by Blake Pierce
And now, after all those torturous weeks of silence, he’d finally gotten in touch again. Of course, he didn’t know he was communicating with Evie’s mother or even that it was a woman. All he knew was that this was a potential client interested in discussing an abduction for hire.
This time she would come up with a better plan than before. The last time, she had less than an hour to get to his assigned meeting place. She tried to set up a decoy to go in her place and survey the situation from afar. But somehow he knew the decoy wasn’t legitimate and he didn’t come. She couldn’t let that happen again.
Stay cool. You’ve held out this long and it’s paid off. Don’t ruin it by doing something impulsive. There’s nothing you can do right now anyway. The ball’s in his court. Just give a basic response and wait to hear back.
Keri typed one word:
understood
Then she put the phone in her purse and stood up from her desk, too nervous and excited to sit still. Knowing there was nothing more she could do, she tried to force the Collector from her mind.
She headed for the break room to get a bite to eat. It was after 4 p.m. and her stomach was growling, although she wasn’t sure if it was because she’d skipped lunch or due to general anxiety.
When she arrived, she saw her partner, Ray Sands, rifling through the refrigerator. He was notorious for snagging any food not properly marked. Luckily her chicken salad, with her name clearly taped to the container, was hidden in the lower back corner. Ray, a 6-foot-4-inch, 230-pound black man with a bald head and a heavily muscled frame, would have to really be desperate to navigate himself down there just for a salad.
Keri stood in the doorway, silently enjoying watching Ray’s butt wriggle as he maneuvered. In addition to being her partner, he was also her best friend and lately, maybe something more. They both felt a strong attraction to each other and had admitted as much to one another less than two months ago, when Ray was recovering from a gunshot wound he’d sustained when they took down a child kidnapper.
But since then, they’d only taken baby steps. They flirted more openly when they were alone and there had been several semi-dates, where one of them would come to the other’s apartment to watch a movie.
But they both seemed afraid to make the next move. Keri knew why she felt this way and suspected Ray felt the same. She was worried that if they decided to really go for it and it didn’t work out, both their partnership and their friendship could be put at risk. It was a legitimate concern.
Neither of them had a great romantic track record. Both were divorced. Both had cheated on their spouses. Ray, a former professional boxer, was a notorious ladies’ man. And Keri had to admit that since Evie was taken, she’d been one big pulsing nerve, constantly on the verge of spinning out of control. Match.com wouldn’t be putting either of them on posters anytime soon.
Ray sensed that he was being watched and turned around, half of an unclaimed sandwich in his hand. Seeing that there was no one in the room but Keri, he asked, “Like what you see?” and winked.
“Don’t get cocky, Incredible Hulk,” she warned. They loved to tease each other with pet names that highlighted their substantial size difference.
“Who’s using the double entendres now, Miss Bianca?” he asked, smiling.
Keri saw his face darken and realized she hadn’t done a good enough job of hiding her nervousness about the Collector. He knew her too well.
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.
“Nothing,” she said as she brushed past him and bent down to grab her salad. Unlike him, she had no problem navigating tight spaces. While she wasn’t as small as a fictional mouse nickname might suggest, compared to Ray, her 5-foot-6-inch, 130-pound body was Lilliputian.
She could feel his eyes on her but pretended not to notice. She didn’t want to discuss what was on her mind for a couple of reasons. First of all, if she told him about the email from the Collector, he’d want to break it down in detail with her. And that would undermine her efforts to keep sane by not thinking about it.
But there was another reason. Keri was under surveillance by a shady lawyer named Jackson Cave, who was notorious for representing pedophiles and child abductors. To get the information that led her to find the Collector, she’d broken into his office and copied a hidden file.
The last time they’d seen each other, Cave had hinted that he knew what she’d done and said outright that he had his eye on her. It was clear to her what he’d meant. Ever since, she’d done regular sweeps for listening devices and been careful to only discuss the Collector in secure environments.
If Cave knew she was on to the Collector, he might warn him. Then he’d disappear and she’d never find Evie. So there was no way she was going to mention anything about it to Ray here.
But he didn’t know any of that, so he pressed her.
“I can tell something’s up,” he said.
But before Keri could diplomatically shut him down, their boss burst through the door. Lieutenant Cole Hillman, their immediate supervisor, was fifty but looked significantly older, with a deeply wrinkled face, uncombed salt-and-pepper hair, and a growing potbelly he couldn’t hide with his oversized dress shirts. As usual, he wore a jacket and tie but the former was ill-fitting and the latter was ridiculously loose.
“Good. I’m glad you’re both here,” he said, skipping any kind of greeting. “Come with me. You’ve got a case.”
They followed him back to his office and both took seats on the weathered loveseat against the wall. Knowing she likely wouldn’t have a chance to eat later, Keri scarfed down her salad while Hillman read them in. She noticed that Ray had already finished the sandwich he’d stolen before they sat down. Hillman dove right in.
