Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  “Not all that bad,” Cassie said, “considering I never killed anybody before. I’ll probably have a nervous breakdown later tonight, sometime. There just didn’t seem to be time for it while Roger was trying to kill Melanie.”

  “You know, that’s what makes a hero. When I was in Afghanistan, they gave me a couple of shiny medals because I didn’t take time to think about what I was doing before I did what I had to do. Wasn’t anything heroic about it—it was really just a case of either I was going to die, along with a bunch of other men, or that other bastard had to die. Since he was a sniper sitting on top of some kind of tower, with lots of heavy metal to hide behind, the only way to get him was to climb the tower. If I’d thought for one minute about what I was doing, I’m pretty sure I would have taken off running in the opposite direction.”

  Cassie chuckled. “Yeah, I heard you were some kind of medal winner. Good job, I guess. Now, what’s this big problem you want to talk to me about?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone,” Dex said. “It’s still fairly early. How about you let me buy you dinner?”

  Cassie groaned. “Dude, did you see my face? Do you think I like going out to restaurants and letting people stare at me?”

  Dex was quiet for a couple of seconds. “To tell the truth, I don’t think you really give much of a rip about people staring at you. If I’m wrong, we can hit the drive-in and eat in my car. Look, you might as well just say yes, because I’m not going to tell you what it is until you do.”

  “Suit yourself,” Cassie said. “I’m pretty sure I got enough of my own problems; I don’t really need any of yours. If going out to dinner with you is the price of finding out what it is, then I’ll just have to live with not knowing.” She hung up the phone and dropped it on the seat beside her.

  Arrogant piece of crap, she thought. Like I’m going to go crazy if I don’t know what it is you wanted. Well, you can shove your problem right up where the sun don’t shine, as my daddy used to say. I don’t need you, and I don’t need your problems. I’ve got plenty of my own, and lots of other people’s, too.

  She made it almost two miles before curiosity got the better of her, and she picked up the phone again. It took her three tries to make her thumb tap his number, but this time he answered on the first ring.

  “So,” Dex said without any kind of preamble, “I’m thinking about the seafood place out on the loop. It’s casual, so we don’t have to get dressed up or anything. That work for you?”

  Cassie opened her mouth and then closed it, pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at it with a snarl, then put it back. “Fine,” she said. “What time?”

  “It’s just three thirty, now. How about six o’clock? That’ll give me time to run home and get a shower, and after the day I’ve had, I need one. Come to think of it, you probably need one, too.”

  “Six o’clock,” Cassie said. “I’ll meet you there.” She hung up the call again and let herself smile just a bit. True, she didn’t want to date, and Dex wasn’t exactly her type of guy, anyway. Still, it might do her a bit of good to just relax for the evening.

  She drove on home and did take a shower, because getting the crap scared out of you had a tendency to make you sweat. Critter was delighted to see her and tried once again to climb into the shower with her, but Cassie pushed her out and just luxuriated in the spray of the tepid water for more than an hour. When she felt clean, she got out and wrapped herself in a big fluffy towel, then opened her closet.

  A casual place, Dex had said, so a dress was out. She had a couple of decent pantsuits that she liked, especially that red one with the vest. She pulled it out and laid it on the bed, then chose a white, long-sleeved blouse to go with it.

  A rummage through her dresser gave her fresh underclothes. As always, she briefly fingered the left cup of her bra. She had lost enough tissue on that boob in the fire to require some extra padding, there, and these were custom-made for her. They even had a little prosthetic nipple bump, since the original was burned away. The other cup was thin and soft, so the effect was to look perfectly normal with a silky blouse on.

  Cassie didn’t often bother with pantyhose, since her left leg was a mass of scar tissue, but the slacks of the pantsuit were kind of tight-fitting, so she dug out a pair and forced herself to put them on. No one would see them, anyway, but they did let the pants slide on much more easily than they would have over the scarred left leg and the unshaved right. With pants and bra in place, she stood in front of her dresser mirror and looked at herself.

