Kill Tide

by Timothy Fagan

  The woman let him watch until the video time stamp said 5:05 PM. “Like I told you,” she said. “Our camera can’t see much of the street.”

  But Pepper hadn’t been watching the blur of traffic. He was watching the parking lot and who exited the workspace.

  There were many vehicles in the parking lot, but none of them were the Jeep Wrangler that Yelle said in his interview he’d driven on Thursday. But there was a white van. Pepper couldn’t make out the license plate.

  Pepper watched video of three men leaving the machine shop, getting into vehicles and driving away. None of the men looked like Yelle. The white van remained. Pepper also watched for vehicles departing from the blind spot area at the very rear corner of the lot. He didn’t see any.

  The door behind them groaned open and the bird woman quickly minimized the screen with the video footage.

  Two men entered the lobby. One was a short, thin guy in his sixties. But he had the expansive posture of a man in charge. With him was Casper Yelle. Pepper immediately recognized him from his photo, but he hoped the man had no reason to recognize him.

  “Judy, what’s going on? Is everything okay?”

  Pepper began taking tiny steps away from the computer, back toward the other side of the counter.

  “Yeah, no problem,” said Judy, making nervous, flitting gestures with her hands.

  “Who are you?” the short man demanded.

  “I was just, ah, looking for directions.”

  Casper Yelle stood behind the short man, saying nothing while watching everything.

  “He was just leaving,” said Judy, taking a sip from her water bottle. Her face had gone pale.

  “Thanks for the directions,” Pepper said to her. “And hey, funny sign out front! Good one!” He left quickly.

  The men didn’t come after him.

  Pepper hoped Judy wouldn’t get in trouble. But he guessed she would, and he felt terrible about it.

  His blood was pumping as he jogged to his truck, looking back over his shoulder. He saw the two men in the doorway, watching him go. But Pepper was too deep in thought to care.

  Casper Yelle had almost certainly lied during his interview about leaving in his Jeep at five o’clock on Thursday. Why?

  Pepper drove his truck out of Johnston’s parking lot onto Richards Road and quickly pulled into the Big Red Yard next door. A faded sign said Lower Cape Contractor Park, but no one called it that.

  It was time to meet Dennis Cole—if he could get through the closed gate.

  The Big Red Yard was a three-acre madhouse of trucks, containers and heaps of wheelbarrows, tires and other equipment. If you were a landscaper or tree topper or whatever and needed a place to store your work vehicles overnight and have a base of operations, this was the place on the Lower Cape. Other options existed, but this was the cheapest.

  The property was surrounded by an eight-foot brick wall painted bright red, topped by rusty loops of barbed wire. And the entrance was controlled by a rolling gate, also with barbed wire.

  By good luck, Pepper was right behind a pickup truck towing a landscaping trailer. It stopped just short of the gate. The driver waved a small gray card at a reader and the gate rattled open with a long, grinding squeak.

  Pepper pulled up behind the truck and followed it through just before the gate slid closed.

  He was glad he had a truck too as he drove along the rough dirt lane into the lot. The potholed lane split into four lanes which each zigzagged away into the tangle of containers, trucks with trailers, and piles of discarded equipment. There were small dump trucks, bucket trucks, and vans. Especially white vans.

  There were also shipping containers like the ones hauled around by eighteen-wheelers. The containers had big ads on their sides for companies like Budweiser and Evergreen. Some containers were so rusty the ads were illegible. Pepper knew that contractors used the containers to store equipment. All in all, the place was quite a maze.

  And crowded. Pepper figured contractors paid by the square foot and only rented enough real estate for their needs. Not one inch more.

  Luckily, he found Cole quickly. The man was welding a trailer close to the front of the property. He was near a small brick building with a neon sign which said Office. Half of its letters were burned out, so the sign just said Off.

  Pepper parked his truck and was about to climb out when he almost had a heart attack. He saw an enormous dog—so big it made the Doberman pinscher from Pepper’s earlier misadventure at Scooter McCord’s house look like a puppy. It was the biggest dog he had ever seen.

