Joel Goldman - No way out

“Then why do you think he won’t help the police find his children?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking away. “Maybe he knows they’re okay and he doesn’t want to let Peggy have them.”

Kate reached across the table, covering Ellen’s hand with hers. “If you believed Evan and Cara were safe, you wouldn’t have raised the money to hire Lucy Trent or organized the volunteer searches, and you wouldn’t have been at the lake yesterday.”

Ellen raised her head, her eyes moist. “You never know for sure about someone. You try to find the good in them.”

“Did you see Jimmy the day the kids disappeared?”

“No. Like I told the police, I didn’t see anybody or anything.”

“It’s possible Jimmy had nothing to do with the kids’ disappearance. It’s possible that someone else who had access to the house and who the kids knew well enough to let inside may have taken them. Can you think of anyone like that?”

“No,” she said, her gaze aimed at the floor. “Nobody I knew of.”

“Peggy admitted she was having an affair but wouldn’t tell us with whom. We need to talk to her boyfriend. The kids could have let him in, and he could have taken them. Do you know who she was seeing?”

Ellen sagged, shaking her head. Kate squeezed her hand.

“I think you do know. I can see it your face. There’s nothing more important than saving Evan and Cara. Please help us.”

Ellen withdrew her hand, clutching her arms around her chest.

“It wasn’t his fault. He’s a good boy, and she’s old enough to know better, but she kept after him.”

“Who?”

Her chest heaved. “Adam.”

“Peggy was having an affair with your son?”

Ellen turned away, crying. “She’s nothing but a damn whore! Threw herself at my son. I found out a couple of months ago and made him break it off.”

“Did he stop seeing her?”

She shook her head. “He says so, but I don’t know.”

“Where’s Adam?”

“He left a while ago. He didn’t say where he was going.”

My cell phone rang. It was Lucy. There was a door in the kitchen leading to a small, bricked patio. I waited until I was outside to answer.

“Did you pick up the files?”

“Yes. Simon and I have been going through them all morning.”

“Anything?”

“Timmy Montgomery and the Martin kids went to the same school and the same church.”

“We knew that. What else?”

“There’s a list in the Montgomery file of all the Sunday school teachers at the church and the older kids who helped out in the classroom. One name jumped out; a teenager who was assigned to Timmy’s class.”

“Who?”

“Adam Koch.”

“You and Simon were going to try to catch up to him and his mother last night. Any luck?”

“No. The house was dark. We rang the bell, but no one answered so we waited outside for a couple of hours before Simon made me go home. And, get this. I called the church to find out if Adam worked in either of the Martin kids’ classrooms, and he didn’t. Turns out that the church gave him the boot a year after Timmy Montgomery disappeared. It seems that a parent complained he’d gotten too friendly with a little girl.”

“Did the police question him about the Montgomery boy?”

“Yes, but it was a perfunctory interview, covering the bases. They talked to all the Sunday school teachers and staff, asking them if they’d seen any strangers hanging around the church or the neighborhood, stuff like that. He was never considered a suspect.”

“What about the parent’s complaint?”

“There’s nothing in the file about it.”

“Makes sense. The complaint was a year after Timmy’s disappearance. No reason for anyone at the church to make a connection and call the police.”

“You’re right. Only reason I found out was that the church secretary likes to gossip. When I asked her about Adam, she couldn’t wait to tell me.”

“Did you get the name of the parent who complained?”

“Yeah. I’m going to see her later this afternoon. Where are you?”

“On Ellen Koch’s patio. Kate is inside talking with her. She told us that Adam was having an affair with Peggy. He left the house this morning, and she doesn’t know where he went. Peggy isn’t home either. I’m going to have a look around. If he killed the Montgomery boy, he may have kept souvenirs.”

“Timmy’s file says he was wearing blue shorts, a Harry Potter T-shirt and flip-flops when he was last seen. Any of those would qualify.”

When I came back in the house, Ellen and Kate were still at the kitchen table, Kate holding her hand, their heads bent close together, Ellen apologizing, Kate granting absolution.

“Mrs. Koch,” I said, “do you mind if I look around Adam’s room?”

She raised her head, red, puffy eyes popping with panic. “Why?”

“The police will want to talk with Adam. It will help if we can tell them we didn’t find anything to connect him with Evan and Cara disappearing.”

She hesitated, looking at Kate for reassurance. Kate nodded. Ellen surrendered with a weak shrug and quiet consent. “Top of the stairs.”

“Thanks. This will only take a minute. Kate will stay with you.”

Adam’s room looked like any other teenager’s, moguls built of dirty clothes, muddy jeans on top on one of them, rose from the center of the floor, his bed unmade, his closet a tangle. I sifted through his clothes and dresser drawers, flipped his mattress and looked under his bed without finding a thing.

The hallway outside his room led to a bathroom, which revealed nothing more incriminating than a brown bathtub ring. The other bedroom was Ellen’s. Unlikely as it was to yield anything, I did a quick search, coming up empty. I headed for the stairs until I noticed a pull-down panel in the hallway ceiling. When I opened it, a rickety wooden cross between a stairway and a ladder unfolded to the floor.

The stairs led to the attic, pink insulation stuffed between two-by-fours, plywood laid over floor joists, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I turned on the light, scanning the dim empty space. Straddling the joists, I lifted one of the plywood panels, finding a laptop computer half-buried in insulation.

There was enough juice in the battery to boot it up. I clicked on the Internet browser, not surprised that it wasn’t password protected, teenager logic dictating that a good hiding place beat a password every time.

I knew what I’d find even before I opened the hard drive, flashing back to a time too many years ago when Joy, Kevin, Wendy, and I were living in Dallas. A neighbor had offered to give Kevin a ride home from school. When Kevin didn’t come home, Joy went to the neighbor’s house to look for him. The door was unlocked, a treasure trove of child pornography spread on a table. He killed Kevin and himself as the police and I closed in on him.

Adam’s computer was loaded with hundreds of the same kind of images. I pulled up the other plywood panels. Lodged deep in the insulation beneath one of them was a soft package bound with yellowed newspaper. I unwrapped it, confirming what I felt in my bones. It was a child’s bloodstained Harry Potter T-shirt.

I set the T-shirt next to the laptop and called Adrienne Nardelli, told her where I was and what I’d found.

“I’m on my way. Put my evidence back where you found it and don’t touch another thing.”

Kate and Ellen had moved to a small sofa in a den cluttered with half-finished knitting projects, a crucifix on the wall above the television. Ellen was leafing through a family album, Kate oohing and aahing at Adam’s baby pictures, shielding Ellen a while longer from the storm about to rain down on her. They looked up as I walked in the room.