Never Coming Home (18 page)

He straightened up as a small figure appeared at the entrance to the building. God, he’d never realised how tiny she was. Fragile, delicate, but indomitable. Every muscle in his body tensed as she looked directly at him. For a second she stood, just looking. Then she crossed the road and walked straight into his arms.

Chapter Twenty-Two

He could feel her trembling, or maybe it was him?

‘What
 
…’ She coughed, tried again. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I was in Dublin. I spoke to a guy in your office and got on the next plane. I guess it was the right thing?’ He scanned her face. She was God-awful pale, with dark smudges under her eyes. And still beautiful. She gave a tiny nod. Something in his chest shifted.

‘Can we get out of here?’ She was looking at the car, then up at him. ‘I’d like to
 
…’ She stopped, swallowed. Wordlessly Devlin opened the car door, settled her in the seat, fastened the seatbelt around her, then loped around to the driver’s side.

‘Would you take me
 
… I’d like to go to the place where they found her.’

‘It
 
…’ Devlin all but gagged on the words. ‘It is Jamie?’

Kaz knotted her hands in her lap. ‘They can’t say for certain. Not yet. They found the place just after we left, and they’ve done some forensic examinations
 
… enough to suspect
 
…’ She stopped. ‘They still have to do more tests. The Inspector was very kind. He explained it to me very carefully.’ Hesitantly she repeated what the man had told her. ‘I want to still have hope. I want to think that they’re wrong, but how can it not be Jamie?’

It was very quiet. A pocket of land, with a few rows of vines, under a hot blue sky. Police markers still surrounded an area in one corner, where the ground had been extensively disturbed. Devlin leaned against a rock that marked the field boundary. High overhead a bird hovered, and a small lizard darted across the boulder and disappeared under it. Kaz went quietly up to the edge of the markers and stood for a long time. Then she came back to him.

‘It’s a good place. If she’d stayed buried here, it would have been okay.’ She looked around. ‘I had no idea Jeff owned this.’ Her face worked. ‘The farmhouse, and all this land? The police said he bought it outright.’

Devlin leaned back against the rough surface of the rock. There were a lot of things about Jeff Elmore that his ex-wife didn’t suspect. Now was as good a time as any.

‘Did you know that Jeff had Jamie insured?’

‘What?’ Kaz turned from her minute inspection of the ground, tilting her head. ‘Well yes – travel insurance. I signed some papers. It was for medical expenses, lost baggage, that sort of stuff.’

‘No,’ Devlin corrected. ‘Life insurance. Just over a year ago, Jeff insured Jamie’s life – for a million.’ He leaned forward, cursing, as Kaz swayed slightly. He gathered her hard against his chest. ‘Sod it, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have thrown that at you, after everything else.’

‘No.’ She put a hand to his mouth, to cut him off, looking up intently into his eyes. ‘There’s more, isn’t there?’

Devlin nodded. ‘Me and Bobby Hoag – we’ve been digging. That’s why I rang your office. Get in the car, and I’ll tell you.’

They sat in the shade of a tree, with the doors open. There was no breeze. Foraging bees hummed. The lizard came back out, to bask on the rock.

‘When I got back, I wanted
 
…’ Devlin stopped, looking at his hands. How could he explain why he’d done what he’d done, when he didn’t understand it himself? ‘Bobby had already talked to a few people – the other girl’s mother, her grandmother, someone from the sheriff’s office, so he had a stake in it. We just carried on from there.’

He stared through the windscreen, reluctant to continue. He’d sat like this before, in out-of-the-way places, making reports in terse phrases, but never to a woman who had lost a child. He almost flinched as Kaz’s hand found his forearm, fingers tentative against the tense muscles, prompting him to go on.

At last he turned. ‘Bobby and I put this together. A lot of the stuff – I got it through contacts, people who have to stay anonymous, who’d deny flat out what they told me, or gave me, if they were asked.
So – there are gaps, and not much of it can be proved. Not like a lawyer would need to prove it. It’s ugly, and it may not be true.’

