Kill Tide

by Timothy Fagan

  They had only two miles left to go. To the safety of the Heart. To success.

  He turned his van left onto a back road with a dead end sign. It was basically a gravel lane scattered with smaller, older houses. A pretty run-down neighborhood for the Cape.

  But he knew the lane wasn’t a real dead end. He’d been down it pretty regularly for years. The dirt road officially ended at a small wetland parking lot, where bird watchers and other weirdos would park and wander in the marshes and the light woods.

  Off to the side was a thinner path worn in the grass by municipal workers or whoever drove back here to pick up trash. And one hundred yards down that path, it split in two. If you took the left path, as he did, you soon reached the back side of a new subdivision.

  With a quick bang down off the curb, his van was back on paved roads again. In just a few more minutes, he’d be out of reach. It would be easy to carry the girl into the Heart, where she’d be safe and warm.

  One damn grab down! Two more to go…

  His deep excitement came rushing back. Other than one random police lady, the planned path had avoided all roadblocks and cop activity.

  In just a few days, the man in the van would head over the Bourne Bridge and leave all his troubles behind. Sunshine and freedom. Sipping beer on a dock, like his buddy always described. It sounded like heaven.

  The man in the van had been nowhere major. He’d never even left the damn state, but he wasn’t nervous about it. No, sir. It was all in the game plan. Nothing would stop him now.

  Trust the plan. Trust the man. It was all happening…

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, Pepper arrived for work at the New Albion police station a few minutes before nine.

  His dad had left home before Pepper woke, or maybe he’d worked all night. The first twenty-four hours were crucial when investigating a kidnapping, and his dad got more heavily involved in big investigations than typical police chiefs.

  Pepper parked his old truck in a space reserved for police personnel. He saw a crowd gathered on the front lawn, so he walked around to the side door, swiping his ID card to enter.

  “Hey, young Ryan!” said Officer Randy Larch, punching his shoulder as he walked past with a cup of coffee. “You see the crowd out front? It’s the same at every station in the Lower Cape. Volunteers to help search for the girl.”

  “Cool,” said Pepper, careful not to rub his shoulder.

  “It’ll be a miracle if they find her, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Pepper knew what Larch was getting at. Cape Cod is over three hundred square miles in size. Law enforcement and civilians would need to search about three hundred zillion places in their hunt for Emma Bailey. And any search efforts in marshes or woods would be to locate her dead body.

  “The focus is on the Lower Cape for now. You should see the map Weisner has just for New Albion. We’re getting a ton of civilian tips—every time someone sees a white van, they call. It’s nuts! But every time she puts a pin in the map. She’s organizing teams to canvas the areas where the pushpins are in clusters. You should volunteer.”

  Larch explained that when a stranger abducts someone, the police need to recover the victim within three hours or else the victim is probably dead. Kidnappers who kill often dump the body and flee the area.

  Pepper checked his watch. It’d been thirteen hours since the kidnapper took Emma Bailey.

  “So we’re flat out,” Larch said. “Her info’s in the NCIC database. Every town on the Lower Cape is doing searches just like us. And your dad has Sweeney working through a list of sex offenders registered in town. I cross-referenced that list to RMV records for white vans.”

  Kevin Sweeney was his dad’s most senior detective, a transplant from Boston P.D. somewhere in his mid-thirties. He’d been with the department for five or six years. He was approximately 5’8” and built like a former weightlifter. Pepper didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a nice guy and his dad had commented once that Sweeney was a real pro.

  Pepper’s main assignment this summer was to sit in a small, windowless room and enter case info into a new database, which was a soul-crushing way to spend his last summer before college. So of course he would volunteer to help the search effort. He headed to the front lobby, looking for his supervisor, Sergeant Roxanne Weisner.

  Volunteers jammed the lobby, and Pepper knew there were plenty more outside. He saw a middle-aged couple whose lawn he used to mow. He spotted his retired dentist talking loudly to the mother of a girl he dated super briefly in high school. Pepper didn’t go over to say hi to any of them.

