“Agent Rivers can drive it back for you,” Harrison said coolly. His look suggested there was no way he was trusting us to drive ourselves home, and I had to give him credit for that, as I knew Candice would have found a way to stick around if given the license.
Dutch looked a little surprised and glanced at his watch. I knew we had about two hours to catch the flight, and given that our luggage was still at our hotel room on the other side of town, we’d be sprinting to make it. “Yes, sir,” he said, getting up and motioning me and Candice along.
We followed behind Dutch to the parking garage, and Candice muttered and grumbled the entire way. “Spineless jerk!” she growled. “How the hell am I supposed to get around without a car?”
Dutch reached into his pocket and handed her some keys. “Here,” he said. “You guys can catch a cab home from the airport and you can drive my car until I come back to town with yours.”
Candice took the keys and grumbled some more, but she eventually handed him her keys and gave him the location of her SUV at the mall. Then she continued to sputter and grumble and grouse under her breath.
“Who exactly are you angry at?” I asked when we got to Dutch’s company car.
“Harrison,” she spat. “Who else?”
I thought back to how he’d sat with me in the conference room and made me feel better. “He’s not so bad, you know,” I said.
“Of course he is, Abby!” Candice snapped, jerking the car door open and sitting down in a huff. “Did he defend you even once? Has he openly acknowledged even one time what an asset you’ve been to this investigation?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but Candice was already answering her own question.“No! He doesn’t defend you. He doesn’t take you seriously—he doesn’t consider anything you offer him to have any kind of value! He’s a pompous, no-good ignoramus who couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag with a map, a tour guide, and runway lights!”
I glanced at Dutch in the seat next to me, but he had his head positioned so that Candice couldn’t see him, even though I could tell he was quietly laughing. “Candice, I think that maybe he’s just trying to keep the peace with all these other branches being involved,” I said, trying to give Harrison the benefit of the doubt.
“Bah!” Candice scoffed from the backseat as she crossed her arms. “The man’s a world-class idiot, Abby!”
I looked pointedly at Dutch. “What?” he asked.
“Tell her he’s not such a bad guy.”
“No way,” he said, glancing at her furious figure in the backseat. “Too risky.”
I sighed heavily and buckled my seat belt. I was exhausted and I still had two hours to go before I could catch a catnap on the shuttle home. Candice continued to grumble all the way to the hotel, then all the way to the airport. She barely stopped long enough to thank Dutch for the ride and wish him luck with the rest of the case. “With that asshole at the helm, you’re going to need it,” she said, wanting to have the last word.
Once we were in the check-in line for our flight, Candice reached behind and under her shirt as she pulled out the lavender notebook that she’d stuffed into the back of her pants many hours ago. “Holy cow!” I said when she pulled it out. “You’ve had that thing wedged against your skin this whole time?”
Her expression was sober. “Well, I wasn’t very well going to parade the evidence of our B&E out for the FBI, now, was I?”
“I’m surprised that Harrison didn’t question us about being caught so close to the Derbys’.”
“I’m sure he was about to when you informed him that Leslie had been killed.” I blanched and Candice said quickly, “Hey, don’t go there, Sundance. You know it’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not entirely,” I said. “But I still can’t help feeling responsible.”
“How could you feel responsible?” she demanded.
“I knew we were running out of time, but I still thought we had longer than two days to find her.”
“How long did you think we had?”
I shrugged. “Maybe a week to ten days.”
Candice came to the same conclusion I had. “Something sped up the timetable.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
Candice pursed her lips and flipped open the lavender notebook, glancing at the contents for the first time. I leaned in to look over her shoulder. The notebook was basically empty of content. There were a lot of empty pages after the first two, but on those first pages something struck me. I recognized the handwriting. “No way!” I said, yanking the notebook out of her hands.
“What?”
“This was Bianca’s!” I said. I would recognize her distinctive, overly loopy b’s, p’s, and g’s anywhere.
