The Fifth Justice (Michael Gresham Legal Thrillers Book 10) Page 11

  Maddy is going to get a car and take us away from here. Justin Maybe says he should just kill this man. I won’t allow a killing so I’ll go with Maddy at the right time.

  Please tell the police:

  1. I am married to Andrew Constance. We have two kids, Denise and Andy.

  2. Andrew and I met in the law program at the University of Chicago and were married in 2012.

  3. I am a lawyer, and my practice is in downtown Chicago with my husband. The name of our firm is Constance and Constance, LLC. We limit our practice to criminal law.

  4. The man who kidnapped me is Reno Rivera. My husband defended him once on a murder case and got him off. He paid us back by raping me in my home. Then I carried his child and had a baby. He’ll never see that baby, and if he finds this diary, he can kill me, but I still won’t let him have my son.

  So, it was her diary! It must be her diary because she knew Justin and Maddy. Nobody knew them but her. If it was the same Justin and Maddy—it had to be.

  She closed the diary and sat back. It stunned her. Her real name was Chloe Constance, she was married to another man, and she had two children! What in God’s name? The room spun around her, and she felt like she was about to flow down a drain.

  Fear built in her abdomen. It worked its way up into her chest like a cold hand touching her heart. She now understood why parts of her had reacted to Reno before, pushing his hand away, regretting her decision to give in to him. She shivered and sat back down on the bed. She turned onto her side, drew her knees to her chest, and closed her eyes.

  She missed the hospital, her old hospital room, and she wanted to go back. She wanted to escape this room he kept saying was hers and flee the house and him. It was maddening not knowing for sure, but going by this journal, something was wrong. She closed her eyes and, shaking yet, she fell asleep.

  When she woke up, it was dark outside. She could hear the patter of sleet against the window. She sat up on the bed and felt her cheek. It was damp. She’d been crying in her sleep.

  She knew she needed to get her hands on a computer. The computer would let her find out all about this woman called Chloe Constance. The diary said she had a husband and children. After waking up, she was confident she had been dreaming about them. Now she wanted more than anything to be reunited with her family.

  “My name is Chloe,” she said to the dark ceiling, “and I want to go home.” She cried herself back to sleep.

  After midnight, she awoke and sat up in bed. Voices. The voices of girls speaking a foreign language were in the walls. Coming from—she couldn’t tell where. There was crying, too. Lots of crying. Then the voices of men, rough and angry. The female voices trailed away until the house was still again.

  Chloe wondered about the walls. Wondered how voices were inside the walls of her room. She couldn’t sleep for hours, so she shivered under her covers and blinked into the darkness.

  It continued several nights, the voices. Some of them she recognized now, since she did little else but lie in her bed and listen. For some reason, Reno would only let her out of her room when she needed to use the bathroom. She worried him, he’d told her. She didn’t look well; she needed to rest in her room and recover.

  Then one morning she awakened, and it was still and quiet. The voices were no more.

  Her door was unlocked when she tried the knob. She stole into the kitchen and heated a bagel. She spread strawberry cream cheese and strawberry jam and ate it ravenously. He’d starved her.

  Tears flowed into her eyes and she wept.

  None of this was her.

  Chapter 24: Detective Davidson

  One morning, Detective Davidson received a white business envelope, hand-lettered in a blocky first-grade style, addressed to Detectives, Alton PD, and passed along to him by Lieutenant Brower, Chief of Detectives. The LT meant for Joe to follow up on the contents. Joe peered into the envelope and pulled out a newspaper article. He blew it open for reading. The story was one that Joe hadn’t seen that had run months before. The reporter had visited Jane Doe at the hospital and had taken pictures of her at the behest of the hospital and the police department. Joe studied the article, looked at the woman’s picture, then read the article twice more. There was something about the whole thing that made Joe suspicious. Suspicious of what? He asked himself. Suspicious that the woman was someone he had maybe seen somewhere before? For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where. These were police officers who had hundreds of contacts in a week or two. People came and went, including the ID of the girl in the newspaper. He wracked his brain. Where had he seen her?

  At church? He didn’t think so. Had he answered a service call at her home or where she worked? He didn’t think so. Joe would take it up with Lieutenant Brower. He walked down the hall outside the police detectives’ bullpen and knocked on LT’s doorframe. As always, the door was open, and he heard LT on the phone. “Wait one minute!” he called out to Joe, so Joe placed his back against the wall and waited, nodding to cops and clerks as they came and went. Minutes later, he was summoned inside the LT’s sanctuary.

  “Big Bad Joe!” said LT. “Get your butt in here, boy!”

  Joe stepped inside and held up the newspaper article about Jane Doe. “What’s with this?”

  “I dunno. Someone sent it. I thought you should take a look.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because, Detective Joe, you are one suspicious fellow and we need a one-pager from you stating that you’ve looked into the matter and there’s nothing there. Words to that effect.”

  “So this came down from the mayor or city attorney, and you want me to one-page it?”

  “City attorney, I believe. Make a couple of calls, maybe run by the hospital; I don’t know. But hang a page on it and close the file. Then we’ve done what we can if anyone ever comes around asking whether we looked into so-and-so’s case. My guess is that’s why the City sent it down to us. Passed the buck because they had no clue what else to do. Bastards.”

