by David Archer
I looked at him and couldn’t help smiling. “Do you realize you sound a little bit drunk?”
“I haven’t been drinking,” he said. “This is what you call shock. I think maybe I need to sit down somewhere.”
I grabbed his arm and pulled it around my shoulders, and walked him over to the van. Of course, when I got there, I realized that there were four naked women inside, so I settled him on to the concrete floor and let him lean back against one of the tires. Then I looked inside the van.
“Are you guys okay?” I asked.
“We’re okay,” Wanda said. “What the hell is going on out there?”
I glanced over at where the Buick had put an end to Stan the Strangler. “Remember, ladies, when I told you not to give up hope? Well, you have all officially been rescued. You’ll understand a lot more tomorrow, but I’m Cassie McGraw, and I’m a private investigator.”
Wanda stared at me. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God, it really is you. What happened to your face? I mean, why doesn’t it look all…”
I smiled and reached up to the middle of my forehead, where a part of the mask was coming loose and peeled it back part of the way. “I’m in disguise,” I said, and I thought her eyes were going to pop out for a second.
Alicia arrived moments later, and several other cops followed. Since the ladies had no clothes on, I convinced Alicia to keep the officers away from the van until the ambulances arrived. Dex loaned me his Swiss Army knife and I climbed inside the van to cut the zip ties that Michael had put on their wrists and ankles, and then it was all I could do to make them stay inside the van.
Modesty won out, when I pointed out that they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the building just yet anyway, so they’d be running around naked with two dozen mostly male cops out there to watch them.
Sirens did a lot of damage to the night, and it was only an hour or so before all of the women were wrapped in sheets and transported to the hospital. They were all treated for mostly superficial injuries, but the doctors wanted to keep them overnight for observation, anyway.
Of course, one of the paramedics spotted me with my face trying to peel off and went into a panic. It took me several minutes to convince her that it really was a latex mask that was specially designed to cover up my burn scars. Once she grasped the concept, she thought it was one of the coolest things she had ever seen, and I ended up promising to show her how I apply it—someday.
Dex was transported to the hospital, as well, and I went along. The shock was apparently beginning to wear off by then, because he did his best to refuse medical treatment. He gave in when I insisted, but he grumbled about it all the way to the hospital.
“You might as well stop,” I said. “I’m not going to sit by and just wait to see if you have any internal injuries.”
“But I’m not hurt,” he insisted. “Trust me, I can take an airbag without getting any internal injuries.”
“You’d say that even if the airbag hadn’t gone off,” I said. “Dex, one of the things you’re going to have to get used to is me taking care of you. It’s a deal breaker. If you can’t accept that, then we just can’t move forward on this.”
“Okay, now, that’s not fair. I mean, I come crashing through the door to come to your rescue, I end up killing the guy who was planning to kill you and a bunch of others, and you’re gonna make me go to the hospital over a couple of little bruises?”
The paramedic’s eyebrows went up. “Sir, you got a broken nose, at least a couple of cracked ribs, potential internal bleeding and swelling—if I were you, I’d shut up and listen to the lady.”
“See?” I said. “I have allies. Dex, you just saved my life. You might as well accept the fact that you’re stuck with me, now. What is it the Chinese say? Save someone’s life, and they belong to you?”
“I don’t think that’s exactly how it goes. Oh, fine, if it’ll make you happy. I’ll go ahead and let the doctors poke and prod me, but I draw the line at surgery. No operations, you got that?”
“No operations,” I said, “unless they’re necessary. If they find internal bleeding, you’re not going to give them any static about going in to fix it. Right?”
He glared at me, but he didn’t argue. Instead, he told me how he’d come to show up at the right moment as the nurses started checking him over.
He was in position before eight, parked in the Buick a few blocks away from the apartment. He had already met with Niles, who had passed him a small walkie-talkie.
“That’s not police issue,” Niles said. “I bought four of these little FM radios to use for this operation. They are all on the same channel so we can all hear each other, and they’re supposed to have a ten mile range. That’s probably in open country, which this damn well isn’t, but we should be good up to three or four miles, I would guess. Oh, and they’re rechargeable; plug this into your cigarette lighter and stick the other end in the radio, at the bottom.” He passed over a charger cord. “These things are fairly secure, because they’re made in sets with a programmable code. I’ve got them all set to the same code, but anybody who doesn’t have that code programmed into one can’t hear what we say.”
“Sounds good,” Dex said. “So all I’ve got to do is push the button and talk?”
“Yeah, and we’ll all hear you. You can hear all of us, too. This was the best way I could think of for us all to keep in touch if this thing happens. Now, we’ve got to stay on the job, so if any of us don’t respond, it means we’re too far away to pick it up. If that happens, we can fall back on cell phones. You just sing out if that alarm goes off, and no matter what we’re doing, we’ll be on it with you just as fast as we can.”
Dex watched him drive away, then sat back and kept his eyes on the cell phone Alfie had given him. He knew I was planning to head out a little early, but there was no way to know when Stan the Strangler would try to make his move.
