CHAPTER ONE-2
2121 Words
She kicked the bag and bit out every word: “Tell me where they are.”
“If you must know, I bought a place in this area. I’m renovating it.”
“You bought a place in Cedar Crest?” David asked doubtfully.
Andrews nodded.
Bullshit. His meter was off-the-charts. This wasn’t exactly the neighborhood for a summer home, or even a rental unit. Due to the rash of crime, home values around here were going nowhere, fast. “What’s the address?”
“Forty-seven Prescott.”
“I’m checking it out.”
He shrugged. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it.”
She had no choice. Maybe, just maybe, she’d find something to help her solve Sara’s disappearance. She could only hope.
Even if she did find more clues to lead them to the location of Sara Waverly’s body, she’d likely get a mouthful-- maybe even worse—from Special Agent in Charge Pembroke. But she was just doing her job. And maybe it was just a hunch or women’s intuition, but what was right, was right. She’d been nearly brought to tears by the press conference footage of Sara’s poor parents, red-eyed and haunted, begging for the young girl’s safe return. She knew, better than anyone, what they were going through.
This sleaze deserved to be behind bars, and not just because of poor Sara.
Grabbing her cuffs, she barked, “Turn around. Put your hands behind your back.”
He complied as if he’d done it a thousand times before, still effortlessly composed. “You’re going to be sorry for this, Agent North.”
So he knew her name. If her hunch turned out to be wrong, she’d probably never live it down. She could just imagine Wilson Andrews, speaking ill of her, a decade from now, from his desk in the Oval Office.
She decided not to cuff him yet.
“Go.” She nudged him. “Show me this place.”
He gave her an insolent shrug and headed the way they’d come. Occasionally, he seemed to be dragging his feet. She looked over at David, whose face seemed to say, This has “bad idea” written all over it.
“Trust me,” she whispered to him, though at that moment, she wasn’t sure she could trust herself.
On Broad Street, it was more of the same. A pawn shop with barred windows. More strewn garbage than garbage cans. Syringes in the gutters. A motley assemblage of unsmiling, tough-looking thugs hanging out on their front stoops, smoking and drinking beer. The moment the two agents and the politician appeared on the street, every eye was on them. “Right up this way, Agent,” Andrews said pleasantly, as if he were a realtor, showing the place.
They turned another corner, onto a narrow side street called Prescott. If Mia hadn’t had David with her, she’d have worried. She’d made it through tough scrapes before with just her Glock, prided herself on needing no man, but she was barely over five-foot-three and slim. This wasn’t exactly the safest prospect.
He stopped at a burned-out shell of a brick building that even squatters would’ve found unsuitable. Every window was boarded up. The mossy stoop crumbled a bit beneath her feet as she climbed to a patch of black mold where a welcome mat once stood.
David laughed bitterly. “You could’ve really done wonders with this place with that gallon of bleach, man.”
Mia’s pulse skittered, and she only became more convinced she was on the right track. David was right. Bleach was like putting a Band-Aid on cancer. No amount of restoration would save this place. It was a hazard. It needed to be leveled.
Even so, the door seemed to be intact. Andrews produced a key, as if what was inside needed to be protected, and worked at the door. As he did, a couple of men in hoodies jumped off the stoop across the street and advanced toward them. “Yo, what are you doing over there, man?”
That could be trouble. David, though, had grown up in a neighborhood like this. He crossed his arms and gave them a look that said, Stand down. He knew better than to flash his badge, here.
It seemed to work. The men hesitated there, gauging the situation.
“Ah,” Andrews said with a shrug. “Looks like I got the wrong key.”
David snorted. “Right. I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.” He nudged forward. “Give it here.”
Meanwhile, the men behind them continued to hoot and holler, even if they weren’t coming any closer. Mia glanced over her shoulder as David fumbled with the key. No dice.
Mia let out a heavy sigh and backed away. Before, it had just been noise, something she ignored as easily as the catcalls she sometimes got. But at that moment, she actually listened to what the men across the street were saying. “Yo, man. Ain’t you in the wrong place? This here’s your place.”
She looked across the street, at a house that made the one they were standing in front of look like the best of the Three Little Pigs’ homes. Maybe in the Great Depression era, the clapboard shack had been a source of pride, but now, it was in the process of disintegrating into the earth beneath it. Its roof—and in fact, all of its lines—seemed to slant in unnatural ways, as if it was already in the process of being swallowed.
Her eyes rose to meet Andrews. He stood there, frozen, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “If you let me go back to my car—”
She nudged David, who was still twisting the key in different directions, trying to get it to work. When he looked at her, she pointed across the street. That’s the house.
“Huh?”
She grabbed the key and marched across the street. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said to the men, who parted to let her pass.
No surprise, the key fit.
Andrews swallowed as she pushed open the door. “All these old houses look the same,” he said, that swagger gone as he mustered a shrug.
