Jack Davis Mystery - 01 - Shakedown (25 page)

“No one is saying that she did.”

“Then what are they saying?”

“That they can’t find her.”

Joy let out a low, wailing moan, understanding at last what I was saying. The woman who’d left me two months ago would have hung up, asking the rest of her questions in private, getting the answers from a bottle. She didn’t, gathering herself and asking, “What do we do?”

“The Bureau is tied up at Colby’s house. I don’t know if they’ve sent anyone to Wendy’s yet. I want to get there before they do. But I don’t have a key.”

“I do. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

“I’m on my way.”

Wendy lived in an apartment complex on the east side of the Country Club Plaza, a shopping, eating, and drinking district in midtown on the Missouri side of the state line. Her balcony looked west toward the public library and north up Main Street. I could see it as I approached along Ward Parkway, the library to my right, Brush Creek to my left. Her unit was on the northwest corner. The drapes facing the balcony were closed.

Searching her apartment was another calculated risk. If there was evidence of a crime, I might contaminate it without even knowing it. In that event, I’d be adding another count to an indictment for obstruction of justice. Good intentions wouldn’t save my career or mitigate my sentence. None of that mattered as much as the precious minutes that would evaporate while Troy Clark allocated his limited resources to finding Colby Hudson. Waiting was not an option.

Joy met me in the parking lot. Her jaw was set, her eyes stony, a thin purse stuck under her arm. She was wearing jeans, a lavender short-sleeved jersey under a tan jacket, and no makeup, her hair pulled back and held in place by a black band. She was bouncing slightly on the toes of her running shoes. She had never been a runner. The shoes were as new as she was. She gave me a hug. I held on until she pulled back.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Wendy’s apartment was a small one bedroom, one bath. The carpet was a rich cream, one pale wall set off by an array of four vibrant prints, each of two women, sitting at a café, strolling on a sidewalk, reclining in a drawing room, and lingering in a garden, their faces blank, featureless, their personalities expressed in their posture. There were prints on the other walls of a fanciful jungle filled with oversized tropical birds, a framed poster from the 1972 Montreux Jazz Festival and another celebrating Shakespeare in the Park. The furniture was modern, spare, and comfortable.

Two dinner dishes caked with uneaten spaghetti, dirty silverware on the top plate, were stacked in the sink alongside two wine glasses, a swallow of red left in each. A colander half filled with pasta sat on the kitchen counter next to an open jar of marinara sauce and an uncorked bottle of wine. Damp towels filled the washing machine, underwear in the dryer. The queen-size bed was unmade, the pillows spread out for two. Wendy’s suitcase was under the bed; her clothes still hung in the closet. There was no sign of a struggle or of forced entry.

The stuffed animal from her childhood, Monkey Girl, sat on her dresser. I remembered when I had given it to Wendy.

“It looks like she didn’t finish dinner and left in a hurry,” I said.

Joy surveyed the kitchen. “Dinner for two.”

“This has to be from last night’s dinner. Not the night before. That’s when she met me at Fortune Wok. As angry as she was, I doubt that she came home and made dinner. When was the last time you talked to her?”

Joy paced the living room, arms folded over her chest. “Wednesday night, after I talked to you. I called her back so she’d know that we had talked about your doctor appointments.”

“Did she say anything about going away?”

Joy shook her head. “No. Remember, I told you that she insisted on going with you to see the neurologist on Monday. She would have told me if she had changed her plans.”

“Did you talk about anything else?”

“I told her what you’d said about Kate Scranton. You were right. She was furious with you, but she was too upset about your shaking to deal with that. I told her to give you a break, that you were weak and pathetic like all newly single middle-aged men who had no idea how to live alone.”

Joy said it like she was reciting material learned for a test, the humor of her last comment lost until she realized what she’d said, looking at me, covering her mouth.

“I’m sorry, Jack.”

I waved off her concern. “You’re both right. I screwed up. Did she say anything at all about Colby either in that conversation or anytime in the last week or so?”

