Vanished in the Night (22 page)

She wasn’t sure. “Yesterday, maybe?”

“Yeah. You know, I always make my best decisions when I’ve had no sleep and have been living on an emotional roller coaster for several days.”

She poked him in the ribs. “Hey, I decided to sleep with you on no sleep after riding an emotional roller coaster.”

“And that was an excellent decision. But you
can’t really expect to make a bunch of those at once, right?” He chuckled.

She smiled. “You know, you’re kind of a sarcastic son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

She sighed. “I think we’re going to get along just fine. By the way, I think my father was blackmailing someone.”

That woke him up.

Zach had decided to look over the bank statements the next morning. They weren’t going anywhere, and he’d rather be naked in her bed.

“So this was what you wanted to show me?” he asked now.

“They’re from the year that Max went missing.” She sat back at the table, sipping her coffee. “I found them in my dad’s stuff. I was looking to see if he had a will or anything.”

He let out a low whistle. Six deposits of $9,500 each.

“Do you have any idea where your parents might have gotten that kind of cash?” He looked up at her, hoping there might be some other explanation.

“Not a clue.” She took another long sip of coffee.

He set the bank statements down on the table. People got paid that kind of money in cash for a few
things. Drugs, sometimes gambling debts. But more often, blackmail. And the timing was way too coincidental. “So you think your parents knew something about Max’s death? Something someone paid them to keep quiet about?”

She bit her lip. “Not my mom. She was weak, but she loved Max. If she knew something, I don’t think she would have kept quiet about it. Plus, she was still hoping he’d come home. Even as she was dying, sometimes she’d cry out for him.”

She stopped speaking for a second, then she swallowed hard. “I think my dad knew something. All that stuff about me not knowing what I was getting into, and now this money . . . I think he knew something, and I think someone killed him because of it.”

“So who do you think your father was blackmailing?” Zach set the bank statements down on the table.

She wavered. Blackmail was such an ugly word. Was her father capable of that? He would have made some kind of excuse for it, rationalized it somehow. She could practically hear him now: Whatever he knew wouldn’t bring Max back, so why shouldn’t he profit from it in some way? He’d make it sound pragmatic and reasonable. Or his other favorite, he’d make it someone else’s fault. Pretty much everything that went wrong in George Osborne’s life was someone else’s fault.

Veronica likened it to what she liked to call the “some dude” phenomenon she saw in the emergency room. Half the people who came in were there because of the actions of “some dude.” Or the equally infamous “two dudes.”

“I don’t know who. I don’t know why. I don’t even know for sure that he was blackmailing anyone. Was he capable of it?” Veronica put her head down on the table, pillowed on her arms. “Yeah. I think he was.”

“I’m sorry,” Zach said softly.

She snorted a little. “Me, too.”

16

“So what can you tell us about Susan Tennant?” Zach asked. He and Frank were sitting in the Bean Conference Room with Josh Wolfe and Elise Jacobs, the detectives who had caught the Tennant case.

“Not a hell of a lot,” Elise said. She was a tall woman with a café-au-lait complexion and a no-nonsense attitude. “Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything. She was quiet, kept to herself. She seemed to have spent every waking moment running her foundation.”

“And she ended up tied up in her house, choking on her own vomit?” Frank asked.

“It sounds so pretty when you say it like that.” Josh Wolfe leaned back in his chair. He was a big man. Nearly six foot three and well over two hundred pounds, but without an ounce of fat on him.

“I’m like a poet.” Frank smiled at him. “How’s married life treating you?”

Josh had recently gotten married to a psychologist he’d met during the course of a case last year. “It’s nice. Really nice.” He smiled.

Frank kicked Zach under the table. “See? I’m not the only one who likes marriage.”

“No one likes marriage as much as you, Frank,” Elise said. “So why do you think our dead nurse is related to your twenty-year-old bones?”

Zach explained about the connection between Susan Tennant and Max Shelden.

“So because she worked at the school when he disappeared, you think she had something to do with his reappearance?” Elise looked skeptical.

