The police pounded on my door at seven thirty in the morning like I thought they might. I had just finished my run and greeted them in jogging shorts and a T-shirt. Only it wasn’t cops from the City of Mound or deputies from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. Instead, it was Detectives Weiss and Manske of the St. Paul PD. When I opened the door, they stepped inside the apartment without asking permission and began glancing around as if they expected to see a meth lab set up next to my refrigerator.
“Something I can help you with?” I asked.
“We searched James Cowgill’s place,” Weiss said. “Guess what we didn’t find. We didn’t find a computer, a cell phone, or a camera. If it wasn’t for the power cords that were left behind, we wouldn’t have known he even owned a computer, cell phone, or camera.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?” Weiss turned to his partner. “Did you hear that? He said ‘Oh.’”
“I heard him,” Manske said.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked.
“Where the hell are the kid’s computer, cell phone, and camera?” Weiss said.
“How would I know?”
“Are you saying you don’t know who took them?”
“I don’t know who took them.”
“Guess.”
“I can’t.”
Weiss turned to his partner again. “He said he can’t.”
“I heard that, too,” Manske said.
“Taylor, you said there were photos.”
“I suggested that there were photos.”
“The photos are missing.”
“I gathered that.”
“Who was in the photos? What were they doing in the photos?”
“I’ve never seen the photos.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
I flashed on Douglas Jernigan and what he told me in no uncertain terms.
“That’s a line I can’t cross,” I said. “I want to, believe me. You have no idea how much I want to. I’ve already told you more than the law allows.”
“Taylor—”
“I can’t. At least not yet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Not yet? Are we supposed to cool our jets while you wrestle with some sort of ethical dilemma?”
“It has nothing to do with ethics.”
“What, then?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Look, we know you’re tight with the assistant chief, worked homicide with her back in the day. I’m guessing it was you who told Scalasi to tell us to look into Cowgill’s finances. Am I right? If you want to tell her on the down low…”
“I can’t.”
“Taylor, it’s murder.”
“You wouldn’t even have known that much if I hadn’t told you.”
“You think that makes you a hero?”
Ogilvy bounded into the room. Weiss stared down at the gray-and-white French lop-ear. For a moment, I thought he meant to kick him.
“Where I come from, you know what we do with rabbits?” he asked. “We eat them.”
Ogilvy must have been as distressed by the sound of Weiss’s voice as I was, because he turned and quickly hopped away.
“Now you’ve hurt both of our feelings,” I said.
Manske slid between me and Weiss.
“We’ll give you a couple days,” he said.
“What do you mean, you’ll give me a couple days?”
“Forty-eight hours. See, I think you want to tell us what we want to know, but you can’t without screwing over your client. I get that, Taylor. I really do. So we’ll give you forty-eight hours from right now to figure it out. Cowgill’s still down at 300 University Avenue.” 300 University Avenue is the address of the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office in St. Paul. “He’s not going anywhere.”
“What happens after forty-eight hours if I don’t deliver?” I asked.
“I don’t know. We’ll take a couple days to think about it.”
The knock on the door came so quickly after the cops left that I figured they must have forgotten something. Another threat left unspoken, perhaps. It was Claire, though, and that made me wonder if she had known the police were in my apartment and had been waiting for them to leave. She was wearing a white shirt under a blue vest that matched her skirt, and I said she looked great. She ignored the compliment.
“He came back,” Claire said.
“Who?”
“That man from the other day, something Peterson.”
“Clark Peterson?”
“I saw him drive by while I was waiting with Mandy for the school bus. He slowed down so I could see him.”
“Are you sure?”
“I remembered the car. Purple convertible.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll look into it.”
“Why is he hanging around?”
“He’s trying to annoy me. Guess what? It’s working.”
After Claire left, I inspected Hayley’s phone. The ringer had been turned off, so I hadn’t noticed that she received five calls and seven texts. The first came at eleven the night before and the last just twenty minutes earlier. All of the calls were from Maura O’Brien. Apparently Hayley had refused to list her mother as a Guernsey on her contacts list.
