Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery

  The elevator bell dinged and its door opened. “You’re assuming I actually want to work,” Lyle said. They walked down the hall.

  Patten rang the bell. They waited. The peephole went dark for a second. “Yes?” a voice said from behind the door.

  “Detective Patten of the Albany Police Department and Deputy Chief MacAuley of the Millers Kill Police Department. We’d like to talk with you, Mr. Davies.”

  The door opened. “In that case, come on in.” Jonathan Davies ushered them past the tiny foyer into a wide, windowed living room. The place looked like Davies himself—expensive, snooty, and just a little too cute for its own good. “How can I help you, Detective?”

  “You’re Jonathan Davies?” The man nodded. Lyle held out Sullivan’s mug shot. “Do you recognize this man, Mr. Davies?”

  Davies took the picture. “I think so. Wendall Sullivan?” He looked up at them. “One of the released convicts that I’ve worked with over the years.”

  Patten’s eyebrow went up. “Released convicts?”

  “That’s right. I head a small charity that tries to get felons who have served their time back on their feet.” Davies smiled. Lyle could have sworn the guy’s teeth actually twinkled.

  “How about these people? Know any of them?” He handed Davies a copy of the photo of Mikayla Johnson, her mother, and the mom’s boyfriend that Knox and Flynn had gotten from the Johnsons.

  Davies’s face remained bland, but his chest moved, as if he had taken a quick, quiet breath. “No. Sorry.” He handed the picture back to Lyle.

  “You rented a storage unit for Wendall Sullivan several months ago,” Lyle said.

  “I did?” Davies looked confused. Then he flashed his teeth again. “Oh. Wendall probably had one of the charity’s debit cards. I keep several of them, with small amounts on them, for our clients to use.”

  “Really?” Patten held out his hand for the copy of the receipt. Lyle gave it to him. “If this is the charity’s card, why’s your name on it?”

  “Less red tape. And if one goes missing—which does happen on occasion, sadly—it’s easier to cancel.”

  “Mmm.” Lyle nodded. “Did you know that Sullivan was using his space to store child pornography?”

  Davies recoiled. “God, no! That’s terrible.”

  “Mr. Davies.” Patten gave Lyle a sidelong glance that said, Time to turn up the heat. “I think you did know. I think you gave Sullivan that card to set up a safe spot where you and he can enjoy your sicko hobby. And I think we need to get a team in here to secure your computer, search your apartment, and see what other perverted porn you’ve got stashed around.”

  Lyle was surprised. Davies didn’t even blink at Patten’s threat. “You can do that if you deem it necessary, Detective.” Patten stepped to one side and made a sweeping gesture. “In fact, you can start right now. But I can assure you, I am registered as the head of a state-licensed charitable organization, I’ve never been to any self-storage unit, and my bank will testify that I do indeed provide debit cards for my clients’ use, as I have told you.”

  Patten looked at Lyle. Now what?

  9.

  They left the cabin—Russ and Clare, and Oscar tagging along—without Lieutenant Mongue. It took them an hour of arguing to decide, a process that wasn’t helped by the fact Clare was mad enough at Russ to consider locking him in the woodshed and throwing away the key.

  “I should go alone,” Russ said. “I’ll get help and come back for you.”

  “And what happens if you slip on the ice and break something? Or a branch falls and knocks you unconscious?” Clare tried to keep her pleasure at the prospect out of her voice. “Lieutenant Mongue and I are stuck here with no reliable form of communication.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me. And I can move a lot faster without you.”

  “Oh, yes,” she hissed. “You’ve made that clear.”

  “What about the missing girl?” Mongue’s voice was thinning out again.

  A tide of shame washed over Clare. She had almost forgotten about Mikayla Johnson, not to mention Amber and her baby.

  “I’ll do a recon on the cabin,” Russ said. “See what’s going on.”

  “Then you’ll absolutely need backup,” Clare said.

  Mongue nodded. “She’s right. I’ve been thinking. If you splint me nice and tight and then lace my boot around the splint—”

  “No.” Russ’s tone was final. “We’ll splint you up so you can move if absolutely necessary, but you’re not leaving the cabin.”

