Vanished - A Mystery (Dixon & Baudin Book 1) (21 page)

47

Jessop emailed Dixon and told him he was suspended with pay for a week. Baudin thought it was because it would look too odd to fire them over just asking the police chief a question related to a homicide.

Hillary was gone for the day, and Dixon hadn’t told her about his suspension. That would be a conversation for tonight when she got home. He’d have today to himself to lounge around, watch sports, and not do a damn thing.

As happened whenever he had days off and wasn’t sick, boredom set in after about an hour. He began combing through the fridge for snacks and then went outside and sat in a lawn chair, staring at his backyard and debating whether they should get a dog. Then he checked his cell phone. He told himself he was checking department email so he wouldn’t have a stack waiting for him when the suspension ended, but really he was waiting for a text from Baudin. Or maybe from Jessop, if Orridge decided to report their little scuffle the other night. But no texts like that came in.

By midday, Dixon had taken a nap, read several newspapers online, eaten about twenty snacks, and watched two movies on Netflix. He decided the only way to feel like he was being productive was to dress the part, so he showered and changed into slacks and a suit coat.

He left the house and headed for a nearby coffee shop. Ordering a black coffee with milk, he flirted a little with the cashier and felt bad about it. She was young, maybe nineteen, and was only being friendly because he was a customer, but it still made him feel young again and desirable.

The coffee shop had shelves of books, and he scanned them before settling on one:
Of Mice and Men
. It seemed to be the shortest one up there.

Dixon sat at a table by the window and began reading as he sipped his drink. When he was almost through, evening was falling outside, and he was hungry. Hillary should be home and readying dinner. He put the book back on the shelf, used the bathroom, and headed home.

When he walked in the house, he noticed something he wasn’t used to upon entering the house later in the day: nothing cooking. He entered the kitchen to find Hillary sitting at the table. Her arms were folded, and she was staring into space. Her eyes lifted and held his in silence.

“What is it?” he said. “What happened?”

“We need to talk, Kyle. Please sit down.”

Kyle grinned. “You need a new car again? I told you, when I get bumped up to lieutenant, which shouldn’t be too long now, we can—”

“I don’t want a new car,” she said brusquely. “I need to talk to you.”

He pulled out a chair and sat down across from her. “Okay. Here I am.”

Her mouth opened, but she didn’t get a single word out before a knock at the door stopped her. Hillary’s eyes went wide and Dixon, suddenly, wondered who was at the door at this hour. He rose and answered it.

Baudin stood there in a leather jacket with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“Ready?”

“One sec,” Dixon said.

He ran to the master bedroom and into the walk-in closet. On the top shelf was a gun safe. Dixon input the numerical code—Randy’s birthday—and got out his Browning revolver. He tucked it into his waistband and then went back out to the kitchen.

“I’ll be back,” he said, kissing Hillary on the forehead.

“When?”

“Few hours. We’ll talk then. I promise.”

The city always looked different at night. Dixon had never lived in any other city, and he wondered if it was the same everywhere. He thought about cavemen and what night was like for them. A disappearing of the life-giving sun without any guarantee it would rise again in the morning.

Orridge had been telling the truth. Baudin had called his father, and he’d clammed up immediately and told them to speak to the family’s lawyer. The lawyer and Dustin’s father were both alums of Sigma Mu, as were two judges in Laramie County District Court and the District Attorney. Dixon had no doubt that Dustin Orridge never would have gotten anywhere near a jury. It certainly would’ve halted their investigation, and once a defendant was released—say, for a legal technicality—the detectives assigned to the case were usually reluctant to spend time pursuing him again. Especially if the chief of police told them not to. Or, more likely, gave the case to other detectives who wouldn’t care about it as much.

“How’s Heather?”

“Good. Not great, but good. She thought she’d be doing me a favor by killing herself. Like my life would be better without her in it. I told her she
was
my life. That nothing else meant anything. She cried for a while… and we talked about her mother. Something we’ve never done before.”

Dixon glanced to him. “What was her mother like?”

“Fiery, man,” he said with a smile. “All piss and vinegar. When we were dating, that’s what attracted me to her. That confidence and assertiveness, the aggression. But those aren’t the qualities you need to be a good mom and wife. You need compassion and forgiveness, and she never learned those. She was angry at us, but it turned inward, into depression.” He paused. “I heard once that women marry men hoping they’ll change and men marry women hoping they won’t. Ain’t that the shit.”

“Marriage isn’t an easy thing for anybody.”

“How’s Hillary as a wife?”

“The best a guy could ask for. I don’t know how a jackoff like me earned her.”

Baudin was silent for a second. “That neighbor of yours—Chris. What do you know about him?”

“Chris Hicks? He’s a good guy. Bad luck with the ladies, though. Always hoppin’ from one woman to the next. We were supposed to go on a double date but that fell through. He probably would’ve just screwed it up anyway. Why you askin’ ’bout him?”

