Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery (Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) (17 page)

Samuel’s eyes widened. “I don’t know anything about that!”

“She’s just eight years old,” Hadley went on. It amazed Kevin how utterly pitiless she could sound without ever raising her voice. “A little girl. She has a medical condition that can kill her if she’s not found and given treatment.”

“Oh my God.” Samuel did start to cry. “I didn’t know. All I did was ride around from store to store and buy the stuff. It wasn’t going to hurt anyone!”

“Do you know where Annie Johnson might be if she were hiding her daughter?”

“Uh,” he sniffled. “Her place. Her boyfriend’s place.”

Kevin looked at Hadley. They had already ascertained that Travis Roy, who was also missing, had no fixed residence. “Where else?”

“I don’t know!” Samuel paused. “Maybe the house in the country.”

“The house in the country?”

“That’s what Annie called it. She only mentioned it a few times. She had to make a delivery to the place in the country, she’d say.”

“That was where they manufactured the meth?”

The kid flinched away at the word. “I don’t know. Nobody told me what happened to the stuff after we bought it.”

“Where is this house, Samuel?”

“I don’t know. Someplace north or west of here, I think. Nobody told me anything. I didn’t want to know anything.”

Hadley held up her sheaf of printouts and looked questioningly at Kevin. He nodded. “Samuel. Officer Knox here is going to show you a bunch of driver’s licenses. You’re going to tell us the real names of everyone pictured. Got that?” He stood up and let Hadley take his seat.

As she went over each suspected smurfer, Kevin weighed the possibility of the meth house being Annie Johnson’s bolt-hole. Meth manufacturing was a smelly, dangerous business, prone to toxic chemical spills and explosions. Would Annie be careless enough to take her daughter there? Maybe. She wasn’t about to win any mother-of-the-year awards. On the other hand, the meth house wasn’t hers. It probably wasn’t her boyfriend’s, either. They were both working for someone else—someone financing the operation. Someone who wouldn’t want the attention a child’s kidnapping brought to his business. He couldn’t just cut Annie loose, though. If—
when
—she was caught, the first thing she’d do was roll over. Give the DA a bigger fish to fry. If her boss was smart, he’d realize this. So maybe he was keeping her and Mikayla under wraps.

“Samuel. Who was Annie working for?”

The kid looked up at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t think she was cooking meth herself. And she sure wasn’t able to afford the money for your shopping trips on her own. So who was behind her?”

“She never said outright, but she mentioned one guy’s name a few times. Tim LaMar.”

Hadley glanced up at Kevin, a pleased expression flashing across her face.

“But he’s in jail,” Samuel said.

“What?” Hadley asked.

“If it’s the same guy Annie mentioned, he’s in jail,” Samuel said. “Down, I don’t know, somewhere around Poughkeepsie. It was in the papers.” He frowned at them. “Didn’t you know? I figured … that’s where you got my name, right? He’s telling the cops about the rest of us to get his charges reduced. Right?”

3.

The weather wasn’t letting up. No matter how many times he checked it, Russ’s hand-cranked radio kept giving them the same forecast: wintry mix and freezing rain from Albany to Montreal. As the morning progressed, Clare watched her husband go from boneless satisfaction to busily packing and prepping the cabin for his absence to stalking back and forth across the space, glaring at the unchanging vista of wet snow and dripping ice. “I just want to know what’s going on,” he said for the tenth time.

She was tempted to ask him if this was changing his mind about their little no-one-can-reach-us hideaway, but she knew he was on edge about the missing child and the problems the department would be having with the worsening roads.

The next time he paced past her to stare accusingly at the lake—now invisible through a scrim of snow and icy rain—Clare set her book in her lap and said, “What about the radio in your truck?”

“What do you mean?”

“The police band radio. Why don’t you use that to contact Lyle?”

“I’d never reach our signal from here.”

“Of course not. But there must be
some
emergency bandwidth out here, right? They do have nine-one-one?”

Russ stopped in his tracks. “Yeah. Yeah, they do.”

“Can’t they relay your signal?”

He grinned at her. “Yes. They can.” He ruffled her hair. “Smart girl. I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”

“Mmm.” She went back to reading as he wrestled on his outdoor gear.

