C T Ferguson Box Set

by Tom Fowler

  I called Rich en route. He said he would meet us there.

  Rich’s blue Camaro pulled next to Rosenberg’s business a couple minutes after Rollins and I arrived. We walked in and headed toward the back right away. Rosenberg’s door was closed, and I didn’t see any light spilling from under it. Jasper appeared at the end of the hallway and stared at us. If annoyed, afraid, or even alive, he did a good job of hiding it.

  “Mr. Rosenberg isn’t here,” Jasper said.

  “When did he leave?” I said.

  “Mr. Rosenberg leaves when he wants. He wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Guilt got him down?”

  “I wouldn’t know what you mean.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t.”

  “Are you gentlemen interested in restaurant supplies?” Jasper gave us the fakest smile I’d seen in some time. “If not, I’m going to need to ask you to leave.”

  “You know where your boss keeps the girls?” Rollins said it louder than necessary and at a slightly higher pitch than normal. For a bodyguard, he seemed to relish his role in this case.

  “Now I definitely don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jasper.

  “We’re going to find your boss,” I said, taking a step closer to Jasper. He didn’t move back. “We’re going to find what happened to the girl, and all the other girls he’s ordered kidnapped. When we do, you’re going to go down with him, and I’m going to enjoy watching it.”

  Jasper’s fake smiled faded into a scowl. “You should be careful with the accusations you make.”

  “Why? Your boss already tried to have me killed once. Didn’t work out so well. Now he’s turned tail and run. Maybe you’ll be the one left holding the bag. He’ll reward you for your loyalty by bailing on you. What a piece of work.”

  “You need to leave now,” Jasper said, looking at each of us. “If you don’t, I’ll call the police.”

  Rich made no effort to out himself, and I went right along with it. “I think you’d have a lot more explaining to do than we would,” I said. “But we’ll go. Tell your slimy asshole boss we’re going to expose him. It doesn’t matter where he hides. It won’t matter where you hide, either.”

  Jasper gave me a sincere smile this time. “I’m not going to hide,” he said.

  “Even better,” I said.

  Chapter 13

  I knew Rosenberg’s home address from his financial information. He owned a nice house but not a lavish one. It was a single-family dwelling, two stories, short driveway, vinyl siding, maybe fifteen hundred square feet. A middle-class family could have lived there, even with residential prices enjoying their gentle upward trend. When we arrived, the place was dark, and no car sat in the driveway or street in front of the house. Rollins, Rich, and I got out of our cars and walked up to the front door. Rich tried the doorknob. “Locked,” he said.

  “Detective, I think you’re about to witness a crime,” I said, taking out my special keyring.

  “My vision is fuzzy,” Rich said.

  I got to work. Rosenberg had a lock and a deadbolt. They both looked new. Rollins and Rich did a good job screening me from the street. A couple trees in the front yard would also help hide what I did. If anyone got curious about it, Rich’s badge would assuage their concerns, at least long enough for us to get in and get out.

  Three minutes and zero goody-goody neighbors later, we walked in the front door. I’ve seen places which had been gently lived in and ones tossed by some miscreant—or the police—looking for something. Rosenberg’s house was a combination of the two. Entire rooms saw nary a piece of furniture or sign of past habitation in them, and others looked like someone lobbed in a grenade, closed the door, and laughed at the results. Boxes, papers, books, and drawers from dressers lay strewn about a bedroom and an office.

  “Where do we start?” I said. “We don’t have much time.”

  “He’s obviously spooked,” Rollins said. “He split. I don’t think his people will give him up, if they even know where he is.”

  I looked through a few pieces of detritus on the floor but found nothing useful. Maybe Rosenberg took all the relevant stuff with him. Maybe he didn’t have anything useful here to begin with. I didn’t see a safe in any of the rooms nor any paintings whose sole purpose would be obvious hiding places for wall safes. Rollins was right: Rosenberg was long gone, and we weren’t going to find him anytime soon. Sifting through the rubble he left wouldn’t help. Katherine was still on the clock. I had to prioritize.

