Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

offender registry. One DUI, at age twenty-two. Two arrests for possession, at twenty-three and twenty-six. Both drug cases dismissed. Six relatives and associates with names I didn’t recognize. Nothing suggested he had hit rock bottom, but at least Jeremiah Grace was his real name. After compiling the information into another pdf and saving it, I ran a search of the F-150 license plate I had memorized in the church lot. The truck was registered to Titus Oliver Glenroy—Tito—and had nothing more serious than late-paid parking tickets. Further digging revealed Tito lived in a mortgage-free house on Masten Avenue near the armory, inherited from his parents, and had never been arrested. Also, he owned an old Cadillac that had belonged to his father. Disappointed his other ride wasn’t a Lincoln Navigator, I closed my Lenovo and opened Keisha’s Dell.

I started by searching for keywords like drugs, money, shipment, delivery, and product, among others, but the first twenty of the hundreds of hits led to documents in the Humanitas folder or to the church newsletter or to other appearances in text that had nothing to do with crime. Next, I tried heroin, fentanyl, and assorted street names for drugs. Again, nothing beyond professional articles and treatment summaries. After an hour I faced the fact that I would have to read or at least skim hundreds, if not thousands, of files and emails.

I was up till half-past three reviewing reports, letters, memos, proposals, meeting minutes, articles, alerts, real estate documents, supply lists, membership lists, spreadsheets, patient evaluations, newsletters, operating budgets, pictures, and even Turbo Tax files for Keisha and her parents going back nine or ten years. I skimmed to determine usefulness, reading till my vision blurred, and drank so much coffee my stomach burned. Every now and then I had a vague sense I was missing something but the sheer volume of material I faced kept me from stopping to ponder what it was. When I reached my limit for the night, I had plowed through perhaps a third of her files and found nothing that pointed toward Keisha’s whereabouts or why someone would be after her.

Sore and tired, I stood up and stumbled to my bedroom.

Despite the coffee, I fell asleep quickly and stayed that way until someone knocked on my door around ten-thirty. It took a bit for the pounding to penetrate my coma. I called, “Just a minute!” as I pulled on sweatpants and stepped into my slippers. I went down the corridor and opened the door. There stood Dr. Lila Cook, who lived across the hall and taught literature at D’Youville College. Beside her was fifteen-year-old Andrea, whose dark hair and complexion must have come from her late father instead of her pale blonde mother. Both wore long coats and had large roller suitcases beside them. Lila wore the customary half-smile that revealed her perpetual nervousness. Andrea, like most kids her age—and cats—had a look of barely disguised disdain.

“Morning, Lila,” I said. “Andrea. Sorry it took me a bit, but I was up late working.” Unable to help myself, I yawned.

“Then I’m very sorry to bother you, Gideon.” Lila handed me a business envelope addressed to Bobby. “Dr. Chance isn’t here. We’re on our way to the airport and won’t be back until the middle of next month. I wanted to leave the January rent check.”

“Sure.” In the few years since they had moved in, Lila Cook took her daughter away every December, returning a week or so after the charter school where Andrea was an honor student resumed classes. Long ago Bobby told me that Lila’s husband had died on Christmas Eve and travel was her way of getting through the holidays. “Where are you off to this year?”

“Ireland,” Andrea said without emotion. “Mom’s had me reading Joyce, Wilde, and Shaw since the summer. Now I’m halfway through Dracula. I’m supposed to be looking for subtext and the Irish imagination.”

“Don’t sound so excited about it,” Lila said.

“I was about your age when I read Dracula,” I said. “I recall it as pretty creepy.”

Andrea smiled—but only while her mother was looking at me instead of her.

I carried the suitcases down to the front vestibule and left the Cooks there to wait for their taxi. Once back in my apartment, I opened the envelope and took out the check, folded inside a full sheet of paper. I had power of attorney and a card to Bobby’s business account, so I would deposit the check at an ATM later that day. But before I could discard the paper, I noticed two handwritten words near the top of the page: January Rent. The note struck me as unnecessary, especially since it was repeated on the memo line of the check. The paper was unnecessary as well. The purpose of the untouched white space had been to mask a check in a thin envelope. I suspected it was Lila’s custom to use the blank or near-blank page to hide her checks, even those delivered by hand. Then I remembered the nagging feeling I’d missed something while scanning files last night. Putting the check on the counter, I booted up Keisha’s computer.

Remembering that many of her Word files had a blank page or two at the end, now I wondered if she had changed the font color to white so the pages appeared blank to someone going through her computer. I began reopening documents I had examined last night. When I came across a blank page at the end of something, I selected it and clicked on the font button to make sure the color was black. For more than a dozen files, this produced nothing. I began to think my idea was silly. Just then random symbols appeared in the middle of the last page of a church membership list, a collection that looked like a mix of astrological signs and mathematical symbols. Realizing I had been right, I dragged the mouse over the symbols and watched the font name change from