Without Warning (21 page)

As I had requested, Bennett and Hank were on the podium along with Harrick. Bennett nodded when we made eye contact, and I realized that he was pointing me toward an envelope sitting on a shelf just under the podium. I was pretty sure it was material he had gotten on Drazen.

The mayor didn’t try to engage me in conversation as we passed by; it was way too late for that. Instead he just stared daggers at me, which I seemed to survive fairly well.

Based on the news I heard on the radio coming in, the speculation was that I was going to be talking about Sandman’s murder. The other media outlets had been just as quick as Matt to the story; Sandman still had some celebrity attached to him. I don’t know who it was that first uncovered the fact that he had campaigned against my getting the job, or that I was present when he was killed, but everybody was reporting it.

I started by saying, “I have a statement to make, and I won’t be taking questions on it. I’m sure that most of your readers and viewers are familiar with many of the events that have transpired since the time capsule was opened. There’s no need to rehash them now; and since it is an investigation that I have been involved in, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to do so anyway.”

“The media reports have been essentially correct about one thing; it seems as if I am the center of whatever is going on. I don’t know why, or where that is heading, but it is clear that it is very much about me.”

“It is for that reason that I am withdrawing from the case effective immediately and taking a leave of absence from my position as chief of police. Since the case now extends well past Wilton, and in fact across state lines, I have requested that Agent Bennett take over the case on behalf of the FBI. He has agreed to do so, and you’ll be hearing from him shortly.”

“I have no doubt that he will be calling on the very capable Wilton Police Department, under Captain Hank Mickelson, for assistance and support. And I also am quite sure that Captain Mickelson will be more than up to the challenge.”

“My thoughts are with the victims in this case, and with my friend Katie Sanford, whose whereabouts are unknown. I hope and believe that she will be brought home, safe and sound.”

“I am not going away, I am merely stepping back so that the spotlight can move off me and back to the solving of the case, where it belongs. And I certainly will be available to Agent Bennett and Captain Mickelson if there is anything they need from me.”

“I thank everyone for their support, and now I’d like to turn the microphone over to … Special Agent Sean Bennett.” I paused slightly before I said his name, and I saw the mayor take a slight step forward, thinking he was next. He covered it up as well as he could, but I caught him and smiled. It was a small victory.

I casually took the envelope that Bennett had left near the podium, and left the stage. I heard him say, “Thank you, Chief Robbins,” but not much more. I had work to do, so I was out of there.

Things had gone according to plan, but I certainly wasn’t happy about it. I don’t see myself as a quitter, and even though I wasn’t quitting the case, everybody thought I was. Some would also see it as an admission of guilt, but they would eventually learn that it was far from that.

I went directly back to my office, to grab a box of stuff that I had packed up before the press conference. It was mostly materials related to the capsule case; I had copied anything I thought I might need. I knew that Hank would be available to me, but I wanted to have a lot at my fingertips.

I was pleased to see that Mike Hutner had e-mailed me some material, to my private account, as instructed. I could print it out when I got home, and then pore through it along with the documents that Bennett had given me. Between the two of them, I hoped and expected I’d have enough to go after Richie Drazen.

Providing, of course, that Richie Drazen was less dead than the last time I saw him.

I was so anxious to get to the material that I didn’t even stop for a pizza on the way home. My instincts told me that the photograph that Jimmy Osborne discovered was significant, even if I had no idea at all how it could be Drazen. But it was; I could never forget that face.

My answering machine light was blinking steadily; it had not stopped since the case began. I did what I had been doing; I played the messages almost as background news, since they were always from members of the media, pleading with me to talk with them.

I wasn’t counting, but the first dozen were either media people or friends calling to offer support. Number thirteen was different, though.

The voice of number thirteen belonged to Katie Sanford.

“Jake, he has me. I don’t know where I am, or why I’m here. He has me, Jake, but it’s not me he wants. He wants you. He said he owes you one, and that he’s had years to think about destroying you.”

I can’t remember feeling anger that intense. Not in Afghanistan, not on the streets, never.

I was sure that Katie said only what she was instructed to say by her captor, otherwise she would not have been allowed to call.

I assumed that the words were actually accurate, and not at all surprising. She was obviously being held by someone against her will, she probably did not know why he was doing it, and that person certainly had a grudge against me and felt he “owed me one.”

Her comment that he has had years to think about destroying me might at some point prove revealing, but got me nowhere now. We had already looked at people I had put in prison but who were released relatively recently, and we couldn’t come up with any suspects.

So everything she said was probably true, but what was definitely real was the panic in Katie’s voice and the fear that came through on that tape. And it was that that left me furious, and frustrated. She was going through all of it because of me, and that was pretty tough to bear.

On the other hand, the call was the first confirmation we had that she was alive, or at least was alive when she made the call. That was something pretty significant to hold on to, and be grateful for.

I had to decide what to do with the tape. There was nothing to gain from withholding it; it needed to be analyzed, and records had to be checked to determine where the call originated from.

I decided to give it to Agent Bennett, for a couple of reasons. Certainly the Bureau had more resources to do the analysis; a local police force like ours would have had to send it to them or the state anyway. They also could easily access phone records, though we could accomplish that as well.

But I didn’t want to give it to Hank to handle for still another reason. I didn’t want Matt Higgins and the rest of the world to know about it, and the Wilton Police Department, headed by yours truly, had already proven incapable of keeping a secret.

Before I called Bennett, I listened to the tape at least a dozen times. I couldn’t detect anything that would give me a clue to Katie’s whereabouts, no background noises that might prove revealing. It didn’t mean that they weren’t there, though I suspected that they weren’t. It just meant that sophisticated equipment would be necessary to have a chance to detect what I could not.