  He saw a big guy in mirrored sunglasses going from police officer to police officer, chattering excitedly. It was Fester Timmins, who had been in Jake’s year at New Albion High School. A pretty good high school wrestler, in his day. Timmins was about six foot tall and fifty pounds overweight. Today he seemed excited, like this was a party.

  Timmins stopped to talk to Randy Larch, who’d joined the crowd to help organize the civilians. They were laughing about something and the guy gave Larch a bearhug. Pals? Pepper cruised right past, still hunting for Sergeant Weisner.

  Then Pepper saw his big brother Jake on the other side of the crowd. He was talking to Gus Bullard, their old high school hockey coach. Bullard was a big guy—slightly shorter than Pepper but heavier. He was a former athlete who had gained weight by his early fifties.

  Jake appeared to be telling his old coach a detailed story, and Pepper could hear Bullard’s too-loud laugh from across the crowded room.

  Bullard had always loved Jake but was much less a fan of Pepper. As Pepper pushed through the throng of people, he tried to slip right past his brother and his old coach. But a strong hand grabbed his arm. Coach Bullard.

  “Hey, Pylon! You helping with the big search?”

  Pepper hated that old nickname his coach had given him to make fun of his relative lack of speed on the ice. He shrugged and said, “Maybe.”

  Coach Bullard shook his head, looking disappointed. “You missed my big party last night too! What’s your excuse this time?”

  The New Albion high school had thrown a retirement party for Coach Bullard after twenty-four years of coaching the varsity hockey team. To celebrate his record and to ease Bullard’s forced retirement—he’d wanted to coach a twenty-fifth season, but the athletic director was bringing in new blood for a new era. Pepper had been performing with Brad and the Pitts at the Beachcomber in Wellfleet last night, but he doubted he’d have gone to Bullard’s extravaganza even if he’d been free. He wasn’t a fan.

  Pepper made a somewhat apologetic face, then slid his arm loose and quickly moved away. Where the heck was Weisner?

  Pepper found her in the conference room. His supervisor was consulting a list of tips received on the town’s public hotline—sightings of white cargo vans, unusual activity noticed, that sort of thing—and was pin-pricking a large copy of the New Albion map.

  Weisner was a short, pear-shaped woman in her forties with frizzy brown hair and a habitual frown on her face, especially when she was around Pepper.

  “Morning, Sarge,” he said. “Which search party do you want me to join?”

  She didn’t even look away from her map. “It’s morning already? Sorry, I don’t have time for you right now. You need to focus on the database and let me focus on this.”

  Ouch.

  At the beginning of the summer, Weisner had sat Pepper down and warned that she didn’t have much time to waste supervising him. It kept her from valuable police work. But since then she’d been riding his ass like a rent-a-donkey, like if she pushed him hard enough, possibly he’d quit.

  Unfortunately for Pepper, there was a bad history between them. She’d caught him and Angel on the wrong side of the law a few times when they were in high school. Nothing too horrible, just teens being teens. But she wasn’t exactly a fan of Pepper.

  Unlike Jake.

  Jake was the better student. The better athlete.
Better behaved. Better freaking everything.

  Jake had been a cadet part-time for the last two summers, and he’d spent a lot of it doing beach patrol on a bike. No cool cop gear except a radio, but at least he was out in the sun. And he’d gotten a great tan and a lot of girls’ phone numbers.

  “That’s a hell of a map,” Pepper said, not giving up yet.

  Pushpins covered the New Albion map, and Sergeant Weisner had circled in red ink the six areas with the biggest clusters. Pepper noticed a smaller cluster of pushpins—a seventh hot spot he knew well. It was half-wooded, half-marshy area which teens often used to get away from the eyes of adults. Pepper had been one of those teens. Could that be where the kidnapper had taken the girl?

  Pepper caught Sergeant Weisner by the sleeve. “Please, Sarge? Let me join a canvas team.”

