Twisted Reason (22 page)

“We’ll do our best, Lieutenant. Will get on it as soon as that report hits my email box.”

Lucinda hung up, scanned the report and sent it down to Research. She leaned back in her chair to think. The ringing of her desk phone brought her out of her reverie. “Chief Deputy Hirschhorn on line three, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks,” she said and pressed in the button. “This is Pierce. How can I help you, Chief?”

“I’m calling with good news, Lieutenant. We picked up your boy on the domestic violence case. The lady’s still in the hospital but the old boy is behind bars.”

“That is good news. Is he talking at all?”

“That’s the best part, ma’am. That little bastard admitted to beating up the old lady in the parking lot but he did it with a grin. I said to him, ’You’re looking mighty happy for someone who’s about to go to prison.’ And he laughed at me and said, ‘My mom won’t press charges.’ Then I laughed and said, ‘She doesn’t have to, we can charge you with or without her help.’ Grin slid off the old boy’s face real fast.”

“Thank you, Chief. I do have a favor to ask you, though.”

“Sure, what do you need?”

“Could you call DA Reed and tell him what happened? I’d really like him to hear the news from someone other than me.”

“DA giving you a hard time? They sure can be pissers sometimes. I’ll let him know right away.”

“Before you go, what about the little girl?”

“Oh,” he sighed. “Hannah Singley? We haven’t found her yet. I’m not having good thoughts.”

“Hang on to any thread of hope you can find, Chief. And let me know when you find her.”
Dead or alive, she thought but could not bear to speak those words aloud.

 Lucinda thought about calling Evan Spencer at his office to tell him about the arrest but decided it would be more fun to deliver the news in person. She’d go over to his place when she left here for the day. It would give her a chance to see Charley; it’d been too long since she’d seen the girl. She thought about calling Jake Lovett to bounce the case back and forth with him. But she worried if she called him at the office, he’d feel obliged to report it. Then she’d have the local FBI jerks breathing down her neck over the attempted kidnapping and the other suspected abductions. She really liked Jake – more than liked him truth be told – but the rest of those Feebs? She’d like to give them all a hand basket and send them on their merry way.

Thirty-Three

Jumbo entered Lucinda’s office and flopped into the chair by her desk with a huge sigh. “I hope I never have to see that woman again for the rest of my life.”

“Didn’t go too well?” Lucinda asked.

“Could have been worse, I suppose. There’s was a lot of yelling and shrieking, mostly on Rachael’s part but Eli did lean over the balcony occasionally and holler out a zinger. It took all my powers of persuasion to keep her downstairs and under some semblance of control. For a while there, I thought I was going to have to sit on her.”

Lucinda grinned at the image he created in her mind: a leprechaun perched on a shrew. “Have you given any more thought to Eli’s accusations?”

“At moments of relative calm, I fired a few questions at her. I did get the sense that she was holding something back, hiding something from me. But I sure can’t imagine her killing somebody. And I can’t imagine anyone she’d know who’d be inclined to commit a crime for her or her money. She doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who inspires loyalty or devotion.”

“But she’s lying about something?”

“Could be just a lie of omission – but, yeah, there’s something there.”

“Maybe we ought to get busy looking for a connection between Rachael and the Blankenships.”

“Phone records?” Jumbo asked.

“I doubt I can get a warrant for the Kendlesohn’s phones and with Eli locked out of the house, he can’t provide them. Damn, I wish I’d thought of that while you all were still inside. I’ll ask Eli to request copies from the phone company.”

“And I’ll go down to Documents and see what they found at the Blankenship place.”

“As long as the family’s been gone from that place, there won’t be anything dating up to the time of Adele’s disappearance. But I shouldn’t have a problem getting a judge to sign a warrant for their records from that time until now.”

“If not, maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe there’s a connection that dates back to when the Blankenships still lived in the house.”

“Maybe, but I’m not going to count on it. Let’s get busy.”

