Swift Justice (11 page)

“Yeah, that worked a treat with Les, didn’t it?”

I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. Gigi gave me the wounded doe look and pushed up from the chair. “Should I call you if something happens tonight?” she asked quietly.

“Sure, that’d be great,” I said. I started to apologize as she returned to her desk and packed up her saddlebag of a purse, but the words stuck in my throat.

As Gigi walked out the door, I finished my Pepsi and slammed the can into the trash with unnecessary force. The clang of metal on metal jolted me. Shit. This is exactly why I didn’t work with anyone. You had to watch what you said, worry
about their feelings, make small talk when you’d rather be thinking, and listen to stupid damn tree frog mating songs. I stalked to the stereo Gigi had left on and jabbed the
OFF
button. The rumble of the Hummer starting up prodded me to the door with an “I’m sorry” on my lips, but the lumbering vehicle was just pulling out of the parking lot as I yanked the door open.

The Hummer! Talk about your conspicuous surveillance vehicles. I’d forgotten to tell Gigi she’d need to find alternate transportation for the night’s task, and I didn’t even have her cell phone number. A glance at her desk showed a tray with business cards set on one corner. When had she had cards made? I picked one up and saw it through a red mist. The card design matched mine, except under the Swift Investigations logo she had her name, Georgia Goldman, and under that, in small type, the word
PARTNER
. I methodically ripped the card into so many bits of confetti and sprinkled them around the ficus.

The Sprouse residence, in an unzoned area on the fringe of Black Forest, looked absurdly normal at first glance. With a brick front and white siding, it looked like it’d been built in the seventies and well maintained. The yard consisted of patchy grass ringed by a chain-link fence, and a carport housed a Toyota Tercel and a tan Chevy pickup, neither new. A strange burbling noise puzzled me until I realized it was chickens clucking from the backyard. Maybe the Sprouses had a coop.

When I rang the doorbell, a woman I assumed was Patricia Sprouse answered. Her reddened and puffy eyes and the lank hair straggling to her drooping shoulders convinced me she was the dead girl’s mother. The dirty fingerprints of grief clouded her like a window too long unwashed. She wore a long-sleeved cotton knit dress in beige that obscured her figure and ended at ankle height, just above a pair of battered clogs. It was hard to believe this woman had once been Aurora Newcastle’s best friend. Aurora, dying of cancer, exuded more energy and personality from her pinkie than this woman had in her whole being. I felt a twinge of guilt intruding on her
sadness, but then I thought of baby Olivia and extended my hand.

“Mrs. Sprouse? I’m Charlotte Swift with the El Paso County Department of Human Services.” I handed over the card I’d printed out that morning, complete with the logo I’d lifted off the DHS Web site and my real cell number. “May I say I’m very sorry to hear about your recent loss.” I was, too. It’s nice to be able to work the truth in occasionally.

She shook my hand limply and invited me into a tiny foyer that opened on a sitting room to the left and a half bath on the right. The kitchen lay straight ahead, something fruity-smelling bubbling on the stove. “I don’t understand—”

“I’m here about the baby, your daughter’s baby.”

She whitened. “There is no baby.”

“Mrs. Sprouse, DHS is only concerned about the child’s welfare. The police informed us your daughter had recently given birth, but there’s no record of the mother or baby receiving postnatal care of any kind. In such cases, it’s departmental policy to do a home visit to ensure the child’s well-being.” Eleven years in the military had given me a good line in bureaucratic bullshit.

“She didn’t— I can’t— Let me get my husband.” She fluttered to the back door and pushed it open. The cackling of the chickens got louder. “Zachary.”

I was disappointed by the small man who stepped into the hall after exchanging a few whispered words with his wife in the kitchen. Expecting a towering figure with a Moses-like beard trailing to midchest and eyes that burned with a strange fire, I was confronted by a man who looked like he worked in a cubicle and shopped at Walmart. Short brown hair, thinning,
topped a middle-aged face with deeply carved grooves scoring the forehead and bracketing the lips. Big ears that stuck out a bit and a prominent Adam’s apple were his only distinctive features. On second glance, the eyes met my expectations: deep-set, blue, and just enough “off” that they set my Spidey sense tingling.

“This is a house of mourning, ma’am,” he said to me. “Surely you can respect that.”

“I do, and I’m very sorry for your loss,” I repeated, “but the welfare of the baby must—”

“Fornication is a sin!” His voice boomed from his small frame, and I almost jumped. “If my wife’s daughter was led astray by evil forces, if she fell under the sway of demons and yielded to carnal temptation, if she died without confessing her sins and repenting of them, then she is lost and no daughter of ours.”

“No, Zachary—” Mrs. Sprouse bleated.

“Lost! And the child damned.” His voice shook on the final word, and he raised his fists above his head.

So much for mourning. It was abundantly clear why Elizabeth Sprouse had run away. What was still not clear was how she could afford to do so. Unless the chickens laid golden eggs, I didn’t know where she got the money. Surely, sewing the odd pillow cover or set of curtains wouldn’t pay the rent.

I tried again. “Is the baby with its father? If you’ll just give me his name and address . . .”

“We don’t know who the father—” the pale woman said from the kitchen door, only to be overborne by her husband’s fury.

