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This one rang forced and tight.
“You’re worried about this.”
He nodded. “Something’s off about the whole thing.”
“Spidey sense tingling?”
“I wish to hell you’d been a fly on the wall at lunch so you could tell me if you sensed it, too.”
“Is there some reason you’re doubting your eerily accurate cop instincts, Mason?”
He looked at me, then at the sidewalk. “Yeah. A couple of them.” He didn’t elaborate, so I didn’t push it, figuring it was either something deep and emotional or something about us, and those topics were things we’d sort of agreed to avoid without really ever saying so out loud. He was no more into gooey emotional gunk than I was, thank goodness.
It was beautiful outside. Warm in that springlike way that would seem chilly a month from now, but sunny and fresh. I’d always loved that about spring, that freshly washed newborn feeling it had to it. But I loved seeing it even more. The trees were taking on a pale green cast as their buds started to become leaves. Birds were flitting around singing like extras in a Disney flick. Tulips and daffodils everywhere you looked. And the apple blossoms were busting out all over. Out in the Point they were barely peeking out of their buds.
Myrtle hurried from one spot to the next, sniffing everything thoroughly, excited by a new place and not even keeping her side pressed to my leg. She really was getting more confident. I loved that.
“So she walked from this bench to that corner,” Mason said. “Bitching all the way, according to her coach.”
“Her blindness coach. The person her father hired to teach her how to be blind.”
“Yeah.” He chose to ignore the sarcasm in my tone.
“But the coach is sighted, right?”
“Uh-huh.” He said it like he knew what was coming next. Hell, he probably did.
“And that makes sense because no one knows what it’s like to be blind better than a sighted person does, right?”
“Of course not.”
“So explain it to me, then, ’cause I’m not getting it.”
He stopped. We’d walked about five steps. (Myrtle, twenty.) “I didn’t say I thought it was a great idea, I’m just telling you how it went down.”
“I know.” I said it like it should’ve been obvious. “I’m just saying.”
“Can we focus here? And stop looking at the damn birds, Rachel, we need to look at the ground.”
I’d been watching a red-winged blackbird in a nearby tree. He was perched on the topmost branch, and he kept chirping this loud, long note and hunching up his shoulders at the same time, so the little red patches were more prominent. Showing off for the ladies, I bet. “You look for clues with your eyes. I look with my other senses, remember?”
“So is that bird giving you anything to go on?”
I shrugged. “It’s spring. Horniness thrives. I say we question the boyfriend. She does have a boyfriend, doesn’t she?”
“Two that her father felt worth mentioning,” he said. “One former, one current.”
“Let’s talk to them both. And the blindness coach.”
He nodded. “Already on my list.”
“I’ll be more helpful when we’re doing that.” I glanced ahead and saw a fat robin skipping along the sidewalk pecking at something too small for me to see. Myrtle sensed it or felt it or something, because she was focused in that direction, too, leaning forward like she was getting ready to lunge at the bird, even though she couldn’t see it. “If we do it indoors,” I added.
He didn’t reply, so I lifted my head again, met his eyes. He was grinning at me, flashing the Dimple of Doom. My doom, at least. I made a face and started walking, scanning the sidewalk as I went, at least when I could take my eyes off my bulldog and her absolute enjoyment of the walk. Myrt really had living in the moment down, that was for sure. Can’t see? Oh well. I smell a squirrel! was her philosophy. Frankly, I thought it was a pretty good one.
I used to have to coax and cajole and tug to get her to walk any distance at all. But today she was rushing me. She was definitely getting more fit. Mason caught me watching her, sent me a look that asked for my focus.
I know, I know, but it was my first sighted springtime since age ten. So shoot me. “Come on, get with the program, Detective,” I said. Best defense is a good offense, right? “Daylight’s burning.”
We completed our inspection of the sidewalk where Stevie had obeyed her coach’s orders, tapping her way from the bench to the corner, and didn’t find anything. Well, we didn’t, but Myrtle did. She’d peed on a clump of weeds, chomped the blossom off a stray daffodil and picked up a discarded Pepsi can, which she was still carrying like a prized treasure.
Whatever had happened to Stephanie had happened after she’d gone around the corner. But we’d already known that. So we turned right, just like she had. And then I really slowed down. Mason walked near the inside edge, where sidewalk met park, so I took the curb, where sidewalk met road.
