Read Forgive Me Online

Authors: Daniel Palmer

Forgive Me (19 page)

BOOK: Forgive Me
4.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Angie made the bathroom run, but didn’t hurry. She stretched her legs and took in some fresh air. The sun had beat away the morning chill and a warm breeze carried with it all the fresh smells of spring. It was hard to trade the cloudless afternoon and scented air for the stench of her Taurus, but that was the job and she was prepared to do whatever it took.

When she returned, Mike had a strange look on his face. Angie got settled, unwrapped her “salwich” and noticed that he had devoured half of his sub. Evidently the new “fitness” program was off to a strong start.

“Got a present for you,” he said.

“I was wondering what that weird look of yours was all about.”

“The mother at my rental gig on Saturday has a brother who’s an ENT.”

“You mean EMT?”

“No, I mean ENT as in ear, nose, and throat doc. He was at the party for his nephew.”

A tickle of excitement came over Angie. She thought she knew where this was headed. “And?”

“We got to talking and I mentioned I had a case involving a girl with a deformed ear. I didn’t give him all the details or anything. He just told me to e-mail him the picture and while you were taking care of business just now, I got a response back.”

Angie’s excitement spiked higher. She had planned to follow up with a doctor on this very subject, but the Nadine search had sidetracked her. She was grateful Mike had taken the initiative. It was an important discovery. A medical issue, something possibly documented, could be useful as they tried to make a positive identification.

“What did he say?”

“He can’t be definite because he would have to see the girl in his office to be sure.”

“Understood. Just tell me what he said.”

“Okay, okay. He said it was”—Mike glanced at his phone—“Microtia-Congenital Ear Deformity.”

“What the heck is that?”

“I’ll read you his e-mail. ‘Hi Mike, nice to meet you at Audwin’s birthday.” Mike lowered his phone and made a look of disgust. “What’s up with these names today anyway? Who names their kid
Audwin
? ‘Oh what a cute little baby. I think I’ll name him—Audwin.’ What’s wrong with—I dunno—Mike or Jack, Billy, David, or something, you know, normal.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” Angie said, repeating a favorite phrase of Walt Odette’s. “Plenty of people would have differing opinions on your style of dress, for example.”

“What’s wrong with plaid and khaki? It never goes out of style.”

Angie had no patience for tangents. “Is this even relevant? Who cares what the kid’s name is. Read on.”

Mike continued. “‘The boys seemed to really enjoy the Ghost Mansion. What a hoot!’” Mike smiled at Angie. “It really is a spectacular bouncy house.”

“Will you please just get to the point?”

“Easy, easy.” Mike tossed his hands in the air. “I’m just reading his e-mail.”

“Fine. But read the important part, will you?”

“Okay—um. ‘The kids seemed to have a lot of fun. I’ll definitely pass your name around—blah blah blah. Okay, here we go.”

“Finally.”

Mike shot Angie a sidelong glance. “ ‘It is my best guess that the girl in the photograph has the classic Microtia. This is a congenital deformity where the external ear is underdeveloped. The condition occurs in one out of every ten thousand births. The right ear is most commonly affected, as is the case with this little girl. The angle makes it a bit difficult to make a determination with complete certainty, but the ear has a vertical skin appendage with a malformed lobule (that’s earlobe). If so, the firm tissue at the upper part of the ear is a disorganized cartilaginous vestige. If you do locate this girl, please let her know that we could reconstruct the earlobe using a piece of lobular tissue from the lower end. I hope this helps. Please e-mail or call if you have further questions. Good luck in your search. Best Regards, Dave Trumbull.’”

Angie mulled over this new information. “I never heard of that before.”

“Me neither,” Mike said. “But now we know. So, what now?”

The answer would have to wait. A black Cadillac Escalade exited the parking garage and rolled past Angie’s car. The license plate matched Markovich’s vehicle.

“Now, we follow,” she said.

She turned the key and the engine rumbled to life. Timing was critical. Pull out too fast and get burned, but waiting too long risked losing sight of Markovich. Angie let Markovich get down the block before she eased into the road.

They were on the move.

