A Trace of Hope

CHAPTER SEVEN

Keri was totally bewildered. A moment earlier, Anderson had been tearing up at the thought of her missing daughter. Now he was holding a razor-sharp piece of plastic to her throat.

Her first instinct was to make a move to break his grip. But she knew it wouldn’t work. There was no way she could do anything before he’d be able to jam the plastic spike into her vein.

Besides, something about this wasn’t right. Anderson had never given her any sense that he had malice toward her. He seemed to actually like her. He seemed to want to help her. And if he really had cancer, this was a fruitless exercise. He said himself that he’d be dead soon.

Is this way of avoiding the agony, his version of suicide by cop?

“Drop it, Anderson!” Officer Kiley screamed, his weapon pointed in their general direction.

“Put your gun down, Kiley,” Anderson said surprisingly calmly. “You’re going to accidentally shoot the hostage and then your career will be over before it’s even started. Follow procedure. Alert your superior. Get a negotiator over here. It shouldn’t take long. The department always has one on call. Someone can probably be in this room in ten minutes.”

Kiley stood there, uncertain how to proceed. His eyes darted back and forth between Anderson and Keri. His hands were shaking.

“He’s right, Officer,” Keri said, trying to match Anderson’s soothing tone. “Just follow standard procedure and this will all work out. The prisoner isn’t going anywhere. Step outside and make sure the door is locked. Make your calls. I’m okay. Mr. Anderson isn’t going to hurt me. He clearly wants to negotiate. So you need to bring in someone who has authorization to do that, okay?”

Kiley nodded but his feet remained rooted in place.

“Officer Kiley,” Keri said, this time more firmly, “step outside and call your supervisor. Right now!”

That seemed to snap Kiley out of it. He backed out of the room, closed and locked the door, and grabbed the phone on the wall, never letting them out of his sight.

“We don’t have much time,” Anderson whispered in Keri’s ear as he relaxed the plastic pressing against her flesh slightly. “I’m sorry about this but it’s the only way I could be sure we could speak in complete confidence.”

“Really?” Keri whispered back, half furious, half relieved.

“Cave has people everywhere, in here and out there. After this, I’m done for sure. I won’t last through the night. I might not last the hour. But I’m more worried about you. If he thinks that you know everything I know, he might just have you eliminated, regardless of the consequences.”

“So what do you know?” Keri asked.

“I told you Cave made a mistake. He came to me and said he was worried about you. He had done some checking and found out that one of his guys had kidnapped your daughter. As you found out, it was Brian Wickwire – the Collector. Cave didn’t order it or know about it. Wickwire operated on his own a lot and Cave would often help facilitate moving the girls after the fact. That’s what he did with Evie and he never gave it a second thought.”

“So he wasn’t targeting her?” Keri asked. She had suspected as much but wanted to be sure.

“No. She was just some cute blonde girl that Wickwire thought he could fetch a nice price for. But after you started rescuing girls and generating headlines, Cave went back through his records and saw that he was connected to her abduction through Wickwire. He was worried you’d eventually find your way to him and he asked me to help stash Evie somewhere well-hidden and to keep him out of it. He didn’t want to know.”

“He was covering his tracks even before I suspected he was involved?” Keri asked, marveling at Cave’s foresight.

“He’s a clever guy,” Anderson agreed. “But what he didn’t realize was that he was asking the exact wrong person for help. He couldn’t have known. After all, I’m the one who corrupted him in the first place. Why would he suspect me? But I made up my mind to help you. Of course, I did it in a way that I thought would keep me protected.”

Just then Kiley opened the door a crack.

“Negotiator’s on his way,” he said, his voice quavering. “He’ll be here in five minutes. Just stay calm. Don’t do anything crazy, Anderson.”

“Don’t you make me do anything crazy!” Anderson screamed back at him, pulling the toothbrush back up to Keri’s neck and inadvertently poking her skin. Kiley quickly shut the door again.

“Ow,” she said.” I think you drew blood.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, sounding surprisingly sheepish. “It’s hard to maneuver splayed out on the floor like this.”

