by Lisa Preston
He tapped his fingers harder, faster.
“Hey, Nate, can you talk to a walk-in before you go out on the street? It’s a guy here about a child abuse issue.” The clerk manning the front desk turned before Osten managed a response.
Osten went to the vantage view of the little lobby at the front of the building. The civilian stood on the balls of his feet, his back to the window, but Osten recognized him. Rudy Donner Junior, also known as Ardy Donner.
Child abuse? Ardy Donner was the kind of man who would not call the police about a child abuser, he’d just go tear the abuser limb from limb.
Osten sighed before stepping into the lobby to hear the man out. He’d grown up with the Donners’ first batch of kids. They weren’t best friends, but they’d been in high school classes together. As a kid, Osten had visited both Bella Donner’s old house, where the Donners still lived, and Ardy’s cabin, where Doug and his wife now lived. He’d played football with Ben and Doug, once had his eye on the older girl, Clara. Emma, the younger girl, had been a blimp back in their school days but was quite the looker now. Hell, she was downright hot and didn’t seem to know it, carried none of the high-maintenance affect some hotties wafted.
“Shit,” Osten muttered to himself, shaking his head. He’d take this one call in house, get on the street, and as soon as he was clear, get back to his thinking game. He sighed while pushing the heavy door ajar. “Mr. Donner?”
Ardy Donner turned with an air of someone there to get things done. Osten nodded him back to a small interview room, gesturing for him to take a seat, glad when he complied. The man held a vague authority over him, the way adults do when they’d known you as a kid, told you to wipe your boots off before coming inside, or settle down, or lay off the kid at the bottom of the tackle pile.
“Here’s the deal,” Ardy Donner said. “My youngest has been acting up to the point of us having to take him to a head doctor, and they say he acts like an abused child, so I think you should investigate the family so that’s cleared up.”
Osten stifled the immediate urge to tell him no and managed, “What?”
“Please. I’ve got to get something going here. Our last little one is losing his noodle.”
“A doctor told you your kid acts like an abused kid—”
A vigorous nod followed. “Says he shows classic signs.”
“And you want the sheriff’s department to investigate your entire family as possible child abusers?”
Ardy Donner’s eager thumbs-up showed Osten that he’d accomplished nothing in the direction of making sense.
“Look, Mr. Donner—”
“Ardy,” the man suggested, hands and arms spread wide in ready amiability.
“Uh huh.” Osten could only think of him as Mr. Donner, even though several guys he went to school with had grown up and become Mr. Donners.
“Just investigate us so you can show for sure that no one abused Greer. I’m at the end of my rope here.” Ardy produced a list of over a half-dozen people.
Osten scanned the paper. The first name listed was Ardy Donner, then Bella, then the adult children: Ben, Clara, Doug, Emma, and Frankie. Next to Ben’s name, Ardy had written Ryan Vesey. Next to Clara’s, in parentheses, was Wes Fine. There was a question mark by the name Gram.
Jesus. “Mr. Donner, I can’t just investigate you and everyone else on your list because you want me to.”
Jumping to his feet with the frustration of it all, Ardy demanded, “Then buddy, you try living with Bella when she’s upset.”
“Well, no sir, that’s not going to happen either.”
“Can’t I hire someone to do it?”
Osten paused, not quite having the nerve to retort: Hire someone to live with your wife?
“Sure, you can hire a private investigator,” he said at last.
Ardy waved like he’d already considered the idea. “But that wouldn’t be as good as a sheriff’s investigation.”
“If a private investigator found evidence of child abuse, that person would be obligated to share the information with our department.”
Ardy swung his arms and yelled enough to make Osten get out of his chair and open the office door to answer the knock of a day shifter checking on them. Ardy raked his hair and slapped his knees as he doubled over then straightened up again. “Of course, it would be reported. I’d report it. I want it found out, if there’s anything to find out. That’s the point. And I want to clear everyone who’s not doing anything bad to my son.”
“Has your kid said someone hurt him or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
Osten waited. Ardy ducked his chin as he struggled to explain, opening his mouth, faltering, finally just spreading his hands and saying nothing.
“What’s your kid doing that makes the doctor say he’s been abused?”
“Well, hell, he’s just gotten strange,” Ardy said with a wave, and went into a litany of what sounded like standard little-kid-being-a-jerk behavior.
Studying this father before him, judging the anger, the demands and purported intentions, Osten finally excused himself down the hallway, gritted his teeth, and wrote down a name and phone number. When he passed the notepaper over, he kept his face expressionless. “This private investigator gal does polygraphs. She even does them for police departments and—”
“Lie detector tests?”
“Yeah,” Osten said, thinking about a pretty good study he’d read that called the device as good as a Ouija board. He’d tried to get his previous department to send him for polygraph training. He loved training.
With Mr. Donner’s hurried, determined exit, Osten sat for a minute, still thinking on the man’s bizarre request, his report of his son getting strange. Strange had to be pretty damn strange for a Donner. He shook his head and suppressed a grin before putting his feet up on the conference table and getting back to his fourth taco, now cold.
