My Soul to Keep

by Melanie Wells

  “She’s off today. We were planning to meet for lunch. I was going to call her after I called you. Where are you, anyway?”

  “Driving back from Shreveport, Louisiana.”

  “What on earth …”

  I told her about Brigid and the blog and about Anael and Joe Riley.

  “So the guy who was so sweet to Christine in x-ray …” The question lingered unfinished between us. It seemed too ridiculous to say out loud.

  “I guess so, yeah. I checked with Parkland. They have no record of anyone named Joe Riley in that day. Inpatient or out.”

  “And Christine asked if God sent him?”

  “Yep. He told her she didn’t need to be afraid of anything.”

  Liz sighed. “Let’s hope he’s as accurate as Earl is.”

  “Call me if you hear anything.”

  “Likewise.”

  I drove for a while longer, then spotted a Starbucks and pulled over to splash some water on my face, scrub my hands with my recently purchased Phisoderm, and get something to drink. Another double-shot latte might well kill me, I was so overloaded on caffeine, but I didn’t think I could stay awake without it. I ordered a turkey sandwich and a sugar cookie too, just to hedge against caffeine-induced heart arrhythmia.

  I people-watched as I ate, impressed by the astonishing variety of individuals parading through the place—a small-town Starbucks on I-20. I drank my coffee and wondered about their stories.

  How did God keep track of it all? Was there a logarithm on a blackboard somewhere, a theorem to prove? Had Peter Terry deciphered it? Or did they all have access?

  I made it back to my house by midafternoon and collapsed in the sunshine on my front porch, rocking back and forth in the swing as the lottery balls continued to bounce around in my head.

  When I’d recovered from my drive, I started making phone calls again. I hated feeling disconnected from everyone. It amplified my mania to somewhere between hysteria and full-on panic.

  Maria was the first one I reached.

  “Did you hear Christine had another attack?” she asked.

  “You talked to Liz.”

  “We had lunch.”

  “So they made it.”

  “We were late going, but by the time they got through Emergency, they were ready for something to eat.”

  “They didn’t admit her to the hospital?”

  “There’s really not much they can do at this point.”

  “Liz said they were going to change her meds.”

  “There’s no point,” Maria said. “It’s not asthma.”

  “I know it’s not.” I heard her sniffle. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer. I could hear the wet, drippy sounds people make when they’re crying.

  “Something’s happening to him, Dylan.” She blew her nose.

  “I know. Did Christine say anything else about him?”

  “She just seemed agitated and afraid. We couldn’t settle her down at lunch. She wouldn’t eat anything.”

  “Have you talked to Enrique?”

  “He’s here with me.”

  “Put him on.”

  The phone changed hands, and Martinez said hello.

  “Is there any news at all?” I asked. “Anything on the car?”

  “We’ve tracked down every white Ford Fairlane of any model year registered in the DFW area. They’re checking them out now.”

  “What about Phoenix? Are you doing the same thing there?”

  “They’re working on it.”

  “How many Fairlanes are there in Dallas?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Any of the owners have criminal records?”

  He sighed. “Why don’t you just apply for my job?”

  “Well?”

  “Two.”

  “Where?”

  “One in Mesquite. One over off Harry Hines.”

  “Where off Harry Hines?”

  A long pause. “Near the hospital.”

  “So the kidnapper may have known Nicholas.”

  Another pause. “Possibly.”

  “Or Maria.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Address?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Please? I just want to know. I swear I won’t go over there.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Is anyone over there looking for the car?”

  “What do you think?”

  “They’re there now, aren’t they?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Great. Maybe we’re getting close. Are you going over?”

  “Ybarra is on it, Dylan. We’ve got cops crawling all over that neighborhood. If he’s there, we’re going to find him. Today.” He must have known what I was thinking. “You stay away from there.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not going to—”

  “I mean it. If we’re closing in on this guy, we don’t need you nosing around and tipping him off.”

  “Understood.”

  “You stay put. I’m not kidding.”

  “I get it, Martinez. Don’t worry. I’ll stay out of it.”

  We hung up.

  I paced around on the porch for a while, then walked the yard and checked my snake traps, which of course were all empty. As the sun began to slip behind my sycamore tree, I went inside, poured myself a glass of David’s favorite New Zealand Sauvignon blanc, and fired up my computer.

  It took me awhile to find Gordon Pryne’s blog. There was another Gordon Pryne, a landscape photographer in Maine, whose listings occupied the first five pages of Google hits. I weeded through those, then found my way to a little four-pager at JusticeForGordon.com. It didn’t have quite the traffic or Web prominence that John Mulvaney’s did. The home page was one of Gordon Pryne’s mug shots—not a particularly inviting image. It was a young version of him, not the ragged, dried-up man I knew. But he was clearly a dangerous sort. Scrawny neck, that wild shock of hair, bad skin, angry green eyes the color of pond water. Whoever was managing his blog wasn’t exactly focusing on design, marketing, or PR.

