Chapter 10
Him
At half-past four p.m., we arrived at the house of the woman who’d seen my wife and her abductor.
There’d been a wreck on the highway, causing a traffic jam, and I’d barely resisted the urge to tell Oscar to drive on the shoulder and I’d deal with the consequences when we were flagged down.
I’d managed to somehow hold in the road rage and say nothing as we inched forward for nearly an hour before we were finally underway again.
By the time we reached the small home listed as her last-known address, I was agitated and raw, so I made sure to control my breathing before even thinking about getting out of the truck.
“What’re you thinkin’?” Oscar asked as he pulled to the curb on the opposite side of the road from the house. We’d scope it out first before we approached, making sure not to spook Gwen—the sister of the server at the bar—or anyone else in the house by having a strange car pull up out front.
I took in the patchy-looking yard with its sagging front porch, peeling yellow paint, rusty wire fencing, and washed-out slide and plastic playhouse in the front yard, and thought about how tough it’d be to raise a couple of kids as a single mom with an addiction problem.
I didn’t judge her; I knew what the pharmaceutical industry had done to create the opioid crisis we found ourselves in—and for that, fuck the Sackler family.
Before answering Oscar, however, I sighed. I was so over being patient. “I think we go knock on the door and see if anybody answers.”
Oscar put a hand on my shoulder and pointed to Eggy, who was poking his nose out of the sling. “I think he should take the lead. Answering the door to a guy holding a dog is a no-brainer. Answering it to a couple of detective-looking strangers is probably a hard pass.”
I grunted. He had a point.
We got out of the truck, and I carefully lifted Eggy out of the sling, setting him down on the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. He sniffed around, did his thing, then sat up on his back haunches, begging to be picked up.
He’d do that all the time with Abby, but this was the first time he’d ever done it with me, and swear to God, I needed a second to compose myself when I picked him up, keeping my back to Oscar while I took a few deep breaths and held Eggy close.
After clearing my throat, I said, “Let’s go.”
We crossed the street, and I carried Eggy in the crook of my arm. He laid limply along the length of my forearm, and I knew he was presenting his cutest self. It was like he was in on the jig to get Gwen to open the door.
Oscar stepped to the side as I went up to the door and knocked, holding Eggy high so that he’d be the first thing Gwen would see if she came to the door to check the peephole.
Sure enough, a couple of seconds later, the door opened, and there stood a sickly-looking, painfully thin woman with mouse-brown hair, deep-set eyes, a pronounced jaw, and clothes that were far too big for her. “That ain’t our dog,” she said, by way of hello.
“I know,” I said softly. “Hi, Gwen. I’m Dutch. The dog belongs to my wife, and I think you may have seen her.”
Her brow furrowed. I was relieved to see that she didn’t appear high, which actually meant nothing. Addicts can be sharp as tacks depending on the timing and the amount of the last dose they’d taken.
“I don’t get it,” she said, just as a little toddler in pigtails and sucking on a pacifier came up behind Gwen and wrapped her arms around her mother’s leg.
The girl stared at Eggy with big, blue eyes, and I bent low so that she could see him up close.
His tail wagged as he looked and sniffed at her, and a smile spread behind the pacifier.
“My wife’s name is Abigail Cooper. We were staying in a cabin north of here along the Blackhawk River in Lincoln when she went missing this past October.
“Today, when we had lunch, we met your sister, Patty, and she said you’d told her you saw Abby,” I continued. “That you recognized her from the flyers we put up. Your sister said you’d seen that she was asleep in the passenger seat of a car.”
Gwen was holding her phone, and it started ringing. She glanced at it and held it up. The call was coming from “Pats.”
She put the phone to her ear and said, “The guy with the missing wife is here. Thanks for ratting me out.”
There was a sound like Patty was protesting as Gwen punched the end button and regarded me angrily. “I don’t want to get involved.”
I stood tall and tucked Eggy carefully back inside his sling. “I get it. But the thing is, Gwen, Abby is the love of my life. I’m barely holding it together since she went missing, and now her dog is sick. Really sick. And if I can’t reunite them before I gotta let him go, it’ll kill me.”
