Line of Fire

by Rachel Ann Nunes

  The door opened, and Commander Huish reentered with Detective Greeley. The commander started to speak, but Shannon lifted a finger, asking him to wait. The Vandykes didn’t appear to notice either Huish’s return or Shannon’s signal.

  “Gail,” I began, “you left an imprint on your ring. I know about Jenny. I know you didn’t give birth to her.”

  Gail’s face crumpled, while everyone else stared—at me, at her, at each other.

  “I know Jenny is the daughter of your best friend, Cindy, and that you took Jenny at her request. What I don’t know is where Cindy is now. Did something happen to her?”

  I really hoped Gail hadn’t been involved in her death, though I knew troubled women did terrible things.

  Gail brought her hands to her face, sobbing. This time Kenyon didn’t reach out to comfort her. “Tell them, honey,” he said. I was glad his voice was still gentle, though it was apparent he was as confused as the rest of us.

  Commander Huish walked over to Gail’s side. “Take a moment to compose yourself, and then tell us what happened.”

  Gail nodded and took a shuddering breath. A few minutes later she could talk. “Cindy and I worked at a sewing factory when I was having problems with Eric. Because of her encouragement, I finally left Eric and filed for an annulment. I wasn’t even nineteen. Cindy had her own problems. Her boyfriend was in jail when I met her, but he got out eventually, and she’d come to work with a black eye or with bruises on her arms and legs. We celebrated when he was sent to prison. She asked me to share her apartment, to help with rent, so I did. Then we found out she was pregnant with Jenny.

  “Cindy had Jenny in our apartment with a midwife. Everything went fine, but Cindy got sick after. She had a cough. A terrible one. I took time off work and took care of her and Jenny. Then when Jenny was a few weeks old, Cindy got a letter from her boyfriend in prison. It scared her. She didn’t want anything to do with him, but she said she’d have to do whatever he said or he’d hurt her. She didn’t want him to know about Jenny, so she asked me to pretend Jenny was mine. She even got the midwife to change the name on the birth papers since we hadn’t sent them in yet.”

  “Did Cindy see a doctor about the cough?” I asked.

  Gail nodded. “At some free clinic. They sent her home, saying they’d contact her in a few days to let her know the results of the tests, but they were too late. She died. Jenny wasn’t even two months old.”

  Huish walked around the table. “The boyfriend ever come looking for her?”

  “He came once right after he got out, but I made sure he didn’t see Jenny. I told him Cindy was contagious and to come back later. He was so angry, as if it was her fault she was sick, but he left.” Gail closed her eyes, as if remembering brought her pain. “After Cindy died, I crashed at a coworker’s until I could rent a room for Jenny and me. A month later, I ran into Kenyon. We started dating and fell in love.”

  “You should have told me.” Kenyon’s arm was back around his wife.

  Gail leaned into him, twisting her neck to stare up into his eyes. “Oh, honey, I was barely twenty. I’d had a failed marriage, watched a good friend die, and unexpectedly become a mother. Jenny was my entire life by then. I loved her so much. I couldn’t risk her being taken away. Cindy wanted me to raise her, and I’d promised her I would.” Her voice grew hard. “Besides, her boyfriend had supposedly paid his debt to society, but I couldn’t let Jenny grow up with him. What would a thug like him do with a baby, anyway? He’d been in and out of jail since he was barely a teen, and he was almost thirty then.”

  “Do you remember the boyfriend’s name?” I asked.

  “Cindy and his friends called him Geyser because of some stupid trick he did with a bottle of beer, but that wasn’t his real name.”

  No leads there. “What about Cindy’s family?”

  “She had a mother, but she was homeless. Cindy tried to get her mother to live with her, even got her a job several times, hoping they could share rent, but her mother would always quit working and go to live on the street again. I was the only person in Jenny’s life able to take care of her.”

  I wondered if she’d married Kenyon more for what he could do to keep her and Jenny together than for love, but in the end it seemed to have worked out. He was obviously gone on her, and she shared a real affection for him, too, or she wouldn’t have continued the marriage and had another child with him.

