange is not a good color for me.” It seemed to Rocky that he was praying. “I can’t sleep without my feather pillow and Egyptian cotton sheets.”

  Good grief, Rocky thought, glancing at Rose. She was watching Chad with a puzzled look, the ferocity momentarily drained out of her.

  “It’s bad enough I’ve had to be stuck out here in the boonies,” Chad complained. Bat shit crazy, Rocky thought. This guy is certifiable. “Why are you doing this to me?” Chad looked up at them with pleading eyes.

  Rocky hated when criminals played victim, and Chad’s sideburns were worse than Elvis’s. The sirens screamed into Solitude’s driveway. “Get up, Chad.” Rocky kicked his shoe, which he saw was some kind of black dress shoe, and pulled Chad to his feet.

  “I’m going to faint.” Chad was swaying on his feet. “I know I’m going to faint.” He sounded like a girl.

  “You are not going to faint.” Rocky opened the slider and pushed him in.

  “How do you know?” Chad asked accusingly. “You don’t know me.”

  Rocky rolled his eyes at Rose. “Just get in the house.”

  Chad sat on the sofa. “I’m sweating,” he whined. “Can I take this off?”

  “I’ll go meet the guys and tell them what’s going on,” Rose said. Flashing strobe lights were making the room look like a discotheque.

  “What’ve you got on under that thing?” Rocky asked cautiously. There was no way he wanted to see Chad stripped down to his skivvies.

  “Silk long johns,” Chad said primly.

  Rocky recalled something he’d been taught a long time ago: It’s easier to get a confession if your suspect feels relaxed. “Okay, go ahead.” He took off Chad’s handcuffs.

  Four cops wearing black BDUs, bullet proof vests and steel-toed boots crammed into the living room. Armed to take down a small army, they surrounded Rose as if she needed protection. Rocky almost laughed.

  “Are they here for me?” Chad sounded pleased. He kicked off his shoes.

  “Wait!” Realizing his mistake, Rocky tried to stop Chad from disrobing, but it was too late. With a striptease artist’s flare, Chad had unzipped his jumpsuit from neck to crotch. Rocky tried not to stare, but it was impossible not to. “What the hell?”

  Chad stepped out of his jumpsuit. “I know, it’s a little much, a gift from Bjorn on Valentine’s Day.” He smoothed his hands over his fire engine red long johns covered in white hearts and Cupid’s arrows. They clung tightly to every part of Chad’s body and made Rocky feel ill. The cops snickered, but Chad didn’t seem to care what they thought. He carefully folded his black jumpsuit and placed it neatly on the coffee table.

  Rocky looked at the cops bunched in the living room. Someone’s radio was going off. He’d never get a confession with all these uniforms swarming around. “Guys, go outside with Miss Chandler and have her brief you.”

  Rose watched him with her fierce green eyes, and Rocky knew if she didn’t go outside, she’d probably wind up shooting Chad. “I’ll call if I need you,” he said gently. “Go on.”

  The Haven PD would have followed tiny Rose anywhere, shuffling around her like a crowd of football players circling the ball. Finally, the screen door slammed, and the house went quiet.

  Chad sat on the flowery couch again, and Rocky sat in the chair next to him. Trying not to gawk, he reached into his pocket for his notebook and recorder.

  Chad lifted his chin. “I want to make a deal.”

  Rocky stared at him. Was he suffering from dementia? “This ain’t Let’s Make A Deal.” He gestured at the empty easel. “We caught you red-handed.”

  Chad’s lower lip trembled. Rocky hoped he wasn’t going to start crying again. “You can’t put me in jail. I work for the FBI. I’m a consultant on assignment. I stole that painting as evidence.”

  “Ah, cut the crap.” God, those purple streaks in his hair were hideous. “We know all about your work with the Bureau,” Rocky said. “Thorne told us about Operation Haven, and we know the FBI never hired you to steal art by big shot painters.” Rocky turned on the recorder and talked in a low, soothing tone, the same voice he used when he read bedtime stories to his kids. “Now, do you still want a lawyer?”

  “No,” Chad said. “I told you, I want to make a deal.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what happened on the night of June twenty-first?” He checked to make sure the digital recorder was still whirling along. “The night you shot Hal Cappodecci.”

  It was difficult to tell if Chad was nervous or excited. His lips were slightly parted, and his eyes kept bouncing to the front door, as if one of the cops were going to come back in and save him. If he was looking for an ally, he was delusional. Every cop in Haven wanted to string up Hal’s killer. “I didn’t shoot him.” He smoothed his static-filled hair.