  “Pepper, nothing personal, but I can’t supervise these search parties and babysit you at the same time. I left fifty old case files on your desk, and I need you to get them all in the database today. You finally want to step up and prove yourself? That’s what you need to focus on.”

  He wanted to change her mind. She needed all the help she could get, right? But her words stung, so he backed off. If they didn’t want his help, fine. Their loss. He’d tried.

  Besides, Pepper was nothing like his brother Jake. Quite the opposite. He wasn’t cut out to be a cop. And he definitely didn’t want to turn into his dad or Sergeant Weisner.

  So he retreated to his assigned workspace—a converted drunk tank now used for storing records. It held a makeshift desk for him. On warm days Pepper swore he could smell the puke and sour B.O. of drunks from years past. Unbelievable.

  Pepper’s main assignment as a police cadet for the past couple of months had been to populate the department’s new local database with metadata from police reports and cases going back for ten years.

  Some data, such as for sex offenses, terrorism, traffic offenders, foreign fugitives, criminal gangs and parole matters, would feed as usual to the national National Information Crime Center systems.

  This new database would hold more local data, such as incident reports which didn’t result in charges. But it seemed suspiciously like a useless project designed to keep him out of trouble while driving him crazy from boredom.

  And today? After the horrible kidnapping it was harder than ever to focus on meaningless data entry.

  After logging in and getting his pile of paper files organized, Pepper checked online to see what the media was reporting about the Emma Bailey kidnapping.

  There was a lot of coverage. Every level of Massachusetts law enforcement was helping with the effort to find the Eastham teen and the man who’d snatched her. The Eastham Police Department had set up a command center and had held a press conference jointly with other agencies, mainly to ask for the public’s help if they saw anything.

  The online stories gave a description of the kidnapper from the eyewitness—Emma Bailey’s little brother. The description wasn’t very detailed: a white male wearing a green hat, possibly a baseball cap. And that the suspect had been driving a white van.

  Pepper finally closed his browser and dug into his database work, hating every minute of work. Feeling frustrated and resentful.

  “Hey, Pepper!” A young teenage girl stood in his doorway. It was Zula Eisenhower, the lieutenant’s fourteen-year-old daughter. She was tall for her age but skinny. She was a mix of her Malaysian mom and her African American dad. Zula had long black hair and wore too-big silver-framed glasses and a long baggy T-shirt, which made her look even younger than she was.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “Aren’t you going out with the search parties?”

  “No, I’ve got to stay here and do this. It sucks, but…”

  “But what? You scared?”

  Pepper laughed. “No, I’m following orders, even if they’re stupid. That’s what grown-ups do.”

  “Oh.” Zula looked disappointed. Or annoyed? “Well, at least you get to complain about it. Have you seen Pop?” She explained the kidnapping had freaked out her mother, so she’d dropped off Zula here while she went to a doctor’s appointment in Hyannis.

  The Eisenhowers were like extended family to Pepper, his dad and his brother. Zula’s mom invited the Ryans over for dinner twice a month, as if to fill in the void of women in the Ryan household. He loved Mrs. E for that. Pepper could barely remember his own mother, who’d died when he was a little boy. He pictured her being similar to Mrs. E—always happy and smiling. Welcoming.

  “I haven’t seen your dad,” he said. “He probably drove to Eastham with my dad to the command center for the Bailey investigation.”

  “Okay, whatever… I’ll just hang with you. What’s that you’re doing? It looks boring.”

  Pepper gave her an exaggerated eye roll. “Boring? This is the most important long-term project we’re doing this summer. And it’s super fun, watch.” He showed her how he identified metadata on the old paper reports and where he inputted it to the new database. “When I’m done, our dads can search for patterns of local crimes, or clues like a tattoo or a scar from an old patrol report, to help solve a new case.”

  “I guess it’s cool,” she said. She watched him closely as he input a few more details into the table. “Not as cool as searching for the missing girl, but…”

  “Maybe,” said Pepper. “Too bad you’re too young to help me with this database.” Like a throwaway comment.

