But fuck it, she thought with uncharacteristic callousness, this isn’t about him. It’s about the missing girls… and my sister.
Georgina…
Chase could still picture her sister’s cute pigtails, the beads of sweat on her tiny, upturned nose, the purple Snow cone stain across her lips.
The image of the last time she’d seen Georgina took all the wind from her sails.
Maybe she was the one who was being unreasonable. Maybe she should enter treatment for real this time.
Or maybe she should just tell the man what he wanted to hear and make up her mind later.
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d lied, after all; far from it.
Chase sighed heavily and turned back to Dr. Matteo.
“I’ll do it,” she said without context. “I’ll fucking sign up for your bullshit program.”
Dr. Matteo, calm and cool as ever, barely even acknowledged her words. Instead, he looked to Stitts for confirmation.
“What about you? Will you guarantee that Chase comes here after this case is done?”
Chase scowled.
“Oh, it’s like that, is it? Do I need permission from my daddy to go to the school dance? Oh, please, daddy, pretty please with a cherry on top, can I go?”
Stitts ignored Chase and addressed Dr. Matteo, which only served to infuriate her further.
“After the case is over, I’ll bring her back myself.”
Chase was so angry now that her hands inadvertently balled into fists.
Keep it together… if you strangle the doctor, he won’t be able to tell you where Louisa is.
And then, as if on cue, Dr. Matteo’s voice piped up inside her mind.
Live in the moment, Chase. Dwelling on the past and thinking about the future will only make you miserable. These thoughts only handcuff the current moment, which is the only thing that really matters.
“How can I think about the present, when you assholes have me promising away my future,” she grumbled under her breath.
Dr. Matteo finally looked over at her, surprise on his usually expressionless face.
Not wanting the man to think that she was taking his mumbo-jumbo teachings seriously, Chase shook her head and spoke quickly.
“I said I’ll come back. Now tell me where the hell Louisa is.”
Dr. Matteo nodded and then reached into his desk again. He pulled out another folder, this one emblazoned with the name Louisa Binari on the tab.
“What the hell? Why is hers so thin, while mine is the size of a goddamn Encyclopedia Britannica?” Chase blurted.
Once again, her comment went ignored.
Dr. Matteo opened the folder and pulled out a single sheet of paper, which he held out to Stitts.
Chase intervened and snatched it before her partner could so much as twitch.
The paper mostly consisted of a list of Louisa’s details — her height, weight, medical status. It took Chase a moment to locate what she was looking for: the woman’s last known residence, which was neatly typed in the upper right-hand corner.
Chase frowned.
“That’s it? She was at home the whole time? This is bull—”
Dr. Matteo’s bald head slowly moved side to side.
“Turn it over,” he instructed.
Chase flipped the page over. Attached to the back with a paper-clip was a single photograph with a glowing orange time stamp that indicated it was taken yesterday.
“What—”
Chase stopped speaking when her eyes focused on the image. It showed a house in a horrible state of disrepair with the siding either filthy or torn off completely. The windows were boarded up and there were smudges of soot from past fires marring the rotting plywood that had been used to replace the glass. The concrete front stoop was chipped and off-kilter.
Chase had never seen this particular house before, but it still felt strangely familiar.
After all, she’d lived in one just like it. And, when it came right down to it, trap houses were all the same, weren’t they?
“187 Ignatius Ln.,” Chase heard a voice say from what sounded like a mile away. “It’s not far from here.”
Chase swallowed hard as she stared at that image of the crack house for so long that her eyes started to defocus.
Louisa… How could—
Chase halted the thought mid-sentence. She knew how, because she’d gone down the same road, herself. And while she’d managed to get out, her visceral reaction to the image suggested that she might just still have one foot in the door.
A hand came down on her shoulder and she jumped, nearly dropping the paper and the photograph in the process.
“You okay?” Stitts whispered.
Chase shrugged him off.
“I’m fine,” she said as she started toward the door. “And thanks for your help, Dr. Matteo. You’ve been a peach.”
“Chase, remember, nothing in the past matters. The only thing that matters, is the—”
“—present,” Chase finished for him. Then she shook her head to clear her thoughts and turned around. “Here, I’ve got a present for you,” she said, raising her middle finger.
Chapter 6
“What a fucking asshole,” Chase muttered as soon as she was back in her car. She hoped — no, hoped wasn’t the right word — she expected that Stitts would have her back on this.
She was disappointed.
“Chase… the man’s only trying to help.”
