[Anthology] Close to the Bones

by Martha Carr

  She said, “You can drop me off at my parents’ house.”

  Story was a beautiful young—let me emphasize young—woman. I’m thirty-five, and she’d just graduated from some college up north. We’d been introduced last night after I’d had a little too much to drink, and here we were.

  Her parents were ten minutes in the opposite direction of where I needed to be, and at my age the idea of dropping a woman off at her parents’ caused the equivalent of a team of Olympic gymnasts to launch a tumbling routine in my stomach.

  I said, “I can’t make it there in time. Can you catch a ride?”

  She gave me another of her looks.

  I grabbed her hand again and started towards my Jeep. “Probably’ll only take a few minutes anyway,” I said. “We should still be able to meet your friends for lunch.”

  Her legs worked double-time to keep up.

  Speed-walking turned to a run. My mind was moving just as fast in a different direction and for that I’d need my eyes and thumbs.

  “Can you drive a stick?” I said.

  “My Porsche is a stick. I think I can handle your ride.”

  We reached the jeep. I tossed her the keys. She hopped in like she owned the thing and I grumbled just a little on the inside. A scrunchie appeared as if by magic and she wrestled blonde curls into a ponytail, then put on her shades, started the engine, and stomped the gas. I shouted to be heard over the engine, “The Castle, you know where it is?”

  She nodded and the sun flashed off her gold-rimmed sunglasses. “Went there for parties when I was a kid.”

  Great.

  I’d been to the Castle too. Once. For a nephew’s seventh birthday. I remembered it as a miniature version of Disney World, only more cluttered and without the interesting rides, cleanliness, hiring standards, or well-controlled crowds.

  I flipped open my phone and dialed Becca Worth.

  Becca is the staff of one at Carpenter Investigations, and she knew more about extracting information from computers than anyone else in the world. Okay, that might have been a slight exaggeration, but she’s a classically trained violinist who somehow managed to acquire a second degree in computer science and she is as good at one as she is the other. The only reason she works for me and not some capital-heavy startup or tech firm is because of the flexibility of our work hours, which allows her to focus on gigs with the Elan orchestra.

  I pressed the speaker hard against my ear to hear past the wind and engine noise.

  Becca answered. She was only slightly happier to hear from me than Chuck had been. “It’s Saturday, Reggie,” she said.

  Maybe I’d missed the year when answering with “Hello” had gone out of style. I replied, “I know. I’m sorry. It’s urgent. Can you trace a phone from a blocked number?”

  “I could probably tell you where the call originated if I had the phone. It’d take time.”

  Story jerked the wheel and sailed the Jeep hard around a corner.

  The way she drove, we’d cut the ten-minute drive in half. I debated about a second. “Are you near the office?”

  “Out shopping with Lizzie.”

  That killed Plan A-and-a-half.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “See you Monday.”

  Story veered across three lanes of traffic. The speedometer read seventy on a road marked forty-five. Wind rushed through the open jeep and set my T-shirt flapping. When the light ahead turned yellow, she stomped the accelerator and swung hard to the left to avoid traffic.

  Well, we would be there in half the time if we survived the ride!

  I leaned back, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I concentrated on the sound of tires against the pavement as I searched for calm in the center of chaos—my way of forcing myself to stay grounded in the moment and avoid getting swept along in the adrenaline rush. It was one of the few war zone habits that had stuck with me since coming home.

  In that space, my mind relived the call and circled back to what I knew.

  The call was real. The one-thousand-dollar demand followed by muted conversation and the switch to a two-thousand-dollar demand was real. The stress in the voice was real and so, until it proved otherwise, I had to assume the kid was real too. But kidnapping a child for two grand?

  That was where I kept getting stuck.

  I played it out again, trying to imagine how it would have gone down. The whole thing reeked of crime of opportunity.

  If the kidnapping had been random, they wouldn’t have had the parents’ phone number. Heck, even if it had been targeted they might not have had it. They’d relied on the kid for the number, then misdialed and gotten me.

