Find You First

Prologue

Outside Springfield, MA

Todd listened to the phone ring, waited for a pickup. Two rings, three. You had to give these old folks time to get to the phone. Maybe they had to use a walker, or were in a wheelchair. Even if they had a cordless next to them, half the time it was tucked down into the BarcaLounger and when it started ringing they didn’t know where the hell it was.

“Hello?”

Good, okay. A woman, and she definitely sounded elderly. You had to be careful. Sometimes their grown kids would be visiting the home when Todd made his calls, and if they answered, the best thing to do was just hang up. They’d know something was up from the get-go.

Todd said, “Grandma?”

It was always a shot in the dark. Did she even have grandkids? And if she did, were any of them boys?

The old lady said, “Eddy?”

Bingo.

“Yes, yes, it’s Eddy,” Todd said. “Oh Grandma, I’m so glad I got hold of you.”

“How are you?” she said. “Hang on, hang on, let me turn down Jeopardy! I haven’t heard from you in so long. Your father, he was going to come by the other day and I waited and waited but—”

“Grandma, I’m in trouble.”

“What?”

“I’m in trouble and you’re the only one that can help me.”

“What is it?” she asked, her voice filled with grandmotherly alarm. “What’s happened?”

“I got arrested.”

The old lady gasped. “Oh no, Eddy, where are you?”

“At the police station,” he said. Which, of course, was not true. Todd was sitting at the kitchen table in his mobile home. In front of him, a laptop flanked by a can of Bud Light and a half-eaten slice of pizza.

“What did you do?” the old lady asked.

“It’s not my fault. The other person cut me off, and I swerved. I didn’t want to hit this lady, she was pushing a stroller? You know? With a baby in it?”

“Oh my, oh dear—”

“And I hit the tree, but the cops found some stuff in the car, that was definitely not mine, it was something one of my friends left in there, and it was only an ounce, you know? But because it was in my car... so they’re holding me unless I put up this bail thing. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Well, you have to call your father. He’ll—”

“No, I... I just can’t. He’s just going to kill me. I’ll need time to explain what happened, and you know what he’s like. He might even leave me in here, try to teach me a lesson, which isn’t fair, because, honest to God, it wasn’t my fault, and in the meantime, I have to pay this bail and—”

“How much is it?” she asked.

Todd smiled to himself. The hook was set. Now all he had to do was reel her in and get her in the boat.

“It’s twenty-five hundred,” he said. “I just don’t have that kind of money. I was wondering... I hate to ask...”

“If you don’t pay how long will they keep you in jail?” Her voice sounded increasingly concerned.

“I don’t know. A few days, I guess. They’ll throw me in with the general population, you know? Some of those guys in there, I just... some of them are big, and really mean, and probably... I just hope no one tries to... I mean, you know what can happen to a kid in jail.”

Was he laying it on too thick? You could overdo it. Todd believed that the first few times he ran this game, he went a little too far, made it sound as though he was about to be gangbanged by the Aryan Brotherhood. Best to let the mark use her imagination some.

The good thing was, most oldsters still used landlines. You got the address of a seniors’ residence through some online trolling, used a reverse directory to get the names of everyone who lived there, and you had a long list of potential marks. If they’d all owned cells, this would be a hell of a lot harder. Todd, of course, used cells. Always used disposable burners when he was doing this. Switched to a new one every week. Didn’t want these calls getting traced back because, eventually, Grandma would discreetly ask a family member if poor little Eddy or Timmy or Walter sorted out his troubles with the police, at which point someone would say, “Oh no, how much money did you send?”

Todd always asked for $2,500. A nice round, believable number, he figured. You didn’t want to go so high that the oldster was scared off, but not so low as to make it not worth your while.

He’d been thinking, maybe this would be his last one. He was making okay money at the computer store. Just part-time, but it looked like they were going to up him from three shifts a week to four. And ever since he’d met Chloe — talk about having your mind blown, connecting with a half sister you never knew you had — he’d been feeling kind of ashamed about how he’d been supplementing his income. So, yeah, maybe this was it. Last time.

Maybe.

It’d be nice to tell her when she came for her next visit, driving up from Providence in that ancient Pacer of hers, that he wasn’t going to do this anymore. Of course, that would mean confessing to it in the first place. It was funny how he felt a need to unburden himself to her. She’d had that effect on him. He believed she suspected he was up to something illegal. She spent a lot of time around old people — her grandfather was in some kind of home and she visited him often — and wouldn’t think much of him taking advantage of them.

“I... I could give you the money,” the old lady on the other end of the line said.

Todd’s mouth was getting dry. He had a sip of beer.

“Grandma, if you did that, you’d like, you’d be saving my life.”

“Do I bring it to the police station? I could get one of the staff here to take me. I could ask Sylvia. She’s really nice and—”

“No, no!” Todd said quickly. “No need to do that. The police said all you have to do is call Western Union. You can do it over the phone. Soon as they have the money, they give it to the police and they’ll let me out of here. Have you got a pen and paper? I can give you all the information.”

