THE ONLY WITNESS: A Mystery/Suspense Novel Page 27

  He promised he would, and then ended the call. He wondered when Agent Foster would get the news that his eyewitness was a gorilla.

  He stood up to pace, but after his second lap, he noticed everyone else in the precinct was staring at him. "I'm headed home," he told the dispatcher. "Call me if anything comes up."

  Twenty minutes later he was out in his backyard, Cargo trailing in his wake as he wandered around his property, shouting over and over, "Lok! Come here, kitty!" The Lost ad he'd sent into the Evansburg Times had run for the last three days, but there had been no calls.

  He sat on his deck, feeling exhausted, useless, and depressed. Some detective he was. Didn't know his wife was planning to ditch him. Didn't know a coyote would eat his cat. Couldn't find a way to finger the kidnapper that he knew was out there.

  He tried to think from Junior's point of view. Why would the guy be kidnapping babies? He was most likely selling them to perverts or childless couples. What would it take to sell babies? A website? Maybe. There needed to be someplace to display your wares, so to speak.

  Wares in this case would be photos, at least to start off with. Finn thought about the photos of mothers and babies in the schools. The same photos were on the YoMama website. But YoMama required an approved user name and password to get in, and neither Adrian in Portland or Mason in Evansburg had detected any unauthorized entries. It was a long shot, but… He called for a fingerprint tech to meet him at Brittany's school, and then he called the principal to come and let them into the building.

  "The janitor can do that," the principal said.

  "I'd rather that the janitor did not know what we're up to. We'll need private access to the hallway where the photos of the Slu…teenage moms and babies are displayed."

  "So you're getting close to solving the Ivy Morgan case?" the principal wanted to know.

  "I hope so." Finn flicked shut his phone.

  When the principal met them at the side door, he told them, "I closed the doors at the end of the hall and told the night janitor that we were doing maintenance on the fire alarms in this wing."

  "Smart thinking," Finn said.

  The principal eagerly rubbed his hands together. "So what are we doing?"

  "I'm sorry," Finn told him, "But I can't have a civilian here. Police only." He gestured toward the door at the end of the corridor.

  The man was clearly disappointed.

  "We'd really appreciate it if you could keep everyone away." Finn said. "And make sure this stays hush-hush."

  The principal seemed pleased to have an assignment. "You got it. I'll await your call." He headed for the double doors.

  "So what are we doing?" Guy Rodrigo, the fingerprint tech, asked after the principal had left.

  Finn stopped in front of the photos of all the Sluts and babies, pulled out his camera and took a photo of the collection. Stepping back, he pointed to the photo of Ivy Morgan.

  "I want this frame fingerprinted, as well as the back of the photo, and then put right back up."

  The tech groaned. "The back of the photo? You mean I need to take apart the frame?"

  "I'm afraid so." The frame may well have been wiped clean, but if Finn's hunch was correct, there might be prints on the photo of Ivy. "Glove up and get started."

  Rodrigo snapped on gloves and dusted the frame. When no prints appeared on the wood or glass, he laid down his brush and powder and then tugged at the frame. "Shit. This is screwed to the wall."

  "I noticed." Finn handed him the screwdriver he'd brought. "And just so you know, if I'm right about this one, we'll need to come back and do the rest."

  Chapter 27

  Twenty-four days after Ivy disappears

  Unearthly shrieks awakened Grace. She sat up abruptly, reaching for her bathrobe at the foot of the bed. Her bedside clock read 3:29 a.m. The shrieking continued, punctuated by loud crashes. It sounded like the gorillas were fighting with an axe murderer in the barn.

  Josh met her in the yard as they dashed to the barn enclosure.

  The lock on the gate was intact. Inside, Neema sat hunched in the far corner, while Gumu frantically raced around the perimeter of the enclosure, leaping up to the net, racing across it to touch all corners, then barreling down, pausing now and then to beat his chest and shriek some more.

  Inside, just to right of the gate, candy and cookies were scattered on the ground, some crumpled as if they'd been shoved through the fence openings. The fencing was bent outwards near the gate, which told Grace that Gumu had launched himself into the wire mesh toward someone standing outside.

