Nemesis (Southern Comfort) (23 page)

Guilt and fury warred in his chest.  “So that bit about going back to your fiancé –”

“Total crap.”   

He heaved out a sigh that was pure frustration.  “Just so you know, that was the exact wrong tactic to get rid of me.”  Although he was damn glad that she’d used it.  He shuddered to think of her facing this alone. 

A wry smile lifted one corner of her lush little mouth, and he wished he was close enough to stop it from trembling. 

“I’m, uh…”  Words escaped him, because this whole thing was such a disaster.   “I apologize, Sadie.  For being an idiot.  Both today and last night.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off with a decisive look.  “This is most definitely not the time or the place to go into this, but when we get out of here we need to talk.”

“It’s okay –” she started.

“No, it’s not.  But more important now is how we’re going to get out of… wherever this is.  Were you blindfolded when they brought you in?”

“No, I wasn’t blindfolded, but we were in the back of their van so I can’t say for certain exactly where they’ve taken us.  We’re deep in the woods.  It looks like some kind of fishing cabin, maybe.”  She nodded toward the old board walls which groaned and sighed with the whistling wind.  And the smell of brine seeping up from the floors suggested the presence of a marsh or tidal creek nearby.  One grimy window behind Declan shed the only light, filtered through clouds and leafy canopy.  Other than the sink, an old table and the bed frame, the place was empty and had been for some time.  Except for the rodents who’d left their droppings.  Sadie shivered and moved her legs.  “Wherever we are, it’s off the beaten track.  We had to walk a ways through the woods from where they parked the van.  You, they carried.”  She pointed to the ratty blanket they’d used to wrap him.

“Who are they?” Declan asked, returning his attention to her after surveying the blanket.  “Did Rick –”

The glare she sent him cut that question off.

“This has nothing to do with Rick.  The men are looking for something the last renter left in the house.”  She explained about the message she’d discovered on the answering machine, and how they’d played security professionals to gain access after their burglary attempt failed.

“Damn,” Declan breathed.  That was not good news.  He’d half hoped this had something to do with her ex-fiancé, although why he’d want to kidnap Sadie, Dec had no idea. But at least it would have meant they stood a good chance of making it through this without being slaughtered.

But now slaughtering seemed pretty much a given.

It was only surprising that they weren’t dead already.

“Any idea why they left us here, still kicking?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “You showing up threw a wrench in their plans.  I think they’re trying to find a way to make our disappearance look perfectly normal so that Kathleen doesn’t get involved.  They want to be able to keep searching the house without interference.”

“What the hell are they looking for, anyway?”

“I’ve no idea.  Something they’re obviously willing to kill for.  I –”

Her words trailed off as she heard the voices.  She looked wildly at Declan, and he stiffened.  Gave the handcuff a futile tug. 

Whatever the men had in mind for them, he guessed they were about to find out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

KATHLEEN
figured she was wasting her time as she strode into the Mount Pleasant Police station, but it was her day off, so what the hell. She’d already wasted the morning playing some kind of psychologist/relationship counselor hybrid to her little brother, so it wasn’t like she was going to get much of anything else done anyway.

And this thing with Sadie’s break-in was still bothering her.

Something – she wasn’t sure what, but chalked it up to the sixth sense she’d developed in her years on the force and to which she had learned to pay attention – kept niggling at her to pursue it.  So here she was, against her better judgment, coming to pick Detective Miller’s brain. Hopefully she’d learn something that might put her worries to bed.

Th
ough small, the station was busy. She flashed her badge to the desk sergeant on duty and gave a brief summation of the purpose of her visit.  He buzzed her through the security door and directed her toward Miller’s desk in the cramped and noisy bull pen.

Miller was hunched over his computer, stubby fingers stabbing at keys with more aggression than actual skill.  A number 2 pencil was clamped between his teeth.  He scowled and muttered something as Kathleen approached, causing the pencil to fall to the floor beneath his feet.  He cursed as he bent to retrieve it.

“Detective Miller?”

“What?  Ouch, damn it.”  He cracked his head on the edge of his desk when he sat back up.  Rubbing it gently with one hand, he clutched the errant pencil in the other. Then glared in Kathleen’s direction until recognition eased his frown.  Being the genial sort, he offered her a sheepish grin.

“Detective Murphy.  Sorry about the…” he made a vague gesture with the pencil.  “Reports,” he offered by way of explanation. Paperwork was the bane of every cop’s existence, and she offered a commiserative grimace. 

He motioned to the banged-up folding chair at the end of his desk, half standing until she was seated.  Then he resettled his hefty bulk, tucking the pencil in a coffee mug proclaiming him the World’s Greatest Grandpa. 

She only hoped his investigative skills were half as good. 

“So anyway,” he smiled at her, lacing his fingers together on his desk. “What brings you here this afternoon?  No more problems with your friends and relatives, I hope.”

“I was just wondering what kinds of leads you’d turned up on the men who broke into Ms. Mayhew’s house.”  She believed in being straightforward.

And he believed in playing his cards close to the vest.  “Look, Detective, I appreciate your concern, but the fact is –”

“You can’t discuss the particulars of an ongoing investigation, even with another cop.  I understand that.  And I’m not trying to stick my nose in your case. I’ve got enough cases of my own to worry about, believe me.  But the fact is… well, I have an itch between my shoulder blades, if you know what I’m talking about.”

Miller sat a little straighter, brown eyes sharpening on her face.  “You sure this has nothing to do with the fact that you share a personal relationship to the victim?”

“Nearly positive,” Kathleen assured him. “Although that makes the itch a bit worse.  I just can’t shake the feeling that we’re missing something important.” 

“We?”

She sighed and leaned toward his desk.  “It might not be my case, but as you said, I have a personal interest.  Not knowing what’s turned up is killing me.” 