Candice pulled me out of the check-in line and dragged me over to a group of chairs. After we sat down, she hovered over my shoulder as we began to read the script.
It was clear that there were two sets of handwriting on the pages and the writing was like some kind of note passing back and forth. Much of it confusing, as if Bianca and someone unknown to us were continuing a conversation from the middle.
“ ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ ” Candice read aloud, before reading Bianca’s response of, “ ‘ I swear on my life it was him!’ ”
“ ‘ Where were you exactly?’ ” I continued, reading the unknown scribbler before speaking Bianca’s reply, “ ‘ Out in front of this dive bar called the Cock Tail. We were looking for a pizza place and we walked by just as he was going in!’ ”
“‘What are you going to do about it?’ ” Candice read.
“ ‘ I don’t know.’ ” I read Bianca’s writing. “ ‘ But this is HUGE, you know?’ ”
“ ‘ Yeah. I’m glad I’m not you.’ ”
And then the script ended. I flipped the page over and there was nothing on the back. I then turned each page quickly looking for any hint of more text, but there was nothing there.
Candice and I sat quietly for a few moments after I’d reached the end of the notebook. She fiddled with her phone and after a minute she showed me the screen. It was the Web page for the Cock Tail Lounge here in Chicago on Franklin Street. She then said, “You know, Bianca was working a story to submit to her professor at MSU.”
I was surprised to hear her bring that up but went with her thought process. “Do you think that whom-ever she saw at the Cock Tail had anything to do with what’s happening now?”
“Maybe,” said Candice.“I mean, why else would Michael have hidden this notebook under his sheets?”
“It doesn’t look like it’s his handwriting,” I said, pointing to the other script that was clearly not Bianca’s.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I looked through one of his notebooks from school. His writing is much tighter and neater than this.”
“It’s rough-looking script, though,” Candice observed. “Might be male.”
“But it sounds female, doesn’t it?”
“You think it might be Leslie’s?”
And suddenly, my right side felt so light and airy that I sucked in a breath. “Yes, Candice! That’s exactly who I think it is!”
“The question is, how did Michael end up with it and why was it important enough for him to hide? I mean, on its own it’s pretty innocuous.”
“If we answer that, we might figure out why he looked so scared when we questioned him at his house,” I said. This notebook held a major clue that wasn’t obvious to us at the moment. “So what do we do?”
Candice looked around the airport at people hurrying to get into this line or that. Her gaze then traveled up to a sign indicating baggage claim and ground transportation were one level down. “We blow this joint and go check out the Cock Tail.” With that, she got up and began walking with purpose toward the escalator.
* * *
Candice and I decided to lie low for most of the day, as it wasn’t likely that a bar would be open at six a.m. We were also both exhausted, so we had our cabdriver take us to the
first cheap hotel he could find, and slept for a couple of hours. Before turning in, however, I made sure to text Dutch that we’d made our flight and I’d see him at home in a few days. Candice and I both thought it best if we stayed off the grid for a while and didn’t let the boys know what we were up to.
When we woke up, it was around three in the afternoon, and my head felt foggy and out of sorts. It was hard to get my body to believe that it was the middle of the afternoon and that I needed to be awake and alert.
Candice suggested a run and I told her to go for it. There was no way I was jogging around in this neighborhood. She, however, wasn’t deterred and went off by herself.
When she got back, I had showered and switched to a fresh pair of jeans and one of Dutch’s sweatshirts I’d brought along, which still carried the scent of his cologne. Candice also took a quick shower and changed, and when she was ready, we went for something to eat. “I think we should hit the bar around seven,” she said over dinner.
“There probably won’t be many people there until nine or ten,” I advised as I munched on my fries.
“Which will give us the opportunity to talk to the staff without the distraction of a lot of other patrons.”
“What’s our approach?” I asked. “I mean, we can’t just go in there and wave the purple notebook around insisting that something big happened there two years ago.”
