Night Sins (15 page)

“Don't say that.”

“Why not? It's true. If I'd been there to pick him up, he would be with us now.”

“You were trying to save a life, Hannah.”

“Kathleen told you that, didn't she?” He didn't answer. He didn't have to; she knew Kathleen too well. “Did she tell you I went 0 for two last night? Ida Bergen died and I lost Josh in the bargain.”

“They'll find him. You have to believe that, Hannah. You have to have faith.”

“I had faith that this would never happen,” she said bitterly. “I'm all out of faith.”

He couldn't blame her. He supposed he should have tried to prod her into retracting the statement. He could have wielded that favorite old Catholic club of guilt, but he didn't have the heart for it. In times like these he had enough trouble hanging on to his own faith. He wasn't hypocrite enough to castigate someone else.

The fire went out of Hannah abruptly. She heaved a sigh and rubbed her mittened hands over her face and back through her hair. “I'm sorry, Father,” she whispered. “I shouldn't—”

“Don't apologize for how you feel, Hannah. You're entitled to react.”

“And rail at God?” Her mouth twisted up at one corner as a new sheen of tears glazed across her eyes.

“Don't worry about God. He can take it.”

He reached out and tenderly brushed a tear from her cheek with the pad of his thumb. For the first time Hannah noticed he wasn't wearing gloves. His thumb was cold against her skin. Father Tom, the absentminded. He routinely forgot little things like wearing gloves in freezing weather, eating meals, and getting his hair cut. The trait brought out the maternal qualities in all the women of St. Elysius Parish.

“You forgot your gloves again,” she said, drawing his hand down and holding it between hers to warm it. “You'll end up with frostbite.”

He shook off her concern. “More important things on my mind. I wanted to let you know I'm here for you—for you and Paul.”

“Thank you.”

“I've organized a prayer vigil for Josh. Tonight at eight. I'm praying we won't need it by then,” he added, squeezing her hand tight.

“Me, too,” Hannah whispered. She couldn't tell him that she had the sick, hollow feeling her prayers weren't going anywhere, that the pleas did nothing but bounce around inside her head. She clung to his hand a second longer, desperate to absorb some of his strength and faith.

“Would you like to stay for supper?” she asked, scraping together her manners again, and again need and honesty cut through them. “I have a house full of women who don't know what to do except stare at me and thank their lucky stars they aren't in my shoes,” she confided. “It would be nice to break that up. On the menu we have a variation on the miracle of the loaves and fishes—the miracle of the tuna casseroles. I can't imagine there's a can of tuna left in town.”

“Did Ann Mueller bring the kind with the fried onions on top?” he asked, giving her a gentle comic look of speculation, giving her something other than pity.

“And a pan of crème de menthe brownies.”

He grinned and draped an arm around her shoulders, steering her toward the kitchen door. “Then I'm all yours, Dr. Garrison.”

5:28
P.M.
         17°

M
itch walked alone down the hall of Deer Lake Elementary School. Immune to his teasing, Megan had gone off with two of his officers for round two of questioning Josh's hockey buddies and the youth team coaches. Had they seen anything at all? Had Josh talked to them about being afraid of somebody? Had Josh been acting differently? The questions would be asked again and again by this cop, that cop, the next cop, all of them hoping to shake loose a memory. All of them hoping to find some small piece of information that might seem insignificant in itself but fit together with another piece to form a lead. It may have seemed tedious to the people being questioned, and it certainly created mountains of paperwork, but it was necessary.

Mitch had chosen to meet with the schoolteachers and other school personnel for the same purpose. One of his men had already questioned Josh's teacher, Sara Richman. Mitch addressed the entire staff in the cafeteria, conducting the meeting as an informal question-and-answer session. He told them what little he knew, tried to stem the flow of wild rumors, asked them for any information they had. Had anyone been hanging around the school? Had any of the children reported being approached by a stranger?

