ONCE LOST Read online

  She said in a sharp, loud voice, “My partner and I are looking for a man named Ivan Crozier. He calls himself ‘Trip.’ Do you know him? Does he live around here?”

  To Riley’s surprise, the men all stopped in their tracks.

  She noticed some of them smiling grimly at one another.

  “You’re FBI—and you’re looking for Trip?” one said.

  “That’s right,” Riley said.

  Several of the men let out a burst of sardonic laughter. Even a couple of the women joined in.

  “We know Trip, all right,” one man said.

  An obese, middle-aged woman said, “What’s this about, drugs or something?”

  Riley knew better than to answer her question.

  “We’ve got our own business with him,” Riley said.

  Another woman pointed and said, “Trip lives down that way, in Trailer Q.”

  The circle of men opened, leaving Riley and Jenn room to move.

  “Go ahead, go in after him,” one said.

  “Knock yourself out,” said another. “Good luck.”

  There was a general murmur of amused agreement. The obese woman let out a mean-spirited cackle.

  Riley actually felt more worried than before. What did these men know that she and Jenn didn’t know? Perhaps Trip wasn’t alone in that trailer. Perhaps he had an arsenal of weapons like the lone wolf she had arrested in California.

  She also didn’t know whether the people clustered around them might be working with Trip. They were clearly an angry bunch but she hadn’t determined where their anger was focused.

  All of those unknowns meant that she and Jenn could be heading into a dangerous trap. But Riley didn’t see that they had any choice.

  Apparently Jenn felt the same way, because she started walking in the direction of Trip’s trailer.

  Riley stopped her and said, “Let’s do this my way. Give me the car key.”

  With a slightly puzzled look, Jenn gave Riley the key.

  “Come on,” Riley said. Jenn followed her back to the car and they both got in.

  Riley drove through the maze of mobile homes until they got to one with letter Q roughly painted on the door. This trailer was in such bad shape that she found it hard to believe anyone lived there. But there was a battered car parked in front.

  Riley pulled up tightly behind the car, leaving no room for it to pull out. She and Jenn got out of their car and walked onto the stoop outside the door. Riley knocked sharply.

  “We’re looking for Ivan Crozier. Are you at home?”

  A voice answered from inside.

  “What do you want?”

  “We just want to talk to you.”

  “If you’re selling something, go away.”

  “That’s not it,” Riley said. “We just want to talk.”

  After a pause, the voice grumbled, “Shit.”

  Riley heard footsteps, and then the flimsy metal door rattled open.

  Inside the door stood a thin, groggy-looking man wearing an undershirt and pajama bottoms. He was about thirty, and he had a punkish haircut with shaved sides and an unkempt top. His hair was dirty, and judging from his smell he badly needed a shower.

  Riley fleetingly wondered why the kids in Angier found this guy to be cool.

  He must clean up well, she figured.

  Riley and Jenn pulled out their badges and introduced themselves.

  Trip rolled his eyes, which looked dilated. Riley guessed he was pretty stoned right now.

  “FBI,” he said in an unsteady, distant-sounding voice. “Crap. What’s this all about?”

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Katy Philbin?”

  “Katy who?” Trip asked.

  Jenn said, “We think you know who she is.”

  Trip just stared around blankly, squinting in the bright daylight.

  “She lives over in Angier,” Riley said.

  Trip nodded.

  “Oh, yeah. Katy. What about her?”

  “We’d like to come in and talk to you about that,” Riley said.

  Trip smirked a little.

  “I don’t have to let you in, do I?” he said.

  Riley took an intimidating step into his personal space—a tactic that had worked for her in countless situations like this.

  “Why wouldn’t you?” she said. “If you’ve got nothing to hide?”

  Trip nervously backed away, and Riley and Jenn stepped into the trailer. They found themselves in a long, narrow hallway that contained a rudimentary kitchen area. She guessed that two doors on the right-hand end led to a bedroom and a bathroom.

  To her left was what looked like a living room.

  Riley nodded in that direction.

  “Maybe we could go sit down,” she said.

  Again, she stepped a little too close to Trip for his comfort.

  He backed away unsteadily, then started to lead Riley and Jenn down the hallway.

  As they followed him, Riley began to worry.

  Something seemed off about this situation.

  Trip didn’t seem dangerous—at least not at the moment. So what had the neighbors been up to, eagerly sending Riley and Jenn here?

  The one thing Riley knew for sure was that the neighbors hated them for being feds.

  Now she wondered if they had directed them here as a ruse. Might they be preparing some kind of an ambush outside?

  Riley whispered to Jenn as they walked, “Keep an eye out a window.”

  “Looking for what?” Jenn whispered back.

  “You’ll know it if you see it.”

  The little living room was sparsely furnished with a couple of chairs, a table, and an unlighted lamp. The furnishings looked so battered and seedy that Riley doubted whether Trip had even bought them at a thrift shop. It seemed more likely that he’d scavenged them from junkyards.

  He might well be a drug dealer, but he didn’t strike Riley as a very successful one. He probably just sold drugs to support his own habit. Judging from his thin, drawn face and pallid skin, she guessed he might be into heroin.