“Only that they had argued.”

“When? About what?”

“After your scene at Fortune Wok. Wendy didn’t say what they argued about.”

“Did she say anything about Colby buying a car and a house?”

Joy nodded. “She mentioned the house. What’s that got to do with all of this?”

I ran through a quick summary of the Thomas Rice case and the con?icting stories I’d gotten from Rice, his ex-wife, and Colby. When I told Joy that Thomas Rice had apparently hanged himself, the little color in her face vanished.

“Are you saying that Colby had something to do with that?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to tie all this together and I can’t make it work. There’s too much I don’t know.”

Wendy’s desk was on the wall opposite the balcony. A computer sat on it.

“Go through these papers on her desk,” I told Joy. “I’ll look at her computer.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Anything about Colby, anything about going away, anything that will help us find her.”

Fortunately, Wendy had ignored everything that I’d taught her about security and hadn’t protected her documents, e-mail, or bank records with passwords. Nothing jumped out at me, but I didn’t have time to read much of it.

“I’d take her computer with us, but that’s the first thing Troy will look for when he gets here.”

“No problem. Back it up with this.”

Joy tossed me her key ring. It had a ?ash bar on it with four gigs of memory.

“You are really something.”

“That’s the second time this week you’ve said that. Keep it up and I’ll start thinking you believe it.”

I looked at her. Her eyes had softened. The corners of her mouth had dipped. She wasn’t ?irting. She was hoping.

“There’s nothing here but bills and junk mail,” Joy said.

I finished downloading the contents of Wendy’s hard drive to the ?ash bar. “Let’s get out of here.”

We had found as much good news as bad. No signs of forced entry. No signs of struggle. No signs she had planned to leave. No signs she was coming back.

“What now?” Joy asked.

We were sitting in her car, the engine idling. I wanted to run in a dozen different directions, but I didn’t know which one to choose.

“Who did Wendy hang out with? Who were her friends? We should talk with them. Maybe she said something to one of them.”

“There’s a woman at work she’s mentioned quite a bit, Julie Rutherford. I’ll call her,” Joy said, pausing and then adding, “Isn’t that awful?”

“What?”

“Between the two of us, we only know about one of her friends. We don’t even know if she has any others. Where have we been?”

“It doesn’t matter. We can beat one another up about being lousy parents when this is over. We don’t have the luxury of doing that right now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to talk with Jill Rice again. Tell her about her husband, if she doesn’t already know. See if his death refreshes her recollection. Then I’ll take a look at whatever was on Wendy’s computer. I’ll just keep pushing until something breaks.”

I fought to get the last words out, my shoulders twisting one way, my neck and head yanking me the other like I was being wound in opposite directions by dueling corkscrews. Joy leaned over, holding me, just as Wendy had, as if she could squeeze the demons out.

“You don’t have to do this, Jack,” she said, her lips to my ears. “We can leave it to the Bureau.”

“You know I do,” I managed when the spasm released me. “Ben Yates will make certain that Troy follows standard procedure, which means focus on the high-priority target. That’s Colby Hudson. Troy will let things unfold until he knows where Wendy fits into the picture. It’s what I would do if I were in his position. But that might take too long.”

She let go. I held her hands, looking at them, avoiding her eyes. When Kevin was taken, I had told Joy not to worry, that I would get him back, that he’d be okay. I was afraid to make the same promise again, knowing how hard it would be to keep it. There was too much that could go wrong, beginning with me. She needed to know that.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I said, my voice still wobbly. “And I’m scared that I won’t be able to do what I have to do.”

“Jack…”

“No, let me finish. I’ve been afraid before. When Kevin was taken, I was crazy scared. But I could do what I had to do then even if it wasn’t enough. I haven’t been that scared again until today. When I shake, I don’t know what I am or who I am. I only know that it can’t be me that’s doing it. Then it stops and I know that it is me, it’s who and what I’ve become. I don’t know why and I don’t know if I can do what I have to do.”

