This is a not an erotic story. There are no sex scenes.
After being assigned to look into Tracee’s disappearance, Rowdy talked to the December 2015 Christmas show organizers. No one had any record of Tracee Nelson attending. After checking in the day of the Christmas trade show the Blue Point had checked Tracee out the next day when her bill went unpaid.
Rowdy saw the incoming call identified as the Redville police chief.
“This is Rowdy. How can I help you?”
The Redville police chief told him about the messages he had just gotten about an attempted kidnapping in Raymond as part of a sex trafficking operation and since Rowdy was heading up the investigation he would forward the messages to Rowdy. Rowdy said he didn’t see the connection to Tracee Nelson’s disappearance but with nothing else to use as a starting point he was chasing down anything that seemed out of place. A message about an attempted kidnapping as part of a sex trafficking operation in Raymond was way out of bounds and Rowdy thought this might be the starting point he needed. The police chief also told him about finding a cab abandoned at the Redville airport. He gave Rowdy the plate number. Rowdy recalled that Tracee had been on the phone talking to her mom in route to the convention center in a cab when the call got dropped. After that she had never talked to Tracee again. She hadn’t checked out of the Blue Point on her own. He did a data base search for anything about the cab plate number. There was a hit that might be worthwhile to follow up on. On the night and about the time of Tracee’s disappearance an angry visitor had snapped a picture of a cab’s plate that matched the number on the abandoned cab.
Rowdy called the Redville police chief and got clearance to move the abandoned cab from the airport to the police garage. Once he had the cab back in the Raymond police department garage he had a mechanic go over it carefully. This was not just some run of the mill cab. He was advised about the special features. The dashboard signals, the ear phone jack that would allow someone in the rear seat to have their conversation heard, the window between front and rear seats that once closed could only be opened from the front seat. No lock knobs or handles on the rear doors wasn’t unusual. A GPS tracker wasn’t unusual either. The most notable special feature was the nozzle under the trunk. The mechanic tested it and found that the nozzle would allow someone outside the cab to put something into the cab. Quite by accident the mechanic was on his phone when he activated the jammer. The call was immediately dropped and the GPS lost a useable signal down.
Rowdy had the locks changed so he could drive the cab and retrieved the GPS tracker information. He was hoping to find data from the time of Tracee’s disappearance but there was nothing that far back. The most recent data showed that the cab had been close to the channel and ocean side point. Nothing for the last two days. He reasoned that if someone wanted to not have the cab location tracked the signal jammer could be activated and the tracker wouldn’t receive any information to record. He drove to the point. The closest parking was at the lighthouse and the indicated coordinates were almost an exact match with the GPS tracking information showing that the cab had been at the point.
So the cab was either here or very close to here.
He got out and started walking around. Carla, Jeff, and Beverly were setting up the storage room where Jeff had been held for Beverly to use. At about the same time Rowdy saw Carla, Carla saw Rowdy.
Carla, Rowdy, and Sam sat on the deck. They talked about Jeff’s attempt to take Carla and Sam prisoner, the storage room with the bed, restraints, and locks. By then they had removed the posts, bedding, and restraints and renovations were well underway for Beverly’s use. They told Rowdy about putting Jeff in the rear of his cab and then texting someone just referred to as Chief and Ryan Brown.
Rowdy thought that Jeff’s cab and the notebook could be keys to figuring out what happened to Tracee. He told Carla and Sam that he would have preferred for them to have contacted him earlier but didn’t see that they had done anything illegal. All they had done was to put Jeff in the rear seat of his own cab and taken the cab someplace else to drop it off. They hadn’t harmed Jeff in anyway. What they had done was after he had tried to take them prisoner on private property. As far as he was concerned they acted with tremendous restraint in self-defense. There was nothing illegal about sending texts from Jeff’s own phone. He also said he might to come back for them to tell their story once the case was solved. Carla said she was hesitant to have too much publicity but would help if she could.
Rowdy looked through the notebook. There were the entries Sam had noticed. One piece of information that stood out to Rowdy was a note in the book about a capture made at about the exact time of Tracee’s disappearance. He couldn’t find anything to pinpoint the location where she may have been taken.
After a week of driving around the route between the Blue Point hotel and convention center and getting nowhere Rowdy enlisted the help of a couple of fellow police officers to drive around when their other police department duties permitted.
They had been driving around the Blue Point and convention center for almost a month getting nowhere and Rowdy thought maybe the cab wasn’t the key he had thought it might be. On a Wednesday morning one of the officers was driving from the Blue Point to the convention center and had to take a detour because of road work. He pressed the blue button. Almost immediately the red signal light came on. He notified Rowdy and went to pick him up in Jeff’s cab. They returned to the area where the officer had seen the red light come on and pressed the blue button. Immediately the red signal light came on.
