Finding You

by Jenna Bennett

  I barely had time to step into my panties and pull them up before Enrique burst into the room and let loose with an explosion of Spanish. I know some basic high school Spanish, but I had no hope of following it, and Ty must have found it difficult too, because after a few seconds I heard him say, “Slow down. Slow down! What’s going on?”

  There was a second’s pause, most likely while Enrique switched his brain over from his native Cuban to English. I took the opportunity to slip into my bra and fasten the hooks. Then he was off again.

  “He’s got her! She’s gone!”

  “Cassie’s right there,” Ty said. “In the bathroom.”

  I opened the door a crack, stuck my hand out, and waved.

  Enrique switched to Spanish again, and this time I had no problem following. The comment was blunt, crude, and commented on Ty’s lack of morals and intelligence, both.

  Then he switched over to English again. “I’m not talking about Cassie.”

  “Who are you talking about, then?”

  “Carmen,” Enrique said. “He’s taken Carmen.”

  The next few minutes were a bit of a blur. I dropped the eyelet dress over my head and was still doing up the zipper when I walked out of the bathroom. “What do you mean, he’s taken Carmen? Stan’s taken Carmen?”

  “Who else?” Enrique snarled.

  Ty looked confused. “Why would he want Carmen?”

  “No idea,” Enrique said, halfway between sarcastic and furious. “You obviously don’t.” He shot me a look that could have peeled the paint off the wall behind me.

  Uh-oh.

  “Leave Cassie out of it,” Ty ordered. And added, more reasonably, “You know we lived together for six months in Chicago.”

  “So this is just picking up where you left off?”

  Enrique shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “You know what? I don’t give a shit what you do on your own time. If you make a habit of sleeping with witnesses you’re protecting, that’s your business. Carmen’s mine. And she’s gone.”

  “How?” Ty wanted to know.

  “How the fuck do I know? I wasn’t there!”

  “So how do you know Stan took her?” I asked, trying to be the voice of reason. “Maybe she went for a run, or something.”

  The both looked at me like they suspected I’d lost my mind. I guess Carmen didn’t run.

  “Maybe she went to the hospital to see Juan,” I said. “Maybe she spent the night with a friend because she didn’t want to be alone.”

  There was a beat of silence. Then—

  “Do me a favor, Cassie,” Enrique said.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t try to help.”

  Ouch. I sniffed. “Tell you what. I’ll go to my own room, so I can change out of this dress and this underwear, since I wore it all day yesterday. I’d like to brush my teeth, too. And I’m sure Ty would like a couple minutes alone in the bathroom. And you could use some time to calm down so you don’t bite people’s heads off for trying to help. Then we’ll figure out what happened and where she is, and go find her.”

  I didn’t wait for either of them to agree or disagree, just grabbed my purse from the floor beside the door and headed out. If Stan had Carmen, then he was busy with her, and I wasn’t in any danger.

  Except Ty must not agree, because there was a minor explosion behind me. “Go after her, dammit!”

  “If he’s got Carmen, he’s not going to bother with Cassie,” Enrique said—not the most flattering sentiment, really, even if I’d just thought the exact same thing myself—but he must have changed his mind, because a few seconds later I heard his footsteps behind me. “Cassie! Wait!”

  I didn’t. But I did slow down a little so he could catch up. And by the time I’d dug my key out of my purse and inserted it in the lock of the door, it was Enrique who went through first, gun drawn.

  The room was empty, of course. I hadn’t expected anything else. Unflattering it may be, but Enrique was right: if Stan had grabbed Carmen, why would he bother with me?

  It took me a minute to change into clean underwear, a pair of jeans, and a T-shirt. It took another thirty seconds to brush my teeth. Usually I do the recommended ninety, but Enrique was standing outside the door tapping his foot, so I had incentive to hurry. I bundled my hair into a messy ponytail—unintentionally messy, since I didn’t take time to comb first, but nobody had to know that. And then I stuffed my feet into a pair of sneakers—just in case I had to run away from someone, or toward them—and headed back out. “I’m ready.”

