Call Of The Witch (34 page)

“
Are there any in
town?”

“
I can check.”

“
Okay, do
that.”

“
I have a question,” said
Brittany.

“
Go.”

“
Am I the only one
thinking that the skinny-armed woman could be Amanda Brewbaker?
That would explain so much, wouldn’t it, like why she only talked
in whispers, how she knew Kelly needed medicine; how she managed to
get Kelly’s medicine. And why just a minute ago Kelly asked us to
send her daddy up here. She didn’t ask for her mother.”

“
No,” I said, “because
Kelly told us the skinny lady gave her a big hug just before they
dropped her off in the alley. She couldn’t have done that if she
was with you all morning.”

“
Kelly could be lying
about that part to provide her mother with an alibi.”

Dominic asked, “So what do we do now?”

I checked my watch. “It’s almost noon. Unless
I miss my guess, Carlos should be back up here any second wanting
to go––”

“
Lunch time!” said Carlos.
The elevator doors had barely opened before he shouted it out.
“Come on. Who’s going? I’m buying.”

“
You’re buying?” I said.
“Aren’t you broke now?”

“
Oh yeah. Hey can you lend
me some money? I’ll pay you back next payday.”

“
Payday was three days
ago.”

“
Yes, and I gave all my
money away last night. So either you can buy lunch, or you can lend
me some money and I can buy lunch. Your call.”

“
I’ll buy lunch,” said
Brittany. Clearly, she was new to the game. Carlos and I agreed
that would be satisfactory.

“
Count me out,” said
Dominic. “I have to get this evidence downtown, get it separated,
cataloged and then send it to forensics.”

“
You can meet us there,” I
said.

“
Where? The
Perc?”

“
Where else?”

“
All right. We’ll
see.”

He said we’ll see, but I knew better.
Dominic’s like a kid with a new toy when it comes to fresh
evidence. Even though we have a state-of-the-art forensics lab with
highly qualified technicians to run it, he still likes to hang
around and watch the system work. And I think that’s a good thing.
If he wasn’t there bugging the techs, then they wouldn’t be in a
hurry to process our evidence and get him out of their hair. It’s a
symbiotic relationship at best.

Lunch at the Perc almost never tastes as good
as it does right after a solved case. And though our case wasn’t
exactly solved, the major criteria surrounding it were satisfied.
Kelly was home safe, no one got hurt and the newest member of the
detective squad, Detective Brittany Olson, proved herself a
qualified and capable addition to our team. Together, it all made
for some of the best tasting lunch I had in months. Of course,
having Brittany pick up the tab didn’t hurt much either.

We spent most of the lunch hour filling
Brittany in on the events surrounding the ransom drop. I told her
about the money pick up at the bank, about the stakeout formation
and the sniper up on the roof. “We had all the bases covered,” I
said. “Or so we thought.”

Between mouthfuls, Carlos filled her in on
the rest. He told her about Brewbaker dropping the money bag over
the railing into the water, and about Dominic wading in to get it
after we thought the kidnappers had failed to show.

“
Through astute
observation,” he said, shamefully trying to impress Brittany,
“standing on the bridge like a captain surveying his crew, I
noticed what looked like drag lines in the creek bottom left by the
cast net and rope. I told Dominic to check it out, and sure enough,
I was right.”

I gave him a look designed to wound. “Carlos,
that’s not––”

“
Not important, I know. It
doesn’t matter who noticed what. The important thing is that we
were all out there together, doing our jobs, working as one to save
a little girl and bring her home safely.”

The rest of the story went much like that.
Suffice it to say, without Carlos, the sun might not have even
risen that morning; he was that magnificent.

By the end of lunch, it was Brittany’s and my
turn to fill Carlos in on the details Kelly provided us in her
hospital room interview. He seemed only mildly interested until we
got into the connect-the-dots issues that Dominic, Brittany and I
discussed in the hospital hall. Then he became curious.

“
So what you’re telling me
is that you think Kelly’s lying to you?”

“
I’m not sure if she’s
lying,” I said, “so much as I think she’s withholding some
truths.”

“
Do you think she got a
look at her captors?”

“
I don’t know if we…wait a
minute. Maybe I do. Brit, do you still have that photo of Kelly the
kidnappers sent us.”

“
No. They sent that to
Brewbaker’s phone, but we forwarded it to Carlos.”

“
Yeah, I should have it,”
he said. He took his phone out and handed it to me, explaining, “My
hands are greasy.”

I gave the phone to Brittany. “Would you
mind? I’m all thumbs with those things.”

“
Of course.” She took the
phone, poked the screen a few times and pulled up the picture.
“Interesting. Look at this.” She handed me the phone.

“
Uh-huh, just as I
thought.”

“
What?”

I turned the phone around for Carlos to see.
“She’s not blindfolded. Unless whoever took this picture was
wearing the hood, then Kelly saw who took her picture.”

Brittany said, “You think we should go back
to the hospital and talk to her?”

“
No.” I dismissed the idea
with a light shake of my head. “They probably sent her home
already. Besides, we need to get her statement down on tape. It’ll
be interesting to see how it changes once she’s had a day or so to
think about it.”

“
You think so?”

“
I know so. I’ve been
doing this a long time. I know when something isn’t adding up. And
Detectives, something definitely isn’t adding up.”

“
What about the
footprints?” Carlos said.

Brittany looked surprised. “What
footprints?”

“
At the creek. I forgot to
mention. We found these ridiculously large footprints in the mud.
Whoever left them must have been a giant.” He spread his hands out
over the table approximately fifteen inches apart. “What do you
think, Tony, like this?”

“
At least,” I
said.

“
How deep?” Brittany
asked.

“
How deep
what?”

