Little Girls Lost (Carson Ryder, Book 6)

by J. A. Kerley

  Rose turned his face away. “I don’t feel like it.”

  Truman patted his brother’s back. “Things are tense now, it’s that kind of business. But after tonight we’ll have three-quarters of a million dollars in the bank.” Truman pursed his lips again. “Come on, bro.”

  Rose leaned over, kissed Truman’s lips and quickly pulled away.

  “You and me, brother,” Tru said as he mock-punched Rose’s shoulder. “We’ll let things cool off and start making withdrawals. I’ll wash the money through the business and we’ll live large. Plus we’ve still got more product on the site. I move four and that’s another sweet mill. We’ll live off the interest and never have to work.”

  Rose stared at the blank TV. “I don’t want to do this any more, Tru. Steal girls.”

  “Come on, Rose. You get like this every time we make a delivery.”

  “It’s different. I mean it this time.”

  “You get attached,” Truman said, patting Rose’s forearm. “It’s sweet.”

  “No. Things are different. Jacy’s … different.”

  “They’re all different, Rose. Each a precious little gem. That’s what makes them so valuable.” Truman pursed his thin lips, wet them with a slip of tongue. “Come on, Rose, give me another.”

  They kissed again, Truman’s hand slipping down Rose’s back, gliding over his buttocks. “There we go, Rose. You and me. Now go get Lorelei.”

  Rose started away, then turned and glared over his shoulder. “It’s Jacy, Tru. J-A-C-Y.”

  “Jacy then. Go get Jacy, Rose. Give her the pill. Hurry.”

  Ryder heard the outsize voice halfway up the stairs to Sandhill’s apartment. He knocked and, when there was no answer, pushed open the door to see Sandhill side-arm a stack of papers from his dining-room table. Copies of the case files brought by the greasy inspector, Wentz, the pages scattered half the length of the room.

  “It’s here, it’s goddamned here,” Sandhill growled, oblivious to Ryder’s presence. “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  Sandhill didn’t look happy to see Ryder. He didn’t look happy about anything. “The piece, the goddamned key.” He picked up a sheaf of photographs and threw them across the room.

  “Key to what?”

  “All this damned BULLSHIT!”

  “Jeez, Sandhill, calm down.”

  “We’ve got nothing. It’s all WORTHLESS!”

  Sandhill kicked the table, upending it, sending reports, timelines, notes spilling all the way into the kitchen area. He punted the table again, sending a leg flying into the kitchen area.

  Ryder grabbed Sandhill’s arm. “Sandhill, listen—”

  Sandhill yanked his arm away. “Let me be, Ryder. I’m working.”

  “You’re not making sense. Stop and listen to me.”

  Ryder grabbed Sandhill’s arm again. Sandhill spun, sending Ryder tripping forward over the stacks of papers. He caught himself on a chair piled with notepads and revised timelines, spilling them across the carpet.

  “Dammit, Sandhill …’ Ryder stormed back toward the red-faced restaurateur’s back. Sandhill whirled, eyes blazing, fists tight and raised.

  “Leave me alone, Ryder.”

  “Then stop acting like an asshole. Get your act together.”

  Sandhill waved a clenched fist under Ryder’s nose. “I could knock your face through that window.”

  Ryder smacked the fist away. “Not a chance.”

  The two men circled one another, Sandhill quivering with anger, Ryder reflecting it right back.

  A voice barked, “What in the hell is going on?”

  The men turned to the open door. An aproned Marie stood framed in the doorway waving a ladle like a hatchet.

  “Dora and me got fifty folks downstairs tryin’ to eat in peace an’ all they hearing is the ceiling thumping like it’s gonna crash down. If you silly-ass fools gonna try and kill yourselfs, do it somewhere else. Conner, you stop lookin’ at me like that else I’ll slap this ladle upside your head.”

  “You knew, didn’t you, Marie? About Jacy?”

  “Yes, I surely did, Conner.”

  He glared at her. “You didn’t tell me. All the time we been together and you never told me.”

  “Wasn’t mine to tell.”

  Ryder’s head swiveled between Marie and Sandhill. “I’m missing something big here, right?”

  Sandhill wavered for an instant, then sat heavily on the floor, his face contorted with misery. “Jacy’s my daughter, Ryder. I found out an hour ago.”

