No way out

Chapter Fifty-five

“Why do people insist they’re innocent when it’s so obvious they aren’t?” Lucy asked after Jennings left. “Jimmy Martin begs Kate to find his kids when we know he was the last one seen with them. And this bozo Jennings says we’re wrong about him when he’s done everything but draw targets on Roni and Jack. I don’t get it. Do they think we are that stupid?”

“Maybe they are innocent,” Kate said.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Hear me out. Jimmy Martin and Agent Jennings share one thing in common. They’re both afraid of something.”

“Great, because I’m afraid of spiders and growing old with flabby triceps, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got anything in common with those two.”

“Lucy,” I said, “chill. I think I know what Kate’s getting at, at least as far as Jennings is concerned. He started something dangerous he thought he could control, and now he’s lost the reins. It’s a case of go big or go home, only he can’t go home.”

“That’s right,” Kate said. “Not to beat the gambling metaphor to death, but Jennings is playing high-stakes poker with Mendez. He went all in, thinking he had a nut hand with Brett Staley, but turns out all he had was a bad beat.”

We stared at her, mouths open, waiting for a translation.

“Listen,” she said, “there’s no better place to study facial expressions than at a Texas Hold’em poker tournament. A nut hand is the best hand at any particular moment, and a bad beat is a hand that looked like a winner but was a loser.”

“What’s that make Jimmy Martin?” Simon asked.

“A man who bet his kids on a long shot,” Kate said.

“I don’t buy that,” Lucy said, “unless the long shot was getting away with murder. Don’t over-science this case. Go back to the beginning. The Martins are lousy spouses and worse parents. I’ve got no quarrel with that. But Jimmy took the kids. We know that. He swore he’d never let Peggy have them. We know that. He won’t lift a finger to find them. We know that. So, what else do we need to know?”

“For starters,” I said, “we need to know if Adam Koch is telling the truth about Jimmy taking the kids or whether he’s trying to avoid two more murder charges. We need to know if Jimmy is just a down-on-his-luck blue-collar guy who’s pissed off at his wife or if he’s a psychopath who would murder his kids to keep her from getting custody. Plus, we need to know why Jimmy tried to escape. Let’s start with Adam Koch. Simon, did you find anything else in the police files?”

“Nothing that proves whether Adam is telling the truth. The kid is a pedophile and a confessed child murderer who had easy access to the Martin kids, and, most importantly, the story he tells incriminates him as much as it incriminates Jimmy because it puts him in Peggy’s house with the kids when they disappeared. If he’s lying about Jimmy, that makes him the last person to have seen those kids alive.”

“Anything else?”

“KCPD posts crime statistics on their website broken down by offense and location. There aren’t any other cases of missing kids in Northeast in the last five years. Predators like Adam tend to stick to their own neighborhoods. The Montgomery and Martin kids were snatched two years apart. That fits with a pattern where the predator holds off as long as he can until he can’t resist the urge any longer. Adam knew he was screwed up. He tried to quit the kiddie porn, but he couldn’t, no matter how many times he slept with Peggy. His urges may have overwhelmed him, the opportunity presented itself, and here we are.”

“Make up your mind,” Lucy snapped. “Was it Adam or Jimmy?”

“Sorry, Luce. I’m not ready to pick a winner.”

Simon’s ambivalence took the air out of the room, all of us sharing his uncertainty. It wasn’t only that we wanted to be right, we had to be right if there was any chance we’d find Evan and Cara Martin alive. They’d been gone almost a month without so much as a false sighting, no one sure they’d seen the kids at a mall in Montana, no one swearing they’d seen them at Disney World, SeaWorld, or anywhere in the world. Either they were in a locked room or buried in a shallow grave, and the longer it took to find out which, the more likely it was that we’d find nothing but bleached bones and heartache.

Time was running out for them and for me. Jennings had made his case too personal, letting his future depend on getting it right. I had done the same thing, betting my past against my future-what I should have done to save my children, Kevin and Wendy, against what I’d yet to do to rescue Evan and Cara and protect Roni. No matter how many times I told myself that it wasn’t my fault, that bad things happen to good people and worse things to innocent children, I couldn’t stop trying to patch my soul. It shamed me to compare my old pain to Peggy Martin’s certain anguish, to admit that her loss would compound mine, but there it was, the threat to Roni’s life weighing just as heavily. I’d crossed my own line and couldn’t see back to the other side.

“What do we do now?” Kate asked.

“Start over with the time line, beginning with when Adam says he saw Jimmy leaving the house with Evan and Cara,” I said.

“That was around eight-thirty in the morning,” Lucy said. “According to the arrest report, the police picked him up at twelve-thirty that afternoon, which is not a lot of time to kill his kids, bury them where they can’t be found, and steal a truckload of copper.”

“But it is enough time to leave the kids somewhere, figuring he’d pick them up after the job was done. So, that’s what we’re looking for. Lucy, go see Peggy, ask her if she knows where he might have left them.”

“We’ve asked her a hundred times,” Lucy said.

“Ask her again and talk to Ellen Koch. Get everything you can about Adam, his relationship with Peggy, and what happened the morning the kids went missing. And take a run at Adam if he’ll talk to you,” I said.

“I’m on it. Where are you headed?”

“Kate and I will take another shot at Nick Staley and Jimmy Martin, and I’ve got to figure out some way to protect Roni even if she won’t talk to me.”

“You can’t protect her unless you’re on her twenty-four seven,” Lucy said. “And we don’t have that luxury. You’re going to have to choose.”

“I can’t do that. I’ve got to keep the balls in the air as long as I can.”

Kate picked up her purse. “I’ve got to make a call. I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said, closing the office door behind her.

Simon opened a desk drawer and handed me a cell phone. “It’s clean and prepaid for a thousand minutes. Turn off your cell phone. That way Jennings can’t monitor your calls and texts and he can’t use cell towers to ping your phone and keep track of your movements.”

I slipped the phone in my pocket. “Nice touch. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“What am I supposed to do while you and Lucy are running around saving the world?”

“Do what you always do,” I said. “Something brilliant.”