Pursuit Page 7

  She didn’t know. It could be important. But it was too late to call the State Patrol property room and her new best friend Madeline. She’d do it in the morning.

  The next day, Julie felt ridiculous being carted out to the entrance curb in a wheelchair, but no sense fighting policy. It felt great to be out. Todd picked her up for the drive home.

  “Before I forget it, Big Man, can you do me a favor?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I keep going back to this cold case I’ve been on. Who or why would a ring be put on a chain? If it wasn’t the victim’s, did it belong to someone else? A keepsake? The ring got taken into evidence, but I don’t know about the chain.”

  “So what’s your thinking about this, Sarge?”

  “There might be some evidence there. The lab checked the ring and cleaned it but not the chain, at least as far as I know. Probably a long shot but worth checking.”

  Charles walked through Legionnaire’s Park. Bronze statues of fallen heroes flanked the wide concrete paths. He pushed his hands into his trouser pockets, trying to get over the stupidity of his unsuccessful recon at the hospital. But doing stupid things these days seemed to be his life’s blood. He just needed to see her, to glance at his handiwork, the beautiful dark bruises around her green cop eyes.

  He wanted her. The brief newspaper account of Sergeant Juliette Worth’s auto accident made no mention of criminal intent. Her prognosis, according to the paper, seemed good and her release from the hospital imminent.

  He tried to think positively about the events; he slotted his feelings with ease. Whether successful or not, he’d manage to find something of the truth in what he liked to refer to as “the periodic arrival of the circus.”

  Rarely did the red-nosed buffoons appear; it was always men and women in their tights. The vision of the ringmaster thrilled him. The long-tailed jacket, flowing cape, often a white scarf draping his torso, and, of course, the hat. His fingers touched the silk brim of the topper as he turned to introduce his acts.

  The bareback riders. Demure women sitting with both legs on one side of the shiny beasts, their buttocks protruding delightfully as they crouched upon the undulating hind quarters of their half-ton chargers.

  His ringmaster would introduce a woman—a Rosetta or a Maria Elena—who would wrap her arm around a thick lanyard and then flange her legs straight out horizontally as stagehands towed her forty feet into the air. One foot secured into the inner thigh of her opposite leg, the vulnerable Maria Elena would begin to twirl faster and faster.

  The Spanish web, a marvel of grace and sex. His hero would doff his hat and encourage the throng to applaud what he had wrought. Often in his daytime dreams, the women would follow his master of ceremony into a wooded glen, his cloak a blanket to perform upon. The white scarf for later, when dreams succumbed to reality.

  He stopped in front of a seven-foot bronze soldier, hand in hand with a small boy. How cheap.

  His rendition of the law enforcement pit maneuver had gone well, until the arrival of the first lookie-loos, and then the ambulance. He parked fifty yards down the road and then jogged back, hoping to finish the job. She saw him, but all cockeyed and jumbled through a maze of splintered glass and sharp-cornered metal. The wheels of her vehicle reached skyward, turning gently.

  Not able to complete his task, he drifted back up the culvert and meandered through the growing crowd to the stolen truck, as wide-eyed late arrivals hurried to the overturned police car.

  He recalled driving past the spectacle, seeing a tall, sandy-haired young man in a dark sport coat bullying his way through the crowd. He looked like the one from the parking lot with the cell phone outside the police station. Were they lovers? He hoped so.

  Then the deliberate drive back to town, to shed the illegally acquired truck. It disappointed him that his mission remained unfulfilled both on that day and the hour previous, which he’d spent wandering through the scrubbed halls of St. Mary’s Hospital.

  He sat under a flowering dogwood just off a well-used nature path.

  Over the years, hikers expanded the winding trail that stretched for several miles across a vast wooded area, eventually leading to a rapidly flowing creek. In the distance, a small rundown community, unchanged over the years. A church steeple appeared slightly tilted, a general store and school long since abandoned by their people.

