Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel) (4 page)

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

S
tevie 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.”

She felt the other girl come around to crouch beside her, heard her pawing around in the box. “Four glasses. Four spoons. Four hairbrushes.” Lexus paused, took a breath. “Four beds in here. Four blankets.”

“I didn’t realize... Lexus, do you think...?”

“I think he’s gonna open that door at least two more times, Stevie-girl.”

Stevie nodded. “Okay. Okay, then we’re gonna have to figure out how to take advantage of that the next time he does.”

* * *

Even though we had Myrtle with us, we didn’t go to a drive-thru window for lunch. We headed instead to the Park Diner, ordered take-out and took it with us to a bench nearby with a view of the Susquehanna River. I liked that I could hear its rushing flow from where we sat, and I liked even more that I could see it. Bodies of water had fascinated me since I’d got my vision back. I live across the dirt excuse for a road from a lake—okay, a reservoir, but it looks like a lake—so I get plenty of time to study it. Rivers were an entirely different creature. The countless colors, the eddies and swirls, the constantly shifting patterns, the frothy bits and the way the sunlight reflects like diamonds when it hits just right.

I sat there, relishing my club sandwich with added hot sauce and sipping my Diet Coke, staring at the water until a paw on my leg reminded me I was not alone.

“Sorry, Myrt.” I tore the other half of my oversize sandwich into Myrtle-sized bites and fed her one of them. “Good, huh?”

Myrt swallowed it whole and whacked my shin again. And I knew what she was saying with her sightless brown eyes.
How would I know if it’s good? That bite wasn’t big enough to tell. More, please. And by please, I mean now.

I sighed. I hate depriving her of people food when she likes it so much.

Mason was ripping the cellophane wrapper from the pack of styluses we’d picked up at the drugstore. “You should carry dog food,” he said. “Diet dog food.”

“Shut up. She’s not fat.”

“The vet said—”

“The vet is partial to skinny dogs. Greyhounds and Chihuahuas. For crying out loud, he owns a whippet.”

“Is his whippet good?”

I had broken off another bite and was handing it down to Myrtle, but I stopped in midmotion to send him a grimace. “That was terrible.” I didn’t tell him that I’d made the same joke in the exam room.

“I liked it.”

“Snarf!” said Myrt.

Mason smiled at her. “See? She agrees with me.”

“No. She wants her sandwich.” I obliged my dog, then said, “That’s all, Myrt. It’s all gone.”

She tilted her head to one side at the words
all gone.
Her least favorite words in history, besides
go to the vet.
Then she sighed heavily and collapsed, because bulldogs don’t lie down, they just drop. I knew that she knew I was a liar, and she knew that I knew that she knew it.

Mason whistled softly, drawing my attention away from both my dog and my guilt trip. “What?”

He was looking at the phone, holding it with his napkin and using the stylus to touch the screen. “She’s been calling Jacob Kravitz. Frequently.”

“Jacob,” I said, reviewing the details he’d given me on the way over here. “Oh, Jake. Wait a minute, isn’t that the
ex-
boyfriend?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. Doesn’t sound all that ex, does it? How about the current love interest? Kirk what’s-his-name?”

“Mitchell Kirk. And yes, there are two. One incoming, one outgoing.”

“Sounds like trouble in paradise.”

“All the calls to Jake were outgoing. Less than a minute each.”

I nodded. “So she was calling him. Maybe leaving him messages. But he wasn’t answering.”

“Or calling back,” Mason said, tapping the screen with the stylus but not saying much, until he finally seemed satisfied and dropped the phone back into its plastic bag. “Nothing much on there. Nothing that jumps out at me, anyway.”

I looked at my watch, grinning because I didn’t have to feel it. Yes, still, after almost nine months of being sighted. Hell, I still smiled when I opened my eyes every morning and found I could see. I’d had no idea just how much I’d been expecting the transplant to fail, my body to reject the new corneas the way it had all the others, and my world to be plunged back into darkness all over again, until I noticed just the other day that I’d stopped expecting that. There had been some kind of bowstring tension inside me. Waiting for the axe to fall, that sort of thing. And then one day I noticed its absence. Such a different feeling. Like I’d become seventy pounds lighter overnight.

“Rache?”

I realized I had been staring at the ticking second hand. “Sorry. I was just wondering what’s taking Amy so damned long.”

“I’m here, I’m here!” she called from about fifteen feet away. She was scurrying toward our bench with a paper bag in her hand. She wore a black T-shirt dress with a neon green geometric design over leggings and black leather boots. She had spiked her purple-and-black bangs with more gel than usual, and her nose stud was winking in the sunlight. “Sorry I’m late. My mother called just as I was heading out the door. What’s the emergency?”

Myrt lifted her head at the sound of Amy’s voice. She was one of Myrt’s favorite people, probably because Amy was the one who’d rescued her and brought her to me, then used skillful emotional manipulation to trick me into falling in love with the mutt. I don’t know exactly how. Introducing us, I guess.

“It’s all good. How’s your mom?”

“Excellent, as always. Sends her love, says she’ll send you that stuffing recipe from Thanksgiving. She won’t, though. She never shares her secret recipes. Says I’ll get them all when she’s dead.” Amy took a seat on the bench next to ours, opened her bag and took out a bag of chips. She ate one, gave one to Myrtle and flashed the bag at me when I scowled at her. “It’s all right, see? They’re baked. And it was just one.”

“You know by the time each of you and everyone else in that dog’s life gives her ‘just one bite’ it adds up to a couple of extra meals’ worth of food a day,” Mason said. “At least.”

“Life’s short. Dieting only makes it
seem
longer,” I said.

“Oh, that’s a good one, Rache. We need to put that one on a mug.” Amy yanked her smartphone from her bag, wiped her fingers on her black spandex leggings and started tapping the screen. “‘Life’s short. Dieting only makes it seem longer.’ Rachel de Luca.”

Mason frowned at me.

“She’s working on some new merchandising for me. We’re adding mugs and mouse pads to the affirmation cards and perpetual calendars.”

He tightened his lips and nodded. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking and was afraid he thought I was greedy. Well, hell, maybe I am. If there’s more money to be made, I’ll go for it. But I share. A third straight off the top to Uncle Sam to pay for bombs and guns, of course. And I give bushels to my charities on top of that.

“So, Amy,” he said, turning his full focus to my assistant. Hard not to. “I wanted to talk to you about last Thanksgiving.”

She stuffed her cell phone back into her oversize bag. Black. Of course. “When those two pervs snatched me off the side of the road?” she asked. Then she looked up at him. “How come? Did you finally catch the second guy?”

“No. Just want to keep it fresh in my mind.”

For a detective, he was terrible at deception. Amy saw right through him. “You
didn’t
catch him. Then there must have been another kidnapping.”

“No,” Mason said at the same exact moment that I was saying, “We’re not sure yet.”

He shot me a quelling look. I waved a dismissive hand. “What? Like she’s gonna go Tweet it to the world?” I looked at Amy sternly. “This is strictly hush-hush. Spill it and you’ll nix Mason’s shot at the chief’s job.”