Joel Goldman - No way out

“I’m Jennings’s insurance policy, another set of eyes and ears looking for Brett Staley. If I find him and tell Jennings, it greases the skids for Mendez.”

Jennings fought his control, jittering like me on a good day. “Are you through?”

“Yeah, except for one question. Why did Mendez put one of his boys in the city jail to go after Jimmy Martin?”

Jennings eyebrows jumped, and his jaw dropped. “Who the hell is Jimmy Martin?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve got no fucking clue. Who is he?”

“A friend of Nick Staley’s. They grew up together and served in Iraq together.”

“Why is he at the Farm?”

“Theft of construction materials.”

“Since when is that a municipal offense?”

“It isn’t. The county didn’t have room for him, so they sent him there. He has two kids that are missing, and the judge held him in contempt without bail when he wouldn’t cooperate in the investigation of their disappearance, which makes him a kidnapping suspect and, if the worst happens, a murderer.”

“How does that get him crosswise with Mendez?”

“I was hoping you’d know the answer to that question. A Mexican kid named Ricky Suarez got ten days at the Farm for drunk and disorderly. He started his sentence two days ago. Yesterday, Jimmy carved the handle of a toilet bowl brush into a shiv and tried to escape. I think he was running from Suarez.”

“I talked to Ethan Bonner this morning,” Kate said. “He said that Jimmy has been transferred to the county jail. Adrienne Nardelli briefed Ethan after she questioned Suarez. The kid isn’t in the gang.”

“So that’s a dead end,” Jennings said. “This guy Martin, he must have been trying to escape because he doesn’t want to stand trial for killing his kids.”

“Nardelli isn’t so certain. She says Mendez could have sent Suarez after Jimmy Martin as an initiation into the gang. Kill someone and you’re a member for life. The jail superintendent said that Jimmy and Suarez got into it the day Suarez got to the Farm, but the guards pulled them apart before it got physical.”

“That shit happens every day in every jail in the country. It’s how the pecking order works. Bottom line,” Jennings said, “you don’t know anything that ties Martin to Mendez.”

“I know you’re in a world of hurt if we don’t find Brett Staley before he kills Roni Chase.”

“You think you can make that work, have at it. But I’m going to be on your ass every step of the way.”

“Why do people insist they’re innocent when it’s so obvious they aren’t?” Lucy asked after Jennings left. “Jimmy Martin begs Kate to find his kids when we know he was the last one seen with them. And this bozo Jennings says we’re wrong about him when he’s done everything but draw targets on Roni and Jack. I don’t get it. Do they think we are that stupid?”

“Maybe they are innocent,” Kate said.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Hear me out. Jimmy Martin and Agent Jennings share one thing in common. They’re both afraid of something.”

“Great, because I’m afraid of spiders and growing old with flabby triceps, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got anything in common with those two.”

“Lucy,” I said, “chill. I think I know what Kate’s getting at, at least as far as Jennings is concerned. He started something dangerous he thought he could control, and now he’s lost the reins. It’s a case of go big or go home, only he can’t go home.”

“That’s right,” Kate said. “Not to beat the gambling metaphor to death, but Jennings is playing high-stakes poker with Mendez. He went all in, thinking he had a nut hand with Brett Staley, but turns out all he had was a bad beat.”

We stared at her, mouths open, waiting for a translation.

“Listen,” she said, “there’s no better place to study facial expressions than at a Texas Hold’em poker tournament. A nut hand is the best hand at any particular moment, and a bad beat is a hand that looked like a winner but was a loser.”

“What’s that make Jimmy Martin?” Simon asked.

“A man who bet his kids on a long shot,” Kate said.

“I don’t buy that,” Lucy said, “unless the long shot was getting away with murder. Don’t over-science this case. Go back to the beginning. The Martins are lousy spouses and worse parents. I’ve got no quarrel with that. But Jimmy took the kids. We know that. He swore he’d never let Peggy have them. We know that. He won’t lift a finger to find them. We know that. So, what else do we need to know?”

“For starters,” I said, “we need to know if Adam Koch is telling the truth about Jimmy taking the kids or whether he’s trying to avoid two more murder charges. We need to know if Jimmy is just a down-on-his-luck blue-collar guy who’s pissed off at his wife or if he’s a psychopath who would murder his kids to keep her from getting custody. Plus, we need to know why Jimmy tried to escape. Let’s start with Adam Koch. Simon, did you find anything else in the police files?”

“Nothing that proves whether Adam is telling the truth. The kid is a pedophile and a confessed child murderer who had easy access to the Martin kids, and, most importantly, the story he tells incriminates him as much as it incriminates Jimmy because it puts him in Peggy’s house with the kids when they disappeared. If he’s lying about Jimmy, that makes him the last person to have seen those kids alive.”

“Anything else?”

“KCPD posts crime statistics on their website broken down by offense and location. There aren’t any other cases of missing kids in Northeast in the last five years. Predators like Adam tend to stick to their own neighborhoods. The Montgomery and Martin kids were snatched two years apart. That fits with a pattern where the predator holds off as long as he can until he can’t resist the urge any longer. Adam knew he was screwed up. He tried to quit the kiddie porn, but he couldn’t, no matter how many times he slept with Peggy. His urges may have overwhelmed him, the opportunity presented itself, and here we are.”

“Make up your mind,” Lucy snapped. “Was it Adam or Jimmy?”

“Sorry, Luce. I’m not ready to pick a winner.”

Simon’s ambivalence took the air out of the room, all of us sharing his uncertainty. It wasn’t only that we wanted to be right, we had to be right if there was any chance we’d find Evan and Cara Martin alive. They’d been gone almost a month without so much as a false sighting, no one sure they’d seen the kids at a mall in Montana, no one swearing they’d seen them at Disney World, SeaWorld, or anywhere in the world. Either they were in a locked room or buried in a shallow grave, and the longer it took to find out which, the more likely it was that we’d find nothing but bleached bones and heartache.

Time was running out for them and for me. Jennings had made his case too personal, letting his future depend on getting it right. I had done the same thing, betting my past against my future-what I should have done to save my children, Kevin and Wendy, against what I’d yet to do to rescue Evan and Cara and protect Roni. No matter how many times I told myself that it wasn’t my fault, that bad things happen to good people and worse things to innocent children, I couldn’t stop trying to patch my soul. It shamed me to compare my old pain to Peggy Martin’s certain anguish, to admit that her loss would compound mine, but there it was, the threat to Roni’s life weighing just as heavily. I’d crossed my own line and couldn’t see back to the other side.

“What do we do now?” Kate asked.

“Start over with the time line, beginning with when Adam says he saw Jimmy leaving the house with Evan and Cara,” I said.