Pretty Like an Ugly Girl (Baer Creighton Book 3)

by Clayton Lindemuth

  Coy.

  Her body moved with the music, and he couldn’t resist imagining her moving that body on top of him, keeping that same pelvic rhythm, that same intensity that kept pressing out her pubic triangle against her red silk dress, each time she thrust forward her hips. She’d seen him watching her, and now she danced for him. It was like watching a spinning ballerina; each time around, she snapped her head straight to him, and they shared strobe-like flashes of connection. All while her thrusting hips allowed him to read her outline through her dress.

  He tried drinking up the gumption to talk to her, but each time he convinced himself to go to her, he couldn’t imagine what the interchange would come to. He was older. She was younger. He had a gut. She was flawless. He’d say something to her, and she’d freak out in laughter. Or some unseen man would come up and claim her.

  Gordon drank more that night than any occasion since his undergraduate days. He drank like he had no mission in life. No tomorrow worth his clear best.

  He thought about it afterward, how seeing the girl in the red dress redirected his mission from law and order to lust.

  Since law school, Gordon had dated, but never married. He tried to connect with women, but never made a connection deeper than dinner, a movie, and a fish-lipped goodnight kiss.

  He dropped his leg from his James Dean wallflower pose and walked to her. She took his hands and he bounced to the beat, drunk-awkward, drunk-not-caring. She spun and he pulled her, she backed and he followed, she pressed her body to his and he felt the sheerness, the places she was firm, the others where she was soft. She retreated but held his hand. Led him past a short haired Nordic looking man standing with arms crossed by a pair of doors. She opened the one on the left. They were in a storage room. Again, more doors. Now they were in a hallway.

  “Your name?”

  “Amy.”

  “You are beautiful Amy.”

  Keeping his hand in hers, she led down a hall to an elevator. The doors closed on them and she dropped to her knees before him, opened her mouth wide like to consume a tennis ball, and pressed her lips to his pants. She blew steamy breath, heating his organ. He dropped his hands to his zipper but the chime rang and the door opened.

  Amy pulled him by a belt loop.

  The hallway light was better on this floor. Exotic paintings. Brass fixtures. She wore no underwear. No lines. In a moment she opened a door to a room. He sat on the bed. She crawled across it, shedding her dress like a snake slides out of its skin, until she was over him, on all fours. She planted her mouth on him and he tasted her.

  When he felt a second set of hands on him, a second mouth, he froze.

  It was dangerous… a second woman coming from nowhere, maybe already hidden in the room. Something fired in his brain, a warning. But the girls’ mouths were persistent and he’d never been with two. He felt along the back of one. Then the front of the other. Sampled four breasts. He shook and moaned and quivered until his head ached from the blood pressure and stress.

  When it was over she smiled at him, and the other girl disappeared before he could see her face.

  Amy walked him to the elevator, then to the ground floor, and left him at the double door with the Nordic man, who smiled and said, “Good night, Gordon.”

  And Gordon Emerson knew one day, he would have to make the impossible decision.

  A few days later, a packet of photos arrived at his home. He didn’t need to open them, but did. Didn’t need to read the letter, but read it anyway.

  The girls were thirteen and seventeen years old.

  After that, when Wayman Graves wanted information, the decision always came down to the same question. Was he ready to die? Because otherwise, there was no way out. Only the constant deferral, one day to the next.

  Gordon always gave Wayman what he wanted.

  Gordon opened a browser window on his laptop and went to a news aggregator. He clicked a link.

  MASSIVE PEDO RING BUST: HUNDREDS OF VIDEOS.

  It always came down to the same question.

  Gordon Emerson picked up the S & W .40 bullet from the table, fed the Glock, then his mouth, then the wall.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Maggie Sandberg—no longer dressed for her undercover role as Wayman Graves’s lover Claudia—stood on the driveway taking in Luke Graves’s log mansion. She thought of the countless girls the Graves family had transported.

  Sold, murdered, and made to vanish.

