Ring of Truth (8 page)

“Slow down, sir, let's take this one step at a time.”

That first step was a physical description: five-footeight, 135 pounds—he guessed—Caucasian, thirty-two years old, very short dark brown hair, no distinguishing body marks except for a scar from a cesarian section.

“She's pretty,” he told the officer. “And she's in good shape. She works out.”

“You have children?” she asked, thinking of the cesarian scar, and of youngsters missing their mommy.

“No.”

“Oh. Any other distinguishing marks?”

There was a brief pause, before he said quickly, “I can't think of any.”

“What about the car she was driving?”

“It's a 1998 Mercury Mystique. It's white.”

“Do you know the license number?”

“It's a personalized one,
WG-PRYR. That's
the name of her realty company—A Wing and a Prayer. Because I'm a minister and she's a realtor.” He cleared his throat, sounding a
little embarrassed by it. “Will somebody come out to my house, or should I come down to you?”

“Not yet, sir. I have to tell you that most adults who seem to be missing have their own reasons for being gone. Statistically, your wife is likely to show up sometime soon, or maybe you'll realize there's a reason she left.”

“No, not Susanna. Please, believe me.”

“I'll send out the word to look for her license.”

“Yes, thank you! But what else—”

“Nothing right now, sir.”

“Nothing else? But—”

“She'll come home, sir.”

“No, she'd be here if she could be. Please—”

But the young transfer from vice had done all she could do for the husband at that point. His description of his wife went into a current file, where it would wait until any further action might be required.

On second thought, and feeling bad about the minister, the officer attempted to get her boss to issue an all-points bulletin on the license plate. He laughed her out of his office. “Are you kidding? Can you imagine how embarrassing that would be for her, a minister's wife? We come rolling up to the motel where she's shacked up with a deacon, and then she sues us, or the deacon does.”

“The husband says—”

“Yeah, they all do.”

“He was really upset.”

“They all are.”

“Okay.”

What could she do? Maybe his wife really was shacked up with a deacon.

No alert went out for the license plate.

* * *

At ten minutes to two
A.M.,
the Bahia Beach police chief, Marty Rocowski, known as Rocco to everybody who didn't call him “Sir” was awakened by an urgent phone call. He reached for it too late to avoid waking his wife, who propped herself on an elbow and stared across the pillows at her thirty-seven-year-old husband who hardly ever got a whole night's sleep. Which meant that she didn't, either. The seven-year-olds that she taught in an inner-city school were going to get a sleepy teacher yet again this coming Monday morning. Seeing that she was listening anyway, Rocco put the call on speaker so his wife could hear, too.

“Rocco, this is Tammi Golding.”

Police chief and wife exchanged surprised glances.

The caller was a prominent local attorney and regular golf partner of his wife's.

“Good morning, Tammi,” Rocco said, with an emphasis on the word “morning.” Knowing this couldn't possibly be a call bringing good news, he shot straight to the point. “What's wrong?”

Her familiar voice, grating and aggressive and stripped of all its usual characteristic humor, filled their bedroom. “I'm sorry to roust you out of sleep like this, but the wife of one of my clients has gone missing. My client, the husband, got detoured by 911. He got the runaround from Missing Persons—wait three days, that crap. But this is the real deal, Rocco. She's gone, and she's not a woman who would do this. I'm telling you that somebody's got to take this seriously. He does. I do. I want you to, and I want you to make somebody down at the department take it seriously, too. This is a minister's wife, for God's sake, Rocco. She hasn't run away from home. She's really missing, and she's been missing for hours, and the only possible explanation is that she's dead, or she's hurt, or she's been abducted. Or something else bad has happened to her. She's in trouble somewhere, we know it, and we can't find her, and we've called
everybody, and we need help, and we need it right now. As you know, I am not given to hysteria, and I am on the verge of hysteria here.”

“You sound personally involved,” he observed, with a question in his tone.

“I care about these people,” she shot back, sounding defensive.

“Who's your client?”

“BobWing. Sands Gospel Church.”

“You don't mean that anti–death penalty minister?”

“Yes, I do, Rocco, that's exactly who it is. Bob Wing. It's his wife, Susanna, that's missing.”

