The Sam Prichard Series - Books 9-12 (Sam Prichard Boxed Set 3)

by David Archer

  Sam grinned at her. “Have I mentioned today that I love you?” he asked.

  “Not nearly enough.”

  2

  Sam left the house a few minutes later, climbed into his Corvette and drove out to East Colfax Avenue, where Rocky Mountain Auto Parts was located. Sam had once been a regular customer of the store, back when he was working steadily on restoring the 'Vette, but that had been before Tracy would have worked there. The store specialized in performance and custom parts.

  He parked in front of the building and got out of the car, his bad hip making him wince as he walked up to the door. A customer coming out held it open for him, and Sam offered his thanks as he stepped inside. A young man behind the counter looked up and smiled.

  “Welcome to Rocky Mountain,” he said. “I’m Clayton, how can I help you today?”

  Sam produced his ID and flashed it. “Sam Prichard,” he said. “I’m a private investigator. I was hoping you might be able to tell me something about Tracy Jensen’s disappearance.”

  Clayton’s smile got even wider. “Mr. Prichard,” he said, “it’s an honor to meet you. I follow you on Twitter, man, you’re the best private eye since Mickey Spillane!” He extended a hand, and Sam shook it with a smile.

  “Well, thanks,” he said. “Twitter? That must be something my wife does, I’m not all that into computers.”

  “Well, she does it great! I love reading about your cases and how you solve them. That last one, with the Army dog who helped you catch the killer? That was awesome!”

  Sam grinned, but made a mental note to speak to Indie about Twitter. “Thanks, I appreciate it. As I was saying, though, I’m looking into Ms. Jensen’s disappearance, and I was wondering if you can tell me anything that might help.”

  Clayton toned down his smile a bit and leaned across the counter conspiratorially. “Way I got it, her and Marty Fletcher ran off together,” he said softly. “They were always huddling back in the racks, whispering to each other. I think they were having a fling, know what I mean?”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah, that’s what the police think, too,” he said, “but I’m not so sure. Seems Marty may have gotten himself into some kind of trouble, and Tracy was trying to help him get out of it. Had you heard anything about that?”

  Clayton frowned. “I didn’t,” he said, “but James might have.” He leaned back away from Sam and called out. “James? Can you come up here a minute?”

  Another man stepped out from between the racks of parts and came toward them. “I’m James, the manager,” he said as he got close. “How can I help you, Sir?”

  Sam showed his ID again. “Sam Prichard,” he said. “I’m looking into Tracy Jensen’s disappearance. Wondered if you might have any insight into what may have caused it.”

  James glanced at Clayton, then motioned for Sam to follow him. “Come on back to my office,” he said. “Maybe we’d better talk there.”

  Sam followed the man through the racks and into a small office that was barely big enough for the desk and two chairs it contained. James took the one behind the desk, and Sam sat in the other. The manager looked at him for a moment, then rose again and shut the door.

  “Do you know Marty or Tracy?” he asked.

  “I knew Tracy years ago,” Sam said without adding anything further. “I’ve never met Marty Fletcher, but I understand he was in some kind of trouble, and Tracy was trying to help him out of it. Would you know anything about that?”

  James seemed to hesitate for a moment, then leaned a bit closer and spoke softly. “Way I got it, Marty was doing one of his YouTube videos, and ended up pissing off some powerful people. He actually claimed he was scared someone was gonna kill him, and I guess Tracy was trying to help him get it all straightened out.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “YouTube videos?”

  James scowled. “Yeah, he was always making these videos, where he basically just runs his mouth about something, and I guess people like to hear what he’s got to say. Lately, it’s been stuff to do with politics a lot, and I told him more than once I better not find him talking up his crap to our customers. He was always going on and on about how the government is corrupt, or how the cops are dirty, that kind of stuff, and I didn’t need our store to be associated with it, right? I even told him he couldn’t make any more of them in our parking lot.”

  “He was making videos here?” Sam asked.

  James seemed to want to look elsewhere for a moment, but then turned his eyes back to Sam. “He made them in his van,” he said. “If you look at a lot of those video rants people do on YouTube, a lot of them are done in cars. I guess it makes ’em seem more real or something, from what Marty said. Anyway, he was making them in our parking lot and I made him stop.”

  “And you think he got into some kind of trouble? Any idea what kind?”

  “Not really,” James said. “Way I understood it, he must’ve said something that made people mad, but I can’t really imagine anyone would want to kill him over it, y’know? That sounds like pure paranoia to me.”

  Sam nodded his understanding. “I can see how it would, yeah. Still, if he made the wrong people angry, I suppose it’s possible he could be looking at some kind of dire consequences. Any idea who it might have been?”

  James shook his head. “Not a clue,” he said. “All I know is he was worried somebody might be after him, and he got Tracy mixed up in it. He disappeared about ten days before she did, but I got the impression she was hiding him out in some motel room and taking food to him after work every day. Then she didn’t show up for work day before yesterday, and the cops showed up that afternoon asking about her and Marty. They seem to think the two of ’em were havin’ a fling and ran off together, but I can’t help wondering if maybe something bad really has happened to the pair of them.”