  “You already have torn-up blood vessels and tissue in there,” Clare said. “If you walk on it, even if you limp on it, you could cause permanent damage.” Or death. She had flown the medevac for a marine who thought he could keep on going just like Mongue did. The internal hemorrhaging crashed his system. By the time Clare had reached a Forward Surgical Unit, the medics in the back of the bird had called it. “I’ll do the recon with him.”

  Mongue looked at her belly. “You, ma’am?” Clare suspected it was only his innate politeness that kept him from laughing at her.

  “Clare is a combat veteran who spent eighteen months in Iraq. She knows how to handle herself.”

  A tiny warm glow kindled beneath her breastbone. She had to remind herself that Russ was also a monumental jerk.

  They finally settled on Mongue staying and Russ and Clare going. “And Oscar,” Clare said.

  Russ looked up from where he was dismantling the slatted chair to make Mongue’s splint. “The dog? Why the hell do we need to bring the dog?”

  “Because I don’t think Lieutenant Mongue is going to want to let him in and out. It’s going to be hard enough for him to get to the privy himself.”

  Russ unscrewed the chair’s back and slammed it against the kitchen counter. “Just leave the dog outside. He can take care of himself.” He held up the still-intact back and frowned.

  “Give it to me,” Clare said tightly. She ripped the back out of his hands without waiting for a reply and brought it down with enough force to send a nerve shock into her shoulder. Wham! Wham! Wham! The horizontal braces splintered, cracked, and fell apart. She swept the remaining slats across the counter toward Russ. “There.” She was out of breath. “We take the dog.”

  Russ eyed her warily. “Okay. We take the dog.”

  They dragged the bed to the center of the cabin, where it would be most protected under strong beams, should a tree fall. They left Lieutenant Mongue there with two jugs of water, Clare’s bottle of Tylenol, and enough bread and cold cuts to keep him going for a week. There was another debate about his service weapon. He had wanted Russ to take it.

  “I’d rather keep my rifle in this situation,” Russ said. “Give it to Clare.”

  She held up her hands. “I won’t use it.”

  “Oh, for…” Russ jerked the straps of her day pack to fit it to his larger shoulders. They were taking water and some sandwiches, a change of clothing, and the Maglite. He glared at her, but he didn’t try to argue. A sidearm was only useful if you were willing to kill someone with it, and Clare wasn’t.

  “You keep it.” She laid it on the bedside table, next to the kerosene lamp. “Just in case.”

  Mongue looked at her skeptically. “Save one bullet for myself?”

  She squeezed his hand and turned away. She knew they had made the only sensible decision, but the image of the enormous pine crushing the redwood house kept playing and replaying in her head.

  Clare moved to the door and slapped her leg. She had wrapped her waterproof windbreaker around Oscar’s midsection, tying it on with remainders from the ACE bandage Russ had used on Mongue’s splint. The dog now looked like the cover canine for Outdoor Adventure magazine, but at least he wouldn’t freeze in the icy rain.

  Russ and Lieutenant Mongue were talking together in low tones. The fires were crackling, casting warm light throughout the cabin. For a moment, she thought, Let’s just stay right here. They had everything they needed. They could
be safe and dry until help came. The state police knew Mongue had come out to the lake. They’d send someone to investigate. Eventually.

  Eventually.

  Russ straightened. Shook Mongue’s hand. Adjusted his straps one more time as he crossed the floor. He put his hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” she said.

  10.

  “No. I keep telling you, no one’s contacted me.” Lewis Johnson’s gravelly voice was frustrated, but it didn’t sound like he was lying. Of course, Kevin admitted, he wasn’t always the best judge of someone’s truthfulness.

  “Mr. Johnson, we can provide protection for you.” Hadley scooted forward in her armchair. “If anyone’s told you to back off from your testimony in exchange for Mikayla—”

  “Look, Officer Knox, if someone had contacted me and offered Mikayla in exchange for me keeping my mouth shut, I’d say yes and be grateful for it. What’s one more drug dealer in prison? The moment he’s locked away, someone else will take his place. None of this—what you do, what I do, the whole stupid War on Drugs—none of it makes any difference.”

