Girl Without A Chance, page 4
They were walking toward the car when another one drove past them – a car that Tara recognized with a drop in her gut. It slowed as it passed by them, coming to a stop so the passenger could lean out of the window and call out to them.
“Hello, Deputy Sheriff!” she called out.
“Hello, Ms. Peablossom,” Tara responded, not particularly wanting to. Lydia Peablossom was a gossip, and if talking was an Olympic sport, she would have been a gold medalist. “We can’t stop. We’re on official business.”
“It’s about that girl, isn’t it?” Lydia asked, but Tara held up a hand as if she was waving goodbye and then practically threw herself into the car to avoid her. After a moment’s pause, the car Lydia was in sped up – going in the direction of the next property they had to visit.
“Well?” Glenn asked from the seat beside her. He looked at her expectantly. He was right about her being the senior one of the two of them. It was down to her, apparently, to make this choice.
Rumors flying everywhere weren’t going to help solve the case. Solid leads were.
“We go after the pickup truck,” Tara said determinedly.
She wasn’t going to let this creep get away. Now they had a lead, she would chase it down until they found him.
She wouldn’t let him attack another girl again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tara rubbed her fingers together for a moment, limbering up as the program loaded on the ancient computers the Sheriff’s department had to work with. “You rea?” she asked Glenn.
“Nearly,” he said. His tone was distracted, focusing on the screen in front of him. They had sat down at their usual desks, facing one another, computers back to back in one corner so that they could still see each other and talk easily.
“I’ve got mine up,” Tara said, quickly typing in a query and filtering the results with a few tick boxes. She was looking for people who owned purple pickup trucks and were registered in the state, while Glenn was looking up the names of registered owners of properties on or near the water. Her list loaded and she looked at him expectantly.
“Okay, ready,” he said.
It wasn’t as simple as just reading the address the truck was registered to. A lot of people around here would have a home somewhere in one of the towns and then a second property by the lake. “Anthony Adams,” she read out, the first alphabetical response. Thankfully, the list of purple pickups was not long – though it was longer than she might have expected for such a specific color.
“No match,” Glenn said after a moment, peering in at his screen and scrolling up and down with his mouse.
“Okay,” Tara said. “James Bartholemew.”
“No match.”
Tara sighed and took a breath, scrolling to the next name. This was going to be tedious. She started to read them out mechanically, barely paying attention to what she was saying out loud. All she heard was the constant reply: no match.
There had to be someone on this list who matched up to what they were looking for. There had to be.
“Xavier Hume,” she read aloud, waiting for the inevitable response.
“Wait,” Glenn said. “H-U-M-E?”
“Yes,” Tara replied, catching her breath – but not letting herself get her hopes up yet.
“That’s a match,” Glenn exclaimed. “He owns a house on the lake just above the one we were asking around at.”
“Just above?” Tara asked. “How far?”
Glenn glanced over his shoulder at a huge map of the county that was pinned across one of the walls of the station. “About a twenty minute drive.”
“Then it could be him,” Tara said. She clicked on the record she had for the vehicle, opening it up. “Hold on. This says he is registered as having sold the truck two months ago.”
“Two months?” Glenn asked. “Isn’t that mighty convenient?”
“He could have reported it sold in order to cover his tracks so he can keep using it. Look him up in the system,” Tara urged. “I’m getting his home address. Looks like he’s from out of town. A different county.”
Glenn typed and clicked around for a moment, then paused as he waited for the results of his search to load. “He has a record.”
“What?” Tara demanded, her head snapping up. A purple pickup, a lakeside property, and a criminal record? How much better of a match could this man be?
“He assaulted a woman in her early twenties a few years ago,” Glenn said. Then he whistled. “There’s a picture of her facial injuries submitted as evidence. She was a redhead.”
Tara only just held herself back from gasping out loud like she was in some daytime cop show. “You’re serious?”
“This has to make him an extremely good suspect, right?” Glenn said.
“Better than good,” Tara said, switching off her screen and getting up, grabbing her cell phone from her desk. “I’d say he’s suspect number one. Come on. We have to go and talk to him.”
“I thought you said he was out of county?” Glenn replied.
“We’ll figure that out on the way,” Tara told him, heading for the door. As she did, it opened, allowing Sheriff Braddock into the station.
“Oh, Deputy Sheriff Strong!” he called out. “Any progress on your door to door interviews?”
“We have a suspect, sir,” Tara said, feeling like a pony that had just been reined in. She could see the start line for the race right ahead. She wanted to go. “We’re about to head off to interview him.”
“Fantastic work,” the Sheriff grinned. “What’s the location?”
“He lives in Desmond,” Tara said. “If he was here at his lakeside property over the weekend, I’d guess he’s back home now that it’s Monday.”
“Wait a second,” the Sheriff said, holding up a hand to physically stop her as she tried to walk past him. “Desmond?”
“Yes,” Tara said impatiently.
“That’s not in Edgar County,” Braddock pointed out.
Tara sighed. “I know, but we need to go and talk to him.”