“The devil! Only the devil himself would seduce an innocent virgin and get her with his spawn.”

This guy had watched
Rosemary’s Baby
too many times. I wondered what my chances were of getting Mrs. Sprouse alone. Not good.

“Does the devil have a name?” I asked drily.

“Beelzebub. Satan. The Beast.” He dragged in a deep breath and proclaimed, “ ‘The dragon is filled with fury because he knows that his time is short. He pursued the woman who had given birth to the child. And from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent!’ ” Zachary Sprouse watched my reaction through narrowed eyes. “You are the Serpent’s agent,” he suddenly declared, advancing on me. Spittle flecked the corners of his mouth. His fingers clenched and unclenched at his sides.

Whoa. This guy was several knights shy of a crusade. I flung up one hand and said in my most sermonly voice, “The wages of sin is death!” Montgomery had told me Sprouse was fond of that line.

It stopped him in his tracks, and the biker-on-PCP look faded out of his eyes. “You speak truly. The wages of sin is death. We are all doomed. We should pray for the power to overcome temptation.” He bowed his head.

I backed toward the door, reaching behind me for the knob. “Exactly. Well, nice chatting with you.” I slipped out the door and pulled it firmly closed, my heart aching for young Elizabeth, who had lost her father so tragically only to have to accept that nutter in his place. I wondered anew how she had died. If she’d drowned, I knew who got my vote for most likely
perpetrator, what with his talk of women getting swept away by serpent-spewn torrents. I made a mental note to ask Father Dan about the quotation, which I recognized from the acid-trip images as being from Revelation. Not for nothing had I grown up with missionaries for parents.

Backing my car past a handsome black chicken, I headed for the local high school, figuring that what Elizabeth’s parents didn’t know—or wouldn’t admit—about her sex life, her friends might.

Finding a parking spot at Liberty High School was damned near impossible since I was neither staff nor student; I ended up leaving the Subaru in a satellite lot outside the stadium and hiked over two blocks. When I presented myself at the office, I was asked to sign in and wear a
VISITOR
badge. I didn’t try to pass off the DHS story at the high school; dealing with so many kids, these people probably knew every caseworker on a first name basis. Instead, I simply asked to see the counselor. As luck would have it, he was pulling lunch duty in the cafeteria. I got directions and headed down a hall clogged with students, some making out in stairwells, others shuffling sullenly in the direction of their next class, one student practicing scales on a trumpet outside a closed door marked
BAND
. I noted the boys particularly. They were almost universally clad in jeans, some with boxers peeking over the tops of sagging waistbands, others with letter jackets and athletic shoes that cost more than a teacher’s daily wage, or a PI’s for that matter. You could tell where they stood in the hierarchy of teen coolness by the way they walked, from wall-hugging, eyes-averted
slumps to cocky struts down the middle of the hall. I wondered if any of them had fathered Elizabeth’s baby.

The hall smelled just like my old high school, despite the fact I was living with Aunt Pam and Uncle Dennis in New Jersey by then; the humidity there should have smelled different from the dry air of Colorado, but the universal scent of raging teen hormones overcame any climatic differences. The mingled odors of sweat, hair-care products, the cold metal of lockers, new denim, tired sneakers, and meat loaf thrust me back into my high school days. The noise in the cafeteria busted me away from wondering what had become of Andrew Meslin, Lancelot in our production of
Camelot
, and the subject of my first crush. I’d heard somewhere he’d dropped out of Rutgers to go on some reality show. I looked around for Jack Van Hoose, whom the secretary had described as “a short Kojak on steroids.”

I spotted a bald man sitting at a table near the front of the cafeteria from which he could observe most of the students present and worked my way over to him. He did look a bit like a black Telly Savalas, minus the lollipop. Biceps bulged from beneath the sleeves of his tan polo shirt; I’d’ve pegged him as a PE teacher rather than a counselor. “Jack Van Hoose?”

He looked up from his turkey sandwich, searching my face with hazel eyes. “Yes. What can I do for you?” His voice was deep and sexy.

I introduced myself and told him I was a PI.

“Like Magnum?” he asked, taking a large bite from his sandwich. I caught the twinkle in his eye.

“Minus the Ferrari and the sidekick with the helicopter,” I
said, scooting onto the bench across from him. “I’m here about Elizabeth Sprouse.”

He stopped chewing, and his fingers compressed the bread of his sandwich. “I saw the article in the
Gazette
this morning,” he said, swallowing. “Do the police know any more about how she died?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said, wishing I did. The article had been bare bones: Elizabeth Sprouse, seventeen, found dead near Fountain Creek, police investigating. The smell of pickles from his sandwich was making me hungry. “I’m not investigating her death. She left her newborn daughter with . . . a friend, and I’ve been hired to locate the father with an eye toward him assuming custody.”

“Nuh-uh, Mason,” Van Hoose said in a louder voice. I looked over my shoulder to see a tall boy sheepishly tuck a Frisbee into his backpack. I turned back to Van Hoose as he pulled a bag of chips from his lunch box and opened it. “So she had a baby, huh? Have one.”

He offered me the bag, and I took a chip. “Yes, a daughter. About ten days ago.”

“I must say I’m surprised. She didn’t have too many friends, seemed leery of boys. Have you met her father?”