Chickasaw County Captive

Chapter Eleven

Kristen’s phone rang as she was belting herself behind the wheel of the Impala. “Tandy.”

“Where are you?” It was Sam. He sounded tense.

“What’s wrong?”

“Are you still in the courthouse complex area?”

“I just got in the car. What’s going on?”

“Did you see anyone as you left the building wearing a tan windbreaker jacket and a blue baseball cap?”

“No, I didn’t see anyone like that. Now tell me what the hell is going on.”

“I got another packet of photos. It was just delivered. The staffer who took it described the person who left the package as a man in his mid-forties, brown hair, wearing a blue baseball cap and a tan windbreaker.” Sam’s voice tightened further. “The son of a bitch made a threat.”

“I’ll be right up.”

“Meet me at the reception area. I’m trying to get a look at whatever surveillance video might be available.”

Kristen retraced her steps back to the District Attorney’s office, where she found Sam in the lobby, holding Maddy tightly on his hip while he conferred with a couple of Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputies.

“Any luck on the video?” she asked.

Sam introduced her to Griggs and Baker, the two deputies who were apparently part of the office’s security detail. “Baker printed a screen grab.” He handed her the grainy photo of a man in a light-colored jacket and dark cap with a blurry cursive A on the front. “We think it’s a Braves cap.”

Kristen stared at the photo, remembering with growing excitement the picture she had helped Maddy color the day before. Maddy had chosen a dark blue crayon and said there was an “ABC” on the front of the cap.

“Could this be Darryl Morris?” Kristen asked Sam.

“Maybe. The photo’s not great so it’s hard to be sure.”

Kristen’s cell phone rang. It was Foley. “Excuse me a second.” She stepped a few feet away and answered. “Tandy.”

“It’s me. I’ve got a bead on Darryl Morris.”

“You mean you’re looking at him right now?”

“Yeah-had to drive all the way to Birmingham to do it, too,” Foley answered.

“Where are you now?”

“Parked outside the shipping company where he works. He just walked in. Did you get a look at the letters he sent Cooper? Do we have probable cause to pick him up?”

“What was he wearing?”

Foley was silent a second. “Why do you ask?”

“Just tell me what he was wearing.”

“Jeans, a tan jacket, blue Braves cap-”

Kristen looked over at Sam and Maddy, anticipation surging into her veins. “Oh, yeah,” she said with a broad grin. “We have probable cause.”

“DETECTIVE TANDY REALLY thinks he’s the one?” Norah asked Sam later when he met her for lunch in town. She glanced at Maddy, who clung to Sam like a little leech.

Sam coaxed Maddy into one of the chairs lining the sandwich shop window. “He fits the description of the man who left the photos at the office earlier today. The police were already looking at him because of the angry letters he sent me after his son’s case was settled. We think he’s the one.”

Norah took the seat across from him, careful not to encroach on Maddy’s space. “Then maybe this is really over.”

“It won’t really be over until Cissy wakes up and is okay,” Sam said soberly, thinking about the way his niece had looked the last time he’d visited her hospital room.

“Of course,” Norah said with a sympathetic nod. “But Maddy is safe, at least.”

He hoped so. After the scares of the past couple of days, he wasn’t quite ready to let her out of his sight.

“I have to go back to D.C. I’d only taken a couple of days off to go to the Hamptons, and I’ve had a case blow up on me that I really need to attend to.” Norah waited for the waitress to bring water to the table before she continued. “I’ve already arranged for the nice people at Limbaugh Motors to take me to the airport this afternoon. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“That wasn’t necessary-”

“I think it was,” Norah said gently. “I made a decision four years ago because I thought it was the right thing for everyone involved. I still think it was.”

He looked down at Maddy, who was playing with the colorful place mat on the table, oblivious to their conversation. At least he hoped she was. “So, back to how things were before?”

“Yes.” She leaned a little closer, her eyes full of regret but also determination. “I’ll never be what she needs. We both know that. It makes no sense for me to disrupt her life every once in a while just because of biology. She won’t understand why I always leave again. She’ll think it’s something she’s done when it really has nothing to do with her at all.”

Sam would never understand how Norah could walk away from her daughter, but he also believed she was sincere in saying she didn’t want to cause Maddy harm.

It was time to let Norah go completely and move on. No more hopes for something changing.

Norah wasn’t going to change.

“I would like frequent updates, however,” Norah added. “To know how the two of you are getting along.”

“I’ll e-mail you.”

The waitress approached with menus. Sam took one and bent to show Maddy what the children’s menu included. As she weighed the merits of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich versus chicken fingers, Sam glanced at Norah and found her smiling.