“Just rein it in a little, okay?”

“I’ll try. There’s just a lot going on, you know? Anyway, I talked to Wickwire and told him to place Evie at a location somewhere in LA where she’d be well taken care of, in case we needed her later on. I wanted to make sure she didn’t leave the city. And I didn’t want her to go through… more than she had to.”

Keri didn’t respond but they both knew there was nothing he could do about the years prior to that, and the horrors her daughter must have suffered in that time. Anderson continued quickly, clearly not wanting to linger on the thought any more than she did.

“I didn’t know what he did with her but it turned out he put her with the older guy you eventually found out she was staying with.”

“If you had decided to help me, why didn’t you just find out her location and get her yourself?”

“Two reasons,” Anderson said. “First, Wickwire wasn’t going to give up her location to me. It was prized info and he kept it closely guarded. Second, and I’m not proud of this, I knew that I’d get arrested if I came to you with your daughter.”

“But you got arrested intentionally anyway a few months later for child abductions,” Keri protested.

“I did that afterward, when I realized I had to take drastic action. I knew that eventually you’d research child abductors and traffickers and find your way to me. And I knew that I could set you on the right path without making Cave suspicious of me. As to getting arrested intentionally, that’s true. But you may recall that I defended myself in court. And if you check the court record closely, you’ll discover that both the prosecutor and the judge made several errors, errors I baited them into, that would almost certainly lead to my conviction being overturned. I was just waiting until the right time to appeal the case. Of course that’s all moot now.”

Keri looked up and saw a commotion outside the window of the room. She could see multiple officers passing by, at least one of whom was carrying a long gun. He was a sniper.

“I don’t mean to be cold but we need to wrap this up,” she said. “There’s no telling if someone out there has an itchy trigger finger or if Cave has ordered one of his minions to put you down as a precaution.”

“Quite right, Detective,” Anderson agreed. “Here I am blathering on about my moral conversion when what you want to know is how to get your daughter back. Am I right?”

“You are. So tell me. How do I get her back?”

“I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know where she is. I don’t believe Cave knows where she is. He might know the location of the Vista event tomorrow night but there’s no chance he’ll attend. So it’s pointless to have him followed.”

“So you’re saying I have no hope of getting her back?” Keri demanded, disbelieving.

Have I been through all this for that answer?

“Likely not, Detective,” he admitted. “But maybe you can get him to give her back.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jackson Cave used to consider you an annoyance, an obstacle to running his business. But that has changed in the last year. He’s become obsessed with you. He not only thinks you are out to destroy his business. He thinks you want to destroy him personally. And because he has twisted reality to make himself the good guy, he thinks you are the bad guy.”

“He thinks I’m the bad guy?” Keri repeated, incredulous.

“Yes. Remember, he manipulates his moral code as he sees fit so that he can function. If he thought he was doing evil things, he couldn’t live with himself. But he’s found ways to justify even the most heinous of acts. He told me once that the girls in these sex slave rings would be starving on the streets if not for him.”

“He’s gone mad,” Keri said.

“He’s doing what he can to look himself in the mirror each morning, Detective. And these days, part of that means believing that you are on a witch hunt. He views you as the enemy. He sees you as his nemesis. And that makes him very dangerous. Because I’m not sure what lengths he’ll go to in order to stop you.”

“So then how can I get a guy like that to give Evie back to me?”

“If you went to him and convinced him that you’re not after him, that all you want is your daughter, maybe he’d relent. If you could persuade him that once you had your daughter safe in your arms you would forget about him forever, maybe even leave the police force, he might be convinced to lay down his arms. Right now he thinks you want his destruction. But if he could be made to believe that you don’t want him, that you only want her, perhaps there’s a chance.”

“You think that would really work?” Keri asked, unable to hide the skepticism in her voice. “I just say ‘give me my daughter back and I’ll leave you alone forever’ and he goes for it?”

“I don’t know if it will work. But I know that you’re out of options. And you have nothing to lose by trying.”

Keri was turning the idea over in her head when there was a knock on the door.

“The negotiator’s here,” Kiley yelled. “He’s coming down the hall now.”

