Cold Winter Rain (20 page)

“
And we discovered Akilah had been murdered,” Sally said.

“
Yes.  Her room had been searched, and she had been strangled.  It seems a strong possibility that it was someone who’d been sent to look for the thumb drive.  My presumption has been that the intruder did not expect to find Akilah there and killed her to remove a witness.”

“
Pointing to some relationship with the Michael Godchaux business,” Moeller observed.

“
Right.  The next day I spoke with Mrs. Kramer again, and she and I visited the Woolf White firm, where Bill Woolf created an arrangement for me that would allow me free rein to review their files on the Godchaux matter.”

I skipped the dinner date and the overnight in Sally’s condo.  Although Moeller had never hesitated to describe the activities on the
Billy Tell
or in his chalet southeast of Geneva, I preferred a little mystery.  And besides, at the moment Sally sat close enough to touch.

“
The next morning a local talent named Billy Royal breaks into my hotel room posing as a room service waiter and tries to muscle me.”

“
And fails.”  Sally smiled a little.

“
Later, Royal tells me he had nothing to do with the boat incident and that a guy who looked Italian hired him, but he doesn't know the guy’s name.”

“
How plausible is that?” Moeller asked.

“
I believe him.  If you met Billy Royal you’d understand.  He’s not capable of making anything up.

“
And that’s essentially all the important events.  This recitation hasn’t been as linear as I’d have liked.  Anyway, before speaking with Royal, I flew to New Orleans and met with Godchaux.  Godchaux gave me the password for the thumb drive, and when I returned to Birmingham, I turned the thumb drive over to the FBI so they could extract the files.”

Moeller finished his most recent Scotch and noticed, apparently for the first time, the Irish coffee.  “Did I order this?” he asked.

“No, Hans, I ordered one for each of us,” I reminded him.

“
Thanks, my friend, but I can’t drink coffee late at night.  Keeps me awake, you know.  I need my sleep in order to keep up with the young ladies,” he said.  “Single malt Scotch, now, that’s different.  Quite different.  Good for a body.  Anything interesting on the thumb drive?”

“
I haven’t heard from the fibbies yet.  I handed over the drive this morning after meeting Royal at the jail.”

Moeller nodded.  “So how close are you to finding this girl and solving a murder?”

I shrugged.  “Solving the murder of my client is not my job, not technically anyway.  The police and FBI are on it.  They have a few leads.  But my best guess, and probably theirs, is that the killer was probably sent by the same people who hired Billy Royal, and that the murder is related to the oil and gas investigation.”

Moeller persisted.  “And the girl?”

“If it’s a kidnapping case, it’s an unusual one.  No ransom note.  No contact from anyone who claims to have taken her.  Most of the time in such cases those circumstances are not good news.”

“
Why?” The question was Sally’s.

I glanced from Moeller to Sally and back.  A bit of cream and a tablespoon of coffee remained in the bottom of my glass.  I drank it off before answering and set the glass down with a louder thud than I intended.  Flying back to Birmingham was definitely out of the question until the middle of the morning.  “Because most of the time if there is no ransom note within two days, the victim doesn’t make it out alive.”

Moeller finished his Scotch.  “Well, Slate, you’ve managed to render me depressed, tired, and drunk.  I shall have to repair to the quiet of my boat and process all this information in my sleep.  Perhaps then some answer will come to me in my dreams.”

“
Answers would be welcomed, whatever their source, my friend.”

Outside, Moeller made his slightly uncertain way toward the
Billy Tell
, while Sally and I carried our bags along the catwalks to slip A-7.  The
Anna Grace
sat, gleaming softly in the dim electric light, graceful and undisturbed, in the calm still water of the harbor.  I stepped onto the gunwale, gave Sally a hand up, unlocked the companionway door, and stepped aside for Sally.  She stepped down the steep stairs carefully, then turned around with a big smile.  “I’ve never spent the night on a boat.  Two firsts for me today.”

