by James, Ed
She tosses her passport into a trash can and pushes it right to the bottom. Something slimy slithers over her wrist, so she jerks her arm out. Sniffs it. Banana peel. Could’ve been a whole lot worse. She washes her wrist in the sink and catches her reflection.
Her natural dark hair is shoulder length, and she doesn’t have the time to dye it. They think it’s blonde from the wig, but she needs to change it, so she reaches into her backpack’s side pocket for her scissors and sets to work trimming her hair short. Real short. The bathroom sink fills up with hair and she gives herself another check. Long around the ears, but with a nice quiff she’ll need help to make stay up. It all works and she doesn’t think she’s made that much of a mess of the back either. She scoops up the damp hair and tips it into the toilet bowl, then flushes it away. A few scraps left in the sink, which take minutes to fully remove. The sink seems the same as when she entered—not exactly pristine, but it’ll do.
Next, her face. A pad takes care of most of the thick makeup, taking her skin back to its natural tone. Olive dulled to gray by the local weather.
She goes into her bag and pulls on the bright-yellow soccer jersey. It’s going to be cold as hell, but she doesn’t see a choice here. She tugs the sweater back on, and has another check in the mirror.
Goodbye Azra Gündoğan.
Hello Isabella dos Santos.
Brazilian student on a soccer scholarship. She’s not Layla anymore, not Azra or Luisa or any of the others. She tears into the hidden compartment in her bag and pulls out the Brazilian passport. Her last one. It’ll have to work. The money for her last gig was good, but it won’t stretch to getting another one.
She gathers her stuff together and takes a final look around the room. It’ll do. So she leaves the restroom and peers back outside. The fed presence across the road is diminished. No likely suspects inside, so she strolls up to the counter. “Hi, I just had my car stolen and I’ve lost my ID. I desperately need to rent something to get home.”
Five
KAITLYN
19:05
The main road is brightly lit, so I keep to the shadows as I walk along, hugging Ky tight, the makeshift shawl all I’ve got to protect him from the wind. But he’s still asleep through it all. God knows how; maybe the movement is soothing.
I stop on the corner and hug him even tighter, scouting ahead for threats and opportunities. There’s a bus stop to the right, one with a shelter. Halfway across the intersection, Ky wakes up and stares up at me. Those perfect blue eyes. You can see why they call them baby blue. No blemishes; they haven’t witnessed any traumas.
A police cruiser trundles along the street, slow and steady. I duck through a gate and hide in someone’s front yard.
Ky starts screaming and it’s like someone’s put a drill against my skull. I hug him tight and try to shush him, but he just gets louder and louder and louder AND LOUDER. I stroke his back, pat him, slow and steady. But nothing works.
I don’t know what to do here.
I can’t flag down the cruiser, talk to the cop, say I found this baby. They’ll ask way too many questions, pin this back to me, know precisely how and why I’ve done this. I have to keep going, I have to stick to the plan.
“Miss?” The voice comes from behind me. Loud, male, aggressive. “The hell you doing in my yard?”
I try to step back through the gate.
But something clicks. That familiar sound of a hammer being cocked, just like when I went shooting at the range.
“Stop right there.” In the pale light, an elderly man circles around me. Frail and white-haired, old enough to have seen service, maybe even in Vietnam. He’s pointing an old revolver at me, his liver-spotted hand shaking like crazy. “The hell you doing in my front yard?”
“Please, sir, I need to catch the bus.”
Ky screams again.
“That your kid?”
“No, I just stole it.” Enough sass that it looks like he buys it. “Please, sir, I need to catch the bus and get her home.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Jennifer. I’m a cleaner, working at a house down on Lake Washington Boulevard. I need to get the bus home, it’s due real soon and there won’t be one for another hour and my baby’s super hungry.”
“Huh.” The old-timer is still pointing the gun at me, but his eye’s twitching like he’s starting to come around to my side of things. “You think you can just step onto people’s property?”
