Thread of Suspicion (Joe Tyler Mystery #2)

by Jeff Shelby

  “Look, I don’t know what went on with the Detwiler family and I don’t care,” I said. “I can make some guesses since Isabel said you might be able to help. It wasn’t some simple divorce and custody case if DCFS can help. I’m not dumb. I look for kids for a living now. I can put two and two together.”

  She stared at me, her expression blank.

  I took the picture out of my pocket and held it out to her. After a moment, she took it.

  “Think it’s from about six or seven years ago,” I said. “The girl with my daughter is Bailey Detwiler.”

  “Where’d you get the photo?” she asked, her eyes still on the picture.

  “Cop in San Diego,” I said. “From some file. All I got with it was Detwiler’s name and address.”

  She handed the photo back but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not asking you to turn over the case file,” I said. “But give me something. Some place to start. I know you can do that or Isabel wouldn’t have sent me to you.”

  She drummed her fingers on her desk, staring at the wall for a long minute. “Anyone other than Isabel, I’d tell you to get lost.”

  “Glad it was Isabel then.”

  She smirked. “I honestly don’t remember much about the family and even if I did, I wouldn’t share it with you.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

  “Sure you would. If you thought it would help you.”

  She was probably right.

  She grabbed a sticky pad and pen. She scribbled for a moment, tore the sheet of paper off and handed it to me.

  “That’s the name of someone who might be able to help you,” Tess said. “I stress might.”

  The name Rodney was written on the sticky along with a phone number. “This is it?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “Yep.”

  “Isabel couldn’t have given me this name?”

  Something rushed through her eyes that I couldn’t read and she glanced away before I could figure it out. “No. She actually couldn’t have.”

  I didn’t understand. It wasn’t much and I was hoping for more. But I’d learned that even the smallest things could point in the right direction and to take what I could get.

  I folded up the small piece of paper and stuffed it in my pocket. “Alright. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Can I ask you one other thing?”

  She sighed and shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Any way you could just look in some drawer and pull out a file on Bailey Detwiler and let me look at it?” I asked.

  Tess Gorman folded her arms across her chest and shook her head, a less than amused smile on her face. “Absolutely none.”

  TEN

  “She gave me a name,” I said to Isabel. “That was it.”

  I’d driven back to the apartment and found her dragging a twin mattress into the place she’d loaned me. I’d helped her carry it into the small bedroom and we dropped it on the box spring she’d apparently already brought in.

  She brushed a long wisp of hair from her face and fiddled with the pushed up sleeves of her T-shirt. “I thought she might.”

  “I thought she might give me a little more.”

  “I didn’t,” she said, smiling. “She’s tough and she plays by the rules.”

  “So you couldn’t have saved me the drive and just given me the name she gave me?”

  She looked around the room. “I think there’s a small dresser in storage.”

  “Isabel?”

  She looked at me. “It wasn’t my place to recommend him.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Means what it means,” she said. “Wasn’t my place to recommend him. And maybe if you’d called her, like I told you to, she might’ve just given you the name and saved you the drive. But I also thought there was a slim chance she might give you more. It was worth a shot.”

  Had me there and I didn’t have a response.

  “Just call him,” she said. “He’ll probably be able to meet you today. And I’ll go with you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Be better if I’m there,” she said. “Just to break the ice.”

  “Who is he?”

  She pushed down her sleeves, shaking her arms until they dropped to her wrists. “Someone who can probably help you. I wouldn’t have suggested you go to Tess if I thought otherwise.”

  I hated that she was talking in circles and keeping me in the dark. But I didn’t really have any other choice but to trust her.

  “I don’t need the dresser,” I said. “I didn’t bring anything with me.”

  “Okay. I think I might have a chair, though, so you’ve got something to sit on.”

  “That would be good. Thanks.”

  She nodded. “Yep.” She stared at me for a moment. “Just call him. Trust me. He can help. Not trying to be obtuse here, alright? It’s just…” She waved a hand in the air. “Just call him, alright?”

  It was going to have to be because it was all I had.

  ELEVEN

  I glanced at my watch. “He said he’d be here at one.”

  Isabel made a face. “It’s five minutes after. Chill out.”

  We were sitting in a cafe not far from the apartment. I’d called Rodney after we talked and got no sense of him over the phone, only that he was happy to meet us for lunch. As soon as we sat down in the booth, Isabel began asking me questions about Elizabeth, which I answered truthfully and which brought up the normal pain and anxiety for me.

  It was never easy talking about her. I could start out removed from her, but the more details I spoke of, the more I missed her and the more painful it became to wonder about where she was and what happened to her. I could compartmentalize those things on a daily basis, but talking about them was like going from dipping my toe in scalding hot water to submerging my entire body into it.

  “If anyone can help you, it’s Rodney,” she said. “He’ll be here. Just don’t judge.”

  “What is there to judge?”

  She smiled. “Just don’t judge.”