  This dog looked like it was mostly English mastiff, with possibly some wolf blood mixed in. It was the size of a small pony and had to weigh well over 200 pounds. Probably weighed more than Pepper.

  It had a wide metal collar and was tethered by a thick chain. The dog was ripping at the ground with its enormous paws. It wasn’t growling. It was watching him and Cole, as if deciding which of them would be today’s appetizer and which would be the main course. The beast would be intimidating on any day to anyone who wasn’t carrying a rocket launcher. But today? After that Doberman had already almost ripped apart Pepper? No, this was too much.

  Cole was working about five feet beyond the full length of the dog’s chain. Pepper watched the dog gallop at the man and flip backward when he reached his chain’s maximum. After only a few seconds, the dog repeated his effort. It looked like the dog was intent on either breaking his chain or his neck.

  Cole picked up a rock the size of a softball and threw it hard at the dog. The rock hit the dog’s side with a thump, but the dog didn’t flinch or bark. It just stared at the man, as if it was taking his number. Adding Cole to his shit list. The dog was actually scarier than if it had barked.

  Pepper climbed down from his truck, carrying the second half of the sandwich he’d abandoned at lunchtime during the McCord house debacle.

  “Here you go, boy,” he said, lobbing the sandwich near the beast. Pepper pitied the dog, but he wasn’t stupid enough to hand-feed it. He wanted to keep his hand.

  The dog snatched the food up out of the mud and swallowed it whole. Then he stood still, looking at Pepper expectantly.

  “Sorry, boy, that’s all.”

  The dog started whining, in a low voice which sounded like a dump truck with a bad transmission.

  “Hey, Ryan!” said Cole, setting aside his welding mask. “Meet Stinky, the Big Red Yard’s guard dog. That fucking dog’s been coming at me for the last hour. He’s lucky I haven’t beaten him silly yet.”

  You throw one more rock at Stinky and I’ll toss you to him like that sandwich, thought Pepper. But out loud he said, “I got your text. What’s up?”

  Cole shut down his welding equipment, then gestured for Pepper to follow him. They walked to Cole’s truck and climbed in. The truck was full of fast food wrappers and empty coffee cups.

  “Thanks for coming, man,” said Cole. “This place is a goldmine for me. Just last week, I welded a temporary manhole on a delivery truck. Five hundred bucks—cha-ching! And someone’s trailer hitch or whatever’s always breaking in here. Speaking of money…”

  “You’ve figured out how I can make millions off my songs?”

  Cole laughed. “Maybe. But something else first. I heard on the radio the reward for the two kidnapped girls is up to a hundred thousand dollars. Crazy, right? And I think I know who the Snatcher is.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Dennis Cole’s statement surprised Pepper. He knew who the Greenhead Snatcher was?

  “Yeah? Who is he?” Pepper asked.

  Cole grinned at him. “No, no. Not yet. But since you work at the cop shop, I need you to do me a solid and fill me in on how the reward thing works. If someone’s already a suspect, but I give the cops info that helps convict the bastard, do I still get the money?”

  Pepper thought about it. “Sure, why not? If you tell them something that’s key to catching and convicting the guy, I bet you’ll get the money.” />
  Cole chuckled. “I better. But about the case…how’s it going? You know, give me an idea if I’m chasing a dead end or if I’ve got a fucking good idea.”

  Pepper knew it was a bad idea to share inside info about the investigation with Dennis Cole or anyone else outside of the police. Especially after the trouble that the Bailey family got into with vigilante activity.

  But he was still annoyed at his dad and law enforcement in general. So he did what he knew he shouldn’t. He gave Cole a full recap of the case’s progress. Casper Yelle. Scooter McCord. The ransom note. All the details and other big events which Pepper had either seen or learned over the past four days.