“Be right back,” he said. “C’mon, Oscar. You might as well get out, too.” As the door shut behind them, Clare put her book down. She really did want some alone time this week. She never realized how much sheer energy her pastoral work took out of her until she was away from it. These past three months had been like working under a Laundromat’s steam presser. Nothing but scorching heat and pressure and every last wrinkle ironed out of her. She smiled a little. Except for the being-married-to-Russ part. Despite the huge issue that lay—literally—between them, marriage was turning out to be good for her. A bulwark against her PTSD-induced cravings for alcohol and amphetamines. A guarding line between her personal life and her ministry. The place where she wasn’t the Reverend Fergusson or Major Fergusson or even—as strange and spiky as it sounded—Mrs. Van Alstyne. Just herself.

Oh, hell, she couldn’t stay here alone. She sat up and tossed her book on the rickety end table. She didn’t need solitude to figure out what to do about the bishop’s ultimatum. She needed Russ.

The kitchen door slammed open. Oscar bounded in, shedding snow and ice. “Good Lord,” Clare said.

Russ was on the dog’s heels. “Get a towel before he—”

Oscar shook himself hard enough to make his short red-gold coat stand to attention. Clare flung up her arms to protect herself from the shower.

“—shakes off,” Russ concluded.

“Thanks for the tip.” Clare grabbed one of the towels hanging on the wall next to the bathroom. She rubbed Oscar down as he wiggled and twisted and tried to lick her face. “Did it work?”

“Sure did. The state police barracks relayed my call to Harlene, who patched me through to Lyle. It wasn’t the best connection, but we could communicate.”

“What did he say?”

“Kevin Flynn and Hadley Knox turned up an interesting lead yesterday evening. Seems the missing girl’s father—an ex-con named Hector DeJean—was up here at Cooper’s Corners overnight Thursday. Allegedly fixing up a sprung pipe at a church camp. Lyle asked me to check it out.”

“Good thing you didn’t leave first thing this morning, then.”

He slanted her a smile. “Good thing.”

“Listen.” She caught his arm. “You were right. About me staying. I should go back with you.”

“Thank God. Okay, we can—” He glanced around the cabin. “No, wait. I don’t want to take the time to pack the rest of our stuff up right now. I need to get up to Cooper’s Corners.”

“Fine. We go and come back after you’ve cleared the place.”

“What we, kemosabe?”

“You know, you shouldn’t keep saying that. I think it may be racist.”

He held out his hand and made a beckoning motion.
Spill it.

“The thermostat’s turned down to fifty at the rectory, and the driveway is probably completely impassable at this point.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So is that what you want to come home to after a long, stressful drive through bad weather? After dark? Geoff Burns said he’d turn the heat back on and arrange to have us plowed out the day we were getting home. I’m going to ask him to do it this evening, before we get in.”

Russ made a face. He wasn’t terribly fond of lawyers, and in Geoff Burns’s case it was an actual antipathy.

“You don’t need to come all the way up to Cooper’s Corners for that.”

She scooped her cell phone off the kitchen counter and slapped it into his hand. “Okay.
You
call Geoff and ask him to do it.”

Russ looked at her phone as if it were a giant cockroach. Which was close to how he saw Geoffrey Burns. “Okay,” he finally said. “But you stay in the truck.”

“All right.”

“With the doors locked.”

“Okay.”

“If—and it’s a long shot—but if the little girl is there—”

“We head straight for the nearest hospital.” She hugged him. “Come on, love. We’re burning daylight.”

He looked over her head to where the windows showed their unchanging view of pelting snow and ice. “Such as it is,” he said.

4.

Lyle finally caught a break just before noon. The warrant to search Wendall Sullivan’s miserable rental house came through around nine, and he had spent a good chunk of the morning going through Sullivan’s room, examining each and every paper, leafing through the books, taking apart the bed, and searching the drawers inside and out. He had pulled the dresser and nightstand away from the wall to see if Sullivan had concealed something, anything, along their hidden surfaces. Nothing.

He was digging into the pockets of the clothing hanging in the closet when he found it. An old peacoat with nothing in its pockets jingled when he slid it out of the way. Lyle shook it again. Another jingle. He traced the stitching of the pockets again, more carefully.