  “You guys can stay if you want,” I said. “I need to keep looking for Katherine. If we all stay here, it’s not productive.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Rollins said. “Gotta earn my keep.”

  “I’ll look around for a little while,” Rich said. “If I don’t come across something soon, I’ll leave. Where will you be?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea,” I said. Then Rollins and I left.

  Rollins drove the Caprice. I looked at some files on my tablet. Rollins said Rosenberg’s people wouldn’t give him up. We couldn’t presume it to be true. I compelled toadies to flip on their bosses before. We needed someone who might know what was going on. Maybe nobody but Rosenberg knew where Katherine was, but someone surely knew to where Rosenberg absconded. I went through the payroll information and found Jasper’s address. I gave it to Rollins. He said he knew it.

  I called Rosenberg’s business and asked to speak to Mr. Jasper Dexter, “my” account manager. This was the position invented for him in the payroll system. The pleasant-sounding girl who answered the phone said Jasper just left. I thanked her for her time, hung up, and told Rollins to step on it. Jasper didn’t have a long drive to his house. I didn’t want to give him a chance to get comfortable.

  The Caprice surged forward. Rollins darted between cars, passed on the left and the right, and unlike me, never needed to use the shoulder. The Caprice was rarely still on the highway, and even when it was, I felt the potential for it to zig or zag any second. I rode in a coiled snake, handled by a man who knew its moves and anticipated making them. If I could afford to hire Rollins as my permanent driver, I would. I’d just be worried about him denting the Audi.

  Thanks to Rollins, we got to Jasper’s house in record time. He owned a newish plain end-of-group townhouse in Lutherville. I derived some satisfaction in Jasper’s model being the smallest on the street. “Think he’s home?” Rollins said as he parked the Caprice at the curb two doors down from Jasper’s.

  “Don’t think so,” I said. “There’s no garage, and I don’t see his car anywhere nearby.”

  “Let’s look around back, then.” Rollins padded around the left side of the house, and I followed him. The backyard lay framed by an ugly four-foot wooden fence. A small metal sign on it advertised the company responsible for building it. If I constructed the hideous thing, I wouldn’t want my name anywhere close. I didn’t see any lights on in the house, but the afternoon sun provided enough brightness we couldn’t tell. Rollins broke his crouch long enough to spring over the fence, then took up a low profile again. I followed suit.

  A row of flagstones bisected a well-maintained green yard unadorned by any accessories save a covered gas grill. We moved as quickly as our crouches would allow. Four concrete steps led to the white metal storm door. Rollins gave a tug, and it opened. While he held it, I tested the back door and found it locked. I took out my keyring and got to work. Jasper didn’t have a very good lock; I cracked it in under a minute.

  Rollins went in first. At some point, while I worked the tumblers, he drew his gun. I did the same and shadowed him in. We moved through a narrow kitchen filled with average appliances and counters years overdue for a cleaning. A closed door stood to the right of the refrigerator. Rollins ignored it and padded through a doorway into the dining room. Jasper needed new furniture. His dining table came from a discount store and must have been assembled by a discount laborer. No one hid anywhere. Rollins hugged the wall and peered through an arch into the li
ving room. I stood beside him.

  I didn’t hear anything except my own heart beating. Rollins tore away from the wall and skulked into the living room. I crouched and went behind him. Jasper owned lousy furniture in here, too, but at least his slapdash TV stand propped up a nice big screen. Bookcases beside the TV held hundreds of DVDs and Blu-Rays. As Rollins and I nosed around in the living room, we heard footsteps on the front porch. Rollins pointed to himself, then the dining room—finally, to me and the front door. He moved into position in the next room as a key slid into the lock. I stood beside the door so Jasper swinging it in would hide me even better.

  The key ground in the lock. The knob turned. Jasper opened it and came in. He held a few pieces of mail. Without looking, he grabbed for the door. Then he looked up and saw me. His eyes went wide in time for me to take a step into him and shove the .45 under his chin. All he could do was drop the mail. “Welcome home, asshole,” I said. Rollins walked in from the next room, his gun leveled at Jasper.