  Her left side had taken the brunt of the fire, and that went from her foot all the way up her leg, up the left side of her torso, her entire left arm, and most of the left side of her neck and head. All of that was scar tissue, and while she could hide the majority of it under her clothing, there was absolutely nothing she could do about her hand or the burns above the shoulders.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. She had stumbled across something called prosthetic makeup while she was in college and had actually gone to a studio that specialized in it. With great care, the technicians there had made a mold of her face as it now was, then sculpted a soft, rubbery half mask that covered her burns perfectly. It even had hair and an ear, and when it was glued into place with its special adhesive, she looked almost perfectly normal. With some heavy makeup to make it all blend together, she could hide the monster for several hours at a time.

  The only problem was that she knew it wasn’t real. In her mind, she had gotten burned because she was stupid. She preferred to let the evidence of her stupidity be visible, so that she would never make that mistake again.

  No, she decided, she would not wear the half mask on this night. Let Dex see exactly who she was, and if he had the courage to ask for the rest of the story, she would tell him. She had absolutely no illusions that he might have any romantic interest in her, but something about the man suggested that it might be just barely possible that she could end up with a friend.

  She put on the blouse and vest, added a matching red eye patch, slipped her gun and holster into the back of her pants, and picked up her purse. Moments later, she was on her way to the Lobster Shack. After spending so much time in the shower, she would arrive just a few minutes early, and she wanted to be the first to get there.

  Apparently, Dex had had the same idea. He was standing beside the door as she pulled in, and somehow he actually spotted her. He waved as she parked, and then she climbed out of the car and walked toward him.

  And then she blushed. Dex actually looked her up and down, just the way men used to do before she became a candidate for nightmares on Elm Street. No one had given her that kind of appreciative look in a long time, and it was just a bit uncomfortable.

  “You clean up pretty nice,” Dex said. She would have laughed, except he was looking directly into her one good eye, which meant he could see her face clearly. She rolled the eye and heard him chuckle for a second. “Okay, I didn’t ask you here to make a pass at you. Let’s go in and order, and then we can talk. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Cassie said, and then she walked through the door he held open for her.

  NINETEEN

  “Okay,” she said finally, once their orders were taken. At his insistence, she had ordered lobster. She loved lobster and could tell he was making an effort to impress her, but she also wondered what Dex would think if he knew that she could not only afford to buy her own dinner, she could afford to buy this restaurant if she so chose. “So what is this problem?”

  “Straight to the point,” Dex said. “That was one of the first things I liked about you. You didn’t beat around the bush when you came to see me today. You knew what you were after, and you asked the questions that would get you the answers you needed.”

  “You’re stalling,” she said. “Start talking, or I get up and walk out.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, holding both hands up as if to ward off a threat. “Just promise you’ll hear me all the way out. Would you do th
at? It’s gonna sound kind of crazy at first, but I promise you I’m completely serious.”

  “I’m listening, aren’t I?” Cassie let a bit of irritation enter her voice and saw the twitch of his eye that said recognized it.

  He let out a deep sigh. “Here it is,” he said. “There’s this girl I used to know. It was about two years ago, not long after I got back from overseas, and we got to be good friends. I think we probably would’ve started dating, but she had this ex who wouldn’t leave her alone. He was always calling or stopping by, trying to act like he was just being a friend, but it was easy to tell that he wanted her back. You know the kind I mean?”

  “Of course,” Cassie said. “I deal with men like that a couple times a week. They’re the kind who become abusive.”

  “Which is another reason why you’re the gal I need to help me with this. Well, anyway, we had started some pretty playful flirting and I was just about to ask her out, and then one night she calls me and says she thinks we need to stay away from each other for a while. I asked her why, and she said it was because she didn’t want me to get hurt. I asked her was it because of the jackass and she said yes, but that it was more than that. I tried everything I could to talk her out of it, but she told me to quit calling, quit coming over, just stay away. So, I did.”

