‘We never found him, and the other two suspects were dead. So was Billy Harvey. They’d tied him to a chair and tortured him to death. We never really uncovered what had happened, whether it was a robbery gone wrong or something else, but we recovered a couple of pounds of dope and a whole pile of coke from the property, so maybe the gunmen were after that. Either way, the hip-shot that Chris took meant he was going to walk with a limp for the rest of his life and he was invalided out of the Force. He’d done close to his thirty years, so he got most of his pension, but the whole incident pretty much broke him. I think it was the shame of it, knowing that he – this old-school Robbery Homicide cop from the big city – froze under pressure when it came to it and couldn’t pull the trigger. It didn’t make it any easier for him that I could.’
Giant knew exactly how Cervantes must have felt, but it filled him with renewed admiration for Jenna.
‘Anyways, that’s the story,’ she said. ‘Chris left the Force under a cloud of his own making and didn’t really keep in touch with anybody, least of all me. I haven’t seen him since I visited him in hospital afterwards, and he didn’t say a lot then. It’ll be strange seeing him now, after all this time. I don’t know how he’ll react.’
‘He’s going to be the one under pressure,’ Giant told her, ‘especially if Brook Connor hired him for something, and Cervantes hasn’t seen fit to tell us.’
43
Brook found it almost impossible to believe what Chris Cervantes had just told her about his son.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ she asked him, but she could see from the stricken expression on his face that he was.
‘I’m positive,’ he said wearily.
Brook felt for him – she really did – but at the same time she was ecstatic at the prospect of this new, and potentially groundbreaking, lead. If they could get Paige back, then she finally had a chance of proving her innocence. ‘We’ve got to find him, Chris. Do you know where he is?’
Cervantes placed his chin in his hands and stared down at the desk. ‘I haven’t seen him in a long time. We’ve been estranged for years.’
‘Could he have done something like this? Kidnapped a little girl and committed murder?’
‘I’d dearly love to say no, but sadly, I think that yes, he is capable of that. Especially if there’s money involved. He’s not a good man. He never has been.’
‘Can you track him down for me?’ Brook didn’t attempt to keep the desperation out of her voice.
Cervantes pondered this for a moment. ‘I think maybe I can. I know he was in jail for burglary until a few months ago, and that probably means he’s still on probation. I could call one of my contacts in the department and see if I can get an address for him.’ He hunted around the desk for his phone.
Brook could see it, partially covered by some paperwork, and she handed it to Cervantes and waited while he looked up the number and made the call, working hard to keep her excitement in check.
‘Joe, how you doing?’ said Cervantes, when the call was picked up at the other end. He sounded and looked happier now and was even smiling, and it struck her that human beings can be very good actors.
Brook listened impatiently as they made awkward small talk, before Cervantes slipped his son’s name into the conversation, asking if Joe knew how to track him down.
After a few seconds Cervantes thanked him and wrote something down. He was just about to come off the phone when Joe must have said something else, because Cervantes suddenly frowned. ‘That’s right,’ he said uneasily. ‘I talked to her a few weeks ago. She wanted some work done – she didn’t say what exactly – and she was meant to come and see me, but she never turned up. Then she left a couple of messages for me last week. If I’m truthful, I didn’t think it was worth reporting.’
As they talked, Cervantes looked at Brook intensely, the smile gone. It was clear that she’d been connected to him, probably through her cellphone records, although Cervantes was doing a good job of making the connection sound as tenuous as possible.
There was a pause while Joe talked at the other end, then Cervantes apologized for holding him up from going home, said something about grabbing a beer sometime and ended the call.
‘Where’s your car?’ he demanded.
‘Out on your driveway. It’s not mine. It belongs to Tony Reyes. The police don’t know about it.’
‘It doesn’t matter. The police are on their way here now. You’ve got to get out of here, fast.’
‘But we need to sort this out.’
‘We will. Text me from the phone you’re using, and I’ll text you back when they’ve been and gone. Now go!’
Brook ran out of the front door and across the courtyard, shoving on her sunglasses and forcing herself to slow down to a casual walk as she made for the Rav4.
The street was quiet, but as she reversed out of the driveway she saw a car driving slowly down the street. It was barely thirty yards away, and there were two people in the front. It looked as if they were trying to find a house. Conscious of her heart beating in her chest, Brook drove as slowly as she dared away from them, watching in the rear-view mirror as the car stopped directly outside Cervantes’s house.
A man and a woman – both obviously cops, by their dress and demeanour – started to get out, but Brook kept her cool, saw a right turn ahead and took it, remembering to signal and thanking whoever was up there, watching over her, that once again she’d got away by the skin of her teeth.
Now all she needed was for Cervantes to keep his nerve with the cops and then lead her to his son.
After that, she’d do the rest.
44
When Chris Cervantes answered the door to Giant and Jenna, Giant saw immediately that he didn’t look pleased to see her.
