Thread of Suspicion (Joe Tyler Mystery #2)

  THREAD OF SUSPICION

  by

  Jeff Shelby

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THREAD OF SUSPICION

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright ©2012

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the expressed written consent of the author.

  First Edition: October 2012

  Books by Jeff Shelby

  The Joe Tyler Novels

  THREAD OF HOPE

  THREAD OF SUSPICION

  The Noah Braddock Novels

  KILLER SWELL

  WICKED BREAK

  LIQUID SMOKE

  DRIFT AWAY

  The Deuce Winters Novels (Under the pseudonym Jeffrey Allen)

  STAY AT HOME DEAD

  POPPED OFF

  For Hannah Elizabeth

  ONE

  I stood on the sidewalk, late afternoon snow swirling around me, and stared at the house.

  The wind pushed at me, trying to propel me forward. I pulled up the collar on my wool coat, protecting my neck from the icy air. The snow fell light and steady, already beginning to coat the grass and dot the sidewalk.

  But I could still see the house.

  A bungalow painted light green, it sat close to the street. The shades were pulled in the windows and a massive tree stood sentry over the entire front yard. The screen door hung crooked in front of the main door. An ancient Buick was parked on the cracked asphalt driveway and a large, blue city-issued trashcan sat just off to the side, under the carport.

  The wind pushed again and I winced. The temperature dropped by the minute and snowflakes clung to my hair and tucked themselves inside my ears.

  I reached into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled out the folded envelope.

  I’d already looked at it at least a hundred times. I’d sat on the airplane, my eyes locked as tight on the handwriting as my hand was on the envelope. I knew the address by heart, plugging it effortlessly into my phone after getting into the rental car at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

  I was at the right address.

  I shoved the envelope back into my pocket and walked quickly across the yard, hopping up the three concrete steps that led to the front door. I opened the screen door and knocked hard on the door three times, my heart crashing against the inside of my chest.

  The door swung open. A kid in his twenties stood in the doorframe, a cigarette hanging from his lips, attitude hanging from everything else.

  “Yeah?” he asked, frowning at me

  “I’m looking for Jacob Detwiler.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Joe Tyler. Are you Jacob?”

  He took a long drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke in my face. “Fuck off.”

  He tried to shut the door, but I stiff-armed it. “So you’re Jacob?”

  He flicked the cigarette over my shoulder. “Yo, you better get your hand off my door like now, dude.”

  “Are you Jacob?” I asked again.

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’m not gonna tell you again, dude. Get your hand off my door.”

  I grabbed him by the shirt and whipped him around, throwing him over the steps and into the snow-covered yard. He landed hard on the frozen ground, his mouth open in a wordless scream.

  I descended the stairs, picked up the butt of the cigarette he’d tossed and knelt on his chest. The red ember on the end of the cigarette glowed in the falling snow.

  I held it near his cheek. “One last time. Are you Jacob?”

  His eyes locked on the cigarette. He knew I was ready to bury it in his skin. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m Jacob.”

  My mouth was so dry I could barely get the words out. “Do you know where my daughter is?”

  He couldn’t pull his eyes from the burning ember. “What? Who?”

  I laid my forearm across his throat. “Elizabeth Tyler. Do you know where she is?”

  He squirmed beneath me. “No! I don’t know no bitch named Elizabeth.”

  I jabbed the cigarette into his cheek and he screamed.

  I pulled it away. “Next one’s going in your eye.”

  Tears pooled in his eyes. The spot I’d touched was bright red and puffy.

  I pulled the photo from my pocket and held it over his face. “Elizabeth Tyler.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them, staring at the photo several inches from his nose. Something changed in his eyes. “That’s Bailey.”

  “No, it’s my daughter,” I said. The snow stung my eyes. I pushed down harder on his throat.

  He coughed and shook his head. “No! The one on the left. That’s Bailey. My sister.”

  TWO

  I lifted my arm off his neck and he wheezed, gasping for breath.

  He rubbed at his throat. His eyes were now locked on the picture in my hand. “Man, that’s old.”

  “How old?” I asked, my voice tight and raw.

  He wrinkled his nose. “Dunno. Maybe six? Seven years?”

  That sounded right to me, gauging how old Elizabeth looked in the picture.

  “Where’s your sister now?” I asked.

  He started to say something, but anger filtered into his features and he frowned. “Who the hell are you? You just show up at my door, throw me down and now you wanna ask me questions? Stick a fucking cigarette on my face.” He ran his thumb over the welt on his cheek.

  “The other girl in the picture,” I said. “That’s my daughter. I’m trying to find her.”

  “From that old picture?” He smirked. “Good luck.”

  I held the picture in my hands as if it might break. “It’s all I have.”