With the radio playing, Dex sat in the Buick and waited. The clock on the dashboard ticked over to nine, and then nine thirty, and he continued to wait. The radio was playing something new by one of his favorites and he reached over to turn it up, and that’s when the alarm went off.
The cell phone he was holding in his left hand suddenly started emitting a loud buzz, and he snapped the radio off instantly. He looked at the screen on the phone and was amazed as a map of Tulsa opened up, showing that I was on 11th Street, just off of Delaware Avenue. He picked up the radio Niles had given him and squeezed the button.
“Okay, heads up,” he said. “She just triggered the alarm. Right now she’s at Eleventh and Delaware.”
“Perkins,” Alicia said. “I’m about five minutes from there, on the way.”
“This is Niles. Perkins, I’m probably about the same, meet you there.”
“Knowles here, I’m way down south, heading that way as fast as I can.”
“I’ll meet you all up there,” Dex said, and then he put the car in gear and left rubber as he pulled out. It took him almost eight minutes to get to the intersection, and he had to look around for a moment before he spotted flashing lights at the Taco Bueno. He whipped the wheel to the right and pulled in quickly, then jumped out of the car. He saw my Toyota sitting there as Alicia walked up to him.
“Are you tracking her?” Alicia asked. “She was gone when we got here.”
Dex looked at the phone in his hand and held it out for Alicia to see. The little round circle that represented my position was moving south on Harvard. Niles and Knowles hurried over and took a look, and then Niles said, “Let’s move.” They all got back into their cars and let Dex take the lead as they headed toward Harvard.
“Slow it down a bit,” Niles said through the radio. Dex looked down and realized he was doing almost sixty, and eased his foot off the accelerator. He dropped down to forty-five, the speed limit, and then looked at the phone again.
“She just passed the Broken Arrow Expressway,” he said into the radio. “Still going south.”
A mo
ment later, the circle on the screen suddenly changed direction, going east. “She just turned left onto 41st,” he said. “Come on, guys, we gotta hurry, this thing is flickering.”
“Well, then push it a bit but don’t go crazy,” Niles shot back. “She’s probably about to go out of range, I knew we should have tried to get something better.”
Dex pushed his foot down again and the Buick shot back up to sixty. He got to 41st Street and turned left, watching the little circle as it proceeded ahead of him. A moment later, it began blinking.
“She just passed I-44,” he said, speeding up to seventy. The little circle seemed to steady for a moment, but then it suddenly blinked out completely.
“No!” Dex screamed. “Just lost the signal, it just went completely out. Right after she passed I-44 it just disappeared.”
“Keep going, you might pick her up again,” Niles said. “That’s a heavy industrial area, there could be something interfering with the signal. Keep going and it might come back.”
They drove on for another couple of miles, but there was no sign of the signal. They finally came to a stop at a convenience store, and gathered around Dex’s car to try to decide what to do.
“If I hadn’t slowed down,” Dex said, but Alicia cut him off.
“Stop that,” she said. “We don’t have time for that. Most likely, he turned off with her into one of these old industrial buildings. There are dozens of them around here, and God only knows which one they could be in.”
“You’re right,” Niles said. “He’d need someplace he could keep those women completely out of sight, and any of these old buildings would be ideal. A lot of them are still live with power, even though they’re sitting empty. That would almost be like a welcome sign to a guy like this. Let’s get a search pattern set up, and I’m going to call in reinforcements.”
“What does he mean, reinforcements?” Dex asked Alicia, but it was Knowles who spoke up.
“He’s saying it’s time to call in the department. This is the first time we’ve got a lead on an active abduction, and we have reason to believe that the perpetrator is within a certain area. That gives him what he needs to get warrants, the authority to demand resources, officers to start going building to building and checking them out. Don’t worry, we’ll find her, and hopefully the rest of the women with her.”
Dex nodded, but he was worried. If Stan figured out who I really was, there was no telling what he might do. The longer it took to find me, the greater the chance that my presence could end up dooming all of them.
Unfortunately, the halls of justice don’t always move quickly. It took almost two hours to get the search warrants and set up the grid with officers on the ground, and then they had to cover hundreds of acres of buildings. Even those that were still occupied and in operation were to be searched, so what it boiled down to was having sixty police officers trying to search hundreds and hundreds of rooms in many dozens of buildings.
It was after noon before the actual search began, and Dex was frustrated that he wasn’t even allowed to participate. Niles insisted that he stay close by, and keep watching the screen in case the tracker were to show up, no matter how briefly. “It’s entirely possible that it might reappear if she gets near a door or window,” he had said. “If it does, I need to know about it instantly.”
With nothing else to do, Dex agreed. He sat in the middle of the search staging area in the Buick, keeping the phone plugged in and his eyes locked on it.
He was still there when the search was called off at just after ten p.m. Niles told him that they had to stop for the night, because too many of the buildings still had contents that could be dangerous. They would start again at first light, and there was nothing more they could do until then.
As he’d said, though, Dex refused to leave, and that’s why he was still there when I came bursting out of the stairwell. The tracker got through faintly, but it was enough for him to see where I was, and he yelled for help as he came charging to my rescue.