I scan around, searching for anything I can use to persuade him to let me go. “The wind… It blew my scarf when I was retying it. It’s so cold and—”
“Think you can just walk onto my lawn to fetch it, huh?”
“I didn’t think, sir. I’m sorry. Please, I just need to get her—”
Ky’s scream is so loud in my ear, I can barely hear anything.
“You going to shut her up?”
“I’m trying, sir.” I jog Ky in my arms. Please, go back to sleep. “My lousy boyfriend was supposed to be babysitting tonight, but the dumb-ass went out drinking with a buddy. Left me a note. And I need to work, man. He says he’s between jobs, so I’ve got to pay for both of us and Kayla here, and it’s so goddamn hard.”
The guy lowers the gun to his side. “I hear ya.” He lets out a long snort. “You need a ride somewhere?”
It’s tempting, but he’s already a witness. I can’t let him get any deeper in.
“Thank you, sir, but the bus takes me pretty much to my door.”
He grunts. “Be on your way now, and don’t step on people’s property, y’hear?”
“Yes, sir.” I hurry off.
“Jennifer?”
I turn back around, my heart racing. “What?”
“You didn’t find your scarf?”
I reach into my pocket and pull it out. “Damn, it’s right here.”
“Huh.” He actually laughs. “Be seeing you, missy.”
I smile at him and scuttle off to the bus stop, twenty feet away, empty and dark. Ky’s quiet again, a soft cooing in my ear, his burning warmth against my chest.
Another police cruiser crawls down the street, so I duck into the shadows again.
A loud rumble comes from behind. The bus is coming!
I need to get on it!
Can I make it in time? Will I get caught? Even then, the cops will just pull the bus over and find the strange chick with the kidnapped baby. Over before it starts.
A loud noise tears out into the night and a black sedan hurtles down the road, more tire squeal than engine. Sounds like a spaceship taking off. Landon’s Tesla, rounding the bus and narrowly avoiding plowing into the cop car.
Is it Landon again? Might be his plates.
Assuming it’s him, it means he knows. Jennifer must’ve come back home early. Either way, one of them has called the cops.
They’re on to me.
Or it could be something else, some tech bro hitting his toy’s gas pedal too hard in a back street.
Woop woop, and the police cruiser shoots off after it, siren wailing, lights flashing.
I hug Ky tight and jog over the road, waving my free arm at the bus driver. He pulls up and I hop on the bus. Dude doesn’t realize he just saved my life.
Six
JENNIFER
19:24
Jennifer searches the empty crib again, like she can somehow magic up her baby from thin air. “No. No, no, no, no!” She starts tearing at it, pulling up the mattress and the sheets like a baby could get lost under it all.
But he isn’t there. Ky isn’t there.
Rosita is standing in the doorway, tugging at her long hair. Useless. Beyond useless. “Mrs. Bartlett, I am so sorry.”
Jennifer can’t look at her for long. “I received a notification on my phone saying you left my son alone!”
“For two minutes, ma’am. I’m hungry. I need to eat, Mrs.—”
“Rosita, you were smoking again, weren’t you?”
Rosita has her hands on her hips
. “Mrs. Bartlett, I had the intercom out with me. I didn’t think anything would happen to him.”
“Rosita, you can’t just leave him like that!”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bartlett.”
Jennifer knew hiring her would be a mistake, but she didn’t think it would be this bad.
“Ma’am, are you still there?”
Jennifer forgot she was still on the line with him. “I’m… What’s happening?”
“Stay on the line with me, Jennifer. You’re doing great.” The 911 dispatcher’s voice is soothing, like ten hours in a flotation tank.
But it’s not enough to stop Jennifer from panicking like crazy. “Some asshole’s taken my baby!” She can’t take her eyes off the empty crib.
“It’s okay, Jennifer. Police officers are on their way.”
