by R. B. Schow
Unfortunately, the noise didn’t stop.
Scotty opened his eyes and saw a sub-compact shitbox of a car pulling into the driveway. It idled there for a moment and then the engine stopped, allowing the beauty of silence to once again permeate the neighborhood.
The driver opened a door with rusted hinges and struggled to squeeze her substantial weight through the small opening. What emerged was an older heavyset woman in a housedress carrying what appeared to be a few bags from various grocery stores.
She lumbered toward the house in a back-and-forth rocking motion, moving slowly, methodically. At the front door, she set her bags down and fished her keys from her purse. When the door was open, she collected her things, then went inside and shut the door.
“Jesus, she even looks like an Apple White,” Scotty said, nudging Jackson.
“I saw her, man,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I saw.”
A few minutes later, they got out of the car and walked up to the front door. Jackson knocked three times and they waited.
This could be it, Scotty thought.
When the woman opened the door, she looked back and forth between them then said, “Can I help you?”
“It depends on whether or not you know this lovely couple,” Scotty said as he held up the photo they took from Keegan and Gabby White’s home.
“Of course, that’s my son and daughter-in-law.”
“Well, your son is face-down in the toilet right now, alive if that matters, and he says his wife and Alabama are here. For your sake, I hope that’s true.
“Alabama?” she asked nervously.
“You don’t want to lie to us, Miss White,” Jackson said. “It would be very bad for you.”
“Are you threatening an old lady?” she asked, taking a defensive tack.
“Fuckin’ A right we are, Apple,” Jackson said. “Now answer the question or we’re going to beat the answer out of you.”
Startled like she couldn’t believe the audacity of the two of them, she said, “Why, in all my years—”
Scotty shoved his way into the house; Jackson followed him inside then shut and locked the door behind him. “We’ve asked you nicely, ma’am. Where is your daughter-in-law?”
“She’s gone,” Apple said.
“Where did she go?” Jackson asked.
“She’s dead.”
“She’s not dead,” Scotty growled, a sinking feeling beginning to form.
The woman got her cell phone and played back a message left by the NYPD.
“This is Detective Conrad from the NYPD. We spoke yesterday. Again, I want to offer my condolences, but I’d also like to discuss a lead we may have. It’s time-sensitive if you’d like to meet us downtown. If not, we can come to you, but either way, I think we should speak.”
The man then gave her his phone number and encouraged her to reach out to him. Scotty looked at Jackson, and then back to this shiny-eyed woman.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Scotty said.
“How did she die?” Jackson asked.
“They say she killed herself but now maybe they think it was a homicide. I don’t know, I still think she killed herself.”
“Why would she do that?” Scotty asked.
“Because of that little girl and what my Keegan did to her.”
“You mean getting her pregnant?” Jackson asked.
The woman turned and scoffed, not at him but because of her son. “He always did like the younger girls. Gabby knew this when she met him. But this time was just too much. He went too far.”
“Are you aware that Alabama Hargrove was kidnapped years ago, that Keegan and Gabby have kept her locked in a dirt pit in their backyard?”
“They didn’t do that,” she said feigning offense. “They were extra good to that girl.”
“No, they were not,” Scotty said. He looked at his partner. “Show her the photos.”
Jackson showed Apple the pictures of the hole in the ground, the mattress, the jug of water, and the bucket.
Apple brought her hand to her mouth. “I had no idea.”
“Where is she?” Jackson asked.
“Not here.”
“Where the hell is she?” Jackson roared.
“At my other son’s house, probably,” she said, visibly shrinking back from the man. “Gabby took the girl with her when she left to kill herself. If anything was done with her—this is Alabama I’m talking about—she would be with my Marty in Newark.”
“I’m going to need that address,” Scotty said. To Jackson, he said, “Take a look around, check the backyard, too.”
“You can’t just go through people’s homes!” Apple said, having had her proverbial feathers ruffled.
“Watch me, lady,” Jackson said.
“Address,” Scotty said, snapping his fingers to get her attention.
Apple begrudgingly gave him the address then said, “I swear, if your boyfriend takes anything—”
“The only thing we want is Alabama Hargrove. Beyond that, you and your possessions are perfectly safe.”
“I don’t want him going through my unmentionables,” she added. “I have private things in the drawers, personal belongings a young man shouldn’t be seeing.”
“He’s not looking for Alabama in your dresser drawers, Apple, so you can relax. Whatever secrets or embarrassments you have in there are yours to keep.”
A moment later, Scotty heard Jackson go out back. He wasn’t out there long. Scotty’s spirits were soaring before but now they waned.
Jackson shook his head then said, “You get the address?”
“Yeah, let’s leave Mrs. White to her grieving.”
“I’m calling the cops when you leave,” Apple said, real stern like she meant it.
“Who do you think gave us the lead in the first place?” Scotty asked with a laugh. This startled her. “Oh, yeah, Apple. The cops know exactly what happened as of about an hour ago. So if you see them, you tell them Walter Maddow said hello.”
“Your name is Walter?” she asked.
