If I'm Found

by Terri Blackstock

  When the infomercial ends, one about a cooking implement comes on, then a Zumba DVD set.

  Finally, I drift into sleep. A knocking on the door wakes me some time later. I sit up and ask, “Who is it?”

  “Housekeeping.”

  “Can you come back later?” I call.

  She goes away. I check the clock. It’s noon. The midday news is coming on, the theme song playing.

  Accused child molester Cole Whittington was found dead moments ago.

  I come up in bed like I’ve been splashed with ice water. “No . . .” I grope for the remote and turn it up.

  . . . one-car accident that took his life.

  They show his mangled car at the bottom of an embankment. I drop the remote and hold my head to keep it from bursting apart.

  . . . we’ve reported on all week. A family spokesman told us that he had been to court this morning regarding the custody of his children, who were returned to his wife, Daphne.

  We will continue to report on this developing story.

  Despair rushes up in me to mushroom-cloud level, bursting out of me in a scream I mute with my fist.

  Minutes pass, but I can’t move. I feel my heart pounding, noise screaming in my ears, reality crushing me.

  Cole is dead. Nothing I’ve done has mattered.

  37

  DYLAN

  My lungs lock when I see the emails that have come in from Casey. I take a second to breathe, then as I study each of the pictures she’s sent, I realize that she’s in Dallas, only three hours from here. When I see how close she got to Keegan, I get a little sick. The most recent email she sent was the one that contained the airplane pictures, sent last night, and I write her back to tell her that I have the tail number of the plane because I’ve seen Keegan in it before. I tell her to back off, that she’s putting herself at too much risk. I tell her to let me take it from here.

  As I pack a bag to go to Dallas, hoping to see a return email pop up, my phone rings and I see that it’s Dex.

  I click it on. “Hey, man.”

  “Pretty Boy, you’re not gonna believe this.” His voice is low, but behind him I hear Tim McGraw singing “Live Like You Were Dying” over the noise of a crowd. “I lost Keegan, so I wound up tailing Rollins, and he’s in Marshall, drunk in a bar.”

  “Marshall, Texas?” I ask. “Who’s he with?”

  “By his lonely. Want me to make friends?”

  “No, you’d be too recognizable if he sees you after this.”

  “Because I only have one leg and one arm? That’s discrimination, dude. I might sue.”

  “It’s reality. Just wait for me. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.

  I was just about to head to Dallas. Can you hang and watch his car until I get there, in case he leaves? Maybe if I talk to him while he’s drunk, I can get him to spill something.”

  “Will do. He might gush. Looks to be in a good mood.”

  I grab my bag and head out to my car. Marshall is forty-two miles from Shreveport. Rollins probably went there to drink so nobody he knows would be there to see him. If Keegan’s in Dallas, maybe it’s a case of the cat being away.

  I drive faster than I should and get to the bar half an hour later. I find Dex in his car, and he tells me where Rollins is sitting at the bar. Dex leaves, and I go into the bar and sit on the opposite side, pretending I don’t know he’s there. I order a Coke with ice and see him at the bar, nursing his drink as he sings to the song playing. When I get my drink, I take my glass and go to the bar stool next to him.

  “Detective? I thought that was you.”

  Rollins looks at me, and it takes a minute for him to focus. He groans when he sees me. “Man, I can’t go anywhere.”

  “Hey, dude, enjoy yourself. I just stopped in for a drink. What you do in your off time is none of my business, right?”

  “Right,” he says, and bottoms his glass, then slides it across the counter for a refill. “Anyway, you’re a chick magnet. Can’t hurt to be seen with you.”

  I grin and glance around like I’m looking for some of those chicks. “So where’s Keegan? I thought you two were joined at the hip. You guys both off this weekend?”

  “He’s out of town,” he says. “I’m not really off. I’ve been working the”—he burps—“Cox case.”

  “Yeah? Learned anything new?”

  “No, but I could ask you the same. You here on the case?”

