If I'm Found

by Terri Blackstock

  “It’s okay. Just bruised when they were ramming me in the car. I slammed against the door.”

  He moves my foot around, and I suck in a breath through clenched teeth. “It probably needs X-rays,” he says.

  “Well, that’s out of the question.”

  “Yeah. Let’s hope it’s just sprained.” He gets up and grabs his room key off the table. “I’ll go get the ice. Want anything else?”

  “No thanks,” I say.

  He finds the ice bucket. “You’re low maintenance. You just may be my dream girl.”

  I laugh now.

  He pauses at the door. “I like how at home your grin lines are around your eyes.”

  “I used to use them a lot.”

  He brings the ice back and fashions an ice pack out of the bucket’s plastic bag so it doesn’t hurt my skin. He takes the pillowcase off his pillow and puts the ice pack inside it. “You should go put your foot up. Get some sleep while you can.”

  “I don’t know if I can sleep,” I say. “I keep thinking about Ava . . . and that man . . . and this just becoming a way of life for her while her parents get away with everything. She’s only seven.”

  I tell him again about her hiding in the bathroom stall, then being handed over to the man.

  “It’s not right, Dylan. I know I need to lay low with all this stuff going on, but I keep thinking of her. Is there something you can do to investigate? Some way you could go to the accident scene or look at his car or something?”

  “I’m sure the police are investigating.”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “Why would they? He had reason to kill himself, if they don’t consider that things were turning around.”

  “They will consider that, Casey.”

  “But they’ve already told the press it was a suicide. And they know Ava was abused, but they think Cole did it. Now that he’s dead, if they just close the case, that man will keep doing it. I can’t stand it.”

  Dylan lets out a long breath, but I see him thinking it through. “You’re sure he’s abusing her?”

  I tell him everything I saw again and what Cole said about Ava accusing a guy named Fred.

  Finally, I see that he’s coming around. “If I promise that in the morning I’ll go back to Dallas and see what I can find out, will you go lie down?”

  “But how will you do that?” I ask.

  “I don’t know exactly. Let me think about it.”

  “And if I fall asleep, you’ll wake me up if . . . ?” My voice trails off.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you? You know I’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

  Our eyes meet and hold for a moment longer than necessary. I’m losing it, I tell myself. Just because he’s helping me doesn’t mean he’s in love with me. I’m lapping up his attention like a drug.

  I make myself get up. He takes my hand, looks up at me. Again, I meet his eyes.

  For a moment, I think he might kiss me, and I feel the magnetic pull of his wet lips. I could just bend down a few inches and kiss him myself . . .

  Then he drops my hand and whispers, “Get some sleep.”

  I feel safer than I’ve felt since Brent was murdered, and I fall into a deep sleep.

  52

  KEEGAN

  The photoshopped rendering I’ve gotten back from our forensic artist is better than I could have hoped. I enlarge it on my laptop screen and lean back and laugh. “This is perfect. Black hair, heavy eye makeup.”

  Rollins is driving our rental car tonight, since I don’t want to attract attention in my Jag, and he glances over at me. His breath smells like cough drops, which he sucks on every waking moment, probably to hide the alcohol smell. “Is that how she looked?”

  “I only saw her in my headlights for a second, but this is it, man. She just came out of nowhere. Freaked me out. I didn’t know how long she’d been there, what she saw. I tried to find her but she got past me. There were families pulling out of the parking lot, and it was dark, and I looked into each car and didn’t see anyone who looked like her. I still don’t know if she left on foot or drove right past me.”

  “Here’s the list of local media who are waiting for the email,” Rollins says, pulling an index card out of his pocket. “Want to send it now?”

  “No, the motel guy said she was in a red wig. I’m waiting for that rendering. Maybe I should get a picture of Dylan to send them too.”

  Rollins stares through the windshield at the traffic ahead of us on I-20. “Listen to me for a minute,” he says, rubbing his chin.

