The Iron Ring

by Matty Dalrymple

  Louise nodded.

  “Excellent. I’ll leave you to it.” Without a glance toward Rinnert, he let himself out the door, and they heard a snatch of hummed tune floating through the air before the door closed on it.

  23

  Brady Plott opened the door to his daughter’s bedroom. A Cinderella nightlight cast a soft glow, illuminating a room decorated entirely in Disney princess. His wife, Carly, wouldn’t be getting Kaitlyn out of bed for another hour, but the last time Brady had left the house without giving Katie a goodbye kiss, she had pitched such a fit that Brady had had to promise he would kiss her goodbye regardless of how early he left.

  He bent over the bed, pushed a tumble of brown curls off her forehead, and kissed her.

  “Hey, Lady Katie,” he whispered. “I’m heading out.”

  She rolled over and rubbed her eyes. “So early?”

  He stifled a laugh—she sounded just like her mother.

  “Yup. Uncle Den has some early morning work for us to do.”

  “Okay,” she said, almost back to sleep.

  Brady kissed her again, closed the door behind him, and ran lightly down the stairs. Carly was pouring coffee into an insulated mug, looking almost as sleepy as Kaitlyn.

  “Thanks, hon,” he said as she handed him the mug. “You know, you don’t have to get up when I have to leave early.”

  She yawned. “I know. I might go back to bed.” She blew him a kiss. “Morning breath. Best to keep your distance.”

  He saluted as an alternative, and headed for the car.

  Once around the corner, he pulled to the side of the road, got out his phone, and tapped out a text.

  Need to take day off—Kaitlyn’s sick and Carly’s away

  In a moment a response came back from the lieutenant. Okay don’t forget to call the com room

  “No shit,” muttered Brady as he tapped the speed dial for the station’s communications center.

  That call out of the way, he plugged Andrew McNally’s home address into his GPS and pulled away from the curb.

  The sun was just coming up when he arrived at the expensive-looking condo complex in Villanova. He circled the building and confirmed his Google Street View reconnaissance of the previous night: the parking garage had three exits, and he would be able to watch only two at once. He found a spot on the street where he could watch the two closest to the main road.

  He had spent the previous afternoon complaining to Den about the cancellation of the investigation, and to the lieutenant about the cold case he had put them on. When the lieutenant got tired of his complaining and told him to take the rest of the afternoon off—big deal, it was already four o’clock—he had gone home and complained to Carly. There was no reason, no explanation--just an infuriating I’m the boss and that’s how it is.

  Brady was pretty sure if McNally led him to Philip Castillo, the lieutenant would rethink his position.

  He waited only about twenty minutes before he caught a glimpse of the car he had been hoping to see—a sweet cherry red Lexus sport coupe registered to Andrew McNally. Unfortunately, it had left the parking garage from the one exit that Brady couldn’t see from his position and was already almost at the intersection at Lancaster Avenue.

  “Figures,” he muttered as he started up the car.

  The Lexus turned left, which made sense—McNally worked at Bryn Mawr Hospital. By the time Brady had reached the intersection, the Lexus was lost to view, and he had to wait for the traffic to clear to make the turn.

  Traffic was heavy even at this early hour, and Brady split his attention between trying to pick the fastest lane and glancing down side streets in case Bryn Mawr wasn’t McNally’s destination and he had turned off Lancaster Avenue.

  He swore as he passed the entrance to the Blue Route. McNally could be headed toward Plymouth Meeting or Chester, and even if Brady guessed right, he would probably never catch up with the Lexus. He continued on to Bryn Mawr and drove through the hospital’s parking lots without much hope of seeing McNally.

  With a sigh, he resigned himself to going back to the condo to wait for McNally to return. He figured he had some time to kill and decided to make a stop at a Wawa for a breakfast hoagie.

  He negotiated the scrum of early morning traffic and went inside. He entered his order at the self-serve kiosk, paid at the register, and then joined the other customers waiting for their orders.

