A Trace of Crime

On the surface, nothing was out of the ordinary. Carolyn always left the house around 2:30 to meet up with Jessica. She enjoyed the solitary, if brief, walk. It allowed her to clear her head for the second half of the day.

Playa del Rey Middle School let out at 2:35 and Jessica biked home every day. By the time she got everything from her locker into her backpack, made it to the bike rack, said goodbye to her friends, and got on the road, it was usually around 2:45.

Mother and daughter invariably met up at about the halfway point between the school and house around 2:50. Then they would return home together, Carolyn walking, Jessica biking slowly beside her, occasionally circling her mom playfully.

They would talk about the events of the day: who had a crush on whom, which teacher accidentally used a curse word, what song they were working on in choir. When they got home, there was always a snack waiting, after which Jessica would dive into her homework and Carolyn would get back to her own work. They had their routine and it was always the same, give or take a few minutes.

But Carolyn had been walking for close to a half hour now. It was almost 3 p.m. and she was nearly two-thirds of the way to the school. She should have run into Jessica by now.

Maybe her daughter had needed to go to the bathroom. Or maybe she had gotten caught up in a conversation with Kyle, the cute boy from her English class. But the tingling sensation on her neck told Carolyn that something else had happened.

When she rounded the next corner, she saw that she was right. Jessica’s purple bike, covered in stickers from the live-action Beauty and the Beast movie and photos of her favorite singers, Selena Gomez and Zara Larsson, was lying on its side, half on the sidewalk, half on the road.

She ran over to it and stared, frozen with fear. Looking around desperately, she caught a glimpse of something in the bushes of the nearest house. She hurried over and pulled at it. A branch snapped and the thing came loose.

She looked at it, almost unable to process what she was seeing. It was Jessica’s backpack. Carolyn dropped to her knees, her legs suddenly unsteady. Her heart pounded nearly out of her chest as the realization hit her: her daughter had vanished.

CHAPTER ONE

Detective Keri Locke was frustrated. She sat at her desk in LAPD’s West Los Angeles Pacific Division, studying the computer screen in front of her.

All around her, the station was bustling. Two teenagers who had snatched a purse and tried to escape on skateboards were being booked. An elderly man was seated at a nearby desk, explaining to a patient officer how someone took his morning paper every day before he could get outside to collect it. Two chubby guys were handcuffed on benches at opposite ends of the holding area because they’d gotten into a mid-afternoon bar fight and still wanted to go at it. Keri ignored them all.

For the last twenty minutes, she’d been poring over every post in the “strictly platonic” section of the Los Angeles Craigslist. It was the same thing she’d done every day for the last six weeks when her friend, newspaper columnist Margaret “Mags” Merrywether, had given her a tip she hoped would help her find her missing daughter, Evie.

Evie had been abducted over five years ago. But after relentless, mostly fruitless searching, Keri had finally found her, only to have her ripped away again. The memory of seeing Evie being driven away in a black van, turning a corner and disappearing from sight, perhaps forever, was too much. She shook the thought from her head and refocused on what was in front of her. After all, it was a lead. And she desperately needed a lead.

It was in late November when Mags had reached out to a shadowy figure known only as the Black Widower. He was a fixer, legendary for doing the dirty work of the rich and powerful, whether that was assassinating political enemies, making troublesome reporters disappear, or stealing sensitive material.

In this case, Keri suspected that he either had her daughter or at least knew her location. That was because just six weeks ago, Keri had tracked down the man who had abducted Evie all those years ago. He was a professional kidnapper known as the Collector. Keri had learned that his real name was Brian Wickwire after she killed him in a life-or-death struggle.

Using information she later found in Wickwire’s apartment, Keri had been able to piece together Evie’s location. She’d gone there just in time to see an older man forcing the girl into a black van. She had called out and even locked eyes with her daughter, now thirteen. She had actually heard Evie say the word “Mommy.”

But the man rammed Keri’s car with the van and escaped. Dazed and unable to follow, she’d been forced to watch helplessly as her daughter disappeared from her sight a second time. Later that night, she’d been told that the van had been found in an empty parking lot. The older man had been shot in the head execution style. Evie was gone.

For several weeks after, the department had run down every lead, shaken every tree in search of her daughter. But they were all dead ends. And without any evidence to go on, the team eventually had to pursue other cases.

Ultimately it was Mags, who looked like a cover model for Southern Socialite magazine but was actually a tough-as-nails investigative reporter, who had provided a new lead. She told Keri that the situation with Evie reminded her of someone she had investigated years ago called the Black Widower. He was notorious for double taps in parking lots late at night. He was known to drive a Lincoln Continental without plates, which had been visible in the parking lot surveillance footage where the black van was found.

And it was Mags who, using a tip from a confidential source and writing anonymously, had reached out to him using the seemingly outdated Craigslist message board. It was apparently how he liked to communicate with potential new clients.

And to her amazement, he’d responded almost immediately. He said that he’d be in touch and would soon ask her to create a new email address so they could communicate confidentially.

