Committed (19 page)

“I thought you said he was old and fat. Why would a seventeen-year-old girl be sleeping with an old fat guy?”

“Just leave it alone, already.”

“Tell me.”

“Nick, come on.”

“Tell me now, or this is over.”

“God. He used to give me money, and I used to sleep with him, okay? He had the same arrangement with half the girls that worked there. I’d meet him out at the summer house, which is why I know where it is. I used to call his house to ask when he wanted me to meet him out there. This went on for years, which is why I remember the number.”

“There we go—honesty. Since we’re being honest, why didn’t you tell me you were a hooker when we met? That would have been good to know prior to us beginning this relationship. So I’m guessing that you normally ran the kissing tent at the carnival? A couple extra bucks for a little special treatment in the back?”

“I’m not a damn hooker. I did what I had to do at the time for a little extra money. It’s not like you came out and told me you killed people, either,” Molly said.

“So you took money from a man for sex? Pretty sure if I look up what that is, it’s going to say”—Nick leaned his face next to her and whispered—“hooker.”

She pushed him away. “Stop calling me a hooker. That’s not how it was, and it was a long time ago.”

“Right. That’s what you said—when you were seventeen. That’s just great. An underage hooker. I bet a lot of guys liked that.”

“Please stop.”

“Maybe we should have just been hitching rides with truckers the entire time.” Nick pointed through the car’s windshield at a semi parked on the far side of the lot. “Why don’t you go see if that guy is buying? Maybe he can give us a lift after you two have finished.”

Nick felt the slap hit him on the nose and the side of his face a moment later. He reached across the car and grabbed a handful of Molly’s hair with his left hand. He yanked her across the center console toward him and pulled the gun from his waistline. He held Molly’s head over his stomach and kept her from moving by gripping her hair. He jammed the barrel of the gun under her chin. “Now that I know you’re a hooker, you’re pretty easy to replace. Give me a reason why I don’t blow your hooker brains all over this car.”

“Because I love you,” Molly said.

“That’s it?” Nick asked. “Because you love me?”

“That… and this,” Molly said.

Nick felt something hard jam him between his legs.

“That’s my gun, and I figure you’d like to keep what it’s pressed against,” Molly said.

Nick took the gun from her chin and his hand from her hair.

Molly backed off and retook a normal position in the passenger seat. She placed the gun on her leg and fixed her hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t how you think, and like I said, it was a long time ago. Now, can we just drop it?”

Nick let out a breath and shook his head. “I’m sorry, too. That my girlfriend is—sorry, I mean
was
—a hooker.”

“Whatever, Nick. You can kill him after we’re done with him if that’s going to make you feel better about it,” Molly said.

“Trust me. That guy is already dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

“Whatever. Are we done?”

Nick said nothing.

Molly placed her gun back in her waistline. “So what are we looking for? A different car or another RV?”

Nick cracked his neck and slouched. “Truck. We can risk one or two fill-ups. I don’t want to have to deal with getting any more vehicles.”

“Okay,” she said.

The pair sat quietly, waiting for a suitable vehicle to pull into the rest area.

Molly reached over and placed her hand on his leg. “I love you,” she said.

“Yeah,” Nick responded.

Our flight touched down in Great Falls a couple of minutes before eleven thirty. We’d made the trip back to our Omaha hotel, grabbed our things, and hustled to the airport to catch our flight out, which Jim had booked. The flight out of Omaha went the opposite direction from our destination, to Minneapolis, before we caught our connecting flight to Great Falls. On our hour-long layover, I spoke with Bill. There had been no signs of our couple, and the only new information we’d found out was a little more on that Armond Gormon guy, the one called from the farmhouse. Apparently, he owned a restaurant called Big Red’s Barbecue in Great Falls that Molly McCoy had once been employed at prior to turning eighteen. What the connection between the two was, aside from employer and employee, we didn’t get anywhere on.

Beth was saying a few more words on a phone call and finished with, “I’ll call you when we get checked into our hotel.”

I glanced over at her from the passenger seat of our new rental car—a black late-model sedan that was as about as base model as could be imagined. “Ex-husband?” I asked.

