by Leslie Wolfe
He wasn’t alone in the office. Two women sat on adjacent chairs in front of his desk, holding hands. One of them, bulky and slightly unkempt in appearance, wore an unbuttoned, white lab coat over her floral-patterned dress. The school nurse, I thought. The other woman, who appeared younger, had almost curled up in a ball, hugging herself and rocking back and forth, the way people do when they are severely distraught. She must’ve been the person who’d signed off to Holt’s daughter’s release from school.
The principal stood up so quickly that his chair bounced back and hit the wall with a loud bang. The woman started sobbing and turned her face away from Holt, while the nurse also stood, shoulders hunched forward and head lowered, her quivering lips a foretelling sign of barely withheld tears.
“Detective,” he said in a trembling voice, “I’m so sorry. Words cannot express,” he added, wringing his hands. “I’m glad you’re not, um, you haven’t been shot, but I’m—”
“Never mind that,” Holt cut him off, reaching the desk in three large steps and stopping only a couple of feet away from the two women. “Tell me what happened, step by step.”
“We assure you, Detective, that we’re aware we broke—”
Holt circled the desk with feline agility and grabbed the man’s lapels. “Shut the hell up,” he said, inches away from the man’s face. Then he let him go, and the principal fell into his chair as if his legs had given away.
Holt turned to the two women, and I noticed how he tried to control his appearance, to project calm and reason and patience, when he was nothing but a desperate parent with a badge, terrifying the people who had the information we needed.
“Which of you spoke with them?” Holt asked, sounding surprisingly calm.
His apparent composure didn’t fool anyone. The younger woman tried to speak, but the first sounds she made were choked. She cleared her throat and lifted her eyes to look at him.
“I swear I didn’t know,” she said, speaking barely above a whisper.
“I know you didn’t,” Holt reassured her. “Tell me everything you can remember.”
“They were cops,” she mumbled, but then quickly stopped and corrected herself. “They were dressed as cops. White, thirty years of age or so, one of them younger, maybe twenty-seven.” She stopped and looked at Holt, waiting.
“Go on,” he encouraged her. He leaned against the desk, his back turned to the principal, and directed all his attention to the woman. “What else do you remember?”
She licked her lips nervously. “Buzz cut hair, cleanly shaven, about your height. The younger one a couple of inches shorter.”
I searched for a uniformed cop photo from our precinct in my phone’s photo archives and showed it to her. “Did they look like this? Their uniforms?”
“I—I think so, yes,” she replied, unconvinced.
“What was different?”
“I think the younger one had a different patch, here,” she pointed with a thin, slightly trembling finger to the man’s shoulder.
Holt and I exchanged a quick glance. Those patches showed which police department the cops belonged to. But we already suspected Meredith had been taken by fake cops. At first, I thought the information might’ve been relevant; on second thought, it wasn’t really that much of a surprise.
“How about name tags?” I asked, pointing at the man in the photo. All uniformed cops wore gold, metallic name tags with their last names.
The teacher stared at the ceiling for a moment, trying to remember. Her eyes kept veering up and to the left, an involuntary movement when someone accesses the memory center of their brain.
She shook her head discouragedly and clenched her hands together, squeezing tightly. I could see her knuckles turning white, and I thought I heard a whimper.
Holt started saying something, but I cut him off. “What’s your name?” I asked, as gently as I could.
“Dana,” she replied. “Dana Garrett.”
I acknowledged her answer with a tiny smile. “Are you a teacher, Dana?”
“Yes. I teach English,” she replied, then exchanged a quick glance with the nurse.
I followed her lead. “How about you?”
“Charity Arnold, school nurse,” the heavyset woman replied in a hoarse voice. She must’ve smoked two packs a day the bulk of her adult years, if I were to draw a conclusion based on the pitch of her voice and the color of her teeth. For a health professional, she didn’t look or sound healthy at all.
I looked briefly at Holt and noticed he’d crossed his arms at his chest and was fuming. As they say in police training, slow is fast. I hoped he remembered that.
“Did you see the two men, Charity?”
The woman nodded twice, her thin, bleached hair settling in wispy strands on her shoulders.
I looked at Charity, then at Dana, and asked again, “Were they wearing name tags?”
The two women looked at each other, then nodded. “Y—yes, I believe so,” Dana eventually replied.
“Let’s try to remember those names,” I asked encouragingly.
There was a slim chance the two uniforms had been stolen and finding out who they’d been stolen from could bring us closer to finding the two men who had worn them.
“One was Beasley,” Charity announced, ending a long minute of conferring with Dana. “The other one read Greer. I remember that because I thought of my old neighbor, from when I used to live in Texas.”
“Excellent, that’s great,” I replied, feigning an excitement I wasn’t feeling. “Did they touch anything, a doorknob, maybe?”
“No,” she replied, shaking her head vigorously. “I remember one of them opening the door with his elbow. I didn’t think of it at the time, but now…” Her voice trailed off under the weight of her hindsight understanding of what had transpired. The two men had been careful not to leave any fingerprints.
“What else did they say? Did you ask them anything?” I added, turning toward Dana.