“I’m Walter, he’s Chuck, and now we’ll be on our way.”
When Scotty and Jackson left, it was with a shaky lead, a lead that was either bogus or a lead that would lead them straight to Alabama.
“So, Newark, huh?” Jackson asked.
“New Jersey, here we come,” Scotty grumbled.
On the way out of Queens, they stopped at a cell phone shop and bought Scotty both a wall-mounted charging cord and a car charger, the latter of which they used to bring Scotty’s LG back to life.
“Are you going to call Leopold or what?” Jackson asked.
“Not while we have leads,” Scotty responded. “Did you forget about the performance bonus?”
“Of course not,” Jackson said.
“Until he calls us, as long as we have leads, we keep working. Because I could use that fifty-grand and I know you could, too.”
“You’re not wrong there.”
“If we’re close to finding the girl, we don’t answer the phone, yours or mine. We only call him if we stall out and have to start back at zero.”
They drove out of New York in their rental car, crossed into New Jersey then found the address Apple White had given them.
“Nice place,” Jackson said, admiring the home.
“My fingers are crossed on this one,” Scotty replied, hopeful. The truth was that he couldn’t take many more disappointments.
The two of them got out of the car, walked up to the front door, knocked twice. A younger boy answered the door.
“Yeah?” he asked. He had to be twelve years old, maybe thirteen.
“Is your father home?” Scotty asked.
He turned and yelled, “Fake dad, it’s for you!”
A man about Scotty’s age came to the door and said, “How can I help you?”
“Martin White?” Scotty asked.
“Yes?”
Scotty introduced himself and Jackson, explained what they had found out abo
ut his brother, Keegan—omitting details about the little torture session, of course—and told him that Apple had sent them here.
“I ain’t talked to my brother, his crazy wife, or my lunatic mother in over a decade. Why she thinks I’d take in a kidnapped girl is just ridiculous.”
“I take it you are the black sheep of the family?” Jackson asked.
“Was it the success that gave it away?” he asked with hints of cold sarcasm.
“If you’re helping him in any way—” Scotty said.
“I ain’t helping no one,” he argued, his New York accent thick. “But if you see that sick pervert brother of mine again, you do whatchu gotta do. Lord knows he got it coming.”
“Why do you say that?” Jackson asked.
“There was always something wrong with him. He’s got Momma’s disease. That’s why none of us had kids. Momma was always pissed ‘cause she wanted a grandbaby. We made a pact, though, a promise to deny her any more kids on account of her having a head full’a rocks.”
“Who was that that answered the door?” Jackson asked.
“My wife’s kid from another marriage,” he said. “He’s a good boy. A smart-ass little turd sometimes, but a good boy nevertheless. Anyway, my wife now, I told her she wasn’t getting no kids from me. As I said, we didn’t want none of them having what Momma had.”
“From what I know of her,” Jackson said, “I understand.”
“Hey! Only I can say bad things about my mother. Not you, no matter what she did or how she thinks.”
Jackson held up his hands in surrender and apologized.
“Anyways, I lost my first wife over not wantin’ to give her a bunch’a rug rats, but I think the world is better if my genes aren’t nowheres near it. Momma, she’s like dealing with a child sometimes. Otha times, she’s an unhinged nightmare.”
“That’s very…responsible of you,” Scotty said, at a loss for words.
“Did you check Momma’s basement?”
“I did,” Jackson said.
“What about the room behind the cabinet? That’s where she kept us when we was bad, when we needed to get our heads straight.”
“I didn’t see a room down there,” Jackson said.
“It was dark and damn cold. And it was so quiet you could hear your own cells dividing inside of you.”
“Where exactly is it?”
“I just said it’s behind the antiques case on the wall.”
“Behind it?” Jackson asked.
He gave Scotty a funny look, then shook his head at Jackson and said, “We bought the place from some old Jew who survived the internment camps in ’44. He called the small room his Anne Frank closet.”
“That’s the girl who hid in a closet from the Nazis?” Jackson asked.
“As far as I can tell, yeah, but that’s just what he called it. You should check there, see whatchu find.”
“Do you mind if we have a look around here?” Scotty asked.
“No problem,” he said, opening the door and standing back to let them in. “I don’t have no basement so this should be quick.”
They looked around to their satisfaction then thanked the man and left. Sitting in the rental car, Jackson looked at Scotty and said, “Well, New York, here we come…again.”
When they returned to Apple’s house, the woman’s car was gone. They let themselves in through the back door, cleared the rooms then went down to the basement.
“There’s the antique cabinet,” Jackson said, shining his phone’s flashlight on it. Scotty pulled the closet back after wiggling it here and there, and just like Martin said, there was an enclosed closet with an air hole in the roof.
“There’s enough room for a person to lie down comfortably,” Scotty said, saddened by the sight of it, its implications for the boys when they were younger, and now Alabama.
Unfortunately, there was no Alabama.
“I’ll have another look upstairs,” Jackson said.
“Son of a bitch,” Scotty cursed to himself. He was sure they would find her here.
