Not Without Her Child, page 2
Probably not much evidence still hanging around after eighteen months and a lot of rainfall, but his private investigative expertise supposedly made him capable of finding what others had not.
“And in case you’re wondering,” she added as it occurred to her, again, that he and his firm might think that her pain made her vulnerable and someone who could be taken advantage of, “I know this is a long shot. That the chance that you’d be able to come here and magically find what all of the best law enforcement in the country has not, is miniscule. I’m not expecting to get my money’s worth,” she added, just to be clear. “But I’m not going to leave any stone unturned, any chance uninvestigated, any harebrained scheme unattempted, until I have my daughter home with me.”
His silence, in light of her forthrightness, didn’t sit well. Yeah, she’d been abrupt during the entire forty-five minutes of their acquaintance, but where her case was concerned, she needed him to be open with her. “You have no response to that?”
“None that I care to make at this time.”
“May I ask why?” He was on her payroll. She had a right to ask questions.
“Because you aren’t going to like it.” The words, the warning tone of voice, his glance to the car seat behind her, gave her an idea of what he was thinking. It wasn’t like she hadn’t heard the same from pretty much every source open to speak to her about it.
“My daughter is alive, Mr. Powers.” Her tone brooked no argument and she felt no apology for it.
“I know you believe that.”
“I don’t just believe it. I know it.”
His eyes shot toward her. Stopped at a light, she looked right back at him. “You have proof?” he asked, brows raised.
He knew she didn’t.
And yet...that gaze, the way his eyes seemed to light up...it was as though he truly wanted to believe her.
“My ex-husband is, in my opinion, a narcissist. He needs to be pandered to at all times. He’s emotionally weak and he is cruel when it gets him what he wants, but he is too afraid of the afterlife to ever kill anyone or to lie about not having done so.”
“Even if lying about it keeps you coming to visit him every single week that he’s locked up in prison?”
Her stomach lurched. The granola bar she’d had for breakfast wasn’t soaking up enough of the acid inside her. “There is that possibility,” she acknowledged through a throat gone dry. Finding Brooke meant total honesty. With herself and others. “But when Clint gets truly worried about his mortality, his gaze tends to dart around. He looks me straight in the eye, every time, when he tells me that Brooke is alive and well.”
The man swore under his breath. Something about Clint’s lack of legitimate paternity, if she wasn’t mistaken.
“I also know that I’d feel something if she was gone,” she said. “My certainty that she’s alive isn’t just wishful thinking, or an inability to accept the worst. It’s a peaceful sense that comes over me when I think I can’t go on, when I’m exhausted, or when I wake up in a panic in the middle of the night.”
His silence was so lengthy she considered the conversation over.
“I don’t believe you’re wrong in what you say, or feel.” His words fell into that quiet like warm tea in the morning. And then he added, “But if I’m going to do the job you’ve hired me to do, I have to keep the possibility of her being...gone...on the table.”
He was there to find her daughter. One might look for life or...not...in different places. Using different means.
He was giving her his honesty.
She wanted it. Needed it. Was grateful that he’d given it to her.
“I understand.” She pulled onto the apartment property and around to the covered parking outside his door. “And I look forward to you finding out that I’m right.”
* * *
Brian didn’t want to prove her wrong. He couldn’t try to prove her right. All he could hope to do was to prove what happened.
To do that, he needed an open mind to any and every possibility. To find and follow evidence, no matter where it led.
That was why he couldn’t get emotionally involved in a job.
Or a client.
Usually, a no-brainer for him.
So why was a woman he’d just met creating a struggle within him to find his detachment? He pondered the question briefly as he took a cursory look around the bare-walled apartment and rolled his bag into the nondescript but comfortable-looking bedroom. He changed into jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, set up his mobile printer, and surge protector that traveled with all chargers plugged in, on the kitchen counter, and grabbed the key ring he’d taken from the envelope.
He’d told Jessica he’d be at her house that morning, to familiarize himself with the scene of the original crime—the kidnapping. She kept a rigid schedule. As an investment broker, she always worked from 8:30 a.m. until 3:00 p.m., Wall Street hours on central time, Monday through Friday. Using early mornings and evenings for phone calls and research for her clients as necessary. Her standing half-hour video visit with her ex-husband was on Friday at four. Once a month, she drove the two-and-a-half hours to have the meeting in person at five-thirty. And the rest of her life was compartmentalized around the false leads Clint sent her way.
Seemingly false. According to the reports he’d read, as far as Jessica, or anyone else had been able to ascertain, Clint’s information had, thus far, led nowhere. Brian would be taking a look at every single one of the sixty-four supposed clues.
But, first, was the truck, and then the scene of the crime. Start at the beginning.
The bed of the truck had a liner, good quality, professionally installed. Clean. He bagged a small blade of grass he got off the side of a ridge in the heavy black plastic. Could have landed any time in the past fifteen months. Except that she’d said the only time she’d driven was to move it to his apartment and the grass was browned with age, but still viable due to whatever substance had stuck it to the liner.
