Kisscut

  He nodded, debating whether or not to tell Sara the rest, then deciding he should be open with her. “The meeting is being scheduled for tomorrow at noon.”

  “What meeting?” she asked, and he could see the concern in her eyes.

  “Nick’s guy, this porn distributor, got a call from a pay phone. A man’s voice was on the other end.” He paused, trying to gauge Sara’s reaction. “I didn’t recognize the voice, but they’re meeting at the hotel over in Augusta to drop off the magazines.”

  “And I take it you’re going to be there?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I take it you’ve got a problem with that?”

  She sighed. “I remember when we were married how I would cringe every time the phone rang and I didn’t know exactly where you were.”

  He drank some wine, letting this sink in. “You never told me that before.”

  “I know I didn’t,” she said, then changed the subject again. “So, how does this work? Dottie and Grace do the magazines, Teddy Patterson delivers them, then Nick’s guy distributes them around here?”

  “Pretty much,” Jeffrey confirmed. “We think Patterson probably makes stops all around the Southeast. Nick is going to pull his records from the Department of Transportation as soon as we bust him.”

  “Why not before?”

  “Who knows who’d tip him off?” Jeffrey pointed out. “Besides, Frank’s glued to Teddy. It’s not like he’s going to be able to get away with anything.”

  “Why arrest Patterson now? Why not follow him on his route and pick up all the distributors?”

  “Nick says they have a phone network. If one of them doesn’t call the next with the okay, then they close shop. It’s very sophisticated.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone knows anything about where Lacey might be?”

  “You don’t suppose right.”

  “How long has the GBI been working on this pornography ring?”

  “Years,” Jeffrey said. “They just needed to know who was bringing them in.”

  “Is this where Dottie comes in?”

  Jeffrey shrugged, because nothing was clear at this point. “I don’t like to think about that woman having some kind of network. It means she’s got a safe place to go and hide. It means she’s connected to all kinds of people all over the world who are invested in helping her because she keeps supplying them with their sick porn.” He felt his anger swelling again, and took a deep breath to calm himself. When that didn’t work, he settled on drinking some more wine.

  “You know they swap kids,” Sara said, her tone measured. “Lacey could be in Canada or Germany by now.” She paused, then continued, “Or, Dottie could be abusing Lacey herself. Dottie could be keeping her somewhere, doing God knows what.” Sara’s voice went up on this last part as the threat seemed to hit her.

  Jeffrey rubbed his eyes, like he could wipe this away. “How could a woman, a mother, do that kind of thing to a child?”

  “In my experience,” Sara began, “women who abuse children are much more sadistic than men. I think it’s because they know they can get away with it. They know no one will believe they’re capable of hurting children.” She added, “It’s especially bad when it’s a boy who is being abused. Let’s take the incest out of it for a minute. A boy having sex with a woman twice his age is patted on the back. A girl doing the same thing is considered a victim. There’s a big disparity there.”

  Jeffrey said, “I never even suspected his mother.”

  “Why would you? There was no reason to.”

  “I didn’t have a problem with Teddy Patterson as a suspect.”

  Sara sat back in the tub and let him talk.

  Jeffrey told her, “The crime scene techs are still at Weaver’s house, but preliminary results show printer’s ink in the basement.”

  “For magazines?” Sara asked. “I thought they needed a big press.”

  “They’re not exactly slick,” Jeffrey said. He drank more wine. “All the articles are about how to meet the right kid.”

  Sara pressed her lips together.

  “I’ll tell you what, Sara, I wish to God I hadn’t seen any of it.”

  She stroked his leg with her foot. “Have you found the carpeting from the house?”

  “Brad and Frank are going to check the dump at daybreak. Based on what they sampled from the floor, the carpets are coated in fluids.”

  “Body fluids?” she asked. “They soaked through?”

  He nodded, not liking how that sounded, either. “There’s also a room in the basement that looks like it was used as a darkroom.” He rested his glass on the rim of the tub. “My guess is they used the house to take the pictures, and printed up the magazines there.”

