“Sun, sand, and ocean breezes. It’s about ten degrees cooler than this hellhole. Of course, it dropped to near Arctic temperatures when I told Michelle I had to come in.”
“We’ve got a missing kid. What are you going to do?”
“It’s our anniversary.” Dorie held up her left hand to show off her wedding band. “Ten years tomorrow.”
“Congrats.”
“Yeah, maybe hold off on the kudos until we see if there will be an eleventh year.”
“That bad?”
“Nah, she’ll come around.” Dorie looked at her ring. “I hope. What about you? Conroy says you’re working the tips.”
“More than seven hundred of them logged so far. Not a genuine lead to be found,” Ellery replied with disgust. “Our guys estimate there were a hundred thousand people on the Common at some point today. You’d think one of them would’ve seen something useful.”
“Maybe they did. It takes time to interview that many potential witnesses. About all you can say is that she probably wasn’t dragged kicking and screaming into the back of some van—someone would’ve put that up on YouTube by now.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “She’s been gone more than seven hours. What’s your gut say?”
“You’re asking my gut?” Her instincts had been broken years ago; at least that’s how the brass explained it to her during the shooting investigation. Too damaged. Unstable. Sees the Bogeyman in every shadow. As such, Ellery hesitated to give voice to the tension coiled in her midsection. “I think it’s bad,” she said reluctantly.
Dorie digested the confession in silence for a moment. “I heard there was already a dead kid in the family.”
“Chloe’s half brother, Trevor. We’re pulling the available files.”
“We?”
Heat flooded her face. “Reed Markham was here visiting when Chloe disappeared. He’s agreed to help with the case—unofficially for now, until we have any confirmation of an abduction.”
The door to the small room swung open and Officer Owens stuck his head in the room for what felt like the hundredth time that day. “Here’s the latest,” he said, handing Ellery a stack of notes. “The one on top just came in right now. Thought you’d want to see it first.”
“Thanks.” Ellery scanned the message and her breath caught in her chest.
“What is it?” Dorie asked, leaning forward.
“A dry cleaner in Roslindale just had a customer come in for help in getting stains out of a dress shirt. The cleaner says it’s blood.”
“Okay,” replied Dorie in a tone that suggested she didn’t think much of the tip.
“The customer’s name is Frank Brimwood. Brimwood is the last name of Chloe’s nanny, the one who was with her when Chloe went missing.”
“Related how to this Frank Brimwood?”
Ellery stood and headed for the door. “I don’t know, but let’s find out.”
* * *
Frank Brimwood turned out to be Margery’s husband, age fifty-six, no wants, no warrants. They had three grown kids and he worked as a loan officer at a bank in the city. The dry cleaner, Carol Rosales, kept the store open late so Ellery and Dorie could survey her findings. “Tell me that’s not blood,” she said, pushing the shirt across the counter to Ellery.
Ellery snapped on gloves and examined the dark red smears across the front of the white shirt. “It looks like blood,” she agreed.
Mrs. Rosales folded her arms. “That’s because it is. I’ve been doing this thirty-two years now. I know blood when I see it.”
“What about Frank Brimwood?” Dorie asked. “Do you know him?”
“Never seen him before today.” She watched as Ellery withdrew a Kastle-Meyer kit, took a cotton swab, and ran it over one of the red stains.
“How did he seem to you when he dropped off the shirt?”
“Sweaty. In a rush. He wanted the shirt back tomorrow, but we’re not open on Sundays.”
It was dark outside and still over eighty degrees. The entire city was sweaty. Ellery added a drop of the reagent to the tip of the swab and the cotton turned pink. “It’s blood,” she announced.
Mrs. Rosales gave a short, authoritative nod. “Told you. He did it, didn’t he? He took that girl.”
“That’s getting ahead of things,” Dorie said. “Did he mention how he got the stains?”
“No, just gave me orders on the shirt. I saw he had a big scratch on his arm, right here.” She indicated her forearm. Ellery wondered if that meant the blood could be his, but the stains seemed too large to have come from a scratch.
