First Girl Gone: An absolutely addictive crime thriller with a twist (Detective Charlotte Winters Book 1)

by L. T. Vargus

  Will burst out laughing.

  “See? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t even remember that, but you do.” He chuckled again. “Did I really ask Mr. Bates that question?”

  “Yep.”

  “Jesus, what a pain in the ass I must have been.” As they walked on, Will’s face turned serious, his eyes on the ground. “Anyway, my point is, I wanted to know you better. But I didn’t know how to get past the walls.”

  The bluntness of his words caught Charlie by surprise. She stopped in her tracks.

  “Wow.”

  Will blinked a few times.

  “Sorry. I’m a bit drunk. I didn’t mean to… dissect you like that.”

  Charlie craned her neck to look at the moon. It was huge, nearly full.

  “No, it’s OK. I suppose you’re not wrong. Allie used to accuse me of being antisocial.”

  Charlie smiled faintly, remembering the time Allie told her she was going to turn into a dorky weirdo with no friends if she didn’t quit reading all the time.

  She scraped a patch of sidewalk clean with the toe of her shoe, and then glanced up at Will.

  “So am I less scary now?”

  “God, no.”

  She laughed and tilted her head to one side.

  “Then why are you talking to me?”

  “Because these days I have enough experience to know how to handle intimidating women,” he said, his eyes locking onto hers.

  “Do you now?”

  Will nodded and took a step closer.

  Charlie’s heart fluttered against her ribcage like a trapped bird as Will bent down and kissed her. His lips were cold from the night air, but behind that was warmth. She gripped the lapels of his coat, pulling him closer.

  Someone in a passing car—probably a teenager—called out, “Get a room!” as they passed by, breaking the spell. Charlie and Will pulled back at the same moment, laughing.

  “Hope you enjoyed the show,” Will yelled at the fading taillights.

  Turning to her, he put out his hand.

  “M’lady?”

  Charlie took his hand, and they walked on, fingers intertwined. She felt a flush working up from her neck to her cheeks. This was not how she’d expected the night to end.

  They continued down the sidewalk, taking the alley next to Charlie’s office around to the back stairway that led up to her apartment. Charlie climbed the first step and turned back to face Will. They were close to level height now. He put a hand on either side of the wrought-iron railing and leaned in, kissing her again.

  After a long moment, he stepped back, fingers brushing against her cheek.

  “I hope we can do this again sometime soon.”

  “Ask him upstairs,” Allie whispered. “You need human contact, Charlie. It’s not normal, living most of your life alone like you do. Plus, you wouldn’t shut up about his penis before.”

  Charlie nodded, wondering if he could tell she was blushing in the darkness.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “Human contact. A person shouldn’t primarily socialize with the voice of their dead sister. Invite him in. Now.” Allie’s voice was a hiss. “Don’t you dare say ‘goodnight.’ I will revolt. I will spend all night singing a nonstop medley of annoying songs. I won’t let you sleep.”

  Charlie sucked a deep breath into her lungs and let it out slowly.

  “Goodnight, Will.”

  As her feet rang out against the metal steps, Allie cleared her throat.

  “You asked for it, Charles. So would you rather hear ‘Thong Song’ by Sisqo or ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ by the Baha Men? I’m taking requests.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Charlie woke the next morning with a throbbing headache. She made a pot of coffee and wondered if she’d dreamed the kiss with Will. All through her morning work hours, she pondered it, brief snippets of the night coming back to her, all of the memories strangely distant.

  “No, the kiss was real,” Allie assured her. “And it could have been so much more if you weren’t so intent on living like a nun.”

  Charlie said nothing, trying to ignore her.

  “Actually, that’s not a bad idea, you becoming a nun. The fact that you’d live with the other nuns would be sort of like having friends.”

  “I have friends,” Charlie said, counting them off on her fingers. “Zoe. Will. Frank.”

  Allie scoffed.

  “You can’t count Uncle Frank. He’s family.”

  “Fine. Zoe and Will.”

  “Wow. You really got me there, Charles. Two friends. You think in maybe another decade you’ll be ready for a third?”

  Charlie rolled her eyes and sipped her coffee.

  “Have you even considered what you’re going to do when Frank’s gone?”

  Charlie stopped drinking.

  “I mean, even if he beats the cancer, he’s no spring chicken,” Allie went on.

  “Stop,” Charlie said, her voice just above a whisper.

  “What? It’s true. He isn’t going to be around forever, you know.”

  Charlie thunked her mug onto the counter.

  “I said stop it!” Her tone was shrill, verging on panicked.

  Allie took the hint and shut up after that, keeping silent for the next several hours.

  But it didn’t matter. Allie’s words had done their damage, worming their way into her psyche. What would she do if Frank didn’t make it? What if she did end up alone for the rest of her life?

  The questions rang in her skull all through picking up Frank and driving him to the hospital, receding only slightly once they got to the room where he received his chemo treatments. She watched a nurse hook Frank up to his IV bag of meds and reminded herself that she had to have hope. She owed him that.

  Frank settled back into his chair and closed his eyes. Charlie thought he might doze off, so she brought out her notebook and flipped through the pages, looking over her notes for the thousandth time.