  “An explosion would have destroyed all of that evidence.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I still can’t figure out why she didn’t strip Jenny’s room.”

  “She didn’t really need anything from Jenny’s room, did she?”

  “I guess not,” he agreed.

  “Did you find any evidence in the room?”

  “Nothing. The gasoline might have covered semen traces. I don’t know how that works.”

  “But there was nothing obvious?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “None of the pictures was taken in there. Maybe it was the only room in the house that was clean.” He rubbed his eyes, feeling incredibly tired. “I can’t believe this was going on in town and nobody knew about it.”

  Sara picked up the bottle of wine and filled his glass. “Do you remember what she said to me?” she asked. “She asked if I had cut Jenny open. Do you think she meant the castration?”

  Jeffrey thought about this for a second. “She could have.”

  “I keep playing that interview back in my mind, and when I get to that point, I see how Dottie changed. You know what I’m talking about? She was almost relieved.”

  “I guess,” Jeffrey said, though he could not remember. The interview seemed like a lifetime away.

  Sara said, “I called the hospital. Mark still hasn’t regained consciousness.”

  “Do they have a prognosis?”

  “It’s hard to tell with ABIs,” she said, then, “anoxic brain injuries.” He nodded, and she continued, “There’s a lot of swelling in his brain. They won’t know how much damage was done until the swelling goes down. The longer it takes, the worse it will be.”

  “Does he have a chance of being normal?”

  She shook her head. “No.” She paused, as if to let this sink in. “He’ll never be the same again. That is, if he wakes up. There’s going to be some damage.”

  “He just seemed like this punk kid.”

  Sara finished the wine and set her glass on the floor. “You think Teddy Patterson beat him up before he came to the clinic?”

  Jeffrey had forgotten that detail. “I guess it’s possible. What about Lacey, though? Why was Mark chasing after her?”

  “She could have been threatening to tell.”

  “We didn’t find any pictures of Lacey. Wouldn’t Teddy Patterson handle something like that anyway?”

  “Possibly,” she said. “Maybe he was in the black Thunderbird.”

  “He was probably at the hospital,” Jeffrey pointed out. “I’ll have Frank check, but I’m pretty sure.”

  “If Lacey is the mother of that baby, who do you think the father is?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, because none of it really made any sense. Jeffrey put his hand over his eyes, trying to understand this. Lately, it seemed like every case he dealt with had some kind of weird twist to it that took a part of him with it. He longed for a simple money-motive or jealous threat gone wrong. He figured that he could take just about anything but knowing a child was in jeopardy.

  Sara must have sensed his anguish. She slid toward him, and Jeffrey moved over so that she could put her head on his chest.

  “You still smell smoky,” she told him.

  “Explosions can do that.”

  She ran
her fingers along his chest, but it seemed like she was doing this more to make sure he was really there than to arouse anything in him. She curled a piece of his hair around her finger, saying, “I want you to be careful tomorrow.”

  “I’m always careful.”

  Sara sat up a little so that she could look him in the eye. “More careful than usual,” she said. “For me, okay?”

  “Okay,” he nodded, pushing her hair back behind her ear. “What’s going on with us?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” she said.

  “It feels good, whatever it is.”

  She smiled, touching her fingers to his lips. “Yeah.”

  He opened his mouth to say more, but his cell phone rang, spoiling the moment.

  “It’s two in the morning,” Jeffrey said, as if this made any difference. The phone was on the closed toilet lid, and Sara picked it up and handed it to him. “Maybe it’s Nick?”

  He checked the caller I.D. “It’s the station.”

  PAUL Jennings was a tall, barrel-chested man with a dark beard accentuating his round face. His white dress shirt was wrinkled, as were his brown polyester pants. But for the expectant expression on his face, Jeffrey thought he looked like a high school math teacher.

