Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (31 page)

Then the line went dead.

The abduction of Wendell Byers went as smoothly as Primo could have hoped, aided in no small part by Byers’s own lack of guard. The fool was convinced being a councilman made him invincible, as if elected officials didn’t bleed like everyone else.

Byers was so unsuspecting, Primo probably could have done the job himself. But Primo brought two men along, just in case. They were pros from New York, rented thugs. They went through the front door—unlocked—and found him in the study, typing on his laptop. He was, naturally, outraged at the intrusion. But his blather only lasted so long. One of the thugs clunked him on the head with a paperweight, opening a small gash in his scalp. The other bound him with an electrical cord. Together, they dragged him out of his house while Primo, having nothing else to do, grabbed the laptop.

It had been an afterthought, taking the computer. Later, when a broken Byers started whispering secrets, Primo realized it had been a brilliant bit of criminal intuition.

But first Primo had to do the breaking. They tossed Byers in the trunk of Primo’s sedan, then brought him back to the warehouse. When Byers came to and found himself tied to a chair, he was indignant at first, filling the room with his how-dare-yous and you’ll-pay-for-thises. It was typical Byers bluster, and Primo wanted to silence it.

So he took his nail gun, grabbed Byers by the wrist, and shot a nail into Byers’s right hand, actually pinning it to the wall behind him. The man yelped with pain, cursing Primo loudly and profanely—as if it would do any good.

There was still too much fight in Byers. So, slowly, Primo took it out of him. He positioned a clock in front of Byers’s eyes and informed the councilman that he would be leaving the room for ten minutes. Then he returned and punched a nail in Byers’s forearm.

Primo knew the anticipation of pain was almost as excruciating as the pain itself. So he kept returning every ten minutes, wordlessly shooting a nail into another part of Byers’s body, then departing. After forty minutes, Byers stopped cursing him. After an hour and a half, Byers was more than ready to talk. After three hours, Byers was begging to talk. But Primo waited until four hours passed before he chose to listen.

That’s when it came pouring out of Byers—all the answers to Primo’s questions, everything Primo needed to bring this messy arrangement to a neat conclusion. Whenever Primo decided Byers was being something slightly less than a hundred percent forthcoming, he left the room, announcing he would return in ten minutes. Sometimes he left the room even when Byers was cooperating. It kept Byers’s fear at the appropriate level.

Eventually, the councilman began growing weak, slipping in and out of consciousness. So Primo finally finished him off with a few nails to the head. By that point, Primo had already learned everything he needed to know.

Other than the laptop—which Primo already possessed—Byers had left behind just one piece of evidence that could prove troublesome for Primo. But Primo could take care of that quickly enough.

CHAPTER 8

There is something about the female scream that juices my body chemistry. Probably it’s hardwired, a remnant of the days when my more hirsute forebearers clung together in nomadic bands wandering an inhospitable planet. Back then, a woman’s scream meant someone was about to be sabertooth tiger lunch. Or something like that. Whatever it was, I suddenly found myself wired on adrenaline, with my heart pounding and my body primed for large-motor activity.

My hands were shaking, but I managed to force my fingers to call Sweet Thang back, on the off chance it was nothing—like a big spider scared her and made her drop her phone.

But my call went straight to voice mail and, besides, I knew this wasn’t arachnid related. Sweet Thang had made that kind of noise when Akilah jumped her and put a knife to her throat. It was an I’m-in-trouble-come-help-me-now-don’t-dawdle-please kind of scream.

I pulled a screeching U-turn, the kind that involved jumping a curb because the road just wasn’t wide enough, and sped toward Akilah’s house. As I blew through a series of red lights—I thought they were orange, Officer—I called my favorite detective sergeant, in hopes of getting some reinforcement.

“Raines here.”

“I think Akilah Harris knows who killed Windy,” I said. “And I think the killer is after her.”

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, slow down. What happened?”

I relayed what Sweet Thang told me about Akilah knowing more than she let on, then told him about the scream.