Mitch studied the faces in the room—the teachers, the cooks, the janitors, the office help—wondering, as a cop, if any one of them could have done this; wondering, as a father, if any of the people who came into contact with his daughter every day could have been a danger to her.

After nearly two hours, he left them to their own discussion of plans for a schoolwide safety assembly, and headed down the long hall for the side door. His head felt like a walnut in a vise. Questions chased each other around and around his brain. Questions with no answers. He had his own staff meeting at six, to talk with his men about what the day had yielded in terms of information, and to brainstorm for ideas. With no real leads and no real suspects, it was difficult to focus the investigation.

As he walked, Mitch couldn't help but notice the miniature lockers that made him feel like a giant, the artwork taped to the walls at his hip level. He caught glimpses of classrooms with pint-size desks. All of it served only to make him more painfully aware of the vulnerability of children.

He had asked to look inside Josh's locker. One of O'Malley's evidence techs had beat him to it, cleaning out Josh's desk and locker of notebooks and textbooks, leaving behind a stash of Gummi Bears and Super Balls and a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo. The detritus of boyhood. Evidence of nothing more than Josh's normalcy and innocence.

Every day this hall was filled with little kids just like Josh, just like his Jessie. It pissed him off to think that all of them would be touched by this crime. Their innocence would be marred like a clean white page streaked by dirty fingers.

Mitch didn't bother to zip his coat as he stepped outside, but he dug his gloves out of his pockets and pulled them on. Day had yielded to night. Security lights shone against the brick walls of the school and illuminated the parking lot at intervals.

The school had been built in 1985 to educate the children of baby boomers and the influx of new families into Deer Lake. The site was on Ramsey Drive, in a newer part of town, just two blocks from the even newer fire station, ensuring disruptions of class every time a fire truck rolled out for duty. The parking lot stretched out before Mitch, edged on two sides by thick rows of spruce trees. The playground sprawled across three acres just to the west. A handy arrangement for parents picking up their kids—or for anyone looking to steal a kid.

Now everywhere Mitch looked he saw hazards, potential for danger, where before he had seen only a nice, neat, quiet town. The knowledge served only to darken his mood. Fishing his keys out of his pocket, he headed for the Explorer.

The truck sat alone in the second row, just out of reach of a light. Mitch stuck the key in the lock of the door, his mind already on the meeting to come and the night beyond that. He wanted to make it to his in-laws before eight o'clock, before Joy could get Jessie into pajamas. He wanted his daughter home with him tonight. A brief oasis of normalcy before another day of madness and frustration.

As he moved to open the truck's door, something caught his eye, something out of place, something on the hood.

Even as he turned, the reaction began—the rush of adrenaline, the tightening of nerves, the instincts coming to attention. Even as he reached for the spiral notebook, his heart was pounding.

He picked it up gingerly, pinching the wire spine between left thumb and forefinger, lifting the opposite edge with the tip of his right forefinger. The cover was dark green, decorated with the image of Snoopy as Joe Cool. Printed in Magic Marker across the top was “Josh Kirkwood 3B.”

Mitch swore. His hands were shaking as he eased the book back down on the hood. He went into the truck and returned with a flashlight and a slim gold pen. Using the pen, he opened the notebook and turned the pages.

Nothing remarkable, just a little boy's doodling. Drawings of race cars and rocket ships and sports heroes. Notes about kids in his class. A boy named Ethan who puked during music—
He herled chunks all over Amy Masons shoes!
A girl named Kate who tried to kiss him at his locker—
gross! gross! gross!
On one page he had carefully traced the Minnesota Vikings' logo and drawn a jersey with the number twelve and the name KIRKWOOD in block letters.

A little boy's dreams and secrets. And tucked in before the final page, a madman's message.

i had a little sorrow, born of a little SIN

CHAPTER 11

D
AY
2
8:41
P.M.
         16°

H
annah took one look at the notebook, turned chalk white, and sank into the nearest chair. It was Josh's, no question. She knew it well. He called it his “think pad.” He carried it everywhere—or had.

