by CJ Lyons
"At least I don't have to get the blood work," Megan continued, legs crossed on the front seat as she swung her foot in time with Led Zeppelin's Black Dog.
"He said you didn't have to get the blood work today."
Good thing because Lucy was already losing precious time taking Megan home. Plus she needed to change clothes—couldn't go out on a high-risk missing child case looking like, as Megan so bluntly put it, a slut. She wished she'd have time for a shower, she stank of sweat and algae and adrenalin. And snakes.
"If your throat culture is negative Monday, then we'll take you in for the tests."
"But Mom—"
"No buts."
Megan's lips blanched, pressed together in a thin line. Lucy pressed her hand on Megan's shoulder, stroked her upper arm. "It's okay. Either Dad or I will be there with you."
Megan shrugged her hand away. Lucy swallowed her sigh. She couldn't remember the last time Megan had welcomed her touch. Since before they left Virginia.
"If I feel better on Monday, can I at least play soccer?"
"We'll see, no promises."
Megan blew her breath out in a sigh more sorrowful than a funeral dirge. As if Lucy had just condemned her to a fate worse than death. Lucy was glad Megan had no idea how lucky she was that skipping a soccer game was the worst catastrophe life could offer.
After she dropped Megan off, she had to face a parent's greatest nightmare. A fourteen-year-old missing since sometime yesterday afternoon—at least eighteen hours gone already. Multi-jurisdiction nightmare, divorced parents, evidence the kid may have covered her tracks, no witnesses, delay in reporting—all conspiring against their chances of finding the girl alive.
Apparently the parents wielded some political clout and were waving it like a club, unhappy with the local response. So it had been dropped into Lucy's lap. Probably with some relief.
Exactly the kind of case the SAFE squad and Crimes Against Children initiative were designed to handle. The kind of case that rarely had a happily-ever-after ending.
Statistically, if Ashley Yeager had been taken against her will, then she was already dead. If she'd been coerced away from home, then there was a good chance she was either dead or being prepared to enter the trade as a sex worker.
Best case scenario, she ran away and right this moment was hiding out at a friend's house, laughing at all the commotion she'd caused….Unfortunately, by the time local law enforcement called in Lucy and her people, things were usually way beyond best case scenario.
When Lucy and her team were called in, it usually meant worst case nightmares.
She pulled the Subaru into the driveway of their new home—a remodeled Victorian in a gentrified area of West Homestead. Pittsburgh's entire South Side was undergoing a renaissance, its flats and slopes bristling with new construction and renovations. They had been lucky to find this house so close to her work and Nick's office and in their price range.
Lucy herded Megan into the foyer and reset the alarm. "Your dad has clients until one. Will you be all right until then?"
"Mom, I'm not a baby." She gave an irritated shake of her head and started to flounce away, implying Lucy had gone senile.
Lucy was running late, a kid's life ticking away with the seconds, but she couldn't restrain her need. She caught Megan from behind, giving her a bear hug and a noisy smooch on the top of the head, inhaling the almond-vanilla scent of Megan's shampoo. She'd liked the No More Tears scent better—it felt safer with its memories of Megan splashing in her baby tub, Lucy's hands supporting her; nights spent with her and Nick bleary eyed with exhaustion, rocking Megan, watching over her...
"Mom!" Megan protested, breaking free. "You smell awful. Gross." She stomped into the living room where she threw herself onto the sofa and reached for the TV remote.
Lucy reluctantly started up the steps. Ten minutes later, face scrubbed, hair combed, a fresh swipe of deodorant, and a change of clothes, she was racing back down them again. "Remember, drink lots of fluid and tell your dad you had ibuprofen at eight, so you're not due again—"
"Mom, would you just go already? I can handle it. Go on, they're waiting."
"Okay, okay. I'm out of here. Love ya!"
Apparently the last was too soporific for the Queen of Apathy, who gave Lucy a shrug and a wave, muttering, "Yeah, right."