‘But you think it is?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Then I want to hear it.’

Devlin shifted, cleared his throat. ‘Okay, then. This is what we have. Jeff and his girlfriend picked up the other little girl, Sally Ann, way before the accident. She was with them and Jamie for five days at a motel. The day of the crash they moved to another place, fifty miles away. Jeff checked them in alone – two adults, one child. The Sheriff confirmed it when he investigated. It looked perfectly above board. Sally Ann had already dropped off the radar.’

‘You mean
 
…’ Kaz’s voice wavered.

‘Sally Ann was selected for the switch. She wasn’t anything like Jamie, but that didn’t matter. She was
there
. Running away from her mother. They probably promised to get her to her grandmother in Lynchburg. On the night of the accident, according to Jeff’s account to the Sheriff, he and Gemma were breaking up. He was tired of her drinking and suspected she was taking drugs. Didn’t want her around his daughter any more. He bought her the car, as a sweetener, and told her to go. There was a row and she took off. The Sheriff checked it out. A few people at the motel remembered a bit of banging and shouting around about the time, but no one saw anything. When Jeff found out Gemma had taken Jamie with her, as some sort of revenge, he chased after them. She’d been downing vodka and popping pills. He was frantic to catch them, but he chose the wrong direction.’

‘That wasn’t the version I got.’ She pushed her hair away from her face. ‘I didn’t talk directly to the police. Thinking about it now, Jeff made sure that he kept me away from them. I wasn’t a witness, so they didn’t need to see me, and it never occurred to me to ask to see
them
. Jeff said he had no idea why Jamie was with Gemma in the car. That he’d left them at the motel, by the pool.’ Her voice iced in horror. ‘He knew all along that the girl in the car wasn’t Jamie.’ Her hand crawled down Devlin’s arm, found his fingers and held on.

‘Neither version was true. None of it was.’ Devlin’s voice was flat. ‘Gemma Smith didn’t drink and she didn’t do drugs. Hated them, in fact. I don’t know how she was persuaded to take the stuff. It was probably forced into her. If she’d been assaulted and terrified, she would have been desperate to get away, even though she wasn’t fit to drive. She ran, and she took the other child with her. She was allowed to get away, and to take the old wreck of a car Jeff supposedly bought to sweeten her. That car
 
…’ He stopped, shaking his head. ‘It was an accident in waiting. The airbags were blown and the brakes were defective, and there’s evidence it was deliberately run off the road. I don’t think Jeff did go looking in the wrong direction. I remember a car passing, when I was
 
… when I was with Sally Ann. I’m betting that Jeff was meant to be the one who found the wreck. He must have been shitting bricks when I got there first.’ Devlin gave a harsh bark of laughter, with no warmth in it. ‘The whole thing was a setup, from start to finish. They picked up a suitable child, and kept her with them until they had everything in place, then they got Gemma Smith high, scared the living daylights out of her and shoved her off the road. It was a very carefully orchestrated plan. And I walked into the middle of it.’

‘You said “they”. Jeff
 
… he didn’t
 
…’ She couldn’t go on.

‘He didn’t do it alone. He may not even have been there until it was time to find the wreck. It was a professional job. Hell, it fooled me.’ He turned to look at Kaz. ‘Jeff was part of it, he had to be. I guess he commissioned it.’

‘For the insurance money?’ Kaz frowned.

‘It hangs together.’

‘He got Jamie and all that money,’ Kaz spoke slowly. He could hear her putting it together in her own head. ‘It wasn’t just that he saw an opportunity to identify the wrong girl and took it. The thing was planned – for over a year.’

Abruptly she doubled over, leaning out of the car to retch, dry heaving. Devlin dug a bottle of water from between the
seats and handed it to her. When she gave it back, her eyes were
dark not just with pain but with fury. ‘He paid for his girlfriend
and that little girl to die. No wonder he killed himself.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Devlin looked away. He wasn’t ready to share what he felt on that, when it
was
no more than a feeling. A memory, and something cold at the back of his neck. It was impossible, yet it all fitted. And if anyone could organise that accident, and scare a women into driving to her death
 
…

He stared out, over the vineyard. ‘You only have my take on this. This was the guy you married. Fathered your child.’