“He lost it,” she murmured, rubbing her fingers over the plastic evidence bag, wanting to touch the book. Something of Josh. Something his kidnapper had tossed back at them. A taunt. A cruel flaunting of power.

“What do you mean, he lost it?” Mitch asked, kneeling beside her, trying to get her to look at him instead of the notebook. “When?”

“The day before Thanksgiving. He was frantic. I told him he must have left it at school,” she said. “But he swore he hadn't. We tore the house apart looking for it.”

She remembered that all too well. Paul had come home from racquetball and blown up at the sight of the mess. His family was coming for Thanksgiving. He wanted the house to be perfect, to rub it in to his relatives how well he had done. He hadn't wanted to waste time looking for a stupid notebook he thought could be easily replaced.

Hannah looked down at that “stupid notebook” now and wanted to hug it to her chest and rock it as if it were Josh himself. She wanted to turn to Paul and ask him how he felt about Josh's stupid notebook now, but Paul had yet to come home. She imagined he had gone straight from the search to the prayer vigil—something she couldn't think of facing. Father Tom had understood. Somehow she knew Paul would not.

“He was upset for days,” she murmured. “It was like losing a diary.”

Megan exchanged looks with Mitch. “He must have found it again, though,” she said. “He must have had it with him last night.”

Hannah shook her head, never taking her gaze off the book lying in her lap. “I never saw it again. I can't believe he wouldn't have told me if he found it.”

Lily peeked around the side of the chair, turning an impish smile up at her mother, her blue eyes wide, her golden curls tousled around her head. The notebook caught her eye and she gave a little squeal of delight, pointing a finger at the figure of Snoopy on the cover.

“Mama! Josh!” she declared. Giggling, she reached for the notebook.

Mitch caught the end of the plastic bag and lifted it away from her. Megan took the bag from him. “I'll give this to my guy,” she murmured. “It'll be in the lab first thing in the morning.”

Mitch remained behind to offer empty words of little comfort and less hope. Hannah seemed dazed. A blessing, he supposed. He left her sitting in the wing chair with Lily on her lap and a cop in her kitchen.

Megan waited for him in the Explorer. She had come to the elementary school in a squad car with Joe Peters, the officer who had been helping her interview the youth hockey crowd. They had yet to return to City Center, where her Lumina was parked.

The search of the school grounds had been an exercise in futility and frustration. The notebook could have appeared by magic for all anyone could discern. The school staff had all been in the cafeteria with Mitch—no witnesses. It would have been simple enough to drive up alongside the Explorer and place the book on the hood. The perpetrator wouldn't have even had to get out of his car. Slick, simple, diabolical.

Fury curdling like sour milk in his stomach, Mitch climbed into the truck and slammed the door shut.

“Mother-fucking son of a bitch!” he snarled, pounding a hand against the steering wheel. “I can't believe he just plunked it down on the hood of my truck.
Here, chump, get a clue!
Fuck!”

Like throwing down the gauntlet, he thought, and the thought sickened him. It turned a crime into a game.
Catch me if you can.
A mind that worked that way had to be black with rot and soaked with arrogance. So sure of himself he believed he could drop evidence in their laps and calmly slip away—which was exactly what he had done.

“I want this bastard,” he growled, twisting the key in the ignition.

Megan took his temper and his language in stride. Neither were anything new to her. In his position she imagined she would have been saying the same things. The kidnapper had shown him up, made him feel like a fool. It was difficult not to take that personally, but personal couldn't enter into the picture. There was too much potential for distorting perceptions.

The notebook was the only lead they'd picked up since the night before. Nothing had been turned up by the teams in the field. The volunteer ground search had been called for the day. Teams of Deer Lake police, the county boys, and Megan's agents-on-loan from the St. Paul regional district continued on, checking vacant and abandoned buildings, warehouses, the railroad yard; patrolling the streets and side roads for signs of anything remotely suspicious; following up on anything promising picked up by the flyboys in the search choppers, scrambling from point to point like participants in a macabre scavenger hunt.

