“I’ll create a diversion,” she said. “Work your way around back.”
She stood up and walked directly toward the circle of light surrounding the trailer.
“Hey,” I said. “What’re you doin’?”
She turned back to me. “Go look for Maya.”
I didn’t like what she was about to do, but I couldn’t stop her. I knew she was armed and could take care of herself. She made it to the edge of the brush before the man with the dragon tatt saw her.
“Well, well, well,” he said in a loud voice.
“Easy, big boy,” Kelly said. Her voice carried over the music. “I’m looking for Mike Bauer.”
While Kelly distracted them, I ducked around behind the trailer and searched the edge of the windows for a crack. I found a small tear in the white plastic covering. Inside, the room was small with warped wood paneling and a mattress without sheets. The young woman I’d seen outside was lying on the bed staring at the screen of her smartphone. There was a naked man sprawled on the bed beside her.
I moved to the next window. It was smaller and higher off the ground. The plastic on this one was raised a couple of inches. I could see a sink full of dirty dishes and a table against the opposite wall. Two women sat smoking. Each had shorts and tank tops exposing a number of tattoos. There was a half-empty bottle of tequila in front of them. I peered around the small space looking for other bodies but saw nothing. The TV was on, tuned to a reality show. There were dirty clothes tossed on the floor, along with black plastic trash bags stacked to the ceiling against one wall.
I didn’t see Maya.
I moved to the rear of the trailer. Here, the covering was taped down to the edge of the window. The light inside caused the white plastic to glow. I heard muffled voices but couldn’t make out what was being said. They were feminine voices engaged in a serious conversation. I put my ear to the metal frame but could only hear the buzz from the loud music in the front room. I couldn’t leave without knowing if Maya was in there.
I took out my folding knife and slowly lifted the edge of the glass window. The frame was old and oxidized, and the window easily opened half an inch. I grabbed a mesquite branch and wedged it under the glass to hold the window open. I paused to listen. They were speaking Spanish, but I didn’t know if Maya knew the language. She had grown up in Southern California with her father’s family.
I made a tiny incision through the white plastic covering and put my eye to the hole. There were two young women Maya’s age sitting on a queen-sized bed. They were dressed like the older women in shorts and tank tops. I smelled the distinct odor of marijuana. The women had long dark hair hanging over their shoulders. Both wore heavy makeup with dark eyeliner. Neither was Maya, but I wondered what they were doing there and what they were talking about.
One turned to the window. Their conversation stopped. They sensed a presence watching them. I ducked away, took the twig from the window, and slipped into the surrounding brush.
Kelly was waiting for me when I got back to the pickup.
“What’d you find out?” she asked.
“No Maya, but there’re four other women in the trailer. The one we saw talking to Mr. Tattoo was entertaining a naked guy or had just finished. He looked passed out.”
“Any drugs?”
I told her about the plastic bags stacked against the wall and the smell of marijuana. She seemed to think it was probably drugs. She’d been in on more of those kinds of busts than I had. We got in the pickup, and I made a U-turn in the road and headed back toward town.
“What’d you say to the tattooed guy?” I asked.
“Told him I was looking for Mike Bauer. I showed him my campus police badge. He didn’t seem impressed. The big dragon tatt on his chest looks like a prison job. The two skinheads were stoned. They’re all ex-cons who definitely shouldn’t have drugs or weapons, but the big guy didn’t seem shy about showing off.”
“What’d he say about Bauer?”
“Said he works for him. And that he would be back in the morning. He offered me some barbecue and a joint if I wanted to wait.”
“How generous.”
“They guy’s evil. I do know that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“His eyes. Cold. Dead. No empathy. A prison stare. The kind of guy that makes my skin crawl.” She crossed herself. “Don’t go up against him alone. Not now. Not with that hole in your chest.”
Something told me I wouldn’t have that option.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning Kelly and I stopped by the local police station to see if Officer Zeller had turned up anything new in Maya’s missing person case and as a curtesy heads-up that Helmut had asked me to help him find her. We found Zeller eating a blueberry kolache and talking on the phone at his desk. He looked like he could happily put away a dozen of them and had been doing just that since I’d seen him in high school. He had instantly recognized my name when I called to make an appointment and agreed to give me a few minutes of his time on the busy Oktoberfest weekend.
Zeller motioned us into a couple of metal chairs and held up two fingers, which I took to mean give him two minutes to finish his phone call. The other party seemed to be doing all the talking. Les was nodding as if the caller could see him and grunting responses through blueberry-stained teeth. He pointed at a large white pastry box on the desk. I took that as an offer to help myself and selected a pastry filled with cream cheese.
Kelly declined.
I would pay for it when I finally got back in the gym, but for now it was fun to eat like a teenager again and pretend the fuel would help me heal more quickly.
“Well, you two look like newlyweds,” Les said, hanging up the phone.
Kelly rewarded me with a bright smile.
“This is my girlfriend, Kelly Hoffman. She was at the funeral. We spoke with your dad.”
Kelly shook Les’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said. “I’m a police officer in Lubbock.”
