Come and Get Me

by August Norman

  “Why?”

  “College town. I bet he’ll make a delivery. Plus, I really need to pee.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “It’s a rent-a-car, and pee’s mostly water?”

  If Mary laughed, Caitlin didn’t hear it.

  “I’m not gonna rob Fort Knox, Lubbers, but this trip has to be important. The busiest party week of the year, and he drives to Kentucky?”

  “Caitie—”

  “Hold that thought I assume will be a warning, Mary.”

  “Why?”

  Frodo’s turn signal blinked for the next exit.

  “I get to pee.”

  She hung up, watched the Bro-duce truck exit the freeway. She put her own signal on, followed. Two gas stations opposed each other at a stoplight. Frodo turned into the one on the right, parked at a pump. Caitlin crossed to the other, took a spot by the front door. She looked back. Frodo placed the nozzle in the gas tank and walked into the convenience store.

  Caitlin ran for the bathroom, lucked out—no line. She opened the door to a single stall, locked the door, grabbed the paper ring, and unleashed the floodgates. Her body went looser than that time she got the two-guy massage at the spa in the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Someone jiggled the door handle. A harsh male voice followed. “Come the fuck on, Wendy.”

  The man had the kind of Southern accent that made people hate Southern accents.

  Caitlin felt her tension return. “There’s someone in here.”

  “Wendy—”

  Outside, a female voice answered. “What?”

  “Where you been?”

  “Looking at the scratchers,” Wendy answered. “Who are you bothering?”

  Caitlin reached for toilet paper.

  “Never mind. Get me a Mountain Dew.”

  “I gotta pee. Lay off, Darryl.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  The girl’s voice cowered, subservient. “You gonna hit me in the store?”

  “What did I say, girl?”

  Caitlin flushed, washed her hands. The drama continued.

  “You said do what you say, Darryl.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I don’t get any Oxy.”

  “I gotta crap,” he said. “Steal me a Mountain Dew and some jerky.”

  Caitlin opened the door, caught a glimpse of the dickhead going into the men’s room. Maybe forty, white tank top with an eagle and an American flag on the back.

  She turned the other way and ran into the girl—about sixteen, bad teeth, bad hair, bad bruises on her wrists.

  “Sorry,” Caitlin said.

  The ghost brushed past her.

  Caitlin walked to the front window. Frodo’s truck still sat at the pump, nozzle in place.

  She grabbed trail mix and a bottle of water, then found a travel-sized mouthwash. She looked up, saw bathroom Wendy at the refrigerators. The girl picked two bottles of Mountain Dew, glanced around. Her eyes met Caitlin’s, then shifted away. Caitlin went back to the coolers.

  The girl tried to walk past. “I’m not stealing.”

  “Yes, you are. Do you need help?”

  “Stealing?”

  “To get away from the guy you’re with?”

  Her eyes shot toward the bathroom. “What? No.”

  “Is he family, an uncle or something?”

  “Please, don’t.”

  Caitlin checked the window. Frodo removed the nozzle from his tank.

  “Last chance, do you want me to take you somewhere?”

  The girl shook her head no.

  Caitlin grabbed a twenty from her purse, handed it to her. “Don’t let him know you have this.”

  She wrestled the Mountain Dews from the girl’s hands and walked to the counter.

  “Hey, wait.”

  Caitlin pushed everything toward the clerk, swiped her card. “It’s on me.”

  Frodo climbed behind the wheel of the truck.

  Caitlin grabbed her receipt, left the Mountain Dews. “Good luck.”

  She went for the door. Frodo pulled away from the pumps, put a turn signal on, and waited for traffic.

  Caitlin got in her truck, started the ignition.

  “Wait.”

  She looked up. Bathroom Wendy stood outside the gas station door, Mountain Dews in hand.

  Caitlin watched Frodo disappear in the rearview and rolled down her window. “Get in, Wendy.”

  * * *

  Caitlin got her to local law enforcement. The deputies tracked down a distant relative, said all the right words about getting Wendy help. She left the girl with the two Mountain Dews and her phone number.

