The Specter (3 page)

“Your sister has been missing three days as of today.”

Aaron nodded and waited.

“I have to caution you again. It’s important you listen.”

Aaron nodded for him to go ahead.

“Vigilantism. Doing it on your own.” Folley leaned forward in his chair and braced his forearms on the desk. “Do you know how stupid it was to address those men? You could’ve been shot. When I find your sister, what do I tell her then? Her renegade brother got shot searching for you?”

Aaron looked away. Anger served itself up along with a twist of lemon-filled pain. The bitter kind.

“What’s wrong?” Folley asked. “Why are you so pissed off?” When Aaron didn’t answer immediately, he continued. “Talk to me.”

“All right. I’ll talk because maybe it’ll help you understand how I feel and why I will do whatever I can to locate my sister.” He uncrossed his legs and stood, pacing off the anger, willing his temper to cool. “My sister has been missing for three days. So far, no one has taken my statement or asked me any questions.” He looked at Folley and raised a hand. “I know, I know, you get missing person cases all the time and they turn out to be a weekend drunken binge or someone eloped. Well, that hasn’t happened in Joanne’s case. She called me. She was scared. No one was there for her and now she’s gone. I’m fucking concerned here.”

“I know, and that’s what we’re here for.”

“My other issue was her job.”

“How so?” Folley asked.

Aaron faced him, his body a temple, rigid in the face of adversity, every muscle tensing. “I felt that since she was a dancer, a
stripper
,” the word slipped off his tongue like one would spit a gob of saliva on the pavement, “her case wouldn’t get the same attention that another one would.”

“That may be perceived in the public, but that isn’t how it is in here. Our job is to protect human life,” he tapped his desk with his pen, “as the highest priority, and that includes dancers, prostitutes and ballerinas. You clear on that?”

Aaron nodded, walked over to the Rubik’s Cube and picked it up. “You mind?”

Folley shook his head, set his pen down, laced his hands behind his head and leaned back.

Aaron worked the puzzle, using deft fingers to slide and twist with the speed honed of years of managing and manipulating every muscle and tendon in his body. He got his first Rubik’s Cube in the second foster home he was shipped to and only lost it three years ago. It was the one item that allowed his mind a chance to settle when the world around him was chaos.

It took him just over a minute to solve the cube. He slammed it down harder than he meant to.

“If only life could be that easy,” he whispered.

Folley said nothing, just stared.

“My parents took Joanne and me on a summer vacation when I was twelve years old and Joanne was ten.” He angled the guest chair and slumped down in it, defeated for the moment as memories assailed him. “We had it all planned. Northern Ontario, camping, fishing, lakes, sunshine, swimming and ice cream. Joanne had even bought suntan lotion out of her allowance—I remember because of how proud she was of it.” He paused to collect his emotions. He refused to weep in front of Detective Folley. “They stopped at the Petro-Canada on Highway 400, just north of Toronto and we all went to the bathroom.” Aaron glared at Folley. “Joanne and I never saw them again.”

“What? What happened?”

“Don’t know. We waited all day. We were young. We didn’t think to check the car for over ten minutes, but it was already gone. I told Joanne that they probably went to gas up and that they’d be right back. They never showed.”

“Did you ever find out what happened?”

Aaron shook his head in the negative. “A nice lady bought us an ice cream when she became concerned with Joanne’s crying. I’ll never forget her. She had long earrings and a wide smile. To this day I can close my eyes and still see that kind woman’s face.”

Folley unlaced his hands and clasped them together on his lap.

“They separated Joanne and me. Said there just wasn’t enough people taking a brother and a sister. We tried to stay in touch but they moved us so much it became impossible. When I was sixteen, I ran away. I left the system and started searching for Joanne. It took over two years. By the time I found her, she’d gone through seven homes and been abused by at least three different men. She was a wreck.”

Aaron clenched his fist and covered it with his other hand.

“I had been practicing martial arts for a few years by then and wanted to go and kill whoever had done that to her, but she said it was over. She begged me to do nothing about it. Do you get my point? Not only didn’t the system help us when we needed it the most, but no one was ever accountable. I pulled her out and gave her a place to stay. By the time she got clean of drugs and alcohol, she started dancing in the clubs around Toronto. She’s an adult, and I couldn’t talk her out of it. But understand something about me. I searched for her all those years ago and I found her on my terms. No one helped. In fact, I was pushed away by the system. Privacy and shit like that. Well, guess what? She’s the only family I’ve got left and I will search for her this time too. Nothing and no one will stop me. I’m a private citizen. I pay my taxes and will come and go as I please. And if I find whoever has hurt my baby sister, they had better fucking pray you get there first.”

He slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand to release the pent-up anger. He needed to be in his gym. He needed the bag to punch and kick for an hour. It was the only way to release the violence.

Folley nodded, concern in his eyes. “Your story isn’t uncommon. I understand where you’re coming from, and I don’t want to belittle you or your passion when I say that you have to let the professionals handle this. You have to try to step aside and let us walk in on men with guns. You do know where I’m going with this?”

Why did I tell him in the first place? I should’ve expected that response because no one really cares, do they?

Folley typed on his MacBook. His eyes widened and he looked from Aaron and then back to the screen.

“I thought I recognized your name. I didn’t connect it to your sister when I got the file, but your name was nagging at me. Then I thought I’d check our system to see if there was anything on your parents and here’s what I found.”

Aaron leaned forward as Folley turned the laptop toward him. His mug shot from six weeks ago filled the screen.

