“In the heat of battle, things don’t always go as they should.”
He shoots a bullet of a look at me. “Don’t give me that heat of battle dreck. I fought in Desert Storm, but I was on the front lines, not hiding behind a badge.”
He knows nothing about what I did as a criminal investigator in the army, so I don’t answer.
“Back then we didn’t coddle our soldiers with some overinflated excuse for putting their lives in neutral. When our guys came home, they had to work and make something of themselves.”
Really? I think. There was no PTSD in Desert Storm, or Vietnam? In Korea? In the World Wars? It all started with the war on terror?
Keegan is an even bigger fool than I thought. I wonder what excuse he uses to justify his extortion and murder. Will he use those defenses in his trial, when I finally nail him for all his sins?
“I’ll find her,” I say. “Don’t worry. I tracked her down here, didn’t I? I’m starting to understand her patterns and her thought process. Every minute I spend with you is time I’m not going after her.”
I get to the small airport and pull into the parking lot in front of the building. Keegan shakes his head. “Just drive out onto the tarmac. I’ll show you which plane I’m in.” As I pull around the building to the concrete pad, he grabs his duffel bag out of the backseat.
“Plane yours?” I ask him, scanning the twenty or so planes lined up.
He hesitates half a second, which I’m realizing is a tell. What follows is usually a lie. “Belongs to a buddy. He lets me take it now and then.”
I’ve known lots of pilots, and those who own their own planes don’t loan them out like Weed Eaters. The insurance costs a mint and doesn’t extend to occasional pilots, and logging extra hours results in more expensive maintenance. But I don’t call him on it.
“You ever thought of learning to fly, Dylan?”
“Took lessons when I was in college,” I say. “Got my license, but I haven’t flown in a few years.”
He looks disappointed. I want to tell him not to take it so hard, but I stay quiet as he points the way to his Cessna 182.
As he loads his stuff into the cargo bay of the single-engine plane, I write down his tail number. He comes back to my car, leans in. “So what are you gonna do now?”
“Go after her. Keep looking.”
“Naw,” he says. “Just come home. I don’t know if we’re gonna keep you on the case. Besides, we have the attention of all the police departments in a five-state area now. National news will jump all over this, probably make her identifiable anywhere she goes. We don’t need you.”
I don’t bother to tell him that Casey isn’t stupid, that she’ll change her identity again. She probably already has. “I don’t work for you,” I say, keeping the edge from my voice. “I work for the Paces.” Brent’s parents, who hired me as a PI to find the girl they’re certain murdered their son, won’t be any happier than Keegan that I let her get away. But if anyone’s going to fire me, it’ll have to be them.
“We’ll see about that. Come home. Time to regroup and reevaluate.”
I nod. At least if I’m meeting him in Shreveport, that’s precious time that will allow Casey to get farther away. “All right. I’ll start home right now. You want to meet tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Come to the department at one. That’ll give me time to talk to the chief and the Paces and see where we are.”
That’ll give me time to talk to them too. We shake hands, because if I don’t, he’ll know I’m on to him. As I turn my car around, he starts his preflight checklist before the flight home.
I’ll be in the car most of the night, driving back home. But as I drive, I pray for Casey, that she’ll have time to get well hidden before Keegan goes after her.
It’s the wee hours by the time I get home, and my apartment feels stale. The smell I noticed when I first moved in is apparent again. I guess when you’re away from something for a few days, your olfactory senses sharpen and are easily offended again when you come back.
I check my fridge and my garbage disposal drain to make sure nothing is rotting there. I squirt a dollop of dishwashing soap down the drain and run the disposal for a minute, and the smell clears up, but the scent of previous tenants doesn’t go away. I figure my brain will filter it out again in the next day or so.
I open the doors to my tiny balcony and step out to the rusted railing. Leaning out, I can see the parking lot where a young couple is arguing through a car window. She’s threatening to leave, and he’s yelling at her. When she pulls away, he curses after her. Then he storms into a downstairs apartment and slams the door.
