I changed buses at the Transit Plaza on Tenth and Main, picking up the Number 24, which runs the full length of Independence Avenue. Two-person bench seats separated by an aisle lined each side of the bus. I slid across a bench, sitting next to the window, watching a wide-hipped Vietnamese woman, stoop-shouldered from carrying stuffed shopping bags and the clutch of two small children, settle onto the bench behind me, gathering her possessions.
Three Hispanic teenage boys, jeans sagging off their hips, strut-walked down the aisle, the number fourteen, four dots, the letters
NF,
and a sombrero speared with a machete dripping in blood, inked on their hands and necks, tattoos of the Mexican drug cartel Nuestra Familia. The cartel was affiliated with gangs by the same name that originated in California prisons in the 1960s, spreading through the southwest, eventually making their way to Kansas City, recruiting kids whose idea of the good life was a street corner they could call their own, dealing dope, and standing strong against the cops and the competition.
The one in the lead, a skinny kid weighed down by gold chains bouncing against his chest, bumped into a slight, older white man wearing a loose-fitting barn jacket, knocking him onto my bench. The kid snickered, his friends joining in the laughter. One of them slapped him on the back, calling out “Yo! Eberto,” as they each claimed a bench. The man righted himself, smoothing his thin gray hair.
“Time was,” he said, “I would’ve kicked all three of their asses.”
“Time was, I would have helped you.”
He chuckled. “Wouldn’t have needed the help.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered.”
He looked me up and down. I’m six-foot and more muscle than fat, though the fat is catching up to the muscle. I gave him the hard stare I’d learned to use with the FBI, trying to convince both of us.
He didn’t blink. He had a smoker’s aged face, his skin yellowed and drawn, cheeks sunken. His dark eyes were deep set and clouded. He let out a long breath and coughed, a wet raspy hack, and grinned.
“First liar doesn’t stand a chance, does he?”
I grinned back. “Nope.”
“Punks like that are the same all over. Some turn out okay, others don’t last long enough to find out.”
We left it at that, both content to watch the streets pass by. There are two cities named Kansas City, one in Missouri and one in Kansas, their borders rubbing along a shared state line, staring at each other across the confluence of two rivers bearing the names of each state. Both grew outward from the rivers, their older cores encircled by ever-expanding rings of new development with predictable patterns marked by the common modifier predominantly—as in Black, Hispanic, or White; rich, middle class, or poor. There are five counties, two in Kansas and three in Missouri, with suburbs and towns that melt and meld into Census Bureau calculations, each carving out an individual identity while still a part of something as ambiguous as Greater Kansas City.
Though Kansas City is more than the sum of its parts, some of its parts bear little resemblance to one another. Whether by design or happenstance, you can drive from Northeast to the southern limits of the Kansas side suburbs, where new rooftops stretch to the horizon and there is little color in the cul-de-sacs, and conclude that you haven’t just left town, you’ve entered a parallel universe.
More than a hundred years ago, Northeast KC became the city’s first suburb, led by wealthy lumber-men who built its mansions, followed by Italians, some of whom never left, and Jews who did, moving steadily south and west, and working-class people of all stripes. In recent years, it had become the new home for immigrants and refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
Bright lines are hard to come by, but Independence Avenue comes close, defining and dividing the Northeast. Everything is available on the Avenue, from sex to groceries, from salvation to cemetery plots; everything, including Frank Crenshaw’s scrap and Roni Chase’s bookkeeping. It’s where life happens.
North of Independence Avenue, people fight to put their homes on the national register of historic places, to put their kids through school, and to gain a foothold in a strange new land. South of the Avenue, they fight to survive poverty, gangs, and despair.
The Vietnamese woman with her two children, the older man, the three teenagers, and I got off at the intersection of Independence Avenue and Brooklyn. It was late morning, the sun was playing tag with the clouds, and a crisp breeze gave the low fifties a chill. The man buttoned his jacket, pulled a watch cap from one pocket, covered his head, and waited for a break in the traffic. He crossed the Avenue, slow, sure steps taking him north on Brooklyn. The woman shepherded her children a block east before turning south onto Park.
