Jude Devine Mystery Series (42 page)

“He claims it must have transpired earlier in the night when he was picking Ms. Perkins up from the sister’s place, but he didn’t see the damage when they arrived home. Too busy getting the mother of the year into bed after her drinking binge.”

Jude went over to Tonya Perkins and woke her up. The woman smelled like a bar.

“What am I doing here?” Perkins gazed at her dully. “I want to go home.”

“Ms. Perkins, you’re here because your son Corban is missing.”

Perkins began to laugh. The sound was slurred and uneven. “No, he’s not. Ding dong’s just playing games. Where is he?” She cast a wavering glance around the room.

“Where is who?”

“Wade.”

“Your boyfriend is being interviewed.”

“Tell him I want to go to bed. This is stupid.”

“Do you know where your son is?” Jude asked.

Perkins squinted at her like she was a figment of a bad dream. “Isn’t he at home?”

Jude summoned patience. There was no point getting frustrated with a confused, drunk woman. “No, he’s not, Ms. Perkins. If your boyfriend was playing a trick on you, where do you think he might take Corban?”

Slowly an idea registered on Tonya Perkins’s face. “He’s in the hospital,” she announced.

“Why would he be in the hospital?”

“He burnt his hand. Wade took him to the hospital last night.”

“First we’ve heard,” Pratt murmured from a few feet away. “Which hospital?”

Perkins shrugged. “I don’t know. Hey, where can I get a cup of coffee round here?”

Pratt waved a deputy over and ordered the refreshment. Jude glanced at the wall clock. 6:30 a.m. Corban had been missing for at least three hours, maybe longer, depending on whether this woman or her boyfriend were telling the truth or covering up a crime.

“I’ll call the hospital,” she said.

Pratt met her eyes. The doubt in his own was transparent.

*

Southwest Memorial had no record of Corban Foley. It had been a slow night, and no one could remember a man coming in with a small child. A couple of deputies were analyzing the security tapes.

So far, there was no sign of the toddler in his own neighborhood, either. The preliminary canvass had generated only a few leads worth a dime. At 2 a.m. when Wade Miller claimed he’d left to pick up his intoxicated girlfriend, the residents of Malafide Road were tucked in their beds sound asleep. No one could say with any certainty that they’d heard a vehicle drive past their home.

Earlier that same evening, they’d been snugly ensconced in front of their TVs watching
Nancy Grace
and
Deal or No Deal
while the snow came down outside. No one had noticed Wade Miller’s truck arrive or leave the Perkins house. Everyone whined about the price of gas and the amazing March snowfall that had terminated their dry, warm winter. An elderly man several doors down shared his unflattering views on Tonya Perkins’s appearance and morality. And Tonya’s next-door neighbor, a single mother of three, said Tonya had “bad taste in men.” She’d seen “that loser she’s dating” shouting at the missing child, calling him names like “retard” and telling him to shut up.

According to her, they’d been out in the yard one day just before Christmas playing with Miller’s big dogs, and Corban was howling up a storm and trying to escape from the animals. Miller kept calling him a “dumb little faggot” and looked like he was going to start belting the kid. The neighbor went to the fence and made her presence known. Miller called off his dogs then, and took Corban into the house.

The woman concluded her comments with the statement, “If anything’s happened to that poor little kid, he did it.”

“Only problem is,” Pratt told Jude as they approached the Perkins house, “her sister was dating Miller before he took up with Perkins, and there’s some bad blood there. Girl named Brittany Kemple. We’re bringing her in.”

Jude crunched her way through a foot of fresh snow to Tonya Perkins’s driveway. The Perkins house was a fixer-upper no one had bothered to fix up. It stood out, even among the surrounding low-priced real estate, as the one house in its street with paint so badly flaked that the timber beneath was exposed. It also stood out because the front yard was secured by crime scene tape and in the dead center the snow had been blown aside to reveal a gory crimson halo surrounding the decapitated head of a goat. Compounding this macabre spectacle, the goat wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan Don’t Blame Me! I Didn’t Vote For Him
.
Someone had tried to cross out “For Him” with a black marker pen. The goat’s ears were fed through a couple of holes cut in the cap.

