“Ser-Sergio.”
“Why?” Helmer asks, not hiding his shock.
“I . . . told him you were asking . . .”
“Shh,” I say, dropping down beside her and taking her hand between mine. “Save your strength. They’ll be here in a minute, and you’re going to be fine.”
Madison’s gaze drops to the blood on her blouse, the blood pooled on the floor around us. I glance down to see that my jean-covered knees are now also red. When she looks up at me, her voice is barely audible when she says, “I didn’t think he would do what you said. About your sister. He was good to me . . . gave me stuff.” She stops there, her lungs audibly gasping for air.
“Don’t,” I say. “You can talk later.”
“Madison,” Helmer says, tipping her chin toward him. “I’ll find him. He won’t get away with this, but I need you to tell me everything you know. His last name? Where he lives?”
She stares up at him, and I cringe at the sound of her struggling to breathe.
“Detective,” I say, “please . . .”
But he ignores me, imploring Madison to answer. “His last name, Madison.”
“Sokolov,” she manages to get out.
“Where does he live?” Helmer pushes.
“I don’t know,” she says on a whisper. “We always came here.”
A siren wails in the distance and then the sound grows closer outside the building. “They’re here, Madison,” I say, squeezing her hand again, as if I can infuse my own life force into her. Her face blurs before mine, and I’m seeing Mia, watching the life fade from her. Is there someone there for her? Panic rises inside me, and I’m leaning over Madison, pleading with her to hold on. The girl’s eyes flutter, and a gurgling noise sounds in her throat. Blood oozes from the left corner of her mouth.
I start to cry.
Helmer puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes hard. “Emory,” he says, and I latch onto the crazy question of whether this is the first time he’s said my name.
Footsteps pound on the stairs outside Madison’s broken door. Two paramedics rush through, calling out that they’re here. But I look down at Madison’s still body, her open blue eyes, and I can see that they are too late.
Knox
“I am both worse and better than you thought.”
―Sylvia Plath
KNOX GIVES THE officers on the scene all the information he has about the driver of the Range Rover, the name he believes he goes by and the photo of the license plate.
Randall Macintosh, a uniformed officer he’s known since joining the force, takes down everything Knox tells him. “What was your interest in Madison Willard?” he asks, his head swinging from Knox to Emory Benson.
Knox glances at Emory and then says, “I’m doing some private work for Dr. Benson. Her sister and her sister’s best friend recently disappeared from the Spring Jam Festival. In reviewing the festival’s security footage, I saw a man who appeared to be following them. I believe he might have bought the hat he was wearing at the store where Madison worked. We went there earlier tonight to ask her some questions. She indicated she didn’t know who he was, but I had a feeling she wasn’t telling us everything, so we waited for her to get off work. The suspect picked her up outside the store, and we followed them to her apartment. They had barely gotten inside the building before he was coming back out again, and my phone rang. She could hardly talk, but she was asking for help.”
“You think she told him about your questions, and that’s why he shot her?” Macintosh asks.
“I don’t know what else to think.”
The officer’s phone rings. He answers, listens intently, before clicking off, and then says, “The plate on the Range Rover was stolen. Belongs to a woman in Maryland who reported it a couple of weeks ago.”
“What about the vehicle?” Knox asks.
“Still working on that. We’ve got an APB out for the Range Rover. Chief Parker would like the two of you to come to the station and answer a few more questions.”
Knox blows out a short breath, and says the only thing there is to say, “We’ll head over now.”
~
THEY’RE ON THE Beltway driving toward downtown before either of them speaks.
Strangely, they both start to say something at the same time.
“I should have . . .”
“How could we . . .”
They glance at each other, and Knox can see the horror of what they witnessed in her eyes. “I want to believe we could have prevented that,” he says, his gaze now on the highway before them.
“But how?” she asks quietly. “Why did she lie to us?”
“She didn’t think he could be capable of what we’d told her.”
“But he is. And now he’s back out there. What if he’s already killed my sister and Grace?” She barely manages to choke out the last words, before her head is in her hands, and he can hear her quiet crying.
Without giving himself time to correct the impulse, he reaches out and puts a hand on her arm. “You can’t think that. We don’t have any reason to believe it at this point. The only way to get through this is to take each piece of information we have and follow it through to the best of our ability. Trusting only what’s immediately in front of you is how you get to the next critical clue. Think of what we knew yesterday and what we know now. We have somewhere to go.”
She presses her lips together, and he senses her struggling to bring her emotions under control. She nods once, her right elbow on the Jeep door, her hand running through her hair.
When they reach the station, Knox pulls into the parking spot it is his habit to park in. He’s just getting ready to suggest she wait there for him when a text dings on his phone. It’s the captain.
Bring the Benson girl in with you.
He doesn’t bother texting her back, because an order is an order.
He looks at Emory and says, “The captain wants to speak with you too.”
“I don’t have a problem with that.” She opens her door and slides out, then waits for him to walk around.