An hour passed as he made his way around the outside of the truck, the wheel wells, bumpers, tires. He’d collected thirteen samples by the time he first opened a door. And another thirty-seven in the back and passenger seats. Most, maybe all, would lead to nothing.
All he needed was one little something. If not from the truck, then from somewhere.
Authorities had already gone through glove box and console contents. With his medical gloves on, Brian emptied both receptacles into one large zip-lock bag for his later perusal. May not lead him any closer to finding Brooke, but they’d give him insight into the man who’d taken her.
Jessica Johnson had been waiting too long for answers. Even the unthinkable would allow her to get off the treadmill leading to nowhere and move forward with her life.
On his back on the front floor of the truck, he perused under the passenger seat, found an old dried-up piece of what looked to be a French fry lodged in the seat adjustment track. And slowly moved his way over to the driver’s side. The carpeted interior made his job both easier and harder. There weren’t a million grooves in rubber mats to get through. But he was going to have to vacuum the carpet into a clean bag and then go through what came out—before bed that night.
With tweezers and small evidence bags, he retrieved half a dozen small, dried pieces of what he suspected was food under and around the driver’s seat. Assuming Clint Johnson was the usual driver of the truck, the man ate in his vehicle more often than someone else ate in it with him.
Or he was a lot messier when he ate than any companion had been. There was a lot more debris under his seat than the passenger’s.
Mentally logging both impressions for the notes he’d make at the end of his inspection, Brian moved his head back toward the brake pedal and stopped. The seam at the edge of the seat, out of line of normal vision, just under the edge of the seat...it was thicker in a four-inch section. Reaching out, he ran his fingers slowly along the edge, no hypotheses forming. He’d never seen a leather seat seam be perfectly symmetric but thicker in one part.
But yeah, it definitely was. As though someone had inserted something into the seam? Heart rate speeding up a bit as a pump of adrenaline shot through him, he wondered if the job could really be that easy. Had he already found the missing piece? Something just a little bit off that would lead him on the chase to the successful conclusion?
The thin rubber of his glove snagged on an edge of the seam. Brian pointed his skinny powerful light to the spot he held as he scooted his head as far under the seat as he could get it. Working in the tight spot wasn’t easy. He didn’t care. He’d find a way.
Half seeing, feeling the parts he couldn’t see, he realized that the seam wasn’t sewn tight. With a good tug, he knew why. Inserted in the four-inch section were two thin plastic sheets covered with hook and pile fasteners that, when yanked, came apart. Heart pounding harder, and flat on his back, with his head turned to the side, he slowly slid his free fingers into the opening.
And jammed them into cold hard metal.
With a butt and a barrel.
Clint Johnson had a hidden gun.
Chapter 3
“It’s not like you, Jessica, throwing money away on an ‘if, come, maybe.’”
“It’s a nationally renowned firm, Ma.” Jessica arranged folders in order of the phone calls she had yet to make before lunchtime as she spoke into her headpiece.
Calling her stepmother hadn’t been on the list. And yet...there she was...talking to her.
A certified financial planner who was also licensed to buy and sell securities, Jessica loved her job. Was challenged by it, but more, got great satisfaction out of helping her clients construct secure futures. Having grown up without, she wasn’t about building wealth—she believed in building financial security.
Throwing money into the wind, on a whim, an “if, come, maybe” was definitely not like her.
Her stepmother, the most pessimistic person she’d ever known, and thankfully, firmly ensconced in her life in a retirement community in California, kept Jessica grounded.
Not that Jackie Shepherd knew that. Jessica and the woman who’d raised her from infancy, later adopting her, didn’t talk about such things.
Their lives, after her father had gambled away everything they’d owned, including their home, and then split with a rich widow, had been about survival.
Even after Jackie had graduated from college at forty-five, with a nursing degree, and Jess had made some good investments for her that had turned a little bit of money into enough to let Jackie buy a small home in a nice, gated community, her stepmom still lived with a scarcity mentality.
“I still think you need to send him back, Jess. If he just got there today, he won’t have racked up hours yet, you’ll just be out the flights and the week’s apartment rental if you can’t get a refund...”
She’d given the woman too many details.
Because she’d been...off her game. Unsure.
Not about Brian Powers or Sierra’s Web. Not exactly.
But the way the man had moved her...made her feel as though he was her answer to unspoken prayers...
That had scared the hell out of her.
Hence a midmorning call to her own personal scrooge. A woman she loved. A woman she knew loved her.
Even if she disagreed with Jackie ninety percent of the time.
“I’ve got the money, for now, without touching a single investment,” she said aloud. “I got the apartment basically on trade for a week’s fees,” she admitted to the only person she’d tell. Her client would pay the fee, she’d reimburse every penny. And based on what rentals went for in town, she was making out on the deal. “And honestly, Ma, isn’t Brookie worth every dime of every investment?”
There. She’d put her state of mind right out there.
