River of Glass

by Jaden Terrell

  “Oh. Oh no. Wait, let me get Andrew.”

  I followed her around the corner and found Talbot at his computer again. “One minute,” he said. “I just need to finish this e-mail. There.”

  “He has bad news,” Claire said. “I wanted us both to hear it.”

  “It’s about Marlee,” I said.

  “She left,” Talbot said. “We assumed she went back to her pimp.”

  “She did. And then someone blew them both up, along with everybody else in the house.”

  Claire sank into the chair across from Talbot’s desk and covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh my God.”

  Talbot came around the desk, and she stood up so he could put his arms around her. She laid her forehead on his chest and clutched his jacket in one fist, her shoulders jerking in silent sobs.

  “What happened?” Talbot said.

  “That picture I showed her,” I said. “We think she recognized it. Maybe she went back to warn Helix that we were on to his partner. Maybe she thought she could blackmail them. But then they decided to tie up the loose ends.”

  Claire lifted her head. Her mascara had left dark rings beneath her eyes. “What picture?”

  Talbot said, “I put it on your desk so you could scan it in and post it with the other two. It was in a manila folder. Didn’t you see it?”

  “There was no manila folder on my desk.” She looked up at me. “You don’t think she took it?”

  “Maybe. She’d need it to show him we were closing in.”

  “We’ll need another one to post, then.” She pushed away from Talbot, dabbed at her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “You had your pictures on a smartphone last time. Can you just share the file with me?”

  I pulled it up on the phone and transferred it to her number. She looked at the photo and her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God, Andrew. Did you see this?”

  “No, I was in the middle of something when they brought it. I figured I’d take a look when you posted it. Why?”

  “It’s Hal.”

  “It’s not Hal. It can’t be.”

  She handed him the phone. He looked at the screen, the muscles around his eyes tightening, then sank onto the desk as if his bones had turned to oatmeal. “This isn’t possible.”

  “Who is Hal?” I said.

  Talbot said, “My brother. Half brother. He took his mother’s last name.” He bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers and a thumb. “How could he do this?”

  “Your father,” Claire said, softly.

  Talbot turned to me. “Our father was a gunrunner. He had contacts all over the world. He used to take us with him, teaching us the family business. He must have branched out.”

  “You said your stepmother was trafficked.”

  “Dad bought her from a Saudi prince, who’d gotten her from a kingpin in the Japanese mafia. She used to tell us stories. Horrific stories.”

  “What about your real mother? She didn’t object to all that?”

  “She died when I was a child.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I can’t believe Hal would put another woman through that kind of hell. But he must have started making contacts when we were working with Dad.”

  Claire said to me, “They were just boys. It was all they knew.”

  I looked at Talbot. “When did you get out of the gunrunning business?”

  “I left home when I was fifteen and didn’t look back. Hal and I reconnected at our father’s funeral a few years ago. His mother had died by then.”

  “So you and Hal weren’t close.”

  “As kids, we were inseparable, but I just had to get out of there. I was always sorry I’d left him. So when we reconnected . . .” His voice caught. “If I’d looked at that picture, Marlee might be alive.”

  My cell phone rang. Sun.

  I looked over at Talbot and Claire, who looked like they’d just walked away from a plane crash.

  “Where are they?” I said into the phone.

  Harold Sun said, “I got your message. I have something you want, but what do you have that I need?”

  “Freedom. I don’t care about your little business venture. I just want Tuyet and the two women you took yesterday.”

  “You’re saying if I give you three women—three specific women—you’ll stop investigating. But it’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

  “The cops don’t have anything on you yet. As long as I can keep the women quiet—and I can—you can go on buying and selling girls to your heart’s content.”

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You pick the time and place. You bring your people, I’ll come alone. However you want it.”

  “Tomorrow morning. Ten A.M. Indian Springs in Percy Warner Park. You know it?”

  “I can find it.”

