When She Left: A Thriller, page 13
The car, an old white sedan, stopped about fifty feet away.
The engine roared, and the car rushed forward. Seth fired and the windshield cracked and he kept firing, calmly stepped to the side of the van doors, outside Melissa’s sight.
The car just missed the van’s swinging open door as it rocketed past.
Melissa heard the sound of the car hitting Seth, like soup splattering.
And she heard the car dig into the gravel again. The engine revved, and the car screeched and stopped outside the van door. The front passenger window rolled down.
Melissa protectively knelt in front of Jake.
A woman she had never seen peered over from the driver’s seat.
“Where’s my son?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LUCKY
The setting afternoon sun brought an early evening excitement, one that reminded Lucky of the twilit summer nights in his neighborhood, back when Marybeth had been either ten or eleven, the age right before her teenage distance set in seemingly overnight. Renee relaxed and lovely as she talked to someone’s wife, sitting in a lawn chair with her legs lazily crossed, a glass of wine in hand. Lucky standing in a circle of men, as he was expected to, but their conversations distant to him, lost in the evening, lost in Lucky’s quiet observations of his wife and daughter.
But those evenings hadn’t been lit by police cars.
Lucky walked back toward the cordoned off parking lot from the warehouse, toward a pair of cops standing apart from the investigation, mounted lights illuminating every inch of torn gravel and spilled blood.
His phone buzzed.
Lucky pulled it halfway out of his pocket, glanced at the screen.
A notification from the WatchFull app.
He pushed the phone back into his pocket, tried to focus on the cops’ efforts to reconstruct what had happened. Towns like Wharfside didn’t often come across this level of violence. He’d overheard that a CSI team from Baltimore was on the way to investigate the blood throughout the warehouse and parking lot, as well as the murder at a nearby convenience store. Lucky had gone to that store first but hadn’t been able to get inside. Even so, he’d learned that the only corpse there belonged to the clerk. Not anyone he was looking for.
And there was little chance the cops would learn who’d killed him. Lucky knew the nearby Baltimore cops were too busy to offer much help, and a town this small lacked the resources to conduct an effective investigation on its own. Especially when the criminal knew what he was doing.
Law enforcement was stretched too thin. If you kept a low profile and hid your crimes with even a slight degree of competence, no one could catch you.
It was so easy to be corrupt in America that it barely felt like living a lie.
“When’s building management getting here?” Lucky heard a nearby cop ask another.
“On the way,” the other cop replied, “but coming from DC. Going to take a few hours.”
“Who are you with? Waiting for your team?”
Those questions were directed to Lucky.
“Team?” Lucky asked.
“News team.”
“I’m not media. PI.” He showed the disinterested cops his badge; they didn’t even glance at it. “Hired by a family searching for their son. I heard a rumor he might be in Wharfside.”
“What’s the kid’s name?”
Another notification.
“Jake Smith,” Lucky replied, ignoring the phone vibrating in his pocket. “About six feet, twenty-four, white. Curly brown hair, brown eyes.”
“Haven’t seen him.”
“No worries. Better for his family that he wasn’t here.”
Lucky and the two cops watched an investigator measure the distance between drops of blood.
“You serve before?” one of the cops asked.
Strange, Lucky reflected, how distant he was from that question. Never compelled to mention his brief time in the military.
“I was San Diego police,” Lucky lied.
“You ever work with ICE?”
“All the time.”
The cop nodded approvingly. It was a lie Lucky had told before, claiming prior police work to help himself slip into crime scenes or gather information. Years ago, at his request, the Winterses had mocked up a fake badge for him, and he’d used that badge countless times. It was a gold oval with “POLICE OFFICER SAN DIEGO” written on it in blue, San Diego chosen since it was too far and large to easily verify.
Not that, after Lucky showed someone the badge, he ever stayed around long enough to answer questions.
“Is the pay good as a PI?” one of the cops asked.
“Not according to my wife.”
The cops snorted and laughed. This was something Lucky had always been good at, easing his way into any group of men. He knew what men wanted, what they trusted. Men will believe anything if it has a sense of superiority to it. For some it was wealth, for others, strength. But the key was for that trait to be held aloft and superior. Men treasured that approach, mistook it as admirable.
“You two work out of this town?” Lucky asked.
“Nah, we’re Salisbury. Wharfside doesn’t have its own PD. Jim Carver. This is Derrek Lough.”
“Lucky Wilson.” Lucky shook each of their hands.
“You heard Harold’s in the hospital?” Lough asked Carver.
“I heard.”
“Harold?” Lucky asked.
“Harold Thompson,” Carter replied. “Old local and part-time security, mostly as charity. Probably would have greeted customers at Target if Wharfside had one but kept an eye on the warehouse instead.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?”
Another frustrating notification. Lucky reached into his pocket and silenced his phone. He was certain the camera was picking up a neighbor walking his dog or William checking the mail, not any incriminating evidence about William and Renee.
