Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

While the three of them ate, Chloe, her mouth full of fries, said to Charise, “This is my first meal in my entire life with my dad.”

Charise’s eyebrows rose a notch. “Oh?”

“This doesn’t look like the kind of place that has champagne,” Chloe said, grinning.

“I don’t think so,” Miles said. “Maybe later.”

Charise looked across the table at Miles, her expression an unspoken question. Miles was about to offer a short explanation, but Chloe cut him off.

“Save it for later. No one wants to hear the word ‘sperm’ while they’re eating.”

They were back on the road in twenty minutes. Bringing Charise up to speed would have to wait, given that she was in the trailing car. About an hour after they’d left the burger place, Chloe pointed ahead and said, “This is it, up here. Just past the fire station.”

She slowed the Pacer, hit the blinker, and turned off the main road onto a gravel driveway. She made a turn around a copse of trees, and there was the trailer. Charise stayed on the main road, pulling over onto the gravel shoulder to wait.

“So this is it,” Miles said, scanning the trailer from one end to the other.

“I don’t see his car,” Chloe said. “Let me try him again.”

She got out her phone, tapped the screen, put it to her ear. She waited for several seconds before it went to voice mail.

“Hey, Todd,” she said. “We’re at your place. Where are you? Wherever it is, you need to get your ass back here ASAP. I brought someone you need to meet.”

She ended the call, tucked the phone back into the front pocket of her jeans.

“I heard it inside,” Miles said.

“Heard what?”

“When you called him, I heard a phone ring inside the trailer.”

Worcester, MA

The plan had been, once Kendra Collins and Rhys Mills got to the funeral home about an hour’s drive from Springfield — one of several across the country with whom they had a standing arrangement for body disposal — they would search Todd Cox’s body for a second cell phone before they put him on the conveyor belt and sent him on his final journey, right into the crematorium. They’d realized there had to be a second phone after recalling the Verizon bill they’d seen on the trailer’s kitchen table. They were hoping to find it in Todd’s pocket.

They hauled the body bag up onto a table, unzipped it, and Kendra, pulling on some latex gloves and holding her breath, dug down into the front pockets of the dead man’s jeans, but came up empty.

“Maybe it’s in one of his back pockets,” Rhys suggested, turning away, trying not to gag.

“Help me turn him on his side.”

“Shit,” Rhys said, holding his breath as he rolled the body onto its side so Kendra could check the back pockets.

“Nothing,” she said, stripping off the gloves with two declarative snaps. “Where else could he have it?”

Her partner shook his head as he let the body settle onto its back again. “Nowhere else for him to carry it.”

“Maybe it fell out and it’s in the bag somewhere,” Kendra said, looking at Rhys.

“What?”

“Feel around.”

He met his partner’s look with one of disdain. “You’ve already been digging around in there. You do it.”

“I just took off my gloves.

Why don’t we just call the number and listen for the ring?”

“I don’t have a number for his personal cell phone. Do you?”

“No. Come on,” she said. “Snap on a pair and give it a go.”

He didn’t miss her double meaning. She knew he was squeamish about bodily fluids — other than blood — and the bag was swimming in it.

Fuck it.

He pulled on the gloves and felt around inside the bag, right into all four corners, under Cox’s lifeless legs, around his head. He withdrew his hands, carefully peeled off the gloves, saying, “Nothing.”

“Son of a bitch,” Kendra said.

“Yeah,” Rhys said.

“Could it be in any of the garbage bags?”

The bags of material removed from the trailer were still in their van and Todd’s Hyundai, outside. Their next stop was to be a nearby junkyard, where the car would be crushed into a cube, never to be found again.

“We would have noticed it, wouldn’t we?” he said.

She briefly closed her eyes, as though seeking some sort of divine guidance. “I think we would, but we need to check.”

“We leave the bags in the car, let it get crushed with everything else, does it matter?”

“We’ll never know,” she said. “We have to know. The phone matters. It’s something he handled. There’s more traces of him on that than just about anything else.”

He knew she was right.

Confident now that the phone was not in the body bag with Todd, they could at least proceed with this stage of their duties. They moved the bag and its contents onto the platform in front of the door to the furnace. Rhys fired it up, and they waited for it to reach the desired temperature, then watched as the body was conveyed into the raging furnace.

That done, they went back outside to the Hyundai, parked in back of the funeral home, and hauled out all the bags.

“There’s no easy way to do this,” she said.

They dumped everything out onto the parking lot. Cleaning rags, clothing, bedding, the laptop, all of Todd’s most personal items, like his toothbrush and comb. They spread the items out on the pavement. They found the cheap flip phone that had been on the kitchen table in the trailer, but that was it.

Rather than put everything back into bags, they tossed it all, loose, into the trunk and the back seat.

Kendra said, “We have to go back.”

Rhys leaned up against the Hyundai and hung his head. “I’m so fucking tired.”

“I know. Let’s get rid of the car, get some breakfast, mainline some caffeine, we’ll go back.”

Wearily, he nodded. “You take the car, I’ll follow.”

They went to the junkyard, asked for “Harry,” who was happy to put the car into the crusher after Rhys slipped a thousand in twenties into his greasy palm. They stayed until they saw the Hyundai go into the crusher and be reduced to a small cube of mangled metal and plastic.

They found a nearby Denny’s and demanded coffee immediately. Kendra ordered a veggie omelette, Rhys went for the steak and eggs.

“You know, I usually work alone,” Rhys said as he sipped on his first cup.

“Same,” she said. “But the client was right, figuring this was a two-person job.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Different.”

“So, Rhys , you got a real name?”

“I do. But how do you know it isn’t Rhys?”

“No one would really want to be named Rhys. If it was your name, you’d change it.”

“How about Kendra? Sounds like you walked out of a Chanel ad.”

“Okay, so I’m not Kendra and you’re not Rhys.”

Rhys raised his mug and smiled. “To us, whoever we are.”

She raised her mug and clinked his, as if they were wineglasses.

Their waitress arrived with the food, and even before the plate had been set down in front of her, Kendra had her fork in her hand. She speared some home fries, shoveled them into her mouth. While chewing, she said, “This one is a weird gig.”

“Gig? What are we, a band?” he asked, cutting into his steak, checking to see whether it was rare, as he’d ordered.

“Everything’s a gig to me,” she said. “You don’t have questions?”

He shrugged and chewed. “Everything’s a job, a task to be completed.”

“This list, though,” she said. “What’s the connection? Why the special instructions about cleaning the scene? The fires?”

Rhys slowly shook his head. “Only know what you need to know.”