Chastity was sitting at the table in the kitchen, working on the white skirt she’d torn. It was her favorite skirt. It made her butt look great but falling down on the pavement in front of those cops had torn it.
She had her mother’s sewing small kit spread out on the table in front of her. It was the only thing she had from her mother—a small, ornate, golden orb about the size of an apple. It unfolded on the sides, and the small compartments held tiny spools of thread and a few needles, patches, and a thimble.
The rip in her skirt was a simple tear. She wouldn’t need a patch—the heavy white thread, doubled-up, would work fine.
Chastity stabbed the needle through the white fabric, trying to ignore the crying sounds from upstairs. This whole thing was taking longer than it should have, and George’s complete lack of balls wasn’t helping. Chastity knew what she would have done in his situation—kicked some ass until she got her money—but George was simple and apt to get along.
She didn’t care—at least he was taking care of the girls. Chastity didn’t want anything to do with them. She’d told George she didn’t like kids—the look on his face had been precious, like a wounded kitten—but, in truth, she didn’t want the girls to see her face. Chastity was smart enough to know that this “plan” had little chance of coming off without a hitch, and she didn’t want it blowing up in her face.
She looped the thread around, tying it off and cutting it, then rethreaded the needle and started again. Her mom had taught her to double-stitch everything. That, and how to turn her body into a steady flow of cash.
Chastity’s mom had checked out doing what she loved best—staring at a ceiling in some dingy hotel, ignoring the john on top of her. Probably counting the money in her head, over and over as a lethal dose of coke ran through her system.
Of course, Chastity hadn’t been old enough at the time to turn tricks, but that hadn’t kept her mom from teaching her every detail of the trade. And now, when things were tight, Chastity fell back on her God-given, built-in skill set.
Things had been better, lately, with George. Although he was simple, and sometimes impossible to hold a conversation with, he knew where to score and had money and sometimes a car. And he never hit her.
And this setup here at the farmhouse with George’s boss was killer. George grew the pot and prepped it for sale, and she could usually sneak some with no effort. And his boss kept prying eyes away. And Chastity? Well, she got to sit on her ass all day, watching TV, smoking and shooting up. It was the life.
But George had talked so much about California, about heading out west, that Chastity had caught the fever as well. He’d never been, of course. But he’d told her stories about the ocean. He said that the water hissed like snakes as the waves crashed on the sand and went back out to sea. He said that you could look out at the water and know there was nothing for a thousand miles but water and wind and endless waves.
George was an idiot, of course, but sometimes he sounded like a goddamned poet. He was nothing to look at, but when he was in his telling-stories mood, she could listen for days.
Chastity finished up the skirt and held it up to the light. You almost couldn’t tell there had been a tear at all. Money was tight—even with George handing it over all the time—and she didn’t feel like wasting it on a new skirt, so fixing the old one was good. She never could handle money. It seemed to evaporate from her hands, especially when she was high. Or drunk.
She slowly gathered up the items from the table and carefully folded them back into her mother’s ornate sewing kit. It really was beautiful. When closed, it looked like a large golden apple. Chastity had no clue where her mother had gotten it, or how she had managed to hang onto something so beautiful for so long, living the life she had. But Chastity was happy to have it.
Chastity walked to the stairs and went up. The girls were finally sleeping, by the sound of it. The little Mexican one almost never shut up, whining on and on in Spanish, and Chastity had gotten tired of yelling at her. At the top of the stairs, she stopped and listened but didn’t hear anything.
She and George shared one of the four bedrooms, and Chastity went into their room and locked the door behind her. She pulled the drawer open on the tall bureau—all of the furniture was old and had come with the house in the foreclosure—and put the skirt and sewing kit away.
Someone started crying quietly in the next room, but she shook her head and ignored it.
Chastity caught sight of herself in the floor-length mirror on the back of the door. She’d insisted George put one in when she’d moved in. Slowly, she stripped off her clothes, letting them drop to the old brown hardwood floors. She watched in the mirror as she ran a hand down her body, admiring the curves and the flat stomach. The rise of her breasts, as she breathed slowly in and out.
She knew she was beautiful.
The looks she got whenever men were around only confirmed what she already knew—and what her mom had said, over and over. It had started at fourteen—her mom had still been alive and had clucked appreciatively at the catcalls that started to come whenever Chastity was out in public.
