Whirlwind (7 page)

12

Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

S
itting behind the wheel of his battered pickup truck at the traffic light, Mason Varno gritted his teeth.

Everything’s gone to hell. Everything’s closing in.

He looked at the surrounding traffic, checked his mirrors.

Sure as shit more people would be looking for them now.

He hammered his palms against the wheel.

I’m not going down for this. I’m not going back to prison for some whacked-out—

The light changed.

Calm down. Think this through. Take care of first things first.

He looked around. Other than a scattering of branches and trash, he saw no storm damage in this neighborhood. He wheeled into a McDonald’s parking lot, taking a spot out of sight in a far corner, under the shade of a maple tree. He fished out a small glass tube and a stamp-sized square of tinfoil. He unfolded the foil to reveal the small heap of crystals, almost tasting the anticipation as he heated the underside with his disposable lighter. The crystals crackled, liquefied and vaporized. He savored the smell as he inhaled the rising smoke through the pipe.

Sweet Jesus, yes
.

In seconds, Mason floated on a euphoric cloud. All his troubles lightened and drifted away as he shut his eyes to embrace the bliss.

That’s what I needed. Now I can think.

Review and assess, as his counselor used to say.

Mason guided his pickup through the back of the long drive-through line.

He’d never expected Remy to kidnap a baby. All this time he’d thought that her odd behavior was a reaction to the stillbirth last month. That these past couple of weeks she’d needed to cozy up to other women and their babies in malls and such because it was a kind of therapy for her.

At the hospital, a few days after it had happened, the doctor had informed Mason that Remy was having trouble dealing with the loss and could experience “borderline postpartum psychosis.” It meant she’d sometimes have “delusions, hallucinations and other thought disturbances.” They gave her medication, but every so often Remy had a spell, a headache accompanied by a lot of crying.

Mason never thought her condition would go beyond her having the blues and ogling other people’s babies then—
BAM
—she grabbed that kid after the storm, then screamed at him that the mother’s dead and the kid’s bleeding and they have to get out.

But the mother ain’t dead, is she, Remy? She’s on the damn news looking for her baby, and we’re in a world of trouble.

He shook his head as he inched his truck along the drive-through line.

Oh, but Remy had a
plan.

She had a way out of their situation, and she wanted him to trust her. Un-freaking-believable. She was an unstable psychotic, and he had to trust
her
plan?

He struggled to get hold of the situation, which was getting worse by the second. The baby’s got that bump on his head. That can’t be good. What if it dies? He’ll just dump the thing and Remy and run, find his way out of it all.
I should do it now. Just hit the gas,
he thought.
Dump her now and never look back.

But he couldn’t.

He was handcuffed to her by circumstance.

How in hell had he let this happen? He had planned things so carefully while doing his eighteen months in Hightower Unit. His time was for a drug deal that involved a lot of players and went wrong. A lot of money was lost, and Mason took the fall with the understanding that he would be cut loose, left alone. Then word got to Mason inside that a wronged party, a guy by the name of DOA, might seek payback or retribution from Mason. DOA had a lot of associates. Mason knew some of them, and he could trust a few but not all of them. One thing Mason knew about DOA was that he was big on threats, liked to talk them up but didn’t always follow through. Still, as month after month passed, Mason kept his ear to the ground for talk about DOA reaching inside to seek vengeance on him. So far, nothing had come of his threat.

Remy had started writing to him through a social network. Then she’d started visiting. She was a looker, no doubt about it. And he’d decided that of all the women who’d written to him, she was the one he’d use for his plan.

In Hightower he needed to show the system that he had something stable set up on the outside to be eligible for early release and a minimum level of supervised parole. Inside, he stayed out of trouble, enrolled in carpentry school and took several reentry programs dealing with addiction, conflict and confrontation, learning how to “cage your rage.” His clear, stated objective was to settle into a stable life with his new woman, Remy Toxton, and get a carpentry job with the goal of eventually starting his own carpentry business in Oregon, where Remy wanted to get married and begin a family. It was what the Texas Department of Criminal Justice needed to hear from inmate #01286413.