‘How are you doing, Chris?’ she asked him with a tight smile.
He gave her a nod in return. ‘Jenna. Long time no speak. To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘It’s official business. This is my partner, Detective Giant. Do you mind if we come in?’
Giant gave him a nod. Cervantes wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He was on the short side – about five eight – with Latino features and a narrow, lined face flushed with booze-veins. He leaned heavily on a walking stick and, although he could only have been about fifty, it was the type of fifty that didn’t much look like it was going to make sixty. Giant felt an immediate sense of superiority. He had nothing to prove to a man like this.
Cervantes stepped aside and let them in, limping down the narrow hallway into his kitchen, his stick banging heavily on the wooden floor. ‘I guess you’re here about Brook Connor,’ he said, leaning back against a work counter that looked like it could do with a clean. He didn’t seem unduly nervous.
He obviously wasn’t going to offer them a seat, so they stood opposite him a few feet away. ‘That’s right,’ answered Jenna. ‘What were you and she in contact about?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, looking at Giant rather than Jenna. Giant could sense an atmosphere between the two of them, but that was no real surprise, in light of what she’d told him. ‘Well, what I mean by nothing,’ he continued, ‘is that she – Brook Connor – contacted me a few weeks back. She said she wanted to hire me to do some work for her.’
‘What kind of work?’ asked Giant.
‘She never actually said. She made an appointment to see me, but never turned up, so I let it go.’
Giant frowned. ‘You didn’t try to find out why Connor didn’t come?’ It didn’t sound to him like the action of a private detective not to be curious.
‘No.’
‘You must be doing very well not to have to chase clients,’ said Giant, looking around the dilapidated kitchen.
Cervantes shrugged, not rising to the bait. ‘Busy enough that I don’t have to put up with people who miss appointments. She also phoned and left messages a couple of times last week, apologizing for the missed appointment, and said she wanted to see me and that this time she�
��d definitely turn up.’
‘Can we listen to them? The messages?’ asked Giant.
‘Sorry. I wiped them.’
Giant didn’t believe him, and wondered why Cervantes was lying.
‘Did Brook Connor say why she wanted to see you this time?’ Jenna asked him.
Cervantes looked at her and there was something dismissive in his gaze that Giant didn’t like. It was clear he’d have far preferred someone else coming here to question him, rather than Jenna. He shook his head. ‘No. And I didn’t call her back, either. Like I said, I don’t enjoy being stood up; and I’m an ex-cop, so I don’t tend to believe in second chances, either. If someone lets you down once, they’ll do it again.’
‘And you never thought to call and tell us this?’ said Giant ‘You must have known Connor was a wanted murder suspect. She’s been all over the news for the past thirty-six hours,’
‘Point taken,’ said Cervantes, leaning hard on his walking stick. ‘I should have done, but because I only spoke to her for about a minute and there was nothing useful in the conversation, I figured it wasn’t worth clogging up your phone lines for.’
‘Well, according to our phone records, it was four and a half minutes,’ Giant told him.
Cervantes made a gesture with his free hand. ‘Well, either way – one minute or four – Ms Connor didn’t tell me what it was she wanted me for. So I had no information for you guys. I’m guessing you haven’t been able to track her down yet?’
‘We’ll get her soon,’ said Jenna.
‘Well, good luck,’ said Cervantes, signalling that as far as he was concerned, it was the end of the interview.
Giant didn’t move. ‘Who was that who just left your place in the Toyota Rav4?’ he asked.
Cervantes didn’t hesitate. ‘A client.’
Giant sighed. There wasn’t much else that he could ask. Cervantes had answered their questions. His story made sense, too, at least on the surface, and his account of the number of phone conversations he’d had with Brook Connor tied in with what they’d found in her records. But he found Cervantes’s lack of curiosity as a PI hard to swallow; and his lack of desire – as an ex-cop fallen on hard times – to want to be a part of the manhunt for a quadruple murder suspect even harder. Cervantes might have been projecting an air of confidence while he’d been talking to them, but it was the work of an understudy rather than a first-night actor. And there was a tension about him that he couldn’t quite hide. And wiping the messages, too …
‘Thanks for your help, Chris,’ said Jenna after a pause. ‘It’s good to see you again. I hope you’re doing all right.’
‘I’m doing fine,’ he said tightly. ‘Thanks for asking.’
She gave him an awkward smile and asked him to get in touch with them if he heard anything from Ms Connor, then they left.
When they were back in the car, Jenna turned to Giant. ‘Did he seem agitated to you? He did to me.’
Giant told her his own thoughts. ‘Yeah, a little. He might be protecting Connor, although I can’t think why. There’s no evidence he even knew her. I’ll let the marshals make the decision about whether it’s worth putting him under surveillance.’