“I was right,” she said. “You were meant to be a father.”

On that, he thought, they could agree.

“Are you going to sit in on the interrogation?” Norah asked later, after the waitress had brought their orders.

“Detective Tandy wouldn’t let me.”

Norah smiled. “She’s quite the little authoritarian.”

“She’s right. It would be a conflict of interests.”

“But she’ll whisper the details in your ear later, no doubt.”

Sam tried not to react to Norah’s sly tone. She was clearly fishing for information about his relationship with Kristen, and since he didn’t know how to define it himself, playing Norah’s game would be folly.

“If she’s as good at interrogating suspects as she is at interrogating innocent people like me, Mr. Morris should break in no time.” Norah settled back in her chair with a wry smile.

Sam hoped she was right. Because if Darryl Morris wasn’t the person who’d tried to kidnap Maddy, then Sam and the cops were back to square one.

“THIS IS YOU IN THE surveillance video, isn’t it?” Kristen reached into the manila envelope lying on the table, pulled out the screen grab the deputy had supplied and slid it toward Darryl Morris.

Morris looked down at the photo, his complexion shiny with sweat. Morris had grown increasingly unnerved since the Birmingham Police had transferred him over to her custody. The interview room she’d placed him in wasn’t air-conditioned, by design, but it wasn’t hot enough to warrant the perspiration dripping down the man’s sallow cheeks. He looked queasy, well aware he’d been caught red-handed.

“That could be anyone.”

“Anyone wearing a tan windbreaker and a Braves cap.”

“Exactly.” Morris looked at Foley, who’d remained quiet to this point. “There’s gotta be a lot of guys out there with Braves caps.”

“Who also happened to send angry letters to Sam Cooper?” Foley asked reasonably.

“And took pictures at Maddy’s preschool while Maddy was in attendance?” Kristen added.

“I’m a part-time photographer. Big deal.”

“Apparently a courier, as well.” Kristen tapped the photo.

“Jeez, okay. I dropped off a package at the D.A.’s office. Is that some sort of crime?”

“A terroristic threat comes to mind,” Kristen said to Foley. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’d think that’s fair.”

Morris’s eyes widened. “Wait a second-terroristic threat? Sure, I wrote the jerk a couple of letters, but I didn’t make any threats.”

Kristen pulled a piece of paper from the envelope and placed it on the table in front of Morris. It was a full-size photocopy of the handwritten threat on the back of the last photo.

“What does that say, Mr. Morris?” she asked.

He stared at the words. “I didn’t write that.”

“That was in the envelope you delivered to Sam Cooper.”

“I didn’t know what was in the envelope.”

“Why not?” Kristen prodded.

“Some guy paid me ten bucks to deliver it.”

“You needed ten bucks that bad?” Kristen asked, skeptical. “Come on, Darryl. You don’t really expect me to buy this.”

“‘Your child for mine.’” Foley read the phrase written on the paper aloud, letting his tongue linger over each word. “You lost your son in a terrible accident.”

“He was murdered.”

“Sam Cooper didn’t see it that way,” Foley said.

“Wasn’t his kid!”

“But Maddy Cooper is.” Kristen leaned closer, dropping her voice a level. “Must be hard for you, watching Maddy Cooper running around the playground, so full of life and promise.”

“No,” Morris said, shaking his head. “I think her father’s a bootlicking political hack, but I’d never hurt a kid.”

“How about a teenager?” Foley nodded at Kristen.

She pulled out another photo and laid it on the table in front of Morris. It was a photo taken at the crime scene of Sam Cooper’s niece Cissy lying unconscious and still, her face wet with blood from her head wound.

Morris recoiled. “You think I did that?”

“Where were you this past Tuesday night?” Kristen asked.

Morris looked at her suspiciously. “At home.”

“Anybody there with you?”

He looked down at his hands. “No.”

“Nobody saw you at home?”

“I live up in Pell City, near the river. Not a lot of neighbors around.”

“You took these photos of Maddy, didn’t you?” Kristen pulled out the photocopies of the pictures Sam had received, both the more recent batch and the set from two days earlier.

He looked down at the photos again. She saw his eyelids flicker, and she knew she had him.

“Why did you take the photos and send them to Sam Cooper? Why did you tell him, ‘your child for mine’?” Kristen pulled up the chair across from Morris, settling down to look him in the eyes. “He denied you the justice you needed, and yet there he was, with his perfect, happy little child. It wasn’t fair, was it? That he could go home to his kid while the best you can do is go see a headstone.”

