Searching for Elaina

By Jim Schneider

Searching For Elaina
Book Three of the Pulaski Series
Leela Pulaski’s garden visit with friend, Georgia May, leads to a desperate plea for help in finding Georgia’s infant granddaughter, kidnapped a week earlier. The tragic story of the child’s mother and her subsequent suicide, ties back to a member of the Aryan Nations extremists killed by Leela during an attack on the Pulaski home in 1999. Georgia May believes Leela is destined to solve the kidnapping because of it. Meanwhile, Emil, the other half of the Pulaski team, is in Phoenix, tracking down Annette Van Zandt, the seventeen year-old, run-away daughter of a Coeur d’Alene family. Upon learning why the girl left home, Emil immediately cancels his contract with her father, and befriends the young woman, an act that will have profound consequences for the Pulaski family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387906956

Book preview

Searching for Elaina

Searching For Elaina

A Mystery Novel

By

Jim Schneider

Copyright © 2018 by Jim Schneider

All rights reserved: This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Searching for Elaina is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Also by the same author

Biography:

My Father’s War

Mystery Novels:

Lost Legacy

Diamonds to Die For

ISBN: 978-1-387-90695-6

Printed by Lulu Press

www.lulu.com/jamesfs

Acknowledgements

My wife Stella; companion, helpmate, and Chief of Grammar Police.

The Writer’s Group- Peter, Wang, Marty, Stephen and Janet, for the many hours of review, encouragement and critique.

Alan Hertzfeld, attorney, my editor.

Thank you.

Searching For Elaina

Chapter One

Saturday, September 22, 2001, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 1:30 PM

Leela Thayer Pulaski sat in the patio of the home she shared with her husband and business partner, Emil Pulaski, sipping wine with Georgia May, a classmate in the county’s master gardener program in which Leela had enrolled the previous April. Georgia was the wife of Alfred May, a successful real estate developer. She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Leela, still fairly attractive but beginning to lose her figure to an insatiable appetite if her consumption of the snack plate Leela had put out was any indication. Georgia smiled often, but the ever present sadness in her eyes seemed to belie any joy she might have found. They had become friends over the past several months and Georgia had hinted on several occasions she would like to get together with Leela in her home.

Georgia said, I don’t know if you knew it, but my husband is the one who developed all of the housing around you. I’ve never had a chance to see the old farm house, though. It’s beautiful. How long have you lived here?

I bought it in 1990, a few years before I married Emil. The owner was the daughter of the farmer who owned all this land. She’d lived here all her life.

Where is your husband? I’d like to meet him.

He’s down in Arizona right now. I expect him back tomorrow.

You’re detectives aren’t you, you and your husband?

A little wary now, Leela replied, Yes, we have a business called Northwest Investigations. I’m also an artist and work professionally at that as well.

You killed a man, one of the skinheads from Hayden, out in your driveway in 1999. A man named Henry Krauss.

Where are you going with this, Georgia?  Why are you asking? asked Leela, who was now becoming very alarmed.

I’m sorry, said Georgia. This must sound a little crazy. In a way, it is. I owe you a huge debt, Leela, one I’ll never be able to repay completely. Can I tell you a story?

Leela nodded and refilled the wine glass that Georgia held out.

Georgia said, Thank you. It helps. Do you and your husband have any children?

Leela shook her head, saying, No, neither of us does.

Al and I had a daughter, Alice. She was just seventeen in 1999. She was very pretty. She looked a lot like me before I started to fall apart, she said with a wry smile. Alice had boys lined up wanting to date her, and she enjoyed parties with her friends. Something she learned from us, I guess. In Al’s profession, it’s something you have to do. At any rate, she seemed to handle it OK. She kept her grades up in school and actively participated in school activities. She was our only child. After she was born, the doctors urged me to have a hysterectomy. They said a second pregnancy would probably be fatal.

She sighed and stared at the flowers under the lilacs for a moment. So that’s what I did. Alice didn’t disappoint us. She was easy to raise. Obedient - well, mostly anyhow, she said with a sad smile. She had a will of her own from the time she was six or seven. She was very popular at school. As far as we knew, she was never into drugs except for some pot once in a while. I’m pretty sure she didn’t use it very often. The smell is pretty persistent, you know? She seemed to use good sense about the boys she dated. Always home on time, no drinking, that sort of thing. Of course we tried to be aware of whom she was going out with, but we didn’t feel like we had to be looking over her shoulder all the time.