I was watching her closely, and her gaze darted from Eggy to my eyes and back again. “He’s sick?”
I nodded. “Cancer. We’ve got maybe a week, two at the most, before he’ll be in too much pain to justify keeping him alive. It’d be too selfish to make him suffer more than he already is.”
Her expression softened, and she reached a tentative hand out toward Eggy, looking to me as if to ask for permission.
I lifted him toward her. “You can pet him.”
She ran tender fingers along his brow, and he licked her hand. “I had a wiener dog,” she said. “He was my best friend when I was growing up. He lived till he was sixteen.”
“Eggy just turned fifteen. A huge milestone that Abby will be so sad she missed if we can’t bring her home in time to say goodbye.”
Gwen sighed while her daughter continued to hug her mama’s legs.
“I was at a gas station south of town, waiting for a pump because some moron towing a shitty-looking camper decided to take up the whole line of three pumps,” she began.
“The pump just on the other side of him opened up, so I pulled into the space opposite where he was getting gas. He looked me up and down and gave me the creeps, so I looked away, and that’s when I saw his girlfriend in the truck, fast asleep.
She was wearing this red sweater and sheepskin coat—they both looked expensive, which didn’t fit with the guy or his run-down camper. Plus, she was way too pretty for him, which is why I really took notice. He also stank, like stank,
and I didn’t know how such a classy-looking lady could be with somebody so gross.”
I felt my heart start hammering. A lead. This was our first real lead and proof that Abby had been alive after she went missing.
“Do you remember what he looked like?” Oscar asked from behind me.
She jumped a little at the sound of his voice, and I realized she was startled to see another man with me.
“Sorry,” I said, motioning to Oscar. “That’s Abby’s brother, Oscar.”
Gwen nodded, but I could tell she was a little spooked, so I waited for her to get used to the idea that there were two of us, and that seemed to do the trick. “He was big,” she said, answering his question.
“Big how?” I asked.
“A lot taller than me. Probably even taller than you.”
I was a little over six feet, so this was a good point of reference. “Hair color?”
“Greasy. Like I said, he was gross.”
“Was his hair dark?”
She nodded.
“How about skin color?”
“White.”
“Age?”
“Don’t know.”
“Can you guess?”
“Maybe late thirties or early forties? It was hard to tell.”
“Facial hair?”
“Yeah. He had a horseshoe mustache and a goatee under that.”
“Was the beard and mustache the same color as the hair?”
She nodded again.
“Did you notice anything else about him? Any tattoos or scars?”
She squirmed a little, and I could tell she was holding back, trying to decide if she should tell us what else she’d noticed. At last, she whispered, “He had a tattoo of a naked lady on his forearm.”
“Naked lady. Would you recognize the tattoo if you saw it again?”
“Yeah. Definitely. The naked lady was being . . .” she paused to look down at her daughter. “Sophie, honey, will you get mama her slippers?”
Little Sophie stared up at her and nodded dully, then trotted off. Once she was out of earshot, Gwen said, “The naked lady was being…licked by a…tiger.”
I felt bile hit the back of my throat, and I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds to get ahold of myself. Eggy squirmed in his sling, no doubt sensing my fury and fear. Swallowing hard, I opened my eyes again, doing my level best to hold my emotions in check.
“Licked,” I repeated, knowing exactly what she must mean. “As in…”
She nodded and pointed to her crotch.
“Jesus Christ,” Oscar muttered. The only kind of guys who brazenly wore shit like that were the worst kind of scum.
“Do you remember the car he was driving?” I asked, giving myself credit for sounding a thousand times calmer than I felt.
“It was one of them SUVs. Maybe a 4Runner?”
“How about a Tahoe?” Oscar asked. “Could it have been a Chevy Tahoe?”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah, it coulda been.”
“What color?” I asked.
“Dark blue. Maybe black.”
“And the camper?”
“It looked like a piece of shit. It definitely didn’t go with the SUV towing it.”
“In what way?” I pressed.