The police chief, who was only human, after all, paused for a brief moment to appreciate the moment. Everybody knew that Tammi Golding did the legal work for the Sands Gospel capital-punishment crusades. Locally, she and the Reverend Bob Wing were a pair of burrs under the seat of every cop, judge, and prosecutor who favored the death penalty. Rocco's own wife had been known to quote Tammi to him. He couldn't resist saying, “If his wife has been abducted, or killed, there is a certain irony in this situation, don't you think so,Tammi?”

“I don't give a damn about the irony,” his wife's golfing partner nearly screamed at him. Across the bed, his wife made a grimacing, apologetic, expression at the noise. “I care about finding Bob's wife! Please, Rocco, throw your weight around, pull strings, do something, or what the hell good does it do me to have friends in high places?”

The police chief's wife smiled faintly at that.

“Have you got this on speakerphone, Rocco? Betty, are you listening to this? If you are, kick his ass out of bed. And don't count on me for golf today, not unless we find Susanna before our tee-off time. Betty?”

“I hear you, Tammi! I hope she's all right! Do I know her?”

“I doubt it, Betty,” called the voice over the speakerphone.

“I've heard you talk about her though, right? Weren't you telling me some story about them—”

“Not me. Gotta go. We're organizing search parties.”

The police chief, who didn't personally know the minister or his missing wife, couldn't help but feel amused as he called his own Missing Persons Department to get them moving on the report. Not that he wished anyone ill—of course he didn't—but as his old grandmother might have said, My goodness, how things that go around do eventually tend to come around. If this man's wife turned out to have been kidnaped or even killed by somebody who could get the death penalty for it, what would the good minister do then?

Picket his own wife's murderer's execution?

Marty Rocowski allowed himself a small smile as he placed his call.

The search to locate Susanna Louise Wing commenced officially five minutes later. Shortly after that the police chief was showered, shaved, and dressed, and heading down to his office at the Bahia Beach Police Headquarters on Twenty-Third Street, between Sunrise and Gulf avenues. Back home, Betty Rocowski rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. While she tossed and turned, Rocco drove A1A, enjoying the beach road in the darkness, rolling down his windows so he could hear the ocean, feel the breeze. Himself a firm believer in the death penalty, Chief Rocowski wanted to be sure this missing persons case was handled impeccably. He would make sure that nobody could accuse his police force of failing to do their duty for the wife of a man who was loathed by his officers.

Susanna
5

Confronted with two anxious visitors, I am not yet up to normal social response, much less solicitousness. “How'd you find me?” is the best I can do, after Jenny and Anne Carmichael scurry past me with their canvas boat bag. As stupid and trivial as the question sounds, their answer is important to me. I try hard to barricade myself from exactly this sort of thing, these uninvited visitors. Partly, that's to protect me when I'm writing; partly, it's to protect me, period, from some of my nutso book subjects. If I wanted to be found, I'd be in the phone book.

“You're on the tours.” Anne looks back at me over her shoulder as I follow them into my living room. When she sees my puzzled look, she explains, “The tourist boats and buses? The ones that go past landmarks and homes of famous people? One time we took some relatives on one of those big boat tours, and they pointed out where your house is.”

“They know where I live?” I am surprised, displeased.

“Because of your trees.” Ah. Damn. I have six magnificent cypress trees in front of my house, three to each side of my front door. “You can see those trees from miles away, so it wasn't hard to find this place again. We think of you every time we take our own boat out and go past this neighborhood. Didn't you know you were on the tours?”

I shake my head. This would seriously annoy me if it weren't so amusing in an ironic way. Here I thought I was hidden under those trees, and now I find that they are fingers pointing right at me.
“And that's where the true crime writer Marie Lightfoot lives, folks. See those six cypress trees on that point of land over there?”

“I hope they plug my books, at least,” I say, with a wry smile.

Her frown relaxes a bit. “I don't remember.”

“What's in the bag, Jenny?”