“Hang on.”

Todd heard her set down the receiver, some paper shuffling. Her voice, distant: “I think the pen slipped down between the cushions. Oh, wait, I think...”

God, they could be so pitiful. Todd comforted himself with the thought that these people didn’t have that much longer, anyway. They got swindled out of a few bucks, was it really going to make all that much difference? If they ran a bit short one month, they could always ask their own kids for—

Someone banged on the door of his trailer, so hard that it made him jump. Three times. BANG BANG BANG.

“Mr. Cox! Todd Cox!”

A man, shouting. What the hell was this? Especially at this hour. It was after nine at night. Todd didn’t get a lot of visitors here. His mobile home sat just off the road but was shielded by a line of trees. It was pretty quiet, except for the occasional blast of sirens from the fire station on the other side of the property line.

Todd glanced out the window, squinted. There were two people on the steps he’d fashioned from several cinder blocks, lit dimly by the outside light. A man and a woman, late thirties, early forties. What was that clipped to the belts of their jeans? Badges? Fucking badges?

“Todd Cox, are you in there?” the man shouted.

“Who is it?” he yelled back, like he didn’t already know.

“Police.”

Shit shit shit shit shit.

“I’ve got pen and paper!” Grandma said, her voice now clear as a bell.

Todd flipped shut the burner he’d bought online for twenty bucks. Next to the laptop were printouts of old folks homes across the country, as well as an overdue Visa bill and a recent Verizon statement for his personal iPhone. He grabbed the printouts and stuffed them into the utensil drawer as he headed for the door.

How’d they find out? How’d they get on to him? He’d been so careful. New phones all the time, different Western Union accounts, always covering his tracks. Todd figured, given that they weren’t in uniform, they were detectives. Not good. Not good at all.

“Mr. Cox, open the door, please.” The woman cop this time. She sounded like a ballbuster. Deep voice, commanding.

Where the hell could he go? The trailer’s back door was on the same side as the front door, so he couldn’t sneak away. So he went to the door, took a breath, tried to look like he didn’t give a fuck about anything in the world, and opened it. When he did, he was able to see a dark panel van parked next to his ten-year-old Hyundai.

They flashed their badges.

“Detective Kendra Collins,” the woman said.

The man said, “Detective Rhys Mills.”

“So, like, what’s up?” Todd said.

“We’d like to come in and talk to you,” Mills said.

“What about?”

“We can talk about that when we get inside.”

Todd nervously shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“You got a warrant?” he asked.

Kendra Collins frowned. “Why would we need a warrant, Mr. Cox? Have you been doing something you shouldn’t?”

“No, shit, no, nothing like that,” he said hurriedly, forcing a grin. “I just thought that’s what you’re supposed to say when the cops want to come into your house.”

Todd backed away from the door, allowing them room to step in. They each gave the trailer a disapproving look as they crossed the threshold and found themselves standing in the kitchen area. There was a small living room, if you could call it that, to one side, and a narrow hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the other. The sink was filled with dishes, and the counter was buried in beer cans and empty takeout containers.

Todd said, “Look, I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m clean, like, if you’re looking for drugs or anything, I haven’t been doing anything. I don’t do that stuff. Seriously.”

Rhys Mills surveyed the mess in the sink. “You’re Todd Cox? Twenty-one years old? Born in New Haven, September tenth, 2001?”

“Yeah, one day before all the shit went down.”

Kendra, standing behind him, asked, “Your mother is Madeline Cox?”

“That’s right,” he said, turning to look at her, his back to Detective Mills. “This got something to do with her?”

Kendra took out her phone, opened up the photo app, and said, “There’s something I’d like you to have a look at.”

She extended her arm, holding the phone low so Todd had to bend over to look at it.

“I can’t really see—”

“Look closer,” she said.

Todd tried to focus, leaned in. That was when Rhys came up behind him and jammed the needle into his neck.

“What the—” Todd turned abruptly, slapping his neck as though he’d just been stung by a bee. But Rhys was quick, and had not only completed the injection but withdrawn the syringe before Todd could swat him.

Almost immediately, Todd became unsteady on his feet. “Jeshush... wha the fu was...”

He looked quizzically at Rhys, who stood there, smiling grimly. “Sorry about this, Mr. Cox.”

Kendra, “Back in a sec, Rhys.”

She exited the trailer.

“Where’s your pardner go...” Todd said, throwing a hand up against the wall to steady himself.

“It shouldn’t take long, and you shouldn’t feel any pain,” Rhys said, a hint of sympathy in his voice. “It’ll all be over soon.” He’d taken some rubber gloves from his pocket and was pulling them on, snapping them when he had them up to his wrist.

Todd began a slow slide down the wall. When his butt touched the trailer floor he rested his head against the wall, watching the room spin.

