Authors: J. D. Robb
“Christ. Yes. Block video,” she ordered. “Dallas.”
“Dispatch, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.”
At 4:18 a.m., she learned of Reed Aaron Mulligan.
Downtown again, she thought. A full day ahead of schedule. Unless…
“Do you want me to wake Peabody?” Roarke asked.
“Yes. No. No, no point. It’s going to be one of theirs, but that’s gut, not fact. I’ll talk to this Mulligan’s mother first.”
“Then I’m with you. With you,” he repeated before she could object.
She was showered, dressed and pumped on coffee inside ten minutes, with Roarke barely a minute behind as he remoted a vehicle over from the garage.
Then they were out the door, into the cold, clear night, where one of his burly A-Ts waited, engine and heaters running.
“Possible missing lives with his mother on Leonard, off Broadway.”
“I heard Dispatch.” He drove fast, smooth through the gates and onto streets quiet in the predawn winter. “This is a break-in pattern, yes?”
“If they’ve got him, yeah. Jayla Campbell should have had another day. Maybe something went south there, and they’ve dumped her body where we haven’t found it yet. Or disposed of it another way. Or…”
“Still have her. Alive.”
“Doubtful, but I’d like to think so. And it may be this is a false alarm. The missing’s twenty-one – barely.” She scanned her PPC, and the run she’d already started on him.
“A couple juvie bumps, looks like. Illegals, nothing major. Currently working as assistant manager, days, at a music store – instruments, lessons. Got some income here from a band called Thrashers.”
She dug a little deeper. “Plays the guitar, sings. Looks like a handful of club dates – low-rent. Have to check it out, but —”
“He might have gotten lucky, might have gotten stoned and flopped with a friend.”
“Maybe. But it’s their territory. Single mother, bar waitress, no sibs.” Eve put her PPC away. “We’ll hear her out.”
The Mulligans lived in a triple-decker walk-up with solid security and a reasonably clean lobby.
No graffiti on the stairway leading up to three, Eve noticed, which said something about the tenants. She’d heard a mutter of a media report on two through one of the apartment doors.
Lousy soundproofing, and someone worked the early shift.
She’d lifted her fist to rap on the door, but it swung open first.
“I heard you coming. Cops?”
“Lieutenant Dallas.” Eve held up her badge. “And my civilian consultant. Ms. Mulligan?”
“Yeah, yeah, come in. Thanks for getting here so fast. The first guy I talked to barely listened to me.”
She wore a short black skirt that showed good legs and a low-cut white top that framed good breasts. Her work clothes, Eve thought, and had only changed out her shoes for house skids, tossed a bulky cardigan over the shirt.
She radiated worry.
“Reed wouldn’t not come home. I mean to say he’d let me know if he was staying out. That’s our deal. I do the same for him.”
“Why don’t we sit down, and you can run through it for me?”
“Oh, sorry.” She looked around as if she couldn’t find her place in her own apartment. “I can’t think I’m so worried. Have a seat. I’ve got coffee.”
“That’d be great,” Eve said, mostly to give the woman something to do, something that would settle her. “Just black for both of us.”
“Give me a sec.”
She moved to the rear of the room, to the jog that held a narrow, open kitchen.
She wore her flame-red hair scooped up in a bouncy tail that left her face – narrow, angular – unframed. Her run had put her at forty, but she could have lied her way to thirty-five, even with the pallor and the shadows under misty green eyes.
“I work five nights a week at The Speakeasy. It’s a bar just a couple blocks over. It’s a good place, not a dive. Classy, good customers. Roarke owns it – you know who I mean.”
Eve slanted Roarke a look. “Yeah.”
“So it’s a good place to work – not a lot of ass-grabbers come in. And it’s close to home – Roarke owns this place, too, so it’s nice. It’s secure, and it’s clean. Reed’s a good boy. Responsible. He’s got a solid day job. He wants to be a music star – that’s the dream. He plays in a band, and they’re starting to get some jobs. He’s good. I know I’m his mom, but he’s good. Anyway.”
She brought coffee on a tray with the grace and ease of a longtime waitress.
“I work four nights seven to midnight, and one night – like tonight – five to two. Reed said how he might go out late, jam with his band some. They’re working on a sound, compu-boosted. He’s got a knack with computers. So when I got home and he wasn’t here, I wasn’t worried. But when I checked the house ’link – it was blinking so I knew there were messages, I got worried.”