But, still, at the thought of them together . . .
Lucky forced those images away.
“Looks like Harold was out here,” one of the cops was saying, “got dragged inside. Old Harold put up a fight, though. He’s under right now, but they say he’s going to pull through.”
There was so much these cops didn’t know, and so much they’d never know.
A call on the burner phone during Lucky’s drive over had filled in these blanks ahead of time.
“Lucky? The buyers pulled out. Said they had a new job in a new city and couldn’t commit. And their agent is going on vacation for a few days. They sent us a quick message that the property is wide open again.”
This one was easy for Lucky to decipher.
Jake and Melissa had escaped and left town, and the person searching for them had been laid up, left with wounds that required medical care and a few days off.
The property is wide open.
The search for Jake and Melissa was still on.
Investigators were documenting everything inside, and Lucky had caught only a quick glance. But that had been enough. He’d seen the smashed window on the other side of the building, the broken door to an office, the bloody path from the center of the room.
The scent of gasoline.
The blood might have seemed like one of the most prominent clues in the investigation, but the real clue, Lucky knew, was the gas.
The man who had spilled it was named Seth Yates. Lucky had trained him.
A few years ago he’d been asked by the Winterses to take Seth under his tutelage. He’d thought the young man would be impetuous and flamboyant, like most dumb, immature criminals, but instead Lucky met someone hardened and serious. Saw that Seth was driven by anger and revenge, hatred of the scars a fire had mapped over his face and body.
Lucky channeled that rage, taught Seth the importance of death over desire. The Winterses were never interested in sending a message or torturing someone to prove a point. Death was the most effective message there was. Particularly when the death appeared natural or as the result of an accident. None of their methods caused attention, and that was the precise outcome the Winterses wanted.
Seth chose fire. Houses set ablaze, offices burned to the ground, a corpse found unconscious in a smoke-filled kitchen. He studied the science of fire, even considered being trained as a volunteer firefighter, but Lucky quickly dissuaded him of that notion. He knew that if these fires were ever investigated, those with training would be suspect: Seth’s scars and demeanor made him memorable. Instead it was Lucky who took the training—a few weekend classes offered by the local FD focused on what to do if a fire occurred in different situations. Lucky took careful notes and gave his findings to Seth.
And then, after a few months, they parted ways.
Seth seemed confused by this, as if he’d expected Lucky to remain a mentor to him, to keep in contact as friends, but that was the final lesson Lucky wanted to teach.
Never mix your professional and personal lives. The only person Lucky had ever trusted with the Winterses was Ruby, and he forever had the knowledge that she could betray him. He’d helped her escape, and if she was found, he had no assurance that she wouldn’t turn on him.
It would have been better to have never trusted anyone.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Carver asked, “how much money are we talking?”
Lucky blinked back to the conversation.
“I hope that’s not personal,” Carver added. Lough’s head was tilted as he listened to the radio mic on his shoulder. “Just curious.”
“Depends how successful you are,” Lucky said. This was a question he’d been asked before, one he’d researched. “Starting out, you might make in the twenties. Once you get established, maybe three times that.”
“That’s it?”
“Sorry.”
“Damn.”
“Hey,” Lough said. “We need to look at the tracks. They’re thinking we could have multiple victims.”
“Okay.” Carver didn’t seem particularly motivated to look into the case. “So, what? You get your license and go right to work? Or did you work with someone first? I heard you have to apprentice.”
Lucky could have continued this conversation, kept on fabricating a story that he’d told before, but his phone buzzed again and he finally gave in. Pulled it out, glanced at the WatchFull notification.
“One second,” Lucky said, and he lifted his phone. “I need to take this.”
He walked away from Carver and Lough, away from the conversations occasionally punctuated by laughter in the warehouse. Over to his car at the end of the lot, a few spaces away from the police automobiles. A younger cop was back there, vaping and staring down into his phone. Lucky strode past him, opened his own car door, climbed inside.
Shut and locked it.
Closed his eyes tight.
Realized he was gripping the phone so hard he was in danger of shattering the screen.
Lucky stared out the windshield at the dark night. At the silhouettes of trees, like sentries waiting to be told what to do.
Lucky swiped open his phone.
Tapped the app.
He pressed it too long, and an option appeared to delete it, the app trembling on his screen with a small X in the corner. Lucky briefly considered the idea, the bliss of ignorance from not knowing what was on the camera.
Instead he opened the camera to its live view.
Renee’s car was parked in William’s driveway.
Lucky didn’t even wipe the tears off his cheeks. Just stared down at the phone.
He watched the door to the house open. Saw William McKenna standing in the doorway. Lucky squinted and imagined he could see the smile on William’s face.
The car door opened, but it wasn’t Renee who stepped out.
Lucky watched his daughter run over to William McKenna, watched her disappear into his embrace and then pull back and kiss him. William made a laughing sound the camera picked up, held Marybeth away, glanced up and down the street. Then he took her hand and pulled her inside and closed the door.
