Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 04 - Jupiter Returns (6 page)

Tracy talked to Jake and told him to stay put and that we were going to check out the Hyatt hotels.
We had three to check out and started with the one downtown.

We had no luck there and moved on to Westpark.
When we walked up to the desk a young woman with thick glasses and with her hair pulled into a severe knot looked up and made eye contact with me.

“I thought you had checked out,” she said
. We knew we had found the right place but that we were too late.

Tracy asked while flashing her badge, “When did they check out?”

“Early this morning, I had just come on duty, so it around seven.” She kept looking at me and finally asked, “Are you her twin or what?”

“Triplet,” I said but didn’t elaborate.

Tracy cleared her throat to get her attention, “Did you hear them say anything about where they were going next? What address did they put on the registration?”

The girl, whose name tag said Jo
dy, started typing on her computer.

“They gave a post office box. She said.
“We’re not supposed to accept a post office box. but one of my coworkers checked them in two days ago. I’m sorry, that’s all I have on them.”

“They told me they were going to Galveston and look for a place on the beach,” s
aid a tall thin man with a big Adam’s apple who happened to be walking by. His name tag said Mr. Jenks, Manager.

“Can you describe the woman that was with Christina, one of the triplets?” Tracy asked.

Jody spoke up, “She had on a bad wig. It was almost white, a very light blond. She wore sunglasses the whole time and they were shaped like hearts.

“Oh, yeah she also wore a red jacket and a black floppy hat.
It was almost as if she wanted to be noticed. Is the blond kidnapping the other one?”

“We don’t think so and we ask that
neither one of you discuss this with anyone.”

They promised and we got in the car where Huck was waiting, “Since we have nothing else, we’ll go to Galveston,” Tracy said as she buckled her seatbelt.

“What about Ben, Tracy?”

She turned around to face me and what I saw in her eyes scared me so badly that I almost lost it.
She thought they had already killed him.

“Maybe they have him in Galveston,” I said but I didn’t feel hopeful.
Would I know in my heart if Ben was dead? I didn’t know.

Galveston is almost sisty
miles from Houston and it usually took me at least an hour to drive it but Huck made it in forty three minutes. I was white knuckling it all the way.

“One thing going for us,” Tracy said as we drove down the Strand, “Galveston is so small we might just run into them.
” She looked at her watch, “Why don’t we have lunch?”

We found a restaurant overlooking the Gulf and got a table on the porch.
I usually like walking on the beach but Galveston has an ugly beach because of all the oil rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico. There are globs of black solidified oil all over the beach and if you get it on your feet it’s hard to get off. It has the consistency of sandy tar.

I was in the mood for some fried shrimp and the other two followed my lead but Huck also ordered a dozen raw oysters.
We had sweet iced tea.

When the waitress brought our orders Tracy asked her if she had seen someone who looked like me.

She looked straight at me for the first time and said, “Yeah, you look just like her except she was thinner. Are you twins or something?”

“Or something,” I said.

“Was she alone or did she have someone with her?” Tracy asked.

The waitress put her finger on a dimple and
looked up like she was thinking. “Let’s see, she was with another woman and a man. I could never forget the man. Boy, what a hunk, with a lot of meat on him, just my type.

“The woman who looks like you was all over him but he didn’t pay her much attention.
He kept looking at the other one.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.
It sounded like Ben. “What did the other woman look like?” I asked.

“She was kind of mousy, actually.
She had dirty brown hair and it was sort of stringy. She wore no make-up and had on the ugliest housedress I’ve ever seen.”

“Her attempt to blend in,” I said to Tracy.
Huck hadn’t said anything the whole time and seemed to be enjoying his food. But now he spoke up, “Sometimes it makes you stand out though.”

I looked at him and he didn’t say anything else.

“Did the man look like he was under duress?” Tracy asked.

“Under dressed?
I don’t know about that but he looked like he didn’t want to be with them,” the waitress said and shrugged.

Tracy and I traded looks and I could tell she was trying not to laugh.
The waitress left and we finished our lunch.

We decid
ed to walk down on the beach. Huck said he would watch us from the seawall.

We watched where we were walking and I laughed, “You know what this reminds me of, Tracy?
” Without waiting for her to answer I continued, “It reminds me of the night when I first met you and you were posing as the housekeeper for the Reynolds’.”

“Yeah,
I remember you were a scared sixteen year old who needed answers and I leveled with you and told you I was an FBI agent.”

“That seems like such a long time ago.
We rescued Julia and broke up the pedophile ring and now it feels like we are starting all over again.”

“Well, we were able to put quite a few people behind bars including some judges.
I hate to say this, Judith, but I almost hope that we have to kill Jupiter instead of spending the tax payer’s money prosecuting her again.

“She will probably try to con her way out of it and, as you know, she is very good at conning people.”

“At least we know now that Ben is alive,” I said. “I feel so relieved about that, Tracy. But I remember how she shot Bill right through the head and he was on her side.”

“Well, I think he will remember that too and be careful.
Let’s walk back to the car and not keep Huck waiting. I want to go to some of the realty offices and see if Jupiter has maybe rented a house from them.”

When we got back to the stairs leading to where we had left Huck he wasn’t there.
We looked around and saw a crab shack and wandered over there but he wasn’t there either. We looked up and down the sea wall but it appeared he had vanished.

