Whirlwind (15 page)

31

Dallas, Texas

MISSING BABY—The FBI is now leading the investigation into the case of a baby boy who vanished in the storm, after his clothing was found 20 miles away under suspicious circumstances.

K
ate stopped to proofread what she’d typed at her desk in the bureau then took a sip of fresh coffee.

It had been fifteen minutes since she’d been back from the shelter in Duncanville. It was late in the afternoon and the morning was ancient history. So much had happened on the story: the discovery of the baby’s clothing, the mystery couple with a baby that appeared to have been Caleb Cooper, and now the FBI’s investigation.

During the drive back from Duncanville, her heart raced the way it did whenever she was on to a strong story. Upon returning to the bureau she couldn’t find Chuck Laneer or Dorothea Pick, so she’d settled in and started writing.

Kate unwrapped the remainder of the turkey sandwich she’d brought back from the shelter and bit into it. As she ate, she inserted her earphones to listen to her recorded interviews, checking them against the quotes she’d flagged in her notebook from FBI Special Agent Phil Grogan, Jenna and Blake Cooper, Dr. Butler, Frank Rivera. Then she arranged them, enabling her story to flow.

“Slug lines! Get me your slug lines, everybody!” Tommy Koop called out a looming deadline to get a short description on coming stories to him for the budget list. Tommy would send the Dallas bureau’s budget to Newslead’s headquarters in New York, who would then distribute a revised, shortened version of top stories to subscribers across the country and around the globe. Tommy always made a show of pacing the bureau, which was now nearly full with reporters working at every desk, to get stories on the budget.

“If it’s not on the budget it’s not on the wire, folks. Hey there, Kate, didn’t see you come in. Can I get your slug line ASAP?”

Kate gave hers a last quick read, tweaked it then pressed Send. “You got it. Where’re Chuck and Dorothea?”

“In a meeting about coverage of the President’s upcoming visit.”

Kate finished the last of her sandwich then got back to her item, working from her notes and thoughts of the day. As the minutes swept by, she no longer heard the conversations and other sounds of the newsroom because she was immersed in her writing, pulling things together as fast as she could.

Her line rang.

“Kate Page, Newslead.”

“It’s Chuck. Can we see you in my office now?”

Chuck was at his desk reading his monitor. Dorothea was on the small sofa looking over a few printed pages. Kate remained standing.

“We read your slug line,” Chuck said. “This missing baby story has taken a helluva twist. Is our stuff exclusive?”

“Sort of.”

“What does that mean?” Dorothea asked.

“No one has the detail we have and the interviews, but I strongly suspect that the FBI’s going to issue a news release and a missing-person poster soon.”

“Hell, that’s not exclusive at all,” Dorothea said. “And your slug line said
missing.
Is this an abduction or one of the hundreds of tragic missing-person cases arising from the storm?”

“No one’s certain. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding the recent developments,” Kate said.

Dorothea rolled her eyes. “So we don’t know what this is, exactly?”

“No. It’s a mystery with a lot of disturbing elements that the FBI is trying to piece together.”

“That’s what I like about it,” Chuck said. “Readers love a mystery and this one is charged with anguish and heartbreak. What about the pictures? Where are they?”

“We have the mom and baby.”

“Those are old,” Dorothea said. “You should’ve flagged them as
file pix
instead of
pix
in your slug line. Your submission here implies new art.”

“I’m expecting composites of people of interest from the FBI.”

“Expecting them?” Dorothea’s eyebrows arched. “So they could be issued with the FBI news release? So you really don’t have a lock on this story at all, do you? You seem to have oversold it. We should notify New York and remove it from the budget. This whole thing could fall through.” Dorothea turned to Chuck for agreement.

He had removed his glasses and was tapping them to his chin.

“Chuck,” Dorothea continued, “this could amount to nothing more than a rewrite of a police news release. Mandy has a story coming. A beautiful story about a kindergarten teacher who saved twenty-five little kids by herding them into the basement—”

“Fort Worth TV had that late last night, Dorothea. What Mandy has is a follow. What Kate has here is the result of enterprising. New York already said that they love this.”

