Caballo Security Box Set

by Camilla Blake

  I started to turn when a flash caught my eye. I returned my gaze to the window just in time to see several cars explode in a great flash of light. Fire burst into the air in a massive balloon of gases and flames, smoke following quickly in a great white cloud. I barely managed to see the chaos that was left by the explosion—but the antenna with that football on it was caught dead in the center.

  Someone had just blown up Luna’s car.

  “Excuse me? What was that?”

  I turned to find the door to room eight-forty-three open. Standing there in nothing but a towel around her chest, her hair also wrapped in a towel turban, was a tall, slender woman of about forty with the biggest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen. Too tall to be my mysterious scarf woman.

  “I don’t know, ma’am. It looks like a car just blew up.”

  “Someone’s having a bad day.” She reached up and touched her forehead. “I hope it’s not catching.”

  She disappeared back inside her room, leaving me there alone.

  I had to get Luna as far from this place as I could. Something wasn’t right here.

  ***

  I expected chaos when I arrived at Luna’s suite, but everything was about as normal as ever. Angela was on the couch, reading out the schedule we were supposed to follow for the rest of the weekend. Luna was in the bedroom, going through what few clothes we’d been able to salvage from the closet in the old suite. She glanced at me as I hurried into the room, her disgusted expression turning to anger when I began gathering her clothes up and tossing them willy-nilly into her leather bag.

  “What the hell are you doing? Some of those are very expensive!”

  “We need to go.”

  “I know. My meeting’s in twenty minutes.”

  “No—we need to go right now.”

  “What’s gotten into you, Brock?” She grabbed my arm, taking a silk scarf from my hands. “Why are you acting like a fool?”

  “Someone just blew three cars up downstairs. One of them was yours.”

  Luna paled. “What do you mean one of them was mine?”

  “Did I stutter?”

  “Angela, cancel the rest of the day. We’re going home.”

  Angela came to the door, her expression just as puzzled as Luna’s. “Why?”

  “We need to get Luna to a safe place. This just got serious.”

  “It wasn’t serious before?” Luna asked.

  “That’s what I was about to say,” Angela added.

  “Listen to me, ladies.” I turned to face both of them. “We need to get Luna to a place where she cannot be hurt until we figure out what’s going on here. To do that, we have to get her out of this hotel as soon as possible.” I reached for the iPad Angela was holding. “And we’re not sending out any messages, or telling anyone anything until we’ve done that. Do you understand?”

  “What about my boyfriend?”

  “You can stay here with him, or you can come with us and we’ll have someone notify him later what’s going on. That’s up to you.”

  Angela crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes cutting from me to Luna. Then she started to stare at the scarf in my hands, her puzzled look coming back hardcore. “Where did you get that?” she demanded.

  I looked down at it and realized it was the same scarf the woman in the surveillance footage had been wearing. I held it out, like it was a live snake, and just stared at it.

  “What the hell?”

  “I’ve never seen that before,” Luna said, backing away from me. “Did you bring that in here?”

  “No! It was with your clothing.”

  Luna shook her head. “It’s not mine. And it wasn’t there a few minutes ago.”

  “It had to have been. I picked it up right there,” I said, gesturing to where she’d had all her clothes spread out just a moment ago. “It was there.”

  “It wasn’t. I would remember,” Luna said. “What are you doing, Brock? Did you pull that out of your pocket? Where have you been?”

  “He asked about Jenny’s room.”

  “Were you meeting with someone?”

  “It was on the bed!” I dropped the scarf, taking a step toward Luna. “It was there; I swear it was!”

  She shook her head, moving closer to Angela. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but you’re scaring me. I just… I want out of here.”

  “Then you have to trust me. You have no other choice.” I grabbed her upper arm and dragged her into the sitting room. “We’ll leave everything here, get you new things later. Just you and me.”

  “What about me?”

  I glanced back at Angela, realizing I couldn’t trust anyone. “Go find your boyfriend.” I took Luna toward the door, half expecting her to insist that her assistant come with her, but she was too stunned by the whole thing to say a word.

  It wouldn’t last long. I had to act fast.

  Chapter 18

  Cheryl

  “Garth, my friend!”

  “Oh, Cheryl, I’m wounded! I stay past five o’clock to answer your call and you insult me by calling me friend?”

  “What would you rather I call you?”

  “Lover works well. Future husband. The love of my life?”

  I blushed, biting back a giggle. “We’ve never even set eyes on one another.”

  “Whose fault is that? I’ve invited you up to Dallas a million times.”

  “Why don’t you come to San Antonio?”

  “I will. All you have to do is say the word.”

  I groaned. “You’re such a flirt. But if I ever did invite you down here, or showed up at your place, I’d probably discover you’re a married man with four rug rats running around your house—right?”

  “Nothing like that. I would never do that to you, darlin’.”