  “Why’d you stash his body in the woods?” Rocky asked wearily. He wondered why the Bureau would hire such a flake, even as a consultant. No one would suspect that someone like Chad worked for the FBI.

  “I was at Solitude that night,” Chad said almost happily, looking down at his ridiculous underwear, “but I didn’t kill anyone.” He lifted his eyebrows, which appeared painted on and said, “If I tell you who really killed that guy, will you let me go?”

  A snitch, Rocky thought. That’s who we caught. A goddamn snitch. He hated snitches. They made the work easy, but they were two-faced and sneaky, and he always felt himself rooting for the person they snitched on. “If you cooperate, I’ll put in a good word for you with the State Attorney General’s office. That’s the best I can do. We caught you breaking and entering and stealing art, which is a felony. What’s the matter, the government not paying you enough?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Rocky scratched
his head. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  Chad straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. “A few days after I got to Haven, one of Beach’s thugs showed up at my house. He called himself Nicky the Knife.” He looked nervously around the room, as if Nicky were going to appear in front of them. “He knew all about Operation Haven and said Beach would pay me five thousand dollars for every painting that made it to Canada, and if I refused to do it, he’d kill me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the Bureau?”

  Chad crossed his legs. “Gee, I don’t know, maybe I didn’t want my dead body found in the trunk of my car.” He studied his fingernails. Every nail was perfectly filed and buffed. “I’m not that much of an idiot. Everyone who’s anyone in the art world knows Sandy Beach is the mobster behind it. I had to bring the stolen paintings to Amber to fix.”

  “Why would Beach pick you, a Bureau consultant, to help him run paintings over the border?”

  Chad rolled his eyes as if that were a stupid question, which it was, but Rocky needed the answer on tape. “So I could spy on how the investigation was going and lead them down the wrong trail.”

  The last thing Rocky wanted to do was help Thorne solve his case, but nothing seemed to be going according to plan. “Okay, how did Amber fix the paintings?”

  “She put one of her own paintings over each one to hide the original. Then someone on Beach’s payroll bought it from Mountain Arts.”

  Rocky remembered Cameron had given Amber free art lessons because she claimed she was dying to be an artist. “She’s got about as much talent as a lamppost,” he’d said one night when they were eating dinner with Rose and Emily.

  “And Border Control didn’t suspect a thing, did they, because it all looked legit?” he asked Chad now.

  Chad blinked rapidly. “Yes.” He tapped his bare foot on the floor, but Rocky didn’t want to look, because he’d painted his toenails a dark purple, and he was afraid it would throw his questioning off. “You said you wanted to steal one of Barrington’s paintings for the money. Why?”

  “The only way I’d ever be free of Beach was to get as far away from him as possible, but I didn’t have enough money to disappear.” Chad talked with his hands, and they were moving faster now, touching his face, waving in the air. “I overheard Tom Minot telling his mother at Table Talk that Barrington was renting Solitude for the summer. I figured he must’ve come here to paint, and if I could steal one of his paintings, I could sell it to the highest bidder, and I’d have enough money to disappear forever.”

  “So you went to Solitude that night to steal a painting?”

  Chad nodded. “Then I heard voices and the gunshot, and goodness …” He put his hand to his heart.

  Rocky knew he was lying. He wasn’t sure what part of the story was a lie, but he knew some of it was. Chad’s eyes were flitting around too much. He was talking too fast. “You came back a week later to try again, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have killed Barrington with that blow to the head.”

  “I checked to make sure he was breathing,” Chad pouted.

  Rocky looked out the window and saw Rose talking to the cops. The strobe lights were still turning round and round. “It must have been frustrating, not finding what you were looking for.”

  “Oh, my dear, you have no idea.” Chad plucked at a heart on his sleeve. “I couldn’t find anything, not a painting, not even one of Barrington’s photographs. That’s when I resigned myself to working for Beach, but then Chandler had that party, and when I saw The Peacemaker …” He narrowed his eyes at Rocky. “It was a trap, wasn’t it?”

  Rocky scribbled in his notebook: Not the brightest bulb in the box. He looked up. “And then you shot Hal because he surprised you?”

  “I heard voices around the side of the house and then a gunshot. I got scared, so I hid behind those gorgeous hydrangeas. That’s when I saw someone drag his body into the woods.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not telling unless you promise to let me go.”

  “All right, fine.” Rocky stood up. “Rose,” he called out, but not loudly enough for her to hear him. “Would you come in here and cuff the prisoner?”

  “No, wait!” Chad raised his hands. “Jess, her name is Jess.”

  Rocky felt as if someone had splashed cold water on his face. He turned back to Chad. “Jess?” God have mercy. Barrington’s long lost girlfriend? Chad’s face was tipped up, shining and proud as if he’d just made a home run.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Rocky asked him.