“That’s your ticket, honey,” she’d said, one of the last things Chastity remembered her mom saying. “Them boys are gonna pay your way, if you let ‘em.”
Chastity smiled at the memory and dug back into the top drawer, getting out her other kit. She rolled it out on the bed and sat down next to it. Needle, spoon, lighter. A vial of white chunks of crack cocaine. She didn’t know where George got the stuff, and didn’t care. But he could touch her all he wanted, day and night, as long as the stuff kept coming.
She spooned out a chunk and crushed it in the spoon and melted it into a liquid with the lighter, then shot up. The warmth flowed into her, a sharp fire that burned through her veins and skin and hair and right into her soul. Chastity lay back on the bed, enjoying the ride, letting it burn through her. She loved the feel of sheets against her, when she was high. No clothes. They were too rough against her warm, tingling skin.
The sounds of crying, coming from the next room, faded away into the silent inferno that engulfed her.
Frank slowly walked the five blocks to the school, scouring the bushes, sidewalks, and gutters as he went, but he found nothing out of the ordinary.
This case was getting odder by the moment.
First, no one saw the actual snatch. In a town this small, someone had to see something or know something. People talked, and in a town like this, everyone was somebody’s cousin or ex-wife or boss.
And Frank knew that half the town could logically be suspects in the kidnapping case. Nick Martin’s cost-cutting zeal had apparently pissed off a lot of people. But how many of them were angry enough to take a kid and hold them for money? Planning a kidnapping took months of work and a whole other level of zeal. It seemed like a stretch for someone pissed off about getting let go from a job.
And then there was the whole mess with the ransom drop and ensuing getaway. Bad planning and setup of the scene. Horrible perimeter control, allowing the kidnappers to take back streets and alleys to get away. And the electronic trackers, easily found and removed.
Added together, it gave Frank half a mind to suspect Chief King or one of his cops of involvement. But if the Chief were somehow in on it, he’d be an idiot to bring in outside help.
As Frank walked the five blocks up Hyatt, he tried to organize all of the facts in the case in his head. There were a lot of details to track.
Hyatt was a nice street, one of the nicer he’d seen in town. The houses were large and spread out on the west side, closer together on the east. Plenty of houses and doorways and windows.
He got to Broadway and turned. The location where they found the water bottle was thirty feet up on the right. Frank turned to look back at the Martin house. He could clearly see the long driveway, and, from this corner, he could see the crime scene as well. The Chief was right. It was hard to believe no one saw anything.
He wished he had an iPod or some way to listen to music. It helped him think.
Frank started off again, walking slowly up Broadway, looking at the bushes and trees and driveway and houses that lined both sides of the wide street.
He saw Chief King up ahead, waiting for him in front of the school, but Frank did not hurry. After a minute of careful searching, he came to the location of the water bottle, marked with a fading chalk circle in one gutter. Other than the chalk circle, there was nothing to indicate anything had happened here.
“Anything?” the Chief asked, walking over.
Frank shook his head. “There’s a clear line of site from the corner to the Martin house, and a clear line of site from here to the school,” he said, pointing at the massive elementary school, just a hundred yards away.
The Chief nodded.
“Like I said. This case is weird.”
“What?” George asked.
Chastity, bleary eyed and angry, was standing too close behind him, trying to listen in on the call.
The boss was on the other end.
“Look, the other guy is wrapping things up,” the boss was saying. “He’s getting me the money tomorrow, but you have to stay until Saturday, before HarvestFest. Everyone in town will be busy until then. After that, we can wrap this up. I just need another three days. Let things quiet down. Just keep the girls quiet—”
Chastity, behind him, cursed loudly and stormed off.
George nodded, although no one could see him.
“Sure, boss,” George said. “I’ll make sure they’re good, but...um...what about our money? We’re taking the biggest risk, being here with the girls all the time. If the cops come—”
“The cops won’t come,” George’s boss said on the other end of the line, cutting him off. “When was the last time they came, took you to jail, and burned down the crop?”
George thought about it for a second.
“Never?”
“Right,” the man on the other end of the phone answered. There was a loud rumbling in the background. It sounded like he was driving. “Stay put, and your share will go up for the extra days. But you gotta keep that woman on a leash. She sounds ready to bust.”
George agreed and hung up.
Chastity was standing there, exasperated.