  Cole had a pencil and a battered notebook, and he wrote notes as Pepper talked. “How many other suspects are the cops looking at?” Cole asked.

  Pepper didn’t remember them all, so he pulled out his phone and flipped through the pictures of suspect reports in his dad’s file. He read out each suspect’s name and address, about twenty of them, and Cole carefully wrote it all down.

  When Pepper finished, the biker offered him a fist bump.

  “You da man, Ryan. I need you to do two other things. Find out if the detectives have a list yet of all the girls named Emma in the Lower Cape. They must have thought of it already, right? The Greenhead fucker must be targeting girls with that name for some sick reason, don’t you think? So first thing, get me their Emma list.”

  “Ah, I’ll see what I can do,” said Pepper, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. That was probably something the detectives had already focused on, but he didn’t know how he would get a copy of their list.

  “And let me know how the case’s going from now on, okay? Like you and me are a team. You fill me in if the case goes in some new direction, or they get any big breaks. Maybe we can find those girls faster than anyone else. We’ll chop the reward fifty-fifty. Next stop, Nashville!”

  Pepper was only twenty years old, back then. He had only heard a little about ideas like ethics and conflicts of interest. But he knew he felt like crap, deep in his gut, when he answered, “Okay.”

  Another fist bump.

  Pepper walked back to his truck. Stinky the monster dog, was lying flat in the mud at the end of his chain, his huge face pressed to the ground and his bloodshot brown eyes fixed on him. As if he’d heard the whole conversation. As if he was glad he was only a dog on a chain in the mud and wasn’t Pepper.

  Pepper didn’t blame him.

  The man who’d snatched the two Emmas was nervous as he methodically climbed down the metal ladder to take care of the girls.

  This part of the job hadn’t gone too well. He felt as if he was the one tied up—he was too freaking handcuffed by limits on what he could do to get the girls to get with the program, ASAP.

  The plan said, be nice to them, for good reason. No beating them up, no grabbing teenage titties, nothing like that—not yet.

  He knew the teens were scared, which made total sense. The older one, Emma Bailey, had a hell of a temper and was setting a bad example. She was fighting back, even though she was helpless. It worried him. It wasn’t part of the plan. He hoped Emma Bailey had settled down and would behave today. She hadn’t eaten or drunk since yesterday, which hopefully would help.

  Trust the plan. Trust the man.

  He pulled down the Shrek mask over his face, which he hated, because it only let him breathe hot, stale air.

  He began by taking off the eye masks and ball gags off from both girls.

  “Hey, smelly Shrek’s back! Too bad we can’t hold our noses!” said Emma Bailey.

  Damn! He’d had a lot going on this week and hadn’t had extra time for showering or doing laundry. He’d kidnapped a freaking Mean Girl…

  “We’re going to try something new,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. He didn’t want Emma Bailey to think she was scoring any points. “I’m going to free you both up and you can use the toilet and then eat and drink together. You two have to start acting like a team. Like sisters.”

  “I haven’t got a sister,” said Emma Bailey.

  “I do,” said Emma Addison quietly. Then a little louder: “But she’s a pest!” The girl half laughed, half sobbed.

  The man in the mask attached the longer bike-chain tethers and removed their short chain tethers. Then he used his knife to cut the plastic tie wraps at their hands and feet.

  “Can you give us some privacy to take a leak, you perv?” asked Emma Bailey.

  “You need to learn to talk nice,” he snapped back.

  “Do any women talk to you if you don’t kidnap them?”

  “Don’t get him mad,” said Emma Addison, in a scared little voice.

  “Hush up, I know his game,” said Emma Bailey. “He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. He’s too stupid.” And she laughed!

  The man had to resist the impulse to freaking knock her down. He could feel blood rising in his ears, behind the hot Shrek mask.

  Who the hell did she think she was? He barely controlled himself, stepping back toward the ladder, crossing his arms and watching them as they moved to the toilet chair.

  He saw them whispering a bit, but didn’t intervene.