Chuck replaced his glasses, sat up and checked his monitor. “Kate,” he said, “how close are you to being done?”

“Minutes.”

“Call your FBI contact. Push them to give us their pictures ASAP and for us to get a thirty-minute jump. Can you do that?”

“I will.”

“That way our story will move out to everyone with the FBI sketches before our competition can write a word. That way we can say Newslead broke the story. Agreed?”

“Fine, if it doesn’t fall through,” Dorothea said, brushing by Kate as she left.

“Kate?” Chuck looked at her.

“Yes?”

“Don’t mind her. The storm’s taking a toll on all of us.”

“I understand.” Kate turned to leave.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Good work.”

32

Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

A
ll day long, after leaving Remy and the screaming brat at the motel, Mason Varno drove.

Rubbing his lips, he battled his craving, which got worse with every mile of the LBJ. Remy’s reluctance to cash in on the kid and his mounting parole issues, like missing his meeting for random drug-and-alcohol testing, didn’t help. His dream was slipping through his fingers. He was coming to the edge of a black hole. He pounded his palms on the dash and cursed.

No damned way was he was giving up without a fight.

I’ve got to come up with a way to get through this! Think!

He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.

Step one: Don’t let the dream die.

He got off the expressway, pulled into a drugstore, bought a disposable phone and used it to call Garza.

After five rings it went to voice mail.

“It’s Varno. I got a new number. You’re the only one who has it. Call me so we can talk about my buy in.”

Mason then sat in his truck in the parking lot. He grabbed the small pouch with the remainder of their cash. He fanned it with his thumb. Just under nine thousand left from the original fifteen the agency had paid Remy. She’d trusted him to manage the money, believing that he’d saved it. She had no clue that he’d used up much of it to buy dope. What they had left would not last, especially since he hadn’t been working these past few weeks.

Mason tried to think, but his craving evolved into an aching. He used one hand to grip his temples, squeezing hard to keep his skull from splitting open. The tires squealed as he got back onto the freeway and headed to a place he knew at the western fringes of downtown Dallas.

It was a menacing stretch of run-down houses, condemned buildings, fortress liquor stores, hookers and the walking dead. He cruised the area for any police units, marked or unmarked, like the telltale electrician’s van they used for busts.

It looked good.

He wheeled up to the rusted newspaper boxes in front of Bill’s Second Chance Pawnshop. A kid wearing a Mavericks T-shirt, sideways ball cap and saggy pants hanging low to reveal his underwear, leaned into Mason’s window.

“Yo, how you doin’ today, sir?” the kid asked.

“I need a blast.”

The kid’s eyes took in Mason’s prison tattoos. Dealing on the street made him fast and smart. Everything was cool.

“Got nothing but the finest quality. How much you down for?”

Mason rubbed his chin hard; he needed something to sustain him and backup for later.

“Fourteen grams.”

“WE-EE!”

“That a problem?”

“I can do that, I can do that. It’ll cost you one point five large.”

Mason reached into his pocket, counted fifteen hundred dollars and held it out for the kid, letting him see the grip of his gun.

“Don’t think of fucking with me, got that?”

“
Nu-uhh.
I know where you comin’ from. This a straight-up deal. A good deal for you and a good deal for me.”

The kid passed him a tea-bag-sized pillow of foil. Mason opened it to inspect the crystals, touched a tiny one to his tongue. Satisfied, he drove off for several blocks, stopping at a shaded corner of a vacant parking lot.

Less than ten minutes later, he was riding a cloud of bliss and watching his troubles float around him like helium-filled balloons. He shut his eyes and smiled at the sky.

Now I can think. Review and assess.

Mason’s chief obstacle to achieving his objective was Remy.

He was convinced she was stalling on closing her deal with the surrogacy agency because she was all messed up. It started when she’d lost the baby. The doctor used all that mumbo jumbo about postpartum psychosis, hallucinations and delusions to tell Mason that she could get messed up. Well, she did get messed up, with her headaches, her crying and her spells.

Then she grabbed the new baby.

She was whacked, all right.

