Little Girls Lost (Carson Ryder, Book 6)

by J. A. Kerley

  Squill sneered. “I don’t care if he stepped on his dick, Sergeant. The perception is that Ryder didn’t like the guy in his face and gave him the heave-ho.”

  “I didn’t try to hurt him. I barely touched him.”

  Squill stood. “Detective Ryder, you are officially off this investigation. In fact, until I decide what to do with you, you’re suspended.”

  “Sir, I respectfully ask that you review—”

  “Get out, Ryder. I’m sick of looking at you.”

  Nike lay on Sandhill’s couch, staring at the white of his ceiling. Sandhill had pulled a chair beside her and was holding her hand.

  “Jacy’s alive, Conner. I know it. I don’t know how I do, but I can feel it.”

  Sandhill closed his eyes. All he could feel was Nike’s hand in his own.

  Still, he said, “I feel she is too, Nike. Alive.”

  “But that little girl in the house, the one that burned, what happened with—”

  “I don’t know. I think something went wrong. Maybe she was … maybe we shouldn’t discuss this now, Nike.”

  Nike plucked a tissue from a box on the table, wiped her face. “Let’s talk about it, Conner. I’m scared numb and my insides feel like ice, but I need to talk.”

  Talking would probably do her good, Sandhill thought. Since Jacy’s abduction, Nike had been running on fear and guilt and the dark voice behind the heart that ceaselessly whispers, The worst is yet to come.

  He said, “You did an incredible job yesterday, staying away from the bad things.”

  “It wasn’t me that kept me straight, it was the cab driver. I wanted to fall into that dark hole and hide. He wouldn’t take me where I wanted to go.”

  “You could have gotten out and taken another cab, right? But you didn’t. TeeShawn Green got you past the moment of craving and you kept yourself safe. That took strength and resolve.”

  “I don’t have much left, Conner.”

  “Strength isn’t a limited resource, it’s self-renewing. You use it, you get more.”

  “I have to know, Conner—are the cops really doing everything? Turnbull’s got me thinking that maybe—”

  “Forget that yappy bastard, Nike. Turnbull’s a media junkie, Sharpton Lite. Whoever’s taking the girls is methodical, a planner, someone who selects his targets, then waits for the perfect moment. That’s what’s kept him ahead of us.”

  “What makes these people start, Conner? What makes an adult have fantasies about children?”

  Sandhill’s eyes tightened with controlled anger. “A mindscape from hell. A shrink might call it some form of psychological stunting, a huge displacement of sexual focus. Most sexual abusers of children were abused themselves.”

  Nike shook her head sadly. “Passing on the sickness. It’s … it’s like vampires.”

  Sandhill thought a long moment.

  “Vampires? Yes, Nike. As close as we truly come to them, I think.”

  There was a gentle knock at the door and Marie entered, her face heavy with fear and concern. When she saw Nike standing and talking, Marie managed a smile.

  “Nike, you ready to come to my place, get some sleep tonight, child?”

  Nike nodded to Marie, then turned to Sandhill. “You planning on getting some rest yourself, Conner?”

  “Sure,” Sandhill lied. In a little over an hour he and Ryder were going to the property and records annex to root through the physical evidence on Darla Dumont, the girl abducted last year. Groping at straws.

  The women walked to the threshold when Nike paused and turned to Sandhill. Her eyes seemed elsewhere in time, lost in a distant moment.

  “Listen, Conner, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say …”

  Marie seemed to hold her breath, looking between Sandhill and Nike. Sandhill furrowed his brow.

  “What?”

  Nike’s eyes suddenly looked no more than simply weary. “No. It’s nothing. We’ll talk about it later.” She turned away and started down the steps, wiping away a tear. Sandhill looked at Marie and raised an eyebrow.

  Marie said, “It’s Jacy’s birthday next week, Conner. She going to be nine years old.”

  Sandhill nodded; Jacy had spoken about it a couple of times.

  “That little girl’s birthday coming up next week,” Marie repeated, then turned to catch up with Nike.