  She rubbed fists to her eyes. Tried to blink them alert. The week had passed in a flurry.

  First, Gordon Emerson had been found in his house, suicide. His laptop remained opened to a breaking story that felt like old news by the time his body was discovered the morning after his death.

  It was a canary in the coal mine event, foreshadowing a seismic aftermath.

  Video evidence had arrived by electronic means to more than a hundred law enforcement and press organizations. While the former scrambled to verify the videos, the press began quickly disseminating snippets showing various men in stages of undress before consummating their attacks on blurred—but apparently underage—girls. From these videos made freely accessible on the Internet, many men were quickly identified. In the last twenty-four hours, two US congressmen had committed suicide.

  Dozens of news organizations broke stories about a pedo and snuff business—on the upper floors of the Butcher Shop nightclub—being the location of a mass murder.

  Gruesome details, such as human flesh being found in the kitchen and an entire floor designed with easily sanitized “kill rooms,” had not yet leaked to the press. But they would, and the furor would only grow.

  Already three billionaires had been arrested for murder. The FBI rumor mill said many more—maybe dozens—would follow.

  Who knew there were dozens of billionaires? When did that happen?

  Each subsequent day brought reports of the arrests of powerful men. Social media blazed with speculation about who would be next. On television, everyone was an expert.

  Whoever had released the videos to the press had done a great disservice to justice, because the only way to take down big money was to investigate until the case was unassailable. Any man worth a billion dollars who was also a criminal—she’d like to see the overlap on a Venn diagram—also had an escape hatch ready. So while the press directed heat on him, all it did was warn him to leave the country.

  The surviving girls who had been victims of the Graves trafficking organization stayed at the Mexican embassy. They had not met with media, but as a show of good will, the Mexican government had allowed them to meet with a joint investigative task force made up of officers from the Mexican Federal Ministerial Police and the FBI.

  It was destined to become a political clusterfuck. Another gift of the assholes who’d shot up the Butcher Shop and freed the girls.

  About the same time as Gordon Emerson’s body was discovered, Maggie’s colleagues in Flagstaff—dispatched to investigate Luke Graves after she reported having seen Wayman’s operation first hand—reported back that Luke, his wife Caroline, and an FBI agent named Lou Rivers were all found murdered at the Graves’s house. Later that day Maggie received an update: Wayman Graves was also among the dead, apparently in an unrelated attack by a wild dog in the woods near his father’s home.

  Right.

  Hours later came another jolt.

  A Smith & Wesson 629, in a .44 magnum, was found in the grass in front of the Graves house, near the garage.

  Expedited ballistics had taken three days. Fingerprints, one.

  The firearm belonged to the North Carolina man now subject to a nationwide manhunt for the murder of two FBI agents—now possibly a third, Lou Rivers—four police officers—and more than a dozen civilians.

  What was the tie-in with the human traffickers in Arizona and Salt Lake City? The North Carolina suspect was reported to have been a hermit who never left his small town. How could he be connected to Arizona?

  Maggie Sandberg had n
ever seen the FBI quite so frenetic to catch a killer, and confused on how to do it.

  Ahead of her stood the deputy director of operations. Beside him, the sheriff of Coconino County. They walked slowly, heads down, plotting what would be the biggest, most coordinated manhunt the wild west had ever seen.

  Maggie also noticed a white surveillance van and, next to it, two men in FBI jackets kneeling by a boulder. They were preparing to capture video of the area in the coming days and possibly months. It would be unlikely for a crowd to gather at a place this remote, especially after the bodies had been removed and the news crews had gone. But because killers so often return to the scene of their crimes, FBI cameras would monitor the Graves house.

  Maggie thought it unlikely to bear fruit. From what she’d read, Baer Creighton was a vendetta killer, not a sicko who needed violence to get off, and who would return to a crime scene to relive it.

  They’d also place cameras near the highway that passed a few hundred yards from the Graves house, in case the killer only sought a glimpse. They’d capture every face that passed and transmit it to a supercomputer in Virginia. Using facial recognition software developed in coordination with the NSA, they’d screen for not just Baer Creighton, but every other face on their list.