I watched the gangbangers study the man and the woman; their eyes narrowed to predatory slits, whispers and looks passing between them, casting their votes with shrugs and tilted heads. When they took a step toward the curb, aiming toward the old man, I let them see the gun on my hip, closing the distance between us.
Eberto caught my advance, stopped, and stared, his eyes shifting from my face to my gun and back again. He was wearing a ball cap turned backward, both hands in the pockets of his zippered sweatshirt. He ran his tongue across his lips, took off his cap, and swept his hand across his buzzed scalp. He shifted his weight from right to left, his eyes flickering. His boys were behind him. They were young and thought themselves tough, outmatching a middle-aged man, yet they saw something more than my gun that made them hesitate. They saw that I was willing.
I took another step toward them, Eberto backing up, one foot slipping off the curb. The woman was gone, the man nearly out of sight.
“Don’t need this shit today,” he said.
He turned and shuffled west toward Woodland, the other two trailing him, reclaiming respect with a slow retreat. I waited until they disappeared before collapsing on the metal bench at the bus stop.
Looking up, I saw a flier with Evan and Cara Martin’s pictures on it taped to a light pole. The photographs, headshots, had been taken at their elementary school, Evan’s cowlick standing at attention, Cara’s grin gap-toothed; both smiles were full-faced and easy, their place on the light pole unimagined and unimaginable. Beneath it was another flier with a picture of another child, Timmy Montgomery, his image faded from too many months on the pole, the flier listing the date he was last seen as two years ago. I took a deep breath, hugged myself, and shook so hard the bench rattled against the bolts locking it to the concrete.
I was in Simon’s office the first time Peggy Martin called. Lucy answered, warm but professional, listening, her jaw easing open, her eyes widening.
“Hang on. I’m going to put you on speaker. I want my partners to hear this,” Lucy said, punching a button on the phone, shifting from professional to soothing. “Start over, Mrs. Martin.”
“He took my kids,” she said, her voice cracking. “You’ve got to find them.”
Lucy grabbed a notepad and pen as Simon and I pulled our chairs closer to the phone.
“Start from the beginning, Mrs. Martin. Take your time.”
Her voice caught as she fought back tears. “I’m sorry. It’s just that the police say they’re doing all they can, but my kids have been gone for two weeks. Why would he do a thing like that? What kind of man kidnaps his own kids, for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Martin. Where are you?”
“Home. I’m at home. I’m afraid to leave in case the police call. Please, you’ve got to help me.”
“It would be better if we talked in person. Give me your address.” Lucy wrote it down and glanced at her watch. “We’ll be there in thirty minutes.” She ended the call and looked at me. “You in?”
She knew without asking. It was the hardest kind of case, but neither of us could say no. Kids disappear for all kinds of reasons, none of them good. Parents wake up and die each day they’re gone, the uncertainty of what may have happened and the unspeakable fear of what did happen a daily acid bath. And no matter how it ends, it never ends. I was living proof that survivors don’t heal and ghosts don’t rest.
“I’m all in.”
Peggy Martin lived in a small house on Wabash between Third and Fourth Streets, a few blocks north and east of my bus stop bench. Her house sat above a two-car garage, wooden steps leading up a flight from the driveway to the front door, white paint cracked and flaking off the wooden siding.
Lucy and I sat at her kitchen table, looking at pictures of Evan and Cara, both fair-skinned with blue eyes and light brown hair, like their mother, listening as she talked about them. Cara was all bones and crooked teeth, a gawky girl who danced, played basketball, loved to draw, and cried herself to sleep when her parents fought.
Evan was her devil child, a spark plug full of mischief and laughter, throwing himself around his mother like a shield when things got hot between his parents. He was the first son in four generations not named Jimmy. Her husband was Jimmy Martin, III, his father was Jimmy Martin, Jr., and the old man who had started it all and dropped dead of a heart attack three years ago while chewing out a cashier he claimed had shortchanged him was Jimmy, Sr. Her husband had wanted Evan to be Jimmy the Fourth, but she’d refused.
