The Homecoming (40 page)

“That’s true.” She glanced over at the attorney and decided, from his expression, that he’d told them the other side, too. “It can also be determined to be a felony.”

And didn’t that get the waterworks flowing again?

“That’s not my call. Meanwhile, Mr. Fletcher, I’m going to book you into the jail.”

“You’re putting me in jail?” The color drained from Harlan’s face again.

“We discussed this,” the attorney reminded his client. “The sheriff will take the case to the district attorney, who’ll decide whether to prosecute.”

“Which I believe you can count on,” Kara said. “Then you’ll have a court date. Which, given that Shelter Bay isn’t exactly a crime hot spot, so there’s not a backlog of cases, shouldn’t be any later than tomorrow morning. At which time the judge will take your plea and either set bail—”

“How much?” Janice asked. “I lost my job washing dishes at The Fish House six months ago. First Coastal foreclosed on our home, and it’s been a struggle to keep up with the rent on the house we’re in now because construction has been slow, so Harlan hasn’t been working regular, and—”

“Mrs. Fletcher,” Bradford began to warn his client’s wife.

“It’s all right,” Kara said. “I understand things are difficult these days. How long have you lived in Shelter Bay?”

“We moved here from Tillamook nine years ago,” Harlan said. “Both of us have worked steady until this past year.”

“Again, I can’t speak for the court, but I suspect the judge won’t find you a flight risk and will probably release you on a personal-recognizance bond.”

“So we won’t have to come up with any money?”

Kara wondered exactly how much time Bradford had actually spent with this couple.

“We came straight here,” he answered her unspoken question. “Although I cautioned taking more time to prepare for this interview, the Fletchers were understandably upset. So we didn’t have time to work out all the details.”

“Well, the way it works,” she explained, thinking she should get a cut of the lawyer’s fee for doing his job for him, “is that a dollar amount of the bond is set. However, if this turns out to be the case, Mr. Fletcher only has to sign the bond promising to appear on the future court date.”

“He’ll be there,” Mrs. Fletcher said.

“Good. Meanwhile, Mr. Bradford will take care of the paperwork getting you preapproved through the court.”

She could tell he wasn’t all that pleased at spending his hiking day filling out papers for the bond commissioner.

Nor was Harlan happy at the prospect of spending the night behind bars.

Kara thought about Danny, lying there in a pool of his own blood, with a potentially deadly head wound. Thought about Fletcher’s own children, who might someday shoot themselves or a friend with that pistol.

Having grown up in hunting country, Kara was all for the Second Amendment—within limits, since, as a city cop, she’d also seen what happened when the bad guys were better armed than the police.

But as a sobbing Mrs. Fletcher left her office with the lawyer, Kara decided that if anyone ever put her in charge of the world, some people would just have to protect what was theirs the old-fashioned way. With fists, sticks, and stones.

Unfortunately, Eve Vernon had left Shelter Bay. Fortunately, she hadn’t left Oregon, but moved to a town about an hour and a half’s drive inland, where, according to the local sheriff, she’d been busted several times for soliciting at truck stops along I-5.

Although it wasn’t her jurisdiction, after Kara assured the sheriff that she wasn’t operating in an official capacity, he didn’t have any problem with her and Sax going there to interview Celia’s mother.

Since the sheriff’s offer to accompany them was half-hearted at best, they decided, for the same reason Sax had talked Kara into letting him come with him in the first place—that Eve and her neighbors probably weren’t that fond of cops—to talk to her by themselves.

She’d always looked rough. During the years since Sax had last seen her, she’d gone even further downhill. When they showed up at her rusted trailer propped up on blocks, a wasted, skinny-as-a-rail woman dressed in a halter top and miniskirt that showed off a dizzying array of ink opened the door with a beer in her hand and a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

It was definitely not her first brew of the day. After learning that they hadn’t come here to pay to play, she got in a mood, not wanting to talk about her daughter, who, she claimed, was a selfish little bitch who’d just taken off so she wouldn’t have to share the money she was going to be getting with her family.

