“Which makes you a lousy consultant. Lucy says Jimmy Martin stiffed you on the kids.”
“That he did.”
“Where’s that leave you?”
I shrugged. “Same place as the FBI and the cops. No place. Some of the neighbors are sticking up fliers with the kids’ pictures all over Northeast, and they’ve organized search parties.”
“Where are they looking?”
“Kessler Park, the bluffs, and the river, anyplace you could bury two little kids without being noticed.”
“Any chance they aren’t dead?”
“Not much. There’s been no ransom demand. The FBI has checked out the rest of Jimmy’s family to make certain he didn’t stash the kids with one of them, and they’ve run down his known acquaintances and come up empty. If Evan and Cara are still alive, someone has to be taking care of them, and there aren’t any likely candidates.”
“What else can you do?”
I shook my head. “Keep looking, go back to the friends and family, and hope somebody remembers something or lets something slip. It’s not much of a plan, but it is what it is.”
“So what can I do?”
“A couple of things. A gun dealer that lived at Lake Perry died on his way home from a gun show in Topeka last month. Hit a deer and had a heart attack. Somebody stole his inventory before his body was found. See what you can dig up on it.”
“Because someone is going to pay me or because you’re asking me?”
“Because you’re a humanitarian. And, because one of the stolen handguns was used in the shooting at LC’s.”
“Lucy told me, the guy who killed his wife. Why do you care?”
“Roni Chase, the woman who shot him, may be in over her head.”
“Is she going to pay me?”
“I was thinking it would work the other way. You pay her.”
“That would make me a moron, not a humanitarian.”
“Actually, it would make you her employer. You’ve been looking for someone who can help you analyze financial records. She’s got an accounting degree and runs a bookkeeping company. You remember the Jensen case from last year, the one where the bookkeeper embezzled a couple hundred grand from that construction company?”
“Yeah.”
“Give me a set of the records, let her take a look at them, see if she can put it together. You already know what’s there. If she can find it, maybe you can use her. Plus, she’s a good shot and takes her gun into restaurants.”
He shrugged and pursed his lips. “I’ve got a better idea.” He pulled up a file on his middle screen, tapped a few keys, copied it to a CD, and handed it to me. “These are the financials on a new case I’ve got for an electrical supply company. I redacted the company name. Tell her if she finds what I think is buried in those numbers, she can be a consultant making the middle money just like you.”
“What are you looking for?”
He smiled. “Like I’m going to tell you.”
“Why not tell me?”
“Because I know that look on your face. This Roni reminds you of your daughter, Wendy, or someone else who reminds you of Wendy, so if I tell you, you’ll tell her because you think if you save enough stray cats and dogs you’ll pay a debt you don’t owe and couldn’t pay if you did.”
I slipped the CD into my side jacket pocket, not arguing because he was right.
“Thanks.”
“Jack, do both of you a favor and just give her the disc. Let her save herself.”
Chapter Eight
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
