Little Girls Lost (Carson Ryder, Book 6)

by J. A. Kerley

  “Ryder? What the hell are you doing here? Is that Harry Nautilus? Harry, I thought you were still recup—”

  “Open sesame, Royce,” Ryder said, banging the door. “Let us in.”

  “I don’t think I should.”

  Harry Nautilus glared at the camera above the entry. “Open the damned door, Leland. Right now.”

  A pause. “Sure, Harry.”

  The lock buzzed open and the pair entered. Ryder ran to the counter. “Cold cases, Royce. What happens when Tom Mason pulls some for review? Where’s the assignment get noted?”

  Royce started to protest. When Nautilus cleared his throat, Royce slipped a log book from beneath the counter.

  “Lieutenant Mason signs them out. Usually he pulls the paperwork files first. If the detective or detectives he assigns to the cases need photos and physical evidence, I know the loot’s approved the look-see. They can come down and root through the boxes.”

  Nautilus spun the log book his way and began flipping pages. “Lessee … I got jumped in mid June, so I’m looking for three cases assigned to me a few days earlier. Here we go.” Nautilus copied down the ID numbers. “We’re going back to the shelves, Leland. That fine with you?”

  Royce side-eyed Ryder, like he was a rabid felon. Looked to Harry Nautilus.

  “Uh, you’re taking responsibility for everything going on tonight, Harry? You’ll sign an authorization?” Royce nervously slipped a sheet to Nautilus.

  Nautilus sighed and picked up a pen. “Here I am doing paperwork. Guess this means I’m back with the department.”

  They headed into the rear section, cavernous, boxes stacked to the ceiling. The air reeked of mold, mold-repelling chemicals, and the twice-yearly fumigation. Ryder ran ahead of Nautilus, locating boxes with case numbers. He pulled a box from the shelf, blew dust away, popped the top. He checked the attached review of contents.

  “The case is ten years old. A wino found dead in an alley.”

  Nautilus shook his head. “Can’t see it having any connection to anything. What’s the next one?”

  Ryder moved four aisles over. He dug amidst tattered packages and removed a box held together by tape, barely. He checked the case description.

  “It goes back to 1976.”

  “Too old. That leaves just the one.”

  Ryder jogged to another shelf, checking number sequences. He stopped in front of a set of boxes. He popped the front one and read the case synopsis. “Dates back eight years. A dead hooker …” Ryder read silently, then handed the synopsis to Nautilus. Nautilus stared at the sheet in his hand, eyes widening as he read.

  “Jesus, Cars. It’s Sally Harkness.”

  Ryder nodded. “One of the savaged red-headed prostitutes and one of the cases Sandhill was trying to protect.” Ryder added the new information to his earlier thoughts. “It’s making sense, Harry. It’s fuzzy and discombobulated. But I’m feeling it all come together.”

  Nautilus scowled. “Ducky, right? He’s connected?”

  “He’s been hiding something about the cases for years. I’ll bet he was tampering with them when Sandhill found out.”

  Nautilus said, “But Sandhill got fired.”

  Ryder slapped dust from his palms. “And Ducks relaxed, felt safe. Until back in June, when he walks through the detectives’ room and looks at your desk: There’s the Harkness file pulled for review.”

  Nautilus frowned. “Why didn’t Duckworth let it pass? The tampered files stood up under inspection before.”

  “Because this time it was Harry Nautilus doing the review. You’re the hound dog of detail, Harry. Everyone in the department knows if there was one fake blade of grass in a golf course, you’d smell it first, then get on your belly and track it down. Duckworth freaked because you were the one checking the case.”

  Nautilus stared at the box, thousands of pages of case history plus several accompanying parcels of physical evidence.

  “What do we do? We don’t have weeks for me to comb through three cases for inconsistencies.”

  Ryder studied the boxes. “Maybe you already have, Harry.”

  “Have what?”

  Ryder pulled a parcel from the shelf and dropped it on the floor. “Go out front and call Bidwell, clue him in on what’s about to happen. He’ll listen to you. While you’re there, get Royce to give you a hand truck. We’ll need it to cart files to the car.”

  Atwan glared at Jacy. “Take off clothes, little girl.”

  “I don’t undress in front of people, except maybe Aunt Nike.”

