by R. H. Herron
Fumbling with her keys in her pocket, she pressed the fob so hard she heard her car relock. It was lucky she hadn’t hit the PANIC button.
She was losing it.
In just a block’s radius from where his car was parked, there had to be more than eighty residences. Old Victorians stood skinny and tall, each broken into eight or more units. Next to them sprawled apartment buildings holding dozens more. She couldn’t knock on every door.
She couldn’t do anything except stand here, completely helpless.
Kevin’s house was seven minutes away.
As she started the car again, heading for Kevin’s house, Jojo’s phone rang.
“Pamela, it’s Laurie.” She balanced the phone between her shoulder and chin as she strapped in. “I’ve got Jojo’s phone.”
“Oh, thank God. I tried calling you first. Have you heard anything?”
“Not yet. I’m so sorry.”
Pamela’s voice sounded like it came over a string laced into a tin can. “She’s gone. I can feel it.”
“No, don’t—”
“She’s gone. That man—Kevin Leeds—is out, and he knows where she is, and it’s not fair—none of this is fair. . . .”
“We’ll find her.”
Pamela said nothing. She just sobbed.
As she drove, Laurie set the phone on speaker and listened to Pamela cry. In the background she heard another snuffling noise. Andy. Both of them, sobbing on the open line.
“I’m here,” Laurie said as she turned onto Ninth. “I’m here with you.”
“You’re not,” Pamela finally managed to whisper as Laurie pulled up in front of Kevin’s house. “No one is.”
Laurie got out of the car and headed for the door, keeping the phone to her ear. “We’re doing the best we can. I’m following a lead right now.”
Kevin Leeds’s front door stood open.
Something was wrong.
“I’ve got to call you back.” She disconnected and stepped inside the house. “Hello?”
There was no answer. “Jojo? Kevin?”
She saw something glint on the hall runner—glass, shattered. Lots of it. “Shit.” She should call for backup, but by the time they got here, she’d have found whoever might be here. And who would come, exactly? How could she trust whoever might show up?
Inside, the house was trashed. There was barely a solid thing left. Fear spiked in the back of her head, and she drew her gun. She yelled into each room before she cleared it. She kept her finger off the trigger, just barely—what if she surprised Jojo? Or Kevin? Laurie looked into every closet, under every bed. There was shit in the carpet and urine soaked a shredded couch. This wasn’t the work of just one person. Two or more people had to have created this carnage.
But she found no Kevin.
Worse, no Jojo.
Desperately, she holstered her gun and punched Kevin’s number on Jojo’s phone. It rang with no answer. She sent a text. Where are you both?
Where are you?
Answer me, goddamn it!
Sweat slicked her skin. Her clammy hands shook badly. She dropped the phone into a mixture of something that looked like flour and smelled like cinnamon and shit. Not caring, she wiped it on her pants.
She went into the backyard, and her heart, already so wobbly, almost stopped.
The grass was ripped, the ground muddy. A mattress and box spring sat in the middle of the yard. Toward the gate, which still stood open, the earth was flattened and smoothed, as if something—or someone—had been dragged out and away. Dirt trailed down the concrete path that ran along the side of the house.
There’d been a struggle. If Jojo had been here with Kevin, one or both of them had been dragged away.
FIFTY-SIX
LAURIE RAN OUT Kevin’s open gate and raced to the yellow house next door, tripping over a potted geranium, catching herself on the iron porch rail. She banged on the door and rang the bell and yelled, but the house was dark and closed.
The green house on the other side, then. She did the same, and this time the door was pulled back slowly. The resident left the iron screen door closed.
“My daughter! Did you hear anything next door? Did you see anything?”
But the older woman hadn’t heard anything. She tugged on the single earring she wore. “I was watching the news. Hearing’s not good. Volume up high. You know that guy next door? You know what he did?”
Laurie didn’t bother answering.
It didn’t matter how Omid felt, it didn’t matter whether he was up to this or not. She needed him.
