Vanished - A Mystery (Dixon & Baudin Book 1) (14 page)

28

Dixon waved to someone on the street who waved to him as he drove past. He wasn’t sure who the man was, but he didn’t want to be rude. He thought for a moment that the guy might be crazy, but it didn’t matter. He missed the days when everyone said hello to strangers on the street.

He parked at the grocery mart near his home and went in. It wasn’t one of the large grocery chains, but it had enough. Dixon grabbed some beer as he knew he was out and some flowers on the way to the register.

When he was back in his car, he laid the flowers on the passenger seat and wondered whether Hillary would really like them or if she would just pretend to like them. She had a tendency to spare his feelings in all things, and he knew there were gifts he’d given her that she hated but never said anything about.

He drove home with the windows down and parked in the driveway. As he was getting out, Chris was coming from across the street, a smile on his face. In his hand was a leash, and on the end of that leash was one of the ugliest dogs Dixon had ever seen.

“Holy shit,” Dixon said.

“I think it’s a dog,” Chris said playfully. “Picked it up from the pound yesterday. Just needed a little company.”

Dixon bent down and rubbed the dog’s head. “Well, I’m sure he’s got a sweet spirit.”

Chris shrugged. “Someone else to talk to.”

“If you’re lookin’ to hook up, Hillary has this friend who just went through a divorce. Blonde, skinny, an accountant… If I weren’t married—”

“You sold me at blonde.”

Dixon grinned. “You’ll like her.”

“Mind if we make it a double date? I’m a little awkward on first dates.”

“Don’t see why not.” Dixon reached into his backseat and pulled out some files before getting the flowers.

“Those cases you working?”

“Yup.”

“I always wanted to be a cop,” Chris said. “Just never had the stomach for it. Too scared of getting shot or something.”

“Yeah, there’s that. But you put it outta your mind most of the time. Sometimes you can’t help it, but officer deaths are rare. Especially here.” He paused, thinking of his last partner, and then reached for his suit coat.

“I bet. That’s one of the reasons I chose to live here—how safe it is.” He hesitated. “Hillary like it here?”

“Yeah, I think she does. She’s more big-city-folk than me, but I think she generally likes it.”

“Huh. Her family here?”

“No, they live in Kansas City. Like I said, big city folk. She came out here for college and just never went back. Probably ’cause we got married.”

Chris smiled. “Well, I’m sure it was worth it.”

Something in the way he said it made Dixon think that he didn’t think it was worth it. Almost as though he were mocking him somehow, though Dixon couldn’t see how that was an insult.

“Yeah,” Dixon said. “I better head in. You have yourself a good one.”

“Will do.”

The house was cool as Dixon entered. He hated wasting money on air conditioning, so he turned it off and opened a few windows, tossing the files on the couch. He left the flowers on the coffee table where he knew she would see them.

“Hil?” he shouted.

“In the backyard.”

He headed that way and saw her lounging in a deck chair in her bathing suit. The baby was in a covered bassinet next to her. Dixon leaned against the wall and watched her. Her skin wasn’t as tight as it had been when she was younger, but it was still toned and turning a caramel color from constant tanning. She had little body fat, and her abdominal muscles showed. A vein running down her shoulder was visible because of how lean she was, and—Dixon’s favorite—another ran down her stomach and disappeared below her bathing suit.

He walked over and kissed her and attempted to put his tongue in her mouth. She giggled and pushed him away.

“Let’s do it out here,” he said.

“The neighbors will see.”

“Let ’em watch. Old Mrs. Dodd needs to see some sexing.”

She giggled as he bit her neck and ran kisses down to her shoulder. “Stop, stop. I’m embarrassed. But maybe tonight you’ll get a treat. If you’re a good boy.”

Dixon pulled away, an erection pressing against his pants. “Well, a cold shower for me, then.”