  “I was heading for Tyler, just stopped off on the way. I was going to talk to a relative of hers who lives there. A distant cousin, but it’s worth a try.”

  He shrugs. “We tracked down all the relatives.”

  “Still . . . Got to earn my money, right?”

  “Right.” He leans toward me, almost falls off his stool. “Hey, how much are the Paces paying you? That guy’s rolling in money.”

  I hide behind my glass and take a sip. “I’d rather not say. It’s enough to pay my rent.”

  “But how much? Seriously, I bet he’s paying you more than I make.”

  “He’s not.”

  “But sometimes I think maybe I should go private, you know? Get out of all this. Get away from Keegan, with all his ideas and demands.”

  “Ideas? What kind of ideas?”

  He gets quiet then as the barmaid brings back his glass. He swigs the whiskey and belches again.

  I try again. “What kind of ideas are you talking about?”

  He waves a hand at me. “Nothin’, man. Just, do this, do that. Don’t do this, don’t do that.”

  I know I can’t press harder, so I just wait, hoping he’ll go on, but he sees a girl walk by, and he grabs her arm and pulls her toward him. She isn’t flattered and jerks away.

  He turns back to the bar, brooding, and curses her.

  After a few minutes, he pulls out his wallet, drops a ten on the bar, then changes his mind and leaves a twenty. “I gotta go,” he says.

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah. Work to do.” He gets up and steadies himself, then pats me on the back. “Later, man.”

  “You sure you want to drive? You’ve had a little much.”

  “I’m fine,” he says. “Don’t be like him.”

  “Like who?”

  “Gordon. Like he’s my ol’ man or somethin’.”

  I look back at the counter, but I can’t tell how many he’s had. There’s only the one glass. He may have been three sheets already when he got here.

  He staggers out and, when the door closes, I follow him. He’s already in his car, pulling out of the parking lot. As he drives away, I pray that he won’t kill anybody.

  It’s an hour later, and I’m driving through Tyler on my way to Dallas when my phone rings. It’s a number I don’t recognize. I pick it up. “Hello?”

  “Dylan, it’s me. Sy.”

  I frown. This isn’t the number I have programmed into my phone for Rollins. “Yeah, what’s going on?”

  “I was arrested.”

  “What?”

  “DUI. It’s not good. I need you to bail me out tonight.”

  I look at my watch, then I turn at the next exit, cross under the interstate, and head back the other direction. “All right,” I say. “I’m in Tyler, but I’ll be there in about an hour.”

  “Look, don’t tell Keegan or the chief or anybody. Got it?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Hurry.”

  It occurs to me that I should leave him there to rot in jail, but I know he’ll find some way to be out by tomorrow. Maybe I can take advantage of his vulnerability.

  An hour later I show up at the Marshall Police Department and find the bail bondsman who’s waiting for me. I pay the 10 percent of Rollins’s bond and wait until they release him. After a while, he comes out, clearly still drunk.

  “Thanks,” he grumbles.

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Where they stopped me. It was at that grocery store . . . what’s its name . . . I don’t know, Kroger, maybe.”

  I walk him
out to my car, and he heads to the driver’s side, forgetting it’s my car. “Do you think you should be driving?”

  “I’ll be all right,” he says.

  “But you weren’t. And it’s my car. Let me drive, okay?”

  He acquiesces and goes around to the passenger side. We get to the grocery store that I figure would have been on his way home, and I pull in behind his car. “Look, there’s a motel over there. Why don’t you get a room and just sleep it off? Drive back tomorrow? Nobody’ll know.”

  He considers that, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, maybe.”

  I don’t wait for consent. I drive over there and stop at the office. He doesn’t get out.

  “You know,” I say, “you have the same rank as Keegan. You don’t have to let him call all the shots.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  I’m thinking how to say that he should out Keegan for anything he’s doing, but Rollins speaks first.

  “You know, he doesn’t trust you. He’s sure you’re a turncoat, that you’re trying to help Casey. But I think you’re okay.”

