by L. A. Witt
“Hmm.”
Less than five minutes later he was asleep, and I was on my way back to the station.
Speak of the devil—Paula was there to meet me as I got off the elevator. “I heard,” she said grimly, not bothering to specify what she’d heard. There was only one case right now, as far as I was concerned. “What can I do to help?”
“Are you even supposed to be working right now?” Paula’s schedule was a mystery to me. I wasn’t sure she ever took a full twenty-four hours off.
“Would I be here if I wasn’t?” she countered.
“Probably.”
“Okay, fair.” She folded her arms and blew a loose strand of long blonde hair out of her face. “Thibedeau is hunting down surveillance of the vehicles used in the kidnapping, so I’m hoping we can piece together the route they used, maybe get an idea of where they’re going.”
She followed me into the bull pen. People stopped what they were doing and stared, but I didn’t let it get to me. “And the kidnappers themselves?”
“All masked. We don’t even have a final count. At least four in one vehicle, two in the other if we include the drivers.”
“That’s a lot of manpower.”
“It was well-thought-out.” I went to sit down at my desk, but Paula immediately pulled me back to my feet.
“Nuh-uh, no, you’re not doing this here. We’re getting a room with a television where you can spread out.”
“There’s nothing to spread.” Not enough evidence, not nearly enough to go on.
“Not yet, but there will be, and when you and your case are ensconced in a conference room with a TV and a whiteboard instead of squeezed in at your desk, you’ll thank me.” She tugged me down the hall and into a room that had both of those things, plus a table big enough to seat eight, and a couch along one wall. She looked at it fondly. “I went to every thrift store in the city looking for a couch that was both clean and comfortable. You’ll like it, trust me. You want me to go talk to Mark, see where that footage is at?”
“Sure.” I didn’t mind getting a break from dealing with Thibedeau. Besides, there were still some phone calls I needed to make. “Thanks.”
“Of course.” She left, and I dialed up Captain Hamilton’s number. He wasn’t working this late, but the sooner he knew about this, the sooner we’d get approval for more support if we needed it.
He picked up on the first ring. “Darren, are you and Andreas at the station?”
“I am,” I said, a little taken aback by how quickly he’d responded. “Andreas was wiped, he’s at home. I’ll get him after he’s recovered a little.”
“He was injured?”
“Knocked down. It exacerbated his injury a little, but he’s mostly just exhausted.”
“Well, hell.” He sighed. “Tell me the rest of it.”
This was just the second time I’d given someone a rundown of tonight’s events, and I was already getting tired of repeating it. I didn’t want to dwell on what had already happened, I wanted to do something, but I’d rather the captain heard it from me than anyone else. I would at least give things the proper emphasis.
“All right,” he said when I was done. “I’ll talk to the commissioner, let him know that this needs to be a priority for every precinct until it’s solved. Put together a file breaking down what you know so far and email it to me. I’ll talk to the crime lab too, make sure any evidence connected to this case is put to the front of the line. Who’s working with you?”
“Thibedeau and Morris.”
“Don’t be afraid to requisition some uniforms if you need to.”
“I will.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of this, Corliss. I promise.”
Bold words, all things considered, but my rigid spine softened a little all the same. “Thanks, Captain.”
He hung up, and I stared at the phone for a moment, indecisive. I didn’t have the personal number for Erin’s boyfriend, but I knew the hospital he worked at. I could call and have him paged, and let him know what had happened. Somehow, though, it just didn’t seem right, coming from me. We barely knew each other, and there wasn’t much I could tell him at this stage in the investigation. And honestly, my capacity for dealing with fresh outbursts of unfiltered emotion was running on empty.
Time to punt. I’d let Andreas handle it in the morning.
I went and got my laptop. By the time I was done hooking it up to the TV, Paula was back with a USB key and two cups of coffee. Starbucks coffee. I didn’t get it. “Did you walk four blocks to get these?” I took mine and sipped it. Oh, damn, this wasn’t coffee. I coughed and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth.
“What is this?”
“It’s a black eye. Coffee and espresso. And Starbucks delivers,” she added.
“I thought that was called a red eye.”
She shook her head. “Those only have one shot. They’re for wusses. This’ll keep you up all night, trust me. Here.” She handed me the key. “These are from all the city-operated CCTV cameras Mark could access within two miles of the restaurant. He’s still working on getting copies of the commercial ones, but it’s a start.”
“Let’s do this.”
This wasn’t my first time combing through low-res camera footage for suspects, but I’d probably never paid such close attention before. The police force had installed a number of CCTV cameras at stop lights, tricky intersections, and highway entrances and exits—anywhere there was a high potential for traffic accidents. It wasn’t perfect coverage by any means, but it gave me something to work with. I opened up the original file and pulled up a still of the sedan and the van. I showed it to Paula. “These two, these are what you’re looking for.”
“No license plates. Great.”
“These people aren’t idiots.” I wish they were.
Paula just patted my shoulder and got to work. I took half an hour to put together the basics for Captain Hamilton and sent it off, then went back to surveying camera footage. A lot of camera footage, and the quality was shit so I had to double-check every similar-looking car to make absolutely sure it wasn’t the kidnappers. Trust the city council to go for cheap over effective when it came to surveillance.