I smiled.  “If you’re lucky, maybe we can make it three.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Tuesday, January 31

A few minutes after six, I rolled out of the double berth, careful not to waken Sally, pulled on sweats and boat shoes, and went topside.  There was no rain, and the temperature was in the high forties, but low clouds threatened and a damp breeze made the temperature seem lower.  I walked over to the marina and bought two large styrofoam cups of marine-grade coffee and brought them back to the boat.  A few others were stirring around the marina grounds, fishing crews, a few marina employees, a boat owner or two.

Sally was in the shower.  I placed one of the coffee cups on the stainless sink ledge in the galley, went back topside, and sat with my feet in the boat’s cockpit.

The day after I’d thrown everything in the Camry and driven south from Birmingham all the way to Beach Boulevard, the southernmost east-west road in Alabama, I’d driven over to the
marina at Orange Beach -- owned then by Fob James, a former Alabama governor – and bought a live-aboard sailboat.  I renamed it the
Anna Grace
.

But the boat was more than a home.  A thirty-two foot Allied Seawind ketch, she’d taken me solo around the Florida peninsula, through the Florida Straits and up to Bahia Mar, a pause for fresh water and provisions before the short sail over to Freeport.  She had been south and east to the Caymans, south to Jamaica and down to the Leeward Islands.  Constructed of fiberglass, she was strong and solid and, because of her ketch rigging, easy to sail single-handed.  One of her predecessor sister boats was the first fiberglass vessel to circle the watery part of the world.  She was fast, too; she’d averaged a hundred miles a day on the run to Jamaica.

The
Anna Grace
and slip A-7, Orange Beach Marina, Orange Beach, Alabama, had been my home now longer than any other place I’d lived as an adult.

At this hour in the winter months, the marina was quiet enough to hear water lapping gently against the unmoving pilings, punctuated by the occasional squeak of a boat rubbing against a bumper or the musical clank of rigging slapping a mast.  Not yet visible over the Florida panhandle, the morning sun painted the eastern sky orange.

The companionway door opened.  Sally climbed the stairs carrying the styrofoam coffee container in one hand, the other holding closed an old robe of mine.  She sat beside me in the cockpit.

“Good morning,” I said.

“
Hey,” she said.  “I think I like sleeping on a boat.”

“
Once you get accustomed to the new sounds, the slight motion is a little like being rocked in a cradle.”

“
Something like that, I guess.”

We sat for a few minutes in silence listening to the sounds of the marina morning:  a few low voices, the cries of seagulls, and in the distance, a heavy diesel engine snorting to life.

“Did we accomplish anything last night?” Sally asked.

“
Oh, I’d say so.”

She elbowed me.  “Besides that.  Did the discussion at dinner help?”

I shrugged.  “No conclusions.  But the exercise did crystallize the events for me and helped me get the timeline straight.”

“
That’s something,” she said.

“
Yep.”  I swallowed the last of my coffee.  “We need to start back.”

“
I’ll get dressed.”  Sally stood, gathered the robe at her waist, and stepped with care out of the cockpit and down the companionway.

North of Gulf Shores, almost at the Baldwin County line, tall electrical transmission towers and power lines require a brisk initial climb of all aircraft heading north from Jack Edwards airport.  No problem for the Albatros, but my practice has always been to peg the airspeed at best angle of climb, Vx, the speed at which maximum altitude is gained per unit of ground distance.  Even in a single-engine Cessna, especially when the air is cold and dense, this airspeed yields a deck angle that can create the illusion that the airplane is going straight up.  In the Albatros, the angle is even nearer vertical.

This time I left Sally’s headset volume turned up, and this time she didn’t scream on takeoff.  All I heard was a quiet “wow,” as the wheels came up and I pulled the nose up to peg the airspeed.  In minutes, we had leveled out at ten thousand feet, and we cruised into Birmingham with only a minor traffic delay for sequencing and landing.

