by Rivers, Mal
“And they took Melissa,” I said worriedly.
Sully looked back at the cabin and mumbled, “Hmm.” He shook his head. “Not so sure. There’s no sign of a struggle inside the cabin. If anything, it looks like she left with whoever came here. Either that or she was disabled with zero struggle. Is any of her stuff in the cabin?”
“No, it’s all gone.”
“She left without a struggle—but why?”
Why was indeed the question on my mind. There was also the fact that neither the fire nor the power had been used, which could mean she’d left not long after arriving.
“What shall we do?” Sully asked.
I sighed. “What can we do? We can’t exactly call the police.” I paused for a second, and then changed my mind. “Or can we—”
“What are you, kidding?”
I took out my cell phone and considered the option. I decided it wouldn’t hurt any, and that I could trust Kacie Cordell. But, given the week’s proficient use of surprise, I’m not sure why I expected it to be that easy. Truth be told, as the phone rang out, I was surprised, but not because no one answered. It was because after the first few rings, I could hear something behind me. The ringing. It was a standard ringtone belonging to an iPhone.
Sully and I looked around and located the noise coming from the bushes at the bottom of a knoll beside the dirt track leading to the cabin. It kept ringing, and I looked at Sully, and he looked back at me, with a rather cold and confused stare. To confirm what we had already assumed, I ended the call, and, without a moment’s hesitation, the ringtone stopped.
We stood for a while, motionless, not saying a word. Sully then rooted around in the bushes, pulling back branches and leaves, while I stared at my phone. He found the iPhone—belonging to Kacie Cordell. He held it up to my eye line. The screen was cracked and caked in mud.
“What the hell is that FBI chick’s phone doing here?” he asked.
I didn’t really know how to answer, as I didn’t know what to think. Kacie had been here, and Melissa was gone—what did that mean? As a detective, the first job is usually to state the obvious. In this case, it would mean, quite simply, that Kacie had taken Melissa. But I didn’t want to believe that.
I took the phone from Sully and looked into the call history. The last call she made was last night—or rather, early morning, twenty minutes after midnight. Probably half an hour after she had left the beach house after our drink at Ellie’s.
“What is this?” I said, somewhat rhetorically. “I was with her less than twenty-four hours ago.”
“Have you been in touch with the FBI? Maybe she double-crossed you and took Melissa in.”
I shook my head.
I wasted no time in dialing the FBI section of the federal building. I only had two numbers, one of which was the inquiry line, which wouldn’t be manned at such an hour. The other was a direct line to a desk phone. I had no idea to whom it belonged. It was just a random line I had used once before when I required it. Knowing my luck, they would have had the decorators in and switched the line to the Director’s Office.
It took a while, but an agent answered and said, “Hello, Special Agent Crawley.”
“Yes, hi,” I said. “Can I speak to Special Agent Kacie Cordell?”
“She’s not in today. How did you get this number?”
“Not important. You’re saying she hasn’t come in at all? Did she call in sick or something?”
“No—she’s AWOL as far as I know. Now listen here, who are—”
I hung up before he could finish. I put my cell phone back in my pocket and shook my head at Sully. “She didn’t bring Melissa in. Hell, she didn’t bring herself in. She didn’t go into work this morning.”
“What does that mean, then?” Sully asked. “What was she doing here?”
“Hell if I know. I sat across her at a bar last night and she didn’t seem out of sorts.”
“You sure? You didn’t give away Melissa’s location?”
I shook my head at first, but then it hit me. “Shit.”
“What?”
I rubbed my head as if it was sore. “We drove in my car. If she had a second or two, she could’ve checked my onboard GPS. It logs my travel history.”
“What were you thinking?” he said with a sigh.
“I trusted her.”
Sully sighed again. “If she didn’t take her in—then what are we looking at here?”
I shrugged. Sully started to walk up and down. On the odd occasion, he can get mild hysteria when it comes to speculation.
“Jesus, Ader, what if she’s a bent agent. I mean, think about it, who else was in a prime position to plant that evidence at the restroom in the first place?”
“No—that’s not Kacie.”
“You say that, yet she’s already duped you. The lack of commotion here makes sense, too. All she had to do was knock on the cabin door and make out she was arresting Melissa. Doubt she would’ve resisted.”