  My mouth goes dry. “Keegan thinks that?”

  “Yeah, he’s paranoid. Don’t worry about it.” He gets out of the car and staggers inside.

  I watch as he goes to the motel desk. After a moment, I drive away.

  So Keegan is on to me.

  I’ve suspected this, but now that I know for sure, it changes everything.

  38

  CASEY

  The news of Cole’s death vibrates through me like an electric shock. I’ve been frozen all afternoon, not sure what to do. Little Ava’s fear as she hunkered in the bathroom stall splits through my brain. Did he really go through with suicide? Ava’s fate seems sealed. There’s no one left to tell the truth about what’s happening to her.

  I check out of the motel and drive back to Dallas, knowing it’s the last place I should be. But I can’t just forget about Ava’s problems, whatever mine might be. I drive from Cole’s house to the UpDown Seat Company, trying to find the embankment he went over. I don’t see anything like that.

  I stop at a restaurant with Wi-Fi. On my laptop, I go to the news station’s website and watch the clip again that I saw this morning, and also the updates they’ve filed since. Police are ruling it a suicide based on it being a one-car accident, and on his state of mind over the last few weeks. Family members have told authorities that he had talked of suicide and that he’d been talked down from jumping off a bridge just days earlier. I’m surprised he told them about that.

  I’m thankful no one mentions me to reporters.

  I try to imagine what would make Cole do such a thing after his children were back with his wife and the media were exposing the Trendalls. Just when things were turning around, when there was a chance to right things, he drove off a cliff? No, I don’t believe it. The website identifies where his car went off the embankment, and I drive over there. There are flowers on the side of the road where it must have happened. They’ve been placed near a broken guardrail.

  I walk up to the flowers and look down to the rocks below. There’s paint where the car hit, but the car itself is nowhere in sight. I sit on what’s left of the guardrail and look down the road. It’s not on a curve, so it’s not like he checked a text and forgot to turn. It’s a straight stretch.

  I get back in my car and turn it around. I drive slowly up the road. I see two sets of black tire tracks about a half mile from where he went off. They zig toward the dirt, then back onto the road. I frown. Surely the police saw that. Those could be Cole’s tracks, and the other set indicates that someone might have run him off.

  Suddenly I’m as sure as I was with my own father. Cole Whittington didn’t kill himself. He was run off the road.

  39

  CASEY

  I drive aimlessly that afternoon, one moment thinking of going back to the TV station to tell them who probably made those tire tracks, the next thinking of calling the police to give them an anonymous tip. But knowing that Keegan is on to me, I decide that neither course is wise.

  Instead, I create another alias email account and shoot a message to the reporter who followed up on my story. I tell her to check out the tire tracks and the Trendalls’ vehicles, that I don’t believe it was suicide.

  My body is so tired that I don’t feel I can go on, so I finally make myself eat. I pack carbs, trying to feel better, but every bite is dry and knots going down.

  I go back to the town where I spent last night and check into a different motel with my alternate ID—Liana Winters. Then I collapse into bed.

  But sleep still evades me. I can’t stop thinking about Cole’s death, and his children marked by that for the rest of their lives, and his wife seething with anger at him, unaware that it wasn’t suicide, that he’d ruled that out.

  And my head aches with thoughts of Ava.

  When morning finally comes, I shower. As I’m packing and getting dressed, I turn on the TV, an old box unit with sticky fingerprints on the screen and a layer of dust on the top. I find a news station. They’re covering something political as I dry my hair, and then it moves to national news.

  I hear my name and dart out of the bathroom.

  Casey Cox, the woman accused of murdering Brent Pace in Shreveport, Louisiana, is still at large, but her sister, Hannah Boone, was arrested today and taken into police custody.

