Forgive Me(41)

Angie approached the girl from behind. “Go away from him, and go away fast,” she said as she passed. She didn’t break stride. Didn’t stop to engage, but the girl heard Angie’s words loud and clear.

She headed in the opposite direction. It would have been a bonus to get the business card the girl had accepted, but that would have meant stopping to engage. Engaging could have blown Angie’s cover, or worse, let her target disappear. If the man was what Angie believed him to be, the card would be bogus anyway.

The man stopped and looked back. He didn’t notice Angie, who took cover in a crowd. Any girl who took notice of the man’s snarling face would never consider stopping to talk to him. He marched off in a huff. Angie stayed on his heels—thirty feet back, of course. Maybe he’d had enough for the day. Not every hunt was a successful one.

He took the escalator to the mezzanine level. Angie let a group go in front of her, target still in her sights.

He turned toward the parking garage. The crowds had thinned, and Angie’s anxiety levels spiked. She changed her approach as she changed her stride. She was headed for her car, and he was going for his.

She fished the car keys from her purse. He either didn’t notice her behind him or he didn’t turn around to look. He stopped at a gleaming Cadillac Escalade. With her phone out and held in front of her at an angle, she launched her camera app and managed to snap a picture of the license plate as she passed.

He was definitely leaving. Taillights came on as he reversed out of his space and drove by Angie at a good clip. Her car was parked near the ramp on the east side of Union Station, while he had entered from H Street. He would be long gone by the time she retrieved her vehicle.

Still, she tried. She paid at the ticket window and pulled out into traffic. The Escalade was nowhere in sight. Gone. Long gone. She pulled over where it was safe and used her phone to access the DocuFind portal.

DocuFind provided licensed private investigators with a wealth of useful data. The movies made this process look so easy. Jot down a plate, hop on a computer, and wham-o, there’s your guy. A real license plate search was not as straightforward. Free websites frequently provided out-of-date or incorrect information. The DocuFind results came straight from the DMV, but instant was to the DMV as animated was to a mummy.

Angie entered the data into the website forms and submitted her request. The results could come back in an hour or a day. Soon, though, she could begin to build a profile of this man, gathering bits of his background the way a bird builds a nest, piece by piece. Date of birth, current address, criminal record, properties owned, that sort of thing. Who was this man? Did he know Nadine’s whereabouts? Was Angie even watching the right person? Maybe the entire exchange between Mr. Baldy and Nadine was innocuous.

Angie was on a fishing expedition of her own. She had cast her line with a good-sized hook and some tasty bait on the end.

All she needed was a bite.





CHAPTER 22



Excerpts from the journal of Nadine Jessup, pages 38-40




I’ve divided my life into two periods. B.B. for Before Buggy and A.B. for After Buggy. I can’t write what I did with him. I won’t go there. If I wrote it down, it would be permanent and I want it to just fade away. I puked in the wastebasket after he left, I will confess that much. Ricardo came back at some point and said he’d take me out to eat, but I didn’t want to go anywhere with him. I didn’t want to eat either, not that it matters. I guess Ricardo didn’t like my answer. He grabbed my hair and yanked it hard. I screamed because it hurt. He looked me in the eyes and said if he wanted to take me out to eat, I’d go with him. No was never an answer. Then he calmed down because he said he didn’t really care what I did. He let go of my hair and I started to cry.

I asked him why he was being so horrible to me. He told me he was helping me. He was teaching me. You can’t say no here. If I didn’t cooperate every time something gets asked of me, I go into the hole. I wanted to know what the hole was all about, so Ricardo took me by the hand. Not in a loving way, more like a handcuff kind of way.

He pulled me out of my room. Without the blindfold I could see that I was in a basement divided into a bunch of rooms made with that cheap wood. I heard bedsprings creaking and those kinds of groans. The smell made me gag. It was that kind of smell. The corridor was narrow and the floor cement. We stopped at a kitchen area. It was filthy! I always kept the kitchen at home spotless. There was trash on the floor and piles of dirty dishes in the sink. If my mom did the cleaning, that’s what our house would look like. The fluorescent lights were blinking, or maybe I was still high. I wanted to be higher. I wanted to not feel any of this. My stomach was hurting but in a strange way and somehow my body knew if I smoked a little more of what Stephen Macan gave me, the pain would go away.

There were girls sitting at the kitchen table, chain smoking cigarettes and drinking beers. A tall thin blonde girl with a strappy dress and a cocky look got up and approached me. She spoke with a thick accent that reminded me a little of the way Stephen Macan spoke.

She put her hand on my face and caressed my cheek. She said she heard about me. Knew I was the new kid and said she’ll take care of me. She grabbed my chin and forced open my mouth. She shoved a blue pill inside and closed my mouth for me. She gave me a swig of her beer to swallow it down. Then she let me have a few drags of a special cigarette.