Unfortunately, after that initial communication, he’d gone dark. Mags had reached out a second time about three weeks ago but hadn’t heard anything back. Keri wanted her to try again but Mags insisted it was a bad idea. Pressuring this guy would only make him go to ground. As frustrating as it was, they had to wait for him to reach out again.

But Keri was worried it would never happen. And as she scoured the “strictly platonic” board for the third time today, she couldn’t help think that what had once seemed like such a promising lead might just be another devastating dead end.

She closed the window on her screen and shut her eyes as she took several deep breaths. Trying not to let hopelessness overwhelm her, she allowed her mind to drift wherever it wanted. Sometimes it took her to unexpected, revealing places that helped unlock puzzles she thought were beyond her.

What am I missing? There’s always a clue. I just have to recognize it when I see it.

But it didn’t work this time. Her brain kept circling around the idea of the Black Widower, untraceable and unknowable.

Of course, at one time she had thought that same thing about the Collector too. And despite that, she had been able to track him down, kill him, and use information in his apartment to discover her daughter’s location. If she did it once, she could do it again.

Maybe I need to review the Collector’s emails again or go back through his apartment. Maybe I missed something the first time because I didn’t know what to look for.

It occurred to her that both men – the Collector and the Black Widower – operated in the same world. They were both professional criminals for hire – one a child abductor, the other a killer. It didn’t seem impossible that their paths might have crossed at some point. Maybe the Collector had a record of that somewhere.

And then she realized there was one other piece of connective tissue. They both had links to the same man, a well-heeled downtown lawyer named Jackson Cave.

To most people, Cave was a prominent corporate attorney. But Keri knew him as a shady dealmaker who represented the dregs of society, was secretly involved in everything from sex slave rings to drug trafficking operations to outright murder for hire. Unfortunately, she couldn’t prove any of that without revealing some secrets of her own.

But even without proof, she was certain that Cave was involved with both men. And if that was the case, maybe they had interacted. It wasn’t much. But it was something to follow up on. And she needed something, anything, to keep her from going crazy.

She was about to go to the evidence room to look through Wickwire’s stuff again when her partner, Detective Ray Sands, walked over.

“I ran into Lieutenant Hillman in the break room,” he said. “He just got a call and he’s assigned us a case. I can give you the details on the drive over. Are you okay to head out? You look like you’re in the middle of something.”

“Just some research,” she answered, locking the screen, “nothing that can’t wait. Let’s go.”

Ray looked at her curiously. She knew he was fully aware that she wasn’t being completely straight with him. But he said nothing as she stood up and led the way out of the station.

*

Keri and Ray were members of West Los Angeles Division’s Missing Persons Unit. It was generally regarded as the best in all of the LAPD and they were the two major reasons why. They had solved more cases in the last eighteen months than most entire divisions had in double that time.

It was also true that Keri was viewed as a loose cannon who could create as many problems as she solved. In fact, she was currently technically under investigation by Internal Affairs for how the Collector confrontation had gone down. Everyone kept telling her it was only a formality. And yet it hovered over her, like a rain cloud always threatening to open up.

Still, despite the corners they sometime cut, no one could question their results. Ray and Keri were the best of the best, even if they were going through a few personal hiccups these days.

Keri chose not to think about that as Ray walked her through the case details on the drive over to the scene. She couldn’t handle focusing on both a missing persons case and her complicated relationship with Ray at the same time. In fact, she had to look out the window to avoid focusing on his strong, dark forearms gripping the steering wheel.

“The potential victim is Jessica Rainey,” Ray said. “She’s twelve and lives in Playa del Rey. The mom typically meets her on her bike ride home from school. Today she found the bike lying at the edge of the street and her backpack shoved in a bush nearby.”

“Do we know anything about the parents?” Keri asked as they barreled down Culver Boulevard in the direction of the seaside community, where she also happened to live. Often parental estrangement was a determining factor. A good half of their missing child cases involved one parent kidnapping the kid.

“Not much yet,” Ray said as he weaved through traffic. It was early January and cold out but Keri noticed beads of sweat trickling down Ray’s bald head as he drove. He seemed nervous about something. Before she could pursue it, he went on.

“They’re married. Mom works at home. She designs ‘artisanal’ wedding invitations. Dad works in Silicon Beach, for a tech company. They have a younger child, a six-year-old boy. He’s in his school’s aftercare today. The mom checked and he’s there, safe and sound. Hillman told her to leave him there for now, so his day can stay normal for as long as possible.”

“Not much to go on,” Keri noted. “Is CSU on the way?”

“Yeah, Hillman sent them at the same time as us. They may already be there, hopefully processing the bike and backpack for prints.”

Ray zipped past the intersection with Jefferson Boulevard. Keri could almost see her apartment in the distance now. The ocean was only half a mile beyond that. The Rainey home was in a separate, fancier section of the community, on a big hill with multimillion-dollar homes. They were less than five minutes away.

Keri noticed that Ray had become unusually quiet. She could tell he was working up the courage to say something. She couldn’t explain why but she dreaded it.