“Just hold on up,” Braddock said, shaking his head. “We need to be careful, here. You have to be respectful when crossing jurisdictions. Your first step is to coordinate with the department over there and get everything set out in terms of who gets to do what.”
“Sir,” Tara argued. “We can’t rely on someone else to do this investigation. They don’t know what we’re dealing with. They might not ask the right questions – they might miss something. And I don’t want interview notes second-hand. I want to look him in the eye and watch his reactions. We’ve got to be the ones to do the interview.”
“You can negotiate that when you talk to the locals,” Braddock said. “Be careful, Tara. I mean it.”
“I will,” Tara promised, which was the quickest thing she could think of to say to get him to let them out. “I’ll call from the car.”
“Make sure she does,” Braddock called after them, no doubt aiming it at Glenn, as they disappeared through the doors of the station.
Tara didn’t want to wait for Braddock to be able to hold them back any further.
“You’re going to call them, right?” Glenn asked as they headed to the car and opened their doors. “I don’t want him coming down on my head later. It’s alright for you, the golden child.”
Tara rolled her eyes as she got into the car and buckled up. “I’m not the golden child. And I don’t want them getting to him first. I mean it. We have to be the ones to ask the questions.”
“You still have to call them,” Glenn groaned. “You heard him, didn’t you? And we don’t want to run into legal problems later about jurisdiction that could get the case thrown out.”
“I’ll call them,” Tara said, looking right ahead as Glenn pulled out and began following the instructions of the GPS.
“Okay?” Glenn said expectantly, given that Tara hadn’t yet moved to pick up her phone.
“I’ll call them,” Tara repeated. “When I’m ready.”
Glenn groaned, a strained noise which suggested she was putting him in a very difficult position.
“It’s going to be fine,” Tara said, ignoring him. “I just don’t want to give them enough notice to be able to beat us there. I’ll start the call when we cross the county line. It’s only a short drive from there. And we’ll technically be playing it by the book, letting them know that we’re coming over. I’ll tell them I want to be the first to talk to him but it’s okay if they come, too. And then when we get there, I’ll say we had to go in right away to avoid the risk of him looking out front, seeing the car, and then running out the back.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Glenn said wearily, obviously already resigned to letting her get her way.
Privately, Tara hoped she did, too.
But she wasn’t going to let self-doubt get in her way now. They knew who had attacked Miley Piper, and he wasn’t going to get away with it. There was no way she was going to trust this to anyone else.
Tara was going to arrest Xavier Hume, and no jurisdictional politics were going to stop her.
CHAPTER SIX
Tara hammered on the door and then stepped back, trying not to be intimidated. The property the GPS had taken them to was at least three times the size of her parents’ home – and that in itself was twice the size of her own.
“He must be in,” Glenn said, nodding to the Jaguar parked in the driveway, a status symbol that clearly smacked of the amount of money the resident commanded.
“Unless he has several cars,” Tara muttered.
She checked her watch. It was past ten in the morning – four hours since the start of her shift when all she had on her radar was finding Billy Westfoot. It was more than possible that Xavier Hume was somewhere else, at work.
There was a clattering noise somewhere behind the door and then it clicked open, revealing a man in a sharp suit with a thin red tie that he smoothed down as he looked at them. He was maybe in his early forties, well-groomed and smooth-shaven. “Can I help you, officers?” he asked, looking down at them from the slightly elevated position of the door.
“Xavier Hume?” Tara asked, immediately taking the measure of him. He was tall and broad shouldered. Enough to be able to grab a young woman from the street and shove her into the back of his car, for sure. Maybe not the Jaguar. Since he had the pickup truck, it was likely he’d used that.
“Yes,” he said, fiddling with one of his cufflinks. “Is this important? I’m on my way to court.”
Tara raised her eyebrows. “Are you up on charges?” she asked. That would explain the sharp suit.
Hume snorted a laugh. “No. I’m representing the defendant.”
Oh.
He was a lawyer.
Tara’s heart sank. If there was one thing lawyers knew, it was how to get out of charges. To get out of interviews. To say nothing at all.
The second she knew he was a lawyer, she knew the difficulty of this case had just been turned up to eleven.
“Perhaps we can speak for five minutes,” Tara said, gesturing inside. “I’m afraid this is really rather important.”
He looked them over for a second, pausing now. He turned back from the door with a kind of exasperation, gesturing inside. “I’m just packing my briefcase,” he said. “You have until I’m done.”
Tara gritted her teeth against the insolence of that remark, as if he was so important that solving an important case – and possibly saving lives – had to wait for him to deign to give his attention. Glenn made a tiny sketch of a bow, allowing her to step inside first, and Tara did so.
The home was just as opulent inside as the outside suggested. The marble-lined entrance led on to plush carpets, a hallway stacked with diplomas and certificates in a long row that stretched as far as the back of the house. Hume led them off to the side, through a doorway that led into an elegantly appointed sitting room with a fireplace in that same marble.
There was a briefcase on a coffee table in the center of the room, as suggested, and he went directly over to it to continue selecting and packing papers and files. “Talk, then. Your window of opportunity is closing.”