Back at Sally’s condo, Sally changed clothes and hurried out the door to return to her office.  I chose a blue blazer, white shirt, and repp stripe tie.  It was time to update Bill Woolf on the status of things, including my meetings with Michael Godchaux and with Agents Sanders and Alston.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sally texted me just as I was knotting my tie.  “MY OFFICE NOW!”

Then, almost immediately, another.  “CALL ON YOUR WAY.”

So I locked the door, walked to my car, and headed toward the Alabama Southern campus.

Once in the car, I chose Sally from my contacts list and selected her phone number.  My call went straight to voice mail.  I didn’t leave a message.  The campus was minutes away, and she would see that I had called.

At the campus gate, the same guard I’d seen before waved me through.  Before the bar came down behind me, my phone rang.  “Slate,” Sally said.  “It’s Paul Kramer.  He’s here, in my office.  I already called Captain Grubbs, and he’s here too.  Paul says he knows where Kris is.”

“I’m thirty seconds away.  Thanks.”

Leon Grubbs and Chief Miller were both standing in Sally’s inner office.  Paul Kramer, looking pale and miserable, his hair unwashed, sat on Sally’s couch.  Sally sat near him, her hand on his shoulder.  Grubbs, Miller, and Sally were speaking quietly to the boy.

Paul Kramer shook his head in answer to a question I could not hear.  “Nobody ever looked in the secret room,” he said.  “Not the FBI, not the police.  Nobody.  And my parents didn’t tell them to.  My dad never goes –never went down there, and my mom, well, I guess she didn’t want them in there.  I don’t know.”  He shook his head again and stared down at the floor.  “I should have told someone before, I know.”

Miller spoke.  “What about your mom not wanting the police in the secret room?  What do you mean?”

Paul Kramer shook his head again and let out an explosive breath.  “Don’t you see?  It’s my mom.  She’s kept Kris down there all this time.  She wouldn’t let her come out.  She’s . . . she has her locked in there.  My mom has my sister locked up in our house.”

Sally looked up at me for the first time, her expression a mask.  Grubbs noticed me and said, “I think we’re about to find your missing girl.”  He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, made a call and barked orders at the person who answered.

“Who could know?” Sally said to no one in particular.

“
I wanted to tell someone.  My mom forbade me to tell.  Dad didn’t know.  I don’t know why she did it,” he was saying.

Grubbs said, “It’s all right now, son.  We’re going to get your sister out of there.”

Paul looked up at Grubbs and Miller, then noticed me.  “My mom?” he said.

“
One step at a time, Paul,” I said.  “First let’s allow the police to do their jobs and make your sister safe.  Then we will see about what to do regarding your mom.”  I looked at Grubbs.  “Mind if I tag along?” I said.

“
Right behind me,” he said.

Miller said, “We will stay right here with the boy.”

“I’ll stay with you, Paul,” Sally said.

“
Let’s go,” Grubbs said.

The immediate vicinity of the Kramer home was a chaos of black and whites and unmarked police cars, parked at all angles, half in the street and half on the lawn.  The TV film crews were in hyperdrive, reporters and their makeup people and cameramen elbowing each other for space to shoot standups.  They shouted questions at Grubbs as we picked our way through the police cars, but he shook his head and grunted out “No comment.”  Wet trees dripped rainwater onto my shoulders as we walked through the Kramer front yard and into the house.

Inside, Agent Patricia Sanders sat at the booth in the kitchen across from a tall blonde girl whom I recognized from her pictures:  Kristina Kramer.  They were both drinking tea.  The girl wore an Alabama Southern sweatsuit, and her feet were bare.  In the girl’s lap, I noticed a small stuffed deer, tan with white spots.  Two fingers of one hand rested on the deer’s head.  Across the island from them, wearing a priest’s collar and looking uncomfortable, stood a slim middle-aged man with dark hair and a graying goatee.