Sigh. My hero.
Dex was also kept for observation, but the doctors came in about ten the next morning and said he’d be fine, if a little sore. I helped him get out of bed and through all the discharge paperwork, and then we called a taxi and went to his place. We had just gotten inside, where Critter seemed to be torn as to which one of us she wanted to try to trip first, when my phone rang. I pulled it out to check the caller ID, but then I remembered I had deleted all my contacts and the number didn’t register. I raised the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“What the hell did he do to my Buick?” Alfie yelled in my ear.
“Whoa, whoa, inside voice,” I said. “Geez, Alfie, it’s just a car. And if you really want to know, he used it to save my life.”
“I don’t give a damn about your life,” he said, “he wrecked my Buick!”
“You don’t—just what the hell is so special about that car? I mean, when it comes to human life, I would think a car would be expendable.”
“The Toyota would be expendable. I’ve got six other cars out there in the lot that would be expendable. But that was my Buick. That car has special sentimental value. And now it’s totaled, destroyed. The insurance company won’t even talk about fixing it, they said it would cost more to fix than to replace, but you can’t replace the memories that live in that car.”
“Memories? What kind of memories?”
“That’s none of your business,” he shot back. “You just tell Dex that I don’t care if he has to work weekends for the next year, he’s fixing that car! And I mean like new! Just the way it was when he picked it up. Oh, and by the way, congratulations on catching the bad guys and saving the ladies. Good job and all that. And I really do give a damn about your life, I was just really, really ticked off. That was my Buick.” He hung up, and I turned to look at Dex.
“You were right,” I said. “He’s gonna kill you. What was so special about that car, do you know?”
A slow smile spread over his face. “I could tell you,” he said, “but then Alfie would want to kill you. Only three people know the secret of that car, and I happen to be one of them. And trust me, Cassie, you really don’t want to know anyway.”
Considering the mental images that were flying through my brain, he was probably right. I don’t know if that Buick is where he lost his virginity or where he last saw his beloved old mother, but my gut instinct says it’s probably somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum.
Things were busy for the next couple of days. I was interviewed by two newspapers, two radio programs, and a TV news show about my “incredibly courageous” plan to use myself as bait for an unknown serial killer. Dex and I both received medals from the city, and I got a phone call from the governor telling me what a fine example of Oklahoma womanhood I truly was.
Of course, my photo made the paper; actually, both of them made the newspapers. Both versions of my face, with the mask and without, were on the front page of the biggest daily. An awful lot of people tried to get hold of me for information about where to buy a mask like mine, and I happily gave then Mr. Barron’s information. I got a call from Lester Sparks, thanking me for making sure Wanda was able to come home, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was when he asked me to recommend counseling, so that he could hopefully stop being the man that almost drove her to having an affair.
I gave him a couple of names, but I sincerely doubted Wanda would ever consider straying again. I was pretty sure the way things turned out would sour her on any type of illicit relationship in the future.
I went back to the apartment a couple of days later to get the rest of my personal things, and ran smack into Donna. I smiled and started to say hello, but she looked at me for a moment, shook her head and walked into her apartment. I stood there and stared at the door, then knocked on it. She opened it a moment later and looked out at me.
“Oh, hello, Cassie. Or is it Emily? Which one is it this week?”
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��Okay,” I said, “I get it, you’re pissed. Do you have any idea what being undercover means? I was trying to save lives, Donna, and I’m sorry if my disguise caused you any inconvenience.” I started to turn away, but she called me back.
“You’re right,” she said, making an effort to look apologetic. “You were doing something important, and I shouldn’t get my feelings hurt over it. I guess the thing that bothers me the most is that I didn’t even recognize you. I mean, all the time I’ve known you, I honestly thought your whole face had been burned and scarred, but I’m looking at you right now without the mask that everybody’s talking about in the newspaper, and I can see that same pretty girl who lived across the hall from me for a few days on one side, and the Cassie that I remember on the other side. How could I not have known it was you?”
I shook my head. “Donna, people naturally focus on what’s most prominent. Everyone has a face, but not everyone has a face that looks like this. It’s perfectly normal for you to have seen the scars and thought they covered all of my face, because the scars are how you mentally tag me. It’s okay, I understand it. And besides, you don’t know how close I came to telling you. I really wanted to, but I couldn’t take the chance that you might accidentally slip and tell someone who might accidentally let the bad guy find out.”
“Well,” she said. “Can we still be friends?”
I smiled. “I’d like that,” I said. “As long as you promise to bake some more of those cookies, they were delicious.”
She laughed, and then she came over to help me gather my things. I gave her a lot of the stuff I had bought, because I didn’t need it and neither did Dex. The waffle iron in particular made her smile.
On Thursday, I went to St. Mary’s to visit with Marsha. She was ready for me when I got there, with a whole speech prepared about how much good I was doing as an abuse counselor. I had always been a volunteer, but she offered twice to put me on the payroll before I managed to get the words out to tell her that I would be coming back on Monday.