  The waitress came, dropped off our menus and iced water, and we told her we were waiting for one more.

  “Where is Elizabeth’s mother?” Isabel asked, redirecting me back to the conversation about my daughter.

  “She’s still in San Diego,” I said.

  “You’re divorced?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She and I, we’re…okay. I think. I don’t know.”

  She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she really understood. Our divorce had nothing to do with how I felt about Lauren and everything to do with losing a child. I was certain that my feelings for Lauren had never changed, only that other things had gotten in the way of showing them. Seeing her the previous few weeks had been cathartic, but I wasn’t sure anything had really changed. She was still trying to move forward and I was still stuck in neutral, still stuck on Elizabeth.

  “You married?” I asked, looking for any excuse to turn the conversation away from me for a moment.

  She shook her head. “Always a bridesmaid, not interested in being a bride.”

  “Ever?”

  “Never say never,” she said. “But right now? I like my life. I saw my parents make a mess of their marriage. I’m not sure I’m good marriage material.”

  “How so?”

  She sipped from the Diet Coke the waitress had delivered. “I’m independent. I’m stubborn. I like my work. Not sure I want kids. I’m selfish. And those are just the reasons at the top of the list.”

  She was attractive. She was smart. She had her own career. Someone would break her down, eventually. Make her feel like she couldn’t live without them. Which was a good thing.

  “And I don’t like the complications of dating relationships,” she said, twirling the straw in her glass. “So I’m pretty sure I’d suck at marriage.”

  There was something in t
he twirling and the way she said it that made me think maybe she’d been burned or hurt in the past. Something that made her gun shy and defensive. And something that would eventually give way for the right person.

  Her eyes shifted from me toward the front of the diner. “There he is.”

  An old man using a walker pushed his way through the door while a massive man weighing well over three-hundred pounds held the door open for him.

  “Wow,” I said. “He’s big.”

  “Yeah, he is,” Isabel said. “But that’s not him.”

  The man with the walker paused, scanning the restaurant. Isabel held up a hand and he nodded and began moving our way.

  “Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say.

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Don’t judge.”

  The old man’s eyes moved to me as he pushed toward us. He wore a flannel shirt beneath a thick wool coat that hung below his waist and gray slacks over bright white walking shoes. His thin white hair was brushed back over his pink scalp, sticking up in several different directions.

  He reached the table and cleared his throat. “Hello, Isabel.”

  She slid out of the booth and hugged him awkwardly as he wrapped one arm around her. She helped him extricate from the walker and slide into her side of the booth.

  He extended a hand across the table and stared at me with clear eyes. “Rodney Gorman.”

  “Joe Tyler.” I thought for a moment. “Gorman. You’re related to Tess?”

  He nodded and kept his eyes on me. “I’m her father. And I’ve heard of you.”

  I wondered why no one told me he was Tess’s father. “Really?”

  He glanced at Isabel, then moved his eyes back to me. “Yes. A friend of mine in Kansas City told me about you.”

  I thought for a moment, but couldn’t pull anything up. “I’m sorry, I don’t…”

  “A family from Topeka,” he said. “You found their daughter. Four years ago. They had relatives in Kansas City that knew my friend.”

  Topeka rung the bell for my memory, but he got part of it wrong. “I found their son, I think.”

  He blinked several times. “Yes. Their son.”

  I couldn’t recall the family’s name, but I remembered finding their nine-year-old son. The parents had divorced and managed to do so on amicable terms but their extended families had not. The father’s parents decided that the mother wasn’t taking care of the boy and tried to turn a weekend with their grandson into an abduction. They’d run to Florida and stashed him with other relatives, claiming the boy had been taken in his sleep.

  It hadn’t required much work. Nothing added up when I spoke to them and the dissension within the family was easy to see. The police knew, too. They just thought it was the mother’s side of the family and placed their focus on them.

  The grandparents had cracked quickly.

  I just happened to be the one to crack them.

  “They were very grateful for your work,” Rodney said. “They said you were…determined.”

  I shrugged because I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “So I asked around a bit more.” He paused. “Turns out you’ve helped a lot of people.”

  “I try. I hope so.”

  “But Isabel here tells me you’re here for you,” he said. He cleared his throat. “For your daughter.”

  “Yes, sir. I am. I’m chasing a lead that found its way to me.”

  He chuckled. “Mr. Tyler. Please don’t call me sir. It makes me feel older than I already am and I’m still strong enough to lift up that damn walker and smack you in the face with it.”

  I smiled. “Okay. Please call me Joe then.”

  He nodded.

  “Rodney was in Minneapolis PD for years,” Isabel said. “Then with BCA. He was a state investigator.”

  “That was a long time ago, Izzy,” he said.

  “They kept him on an extra ten years because he was so good,” she said, ignoring him. “His solve rate was nearly perfect.”

  “And you know what nearly perfect means, right?” he said, narrowing his eyes.

  I nodded. “Left a couple on the table.”

