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She nodded with a soft smile. “Tell your mother I said hello.”
“Thank you,” I said in surprise. “I will.”
I followed the chief down a hall to a rec room that had a large screen TV and a pool table. Green shag carpet covered the floor. He gestured toward a faded brown sofa. I took a seat while he lowered into a cracked leather recliner that looked older than I was.
Chief Larson’s study was a total man cave.
“What do you know?” he asked with a sigh.
“I know Barry Sylvester called John Michael Stevens and told him you were on your way to arrest him.”
He pressed his lips together and directed a far-off stare at the wall. Finally, he said, “He nearly got a couple of my men killed.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“Never got a straight answer out of him. He damn near got himself arrested, but we smoothed things over. I fired him on the spot, of course, but we saved his family the embarrassment of his actions.”
“Which is why it’s not in any report.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
“So what happened after you fired him?”
“After the investigation died down, he left town, but his wife stayed behind with the kids.”
“Where’d he go?”
He shrugged. “Little Rock, last I heard. Got a job on the police force there.”
My heart stuttered. “Is he still there?” Was he working for the LRPD when I’d shot Dylan Carpenter? Was he the one who’d stolen the photo from my house?
“Don’t know. Maybe. I’m friendly with his ex-wife, but she doesn’t talk about him much.”
“Was Sylvester a good cop?”
The chief rubbed his face and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Yeah. One of my better investigators. No one was more surprised by what he did than me.”
“Do you think there was any way he was working with Stevens?”
He jerked upright, his eyes flying wide. “You’re asking if he was part of kidnapping your sister?” He shook his head. “No. No way.”
“He had to have some reason for warning Stevens,” I insisted. “It’s too random otherwise. Was there anything off with Sylvester? Had he been acting erratically?”
“Barry was having some financial issues.” He grimaced. “I mean, we don’t pay much, and his wife wasn’t working. His son had some medical bills and I know he felt overwhelmed by that.”
“So could Sylvester have tried to extort Stevens? Based on everything I’ve read, Stevens didn’t have any money.”
The chief shook his head again. “You’re right. He didn’t. Stevens lived in a shithole rental house and worked for the gas station on the edge of Jackson Creek. We figured that’s how he spotted your sister. She liked to hang out in the park, and he saw her with you and Vanessa.” He cleared his throat. “The guy was broke, and Barry knew it. There was no way he’d ever get money out of him.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “We’re missing something.”
“I know, but Barry never told me, and I questioned him multiple times. The only thing he ever said was that he didn’t think Stevens got a fair shake, which never made any sense. Sure, we went in planning to arrest him, but if the search warrant hadn’t yielded the evidence we needed to make the arrest, we would have been forced let him go.”
“What happened to the son with the medical bills?”
“I know that Jackie applied for Medicaid, but I think Barry ended up stuck with most of them. Jackie refused to let the boys spend much time with him. Barry lost everything because of what he did.”
So maybe he blamed Stevens for the loss of his job and his family. But if he was responsible for what was happening now, why kidnap Ava? Was the shooting last October the trigger that made him set all this in motion, starting with stealing my photo?
