Rainey with a Chance of Hale (A Rainey Bell Thriller Book 6) Read online

  “It’s five a.m. The snow will slow us down a bit, but if we’re on the road in thirty, we can be there by sunrise.”

  “I’ll be down in fifteen,” Rainey said, coming fully awake.

  “Dress accordingly, we’re in for negative temps today.”

  Rainey chuckled. “This adds a whole new level to being frozen out.”

  Hébert, in standard North Dakota form, answered, “It’s not so bad. You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to be here long enough to get used to it,” Rainey said without thinking.

  “Well now, Special Agent Bell, you should have thought of that while you were down in the sunny south and before you told your last supervisor to ‘lighten up.’ Care to piss off two in a row?”

  Rainey wasn’t about to let her career crash over a prank. She responded with a crisp, “No, sir. I’ll be right down.”

  After a harrowing drive up US Highway-29, even with an experienced North Dakota winter driver, they arrived just as the sun began to rise. The ruse for a visit was a verification of the whereabouts of all males in the vicinity the night of Alyson Grayson’s disappearance, but they really wanted another crack at Chance. In his previous interviews, he had informed them that his dad was in Canada on a short run and didn’t make it back until the afternoon on the first day of 1998. Joshua Hale left again before Alyson was reported missing and had been on the road until late last night.

  The polite knock garnered no interest from the occupants of the Hale home. The much more intrusive cop knock brought a woman wearing a turban and face cream to the door, where two freezing but smiling federal agents greeted her. She was tall and a redhead, judging by the curl peeking from the headdress. That’s about all Rainey could say about her, other than she looked unhappy to be answering the door at the crack of dawn.

  “It’s a little early. What can I do for you?” she asked, tugging the thick robe tighter against the cold seeping under the storm door.

  “Good morning. I’m SSA Hébert. Are you Jean Berry? I believe we’ve spoken on the phone.”

  “Yes, Agent Hébert. How can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Joshua.”

  “Wait here. I’ll get him,” she replied, in an accent Rainey recognized as originating in the Piedmont area of North Carolina.

  “Who was that?” Rainey asked.

  Hébert’s answer formed a trail of smoke, as he said, “Jean Berry. She works for Hale Trucking. That garage out back keeps their rigs on the road. Ms. Berry is here from the Carolina office to do parts inventory and accounting work for the shop. She does that about once a month. She has a private apartment and an office in the basement.”

  Rainey wondered why she hadn’t seen anything about Jean Berry in Hébert’s case notes, or why this was the first she knew of a private apartment. He seemed to read her expression.

  “This house was searched top to bottom. Alyson is not here.”

  “What did she tell you about New Year’s Eve?”

  “She wasn’t here that night. I verified with the home office in North Carolina that she drove up the next day after Alyson was reported missing. She answered the phone a time or two when I called to ask about Mr. Hale’s whereabouts. She’s usually a little nicer, but I guess it is early.”

  Rainey didn’t think Jean Berry was all that “nice,” having left them to freeze on the steps until Joshua Lee Hale came to the door.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hale. Sorry to knock so early, but you’re a hard man to catch at home. I’m Supervisory Special Agent Hébert with the FBI, and this is Special Agent Bell. Do you mind if we come in out of the cold to chat for a few minutes? It won’t take long.”

  Hébert managed an invitation to the kitchen and scored a couple of hot cups of coffee, while he cagily pried information from Joshua Hale. Rainey admired Hébert’s non-confrontational style and relaxed into the role of quiet sidekick. She mostly watched Chance, who reluctantly joined them at his father’s request. The redhead had not reappeared.

  “I got my logbook out in the cab of my truck. It’ll show when I entered the country from Canada on New Year’s Day,” Joshua said, as a way to back up his alibi. “I was on a run to Mexico City and stopped by the house for a couple of hours, then I was back on the road.”

