The news report was over too quickly and contained frustratingly little information. If they were raiding a car at a Pennsylvania rest area, then maybe they had picked up some sort of trail in Culver Creek, but had she waited too long to come forward with the information that she had driven Adam out there?
She looked over at her mother for confirmation, and her mother knew what she was asking without Caitlin having to say a word. Luanne nodded. Standing here watching useless news reports wasn’t going to bring her son home. There was only one thing she could do that would have any hope of saving Adam, and she knew she must do it now.
“I’m going to bed,” she announced.
32
Sage had not bothered to look at the clock before jumping in his car and driving over to Brighton’s, and he realized it was not quite seven thirty in the morning. Maybe it was a bit early to be showing up at a retired man’s front door, but there was a light on inside the house.
It was Mrs. Brighton who answered the door. She frowned when she saw him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“I need to speak with your husband about something,” he said. “I’m sorry about the early hour.”
“Oh, I’m a cop’s wife,” she said. “I’m used to it.”
Brighton was sitting in an armchair in his living room, drinking his morning coffee while watching the birds eating their breakfast at his backyard feeder.
“You crack the case?” Brighton asked without taking his eyes away from the window.
“Why didn’t you look more closely at Rick Esposito?” Sage asked.
“You would have to be a monster to brutally murder your daughter like that, and then you have to ask yourself, why would he kill one daughter and not touch the other?”
“What if Lily wasn’t really his daughter?” Sage asked.
Brighton finally turned away from the window long enough to give Sage a skeptical look.
“What makes you say that?”
“It’s a fact of life,” Sage said. “Sometimes husbands and wives aren’t faithful to each other.”
Brighton set his mug down on a coaster.
“That nasty blue jay is back,” he said. “Come with me.”
Sage followed Brighton out onto the patio. They stood there in silence for a minute or so. Brighton’s eyes were fixed on the feeder, but he didn’t really seem to be seeing it. Sage, for his part, never saw the alleged blue jay.
Brighton glanced back at the closed patio door before speaking. “I knew you would figure it out. I heard about you. Rayanne said you were super smart. Astute was the word she used. Thank you for that bit of misdirection back there.” Brighton nodded toward the house. “I appreciate it. That bit about Rick Esposito.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Sage said.
“My wife never knew about it,” Brighton said. “I think she always suspected, though. She’s astute like you.” He smiled briefly, then a stoic expression returned to his face as he stared in the direction of the bird feeder. “I’d never cheated on her before, but I guess we were going through a rough patch, and well, I just made a really shitty decision.”
Sage tried to wrap his head around what Brighton was telling him, and before he could stop himself, he burst out with, “You’re Lily’s father! You should have taken yourself off the investigation!”
And was that why he had never seriously investigated Melodie’s murder? On the one hand, it would seem that being related to the victim might give you special insight, but it could also complicate things in so many ways.
“Lily?” Brighton looked horrified. “No, I meant the psychic’s mother. Isn’t that why you came here?”
Sage thought of that psychic reading place above the lawyer’s office. Did Brighton mean he had an affair with that woman’s mother? Why did he think Sage would have found out about that?
“The Lily Esposito case was a national news story,” Brighton said. “People were coming out of the woodwork with their theories and speculations, and of course there was a whole slew of people who knew who the killer was because the Virgin Mary had told them in church, or because they had read it in their tarot cards or whatever. I wouldn’t have given that girl and her psychic dreams more than a passing notice if it wasn’t for her mother. She was a looker.”
And at last Sage knew what Brighton was talking about. The girl who had given the description to the sketch artist. The man she had seen in her dream.
“Luanne was vivacious,” Brighton recalled, “and she really believed in these psychic dreams her daughter supposedly had, so then I started believing in the daughter’s dreams. The murderer got away because I was too busy screwing around with a woman who wasn’t my wife and chasing the bogeyman a little girl had seen in her nightmare.” Brighton shook his head at the memory. “You know what it’s like living with this guilt?”
“I can imagine.” Sage thought of the look on his sister’s face when he abandoned her in his dorm room. “You don’t happen to remember what kind of car Rick Esposito drove, do you?”
“Rick Esposito,” Brighton repeated. “What, you don’t really think . . . You don’t really believe what you were saying about Rick, do you?”
“Right now he’s the best lead I got,” Sage said. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about Craig Walker’s death, would you?”
“Walker? That was the guy who fell down the stairs, wasn’t it?” Brighton asked, and Sage nodded. “Not really, no. But I wonder what ever happened to his kid.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, imagine how something like that would have fucked you up, right? Finding your dad dead like that when you were just a little kid. That sort of thing could really mess a kid up.”
Sage had forgotten about the kid. If his theory about Rick Esposito was correct and there had been some sort of heated argument, then the boy almost certainly would have heard it. It would have woken him. Why would Rick leave the child untouched, but then years later murder Lily? Maybe Rick hadn’t realized the boy was there. Plus, it would have been different with Lily. She represented the living, breathing proof of his wife’s infidelity. Well, maybe. It was only a theory.
