No Show (20 page)

“Four other women.” He read out their names from his scribbled list. “Do they mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Did my wife ever call Alicia?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She might not have called herself Sarah Sheffield. She might have called herself Sarah Morton.”

“No, I haven’t heard of your wife.”

Leaning back in his chair, Terry sighed. He was tired of the dead ends. He was wasting his time again.

“Does he know anything?” Oscar whispered.

Terry shook his head. Oscar frowned.

“I should be getting back to my kids,” Hyams said.

“One last question, Mr. Hyams.”

“Yes.”

“Was your wife ever in the news or anything? Did she make the headlines? It can be for anything, from bake sale to federal witness.”

Silence intervened.

“Mr. Hyams?”

“Yes, Alicia did make the headlines.” Hyams sounded a hundred years old.

“How did she make the headlines?”

“A few years back, Chris, our little boy, was in day care. Alicia suspected that the day-care manager’s husband was molesting the children.”

“Was he?”

“The cops found magazines. The kids confirmed Alicia’s suspicions. The cops built a case from there. They prosecuted, and the guy went to prison. The city closed the center, and his wife moved away.”

Terry could tell Hyams was holding something back. It was in his tone. The story was far from over. “What else?”

More silence ensued before Hyams answered.

“Pedophiles aren’t too well liked in prison. He eventually killed himself.”

Terry was silent. He still felt the story wasn’t complete. He let silence draw the truth out.

“A few months after his suicide, the real story came out.”

“He wasn’t a pedophile?”

“No, he was innocent. The kids had been playing doctor and one of them was a little too knowledgeable, a little too worldly. He’d said all the right things. Alicia believed what the kids had said.”

“What about the magazines?”

“They were
Playboys
. The cops used them to get a confession.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Alicia wasn’t a bad woman,” Hyams pleaded. “She wasn’t vindictive. She had only the best intentions. She didn’t deserve to die.” A sob slipped out.

What a mess
, Terry thought. He couldn’t help but feel for the innocent man who’d taken his life. But if he’d been in Alicia Hyams’s position, would he have acted any differently? He doubted it. It was a nasty collision of events where there were bound to be casualties.

“Could we speak in person? You might be able to help me further.”

“I’m not sure. I’m stretched very thin.”

“How about the weekend? Any time would be good with me.”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to go.”

“I’ll call tomorrow, perhaps?”

But Hyams had already hung up.

“That sounded serious,” Oscar said. “What was that about?”

“About seeing bad guys that aren’t really there. I have a really bad feeling about Sarah’s list. I need to find out who these women are.”

Terry went into Sarah’s bedroom office and fired up her computer. He launched Google on the computer and his finger froze over the keyboard.

Oscar pulled up a chair next to him. “What’s wrong?”

Cyber trails
, he thought. These days, you were what you typed. Sarah had wiped her browser history, and maybe he shouldn’t start one that could compromise either of them further down the road. If Holman came after him again looking for evidence of his involvement in this, a questionable search-engine history would fit the bill.

“I don’t think it would be a smart idea to do this search on my home computer. Are there any cyber cafés around?”

“Cyber cafés? This is Edenville. Y2K hasn’t caught up to us yet.”

Terry grinned.

“There are a couple of Wi-Fi hotspots kicking around, or there’s the library. They have terminals.”

“The library sounds good. I just want something that Holman can’t trace back to me.”

The library smelled of musty books, as all libraries do. The odor hung in the air, eating the oxygen and the life from the room. Terry wondered if there was a universal air
un
-freshener that came free with every state-owned library.

They checked in at the front desk, and the librarian escorted them to a bank of six PCs next to the reference section. They were set up like phone booths with a partition to provide privacy. Only two of the six computers were in use, by a couple of kids doing their homework. Terry and Oscar sat next to each other.

“The library will be closing in an hour, gentlemen.”

Terry moved a stack of paper to one side and discovered that his predecessor had been accessing porn sites. The booth was strewn with printed downloads of a lot of very naked women. The time stamps were only minutes old. He admired the guy’s nerve and smiled as he pulled his list of names out of his jeans pocket. He picked up one of the printouts, turned it over, and wrote two of the names on Sarah’s list, then handed it to Oscar.

“See what you can find out on these two.”

Oscar took the sheet, turned it over, and leered at the open-legged centerfold. “What have you been up to?”

Terry cracked a smile. “Try the other side.”

“Not sure I want to.”

“Remember, we’ve only got an hour.”

“Okay.”

Terry googled Hope Maclean’s name. Proving the World Wide Web was more chaff than wheat, Google threw back over a quarter of a million hits in half a second. He was looking at thousands of Hope Macleans and any one of them could be Sarah’s Hope.

He refined his search by punching in the names of all five women on Sarah’s list and got no hits. Sometimes, dealing with the Internet felt like talking to an inept translator. If you didn’t speak its language just the way it had learned it, you were wasting your time.

He started over, this time incorporating the only other piece of information he knew about the women—a city.

He retyped Hope Maclean’s name and added Delano to the search. He still got back over two thousand hits, but the first page of results were all connected to the same topic—city government embezzlement. According to the reports, the mayor of Delano and several members of the city council managed to funnel three-quarters of a million dollars of city redevelopment funds into their own bank accounts. Hope Maclean had been Delano’s city clerk when she discovered the scheme and reported it to the state. An investigation followed, leading to arrests of everyone involved. Terry printed the most in-depth stories for reference.

It sounded like the kind of story Sarah would cover, but Terry didn’t find her byline on any of the pieces. As sordid as the tale was, he failed to see the significance of it. The piece had failed to break the gravitational pull of the local newspapers and TV, and it wasn’t even current. The events had taken place in 2007.