  Maybe the kidnappers were morons.

  We should be so lucky. In my experience, it was best not to assume ignorance, no matter how often it popped up.

  Horns blared and I opened my eyes.

  We skidded across another three lanes towards The Castle’s entrance drive. Story downshifted and my poor tires squealed. She blew past a guy who had to be a cop, narrowly missing the unmarked car he’d parked across two lanes to block incoming traffic, and plowed toward the park’s entry gates.

  Story slid the Jeep to a sideways stop the way stunt drivers do it in commercials. I unbuckled and hit the ground running hopping over the turnstiles on my way into the park. Voices yelled at me, but I kept on going, only to stop dead at the edge of the miniature golf course that led to the kiddie rides.

  The park was pretty big, and Chuck hadn’t exactly said where to find him.

  A gathering of mothers, arms tight around their children, stood off to the left in front of a silent merry-go-round. The crowd was just far enough away from a sobbing woman and someone I thought might be a detective to give them the illusion of privacy. I started toward them.

  Someone yelled my name.

  I glanced around and spotted Chuck standing on a picnic table, waving me over.

  I maneuvered past a cluster of his team members and tried not to glare. If the kidnappers were still in the park, the whole no-cops thing was well past blown.

  Chuck eased to the ground, pushed his way toward me, and thrust a beefy hand into my personal space. “Phone,” he ordered.

  The good-to-see-you-too smartass reply got stuck halfway up my throat.

  I gave him what he wanted. He took the phone without a word, tipped his head toward the park gates as if to say Now get on out of here, and stalked off toward a ragtag group huddled around a computer a few tables over; probably the best he could assemble on notice short enough that they’d gotten here before I had.

  The entire lot of them ignored me as if I didn’t exist. I came. I saw. I’d been dismissed.

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of my cargo shorts and looked around for a friendly face who might tell me what was happening. Instead I saw Story, a little out of place in her body hugging shorts, ribbed tank top, and glittering jewelry.

  She sidled up beside me.

  “God, this place is way worse than I remembered,” she said.

  I had to agree. The Castle, or King Leopold’s Park as it was officially called, had been built despite a great deal of opposition around the time I’d left for college. By the time I’d graduated law school and reported to Parris Island, it was a well-established community eyesore.

  Story looked at me. “Suppose you can tell me what’s going on now, Reg?”

  Reg.

  Only a handful of people called me Reg, and I knew all of them a lot better than I knew her.

  “A child’s been kidnapped. While we were on the boat, the people who took the kid called me demanding a ransom.” I nodded towards the woman trying to hold herself together. “I’m guessing that’s the mother.”

  Story lifted her sunglasses, studied the woman, and slid them back down. “You know her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Wrong number?”

  I nodded, pleased that she’d put it together so quickly.

  Story made a slow circle and took in the sce
ne. I had no idea what she saw. I saw parents holding their kids tight and strangers hugging each other; parents reacting to having witnessed their worst fear come to life.

  The huddle around the computer tightened. I figured by now they’d performed whatever voodoo it was that cloned a phone, which meant the Elan Police Department had access to every call and text I’d ever sent. Ever, being the two weeks since I’d changed burners.

  Changing cells regularly gave me an illusion of privacy, which kept me from worrying too much, and that was just one of several reasons I preferred to use cheap disposable phones rather than eight-hundred dollar iPhones. Sue me. I don’t like Google, Apple, Facebook, and every other multi-billion-dollar company in the universe tracking my every move.

  Story asked, “So this isn’t one of your case things?”

  “No. Not a case.”

  She brushed up against me and looped her arm around mine. Her warmth felt good against my skin. “So does that mean we can go?”

  The answer was technically yes. I wasn’t involved, had no client, and wasn’t getting paid. Chuck would look after my phone, or I could pull another one off the shelf and, even if he hadn’t used words, he’d been explicit about wanting me to leave.