She cupped my chin in the palm of her hand, bringing her gaze to mine. Her eyes were full. She blinked back tears, a few escaping across her cheeks.

“We’ll do the best we can and we’ll live with the rest. We’ve never had the luxury of doing anything else.”

I called Marty Grisnik on my way to Jill Rice’s house to let him know that Detective Funkhouser was about to find himself in deep shit.

“You’re going to get a call from Troy Clark.”

“At last. Is he going to ask me out on a date?”

“He’s going to ask you about Detective Funkhouser.”

Grisnik hesitated for an instant. “Why would he do that?”

“Troy ordered everyone on the squad to take a polygraph so he could find out if one of us tipped off the drug house killer about the surveillance camera I put in the ceiling fan.”

“Including you?”

“Excluding me. Movers and shakers need not apply.”

“Makes sense. It’s hard enough to tell when someone is lying without all that going on at the same time. But if you’re not taking the test, how will Troy find out about Detective Funkhouser?”

“An agent named Colby Hudson didn’t show up for his polygraph.”

“Any chance he’s the same agent who bought Rice’s house?”

“Hundred percent. Two agents went to his house to check on him. He wasn’t there. They found drugs and cash. Troy is coming back with a search warrant. He’ll probably find records showing that Colby bought Rice’s house and car. Then he’ll find out that you and Funkhouser went to see Rice and that Rice is dead. Then he’ll call you.”

“What do you want me to tell Troy?”

“Tell him the truth. Tell him that I asked you to help me and that, as far as you knew, I was acting in the course and scope of my official duties.”

“You call that the truth?”

“I call that enough of the truth. You helped me out. I’ll take the heat.”

“Is that all of it?”

“No. I told you before that I had a personal interest. Colby Hudson is involved with my daughter. We can’t find either one of them.”

“You think she’s in trouble?”

“Until I know otherwise.”

“Any reason to think she was a victim of a crime committed in Kansas City, Kansas?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t help you officially, but if you keep me in the loop, I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks. You’ll know what I know.”

“That’s what I’m looking for.”

I started to tell Grisnik that my daughter’s name was Wendy, where she lived and worked, and what she looked like, but he’d already hung up. Either his offer to help was perfunctory, a cop’s version of “drop by anytime, we’re always open” or he had that information already. If it were the former, I’d misread him. If it was the latter, he was doing a better job than I was.

Jill Rice came home at four-thirty. I’d been waiting in front of her house for an hour, ignoring the neighbors who’d slowed down as they passed me by. She slowed down as well, giving me a curdled look as she pulled into the driveway. I followed her into the garage and opened her car door.

“We need to talk.”

Her makeup was intact, her tennis clothes unwrinkled and unstained by sweat. Her perfume was mixed with wine. My guess was that she’d spent her tennis game gossiping at the net and drinking in the clubhouse.

She stayed in the car. “What about, Detective Funkhouser?”

“My name, for starters. It’s Jack Davis. I’m an FBI agent.”

“But you said you were a policeman from Kansas City, Kansas.”

“It’s a long story that will be easier to tell inside.”

She drew her lips back. “I want to see some ID.”

I knew she would. All I had was my driver’s license and a business card I handed to her.

“You can print business cards at Kinko’s. I want to see your badge or I’m calling the police.” She reached for her cell phone.

“I am an FBI agent, Mrs. Rice. When we’re finished talking, you can call my office and they’ll tell you. I’m on leave, so I don’t have my FBI credentials.”

She edged back toward the center console on the front seat of her car. “I don’t believe you. Why should I?”

I reached toward her, extending my hand. “Please, Mrs. Rice. I don’t want to make this any harder than it is.”

She cringed and ?ipped open her cell phone. “I’m calling 911.”

“Let me talk to you first. I’m not going to hurt you. Inside will be better.”

She hesitated with the phone. “Not until you tell me what this is about.”