“He was a cop?”
“Worked patrol for eighteen months until a couple of complaints about undue force brought him and the department to a mutual understanding.”
“He quit, no prosecution.”
He nodded. “After that, there were some years when he reported no income, as best as Sue can tell, he drifted around as a laborer. He got on the dude ranch circuit ten years ago, moved to California. After he got married, he switched to swimming pool maintenance. Other than a short temper with suspects when he was twenty-one, he’s got nothing iffy in his background. The surface impression seems to be all of it: a taciturn loner whose life hasn’t turned out so great.”
“As opposed to Daney.”
“Reason he was hard to trace is he changed his name. He was born Moore Daney Andruson, is five years older than he claims on his driver’s license. Grew up in rural Arkansas, one of seven kids, at least three of whom have ended up in prison for violent crimes. His folks were itinerant preachers on the hillbilly circuit.”
“The part about growing up in the church was true,” I said.
“More like growing up in revival tents. With reptiles. His daddy was one of those rattlesnake handlers, religious rapture supposed to protect him against venom. Until it didn’t.”
“How’d Sue find all this out?”
“Despite being a scumbag the name change was legal and Daney has been reporting income with the IRS, on and off since he was eighteen. His credit history as Moore D. Andruson bottomed out twelve years ago. Lots of unpaid bills, a couple of bankruptcies.”
“Wonder why he bothered to file returns,” I said.
“He didn’t have much choice. His early jobs were salaried, required withholding, SSI, all that good stuff. Now that he bills the state, there’s different paperwork required.”
“What kind of jobs are we talking about?”
“Guess.”
“Youth work.”
“Camp counselor, substance abuse counselor, substitute teacher, Sunday school teacher, gym coach, always in small towns. He put bogus degrees on his applications and that eventually got him kicked out of three jobs in three different towns. After that, he tried suburbia, drove a school bus for a girls’ preppie academy in Richmond, Virginia.”
“What a surprise.”
“That’s where he met Cherish. He was Drew Daney by then. She’d gotten a degree from Bible college, was teaching retarded kids at another school.”
“He’s got no southern accent,” I said. “More reinvention. His employers discovered his phony credentials after they’d hired him. Meaning they got suspicious about something else and checked him out.”
“No doubt, but no one’s being free with the details. Sue had to work just to get them to admit they knew him.”
“Meaning they kept it in-house. Anyone report the credentials scam?”
“Nope, they just sent him packing.”
“To his next victim.”
“So what else is new?” he said. “He did manage to acquire a police record, but not the type that would get entered in NCIC or any other national file. Indecent exposure pled down to a misdemeanor trespassing in Vivian, Louisiana; bad checks settled by reimbursement, no jail time, in Keswick, Virginia; sexual assault in Carrol County, Georgia. That one was dismissed. Sheriff said he knew Andruson did it but the girl he was accused of seducing had cerebral palsy and could barely talk. They figured she wouldn’t make the grade as a witness, wanted to spare her the ordeal.”
“Moral of the story: go for the vulnerable.”
“I asked Sue to find what she could on that missing girl, Miranda. Gave her Olivia’s number. Talk about your meeting of the minds.”
Out of his jacket pocket came tinny music. No more Beethoven, some sort of Latin beat. He reached in and extricated his cell phone. It kept tangoing as he checked the caller’s number. He had reprogrammed the ring. I’d thought it was mostly kids who did that.
“Sturgis… yeah, hi. No, there’s no parking on the property. I’m sure, Sean. You’re positive you didn’t miss anything? Well, that definitely complicates things… hope not… yeah, yeah, check all that out, our E.T.A.’s fifteen, twenty, I’ll call you unless you learn something earth-shattering.”
Click. “Sean’s been in place since six forty-five. Neither Daney’s Jeep nor Cherish’s Toyota are in sight. Ditto for Malley’s black truck. The gate’s closed so he can’t tell if anyone’s home. No sight or sounds of any kids, but he’s a hundred feet up. I told him to list the plates of any cars on the block and run them.”
“Both gone, separate cars,” I said.
“Maybe they went for doughnuts. Why don’t you drive a little faster?”
I sped over the canyon, raced through morning traffic, finally reached Vanowen just after eight. Milo got back on the phone and asked Binchy about the vehicle registrations. “No, keep going… no, no… hold on, repeat that one… interesting. Okay, stay there until we show up. Thanks mucho, lad.”
“Something come up?” I said.
“Cream-colored Cadillac DeVille parked right in front of the house,” he said. “And guess who pays the sticker fees.”
The Reverend Dr. Crandall Wascomb looked as if his faith had been tested and he wasn’t sure he’d passed.
He opened the gate within seconds of Milo ’s pounding, stepped back, stunned.
“Dr. Delaware?”
Milo ’s badge made his shoulders drop. Not dismay, relief. “Police. Thank goodness. Cherish called you, as well?”
“When did she call you, sir?” said Milo.
“Early this morning,” said Wascomb. “Just after six.”
His white hair floated above his brow and he had dressed haphazardly: heavy gray cardigan buttoned out of sequence so that it bunched mid-chest, white shirt with one bent collar point, maroon tie knotted well short of his neckline. Behind his black-framed glasses, his eyes were watery and uncertain.
“What did she want, Reverend?”
“She said she needed my help immediately. Mrs. Wascomb’s not well and I keep the phone in the hallway rather than at bedside so as not to wake her. The ring got me up, but at that hour I assumed it was a wrong number and didn’t get out of bed. When it rang again, I answered and it was Cherish, apologizing for disturbing me. She said something had come up, implored me to come to her house as soon as I could. I tried to get her to explain. She said there was no time, I simply needed to believe her, hadn’t she always been a faithful student.”
Wascomb blinked. “She had been.”
I said, “Was she distraught?”
“More like… anxious, but in an efficient way. As if she was faced with a sudden challenge and was rising to the occasion. I wondered if one of the children, or Drew, had taken ill. I asked her again what was wrong and she said she’d tell me when I showed up. If I’d come. I said I would and went to get dressed. Mrs. Wascomb had stirred and I told her I was having one of my insomnia episodes, she should go back to sleep. I instructed the housekeeper to keep an eye on her, got myself presentable, and drove over.”
His eyes compressed as they traveled from Milo to me. “When I arrived, the gate was open but no one was in the house. The front door had been left unlocked so I assumed Cherish wanted me to come straight in. The house was empty. I looked around, came back out. I was growing quite alarmed. Then a young woman came out of there.”
He cocked his head toward the pair of outbuildings. Converted garage painted pale blue to match the house. Off to the side, the odd-looking cement block cube.
The door to the cube was ajar.
“I left it open so the girls wouldn’t feel confined,” said Wascomb. “There’s only one window and it’s bolted shut. Two of them were in that other building, the blue one, but I assembled them all in one place until help arrived.”