The BCA and State Patrol helicopters would continue through the night, creeping over every inch of Park County again, their rotors breaking the quiet peace of the winter night. But unless they found something to go on, they would not be coming back the following day. They had covered a territory of two hundred square miles with nothing to show for it and no clue as to which direction to expand the search.

At the command post the hotline phones had been ringing off the hooks—mostly calls from concerned citizens wanting to check up on the progress of the search or express their fears and anger about the abduction. No one had seen a thing. No one had seen Josh. It was as if an unseen hand had reached out of another dimension and plucked him off the earth.

And the clock was ticking. Twenty-six hours had passed, the sense of urgency and desperation increasing with every one of them. Twenty-four was the magic number. If the missing person wasn't found in the first twenty-four hours, the odds against finding the victim went up with every passing minute.

Night had fallen around them like a black steel curtain. The wind was starting to pick up, whipping mare's tails of snow along the white-blanketed ground. The temperature kept dropping, aiming for a nighttime low of ten degrees. Cold, but January nights could get colder. Ten below zero, twenty below, thirty below. Brutal cold. Deadly cold. In the back of everyone's mind was the fear that Josh's abductor might have left him somewhere, alive only to die of exposure before anyone could get to him.

“We need to go over these pages,” Megan said, looking down at the stack of photocopies on her lap, copies of every page in Josh's think pad. “I can't imagine the kidnapper would have left anything truly incriminating in it, but who's to say.”

Mitch turned toward her. In the glow of the dashboard lights, his lean face was all rough angles and shadowed planes, the deep-set eyes hard and unblinking.

“What about the big question?” he asked. “Where and when did our bad guy get the book? It's been missing nearly two months. If he's had it all that time, we're looking at a crime with a lot of premeditation.”

“And where did he get it from? Josh's locker? That could implicate a school employee—”

“Anybody can walk into that school at any time of the day. The halls aren't monitored. There are no locks on the lockers.”

“Josh might have dropped the notebook walking home,” Megan offered. “Anybody walking down the street could have picked it up. Anybody coming into the Kirkwood house might have taken it, for that matter.”

Mitch said nothing as he backed the Explorer out of the drive and headed it south on Lakeshore, then east on Ninth Avenue. He ran through the mental list of new complications created by the notebook.

“We'll have to find out if any school employees were missing from that meeting tonight, find out if anybody's been fired in the last six months, get a list of everyone who has been through Hannah and Paul's house since mid-November—friends, neighbors, service people . . .”

The idea of the manpower, the tedium, the paperwork, was daunting. The irony made him see red—that their perpetrator had handed them a clue and in doing so had built a bigger haystack to hide the needle in.

Mitch swore. “I need some food and a bed.”

“I can offer the first,” Megan said cautiously. “You're on your own for the bed.”

It wasn't that she wanted his company, she told herself. It had nothing to do with the hollow feeling that came with the thought of sitting alone in her apartment that night. She had spent most of her life alone. Alone was no big deal.

Josh's image floated through her mind like a specter as the glowing green numbers of the dashboard clock marked another passing minute. Alone was a very big deal. Like most of the cops on the case, she would have worked around the clock if she could have forgone food and rest, but the body needed refueling. So she would pull herself off the streets for a few hours and lay in bed staring at the dark, brooding about Josh while the clock ticked. And Mitch would do the same.

“We can go over these pages without any distractions,” she said.

“Do you have utilities?” Mitch asked, his thoughts following the same line.

“I'm hopeful, but as a born cynic I took the precaution of calling for a pizza on your cellular phone while you were talking to Hannah.”

He arched a brow. “Using police equipment for personal business, Agent O'Malley? I'm shocked.”

“I consider the need for pizza a police emergency. And so will the delivery boy if he knows what's good for him.”

“Where are you living?”

“Eight sixty-seven Ivy Street. Drop me off at my car and I'll lead the way.”

“We go back to the station now, we've got reporters to face,” Mitch said. “My temper is too short for one more asinine question.”