  I scanned the site, which was similar to the other prisoner sites I’d seen. Proclamations of innocence, tirades against the American justice system. There were none of the background photos like John’s site had—no baby pictures or hometown references. But there was a message board.

  I clicked on the message board, made up an e-mail address and a screen name, and logged in as a new member. Apparently Gordon’s brother was the Webmaster.

  There was lots of back and forth about court dates. Some notes about Pryne’s mother’s impending death. She wanted to see her son out of jail before she died.

  “Fat chance,” I said out loud.

  I scanned the message page, but there was nothing of note. A few conversations between buddies of Pryne’s who were in and out of jail. One thread about a package delivery. One thread about a bank deposit—I guess Pryne conducted some business with friends via the message board.

  Back to the home page, perusing the site for the flowery language Brigid had referred to. I finally found it in one of the innocence rants: “Gordon Pryne is not the criminal you have seen in the papers. He is a family man, innocent and clean as the driven snow.”

  A family man? Who made up that drivel? The only child I knew of was Nicholas. And Nicholas was the product of a violent rape, the same crime for which Pryne was serving his current stretch of time.

  Disgusted, I left the site and did a search for the online records of sex offenders registered in Texas. The zip codes near the hospital were pocked with them, which was no surprise. Parkland is in the barrio on the west side of town, not far from all those seedy strip joints on Harry Hines. I was willing to bet that half the men in that zip code had done jail time for something. Pryne had lived in that zip code, come to think of it. At a dump near Northwest Highway and Harry Hines called the Circle Inn.

  I printed out the map, yanking it out of the printer and staring at the little yellow
stars pinpointing the spots. They all centered around the intersection of Northwest Highway and Harry Hines. Not far from the house where the Fairlane plates had been stolen.

  I felt my heart jump. Martinez had said they were over there right now looking for the Fairlane. We were close. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name.

  I looked around the room. “You’re going down, you know that?” I said to the ether. “We’re going to snatch that little boy right back out of your filthy white hands and take him home to his mother where he belongs.”

  The clock buzzed to a stop.

  35

  I SAT THERE TAPPING the tabletop for a solid hour trying to figure out what to do next. What I wanted to do was get in my truck and drive over to Harry Hines and join the hunt. But Martinez was right. I couldn’t go over there. Armed men were combing the neighborhood looking for a kidnapper. Any interference could turn out to be disastrous. But I couldn’t just sit on my hands, either. I finally grabbed my keys and headed that direction.

  I stopped down the street from the first address I’d printed out, looking up and down the road to get my bearings. I backed my truck into an alley and checked out the neighborhood. Mostly postwar-era houses with siding in various states of disrepair and sparse, unkempt lawns. Almost every block, though, had some holdout who tended rosebushes, watered the lawn, or placed a pot of flowers on the porch. You had to admire the determination.

  There weren’t many people out at this time of the evening. Yellow light shone through windows up and down the street. Blue TV screens flickered in living rooms. The neighborhood looked completely normal. You’d never know all those cops were there. Wherever they were, they were discreet.

  I don’t know what I was hoping to see. Some guy walking down the street wearing a sandwich board that said, “Shoot me, I’m the kidnapper”? After a few minutes, I started up the truck and threw the transmission into gear. I pulled into the street and began passing liquor stores, gas stations, convenience stores.

  I began stopping at each one, hitting all the businesses on the south side of the street. At every stop, I went inside and spent a couple of minutes talking to whoever was behind the counter, asking them about the white Fairlane. They’d all seen the news reports. The ones who spoke English took my card and said they’d call if they saw or heard anything.

  I was just about to give up my quest when I spotted one business I knew a little about—a strip club called Caligula. Gordon Pryne had been a customer there, which meant it was a hangout for users and dealers. Exactly the place where the guy in the sketch would hang out.

  I pulled into the club parking lot and sat there for a while, watching men park their cars and walk in. After a few minutes, I threw my weight against the squawking truck door, squared my shoulders, and went inside.

  Caligula is on Northwest Highway—a major thoroughfare situated between the wealthier parts of Dallas and DFW airport. It’s one of those places you drive by regularly, averting your eyes, and then forget about as soon as you’ve made it around the bend. Among strip joints—already a foul business, to my mind—Caligula had a reputation for being one of the seediest. The Metro section of the paper referenced it occasionally as a crime scene. I knew it had been shut down for a number of years—the door boarded, the sign dark—until a year or so ago.

  At any rate, suffice it to say, I’d never been to a strip joint, never considered what it might be like to go into one. And never imagined myself stepping into this one, of all places. But here I was, yanking the door open and stalking up to the bouncer like I knew what I was doing.

  I stopped short. The man’s biceps were the size of melons. His black T-shirt and jeans were stretched taut over a superhero body—enormous shoulders, muscular bulges, tiny waist, and chiseled quads. Beside him stood a live Barbie doll—Strip Club Barbie. Same measurements as Malibu Barbie but a tinier, sluttier outfit. I’d never seen that particular shade of blond hair, but it was somewhere between egg-yolk yellow and cream-cheese white. Tattoos fanned out from her bellybutton to her G-string.

