Inside Out (33 page)

Nat was just pulling out from the curb in front of the coffee shop when she heard a loud thump on her trunk. She slammed down on her brakes and the next thing she knew, Oates was yanking open her passenger-side door.

“The Bells’ house in Newton. Let’s go.”

A flood of possibilities rushed through her mind, but they were all so potentially awful, Nat couldn’t bring herself to voice them aloud.

When they got to the Bells’ house, they saw Leo’s car. It was half on the Bells’ manicured lawn, his car door open. So was the door to the house.

Nat’s heart was in her throat. Had they found Jakey? Was he alive?

Oates and Nat were just dashing out of her car when two uniforms emerged from the house with a raging man, arms pinned behind his back, wrists cuffed. They were heading for the cruiser.

Nat froze in place. The man being dragged from the house was Leo.

Oates yanked out his ID, waving at the cops as he rushed over to his partner. Leo was acting like a madman. The cops were doing their best not to roughhouse him as they tried to get him into the back of the cruiser. They must have known they were dealing with a police officer because one of them called him “Detective.”

“Jakey’s jacket,” Leo gasped hoarsely. “It was in her car. They’ve got him, man. They’ve got my boy. I’ll kill them. I’ll fucking kill them—”

“I’m on it, Leo. I’ll find him,” Oates said fiercely.

An unmarked car pulled up to a screeching stop just as the uniforms managed to get Leo into the cruiser.

The plainclothes detective Nat recognized from Jakey’s nursery school, and whom she presumed was Detective Romero, got out of the car. He held up a hand to stop the cruiser from taking off. Oates and the detective had a brief powwow, then the detective opened the back door of the cruiser and slipped in beside Leo. He was in there for a couple of minutes. When he got out, the cruiser took off.

Nat rushed over to Oates. “They’re not going to arrest Leo, Mitch. They can’t.”

“Take it easy, Nat,” Oates said. “Leo needs a little cool-down time.”

The detective, Eric Romero, approached them. “Leo was at the school when one of the parents who was picking up her kid told us she saw a red Subaru Outback racing past the school. She noticed it because she was upset the driver was speeding in a school zone. The instant Leo heard the make of the car, he was off and running.”

“Who could blame him?” she said hotly.

“Not me, believe me. But he shoulda let me go. He was in no condition—and I’m still not saying I blame him, because I don’t—but still, he should have left it to cooler minds. Instead he went on a raving rampage, tore up half the house, roughed up Carol Bell—”

“She’s lucky he didn’t kill her,” Nat said fiercely.

“No, Nat,” Oates said pointedly. “
Leo’s
lucky.”

Helen Katz entered the interrogation room where Carol Bell sat near the point of emotional collapse. Across from her was Mitchell Oates and Eric Romero.

Nat found herself once again sitting in a room next door, watching through a one-way mirror.

Katz rushed over to Carol, gasped audibly when she saw her bruised cheek. She glared across at Oates, but he raised his hands in a gesture that said,
Not my doing.

Once Katz found out it was Leo, Nat was sure she was going to push for Carol Bell to press charges against him. Right now, though, the criminal lawyer had other, more pressing concerns to attend to. Her two clients—Harrison Bell was in an interrogation room across the hall—were about to be charged with the kidnapping of four-year-old Jacob Coscarelli.

Carol grasped the lawyer’s sleeve like it was her lifeline. And it might well have been. “I keep telling them, I don’t know how that jacket got in the car. I never saw it before in my life. Anyone could have put it there. I’m always forgetting to lock the car. Harrison’s forever scolding me—”

“You shouldn’t have said anything until I got here.”

“What about Harrison? Can he explain—?” Carol asked.

“My partner Craig Paulson is with Harrison. Let’s focus on you now,” Katz said, sliding into a chair beside her client.

Oates leaned forward. “Give us a blow-by-blow accounting of your day so far, Mrs. Bell.”

Carol glanced anxiously at Katz. Katz nodded.

“I already told Detective Coscarelli about going to Dr. Varda’s apartment at eight-thirty. And that he wasn’t home. Or, at least, didn’t answer my ring or knock. Then I went home.” “Did you tell your husband you were going to see Varda?” She hesitated. “No. I thought he might not want me to go.” “Why?”

“I don’t know. I got the feeling he didn’t like the psychiatrist.”
Yeah,
Nat thought,
I bet he didn’t.