“No, but we can show pictures of Bianca and the others and see if one or all of them ring a bell.”
I frowned as I put more salt on my fries. “It’s a long shot,” I said, then looked up to see Candice giving me an odd look. “What?”
“It is a wonder you’re alive,” she said, pointing to the fries and the saltshaker. “You eat worse than a trucker.”
“You eat like a gerbil,” I replied, waving my hand at her garden salad with lemon and lime wedges. “I mean, jeez, girl! That isn’t food. That’s landscape!”
At seven o’clock we arrived at the Cock Tail by taxi. The cabbie glanced at us several times in the rearview mirror and I was getting nervous about how he was looking us over, especially when he asked us three times if we were sure we wanted to go there. But when we unloaded from the cab, I understood fully. The Cock Tail was obviously a gay bar and burlesque club. Candice tipped the driver huge and said, “If you come back by and pick us up in twenty minutes, I’ll double that tip.”
He saluted her and drove off. “Are you sure you want to go in?” I whispered to her as two somewhat meaty-looking transvestites came out of the bar and stood on the sidewalk to smoke, giving us the once-over before tossing up their noses at us.
“Definitely,” Candice said with a smile. “I love the ladies in drag,” she sang, and sauntered into the club. We pushed through the door and I squinted. The lights were dim and the floor was flooded with mist from a dry-ice machine. The music was also so loud it hurt my ears. There were very few patrons about, and several waiters (waitresses? it was hard to tell) were loitering around looking very bored. Candice approached the bar with confidence. I followed her so closely I could have ridden piggyback. “Can you give me a little space, Abs?” she said over her shoulder.
I smiled weakly and backed off two inches and smiled when she sighed. “Sorry!”
Candice turned her attention to the queen behind the bar, a colossal, frightful figure in a leather bustier that pumped up the fake cleavage to an unholy degree. I wondered how she breathed. “You two lost?” she said in a deep voice, obviously taking us for tourists.
“Not really,” Candice replied. “Couple of Miller Lites, please?” and she delicately placed a fifty on the bar.
The bartender shrugged and uncapped two bottles, setting them down in front of us. “I can’t break a fifty this early in the night. It’ll use up all my change,” she complained.
Candice smiled sweetly and said, “Then keep the difference.”
The bartender looked surprised but didn’t argue and shoved the fifty directly into her cleavage. I noticed that she’d also failed to ring up the sale. Before she could turn away, however, Candice added, “I was wondering if you might have seen this girl in here before.” And she shoved the picture of Bianca forward.
The bartender regarded it and smiled. “She’s a little too young and a little too pretty for these bitches to put up with in here, honey.”
“She would have been an unwelcome guest?” Candice probed.
“Yep. Just like the two of you are likely to be. I’d suggest you two ask your questions quick and get out before the rest of the party shows up, if you know what I mean.”
Candice nodded but showed the other pictures of the kids to the bartender, who continued to shake her head. “Nope,” she said. “Never seen ’em.”
Candice thanked her and stepped away from the bar, leaving her beer untouched. I followed after downing about half of mine. (What? A girl can’t have a little something to take the edge off?)
My partner methodically wove her way through the staff, asking all of them if they’d ever seen Bianca or any of the others. Each and every one said he hadn’t. We were on our last server when someone tapped me from behind. I turned around and got a whiff of the worst breath I’ve ever smelled in my life. It was so bad, my eyes watered, and I took an involuntary step back as I eyed the owner of the offensive smell. I stared up at the ugliest “woman” I’d ever seen.
A veritable beast stared angrily down at me. Six-five in the stiletto heels she wore with a bright yellow skirt that bulged in very inelegant places and a matching feather halter top that allowed scads of flab and fake boobage to droop and dangle and collect in some rather odd spaces.