  “Thank you for coming in,” he said. “I was going to wait to call you, but I couldn’t sleep. I had this feeling.”

  “It’s all right,” Jeffrey said, leading the man into his office.

  “I know this is a shot in the dark. I just had this feeling,” he repeated. “I took the first flight they had.”

  “I apologize for not returning your call,” Jeffrey told him. “My secretary thought you were trying to sell me something.”

  Paul told him, “I work for a vinyl supply company up in Newark. I guess I should have made it clear why I was calling.” He paused. “I’ve been looking for my daughter for so long, and I’ve been disappointed so many times.” He held his hands up in a shrug. “Part of me couldn’t believe they might be here, after all this time.”

  “I understand,” Jeffrey told him, though he really had no idea what kind of pain this man had suffered over the last ten years. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, no,” Paul said, taking the seat Jeffrey indicated.

  “We’ve got a fresh pot in the back,” Jeffrey offered, walking around to the opposite side of the desk. He knew who this man was, and what he had to be told. Jeffrey wanted to keep some distance between them. He needed space.

  “This is a picture of Wendy when she was three,” Paul said, showing Jeffrey a photograph of a happy-looking child. Though it was taken several years ago, Jeffrey was still able to tell that the girl in the photograph had grown up to be Jenny Weaver.

  “Was this just before she disappeared?” Jeffrey asked, sliding the photo back across his desk.

  The man nodded, showing Jeffrey another picture. “Wanda took her shortly after that.”

  Jeffrey studied the next photograph, though he knew from first glance that Wanda Jennings was the person he knew as Dottie Weaver. He slid this back across, and watched as Paul stacked them together, putting the picture of Dottie Weaver on the bottom so he would not have to look at her while they talked.

  Jeffrey asked, “Can you tell me when it was your wife and daughter disappeared?”

  Paul shifted in his chair. “We were living in Canada while I went to graduate school,” he said. “Vinyl siding wasn’t how I planned to spend my professional career. But when Wendy was taken from me…” He paused, a sad smile on his lips. “Wanda was working as a nurse at the hospital. I guess she was there about five months when the allegations started.”

  “What kind of allegations?”

  “She worked in the maternity ward,” Paul said. “There were rumors that something wasn’t right. That something was going on.” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t listen to them, of course. We had been married for three years by then. I loved my wife. I would never have thought she was capable of…And women don’t really do that kind of thing, do they?”

  Jeffrey was silent. They both knew the answer to that.

  “So,” Paul began. “She was put on administrative leave while they investigated the charges. Babies can’t really tell you what happens to them, but there were rumors of some physical findings. I still didn’t believe what people were saying, until one day there was a knock on the door. Two cops wanted to talk to me.”

  “Where was your wife?”

  “She was out doing the shopping. I suppose they were watching the house, because they knocked on the door ten minutes after she left.”

  Jeffrey nodded for him to continue.

  “They told me about the physical evidence,” he said. “They had photographs and…” He stopped. “It was graphic.”

  “You don’t have to tell me what they found,” Jeffrey told him, and Paul seemed relieved.

  “They wanted to check Wendy to see if she had been…” He paused. “I still could not accept that Wanda had done these things, let alone that she would ever harm our daughter. Wanda is very good at making people think she’s trustworthy.”

  “Yeah,” Jeffrey agreed, because he had seen that firsthand.

  “When Wanda got back from the store, I confronted her with what they had said. We argued. Somehow, she convinced me that the police were wrong, that it was another woman at the hospital. A nurse I had met a couple of times and, honestly, did not like.”

  “People like your wife can be pretty persuasive.”

  “Yes,” Paul said. “A week went by, and it was still in the news. The police actually did investigate this other woman.” Tears came to his eyes. “We believe what we want to believe, don’t we?”

  Jeffrey nodded.