Raines was unimpressed.

“All you really know for sure is that your colleague’s cell phone doesn’t work,” he said.

“Come on, you’ve got two young women in trouble, probably kidnapped or worse,” I said, feeling a little frantic that I couldn’t impress on him the gravity of that scream. “Can’t you put out an amber alert or something?”

“I can’t put out an amber alert because someone yelled just before her cell phone battery conked out,” Raines replied. “We would need confirmation an abduction had occurred. And besides, amber alerts are for kids, not adults.”

I knew that, of course. I also knew, thinking as a levelheaded cop—and not an easily addled newspaper reporter—he was right: I had a strong hunch something was wrong, but little more than that.

“If you can get a witness to say they saw a forcible abduction, we’ve got a different scenario on our hands,” Raines continued. “Otherwise, you got nothing.”

“Can you at least ask a squad car to meet me at the house? Something?” I begged. “For all I know, it’s a hostage situation and they’re still holed up inside.”

“Fine,” Raines said. “I’ll ask patrol to send a car over. But I’m a little busy, you know? I got a pretty major investigation here, and I’m going to have to ask you to lose this number if you keep bothering me with half-baked hunches.”

He hung up before I could reply.

Continuing to drive as if traffic signals were mere suggestions, I contemplated my next move, concluding quickly I didn’t have one. I couldn’t exactly charge into Akilah’s house, guns blazing. Not when the the most dangerous weapon I had in my car was nail clippers.

Thankfully, I arrived at Akilah’s simultaneously with a white and black Newark patrol car. Two cops, a tall black man and a short Hispanic woman, got out. I waved to them.

“We were told we got a possible DV,” the guy said. “You the one who called it in?”

DV. What’s DV? Oh, right: domestic violence. Why would Raines tell them it’s a domestic violence?

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said. “I was talking to a colleague of mine on the phone and I heard her scream like she was in real trouble.”

I could tell the guy thought I was wasting his time and was doing his best to suppress an eye roll.

“And she’s in
there
!” the female cop said, pointing to Akilah’s burned-out shell of a house which, admittedly, didn’t look very domestic at the moment.

“Yeah,” I said. “Her name is Lauren. There’s a woman with her named Akilah.”

“What’s the guy’s name?” the male cop asked.

“I, uh, I don’t know.”

More barely restrained eye-rolling.

“All right,” he said, then turned to his partner. “We’ll check it out. You stay here.”

The cops walked up to the front door—or, rather, the hole where it used to be—and entered. I braced myself for the sound of gunshots, or another scream, or something. But the cops came out two minutes later. The guy looked perturbed.

“There’s no one there,” he hollered from the top of the porch. “You sure they were in that place?”

I was about to answer when I was interrupted by a lady standing on the stoop of a three-family house two doors down.

“They left,” she said, in an African accent. She had a brightly colored shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and I could guess from the slippers on her feet she didn’t want to leave her spot. The male cop took the lead and walked toward her.

“Who left, ma’am?”

“Two women, three guys,” she said. “They got in a black car and drove away.”

I felt the adrenaline rush renew itself.

“See? They were kidnapped,” I said in a voice that sounded more like yelling than I wanted.

The male cop shot me an annoyed look that said,
Shut it.

“Could you please describe the women?” he asked.

“One was a pretty white girl, blond hair. The other was small, dark. She was pretty, too, but she looked like a mess. I had seen her before. She lives in that house, but I don’t know her.”

“Now what about the men?” he asked.

“I didn’t look that hard.”

“Did it look like they were being forced into the car?” the cop asked.

She thought for a moment

“Maybe. Maybe not. The little dark one was crying. But they walked to the car and got inside.”

Something unintelligible squawked on the cop’s radio, which he had attached to his belt. Whatever it was, he was suddenly in a hurry to leave.

“All right. Thank you, ma’am. You can go back inside.”

The cop started walking toward his patrol car.

“What!” I said. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”

“You heard her. She said they weren’t abducted.”