  I turn and look at him. “What?”

  “I think you’re making a mistake. You can’t name him as an accessory when we don’t know for sure he’s helping her.”

  “Then explain to me how our tracking him led us right to her room tonight. He’s about to lead us to her again, mark my word.”

  “But what if that’s not what happened? What if he was tracking her too? We need to talk to him and find out if he saw her.”

  “Rollins, what is it with you? You got a man-crush on this guy?”

  “Come on,” he says. “I’m just saying that the chief is not going to like it if we make a big stink about him outsourcing the hunt for Casey Cox, and insinuate that his guy flipped, when we don’t know that he did. Why would he, anyway?”

  “Okay, the alcohol is addling your brain, dude. You need to dry up.”

  He grunts and looks at me. “What are you talking about? I haven’t had a drink all day.”

  I twist in my seat and reach into the backseat for the Igloo cooler. I open one of the bottled waters and take a swig. “Vodka.”

  He broods for a minute. “I didn’t drink it,” he says. “I’m making sense, Gordon, and you know it.”

  “Okay, you want to know why he would turn on us? Maybe he figured the whole thing out, idiot! Maybe he’s talked to her. Maybe he believes her! And if that’s true and he rats us out, then we’re sunk, you and me. Do you get that?”

  He gets quiet as he always does when I rag on him. I bite my lip until I taste blood, then I check the GPS locator app that I’ve linked to Dylan’s phone. We’re catching up to him. Should be another fifteen minutes or so.

  I think over what Rollins has said. Maybe he’s right about Chief Gates getting a burr in his saddle over our outing Dylan to the world. It would be an embarrassment and would upset Jim and Elise Pace. Maybe it is an overreaction.

  A new email appears in my inbox. “Here’s the other picture of her. I’ll just send her pictures for now.”

  Rollins is still sulking. I get the index card and turn on the interior light so I can read it. I type the addresses of our contacts at the news outlets, draft the official statement I’m giving them about her recently being seen in their area, and attach her picture.

  Then I press Send. “You sure they’re waiting for it?”

  “Yep,” Rollins says. “With bated breath.”

  “So how close are we to him?” I click on the GPS banner and enlarge it so it fills my screen. I try to locate the blue ball that indicates Dylan’s location, but I don’t see it anymore. “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “The location. It’s dropped off. Are you kidding me?”

  “Maybe he stopped.”

  “It’s tracking his phone! There’s no reason it would go off just because he stopped. What the—”

  “His battery died?”

  I let that sink in, then I slam my hand on the dashboard and curse. I punch the light back out and put my hands over my face. “I don’t believe this. How can this moron let his phone die in the middle of an investigation!”

  “So what do we do?” he asks.

  “Keep driving. Maybe he’ll realize it’s dead and plug it in.”

  But we drive for half an hour more and never find him. Finally, we give up and I seethe as we head back to Dallas.

  53

  DYLAN

  Casey sleeps hard all night. I doze off and on, sitting in the dark at the hotel
window, watching every car that comes into the parking lot. I wonder if Keegan has caught up to the eighteen-wheeler with my phone yet, or if the trail ended when the battery died.

  It’s six a.m., and I turn on the TV. I flip around until I find a Dallas station. They cover a city council meeting and the governor’s speech at an NAACP meeting. Then I hear Casey’s name.

  I spring to my feet and see the artist’s sketch of Casey’s face with her current black hairstyle. I go to her bedroom doorway. “Casey, wake up!”

  She jumps too fast out of her sleep and sits bolt upright. “What?”

  “In here!”

  She gets out of bed and stumbles into the living room, and sucks in a breath as she sees the rendering. “It’s me.”

  “You have to change your hair.”

  She looks around. “The wigs.”

  “Not the red one. They have that too. It’s going to get harder and harder to disguise yourself. They have you with long blonde hair, shorter blonde hair, black hair, short red hair, heavy makeup, no makeup . . .”