But it was all bullshit.

Sure, once Mason got out, he’d play along with the straight life until he activated his real plan, which he’d kept secret from Remy. In prison, trusted friends told Mason that for $25,000 he could buy into an import-export start-up company run by an American player known only as Garza. This business would be based in Belize, then expand in the Caribbean and Central America. It was going to be huge. With the $25,000 investment Mason was guaranteed $250,000 return in the first two months.

Word got back to Mason that Garza would let him into the enterprise as a favor for a friend. Garza was moving fast so he’d set a deadline for Mason’s delivery of $25,000 cash: within three months of Mason’s release.

Trouble was Mason had lied about having the cash.

He’d said he had it stashed from the deal he was doing time for, just so Garza would hold a place for him in the deal when he got out.

Truth was Mason had no cash.

He’d told no one, but when Mason got out he intended to pull a few quick freelance deals to secure the cash for his investment. It was risky, but it was the best he could do.

Whenever Remy visited Mason at the prison he’d tell her he needed $25,000 to start his carpentry business. Then they could live their dream in Oregon. That’s when she stunned him.

“I can get the cash for us,” she said.

A couple of months after that, she beamed from the other side of the glass, telling him that she was pregnant, how she’d answered an ad online to be a surrogate. When she delivered and signed off she’d get $60,000.

Mason couldn’t believe his ears.

But there Remy was, smiling, saying it was all legal, all handled by international adoption lawyers through a global network. They took care of everything. They’d flown her to one of their clinics overseas for the procedure. Remy would be due around the time of Mason’s release. She said giving up the baby was not a big deal for her. As a teen she’d had a baby and given it up to some couple. This time it was all planned, and again she’d help a childless couple.

“And I’ll be helping us get closer to our dream, too. It’s all meant to be, babe,” Remy told him.

This was a long way from the fifty dollars in gate money and the bus ticket the prison gave Mason when he got out. It left him thinking how now he wouldn’t have to pull off any risky deals. When Remy delivered the baby, he’d take $25,000 and dump her.

Hard.

Let her learn a valuable life lesson.

He had other plans that did not include carpentry, kids or any white picket fences in freaking Oregon.

When Mason was released from Hightower, Remy had things nicely set up. She already had a clean apartment for them in Lufkin where Mason started his first carpentry job, through a prison reentry program with a faith-based outreach group, the Fellowship of the Good Thief Society. They’d already helped him get the low-interest loan on his truck, which he needed for work, and they were very protective of an ex-con’s privacy.

As part of the surrogate deal, Remy’s agency would pay all her medical costs and ensure regular home visits by nurses, and provide a small living allowance. But, if the mother backed out of the deal, or lost the baby, all coverage would cease and the mother could be responsible for repaying the agency fifty percent of what they’d paid out to cover medical costs so far.

“They told me they deal with repayment by the mothers on a case-by-case basis,” Remy said.

Remy and Mason kept the surrogacy secret and kept to themselves. Everything went well until the night he woke to Remy’s screams as she held herself in agony.

“Something’s wrong, Mason! Take me to a hospital!”

His first thought was to alert Remy’s agency nurse.

“No! They can’t know! If I lose it, we lose everything! We’ve got to do this without them knowing at all! Hurry, call the people you work for. I saw in your file papers, the church fellowship that supported you, they’re connected to a medical network. There’s a twenty-four-hour emergency number.”

Mason’s people were helpful and discreet. They’d immediately arranged for an ambulance to rush Remy and Mason to the Beau Soleil West Medical Center, a faith-based nonprofit hospital in Shreveport, a little over one hundred miles away.

That’s where she lost the baby.

The church group quietly covered all the costs and arranged to bring them back to Lufkin, protecting Remy and Mason’s privacy while they mourned their loss. Few people knew what had happened.

Remy said they had to leave before the agency nurse came for her next visit. Once the agency found out what had happened, Remy would not only lose out on all that cash, but the agency would demand she repay them half of the thousands they’d spent on her.

