Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  Suddenly, standing there looking into the mirror at a face that looked almost complete and perfect and a lot like the one I had worn for so many years, I started to feel sorry for myself. If I still looked like this, I thought, maybe I could have a decent life, maybe I could find romance, maybe I could marry and have children and do all the things that I had dreamed of as I was growing up.

  But looking into the mirror at the artificial face didn’t change the fact that I knew what was under it. The burns were still there, the scar tissue would never go away, and Freda Krueger was going to be part of my life forever. I shoved away the self-pity and thought about Wanda, Bernice, Connie, Candace, and Leanne, who needed me.

  Next, I had to apply the special makeup that made the seams invisible. It went on like a lot of other makeup, with a pad that smoothed it over both the real and artificial sides of my face, and then there was the lip gloss that would keep the edge of the latex lips smoothly connected to the original, unburned mucous membrane on the right side of my mouth. The stuff was actually latex-based itself, but had been mixed specially for me in a color that would look natural when it was applied.

  I stood back and took another look in the mirror, and once again thought about how nice it would be if this were the way I always looked, but this time there was no self-pity. The mask was a tool, and that’s how I intended to use it. It would be a tool that would help me put an end to this monster’s reign of terror, and then it would finally be worth having.

  With everything in place, I looked almost completely normal from my bra upward. The hair that was attached to the mask matched my natural hair in color and texture, but I noticed that the real stuff was longer by about an inch. That wasn’t a problem; a couple of minutes’ work with some scissors solved it nicely, and then a few minutes more with a brush blended it all together. The only giveaway left was my left eyelid, which was only molded into the mask and didn’t move when my right eye would blink. I’d have to remember that, or some guy might think I was winking at him.

  Mr. Barron, the anaplastologist who made the mask for me, suggested that I carry a bottle of eyedrops around whenever I wore it. “If anyone ever notices that the left eye doesn’t blink, just say it was paralyzed in an accident. Show the bottle of eyedrops and put a couple in, and just tell them you have to do that to keep the eye from drying out.” He showed me that the eyelid had been made so that I could pull it down, and it would usually be about half closed, anyway, like a lazy eye. I’d never actually had to use that excuse, but there was a bottle of eyedrops in the kit with the mask for that very reason.

  I got into my closet and took out a pantsuit that I’d had since high school. I wanted to look decent for this role, but not too well off. While it’s true that domestic abuse can be found in every kind of family, the majority of women who come forward about it tend to be economically disadvantaged. If I did get the perp’s attention, I wanted him to see what he expected to see. I decided to go shopping at some thrift stores that afternoon, just to get a wardrobe that would fit the level of poverty I was trying to project.

  I was ready. While I could see every little imperfection in my face, it was highly doubtful that anyone else would be able to notice anything at all, simply because we tend not to see what we don’t expect to see. Nobody who met me that day would expect to see a slight misalignment of the eyebrows, a minor discrepancy in the distance between my nostrils; unless the mask fell off, no one would ever know it was there without being told.

  I grabbed my phone and called Dex at a few minutes after eleven.

  “Cassie? How’s Tucson?”

  “Um, warmer than Tulsa, but I’m not there. I came back last night, and then I got rousted out by the police this morning. Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?” Dex asked, his voice sounding slightly nervous.

  I took a deep breath. There had been a time when Carolyn Stern had been among his circle of friends. “They found a body this morning,” I said. “Dex, it was Carolyn. She’d been strangled.”

  He was quiet for a couple of seconds, then I heard him sigh. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “She wasn’t a bad person, you know, just never too sure where she was supposed to fit in. We ought to let Sabrina know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I came back because I learned some things out there that gave me an idea how to stop this guy. Can you meet me at your place for lunch?”

  “Uh, yeah, but I’m a little behind schedule here today. Can we make it about twelve thirty?”

  “That’ll be perfect,” I said. “See you then.”

  I put the phone into my pocket and grabbed my coat, then headed for the garage and my car. That’s when I thought about the possibility that the killer might know what I drive, so I pulled up the hood of my coat to hide my now-almost-normal face and got out of there as quickly as I could. If he was keeping watch on me, I didn’t want him to be tipped off about the mask, or my new appearance.

  Of course, that meant I needed a different car, as well as different clothes and everything else. I hadn’t thought all of this through before I jumped into it with both feet, but it was too late to worry about that. I had to go by Alfie’s place and pick up the new fake ID stuff before I went to meet Dex for lunch.

  I knocked “shave and a haircut,” the way Dex did the first time he brought me there. Alfie came to the door and yelled, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Cassie,” I said, just loudly enough for him to hear me through the door. I heard chains come off and the deadbolt open.

  “Hey, there,” Alfie said as he let me in, and then he froze and stared. “Who are you and what have you done with Cassie?”

  I grinned. “Pretty amazing transformation, isn’t it?” I asked. “Think you’d know me on the street?”

  “I don’t think I know you now,” he said, looking closely. “If I look really hard, I can see slight differences in the pigmentation, but that is really awesome! Why don’t you wear it more often?”