  When an operation has a hysteria factor this high, you do everything with even a remote chance of working. You overwhelm the odds. Play the lottery a hundred billion times, you win.

  Maggie learned that morning she would receive the FBI Shield of Bravery for her undercover part of the Graves investigation.

  She wondered.

  Was the FBI inserting a pretty face into the news cycle to deflect criticism they’d arrived late, after some vigilante solved the problem for them?

  She didn’t know how to feel about her commendation. She’d followed a hunch and through undercover investigation confirmed it was correct. Nothing more.

  The whole thing had started when she agreed to meet some girlfriends to blow off steam at the Butcher Shop nightclub. By happenstance, she’d followed a portly gray-haired man of obvious wealth from his Mercedes to the entrance and, within minutes of arriving, noticed he was nowhere in the nightclub. Ever-curious about probably-unimportant things, she’d asked a man who’d made a pass at her to look in the restroom for her “date.” The portly man wasn’t there. She’d stepped outside, verified his car was still parked out front, and then she went into the Butcher Shop restaurant.

  The man had disappeared.

  She’d stood on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street, then skyward. Interesting ... Where was the entrance for the apartments on the fourth through sixth floors?

  The next two days she observed six more well-dressed men entering the club and disappearing. Shortly after, from inside, she watched Wayman Graves meet a man on the balcony, and welcome him into his office.

  When he emerged two hours later, it was through a pair of double doors on the dance floor level. There was always a bouncer near the doors.

  She wanted closer to the action and scored when a guard looked her up and down and allowed her to dance with the girls on the upper balcony.

  Then Wayman Graves approached her.

  Thinking fast, she realized he probably was accustomed to having nearly any woman he wanted. She refused him, and within weeks he wanted to marry her.

  For that, the FBI Shield of Bravery.

  What she really wanted was something to take away the ache in her heart that came from knowing the Graves operation was only one in how many across the United States? A dozen? A hundred? More?

  It was too early to make sense of anything. She needed facts. She needed a pile of evidence she could assemble into a picture. The involvement of the man wanted for murders across the country, Baer Creighton, seemed impossible. And yet his gun was on the property. More facts would explain it.

  Maggie Sandberg released a deep breath that didn’t relieve the tightness in her chest. She stepped toward the house. Because of the odd connection between the North Carolina murderer and the Graves operation, she’d been placed on the task force searching twenty-four hours a day with unrelenting focus on a single mandate.

  Find Baer Creighton.

  Okay. Let’s find Baer Creighton.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Doctor been good ’bout checking in each morning on the leg. He say today like to be his last for a handful; had a bout of summer weather come through but the storms is ready to push out the warm and leave six feet snow. Same thing every year, says the high school girl they got on the nightly news.

  Leg better. Doc come back second day and put a rubber band up the hole. Puss drain constant. Doc says it’ll do that a year two. No shit, says I. No shit, says he. All the dead meat up there got to drain out. But they’s a good water seal, and take the antibiotic I be fine. Someday he’ll take out the rubber band he stuck up there to hold the drain open, and maybe a few month later the hole ’ll heal.

  Pert near unbearable living with Mae.

  Nat Cinder said ...

  Give a man a powerful need for the spirit. Accourse ain’t been able to walk fer shit and she won’t get me a bottle, so it’s nothin but screaming little Joseph, Morgan and Bree, and niggle naggle tongues’ll waggle Ruth ...

  I wonder what Nat would say.

  Mae! Ease up on the bullshit!

  One girl got the hormones clucking, the other got her old woman nurse polished up. “Here baby let me get that for you. Oh, by the way, I saw the strangest thing on television ...”

  If I had Smith, I’d ask him one last kindness.

