Helpless

Chapter 61

Tom drove Kelly’s eight-year-old Honda home from Marvin’s on autopilot. He was lost in a fog. Only when he neared the house could he vaguely recall having driven there.

Marvin had made Tom swear, with his right hand pressed on his case file, that he’d keep his distance from Roland Boyd and Frank Dee.

“Let me do some more digging before you go charging at them,” his lawyer pleaded. “I’m not convinced this doesn’t have something to do with your trial. I need to learn everything I can about Frank Dee and how he operates. Last thing we need is an incendiary like you blowing things up before I can even piece it together.”

“Agreed,” Tom said.

The first call he made was to Adriana. He dialed her cell phone from the landline in the kitchen. As he expected, the call went to voice mail.

“I’m not looking for redemption here, Adriana,” Tom said in his message. “I value our friendship, and I’m forever grateful for your generosity. But my child was in danger, and you may be as well. Please give me a chance to explain. Call me.”

Tom set the wireless phone back in its cradle. He felt a sudden craving for a cup of tea. He selected a packet Kelly had kept in the cupboard. His head still wasn’t right, and Marvin’s findings, though provocative, cluttered his thoughts and overwhelmed him. Perhaps a cup of raspberry green tea and an afternoon nap would do him some good. Concussions, after all, weren’t overcome by the sheer desire to overcome them. He didn’t need a medical degree to know that a bit of rest was good medicine. He could clean up the kitchen after a quick nap.

Still sensitive to light, Tom lowered the shades in the living room. Teacup in hand, he settled himself onto the couch. Two sips and already his eyelids were shutting. He set the cup and saucer carefully on the floor and laid his body lengthwise on the couch. The quiet was blissful. There was a distinct smell that the late morning sun had baked into the cushions—an odor of sleepiness.

And so the darkness came to him.

“Dad!”

Tom stirred.

“Dad!” Jill’s voice cried again.

Tom opened his eyes and saw his daughter’s tear-streaked face staring down at him. He sat upright and knocked over the teacup with a loud clank when his feet found the floor.

“Jill… what are you doing home?” he asked, while his hands vigorously rubbed his face awake. “What time is it?” Tom peeked at the gap between the window and shade and saw bright light seeping through.

“Lindsey is missing,” Jill managed to say before her tears said the rest.

“Missing? What are you talking about?” Tom stood and gripped his daughter by the shoulder.

Jill regained some composure after taking a few deep breaths. “She wasn’t at school. Hasn’t been answering her cell phone, either. I figured she was home sick. Then her mother called me. She wanted to know if I’d seen Lindsey at school.”

“Didn’t her mother know if she went to school?”

Jill shook her head no. “She says she was asleep and didn’t hear Lin leave. But I know that means she was passed out in the living room. Lindsey could be missing for hours. What are we going to do? Her mom is totally freaking out, and so am I.”

Tom encouraged Jill to take a seat on the couch. “Wait here,” he said to her. He gathered up the teacup and saucer, then returned them to the kitchen. He came back holding a tall glass of water. “Drink this slowly,” he instructed. Jill did as she was told, and it seemed to help. “Now, tell me why you think she’s missing and didn’t run away or something. She’s under a lot of pressure.”

“No. Lindsey wouldn’t do that. I know her. She’d have called me.”

“How can you be so sure of that?” Tom asked. “You don’t always know what your friends will do.”

“No, there’s more. I didn’t tell you the truth about that night at Mitchell’s. I think something’s happened to Lindsey because of it, and it’s my fault.”

Tom felt his chest tightening. “What did you hide from me, Jill?” Tom said as he braced himself to hear the word rape.

“Mitchell didn’t try to have sex with me,” Jill confessed. “I found images on his computer. Naked pictures of me. There were pictures of Lindsey, too. And other girls from school. Girls I didn’t even know.”

Tom gave his daughter a fractured look. He could not have misheard her, but what she said didn’t make any sense. “Pictures? What do you mean?”

Again Jill took in a breath. She told her father about the party she’d attended last June. About getting drunk and passing out. She confessed to having no memory of her top coming off—whether she’d done it herself or someone had done it for her. Then she told him why she’d gone to Mitchell’s in the first place.

“Lindsey and I wanted to know if Mr. Boyd was paying Mitchell to get you in trouble.”

“Jill, this is very serious,” Tom said. “The police found pictures of Lindsey on my computer. Other girls from Shilo High School, too. They might be the same images you found on Mitchell’s computer.”

“You didn’t tell me what they found,” Jill said. “All I knew was that they were illegal. I couldn’t think about what that really meant.”

Tom nodded. He’d shielded Jill from those pictures. He couldn’t face telling her that one set of images was of her best friend naked.

