by Blake Pierce
“Lanie?” Keri said softly.
The girl looked over at her. Her terrified eyes were puffy and red and her cheeks were streaked with a river of mascara.
“Who are you?” she asked suspiciously between sobs.
“My name’s Keri. I’m a detective. I’ve been looking for you.”
“You have?” Lanie asked, sounding more like six than sixteen.
“Yep, for hours now. I know you’ve been through something awful. But you’re safe now.”
“What about Sarah? Is she okay?” Lanie asked.
“We’re still looking for her. Was she brought here too?”
Lanie nodded.
“We all were. But I don’t know which room she was taken to.”
“That’s okay. We’ll find her,” Keri assured her. “Do you remember anything else that might help? Were there other men here?”
“I don’t know where Dean went after the house. There was this fat guy named Chiqy and all his guards. And Mr. Holiday.”
Keri felt her pulse quicken but tried not to let it show.
“Who’s Mr. Holiday,” she asked quietly.
“He was the one in charge. He cut my hair to look like this. Chiqy wanted to sell me to him but Mr. Holiday said I didn’t have the right look. He said I was too used up.”
“What did Mr. Holiday look like?” Keri asked, pushing past everything else Lanie said for fear that acknowledging it would make the girl fall apart again.
“He’s really muscular and tan, brown hair. He wore a track suit.”
“Do you remember anything else about him?” Keri asked.
“He had a soft voice but he said awful things.”
The memory seemed to set her off and she started to break down again before suddenly regrouping. She grabbed Keri’s hand and stared hard at her, willing her to understand.
“It’s all my fault this happened,” she said. “My boyfriend worked for these guys. He tricked me. I thought he loved me. But he was just using me to turn us into…he used us.”
“It’s going to be okay, Lanie.”
“No! It’s my fault this happened to Sarah. She’s the only decent person I know. And now, because of me, she’s—”
She broke down into tears, unable to continue. Keri looked at the female officer sitting beside her and motioned for her to hug Lanie.
“When she’s able, get her to give a full description of Holiday to an artist,” she whispered in the officer’s ear.
Then she quickly left the room, waving for Castillo to follow her. They stepped out onto the walkway.
“This Mr. Holiday sounds like a piece of work,” Castillo muttered.
“Agreed. I think Chiqy was referencing him before too. All that talk about taking a holiday while he was drugged up—too clever by half. And it sounds like Sarah was exactly the kind of ‘not used up’ girl this Mr. Holiday would be willing to buy from Chiqy. She’s almost certainly gone.”
She looked in the one room they hadn’t checked, just to be sure. The girl in there, sprawled out and unconscious on the bed, was African-American. That made it official. Sarah was nowhere to be found.
“What now?” Castillo asked.
Keri stood there silently, going over everything in her head. After a good ten seconds, she finally spoke.
“We know she was here. If we can determine which room she was in, we might be able to find a clue. She left us one at the warehouse. I bet she’d try to do it again.”
“How do we know which room she was in?” Castillo wondered.
“I think we can assume she was in one of the ones we found empty. We didn’t really look at them closely once we saw they weren’t occupied.”
“Okay, which one first?”
“When we were staking the place out, I noticed that one room didn’t have its light on. That makes me think whoever was in there got moved a while ago. Let’s start with that one. It’s here on the second floor.”
She led the way down the hall to a room they’d only peeked in before. Keri stepped in and turned on the light. It was immediately obvious something had happened in here.
There was a pool of blood on the carpeting next to the bed. A phone lay on the floor beside it. It had been ripped from the wall. Keri knelt down to get a closer look. One corner of the base of the phone was covered in dried blood.
Keri stood up again and looked at the bed. She noticed that a bar was missing from the headboard in the same spot where the other girls had been handcuffed.
Maybe this one got free and tried to escape.
She wandered into the bathroom. A chair was lying on its side in the tub and the small window was open. She stood the chair upright and climbed up to peek out the window. It was a long way down with only a nearby dumpster to break a fall.
“What do you think?” Castillo asked from behind her.
“I think the girl in this room got the upper hand on her john and tried to escape.”
“Maybe she got away,” Castillo said hopefully.
“I doubt it. If she had, we’d know about it by now. A naked, handcuffed girl would have gotten some kind of mention on the radio by this point.”
Keri returned to the bedroom and slowly walked around. She was sure that if Sarah had been the girl in this room, she’d have left some kind of clue.
She stared at the bed where the girl had been handcuffed while she was assaulted. It made sense that if her left hand was handcuffed to the headboard, she had somehow managed to use her right hand to grab the phone and hit her rapist with it.
Moving closer to the right side of the bed, she imagined the girl lying there, a man forcing himself on her for who knows how long, unable to do much more than squirm.
And scratch.
Keri looked at the right side of the headboard and saw multiple scratches where the girl must have struggled. They looked fresh. Little bits of splintered wood still clung to the edges of the scratch marks. Keri looked closer and then, despite herself, she gasped.
