The Depth of Darkness (Mitch Tanner #1) (12 page)

Focus, Debby.

The guy said, “When I say keep your mouth
shut, I mean keep your damn mouth shut.”

She struggled to talk. “He has asthma.”

The guy slapped her across the face. “Shut
up!”

Debby began to cry. The tear tracks felt cold
as the wind pelted her face. She struggled to turn her head to the
left. The other guy sat in the passenger seat. He watched her in
the side mirror. Their stares connected. He narrowed his eyes then
looked away. She noticed a tattoo that started behind his right ear
and ran down his neck. A weird, spiky design.

“You and I reached an understanding?” the man
holding her said.

She turned her head, nodded and didn’t say a
word.

He let go, and she fell to the ground. “Okay,
then. Get your butt back inside. We’re almost there.”

The door swung open and missed her head by
inches. She pulled herself up using the running boards and then
slipped inside, taking her place on the floor, head to head with
Beans. The vehicle didn’t start moving, though. The men were
speaking to one another. Their voices were so low that she had
trouble making out what they were saying. A minute later the front
doors opened, then the rear ones. She felt hands on her body,
pulling her out. Beans gasped. She opened her eyes and saw him
being pulled from the cab.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

The guy said nothing. He slipped a black bag
over her head and tied it loosely around her neck. Then he said,
“If you struggle, that’s going to cinch tighter and you’ll strangle
to death. You got that?”

Debby said nothing. She didn’t even nod out
of fear that the string would draw tighter and she
would
suffocate. She had no idea where they were going or why they were
going there. She didn’t want to think about where this was leading.
She’d seen similar events on TV shows. Rarely did they work out for
the people that were kidnapped. The only thing she knew at that
moment was that she had no intention of dying in the back of the
white truck.

We reentered McCree’s bedroom. The man sat on
the edge of the bed in a pair of shorts. His shoulders were slumped
over. He draped his left forearm across his knees. In his right
hand he held a lit cigarette.

“Where’s your truck, McCree?” I asked.

He looked up at me, then at Sam. He took a
deep drag on his cigarette. Exhaled through the corner of his
mouth, away from us. The smoke drifted toward the window, which was
cracked open a couple inches. I found myself appreciating the
gesture. I hadn’t smoked in ten years, but the urge came around
every once in a while. This wasn’t one of those times.

“Well?” Sam said, taking a step forward.

McCree took another drag and said
nothing.

I lunged toward the guy, knocking the
cigarette from his hand, and grabbing his arms. “You listen to me
you piece of crap. We need to know where that truck is, and we need
to know five minutes ago.”

McCree looked over at the cigarette burning
through his satin sheets. “These are five hundred dollar sheets.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that I forgot he worked in a
school.

“They can burn and so can you.” I let him go
and took a step back.

A red-ringed circle spread out along the blue
sheets. McCree knocked the cigarette to the floor and used his palm
to put out the embers. Once they were extinguished, he looked at
the palm of his hand and brushed away the gray and black ash. “I
loaned my truck to my brother.”

“Roy Miller,” I said.

“What?”

“Is he your brother?”

“Who the hell is Roy Miller? My brother is
Brad McCree. His truck’s in the shop. He’s in construction. Can’t
work without a truck. He needed mine for a job, so I lent it to
him.”

“What kind of job?”

“Whatever kind of job guys in construction
need a truck for, man. I don’t know. I’m not his boss. He needed my
truck, and I had a ride available if I wanted it.” He jutted his
chin toward the open doorway and I imagined the half-dressed woman
with Officer Wiggins.

“And the name Roy Miller?” Sam asked. “What
does that mean to you?”

McCree shrugged and held out his arms. “Never
heard that name in my life. Can I light up again?”

“No,” I said. “What about Michael
Lipsky?”

McCree looked toward the window. He clenched
his jaw. The muscles at the corner of his face rippled. After a
moment, he said, “What about him?”

“You hired him to be a janitor at the school.
Correct?”

He nodded.

“They told us that you two were childhood
friends. Is that correct?”

He nodded again.