I called Alex using my own phone. “How’s it going?” I asked.
“Very well. Hayley is a sweet girl, and I like her very much.”
“Sweet?”
“She’s been on the defensive every day for the past twelve years. Give her a chance to relax and be herself with someone she likes and trusts and she’s simply delightful.”
“Likes and trusts? Alex”—I glanced at my watch—“it’s been less than twelve hours.”
“I can’t help it if I bring out the best in people. What do you want, anyway?”
“Just checking in. Do you have plans?”
“We’re going shopping, going to lunch, making it a girls’ day out. I told Hayley not to worry about a single thing, that you would take care of it.”
“I would prefer that you stay close to home while I do.”
“If anyone ever needed a break, it’s her.”
Since Hayley started all of this out of anger, I wasn’t sure I agreed. Still …
“Let me speak to her,” I said.
A moment later Hayley was on the phone.
“Good morning, Holland,” she said.
I couldn’t remember telling her my first name. “What else did Alex tell you about me?” I asked.
“You really did have a daughter. I’m sorry about what happened to her and your wife. I know, I really do know, how hard that must have been. How hard it must still be.”
“Thank you. Listen, your mother seems desperate to reach you. She’s called and texted a total of twelve times since last night.”
“Do me a favor. Swipe left.”
“Hayley—”
“My mother doesn’t love me, Taylor.”
I thought of all the mothers I’ve known, starting with my own and ending with Claire Wedemeyer.
“I find that hard to believe,” I said.
“So do I.”
“If I run into her, do you want me to deliver a message?”
“Tell her—tell her if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have gotten the tattoos.”
Whatever that meant.
I was surprised when I found the door locked. For the first time in a week I had beaten Freddie into the office. I used my key to unlock it. The door swung open to the left. I took one step inside the office and saw a tall man on my right. He was young, about twenty-five, and dressed in a suit. He was also pointing a gun at my head.
“Don’t move,” he said, so I didn’t.
Behind him I could see Freddie sitting at his desk. He was grinning as if the surprised look on my face was worth the price of admission.
“You have no idea how disappointed I am in you right now,” I said.
“Me?”
“Letting this punk get the drop on you.”
“I was distracted.”
“By what?”
“Please close the door,” a woman said.
When I did, I discovered her standing on the left side of the office near my desk. I knew immediately that she was Maura Guernsey. Brooke St. Vincent had called her “stunning.” The first word that came to my mind was “startling.” Her appearance was startling and dramatic in the same way that Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Pfeiffer, Catherine Deneuve, Charlize Theron, and Hedy Lamarr were startling and dramatic.
I turned to look at Freddie.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give you this one.”
He spread his hands wide as if he expected nothing less.
The gunman had moved against the wall. I noticed for the first time that the curtain had been drawn over our bulletin board, keeping the index cards and red yarn from prying eyes. I figured that Freddie must have done it before opening the door to Maura and her boy-toy.
The gunman kept pointing his piece at me, but he was now in a position where he could cover Freddie, too, if Freddie made any sudden movements. I pivoted back toward Maura. I pretended that I didn’t know her name.
“What can we do for you?” I asked.
“Where’s my daughter?”
I threw a thumb at the gunman. “Missing persons is one of the things we do for a living,” I said. “You don’t have to threaten us to look for your kid. Just offer money.”
The gunman moved up behind me and pressed the muzzle of his weapon against the base of my neck.
“Hands up,” he said.
I raised my hands. It took him only three pats before he found my Beretta, yanked it from the holster, and tossed it onto the cushion of one of the chairs surrounding our glass table. The gun caromed off the cushion and ended up on the floor beneath the table where I wouldn’t be able to reach it in a hurry.
By then I was doing a lot of thinking along the lines of how we were going to get out of this mess. None of my thoughts filled me with confidence. Freddie must have been doing some thinking, too, because he said, “Hey.”
Gunman and I both glanced at him. He was sitting tall behind his desk, except now his right hand was hidden from view. Like old married couples, sometimes partners know exactly what the other is thinking.
I told the gunman, “Put your piece away before my partner shoots you.”