Why did you make Sarah’s list, Hope?
he thought.

He opened a new page and googled Judith Stein and Medford. Just as with Hope Maclean, the search kicked back a common story on the first page of hits. In 2009, Judith Stein revealed a scam at a nursing home. Her mother was a resident, and Judith found the staff wasn’t administering her medication. Judith also discovered the staff was abusing the residents and stealing Social Security checks. Again, the story was significant, but not earth-shattering.

Just to confirm, he plugged in Alicia Hyams’s name and got the news stories to back up her husband’s account.

Switching among open windows, he examined the three stories and saw a pattern. Each of these women had exposed a crime or misconduct. Was this the connection Sarah had seen?

“Have you found anything out?” Terry asked.

Oscar leaned around the partition. “Yeah. You?”

Terry nodded.

“Tell me what you’ve got.”

“All these women have a small claim to fame as whistle-blowers. Hope Maclean was a city clerk who discovered that half the city council was embezzling funds, and Judith Stein uncovered elder abuse at a nursing home. What have you got?”

“Juicy stuff, like you. In 2010, Myda Perez was a nurse who turned in a hospital physician for a series of botched procedures resulting in one death and two people left in a vegetative state. And in 2011, Christy Richmond was a prostitute who beat a felony charge by blowing the whistle on a vice squad that ran a stable of hookers.”

“A stable of hookers,” Terry echoed. “What a delightful turn of phrase you have there.”

Oscar grinned. “What would you call them?”

“Anyway, I checked out Alicia Hyams too. She voiced her fears about the pedophilia in 2006. The guy was convicted in 2007 and committed suicide the following year. The truth only came out last year that one of the kids had made the whole thing up.”

“Was it her kid?”

“No, a kid called Johnny Masterson. He was the one who liked to play doctor.”

“How old was this Johnny?”

“Four.”

“So how did the pedophile accusation start?”

“Alicia started kicking up a fuss and word was getting around the day care. She quizzed her boy, and he pointed her in Johnny’s direction. Apparently, little Johnny had been told by his
parents to be wary of strange men who might touch children. So he pointed the finger at the day-care manager’s husband.”

Oscar exhaled. “Imagine if you got accused of something like that and you knew you didn’t do it. Nobody would listen to you. Everyone would convict first.”

Terry didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to imagine. He’d been accused of a crime he hadn’t committed. It was an experience he never wanted to repeat.

Oscar’s expression turned grim. “I found out something else about these women and it’s not good.”

Terry’s stomach tightened. “What is it?”

“Myda Perez was murdered a year after the scandal, and no one has seen Christy Richmond since she testified against the cops.”

It was coincidence, Terry told himself. Murders happened. Prostitutes disappeared. It is the world we live in. But as much as he wanted to believe in coincidence, he knew he was lying to himself.

He turned back to his computer and added the word “dead” to Hope Maclean’s search field. The results listing changed and the headlines for the top results reported Hope Maclean’s murder. Oscar was saying something, but Terry could only hear the rushing of his own blood in his ears.

He pulled up Judith Stein’s page and repeated this pattern. The results changed, but the answer was the same. Judith Stein was dead too.

“I think all these women are dead, Oscar. First they went missing, then they were killed. Now, Sarah’s missing. I’m scared. I’m really scared.”

“Shit. You don’t know that for sure. Christy Richmond is just missing.”

“You’re right, we don’t. So clear your weekend.”

“Why?”

“We’re going on a road trip. We’re going to these cities, and we’re going to find out as much as we can about these women and how they died.”

“W
hat is it?” Terry asked, unsure of what Oscar had brought him.

“It’s a car.”

“I know, but what is it?”

Oscar sighed. “Don’t you know a classic when you see it?”

“Not really.”

“Classic cars aren’t all Jags, Aston Martins, and Rolls-Royces. This country produces its own fair share of desirable machines.”

“It does?”

Oscar frowned. “Are you going out of your way to hurt my feelings?”

Terry smiled. “Okay, what am I looking at?”

“A Chevy Monte Carlo,” Oscar announced proudly. “’85 vintage.”

It didn’t look like the playground of the rich and famous inspired it. The car was huge with precious little styling. Close to eighteen feet long, it was a slab-sided hunk of steel. Despite its size, it had only two doors, giving it an acre of hood and a trunk big enough to store a family. The black paint job made it look as aggressive as hell.

“It’s…er…lovely.”

“Don’t be like that. Don’t knock it until you’ve driven it.” Oscar tossed Terry the keys.

Examining the keys, Terry said, “Do we have time for this? I thought you wanted to get this road trip underway. We’ve got a lot of miles to cover.”

“You’ll want to test drive it first, won’t you?”

“Why?”

“It’s yours.”

“Mine?”

“You’ve been moaning about the rental charges and how you needed your own car. Well, I got you one.”

Terry stared at his keys then the car.

“Try it. You won’t regret it.”

Terry frowned. “Where’d it come from?”

“It’s my nephew’s. He’s going to college, and it’s either an education or the car. The car goes.”

“How much?”

“Two grand,” Oscar said. “Put your eyebrows down. That paint job alone is worth it. And that engine is custom.”

Terry wasn’t convinced. The car wasn’t him. It was so American.

“Are you getting all English on me?”

“What’s that mean?”

“All quiet and disapproving.”

“No.”

“Then get in.”

Terry gunned the engine. The Monte Carlo roared with the unmistakable rumble of a V-8. He thrust the selector into reverse, and the car trundled off the driveway and into the street.