Quiet again.
I lower into the folding lawn chair that collects pollen, and put my feet up on the plastic bin I’ve turned upside down to use as an ottoman. That old familiar dread thickens the air, making it hard for me to breathe. My shrink calls it depression and wants to dig deep into it.
I’ve told her how disappointed I am in myself, that I feel lazy and useless since coming back stateside, that I have no purpose. Funny how chasing Casey made me forget all that. I did have purpose. I was trying to find the suspected killer of my childhood friend.
Now I have another purpose.
I drop my feet and plant my elbows on my knees. Why does the thought of keeping that secret deepen the dread? I’ll have to hide what I know until I can make a case that can’t be ignored or swept under a rug. I don’t like lying to the Paces, who’ve been through enough and who trust me, not only as a PI but as their longtime family friend. They expect me to bring their son’s killer to justice.
I will do that. It’s just that the person they’re paying me to find is not his killer.
I also don’t like what this will do to the Shreveport Police Department, where I hope to work someday. I admire and respect cops, always have. There are good people in law enforcement who have made a difference in my life. There are men and women who run toward gunfire and screams and explosions, when everyone else runs from them. The corrupt ones make it tough for those with courage and integrity.
I don’t want to lower the Shreveport cops’ morale or paint them with a broad brush. I want my approach to be surgical, taking out the men who deserve to be in prison, the ones who give cops a bad name, the ones who are dangerous. I want the force to be rid of these, and make them an example to any others who use their badges to terrorize and extort. And I want them to pay for every one of Brent’s stab wounds, every lie they staged to cover up his murder, every moment that ticks by as they star in their own fiction.
But who am I to do all that? I’m damaged goods. I can’t even depend fully on my brain these days.
Still, I can’t back down now. Casey’s life depends on it.
As my eyes close, I see her eyes, when we stood face-to-face under a streetlamp. They were miles deep, filled with words that she didn’t utter, words I would have loved to hear. I would have liked to tend to her injuries, stare into that pretty face, and bask in the peace that came over me just by being close to her. I think of those words she wrote me in an email from an account she’d set up just for that purpose, written to an inbox I’d set up for the same reason.
There is real evil in this world. I’ve seen it up close. Hiding for the rest of my life would be an acceptable cost for avoiding that evil. If only it weren’t everywhere . . .
Then she nailed me with a challenge.
Do you have the courage to go after the evil that plagues me, even if it means that the job you’ve been hired to do is an extension of that evil?
Here are the names. Keegan, Sy Rollins, for sure. Don’t trust their close friends or Keegan’s son. Keegan and Rollins are not just dirty, they are brutal. Evil sits in the Major Crimes unit, making proclamations on people like me.
I go back into my apartment and pull my computer out of my bag. I open it and go to that inbox, checking to see if she’s contacted me again. There’s nothing new, so I read back over the ones she’s already written.
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It pains me that Casey doesn’t have God to turn to. I want that for her. Loneliness is too crushing a weight to bear alone. Jesus never promised to erase his believers’ burdens, but he did vow to help carry them.
I lie down on the couch, staring up at the stained ceiling tiles, and pray for her. She doesn’t have to be a follower to have God watch over her. As I pray, I feel his fondness for her. He sees in her what I see.
I wonder if she’s still driving. I hope she’s ditched the car by now, before Keegan’s BOLO gets her pulled over. Maybe she’s found a safe place to sleep. I hope she’s still got cash to get her through.
I know I will find her again, and hopefully when I do, I can make it safe for her to come back and confront her accusers.
3
CASEY
I knew this time would come, so for the last several weeks I’ve carried a bag in my trunk with some things I would need when I had to make a fast getaway. I have hair color in three shades—black, red, and platinum blonde—along with scissors, a couple of baseball caps, my cash, and some clothes. I knew when they came for me I wouldn’t be able to go home. I would have to just drive away with whatever I had.