Tara gritted her teeth momentarily. She hated this guy already. His attitude was so arrogant, she was glad she was going to be able to put him in handcuffs. He hadn’t batted an eyelid at their arrival, but that was probably just because he was an experienced enough lawyer to have spoken with a lot of law enforcement and he knew how to keep a poker face.
“We’re looking into a case which happened in the local area,” Tara said. She glanced at Glenn, who had lingered near the doorway as she stepped into the room. That was smart. He might be able to head off any attempt to run. “We’d like to know where you were over the last few days.”
“Few days?” he looked up at her and snorted. “You want an itemized schedule for every moment of my time?”
“Well,” Tara said, squaring her shoulders. “Yes. That would be very helpful.”
The lawyer shot her an annoyed look and shut his briefcase, clicking the locks into place. “You could have just called my secretary.”
“If you could give us their details, we’ll be happy to liaise with them on the proof of your alibis,” Tara replied evenly. “But we’re asking you now.”
Hume swung his briefcase off the table and into his hand, clearly ready to go. “Excuse me?” he asked, his tone rising and getting harder. “You’re asking me for an alibi?”
“Did I not make that clear enough?” Tara asked, knowing full well that she had. “We are investigating a crime, Mr. Hume. That means we need to rule you out from our suspect list.”
“Well, you can rule me out,” he said, shaking his head and brushing by her – only to find himself facing Glenn, who was doing his best attempt at making himself as wide as possible.
“Sir,” he said. “I would really advise that you simply answer our questions, so we can all get on with our day.”
The lawyer snorted again, then looked back at Tara over his shoulder. He had one hand in the pocket of his expensive-looking suit, the other hand holding his briefcase, and he looked absolutely unafraid. “Really?” he said. “You’re going to have to subpoena those records. I’m sure that wouldn’t be a problem because you’ve already spoken to a judge about the case, right? After all, this is outside of your jurisdiction, so you must have a lot of connections working on this and making things easy for you. Right?”
Tara faltered for a moment, opening her mouth only to find she couldn’t find the words to say to justify herself.
Hume laughed. “Right. So you’re here outside of your jurisdiction, without permission, without clearance, and with no leg to stand on. Get out of my way, deputy. I’ve got to get to court, and if you obstruct me, you’re the one who is going to be up on charges, not me.”
“If you could just -” Tara began, but there was a loud knock at the door which surprised all of them.
Hume gave them an exasperated look and pushed past Glenn, who offered no resistance under the circumstances, to go back to his door. Tara waited where she was, Glenn watching from the hall – and so she saw his face blanch when Hume answered the knock.
“Hello,” Hume said, with some smugness. “Well, well, well, this is interesting. Now, are you here to talk to me, or to liaise with your colleagues from out of county?”
Tara swallowed.
There was a voice from outside, muffled so that she couldn’t make out what it was saying, and then Glenn was backing up to allow Hume back into his own sitting room. This time he was followed by two officers dressed in the uniform of the local Sheriff’s department – the same as their own, but with a different patch on the arm indicating their jurisdiction. Each of them looked Tara up and down with frowns, as if examining something that was out of place.
“What’s going on here?” one of the pair, a tall man with a bald head, asked to the room in general.
“We’re here to question Mr. Hume in relation to an incident in Edgar County,” Tara said, steeling herself to make a stand. “I spoke to a coordinator for your county over the phone.”
“I believe you were told to wait until we could arrive and speak to the suspect together,” the other deputy told her sharply.
“This is a time-sensitive investigation,” Tara began.
“Every investigation is time sensitive,” the deputy snorted. “That’s no excuse for breaking protocol.”
“Talking of things being time-sensitive,” Hume interrupted, his voice supercilious and carrying over all of them easily. “I really do need to get to court. I’ve been out of the loop for two weeks while I was overseas, so I needed to get there early – bad enough to miss that, but if I stay for the floorshow, I’m going to be late. Perhaps you could play out the whole thing and then let me know later who won the right to actually talk to me.”
“Wait,” Tara said, her heart pounding hard in her chest as she realized that maybe all of this was for nothing. “You were overseas for two weeks? When did you get back?”
“Late last night,” Hume said. “I had a lovely vacation, and you people are ruining my vibe. Now, come on, so I can lock up.”
He was making a shooing movement with his hands, and this time, Tara actually obeyed him.
“There’s no point in having this argument,” she sighed at the tall deputy. “He has an alibi.”
If he had been in the county last night, that meant there was a chance he would have been at the cabin. But it was moot. In order to kidnap Miley Piper and take her to the cabin in the first place, he would have needed to be around the day before. If he’d been on a plane on his way back into the country, that would make it impossible for him to be the man who had abducted her. The purple truck was nowhere to be seen, which tallied with the report that it had been sold – and the new registered address had been out of state. That truck was gone. And in the end, Tara had to admit to herself that the guy their witness had seen parked by the lake shore might not be related to their killer at all. It had always been a tenuous lead to start with.