In August of 1999, she started dating Henry Krauss. We didn’t think much about it until little signs began to tell us this wasn’t quite as casual as her earlier boyfriends. We forced her to bring him to the house for dinner one evening so we could check him out. We didn’t notice anything remarkable. He was well dressed, not very talkative and perhaps a little arrogant, although not offensively so. The only thing unusual was his lack of hair. He said he’d done it on a dare a year or so before and had come to like it that way. On September 2, 1999, she went out with this guy to a party, supposedly at the home of a mutual friend here in the city. That was the day before you killed that son-of-a-bitch. She didn’t come home that night. Al and I were frantic. We called the police and were told the place where the party was supposed to have taken place didn’t exist. It was a vacant lot. They’d both lied to us. We filed a missing person report and the authorities did what they could to find her. That’s how we learned about what happened here the next night. You were badly wounded weren’t you?

Leela nodded, I don’t remember much about what happened after I was shot.

How did he die?

Krauss? He burned to death. I still have nightmares about it.

Georgia stared for a moment before saying, I’m sorry for what you had to go through, Leela, but I’m glad he suffered before he died. Six days after she disappeared, someone found our little girl lying naked in a ditch along a farm road in Bonner County. She was barely alive. Tears flowing freely down her face, Georgia continued, She’d been raped repeatedly in every way you can imagine. The police think she’d been held captive for those six days before they found her. Georgia paused to wipe away tears with her napkin and take a healthy swig of wine before continuing. Anyway, we took her to the hospital and it was touch and go for a while. The rapes had torn her up inside, particularly the anal rape, and she was suffering from very bad infections. It took two weeks to start getting them under control. Eventually, they were able to heal her body, but they couldn’t fix her mind. She didn’t seem to care. Leela, they turned her into a zombie. She wasn’t Alice anymore. She would just sit in a chair and stare at the wall. We had to spoon-feed her like a baby. She didn’t care if she ate or not. She was going through withdrawal from the heroin those animals pumped into her at the time and even that didn’t seem to bother her. At night, she would have nightmares, screaming and crying, and the only way she could get any rest was with some heavy-duty sleeping pills the doctor prescribed. A month later, we discovered she was pregnant. Once we learned that, she couldn’t even use those.

Oh, my god, Georgia, that’s horrible. Did you ever talk about an abortion? asked Leela.

Many times. Alice didn’t care, like everything else. She would just stare at the wall. Even Idaho would permit an abortion in a case like this, but we learned she was carrying a healthy girl and, by some miracle, it looked like she could go to term. I’ll be honest, Leela, at this point I’d given up on Alice. They’d destroyed our daughter. She was lost to us, a young adult without any capability of caring for herself. She was almost a vegetable. I wanted that baby, I wanted another Alice. Was that selfish of me? I still don’t know. Alice came to term in early May of last year and the baby was delivered by caesarian section. Her birth canal was too damaged by the rapes for a normal birth. The baby seemed healthy but Alice was totally indifferent to it. She pushed the child away when we tried to get her to nurse it.

Alice’s nightmares continued and we put her back on the sleeping pills again. Al and I moved the baby in with us so Alice wouldn’t wake her up every time she shrieked during the night. She wouldn’t care for her anyway. Last September, around the anniversary of her disappearance, we put her to bed as usual with a sleeping pill. Sometime during the night, she slipped into our bathroom and took the entire supply of sleeping pills back to her room. When we went to check on her in the morning, she’d been dead for about three hours. God, I hope my little girl found some sanctuary. Georgia paused while she struggled to get her emotions under control. Well, that’s what happened to my daughter. It’s not the end of the story, though, and it’s not the main reason I wanted to talk with you alone. I’m sorry, Leela, that must sound terrible. I really do enjoy your company and even if none of this had ever happened, I like to think we would still have become friends.

Leela reached over and laid a hand on Georgia’s arm. It’s OK, Georgia. You’ve been living in a nightmare. I understand.

Georgia replied, Thank you. I’m a little out of control. Would it be OK if we walked around a little before I finish my story?

Sure. Would you like a house tour?

Thank you. That would be wonderful. Could I see your studio, too?

Let’s go.

They spent the next thirty minutes going through the house and looking at Leela’s work in her studio. It seemed to relieve some of Georgia’s stress. As they approached the back door to the house after leaving the studio, Georgia paused and said, This is where it happened, isn’t it?

Leela nodded and replied, Would you like to hear about it? I don’t like talking about it, but in your case, I will.

Oh please, Leela. I know it must be unpleasant for you, but I desperately want to know how that animal died.

Do you want to hear the whole story – why we went to war with the Aryan Nation goons and what led up to their attack on us?

Yes, everything.

