Misdirection, page 7
part #2 of Borealis: Without a Compass Series
“I had some really good friends here,” Shaw said. “Oh. I should call them. I’m going to call them right now.”
“Not just yet,” North said, pushing Shaw’s phone down. “Why don’t you work on your vocal fugue until we drop Flip off? Then we can talk about going to school here and your friends and anything else you want to tell me.”
“It’s going to be three hours long now,” Shaw said with a bleary smile. “I remembered one part I forgot.”
“Is he all right?” Countee asked.
“This really isn’t too far off normal, actually. Let’s get Flip.”
Countee gave Shaw several dubious looks as she led them up the walk. The residence was another of the brick colonials framing the quadrangle. Countee swiped an access card, and a lock disengaged. She led them inside, up the steep stairs, and down a hall. The decorations in the main areas all looked to be period reproductions, paintings and portraits that must have been meaningless to the students boarding there and, in North’s opinion, gave the space a decidedly museum-like (and creepy) vibe. Countee led them up another flight of stairs, to a cramped third floor that had probably once been an attic, and then stopped. Her breath caught in her throat.
North saw it a moment later. The second door down the hall hung ajar, the frame splintered where repeated blows had forced the door open.
“Stay here,” North said.
Countee listened to him; Shaw didn’t.
In the doorway, North used his elbow to force the door open the rest of the way. The bed lay on its side. The dressers were overturned. The closet door hung open, and clothes were thrown across the floor. A crack in the wall’s plaster, though, was what worried North the most.
“Call the police,” he told Countee. “Someone was definitely trying to find something, and it looks like there was a struggle.”
Chapter 8
THE POLICE CAME AND took their statements. Their phone call to Celia consisted of a battery of short, sharp questions, and then she had ordered them not to do anything until she contacted them. No one said the words, but missing and kidnapped floated just below the surface of every conversation. Then nothing; the next two days carried them into May, the passage marked by spring thunderstorms, the days dark with clouds that looked like they’d never move on.
North spent the days catching up on Aldrich Acquisitions jobs and one-off clients: he finished the report on Nicci Lesperance and sent it to her father; he spent six hours following the Armenian child-bride of a hedge fund manager, which consisted of two hours waiting for her to get her hair and nails done in a Clayton salon and four hours, on and off, of snapping photos of her affair with the owner of an Armenian grocery store in Bevo; North even tried following up on Johanna Griffin, their client who wouldn’t pay. She’d stopped taking his calls, but that didn’t mean he stopped calling. He offered her one last week before he sent it to collections.
Shaw had taken over coordinating with Haw, which consisted of a slush pile of carbon-copy memos on North’s desk that said things like No updates on the break-ins, and Haw says hi (she really didn’t, but I’m being polite on her behalf), You have a cute butt, That was me making a pass at you, But seriously sexual harassment in the workplace is not a joke, Please buy me spaghetti, and what looked like the beginning of a Shaw original, covering the front and back of the tiny rectangle of paper and which seemed to be a gay ballroom retelling of an Icelandic saga.
“Do you do any work around here?” North asked at the end of one day, scooping the haystack of messages into the trash. He was soaked from the rain, his back ached from all those hours in the car, and he had the sneaking suspicion that Shaw had done another fridge purge again.
Shaw pointed at the messages without looking up from the Legos he was playing with. It was supposed to be the Death Star, but judging by the completely inaccurate placement of the thermal exhaust port, North had a bad feeling about the final product.
“Any real work, I mean?”
“I’ve been working on finding Danny Wilkintonis.”
North grunted.
“I ran down his parents,” Shaw said, pausing to stick out his tongue as he studied where the next Lego should go. “And his best friend from college. And his one girlfriend before, as she told me, ‘He started wearing those rhinestone jeans and slurping cocks.’ And Searls sent over some of his bills, so I started going through those.”
North made another of those acknowledging noises.
“Something really bad happened to Flip,” Shaw said quietly.