  Jacob ran a hand through his overgrown mane. “Well, she might be with Bailey for all I know.”

  I felt a twinge, a small flutter, in my chest. “With your sister?”

  “Maybe. But I haven’t seen Bailey since probably about then.”

  The twinge died.

  Like it always did.

  I stood and offered a hand to help him up. He refused and got up on his own.

  “Why haven’t you seen her since then?” I asked.

  He brushed snow from his shirt. “She left with my mom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My parents got divorced,” he said. “She went with my mom. Chicago first, then down to Florida.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “No clue.” He looked away. “I stopped talking to my mom when they got to Florida. So I didn’t talk to Bailey, either.”

  “And you stayed here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about your dad?” I asked. “Would he know where they are?”

  “He’s dead,” he said, his voice flat. “And he wouldn’t have known anyway. He took off right after my mom and I never heard from him again.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “I stayed here,” he said. “By myself. I didn’t need them. Either of them.”

  “You didn’t have any contact with them? At all?”

  He wiped at the snow on his face. “I got some Christmas cards and shit, I think. But I was fine. I didn’t need them.” He shrugged. “My dad didn’t wanna be a dad. That was cool. He split, I bailed school and life was fine.”

  It was easy to see that it wasn’t cool and that life wasn’t f
ine, but I wasn’t there to play life counselor. I was there to find my daughter and Jacob was connected to a girl in a photo with her. I wasn’t going to waste time solving his problems.

  I wanted to solve mine.

  An engine sputtered at the curb and I looked up.

  A red SUV idled and a woman stared at me from the windows.

  “Oh, great,” Jacob muttered. “My day is just kicking ass.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “No one,” he said.

  The passenger side window dropped and the woman leaned across the seat. “Everything okay, Jacob?”

  “Fabulous,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m going inside.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “I’m not done talking to you.”

  His face screwed up in agitation “Man, I don’t have shit to say to you, alright? I haven’t seen my sister in years. I have no idea where she is. And you know what? I don’t care where she is. So I don’t know where your kid is, either. Sorry. Life sucks, sometimes.” He shook his head and pushed past me. “Get used to it.”

  THREE

  The woman got out of the SUV and trudged across the snow-covered yard.

  Waves of dark hair snaked out beneath the knit beanie on her head. A large parka covered most of her short, compact frame. Pale blue eyes stared at me, curious.

  “Hi,” she said, holding out a gloved hand. “I’m Isabel.”

  I shook her hand. Feathery crows feet and tired eyes couldn’t convince me she was old. I put her somewhere in her early thirties.

  “Joe Tyler,” I said.

  “You have an issue with Jacob?”

  “I just met him.”

  “Doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I wasn’t trying to.”

  She folded her arms around the parka. “Okay. For the record, I don’t like him. So it’s alright with me if you do have an issue with him.”

  “How do you know him?”

  She stared over my shoulder at the house, choosing her words carefully. “We sort of work together.”

  “Sort of?”

  Her eyes refocused on me. “You know anything about Jacob?”

  “I wasn’t kidding. I just met him. No. I know nothing about him.”

  She nodded. “He’s kind of a scumbag.”

  I smiled. “In my experience, you either are or you aren’t.”

  She returned the smile. “Probably so. He’s a scumbag, then.”

  “How so?”

  “Deals,” she said. “Probably a bunch of other crap I don’t know about.”

  “So how do you know him?”

  “I find kids through him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She fished in the pocket of her jacket, pulled out a card and handed it to me.

  The card listed her full name, Isabel Balzone. A cozy image of a brick home was centered above her name. Below, the words Director, Run Home.

  “Don’t let the director title fool you,” she said. “I’m a one-woman organization.”

  “What’s Run Home?”

  “Mostly a failing endeavor,” she said, smiling dryly. “I try to get kids home.”

  “Kids?”

  “Mostly teens,” she said. “Runaways. Homeless. Some others. I try to get them home. Or at least to a safe place.” The smile appeared again. “Run Home is the opposite of run away.”

  I nodded. “I get it. So what do you have to do with Jacob?”

  She sighed. “We kind of have a deal. He runs into anyone that really needs help, he calls me. In turn, I don’t turn him into the cops.”

  “Sweet deal.”

  “Believe it or not, he does call me,” she said. “I check in with him a lot. But he does call.” She paused. “So maybe he’s not a scumbag. Maybe just a bit of a jerk.”

  The snow fell in earnest and the entire street was blanketed in white.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. “And why did you have him on his ass?”

  I shoved her card in my pocket and held onto the photo of Elizabeth and Bailey. I stared hard at it, willing Elizabeth to speak to me, to tell me where she was, where she’d gone, who’d taken her.

  But she said nothing.

  I offered the photo to Isabel. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

  FOUR

  Isabel Balzone blew the steam off the top of her coffee. “You’re still looking?”

