Jude Devine Mystery Series (55 page)

Jude kicked the weapon back into the meeting room and took her handcuffs from her belt as officers swarmed from all directions to restrain him. “You’re under arrest, Mr. Foley. Place your hands behind your back.” As she cuffed him, she said, “I’m very sorry about your son. We all are.”

“You know he did it, don’t you?”

Jude said neutrally, “Mr. Miller is helping us with our inquiries.”

“He’s not helping, trust me. I know the guy. He’s playing you.”

She took Foley by the arm and started walking. Catching a look of consternation from Sheriff Pratt she said, “Stand everyone down, sir. I’ll bring Mr. Foley to booking once we’re done.”

“I wasn’t going to shoot you,” Foley said as they walked. A couple of deputies followed them.

“I know. But plans can go wrong and people can get hurt.”

“Have you arrested him?”

“Mr. Foley,” Jude said patiently, “we haven’t found Corban yet. We have no idea what really happened that night. We can’t make an arrest unless we have hard evidence that Mr. Miller committed a crime. I know you don’t want to hear this, but Wade Miller is probably going to walk out of here tonight.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“All I can promise you is that we are watching him. If he has something to hide, we are going to find out what it is. But we need time.”

“He killed my son, and he’s dumped him somewhere like trash. You want me to back off?”

“I’m asking you to let us do our job.” Jude knew he felt helpless and wanted to give him a sense of purpose. “You could help us. Talk to Tonya. We need to know if she’s telling us everything.”

“I think I blew that already. I went round to Amberlee’s place and they were out there talking to the reporters, dressed like hookers. I don’t know what happened. I went crazy and hit her.”

Great. The father beats up the mother in front of the whole world, then takes a deputy hostage at gunpoint, just in case anyone thought the only guy with a temper was Miller.

“She used to be nice,” Foley said wistfully. “When she was a kid. Real sweet.”

So nice, you had sex with her while you were married to her sister.
Jude kept her thoughts to herself.

Foley stopped walking and turned bewildered eyes to her. “Why would she have left Corban with him? How could she trust that guy?”

Tempting the Fates? Had Tonya unconsciously placed her child at risk because on some level she wanted him gone? Did she want her life back the way it was before, but without the guilt of being a bad mother who gave her child up willingly to the father who thought she was unfit? She had to know there was a risk in leaving Corban with Wade. If he had been violent or even threatening with the child at any time when she was present, she could not pretend she thought her son would be safe.

“Mr. Foley, why apply for custody now?” Jude asked.

“I went to a lawyer the minute I heard she was with that jerk. I know stuff about Wade Miller—I went to school with him. I knew he’d hurt Corban.”

“Has anyone said anything to you about how he treats your son?”

Foley gave a short, bitter laugh. “He’s been on his best behavior. They only got hooked up a couple of months ago. But there’s something Amberlee said—”

“About Mr. Miller?”

“Yeah. He cut Corban’s hair. Did it himself. But he shaved out the center so Corban was bald on the top of his head. Amberlee said it was like he meant to make Corban look ugly, just like him.”

“This was just a few days ago?” And Tonya hadn’t thought it was worth mentioning?

“Tuesday, I think.”

Jude frowned. “We were hoping to get a statement from you before all…this.”

With a pained grimace, Foley said, “I guess nothing I tell you guys is worth shit now.”

“We’ll still need to interview you. We have to clear you as a suspect in Corban’s disappearance.”

“About Miller…can we drop it?”

Jude was surprised. She’d never intended to do anything more than confront Wade Miller with the enraged Foley and threaten to leave them alone. But she was reluctant to take advantage of this man’s desperation.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’d have to kill him and I’m in enough trouble. Why should I go to prison when he’s the criminal.”

“Smart thinking.” Jude instructed the deputies, “Book Mr. Foley, and when you’re done let me know.”

“The hair.” He looked ill. “That was weird, right?”

Jude met his eyes. “Very weird.”

Chapter Ten

“Aunt Chastity! Come see!” Adeline stuck her head around the door of Chastity’s office. “Guess who’s on TV.”

“Is it really important?” Chastity Young completed a column of figures before she turned to face her fourteen-year-old niece. It was time she hired someone to do her accounts for the business. Her home health care company was growing so quickly the administration, coupled with the nursing hours she put in, was becoming more than she could handle.

Adeline heaved a teenage sigh. “You’ve been stuck doing that boring stuff all night.”

“Okay.” Chastity allowed herself to be hauled out of her chair and down the hallway. “But only for five minutes.”

“I’ll wind it back.” Adeline, a TiVo junkie, snatched up the remote and smugly returned the picture to “play.”

Chastity stood behind an easy chair, wearily resting her elbows on the back. “Tell me it’s not
MythBusters
,” she mumbled.

To Chastity’s surprise, they were watching CNN. The face on the screen was a little thinner than she remembered, and slightly drawn. But Detective Jude Devine did exactly what she did the very first time Chastity set eyes on her. She made her very uncomfortable.

“There’s a little boy missing where Detective Devine lives,” Adeline said. “It looks like he got kidnapped.”

Jude was introduced as the detective leading the investigation. The camera zoomed in, and Chastity was struck anew by the languid gray-green beauty of her eyes. They seemed an odd fit with features that were almost severe. Her face was lean, her jaw sharply defined and squarish, the chin as stubborn as any Chastity had seen. She had the kind of classic Roman nose plastic surgeons across the nation bobbed into pert inanity. It lent her profile a granite authority few women possessed. With her boyishly cut black-brown hair and her tall, powerful build, she had an androgynous quality Chastity found disconcerting. Yet there was a vulnerability to her as well.