“This sick ticket thinks he’s a funny guy,” Pratt wheezed.

“Sir, I can walk the scene,” Jude offered. “Why don’t you go back home and get warm. I’m sure Mrs. Pratt must be worried sick knowing you’re out here.”

Pratt seemed genuinely torn. “You’re right, but the way this is shaping up, I should be at the scene.”

Jude knew what he was saying. With elections looming in less than nine months and the political climate being what it was for Republican incumbents, the race for sheriff was heating up. It hardly seemed possible that a Democrat former deputy was looking like a real contender, but Pratt was as neurotic as Jude had ever seen him. He wanted his face plastered all over the TV screen at every possible opportunity, and he saw every open case in the county as a personal slight. Arrests, even dubious ones, were the order of the day.

“The broken windows,” she asked, “these happen last night?”

“So we’re told. One of them belongs to the kid’s room.” Pratt singled out a narrow casement-type window about four feet from ground level. They ducked under the yellow tape and padded carefully around the perimeter of the yard to inspect it.

“No one got in or out of that hole,” Jude said.

The entry point smashed in the window wasn’t big enough for a child, let alone an adult kidnapper in winter clothing. There was no sign of fiber or blood on the deep jagged shards and no way anyone could have squeezed past them without leaving part of their anatomy at the scene. The pane had been smashed from the outside, and some kind of dust coated the tips of the shards.

“Brick through the window.” Pratt gave voice to Jude’s immediate conclusion.

She pulled on a pair of latex gloves. The sensation was like sliding her hands into a second skin of frigid Jello. She allowed her eyes to roam slowly around the scene and realized she wasn’t the only intent observer. A solitary raven, wings held low and close against the cold, was perched on the guttering of the house next door, wearing its sleek black feathers like a mourner’s cloak. It angled its head quizzically, as if in response to Jude’s gaze, and took several slow sideways steps in her direction. Staring pointedly down at the goat’s head, it released a soft, guttural “quork” that sounded like a question.

“I guess you’re hungry,” Jude said. Winter in the Four Corners was usually harsh, and most Colorado birds flew south. They started returning to their nesting territories in March. The raven had probably made the flight from Mexico some time in the past few days, reaching its destination just in time for the worst blizzard of the year.

Jude examined the torpid sky. There was no sign of sunlight through the snow squall. Drifts of big feathery snowflakes had replaced the wind-driven deluges of the past twenty-four hours. Falling snow had long since covered any footprints or tire tracks on the Perkins property, and the white hush of morning was broken only by the sounds of voices, car engines, and horses snorting.

A few yards down the road, the sheriff’s posse had assembled, ten riders in black felt cowboy hats, black bandannas, and heavy snow vests. Surrounding them, members of the SAR team coordinated a steady stream of volunteers. News spread quickly in a small town like Cortez. By noon half the town’s able-bodied adults would be involved in the search-and-rescue operation.

Uncomfortable with the foot traffic milling about, Jude said, “We need to relocate everyone. They’re already compromising the scene.”

“It’s in hand. As soon as we’ve combed the neighborhood again, we’re shifting the command center to the posse hall,” Pratt said. “Maybe the town hall if we get a big turnout.”

Jude began photographing the surroundings. “We’ll want pictures of the crowd, too,” she said.

As Pratt relayed these instructions over his radio, several members of the Crime Scene Unit emerged from the house. One of them waved Jude and Pratt in, saying, “You gotta see this.”

They traipsed indoors to the entrance of a cheaply furnished living room. A green Formica dining table was jammed into the corner behind the door, and a dated sofa was parked about six feet from a television that was too big for the room. Between the two, a plain mint-toned rug lay across the floor. Standing to one side was a CSU technician Jude had worked with a few times, Belle Simmons, one of several Montezuma County deputies trained in crime scene processing.

