Chapter 25
Tessa
“I’m sorry, he is not in today.”
Deputy Heather Solingate is manning the front desk today and is on the phone when I walk into the station.
I’m just coming back from an accident scene in the church parking lot of all places.
It’s busy for a Sunday, with two domestic calls, an attempted overnight break-in at the pharmacy, a statue in the park depicting the town’s founder defiled by vandals, and a neighbor dispute heating up between two bordering ranches north of town; and it’s only just after noon.
Which is why I went to the church when the accident call came in to the office; there were no deputies left to send out.
Luckily, it was fairly easily and quickly resolved.
The drivers involved were unharmed, but disputing responsibility.
Fortunately, since church just let out, there were ample witnesses to the actual sequence of events.
By the time I left twenty minutes later, things had calmed down, the parties had exchanged insurance information and were on their way home.
“Yes, I’ll send out a deputy as soon as I have one available.”
“Who is it?” I mouth at Heather.
She covers the mouthpiece and shares, “Mrs. Dixon.”
The name rings a bell.
“Something about her car. Hugo apparently left messages for her,” Heather explains when she ends the call a moment later.
It suddenly comes back to me. Her car, the white Chrysler 3000. The vehicle driven by my son’s attackers.
“I’ll go. What’s her address?”
That car is one of the loose ends that still need to be wrapped up.
As are the identities of the cowardly goons who beat up my son in the shadows of an alley.
My heart rate, which had started calming down with the arrest of Doyle Benjamin, is starting to race again.
There’s nothing to suggest this woman’s car is actually the same one seen on the security video from the night of Remi’s attack, but it’s the one lead we haven’t been able to follow through on.
I take the piece of paper Heather scribbled the woman’s address on and head straight back out into the cold.
To my surprise, the address is only a few streets down from our house, in the same neighborhood.
It’s a small bungalow, with a detached, single-car garage.
There is still a layer of snow in the driveway, and the only visible tire tracks show someone pulled in and out again, likely someone dropping the woman off.
She must’ve been on the lookout, because the moment I get out of the cruiser I park along the curb, the front door opens. I’ve seen the small-statured, white-haired woman in the doorway around town before, but I didn’t know her name.
But apparently she knows mine.
“Detective Tessa Androtti. Finally, I get to meet you in person.”
She has a sweet smile she greets me with, along with the small, arthritic hand she offers. I take it cautiously.
“You must be Mrs. Dixon.”
“Yes, I am. Town librarian emerita.”
She states her honorary title with a pride that makes me smile. The elderly woman may be small and rather frail-looking, but she is showing a core of strength. She’s no pushover, that’s for sure.
“I understand you were looking for Deputy Chief Alexander earlier?” I prompt her.
“Yes, yes I was. Please, won’t you come in?”
As much as I’d like to launch into the subject of her vehicle right here on the doorstep, it is cold, and I get the distinct impression Mrs. Dixon isn’t one to be hurried along. It’s probably easier and likely faster to let her set the pace.
So I nod politely, and say, “Thank you,” when she waves me through into a cluttered but cozy living room.
I take the pink floral wingback chair she offers, and notice the porcelain tea set on the coffee table, along with a small dish with lemon slices, and a plate of cookies. Clearly she was expecting to entertain whoever would’ve shown up today.
It feels a little like I’ve traveled back into another era.
“Tea?”
I could really do with another coffee, but who knows how long that would take, and tea is better than nothing.
“Please.”
It takes every ounce of my patience to sit through the almost ritual serving of tea, and I even take a cookie off the tray when offered.
“So…you called the station?” I prompt her when she finally takes a seat on the couch.
“Yes, in response to Hugo’s messages. He left a few, and I feel bad because I was on a European cruise with my sister.
She’s my only living relative, you know?
Neither of us ever had children. But she lives in New Mexico, which is not next door, so we go on a trip twice a year, sometimes a cruise, sometimes a bus or train tour, and then we spend another week or so at one or the other’s house.
This time I stayed with her in New Mexico.
Beautiful state, have you ever been? So different from our mountains here. ”
“I’ve visited, yes,” I interrupt the flow of words. Then I try to redirect. “So, you’re saying you were traveling and that’s why you didn’t respond to the messages.”
“Yes, because I don’t carry a cell phone, you see? I never saw the point of getting one. If I’m home, my sister can reach me by phone, and if I’m traveling, I’m with her anyway, so I don’t need a phone.”
There’s a certain kind of logic in what she says, I suppose, but I’d like to get to the point of my visit.
“Mrs. Dixon, I’m not sure how much you were able to glean from Deputy Sheriff Alexander’s messages, but we were interested in finding out about your car. Your Chrysler 300. I don’t see it parked in the driveway; did you by chance loan it out to someone while you were away?”
“No, I certainly did not. I don’t own that car anymore. I sold it.”
“Sold it?” I echo.
This sends up red flags right away, since the vehicle still shows up in her name.
“Yes, with my eyesight going, I decided a few months ago I wasn’t comfortable getting behind the wheel anymore, so I placed an ad. One of the girls at the library suggested something called Craigslist and helped me set it up.”
“I assume the ad drew interest?”
“Well, not at first, but then a few weeks before I left on my cruise, someone messaged asking if it was still available. A nice gentleman from out of town, who was able to meet me the next day in the library parking lot, would pay in cash, and offered to take care of all the paperwork so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. ”
I bet he fucking offered.