Chastity had seen it that day in Rapture, after the shooting, when Jude walked Adeline across the desert toward her. On her trail bike, the injured child Daniel clinging to her, Chastity had rolled to a halt a few feet away from them. The moment was etched in her mind’s eye, perpetually replaying itself even when she attempted to dwell on something else. She had tried to distance herself from what happened in various ways, rationalizing it in the context of extreme circumstances, determinedly referring to Jude as “Detective Devine”—which only made matters worse because that came out as “divine”—and dismissing her own behavior as unsurprising, given her relief to see Adeline alive and well.

She’d kicked her side-stand out, dismounted, and helped Daniel slide down from behind her. Adeline squealed his name, opened her arms out wide, and the two children ran into a frantic embrace. Chastity dropped her helmet on the seat and faced Jude. Automatically, they took a few tentative steps toward one another, but there was such naked grief in the detective’s face, Chastity reached for her automatically. She was not even surprised that Jude stepped into her arms without hesitation. She was taller, stronger, harder. Yet Chastity sensed a need in her so intense she answered it the only way she knew how—by giving. By holding her and murmuring soothing words, stroking her hair, gentling her. She could remember wanting desperately to give her back the morning, changed. She wanted to evict from memory whatever had gouged away at the cool confidence that seemed so much a part of the detective the first time they met.

The strength of those feelings still startled her; that she could have them for a stranger startled her even more. She wasn’t sure how long they’d stood there washing into one another, ignoring the constraints of unfamiliarity. She could still feel the weight of Jude’s hands resting below the small of her back, the shape of her head, the press of her thighs. How strange it was, she’d thought since, that even naked she’d never felt so connected to another person. When finally they drew back to stare at each other, she knew Jude felt the same connection.

She took Chastity’s face between her hands as if cupping a butterfly she was afraid to hurt, and Chastity found herself mesmerized. Helplessly, she imprinted the dark-fringed eyes, the firm nose and straight but sensual mouth, on the canvas of her mind.

“You have no idea,” Jude said. Then she lowered her head and brushed her lips across Chastity’s.

The kiss was so swift, so cautious, Chastity had barely closed her eyes when she was released and suddenly Adeline was in her arms, weeping for the loss of her dead sister and begging to go home. When Chastity looked up from ministering to her a few minutes later, Jude had gone.

That day seemed like a long time ago, now, yet barely six months had passed. Chastity had meant to call Jude at least once to say how thankful she was. Instead she wrote a letter and had Adeline do the same. She sent them together. A few weeks later, Jude replied, also in writing. She invited them to drop by if they were ever in Paradox Valley.

“We could go down there and join the search,” Adeline said.

“It’s nice of you to think about that.” Chastity couldn’t stop her eyes from lingering once again on Jude’s mouth as she spoke to the reporter.

What had happened in that moment out in the Utah desert belonged to the emotional terrain of that day only, she told herself. People did uncharacteristic things at such times. She understood the kiss as a recognition of the human frailty they shared and a thank you from Jude for the brief escape from horror witnessed. Likewise those mystifying words:
You have no idea.

“How far is it to Cortez?” Adeline asked.

“About four hundred miles.”

“Then it will only take us a day to get there.” Adeline bounced in her seat. “Can we?”

“You have school.”

Chastity knew how ineffectual that argument was. Adeline was easily two years ahead of her age group academically. Attempting to assess her learning needs, the school had just given her an SAT. Out of 2400, she’d scored an impressive 2300. In other words, her dean said, she would be able to pick her school when the time came. In fact, she could start college now if she wanted. But at fourteen, Adeline had led such a sheltered life she seemed very young for her age.

Her upbringing was responsible for that. Adeline was one of Chastity’s older sister’s many children. Vonda had married a man who, only a few years into their marriage, decided polygamy was the lifestyle he wanted. Tucker Fleming had offered Chastity the honor of becoming his second wife and, when she’d foolishly declined, packed up his family and moved south to the polygamist stronghold of Hildale/Colorado City. He’d since acquired a harem of three other “celestial wives,” another ten children, and the sister Chastity loved and looked up to had all but vanished.

Adeline was brought up in this nightmare until she was eleven, at which time Tucker started planning her “sealing” to a friend of his, who thought marrying children was the Heavenly Father’s plan for all right-thinking males of forty. Somehow Vonda had persuaded her husband that Adeline was not going to make a good enough wife for the chosen pedophile and that they should hand her over to Chastity. She was supposed to see to it that Adeline acquired the necessary feminine attributes to serve a husband appropriately in the future.

They’d returned for Adeline when she was fourteen, with Tucker hell-bent on marrying her to his brother Loudell, another convert to the child-bride fraternity. In the end, they were ordered by their “prophet” to give Adeline to Nathaniel Epperson, the seventy-something they’d pimped another of their daughters to. It was at the Epperson compound in Rapture that Chastity first encountered Jude Devine.

The detective was investigating the slaying of one of Epperson’s wives and had just arrested Naoma Epperson, the head wife. This set off a chain of events Chastity had never fully pieced together. All she knew was that after the dust had settled, Adeline’s older sister Summer was dead. And so was the baby she was giving birth to. Gunned down by the “family” they were part of as they tried to run to safety.

Chastity had legally adopted Adeline a few months later.

“School.” Adeline snorted. “Like I’m going to learn anything. This is important. They said it’s the biggest search they’ve ever had.”

“By the time we get there they’ll probably have found him already,” Chastity warned lamely.

“Then we can go see the Anasazi ruins.” Adeline had it all figured out. “And maybe do some climbing. We can take the snowmobile.”

Chastity sighed. “I can’t leave the business.”

“What about Mrs. Smith? You said she was trained now so she can take over if anything happens.” For good measure, she cranked up the emotional blackmail. “How are we ever going to climb to Everest Base Camp next year if you can’t leave this place for a day?”