Yet Mason started to believe—needed to believe—that Remy’s twisted idea would work. It was the only way they would see the payoff. But now, he was convinced that she didn’t want to give up the baby, that she was forming some kind of attachment to it. He saw it in the way she was holding him, looking at him, the way she was caring for him.

Mothering him
.

It was all messed up.

He had to fix it.

That baby was his forty-five-thousand-dollar ticket to the sweet life.

Mason’s new phone rang.

Startled, he tried to figure how much time had passed. Had he fallen asleep? The phone rang again and he answered.

“You called me?” It was Garza.

“I still want in.”

“You got the money?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Goodbye.”

“Hold it, hold it. I’ll get the money.”

“All you give me is talk. There’s an expiry date on this deal. People sponsored you, said you were solid.”

“I’ll get it. I just need more time.”

“The buy-in number goes up. Now it’s thirty-five.”

“What? That’s too high.”

“That’s the number. The clock is ticking.” The line went dead.

Mason ran his hands over his face.

He would work this out. He had no choice.

How? How am I going to do this?
he asked himself half an hour later, when he was sitting on a stool at the empty end of The Purple Sage Cantina.

He gazed at the suds sliding to the bottom of his beer glass as he waited for his nachos and a solution on how he would convince Remy to call the agency and get the deal done.

The server set a cheesy plate before him and as Mason bit into his first chip he glanced up at the big TV behind the bar and froze.

What the hell?

The screen was filled with police sketches concerning persons of interest in the mystery surrounding a baby boy who was taken from his mother during the storm at the Old Southern Glory Flea Market in southeastern Dallas.

The TV news was quoting Newslead, the wire service, which had reported that the FBI was now investigating the case and appealing to anyone with information to call in.

Mason’s stomach tightened.

He pulled his ball cap a little tighter and lower on his head.

Oh, Jesus. The FBI.

33

Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

M
ason forced himself to relax.

He ate about half of his nachos, paid his bill with cash and left the bar as if he were just another customer.

Squinting in the bright Texas sun, he got into his truck. He was coming down from his high, and the TV report had hit him like a blow to the gut.

The news changes everything—every damned thing. Hang on. Be cool. Be cool. Be cool. We have to pull this off. We have no options
.

He took a long, deep breath then exhaled.

He knew exactly what he had to do—the new risks he had to take.

Mason turned the ignition, calculating that he still had time.

Within minutes he was back on the interstate, heading east. But as he navigated through lines of vehicles with brake lights flaring, horns blasting, big rigs grinding, his knuckles whitened on the wheel.

His thread of control started fraying.

Glancing in his rearview mirror, he mentally tripped through the trouble pursuing him. The surrogate agency was surely looking to get their money back, DOA was on his trail, his parole people would soon flag his violations and now the FBI was all over his ass.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

Mason had been running all of his life.

He’d tried running from Jerry, the monster who’d lived with his mother. He would never forget how Jerry’s belt made leathery snaps when he yanked it from his pants and whipped him in front of his drunken loser friends.

“Look what I can make this pup do! Get me a beer from the fridge!”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

The belt would burn across Mason’s arms.

“YES, WHAT?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jerry was not Mason’s father, just the man who stayed with his mother, a junkie whore who’d brought a lot of strange men home. One night when Mason was fifteen and Jerry had passed out on the sofa, he stood over him with a ball-peen hammer determined to splatter his brains.

Instead he left it on Jerry with a note:

I decided to let you live, you piece of shit.

Then Mason left and never looked back, never accepted the blame and beatings for the mistakes his mother and Jerry made in their lives. And he would be damned if he’d go down for Remy’s.

The problem was he and Remy never had a plan.

At first, when she lost the baby, they ran off to get away from the nurse so they wouldn’t have to repay the cash. Then Remy got all whacked out with her postpartum psychosis and grabbed the baby. Hell, maybe she’s bonding with it now while the FBI is looking for them.

I’m not going down for this. I’m not going back to prison. Remy got us into it. I’ll get us out. Then I’ll dump her.