“So you met the gentleman?”
“Yes.”
“Did he give you a name? Tell you anything about himself? Do you know where he’s from?”
“Yes, he mentioned owning a used car business near Colville. He said that’s why he took off my license plates and put one of those dealer tags on the back. He did introduce himself…let me think. Wyatt?”
She immediately shakes her head. “No, Emmet. That’s it. I’m positive that’s his name.”
“Did he give you a last name?”
“Not that I can remember. I’m a little confused though, why are you interested in the car?”
Lying would be pointless, because if it turns out it is her car we’re looking for—which is looking more likely by the minute—she will undoubtedly need to be contacted again.
“A vehicle with the same description as your car was reported at the scene of a crime.”
The poor woman’s shock is visible, and I stick around for a few moments to make sure she’ll be okay before I rush out to my cruiser.
Still parked outside her house, I immediately put a call in to Jason Mancuso to fill him in.
“Colville?” he echoes in my ear a few minutes later. “Are you sure?”
“She said near Colville, but yeah, I’m positive. Why?”
“Because we’ve been going over Benjamin’s phone records and there is one number we can’t identify and have been tracking, and it pings from a tower in that area.”
“Are there any used car lots in or near Colville? Preferably owned by a guy named Emmet,” I suggest.
“I’m already looking,” he mumbles, and I hear the clicking of keyboard keys in the background. “Two car lots, but both are actually in town. Let me have a quick look if I can find out who owns them.”
More clicking and a soft curse before he comes back. “No, the one guy is named Sonny, and the other is Monty. Not an Emmet in sight.”
“And there’s nothing outside of town?”
“Give me a sec. Um, not a used car lot anyway. Unless you consider a junkyard the same thing, but it looks to be closer to Kettle Falls.”
Junkyard. Kettle Falls.
I can feel the blood in my veins freeze. My God.
“Remi…”
“…mother’s name is Martha Benjamin, and she was originally from Kettle Falls.”
I’m on an open call with Mancuso, and an intelligence analyst on his team, who is giving us on the spot updates as new information becomes available.
“Is her family connected to the junkyard?” Mancuso asks.
His voice sounds a bit distorted as a result of the headset he’d be wearing in the helicopter.
After I realized my son might be heading straight for trouble, I abruptly hung up on the agent and tried Clem’s phone, which rang and rang before sending me to voicemail.
I tried three more times, ignoring the repeated attempts by Mancuso to get through, but all with the same result.
There was no use trying Remi’s new phone, since that is still in the kitchen drawer where I put it after Mancuso took my son into protective custody.
He hadn’t asked for it yet, and I’d frankly forgotten about it until now.
Trying not to panic, I realized reception would be spotty at best going through the mountains, but I could feel the urge to scream building.
Once I got back on the phone with Jason and explained my son and Clem were on their way to that particular junkyard at that exact moment, he jumped into action. He said he’d be on his way with a team and urged me to stay put, but included me in their open call.
“I’m looking,” the agent on the other end responds. “But the Washington State Digital Archives portal was down, and I was only just now able to get in, so give me a minute.”
What Mancuso doesn’t know is that I wasn’t at the office to begin with, and I never bothered to get back there, instead heading straight out of town.
Like hell was I going to sit by idly while my kid is out there, possibly in big trouble.
I’m keeping my phone muted, so he can’t hear I’m on the move.
With any luck, we’ll arrive at the junkyard at the same time and he won’t have a chance to ream my ass out then.
Well aware I’m breaking all the rules, I silenced my radio and have ignored a few incoming calls from the station.
I’m in someone else’s jurisdiction now, and there’s nothing my colleagues could do for me here.
Trust me, I don’t want to lose this job, but there is no way I’m going to sit by a phone and wait for someone else to get my kid out of trouble.
At this point, I’m about twenty-five minutes into what would normally be a forty-five or fifty-minute drive, but I’m thinking at the clip I’m going, I’ll get there sooner.
I hope I do because by my calculation, unless they made some stops on the way, Clem and Remi should’ve already gotten there close to an hour ago.
But only a few minutes later the jig is up when I hear my boss’s voice join the call.
“Is Androtti on the line?”
“She is,” Mancuso answers.
I release a deep sigh before unmuting my phone.
“Yes, sir.”
“Christ, Tessa. I know what you’re doing; I don’t even need to ask,” Hugo comments.
“I fucking knew it.”
This from Mancuso, who sounds predictably pissed. I don’t know how my boss got clued in or how he ended up tapped in to this call, but it shouldn’t surprise me.
“You cannot make a move until I get there, Tessa. I won’t hesitate to have local authorities arrest you before you even arrive.
They’re on standby at a self-storage about a mile down the road from the junkyard, where there’s room for us to land.
That’ll be in about twenty minutes, so you hang tight. ”
“Got it!” The FBI analyst’s voice cuts in. “In 1972, Martha Elizabeth Benjamin married a Wallace James Shirk. A year later they welcomed a son, Everett James Shirk. Wallace Shirk is listed as the owner of the junkyard along Route 395, midway between Colville and Kettle Falls.”
The old lady was close, it’s Everett, not Emmet.
My worst fears confirmed, my foot presses down harder on the gas pedal.