“Thank you for calling us,” she said to Mrs. Rosales. “We’ll take it from here.” She bagged the shirt and prepared to go.
“What if he comes back here looking for it?” The woman’s dark brows knit together in concern.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. We’ll be keeping him company for the next while. You have a good night.”
Outside, they gave the shirt to the waiting Officer Owens, who had tagged along in a squad car. “Take it to the lab for processing,” Ellery said. “Tell them it’s a rush.”
She climbed behind the wheel of her SUV while Dorie took the passenger side as usual. This was one aspect to their partnership that fired on all cylinders, so to speak—Ellery liked control and Dorie loathed driving in Boston traffic. It’s the only city where the driver’s manual shows you how to give the finger, she liked to say. To prove her point, a blond driver in a BMW (license plate “BEEMAH”) cut off Ellery as she tried to merge into an open slot. Ellery might have replied with double-barreled fingers except Dorie was sitting right there and Dorie was the one who’d be evaluating Ellery’s temperament in next month’s report to Conroy. When she glanced over, though, Dorie wasn’t watching her. She had her phone out and was scrolling through it.
“We’ve got something back on Frank Brimwood. He’s clean in Massachusetts, but there’s an old record for assault in Providence. Old as in 1988.” She looked at Ellery. “Before your time.”
“I was born in 1988.” Barely.
Dorie laughed in reply. “Yeah, sure, kid. Check it out, though—the victim was a female minor.”
Ellery pressed the pedal closer to the floorboards. “What kind of assault?”
“Doesn’t say here. But there’s no good kind when we’re talking about a grown man and a little girl. Turn right up here; it’s faster.”
Dorie may have hated to drive, but she was a Boston native who knew every back road better than Ellery’s GPS. The car swayed as Ellery took the turn harder than she should. “Margery’s worked for the Lockharts for eight years,” she said. “That’s like three thousand days where Frank could’ve grabbed Chloe and didn’t. Why snatch her in broad daylight in the middle of a street fair after all this time?”
“Some of these guys who like to diddle kids can go years without acting on their impulses. They get by with fantasy and black-market porn until one day it isn’t enough to just think about being with a kid. They need the real thing.”
“I keep thinking about the blood. There was a lot of it on his shirt.”
“That’s the other thing about these guys. When they do grab a kid, it’s usually over with quick.”
“How quick?” Ellery had lived three days.
“Hours. Sometimes before anyone even knows they’re gone.” She stretched toward the windshield and squinted out at a Cape-style house on the right. “That’s the place.”
At twilight, the house looked like a paper lantern, aglow with light from within. It sat next to a line of homes exactly like it, all of them wood-frame one-story houses with a pitched roof, little space between windows and the gutter, and no overhang. The central front door was painted red, with two symmetric windows on each side, like big eyes peering out into the night. Ellery and Dorie walked up the cement path that cut through the patch of front grass. Ellery heard the television playing inside, but it went mute at her loud knock. A tall, balding man with a long face and broad forehead answere
d. He reminded her of the stone statues on Easter Island. “Yes?” he said, frowning down at them.
They showed off their shields. “Are you Frank Brimwood?” Ellery asked.
“Yes.” His imposing frame blocked the entryway entirely.
“We’re investigating the disappearance of Chloe Lockhart. Can we please come in to talk to you for a few minutes?”
He turned where he stood and hollered behind him, “Margery! There’re two detectives here to see you.” He moved aside to let them enter.
“Actually, sir, we’d like to speak with you,” Ellery explained as Margery appeared, wiping her hands on a dishrag.
“Is there news?” Margery asked, her eyes anxious. “Did you find Chloe?”
“No, ma’am, not yet.” Ellery replied to Margery Brimwood, but her eyes were busy cataloging the room for any signs of trouble. She found only a brown sofa, a coffee table with a beer can sweating on it, and a wall jam-packed with family photos. “We just have a few questions for you. First, though, do you have a gun on the property?”
“I have a Walther PK380,” Frank answered. “Why?”
“Could I see it, please?”