In her mind, as she sped through the darkening streets to the hospital, she could see only one image: Jojo’s overalls. When she was five, she’d driven a nail through her thumb while helping Daddy with carpentry. It wasn’t a big deal. The nail had jumped, and it had gone clean through the fleshy part. Jojo, of course, had pulled it out and bled all over her new overalls. They’d taken her to urgent care, and it had needed just cleaning and a bandage, not even stitches.
That night, though, Laurie had held up the overalls before dropping them into the washing machine, and she’d seen, for what felt like the first time, the sheer amount of blood that covered them. How could there possibly be so much blood—how was there any left in her tiny daughter?
In that moment at the washer, Laurie’s mind had flashed to every single possibility of bodily trauma that could occur to Jojo in her life: a bicycle accident in which she was dragged under a car’s wheels, an airplane crash in which no body was ever recovered, a house fire in which only charred, ashen bones were found. Laurie’s entire job as a mother was to make sure that her daughter’s blood and bones and guts and viscera stayed inside her skin, and she’d already failed.
Those overalls. Those tiny overalls were all she saw until she was racing through the hospital corridors.
A nurse tried to slow her down, but Laurie shook her off with a barked, “No!”
In his room Omid was asleep. Fury coursed through her. “Wake up! Now!”
Omid jumped, and his eyes flickered open. “Laurie? Wha’? Where’s Jojo?”
It wasn’t fair, to wake him like this and lay this on him, and then Laurie remembered what he’d hidden from her about Harper and the men, and her rage rose. “She’s gone. Gone, you son of a bitch.”
“What?” Omid’s voice was a gasp, and his eyes went black—darker than she’d ever seen them. Terror filled his face. Laurie wanted to repent, but she couldn’t. This was on him, all of it. It had to be. “What do you mean?”
“She was with Kevin. I think they were at his house. The place’s been torn apart. Signs of a struggle in the backyard. They’re gone. I think whoever has Harper has them.”
Omid was already pulling at the lines hooked to his arms and hands. Beeps rose around them, a flood of screaming machines. “Who? Fucking hell, Laurie, who?”
“I don’t know, but I think Darren Dixon is mixed up in it. I think it’s been him all along.” She’d listened to her gut—the gut that said Dixon was a drunk, that he could never pull off this kind of thing.
But her gut had been wrong. For the umpteenth time. She’d been wrong, and now she’d be punished by losing her daughter.
“Then we go to him.” He stood, his legs wobbling.
“Omid!” Laurie propped him up, and he gave her almost his whole weight. “Jesus, sit back down.”
He yanked out another line of some sort, and blood flowed down his arm. “You think you can stop me? We go together. We get our daughter back.”
Relief stabbed her lungs. Yes, she wanted him. She needed him. She couldn’t do this herself.
Omid pressed the sheet against his arm and lunged with the other arm at the closet. He pulled out a plastic bag and dumped out the clothes and shoes he’d been wearing when he was admitted. “Where? Do you have any idea wher
e she is?”
“In dispatch we always thought he had a beat wife in sector four—he would park at Hind and Seventeenth for his breaks. I went to the station to try to figure out the address, but—”
Omid’s head jerked up. “I know it. I went there once. A long time ago. We were partners that day, and he had to take a shit and wouldn’t do it at the station.”
“Do you remember the address?”
He rolled his eyes and pulled out his phone. Only dispatchers remembered addresses. Cops remembered what properties looked like.
Omid stabbed at Google Maps. He zoomed in once, then again. “Street View, come on, slow-ass piece of shit.” He shook the phone as if that would make it work faster. “Here. This is it.”
She recognized the house—she’d been right there, not even an hour ago, getting her phone from under Dixon’s car. It was three doors up from the sketchy apartment, a run-down Victorian that she wouldn’t have looked at twice. She pulled Jojo’s phone out of her pocket—it was barely charged now, but it was better than her own dead phone, still wrapped in duct tape. “I’ll call dispatch, get some cars to meet us there.”
Omid put out a hand. “Wait.” His face was drawn.
