To Trust a Stranger

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In that act of reaching out, her fingers froze and her brain refused to process what she was seeing. Perhaps she was even more confused than she thought. She went to the other side of the bed and looked down at the still body. Anger and bewilderment welled up in her. “Deputy Gardner?” When he didn’t answer, she said it louder.

He came into the cubicle still holding his papers. “What is it?”

“This isn’t Laura. I don’t know who this was, but it isn’t my sister.”

His brow wrinkled and he looked as if he wanted to say all kinds of things. Instead he stood there silently for a moment before he asked a simple question. “Why do you say that?”

Jessie lifted her right pant leg, exposing her ankle and the tiny bluebird tattooed there. “Look at this. We got them on vacation two summers ago. It was one of those stupid things you regret afterward when it’s already done.” Laura hadn’t regretted hers, though. In fact she’d shown it off.

He looked at the body on the bed before saying anything more, and then, understanding growing, looked back at Jessie. “Your sister had one, too?”

“On her ankle, just like I did.” Jessie pointed to the ankle of the person on the bed. The pale skin was unmarked by fire or anything else. Who just died in this hospital room? And where was her sister, Laura?

Steve Gardner’s brain hurt. An hour after the death of the person he’d thought was Laura Barker he’d made the first round of phone calls to get crime scene investigators involved. Although the hospital itself wasn’t the scene of a crime, the fact that this death was an obvious homicide meant all the sheriff’s department’s resources needed to be called into play.

It had been difficult to explain to the medical examiner’s staff why he needed as much care taken as he did. Nothing about this case so far made any sense. At first things seemed merely confusing; a young man who appeared to have come from nowhere was missing and a woman who’d only known him a couple of days was left in his apartment near death.

The fire someone had set to destroy evidence hadn’t left many clues except the identity of the woman and now that was in question. Not just in question according to Jessie. She was firm in saying that the body didn’t belong to her sister. In some cases he’d question a distraught relative’s statement, thinking that they just wanted to believe against hope that the person they cared about couldn’t possibly be dead. But Jessie wasn’t hysterical or in denial. Instead she seemed perfectly calm.

He realized that Jessie was staring at him, waiting for him to make some kind of decision about what to do next. Here he was, with his first case like this as a lead investigator, and it was threatening to implode on him. If Jessie Barker was right, then he’d have to involve the Major Case Squad. Only the combined efforts of the best homicide experts in the five counties that made up the St. Louis area would feel qualified to deal with this. Steve groaned inwardly. The last thing he wanted to do was make an immediate call to the county sheriff, but he didn’t have any other choice. “How sure are you that this isn’t your sister?” he asked Jessie, knowing even then what her answer would be.

“I’m positive.” Her gray-blue eyes were rimmed with red and her brown hair was in disarray, but Jessie spoke with a certainty Steve wasn’t ready to question. She had radiated authority the whole time he’d known her and it had impressed him. Most of the relatives he saw in tough cases went to pieces, but not this woman.

No one else was around who could dispute her claim anyway. To do that, he’d have to talk with Laura’s coworkers at the day spa and see if there were any friends there that knew her well enough to verify that she’d had that tattoo. Even then, he’d have more of a mess on his hands. If this wasn’t Laura Barker who was it? And what happened to the real Laura, and Adrian Bando?

So far Bando hadn’t turned up alive or dead, and trying to trace him hadn’t been promising, either. It was as if he’d just shown up out of the blue less than six months ago without any history before that. No driver’s license in any state, no Social Security number in the name he went by now and no other records that matched his name or fingerprints left in the apartment. Whoever Bando had been before that, he had a clean record and hadn’t been in the military.

Steve shook his head, trying to clear the fog. “You know, one thing is pretty certain. If that isn’t your sister…”

“It isn’t. I know for sure now that it isn’t,” Jessie said firmly.

“I wasn’t arguing with you, Ms. Barker. I was just thinking out loud. And if you’ll let me finish…” Steve felt bad immediately about the tone he’d used. No one who’d just gone through what Jessie Barker had needed more grief.

He stayed silent a moment trying to compose himself, asking God to settle his troubled feelings so that he could do his job with the skill it demanded. “As I said, if that isn’t your sister there’s not much either of us can do here to figure out who it is, and where Laura might be now. I need to go back to work, and you should probably go home and get some rest.”

Tears filled Jessie’s eyes and Steve felt even worse than before. He had no way to comfort this woman on what was probably the worst day of her life. “I know you’re right, but I feel so confused. Whoever this is, she must have looked a lot like Laura before all this happened to her.” Her eyes widened and she sat down quickly.

“What is it?”

“I know it’s not Laura, but I just realized something. The one time she spoke to me, she called me by name.” Steve leaned in close as the tears started to slide down her cheeks. He just caught her last whispered words. “She said I was beautiful.”

