Doom with a View (29 page)

“The structure they’re hidden in is large, but the specific area of that structure where they are located is at least one level belowground. There are no windows that I can sense and no other persons present, which is unusual for such a large structure, so I would venture to say that this might be some sort of abandoned building. There is also lots of seating in the particular room where Leslie and Michael are. It might be an old theater or small stadium of some kind. But the truly curious thing is that I smell a lot of antiseptic, and the only thing I can equate that to is a hospital.”

I paused to look around the room. Every face staring back wore the same confused look. “I know it sounds odd,” I said to them. “But these are the physical clues that I’m able to pick up on. They describe a structure’s characteristics, not necessarily what that structure is utilized for.”

“So, we’re looking for a small stadiumlike theater-slash-hospital that’s partially underground?” asked one agent.

I gulped. “Something like that,” I said.

“Abs,” Dutch said. “Could it be that the place used to be a hospital and was converted into a theater?”

I let go a big breath and said, “Yes! It absolutely could be that. Which would explain the ghosts too.”

“What ghosts?” Candice asked.

“The place is totally haunted,” I said. “Lots of grounded energies who are super agitated. And the general atmosphere there is just god-awful! There’s this unsettling quality about it, like lots of terrible things happened there over a long period of time. It’s no wonder, then, that it’s haunted.”

And that’s when I knew I’d said a little too much because every face in the room save Dutch’s and Candice’s turned incredulous, then comical.“
Ghosts?
” said Agent Blass from across the room. “Sir,” he added, looking at Harrison as if he had to be kidding, “is this bullshit for
real
?”

Harrison didn’t have time to answer because Candice came immediately to my defense. “Instead of questioning whether Abby is for real, Agent Blass, I would suggest that you remember that the information she supplied earlier led you
directly
to Kyle Newhouse when this task force had no leads and had made no progress in locating him for
months
!”

There was a small eruption of noise as Blass took offense and some of his buddies, including Agent Albright, came to his defense, and both Dutch and Candice spat a few more defensive remarks at them until Harrison stood up abruptly and everything got quiet.

“Thank you, Ms. Cooper,” he said quietly. “We will take your information under advisement.”

“Sure, you will,” muttered Candice, and Harrison’s eyes narrowed at her.

“Agent Rivers,” Harrison said next. “Please escort these two to the airport. I’ve booked them on the six a.m. shuttle back to Detroit.”

“I’ve got a car in town,” Candice growled. I knew she didn’t like it when Harrison played travel agent.

“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.