  Whole time I been waiting the FBI to show up at the door. Left Smith at Graves’s place and they musta knowed it was mine that day. Had the news on every day since, and after I come off the pain drugs and could hear the women’s voices instead of just looking at they boobs, turns out the whole world’s looking Baer Creighton. Every time you part the curtain they’s a man in a suit on the sidewalk. You know he’s Fed ’cause local boys druther get dunked in a sewer than wear a suit.

  So we sit here marveling we ain’t been hauled off to jail. I’s ready haul ass to Idaho, some shit, but noooo ...

  I wonder what Nat Cinder thinks we should—

  Ahhh, fuck. Somebody shoot me. Somebody got a gun somewhere ...

  Knock on the door.

  Feeling spry this morning, like I could get out the hotel room and mebbe walk a mile if I was allowed. I check the peep hole. See black. Good enough.

  “Feeling good Doc—”

  It ain’t Doc.

  “Tat.”

  “Who is it?” Mae says from the other room.

  “C’mon in. C’mon. How you been?”

  I look in the hallway. Bring her in. Lock the door.

  Tat clean up good. She don’t look the vagrant wanderer like when she found me on the mountain.

  She enters, stands stiff. Eyes search about like they never find what they seek. Her mouth is always flat and little come out it.

  “Glad you come by. I never got to say my thanks. You coulda left me fer dead but didn’t. I’s grateful. ’Cept for now I live with these nags. Drive a man extreme.”

  She look like she ain’t heard a word. Some folk don’t know what to do with kindness, or gratitude.

  She wear a black pistol holster on her hip—got a gun in it. Accourse in Arizona, you don’t carry, people think you’s touched.

  “I found your dog.”

  “What?”

  “Your dog. Stinky.”

  “Joe. Where?”

  “Same place we were. He comes each night.”

  I been troubled on Joe. How I sniggered at him, he wished he was a bear. The hurtful things I said.

  Living with women turned me to mush.

  And now we got the snow set to come in and bury him. North Carolina dog, barely got enough fur to warm a house dog. I think on him snuggled in the sleeping bag, and how cold that ground get froze.

  Time to fetch Stinky Joe.

  I grab a jacke
t. A cane Ruth bought from the pawn. Holster and Judge.

  “I want to go back fer Joe. How you get here?”

  “I walked.”

  “Holy moly. Mae, I need them keys.”

  “What keys?”

  “The car.”

  “Go ahead. You’ll get caught, and all this shit’ll come down on the rest of us. Right when things are starting to go good. You know Nat and me—he knows people who can make new identities for us. Change fingerprints, the whole deal. All we have to do is lay low a little while.”

  Find the keys in her purse.

  “Lessgo.”

  Close the door. Hotel got a back exit, leads to the alley and parking lot off Main. Limp down the steps with the cane. Got the old man fedora, big ass plaid coat. Look civilized enough for Flagstaff. Fire the station wagon, blink a couple times to clear the eyes.

  I think on Stinky Joe, that time he first found me in the cave where I was fittin’ to slaughter men with poison, how he come up and woke me with dog slop kisses. And how I give him cheddar and eggs.

  Make a man misty.

  Tat climb in the front seat.

  “Nat say you give him a helluva time up there, but you did real good.”

  I pull out the lot, slip on sunglasses resting in the cup holder. They’s so many suits it appear God loosed a plague of yuppies. Ease down the street, no squealing tires, no failure to signal. Speed limit and all that.

  Tat don’t speak.

  “Tat?”

  She look at me.

  “Got something on yer mind?”

  “I didn’t know about you. What you did before.”

  “You mean all the killin’?”

  She nod.

  “Well, suppose it’s like all yer killin’. Somebody gotta do it, or it won’t get done.”

  “Makes good sense.”

  “How long you figger to stay?”

  “Here?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe.”

  Wait her out.

  “Maybe a long time. I found something safe.”

  “Mmm. I had a cave. Couldn’t wish a better hideout. Bad fellas come up, you got sixteen lanes of fire, all downhill. Get enough ammo in there, ’nough food, fuck ’em all. Fuckemall a good long time.”