  “Kaitlyn,” he heard, and the sound of his daughter’s name made him turn toward the speaker, who stood next to him. He was a tall, heavyset man with fair hair and skin. “I told you not to do that,” said the man into his phone, speaking with an accent of some sort—maybe Swedish or Norwegian.

  Brady faced forward again.

  “Because I’m the boss, that’s why,” continued the man.

  Brady smiled ruefully at the echo of his conversations with the lieutenant the previous day.

  “Because when the boss says not to do something and you do it anyway, bad things happen.”

  Brady’s smile faded.

  “And not just to you,” continued the man, “but to other people, too. There’s no telling what bad things might happen.”

  Brady looked back at the man. He was gazing placidly at the crew behind the counter. Brady glanced around at the other customers waiting for their orders. None of them was paying any attention to the man on the phone. He wasn’t speaking loudly, and considering the bustle in the store, Brady doubted that his one-sided conversation was anything more than part of the ambient noise to anyone else.

  “What kind of bad things, you ask?” said the man. “Hard to say. Could be anything.”

  Brady turned to face the man directly. He didn’t look startled, as Brady would expect someone to look if a stranger interjected themselves into a private conversation.

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Brady quietly.

  The man pulled the phone away from his ear, and Brady could see that its screen was black.

  The man glanced at the phone. “Would you look at that. She hung up.”

  Brady took a step toward him, his face a foot from the man’s. “Who’s Kaitlyn.”

  The man smiled and nodded toward his phone. “That was who I was talking to. Some people just don’t know how to take no for an answer.” He shook his head and dropped the phone into his pocket. “Hope she heeds my warning. Because bad things could happen to Kaitlyn if my warnings aren’t heeded.”

  “One-sixty-five!” called one of the employees behind the counter.

  “Your number’s up,” said the man.

  “Someone else can get it,” said Brady.

  “As you like. I must be going. Have to go see my girl. She’s so spoiled—like a fine lady of the manor, always thinking she knows best.” He turned away from Brady, but Brady caught what he said next over the buzz of the store. “Lady Katie.”

  The man walked toward the exit. Brady followed him and as they stepped out the door he grabbed the man’s arm.

  “What did you say?” asked Brady, his voice rough.

  The man raised an eyebrow. “I said that I have to go see my girl. I said she’s spoiled. That she thinks she knows best.”

  “After that.”

  “I didn’t say anything after that.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man looked down at Brady’s hand where it still gripped his arm, then back at Brady. “Who are you?”

  Brady dropped his hand.

  The man shook out his coat sleeve. “I’m guessing you eavesdropped on my phone call and that you must know someone named Kaitlyn. She must be very special to you, to follow a complete stranger, to accost him in public.”

  Brady glanced around them. They had attracted some curious stares from fellow customers.

  “Maybe you thought I was talking to your Kaitlyn,” continued the man calmly. “Maybe you have reason to be worried about your Kaitlyn. On that basis, I’ll overlook what happened. I don’t want to call the police and report that you harassed me.
I don’t want to get you in trouble with them, or with your Kaitlyn.” He interlaced his fingers, inverted his huge hands, and cracked his knuckles. “They break our hearts, these ladies of the manor. We must be careful not to break theirs, yes?”

  The man turned and crossed the parking lot to a black sedan with tinted windows. It was parked in the space furthest from the building and closest to the road, its front facing the store so that Brady couldn’t see the license plate. Brady started walking toward the sedan, but jumped back at the honk of a car horn. By the time he had dodged several other cars, their drivers no doubt desperate for their morning dose of caffeine, the black sedan was already turning onto the road. Although the car itself was pristinely clean, the license plate was too dirty to read the number, although it looked like the Maryland design. Odd, since Maryland required a front as well as rear plate.

  He stood looking after the sedan as it disappeared down the road, then returned to his own car and dropped into the driver’s seat. After a minute, he got out his phone and called Carly.