We decided to check into a hotel and picked one that was on a pier overlooking the Gulf.
It was an older hotel but had a lot of personality. We got one room with two double beds.

Once we got checked in we left the
unpacking for later and made our way to a realty agency on the strand. A plump woman with big hair greeted us and we followed her to her office in the back.

Tracy flashed her badge and explained, “We’re looking for a woman who looks like her,” she said as she pointed to me.
“She would have been with another woman and maybe a man.”

“Oh, I know who you mean.
They rented a house from me on the beach earlier today. Let’s see…she was with another woman, a mousy woman with dirty looking hair. But I didn’t see a man.”

She stopped and stood there thinking.

“What are you thinking?” Tracy asked.

“Well, when I was taking them to my car to show them the house, we walked past their car and there was something in the back seat that was covered with a blanket.
It was about the size and shape of a man curled up.”

Tracy looked at me and then back at the realtor, “We need you to take us to this house.”

“Oh, okay, just let me lock up here,” the realtor said, looking confused.

We followed her and she parked in the yard of a house about one-half mile down the beach from where w
e had quit walking before turning around.

The yard was made of sand and the house was yellow with white shutters.
It looked tiny from the outside but had a wrap-around porch painted white. There was no car parked in front of the house.

When Tracy got out of the car she started running and then I noticed Huck lying face down in the yard on the side of the house.
He had been shot in the back.

Tracy stooped down and put her fingers on his neck, “He’s alive.
Judith, call nine-one-one.”

While I was on the phone with 911, she took off her blouse and I noticed she was wearing a sports bra underneath.
She balled up the blouse and held it against the wound and told the realtor to hold it there.

When she
hesitated, Tracy yelled at her, “Come on lady, I need your help, here.”

When the realtor
reluctantly took over, Tracy took out her gun and trained it on the house, “I’m not going in until backup gets here,” she said.

It seemed like only a few seconds after I placed the call when we heard the sirens.
The realtor moved aside and looked relieved when a tiny gray-haired woman took over. In no time they had him in an ambulance.

Tracy was conferring with the local cops and told me and the realtor to get in the car.
They went into the house, with guns drawn, some in the back door and some in the front. I heard yelling and someone yelled, “we have another shotgun victim in here.”

I didn’t ask anyone’s permission but ran inside.
Ben was in a closet in the bedroom. He was hunched over and I could only see his back. His head was between his legs.

I was screaming and someone grabbed me from behind and forced me outside.
I broke away but then I had two men on me and I felt a needle prick in my arm. “No!” I screamed and then everything was black.

I woke up in my own bed.
It was dark but I heard Tracy say from the darkness, “How are we going to tell her, Mimi? She’s going to be devastated.”

“No!” I screamed into the darkness, “Please don’t tell me Ben is dead.”

I cried while both Mimi and Tracy held me. “Ben,” I cried, “My darling Ben, the one man in a million.”

I looked wildly around the room “
Ben,” I said, “the man who had waited for me patiently for eleven years.”

“She’s getting hysterical,” Tracy said. Should we call the doctor back?

I screamed at her, “I don’t need a doctor. I need Ben, the man who had put up with my neurosis while I got my life together, my wonderful husband of only two years. We had just come back from our honeymoon.”

Suddenly, I was more angry than sad, “I’m going to kill that bitch,” I said.
“I’m going to catch her and I’m going to kill her, both of them.”

“You know you’ll be taken off the case, don’t you, Judith?”

“No, don’t do this to me, Tracy. Please.”

After some hesitation she said, “You will be officially off the case.
You won’t be sitting in on any meetings and I can’t share information with you, but you will be assigned a new bodyguard. I don’t want to know what you’re up to.”

I nodded slowly. “That’ll work for me,
” I said slowly.

CHAPTER 10

My new bodyguard was named Bert Jamison.
He was so much smaller that Hutch that I almost laughed.

He saw me looking him up and down and he said, “I’m a black belt in karate, an expert sharpshooter and I used to be on the Swat team.
You’re damned lucky to have me.”

I took an immediate dislik
ing to him. I thought he was a cocky little bastard.

I was assigned a new case by t
he FBI. She was a small girl who looked about five and had been found wandering around in the Montrose area of Houston at three o’clock in the morning a few days earlier.

She had been wearing a pair of dirty jeans and tee shirt
and was barefoot. She wasn’t talking and we didn’t know yet if she was physically unable to talk or if she had experience some sort of psychological trauma.

I was excited to be working on a new case to get my mind off Ben’s death.
I couldn’t believe he was gone.

My whole family had loved Ben and I had wasted so much time before I had agreed to
marry him. He had been only forty three years old and too young to die.

A very good psychologist had been working with the little girl but she had failed to open up to her.
A good match in therapy is so important and I had been lucky in my own therapy with Dr. Anna who was Julia’s psychiatrist and later mine when I decided to become a psychologist.

Dr. Anna
lived in Jacksonville, Florida and owned Ocean Sands Psychiatric Center where Julia had been a patient when we were sixteen.

Since
we didn’t know the name of my new client, we were calling her Jane. She was very tiny and had thin blond-white hair and light blue eyes. She had been staying in a foster home and the first thing I did was to visit the foster home. After my own experiences in foster homes I wanted to make sure she was well taken care of.