  When the girls finished, they shuffled back to where he’d laid out food and water (with the usual sleeping pills ground up in it). Only the younger girl, Emma Addison, began eating and drinking.

  “You only get a few minutes,” he warned Emma Bailey.

  “I’m all set,” she said, calm and cool.

  The man groaned. Now what the fuck—she’s doing a hunger strike? Did she think she could throw him off, make him change the whole plan? What the hell was the point of her defiance?

  This wouldn’t last. Who was the old Indian guy who did a hunger strike, became a big hero with a movie, but he died… Gandhi something? Was that the hippie protest bullshit they taught in school these days?

  But this girl was no freaking hero. She’d be begging for food and even sooner she’d be begging for water. The man knew a person would die of thirst in a few days. She could starve herself for longer if she drank something. Weeks?

  The man didn’t know the science, he’d have to look it up. But he believed in his gut the brat would give up and get with the program.

  Wouldn’t she?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Pepper was back in his converted drunk tank by 4:30. He still had a handful of cases to get into the database for his daily quota. Miraculously, Sergeant Weisner didn’t come by and give him hell about disappearing. Maybe she was too busy to torture him today.

  He had promised to get Dennis Cole the list of Emmas in the area, but now he felt sleazy about following through with it. The biker didn’t have any business getting involved—the reward wasn’t a legit reason for Cole to carry out a personal hunt for the Greenhead Snatcher. And giving him a copy of something that was part of the official investigation…it just seemed wrong.

  Pepper cruised past his dad’s office. His door was closed and faint voices drifted through. Better not to interrupt. Luckily, he cornered Detective Sweeney in the officers’ bullpen.

  “Young Ryan, what do you know?” asked Sweeney with a smile.

  Maybe Sweeney would be open to a little old-fashioned horse trading of info. Only one way to find out.

  “I heard some crazy info about Scooter McCord. He has a passport from the United Kingdom with his photo, but a different name.”

  “Oh yeah? Who told you?”

  “Just someone who wants to stay out of trouble. Have you gotten a warrant to search his house yet?”

  Sweeney studied him with a hint of a smile on his face.

  “We’re working on probable cause to get one and aren’t even close yet. Think I can talk to your friend?”

  Shit. “I’ll ask the person. They didn’t want to get involved, so…”

  “You do that. I can talk to him on the down low. Or is it a her?”

  “I’ll, ah, check with them.”

  The dete
ctive laughed and slapped his back.

  “By the way,” tried Pepper. “Have you put together a list of teenagers named Emma who live in the area?”

  “You bet. Why?”

  “Well, I could look it over if you like. See if you’ve missed anyone I know.”

  The detective sighed. “I appreciate it, kid. That list’s too hot to show anyone. Completely need-to-know. Can you imagine if someone leaked it to the media? They’d have a field day with it. And someone’s ass would get canned.”

  So, a total fail.

  Pepper headed back to his drunk tank office. He’d have to create his own list of all the Emmas who lived on the Lower Cape.

  He sat in front of his computer, chewing a pencil eraser. He had to start with some assumptions. Since the two missing girls were both Cape locals, not tourists, he had to assume if there was something to the “Emma” theory, that he could exclude any tourists. They probably weren’t a target.

  He started by searching an online White Pages site. He typed “Emma” in the first-name box, leaving the last-name box empty. For town, he typed “New Albion, MA.” He would have to repeat the search for each town on the Lower Cape.

  Thirty-two Emmas appeared in his search result. None of them were teens. The site offered the Emmas’ ages by decade, but all were twenties or older.

  Pepper sighed. This was useless. There had to be an easier way.

  “What’s that?”

  Pepper jumped at the voice, but mid-jump realized it was not the soul-crushing voice of Sergeant Weisner. It was the high-pitched teenage voice of Zula Eisenhower.

  The girl had crept to his shoulder and was looking at his list.

  “Damn, Zula. What the hell?”

  “Language, language.”