It took Eli’s gleeful cooperation and hours of paperwork and conversation, but finally they had all the records they needed. The documents for the land lines were useless since the calls between the two households were local. And there were no records of any of the Blankenships having cells. On the other hand, Eli and Rachael’s cell phones were on a single plan. Eli had no trouble obtaining the records and those documents had every call listed: incoming and outgoing, local and long distance. The detectives went through the pages carefully, line by line, looking for any calls to the Blankenship home and verifying all the phone numbers on the list around the time of Adele’s disappearance. When they finished, Lucinda dropped her head on her desk with a thud. “Another dead end,” she said with a sigh.

“Rachael still could have called him on the landline.”

“Shoulda. Coulda. Lot of good that does us. The Blankenships haven’t had a landline since they left the house. They had to have cells, but they must have been throwaways. Those damn things should be illegal.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath on that legislation,” Jumbo said.

“Have you seen Ted Branson today?” Lucinda asked,  her mind suddenly on other things.

“Yeah, a little while earlier, he helped me out when I was going through the evidence looking for phone records, but I haven’t seen him since. Why? Is he supposed to be doing something for the investigation?”

“No, we just started a conversation I’d like to finish but we never seem to be in the same place at the same time. Well, that will have to wait,” Lucinda said. “In other dead ends, I heard back on the criminal background checks of the staff at River’s Edge. A few traffic violations, a couple college-era misdemeanors but not a single felony in the bunch – not one red flag, not even a pale pink one. Research is preparing a spreadsheet for the complete list with employment dates and job positions. We should get it in the morning. We’re going to need to follow up with each one of them.”

“Is that really necessary? I mean, I know that River’s Edge keeps popping up but the investigation seems to be pointing in another direction.”

“Yes, it
seems
to be but what if there is an accomplice at River’s Edge – someone who perhaps does nothing more than feed information to the Blankenships? That’s a possibility but, I agree, the leg work will probably turn out to be a big fat waste of time, except for one thing: we can never close a door that the defense might open at trial. Every avenue needs to be followed to the end.”

“I think I’ll stay in Missing Persons – we don’t have trials, just successes and failures. And if the failures end in murder, we give them to you guys.”

“After all this afternoon’s futility, it’s time I switched gears and did something pleasant. I’m going to give someone else a bit of good news,” Lucinda said. “If you think of anything, give me a call, anytime. Otherwise, I’ll see you back here in the morning.”

In the lobby of the building where the Spencer family lived, Lucinda called up to the condo and Evan Spencer activated the elevator for her to go up to the top floor. The moment the lift’s door slid open, she heard a squeal down the hall. Charley was running toward her at full speed. Lucinda embraced her, lifting the girl off the ground. She gave her a kiss on the forehead and set her back down.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lucy! You get another star on your hero chart.”

“You already know?” Lucinda asked.

“You mean about you saving Daddy from jail?”

“Yes. I thought I was going to deliver the news.”

“Some man called for Daddy and told him that they were dropping the charges and it was all because of you.”

“I bet he didn’t say that last part.”

“Well, no, but me and Daddy, we know – if it wasn’t for you, he’d be a jailbird.”

Lucinda laughed. “I doubt that, Charley.”

The eleven-year-old girl stopped walking and put her hands on her hips. “You never give yourself enough credit, Lucy.”

A bitter-sweet thrill rushed through Lucinda’s mind as she looked down at her young friend.
Still such a child despite the veneer of maturity granted by her intelligence and enhanced in the fire of tragedy. Soon, though, the transition will begin and where will we go from there? It will change our relationship and probably not for the better; not until she’s made it through the rebellious rite of passage.
Lucinda sighed.

Charley cocked her head to the side. “Okay?”

“Yes, okay.” Lucinda smiled.

The door opened and Evan said, “I cannot thank you enough, Lucinda.”

“Evan, this would have eventually worked out fine without me.”

“Maybe. But even if it did, it certainly would have dragged on a lot longer.”