“We have to get away, Mason, so I can decide what to do.”

He told his employer and parole officer what had happened and that they needed time away, for a “spiritual retreat,” to begin to heal.

They pulled together all the cash they had and hit the road. They both tried to find a solution in between Remy’s postpartum bouts of psychosis.

That’s how Mason got here.

The speaker atop the menu board crackled.

“May I take your order?”

He ordered, and as he moved on down the line he wondered if his situation could get any worse. While idling, he reached under his seat and felt his Smith & Wesson .40-caliber pistol and the magazine, taking comfort in the fact it was there if he needed it. Then he licked the residue off of the small square of foil as he always did in a bid to prolong his comedown. There was no shortage of challenges.

He glanced at the letters on the console, one reminding him of his monthly meeting with his parole officer, another from the Parole Division saying he’d been randomly selected for drug and alcohol testing. He had twenty-four hours to report to a District Parole Office to submit a urinalysis. Failure to appear would result in a case conference, which was not a good thing.

Mason stopped at the first window and paid for the food.

While waiting to pick up his order, he saw a new message on his phone. The number was blocked.

Heard you are out and got access to 25k—about what you owe. DOA’s comin for your ass.

13

Dallas, Texas

S
tiff from five hours of hard sleep, Kate woke with adrenaline pumping through her. She sat up and switched on the TV news.

Still live with wall-to-wall coverage of the storm.

While watching, she checked her phone for new messages. Nothing. Again, she came to her photo of Jenna Cooper searching for her baby.
Could I help her find him?
Again, Kate felt like she had been punched in the gut. It had only been a few hours since Dorothea Pick dismissed her desire to follow Jenna’s tragic story.

Why is she sidelining me and not the others? I need this job as much as they do. I can’t sit here until three in the afternoon to work in the bureau when one of the biggest stories in the world is happening all around me.

Kate showered, dressed and bit into a stale bagel for breakfast as she went online and searched the long list of emergency shelters across the Metroplex. After making notes on those located near the flea market, she went to her car, determined to deliver a solid story today.

I’ll prove that I’m as good as the others.

Early-morning traffic was manageable. Thankfully she was familiar with her destination. First, she went to the flea market, where she’d learned that security had been tightened. For safety reasons, access was now limited to officials and media with valid accreditation.

After Kate showed her Newslead ID, she headed across the debris-covered grounds to the Saddle Up Center, concerned that she was not going to find Jenna and Cassie Cooper here.

Amid the barks of dog teams, search-and-rescue efforts were still continuing before the operation evolved into debris removal, Fire Captain J. B. Langston told her.

“We’ve been going all night and we haven’t recovered a baby so far. We’ve extracted more injured survivors and fatalities. Several children and more adult victims, but no baby,” Langston said. “You know that people were swept up into the winds. I heard our guys found one of the center’s vendors in a tree, seven miles from here.”

“Yeah, that was terrible. I read that in an Associated Press story,” Kate said. “Captain, do you have any idea where shelter survivors and their families were taken?”

“Try Rivergreen Community Hall. There are a few others but Rivergreen’s your best bet.”

It was a short drive, some two miles south. The community hall, a square one-story building, had been designated an emergency shelter for the area.

Emergency vehicles, buses, news vans, along with trucks delivering food, water and other aid, filled the parking lot. Clearly, this shelter had been operating nonstop through the night, Kate thought as she entered.

Inside, the hall droned with activity. Banners from a Retirement & Appreciation banquet, planned for last night, waved like a memory over rows of cots and mats occupied by people recovering from the storm. They filled the large central area. Some were sleeping, some were huddled comforting others. Some were reading government application forms or talking on cell phones. Although spotty, there was service.

Tables staffed by emergency workers, aid agencies, church groups and other volunteers lined the walls. They offered medical help, advice on insurance claims and counseling. Signs pointed to showers, extra toilets, laundry facilities, toiletries, towels, clothing and toys. There was a station to donate blood. At one end of the hall, people lined up for hot food. Several large TVs were turned to storm news and there were computers with internet service donated by local companies.