On the east side of Dallas, Mason found his way into the fringes of the Metroplex that were untouched by the storm but were hellish for other reasons. He moved down a strip of taco huts, Big Bobby Jay’s Used Appliances, the Famous Glitter Hair and Nail Boutique.

He pulled into Ray’s Right Fix Auto Repair.

The weatherworn wooden sign above the garage was blistering. The lot was dotted with heaps in various stages of repair. The pavement was a mosaic of oil, grease and fluid stains that fed the film over the two-bay garage.

Mason got out and approached the open service doors.

A Toby Keith song echoed from a radio.

The air reeked of rubber and echoed with compressors and the clank of steel tools dropped on the concrete floor. A man in filthy jeans with a stained bandanna lifted his head from under the hood of an Olds.

“Sorry, mister, we’re closing up for the day. Come back tomorrow.”

“I just need to see Lamont. Is he still here?”

A socket wrench whirred and the man went back to his work before he answered.

“Out back.”

The bay doors opened to the rear of the lot.

A mobile home with vinyl siding sat in one corner, as if it had given up. Across the yard, a high-fenced kennel contained a large dog. The rear area was a graveyard of car parts and equipment, engine hoists, metal drums, chains and batteries. In the middle of it all, a large man was bent over an anvil, hammering on a piece of metal. When the dog snarled at Mason, he’d noticed it was missing its left eye, and fur had been ripped from its hind legs. The dog’s guttural grumbling grew louder until the man stopped pounding and turned.

He stood about three inches over six feet and wore dirty overalls and a welder’s cap. His stubbly beard was flecked with gray; his longish hair was tucked behind his ears, revealing a face that had been carved out of cold stone. He looked at Mason for a long silent moment, his jaw tensing, twirling the hammer in his hand as the dog growled.

As sudden as a cobra’s strike, the man flung the hammer at the kennel fence, making the dog yelp and Mason flinch.

“Shut the hell up!” The man’s black jagged teeth flashed when he turned to Mason. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I need help, Lamont. I’m jammed bad.”

“Why should I give a crap about you?”

Mason indicated the tip of a roll of bills in his hand. Lamont’s eyes rested there for a moment. He was listening.

“When we were inside, you said that if a brother ever needed a place to disappear, a place to lay low if they were hot, that you had one. I need that place, Lamont. I need it now.”

Lamont scratched his chin.

“I don’t know what kinda shit you’re in and I don’t want to get any on me.”

“You won’t, I swear. Me and my old lady need a place.”

“I keep to myself these days.”

“I need this place. This is survival, Lamont. I can’t go back to Hightower. I can’t go back inside.”

Lamont glanced at the roll of bills Mason was showing him and took several long moments to estimate his own vulnerabilities and situation before making the kind of decision that could irrevocably change lives.

“How long you need?”

“Four or five days, a week tops.”

“I want a thousand now.”

“Done.”

“And a thousand when you get there.”

“Yes.”

“And I’ll need an untraceable number. I’ll call you within twenty-four hours with the location.”

Mason shook Lamont’s hand, leaving ten fifties and five one-hundred-dollar bills in it.

* * *

When Mason returned to the hotel, his heart was going fast.

He circled the block a few times for any sign of police sitting on the place. Satisfied there were none, he parked in front of their unit.

He was fortified because he’d found a way for him and Remy to escape, regroup and make a play for the money. But he was still shaky from the aftershock of the news report and it took him two attempts to slide his key into the lock for their room.

He opened the door.

What the hell is this?

Mason stood in the empty room. Remy and the baby were gone. Their luggage was still there. He went to the night table by the phone to see if she’d left a note. Nothing. Nothing on the desk, either.

I told her not to do anything. I told her to wait. Where the hell is she?

Scenarios played in his head as his pulse accelerated.

Maybe police came for her? No, they would’ve been waiting for him. Maybe she called the agency and is closing the deal? No, she wouldn’t do that without him. Or would she? Maybe it was something else? The kid had been wailing. Maybe he was sick and she took a cab to a clinic or hospital? Would she take that risk?

He tried calling her cell but it rang through to her voice mail.

“Where are you? Call me now!”

He hung up and cursed.

He had to find her.