  “Hey, what’s up?” she answered, sounding considerably more alert than she had been when he had left the house.

  “Just checking in. What are you guys up to?”

  “I’m unloading the dishwasher and Katie is coloring. The excitement level is pretty high.”

  “Listen, turns out Den doesn’t need me today after all, and I think I’ll take the rest of the day off. Want to go over to Camden, to the aquarium? Tell Kaitlyn it’s where Ariel lives.”

  “Hey, Katie,” said Carly, “guess what Daddy wants to do today?”

  “Drive the police car?” Brady heard faintly over the line.

  “No.”

  “Turn on the siren?” She pronounced it sigh-a-ron.

  “No.”

  “I give up.”

  “He wants to take us to see where Ariel lives. You interested?”

  Brady heard an affirmative shriek from the phone.

  “I think that would be a yes,” said Carly.

  “Great, I’ll see you in a bit.”

  He ended the call and looked in the direction in which the sedan with the tinted windows had disappeared. He played the scene through in his mind. Had he let his imagination get the better of him? Had he really heard the man say Lady Katie. He had certainly said Kaitlyn any number of times, but it wasn’t an uncommon name—there was another Kaitlyn in Katie’s class, and another at Sunday school.

  If he had misunderstood the situation, then he was lucky that the man hadn’t made a bigger deal of Brady’s behavior.

  And if he hadn’t misunderstood the situation …

  All he could think of was the man’s huge hands, and his daughter’s unmarred skin, her slender wrists, her delicate neck.

  Today he’d have a day with his girls.

  And tomorrow he’d go to work on that cold case.

  24

  Lizzy spent the night at Ruby’s Overbrook apartment. The next morning, Ruby drove into West Philly to meet Andy McNally, leaving Lizzy in the apartment to pace obsessively from the sitting room through the bathroom to the kitchen and back, until someone in the store over which the apartment was located thumped on the ceiling. Ruby returned an hour later carrying a knapsack and a FedEx envelope.

  “Is this what you were waiting for?” she asked, handing Lizzy the envelope. “It showed up at the hotel this morning, addressed to the younger Dr. McNally.”

  As Lizzy opened the envelope, Ruby continued, “If it’s your new identity, don’t tell any of us what the name on it is. If we’re not supposed to know where you are, we probably shouldn’t know what name you’re traveling under either.”

  Lizzy nodded. “Okay.”

  She was startled by how much the photo looked like her—or at least her when she had long blond hair. Tracy Coates from Beloit, Wisconsin. She almost said it out loud, just to try it out, but stopped herself.

  Ruby handed her the knapsack. “This is from the Dr. McNallys.”

  Lizzy unzipped the knapsack, which contained five envelopes. She took one out and opened it up. It was filled with bills.

  “Holy cow, how much is in there?”

  “Five thousand dollars. That should hold you for a while.”

  “Jeez.” Lizzy looked uncomfortable. “I wonder if they have enough money to keep giving me loads of cash.”

  “I know a good place we can hide it in the van,” said Ruby.

  They went out to the van and Ruby showed Lizzy where she could hide the envelopes in the wells into which the back seats could be retracted. Then they loaded their luggage—Lizzy’s suitcase from her trip back to Pennsylvania from Arizona and a small overnight bag for Ruby—and Ruby climbed into the driver’s seat. “I’ll drive us out of the city. Any idea which direction you want to head?”

  “West.”

  Ruby shot her a suspicious look.

  “Since I’m not exactly an expert driver yet,” Lizzy said, “I want to stay out of busy areas. West seems like a good direction to head.”

  “Northern Pennsylvania would have lots of back roads you could use, and a lot of small towns you could stay in.”

  “I don’t want to go toward the Poconos.”

  The Poconos was where Lizzy’s mother, Charlotte, had died.

  Ruby nodded. “West it is.” She started up the van and pulled away.

