by Jude Hardin
“Would it be possible for me to watch that video?” I said.
“I guess that would be all right. Could I see your PI license?”
“Sure.”
I showed her my license. She sat back down at the desk and opened her laptop. A few mouse clicks and a few key taps later, she motioned for me to come around where I could see the monitor. A man and a woman were walking across the parking lot toward an SUV. The images were dark and grainy, but I could see that the woman was wearing a jacket with some sort of logo printed on the back, and I could see that the man was tall and muscular. The woman’s hands were in the pockets of her jacket, and she was walking a couple of steps behind the man and a little to his right. As they approached the SUV, the woman handed something to the man with her left hand. The keys, maybe. He opened the driver’s side door. Once he was seated behind the steering wheel, the woman walked around to the other side of the vehicle. She was off camera now. The man closed the door. The windows were tinted, so he was no longer visible either. The brake lights flared and the headlights came on and the SUV pulled out of the space and exited the parking lot.
“That’s it?” I said.
“That was Kei Thrasher.”
“How do you know?”
“Because of his size, for one thing. Also, my husband had walked up to Mr. Thrasher’s apartment to have a word with him earlier that evening. When we watched the video, my husband recognized the clothes Mr. Thrasher was wearing. We think the woman was Anna Parks. We think she kidnapped Mr. Thrasher. See how she kept her right hand in her jacket pocket? She probably had a gun.”
I stood there and stared at the blank computer screen for a few seconds, thinking about what I knew so far. Anna Parks quit her job and moved out of her apartment. She wasn’t answering her phone or returning anyone’s calls, and none of her friends or acquaintances I’d spoken with had heard from her. Convicted felon Kei Thrasher, who had gone out on one date with Anna Parks, moved into the same apartment she had moved out of, apparently before the property managers had time to paint or clean the carpets. Now Thrasher was gone, and he wasn’t answering his phone or returning anyone’s calls either. All of that was bizarre enough. But if Mrs. McFadden’s theory was correct, it meant that Anna Parks returned to the complex in an SUV several days later and abducted Kei Thrasher at gunpoint.
I didn’t think so.
I appreciated Mrs. McFadden trying to help, but that just didn’t make any sense. It was all speculation. And pretty wild speculation at that.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I think I’m going to have to agree with Detective Hollinger. There’s no way to know who that woman was. The video’s too grainy to make out any facial features. And Kei Thrasher—if that was Kei Thrasher—didn’t appear to be doing anything he didn’t want to be doing. He willingly got into the vehicle. The woman even let him drive.”
“So what do you think happened?” Mrs. McFadden said.
“I don’t know. But I’m going to try to find out. Start the video again. I want you to freeze it when I tell you to.”
“Okay.”
She started the video, let it play for a few seconds.
“There,” I said.
She hit pause. I told her to zoom in on the license plate. The image was too dark and blurry and pixilated to make out any of the numbers or letters, but I could see that there was a dent in the rear bumper. I figured someone had backed into a pole or something. I told Mrs. McFadden to drag the frame a little to the left. I wanted to see the logo on the back of the woman’s jacket. It was also dark and blurry and pixilated, but it appeared to be a silkscreened image of a fat man carrying something above his head with one hand. Like a waiter in a restaurant carrying a tray of food to a table. A group of words had been printed below the man’s feet, but I couldn’t make them out.
Mrs. McFadden must have sensed my frustration.
“It’s piping hot,” she said.
“You can read that?”
“No, but I recognize the picture. It’s a pizza restaurant. I can’t remember the name of the place, but let me see if I can find it real quick.”
She clicked and tapped and found the logo and went to the website.
Stottolini’s.
After seeing the name, I remembered getting an advertisement and some coupons from them in the mail a while back. The Amberjack Heights location was only one of several in the state of Florida, and there had been a toll free number at the bottom of the ad for anyone interested in franchise opportunities.
“They deliver,” I said. “I wonder if the woman was an employee.”
“Must be. Why else would she be wearing one of their jackets?”
“So you still think it was Anna Parks?”
“I don’t know. But it should be easy enough to find out. Should I make the call, or do you want to do it?”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
I pulled out my cell phone and punched in the number.
9
The woman I talked to at our local Stottolini’s said she’d never heard of anyone named Anna Parks. I asked if anyone from the apartment complex had ordered a pizza for delivery last Thursday around eight o’clock.
“Probably,” she said. “We get calls from over there almost every night. But I couldn’t tell you the names of the people who placed orders or the apartment numbers or the times or anything. Only the manager has access to those records.”
“Does the name Kei Thrasher ring a bell?” I said. “He might be friends with one of your female deliver drivers.”
“No. Sorry. Never heard of him either.”
“One more question. Does one of the women working there drive a black SUV?”
“An SUV? No. They all drive small cars. Or small pickup trucks. Because of the gas mileage.”
“All right. Thanks so much for your time.”
I clicked off, turned back to Mrs. McFadden.