"I can't stay long, Mom." Jimmy gently combed no-rinse shampoo through his mother's silver-white locks. Her hair was heavy, thick. Once upon a time it had been dark as ebony, her crowning glory. The nurses here at Golden Years did a good enough job, but Alicia always insisted that Jimmy was the only one who could take care of her hair.
Alicia patted her hand against his thigh and shifted in her chair so that he could reach better. "Tell me all about your new girl, Jimmy. I want to hear everything."
He grasped her hair above the comb so that when he tugged against snarls it wouldn't hurt. Just the way she had taught him. "I think she might be the one. She's smart, really brave, and so beautiful."
"How old is she? Not too old, I hope. I keep telling you, Jimmy, a man like you, he needs a young woman to keep up with him. Just like your father had me."
He closed his eyes, swaying in time with her words. Her voice was whisper soft, his one constant companion until her health had forced her to leave his side three years ago. Even so, he visited every day.
"Your father was only a few years younger than you are now when he came and stole me away. Climbed up on the porch roof, slipped into my window like Errol Flynn, so handsome he was. Rescued me, carried me away before my father even knew it. Good thing too. He would have shot us both." She shuddered. "Or worse."
Jimmy wrapped his arms around her from behind. She was so petite that it was no effort at all to reach around her wasted body. Years of unchecked diabetes had stolen her vision, aged her beyond her seventy-eight years and now threatened to finish her off if the doctors couldn't fix her kidneys. Her hand fluttered up, landing on his arm.
"How old were you?" he asked, following their familiar litany.
"I was fourteen. But I knew enough of the world, that's for sure. Enough to know that anything was better than staying in my father's house. If not for your father, big, brave, bold, beautiful man that he was, I would have died. He saved me."
Jimmy set the comb aside, rested his head against hers, inhaling the lemony scent of the shampoo. So much better than the sickly-sweet-dead-flesh smell that shimmered from the other denizens of the Golden Years Home. "Tell me about my father."
"Ah, how I wish you knew him. Even for one day. Being near him was like being near the sun. He was so brilliant you had to sometimes shut your eyes or be blinded by the beauty of him." Her hand tightened on his arm. "I would have done anything for the man."
"Why didn't he stay after I was born?"
She straightened, dropping his arm and pulling away, leaving him cold and alone. That question was not part of the ritual. He'd never dared to ask it before, but he needed to know.
"I don't know what you're talking about." She snapped each word between clicks of her dentures. "If you're going to talk like that about your father, then maybe you should just go, be with your girl and forget all about me." She rocked the chair to one side, away from him.
"No, Mom. I'm sorry. Please don't send me away." He knelt at her side, reaching for her, but she blindly batted his hands away.
"Why not? When I'm dead, you'll be all alone."
Ice seared Jimmy's belly. "Don't say that. You can't leave me."
"A man is nothing without his family. Your father taught me that."
"Tell me more. Please. About my father, how he saved you."
"Ahh…your father." A stray shaft of sunlight spun past her, leaving her face in shadows, giving her the illusion of youth. "You'll never be half the man he was. Never."
Jimmy had no answer to that other than to lay his head in her lap as he knelt on the hard, cold floor. Finally she relented, feathered her fingers through his hair. "Poor, p
oor boy. You'll never find a woman as good for you as I am. Maybe now that I'm dying, you'd be better off dead too."
Chapter 5
Saturday, 10:04 am
Damn, she'd seen riots less chaotic than this. Lucy hit her horn, attracting the attention of the patrolman manning the barricades. He held a hand up, ignoring her as he argued with several civilians. A TV crew set up their equipment not ten feet away from him. This was what happened when a case was getting older and colder by the second and an investigation went from being a case file to a political agenda to a full-blown media storm.
All with one girl's life hanging in the balance—and now very much in the spotlight.
The neighborhood was an upper-middle class development in Plum Borough, a suburb northeast of Pittsburgh. Large stone and brick homes shoe-horned to fit on small lots lining streets named Deer Run and Pheasant Way. The development was surrounded by farmland and forested acres holding their breath, waiting to be bulldozed in the next round of suburban sprawl.