His daughter.
His seventeen-year-old daughter.
The screen cracked under Lucky’s thumbs.
PART TWO
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
John 8:44
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MELISSA
“I like that,” Jake told her. “It gives you something different. Something special. Don’t smile.”
They sat on a grassy hill after he took that first set of photos, a sunny day in Baltimore’s Patterson Park, the summer still too young for Baltimore’s brutal humidity. A boy and his father kicked a soccer ball back and forth. Another couple was on a blanket to their right, the woman sitting up and the man lying on his back.
“Can I see the pictures?” Melissa asked. She slid next to Jake, pulled her dyed red-brown hair over her shoulder. Peered down at the camera.
She’d never had pictures taken by a professional photographer. The photo shoot had been Chris’s idea, inspired by the photos of a friend’s wife. Lately Chris had always seemed inspired this way; what someone else had, he wanted.
The friend’s wife—Janet or Janice, Melissa wasn’t sure which and, because she’d already met her, was too embarrassed to ask—had shown her own photos to Melissa and a group of wives and girlfriends a few weekends before, black-and-white pictures she was getting framed. “You probably saw them when I posted them on Insta a month or so ago,” Janet/Janice told them, and the other women assented they had.
Melissa had been surprised to discover, over the rest of that afternoon, that the photos actually changed how she regarded Janet/Janice. Melissa had only met her that day and had seen her as somewhat shallow, empty, the kind of woman Chris’s friends tended to date or marry and, she was certain, no different from how they saw her. But the pictures changed that impression, particularly one where Janet/Janice was glancing down, eyes away from the camera, conveying a sadness Melissa would never have suspected.
She showed that picture to Chris before they left.
“You like that?” he asked. “You want some old photos of you too?”
“I just think they’re so pretty.”
And now Melissa looked at the photos Jake had taken, one where she was staring at the camera, unsmiling but with a gleam in her eye. An excitement Jake had somehow spotted and captured. Melissa didn’t recognize herself.
It wasn’t just how she looked—something else about the picture drew her. How Jake saw her.
“I don’t know where I am,” Melissa said.
Jake’s mother sat next to her, slumped with her hands wrapped around the back of her neck. She didn’t look up as she spoke.
“We’re at Steve Debko’s. He’s a friend and a doctor.”
“I don’t remember you telling me that.”
“That’s because you’re still in shock.” Ruby kept staring down at the floor. “You asked me where we were going three times on the way here.”
“Dr. Steve, your friend, he can help Jake?” Melissa asked.
Ruby didn’t answer. Melissa stood and walked over to the kitchen window and stared out at the neglected lawn, fading from green to gray, the bright colors of day changing to a black-and-white evening.
“You knew who he was,” Ruby said softly, as if to herself.
Melissa didn’t know how to respond.
“You knew who he was,” Ruby said again. “You were with Chris Winters; you knew the kind of danger Jake would be in. This is your fault.”
Melissa remembered the day after that long first photo shoot in Baltimore, the text from Jake thanking her for her time, the way she relentlessly analyzed the closing words: . . . and I loved your sunset eyes.
She’d told Chris about the photo shoot, how Jake had taken her to different parts of Baltimore she hadn’t yet seen. Highlandtown’s Patterson Park. The tree-filled neighborhoods of Bolton Hill. The quirky, festive goofiness of Hampden. She’d lived near the city with Chris for years and felt like she had never seen any of it.
“So you had fun,” Chris replied.
Melissa wondered, suddenly, if she was too excited, talking too much about another man. But Chris was staring down into his phone, pressing the screen with alternating thumbs, the slow way he texted. Melissa often wondered if that was why her texts with girlfriends were so much more detailed, their fingers smaller and nimble. Or maybe men were always more reserved.
“I did,” she said and then added brightly, to make what she was saying about Chris, “I think you’ll really like the pictures.”
“Cool.”
She wondered who Chris was texting. Melissa knew a lot of what Chris was involved with couldn’t be discussed. She understood that, had grown used to it long ago—the way someone might accept their partner’s drinking, a cautious eye toward excess, without realizing excess was already upon them.
Like the gun collection that had proliferated in the closet. The quiet men who came by late at night, whom Chris led to that room in the basement. Even the video she’d seen of that man being killed. The images that she’d forced herself not to think about.
What wouldn’t she accept?
Melissa had been so terrified the night after she’d seen that video over Chris’s shoulder. She’d lain awake afterward, alone in bed, tears wetting her pillow. And then she somehow fell into a deep, dreamless sleep and woke the next morning with Chris gone, the sun out, the video a memory that glaringly returned.
But it was easier hours later, a morning later. That dread in her, the fear rock, was smaller. There was a city outside her window, and it moved and lived and breathed, and so there was something else she was part of.
Melissa thought about the pictures Jake had taken, how he’d talked to her. How they’d walked through Baltimore together.
And she longed to see him again.
