There was nothing on the tip lines, as usual. Nothing from the four investigators she’d hired in different regions of the country. But she would never stop. Never forget every moment of the night he was taken, ignore the horrors he might be going through, nor forgive her own failure. Never.
She lay down on the bed in the Orlando hotel room, dark thoughts swirling. Disturbing dreams controlled her sleep regardless of where she slept each night.
A few years before, a professor at Stanford University had taught her techniques to manage the nightmares. She had listened and learned the method. Meditate. Focus on the positive. Bright and shiny thoughts. Simple pleasures. Fresh cotton, green fields, the crunch of newly fallen snow. Happy memories. Family celebrations. A shared past. A future to long for. Drift into peace.
She remembered everything he had said, but she was too exhausted to heed his advice.
She slipped into sleep where her familiar demons lurked.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Denver, 3:37 AM
6 years earlier
Night shifts were like this. She’s edgy and dulled at the same time. Exhausted, hungry, her stomach growls. It’s late. She wants to leave, but she has more of the endless work to complete before she can rest. She notices everything. Takes notes. Later, she’ll write a compelling story. Again.
She is seated opposite the desk in the prosecutor’s office, a war zone of its own kind. The room is small and cheaply furnished. The desk has been abused by dozens of young prosecutors. Her pantyhose are snagged where a gouge in the wood caught her left thigh earlier, leaving an angry red scratch on lightly-tanned skin. She feels the still-fresh stinging. She is cold in the drafty room. Her nipples are visible through her bra and the pink silk blouse she’s wearing. The rose scent from the candle burning on the window sill tickles her nostrils but can’t hide the stench of fear in the room because that stink has seeped into the walls and carpet like old cigar smoke.
Glaring fluorescent lights overhead cast a green hue on Jess’s blonde hair. Mr. and Mrs. Axel are seated in the plastic chairs, waiting for the prosecutor to review their petition, to sign the request for a restraining order against the worthless slime who has been threatening their five-year-old daughter. The form is incomplete, only a few of the blank lines filled out in shaky blue ballpoint, skips in the ink where Mr. Axel has tried to write over the greasy spots on the page. The prosecutor smooths the folds from the paper, feels its rough edges.
Mr. Axel is about the prosecutor’s age, Jess thinks. Mrs. Axel appears a bit younger. Unlike most of the unending train of victims Jess has interviewed during her final college internship, Mr. Axel is neatly dressed. He’s wearing polished shoes and black socks instead of scuffed sneakers and white ones.
His khakis are inexpertly pressed, the fresh crease is sharper than the ghosts of its predecessors. His blue striped cotton shirt is pressed, too, but the collar isn’t stiffened by starch nor the placket crisply flat. A logo over the breast pocket declares he works for Grand Gardens, a local tourist attraction. The prosecutor doesn’t know or care what work Mr. Axel performs there, so Jess makes a note to find out.
Mrs. Axel’s sweaty hands lay one over the other on the black vinyl shoulder bag in her lap. When she moves slightly, damp palm prints remain. Mrs. Axel has said nothing since she arrived.
Her husband does all the talking.
“He drives by our house. When little Tia is outside, he blows the horn and scares her. He turns up the music in his car to make the ground shake. My wife—he drives right up behind her and slams on his brakes. They squeal so loud she thinks he’s going to hit her with his car.” Mr. Axel’s heavy accent is hard to place. Is it Russian? Polish? Slavic of some kind, Jess thinks, from his Caucasian features. Again unlike many of the crime victims she’s followed who have been mostly Latino so far.
Mrs. Axel shudders, lowers her head and covers her eyes briefly with her left hand. Jess notices tears on Mrs. Axel’s cheeks. The woman is afraid, terrified for herself and her family.
“Why is he angry with you?” the prosecutor asks.
“We’ve done nothing, I swear! He says we’ve complained about him to the police. He says we turned him in for selling drugs. But we didn’t! We didn’t!” Mr. Axel’s agitated pleading causes his wife to cry softly.
