Vanished - A Mystery (Dixon & Baudin Book 1) Read online

  “I’m gonna drop you at Molly’s.”

  “Now? Why?”

  “I have to go meet with someone.”

  “I can come, too.”

  “No, not with this person.”

  15

  Baudin was already back at the precinct when Dixon came in after lunch. He walked up to their desks and sat down. Baudin had several windows open on his computer, and he began going through them, closing the unnecessary ones.

  “Your kid okay?” Dixon said.

  “She’s fine.”

  He nodded. “Fight or something?”

  “Or something.”

  Dixon leaned back in his seat and put his feet up on the desk. “Jane Doe’s going on the news. I know the chief said to keep it quiet, but I ain’t revealing any details. Hopefully he don’t chew our asses for it.”

  Baudin looked at him. “I have a feeling it’s not going to matter what we do. I don’t think he’ll be happy with any outcome.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Well, what’d your hunches say about Brett McCabe?”

  “I was gonna head up there now, actually. He declined to come down here yesterday.”

  “He seems really frail to me.”

  Baudin stretched his back from side to side. “Frail or no, he didn’t look too pleased we were up there.”

  “Well, you drive.”

  Dixon pulled his feet from the desk and headed out, Baudin following. The air outside smelled like factory exhaust. Not entirely unpleasant, but that could’ve been because Dixon was used to it now. He wondered if Baudin found it repellent.

  Once they had pulled out of the parking lot, Dixon rolled down the window and rested his elbow on the edge of the door. He’d spent most of his life in Cheyenne and wondered if that was why most people stayed. He couldn’t think of many people he knew growing up who had left. Almost his entire high school graduating class was right here, as was everyone he’d gone to church with as a child. His daddy used to say Cheyenne was the crib and grave of people born there.

  “Who’s your contact with the news?” Baudin asked.

  “Girl I used to date. We’re on good terms. She wants first release of anything going public, and if we get a collar she wants an interview in the holding cells with him.”

  “Did you agree to that?”

  “I would’ve agreed to a whole helluva lot more. Where else am I gonna go to get her face out?”

  “Did you post on any websites or blogs?”

  “Wouldn’t help. This isn’t LA, not yet. People out here still get their news from the TV. Few folks got Netflix or DVRs. They just watch whatever’s on.” He looked at Baudin. “How you likin’ it out here?”

  “It’s… different. Slower. But people are the same everywhere. That doesn’t change.”

  Dixon hesitated. “I’m havin’ some folks over for the game tomorrow. Two o’clock. You should come. My wife needs to meet you anyway.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Just… something she does. She needs to meet you.”

  “I’m not really good with the social stuff.”

  “Don’t matter. You gotta be there and be met. Otherwise I’ll catch an earful every day until you do. Bring your daughter, too.”

  “If you insist, I guess I can’t be rude.”

  They rode in silence until they were back out on the border of Laramie County and surrounded by desert and brush. The air was dryer out here and had a different smell. Dixon slipped on his sunglasses.

  “You don’t have any?” Dixon said.

  “Sunglasses? No, man. I like to see things as they really are, not filtered with that shit.”

  “Don’t hurt your eyes? All the sun?”

  He shook his head. “Sun’s natural. Sunglasses are not natural. You tell me which one poses the risk to my eyes.”

  The winding road up to McCabe’s property was empty, and they got there without seeing another soul. Baudin parked and got out. He went over to the intercom, glancing around the whole time, and pushed the call button.

  “Yes?” a voice came through from the other end.

  “Detective Ethan Baudin. I need access to your property again, Mr. McCabe.”

  A string of profanities came through the intercom before he said, “Can’t it wait?”

  “Afraid not, sir.”

  A few more F-bombs and then the gate clicked open.

  When they were riding up the dirt path, Dixon watched the way the trees moved with the wind. He’d never seen a painting really capture the bending and twisting to avoid being broken. He’d always thought it was like a beautiful dance. Hillary had wanted to move to bigger cities several times in their marriage, but he couldn’t imagine a day going by where he didn’t get to look at trees.

  “How you think it is people can live in the big cities?” he asked. “Didn’t you miss bein’ outside in LA?”

  “I got outside. There were palm trees and the ocean. Don’t really miss nature.”

  “You grew up there?”

  He nodded. “Born and raised. You?”

  “Cheyenne. My mom took off when I was young, and my dad worked at a factory making engine parts. Made twenty-five thousand a year, and we had a home, a car, and went on good vacations every year. Not to mention a full-time nanny. Can’t do shit on twenty-five grand now.”

  “People always degrade the present and elevate the past, man. It’s bullshit. World’s always been the same as it always is.”

  Dixon saw the home up ahead, and McCabe was standing there with his dog and a cane. The grimace on his face was that of a person about to do something extremely unpleasant but with no choice.

  They parked near him on the horseshoe driveway in front of the house, and McCabe had to limp over.

  “Thought you was goin’ to where that girl was killed,” he said, standing a good ten feet back as the two detectives got out.

  “We will,” Baudin said. “Just needed to speak with you first.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “Got someplace we can sit?”