Chase rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, everyone is always just trying to help. Like Ryanne Elliott was just trying to help her husband sell books, like Mike Hartman was trying to educate everybody on the nuances of American capitalism and free markets. Like the asshole who took my sister was just trying to teach my parents a lesson for leaving two young girls to walk around at a fair without supervision.”
The last part surprised even Chase; despite how much her sister’s disappearance had tortured her over the years, she’d spent little time talking about it. Just the thought of that day was often enough to send her into a spiral of one sort of self-mutilation or another.
Chase drove in silence for a few more minutes, following the directions on her cell phone to the address that Dr. Matteo had reluctantly handed over. Just as she turned onto Ignatius Ln., Stitts spoke up.
“What are we doing here, Chase? Do you really think Louisa can help us? Or are you just hell-bent on helping her?”
Chase cast a glance in her partner’s direction. It was an odd question, one that took her by surprise.
Hell-bent on helping her? She did save my life once, but I’m not doing this for Louisa. I’m doing this for the girls.
“You know what I think, Chase? I think that you’re doing this for yourself.”
Chase wrenched the wheel to the right and slammed her BMW into park.
Stitts’s body rocked in the passenger seat and he looked at her, a frown on his face.
“Jesus, Chase, I was just—”
“You were what? Acting like a fucking amateur psychiatrist? If Dr. Matteo and his years of research and experience can’t crack me, what makes you think you can? For once, why don’t you just try to be my partner instead of my goddamn shrink. What do you say?”
The anger in her voice surprised Chase. She hadn’t intended on lashing out the way she had, but the words had just regurgitated from her mouth.
It was as if they’d been lingering on her tongue for some time, waiting for this exact moment to come forth.
Stitts didn’t react right away to her outburst; his tired eyes just calmly scanned her face. Something had happened to the man over the course of the relationship, Chase realized. He was different than when they’d first met, when Chase had called in the FBI to help them catch the Download Killer. Stitts was still introspective and intuitive, but the element of silent authority that he’d once possessed was now gone.
Something had happened to him, but Chase couldn’t pinpoint the inciting incident that had so changed hi
s personality.
The man opened his mouth and for a brief moment, Chase thought that he was going to snap back at her — insult her, perhaps, or just tell her that she needed to put on her big boy pants and get the help she needed. That Dr. Matteo was right.
Part of her wanted that, too, because part of her needed to be told.
In the end, Stitts let her down.
“I’m sorry, I know that we’re partners, but I care about you. We work together well, and we get shit done, but I can’t help thinking—”
Chase rolled her eyes and started to get out of the car.
“Do you hear yourself, Stitts? You sound like a high school girl. Maybe you’re the one who needs professional help.”
Stitts followed her out of the car.
“Chase? Where the hell are you going? Get back in the car. I was just—”
Chase hooked a thumb over her shoulder, indicating the dilapidated structure from the photograph. The numbers ‘187’ were pretty much intact, with only the seven hanging upside down, dangling from a single screw.
Stitts raised an eyebrow and lit a cigarette.
“Even when you’re berating me, your still on the case,” she heard him mutter under his breath.
An image of Georgina’s face appeared in her mind then, and her breath hitched.
I’m always on the case, Stitts. You should know that by now.
Chase hurried across the sidewalk and approached the chipped and broken stoop. There was a man seated on the top step, leaning up against the warped railing, his hands tucked into the center pocket of his hoodie. His hood was pulled tightly over his head, revealing only a pockmarked nose and cracked and blistered lips.
The man was shaking slightly, Chase realized, despite the fact that it was September in Virginia and the temperature was still in the low seventies.
“We’re here, Stitts,” she said over her shoulder. “So, do you think you can silence your Freudian brain for a minute so that we can find those girls?”
Chase took several steps towards the building before pausing to offer a final comment.
“Unless, of course, you’d rather us sit in the car and talk about our feelings for a wee bit longer.”
Chapter 7
Chase walked over to the man on the stoop and gently nudged him with her knee. He groaned and turned his face away from her, pressing it up against the metal railing. Chase repeated the nudge, this time a little harder, but the man just grunted.
She glanced over her shoulder at Stitts, who was standing at the bottom of the landing smoking a cigarette. He shrugged at her and Chase frowned. Turning back to the stoop kid, she dropped to her haunches and grabbed the two strings coming from the man’s hoodie and yanked them in her direction.
The man yelped and had no choice but to turn and look at her. His eyes were half open and his pupils were the size and color of oysters. What Chase could see of his skin through the small opening in the hoodie was pale and moist.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said.
The man’s eyes rolled back and Chase gave a hearty yank on the strings again.
“A woman — someone who doesn’t really fit in. She was here yesterday so I’m pretty sure she’s here today.”