Sage sat at his squad room desk, Facebook open on his browser.
“Goofing off on social media is a big no-no,” Rod said as he peered over Sage’s shoulder.
“It’s for an investigation,” Sage said. Whatever camaraderie had developed between him and Rod at the rally seemed to have melted away.
Rod leaned in a little closer to get a better look at the search bar that read “Jade Culver Creek.” Sage had tried every variation he could think of to pull up something on Lily’s sister, but it was like the girl had ceased to exist.
“Oh, shit, are you stalking some broad,” Rod said, then he announced to the room at large, “We got a regular old horndog here!”
“It’s not—”
Rayanne cut him off. She leaned her head out of her office, and in that no-nonsense way of hers said, “Sage. Office. Now.”
He exhaled loudly through his nose as he resisted the urge to shove Rod through the wall, and stood and walked into his boss’s office. There were a few stray catcalls from his fellow officers.
“It wasn’t what you think,” Sage said after Rayanne closed the door behind them. “It was for the Lily Esposito case.”
“Yeah, about that,” Rayanne said as she sat down behind her desk. “You’re officially off that investigation as of right now.”
“But I think I might have something.”
“Lily Esposito’s been dead nineteen years. It can wait. Meanwhile, we’ve got a kidnapped child and the FBI looking for our help. I’d like you to be the official liaison.”
“What?”
Rayanne passed him a fax that had just come in. He scanned through it quickly.
“The child was kidnapped in New Jersey,” Sage said. “How do they expect us to help?”
“Apparently the parents gave them some conflicting i
nformation. The mother originally said the child had been kidnapped in New Jersey, but then changed her story. Said she was out here earlier in the day and that’s when the kid was taken. Look, most likely the parents are lying, but right now there’s a kid missing, and if he’s out there alive somewhere, we’re going to do everything in our power to bring him home safe.”
“Of course,” Sage said.
“An Agent Henderson is going to be calling you shortly with more information,” Rayanne said. “He’ll catch you up to speed.”
“Should I return to my desk to wait for his call?”
“Yes,” Rayanne said. “Henderson will give you further instructions, and of course you’ll receive overtime pay for any extra hours you put in.”
Sage stood to go, but before he left the office, Rayanne added, “I wanted you on this because you’re the best we have. If that kid’s here somewhere, I know you’ll find him.”
Sage thought of the impasse he had come to with the Lily Esposito case and wondered if the praise was warranted, but he nodded his appreciation before leaving Rayanne’s office.
The pharmacy Agent Henderson wanted Sage to check out was outside the city limits, but he wasn’t about to quibble over that detail. He was relieved to get the hell out of the station. Word had spread quickly that he was working with the FBI, and this caused a bit of an uproar with the other officers, who considered it tantamount to making a deal with the devil.
Apparently it wasn’t the first time the feds had rolled into town and thrown their weight around. Sage wondered if his skillset wasn’t the only reason Rayanne had chosen him to be the FBI liaison. Maybe she knew no one else on the force would agree to it.
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Steve Arlo said as Sage was on his way out to his car. “I knew you were disloyal.”
Sage hadn’t bothered to respond, but the remark was still taking up real estate in his head as he sped out to the state road toward the pharmacy.
The memory, like too many of them, was a hazy one. He had been in his early teens. His parents had gone out to the store, when one of his friends had come over with some fireworks. For some reason, Sage had thought it would be a good idea to use their new plastic patio table to launch the fireworks from. As fireworks displays went, it was pretty lackluster. Sage at least had the good sense to clean up all the evidence from the lawn so his parents didn’t flip out when they returned, but there was nothing he could do about the weird melted spots the fireworks had left on the tabletop. He hoped his parents wouldn’t notice. They noticed.
When they asked him about the marks, he claimed ignorance. Then they asked Melodie. She had seen the whole sad fireworks spectacle from her bedroom window, and she could have easily ratted him out, but she didn’t. She said maybe it was hail damage from that storm they’d had a few days back.
Late that night, after his parents had gone to bed, he went into her room to thank her.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
“Yeah I did,” she said. “You’re my brother. We look out for each other, right?”
“Right,” he agreed.
Melodie had always been loyal to him, but when the ball had been in his court, he let her down in her hour of need and hadn’t done a thing to save her from being murdered. The least he could do was bring her murderer to justice, but he hadn’t even done that. Steve Arlo had him pegged.
He pulled his car into the empty pharmacy parking lot and sat there for a few minutes as the guilt of his disloyalty weighed on him.
The pharmacy was closed—not closed for the day but closed for business forever, and it looked like it had been for a while. Certainly there was no way it had been open earlier in the day, when the mother claimed to have been shopping there.
Rayanne was most likely right. The parents were lying. Probably they had murdered their kid and were now making up some bullshit story to try to save their necks. It was like Rick Esposito all over again, only this time they weren’t going to get away with it. Sage would make sure of that.