“Well?”
“That was the boss,” George said. He thought she knew that.
“No shit. I know it was the boss,” she screeched at him. “Tell me what he said, Puddin’, or I swear to GOD I’m gonna get dressed and leave. I’ll just start walking,” she said, her arms crossed. “It’s not that far into Troy. I’ve walked it, plenty of times, when I ran out of smokes. Someone there will give me a ride to anywhere I want to go, believe me. I just want this whole thing to be over.”
“It almost is over,” he said, smiling at her. “We’re going to get our money, plus extra. The boss said the other guy already paid him, and we’re getting paid Saturday. So we just need to watch them a couple more days—”
“What?”
George put his hands up.
“But I liked your idea,” he said, trying to get her to calm down. “The excellent one where we pack and get ready? I’ll take care of the girls, and Sunday, Sunday we’ll leave. Even if they haven’t come up with the money, we’ll leave.”
Chastity did the math in her head and slowly agreed.
“OK,” Chastity said. “But we should get paid more—”
“We’re gonna, for the extra days. The boss said.”
Chastity nodded and then turned and left the kitchen, heading upstairs. She was completely naked again. George thought she looked tired and out of it. George knew she was high again; she always got high when she was stressed.
The Chief drove them back to the police station.
Frank wasn’t in the mood to talk. The conversation with Nick Martin had not helped, and the wife hadn’t even been there. He really needed to talk to her and asked the Chief to set something up.
“Now what?” King asked, as they walked inside, avoiding the throng of reporters and their questions.
Frank shook his head.
“I’m not sure,” Frank said. “Frankly, I thought I’d go through the files quickly and pick out something you missed. Now, I’m not sure.”
Inside, they went back into the meeting area in the middle of the large central room and joined the others who were waiting for the Chief to return to hold a status update. Frank listened to the other cops go through their reports—Chief King literally went around the table, letting each Sergeant and Detective and beat cop talk about the various aspects of the case they were handling. Frank listened and took notes, but half of his mind was trying to come up with options and angles.
At the end of the meeting, King covered a few more procedural things and assigned a few promising leads to those involved in the case. Detective Barnes also reviewed a few new items that had come up in the investigation, but Frank didn’t think any of them sounded relevant. As the meeting broke up, Chief King invited Frank into his small office.
“So, what do you think?” Chief King said, checking his email while they talked.
Frank sat down heavily. “I don’t know. You guys are working it, covering all the bases and dotting all the ‘i’s’. There wasn’t anything wonky mentioned by anyone at the meeting, and I can’t think of anything you’ve missed.”
Chief King looked at him.
“You sound frustrated.”
“Yeah,” Frank said, nodding. “I guess I was hoping to come in here and wrap things up quickly. Maybe find a clue that you all had missed or something.”
Chief King smiled. “Wanted to school us?”
Frank smiled, looking up at King. “Maybe a little.”
King steepled his hands together, looking like he was almost praying. Ben Stone used to do that, and said once that he liked to do it because he thought it made him look smarter, more studious. Frank wasn’t too sure.
King looked directly at Frank.
“It’s like I said. I’ve been here a long time, and we’ve had strange cases. A few cases we lost because we couldn’t get the evidence cleanly or in time. We mostly get OVIs and domestic violence, but we like to think we can handle these big cases, when they come along. But I’m stumped.”
They sat in silence for a long time—Frank tried to not interrupt silence. It was often a forge for new ideas. People could be tentative with their opinions, and he’d learned to not talk over them.
When it was clear that King was done talking, Frank spoke up.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. He thought about the two boxes of files, a couple of them stained red. “But I am going to go through all the files again tonight. Hopefully, I’ll find something.”
Frank left, avoiding the reporters. They didn’t know who he was, and Frank wanted to keep it that way.
He drove back to the hotel and carried the file boxes into the hotel. He was sweating up the stairs and set the boxes down on the bed. But he didn’t open them; he’d lied to King. He had no intention of going through the files again. He wanted a drink so badly his face was starting to hurt. The walk up Hyatt had been frustrating, and then sitting through that interminable meeting, all he could think about was the bottle of bourbon back in his hotel room.
Once the TV was on and Frank had gotten three good sips of Bourbon in him, things started to calm down. He relaxed into it, feeling the alcohol warm him from the inside out, letting his troubles drift away like smoke.