“A fellow officer.” He sized her up from top to bottom before turning back to me. “We were all sorry to hear about your grandpa. Otto was a real fixture around here.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna miss him,” I said. Most of the town had come to the funeral. At least, everyone that had lived there more than twenty years. Les’s father had been a deputy in the sheriff department under my father and recently retired and moved to Rockport.
“Too bad about the SAPD detective,” Les said offhandedly.
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. Was he sorry the detective was a dirty scumbag, or was he sorry I’d killed him? The SAPD detective killed my grandpa, put a bullet in my partner, and shot my dog. I wasn’t sorry he was gone.
“Yeah, the bastard was dirty.” My blood pressure rose, and the hole in my arm from the good detective’s .308 sniper rifle throbbed.
His phone rang before he could respond. Les listened to the caller. He held up his hand, signaling for me to wait again while he took the call.
I stared at Les and considered his comment about the SAPD detective while he chatted on the phone. The fact that I had killed an SAPD detective during the course of the investigation, regardless of the officer’s obvious criminal conduct, rubbed some law enforcement officers the wrong way. Cops didn’t like dirty cops, but there were a few who didn’t like anybody outside the fraternity doing anything about it. They wanted to punish their own. Les seemed to think that way.
“Give me five minutes,” Les said into the phone and hung up.
I figured that was the time he was giving us, so I let the SAPD remark slide for now and plunged in with my story. “Like I said on the phone, I’m here about Maya Chavez. Helmut Geisler told me about his granddaughter. He’s worried. I told him I’d look into it.”
Zeller nodded. “You workin’ the case?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“We haven’t officially signed papers, but there does seem to be cause for concern. S
he hasn’t been home since August.”
Les put his hands on the desk and laced his fingers together, gathering his thoughts.
“I appreciate you stopping by and sharing your concern. Helmut’s been in here to talk to me a couple of times. I like Helmut. He’s a good man. But I think he’s way off base with Maya.”
“What makes you say that?” Kelly asked. She didn’t like the way this was going, and neither did I.
“Here’s the deal with Maya,” he said. “She’s what you might call a wild child. I spoke with my counterparts in San Bernardino and Riverside County. Maya had a history. Picked up for truancy. Runaway. She had gang ties. Her father’s side of the family.”
“She was born here, Les.”
“She spent eight years in Southern California. That had to make an impression on her.”
“I spent five years in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Kelly said. “I’m still a Texan.”
Zeller sighed. “You know what I mean.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’s still missing,” I said.
“She’s eighteen. It matters. There’s no law against her leaving home. You did it.”
“Yeah, I joined the Marine Corps. It wasn’t a secret. Everybody knew where I was going.”
“The thing is, as much as I’d like to help, we don’t have the manpower to chase down every runaway case we get. We notify the hotline and wait for a tip. If she committed a crime or she was a victim, and we knew she was still in town, we could go after her. We have to have probable cause.” He said this last part like he was explaining it to a third grader. “That means that we could—”
“I know what it means, Les.” I could feel my face getting hot.
“The rules have changed, Nick,” he said. “We follow the law.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I read about your last case. I got the call the day you killed the detective. You played fast and loose with the law.”
I suppressed the urge to put a right jab into Les’s smug expression. “It was an ambush, Les. I didn’t pick a fight, and I didn’t fire first.”
“We just wanna know who you talked to about Maya,” Kelly said, interrupting the escalating tension. “You called the hotline, but did you track her phone or put anything out on social media? That kind of thing?”
Zeller wiped his face with a paper towel. “We opened a file.” He held a manila folder up as evidence. “The phone number Helmut gave me was a prepaid phone she bought herself. I talked to a couple of her classmates down at the school and her mother. Nobody’d seen her. We don’t have the time or the resources to do social media.”
“Was one of them Lori Kostoch?” I asked.
“Yeah, I believe one of them was Lori,” he said, reading from the file.
“What about Owen Bauer?” I asked.
“Yeah, him too.”
“I talked to him yesterday. He got into a fight with Lori Kostoch, then drove out to a trailer house past Palo Alto Creek.”
“The trailer looks like a stash house,” Kelly said.
“Now, wait a minute.” Les laid his cubby hands flat on the desk. “That’s all Bauer property. You can’t be out there without Mike’s permission.”
“Mike Bauer dealing drugs these days?” I asked.
“You saw drugs in the trailer?”
“I saw plastic bags stacked to the ceiling. The windows are closed. Get a warrant and go check it out. I smelled marijuana, and they had firearms.”
“No law against havin’ guns,” he said.
“Unless you’re a felon,” Kelly reminded him.
“There were also some females in the trailer. You can take a wild guess why they were there,” I said.
Les’s face turned red. He stood up. “I need more than that to get a warrant to search Mike Bauer’s property. This ain’t your daddy’s county no more. You can’t run around here like you own the place.”
“Who owns it now, Les? You? Mike Bauer?”