  Jonathan Zyrnek trotted up with a walkie-talkie in his hand, panting. "What the hell's going on?"

  A second later, Caryn arrived.

  "We had a visitor." Grace pointed to the snacks scattered across the ground. She took the key out of her pocket and reached for the lock.

  "Shit," Jonathan said. "Caryn reported a car, so we went out to track it, but the driver must have already let someone out down the road."

  Grace unlocked the padlock. A second before she pulled the gate open, Neema rushed over to the pile of goodies, grabbed a lollipop, and scuttled up onto the webbing.

  "No!" Grace bellowed, dashing after her, Josh at her heels. "No, Neema, don't eat that! No! Give candy to Grace! Not for Neema!"

  She struggled to lift herself into the webbing. Josh grabbed her around the knees and tossed her up. Below them, the two ARU volunteers walked toward the sweets, keeping a wary eye as Gumu continued to circle and screech. "Don't touch that candy with your bare hands," she screeched at Jonathan and Caryn. "It's poisoned!"

  Josh pulled himself up on the rope webbing behind her.

  "No, Neema! Bad candy!" Grace couldn't sign while she crawled across the rope net on her hands and knees. "Candy will make Neema sick!"

  But Neema, in typical bad kid can't-stop-me fashion, had the lollipop in her mouth by the time Grace arrived. Grace reached for the stick between her lips, and Neema turned away, chewing. Then she dropped, inert, face down into the netting.

  "No!" Grace wailed.

  Josh helped her roll Neema's head sideways. The lollipop fell out of the gorilla's mouth down to the ground. Neema's eyes rolled back in their sockets.

  "Who should we call?" Josh asked. "I didn't grab my cell phone."

  "I have mine." She leaned across Neema and laid her head on the gorilla's furry back. Neema's heartbeat sounded strong, and so did her lungs. So far. Grace sat up and used the corner of her robe to wipe out Neema's mouth. Then she pulled the cell phone out of her robe pocket.

  "Who you gonna call?" Josh looked at her.

  Grace stared at the phone for another few seconds. She hadn't yet found a local vet for the gorillas. If she called 9-1-1, they'd be invaded by useless uniforms and infuriating reporters. She scrutinized Neema again. The gorilla hadn't twitched a muscle. Would she ever move again?

  "I'm calling Detective Finn. I'll stay with Neema. Go check on Gumu." The big male had ceased his shrieking, but still circled the pen, intermittently beating pock-pock-pock threats on his chest. "Pick up that lollipop."

  Josh moved off, crawling across the net. "Calm down, buddy," he called to Gumu.

  She tapped in Matt's home number and pressed the phone to her ear. He promised to bring a vet with him and get there as soon as he could. After ending the call, she sat in the net, criss-crossing her legs to keep her feet from sliding through the ropes.

  She could hear Josh's soft murmurs over in the furthest corner as he tried to calm down Gumu. The ARU kids had taken off, flashlights in hand, to track the trespasser.

  It was quiet, too quiet. She picked up Neema's giant hand, holding it in both of hers. Was the gorilla's breathing slowing? How could this happen again? Grace bit her lip, trying to keep the tears from coming. Most human beings would never touch one gorilla in a lifetime. Was she going to lose two to murder?

  * * * * * *

  The vet Matt brought with him forty minutes later was a surprisingly petite woma
n named Nan Brewer. She assured Grace that she was a large animal doctor who had volunteered at a zoo while in veterinary school. Brewer seemed unperturbed at having been yanked out of bed at four in the morning to crawl up into a suspended rope net to examine a comatose gorilla. Matt, on the other hand, looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  "I was so hoping I'd get a chance to see these guys," the vet said, pulling a stethoscope from her bag. "Under different circumstances, of course," she added.

  "This is Neema," Grace told her. "The other one, Gumu, is in the barn."

  Neema was heavily anesthetized, the vet concluded. Her breathing and heartbeat were very slow, but both were regular. Brain damage was her biggest fear. "Sometimes anesthesia changes animals forever; we don't really know why," she said. "Unfortunately, there's no way to know how she'll come out of it without knowing what she ingested. I'd suggest an IV to protect against shock," the vet said. "Saline and glucose. I'll stay with her for awhile."

