Finding Jessie: A Mystery Romance (26 page)

“Yeah. Pre-meditated, for sure. And I may be a lawyer, but I’m not a magician.”

Chapter Nineteen

Because she was driving, Jessie ignored the ringing cell phone that was on the floor of the car wherever Sam had dropped it. He was always misplacing the dang thing.

She only stopped to check it when she had pulled in front of the rundown house with peeling paint in a mixed-use neighborhood.

Sam’s phone had a missed call from Linda Jacobs. Jessie liked her.

Though she wondered if Linda Jacobs had turned up any clues about her identity, Jessie knew she had to first see if this Tansy from Facebook was the same woman who had held her captive and abused her for years. Besides, it was Sam’s phone and Linda was calling Sam, not her. She wasn’t about to snoop on his voicemails.

Movement caught her eye. A few dozen puppies of various breeds and ages, including Yorkies, played in the frosty dead grass of the front yard, which was surrounded by rusty chicken wire. The yard itself was studded with a minefield of steaming dog poop, plastic water bowls, and half-empty trays of puppy kibble.

There was a homemade poster in the window that read: Tansy’s Pampered Pets. They were anything but pampered. They were tiny, muddy, crying and shivering.

Her stomach swirled and clenched as Jessie put a knit watch cap over her bright red hair and pulled it down low to her eyebrows. She hoped that the years since she had escaped had dulled their memories of her face. Of course, they had rarely looked her in the face. It was her body they had been interested in. Both of them.

She took a deep breath and loaded Sam’s handgun, as she had practiced in the middle of the night with a YouTube video. She tried to remember all of the steps to firing the gun, too. She put the safety on and off and then on again, so it wouldn’t go off in her purse, which is where she put it.

She briefly bowed her head and closed her eyes.

Please God. I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t even know if it’s her or not. I just want to know my own name. Please make her tell me my name. Amen.

When she looked up, she was startled to see the passenger-side car door opening and a man’s horribly burn-scarred face leaning down to look inside the vehicle.

“Hi! Did you come to see the Yorkie puppies?”

When she started screaming and couldn’t stop, he pulled the knit cap off her head and her red hair came tumbling down.

“Jessie Conyers?!” he shouted. He grabbed her around the throat and pulled her across the seat and out of the right side of the car, kicking and screaming. She fought as hard as she could, but he punched her in the face, broke through the front gate, and dragged her through dog poop and puppies into the rundown house with the torn, filthy drapes.

Chapter Twenty

“Look! There’s my car!” Sam exclaimed as Linda pulled up the Lincoln right behind it.

“Don’t get excited. For all we know, she might just be inside looking at puppies.”

“No, Linda. Something’s wrong. Look at all that dog poop smeared on the front steps. It looks like someone
just
broke the gate—it’s hanging by a hinge—and dragged someone through the front yard into the house. It truly looks like someone was dragged through mud.”

“It does look like that, but let’s check it out.”

Sam said, “Look, dozens of puppies are getting loose in the neighborhood. It’s like someone just pulled out the cork from a champagne bottle but the bubbles are puppies.”

“Maybe those huge poop smears across the yard are from something else,” Linda said. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“Maybe it’s about time someone did. After I get out, lock the doors on the Lincoln. If I don’t come out in thirty seconds with Jessie, call 9-1-1,” Sam ordered. He jumped out, vaulted over the fence like he was young and evaded the puppies.

He banged on the front door frame and bellowed, “Jessie! Jessie!”

A scared-looking woman with stringy hair and a gaunt meth-ravaged face came to the door. She moved a curtain aside to see who it was.

“Where’s Jessie?” he shouted again.

She talked to him through the glass on the upper part of the door. “There’s no Jessie here. You’ve got the wrong house.”

“Bullshit! The car she drove is right in front of your house. Open this door! Now!”

The curtain fell back and the woman disappeared.

Sam punched his bare fist through the glass and grabbed the woman by her stringy black hair and said, “Tansy, if you don’t tell me where she is, your face is getting dragged through this broken window glass. Multiple times.”

She blurted, “Don’t hurt me! Frank took her to the garage in back.”

“Frank is here?!” Sam shouted, horrified. Both of her abusers were here.
And one of them had Jessie!

Sam let go of the woman’s hair and shouted to Linda, “Call 9-1-1! It’s them!”

He ran down the long driveway to the old one-car closed garage in the back yard, his feet crunching on icy gravel and his breath coming hard, like puffs from a steam engine. He didn’t even slow down but crashed right through the side door.

Tansy was screaming a warning to Frank and running to the car with her purse on her shoulder and a laundry basket of dirty clothes.