  I hesitated.

  The clock in my head said seventeen minutes had passed since I’d gotten the call. I stole another glance at the woman I assumed was the mother.

  Story twisted towards me and pressed a firm breast against my arm.

  This was the weekend. She was heading back to Boston on Monday. She wanted to have lunch with her friends at Port of Call by the city dock, and then it’d be just the two of us. The answer wasn’t just technically yes, it was a very untechnical hell yes. But somehow, here I stood, fighting against a surging desire to stay and join the hunt.

  I found compromise in answering Story’s question with questioning.

  I slipped my arm free and kissed her hand. “Let me check,” I said.

  She gave me a side-eye glare. I gave her my most charming smile and headed for the huddle where a young woman with light blue hair and red sunglasses snapped my phone’s battery cover back into place and handed the whole thing to Chuck.

  We were at nineteen minutes, I guessed.

  Chuck strode for the crying mother and the detective who was still with her.

  The detective took the phone and pressed it into the woman’s hand.

  I worked my way closer to the table with its laptops and gizmos and a bunch of cord spaghetti. A guy wearing a white polo shirt two sizes too small stuck out a hand to block me. He said, “Back off, Carpenter. We’ve got this.”

  I didn’t know much about tech but it didn’t seem like they’d been able to pull much together on short notice. Even if the kidnappers did turn out to be morons, the limited resources worried me. I asked, “You guys have a mobile unit coming or anything?”

  Polo Shirt snorted. “How about you leave Mrs. Harris and her daughter to the professionals?”

  I almost wished he hadn’t.

  Little Girl Harris.

  The kid had a name now, she wasn’t some anonymous child anymore.

  The clock in my head ticked over to twenty minutes.

  The electronics on the table started flashing. Time was up.

  In my experience, women tend to be stronger than men when dealing with pain. I figured that for Mrs. Harris to be holding up as well as she was under the circumstances, she had to possess an enviable reservoir of strength, but her child had just been taken and sometimes tragedy takes time to process. When the lights on the table began doing their thing and the phone in her hand started buzzing, she froze and then slowly came undone.

  The detective who’d been with her—Chuck’s new partner, I assumed—reached out, opened the phone and pressed it to Mrs. Harris’s ear.

  I moved closer.

  Mrs. Harris answered with a choked and whispered, “Hello?”

  She stared at the ground; as she listened her hand shook.

  “Yes,” she said.

  A god-awful digital clacking from the other side of the kiddie rides shattered the preternatural silence. That noise, or maybe something else, frightened a small girl, who began to wail. With that, the shaking in Mrs. Harris’s hand took over her entire body, and her pain escaped in the form of a protesting scream.

  The tech team at the table stared, waiting for orders.

  Chuck’s partner put all her energy into trying to keep the mother upright.

  An athletic-looking brunette with a face I thought I recognized broke away from the nearby group and ran towards her.

  Multiple children joined what was now a veritable crying symphony.

  As far as I knew, the kidnappers were still on the line, Mrs. Harris was collapsing, and none of Chuck’s team could take over the call without the risk of giving themselves away.

  Indecision can get you killed. I’d seen it happen, spoken to the wives and mothers of men who’d frozen under fire. I was watching it happen now.

  Do or do not, but decide.

  I took two long strides to reach the mother, snatched the phone from her hand and, hoping it wasn’t too late, pressed the speaker to my ear. I said, “Sorry. I’m back. And yes, I’ve got your money.”

  Silence answered.

  I pressed the phone to my ear harder. “Can you hear me?” I said.

  From the other end a loud whoosh filled my head.

  I raised my voice. “I’ve got your money. How do I get it to you?”

  When it finally arrived, his voice was a hiss. “The whole two thousand?”

  The world closed in with the tunnel-like claustrophobia of responsibility.

  In a split-second decision, I’d grabbed what wasn’t mine to bear. I had no idea if the cops had the money or how badly I was about to screw things up, but if that cretin was serious about hurting the little Harris girl, it wasn’t going to happen because I’d failed to act.