  He let me come in and I slid my coat off. “Well, it’s a lot of work to put on, actually, so that’s why I haven’t worn it lately,” I admitted, “but now I’m thinking it might be more useful when I need to go undercover. If I need to go unrecognized, this makes me look like a whole ’nother person. Nobody who knows me would realize it’s me, because my most recognizable feature is my scarring. Cover that up, and most people couldn’t tell you what the rest of me looks like.”

  He continued to look at me for a few more seconds, then motioned for me to move over and stand in front of a green sheet hanging on a wall. “Let’s get the license photo,” he said. I stood where he wanted me and he took a picture with his phone, then turned to his computers again. A moment later, a machine by the wall started to hum, and then it spit out a very realistic-looking Oklahoma driver’s license.

  “How did you get a license printer?” I asked. “Aren’t those specially made for states?”

  “It’s an old HP photo printer I freaked up to let me run plastic cards through it,” he explained. “That thing will stand up to a visual inspection, but don’t let anyone try to run the number or use the magnetic strip, because neither one is real. And like I said, you get caught with that, I don’t know you!”

  “I won’t,” I said. “It’s just so I can show ID to rent a place, that kind of stuff. What about Dex?”

  “His is already finished, since I just hacked his real DMV picture.” He handed me an envelope. “Everything else is in here. By the way, I also got into your credit card account and made you one. It’s got the real credit card number, and the chip will work, it’s just got your fake name on it. Nobody will ever know, so you can use it if you need to.”

  I didn’t know whether to be grateful or pissed, so I settled for a grumpy, “Thanks, I think.”

  “De nada,” Alfie said. “Anything else?”

  I thought about it for a second. “Yeah,” I said. “When I was out in Tucson, I got a name I want you to check out. He might be hard to tra
ck down, all I know is that he worked in Provo, Utah, as a caseworker for the state, dealing with abused kids. He moved to Tucson a few weeks before the abductions began there, and he moved away from there about three months back, supposedly to Massachusetts. I want to know everything you can find on him, like if he was in Bakersfield and Jacksonville when it happened there.”

  “You want to give me a name?”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry. Ronald Orloff was the name, at least in Tucson. I know it’s not that hard to change names if you really want to, but see what you can find on him.”

  “It’s on my to-do list, and it’ll be on your bill. Speaking of which, I don’t like to carry credit for too long, hint, hint.”

  “Screw you,” I said with a smile. “You’ve got my credit card number, go ahead and charge me. I pay it off every month anyway, to avoid the interest. Oh, and can you trade me cars for a few days? I don’t know if the bad guy knows my Kia or not, but I’d rather not take the chance.”

  He looked at me as if I had flowers coming out of my ears. “Nobody drives my car,” he said, “but I’ve got a few others. Sometimes I need to send somebody out on a surveillance job, so I got some plain janes, older cars that nobody pays much attention to. How about a fifteen-year-old Toyota Camry?”

  I grinned; my mom drove a Camry from that era. “Perfect,” I said. He went to a board on another wall and tossed me a set of keys.

  “It’s out in the back, behind the storage building. Green Camry, one of the most unnoticeable vehicles in the world. I keep it in good shape, so bring it back the way you found it.”

  “I will,” I said. “One more thing.” I told him about how the hotlines work, and how easy it would be for someone who knew computers to hijack a line to a different terminal, and he slapped himself in the head.

  “Damn,” he said, “I should have thought of that. It’s so obvious!”

  “So, that kid was right? That would be how this guy is doing this?”

  “Almost definitely, but it’s better than that. I can go back in there and look for redirections in the code. If he’s added a computer, he’s got to give the program an IP address to send the calls to.” He went to a computer and started typing instantly, and he looked up a moment later with a grin. “I found it! The son of a bitch is using an anonymous IP redirect. God only knows how many servers he’s bouncing it through, but I’ve got the primary IP address he inserted into the program.”

  I think my eyebrow was trying to reach my hairline. “Can you find him with that?” I asked.

  Alfie shook his head. “No, it’s not the actual IP address of his computer. This one is probably to a server in Costa Rica, and that server reroutes it to one in Lithuania, which reroutes it to one in Russia, which reroutes it to…”

  “Okay, okay, I get the picture. So, having that IP address doesn’t help, then, right?”

  Alfie looked at me with a shark-tooth grin. “The way he’s got it set up, if all the other lines are busy, the next call comes to him. He’s also got it set so he can add certain numbers that always go straight to him, just as that kid thought. What this means is that I can make sure that when you call, it goes to his line.”

  The eyebrow went even higher. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s easy,” Alfie said. “All I’d have to do is change one little line of code, and insert your number as one of those that goes directly to his computer. I’ll hide it in a different section of the code, though, so he won’t see it. He’ll think the first call is just one of the random calls he gets, but if he decides to focus on you, he can insert your number into his own string of code and he’ll never know it was already there.”

  “Oh, that would be awesome! There won’t be any doubt that I’ve got the right guy, then.”