“Make it quick!” She rushes through to the bedroom and tosses the cell on the bed. Then starts tugging at the party dress from that stupid-ass gala Landon forced her to go to, tearing the padding off her perfectly flat stomach. A thousand crunches a day, and what has that gotten her? She pulls on a T-shirt and some track pants—back to the suburban mom—then puts the phone to her ear again. “Where are they?”
“I’m just checking.” The dispatcher’s voice is syrupy, slow and soothing, deep and warm. “Okay, two units are just pulling up outside your drive now.”
Through the tall front window, the street is quiet. A car drives off, and the wooden gates slide open.
Jennifer’s cell rings again and she checks the screen:
LANDON CALLING…
“Ma’am, are you still with me?”
Jennifer stabs her finger on the screen and kills Landon’s call, then puts the cell back to her ear. “Sure, I’m still here.” She races over to the window and tries to wave at Landon, tries to signal him.
“Jennifer, the police are just pulling up in your street, okay? Can someone let them in to your property?”
“Sure, sure.”
Two police cars are down there, blue and red lights twinkling.
“And I need you to give them your full cooperation if we’re to find Ky, okay?”
“Okay.” Jennifer slumps back against the empty crib, and the tears start flowing. She doubts they’ll ever stop.
Seven
Chase
19:26
Chase stood between the huge gates and looked up at his brother’s mansion, the upstairs lights burning bright.
Hordes of police officers were searching the yard, climbing up the landscaped gardens to the old walls up on the top street. A dog barked somewhere. Then another, much nearer.
Jennifer was in the middle of the front yard, standing in the cobblestone driveway, staring hard at him. Then she turned away.
Chase took another look at the car on the street, in the middle distance. A turquoise Chevy, that electric model. The driver leaned forward and Chase recognized the face immediately. Marcus Edwards. Thick dark hair hanging down to his shoulders. Barely three teeth left in his mouth, some freakish condition where his adult teeth got stuck and never grew out. The Chevy pulled off in a wide arc and slid into the line of traffic snaking away from the house.
What the hell was he doing here?
Another cop car pulled up and two uniformed patrolmen got out, puzzled expressions on their faces. “Damn, Jimmy, just heard the watch commander calling in the feds.”
The FBI. This was serious, then.
“Yeah? Make our life hell, man. Still. Rich asshole’s kid goes missing, what are you gonna do? Way above our pay grade.”
Chase put it to the back of his mind and charged across the drive. One of the new cops stopped him. “Sir, you can’t go in there.”
“This is my brother’s—”
A roar came from inside. Landon charged out the front door, fists clenched, and stopped in the middle of the police scrimmage. He looked through the crowd, then stopped dead, staring right at Chase. Landon set off, a man with divine purpose, stomping across the cobbles. “Have you found him?”
A local Seattle PD sergeant, a big black dude with silver hair, stood firm against Landon. “Sir, we have yet to ascertain the location of your son.”
“Goddamnit.” Landon grabbed hold of Chase and pulled him into his arms. Tears lashed at Chase’s neck. “Bro…”
Shocked, Chase returned his brother’s grip. “Hey, I’m here for you.” He spotted Jennifer brushing past the sergeant. “Jen…”
But Jennifer couldn’t even look at him.
“That goddamn tree!” Landon broke free, coiling beard hair around a finger. “What’s the point in paying all that money for security if some lousy bum can just jump in? I knew I should’ve chopped it down myself.”
Chase grabbed his arm. “Landon, you need to—”
“Bro, get off of me!” Landon shook him off but didn’t go anywhere. “I need to find my son!” He charged past Chase and got in the cop’s face. “YOU NEED TO FIND MY SON!”
The cop was standing his ground, just letting it all play out. “Sir, we’re doing everything we can.”
“THIS IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH. YOU HEAR ME?”
The cop’s radio blasted out white noise. “Excuse me, I need to take this.” He stepped away, but his look suggested that Chase needed to calm Landon down.
Chase held his brother’s arm. “Hey, let’s you and me give them some space, huh?”