Kate came to a heartbreaking sight in one corner: a Missing/Displaced Persons sign. Under it were a few dozen photographs of women, children and men of all ages hastily taped to the wall like a patchwork quilt of hope. A few had little notes with contact information attached to them.

The effort was run by the Missing Person Emergency Search System—
MPESS
—a national agency based in Washington, D.C. When Kate arrived, several staff members at three tables were using laptops, maps and cell phones as they took information from anguished people.

A bleary-eyed man in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair turned to her. He was wearing a navy MPESS polo shirt. The ID tag hanging from his neck said Frank Rivera, Supervisor.

“Sure, I got a minute,” Rivera said after Kate had requested someone with the group speak to the press. “What do you need?”

She asked for a rundown on the search system, how it was helping to find missing people, because she’d thought that the process was already being handled by local relief workers.

“That’s correct,” Rivera said, “we’re helping local groups and the Dallas Police Department and Sheriffs for surrounding counties. We’re coordinating their ‘missing persons’ work and their database. We’re an experienced national nonprofit agency, with expertise in this area of crisis response. We’ve got retired cops, federal agents and investigators. The federal Justice Department and FEMA arranged for us to come. Once they got the airports running, most of our teams flew in overnight from all over the country. We’re set up at emergency shelters at all the hardest-hit communities.”

Rivera sipped from a large cup of coffee and said his group dealt with all types of situations where people are disoriented, lost or still trapped. Families get separated or a member may have been helped by strangers and taken to a facility without their family knowing.

“We list every detail on anyone reported missing, photographs, names, descriptions, clothes and their situation when the storm hit—were they at work, school, church, shopping, visiting from another city, state, that kind of thing. It all goes into the database. Then it’s cross-referenced at hospitals and shelters with descriptions of deceased who are being processed by teams from the various Medical Examiners’ offices.”

Rivera said the database was growing and being constantly updated online. There was also a toll-free twenty-four-hour help number. In cases requiring identification of the deceased, nothing was posted and family members were notified for next steps.

“Our analysts are also hitting the ground, going into hospitals and shelters to collect information on people, children who’ve been displaced, separated, rescued and transferred to a different location. All people reported to the system are considered missing until law enforcement, fire, paramedics and the M.E. confirm them as recovered, reunited, or deceased. And the clock is ticking on those still trapped in the rubble.”

“Can you give me the status of a case I’m reporting on?” Kate asked.

“Certainly, if it helps to clear it. Our goal is to reunite families and we need the press to help us.” Rivera went to a laptop. “What’s the name?”

“Cooper, Caleb Cooper,
C-A-L-E-B.
Cooper is common spelling.”

“Sounds familiar,” Rivera said.

After entering the name in the database, he took a moment to read the file. Then he summarized for Kate that Caleb’s mother, Jenna Cooper, reported her five-month-old son missing from the Saddle Up Center, along with two unidentified adults.

“It’s still open,” Rivera said. “Nothing has surfaced on this one.”

“What about the adults, anything at all on them?”

“Nothing. We’ve got very few details on them but we’ve been cross-checking the information we have.”

“What about the M.E., anything from the temporary morgues?”

“Nothing.” Rivera shook his head, rubbed his chin then he saw a note in the case file that he’d missed.

“Hang on a sec,” he said, turning to an analyst working near him. “Ellen, take a look at this case. You had this one open not long ago.”

The woman whose ID badge said Ellen White stood and read the screen over Rivera’s shoulder.

“Yes,” Ellen said, “for a reporter with Newslead. That’s the news service which reported this case, right?”

“That’s right. Why, what’s going on?” Kate asked.

“You tell us,” Rivera said. “You’re the second Newslead reporter to ask us about it this morning.”

“The second?”

“That woman was here earlier.” Ellen White indicated a woman walking along the rows of cots, glancing at her cell phone screen and those in the community hall, as if she were looking for someone.

Kate froze when she recognized the woman. Mandy Lee.