“Did you ever meet his wife?”

This time he turned his head toward us. He
looked confused. “Wife? He told me he was single. Said she left him
some time back.”

“Are you sure you never heard the name Roy
Miller?” Sam asked.

“Jesus Christ,” McCree said. “I told you, I
have never heard that name.”

“Not even on the news?”

“I don’t watch that crap. It’s
depressing.”

“Looks like you’ve got a nice antidepressant
in the other room,” I said.

He smiled and his face lit up. “Fresh faces
every year. I even let some come back around time to time.”

Sam cleared his throat, stepped forward and
leaned over so he was face to face with the guy. “Roy Miller is
believed to have killed his wife, Dusty Anne Miller, this past
Friday night.”

McCree reached into his pocket and pulled out
a cigarette. He flipped it between his fingers. “Sucks for her. But
I have no idea what that has to do with me.”

“Had you kept in regular touch with Lipsky?”
I asked.

McCree shook his head. “Nah, not since high
school. He called me up out of the blue. Said he’d been through the
ringer since his old lady bailed. He asked me for a favor. I pulled
some strings, got a few things waived and brought him in as a
janitor at the school. Didn’t think it’d be a permanent position,
just something to get the guy back on track. Told me he lost his
programming job a few years back and been out of work since. He’d
taken to living in shelters and on friends’ couches and stuff like
that. I thought if he could get an apartment, some decent clothes,
a regular shower…who knows, you know? Maybe he could get a job with
one of the companies downtown.”

“What kind of things did you get waived?” Sam
asked.

“Background check, credit check, things like
that. They make the process take forever, and I didn’t want the guy
on my couch disrupting my…extracurricular activities. Besides, I
knew him from way back. Decent guy.”

“Like you, huh?” I took a moment. “So, aside
from the fact that you were friends as kids, you know nothing about
the guy?”

McCree shrugged. “He’s a good guy. What’s to
know?”

Sam dropped the picture he had taken from the
school’s administrative office on the bed. It landed face up.
“That’s Lipsky?”

McCree nodded.

Sam shook his head. “We have reason to
believe that Lipsky is Roy Miller.”

McCree straightened and looked Sam in the
eye. “Say again?”

“You heard me. He bolted from custody early
Sunday morning at the hospital. We got a tip this morning that he
held up a gas station about thirty miles away. He was with another
man. They drove off in a white Ford F-250. What do you drive?”

“A white Ford F-250,” McCree said after
forcing himself to swallow.

“And where is that truck right now?”

“I told you, I loaned it to my brother.”

“And how well did your brother know Miller,
or Lipsky?”

“They were the same age. The two of them were
best friends. He was over a lot, that’s how we became friends.”

“You and your brother were friends as kids?”
Sam asked.

McCree shrugged.

“What’s your brother like, McCree?” I
asked.

McCree shook his head.

“Telling me that you don’t know?”

McCree locked eyes with me. “You should have
access to his record.”

“His record? You mean he’s a felon?” Sam
asked.

“Yeah.”

I took a step back, turned and left the room.
Sam followed me out. We stopped in the middle of the hallway. There
were several more cops combing through the house.

“What do you think?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “We’ve
got a murder suspect with two names. A vice principal with an
ex-con for a brother, who also happened to borrow the man’s truck.
A truck spotted thirty miles away carrying our suspect and maybe
the ex-con. And now two kids missing, presumably taken by the
suspect who was hired a few weeks ago by the ex-con’s brother.”

I assume Sam followed along judging by the
way he nodded.

“Let’s get these two down to the station and
get this house processed. I don’t think those kids were brought
through here, but we might find Miller a.k.a. Lipsky’s prints in
here. McCree might not have been down at the school, but that
doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved. We treat him and the woman as a
suspect for now.”

Sam started toward the room. Officer Wiggins
stepped into the hallway to cut him off.

“What do you want me to do with her?” she
asked.

“Get her dressed and bring her back to the
station,” Sam said. “We want to get her isolated and ask her some
questions.”