He felt an almost overpowering urge to gather this near stranger into his arms and give her someone to lean on. “Is there anybody at all we can call to be with you?”

Jessie shook her head. She looked at him with an intensity that made him wary. There was something that she wasn’t telling him. But then she sighed and her mood shifted. “There’s no one. I told you before that we lost our parents when we were children. We spent most of our childhood in the foster care system until Laura turned eighteen and we’ve lived together ever since.”

“No boyfriend?” Why did he care about the answer suddenly?

“Nobody serious for either of us. I’m too busy and Laura, believe it or not, was a little shy around men.” Her expression brightened a little. “No, I guess I can still say Laura is a little shy.”

“That’s true,” Steve agreed, even though his practical cop’s nature felt like telling her that just because the figure on the bed wasn’t her sister didn’t mean Laura was alive. He prayed silently that when they opened the trunk of the car they’d impounded after the fire there wouldn’t be anybody in it.

Jessie hadn’t heard the change in his tone and he felt thankful about that. “Do you think you’ll be okay to drive home?”

She didn’t answer him right away. “Probably,” she said after a while. “I’m still trying to take in the fact that my sister is out there somewhere. After the last couple days, I’ve been getting myself used to thinking of her…not here.” She wasn’t the first person he’d seen who refused to say the word dead to talk about a loved one.

“How do you figure out who this person really is?” she asked, forcing him to pay attention to the process, as well.

“First we’ll call evidence techs from the county coroner’s office in to process her. We’ll take fingerprints and compare them to those on file in different databases. We’ll take blood and tissue samples to do DNA tests. And just to be sure we’ll need to take blood from you, as well, just to make the fact that this isn’t your sister official.”

Jessie nodded. He felt thankful that she wasn’t arguing with what he told her. “How long will the results of those tests take?”

“Days. Unlike the TV crime shows where they get their results in fifty-five minutes, real life works a little slower. I imagine you wish it didn’t.”

A half smile lifted one corner of her mouth slightly. “You’re right. The sooner we know who this is, or can at least prove it isn’t Laura, the sooner you might be able to find her.” The specter of whether the police might find Laura alive or not hung in the air between them as an unspoken threat. Steve decided not to pursue that for now.

The evidence technicians came into the room and Steve eased Jessie out so that the techs could do their work. Even now that they knew the figure on the bed was a stranger, he didn’t want Jessie to have to witness the things that would happen next.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me about your sister, or your own life?” The words were out of his mouth before Steve was quite sure why he’d asked them. Didn’t he already have enough to do? Still, his experience as an investigator made him value those hunches that drove him to ask a last question.

Jessie shrugged. “Not really.” Her expression said something else. There was information she kept to herself right now, but he didn’t know Jessie well enough to know how important her private information might be. Given her cryptic look it could be anything from a stash of unpaid traffic tickets to her sister being involved in criminal activity. What he’d seen of Jessie so far led him to believe that her secret might be closer to the traffic tickets, or something even more trivial. At least he hoped so; Jessie Barker intrigued him and for a change he wanted that feeling to come from something positive, not somebody’s criminal nature. Still, watching Jessie walk away gave Steve an uncanny feeling that something very serious was wrong.

FOUR

Jessie knew she should go back to work, but she couldn’t quite push herself to do it yet. Laura wasn’t dead, but she was still missing and no one seemed to have any idea where she might be. The condo felt so empty without her sister there. It took only two days for Jessie to realize how much Laura usually did around the place.

When the flowers on the kitchen countertop wilted Jessie threw them out, and had no idea where to get more. When she reached for one of her favorite coffee cups on the third day and couldn’t find it, it took another hour to figure out that the cups were clean in the dishwasher. Laura always unloaded it. How many of the little pleasures of her life were due to her sister? Almost all of them, apparently. Without Laura life was amazingly mundane. There was no loud music in the house when she came home from errands, the shutters stayed closed even when it was sunny. In three days the quiet got to her so much she began to think about going to the pound and adopting a dog. She had even decided what kind of dog; something large and very furry of vastly mixed breed that would answer to the name of Spike or Tiger.

She was online looking up the address of the nearest animal shelter when the phone rang. When the caller ID showed that it was the country sheriff’s department she picked it up immediately. “Deputy Gardner?”

“Yes. Ms. Barker? I have something to discuss with you. Would it be all right if I came over?”

Jessie turned away from the computer, her heart beating faster. Had they found Laura? “Certainly. Do you want to set up a time to meet?”

There was silence for a few seconds. “Actually, I’d like to come over now if you don’t mind.”