“Wait a minute!” Anderson yelled. “Tell him to stay back. I’ll tell him when he can come in.”

“I’ll tell him,” Kiley said, though his voice indicated he was desperate to hand over communication as soon as possible.

“One last thing,” Anderson whispered in her ear, even more quietly than before if that was possible. “You have a mole in your unit.”

“What? West LA Division?” Keri asked, stunned.

“In your Missing Persons Unit. I don’t know who it is. But someone is feeding information to the other side. So watch your back. More than usual, I mean.”

A new voice called out from the other side of the door.

“Mr. Anderson, this is Cal Brubaker. I’m the negotiator. May I come in?”

“Just one second, Cal,” Anderson called out. Then he leaned in even closer to Keri. “I have a feeling this is the last time we’ll talk, Keri. I want you to know that I think you’re a very impressive person. I hope you find Evie. I really do. Come in, Cal.”

As the door opened, he brought the toothbrush back up to her neck but didn’t actually touch the skin. A pot-bellied man in his mid to late forties with a mop of bushy gray hair and thin, circular-framed glasses that Keri suspected were just for show eased into the room.

He was wearing blue jeans and a rumpled lumberjack-style shirt, complete with the red and black checkerboard pattern. It was borderline laughable, like the “costumed” version of what a nonthreatening hostage negotiator might look like.

Anderson glanced at her and she could see that he felt the same way. He seemed to be fighting the urge to roll his eyes.

“Hi, Mr. Anderson. Can you tell me what’s bothering you this evening?” he said in a practiced, unaggressive tone.

“Actually, Cal,” Anderson replied mildly, “while we were waiting for you, Detective Locke talked some real sense into me. I realized I was just letting myself get a little overwhelmed by my situation and I reacted…poorly. I think I’m ready to surrender and accept the consequences of my choices.”

“Okay,” Cal said, surprised. “Well, this is the most painless negotiation of my life. Since you’re making things so easy on me, I have to ask: are you sure there’s nothing you want?”

“Maybe a few small things,” Anderson said. “But I don’t think you’ll take issue with any of them. I’d like to make sure Detective Locke gets taken straight to the infirmary. I accidentally poked her with the point of the toothbrush and I’m not sure how hygienic it is. She should get it cleaned up right away. And I’d appreciate it if you had Officer Kiley, the gentleman who brought me in here, cuff me and take me wherever I’m headed. I have a feeling some of those other guys might be a little rougher than needed. And maybe, once I drop the pointy object, you could ask that sniper to clear out. He’s making me a bit nervous. Reasonable requests?”

“All reasonable, Mr. Anderson,” Cal agreed. “I’ll do my best to accommodate them. Why don’t you start the ball rolling by dropping the toothbrush and letting the detective go?”

Anderson leaned in close so only Keri could hear him.

“Good luck,” he whispered almost inaudibly before dropping the toothbrush and lifting his arms high so that she could slip under the manacles. She slid away from him and slowly got to her feet with the aid of the overturned table. Cal reached out his hand to offer assistance but she didn’t take it.

Once she was standing upright and felt steady she turned to face Thomas “The Ghost” Anderson for what she was certain would be the last time.

“Thanks for not killing me,” she muttered, trying to sound sarcastic.

“You bet,” he said, smiling sweetly.

As she stepped toward the interrogation room door, it opened wide and five men in full SWAT gear burst in, tearing past her. She didn’t look back to see what they did as she stumbled out the door and into the hallway.

It looked like Cal Brubaker had been true to at least part of his word. The sniper, leaning against the far wall, with his gun at his side, had stood down. But Officer Kiley was nowhere in sight.

As she walked down the hall, escorted by a female officer who said she was taking her to the infirmary, Keri was pretty sure she could hear the sound of gun butts slamming into human bone. And while she didn’t hear any subsequent screaming, she did hear grunting, followed by deep, ceaseless moaning.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Keri hurried back to her car, hoping to leave the parking structure before anyone noticed she was gone. Her heart was beating in time with her shoes, pounding hard and fast on the concrete.

