Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

I could tell the guy thought I was wasting his time and was doing his best to suppress an eye roll.

“And she’s in there !” the female cop said, pointing to Akilah’s burned-out shell of a house which, admittedly, didn’t look very domestic at the moment.

“Yeah,” I said. “Her name is Lauren. There’s a woman with her named Akilah.”

“What’s the guy’s name?” the male cop asked.

“I, uh, I don’t know.”

More barely restrained eye-rolling.

“All right,” he said, then turned to his partner. “We’ll check it out. You stay here.”

The cops walked up to the front door-or, rather, the hole where it used to be-and entered. I braced myself for the sound of gunshots, or another scream, or something. But the cops came out two minutes later. The guy looked perturbed.

“There’s no one there,” he hollered from the top of the porch. “You sure they were in that place?”

I was about to answer when I was interrupted by a lady standing on the stoop of a three-family house two doors down.

“They left,” she said, in an African accent. She had a brightly colored shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and I could guess from the slippers on her feet she didn’t want to leave her spot. The male cop took the lead and walked toward her.

“Who left, ma’am?”

“Two women, three guys,” she said. “They got in a black car and drove away.”

I felt the adrenaline rush renew itself.

“See? They were kidnapped,” I said in a voice that sounded more like yelling than I wanted.

The male cop shot me an annoyed look that said, Shut it.

“Could you please describe the women?” he asked.

“One was a pretty white girl, blond hair. The other was small, dark. She was pretty, too, but she looked like a mess. I had seen her before. She lives in that house, but I don’t know her.”

“Now what about the men?” he asked.

“I didn’t look that hard.”

“Did it look like they were being forced into the car?” the cop asked.

She thought for a moment

“Maybe. Maybe not. The little dark one was crying. But they walked to the car and got inside.”

Something unintelligible squawked on the cop’s radio, which he had attached to his belt. Whatever it was, he was suddenly in a hurry to leave.

“All right. Thank you, ma’am. You can go back inside.”

The cop started walking toward his patrol car.

“What!” I said. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”

“You heard her. She said they weren’t abducted.”

“She said she wasn’t sure. There’s a difference.”

I panned my eyes toward the female cop, just to see if there was a chance I’d be able to prevail on her softer, female side … except, apparently, she wasn’t into that stereotype. She seemed more concerned her hat wasn’t sitting straight as she walked toward the squad car and paid little heed to my discussion with her partner.

“She said one of the women was crying,” I pleaded. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“My wife cries all the time,” he replied as he got back into his car. “I’m sorry, sir, we have to go.”

As he pulled away, the shriek of the tires on the pavement made it all the more emphatic: the police were not going to help me on this one.

Better sharpen those nail clippers.

* * *

Not to denigrate Officer Friendly’s interrogation techniques, but I felt there was a little more to be learned from our eyewitness, so I jogged up to the African woman’s house, climbing the steps to her sagging front porch. There were three doorbells. I rang all three.

A window to my left cracked open.

“Yes?” a voice asked. It was the African woman.

“I’m Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner . Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions about what you just saw?”

“Hold on,” she said. Soon, she was standing with the front door slightly ajar. She didn’t ask me in, which was fine. I didn’t have time for hospitality.

“Yes?” she said again.

“I’m worried those two women may be in trouble,” I said. “Can you tell me a bit more about the men you saw them with?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get a good look.”

“Please try.”

She closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment.

“Well, two of them were large. They were young,” she said. “The other was old. He wasn’t very tall, but he looked like he had muscles, like a weight lifter.”

She paused.

“He had a beard, a, what do you call it,” she said, opening her eyes and drawing a circle around her mouth with her finger. “A goatee.”

Short. Built. Goatee. It seemed like a description I had heard before.

“Racially, was he white, black?”

“I would say … Hispanic.”

“And how would you describe his hair?” I asked.

“He didn’t have any. His head was shaved.”

That cinched it for me. Akilah and Sweet Thang had been kidnapped by the so-called Puerto Rican man, the one Akilah said sold the mortgage on her house. I had dismissed him as being a product of her imagination, just another piece of her intricate fabrication. But really he was like everything else in Akilah’s world: twisted slightly, for storytelling purposes, but basically real.

It also fit the rough description of the man who had returned Windy’s corpse at Enterprise-Donato Semedo, or whatever his name was-whom Raines had described as short and broad.

“How long ago did they leave?” I asked.

“About ten minutes ago,” she said.

In other words, right after I heard Sweet Thang’s scream. He probably marched them right out of the house. It was a bold move-a kidnapping in broad daylight-but I supposed if Akilah knew something about the murder of Windy Byers, the killer would take some big risks to be rid of her.

And anyone who happened to be with her.

“And you said the car was black?”

“Yes, long and black. Like the cars the men drive to pick people up at the airport.”

“A livery cab?”

“Yes, a livery cab.”

“Thank you, ma’am, you’ve been very helpful,” I said, slipping my card through the door opening. “Please call me if you think of anything else.”

I trotted back to my Malibu, wondering how I could track down a single black livery cab in a city where ten thousand of them came to pick people up at the airport every day.

I had no shot.

At this point, my only connection to the Puerto Rican man was Hector Gomes of Van Buren Street. I had to get to him, fast, with what resources I had.

I made two phone calls. The first was to Denardo Webster. My picture was helpful, but he was the only one who really knew what Gomes looked like. I told Webster about the abduction and instructed him to meet me at Gomes’s house just as soon as he could get his feet off his desk.

My second call was to Tommy, who would be helpful if there was, in fact, a language barrier to surmount.

“Hey, can I pick you up outside the office in five minutes?” I said. “I think Sweet Thang is in real trouble, and I may need your Spanish or maybe even some fake Portuguese.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ve been figuring out some real interesting stuff with these dead donors, by the way.”

“Great. You can tell me on the way.”

Once again, I made the Malibu do things the good people at Chevrolet never intended, which might have bought me an extra minute or two. I jammed the brakes to noisy effect directly outside the building, where Tommy was waiting.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he climbed in.

As I tore off toward the Ironbound, I told him about Sweet Thang’s bone-chilling scream, my inability to convince the authorities to take it seriously, and the existence of the so-called Puerto Rican man.