  “How’s your case? The missing girl,” Frank said.

  Charlie glanced up. His eyes were still closed, but apparently he was in the mood to talk.

  “Someone sent me a cryptic email yesterday. Anonymously.”

  “And what did this cryptic email say?”

  “‘Follow the white rabbit.’”

  Frank’s eyelids fluttered open. He repeated the words, frowning.

  “Mean anything to you?” Charlie asked.

  “Can’t say that it does.” He shook his head. “Bizarre.”

  “I know,” Charlie agreed. “Like, if they actually want to tell me something, why not just say it?”

  “The technology stuff is all over my head, but I got a computer guy you could talk to,” Frank said.

  “You have a computer guy?”

  “Well, computers aren’t my strong suit, you know that. He’s great on the divorce cases. You should see the stuff he’s been able to dig up from message boards and stuff. Solid gold,” Frank said, shaking his head. “The things people post when they think they’re anonymous.”

  “Well, that sounds promising,” Charlie said. “How do I get in touch with this guy?”

  “He prefers that clients go to him.”

  “OK. Does he have an office or what?”

  “You know the place over by the river docks? In the old Sander’s Dry Goods warehouse?”

  It was easy enough to picture the place. The massive old building was situated right on the river and had been a major shipping hub in the early nineteenth century. Since then it had undergone a stint as a garden center, an indoor trampoline park, and a dinner theater venue. Charlie also remembered plans to convert the place into luxury lofts when she was in high school that never came to fruition. None of the ventures seemed to last long, but she’d heard the current owner was having more success.

  “The marijuana dispensary?”

  Charlie imagined a nerd camped out on the dispensary lawn, laptop on his knees, high out of his gourd.

  “Yea
h, that’s it. The computer thing is sort of a side hustle.”

  “He owns the dispensary?” Charlie asked. That was almost weirder than her first assumption.

  Frank nodded, and before Charlie could request more details, he said, “Ask for Mason, and tell him Frank sent you.”

  “Wait.” Charlie held up a hand. “Mason Resnik?”

  “Yeah. You know him?”

  “We went to school together,” Charlie said, chuckling to herself. Pot and computers. She should have known it’d be Mason.

  Before Charlie could say more, Frank sat forward in his chair, nonexistent eyebrows all aflutter.

  “A Volkswagen!” he said, jabbing a finger in the air. The words came out with an excited laugh.

  Charlie was lost.

  “A what?”

  “Your white rabbit.”

  Charlie just stared, still not following.

  “A VW Rabbit. What if the anonymous tip is about a car? It would make sense to follow a car, right?”

  “That’s not bad,” she said. Considering it further, she added, “Actually, it’s the only explanation that even half makes sense, so far.”

  Frank rubbed his hands together, a look of sheer glee on his face, and for a moment, the old Frank was there. The one who loved nothing more than solving a riddle.

  “You clever old bastard,” she said.

  That only made him grin wider.

  By the time she’d dropped him off a few hours later, Charlie’s hangover was long gone. She left a message for Zoe, asking if she could track down any white VW Rabbits in the county.

  With that taken care of, her focus shifted to something else: Will’s tip about the Red Velvet Lounge. She looked the place up online, noting a Yelp review that praised the “hot girls and hotter wings!” Even though it was open during the day, she figured the evening rush would be a better time to scope the place out. The bigger the crowd, the easier time she’d have snooping around without attracting unwanted attention.

  Charlie returned to the project she’d started that morning—creating a MISSING flier with Kara’s name, age, physical description, and a large color photo. It was an old-school technique, but Frank insisted it worked for animals, so why not a girl?

  Charlie added her phone number to the bottom of the page in bold text, then sent the file to the print shop down the street. Less than thirty minutes later, they had a hundred copies ready for her, hot off the press.

  She spent the rest of the daylight hours plastering Kara’s face all over town. The grocery store, the post office, and every lamppost in between. It brought back a lot of memories, most of them unpleasant. How many fliers had she posted when Allie went missing? Hundreds, at least. And where had that gotten her?

  The stapler thumped as Charlie affixed another flier to a utility pole. She only hoped this time would be different.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As the sun cast a reddish light on the western horizon, Charlie’s car juddered over the bridge to the mainland, tires thumping against the rough roadway as she left Salem Island behind. It’d been years since she’d rolled down this particular roadway. Even so, she recognized every barn, every truck stop, every bullet-pocked stop sign.

  Once again, she found herself thrust into a slab of the rural Midwest. Woods occupied the roadsides most places, with the occasional corn or soybean field thrown in for good measure. Driving through it now was simultaneously novel and deeply familiar.

  She made her way to a new place, however—the Red Velvet Lounge, the strip club of such seeming importance to the Kara Dawkins case.

  The night settled over things, falling quickly. She flipped on the headlights. Pierced the darkness.

  Finally, a neon glow in the distance announced that she’d found the place. The red sign shone bright, a brilliant, gleaming portrayal of a dancing cartoon woman with the club’s name in gaudy letters forming a shallow arch beneath the female form.

