Chapter Twenty #2
The Robinson house was in a nice part of town, full of mini mansions that had shit like gift-wrapping rooms and marble everything.
The house itself didn’t look ostentatious from the outside—a sturdy three-story building made of a deep gray stucco with wrought iron mini-balconies and a giant security door out front.
The grounds were perfectly kept, with shaped shrubbery and a winding stone path to the door.
We all piled out, somewhat certain the cops would be called on us for even being there as we made our way to the front door.
We rang.
We knocked.
We waited.
“They’ve got a security system,” Tig said, nodding to the number pad inside the front door.
“Right,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my phone.
“Where the hell are you? She’s holding it together, but she’s worried.”
“Get her mind off of it. We still have a while left tonight. We’re at the wife’s place, and no one is answering. Any chance you can find the security code for their system?”
Barrett made some kind of snorting noise, as if I were an idiot. “It’s ‘zero-four-nine-six-eight-four-two.’”
I paused, shaking my head. “The shit you remember is either impressive or scary. Thanks. And find a way to calm my woman down, would you?” With that, I hung up and nodded at Brock, who reached for his kit again, choosing a different set of picks for the more advanced door.
As soon as the door opened, the beeping started, loud enough to be almost unsettling as I punched the code in. It took a long second before it stopped, and the readout informed us that the system had been deactivated.
“Jesus. I should’ve been a doctor,” Brock said, looking at the double staircase leading up, the chandelier giant and shining.
I had to agree it was a nice place. The floors were dark hardwood, shining. The walls had perfectly chosen artwork. The furniture in the rooms to both sides was upscale and expensive, tasteful, if a bit bland.
“I’m half-expecting to find a corpse in here somewhere,” Brock said, exhaling.
He wasn’t wrong; the place felt eerie.
Granted, a big part of that might have been how cold and empty the place felt because of the lack of personal touches. It was also almost painfully quiet, silent enough to make your ears ring.
“Fan out?” Tig asked, and I nodded, moving to the right. Brock went to the left, and Tig went upstairs.
The living room was empty, nothing personal lying around at all save for a fashion magazine left face-up on the coffee table.
Not one to leave anything to chance, especially in such a strange case, I picked it up and checked the date of the issue.
It was September of that year. So that wasn’t weird.
Granted, we were into October, but the new issue might not have arrived yet.
I checked the half bath in the hall, the linen and coat closets, and the office.
Finally, I moved into the kitchen, huge and all white, so white it made your eyes hurt. I waited there, hearing Brock move around the other side of the house and knowing Tig had the top floor covered.
They both came to meet me ten minutes later, each shaking their heads.
“Anyone else getting a feeling she’s not just out to dinner?” Brock asked, voicing the concern we were all having.
Tig made a grunting agreement, moving over toward the fridge and reaching in for the milk. He turned the carton and then looked at us with a brow raised. “This expired a week ago,” he told me, putting it back and pulling open the vegetable drawer. “Fuck, yeah, this shit is all decomposing.”
“Don’t know much about this woman, but I don’t figure she’s the type to let veggies rot in her million-dollar home,” Brock added ,and I agreed.
“So, what?” I asked myself out loud. “Shit went south with Riya, so he snatched his wife instead?”
“He is out of his mind,” Brock said with a shrug.
“Alright,” I said. “Go find mail or financial records or anything that might point to a property.”
It was around five in the morning that my phone started vibrating in my pocket, pulling me out from under the pile of paperwork I had been buried in for hours.
“Yeah?”
“So after your girl vomited for about fifteen minutes,” he started, and I felt my stomach tighten, feeling guilty for not being there for her, “she walked out to get some plain toast while I was out walking Slim. Had my laptop open…”
“Oh, fuck,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “What did she see?”
“I was working on the van picture. I got two letters and the very corner of a logo, by the way.”
“And you’re telling me this because…”
There was a pause, and when he spoke, I could hear the smile there. “Because two letters and a corner of a logo meant nothing to me, but when I walked back in, she was sitting in the chair and turned to me and asked me why I had a picture of Sully’s van.”
“Sully?” I asked, stiffening, drawing both Tig and Brock’s attention.
“That’s what I said. Apparently, Sully is the cleaning guy at the IVF clinic.”