Jimmy worked construction, but the recession had knocked the pins out from under builders. With forty hours a week hard to come by, he started going crazy and turning mean from long stretches with nothing at all. Peggy worked part-time at a nursing home, barely making enough to cover the cost of someone to look after the kids. They were three months behind on the mortgage, and she didn’t know what they were going to do or where they would go when the bank made good on its threat to foreclose.
Her husband had beat her and accused her of cheating on him, a charge she dismissed with a bitter laugh, but didn’t deny, saying who could blame her if she did, being married to him. Her lawyer got a restraining order against Jimmy when she filed for divorce, telling her that the piece of paper was about as much protection as a condom with a hole in it, but short of a shotgun, it was the best the law could do.
She wore no makeup. Her cheeks were sunken, her bloodshot eyes suspended above dark bags, and her unwashed hair hung loose around her thin face. Though disheveled, there was beauty behind her pain, features that in another time had turned heads. She trembled as she spoke, her party days, if there had been any, behind her. She was holding herself together with bubble gum and string.
“Why do you think your husband is the one who took Evan and Cara?” Lucy asked.
“Who else could have done it? He’s that hateful!”
“When did you discover that your children were missing?”
She sniffled and wiped her nose with a dish towel. “It was Saturday morning, almost two weeks ago. They was watching television, and I told them I had to run out to the store. I was only gone a few minutes. When I come back, they was gone. I ran all over the house, hollering, but they didn’t answer.”
She dissolved in tears, ducking her head, looking up at us. Lucy flinched for an instant, resisting the impulse to comfort her, not ready to sacrifice the objectivity she needed to decide whether to take the case. That decision depended on whether she thought Peggy might have had something to do with her kids’ disappearance. She wouldn’t be the first parent to kill her kids and beg for help to find who did it.
“Was this the first time you had left them home alone?” Lucy asked when Peggy stopped crying.
“I left them once or twice before. Just for a few minutes. Oh, I know everyone says they was young to be left alone, but Cara, she’s real responsible.”
Lucy nodded, meaning only that she had heard what Peggy said, but Peggy brightened, interpreting the gesture as one of forgiveness and understanding.
“I’m sure she is. Did you lock the doors before you left?”
“I know I did, not that it would make a difference. Jimmy’s got a key, and the kids would have let him in anyway. The police said there was no sign of forced entry.”
“What store did you go to?”
“The QuikTrip up on Independence Avenue. We was out of milk.”
“What have the police told you about their investigation?”
“Adrienne Nardelli is the detective in charge of the case. She says she talked to the neighbors but no one’s seen anything.”
“Have you talked to your neighbors? Sometimes they’ll tell you more than they’ll tell the police.”
She started crying again, wiping her face with the towel when she stopped.
“Them people have been so good to me. Ellen Koch, she lives across the street. She’s organized the volunteer searchers, and she’s talked to everyone and they all say they didn’t see nothing or nobody. The police are looking and my neighbors are looking, but nobody’s seen my babies. And Jimmy, he went to jail just so he wouldn’t have to tell what he did.”
“Why did you call me?”
“Ellen give me your number. She said she seen you on the news last spring when you found that little boy after his father kidnapped him.” She reached behind her, picking up an envelope from the kitchen counter, handing it to Lucy. “Ellen took up a collection. There’s nine hundred eighty-seven dollars in there. It’s all I can pay you.”
Lucy had made a splash six months ago in a custody case. The father, who had been denied custody because he was a drug addict, had taken the boy to Toronto. Lucy tracked them down, bringing the boy back and leaving the father in a Canadian jail. She picked up the envelope, ran her fingers across it, but didn’t look inside.
“Okay, Peggy. We’ll give it a shot.”
Adrienne Nardelli had accepted our involvement without enthusiasm, reluctantly admitting that she was nowhere on the case, adding that Quincy Carter had told her she would be sorry and warning us that we’d better make a liar out of him. We had made no more progress in a week than she had in two. Evan and Cara Martin had vanished, and their father was the only suspect.