“Here,” Paula said around 2 a.m., the first time either of us had spoken in hours. “Here, on Seventeenth, heading for Highway 2. Look.” She put it up on the TV and slowed it to half speed for me. A sedan was stopped behind a truck at a stoplight. I couldn’t see the license plate until traffic was moving again, but once it was—yep, nothing there. A few more cars passed through the intersection, and then a familiar black van pulled through as well. Again, no plates.
“Nice catch.” I pulled up the same video on my computer and checked the address against the map I had open in another window. “There’s another camera at the entrance to the highway, it’s just a quarter mile from there.” I found the relevant file and fast forwarded until I had the same time stamp as the last video. “They should show up pretty soon.”
Only they didn’t. A minute passed. Two minutes. There was the truck that had been right in front of the sedan, but where was the sedan? Three minutes. Four.
“Could they have taken another street?” Paula asked.
“They might have doubled back, but the only place to stop between Seventeenth and the highway is a convenience store. I don’t— Wait.” There went a black van, just like the one we were looking for. I zoomed in on it. No plates. “I think we found one of them, but where’s the other?”
“We must have missed it.” Paula and I checked the footage three times, but no—between one camera and the next, the sedan had gone missing. “They must have ditched it out there.”
“Why would they bother doing that?” Unless they didn’t need it anymore. Oh, fuck. I stood up and threw on my jacket. “We have to go.”
“Why? We can send a uniform out to—”
“No, Paula, we have to go! Or at least I do! If that car was abandoned somewhere, there’s no telling what co
uld have been left with it, and I’m not— I can’t—” I forced myself to take a deep breath. “It was carrying the girls. Erin and Emily were in there.” I prayed she wouldn’t make me get more explicit than that. I couldn’t even think it, let alone say it.
Paula paled and got to her feet. “Okay. Let’s go check it out.”
I drove. The silence in the car was stifling, but I didn’t want to speak. There was nothing to be said, anyway. Nothing that could help. If we found the car and it was anything other than empty . . . I clenched my hands around the steering wheel so hard my knuckles damn near burst through the skin.
There was no traffic at this time of night, so we got to the stoplight at Seventeenth relatively fast. Once we were past it, I slowed way down. It was a two-lane road, empty scrubland on either side that might have once housed businesses, but was nothing but tall grass and weeds now. I looked left and Paula looked right, and after a minute we were almost at the highway. Where was the fucking—
“There!” She pointed. “Turn here, turn right, you’ll see it when the headlights are on it.” I turned us onto the rutted dirt, and sure enough, there was the sedan. It was maybe fifty feet from the edge of the road, partially obscured by a large thorn bush. I skidded to a stop right in front of it, put the car into park, and got out, but left the headlights on. With my flashlight in one hand and my gun in the other, I circled around to the driver’s side. The left rear window was broken, spidery cracks radiating out from a central impact. I couldn’t see inside, though; the tinting was too dark.
My heart beat so hard I could feel it in my eardrums, drowning out every other noise. I put my light away, reached for the door, jerked it open before I could turn away and be sick, Oh please God oh please oh please—
It was empty.
Thank fuck. My knees wavered, and I had to fight for a moment to stay on my feet.
Paula paused to put on a glove—I’d been in too much of a hurry. Then she opened the front door, leaned inside, and popped the trunk. “I’ll check it,” she murmured, and I let her. “Nothing. There’s nothing here.”
Actually, not quite nothing. I looked closer at the broken window as I pulled on a glove. None of the glass had fallen out, but it was clear that something had hit it hard. In fact . . . was that a . . .
I swiveled away as fast as I could and bent over double, gripping my knees hard enough to bruise. I shut my eyes and fought to gasp in air, air that stank of dust and exhaust, but I didn’t care. Paula was beside me in a second, her hand on my back. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“There’s a . . . there’s a hair. In the crack in the glass. Some blood, and . . . and a hair.” A long, brown hair. A hair that looked like it might have come from Erin’s head.
Paula froze for a second, then slowly started moving again. “Okay. Okay, we need to close the door. We don’t want to lose any of the evidence.” I knew she was avoiding being explicit for my sake. “I’ll call the techs and get them out here so we can bring all this back to the precinct. They’ll analyze it and . . . Darren.” She squeezed my shoulder. “It’s not the worst thing we could have found.”
I nodded, my eyes still shut. “I know.”
“I need you to focus now, okay? I need you to come back. Come on back. You can do this.”
“I know.” Slowly, so slowly my spine creaked, I straightened up. I opened my eyes, and saw Paula watching me, concern written all over her face. There was no one else to see me being weak—especially not Andreas, thank God. The last thing he needed right now was to worry about my ability to keep my shit together. “I’m all right.”
“Of course you are.”
“Let’s get this done.”
We stayed long enough to watch the car get towed away. The crime scene people would work it over once they got it back to their garage, but I wasn’t overly hopeful they’d get much out of it. The only shred of evidence I’d seen in the whole thing had been stuck to the glass; the interior smelled like it had been recently detailed, and the kidnappers had been wearing gloves in the video footage.