  Strip Club Barbie looked me over. “Twenty-dollar cover.”

  I felt my face flush. “I’m not a really a customer.” I looked around, as though someone might catch me here and send me to the principal’s office. “I just wanted to ask the manager a couple of questions.”

  “Twenty-dollar cover,” she said again.

  I reached in my bag, found a ten and nine ones. “All I have is nineteen.”

  Her face didn’t move.

  I leaned in. “Listen. Do I look like your regular customers?”

  A barely perceptible smile. “You’d be surprised.”

  “I doubt it. But I’m not here for the show. I swear. I’d just like to ask the manager some questions.”

  “Reporter or cop?”

  “Psychologist.”

  The man with the melon biceps raised his eyebrows. “You a shrink?”

  “Yep.”

  “I got a problem with my wife,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t get her to leave me.” He threw back his head and laughed.

  “I can probably help you with that.”

  He cocked his head toward the door, waving me in. “Straight through, all the way to the back on the left. Name’s Hardy.”

  He refused my nineteen bucks, so I stuffed it back in my bag, pulled open the door, and stepped inside.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I found myself in a small entryway dominated by an enormous fish tank. A thick velvet curtain walled off the little room from the rest of the club. I’d have to pull back that curtain—touch it personally with my hands—if I wanted to get back there. I grabbed one of the free newspapers from the stand by the fish tank and used it like a glove, shoving the curtain aside and stepping into what my grandmother would have labeled dramatically, a “den of iniquity.”

  The music was loud and thunky, the room’s air stale and humid, the lighting nonexistent except for the spots aimed at three long runways jutting out into the room between tables with weak candles on them. A few women were gyrating on the runways.

  In spite of myself, I stopped and stared.

  I should add here that it is an essential truth in the universe that all women obsessively compare themselves to one another. Why we engage in such futility is one of life’s great mysteries. But as any married man knows, this should be accepted as fact without argument.

  It’s inevitable. It’s a reflex. Just make peace with it now.

  So as I stood there, mouth open, staring at the room in front of me, I gave the dancers the once-over, looking for the usual suspects: sag, cellulite, poor muscle tone, jiggles. I’m happy to report that all the dancers checked out as completely average in every department. Except, of course, in the areas that were surgically enhanced. But that’s another conversation.

  Feeling better about my thighs than I had in months, I sauntered back to the office, past a succession of seemingly regular-looking men. None of them were drooling or making inappropriate sounds or gestures or anything like that. In fact, several tables held groups of men who weren’t watching the dancers at all. Stacks of paper covered one four-top, its occupants punching numbers into calculators just like they were sitting around a conference table at the office.

  I shook my head—not exactly the scene I’d expected—and found the office door. A sign on the door read “Private—Do NOT Enter!”

  I knocked.

  No response.

  I knocked again.

  Still no response.

  The third knock was the charm. I heard someone push a desk chair back and stalk to the door. It flew open, and I was staring at a lovely woman in a tailored business suit. She was about my age.

  “Um, hi. I’m looking for … the manager? Mr. Hardy?”

  “I’m Eileen Hardy. What can I do for you?”

  I failed to keep the raw consternation out of my voice. “You’re the manager?”

  She shif
ted her weight to one foot and crossed her arms. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Could I come in?” I glanced back at the dance floor. “It’s a little loud out here.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No. Just an interested party.”

  “Interested in what?”

  “Nicholas Chavez.”

  I couldn’t tell if the name registered, but with the last week’s news coverage, unless she’d been in a coma the past week, it should have rung a loud, clanging bell. Eileen Hardy stepped back. I walked in and looked around the room. I could have been standing in any office—drab furniture, industrial fluorescents, putty-colored file cabinets. A whiteboard on the wall had a list of girls’ names, along with their shifts. I scanned the list: Bambii, Freedom, Sugar. There were fifteen of them.

  She led me to a seat, then settled herself in opposite me, crossing her legs and waiting for me to begin. Her gaze was steady. If I didn’t know what she did for a living, I’d have thought she was a lawyer or something. I probably would have invited her for coffee.

  “I didn’t expect you to be a woman,” I said at last.

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  “Are you the owner? Or what?”

  “I’m the manager and part owner.”

  “Do you mind if I ask how you got into this line of work? I mean, I’d think places like this would be managed by men.”

  “Now why would you think that?” she said, clearly enjoying my discomfort. She got up, walked over to a credenza, and poured us both some Pellegrino. She handed me a glass and sat down again.

  “Well, uh, I guess I assumed since it’s a club for men … I mean …”

  “Ninety percent of the employees are women,” she said. “Don’t you think they could benefit from female management?”

  I let out a breath. “I hadn’t thought about that. Good point.”

  She pointed toward a stack of paint swatches and floor plans piled on her desk. “If you know this place, I’m sure you know the old Caligula. We bought it last fall. We’re gutting the place next month—completely redoing everything. We’ve hired a new chef, and we’re holding auditions for new dancers. Our goal is to elevate the whole place to a new level.”