Inside, Dixon went to his son’s bedroom and leaned over the empty crib. Even without him in the room, it still held his scent. This room—having a child’s bedroom, even having a son—was something he never thought he would have. In high school they’d called him Dirty Dixon because of how many girls he’d bedded. It took a woman like Hillary to change him. Before her, he’d pictured himself a lifelong bachelor.

Dixon took another cold shower. He didn’t believe hot water killed germs any more effectively than cold, but it did cost money to heat.

When he was through, he came out wearing sweats and toweling off his head. He began going through a stack of bills on the kitchen counter.

“Hey, hon?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the name of your friend who just went through the divorce?”

“Tiffany.”

“We need to set up a double date with her.”

“For Ethan?”

Dixon grimaced. The thought of setting Baudin up with one of her friends was repellant for some reason, as if Dixon would be revealing some secret to a stranger. Though maybe meeting a good woman was exactly what Baudin needed to quit being so damn weird. “No, not for Ethan. For Chris across the street. He bought the nastiest-looking dog I’ve ever seen ’cause he’s lonely.”

An envelope addressed to him had no return address. He opened it and found an advertisement for a new car.

“You hear me, hon?”

“I did. I don’t think they’d get along.”

“He’s not bad looking.”

“She likes manly men. He’s kind of feminine.”

“Well, you’re right there, but I already told him we’d do it. Set it up for Friday, would you?”

“I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Dixon threw the last of the envelopes back on the counter and regretted going through them. Reading bills was the quickest way to put him in a sour mood. He trudged over to the couch and collapsed onto it, staring at the ceiling fan. “Why you fightin’ me so hard on this?”

“I just don’t think they’d be a good fit. And she’s a friend—I don’t want to set her up on a bad date.”

“So we’ll go have dinner, and if she hates his guts, we’ll call it a night. No biggie.”

“If you say so.”

As Dixon closed his eyes and began drifting off to sleep, he thought about Hillary’s friend and Chris. Hillary was right; he was feminine. And Tiffany’s last husband had been an avid hunter and ex-rugby player. Chris had once told him that his favorite sport was volleyball.

Still, Dixon felt sorry for the guy. He was alone and didn’t have a woman like Hillary to come home to every day. If he could, he would find someone for Chris.

29

Ethan Baudin was nearly out the door to find Heather when she called and asked if she could stay and have dinner at Gina’s house. They were having spaghetti, and her mom, whose name was Keri, he learned, had specifically asked for him to join them.

“Maybe later,” he said. “I have something to do tonight.”

“Dad, don’t be a douchebag. She invited you.”

He sighed. “All right. Dinner, and then I gotta go.”

Baudin went to a back closet. Inside was a large trunk. He took out his keys and unlocked it. It took some rummaging, but he found what he was looking for: a black nylon mask, a canvas bag, and a 9mm Smith & Wesson without a serial number, along with latex gloves.

He changed into black pants and a black T-shirt before putting the mask, gun, and gloves in the canvas bag and heading out.

Gina’s house was in a more upscale neighborhood, and a BMW—not the car she’d been driving earlier—was parked in the driveway. Baudin parked at the curb and got out. Poor neighborhoods were all unique in their own ways, but rich ones were all the same. The quiet was what he always noticed; a deep quiet that never existed in a poor neighborhood. He smoked a cigarette by his car, enjoying the silence before going inside.

Keri had showered and changed, putting on fresh makeup and tight jeans with boots that came up to mid-calf. Gina, Heather, and another girl their age were seated at the table.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Keri said.

He sat at the head of the table. All the family photos on the walls and on top of the shelves had one thing in common: no man.

“You didn’t have trouble finding the place, did you?”

“No, I just did a GPS search.”

The girls dug in and began eating. Keri slapped Gina’s hand and said, “We say grace in this house.”

Everyone bowed their heads, so Baudin did the same as a courtesy, though he didn’t close his eyes. Keri said a quick prayer thanking the Lord for the food and asking that he bless it so it would nourish and strengthen their bodies. When the prayer was done, the girls dug in again and began laughing and joking among themselves.