He leads the way inside the building, holding the door for her and then making his way to the captain’s office. The door is closed. He raps once; opens it at her terse, “Come in.”
He steps aside and waves Emory through before him.
“You must be Emory Benson,” Chief Parker stands from the chair behind her desk, sticks out her hand.
“Yes,” Emory says, shaking hands with her and keeping her gaze locked with the captain’s. Knox takes note of the fact that she isn’t intimidated.
Chief Parker looks at Knox, any residue of pleasantness leaving her expression. “You’re on leave,” she says matter-of-factly.
“Yes,” he agrees.
“Would you like to tell me how you ended up in the middle of an investigation you were relieved from?”
“I hired him as a private detective,” Emory answers before he can.
The captain’s gaze swings to her. “I think Detective Helmer can answer that question.”
“I didn’t expect what happened tonight to happen, Captain,” he says.
“I should hope not. But you have defied an order in continuing to work on this case.”
“Chief Parker,” Emory says, her voice suddenly a hard line of steel. “Has anyone you loved ever gone missing?”
The captain meets her questioning gaze, and it is clear she’s surprised by her boldness. “No.”
“But you have no doubt witnessed many families struggling with this reality?”
“I have,” she says carefully.
“Then you must have some idea how unbearable it is to sit and wait for a phone call that might give you the smallest piece of information about the person you love? For three days, I have heard nothing. My seventeen-year-old sister, whom I have raised since she was eight years old, vanished. And while I know this police department will do everything within its power to find her, I also know it might not be enough. I can’t stand by and do not
hing. Detective Helmer agreed to help me because I all but begged him to. If anyone is going to get reprimanded for this, it should be me.”
“You’re not an officer of this department, Miss Benson.”
“It’s Dr. Benson,” Emory says. “And no, I’m not. But tonight is the first lead I’ve been made aware of. The first piece of hope I have that my baby sister might be found. Only, I don’t even know if I have that because the man who killed Madison Willard is a monster. And how do I know that he hasn’t already killed Mia and Grace?”
Emory swallows once, as if trying to push back the emotion welling up inside her. “Can you find him, Captain?”
“We’ll do our best,” she says. “I can assure you of that.”
“I believe you,” Emory says. “But what if that’s not enough? My sister is the only family I have left. I will never be able to live with myself if I don’t do anything and everything I possibly can to help find her.”
The captain glances from Emory to Knox. He holds her gaze, aware that, like his superiors in the Special Forces, to look away is to show weakness and lose her respect.
When she finally speaks, it is on the exhalation of a long sigh. “Detective Helmer, you will not in any way interfere with the ongoing investigation of this department. And if you develop the smallest of leads, you will notify Detective Carmichael, who is now the lead on this case. Am I understood?”
“Perfectly,” Knox says, keeping his expression neutral.
“That will be all then. Maybe we could go home and try to get some sleep now.”
“Goodnight, Captain,” he says, opening the office door.
They’re in the hallway when the captain calls out, “I’m really sorry about your sister and her friend, Dr. Benson. It is my fervent hope that they’ll be found.”
Sergio
“The power of the sin is in its secrecy.”
―TemitOpe Ibrahim
HE’S HAD SECOND thoughts about keeping the Range Rover. He’ll need to change the license plate again.
And he’ll get a detail first thing in the morning to lose any traces of Madison having been in the Range Rover.
He lets his mind scan his own personal checklist for cleaning up potentially messy situations.
What had gone down tonight was more than potentially messy. It could end life as he knew it.
Inside the quiet walls of his Georgetown townhouse, Sergio pours himself a shot glass of tequila, downs it, and then pours another, waiting for the first to hit his bloodstream. He glances at the label on the bottle, Patrón en Lalique, and remembers the morning it had arrived by special courier on his doorstep. He remembers too the evening before that had prompted Senator Hagan to send it to him as a thank you.
At six thousand dollars a bottle, it was a gift not only meant to compensate for the favor Sergio had bestowed on the senator the night before, but also an implication of future expectations. Sergio wasn’t stupid. He would concede to greed, but he knew that stupid and greedy would not allow for a lengthy lifespan.
Not where his employer was concerned.
He downs the second shot of tequila, aware of its nearly instantaneous ability to smooth the edges of his insecurity.
He’d taken care of the problem tonight. As soon as he realized there was one, he’d taken care of it. And wasn’t that his job anyway? His employer had hired him to be a problem solver of the highest caliber. This was one problem she didn’t need to know about, because it wasn’t one any longer.
The proprietor did not suffer fools. And she would without doubt find him at fault for the fact that a cop was asking questions of a girl he was currently banging.
Growing up on the streets of Cartagena had taught him many things, but one of the most important lessons of all had been the fact that survivors never left loose ends. Above all, Sergio was a survivor. He had a second sense for knowing when it was time to cut losses.