“It was old and dirty.”
“Color?”
“Tan, I think. It had a stripe at the top.”
“A stripe?”
“Maybe a couple of stripes. I don’t remember. I just remember the one stripe that was darker than the color of the camper.”
“So, brown?”
“Yeah.”
The toddler came back with her mother’s slippers. Gwen took them from her and stroked her fine blond hair. The gesture was tender, and it tugged at me a little.
I pushed a smile to my lips while I looked down at the little girl and asked her mother, “Do you remember which gas station?”
“The Exxon station at the south end of town in Lincoln.”
I glanced back up at Gwen, trying to show her in my expression how grateful I was for this lead. “Did you notice if he was headed out of town or back in?”
“Out,” she said definitively. “I waited in my car until he left. Like I said, he really gave me the creeps, and I had my kids in the car.”
“Do you remember the date, ma’am?” Oscar asked.
Even without looking, I knew he was taking notes.
“It was the day before my kid’s birthday.” I dropped my eyes to the little girl, leaning against her mom’s legs. Gwen seemed to notice because she stroked the blond head again and said, “Not Sophie’s. Mitchell’s. That’s my son. He turned ten on October twenty-seventh.”
Abby had gone missing the twenty-sixth. And now we knew that she’d been abducted and probably drugged. I didn’t want to imagine what horrors she’d been enduring these long six months since—if she was even still alive.
I must’ve been wearing some of that fear because Gwen put a tentative hand on my arm, and when I looked up at her, she was staring at me intently.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call the sheriff about it. I didn’t want to get involved because I got kids, you know? They’ve already been taken away by CPS once. I couldn’t risk that again. And that guy just looked like he’d hunt you down and kill you if you ratted him out.”
“Ma’am,” Oscar said into the silence that followed.
I was too frustrated and angry to say anything after that.
I understood Gwen’s fear, but goddammit—my wife was in that car with that piece of shit, headed off to God knows where to endure God knows what.
If Gwen had just come forward when she was in Lincoln, when she knew something was off about a scummy-looking guy with an unconscious woman in his truck who appeared way too good for him, we would’ve had a lead to follow.
Abby could’ve been home months ago. We could’ve found her. I know we could’ve.
Gwen swiveled her attention away from me to him. “Yeah?”
“Would you be willing to look at some mug shots if we can collect them? Or sit with a sketch artist?”
She shook her head. “No. Sorry. I can’t. I’ve told you all I can. I can’t put my kinds in danger, you know?”
“But—”
“Sorry,” she said again, then firmly backed herself and little Sophie into the house before shutting the door in our faces.
It was a long couple of seconds before I could turn away from the door. I followed Oscar back to the truck, and we both got in silently.
My fists were clenched tightly, and I eyed the dashboard, wondering if I could punch a fist through it when he said, “We knew that if Cooper wasn’t dead, it’d be bad, sir. She’s not dead.”
He tapped his heart and insisted, “She’s not. I can feel she’s not. But I also can feel that it’s been bad for her. We gotta focus on getting her back and not what’s happened to her since she was taken.”
I continued to study the dashboard, the fury roiling through my insides like lava. “I badly want to ram my fist through the dash, Oscar.”
I could feel his eyes on me while I continued to stare at the dashboard like it was double-dog daring me to punch it.
And then he played dirty. “You’ll upset Eggy, sir. The poor guy’s just getting back to sleep.”
I looked down, and sure enough, Eggy’s eyes were heavy-lidded and closing fast.
I took a deep breath and let it out as slowly as I could.
I wasn’t willing to upset him. I’d eat the fire in my belly and swallow back the rage threatening to wreak havoc on our rental truck.
“Fine, but when we get back to town tonight, I’m gonna break something.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Something expensive.”
“How about I get us a couple of bottles of Jack Daniels, and you can smash one while I pour you a few fingers from the other?”
I considered that. “I’m feeling the need to break something a little more substantial than a bottle of whiskey.”
“Like what, sir?”
I turned to look at him, knowing I had murder in my eyes. “Like the neck of the motherfucker who took my wife.”