  Riley and Jenn sat down on a ragged chair while Trip squatted onto a little three-legged stool. Jenn moved toward the window.

  Riley flashed a fake smile at him.

  “We hear that you go by the name of Trip,” she said. “Is it OK for us to call you Trip?”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s what everybody else calls me.”

  Riley asked, “What do you do for a living, Trip?”

  “I’m an independent filmmaker,” Trip said, sounding more alert now—even a bit enthusiastic. “You may have heard of my work. I’ve won awards at some of the best festivals. My best-known work is a movie called Origami Lace. It was a huge hit at Sundance.”

  It was such a brazen lie that Riley was starting to feel fascinated.

  She remembered what Daisy had said about him …

  “… a real bullshitter.”

  Daisy had definitely gotten that right.

  Riley shook her head and said, “Sorry, it doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Jenn said, “Not with me either.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Riley could see that Jenn was keeping watch through the filthy window.

  Trip said, “What about the girl?”

  “Maybe you should tell us,” Riley said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Trip said.

  Riley couldn’t tell whether he was lying or not.

  She said, “Her body was found this morning in a cornfield near Angier. She’d been raped and murdered.”

  Riley noticed barely any change in Trip’s expression.

  “That’s bad,” he said.

  Still looking out the window, Jenn said, “We understand something happened between the two of you at a party not long ago.”

  Trip snickered a little.

  “Yeah, she was kind of all over me. Not that I minded. I liked her. We really clicked. I thought maybe we might have a future together.” />
  He seemed to be coming to life more and more as he thought about Katy.

  “Did you ever have that kind of a thing? Where you meet someone and it feels like fate pulled you together? I felt that way about Katy, and she told me she felt the same way about me. But now …”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s just too bad,” he said.

  Riley studied his expression, which was now pretty cheerful.

  One lie after another, Riley thought.

  She’d dealt with bullshit artists like him before. Based on her experience, she’d found them surprisingly easy to interview or interrogate. That was because they loved to talk and she could almost count on every single statement they made to be a lie. They could be informative in a negative sort of way.

  Almost everything was a lie, Riley reminded herself. After all, few things in her line of work were ever that simple and easy.

  Riley said, “Katy’s friends said you drugged her at that party and raped her.”

  Trip looked completely indifferent.

  “Who told them that?” he asked.

  “Katy.”

  “It’s not true. Do I look like the kind of guy who needs to drug girls to get them have sex with him?”

  Yes, that’s exactly what you look like, Riley thought. But there was no point in saying so aloud.

  Riley said, “Katy was killed on Wednesday night. Can you tell us where you were then, from dusk until dawn?”

  Trip grinned and got up from his stool.

  “Sure. I was in Des Moines. I can prove it.”

  He walked across the room to a Formica table covered with bills and miscellaneous papers. He dug around looking through them.

  Meanwhile, Riley noticed a change in his attitude.

  As he rummaged through papers, he kept glancing up at a plywood cabinet hanging on the wall above the table. It was locked with a padlock.

  Something was in there—something he didn’t want them to see.

  Riley felt sure of it.

  He managed to find the paper he was looking for and stepped over to Riley and handed it to her.

  It was, in fact, a bill with his name on it from a motel in Des Moines.

  It indicated that he had checked in on Tuesday and left on Thursday.

  Convenient, Riley thought.

  But it was hardly proof of his innocence. If he’d wanted to set up an alibi in advance, someone else could have gone to Des Moines in his place using his name.

  But was this guy shrewd enough to plan ahead like that?

  Trip didn’t sit back down. He was pacing anxiously now, back and forth in front of that cabinet.

  She asked, “What do you keep in that cabinet, Trip?”

  He flashed her a weak smile.

  “Film equipment,” he said. “The tools of my trade.”

  Like almost everything else he’d been saying, it was a lie, and Riley knew it.

  She smiled and said, “Would you show them to me? I’ve always been fascinated by filmmaking.”

  “A funny thing—I lost the key,” he said.

  Riley realized that Jenn was standing beside her now. The talk about the cabinet seemed to have gotten her attention, and she’d left her post at the window.

  Riley was annoyed with her.

  She wanted to tell her to go back and do as she’d been told.

  Jenn stepped toward the cabinet.

  “Are you sure it’s really locked?” Jenn said. “Looks like it might be open to me.”

  Riley tingled all over with alarm.

  What was Jenn going to do, break into the cabinet with her bare hands?

  Riley thought that it wouldn’t be hard to do. For that matter, either of them could pick that lock pretty quickly. But that would be a disaster—an illegal search that would lead to trouble and get them nowhere. Any evidence would be inadmissible.

  Riley stepped toward Jenn and reached out to touch her arm. Then everything happened fast.

  Trip moved between Jenn and the cabinet. He gave the young agent a sharp, unexpected push. Jenn fell backward against Riley, and they both tumbled to the floor. With surprising agility, Trip darted around them and into the hallway.

  As Riley and Jenn scrambled to their feet, they heard the trailer door slam.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Riley said.

  “Bending the rules,” Jenn said. “Don’t tell me you never do it too.”