  He pointed with his chin to a stone slab surrounded by several chairs. Dixon sat first and leaned back, watching Baudin. There was something different in the detective’s eyes. He had a challenge in front of him, Dixon guessed. Baudin was a man who thrived on challenge. He wondered what Baudin was like when there was no challenge.

  Baudin stood but leaned against the stone table. “This is a lot of property, Mr. McCabe. How many acres you got?”

  “Fifteen hundred all told. Used to be closer to three thousand, but I gave some of it away to save on the damn taxes.”

  “I bet.” He looked down at his shoes before pushing away from the table and strolling around as though studying the house. “You walk the property much?”

  “Yeah, with my dog.”

  “How often?”

  “Every day.”

  “You ever see that girl up there?”

  “No, of course not. I would’ve called the police.”

  Baudin stepped to within a couple of feet of the man. “You telling me you walk this property all the time, and a dead girl was hanging on a cross not a mile from here and you never saw her? Not in the entire month she’d been up there?”

  “Just what the hell are you saying?” he spit, his face flushing red.

  Baudin shook his head, turning back to the house. “Nothing. Just talking. What did you do for a living, Mr. McCabe?”

  “Real estate. I was a developer. I built Cheyenne from a desert into a city. Me and my father and his father before him, when there was nothin’ out here but dirt.”

  Dixon asked, “Anybody else live on the property? Squatters, maybe?”

  “No, no one else here. I see to that.”

  Baudin said, “You have any idea who could’ve done something like that?”

  “No, Detective, I don’t make a habit of spending time with psychopaths. I have no idea who did that to the girl.”


  “Did you know her?”

  “No,” he said loudly. “I told you I would’ve called the police.”

  Dixon said, “What about the hiker? The guy who called it in? He come down here and see you?”

  “No. I didn’t know anything about this until that first cop from the sheriff’s office showed up and made me let him in.”

  Baudin turned suddenly, so fast that Dixon was afraid he’d drawn his weapon. But instead he marched up to McCabe and stared into his eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

  McCabe was flustered, his mouth agape with no words coming out. “I don’t give a shit what you believe,” he finally snapped. “And I’d like you to leave my property now.”

  “I’ll be back with a warrant to search your house. And I won’t take it easy, either. Or you can let me search it now, and I promise I won’t disturb anything.”

  McCabe stepped close to him, so close their noses almost touched. “Get the hell off my property.”

  Baudin grinned and turned away. Dixon rose, nodded to McCabe, and followed Baudin back to the car.

  “Well, he was pissed,” Dixon said.

  “Don’t think it was him. He can barely walk. Did you see his feet?”

  “No.”

  “He was wearing sandals. Both his feet were nearly black and swollen. He couldn’t put much pressure on them, much less haul a body onto a cross and then pull it up.”

  “Unless he had help.”

  “True. But he’d have to be a fool to put the body up on his own property, even if there’s nobody else out here. He didn’t strike me as a fool. I still would like to search his house, though. You know any judges that would give us a warrant?”

  “McCabe’s well known in this town. You’re gonna need somethin’ good for a judge to let you look through his home.”

  He grinned. “I think I got just the thing.”

  16

  Baudin waited until evening, filling out paperwork on another case. The chief had given his word that they weren’t supposed to be given anything else, but Jessop didn’t care. He knew they wouldn’t go complaining to the chief about it, and he sure as hell wasn’t going out himself to investigate a convenience store robbery or credit card theft.

  Baudin looked up and saw Dixon concentrating on his screen. He leaned forward casually and pretended to need something at the far end of his desk, but he actually glanced at Dixon’s screen. It was the Wikipedia page on the Tuskegee experiments. Baudin grinned and leaned back in his chair, pushing the credit card theft case file away from himself.

  “What ya reading?” Baudin asked.

  “Nothin’. Just bullshit to pass the time.”

  He nodded, not taking his eyes off him. “You staying late?”

  “Nah, I’m gonna head home and have a beer, relax on the couch and just forget about chicks with their vages missing.”

  “You haven’t seen many vics, have you?”

  “Homicides? I’ve had some. Maybe ten. Nothin’ like this, but still homicides. Most murders in this town are drunken brawls that ended bad. I had one that might’ve been somethin’ like this, but I don’t know.”

  Baudin put his hands behind his neck, revealing the sweat stains under his arms. “What was it?”

  “Girl from the strip club, the Eastern Exposure. Don’t exist no more. The owner went under ’cause of back taxes, but it was big business years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “We found one of the girls—I can’t remember her name, but her stage name was Diamond, I remember that—we found Diamond in the backseat of her car in the lot, dead. Just starin’ up like a fish that’d just been caught and thrown in a cooler to suffocate. Just starin’ up. We found some track marks, and her system was filled with so much smack it woulda killed a horse. It was ruled overdose, but… I don’t know.”

  “Just didn’t sit right in your gut, huh?”

  “No. Never. Not even now. Somethin’ about the way she was looking. They found semen and evidence of rape, vaginal tearing, but her previous boyfriend said she liked it rough.”

  “You look into him?”