They tested it several more times and found that if the signal jammer was on the red light would not come on after the blue button was depressed. Rowdy enlisted the help of an officer assigned to the marine unit. He thought that the red light response was being activated by a signal from someplace in the vicinity of where it had been first observed. He got a direction finder that would show the straight line between the cab and the signal source. After a day of testing Rowdy thought he could use triangulation to pin point the response signal location. It looked to be coming from an abandoned food processing operation in an old part of town a good way off the route from the Blue Point to the convention center. The building had been foreclosed on for non-payment of taxes. The previous owners had declared bankruptcy and current ownership of the building was now with the city. It seemed like once the food processing operation had shut down the building was abandoned. No one could recall anyone going in or out of there in over a decade.
Rowdy thought about how to proceed and finally brought in a lock smith to open a small entry door on the alley way. Inside the building it was obvious that something had been going on there recently. In the middle of the garage floor was a wire cage with a cab inside. Rowdy checked the cab registration.
“Ryan Brown.”
That was the name Sam had given him. The cab was set up similarly to the cab that had been abandoned in Redville. In the rooms that could have been used for refrigerated storage were tables with restraints. He found the crates, nitrogen, oxygen mask, and gurney. In still another room he found some empty stainless steel vats that could be used for food processing. In the office he saw the blue lights and the yellow, green, and red buttons. He couldn’t figure out how it all was supposed to work. But he also figured that whoever had set it all up had been smart enough to destroy any evidence. There were a lot of empty bleach containers. A week of investigation by a team of specialists turned up nothing.
Rowdy recalled that the source of the cab license picture had described Tracee. He sent a photo to Edward and asked him if that was the woman he had seen. Edward responded that even though it had been a very long time that it did look like her.
At last Rowdy was able to reach some conclusions and he hated to tell Tracee’s mother what he thought.
He enlisted the help of a police department counsellor in Miami and flew to deliver the news to Harriet. Harriet invited them in and braced herself.
Rowdy started,
“I think I know what happened to your daughter but I don’t know who is responsible or where she is now.”
Harriet said, “Please. I didn’t think there would be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow on this. It will be easier to just hear it so I can deal with it.”
“I think your daughter was kidnapped and shipped off as a sex slave. I don’t know where to, by whom, or to whom. I contacted someone who might have seen her the night she disappeared getting into a cab and he confirmed that she was the one.
“Ownership of the cab can’t be determined. It seems like it was stolen a long time ago and never registered.”
After talking for a while, Rowdy said he felt bad that he couldn’t provide more information. Harriet said she understood and that she was appreciative of the effort he had made.
Back in Raymond, Rowdy went back to the lighthouse to see if Sam or Carla could help any further. He asked if he could have the Redville TV station do a broadcast from the lighthouse asking for anyone with information to come forward.
Sam asked Rowdy if he had found out anything about the cab driver. Rowdy couldn’t recall getting the driver’s name. Sam said he hadn’t seen him in years but that he thought his name was Jeff Thompson or something like that. Rowdy got out some past high school yearbooks. Sam leafed through looking at the pictures. He finally pointed out Jeff Thomas as the person who had tried to take Carla and Sam prisoner.
Rowdy went to Jeff’s home and found out he had left long ago. Neither of his parents had any idea where he had gone to or why. After Rowdy left Lynda went to Jeff’s room and looked inside his safe. It was unlocked and inside she found 100,000 in bundles of 100 dollar bills with an unsigned note. The note was addressed to mom and said that he would probably not be back and for them not to worry about him.
The Redville TV station aired a broadcast about the police investigation. Joe didn’t see Carla but he recognized Carla’s car in the background and the plate matched the one for Carla’s car. Jack Carter had been watching the news. The story about activities involving the lighthouse caught his eye. He got in his car to go to the lighthouse and arrived shortly after Joe Glass.
Joe, Carla, Sam, and Beverly were all on the deck. Joe was yelling and cursing at Carla calling her a slut, whore, pig, filthy cunt, cheap fuck, and just about any other insulting word he could think of. He yelled at Beverly calling her a bitchy little slut whore like her mother. He finally told Carla and Beverly to get their things together and get their butts back to the Glass’s house or there would be hell to pay.
Jack decided he had heard enough and he was angry. He walked to the deck and stood between Joe, Carla, and Beverly.
“Joe, you have had your say. Now I will have mine.