  With Gail’s confession, our suspect pool had become wider. I knew I should be happy about that, but at some point I’d switched goals. Instead of trying to prove whether or not Cody had anything to do with Jenny’s disappearance, my primary goal now was finding her. More suspects meant more time to discover who actually took her.

  “Does Jenny know any of this?” I asked.

  “I never told her about me,” Gail said. “But she knows Kenyon’s not her father.”

  “I insisted we be up front with her about that,” Kenyon added. “I didn’t want her to stumble on the information later and feel we kept it from her.” His voice faltered when he saw the hurt on his wife’s face. “I didn’t mean …” He didn’t finish.

  Commander Huish pulled up a chair and sat down at the table, pulling a writing tablet from his pocket. “Okay, Gail, I’m going to need every name you can remember. From your coworkers to neighbors to the midwife who delivered Jenny, if you can remember her name. Whoever might have known you and Cindy then and who knew or might have suspected she was pregnant or that you weren’t.”

  Gail furrowed her brow. “I don’t understand. Geyser didn’t even know she was expecting.”

  “Someone might have tipped him off,” Huish said. “He could have come looking for her. If you tell us everything, we can start the search before the FBI gets here.”

  “The FBI?”

  “They’re sending someone to check out your story about your ex-husband, but believe me, they’ll be far more interested in this.”

  Gail took a shuddering breath. “But what if after all this time I have to fight him for custody?”

  “I think,” Shannon said, “we need to worry about finding Jenny first. If this Geyser has as long a record as you say, custody won’t be an issue.”

  “Okay,” Gail said. “I’ll try to remember everything.”

  Huish looked at us. “You can stay, if you want, but you may be interested in the guy my detectives just caught up with.”

  “Cody Beckett?” I guessed.

  “Yes, and he’s asking to see you.”

  Chapter 9

  If Jenny knew Kenyon wasn’t her father,” I said to Shannon as Detective Greeley led us to another interrogation room, “it’s possible she went looking for her real father. Physically or over the Internet.”

  “Maybe she assumed Mrs. Vandyke’s ex was her dad and took a bus to Portland.”

  Greeley shook his head. “No one remembers selling her a ticket. Though that’s not saying much.”

  “She would have had to come into Salem to get the bus,” Shannon said.

  “It would be a long walk.” Greeley paused outside a door. “Maybe she had a lift into town.”

  “One of her friends, then,” Shannon said.

  The boot might have told me if she’d left on her own, but they apparently hadn’t found it yet. “So,” I said, “what did your prisoner have to say? The guy from the gas station, I mean. Not Cody Beckett.”

  Greeley gave me a flat smile that did nothing to soften the lines of his face. “David Bremer denies stabbing anyone.”

  “That’s strange.” I worked hard not to roll my eyes. “And I thought he’d jump right up and volunteer the information. After all, he wasn’t shy about trying to shoot us all at the gas station.”

  “I didn’t say I believed him.” Greeley lips tightened. “He’s lying, of course. But unless John Doe regains consciousness or Bremer left fingerprints on the victim, we can’t prove it until we find the crime scene. Maybe not even then.”

  “Maybe he’s working with t
hose men at the hospital who also tried to kill John Doe.” I frowned, even as I spoke. The two parties involved didn’t seem to go together. Bremer had been wearing jeans and a baseball cap and was carrying a stolen gun, but the men who climbed from the van to shoot at us were wearing dress pants and sported ample firepower.

  “I’d bet not,” Shannon said. “You mentioned drugs in the imprint from that needle. That could mean more players. A lot more.”

  “The stabbing, the drugs, and Jenny’s disappearance have to be connected somehow. It can’t be coincidence that it all happened now.” We needed answers, and Cody Beckett might be able to give them to us. I set my jaw. “Okay,” I told Greeley. “Let’s go in.”

