Killing Bliss (23 page)

Cade didn't know much about Bliss, but what she said tied in with his criminal record.

"A man called Wayne Grover took us to Belle's place, kind of a rundown farmhouse outside of Seattle." She got up again and went back to the window, set her bottom on the low ledge and crossed her arms. "He was my caseworker, Beauty's too, as it turned out." She rubbed her forehead, looked tired suddenly, as if she were running out of energy. "He said he'd put us somewhere safe." The last was a murmur, a note to herself. "What he did was put us in hell..."

Chapter 15

Damn. Cade coped better with story-telling mode, and it looked as though Addy did as well. The second she made it personal, she'd taken on the air of that lost kid she'd been years before.

He forced himself to a professional stillness he didn't feel, resisted the urge to take her in his arms, tell her everything would be okay. He needed to hear this and, more than that, she needed to get it out. "You mentioned an 'awful night,'" he said. "Tell me about it."

She surprised him by pushing away from the window ledge and coming to sit beside him. "Turn more lights on," she said. "I need to see your face."

"Why?"

"So I can decide if, after I've told you the whole story, I need to hop the next train out of town before you call the men in blue." Gone was her wistful expression, the look of melancholy; she was all business now, sharp-eyed and focused. "I don't usually trust people much. Especially ones who were cops." She stopped, rubbed her palms together. She looked edgy again, afraid. "But this time, I have to. Trust someone, I mean."

"That makes me what? Your only choice?" He turned on the light.

She nodded, looked frustrated.

"Then do it." In order to meet her eyes directly, he altered his position on the sofa, resting one knee on it and leaving one foot on the floor. "Tell me the whole story. Get it out, and we'll see where we go from there. Okay?"

For a time all she did was breathe. The sound of it filled the quiet room. Then she mirrored his position on the sofa, settled in as if to ground herself, prepare for the words she was about to say. "When I was a teenager," she said. "I was... involved in a murder." The last four words came out so fast it was as if they'd burned her tongue.

"Whose murder?" he asked, hating himself for having to ask a lying question, and grateful she didn't register his lack of shock.

"My foster mother's, Belle Bliss."

He kept his face impassive. "Go on."

"We'd been at the Bliss place about a month when Frank raped Beauty in the barn. More of a shed, really. Dirty place, leaky, full of moldy hay. He kept her there for a long time. He had a knife..." She closed her eyes, looked as though she were struggling to sort through the ugliness. "When he let her go, she was a mess, hurting something awful, had a cut here"—she ran a hand over her collarbone area—"but Belle didn't care, wouldn't get a doctor." She stopped, and her forehead crinkled as if she'd remembered something long forgotten. "You know what she did? She hit Frank with a rolled up newspaper, across the back, like he was a dog who'd messed on the carpet. Then she went into the kitchen and got a bottle of whiskey—or something." She shook her head. "She said getting a doctor involved would mean police and police meant trouble. Frank was 'just havin' some fun,' she said, and Beauty better get used to it, because 'Frankie' wouldn't be the last man to 'dip his wick.'" Her expression hot and sick, she added, "I've never forgotten those words."

"No, I guess not."

She took a deep breath, went on, "Gus wasn't there when it happened. Some social worker had come, taken him downtown"—she shook her head, looked confused—"something about finding out who he was... I can't remember. But I know Frank wouldn't have done it if Gus had been around to stop him. Anyway, when Gus got back and found out what happened, he went after Frank. Nearly killed him before Belle broke things up—"

"How did she do that?"

"Not with a rolled up paper." Addy winced. "This time, she used a poker. Really tore Gus up." She touched her face fleetingly.

"That'd do it."

"After that, she locked us all in our room—Beauty's and mine—on the third floor, more of an attic really. She told me to 'fix up my stupid friends' and keep my mouth shut." She glanced away in disgust. "I remember her—and Frank—shoving Gus into the room, him stumbling to his knees, and Belle kicking him in the back so he fell facedown." She moistened her lips.

"You were scared," Cade said, his gut knotted with fury.

"Terrified. Belle was a horror, and Frank—" She let out a breath. "Anyway, after they left, when Beauty wasn't sobbing into—or pounding on—her pillow, she banged on the door, screaming how she was going to kill Frank—and Belle—the first chance she got. She was crazy, wild crazy. Gus tried to calm her down, but he wasn't in such good shape himself, could hardly see because of all the blood in his eyes. And his face..." She swallowed. "It looked like the poker had torn away part of his cheek. Beauty stopped yelling when he promised he'd take care of the Blisses 'for good' when the time was right. I told him he was as crazy as her, that nobody wanted to kill anyone, that we all had to keep it together, think things through." Her eyes looked into his, fervent and questioning. "Gus didn't really mean it, just said it to make Beauty stop crying."

"What time was this?" He ignored her defense of Vanelleto, wanted to forge through the ugly scene she described, merge it with Grover's more objective account, Frank Bliss's statement to the police.

"I'm not sure. Midafternoon sometime? I knew I needed to get to the bathroom, find some towels for Beauty and especially for Gus. He was bleeding so bad.... Anyway, I took the hinges off the door and sneaked down. The bathroom was on the second floor."

Impressed as hell by a thirteen-year-old girl with enough wit and know-how not to be held back by a locked door, Cade nodded, said, "What about Frank?"

"After he walked out that bedroom door with Belle, I never saw him again. And never want to." She shuddered and massaged the knee she had propped on the sofa. "Not long after my trip to the bathroom, I saw Wayne Grover's car pull up outside."