Morris’s eyes welled up with tears. “Charlie didn’t deserve to die. Yeah, he had some trouble, but he didn’t deserve to die!” He wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. “Sam Cooper didn’t think his life was worth crap, or he’d have tried that stupid son of a bitch who ran Charlie over!”

“You wanted to give Sam a taste of his own medicine.” Kristen kept her voice low and soothing. “Because he should know how it feels to lose his kid.”

Morris froze. “No, I didn’t say that-”

“Why did you take the photos, Darryl?”

“The guy paid me to.”

“What guy?”

“The guy who gave me the envelope. He was right outside the courthouse-didn’t your cameras catch that, too?”

Kristen slanted a look at Foley. He shrugged.

“What did the guy look like?” she asked, deciding it wouldn’t hurt to play along.

“I don’t know-average. About my age. Blondish hair, going gray, maybe, what there was of it. Not short, not tall.” Morris’s face twisted with frustration. “Go look at the video.”

Kristen glanced at Foley again. He gave a little nod and slipped out of the room.

Kristen remained silent for a few minutes, deciding it wouldn’t hurt to let Morris sweat a little more. She wasn’t really buying his story about another man-what were the odds that there were two men, both with an axe to grind with Sam Cooper, collaborating on the threats against Maddy?

But might as well be thorough. Foley would check with Jefferson County Courthouse security and be back with the answer. Meanwhile, she could toy with Morris a little more, see if she could coax a confession out of him.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Morris broke the silence after a couple of minutes.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that a guy who has it in for Sam Cooper managed to find the only other guy in town who feels the same way?”

“Maybe he heard about my son’s case.”

“And just knew you’d go along with his plan to terrorize Cooper?”

“I didn’t know what he was going to do with the photos.”

“Then why did you take them?”

“He said he was working for Cooper’s old lady.”

“His old lady?”

“Yeah, the kid’s mother. Said she was looking to take the kid away from Cooper, and if I’d take pictures of her at the day care it would prove he just pawned her off every day to other people to take care of.”

Kristen frowned. “Maddy Cooper’s mother is not seeking custody of Maddy.”

Morris looked confused. “She’s not?”

“No, she’s not.”

He pressed his lips into a tight, thin line. “Then he lied to me about what he was up to.”

“Isn’t it more likely that you decided to pick this excuse for your own behavior without knowing the real situation between Sam Cooper and his ex-wife?” Kristen asked gently. “It’s understandable, to assume Maddy’s mother wanted custody. Most mothers do.”

“You’re trying to twist me up and make me cop to something I didn’t do,” Morris protested. “I didn’t touch that kid. Or that girl, either.” He pushed away the photo of Cissy. “I wouldn’t do that.”

Foley came back into the room. She looked up. He gave a small shake of his head.

“The camera outside the courthouse didn’t pick up anyone else with you, Mr. Morris,” she said aloud.

Morris looked up at her, alarmed. “He was there!”

“The camera didn’t see him.”

“I’m telling you-”

Foley pulled up a chair next to Darryl Morris, crowding close. “Mr. Morris, what say we start over from the beginning?”

“IS MOMMY REALLY GONE?” Maddy asked Sam that afternoon as he fed her a snack of peanut butter, banana and crackers.

He paused, his heart breaking a little for his daughter, who seemed more confused than saddened by the question. “She went back to Washington. That’s where she lives, just like we did for a while, remember?”

Maddy licked a stray dollop of peanut butter from her fingers, blinking at him. “And she’s not coming back?”

“Maybe now and then to visit. I don’t know.” He handed her a slice of banana. “Does that make you sad, baby?”

Maddy shook her head. “Now Miss Kristen can be my mommy, can’t she, Daddy?”

He stared at her, nonplussed. “Miss Kristen isn’t your mommy, Maddy Jane. You know that.”

“But she can be, right? If I want her to?”

“I don’t think it’s that easy. Miss Kristen may not want to be your mommy.”

The look of puzzlement on Maddy’s face would have been comical under other circumstances. “Why not?”

“She may want to wait and have a little girl of her own.”

“She don’t have to wait.”

“But maybe she wants to.”

The light of determination in Maddy’s green eyes reminded him of his younger sister, Hannah, who’d never taken no for an answer without a fight. “You do it, Daddy. You tell her to be my mommy.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at the thought. “I know that won’t work.”

She reached out and cradled his face between her sticky hands, her expression serious. “Try, Daddy.”

He swept her up into his arms, cracker crumbs and all. “Tell you what. Why don’t you take a nap and we’ll talk about this when you wake up?” He tickled her gently to distract her.