“Then I guess I won't ask you if you're a mushroom man or strictly a pepperoni guy.”

“My only requirement tonight is that it isn't alive and it doesn't have hair. We'll eat, take a look at these pages. With any luck, by the time we get back to the station the press people will have given up for the night.”

They rolled past the turn for downtown and City Center. Mitch hit the blinker when they reached Ivy Street and eased the Explorer in along the curb. The three-story house on the corner was a huge old Victorian that had been cut up into apartments. The wraparound porch was lit up invitingly, the lack of natural light hiding the fact that the house was in need of a coat of paint. A Christmas wreath still hung on the front door.

They climbed the creaking old staircase to the second floor and wound their way down a hall. The sounds of television sets and voices drifted out of apartments. Someone had fried onions for supper. A mountain bike was propped in the hall with a sign taped to the handlebars—
RIGGED TO BLOW. THIEVES, TAKE YOUR CHANCES
. Then they turned onto another flight of stairs and left the neighbors behind.

“I've got the third floor to myself,” Megan explained, digging her keys out of her coat pocket. “It's big enough for only one apartment.”

“What made you pick this place instead of one of the apartment complexes?”

She shrugged off the question a little too easily. “I just like old houses. They have character.”

A blast of heat hit them as she opened the door. Light banished the darkness as she hit the switch.

“Behold utilities!”

“God, it must be eighty degrees in here!” Mitch declared, peeling his coat off and tossing it over the back of a chair.

“Eighty-two.” Megan gasped for breath and gave the thermostat a twist. “Guess there's a trick to this. I had it set for seventy-two.” She sent Mitch a wry look as she shrugged out of her parka. “You ought to like this, you're from Florida.”

“I've acclimated. I own snowshoes. I go ice fishing.”

“Masochist.”

She tossed the stack of photocopies on the table and disappeared down the hall and into what Mitch guessed was a bedroom. He stood in the center of the living room and surveyed the apartment, trying to find clues to Megan O'Malley as he rolled up his shirtsleeves.

The kitchen and living area flowed together, divided only by an old round oak table surrounded by mismatched antique chairs. The kitchen cupboards were painted white and looked as though they had been salvaged out of another old house. The walls were a soft rose pink and, while he knew Megan couldn't have had time to paint them herself, he thought they suited her. He also thought she would deny it if he said so. The color was too feminine. That was a side she didn't show to the public. But he had caught glimpses of it.

The furniture in the living room was all old, and what he could see of it was lovingly well kept. Boxes were piled on every available surface. Books, dishes, quilts, more books. It looked as if nothing but the bare essentials had been unpacked.

“Just move the boxes anywhere if you want to sit down,” she called.

She emerged from the bedroom rolling up the sleeves of a flannel shirt three sizes too big for her. The heavy sweater and turtleneck were gone. The black leggings remained, hugging her slim legs like a second skin. A pair of shorthaired cats wound themselves around her ankles, begging for attention. The larger one was black with a white bib, white paws, a crooked tail, and a complaining voice. The smaller one, a gray tabby, flung himself on the rug in front of her and rolled on his back, purring loudly.

“Beware the watchcats,” she said dryly. “If they mistake you for a giant hunk of Little Friskies, you're a goner.” She turned for the kitchen and they trotted after her with their tails straight up. “The black one is Friday,” she said, popping open a can of food. “The gray one is Gannon.”

Mitch smiled to himself. She would name her cats after the characters on
Dragnet
. Nothing soft and fuzzy, no Puff, no Fluff. Cop names.

“My daughter would love them,” he said. Guilt nipping him, he checked his watch and realized he'd missed Jessie's bedtime for the second night in a row. “We've got a dog and that's enough animal life for our house. She's been begging her grandparents to get a kitten, but her grandfather is allergic.” Or at least that was Joy's excuse. Dump the blame on Jurgen. Mitch suspected it was more a matter of Joy being allergic to changing litter boxes and brushing hair off her furniture.