She fidgeted in place, then reached for the water bottle she’d placed on the principal’s desk but decided to refrain from drinking. Her hand settled nervously in her lap. “I asked them where you’d been shot,” she said, casting a side glance at Holt then quickly lowering her eyes. “They said the abdomen, and that it was serious.”
Holt pressed his lips together but didn’t say a word.
“I asked if you were going to be okay,” Dana added, “and one said yes, the other said that they didn’t know yet, it was too soon.” She looked at me with pleading eyes. “I should’ve known, when they disagreed like that,” she added, her voice breaking. “I just thought that the younger one didn’t want to tell me the truth. You know how cops are,” she added.
I looked at Holt, waiting for his lead. There wasn’t anything else we could learn from these three. The two men who had kidnapped Meredith had been bold and well-prepared. They’d taken advantage of the heightened emotions brought on by the shocking news they disclosed and made a clean exit without anyone making the required call to the precinct to verify their story.
“We’ll need you to sit down with a sketch artist,” I said, hoping Holt would let me get our artist involved. “Please wait here until he arrives.”
I turned toward Holt, ready to leave, but he looked at Dana intently.
“Did my daughter seem all right leaving with them?” he asked.
Confused, the teacher furrowed her brow. “What do you mean? She was in tears, hearing you’d been shot. She wasn’t all right.”
“Did she seem to recognize them? Know them?”
She hesitated a little, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“But she didn’t react to them, as if noticing something was off about them?”
I looked at Holt, wondering what he was thinking.
“No, she didn’t,” Dana replied. “I’m so sorry I didn’t—”
Holt walked out of the office without another word, rushing to the exit. Halfway through the corridor, I caught up with
him and grabbed his sleeve.
“Holt, we need—”
“A sketch artist?” he asked, without letting me finish my sentence. “And who else do you want to tell about this? I thought we agreed—”
“We need help, Holt,” I said as I climbed onto the passenger seat of his Interceptor. “We need video, street surveillance, GPS tracking on Meredith’s phone,” I pleaded. “We need Fletcher.”
“I told you, I can’t take this to the squad room. Not yet. Let me work this my way, all right? It’s my kid, Baxter!”
“What are you so afraid of? Every cop who draws breath in this city would drop everything to help. We’re nothing if not united when it comes to one of our own.”
“Yeah… sure, we are. Morales would yank me off this case so fast, my head would be spinning for an hour, and he’d call the feds in on it just to make sure his ass was covered.”
“Maybe the feds are the right approach, Holt. They have tools, a dedicated strategy, they have CARD teams. You know, it stands for Child Abduction Rapid Deployment. They might be just what we need.”
He hit the brakes hard, and I felt the seatbelt cutting into my flesh. Then he turned toward me, glaring. “If you don’t want to help me, fine. Get out and find a ride back home, and no hard feelings. But we’ll do this my way, is that clear?” he shouted.
I felt the vibrations of his voice against my face, but I didn’t flinch.
“I’m with you all the way, Holt,” I replied calmly, although I wasn’t feeling calm, not in the least. My heart was thumping against my chest, and I felt the urge to scream back at him despite my best judgment. He was being irrational, asinine, and a total plonker. On the flip side, considering what was at stake, I was surprised he was still keeping it together as well as he was.
One thing was certain; he needed me, more than he cared to admit. I breathed, looking at him calmly. “You can count on me,” I added.
“Great,” he said, turning away from me. “Then act like it.” He floored the gas pedal, and the Interceptor took off abruptly, pushing me against my seat.
I rode in silence, knowing from experience it wasn’t the best time to make my point with my stubborn-as-a-mule partner. In his shoes, I’d probably not have done a whole lot better.
“They might kill her if we go wide, Baxter,” he said after a mile or two on the Interstate at over ninety miles an hour. “They want something, and they have to believe they could still get whatever the hell it is they want.”
“What if they only want to hurt you, Jack?” I asked softly. “It’s one hell of a risk you’re taking.”
He slammed his fist into the steering wheel. “A small one,” he eventually replied. “If this were about vengeance, there would’ve been one abductor, not two.”
“Chances are—” I started, but he cut me off.
“Yeah, exactly, chances are this is a crew on a mission, and I have to make sure they still think they can get whatever the hell they’re after.”
“Okay,” I replied quietly. “Then let me help you your way. Let’s go to Fletcher’s home. I’ll text him to meet us there.”
“You know where he lives?” he asked, evidently surprised. “Don’t tell me, you and he go way back too, or something? Another one of your damn secrets I can’t be trusted with?”
“No, I just met him when I transferred in from Henderson.”
“Then how?”
I gave him a long stare that he probably didn’t notice, as he was focused on the thick, rush-hour traffic. “Are you sure you want to know?”
He pressed his lips together and stayed quiet.
“Look, I promise you he’ll help, one hundred percent off the record.”
“Do you trust him that much?” he asked, a trace of his earlier surprise still coloring his voice. I also heard a tinge of hope in his inflections and realized I had finally reached him.
“I trusted him with my life once,” I replied, then added quietly, “and with yours.”