  “Because she dropped something.”

  You son of a bitch, Rocky thought. “And you never brought the evidence to us because you thought you might need to bargain with it at some point, is that it?”

  “Maybe,” Chad said smugly.

  Rocky wanted to slug him. “What did she drop?”

  “I’ll tell you if you let me go.”

  “Jesus God.” Rocky was losing his patience. “Rose,” he called again, louder this time.

  He saw her run across the lawn, and then she was in the doorway.

  “Need help, Rock?” she was glaring at Chad.

  “It was on the locket,” Chad said quickly.

  “Where’s this locket now?” Rocky asked.

  “In my bedroom dresser at home.” Chad glanced at Rose. “It has an inscription on back, to Jess, love BB, forever yours.” Chad started crying. “Forever yours,” he said again. “Oh, God.”

  Rocky could hardly believe what he was hearing. If Chad was telling the truth, they had proof that Jessica had killed Hal. But who was Jessica? He glanced at Rose, who was watching Chad carefully.

  Chad was shaking his head. “That’s what I thought we had.”

  “Who?” Rocky was confused.

  “He told me he loved me.” Tears swelled in Chad’s eyes.

  Were Barrington and Chad lovers? What the hell? Rocky looked at Rose.

  “That’s why I told him about Beach and what happened at Solitude.” Chad was blubbering now, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “And you know what he did?” He gulped air, reminding Rocky of a reeled-in fish caught on a line, only this prize fish was on dry land, blubbering like a baby. “He blackmailed me, told me he’d go to the police, tell them everything unless I kept working for Beach and gave him all the money.” Tears streamed down his face. “He broke my heart,” he wiped his runny nose on his silk sleeve.

  “Who?” Rocky asked him, “Who broke your heart?”

  Rose took a step forward. “Bjorn,” she said, looking at Rocky. “He’s talking about Bjorn.”

  “I didn’t want to.” Chad looked up at her with his red-rimmed, puppy dog eyes. “But I had no choice. I had to kill him.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  At the same time that Rocky was reading Chad his Miranda rights, Barrington was bellying up to the bar at the Hanger, a popular establishment near Haven’s tiny airport, drinking a vodka tonic among Haven’s twenty-something crowd and feeling very old. He also felt a little guilty that Rose was hiding in the woods by Solitude, trying to catch a thief. But he’d gotten tired of pacing the floor at her house, waiting for news, and had gone out to grab a bite to eat at Table Talk. Just as he was turning to park, he’d seen a woman getting into a Cadillac, and he’d done something he’d never done before. He’d followed her.

  It wasn’t her face, he thought now, grabbing a handful of peanuts and looking around at the Wright Brothers’ box kites and modern-day jets covering the walls and the model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, it was something else: the curve of her shoulders, the hand on her steering wheel, and something about her profile that was so familiar. He was trying not stare, but his eyes kept straying to her. She was sitting by one of the windows, watching the planes take off and nursing a drink, her back to him. She had short, spiky hair, and he could have sworn he knew the slant of her neck, would have bet his savings he’d painted it before.

  The bartender
returned with his second drink. She couldn’t have been much older than legal age, so he didn’t have much hope when he asked, “Do you know the woman sitting at that table over there?” He hated to shout, but Green Day’s “Burn Out” was blaring over the speakers.

  The bartender cocked her hip and swung her rag around like a pompom. “Sure, that’s Heidi Edelstein. She owns Table Talk. You want to send her a drink?” The girl smiled; she had pretty hazel eyes.

  Barrington shook his head and took a sip of his drink, pretending he wasn’t interested, but he was more than interested. He felt a little obsessed.

  After his third drink he was finally brave enough to pick up his glass and thread his way through the crowd. But when he approached the table, ready to offer her a drink, she got up so fast, she almost knocked her chair over. He watched her throw a ten down, then push her way to the door. She’d left a red Table Talk sweatshirt behind, and he grabbed it and headed out the door after her. Outside the hot air caught him by surprise. What happened to cooler evenings? In the blur of cars, he saw her heading toward her ‘70s Cadillac, her gray spiky hair silver under the lights.

  “Hey,” he called after her. It seemed urgent that he talk to her, and he found himself running to catch up; but she was already in her Cadillac by the time he reached it, her brake lights two red warning signals telling him to get lost. He knocked on the window. Just as she turned to back up, he knew for sure. He knew from the strength of her cheekbones, the arch of her eyebrows. “Hey,” he found himself running after the car, moving toward the passenger side, reaching for the handle even while she was trying to barrel out of there and leave him behind. When he finally swung the door open, she could do nothing but stop.