  “Take off clothes, go in bathtub. Clean.”

  “NO! Not in front of you.”

  “I say and you do. Get in bathtub.”

  “NO! NO! NO! Not with you looking!” Jacy stamped her foot. “GET OUT! GET OUT!”

  Atwan growled and spun away. Jacy studied the bathtub, the strangest she had ever seen, the water swirling and bubbling and smelling sickly sweet, like old ladies’ perfume. She started to sit in the water, but winced at a sharp pain. It hurt to bend. There was a washcloth set by the tub and she dipped it in the smelly water and washed herself off.

  The towels were fluffy like sheep. On the sink was a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. Under it was a sign that said, For Jacy. She brushed her teeth. There was a pink robe hanging on a gold pole, another For Jacy note at the sleeve.

  She wrapped herself in the robe and stepped through the door into the outer room just as a man slipped through the door. Jacy screamed.

  “Pleased don’t be scared, miss,” the man said, a hand clasped over his eyes. “My name is Sajeem Ghobali. I’m here to assist you. Are you decent?”

  “Decent at what?” Jacy said, staring at the strange man, small and brown and with a voice almost like singing. He had white clothes and a sailor hat. And a big golden box beneath his arm.

  “Do you have your robe on, miss?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m here to help you get dressed.”

  “I do that by myself.”

  “I mean, I brought you a dress to wear. A new dress, just for you.”

  Jacy watched Sajeem Ghobali pull the top from the box. He reached through the folds of pink paper and pulled out a dress as white as snow.

  “That’s a dress like brides wear,” Jacy said.

  Ghobali looked away.

  “You like this kind of thing, buddy, watching guys take showers?”

  Sandhill stood in a crew shower room, lathering under the watchful muzzle of Atwan’s weapon. He let the steaming water pound his back and loosen rigid ligaments. He kept his legs straight as he bent to wash himself, stretching mobility into his back and thighs.

  Atwan had come for Sandhill ten minutes back. Hearing Atwan’s fast, clipped footfalls, Sandhill had rewound his legs with tape from the roll from the tool room, then reluctantly snapped the cuffs back on. They’d been easily snipped away with bolt cutters.

  The shower room smelled of chlorine. Behind Atwan were two crewmen, one Oriental, the other vaguely Middle-Eastern; both holding H&K semiautomatics. They looked more like beer-soaked mariners than thugs, Sandhill noted, sloppy with their handling of the weapons, unfamiliar with the weight. Sandhill figured guard dog wasn’t high on their list of duties. It was a small observation, but important.

  Atwan glared. “Wash not talk.”

  Sandhill spun his head on his neck, arched his back. There’d been no way to hide the knife on his body; he knew they’d check for anything he might use as a weapon. He’d kept the useless badge wallet, just because it felt good in his pocket. He had no assets save for soap and a washcloth. He held up the sliver of blue soap.

  “Guess there’s not enough to carve into a gun, is there?”

  Atwan trained the pistol on Sandhill’s face. He reached in and tore the soaked hospital dressing from Sandhill’s side, finding only a smear of bruise and crusted sutures.

  “Hands high, turn in circle,” Atwan ordered “Then bend over and open hole wide.”

  The full insp
ection, like Sandhill imagined. He did the turns and finished with the anal request.

  “See any of you relatives up there, partner?”

  Atwan shook the pistol emphatically. “You done. Get dress now.”

  Sandhill toweled off roughly, avoiding the swollen, plum-purple bruises on his thigh and the dressing on his side. Atwan gestured him into an adjoining room walled with gray lockers and pointed to clothing draped over a chair.

  “Dress.”

  Sandhill stepped into a pair of outsized black pants, coarse wool worn shiny on the buttocks and knees. He pulled on a gray-green shirt with stamped-tin buttons.

  “Where you get these duds, boys? Albania have a going-out-of-business sale?”

  “Shut mouth. Dress.”

  A pair of box-square black shoes sat beneath the chair. Sandhill set his foot beside one and wiggled his toes. “I can’t wear these brogans, they’re four sizes too big. I’ll fall on my face.”

  “Wear shoes now.”

  Sandhill produced his most reasonable look. “Come on, partner. Your boss isn’t gonna like it when I trip and fall in the middle of his ceremony. Maybe my shoes aren’t as formal as these rowboats, but they fit. How about it?”