  “Damn right, I did,” he said, his face darkening. “There was nothing near perfect about not getting those cases closed.”

  I’d heard that before from cops. It wasn’t about the cases they solved or managed to close. It was the ones that stayed open, that they couldn’t figure out, that remained with them until they were dead. It was why Mike Lorenzo still worked Elizabeth’s disappearance. Yes, we were friends, but the cop in him couldn’t let it go.

  “Still,” Isabel said. “He was the best. He knows everyone.”

  The old man shook his head. “I’m not near what she says I am, Joe. But I might be able to give you a little direction.”

  “Anything you can do, I would appreciate,” I said.

  He folded his hands on the table and cleared his throat again. “When I said I’d heard of you, I wasn’t kidding. Did I mention the Topeka case?”

  An awkward silence settled in at the table and I glanced at Isabel.

  “Yes, you mentioned Topeka, Rodney,” she said, touching his elbow.

  He frowned as the waitress came. She took our orders and wandered off.

  “Anyway, when your name kept popping up, people saying you’d helped them, I starting seeing what I could learn about you,” he continued.

  I knew information was out there. Old media coverage, message-board stories, and I kept Elizabeth’s profile alive in communities that involved missing children.

  “I laughed when I read about your leaving the department in San Diego,” he said, a corner of his mouth turning up. “I assume they had a problem with all of the attention your daughter was bringing them? Pushed you out the door?”

  “More or less.”

  He shook his head. “Cops are great until things go wrong inside. Starts to make them look bad. They’ll turn on anyone and anything, even their own.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t have put it any better.

  His thin lips came together. “But I started digging. Nothing extensive, mind you. But just reading.” The corner of his mouth turned up again. “When you’re an old retired cop, there isn’t much else to do.”

  Isabel rolled her eyes, indicating she didn’t buy the old man act. I didn’t either, really. His body may have been aged and frail, but there was something alert and vibrant about him.

  “And I think I learned something about your daughter,” he said.

  The familiar heart tremor started and I grabbed the glass of ice water in front of me, taking a long drink.

  “If I knew for certain, I would’ve gotten in touch,” he said, quickly. “Please don’t think I was holding information back. It was my experience that one of the worst things you can do to a parent is give them a glimmer that isn’t there.”

  Again, he was right. It was the worst. Getting one’s hope up and then having it crushed. I’d experienced it on both ends and I did my best to avoid it on both ends.

  I set the glass down, let the cold water run down my throat. “What do you think you learned?”

  Isabel sat rock still next to him, eyes fixed on the old man.

  Rodney cleared his throat again and set his bright eyes on me. “I feel certain your daughter is alive.”

  TWELVE

  Our food came, but I was too unsettled to touch mine. I sat there in silence while they ate, thinking about where Elizabeth might be. What she might look like. If she remembered me.

  “I don’t say that easily,” Rodney said, staring across the table at me, pushing his plate aside. “Because I know what hearing that means for you.”

  I wasn’t sure if he really did or not. Unless your own child had been abducted, I wasn’t sure that anyone could quite understand what the roller coaster of information and emotions was like. But I did believe him that he wasn’t giving me some flippant opinion. If he was willing to look in my eyes and say those words, he had a reason. />
  I cleared my throat. “Why do you think Elizabeth is alive?”

  He laid his hands flat on the table. “A couple of reasons. First, you’ve done an excellent job keeping her case alive.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  He shook his head. “No. You have. You’ve been constant. Her presence, despite the time she’s been gone, hasn’t been diminished. People in the community still know her name. Her disappearance is still discussed. That’s a good thing. It makes people aware.”

  “All parents don’t do that?” I asked.

  “Most parents can’t,” he explained. “They become overwhelmed. They give up hope. They move on. They don’t forget their child, but they don’t have the energy to face their missing son or daughter every single day.” His eyes filled with sympathy. “You don’t seem to fall into that category.”

  He was right. I’d given over my life to finding her. It had ended my career and my marriage. It consumed me. I had the energy. As long as I didn’t mind the isolation.

  “So her disappearance and her name are still in the public consciousness,” Rodney said. “She hasn’t been forgotten. There are people who are still, in some way, looking for her. Not just you.”

  I glanced at Isabel, then fiddled with the napkin under the glass of water, pulling at the corner.

  “So this new lead...it's a good one?” he asked.

  “I think so. As good as I've had in a while. I think she was here in Minnesota.”

  He nodded. “Do you know the statistics about children who are still alive after the first few weeks following their abduction?”

  “I know the chances are better that they’re alive.”

  “Not just better, Joe,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Astronomically better. It’s something like sixty percent at ninety days. Seventy-five percent after a year. But after several years?” A faint smile crept on his old mouth. “It’s very likely that your daughter is alive somewhere.”

  My heart beat quickly. He wasn’t telling me things I didn’t already know, but someone who knew what he was talking about was giving me hard numbers. Statistical probabilities that were in Elizabeth’s favor.