“All right.” They hung up and Jessie shut down her computer and went to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Coffee was out of the question because she knew there was no milk in the house to offer the deputy. She sighed. “Maybe once I get the dog we can walk to the store together,” she said to the empty kitchen.

Deputy Gardner refused her offer of tea, and sat in the living room in the most upright chair available. “Have you gotten a lead on Laura? Do you know where she is?”

His brow wrinkled. “Not exactly.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Is there anything about your family situation that you haven’t told me? Anything that might change the way our investigation is going?”

Jessie’s palms began to sweat. She had only known this man for a week. There was no way she could trust him. “No. What does this have to do with finding my sister?”

“I’m not sure yet. But it has a great deal to do with identifying the victim in the morgue who isn’t your sister.” His eyes narrowed, making him look much more like an investigator than the compassionate man she had started getting to know in the hospital. “How much do you know about DNA?”

“Enough. I teach history, not science. But I’m sure you’re going to enlighten me,” Jessie snapped.

“I won’t go into deep detail. But we had a surprise with that sample we took from you to prove that the victim wasn’t your sister. It proved that all right, but it gave us another interesting fact. The victim shares half your DNA profile.”

“Only half?” She wanted to ask more, but it was all she could choke out. Jessie always thought fainting from shock was one of those things that only happened to Victorian women who wore whalebone corsets. Surely it wasn’t possible today. But suddenly she had this funny buzzing in her head and there didn’t seem to be enough air in the room.

“Only half,” Steve Gardner said. “Which makes the story you told me about losing your parents in a car crash just that—a story. Now I’ll repeat my earlier question. Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

The buzzing was getting louder. “Only that I’m glad there’s no statute of limitations on murder because now I’m sure that someone killed my father.” After that her vision blurred and Jessie quickly lay down on the couch before she pitched forward into the coffee table. The last thing she remembered thinking was that when they found Laura she didn’t want to have to tell her that she’d ruined the veneer on the furniture, so she better pass out in a different direction.

Steve Gardner lunged for Jessie as she slumped sideways on her own living room couch. Before now he’d never seen anybody truly faint from stress or shock, but there was always a first for everything. Of course he’d never before confronted anybody with the news that a dead person thought to be a complete stranger was actually their parent, either. Had that really come as a shock to the woman, or was she only buying time?

The pallor of her skin and her general wooziness as he tried to make her sit up seemed to attest to the shock being real. He looked behind him and picked up the mug of tea she’d poured herself after he’d declined her offer to pour him some, as well. It was still quite warm, but not too hot to drink. “Why don’t you take this and sip it slowly. Then when you’re a little more composed we can start talking about this.”

She did as she was told; something he felt was probably out of character for Jessie Barker. What he’d seen so far told him that she liked to be in control of most situations. She didn’t seem to be in control of this one. Her hands shook slightly as she drank a little of the aromatic tea. “Are you going to be all right?” He didn’t want to go back to his seat until he was sure she wasn’t going to faint again.

She took one hand and pushed back waves of deep chestnut hair away from her face. In the hospital she’d worn her hair caught back rather severely in clips. Today it was gathered loosely at the nape of her neck, and shorter strands had worked their way out to brush around her cheeks. “I think I’ll be okay.” She put the cup down, placing it carefully on a coaster. “I don’t even know where to start to try and explain this.”

“Well, that makes two of us. Why did you tell me before that your parents were dead, when you must have known that your mother was still alive?”

She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Well, see, that’s the problem. Nobody knew that but me and Laura. At least nobody else ever believed it. That car crash when we were small really happened. I’m sure you can find reports of it in the newspapers in the little town where my father taught at the state university. And in the cemetery at the edge of that same town there’s a very lovely monument with both of my parents’ names on it.”

Okay, this made even less sense than he’d expected. “How did that happen? Were you adopted?”

“No. I wondered that, too, when I got old enough to try and figure all of this out myself, but I checked the birth certificates for my sister and me and they both list our parents. I know that can be faked but nobody ever suggested that was the case. I figured that if we’d actually had another mother somewhere, the courts would probably have notified her and she would have come and gotten us. We wouldn’t have had to spend so much time in foster care.” Her gray eyes flashed with anger. “I mean, nobody would have abandoned two kids like that if they didn’t have to. I think our mother actually saved our lives by leaving us that night.”

He must have looked even more confused, because she took a deep breath and sat back on the couch. “I’m going to tell you this story once, and afterward you can ask any question you want as long as you give me the benefit of the doubt believing me. All right?”

He didn’t know why he should agree, but he had nothing to lose. If she shut down now he had no other real avenue to explore. “All right. Do you want me to keep from interrupting while you tell the story?”

“It would probably help. I haven’t told anyone all of this in more than twenty years. And I’ve never told it to anybody who believed me.”