  I suck in a breath and rush to turn up the TV. I see footage of my sister being handcuffed and walked out of her home in front of everyone, cameras flashing all around her. Jeff stands in the background, yelling at the police as he holds Emma, screaming in his arms. I drop to the floor, my hands over my head. This is worse than my fear of being caught and dragged out through the press. Worse than me being murdered in my motel room. To have my sister paraded out of her house in handcuffs in front of her daughter . . .

  I listen as the panel discusses whether Hannah was an accessory to my escaping, whether she’s been communicating with me, whether she’s going to bond out or spend a night in jail.

  I know exactly what’s happening. Keegan saw me at the marina in Dallas, and he’s drawing me out. He’s telling me that I’d better keep my mouth shut, that I’d better stop snooping, that I’d better be afraid of him. He’s using Hannah to torment and control me. My mind races as I wipe the tears staining my face, my makeup dripping down my skin like mud. I have to put Hannah first, even if it means playing into Keegan’s hands.

  I don’t stop to reapply my makeup. I don’t even stop to check out of the motel and get my overpayment back.

  I finish packing as fast as I can, pull on my short red wig, and turn off the TV. There’s only one thing to do. I have to go back to Shreveport.

  40

  DYLAN

  Because of bailing Rollins out of jail, I haven’t yet made it to Dallas in response to Casey’s email. For now, I get a room back in Tyler, and my investigation from there is productive. I get Candace Price’s address from Casey’s email and do a Google Earth zoom-in. The house is massive, with a pool in the back . . . not the kind of thing a cop would normally have as a second home. Maybe she has some high-powered job of her own.

  I do a deeper search, find that she’s a real estate agent. I get the address and look in one of my databases for public records on that address. The house doesn’t have a mortgage. It was paid for with cash three years ago.

  I search for the documents and see that everything is in her name. I dig a little deeper, looking for any kind of estate that she might’ve come into three years ago, but there isn’t anything. I pull up her tax records, find that she only makes $60,000 a year. Not enough to pay cash for a house that’s worth $2 million. I dig deeper through the mortgage records and find a copy of the certified check used to pay for the property. It’s listed as L.W. Enfor Enterprises. I frown. L.W. Enfor? Then I realize it’s a kind of shorthand for law enforcement. Some sense of humor.

  So I dig for information on L.W. Enfor. It’s owned by anoth
er business that appears to be a glass repair company. It’s listed in Dallas, so I pull it up on Google Earth, zoom in on that address. It looks like it’s out of business, like the building may even be condemned.

  So this is a classic money laundering scheme. Somehow I have to follow it back to Gordon Keegan. I dig all the way back to Shreveport, then I finally get to a property deed that has his name on it. It’s four businesses removed, and it’s paid for with funds from an offshore bank account.

  But his name is clear. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

  I stay up all night, making a record of everything I can find about Candace. As morning comes, I sip a cup of coffee and I don’t even feel tired. I’m finally getting somewhere.

  I turn on the TV, make some coffee, and as I drink it, I hear Casey’s name.

  I turn around and move closer to the TV.

  Casey Cox, the woman accused of murdering Brent Pace in Shreveport, Louisiana, is still at large. But her sister, Hannah Boone, was arrested today and taken into police custody.

  I grab my phone as I see the footage of Hannah, handcuffed and crying as her husband holds the baby behind her, media swarming like vultures as the police try to push them back. Keegan is right there, one of the cops doing a sorry job of holding back the media who are trespassing in her yard.

  My heart is slamming so fast it makes me dizzy. I call Keegan’s cell phone, but he doesn’t pick up. I try Rollins and get voice mail. I call Keegan again, and again, hanging up each time the voice mail recording comes on, then immediately calling back. He will not ignore me! I grab my keys and head into the parking lot, still calling.

  Scum of the earth! That guy has no business bothering Hannah. But part of me wonders if my conversation with her might have been overheard, or if they think she’s an accessory because of what I asked her to tell Casey. Did she make a mistake? How did Keegan know?

  I head back to Shreveport instead of Dallas, praying that nothing happens to Hannah in retribution for her sister’s survival.