Doubleback: A Novel (5 page)

Dan O’Malley and Georgia had come onto the force at the same time, but Dan had ended up her supervisor. Now he was Deputy Chief. She was happy for him; he was a good cop, honest and smart, and his promotion was long overdue. As for her, she sometimes wondered what might have happened if she’d played the career card as well as, say, Christine Messenger. Maybe she would have been made it to upper management, too.

O’Malley’s butt hung over his stool, and he shifted as he nursed his scotch. His eyes had made him look old ever since he was a rookie, but now craggy lines dug into his forehead. At the same time, his carrot orange hair, bristly mustache, and ruddy cheeks made him appear young—even naive. O’Malley used that to his advantage. People always underestimated him.

She slid onto a stool next to him. “Congratulations. Drinks are on me.”

He looked up, surprise on his face. She wondered whether that was part of his
shtick
. Act shocked and a suspect might feel obligated to explain. And incriminate himself.

“Thanks,” he said.

Georgia waved a hand. “It’s the least I could do. Except I had to wait longer than I should have to buy you a round.”

“Tell me about it.”

She swiveled toward the bar. The bartender lifted his chin.

“Another Dewers for him, Diet Coke for me. With lemon.”

The bartender nodded. Georgia swiveled back. O’Malley’s face smoothed out.

“You thought I was back on the booze?”

He flipped up a palm.

“You gotta have faith.” She grinned. “So, congratulations.”

O’Malley cocked his head. “You already said that.”

“I mean the Molly Messenger case.”

O’Malley looked down.

“Nice work.”

He tossed back the rest of his drink, then clinked the empty glass on the bar. “Everyone’s a joker.”

“What’s so funny?”

He kept his mouth shut.

Their drinks came. Georgia pushed his scotch towards him. “So, what’s going on? Why so tight-lipped with the press?”

“You noticed.”

“Hard not to notice when the force that loves to brag about itself suddenly goes quiet.”

O’Mally wiped his sleeve across his mouth.

“Who handled the investigation?”

“Who do you think?”

“Robbie Parker.”

Parker had been her partner on the force. He’d never been a particularly thorough cop. Except when he played politics. Which, it turned out, he did better than Georgia. He’d been promoted from patrol to detective a year ago.

“What’s the story?”

O’Malley’s eyes bored into her. “I wasn’t here tonight. Or if I was, we never had this conversation.”

“Just buying my former boss a drink to celebrate his promotion.”

O’Malley nodded. “What happened was nothing. A big fat zero.”

Georgia frowned.

“Parker started working the case. Did all the things you’re supposed to. Went to the camp, interviewed the counselors. Canvassed neighbors and relatives. Even tried to talk to some of her friends— ’course, then he had to get the parents involved, and some of them refused, and—”

“I get it.” Georgia cut him off. “This is the North Shore.”

“Right. Well anyway, we got nowhere. Really. The kid just showed up.”

“That’s crazy.”

“God’s honest truth is whoever had her just decided to let her go.”

“Come on, Dan. That doesn’t happen.”

“It did here. We had people with the mother 24-7. Monitored her phone, her email, her cell. Even went downtown with her when she went to her office. No one was more surprised than us when the car pulled up at the corner and the kid jumped out.”

“What kind of car? The TV report didn’t say.”

“We canvassed the neighborhood again. Someone came forward. They think it was a Lexus. Their biggest fucking sedan.”

“No plates, I guess.”

“You guess right.”

Georgia sipped her drink. “Weird.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Do you think someone was negotiating behind the scenes?”

“It wasn’t us.”

“Maybe the mother was working it herself.”

“If she was, we didn’t see it. And, in any case, there’s nothing we could do. There’s no law against trying to rescue your kid.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a kidnapping to begin with. Maybe the ex-husband just took her for an ‘extended’ visit.”

“Don’t think so. His whereabouts are accounted for. He went to work. Then stayed overnight at his girlfriend’s.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Plenty of people vouched for him.”

“You think maybe the mother staged the whole thing?”

“I don’t see how. Or why.”

“Munchausen’s?” she asked. Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy was a form of child abuse in which a mother invents imaginary symptoms of illness in a child that are subsequently treated, sometimes with fatal results. “It could be a variation.”