  "Did you see anyone?" Matt asked Grace, peering out at the yard. "Did you hear anything?"

  Of course. He would be itching to do the cop thing. "No," she told him. "We wouldn't have been able to hear the space shuttle launch, the way Gumu was carrying on."

  Josh, leaning against the fence below, said, "He kept signing bad, bad."

  Grace looked surprised. "When did he learn that sign?"

  "Guess Neema showed him."

  "Cool," said the vet.

  Matt crawled toward the edge of the net. "I'll go check the premises."

  * * * * * *

  The ARU kids showed Finn the path the intruder likely took, out through the barbed wire and across that blasted blackberry-filled field, the same way the YouTube reporter had escaped.

  "It was a dark pickup," Caryn told him. "I heard it crawling along the side of the road in the gravel and called Jon, and then we both went out to check."

  "The headlights weren't on. Pretty hard to make out the plate in the dark, but I think I got a partial." He pulled a small page out of a tiny notebook. "That letter"—he pointed—"might be an O or a D; and that number might be a 3 or an 8. I think I nailed the rest of 'em."

  "Thanks," Finn said. So he had four possible combinations to run; it was a good start. It felt weird to get help from two kids he'd testified against less than a month ago.

  "Really fucked up on letting the dickhead into the compound," Jon said.

  For a second Finn thought the kid was carping about the lack of police protection, but then he realized Zyrnek was criticizing himself.

  "You're not an experienced guard," Finn told him. "Don't sweat it."

  Caryn frowned. "But with all the ops training we've gone through," she said. "We should have known better."

  "Ops training?" Finn asked. "Where'd you do that?"

  "Uh." Jonathan pulled at Caryn's shirttail. "We should be making rounds, don't you think?"

  She looked at him and then back at Finn. "Oh, yeah. Gotta check the perimeter."

  They peeled off in separate directions into the darkness, and Finn walked back to the barn enclosure.

  Josh went to bed. Grace and the vet remained sitting in the rope webbing, bonding over the comatose gorilla, discussing eating habits and good and bad behavior like two suburban moms. Brewer still had no prediction on when Neema would wake up.

  "Could this affect her memory?" Finn asked from below.

  "Hard to say," the vet said. "It could." She turned to Grace. "How would you tell if it affected her memory?"

  Grace launched into more Neema stories. He could tell she was more worried than she let on. He wasn't feeling too optimistic, either. It was bad enough to depend on the testimony of a gorilla. What if that gorilla never told the same story again?

  Dawn was just beginning to brighten the horizon as Finn drove to the station to look up the license numbers.

  Chapter 28

  Twenty-six days after Ivy disappears

  Bad man baby cry snake skin bracelet man come. Bad bad. Gumu scared. Neema scared. Bad bad. Snake arm bad. Candy now.

  Neema not only remembered the poisoning event, she talked about it constantly. She reported that Gumu make bad man go. From her description, it sounded like the bad man was not the wacko who'd murdered Spencer years ago, but the man who'd taken the Morgan baby.

  "Snake arm man?" Grace asked, taping the question session. "The same snake arm man who took the baby to the green car?" It was questionable whether Neema truly understood the meaning of the word same; Grace hadn't had sufficient time to test the gorilla on that.

  Brittany let herself into the trailer in time to hear the last part. Her blue eyes widened as she glanced back and forth between Neema and Grace. "What's going on?"

  Bad skin bracelet snake arm candy now, now candy, Neema gestured to Grace. Then, turning to Brittany, she signed red tail candy Neema candy please.

  "What's she saying?" Brittany asked, signing where baby? at Neema.

  Red tail give candy good gorilla, Neema signed back. She scooted close to Brittany to touch her hair.

  "Neema says good morning and wants you to give her C-A-N-D-Y. Before that, she was describing the man who tried to poison her two nights ago."

  "Really?" Brittany's face stiffened. "Could it be the man who took Ivy? How did she describe him?"

  Grace sighed. "Bad skin bracelet snake arm."

  It had taken her so long to clue in on skin bracelet. What else had she missed? She pulled out the videos taken of Neema right after Ivy had disappeared. None of them was safe as long as Snake Arm was still out there.