“We don’t know that,” North said, because that was his line in this scene.
He watched Shaw for a minute. Watched how intently Shaw was focused on the Legos. Stretching his back, he let his shirt ride up, and he strummed his abs. Shaw threw a quick look before snapping his attention back to the blocks, and North smothered a grin.
“Come upstairs in five minutes,” North said. “You need a real distraction, and my back is killing me. We’re going to take a bath. If you want to be nice, you could bring me a couple of beers.”
“I’m kind of busy. And you hog the tub. Your legs are too big. All of you is too big.”
“All of me?”
“You’ve got the mind of a fifteen-year-old.”
“Five minutes,” North said, “or I come looking for you.”
Shaw was there in four minutes and fifty-nine seconds, naked, hard, and carrying two beers by the necks.
On the news the next day, the story was everywhere: Philip Chittenden was missing, and police suspected kidnapping. The summons came at nine o’clock that morning—there wasn’t any other word for it. Celia Chittenden demanded that they attend a meeting at her house in Maries County.
“Do you think we’ll see Emery?” Shaw asked as they sped west on I-70.
“God, I hope not.”
“Do you think we’ll see John-Henry?”
“I doubt it. We’re not going to Wahredua. We’re not even going to Dore County. And please don’t tell Hazard and Somerset we want to have lunch or check each other for lice or wash our hair and watch Golden Girls while we all wear towels or whatever you’re about to do.”
Shaw froze, phone in hand. “I wasn’t going to—I wasn’t going to suggest any of that.”
“Then whatever it was, it would have been worse. Put your phone away.”
The Chittendens lived in a farmhouse north of Vienna, although calling it a farmhouse was like calling the Sears Tower an office building. The place was an estate. Sure, it was white clapboard with a wraparound porch instead of brick and stone, and instead of a stable and horses and fox hunting or whatever the hell people did at estates, their preferences (to judge by what North could see through the open doors of the barn) seemed to be boats and four-wheelers. But this was rich people land, and the sprawling house and the perfect landscaping were just the beginning.
Gavin met them at the front door, gesturing them into the entry hall. It was open to the second floor, with wraparound stairs and a landing that looked down on the front door—presumably so the Chittendens could perform a downsized version of the Von Trapp family bullshit, or something like that. The walls were whitewashed, the floor a pale, scrubbed oak, with accent pieces that offered pops of dark wood and shades of blue and pink to complete the rustic-chic look. The sun had finally come out, and the house was full of light, the whitewash glowing with it. An opening connected the entry hall with a large space that was probably called the family room or the great room, where black cables snaked across the floor, and a pair of men in grubby tees were disassembling softboxes.
“Did they start the reality show today?” North asked.
Making a face, Gavin pointed at double doors that led off from the entry hall. “You can wait in there.”
“I’ve got my lines all memorized,” North said. “Keep your hands off my man!”
“He doesn’t care about you or your fake tits,” Shaw said.
“You can’t say tits, remember?”
“No, it’s not me. That’s my character. Fiona Vandersaints. And anyway, it’s in the script. Let’s take it from: ‘He doesn’t care about you or your fake tits.’”
“He doesn’t want you because your skanky ass got trashed at Ladonna’s cat fashion show and you fell off your chair and gave everyone your own cat fashion show.”
“All you want to do is spend his money. You never cared about him, and I have proof—”
“Just wait in there,” Gavin screeched.
“Touchy,” North said as he slid the double doors open.
“Rude,” Shaw said.
“Respect the craft,” North said. “And respect the scene.”
“Even if North was stepping all over my lines.”
“You little shit. You were taking forever to finish. It’s not my fault—”
Gavin whirled and stalked away, heading toward the great room.
“You don’t have to antagonize everyone,” Shaw whispered.
North shrugged.
“It’s not his fault he’s a major drip. This place has some super creepy energy.” Shaw looked around them at the farmhouse full of light and chafed his arms. “Creepy and dark and cold.”