She picked up her own coffee, set it down again. “The first message was from Benj—that’s Reed’s best friend, and one of the band. He was a little steamed. Where are you, sort of thing, why aren’t you answering your ’link. You could listen.”
“That’d be good.”
Quickly, Jackie rose, flipped on the message replay.
Hey, man, wtf! We’re still waiting. Answer your pocket, dude. You said you’d be here in a few. It’s been a freaking hour. Tag me.
The machine flagged the message at 1:06 a.m.
And the next, again from Benj, twenty minutes later. A third from a female – ID’d as Roxie Parkingston, lead vocalist – twenty-two minutes after that.
Reed, you’re scaring me now. I swear if I don’t hear back from you in another half an hour, I’m tagging your mom. Don’t make me tag your mom.
“She did,” Jackie confirmed. “I was listening to the message, her last message, when she rang through. She said Reed had talked to Benj when he was on the way – walking to this basement unit Benj and a couple of the other boys share on Morton, just off Seventh. They’ve soundproofed it, so they practice there. It’s only ten minutes away on foot. At most.
“Something happened,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t do this. We have a deal. All either of us have to do is say we won’t be home – no explanations, no questions. But we have to let the other know. We always do. And he was on his way to Benj and the band. His dream.”
“What would he have been wearing?”
Jackie let out a long breath. “I looked, to be sure. I got him a new coat and new boots. His birthday, Christmas. Brown Trailblazer boots – the real leather ones. It was his twenty-first birthday, and he really wanted them. And the coat, it’s a Moose brand parka. Hunter green. I think he’d be wearing black pants, a black sweater. It’s a band thing.”
“A girlfriend?”
“He’s half seeing this girl – Maddy – and I checked with her, woke her up. She hasn’t seen him for a couple days. He’s got the hots for Roxie. I can see it. Hell, she can see it, but he hasn’t moved on it yet. I’d know. So he’s half seeing Maddy, but it’s not serious, and she hasn’t seen him since they grabbed a pizza the other night.”
Eve asked more questions, got a sense of a happy-go-lucky sort of guy, earning a living, helping his mother with the rent, sliding along, and dreaming of fame and fortune rocking it out for millions.
As her own closest friend did just that, Eve knew it could actually happen.
She got the contact information on the bandmates, the half-a-girlfriend, some coworkers.
“You’re going to look for him, right?”
“Yes, we’re going to look for him.”
“I know he’s of age, but he’s mostly still a boy. And he’s pretty.” She pressed her lips together. “I know there are people out there, people who prey on boys, even boys of age.”
Yes, there are, Eve thought, but she said, “We’re going to look for him.”
The minute she stepped out, she turned to Roarke. “Your building.”
“Apparently it is.”
“Then getting the security discs shouldn’t be a problem. Cam on the door. It would show him leaving.”
“I’ve already contacted the security company who handles this property. The system’s in the basement utility. I have the codes.”
“Can you get me copies? I want to get his description out. It’ll hit the morning reports. Maybe somebody saw him.”
“Five minutes,” he told her, and took the basement exit.
He was back in four, handed her the copy. “I ran it from nineteen hundred through oh-one-hundred. Just to cover the ground.”
“That’ll do it.”
She ran it through her PPC, zipping forward until she saw Reed.
“Straight up midnight, and dressed just like his mother said. Hood up. It’s cold.”
She stood where she was, ran it straight through until she saw Jackie Mulligan walk to the door and key in.
“Three people out, two in between. No couples. And no reason to think they’d grabbed the kid, then bopped over here.”
“But now you’re sure.”
“Yeah. You up for a walk?”
“A walk in the cold and dark? Sounds just lovely.”
“He’d walk west,” she said as they stepped outside. “West to Seventh, turn south. “Ten-minute walk – probably a little less as he’d be walking fast in the cold. And somewhere along the route, he ran into them. Between midnight and ten after – if he didn’t detour. It’s a good, narrow window.”
She scanned as they walked, looking for more security cameras, for lighted windows, for shadowy spots where LCs or dealers or muggers might lurk.