  “Let’s go.” Ty was already there. I wondered whether he’d taken the time to put on a pair of briefs, or whether he was still commando under the jeans.

  And then I told myself to stop thinking about it, since it was distracting, and the last thing any of us needed right now was a distraction.

  Enrique had brought the car, of course, and I crawled into the back seat again while he and Ty took the front. They were both armed today. Enrique always was—the gun was part of his uniform of tailored suit and tie—and I saw the handle peek out from Ty’s waistband when he got into the car. I hoped he was right about Glocks taking effort to fire, because I’d hate for him to shoot himself in the butt.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” he asked when we were inside the car with the doors locked and the air conditioning going. “You dropped Carmen off at your parents’ house last night for dinner, and then you took Cassie and me here.”

  Enrique nodded. “And then I went back to work. The tip line kept getting calls, and people kept saying they’d seen Stan. The darker it got, the more likely it was that he was actually out there somewhere, so I spent most of the night driving around, checking out tips.”

  “Did you get any sleep?” I asked, worried. He was driving me and Ty around; if he hadn’t slept at all, what were the chances that we’d get through the day without crashing the car?

  “Couple hours. More than I get sometimes.” He went back to the events of last night, or this morning. “I never saw him. Whether he’d been there at all, or whether the people who thought they saw him were wrong, I’m not sure.”

  “What were some of the sightings?” Ty asked.

  Enrique sighed. “The cemetery again. Walking down Duval talking to himself. Sitting at a corner table in Sloppy Joe’s Bar.”

  “That last one was probably the liquor talking,” Ty said. “Either that, or someone thought it would be funny to watch a SWAT team in full riot gear come into Sloppy Joe’s.”

  Enrique nodded. “I didn’t respond to that one. They know Stan at Sloppy Joe’s. If he was there, someone would have called me.”

  “So about Carmen...”

  Enrique closed his eyes for a moment. I was about to tell him to open them again when he did. “I caught a couple hours sleep and a shower between two and five, basically. And then I stopped by my mom’s house for breakfast. My dad goes to work early, so I knew they’d be up. I wanted to know when they were planning to go to the hospital.”

  Ty and I both nodded.

  “There were tostadas and café con leche, so I took a couple minutes to sit and eat. And then I asked why Carmen wasn’t up, when all the rest of us were.”

  “Does she live with your parents?” I asked.

  Enrique shook his head. “She has her own place. But I thought she’d stay the night. It was late when we got there, and she knew Stan was out there somewhere...”

  “But she left?” Ty said.

  “Mamá said she got a text message. I thought maybe—” He glanced at Ty, who shook his head. “I checked her apartment. It was empty. And I knocked on Cassie’s door. When she didn’t answer, I figured she was with you. And if you were with Cassie...”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. If Ty had been with me, he hadn’t been with Carmen.

  “So where is she?” I asked. “I mean, just because she isn’t at home, or at your parents’ house,” or with Ty, “doesn’t mean Stan
has her. Maybe she couldn’t sleep and went to the hospital early. Maybe she spent the night with a friend. Maybe a guy she knew made a booty call, and since Ty turned her down, she wanted someone to want her, so she went to meet him.”

  There was a moment of silence. Enrique didn’t say anything. Ty grimaced.

  “I found this,” Enrique said. “Stuck between the door and the jamb at her place. Like a fucking calling card.”

  He pulled something out of his pocket. A small, white rectangle inside a clear plastic envelope.

  It really was a calling card. Or a business card, rather. Just like the one had been leaning up against the vase of flowers in my room three days ago. It had the logo of the Key West Police on the front, with its bright yellow sun, and the slogan Protecting & Serving Paradise in cursive along the bottom. Just above was an officer’s name and contact information.

  Or an ex-officer. Stanley Laszlo.