And there in a drain was a cell phone. It had fallen onto the grate, and wedged itself most of the way through. I’d been hanging around cops—well, one cop—long enough to know not to touch it, so I pointed it out, then crouched low, pulled my long sweater over one hand and picked it up with the sleeve while Myrt dropped her soda can and tried to grab it before I could. “Got’cha!”
I won and turned toward Mason, holding up the phone. And then I flashed back to Thanksgiving, when my personal assistant and best-Goth, Amy, had been snatched off the highway by two jerks in a white pickup truck. We’d found her phone at the scene, too.
Weird.
Mason came over with a plastic bag and I dropped the phone in. “Nice find,” he said.
“Wish I still had that damn stylus in my purse so we could tap this thing without leaving a print. I lost it, need to buy another one.” I’d had one at the scene of Amy’s brief abduction. Ms. Smarty-pants had snapped a photo of the pickup, knowing it was trouble, and left it behind to lead us to her. “Mason, do you think this could be related to what happened to Amy?”
“Because of the phone?”
I nodded.
“I don’t think so. Amy threw her phone underneath her car deliberately. She knew she was in danger. Even if Stevie did the same, it would only mean that they think alike.”
“Right. And we have so many women being snatched off the streets of Binghamton that there’s no way it’s connected.” I was being sarcastic.
He gave me a look. “Okay, I’ll give you that one.” He nodded, thinking on it. “Amy’s twenty-five, Stephanie’s twenty. That’s close enough, I guess.”
I thought back to the photo he’d shown me of the missing girl. “Amy’s got dyed black hair and multiple piercings. Stephanie’s a blonde Barbie doll. It can’t be the resemblance. Still,” I said, “the phones.”
“Coincidence. Besides, we don’t even know it’s her phone.”
I made a face while I tried to figure out how to say what I was thinking without sounding like a complete flake. “I’m not saying that us finding the victim’s phone at both scenes is evidence that the two things are connected. I’m just wondering if it’s a more...a more woo-woo clue.”
“A woo-woo clue?” he asked, arching one eyebrow. I loved when he did that. “Is that a technical term?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“You mean, like maybe the phone being here is the universe dropping us a reminder of Amy’s abduction, just to get us thinking along those lines?”
I shrugged and averted my eyes. “If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“You mean the sort of thing you put in your books and then tell me is bullshit, Rachel?”
I shrugged. “You’re the one who keeps trying to convince me it might not be.”
“So you’ve decided to believe me, then?”
Tipping my head to one side, I said, “I was just trying it out. You’re right. It’s bullshit.” Then I took a big breath. “But if that is Stephanie Mattheson’s phone, then it’s probably safe to say she didn’t run away just to ditch her coach and worry her parents.”
“You’re right about that.”
“There’s a drugstore around the corner, and I’ll bet we can find a ten-pack of those styluses.” I frowned. “Styli?”
He was looking at the road near the grate, though, all but ignoring me. So I looked, too. There was a parking meter there. Probably had been a few dozen vehicles in and out since the night before last, when this had gone down.
Or maybe not.
He pulled out his own phone and took a few close-up shots of the area, while I looked up and down the sidewalks and road, wondering how this chick could’ve been snatched against her will without someone seeing something. I mean, it wasn’t a busy place, but it wasn’t deserted, either.
And then I thought of Amy again. Stupid, I know, but there was something bugging me, itching at my brain. I kept feeling just like I’d felt last Thanksgiving morning, when Amy’s mother had called to tell me she’d never made it home, and I had known—just known—that something awful had happened.
We’d tracked Amy down before it had gone from awful to fatal. One of her abductors was still with her when Mason and I caught up. Now he was with the angels. (I know, but I don’t believe in hell, even for jerks like him.) We’d never tracked down the other one.
Mason nudged me with an elbow. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”
I wasn’t, so I looked where he was looking, down the block to the next corner. “There’s a camera on that traffic light at the intersection. Snaps automatically when someone runs the light.”
“Fuckin’ cops. You’re like Big Brother, you know that?”
“Not the point.”
I nodded. “I know it’s not. What is the point is what difference does it make? What are the chances the kidnapper ran the light?”