“I’ll report it to the energy police,” North said as he passed through the doors.
The room was an office, and it was immediately clear that this was Celia’s private domain and not a space she shared with her husband. The furniture was in keeping with the rest of the house: blond wood with brush strokes of milk paint, a shiplap wall full of photos, lamps that were meant to look like they’d once served noble farm functions as moonshine jugs and blue-enameled percolators. Against all that, the computer was a black beetle crouched on the desk, all hard lines and glossy plastic. A red-felt display case held a small revolver: satiny stainless steel and black rubber grip. Stamped on the barrel was the Ruger phoenix.
The computer’s monitor was dark, and when North jiggled the mouse, a lock screen appeared. He made his way around the room, examining the photographs. They all looked like they’d been taken relatively recently, perhaps within the last five years, because it was easy to spot Flip’s entrance into adolescence, complete with acne and stooped shoulders, and his transformation into an attractive man-child on the cusp of adulthood. Celia Chittenden didn’t change at all, and neither did the man, who must have been Flip’s father. If Celia was Kim Novak, this guy was a puffy-faced, gin-soaked Jimmy Stewart, with his businessman’s haircut and tassel loafers.
A drawer rattled. When North glanced over, Shaw was pawing through it.
“Don’t take anything,” North said.
Shaw made an indignant noise.
“Uh huh. Well, I have to tell you ever since you walked out of that dermatologist’s house with an eight-thousand-dollar fountain pen.”
“It had a unicorn on it! And I was going to give it back.”
North let that one go. He moved to the center of the room, trying to take it all in at once. Energy and juju and all of that was bullshit, but he had to admit that something about the house gave him major creeps. The five-year span of the photos was one reason. And the stilted postures, the mannequin smiles, the way bodies didn’t quite meet—a silhouette of some seriously fucked-up family dynamics.
“This is weird,” Shaw said.
North joined him to look at the four-by-six in a plastic frame. Celia, her husband, and Flip were much younger. Flip couldn’t have been older than eight, although North had a hard time being more specific than that because he had relatively little experience with children. The smiles looked real—or closer to real. Flip was pressed against Celia’s legs, in overall shorts and a train conductor’s cap, his face half-hidden against Celia’s jeans with embarrassment. Or perhaps laughter. The husband was holding a little girl in a frilly pink dress. The child wasn’t an infant, but she didn’t look sturdy enough to release into the wild yet.
Voices moved toward them, and North said, “Put it back.”
Shaw replaced the photograph next to the computer monitor. North slid the drawer shut. They moved away from the desk.
“Do I sound like I’m bullshitting you, officers?” A man.
“Detectives.” That was a woman’s voice, and it sounded familiar, although North couldn’t place it.
“Whatever. Do you think I’m bullshitting you? I run a multimillion-dollar company. I don’t bullshit. I expect people to do their jobs and do them well. If they don’t, they’re out on their asses. Not like you government types. Half you lot sit around scratching your butts all day, and there’s no consequences. Nothing. Get a raise. Get a promotion. Move them up the ladder, and the whole time they’re standing around picking lint out of their cracks. I was telling Celia the other day, just the other day I was saying, ‘These are the people they want us to put in charge of our healthcare?’ I mean, I expect results—”
“Francis,” that was Celia’s voice, cold and clipped, “shut up.”
The silence had its own kind of echo.
A moment later, three women and two men entered the room. One of the men must have been Francis, and he matched the man in the photographs, right down to the tassel loafers. The other was a cop of some sort, although he was wearing a shabby green suit that was out at the elbows. One of the women was Celia Chittenden in a simple white blouse and a navy suit, the blue so dark that it suggested mourning. Another was a nervy blonde in what looked like the clearance-rack version of Celia’s outfit. And the last was Diamond Kelso.
“Diamond?” Shaw said, a grin splitting his face. “What are you doing here?”