CHAPTER 24

M
arkovich was five cars ahead and easy enough to spot that Angie decided to pull over and let Mike out. He had returned to DC in his own car, a red Toyota Corolla, and it was best if they each had a vehicle on this tail. If one of them got caught in traffic or something, the other could relay location information by cell phone.

Mobile surveillance is a bit of an art form because every ‘how to do it right’ rule comes with an exception. The amount of traffic and the environment (road conditions, traffic lights, and such) dictated how far back Angie would follow. Because of congestion, she wanted to be close. She got to within three cars of Markovich’s vehicle and would try to close that gap to two or even one at the next light if possible. The basic rule was the more traffic, the closer she had to follow.

Mike was easy to spot in her rearview mirror. She got him on the phone, using hands-free calling.

“There’s a major choke point up ahead,” Mike said. “Intersection between H and Sixth.”

Angie thanked him. Knowing ahead of time where the choke points were—places like intersections, toll roads, construction areas, basically anywhere it was possible to get stuck—was the best way to avoid getting caught in one. She pushed on the gas and weaved between a couple cars to get two cars behind Markovich.

Mike got caught at a light, but no worries. Angie continuously relayed her position to him using her cell phone.

Markovich turned left onto Massachusetts Avenue NW. Angie sped up to the intersection, but quickly decreased her speed and made the turn without burning rubber. She didn’t want to give Markovich any cause to check his rearview mirror. She passed a slow moving Nissan as she crossed over 7th Street onto K Street. Other drivers didn’t care one iota if Angie was on a tail.

“Did you get your E-ZPass yet?” Angie asked.

“Um, I’m going to file an application. Definitely on the to-do list.”

Angie made a
tsk-tsk
sound. “Well, do you at least have your change handy?”

“You trained me, didn’t you?”

“And if I did it properly, you would have an E-ZPass.” Angie didn’t know if Mr. Markovich was going to take a toll road or not.

Toll roads were pretty far out of the city, mostly on the Virginia side. Either way, Angie had her E-ZPass and plenty of quarters on hand for either situation. She also had a full frame digital SLR camera from Nikon and a digital video camera from Sony. The Polaroid CUBE, which took stills and video was mounted to the dashboard of her car and recording the tail. One day, it could be evidence in a trial. Notes were fine, but for flawless recall, nothing beat a video recording.

When Markovich turned onto New York Avenue, heading uptown, the setting sun became a problem. The strong glare would wash out her video, and it made it difficult to keep him in sight. Things got a little better when he took a right onto 15th Street. A left would have taken her to the White House.

“I’m three cars behind him. How are you doing, Mike?”

“I got you in sight.”

“Hey, you’re getting better at this.”

“Once I was the pupil, now I am the master.”

Angie hesitated. “You really want me to say ‘only a master of evil,’ don’t you?”

“It would be nice.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Dang.”

Markovich crossed K Street and pulled to the curb in front of a building hidden by scaffolding. The black painted doors to a place called Solyanka opened, releasing a bear of a man in a paisley shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal what could have been a fur rug glued to his ample chest and enough gold chains to function as armor. He waddled toward Markovich’s car.

“Mike, are you seeing this?”

“Seeing this. I can tell you Solyanka is hipster heaven for the Euro set and very Russian.”

“How’d you know that?”

“Yelp.”

“Good work.”

Mr. Gold Chains climbed into the Escalade and drove it around the block. Markovich went into the club.

Angie didn’t follow. Her guy was inside, so she found a nearby spot designated for fifteen-minute parking. A minute later, Mike drove up and honked.

Angie hung up the phone and rolled down her window. “Wait for me on the next block.”

The wait lasted two hours, but since she stayed with her car, the meter maids didn’t give her any hassle.

A little after seven, the sun was making its final retreat and had dappled the sky with a sundry of glorious colors. There hadn’t been any sign of Markovich, and aside from Mr. Gold Chains who returned on foot, nobody else had entered the club.

Angie’s phone rang. “What’s up, Mike?”

“I have a good parking space if you have to stretch or something.”

“I’m all right for now.”

“I got something else for you about our mystery girl.”

“Yeah, let’s have it.” Angie was watching the door to the club in her rearview in case Markovich came out.