“I don’t know why the woman in the video was wearing a Stottlini’s jacket,” I said. “Apparently none of their delivery drivers has an SUV.”
“Maybe it was Anna Parks posing as a delivery driver. Maybe she put the jacket on so that when she knocked, Kei would look through the peephole and think his pizza had arrived. Then, when Kei opened the door, she pulled her gun out and made him walk down to the parking lot and get into the SUV. What do you think about that theory?”
I had a feeling Mrs. McFadden had watched too many mysteries on TV. That was what I thought about her theory.
But I didn’t tell her that.
“How would Anna have known that Kei ordered a pizza?” I said. “And why would she have wanted to kidnap him anyway?”
“I don’t know. But Kei was looking for Anna, and now they’re both missing. Doesn’t that seem kind of strange to you?”
“It does. I was hired to find Anna Parks, and I’m going to keep looking into this. But I really don’t think there’s anything on that video that’s going to help. I do appreciate you showing it to me, though. It was worth a try.”
“Okay. Well, let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.”
I told her to give me a call if Kei Thrasher came back to his apartment. I figured he would. I figured the young woman with the SUV was probably a recent acquaintance, maybe a customer at the bar where he worked. Maybe they’d gone somewhere together for a few days of fun. That was my theory. Thrasher didn’t seem like a very responsible guy. Not if the background check I’d done on him was any indication. He probably didn’t care about his job at DP’s Barbecue. He could find something else after the party was over. There were dozens of jobs just as good or better all over town.
Mrs. McFadden must have grabbed a can of air freshener as soon as I turned to exit the office. I heard the hiss of it being sprayed as I closed the door behind me.
I drove home and took a shower, and then I went outside and lifted the trash bags out of the trunk of my car and dumped their contents onto my driveway. There were some bags and cups and sand
wich wrappers from some fast food places and part of a pizza box from Stottolini’s and some miscellaneous junk that Anna Parks must have left behind when she moved. Old magazines and a broken desk lamp and a dish drainer and some partial boxes of pasta and some little complimentary bars of soap from a motel.
I was about to stuff everything back into the bags when something caught my eye. It was just a spec there on the pavement, a piece of card stock no bigger than a fingernail, but I recognized the printing on it. There was a D and part of a P. It was from DP’s Barbecue. It was a piece of the matchbook Thrasher had given to Jack Gilmore. I started looking around, and I found some more of the pieces. I picked them up and carried them inside and brushed them off my palm onto the dining room table, and then I turned the light on and sat down and started trying to reassemble the puzzle. Gilmore was right. Someone had written a phone number on the inside of the matchbook cover. I had five numbers there in front of me. I needed two more, assuming it was a local number.
I went back outside and sifted through the trash some more, found another piece, searched for another fifteen minutes or so and then gave up. I had six numbers now, and there were only ten possibilities for the seventh. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Which meant that I would have to make a maximum of ten calls before reaching the correct phone number.
Easy enough. But I didn’t have any idea who I was trying to call. The phone number on the inside of the matchbook cover could have belonged to anyone. Maybe it was Thrasher’s dentist. Or his mechanic. It was possible that the number belonged to his new lady friend with the SUV, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. It was just as possible that the number belonged to a veterinary clinic.
Which was what I got when I added a zero to my other six numbers. I told the lady who answered that I was a private investigator and that I was looking for a man named Kei Thrasher. She put me on hold while she looked through her files. No, there was nobody by that name who’d brought a pet to the clinic. I thanked her and hung up and crossed the zero off my list and added a one to my other six numbers. A clerk at a used bookstore answered. Never heard of Thrasher, but he let me know about the buy-two-get-one-free special they were having on paperbacks.
I tried a two with my other six numbers. A woman answered. I decided to modify my strategy. I told her that I was Kei Thrasher. I asked her how she was doing. Like a friend calling a friend.
“What did you say your name was again?” she said.
“Kei Thrasher.”
I heard some noise in the background, and then the woman’s voice was replaced by a man’s.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Just wanted to say hello.”
“What? What are you talking about, man?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“What is your problem? Why are you wasting my time? I already told you. No guarantees. No refunds. I need to tell Desmond to stop sending me crazy people.”
He hung up.
I opened my laptop and tried to use the phone number to find an address, but there was nothing listed. I figured the phone was probably one of those prepaid things you can buy at the discount stores. What they call a burner. I was probably never going to be able to find its owner, but at least I knew that my hunch about Desmond had been correct. He knew more than he’d told me. He’d put Thrasher in contact with someone, about something. No guarantees. No refunds. Thrasher must have bought something from the man with the prepaid phone. Probably something illegal. Drugs, maybe. Or a gun. Those were the two things that came to my mind immediately.
I walked out to the driveway and put the trash back into the bags, and then I set the bags out at the curb.
I called DP’s Barbecue and asked to speak with Desmond.
“Just a minute,” the guy who answered the phone said.