They had met her on the Slasher case; she’d been a uniformed officer who had helped them when she’d been able to, and they’d stayed in touch over the months when she’d occasionally passed along a tip or some helpful information. She had midnight skin, a sleek twist-up bun of hair that was now dyed a coppery color, and a fawn-colored suit that didn’t look quite big enough. Her eyes, though, were her most remarkable feature: the irises a startling gold that demanded attention.
“I’m a detective with Juvenile now.” She made a vague gesture at the blonde, as though that explained something.
“You got promoted?” North said.
“About time,” Diamond said.
“Hey, that’s great. Congratulations.”
“You know these two?” the blonde asked.
“I know them,” Diamond said. “What are you—”
“Mr. McKinney and Mr. Aldrich are helping with the investigation,” Celia said. “Take a seat; I have an interview with the Kansas City Fox affiliate in forty-five minutes.”
As soon as they were seated, the blonde spoke up: “Mrs. Chittenden, in my experience, private investigators are rarely worth the expense, and they’re a classic case of over-promise and under-deliver. You could save yourself a lot of money and heartache by sending these two on their way.”
“Thank you, Detective Raskowski, but it is my money, and I’ll spend it however I please. Mr. McKinney, Mr. Aldrich, this is Detective Baker. Local police.” She nodded to the man in the out-at-the-elbows suit. “And it seems you know Detectives Kelso and Raskowski. My husband, Francis. There, that’s the introductions done.”
Sure, North thought, looking around the room: Raskowski fidgeting in her seat, Diamond glaring at North and Shaw, Baker tapping nicotine-stained fingertips against his seat, Francis at the picture window, leaning against the glass and staring out into the world. Celia occupied the chair behind the desk. The way she and her husband had placed themselves, North thought you could have built the Great Wall of China between them and neither would have noticed. Sure, North thought again. All of us nice and introduced like feral cats in a drawstring bag.
“Detective Baker will continue to investigate any local leads, while Detectives Raskowski and Kelso take the lead in St. Louis. Mr. McKinney and Mr. Aldrich, you’ll report directly to me.” She flashed a smile, pearly and sharp. “Since it is my money, after all. Now that you’ve all met, I think you should exchange contact information, and then I’ll need to speak to Mr. McKinney and Mr. Aldrich alone.”
The three cops might have been too professional to share unhappy looks, but only barely. Raskowski snapped out a number before North had finished pulling out his phone, and she huffed loudly when he asked her to repeat it. Baker looked like a guy who just wanted to climb out of the lion’s den, but his eyes were sharp, studying North and Shaw a little too closely for North’s liking. Diamond just rolled her eyes; they already had her number, and she had theirs. By the time the cops had left, North’s shirt was sticking to the small of his back. Shaw wasn’t kidding about the bad juju.
“Alone,” Celia repeated.
Francis glanced over from the window; his smile could have chopped wood. “Of course, dear.” When he stepped into the entry hall, he rolled the doors shut with a kind of mocking bow, but the movements were stiff and stilted.
“You report directly to me,” Celia repeated. “I’m paying the bills, so I’m the one who gets answers.”
“That’s how we always work,” North said, “but you should be aware that we’re professionally and ethically obligated to inform the police about illegal activity.”
It took a moment, and then Celia barked a short laugh. “I’m not asking you to help me cover up any crimes, Mr. McKinney.”
“What are you asking us to do?” Shaw said.
“Find my son. What in the world did you think I wanted you to do?”
“I’m not sure,” Shaw said. “That’s the whole problem.”
“What Shaw means,” North said, “is we seem to have been cut out of the loop for a couple of days. Why don’t you bring us up to speed?”
“My son is missing. The police want to tell me he ran away, which is ridiculous. He was kidnapped. I fought tooth and nail to get an AMBER alert pushed out, but that didn’t yield anything. Those first two days, I thought the police could handle this situation. Obviously, I was wrong, which is why you’re here.”
“Why do the police think he ran away?” Shaw said.