“Let me guess,” I said, stomach turning sour, “tall and skinny with stringy hair,” I added, remembering the man from the clinic. He had made it a point to tell me Michael and his wife had been trying to work it out… in Pennsylvania.
He was in on it.
“That’d be him. He has a small cleaning business. Just him. He does the IVF clinic, a vet, and two office buildings in town. Makes dirt,” Barrett added.
“Okay. Find out where I can find him this time of day. And once you get that, I need to know if there is anywhere Shannon Robinson might be for a week.”
“Got it,” he said, hanging up.
“What’s up?” Tig asked, looking tired. He, unlike Brock and me, hadn’t had sleep deprivation used against him in anti-interrogation training, so it could never be used against us to extract information in a torture scenario.
While it wasn’t quite as traumatizing as waterboarding had been, it was certainly more useful.
We could go for days without sleeping if we needed to and never lose focus.
“Riya identified the van. Belongs to the cleaning guy at the clinic. Sully. Barrett is going to get on a location for us. We got to clean this shit up,” I said, gesturing at the piles of paperwork that had produced no intel but the fact that the bills were on auto-pay and Michael’s college debt was somehow paid off.
Most doctors didn’t pay that shit off until their late forties or fifties.
Twenty minutes later, paperwork back in place, hard surfaces wiped down, we reset the alarm and left, heading in the direction of Sully’s apartment, which just so fucking happened to be in the same building as Michael’s fleabag place.
Coincidence?
I think not.
I knocked, and I saw a shadow darken the peephole before I heard some frantic shuffling inside.
“Knock it down,” I told Tig as I moved out of the way. Tig moved in and plowed a giant booted foot into the middle of the door, sending the shitty thing flying inward.
Sully’s apartment was, while as dated and shabby as Michael’s, at least clean.
There was no mold or piles of shit or broken anything.
His bed was made. His windows were even shining, facing the parking lot out back where the van from the video was parked, white shit off the logo and plates no longer covered.
“Don’t!” he shrieked, arms flying up, covering his face. “Don’t hit me.”
“Won’t need to hit you if you tell us what we need to know,” I said, teeth gritted, tired and pissed, wanting to get this shit handled so I could go home to my woman who needed me.
But I couldn’t go home to her again without some goddamn answers.
“I’ll talk! I swear, I’ll talk,” he said, dropping his hands but looking ready to bolt. Sensing that too, Tig moved into the doorway to block it as Brock slid a wooden chair from the tiny kitchen table across the room and put it in the center, gesturing toward it.
Sully sat down, eyes darting between us like a scared rabbit surrounded by predators, not sure which might pounce first.
“So, here’s what I know,” I started, moving forward to tower over him, hands clasped behind my back.
“I know that Riya worked with you and Dr. Robinson at the clinic. I know Riya and he dated, and that she dumped him when she realized he was married. I know he told her he and his wife were breaking up, so she took him back. I also know that was bullshit and that his wife threw an embarrassing fit at his work and that he quit. I also know that you lied to me and said they moved to Pennsylvania while she went on living at her house and he shacked up here.”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“Then I know that Riya was put in a medically induced coma with Pentobarbital and shot up with hormones and vitamins. I know that sick fuck opened her up without her consent and undid her tubal ligation. I know that she lost a year of her life and came to me when no one believed her. Today, I found out that he had been stalking her for a while, his apartment some stalker’s wet dream.
I know that he is nowhere to be found. And, lastly, I know that your van was used to drop her unconscious body behind a dumpster at Famiglia like some piece of trash.
Now you are going to fill in the fucking blanks, or you’ll become intimately acquainted with black ops intelligence extraction. ”
I hated the shit Brock and I had needed to do in the name of so-called patriotism, but right at that moment, I wanted to do everything I had ever done to a person to the man sitting in a chair in front of me. Then find her ex and do the same to him… twice.
“I’ll tell you everything,” Sully said, shaking his head. “You have to understand… he… I didn’t agree with any of it, but I mean he…”
“He paid you a shitload of money,” Brock supplied, arms crossed, face tight, his entire body humming with the same adrenaline that was coursing through my system.
“Well, yeah. I barely make enough to cover rent and bills. I was struggling and… and all he wanted was for me to swipe some supplies and drop them off to him.”
“What supplies?”