  Riley knew they didn’t have time to argue.

  “Come on,” she said. “He’s getting away.”

  She and Jenn tore out of the trailer in time to see Trip hesitating outside his car. It seemed to be taking a moment for him to realize that Riley’s vehicle was very effectively blocking his.

  When he looked up and saw Riley and Jenn, the skinny young man took off on foot and disappeared behind the next trailer. Riley and Jenn dashed after him.

  At that moment, she heard a man’s voice call out.

  “Hey, boys—the FBI girls are after our boy!”

  Damn, Riley thought.

  The neighbors were surely about to come to Trip’s rescue.

  Things were about to get messy.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In pursuit of the fleeing suspect, Riley and Jenn rounded the back of the next trailer. They pulled up in surprise at what they encountered there.

  The two agents almost ran into the backs of a circle of people. The neighbors who had confronted them earlier had surrounded Trip, but they didn’t seem to be protecting him.

  Riley pushed her way between two women in the circle. At that moment, she saw the biggest of the men body-slam Trip. Then the same man stooped over the wailing figure on the ground, raised his fist, and punched him in the head.

  The onlookers, both women and men, all cheered loudly.

  The situation became brutally clear to Riley. The neighbors had turned vigilante.

  Trip’s very life was now in danger.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” Riley said to Jenn, who had pushed her way up beside her.

  Jenn nodded in agreement and reached for her pistol.

  “No weapons,” Riley said.

  Jenn looked at Riley with an incredulous expression.

  “Are you kidding me?” Jenn said.

  Riley knew all too well how deadly a situation like this could turn if weapons were drawn. This crowd was far too riled up to stop account of a threat to shoot. Even a warning shot might not stop them. Other weapons would surely appear and matters could get out of control in mere seconds. Someone could get killed.

  But Riley didn’t have time to explain.

  “I mean it,” she snapped.

  Jenn didn’t look happy, but she seemed to understand.

  Riley flung herself inside the circle of angry people.

  “Break it up, all of you!” she shouted.

  Most of them stepped back, looking disappointed.

  But the man who had thrown Trip down was ignoring her, hitting Trip in the face repeatedly.

  Riley grabbed him from behind by the shoulders and pulled him hard. He was an enormous man, and Riley couldn’t budge him. Then she saw Jenn hurry around in front of him and give him a sharp kick to the chest. The man hurtled onto his back.

  Now those who had been standing back were furious. A couple of other guys rushed forward to pick up where the big man had left off.

  Riley said sharply to Jenn, “You take the guy on the right.”

  Riley rushed at the nearer assailant and gave him a swift punch in the solar plexus. The man buckled over, and Riley could hear the air rush out of his lungs. She turned in time to see Jenn take the other man down with a kick to the groin.

  The small crowd was yelling curses at Riley and Jenn now.

  Riley wondered if they were going to need their weapons after all. She yelled over their voices.

  “What do you people think you’re doing?”

  One of the men yelled back, “We’re doing what’s got to be done.”
/>   A woman holding a baby yelled, “We were sure that Trip was dealing drugs. You FBI folks coming here proved it. We’ve got kids growing up here. We won’t put up with it.”

  “Let us do our job,” Riley said.

  “Your job!” snorted one woman in contempt.

  A man yelled, “Ain’t that just like you feds,” a man said. “You beat up a couple of us good citizens for no good reason, but you won’t touch a hair on this punk’s head. You’ll just haul him in for a good talking-to, and he’ll say he didn’t do anything wrong, and you’ll say you believe him and let him go.”

  The crowd was getting louder now.

  Riley shouted, “That’s not what’s going to happen! Listen to me! We’re going to arrest him on suspicion of sexual assault and murder.”

  The shouting died down. The men and women looked surprised.

  “You heard me,” Riley said. “We’re definitely not letting him go with a slap on the wrist.”

  There was a general murmur among the crowd. Everybody seemed to agree to let Riley and Jenn make the arrest.

  Riley breathed more easily. She turned to Jenn and said, “Cuff him and read him his rights.”

  Trip lay curled up on the ground whimpering, his face bleeding from the blows he had taken. Jenn handcuffed his hands behind him and began to read him his rights.

  Meanwhile, a woman stepped toward Riley.

  “Psst,” the woman said to her. “Did you find the drugs in his trailer?”

  Riley was too puzzled by the question to reply. Then she recognized the woman.

  She was the obese woman who had asked earlier …

  “What’s this about, drugs or something?”

  Riley squinted at the woman, not knowing what to say.

  The woman let out a low cackle.

  She said, “Well, maybe you just didn’t look hard enough. Maybe you should go poke around some more.”

  For a moment, Riley hesitated. The woman seemed to be making a point that she thought was important.

  She looked over at Jenn to see if she had things under control. A couple of the guys were actually helping her now, pulling Trip up on his feet. Everyone seemed perfectly happy with the outcome.

  “Get him into the car,” Riley said to Jenn. “I’ll be right back.”

  Riley hurried back to Trip’s trailer and went inside. She headed straight for the little living room at the end of the trailer.