by Gary Corbin
She looked Isaac’s way, and he ducked back out of her view. A few guys walking out of the facility’s front door stopped and stared at him. Isaac pretended to respond to a text message on his phone. After several seconds the men shrugged and walked on. Clusters of students across the street paid him no mind at all. But this street was far too busy. Somehow he had to maneuver her into a more secluded spot.
Like, the lot next to the field, where he’d parked his car.
The skinny kid ambled past, his nose buried in his cell phone. Took forever, but he finally turned and headed back toward the center of campus. Good. She’d be alone now.
He braved another peek around the building. Sure enough, she trotted, unaccompanied, toward the soccer field, empty except for a few idiots braving the heat, jogging around the track. But that put her out in the open, where anyone could see her—and him, if he approached her. He’d need to get to her before she reached the gate, without attracting too much attention. But how?
He slid around the building and along the wall as fast as he dared, losing ground with every step. He needed to keep her outside those gates. Then he remembered: the Porsche he’d “borrowed” from the dealership had one of those remote key fobs with the built-in panic alarm. He fished it out of his pocket and pressed the red button. He hoped it would pick up the signal at this distance—he’d left it in the shade at the far end of the lot.
The vehicle’s lights flashed, its horn blaring. The woman paused to look. He had to hurry—she wouldn’t stop for long.
But he was wrong about that.
THE BLARING HORN BLASTED Val out of her obsession with Isaac, and she halted her jog to determine where it was coming from. She spotted the vehicle, a fancy sports car, in the rear corner of the lot next to the soccer complex. Not a gold Toyota, like the kidnapper drove.
She sighed, a nervous release of tension. This car probably belonged to some spoiled brat—Robb McFarland, for example. No doubt Robb had pressed his panic button by accident, or forgot where he parked and didn’t care that his method of finding it disturbed others. She turned back toward the field, but stopped when another noise trickled in between horn blasts.
The sound of a baby crying.
Or, to be more precise, a toddler.
The realization hit her like the charge of an angry midfielder: the car was Isaac’s, not Robb’s. And the child was Jada!
Val broke into a run, heading toward the Porsche, her lungs heaving out steamy air with every step. The heat provoked even more rage and fear: the idiot Isaac had locked Jada inside on a 95-degree day, for God knows how long. He could have killed her!
Footsteps pounded somewhere behind her. Good—she’d have help. As she ran, she slid her backpack off her shoulders and unzipped it. The action slowed her down, but enabled her to search the bag for something to break into the car with. But its contents provided nothing of use: her soccer clothes, cleats, laptop, and a Spanish textbook. Nothing hard enough to smash windows or sharp enough to pick the lock.
She reached the Porsche, its horn blaring and lights flashing. The driver—presumably, Isaac—had left the windows rolled down an inch or two. The tinted glass made it tough to see inside, so Val peeked in through the cracks.
Sure enough, a toddler sat in the back. No child safety seat, just strapped into the seat belt, crying at the top of her lungs. Val recognized the girl from the picture. No doubt at all: it was Jada.
Footsteps thudded closer. Not wanting to take her eyes off Jada, Val shouted over her shoulder to the oncoming runner. “Help me get into this car. There’s a child inside!” She gripped the window with both hands and tried to push it down. It wouldn’t budge. She shook it, hoping to snap it off. No luck. She banged on it with her fists, then with her Spanish text, to no avail. She turned to plead for help.
The blow landed on her temple, and in a flash of pain, she crumpled in a heap on the pavement.
Chapter Fifteen
Tanisha Jordan arrived at Parking Lot D, outside of the UConn soccer practice facility, expecting to find Valorie Dawes somewhere in the vicinity. Maybe not in the lot, but perhaps on the field, or running laps on the track. Worst case, she’d be findable by phone or text. Dawes was young, but reliable. Not a quitter or a flake who’d freak out and bail at the first sign of trouble.
Jordan drove a snail’s pace, scanning the field at the same time. Nobody out there, and who could blame them, in this heat? She reached the end of the lot and turned to circle around. She stopped short when a skinny white kid in a polo shirt and shorts ran in front of her car.