Lucy counted squad cars from Plum Borough, the Allegheny County Sheriff, neighboring Monroeville, and the State Police. Parked haphazardly between the various squad cars blocking the cul-de-sac were several unmarked cars: brown Fords courtesy of the Staties, white Impalas from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.
The mother lode was the large black RV, bright yellow letters, large enough to be read a block away, proclaiming it the Incident Command Center. It held the spotlight, straddling the driveway of a beige brick two-story house with no porch and rigid, unwelcoming landscaping.
Worse were the two news vans at the end of the street. She wondered who called them, who was thirsting for the limelight. It wasn't like they could do more than offer a description of the missing girl—with no vehicle involved they couldn't even issue an AMBER alert.
Tapping her wedding ring against the steering wheel, Lucy blew out her breath in a string of expletives, knowing it would be her last chance to indulge herself. Part of her job was to play nice with all the other boys in blue.
She exited the car and strode up to the patrolman. His cheeks were flushed, sweat rolling from below his hatband as he whirled on her. "Lady, get back in the car!"
Given the noise and crowd and chaos—including, she now saw, a few enterprising kids who had set up a lemonade stand on the curb—she might have forgiven him. If not for the fact that his hand went to rest on the butt of his gun, levering it a fraction of an inch from his holster.
Bad instinct if you're directing traffic at a media event crowded with civilians and the press.
The guy was obviously not only out of his element, he looked exhausted—she'd bet his shift had ended hours ago but he'd been stuck out here and forgotten.
"Officer Nowicki," she read his name tag, "I'm Supervisory Special Agent Lucia Theresa Guardino." She smiled and held her credentials up where he could see them.
He squinted at her, comparing her likeness to the photo on her credentials. "FBI?"
"Yes sir. I know my vehicle is in the way here, but I need to get up to the scene as soon as possible. Do you know who the responding officer is? I'll need to speak with him as well."
"That would be me, ma'am."
"Wonderful. Tell you what. Why don't you call your commanding officer and tell him I'm interviewing you and to send someone to relieve you while you escort me to the scene and we chat. Oh and, if someone could possibly move my vehicle to a more convenient location?" She dangled her keys and he took them. "I don’t want it in your way."
Nowicki nodded and spoke into his radio. When he'd finished, she asked, "So what's the story?"
"Mom got an anonymous call at 3:18 am. Found the girl missing and called us. Apparently the girl told mom she'd be babysitting, but when mom called the family they said they'd never asked her to babysit. So when we got here, we thought it was a runaway. No signs of forced entry, no signs of anything except the kid and her stuff was gone."
"Kid have a history? Anything in NCIC?"
"Nope. But then after dad arrives—they're divorced—mom insists the phone call was a ransom demand."
Nowicki's replacement arrived and they began up the street to the end of the cul-de-sac and the beige brick house.
"Really? So we've got a ransom kidnapping?" Lucy wondered why she wasn't called sooner. Ransom kidnappings were not only rare, they were the kind of case a small town department immediately booted to folks with more resources.
"See, there's the problem. Looks like the kid went voluntarily, even covered her tracks, last time she was seen was yesterday at school."
"But the phone call?"
"Mom says it was a man's voice. He said 'we got what you want,' laughed, then hung up."
"Sounds like a prank call. Could just be a coincidence." Lucy walked faster, trying to process all the pieces of the puzzle. What a mess.
"And then you've got dad. Who's apparently a friend of Pittsburgh's mayor, who's a friend of the Sheriff—"
Ah, that explained a lot as well. They reached the scene at the end of the street where there were less civilians but if anything, more chaos.
"Thanks, Officer Nowicki."
"Good luck." He scrambled back towards the safe haven of perimeter duty.
Ashley Yeager's home was a brick two-story house, too large for the lot it sat on. It was the kind of house kids avoided on Halloween because they knew they'd either get no answer or a scrawny box of raisins. But the kind they'd also never TP or egg—the house was too grim, too empty-hearted to make the tricks any fun.