  “If there’s so much as a single cop, I’ll know.”

  “How will you know?”

  “Trust me, I can smell a cop a mile away. I do, and I’m gone. Oh, and bring ten thousand dollars. That’s a bargain. The ugly one’s not worth much, but I can get that and more for the other two.”

  “Where am I supposed to get ten thousand dollars?”

  “I don’t care where you get it,” he said. “Just get it. And if you try to screw me over tomorrow? I’ll send those women back to you in pieces.”

  The call ended, and Claire and Talbot looked at me. I recapped the conversation, and Talbot put his head in his hands and said, “Of course you have to call the police.”

  38

  Together, Percy and Edwin Warner Parks covered almost 3,000 acres, mostly heavily wooded. Driving through parts of the Warner parks, it was easy to forget the city was just a few miles away. Indian Springs was one of the most remote places in the parks—few hikers, few picnickers, no Frisbee golf stations. Presumably, that was why Sun had chosen it.

  I got there at eight and settled in at the picnic shelter with a couple of bottled waters. A few scattered raindrops pattered on the roof of the picnic shelter. Malone came out of the woods to tell me she and her crew were already set up. They were good. A glint of light on a gun barrel and a shadow at the tree line that might have been a man were the only signs that I was surrounded by heavily armed guys in Kevlar. I told Malone about the glint and the shadow, and the next time I looked, they were gone.

  I had a leather bag full of money from the Metro PD evidence room. I put it on the picnic table and paced and stretched, wondering how early Sun would get there and how he planned to scout the place.

  At nine, Frank called. I was glad for the distraction.

  He said, “I was thinking about your friend the sculptor.”

  “Billy Justice?”

  “I was thinking, what if Justice is a name and not a concept? So I went down to the station and pulled up every Justice in the system, first name or last.”

  A tingle started in my stomach. “You found him?”

  “Justice Hogarth. Honor student, eighteen years old, killed in a random shooting by a drug dealer, name of Cornelius Snow. Arrested and released more than a dozen times. The last time was for murder, but all the witnesses got amnesia.”

  “You worked the case?”

  “All of us on the list worked one or more of Snow’s cases, one way or another. Hogarth’s old man made a stink with the media, accused the whole system of being corrupt. He was a big-time war hero, got some traction with it for a while, and then everybody moved on.”

  “Everybody but Hogarth’s old man.”

  “We got him, Jared. We got the son of a bitch.”

  NINE THIRTY came and went. Then ten. A few more droplets fell. My neck began to ache. Ten thirty, a man in a baggy green jacket drove up and parked next to the picnic shelter. Malone jogged out of the woods in a pink tracksuit and hustled him away. She looked good in pink.

  Ten forty-five. I dialed Sun’s number. No answer.

  Malone walked out of the woods again and said, “He’s not coming. We might as
well pack it up.” She looked deflated.

  “It was worth a shot,” I said.

  “We’re treading water here, McKean. Nothing’s making sense. You know what the medical examiner found about the Asian girl in Helix’s basement?”

  “No, what?”

  “No smoke in her lungs. She didn’t die in that fire. She was already dead. Knife wound to the stomach.”

  “There was no reason for Helix to keep a dead woman shackled in his basement. Which means somebody else put her there.”

  She nodded. “Which means he really was being set up. Sun and his people probably thought the body would be too burned for us to notice the knife wound.”

  I sat down on the picnic table, feeling numb. I had no grief to waste on Helix, but I’d liked Simone. And as Malone had pointed out earlier, I was the one who’d put the target on their backs.

  “Helix was into a lot of bad things,” she said, reading my mind—or maybe just my face. “He put himself out there. Maybe you gave somebody an idea, but it’s just as possible he drew that attention all by himself.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You were getting close. They needed to point you in a different direction. If it hadn’t been Helix, it would have been someone else. Go home, McKean. Get some rest. You’ll feel better.”