  Joshua started for the back door when Hébert asked, “May I come with you? I’d like to see this truck Chance restored. I hear it’s something.” He turned back to Chance. “A ’51 Chevy 3100, five-window, right?”

  Chance only grunted, which Rainey was learning was his preferred response.

  “He ain’t much for conversation in the mornings,” Joshua said of his son, almost apologetically.

  While Hébert and Joshua Hale left to recover the trucker’s logbook from the eighteen-wheeler parked in the massive garage behind the house, Rainey was left with the insolent teenage boy. After nearly five years as a federal agent questioning cunning criminals, she knew how to handle the disrespectful, rebellious type. She figured Hébert had left her alone with Chance in hopes that a female could connect with the motherless child the counselor identified as in need of help. It didn’t appear to be working.

  Rainey stood and walked to the kitchen counter. She topped off her cup with fresh brew from the half empty pot warming on the coffee maker and looked out the window toward the garage. The snow fell heavier now. The grayness of the day delayed the sunrise. The glass in the garage’s oversized rolling doors glowed with the stark white light of the fluorescent tubes illuminating the interior. As Rainey turned back to Chance, she noticed on the counter a picture of the sheepishly smiling teenager standing beside his pride and joy.

  “The paint on this truck looks exactly like the original. That shade of green is hard to come by.”

  Chance opened his eyes to see Rainey holding the framed picture in her hand. He didn’t say anything, but at least she had his attention.

  She continued, “You did a great job on the woodwork. All hand-sanded and stained, I bet.” Softening her features and smiling not at him, but the photo, Rainey asked, “Did you do a wood floor in the bed too? I can’t tell from this picture.”

  “Yes.”

  Finally, she had drawn out a responsive syllable, and a whole word at that. Rainey leaped at the opening.

  “What’s under the hood, restored original or custom?”

  “Cust—”

  That was the last syllable Chance Hale spoke before the wall behind Rainey buckled with an explosive concussion. She noticed a split second of total silence, as if the sound was too loud to hear, then came the blast that sent her diving for the floor. The picture frame and coffee cup flew from her hands. The shattered windows showered the room with tiny shards of glass. Wood splintered into skin ripping projectiles.

  Rainey lay stunned on the floor, her ears ringing. As the air and disorientation began to clear, her instincts kicked in. She pushed herself up from the floor, grabbed the Glock from her waist, and went immediately into a defensive posture. She had no idea what had just happened, but it couldn’t be a good sign that snow mixed with bits of insulation floated into the kitchen through the gaping hole in the wall.

  She called out to Chance, who was under the table, “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  Chance’s eyes were focused on a hubcap that spun like a top not two feet from the now wide-awake teenager. Rainey thought he might be thinking about how close it had come to taking his head off. A small secondary explosion made them both flinch.

  Warily watching the door leading to the back porch for a foe and hoping for a friend, she tried again for a response. “Are you hurt? What the hell just happened?”

  Rainey saw the hatred in his eyes when Chance responded, not with concern for his father, but with absolute abhorrence.

  “That fucker blew up my truck.”

  Rainey was still a bit disoriented she thought. Maybe she didn’t hear him correctly.

  She asked one more time, “Are you hurt?”

  Chance answer
ed with a question. “If he isn’t dead, will you kill him?”

  “Not unless I have to,” she said, moving her eyes from the door to the teenager.

  “If I told you he was a killer, would it make a difference?”

  Rainey glanced at the door and then back to Chance, before she answered, “No. I can’t just execute him.”

  He gave Rainey a cold stare and declared, “I can.”

  #

  Later that morning…

  U.S. Border Patrol Office

  Pembina, North Dakota

  Rainey stood in the hallway, tilting her head from side to side. The volume of the constant ear-ringing increased and receded with the movement of her head. She had shaken much of the rubble dust from her thick curls and washed her face at the scene with water from a bottle offered by a paramedic. He had then carefully touched an antibiotic ointment covered cotton swab to the tiny lacerations peppering the parts of Rainey’s skin exposed to splintering debris during the blast.