  * * * * * *

  When Grace called, Finn was staring at several possible matches to prints from the back of the school photo. None of the prints belonged to Charlie Wakefield. Turning away from his computer screen, he answered his cell phone.

  "Bag glove," she told Finn. "Neema described Snake Arm as using a bag glove."

  "The kidnapper put a bag over his hand?" He was getting surprisingly adept at deciphering Neema's—and Grace's—language. That made sense—the gorilla would be able to see a tattoo through a transparent plastic bag. "Miki," he shouted after he ended the call.

  Micaela's head popped up over a file cabinet. "Yes?"

  "Can you bring me that report the FBI faxed to me?" He drummed his fingers on the desk in anticipation. She plopped a file folder down in front of him.

  He pulled up the common fingerprints from the back of the photos at the school. Ruling out Daisy Taylor's prints—she'd put the collection together—that left only two others. There had been a couple of plastic bags in the collection of detritus he'd had Scoletti scoop up from the Food Mart parking lot. He thumbed through the FBI report, looking for the fingerprint section. If Grace—and Neema—were right, and if his luck had finally turned… Bingo! One of the fingerprints—a male's, judging by the size—from the inside of the bag appeared to match a print from the back of Ivy Rose Morgan's photograph. What were the odds that the same person had his hands on baby Ivy's photo and inside a bag found under the car in the parking lot where the baby disappeared? Now all he needed was a set of Junior's fingerprints to compare. The net was closing, he could feel it.

  He ran all the license plate combos the ARU kid had come up with for the pickup seen prowling the roadside on the night the gorillas had been attacked. On the third try, he hit pay dirt. Francisco Ibañez. Who, he was willing to bet, was a husband or blood relative of Audrey Ibañez, the janitor at Brittany's school.

  He had Scoletti pick Ibañez up and bring her in for questioning. He peeked at her through the video hookup before going into the interview room. She sat straight, nervously twisting her hands. Then she noticed what she was doing and made an effort to place them flat on the tabletop. She took a deep breath, as if preparing herself for battle.

  He entered the interview room. "Thank you for coming in, Ms. Ibañez."

  She smiled. "Of course. I want to help in any way I can."

  "Like you helped kidnap Ivy Morgan?" He sat down in the chair ac
ross from her. "Like you helped to poison the gorillas?"

  She did her best to look shocked. "I would never—"

  "We have identified your pickup driving with lights off at Dr. McKenna's compound at three thirty a.m. yesterday, precisely the time her gorillas were attacked."

  Audrey's eyes darted back and forth for a minute as she thought about it, then her face crumpled. "He made me do it."

  "Who?"

  "Jimson—the quality control guy. He said he'd report me for smoking meth at the school if I didn't."

  "So you've still got a meth habit?"

  She shook her head. "No. No way. I'd never touch that stuff again." A tear escaped her right eye and her nose started running; she reached a hand up to wipe the trail of slime away. "Not anything else, either. But I couldn't lose my job; who's gonna believe me?" Her brown eyes bore into his. "I can't lose that job. I can't go back to jail. He made me take that baby to Ireland."

  Finn's eyes widened. Ireland?

  "I didn't have a choice. But those Irish folks were real nice. I could see they wanted that baby bad. I wouldn't ever have left her there if I thought she'd be hurt. Abe was right, Ivy's really in a better place." She nodded enthusiastically, as if transferring Ivy to a nice couple would excuse her actions.

  "You left the note at the memorial," Finn said, fighting to keep a grin off his face. It was going to happen. He was going to bring Ivy back to Brittany Morgan.

  "I wanted Brittany to know," Audrey said.

  "Did you help kidnap other babies?"

  Her eyes rounded. "Oh dios mio, no. Are there more?" She started sobbing in earnest, and stretched her hands out to him. "Please, please, I can't go back to jail. I'd never see my kids again. He made me do it. He never even paid me one cent."

  Finn sat back in his chair. "Tell me everything," he said. "And then we'll see."

  "Don't you want me to write it down?"

  "It'll all be on the tape," he told her.

  She glanced around the room, her eyes searching for the recorder.