Above the neckline things grew worse. The head was like something out of a freak show. A headdress of yellow feathers framed a truly unfortunate face. Small beady eyes fringed with gigantic false lashes gave the appearance of two spiders divided by a bulbous nose and puffy cheeks smeared with rouge. Orange-coated lips hung open, revealing the source of the stench—rotting yellow teeth with inflamed gums and small particles of food stuck in the cracks.
I took another step back, and Big Bird noticed. “You afraid I’m gonna bite?” she asked in a voice so deep it made the outfit even more comical.
“A little,” I admitted.
Big Bird seemed to think this was hilarious and she opened her gap wide in a freakish smile before focusing on Candice. “Whatcha got there, girlfriend?”
Candice held her composure a little better than I did, but I noticed that she was careful to breathe through her mouth. “We’re trying to find anyone who may have seen this girl hanging around here,” she said, handing over Bianca’s picture.
Big Bird looked at it with interest. “Did she go missing?”
Candice nodded but withheld saying anything about her murder.
Big Bird studied the photo a little more earnestly. “I don’t recognize her,” she said. “And if anyone in here would recognize her, it’d be me. I know everybody that comes and goes through these doors.”
My radar dinged at that moment and I urged Candice to show the photos of the other kids, each labeled with their names. “Did you ever catch a glimpse of these other kids in here?” Candice asked.
Big Bird studied each picture carefully, shaking her head at all the pictures save one. When she pointed her finger at Michael Derby’s name, Big Bird’s eyes lit up. “Derby,” she said with a sly, knowing smile. “Is this Matthew Derby’s kid?”
My radar pinged. “Yes,” I said.
Big Bird’s awful smile widened. “He looks like his dad,” she said, and I knew there was some sort of inside joke that I wasn’t getting. “If you see Matt, sugar, you tell him Reba Bell says hi.” And with that, she walked away, still wearing that same satisfied smirk.
“That was weird,” I said as we watched Reba shimmy and shake her butt better than Marilyn Monroe.
But Candice wasn’t listening. Her eyes were unfocused and she seemed deep in thought. “Hello,” I said, waving a hand in front of her face. ??
?Earth to Candice.”
She blinked and looked at me. “Time to go,” she said, grabbing me by the hand.
I didn’t argue, as I’d really had enough of the burlesque scene, and we headed out. Our cabbie was waiting for us and I don’t think I was ever so glad to see a taxi in my life. “We headed back to the hotel?” I asked.
“No,” was all Candice said, and without further explanation she simply told the cabbie to drive around the block while she had time to think.
While Candice was “thinking,” my cell phone bleeped. I dug it out and looked at the ID. FBI was displayed on the screen. “Crap,” I said as the phone rang again.
I showed it to Candice, who shrugged. “You might as well answer it.”
“Hello?” I said after allowing for one more ring.
“Hey, hot stuff,” came Dutch’s silky voice.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Hi, sweetie,” I said pleasantly. “How goes it?”
“It goes,” he said without further comment. “Did your flight get in okay?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I was quite sure the flight had arrived just fine.
“Milo called me a little while ago,” he said. “He heard you were alone at the house and he wants to know if you might like some company for dinner.”
I was instantly on edge. “Er . . . ,” I said, trying to think fast. “I’m actually thinking of turning in early, honey. And I’m not really hungry.”
“Ah,” he said. “Okay, no worries. How’s Candice?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “I mean, I dropped her off at her place this morning. I’m assuming she’s as exhausted as I am.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “I thought you guys might be out sightseeing or something.”
My stomach clenched and I thought, Uh-oh. “Sightseeing?”
“Yeah, you know, Chicago has so much to offer. Maybe you two could take in a show or something while you’re here.”
My shoulders slumped. “How long have you known?”
“Milo went over to our place to check on you. He said you weren’t there, so I contacted the airlines and they said you two never checked in.”
I looked at Candice, who was now paying attention to our conversation. “We’re busted,” I mouthed.