Goes down easy(22)

Since he was already tottering on a very shaky limb, he was going to take Della’s reaction to mean that there was. His only hope was that a search of the place might turn up a clue he could follow, or a hint of where to go from here.

“Is this where Taylor’s husband worked?” Perry asked, walking toward the center of the room.

Jack nodded, listening to the echo of her steps and her voice. “I don’t know how many shifts they worked here then, but he was lead boss for one of the production crews.”

“What does that mean?”

“You got me.”

She crossed her arms, rubbed them from her elbows to her shoulders. When she exhaled, her breath frosted. And Jack grew even colder.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked. “You want me to see what’s upstairs while you check out the first floor?”

He hadn’t thought much beyond getting inside. “It might be best if we stay together.”

“It might be faster, and warmer, if we don’t.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her…

“Unless you don’t trust me?” she asked, backing toward the staircase with a dare in her eyes.

The risers looked sturdy enough—though her expression left him unbalanced—and he nodded, listening to the metallic ringing of her footsteps echo as she climbed.

Since there was nothing at the front of the bottom floor, the place having obviously been gutted and still waiting for a new tenant, he headed for the rear, where he found two empty restrooms.

The doors were ajar, the toilet tanks long empty, the water pipes clamped tight to the bottoms of the sinks and the walls. He shone his flashlight overhead in both rooms, and found identical bare bulbs with pull strings. The floor drains were dry and as clean as they got in a place like this.

He found no fresh graffiti, and no meaning in what he could read of that which was there. No wastebaskets, no toilet paper, air dryers that were empty of everything but air when he pried them from the walls.

He made a cursory trip around the cavernous room, flicking his light up and down the walls from the floor to the catwalk above. Nothing. Anything Della had sensed had made no lasting mark here.

Just as he started for the stairs, Perry called his name. He glanced overhead, saw her at the catwalk railing waving him up. He took the stairs two at a time, his feet pounding against the metal.

Something in her face told him to hurry. Something in his gut told him to run.

“What?” he asked, before he’d even reached the top. “What did you find?”

She shook her head, her eyes wide and glassy, her face a deathly pale. “It’s not good.”

He reached for her, wrapped his hand around her shoulder and squeezed. “Are you okay?”

“I will be,” she said, her voice as faint as her nod.

She took a step in reverse, then turned and made her way down the catwalk. His heart was pounding from both dread and adrenaline as he followed her to the third door in the long row of five.

He stepped through, shone his flashlight around the small office space. Unlike the floor below, this room hadn’t been emptied. Industrial gray file cabinets lined one wall, a matching desk backed up to another, but he saw nothing in the low-ceilinged space to explain Perry’s alarm.

“At the end of the row of file cabinets,” she said from his shoulder. “There’s a door. Into a closet.”

And that was when his own panic set in. He inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled, the short choppy breaths frosting in cloudbursts of white.

He reminded himself of where he was—New Orleans; of who he was with—Perry Brazille; of the reason he was here—Dayton Eckhardt—before he walked to the corner. He saw the spray-painted message first.

There will be no ransom demand. We have what we want.





And then he saw the chair, the ropes hanging from the legs and the arms. Yellow nylon, a water-skier’s ropes. Ropes used to bind cargo, to secure it on the deck of a ship.

To secure a man below in the hold, leaving him in the dark for days. For weeks. Until he lost count. Until he barely remembered his name.

“I’m guessing that’s his finger?”

At Perry’s question, Jack startled. The flashlight beam danced around the small room as he forced his breathing pattern to return to normal, forced his muscles to relax, hoping doing so would calm the near deadly beat of his heart.

What had she asked him? “Finger?”

“On the floor,” she said, and he looked down to where she pointed.

Yeah. It was a finger. He ground his jaw until he felt a joint pop, then he stepped into the small room, checking behind the door, shining his light into the corners.

It took only seconds to see what he needed to see. He stepped back out. “Did you touch anything in here?”

“I pushed the door open.” She held up both hands. “But I’m wearing gloves.”

He nodded, guided her back to the staircase with one hand on her arm. Once at the top of the stairs, he pocketed his flashlight, dug for Book’s card and pulled his cell from his waistband holster.

“It’s Jack. You need to get a crime scene unit to the warehouse as soon as you can.”





JACK SAT on the running board of his SUV, the door open, the engine running, the heater blowing at full blast. He had his arms crossed, his hands tucked in his armpits, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled almost to his mouth.

Perry had bummed a Styrofoam cup from one of the officers on the scene, and then bummed coffee from the thermos of another. She held it beneath his nose and waited.

It didn’t take long for him to look up and push back the hood. He took the cup from her gloved hand with a muttered “Thanks,” as he wrapped all ten of his fingers around it.

“You’re welcome. And you look like shit.” She hadn’t planned to blurt it out like that, but he did. If possible, he looked as if he’d aged ten years in the last ten minutes.

He sipped, grimaced. “Thanks for that, too.”

“Seriously, Jack. It’s more than a lack of sleep.” She’d hazard a guess that it was more than this case. “You look like a ghost. Or at least like you’ve seen one.”

“Nah. Just a finger,” he said, and sipped again.

Jack Montgomery, Private Eye, reduced to a shell of his former self by a severed finger? She wasn’t buying it.

But before she could say anything else, he asked, “They found the ring, right? Behind the door?”

She leaned against the vehicle’s closed back passenger door. “Believe it or not, yes.”

“They bagged the ropes? And took scrapings from the spray paint?”

“And confiscated the chair.”

“Did they spray it with luminol or fluorescein?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and turned, leaning her shoulder against the frame and staring down at the top of his head.

“Okay. Whatever.”

“You know, Jack. I’m a shop clerk. They’re not exactly giving me a blow-by-blow. I heard about the ring, the rope and the chair while I was hunting down coffee. If you want to know more, you’re going to have to put those investigative skills of yours to work.”

He studied the coffee in his cup for so long that she wondered if he’d been listening, or if he’d returned to wherever the scene upstairs had taken him. He’d said little about what they’d discovered. She’d expected so much more.

She’d expected him to be ecstatic, to be juiced on adrenaline to the point where he wasn’t even feeling the cold. Instead, he sat hunched over, alone, as if he weren’t the victor but the victim.

The same victim Della had witnessed suffering when she’d done nothing more that morning in her kitchen than reach over and touch his arm.

“Jack? Are you okay?”

“I need to talk to Della. I need to know exactly what she saw. If it makes any sense in context.”

“If she saw chickens, you mean.”

He tossed back the rest of the coffee, threw the cup over his shoulder into the SUV’s back floorboard, and got to his feet. “Did Book say anything about how she was feeling?”

“No, but I can tell you she’ll be sleeping until the headache subsides,” Perry said, glancing up at the sound of footsteps approaching.

Book reached them and stopped, gripping the top of Jack’s open door, his expression grim. “Well, it’s an official case now. Which means, we’ll take it from here. I need you to come with me to operations. Fill me in on what happened and what else you know.”

Jack grumbled under his breath, but said, “Sure. Just let me drop Perry off with Della first.”

“I need to get statements from both of you,” Book argued, one hand moving to his waist. “Kachina said she’d check in on Della until one of us gets back.”

“How was she when you left?” Perry asked.

“Sleeping. She went out fast.”

“Good. We’ll go and get this done while she’s asleep,” Perry said, circling the front of the vehicle on her way to the passenger side.

“Right behind you,” Book said to Jack before jogging back to the taped-off scene, and his own car parked just outside.

“Are you going to tell him what you know?” she asked, once Jack was settled behind the wheel.

“I don’t have any reason not to. But anything he gets from me, he could get from the Austin police.”