"You must have called from the window. Didn't he hear you?" The question was a throwaway, because he knew they hadn't connected with Grover. If they had, things would have turned out differently.

She gave him an odd look. "We didn't call."

He frowned. "I don't get it."

"Belle Bliss was a prostitute, Cade. Men came to the house at all hours of the day and night. Grover came oftener than most."

He hoped the shock pummeling his brain didn't show. "You sure about that?"

"Sure enough. Belle wasn't the kind to be quiet about things, and Gus saw—Well, he saw enough to prove it."

"Which was?"

"You're not going to let this go, are you?" She sounded annoyed, as if he were shoving her down a path she'd rather avoid.

"I'm having a hard time accepting that an experienced social worker like Grover placed kids with a practicing hooker."

Her eyes narrowed. "Who said he was 'experienced'?"

"If he was your and Beauty's caseworker, he had a track record of some kind—had to have. They generally don't hand runaway teens to the new kid in the department."
Nice rally, Harding.

She eyed him a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe not, but I'm telling you Belle was a prostitute, and she had the whips and chains to prove it."

"Come on."

"I'm not kidding. She called them her 'tools of the trade,' showed them to Gus—she was always coming on to him—asked if he was interested in a demo. He told her to fu—He blew her off."

"And you think Grover was a customer."

"Do I know for sure? No. But why else would he put kids with her? Because we certainly weren't the first. It had to be some kind of payoff. Maybe she gave him free... whatever, in exchange for a monthly government check." She bunched her shoulders. "That's what Gus figured. Anyway, we weren't about to take any chances on the guy who'd put us with Belle in the first place. That would have been stupid. What we planned to do was run, get out of there. Go as far and as fast as we could." She drained the last of the water from her bottle, set the empty on the maple coffee table. "All Grover did was complicate things."

"How so?" Cade asked, but only half listened. His mind raced, struggled to morph the harassed but helpful social worker he'd met over lunch into a man who used the DSHS to fund his sexcapades. God knew, anything was possible when it came to sexual appetites—and the ways people appeased them.

"When he got out of the car, he was carrying a baby—maybe a year or two old. The idiot was bringing Belle another foster child."

At the mention of Josh Moore, Cade's heart slowed. Again, Addy had his full attention.

"A little boy," she said, then went dead quiet.

Tension snapped around the room like an invisible lightning storm. Addy got up from the bed and paced the cabin before coming back to stand in front of him.

"I never heard his name, never even saw him," she added. "He was gone when—" She stopped abruptly, rubbed her hands down her denim-covered thighs. "Grover didn't stay long, because a few minutes later his car pulled out of the driveway. Belle, with the baby in her arms, was smiling and waving at him like"—she frowned as if the image needed weight—"like one of those homemaker types in a fifties magazine ad, like it was any old normal day, and there weren't two kids upstairs, one bleeding all over the room, beaten half to death by her, and the other raped by her sicko son."

"Seems to me there were three kids up there—one who'd seen more than any thirteen-year-old should have."

"Me? I was fine. Scared, but fine." She looked at him, her eyes bright and sad. "And I was lucky. At least I was all in one piece. Beauty patched up okay, but Gus..."

One piece? Cade didn't see it that way, but didn't argue. What he saw was that the events of the afternoon of the murder had provided plenty of motivation for Vanelleto and Beauty, aka Dianna Lintz, to kill Belle Bliss—and try to kill her son.

"And the boy, what about him?" he asked.

Her expression bleak, she said, "He never stopped crying from the second Grover left. Belle did her usual thing, shoved him into her room—there was a beat-up crib in there—and ignored him. Her bedroom was off the living room at the bottom of the stairs, and the stairway hall magnified every cry. I heard her yelling at him, telling him to 'shut up, or she'd do it for him.'"

She shook her head. "Can you imagine? Yelling at a baby. He must have been hungry and awfully frightened. All alone like that." She closed her eyes a moment. "I wanted to go downstairs, do something, but Gus wouldn't let me. He said he was afraid I'd run into Frank, that he'd do to me what he'd done to Beauty. He said he'd take care of the boy on our way out.

"We were going to take off that night the first clear chance we got, but things went wrong." She tugged an earlobe. "Belle and Frank were drinking. A lot. The baby was crying. The TV was blaring. Brett came home, turned on the stereo, and right away started to fight with Frank, I think about Beauty. Brett kind of liked Beauty, I think. When Frank laughed, shouted something about 'doing me' next, Brett must have gone for him. We heard stuff breaking, lots of cursing, and Belle screaming—shrieking really—at both of them. It got crazy down there. I think Brett left, because I heard the door bang a couple of times." She cupped her hands over her ears as if to mute the din from that long-ago night, then dropped them to her sides and clenched them into fists. "But that didn't stop Belle and Frank. They kept right on yelling at one another, over the stereo, the TV, the crying baby. Then Gus said it was 'now or never,' that while there was so much noise, and they were busy hollering at each other, they'd never miss us. He wanted us to wait upstairs while he went down to check things out. I think he meant to get Belle's keys, take her car. I'm not sure." She shrugged. "Beauty, of course, wouldn't let him go without her."

"And you?"

"Gus told me to stay behind, pack some of our stuff. He said he'd call me when it was safe. By the time he did—"

"Belle Bliss was dead," He finished with his own assumption, then asked the question he was loath to put into words. "Did you see it happen? Did you see who killed the woman?" He forced himself to stay seated, resisted the urge to go to her.