14

Time to make today my bitch.

—T-SHIRT

I steered Misery in the general direction of south until we came to a crumbling group of apartments behind another crumbling group of apartments behind an abandoned group of apartments that made the first two look like the Ritz.

“Charley’s House of Cards,” I said into my phone while pulling in to the lot of the worst of the apartment buildings.

“Yost’s first wife was cremated,” Cookie said.

“What?” I turned the ignition to off. “But her death was suspicious. And they let him cremate her?”

“Apparently. He had it done on the islands before he brought her back to the States.”

“Why do these people not check with me first?”

“No hit on the alias yet. Still looking.”

“Okay, let me know. Soon, because the odds of me getting out of this neighborhood alive are nowhere near good.”

“I knew it. I should have come with you.”

“So we could die together?”

“True. Well, good luck.”

I kept the phone to my face even after we’d hung up. A phone made the perfect excuse not to notice the people ogling me as I strode to apartment three. It didn’t actually have a 3 on the door, but I was pretty good at counting in the single digits.

I rapped on the door of one Mr. Virgil Gibbs, and a thin man, hunched over with age and abuse, answered. He had dark hair and a graying beard.

“Hi,” I said when I got his attention. He was busy looking at a group of men looking at me. “My name is Charlotte Davidson, and I’m a private in—”

“Maybe you should come inside, sweetheart.”

He stood back but kept a wary eye around us.

“Okay.” I was so going to die. I stepped inside nonetheless. He didn’t look super agile. Surely I could outrun him.

His apartment wasn’t bad, considering. A couple empty beer bottles on an end table. A television complete with foil-laced antenna sticking out. No dirty ashtrays, which surprised me. Or underwear on the couch.

“You want a beer?” he asked, the fact that he was missing a few teeth becoming evident with the question.

“No, thank you.”

He stepped to the fridge to get one for himself. “What did you say your name was?”

“Charlotte Davidson. I’m a private in—”

“Davidson?” he asked, twisting off the cap and eyeing me with a squint of blue.

“Yes, I’m a—”

“Well, if you don’t want a beer, what do you want?”

If he’d let me finish a freaking sentence, we’d get through this much faster. “Wait,” I said, walking to the window. “Is my Jeep safe out there?”

“Honey, I could put a cup of gold out there and it’d be safe. They know not to mess with what’s mine.”

“You seemed pretty worried about me,” I countered.

He smiled, showing his disastrous collection of teeth. “You ain’t mine, unfortunately. But you’re in my house. They’ll leave your Jeep be as long as you’re out of here before dark.”

With several hours left in the day, I had every intention of being just that.

“So, you ain’t selling anything?”

“No, I’m a private investigator looking for someone you know.”

“Really?” His interest piqued, but in an amused way. “You don’t look like no dick.”

“Well, I am. And I’m looking for—” I paused and flipped through my notepad to give him a minute to let his emotions level out. I needed a clean read. “—a Mr. Earl Walker.”

He balked, both mentally and physically. “You about ten years too late, missy. You weren’t exactly his type anyway.”

I knew that. I knew Earl’s type, and it was neither female nor grown. And he wasn’t lying. He truly believed Earl Walker was dead. Hell, maybe he was.

With two scratched off the list, it looked like I was going to Corona.

“Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Gibbs.”

“Ain’t no problem. If you find him, tell him Virgil says hey.” He laughed into the bottle as he took another swig.

“I’ll do that.”

I climbed into Misery with several sets of eyes watching, including Virgil’s. He wasn’t a monster like his friend Earl, but I doubted I’d hang with him anytime soon.

I called Cook to let her know where I was headed.

“Hey, boss.”

“I struck out.”

“Oh, was he good looking?”

“No. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, if you asked him out and he said no.”

“Not that kind of struck out. With the guy from Reyes’s list.”

“Oh, bummer. What now?”

“I was going to head out to Corona, but I think I’ll go talk to Kim Millar first.”

“Reyes’s sister?”

“That’s the one.”

Reyes had a pseudo-sister, a girl he’d grown up with, and he cared for her deeply. While Reyes had been kidnapped from his birth parents as a small child and sold to Earl Walker, Kim had been given to the man. When she was two, her drug-addicted mother dumped her on Earl Walker’s doorstep, the man she suspected was Kim’s father, then died days later. Had Kim’s mother known what kind of monster Earl Walker was, I could only hope she would never have left her daughter with him. Walker didn’t sexually abuse her, as I’d feared. He did the next best thing. He used her to control Reyes, literally starved her to get what he wanted out of him. And while we never discussed exactly what it was he wanted from Reyes, the implications of sexual abuse were all there.

“I’ll head to Corona after I talk to her,” I said.

“It’s getting late, and it’ll take you a couple of hours to get there.”

“Yeah, but I need to get this done, and since I can’t do anything about the doctor without more info, I’ll do this.” I could hear her pressing buttons on the fax machine, then rustling a paper or two.

After a moment, she said, “Holy cow, he was there.”

“What? Who was where? The doctor?”

“Yep, just got it. A receipt from the Sand and Sun Hotel in the Cayman Islands. One Mr. Keith Jacoby checked in on the very day Ingrid Yost was found dead. Paid for one night with cash and never visited again.”