  “I think I’ll stick around a little longer.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  With Malone and her team gone, I felt vulnerable, exposed. Eleven thirty came and went. At twelve o’clock, my cell phone rang. I picked up.

  “Sun? Where were you?”

  “I told you I could smell cops a mile away.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Seriously? They might as well have been wearing neon signs.”

  “Listen, I—”

  “No, you listen. You’re lucky, I’ll give you another chance, but you need to know how serious this is. How serious I am. Choose.”

  “Choose? Choose what?”

  “What will it be? An earlobe? A whole ear? Maybe a finger? Yes, I like that. You get to choose which of these lovely—or not so lovely—ladies gets to lose a finger.”

  The veins in my temples pulsed until I thought they might explode. “You’re crazy.”

  “If I were crazy, I’d enjoy this part of it, but I don’t. Choose now. You don’t have much time.”

  “I’m not going to choose, you psychopath.”

  “Then the stakes go up. Shall I cut off these pretty little nipples? You can carve a lot off of a woman before she dies. Karlo taught me that.” A woman shrieked—Ashleigh, I thought—and he came back on the line. “That was just a taste of what will happen to these women if you fail to choose. One. Two.”

  “I’m not choosing.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Then they both lose an eye.”

  Another shriek, and then both women were sobbing. Sun said, “Decide!”

  Impossible. Ashleigh, I thought. Khanh had been through enough. And she was a better person. But Khanh was stronger. Ash seemed tough, but she was weak underneath. I wasn’t sure she could survive it.

  “Khanh!” I blurted. Then, “No! No, wait!”

  “Too late.” There was a thunk and another scream. “I’ll be in touch,” Sun said, and the line went dead.

  I CLIMBED into the Silverado, numb. I felt cold, as if I’d just been immersed in ice water. Another chance, he’d said. But when, and how? I wasn’t good at waiting, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do.

  I drove to Saint Thomas and slipped into my son’s room. Maria was asleep on a cot by his bed. Paul lay on his back, eyes closed, the monitor wires attached to his chest and the IV tube taped to his wrist. His breathing seemed normal. The monitors flashed and beeped at the right times. Careful not to wake them, I pulled a chair over to his bed and watched him sleep until my eyelids grew heavy.

  The buzzing of my cell phone woke me.

  “Don’t talk,” Sun said. “Just listen.”

  I looked out the window, saw an opaque sky and a sheet of rain against the glass. On the cot, Maria stirred, then rolled over and lay still. I slipped out into the hall, phone to my ear.

  “No police,” Sun said. “You got cute last time, and a lady lost a finger. You going to get cute again?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” He reeled off an address. I didn’t need to write it down. It was Ashleigh’s.

  I SHOULD have called Malone, or even Frank, but the memory of our last appointment stopped me. I kissed my son gently on the forehead and took the elevator down to the lobby, where a clot of concerned visitors stood in front of the glass doors, watching the rain.

  “Flash flood warnings,” a woman said, consulting her cell phone.

  I pushed past them into the parking lot. Rain pelted my skin and plastered my hair to my scalp. I was drenched in seconds.

  I found the Silverado and pulled out of the lot, hunched over the steering wheel, windshield wipers slapping the glass, my headlights making a bubble of light in front of me. Occasionally, another car emerged from the gray as I passed it or it passed me. Through sheets of rain, I caught an occasional glimpse of other vehicles lining the sides of the road.

  Smarter—or less desperate—drivers, waiting out the storm.

  It took about a century to get to Ashleigh’s. I left the keys in the ignition and the driver’s door open, drew the Glock as I pelted to the front door and kicked it open. It opened with a bang, and I realized too late that Sun had left it ajar. I stumbled into the foyer, skidded on the slick tiles.

  “Ash?” I called. My voice sounded strained. My muscles felt taut, vibrating beneath the skin.

  No answer.

  The dining room was empty. So was the den.