O’Malley shook his head. “No evidence.”

“There wouldn’t have to be.” Georgia said. “Anyone following up with the kid? About her captors, how she was treated?”

“Parker’s trying, but the mother won’t let us talk to her. Says there’s been too much trauma. But we’ll keep at it.”

Georgia ran a finger around the rim of her glass. “You said your guys went downtown with her?”

“Yeah.”

“When was this?”

“Wednesday morning. The kid came back that afternoon.”

“Why did she go downtown in the middle of everything? The mother, I mean. How could she work while this was going on? Why wasn’t she glued to the phone at home?”

“She said she wanted to pick up a few things. Pictures of Molly, her laptop. She left it there when the kid was taken.”

“If my daughter had been kidnapped, and I didn’t know if she was alive or dead, I sure as hell wouldn’t take time to ‘pick up a few things at the office.’”

O’Malley shrugged. “Parker told her we’d get the stuff for her, but...”

“He was obviously very persuasive.” She frowned. “And Molly was released that afternoon.” She stared at O’Malley.

“Hey, Davis. Our job is over. The girl is safe. We got a happy ending. We move on. We’re having a press conference later today.”

“Which will thank everyone for doing a great job.”

“What do you want from me?” He tapped his glass on the bar again. Then he stopped. “You know Eric Olson is gonna retire next year.”

Eric Olson was the village’s Chief of Police. O’Malley’s boss. “I didn’t know.”

“I need good officers, Davis. I know you told him no last year. But what if I asked you to come back?”

Georgia propped an elbow on the bar and massaged her temples. She didn’t answer for a minute. Then, “Don’t go there, Dan. Not right now.”

chapter
6

O
ne of the things I love about the Midwest is that you really
can
see to the horizon. I’ve spent time on both coasts and, except for the beach, the cities and suburbs are densely packed and obstruct your sight lines. Here on the prairie, though, the eye sweeps across the landscape, and you can see for miles.

Mac and I were driving through farmland in central Illinois the following Monday. The occasional metal silo and cell phone tower glinted in the sun, reminding me I wasn’t really that far from civilization. The ground shimmered with the pale growth of early summer, and when I rolled down the window, an earthy, damp aroma poured in. In a few months, the growth would be thick and sturdy—not quite lush, but our version of it. For now, though, everything was tender and green and very Norman Rockwell.

Mac is Mackenzie Kendall the Third, and he owns a video production studio in Northbrook. He pretends to be an aging hippie, and he rarely changes out of jeans and sandals. A jagged scar down his cheek used to make him look dangerous, but he’s older and grayer, and the sharp planes of his face have softened. A year ago he added a silver hoop earring. Rachel, who knows about these things, promptly told him he’d pierced the wrong ear.

Despite his idiosyncrasies, Mac is a talented director and a shrewd businessman. We’ve worked together for fifteen years. He also employs Hank Chenowsky, one of the best video editors in the solar system. I’m convinced Hank grew up in a dark room with a computer monitor as his only source of light, because he works magic with my shows, making them look like they have twice the budget they do.

“So we’re finally going green,” Mac said as we cruised down state highway 136 in his Ford Expedition.

“We?” Mac’s van probably sucks down gas at the rate of ten miles per gallon. “Speak for yourself, white man.”

Mac threw me a look. “Can you spell significant business expense?”

“You’re polluting the planet.”

“They have these trade-offs, you know. Maybe you’ve heard about them. You get credits when you do something that conserves energy, demerits when you don’t. Linda drives a Prius, so we balance out.”

Linda was Mac’s wife.

“And what about your new boyfriend?” he went on. “Doesn’t he have his own plane? Now there’s a real energy saver.”

“Don’t bring Luke into this. Everyone has to do their part. It’s people like you who...” I stopped myself. “I can’t believe this.”

“What?”

“You’ve done it.” I glared at him. “You’ve gone and become a conservative when I wasn’t looking.”

Mac kept his mouth shut.

“My father always said a person gets more conservative when they have something to lose. Are you going to register as a Republican?”

