Runner, p.1
Runner, page 1
Books by Tracy Clark
BROKEN PLACES
BORROWED TIME
WHAT YOU DON’T SEE
RUNNER
Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.
RUNNER
TRACY CLARK
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2021 by Tracy Clark
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2021931068
The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3201-9
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: July 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-3203-3 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4967-3203-0 (ebook)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, thank you to my agent, Evan Marshall, for his great care and advocacy, and warm thanks as well to my editor, John Scognamiglio, at Kensington Publishing, my fantastic publicist, Crystal McCoy, and the entire Kensington family, for banging the drum loudly on my behalf. Thanks to family and friends for their continued support, encouragement, and understanding, especially when I appear to be listening and in the room when I am actually on the page working my way out of a story jam. Thank you to Detective Gregory Auguste, Chicago Police Department, for helping me get it right. To Cassie Jones, whose hilarious childhood story told around a table gave me the idea for Pouch’s TV remote swipe, thanks. I’m still laughing. And a warm hand to heart to my pals in the writing community and my writing families at Crime Writers of Color, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime, who have been so generous, gracious, and kind with their huzzahs, advice, and fraternity. To all the talented podcasters, bloggers, and reviewers who have been, and continue to be, so enthusiastic and supportive, thank you. My undying gratitude also to all those wonderful readers who have embraced Cass and followed me along on this amazing journey. You are all so fantastic. Until we meet again.
Chapter 1
I yanked the door open and all but flung my half-frozen self into the snug White Castle, the hawk clawing up the back of my neck, my lungs shocked rigid by the subzero wind chill. Chicago. Brutal. Winter’s threat—keep it moving, sucka, or die where you stand.
Winter, apparently, didn’t own a calendar. It was just a couple days past Thanksgiving. I still had leftover turkey in my fridge. Winter had a sick sense of humor and was as welcome as an IRS audit . . . on your birthday.
I stomped my feet to clear the slush off my ankle boots, and then stood there a second inhaling warmth, the smell of fried onions and thin, square meat sizzling on the wide griddle already starting the thawing process. It’d just been a short dash from my car, but the tips of my fingers were already beginning to tingle, and my toes felt like ten frigid fish sticks right out the freezer, despite my having cranked up the car’s heater to its highest setting. My fault, totally. I’d miscalculated and dressed for cute when I left the house this morning—jeans, short puffer jacket, a beanie puckishly placed atop my head, thin gloves, and the boots, good-looking in an everyday, schlepping-around kind of way, but several critical inches shy of adequate. Seriously, I didn’t know what I was thinking. I mean, I didn’t just meet Chicago. I was born here, raised here, live here; I know full well winter does not play. I slipped the beanie off and scanned the tables, finding what I would have expected to find in a White Castle at two o’clock on a Saturday morning—club rats easing down from a stupid night out, street folk looking for a sheltered stop before they ventured out again, and those coming from or going to shift work for painfully low but honest pay. The Castle was cheap, open 24/7, heated, and unless you came in and started tossing the place or harassing people, you were left alone.
I was looking for Leesa Evans, a prospective client. She’d called my office the day before looking for help to find her missing fifteen-year-old daughter, Ramona, but she hadn’t given me a lot of details over the phone. Truthfully, though, she had me at missing fifteen-year-old, so I was here to get the rest of it, and to see if I could do anything for her.
My eyes landed on a lone woman sitting at a far table, burrowed deep in a light jacket, no hat, no boots, her eyes fixed in a faraway stare. She was dark, middle-aged, forties, maybe. There was no one else waiting alone, so I assumed she was who I was here to see. I watched her for a moment, trying to get a feel for her. She looked sad, beaten down to the ground, and she wasn’t eating. There was only a paper coffee cup on her table. She tugged at her jacket sleeves. One foot tapped busily under the table.
The smell of the onions made my stomach growl. I’d spent most of the day tying up paperwork on closed cases, sending out invoices so I could get paid for the work, so it’d been hours since I’d stopped to eat, and my body was just now complaining about it. But I bypassed the counter, ignoring the pull of greasy sustenance, and went over to the table with the sad woman sitting at it.
“Ms. Evans?”
She startled, looked up, took me in warily; then her eyes left mine and she appeared to focus on something over my left shoulder. I flicked a look to see what had caught her attention, but there was nothing but an empty table behind me. I looked back. Evans’s eyes dropped from mine. She’d seen nothing; apparently, she just had a difficult time looking at me.