The prosecutor sits, unmoved, too burned out to attend to the depth of their fear. He has heard so many stories that were much worse. Children murdered, tortured, molested. Women beaten, raped, cut with knives. Men gunned down in front of their homes, or at their jobs. Only two years into the job, and already he’d lost his empathy.
But Jess still felt it.
The prosecutor takes the badly printed application, crumples it up, and drops it in the trash. He pulls a fresh form from his desk and reviews the questions, slowly, carefully, completely. This time, when he asks whether the angry neighbor has been violent or threatened violence, Mr. Axel says, “Yes. He threw eggs at our house. He ran over our lawn with his car.”
Mrs. Axel speaks for the first time. Softly, with grace. “He pushed me today on the sidewalk. I fell down.” She demurely raises her skirt a few inches to display a viciously battered knee, still bloody and too fresh for scabs.
Jess sees the prosecutor write with a felt-tip marker while he recites, “stalking behavior, assault, battery,” on the correct line of the form.
He puts the cap on the marker and slides it into his shirt pocket, tells the Axels, “You wait here. I’ll take this downstairs, get the night judge to sign it, and I’ll send a uniformed police officer home with you to watch your house tonight.”
He raises himself up from the squeaking chair, slips stiff loafers onto swollen feet, slides his arms into a wrinkled gray jacket and hurries down the corridor.
When he returns to the dingy office, Tia is in the room, too. She’s a perfect little girl. Dark hair, like her mommy. Liquid brown eyes, flawless olive skin, already missing a front tooth.
“How old are you?” Jess asks her, although she knows the answer.
Tia holds up her hand, all five fingers splayed. She says, “I’ll be in kindergarten this year. My mommy’s going, too. She’s a teacher’s aide. My daddy’s coach of our soccer team.”
“You bet we are,” Mr. Axel says, as he lifts his daughter in his arms. Mrs. Axel smiles with hope. They believe the harried prosecutor. Rely on him. Trust his promises.
Jess had done that once. In the past. Maybe this prosecutor would be different. Maybe the Axels wouldn’t be sorry.
The prosecutor walks them down the hallway, and introduces them to the uniformed police officer who will take them home, and watch over them until Tia goes to college. Or until the low-life drug dealer shoots up an overdose, and kills himself. Or one of the other gang bangers in the neighborhood takes him out.
It could have happened like that. It should have happened like that.
But it didn’t.
Later that night, the sky is clear, cold. The full moon is nature’s only night-light. Thin frost shimmers on the grass. Jess is standing in front of the scum’s house. The Axels are outside across the street. Mr. Axel is watering the lawn while Mrs. Axel trims dead blooms from red roses. Tia rides a scooter standing up, back and forth along the sidewalk. She calls out, “Hi, Jess!”
Jess waves to her. She laughs. Her parents wave back.
Jess removes her gun from its holster. She walks up the long sidewalk to the killer’s front door, and rings the bell. When he opens the door, she lifts her right arm straight out, holding the Glock as she’d been trained to do.
She squeezes the trigger repeatedly and puts three rounds right into his laughing face. His head blows apart and splatters all over the wall, the door, her.
His warm blood is on her face. But she doesn’t stop. She shoots again and again. The gun booming, the walls shaking, the man screaming. She empties the clip into his body, and the smell of gunfire tingles in her nose.
* * *
She jerked upr
ight in the bed, her clenched fists in front of her. She looked around, not recognizing her surroundings. She pushed the covers aside, and stumbled from her bed.
Nothing had changed. The scum was dead, but Jess didn’t kill him. Tia started kindergarten. But her mommy was no longer a teacher’s aide, and her daddy no longer coached soccer.
Jess stumbled to the bathroom, flipped on the light, and splashed cool water over her face and neck. She looked at the clear water draining from the basin.
She didn’t have the killer’s blood on her face. It had never been on her face. It was on her hands. Always on her hands. No matter how she tried, it would not fade nor wash off. It was as real as the ground under her feet. Even if no one could see it but her.