The thought roused Steve’s interest like nothing else could. What could be so fantastic that an eyewitness account wouldn’t be believed, even that of a child? He got ready to write down what Jessie said, wondering where this tale would take him.

“Remember, I was only six,” she began. “My parents were arguing in the front seat of the car, which wasn’t unusual. It was more like squabbling most of the time, but they didn’t always get along. I don’t know how far away from home we were, and I don’t really remember where we’d been that day. Laura and I fell asleep in the backseat and I remember waking up after hearing a bang.”

“Was the car still moving?” Steve knew he shouldn’t interrupt but he couldn’t help himself.

Jessie didn’t seem to mind the simple question. “No. We were pulled over on the side of the road, not exactly like we’d been in an accident or anything. There were several strange men there, at least three of them. One of them pulled Laura and me out of the car and we stood in some weeds and watched our life fall apart.”

“Did any of them talk to you? And what about your parents?”

Jessie’s brow wrinkled. “From an adult perspective I know now that my father was already dead. I think he’d been shot, but I can’t tell you why I believe that. I didn’t see a shot fired.”

“You said you heard a bang as you woke up. Could it have been a gunshot?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to know.”

“How about the men. Do you remember anything about them, what they looked like or if anybody mentioned any names?”

She looked at him and her eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry. I’ll have to think about that awhile.”

“I’ll stop barking at you so much.” He hadn’t meant to push her this hard.

“No, it’s not that. Nobody’s ever taken me this seriously before. I don’t know how to react.”

He felt more pain for her now than he did when he thought he’d intimidated her. What must it be like to carry this kind of secret for over twenty years? “Take your time. Try to recall as much of the scene as you can. Close your eyes if it helps.”

Jessie leaned back against the couch cushions. “I don’t remember any names. They were just big and scary looking.” She stopped for a moment. “Okay, there is one thing. When I just said the men were scary, something dawned on me. My mother wasn’t scared. Not the way I would expect somebody to be.”

“Do you think she knew them?” It would explain her not being afraid, but it led to a dozen more questions.

“I’m not sure if she knew them personally, but they were familiar to her, if that makes any sense. And now that I think of it, she definitely knew the man who was in charge. She didn’t talk to him the way you’d talk to a stranger. She felt free to argue with him some.”

“Argue how?” Steve had started listening to this story figuring it might be the fantasy of a child. But so far most of what Jessie had told him sounded plausible. He could almost see the serious girl she’d been at six, stuck in this terrible situation.

“I think he wanted to hurt us, maybe even kill us and put us back in the car with my father and the woman. I didn’t tell you about her, did I?”

Steve shook his head, not wanting to interrupt at this point if he didn’t have to.

“Two of the other men took a woman from one of the other cars and put her in the front seat where my mother usually sat. Again, once I grew up I knew that she was probably dead or at least incapacitated somehow. Then I didn’t understand why she let them put her in the car.”

“Why didn’t anybody realize that the body in the car wasn’t your mother?”

“It would have been hard to tell. At the time I remembered the men pushing our car down a hill. There was another loud noise and the car caught fire. Later when I found the newspaper articles they reported that the car had gone down a dangerous embankment and burned.”

“How did anybody explain that you and your sister survived?”

“I’m not sure. Nobody ever wanted to talk about the accident afterward. A few weeks later the social workers were telling us to forget what happened. Child counseling must have been so different then.”

“No kidding.” There were a few things that just didn’t sound right about Jessie’s story, but Steve didn’t want to tell her that now. Especially when she trusted him enough to tell him what she’d hidden for so long. “So what happened after that?”

Jessie sighed. “I don’t remember seeing any cars pass once the men put my mother in a car and they all drove away. Somebody must have seen or heard something, though, because after a while there were fire trucks and police cars there and they put us in the back of a police cruiser and took us to some kind of juvenile hall once they figured out we weren’t hurt.”

“Physically, at least. What you saw had to be an incredible shock.”

“It was. Laura didn’t say anything for about four days. And she was usually the chatterbox of the family. For a while I was afraid she wasn’t ever going to talk again. I stopped wanting to say anything more myself after the third or fourth time I told my story and an adult told me that it wasn’t true.”

Steve couldn’t keep from wincing. It had always been part of his nature to be as honest as possible, even with kids. What had motivated these people to deny Jessie’s story? “Were there services for your parents anywhere? Did anybody try to comfort you or take care of you?”

Jessie lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t think there were any services. We weren’t ever religious, and there wasn’t any other close family. If there was anything at the college where my father taught, they didn’t take us there. Like I said before, they were already telling us to forget that it happened, as if that would ease the pain. We went into foster care, and fortunately we always stayed together. I think Laura could have been adopted if it wasn’t for me. She was still young and cute enough to be attractive.”