  Mrs. Johnson walked in from the kitchen, her fingers threaded through four mugs of hot cocoa. Normally Kevin didn’t accept any refreshments, but he had been so beaten down by the white-knuckle drive north from the capital area he had leaped on the offer of hot chocolate.

  “You should have told them about your being a witness before.” Mrs. Johnson handed around the mugs. Kevin took a long swallow. It was hot and sweet and plugged into the pleasure centers of his brain like a controlled substance.

  “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, June. Those were the instructions from the FBI. That was the whole point. Besides, we thought Annie had taken Mikayla. Hell, these officers thought Annie had taken Mikayla!”

  “Tell me about what you saw, Mr. Johnson.” Hadley unbent enough to pick up her own mug. “What were you planning to testify to when LaMar’s case went to trial?”

  Johnson sighed. “Six months ago, I got a panicky call from Annie. That’s not unusual—she finds herself in deeper water than she planned on and hollers for me to get her out.” His wife reached over and took his hand. “But this time she’d been stupid enough to bring Mikayla along for some reason. She asked me to come and get her.”

  “This was down in Poughkeepsie?”

  “Yeah, they were in this park north of the city. Annie told me to leave my car outside the gate and walk in and get Mikayla from her car. So that’s what I did.”

  “You went all by yourself?”

  Johnson nodded. “I walked in, no problem. Just as I got to Annie’s car, I heard—” He shook his head. “Begging. Somebody crying and pleading. I had a clear view of them over the roof of the car, through a gap in the bushes. Two men on their knees. He just shot them. Right in the center of their foreheads. I didn’t know it was LaMar then, of course. I got his name later when I saw his picture on TV.”

  “What about your daughter?” Hadley asked.

  “I didn’t see Annie anywhere. I woke Mikayla up as quietly as I could and carried her back to where I’d parked. Then I drove home twenty miles over the speed limit the whole way. All I could think about was getting Mikayla out of there as quick as possible. I left and never looked back.”

  Kevin glanced at Hadley. Johnson’s story matched what the Poughkeepsie detectives had told them.

  “Okay, Mr. Johnson.” Hadley stood up. Kevin followed suit. “Call us if anyone contacts you about your granddaughter. Even if it sounds innocent.”

  “You two call me, and tell me you’ve found her. Please.”

  Outside, they hurried to Kevin’s Aztek. A thin shell of ice had encased the SUV while they had been inside. They had to beat at the doors, breaking the ice, before they could get into the vehicle. Kevin started it up and cranked the blowers. “Noble’s running the phone records now. That’ll at least give us an idea of whether he’s shining us or not.”

  “I dunno. I believed him. I don’t think anyone’s been in touch with him.”

  Kevin shifted the Aztek into gear. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “The Feds assumed Mikayla was snatched to put the pressure on her grandfather,” Hadley said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But … I don’t know, maybe LaMar has an informer in the Poughkeepsie department. Or in the AG’s office. But it sounded to me like he’d be thinking Mikayla was the witness.”

  Kevin nodded. “I hope there is a leak.” Because if LaMar had Mikayla Johnson taken to keep her from testifying, chances were good she was already dead.

  11.

  Now what? Damned if Lyle knew. The guy was dirty; he was sure of it. That involuntary breath of recognition … but the storage unit was obviously a dead end. Nobody gave cops a blank check to search their place unless it was already sanitized. He tried a different tack.

  “Mr. Davies, last Friday, a little girl was taken out of her foster home in Millers Kill. Whoever took her torched the house, killing the foster parents in the process.” They had decided to sit on the fact the MacAllens had been shot. “The girl recently had a liver transplant. She needs medicine to keep her body from rejecting her new liver. If she misses more than a week’s dosage, she could die.” Lyle held up the picture of Annie, her boyfriend, and Mikayla again. “Sullivan is a person of interest in her disappearance. So are these folks. Do you have any idea where any of these people might be?”

  “I’m sorry. No.”

  A short answer. Like the way defendants are coached to testify by their lawyers. Answer the question and nothing more. Don’t offer anything. Lyle pressed on. “What is it you do, Mr. Davies?”

