Charlie had no idea where she was.
The house was cold and drafty and smelled old. She could hear the rain starting up again outside, and there was wind, and tree branches were scraping on the window—at least, she hoped they were tree branches. They sounded like fingernails.
Across the hall, it sounded like Maya was sleeping. Charlie hadn’t heard any crying for a while.
It was a dark, old bedroom, with big, dusty furniture and a tall mirror hung on the wall above a long dresser. Every surface was covered with dust. A window, framed with dark curtains, took up half of one wall, and she could see shapes moving against the glass. Ugly wallpaper decorated all four walls, that weird, thick kind of wallpaper that her father had shown her in some of the old buildings he sometimes bought and fixed up. They always removed that kind of wallpaper, and it came off in big yellow sheets.
The room smelled old and musty, like a wet basement. She knew that meant it had been shut up too long.
Charlie shook her head. She had been so stupid.
Daddy had always warned her about getting into cars. She and Maya knew better. They knew all about “stranger danger” and all of that stuff. But he hadn’t been a stranger. He’d simply offered her and Maya a ride around the block in the car, and they had only hesitated for a moment.
She’d never been in a police car before. They’d gone up the alley and turned, walking to his car. Then he’d asked them to sit in the back, because it would be fun, and suggested they take a little drive before he took them to school. They drove away from her school, and she started to say something, but thought better of it. It might be cool to have a policeman drive her to school – they worked for her Dad.
He’d driven out of town, heading north and then east, saying they were taking a quick drive past the river. Charlie remembered driving past the new pool and then over the river, passing the canoe livery where she and her Dad had gone for a canoe ride last year. The police officer had driven them out just past the river and stopped, pulling the car over onto the shoulder and down a slope, then along a dirt area and stopping by some trees.
The doors had unlocked, and he asked them to get out. He said there was something he wanted to show them, down by the river.
She should have figured it out then.
She and Maya had looked at each other, but when Maya shrugged, saying it would be fine. Charlie gave up the tiny argument in her mind and agreed. They climbed out, leaving their backpacks. He took longer—he was doing something in the front seat, something funny that she couldn’t see, before climbing out and following them.
They were near the river, near the City Pool and close to where the canoes were put in the water. Charlie could see the river through the trees, down the thin path that snaked alongside the road. Tall grass edged the path to her right, and she ran ahead, wanting to see the water. She followed the slope down to the river. As she’d approached it, she’d heard a rustling behind her and turned and Tyler, the policeman, was holding Maya strangely. Charlie thought for a second that maybe Maya had stumbled, and the policeman had caught her in one arm. But he was holding something funny over her mouth, a small white square of fabric that looked like a napkin or a towel.
Something was wrong.
In a moment, Maya seemed to fall asleep. Her eyes fluttered closed, and the man dropped her roughly into the grass, then turned and looked at Charlie. He’d grabbed at her, and she’d pulled away, screaming, scrambling into the tall, wet grass. But his hands were too strong, and he’d grabbed her legs. Something white and soft was stuffed over her nose and mouth. It smelled horrible—like a doctor’s office, she thought for a moment, and then the world had shimmered around her, and her knees felt weak, and then everything turned black.
She’d woken in this big, creepy room, her clothes still damp from falling into the tall grass. It had only taken her a moment to realize she was tied to the wooden headboard of the big bed. She wasn’t handcuffed, like the criminals in old movies. Instead, her left wrist was hooked to the headboard with two thin black plastic ties, like the kind she’d seen used to tie together electrical cords. Zip ties, she thought they were called. One around her left wrist, and that tie went through another zip tie that was looped around one of the thick wooden posts of the headboard. She could stretch out and lay down, but it wasn’t comfortable, or she could roll off the bed and stand.
Charlie wondered about Maya. She was younger than Charlie and always a little more scared. Maya’s mother didn’t speak much English and worked for Charlie’s mom. The two girls got along great. Sometimes, Charlie pretended that Maya was her sister. They went to the same school and played together. Sometimes they would play dress-up and paint each other’s nails, when they were allowed.
Charlie could hear Maya start crying in the other room, and the crying quickly grew louder and louder, until it was half crying and half angry shouting. Charlie had never heard Maya cry like that. They’d lived together in the same house for almost two years. One time, Maya had fallen down in the park near their home and had gotten hurt pretty bad. Even that time, Maya hadn’t cried like this. And there was nothing Charlie could do except listen to her cry.
It worried Charlie that a policeman had taken her and Maya. Charlie had always thought the police in town worked for her father—he’d said that once. He was one of the seven people on the City Council. But if the policeman had taken her, would the other policemen in town be looking for her and Maya? Or were all the police friends?