  “Correct, but this will only work once, maybe twice at the most. Once you get him on the line, it’s up to you to convince him you’re the girl he wants to grab next. If you keep getting through to him, he would probably get suspicious and go check this code. If he finds your number there, he’s probably going to get rid of the women he’s got and disappear.”

  “It’s a chance, though,” I said, “so I’ll take it. Anything else?”

  He looked at me for a moment, then a light bulb went off in his brain. “Oh. Yeah.” He turned and went into another room, then came back a minute later with a box in his hand. He opened it and showed me what was inside, and I think my eye tried to pop out.

  I looked up at him. “Are you serious?” I asked. “You want me to do what with that?”

  Inside the box was a gold chain, and hanging from it was the gaudiest metal-and-plastic turtle I’d ever seen. Along with it was a smartphone, one that was almost the size of a small tablet, and another phone that looked like a cheap one.

  “The tracker I could get my hands on in a hurry isn’t very small,” he said, “so I had to put it into something big enough to hide it. That turtle was what I had to work with, so don’t bitch. You turn on the tracker by squeezing it, turn it off the same way. When it’s on, there’s an app on the big phone that can pinpoint its location through GPS. The other phone is a cheapie, to fit your cover. You don’t want to be giving out your real number when you’re supposed to be Emily Keeler, right? That’s the number I just put into the code to make sure you get through to him, by the way, so be sure to use that one when you call the hotline.”

  “But a turtle?”

  “It’s what I had,” he said.

  I stared at him, and then at the turtle.

  “Fine,” I said, “whatever!”

  I took all the stuff and walked out, then found the Toyota where he’d said I would. It started right up, but they didn’t put heated seats in Camrys back then. I was shivering by the time the heater started to remember what it was for.

  And that’s how Dex found me when he got to his place, sitting in a cold Toyota out in front of his house, looking like someone he didn’t know, and shivering. He parked his Mustang in his driveway and glanced at me as he walked toward his front door, but I guess he decided I wasn’t there to see him. He went to the door, opened it, and walked inside, then closed it behind him.

  I felt a slight pang of disappointment. If anyone was going to recognize me, I wanted it to be Dex, but he didn’t even look twice. I was about to get out of the car and walk up to knock on his door when my phone rang.

  It was Dex, and I figured he was calling to see why I wasn’t there. I answered it with a frown.

  “Are you gonna sit in that old car all day, or come inside?”

  “Wha—you knew it was me? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Well, you’re driving one of Alfie’s cars, so I guessed you might be trying to keep a low profile. If you were, I didn’t want to give you away. Are you coming in?”

  “I’ll be right there!” I said, and then I got out and carried the box and envelope up the walk to his door. He opened it as I was about to knock, and then I finally saw the dumbfounded look on his face that I’d been looking forward to.

  “Cassie? Holy—if I didn’t know it was you...”

  He stood aside and let me in, and I carried all the stuff to the kitchen table as Critter ignored the mask and started doing figure-eights between my feet. It took me a couple of minutes to outline my plan for him, and that’s when he went ballistic.

  FOURTEEN

  Selling Dex on the idea was harder than I’d expected, but I finally did it by playing my trump card. I simply reminded him that my becoming a private eye was all his idea in the first place, so if he wouldn’t be my backup, then I didn’t know what to think. He hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, but he finally gave in, and then we started working out the details.

  Lunch turned out to be some leftover pizza he’d ordered the night before, but that was okay with me. We munched it down while we talked about my plan to rent a small, furnished apartment and move into it as Emily. The plan called for Dex to play Darrell, my abusive boyfriend, and he didn’t like that idea until I clarifie
d that he didn’t really have to hit me or anything. I knew enough about makeup to create some bruises on my face and such, so all he’d need to do would be let the neighbors hear us argue a few times. If our bad guy noticed me, we needed to play it out as realistically as we could while he did his stalking.

  The turtle made Dex feel a little better. So far, none of the victims had been stripped of jewelry on the spot, so if I did manage to get snatched, there was a good chance it wouldn’t be taken off me until we got to wherever he was keeping the women. That was good, because even if he destroyed it then, the phone Dex would carry would have its last GPS location marked. Dex would call Niles, and the cavalry would come to my rescue.

  By the time he had to go back to work, we had the details basically worked out. I gave Critter a good scratching, filled her food and water dishes, and went apartment hunting. That proved to be pretty easy, because most of the landlords who owned property in the sleazier areas don’t bother with things like credit or background checks, and they don’t worry about leases that they know are going be broken anyway. I paid four hundred dollars for the first month’s rent, and another four hundred as a security deposit, and got the keys to a furnished one-bedroom unit on the third floor of a halfway decent building. It was an inner unit, which meant that the only windows were in the bedroom, but that was one of the reasons the rent was so low.

  I met my cross-the-hall neighbor a couple of hours later, after spending time in three different thrift stores. I had bought clothes, but I also got a lot of the things I should have if I was just moving in, like a mix-match set of dishes, pots and pans, a used microwave, brooms and a mop, sheets and blankets, and towels and lots of other such stuff. I was carrying it in one load at a time when the door across from mine opened and I came face to face with Donna Torres.