When the man who’d threatened the Axels murdered them in their front yard, he’d shot himself. There and then. In the same front yard. Beside the tree Tia had learned to climb. On the spot where her father had played ball with her. Where her mother had shared her picnics with a stuffed bear, and each and every one of her dollies.
The neighbors had bolted their doors. Drawn their curtains. Hunkered down. They knew at the first shot what had happened. They needed no news crew, or police investigation. The dark clouds they had watched gathering on the horizon finally turning to a storm of gunpowder and hot metal.
Tia had called the police. The first number she had ever really remembered. The one her mother and father had taught her while they prayed she would never have cause to use it. Nine one one. One digit for each of the bodies lying in her garden.
The prosecutor had resigned the next day.
He had vowed never to turn another deserving client away, never to let the gap between what the law promised and what it could deliver take another innocent life.
It was a promise he meant to keep. He said it every day for six months. At breakfast, at lunch, and into many, many late nights.
Every day.
Every day until gang members drove by. Tattoos on their faces. Chemicals in their blood stream. Guns blazing.
She’d never trusted the justice system again. The Axel family was the system’s second strike. No reason to give up a third.
Jess sighed. She straightened her back, and dried her face. She slipped on the hotel robe, snugging the belt around her waist. She blew out a long breath. Sleep was impossible. Work was the answer.
As it had been every day since Peter was taken.
She sat on the side of the bed, and dialed room service. It took less than five minutes for piping hot coffee to arrive at her door.
She poured a generous portion into a bowl-sized cup, and smelled the rich aroma. It was good coffee. Dark but not burnt. Strong but not thick. She gulped and swallowed.
The past would always haunt her. She could do nothing about what had gone before. She could only hope to do better next time.
Tomorrow, if all went well, the job would be over. She would know what Grantly was hiding. With luck, she would find the link Morris needed. She would have the evidence. He could enforce the law. And hopefully some form of justice would be offered to the victims.
She wanted justice. She craved it. She needed it.
For the people Blazek had scammed, the ones they knew about, the ones they had yet to find.
For Peter.
She had promised him that. She had promised herself that. She would find him. She felt it, every moment of every day. She wouldn’t give up. Not until they were together again. A family.
Until then she would help every other victim she found. With her head and her hands and her heart, and if need be, her shoe leather. Whatever they needed. Whatever she could do. She couldn’t ignore them. She wouldn’t ignore them.
She didn’t want to.
And Morris had asked her to help.
So she would.
Hell, yes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Oganee, Florida
May 11
Luigi Ficarra awoke to the sound of a motel alarm clock. An unpretentious shrill buzz. His body had barely entered into deep sleep an hour before. He slapped the clock off the table and across the room. Its electrical cord jerked out of the wall. The alarm went silent. His eyelids drifted closed. He felt himself drift down into sleep.
The alarm clock buzzed again.
He shook his head, and pried his eyes open. He squinted at the black plastic clock on the floor. It must have been equipped with a backup battery because the red display seemed to light the whole room. 3:00 a.m. He breathed deeply. No one in his right mind wanted to wake up at three in the morning.
He stretched his arms above his head, inhaling and exhaling. He rotated his head around, stretching his neck. He ran his palm over his face and felt the abrasion from the dark, heavy whiskers on his chin. No matter what the time, he had a job to do.
He shoved back the paper-thin bedclothes, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed and tousled black, curly hair with both hands. He stretched his arms above his head and groaned. His muscles felt tight.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the cheap mirror across the room. His build was lean and medium, but he wasn’t in great shape at the moment. Too much surveillance time spent sitting on his ass.
If he’d been home, he would have made himself an espresso. Not here. This was the cheapest no-tell motel in the area. Hot coffee was unlikely and espresso impossible.
The room smelled musty and damp. The air-conditioner under the front window roared and rattled, but did little to remove humidity or lower the temperature. He wiped sweat from his brow.