‘It was weird seeing him like that,’ said Jenna. ‘All wizened and small, with that limp. He used to have so much confidence. You know, all the time I was talking to him in there, I kept thinking that it could have been me. All it would have taken was for one of those bullets fired at me to have hit its target and I’d have been dead or, even worse, a cripple with a pension, hanging around some shitty house and dying slowly day by day.’ A shadow passed over her face, and Giant could see there was a lot of pent-up emotion there. ‘That’s why I don’t like talking about it. It brings all the memories back.’
Giant wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t good at talking in depth with women. With anybody, really. It embarrassed him and he was always afraid of saying the wrong thing. In the end, he was saved by the crackle of the radio.
‘All units. Be aware. We’ve had a reported sighting of Brook Connor driving a silver Toyota Rav4, heading north on Del Monte Avenue north Monterey, no more than five minutes ago. We’ve got a partial licence plate – seven LH.’
It was the car they’d seen leaving Cervantes’s place earlier. Giant turned around and they drove back fast, lights flashing, but his white Dodge was no longer on the driveway.
The bastard had tricked them.
45
It was 8 p.m. and dusk, and Brook was sitting in the Rav4 on a deserted piece of waste ground just outside Monterey when Chris Cervantes pulled up beside her in the Dodge. She watched as he got out and limped over to the Rav’s passenger side, leaning on his stick and carrying a pizza box under one arm. ‘I got you this,’ he said, climbing inside and putting the box on her lap, as well as a bottle of water.
Now that she knew Paige was alive and well, Brook’s appetite had returned and, with her mouth already watering, she attacked the pizza, revelling in the smell of the pepperoni and fat, and eating the whole thing without so much as a word. When she’d finished, she downed the water in one go and wiped her face with the paper towel provided.
‘I guess you needed that,’ he said.
‘Totally. Thank you.’ She put the pizza box in the back seat and looked at him. ‘What did the detectives say?’
‘It was what I suspected. They were fishing. I told them we’d never actually met, and I think they bought it. They definitely didn’t follow me here.’
‘Are you sure they didn’t put on a tracking device on your car?’
His face broke into a smile for the first time. ‘You’ll make a detective yet. I checked for that. They didn’t. They’d need a subpoena for it anyways.’
‘So what’s the plan now?’
‘According to the records, Luis, my son, lives just south of Salinas. It’s a twenty-minute ride from here. Our best bet is to go there now and see if that’s where he’s holding Paige.’
‘And if she’s there, we call the police, right?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. Then we call the police.’
Brook could see the doubt in his eyes. This had to be incredibly hard for Cervantes, knowing that his own son was a kidnapper and a murderer. There’d also be the huge shame he’d have to carry, if the crimes his son had committed ever came to light.
And that worried her.
‘I’m putting all my trust in you, Chris. And so would Paige be, if she knew we were coming to get her. I know this is hard, but please don’t weaken.’
‘Look, if my son is something to do with this, then I want him to suffer the consequences. But I don’t want us to do anything stupid, either, so if you’re still armed, leave the gun here.’
‘But what if he’s got a gun?’
‘I’m armed.’ Cervantes lifted his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster containing a revolver with a scuffed handle.
‘There’s no way you’ll shoot your own son.’
‘No one’s shooting anybody – least of all you. But we’ll get the answers we need, and if Luis has your daughter, we’ll find her. Have you still got the tape-recorder with his voice on it?’
She nodded.
‘Then let’s go. Where’s your gun?’
Brook didn’t want to be parted from it. She had no desire to shoot anyone else, but she’d put a bullet in Cervantes’s son if she had to. The problem was that Cervantes probably knew it, and right now she needed his cooperation more than she needed the gun. ‘It’s in the glove compartment.’
He checked, saw it was there and climbed slowly out of the car.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she asked, watching him leaning hard on his stick as he limped heavily back to the Dodge.
‘No,’ he said without turning round. ‘I haven’t been okay in a long, long time.’
46
As Chris Cervantes drove, he told Brook about his son. It seemed he needed to unload everything to a sympathetic listener. He explained how he and his wife,
June, had met when he’d been a cop in uniform and she was under investigation for assaulting an ex-boyfriend. Apparently the boyfriend had had it coming, and Cervantes himself, who’d been one of the arresting officers, thought she had real spunk and had been immediately attracted to her. ‘I was always impulsive,’ was his reasoning behind it. They’d started dating soon afterwards and although it had been a stormy relationship, they’d loved each other enough that when June became pregnant, they’d both been happy. ‘It should have been the start of something amazing,’ he said, ‘but it was the beginning of the end. Of everything.’
The birth of their son, Luis, coincided with Cervantes’s promotion to detective in LA’s Robbery Homicide division. He was working long hours, drinking too much, by his own admission, and keeping out of the way of home, where a screaming baby wasn’t much of a relief from the stresses of the job. This had infuriated June, who left him a number of times – sometimes taking Luis with her, sometimes not. On those occasions when she didn’t take him (which became more and more frequent), Cervantes palmed off his son on whichever relative he could find to look after him.
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