“You’re the detective. Cassandra Raines.” She said it in a clear voice, loud enough for the half-buzzed night owls nearest to us to clearly hear. I cocked an ear, then waited for what I knew was coming. I’d planned on counting to five, but it didn’t take that long for the half-in-the-bag party revelers and seasoned working girls on a break to get up from the tables and slip out into the cold. Detectives, even private ones like me, got no love at all, and it said a lot when a person would rather risk frostbite and hypothermia than share space with one of us. If I were the type of gal who gave a twist, I’d have taken offense.
I began to unzip my jacket, thought better of it halfway through the zip, and zipped it up again. I’d give it another minute . . . or twenty . . . to warm up some. I watched Evans sitting there, her leg bouncing nervously under the table, her not looking at me. She was thin, now that I saw her up close, and her eyes had dark circles under them.
“You’re not hungry?” I said.
Evans shook her head, the denial unconvincing. She took a sip from her cup. There was no steam coming off the top. She’d obviously been sitting with it a while.
“Well, I’m starving. I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. You mind me getting a little something? We can talk while I eat.”
She nodded an okay and I walked up to the counter, ordered double, and waited for my sliders, fries, and onion rings, sneaking the occasional peek back at the table, but finding Leesa Evans unchanged each time.
My order was up fast. Not much of a line at 2:00 AM. I carried the bag back to the table, sat, and then dug in for the first slider. I offered Evans some, but she shook her head no.
“Oh, come on. I can’t eat all these by myself. I mean, I could, but I’d regret it almost instantly.” I offered up the bag. “Help me out?”
Tentatively, like a shy kitten coaxed toward a bowl of buttermilk, Evans took a slider from the bag, bit into it. I spread the rest of the tiny boxes onto the table, positioning them between us, easy access for whoever wanted more.
“Two a.m.,” I said, smiling. “Unconventional.”
She finished the slider, eyed the line of boxes in front of her, but didn’t go for one. It looked like I was going to have to coax her along, one slider at a time. I pushed a few boxes closer to her. She smiled slightly, then took another.
“I got a job. Cleaning places a
I glanced out at the corner of Seventy-ninth and Stony, the stop on the west side of a cage-match intense tangle of intersections, which at the height of the day had cars flying from all directions on mistimed traffic lights. The hub of confusion was loathed by locals, ignored by the city, and had earned a decades-old reputation for being a flat-out death trap. If you were bent enough to try and cross the streets walking, you had better be quick about it. If you were driving and stuck at a light, you’d be wise to cross yourself and get right with Jesus before you pushed off on the green.
I ate another slider, watching Evans as she avoided looking at me, wondering how old she was. I’d pegged her as being in her early forties, but closer to her now, she looked younger than that. Something had hit her hard somewhere, that was evident, and her shoulders drooped from the weight it left behind.
I snuck furtive glances at her hands and wrists, wondering what was hidden under the jacket. She didn’t look high or drunk; she was lucid, though slightly morose. She tugged at her sleeves again, as though she was trying desperately to hide something. I thought addict—recovering, at least. I thought alcohol, too, maybe. It would account for her skittishness, the tugs.
“How can I help you, Ms. Evans?”
She flicked a look at me. “Leesa.”
I grabbed another mushy slider, but mostly so it would encourage her to do the same. “Leesa.”
“Like I said on the phone, it’s my daughter. She ran away. I need somebody to get her back for me.” I plucked an onion ring out of a box, then offered the rest to Evans. “Her name’s Ramona. Ramona Titus. Me and her father . . . Well, we wasn’t married, or anything. She’s fifteen. They say she’s been gone since last Thursday. That’s nine days she’s been out there by herself.”
I sat up straighter. “Who’s they?”
Leesa looked embarrassed. “She don’t live with me. The state took her five years ago. She’s been in the system since.” She eyed me sheepishly. “I got caught up in the drug life. That’s why they took her. They moved her all over, but this last time, she was staying in a good place, I thought, with a woman named Deloris Poole. Ramona seemed to be doing okay there, but it must not have been so good, if she ran away.”
“How long had she been with Poole?”
“About a year. I call her all the time, though. Poole gave her a phone and I called my baby to make sure she was all right, I sure did. Only the last time, I couldn’t get through to her. I got worried, so I went over there.” Her eyes fell to her lap. “I wasn’t supposed to. No contact’s what the judge ordered.”
“Ramona told you where she was living.”