“I’ve got work to do, Nick. Nice to meet you, Kelly. Enjoy yourself at the Oktoberfest. I saw you out there on the dance floor last night. Y’all have some fancy moves.” He smiled and put on his hat. “Just be sure you keep those moves on the dance floor. I understand you have a legal license to investigate, and Helmut can retain your services. But don’t bother Mr. Bauer or his son.”
“And what about Maya?” I asked. I faced off with him. We were about the same height. He had thirty pounds of fresh kolaches on me.
“Sometimes kids just run off. Give her a month or two. My guess is, she’ll get tired of partying and come home.”
“Thanks for the kolache, Les. Say hi to your daddy for me. He was a good man and a good deputy.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was close to noon, and all the German eateries on Main Street had lines out the door. I had promised Kelly schnitzel and red cabbage for lunch but didn’t want to wait all afternoon to get it. Every year, the Oktoberfest celebration seemed to get bigger. Grandpa would say that was a bad thing. People like Mike Bauer and everyone with a business on Main Street loved it.
Kelly reached over and took my hand.
“I’ll settle for a hamburger. Didn’t Germans invent that?”
“Probably. It’s got the two things we love, bread and meat.”
“Throw on a potato and you’d be in heaven.”
“Now you’re talking dirty.”
I pulled into the Whataburger and got in the drive-through line. It didn’t matter where we went, there was a line of hungry tourists.
“Why do you think Les got defensive when you mentioned Bauer?” Kelly asked while we waited to order our burgers.
“He’s a city cop. Bauer’s on the council. He knows who signs the checks.”
“What about Owen?”
“Everybody supports the football team, and Les is good buddies with Rocky. You can bet they will have a conversation about our visit. He’s probably on the phone with him right now.”
The voice behind the intercom took our order. I cut my engine. My ten-year-old pickup was pushing 200K and had started making a clacking noise at idle that was driving me crazy.
“This is a small town. The people who run it are a close-knit group. They all talk to each other. They may not all like each other, but they all talk.”
“I always thought of Lubbock as a small town.”
“Compared to San Antonio. Not compared to Fredericksburg.”
There was a tap on the glass. When I turned, Lori Kostoch was standing by the door. I unrolled the window.
“Mr. Fischer, can I talk to you?” She seemed apprehensive and kept glancing over her shoulder toward the street. Her blond hair hung loose, and she wore a blue T-shirt from the German Bakery.
“Sure, Lori. Get in.”
She glanced at Kelly. “I’d rather it was private.”
“It’s okay. She’s working with me. She knows about Maya.”
Lori opened the door and hopped in the back seat.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, studying her in the rearview mirror. I could see the fresh cut on her lip where Owen had slapped her. She had covered it with red lipstick, but it was still swollen.
“This is Kelly Hoffman. You can talk in front of her. She’s a police officer from Lubbock.”
Lori seemed a little unsure.
“Would you like anything?” I asked.
She shook her head, so I pulled forward to the window. Lori ducked behind the door, hiding her face from the teenage cashier. She would know every teenager in town, and she was obviously concerned about being seen with me.
I drove around the city block to see if we were being followed, then pulled into the parking lot of Fort Martin Scott, the restored army outpost built in a vain attempt to protect settlers from Indian raids in the nineteenth century. The location was on the edge of town and had just enough tourists to keep us from looking conspicuous.
Lori
was still anxious. I took a cheeseburger from the sack and offered it to her.
“Hungry?” I asked her.
“No, sir. Thank you.”
I was starving but wanted to give Lori my full attention, so I reluctantly put the burger back in the sack.
“Did you think of something else?” I asked, waiting for her to work up the courage to speak.
“I did see Maya,” she said, looking down at her hands. “The night she… The night she left. I was with her.”
Kelly raised her eyebrows, shot a glance at me.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“We went to a party on the river before school started.”
“Do you remember the date?” I asked.
“The tenth,” she answered without hesitation.
“Y’all still go to the river bend on the Pedernales?”
“Yeah, everybody goes there. But this was different.”
I waited without speaking. Lori glanced out the widows at the other cars in the parking lot, then scanned the faces of the group of tourists standing beside the historical marker. She seemed to be expecting someone to jump out and approach the pickup at any moment.
“You’re safe here,” I said.
“We can help you,” Kelly added.
Lori focused her attention back inside the pickup. “There were a bunch of guys there I didn’t recognize. Older guys. They wanted us to dance for them, like strippers. It was disgusting. One of them grabbed Maya and pulled her top off.” The words tumbled out of her mouth and left her gasping for breath.
“Slow down. Who were they?” I asked.
“Owen’s friends. He’s the one that told me to go and bring Maya. I barely even knew her. I swear to god, I didn’t know she was Mr. Geisler’s granddaughter. Owen said to bring her and some booze.”
“And you were tryin’ to impress him?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Did they hurt her?” Kelly asked.
“One of them stepped in. I’d seen him before. He works for Owen’s dad. He has this big, like, tattoo of a dragon on his chest. It’s, like, green with red flames. He hit the guy who took Maya’s top off and made him give it back to her.”
Second Chances Page 6