“Your possible victim is a sixteen-year-old girl from Westchester, Sarah Caldwell. She hasn’t been seen since lunchtime. Parents called her multiple times, saying they couldn’t reach her.”
“They’re freaking out because their teenage daughter didn’t call them back?” Ray asked skeptically. “Sounds like pretty much every family in America.”
Keri didn’t reply despite her natural inclination to disagree. She and Ray had argued this point many times. She thought he was too slow to sign onto cases like this. He felt that her personal experience made her far too likely to jump in prematurely. It was a constant source of friction and she didn’t feel like getting into it at this moment. But Hillman apparently was willing.
“I thought so too at first,” Hillman said, “but they were very convincing that their daughter would never go this long without checking in. They also tried to check her location using the GPS on her smartphone. It was turned off.”
“That’s a little weird, but still,” Ray reiterated.
“Listen, it may be nothing. But they were insistent, panicked even. And they noted that the policy of being missing for twenty-four hours before starting a search doesn’t apply to minors. You two don’t have any pressing cases right now so I told them you’d stop by to take their statement. Hell, the girl may be home by the time you get there. But it won’t do any harm. And this keeps our asses covered on the off chance something is up.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Keri said, standing up to go with her mouth full of her last bite of salad.
“Of course it sounds good to you,” Ray muttered as he took the address from Hillman. “Another wild goose chase for you to drag me on.”
“You know you love it,” Keri said, walking out the door ahead of him.
“Could you two please be a little more professional when you get to the Caldwells’?” Hillman shouted through the open door after them. “I’d like them to think we’re at least pretending to take them seriously.”
Keri tossed her salad container in the trash and headed for the parking lot. Ray had to jog to keep up with her. As they reached the exit, he leaned in and whispered to her.
“Don’t think you’re off the hook on whatever it is you’re keeping secret from me. You ca
n tell me now or you can tell me later. But I know something’s going on with you.”
Keri tried not to visibly react. There was something going on. And she did plan to fill him in when it was safe to do so. But she needed to find a more secure location to tell her partner, best friend, and potential boyfriend that she might be on the verge of finally catching her daughter’s abductor.
CHAPTER TWO
As they pulled up in front of the Caldwell house, Keri’s stomach suddenly clenched up.
No matter how often she met with the family of a potentially abducted child, she was always taken back to that moment when she first saw her own little girl, just eight years old, being carried across the bright green grass of a park by a malevolent stranger in a baseball cap pulled low to hide his face.
She felt the same familiar panic rising in her throat now that she’d experienced as she chased the man through the gravel parking lot and saw him toss Evie into his white van like a rag doll. She relived the horror of seeing the teenager who’d tried to stop the man get stabbed to death.
She winced at the memory of the pain she’d felt as she ran barefoot on the gravel lot, ignoring the sharp bits of rock that embedded in her feet as she tried to catch up to the van that was peeling out and driving off . She recalled the sense of helplessness that had overcome her as she realized the van had no license plates and she had almost no description to offer the police.
Ray was familiar with how much she was always affected by this moment and sat quietly in the driver’s seat while she worked through the cycle of emotions and gathered herself for what was to come.
“You good?” he asked, when he saw her body finally relax slightly.
“Almost,” she said, pulling down the visor mirror and giving herself one last check to make sure she wasn’t a total mess.
The person staring back at her looked much healthier than she had just a few months ago. The black circles she used to have under her brown eyes were no longer there and they weren’t bloodshot. Her skin was less blotchy. Her dirty blonde hair, while still pulled back in a utilitarian ponytail, wasn’t greasy and unwashed.
Keri was closing in on her thirty-six birthday but she looked better than she had at any point since Evie was taken five years earlier. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the sense of hope she’d had since the Collector had hinted all those weeks ago that he’d be in touch.
Or maybe it was the real possibility of romance with Ray on the horizon. It could also have been recently moving out of the ratty houseboat she’d called home for several years into a real apartment. Or it might have had to do with her reduced consumption of large quantities of single malt scotch.
Whatever it was, she noticed more men than usual turning their heads when she walked by these days. She didn’t mind it, if only because for the first time in forever, she felt like she had some power over her often out-of-control life.
She flipped the visor back up and turned to Ray.
“Ready,” she said.
As they walked up to the front door, Keri took in the neighborhood. This was the northernmost part of Westchester, adjacent to the 405 freeway and just south of the Howard Hughes Center, a large retail and office complex that dominated the skyline in this part of town.
Westchester had a reputation as a working-class neighborhood, and most of the homes were of the modest, one-story variety. But even those had exploded in cost in the last half dozen years. As a result, the community was a mix of old-timers who’d lived here forever and young, professional families who didn’t want to live in cookie-cutter developments but somewhere with personality. Keri guessed these folks were the latter.
The door opened before they even got to the porch and out stepped a clearly worried couple. Keri was surprised at their age. The woman—petite, Hispanic, with a no-nonsense pixie cut—looked to be in her mid-fifties. She wore a nice but well-worn women’s suit and old but immaculately maintained black shoes.
