Forgive Me (24 page)

Angie waited at the kitchen table while Carolyn got the vodka from behind the cereal.
Who was she hiding it from?
Angie wondered.
Herself?

Carolyn poured a shot of vodka into a chilled glass she got from the freezer, downed it, and then poured another. “What now?”

“Now we try to get her out of there. Safely.”

“Can’t she just leave?”

“It’s not that easy. Your daughter is very scared.”

“Who has her?”

“We think it’s a Russian named Ivan Markovich. We don’t know the other men involved. We’re working on getting IDs. These are very bad people, Carolyn, I’m not going to lie to you. Your daughter is in danger.”

“Then call the damn police and get her out of there.” Carolyn’s jaw tightened as her eyes turned fierce.

“We already did. My associate Mike has gone to the Baltimore PD and filed a report.”

“And there’s been no action taken?”

“No.”

“Well, why not?”

“Hard to say. These things happen. They did send a cruiser by the apartment, but that’s it. Nobody is storming the castle. It could be that the police have used the service, if you know what I mean, and some detective with the Baltimore PD has an incentive to do nothing.”

Carolyn’s disgusted face said it all. Angie didn’t tell her about the runaway named Elise and the standoff and how that police action turned out. In a way, Angie was glad no action had been taken.

“Look, I know this hard to hear. I do. But Mike gave the woman a phone to give to Nadine. There’s a chance we can coax her out of there, and that’s what we’re going to try and do.”

“But they’re going to hurt her.”

“I don’t think so. They want your daughter healthy so she can . . . can . . . work for them.”
Work for them.
Angie grimaced at her turn of phrase. What else was she supposed to say? The truth, she supposed, but Carolyn was smart enough to figure out the euphemism all on her own.

“Can you get her out?” Carolyn’s hands were trembling, and the third shot of vodka didn’t quiet the shakes.

“She’s probably rooted. I want to give her some time to think her options over. We believe she has a phone now, and my card.”

“Let me call her or text even.” Carolyn sounded desperate, but Angie was going to hold firm.

“We’re waiting for her to make the first contact.”

“Why?”

“Because we can’t be certain who has the phone. It could be the woman we gave it to, or Nadine, or someone else. What we don’t want is for Nadine to be linked to the phone. It could be dangerous for her. Best to wait and see if she makes first contact. I’m counting on it that she will. We’re going back on stakeout. When she wants out, we’ll be ready to receive her. Meanwhile, we’ll keep putting pressure on the police.”

Carolyn stood, but her legs wouldn’t hold her. She knelt and put her head in Angie’s lap. Her sobs came in waves, her body convulsed in sputters.

Angie stiffened at first. Her job was to hunt, to find, to retrieve. She was a task-oriented person, goal-driven, and so she froze, unsure exactly how to comfort Carolyn in her time of grief. Then, very gingerly at first, but soon with more confidence, Angie stroked the back of Carolyn’s head and shushed her the way her mother had consoled her.

“Promise me you’ll bring her home,” Carolyn said, her voice cracking.

Angie knew better. So much could go wrong, so many terrible things could happen. Of course she knew better. “I promise,” she said, smoothing the back of Carolyn’s head. “I promise.”

Raynor Sinclair had followed Angie all the way from Arlington to Potomac and that amused him. Wasn’t she the purported expert at tailing someone? And he was tracking Angie in plain sight, never once rousing her suspicion. She made a pit stop at her apartment before journeying to Maryland, but the detour wasn’t to evade him. She had gone upstairs and came down minutes later, taking enough time to water a plant and check the mail, he supposed. There were dozens of ways Angie could have lost him if she had wanted to, but she took no counter measures.

Highway driving made it especially easy to spot him in his Acura SUV. All Angie had to do was change speed—say, drop her speed from seventy-five miles per hour down to sixty. If she still saw his car in her rearview mirror, it would be cause for concern. With little traffic on the roads at that time of morning, he was relatively easy to spot, but she was clueless. She was focused on all the wrong things.

Good for him, bad for her.