“What is it?” Castillo asked from across the room.
“Look.”
“What? All I see are a bunch of scratch marks.”
“They’re not just random marks, Jamie. They’re letters.”
It was Castillo’s turn to gasp.
Keri leaned in, and without actually touching the headboard, she traced her finger over them.
“It says ‘sc xile.’ Is that how you read it too?” she asked.
“That’s what it looks like,” Castillo agreed. “So ‘sc’ is Sarah Caldwell. But what is ‘xile’? Is that short for ‘exile’ or something?”
“I don’t know. But it’s from her. I’m sure of it.”
She took out her phone, snapped a photo of it, and stepped out onto the walkway.
“Sergeant Henriksen. We need you,” she called out before turning to Castillo. “We need CSU to check this room thoroughly—the bed, the bloodstains on the floor, the phone, and especially the area near those scratches. They should be able to find fingerprints and DNA to confirm that Sarah was in this room. Can you honcho that?”
“Of course. Are you going somewhere?”
“Yeah. First I’m going to send this photo to Edgerton to see if he can put ‘xile’ into his databases to determine what it means. And then I have to take care of something.”
“Is everything okay?” Castillo asked, clearly confused.
“Listen. Tech is checking the cameras from the area for vehicles that might have left before we arrived. Ray is waiting to interrogate Chiqy when he’s out of surgery. We’ll see if Edgerton gets a hit on this ‘xile’ thing. But other than that, there’s not much we can do right now. So I’m going to take care of some personal business. Call me if anything comes up, okay?”
“Okay,” Castillo said, still perplexed.
Keri left her that way. She didn’t have much choice.
What am I going to do? Tell her that I’m going to study some stolen postcards from the apartment of a guy I killed for clues about my mis
sing daughter?
She might not have been able to tell Castillo that but it was exactly what she planned to do.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was all Keri could do not to toss her hot coffee on the innocent doughnut shop employee who filled it up for her.
Her frustration was near boiling over and she was tempted to take it out the nearest person. In this case it just so happened to be the sleepy-eyed guy who refilled her cup without asking, messing up the delicate balance of cream and sugar.
Of course, that wasn’t what she was really upset about. It was 12:45 in the morning and she’d been sitting under the fluorescent lights of the doughnut shop for fifteen minutes, her knees, elbows, and everything in between aching, poring over the postcards laid out on the table in front of her. And still she hadn’t figured out what they meant.
Keri had been studying the return addresses, which she sensed were the key to everything. She suspected that these might even be the locations of the abducted children, if she could ever find a way to crack the code.
She knew she could take the postcards to Edgerton and he would eventually figure it out. But he and the entire tech team were using all their resources to find Sarah and the other two missing girls. Besides, she’d obtained the postcards illegally and didn’t want to implicate anyone else in what she’d done.
More pressing, she worried that Jackson Cave had found out about the death of the Collector, or Brian Wickwire, as she now knew him. If, as she suspected, he’d been helping Wickwire facilitate the sales of these abducted children, he would almost certainly warn their “clients.” And if he knew that Wickwire had died in an altercation with her, the first people he’d warn would be the ones holding Evie.
It wasn’t an unreasonable leap to make. Until recently, Downtown Division had an APB out on her. Cave would have easy access to that information. And when he learned the bugs he’d had put in her and Ray’s cars were no longer working, he’d put two and two together. If he was awake at this hour, he might be coordinating it all right now.
I have to figure this out fast.
Forcing all other thoughts from her head, Keri returned her full attention to the postcards.
All the addresses were from States west of the Rockies. But nothing else about them made sense. Each address began with what looked to be initials, followed by a street address in a real city.
But when she punched those addresses in her phone’s map, nothing came up.
Beyond that, most of the addresses didn’t even make alphabetical sense. Some had multiple consonants in a row, so that they were essentially gibberish. She looked at one in suburban Salt Lake City for the third time, completely bewildered:
vb
243 gzqodq lane
taylorsville, ut
84123
She knew Wickwire had written it down. His telltale refusal to use capital letters was everywhere. Taylorsville was a real place. But there was no Gzqodq Lane or street or avenue. It was just a jumble of letters as far as she could tell.
She rifled through the postcards some more until she came to one that was short enough that she was willing to give it another go. It read:
jn
33 dkj road
salem, or
97302
Again, Salem was real but there was no road called Dkj. Keri tried to move the letters around to see if they were an anagram but since they were all consonants, nothing worked. She looked at every street in the 97302 zip code, hoping for anything that might jump out at her. There was a Decker Jones Street and Dokij Lane. Both were kind of close to dkj. But she knew they weren’t right. And there was an Elk Road.
She stared at that last one and felt a tingling sensation in the back of her brain. Something about it seemed possible. It was the right number of letters, even if they didn’t all fit. She looked at them again and noticed something that hadn’t occurred to her before.