“He didn’t just disappear. It looks like he was beaten to death and buried right on the school grounds,” Zach pointed out. “Someone dug him up and brought him down here to Sacramento. Someone who knew exactly where he’d been buried.”

There had been no other holes dug around the school. Whoever had dug Max up had gone to the exact spot.

“Susan Tennant wasn’t the only one who worked there at the time,” Elise said.

“She’s the only one who turned up dead less than twenty-four hours after Max’s bones appeared.” Zach countered.

“Okay. You’ve got a point there,” she said.

“We’ve been doing some research on her,” Josh said. “We saw that she’d worked at the Sierra School. She left there late in 1992.”

Zach and Frank exchanged looks. Zach said, “That’s the year after Max Shelden disappeared.”

“Here’s the thing,” Elise said. “She left there after the school year had already started, which we thought was sort of weird. Especially since she didn’t have a new job lined up. She came back to Sacto, moved in with her folks, and promptly had a little nervous breakdown.”

That was interesting. Zach leaned forward. “What kind of nervous breakdown?”

“She took a lot of pills. It’s unclear whether it was really enough to kill her or not. Parents found her, had her stomach pumped, and slapped her into a comfy little institution for a couple of months. She got out and has lived a life of exemplary service ever since.” Elise tapped the eraser end of a pencil on the papers in front of her.

“Serving at-risk teenagers the whole time?” Frank asked.

Elise nodded. “The kind of kids she probably got to know up at the Sierra School. We were wondering if something had happened up there that precipitated her quitting the job, trying to off herself, and then
dedicating herself to the health and well-being of others. I mean, this chick didn’t even date from what I can tell.”

“You think watching a kid get beaten to death might be a precipitating event?” Frank scratched his chin.

“Sounds pretty precipitating to me,” Josh said.

Zach couldn’t argue.

“I still don’t get why the bones suddenly showed up here.” Elise drummed her fingers on the tabletop.

“We don’t either,” Zach admitted. “But something stirred somebody up. That’s for sure.”

“So what do you want to do now?” Josh asked.

What Zach wanted was a good long look at their case files. “How about we pool our evidence here? Maybe there’s something at Susan Tennant’s house that’ll tie her to our case.”

“Might be worthwhile,” Elise mused. “I thought we were working some freaky sex thing. I wasn’t looking for anything to tie her to your nasty bone thing, but maybe there’s something. We searched her house, her office, her van, and didn’t find anything interesting.”

Zach’s head shot up. “She had a van?”

“Yeah. She used it to transport kids around. Good-size passenger van.” Josh pulled a photo out of one of the files and slid it across the table to Zach.

Zach looked over at Frank. “A van would be handy for moving a set of old bones around.”

“It would at that,” Frank agreed.

“And that construction site is only a few blocks from Tennant’s teen center. She’d have to drive past it nearly every day on her way to and from work,” Zach pointed out.

Frank gestured for Josh and Elise to pass over their files. “Let’s see what you got from the van.”

Veronica opened the door and let Zach in. She wrapped her arms around his neck and started kissing him.

“I can’t stay,” Zach managed to gasp out.

“Are you sure?” Veronica looked up into his eyes. Her pupils were so dilated there was practically no iris left and she was breathing hard.

Zach smiled. Damn, it was nice to know he wasn’t alone in this. “I’m not happy about it, but I’m sure. I think we might have a break in the case.”

“What kind of break?” Wow. She came down to earth fast. Zach tried to still his own breathing to catch up with her.

“A connection to another case. It’s all pretty circumstantial now, but we’ve met with the detectives on the other case. We’re pooling information now, and
that’s how we’re going to trip this guy up. There’ll be something someone heard. Something someone saw. Something left behind. Something will turn up—then we’ll nail the son of a bitch.” He felt it in his bones. This was the big break. This was where the case was going to crack wide open.

“Another case? Someone else has been murdered?” The look of horror on Veronica’s face made Zach slow down. He forgot sometimes when he was dealing with civilians.

“Maybe you should sit down.” He guided her toward the love seat.

“I think that was one of the first things you ever said to me. If it’s going to be one of our inside jokes, I think we need to work on it a little.” She sat down.

