The Night Monster_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [51]
“Jesus, Jack. Don’t be so angry.”
“Do we have a deal or not?”
A long moment passed. I didn’t like to resort to these tactics, but there was nothing else I could do. This was my last lead toward finding Sara Long. If I didn’t pursue it, Sara was as good as gone.
Burrell started to speak, and I heard a catch in her voice. Something told me that I’d burned another bridge with the Broward County Police Department.
“All right, Mr. Carpenter. You have a deal,” Burrell said.
I started to say thanks, but she hung up on me.
CHAPTER 25
inderman and I parted ways in Louie’s parking lot. Linderman was heading back to his office, where he planned to spend the afternoon contacting other CARD teams around the country, while I helped my old unit find a missing thirteen-year-old girl.
“I’ll call you if I turn up anything,” Linderman said.
“I’ll do the same,” I said.
Linderman nodded and stared at the ground. In a flat voice he said, “I looked through the Naomi Dunn file while we were eating lunch. Is it my imagination, or were the police trying to hide something during that investigation?”
His words caught me off guard, and for a moment I didn’t speak.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“You saw a huge guy with mental problems kidnap a college student from her apartment. Yet the police swore that there was no record of this guy. I find that hard to believe. In fact, I don’t believe it.”
It was my turn to stare at the ground. It was the one aspect of the Dunn case that had always baffled me. The giant hadn’t just stepped off a spaceship, and neither had his partner. They were both bad guys, and bad guys always left trails.
“I wish I knew the answer,” I said.
Linderman pressed me. “You must have a suspicion.”
“I called every mental hospital in the country,” I said. “There was no record of the giant. As far as they were concerned, he didn’t exist.”
“Did any of them try to stonewall you?”
I shook my head.
“Did any of the mental hospitals stand out?”
“One did,” I said. “There was a mental institution in Broward called Daybreak that had been shut down after a TV news show exposed the horrible practices going on there. In the beginning, I focused on them almost exclusively.”
“Why?”
“Daybreak had a ward for the criminally insane, and I wondered if the giant had been institutionalized there. I spoke to Daybreak’s managing director and several doctors who’d worked there. Nobody remembered a crazed giant. I also checked with several Broward cops who helped move Daybreak’s patients when the facility was closed. They had no memory of the giant either.”
“Did you ever visit the place?”
“No. The place had already been closed when I started my investigation.”
“So all of the information you got about Daybreak was secondhand.”
“It was all I had to work with.”
“What about records?”
“I looked high and low for their records, but could never locate them.”
Linderman’s expression had turned cold. Most law enforcement agents did not deal well with bad news or hitting dead ends. He was no exception.
I waved as he drove off, but he did not wave back.
I got back into my car, and headed west into the far reaches of Broward County.
Suzie Knockman’s family lived in Plantation, a monied area of horse farms, high real estate taxes, and private schools. The Knockman address was one of the better zip codes in town. Which made their decision to hire defense attorney Leonard Snook all the more damning.
Everyone was entitled to hire an attorney; it was written in the Constitution. Only it didn’t make sense to hire an attorney when you hadn’t been charged with a crime. Yet that was exactly what the Knockmans had done.
I had seen Snook represent families of missing kids before, and I knew how he worked. His playbook went like this:
First, Snook would make the Knockmans circle the wagons and stop talking with the police. Snook would become the conduit for any communication between the family and the cops. All information would