  Ryder’s jaw drooped. “Jesus,” he whispered.

  “My daughter, Thena’s daughter. Ours.”

  “Jesus. Jee-sus.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a three-Jesus day, Ryder. And it ain’t even over.”

  Marie studied her boss. “If you think maybe you can behave without a head-whopping, I got customers to worry over.”

  Sandhill nodded his head. “I got it back together, Marie. Thanks.”

  Marie turned and walked downstairs to the restaurant. Ryder bent and began gathering papers. Sandhill remained on the floor.

  “I screwed up, Ryder. I confronted Duckworth about James, got nothing for it but mud on my face. I had to slink off like a whipped puppy.”

  “Screw Duckworth. We’ve got to make sense of the case. Now. Tonight.”

  Sandhill stared at the upturned and broken table, the floor littered with reports, notepads and photographs. His eyes were red, his face dark with misery. “Nothing about this case makes sense. Nothing ties together. The events don’t lead, they circle. It’s all meaningless.”

  Ryder examined the room, awash in papers and documents, the careful stacks now tumbled together in chaos. “The facts are scrambled. We’ve got to be intuitive, find the invisible lines. You don’t see them, you feel them.”

  Harry Nautilus had always felt events were connected with invisible lines that slowly began to show themselves until it was revealed that the detectives had been either missing or tripping over the lines at every turn. It was intuition, the ability to feel the lines—and instinctively know their importance—that made a great detective.

  “Touchy-feely crap,” Sandhill said. “Thena’s type of thinking.”

  “We need it now, Sandhill. We need to start feeling for the lines.”

  Sandhill dropped his face into his hands and mumbled to the floor in a voice as soft as prayer.

  Ryder said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  Sandhill looked up, his face a mask of bereavement. “I was wishing Thena was here, Ryder, like I’ve done a thousand times before. I want Thena to walk through the door and tell me what I’m supposed to do, what I’m supposed to connect. What I’m supposed to feel.”

  Ryder reached to Sandhill’s shoulder and squeezed it. “We’ll need coffee to keep working. I’ll go downstairs and ask Marie to brew an extra strong pot.”

  Ryder closed the door behind him, starting down the steps. The stairway was quiet and he heard Sandhill’s voice behind the door.

  “How do I do this thing, Thena?” he pleaded, his voice ragged. “How do I do it, baby? Help me.”

  Chapter 44

  Rose descended the ladder with an armload of clothes. Jacy looked at him, her eyes suddenly allowing a moment of hope.

  “Am I going home now?”

  Rose opened his hand and showed Jacy a little white pill. “I’m supposed to give you this, Jacy. To make you sleep so you’ll be quiet. But you’ll wake up with a headache. Do you want that?”

  “No. Am I—”

  “Promise me on a cross-your-heart that you’ll pretend to be asleep. I don’t want you to have a headache, all right?”

  “But am I—”

  “Shhh. Where’s that cross-your-heart?”

  Jacy crossed her heart and zipped her lips. Rose turned his back while she changed into fresh clothes. Then he lifted her over his shoulder and carried her up the steps.

  The old dock was a half-mile u
p-channel from the mouth of the Mobile River. Mattoon had bought the five-acre facility for storage until the shipping facility was complete. He had cut the main battery of security lights, the only illumination a pair of lamps a hundred feet away. He shifted uneasily in an ebony Mercedes tucked beside a green seatainer. The car had been offloaded from the Petite Angel immediately after the tugs had positioned the ship at the dock.

  Downriver, lights twinkled across the light chop, a cool northeast wind blowing at a steady twelve knots, the heat of the day upended by the first true breath of fall. Mattoon buttoned his cashmere jacket and heard the sound of a vehicle turning off the main road. The lights stopped at the locked gate and blinked twice.

  “She’s here,” he said, feeling his heart rise into his throat.

  Atwan leapt from the vehicle and ran the hundred yards to the gate in sprinter’s time. Mattoon watched him speak into the driver’s window. As the white van passed through the gate, Atwan jumped on to the rear bumper with the agility of a cat.

  Mattoon slid a stocking mask over his face before exiting the car. Disguise was crucial; after the announcement of his business intentions, his name and visage would dominate the media for days.