  “What do you want?” Jasper said. I couldn’t see his face very well because of my gun forcing his head up. I hoped he looked scared.

  “Katherine Rodgers,” I said, “but I’ll settle for your boss.”

  “I don’t know who—“

  “If you tell me you don’t know who she is, I’m going to decorate the ceiling with bits of your skull.”

  Jasper pursed his lips. I felt his chin push into the gun as he tried to nod. “OK,” he said, “I know who she is. But I don’t know where she is.”

  “What about Rosenberg?” I said.

  “Him either.”

  “You’re not very useful for a man who has a .45 under his chin.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.” Exasperation came through in Jasper’s voice. I didn’t care to hear it.

  “A couple of Asian guys kidnapped the girl,” I said. “Your boss must have hired them. You know anything about them?”

  “If he did, he didn’t tell me about it,” Jasper said.

  “Maybe you hired them,” I said. “You look like you have Asian blood.”

  “Wasn’t me.”

  I couldn’t see a lot of his face, but I doubted Jasper. He or Rosenberg must be involved. “Give me something here,” I said. “Where else would Rosenberg keep stuff? He have a warehouse anywhere? Rental property? Boarded-up snowball stand?”

  “I don’t know, I’m telling you.”

  “You believe him?” I said to Rollins.

  “Not really.” Rollins came into the room. “But I’m not gonna torture him. He’s useless right now.” Rollins moved beside Jasper and walloped him in the head with the butt of his gun. Jasper’s head whipped to the side, and he crashed to the floor.

  “Let’s go,” Rollins said. “We’re still behind the eight ball. If the girl’s been trafficked, she’s running out of time.”

  We let ourselves out the front door.

  I sat across the street from Eliot Eisenberg’s office with my laptop and a wireless antenna capable of finding a signal in the Marianas Trench. My guess was the residents of his building shared a connection, but Eisenberg’s business did well enough for him to have his own. He wasn’t smart enough to secure it very well, so his building-mates probably leeched off it. The answer to “who still uses WEP?” consisted of Eliot Eisenberg and the Amish. Wired Equivalent Privacy sounds like good security to people who don’t know any better, and to people who do (like me), it makes breaking into a network easy.

  Eliot kept his computer online all the time. Might as well get all the perks of your poorly-secured broadband connection. I poked around on his hard drive, looking for files on Rosenberg. Someone surely knew more about Katherine Rodgers, who took her, and where she might be going.

  As I scoured Eisenberg’s data, I munched pizza from Brick Oven Pizzeria and a hot pretzel from a nearby stand. All of it dropped to room temperature, but I didn’t care; I just needed food to fill the gnawing hole in my gut. Finally, I found a hidden zip file labeled “DR” and copied the contents to my laptop. I hunted for some more Rosenberg-centric files, didn’t find any, and made sure my e-fingerprints were gone.

  I sipped some freshly-squeezed lemonade from the stand (better than the pretzel at this point) as I looked over what I found. Eisenberg kept these simple. The ledger books were required to stand up to professional scrutiny if Rosenberg ever got audited or investigated. These files—safe behind a wireless network running outmoded security—did not need to obfuscate. I could see every payment made in exchange for a young girl. Their names were never listed, but Eisenberg listed them as “domestic commodity.” I counted eleven such commodities over the last three years.

  How come Rosenberg never faced charges for even one of these? As far as I could tell, no authorities also cared he was a loan shark. For whatever reasons, past police investigations couldn’t make anything stick. Armed with what I discovered on Eisenberg’s computer, I hoped to reverse the trend. After I found Katherine Rodgers. Eisenberg’s files weren’t helpful there. If Rosenberg told him the intimate details of his little kidnapping ring, Eisenberg had been smart enough not to save them to his hard drive.