  Sandhill closed the door, his brow knit in confusion, feeling as if a huge and indefinable presence had entered the room and licked the back of his neck, disappearing just as he turned.

  Chapter 34

  Sandhill said, “You sure you want to do this, Ryder?”

  “No. Which is why we’ve got to do it right now, before I think about it any more.” Ryder took the corner fast, tires squealing.

  “You’re on suspension, right?”

  “Squill blames the riot on me. Says I pushed the old guy off the stoop.” Ryder squeezed through a yellow light. “Maybe I did. But it was an accident.”

  “If you get found out, it’ll be …” Sandhill let his words hang in the air.

  “Squill’s not going to send out a memo on my suspension. The news’ll take a while to filter down.”

  Ryder whipped the truck into the parking lot beside the MPD property room. The near-deserted lot was desolate under yellow lamplight. Sandhill stared at the building and made no move to leave the car. Ryder got out, closed the door, bent to look in the window.

  “Something wrong?” Ryder asked.

  “I haven’t been here since the night I snuck in for the evidence. When I was tracking the guy killing the redheads. Trying to find that one detail, that one little arrow pointing the way.”

  Ryder looked between the building and Sandhill. “Given what happened that night, afterward … If you had it to do all over again, would you still do things the same?”

  Sandhill reluctantly pushed himself from the car. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the property building with a dark light in his eyes.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “You’d have stayed away?”

  “No,” Sandhill said, walking toward the building. “This time I’d make goddamn sure I knew exactly where every camera was.”

  They stopped at the door. Ryder pressed the buzzer and looked at the video lens set into the brick, letting the night-duty clerk see who was outside. He checked his watch. “Almost midnight. I expect Squill and his robocops are in beddy-bye, dreaming of hot lights and rubber hoses.”

  Ryder thumbed the buzzer a second time. The lock disengaged. Ryder pressed through the door with Sandhill on his heels. The property annex had a green-walled front section where a clerk sat behind a counter. Beneath the counter were file cabinets, and to the clerk’s left were security monitors. At the back of the small room, through a large door with red-lettered signs screaming NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE and NO SMOKING, was a rabbit-warren of shelves and boxes holding the detritus of crimes collected over decades.

  There were two points of ingress: the front entrance, and a locked steel door in the back, now with a much better lock than the one Sandhill had picked. The smell was the same as ever, he noted: a musty mix of tobacco smoke, burnt coffee and cleaning solutions.

  The eleven p.m. to seven a.m. shift was manned by a single clerk instead of two. Ryder muttered “shit” when he saw Leland Royce, a sixty-ish former street cop with a heavy dose of attitude. Ryder noted Royce hastily eject a videotape from the master surveillance console as they entered, sliding the tape beneath the counter.

  Ryder filed the motion under curious.

  Royce looked up, a stump of cigar in a wet, outsized mouth, his nose a webwork of veins. Fleshy half-moons bagged beneath rheumy eyes. Perched on the high stool behind the counter, Royce resembled a balding pear ripening into dissolution.

  “Lord, looky here—it’s Conner Sandhill. Somebody lock the place down.”

  “How you keeping, Lee?” Ryder said.

  Royce shifted his corpulence to break wind and looked past R
yder. “What’s Sandhill doing here, Ryder? He forget to steal something?”

  “Can it, Lee,” Ryder said. “He and I were hanging out when I remembered I needed to look at a case before tomorrow. We’re going back into the file room for a few minutes.”

  “No, Ryder. Not tonight.”

  The door buzzer sounded. Royce padded back to his work area and checked the monitor before releasing the lock. A man in a green uniform carried in a cardboard box with a surgical mask on it. He set the box on the floor and left, returning a minute later with a six-foot stepladder and a sheaf of brown paper bags.

  Royce slapped a pudgy hand on the counter. “You can come back at six in the morning, Ryder. Alone.”

  The uniformed man opened the box and removed several canisters resembling miniature fire extinguishers. Sandhill noted the logo embroidered on the man’s shirt: PestPro Industrial Pest Control. They watched him tuck the paper bags in his belt, then walk into the warehouse section, setting his ladder beneath a surveillance camera.