  With no hope of finding Frodo, she started the three-and-a-half-hour journey back to Bloomington under a steady deluge. Around ten PM, her dry Los Angeles roots got to her. The Midwest had three seasons more than California, and she was wasting good thunder. She took an exit, parked on the side of a country road. She lowered the windows and listened to the majesty of nature’s percussion section.

  The ring of her phone disrupted the symphony. She didn’t recognize the number or the 786 area code. “Hello?”

  “Bergman, it’s Mike.”

  Caitlin closed the windows. “Where are you?”

  “According to the nice people whose campfire I’m sharing, I’m in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park on Key Biscayne.”

  “Key Biscayne? As in the Florida Keys?”

  “Apparently, and I may have messed up.”

  He told her the tale.

  “So Fodor said he would talk to his brother?”

  Mike repeated the exchange. “He said, ‘I’ll talk to Nate; he’ll talk to Kieran.’ Does that make sense to you?”

  If Frodo drove from Bloomington to his parent’s condo with no stops, he could make the trip in twenty hours.

  “Mike, how fast can you get to Fort Lauderdale?”

  “I have to wait for a mailbox store in Miami to open at nine tomorrow morning. Assuming my credit cards and ID are there, I can rent a car. What am I looking for?”

  Caitlin started her engine. “A produce truck. Should be in town around two.”

  CHAPTER

  45

  “WE’RE NOT HAVING sex?”

  Greenwood already had his sport coat off. He hadn’t bothered with an umbrella from the curb to the cottage’s front door, so his shirt had a small crop of wet spots. According to the forecast, the storm that had dazzled Caitlin in Kentucky the night before wouldn’t end until Saturday, two days from now.

  “That depends.” She turned her laptop his way. “Does this picture get you hot?”

  He sat at the kitchen table, looked at her computer screen. “One of the Bro-duce trucks. What does this tell me?”

  “This photo was taken two hours ago in Fort Lauderdale.”

  Greenwood laughed. “As in Florida? No wonder it’s sunny.”

  She showed the next image in the series Mike had sent. “Recognize either of these two?”

  Greenwood took a second. “Is that Frodo?”

  “He left Bloomington yesterday, drove nonstop to Lauderdale, where he met his brother’s boat from the Bahamas—except he didn’t stay.”

  “Okay, I’m hooked. Where’d he go?”

  “He spent an hour loading boxes, then turned around, drove north. If he doesn’t stop, he’ll be back in town tomorrow, just in time for Little Five.”

  “What’s in the truck?”

  Caitlin winked. “Getting hot, right? It’s time to show you what I’ve been working on.”

  She laid out her theories, showed Greenwood the financials she and Lakshmi had been able to retrieve.

  Greenwood took it all in. “You still don’t know what’s in the truck?”

  “Look at it this way. Fodor says this is the last shipment. Those boys are getting something from the Caribbean, and whatever it is will be on the truck tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Caitlin, you are aware I can’t just pull someone over because the woman I’m havin
g sex with wants me to?”

  “Nate Fodor is the weak link, Jerry. He handles the deliveries; he handles the money. He was there the night Chapman disappeared and you guys didn’t look at him.”

  Greenwood got defensive. “You don’t think we looked at him?”

  “I’m not saying he’s a viable suspect in Angela’s disappearance. I’m saying he worked for Kieran and Dave then, and he works for them now. He knows things. You stop him before he gets back to town, find what he’s got in the back; he’ll do whatever it takes to stay out of jail, and you get your warrants for the farm. That’s twenty unsearched acres where Chapman’s body could be hidden. Twenty acres you’ll have to tear apart when you find their growhouse.”

  Greenwood shook his head, unimpressed. “Or their cucumbers.”

  The time for fun and games was over. Sex was one thing, but Caitlin had spent the last fourteen days doing this good-looking asshole’s legwork. She stood, pushed her chair back, and slapped both of her hands on the tabletop. “Why are you acting like this isn’t what you wanted me to find? Or should I say”—she leaned over, her words slow and direct—“used me to find?”

