Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“Hello!” she said in a chipper, much louder voice. Obviously, our phone call was now with Akilah’s full awareness.

“Hey, Lauren, it’s Carter,” I said.

“Oh, hi, Carter!” Sweet Thang said, as if we hadn’t spoken in years. She put the phone down for a moment and announced to Akilah, “It’s Carter. Remember my colleague Carter?

“How are you?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m just ducky,” I said. “Where are you guys right now?”

I could hear Sweet Thang cup the phone.

“He wants to know where I am. Is it okay if I tell him?” she asked Akilah, who must have signaled her assent because Sweet Thang brought the phone back to her mouth and said: “We’re back at Akilah’s house, just getting a few things. I’m helping her move into a Red Cross shelter.”

I was about to tell her that sounded like a fine idea. But before I could get the words out, I was interrupted by Sweet Thang’s loud, piercing scream.

Then the line went dead.

The abduction of Wendell Byers went as smoothly as Primo could have hoped, aided in no small part by Byers’s own lack of guard. The fool was convinced being a councilman made him invincible, as if elected officials didn’t bleed like everyone else.

Byers was so unsuspecting, Primo probably could have done the job himself. But Primo brought two men along, just in case. They were pros from New York, rented thugs. They went through the front door-unlocked-and found him in the study, typing on his laptop. He was, naturally, outraged at the intrusion. But his blather only lasted so long. One of the thugs clunked him on the head with a paperweight, opening a small gash in his scalp. The other bound him with an electrical cord. Together, they dragged him out of his house while Primo, having nothing else to do, grabbed the laptop.

It had been an afterthought, taking the computer. Later, when a broken Byers started whispering secrets, Primo realized it had been a brilliant bit of criminal intuition.

But first Primo had to do the breaking. They tossed Byers in the trunk of Primo’s sedan, then brought him back to the warehouse. When Byers came to and found himself tied to a chair, he was indignant at first, filling the room with his how-dare-yous and you’ll-pay-for-thises. It was typical Byers bluster, and Primo wanted to silence it.

So he took his nail gun, grabbed Byers by the wrist, and shot a nail into Byers’s right hand, actually pinning it to the wall behind him. The man yelped with pain, cursing Primo loudly and profanely-as if it would do any good.

There was still too much fight in Byers. So, slowly, Primo took it out of him. He positioned a clock in front of Byers’s eyes and informed the councilman that he would be leaving the room for ten minutes. Then he returned and punched a nail in Byers’s forearm.

Primo knew the anticipation of pain was almost as excruciating as the pain itself. So he kept returning every ten minutes, wordlessly shooting a nail into another part of Byers’s body, then departing. After forty minutes, Byers stopped cursing him. After an hour and a half, Byers was more than ready to talk. After three hours, Byers was begging to talk. But Primo waited until four hours passed before he chose to listen.

That’s when it came pouring out of Byers-all the answers to Primo’s questions, everything Primo needed to bring this messy arrangement to a neat conclusion. Whenever Primo decided Byers was being something slightly less than a hundred percent forthcoming, he left the room, announcing he would return in ten minutes. Sometimes he left the room even when Byers was cooperating. It kept Byers’s fear at the appropriate level.

Eventually, the councilman began growing weak, slipping in and out of consciousness. So Primo finally finished him off with a few nails to the head. By that point, Primo had already learned everything he needed to know.

Other than the laptop-which Primo already possessed-Byers had left behind just one piece of evidence that could prove troublesome for Primo. But Primo could take care of that quickly enough.

There is something about the female scream that juices my body chemistry. Probably it’s hardwired, a remnant of the days when my more hirsute forebearers clung together in nomadic bands wandering an inhospitable planet. Back then, a woman’s scream meant someone was about to be sabertooth tiger lunch. Or something like that. Whatever it was, I suddenly found myself wired on adrenaline, with my heart pounding and my body primed for large-motor activity.

My hands were shaking, but I managed to force my fingers to call Sweet Thang back, on the off chance it was nothing-like a big spider scared her and made her drop her phone.

But my call went straight to voice mail and, besides, I knew this wasn’t arachnid related. Sweet Thang had made that kind of noise when Akilah jumped her and put a knife to her throat. It was an I’m-in-trouble-come-help-me-now-don’t-dawdle-please kind of scream.

I pulled a screeching U-turn, the kind that involved jumping a curb because the road just wasn’t wide enough, and sped toward Akilah’s house. As I blew through a series of red lights-I thought they were orange, Officer-I called my favorite detective sergeant, in hopes of getting some reinforcement.

“Raines here.”

“I think Akilah Harris knows who killed Windy,” I said. “And I think the killer is after her.”

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, slow down. What happened?”

I relayed what Sweet Thang told me about Akilah knowing more than she let on, then told him about the scream.

Raines was unimpressed.

“All you really know for sure is that your colleague’s cell phone doesn’t work,” he said.

“Come on, you’ve got two young women in trouble, probably kidnapped or worse,” I said, feeling a little frantic that I couldn’t impress on him the gravity of that scream. “Can’t you put out an amber alert or something?”

“I can’t put out an amber alert because someone yelled just before her cell phone battery conked out,” Raines replied. “We would need confirmation an abduction had occurred. And besides, amber alerts are for kids, not adults.”

I knew that, of course. I also knew, thinking as a levelheaded cop-and not an easily addled newspaper reporter-he was right: I had a strong hunch something was wrong, but little more than that.

“If you can get a witness to say they saw a forcible abduction, we’ve got a different scenario on our hands,” Raines continued. “Otherwise, you got nothing.”

“Can you at least ask a squad car to meet me at the house? Something?” I begged. “For all I know, it’s a hostage situation and they’re still holed up inside.”

“Fine,” Raines said. “I’ll ask patrol to send a car over. But I’m a little busy, you know? I got a pretty major investigation here, and I’m going to have to ask you to lose this number if you keep bothering me with half-baked hunches.”

He hung up before I could reply.

Continuing to drive as if traffic signals were mere suggestions, I contemplated my next move, concluding quickly I didn’t have one. I couldn’t exactly charge into Akilah’s house, guns blazing. Not when the the most dangerous weapon I had in my car was nail clippers.

Thankfully, I arrived at Akilah’s simultaneously with a white and black Newark patrol car. Two cops, a tall black man and a short Hispanic woman, got out. I waved to them.

“We were told we got a possible DV,” the guy said. “You the one who called it in?”

DV. What’s DV? Oh, right: domestic violence. Why would Raines tell them it’s a domestic violence?

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said. “I was talking to a colleague of mine on the phone and I heard her scream like she was in real trouble.”