“I’m on my way. Put my evidence back where you found it and don’t touch another thing.”
Kate and Ellen had moved to a small sofa in a den cluttered with half-finished knitting projects, a crucifix on the wall above the television. Ellen was leafing through a family album, Kate oohing and aahing at Adam’s baby pictures, shielding Ellen a while longer from the storm about to rain down on her. They looked up as I walked in the room.
“Mrs. Koch, the police will be here in a few minutes. Do you have any idea where Adam is?”
She went pale, cradling the photo album to her breast. “Why are the police coming? What did you find?”
“Did Adam know a boy from your church named Timmy Montgomery who disappeared a couple of years ago?”
She melted into the sofa, the photo album sliding from her limp arms onto the floor, muttering. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”
Kate looked at me, eyebrows raised, her question obvious. I answered it with a quick nod. She turned toward Ellen, gently rubbing her shoulder with one hand, holding Ellen’s with the other.
Parents’ worst fear is that something horrible will happen to their child. They cannot imagine the flip side of the nightmare, how much worse it would be if their child committed a terrible crime, especially against another child. Ellen’s response spoke to the suspicion, guilt, and fear she harbored about her son, worries she had spent years tamping down with denial, unable to face them and her own failings as a mother. Her world, built on thin reeds of self-deception, was collapsing.
I understood now why she had led the neighborhood search efforts for Evan and Cara and raised the money to hire Lucy. Knowing that Adam was sleeping with their mother, suspecting him in Timmy Montgomery’s disappearance, she had to find them, if only to hold on to her sanity. Hating Peggy Martin was her last lifeline, giving her someone else to blame for the child she could face only in her darkest moments.
“Adam hid something in the attic that might have belonged to Timmy. What do you know about that?”
She folded forward, rocking slowly back and forth, shaking her head without answering.
“Ellen,” Kate said. “Adam is in trouble, and he needs our help. It will be easier for him if Jack finds him before the police do.”
She sobbed and shuddered, forcing deep breaths into her lungs until she could speak.
“He was out all night and wouldn’t tell me where he’d been and wouldn’t tell me where he was going when he left again.”
“There’s a pair of muddy jeans on top of a clothes pile in his room. Is that what he was wearing last night?”
“He tracked mud all over the house. I cleaned it up this morning, but I told him I wasn’t going to wash his clothes.”
If Adam had spent the night digging in the dirt I had a good idea what he was doing and where he was doing it.
“Kate, I need the car keys.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find Adam. I need you to stay here with Ellen until the police come. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She straightened, ready to argue, but let the moment pass and handed me her keys.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I get lucky every now and then.”
Chapter Forty-five
It was easy and irresistible to convict Adam of Timmy Montgomery’s murder. The church connection, the parent’s complaint to the church, the child porn, and the bloody T-shirt marked a straight line from delinquency to a death sentence. But resisting the irresistible is what separates good cops from sloppy cops.
I would wait until Timmy and the rest of the evidence that was buried with him was unearthed. I would wait until Adam confessed or didn’t, until he pled guilty or not and a jury extracted the truth from the witnesses and exhibits.
If Adam had killed Timmy, the chances that we would find Evan and Cara alive had all but evaporated, a child predator’s habits one of life’s sad and predictable patterns. His affair with Peggy Martin may have been nothing more than an escalation of his perverse sexual fantasies: screw the mother, then kill the kids. And, if it was, their bodies wouldn’t be far from Timmy’s.
Adam had lied to Kate about having been in the woods above North Terrace Lake before yesterday. If that’s where he’d buried Timmy Montgomery, he couldn’t take the chance that crime scene investigators would find the body, and there was no way for him to know whether they’d be back today for another pass. They were careful and thorough, the odds of them finding something they weren’t looking for too great for Adam to risk.
It was a problem with a simple solution. Dig up Timmy’s remains and find them a new home before the police did it for him, meaning he had to dig in the dark when no one was looking. But there would be proof: fresh dirt where it didn’t belong, trampled undergrowth, overturned rocks, the sort of thing a disorganized, immature teenage killer would ignore.
I found Adam’s pickup on Cliff Drive in the same spot where he’d waited for his mother and Peggy Martin the day before. He hadn’t made any attempt to hide his truck, making it virtually certain that someone would see him going into the woods and coming out with a bag of bones. Either he was an innocent kid going for a hike or he was in full-blown panic, oblivious to risk, and, if the latter was true, there was another possibility. He wasn’t planning on moving Timmy’s body. He was planning on joining him.
I parked behind his truck and made my way down the bike path, around the lake and to the edge of the woods. Flecks of crime-scene tape clung to a few tree trunks. CSI had finished its work, leaving a trail of flattened grass and rutted gurney tracks leading to the spot where the dead woman had been found buried beneath rocks on a rugged slope midway between the tree line and a ridge above the site.
I stood at the foot of her open, empty grave, doing a slow turn. A lot of people had been in these woods yesterday, poking and prodding the surrounding area, scooping up soil, rustling through deadfall. Separating out CSI’s effort at discovery from Adam’s effort at recovery was beyond my outdoor forensic skill set, but the extent to which the ground in the immediate vicinity had been disturbed convinced me that if there had been a child’s body buried nearby, CSI would have found it.
That didn’t mean Adam hadn’t buried Timmy here; it just meant that he hadn’t buried him right here. I began walking back and forth across the face of the slope, working my way up to the top of the ridge until I reached the outer perimeter CSI had established, marked again by fragments of crime-scene tape, the grave a hundred yards or so below me.
The ground on the other side of the ridge fell away into a ravine, a thin creek running along the bottom, cutting through muddy banks. I scrambled down the slope, crouching close to the ground along the creek, finding a trail of muddy footprints.
Adam Koch was younger, stronger, and faster than me, a probable killer who may also be suicidal, operating on little sleep and running on fear, someone who would flee if he could and attack if he couldn’t. I was unarmed and had to assume that he wasn’t, that whether he had a gun, knife, or sharp-edged shovel, he was more of a threat to me than I was to him.
All of my training and all of my experience in the FBI screamed at me to wait for backup, but I was deaf, though I knew why. I missed the man I used to be too much to listen. Mine was a phantom pain, only instead of reaching for a lost limb I was searching for a missing person last seen with steady hands and a badge, hoping to redeem him by a grand gesture in a moment such as this.
But I had no trouble hearing the voices of Timmy Montgomery and the Martin kids, all the justification I needed for pretending not to know any better. It was enough to make me shake, and I did, a full torso, neck, and head, knee-bending twister, putting me on the ground, my hands grasping the soft earth.
I’ve heard it said that losing one of your senses sharpens another, acute hearing compensating for failing sight. I was about to find out what happened when you lost all your senses.
The footprints ran along my side of the creek for twenty yards before jumping to the other side, a crossing