“Shit, Omid. No.” It couldn’t be this bad in the department.
“If Dixon is behind this whole thing with Harper—it’s not good. He’s still got a lot of friends. Obviously.”
Friends who would fuck a teenager for money. “They might be shitheads, but they’re probably not down with murder and kidnapping. They can’t be.” It couldn’t be that bad—it was still San Bernal. It was still the department she’d loved for so long. Ben Bradcoe was on the list of men who’d slept with Harper, but he was the chairperson for the department’s Toys for Tots drive. When Darren Dixon had written his Facebook rant, Dan Toomey—who was on the list—had defended Omid in the Internal Affairs investigation.
The IA.
The cops who rose to Omid’s defense, publicly.
Ben Bradcoe. Dan Toomey. Will Yarwood. Sherm Naumann. Heinz Tollis. Names scrolled through her head.
“Omid. Every guy on Harper’s list stood up for you at the IA.”
“Oh.” Omid’s eyebrows shot together. “Damn, Laurie. That’s it.”
Of course. Dixon was out to get every single person who’d been against him then. Get a girl to reach out to them, trap them, ensnare them. If Harper had feelings about Dixon, if he was the one who’d set up the plot, then all he’d had to do was feed her their personal contact details. If they fell for the bait, Dixon would be the winner.
“The list, though. Your list, the guys you were working with to get the money for her. Is that all of them?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea if that list is complete.” Omid’s voice was gruff, almost a cough. “We have to go get her. Now.”
“Them.” There were two girls. Not just Jojo, though Jojo was the one who mattered most. Harper, though, mattered almost as much. Jesus, what was Darren doing to her? To them? And how the hell was Kevin involved in all this?
“Them,” Omid agreed.
“He’s insane.” Laurie didn’t have to say Dixon’s name—he felt like the devil now. Say his name too many times and he’d appear.
“Clearly.” Omid’s gun was at the bottom of the plastic bag. He held it in his hand, still in his hospital gown, as if looking to see if it had a built-in holster. He looked pale except for two odd spots of bright color at the tops of his cheeks and red flushed along his forehead.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Never more sure about anything in my life. I’ll kill the motherfucker.”
Then Omid wobbled slowly and passed out, thunking his head on the metal rail of the bed as he went down.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck.
Laurie yelled into the hallway for help.
The nurses put him back in bed, reattached his lines, checked the lump on his head, and assured her that he would keep breathing. “Don’t worry, sugar, he just got up too soon. Happens all the time. He’ll sleep it off.”
Laurie would have to do this on her own, then.
She ran.
FIFTY-SEVEN
ONCE JOJO HAD had a dream in which a demon was sitting on her chest, paralyzing her. Maybe she was having the same dream now. It was okay, though—she could hear Bettina from dispatch talking about a yellow van parked in front of a fire hydrant. That meant she was home, that she could hear the police scanner—but she couldn’t move, could barely breathe around the mouthful of . . . What the fuck was in her mouth?
Her eyes flew open.
She was in a dark, low-ceilinged cement room of some type—maybe a basement. She lay on her side on the cold floor, her hands tied behind her. Her legs felt tied together, too, and her body ached coldly. Her fingers were numb, and her wrists screamed in pain. Her mouth was full of cloth that seemed to be epoxied to her tongue. She spit, and coughed, and gagged, then stopped and tried to breathe through her nose, terrified that she was sucking the gag deeper. She couldn’t see much—just a ladder propped against one wall and a set of dark stairs.
She coughed harder, trying to dislodge the gag. Her brain was sluggish, and she felt dizzy and nauseated.
A low light snapped on in the corner.
Harper said, “He taped it to your face. You can’t spit it out.”
Hysteria filled her blood—she’d die, she’d drown, if she didn’t get it off. Her nose was running, and she was crying, and if she didn’t get the gag out, she’d die right here. Panic rose, and her breathing got shallower. Her chest started to hurt.
Harper.