  To the east, another group of houses, the road connecting the two settlements making a large semicircle around the dense woods.

  He stopped along this road a blue moon ago to let the Nomad cool off.

  While his overheated car sat ticking in its cooling process, the woods beckoned. He walked to a patch of berries alongside the road extending into a pine-covered wood. He thought back about the dense growth of underbrush and timberland, his several-day-long surveillance under this same dogwood.

  Animated with constant chatter, their friendly arguing interrupted by genuine excitement at the discovery of an odd-shaped stone, peculiar-looking stick, or flower they couldn’t identify. They seemed in no hurry to get home from school, and one of them always appeared too proud, a criticism ready to roll from her tongue. Sisters, undoubtedly. Similar but different. He tried to sort out how many years it had been—perhaps seventeen. The seasons melded into one enormous tangle.

  He recalled having come back after the—what should he call it?—“occasion.” But that word seemed too casual. He liked “happening.” It felt celebratory, as if it had reason to exist. His mind wandered back to the search of the grounds for his keepsake, much of it having been trampled by the authorities. He blamed himself, not for the way it was lost but for his hubris—the sheer overbearing need to advertise his accomplishments by wearing something around his neck that should have been left in his nostalgic treasure trove along with the rest.

  Rising now from his mossy seat, he searched once again—more out of curiosity than hope—the brush-covered area just off the hiking path. Wondering if the slight slope in the ground would, with the yearly rainfall, carry something as heavy as his prize farther toward the creek bed, he moved downhill.

  The sound, when it came, startled him. A squeaky voice, an off-key song coming from the direction of the path. The key high and tremulous, full of wispy accusation.

  The words seemed cobbled together. Something about a blue-eyed girl with a wandering heart.

  Come back, come back, ohh sweet little one,

  your kin doth miss you so.

  Oh run, please run. Blue Mountain girl,

  run home this bright clear morn.

  He dropped down behind a thorny bush, the spiked branches tearing at his sleeves and forearms. A woman off the path with a stick made large circles around the area he had been searching. She scratched the earth and hummed, raising her head as if sensing the air.

  Run, oh Betty Blue, please run lest

  you be late for school.

  Julie had been home for three restless days. Her limp was only a bit more pronounced, and with her shoulder strapped and supported under a generous blouse and a cut above her ear covered by her hair, one might not have known she had survived a serious accident. They would have to overlook the discoloration between her eyes, however.

  If anyone asked, she would blame it on her ex-husband. “He’s six foot four, can’t fight for beans, but he managed to clock me in the face. I got him good, though. A size-eight hard-toed oxford right in the man handle. Blah-blah-blah.”

  She called Todd. “What’s doing, partner?”

  “Funny you called. I was just waiting for an email from the lab before talking to you. I spoke to them this morning. Listen to this. After our talk in the hospital about ex-cons looking for tit for tat, I rechecked the debris from the stolen truck for evidence and ran a Kleenex tucked into the driver-side door pocket—mucus and a dot of blood on it. Guess what?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “None of the yahoos we’ve managed to blood-type ov
er the last—how long we been partnering? Seven years, something like that?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “No match. The suspect has a rare AB negative blood type. One in one seventy.”

  “Come on, Devlin, for Christ’s sake,” Julie rattled. “Let’s hear it. Who is it?”

  “We don’t know, but this blood type from the truck matches the one on traces located on the chain.”

  “What? You mean the chain holding the ring?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Sarge.”

  Julie couldn’t put it together. If it were true, whoever was driving the truck could have been in the woods abducting the Preston child all those years ago. But it didn’t make sense. She didn’t have any connection to the Preston case other than simply looking into it. How and why would the driver connect her? “Todd, this is wacky. You’re saying it’s a match, the blood?”

  “The labs always give you that one-in-a-thousand crap but yeah, it’s a match. Walker’s gonna push the envelope on the lab business; splurged on a private company out of Chicago. For DNA, it’ll take a while. What do you think? Does this jar your rehab efforts?”