  The van stopped a dozen feet away and killed its lights. Mattoon felt giddy, unsteady, as if the air held intoxicants instead of the smell of brackish water glazed with fuel oil.

  The doors of the van opened, and Mattoon stood face to face with the abductors, grotesquely mismatched bookends, one small and slight, the other huge. The small one smiled, cocky, just as he’d been the previous year. The other one, the bodybuilder, was new. His face held concern, but not fear. There was a sense of challenge behind his eyes.

  Atwan began pacing in front of the bodybuilder as if Rose’s size was a challenge, looking him up and down, sneering.

  “Tenzel,” Mattoon said, “I must talk to these gentlemen alone. Please wait by the automobile until I call for you.”

  Atwan spat beside the bodybuilder’s feet and slipped to the near side of the Mercedes.

  “What’s bothering him?” the small man said.

  “You must excuse my colleague. Land makes him nervous.” Mattoon eyed the van. “She’s inside?”

  “Sleeping. A few milligrams of Demerol. She’ll come around soon. You want to know her name?”

  Mattoon had tracked events via computer link to the Mobile Register’s website; Mattoon had tracked many things in the past weeks. “Her given name is Jacy Charlane. Though I admit a preference for Lorelei.”

  The bodybuilder stepped forward. “Her name’s Jacy. If you call her Lorelei she’ll get confused. It’ll scare her.”

  “Rose,” the smaller man cautioned.

  “I have no intention of scaring her,” Mattoon said politely, hiding anger at being told how to handle his woman.

  “She likes to read, too. She needs lots of books. Get her some books.”

  Atwan strode into the group, his finger pointing at the big man’s eyes. “You listen, not talk,” he snarled.

  “Tenzel! Be quiet and step aside!”

  Atwan retreated several paces, his face smeared with disgust and anger, his eyes like fanned coals. The bodybuilder’s protectiveness worried Mattoon.

  “You haven’t … touched her, have you?” he asked.

  The small man said, “We are businesspeople. We deliver as promised.”

  Despite the tenseness of the exchange, Mattoon felt a flicker of joy. He nodded.

  “Bring her to the car and we shall be finished. The balance will appear in your account tonight, as soon as I get back to … where I’m staying. Hurry; I have other business to conduct this evening.”

  Chapter 45

  Ryder had pushed the broken table aside and spread files and photos across the floor. Sandhill studied the papers as if walking a maze, occasionally picking one up, scanning it, and dropping it. “It’s all shit,” he whispered to himself. He’d taken a cold shower and his hair was wet and dripping.

  Ryder walked counterpoint across the room, studying photos he saw in his dreams, reading words he’d read a hundred times before. He stopped at Sandhill’s rumpled, cast-off crown, plucked it from the floor.

  “Hey, Sandhill, catch.”

  Sandhill snatched the crown from the air, wadded it up and pushed it into his back pocket. Ryder’s eyes fell on foil-shiny paper in a zippered plastic bag that had been beneath Sandhill’s headpiece. He picked up the wrapper ends Sandhill had retrieved from Desmond’s photography studio and bounced the bag in his hand.

  “You ever figure out what these things are, Sandhill?”

  Sandhill disgustedly threw a page of interviews to the floor, glanced at the silver scraps. “The ends of film packages, probably; there were a bunch of them. I wasn’t thinking content, I was thinking what a nice surface it was for fingerprints. I forgot the scraps after Desmond came back negative.”

  Ryder poured the torn paper into his palm. With no need to handle the torn wrappers lightly, he tugged at one, tore it. “Not too strong. Cheap metallic paper.” He lifted the bag to his nose and sniffed. He frowned and sniffed again.

  Sandhill noticed the frown. “What?”

  “Chocolate, sort of. Or maybe carob. There’s a chemical smell in the background. It’s a candy wrapper or something similar. Take a whiff.”

  “Why?”

  “Smell it, dammit. I want your impression.”

  Sandhill sniffed the bag, shrugged. “Candy bars? Remember how Desmond was sucking down pop and chips? Candy fits his diet.”

  Ryder spread the half-dozen torn ends across the kitchen counter. “But what brand? You’ve spent as much time as me in the check-out aisle. All the candy bars are there for the kiddies to snatch up. You ever see a package this shiny?”