Her trip to the infirmary had been a gift from Anderson. He knew that after a hostage situation, she was sure to face hours of interrogation, hours she didn’t have to spare. By demanding she be allowed to go to the infirmary, he was ensuring her a window in which she would have little supervision and possibly be able to leave before being cornered by a bunch of Downtown Division detectives.

That’s exactly what she had done. After a nurse had cleaned up the small puncture wound on her neck and bandaged it, Keri had feigned a brief post-hostage-crisis panic attack and asked to use the bathroom. Since she wasn’t an inmate, it was easy to slip out after that.

She made her way down in the elevator with the janitorial staff who got off at 9 p.m. Security Officer Beamon must have been on break because there was some new guy manning the lobby and he didn’t give her a second look.

Once out of the building, she started across the street to the parking structure, still expecting some detective to come racing outside after her demanding to know why she’d been interrogating a prisoner when she was on suspension. But she heard nothing.

In fact, she was completely alone with her footsteps and heartbeat as all the off-duty janitors headed down the street to the bus stop and metro station. Apparently none of them drove to work.

It was only when she had reached the second floor of the stairwell that she heard the sound of other shoes below. They were loud and heavy and they seemed to come out of nowhere. She would have noticed them earlier if they’d been walking before. They couldn’t have come from across the street. It was almost as if someone had been waiting for her arrival to start moving.

She headed toward her car, about halfway down the row on the left. The footsteps followed and it became clear now that it wasn’t one set of shoes but two, both clearly belonging to men. Their gaits were thick and lumbering and she could hear one of them wheezing slightly.

It was possible that these men were detectives but she doubted it. They likely would have identified themselves already if they wanted to question her. And if they were cops with ill intent, they wouldn’t be approaching her in the Twin Towers parking structure. There were cameras everywhere. If they were on Cave’s payroll and meant her harm, they would have waited until she was off city property.

Keri slid her hand down involuntarily to her gun holster before remembering that she’d left her personal weapon in the trunk. She had wanted to avoid questions from security and decided that carrying her personal piece into a city jail might not accomplish that goal. For the same reason, her ankle pistol was in the same place. She was unarmed.

Feeling her pulse quicken, Keri ordered herself to remain calm, not to speed up her pace to alert these guys that she was on to them. They had to know. But maintaining the illusion might give her time. Same for looking over her shoulder – she refused to do it. That was certain to set them running after her.

Instead, she casually glanced in the windows of some of the shinier SUVs, hoping to get a sense of who she was dealing with. After a few cars, she was able to size them up. Two guys, both wearing suits: one big, the other huge with a belly that tumbled over his belt. It was hard to gauge age but the bigger one looked older as well. He was the wheezer. Neither were holding guns but the fat one had what looked to be a Taser and the younger one was clutching some kind of nightstick. Apparently someone wanted her taken alive.

Trying to appear nonchalant, she pulled her keys from her purse, sliding the pointy ends between her knuckles facing outward as she hit the button to unlock her car, now only twenty feet away. The two men were still about ten feet from her but there was no way she could get to her car, open the door, get in, close the door, and lock it before they caught her, even at their size. She silently cursed herself for parking head-in.

The beep her car made seemed to startle the fat one and he stumbled a bit. After that, Keri knew that pretending she didn’t notice them at this point would seem more suspicious than turning around, so she stopped abruptly and spun quickly, taking them by surprise.

“How’s it going, guys?” she asked sweetly, as if discovering two hulking dudes right behind her was the most natural thing in the world. They both took another couple of steps before awkwardly pulling up five feet from her.

The younger guy appeared to be at a loss. The older guy started to open his mouth to speak. Keri’s senses were tingling. For some reason, she noticed he had missed a patch of hair on the left side of his neck the last time he’d shaved. Almost without thinking, she pushed the alarm button on her car remote. Both men glanced involuntarily in that direction. That’s when she moved.

She lunged forward quickly, swinging her right fist, the one with the exposed keys, at the left side of his face. Everything began to move in slow motion. He saw her too late and by the time he started to raise his left arm to try to block the punch, she had made contact.