“Money?”

“She got herself knocked up. Which is the oldest trick in the book for getting a man.” She gave Kara an up-and-down look. “Something you figured out yourself.”

“Excuse me?” Kara asked.

“Celia was working the cosmetic counter down at the CVS in Newport that day you came in and bought that home pregnancy kit. When you got married right after graduation, we had a good laugh together about little Miss High-and-mighty not being so pure after all.”

Kara could feel Sax stiffen beside her. And although he remained silent, she knew the accusation was probably more difficult for him to hear than it was for her. She had, after all, had people say a lot worse things to her during her years as a cop.

“You filed a missing-persons report,” Kara said, returning to her original questioning. No way was she going to discuss Jared and Trey with this horrid woman. “So you must have been concerned about her.”

“I couldn’t find the damn kid.” The woman lit another Marlboro from the end of the one she’d just finished. “She said she’d landed in clover. So I figured the sheriff could get her back so I could get my share. Kids owe their mothers that much, right? It’s not like I
had
to give birth to the little bitch. I could’ve gotten rid of her when I found out I was pregnant.”

The interview went downhill from there.

“It’s amazing,” Kara murmured as they drove out of the place that looked like it could’ve been the set for
Deliverance II.
“Sometimes stereotypes really do exist.”

“I told you we weren’t exactly talking the Cleavers,” he reminded her.

“Jared’s folks live in a trailer park outside Las Vegas.”

“Yeah, Cole mentioned something about that.” They’d left town after scattering their son’s ashes at sea, as he’d requested.

Partly, Cole had reported, because they wanted to move somewhere hot and sunny. But mostly because they’d found it too painful staying where everywhere they turned around, everywhere they went in Shelter Bay, reminded them of their murdered son.

“Trey and I visited them a few times. It’s a really pretty place,” Kara said. “With flowers around all the mailboxes. And everyone’s really friendly.”

“They’re probably friendly because they don’t have Eve Vernon and her pals living in their park,” he suggested.

Celia’s mother’s neighbors had looked as if they’d been seriously considering shooting the interlopers and taking Sax’s Camaro to the local chop shop.

“Good point.” She turned back toward Shelter Bay. “Can you imagine a mother treating her own daughter that way? As if she were nothing more than a commodity?”

“Unfortunately, I can.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Me, too. I saw things like that in California. But I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that kind of behavior.”

“Probably wouldn’t want to,” he suggested.

“Good point. It’s too bad she didn’t remember anything about the cowboy from Pendleton.”

“Sugar, that woman’s brain was fried a long time ago. I doubt if she remembers what she ate for breakfast.”

“Sure she does,” Kara said.

“Beer,” they said together.

“Celia wasn’t like that,” Sax felt obliged to say. “Yeah, she was a little wild, and I’ll admit, at seventeen, I wasn’t going to turn down what she was offering, but she hadn’t had all the humanity knocked out of her yet.”

He remembered a time when they’d found a lost kitten by the side of the road. Celia had named it Spooky, for its orange-and-black Halloween coloring, and taken it home, where she’d hidden it in her room. Whenever they’d go park out on the cliff or in the woods, she’d bring the cat along.

Then one day she hadn’t. When he asked about it, she’d burst into tears and told him her stepfather had found it. Not wanting to know details, Sax hadn’t asked. But now that he thought back on it, she’d gotten even more reckless after that incident.

“She wrote poetry,” he remembered.

“Really?” Kara glanced over at him, clearly surprised.

“Yeah. They were mostly typical teenage stuff about car crashes, dying too young, broken hearts, suicide. But a lot were pretty good. I wrote some music for them, because she was talking about maybe getting a singing gig at some cowboy bar once she got to Pendleton.”

“That’s something that occurred to me when her mother mentioned her landing in clover. Granted, wealth is relative, but I’ve never met a rich cowboy.”

“Could’ve been a rancher. Or a rancher’s kid.”

