“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. Neil didn’t see Jenna much, hadn’t seen her in years to tell the truth, but I’m still close to Ellis. He and his wife, Sara, are the ones who are looking after Jenna this week, and he was the one who told me about you.”
“I turned him down. I couldn’t give him help when he asked for it.”
“He understood. He didn’t blame you. He still doesn’t. Neil was lost to him. Ellis knew that, but he loved him. When I told Ellis about Merrick, he said that I should talk to you. He’s not the kind of man to bear a grudge.”
She released her hold on my arm. “Do you think they’ll ever get the men who killed Neil?” she asked.
“Man,” I said. “It was one man who was responsible. His name was Donnie P.”
“Will anything ever be done about it?”
“Something was done,” I said.
She stared at me silently for a time.
“Does Ellis know?” she asked.
“Would it help him if he did?”
“No, I don’t think so. Like I told you, he’s not that kind of man.”
Her eyes shone, and something uncurled itself deep inside her, stretching sinuously, its mouth soft and red.
“But you are,” she said, “aren’t you?”
We found the girl in a glorified kennel in Independence, east of Kansas City and within sight and sound of a small airport. Our information had been good. The girl didn’t open the door when I knocked. Angel, small and apparently unthreatening, was beside me and Louis, tall, dark and very, very threatening, was at the back of the house in case she tried to run. We could hear someone moving inside. I knocked again.
“Who’s there?” The voice sounded cracked and strained.
“Mia?” I said.
“There’s nobody called Mia here.”
“We want to help you.”
“I told you: there’s no Mia here. You have the wrong address.”
“He’s coming for you, Mia. You can’t keep one step ahead of him forever.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Donnie, Mia. He’s closing in, and you know it.”
“Who are you? Cops?”
“You ever hear of a guy named Neil Chambers?”
“No. Why would I have?”
“Donnie killed him over a bad debt.”
“So?”
“He left him in a ditch. He tortured him, then he shot him. He’ll do the same to you, except in your case nobody is going to come knocking on doors to try to even things out later. Not that it will matter to you. You’ll be dead. If we can find you, then he can find you too. You don’t have much time left.”
There was no reply for so long that I thought she might have slipped away from the door. Then there was the sound of a security chain being removed, and the door was unlocked. We stepped into semidarkness. All the drapes were closed, and no lights burned in the room. The door slammed shut behind us and the girl named Mia retreated into the shadows so that we couldn’t see her face, the face that Donnie P. had beaten on for some offense that she had given him, real or imagined.
“Can we sit down?” I asked.
“You can sit, if you like,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not so much, but I look bad.” Her voice cracked further. “Who told you I was here?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“Someone who’s concerned for you. That’s all you need to know.”
“What do you want?”
“We want you to tell us why Donnie did this to you. We want you to share what you know about him.”
“What makes you think I know something?”
“Because you’re hiding from him, and because the word is he wants to find you before you talk.”
My eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. I could make out some of her features now. They looked distorted, her nose misshapen and her cheeks swollen. A shard of light from beneath the door caught the edge of her bare feet and the hem of a long red dressing gown. The varnish on her toenails was red too. It looked freshly applied. She removed a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of her gown, tapped one out, and lit it with a cigarette lighter. She kept her head down, her hair hanging over her face, but I still caught a glimpse of the scars that ran across her chin and her left cheek.
“I should have kept my mouth shut,” she said softly.
“Why?”
“He came around and threw two grand in my face. After all that he’d done to me, a lousy two grand. I was angry. I told one of the other girls that I had a way of getting even with him. I told her that I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. Next I hear, she’s sharing Donnie’s bed. Donnie was right. I am just a dumb whore.”
“Why didn’t you go to the cops with what you know?”
She drew on the cigarette. Her head was no longer lowered. Absorbed by the details of her story, she had briefly forgotten to hide her face from us. Beside me, I heard Angel hiss in sympathy as he caught sight of her ruined features.
“Because they wouldn’t have done anything about it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh, but I do,” she said.
She took another drag on the cigarette and toyed with her hair. Nobody said anything. Eventually, Mia broke the silence.
“So now you say you’re going to help me.”
“That’s right.”
“How?”
“Look outside. Back window.”
She put her hand to her face and stared at me for a moment, then walked to the kitchen. I heard a soft swishing sound as she parted the curtains. When she returned, her demeanor had changed. Louis had that effect on people, especially if it seemed like he might be on their side.
“Who is he?”
“A friend.”
“He looks…” She tried to find the right word. “…intimidating,” she said at last.
“He is intimidating.”
She tapped her foot on the floor. “Is he going to kill Donnie?”
“We were hoping to find another way of dealing with him. We thought that you might be able to assist us.”
We waited for her to make her decision. There was a TV on in another room, probably her bedroom. It struck me that she might not be alone, and that we should have checked the house first, but it was too late now. Finally, she reached into the pocket of her gown and withdrew her cell phone. She tossed it across the room to me. I caught it.
“Open the picture file,” she said. “The ones you want are five or six photos in.”
I flicked through images of young women smiling together at a dinner table, of a black dog in a yard, and a baby in a high chair, until I came to the pictures of Donnie. The first showed him standing in a car park with another man, taller than he was and wearing a gray suit. The second and third pictures were different shots of the same scene, but this time the faces of the two men were a little clearer. The photos had been taken from inside a car because the frame of a door and a wing mirror were visible in two of them.
“Who is the second man?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I followed Donnie because I thought he was cheating on me. Hell, I knew he was cheating on me. He’s a dog. I just wanted to find out who he was cheating with.”
She smiled. The effort seemed to cause her pain.
“You see, I thought I loved him. How stupid is that?”
She shook her head. I could tell that she was crying.
“And this is what you have on him? This is why he wants to find you: because you have pictures of him on your phone with a man whose name you don’t know?”
“I don’t know his name, but I know where he works. When Donnie left him, the guy was joined by two other people, a woman and a man. They’re in the next picture.”
I flicked on, and saw the trio. They were all dressed for business.
“I thought they looked like cops,” said Mia. “They got in the car and drove away. I stayed with them.”
“Where did they go?”
“Thirteen hundred Summit.”
And then I knew why Donnie wanted Mia found, and why she couldn’t go to the cops with what she had.