‘Are you telling me I shouldn’t trust you?’

‘I don’t know.’ He swung round. ‘I guess I’m checking that you do. Asking. I don’t know,’ he repeated. Something was catching in his chest, something important that had come out of nowhere. ‘You know sod all about me, yet you believe me.’

Kaz closed her eyes, thinking back. When
had
she started to trust? Then it came. It hadn’t been a matter of starting. She’d trusted him, ever since he’d sat at her feet in her own sitting room, after she’d realised he wasn’t a journalist after a story. In what felt now like another life.

‘If the body they found in that field is my daughter, and I don’t see how it can
not
be, then that proves the key point of what you told me. My daughter didn’t die in a car crash.’

‘Christ.’ She could see the tension in his jaw. ‘I’d rather any way but that.’

‘You didn’t make it that way. Jeff did. And I would rather know than not.’

There was silence between them for a while. Devlin broke it. ‘There were a couple of other things. After the accident, Jeff wasn’t the one who took Jamie out of the country. When he left, he left alone.’

‘He had professional help. You said so. I suppose if you can arrange a double murder, you can arrange for a small girl to disappear. Jeff simply handed her over to someone. A stranger.’ Kaz drew in a deep breath. The silence lengthened as she stared bleakly at the dug-over area amongst the vines. After a while she roused herself. ‘What do you think happened here? How did Jamie die?’ she asked softly.

‘It had to be an accident, or an illness.’ He didn’t voice what was in his mind. Had Jeff Elmore been afraid to seek medical help for his daughter, in case it gave him away? He went with the practical. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Munroe and Rossi. I asked them to see what they could find out. I haven’t heard from them. They’ve gone to ground.’ Kaz turned, enquiry in her eyes. ‘In our line of work, it happens.’ He wasn’t comfortable about it, but it could just be coincidence. He put out a hand, holding her fingers tightly. ‘What do you want to do now?’

Kaz looked around, at the car where they sat, shaded by the cypress trees, at the man, at the brilliant sunshine streaming over the peaceful vines. Was this almost her daughter’s last resting place? ‘Do you think we could get in the back, and you could just hold me for a while?’

Kaz stirred. It was dark. When they’d finally left the vineyard Devlin had found them a room in a small hotel close by. Her luggage was sitting in a room at the Florence hotel she’d hastily checked into, before getting a taxi to the police station in the hills outside the city. Devlin had bought her a toothbrush and other necessities, without being asked. He’d brought her a large glass of wine and coaxed her to eat more of her dinner that she’d thought she would, then left her to bathe and get herself to bed. She had been the one who persuaded him not to sleep on the sofa.

He hadn’t expected to make love to her, and that touched something inside her.

She’d needed his comfort, his warmth beside her in the narrow bed.

The curtains were open. She could see the stars. She’d helped Jamie count them so often. There was nothing she could do for her daughter now. Pain curled in her chest. She reached for Devlin, nestling against him.

Eventually, she slept.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Bobby squinted at the bright pink hotel message slip. The words on it blurred at the edges and the colour stung his eyes. His head was buzzing a little. No, make that a lot.

Devlin had taken off for the airport and Italy yesterday, like there was a shark with its nose in his ass. Which was interesting in itself. Looked like his old buddy was really taking a fall for Katarina Elmore. Bobby shook his head from side to side, gingerly, pleased when the floor and ceiling stayed relatively where they were meant to be. When his brain was clearer he was going to have to think about that one. Right now it needed to focus on the words on the paper, which wasn’t easy.

His mouth curved, without doing major damage. Cool! Semi-return of motor function. The full Irish breakfast he’d just consumed in the hotel restaurant was getting to work. A cigarette would top it off nicely. Pity he’d quit. Again.