  Ryder nodded at the newcomer. “What’s happening, Lee?”

  “We get roaches in here, silverfish. Bigger critters, too, not that the fuckin’ roaches aren’t the size of shoes. Mice, sometimes a rat. Got to knock ’em back before they eat the joint up. This guy’ll set off some insect bombs and other stuff. Fills the property room with smog until it looks like LA. Works for six months and we do it again.”

  “You breathe in that stuff, Lee?” Ryder said. “The bug crap?”

  “Hell no. Shit poisons your brain. That’s why the back’ll get closed off.”

  Ryder stepped to the counter and watched the exterminator climb the ladder, a bag in his hand and a roll of tape at his hip. The exterminator popped a bag open and peeled strips of tape from the roll.

  Ryder furrowed his brow. “What’s he doing now?”

  “They gotta put bags over the cameras. So the chemicals don’t fog the lenses.”

  Ryder watched the exterminator slip a bag over the camera and tape it tight.

  “What do you do while the chemicals work, Lee—drink coffee? Nap?”

  Royce slitted his eyes and jutted his jaw. “Fuck you. I do bookkeeping. Filing. Catching up. I think it’s time I saw your sorry ass leaving out that door. And I think the chief’s gonna be wondering what you and Sandhill were doing here when I mention it come morning.”

  Sandhill shot Ryder a You’re sunk look and walked to the door. Ryder turned to follow, stopped. He looked at Royce’s work area behind the counter where his hand had been busy when they entered. The ejected videotape was tucked beneath a sheaf of papers. Ryder leaned across the counter and snatched the tape.

  “Hey, gimme that,” Royce said, grabbing for the cassette and missing. Ryder studied the video jacket; several young men in various stages of arousal cavorting in a pink-themed hotel room.

  “Tight Buns Party Boys Crazy in Vegas? This yours, Lee?”

  Royce turned the color of a ripe tomato. “That’s … a piece of evidence,” he stammered. “I just hadn’t got to logging it in yet.”

  “Sure, of course, that’s what I figured.”

  Ryder put the tape back on Royce’s desk and replaced the papers over it, like tucking it into history, maybe never mentioned to anyone.

  “We’re heading out, Lee,” Ryder said. “But could you answer me a couple questions first?”

  The clerk champed his dead cigar and studied the floor. “What you want to know?”

  “Didn’t you once tell me the cameras were never off? And that Property was never unattended?”

  “Four, maybe five hours twice a year? Never thought about it. What’s it to you?”

  Ryder frowned. “Same time during the year, or does it vary?”

  “You could set your calendar by them. What? You got rats in your fancy-ass place out on Dauphin Island?”

  Ryder didn’t hear Royce’s question; he and Sandhill watched the exterminator move his ladder to the next camera and prepare to blind it.

  By two a.m. Sandhill was home, slumped on the couch, nodding off in fitful bursts. With each awakening he paced the room, dark, lit only by a streetlamp through the window. At three a.m. he drifted into a dream edged with broken glass. He eased past the ragged shards and was in the central room of a shadowy cave. Tunnels ran in all directions, spokes from the hub of a wheel. When he walked toward one of the tunnels, the whole system moved with him; no matter how fast he walked he remained in the exact center of the room, the radiating tunnels neither an inch nearer nor an inch farther.

  He heard a small voice calling from a great distance.

  “Mr King, Mr King …”

  On the rock floor of the cave lay a huge wooden mallet, beside it an oaken spike. He drove the spike into the rock until its head was flush with the floor. He tossed the mallet aside and took a few tentative steps. The system didn’t follow him any more. It was pinioned in place, secured to something just below the surface.

  “Mr King, Mr King …”

  He put his ear to the opening of each tunnel in turn, trying to discern the correct path, somehow knowing the choice he made was the only choice he’d get. He heard echoes within echoes, sonic palimpsests.

  “Mr Ring …”

  The floor began to tremble, the rock chafing at the spike. Sandhill picked a tunnel and began running to the voice. The walls shivered and oily dust fell from above. Then, a light in the distance, a shimmering point of white. But he could no longer run, the floor now rippling like waves. He began crawling to the light, the voice.