Lucinda caught sight of Ruby, Charley’s six-year-old sister, peering out from behind her father. “Hi there, Ruby.”

“Hello, ma’am,” she said and then stuck the knuckle of her thumb sideways in her mouth and gnawed on it.

Lucinda crouched down to see her eye-to-eye. “How are you doing in school, Ruby?”

One of her shoulders pulled up to her ear, “I’m doing okay,” she mumbled.

Poor little thing. Is she always this shy? Is the pain always so obvious in her eyes? Or is it just me. Do I remind her of her mother’s murder?

“Okay?” Evan said. “You’re doing much better than okay, Ruby.”

The little girl squirmed; her discomfort obvious. Lucinda rose to her full height; getting down to the girl’s level seemed to have made matters worse.

“Ruby has gotten excellent marks on her report card and she’s started playing the violin. But she says she really wants to play the cello as soon as she’s big enough, right, Ruby?”

She gave a tiny nod and shrunk back further. Charley patted her sister on the shoulder and Ruby offered up the hint of a smile. Charley turned to Lucinda and said, “Oh, enough about Ruby. C’mere. Come to my room. I need to show you something.” She grabbed Lucinda’s hand and tugged.

When they reached Charley’s room, the door was shut and a note taped to it read: “No Male People Allowed.”

“Are you already having problems with men?” Lucinda asked with a laugh.

“Don’t be silly, Lucy. That’s just to keep Daddy out. He can’t come in here while I’m working on his birthday present.” She opened the door and shut it behind them.

“Look,” she said. “I made the casts all by myself with plaster of Paris and strips of newspaper. I had to throw a bunch of them away before I got it right.”

An eighteen-inch-high skeleton hung from the hook of a black metal stand. It was sat atop a block of wood with a computer-generated label that read: “No break too big or too small, Dr. Spencer fixes them all.” It wore three casts: one on the right leg from knee to toes; another on the left arm hanging in a blue fabric sling; and a third, bulb-shaped, stuck up on the thumb of the right hand. The lower ribs were wrapped in tiny strips of adhesive tape. The crowning glory of the whole creation was the left hip: the socket was painted bright silver to resemble an artificial joint.

“This is incredible, Charley.”

“I wanted to wire his jaw shut but I wasn’t sure how to do it without making a mess of the skull, so I didn’t. But I do need your help with one thing.”

“I doubt if I can do anything to improve on this.”

“Yes. Yes, you can. It will be a big surprise,” Charley giggled. She carefully slipped the blue sling over the skull and off of the arm and handed Lucinda a fine tip pen. “Sign it. Autograph his cast. Write as small as you can – he’s got a little arm. Then I’ll put the sling back on so Daddy won’t see it right away. It’ll be a big surprise.”

Lucinda pinched the pen between her fingers and with her nose almost touching the cast, she spelled out her name on the white surface. “There you go.”

While Charley put the sling back in place, she said, “You know how I told you I liked that boy Shawn at school?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t like him anymore.”

“What happened?”

“We were reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
and the teacher was talking about how those bad Nazi police busted into people’s homes and took them away to those prison camps. And Shawn raised his hand and said, ‘My dad says if we’re not careful the police here will start doing that to us – to real Americans.’

“I said, ‘They will not. My best friend is a police and she wouldn’t do that – she wouldn’t let anybody do that.’ And he said, ‘Not now. But my dad says to watch out cause those socialists want to take all our guns and when they do, we’re done for.’ And I said my dad said that you should never listen to anybody who calls people names – he says they only do that ‘cause their ideas are stupid. And then Mrs. Marsh said, ‘I don’t think your dad used that word, Charlotte’ – she always calls me that even though I told her I don’t like it. Then she says, ‘It’s not right to call people stupid.’ Well, she was right about one thing. Daddy didn’t say ‘stupid’. I forget what word he used, but I’m sure it meant the same thing as ‘stupid’. Anyway, she told us to stop talking politics and get back to history.