Mia stepped into the darkened room, sure the first step would be a trap door. David and Andrews followed, the latter with his head down, mumbling to himself.
I’ve got him, she thought, ignoring the men once again, who were now shouting at them. Something about how this was their turf and outsiders weren’t welcome here.
When the three of them were inside, Mia directed David to close the door and lock it. He did so, just in time, because the second the lock was in place, the hoods outside began to pound on the door.
But she had other things to concern herself with than being in the middle of a turf war.
She turned on the flashlight from her phone and arced it about the room. As she did, she saw movement. A couple of rats scurried along the baseboards of a room with a lumpy sofa, a threadbare oriental rug, and a battered player piano. Across the hall, a kitchen with peeling, charred wallpaper seemed to have been the source of a few too many cooking accidents. A staircase with a rather pretty bannister swept up to the second floor, but some of the wooden floorboards were missing.
The men outside were banging hard on the door, trying to get in, shouting obscenities. They were just looking for something to fill the time. Eventually, they’d give up and go away. She hoped. Right now, they didn’t need any more trouble.
She went farther in, shining the light everywhere she could, hoping for some clue. She came to a door, opening it to find nothing more than a closet. There was an old bowling ball in the dark recesses of it, but nothing else.
Carefully, she climbed the stairs, the structure creaking beneath her. She found bedrooms with rotting mattresses and rusted bed frames, a bathroom with a massive clawfoot tub. Plenty of insects and cobwebs.
But nothing to indicate Sara or Chloe had ever been here.
Turning, she briefly caught sight of Andrews’s smug smiled. “Satisfied?”
She shook her head, pacing the floor. Outside, the men were still knocking, making it nearly impossible for her to concentrate.
She wasn’t satisfied. There had to be more than this. There just had to be.
“Is there a basement?”
Andrews shook his head. “No, and you’re wasting your time. You’re done, Agent. You’re going to hear from my attorney, and they’ll have your badge so fast—"
“Crawl space? Attic?” She studied the ceiling, which had holes in the drywall that bared the rafters up above. Nothing to indicate a door was or ever had been there.
“Nope. Not that I know of. Like I said, I’ve only owned the place--”
“All right.” She made a mental note to check on the ownership records. Other than that, she was at a loss. Not another dead end.
The knocking continued.
Her hands shaking with desperation she snapped, “David. Can you get rid of those guys? I can’t hear myself think.”
“On it,” he said, heading down the stairs.
She followed a moment later, exasperated. As she did, she found David at the foot of the stairs, staring wide-eyed at the ground. The knocking continued.
“David!” she muttered. “What’s the problem? I told you to get rid of those guys.”
He shook his head. “They’re gone.”
She paused, listening. No, the sound wasn’t coming from the other side of the door, after all. It was coming from down below, under their feet. And it wasn’t the sound of knuckles on wood. It was a metallic, clanging noise.
She spun on Andrews. “There’s no crawl space?” she demanded.
For the first time, he looked rather nervous. He shrugged. “Well, I don’t—”
But they’d already set out, looking for the door. Sure enough, Mia found it, underneath the rug in the living room. When she pulled open the latch, she shone her light upon a ladder that descended into a basement. There were footprints in the dirt below that looked like they belonged to a pair of dress loafers.
She had a very good idea who those belonged to.
“Holy—” David started, as the knocking became louder.
“Hey,” Andrews said, his voice now an octave higher. When she shone the light across his face, his forehead glistened with new droplets of sweat. “I didn’t even know that was—"
“Hold onto him,” Mia instructed David, quickly taking the ladder down. “Make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
It was cooler below, and smelled like mold. The cinderblock walls of the basement were weeping. She arced her flashlight in all directions before stopping at what looked like a heap of blankets.
But then she realized it was a tangle of pale limbs and a web of blonde hair. The girl was gathered up in a corner, wrapped in a wool blanket and handcuffed to the piping there.
Though the waif in front of her was a shadow of the smiling yearbook photo she’d taped in her cubicle, she recognized the girl at once. “Chloe?”
Mia approached her, her heart thudding, afraid of what she might find. Was she . . . alive?
The movement wasn’t just a trick of the eye. She was holding a metal cup, still rhythmically banging it against the pipe, her face dirty, her eyes unfocused, lower lip trembling.
Behind her, Andrews’s voice was nothing like the one he used when addressing his constituents. “I didn’t . . . I don’t know . . . how did she . . .?”
“Save it,” David barked, then breathed, “Jesus Christ.”
“It’s all right. You’re safe now,” Mia soothed, reaching out to smooth back the girl’s hair. She whirled around, shining the light into all corners. No movement. Nothing. Her flashlight went to Andrews. “Where’s the other girl? Where’s Sara?”
He continued to shake his head blankly, blinking in the bright light as he professed his innocence.
But in the split second before she pulled the light away from his face, she could’ve sworn she saw the man smile.
- Writer
