No way out

Chapter Nine

I was in Simon’s office the first time Peggy Martin called. Lucy answered, warm but professional, listening, her jaw easing open, her eyes widening.

“Hang on. I’m going to put you on speaker. I want my partners to hear this,” Lucy said, punching a button on the phone, shifting from professional to soothing. “Start over, Mrs. Martin.”

“He took my kids,” she said, her voice cracking. “You’ve got to find them.”

Lucy grabbed a notepad and pen as Simon and I pulled our chairs closer to the phone.

“Start from the beginning, Mrs. Martin. Take your time.”

Her voice caught as she fought back tears. “I’m sorry. It’s just that the police say they’re doing all they can, but my kids have been gone for two weeks. Why would he do a thing like that? What kind of man kidnaps his own kids, for Christ’s sake?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Martin. Where are you?”

“Home. I’m at home. I’m afraid to leave in case the police call. Please, you’ve got to help me.”

“It would be better if we talked in person. Give me your address.” Lucy wrote it down and glanced at her watch. “We’ll be there in thirty minutes.” She ended the call and looked at me. “You in?”

She knew without asking. It was the hardest kind of case, but neither of us could say no. Kids disappear for all kinds of reasons, none of them good. Parents wake up and die each day they’re gone, the uncertainty of what may have happened and the unspeakable fear of what did happen a daily acid bath. And no matter how it ends, it never ends. I was living proof that survivors don’t heal and ghosts don’t rest.

“I’m all in.”

Peggy Martin lived in a small house on Wabash between Third and Fourth Streets, a few blocks north and east of my bus stop bench. Her house sat above a two-car garage, wooden steps leading up a flight from the driveway to the front door, white paint cracked and flaking off the wooden siding.

Lucy and I sat at her kitchen table, looking at pictures of Evan and Cara, both fair-skinned with blue eyes and light brown hair, like their mother, listening as she talked about them. Cara was all bones and crooked teeth, a gawky girl who danced, played basketball, loved to draw, and cried herself to sleep when her parents fought.

Evan was her devil child, a spark plug full of mischief and laughter, throwing himself around his mother like a shield when things got hot between his parents. He was the first son in four generations not named Jimmy. Her husband was Jimmy Martin, III, his father was Jimmy Martin, Jr., and the old man who had started it all and dropped dead of a heart attack three years ago while chewing out a cashier he claimed had shortchanged him was Jimmy, Sr. Her husband had wanted Evan to be Jimmy the Fourth, but she’d refused.

Jimmy worked construction, but the recession had knocked the pins out from under builders. With forty hours a week hard to come by, he started going crazy and turning mean from long stretches with nothing at all. Peggy worked part-time at a nursing home, barely making enough to cover the cost of someone to look after the kids. They were three months behind on the mortgage, and she didn’t know what they were going to do or where they would go when the bank made good on its threat to foreclose.

Her husband had beat her and accused her of cheating on him, a charge she dismissed with a bitter laugh, but didn’t deny, saying who could blame her if she did, being married to him. Her lawyer got a restraining order against Jimmy when she filed for divorce, telling her that the piece of paper was about as much protection as a condom with a hole in it, but short of a shotgun, it was the best the law could do.

She wore no makeup. Her cheeks were sunken, her bloodshot eyes suspended above dark bags, and her unwashed hair hung loose around her thin face. Though disheveled, there was beauty behind her pain, features that in another time had turned heads. She trembled as she spoke, her party days, if there had been any, behind her. She was holding herself together with bubble gum and string.

“Why do you think your husband is the one who took Evan and Cara?” Lucy asked.

“Who else could have done it? He’s that hateful!”

“When did you discover that your children were missing?”

She sniffled and wiped her nose with a dish towel. “It was Saturday morning, almost two weeks ago. They was watching television, and I told them I had to run out to the store. I was only gone a few minutes. When I come back, they was gone. I ran all over the house, hollering, but they didn’t answer.”

She dissolved in tears, ducking her head, looking up at us. Lucy flinched for an instant, resisting the impulse to comfort her, not ready to sacrifice the objectivity she needed to decide whether to take the case. That decision depended on whether she thought Peggy might have had something to do with her kids’ disappearance. She wouldn’t be the first parent to kill her kids and beg for help to find who did it.

“Was this the first time you had left them home alone?” Lucy asked when Peggy stopped crying.

“I left them once or twice before. Just for a few minutes. Oh, I know everyone says they was young to be left alone, but Cara, she’s real responsible.”

Lucy nodded, meaning only that she had heard what Peggy said, but Peggy brightened, interpreting the gesture as one of forgiveness and understanding.

“I’m sure she is. Did you lock the doors before you left?”

“I know I did, not that it would make a difference. Jimmy’s got a key, and the kids would have let him in anyway. The police said there was no sign of forced entry.”

“What store did you go to?”

“The QuikTrip up on Independence Avenue. We was out of milk.”

“What have the police told you about their investigation?”

“Adrienne Nardelli is the detective in charge of the case. She says she talked to the neighbors but no one’s seen anything.”

“Have you talked to your neighbors? Sometimes they’ll tell you more than they’ll tell the police.”

She started crying again, wiping her face with the towel when she stopped.

“Them people have been so good to me. Ellen Koch, she lives across the street. She’s organized the volunteer searchers, and she’s talked to everyone and they all say they didn’t see nothing or nobody. The police are looking and my neighbors are looking, but nobody’s seen my babies. And Jimmy, he went to jail just so he wouldn’t have to tell what he did.”

“Why did you call me?”

“Ellen give me your number. She said she seen you on the news last spring when you found that little boy after his father kidnapped him.” She reached behind her, picking up an envelope from the kitchen counter, handing it to Lucy. “Ellen took up a collection. There’s nine hundred eighty-seven dollars in there. It’s all I can pay you.”

Lucy had made a splash six months ago in a custody case. The father, who had been denied custody because he was a drug addict, had taken the boy to Toronto. Lucy tracked them down, bringing the boy back and leaving the father in a Canadian jail. She picked up the envelope, ran her fingers across it, but didn’t look inside.

“Okay, Peggy. We’ll give it a shot.”

Adrienne Nardelli had accepted our involvement without enthusiasm, reluctantly admitting that she was nowhere on the case, adding that Quincy Carter had told her she would be sorry and warning us that we’d better make a liar out of him. We had made no more progress in a week than she had in two. Evan and Cara Martin had vanished, and their father was the only suspect.