  The man blinked. “I’m a broker.”

  “What brokerage do you work at?” Patten asked.

  “I work from home.”

  “Yeah?” Lyle looked around. There was nothing in the living room, at any rate, that looked like the guy was trading from here. “Can we see your setup? What do you have, the modern version of ticker tape? What is that?”

  “I think it’s Bloomberg,” Patten said. “That’s how the mayor made all his dough.”

  Davies sighed. “I don’t sell stocks. I’m more of … an information broker.”

  “Information.” Lyle kept his voice flat.

  “Information, introductions … you might say I bring people together so they can meet each other’s needs.”

  “Sounds like pimping to me,” Patten said. He turned to Lyle. “Lemme check with Vice to see if anyone there’s heard of this guy.”

  Davies started to look flustered. “This is harassment. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I don’t know anything about a missing girl.”

  Lyle thought about the information from the Feds Hadley had managed to pass on between cell phone failures. “Sullivan did his time in Fishkill.”

  Davies nodded warily.

  “Your charity. You get other clients”—Lyle air-quoted the word—“out of Fishkill?”

  “Of course. It’s the closest maximum security prison to Albany.”

  “You know what?” Lyle continued. “I bet all your clients come from Fishkill. I bet if Detective Patten and I got a warrant for your charity’s records, we’d find nothing but Fishkill alums.”

  Patten gave Lyle his trademarked so-what frown but didn’t say anything. “The Feds have a major meth trader on ice, name of Tim LaMar,” Lyle explained. “Big network all over the northeast part of the state. They think he does most of his communicating by messengers, everything face-to-face, no electronic trails or phone records to worry about.”

  “Hey!” Patten said excitedly. He gave Davies a bright and knowing grin. “That sounds like bringing people together so they can meet each other’s needs!”

  Davies’s color was up. His gaze kept bouncing around the room, and he was a little damp around the edges.

  Lyle nodded conspiratorially. “That’s what I thought, Vince. Poughkeepsie thinks LaMar uses Fishkill cons and their family members as his mouthpieces. Now I figure,
if you’ve got an organization like that, you need somebody to help keep track of your employees.”

  “You mean, like a human resources manager?”

  “Yeah. Like that. I think Mr. Davies here is that guy. Tim LaMar’s human resources manager.”

  “I don’t know anything. I run a legitimate charity, and I think you gentlemen had better go now.” Davies still looked twitchy, but his voice was calm. “If you want to talk to me again, make an appointment, and my lawyer will come with me.”

  Patten glanced at Lyle. “Okay, Mr. Davies. Tell you what I’m going to do. I know a reporter at the Times-Union who would love to get an exclusive about the upcoming Tim LaMar trial. So I’m going back to my office and I’m going to call her and let her know—I’ll be the unnamed source in the story—that the investigation has been greatly helped by police informant Jonathan Davies, who is expected to be a major witness for the prosecution.”

  Davies went white. “You can’t do that.”

  “Sure I can,” Patten said cheerfully.

  “You can’t do that!” Davies grabbed Patten by his coat sleeves. “He’ll kill me! He’ll fucking kill me! I won’t live twenty-four hours after that story gets out!”

  Patten removed Davies’s hands. “And why would he do that, Mr. Davies? If he’s never heard of you before?”

  “Shit. Screw it. I’ll tell what you want to know, but nobody gets my name. I mean, it’s not even in your reports. We never had this conversation.”

  “Why don’t you sit down and tell us what really happened with Sullivan. Did he snatch the little girl?”

  Davies collapsed onto his sofa. “Sullivan’s nobody. I throw him a few hundred here and there. He runs errands once in a while.” He bent over and buried his head in his hands. “After he got arrested, LaMar was looking for Annie Johnson’s kid. She was a loose end, he said. Annie didn’t know where she was—CFS wasn’t giving her any visits. Then about a week ago, Sullivan came to me. Said he’d been cleaning in some house up in Cossayuharie and got talking to the little girl there.” He looked up at them. “I mean, of course he would, the guy’s a fucking child molester. He got her to tell him her name.”