“If he was going that way? Pretty good, actually. People get all hopped up during the commission of a crime. Adrenaline’s surging, they’re nervous, jumpy, in full-blown fight-or-flight mode.”
“Walking textbook,” I accused.
“What? It’s as good as you wanting to check the phone for photos.”
“I do not want to check the phone for photos. I want to see who she’s been talking to. Blind women do not snap a lot of pictures, Einstein.”
“I knew that.” He picked up the pace as we hustled to the end of the block, and Myrtle jogged along happily for most of the way, then started snuffing at me as if to say, Enough with the running, already. Do I look like a sprinter to you? “I was teasing about that Einstein thing,” I said, slowing my pace to accommodate my bulldog.
“I know you were.”
“Could you get the traffic-light photos without making the case official? I know Judge Howie wants to keep it under the radar.”
“Yeah, except it won’t do any good. Look at the camera.”
“What?” I looked. It had what looked like a bullet hole in its lens. “Shit.”
Mason turned in a slow frustrated circle. “I feel like I’m missing something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. The judge. Something was off about him.”
I frowned at him. That again, I thought. “So? Elaborate already. In what way was something off?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t ready. He’s an old friend of Chief Sub’s, and I was expecting another power lunch, not an off-the-books case. I didn’t have my game face on, you know? But there was something.” He sighed. “I wish you’d been there.”
Wow. That he’d said it to me twice now told me he meant it in spades. And that made my insides get mushy. My inner idiot acting up, I guess. “Maybe it’s that he wants it off the books at all? ’Cause, damn, Mason, that has my antennae all aquiver.”
“No, I can see him wanting it handled discreetly. They kept her accident and blindness quiet.”
“How did they manage that? I thought it was a drunk driver. Wasn’t there an arrest? A trial?”
“Must’ve been. The judge said he got the max. Still, the judge is in the public eye. It makes sense to keep this out of the press if Stephanie is just throwing a tantrum.”
“I don’t know. If my twenty-year-old kid went missing—hell, if my dog went missing—I’d have the National Guard on it before morning. He waited two freaking nights. And how can you say you get that? What if it was Jeremy? How long would you wait to report him missing?”
“I don’t know. Ten minutes?”
“There. See?”
He nodded. “Yes. I see.” Then he stopped looking at the sidewalk and turned to me. “Maybe you’ll get the chance to talk to him yourself, see if you...pick up anything.”
I lifted one eyebrow the way he so often did. I had practiced doing it in the mirror and thought I was pretty good at it. I loved mirrors. Looking into them, trying different expressions out on myself. It’s not vanity. I hadn’t had a clue what I looked like for twenty years, you know? “I’m picking up something now. From you. What do you know that I don’t?”
He sighed. “You’re too good at this game.”
“No such thing. So what haven’t you told me?”
“Chief Sub’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party is Friday night at his place. The judge will be there. We’re invited.”
“And by invited, you mean...?”
“He told me to be there.”
We’d been standing still so long that Myrtle decided to lie down. Head on her paws, she closed her eyes and was snoring with her next breath.
“And by we, you mean...?”
“He said I should bring you along.”
I couldn’t have been more surprised if lobsters had crawled out of his ears. “So now he’s auditioning me? Doesn’t he realize that we’re not...serious?”
He got a little red in the face as he turned away. “I couldn’t exactly blurt out that we were just each other’s most reliable booty call, could I?”
My radar went completely haywire. I didn’t know if he was being sarcastic or serious, if he was a little hurt that I’d said we weren’t serious or making a joke so I’d know he agreed.
Jesus, why didn’t my supercharged intuition come with an instruction manual and a twenty-four-hour tech-support hotline?
I said, “I don’t like that ‘most reliable’ line, pal. You’re my only booty call.”
He looked almost relieved. “Me, too. So then, we’re...exclusive.”
“I guess we are.” It was, I realized, the single largest declaration either of us had made in regard to our relationship, and it was more than enough for one day. For both of us.
“You don’t have to come to the party if you don’t want to,” he said.
“No, I want to.” Shit, it was getting gooey again.
He looked at me. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, and quickly shifted focus back to business. “I want to see this Judge Howie and try to get a feel for what’s going on. Presuming we haven’t found Stephanie by then.”