“First, this is private property. I own it. You have no standing here. Sam is here. He is my son. If these two women are his guests then they are my guests.
“Second, you have come here, yelled, and cursed at everyone here except me. And I expect that you will after I finish having my say.
“I don’t know what you would expect. You have yelled and cursed at your wife and daughter calling them names that I have never heard. I see absolutely nothing that to warrant the behavior you have just shown.
“Third and this is the last thing I am going to say to you. Get in your car and get out of here. Do not ever let Sam or me see you around this lighthouse or I will have you thrown in jail for criminal trespass and take everything you own. We have four people who will bear witness against you. So get your own butt in the car and get the hell out of here while you can do so under your own power.”
Beverly moved out of the house with Joe and fell completely in love with her magical life at the lighthouse. She got Sam to show her how to use the telescope and spent hours and sometimes days in the lens room or on the parapet writing bits of poetry or making sketches. Carla and Beverly were happy as mom, daughter, and friends. Carla read some of Beverly’s poetry and looked at some of her sketches. However it had happened she didn’t care. Beverly was turning into a beautiful human being with the ability to give joy to others through creations resulting from her mind.
Eight months after the confrontation at the lighthouse Joe was still angry. Mostly at Carla but he swore that he would make all of them pay for him being so publicly humiliated. After high school graduation in the spring Beverly and Sam enrolled at the university in Stonetown and with Beverly no longer needing her protection from Joe, Carla moved out of the Glass’s house and started living full time at the lighthouse. Spring break was coming up and Joe thought it likely that Sam, Beverly, and Carla would be at the lighthouse.
Just beyond the lighthouse access road turnoff one could turn to go the ferry landing or to a dead end at the channel. Joe called Beverly to find out what her spring break plans were. Once Beverly confirmed that she, Carla, and Sam would be at the lighthouse he finalized his plans to sneak up on them at the lighthouse and assassinate all of them. He drove to the end of the road. From there he would walk to the lighthouse and then ambush the people responsible for his humiliation. He had been walking beside the channel for almost 20 minutes when he came to a stretch where the channel bank sloped up sharply for almost three quarters of a mile. He was about 5 minutes into the steep stretch when he heard waves starting to crash against the bank behind him. The bow wave hit him throwing him up against the rocks. Water from the bow wave was just receding when the second wave hit. After the fourth wave he was out 75 yards from the bank and being carried further out with each of the ship’s waves. As the ship passed he was being dragged out into the channel by the ship’s backwash. He still had his 9 millimeter strapped to his hip, his 12 gauge strapped across his back, and was fully dressed in his heavy combat boots and fatigues. With no one there he was on his own. And not being capable he was pathetic. Helpless. As his lungs filled with water all of his meanness, weaponry, and combat gear were finally fulfilling the role for which they were intended. They were ending life. He sank to the bottom where the tidal flow moved him further out into the channel until his dead lifeless body reached the center. The big fish in the channel followed the smell and started to feed. By 400 am the next day there was little flesh left and the smaller bait fish had started to feed on the small bits of flesh and connecting tissue holding the joints together. With no flesh or cartilage his skeleton broke apart scattering his bones along the bottom over a 100 foot area.
The next day the police found his abandoned car and several boxes of ammunition. They found no notes or final statements. The divers did their tasks and found his bones. DNA testing confirmed it as Joe. Carla did her tasks to settle the estate. The courts ruled that Joe’s part of the estate would be going to Beverly and as provided for in the law she would get half of their estate.
Carla traded some of her property for enough interest in the lighthouse to show Jack Carter that she had “skin in the game” and was not just a free loader having gotten a bird’s nest on the ground. Sam came to the lighthouse each week end and sometimes during the week when he needed a shot of sweetness injected into his life.
Sam discussed his future plans with his dad. Jack thought that Sam’s plans were well thought out and what he wanted to do was badly needed. Jack asked him about his plans for Carla and told Sam that Carla seemed like a really nice woman that any man would be lucky to be with. Sam asked him what he thought about the differences in their age or her having her tubes tied off. Jack told him that love was what mattered and that age is just a number. As for her tubes being tied off, Jack came up with at least a half dozen ways for him to have grandchildren.
Carla asked Beverly what she thought about Sam and the differences in their ages. Beverly told Carla that she should choose happy over compliance with other people’s rules.
As Sam approached receipt of his degree, Jack transferred the property Carla had traded for an interest in the lighthouse back to Carla.
After graduation Beverly moved back to the lighthouse and followed her passion of writing poetry and art. Sam and Carla got married and set up a counselling practice in Redville for people wanting help making their love life more rewarding.