Joel Goldman - No way out

“So you’re like a human lie detector, is that it?”

“More like a lie catcher, and I’ve got a better track record than any lie detector.”

“Any judge ever let you testify in court that someone’s a liar?”

Kate took a deep breath. “That’s not how I work.”

Nardelli shook her head. “Course not. Why would you when you can catch people lying by watching how they shrug their shoulders?” She turned to Lucy and me. “I should have listened to Quincy Carter. I’m going back to the woods. You find something a judge will let into evidence, give me a call.”

“Hang on a second,” I said. “Any chance there’s a connection between the Montgomery and Martin cases?”

Nardelli hesitated, staring at me. “Ask your lie catcher. She’s the one with all the answers.”

Kate waited until Nardelli was out of earshot. “I’m right about Jimmy Martin and Adam Koch.”

“That’s good enough for me. We’ll talk to Adam again,” Lucy said.

“Talk to his mother too,” Kate said.

“Why?”

“I watched her when she was helping Peggy to the pickup truck. She was flashing unilateral contempt the whole way. The right corner of her lip was tight and raised. That indicates arrogance or a feeling of moral superiority. Maybe she does that all the time, but I’d bet against it. She’s helping Peggy even though she doesn’t like her.”

“Then why bother?” I asked.

“And,” Lucy added, “why doesn’t she like her?”

“All good questions,” Kate said, turning to Lucy. “What about Peggy Martin? Did she agree to let me interview her?”

Lucy nodded. “She didn’t like the idea at first since you started out working for her husband, but I convinced her.”

“How?”

“I told her that you didn’t care who hired you, you’d do the same job, and that if we were going to find her kids, we needed your help.”

“That’s all it took?” Kate asked.

“That’s all.”

“Did you tell her that I’d know if she was lying to me?”

Lucy shook her head. “No. I didn’t want to put any more pressure on her. Besides, nobody tells the truth, or all of it, all the time or all at once.”

“Then we’re all on the same page here.”

“Chapter and verse,” Lucy said.

“So let’s go talk to her,” Kate said.

I looked at my watch. “Can’t. Not till later. I’m supposed to meet Roni Chase at her house pretty soon. Quincy Carter is going to interview her again. I don’t want him to have another shot at her alone, and I need some time to prep her. She doesn’t live far from here. It won’t take long.”

“Kate and I can talk to Peggy while you go see Roni.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“Take mine. I’ll ride with Kate. You up to driving?”

The day was wearing on me, twitches and shakes coming and going like wind changing directions, but Roni’s house was close enough that I could make the drive.

“That’s not the point. I need to be there when Kate talks to Peggy.”

Lucy raised one eyebrow. “Needing and wanting isn’t the same thing, Jack,” she lectured. “Roni Chase may be your latest reclamation project, but she isn’t mine. Finding those kids is the only thing I care about. And you’re the one who told me I had to sit out the Jimmy Martin interview because three people were one too many.”

“Don’t you hate that?” Kate said, grinning. “You raise them, and then they turn on you.”

I stuck my hand out. “Keys.”

There was enough to tie the disappearances of Evan and Cara Martin together with the disappearance of Timmy Montgomery to ask whether it was possible. All three kids were of the same age and lived in the same part of town. Although they vanished two years apart, there was reason to look for other connections.

Did the families know one another? Even if they didn’t, did they have friends in common? Did their kids go to the same schools? How else might they have crossed paths?

Those questions focused on the possibility that the kids were taken by someone who knew them, but that theory didn’t suffer much scrutiny. If Jimmy Martin killed his kids to punish his wife for her real or imagined sins, it was unlikely he’d have had any reason to kidnap and kill Timmy Montgomery two years earlier. The same would no doubt be true of any member of the Montgomery family.

If there was a connection, it was more likely that the kidnapper/killer preyed on small children, indifferent to whether his victims came from happy or unhappy homes, caring only whether he could have them. And that meant he probably lived in Northeast, probably hadn’t started with Timmy and wouldn’t stop with Evan and Cara. It was an incendiary conclusion that would terrify families from one end of Northeast to the other.

Adrienne Nardelli had ducked my question about a connection, and that was enough to scare me. Regardless of why she had avoided answering me, it was clear she wasn’t going to share anything she had, at least not until I had something to offer her in return. Her lack of cooperation made my job harder but not impossible. I left a message for Simon Alexander describing what I needed and left another for the one friend I still had at the FBI, Ammara Iverson, asking for a favor, hoping I hadn’t gone to the well once too often.

The bones dug out of the woods above North Terrace Lake would distract Nardelli, not because one victim was more important than the other but because the job demanded that she work the cases at the same time. A housewife had disappeared from her Northeast home a few months ago, her husband refusing to cooperate with the police in their investigation. Without a body or other evidence of a crime, the husband had gone on with his life, raising their kids. Maybe the bones were hers, or maybe they were those of a prostitute who’d gone with a john into the woods for her last trick. Regardless, missing kids and bleached bones would divide and subdivide Nardelli’s time and attention.

I was no better off than Nardelli. I’d spent last night at Truman Medical Center worrying and wondering about Roni Chase, her relationship to Frank Crenshaw, and the possibility that her boyfriend Brett Staley had killed Frank, with or without Roni’s help.

The murdered and missing don’t take a number, waiting their turn, hoping people like Adrienne Nardelli and me can work them into our schedule. No matter how long they have been silenced, they scream for our attention, refusing to take no for an answer, and I never stop hearing their voices. Lucy may have shut out everything except the voices of the Martin kids, but Nardelli and I couldn’t. We’d keep doing the same thing: press on. Because that was the only thing we knew how to do.

When I pulled up in front of Roni Chase’s house, I double-checked the address, wondering how a bookkeeper afforded a mansion, even one that had to be at least a hundred years old. The three-story asymmetrical design was topped with eyelid dormers on the third floor, set beneath a steeply pitched roof offset by a two-story turret on the northeast corner that was capped by a witch’s-hat roof. An ornate wooden rail framed the porch extending across the front of the house.

It wasn’t quite as impressive close up. The exterior paint was faded and chipped in places, wood rot evident around the windows, the floorboards of the porch creaking and sagging. The house needed a lot of work.

Roni answered when I rang the bell and led me inside through a set of double doors into a small foyer, through another set of carved wooden doors and into a wide space with a high vaulted ceiling, a white flagged floor, and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing leading to the second floor. I raised my head at the ceiling, rotating my gaze. Yellow watermarks and spidery cracks in the plaster were more evidence that the house would soon turn into a money pit if it hadn’t already.