Frank raised a Taser, which he had already used on Jessie. She was bound and in the trunk of a Toyota Camry with the trunk lid open. Her face was streaked with tears and she had a bloody nose and a dirty shop rag stuffed in her mouth. Her eyes were wild with fear.

Without even thinking, Sam picked up a tire iron from the floor of the garage and threw it like a javelin. It pierced his Frank’s thigh and he howled and fell down, dropping the Taser to try to pull the tire iron out of his leg. He writhed on the floor of the garage, bleeding and screaming.

Sam picked up the Taser, just as the police car pulled up, turned into the driveway, and slammed on the brakes at the garage door. Two officers jumped out of the car.

They ran up, guns drawn, and Sam found himself pushed face down on the dirty concrete and handcuffs snapped across his wrists, along with Tansy and the injured Frank.

An officer ran to the open car trunk and pulled the rag out of Jessie’s mouth.

“Are you all right, miss?”

“I’m alive, if that’s what you mean. Now that Sam came to save me. And you, too.”

He untied her and helped her out of the trunk. “Sam’s my boyfriend. He came to rescue me.”

“Which one is he?”

“The big guy with the salt-and-pepper hair. Could you let him up, please?”

“The old guy?”

She laughed. “Age is a state of mind. And he’s also my lawyer, Sam Gold. We live in Port Sapphire.”

“State your name, sir,” the cop asked, as he undid Sam’s handcuffs and helped him up.

“Like she said, I’m Sam Gold, her attorney. I followed her here to protect her from these dangerous people.”

“We found a meth lab in the yard!” hollered one of the officers. “And about a hundred puppies in the house.”

“Oh, great. Call the meth team first and then animal control.”

“Yes, sir!”

Linda Jacobs walked up.

“This is a crime scene, ma’am. You’ll have to leave.”

“I know. I’m just kind of a bystander, but I need someone to gather up loose puppies. The front gate is broken. They are getting all over the neighborhood.”

“Fritz?”

“Yes, sir?”

“We’ve got a puppy stampede in front. Ma’am, we can’t do anything about it at the moment. We’ve got Mirandas to deliver, weapons searches and evidence to gather.”

He turned back to Jessie.

“What’s your name?”

“I think it’s Jessie Conyers.”

“Did you say
Conyers
?” the officer said.

“Yeah, why?”

“There’s going to be a lot of paperwork for this incident. Lots of questions from us, but at the other end of this district, there’s more cops for you to talk to. About a different case.”

“Detective Bob Jacobs is working that case,” Linda said. “He’s my ex.”

“Oh, my gosh!” Jessie said.

“You could have been killed!” Sam said, taking Jessie into his arms.

A cop said, “You three. Wait in front of the house in case this meth lab in the yard blows.”

They ran to Linda’s Lincoln and sat in it while all kinds of police vehicles arrived and finally, they got to talk to the officers who had come to rescue Jessie.

It was almost two hours before they were told they were finished telling the story about Frank and Tansy, but now they had to report to another police department to talk about the other case.

The officer in charge told Linda to go home and not to talk about the case.

Sam slid behind the wheel of his Volvo and he and Jessie buckled up.

“I’m not scared anymore. Nobody can ever hurt me again,” Jessie said.

Chapter Twenty-one

Exhausted, Jessie read the latest local news on her Kindle Fire as they sat in the conference room of the police department, waiting to be called.

“The story’s breaking in the media. So, what Linda was saying yesterday was true. They did find bodies at that bed and breakfast inn that used to be an unwed mothers’ home. One of them had red hair.”

“Let’s allow the detective to tell us what is going on with that, and not rely on the media. And red hair is a recessive trait, but we don’t know if the victim is your mom.”

“Okay.” She turned off her Kindle and leaned against Sam while they sat in a police station drinking lukewarm coffee and eating stale donuts.

Jessie said, “I can’t believe that Linda stole a pair of Yorkie puppies from Frank and Tansy’s meth house.”

“
Shh.
Me neither. Her rationalization was that they were all going to the pound anyway. But she didn’t really steal them from the house or yard. They were loose on the street. Strays.”

“Do you want to go get a Yorkie puppy at the pound?” Jessie asked.

“Bite your tongue. We’ve got two cats, perfectly housetrained, and no chewing on books or paper, or anything else for that matter. I am a cat man all the way.”

“Fine.” She paused. “I should stop avoiding talking about the painful things by chattering about other stuff.”

“What do you really want to talk about, Jessie?”

“I want to know if I’ll have to testify against Tansy and Frank for the present crimes and for the past crimes.”

“I don’t know. It seems like the prosecutor is going to deal with the drug charges first. It might be a while before they are charged with other things, like assaulting you and kidnapping you and making you into a sex slave years ago.”