Find Her (Detective D.D. Warren #8)(29)

The man kicked me again, back of the neck. I whispered:

“Edgar.”

In response he slammed his foot against me harder, this time catching my ear. “Liar.”

“I’m not—”

“Fucking idiot.” He waved his cigarette at me. I watched the glowing end nervously. I knew what it could do. “Your father’s name. I mean it!”

“Edgar,” I murmured again.

“Fucking liar!” he roared as he came off the sofa. “Name, name, name, give me the fucking name!”

“Molly, Molly, Molly,” I tried.

He whacked me on either side of the head as I cowered with my face against the carpet. I thought, frantically, crazily, I should pull out some of those brown threads. Grab them between my fingers and twist. I could tuck them behind my ears, take them with me back into the box. Oh, the hours of entertainment ahead.

“Give me his fucking name!” the man was still screaming at me. “Last chance, girl! Or I walk out that door, and you’ll never see me again. Hell, you’ll never see anyone again. You’re gone, don’t you get it? You’re just another stupid drunk girl who disappeared on spring break. Think anyone knows where you are? Think anyone cares?”

My mother, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. I kept her to myself. Just like my father’s name, and my brother’s face.

“I’ll stick you back in that box,” he was threatening now. “I’ll lock the lid and that’ll be that. You’ll die down here. Rot away. Become just another stench in this room. And no one will ever know. Your family will never see you again. Never even identify your body.”

I was crying. He hit me harder. But it wasn’t the beating that had me undone. It was the thought of him locking me in the box and then taking off. Of me dying all alone in a coffin-size box.

Like my father rotting away beneath the earth.

When I was a little girl, I used to think my father could see everything. Like Santa Claus, or God, I suppose. My father wasn’t a real dad at all but an all-knowing ghost, and I would look for him in the sunlight dappling through trees, in the shadows of the deep woods.

“Daddy,” I would whisper. And always, always, always, I knew he was there. Because, according to my mother, my father had always loved the forest.

Where I could not find him was in the stillness of a coffin-size box.

“Ernesto,” I whispered.

But the man was now too busy beating me furiously to hear.

I curled up tighter against the dirt-brown carpet. “Edgar,” I shouted suddenly. “Evan. Ernesto. Eli. Earl.” I made them up, quickly, frantically. Another game to pass the time. Names that begin with E.

Yelling the names again and again. Because the shit-brown carpet was composed of so many threads, and so was I, and I couldn’t afford to give anything more away. There was too little of me left, and my father’s name was part of that. A highly polished granite marker in the ground. A small but precious memory.

Eventually, the man wore himself out. He stopped beating and kicking, falling to the floor instead. He lay beside me, breath ragged from his exertions. We remained side by side in silence.

“Damn shame,” he said shortly.

I didn’t respond.

“I mean, considerin’ how nice I was planning on being and all. I mean, hell, taking you with me.”

I couldn’t help myself. I stirred, shifting slightly against the grimy floor.

“A week in a big rig. Maybe it’s not for everyone. I mean, I would definitely have to take the box, being your first outing at all. But still. You’d be on the road. Maybe I could let you out at night. You know, versus seven days shut up alone here. Maybe even eight, nine, ten days. A delivery takes as long as it takes. Man’s gotta do his job.”

“Water?” I couldn’t help myself. Seven days alone was terrifying enough, but a possible ten days without water? I’d never paid enough attention in science classes, but I was pretty sure no one could survive that long.

“All the more reason to join me on the road,” he informed me. “All the more reason to give me a name.”

I lifted my head at last. I stared at him. His hard-lined face. His unshaved cheeks, his crooked tobacco-stained teeth. He was ugly and awful. He was powerful and divine, even more so than a ghost dad in the woods.

And I knew then, just as he no doubt knew all along, what I was going to say next.

“Everett. Everett Robert Dane.”

The man smiled at me.

“Now was that really so hard?” he asked me.

I didn’t say a word.

He climbed off the floor, started rooting around on the coffee table.

“So. Time to write a note. I mean, as long as you’re running off with me, don’t you think you should at least tell your mother?”





Chapter 13


D.D.’S SUNDAY MORNING BEGAN with a phone call. Walking into her office (no rest for the wicked, or for a homicide supervisor who’d just landed a major case), she was juggling coffee in one hand and her crossbody leather messenger bag in the other. She barely set down her travel mug in time to snag the receiver.

“Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren.”

“Is it true? Did that man take my daughter? Do you know what happened to her yet? For the love of God, why are we having to learn all this from the press? What kind of unfeeling monsters are you?”