“I don’t trust him. And I can read people pretty quick.”

“Oh yeah? What was your read on me?”

He grinned. “Naïve, but with a good heart.”

“Funny. I thought the same thing of you.”

The drive on the interstate was quick, not much traffic. They passed the scene of an accident, a truck that had rammed a sedan from behind. A woman on a stretcher was being loaded into an ambulance.

Valley Mills was about a hundred homes, one of the most exclusive areas in all of Wyoming. The gates entering the development were closed, and a security guard sat in a booth, his feet up on a desk and his face in a magazine. He looked up and was putting the magazine down when Baudin flashed a badge. The guard nodded and opened the gate before going back to his magazine.

“Where’d you get that?” Dixon said.

“You only got one badge?”

“Yeah, I only got one badge.”

“So what happens if it gets stolen or you lose it?”

“I put in a request for a new one.”

Baudin chuckled. “Man, it is different out here. You lose the gold shield with the LAPD, you better run online and see if you can get a good replica. It’s about the worst thing that could happen. The bangers there like them as trophies. They’ll wear ’em around their necks as an insult to us. No one puts in for lost badges, man. You won’t be respected.”

“Well, that’s childish. Stuff gets lost. You telling me you never lost your badge?”

“I have. That’s why I keep a spare.”

Within a hundred yards of the gate, the homes grew from two or three bedrooms to palatial estates with lighted pools in back. Dixon could see a pool party at one, girls in bikinis and boys running after them on the deck.

“You ever get jealous of the rich?”

“No, man. They’re as miserable as everybody else. Life is one ridiculous thing after another, and it doesn’t matter if you’re homeless or a millionaire. You go through the cycle enough times, you start sensing the futility of it. How absurd it is that we take ourselves so seriously.”

“Well, you’re just a ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”

Baudin parked the car at the curb. “Good a place as any, I guess.”

“How exactly you plannin’ on finding this house?”

He shrugged. “Just thought we’d check every house for furniture with plastic on it.”

Dixon chuckled. “Well, we gonna be out here for a while, then.” He thought a moment. “There’s probably no one living in the house, right? So maybe we look for something that doesn’t have lights on. And then it’s unlikely they’re here right now, so probably something without cars in the driveway.”

Baudin opened his door. “Good enough.”

48

It was well past midnight by the time Baudin and Dixon stood in front of a home up on the farthest hill in Valley Mills. Dixon scanned the area. The most secluded home was set apart from the others by at least thirty yards, with no lights on and no cars in the driveway.

Dixon approached the house and stepped up onto the porch. He peeked through one of the windows but couldn’t see anything. The drapes were thick and black. As he turned to head back down the porch, he noticed the lock on the front door: thick, round, and sturdy, something that should be on a vault, not a home in this neighborhood. The door itself was reinforced, as were the windows.

“Dollars to donuts this is it,” Dixon said.

“Well,” Baudin said, lighting a cigarette, “only one way to find out.”

“It might have an alarm.”

“If it’s our house, it won’t. They wouldn’t want the cops coming out here for false trips.”

Dixon looked over the area again: nothing but tall grass, weeds, and gravel. Then he hit his elbow against the window. It didn’t do anything at first, so he hit it again and again, each strike harder than the last. Finally, it cracked, and he focused the blows on the fracture, making it larger and larger until pieces fell. When the hole was large enough, he reached in, unlatched the window, and opened it. No alarm.

Dixon sneaked through first. Once he got through the drapes, he rose and scanned the front room.

The space was dusty, old, and unused. The furniture had dense plastic covering it, and no decorations hung on the walls. Except one: a painting near the front door of a sigma and mu.

Dixon opened the door, and Baudin came in, blowing out a puff of smoke. He noticed the painting and grinned.

Wordlessly, they began searching the house. The front room was first, but there was practically nothing there. Then they started on the bathrooms and bedrooms. Dixon went into the kitchen. He checked the fridge, which had nothing but an old box of Arm & Hammer, and the dishwasher. A door led out to the garage, and he opened it and froze.

“Ethan, you better come look at this.”

Baudin came up behind him and said, “Shit.”

A Ford truck was parked in the garage. The tires were dirty, and the scent of exhaust hung in the air. Someone had driven here not too long ago.

“There’s someone in the house,” Dixon said, pulling out his revolver.

Baudin took out a .40 semiautomatic pistol, and they turned toward the house. Whereas their first search was quick and haphazard, they now moved quietly, scanning the areas they’d already searched for any disturbances.

Neither of them had been upstairs yet. Baudin went up first, his back pressed against the wall, his eyes up, his gun held in front of him. Dixon went up the other side, his heart pounding as he felt the stickiness of sweat on his neck.