“What’s all this?” Folley asked. “Attempted murder? And now you’re in my office telling me about guys pointing guns at you. Is trouble just finding you or are you searching for it?”

Aaron got up and headed for the door.

“Hold up,” Folley said.

Aaron stopped without turning around. He waited.

“You want to tell me about this so we can be on an even keel or do you want to walk away and make me think you’re just a bad dude looking to even a score?”

Aaron leaned against the wall, facing Folley.

“A seventeen-year-old girl showed up at my dojo two months ago. She had been in the hospital for three days. Her face was bruised up bad, one eye swollen shut. Her right arm was broken in two spots and four of her fingers had been split back and broken like pretzels. She limped into the dojo and asked if I was the owner of the gym. She told me that one of my students was her father, John Ashcroft, and that her mother was still in the hospital. Apparently he had started taking my classes two months before so he could learn new and exciting ways to beat his wife and daughter.” Aaron paused to step away from the wall. “The system wasn’t helping. No charges were laid. The mother refused. The daughter was too afraid. When John Ashcroft showed up on his regular Wednesday night class, I did two things wrong. I made an example of him and I went too far. I showed the rest of my students what it looks like to break up the human body and how easy it is to snap bones. When Ashcroft lay in a puddle of his own blood, I explained to the students that if any of them use this martial art for abuse, the same consequences would befall them. John Ashcroft is still in a coma, and if he dies, my charge goes up to first degree murder. I don’t know how my lawyer got me bail, but he did. My dojo went up for sale the next day and it sold to a bunch of Russians recently.”

“You’re full of tales about the system not working in your favor. Well, maybe I can change that, but you’re going to have to do something for me.”

Aaron opened the office door and said, “What’s that?”

“Stay out of this and let us do our job. You’re too wound up. You’re too close to this. Trust me, that doesn’t work. Give me your cell number. I will call you every day. I will keep you in the loop. The minute I know something, I will tell you. No stone unturned. Deal?”

Aaron nodded, knowing he could never agree to walk away, but at least it would calm Folley and let him focus on what he had to do. He recited his cell number and walked away.

“Stevens?”

Aaron stopped and stuck his head back in. “Yeah?”

“Sorry about your parents. They sound like shits. When I have some free time, I’ll look into your case. It was only eleven years ago. Maybe I can find something out for you.”

“I had a recording on my cell phone for two days from my missing sister. A little research and I witnessed Gary Weeks being manhandled into a white van. Do you mean you’ll
investigate
my parents like you’re handling my sister’s case? Sorry, I’m not trying to be rude, but you can’t even solve that Rubik’s Cube. Detective Folley, thanks, but no thanks. Don’t need your help, and how do you even know
if
I want to find my parents?”

He shut the door hard and walked away. He knew that was uncalled for, but he was sick of the system, the promises and the security it was supposed to represent.

He had other places to go and other people to see. Aaron would find his sister before the cops did, and Folley could eat shit.

It didn’t hit him until he had already pulled out of the station that Folley hadn’t taken his statement of what happened on the island airport that morning. Men had pointed guns at him and the detective didn’t file a report or send someone else to do it.

What the fuck are the cops doing anyway?

It was time to get serious. He had a court date coming up for attempted murder. Jail time was a probability. He had to find Joanne and help her out of whatever trouble she was in before he could think about his own future.

Without Joanne, his only surviving family member, he had no future.

Chapter 3

The anger at the injustice of the system brewed in Aaron like rancid milk, turning his stomach and making him physically sick. He had to do something about it. He had to find Joanne first and then talk her into leaving the strip club. Whatever was needed, he would do it.

After staying up all night to meet the ferry at the Toronto docks, Aaron left the police station and headed home to sleep. But sleep was elusive. He tossed and turned, his mind spinning possible scenarios, attempting to sew something together that made sense.

At just after four in the afternoon, he rose from bed, groggy and exhausted, did a fifteen-minute kata to loosen up his muscles and initiate better blood flow, and got dressed.

He grabbed his car keys and headed out. Ten minutes later he was en route to the House of Lancaster. Someone there must have seen something. He still had no idea how Frank or his brother Gary were involved with his sister. Now that he had seen Gary, maybe one of the girls at the club would recall him.

He pulled into a half-full parking lot.

Not too busy just before the dinner hour, eh?

A large bouncer stood by the back entrance. The House of Lancaster had a front door facing Bloor Street, but almost everyone used the more discreet back door by the parking lot.

Aaron walked through the back lounge area that was always devoid of people but filled with tables and chairs. He walked down a short hall, the kitchen’s window on his left, the stage on his right. Ahead of him sat the cavernous seating area where men could drink and drool over the cavorting bodies of half-naked women, or in some cases, completely naked women.

The young girl on the stage couldn’t have been more than eighteen, thin, undernourished, already wavering on her feet, no doubt due to alcohol, dancing to a Blind Melon song about no rain. She wore a thong and nothing on her breasts as she worked the pole. Five men sat in pervert’s row, right up at the stage, two of them tapping the edge of the stage to the beat of the song.

He found an empty seat halfway to the back. When talking to the dancers about his sister, it would provide a modicum of privacy.

He didn’t have to wait long. A tall black girl wearing a purple lace bra and panties approached him.

“Ya wanna dance, honey?” The dancers were on him before the waitress.

“No, a coffee would work though.”

“I’m not a fucking waitress,” she mumbled and was off to the next table.