His response was to smirk and tighten his grip on the butt of his gun. He was holding it with one hand about a foot away from my upraised hands. Foolish boy.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “We don’t usually carry weapons. Why would we? Still, what we do for a living, sometimes we get unexpected visitors like you two. Usually irate husbands who are going to fall hard in a divorce settlement because of some photos we took. They threaten us, sometimes with guns, also like you two. We stash our own weapons beneath our desks in case we need to reach them in a hurry to protect ourselves. Freddie is pointing his at your head right now.”
The gunman glanced at Freddie and back at me again. From the expression on his face I guessed that he thought I was bluffing.
“You, lady,” I said.
“My name is Maura Guernsey.”
“Take a look under my desk. Tell your friend what you see there.”
Maura walked behind my desk and leaned over. For a moment, I could peek down her shirt at a pair of perfect breasts encased in a white lace bra. So could the gunman; his eyes followed her every movement. Foolish, foolish boy.
“I don’t see anything,” Maura said.
I grabbed the slide of the gunman’s automatic with my left hand and held it still. With my right, I hammered the gunman’s wrist, breaking the strength of his grip on the gun butt. He released the gun. I held it with my left hand, the muzzle pointing in the wrong direction, but it was a simple matter to transfer it to my right hand and point it at the gunman, who now had a stunned expression on his face. The move took about a half second.
“Slick,” Freddie said. “All those classes you take must be paying off.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to come with me once in a while.”
Freddie removed his right hand from under his desk and set his stapler where it belonged.
“Next time maybe I will,” he said.
I told the gunman to sit down. He didn’t it do it fast enough to suit me, though, so I whacked him on the side of the head with his gun. He stumbled and needed to use the back of a chair to maintain his balance before he sat.
“Geez, Taylor,” Freddie said.
“The man invades our space, points a gun at us, he’s lucky I don’t blow his brains out. You, lady—”
“I’m Maura Guernsey.” She repeated her name as if it were a shield that would protect her.
“Sit down.”
Maura glided to the chair, smoothed her skirt beneath her well-shaped bottom, and sat, crossing her legs at the knees, resting one arm across her lap so that the fingers of her hand brushed the hem of her skirt where it met her thigh. The other hand she used to caress the single strand of pearls around her pale neck. It was wonderfully choreographed, and I thought, you need to stop noticing these things. In fact, you had better stop thinking about this woman altogether.
I stood away from Maura and her young companion. From where they sat, the gun was at eye level. I casually waved it around in front of me.
“Let’s start again, shall we?” I said.
“Where’s my daughter?” Maura repeated.
“Who’s your daughter?”
“Hayley O’Brien.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“Are you trying to be funny?” Maura asked.
“It’s a question we ask everyone on a missing persons case. How long—”
“Nine days.”
“Actually it’s been eleven counting today,” I said. “Hayley left two days before you even noticed she was gone. What the hell is wrong with you?”
The color drained from Maura’s face, leaving only her expertly applied makeup behind. Standing closer to her, I now noticed she had no lines on her forehead, no creases around her eyes or the corner of her mouth. Hell, even Amanda Wedemeyer had lines and creases. The secret to Maura’s beauty was that she was having work done even at her comparatively young age, forty-two if my math was correct. I was less impressed with her. She reminded me of a photograph on the cover of Vogue that had been airbrushed until the subject had been robbed of all character, until it was nothing more than a caricature, a wax-museum facsimile.
She spoke in a soft voice, her eyes fixed on the carpet. “She’s been spending weekends away lately, and I thought…” Her head came up and her voice increased in volume. “You’ve spoken to Hayley. You must have. Where is she?”
Knowing Dr. Campbell’s shopping habits, she might have been at the Mall of America, Rosedale, Grand Avenue, or Uptown, so I wasn’t lying when I said, “I have no idea.”
“You must.”
“I don’t.”
“Is she safe?”
“Last time I saw her.”
“Please, Taylor, I need to know.”
“Why did you come here? How did you and your gunsel come to think that we even knew Hayley?”
