by Blake Pierce
As she clicked her seat belt into the buckle, she heard a screech and looked up. The van had turned around and was coming back. Maybe the guy had realized that he was sure to be caught unless he took Keri out. She couldn’t think of any other reason why he would return. She aimed her gun out the window at him.
He was about forty feet away when she realized that he was going to ram into her head-on and there was nothing she could do about it. He was going at least thirty miles per hour. She didn’t have time to get out of the car. And even if she fired at him, he’d still slam into her. All she could do was brace herself.
The impact of the collision shot her back against the seat and then forward again into the airbag. The crunching sound of the hoods smashing into each other was deafening. And then, for several long seconds, there was no noise but the soft hiss of steam from her engine.
She took a moment to see if anything was broken. Her neck ached but other than that, the only pain she felt was what she’d already been dealing with all night.
Suddenly there was another scraping metallic sound. With the airbag blocking her view, Keri couldn’t see it but she knew the guy was backing up. She didn’t know whether he was about to leave or preparing to pull up next to her and shoot.
Glancing down, she saw she still had her gun in her right hand. She lifted it up, pressed it against the airbag, and fired. The loud popping sounded like a bomb going off in front of her. As the thing deflated, she tried to move it aside so she could get a better view of what was going on.
She saw red lights and aimed in that direction. It took her a moment to process that they were the van’s brake lights as it slowed and turned left at the end of the street. Apparently the man had decided that he would make a run for it after all. She thought she could hear Evie’s voice in the distance, calling out for her.
Keri put her foot on the brake, shifted into drive, and then pressed the accelerator. Nothing happened. She pressed harder. The engine sputtered and died.
With a growing sense of dread that she wouldn’t be able to pursue the man, Keri reached for her police radio to call in his license plate number. But she was having trouble grabbing the receiver. Her vision was blurry and her hand felt heavy.
I think I have a concussion or something.
That was her last thought before she lost consciousness.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Keri sat in the back of the squad car, mostly numb, as it drove her back to her to her apartment. Everything that had happened since she regained consciousness seemed to be part of a dream that she was half participating in, half observing.
She had been shaken awake by another driver who’d come across her smashed, smoking car. Within minutes, a black-and-white arrived and took down everything she could remember: the description of the man and his van, his license plate number, and of course, every minute detail of Evie’s appearance.
When she’d described it all to the officers, she felt like she was underwater. They looked shimmery and indistinct and their voices sounded far away. She knew she should be overwhelmed by desperation at her daughter being ripped away from her a second time. But she couldn’t seem to locate any emotion inside at all, much less something as intense as desperation.
Someone had reached out to Lieutenant Hillman, who filled them in on the back story of this missing girl. Even in her diminished state, Keri noticed that the cops around her seemed to move faster and with greater purpose once they knew the full situation.
It was Hillman who had ordered that Keri be given a ride to the station and said that he’d call Keri back momentarily with an update. Only when the officers left the scene with her in the back did she insist that they take her home instead of to Pacific Division. She thought they might argue but something in her tone must have warned them off and they agreed without question.
Keri tried to rev up her brain, to make it work faster and more effectively. She knew this was a critical time and that being a walking zombie was counterproductive. But she couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
Her hands were shaking so she shoved them in her coat pockets. Her right hand bumped up against something and she pulled it out. It was one of the postcards from Wickwire’s apartment. She glanced at the return address. It said Tucson, Arizona.
Something about that bounced around in her skull. It was important somehow.
Tucson is the return address. But it’s not real. Tucson is where the girl is. The girl is hiding there. No, not hiding—being kept.
Her thoughts were still jumbled but one of them rose above the others and nearly screamed itself at her.
These postcards say where the girls are being kept. But Cave knows I know. He’s going to have them moved. I have to save them.
But she wasn’t sure how to do that other than by simply willing it to happen. She stared at the address, hoping that somehow the answer would pop into her head.
That’s when her phone rang. She looked at the screen and saw it was Hillman.
“Lieutenant?” she said.
“Hi, Locke, how are you holding up?” He didn’t sound like his normal self. He was being nice. She ignored that and rushed to tell him her thought before she lost it.
“Lieutenant, the Collector wrote the addresses where he took the girls he abducted on postcards. I found them in his apartment. But they’re in a code. I figured it out. That’s how I found Evie. But the lawyer who was working with the Collector knows I figured it out. He’s calling the houses where these girls are and warning them to move the girls. They’re all over the western states. You have to call the police departments in every city and get them to go to those houses now.”
She had said it all in rush so she wouldn’t forget anything. Both of the officers in the front looked back at her oddly but she couldn’t understand why. Hillman waited a long time before responding.
“Detective, are you all right? You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m okay. I’ve just been knocked around a lot tonight. If I give you the key, can you reach out to those jurisdictions?”
“Of course,” he answered, his voice still weird.
