by David Grace
Virgil turned to Dion with an embarrassed expression.
“Yeah, he’s right. If you were really the driver then there’s got to be something else you can tell us about the van. What color was it?”
“White!” Dion said as if calling out an answer on Family Feud.
“Good. Good. You’re almost there. What else?”
Dion closed his eyes and Virgil shot Kudlacik a look that could have had the caption, Moron!
“Ahhh, I know! The speedometer was round and right in the center of the dash and the shift lever thing was, like, on the steering column, on the right side of the steering column,” Dion answered smiling.
“Damn,” Virgil said, turning to Kudlacik. “I’m convinced. Stan, how about you?”
“I doubted it, but I’ve got to give it to him.”
Virgil turned back to Dion and smiled.
“All right. We believe you. You were just the driver. The other guys went inside and did the dirty work while you waited outside. So, Dion, who was it who did that little girl? You’re just,” Virgil waved his hand, “kind of a bystander next to him. He’s the guy we really want. Who was the prick who did the little girl?”
“Paulie, that sick fuck! He was the one. He was always after those little girls. Bastard. You can fry him for all I care.”
“What about Latwan?”
“Nah, he doesn’t go for them kids. He likes women with meat on their bones, the bigger the better.”
“So, was Latwan the one who did the girl’s mother?”
Dion hesitated a second then nodded. “Yeah, he bragged how he probably gave her the best fuck of her life.”
Kudlacik turned away to hide the rage that was seeping into his face.
“So we don’t have to go through all this shit again, who was driving the other vehicle, the car?”
“That was Ralphie.”
“We gotta have the full name,” Virgil said in a bored voice as he leaned over his pad.
“Ahhhh, Ralph Anderson.”
“OK, Ralph Anderson, other driver,” Virgil muttered as he made a note. “That means it was . . . .” Virgil flipped through his pad. “Fuck! What’s that word?” He handed the notebook to Kudlacik who squinted at the page. “Bass? Buuuh . . . Boss man! Shit, you write like a two-year old.”
“Two-year-olds can’t write.”
“That’s my point. Seriously, you’ve got to get your act together. What if you got hit by a bus or something and I had to go into court with this shit?”
“All right all ready. Jesus, fuck, Dion, help me out here.” Virgil flipped to a clean page and glared at Kudlacik. “I’m going to print it nice and neat, just for you, OK?”
“Don’t strain yourself.”
“Stop breaking my balls! . . . Dion?” Virgil called without looking up.
“Ahhhh, Kyle,” Dion said after a half-second pause. “We just called him ‘The K’ or ‘Mr. K.’ Sometimes, ‘Mr. Kunt’,” Dion added with a laugh.
“I gotta have the legal name,” Virgil muttered, not looking up.
Dion was silent for a moment, then closed his eyes. Virgil and Stan held their breath.
“Neddick!” Dion half-shouted, opening his eyes.
“Kyle Neddick,” Virgil repeated, laboriously printing each letter on the page.
“So, do I get my deal?” Dion said in the same tone that a third grader might use to ask if he had earned his gold star.
“Oh, yeah,” Virgil said. “All we got to do is write it up and we’ll all sign it and you’ll absolutely have your deal. I’ll get you a pad and a pen. While I’m at it, you want anything? A drink or whatever?”
“You got any Twinkies?”
Virgil glanced at Kudlacik.
“I think there are some in the machine on the third floor.”
“OK, a package of Twinkies. You got it.”
“And, uhhh, maybe a grape soda. I like having a grape soda with my Twinkies.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Virgil said and pushed back from the table.
Chapter Forty-One
For the thousandth time in his career Virgil wished that catching crooks in real life worked like it did on TV, that DNA scans actually came back in twenty minutes, that getting phone dumps and credit card records took half an hour, and that a few clicks on a keyboard would instantly tell you where your suspect would be ten minutes from now.
Unfortunately, real crooks used credit cards with fake names and post-office-box addresses, bought most things for cash, carried burner phones, drove leased cars registered in someone else’s name, and never filed tax returns.
The team had two new names, Ralph Anderson and Kyle Neddick. They had no current addresses, vehicle registrations, bank accounts, or real-estate records. So far, all they did have were Anderson’s criminal package – date of birth, social security number, the names of his next-of-kin, and where he had done his time.
The name “Kyle Neddick” came up clean which meant that it was probably an alias, so he was a ghost. Virgil had worked until his legs had begun to shake and the room tilted a few degrees out of true before settling back to horizontal. This time he didn’t wait for Kudlacik to tell him to call it a day. This time he punched out on his own.
On the way home he stopped long enough to grab a combo-meal from McDonalds and he ate it on the couch while watching the local news. Someplace between a fire in a scrap-metal yard and the possibility of hail accompanying the weekend’s threatened storm his brain clouded over and his eyelids went on strike, leaving him with vague memories of Steve McGarrett screeching around a corner in his black Mercury in a race to get a crucial witness to the courthouse before Jack McCoy finished his closing argument.
“This is Classy, Classy TV,” a distant voice announced. Virgil twisted his shoulders and idly thought about opening his eyes. “We’re the home of Classic TV, the shows that made America great.” The room went silent for a couple of seconds then Johnny Western began singing, “Have gun, will travel reads the card of a man. A knight without armor in a savage land.”