  “He left this on her door?” Ty asked, turning it over in his hands. I didn’t want to touch it, even through the plastic. I had a feeling it would make me feel contaminated.

  Enrique nodded.

  “Could mean one of two things. He grabbed her, and wants us to know it. Or he was there and didn’t find her, but he wants her to know he can come back anytime he wants.”

  “Stalker,” Enrique muttered.

  “We already knew he’d been obsessed with her for years.” Ty’s voice was calm. He put the business card down in the console between the seats. “This just proves he still is.”

  Enrique’s hands tightened on the wheel. “So what do we do now?”

  “First we figure out where she is. Then we deal with what needs dealing with. I assume you’ve tried to call her?”

  “All morning,” Enrique said. “Her phone’s off.” He added, before Ty or I could, “Doesn’t mean anything either way. She could have run out of juice and forgotten to charge it. Or he could have turned it off.”

  “So she’s not at home,” I said. “She’s not at your parents’ house. I assume you’ve talked to your other siblings. Have you checked with the hospital?”

  Enrique nodded. “She hasn’t been there this morning.”

  “Does she have a job?”

  “She’s a waitress,” Enrique said. “She has the week off for the trial.”

  “So she probably wouldn’t be at work. Have you checked anyway?”

  “It’s a bar. They won’t be open until ten.”

  Because the bars opened at the crack of dawn in Party Central.

  “Friends?” I said, a bit desperately. “Does she have any?”

  “She grew up here. Of course she does.”

  “Have you checked with them?” Ty asked, hearing—or sensing—my frustration. He glanced at me over the back of the seat and winked.

  I smiled back, and then I felt a little guilty. Here I was, googly-eyed (again) over this guy I liked, while Carmen could be tied to a bed in Stan’s personal dungeon. Or locked in a mausoleum at the Key West Cemetery. Or dead.

  “Have you checked the cemetery?” I asked.

  “The cemetery?”

  “He seemed to like it there. It’s where he took me. And Jeanine, one of the other girls. And it’s where Juan was found.”

  “That was a coincidence,” Enrique said.

  “Maybe not.”

  He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What do you mean?”

  I sat back against the seat. “I think I’ll let Ty explain this one.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Ty said, and turned to Enrique.

  “THAT’S CRAZY,” Enrique said after Ty had gone over his reasoning for why Juan had been attacked. “Nobody would do something like that.”

  “Stan would. Juan’s your brother. He’d see it as getting back at you for arresting him.”

  “That’s crazy,” Enrique said again, but with a bit less conviction. “And anyway, Stan was still locked up the night Juan...”

  “That’s the whole point,” Ty said. “He needed you and me out of the way so he could escape.”

  “But that’s crazy.”

  “Maybe,” Ty said. “But it’s logical. And too much of a coincidence otherwise.”

  Enrique thought for a moment. “He could have heard about it and decided to take advantage of you and me being gone. Sullivan or Martoni could have been talking about what happened when they picked him up that morning. And by the afternoon he had decided to make his move.”

  “Sure. It just seems it would take a little more planning than that. And some help.”

  Enrique was quiet.

  “So which of your officers do you think opened the handcuffs?”

  “Neither of them,” Enrique said.

  “Someone did. Unless whoever put them on in the first place didn’t do a good job. But Sullivan said he checked them when they picked Stan up. So if whoever put the cuffs on left them open, he’s either a liar or incompetent.”

  “He’s not incompetent,” Enrique said.

  Ty and I both waited, but he didn’t continue.

  “Martoni?” Ty said.

  “Not incompetent, either.”

  “Is either of them a liar?”

  Enrique scowled out the windshield at the traffic. “If what you’re saying is true, one of them must be.”

  “Is either of them gay?” I asked.

  Enrique looked shocked. “If he is, he hasn’t told me. We don’t talk about that.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell? I thought they did away with that.” I glanced at Ty for confirmation. He shrugged.