  “Sure.” I sat back in my chair and opened the file folder that had been sitting over my keyboard. “So, we need the information we asked you to get.”

  “On Heather Masters. I have it right here. She graduated from Spring Branch High in 2014. Graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern this past May. She married a lawyer, John Weathers, four months ago and is expecting her first child in three months.”

  “We got all that. Have you found any evidence that she’s traveled in the past few months?”

  “Except for her honeymoon, which she spent in Mexico City, she hasn’t traveled since leaving Texas for Chicago.”

  “What about Luna Walsh? Has she tried to contact her?”

  “All phone records come back clear.”

  I cursed under my breath. That was exactly what I’d found, but Garth had access to databases I didn’t. I was really hoping he’d find something I hadn’t.

  “I called her, if you’re interested in that?”

  “What do you mean, you called her?”

  “I called her. Asked her what she knew of Luna Walsh. Woman gushed about how brilliant Ms. Walsh is. When I asked her about trouble in high school, she admitted that she told everyone to stop hanging out with Ms. Walsh, but that she regrets it. When I asked about animal heads and feces in Ms. Walsh’s car, she insisted that wasn’t her, but can’t say it wasn’t members of her clique.”

  “She denied it?”

  “She did. Said she’d thought that it was funny and she’d enjoyed watching the show, but she didn’t actually do it. That’s why nothing happened when the principal came after her and her boyfriend. They had solid alibis.”

  “The boyfriend too?”

  “She insisted they were together on every occasion on which it happened. Says that her friends knew they were together, too, which makes whichever one of them who did it really stupid because it wouldn’t take much for someone to narrow it down and figure out which it was.”

  “Then she knows who it was.”

  “Yes. And a little flirting got that out of her, too. She says it was a girl named Geraldine Thomas.”

  Geraldine Thomas? That wasn’t one of the names on my list.

  “She says
this Thomas woman was angry with Ms. Walsh for refusing to do some art show that was really important to the entire school, some sort of competition or something. I don’t know, she didn’t know much about it, being a cheerleader and all, but that’s what she thought it was.”

  “Great. You got twice as much out of her as I did.”

  “She mentioned someone else called. Why are you always having me come up behind you, Cheryl? You know how good I am. Why not just call me first?”

  “Because you’re the backup, Garth. You know that.”

  “But I’m good. Admit it.”

  I smiled, a blush burning my cheeks. “You have quite an ego, Garth. You should reel that in a little. Maybe then you wouldn’t just be a voice on the phone.”

  “Yes, well—”

  I hung up before he could finish his thought. I liked to leave him wanting.

  I picked up the list of names Skylar had given me. As I scanned it, a couple of names jumped out. There was no Geraldine on the list, but there was a Thomas. Jenny Thomas was an artist who worked with Ms. Walsh at her company—now Jenny Samuels. And then there was a Thomas Jennings, a boy who was a year behind Ms. Walsh in school, but he was known to be involved in the rumors that had swirled around her that last year of school when things got so rough for her. Could one of them be Geraldine Thomas? Could one of them be behind all this?

  There was something about the whole thing that bothered me. I’d done a lot of background checks in my time as head of investigations here at Caballo. You get a feel for these things, an expectation that comes with some of the facts you routinely find. Like if some guy has a lot of parking tickets in one specific area of town, either he’s a prick who thinks he can park anywhere he wants, or he’s a cheater trying to get caught. If you have some woman who has a lot of credit card debt, you can be sure she’s trying to show off for someone, or she has a shopping addiction. Human nature is not that hard to figure out.

  However, there was one person on the list Skylar gave me who didn’t follow any of these rules. Her background check was too perfect, everything just within the right parameters. She wasn’t in debt, but she didn’t make a lot of money. She didn’t have parking tickets, but she lived in a part of town that was notorious for parking issues. She had a car, a decent car, but her car payments were a dream.

  Her background check stunk of the government, of someone’s interference. The last time I’d seen a check like this, it turned out the person was in WITSEC.

  What had Luna Walsh gotten herself into here? And where was it taking Brock and Ox and everyone else here at Caballo?

  Chapter 19

  Luna

  All the times I’d imagined being saved by a knight on a white horse, I’d never imagined that we’d go for a leisurely stroll in downtown Paris.

  Smoke still rose high into the air from the front of the building, the only telltale sign that anything significant had happened. We didn’t go through the lobby, didn’t see any of the emergency vehicles that one would imagine had arrived on the scene. We didn’t see anything but the smoke.

  And we were walking.

  “Where are we going?”

  “As far from the hotel as possible.”

  “And if the person who did this sees us? What then?”

  “I think whoever’s been doing this has been one step ahead of us the whole time. They knew where you’d be when they had the package delivered to the restaurant. They knew when you’d be out of the room so that they could deliver the goat and the other carnage. They knew when your car would arrive so that they could blow it to high heaven. I think they know everything.”

