99 Souls Page 8
“Jesus, why?”
“I sent him to the principal’s office the day before for acting up and I guess he wanted to show everyone else how tough he was.”
“Where did he get it from?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“But he didn’t shoot you, right?”
“No. Luckily, he didn’t. He just told me if I ever turned him in again, that gun would be the last thing I’d see.”
He shivered and fell silent, reliving the experience in his mind. Then he continued. “Anyway, one of my girls had a mom who turned tricks. You learn some things when you’re in an environment like that.”
“What did you do?”
“About the girl or the gun?”
“Both, I guess.”
“What could I do? After that kid turned his gun on me, I tendered my resignation and never came back. Regarding the girl, I encouraged her to get into some after-school programs. I set up several parent-teacher conferences. Her mom only showed up once.”
“You could have called Family and Children Services.”
A joy rider whizzed past them, bass thumping. Jim’s hands tensed around the steering wheel. His fingers turned white. At over a hundred miles-an-hour, the joy rider was gone as fast as he appeared.
“I might as well have reported the whole school. Everyone knows what goes on down there. The one time her mom came, she looked sober. I didn’t see any signs of drug abuse. Her daughter never showed up with bruises. She got good grades. She had friends. It’s not a life I could imagine for myself, but who’s to say putting her in foster care would be any better? Anyway, I don’t think she’s going to end up like her mom.”
Sarah couldn’t say she’d have done the same thing in his place, but she had a good idea of how it felt to be helpless and saw no reason to belabor the issue. There was no changing the past. If she could, she’d be curled up in bed with Brandon right now eating sugar-sweet cereal straight from the box and watching cartoons.
“But back to what I was telling you,” Jim said. “I first heard about the hotel when the girl told me her mom worked there. After she missed her second meeting with me, I called over to ask why she hadn’t shown up. The guy who answered the phone didn’t know her name. I thought he might be new, so I described her to him.
“‘Oh, her,’ he snickered. ‘Yeah, ya might kinda say she works here.’
“I asked him what he meant and he said something like: ‘There are a lot of girls who work here.’”
The hotel was actually a motel called Sunshine Rooms. It was situated on a street that one would be best advised to stay off of at night—unless you were a street walker or gangbanger, anyway. True to the cliché, the marquise advertised “AIR CONDTONING, COLR TV.”
Jim parked directly in front of the lobby. He left the key in the ignition. “Lock the doors. I’ll be right back.”
Sarah did as she was told. Her eyes followed Jim into the lobby. Once he was out of sight, she looked left, right, over her shoulder, then again in each direction. She didn’t like being in this part of town.
A pair of women in knee-high boots strolled over to the corner of Sam’s Market next door and waited for dates. They glanced at her once, with no apparent interest.
Jim returned, holding up a room key. After she let him in, he said, “I’m checked in under Mike Mandalay. We’re in Room 232.”
“Mandalay?”
“Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
“It’s great if you’re in Burma.”
The motel was two stories of white siding that had started to yellow to the sunshine color of its name and large floor-to-ceiling windows with blackout curtains for the occupants’ privacy. The building wrapped around its parking lot in an L shape. All the rooms opened onto the parking lot.
Jim drove to the corner farthest from the office and parked near a staircase. As they ascended a series of cement stairs, Sarah grabbed the handrail. She felt the paint underneath her palm chip away.
She hadn’t known quite what to expect from a motel that would knowingly rent rooms to prostitutes, especially one that didn’t require a credit card or ID from a guest. Considering the building’s exterior, she wouldn’t have been surprised if the bed had been unmade and there were roaches that scattered in the light. At least they weren’t on the first floor.
Jim unlocked the door and they stepped inside. The room had two full beds with a single nightstand sandwiched between them. A dresser occupied the wall opposite. On it sat a fifteen-inch TV. The bathroom was small, but adequate. In contrast to what she’d seen outside, everything in the room appeared clean.
She closed the curtains over the large window that covered most of the exterior wall, then sat down on the corner of the nearest bed. Jim took a seat on the other.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’ll do, I guess.”
“What’s your shoe size?”
“Why?”
“I thought you might like something to wear.”
“Seven. Sometimes seven and a half.”
“Got it. Will you be all right on your own while I go get you some clothes to change into?”
“Yeah. I’ll be all right.” Although she didn’t like the area, the room felt like the safest place she’d been since diving out her window.
Jim stood. “You’re sure?”
She smiled. He could be so sweet. “Go get me some clothes, Mr. Mandalay.”
He smiled back. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t.”
After he was gone, she latched the chain on the door and turned on the TV. A comedy with Will Smith was on HBO. Although Brandon was too young for most of Will Smith’s films, he loved The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reruns.
Sarah’s heart ached.
She revised her plan for Brandon’s return. Instead of cartoons, the first order of business would be all the Cocoa Puffs he could eat and a Fresh Prince marathon.
Chapter 14
THE DISTINGUISHED MAN WHO CALLED himself Trevor Borin was tired. Still dressed in a suit, he lounged in an oversized leather chair in his den and sipped a brandy. The kiln in his basement had been fired down for the evening. He would not make a new doll for Brandon tonight.