The man was easily half a foot taller than her. He was white, balding with tufts of grayish-blond hair, and spectacles hanging around his neck. He was at least as old as her and probably closer to sixty. He was more casually dressed than she was, in comfortable slacks and a crisp, buttoned-down plaid dress shirt. His brown loafers were scuffed and one of his laces was undone.
“Are you the detectives?” the woman asked, reaching out her hand to shake theirs even before getting confirmation.
“Yes, ma’am,” Keri answered, taking the lead. “I’m Detective Keri Locke of LAPD’s West Los Angeles Pacific Division Missing Persons Unit. This is my partner, Detective Raymond Sands.”
“Good to meet you folks,” Ray said.
The woman beckoned them in as she spoke.
“Thank you for coming. My name is Mariela Caldwell. This is my husband, Edward.”
Edward nodded but didn’t speak. Keri sensed that they didn’t know how to begin so she took the initiative.
“Why don’t we have a seat in the kitchen and you can tell us what has you so concerned?”
“Of course,” Mariela said, and led them through a narrow hallway adorned with photos of a dark-haired girl with a warm smile. There had to be at least twenty photos covering her entire life from birth until now. They came to a small but well-appointed breakfast nook. “Can I offer you anything—coffee, a snack?”
“No thank you, ma’am,” Ray said as he tried to squeeze against the wall to maneuver around and into a chair. “Let’s all just sit down and get as much information as possible as quickly as we can. Why don’t you start by telling us what has you worried? My understanding is that Sarah has only been out of touch for a few hours.”
“Almost five hours now,” Edward said, speaking for the first time as he sat down across from Ray. “She called her mother at noon to say she was meeting up with a friend she hadn’t seen in a while. It’s almost five p.m. now. She knows she’s supposed to check in every couple of hours when she goes out, even if it’s only a text to say where she is.”
“She doesn’t ever forget?” Ray asked, keeping his tone neutral so that only Keri caught his underlying skepticism. Neither of the Caldwells spoke for a moment and Keri worried that Ray had offended them. Finally Mariela answered.
“Detective Sands, I know it may be hard to believe. But no, she doesn’t ever forget. Ed and I had Sarah later in life. After many failed attempts, we were blessed by her arrival. She is our only child and I admit that we are both a little, what’s the word, hovering?”
“Helicopter parents,” Ed added with a wry smile.
Keri smiled too. She could hardly blame them.
“Anyway,” Mariela continued, “Sarah knows that she is our dearest love in the world and amazingly, she doesn’t resent it or feel stifled. We bake together on weekends. She still loves to go to ‘take your daughter to work’ days with her father. She even came with me to a Motley Crue concert a few months ago. She dotes on us. And because she knows how precious she is to us, she is very diligent about keeping us in the loop. We established the ‘text where you are’ policy. But she’s the one who chose the two-hour rule.”
Keri watched both of them closely as they spoke. Mariela’s hand was in Ed’s and he was gently stroking the back of hers with his thumb. He waited until she was done, then spoke up.
“And even if she did forget, for the first time ever, she wouldn’t have gone this long without getting in touch or replying to any of our texts or calls. Between us, we’ve texted her a dozen times and called half a dozen. In my last message I told her I was calling the police. If she had received any of those, she would have reached out. And as I said to your lieutenant, the GPS on her phone is turned off. That’s never happened before.”
That unsettling detail hung in the room, threatening to overwhelm everything else. Keri tried to squelch any movement in the direction of panic by quickly asking the next question.
“Mr. and Mrs. Caldwell, may I ask why Sarah wasn’t in school today? It is a Friday.”
; Both of them looked at her with surprised expressions. Even Ray appeared taken aback.
“It’s the day after Thanksgiving,” Mariela said. “There’s no school today.”
Keri felt her heart drop into her gut. Only a parent would know that kind of detail and for all practical purposes, she no longer was one.
Evie would be thirteen now. Under normal circumstances, Keri would have been negotiating how to ensure child care for her daughter so she could work today. But she hadn’t had normal circumstances in a long time.
The rituals associated with school breaks and family holidays had faded away in recent years to the point where something that used to be obvious to her no longer registered.
She tried to respond but it came out as an unintelligible cough. Her eyes got watery and she lowered her head so no one could see. Ray came to her rescue.
“So Sarah had the day off but you didn’t?” he asked.
“No,” Ed answered. “I own a small paint store in the Westchester Triangle. It’s not like I’m rolling around in money. I can’t take many days off—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—that’s about it.”
“And I’m a paralegal for a big law firm in El Segundo. Normally I’d be off today but we’re prepping a huge case for trial and they needed all hands on deck.”
Keri cleared her throat and, confident that she had control of herself, rejoined the conversation.
“Who is this friend Sarah was meeting?” she asked.
“Her name is Lanie Joseph,” Mariela said. “Sarah used to be friends with her in elementary school. But when we moved here from our old neighborhood, they lost touch. Frankly, I wish it had stayed that way.”
“What do you mean?” Keri asked.