  Greeley opened the door and went in first. I had to wait for him to move to the other side of the room before I could see Cody Beckett seated at a table opposite Detective Levine, his long white hair looking more wild since the last time we’d seen him.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” I noticed his hands were in his pockets, as though he was afraid to touch anything. I knew exactly how that felt.

  “Stinking communists,” he muttered. “They think everyone is guilty.”

  “Well, you did disappear.” Shannon slipped into the empty seat next to Levine.

  Cody lifted his grizzled chin. “I wasn’t under arrest, was I? Maybe I didn’t want to answer no questions.”

  “You’re under arrest now,” Levine pointed out.

  “For what?”

  “For avoiding arrest.”

  Cody spluttered a laugh. “You can’t arrest me for avoiding arrest unless you have enough to arrest me in the first place. You can’t prove I did anything!”

  “We found a man stabbed nearly to death in your bedroom.” Greeley walked closer to Cody, placing a hand on the table. “And a missing child’s boot on your property.”

  Cody held his gaze. “I told you, I don’t know how that man got there. Or the boot. I can’t control when people trespass on my property. Any time you waste on me is less time you have to find out who was really after that girl.”

  Cody and Greeley glared at each other for a long minute. Cody didn’t back down but neither did Greeley. I knew enough about them now to bet the two could sit there glaring all day.

  “Well, they have the man who stabbed that guy in custody,” I said into the heavy silence. “He’s the guy who held up a gas station this morning outside Hayesville and shot the clerk. What’s more, you are no longer the only suspect in Jenny’s disappearance. That’s got to be good news.”

  A brief shadow of relief passed over Cody’s face. Or was that only my imagination? And what if he was relieved? It didn’t mean he was getting away with anything.

  Greeley’s mean little eyes shifted to me, his lip curling. “Did you have to tell him that? How am I supposed to get anything out of him now?”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” I shrugged. “I’ve never been good at hiding the truth. Now if you’d stop glaring at me, I’d like to ask Mr. Beckett a few questions.”

  Detective Levine gave a short laugh, which Greeley quelled with a mere look. Shannon winked at me, his lips twitching.

  “He still has to answer for the boot,” Greeley said.

  “Then I hope you find it so we can see if he’s involved in some way.”

  Cody blinked at me and then looked back to Greeley. “You lost evidence?” He shook his head. “That poor little girl.” The sympathy in his voice appeared genuine, and I steeled myself against it.

  “It’s not lost,” Greeley told him. “I have a call out to the FBI for it. They have it and the computer.”

  I could tell from his tone it was more of a hope than a certainty, and I found I liked Greeley better when he was uncertain. Of course it could be an act. Maybe he’d purposely mislaid the evidence. Him or someone else. For Jenny’s sake, I hoped I was wrong.

  “Look, Mr. Beckett,” I said, “you said the man at your house looked familiar. Have you remembered where you might have seen him?”

  He shook his head. “Wasn’t him. Just someone who looked like him. But I can’t remember… .” His face scrunched in thought. “Nah, just can’t place him. It’ll come to me, though. It always does. I have a good memory.”

  “Then can you tell me how many times you’ve met Mrs. Vandyke?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. A few times. In passing, is all.”

  “You’ve never seen Jenny?”

  He sighed. “Once. At my bank. She was outside waiting for her mom.”

  Did I give him credit for being honest or was the admission one more bit of proof against him? “How did you know she belonged to Mrs. Vandyke?”

  “When Mrs. Vandyke left the bank, she took her hand. The girl pulled away, though. I remember thinking that besides the blonde hair they didn’t look much alike.”

  “You didn’t talk to Jenny?”

  “No reason to.” He frowned. “Look, just because I saw the child doesn’t mean I had anything to do with her going missing. You said you had a better lead. Why not chase that one?”

  My turn to sigh. “They’re following up on it now.” I was about to give up, but his expression had suddenly changed. “What?” I asked.

  “I remember now. The man bleeding all over my room? I just put it together with what you said about that gas station. It was the one closest to my house, right? Well, he reminds me of the clerk there. The really young-looking one. They have the same build, the same lines of the face. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were brothers.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Levine said.