“Good. Good.” He looked relieved to be back on topic, too. “Just...don’t call him Judge Howie.”
I smiled at him. “I want you to get the chief’s job, remember? You’re the one dreading the offer.”
“I’m not dreading it. I’m undecided.”
Nodding, I said, “How about we wrap things up here? Myrtle’s getting hungry, and so am I.”
“Myrtle’s entering a coma. But okay. Back on track. You’re the expert on being blind. Tell me this, just in case this turns out not to be her phone. Once she got around this corner, how far do you think Stephanie could have walked in the time it took her coach to run from the park bench to here?”
I mulled on that for a second, then got a brilliant idea. “Let’s find out. I’ll go back to the park bench where they started. You wait at the corner. Then, as soon as I sit on the bench, you close your eyes and start walking. I’ll come running and we’ll see how far you manage to get.”
I could tell he didn’t like the suggestion by his thoughtful scowl. “Why don’t I be the coach, and you be the blind girl?”
“Uh, ’cause I was the blind girl for twenty years and I could walk without my eyes faster than you walk with yours. Stevie was new at this. Like you.” I bent down to pat Myrtle’s head. “Come on, Myrt, we’re back on duty.”
“I hate when you make perfect sense,” Mason said.
Myrt opened her eyes and sighed heavily, then got upright again, stretched and farted at the same time.
I handed Mason Myrtle’s leash and jogged back around the corner, then back down the sidewalk to the bench. I sat down and waved at him, where he stood on the corner with Myrt. “Okay, close your eyes and go!” I called.
So he scrunched his eyes tight and started walking. I got up and jogged to the corner, rounding it just in time to see him bean himself on a telephone pole, take a step back, trip over Myrtle and land on his ass. He’d made it about twenty feet.
“Jeez, don’t kill yourself, for crying out loud.” I made it to him, helped him up and almost choked trying not to laugh at him.
He handed me the leash and rubbed his forehead. “It’s harder than I thought.”
“It’s harder than most people think.”
He nodded, looking at me oddly. Like he was feeling sorry for me. I pointed a forefinger at him. “Don’t do that, Mace. Don’t put on that ‘poor, poor pitiful Rachel’ face. I was fine blind. Got rich and famous blind. Did better than most sighted people do.”
“I know you did.”
“Let’s get a stylus, check that phone to see if it was hers, and if so, who she was talking to right before she vanished.”
“Lunch for you and Myrtle first. Call and invite Amy to join us, okay?”
I lifted my brows. “So you don’t think my feeling that there’s some connection is completely insane, after all?”
“I’ve seen too much to think any of your feelings are insane, Rachel. So what do you say? Food?”
I was not one to argue when food was on the line. Nor was Myrtle, whose bulldog smile appeared the second he said the word.
3
Stevie had given up the screaming and swearing, crying and pleading, halfway through the first night. She’d given up shaking and tugging at the bars of her cage after what felt like twenty-four hours. Neither of these things had been a choice. She’d stopped screaming because she’d screamed her throat raw and could barely talk anymore, and she’d stopped shaking the bars because she had broken, bleeding blisters on both hands. After that she’d spent her time exploring her cell.
There were three concrete walls around her and prison bars in front, with a locked door. There were bunks attached to the walls on either side with chains. Two high, two low. Four beds total. There were a toilet and sink on the back wall. The water worked. There was a box under the bottom bunk on the right with a few supplies. Someone had used duct tape to drape a vinyl shower curtain in front of the toilet. It smelled new. Everything else about the place had a damp, musty smell to it. It was cool enough to make her grateful she’d been wearing a sweater.
Her captor had thrown her into the cage after a long drive. She’d lost her cell phone. She’d only realized it when he had searched her—thoroughly—while she’d still been tied up. Then he’d finally dragged her to the bars and stuck her hands through, holding them there while he went outside and closed the door with a frightening bang.
From there he’d cut the zip ties from her wrists. As soon as they were free she jerked away from him, yanked the tape from her mouth and started calling him names and demanding to be let go, and screaming and swearing. But a few minutes later she’d realized he was gone.