Let’s walk while I talk. This will take a little while. As they slowly strolled down the long driveway, Leela took her back to the 1944 plane crash with its cache of diamonds and their discovery by a local writer in 1998. The writer, Bill Clifton, was murdered that same year and the diamonds were stolen from him. The guy who did it, Warren Caufield, struck a deal with Richard Butler’s people to fence the diamonds for him, a few at a time. We’d been hired by the writer’s parents to find the killer of their son, and as our investigation got closer to Butler’s organization, they started to push back. It started with an attempt to work Emil over with baseball bats that ended up with one thug dead and another badly wounded. Emil wasn’t hurt. A day or two later, they snuck in while we were gone and planted a bomb in my car. Fortunately, we found it before it went off. So by the time the attack took place on our home, we were expecting trouble and were prepared. Leela explained who their guests were on the night it happened. Dan Jablonski is a retired policeman from Spokane who frequently works for us and Anna Mauser, now his wife, is a retired nurse. We’d been sitting in the patio, just as we’ve been doing today, when I took Anna inside to show her more of the house. Emil heard a motorcycle coming down the driveway and told Dan to get Anna and me under cover. He grabbed a shotgun he had stashed just inside the door to the patio and headed around the side of the house just as the guy on the motorcycle unloaded a whole magazine from his machine pistol into the kitchen and the sunporch you see over there. When Emil reached the driveway, the man on the motorcycle had just put a fresh magazine in his gun and started back for another run. Emil shot him in the head and killed him.

Just as Emil shot the guy, I stepped out of the kitchen doorway and saw Krauss running towards us with what they call Molotov cocktails, bottles of gas with a burning rag stuffed in the top, in either hand. Like my husband, I was armed, and I opened fire on him. I think I must have fired three times when I hit one of his hands, shattering the bottle of gasoline all over him and setting him on fire. He fell and the other bottle shattered as well, turning him into a torch. I think I remember his screaming, but about this time a third goon opened up with a machine pistol from the end of the driveway. I was hit twice and things are pretty hazy after that. Dan shot the third guy, wounding him badly. He was the mastermind behind the attacks on us. He died the next day in Spokane at a hospital where he went for help. If Anna hadn’t been here to plug up the holes in me, I probably would have died as well.

Georgia said, My god, Leela, I had no idea. I can see why you don’t like to talk about it. What happened to the guy who murdered the writer?

Dead. I can’t talk about that part of it. The diamonds are back with their rightful owner.

And the Aryan Nation is no more.

Not really, Georgia. They’re bankrupt and they’ve been forced to move on, but they’re not gone. As long as people can hate, they’ll be around. If you turn over enough rocks, you’ll find them. In fact, Butler himself still lives in Hayden, although he has nothing of his little empire left. You realize, I suppose, that they’re almost certainly the ones who did that to your daughter.

Yes, we know that. The police told us, but knowing it and proving it in court are quite different. Alice was no help in identifying anyone. I told you what she was like. She didn’t even seem to care.

Well, at least we took some of them off the street. I don’t like violence, Georgia, but these pigs have to be stopped. Your story will make me sleep a little easier about killing Henry Krauss.

Have you ever had to do it before – kill someone?

Leela looked at her for a moment before answering. Yes, one other man.

Weren’t you frightened? I’d be completely terrified.

The first time, yes, I was scared out of my wits. I was just running on what Emil taught me to do. Krauss was different, though. I was angry. Incredibly angry. I had no compunction about shooting him. I’m glad I didn’t step over the line and commit a criminal act because I was totally out of control.

I think I can understand that. For a long time I used to fantasize about killing the men that raped Alice. I mean murdering them, intentionally seeking them out and killing them in the most horrible way I could think of. She laughed softly. Of course it’s a big step from dreaming about it and doing it.

Not as big as you might think, Georgia. Be careful of what you fantasize about. It can lead you into a disaster.

I’ve never met anyone like you before, Leela. On the outside, you’re attractive, beautiful even, artistic, intelligent and interesting. On the inside, you’re as hard as a diamond. I could never do what you do.

Leela laughed out loud. Thanks, I think. It’s sort of a niche profession. Not many do what we do. Uncomfortable with the direction their conversation was drifting, she said, Let’s go back to the patio and you can finish your story.

Leela opened another bottle of wine and topped off their glasses. Hold on and I’ll grab some more cheese and crackers from the kitchen.

By the time she returned, Georgia had almost emptied her wine glass. She helped herself to some cheese and a couple of crackers, gobbling them down in two bites. She saw Leela watching her and said, Ever since we got Alice back, I’ve had this compulsion with food. The doctors say it’s something like PTSD that soldiers get in combat.

Well, you’ve sure been through some pretty heavy trauma, there’s no question about that.

I’m trying to get it under control. It’s better than it was six months ago.

How is your husband dealing with all of this?

We don’t talk much anymore. He’s just retreated into himself. His business is going to hell and he won’t do anything about it. I’m frightened of what’s happening to us.

Leela shook her head saying, "You should be, Georgia. That sounds really serious. Are both of you seeing a counselor or a psychiatrist?

I’ve been talking to a counselor from the beginning. I finally talked Al into seeing a psychiatrist just two days ago. His first appointment is on Monday.

Don’t let him skip it. Stay on his case until he goes, you could lose him if you don’t.