I finally called Bennett, and he made arrangements to get the tape from me. I also faxed him permission to access my phone records. He could have done so anyway, but that eliminated the need to get a court order. I didn’t want to do anything that would in any way slow down the process of finding Katie.

I then turned my focus to the information about Richie Drazen I got from Bennett and Hutner. As I expected, much of it overlapped, primarily because they were both getting a lot of it from the Department of Defense files.

The other thing that was no surprise was that all of the information was dated, ending almost eight years ago. It turns out that dead people must live fairly uneventful lives, and there was no hint in the files that Richie Drazen was breathing. Of course, there was also nothing in the files that explained how the dead Richie could have shown up at the ceremony to bury the capsule just four years ago.

I had a few moments of feeling dread, mixed with panic, which I don’t recommend if you have a choice of what feelings you are going to have. I was just worried that I was going off on this ridiculous search for a resurrected dead guy, while the real world was going on without me.

But my options for helping Katie had become very limited, and I was at least partially responsible for that. All I had was Drazen, and all he had was me. I needed to pursue it as if it were real, because I had nothing else that I could effectively do.

I caught a small break when I learned that Drazen had been from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which isn’t all that far from Wilton. At the time he supposedly died, his mother was still living in that area, as was his fiancée. The records did not reveal whether they were still there, but their phone numbers and addresses at the time were still listed.

I could have called, concealing my identity with some pretense, but I decided to go ahead and take the drive down there. It could have turned out that they had long ago moved out of the area, but if not, then it was important to me to see their reaction to my questions, and it wasn’t like I had anything else to do.

It was a four-hour drive to Portsmouth, and my time there didn’t start well. The address for Drazen’s mother was a construction site; they were building what looked like garden apartments. I approached one of the workmen, and asked him who the foreman on the job was. He pointed toward someone who was inside the partial structure, so I walked over to him.

“You don’t belong in here,” was his greeting in place of hello.

I took out my badge and showed it to him. “Then let’s go out there,” I said.

He frowned and followed me outside, on to the street. “That was a Maine badge,” he said. “This is New Hampshire.”

“I’ll keep that in mind if I need to make an arrest. Now I have some questions; you going to answer them?”

“Yeah,” he said, still clearly not pleased.

“Do you know a woman named Donna Drazen?”

“Who?”

“Donna Drazen. She used to live at this address.”

“This isn’t about some construction violations?”

This was going nowhere in a hurry, and I was getting pissed. Katie Sanford was somewhere being held against her will, or worse, and this construction foreman was jerking me around. “Just answer the question, okay, pal? Because you sure as hell won’t like the alternative.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Donna Drazen used to live at this address. Do you know her?”

“No.”

“Did you knock down a house before starting this thing?”

He nodded. “Yeah, but it was vacant. Hadn’t been lived in for a while.”

Fresh off that triumphant conversation, I went to the address I had for Drazen’s fiancée, Elaine Peterson. It was a small house on a cul-de-sac, and at first glance held little promise. The mailbox in front said “Walker,” though it was certainly possible that Ms. Peterson had rebounded from the Drazen relationship into another one that resulted in marriage to a guy named Walker.

No such luck. The woman who answered the door said that she had lived there for six months and was pretty sure that the previous tenant was not named Elaine Peterson.

In a desperate measure to avoid a complete waste of time, I went down to the local police station, and asked to see the officer in charge. A female sergeant behind the reception desk checked out my badge, decided I might be worthy of seeing her captain, and called back to him.

The small sign on her desk identified her as Sergeant Collins. I was going to ask her if she knew Elaine Peterson, but I figured I’d start with her captain and work my way down. The captain must have agreed to see me, because she took me back there, though she didn’t seem that happy about it, and was eyeing me warily.

The captain’s name was Simmons, and he seemed quite pleased to have a visitor. We talked cop talk for a few minutes, and then I steered the conversation around to why I was there.

“I’m looking for two people; one is Donna Drazen. She’s…”

He interrupted me. “Dead. Lung cancer, maybe two years ago. Her son Richie murdered someone in the Navy a while back and got killed himself. She went straight downhill from there.”

“What about the son’s fiancée? Her name was…”

Another interruption. “Elaine?”

“Right. Elaine Peterson. Does she still live here?”

“What do you want Elaine for?” he asked, avoiding the question but making me believe she did in fact still live there.

“I need to talk to her about Richie Drazen.”

“We like Elaine Peterson a lot around here,” he said.

“She’s not in any trouble. I just have a few questions for her. Is she in the area?”

“You could say that. She just brought you in here.”

I pointed back to where the female sergeant had been moments before, and he nodded. “Her married name is Collins; her maiden name is Peterson.”

“I thought that was you,” she said when Captain Simmons called her in. She didn’t say it like she was thrilled to see me.

Simmons seemed confused. “What’s going on here?”

Sergeant Collins, formerly Peterson, said, “This is the guy who killed Richie.”

“Just for the sake of clarity, I didn’t kill Richie Drazen,” I said. “He killed himself.”

“After you shot him,” she said.

I nodded. “After I shot him in self-defense. After I broke with proper procedure by not shooting to kill.” I was getting annoyed. While I understood that shooting her fiancé should not make us best buddies, she was a cop herself, and should have understood it a little better than most.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” Simmons correctly observed. “What is it you want?”

I had planned a number of possible ways to go about this, all concealing the truth while trying to get information. But sitting here with two cops, I decided to go with the truth.

I addressed my questions to Collins. “When was the last time you saw Richie Drazen alive?”

“Why?”

“I’ll get to that; I promise. Just please go with me on this.”