  I found her lying on the living room floor, in a puddle of muddy water. She was dressed in bikini panties and a torn blouse that clung to her skin. Her back was to me, a two-pronged burn below one shoulder blade. A length of cotton rope bound her hands. Her hair was matted with mud and rain.

  “Ash. Ah, God, Ashleigh.”

  I knelt beside her, pressed my fingers to her neck and felt a thready pulse. A relieved breath burst from my lungs. She was alive.

  I dialed 911, then used my pocket knife to cut the ropes. Rubbed her icy hands in mine until they warmed. Her eyelids fluttered open. Then her arms snaked around my neck, and I rocked her like a baby until we heard the wail of sirens.

  “Stay with me?” she said.

  “I’m not going anywhere. Did they—”

  “They cut off her finger. God!” Her voice rose, tinged with hysteria.

  “I know, I know. Do you know where you were?”

  “I don’t know anything. They used something . . . a taser, I think.” She gave a little hiccupping laugh. “I guess I got the story this time.”

  “I guess you did.”

  She clung to me as they loaded her into the ambulance, one fist clenched in my shirt, the other squeezing my fingers until I thought they would break. As the paramedics wheeled her into the emergency room, a doctor with a craggy face and a bad comb-over peeled her hand from my shirt and injected a sedative into her vein. She whimpered once, then fell silent. A few minutes later, her grip on my hand loosened and he helped me lower her to the pillow.

  When her breathing was even, he gave me a nod and I went out to the waiting room and watched the hands of the clock creep around its face. The big hand had inched its way around twice when my phone buzzed. Sun.

  “Did you find her?” he said.

  “I did.”

  “This was a gift. A gesture of good faith. You leave us alone, and we let this one live. If not . . . we know where she lives.”

  “I get it.”

  “This is the one you care about. You know it. I know it. They know it. Do we have a deal?”

  I thought of Khanh, bound and gagged, maybe worse, hoping I would come for her, wondering if I would even try. My fists clenched, but I shook away the image and said, “We have a deal.
”

  BY THE time Ashleigh’s parents arrived, she’d been settled in a private room. She gave my hand a final squeeze, and I slipped out as her mother slid onto the bed and wrapped Ash in her arms. Her father stood back, hands in his pockets, eyes red and a muscle in his jaw throbbing as if he couldn’t decide whether to cry or hug his daughter or hit someone. I gave his shoulder a pat, then drove home through the deluge, where Jay met me at the door, bleary-eyed, holding up a sheet of paper. He looked like he hadn’t slept all night.

  “James Decker,” he said. He rattled off a phone number and address.

  “Decker? You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. I’ve been tracking this son of a bitch through twenty different countries.”

  “James Decker. That’s our Good Samaritan.”

  39

  James Decker, thirty-two, brown/brown, married, two daughters. Both in elementary school. The thought made me angry all over again. He owned two cars and a boat, and he made a good income as a marketing director for a company that turned out to be a shell.

  Malone had called me a cowboy, but I was not a stupid cowboy. I called her as soon as I’d finished the background check. The call went straight to voice mail, so I left a message and called the precinct, where I spent fifteen minutes listening to elevator music, the calming influence of which was lost on me.

  Finally, my phone buzzed, and Malone’s breathless voice came on the other line. “I can’t talk right now. We’ve got this bastard. He took down two more of our guys, the son of a bitch, but we’ve got him pinned down in a shed a couple of miles outside town. He’s got hostages. I’ll get to you as soon as I can, I swear.”

  Frank’s phone went to voice mail too. I said I’d call him later and told him to give Patrice my love. Then I called Mean Billy. He picked up, and I said, “Remember that time you said I ought to pay you double for boring?”

  “How could I forget? You got some other boring thing for me to do?”

  “It isn’t boring. But it’s not exactly legal.”

  “How not-exactly-legal is it?”

  I thought of my conversation with Khanh:

  That’s called kidnapping, and we try to avoid it, unless we want to go to prison.