  Sam nodded thoughtfully. “If Marty was making political videos and actually aiming them at particular politicians or cops, I can see how he might be worried about repercussions. But afraid of getting killed? Did he have something on someone, something that proved some kind of corruption?”

  “Not a clue,” James said. “I never paid a lot of attention to his rants, and I didn’t let him talk that crap around here at all. Tracy tried to tell me what was going on a few days ago, but to be honest, I didn’t want to hear it and I shut her down. It was bad enough trying to deal with our customers who followed him; they were always coming in and asking him about his latest video. I made him tell all of them he wasn’t allowed to talk about it here, but I’m sure he did whenever I wasn’t around.”

  “So, he made somebody mad, and then he disappeared,” Sam said. “You haven’t heard anything from him since then?”

  James shook his head. “Not since he just didn’t show up for work. That was just about two weeks ago, maybe a little less, and the funny thing was there was a couple of cops here asking about him that morning just when he should have been coming in. He never showed up, though, so they left. All I got after that was Tracy saying he was hiding and wouldn’t be back 'til it all got straightened out.”

  Sam’s eyes narrowed, but he simply smiled. “Well, listen,” he said. “I really appreciate this. I may need to come back and ask some more questions later, would that be okay?”

  “Sure. Anytime.”

  Sam left the store and got back into his car, pulling his phone from his pocket as he drove out of the parking lot. He dialed Indie’s cell number as he drove sedately up the street.

  “Hey, Babe,” he said when she answered. “Looks like Marty was one of those guys who do videos that go viral, always complaining about the government and such. The way his boss understood it, he got some local politicians or cops mad at him, and even said he was afraid someone was out to kill him. Somehow or other, Tracy was trying to help him get out of whatever mess he was into, and might have been hiding him at a motel.”

  “Well, that would account for the security video,” Indie said. “I let Herman go into the city’s database and find ever
ything he could on both Marty and Tracy, so I’ve got all their cell numbers, credit card numbers and such. Marty’s phone went inactive about a week ago, but Tracy was calling him two or three times a day, usually around the same time each day. I took a look at her calls after that, and found another number she was calling around the same times.”

  “Probably a throwaway phone,” Sam said. “She bought him one of those cheap ones and most likely tossed his usual one out on the highway somewhere.”

  “Yeah, exactly what I figured. Unfortunately, I have no idea who the carrier is—it’s one of those that piggybacks on other carriers—so I can’t get into any of its records. All I know is that Tracy called it four times the night she disappeared, each call lasting only a few seconds, like she got voicemail. They were also very close together, like only five minutes or so apart. Sort of looks like they might have been frantic calls.”

  “What about since then? Is Tracy’s phone still active?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Indie replied. “It hasn’t made any calls since the last of those four calls to the disposable. I tried getting a GPS trace on it, but it’s not even showing up anywhere.”

  “Gotcha. Have you got hold of any recent pictures of Marty and Tracy?”

  “Yep, got them from the PD file, and a few more from social media.”

  “Send me whatever you think are the best ones,” Sam said. “I’m going to check some of the motels that are easiest to hide out in and see if I can find anyone who remembers either of them.”

  “Okay, Babe. I’ll see what else I can find out.”

  “Try to find out all you can on these videos he does, okay? Especially the most recent ones, from the past three or four weeks. Marty disappeared almost two weeks ago, so I’m guessing he probably got into this trouble not long before that. If we can see what he was talking about, it might give us a better idea of what was going on.”

  “You got it,” Indie said. “Love you!” The line went dead.

  3

  Sam went to more than a dozen motels scattered throughout the metro area, but didn’t hit any pay dirt. He left the last one feeling frustrated and realized that it was getting close to lunchtime, so he headed for the house. Indie was just starting to make a lunch of ham and cheese sandwiches for herself, her mother and Kenzie, so she added another sandwich for Sam. He sat in the kitchen with her and told her what little he had learned.

  “I wish you’d had better luck,” Indie said. “Now, as for me and Herman, we did a little better, I think. I tracked down Marty’s videos, and he does seem to have a lot to say.” She picked up a tablet from the counter and handed it to Sam. “Just hit play,” she said. “That’s his last two videos.”

  Sam tapped the screen to wake up the tablet and saw that it was already on a YouTube app. There were two videos linked on the display, and he tapped the play icon on the first one.

  Marty’s face appeared, sitting behind the steering wheel of his van. His voice began to come though the speakers as the video finished buffering.

  “Hey, it’s Marty Fletcher again, and this time I’m gonna give you guys something I know is gonna get your dander up!” The last two words were said in a somewhat comical scream, and Sam’s eyes went a bit wide. “I’m talking about the terrible drug problems in our streets, and how it never seems to get any better. Come on, you all know what I’m saying is true, right? You hear about all the big drug deals and busts, and it’s a safe bet that pretty much everyone knows somebody who’s been affected by what drugs can do to a person’s life, right? So, how come, even though the USA has locked up more of its citizens than any other country on earth, and even though we have more cops and federal agents than any other country, the problem never seems to get smaller? If anything, it just gets bigger and bigger, year after year, and yet nobody wants to talk about why that is!”

