Feeling the chill of the gray afternoon, she tucked the tails of her plaid muffler into her black parka and patted her pockets. Gloves, where was her other glove? Damn. Had she left it in the car?
She paused on the front steps of her brownstone, looking up through the bare branches of the municipal maples that lined Corey Road. False alarm, the cops had insisted. Nicer to think so. Maybe. Still, was it better she was leaving?
Her shoulders sagged briefly. Was she afraid? No. Yes. No. Of what? And if she were, what should she do? Call the police? They’d think she was the girl who cried wolf.
Scanning the mid-century brick and brownstone buildings across the street, she wondered if the cop’s brother or whatever he was with the surveillance camera was still on the lookout. Was he watching her right now? She raised both arms, waving, then pointed to her car. Half-serious.
“I’m leaving,” she mouthed the words.
44
Jake took the seventh key from the front door. “Not this one, either, Mr. Ricker.”
“So the hell what?” Curtis Ricker’s contempt for the situation, for the cops, for Jake, apparently knew no bounds.
Jake couldn’t care less. “You sure you can’t tell me what door these keys do open?”
“I told you, I never saw them before.”
“They’re in your kitchen drawer,” DeLuca said. “Sir. You don’t open your kitchen drawer?”
“I never-that’s-you can’t just-”
“Inventory.” Jake interrupted Ricker’s bluster, signaling Hennessey, who unclicked the snaps of a hard-sided leather briefcase and pulled out a glassine bag and a legal pad.
“Yup.” Hennessey patted his pockets, found a pen. Clicked it open. “All set. Item one?”
“Inventory item one, subsequent to the Ricker warrant, number thirteen dash nine-forty-four, at,” Jake looked at his watch, “approximately three twenty-six P.M. Tuesday. One set of keys, one Schlage, one Yale, five blanks. One key ring, metal, no identification.”
“That’s the most idiotic-I’m gonna call-”
Jake ignored Ricker, who, judging by his sudden rigid posture and deepening frown, seemed finally to realize this visit was not a game.
“Officer DeLuca, you’ll stay here with Mr. Ricker. Officer Hennessey, you’ll come with me. Officer DeLuca will take over the inventory.”
This was a tough one. Jake’d rather have D with him when he tested the keys, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave loose-cannon Hennessey here with the bad guy. They’d probably wind up in a contest to see which moron would convince the other to flee to Vegas. Hennessey would have to be his witness. Sad but necessary. “We’ll return in approximately thirty minutes.”
“Where’re we-?” Hennessey couldn’t have looked more befuddled.
How’d this guy make it, all these years?
By the time Jake got back from Callaberry Street, six more butts crowded Ricker’s ashtray, and the suspect apparently hadn’t moved from his post at the front door. DeLuca was counting a lineup of amber plastic prescription containers he’d arranged on the coffee table. A cast-iron frying pan was bagged on the couch. So was what looked like a bowling trophy and a stack of ratty-edged papers. No cell phone.
“Only took us two tries with the keys,” Jake announced. “One opened the door to 56 Callaberry Street, and another the front door of apartment C. Why’d you have Brianna Tillson’s keys, Mr. Ricker?”
“Are you fricking-” Ricker took two steps backward, toward the now-closed front door. DeLuca was at his side before the second step ended.
“You said you didn’t remember when you’d last seen her,” Jake said. “So why’d you have her keys?”
“Hey, I never… ow! Shit.”
He saw DeLuca unclick the cuffs, heard them ratchet over Ricker’s scrawny wrists. Hennessey breathed through his mouth, slack-jawed, as if he’d never seen an arrest. Had Ricker been the one who called the Callaberry Street 911? Soon the voice-forensics guys would find that out.
Jake thought about Brianna Tillson’s ragdoll body, her spotless kitchen, the awkwardly wrong splay of her long legs, and those bare feet, somehow all the more heartbreaking. ME Kat McMahan had confirmed her cause of death as blunt trauma. No accident. Murder. Jake was a murder cop. Times like this were what made him happy. Happy as you could be when an innocent person got bludgeoned to death with a frying pan.
What happened to set Ricker off like that? To murder that woman? With Phillip and Phoebe probably in the next room?
Those two kids-maybe three, that was next on his list-had lost another mother. He couldn’t bring her back, no one could. But he’d made a promise to Brianna Tillson, as he did to all his victims. Right now, this minute, in this smoke-stained sorry excuse for an apartment, he got to keep that promise. Case closed.
“Curtis Ricker? You’re under arrest for the murder of Brianna Tillson.”
Jane clicked her remote, trotted the last few steps to her car door. Yes, fine, she was looking around to see if anyone was… no. No one was watching her; no one was even in the street, or in a car, or pretending to be casually walking down the sidewalk. She couldn’t be spooked for the rest of her life.
She slammed the car door, slipped her keys into the ignition. Bethany Sibbach lived on Hinshaw Street, about twenty minutes away. She opened the center console, got out her GPS. It would be so much easier if there were a GPS for everything in life. A magic gizmo that would give you exact directions, alternate routes. So you could never be lost.
The Audi’s engine hummed to life. She needed to find Hec Underhill. But first, Bethany Sibbach. It would be so rewarding to power back into the newsroom with a big scoop. Then, no way they could lay her off.
Jane glanced in her rearview. Nothing. No one. She was on the way to her story, and, she promised herself, leaving her fear behind. She was not, not, going to allow her own possibly overdramatizing brain to scare her with shadows of terrors that did not exist.
And there appeared the first good omen. She spotted it on the floor of the passenger side. Her missing glove.
“Thank you, universe,” she said out loud. “About time.”
Leaning across the center console, she stretched full out to reach, and patted her hand across the floor, blindly feeling for the glove. She scooped it up, then felt something… else? She stared, uncomprehendingly, at what items now lay in her hand. Her no-longer-missing black leather glove.
And a red stretchy cat collar.
Where baby? If little Phillip Lussier was actually remembering, those two words were about to explode this whole case. If there was a baby, where was it? Jake had worked his share of juvenile crimes. Knew, bottom line, if a third child had been in the Callaberry Street apartment, only a few possibilities existed for where that baby was right now.
Dead, for one. If so, there’d be another murder charge in Curtis Ricker’s rap sheet. And no jury would let the asshole off.
Jake opened the door of his cruiser, slid into the seat, adjusted the rearview mirror. Getting dark already. His shift ended at five, but there were no shifts in a murder case.
Thing was, there were other potential outcomes. The ones that also made his knuckles go white on the steering wheel and pushed his cop instincts into overdrive.
What if the baby were alive? Kidnapped? Sold? By who? And why?
Jake turned the key in the ignition, then paused, seeing his own frown in the rearview. “You watch too much TV,” he said aloud.
He shifted into reverse, checked for street traffic as he backed out of Ricker’s patched asphalt driveway, and considered his to-do list. Ricker was in custody. Check. Kat McMahan still hadn’t filed her autopsy reports for Brannigan or Lillian Finch. Check.