“She said she wasn’t sure. There’s a difference.”

I panned my eyes toward the female cop, just to see if there was a chance I’d be able to prevail on her softer, female side … except, apparently, she wasn’t into that stereotype. She seemed more concerned her hat wasn’t sitting straight as she walked toward the squad car and paid little heed to my discussion with her partner.

“She said one of the women was crying,” I pleaded. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“My wife cries all the time,” he replied as he got back into his car. “I’m sorry, sir, we have to go.”

As he pulled away, the shriek of the tires on the pavement made it all the more emphatic: the police were not going to help me on this one.

Better sharpen those nail clippers.

*   *   *

Not to denigrate Officer Friendly’s interrogation techniques, but I felt there was a little more to be learned from our eyewitness, so I jogged up to the African woman’s house, climbing the steps to her sagging front porch. There were three doorbells. I rang all three.

A window to my left cracked open.

“Yes?” a voice asked. It was the African woman.

“I’m Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner
. Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions about what you just saw?”

“Hold on,” she said. Soon, she was standing with the front door slightly ajar. She didn’t ask me in, which was fine. I didn’t have time for hospitality.

“Yes?” she said again.

“I’m worried those two women may be in trouble,” I said. “Can you tell me a bit more about the men you saw them with?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get a good look.”

“Please try.”

She closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment.

“Well, two of them were large. They were young,” she said. “The other was old. He wasn’t very tall, but he looked like he had muscles, like a weight lifter.”

She paused.

“He had a beard, a, what do you call it,” she said, opening her eyes and drawing a circle around her mouth with her finger. “A goatee.”

Short. Built. Goatee. It seemed like a description I had heard before.

“Racially, was he white, black?”

“I would say … Hispanic.”

“And how would you describe his hair?” I asked.

“He didn’t have any. His head was shaved.”

That cinched it for me. Akilah and Sweet Thang had been kidnapped by the so-called Puerto Rican man, the one Akilah said sold the mortgage on her house. I had dismissed him as being a product of her imagination, just another piece of her intricate fabrication. But really he was like everything else in Akilah’s world: twisted slightly, for storytelling purposes, but basically real.

It also fit the rough description of the man who had returned Windy’s corpse at Enterprise—Donato Semedo, or whatever his name was—whom Raines had described as short and broad.

“How long ago did they leave?” I asked.

“About ten minutes ago,” she said.

In other words, right after I heard Sweet Thang’s scream. He probably marched them right out of the house. It was a bold move—a kidnapping in broad daylight—but I supposed if Akilah knew something about the murder of Windy Byers, the killer would take some big risks to be rid of her.

And anyone who happened to be with her.

“And you said the car was black?”

“Yes, long and black. Like the cars the men drive to pick people up at the airport.”

“A livery cab?”

“Yes, a livery cab.”

“Thank you, ma’am, you’ve been very helpful,” I said, slipping my card through the door opening. “Please call me if you think of anything else.”

I trotted back to my Malibu, wondering how I could track down a single black livery cab in a city where ten thousand of them came to pick people up at the airport every day.

I had no shot.

At this point, my only connection to the Puerto Rican man was Hector Gomes of Van Buren Street. I had to get to him, fast, with what resources I had.

I made two phone calls. The first was to Denardo Webster. My picture was helpful, but he was the only one who really knew what Gomes looked like. I told Webster about the abduction and instructed him to meet me at Gomes’s house just as soon as he could get his feet off his desk.

My second call was to Tommy, who would be helpful if there was, in fact, a language barrier to surmount.

“Hey, can I pick you up outside the office in five minutes?” I said. “I think Sweet Thang is in real trouble, and I may need your Spanish or maybe even some fake Portuguese.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ve been figuring out some real interesting stuff with these dead donors, by the way.”

“Great. You can tell me on the way.”

Once again, I made the Malibu do things the good people at Chevrolet never intended, which might have bought me an extra minute or two. I jammed the brakes to noisy effect directly outside the building, where Tommy was waiting.