The Brimwoods looked at each other for a beat, but Frank went to retrieve the weapon. He returned with an opened lockbox and handed it to Ellery, who made a perfunctory check of the contents. “Thank you.” As he took his seat, she noted the fiery red scratch on his arm, the one Mrs. Rosales had mentioned.
“I don’t understand. What does my gun have to do with Chloe Lockhart?”
“Did you know Chloe?” Dorie asked.
He looked befuddled. “Not really. I’ve met her a few times here and there. Margery’s like a second mother to her, though. Maybe even a first mother if you want to be honest about it.”
Margery slapped his arm. “Oh, hush now.”
“When is the last time you saw Chloe?” Dorie asked him.
“Jeez, I don’t know. Last winter, I guess. She had some kind of Christmas concert and Margery dragged me along to see it. We ate sugar cookies and drank warm punch.” He sounded bored as he relayed the story, not like a pedophile eager to get close to his prey.
“Mr. Brimwood, you have an old arrest on your record,” Ellery said, laying out her cards. “You assaulted a female minor.”
His cheeks darkened as he caught on to why they were at his home. “Now look here, I didn’t touch that girl.”
“Do you mean Chloe or the one from 1988?” Ellery asked him.
“Both. Neither. That girl from before, her name was Melody Marshall. She was bullying our daughter, Cindy. Roughing her up on the bus and taking her money. The school wouldn’t do anything about it, so I paid Melody a visit one evening. I told her to leave Cindy alone or she’d have me to deal with. She wasn’t impressed, said my kid was a crybaby liar. I said I’d wait to talk to her parents, and she said good luck because her dad went to buy milk fifteen years ago and never came back. Then she, uh…” He broke off with a cough. “She hit on me.”
Pedos always made this claim: the kid started it. “Go on,” Ellery said as neutrally as possible.
“She grabbed my crotch and said she had some ideas about what we could do while we waited for her mother. I shoved her backward away from me, and she fell and cut her arm. She wasn’t crying about it, neither. She thought the whole thing was hilarious. I told her again to leave Cindy the hell alone and I left. Later, I guess her mom came home and filed the complaint.”
“The judge saw Melody had a record for drug use,” Margery said. “So he believed Frank.”
“Uh-huh.” Pedophiles often picked victims no one would believe. “You mind if we look around?”
“You think I have Chloe stashed here?” Frank leaped to his feet. “You think I’m some kind of pervert, is that it?”
“We’re looking everywhere, Mr. Brimwood,” Dorie said, her voice soothing. “We’d go door-to-door if we could.”
“We have nothing to hide,” interjected Margery. “Do we, Frank?”
“You’re wasting your damn time here,” he said, his color still high. He rammed his hands into his pockets. “Look all you want. I don’t care.”
Ellery and Dorie went room by room, opening closets and peering under beds. Ellery checked the laundry hamper for any signs of more bloody clothing but found none. The only photos of children she observed were the old family portraits on the wall and one snapshot of Margery and a younger Chloe that sat in a handmade frame decorated with glue and glitter. Dorie came up from the basement and shook her head. “Nothing down there.”
“Let’s hit him with the shirt.”
They rejoined the Brimwoods in the living room. Frank had poured himself a bourbon. His eyes were on the television, where the Red Sox played the Blue Jays, but the angry set of his mouth said his mind wasn’t on the game. “Well? Do we pass?”
“You took a shirt to the cleaners today,” Ellery said. “The front was stained with blood.”
Margery turned to him, aghast. “Frank?”
“It wasn’t what you think. I was driving home, and I saw this hurt dog by the side of the road. A small poodle-like thing. I think it got hit by a car. Anyway, there was another bigger dog snapping at it, like it wanted to attack. I stopped the car and put myself between the two dogs. The big one reared up and lunged at me. His paws caught my arm, right here. I growled back at him and eventually he backed off. Then I took the hurt dog out of the street and onto the sidewalk. That’s when I got the blood on my shirt. I called the cops and they sent Animal Control to come take the dog to the hospital. I went to the nearest cleaners.”
