I drove with Jackie over to Rebecca Clay’s house. She looked relieved to see me again. I made the introductions and told Rebecca that Jackie would be looking after her for the next few days, but that I’d also be around if anything came up. I think Jackie looked more like her idea of a bodyguard than I did, so she didn’t object. In the interest of almost full disclosure, I also told her that there would be two other men nearby in case of trouble, and gave her a rough description of the Fulcis that erred on the side of flattery without resorting to outright lies.
“Are three men really necessary?” she asked.
“No, but they come as a package. They’ll cost one-fifty a day, which is cheap, but if you’re worried about the cost, we can work something out.”
“It’s okay. I think I can afford it for a while.”
“Good. I’m going to try to find out more about Merrick while we have breathing space, and I’m going to talk to some of the people on your list. If we’re no closer to figuring out Merrick at the end of this two-day grace period, and he still won’t accept that you can’t help him, we’ll go to the cops again and try to have him picked up before running the whole thing by a judge. Right now, I know you’d prefer a more physical approach, but we need to exhaust the other possibilities first.”
“I understand.”
I asked after her daughter, and she told me that she’d arranged for Jenna to go to D.C. with her grandparents for a week. Her absence had been cleared with the school, and Jenna would leave first thing in the morning.
She walked me to the door and touched my arm.
“Do you know why I hired you?” she asked. “I used to date a guy called Neil Chambers. He was Jenna’s father.”
Neil Chambers. His father, Ellis, had approached me earlier in the year, seeking help for his son. Neil owed money to some men in Kansas City, and there was no way that he could pay the debt. Ellis wanted me to act as an intermediary, to find some way to solve the problem. I couldn’t help him, not then. I had suggested some people I thought might be able to work something out, but it was too late for Neil. His body was dumped in a ditch as a warning to others shortly after Ellis and I had spoken.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. Neil didn’t see Jenna much, hadn’t seen her in years to tell the truth, but I’m still close to Ellis. He and his wife, Sara, are the ones who are looking after Jenna this week, and he was the one who told me about you.”
“I turned him down. I couldn’t give him help when he asked for it.”
“He understood. He didn’t blame you. He still doesn’t. Neil was lost to him. Ellis knew that, but he loved him. When I told Ellis about Merrick, he said that I should talk to you. He’s not the kind of man to bear a grudge.”
She released her hold on my arm. “Do you think they’ll ever get the men who killed Neil?” she asked.
“Man,” I said. “It was one man who was responsible. His name was Donnie P.”
“Will anything ever be done about it?”
“Something was done,” I said.
She stared at me silently for a time.
“Does Ellis know?” she asked.
“Would it help him if he did?”
“No, I don’t think so. Like I told you, he’s not that kind of man.”
Her eyes shone, and something uncurled itself deep inside her, stretching sinuously, its mouth soft and red.
“But you are,” she said, “aren’t you?”
We found the girl in a glorified kennel in Independence, east of Kansas City and within sight and sound of a small airport. Our information had been good. The girl didn’t open the door when I knocked. Angel, small and apparently unthreatening, was beside me and Louis, tall, dark and very, very threatening, was at the back of the house in case she tried to run. We could hear someone moving inside. I knocked again.
“Who’s there?” The voice sounded cracked and strained.
“Mia?” I said.
“There’s nobody called Mia here.”
“We want to help you.”
“I told you: there’s no Mia here. You have the wrong address.”
“He’s coming for you, Mia. You can’t keep one step ahead of him forever.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Donnie, Mia. He’s closing in, and you know it.”
“Who are you? Cops?”
“You ever hear of a guy named Neil Chambers?”
“No. Why would I have?”
“Donnie killed him over a bad debt.”
“So?”
“He left him in a ditch. He tortured him, then he shot him. He’ll do the same to you, except in your case nobody is going to come knocking on doors to try to even things out later. Not that it will matter to you. You’ll be dead. If we can find you, then he can find you too. You don’t have much time left.”
There was no reply for so long that I thought she might have slipped away from the door. Then there was the sound of a security chain being removed, and the door was unlocked. We stepped into semidarkness. All the drapes were closed, and no lights burned in the room. The door slammed shut behind us and the girl named Mia retreated into the shadows so that we couldn’t see her face, the face that Donnie P. had beaten on for some offense that she had given him, real or imagined.
“Can we sit down?” I asked.
“You can sit, if you like,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not so much, but I look bad.” Her voice cracked further. “Who told you I was here?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“Someone who’s concerned for you. That’s all you need to know.”
“What do you want?”
“We want you to tell us why Donnie did this to you. We want you to share what you know about him.”
“What makes you think I know something?”
“Because you’re hiding from him, and because the word is he wants to find you before you talk.”
My eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. I could make out some of her features now. They looked distorted, her nose misshapen and her cheeks swollen. A shard of light from beneath the door caught the edge of her bare feet and the hem of a long red dressing gown. The varnish on her toenails was red too. It looked freshly applied. She removed a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of her gown, tapped one out, and lit it with a cigarette lighter. She kept her head down, her hair hanging over her face, but I still caught a glimpse of the scars that ran across her chin and her left cheek.
“I should have kept my mouth shut,” she said softly.
“Why?”