Charlie wasn’t sure, but she hoped someone was looking for them. It made her feel better, but only slightly. Charlie had spent the first six hours straight trying to wiggle free, but the zip ties were too tight. After that, she’d joined Maya and cried until she fell asleep, tired and alone in a bed far too big for her.
Frank Harper stood by the window of his hotel room again, looking out at the highway. It was Monday morning, and his head hurt. A lot.
Beer always did that to him—he was good with whiskey and bourbon, even the cheap stuff, but the headaches that came with beer stuck with him, sometimes for days. When the vodka had run out, he’d switched to cheap beer, knowing he would pay the price. Yesterday had been a fog—he’d spent most of it looking out this window, staring at the highway and thinking about Tuesday and Laura. And St. Barts.
Really, what was the point of it all? Things probably weren’t going to improve with Laura. She’d take one look at him and kick him out. Or they would start to talk, and he’d say something stupid, like something about her mother, or about how they had left, and she would politely ask him to leave.
But he didn’t want to go back to that cubicle in Birmingham. It didn’t matter if Frank was sitting there or not—exactly the same amount of progress would be made on the cold cases. Just getting out of there felt better. Maybe he should skip the meeting with Laura. It was destined to fail, anyway. Maybe he should just climb into his crappy car and leave. Start driving in some random direction and never look back.
The Vacation Inn was just a few yards from Interstate 75, a wide swath of concrete full of speeding trucks and cars. He could take it anywhere, maybe find someplace where he could be useful again. The road, if one were interested in following it, stretched north all the way to Canada and south to Miami.
Ben Stone had been from Miami.
The guy was a crack shot, always topping Frank at the sandy Florida shooting range where they practiced. They would go almost every week, and Ben would always kick Frank’s butt, never letting him forget it. They’d gotten along okay, and their competition at the range had been a nice diversion from the counterfeiting case, even if sometimes Ben would keep the used paper target silhouette of his shots and leave it in their car just to piss Frank off.
But Ben was also a hot head and prone to occasional bouts of stupidity. One day, Ben decided to return to investigate a lead on the case on his own—without Frank or department approval—and got himself killed in a back alley in Coral Gables. His gun was still in its holster.
Fat lot of good his range rating ended up doing.
Frank looked out at the highway and wondered if the weather would be as miserable today as it had been yesterday—cold and wet.
He’d tried to sleep in, but Frank had never been really good at that—too many years of rising early. First the military, then the NOPD. Too many early mornings, early meetings, early drills.
But early mornings were good for some things. He liked the quiet stillness, before everyone else was up. He’d heard an old-timer once sum it up nicely. The elderly black man only had two or three teeth, but smiled all the time, nonetheless. Worked at one of the restaurants in the French Quarter, an area of town Frank had frequented as much as possible. The old man had loved the early mornings because he could “enjoy the day before some idiot screwed it up.”
Frank turned and looked around the hotel room—it was looking pretty shabby. He thought about tidying up but then remembered no one was coming to visit him, and he really didn’t give a shit.
His brain felt sluggish, out-of-sorts, with nothing to work on. Frank had also spent much of yesterday thinking about Saturday night and his inability, or more accurately his unwillingness, to step in and help with those drunk guys. Frank felt impotent, a caged animal straining to get out, but knowing that he should do the right thing and just stay in his cage. The cold cases weren’t as interesting as his old work, and conversations with his old cop friends were few and far between. And the drinking wasn’t helping as much as it used to.
It was all Trudy’s fault. She should have stuck with him, after St. Bart’s, instead of taking Laura and leaving. He’d needed help, and she’d bolted. Of course, it was hard to blame her. He’d been a class “A” prick to her.
Frank shook his head and decided to run through an abbreviated workout to loosen up the kinks. Maybe it would work some of the alcohol out of his system.
He turned and sat on the edge of the hotel bed, turning on the TV and flipping through the channels. There was nothing on but the “Today” show, so Frank tossed the remote on the bed and got down on the floor in front of the TV to do crunches. The room swam when he moved too fast, so he slowed, rocking up and down, counting methodically. Frank concentrated on the crunches, trying to push everything else out of his mind. He willed the alcohol to burn through his system and evaporate out through his pores.
He hated the “Today” show. He hated all the morning shows, full of dumb news segments and canned interviews and staged interactions. He always felt sorry for the guests, who seemed rushed through their segments. Why invite people onto your show, fly them all the way to New York, clean them up, and put them on TV, and then just talk over them and interrupt them for the whole segment? Why invite them on and then hurriedly kick them out the door? Some smart producer should come along and tell the folks on these morning shows to just slow down and breathe.