“Watch out!” she yelled. Wasted effort, with her windows up and the AC on. She lowered the driver’s side window and leaned into the wall of heat that greeted her. “You crazy, mister?” she called to the boy. “You trying to get killed?”
“Sorry!” The kid looked worried, and not just from the close call.
The radio blasted a cacophony of static, reporting a burglary in progress across town. She turned it down.
“Are you a policeman?” the kid asked. “Er, police woman. Sorry.”
She badged him. “Detective Jordan, Mansfield P.D. You in trouble, son?”
The kid scurried closer, leaned on her car door. “That Porsche that just left? I think he took my friend!”
“What Porsche? Who’s your friend?” Alarm bells rang in her head. According to reports, Isaac worked for a car dealer and liked to show off by driving the fanciest ride in the fleet.
“Valorie—”
“Dawes?”
The kid nodded, surprise plastered across his face. “You know her?”
“Hop in!” Jordan unlocked her passenger door, attached her portable flashers to the roof, and switched them on. “Did you get a license plate? Description? Anything? Hell, kid, what’s your name?”
“Robbin McFarland,” he said, buckling his seat belt. He bounced back in his seat when Jordan floored the gas pedal, burning rubber out of the parking lot. “The car was a silver Porsche Carrera. Pretty new—2013 or ’14. Connecticut dealer plates, but I didn’t get the numbers.”
“You know cars?” Jordan honked her horn and zoomed around the slow-moving traffic.
“My dad has one like it, in green. The Porsche turned right, by the way.”
Jordan nodded and accelerated around the curve, blasting her horn to clear the campus streets of clueless pedestrians. A few, wearing headphones, seemed oblivious even to the crazy amount of noise she was generating, but she got past them without losing too much speed. “Did you get a look at the guy?”
“The driver?” McFarland said. “Not really. Kind of short and chunky, with dark hair. I didn’t see his face.”
Jordan grimaced. Could be Isaac or Rizzo. “S’awright. We’ll find him. How many Porsches can there be with a captive female student inside?”
The kid frowned. “Maybe a half dozen,” he said. To her startled reaction, he added, “This is a college campus, after all.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that.” Jordan radioed in the description to dispatch. At the edge of campus, she rolled through the turn onto Route 275, heading west, and floored it again.
“How do you know where you’re going?” Robb held on for dear life and his skin looked even whiter, somehow.
She grunted. “I have an idea who we’re after and where he lives,” she said. Right or wrong, it at least gave her a place to go.
“Are you sure I should be in here with you?” Robb asked. His complexion had already changed from pasty white to a sickly green.
“If you puke, do it out the window,” she said. “What else? Did you see him take her?”
McFarland clenched his eyes shut as she zoomed past a truck in a no-passing zone. “She approached the Porsche and yelled something about a baby inside,” he said. “The fat guy slapped her or punched her, and she fell. When I called out, she didn’t answer. I walked toward them, but I was at least a hundred yards away. The next thing I know, the Porsche is racing past me, and when I got to the
spot where he hit her, she was gone.”
“So you’re not certain that he took her.”
“Where else would she be?” He opened his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.
“Okay, okay. You mentioned something about a baby?” She reached the open road and stomped on the gas.
Robb nodded and squeezed his eyes shut again. “Apparently it was locked inside the car. On a hot day like this—”
The radio blasted again. “Suspect vehicle spotted traveling northbound at high speed on Stafford Road, near the Middle Turnpike,” the dispatcher said. “Patrol vehicles en route.”
“Copy.” Jordan glanced at McFarland, his skin as green as a Granny Smith apple. He was right—she couldn’t take him with her. “I’ll drop you off at the next intersection, at the fire station,” she said. “A patrol car will pick you up. We’ll want a statement from you. Shouldn’t take too long. ’Kay?”
McFarland sucked in a deep breath and nodded again. “Yes, please. Happy to. Sure.” Exhaled, loud and sloppy, eyes still locked shut.
