Little Girls Lost Read Free

overhead as Rose went to a barrel-wide shaft, hatched and secured by a heavy marine lock. The shaft descended to a submerged steel tank resembling a dwarf submarine, ten feet long, five wide, six tall. It was a hurricane shelter, a place to ride out a storm in an emergency.
    Rose descended steel rungs to a chamber lit by a solitary 40-watt bulb. Two girls huddled like kittens on a cot at the far end of the cylinder. Maya Ledbetter, the one who’d been there a week, was mewing softly, LaShelle Shearing, the one picked up late last night, tried to burrow beneath the wadded blankets. The girls were restrained with lengths of clothesline knotted to the cot, the cot bolted to the floor.
    “Mister Breakfast’s here,” Rose sang in a wispy falsetto. “He’s got goodies for your bellies…”
    He crept forward. Maya’s eyes filled with fright. She retreated to the farthest corner of the cot. Rose set the sandwiches on a TV tray.
    “Come out, come out wherever you are, LaShelle,” he prompted the crying girl. “It’s peanut butter and jelly. Everybody likes PB&J, right?”
    The girl burrowed deeper beneath the covers.
    Rose traded the full pitcher of shake mix for the empty one in the cooler beside the bed, then bagged the leavings in the travel toilet and replaced the liner. He turned to leave, liner bag and empty pitcher in hand. Before ascending he turned to study the terrified girls.
    He wanted to stay and talk. But he’d been ordered to perform his tasks and get out. Rose willed himself to ascend the rungs. He returned to the house and set the full toilet bag on the floor in the shower, ignoring it through three sets of curls and two hundred crunches.
    Then he was back in the bathroom, peering into the bag, fascinated by all things female.

4
    Four in the afternoon and seven cops plus Ryder surrounded the long table in the administrative conference room: Terrence Squill, the acting chief of police, Deputy Chief Carl Bidwell, and captains Roy Grady and Bobby Harlan.
    Lieutenant Tom Mason, Ryder’s immediate supervisor, was there, as was Roland Zemain. Coal black and the approximate build of a Humvee, Zemain had been the ranking uniform on the scene and his street sense was unquestioned. For years the department had tried to move him into plainclothes or administration and he’d been as unyielding as titanium rebar.
    “The street beats on me one day, kisses me the next,” Zemain had once explained to Ryder. “It’s a love-hate thing, and when the hate steps in front, I’ll get out.”
    The seat beside Squill went to Commander Ainsley Duckworth, who didn’t sit on the chair as much as absorb it, a man who looked fat from ablock away, imposing at a half-block, with the last twenty feet making people wish they’d chosen the other side of the street. Part of it was the eyes, small and hard and tucked beneath a ponderous sheet of brow. Another was his mouth; too small to enclose his teeth, they seemed permanently bared.
    Beside Duckworth was Bobby Myers from Internal Affairs. Ryder figured the whippy, rat-faced Myers was there to run errands for Squill or Duckworth, taking orders being Myers’s sole talent. Myers was gnawing on his fingernails as if something tasty was stuck beneath them.
    When everyone was settled, coffee, pens and notepads on the table, Squill stopped studying his nails and trained eyes as blue as acetone flames on Ryder.
    “So, Ryder, when were you made spokesman for the department? I forget.”
    “I was hoping to calm the crowd. Explain that we were working on the abductions.”
    “I can tell how well they believed you. Especially with Turnbull making you sound like some mealy-mouth crossing guard.”
    “What gets me is, where did they come from?” Ryder said. “Turnbull, the crowd?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    Zemain cleared his throat. “Detective Ryder was in my cruiser, Chief. I was giving him street skinny on that domestic last week—wife spread hubby’s brains across the