There. A rip in the lining. Lyle pulled the coat off its hanger and fished his nonregulation Swiss Army knife out of his pants. He slid the tip of the knife in at one end of the coat and slashed the lining open. A shower of small change, paper clips, lint, and crumpled receipts fell to the floor. Lyle got down on his knees and started in on the receipts. McDonald’s. Dunkin’ Donuts. Gas. Gas. Bob’s Self Storage Units.

He smoothed the small paper out, trying to read the details. It was dated last March. Two months after Sullivan had gotten out of Fishkill. One hundred twenty dollars charged to his card. No other details. No indication that it was a unit rental. Bob’s sold cardboard boxes and rented trucks and those pod things people used when they moved. Lyle trusted his nose, though, and right now it was telling him Sullivan hadn’t needed any U-Seal-It packing tape last March. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and placed a call.

“This better be pretty goddamn important.” Eric McCrea’s voice was rusty with sleep.

“Get your gear on,” Lyle said. “You’re coming in early today.”

5.

The church camp was empty. Russ searched the main building first, a deep-eaved shingle-sided structure that was basically one football-field-sized room with a kitchen in the middle and toilets on each end. He could see where a leak had indeed sprung; if it was Mikayla’s father who had fixed it, he tidied up well after himself, but the floorboards and wall were stained with a film of ice. Clare met him on the wide porch as he came out. “Can I call from here?” She thumbed back toward the truck. “I can’t hear myself think with the rain on the cab roof.”

The snow and hail was thinning out, replaced with icy rain that pounded on every surface like a pellet-gun attack. “Sure,” he said. “It’s clear. Don’t touch anything, just in case.”

“I won’t.” She went into the meetinghouse. Russ tightened his hood around his head and waded through the slop of slush and snow to search the individual cabins scattered among the thick pine trees framing the central building. They were small and spare, just empty bunk frames and hooks along the walls and a tiny water closet squeezed into one corner. They were empty, too, and, given the smell of damp and disuse, had been since last September. Russ stepped out of the last cabin, latched it tight, and turned just in time to hear a crack overhead. He slammed himself flat against the door. A thick, ice-encrusted pine branch crashed to the ground, so close he could feel the whiskery brush of needles as it fell.

He looked up. The tree’s other branches yawed toward the ground, the weight of the accumulating ice spreading over every needle and twig. The stump left by the breaking branch stood out jagged and white against the near-black bark.
Shit.

He stomped back to the meeting hall, registering for the first time how his boots were breaking through a crust of ice before sinking into the slurry below.

He kicked the rest of the snow off against the meetinghouse porch and went inside. “Clare—”

She held up one finger. “No,” she said to her cell phone. “I haven’t decided yet.” She turned away from him. “No, thanks, Karen, I don’t need to be represented yet. And if I do, it’ll be under canon law, not civil.” She was standing in the middle of the empty space, not touching anything, like she promised. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. And thank Geoff for us again.” There was a pause. “Yeah, I figure”—she checked her watch—“about four hours from now.” She turned back around and smiled tentatively at Russ. “I will. Bye.” She folded her phone and slipped it into her pocket.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“We’re all set. Geoff is going over to turn up the heat, and the man who plows for the Burnses will clear out our driveway.”

“I don’t mean that. What’s this about a decision and needing a lawyer?”

She looked up at the old-fashioned tin light fixture overhead. “Russ—”

“Clare…”

She threw up her hands. “I was looking for the right time to tell you.”

“Tell me what, exactly?” His voice was harsh. He tried to bring it under control. “Are you in trouble? Over a church thing? That’s what canon law is, right? Church law?”

She nodded. “The bishop—” She sighed. “The bishop’s given me an ultimatum. Either I resign my cure quietly, or I face a possible disciplinary hearing for sexual misconduct.”

“Sexual—!” He stared. Then he got it. Her bishop had put two and two together and gotten three, just like everyone else. “Because you’re pregnant.”

“Because I was pregnant before we got married. Yes.”

“But—” He tried to shove his hand into his hair but hit the furred edge of his hood instead. He yanked it down. “You talked to him. Right? I thought you had to confess and repent.” Goddamn ridiculous church rules. This was why he wasn’t religious.