There was no rush.
As long as Brandon was in his house, he was not afraid the boy might escape. The windows were unbreakable. The door was locked. Even if Brandon found the key, the mortise lock would only turn for Trevor.
The fire in the fireplace crackled, providing the only light in the room. Shadows thrown by handcrafted Maplewood furniture danced along the Persian rug.
When Trevor had told Brandon he’d been the one he was searching for, he hadn’t been lying. Trevor never lied... almost never. There were still others to find, but Brandon was the most important.
He finished the brandy. Then, leaving the glass on the seventeenth-century drop leaf beside the chair, he went into a kitchen that was as luxurious as his den and made a ham sandwich with all the trimmings: lettuce, tomato, cheese, mayonnaise, mustard. He even cut the crusts off.
Soon, Brandon would not need to eat. But until that time came, Trevor wouldn’t let him go hungry.
He put the sandwich on a plate, poured a glass of milk, and grabbed a napkin. At the top of the stairs, he listened at the door for almost a minute. He heard no noise. Strange, he thought, as he placed the milk on the banister at the top of the handrail so he could unlock the door. All of the others had never stopped crying or screaming.
When he entered, he found the boy asleep on the floor. This made the silence only slightly less baffling. How could he sleep after finding himself locked in a stranger’s home?
Trevor left the sandwich and milk on the nightstand, then picked up Brandon and laid him on the bed. Lastly, he slid a bedpan out from underneath the bed to make it easy to find.
After he finished tending to the boy’s needs, he left the room, locked the door, and crossed the hall to his own bedroom.
JIM PICKED OUT SOME CLOTHES AND SNEAKERS for Sarah at a Super Walmart fifteen minutes from the motel. Nikes. After he finished, he decided a disposable cell phone would also be a good idea. He headed over to the electronics section where he browsed a variety of flip phones from AT&T, Verizon, US Celluar, and TracPhone. Most of them were around ten or twenty bucks. To get as much mileage as they could from their cash, he picked up the cheapest one he saw. It was ugly and practically featureless, but it would make calls and that’s all he cared about.
Come to think of it, he decided on the way to the cash register, using a disposable cell phone was not the only precaution they should be taking. There was at least one other—and for that he would need an electric screwdriver.
They had been lucky so far, but luck runs out.
MARK HAMMOND AND Les Armstrong worked out of the Criminal Investigative Division on the third floor of City Hall East. Formerly a distribution center for Sears, Roebuck & Company, the two-million-square-foot brick building stood ten stories high and laid claim to one city block.
If anybody asked, Mark would have told them it looked more impressive than it actually was. Large sections of the building had remained unused since the city had purchased it in 1991, and only a small percentage of it was designated for use by the Atlanta Police Department.
The CID handled a broad spectrum of cases, including murder and assault. Thanks to the “God is Blind” murders, CID had recently swallowed up Missing Persons as well, which is why Hammond and Les found themselves at Sarah Winslow’s house to begin with. Up until this latest re-org, they had dealt with only the worst of the worst. Brass claimed the plan was to better facilitate the exchange of information between departments, but Mark thought it was just an excuse to cut costs.
Despite its inflated set of responsibilities, the CID certainly wasn’t bleeding money. Anyone who’d grown up watching CSI would have been underwhelmed at the sight of it. The reality of the CID offices did not include state-of-the-art lasers for measuring trajectory, glass panel walls, or hip furniture. Real life at the CID meant scuffed linoleum floors, wooden desks, and fluorescent lighting.
At two of those desks that sat nose to nose Les divided up the numbers in Sarah’s cell phone while Mark called Verizon to request a trace on Jim’s.
“No luck,” the Verizon technician told him. “The phone appears to be off or out of range of a cell tower. If we get a hit, we’ll notify you right away.”
Though disappointing, the news didn’t come as a surprise. He figured, with all the crime shows on TV now, most people knew that using your cell phone is the best way to get caught when you’re on the run.
They would have to resort to more primitive methods. They started calling Sarah’s contacts. Each call went more or less the same way: “I’m sorry for disturbing you so late... No, I can’t discuss what this is about... Are you sure you haven’t spoken to her tonight?... It’s urgent we get in touch with her as soon as possible... I understand. Please call me if you hear anything.”
They wrote down the names of every person they called and made notes about every conversation.
Alice Burke – co-worker at St. Ives – has not tlkd to tonight – hm w/ hsbnd & son
Nancy Walker – vm. Left msg.
Rick Nelson – co-worker at St. Ives – has not tlkd to tonight – went out w/ frnds to Corner Tap
Robert Hamilton – gnrlst (fmly dr?) – office closed – call back tmrw.
Drake Cruz – frnd from college – GSU – hm with gf
By the time they were done, they had eliminated almost everyone as possible accessories.
Short on leads, they began gathering all the information they could on both Jim and Sarah in hopes of finding clues that would help them narrow their search.
