Forgotten (20 page)

TWENTY-TWO

P
ortia welcomed the dry heat of the Nevada desert after the high humidity of the Maryland summer. She took a cab from the airport to the condo where Rhona Naylor lived. The street was lined with identical two-story stucco buildings. Portia walked to the first-floor unit and rang the bell. On the step were several chipped clay pots, each holding a thriving cactus, and copper wind chimes hung from the wall. The door was answered by a tall woman wearing white cutoff shorts and a T-shirt that was the same shade of red as her hair. On her feet were sandals adorned with fake jewels. Three fingers on each hand were encrusted with rings with various colored center stones.

“Mrs. Naylor?” Portia asked in the politest possible voice.

“Yes?” the woman replied through her bright-red lips.

Portia held up her identification. “Special Agent Portia Cahill, FBI. I’d like to talk to you about your son Sheldon Woods.”

Rhona Naylor slowly blinked her mascara-coated eyes. “What the hell’s that boy done now?”

“Nothing. Well, nothing new, anyway. May I come in?”

The woman hesitated for a moment, then ushered Portia in. “You’ll have to forgive the way the place looks,” Rhona told Portia. “I’ve been having migraines and haven’t been able to keep up with the housework.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Portia said with as much sincerity as she could muster. “Migraines are the worst, aren’t they?”

“You have them, too?”

“Since I was in my teens,” Portia lied through her teeth and poured on the sympathy. “I know how you must be suffering. If you’d rather I came back—”

“No, no, hon. It’s all right.” Rhona plunked herself down on a chair and pointed out a place on the sofa for Portia. She fished a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from her pocket. “Mind if I smoke?” She lit up before Portia could reply.

“Of course not.” Portia wondered if it would make any difference if she’d said yes, she did in fact mind.

“So what’s that boy up to these days?” Rhona searched the cluttered coffee table for an ashtray.

“He’s still in Arrowhead Prison, as I’m sure you know.”

“We’ve been out of touch, Shelly and me. After what he did…” She shrugged. “Well, some things are hard to forgive.”

“True enough, but he’s still your son,” Portia reminded her.

“My little man.” Rhona nodded.

“What was he like as a child, Mrs. Naylor?”

“Oh, please, call me Rhona. I’m a divorced lady, you know.”

“I didn’t know.” Portia tried to keep a straight face as she tried to count the number of divorces Rhona had gone through. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Rhona made a face. “Good riddance to bad garbage. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. I’m just such an easy mark, you know? I never seem to see the worst in anyone until it’s too late. I just get taken advantage of, left and right.”

And did pretty damned well by it, too,
Portia thought, her eyes scanning the well-decorated room.

Rhona appeared to have taken her exes for all they were worth.

“That’s what happens when you’re too tenderhearted.” Portia smiled gently and tried to think of how she was going to get the conversation back on track.

“Oh, isn’t that the truth?” Rhona nodded vigorously and blew out a long blue curl of smoke. “You know, my mother always told me that I needed to be tougher when it came to dealing with men. But no. Why, I—”

“Oh, is that a picture of Sheldon as a little boy?” Portia interrupted her and rose to walk to a marble-topped table on which a number of photos were displayed. She picked up the first one she came to and held it up. “What a cute little boy he was.”

“Oh, he was such a sweet thing,” Rhona said sadly.

“And this would be…let’s see, I’m guessing this is Douglas?” Portia held up a photo of a boy who was obviously not Sheldon.

“Yes. A sweeter boy you never met.”

“And this is…” Portia frowned. The boy did not look like either Sheldon or Douglas.

“That’s Teddy. He was my youngest.”

Teddy? Portia didn’t remember having heard about a third brother.

“How old is Teddy?” Portia asked.

“He would have been seven on his next birth day.” She pulled a wadded-up tissue from a pocket in her shorts and dabbed at her eyes. “We lost Teddy when he was just a little guy.”

“I’m so sorry,” Portia patted Rhona on the hand and dodged the lit end of the cigarette. “What happened to—”

“Oh, all my little men.” Rhona sighed dramatically. “All of them lost to me, one way or another. Sheldon…well, we know about Sheldon, don’t we? And Dougie, my first baby boy. Do you have children, Portia?”

