Chapter 50 Quest
QUEST
Kacey opened the door with red eyes and a baby on her hip, and I knew within five seconds that she didn’t have Thad.
I’d driven out to Frederick to read her face in person because phone calls were for people who didn’t know how to spot a lie, and I spotted lies the way other people spotted traffic lights.
Kacey was a lot of things. She was persistent, desperate, angry, exhausted, but she wasn’t hiding a kidnapped man in her four-bedroom house in the suburbs.
Her energy was all wrong for it. She was too frayed, too open, too willing to beg.
“Quest, please,” she said, bouncing the baby on her hip while her older daughter watched cartoons on the couch behind her. “I know Mehar knows something. I can feel it. Just let me talk to her. Woman to woman. Five minutes.”
“She doesn’t have anything to do with Thad.”
“Then why was her name in his phone? Why was she the last person he contacted before he disappeared? That doesn’t make sense unless she knows something.”
“Kacey, I’m telling you she’s not involved. I’m looking into it. I told you I’d help you find him, and I will.”
“You’ve been saying that for months.” Her voice cracked. “My kids ask me where their daddy is every day, and I don’t have an answer. Every single day, Quest. Do you know what that does to a mother?”
I looked at her holding that baby and thought about Quindon and thought about Peanut and thought about all the women in the world raising children alone because the men in their lives had either left or been taken, and I felt something shift in my chest that I didn’t have time to examine.
“I’m working on it,” I said as I handed her a wad of cash. “That’s all I can give you right now.”
She nodded because she didn’t have a choice. I left and got back on the road toward the city.
In the car, I called Mehar. Voicemail. I figured she was still in therapy or running errands or doing whatever women did when they were avoiding men who’d broken their hearts.
I called again ten minutes later. Voicemail.
On the third try, twenty minutes after the first, the line didn’t even ring.
Straight to voicemail. Her phone was either dead or off.
Mehar’s phone was never off. This was a woman who slept with a gun on her nightstand and checked exits every time she walked into a room. Her phone was her lifeline, and it was always charged and always on.
Something wasn’t right.
My phone rang before I could call a fourth time. Mekhi.
“We got him,” Mekhi said. His voice was tight with adrenaline. “The kid from the apartment off Georgia Ave. The one connected to Keyvon’s sister. I’ve been watching the building like you said, and I grabbed him this morning. He’s in the basement at Silk and Sin right now.”
“Who is he?”
“Young nigga named Bryce. He’s the one who set the warehouse on fire.”
“Don’t touch him again until I get there,” I said. “I’m coming, but I need to make a stop first.”
“How long?”
“An hour. Maybe less. Don’t do anything, Mekhi. I mean it.”
“Aight. But hurry up. I’m having a hard time being patient with the nigga who put my brother in a chair.”
I hung up and pressed the gas harder toward the hotel. Two crises running at the same time, but my gut was telling me to check on Mehar first. That instinct overrode everything else, the anger, the breakup, the “cool we done” from two days ago. None of that mattered if she was in trouble.
I pulled into the hotel parking garage and drove to the second level where she always parked near the elevator. Her Honda was there. I pulled into the spot next to it and that’s when I saw it.
A smear of blood on the driver’s side door panel.
A dent in the metal right above it, shallow but visible, like something or someone had been slammed against it.
Her purse was on the concrete next to the front tire, contents spilled.
And her phone was about three feet away, screen cracked and dark, lying face down on the garage floor.
I got out of my whip and stood there looking at the scene and every alarm in my body went off at the same time. Someone took her.
I pocketed the phone, grabbed her purse off the ground, and took the elevator up to her floor. My hands were steady because they had to be, but the thing happening inside my chest was not steady at all. I used my key. I’d kept a copy since I’d rented the room, and I used it to open the door.
The room was exactly how she’d left it this morning.
Bed made. Jacket not on the chair where she always threw it when she came home.
Shoes not by the door. The coffee she’d made before leaving for therapy was still on the nightstand, half-finished and cold.
She hadn’t been back here since she left this morning.
I set her purse on the desk and her things spilled out further. There was her wallet, lip gloss, a pen, receipts from Target, and a coffee shop. And a business card.
I picked it up.
Janelle Black, LCSW. Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Dupont Circle, Washington DC.
I read it twice. Then a third time. Then I stood in the middle of that hotel room holding a business card and felt the floor tilt underneath me because the name on that card was a name I hadn’t said out loud in fourteen years but had never stopped hearing in the back of my skull.
Janelle Black.
Peanut.
Why did Mehar have Peanut’s business card?