A blonde stood in the middle of the barren lawn, beating her fists against a man's chest as he tried in vain to restrain her. Her silver satin robe had come unbelted, its hem trailing on the ground. Her feet were bare and muddy. The man wore crisply pressed navy slacks and a matching silk polo.
He grabbed the woman's arms and held her in place. The expression on his face was as blank as the brick wall behind them.
"It's all your fault!" the woman screamed.
A group of men surrounded the couple, none of them attempting to intervene, all watching and listening closely. No one seemed to notice the news crews at the end of the block, their telephoto lenses aimed at the gathering.
Lucy pushed past several uniformed officers, noting representatives from several jurisdictions: Plum, Monroeville, Allegheny County. The Staties and PBP reps were in plainclothes wearing various shades of brown suits—a good color for crime scenes, it hid most of everything you might come in contact with.
Lucy had exchanged her jeans and too-tight tank top for khakis and a pair of white Reeboks. Had hoped to make amends with Megan by wearing the twin-set she'd gotten Lucy for her birthday, even though the light blue knit would make her look washed out and sallow if the TV crews caught her in it. Which was only one of many reasons why she had no intention of allowing that to happen.
Although the Allegheny County Sheriff had called the FBI in for assistance, Lucy had no intention of strutting onto center stage and taking over their case. Her greatest value lay behind the scenes, far from the spotlight.
The mother's hysterics continued unabated. From the exasperated looks on the cops' faces, Lucy guessed this had gone on for quite some time. She pushed through to the inner sanctum, a cluster of three men, two in suits, one in a brass-riddled uniform.
"Who's Incident Commander?" she asked.
"I am," all three said at once, confirming her suspicions. Cluster-fuck with a capital fuck.
The three men stared at her. Since she arrived in Pittsburgh, she'd begun a whirlwind tour of local copshops, introducing herself to law enforcement brass of the one hundred and twenty-three Pennsylvania agencies the SAFE/CAC unit would be working with. She recognized one of the men: Dunmar of the Allegheny County Sheriff's department. Ahh...the man with the fancy toys.
He and his boss were the only cops involved who were elected officials. She'd bet a dozen Krispy Kremes he was the one with the hotline to the local media.
"Nice to see you agai
n, Chief Deputy," she said, extending her hand and plastering a smile on her face. From his scowl it was obvious her invitation to join the game hadn't been his idea.
"I'm so glad you were able to bring your new incident command van out here to help us today." She bolstered her lie by widening her smile until she feared her face would crack. Tact, diplomacy, team building—she needed these men as much as they needed her.
Not to mention a missing fourteen-year-old girl who should be home right now listening to bubble-gum pop rock and painting her toenails. Or whatever Ashley Yeager did to amuse herself in the large, looming house that reminded Lucy of San Quentin.
"Would you mind introducing me to your colleagues?"
"Uh, sure." Dunmar jerked a thumb at the brown-haired man in the tan suit to his right. "Don Burroughs from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police's Major Crimes Squad, and this," the thumb waggled to indicate a tan-haired man in a brown suit on his left, "is Adam Lowery from the State Police."
Dunmar didn't introduce her, as if he thought that would make her disappear. "Nice to meet you, gentlemen. I'm Supervisory Special Agent Lucy Guardino from the FBI's Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement Squad."
"Sexual assault? We don't need—"
She interrupted Lowery. "I'm sure you're all aware that crimes against children fall under the SAFE unit's purview. That includes abductions as well as high risk juvenile runaways. Do we know which we're dealing with here?"
"Runaway," the Statie said.
"Snatched," Dunmar said.
Burroughs, the PBP detective remained silent. He was too busy checking her out, his body posture re-aligning itself into a wide-based stance, hands on his hips, pushing his suit coat back, revealing his very big gun.
Ahh, one of those. She'd bet he didn't walk, not like other mere mortals, instead he swaggered.
Ignoring his smile so wide that she could count all his teeth if she was inclined to take the time, she continued, "All right then. My job is to coordinate, to help in anyway possible."