  “For three months. I followed him around so much he filed a complaint against me. I was ordered to back away. Before I could do anything, he took off. Left the state. I let sleeping dogs lie after that.” Dixon stared off into the distance for a moment, and Baudin could tell he was gone, in some distant place considering distant possibilities that no longer mattered. “What about you?” he said after a time.

  “I’ve had similar, but nothing this brutal. Sometimes in the canyons you’d find bodies. We found a young mother once who was pregnant. He’d torn out her throat like an animal. Left teeth marks in the flesh. Real vicious. I started scanning the open-unsolved files, mostly because I had nothing. Nobody saw anything, nobody reported her missing, no relatives. So I’m scanning the files and I come across a woman from 1975 who was killed in an identical way. Throat ripped out, teeth marks, but the vic had been sodomized and mine hadn’t. That was the only difference.”

  “You ever find him?”

  Baudin nodded as he took a sip of coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. “Some uniforms went into a house because the neighbors reported a bad smell. They found the owner, Randall Dupas. He died of congenital heart failure. When the uniforms were going through his stuff, waiting for the paramedics to call it and get the ME out there, they found photo albums. Like, five of ’em. They were filled with women, pictures he’d taken of ’em… after he’d bitten out their throats. About twenty women over a forty-year period. But he was a long-haul trucker, so I bet that figure’s closer to one or two hundred. He didn’t sodomize my vic because he was too old at that point to get it up.”

  Dixon didn’t say anything. Baudin was now the one staring off into space. He blinked several times as though wiping memories away and said, “Better to leave ghosts alone.” He rose, finishing his coffee and tossing the cup in the trash. “Need me to bring anything tomorrow?”

  Dixon shook his head. “No. There’ll be plenty of everything.”

  Baudin turned and walked away. As he neared the glass doors heading out of the detective’s floor, he could see Dixon’s reflection in it. He was staring at him, all the way until the moment Baudin had opened the door and gone through.

  Baudin ate a slow meal at a Mexican restaurant. He sat in the corner by himself and called Molly. She didn’t answer but called him back after a few minutes.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Sulking. Listening to some awful music in my bedroom.”

  “Can you make sure she eats something? If you don’t push it, she won’t eat.”

  She chuckled. “I raised five of my own, you know.”

  “I know. And I can’t tell you how appreciative I am, Cousin.”

  “Well, bring me a burger and fries, then. From Shakey’s. None of that cheap fast-food garbage.”

  “You got it.”

  He hung up and put the phone down next to his plate. He’d only taken a few bites of the meal but couldn’t eat. Food was hard for him to get down, and it seemed to be getting harder, as though his body were rejecting it the older he got. An image of himself withering away would sometimes come to him. His ribs stuck out, his face gaunt and blackened with malnutrition. When he didn’t feel like eating, he would picture that and then take another bite.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the waitress. “Could I get a beer, please? Corona with lime.”

  The beer was warm, but he didn’t mind. He sipped it slowly and kept his eyes on the people around him. Personal intelligence, the ability to read and understand people, was, in his view, the most important type of intelligence. But they didn’t teach it in college, and they didn’t measure it in IQ tests. That was why people like the man who crucified Jane Doe could get away with things like that for so long: no one suspected them, because they were geniuses of personal intelligence. They could fit in and seem no different from the people they were around, just part of their world.


  When darkness came, he left cash on the table and went out to his car. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, leaving the keys on his lap. Rest wasn’t something that came easily or often, but sometimes it would come in fleeting moments that would make everything else melt away.

  Baudin wasn’t sure how long he’d sat there, but when he opened his eyes he knew he’d been asleep. He started the car, and pulled away.

  In Los Angeles, sometimes he would just go for long drives. Take the Santa Monica Freeway and drive until he was someplace new, someplace he’d never seen. He’d roam the neighborhoods with a small colored spotlight and shine it on houses in the dark, lighting them up a soft blue. He could spend hours driving around the city and still feel like he hadn’t seen anything.

  Cheyenne wasn’t like that. The city wasn’t sprawling with hidden nooks to explore. The streets were laid out plainly, and the people were even plainer. Everything had the appearance of being straightforward here, although he knew what lurked beneath that veneer. He’d seen it really close, felt it, tasted it on his tongue… and every city had it.

  The Motel 6 parking lot was so packed that there were no spaces available. He had to park across the street in the lot of a payday lender. He stepped out into the warm night air and lit a cigarette, taking a puff before he began the trek across the intersection.

  The girls were already out, more of them than before. The new ones were more beautiful and didn’t have the worn appearance of junkies and alcoholics. Housewife hookers… women who came out part time to sell themselves, usually behind their husbands’ backs. In his time in the vice squad, Baudin had even busted a medical doctor who would sell herself through Backpage when she grew bored. Baudin didn’t fully understand it but believed it came from some need to degrade themselves. He tried talking to them about it, but their insights into themselves were clouded with layers of rationalizations and denial. Most of them hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing out on the streets.

  He passed groups of women who smiled and asked him innocuous questions, awkwardly gauging his interest. Keeping his head low, he sucked at his cigarette, amazed at his sudden realization that there was no litter on the sidewalks.