Casey
Seven hours missing
She peered out the window, careful not to move the sheers and let anyone who could be looking know that she was home, even if there wasn’t anyone out there that she could see. Feeling a chill, Casey curled up on the couch and started biting on her left index finger, grinding her teeth against the shiny, lacquered surface of her manicured nail, ripping tiny shreds of flesh from her raw cuticles.
What was going on? Had they found out?
Ever since her best friend, Meredith, got pulled out of calculus class that morning by a terrified and tearful Mrs. Garrett, her stomach had been twisted in a knot. What if the school had found out what they’d done? Worse even, what if those men got to Meredith first, and now they were coming after her?
She shifted in place, shivering, then reached out and grabbed the blanket folded neatly on the armrest and wrapped herself in it. It didn’t help bring warmth to her fingers, nor did it do much to keep the monsters haunting her at bay.
That morning, when the first period had ended, and Casey was finally able to roam the hallways, she’d rushed in search of her friend. She’d started with the principal’s office, the first place she’d be taken to in case they would’ve found out. The principal was out of the office, his door locked, and the light turned off. She probed discreetly with his secretary and found out he was having a root canal.
She asked everyone she could think of, but no one had seen Meredith since first period.
After third period, she was headed to the cafeteria for lunch, although she was nauseous and shaky. She caught a glimpse of Mrs. Garrett, sobbing violently and being escorted to the principal’s office by the warlock herself. The fierce-looking and totally bitchy school nurse, who deserved a slow, painful death at the teeth of millions of hungry rats, was also crying, and that was unheard of. The warlock took pride in making others cry; no one had ever seen her shed a tear before, not even when a ninth grader had fallen to his death last year from the building rooftop.
No, the warlock never cried. Not ever. Not until that day. And the principal had returned to school after his root canal. Weird.
Something had to be terribly wrong.
She’d left dozens of messages on Meredith’s phone and had heard nothing.
Casey had no reason to be in the cafeteria. The more she thought about it, the less sense it made to stay in school. She snuck out of there and raced the whole way home, not running out of breath, not feeling anything but sheer terror. If they got to her while she was at home, at least the school didn’t have to know, and if the school didn’t know, maybe her mom wouldn’t find out either.
Yeah, right. Fat chance that was.
But if they came for her, she’d swear to them she would never tell a soul, and maybe they’d believe her. Maybe they’d let her live.
She heard her teeth chattering, and, at first, she didn’t recognize the sound, as if it came from someone else. She needed a joint badly, even if that meant leaving the safety of her home and going out there by herself.
She rushed upstairs and pulled open the lowest drawer in her dresser, then reached deep inside and peeled off the small packet she’d taped to the bottom of the drawer above it. Then she dashed outside to the backyard and hid behind the tool shed, lighting up with trembling fingers.
She inhaled thirstily and held the smoke inside her lungs for a few seconds, yearning for the soothing effect it usually had. The rampant anxiety relented a little, but the facts remained the same.
Someone had found out. Meredith’s father was a cop. Whether he’d found out, or the other guys had tracked the girls and now knew where they lived, it was just as bad. She and Meredith were seriously fucked, about to be grounded forever, in the odd chance they weren’t both going to be killed.
Maybe Meredith was dead already.
She inhaled again and closed her eyes for a moment, imploring some peace to come to her weary mind. Instead, her stubborn brain returned a rerun of last night’s events, as if she could’ve
forgotten any of it. The man they saw, the things he said, the money he took, the look he gave them when he’d spotted the two of them huddled together, trembling, scared shitless. He’d pressed a finger to his lips in a plea for silence, and they’d nodded immediately with eyes wide open in fear. After all, the man was a cop. He could’ve busted them for being in a club and drinking alcohol when they weren’t even sixteen yet.
But he didn’t. He’d let them go with a weird, foreboding smile.
And now Casey was waiting for that man to come and tie up the loose end that she was. She’d seen it on TV so many times. Wasn’t that what crooked cops did? He’d got to Meredith first, maybe because he was afraid that she’d tell her dad, but Casey was going to be next.
After a regretful last drag, she smothered the minuscule nib against the sole of her shoe, burning the tip of her fingers, then flicked it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. By now, the old lady must’ve had a small mound of her leftovers. Good thing they were biodegradable. Look at her, the concerned ecologist.
She headed inside with a satisfied yet tentative smile, realizing that the herb had done its part and had brought warmth to her extremities and a different perspective on life.
The moment she pulled the French door shut, she heard the doorbell ring. Her newly found serenity vanished, and she felt the urge to throw up.
Standing outside her front door, she recognized Meredith’s father and another cop, a slender woman she’d never seen before.
Frozen in place, she couldn’t think, couldn’t react. All she could do was stare at Mr. Holt’s scrunched face through the white sheers of the living room window. He was angrier than she’d ever seen him, and it was all her fault. He was going to kill her. Or throw her ass in jail, like, forever.
Holt rang the bell again, then pounded on the door with his fist. “Open the damn door, Casey, I know you’re in there,” he shouted.
Pale and weak at the knees, she forced herself to walk to the front door and unlock it. Then she removed the chain and opened it slowly.