When the man’s eyes rolled back a second time, Chase decided to take a different approach. She reached into the man’s jeans and started to rifle through the contents, which consisted of a wad of Kleenex and a plastic lighter.
Chase threw them both over her shoulder, but the man either didn’t care or didn’t notice.
But when she slipped her hand into the center pocket of his sweatshirt and pulled out a baggie of white powder, stoop kid suddenly animated.
“Hey, give that back,” he said in a slurred voice. He tried to grab it, but his movements were slow and uncoordinated; Chase easily held the baggie just out of reach.
“The woman I’m looking for… she’s kinda chubby with dark hair to her shoulders?”
The man’s eyes never left the baggie that Chase was dangling like a proverbial carrot.
“She’s in there,” he grumbled. His lips were so dry that they split vertically with every word, sending thin trails of blood and pus into his mouth.
Chase breathed deeply. Even though she’d come here thinking — knowing — that Louisa probably never left the trap house, she’d desperately hoped that this wasn’t the case.
“Take me inside,” Chase ordered. In her periphery, she noticed Stitts flick his cigarette away, then take the first step up the stoop, a hand on the butt of his service pistol.
Chase shook her head, indicating for him to stay put.
Stoop kid didn’t care about himself or what you did to him, be it assault or prison. All junkies like him cared about was their next fix. Even when Chase was high, in the back of her mind a little voice kept reminding her that this was only temporary, that she needed to focus on getting more.
On staying high.
“You get me inside, and I’ll give you drugs back,” she said.
The man’s tacky tongue skipped across his sore infested lips. Like an owner leading a puppy, Chase hauled the man to his feet by her makeshift collar. Then she spun around and shoved them towards the door.
The man protested again, but Chase wagged the plastic baggie as a reminder that she was the one in charge of his next fix.
With a scowl, stoop kid rapped his knuckles on the wooden door. It was so rotten and waterlogged that it bowed and flexed even with his pathetic and feeble knocks.
Chase stepped to one side as it opened, out of the line of sight of the eye that peered out.
“Quickie, what you want? I know you ain’t got no more money. You gotta wait—”
Without hesitation, Chase flung the baggie over her shoulder. The man named ‘Quickie’ immediately spun around and lunged for his drugs.
“What the fuck?” the man in the doorway said in surprise.
Chase stepped in front of the doorway and stared at the dark face that peered out. The man’s nose and mouth were covered with a dark bandana adorned with white seashells that matched the man’s wide eyes.
When he saw her face, he tried to slam the door closed, but Chase anticipated this.
Her foot shot out and wedged between the door and the frame. The man grunted and stumbled backward due to the flex in the door.
Chase smiled and took her gun out of its holster.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said, stepping forward while pressing the door open at the same time. “I don’t want your drugs and I don’t want your money. In fact, I only want one thing: I want my friend.”
Chapter 8
Bandana man recovered quickly from the shock of Chase’s intrusion and started to reach for something beside the door. Seeing this, Chase withdrew her foot and drove it into the rotting wood.
This sent the man stumbling again, this time deeper into the dingy interior of the trap house, and Chase followed him inside. There was a commotion behind her and she was about to spin around when a hand came down on her shoulder.
“Just me,” Stitts whispered in her ear.
Chase nodded and turned her attention back to the man who’d opened the door and since fallen on his ass.
“Where is she?” Chase demanded, leveling her gun at the soiled white muscle shirt that covered the man’s narrow chest.
The man’s eyebrows furrowed.
“You best leave now,” he hissed, using his elbows to scoot backward on the dirt-covered floor. “While you still can.”
For a brief moment, bandana man’s words transported Chase back to another time.
“Yeah, you can leave, Chase. But then you won’t get any more of this,” Tyler Tisdale said as he raised the syringe and wagged it seductively in the air. Chase moaned and managed with considerable effort to prop herself up on her elbows.
Her eyes flicked from the syringe that was preloaded with heroin to Tyler’s smiling face.
One more, she thought as she extended her l
eft arm out to the man. Just one more…
Chase shook her head.
“I’m looking for Louisa,” she said through clenched teeth.
The room was damp and reeked of sweat and god knows what else. Even though Chase got the impression by the way her voice traveled that it wasn’t very deep, it was too dark to make out much more than a couple of yards in front of her. She was acutely aware that the ground underfoot was covered in sand — a common tactic that junkies used when the power and water were cut off so that they could just urinate and defecate on the floor — and that there were several soiled mattresses off to her right. In the air hung the vinegary scent of heroin, punctuated by the acrid odor of burnt crack cocaine.
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