Joel Goldman - Shakedown

While all that was happening, Wendy would be slipping farther away. She would be only one of several priorities, probably at the bottom of the list until there was hard evidence that she was a victim of something.

When Kevin was taken, I had had the full resources of the federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies in one of the biggest cities in the United States. They and I did everything we could as fast as we could and it still wasn’t enough. This time I was alone and relegated to the sidelines, unable to control the investigation or, for that matter, my own body.

I tried to dial Joy’s phone number, but I was shaking so much I couldn’t get it right. I slammed the phone onto the car seat, cursing all that was holy and more that wasn’t. I hinged forward, smacking into the steering wheel, anchoring my arms around it until the worst had passed.

I raised my head. The street in front of Jill Rice’s house was deserted. It was small consolation that my outburst had gone unnoticed. My breathing slowed, keeping pace with the decreasing aftershocks in my torso. When my hands steadied, I tried Joy’s number again, searching for a way to tell her that our nightmare was back.

She answered on the first ring, her voice light, almost playful.

“Jack,” she said. “I guess you survived the radiologist.”

“Perfect attendance. Do you have a key to Wendy’s apartment?”

Joy always said I had two voices, with and without my badge. She hated the badge voice, said it was indifferent.

“What’s the matter?”

“Wendy didn’t go to work today,” I said, taking it one step at a time.

“Did you call her apartment or her cell?”

“I didn’t. Ammara Iverson did.”

“Why was she calling Wendy?”

Intuitive anxiety had elevated her pitch half an octave, her voice quivering. I imagined her sitting up, spine stiff, running one hand through her hair before grabbing on to something solid.

“She was looking for Colby Hudson. He didn’t show up to work, either.”

Joy forced a laugh. “Oh, you don’t think they ran off and got married, do you?”

My answer caught in my throat, held there by another spasm, escaping with a stutter. “I wish they had, but it doesn’t look that way. When Troy couldn’t find Colby, Ben Yates sent a couple of agents to his house. They found some things that didn’t belong there and now they’re looking for both Colby and Wendy.”

“Oh, my God, Jack! If Colby did anything wrong, the Bureau can’t think Wendy had anything to do with it! That’s absurd!”

“No one is saying that she did.”

“Then what are they saying?”

“That they can’t find her.”

Joy let out a low, wailing moan, understanding at last what I was saying. The woman who’d left me two months ago would have hung up, asking the rest of her questions in private, getting the answers from a bottle. She didn’t, gathering herself and asking, “What do we do?”

“The Bureau is tied up at Colby’s house. I don’t know if they’ve sent anyone to Wendy’s yet. I want to get there before they do. But I don’t have a key.”

“I do. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

“I’m on my way.”

Wendy lived in an apartment complex on the east side of the Country Club Plaza, a shopping, eating, and drinking district in midtown on the Missouri side of the state line. Her balcony looked west toward the public library and north up Main Street. I could see it as I approached along Ward Parkway, the library to my right, Brush Creek to my left. Her unit was on the northwest corner. The drapes facing the balcony were closed.

Searching her apartment was another calculated risk. If there was evidence of a crime, I might contaminate it without even knowing it. In that event, I’d be adding another count to an indictment for obstruction of justice. Good intentions wouldn’t save my career or mitigate my sentence. None of that mattered as much as the precious minutes that would evaporate while Troy Clark allocated his limited resources to finding Colby Hudson. Waiting was not an option.

Joy met me in the parking lot. Her jaw was set, her eyes stony, a thin purse stuck under her arm. She was wearing jeans, a lavender short-sleeved jersey under a tan jacket, and no makeup, her hair pulled back and held in place by a black band. She was bouncing slightly on the toes of her running shoes. She had never been a runner. The shoes were as new as she was. She gave me a hug. I held on until she pulled back.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Wendy’s apartment was a small one bedroom, one bath. The carpet was a rich cream, one pale wall set off by an array of four vibrant prints, each of two women, sitting at a cafe, strolling on a sidewalk, reclining in a drawing room, and lingering in a garden, their faces blank, featureless, their personalities expressed in their posture. There were prints on the other walls of a fanciful jungle filled with oversized tropical birds, a framed poster from the 1972 Montreux Jazz Festival and another celebrating Shakespeare in the Park. The furniture was modern, spare, and comfortable.

Two dinner dishes caked with uneaten spaghetti, dirty silverware on the top plate, were stacked in the sink alongside two wine glasses, a swallow of red left in each. A colander half filled with pasta sat on the kitchen counter next to an open jar of marinara sauce and an uncorked bottle of wine. Damp towels filled the washing machine, underwear in the dryer. The queen-size bed was unmade, the pillows spread out for two. Wendy’s suitcase was under the bed; her clothes still hung in the closet. There was no sign of a struggle or of forced entry.

The stuffed animal from her childhood, Monkey Girl, sat on her dresser. I remembered when I had given it to Wendy.

“It looks like she didn’t finish dinner and left in a hurry,” I said.

Joy surveyed the kitchen. “Dinner for two.”

“This has to be from last night’s dinner. Not the night before. That’s when she met me at Fortune Wok. As angry as she was, I doubt that she came home and made dinner. When was the last time you talked to her?”

Joy paced the living room, arms folded over her chest. “Wednesday night, after I talked to you. I called her back so she’d know that we had talked about your doctor appointments.”

“Did she say anything about going away?”

Joy shook her head. “No. Remember, I told you that she insisted on going with you to see the neurologist on Monday. She would have told me if she had changed her plans.”

“Did you talk about anything else?”

“I told her what you’d said about Kate Scranton. You were right. She was furious with you, but she was too upset about your shaking to deal with that. I told her to give you a break, that you were weak and pathetic like all newly single middle-aged men who had no idea how to live alone.”

Joy said it like she was reciting material learned for a test, the humor of her last comment lost until she realized what she’d said, looking at me, covering her mouth.

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

I waved off her concern. “You’re both right. I screwed up. Did she say anything at all about Colby either in that conversation or anytime in the last week or so?”

“Only that they had argued.”

“When? About what?”

“After your scene at Fortune Wok. Wendy didn’t say what they argued about.”

“Did she say anything about Colby buying a car and a house?”

Joy nodded. “She mentioned the house. What’s that got to do with all of this?”

I ran through a quick summary of the Thomas Rice case and the con?icting stories I’d gotten from Rice, his ex-wife, and Colby. When I told Joy that Thomas Rice had apparently hanged himself, the little color in her face vanished.