“Of course she is,” Jackie said, easing Jess’s stomach tension a bit. Until her mother added, “But, Jess, it’s been eighteen months. Even without the jackass’s input, surely, if a two-year-old child was out there, she’d have turned up somewhere by now.”
Unless Clint had sold her. Her stomach roiled.
Or...had given her to a good family to love as their own. Lying about her having a mother who desperately wanted her home.
“She’s alive, Ma.”
Jackie’s silence brought an end to the conversation. The same end every time.
“I love you.”
“I know and I love you, too, which you know, and, Jess, it’s because I love you that I can’t stand to hear you talk about all of this anymore. You’re killing yourself. Making yourself mentally and emotionally a wreck. You have to stop visiting with Clint. Stop grasping at straws. You’re stronger than this...”
She was strong. Jackie Shepherd knew her better than anyone.
Strong in body, in mind, and in spirit. And her spirit would not let her listen to the well-intentioned poison coming from her stepmother’s mouth. “I gotta go...”
The ringing of her front doorbell had nothing to do with the statement as it came immediately after she’d said it.
“Jess, wait, please...”
She held the phone to her ear as she went to see who was out front. Her newly hired private investigator wasn’t due for another half hour. “Seriously, Ma, I’ve got someone at the door.”
“Just promise me you’ll think about what I said.”
She couldn’t make that promise. She wasn’t going to let Jackie’s lack of faith bring her down. She might give a second or two to ponder why she’d called the only mother she’d ever known in the first place. But...
The living room window gave her a view of Clint’s truck in the driveway. The clock on her wall, a house-warming gift from her ma many years before, confirmed that she hadn’t lost track of time. She wasn’t running late, their appointment wasn’t for another thirty minutes. She upped her pace to the door.
“I love you, Ma,” she said, the phone still held to her head, Jackie’s voice droning in her ear as she opened the front door.
And saw the gun in Brian Powers’s hand.
* * *
Jessica clicked off the phone, seemingly without saying goodbye, as Brian stepped into her foyer. He’d removed the medical glove from his driving hand, but still held the gun with a gloved left hand just as he’d pulled it out of her husband’s truck.
“Did you know Clint had a gun?” It hadn’t been what he’d meant to say, but the wide-eyed look of horror on her face as she dropped her phone hand to her thigh and stared at him, had jerked the words out of his mouth.
“I—no! We...with a baby in the house...no!”
“He had it stowed in the seat of his truck. You need to call the detective in charge of your case, to get me pulled in, if nothing else, but they have to know about this now. Get Forensics back out.” Other than the gun he’d pulled from the under-the-seat enclosure, he hadn’t touched any part of the secret hiding place. Hadn’t wanted to mess with the chain of command. “I don’t know if it’s loaded. Or if there’s ammunition in the pocket I found. I didn’t want to chance my gloves rubbing off any identifying evidence.”
He could have one-handedly bagged it.
The fact that he’d jumped in the truck and driven straight to her wasn’t good news to him. Didn’t speak well of him as a professional. At least, not in his opinion.
He had no time to assess what she thought of his actions. She already had her phone to her ear and was engaging with the detective who’d answered right away.
Detective Anderson. Duane Anderson—one of the names he’d read in the file she’d sent over.
She’d pushed one button. Anderson was on her speed dial.
Just based on the questions she was answering, Brian’s first impression of the detective was ranking higher than the one he was currently holding of himself.
Yeah, he might have smudged the gun further if he’d tried to get a bag and open it with only one hand. But driving like a bat out of hell straight to her door...
The evidence was huge. If there was any gun powder residue in the barrel...even a hint of it...if there was ammunition or anything else incriminating inside that pocket...
Jessica was explaining to Duane Anderson that she’d hired Brian, who he was...
Going over the vehicle after Forensics was through with it, picking up a blade of grass and small particles that were left behind...that wasn’t tampering with evidence, or tainting it for future use in court. Finding a gun...
When a body was missing...
“Yes, that’s right. Sierra’s Web...” Jessica was saying and then handed over the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
Still holding the gun away from touching anything but his two left fingers, Brian took the phone. Kept his gaze on his new client, noticing the teeth biting her lower lip, the way her gaze continued to head toward the weapon in his hand and then slide quickly away.
Felt a knot tighten in his gut.
And told the detective everything he’d done to that point.
Minus the part where he was fending off a deep, unsettling empathy for his new client.
* * *
Five minutes after the phone call, Detective Anderson and a forensic team showed up at Jessica’s door.
They took the truck, would be removing the secret pocket and keeping it, anything they found within it, and the gun, in an evidence locker. After testing all for anything the articles could tell them.
While she was mollified by the respect her newly hired Sierra’s Web expert was receiving, and glad to see that Brooke’s absence was still worthy of immediate attention, Jessica watched the proceedings, listened to conversation, with a growing panic.
“You do understand that the gun’s existence doesn’t mean Clint used it to kill anyone,” she blurted, standing between Brian Powers and Detective Anderson as they watched the truck be towed away. Protocol, that.