  “Too bizarre. I’ll check with you later. Thanks for the info.” Julie didn’t believe in coincidence. In her job, it didn’t pay. It was too easy. Also, how did the ring and chain get to the site if they weren’t in the man’s pocket or around his neck, and how did blood—evidence—get onto the chain?

  Julie rubbed her thigh, trying to coax circulation back to her leg. She thought there might have been a struggle, and perhaps the kid grasped at the man’s eyes or throat and came away with the chain, scraping the man’s neck, leaving DNA.

  Gonna get you, mister.

  He watched as Julie limped to her car. He laughed, amused that she was disabled. She backed out of her drive, the right rear wheel of her Jeep bouncing over the curb, just missing the garbage can. If there were more time at the crash site, he could have rendered her persona non grata. A simple ninety-second choke hold seemed more in keeping with his intent.

  Staying back several hundred feet, he tried to keep a two- or three-car separation between them. She drove across town, to a modest suburban community bordering a wooded area. Idyllic. Children playing ball in the winding streets, housewives conferring with neighbors, a genuine all-American homespun atmosphere.

  He settled in next to a grassy dog park. Julie parked on a dead-end road in the midst of several other vehicles dotting the long, clean street. Taking a map from his glove box, he watched over the top of it as she made her way up the walkway to a frame house. Halfway there, a teenaged girl and a heavyset woman of Julie’s age came out to greet her. A half-pint brown-and-white dog jumped around the trio as they drifted into the house. Charles drove around the nearby blocks several times, coming back to Julie’s car. Continuing a bit farther to the end of the street, he parked at a For Sale sign in front of a new home. A sign reading Thousand Pines Estates, Phase Two hung on a nearby gated barrier.

  While waiting, he surveyed the empty house. Trees and shrubs both in back and front provided good cover. A large yard at the rear of the house faded into a dense wooded area. He took down the name and number of the broker from the sign. He settled into his seat, keeping an eye on the street. Nearly an hour passed.

  He watched the activity on the sidewalk near her car. The girl hugged his new favorite detective while the other woman looked on. It seemed as if the girl he’d seen at night darting in and out of the isolated house at North Point was probably the daughter, whom he thought might be staying with a friend while Miss Pain in the Ass Worth recuperated.

  The dog scampered about, darting across the street and returning when called back by the heavyset woman. “Here, Scoot! Scooter, come boy!”

  He enjoyed watching the tall woman’s hampered movements; she seemed vulnerable getting into her car. He stopped at a Walgreens to call the Realtor.

  “Hey, Sergeant, howzit goin’? You’re looking pretty fit.” Several of the officers in the unit working desk came over to say hello and wish Julie well. She tried walking without a limp or a shuffle, squaring her shoulders as if she just came back from vacation.

  Captain Walker wasn’t in, so she called Todd. “Devlin, what are you up to?”

  “One eighty-five and holding.” He seemed surprised to hear from her. “How about you?”

  “Good, good. Hey, can you run me out to that Preston woman’s house? I need to ask her a question.”

  “You want to speak to el jefe, or should we just wing it?”

  “I’ll leave him a note. Can you meet me out front in ten?”

  They drove out without calling, Julie not wanting to deal with Preston on the phone. Todd was full of questions about her recuperation and when she would be back.

  “I’m back. Just not officially or full-time, okay?”

  They pulled up to the Preston house, which looked the same as the last visit. Tired and neglected. The yard, a combination of foot-high weeds and dandelions gone wild. She wondered how Miss Preston made do, living out in the country, so isolated, and especially after what had happened to her sister. Julie thought that Beverly Preston’s run-down yard reflected the woman’s state of mind.

  “Hi, Miss Preston, remember me? Sergeant Julie Worth, State Patrol. This is my partner, Detective Todd Devlin. May we come in?”