Still wearing the yellow dress she’d worn in the backyard, when Jojo had thought she was a ghost, Harper came nearer to Jojo. She knelt next to her and stroked her hair. “Shhhh. If I take it off, will you promise not to scream? You have to promise.”
Screaming was so far past what Jojo wanted to do—all she wanted was air. Her lungs shrieked, and her chest heaved. She nodded as hard as she could.
Harper ripped off one side of the tape, and Jojo spit out the cloth. With it came a stream of bile. She turned her head to the side and vomited onto the concrete. The gag hung next to her mouth from the flap of the other side of the tape, still attached to her cheek.
From somewhere behind Harper, Jojo heard Bettina’s light voice on the scanner: “3V11, 933 audible, Safeway on Bryant. Unit to cover?”
Jojo panted as she hauled oxygen into her lungs. She spit out the remainder of vomit, and it dribbled down her cheek.
“Gross, dude.” Harper slapped her lightly—friendly-like—on the biceps. “Suck it up.”
It was so what Harper would say that it finally convinced Jojo—this was the real Harper. She was alive, and they were together.
“Come on, breathe.”
She was trying. Couldn’t Harper see she was trying? Air went into her lungs with a sick wheeze and left in a bubbling rush. She couldn’t see, her vision blurring, clearing, and then going dark again. For a long moment, Harper sat and stared at her. Jojo managed to grab a whole lungful of stale air. Then another.
Slowly the blackness left her vision. Chills racked her body, even though she was still sweating from every pore.
Breathe.
They had to get out of here. Jojo had to save Harper.
Jojo glanced behind her, wincing at the way her shoulders ached. Around the panic in her throat, she whispered, “Untie me. We’ll get away.”
“I can’t do that,” said Harper.
From the far corner came a groan in the darkness.
“What? Who is that? Is that Kevin?” Terror rose higher in her chest. “Is that Kevin? What happened to us? Why are we here?”
Harper leaned forward, still on her knees, and pressed her hand against Jojo’s lips. “Shhh. You have to be quiet. And if he comes in, you have to put t
he gag back in and pretend you’re asleep.”
Like hell she’d put the gag back in. She and Harper could get away, could run, could get help for Kevin. “Untie me and we’ll go. Are we locked in?” Of course they were. “Or we can wait till Kevin wakes up, and then he can break the door down. One way or another, we’re going to get you home.”
Harper’s eyes looked funny. Like she wasn’t listening, or rather like she was listening for something else. “Shhhh,” she said again. She made no move to touch the rope at Jojo’s wrists.
“Harper, what’s going on? What happened? Are you okay?” She wanted her hands free so she could touch Harper, so she could run her fingers over her best friend and make sure nothing was broken.
“Shhh!” Harper tilted her head. “He’s coming. Be asleep.” With one swift motion that Jojo couldn’t stop, Harper shoved the gag back into her mouth and slapped the tape in place again. Harper pushed Jojo’s head down, and covered her eyes with her hand, as if to close her eyelids. Then she ran back to the chair she’d been sitting in when she’d turned on the lamp.
Harper was brainwashed. That must be it.
Jojo thumped her legs, once, twice. But then she saw Harper’s face. She looked eerily calm. Confident. Almost . . . happy.
It terrified her.
So Jojo stilled. She forced her eyelids closed and tried to control her breathing so that it wasn’t as ragged in her chest.
A heavy footfall came down the stairs. “They still out?”
“Yeah.” Harper’s voice was lazy and amused. “Are you sure you didn’t give them too much? Because she was making noises like she was drunk.”
“Just enough to keep them down a while.”
It was Darren Dixon’s voice.
They’d been right. He might be a drunk, but he was also a fucking maniacal kidnapper. Rapist. Murderer. Fear swarmed up Jojo’s gullet, and she shivered uncontrollably. Please don’t see.
“What are you going to do when they wake up?”
Jojo heard Dixon kick something, and she was pretty sure it was Kevin. “Have a little fun.” She wanted desperately to slit her eyes, to peek through her lids, but when she used to do that at slumber parties, she was always caught. God help her—she couldn’t get caught now.