  Thoughts racing, I remembered the feeling I’d experienced when I saw Kirt in the hospital parking garage. “Now that he’s pointed it out, there is a resemblance.”

  “You think they’re related?” Greeley asked.

  “They wouldn’t have to be,” Shannon said. “Bremer would just have to think they were. Maybe he saw them together. He didn’t get what he wanted from one so he went for the other.”

  “Or they could actually be related.” I looked at Shannon pointedly, remembering the imprint on John Doe’s shirt. “Maybe cousins.”

  Shannon tapped the table with his fingers. “If so, the clerk might be able to ID your John Doe.”

  “Seems like a long shot.” Levine arose, sending his chair back with a loud screech. He gave us an apologetic shrug.

  Cody came with us as we all gravitated to the door. “Does this mean I can go? I got a deadline, you know. For my next sculpture.”

  “Not until the commander says so.” Greeley paused at the door. “You might still be under arrest.”

  “You can’t hold me if you aren’t arresting me.”

  Greeley’s expression hardened. “We can until tomorrow. So if you don’t want to sleep in this room, sit down and let me go talk to the commander.”

  Cody stomped back to his seat, mumbling something about beady-eyed detectives and a nosy woman who wanted to know too much and how if he stayed in that cold room or in a cell with other detainees, he’d probably contract a rare disease and fall so sick that he wouldn’t finish his project, which would then make it so he couldn’t pay his bills, and the city would take his land because he’d default on the taxes, and he’d have to try to find a bed at the local shelter and probably end up dying in the street of exposure.

  It sounded so much like a story my sister would make up to joke about a point that for a moment I couldn’t move. It was a sense of family I wasn’t prepared to experience with him. I’d known she shared his artistic talent, but this seemed more personal somehow.

  “Autumn, you coming?” Shannon stood in the doorway. There was a question in his eyes that I recognized from when he wanted to know about the imprints I’d been reading. He would have noticed, though, that I hadn’t touched anything in the room.

  Having nothing to say, I nodded and swept past him out into the hall where the two detectives were talking.

  “I still say it’s him for the stabbing.�
�� Greeley glanced at the door Shannon was closing behind him.

  “Agreed,” said Levine. “I don’t think this lead with the clerk is going to pan out. He was shot. He certainly would have said something if he knew the robber was after him.”

  “Beckett only came up with this because of what Ms. Rain here said about the gas station.”

  I felt deflated at the idea. Greeley was right—I had brought up the station first.

  “Or the clerk could be into something up to his neck,” Shannon retorted. “Either way, it’s too big a coincidence that Bremer stabbed John Doe before hitting the gas station. The clerk needs to be questioned.”

  Levine scratched the short hair on his head. “Remind me again—who says the gas station robber stabbed John Doe?”

  “That was me.” I smiled at him. “It was something I picked up from John Doe’s clothing.”

  Smiling, Levine leaned toward me, a little too close for my comfort. “I’d really like to hear more about how this works sometime. It’s fascinating.”

  Greeley gave the ceiling a save-me-from-idiots look, which irritated me more than if he’d come right out and said he didn’t believe.

  “So are you going to pick up the clerk or not?” Shannon asked. “The commander said he’d help us. Ask him. I bet he’ll tell you to pick him up.”

  Greeley sighed. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have a chat with him.”

  “I’ll take Schmidt and do it while you talk to the commander,” Levine said.

  “His name’s Kirt, and he might be at his fiancée’s.” When I saw Greeley’s annoyed expression, I added, “But I guess you probably already have that in your report.”

  Levine didn’t seem concerned at my interference. He snapped his fingers and pointed at me, walking backwards. “When this is all over, you and me, on the town. I know a place that makes great steaks.” He winked—and then stumbled into the wall. Face reddening, he hurried away.

  Greeley sighed but didn’t comment on his partner’s awkwardness. “Let’s go see the commander. Let him know what Mr. Beckett has come up with.” The way he said it was a challenge, but I wasn’t afraid of Huish. I knew too much about his personal anguish.