Mac let out a long-suffering breath. “You know, it is possible to accumulate assets without losing one’s humanity. Or becoming a hypocrite.” When I didn’t answer, he added, “It might even be possible to run a business ethically. Aren’t we going to scout one right now?”

•   •   •

“I am delighted that such a lovely woman as you made time to visit our humble operation.”

I knew I was in trouble as soon as the words came out of his mouth. Fred Hanover, the man who would be showing us the Voss-Peterson ethanol plant, wasn’t much to look at. He had small recessed eyes, a middle-aged paunch, and a smear of a mustache that looked painted on. What little hair he had was slicked back with something that reminded me of Bryl Crème. In fact, with his starched white shirt, striped seersucker suit, and red bowtie, he looked like a door-to-door salesman from seventy-five years ago. But his manners were impeccable, and when he opened a door for me and called me “ma’am,” I couldn’t resist a smirk at Mac.

“Now, ma’am,” Hanover said with a rueful expression, “I am so sorry to muss up that lovely hairdo, but you’re going to have to wear this.” He handed me a yellow hard-hat. “The ladies hate these,” he said as an aside to Mac. I absently touched my hair, wondering who’d told him that—his wife? a secretary?—and put it on.

“Does it fit all right, Ms. Foreman? Because I have another size.” He looked concerned.

“It’s fine,” I centered it on my head. He handed another to Mac and clamped one on himself.

“Well, then. Let’s go.” He rubbed his palms together and led us outside. We’d been in a utilitarian one-story building set back from the road. Behind it, railroad tracks ran past a series of stainless steel tanks and metal-roofed sheds, all connected with pipes of various diameters and lengths. All the equipment gleamed and looked antiseptically clean, but its unfamiliarity made me think some alien society had somehow jettisoned it from their spacecraft and plunked it down on the prairie late one night.

“You know, you needed top secret clearance before we could let you in here,” Hanover said with a chuckle.

Had the man been reading my mind?

“We had to make sure you were on the up and up. Both of you.” He glanced at Mac.

“Why?” I asked.

“The process I’m about to show you is proprietary,” he said. “Can’t let in any industrial spies, can we now?”

“I thought ethanol production was generic—like petroleum refining.”

“Not at all. Our competitors are always looking to see what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We use a dry milling process, but there’s a wet one, too, which is very different. We have to be careful.” He grinned. “Then again, if I’d known I would be in the presence of such a lovely woman, I might well be forced to reveal our secrets.”

He chuckled and rubbed his palms together in little circles. I smiled painfully. Mac kept a straight face.

Hanover walked us over to the train tracks which led into a small warehouse and out the other side. “Basically the grain comes here in covered hoppers, unless it happens to be trucked in. Then it’s unloaded, and transferred to these.” He gestured to several tall silos behind the warehouse.

I peered inside. “We could get a great shot from the rail car going into the shed,” I said to Mac. “You know. From the POV of the rail car, shooting up.”

Mac nodded. Hanover looked perturbed at being interrupted. “The grain is ground into powder and piped into tanks where it’s mixed with water and enzymes and forms a mix we call a slurry.” He guided us past a group of huge cylindrical tanks. “And this is where the mixture is fermented.”

“Like beer?” Mac asked.

Hanover nodded. “We let it sit for forty-eight hours. Then, after it’s distilled, which happens here...” Hanover gestured to another group of tanks, “... the alcohol is separated from the solids. At that point, it’s ethanol. One-hundred-nintey proof.”

Mac whistled. I visualized vats of Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker, and wondered whether they had any place in the video.

“The alcohol is siphoned out the top while the stillage goes out through the bottom for further processing. Then the alcohol mix is dehydrated, where it becomes two-hundred proof ethanol,” Hanover turned to Mac. “That’ll do some damage, won’t it?” He chortled. “Make you as stiff as a board.”

Mac pasted on a smile.

I checked my watch. Hanover had been talking for half an hour. I didn’t know how much more I could take. As we walked, his hand touched the small of my back. I recoiled, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“The finished product—ethanol—is ultimately transported in tank cars to processors that mix it with gasoline,” he said cheerfully. “Today we’re processing corn, but tomorrow, who knows? Our scientists are working on other grains and prairie grass. Even garbage.”