21st Birthday, James Patterson [best mystery novels of all time TXT] 📗

faces, but just before Brady kicked it in, it opened again without the chain. Burke brushed past us, strode angrily to his vehicle. He revved his engine, honked his horn at the press, and when he had an opening, he hit the gas and his car shot up the street like it was a lit fuse.

Chapter 28

Brady holstered his gun and deployed us from the entranceway; Conklin, Alvarez, and Hallows headed up the stairs while Brady, CSI Culver, and I clung to the ground-floor perimeter.

The living room was small and tidy but not obsessively so, with an ExerSaucer visible in the center. A slate blue corduroy three-seater couch, with matching chairs, was angled toward the fireplace and the TV mounted above it and there were framed family photos on the mantel. To the left, Lorrie was pictured with a stuffed animal, with Lucas and Tara to the right in a traditional just-married pose.

I turned away from the photos and looked for signs of violence, but saw none. No holes in the walls, no blood spatter on the ceiling, no bloody smears on the edge of the coffee table, no wet spots on the carpet. The fireplace tool caddy looked full. The bookshelves didn’t swing open to reveal a hidden room.

I took notes. Culver documented the living room with his Nikon, then stood in the doorway to the den as Brady and I went inside.

“This is depressing,” he said.

“How so?”

“I’m seeing phantoms, Boxer. Burke getting dressed for work. Tara making breakfast. Not speaking.”

“And Lorrie?”

“I just see her beached.”

Me, too.

We took opposite sides of the room, and did a search for weapons or incriminating messages, like a note from Burke’s girlfriend saying, “It’s now or never.” Or from Tara. “It’s over, you jerk. Drop dead.” Found zip. The desk drawers and file cabinets held graded classwork and warranties for household maintenance. Insurance policies. I took a look: whole life, quarter of a million each on Tara and on Lucas Burke. No policy on the baby. If Tara was dead, Burke was in the chips unless he killed her. I confiscated the policies.

“No laptop,” said Brady. “He stashed it somewhere. Work? In his car?”

“I say it’s with Burke. Let’s see the kitchen,” I said. “Knives live there.”

Along the way, I stopped to talk to Culver, who was crouched half in, half out of the hall closet.

“Lookit this,” he said, smiling brightly. “We’ve got video.”

“Show me.”

I saw what looked like a DVR for an old security system.

Culver said, “Just the one camera over the front door. Low-tech, motion activated, and it was running.”

“Good catch.”

Culver reversed the recording so I could see what he’d already watched.

He narrated.

“So here’s Burke on Monday morning. He leaves the house alone at seven forty a.m. The camera is not positioned to show me Burke’s expression, but he’s in a hurry, carrying a computer bag. Car keys in his hand.”

As Culver talked, I watched Burke come out of the house alone, not locking the door, carrying only a laptop bag. He got into his silver Audi and zoomed out of the frame.

Culver said, “And here comes Tara.”

He forwarded the video. The time stamp read 8:12. Tara was wearing a denim dress, low heels, bouncing the baby against her right hip, her handbag in her left hand. As Tara’s friend Johanna had said, the young mother was pretty. Her car, a red Volvo, was in the short driveway.

Tara put her bag down on the asphalt, strapped the baby into a rear-facing car seat, then returned to the house and came out again carrying a diaper bag and an overnight case, which she put in the trunk.

Tara got into the driver’s seat. I could see her checking on the baby, then carefully backing out and making a reverse K-turn on Dublin Street. She headed downhill in the opposite direction her husband had taken.

As with Lucas, the camera angle was all wrong for seeing faces, but her actions and body language were clear.

She was not distressed or in a panic. And the carry-on showed Tara Burke had planned to be gone for some period of time.

Maybe not forever, but surely overnight.

Chapter 29

Conklin shouted down to us from the top of the stairs.

“I need you to see something!”

I followed Brady up the staircase and found Conklin at the closet across from the bathroom. It was filled with linens and cleaning supplies. Conklin pointed to a crumpled-up blanket on the closet floor. It was crib-sized, pink, and patterned with bunnies.

Conklin said, “That blanket must have been there since Tara and Lorrie left the house on Monday. I want to see inside of it.”

Culver took a few shots of the blanket and then Rich carefully unfolded it with his gloved hands. A little pile of feces was in the center of the folds, like the fortune inside the cookie.

Kathleen Wyatt had told me that Tara and Lorrie had been abused, that Lorrie was sometimes locked in the closet for crying. The soiled blanket was suspicious—but by itself proved nothing.

“She could have taken it out of the baby’s crib and thrown it into the closet,” I said, but I made note of it in my book.

This dollhouse of a home had no basement, no attic, the eaves were enclosed with sheetrock. So, after checking out the upstairs rooms and finding no bodies or signs of any, we cops left the house to CSU, stood near our cars, and brainstormed, theorized, hypothesized.

Where had Tara gone? Had she left Burke? How had she gotten separated from Lorrie? Had she and Lucas been in touch since Monday morning?

That was an interesting thought but took me nowhere.

The trees in the park were alive with the light rustling of leaves and the sweet sounds of birdsong. It was the kind of day that made you think that nothing bad could ever happen here.

And then Brady’s phone buzzed.

He answered, “What’s up?”

His face went rigid. He said, “I got it. I got it. Wait, let me get the coordinates again.” He slapped