It took most of a half hour to find Deputy Spiesz’s home. This worked in my favor, since he’d gone to lunch late. I could have just followed him from the station, but didn’t want to risk being seen. 

So I waited and tried to find the place on my own. 

Addresses in the phone book don’t come with directions. You have to use a map for that. Although, use of a map when the address says “East” but the street is on the west side of town requires mental acuity. Or a personal knowledge of the settlement history. Both of these were available from the diner, along with food to fuel my brain.

Rubbing my temples provided little relief for the dull headache. My brain was good and dried up from not eating, and the bouncy ball conversation with Bilbo the Gambler had addled my thoughts. 

I parked next to the idle equipment of a road crew gone to lunch and mimed bringing a sandwich to my lips, keeping an eye on the idle machinery. Sometimes road construction can be useful. Pretend eating is never useful. A rumbling growl from my stomach punctuated this truth.

The stakeout gave me an opportunity to call my lawyer. He wasn’t home. You can’t get a continuance if your lawyer doesn’t answer the phone. And he won’t call you back if his answering machine claims, “Mailbox full,” with no way to leave a message. 

It took five seconds of prideful consideration to shelve the idea of calling Nansi and begging her to get a hold of him. Before I could properly humble myself to the task, Spiesz popped out of the house with the frenzied energy of a wild badger and scurried into his deputized Ford Expedition.

He pulled out of the drive. I let him gain some distance and followed.

Spiesz twisted and turned through town like a cop searching for something out of place. As we jabbed and parried the streets of Eureka, I wondered if I’d been made. The problem was, he knew these routes much better than I, and hanging back to avoid detection would surely lose him.

By the time we finished our little maze of back alleys, Spiesz landed us on the backside of Lorna’s house.

I didn’t recognize it at first.

Until Lorna answered the back door. She appeared as coy and sensuous as she had earlier, only with a few more clothes on her back. Obviously, it wasn’t my particular brand of masculinity that turned her crank. They went inside.

I waited. Thoughts of the traumatized little girl danced around my brain like wood fairies. Images of her tiny figure navigating the nighttime forest haunted my soul. My brain overflowed with the burned-in snapshot of her form tucked into the corners of the greenhouse, while her father lay dead with a pitchfork protruding from him like the mast of an abandoned ship.

The urge to go inside and rescue her from this lunacy burned hot.

My hand was on the door handle when Spiesz appeared out of nowhere and caught me spying.

“Hey there, Mr. Pierce.” 

My chest might have thumped the steering wheel the way my heart jumped inside.

“Odd place to park, ain’t it?” he asked with a vague innocence.

“It is?” was all I could muster without exposing the loss of breath and thwacking sound of my ticker.

His stupid stare began to put me at ease. “Maybe I could help you find what you’re looking for?”

It might be a trick question. Spiesz’s fortuitous appearances didn’t align with the presentation of imbecile deputy. 

My mind whirred rapidly through a list of reasons I happened to sit precisely where he happened to stop. Was I spying on Lorna? That made me look like a double-dealing detective. Was I looking for another suspect and got lost? That one required the name of said suspect, or at least enough information to validate their existence. Could work if Spiesz was as dense as old growth mahogany. He could also be some sort of savant who could tell you the house number of every place in town. Tell the wrong story and get a ticket on the train out of town.

“I expected the Sheriff to show up at Lorna’s.”

“Sheriff de Lude?” Spiesz twisted his confused look into skepticism. “Why now, would Sheriff turn up at Lorna’s back porch?”

“You did,” I blurted, the words escaping before my teeth could stop them.

His eyes showed a glimmer of suspicion.

“He’s working the case and her daughter is at the center of it.”

The deputy contemplated this with a turn of his head. “Maybe.”

“Think about this,” I said. “Somehow the ability to kidnap and move children through the county and into Canada occurs with no one the wiser. How does that happen? The sheriff doesn’t strike me as a stupid man. It hardly seems possible that Aidan Peale was the mastermind behind a human trafficking ring. Despite his intelligence and considerable means, the periodic bouts of delusional fancy would surely derail the necessary logic to manage that.”

The deputy looked off into the trees. He nodded absentmindedly.

My speculative suspicions about the sheriff required the considerable intellect I’d just described. If Deputy Spiesz could process what I was saying, it put him in the frame quite nicely, as well. Of course, my ramblings on about Sheriff de Lude might be true. But, I supposed de Lude’s lack of attention to the child’s fate had more to do with the overwhelming nature of his wife’s illness. Such a thing can tip the balance for any man, regardless of his oath to protect and serve. Even if Kayla might be of special importance to him, that he would never go out of his way to hurt her, a distraction like a dying spouse could easily bend him off true north. Be that as it may, I imagined his reasoning went more toward the belief that Lorna allowed Aidan to keep the girl, so she could throw him under the bus for it later. All that aside, right now, I needed to push Deputy Spiesz a little further from the idea that I was following him, so I kept the story going.

“Why would the sheriff let the little girl go so long without knowing where she was?” I grimaced, hopeful he’d buy what I was selling. “Unless he did know. If he coordinated the supposed illegal adoption on Aidan’s behalf he would know that Kayla Peale was all right, that she was just safely under her father’s care, waiting to complete the transfer.” The irony of that statement almost broke me out of character, and I barely controlled a visible wince.

The bewilderment of misfired synapses furrowed his brow as he tried to make sense of my story. “It all sounds rather handy and all.” Somehow it came together for him. Spiesz switched his confused gaze back to high beams. “Now,” he said, “I been working with Sheriff de Lude for a good bit. It’s hard to shape him into that kind of a person. I don’t claim to be bright or able to suss out these kinds of things. But I reckon I’d see some sign of bad behavior.” He peered at me with a brand of skepticism reserved for the foolish. “Don’t you think, Mr. Pierce?”

“That makes a good point. I’m grasping at straws here.” I rubbed my forehead in frustration, and act of retreat for the deputy’s sake. “I figured to keep an eye on the Sheriff’s activities a bit. Try to make sense out of the whole damn mess of confusing facts. It was a theory. But you’re shooting it full of holes.”

I cranked the Tacoma’s engine. “A cup of coffee and a sandwich might help me rethink this. Get an angle that has traction.”

“Wish I could offer a bit more help,” Spiesz said with a forlorn smile. “Don’t seem right that your sister got all hung up in this.”

“I appreciate that, Deputy,” I said, thinking, maybe you could tell it to the judge. Get her out of jail.

He gave the door frame of the Tacoma a slap. “I’ll let you know when you can meet with my friend. It might be a day, so don’t get antsy. I’m headed over to Libby as a trial witness,” he said, with a confused look, as if trying to recall the reason for the trial.

I watched him in the rearview, looking for signs of intelligence in his gait. A foolish exercise that I shook off. Whatever bothered me about the curious Deputy Spiesz was unlikely to show up in the way he walked. Not after the years he’d taken to practice it, if in fact it was a con. He wasn’t right in the head, for sure. Just how he was broken aroused the mystery.