When Mark had started his career as a detective, information was still keyed out on typewriters, placed in files, and stored in rows upon rows of filing cabinets. Finding a single piece of paper that you wanted could take hours. On the rare occasion it was misfiled, it could take even longer. And good luck getting anything from another department, let alone outside of the brotherhood, where the request was filtered down to the lowest man on the totem pole and dumped underneath all the others.
In those days, detectives didn’t have computers and Mark had never adjusted to the new way of doing things. He felt detective work was done in the field, not behind a machine.
However, Les, bless her South Carolina heart, was a whiz behind a keyboard. And while Hammond pecked his way to a criminal history using only his index fingers, Les tracked down employment and medical records for their two suspects. “You can find anything if you know where to look,” she once told him. “You just can’t use all of it in court.”
Like medical records. Those were supposed to be private, and in a most cases, they still were. Privacy was an antiquated idea, however, and things like medical records, when they could be found, had a way of revealing secrets that might otherwise take days to unearth. Drug use. Depression. Suicide attempts. They all pointed to a certain state of mind.
Les’s disregard for suspects’ privacy was perhaps the primary reason Mark liked her so much. That and the nice rack she carried around. The jobs he couldn’t get done with brute force, she usually could with a gentle smile or a series of key strokes. They were a good team.
The bullpen hummed with an energy that, while muted when compared with its frenetic daytime counterpart, would still impress upon anybody the seriousness of the cases being worked. Mark and Les ignored the detectives around them and were ignored in return.
“What did you find out?” she asked, peering around her monitor so she could see him.
“Nothing helpful,” he grunted. Despite the NicoDerm patch on his arm, the frustration of coming up empty handed birthed a desire for a cigarette—or maybe it was just a desire for a cigarette break. “Some parking tickets, a couple speeding tickets. Between the two of ’em, nothin’ helpful.”
“Same here,” Les said. She pondered a thought. “Are you sure we’re barking up the right tree?”
“Sarah’s diary says we are.”
Les leaned forward, lowering her voice: “You don’t think we’re letting our past case load color our judgment—”
“No, I don’t,” Hammond interrupted. “We’ve set up a trace on her phone and got the number routed to us in case a kidnapper actually calls. So far: nada. So, until that happens, let’s stay on point here. Besides, I’d rather be wrong doing something than twiddle our thumbs until he’s dead.”
“Fine. Let’s try something else.” Les returned her attention to the computer. She logged into the Motorized Transportation Monitoring System, or MTMS. The MTMS provided real-time access to traffic cameras and their archived film, as well as the massive GA 400 toll database.
“It’s a shot in the dark,” she said, as she entered Jim’s name and license plate into the computer. “But we know they drove off in Jim’s car. That’s something. If he’s got a Cruise Card...”
“What are the odds he went up 400, though?” Mark asked.
“Pretty good, actually. From where the officers saw them, that’s the fastest way out of the city.”
“You think they left the city?”
“I would.”
“If you’re wrong, all we got is that he didn’t high-tail it outta here on 400.”
“Or that he doesn’t have a Cruise Card,” she added.
“There’s also I-75, I-85, I-20—”
“Those don’t have tolls.”
“That’s my point.”
“Georgia 400 is still the closest way out. It’s worth a look.”
She hit Enter.
“Seems like a waste of time to me,” Hammond said.
The computer returned the results. “Curious,” Les said, as she read the screen. “Well, looks like he does have a Cruise Card. We got ’em going up 400 at one-fifty-seven AM.”
“So they’re out of the city.”
Mark walked around to her desk to look over her shoulder. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Let’s check the photos.”
In addition to snapping a shot of each license plate when a car passed through the toll, the system snapped a shot from the front with a second camera. The purpose of the second camera was to catch a picture of the driver. If someone used the cruising lane without a card, it was this second shot that guaranteed tickets got paid.
A couple more clicks and the detectives were looking at surprisingly clear photos of Sarah and Jim inside the Civic.
“Why would they come back?” Mark asked.
“I don’t know. You can ask them when we find them. Right now let’s see if we can narrow down where they went.”
Les scoured the footage from traffic cameras until she saw Jim’s car several miles south of the toll. “There they are again.”
With each video time-stamped and the time stamps searchable, she was able to make quick work of tracking his route as long as they were on the highway and interstates. She followed them down GA 400, onto I-75, into downtown. Once they exited the interstate, she caught the license plate on a couple of traffic cams, but the trail went cold fast. All she could say at that point was: “I wonder who they know in that area of town.”
Mark Hammond, who was still standing behind her watching her work, said, “I don’t know, but at least we got a place to start looking.”
Chapter 16
AFTER THE SHOWER, SARAH WRAPPED herself in towels and parked herself on the bed farthest from the door. Springy and old, it wasn’t particularly comfortable, and the mud-brown bedspread patterned with fading red and yellow flowers did nothing for its appearance. Having just stepped from the bathroom, where the light somehow made the white walls even whiter, she noticed that the ceiling lamp in the bedroom seemed to tint everything in this room the same sickening yellow she’s seen on the building outside.