  Charlie slowed the car, turned into the lot. A buzzing energy sizzled in her head now, churned in her gut. Nothing to worry about, she knew. Anticipation had a way of riling her nerves. Always did.

  Potholes scarred the parking lot, most of the open punctures in the asphalt half full of water. She weaved around them until she found a spot and parked, killing the lights and engine right away.

  The quiet seemed to make that gnawing sensation in her gut churn harder. She waited a moment before exiting the vehicle. Wanted to let her body settle, her nerves settle. Wanted to take in the scene before she walked into it.

  The lot looked fairly packed, considering it was early in the evening. The three rows of parking spaces nearest the building were full, and a slow stream of traffic flowed in as she watched.

  A bouncer sat on a stool near the front door, the muscular physique of his torso seeming almost comically bulky propped on the piece of stick-like furniture. In the cartoon version of this scene, the spindly legs of the stool would absolutely snap beneath him, the stool practically disappearing as he slammed straight down to sit on the sidewalk.

  Finally, Charlie reached for the door handle, took one more breath, and opened the car door. As soon as she was outside, the overwhelming stench of fryer grease assaulted her nostrils. She remembered that a lot of strip clubs served chicken wings, and with the aid of this oily smell, she could already picture them congealing there under the sneeze guard, all slathered in that glowing orange paste of the buffalo sauce.

  She strode between the parked cars, walking toward the big front doors framed so elegantly by the dead shrubbery. When she glanced up, she was surprised to see the bouncer staring at her. Was that wariness she read in the bunched skin along his forehead? She thought so, and that got her hackles up. Maybe something suspicious was happening here.

  Most of these places would hump your leg to get you through the front doors and force you to buy your one-drink-per-hour minimum. She figured they’d be even more thrilled to have a real live woman coming in without getting paid for it. And yet, this particular club had a bouncer out here actually screening people, presumably turning some away? Yes. Something strange must be happening here.

  She found herself moving the last few steps a touch slower, watching the muscle-bound bouncer, trying to read every quirk in his body language. She stopped shy of the velvet ropes. Locked eyes with the meathead defying gravity by balancing on this stool. The polo collar ringed around his beefy neck looked like it could burst open at any second.

  There was a propane patio heater set up behind the guy, and she could feel the heat coming off it in waves. It ruffled the wisps of hair at the side of her face, made her blink rapidly against the dryness.

  He squinted at Charlie, looking her up and down. Gestured at her with his clipboard before he spoke.

  “You a cop?”

  She put her hands up, trying a disarming gesture on him.

  “Hell no.”

  He smirked. Apparently he hadn’t been disarmed.

  “Nah. Sorry lady. You look like a cop.”

  Then his expression changed, going from suspicious to curious. He sniffed the air a few times.

  “Yep. Smell like a cop, too.” He crinkled his nose. “I can smell ’em a mile away. Beat it.”

  His hand flicked at the air as though he were brushing her away, eyes going back to his clipboard.

  She just stood there, dumbfounded. During the ride over, it’d never occurred to her even once that she might get turned away at the door.

  After a few seconds, he looked up, eyebrows raised. He locked eyes with her, and after a pause, he waved her away again, tilting his head in a mocking pose.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Confusion roiled in Charlie’s head as she retreated from the velvet rope and walked back to her car, feeling numb. What the hell had just happened?

  She slid behind the wheel and plopped the key fob into the cup holder, but something stopped her finger just shy of the start button. Some instinct grabbed her by the shoulders, whispered in her head i
n Uncle Frank’s voice: Better to give all of this a moment to digest before moving on. Charlie worked herself through the steps again, hoping something would stand out this time.

  She’d been turned away from a seedy strip club, of all places. Almost right away the bouncer had been suspicious of her, called her a cop, figured her for snooping around. Of course, she had, in fact, been snooping around, but there would be no reason she could think of for him to suspect that. She was usually pretty good at blending in. It was part of the job.

  She came to the same conclusion she had on the walk up to the building, the gut revulsion she’d felt when she saw the bouncer’s eyes narrow as they fell upon her: this place had something to hide. Probably something big, whether or not it had anything to do with Kara. Might as well stick around and watch the place for a while. She had nothing to lose but a bit of her time.

  The dome light clicked off as if on cue, plunging her back into shadow.

  Thankfully the stream of traffic into the lot would also obscure whether or not she’d left, though she doubted the bouncer was the meticulous type. Oh, he may be particular when it came to things like anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, but she suspected he was less so when it came to pesky little things like doing his job.

  A few flecks of light snow fell on the windshield, melting quickly into water droplets. Charlie stared through the spatter.

  The crowd trickled in, slowly but surely. Gentlemen of all ages and sizes stepped out of their cars, trucks, and SUVS and headed for the double front doors. The velvet rope swept aside for each and every one of them, allowing them entry. No one but her got turned away, from what she could see. That was curious, wasn’t it?

  “A place like this must have regulars,” Allie said. “He probably knows damn near everyone coming up here on a weeknight.”

  “I was thinking the same,” Charlie said.

  Allie affected some kind of redneck accent then.

  “Goin’ down to the little strip club where everybody knows your name. A few wings. A few laughs. Don’t get any better than that.”