  A sudden camera cut made Marty’s face jump closer to the camera, and his voice dropped to a stage whisper. “Well, I’m gonna tell you! This is one of the biggest secrets our government has, and I’m probably gonna make somebody mad, but it’s got to come out. Are you ready?”

  The scene jumped again, and Marty was back in his original position behind the wheel. “Here it is,” he said. “It all goes back to prohibition, when it was against the law to make or sell alcohol in most of the country. The Department of Revenue, those federal agents that old movies refer to as ‘revenooers,’ were tasked with the job of finding out who was making or selling booze, and taking them to jail. But then, in 1933, prohibition was repealed, and all those revenooers were about to be out of a job. Congress couldn’t have that black mark on their record, so they began enacting laws relating to the possession, use and sale of drugs, and all those federal agents began working on those laws. Sounds good so far, right?”

  The scene jumped again, with Marty now sitting in the passenger seat. “Wrong!” he screamed. “What happened next was the realization that drugs meant lots and lots of money flowing through the country, and so the government began confiscating that money every time they made a bust! Millions and millions of dollars were confiscated every year, and a lot of that money never got accounted for. Instead, it went to the local offices of the agencies that confiscated it and was distributed to the agents as bonuses for doing the jobs they were supposed to be doing anyway!”

  Back to the driver’s seat. “So, why does the drug problem seem to keep going and going and going like that famous pink rabbit with the bass drum? That’s simple! It’s because there is just too much money involved, and since a lot of the people whose job it is to end the problem are actually benefiting financially from it, they’re not about to work hard enough to kill their own personal golden goose!”

  The video went on for several minutes, each scene cutting to a different view of Marty, until he ended it standing in front of the van and looking into the camera through the windshield. When Sam finally reached the end he looked up at Indie and shook his head. “He’s a conspiracy nut,” he said.

  Indie nodded, then pointed at the tablet. “Watch the next one,” she said.

  Sam touched the play icon and the video began with a short commercial, then Marty’s face appeared once again. This time, though, he was talking softly and his face appeared worried and frightened.

  “Marty Fletcher here,” he said, “and this may well be the last video I make. If you’ve been following me for any time at all, you know I don’t pull any punches, but this time I’ve come up against something so bad I don’t know how to handle it. When I get it figured out, gang, I promise you the most explosive video you’ve ever seen, and it’s going to expose something so terrible that it may even lead to a federal investigation of the Denver Police! I can’t say what it is just yet, but I will soon, so just keep watching this space, okay?” He started to reach toward the camera and then froze. “But if anything bad happens to me, then I’m sorry. I just can’t post this up until I know how to handle certain aspects of it.”

  He reached up and apparently turned off the camera at that point, and Sam looked up at Indie.

  “What in the world?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “That was his last upload from two weeks ago, and it’s already gotten more than two hundred thousand views. The comments are filled with people demanding he post another one and reveal whatever he’s learned, but there’s been no response from him at all.”

  “Okay,” Sam said after thinking for a moment. “I’m just not sure what to do, other than keep checking motels. I don’t suppose you found anything on which motel the security footage came from, did you?”

  “No, and that was kind of odd,” Indie said. “There was mention that they had some footage showing Tracy and Marty going into motel rooms together going back several weeks, but none of the motels involved were named. Seems strange to me they’d be able to find so much in such a short time, unless maybe they were watching one or both of them before she disappeared?”

  “Several weeks? What about
the phone records? Have they been calling each other a lot?”

  Indie shook her head. “Not until about two weeks ago. I scanned both of them, and there were occasional calls from Tracy’s phone to Marty’s, but none from his to hers. All of those were made during business hours, too, rather than in the evenings. Most people having affairs would have calls or text messages going both ways, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Good point. What about texts? Can you track those?”

  “Yes, and while both of them text a lot, they never texted each other. That’s another thing that seems off about the whole notion of them having an affair.”

  Sam nodded, and then the sandwiches were ready, so they tabled the conversation and called Kim and Kenzie in to eat. Sam got to hear about Kenzie’s morning, with Kim spending time in the backyard playing with her granddaughter and the cat.

  When lunch was over, Sam headed out again to keep checking motels. Indie had told him that Marty Fletcher drove a customized green Ford van, so Sam kept his eyes peeled for one like it as he drove from one motel to another throughout the afternoon, but once again he was having no luck.

  Sam’s phone rang at just before three, and he glanced at the screen to see that the call was from a blocked number. “Prichard,” he said.

  A gruff voice came on the line. “You the private dick who’s looking for Marty Fletcher and his girlfriend?”

  Sam’s eyes grew wide. “I’m trying to locate Tracy Jensen,” he said. “Who is this?”

  “Well, this is Marty Fletcher, and we don’t want to be found,” the voice said. “We’d appreciate it if you’d just leave us alone.”

  Sam scowled. “Really? I’d like to hear that from Tracy, then.”

  “She don’t want to talk to you,” the voice said. “She don’t like to talk to nobody she don’t know. She just wants you to leave us alone, okay?”