  Atwan kicked Sandhill’s shoes to him. “Your shoes. Hurry fast.”

  Sandhill bent and tied on his battered cross-trainers. It was a small victory, but he could move fast in them. Out the porthole the eastern sky had lightened from cobalt to cerulean.

  “Finish,” Atwan said. “Time almost now.”

  Chapter 55

  Harry Nautilus sat in bed wearing red and black silk pajamas patterned with winged Oriental dragons breathing fire. They were Nautilus’s favorite pajamas, his lucky PJs. He heard a car pull into the drive and rearranged the covers over his legs.

  Downstairs the front door opened.

  Nautilus pulled the rolling bedside table close, covering his lap like a desk. He shot a glance at the closed closet door. Studied the new additions to his wall. Pulled on reading glasses.

  Whispered, “Go time.”

  Slow and heavy footsteps ascended the stairs. Ainsley Duckworth appeared in the hall outside Harry Nautilus’s bedroom door. Nautilus was writing in a notepad, concentrating on the writing, like nothing else mattered.

  “Captain Bidwell said you needed to talk to me, Nautilus. To meet you up here. What the hell you need at five thirty a.m? You’re trying to talk me out of pressing assault charges against Ryder, right? Ain’t gonna happen.”

  Nautilus kept his eyes to the writing pad.

  “Nautilus?”

  Harry Nautilus looked up, showing neither surprise or expectation. He laid down his pen. Took off his reading glasses, folded them, set them beside the pen.

  “Step into the room, Ducks.”

  Duckworth entered and his mouth dropped. Paper was everywhere, surfaces piled high with files, pages strewn across the floor like autumn leaves. A card table in the corner held wigs, clothing, a purse, broken-off fingernails, eyeglasses, a rhinestoned high heel shoe—dozens of pieces of physical evidence from the murdered red-haired women and their crime scenes.

  Nautilus watched Duckworth’s eyes move from the evidence table to the far wall, completely covered with photographs relating to the crimes, a mural of suffering and death. There were photos from the crime scenes, from the morgue, from the autopsies. The largest photos, blown up to poster size, were of the women themselves—Sally Harkness, Tami Zelinger, Jiliana Simpkins—broken faced and sprawled across the ground.

  Duckworth’s confused eyes turned to Harry Nautilus.

  Nautilus said, “I got bored, Ducks.”

  “What are you talking about?” Duckworth whispered, shooting glances around the room. His eyes kept returning to the wall of photos.

  “Six weeks back I got bored laying here. So I asked Tom Mason to send over the cold case files he’d left on my desk before I got knocked. For a month and a half I’ve lived with these girls, studied their cases. Every detail of their lives. Every detail of the crime scenes. Every detail of evidence. I’ve sent pieces to the local lab, the FBI lab, specialty labs.”

  “What did you find out?” Duckworth’s voice was flat and dry.

  “Things, Ducks. Sad things.”

  Harry Nautilus put the reading glasses back on his face. He picked up his pen and resumed writing on the notepad, as if Duckworth were inconsequential, already consigned to spending the rest of his life in a cell.

  Duckworth said, “Why was I supposed to come here?”

  Nautilus kept writing, didn’t miss a beat.

  “I wanted to see what you looked like walking in from the front instead of sneaking up from behind.”

  Ainsley Duckworth blinked his eyes as if Nautilus was moving in and out of focus. He turned for the door, leaving. Paused.

  “They’re waiting for me out there, aren’t they?”

  “Yep.”

  A long pause, the only sound the scratching of Harry Nautilus’s pen. Duckworth couldn’t see that Nautilus was writing gibberish.

  Duckworth said, “It was that fucking Squill, you know. The bastard ruined my life.”

  Nautilus kept writing, his concentration on the notepad.

  “Goddamn it!” Duckworth yelled. “Stop writing and listen to me.”

  Nautilus sighed. He slipped off the reading glasses. Set the pen across the pad.

  “I married a worthless bitch, Nautilus,” Duckworth said. “Patty was her name, its name. Lazy as a goddamn slug. Couldn’t cook for shit. Ironed as good as a quadriplegic. She either dressed like a filthy whore or someone’s grandmamma, couldn’t get anything right. You’ve been around, Nautilus. You know how women need the control of a strong man. Without it they fall apart, nothing gets done.”