“My gal at NCMEC did an age progression on your mystery girl. She apologized for the delay getting this done. I guess there’s a backlog and since yours wasn’t an active missing persons case it went to the bottom of the pile. Anyway, she just sent me the results. Want to see?”

“Do I? Of course.”

That was a huge development. Facial recognition might help Angie identify the girl, or perhaps social media could get the job done. Either way, knowing what the girl looked like today would satisfy a curiosity and could provide a vital clue in the search.

Angie got as far as opening the e-mail from Mike when Mr. Gold Chains emerged from the club.

Mike texted to make sure she saw Gold Chains leaving. She replied that she did. She couldn’t look at the girl’s picture since her focus had to be on Markovich.

Soon enough, the Escalade came into view. Seconds after that, Markovich exited the club. Gold Chains held the car door for Markovich. No money was exchanged, no tip offered, and Angie suspected Markovich was a person held in high regard. He was on the move once more.

Angie got Mike back on the line. “I’m following.”

“Right behind you.”

She used the same techniques to follow Markovich out of DC that she had used to track him to Solyanka. He drove north, out of the District via the Baltimore-Washington parkway. From there, it was a series of highways until they got off at the Russell Street exit in Baltimore.

It was hard for Angie to focus for the hour and thirty minutes the drive took. She kept battling the urge to look at the image from NCMEC. She didn’t want to give it a cursory glance. It needed to be studied, valued.

What would that little girl look like now? Where was she living? Who was she? But the biggest question loomed largest in Angie’s mind. Why had her mother asked for forgiveness?

Even with Mike following, Angie refused to lose her concentration even for a moment. To do otherwise would be unprofessional and undisciplined . . . and uncharacteristic.

They followed Markovich down Martin Luther King Boulevard and onto Cathedral Street. There were some nice shops there, a little gentrified—not a hood, not that intense—but they were on the outskirts of Middle East, Baltimore, a neighborhood patrolled by the Baltimore Police Department’s eastern district, and the place most responsible for the high per capita murder rate.

The Wire
and
Homicide
had filmed there—which Angie wouldn’t have known if Mike hadn’t told her.

On Markovich’s tail, Angie and Mike drove past a Zumba studio, a flower shop, and an art supply store. The sparse pedestrian traffic showed a blend of races, though white was in the minority.

Markovich pulled into the parking lot of an auto repair place adjacent to a three-story brick apartment building that had no fire escape, but all of windows had bars.

Angie wondered if the top floor tenants worried about a rock climber breaking in.
Those bars aren’t for keeping people out
, she thought.

She came to a stop in front of a commercial printer over on the next block. It would be too conspicuous to park in front of the auto repair place where Markovich had gotten out. Using her binoculars, she watched Markovich make his way down an alley between the parking lot of the repair place and the apartment building.

She got Mike on the phone and wondered if he shared her gut feeling. “Do you think there’s a rear entrance to that apartment building?”

“I was asking myself that very question. Let’s watch this place for a while.” He was parked on the other side of the two-way street, a few cars behind her, facing the opposite direction.

“You watch for me for a bit. I want to take a look at this girl.”

From her PI work, Angie knew a great deal about age progression. It was especially tricky to do with very young children from a single photograph. Face shapes change dramatically by adulthood, making it hard to predict the changes. Variables in lighting, shadows, and expression compounded the challenge.

NCMEC was good at solving that complex problem. Its age-progressions had, over the years, been instrumental in the recovery of hundreds of missing children. It was part art and part science, and the folks at NCMEC were kind to apply their expertise to Angie’s case.

NCMEC could also help her with identification, since they regularly shared age-progressed images with the FBI and with thousands of police departments across the nation. But this photo came with no parent for NCMEC progression experts to consult. Nobody could say anything about the girl’s personal tastes—how she maybe loved bangs or preferred her hair short. They didn’t have photos of the parents as children or of other siblings to better predict how the skull and face would lengthen. Age progression of the single photograph amounted to little more than a shot in the dark.

BOOK: Forgive Me
4.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Circus Wolf by Lynde Lakes
Claire Delacroix by The Moonstone
Beastly Things by Leon, Donna
A Risk Worth Taking by Laura Landon
Havana Noir by Achy Obejas
The Professional Part 2 by Cole, Kresley