Unfortunately, Madison was a loss he’d had no choice but to cut. Such a waste though. She’d been great in bed. Impressed by his willingness to drop five hundred dollars on a pair of jeans. Happy with the fact that he drove a Range and took her to dinner at places frequented by politicians she watched on cable news. She liked his accent and bragged to her friends that she was dating a “rich Colombian.”
And he was, by any standard he’d ever imagined.
But then, he’d earned every penny of it.
He knew now exactly how far gone humankind was in the things people wanted in their secret lives. He knew too what those people were willing to pay for those things. Fortunately for him, there wasn’t anything he’d yet been asked to do that he wasn’t willing to do.
That made him invaluable. But it didn’t make him irreplaceable. Where his employer was concerned, no one was irreplaceable.
Even in his street life as a kid, he had never met anyone with the kind of ruthlessness his employer possessed. It was something they had in common.
It had been one of the coldest Januarys on record when he’d first arrived in the United States as a stowaway on a cargo ship that journeyed to Norfolk, Virginia. He’d hitchhiked his way to Washington, DC, and that winter had made him long for the climate of his birth. He had no money, no place to live, except for the nooks and crannies of the city where he saw other homeless people living.
One frigid Sunday morning, he’d slipped inside a church, taking a seat in a back pew, and listening to the man giving the sermon at the front of the sanctuary. He’d quoted a verse from the Bible during his message that had somehow branded itself onto Sergio’s heart. “And if thy right hand offends thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee.”
Nothing had ever made as much sense to him. He’d already accepted the fact that life had little rhyme or reason to it. Those words somehow gave him a vision for his future. A man had to take what was his, cull anything that didn’t serve him. This had become his own life theme, and maybe it was this that his employer had seen in him when she’d walked down the center aisle of the church that morning, noticing him just before she shook the pastor’s hand and thanked him for his sermon.
When he’d reluctantly left the warm sanctuary, turning up the collar of his thin coat and heading down the sidewalk with no destination in mind, she had been waiting for him. She’d asked if he might join her for lunch. There was a restaurant nearby that had a few Colombian items on the menu. He wondered, even as he nodded yes, how she’d known he was from Colombia. He hadn’t yet spoken a word, but then it didn’t take him long to figure out she knew things about people it didn’t seem possible she could know.
At the restaurant, she’d ordered him ajiaco, a soup with chicken, potato, corn, capers, avocado, and sour cream. It made him so homesick, he couldn’t speak, and she’d watched him inhale the food as if she were simply glad to have lent a helping hand to someone who needed it. And he’d had no reason to believe she was anything other than a nice Christian lady. She’d offered him a job that day, and he hadn’t bothered to ask what he would be doing because he hadn’t cared. She’d reached down and offered him a hand up, and he wasn’t about to question any of it.
But then there was another lesson he’d learned on the streets of Cartagena. When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Of course, the proprietor had an ulterior motive in helping him. But he’d ended up with a life as a result of that day. And he liked to think he’d earned it by his willingness to do whatever needed to be done. That was all he’d done tonight after all. Cut off the right hand.
If he’s learned anything from his employer, it is the necessary elimination of loose ends. First thing in the morning, he’ll make sure he’s tidied up each one. And everything will be fine. Life will go on.
He considers another tequila, but decides against it, recapping the bottle and putting it away. What he needs is sleep. And tomorrow, a fresh start.
Emory
“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason
or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
―Ernest Hemingway
IT IS WHAT I want to believe.
With every fiber of my being, I will my own fear to the back of my brain. But it won’t stay there and, like a ball of yarn whose end isn’t firmly tucked to the center of the roll, continues to unravel.
“What’s next?” I finally find the courage to ask when we are a couple of miles from my house.
“We’ll hope to get a lead on the Rover,” Helmer says, hitting the blinker for the exit.
“And what if there isn’t one? Surely, he knows the police will be looking for the vehicle.”
The detective is quiet for a few moments, as if weighing his response. “The thing about criminals is that eventually they mess up. I like to operate under the assumption that they’ll do so sooner rather than later. I don’t have the personal stake that you have, Emory. But I do want to find this guy. What happened tonight feels like it happened on my watch. Whether he had anything to do with your sister’s disappearance, we don’t know. But I want him for what he did to Madison. And I’m going to find him.”
I hear the determination in his voice. Something about the strength I feel emanating from him rolls the ball of yarn back up again, and I put my focus on tomorrow, on another day that dawns with the opportunity to move forward.
~
WHEN WE REACH the house, he leaves the engine running, but gets out and walks me to the door.
“You don’t have to,” I say. “I’m good from here.”
“I’d like to check the house out before I leave.”
“Oh. Okay. Thank you.”
I unlock the door, flick the porch light on, and step inside. He closes the door behind us. I turn on a lamp in the living room. Pounce saunters in from the hallway that leads to the bedrooms, his yowl expectedly offended.
“Mind if I look around?”
“No,” I say, feeling a ping of unease for the first time. It’s never occurred to me to fear for my own safety.
Swerve Page 13