Freddie annoyed me by rolling his eyes and repeating the word “gunsel.” “You’ve been reading those old-time crime novels again,” he said. “The Big Sleep. The Maltese Falcon.”
“Do you mind? I’m working here.”
“I’ve always been a Chester Himes man myself. Walter Mosley.”
“Freddie.”
“Ask the cop for his ID.”
My eyes fell on the kid, who was still massaging the swollen area of his head where I had hit him.
“Cop?” I said.
“Why’d you think I didn’t take ’im when he came through the door? He’s a cop. I know ’em when I see ’em.”
I swung both my eyes and the muzzle of the gun onto the young man’s face. I made a gimme gesture with my free hand. He reached into his jacket pocket—very carefully, I might add, not once taking his eyes off me—and retrieved a thin wallet not unlike the ones Freddie and I carried. He handed it to me. I took a glimpse and tossed it to Freddie, who was still sitting behind his desk, so he could take a look, too.
“Officer Arthur Cerise, City of Orono Police Department,” Freddie said. “Little out of your jurisdiction, ain’tcha, boy?”
Cerise didn’t answer.
Freddie threw the wallet back to me. I handed it to the kid as I drifted past him to the refrigerator, opened it, pulled out a tray of ice cubes from the top shelf, cracked it, and dumped about half the cubes onto a small towel.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Orono has a contract with the City of Mound, providing police services.”
Again Cerise didn’t reply. I twisted the four corners of the towel together, creating a makeshift ice pack, and gave it to the kid.
“You have an arrangement with Mrs. Guernsey,” I added.
He pressed the ice against the swelling and remained silent. I held up his gun.
“I can give it back or I can call your chief and have him come over and pick it up. Which works best for you?”
“You can tell him, Artie,” Maura said.
“See, now you have permission.”
“There was a shooting in Mound last night,” Cerise said. “Two men were killed. One of them was named Sean Meyer. We knew, I knew, that Mrs. Guernsey’s daughter, Hayley, had been involved with him. She had asked us to keep an eye out for Sean, for the girl. Orono has two full-time investigators. They asked me to check all the cameras in the area while they worked the crime scene. We didn’t find video of the shooting, but we do have a traffic camera at the intersection near the Library. I checked the license plates of all the vehicles that passed through the intersection within thirty minutes of the incident. One of them belonged to Hayley’s BMW. I found it parked near the Library. Another license plate belonged to a Toyota Camry owned by a private investigator. You. I asked Mrs. Guernsey if she knew your name, and she said that she did.”
“David Helin called Monday,” Maura said. “He was Brooke St. Vincent’s attorney in her divorce case with my stepson Kurtis. He said you wanted to talk to us about Hayley, but Kurtis refused to listen and hung up the phone on him. That’s how I knew your name.”
“Did you tell all this to the investigators?” I asked.
Cerise didn’t answer.
“You told Maura”—I refused to use her surname out of disrespect—“but not your superiors?”
He didn’t answer again.
“Did you tell the investigators about Hayley’s involvement with Sean?”
He still refused to speak, but at least I got a head shake.
“What about Hayley’s Beamer?”
“The family sent someone to pick it up,” Cerise said.
“I bet your bosses don’t know that, either.”
“We pay extra to keep our family safe,” Maura said.
“Of course you do.”
“Please, Mr. Taylor, tell me where my daughter is. I’ll pay whatever you want.”
“Now we’re talking,” Freddie said.
“I need her home. I need her safe.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “Someone tried to murder your daughter. Twice.”
“Oh no, no…”
“Was it you?”
Maura ignored the automatic I still held in my hand as she jumped quickly to her feet and slapped me hard across the face. It hurt, yet like Cerise when I hit him, I pretended that it didn’t.
“How ’bout the rest of the Guernseys?” I asked.
She hit me again, which is what I would have done if I had been her and innocent—or guilty and didn’t want anyone to know it.
Cerise stood.
“Hey,” Freddie said.
The young cop looked at him. Freddie shook his head. Cerise sat back down and pressed the ice pack against his temple.
“How dare you?” Maura wanted to know.