“No, I…”

“There’s nothing like the love between a mother and her sons.” She dabbed at her eyes again. “Nothing like it. It’s truly sacred.”

“I’m sure. Now, Rhona—”

“You asked what Shelly was like as a child. He was an angel. A more beautiful child you’d never hope to see. And he was a good boy, Portia. He was a very good boy. He always did what he was told, he never talked back. He provided such solace to me when his daddy left us.” She sighed deeply. “He was the best of all my boys. He was special.”

“Rhona, the psychologists who examined Sheldon say that he told them he’d been assaulted as a young boy.”

“Assaulted?” Rhona frowned as if she’d never heard the word before.

“Sexually abused.”

“That’s nonsense.” Rhona flipped her hand dismissively.

“Well, he’d made the statement, and since so many men who…” Portia chose her words carefully. “…men who do the sort of things that Sheldon did, many of them had been abused as children. It’s actually very common—”

“Who did he say abused him?” she asked abruptly.

“That’s one of the reasons why I came to speak with you. We thought perhaps one of your ex-husbands might have been the abuser.” Portia watched as Rhona Naylor’s entire demeanor changed. “I’m sure you would have been unaware of it at the time, it isn’t something you would have necessarily known about, so we’re not saying that you—”

“You’re implying that one of my husbands did something unnatural with my son?” She stood and rose to her full height. “What kind of a mother do you think I am, that I would let any man touch my children in such a way?”

“Rhona, the allegation has been made, and we need to—”

“You need to get out of my sight.” She stubbed out the cigarette violently and stormed to the door and opened it. “Now. How dare you come into my house and say such a terrible thing to me? Don’t you think I would have known if something like that had been going on? Don’t you think a mother would know if someone was touching her boy?”

Portia walked to the door because she had no choice. “Rhona, your son has said this happened. You’re telling me you didn’t know. I believe you. I’m not accusing you of anything, I swear I’m not. No one is. But at some point in Sheldon’s life, when he was a child, something inappropriate happened to him, and that, whatever it was, contributed to—”

“Out. Of. My. House.”

Defeated, Portia walked through the front door, flinching as it slammed behind her with vehemence.

“You have a nice day, too, Rhona,” she muttered as she looked in her bag for her cell, and called for a cab.

“H
e never mentioned having another brother, or half brother,” Jim told her when she called him from the airport, where she awaited a flight home. “Are you sure she said this kid was her son?”

“Positive. Yet neither of the older boys ever mentioned this younger brother. And she referred to Douglas, Sheldon, and Teddy as her ‘little men.’ Kinda creepy, by the way.”

“She was always a little strange in the courtroom, I think I might have mentioned that. Never spoke to her son the entire time.”

“Which is odd, since, to hear her tell it, she and her Shelly were like
this.
” She crossed her fingers.

“You think she knew that something was going on with him?”

“I don’t know. There’s something there…I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it was Woods’s father.”

“Nicholson said that he left when Sheldon was about four, right?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what I think, to be honest. On the one hand, she comes across as a fierce lioness of a mother. On the other hand…”

“On the other hand, she comes across as strange.”

“Exactly.”

“So what’s your next move?”

“I’m going to have dinner with Annie McCall, our profiler, when I get back tonight, then I’m going out to the prison first thing in the morning. I want to see what Sheldon has to say about his younger brother who died.”

“She say what happened to him?”

“No, I tried to ask but she sort of talked over me. Past me. I thought I’d have time to work back to that, but I pissed her off and she kicked me out of the house.”

“Bodily?”

“Damn close. Anyway, I’m curious to see what Sheldon has to say about it all.”

“I’d love to be a fly on the wall.”

“You could be.”

“I’m in court all day tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I’m going to spend some time thinking up the perfect opening argument as soon as we’re done here. I took Finn and three of his buddies for pizza so that Dani could go out with a couple of her old friends tonight.”

“That was nice of you.”

“She really doesn’t go out often enough, doesn’t see her friends often enough. Besides, I’ve had fun.”

In the background, Portia could hear the voices of small boys all talking at once.

“I need to hang up,” Jim told her. “One of the boys just spilled his drink in his lap.”