  “Does it make a difference what was in it?”

  Ryder scrutinized a scrap. “Here’s one with the bottoms of some lettering. Come on, Sandhill, wake up. What d’you think?”

  Sandhill shot a hard eye at Ryder, then spun the letter to his viewpoint. “I’d say a C for sure, followed by an … I’d make it an A, lower-case.”

  “I’m with you. There’s just a snatch of the third letter. It could be one of a dozen letters.”

  Ryder took another sniff from the bag. “I got a weird hunch, Sandhill. One that just flew in from far left field. Feel like a drive?”

  “I could use some real air. Where we headed?”

  “To a health-food joint. There’s one over on LaPont.”

  “I don’t like them, Tru,” Rose whispered when the brothers were behind the van, Mattoon and Atwan out of earshot.

  “This isn’t a popularity contest,” Truman hissed. “They’re customers.”

  “I don’t want Jacy with them, Tru. They’re sick and nasty.”

  Mattoon’s voice cut through the dark. “What are you two talking about? Hurry up.”

  Truman said, “Rose, don’t fall apart.”

  “Why are you whispering? Is something wrong?”

  Truman leaned out past the van. “Nothing’s wrong, we’ll be right there.”

  Mattoon said, “Tenzel, go help the gentlemen.”

  Atwan was at the back of the van in an eyeblink. “Move away, muscle man; I take girl.” He threw Jacy over his shoulder as if she were a rag doll. She started screaming, her voice piercing shadows and echoing between the buildings.

  Atwan grabbed her jaw and clamped it tight. “Shut up, little girl.”

  The veins in Rose’s neck pulsed like shocked worms. “What are you doing to her?”

  Atwan sneered over his shoulder at Rose. “You shut up too, muscle man.”

  Rose strode over, grabbed Atwan’s elbow. “What are you doing? You’re scaring her.”

  Atwan leapt, spinning into the air, his foot connecting with Rose’s head like a brick hitting a melon. Rose tottered, then fell face down on the concrete. Mattoon hissed, “Get in the car, Tenzel.”

  “Coming, Mr Mattoon.”

  Atwan opened the re
ar door and tossed Jacy inside before sliding into the driver’s seat. Mattoon slid into the passenger’s side. He stared at Atwan.

  “You spoke my name, Tenzel.”

  “It was mistake.”

  Mattoon said, “Was it?”

  Atwan’s eyes glittered in the dark. “I can kill them.”

  Mattoon looked in the back seat, the frightened eyes, the tears. The beauty. He had no further need of the pair of pimps.

  “Destroy them, Tenzel,” Mattoon whispered.

  Atwan grinned as he slipped a curved and gleaming knife from beneath the seat. He gripped the handle hard to warm the tool to its task …

  And disappeared out the window, feet kicking.

  Truman spun the wheel and jammed the accelerator to the floor. The van fishtailed out the gate.

  “Jesus, you killed the guy, Rose,” Truman said, breathless. “You pulled the guy out of the car window and killed him.”

  They swerved on to the deserted frontage road. Rose turned to look into the dark behind them. “I squeezed him until he passed out, Tru. That’s all. A lot you did to help.”

  “I was … making sure the other guy didn’t do anything. I had your back, Rose.”

  “Oh sure. What was the other guy doing, Tru?”

  “He just froze, scared shitless. I think he thought you were going to kill him, too.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone, Tru. I just wanted them to go away.”

  “Guess what else is going away? A shitload of money. Guess what you just cost us?”

  “You always said this was a partnership. That means I own half of her. I’ll pay for your half from my money.”

  “We can’t do business like this. The point is to anticipate client needs and then—”

  “Screw your junior college bullshit.”

  Truman jammed on the brakes, the van skidding to a dusty halt. “How much money can we make from the girl business, Rose? How long would it take you to make that working construction? You don’t work most of the time, staying home and lifting those damned weights. You think I want to spend the rest of my life saying ‘Smile’ and ‘Say cheese’ and ‘Watch the birdie’?”

  Rose continued looking over his shoulder, studying a line of ships tethered in their slips. “Pull over there, Tru. Into the shadows.”