“True. Not that they’re all rich, either. But she never said anything to you about his having money?”

“Not a word.”

“You mentioned suicide. Maybe the cowboy or whoever the father of her child was refused to marry her. Do you think she could’ve gotten depressed and killed herself?”

For not the first time in the past few days, Sax found it ironic that he’d returned home to escape violence and death, and it just kept following him around. Like that black cloud over the head of that old cartoon character who used to be in the Sunday comics.

“Anything’s possible,” he supposed. “But if she’d committed suicide, someone would’ve found her.”

“Maybe Velcro did.”

“Maybe so. But again, given that she couldn’t exactly bury herself, it seems the tide would’ve washed her up years ago.”

“True . . . Her mother didn’t exactly look like someone who’d take her child in for regular dental checkups,” Kara mused. “Which means there probably aren’t dental records.”

“She probably didn’t have checkups, but Celia had great teeth. Like I said, she had these dreams of becoming a singer. Or maybe even a movie star. So she used to bleach them. And once, when she broke one—”

“Or had it broken for her,” Kara suggested.

“Yeah. That possibility never occurred to me back then,” he said as they came around a tight bend in the road and approached a scenic lookout. “But I loaned her the money to get it capped.”

“Did she pay you back?”

“No. But it didn’t matter. I never expected her to when I made the offer.”

“Pull over,” she said suddenly.

Thinking she must have thought of something pertinent to the case, Sax jerked the wheel, turning into the parking lot of the lookout.

“What?”

“This.” She unfastened her seat belt, leaned over the gearshift, and gave him a quick, hard kiss.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“Danny’s right.”

“About what?”

“You
are
one of the good guys.”

“I seem to remember telling you that.”

“And you know what else he’s right about?”

“What would that be?”

She kissed him again. Long and deep.

“That we make a really neat couple,” she said when they finally came up for air.

Sax laughed as he felt the dark cloud lift. “Told you that, too.”

Over the next two weeks, Kara discovered that she did, indeed, enjoy change, even as, in many ways, her and Sax’s lives fell into a predictable routine.

Her mother had moved into John’s house to help him get it ready to sell. Together they’d joined Worldwide Medical Relief, the international relief group Sax’s helicopter pilot friend’s wife had once worked for.

Although John lacked a medical degree, his years in police work had left him with valuable people skills. In addition, like many men in Shelter Bay who’d grown up working construction part-time, he was handy with tools, which was definitely a bonus when it came to building emergency medical and refugee camps.

Kara closed her shooting case when the bullet fragments Faith had taken from Danny’s head did indeed prove to have come from Harlan Fletcher’s .22.

Deciding that he didn’t represent a flight risk, and being aware of the family situation, the judge had sentenced him to six weekends in jail and a year’s probation. And, once again showing the more personal relationships of a small town, the judge had gotten both Fletchers jobs at his cousin’s cannery.

Her days fell back into comfortable small-town police mode, with the occasional petty problems from the tourists who flocked to the coast every summer and a missing kid—who was thankfully found safe—at a Rainbow Lake camp adding just enough variety to keep work interesting.

Frustratingly, she had no luck tracking down her unsub. But the fact that no similar attacks occurred in Shelter Bay or any of the other coastal cities pointed to the fact that her attack had been personal. She also spent time sifting through her dad’s cold-case files, specifically the one regarding the missing Celia Vernon. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find any man in town who’d admit to having spent any time with the girl that summer. Which wasn’t surprising, given her reputation and the fact that most of the possible suspects were now family men.

Thanks to Sax, she did manage to track down the dentist who’d capped Celia’s broken tooth. Although he’d retired five years ago, fortunately he’d shared her father’s pack-rat tendencies, and after a day spent digging through boxes in his attic, she’d unearthed the dental records, which she sent on to Cait McKade’s forensic guy. She also included Celia’s yearbook photo, hoping the reconstructionist would find some similarities between the photo and the skull.

Unfortunately, as Cait explained, such work was tedious, requiring patience.