  He tried to fend her off with a smile. “I used you?”

  Caitlin didn’t buy it. “Yes, Mister Nothing-to-Hide-Ride-Along. You’ve been playing me since I got to town. Stop acting like we both don’t know it.”

  He started to talk, shut his mouth, took a second, came back calmer. “I can’t mess this up, Caitlin. One month after Melissa died, Kieran Michelson made a crack about Chapman being another ‘dead slut.’ Let’s just say I didn’t handle it well, and the department lost any leverage it had. They get wise we’re on to them, they’ll tear everything down before we get close.”

  She held back a groan. “You had me do all this work because you’re afraid of a lawsuit?”

  “I’m not afraid of a damned lawsuit.” Greenwood looked her in the eyes, intense. “I’m afraid they got away with murder because I couldn’t keep my shit together.”

  Caitlin stepped back, scratched her scalp with both hands, and sighed. She was the last person on earth who could judge someone for losing control of his emotions.

  Greenwood shifted in the chair, looked away.

  After a few calming breaths, Caitlin sat back down and smiled. “Anyone can have a faulty turn signal.”

  Greenwood didn’t go for it. He pushed the chair back, reached for his sport coat. “What time tomorrow?”

  “Between two and three. Does that mean it’s on?”

  He flung the screen door open and left without answering.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Caitlin kicked Lakshmi’s coffee table. “Bullshit.”

  “What’s it say, Caitie?”

  Mary and Lakshmi looked at Caitlin’s phone over her shoulders.

  “Nothing in the truck but spinach.”

  She dialed Greenwood. He answered, but she started first. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “No problem letting us search. Nothing but eight boxes of spinach and two bags of seeds. Not even a personal joint. They had to cut Frodo loose.”

  “As in, he’s driving back to the farm?”

  “Yes, Caitlin, as in they didn’t find anything incriminating. It would look weird if they tried harder. I gotta go.”

  “Wait—”

  “Seriously, word of this got to the chief and I might have to tap dance.”

  “You didn’t pull him over? Personally, I mean?”

  “No, a patrol car did a routine traffic stop.”

  “So you didn’t see the spinach or the seeds?”

  “They sent pictures. I’ll forward them. I’m hanging up.”

  The line disconnected.

  “Damn it.” Caitlin threw her phone onto the couch.

  Lakshmi bit a nail. “So why did Frodo drive to Florida to meet with Adam?”

  Caitlin dropped onto the cushions. “No idea.”

  Greenwood’s images arrived. The first showed neatly stacked produce boxes. The next showed an officer’s hand two inches deep in a pile of green leaves. A third showed a five-pound sack marked “Seeds—Spinach, Crocodile Hybrid.”

  Caitlin went back through the photos. “What am I not seeing?”

  She stared at the leaves. Slender, one to two inches long, one vertical vein down the middle. “Son of a bitch.”

  She swiped her phone to the web browser, did an image search, didn’t wait for the results. She switched back, dialed Greenwood’s number.

  He answered. “Caitlin—”

  “Why would he drive a truck full of spinach all the way to Florida and not deliver it?”

  “Doesn’t really matter as far as I can tell.”

  She swiped back to the browser, copied and pasted the results into their text message thread.

  “I’m sending you an image. Look right now—don’t hang up.”

  “I’ve got Renton on the other line.”

  She heard his phone ding. “Just look—there aren’t enough veins.”

  He said nothing for five seconds, then came back loud. “I’ll call you back.”

  He hung up, and Caitlin jumped in the air. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Mary and Lakshmi rose for the explanation. “What is it?”

  Caitlin turned the phone toward them. The screen showed the image she’d sent Greenwood, a group of four green leaves and a search heading—“Coca leaves.”

  “They’re making cocaine.”

  CHAPTER

  46

  THE PLASTIC FORK and knife made the tray look childish. He wanted to impress her, but this was only Paige’s second day out of the restraints. He’d been too eager with Angela, and before her, Lourdes, his first. Younger then, less practiced, he’d matured since. Paige would stay; Paige would last.