  “I’ll wear the long brown one. Sunglasses. What if someone saw me here last night? What if security cameras got me?”

  “You didn’t go into the office. I scoped out the cameras. I don’t think they got you.”

  “But what about you? What if they’re looking for you?”

  “They didn’t put me on the news. The hotel managers won’t be looking for me.”

  “Where is this broadcast from?”

  “Dallas.”

  She sinks onto the couch, rubs her eyes. She’s still wearing the clothes she was in last night. I wonder why she didn’t put on her pajamas. Maybe she doesn’t have any with her.

  “They’ll call. My landlady, her daughter. The people I worked with. They’ll see this and know it was me. What number is that?”

  I look at the number they’re showing on the screen. “Unbelievable. It’s Keegan’s cell phone.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “He’s not supposed to. He’d probably rather get forgiveness than permission. It shows how desperate he’s gotten.”

  “He’ll hear from them anytime now.”

  “It’s okay. Put the wig on now. Just keep it on. Don’t ever take your sunglasses off.”

  She goes in her room to grab her duffel bag. When I step into the doorway, she’s putting on the brown wig. Casey looks good no matter how she wears her hair.

  “Yeah, that one,” I say. “It’s a little different.” I don’t tell her, but she still looks too much like herself.

  “I’ll work on it,” she says.

  54

  KEEGAN

  I’m a genius,” I tell Rollins as we sit out by the pool at my Dallas house. Candy has gone to show a house, and I don’t expect her back for a while. I left Rollins sleeping in a guest room, and as he comes out to find me, I can’t help crowing. “The media idea was perfect. Calls have been coming in all morning.”

  He sits down at the patio table, looking a little hung over. “Any leads?”

  “Tons of leads, man. I heard from two people who worked with Casey who say she left work in the middle of the day a few days ago and never came back, and a landlady who says she’s been renting a room but hasn’t been there in a couple of days. And there’s this guy who died while she was working there. I’m trying to figure out—”

  “Someone died? Who?”

  I show him the webpage I’ve pulled up about Cole Whittington. “Drove his car off a cliff the other day. Police are calling it a suicide, but maybe we can use it.”

  My phone rings again, and I check the readout. I don’t know the number, but I click it on. “Detective Keegan.”

  “Yeah, is this the number to report sightings of that Casey Cox woman?”

  The voice is a woman’s, husky and hoarse, and slightly slurred. “Yeah, what you got?”

  “We had some . . . dealings with her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She was stalking us. That man Cole Whittington molested our daughter, and she was friends with him and started following us everywhere. She assaulted my husband.”

  “Wait.” I stop her and jot the information down. “What’s your name?”

  “Tiffany Trendall,” she says.

  I put it on speakerphone so Rollins can hear. “What do you mean she assaulted your husband?”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” she says. “She killed that guy . . . Cole Whittington. She ran him off the road.”

  I get to my feet, locking eyes with Rollins. “Didn’t police rule that a suicide?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t. She was obsessed with him. I bet she killed him.”

  “You bet?” Rollins cuts in. “You don’t know that for sure?”

  “What do you think?” she says. “You think it’s a coincidence that a known killer is here in Dallas, working at his family business, and he winds up dead?”

  I ask to speak to her husband, and he seems a little less slurred, but equally adamant that Cox must be the one who killed Cole Whittington. When I’m finished with the conversation, I cut the phone off and let out a laugh that rises over the whole neighborhood. “Are you kidding me? This is too good to be true. A dead guy?”

  Rollins laughs for the first time in months. Maybe years. He lifts his hand to high-five me. “I’ll call the media. This story just gets better and better.”

  55

  DYLAN

  I find Casey a car for sale on Craigslist for only $1,500. I ask the guy to bring it to a Walmart parking lot a mile from our hotel. Casey gives me a thousand dollars and I put in five hundred of my own money. The car’s got 200,000 miles, but it’s a Nissan. I think it’ll hold up for Casey.