Ardy Donner uncorking himself in the office was an unwelcome interruption in Nate Osten’s mealtime thinking. He was happier puzzling and now got back to the riddle no one else in the twelve-officer department was working on. Nodding through what he knew, separating out what he suspected, he considered it all again, adding the call he’d had this week from the clinic, adding in the police report in his email from Virginia: the missing persons report that became a death investigation. Wife number one. What’s Brayton’s story? This question of Emma’s had sent him on a background investigation, made him learn about the first missing wife, the dead one on the other side of the country. Great question, Emma.
His mind wandered when he considered Emma. No kidding, she’d weighed two of him in high school. Now he wondered about Emma’s story as he hit the street.
After handling a minor traffic accident, kids smoking outside the supermarket and a squabble between roommates, Osten drove past the town’s little marina. By now he could spot Brayton’s powerboat in slip B10. He thought about a boat he’d never seen, Brayton’s powerboat back in Virginia, back with the first wife, the one who supposedly fell off and drowned while Brayton was napping in the cabin. And he thought about the Virginia cop’s email.
I didn’t believe him. He refused a polygraph. That was pretty much it. Made him rich.
Hey, if it worked in one ocean, it could work in another. Suppose Brayton’s first wife hadn’t fallen off a boat in the Atlantic while he slept? Suppose Brayton had pushed her. Now he owned a boat on this salt bay, accessing the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and had another missing wife.
If he could get witnesses that saw Brayton take his boat out around the time his wife went missing, if he could catch Brayton in a demonstrable lie, well, he’d have something to work with. Until yesterday—as the sheriff and the detective pointed out—he had almost nothing. Then the gay guy at the clinic called. If he hadn’t, it would be easier to put away the niggling suspicion. Now, the worst possibility pestered.
I did counsel her that when a woman tries to leave is the most dangerous time, tha
t that’s when a domestic abuser is most likely to kill. I made it clear to her that she needed an exit strategy, but I don’t think she’d gotten there.
And when the guy, who was some kind of a nurse-doctor, shared this confidential exchange, Osten wondered if she announced her exit, if it was the precipitating factor in the final dispute. Brayton had not mentioned an argument or a divorce plan. He specifically denied it, just said she was missing.
But Osten wasn’t the only guy in town who figured Brayton had more than a little to do with the wife’s disappearance. There was the guy at the clinic.
Thank God he’d called.
He pulled his patrol car past Brayton’s house, a nice house.
When he’d stood in the Brayton living room and noticed the error message on the screen, it had been in the early days of the investigation, but he should have been warier, kept his eyes better open to the possibility that he wasn’t doing follow-up to a day shifter’s missing person report but rather keeping a feeler out for a potential crime. He could have been standing in the crime scene. He’d asked about the computer’s search history, and then he’d hamstrung his own investigation with the comment about an expert search.
Now a sleek new laptop sat where the desktop computer had been. Osten could see it from the front window. And he had an idea where the old computer was.
Osten drove to the office of the obvious choice, a she-dinosaur with a Ouija board who was at least as good as the average fifteen-year-old at messing with computers. This polygrapher was old enough to qualify for Medicare, a slick chick who’d moved to town and run her mouth about how incompetent the small-town cops were, hung up a shingle, and done defense work. Defense work. She had dyed-blonde hair, a too-small sweater, Capri pants meant for someone much younger, and an attitude.
“Hey there, kid,” she greeted Osten.
“You doing forensics on the Brayton computer?”
A stony stare came back. The woman set her feet on her desk, crossed her ankles.
“How about on Brayton’s missing wife’s computer?” Osten tried when the old gal still didn’t answer.
Nothing.
“He’s a wife beater,” Osten said. “If you find this gal—if she’s even alive—you’d be setting her up for damage if you give him a location and he shows up, surprises her somewhere. I’m here to ask you to tell us first if you find her.”
“If you thought there was a crime involved, you should have seized the computer instead of suggesting he get an expert to search it.”
Osten rubbed his forehead. He’d be kicking himself about the slip for a long time. The thought that Brayton was involved in his wife’s disappearance—that he’d murdered her—had been young when he’d stood in the man’s living room. But his belief in the possibility grew by the day, even if the rest of the sheriff’s department thought he was running a little hot on the idea. He held a hand up. “Don’t tell me my job.”
“Don’t tell me mine.” Her retort was too quick, a six-year-old’s answer.
Osten softened his approach. “Do you know about his past? His last wife drowned. His story was she fell off their boat. He got a nice life insurance payout. That’s motive.”
From her hesitation and quick blink, Osten knew the death was news.
“And by the way, Miss Polygraph, he refused a polygraph in that investigation.”
Fake blonde hair suffered a thorough patting. “Found her car.”
That rankled. Osten had checked the national database daily for her car and not seen a hit. He’d attached a request to the car’s plate so that if any cop anywhere ran the vehicle in a federal check, he’d be notified. He waited, rather than ask.
“Towed out of Sea-Tac.”
Huh. Maybe the airport cops hadn’t run the plate when they impounded the car. Maybe they could tell him when the car had been left at the airport. Maybe they’d find Betsy Brayton on surveillance camera archives. But maybe it would show Harold Brayton driving the car, planting it at the airport to throw the local sheriff’s department off.