If it was true, there’d be an incident report to back it up. “Where was this?” Ellery asked.
“Down by the Arborway.”
At his words, her phone buzzed and she fished it out for a look. A message from Owens came through: The lab reports the blood on the shirt is not human. She tucked the phone away, relieved and frustrated at the same time. The blood wasn’t Chloe’s, which was good. But if Frank Brimwood hadn’t snatched her, where did she go? “The lab tests came back on your shirt,” she told him. “It supports your story.”
“It’s not a story,” he snapped. “It’s the truth.”
Margery tried to rub his arm, but he brushed her off. “Honey, they’re just doing their jobs. They’re trying to find Chloe.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
He sounded so certain that the little hairs on Ellery’s neck rose up. “What do you mean by that?”
“That girl has bars on her bedroom window. She’s never allowed to go anywhere alone. It’s a big fancy house, all right, but if you ask me, it’s a prison.”
Margery looked pained. “And I suppose that makes me the warden, then.”
He threw his hands at her. “Your words, not mine. But remember what happened when you stopped to get her an ice-cream cone after soccer practice?”
Margery’s face fell and she drew her hands into her lap. When she didn’t explain, Ellery pressed her. “What happened when you bought her an ice cream?”
The woman licked her lips in a nervous gesture. “It was my mistake, really. I hadn’t been working with the Lockharts long—only a few months. Chloe was cranky and hungry. I thought a small treat wouldn’t hurt her and we wouldn’t even be late getting home. That’s the thing. We weren’t even late.” She looked to Ellery for understanding. “The Lockharts have a tracker on my phone and I guess it alerted Teresa that we weren’t on our normal route. She didn’t call me to ask what was up or anything like that. Instead, she called the cops.”
“You see?” Frank looked at them with a gleam of vindication in his eyes. “There’s crazy in that house, and it starts with the mother. Mark my words—Chloe wasn’t snatched up by some nutter. That girl escaped.”
5
“Daddy, look. Speed Bump wants to help you cook!” Distracted, Reed turned from watching both the pancakes and the bacon frying on the stove to see the hound had reared up on his hind
legs and planted his enormous paws on the counter. The animal was approximately one foot tall but practically human sized when he stood up like this—just one of his many ridiculous qualities.
“Down!” Reed ordered, unnerved by the lolling tongue unfurling in his direction. “I don’t need a sous-chef.”
Bump wagged and grinned at him before licking his chops and eyeing the bacon.
“Out, now.” Reed nudged the dog away and Tula slid off her stool to grab him around the neck in a hug.
“I’ll help him find his ball,” she said, running off into Ellery’s living room with the dog close at her heels. Reed expertly flipped the pancakes and turned the bacon. He’d selected “breakfast for dinner” because it was a meal that would please both Tula and Ellery, if Ellery happened to make it home to eat. This had required a stop at the corner store, where he’d tied up the hound to a metal post outside while he and Tula ducked in for a quick shop. He might have worried for the dog except there were two other mutts also tied up along with him, patiently waiting for their owners to return. City life, as it were. Reed and Tula had emerged to find the smaller dog using Bump as a trampoline while Bump just took it like the good-natured lout that he was.
Reed had considered the degree of trust necessary to leave furry family members unattended, how the system worked because most people were good and not, as Reed sometimes had to remind himself, harboring plans for kidnapping or murder. He’d been asked often over the years by family and friends how they could keep their children safe, and he knew better than to tell them the unvarnished truth. You could put your baby out on a street corner every day for a week and odds were good that no harm would come to her. But if there was someone determined to get to your child, someone willing to risk everything of their life to destroy yours, then no protection would ever be enough. Chloe’s parents had a full-time nanny, an on-call car service, and a tracker installed on her phone, but she’d disappeared just the same.
“Supper’s on,” he called to Tula, and both she and the dog came running. He set two plates of pancakes, bacon, and colorful fruit salad and joined his daughter to eat at the kitchen island. Bump collapsed with a whine near his bowl, which was lamentably free of bacon.
Every Waking Hour Page 4