“I had to know it,” I said. “My interest in this is Sashi, not Max and Candy. Everybody lies, Sarah: clients, cops, PIs, everybody. And I guess I was right, Max and Candy have been lying from the start. I had to know what anyone involved possibly had to gain if Sashi went missing.”
“Still…”
“Hey, kiddo, it was your idea to get me mixed up in this. You don’t get to judge.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“That’s okay. Keep going.”
“There’s not much else to tell except that Candy dropped fifty thousand dollars off in a garbage can at Caumsett Park a few days after Sashi was taken.”
“They don’t have a pot to piss in. Where did they get fifty thous-”
“I gave them some of it,” she said, looking rather sheepish. “I think Randy Junction gave them some, and someone else, but I don’t know who or how much.”
“Did you know Candy was sleeping with Junction?”
Sarah hesitated, then said, “I knew about it.”
“We may have to discuss that soon, but for now, I’ve got to call Detective McKenna and figure out a way to tell him and keep your name out of it.”
“Don’t, Dad, just tell him the truth.”
“And maybe fuck up your career and your life because you were trying to do the right thing? No. That’s not gonna happen.” I stood up and threw a twenty on the table. “Eat something and go about your business as if it was just another day.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“You’re my kid. You’re Katy Maloney’s kid. You can do it. You have to do it. And if the cops come to you, don’t say a word without me or a lawyer in the room. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“You did the right thing by telling me, kiddo.” I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “But why tell me now? What happened to make you come to me now?”
“It’s almost four weeks, Dad. I may not have been a cop or a PI, but I can hear the clock ticking too.”
“It’s okay. I’ll fix it.”
Walking away, I didn’t look back.
As I rushed to my car, I felt sick to my stomach. I felt sick because I had visited my sins upon my only child. She was a secret keeper too and I knew there was only grief at the end of that road.
NINETEEN
When I got back to my apartment, there were several sheets of paper sitting in the bin of my fax machine. Apparently the promise of cash money had motivated Devo and Brian Doyle to burn the midnight and pre-dawn oil. PIs are like actors. No matter how good times are, they don’t tend to turn down paying jobs. I scanned the faxes, but put them aside to call McKenna. On the ride over, I figured out how to play it to keep Sarah’s name out of it. My guess was that even if McKenna didn’t totally buy it, he would be too busy to realize it or care.
“Almost four weeks,” Sarah said, but time was fluid and its viscosity was dependent upon your point of view. To McKenna it was an eternity. To the kidnapper-that’s what this was, a kidnapping-it might not seem that long. If the fifty grand wasn’t enough, Sashi might still be alive. Her continued good health would be in his best interest. On the other hand, if he panicked or if he decided to quit while he was ahead, she was dead and all the machinations of all the other players were moot. If Sashi were still alive, I couldn’t imagine what the month in captivity felt like.
When I got McKenna on the phone, he sounded upbeat. I thought he might somehow have gotten word of the ransom demand and payoff. I was wrong. He had other morbidly good news.
“The teddy bear that was left in your car was hers, Sashi’s,” he said. “The parents IDed it. The kid’s beagle had chewed its leg up a little bit when she was younger and the teeth marks were there. We’re running DNA tests now to confirm it.”
“They didn’t notice the teddy bear was gone all this time?”
“Guess not.”
“I got something for you too.”
“What?”
“It’s a guess, but I think I know what they’ve been hiding from us.”
“What’s that?”
“My bet is there was a ransom demand.”
“Get the fuck out of here! The kid was swiped, they paid ransom money, and what, it slipped their minds?”
“I think they were scared, McKenna. What if they’d already called you when they got the demand? It doesn’t take much to figure out why they’d keep this between them.”
“Bullshit.”
“Go talk to them and see if I’m not right. I feel it in my kishkas. ”
“Are you kidding me? If I acted on every gut feeling I had, I’d still be riding around in a fucking patrol car or giving out speeding tickets on the LIE.”
“I’m an investigator too, remember? I got a feeling and it couldn’t hurt to confront them with it like you already know it’s true.”
“You got a point, Prager. Even if you’re wrong, it might shake ‘em up a little and get them to give up what they’ve really been hiding. Maybe between that and the shit we get from the bear and your car, we can finally make some progress.”
“At this point, it’s worth a try, right?”
“Okay, all right. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“Thanks.”
That crap I fed him about this all being one big hunch might not insulate Sarah forever, but I hoped it would work long enough so that it wouldn’t matter in the end. I was doing a lot of hoping lately and that was always a dangerous thing.
When I got off the phone with the detective, I made myself some coffee and started looking through the pages Doyle had faxed me. These new developments-the teddy bear, the ransom demand and payment- would help me fly even further under the radar than I had been flying and I just needed to work out who I was going to see and when. It was difficult to know how to do a threat assessment with cowards who hid their identities with screen names, people who slammed the work of a little girl and the girl herself, but who were too frightened to stand up behind the venom they spewed. I figured I would see the people Martyr suggested first, the ones whose names he underlined, and then I’d take a look at the personal data of the rest and go from there. That’s how I figured to do it until I saw a name and an address I recognized. Now I had my first stop. I had a funny feeling the rest of it wasn’t going to be that easy.
The house was pretty fucking impressive all right: big, brick, and showy with a semi-circular cobblestone drive and white columns reaching only halfway to heaven. The low-slung hedges were perfectly trimmed and the dormant, carpet-like lawn was dotted with just enough leftover leaves to make it look as if they were placed there by the hired help to lend it an air of nature but without the mess. It was just the kind of lawn that screamed to someone from Brooklyn, “Piss on me.” And believe me, in the mood I was in, I was sorely tempted. I parked my gray rental at an awkward angle so it would discourage anyone else from coming up the drive. Like I said, I was in that kind of mood. Call me petty. I’d been called worse, much worse.
The front door chimes weren’t quite as loud as the Vatican’s on Easter Sunday, but they were close. The pope didn’t come to the door. Apparently, I didn’t even rate a parish priest. A chubby, rather pleasant-faced black woman in her forties in a nurse’s get-up came to the door instead.
“How can I help you?” Her voice lilted with the song of Haiti.
“Mrs. Barrows-Willingham, please.”