  After a few minutes of repeated painful prodding, she had pushed his hand away and said, “Enough with the poking.” Apparently, the tone of her voice encouraged her early release from care.

  Less than three miles from the Canadian border, the closest federal law enforcement office to the Hale home belonged to the US Border Patrol in downtown Pembina, North Dakota. After giving her statement to the investigating agents from the Bureau’s district field office, the agents from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the local agencies, and the state patrol, Rainey had been asked to wait at the Border Patrol office. Before she left, evidence discovered at the scene suggested Joshua Lee Hale was, as his son had claimed, a murderer. Crime scene gossip said behavioral analysts were on the way from Quantico.

  Rainey was happy to leave the chaotic scene for several reasons. One, she needed time and somewhere quiet to think. Secondly, Supervisory Special Agent Hébert had been well respected and deeply loved by his colleagues across the various law enforcement departments in the area. As each arrived on the scene, their eyes questioned her with looks that implied Hébert would not be dead had one of them accompanied him to the Hale house.

  The investigation would find her blameless. She had followed her supervisor’s directive and remained with Chance Hale inside the home. A serial murderer took Hébert’s life. A wife lost her husband, children lost a father, grandchildren lost their Papa, the FBI lost an agent, and the people giving her strange looks had lost a friend. She didn’t resent their suspicion, but she was happy to be away from their mournful contemplations.

  She peered through the tiny window of the interrogation room door at the most compelling reason to leave the crime scene. Sitting on the floor in the corner, head resting against the wall, and still covered in dust from the explosion, Chance Hale slept off his hangover. Rainey had not forced him to stay in the room. He asked to be placed there so he could “just be left alone.”

  A border patrol officer, wearing a nametag that read Santee, said, “I’m sorry about your partner,” as he handed Rainey a steaming mug of coffee.

  “Thank you for the coffee,” she said, and then explained, “Hébert was my temporary supervisor, a good man who will be missed. I’ve only known him about a week, but I really liked him. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have split up.”

  Officer Santee pointed out, “Then you’d be dead too.”

  “I suppose so. Still, somebody must be blamed, right?”

  “I know what you mean. The higher-ups are going to want to know how he came across the border with all those women.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Rainey answered, a bit distracted by her own thoughts.

  “From what the crime scene techs found in his bedroom, they believe Joshua Lee Hale has been crossing the border with First Nations women from Winnipeg for seven years–one about every three or four months since he moved here from North Carolina.”

  Rainey stared at the sleeping teen on the other side of the door.

  Santee continued his monologue. “John Joe, uh, he’s with the state lab, he said there were trucking-style logs back to 1991 detailing each victim’s abduction—like he was picking up and tracking a load or something. He said it looked like Hale thought of it as shipping women down to Texas and Mexico. Good thing he wrote their names down, or we would have never known who they were. They’re bones by now, in a desert somewhere, I suppose.”

  Rainey sipped her coffee and watched Chance Hale’s chest slowly rise and fall with his steady breathing.

  Santee leaned closer to look into the window. “You ever see a kid sleep like that after seeing his dad blow himself up?”

  “He didn’t really see it. But no, I haven’t seen a child react this way to witnessing a parent’s violent death. Then again, people’s reactions to trauma are never predictable. Of course, since he apparently hated his father enough to want him dead, this might be the first time he’s had a decent sleep in a long time.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” Santee said.

  “He is also hung over and reeks of alcohol and pot. He could just be sleeping off last night’s indulgence.” She looked away from the window and turned to Santee. “Do you think we could get him something to eat? He might be more attentive with some warm food in his body.”

  Santee was already moving away when he said, “I’ll be right back. The diner on the corner makes a great cheeseburger. Perfect for a hangover.”

  “Sounds like the voice of experience,” Rainey called after him.