  “Too bad,” Cassie said. “What she was probably doing was screaming for help, and you didn’t recognize it. Where is she now?”

  “That is the question I need you to answer. About six months later, I decided to just check in on her, make sure she was all right, you know? And she had vanished, and when I say vanished, I mean she vanished without a trace. I talked to her landlord, and he didn’t know she was gone until the police started asking questions. I talked to her boss, and all they knew was that she just quit showing up for work and didn’t answer her phone. I finally even went so far as to get hold of her mother, but nobody had seen or heard from her in over three months.”

  Cassie’s eyebrow lowered. “You suspect foul play, then?”

  “Wouldn’t you? When absolutely nobody has any idea what happened to her?”

  “Of course,” Cassie said. “Have you gone to the police?”

  “I did, and her mother did,” Dex said, “and we both got the same result. Since there were no signs of foul play in her apartment or anywhere else, and since her closets and dressers were empty, the police say she apparently simply left.”

  “What about the ex-boyfriend? Has anyone talked to him?”

  “You can’t talk to someone you can’t find,” Dex said. “He’s also vanished, and before you say it, I can tell you the police already suggested that the two of them simply ran off together. The problem with that is that we live in the age of the internet. How can anybody completely vanish, when just about everything you do is recorded digitally somewhere?”

  “I can think of a number of ways,” Cassie said. “It isn’t that hard to create a fake identity. I’ve never done it myself, but I know the Outreach has people who help some of their clients do so. There are even online courses about how to do it. I think they only cost about a hundred bucks.”

  “Okay, I’ve heard of those, too,” Dex said. “Then you come to the question of why? Why would she want to just disappear with this guy? I was already out of the picture. If she wanted to be with him, she didn’t have to hide to do it.”

  “And that’s the question I was about to ask next. See, that’s what it all goes down to. In order to figure out what happened, you have to understand the motivations of the people involved. If she did run away with this guy and change her name, there has to be a reason. Was she in some kind of trouble? Was he?”

  “I don’t think she’s ever been in trouble a day in her life, and as for the guy, trouble seemed to be his middle name. She told me the reason she broke up with him was because she got tired of bailing him out of jail every couple of weeks.”

  Cassie sat there and looked into his eyes for a moment. “You really have a thing for this girl, don’t you?”

  Dex’s eyebrows shot upward. “Now? No. I was starting to, but I kinda got over it when she told me to get lost. The problem is that I can’t stand not knowing the answer to something that’s bugging me. That’s why I need somebody to really look into this and find out what actually happened.”

  Cassie picked up the glass of iced tea the waitress had brought and took a sip. When she put it down, she looked Dex in the eye once again. “I think what you need is a private investigator,” she said. “Not a social worker.”

  “I’ve hired them,” Dex said. “I hired two different PIs, and neither one of them could track her down.”

  Cassie’s eye opened wider. “Well, that tells me you spent some money on this problem. Private investigators are not cheap. But, if they couldn’t find her, what on earth would make you think I could?”

  Dex grinned at her. “It’s like I said—you asked the right questions to find out what you needed to know. As far as I can tell, nobody has asked the right questions. Look, I understand you aren’t a normal private eye, but you have a kind of determination I’ve never seen before. Why do you think I came back and told you about the gun? Something about you says you’re going to get to the bottom of whatever it is you’re after, and you’ve got that fearless streak in you that probably comes from surviving one of the worst things that can ever happen. I wanted you to know about the gun because I didn’t want anything to happen to you.” He winked. “I was already thinking about asking you to handle this at the time, and it wouldn’t do me a lot of good to ask if you were dead.”

  Cassie chuckled. “That’s a valid point,” she said. “But, look, Dex, I still don’t understand why you think I might succeed where cops and private investigators have failed. Why me?”

  Dex looked at her for a moment, his teeth worrying his bottom lip just a bit. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands in his lap, then cocked his head slightly to the right.