The “Today” show covered a little bit of news, leading into an interview with some teeny-bopper celebrity—the young woman on the TV was a movie star and had had multiple run-ins with the law. She had once had a promising career, but now in her twenties, she was caught up in a downward spiral of bad career moves, embarrassing paparazzi photos, and too many bad choices.
To Frank, doing crunches on the floor, it sounded like she needed rehab. Or maybe just someone in her life that wasn’t always enabling her every stupid move. These people were usually surrounded by “yes” men, all part of an enabling entourage working hard to keep the gravy train on track.
Sometimes, all you needed to pull your shit together was someone in your life who was willing to say “no.”
The show broke for commercials, then cut over to the local Dayton news. Dayton was interesting. It wasn’t the kind of place he would choose to live, but it wasn’t as “Midwestern” as he’d been led to believe. The people were nice, so far, and they had Starbucks and Target, just like anywhere else.
The anchor came on, a woman with large hair and a chipper, coffee-fueled attitude that made Frank’s beer headache kick back in.
“Welcome back,” the woman said on the TV, grinning. “Coming up is an update on our top story, the two missing girls in Cooper’s Mill, along with Scott Bumpers for the forecast. But first, an update on the news. A fire broke out in the 400 block of Tipper Avenue in Dayton last night, and investigators on the scene are suspecting arson. Let’s go to Dale Scott for the report…”
The TV station cut to an impossibly fat man standing in front of a smoldering home in what looked like a rundown part of Dayton. The home had been reduced to rubble, and, as the fat guy fidgeted, he explained what had happened. The guy was so large, it looked like he was trapped in one of those puffy sumo wrestling suits. A few seconds into the story, the station cut away from the man to taped footage, filmed earlier, of the house still burning.
Frank stood up and started doing arm curls. He didn’t have any weights, so he used the ice bucket. All the ice was melted, and all that was left were a few renegade cubes floating in cold water. He worked to keep the bucket steady, lifting smoothly, not wanting to spill.
“As you can see, the home was fully involved when the first firefighters arrived,” the reporter continued over the footage, sounding winded. “Little could be done to save the home.”
Thanks, Captain Obvious, Frank thought.
Frank had never investigated arsons or fires, but he’d known people who did. A nice black guy named Williams in Birmingham who specialized in arsons. The guy was like a savant. He knew all the subtle signs of accelerants and scorch patterns. That man could walk into a fire that had burned out a month before and say immediately whether or not it had been lit. It was amazing.
Williams sat near Frank in the Birmingham office and would, on occasion, bring over pictures of horribly burnt victims and vacant buildings.
Frank would always say the same thing:
“Holy shit, Williams.”
Why did people enjoy sharing their shock? It happened a lot in the offices where he’d worked—NOPD, the field office in Florida, and now the cubicle farm in Birmingham. Investigators would run across a particularly gruesome photograph in whatever case they were working on and walk it all around the room, sharing them like baby pictures. Frank had done it too, a few times. Somehow, sharing the stories and the indignity helped make it seem less real, more tolerable.
But there were cases that he could never joke about. Like that little boy in Atlanta and the cardboard box. That one had gotten to Frank, more than the others. He’d never felt comfortable talking about it. Certainly never would have walked any pictures around. He hated the images he had in his head from that day, images that would never go away. And sharing them with others—well, he wouldn’t wish those pictures, if they existed, on anyone.
Frank lowered the ice bucket and glanced at the clock. Time to go. He went into the small bathroom, brushed his teeth, and combed some water through his hair. His wife had always liked his hair—ex-wife, that is. After another glance in the mirror, he decided to spend a few minutes and shaved the beard and goatee from his face. Being clean shaven always made him feel more presentable. Normally, he didn’t care, but tomorrow was different.
He left the hotel room and pulled the door shut behind him, then headed down the long, carpeted hall and took the stairs down to the lobby. He skipped the elevator. After St. Bart’s, Frank wasn’t a fan of enclosed spaces.
In the lobby, he passed the front desk and nodded at the young kid working behind it. Frank couldn’t recall his name, but he remembered clearly that the boy—he looked about 14—had sounded like a mouse when he talked, his voice high and squeaky. Good luck hitting puberty, kid.
Outside, the rain had let up. That was one thing he didn’t miss from growing up—it had rained a lot in Baton Rouge. It was always humid, all year round, in the BR. Wet and steamy, they used to say. Birmingham was better, but it was even cooler here in Dayton, and Frank wasn’t used to it. The sky was peeking out from behind the October clouds that covered the sky from horizon to horizon.
Frank started across the parking lot to the Tip Top Diner, next to the Vacation Inn where he’d already eaten a couple times. He glanced at the beat-up Taurus to make sure it hadn’t been stolen. Unfortunately, it was still sitting there, hulking in the spot, exactly where he’d left it.