The trailer door opened and Kendra, who had also donned gloves, came in with two large canvas bags. She dropped them to the floor, unzipped the first one, and took out something shiny and black that had been folded several times. She unzipped it and opened it wide.

A body bag.

“Best to get him stuffed in here before he shits his pants,” she said. “I don’t want to have to clean up any more than necessary.”

Rhys nodded in agreement.

Todd wasn’t dead yet, but he didn’t have enough life left in him to be at all cooperative when it came to getting into the bag. Rhys got his hands under Todd’s arms and dragged him on top of the bag, worked the sides up and around him, and then started to zip it up, starting at the dying man’s feet.

He paused before closing the bag over Todd’s face and looked into the dying man’s unfocused eyes, his dazed expression.

“This is always the interesting part,” he said. “The moment of passing.”

He zipped the bag shut. From inside, one muffled word from Todd: “Dark.”

“How much longer?” Kendra asked Rhys.

He shrugged. “Minute, tops.”

There was some minor rustling inside the bag for a few seconds, then nothing. Kendra watched the stillness for a moment, then opened the second bag and started taking out cans of Drano, scrubbing brushes, spray bottles of bleach, cleaning cloths, paper towels, garbage bags.

Rhys said, “Bathroom’s all yours.”

Kendra frowned. “Come on.”

Rhys shook his head adamantly. “You know I can’t handle that. If the bathroom’s only half as bad as this kitchen, it’s going to be like a latrine behind enemy lines.”

God, Kendra thought, Rhys could be such a germaphobe. He could kill a guy, but ask him to clean a toilet and he looked like he was going to lose his lunch.

She said, “What d’ya think this guy was into? He was scared shitless we were real cops.”

Mills looked at the phone sitting on the laptop. “Burner. Drugs, maybe.” He paused. “Doesn’t matter.”

Kendra said, “Be a lot easier if we could just torch the place like the last one.”

“If there wasn’t a goddamn fire station on the other side of those trees, I’d say yeah. But they’d be here in seconds. Place’d never have a chance to burn.”

They were methodical. Kendra, giving in to her partner’s squeamishness, found her way to the back of the trailer and attacked the bathroom. She cleaned out the sink and shower, then poured Drano into the drains, ensuring that anything in the traps would be dissolved. This was followed by a thorough cleaning of every surface with the spray bottles of bleach. Toilet, walls of the shower, even inside drawers and cupboards.

Into a garbage bag she tossed Todd’s hairbrush, razor, toothbrush, partially used bars of soap, every toiletry item he might have used. She didn’t just empty the small trash container. She bagged the container, too. Plus towels, washcloths.

“How’s it going up there?” she called out.

Down the hall, from the kitchen, Rhys said, “Gettin’ there.”

Kendra, needing a break, traveled the narrow hallway to where it opened onto the kitchen. The countertops were clear and clean, the empty stainless steel sink glistened, and the front of the fridge didn’t have a single, visible smudged fingerprint.

She whistled. “This place almost looks good enough to move into, if it weren’t a fucking trailer.”

It took the better part of four hours. The last thing they did was go back out to the van for a high-powered vacuum to give the place one last, good going-over. Gathered by the door were the body bag and ten stuffed garbage bags that included, among other things, all the clothing from Todd’s bedroom closet and drawers, the laptop, the bills, some list of seniors’ facilities found in a cutlery drawer, all the cutlery itself, trash from under the sink, the half-eaten slice of pizza.

“You look under the bed?” Rhys asked her.

“Not an idiot,” Kendra said. “Good thing, too. Found an empty beer can. I’ll do a walk-around outside, in case he tossed any.”

Rhys dangled a set of car keys from his index finger. “I’ll take the Hyundai. Let’s load as much as we can into the car. Anything that won’t fit, we’ll throw into the van. Hit the funeral home first, then the junkyard.”

She glanced at her watch. “Nearly two.”

“Any luck, we’ll have everything done by daybreak. I’m gonna sleep for a day.”

“You wish.”

They each took an end of the body bag and tossed it into the trunk of the Hyundai. They managed to get several bags in there, too, then filled the back seat. The remaining bags went into the back of the van.

They took a moment to catch their collective breath.

“I reek of bleach,” Kendra said. “Calling us cleaners, that’s supposed to be a euphemism.”

“You want to follow me or you want to head out first?”

“I’ll follow you. Not sure I remember the turn.”

“Shit. The phone.”

“I bagged the phone. It was by the laptop.”

“No, that was a burner. Cheap flip phone. He must have had a personal phone. There was a Verizon bill by the laptop.”

Kendra said, “It’s probably with him, in his pocket, in the body bag.”

“We’ll look for it later.”

They were both silent a moment. Rhys tipped his head back, put his right hand to his forehead as he looked up at the stars.

Then he brought down the hand, let out a long sigh, and said, “Two down. Seven to go.”