He felt that funny buzzy feeling in his chest. Inside jokes. That was something steady couples had.

“So,” she said. “Who else is dead?”

“So far we’ve found one other person connected with the Sierra School who died recently under suspicious circumstances.”

“So far?” Her head jerked up. “Do you think there’re more? What the hell’s going on?”

He held up his hands to slow her barrage of questions. “I don’t know yet. I don’t even know that it’s connected to your brother or your father, but it’s too much of a coincidence not to look into it.”

“Who is this person? Can you tell me?” She tucked her knees up underneath her. She looked so small.

Zach hesitated. Susan Tennant’s death had been reported on the news, but its connection to Veronica’s father and brother was not common knowledge. Who would she tell, though? “You understand this is an ongoing investigation, right?”

She cocked her head to one side. “I deal with confidential information every day. I could lose my job if I talk about a patient. So if you’re warning me to be quiet about something, I get it.”

Good. “Susan Tennant,” he told her.

She froze. “The nurse who ran that program for at-risk teens?”

He nodded. “Did you know her?”

“I worked on her. She died in my emergency room. I was one of the people trying to resuscitate her.” Veronica got up and started to pace.

“Tina recognized her; we’d been to a seminar she gave a year or two ago.” She twisted her hands in front of her as she paced. “She’d dedicated her life to helping kids. What connection did she have with the Sierra School?”

“She was the school nurse there the year that Max attended. She left pretty soon after he disappeared.”

“How could she have had anything to do with what happened to Max?” Veronica asked, still pacing.

“We think she was the one who dug him up and put him in that construction site. Her clinic is only a few blocks away.”

Zach wanted to grab her hands and still them. He wanted to pull her down next to him and hold her. She wasn’t ready for that, though. She was still processing what he was telling her. He had to let her do it her own way, even if it was killing him.

She gave him a startled look. “Why on earth would she do that?”

He shook his head. “We don’t know. We might never know. One thing for certain, though, she wanted him to be found. She wanted Max’s bones to tell us their story—and unless I miss my guess, she died for it.”

Gary sat in his truck outside the St. Elizabeth’s emergency room entrance. The Pop-Tart had driven here in her little Honda. It was parked a few spaces over right now. It had been pitifully easy to follow her and equally as easy to sit here and watch her car. When the time came, it would be simple to find an opportunity when she was distracted and alone. She was so tiny, it would be easy to take her down.

It figured she was a nurse. Another whore. It hadn’t taken long before she was spreading her legs for the cop. The thought of it disgusted Gary.

Now she was inside, pretending to be some angel of mercy. She was as bad as Susan Tennant. Maybe even worse. She was where it had all begun.

He started up his truck and pulled out of the parking lot. He had watched the staff go in and out of the employee entrance and he understood the rhythm of the place. When it was time, he’d be ready.

It felt good to be back in the emergency room. Tina was right; they were both adrenaline junkies. Thank goodness they’d found a socially acceptable way to get their jollies.

She told Tina, “Okay, I gave the drunk in number four his discharge papers. Supposedly his girlfriend is coming to pick him up. Let’s hope she’s had less to drink than he has. The kid in number seven is ready to go, too. His forehead’s stitched up and the doc lectured him on playing capture the flag after dark.” She slapped the two charts down on the counter, rubbed her hands together, and asked, “Who’s next?”

Tina stared at her. “You got some, didn’t you?”

Veronica tried not to look up. She could feel the smile spreading across her face. “Got some what?” she asked innocently, but a giggle escaped.

“You know what. A little something something. Was it the cop with the cute butt?”

“Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t.” The smile was going to split her face.

Tina clapped her hands. “Oh. My. God. I need details. Now.”

Veronica shook her head. “Do I look like the kind of girl who kisses and tells?”

“That good? So good you can’t talk?” Tina clasped her hands under her chin.

Veronica looked up at her. “So good I can barely walk.”

“Girlfriend! Yes, yes, oh yes!”

“That’s pretty much what I said. With a few ‘oh Gods’ thrown in for good measure.” She laughed.