Evans bristled. “I have a right to know where she’s at, don’t I?”
I fiddled absently with the empty slider box in front of me, giving Evans a moment to pull it back in. “Poole couldn’t have been happy to see you on her doorstep.”
Evans sneered. “She acted like I was something she stepped in. Told me straight off, Ramona had run away, like that’s all I needed to know about it. That I’d go away and leave it like that. I thought at first she was making it up because she didn’t want me seeing her, but it was true. She never even tried to call me to tell me she was gone. She should have. Ramona’s my child, not hers.”
I let a moment pass. “I agree. You should have been notified. Did Poole call the police?”
“She said they were looking for her, but I know how they look when it’s us they’re looking for.” Evans looked as though she wanted to spit in disgust. “Detective Hogan’s the one in charge,” she said. “She gave me his number.” Evans wrapped her arms around her body, glanced out the steamed-up window. “I don’t trust the police. I got good reason.” She turned back to me. “That’s why I need somebody working for me. Maybe I’m not much of a mother, but Ramona’s mine. I want to know what they’re doing to find her. I want her back so I can do better.” Evans swallowed hard, and her eyes began to fill. She brushed the tears away with the back of her hand. “I need her back with me.”
I sat watching her, ignoring the food on the table and the new activity behind us at the tables in the wee hours on a Saturday. It wasn’t my place to judge her. Whatever she’d been through, whatever failures led to Ramona being put in the system—it was inconsequential to the problem at hand.
“Before you tried calling and couldn’t reach Ramona, when was the last time you actually talked to her?”
Evans thought for a moment. “Maybe a week before that. We didn’t talk long. I asked about her schoolwork, she said she was doing fine. I told her how good I was doing, that I was making plans to bring her home with me.” Evans’s eyes held mine. They were weary eyes, frightened eyes, but I saw hope in them too. “I made a lot of promises. I let her down bad, but I’m going to do it this time. I know it.”
“How long have you been clean?”
Evans stared out the sweaty window again. “Ninety-seven days. If that means you won’t look for her, just . . .”
I stopped her. “That doesn’t mean that at all. Where are you staying?”
Evans exhaled. “Redemption House. It’s a—”
“Halfway house, sober living. I know it.”
“I’m on probation,” Evans said. “I did my time. Possession. I’m clean. I want my baby.”
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a pen and small notepad, set the pad on the table. “Detective Hogan. You talk to him directly?”
“He and another detective came to see me. They said it was to tell me what all they’d been doing, but they just wanted to see if I had her. Like I took her. That’s how they do people.” She reached into her pocket and slipped a business card out and handed it to me. “Here’s his card. The other one with him was named something Italian. I can’t remember it. He didn’t say one word the whole time, just stared, like I wasn’t even a person.”
The cops had been reading her. It’s what they had been trained to do, to size people up, read their body language, listen for inflections in the voice, physical cues that someone was lying—excessive sweating, body tics, nervous leg movements, averted eyes, whether a person wet their lips too much or laughed too hard and at inappropriate times. It wasn’t personal; I’d done it just a few minutes ago at the door. It was just part of the training, but Leesa Evans didn’t want to hear that. She’d already formed her own opinion on it.
I read the card: DETECTIVE DAN HOGAN. I didn’t know him, but maybe I’d start with my ex-partner, Ben, and see if he did. I held the card between two fingers. “Mind if I take this?”
“Go ahead. When I tried calling to see if they’d found her, I got his machine. I left a message. He never bothered calling me back. I guess he didn’t feel he had to.”
I slid the card in between the pages of my pad, smiled at Evans. “I’ll follow up.”
She dipped a hand in one of her pockets, drew out a small wallet. “I don’t know how this is supposed to work, or how much you charge.... My job’s not much, but it’s steady.” Evans opened the wallet, drew out a small stack of bills, maybe a couple hundred dollars’ worth, and set it on the table between us. “I been saving up for an apartment for me and Ramona, and I’m real close. My time at Redemption is up soon, but right now, this is more important.”
I kept my eyes on her. A couple hundred was less than a day’s pay for the kind of work she needed done. I sat there for a moment and tried to figure out in my head whether I could absorb the financial hit, calculating quickly how many days I could afford to work for Evans for free. “Thanks. But first, has Ramona run away before?”
Evans paused a moment. “I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly in a place where . . .”
“That’s okay. Any idea where she might go?”
Evans shook her head solemnly, flicked a look at the money. “I can’t think straight right now. Is this enough?”