  Joe cut it short. This was because the LT was about to launch into one of his tirades against the city. That could go on for a good ten minutes, and no one wanted an earful of that to start their day. Far be it from anyone in the know to wait around.

  “Right, LT,” Joe said and slapped the doorframe on his way back out. “I’m on it!”

  Which was the moment he remembered. The stolen VW, the vehicle he and Rabinowitz had looked into because it was involved in the accident with the unknown woman at the hospital. He checked the calendar on his smartphone. That was in November when they visited the hospital. They had gone to ask about the VW because of Jane Doe’s accident. The guy that owned it was somebody Hussell. His granddaughter drove it. Then it was stolen, recovered, and he sold it as junk because someone wrecked it. It was coming together: the woman was Jane Doe. That was Hussell’s car. He was sure. Now he had three pieces of information that nobody else had. He had the car—make, model, and year—and he had the woman called Jane Doe. Third, he had the investigator, Marcel Rainford, the man someone shot at the hotel. Joe had no doubt: Marcel Rainford had been looking for Jane Doe. They fit together, just like elbow and grease. He knew what he had to do.

  With Rabinowitz riding shotgun, Joe drove their unmarked car to the hospital where Jane Doe was treated. They went inside, straight up to the nurses’ station on the long-term-care floor.

  Joe badged the nurse who looked up when they appeared at her counter. She smiled.

  “Yes, officer?”

  “We’re here about Jane Doe. We would like to ask a few questions about her. Is her doctor on the floor?”

  The nurse shook her head. “They have released her into her husband’s custody.”

  “Her husband? What’s his name?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give that out.”

  Joe leaned across the counter, a mild intimidation. “Would you like to come down to the station with us while we ask you some questions? Maybe for a day or two?”

  The
nurse recoiled. “One minute, please.” She paged a resident physician.

  As luck would have it, he was two doors down from the nurses’ station, making his morning rounds. He responded to the page.

  “Can I help?” the young doctor said from behind the threesome at the counter.

  Joe turned. “You’re the treating doctor for Jane Doe?”

  “I was, yes.”

  “We need the name of the man they released her to.”

  “Sorry, officer, but that’s confidential.”

  “Law enforcement trumps HIPAA. Look it up,” Joe said, presenting his badge for the doctor to examine. The doctor took the badge case in his hands and studied it.

  The doctor gave in. “All right. The husband went before the Placement Board. Nurse, look up the patient on your computer and let’s give these gentlemen what they’re here for. Thank you, gentlemen,” said the resident, who retreated down the hall to his next patient.

  The nurse typed away and then piped up, “Arnold Soulé is the man’s name. They discharged her into his care, and we have no record of where they went from here. Sorry.”

  Joe made his notes. “Arnold Soulé? Did anyone check the guy’s ID? Check out his credentials?”

  “We did. The hospital attorney always does that in amnesia cases when there’s a release to someone claiming to be family. I can direct you to our attorney’s office.”

  “Unnecessary,” Joe said. “But tell me this: what was her real name?”

  “Goodness, it only says Mrs. Soulé. Nobody wrote down her name, not that I can find.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Yes, serious.”

  With that, Joe and Rabinowitz headed back toward the elevators.

  They ran the name Soulé, but dispatch came back empty-handed. Dispatch told them there was no information on anyone named Arnold Soulé within two hundred miles of Alton. The agent said he would run it through the FBI’s nationwide database, but that would take thirty minutes. Joe and Rabinowitz dropped into a Denny’s and ordered breakfast while they waited on the FBI computer.

  “What are you thinking?” Rabinowitz asked, stuffing toast into his mouth. “You’ve gone silent.”

  “I think someone kidnapped that girl right out of the hospital,” Joe said.

  “Come on, why do you think that, Mr. Suspicious?”

  “Just a hunch, Frostbite.”

  “You think NCIC will give us something?”

  Joe’s handheld radio squawked.

  “Detective Davidson,” he answered.

  “Detective, we’ve got something through NCIC.”

  “Go ahead, please.”

  “Your man Arnold Soulé got a speeding ticket one month ago. His plates were run. It seems the car he was driving was registered to one Reno Rivera.”

  “Spell.”

  “R-I-V-E-R-A. Do you want his address?”

  Twenty minutes later, Joe was rapping his knuckles on the front door at the address from dispatch. The man wasn’t answering the doorbell, though the detectives could hear the buzzer inside. So, Joe hammered at the door even harder, trying to raise someone’s attention.

  “Easy, Joe,” Rabinowitz cautioned his partner. “You’re bending the damn frame.”

  “I want to bend the frame. I want to break down the damn door if this Rivera guy doesn’t answer! He kidnapped this girl!”

  “Let’s come back with a search warrant,” Rabinowitz suggested.

  At three o’clock that afternoon, they returned with a search warrant. They made demands for entry. They looked into windows through cupped hands. Then the door was kicked open, and the detectives charged inside.

  It was empty.