He hadn’t chosen the Oganee Motel for its creature comforts and elegance. Indeed, he’d driven away from the thriving hotels in the Orlando area and off the main highways to find a dump like this.
The motel was located outside the tiny country town of Oganee. When central Florida was a prosperous ranching community fifty years ago, the motel might have been the best place for guests to bunk. Now, the entire town was long past its prime and the motel was as decrepit as the rest of the place.
A potholed parking lot abutted the long, low block of rooms. Once, parking spaces had been marked with straight white lines, one space immediately in front of the door to each room. The paint had faded and worn, too.
It was the kind of place that rented by the hour. Couples who didn’t want to be recognized or traced. Cheating husbands and unfaithful wives. Fifty-year-old bankers from the city who couldn’t afford the scandal. Maybe a few engaged in sordid sex games. Others were excited enough by the forbidden thrills of illicit behavior.
Luigi shrugged. People were the same, the world over. He knew such people avoided better lodging where wide-angle cameras behind the registration desks would be routine. The Oganee Motel clerks were unlikely to go spreading customer names and photos around nearby towns. Residents here craved anonymity and were prepared to forgo the luxuries of comfort and hygiene to get it. Such was the power of secret lust and fetish.
Luigi laughed to himself. He didn’t suffer from unseen forces of moral dignity that directed so many lives. Weaker people. People who would sacrifice their self-respect for a moment’s excitement.
Luigi knew what he wanted, and when he wanted it, he took it. Not groveling. Not in secret. Not laden with shame. He looked people who sought to judge him directly in the eye and bested them with little more than a cold glare.
The annoying alarm’s buzz sounded again. Luigi yawned. He had plenty of time, but he was in no mood to waste any of it. He walked across the room and thumped the alarm’s off button. The buzzer gave a last desperate squawk before going silent. The LED glowed 3:04 a.m.
He padded his way across the disgustingly sticky carpet to the bathroom. White tiles covered the floor and walls. Dark black mold stains inhabited the corners and had taken root in the grout between the tiles. He grimaced. The whole room was a vacation mecca for all the germs in Florida.
He turned on the shower. Despite the motel’s decrepit condition and compromised morals, the water flowed h
ot and plentiful. He stripped off his t-shirt and briefs and stepped under the stream. He opened one eye and glanced around the shower. No shampoo.
He reached out and grabbed the postage-stamp-sized hand soap from the sink. He rubbed the soap between his palms and added a bit of water. It made a weak lather. He started with his hair and worked his way down his body.
The soap left his hair in spiky lumps. He ducked his head under the streaming hot water and smoothed his hair down. He scraped the whiskers off his face with a disposable razor inadequate for the job. He touched the shower knob with his foot to shut off the water and stepped out.
Two towels hung on a rail that might once have been chrome. The towels were thin and small swatches of threadbare terry. He swiped them both over his body, pushing the dampness over his skin without feeling much drier. He used one to blot his hair.
He looked into the mirror briefly and shook his head. “Your eyes are bloodshot.” He widened his brown eyes and turned his head this way and that to assess the redness. He ran a finger over his fuzzy eyebrows to tame them. “You look like a terrorist. How are you going to get a woman looking like that?”
He laughed. Finding women to share his bed had never been a problem for Luigi. Women told him he was dark and dangerous. He shrugged and tossed the damp fabric into a plastic bag.
He twisted the temperature setting on the AC unit to its lowest, but it made no difference to the breeze wafting from the vent.
He shrugged on his clothes, fighting their desire to stick to his damp skin. He collected his belongings and stuffed them into his overnight bag. He took the razor and the soap from the bathroom and placed them into the plastic bag with the towels.
He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, opened a bag of disinfectant cloths pre-wetted with bleach, and wiped down the bedside table. He cleaned the alarm clock and the lamp and replaced the clock on the table. He ran a fresh bleach cloth over the headboard and the chest of drawers, paying special attention to the handles.
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