33
As Lance drifted back toward consciousness, the first thing that seemed peculiar was how loud the rain was. It pounded the roof above his head, which didn’t seem right. Even during torrential downpours, he had never heard it so loud. The attic and all that pink fiberglass insulation meant the sound of the rain always had a muffled quality. But he wasn’t in his bed, was he?
He was sitting in a chair, but as he blinked open his eyes, he realized that wasn’t quite right either. He was in a seat, specifically the driver’s seat of his wife’s Land Cruiser. Please let me be in the driveway, he silently wished as he squinted at the rainy landscape outside the windshield. He was scared that he would find himself looking at the smashed front end of her vehicle, and if that was the case, he prayed that all he had hit was a telephone pole or fire hydrant or some other inanimate object.
It came as a pleasant surprise that the car did not appear to be at all smashed, and instead looked to be parked legally and competently on some unfamiliar road. He had no memory of taking the car for a drive, but was it possible he had simply forgotten about this? Maybe he had found himself getting drowsy and pulled off the road to get some sleep. None of this felt vaguely familiar.
To the best of his knowledge he had never driven a car in his sleep before, though he wasn’t sure how he had gotten to and from the bar the night he had his run-in with Jacob Pinochet. He supposed there was a first time for everything. Stress tended to bring on his sleepwalking bouts, and the past twelve or so hours had been remarkably stressful. So he shouldn’t have been surprised that his disorder had been triggered. But the car thing, well, that was a surprise. A big one. Where the hell was he?
He started the car up and switched the wipers on. It wasn’t the first time he had woken up and not known where he was. Usually when something like this happened, it was because he had been sleeping in an unfamiliar place. A locked door tended to be enough to keep him from getting into too much trouble, but bunking on someone’s living room couch, outside in a tent, or that time he and Caitlin got stuck sleeping in the sunporch during the Rixby family vacation could lead to trouble. He remembered that morning waking up in a patch of scrubby grass near the beach with sand in his mouth. No way he wanted to embarrass himself in front of the snobby Rixby clan. So he had done his best to slip into the house unnoticed. Caitlin was the only one who suspected something might have been amiss, but she didn’t say anything.
He almost confessed the whole thing to her that afternoon when they stopped off somewhere on the way home for lunch, but he chickened out. What if she freaked out when she found out the truth about him? If she left him, he didn’t know what he would do. Of course, the longer they were together, the harder it became to slip into casual conversation the statement, “Oh, by the way, I’m a sleepwalker.”
So Caitlin never knew, and his secret remained his and his alone. Well, and now Garvey knew about it as well. He realized how remarkably wrong it was that his defense attorney now officially knew more about him than his own wife.
The police won’t understand. That damn memory of him and his mother came back to him again. What was it about that memory? It struck him now how much it reminded him of the day he awoke in the bathroom after what he now knew was him beating the crap out of Jacob Pinochet. His mind went back to the bathroom of their old Culver Creek house. He saw his dazed reflection in their cloudy bathroom mirror. His clothing looked to be stained and dirty. Was that mud or blood? His face had blood on it. He must have cut himself at some point. Could he have fallen down the stairs? The thought gave him a chill, but this would have been years after his father’s death. It must have been right before he went away to Ryerson. What was it the police wouldn’t understand?
And as if they could read his thoughts, a cop car approached in the dim morning light. Was he going to get a ticket? Had he even remembered to bring his wallet? The car slowed as it approached, and Lance’s palms started to sweat, but then the
cruiser made an abrupt left turn, and Lance saw that it had pulled into a parking lot full of police cars, which was when he realized he had parked only feet from a police station. Smooth.
What had he been thinking? He didn’t have time to figure out an answer because he had realized where he was. The street wasn’t unfamiliar at all. It was insane, but it also made perfect sense. He had driven to Culver Creek.
He looked out the windshield at the torrential downpour and thought about Adam being out there somewhere. He wondered if the police had tailed him from New Jersey, but no. He had been parked here awhile. Nobody seemed particularly interested in him.
But how would it look when they went to the house and he wasn’t there? When nobody there knew where he was? He needed to call Caitlin or his mom and let them know where he was. What would he tell them when they asked why he had driven to Culver Creek in the pre-dawn hours? He wanted to look for Adam? He had felt helpless just sitting at the house, and he couldn’t sleep anyway? He decided it was a perfectly reasonable explanation, but when he reached for his phone, it wasn’t in the cupholder where he normally left it. He checked the glove box and under the seats as well, but he already knew his phone and his wallet were probably still in his bedroom. It was interesting that in his sleep logic, he had the foresight to grab the car keys but nothing else.
He turned off the ignition as he sat and tried to figure out his next step. The voice of reason told him that what he should do was go home, but he thought of the excuse he had fabricated about driving out here to look for Adam. It wasn’t a bad idea. He could maybe drive around to the different places he and Adam had been on their boys’ day out. Maybe he would see some clue the police had overlooked. The rain might make things more difficult, but if there was even a chance that he could do something that would bring Adam home safe and sound, he had to try. He watched the rain cascade down the windshield and was reminded of the night his father died.
Up the Creek Page 21