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“This is . . . difficult for me . . . .”
“What’s happened?” I said, my voice rising with my anxiety.
“Tina . . . has escaped.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The superintendent didn’t mince words: Tina had escaped with another girl. End of story. Shit. Where the hell could she be?
I felt a mix of relief, that Tina was no longer locked up, and fear about her roaming a dangerous world alone. If I found her, I’d have to turn her in. The thought made me sick. To defend her, I had to talk to her. First, I had to find her.
Little D had left a message for me while I was on the phone. I called back immediately.
“Tina’s escaped the Patuxent Detention Center,” I said. “Do you think she’ll go to her father’s?”
“Mmm,” he hummed. It sounded like low C on a pipe organ. “It’s possible.”
“Can you nose around Fisher’s? See if she shows up there? Or tell me if you hear anything on the street? I’m very worried.”
“Me, too. But try to stay calm. She’s pretty good at lookin’ after herself.”
Pretty good isn’t enough, I thought.
“I called to remind you about tomorrow,” he said. “Calvert Road Park. Half past noon.”
“How’d the Iverson meet go?”
He chuckled. “Jus’ fine. I got a pitcher of ole’ Blue Jumpsuit givin’ the package to Narsh. We followed the dude in the jumpsuit to Silver Hill Intermediate School. Found out later he’s a janitor there.”
“Tina’s school.”
“Yeah. So?”
“I don’t know. Just another odd coincidence.” The kind I don’t believe in.
“And there’s something else you ought to know.”
“What now?”
I must have sounded worse than I felt. Little D just laughed and said, “No, this is good. After we followed the janitor, I convinced Narsh to let me make a couple copies of the disc in the package.”
“Really? How’d you manage that?”
“I figured he wouldn’t want Fisher to know how I out bad-assed his bad ass. Wouldn’t want me to tell Fisher what we got and how we got it. He wasn’t too happy, but he went along.”
“So what’s on the disc?” I asked.
“Haven’t checked yet, but I’ll let you know. Apparently, it’s images, not data, on a DVD. You want to get together sometime, have a look?”
“How about you come over my place tomorrow, after the meet? Around five?”
I gave him directions before we hung up. Images. For computer games? Maybe the embezzlers were paying top dollar to steal a competitor’s game concepts. If so, how did the janitor get them?
If it hadn’t been for Little D, I wouldn’t have known any of this. I felt grateful for his help. And I saw what Duvall meant about D’s methods. They got results, but they were risky. It occurred to me that befriending a guy like Little D was like owning a pet scorpion.
* * * * *
Saturday was a light-traffic day on the B-W Parkway. I got to Riverdale with ease. Twenty minutes before the appointed time, I pulled into the lot of Calvert Road Park, barely a quarter mile from Kozmik’s offices. I backed into a space and flipped through last month’s Maryland Bar Journal.
