The Only Witness (39 page)

"Did you see anyone?" Matt asked Grace, peering out at the yard. "Did you hear anything?"

Of course. He would be itching to do the cop thing. "No," she told him. "We wouldn't have been able to hear the space shuttle launch, the way Gumu was carrying on."

Josh, leaning against the fence below, said, "He kept signing
bad, bad.
"

Grace looked surprised. "When did he learn that sign?"

"Guess Neema showed him."

"Cool," said the vet.

Matt crawled toward the edge of the net. "I'll go check the premises."

The ARU kids showed Finn the path the intruder likely took, out through the barbed wire and across that blasted blackberry-filled field, the same way the YouTube reporter had escaped.

"It was a dark pickup," Caryn told him. "I heard it crawling along the side of the road in the gravel and called Jon, and then we both went out to check."

"The headlights weren't on. Pretty hard to make out the plate in the dark, but I think I got a partial." He pulled a small page out of a tiny notebook. "That letter"—he pointed—"might be an O or a D; and that number might be a 3 or an 8. I think I nailed the rest of 'em."

"Thanks," Finn said. So he had four possible combinations to run; it was a good start. It felt weird to get help from two kids he'd testified against less than a month ago.

"Really fucked up on letting the dickhead into the compound," Jon said.

For a second Finn thought the kid was carping about the lack of police protection, but then he realized Zyrnek was criticizing himself.

"You're not an experienced guard," Finn told him. "Don't sweat it."

Caryn frowned. "But with all the ops training we've gone through," she said. "We should have known better."

"Ops training?" Finn asked. "Where'd you do that?"

"Uh." Jonathan pulled at Caryn's shirttail. "We should be making rounds, don't you think?"

She looked at him and then back at Finn. "Oh, yeah. Gotta check the perimeter."

They peeled off in separate directions into the darkness, and Finn walked back to the barn enclosure.

Josh went to bed. Grace and the vet remained sitting in the rope webbing, bonding over the comatose gorilla, discussing eating habits and good and bad behavior like two suburban moms. Brewer still had no prediction on when Neema would wake up.

"Could this affect her memory?" Finn asked from below.

"Hard to say," the vet said. "It could." She turned to Grace. "How would you tell if it affected her memory?"

Grace launched into more Neema stories. He could tell she was more worried than she let on. He wasn't feeling too optimistic, either. It was bad enough to depend on the testimony of a gorilla. What if that gorilla never told the same story again?

Dawn was just beginning to brighten the horizon as Finn drove to the station to look up the license numbers.

Chapter
28

Twenty-six days after Ivy disappears

Bad man baby cry snake skin bracelet man come
.
Bad bad. Gumu scared. Neema scared. Bad bad. Snake arm bad. Candy now.

Neema not only remembered the poisoning event, she talked about it constantly. She reported that
Gumu
make bad man go
. From her description, it sounded like the bad man was not the wacko who'd murdered Spencer years ago, but the man who'd taken the Morgan baby.

"Snake arm man?" Grace asked, taping the question session. "The
same
snake arm man who took the baby to the green car?" It was questionable whether Neema truly understood the meaning of the word
same
; Grace hadn't had sufficient time to test the gorilla on that.

Brittany let herself into the trailer in time to hear the last part. Her blue eyes widened as she glanced back and forth between Neema and Grace. "What's going on?"

Bad skin bracelet snake arm
candy now, now candy
, Neema gestured to Grace. Then, turning to Brittany, she signed
red tail candy Neema candy please
.

"What's she saying?" Brittany asked, signing
where baby?
at Neema.

Red tail give candy good gorilla
, Neema signed back. She scooted close to Brittany to touch her hair.

"Neema says good morning and wants you to give her C-A-N-D-Y. Before that, she was describing the man who tried to poison her two nights ago."

"Really?" Brittany's face stiffened. "Could it be the man who took Ivy? How did she describe him?"

Grace sighed. "Bad skin bracelet snake arm."

It had taken her so long to clue in on
skin bracelet
. What else had she missed? She pulled out the videos taken of Neema right after Ivy had disappeared. None of them was safe as long as Snake Arm was still out there.

When Grace called, Finn was staring at several possible matches to prints from the back of the school photo. None of the prints belonged to Charlie Wakefield. Turning away from his computer screen, he answered his cell phone.

"Bag glove," she told Finn. "Neema described Snake Arm as using a bag glove."

"The kidnapper put a bag over his hand?" He was getting surprisingly adept at deciphering Neema's—and Grace's—language. That made sense—the gorilla would be able to see a tattoo through a transparent plastic bag. "Miki," he shouted after he ended the call.

Micaela's head popped up over a file cabinet. "Yes?"

"Can you bring me that report the FBI faxed to me?" He drummed his fingers on the desk in anticipation. She plopped a file folder down in front of him.

He pulled up the common fingerprints from the back of the photos at the school. Ruling out Daisy Taylor's prints—she'd put the collection together—that left only two others. There had been a couple of plastic bags in the collection of detritus he'd had Scoletti scoop up from the Food Mart parking lot. He thumbed through the FBI report, looking for the fingerprint section. If Grace—and Neema—were right, and if his luck had finally turned… Bingo! One of the fingerprints—a male's, judging by the size—from the inside of the bag appeared to match a print from the back of Ivy Rose Morgan's photograph. What were the odds that the same person had his hands on baby Ivy's photo
and
inside a bag found under the car in the parking lot where the baby disappeared? Now all he needed was a set of Junior's fingerprints to compare. The net was closing, he could feel it.