  She’d eaten every bit of yesterday’s rosemary chicken. Today’s menu—poached salmon, garden salad.

  He pulled the tray from the dumbwaiter shelf and carried her dinner toward her room. The need to hide the basement entrance to his collection restricted the ease of use, so one of his first improvements to the old house had been a rope-and-pulley dumbwaiter accessible from the kitchen.

  “Shit.”

  In the hallway, he saw light reflected in standing water. The crushed stone floor of the corridor had been dry the night before. He’d dealt with flooding in the past, but not on this scale, and not since he’d completed Paige’s case. He walked the tray back to the shelf, flipped the second light switch. The fluorescents painted the stone-walled hallway a sickly, pale blue. The puddle extended ten feet either direction from Paige’s door. The area further down the hall near the playroom looked dry.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  He took off his shoes, rolled the ends of his jeans.

  Outside the door, the water pooled well past his ankles. He looked through the three-inch vertical window. Pitch black.

  He flipped the wall switch.

  Nothing happened.

  “No.”

  He’d tested the room’s waterproofing before collecting Paige by dousing the walls and ceiling with a hose, but never with the amount of water that had poured through the soil above after days of nonstop rain. He could only learn so much from the people at the hardware store. They’d believed him when he said he was building a recording studio in his basement, but he’d left out the part about the tunnels he’d dug through the soil, the beams he’d installed, the ten feet of earth between the surface and the display case. He’d sealed the wiring conduit with polyurethane. Apparently, not well enough.

  He flipped the top deadbolt, reached for the bottom, stopped. Paige could be standing next to the door. He didn’t remember leaving anything heavy enough to be hit with, but hands and feet had worked in the past.

  “Do this right.”

  He walked back down the hallway, clicked the remote in his pocket. The panel in the public-facing basement wall slid open. He worked his way around the water heater and washing machine
, closed the door behind him, and climbed the stairs back up to his house.

  His laptop waited on the kitchen table. He checked the cameras. Still raining outside, nothing going on in the playroom. Everything else was normal. But Paige’s room looked pitch black. He changed the camera to low-light mode, saw Paige in the fetal position on her bed against the back wall.

  That much water outside the case meant just as much inside. Paige could already have a cold or infection, maybe even pneumonia, and he was supposed to be keeping her safe. He ran for the bathroom medicine cabinet, found the antibiotics he’d gotten last winter.

  He grabbed a flashlight, went back to the basement, hit the remote, and ran down the hallway to Paige’s door.

  He hadn’t wanted the window in the door in the first place, but it came standard in the only door the soundproofing company sold that could fit down the dumbwaiter shaft. Now he was glad he had the option. He shone the flashlight through.

  Definitely water on the floor.

  Paige lay on the bed, faced toward the wall.

  He kept the beam on her, turned the bottom lock. No change.

  He opened the door, smelled wet carpet.

  “Paige, can you hear me?”

  No answer. He swung the beam around the room, saw nothing out of order.

  “I’m coming.”

  His toes dipped into the water inside the room. A foot from the bed, something dragged across his ankle. He aimed his flashlight down, saw the black cord from Paige’s bedside lamp caught on the cuff of his jeans. He followed the cord’s path from the outlet on the left to the table on the right, where a paperback book weighed down the stripped and exposed ends of copper wire.

  “No,” he said, reaching out.

  Too late. Paige’s hand reached out of the darkness and knocked the book off the edge of the table. The exposed end of the cord fell into the water.

  The shock knocked him off his feet.

  * * *

  He woke in darkness, his face wedged against the wall. Every hair on his body stood on end, every muscle tight. The sharp tang of ozone overpowered the smell of soil-rich water.

  “Paige?”

  His fingers searched for the flashlight, found nothing. He stood on shaky legs, felt his way back to the doorway, went toward a light coming from the left. But the light couldn’t be electric; the entire grid had blown when the cord hit the water. Stupid. He’d wired a ground fault circuit interrupter into his collection’s circuit box, but not into each circuit. Paige must have watched him shake until the breaker tripped, then ran safely out the door.