“Hayley told me that your family is being blackmailed for all manner of misdeeds. She said you’re all angry enough to kill. That’s a direct quote.”
“So what?”
“She thinks the family is blaming her.”
“But why?”
I nearly said, “You know why.” Instead, I answered, “You’ve been treating her like an illegal immigrant for twelve years.”
“That’s crazy. Everyone loves her. Robert Jr., Kurtis, Melissa—they take turns pampering her. Robert Paul treats her like a princess no matter what she does, and she’s done plenty. The tattoos and piercings, it’s like she’s deliberately trying to provoke him, yet he refuses to discipline her in any way and gets angry when I do. He bought her an eighty-thousand-dollar sports car for her seventeenth birthday, tied it up with one of those giant bows that you only see on TV commercials, and then he apologized because it was blue. He said he wanted to give her a car that matched her eyes but that model of BMW didn’t come in green.”
Wait, I thought. What?
“Robert Paul is livid about what’s happening,” Maura said. “He blames his children. They’re dishonoring the Guernsey name, he says. He doesn’t blame Hayley, though. Why would he? She’s not involved in any of the family’s business dealings. He doesn’t want her to be. That’s why he never officially adopted her and changed her name. He wants her to live life as an O’Brien. I think it’s because he liked her father so much.”
“You married him so soon after Hayley’s father died,” I said.
“I was shattered by what happened. Robert Paul said he wanted to take care of me and Hayley. I let him. I did it for her. And me. I have no regrets about that.”
“Hayley doesn’t believe that her father committed suicide.”
“I have a hard time believing it myself. Charles was an expert at concealing his depression. Most people wear their hardships like a medal on their chests. Look at me: I’m angry, frustrated, depressed. Not Charlie. Never Charlie. Instead, he concealed it. He always pretended to be the happiest person in the room, always sticking to the positive. He listened to music. Danced whether people were watching or not, exercised, took walks, worked side by side with his employees in the gardens. Not even his best friends knew about the demons he wrestled with every day. Only I knew. Even then, it was difficult for me to recognize when he was hitting a low point. That final trip to San Francisco”—she turned her head so I couldn’t see her face—“he wanted me to go with him. I didn’t because Hayley was six years old and just starting the first grade. I never told Hayley that, though.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that someone is attempting to kill your daughter,” I said. “The first time, they missed. The second time, I think they might have shot Sean and Chad by mistake. It’s hard to know.”
“Hayley was involved in the killing of Sean and Chad?” Cerise said. “Are you sure?”
“She didn’t do it. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t involved.”
Cerise took a deep breath and exhaled slowly as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. I told myself that he had been certain that Hayley had killed Sean and Chad, yet he was willing to protect her for Maura’s sake, for her money. Knowing Hayley wasn’t guilty after all made him think better of himself.
“Where is she, Taylor?” Maura said. “Are you hiding her?”
“I checked the traffic cam video,” Cerise said. “Taylor was the only one in the Camry that I could see when he left the scene.”
That’s because Hayley was hiding behind my seat, I thought but didn’t say.
“Where is Hayley?” Maura asked. “I keep calling her phone, but she doesn’t answer.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Can you find her? You did once. Can you do it again? Please, Taylor. I’ll pay whatever you ask.”
“Okay.”
I think she expected me to put up more of an argument, because she paused for a few beats. Freddie filled the silence.
“We’ll need you to sign a contract,” he said. He took a sheet of paper from his desk. Maura crossed over to him and filled in the blanks. I stared at Officer Cerise. After a few silent moments, I handed his gun to him, butt first. He took it and wrestled it into a shoulder holster beneath his suit jacket.
“You don’t ever point guns at people,” I told him. “You’re a cop. If you want to scare someone, use your badge. That’s what it’s for.”
“I’ll remember.”
“How long have you been on the job?”
“Nineteen months.”
“And already on the take. Good for you.”
By then Maura had finished filling out the contract. I didn’t know if she had paid Freddie a retainer or not.
“Please help me, Taylor,” she said. “Both of you. Please.”
“We’ll call you as soon as we know something.”
I ushered her and Cerise out the door and locked it behind them.