He made his tone as friendly as he could. “You’ve been checking flight manifests?”
“No matches yet.”
He had nothing. But if he could identify a person who gave Brayton a ride back from Sea-Tac Airport, maybe picked him up halfway, say on Bainbridge Island, after he’d planted her car at the airport parking lot, then he’d have something. Brayton was likely smart enough to leave a false trail for police after he’d murdered another wife.
He began to plan the conversation in which he’d ask Harold Brayton to take a polygraph about this wife’s disappearance. And he wondered how good this old bird in front of him was at detecting countermeasures.
CHAPTER 13
Seeing the psychologist in Seattle wasn’t as bad as Greer feared, but it wasn’t good either. Papa and Momma made sure they left plenty of time for this expedition to the city. Through the long drive east and the ferry ride, Momma kept her voice light. Every time she pointed out an unusual building with fancy bricks or Victorian windows, or a vendor on the sidewalk and wondered aloud if they should look at those books or crafts or snacks later on, Papa would say sure, sounds like fun.
Greer wasn’t buying it.
The building was way fancier than anything back at home. Well, it was Seattle, and they’d had to get off the boat in big, fat downtown, and then follow Emma’s directions to a particular place and then try to find a parking space and then walk back to the office, which had expensive-looking furniture on thick carpet and ornate molding where the walls met the ceiling in the waiting room by a receptionist.
Momma and Papa went in first, and he reckoned they said stuff about him. Had they talked about him when he was in school yesterday?
When they summoned him from the waiting room, he was wondering what they’d said to take him out of school today.
The first thing the man said was a surprise.
“Would you like for your parents to stay in the room with us?”
When Greer shrugged, Momma and Papa sat down again on each side of Greer, three across the sofa. That part didn’t last long and wasn’t much different from the other doctors Momma had been dragging him to for weeks. Everybody talked about how it was a good thing to talk. Greer looked out the window at the unfamiliar giant buildings and didn’t move.
But then the man excused his parents and shut the door behind them. With his parents in that carpeted waiting room with dark, cushy furniture and potted plants, and the sunshine coming from behind the man making him look like a shadow, Greer went on full alert, guts drawn up tight. Even if the man didn’t try anything tricky, it seemed only smart to be wary, so wary Greer stayed. He watched the man wipe his glasses. He steadied his breathing, he waited and wondered how long he’d have to sit in this office with this man.
Dr. MacLean didn’t wear a white coat and that was good. He didn’t have a beard or a sweater or a pipe, like Emma said he did years ago, but he had a gaze that Greer hadn’t figured on. It was like he already understood, or like anyone could say anything to him. Greer knew better than to slip up and get careless. Just because they were all the way over here in Seattle didn’t mean he could be sloppy about keeping a secret that protected his whole entire family back in their home county.
“I’d like to get to know you a bit, Greer. Can you tell me what you’d like to be when you grow up?”
Big, Greer thought, giving one sure nod. It was going to take forever until he got big. If he was big, he’d be a man like his papa and Ben and Doug and Frankie. Able to help Gram up into the saddle or lift a bale of hay or drive Papa’s draft team hauling logs. Able to kill a man.
“A man.” Greer guessed it would be maybe an hour before he could leave this room, this too-big building in the too-big city.
MacLean smiled. “You want to be a man when you grow up?”
Greer nodded.
“Can you tell me something else? Can you tell me if there’s anything you’re sad or mad about?” When
Greer said nothing, the man asked, “Is there anything you’d like to talk to someone about?”
There was no good reason to talk. What a strange man with strange questions. Greer looked out the window and saw a beautiful crow leaving a power pole for freedom in the sky. He wanted wings, thought of his parents, and chanced a look at Dr. MacLean. The man was still waiting for an answer. Was the man not going to speak, time was not going to move on until Greer responded?
Dr. MacLean looked thoughtful, not too prying. “Is there anything you’re happy about?”
This was kind of funny, in a way. Greer’s smile flickered. His grades had slipped so far that Momma and Papa decided he couldn’t do yard work or other odd jobs for Caroline’s terrifying boss, not for now. That was pretty happy-making. He studied the room, thinking, comparing, not paying attention while the man talked on.
Dr. MacLean paused then moved to the big chair by Greer’s sofa. “Do you know what your parents and I talked about?”
Greer looked up from the door inventory he’d been doing—one in here, four in the waiting room—and shook his head. They probably hadn’t talked about how many doors there were in each room. For the time he’d been in here with Momma and Papa, he had thought about asking what they said in here about him while he was out there, but then they said he’d be okay and they left him. It would be fine, that’s what they’d told him. They said he could talk to this man. And the man talked, but Greer didn’t listen.
One door. One way out.
Maybe the furniture had this mottling of leaves and flowers because that would hide the barf stains. People did throw up in here, right? He couldn’t be the first person to feel his head tilt with queasiness in this place.
“Your mother said that you got upset about your brother bringing some fish home.”
Greer confessed with a nod, mildly surprised that the man coughed up what they had said. Although everyone claimed there would be no secrets, he just plain knew better. There had to be secrets. That’s the way things were.