  “Let me ask you one question,” he said, “and if you can honestly answer in the negative, I’ll drop this right now. We’ll have a nice dinner, and then I’m out of your hair. Deal?”

  Cassie sighed. “Okay, deal,” she said. “Ask your question.”

  “Now that you know this girl has disappeared under what can only be considered suspicious circumstances, are you really going to be able to walk away without knowing more?”

  Cassie started to make a flippant response, but suddenly she heard Abby’s voice. He’s got you, Cass. He’s got you, and you know it.

  She stared at him for several seconds, then took out her phone. She called up a notepad app and looked at him again. “Give me their names,” she said.

  Dex sat forward quickly and slapped the table. “I knew it! I knew you couldn’t walk away!” He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a photograph that he held up for Cassie to see. It was a young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. “Her name is Sabrina Moss, and she’s twenty-six years old. The guy is Raymond Francis, and I think he’s twenty-eight. You don’t need to make a lot of notes, though, because I’ve got a whole file on this in my car, and I’ll give it to you when we get done.”

  “Good,” Cassie said. “In that case, I want to know little bit more about you and why this case is so important. So far, all I know is you were a troublesome teenager until you joined the Army, and you’ve only been arrested once since then, but the charges were dropped. Tell me who Dex Tate really is before I make any commitments about this.”

  “Me? Well, there’s not that much to tell. My dad ran out on Mom and me and my sisters when I was ten years old—I’m the oldest, by the way; my twin sisters Allie and Ellie are three years younger than me. Mom worked as a waitress at two different cafés to make enough money to feed us, but it was never enough, so I started doing odd jobs and then fell in with some guys who were hustling pot and became a runner for them. You know, they’d have me carry a few joints to some of their customers. I did that for three years before I got busted, and t
hat ruined everything with those guys, so I started stealing. I had found out who would buy what, so first it was bikes and lawn mowers, but then I started boosting cars when I was fourteen. Got caught a couple times and always managed to get it reduced to joyriding, but then I turned seventeen and the next time I got caught, the judge gave me the choice. I could go to jail till I was eighteen, then get sent to prison for ten more years, or I could join the Army. It wasn’t a hard decision.”

  Cassie chuckled. “Bet not. So, the Army made a man of you?”

  “The Army showed me what a man should be,” he said. “I made it through basic by the skin of my teeth, and I was lucky that my drill sergeants didn’t like paperwork or I would have probably ended up at the stockade for insubordination. Then they sent me to advanced training in vehicle maintenance at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and that wasn’t too bad. I spent two years there, and they sent me off to be a mechanic in Afghanistan. That’s where I really figured out what the Army was all about, because our motor pool was attacked on several occasions. The first time was the one I told you about, where I had to climb the tower to get the sniper. They said I was a big hero, but the next time we were attacked, I was the guy who hid under the Humvee and let someone else be the hero.” He shrugged. “Between those two attacks, I realized that it was all about a whole bunch of us trying to work together to keep us all alive. We all have to look out for each other, and that’s how we each make the world a little better.”

  Cassie looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “That’s a lot deeper than I would’ve expected out of a guy like you,” she said, “but I guess it’s about as accurate a description of the human condition as I’ve ever heard. I can see how it would help a troubled youth grow up, but you haven’t told me everything. You got two medals while you were over there. What was the other one for?”

  Dex suddenly looked sheepish. “That one was kind of an accident,” he said. “Our main gate was hit by a truck bomb, and enemy combatants came from just about every direction. I was in the garage, putting new tires on an armored personnel carrier, a big truck with lots of heavy armor on it. There were about four of us in the garage, and everybody else was running around outside, trying to find cover. There was one group, about thirty of our people, who were trapped between two buildings and had nowhere to go. I thought if I could get the APC between them and the people shooting at them, they could make a break for somewhere better, so I jumped in and took off with it.”