Landon stared at him like he’d just suggested jumping off of the Space Needle. Then he snapped out of it. “You’re right. This is…” He started crying, like when they were kids and he was caught stealing baseball cards from another kid’s bag at school. Afterward their dad had hauled him to hell and back. But this seemed even worse.
The cop was back, a stern look on his face. “Sir, we’ve completed a thorough search of the house and we believe that your son has been taken. That was my boss, and she wants to bring in the FBI.”
“The FBI?”
“They’ve got a unit, Child Abduction Rapid Deployment, who specialize in this kinda thing. They’re the best. If anyone can find your son, it’s them.”
Eight
CARTER
19:28
The courtroom’s security station was just off the entrance foyer, but had none of the grandeur of the rest of the building. Dark and windowless, it stank of broiling hotdogs.
Carter rested on the backs of the office chairs Lori and the security guard sat in. “Anything?”
Special Agent Lori Alves looked around at him. Ski-jump nose and manga-sized green eyes, her blonde hair tied in a bun. “Let the guy do his job, Max.”
The guard shuttled through the video from the sentencing, from Megan Holliday rushing off through to Carter spotting Layla al-Yasin in the crowd.
Who he thought was Layla al-Yasin.
Carter went back to pacing the floor, glancing back at the screen for any signs of progress. And saw none. “Son of a bitch.”
“Max, this isn’t your fault.”
Carter looked over at Lori. “No, this is entirely my fault. I should’ve caught her, but I let her out of my grasp. And Mason Wickstrom… He played us like a cello. To take on a lawyer and force us to build a case, to spend a ton of money on it, develop all those deals and plea bargains, just to plead guilty? All that time I spent with him in a room, his lawyer sitting there like a vulture, keeping him from speaking. All the times I offered him a deal to give up Layla’s whereabouts.”
“You ever think he didn’t know?”
“She was right there!”
“You think you saw her.” Lori ground her teeth. “That’s not the same thing as her being there and, it doesn’t mean he was in contact with her.”
“He must’ve been. That slimy lawyer…” Carter sucked in a deep breath. He always tried to keep his powder dry, but he was close to exploding here. “You got anything?”
The guard tapped the screen with his ring finger. “That’s as good as I’ll get.”
Carter leaned between them. He spotted hi
mself, up near the back, watching as his greatest hope—that Layla would show up—turned into his greatest fear, that she’d escape. He couldn’t see her on the screen, couldn’t justify that a large-scale manhunt had resulted in hauling in someone who very definitely wasn’t Layla. It was just a crowd of faces. “Play it forward, nice and slow.”
The guard nudged it frame by frame, each step was a three-second jump, maybe even five.
Carter used himself onscreen as an anchor point and followed his gaze from thirty minutes ago. “She was right here.” He circled an area on the screen, but he couldn’t quite make her out—just a blurry figure, like a ghost in some old hoax photo. He squinted at the screen, trying to resolve the figure into someone he recognized. “Another frame, please.”
It rocked forward and the blurry figure resolved into someone that looked a heck of a lot like Layla al-Yasin. She’d disguised her appearance, switching from the hardcore hacker into some vampish bimbo. Blonde hair, tight dress, heavy makeup that softened her skin tone. But definitely Layla.
The guard stopped. “Who is she?”
“Layla al-Yasin. She helped kidnap two kids. Boy and girl, six and seven years old. The boy died, and she kept the girl until the father killed himself.”
“That’s cold.”
“That’s one way of putting it. We have no idea where she was or what she was doing with the kid when she was away. Didn’t appear to be harmed, but…” The surge of relief was tempered by the bitter ache of disappointment at losing her again. Carter felt it gnawing away, right down in the pit of his stomach. “Play it forward and follow her trail, please?”
“Sure.” The guard inched the video forward, following Layla’s path out of the courthouse. She twisted her neck around, seemed to spot Carter, then hurried on, disappearing off the side of the shot.