Virgil smacked his lips and struggled to sit up, knocking the remote to the floor in the process. By the time he managed to flick the power off, Johnny Western was crooning, “A man called Paladin.”
Virgil wandered into the kitchen and guzzled a bottled water so quickly that he got a brain freeze. It was five after nine. He thought about going to bed but he knew that if he did he’d wake up around four a.m. and then he’d spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling.
Instead he paced back to the living room and settled down in front of the computer. He’d been searching college Facebook pages for pictures of female freshman, hoping against hope that Nicole’s image might magically appear and even more unbelievably that he would recognize his own lost child in a young woman’s guise.
“Facebook? That’s the best you can do?” a voice called from behind him.
Virgil twisted around. Jane/Nicole was sitting on the couch, her feet dangling several inches above the floor.
Cover a man’s face with a hood and put him in an airplane with an invisible glass floor. Circle it a thousand feet over a field of rocks, pull off the hood, then tell him he can’t fall and not to be afraid. It doesn’t matter what the mind knows. His heart will still feel what it feels. Emotion will win out.
She’s just an hallucination, the logical part of Virgil’s brain insisted, but it was drowned out by his heart shouting, Nicole! Nicole! Nicole!
“I’ve done everything I could think of,” he said to the little girl who, to him, looked as real as life itself. “What else can I do?”
Nicole smiled. “That would be telling,” she said in a teasing voice.
“Because you’re just a figment of my imagination and you don’t know anything that I don’t know.”
At first she shrugged, then a sly look painted her face. “Maybe,” she said, “I know something that you don’t know you know.”
“Tell me.”
“What if it
’s something you don’t want to know?”
“I don’t care. Just tell me.”
Nicole stared at him for a moment then looked down and fiddled with the folds of her dress.
The blue dress with the birds on it, Virgil thought. The one she wore to her fifth birthday party. She had named all the birds. A month later she spilled grape juice on it and she cried when Helen threw it away.
“You don’t understand,” Nicole said without looking up.
“Then explain it to me.”
Nicole smoothed out a patch of fabric then frowned when it dissolved into wrinkles again.
“You want me to give you answers, but all I have are questions.”
“Tell me the questions,” Virgil begged, ignoring the fear growing in his stomach.
Nicole’s face went blank for an instant then turned sad.
“Is the real reason you want to find me because you think it’s your fault that mama took me away?”
“No, I–”
“Are you doing all this,” Nicole waved at the laptop on the desk behind him, “because you’re just trying to fix your mistakes?”
“No! You’re my daughter and I love you.”
“But maybe not as much as you loved your job?”
Virgil opened his mouth to protest but no words came out, and he hid his face in his hands.
“She had no right to make you choose,” Nicole answered for him. Virgil wiped his eyes and saw that she was now standing only a couple of feet in front of him. He started to reach out then stopped himself, certain that at his touch she would disappear.
“What will happen if you find me?” Nicole asked, her face serious.
“I don’t know.”
“What if I don’t want to have anything to do with you? Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if I blame you for mama taking me away?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if I hate you?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said, his voice breaking.
Nicole took half a step closer, her face intent. “You’ve done the best you can. No one would blame you for stopping. Wouldn’t it be better if you just let me go?”
“No. I won’t!”
“Why?”
“I love you and I’ll never let you go,” Virgil said in a voice like broken glass.
Nicole’s face seemed to melt then flickered back into place. A little smile curved her lips.
“All right,” she said, dipping her head. “I’ll tell you a secret.” She leaned closer but her voice was like the murmur of a breeze through a pile of stones. Virgil bent forward and closed his eyes but the sounds grew softer and then disappeared, and when he opened them again she was gone. He swivelled his head left then right, searching vainly for her in the corners of the room. Finally, defeated, he spun around and reached for the mouse, but his hand froze in midair as a new idea tickled his brain.
What if I’ve been going about this all wrong? he thought. I’ve been looking for Nicole. Maybe I should have been looking for Helen. What would Helen have or do or need or become that would make her stand out?
She was left handed. She had worked as a bookkeeper. She hated pineapple. She liked to cook Italian food. Her father was an insurance agent. Her mother was a teacher. Her father died from throat cancer. Her aunt died young from something or other. Her mother had been sick with . . . her mother had had surgery for breast cancer.
He had begun his search by creating a list of every nine-to-eleven year old female child who had been registered in a new school in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Washington and Oregon the Fall after Helen disappeared. Expanding that search to the entire country would have yielded an impossibly large pool of candidates which he would have had no way to narrow down. But what if now he did have a way?
In case there was a recall or a newly discovered side effect there had to be some database someplace that kept track of who filled prescriptions for certain kinds of drugs. Someone must have set up something like that after the Thalidomide disaster. If he could find it, if he could get access to it, what if he ran the list of the mothers of those nine to eleven year old girls who were newly registered in school in all fifty states against the list of women of Helen’s approximate age who had received prescriptions for one or more cancer drugs at some time in the last three or four years?