  In all the hullabaloo of the case, I postponed my search for a real office. The fact got punctuated by the man who stood in the doorway of my home-slash-workplace pointing a gun at me. He was Asian, Chinese to be specific, about five-nine and wiry. He bore no resemblance to a typical goon. I wondered if he was one of the men who took Katherine Rodgers. I wondered if I would get the chance to ask him. My pounding heart reverberated in my ears.

  “No sudden moves,” he said, stepping into the room. He had a small .380 semiautomatic trained on me. When I got home, I took the .45 off and put it in the bottom drawer of my desk. The two feet it would take me to reach the gun felt like a mile.

  “What do you want?” I said. If I could inch my chair toward the drawer, maybe I could dive for the gun. Maybe I could do it without getting shot.

  “You to back off,” he said. He stared straight at me. I saw no emotion in his eyes. This was all business for him. Kidnapping, scaring someone, maybe even shooting them—all in a day’s work.

  “I’m a man of many parts,” I said. “I take all kinds of cases because my name is out there so much.” Using my right foot, I eased an inch closer to the desk drawer. My Asian friend didn’t seem to notice. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” he insisted.

  “Pretend I don’t,” I said in Chinese.

  He sighed. If I kept talking, the gun would get heavy in his hand. “You’re looking for a girl.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  He narrowed his eyes. I prepared to dive in case he opened fire. I needed to keep this guy talking, so he’d either get tired of holding his gun or so I could get to mine. What I couldn’t do was push him to the point he decided bantering with me was no longer worth the aggravation. The expected value needed to favor me breathing at the end of this impromptu meeting. “You know the girl I mean,” he said.

  “All right, so I do,” I said. “She got kidnapped. I was helping her family deal with a loan shark, so I moved on to her kidnapping.”

  “You need to stop looking.” The gun remained steady. I inched closer to the drawer.

  “I need to know she’s safe. Her mother needs to know.”

  The Chinese man chuckled. It sounded hollow like he learned it in a bad movie years ago. “She is safe enough for now,” he said.

  “Just for now?” If I dragged the conversation on, maybe Rollins would come back. Or Rich. I’d take either one at this point. Hell, I’d take a random BPD officer coming to cite me for the numbers in my address being crooked.

  “The girls have what they need.”

  If this were true now but not in the future, they must be on the move soon. “When are you transferring them?” I said.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “You’re holding all the cards here,” I said. I gained a
nother inch. “You have me at a disadvantage in my own office. You got the girl hidden somewhere I don’t know about, and you have her mother sick with worry. You can’t throw me a bone . . . maybe let me help her mother get one good night of sleep this week?” Appealing to the humanity of someone who would abduct a college girl as part of a human trafficking ring wouldn’t count as my best plan, but I didn’t see another play. Besides, I had a nonzero chance it would work.

  I looked at the gun while the Chinese man studied me. I hoped he didn’t peer too closely, or he might see my position changed relative to something on the desk or wall. “The girls go tomorrow,” he said. “We have a few more to collect.” His eyes never wavered from mine. I believed him. We had at least until the morning to find Katherine and the rest of the girls.

  “I’ll make sure the girl’s mother knows,” I said.

  “Maybe I should tell her. Maybe my clients pay for an older lady. Has some experience.”

  “I can tell her.”

  “Maybe you’re too nosy,” he said. “You might keep looking even though you say you won’t.”

  I surveyed my desk. I couldn’t throw anything to stop this guy from shooting me. The turn in the conversation didn’t favor my survival. My heart hammered harder. To my left, above where I kept the .45, stood a water bottle I neglected to put away yesterday. A few inches of water remained. “I’m going to take a drink,” I said, pointing at the bottle. “Just so you know what I’m reaching for.”

  “I’ll let you savor it,” he said.

  How nice of him. I scooted my chair down about a foot and grabbed the bottle. The drawer I needed was now within easy reach. I unscrewed the cap, took a swig, pushed my chair out with my butt, and dropped to the floor. I heard a shouted curse in Mandarin as I opened the desk drawer. The .45 felt cool in my hand. I flattened myself for a view through the kneehole as the Chinese man stepped forward. I pointed at his ankle and fired.