  “Then what are we doing? Wouldn’t I be safer back at the hotel?”

  “Back where they probably know you were moved into another suite? Where they probably knew you were supposed to meet with Michael this morning? You really think that’s a good idea?”

  “I don’t know what’s a good idea right now. All I know is that I’m a little scared and I don’t like what’s happening.”

  “That’s why we’re going somewhere safe, somewhere we can regroup and figure out what our next step should be.”

  “Where’s that?”

  He didn’t answer, but he paused at a corner and looked around with purpose, like he did have an idea as to where he wanted to be. When he started walking again, I didn’t fight him.

  “I’m not always a pleasant person,” I said, more thinking aloud than anything else, “but I’ve never done anything outright mean to anyone. I don’t go out of my way to hurt people. I can be rude when I want something done, and I can be inconsiderate when I feel like someone’s standing in my way. I yell at my staff quite frequently and make them work long hours when we have an important deadline coming up, but I pay them well. Very well.”

  “Maybe this isn’t about you.”

  “It’s hard to imagine it isn’t with all this happening to me, to my clothing, to the people around me.” I glanced back at the smoke billowing above the hotel. “You think the driver made it?”

  “I hope so.”

  There wasn’t a lot of faith in that statement. It worried me some.

  “If it’s not about me, when what is it about? Why does it feel like it connects to everything that happened back in high school?”

  “Tell me something: why did all that happen?”

  I shrugged, though he wouldn’t have seen it because he was still intent on pulling me forward through the streets. “It was stupid, really. I had this crush on Kurt Thomas, the captain of the football team—if you can call it that. We lived in a super-small town that’s basically just a bump in the road between two bigger towns. Our football team was just a little six-player team. Kurt was the captain and Heather was the head of the cheerleading squad. They were a lovely couple—I never had anything against the two of them; I just thought Kurt was the dreamiest guy at our school. I thought I kept the secret pretty well, but this guy in my English class saw me staring at him one day and told him. I was mortified.”

  “And then Heather found out.”

  “She did. And she told everyone that I was a boyfriend-stealing bitch and that they should stay away from me. The thing is, my mom was a drunk and there’d been all these rumors about how she slept around with most of the men in town, especially Heather’s father. She used that to prove that I was out to steal Kurt from her.”

  “When did the stuff in your car start?”

  “A couple of days later.”

  “You think it was her.”

  “Who else would have a reason to do something like that?”

  “How many times did it happen?”

  I shrugged again. “Not many. Two or three. But it was really humiliating and every time the jokes and the rumors would begin to die down, it would happen again, like someone wanted everyone to keep talking about me.”

  Brock glanced back at me. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago. I like to think I’m not that girl anymore.”

  “Would Heather have a reason to come after you again?”

  “No.” I shook my head as I picked up my pace to keep up with him. He was pulling me roughly down the street, ducking into side streets here and there like he was trying to keep someone off our trail. When I glanced back, I could no longer see the hotel, and only little streaks of the smoke cloud.

  “What about someone else? Someone you hurt? Someone who might be jealous of your success? Or maybe someone your mother might have hurt?”

  “I don’t know. There are several people in the industry who’d probably be happy to see me gone, but they wouldn’t know about this stuff. And my mom? The whole town still burns from some of the things she did, but I don’t live there anymore, and neither does my father. They have no reason to come after the two of us.”

  “Why did your father stay there after all that? How old were you when your mother died?”

  “Nine. I think he stayed because he was raised in that town. It was his home.”

&nb
sp; “But he’s not there now?”

  “Nope.”

  Brock suddenly pulled me into a bakery and pushed me in front of him up to the counter.

  “Now’s a funny time to want breakfast,” I said.

  “Someone’s following us,” he said close to my ear. “Just pretend you’re interested.”

  I stared down into the case of delicate pastries, actually wishing we had time for a bite to eat. Brock wrapped his arms around me, pulling me hard against his chest, almost like we were lovers who couldn’t get enough of each other. But I could feel tension in his arms, in his chest, could feel the concern that was burning through his body. He was really worried we were in a situation that could quickly get out of hand.

  His concern melted through my body like ice through a glass of warm tea.

  “What now?”

  Instead of answering, he pushed me forward, sliding our bodies through a narrow space beside the counter that led into the kitchen. From there, we slipped out a back door and into an alley. He took my hand and pulled me again, rushing around the building to the next block and the next busy street. He paused to look, and again I could feel the tension come into his body as he spotted something he didn’t like. The next thing I knew, we were in line to enter the Catacombs again.

  “You can’t think of somewhere less creepy?”

  He didn’t answer.

  We melted in with the group of tourists who were seeing these creepy but beautiful dark passages for the first time. Like before, Brock stayed close to me, holding on to my hand as we moved from room to room, looking at the bones like it was the first time, like it was any less shocking this time. I shivered, not sure if it was due to fear, the cold, or the sight of this macabre space.