When the child glances back at me, I am again surprised to see what looks like trepidation in her blue eyes. And more evidence of impending tears. She doesn't speak, but turns around quickly and edges closer to her mother's legs, as a younger child might do. She is not such a little girl now, I note with a sudden pang. She looks a couple of inches taller, her hair is a little less red, a little more brown, and flatteringly long. The tomboy looks more feminine now, but I'll bet that Jenny can still scale fences with the best of them. Even with that fearful, sad tinge to her gaze, she has the same direct, alert expression that I remember from when I interviewed her.

We've come through the front hall, around a corner. When they step fully into my house, the view has the usual distracting impact on them that it has on everybody who sees it for the first time. I like to knock people out of their socks. “Wow!” Jenny says. She drops her handle of the bag and runs around her mother, toward the wraparound windows. “Cool house!”

“What a beautiful view,” her mother echoes.

“Excuse the mess,” I say, automatically, as I try to recall all I know about these two, which is significantly more than I've put in my book. That's always the way. I've heard that fiction writers do that, too—accumulate tons more material about their characters than they really need, all in the service of knowing them well so they can write with confidence about them. My brain is a file cabinet on every person in this case, and what's not in my brain is stored in my computer, along with hundreds
of facts that I keep around the way some old ladies keep bits of string, because I never know when I might need them to fill a paragraph or enliven a metaphor. You probably didn't know, for instance, that Greater Bahia Beach boasts 550 tennis courts and eighteen major shipwrecks. We had almost 900,000 overseas visitors last year, and half that many from Canada alone. None of those tourists visited me. But now I have my own little statistic: two visitors in three weeks, and here they are now. I bring up the rear as they step around piles of reference books. I'm getting curious about the bag, and what's in it. “So what's in the bag, Jenny?” I ask again. Her skinny shoulders visibly stiffen and I get the impression she is not looking at me—or up at her mom— on purpose.

I turn to her mother. “Anne?”

But she frowns down at her daughter and says, “I want Jenny to tell you.”

It suddenly seems merciful to change the subject. “How about some lemonade first? Anne, I've also got iced tea, or I could make some coffee.” Why am I doing this? I ask myself, but too late. I seem to be encouraging them to stick around; maybe I'm a little lonelier for human company than I realized, especially since I still haven't been able to make the one call I want to make to the one person I want to see.

Jenny looks up at her mom as if expecting no for an answer.

“Can I have some lemonade, Mom, please?”

“I suppose so,” Anne says, and then to me, “Iced tea for me?”

“I'll be right back with it.” Then on an impulse, I invite Anne to come with me. Once we're in the kitchen, out of Jenny's hearing, I ask, “How's she doing, Anne?”

“Jenny's okay, I guess, except she can't play with Nikki anymore.”

“What? But they're best friends. What happened?”

“It's
because
of what happened. Nikki's parents won't allow Jenny into their house anymore.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. The girls must hate that.”

“Jenny's miserable. I could just kill the Modestos. It's so unfair. Jenny gets blamed for everything.”

I refrain from commenting that there is probably a good reason for that, given the nature of her willful, adventurous daughter. Nor do I point out that she herself appears to be blaming Jenny for something, too. I just cluck sympathetically.

“And—” Anne Carmichael starts to say something else but then stops, frowning.

“And?” I prod.

She shakes her head. “I want Jenny to tell.”

Patience,
I advise myself. Now that she's safe inside my house, Anne seems to be growing a little calmer, and I'm all for that.

“I wish they'd convicted that woman, too,” Anne suddenly blurts out, and I turn to stare at her. She looks upset and angry. “Jenny has nightmares about her, and I worry about it all the time. What if that woman decides it's all Jenny and Nikki's fault? She's free now; she could do anything and nobody could stop her. What if she blames them? What if she thinks if the girls hadn't found the body, then nobody would have been arrested, and her lover wouldn't be in prison. What if she wants some revenge on the girls?”

She's talking about Artemis McGregor, of course, the “other woman,” who was tried with Bob Wing but acquitted by the same jury that convicted him. I wish I could allay Anne's fears by telling her that her worst nightmare is completely unfounded; unfortunately, I have known killers who did just the kind of thing she's scared about. They waited, they plotted, they took their revenge. Sometimes they got caught at it, sometimes there were only suspicions. Either way, the people they resented were just as dead. I can't bear to think of Nikki and Jenny and their families living under that kind of dread for years to come.