Thank God I had warning that they were closing in. I never returned to my apartment after that.
The motel bathroom is missing tiles over the tub, where moldy Sheetrock peeks through. The vinyl flooring peels up around the base of the commode, showing more mold on the floor beneath it.
I stand in front of the mirror, trying to decide who I will be this time. My natural color is blonde. For the last few weeks I’ve been a brunette.
I cut my bangs first. I’ll figure out the rest of it later. I’d already cut my hair to my jawline for Shady Grove, and I’m sure they have pictures of me with brown hair now. I could hack it off shorter, but that might be too predictable, and once I cut it all off there’s nowhere to go from there. I leave my bangs long enough to hang in my eyes, which I know will take some getting used to. My eyes are the hardest part of me to disguise, mainly because they’re almond-shaped and bigger than average. In Shady Grove I didn’t wear eye makeup, because in the pictures of me that the police are circulating, I had on a little eyeliner. I don’t know what to do this time. The change has to be significant—I can’t just look like version one or two of me. I didn’t let anyone take a picture of me in Shady Grove but, even so, they’ll have security video from places I’ve been. Chances are, no one has a clear enough picture of me as a brunette for the media to use. They’ll keep using the blonde photo.
I color my hair black, then shower and rinse it out. I don’t like the look. I have the skin of a blonde, but it is what it is. By the time I have it dried, I look like a different person. Doing my eyes with a smoky, dark look, rounding my eyeliner so my eyes don’t look so almond, might change my look entirely. If I can get the swelling to go down in my jaw and cover the bruising with makeup, I might not draw a second look.
I flush the clippings, then blow my hair dry and cut a little more.
Tears spring to my eyes as I work on the style, angling it slightly shorter in the back, teasing it messily at the roots. I don’t know why I would cry over lost hair when I endure my lost life, but I can’t seem to help myself.
When I’ve done all I can to change my look, I set the clock next to the bed to wake me in two hours. I’ll need to get rid of my car before daybreak. I dry my tears and fall quickly into a deep sleep.
I dream of a man kicking and swinging at me, smashing pain . . . then it morphs into Brent’s dead body . . . then my dad’s. . . .
When the alarm goes off I fly up, terrified. Where am I? I’m shaking and my skin shines with sweat, but I remember I’m in a motel. I force myself out of bed, brush my teeth, shower again, and muss my hair a little more. I make up the bed, leaving it the way I found it, and steal quietly out to my car. I drive away without being seen, at least as far as I can tell.
Around five a.m. I find a truck stop open. Sweeping my bangs over my eyes, I go in and buy some chips and a drink and a pay-go smartphone in a plastic container, along with a card to put minutes on it. I activate it quickly and get it working. It already has a charge.
Once it’s working, I use the GPS to find the closest bus station, twenty miles away. I follow the directions there. I find it easily just as the sun begins to come up.
Should I leave my car in the parking lot here—a dead giveaway that I took a bus somewhere—or park it somewhere else? I drive around the area for a while until I find a bank’s parking garage. You don’t have to pay until you exit the place, which I have no intention of doing. I leave my car there, hoping it will be a long time before it’s sighted, then I walk back to the bus station wearing a white baseball cap, my bangs pulled low over my eyes.
The sun is up now as I get a schedule to see what’s going out. I need to get back to Durant, Oklahoma, where I know I can get another driver’s license and fake name. It’s possible I could find a place here to get one, but the fewer people I involve, the better. Besides, I’m scared of the people I would have to encounter to get to the lawless underground in a place like this. Though the man at Pedro’s Place in Durant breaks the law, he seems to have a modicum of decency. I’m not afraid of him.
It looks like I can take a bus to Dallas, then transfer to a route that goes up to Durant. I think for a moment before buying the ticket. Did Dylan find out I got a driver’s license there before? Will he think of me doing that again? Will Keegan?