He put me on hold.
I hung up.
Sometimes it’s better to do things in person. This was one of those times.
10
I walked in and sat on a stool. The bar wasn’t busy. There was only one other customer, a guy in a black leather jacket sipping on a beer and munching on some peanuts. There were five vacant stools between him and me. Desmond was behind the bar. He slid the stemmed daiquiri glass he’d been polishing into the overhead rack and walked over to where I was sitting.
“What can I get for you?” he said.
“We need to talk. In private.”
“You still looking for Kei?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you everything I know.”
“No you didn’t.”
I grabbed a cocktail napkin and wrote down the phone number from the matchbook, and then I rotated the napkin so Desmond could see it.
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” he said.
“No guarantees. No refunds.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. Don’t make me embarrass you in front of your customer over there.”
Desmond sighed. He walked over to the guy in the black leather jacket and asked him if he needed anything else right now. The guy ordered another beer. Desmond pulled a bottle out of the cooler and opened it and set it in front of him, and then he walked back over to me.
“Meet me outside,” he said.
I got up and exited the restaurant and stood on the sidewalk by a pair of newspaper machines. One of them was red, and the other was yellow. The yellow one said FREE TAKE ONE. So I did. It was a paper called Amberjack Nights. Restaurant reviews, movie times, scheduled entertainment at the local clubs. Lots of advertisements and coupons. There was even an ad for Stottolini’s in there. For every pizza sold, one dollar would be donated to a certain nonprofit organization. It was an organization I’d never heard of, but it seemed like a nice gesture on the part of the company. I was skimming through an article about one of the charter fishing boats at the marina when Desmond joined me.
“There’s a good reason why I didn’t tell you about that phone number,” he said.
“Let me guess. You were afraid that the guy on the other end of it would kill you if he found out.”
“Exactly.”
“You don’t have to worry about it,” I said. “I don’t have any interest in that guy. I don’t have any interest in Kei Thrasher, either, other than what might be pertinent to locating Anna Parks. So talk to me, Desmond. I’m not trying to get you into any trouble.”
“I was in the weeds one night. Kei helped me out. It was kind of a big deal, because he wasn’t supposed to be handling any liquor. He could have lost his job. I told him I owed him one. That’s when he asked if I knew where he could buy a gun.”
“Why did he want a gun?”
“Someone took a shot at him. You know about that, right?”
“No. Was that the incident at the apartment complex?”
“Yeah. And he said that someone had been following him.”
“Did he give you any details about that?” I said. “Like what kind of vehicle it was or anything?”
“No. He didn’t say much about it. Just that he was being followed. It was weird. Kei had been doing all right for a while. Working here and saving up some money to get an apartment and everything, and then it seemed like all this bad stuff started happening after he went to the hospital last week.”
“Why did he go to the hospital?”
“He cut his finger, and it got infected. He was just there one night. They sent him home with an IV in his arm. He showed it to me that last night we worked together, said a nurse was coming to his place every afternoon to give him some medicine.”
“He went to the hospital here in town?”
“I guess so. He didn’t say, but I don’t know why he would have gone anywhere else. Anyway, that’s all I know. I need to get back to work.”
“The illegal sale of firearms is a serious crime,” I said. “You should probably think twice before you give anyone else that phone number.”
“You said you wouldn’t
tell anyone about that.”
“I won’t. Not this time. But things like that have a habit of coming back around.”
He nodded, followed the sidewalk around to the entrance and walked inside.
There’s a six-lane thoroughfare appropriately named Main Street that runs north and south from one end of Amberjack Heights to the other. Unless you want to waste a lot of time zigzagging through side streets, it’s the only way to get anywhere in town. Which means there’s quite a bit of traffic, especially at two o’clock in the afternoon when the school buses are running. It took me almost half an hour to get from DP’s Barbecue to the sheriff’s department substation over on Oak Street. I parked and walked inside and asked the uniformed officer at the reception desk if it would be possible to speak with a detective named Hollinger.
The officer asked to see some identification, and I showed it to him. He asked the nature of my business, and I told him. He punched five digits into his desk phone and waited for an answer and relayed the information to the person on the other end, and then he told me to have a seat in one of the chairs against the wall with the blue stripe on it. I walked over there and sat down. I wondered what the wall with the red stripe on it was for. There was nobody sitting over there. In fact, there was nobody else in the lobby. Just the duty officer and me. It was very quiet and boring. No old magazines to look at or anything. But I didn’t have to wait long. There was a door to the left of the desk with a sign on it that said POLICE ONLY. A few minutes after the officer made the call, the door opened and a man walked into the reception area.
“Mr. Retro?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Detective Hollinger. Come on back to my office.”
I followed him through the door and down a long hallway. His office was the last one on the right. He motioned for me to have a seat in one of the wooden chairs facing his desk. There were two of them. I chose the one closest to the door. Hollinger sat behind the desk and opened a manila file folder and asked me to state my full name.