  They took the Schuylkill Expressway to the Turnpike. Ruby pointed out signs and their meanings, narrated the rules of the road, and commented on the vagaries of other drivers. When Ruby wasn’t lecturing, Lizzy read the Pennsylvania driver’s manual on her phone.

  Ruby got off the Turnpike at Morgantown and turned the vehicle over to Lizzy.

  They got on a two-lane road headed west. The biggest challenge was that Lizzy’s father’s car had been much smaller than Ruby’s van, and whenever they approached an object near the road—a parked car or the occasional Amish buggy—Lizzy would pull far to the left, unless there was a car coming in the opposite direction, in which case she would stop to wait for traffic to clear, eliciting honks from the cars behind her. After ten minutes, Lizzy’s look of determination was beginning to veer toward grim and a sheen of sweat covered her forehead.

  “Pull off here,” said Ruby as they approached a largely deserted parking lot in front of an under-construction warehouse. “We can practice a little more without all these antsy people distracting you.”

  One side of the parking lot was being paved, and was separated from the rest of the lot by barrels between which yellow nylon rope was strung.

  “Let me out over there,” said Ruby, gesturing toward the roped-off area, “and then you drive by the barrels and I’ll hold my hands apart to show how far away from them you are.”

  After a few passes for which the van’s distance from the barrels was too great for Ruby to indicate, Lizzy started getting a better sense of the width of the van. After a dozen passes, she was able to consistently bring the van to within about two feet of the barrels.

  Ruby waved her down and climbed back into the van. “Very good,” she said briskly.

  They spent an hour in the parking lot, aisles standing in for roads and light poles serving as a sedate slalom course. Ruby ran Lizzy through a parallel parking exercise that prompted Lizzy to refer to her as Sergeant DiMano. When they had exhausted the possibilities in that lot, Ruby drove them to a sparsely populated mall parking lot for more practice.

  When they finally ventured back onto the road, Lizzy was feeling much more confident about her driving skills, and the lack of honks indicated that the other drivers were happier as well.

  After an uneventful half hour, Ruby said, “You’re doing very well. Want to try the highway?”

  “Sure,” said Lizzy.

  “Okay. Let me drive again so we can do a reconnaissance run to make sure it’s not too busy.”

  Ruby drove to the nearest westward-heading highway. Traffic proved to be light, so she pulled off at the next exit and swapped seats with Lizzy.

>   “For the first merge, you just keep your eyes on the road, and I’ll watch for traffic. I’ll tell you what car to pull in behind. Be sure to keep your speed up so that the traffic on the highway doesn’t have to slow down for you.”

  Lizzy started down the entrance ramp at a somewhat sedate speed.

  “It will be better if you can go a little faster,” said Ruby.

  Lizzy increased their speed slightly as they reached the end of the ramp.

  “The truck—” said Ruby.

  Lizzy pulled to the left and the blast of an air horn drowned out Ruby’s “Not yet!”

  Lizzy jerked the wheel to the right as the truck blasted by, and the van lumbered onto the shoulder of the road. Ruby reached over and grabbed the wheel to steer the van away from the guard rail, but in the last few feet before they came to a stop, they heard the teeth-grinding screech of metal on metal.

  Ruby puffed out the breath she had been holding.

  “I’m sorry,” cried Lizzy, “I thought you meant to pull in behind the truck!”

  “I wasn’t very clear about that,” replied Ruby. “Let’s swap places—I want to get us away from the entrance ramp, then we can check things out.”

  There was no indication of any effect on the van’s operation, so Ruby continued on to a turnoff about a mile further on and they climbed out. A dirty silver streak ran the length of the van’s side.

  “Oh, Ruby, I’m so sorry!” Lizzy looked ready to cry. “I ruined your van!”

  “Nonsense. It’s not ruined—it’s just a little cosmetic damage. We’ll get it fixed up when things are back to normal.” She patted Lizzy’s arm. “But maybe you should stick to the back roads for a little while.”

  25