I don’t think so. They know I went to Durant, but it’s doubtful that they know everything I did there.
I think about my look. I don’t like the black hair, but it’s not like there are fifty colors of hair to choose from. I do a quick Google search for wigs and find several local places. As I find directions to the closest one, it occurs to me that I can’t walk into any of them. Too risky. There are people—like cancer victims—who would seem natural buying a wig, but not someone like me. It might raise red flags.
I look on Google again and find an online store based in New York. The synthetic wigs look pretty good in the pictures, but again, if I wear a wig that’s obviously a wig, I’ll call attention to myself. I’ll have to pay more for real hair.
I scroll through their product images and find long wigs with bangs in both blonde and brunette. I click Add to Cart for both of them, then go back and find a short, clean cut in strawberry blonde. I add that one too. The total comes to over a thousand dollars. How am I going to pay for it? I have the cash, but no credit card.
I call the customer service number and ask if I can send them a money order. They tell me I can, so I place the order. When they ask where I want it mailed, I hesitate again. I’m heading for Durant, so maybe they should ship it there. But I don’t know which motel.
I put the phone on speaker, then thumb-navigate my way back to Google and put in “Pedro’s Place, Durant, OK.” Up comes the restaurant where I got my fake ID a few months ago. I give them Pedro’s address. Then I tell them I want it FedExed to him as soon as they receive the payment. I’ll add the cost to my money order.
I go to the post office, wearing my baseball cap and keeping my head down to avoid security cameras, and purchase a money order. Then I find a FedEx store and pay cash to overnight the money to the wig store.
Everything has to be so complicated. I have to think ahead, plan it all out, imagine what could go wrong. But I’m tired. Part of me just wants to let them find me if they’re going to.
No, that’s stupid. I have to hide. I can’t let Keegan and his demons murder me.
I take a taxi back to the bus station. The bus is leaving at nine a.m., so I sit in the bathroom in the wheelchair stall until closer to time. I’m so tired that I can’t even cry.
Finally, I get on the bus and sit near the back, right in front of the bathroom. I take the aisle seat, hoping no one will want to sit with me. I plug my earbuds into my new phone, but then I realize I don’t have music on it. As the bus is boarding, I download
a Pandora app, create a free account under a fake name, and find a station I like. I wish I could transfer my listening preferences from my own account. What’s the point in all those thumbs-ups if I can’t use them? I guess I’m destined to be someone who has her music chosen for her.
The music lulls me to sleep before the bus even takes off, and I sleep for several hours. When I wake, my soul feels blanched at the reality that the last twenty-four hours—or the last few weeks—can’t be erased by waking up.
4
DYLAN
I don’t understand how that girl is being credited with heroism.” Jim Pace’s words come with the rasp of deep grief. “She’s a cold-blooded killer, and they’re sensationalizing it and making it sound like she saved that girl.”
He backs up the video and replays the Fox News coverage of what happened in Shady Grove. Keegan and Rollins sit across from him and Elise at Jim’s square conference room table, and the chief, the captain, and I sit at the end opposite the TV. “That girl broke into that house,” Keegan says, “not once, but twice. She’s a thief, not a savior.”
I stay silent, rigid, looking down at my hands. If I defend her now, it’ll all be over. They’ll take me off the case and I’ll have no chance of protecting her.
“Dylan, you were there,” Elise says, teary-eyed. “Can’t you tell the media what a horrible person she is? Can’t you explain to them what she did to our boy?”
I draw in a deep, ragged breath. “I don’t know that my going on TV is going to help us find her,” I say. “I need to stay under the radar. If people recognize me, she could be tipped off when I get close.”
“What is she, a spy?” Jim demands. “How could she evade the law this long? It’s like she’s been trained by the CIA or something. I don’t get it. She was living there in plain sight. Going to work every day, talking to people.”