  Zula scoffed. “Watch.” She shoved him over and dragged another chair into place. She located metadata in the paper report and entered the right info into the database fields, moving quicker than he had.

  “Hey, nice job, kid! I have to go do something…do you want to keep at it? I’ll pay you ten bucks if you enter the rest of these reports.”

  She gave him a suspicious look through her big silver glasses. “You get that I read Tom Sawyer, right? Don’t think you’re tricking me, Pepper Ryan.” She sighed. “But I’m bored, so whatever… I’ll take your cash.” She tossed her long hair and pushed her glasses up on her nose. Then got right back to work.

  Good old Zula. Nice kid. She was as close as he and Jake had to a little sister, and he figured she was fair game for his exploitation. Like any good big brother would, right?

  “Are you just going to watch me?” she asked without looking up.

  And Pepper realized he had been.

  Zula stopped and made eye contact with him. “If I was missing, would you be sitting here in this smelly room, or would you be out there trying to save me?”

  Oof! Low blow.

  “Tell you what,” Zula added. “I’ll bet you a dollar you can’t find Emma Bailey before anyone else. In case you need more, you know, incentive.”

  Zula was a piece of work for a fourteen-year-old. Her guilt trip had actually gotten under his skin. And with her working on the database, Pepper now had a small window of freedom to go search the seventh pin cluster on the map, right?

  “Okay, Little Ike. It’s a bet!” he said. He liked to shorten Zula’s last name to Ike, like the old U.S. president, because it seemed to bug her. He even shook her little hand.

  Then he messed up her hair and retreated just outside her clumsy attempt to swat at him. “Ha!” he said.

  Pepper walked to the station’s small kitchen area and made three phone calls. Just this once, he’d do the Ryan cop thing. Because he had an itchy feeling about the seventh cluster—that Sergeant Weisner was making a mistake, not sending a team to search it.

  In the back of his mind, he was thinking: if Emma Bailey’s in those woods, that means she’s dead. Oh jeez, that’s probably the only way. What would he do if he found the poor girl’s body?

  Chapter Five

  Half an hour later, Pepper was picked up by his buddy Angel Cavada in Angel’s old car, a beat-up red Toyota Camry which Angel had nicknamed El Diablo. It had faded gold trim and an ugly scrape down the side rear panel, but its engine almost always started.

&nbs
p; El Diablo smelled like a mix of tomato sauce, cheese and hot cardboard because Angel spent most nights delivering pizzas. He was rumored to be the fastest delivery man in the Lower Cape and had three speeding tickets this summer to prove it.

  Angel was the same age as Pepper—twenty. About 5’9,” he was a second-generation Cuban-American. He had the thick dark hair, big smile and quick talk which made him popular with girls—just ask him. They became best friends in kindergarten after a vicious playground fight about whose dad was stronger.

  Pepper had recruited Angel and the other members of Brad and the Pitts to form their own unofficial search party. Pepper was pumped up to be helping. To be one of the good guys, just like the crowd of civilian volunteers.

  They drove to the area Pepper had noticed on Sergeant Weisner’s map—the seventh cluster which wasn’t getting one of her search parties. It covered a subdivision called The Crofts and an undeveloped area of woods and marshes behind it.

  This little subdivision had been under construction for years. Pepper knew the developer had been short on cash for the life of the project and was completing houses slowly, using cash from one sale to finance the completion of the next house.

  Pepper was also familiar with the scrubby woods and wetlands behind the subdivision because it was a popular hangout for local teenagers to drink a little, smoke a little, and do other things better done away from adult eyes.

  They cruised past a long row of medium-sized houses and parked in a cul-de-sac at the end of the street near three unfinished houses.

  “I got to give you one thing, mano: you’re never boring!” said Angel, shaking his head. “What’ll I do for excitement when you flake off to college without me?”

  Pepper laughed. “Buddy, as long as there’re ladies around here, you’ll be fine!”

  An old white van was parked on the street in front of one of the unfinished houses.

  “No fuckin’ way, right?” asked Angel. “That can’t be the snatcher’s van…”