  I pay the cash and sign the title over to Liana Winter, the ID that Casey will be using now. I shake his hand and watch him leave, then I leave the car in the Walmart parking lot and go get Casey. I leave my car down the street from our hotel, just in case, and we wind up back at the motel in hers. We’re eating drive-through burgers and fries in the room and trying to make our next game plan, when the news story on TV changes. The Dallas station cuts in with breaking news, and Casey’s rendering comes up next to Cole’s face.

  Casey sucks in a breath.

  We listen as the anchor excitedly tells of the connection between Casey and Cole Whittington, who police now suspect may have been run off the road by the fugitive killer.

  Casey springs up. “What!” Terror and shock drag on her jaw.

  I get up and pace, trying to think. This will change the whole narrative. The stuff we’ve been compiling won’t be considered seriously if they think she’s killed more people.

  “They think I killed Cole?” She’s almost hysterical now. “How could they think—”

  I start pulling on my shoes. “Tell me where the Trendalls live,” I say.

  She gives me their address. “Dylan, I know they did it. I know they did. They probably called Keegan themselves, maybe even the media, and told them this. They ran me off the road, and they did the same thing with Cole. And now they’re taking advantage of the media coverage to get the heat off themselves.” She goes into the bedroom, and I hear her throwing her things into her bag.

  I go to the door of her room. “Casey.”

  “I have to go back. I have to find their truck. I know it’s got evidence on it. It wasn’t at their house after his wreck—I looked for it. They hid it somewhere so the police wouldn’t connect them.”

  “Now they’ll have dents on their van too,” I say.

  “And those should show paint that connects it to my car. They’ve probably identified it by now.”

  “Casey, I’ll go back. You have to stay here. I’ll pretend I’m still on your case, looking for you. I’ll find out what the police know. I’ll look at Cole’s car. Maybe I can find that truck.”

  “This is out of control!” she cries. “My family . . . what are they going to think?”

  “They’ll think you’ve been framed again!”


  “It’s got a life of its own. I can’t keep hiding.”

  “You can today.”

  She looks at me, suddenly present again. “Take my car. Yours is dented. It might connect you to my wreck.”

  I nod. “Yeah, okay.” I get her keys and leave her mine.

  I go to the door, open it, and stick the Do Not Disturb sign in the key slot. I close it again. “You don’t open this. If anyone knocks, you call through the door and say you’re trying to sleep. And you don’t even think about leaving here to work on Cole’s case.”

  “What if they come in anyway? If it’s the police?”

  “Go out the window again and text me.” I grab my computer and make sure she has all the information I have on hers. “I’ll get you more food before I go. But I have to hurry.”

  I get her more vending machine food. I hear vacuum cleaners up the hall, but no one is watching me. I go back in and leave everything on the table. She’s parked, frozen, in front of the TV.

  “Casey, are you gonna be all right?”

  She nods and wipes her face. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll call you. Keep your phone charged.”

  “Yeah,” she whispers again.

  I’m not sure if she really is okay as I leave the hotel and go to her car.

  56

  DYLAN

  I get to Dallas a couple of hours later, go to the police headquarters, and show them my credentials. “I’m Dylan Roberts, contracted to work on the Casey Cox case with the Shreveport PD. Are you familiar with that case?”

  The sergeant looks me over with disgust and picks up the phone. He walks a few steps away as he talks into it, and I can’t hear him. Finally, he comes back. “The captain and the detective on that case are coming to talk to you.” He leans over the counter. “They’re not happy.”

  I brace myself as the captain emerges from a hallway. I extend my hand to introduce myself, but he rejects it.

  “Why don’t you just tell me who you think you are, coming into my jurisdiction without giving us the courtesy of a phone call letting us know that a known fugitive is here? Going into a motel with guns drawn without once looping us in!”