Chapter 6
Six days later—Thursday, May 15
I walked into Vincent Plum Bail Bonds on Thursday afternoon. I hadn't been here in two weeks, since the day before Stephanie's disappearance. Tank had been picking up RangeMan's files.
Connie and Lula froze when I walked in, two pairs of eyes burning holes in me, accusing me of being mortal. Batman would have found Stephanie by now.
Their expressions pierced me more than I would have thought possible, but I mustered my inner resources to keep my face blank. "Is he in?" I asked, indicating Vinnie's office.
Connie nodded wordlessly and gestured toward the door.
Vinnie was sitting behind his desk, and he closed his laptop computer as I entered, slapping on his sleazy smile. "What can I do for you today, Ranger?"
I gave him a hard stare, watching the smile dissolve and be replaced by fear. After a long minute I spoke. "I heard you're trying to replace Stephanie."
He looked apprehensive, but spoke up. "I can't wait forever for her to come back. I'm running a business here, and if I don't have anyone bringing in the FTAs I won't stay in business for long."
"RangeMan will pick up her skips until she gets back," I told him in my most authoritative voice.
"Okay, then. Good. I'll take care of everything."
I turned without a word and walked back out to my truck, nodding slightly to Connie and Lula as I passed them. The truth was, I couldn't have spoken if I wanted to. My whole consciousness was concentrated on maintaining a lack of expression, on not screaming, not crying, not collapsing into a blubbering heap on the ground.
I still hadn't been able to eat or sleep, and after almost two weeks it was showing, badly. My mirror reflected eyes red rimmed and ringed with the same dark circles as Morelli's. I hadn't shaved in days, and I had to tighten my belt an extra notch because of the weight I'd lost.
But I maintained control, both in the presence of other people and when I was alone.
oOo
"We've got something," Lester said to me when I got back to the office.
My heart jerked painfully in my chest, but I kept a neutral tone. "What?"
"One of the businesses that refused to give us its surveillance video complied with Morelli's warrant. We've got pictures of the truck."
I followed Lester into the conference room, my heart thumping. Maybe this was the break we needed to find Stephanie. The whole team was gathered there, including Morelli.
The video showed the moving truck driving by. There was a clear view of the front and passenger side as it came down the street, and Vince had enhanced the pictures to the nth degree to get us the maximum amount of information.
We spent more than an hour looking at the enlarged digital images on an oversized high-res monitor.
The sign on the side of the cab read "Harry's Moving and Storage." It was a white rectangle with red printing, and Ram said he was pretty sure that it was a magnetic sign. That was extremely bad news, because that meant it was most likely temporary. It had probably already been removed and deposited in a roadside trash can, by now emptied into a landfill.
There was no license plate on the front of the truck, another bad break, but there was no spot for one, either. That narrowed down the number of states it could be registered in. Not New Jersey or New York. But it still could be Pennsylvania, Delaware, or seventeen other states that don't require front plates on commercial vehicles, according to Ram's research.
That was all the information we could discern from the pictures. There appeared to be a small inspection sticker in the driver's side lower corner of the windshield, but that was pretty common. The quality of the video wasn't good enough to actually read the sticker, no matter how hard Vince tried to enhance it. But its placement might rule out a few states that required more than one sticker or permit, or those that put them on the passenger side.
There were no registration or vehicle numbers painted on the side of the truck, and the two figures inside were just dim silhouettes.
After all the hope that had built up in me at the first mention of the video, the letdown was tremendous. I felt like my head was going to split in half, and I headed for the gym to try to work off some of my fear and nervous energy.
Stephanie had been gone thirteen days.
oOo
The next morning—Friday, May 16
I woke up in my bed, groggy. I had a splitting headache and no memory of anything beyond pulling on a pair of exercise shorts in the locker room. My hands were swollen, the knuckles bruised and scraped.
Bobby appeared in the doorway as I was swinging my legs over the side of the bed to get up.
"I'm sorry, boss, but Tank, Lester and I agreed it was our only option."
I realized there was an IV in the hollow of my elbow and I began pulling at the tape that held it in place.
"Carlos." Bobby's voice stopped me cold. He almost never called me that, except when I was injured and in the hospital.
"Let me do that." With rapid efficiency he removed the IV and pressed a sterile gauze pad over the puncture. "Hold this for a minute, and I'll get you some ibuprofen."
I applied pressure to the spot to stop the bleeding and Bobby was back in a minute with a bottle of ibuprofen and a glass of water. He slapped a piece of tape tightly over the folded gauze pad and then handed me four caplets and the water.
"How long was I out?" I asked after swallowing the pills.
"Twelve hours. It's Friday morning, 0700."
"What did you give me?"
"Benzodiazepine. You almost killed yourself in the gym."
That's right. I remembered going to the big bag and punching out all my fear and pain, imagining it was the guy who took Stephanie.
"How'd you do it?"
"You pounded on the bag for over two hours and then just collapsed. You were dehydrated and twitching, and I was afraid you were going to have a convulsion. So I put in the IV for fluids and Tank and Lester helped me bring you up here. When you started to wake up I dosed you."
"I oughta fire all three of you," I said, standing up and walking into the bathroom.