If you inserted the next letter in the alphabet for each letter in “dkj’- “e” for “d,” then “l” for “k,” and finally “k” for “j,” it spelled the word “elk.”
She typed “33 Elk Road” into the map. Nothing came up. It was a rural road and there didn’t seem to be more than a dozen houses on it.
What if he played with the house numbers too?
There was no 44 Elk Road, which wasn’t a shock. If there was no 33, there wouldn’t be a 44.
What if, for the numbers, he substituted backwards?
She tried typing “22 Elk Road” and sure enough, an address popped up on the map. Feeling the excitement build in her, Keri flipped back to the Utah address. Using the same method, 243 gzqodq lane became 132 Harper Lane. She punched that in and got a real address as well.
She did it with several others. They all worked. But none of them told her which abducted child was at the address. She’d have to go into property records to find the owner, then see how many children they had and if there were photos. It would take forever.
Maybe not.
Keri looked at the letters above the address. If they were initials and he’d used the same trick as with the street same, she could find out where Evie was.
“More coffee, ma’am?”
Keri looked up blankly. The guy with the coffee pot was standing over her, a bland smile on his face.
“What? No. Go away,” she told him and returned her attention to the postcards. She flipped through them quickly, looking for “dk,” the letter combination that preceded “el”- Evelyn Locke.
And then she found it. For a second Keri stared at the address, frozen. If it was legitimate, then her daughter was being held at a home on Carson Drive in Lomita. That was a twenty-minute drive from her current location. Was it possible that Evie had been only miles from her all these years?
She punched the address in her phone and ran out of the doughnut shop. The air was bitterly cold but she barely noticed. And the pain she’d felt only moments earlier was gone.
*
As she tore through Lomita on the way to the address on the postcard, Keri hung up her phone. She’d just called the station and learned that Wickwire’s death, her involvement, and the subsequent APB were all over the police scanner. If Jackson Cave was awake, he knew about it.
Keri pulled up to the intersection near the address on the postcard, got out of her car, and walked half a block to the actual address. She could feel herself starting to hyperventilate and forced her breathing to slow down.
It took a second to realize that the address was actually a business, not a home. The sign on the front said Alliance Imports/Exports. Something about that stirred a connection in her brain but she couldn’t place why.
Before she could ponder it further her attention was caught by a man walking out the side entrance of the building. He was tall and skinny with thinning gray hair. Keri guessed that he was in his early fifties.
He was moving quickly to an unmarked gray van in the parking lot. He unlocked it and opened the sliding side door, then returned to the building at a quick jog.
Keri moved closer along the sidewalk across the street, more than a little suspicious. She tried to stay in a crouch, hiding behind one car, then another. As she was about to move to a third, the man stepped into view. Only this time he wasn’t alone.
He was pulling the arm of a waifish young girl, about thirteen years old, with short blonde hair and skin so pale that it must not have been exposed to the sun in years. Even at this distance, she could see the flash of green in those eyes.
It was Evie.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Keri felt a combination of emotions she didn’t know could all co-exist at once: hope, joy, fury, fear, and determination. She stood up from her hiding place behind the car and began to run toward her daughter, pulling her gun from her holster as she did.
She was still a good forty yards away when the man saw her. Without a word, he yanked Evie’s arm and pulled her toward the van. The girl looked to see what had him so agitated and saw her mother
sprinting toward them.
“Evie!” Keri shouted.
Her daughter’s eyes went wide with shock.
“Mommy?” she said, her expression so familiar and so alien at the same time.
Before she could say another word, the man had shoved her into the van and closed the door. He was opening the driver’s door when Keri raised her weapon. She considered shooting but worried she’d accidentally get Evie. He slammed his door shut and started the ignition.
“Mommy! Mommy!” Evie screamed from somewhere inside the van.
Suddenly, through the windshield, Keri saw the man pull out a gun of his own.
“Back off or I’ll shoot her!” he yelled.
For one brief moment, Keri considered firing anyway. She was a good shot and she didn’t know if she’d ever get another chance like this again.
But what if I hit Evie? I can’t risk it.
Keri held her gun above her head, pointing it to the sky. Slowly, she took a step back.
“It’s okay. We can work this out,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm.
“Drop your gun right now,” he screamed.
This isn’t working. He feels cornered. He could do anything right now.
“Okay. I’m putting it down.”
She placed the weapon gently on the ground and took another step back.
“Mommy! Help me! I love you!” her daughter yelled.
“Shut up or I’ll shoot your mother to death,” the man growled. Evie went silent.
The man put the van in drive and hit the accelerator, aiming right for Keri. She dived out of the way, barely avoiding getting clipped.
As he peeled out, she looked at his license plate, committing it to memory. Then she picked up her gun and ran back to her car, ready to give chase and radio every law enforcement agency in Southern California his plates.
She put on her seatbelt and started the car. Somehow, despite the chaos and desperation of the situation, she still felt composed. All her training had kicked in and she was able to set aside the emotion of the moment and focus on the task at hand. It was the best way to save Evie.