Keri knew it was a direct hit because at least one of the keys went pretty deep before hitting resistance. The screaming started almost immediately as blood gushed from his eye. She didn’t pause to admire her handiwork. Instead, she used her forward momentum to dive forward, slamming her right shoulder into his left knee even as he was already crumpling to the ground.

She heard a sickening pop and knew that his knee ligaments were being torn violently apart as he fell to the ground. She forced the sound from her brain as she tried to roll smoothly back up to a standing position.

Unfortunately, throwing herself against such a massive person had rattled her body from head to toe, re-aggravating the pain of the injuries she suffered only days earlier. Her chest felt like it had been whacked with a frying pan. She was pretty sure she’d slammed her injured knee on the concrete parking structure floor as she dived and the collision had left her right shoulder throbbing.

More immediately troubling than any of that was that smashing into the guy had slowed her movement enough for the younger, fitter guy to regain his senses. As Keri came out of her roll and tried to recover her balance, he was already moving toward her, his eyes blazing with an intense mix of fury and fear, the nightstick in his right hand starting its downward swing.

She realized that she wasn’t going to be able to avoid it completely and turned her body so that the blow landed on her left side rather than her head. She felt the brutal smash against the ribs on her left torso just below the shoulder, followed by a stinging pain that radiated outward from the point of impact.

The air left her body as she collapsed to her knees in front of him. Her eyes had gone watery immediately upon being hit but she still managed to make out an ominous sight directly in front of her. The younger guy’s feet had started to rise onto his toes, his heels leaving the ground.

It took less than a fraction of a second for Keri to process what that meant. He was rising up, lifting the nightstick over his head so that he would be able to bring its full force down on hers for a knockout blow. She saw his left foot start to come forward and knew that meant he was starting the downward motion.

Ignoring everything – her inability to breathe, the pain ricocheting from her chest to her shoulder to her ribs to her knee, her blurry vision – she dove forward, directly at him. She knew she didn’t have much momentum pushing off from her knees but she hoped it was enough to prevent a direct hit on the top of her skull. As she did, she thrust her right hand, the one still clutching the keys, in the general direction of the guy’s crotch, hoping to make any kind of contact.

It all happened at once. She felt the stick hit her upper back at the same time she heard the grunt. The whack stung her but only for a second as she realized the man had lost his grip on the stick almost immediately after making contact. She heard it hit the concrete and roll off into the distance as she collapsed to the floor.

Glancing up, she saw the man doubled over, both hands clutching at his groin area. He was cursing loudly and without end. At least for the moment, he seemed oblivious to her. Keri looked over at the fat man, who was several feet away, still rolling on the ground, screaming in agony, both hands covering his left eye, seemingly unaware of his knee, which was bent in an inhuman direction.

Keri gulped in a deep breath of air, the first in what felt like forever, and forced herself into action.

Get up and move. This is your chance. It may be your only one.

Ignoring the pain she felt everywhere, she pushed herself up off the hard ground and half-ran, half-limped to her car. The younger guy glanced up from his crotch and made a token attempt to reach out and grab her. But she steered well clear of him and stumbled toward her car, got in, locked, it, started it, and pulled out without even looking in the rearview mirror. Part of her hoped the young guy was back there and that she’d hear a thud as she slammed into him.

She hit the gas and tore around the corner of the second floor and down to the first. As she approached the exit booth, she was amazed to see the younger guy stumbling down the stairs and shuffling in the direction of her car.

She could see the horror on the face of the booth attendant, who was looking back and forth between the hunched over man shambling in his direction and the tire-screeching car careening to the same spot. She almost felt bad for him. But it wasn’t enough to prevent her from speeding through the exit, slamming into the wooden gate, and sending chunks of it flying off into the night.

She spent the night at Ray’s place. For one thing, it didn’t seem safe to go back to hers. She didn’t know who had come after her. But if they were willing to attack her in a camera-filled parking lot across from the jail, her apartment didn’t seem like such a heavy lift. Besides, the way she felt, Keri wasn’t in any condition to fend off additional attackers tonight.