But her gut told her Reed hadn’t run afoul of a mugger, or a junkie, or some random street deal. So she looked for potential stretches where someone could get a vehicle close enough to the curb to —
“Shit.” She stopped by a loading zone, checked the time. “Right about six minutes in. Broken streetlight, right there. And glass on the sidewalk from it.”
“They broke one of the lights for cover, pulled right into the loading zone.”
“Used the woman to lure him. ‘Hey, honey, can you help me out a second?’ ” She studied the buildings, the storefronts as she spoke. “No bars right here, and that’s a damn shame. Retail, café, residential, accounting firm. Nothing that would be bustling at midnight on a ball-freezing night. But some traffic had to come by. So they had to be quick with him.”
She tipped her face up. “Yeah, they had to be quick. And that’s a mistake. Loading zones have cams. Crap cams, and a lot of them don’t work at all, but we’ve got a shot here.”
She pulled out her communicator. “We’ve got a shot,” she repeated.
It would take some time, but she arranged to have the feed from the loading zone cam sent to her office unit, her home unit, even her PPC just to cover every base.
And while she waited for Traffic to pull that one off, they walked the rest of the way to Benj Fribbet’s basement unit, roused him and his roommates.
She watched their attitude go from pissy, to smirky, then to genuine concern.
“Come on. Nothing happened to him.” Benj, muscular, mixed-race, handsome, scratched his chest through a T-shirt where Mavis Freestone’s face sent out a flirtatious, come-along-boy smile.
It wigged Eve a little to see her friend over some guy’s torso.
“He’s okay. You sure he’s not home?”
“I wouldn’t be here if he was home. When did you last see or speak to him?”
“I saw him yesterday, went by his work, just to chew a minute, and we made the plans to work here tonight – last night, I mean. I talked to him – I don’t know, about midnight – few after – I guess. He was on his way here. Said he was almost here, and…”
“You got your ’link?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve been pissed at him.” He glanced at his roommates – one short and burly with a lot of purple hair, the other wiry with the shaved-on-one-side look and sleeve tats.
The living area boasted a sagging couch, a table covered with takeout boxes and brew bottles, and a lot of music equipment.
Benj found the ’link in the takeout rubble. Punched in, played back.
You coming or what? Roxie’s here, we’re all here.
Yeah, yeah, I’m on my way. Jeez, it’s like the South Pole out here tonight. Nearly there. I’m nearly there. Fire it up!
Eve heard another voice, barely register.
“Hold it. Play that back, boost it.”
“Sure, but I can’t get it to boost much. It’s a crap ’link.”
Eve grabbed the ’link, held it against her ear.
“ ‘Hey, cutie,’ ” she murmured.
Then Reed’s voice blasted.
Back to you.
“That’s it,” Benj said. “You can hear how I tried to tag his ’link a couple times, I left v-mail there, and on his home ’link. And Roxie did the same.”
Ignoring him, she replayed again, listened, noted the time. Five minutes, forty-eight seconds from exiting his building to ending the transmission.
“I need this ’link.”
“It’s the only one I got,” he began, then shook his head. “Yeah, take it. Jesus, sure, take it. You really think… Maybe he detoured to Maddy’s. They’re not really sizzling, but maybe.”
“His mother contacted her, and no. Anyone else?”
“We’re his crew.” He looked at his friends again. “We’re his crew, you know? We were pissed. We were all pissed he ditched us. What can we do? We can troll for him.”
She didn’t see the point in it, but didn’t see one in trying to stop them, either.
“That’s her voice on here.” She secured the ’link in her pocket for now. “ ‘Hey, cutie.’ Bitch. Right there in the loading zone. I
know
it. About halfway between his place and where he was going.”
“Wrong place, wrong time,” Roarke said, and rubbed a hand on her back.
“That’s worked for them so far, but their luck’s going to change. We’ll get something off the damn cam, and we’ve got her voice on this shitty pocket ’link. We know almost to the minute when he was grabbed, and, goddamn it, they’re close. They’re close by.”
Legwork, she decided, and as they walked back ordered up droids and uniforms to knock on doors along that stretch of Seventh.
She’d get started on the loading zone feed, get McNab ready to boost anything they hit on there – and add more boost to the voice on the ’link.
It would be some wild luck to hit a voiceprint match, but they were due.
In the car again, she pulled out her own ’link.
“Who are you tagging at this hour?”