It was a long shot, the longest. Just because Helen had a family history of cancer didn’t mean that she was going to get it. What were the odds? 10%? 5%? 1%? But that was better than 0% which was what he had now.
In his gut Virgil knew that he was wasting his time, that this was just another dead end in nine years of nothing but dead ends, but what was the alternative? Give up looking for Nicole? No, never, he would never, ever do that. Virgil reached for the keyboard and started typing.
Chapter Forty-Two
The club where Kyle told Ralph Anderson to meet him was a hard-drinking dive not far from the river with a craps table in the room behind the bar and cubicles upstairs where the Quarter Girls, so called because they rented the space fifteen minutes at a time, could take their Johns. It was a place where nobody knew your name and they didn’t take American Express. Kyle settled into a corner booth an hour early and waved at one of the Quarter Girls to bring him a drink.
White, thin, and twitchy with slab cheeks that angled on a face like an axe, Ralph Anderson entered the club a little after nine. After a quick glance around he got himself a drink then headed to Kyle’s table.
“What’s up?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder toward the door.
“Latwan fucked up.”
“What else is new?” Anderson laughed. “What’d he do?”
“He got himself shot.”
“Dead?”
Kyle rotated his finger. “Circling the drain.” Anderson made another nervous scan of the bar. “It was on the news. He got pulled over for speeding or something and decided to shoot it out with the cop.”
“So, it had nothing to do with us?”
“We’re in the clear.”
“Then why the rush to get rid of my phone?” Anderson asked.
“Just being careful in case the cops ran the numbers on Latwan’s cell. With both him and Paulie gone we need to plan out what we’re going to do next.”
“Where’s Dion?” Getting twitchier by the minute, Anderson looked back toward the door.
“He’s not answering his phone. He’s probably shacked up with some whore. The thing is we’ve got a new job coming up and we need to get ready.”
“Just the three of us?”
“It’s at least half a million in cash and gold, probably more. Split three ways that’s a hell of a good payday.” For the first time that evening Anderson smiled.
“Sounds good to me.” Ralphie grinned and slugged down his scotch.
“You’re going to have to go in with us and get your hands dirty. Are you up for that?” Ralphie didn’t miss the menace in Kyle’s eyes. Anderson’s smile began to slip but he forced it back.
“Why should you and Dion have all the fun?” he said, glancing at Kyle then looking away. “When’s it going down?”
Kyle looked at his watch. “I’ve got a guy checking out the target. He should be getting back to me in a little while.” Kyle slid a bill across the table. “Go get yourself another drink.”
An uneasy hour trickled by. Barely a word passed between them. Finally, Ralphie went to the can.
“It’s set,” Kyle whispered to Anderson when he returned from the men’s room, then Kyle looked suspiciously around the bar. “Let’s talk outside.”
Kyle led the way south on Brewster then took a quick left into an alley between two decaying brick buildings. When Anderson hesitated Kyle roughly waved him forward and strode into the darkness behind one of the dumpsters. Ralphie reluctantly followed, nervously checking the shadows for hidden threats.
“OK, you’ll be driving so you’re going to have to plan
out the route. Here’s the target’s name and address.” Kyle reached into his pocket then in one swift motion pulled out his Sig and pressed the barrel against Anderson’s chest. Ralphie’s coat muffled most of the noise and the shot came out as barely more than a muted “pop.” Anderson fell backwards, his face a mask of surprise. Kyle pulled a half-crushed soda bottle from the trash, shoved the barrel into the open end, placed the flat bottom against Ralphie’s forehead then shot him again.
Leave him here or put him in the dumpster? Kyle wondered. He wanted to delay the discovery of Anderson’s body as long as possible but getting Ralphie to his feet and heaving him over the dumpster’s lip would likely get blood and brains on his coat. Kyle compromised and removed Ralphie’s phone and ID then dragged him behind the dumpster and covered his body with flattened boxes and random trash. One more potential witness out of the way. Garbage to garbage, Kyle thought, then checked the street in both directions before fleeing the alley.
Almost time to run, he thought. Almost time to run.
Chapter Forty-Three
The phone’s chime dragged Virgil from a tangled dream where he chased faceless men who shouted garbled words and then disappeared. The room was as dark as midnight though the cell’s screen read, “6:04 a.m.”
“Quinn,” he croaked, then cleared his throat.
“They just found Ralph Anderson.” He recognized Stan Kudlacik’s voice.
“Have them bring him to the squad.” Virgil turned and stumbled out of bed.
“The only place they’re gonna bring him to is the morgue. His body’s in an alley just off Brewster with a hole in his head.”
“Where are you?”
“Home. I put my cell number on the BOLO.”
“Text me the address. I’ll meet you there.”
Virgil tapped “disconnect” then stripped off his shorts and headed for the bathroom.
* * *
The alley stank of rotting chicken and human waste, though the stench was slightly muted by the near refrigerator temperature of a mid-October dawn in Detroit. Crime-Scene techs had piled the cardboard, newspapers, plastic bags, crushed beer cans and the rest of the garbage that had covered the body on a blue, plastic tarp just outside the entrance to the alley, and now had moved on to photographing the corpse itself.