Agent Sanders looked up as Grubbs and I walked in.  “Library,” she said, inclining her head.  We walked down the hall and found Bill Alston and four uniformed police officers, two wearing Mountain Brook police livery, the others City of Birmingham.  The cops were having a discussion about jurisdiction.  They stood flanking an expressionless Susan Kramer, who sat on the red couch wearing a beige pantsuit of a nubby material that might have been raw silk.  Her makeup flawless, her wrists and neck encircled with gold, gold loops with green stones in her ears, she might have been waiting for a table at the Mountain Brook Country Club.

Grubbs solved the cops’ jurisdiction issue.  “We’re in the city of Mountain Brook.  Officers, this city has jurisdiction.  I’d suggest that you exercise that jurisdiction and take this woman down to the jail.”

“And charge her with what?” asked one of the Mountain Brook cops, a balding heavy guy, sweating even in wintertime under his bulletproof vest and uniform.  “Being an overprotective mother?”

“
Unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, violation of Alabama Code Section thirteen A dash six dash forty-two, restraining another person of the age of eighteen or older.  A class C misdemeanor in Alabama.”  Grubbs turned to me.  “Miss Kramer is eighteen, isn’t she?”

“
She’s nineteen,” I said.

“
Well, there you go,” Grubbs nodded at the officer.  “What are you waiting for?”

“
I have to hear from my chief,” the officer said.  “I’m not arresting someone in these circumstances without his okay.”

“
Give me your radio,” Grubbs said.

The Mountain Brook officer unclipped his handheld radio from its place on his belt and passed it to Grubbs.

Grubbs spoke into the radio for thirty seconds, then passed the radio to the officer.

The officer listened for fifteen seconds, then, “Yes, sir,” the officer said.  “Yes sir, we’re bringing her in now.”

He turned to the other Mountain Brook officer.  “Drive the car around to the garage.  We’ll take her out through the back.”  He took two steps over to Susan Kramer.  “Mrs. Kramer, stand, please,” he said.  “Hold out your hands.”

Susan Kramer obeyed the orders without a change of expression.  The officer placed the cuffs over her wrists and snapped them closed.  “Mrs. Kramer, you are under arrest,” he said.

While the policeman recited the
Miranda
warning, he and Grubbs escorted Susan Kramer down the hall, bypassing the kitchen, where Agent Sanders and Kris Kramer remained huddled over their tea, and took her out the door leading to the home’s attached garage.

Catching Agent Sanders’ eye, I raised my eyebrows in a question.  In answer she shrugged slightly.  I walked up and introduced myself to Kris Kramer.

“Hello,” she said, extending her hand.  “Kristina Kramer.”

“
Yes, I know.  Lots of folks have been looking for you.”

The young woman shrugged.  “I know.  Sorry to cause trouble.  Ms. Sanders has explained a little of it to me.”

“I’m just happy to see that you’re safe,” I said.

“
Where were they taking my mother?”

“
Your mother . . . has some questions to answer.  The Mountain Brook officers are taking her to the Mountain Brook jail.”

“
Jail?  My mother hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Agent Sanders looked over at me.  She raised her eyebrows and mouthed “Stockholm?”

I spoke again to Kris Kramer.  “I’m sure this will all get sorted out.”

She nodded.  “With my mother it will.  But my father’s dead.  Agent Sanders just told me.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.”

“
How did he die?”  The question seemed directed to both of us.

Agent Sanders leaned over the table and extended a hand toward Kris Kramer.  The girl’s hands remained in her lap, the fingers on the head of the stuffed deer moving seemingly on their own volition.  “I’m afraid he was . . . killed,” Agent Sanders told her.

“Killed how?  An accident?”

“
No.  Kris, he was murdered.”

“
Oh.”  The fingers on the stuffed animal stopped their movement.  “Who?”

“
We don’t know yet,” Agent Sanders said.  “But we’re all working to find out.”

“
Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Kris Kramer told her.  “Where is my brother?”

“
He’s with Coach Kronenberg,” I told her.