  “Mr Ring … Ring … Ring …”

  A roar at his back, wood shattering like thunder, rock screaming. The cave tore loose and exploded in a fury of stone and glass.

  Ring.

  Sandhill opened his eyes and pushed wearily from the couch, his clothes soaked with icy sweat.

  Ring.

  The phone. It was in its usual place, the étagère by the window. The night outside was dead still, parked vehicles shining under streetlight. A car below had its sunroof partially open, poor judgment. Sandhill picked up the phone.

  “This is Sandhill.”

  The line was alive, but no voice responded. “Is anyone there?” he growled.

  Through the phone, Sandhill heard a cold click of metal, like the safety of a gun snapped off. He suddenly understood and spun from the window the instant a yellow chrysanthemum of rifle flame bloomed from the open sunroof. He felt his heart explode.

  Sandhill dreamed he was back in the cave, but this time there was no light in the distance, only a black wave raging toward his fallen body. It roared over him like a storm, and washed the world away.

  Chapter 35

  Rose descended the steps into the hurricane shelter, green flip-flops at the end of skinny legs with calves like grapefruit. He wore a scarlet Speedo and a sleeveless black sweatshirt. Rose studied the form on the cot.

  “I know you’re awake, Jacy. I put the camera in, remember? You were up and looking around a minute ago.”

  Jacy put her hands over her eyes and turned her head away.

  Rose said, “I’ve brought food, Jacy. And something to drink. Aren’t you going to talk to me?”

  Her hands pushed tighter. “I know what you are.”

  “What am I?”

  “A Minute Hour. Like in the Gumbo King’s story. I’m in your place underground.”

  “I’m a what? I’m your friend, Jacy. Come on, let me see that pretty face. Talk to me.”

  “I don’t have nothing to say to a Minute Hour. I want to go home.”

  “Come on, Jacy. Talk to me, please. You can even ask questions if you want.”

  One of Jacy’s eyes showed between her fingers. “Why did you burn that girl up in the fire?”

  Rose froze. “What?”

  “You’re the one taking the girls. You and the Picture Man from school. I heard the one girl burned in a fire.”

  Rose was unable to look at Jacy. “I—I think you’re just letting your imagination g
et away from you …”

  “Why did you burn that girl? You took her and you burned her.”

  “I just said I didn’t.”

  “People are supposed to take care of each other. Didn’t you know that? People help people, they don’t let bad things happen to them. They’re supposed to save them from bad things.”

  A voice in Rose’s head said, Save me, Rosie.

  Rose gasped. He stood so quickly his head banged off the roof of the shelter. He clutched his head and keened in pain. The faraway voice grew louder.

  Save me, Rosie … please

  Rose retreated from the shelter, climbing the ladder so quickly his flip-flops fell off. He didn’t stop to retrieve them.

  Norma Philips glowered at the radio in the bookcase behind her desk, reading glasses unable to contain the anger in her eyes. Tom Clay sat in a chair tugging at his tie and fiddling with his starched collar.

  “This is the way to run a city?” a male voice drawled from the radio, “The blacks gone to tearing everything up and the mayor just smiling and saying how she understands. These people gotta be put in jail if they can’t act right. The police are doing everything they can and it’s not their fault some people let their kids run at all hours. Somebody tell the mayor to wake up.”

  Philips raised her eyebrows at Clay. He said, “It’s talk radio, Norma. It’s for people who won’t write the newspaper because it wears their crayons down.”

  “Weren’t you the one told me talk radio was people saying what really pisses them off? It’s been like this all morning, people complaining about—” She stopped, another caller on the radio.

  “Yeah, I’d like to say this is what happens when the bleeding hearts get control. I saw the mayor on TV last night saying how sorry she was that the … Africans … was frustrated and how they should go right out and riot.”

  Philips said, “Dammit, I do understand the black community’s frustration. And said so. Three girls are missing, one’s dead. Dead!”

  Clay tented his fingers and pursed his lips. “I hate to second-guess, but maybe you could have been tougher on the mob mentality that took over.”