  Once again without answering, the woman left the door open and turned away.

  Todd looked at Julie and shrugged. They followed Preston into the living room, where a musty combination of mildew and sauerkraut settled in the air.

  “I won’t take up much of your time. Just one question, if you will.”

  The woman nodded.

  “Show me again, please, where you kept the ring and the chain?”

  “By the by, when will I get it back—the ring? The smelly policeman that came for it with the foolish paper said he didn’t know.”

  Julie knew she needed to tread lightly. “Miss Preston, the items you gave up might be pertinent to an official investigation, which could lead to prosecution if we can—”

  “My sister, by the way, would be thirty-three, day after tomorrow.” She held her arms out in supplication, eyes moist, head cocked slightly.

  Julie waited until Preston lowered her arms. “Please tell me the conditions in which the ring and chain were kept all these years.”

  She walked back to the knickknack stand that Julie had noticed earlier, and with her back to them, busied herself with a few items. She turned, her hands cupped around the mason jar.

  “I brought the preserve jar up from the room below. I knew you’d be coming for it.” She shoved the jar with its punctured holes in the top toward Julie. “Here.”

  “Can we take this?”

  “Hoo-hah, better take it now than later when your stinky policeman comes back with another piece of paper.” She paced. “As I said before, remember when you were here six months ago?”

  It was four weeks.

  “The slippery devil left it so he’d have an excuse to come for me. When he does, I’ll be waitin’.” She took a pair of household scissors from her apron pocket, making feeble stabbing motions in the air. “He crouched by the dogwood.”

  Julie glanced at Todd, who gestured back to her with an open hand, as if to say, “She’s all yours.”

  “Miss Preston, what exactly do you mean when you say ‘He crouched by the tree’?”

  “Dogwood.”

  “Yes, of course, sorry. Dogwood. What did you mean?”

  “I smelled him, his man scent.” She straightened up. “He stunk of sweat, piss, and men’s cologne. I sang and pretended, like always.” She hummed an off-key lament, breaking up the passage with a half-spoken “Fly home Betty Blue, fly home to your kin.”

  “And where is this area, Miss Preston?”

  She headed for the back door.

  Julie and Todd followed. “What is that old ‘In for a penny’ cliche?” he asked Julie.

  “I’d give more than a
penny for a pair of sneakers about now.”

  They walked behind Beverly Preston, Julie needing to pause every fifty yards to rest her leg. Then Preston pointed her long hickory walking stick to a dogwood tree that sat some thirty feet back from the path.

  “That’s where I smelled the demon, so I sang and fooled about.”

  Julie played along. “Let’s take a look.”

  Todd started up a narrow path. “How do you get to a dogwood?”

  Julie stopped to poke around in a thicket of thorns. “I give up, how?”

  “On an animal path. Get it? Animal path. Dogwood.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Look at this, Mr. Funnyman.” Julie examined the end of a branch, noticing dark spots on the leaves.

  “What have you got?”

  “Looks like fresh blood to me—not much, but enough for an analysis.”

  They searched the ground for footprints and then bagged the branch with the blood sample. When they looked up, they saw the back of Beverly Preston a hundred yards down the path, headed for home.

  A long discussion began on the ride back to the station about the mason jar and whether the cool basement preserved any possible DNA. They placed the glass container in a paper evidence bag. The blood sample was a long shot, and it might have been from an animal. But they would test it nevertheless.

  Good afternoon, Watson Real Estate.”

  “My name is Phillips. I’m interested in purchasing a home—”

  “Let me put you on with one of the brokers.”

  He waited, subjected to a recording of Andy Williams singing something about a moon and a river and how wide the river was and—

  “Hello. Cathy Watson. How may I help?”

  “My name is Phillips, I’m new to town. My wife and I are interested in a home in the two-to-three-hundred-thousand-dollar-range.” He guessed at the figure. “Suburban, maybe.”

  “Do you want a community feel or an individual home by itself?”