“
The footprints. Were they
sunk deep into the mud or not?”

“
I suppose.” Carlos
dropped his hands. “Why do you ask?”

I said, “She wants to know how heavy the guy
was. And no, they weren’t set deep into the mud at all. They
weren’t any deeper than ours––if even.”

She shook her head. “Then he wasn’t a
giant.”

“
Of course,” I said. “He
wasn’t actually a.... Wait a sec. A giant?”

“
What are you thinking,
Tony?”

“
The other day Lionel
Brewbaker told me that Amanda’s theatrical troupe was performing at
the dinner theater.”

“
Yeah. So?”

“
He said the name of the
play they were doing was called, Valley of the Giants.”

“
Yeah, I’m still not
seeing it?”

“
I’m thinking the shoes
that left those prints were props that the theater uses in their
play.”

Carlos snapped his fingers and pointed at me.
“Yesterday when we searched Hector’s van, we found some theater
costumes, including a crazy large pair of pants and shirt. Looked
like they could fit a giant.”

“
Did you find crazy large
shoes?”

“
No.”

“
Then we have to assume
someone got a hold of them ahead of time and planned to use them
all along to try and throw us off track.”

“
You’ve got to admit, it’s
clever,” Brittany said.

“
Too clever,” I answered.
“At least for Hector and Martinez. If they’re involved, I have to
believe there’s a third person involved as well, a mastermind who
could pull all the strings from a distance. Brit, are you sure that
Amanda Brewbaker didn’t use the phone the entire time you were with
her this morning?”

“
Yes, I’m
sure.”

“
And she never left your
sight.”

“
No, except when she went
to the bathroom.”

“
How many times did she do
that while we were gone?”

“
I don’t know, three or
four, but I made her leave her phone with me.”

“
That’s a lot of bathroom
breaks for…what, an hour? Hour and a half?”

“
She said she was
nervous.”

Carlos said, “I pee a lot when I’m
nervous.”

I ignored him. “Amanda could have had a
second phone,” I said. “She’s probably been pulling strings behind
our backs all along.”

“
Tony, I….” Brittany’s
face grew suddenly pale. “I didn’t think about a second
phone.”

“
It’s all right. None of
us did.” I took a sip of iced tea, dabbed my mouth with a paper
napkin and laid it across my empty plate. “Come on. We have to get
back to the office.”

“
But we haven’t had
dessert,” Carlos complained.

“
You can have dessert
later. Come on.”

As we slid out of the booth, I heard Carlos
say, “Sure, no dessert when Brittany’s buying. Could’ve seen that
one coming.”

Brittany peeled a couple of twenties off a
fold of bills she had in her pocket and tossed them on the
table.

We were just stepping off the elevator on the
second floor of the Justice Center when Spinelli called me on the
phone. I answered, “Dominic, we’re here in the building. Where are
you?”

“
Oh, man. Tony, you’ve got
to hurry. You won’t believe it. You just won’t believe
it.”

“
Won’t believe
what?”

“
I gotta show you.
Hurry.”

“
All right. Tell me where
you are.”

“
The media room. Second
floor.”

“
We’re there
now.”

I hung the phone up at nearly the same
instant I opened the door to the media room where Dominic was
sitting at a console, reviewing scores of security tapes he had
acquired within the past three days.

“
Tony! Carlos! Brit!” he
seemed about as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. “Come here.
You won’t believe this!”

The three of us hurried around the console
and huddled behind him in front of a twenty-one inch monitor,
queued up and paused on what looked like a pole-mount video view of
a highway bus stop.

“
Look here,” he said.
“Remember how I told you that all the calls made from Kelly’s phone
to Lionel’s were relayed off various cell towers around the Bay
State area?”

“
Yes.”

“
And I told you that all
the towers were located along major truck routes, state roads and
county interchanges?”

“
Yes, Dominic. I
remember.”

“
Well, see I got to
thinking after I found that bus token among Kelly’s belongings,
that major truck routes are also major bus routes.”

“
Okay?”

He pointed at the monitor. “I’ve watched all
these security videos before, matching up the time and date stamps
with the exact time each of the various cell calls came in to
Lionel’s phone from Kelly’s.”

I was beginning to get impatient with him,
wishing he’d simply get to the point and tell us what he’d found.
But Dominic’s funny like that. If you don’t give him his moment in
the spotlight, it deflates his ego and knocks the wind out of his
sails. When that happens, it’s hard to pick him back up. He mopes
around feeling sorry for himself for hours, sometimes days. Unlike
Carlos, who bounces back from a knock down like a rubber ball.
Between the two of them, I guess it balances out.

“
At first I was only
reviewing the tapes looking for a van,” he continued. “I mean, not
just a van, but a dark colored SUV as well. You remembered how I
said that Dmitry Kovalchuk owned a dark colored SUV.”

“
I remember.”

“
Right, so I wanted to be
thorough. If I didn’t see an SUV or a dark colored van in the shot,
I figured the kidnappers were near enough to the tower to make the
call, but just not in the camera’s view.”

“
Dominic, I don’t mean to
rush you but….”

“
Okay, okay. The thing is,
when I found the bus token in with Kelly’s stuff, it started me
thinking along totally different lines. I wondered what if the
kidnappers rode a bus to all these places, knowing that we’d be
looking for their vehicle.”

“
That’s good thinking. If
there’s one thing we keep giving these kidnappers credit for, it’s
for being awfully clever.”

“
Exactly. And you know who
else is awfully clever?”

“
Who?”

Dominic hit the play button on the console
and let the security tape advance. The four of us stood around the
monitor watching as a municipal bus pulled to a stop in front of a
roadside Waffle House and let off two passengers: a boy and a
girl.