Jordan smirked. They don’t make heroes like they used to.
VAL STIRRED AWAKE, her head throbbing. Something covered her eyes—cloth of some sort, wrapped around her head. The muffled moans of a child, the kind that signaled the end of a long, unsuccessful tantrum, cut through a loud hum of highway noise. She lay on her side in a cramped space, on a hard surface, one that transferred the impact of every bump in the road to her aching temples. Her abductor had bound her hands in front of her with a zip-tie, but left her legs free. The air felt stuffy and hot. The aroma of stale sweat—her own—filled her sinuses.
After a moment, she realized her predicament. Isaac had knocked her out and shoved her in the trunk of his Porsche. How long she’d been unconscious, she couldn’t even guess.
But she was alive. Jada, too, was alive—and in the car. That gave her hope.
Val worked her hands up to her face and pulled off the blindfold. Not much help—everything remained pitch black. She rolled onto her back and felt around her, discovered the glow-in-the-dark handle to the release latch. She could pop open the trunk, maybe, but then what? Jump out? Even if she survived the fall at fifty or sixty miles per hour, she’d get royally bruised up, possibly break some bones. Or the next vehicle that came along would run her over. Plus, Isaac would still have Jada, and God knows where he’d go from there. No, trying to escape that way wouldn’t solve anything.
But she couldn’t do nothing. Isaac wouldn’t let her go—Val had seen Jada, could connect it to the car, and to him. He’d need to make Val disappear. Permanently.
For the first time, real fear gripped her, for her own safety rather than Jada’s. Nobody knew where she was, or what had happened to her. Tanisha Jordan knew she’d been luring Isaac in, but what help was that now? She’d rushed in, as her uncle used to say, “where angels feared to tread,” and her carelessness had cost her. It would cost her even more dearly, unless she got out of this.
But escaping also had to include rescuing Jada. She envisioned the girl’s face, remembering the picture Rhonda had shown her, made real by the quick glimpse she’d caught of her before getting knocked unconscious. And by the sound of the child’s intermittent sobs that leaked through the seat between them. That image morphed against her will to that of her own 18-month-old niece, Ali, whom she loved more than life itself. Jada and Ali had never met, and probably never would. But they fused into a single identity in her mind: the face of joyous, hopeful virtue. A life just beginning, a soul too young to be subjected to the cruelty that lay ahead in Isaac’s hands. She would never allow that to happen to her niece, and could not let it happen to Jada.
Val sensed the car turning and slowing to a stop. The engine remained on, but movement up front shifted the Porsche’s balance, enough to notice. A metallic click startled her, and she realized that the trunk lid had lifted a few inches, allowing bright light and intense heat to pour in. She snagged a metal protrusion in her bound hands, preventing the trunk from opening farther. Her body shook, and she feared she might let go, but somehow, she held on.
A door slammed. Footsteps in gravel alongside the car grew louder, then stopped. Another click, this time a sound she recognized from her youth. On her tenth birthday, Uncle Val had brought her, without her parents’ blessing or knowledge, to a pistol range to teach her to shoot. She identified the sound: a pistol slide being racked to load a bullet into the firing chamber. Then a second click, that of a safety being released.
She froze again, her mind racing. Should she jump out and try to run? That seemed futile—he’d shoot her in the back. Or, should she roll to one side, in case he shot through the trunk? That struck her as unlikely, in such an expensive car—unless he planned to abandon the Porsche afterward.
She recalled the advice Uncle Val had imparted at the pistol range: when everything seems hopeless, get aggressive.
A pudgy hand gripped the bottom edge of the rear of the trunk, and the lid began to rise. Instinct kicked in, and she yanked it back down. A loud grunt preceded the sound of feet shuffling on gravel, and it sounded like her captor was leaning into the effort. The reason for its failure to open hadn’t occurred to him, apparently.
That gave Val her one opportunity to seize the element of surprise, and she took it.
She let go with her hands and kicked upward with both feet. The lid shot skyward for a moment, then shuddered to a stop with a loud thud, followed by a cry of pain. Apparently the spoiler had struck Isaac in the face. He stumbled backward and the trunk sprang open.