  The loud whoosh filled my ear again. I said, “Yes, I’ve got the full two grand. All I want is my daughter back. How do I get her?”

  “Two thousand and no cops.” The voice was still a hiss, but less angry.

  I avoided looking back at the dozen or so LEOs on site. Chuck and his team weren’t in uniform, but even an idiot would have spotted them in a crowd. “Just you, me, and the money.”

  “You still at The Castle?”

  The question, that one question, instilled a sense of relief into me and took my heartrate down a notch. Whoever was on the other end wasn’t watching this madhouse, so the no-cop cover hadn’t been blown yet. “I had to leave to get the money. I came back as soon as I could. Just tell me where my daughter is.”

  “Money first,” the voice said. The whoosh cut him short. He waited for it to pass and added, “Go to the Farmer’s Market. You’ve got twenty minutes to get there. I’ll call with more instructions. And no cops!”

  “Which one? Which Farmer’s Market?”

  No response.

  “Wait,” I shouted. “Which Farmer’s Market?”

  The line went dead.

  I spun back toward Chuck and his partner and Mrs. Harris.

  The mother was still doubled over, and Chuck’s partner was focused on her. Chuck stood with his shoulders squared and fists balled, and his glare could have stopped a charging rhino.

  He quickly strode in my direction and, for the second time that afternoon, thrust his hand into my personal space and ordered, “Phone.”

  For the second time, I handed it over.

  Chuck glanced around, and no doubt saw the same eyes staring at him that I did.

  He’d narrowly missed being suspended a few months back for letting me get involved in a case he’d worked. He jabbed a finger in my direction as if he just couldn’t find the words, then through gritted teeth said, “If I could spare the time or manpower I’d have you arrested here and now.”

  I nodded. That was fair. I’d known it was a possibility, and I’d been willing to take that risk to kee
p the kidnappers talking. “He’s going to call again in twenty minutes,” I said. “He wants me at a farmer’s market. Didn’t say which one.”

  The whoosh resounded in my ears.

  Two times now I’d spoken with the kidnapper and on each call there’d been the same background noise; something mechanical, hydraulic maybe—something I couldn’t quite place.

  I walked back toward Mrs. Harris.

  Chuck watched, but didn’t try to stop me.

  I dropped to one knee in front of her, the least threatening position I could think of. “When you were on the phone, did you hear something strange, like a whooshing sound?”

  She sniffed hard and ran a finger beneath her eye. “A pump maybe. I think.” She looked at Chuck, her face full of panic and pain. “Oh God, he’s done something to her.” Her shoulders shook and the tears started flowing again. “I’m so sorry. I’m not normally like this.”

  Chuck patted the woman’s shoulder. His partner squeezed her hand. Chuck glared at me some more and nodded me aside and out of earshot.

  “A pump?” he asked.

  “Maybe. Could be something like an air pump at a gas station.”

  Chuck leaned around and motioned to someone behind my back.

  Blue Hair strode in our direction.

  Chuck inquired, “You get a location?”

  “Triangulation puts the call within three miles,” she said. “Another few minutes and we should be able to narrow it down.”

  Chuck shook his head. “We don’t have those few minutes.”

  Blue Hair’s partner jogged over with a scrap of paper in his hand.

  Closest Farmer’s Market is at the Heritage Bend Outdoor Mall.

  Chuck studied the ground, head nodding like he was having a little conversation with himself. He looked up at me. “Could it have been a generator?” he probed. “A quiet one? One of those little Hondas?”

  I tried to re-hear the sound. “Can’t say for sure, but I don’t think so.”

  Chuck shouted a few names, circled a finger in the air and instructed, “All right people, let’s go.”

  The team at the table scurried into motion, packing up about as fast as I imagined they’d set down.

  Chuck slid my phone into his pocket.

  “Go home, Reggie,” he said.