“Why would you think Roland Boyd was involved?” Tom asked, more forcefully than he intended.

“You were so freaked out about my hanging around with Mitchell,” Jill said somewhat sheepishly. “You told me that Roland Boyd was dangerous, and I’d seen Mitchell’s computer room.”

Tom grimaced, but at least it explained her thinking. “Okay, so you go to Mitchell’s house to spy on him and you find these pictures.”

Jill nodded.

“How many pictures are we talking about here?”

Jill shrugged. “I took what I could get. Mitchell found me looking at them.”

“You took them?”

“I copied the images to a storage key he had.”

“And then he attacked you?”

Jill nodded. “He didn’t see me call you. Then, for the longest time, he just paced around in his bedroom with me there on his bed. He kept saying, ‘What am I going to do?’ over and over again. He didn’t hit me or anything. He just kept walking back and forth. Making me swear that I wouldn’t say anything, and whenever I thought he was going to let me go, he’d make me sit back down on the bed and swear to him again.”

“Did he hurt you?” asked Tom.

Jill touched her neck. “He put his hands on me,” she said. “I swear, I thought he was going to kill me. He looked totally insane. But then he’d calm down. I think I had him convinced I’d stay quiet. That’s when you showed up.”

“So he wanted you to stay quiet about the pictures. Is that it?”

“He said if I didn’t, he’d ruin me,” Jill explained. “He threatened to publish the pictures all over the Internet and send them to everybody in school.”

“You could have told me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to be ashamed of me,” she said in a low voice.

“Jilly, I’m your father. I’ll never be ashamed of you. But I can’t promise I’ll always be proud of your decisions, either. What you did at that party was a stupid mistake. Dangerous, too, and you know it.”

Jill frowned. “I told Lindsey about it,” said Jill. “And I gave her the images I copied.”

“Do you think Lindsey confronted Mitchell?”

Jill shrugged. “I don’t know. She might have. We need to call the police,” Jill said. “Something bad has happened. I can feel it.”

The police, Tom thought. Oh… no. “Jill, think about this for a second. Why did I get arrested?”

“But none of that’s true. We talked about that.”

“Sergeant Murphy isn’t going to see it that way. I’ve got a feeling, if Lindsey really is missing, I’m about to become a prime suspect in her disappearance.”

“No. I was here with you all last night. I’m an alibi.”

“That’s not how it works. Did you fall asleep?”

Jill nodded weakly.

“There goes your alibi. I better let Marvin know what’s going on. I’ve got a feeling I might not be out on bail much longer.”

Tom moved to get the phone in the kitchen, but Jill caught him by the arm and turned him around. “If the police focus on you, they won’t be looking for Lindsey,” Jill said. “They’ll just keep asking you what happened to her.”

“Honey, that’s their job. You’ve got to trust that they know how to do it.”

“But you just said they won’t do it right.”

Tom fixed Jill with the look he typically reserved for her best plays on the soccer field. Jill was always quick thinking, but her logic impressed him nonetheless. Tom studied Jill’s pained expression. She was smart enough to know they had no easy way out of the conundrum. “You’ll need to tell the police about Mitchell and the pictures. If something happened to Lindsey, it would give them another motive to explore.”

Jill seemed to disappear into thought, and when she returned, she did so with a worried look on her face. “The evidence is gone. I’m sure of it,” Jill said. “Mitchell wouldn’t leave stuff lying around. It’ll be my word against his.”

“And being that you’re the daughter of the guy with a motive, your word isn’t going to be all that credible.”

“Not very credible at all,” Jill agreed.

“I’ll call Marvin and brace him. Lindsey’s mother should call the police.”

“What about Mitchell?” Jill protested. “If they keep looking at you, they’re going to miss something that will lead them to Lin. I just know it.”

“I don’t know anything about computers, Jill. I can work high-tech weapons blindfolded, but I can’t even get on the Internet without your help.”

“Wait here,” Jill said.

Tom watched her storm down the hallway and disappear into her bedroom. She emerged holding something white in her hand. Only when she got closer could Tom see that it was a business card.

Jill handed the card to Tom, then took a step back to wait for a reaction.

“The FBI?” Tom said. “I know this lady. How do you know her?”

“She gave a talk at our school about sexting and stuff.”

“Why’d she give you a card?”

“Lindsey and I went to see her after. We wanted to find out how somebody could have made it look like Lindsey was the one who wrote those blog posts.”

“And?”

Jill gave a quick, nearly imperceptible shrug. “She’s just really smart about this stuff. If there’s anybody who’d know how to recover evidence that Mitchell destroyed, it’s Special Agent Loraine Miles.”