  The steady snow had morphed into a blizzard while we talked in front of Jacob’s house. She’d suggested grabbing coffee at a diner down the road. With nowhere else to go, I said okay.

  The diner, like Jacob’s house, was in a run-down neighborhood west of Minneapolis. Just off 94, north of the skyline and the baseball stadium, nestled in a thicket of brick ramblers and falling-down clapboard homes. The crowd inside was decidedly local.

  I cupped my hands around the warm porcelain mug. My eyes zeroed in on the chipped rim. “Yeah.”

  “Even when you don’t know what you’ll find?”

  “I need to know,” I said. “The not knowing is almost worse than not having her around.”

  She nodded as if she understood. But she didn’t. The only way she could was if she had lost a child.

  Maybe she had. “How’d you get into this?” I asked.

  The waitress returned and set a slice of apple pie in front of Isabel. She hadn’t ordered it.

  “Just wanted to do something helpful,” Isabel said. “I worked at a couple of non-profits out of college but the red tape and restrictions chafed at me. I’m not really a sit around and wait for an answer type. So I just started going out at night. Finding kids, giving them blankets, getting them food, stuff like that.”

  She shrugged. “I got some cards printed up and learned how to write grant proposals. I pay myself a ridiculously small salary. And here I am.”

  “You do anything with missing kids?” I asked. “Help look or locate?”

  She ate a forkful of pie and shook her head. “Not much. It’s mostly assistance. Making sure they’re safe, have food, stuff like that. Most of the kids I work with, they don’t wanna go home. And some of them have good reason not to. I don’t think it’s my job to put them back home unless they want to be there, you know?”

  “But your organization is called Run Home.”

  “Well, sure.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “For those who have a decent home to go back to, it’s the best place for them to be.

  “And the others? It’s okay to let them run away?”

  She smiled, like she’d been asked that a million times. “It’s never okay because it means a kid doesn’t feel loved. But like I said, a lot of these kids…they’re not better off at home.”

  I could imagine the reasons, but I didn’t have the ability to be so objective. I lost that ability the day Elizabeth disappeared.

  “But there is one kid I’m concerned about,” she said, lines forming on her forehead.

  “Who?”

  “He was a regular. And he’s nowhere to be found.”

  “How old?”

  “Nineteen.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “And, yeah, I know. He’s old enough to go do his own thing now.”

  I nodded.

  “But Marc…is different.”

  I didn’t say anything, just watched the snow fall outside the window. Cars were moving slower now as it piled up, slicking the street. It was like watching the world through a snow globe.

  “He helped me,” Isabel said. “He wouldn’t tell me much about himself. I know he was on bad terms with his father. Never spoke a word about his mother. So he was one of the ones that didn’t want to go home.”

  The waitress refilled my mug and Isabel waited for her to leave.

  “But he wanted to be around, you know?” she continued. “He didn’t want to be by himself. So he started coming with me at night, helping me with the blankets and food. He’s smart, good sense of humor. Didn’t mind me asking him qu
estions as long as I didn’t mind when he didn’t answer. I talked to him about getting a job. He wasn’t against it.”

  “Doing?”

  She pushed the plate away and toward the edge of the table. “Working for me, actually. I just picked up another grant two weeks ago. Enough to cover a part-time employee. I asked him if he wanted the job. And he said yes.”

  “What specifically was he going to do for you?”

  “Same thing he’d been doing,” she said. “Nothing really different. Figured I could introduce him to the grant writing stuff, too. Truth is, I need the help. It wasn’t a completely unselfish thing on my part. And Marc knows me, knows what I do. He knows this world. The kids I see on a regular basis, they know him. They trust him. That is a huge thing.”

  I knew that was true. When I went looking for someone, the most difficult thing was gaining the trust of the people in the world the kid left. Kids especially were pessimistic, distrustful of adults. It took time to cut into that armor of skepticism.

  Time a missing kid didn’t have.

  “So when did he disappear?” I asked.

  “Three nights ago,” she said, concern sitting heavy on her face. “He normally meets me to do the food run. He’s only not showed once before and he was sick that time. Sent someone to let me know. But this time? Nothing.”

  “You asked around?”

  “Yeah,” she said, blinking. “No one’s seen him.”

  “You try the dad yet?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. Feels like I’d be stepping over some line I promised Marc I wouldn’t cross.”

  “Waiting is sometimes a really bad thing.”

  She stared at me for a moment. “That sounds like it comes from experience.”

  I shifted in the booth. “It does. You promise things to kids that you intend to honor. But once things go haywire, the promises go out the window. At least for me they do. My goal is to find them. If they’re pissed when I find them, so be it. At least I found them.”

  Snow ticked against the window, the wind blowing it into the glass.