  “He’s not the first interviewee needing some grease to coat his gut,” the patrol officer said, as he grabbed the knob of the door leading out to the main hallway. “Can I bring you something, too Agent Bell?”

  Rainey raised the coffee mug in Santee’s direction. “I’m good. Thank you.”

  Rainey returned to staring through the little window and to wondering if the recently orphaned Chance Obadiah Hale was, in fact, the murdering son of a serial killer. She had not mentioned to Santee that in her experience most people who slept in an interrogation room were guilty of something. Alyson Grayson was still missing, and Rainey believed Chance knew where she was.

  “You should not have said that.”

  Rainey heard Hébert’s voice lingering in her head. He had chastised her after they met with Alyson’s parents.

  “Should not have said what?” Rainey had asked him.

  “You promised Mrs. Grayson we would find her daughter and the man who took her. First, you don’t know it was a man or that she was taken. Second, you don’t know we’ll find him or her. We don’t know who those victims are from the lake. Do you think some investigator told their parents they would find them and catch their killers?” He paused, but he really didn’t want an answer. He sent the message home with his next words. “Don’t promise heartbroken people things you can’t deliver. What you can promise is that we will pursue the case until we find answers and we will not stop. That, I can promise Alyson’s mother.”

  Rainey’s only response option had been, “Yes, sir.”

  Even with his warning, Hébert had believed Chance Hale had something to do with Alyson Grayson’s disappearance. Rainey agreed and vowed silently to prove it one day. She watched Chance’s chest rise and fall for a full minute. Assured he was sleeping deeply, she sat down in a chair just outside the door. She pulled out her notepad and started reviewing Alyson’s case from the beginning.

  #

  “Chance, may I sit with you?”

  Rainey closed the door and crossed the interrogation room to the table where Chance devoured the last bites of the cheeseburger Santee had delivered a few minutes ago.

  Chance swallowed. Squinted up at her and burped out two syllables, “Law-yer.”

  “Wow, such talent, and two syllables in a row. We’re nearly having a conversation now.”

  Rainey smiled and pulled out a chair. She sat across from him and flopped her notepad open on the table, exposing info she had on Alyson Grayson’s case that implicated Ch
ance—tire tracks to his door, names of witnesses who saw them leave together, Alyson’s fingerprints on the garage door and his restored Chevy—all proof she had been with him the night she disappeared. He had never denied Alyson gave him a ride home, but Chance claimed no memory once they arrived outside the Hale garage, where the ATV had been parked under the lean-to shelter, leaving behind wet tire tracks still visible on the concrete the next morning when her father came looking.

  Chance glanced at the notes and reiterated, “Law—”

  Rainey waved her hand to stop his rebuff. She couldn’t talk to him about the case, but she could watch him while he watched her.

  “I know, I know. ‘Law-yer.’ I’m not asking you questions about any crimes you may have witnessed or participated in. You have invoked your right to counsel, so no questions about Alyson or frozen bodies or your dad’s apparent crimes. I’m just here to keep you company. How was the cheeseburger?”

  Chance tossed the last bite into his mouth, smacked his lips loudly throughout the mastication process, and stared back at her with contempt. Without looking down, he flipped her notebook shut with the index finger on his left hand and intensified his sneering glare as he swallowed. Rainey pretended not to notice his tough guy routine.

  “Were the fries good? They looked good. I think there isn’t a better taste in the world than a good French fry dipped in thick ketchup. You know, if I ever have to pick a last meal, it’s going to have French fries and ketchup, maybe a double order. What would you order for a last meal?”

  Santee had delivered a supersized soda with the food. He said he figured the kid was probably dehydrated. Chance reached for the drink, rattled the ice around in the empty Styrofoam cup, and then proceeded to make dry sucking noises until he tired of his cleverness.

  “Well, I’ll be sure to get a big soda when I order the fries. Sounds like you enjoyed it as much as the burger.”