When he trudged back upstairs, Scotty went to Apple’s room, where he found the chest of drawers opened up with clothes spilled on the floor. In the small, mold-smelling closet, he found large, empty sections on an old closet rod where the woman’s clothes once hung. A few more scattered garments were lying on the floor, still on their hangers. Did they scare her off telling her the cops knew about everything? Apparently they did.
“Scotty, you need to see this!” Jackson called out from the other room.
He hurried to where Jackson was then saw the look on his partner’s face. The man was standing over the kitchen table, looking at a large piece of notebook paper. On the paper was the pencil tracing of a middle finger. Coming from the end of the finger was a depiction of a dick spurting out globs of ejaculate. Inside one of the larger loads, the old woman had scrawled the words “Fuck you.”
“Can you believe this?” Jackson asked, astounded. “A real artist, this one.”
“Finger painting for morons,” Scotty mumbled. “The freaking liar packed her clothes, got Alabama out of hiding downstairs then she put this place in the rearview mirror.”
“Martin said she was like dealing with a child,” Jackson reminded him.
“So, what now?” Scotty asked.
“We need to figure out where this crazy bag of bitch meat went, and then we need to find out why she did so with a kidnapped kid.”
“She always wanted a grandbaby,” Scotty said. “Alabama wasn’t hers, but the baby inside of her, Keegan’s baby…now that’s part of the White bloodline. To her, if I’m right, that would constitute a proper grandbaby.”
“We need to find out how far along Alabama is. If she’s close to term, maybe we can lock in on a local hospital and see if they’ve had anyone matching Apple’s and Alabama’s descriptions. We can get photos of both to them as well.”
“That’s going to take some time,” Jackson said.
“Yeah, I agree. It’s time for me to step out and call Leopold, give him the updates, see where he’s at with Juárez. If he’s dragging balls like what happened in Russia and Ukraine, maybe it will buy us more time. If not, at least we’ve got some walking-around money now.”
He picked up the phone and dialed Leopold. The man answered the phone sounding anxious but focused.
“Talk to me, Scotty,” Leopold said, bypassing any of his usual pleasantries.
“I’m afraid we hit a slight dead end on the kid,” he said. “We have very loose leads to go on, but it’s going to take a lot of sniffing around and even more luck if we’re to wrap this up any time soon. How are you doing?”
“We’re closing in on this thing right now,” he said. “It could go either way. Give me the highlight reel on your end; let’s see where we go next.”
Scotty quickly told him about their progress, the outrageous Apple White, and the basement holding cell that might have held Alabama while they were there earlier.
“Let me see how we do here,” Leopold said, mulling it over. “I’d say sit tight for a couple of hours then we’ll be in touch.”
“Sounds good,” Scotty said, trying not to sound too disappointed. “I’ll wait for your call.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
CAMDEN FOX
He didn’t see the text until a few hours after it arrived. Camden had been drinking all night and early into the morning, and then somewhere around three a.m., he passed out in his own vomit. When he rolled over, he realized that the discomfort in his back was from lying on his phone. That’s when he checked for missed calls and found the text message.
As Camden read it, the bottom fell out of his world. He wasn’t aware that his hands had begun to shake until the racing in his heart became so overwhelming he took inventory of his entire body. When the blood ran from his face, he felt it flush out so fast it was like water going down the drain.
With fingers that would barely work, he called the nameless man with the scratchy voi
ce. The phone just rang and rang. It wasn’t so late that he was in bed, was he? He dialed the number two more times before the man finally picked up.
“Yeah,” he said sounding groggy.
“Santiago Cardenas just texted me—” he said, the panic flooding into his words.
“I told you he’s just fulfilling a role, don’t worry about it.”
“You said not to send the money, not to call. I didn’t send the money or call, and I didn’t tell Leopold a thing. But now this slimy fuck is texting me things that I HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT!”
“Calm down, Congressman,” he said, more alert now. “Tell me exactly what he said.”
“He said Callie is already gone and that Maisie and Zoey have a buyer who is picking them up in a matter of hours. He said he sold my kids. He sold my kids and he’s going to start mailing me pieces of Sydney!”
“What?” the old man said. It sounded like he was struggling to sit up in bed. How could he sleep through all of this?
“It was never supposed to be like this,” Camden said, his heart beating hollow as tears leaked from his eyes. “You said they would be safe.”
“No one is really ever safe, Camden,” the old bastard said, his voice as firm as Camden had ever heard it. The man’s sudden disconnect from the situation was not only startling but telling. Was he distancing himself from this deal already?
“I’m calling Leopold,” Camden said, resolute, angry, determined.
“Don’t you dare violate our agreements!” the old man roared.
“You violated yours!” Camden screamed back. “You had better pray to Christ I never find out who you are!”
“This line you’re taking,” the old man said, “is not very wise.”
He hung up the phone, dialed Leopold but got no answer. He called Leopold again and the man picked up on the first ring. It sounded like there was a lot of road noise in the background.
“Camden,” he said.
“Thank God, Leopold,” Camden said. “I got a text from Santiago saying that he sold the girls.”
“Which particular girls?” he asked.
“All of them!”