Keri proceeded to walk him through the letter and number substitution pattern. She found that as long as she stayed focused on the task, her head was pretty clear. But the second she took a break to regroup, things got woozy. So she stopped taking breaks.
After ten minutes, Hillman had all the addresses and handed them off to the team to start making calls. Keri looked out the window. It took her a moment to orient herself, but once she did, she realized they were only a few minutes from her place.
“Keri,” Hillman aid hesitantly, “would you like an update on our search for Evie?”
“That would be good,” she told him, wondering why he didn’t just launch into it as he usually did.
“Okay. We located the van she was taken in about twelve miles from where you found her, in a Walmart parking lot. Unfortunately, she was no longer in it. But the driver was. He fits the description you gave, fifties, tall, skinny, gray hair. He was dead—shot in the head.”
“Wow. Who did that?” Keri asked.
The brief silence before Hillman responded suggested he thought her reply was unusual.
“We managed to get in footage from the store a little while ago. It looked like the guy in the van was waiting to meet someone. But a man in a ski mask snuck beside the driver’s door and shot him. Then he took Evie and carried her to a black Lincoln Continental. He put her in the trunk and drove off. The car didn’t have any plates or other distinguishing characteristics. We managed to track it with cameras to a parking garage a few blocks away. But when our people searched the garage, the car wasn’t there. We don’t know what happened to it. I’m sorry.”
“How do you know it was a man?” Keri asked.
“What?”
“How do you know the person in the ski mask was a man?”
“I don’t know for certain. It just looked that way based on size and frame. D
id you hear what I said before, Keri?”
“I did. You said a masked man killed the guy who had my daughter, took her, and now they’ve both disappeared. Do I have that right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Lieutenant. I understand. It sounds like you all did everything you could. There are no leads to follow on Evie or on the Sarah Caldwell case. There’s nothing left to do. And I’m really sore and tired from everything that’s happened today. I’m not coming into the station. I’m just going to go home and rest for a bit.”
“But Locke, I’m worried that—”
Keri hung up on him and sat in silence for the rest of the ride home, ignoring the occasional troubled glances from the two officers in the front seat.
When they dropped her off a few minutes later, she walked around to the alley and took the short flight of stairs to the second floor. Her apartment, above a Chinese restaurant, came cheap because Ray was friends with the guy who owned the building.
She’d only lived there six weeks but she’d already hit it off with the restaurant’s friendly kitchen staff, who often gave her free meals. The situation was much better than her last place, a dilapidated houseboat in the marina without a shower.
Keri went inside, removed the hidden camera from her bedroom and the listening device from her living room, tossed them both in the bathtub, and turned on the water. When she was sure they were ruined, she returned to the living room and plopped down on the loveseat in front of the blank TV screen. The clock read 2:12 a.m. She was tempted to just lie down and sleep, but worried that she wouldn’t able to face her nightmares.
She considered calling Ray, but after the motel attack and his neck injury, she figured he needed his rest so he could be at full strength when he interrogated Chiqy after his surgery.
As she sat still in the quiet, dark apartment, alone and unmoving for the first time in hours, her head started to clear a bit. It also hurt. She knew she probably had a concussion, which was partly causing her mental hiccups and emotional detachment.
But she suspected the latter was also because if she allowed herself to fully comprehend what Hillman had said, she might break into a million pieces. And after everything that had happened, she doubted she’d be able to put herself back together again. If she let herself give in to the grief she felt circling at the edges of her heart, she’d be lost forever.
She stood up and went to get a glass of water. As she poured it, she glanced at the notepad on the counter. It reminded her that she was supposed to meet Mags for lunch tomorrow. That was definitely off.
Margaret “Mags” Merrywether was Keri’s only real female friend outside of work. And even that friendship was new. They’d met when Keri was investigating the disappearance of a wealthy society wife named Kendra Burlingame. Kendra and Mags had been close and Mags had helped a bit with the investigation.
After Keri had discovered who had murdered Kendra, the one thing that had survived that case was the connection Keri had made with Mags.
Margaret Merrywether was a walking contradiction. A tall, striking, sophisticated Southern belle divorcee with flaming red hair, she was also a crusading columnist for a local alternative weekly newspaper, writing under the pseudonym “Mary Brady.” For reasons she couldn’t quite understand, Keri had a sudden urge to call her.
Without thinking about it, she picked up the phone and dialed. She regretted it almost immediately when she heard Mags’ sleepy voice.
“Keri?” she said hazily.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mags. I forgot what time it is. Go back to sleep.”
“No, wait. I’m awake now. What’s going on, darling?”
“It’s just, you know, I’ve had a really awful day. I’ve been trying to find this missing girl and it hasn’t gone well. And then I got a lead on Evie, my daughter, who was abducted a few years—”
“I know all about that, sweetie,” Mags said soothingly.