On the top floor, they turned two separate directions. Dixon checked the bedroom first: dark, with a large bed and open space and an empty closet. Baudin was coming out of the bedroom he’d searched and shook his head.

Dixon stepped into the bathroom. The shower curtain was drawn, but he didn’t think anything of it… until he saw a few drops of water on the sink.

Before he could react, the shower curtain ripped away, and the blade came barreling toward him. Dixon moved, but only enough that the knife caught him in the chest rather than the neck and slid down to his belly, leaving a trail of blood and burning pain.

He tried to lift his gun, but the man swung wildly with the knife, catching him on the cheek. Dixon ducked to try to tackle him. The knife came up, and then Dixon went deaf.

The man collapsed against the bathroom wall, a hole in his cheek the size of a quarter. Blood poured out of it, filling his mouth, and then it began to drain out of his nose. He was choking, but it only lasted a moment. Then he stopped moving.

Dixon leaned against the sink, checking the wound on his chest. A thread of blood stained his clothing. He lifted his shirt; the wound wasn’t deep, but it sure as hell hurt.

“You okay?” Baudin said.

“Fucker almost got me in the throat.”

They looked at the body on the floor.

“I’m guessing that’s Casey,” Baudin said.

Dixon moved, and a sharp pain went through him as his abdominal muscles contracted.

“You need a hospital?”

“I don’t know. How’s my cheek?”

“Just a scrape.”

Dixon looked at himself in the mirror. “How exactly am I gonna explain this to my wife?”

Baudin bent down over the body. He searched the pockets and didn’t find a wallet, just the keys to the truck in the garage. “I wonder if he lived here.”

Dixon took out his phone. “I’ll call it in.”

“No, man.”

“What are you talking about? We got a dead body. It was a clean shoot.”

“Yeah? And what are we doing in his house?”

Dixon froze. He was right. They were in the house unlawfully. Since a death occurred, the felony murder rule might apply if some prosecutor got creative and charged them with a felony, and self-defense wasn’t applicable to felony murder. Which meant it didn’t matter that Casey came at him first.

Felony murder was a capital crime in Wyoming.

“Shit,” Dixon shouted. He punched the wall. “Shit!”

“Calm down, man. No one knows we’re here.”

“We fucking killed someone, Ethan.”

“This piece of shit? I hope there is a hell and he burns in it, man. I’d kill him again.” Baudin came close to him, resting his hands on Dixon’s shoulders. “No one knows we’re here, man. All right?”

“All right.” He nodded, running his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “All right. Let’s go.”

“I wanna look in that bedroom really quick.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Go downstairs and wait for me. I’ll be right there.”

Dixon turned. He felt as if he was swimming through milk right now. Everything had a hazy glow to it. His mind was a jumble of thoughts and images, of conversations he’d have to have. As he turned down the hall to head downstairs, a noise made him stop in his tracks. Something from the bedroom. He looked at Baudin, who was staring in there, too.

“You hear that?” Dixon said.

Baudin went in gun first. Dixon followed and noticed for the first time that his hands were trembling. He consciously worked to stop them, forcing them to calm.

The bedroom had one other door, one he assumed led to a bathroom. Baudin slid to the right side of the door, and Dixon stayed on the left. They looked at each other, and Baudin nodded. Dixon flung open the door, and Baudin went in, sweeping left to right.

Inside, hanging from chains that had been bolted to the ceiling, was a nude woman. She had a black mask over her head, something like an executioner’s mask. She was young and white, and deep red lashes covered her torso and back.

“Fuck me,” Dixon mumbled. He reached for her, and Baudin grabbed his hand.

“She can’t see us, man.”

“I won’t leave her here.”

“I’m not sayin’ that. I’m just sayin’ she can’t see us.” Baudin turned to her. Her head was bobbing lightly as though she’d been drugged, and every few seconds a soft whine would escape her lips. “I’ll drive his truck down and take her to a hospital, then I’ll dump the truck. I don’t want nobody at the hospital seeing my car.”

Dixon reached up to the chains. They were fastened with screws that could be turned with the fingers. Undoing both of them on her wrists, Dixon caught the girl as she fell limply into his arms. Dixon grabbed the sheets off the bed and wrapped her in them. The two men carried her down to the garage and put her in the back of the truck.

Baudin sat in the driver’s seat, and Dixon stood outside. They held each other’s gaze, some solemn promise or oath between them. Dixon knew that neither one of them would ever tell anyone about this; this was a secret that would die with them. And it gave them a bond they couldn’t have formed any other way: the bond of secrecy.

“Get goin’,” Baudin said. “I’ll pull out when you’re gone.”

Dixon ran out of the house and up the street. By the time he was at the car, the truck was out and headed down the road. He caught a glimpse of Baudin as he sped out of Valley Mills, and his taillights disappeared into the black.