  “I’m guessing he split when he got the speeding ticket and his address went into the computer.”

  “I think you’re spot on.”

  Joe looked at Rabinowitz and knew. He’d seen an evacuation like this too many times not to know: Jane Doe was kidnapped and Reno Rivera was holding her. Why? They’d find that out, Joe promised himself. Reno had shot the investigator who’d been looking for the same girl. Now he knew: find the girl, find the shooter.

  The returned to their unmarked car and found the computer screen plastered with FBI file photos of Reno Rivera at various stages of arrest and incarceration over his criminal career. Beneath each mug shot was a summary of the crime and the victim and the sentence. The victim named underneath one mug shot was Chloe Constance. Joe‘s mouth fell open: she was their Jane Doe. She’d been raped by Reno Rivera years ago. He‘d gone to prison for it. Now he had her again.

  Joe’s world went spinning out of control. His heart raced.

  “Frostbite—”

  “I see it, Joe.”

  The hunt had only just begun.

  Chapter 25: Detective Davidson

  After they found Rivera’s house vacant, Detective Davidson and his partner hit the streets. For weeks, there was nothing, not one clue. They braced informants and hit them with questions, but there was neither hide nor hair of Reno Rivera and Chloe Constance.

  Then the focus shifted to the girls and boys of the streets. Photographs of Rivera were shown all around. Who was this man? At last, they got a break. There was a girl who broke down crying upon seeing the photos. She wouldn’t talk, but she couldn’t stop weeping, either. Davidson took her into their police vehicle, gave her hot coffee, and continued with their questions.

  She was sixteen years old and had come to the U.S. from Vietnam. How had she made her way from Southeast Asia to the U.S.? She had been selling herself to survive when she’d been approached by men in a van. Things would be glorious in the U.S., the men promised her. She hadn’t wanted to leave, but they’d forced her into the vehicle, and then she woke up from a drugged sleep aboard a Finnish freighter bound for San Francisco. There were fifteen other girls just like her on board that trip. Her name was Pham Linh.

  “Can you stop crying now?” Davidson asked.

  “I can show you where he lives,” she agreed.

  Davidson looked at his partner, Rabinowitz. This was long overdue. Find Rivera, and they would find Chloe Constance. He was sure.

  Davidson called up Chloe’s picture on the terminal in their police car. He turned to the young girl. “Seen this one?

  The girl squinted at the picture, studying the woman’s face.

  “She’s too old. You won’t find her going on dates with men. I have never seen that one.”

  Davidson switched to another digital image of Chloe. “How about now?” he asked.

  “No,” said Pham Linh. “Never have I seen that one.”

  “All right,” said Davidson. “We’ll have you direct us to your pimp’s house. Then we’ll bring you back here. Can you do that for us?”

  She nodded and took a swallow of her coffee. “I can do that,” she said.

  And so they drove north out of St. Louis toward Alton.

  It was a tough neighborhood, inner city, rundown, but the detectives understood the rationale for living there. The pimps would be left alone, neighbors wouldn’t snoop, and if anyone ever saw anything, they’d never admit it. Calls wouldn’t be made to the police no matter how many underage girls came and went from the pimp’s house. Heads would turn away; it was just another white devil selling girls. Everyone ignored it.

  Pham Linh directed them to a side street where a white Victorian Rambler sat back from the roadway, behind a chain-link fence. Two ferocious looking Dobie’s prowled the yard, looking for an arm-or-leg feast. The detectives, after returning Pham Linh to her street corner, didn’t try to enter. The dogs owned the yard. The two men decided they would call animal control to get the dogs while they cordoned off the house so that no one could come or go until the dicks had entered and searched for Chloe.

  Davidson called in backup. Additional Alton police came to help. Four police cars, lights flashing, took over the street in front of the house. Uniforms surrounded the dwelling, someone caught the dogs and locked them inside an ani
mal control truck. The two detectives made their way to the front door. They knocked. No answer. They shouted. Still no answer.

  Chapter 26: Michael Gresham

  After two weeks in Saint Petersburg, I was no closer to learning Verona’s whereabouts than the day I arrived. But every day Essine and I journeyed from Essine’s flat to the Big House, as it is known: Bolshoy Dom (Большой дом). It’s essentially an office building located at 4 Liteyny Avenue in Saint Petersburg. It’s the headquarters of the local Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast branches of the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB). It’s an eight-story building with a ninth floor, I am told by the locals, dedicated entirely to jail cells for those unfortunates undergoing investigation or arrest by the FSB. A ten-foot, official state portrait of Putin graces the entry hall and the building smells very musty.

  Our daily visits to the Big House were interrupted only by our waiting ten hours a day for a telephone call from the FSB that never came. Still we anxiously waited, praying for a break. I did receive one call from Marcel two days after the hospital in St. Louis released him. He was back in Chicago, where he was resting and just beginning to work with speech therapy. The jaw wound had definitely affected his voice and speech, which was fine, it was still Marcel and that’s all that mattered. I swore I would never allow him to be in harm’s way again. I didn’t tell him that; it was a promise I made him that he would never know about. But it was a serious promise. Nothing could be allowed to happen to my friend.