Believe me, I know that. Things are incredibly fragile right now. After Alice, well, after we lost her, both Al and I turned to the baby, Elaina Alice May. It’s like we’d been given a second chance, another Alice. She’s a happy little girl, just now starting to take a few steps and beginning to utter sounds we’re sure are words. Well, I am anyhow. One week ago today, I was out working in the garden while the baby took her afternoon nap. Al had gone to his office to try and untangle some of the problems there. Two hours later, I went in to check on her. She was gone. Someone had broken in our home and taken her away.

Leela could see her on the verge of losing control. She laid a hand on Georgia’s arm, saying, Slow down, hon. Take a deep breath and give it a rest for a minute. We heard about the kidnapping on the news, but they didn’t have any details. I guess I didn’t pay close enough attention because I hadn’t associated it with you.

Georgia nodded, See what I mean? You’re so tough, Leela. I’m glad I have you to talk to. She took another healthy sip of her wine and Leela made a note to herself to take Georgia home rather than let her drive herself.

Georgia continued, I was frantic. No, more than frantic, I was hysterical. The first thing I did was call my husband. It took him a while to get me calmed down enough to even understand what I was talking about. As soon as he did, he told me he would call the police and then be home within ten minutes. The police were there before Al. Lots of them. They went door to door looking for anyone who might have seen something and they went through the house with a fine tooth comb, looking for anything that might help. A day later, FBI agents showed up and did the same thing all over again. They interrogated my husband and me like we were suspects ourselves. We have wire taps on our phones now in case someone calls demanding ransom, but nothing has happened yet. We’ve had TV reporters interviewing us, newspaper people, weirdos, you name it, they’ve been there. But no one has found our baby, Leela. No one. I’d like for you and your husband to go to work on it. Have you ever worked on a kidnapping before?

No, I haven’t, but Emil has. He was an FBI agent for seventeen years before an accident forced him to take a medical retirement. He may have done more after he went private, I don’t know. He worked on a lot of cases before I met him.

Would you do it? I know the authorities are doing everything they can, but nothing is happening.

I’ll have to discuss it with Emil when he gets home tomorrow and then we’ll need to sit down with you and your husband before we make that decision. Frankly, I’m not at all sure we can do you much good. It sounds like all that can be done is being done right now. We usually step in after a case has gone cold.

Will you at least talk to us and take a look at it?

Yes, I can promise you that much, Georgia. It will probably be Monday before you hear from us. Emil won’t be home until late afternoon.

Thank you, Leela. I knew I could count on you.

Georgia, you’re not listening. We’ll come and talk to you, but from what you’ve told me, it seems unlikely that we’ll take the case at this point. We’d just be taking your money for nothing, and we don’t do that. Do you know who the lead investigators are for the agencies working on it right now? We’ll probably talk with them before we meet with you.

Georgia seemed to ignore what Leela had just told her, and answered her question, The city policeman in charge is George something – a Hispanic last name I think.

George Lopez?

Yes, that’s him. Do you know him?

Yes, he’s a damn good cop. You’re in good hands. What about the sheriff’s office?

They’re involved, but I think the city police are in charge. The person from the sheriff’s office is a young black woman.

Susan Jones?

Yes, she’s the one. I think the FBI guy in charge is Simpson.

Not someone I know. We’ve worked with both Lopez and Jones before and they both know what they’re doing. The FBI can be a little problematic but Emil knows how to deal with them.

You’ve already made me feel better. I know I’ve taken up a lot of your afternoon, Leela, but would you mind terribly if I stayed a little longer? No more stories, I promise. I like being around you and listening to you takes my mind off my own problems. I guess I need to stop slurping down your wine, too, or I’m going to feel like hell later.

Sure, I don’t have anything on the schedule today. Would you like some coffee?

Yes, please. Can I help carry some of this stuff inside?

That would be nice. Would you like something a little more substantial than cheese and crackers to eat? I could whip us up an omelet in short order.

They were soon seated in the breakfast nook at one end of Leela’s spacious kitchen, eating a late lunch and drinking coffee. Leela found herself telling the story of how she met Emil and their early days together. Georgia laughed with some joy this time, saying, That’s so romantic. Did you really know he was the one the first time you saw him? I mean, really know?

I swear to you, it’s the truth. I’d never felt like that about a man before in my life, nor have I since. I knew as soon as I saw him I wasn’t going to let him slip away. I wanted him in my life, in my bed, whatever. Fortunately, he seemed to feel the same way. It’s never stopped. Not for either of us.

What about the detective business. How did you get drawn into that?

"That happened during the Bradford case when I met him. We were married by then and one day he asked if I’d like to do a drive by of the home where a suspected murderer lived. He thought the guy might be getting ready to run. He’d already taught me how to use a gun to protect myself so I felt pretty confident. I ended up driving right past the guy