Chapter Nineteen
When Ben had completed his call to Detective Shelton, he and Brenda performed a closer inspection of the main bedroom. He was careful to avoid the area immediately around the body. No need to bother with that side of the bed. There was no table or anything else there, just the man’s body.
One of the pressing questions in Ben’s mind was why Cummings was here.
Was he staying here? Was Mallory the friend he mentioned knowing in the area?
Not likely unless of course Mallory was employed by the cartel as well.
But if he were staying here, where were the signs of this?
Ben had found nothing that he could point to as belonging to the man.
No toiletries in the bathroom. No clothes unless Brenda had found something in one of the drawers.
“The usual personal items, all Mallory’s,” Brenda said, as she closed the final drawer on the dresser. “I can’t say if anything is missing.”
“Nothing that may have belonged to Cummings?” he asked from the closet door.
“No. Nothing like that. Are you thinking he was staying here? I wondered that myself. He said he had a friend nearby when we spoke to him at Scott’s house.”
“It was a thought, yes.” Ben completed his inspection of the closet. “There are empty hangers, suggesting some items might be missing. A couple of hangers are on the floor.”
Brenda joined him at the small walk-in closet. “Mallory’s a neat freak. She must have been in a hurry to leave them there.”
“Along with the potential missing clothing, we have this.” He pointed to the wood shelf above the rod. “There’s dust on either side of an empty, dust-free space. My guess is that’s where a large item, like an overnight bag or suitcase, was stored.”
Brenda nodded. “Mallory obviously realized she had to get out of here.” She glanced toward the bed. “But was it before or after she killed Cummings?”
“Very good question,” Ben agreed. He followed her out of the small closet. “In the bathroom there was no toothbrush in the holder. No hairbrush lying on the counter. There’s every reason to believe Mallory grabbed a few things and left.” He shrugged. “Maybe in a hurry.”
“I thoroughly searched the other bedroom,” Brenda said. “Looks like that’s all there is to learn up here.” She glanced toward the bed again. “Unless the forensic people find something they probably won’t tell us about.”
“I checked the other bathroom on this floor. Nothing unexpected there either. Let’s go downstairs and finish our search before Shelton arrives.”
Downstairs there was nothing of Janey’s in the living room. In the kitchen there was that pizza box in the fridge as well as her favorite fruit drink.
“Janey loves these goldfish crackers,” Brenda announced, holding a small bag she had found in one of the cabinets over the sink.
In Ben’s mind there was no question Janey had been here.
The only questions were, where had they gone and had the child been in the house when Cummings was murdered?
The idea made Ben all the more furious at the man Brenda had married.
Ben just didn’t understand how a man could put his own child and her mother in such jeopardy.
Brenda closed the cabinet door and turned to him.
“Why isn’t the Jenner family dealing with any of this fallout?
The accounts you and your colleague found are in my name.
Maybe Tate Jenner did the same with his wife’s name.
And why did his wife decide to get an attorney—the same one the cartel guy, Lanier, is using?
” She shook her head. “The Tate family cannot have been exempt from this.”
Before Ben could go into his theory about the Jenners, there was a firm series of raps on the door. “We’ll talk about this when we’re out of here.”
She drew in a deep breath. “Okay.”
Shelton and the other detective, Truss, waited at the door.
Behind them was a line of other official personnel.
Ben had no idea how the man rallied a team together in such a short time.
Most cops had to wait for the various elements of the investigative team to arrive on scene. Not Shelton; he came locked and loaded.
He and Brenda were deposed to the living room while Shelton and Truss rushed upstairs to have a look at the body and the primary scene.
Ben could see Brenda’s anxiety growing. She wanted to discuss her concerns related to the Jenners.
She was anxious to move forward. To do something.
Her child was missing, and she was beside herself.
But the uniformed officer who’d been left in the room with them prevented any such discussions.
No need to give Shelton a heads-up on their thoughts or their plans.
When Shelton descended the stairs and came into the living room, the other officer took his leave. The detective sat down in a chair closer to Brenda than to Ben. She was the one he hoped to learn the most from. He took out his notepad and started his questioning.
“How did the two of you end up here?”
Brenda looked to Ben, and he said, “Since Brenda has been unable to reach Mallory, I felt it was imperative that we visit her home to see if she was here.”
Shelton grunted a sound of acknowledgment or something of that order. “Why didn’t you do that before?” Again, he directed this query at Brenda.
“In case you’ve forgotten,” Ben intercepted, drawing the detective’s attention back to him, “we’ve been a little busy. We were actually headed here when Brenda was called to speak with Lanier.”
His gaze narrowing with mounting suspicion, Shelton asked, “Have either of you had contact with Special Agent Cummings since he found you trespassing at the home of Scott Devers?”
“No,” Ben said honestly. “Not until this evening. Since you had no updates from him during our last meeting, Brenda was eager to know if the agent had discovered anything new that might help with the search for her daughter.”
“Have you heard anything?” Brenda demanded, her hands clasped on the handbag in her lap. “Surely there’s been some response to the Amber Alert.”
“We’ve had no credible responses so far, ma’am,” he assured her, which Ben doubted was any assurance at all. He turned to Ben then. “You were saying Ms. Devers called Agent Cummings. In my office you suggested I should call Cummings’s superior. Well, I did that, and guess what?”
Ben assumed this was a rhetorical question.