She squealed in his ear, half deafening him, but at least she dropped the subject of Kristen after that. The last couple of days with Norah had apparently taken some energy out of her, for she settled down to her nap without protest, drifting off before he’d finished half of The Cat in the Hat.

He tucked her in, his mind still worrying with her question about Kristen. Of all the women in the world, why had Maddy decided a kidphobic cop with a bleak and tragic past was the best candidate for motherhood? Hell, why was he himself thinking about taking their already-complicated relationship into dangerous new territory?

Anytime now, Kristen could call with the news that Darryl Morris was the guy behind the attack on Cissy. Then it would all be over.

Maybe instead of thinking so much about how to make their relationship with Kristen last beyond the end of the case, he should be thinking about how to close the book on the Kristen Tandy chapter of his life for good.

“JEFFERSON COUNTY’S BOOKING him,” Carl Madison told Kristen after another fruitless hour of interviewing Darryl Morris. “We only have the threatening message to hold him on, and that happened in their jurisdiction.”

Kristen didn’t answer, frustration bubbling deep in her gut. He’d admitted to almost everything except the attack on Cissy and the threat, and he hadn’t wavered a bit from his story about a mystery man pulling the strings. The story seemed crazy, but if Morris was lying, he was lying consistently.

“We’ll tie him to the attack,” Foley added when she remained silent. “He’s got to be the one.”

She wanted to believe it. Then Maddy Cooper would be out of danger and safe to return to a normal, happy life with Sam and the rest of his family.

And she could get out of their lives before anyone got hurt.

Carl pulled her aside as they walked down the hall toward the detective’s office. “Dr. Sowell from Darden left a message for you. He asked if you were still planning to visit the facility this afternoon.”

Damn. She’d forgotten about her planned drive to Tuscaloosa. She glanced at her watch. Almost three o’clock. If she left now, she could be there by five-thirty.

On her way down to the parking lot, she called Dr. Sowell to make sure someone would be there to talk to her about the mysterious “Bryant Thompson.” He promised to stick around until she arrived, so he was waiting for her when she got to Tuscaloosa. He guided her through the security checkpoint, where she had to relinquish her Ruger P95 pistol to the guard before following the doctor to his office.

Sowell pulled a grainy black-and-white photo from the top drawer of his desk and handed it to her. “This is the man who introduced himself as Bryant Thompson. Do you recognize him?”

She looked at the image. The surveillance camera apparently covered the small visitors’ area from a position high on the wall, giving her a bird’s-eye view of the entire room but not much in the way of details about anyone in the frame.

There were only three people in the photo-the mysterious Bryant Thompson, a uniformed guard standing nearby and a thin, frail woman dressed in a white gown and a darker robe, her hands folded in her lap.

Kristen’s stomach gave a sickening lurch as she realized the woman in the photo must be her mother.

She was almost entirely unrecognizable, no longer the woman Kristen remembered. Though hospitalized for only fifteen years, she looked decades older, her formerly dark red hair now a dull gray bird’s nest twisted up in a messy knot atop her head. Her cheeks were thin and sunken, her body stooped and frail.

Tears burned Kristen’s eyes, catching her unprepared. She blinked them away, steeling herself against a flood of devastating memories.

Just look at the photo, she told herself firmly. Study the man. You already know the woman.

She forced her attention to the man sitting across from her mother. He had light-colored hair-blond? Gray? Hard to say, given the photo was in black and white. He seemed to be sitting very still, his hands on his knees. He wasn’t leaning forward into her mother’s space, as she might have expected from someone claiming to be there to help her. If anything, he seemed to be keeping a careful distance.

Beyond that, she could see only small, unimportant details about the mystery man. He wore light-colored slacks, not jeans, and a jacket that might be corduroy.

“What do you remember about the man?” she asked Dr. Sowell.

“Very little, I’m afraid. I saw him only in passing, as I had been called to an emergency elsewhere. The guard on duty may be the best person to ask, but he works the day shift so he left earlier. I can give him your phone number and ask him to call you if you like.”

She frowned at the photo, impatient. She didn’t want to wait for the guard to call her. She wanted this mystery over with now, so she could put it behind her and never have to come back to this place again.

“Did you ask my mother about the man who visited her?”

Sowell seemed surprised by the question. “No. I didn’t think it would be appropriate to interrogate her when she’d done nothing wrong.”

“At least not this time,” Kristen muttered.

Sowell gave her a pitying look. “Of course.”

Dread crept over her, greasy and pitch-black, as she realized the best way to get the answers she needed about Bryant Thompson was to go directly to the source. She’d avoided this moment long enough. Time to face the demons head-on.

“Dr. Sowell, I’d like to talk to my mother.”