“Yeah. Were you eavesdropping on my phone call?” Beth asked.

“Not at all. So how is your little Honey Bear doing?” I asked—she’d said that to him right before hanging up. “Sounds like things are going well.”

“Yeah, it seems different now. We might actually have a shot at this again.”

“Good,” I said.

“You’ll like him. Great guy,” Beth said. “Maybe we should have tried a little harder the first time around.”

I rocked my head to one side and looked out the passenger window. “You said it was work that ended up being the problem last time?”

“Yeah, unfortunately. Between me being gone on investigations and him having to travel, after a while, it just kind of eroded our relationship.”

From previous conversations, I knew he was in the same line of work as he’d been in when he and Beth were married. A thought bubbled in my head, that nothing had changed in their professional lives and the same problem could resurface. I kept that to myself—Beth seemed happy and hopeful. I wouldn’t say something that could bring her down.

“It looks like there are some hotels coming up in a few exits. Have a preference?” she asked.

“Don’t care. I’ll let you pick,” I said.

“Works for me,” Beth said. “I was thinking before, after I talked to Scott, that maybe this Armond Gormon and Molly McCoy used to date.”

“That’s what Bill was talking about as well. I still don’t think so. Think about it—you’re going to bring your new serial-killer boyfriend around your old middle-aged boyfriend that’s then going to help you two. Makes zero sense. Why this guy would want to help her at all makes zero sense.”

“The call was under a minute. Whatever was spoken about was quick.”

“We’ll find out,” I said.

“Do you think we should try to bring the guy in right away? Or spend a little bit watching him?” Beth asked.

“Right away, and try to get him on our side. I’ll feed him the ‘we know you’ve been in contact with these two, and unless you want to be charged with the same crimes for aiding and abetting, you’ll help’ line.”

“That’s if he knows anything,” Beth said.

“Well, they didn’t dial him as a wrong number. He has to know something.”

Beth pointed through the windshield and off to the right. “Are you okay with that?” The billboard she pointed at was advertising a chain hotel off the next exit.

“That’s fine,” I said.

Beth exited the freeway for the hotel a moment later. The hotel stood just off the interstate’s exit ramp on a main road. We pulled into the driveway. The hotel’s grounds were well kept, and the building looked only a handful of years old. I was fairly certain if we passed it up, we wouldn’t find anything nicer. Beth found us a spot in the huge but mostly empty parking lot. We grabbed our things from the trunk and headed for the two-story hotel’s front entrance.

The doors slid open and took us into the building’s lobby, which resembled the parking lot in being far too large for what it contained. I glanced right and left at the small sitting areas to each side of the front door. To our right was the coffee station, which I made a mental note of for morning. The far wall held what looked like a small entrance to the building’s restaurant, which was closed. The ceiling was two stories up. The walls that rose to them were mostly bare aside from some random stuffed wildfowl. I spotted a Canadian goose, a few ducks, and a couple of pheasants—all struck me as odd choices for decoration. Beth and I wheeled our suitcases across the large tan tiles to the far left wall, where a woman stood behind the counter, smiling at us.

“Looking for a room?” she asked. The girl looked to be in her midtwenties. She had straight black hair, a thin face, and a barbell piercing through her eyebrow. A name tag clipped to her black shirt read Claire.

“Two, actually,” I said.

“Okay. Two rooms. Let me see if we still have two available,” Claire said. She began clicking keys on her computer’s keyboard.

The comment caught me off guard. The place probably had a hundred rooms, but I remembered seeing about three or four cars in the lot. I looked at Beth, who shrugged.

“Um, one second.” Claire clicked some keys on her keyboard. “It looks like we can still accommodate you.”

I looked at Beth. “Did you hear that, Beth? They can still accommodate us. You were getting me worried there for a second, Claire. I thought you guys might be all booked up.”

The girl flashed me a bit of a grin. “Yeah, I know. Sorry. The management makes us give the same story to everyone so we seem like we’re busy. A little hard to do with only a handful of cars in the lot, and most of them being overnight staff. Don’t tell anyone I told you that, though.”