  “I suppose it was three weeks later that the police came back. They had a warrant this time, and wanted to search the house.” Paul looked at the picture of his child, resting his hand beside it. “They had talked to her the day before. It was an official interview. I guess they had finally found enough evidence to do something.” He looked back at Jeffrey. “They came very early, about six in the morning. I was still asleep.” He gave a humorless laugh. “I had stayed up late studying for a final. How something like that could have seemed important to me…”

  “We all cope in different ways.”

  “Yes, well,” he said, obviously not accepting this. “They were gone. Wanda had taken Wendy sometime during the night. I never saw or heard from them again.”

  “What brought you here?”

  “A friend of mine called me,” he said. “He runs credit checks for us at work, for the siding, and I had asked him a while back to keep an eye out for their social security numbers. About a week ago, Wendy’s came up on a Visa application. The address was a post office box in your town.”

  Jeffrey nodded, thinking that Dottie Weaver, or whatever the hell her name was, had probably thought it was safe to use her daughter’s identity after all of this time. She would have gotten away with it if Paul Jennings had not been so vigilant.

  “Do you have the address?” Jeffrey asked, feeling hope for the first time. Dottie obviously wanted that credit card. She would have to come back for it.

  Paul Jennings handed him a slip of paper. Jeffrey thought he recognized the address as that of the Mailing Post over in Madison. He copied it down and handed back the paper, hoping they might use this to trace Dottie and maybe find Lacey Patterson.

  “I just had to come down and see for myself,” Paul said, tucking the page back into his pocket. “To see if she was here.”

  Paul waited for Jeffrey to speak, but Jeffrey could not think how to tell the man what had happened to his daughter. What’s more, Jeffrey was not sure how he could admit to this man, who had been searching for so many years, that the person who had killed Wendy Jennings was sitting across the desk from him.

  “Is she here?” Paul repeated, a hopeful tone to his voice that cut Jeffrey in two.

  “I don’t know how to say this, Paul, but Wanda
has disappeared and Wendy’s dead.”

  Jeffrey did not know what he had been expecting the other man to do, but the look Paul Jennings gave him was surprising. For a split second, he seemed almost relieved to finally know for a fact where his daughter was, then it seemed to hit him that after all of this time, all of his searching, she was dead. His face fell, and he covered his eyes with his hands for a moment as he started to cry.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jeffrey told him.

  Paul’s voice shook as he asked, “When?”

  “Last Saturday,” Jeffrey said, then explained to Paul exactly what had happened, leaving out the fact that his daughter had been mutilated. Through the entire story, Paul shook his head, as if he could not accept what he was hearing. When Jeffrey revealed his own involvement in Jenny’s death, the father’s mouth dropped open.

  “I didn’t…” Jeffrey stopped, because he had been about to say that he did not have a choice. He wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe there had been another choice. Maybe Jenny Weaver had not had it in her to pull the trigger. Maybe Jenny Weaver would be alive today.

  The two men stared at each other over Jeffrey’s desk, neither of them really knowing what to say. Paul’s eyes were glazed like he was too shocked by what he had heard to go on.

  “With her mother,” Paul finally said, “I expected the worst.” He pointed to the pictures on Jeffrey’s desk. “That’s how I think of her, Mr. Tolliver. I think of my little girl. I don’t think of what Wanda did to her, the kind of horrible life she must have lived.” He stopped, choking on a sob. “I think of my happy little girl.”

  “That’s best,” Jeffrey said, picking up on the man’s grief. Tears came to his eyes, and when Paul saw this, he seemed to lose his reserve.

  “Oh, God,” the man said, putting his hand over his mouth. His body shook as he sobbed. “My poor little girl. My baby. My baby.” He rocked back and forth to soothe himself.

  “Paul,” Jeffrey said, his voice thick with his own grief. He reached across the desk to pat the man’s arm, but Paul Jennings took Jeffrey’s hand in his own. Jeffrey had never held another man’s hand before, and it felt odd to be doing so now. Though, if it helped Paul Jennings through his grief, it was the least he could do.