  Nautilus looked toward the window. The sun was rising behind the trees and the glass was orange as flame. He turned to Duckworth.

  “You occasionally had to discipline your wife? That what you’re telling me, Ducks?”

  “Sometimes things got loud, nosy do-good neighbors called it in. There were cruiser runs to my house a few times. But things were cool, y’know. I’d make promises to Squill and the boys, they’d chill.”

  “The boys,” Nautilus echoed.

  “One day I found the bitch secretly transferring money from my account, getting set up to leave, like she thought she could make it without me. I had to really set the bitch straight. Maybe I got a little excited. There was some stuff with her teeth, ribs. The slut’s gall bladder had to be pulled out.”

  “What about the boys, Ducks?”

  “Fucking Squill shows up at the hospital, tells me I was the best right-hand man he’d ever had. How much he needs me in Internal Affairs, keeping him tuned in to little opportunities, ways to move up, situations to exploit.”

  “But you were in trouble, right, Ducks?”

  Duckworth waved the words away like a meddlesome fly. “Goddamn Patty was whining about going to the papers, making a huge stink. I told Squill she always said that stuff and I always kept her in line.”

  “But Squill couldn’t take the risk.”

  “Fucking Squill says that, to keep my job and pension, I’ve got to shut her up … give her what she wanted: Divorce, house, savings, and three hundred bucks every paycheck for ten years. She sold the house, took off with everything. I’m still paying a blind account with money for that Irish bitch.”

  Nautilus added up what he’d heard. He went out on a limb. He figured it would hold.

  “Patty was a redhead, Ducks. Right?”

  “Hair like a goddamn fire truck.”

  Nautilus said, “And you got back at her, didn’t you, Ducks? In your own way.”

  Duckworth smiled. His shoulders relaxed and he faced his smile to the wall holding the photos of the dead prostitutes.

  “In my own way.”

  Nautilus slid his right hand beneath the table. Closed it around the blanket-covered pistol in his lap.

  “You couldn’t vent any
more rage on Patty. Hurt her, kill her, and you’d be suspect numero uno. But working over a stand-in, a proxy? Felt good, didn’t it, Ducky? Cleaned the anger out. For a while, at least.”

  Duckworth jammed his fists into his sacrum and arched backward, clicking kinks from his spine.

  “After doing whore number one, I relaxed for the first time in months. Sure, I knew the red-headed little street whore wasn’t Patty. But for some long and tasty minutes, she was. It felt so good I did the other two. And a couple more in Florida when it got hot around here. But you know most of this, right, Nautilus?”

  Nautilus nodded at the files and photos like he’d seen them a thousand times. “You left some loose ends, Ducks, missed a couple details.”

  Duckworth walked to the window, put his hands on the frame, looked out. He seemed pleased with the day. “I should have given you another pop in the head, Nautilus. I screwed up.” His turned, his smile widening into a grin. “I did better with Sandhill.”

  Nautilus said, “Tell me.”

  Duckworth sat on the window frame and drummed his hands on his knees.

  “Sandhill started looking into the cases. I figured he’d find something to front-burner them, a hair, a print. I remembered the property room shut down for fumigating twice a year, cameras shut off. On fume day I snatched the key from Chief Squill’s desk. I was a hell of a lot better at taking evidence than Sandhill was.”

  “Where is Sandhill, Ducks?”

  Duckworth winked. “About to follow the sweet little ladies.”

  “What ladies?”

  Duckworth chuckled. His hand moved upward, nearing the shoulder-holstered weapon beneath his jacket.

  “Freeze!” Nautilus yelled. He pulled his gun from beneath the table as Ryder emerged from the closet, his own weapon zeroed on Duckworth.

  Duckworth’s hand paused, his grin so wide it owned his face. He slowly brought his hand to his lips and kissed his fingertips. He blew the kiss at the photos on the wall.

  Then bent his knees and launched backwards through the glass.

  Ryder got to the window a half second before Nautilus. They stared at Duckworth’s body on the drive, his neck at an impossible angle and a kiss still perched on his lips. Bidwell and the cops who’d been hiding in the garage ran to Duckworth, horrified faces looking between the body and the window.