We were back to having exactly nothing—the CCTV cameras didn’t extend any farther outside of the center of the city. Or, well, I guess we also knew that someone had been injured badly enough that the kidnappers had had to ditch the sedan. I wondered if Erin had fought with them. I wondered why she’d needed to.
I stopped my wondering right there. It was just going to drive me crazy. “What time is it?” I rasped.
“Almost five.”
Shit, we’d been out for nearly three hours. I’d known the crime scene guys were slow, but I hadn’t known they’d been that slow. I was supposed to pick up Andreas at six. “I need to drop you off at the precinct.”
“Sure.”
Somehow, the ride back was a little less fraught, despite what we’d found. Evidence of an injury wasn’t good, it definitely wasn’t, but it was better than a body. I briefly flirted with the idea of not telling Andreas what we’d found, then dismissed it. If he found out later, from someone other than me, he’d feel so betrayed. I couldn’t do that to him, not when it came to his kids.
“Bring food when you guys come back,” Paula said as I pulled into the parking garage. “I could really go for a tuna melt right now.”
“Weird choice for breakfast.”
“Eh, it’s lunchtime somewhere.” She paused for a second, then leaned over the console and gave me a hug. I didn’t even try to resist. She didn’t say anything, no pithy statements about togetherness or community, and I appreciated it. After a few seconds, she let me go and got out of the car. I let it idle for a moment, just long enough to pull myself back together before I went to get Andreas. I needed to be calm for him, needed to help him keep his sense of perspective. If I could only keep it myself.
Someone knocked on my window. I looked up and groaned. It was Detective Kirk Ross, the douchebag who, along with his equally douchey partner, shared the back corner of the bull pen with me and Andreas. He didn’t like either of us, and hadn’t hesitated to tell me that any fucking chance he got. And there he was, in what was probably the only suit he owned, rumpled and gray like an ancient gum stain, scowling at me from under his moustache. He mimed rolling the window down, and I obliged because I could shout at him better without the glass separating us.
“Look, if you’re here to make one single fucking comment about what happened last night, you can shove it up your ass, because—”
“Whoa, hey!” He had the gall to look affronted. “No need to bite my damn head off. I just wanted to say, I heard about Ruffner’s kids. And . . . look, I’m sorry. That’s fucked up. Let me and Schneidmiller know if you need some help, okay?”
I blinked. Apparently falling into a parallel dimension was easier than I’d thought. “What?”
“What part of that was hard to understand, Corliss?”
“The part where you said we could ask you for help.”
Ross looked uncomfortable, but earnest. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess. Nobody’s kids should be used against them like this.” He pointed a finger at my face. “Don’t get used to it, though. You guys are still bad news as far as I’m concerned.” He walked inside, and I watched him go, then pinched myself hard on the side.
“Ow, fuck.” Yep, still awake. Okay then. Twilight Zone moment aside, it was time to get Andreas.
I hoped he’d slept well, since I couldn’t promise it would happen again anytime soon.
Chemical sleep wasn’t dreamless sleep. In fact, as I crawled out of that haze, I had the jittery, queasy feeling that came with waking up from a vivid nightmare. And in a way, I remembered having that vivid nightmare. More than one, I thought.
Fortunately, though, I’d apparently taken enough drugs that I couldn’t remember the actual dreams. As rattled as I was, I decided that was a blessing.
Or maybe I hadn’t dreamed, and the feeling was because I was in a living nightmare. The sun was rising. The birds were chirping. The coffee was
on.
And since Darren hadn’t come in to shake me awake with good news, my kids were still missing.
The fear, the guilt, and the pain were excruciating, but a thick layer of . . . something kept them from hitting me full force. That would come later. Probably when I needed it the least.
I sat up slowly, head spinning and stomach somersaulting. God knew where the drugs ended and the fear began, but I was going to be a wreck for a while, so I decided to just get used to it. What choice did I have?
As I was reaching for my crutches, Darren appeared in the doorway. Ah, that explained why I’d smelled coffee.
“Hey.” He met my gaze with an uneasy smile. “I didn’t think you’d be awake yet.”
“I’m amazed I slept.”
“Those pills are strong shit.” He crossed the room and offered me a hand as I got to my feet. “How’s the pain?” He didn’t ask how I was doing. Maybe it was just because, given all the shit with his brother, he knew damn well what a minefield that question could be. It would make me feel like I needed to say, I’m all right, and I wasn’t. And he seemed to get that.
“Pain’s not as bad as it’s been.” I tucked one crutch under my arm, then the other. My right knee and hip ached furiously, and my back was less than thrilled from the crutches, the weight of the cast, and this off-kilter way I had to carry myself. It wasn’t as bad as it had been, but fuck, I did not need it right now.
Once I was more or less upright, I met his gaze. “Any updates?”
His face fell a little. “We found one of the vehicles.”
My gut clenched. “And?”
Darren swallowed. “There’s . . . there was some blood. And hair.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“It’s not a lot,” he said quickly. “Not . . . not like a serious wound. But the hair is . . .”
I touched his arm, as much for balance as to silently beg him to continue even when I wanted to beg him not to.