He ran all the license plate combos the ARU kid had come up with for the pickup seen prowling the roadside on the night the gorillas had been attacked. On the third try, he hit pay dirt.
Francisco Ibañez.
Who, he was willing to bet, was a husband or blood relative of Audrey Ibañez, the janitor at Brittany's school.

He had Scoletti pick Ibañez up and bring her in for questioning. He peeked at her through the video hookup before going into the interview room. She sat straight, nervously twisting her hands. Then she noticed what she was doing and made an effort to place them flat on the tabletop. She took a deep breath, as if preparing herself for battle.

He entered the interview room. "Thank you for coming in, Ms. Ibañez."

She smiled. "Of course. I want to help in any way I can."

"Like you helped kidnap Ivy Morgan?" He sat down in the chair across from her. "Like you helped to poison the gorillas?"

She did her best to look shocked. "I would never—"

"We have identified your pickup driving with lights off at Dr. McKenna's compound at three thirty a.m. yesterday, precisely the time her gorillas were attacked."

Audrey's eyes darted back and forth for a minute as she thought about it, then her face crumpled. "He made me do it."

"Who?"

"Jimson—the quality control guy. He said he'd report me for smoking meth at the school if I didn't."

"So you've still got a meth habit?"

She shook her head. "No. No way. I'd never touch that stuff again." A tear escaped her right eye and her nose started running; she reached a hand up to wipe the trail of slime away. "Not anything else, either. But I couldn't lose my job; who's gonna believe me?" Her brown eyes bore into his. "I can't lose that job. I can't go back to jail. He made me take that baby to Ireland."

Finn's eyes widened.
Ireland?

"I didn't have a choice. But those Irish folks were real nice. I could see they wanted that baby bad. I wouldn't ever have left her there if I thought she'd be hurt. Abe was right, Ivy's really in a better place." She nodded enthusiastically, as if transferring Ivy to a nice couple would excuse her actions.

"You left the note at the memorial," Finn said, fighting to keep a grin off his face. It was going to happen. He was going to bring Ivy back to Brittany Morgan.

"I wanted Brittany to know," Audrey said.

"Did you help kidnap other babies?"

Her eyes rounded. "Oh
dios mio
, no. Are there more?" She started sobbing in earnest, and stretched her hands out to him. "Please, please, I can't go back to jail. I'd never see my kids again. He made me do it. He never even paid me one cent."

Finn sat back in his chair. "Tell me everything," he said. "And then we'll see."

"Don't you want me to write it down?"

"It'll all be on the tape," he told her.

She glanced around the room, her eyes searching for the recorder.

"It's recording. Just start at the beginning," he said. "When did Abram Jimson Jr. first approach you?"

A half hour later, Finn called the Spokane Police Department and requested Abram Jimson Jr.'s arrest. An hour after that, he received a call back from a sergeant. "Bad news, Detective. Jimson's in the wind. If anyone knows where he's headed, they're not talking. His BMW is missing." He rattled off the license number and VIN.

Finn called FBI agent Alice Foster, got her voicemail, left a message. He hung up, frustrated. He abandoned his desk chair and walked out to the lobby, just to be in motion. In front of the station, two protestors kept each other company as they paced in a circle. Their yellow signs read
Our Police Believe That Gorillas Talk!
and
Next They'll Take Our Guns
.

He wanted so badly to call Brittany Morgan. He could taste the desire burning his throat. Or maybe it was simply the heartburn that had accompanied him throughout this case. But he couldn't make that call until he knew that Ivy was alive and coming home.

His phone chirped.
Foster, FBI.
He answered as he walked back to his desk. "The Morgan case
is
a kidnapping," he reported, feeling a bit embarrassed that he was chortling about a major crime. "And we need all the help we can get ASAP."

Chapter
29

Twenty-seven days after Ivy disappears

The next morning, border guards stopped Abram Jimson Jr. as he tried to cross into Canada from Montana. His right index fingerprint matched one on the back of Ivy Rose Morgan's photo, as well as one on the photo of Tika Kinsey. His thumb and middle finger print matched prints found on the inside of a plastic bag from the Food Mart parking lot.

Reverend Jimson Sr. was so noticeably mortified that Finn was inclined to believe his public apologies. With his long-suffering wife by his side, the preacher kept saying, "Abe was the light of our life, so smart that he almost completed law school, but somehow the devil got hold of his soul. Please pray for my son." The law school history went a long way toward explaining how Junior could have pulled off the adoption arrangements.

True to his legal beagle training, Junior wasn't talking. But right after the news broke about Junior's arrest, a Jimson janitor in Seattle had turned himself into the police and made a plea bargain in exchange for information. The guy was on parole for forgery and identity theft, and Junior had blackmailed him into creating false documents for six babies, including a passport for Ivy. He didn't have the real names of the babies, but he'd been smart enough to keep copies of the fake papers.

"Abe had these Jimson checks in his hand," the guy said. "He told me he was gonna say I stole 'em and faked his signature. Who'd believe me? I didn't have any choice."

Through computer records, FBI Agents Foster and Maxwell discovered that Junior had purchased mailing lists and personal information from adoption websites. With the prospective parents' race and physical characteristics and wishful email messages in hand, Junior had very cleverly matched babies to parents who'd find it hard to say no to an infant that looked like them.

The FBI located Ivy in Dublin, Ireland; she was due to arrive in Seattle at eleven tomorrow night. The whole Morgan family was driving over to get her. Tika Kinsey had been found in New York City and would be reunited with her parents and grandmother the day after that.