“Well, I found her. But before I could get her back, the man who had her crashed into my car and got away and now he’s dead, shot by someone in a mask, and she’s gone again and my boss says they don’t know where…”
Suddenly she was sobbing uncontrollably. Everything she had been trying to hold in came pouring out of her at once. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her nose was running and she felt strands of saliva dripping from her lips. She didn’t care about any of it.
“You’re going to be okay,” she heard Mags whisper softly on the other end of the line. “You’ll be okay, dear.”
“But I won’t, Mags. That’s the thing. All that’s kept me going these last few years has been the certainty that one day I would find Evie; that I would bring her back home and be the mother she deserves. But that’s over. She’s gone. There are no clues. Whoever did this was a professional and left no trace. I don’t have a thing to go on. I’ve failed her, Mags. I failed my daughter again!”
“Why don’t I come over, sweetie? I can make you some tea and we can talk.”
“Mags,” Keri said, ignoring the offer, “maybe you could write something.”
“What do you mean?”
“You could write some kind of column that draws the masked man out and we could set up some sort of sting…I don’t know exactly how but we could come up with something.”
“Keri, apart from the ethical considerations, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I want to help but I don’t see how anything I might write would have any impact at all.”
“What are you talking about?” Keri demanded. “One of your columns brought down the deputy mayor. You can make a big difference.”
“But I knew what I was dealing with then. I don’t have the first clue here. Anyway, darling, let’s not get into a disagreement over this. Please let me—”
“What did you mean by ‘ethical considerations’?” Keri interrupted. “What considerations?”
“I just meant that a journalist doesn’t typically use their work as bait to catch a criminal.”
Keri paused long enough to swallow, long enough to fume.
“This is my daughter we’re talking about, Mags!”
“I know, Keri. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just…you took me by surprise, dear.”
“I’m sorry I bothered you,” Keri said.
“Now don’t say that. I’m sorry, Keri. Please, let’s keep talki—”
Keri hung up on her. A call came in from Mags only seconds later but she rejected it. A text followed but Keri didn’t even look at it, tossing her phone on the coffee table.
She chugged what was left of her water and walked over to the cabinet where half a bottle of Glenlivet rested, staring back at her. She hadn’t touched the stuff in over a month and could feel the difference. She slept better. She felt better. She even looked better.
But right now she didn’t care about any of that. She opened the bottle and poured it in her water glass until it was almost overflowing. She put it to her lips and took a sip. Then another. And as she heard the buzz of another text from Mags, she began to chug.
*
When Keri awoke to the sound of Ray’s ringtone on her phone, it took a second to determine where she was. Faint rays of light streamed in through cracks in the curtains. Her head pounded. Eventually she realized she was lying on the floor in front of the living room loveseat, where she must have drifted off last night.
She reached for her phone. The time on it said 6:08 a.m. She’d started drinking around 2:15 and passed out soon after that. So she was working on about three and half hours of sleep. That felt about right.
“Hello,” she said quietly into the phone, a little afraid of her own voice.
“Are you dressed?” Ray asked, his voice booming, rattling her teeth.
“Why?”
“Because I’ll be at your place in ten minutes,” he said. “We’ve got a new lead in the Sarah Caldwell case.”
“How?”
“I got Chiqy to talk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Sitting
in the passenger seat of Ray’s car fifteen minutes later, Keri kept her attention on the stripes of the road in front of her, breathing in the cold morning air through the open window, hoping the combination would keep her from throwing up.
“Are we going to talk about it?” Ray asked from the driver’s seat.
“About what?”
“About Evie. Hillman filled me in.”
“I can’t, Ray,” Keri said, looking out the passenger window at the buildings whizzing by. “Not yet.”
“Okay. Can we talk about something else?”
“What’s that?”
“Hillman said you sounded really out of it last night. He was worried about you.”
Keri sighed and turned to look at him. He was no longer wearing the neck brace from the previous night and his eyes weren’t as red as they had been. Physically he looked to be in decent condition.
But his brow was furrowed and his lips were pursed. She almost felt bad for him. He was trying so desperately to find out what was going on with her but he was terrified to say the wrong thing.
“I’m pretty sure I got a concussion in the crash. And I kind of shut down after…they got away. So I wasn’t in tip-top chatting shape.”
“And you’re better now?” Ray asked skeptically.
“Comparatively. Why?”
“Because you kind of smell like a distillery,” he said bluntly.
She gave him a withering look but didn’t respond. He went on.
“I just want to make sure you’re up for this.”
“I don’t even know what this is,” she reminded him.
“I told you—I got a lead from Chiqy.”
“And how exactly did you get him to be so forthcoming?” Keri asked, her eyebrows raised.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Really? You’re not going to tell me?”
“You’re better off not knowing, Keri. Then you can tell the truth when Internal Affairs questions you.”