“
Good,” she said.  “He’ll be safe there.”  She looked up at me.  “Tell him I’m okay, would you?”

“
I will,” I said.  “I’d best be going now.  It was nice to meet you, Kris.”

“
Same here,” she said.

In the foyer I ran into Agent Alston.  “So, what happened here?” I asked.

“We all made mistakes,” he said.  “You.  Me.  My partner.  Local cops.  Maybe even your client Don Kramer.”

“
Not looking behind the family’s story, assuming that what seems obvious is also the truth, accepting the conclusions of the group.  I could name several more.  But how?”

“
Turns out that the house has a secret room in the basement.  You absolutely cannot see it if you don’t know it’s there.  The basement appears to be a perfect rectangle, but another basement room, completely underground, juts out toward the street.  That front wall of the basement is paneled in such a way that one of the panels is actually a door.  I walked all through the house alone the night Don Kramer called us in, and I never saw it.”

“
But Kramer knew it was there.”

“
Sure.  But from what I understand, the family rarely used that room.  Off-season clothing storage, an old safe, old toys, some odds and ends.  Nothing much, really.  The first owner of the house constructed the room to serve as a storm shelter.  Solid walls.  Even soundproof. 

“
The family entered the room so rarely the Kramer woman even left the boy alone in the house.  Finally, though, he suspected his sister was there but apparently couldn’t confront his mother.  So he called someone from Alabama Southern, maybe one of his sister’s teammates, hitched a ride out to the campus, and told his sister’s soccer coach that he thought his mother had his sister hidden away.”

“
Why?”

“
Why did she do it?  How?  What?  When?  Where?  I’m good at answering those questions.  Or at least, usually I’m pretty good, or I wouldn’t have the badge in my pocket.  Why?  For that you need someone at a higher pay grade.”  He shrugged.  “But apparently it’s got something to do with needing attention.  I’ve been on the phone with one of our shrinks.  Excuse me.  Forensic psychologists.  He mentioned a mental disorder call Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

“
This thing that happened to the Kramer woman -- it isn’t quite that.  That’s where a parent, usually the mother, fakes the kid’s illness because the parent craves attention.  Here the Kramer woman faked the kidnapping, maybe for the same reasons that drive people with this Munchausen Syndrome.  The psychologist is on his way down here from Washington.  Thinks it’s an interesting case, he says, unusual in the literature but not unique.  Thinks it’s also somewhat analogous to certain cases of child snatching by the non-custodial parent.”

“
Needing attention,” I said.

“
Yep.  Something like that, sport.  Why?”

“
Nothing,” I said, but I was thinking of Kramer and Sally.  “So who’s going to take care of these kids?” I asked Alston. 

“
We’re working on it,” he said.  “A neighbor with children their age spoke with a Mountain Brook officer and me a few minutes ago out on the sidewalk.  She will be taken into the house through the garden and the rear entrance.  She seems capable and willing.”

“
Good,” I said.  “I’d just as soon not have anyone do something stupid like calling the Department of Human Resources.”

“
Makes two of us, sport.  In any event, the young lady in there is over the age of majority.”

“
Right.  Later, Alston.”

Outside, Leon Grubbs stood in front of a swarm of handheld news microphones, cameras, and recorders.  The cameras wore plastic hoods to protect them from the steady mist.  The looks in the eyes of the scribes said Grubbs would be occupied for awhile.  I saluted in his general direction, got into my car and drove away.  Not one member of the media showed me the slightest interest.  Maybe I needed to work out more often.

Back at Sally’s office, someone had scrounged a mug of hot chocolate mix for Paul Kramer.  Sally gestured for me to follow her to her outer office.  She stood facing me only a foot or so away, her arms folded across her chest.  “He’s now aware that his sister is physically unharmed and in reasonably good spirits and that his mother is not in the house.  He seems to be settling down.  But someone needs to find a competent counselor for the Kramer children,” she said.  “They were not the sort of family to keep a psychiatric practice on speed dial.”