“So Heather told me you guys moved out here just a few weeks ago,” Keri said, spooning out spaghetti sauce from a white dish. She poured it over a plate of spaghetti and passed it to him.

“Yeah, we moved from Los Angeles. Change of scenery, I guess.”

“Well, this must be quite a change of scenery. Most people I think move to northern California when they want something different from LA.”

“I don’t know. I wanted somewhere quiet. San Francisco’s just as loud. What about you?”

“We’re from Seattle originally. We moved out here for my ex-husband’s work. And of course that didn’t turn out so well.”

“What happened?”

“We were always kinda drifting apart. I think we both knew the inevitable was coming. So he decided to get started early and began sleeping with a girl who worked at a tanning salon in town. I found out when I ran into them at lunch and saw them holding hands.”

“Men’s appetites control them, not the other way around.”

She snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re making excuses for him, too. Gina does that all day, Daddy this and Daddy that.”

“I’m not making excuses. We all have a choice in what we do. But I think maybe women don’t understand how powerful the sex drive is in a man. We’re designed to breed with as many women as possible at all times. Then comes civilization, and societal norms don’t allow that. We have to repress our most basic urges. That’s why there’s so much violence in society. We’re all sexually frustrated adolescents that gotta get it out somehow.”

A long silence followed, and Baudin knew he’d offended her somehow. Social situations weren’t his finest moments.

“What about you?” she finally said.

“Me included. Although sex has never had the appeal for me that it does for most men.”

“Why’s that?”

He tasted the spaghetti. It was good. The noodles were perfectly
al dente
, and the
sauce had a spicy sausage flavor. “I don’t know. Maybe I just always thought it saps you of your strength. Some research suggests that excessive sex actually lowers IQ, in males.”

“Hm. I could see it.” She twirled some spaghetti on her fork and took a bite before delicately wiping her mouth with a napkin.

Baudin desperately wanted to change the subject and knew he’d talked too much about it, but he couldn’t think of what else to say.

“It must be hard raising a daughter as a single mom.”

“I guess I could say the same thing for a single dad.”

“Sometimes I don’t know the difference between a girl and a woman. I don’t know how to guide her in that transition.”

She reached out and gently set her hand on his. “Well, if you ever need advice, I’m here.”

They ate for a solid hour and talked. Despite his initial reluctance, Baudin actually had a good time. Speaking with someone who wasn’t his daughter and wasn’t a cop or a CI was rare for him. It was refreshing to talk about the mundane and meaningless.

He left later in the evening after Heather convinced him that she should be allowed to sleep over. Keri told him he could come over any time he had questions or wanted a home-cooked meal. He said he would, and got into his car.

Laramie was only about forty-five minutes from Cheyenne. When Baudin arrived at the University of Wyoming campus, he was taken back to his own college days. He had been studying history and was on track to enter graduate school when he tried his experiment with the police department. Policeman would have been last on his list of possible careers, and yet here he was, working a case in the middle of the night.

“Frat row” was on an incline, near the top of the hill. He found Sigma Mu and drove past. He found a parking lot up the block and left his car in a stall in a dark corner. He got out and brought along his canvas bag. He had fully planned on breaking into the car of the man Dazzle had seen, if he could find it. But now he didn’t have the urge. He would find the car and, if possible, see if the man he was looking for was a current member of the frat. Still, he brought along his bag just in case.

Across from the Sigma Mu house, a thicket of trees stood like giants looking down over the house. Baudin simply stopped between them and sat down, making it nearly impossible for someone on the street to see him unless they were specifically looking for him.

There was a lot of activity in the house: people playing pool, some drinking in the front room, others upstairs in the bedrooms or watching television. He had stared long enough at the composite drawing the sketch artist had made that he could recognize anyone even resembling the man in the drawing. But no one he could see through the windows resembled the drawing. He wished there was a way for him to actually get inside the frat.