Sam went into McCree’s bedroom. I turned and
walked into the great room. I looked at everything in a different
light. This had come about so quickly that I hadn’t had time to ask
the most important question. Why? Why had this happened? Why those
two kids? Thinking back on what that blond haired teacher told me,
Miller a.k.a. Lipsky had been carrying the boy toward the van. The
girl ran after them. Attacked the man, as the teacher had put it.
Had she been defending the boy? I needed the kids’ names, addresses
and parental information. I had to find Huff and find out if anyone
had notified the parents yet. If not, I wanted to do it personally.
The boy had been targeted, and I had to find out why.

As I looked around the kitchen, I heard
McCree shouting from the bedroom. Bad idea to shout at Sam. If
McCree didn’t shut his mouth soon, he’d find that out firsthand.
From the kitchen, I went back into the garage. I recalled seeing
the crawl access in there. It had been closed then. Someone had
already opened it. I squatted and rocked forward. I placed my hands
on the dirty concrete floor and peered into the opening. Beams from
flashlights lit up sections of the crawlspace. I saw lots of spider
webs.

“What’ve you got in there?” I called out.

“Nothing,” a voice called back. “It’s empty
other than a couple snake skins and some spiders.”

I fought off a quick bout of the shakes. I
hated both snakes and spiders. Crooks I could deal with. My 9mm
gave me the upper hand there. A black widow or a brown recluse
didn’t care about what kind of gun I carried. Neither did a
cottonmouth or a rattlesnake. I hoped I’d never encounter any of
them. I rose, walked back inside, through the kitchen, to the
opened sliding glass door. Horace and Fairchild hung out on the
back porch, smoking.

“You two find anything out here?” I asked,
trying to remain as polite as I could.

They shrugged and said nothing to me.

“Guys, we’ve got two kids who need our help.
This isn’t the time to act on our grudges.”

“Get lost, Tanner,” Fairchild said. “We were
told to hang back and stay out here unless ordered inside. We can’t
do nothing to help out here.”

“Guys, look, I don’t mean—”

“Oh, crap! Look, Tanner,” Horace said,
hopping up and down and pointing to the corner of the fence. “See
those bricks over there? I bet that’s a clue.” He jogged to the
edge of the yard. “I’m gonna get these processed ASAP.”

The two men fell out laughing. A couple of
hyenas. They’d fit in nice with the media. I waved them off, then
turned and stepped back inside while muttering a few choice
obscenities under my breath.

By the time I reached the hallway, Sam
emerged with McCree. He’d handcuffed the man. McCree did not look
happy about it.

“Wait till you two hear from my lawyer,” the
guy said.

“Hey, he struck me. I got Jennings to back me
up on that.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“Both of you can blow me,” McCree said. “When
I’m done with you, your pensions will be mine.”

I resisted the urge to stick my leg out in
front of the guy, sending him sprawling to the floor with no way to
break his fall. Instead, I grabbed his left elbow. Sam had his
right. Together, we led him outside the house, where things took a
turn for the worse.

Huff stood at the edge of the front lawn,
waiting for us. We tried to avoid him, but did not succeed.

“Detectives,” Huff said. “Come over
here.”

I glanced around and saw Jennings close
behind us. I got his attention and relinquished control over McCree
to him. “Get him to the station. Don’t put him in the room with
Wiggins. Separate rooms, close together. I don’t want to have to
run up and down that hall. Got it?”

Baby-faced Jennings nodded and led McCree to
one of the patrol cars. I heard the man fussing about the cuffs and
police brutality and unlawful arrest. I guess he figured his
complaints would be addressed by the rookie cop.

Standing close to Huff were two men and a
woman. They wore dark suits and dark Ray-Ban-like sunglasses. They
all looked to be in shape. The men were clean cut and fresh out of
the academy. The woman looked to be in her mid-thirties. She had
her long hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She had a slender
face with a figure to match.

“Detectives Tanner and Foster,” Huff said.
“These are Special Agents Vinson, Braden and Dinapoli.” He pointed
at each of them in turn. The woman was Dinapoli. “They’re with the
FBI.”