“There is no Agent Jarrod Cummings.” Shelton harrumphed. “But you knew that, didn’t you, Mr. Clark?”
“I had my suspicions.”
Shelton glanced at Brenda then. “You called Agent Cummings.”
“She did,” Ben responded. “Her child is missing, and we’ll take any help we can get to find her.”
Since phone records were all too easy to obtain, Ben saw no reason not to divulge the information. Giving Shelton a reason to suspect them of something related to Cummings’s murder would prove problematic. When it came to moments like this, omissions were the same as lies.
“And he asked you to meet him here,” Shelton said, looking from one to the other.
“No.” There the detective went hoping to trip them up. “During the call,” Ben explained patiently, “Cummings agreed to a meeting at Brenda’s home at eight. Since we had some time before his arrival, we decided to come by and see if perhaps Mallory might be here hiding for some reason.”
“We,” Shelton said pointedly, “were scheduled to come here. We were only waiting for the warrant. You see, Mr. Clark, unlike private investigators, we have rules and procedure to follow. We can’t just bust in and claim the door was open.”
“We couldn’t wait,” Brenda spoke up. “My child is missing. Rules and procedure were not on my mind.”
Shelton cleared his throat, glanced at his notepad. “Did either of you do any searching of the house, in particular the room where the body was found?”
Ben gave a confirming nod. “We walked through every room looking for any sign Janey had been here.” Their prints would be found, no need to deny this.
“Did you find anything?” Shelton asked. He looked from Ben to Brenda.
Her fingers tightened on her handbag where she had tucked Janey’s purple-haired Barbie. “Her favorite pizza and juice are in the refrigerator, and the goldfish crackers she likes are in the cabinet. That suggests to me that she was here.”
“Had you ever allowed your daughter to come to Mallory’s house in the past?” Shelton shot back.
“No.” Brenda shrugged. “I can’t say that Scott didn’t allow her to come over to Mallory’s when I was traveling, but I haven’t gone anywhere overnight in the past year—except the trip to Los Angeles that you already know about.”
“So she could have been here during that time,” Shelton suggested.
“That’s possible,” Brenda agreed, “but Mallory never mentioned it, and usually Janey tells all about her adventures with Mallory. And the receipt on the pizza box is from yesterday.”
Ben hoped the little girl was seeing this time away from her mother as just another adventure with her nanny.
If one or both had been harmed… He wasn’t going there.
Not yet. There was still every reason to believe the child was safe.
He suspected that would be the case as long as the cartel or persons responsible for her abduction needed her for leverage.
Shelton closed his notepad. “If I have more questions, I’ll call. The coroner will be here soon, so it’s better if the two of you go home. I think you’ve done enough investigating for one evening.”
Brenda stood. Ben followed suit. When they would have started for the door, she hesitated. “I have a question for you.”
Shelton heaved himself to his feet. “If I have an answer I will share it with you.” There was no enthusiasm in the words.
“What about Lena Jenner? Are you investigating her the way you are me?”
Good question. Ben should have asked, but it was better coming from Brenda.
Shelton looked surprised at the subject of the question. “Do you have some reason to believe I should be investigating her?”
“Tate and Scott were partners,” Brenda tossed back at him. “Doesn’t that make the possibility that she knows something as likely as the possibility that I do?”
Shelton nodded slowly as if needing time to make his response more palatable.
“It does. What you don’t know is that Agent Cummings focused on Jenner’s wife while I focused on you.
We felt it was the best way to cover all bases.
But I assure you, she didn’t get off any easier.
At least I assume she didn’t. With what we’ve learned about Cummings, I can’t be certain of his activities.
Which just means I will have to follow up.
So, to answer your question, if she hasn’t already felt the weight of this investigation, she will soon. ”
“Thank you for telling me.”
Once they were outside, Ben scanned the street for a vehicle that may have belonged to Cummings.
There were several. He supposed Shelton’s people would have to figure out that part.
At his rental, he turned on the flashlight app of his phone and checked the car doors, peered at length under the body of the car then had a look under the hood.
Once he was satisfied all was clear, he unlocked the passenger compartment and checked the interior.
“You can get in now,” he said to Brenda, who stood by patiently as she did every time he performed this safety check. Once she was inside, he walked around to the driver’s side and got in.
Not until they were driving away did a rush of words burst out of her.
“I really want to go see Lena Jenner now. I can’t get the idea out of my head that her using the same attorney—Harris Carlisle—as Dirk Lanier means something relevant to all this.
I want to talk to her before she disappears too. ”
Ben glanced at her. There hadn’t been time to go into this before when Brenda brought up the prospect of looking more closely at the partner’s wife.
“I have Max checking up on Lena Jenner. Like you,” he confirmed, “I’m not a fan of coincidences.
We did a preliminary in the beginning but found nothing. It’s time for a deeper dig.”
Brenda turned in her seat. “What if Lena has been looking for Mallory and Janey and was here when Cummings showed up? She may have killed him. I really want to go to her house. Now. Right now. We might even catch her in the act of washing blood off her hands.”
Ben glanced at her. “No wonder your books are so well-done. You think like a detective.” He laughed. “Or maybe a criminal.”
Brenda smiled and he was glad he’d had something to do with it.
“We’re going to find your daughter.”
She nodded and resettled in her seat.
Ben was determined that whoever had started this thing, he intended to end it.