As he watched a couple of the boys playing pool and several more standing around and watching, he caught a look at a wall in the kitchen. The wall was painted red and appeared to be covered with photos.

Baudin debated what to do. He could go in with his badge, but he had no doubt a call to both campus police and the dean would be placed. Not long after that, a lawyer would be asking him if he had a warrant. After that, if the man he was looking for really was in there, his guard would be up. He’d be more careful, more selective.

Baudin opened the canvas sack and took out the gloves and the mask. He slipped them on and slung the bag’s strap around his head and one shoulder. Looking down both sides of the street, he dashed across and to the back of the Sigma Mu house.

The backyard was enormous, with unlit tiki torches spaced every five feet or so. The fence gate was open, and he just slipped inside. Ducking low, he made his way cautiously to the back door. The canvas bag had a lockpick kit in one of the pockets, but he hoped the door would just be open. He tried the knob, but it was locked.

The lockpick kit was something he’d confiscated from a man who’d described himself as a professional burglar. More advanced than anything someone could buy on the market, the man had designed and created it himself. He’d told Baudin that a person could open over 99% of the world’s locks with it.

Baudin inserted a long thin piece, almost like an Allen key, into the lock, and then slid what appeared to be a pin on top of it. With a few turns and tugs, the lock was open. He slipped inside the frat house.

The smell was something he remembered well: young men. Whenever young men lived together, the house always had a certain smell. Musky, almost as if the place had been coated with sweat and allowed to dry.

The kitchen was empty. Baudin, crouching in a duck walk, headed straight to the wall of photos. Most were of drunken parties, girls that had come through the frat, and photos of the members at sporting events or concerts. Up in the corner were at least twenty photos of each year’s members in front of the house, almost like a school picture. Baudin counted them as he took them all down and shoved them in his sack.

“Hey! What the fuck?”

He looked back to see a young man standing at the kitchen entrance with a beer in his hand. Without a word, Baudin dashed out the back door.

“Hey!”

Sprinting out the fence gate, he heard the stomp of shoes as the men poured out of the house. They were coming out of the front door by the time he got to the sidewalk, and one of them got in front of him. Baudin ducked low, drawing the man’s attention there, and came up with a hook that slammed into the man’s jaw, sending him reeling back.

He ran the opposite direction of his car. Men shouted behind him, and car engines were turning. At the bottom of the hill he sprinted through the tennis courts and out the other side into a small park with playground equipment. As fast as he could, his heart pounding in his ears, he jumped inside a large cement tube that was coated with rubber on the bottom: something for children to crawl through.

He lay still, the pack still clamoring for him. He debated getting out the gun but knew even threatening these young men with it was too much. They’d done nothing to deserve that. He would wait in here and hope they passed.

Footfalls grew louder and then quieter as the men ran past the playground. He waited a long time, so long that his heart had calmed. Poking his head out of the tube, he saw no one. Another street near the playground seemed to head up, right past frat row but a block over. He ran for the street, and as he crossed an intersection he saw red-and-blues turning up frat row.

The upscale neighborhood right next to the frat houses was all large homes and well maintained. The easiest way to tell if a neighborhood was affluent was the amount of debris. The rich tended not to have debris in their neighborhoods.

The streets were clean and the lawns manicured. It was quiet, and he stopped for a second and just watched the homes. Through a window he saw a family gathered in the front room. Two children, a mother, and a father. Baudin watched them a long time, feeling as though he’d swallowed lead in his gut, and then hurried up to his car. There was no one in the parking lot, and he stripped off the mask and gloves and threw them in a trashcan at the front of the lot. He started the car and pulled away.

He turned up the hill rather than going back past frat row and soon had looped around and found the interstate again. He reached his hand into the sack and felt the photos. Somewhere in one of them was the man he was looking for, the man who had tortured Alli Tavor to death, and probably several others.

He grinned and pressed the accelerator down.