Miller circled his thumbs, assessing.  After a long moment in which she regarded him earnestly, a conclusion of sorts was reached.  The older man
stretched a hand toward a stack of folders sitting haphazardly on the edge of the desk.

“The renter.  The one who just vacated the place.  He was a phony.”

Kathleen’s eyebrows shot up as he opened the file and glanced at the contents.  “Name, social, references – pretty much every piece of information he wrote on the rental agreement was crap.  But he ponied up the required cash so the property manager didn’t bother checking.  He was a sub-lessee, anyway, so I guess she figured it didn’t much matter.  According to the wording on the contract, any liability would fall with the original renter.”

“Who would be...?”

He flicked another assessing glance.  “Something tells me that if I withhold the name, your next stop will be the Coastal Property Management offices.”

“Good call,” Kathleen agreed.

Miller snorted, but his irritation was mostly put-on.  She was overstepping her bounds, but luckily he didn’t seem inclined to get uptight about it.  “You understand that the only reason I’m sharing this with you is because I myself have had an itch from the time I got a look at that house.”

“It doesn’t fit,” Kathleen nodded.  “The intruders’ behavior was too professional given the state of the house, too messy when they spotted Sadie.  It raised flags all over the place.”

“Which was why I was having trouble buying Ms. Mayhew’s story originally.  What she was describing was not your run-of-the-mill break in.  It seemed almost… over the top.  Anyway,” he glanced at the folder.  “The original lessee is one Thomas David Nash.  He’s a National Guardsman who got called up to active duty overseas.  There were two months and change left on his lease, and prior to shipping out he told the property manager that he’d found someone to fulfill the contract.”

“So the question is did he know the sub-lessee wasn’t who he claimed to be.  I’m assuming you’ve been in contact?”

Another snort.  “You have any idea how big a pain in the hindquarters it is to interview somebody when you’re on one side of the hemisphere and they happen to be on the other?  Large,” he concluded before she could offer an answer.  “A very large pain.  But we finally got an e-mail connection going, and Mr. Nash says that the guy was some friend of his sister’s.  He let him stay there as a favor to her and that’s about all he knew of the situation.  Never met the guy before in his life, or so he claims.”

“And the sister?” 

Miller frowned and tapped the folder.  “Here’s where it gets hinky.  The sister lives down in Beaufort, but when we tried to contact her, no dice.  Not answering the phone, not coming to the door, not even going in to work.  Turns out nobody’s seen her since about two days before New Year’s.  We checked with the Beaufort PD, and sure enough a friend of hers filed a report.  She’s a bona fide missing person.”

Kathleen shifted on the uncomfortable chair, but the restlessness she felt was internal.  “That’s right about the time Sadie’s renter lit out, from what we can tell.”  Could be they were looking at a domestic situation. But that didn’t explain the intruders. 

“They could have gone AWOL together.  Maybe they were involved in something illegal, or owed somebody who came looking to collect.”      

“Could be,” Miller agreed, nodding to another detective who laid a file on his desk in passing.  “A deal gone bad is one of the avenues I’ve been considering, although we’ve found no evidence that Josie Nash – that’s the sister – was into anything illicit.  Nobody knows anything about a boyfriend either, so if this guy was involved with her they kept their relationship on the down-low.  Doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening, just that we’ve got no real obvious motive for her to skip town.  And the thing about Ms. Nash is that if she did leave of her own volition, she didn’t bother to take anything with her.  Clothes, toiletries, purse – hell even her cat – were still inside her apartment.  No sign of foul play, but no sign of Josie, either.”

“I don’t like it,” Kathleen said after a moment.

“Can’t say I’m too fond of it either.  We’ve run her prints – which were on file, bein’ as she’s a day care worker – against those we lifted from your friend’s house.  Came up empty.  If she was ever there, we found no sign of it. Course, with all the cleaning Ms. Mayhew had
been doing there’s every chance any prints might’ve been destroyed.  And the prints we got from the stuff our John Doe left behind got us nothing when we ran them through AFIS.  So whatever he may have been involved in, he’s either a relatively new offender or a real lucky one who’s never been caught.  Either that or we got nothing because he’s clean and the timing of the break-in and Ms. Nash’s disappearance are just an unfortunate set of coincidences.”  Miller raised his eyebrows to show what he thought about that. But before he could elaborate further, a uniformed officer called out to him from the front desk. 

“Cripes,” he said apologetically.  “If you’ll excuse me, that’s something I need to address.”

Kathleen nodded absently as Miller ambled away.  Like the older man had intimated, she wasn’t inclined to believe that the three events had nothing to do with one another.  In her dictionary, coincidence was a dirty word. 

It was possible that the intruders were exactly as she’d hypothesized, men who had a beef with the man sub-letting Sadie’s house and came seeking compensation or retribution.  Sadie’d simply gotten caught in the proverbial crossfire. That would also explain the men’s behavior.  They might have mistaken her for the absentee Josie. 

Although the available evidence suggested that the missing woman probably hadn’t left of her own volition.

Who ran off and left their cat in the house?

Outside – well, people abandoned pets regularly.  But inside… not unless the woman was cruel.

Or
maybe terrified for her own life.

And the fact that Sadie’s renter left a number of his things behind suggested he also vacated in a hurry. 

Were both of them on the run?

Or was it more likely that there were a couple of bodies somewhere yet to be identified?

As Kathleen ruminated over the possible scenarios – and what they possibly meant for Sadie – the station continued to bustle around her.  She could hear Miller’s deep voice as he spoke with the officer, smelled the ubiquitous odors of too-strong coffee and sweat.  The social noises of a workplace filled with people and machines, underscored by the ringing telephone.