Her possessions were few. There were a plastic water pitcher and a few plastic glasses. Spoons but no forks. Washcloths. There were a roll of toilet paper, a tangle of brushes and three wrapped bars of soap in addition to the new bar that sat on the sink. There was a single blanket on each of the bunks. And that was it.
Every few hours he brought her something to eat. Protein bars, a bag of chips, a piece of fruit. Never a meal. Just snacks. At first she’d refused to eat, figuring the food might be drugged. Then when the hunger got bad, she decided she had nothing to lose. She was a prisoner. How could being a drugged prisoner be any worse?
She had no sense of time and no real idea how long she’d been there when she heard the door open and jumped off the bunk, lunging toward the sound in desperation, only to bang hard into a person and fall on the hard floor as the door clanged closed again. Scrambling to her feet, she shouted and threw herself at the bars, grabbing and shaking them, and swearing at her captor.
But there were only retreating footsteps.
And the knowledge that she wasn’t alone anymore. There was someone in here with her, sitting on the floor now, making muffled but urgent sounds.
She turned toward the sounds, knew there were tears streaming down her own face, and felt horribly guilty for hoping it was another captive like her. “All right, all right. I’m coming.” Holding her hands out in front of her, Stevie moved slowly closer, until her hands bumped against a head. She turned her palms inward, running them lower, down the sides of a face, and felt the blindfold around the eyes, the tape over the mouth, and then lower, as the poor thing sat perfectly still, shivering. It was a girl. Had to be a girl. Stevie got to the hands, zip-tied together behind her back. The Asshole, as she’d taken to thinking of the kidnapper, had cut the zip tie partway through. She bent it back and forth until it gave and the newcomer’s hands pulled free.
The girl whipped them around fast, and Stevie stepped backward, waiting for her to remove the tape herself. “What the fuck is this?”
Stevie said, “I don’t know. I’ve been here... I don’t know, a couple of days, maybe.”
“Bullshit. This is bullshit.” The other girl went to the bars, and just as Stevie had done when she’d arrived, she shook and screamed and pounded and pulled. She didn’t beg or cry the way Stevie had. She sounded strong, sure of herself, confident. Everything Stevie wasn’t.
Eventually she stopped fighting the useless door, and paced the cell instead, back and forth.
Stevie was sitting on the bottom bunk hugging her sweater around her and waiting until it felt like time to talk. Eventually she tried. “My name’s Stevie. Um, Stephanie.”
The pacing stopped. She felt the girl looking at her. Eventually she said, “Lexus.”
Stevie nodded. “How did you get here?”
“Fucker grabbed me right off the damn street is how I got here. Threw me in a van, tied me up and tossed me here.” She shuffled a little. “You?”
“Same.”
“He come in here? He do anything to you?”
“No. Nothing. He shoves food through the bars every little while. Never says a word. It’s creepy. I’m not even sure if it’s a man.”
“Oh, he a man all right. I grabbed him by his balls before he got me bound and gagged, put a hurt on him he won’t forget. Piece’a shit. I get the chance again, I’ll rip ’em right off.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“Don’t look to me like you see anything,” Lexus said. “You blind, girl?”
Stevie nodded.
“Shee-it, you get all the luck, don’t you?”
“Looks like.”
Lexus came to the bunk, sat down beside Stevie. “A’right, then. We look out for each other, you and me. We got no one else. We got to get out of this shit, you follow?”
“I do. Maybe between the two of us we’ll find a way.”
“Ain’t no maybe about it, girl. We will.”
Stevie felt a rush of relief. There was no doubt in her mind that Lexus was older and wiser and stronger than she was. She’d been reassuring herself that her father had enough clout and connections to be turning the planet upside down to find her from the outside. Now she had help from the inside, as well. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, immediately clapping a hand to her mouth.
“Yeah, that makes one of us. Not how I ’spected to be spending my eighteenth, you know?”
“Your eighteenth...birthday?”
“Uh-huh.”
She wasn’t older, then. Maybe stronger, maybe braver, but not older. She was just a kid. Stevie’s conscience gave her a needle-like jab. She should be comforting the teenager, not leaning on her. She was almost three years older.
Hell. Okay, all right, might as well show her around the place and see if she came up with any ideas. Stevie got up off the bunk and pulled the box from underneath. “This is everything we own. Pitcher, glasses, spoons, some washcloths and some hairbrushes.”