Angie left the highway. Raynor did the same, following at a safe distance as she drove along leafy streets dotted with fine-looking homes, all with well-tended lawns.

They reminded him of his childhood home in Madison, Wisconsin. More specifically, the lawns reminded him of his father, now long dead, the man who had taught him how to grow grass and the proper way to cut it. No grass grew where Raynor lived now, a two-bedroom luxury apartment in DC that boasted of being a big city sanctuary in the middle of everywhere.

His father had taught Raynor many things, including how to hunt. Raynor might have shunned grass for a concrete landscape, but he still loved to hunt, and tracking Angie counted as sport.

A hundred or so yards up ahead, she pulled to a stop. Raynor pulled over as well. From his car, he watched her ascend a flight of stairs to the wide front porch of a colonial home. A woman came to the door and Angie went inside. No other cars were parked curbside, so he decided to drive around the block. A check of the address told him it was Carolyn Jessup’s residence. Angie’s business there was perfectly justified.

He had a good idea where she’d be headed next. With only one way to get there from where he was, Raynor drove off and found parking where he could wait without being conspicuous. Eventually, he would affix a GPS tracker to the undercarriage of Angie’s car so he could watch her all the time. The technology, though, didn’t feel like sport. It felt like cheating.

Sport. Hunting.
Raynor again thought of his father, Truman Sinclair, a stoic disciplinarian who’d corralled four sons with lies about needing only the Bible, when what he really used was his belt. Of the four brothers, Raynor, who was the youngest, was also the best hunter. He could innately judge his quarry’s pace. As Wayne Gretzky famously said of the hockey puck, Raynor went not to where the animal was, but to where the animal was going to be. He could spot blood on a trail as if he possessed a hound’s nose for the scent.

A memory came to him—the blur of a grouse carving through thickets.

It was a difficult shot, one Raynor’s brothers and his highly skilled father would have passed on. But Raynor thought he could hit the bird, even though his backside hurt from the belt beating he’d taken the day before. Only fourteen years old, and somehow he could block out his excruciating pain to get a lock on his target.

Raynor and his father were grouse hunting by themselves.

“Quality time,” his dad called it as he tightened the laces of his boots. The hunt was Truman Sinclair’s way of apologizing for the thrashing he had given his son over a stack of video games Raynor stole from the home of a neighborhood kid.

He had been at the boy’s home the day of the theft, so it wasn’t a stretch when suspicion fell on him. Parents exchanged phone calls, and upon returning home from his job at the insurance company, Truman Sinclair went on a hunting expedition of a different sort. In no time, he found the missing items in a shoebox stashed underneath Raynor’s bed. Confronted with the evidence, Raynor had no choice but to confess. Punishment was meted out swiftly and without mercy. The belt, oh the damned belt.

Tears clung to Rainer’s eyes as his father drove him to the neighbor boy’s home to return the stolen items. The pain from the welts on his backside paled when compared to the agony of his humiliation. While the boy stood in the doorway of his ranch home looking smug, the mother stood behind her son as triumphant as a queen rejoicing over her enemy’s head on a spike.

She wasn’t rejoicing the day Raynor shoved a stick through the spokes of her beloved son’s bicycle wheel as he barreled down Ridge Road. The bike stopped rolling, but the boy kept going—right over the handlebars and onto the unforgiving pavement, where he landed with a crunch. The boy suffered a cracked skull, broken leg, and a raft of internal injuries. Police never did find out who shoved a branch through the bicycle wheel. That was because while the boy lay on the ground, bleeding from the ears, Raynor set the heel of his boot on the boy’s throat and swore he’d kill him if he ever told.

The kid spent two weeks in a hospital recovering. He was really never quite the same. Popular and preppy before, Smash Mouth (that’s what Raynor called him) turned moody and withdrawn. At a class reunion years later, Raynor heard that Smash Mouth, then in his twenties, had overdosed on painkillers while living in his parents’ basement.