“Must have been a heck of a drive for you this morning, Detective,” Simmons said. Her drawl was pure Louisiana. She’d married a Mancos man who ran an online shoe sales business. He seemed to do okay and was held up as a big success story in the Four Corners, where not too many people lived the American Dream.

“Made me think fondly of the D.C. commute,” Jude remarked.

She liked what she’d seen of Belle Simmons. The deputy was mature, intelligent, and methodical, and she had a warm way about her. This morning, her manic red curls were restrained in a ponytail, and she wore her customary makeup—foundation, coral lipstick, carefully applied eyeliner and mascara, subtle bronze blusher across the cheekbones. Jude had her pegged for the kind of woman whose husband had never seen her without the works. However, Simmons’s job mattered to her. Everyone knew she’d sacrificed her acrylic nails for it. That was the kind of commitment that made the front page of the
Durango Herald
. A celebratory puff-piece was pinned to the staff bulletin board at the sheriff’s office in Cortez.

Jude took a few careful steps into the room. “What have we got?”

“Blood splatter.”

Radiating out from the rug was a low-velocity pattern. The trajectories indicated a source of origin roughly at the rug’s center, but there was no sign of anything on the pale green pile. It looked brand-new.

Jude snapped a few mid-range images, then asked, “Have you lifted the rug yet?”

Simmons shook her head. “Thought you’d want to take a look first.”

“I appreciate that.”

Jude was pleasantly surprised that the scene had been so well preserved. In a situation like this, where the initial investigation was macroscopic and its focus still uncertain, it was not unusual to find a scene virtually ransacked by the first responders. This was especially true in small town environments where the local police and sheriff’s departments didn’t have a wealth of experience dealing with serious crimes.

However, Jude had discovered that law enforcement personnel in Colorado were sensitive about any shortcomings in this regard. Crime scene mishandling had been a significant factor in the still-unsolved Jon Benet Ramsey murder, and no one wanted their officers accused of incompetence if a big-deal slaying like that one ever happened in their bailiwick. From the faces Jude could see, a missing two-year-old and a boyfriend with a history of violence had set off serious alarms bells in the MCSO.

She crouched on her heels and shone a flashlight across the underside of the rug and the heavily scratched wood floor. Even with some smudging and fiber transfer, a wipe pattern and a couple of shoe prints were evident on the boards. Transfer marked the underside of the rug.

“We need a blood-pattern analyst in here,” Jude said. “Seal the room.”

“I’ll call Grand Junction.” Simmons took out her cell phone. “It’ll take a while.”

Jude almost offered to do it herself, but stifled the impulse. “No problem,” she told Simmons and wondered if the strain in her voice was audible.

Yes, she could phone Grand Junction; it would give her an excuse to talk to Mercy for the first time in a month. Was that what she wanted as a major case was unfolding—to exchange pointless civilities with a girlfriend whose idea of commitment was that she was faithful to both her lovers? Jude couldn’t think about that sordid reality without wanting to kick something across the room.

She should phone Mercy some time soon, she thought, if only to prove she wasn’t sulking because Elspeth Harwood was in town. Mercy only slept with one of them at a time, and because Elspeth had to travel from England, Jude was expected to be considerate during her visits. Every time these happened she would tell herself not to tolerate this crazy situation for another day. Then, a prisoner of her hormones, she would slink back to kiss the hand that maimed her. Already, she was counting the days until Elspeth was due to leave and she could yet again nourish her self-abasing passion.

Not this time, Jude promised herself beneath her breath. This time she was going to tell Dr. Mercy Westmoreland to find herself another lonely, weak-willed stud.

“Ready to bag this?” Simmons asked, indicating the bloodstained rug.

“Go ahead,” Jude said, hoping her lapse in concentration wasn’t obvious. “And once the analyst has been in here, lift the boards whole. I want those footprints intact.”