  “Someone’s sexual orientation is nobody’s business but his own,” Enrique said primly. And added, “Unless he likes kids. Then he’s my business.”

  Of course. “Juan was meeting someone the night he was attacked. He said it wasn’t a date, but he dressed up for it.”

  Enrique looked sick. “You’re saying one of my cops pretended to be gay and asked my brother on a date so he could beat him up?”

  “He may not have been pretending. He may just be so deep in the closet you don’t know about it. But yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “I’m gonna kill the bastard,” Enrique said. His hands tightened around the steering wheel until his knuckles stood out against the golden skin.

  “How about we just arrest him?” Ty suggested, as the same time as I said, “We have to figure out who he is first.”

  “And find Carmen,” Ty added.

  “Right.” Enrique straightened his shoulders, with a sort of mental ‘first things first’ adjustment of attitude. “Stan’s folks lived down here on the right.”

  He pointed. We were on our way down an overgrown street on the north side of the island, filled with small, low-slung, cinderblock homes, close together. They had front yards not much bigger than one of my textbooks, filled with sand and patches of grass, and there was a palm tree or two in front of practically every house. Some of the houses were painted in happy, tropical colors, like turquoise and yellow and peach, but a lot were just plain white. Some were peeling and looked like they had leprosy.

  “They left town a couple years ago,” Enrique added, “and since then, Stan’s been living here alone. Nobody thought he’d come here yesterday—”

  “It’s the obvious place.”

  He nodded. “So we didn’t bother to post a guard, since we needed all the manpower we could get for other things. Although of course we checked. He wasn’t here. But it won’t hurt to check again.”

  No, it wouldn’t. When he pulled the car up to the curb and stopped, I reached for my door handle. Only to have Ty turn in his seat. “Stay.”

  I subsided, but not without a scowl. “What am I, a dog?”

  “I’m not risking you out there. Stay in the car with the doors locked and the windows up. We get paid to take down dangerous criminals. You don’t.”

  At the moment, it was almost impossible to imagine such a thing as a dangerous criminal. The sky was a brilliant blue, the sun was beaming down, the green palm fro
nds were rustling in the breeze, and everything looked idyllic. The idea of a gunfight in the middle of all this was ludicrous.

  “OK,” I said, mostly because I figured they wouldn’t find him here anyway. He really would have to be stupid to come here, and I didn’t think he was. “I’ll wait.”

  “Don’t leave the car.” Ty opened his door.

  “She can’t,” Enrique told him. “Police car, remember? The child locks are engaged.”

  Child locks. Great.

  He was right, though. My door was locked, and stayed locked, no matter how hard I yanked on the handle. Now that was just insulting.

  “Flak vests are in the trunk,” Enrique added.

  I watched as they both went around to the back of the car. Then the trunk popped and I couldn’t see anything but burgundy metal for a minute before one of them slammed it shut again. By then, they had both put on black vests with the word POLICE across the back, and lots of Velcro straps. Ty had his gun in his hand, and as I watched, Enrique pulled his from the holster under his arm. He’d stripped out of his suit jacket and down to his shirt, and looked a bit ridiculous with the bulky black vest on top of the dressy pants and crisp shirt. There was nothing ridiculous about the gun, though, or about the way they approached the house through the gate in the small wall surrounding it, before splitting off to the left and right and slithering along with their back against the walls. Every time one of them had to pass a window, he pulled the gun up and aimed it at the window before darting past. And then it was back to the wall and sideways movement like a crab again.

  It was a little like watching a cop show on TV—Hawaii 5-0, with all the palm trees—but a lot more personal, and nerve-wracking.

  Ty went around the corner on the right first. A few seconds later, Enrique disappeared around the corner on the left and into the shadowy carport. I strained my ears, wondering whether I could risk opening the window just an inch to see what I could hear. But Ty had told me to keep the windows up, and I didn’t want him mad at me. And anyway, if the child locks had been engaged, the window locks probably had, too.