“Told us what?” I asked.

Beth smiled and placed her credit card on the countertop.

Putting my back to the counter while Beth and the girl got our rooms squared away, I took in the rest of the lobby. Two chairs and a small fireplace were tucked into the far-left corner at my shoulder with the entrance to the restaurant center of the back wall. I could see the hallway leading to the rooms beyond that and a sign that said Pool. Across from me, taking up a huge bare wall next to the elevators, was a computer and printer on a small desk—a sign above them said Business Center. I continued looking around until Beth swatted my shoulder with a plastic room card.

“Rooms one-eighteen and –nineteen. This way.” Beth walked toward the hallway beyond the restaurant entrance, pulling her suitcase behind her.

I followed. We entered the hall and passed rooms starting at one hundred. We found our room doors a little ways down. Beth stopped at her door, across from mine. “What time are we headed out?”

I pulled up my sleeve and glanced at my watch—the time was a couple minutes before one in the morning, which was wrong. I pulled out the crown on my watch and dialed the time back an hour. “Let’s try to be out of here by eight or so. We’ll make contact with the local law enforcement and the Great Falls resident agency.”

“I’ll be ready,” Beth said.

“Don’t stay up all night on the phone,” I said.

Beth smiled and entered her room. I slid my keycard and walked into mine. The door clicked shut at my back.

I flipped on the lights and took in my room. A pair of queen beds with bedspreads somewhere between the colors pink and brown stood before me on the right, just past the open bathroom door. A pair of paintings hung on the wall just above each headboard, and a nightstand with an alarm clock and lamp separated the two beds. I walked farther in and glanced at the television on a set of light-brown cabinets across from the beds. A small table with an ice bucket and a couple plastic-wrapped cups sat on the table’s surface. The hotel room was the standard side-of-the-freeway fare for around seventy dollars a night. I wheeled my suitcase against the wall near the television, slid out a chair at the table, and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed Karen, who’d instructed me to do so when I’d spoken to her earlier when leaving the Omaha hotel.

“Hey, baby,” she said. Karen’s voice was groggy, as if I’d waken her.

I quickly did a little mental math and figured it was about two in the morning where she was. “Hey, yourself. Sleeping?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I just lay down a little bit ago. I was waiting for you to call. So you’re there? Everything good?”

“We’re here. All is well.”

“Okay.”

Karen yawned into the receiver of her phone. “How was the flight?”

“We had a quick layover in Minneapolis. Hit the ground here about an hour ago. Just checked into the hotel.”

“Did you guys get anything new on the investigation?” she asked.

While I’d talked to her earlier, I didn’t give her anything from the day’s investigation. I knew if I gave her the part about the son of the couple from the farmhouse, our phone call would drag on for hours. It was late for me and later for her—that wasn’t the time.

“We can talk about it in the morning. It’s late by you, and I just wanted to let you know I was here, as instructed.”

“Okay, I guess.” She yawned again.

“Get some sleep, babe. I love you, and I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Okay. I love you, Hank.”

“Sleep well. Bye, babe.”

Karen clicked off.

I let out a breath, set my phone down on the nightstand, then readied myself for bed. My mind went into thought. My wife could get carried away when something was especially bothersome. I figured a recently orphaned boy being turned over to child services was one of those topics she would possibly run with, eventually leading to a conversation regarding adoption.

I was up by six, showered, and made contact with an Agent Kronke from the Great Falls resident agency. Beth and I were to meet him at his office at nine o’clock. I glanced over at the LED clock on the nightstand—just before seven, local time. I took a sip from the coffee I’d acquired from the front lobby and decided to call Karen, who would just be leaving for work. I scooped up my cell phone and dialed.

“Hey, hon,” she said. “I’m just hopping in the car. Are you just waking up now?”

“I got up a bit ago. Got ready and grabbed a coffee. I had to call the local branch here and get us something set up.”

“Set up for? You still never told me why you needed to go to Montana.”

“We have a tree here we need to go and shake.”