“I drove back home and caught up on some chores. My housekeeper was there. She can tell you,” Carol said.

“She was there the whole morning?” Oates asked.

“Not. . . every moment. She did a few errands. Picked up Harrison’s suits at the cleaners, stopped at the bakery, and got a cake for . . . for dinner tonight.” She looked anxiously at the lawyer. “The children are going to be so frantic. My sister went over there to be with them, but what is she going to say to them?” Katz put a calming hand on her client’s shoulder.

“Let’s talk about where you were from eleven forty-five to twelve-thirty,” Oates said, without a scintilla of sympathy in his voice. Nat was actually amazed he was able to hold on to his temper. He was, after all, sitting across from a woman who very likely had kidnapped his partner’s son. His paitner who was, at that moment, being forced to cool his jets in an unused interrogation room down the hall, with two officers there to make sure he stayed put. Anyone else would have done their cooling off in a jail cell.

“Didn’t you go pick up Daphne?” Katz coached.

Carol Bell blanched. “No. I picked her up early from nursery school because she had a tummy-ache. But she felt better later in the morning, so I let her play with her friend next door. I was just about to go over to get her when . . . when that detective nearly broke my door down and threw me to the floor and started storming through all the rooms of my house, knocking things over, pulling clothes out of closets ... I thought he was crazy. I was never so frightened in my life. He kept screaming— ‘Jakey, Jakey!’ And he had that . . . that jacket clutched to his chest. 1 didn’t know it was in my car. I don’t know how it got there. 1 would never hurt a child. I’m a mother. I’m a mother.” She broke into wrenching sobs.

“You fucking
what}”

Whatever cooling off Leo might have managed since they’d arrived at the precinct house was gone the instant he heard that Oates had had to let the Bells go.

The two officers in the room with them were about to grab Leo before he started using his fists as well as his vocal cords, but Oates vetoed the move with a shake of the head.

He tried to encourage Leo to get a grip, but Leo was way past that.

Nat, who’d gotten to the precinct house shortly after Leo’d been brought in, was nearly as beside herself as Leo was. She didn’t give a damn that the district attorney said there was no case yet, that there was not enough evidence even to charge them.

What about Jakey’s jacket? What was that if not evidence?

Nat didn’t want to hear that “anyone” could have dropped that jacket into Carol Bell’s red Subaru Outback. Tell her who that “anyone” could be. Tell her that.

Leo shoved his partner roughly aside and stormed across the room, yanking open the door.

“Hold on, Leo. You’re not going anywhere. Not the way you’re feeling right now,” Romero said.

“Try and stop me,” Leo snarled.

“Leave it, man,” Oates said to Romero. “I’ll keep him under wraps.”

“Sorry. I don’t think anyone’s gonna manage that,” Romero said. Heaving a sigh, Romero reluctantly gave the nod to the two officers who rushed after Leo. They literally had to battle him to the floor in the hallway. It took a third officer pitching in before they managed to subdue him, Leo kicking and cursing a blue streak the whole time.

Oates, looking grim but resigned, and Nat, her expression pure anguish, watched silently from the doorway.

“I don’t know, Nat,” Oates said, sounding less than enthusiastic about Nat’s proposal.

“You have a better idea?” she challenged.

“Give me a little time and maybe—”

“We don’t have time, Mitch,” Nat said.

He knew that as well as she did. “What makes you think it’ll work?”

“She’s the last link. The most crucial one, at that.”

“She has been this w'hole time.”

“But no one could get to her. And the pressure to figure out some way to manage it wasn’t a priority as long as she couldn’t remember. ”

“What if we bring the Bells in? Maybe if Lynn looks them square in the face—”

“Too big a maybe,” she argued. “More time wasted.”

“And Suzanne Holden?”

“You think she’s going to talk knowing they mean to kill Jakey if she does? Come on, Mitch. And she knows they’re not bluffing. Look at what happened to Lynn. To Claire Fisher. To Suzanne herself. This pair is deadly. And damn lucky so far. There’s never enough evidence—”

“I’m still worried. A lot of things could go wrong. You could get hurt, Nat. I think about Leo and everything he’s going through. If, on top of all that, something happens to you, Leo’s never gonna get over it. And he’s gonna blame me. With good reason.”

“I’m thinking about Leo, too, Mitch. That’s why I have to do this.”

“Is this Bill Walker?”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“It’s what I can do for you, Mr. Walker.”