But all that happened after the hunt; after the grouse burst from the thicket, its wings flapping wildly for flight; after Raynor pulled the trigger and peppered the bird’s meaty chest with shot; after the bird went into a hapless tailspin before gravity did its job; after his father burst from their hiding place to confirm the kill. Raynor watched his father trudge through the dense grasses with a look of joy bordering on reverence.

How can he be smiling?
Raynor thought.

Raynor’s bottom bled into his underwear a full day after his beating. He had to squat to take a crap, and would have to do so for at least a week. The worst part of all was that he would get another thrashing, probably sometime soon, over something just as stupid as those video games.

Truman picked up the bird and held it up for Raynor to see. A broad smile cut his face.

But Raynor wasn’t smiling. He was back on his bed, his pants down to his ankles, his teeth clenched together, waiting with dreaded anticipation for the next blow from his daddy’s leather whip.

Everything went black.

But it couldn’t have been all black, or he’d have missed his target. He remembered the tension against his finger as he pulled the trigger. He remembered the crack and an echo like a peal of thunder. He remembered seeing his father’s neck explode, blood spewing from several holes as if pumped through a strainer, a confused look replacing the beam of pride.

Gravity took his father down, same as it did that dead bird. Eventually the police came. Raynor refused to leave his father’s side. He was sputtering and crying, all very real because he was deeply upset. He loved his father, but hated what his father did to him. None of that ever came up during the investigation. He never spoke a word of the abuse. His brothers never suspected their own kin capable of murder, or they didn’t share the theory if they did.

Truman Sinclair’s death was later ruled a tragic hunting accident.

Raynor’s punishment was the guilt he would carry for the remainder of his days. It hurt a lot less than the belt, though he accepted that he did miss his father, strange as that was to admit. He hunted as a reminder of the better times. Hunting in Virginia was damn good sport, with big game like elk, bear, and deer to bag and plenty of birds to shoot.

Raynor wasn’t so lost in thought that he failed to notice Angie drive past his car. He waited a few beats before pulling out into traffic behind her. He could bag all the elk he wanted, but nothing exhilarated him quite like hunting people.

CHAPTER 31

“B
ack at it” meant Angie was back in her car—the Taurus with a bullet hole in the rear—and Mike was in his—the little red Corolla. Angie would submit the repair bill to Greg Jessup, along with the charges for Mike’s hotel room and a host of other expenses they’d racked up on this case. Angie also was back to having aching legs, a stiff back, and a bloated belly, this time from the stale bagel she ate because she couldn’t find a decent meal in the neighborhood.

They were down the street from the brothel, or the
alleged
brothel as the Baltimore PD seemed to think of it. The response (or lack thereof) infuriated Angie, who put aside her fears about Elise and another murder-suicide bloodbath. She wanted more engagement from law enforcement, though it went without saying she wanted a different outcome.

She’d brought two-way radios so she and Mike could communicate without using up cell phone minutes.

“Just charge Papa Greg for the overage,” Mike suggested.

“I’ll handle the billing and you talk to me on the radio from now on,” Angie replied, not curt, but leaving no room for negotiation.

Mike covered one side of the busy two-way road. Angie, who was parked about a hundred yards away from him, covered the other. It was relatively easy to maintain a proper stakeout in the daylight, under the cover of heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic. With temporary tinting to her windows, she didn’t worry about Casper and Buggy spotting her.

Even so, she had no intention of being in this for the long haul. She wanted Nadine to call. Every minute, it seemed, she was picking up her phone, glancing at the display, cradling it in her hand, waiting for the vibration of text, the chime of her ringtone.

The phone finally rang, but it was her father. She went through a health check with him. He assured her he was doing just fine. She believed him enough, and told him she was back in Baltimore. Her dad sounded more worried about her than she did about him. But he was used to her job and the dangers it brought, and he accepted those dangers with the expected degree of reluctance.

What her father couldn’t do was offer an explanation about the check registers Angie had discovered in the attic. “Your mother had a lot of causes she supported,” her dad said.

“Yeah, but the MCEDC isn’t one she ever talked about, and it just so happens they provide care for the same condition our Jane Doe has.”

“Maybe your mom felt obligated to the girl somehow.”