Val rolled to her feet and leaped in a single motion toward the falling body. With her hands bound, she resorted to her next-best weapon. The crown of her head crashed into the man’s forehead, her elbows pressed against his temples. They landed together on the ground with a loud whump, with Val on top. Sharp pain ran up her arms as her elbows crashed onto the pavement. Her forehead smashed into his, and this time she, too, absorbed some of the impact.
Her eyes dimmed, her head seemed to twirl in a dizzying motion, and her body weighed a thousand pounds. She fought nausea, tried to sit up or roll off of him, but her arms would not move. In the back of her mind, she heard a baby cry.
Then, blackness.
THE WORLD SPUN AROUND her. Blackness faded into bright red light through her eyelids. Men and women shouted. Footsteps pounded. Val’s head felt like someone had placed a two hundred pound barbell on it, and both arms ached. Someone touched her face—
Val’s eyes shot open. Above her, a man’s face. Latino. Round and tanned, with dark hair. Unfamiliar. But not angry or sinister.
A friendly face, even.
Her focus widened, and she took in more of her surroundings. She lay on a gurney, elevated a few feet above the ground. The man hovering over her wore blue scrubs and held a stethoscope to her chest. A paramedic, or a doctor or nurse. His hand fell away from her face, and she realized he’d been checking her breathing or her eyes.
The man smiled at her. “Well, that’s a good sign,” he said. “Can you hear me, Miss Dawes?”
Val closed her eyes again, took a deep breath. “Yes, thank you.” She propped herself up on her elbows. “Where’s Jada?”
“The little girl?” His smile broadened. “Safe, thanks to you.”
“Is our hero awake?” said a familiar voice. Moments later, the friendly visage of Tanisha Jordan appeared. “Welcome back to the land of the living, my friend. We were worried about you.”
“Still are,” the paramedic said. “In a few minutes, we’re sending you to the hospital. Are you in pain?”
Val nodded, which only made her head pound harder. “I have a horrible headache. Do you have any water?” She sat up all the way and accepted a bottle from another paramedic, sipping it while watching the crime scene unfold around her. Two uniformed officers tied yellow tape to trees, road signs, and shrubs to cordon off the area. Another officer examined the Porsche, its doors and trunk wide open. A man in scrubs tended to Ja
da in the back seat of a patrol car. A second cruiser held the slumped figure of Isaac Lewis, hands cuffed behind him.
“What happened?” she asked Jordan.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” the detective answered. “We found you lying on top of the suspect, both of you unconscious and bleeding. Don’t touch that,” she said when Val noticed the gauze wrapped around her head for the first time. “We figured you either beat him senseless with your forehead, or you had some amazing roadside hanky-panky.” She held up a broken zip-tie, indicated the red welts on Val’s wrists, and grinned.
Val glared at Jordan, vomit threatening to explode from her gut. “Ew,” she said, shaking her head. “You cops have some crazy gallows humor.”
“We’d better get her to the hospital,” the paramedic said. “Sorry, Detective. Your interview will have to wait.”
“Just one more thing.” Jordan squeezed Val’s shoulder. “Ms. Dawes, I just wanted to thank you. And, okay, I lied—there’s a second thing.” She fixed Val with a steady gaze and a slight smile. “You will make a hell of a cop someday,” she said, “should you choose that route.”
Val reclined back onto her elbows, her head still pounding. “If this is what it’s like, Detective,” she said, “let’s mark me down as ‘doubtful.’ At least, for now.” Then dizziness overcame her, her eyes closed, and she fell back to the gurney, unconscious.
Chapter Sixteen
Isaac broke in mere minutes under what Tanisha Jordan considered light pressure. He confessed to his role in the scheme and named his co-conspirators in less than an hour. In exchange, he received a slight reduction in sentencing and the proviso that they wouldn’t serve in the same prison facility. Authorities caught the Creole woman who’d posed as Rhonda’s mother at the Hartford train station, and her story confirmed Isaac’s.