“Do I know you?”

“We never met. But I listen to your news show on WBBS all the time. I’m a big fan.”

“Yeah, never can have too many of those. Mind telling me who I’m talking to?”

“It’s not important. Here’s the scoop, Bill. Lynn Ingram, the woman who was attacked—”

“The transsexual. Yeah, what about her?”

“She just got moved out of ICU.”

“That’s nice to hear. But not exactly breaking news.”

“That’s because I haven’t told you the best part yet: Her memory’s coming back, Bill. Lynn’s beginning to remember the attack. Some of it’s still a little cloudy. A specialist in hypnosis has been consulted. He’s confident that under hypnosis she’ll be able to identify her attacker. He’s being brought in first thing tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s more like it. Just one question for you: Why are you leaking the story?”

“Sinners have to pay for their sins, Bill.”

“Are we talking about the attacker or the transsexual here?” Sharon Johnson dropped the phone into the cradle. “Okay?” Nat gave a thumbs-up sign. “Perfect.”

“Well, I’m still not one bit happy about this plan.” Sharon shot a dark-eyed look over at Mitchell Oates, who was standing by the closed office door.

“Do I look happy?” he groused.

When Oates walked into the private room assigned to Lynn Ingram on the eleventh floor of Boston General, Carrie Li slipped quietly out. The nurse had willingly put her job on the line for them. She said it wasn’t solely because she felt she owed Nat her life, but because she wanted Lynn’s attacker caught as much as they did. So she got Nat into this vacant room on a floor where she was close friends with the head nurse, and bandaged her up. Oates was putting his job on the line, too, by informing the nurses on the floor that that this was a police-sanctioned maneuver. On his unsanctioned orders, Lynn Ingram had been listed on the hospital roster as being in room 1143.

“Well, it made the six o’clock news,” he said, after giving Nat a rueful once-over.

“Great.”

“Yeah,” Oates said glumly. “What wasn’t great was watching photos of Jakey Coscarelli being flashed on the screen. Or a clip of Leo’s mom sobbing hysterically as she was led into her building.”

“Poor Anna. She must be going out of her mind. I hope she’s not all alone.”

“That's one piece of good news. We moved Leo out of jail and put him under house arrest. He’s home with his mom, along with two uniforms to make sure he stays put.”

Nat sat up in the hospital bed. Not an easy effort, considering she was mummy-wrapped in bandages. Which would be uncomfortable enough, but Oates had insisted on her wearing a Kevlar vest beneath the bandages. He wasn’t taking any chances. Not that Nat wanted to take any chances herself. Which was why she’d also been wired.

“It’s going to work, Mitch. Lynn’s got to be silenced at all costs now, because her identification will be the nail in the Bells’ coffins. And once they know it’s over, they’ll tell us where they’ve got Jakey.” Not to mention Ross Varda and her beloved Hannah.

“We still don’t know for certain it is the Bells,” Oates said. “You know, Nat, someone could be setting them up. The real kidnapper could easily have tossed Jakey’s jacket into Carol Bell’s Subaru. We’ve got to consider that.”

“You’re thinking of Beth and Daniel Milburne?”

“That’s one possibility.”

Nat reflected on her earlier emotional exchange with the councilman’s wife. She’d found herself believing Beth about Daniel Milburne not knowing the truth. And that threatening letter, the intimidating phone call.

“What are you thinking?” Oates asked her.

“I think our real perp was trying to set the Milburnes up. He wanted us to think the councilman knew about his wife’s first marriage because that made him a perfect suspect. With Beth as an accessory.”

“There’s always Jennifer Slater’s brother, Rodney Bartlett,” Oates mused. “Getting revenge for his sister. With her blessing.” “Well, I guess he had motive, but I don’t know,” Nat paused, “he doesn’t seem the type.” Something was niggling at her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She rubbed her eyes, practically the only part of her from her chest up that was exposed. “I wish I could sort it all out. So much has happened so fast. Three disappearances in twenty-four hours. My dog, Varda, then Jakey.” “That’s because our perp, or perps, whoever they are, are getting increasingly more panicked. The closer we get to nailing them, the more desperate they’re becoming. So now they’re racing around trying to cover their tracks. They took your dog to lure you down to the garage and use you for target practice. Varda was a liability right from the start. And Suzanne was reaching her breaking point. They couldn’t get to her so they got to her kid.”