When I came out fully dressed after showering and shaving, Bobby was waiting in the kitchen. There was a fresh pot of coffee and a breakfast tray containing scrambled eggs, toast, fruit, and a large glass of milk.
Bobby waved a hand at the tray. "If you eat that I'll let you go back to work. If not, I'll stun your ass and hook you up to the IV again."
I sat on a stool at the breakfast bar and ate the whole thing.
oOo
Chapter 7
I was feeling somewhat better. After the twelve hours of drug-induced sleep and a good breakfast I was much less on edge. The nausea I'd lived with for two weeks was barely noticeable.
At 0900 we had another meeting of the "Bombshell Team," as the guys had begun calling it. We were all out of leads, and the only thing left to do was to continue to work the streets and pray we could turn up someone that knew something.
I'd spent considerable time reviewing my past and making a list of anyone who might hate me enough to want to hurt someone I loved, and I'd asked Morelli to do the same. Morelli's list consisted of everyone he'd ever put behind bars, and he had Eddie Gazarra and Carl Costanza checking on its occupants in their spare time. They were still working on it, but I wasn't optimistic that it was going to lead us anywhere.
My own list was another story. There were over a hundred names I could come up with off the top of my head, and most of them were the worst of the worst. And since so much of the information was classified, only Tank, Lester or Bobby had sufficient clearance to access it. They were doing the best they could trying to track people down, but a lot of them were in other countries, on other continents, harder to track, and some had apparently disappeared from the face of the earth.
I had a few enemies from operations that were so highly classified that even my three lieutenants didn't have high enough clearance. These I was checking myself.
We had a disheartening meeting, with nobody having anything new to report, just more and more dead ends.
Afterward Morelli said to me, "Can I talk to you for a minute? Privately?"
"This way," I said, leading him into my office.
We settled into our respective chairs and I waited silently.
He cleared his throat. "I don't know quite how to say this," he began, but then stopped.
"Just say it," I growled. I wanted him out of my office so I could spend a couple hours on paperwork before hitting the streets again.
He cleared his throat a second time. "I think we should cut back on our meetings. We're running out of avenues to investigate, and I can't take many more days like today."
I was so furious that it was an enormous struggle to keep my jaw from clenching and to maintain a neutral tone. "If you want to give up on the investigation, just say so and I'll remove you from the team."
"No, no, that's not it at all. I don't want to give up. I just think we should slow the pace a bit. It's been two weeks, and we've found nothing at all. We've done everything I can think of and more, and we're no further along than we were the day it happened."
He sighed and slumped back in his chair. "And quite honestly, I don't think I can deal with any more dead ends. I need to step away and try to put my own life back in order."
"What do you mean?" I asked, my voice very soft.
"My captain is all over my ass because I've spent so much time the past two weeks on what he considers an unofficial investigation. If I don't get back to doing my regular job fulltime he's going to give me an official reprimand, or even possibly can me."
"You're one of the best investigators on the force. There's no way they're going to fire you."
"Well, I hope not, but I need to step back for a time. If you turn up any real evidence that Steph was abducted and didn't just take off on her own, I'll convince them to let me come back on it, but for right now I think I'm finished."
"Fine," I said, keeping my anger locked inside and my face expressionless.
He rose and walked to the door, pausing to look back just before stepping through. "If you come up with any new leads call me."
I gave him a miniscule nod and he walked out, closing the door behind him. I counted to ten slowly, my fists clenched in fury, and then willed myself to relax my jaw and release my white-knuckled grip.
Acid was bubbling up in my stomach and the tension was making my chest hurt. I closed my eyes and began my relaxation technique, a procedure that had gotten me through many a tight situation in the past. I cleared my mind and concentrated on relaxing my muscles one at a time.
The process reduced the strain in my body and even eased my mind a little bit. We didn't really need Morelli, and if something turned up that required police department power I could always bring him back in.
I shuffled papers for a couple of hours and was considering grabbing a quick bite of lunch before hitting the streets when Binkie knocked on my door. At my gruff "come in" he handed me a stack of mail and quickly retreated, closing the door behind him.
I set the pile on the recently cleared blotter in front of me and desultorily flipped through the envelopes.
As I got near the bottom of the pile there was a plain brown nine-by-twelve envelope, the kind with a metal clasp. The sight of the envelope made my skin prickle and my gut spasm, and I moved the rest of the mail to the side and stared at it.
Trenton postmark. Standard small mailing label, computer printed, with the words "PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL" in all capital letters on the top line. Below was my name, Carlos Manoso, followed by the RangeMan address. It looked the same as the labels that were on the letters to the bonds office and Stephanie's parents. No return address. Regular stamps on the envelope, not one of those metered postage labels.
I needed gloves, but I didn't have any in the office.
Wanting to keep this private until I saw what was in it, I got up from my desk and walked casually out to the storage room. Stuffing a pair of gloves into my pocket I went straight back to my office, closing and locking the door.
Pulling the gloves on I bent the metal clip that was the only thing holding the envelope shut. The glued flap hadn't been moistened, ruling out the possibility of recovering DNA from saliva.
The feeling of dread was growing as I pulled out a single sheet of photographic paper. Photo on one side, bold black printing on the other.
I looked at the picture and read the words, feeling nauseated and lightheaded.
Then I grabbed the trash can and vomited up everything in my stomach.
TBC in Part II—What I've Done