“Better take care of that. I’ll talk to you later.”

The first call for her flight was announced, so she took the notebook she’d bought in the news store and tucked it under her arm. She’d been making notes on the case and all the things she still needed to do, from following up with Larisse on the DNA results to the things she wanted to discuss with Annie.

By the time the plane landed, her list of things to do had expanded to include things she wanted to ask Sheldon. At the top of the list she’d printed one word:
Teddy.

I
t was almost nine
P.M.
when Annie McCall rang the doorbell at Miranda’s townhouse. She carried a briefcase in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

“I don’t know about you,” she said after Portia welcomed her into the house, “but after the week I’ve had, I could use a nice glass of Pinot and some good conversation with an old friend.”

She kissed Portia on the cheek as she passed her on her way into the kitchen. “So good to have you back, Portia. How’s it going?”

“It’s going okay.” Portia followed her and opened several cabinets until she remembered where she’d seen the wineglasses. She took down two, set them on the table, and proceeded to search for a corkscrew.

“Brought my own,” Annie told her as she popped the cork out of the bottle.

“You’re prepared for everything, aren’t you?”

Portia laughed.

“I have to be. My life is spent in the midst of chaos. I can’t be stopping every five seconds to look for something.”

“You are surrounded by the most shit, I’ll give you that.” Portia took the glass Annie held out to her.

“Well, then, here’s to us.” Annie raised her glass.

“To those of us who chase the shit down, and those of us who have to figure out how it became shit in the first place.”

“That would be you.”

“True enough, child.” Annie sat on one of the kitchen chairs and kicked off her shoes. “What nibbles did Miranda leave for you?”

“Some salsa, some hummus that Will made but it’s about a week old so it’s questionable.”

“All the garlic he puts in, it’ll never go bad.”

Portia got the hummus from the refrigerator and a new jar of salsa and an unopened bag of pita chips from the pantry.

“Looks like dinner to me,” Annie told her.

“We could call for a pizza and have a real dinner,” Portia said.

“Do you realize how pathetic your life is when your idea of a real dinner is pizza?”

“If you have spinach on it, it has all the food groups, right?”

“Good point.” Annie opened the pita chips and dug into the hummus.

“How’s Evan?” Portia asked.

“Evan is wonderful. Tough being married to a cop, though.”

“I guess he thinks it’s tough being married to an FBI profiler.”

“No doubt. He keeps it to himself, though.”

Annie grinned. “He’s pretty much the perfect husband.”

“Nice.” Portia got out two plates and handed one to Annie. She poured a hill of salsa onto hers, grabbed a few chips and dug in.

“It is nice,” Annie agreed. “What about you? Did you leave behind a string of broken hearts over there—wherever
there
was?”

Portia made a face. “Not much time for romance. Though you’d think with those odds—the odds having been eleven men to two women—someone would have at least asked for my phone number.”

“Pity.” Annie nodded. “What is it with men these days?”

“Might have had something to do with the fact that we were all dirty and smelly from sleeping out in the open most nights.”

“That will put a damper on romance, so I hear.” Annie put her feet up on the chair next to hers. “So you’re not seeing anyone at all?”

“I didn’t say that.” Portia frowned. “I…actually, I don’t know what I’m doing. There is some one, but I don’t know what we are doing. Dating, I guess.” She nodded. “I think we’re dating.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Jim Cannon.”

“Why is that name familiar to me?”

“He was Sheldon Woods’s defense attorney.”

“Oh, yeah.” Annie nodded. “Very good-looking, right? Tall, nice build?”

“That would be him.”

“I’ve seen his picture in the papers a couple of times. They always refer to him as one of the ‘big guns.’”

They munched chips and drank wine for a few minutes, then finally Annie said, “So are you going to elaborate? Give me details?”

“Probably not.” Portia shook her head. “Not yet, anyway. Not until I figure things out a bit.”

“Okay, then. Fair enough,” Annie said. “Let’s talk about your case.”

“The case is a mess,” Portia told her. “On the one hand, we have Sheldon Woods. No introduction needed. On the other hand, we have someone who seems to have mimicked Woods, except in one vital area.”