It was a decent theory, but I still wasn’t buying it. I turned around and kicked a stone at my Lexus in frustration. “Nerks!”
“What should we do?” Sully said.
I stared at the starless sky for a while and considered our options “Stick to the plan, I guess.” It hurt saying it more than it did thinking it.
“With Melissa missing?”
“Well, I don’t see how we can possibly track her now. And either way, it makes no difference. Let’s say Kacie did take her—where would she be? Either in prison—not much we can do about that. But that seems unlikely, given Kacie’s mysterious absence from work. The other option—if she really is bent, she will have taken Melissa to those who tried framing her, so the best thing we can do is go to Gillham and Mane tonight and hope we find something.”
“What about Kendra, you gonna ring her?”
I shook my head. “Nah. What’s she going to do, pray on her ass all night?”
27
We didn’t really speak on our way to the Gillham and Mane factory. Sully didn’t know Kacie or Melissa as well as I did, so who was he to be handing out suggestions?
But, the more I drove, the more the thought was bugging me. Melissa had left that cabin not long after Ryder and I had dropped her there. That was a fact. Kacie Cordell had been there, also a near certain fact. Beside mine, there was only another set of tire tracks outside the cabin, and Kacie hadn’t taken Melissa back to the FBI.
There was only one other explanation I could conjure, and that wasn’t pretty either. The explanation was that Melissa had initially agreed to go quietly, then, outside the cabin, she somehow got the better of Kacie, and made off in her car. It would explain the smashed phone, and it wouldn’t be the first time Melissa had apparently protected herself in a crisis, using force.
For five minutes I clung to the theory that perhaps Melissa had fled before Kacie even got there last night. But that didn’t do much to explain Kacie’s absence at work, or why she had dropped her phone.
We were about a mile from our destination when Sully began to inspect Kacie’s phone some more.
“What are you looking for?” I said.
“Anything bogus. Calls and numbers—texts.”
“Anything?”
“Nothing curious. She doesn’t text much. And I can’t see anything in her numbers, other than she is one of those people that gives everyone a damned nickname. But I doubt she’s going to have a contact under the title, ‘Romanian mafia.’
“You don’t say,” I said in a low mumble. “Who did she call last night?”
“This morning?” Sully said, correcting me. “Someone called Amy.”
I ran the name past my brain and couldn’t think of anything.
“Do you think she made the call before whatever happened at the cabin?” Sully said.
“Dunno, maybe. Midnight’s an odd time to call for anything else. Dial the number, see who this Amy is.”
Sully complied, by pretending he had found the phone and wanted to return it to its o
wner, which was partly true. After the conversation, which I couldn’t quite decipher by only hearing Sully’s polite, non evasive questions, he shook his head.
“Just a friend by the sounds. She did get the call last night, but heard no one on the other end. She hasn’t seen or heard from Kacie in weeks.”
I nodded and sighed. “Goddamnit.”
Sully nodded back. “Yeah, I retract my earlier thought. Sounds more like Kacie was the one who was abducted. She made a desperate call, and dropped it in a struggle. Although, I fail to see why she’d call a friend at midnight. Why not her headquarters or whatever?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think Melissa panicked and took her ride?”
“Don’t think so. Maybe somebody else was there.”
“There were no other tire tracks.”
“So what? There’s such a thing as walking.”
“How would anyone find the place, though? Sounds like a stretch to me.”
I rubbed my forehead and grunted. “I’m starting to wish I’d just left her to be arrested.”
It was an odd location for a factory. West of the highway, not all that far from the residential areas, and the barren fields belonging to Seal Beach within eyesight. It wasn’t what I was expecting, either. Part of being British was being told the old stories from the industrial revolution. History lessons bombarded you with the look of an era, fixed in your mind as buildings engraved with the appearance of charcoal and smoke.
That view is somewhat moot now. Factories are now pristine, uncomplicated buildings. Merely four walls with which to fit the modern machinery that does all the work, so human hands needn’t touch the charcoal and smoke.
As we parked up and inspected from afar, we noted the simplicity of the building. There was an entrance round front and very little else. We maneuvered round the back from a street across the way, and saw a wall with a steel gate. Open now, but would otherwise block entrance to the building’s loading bay.
Aside from a stray cat wandering inside, there was nothing of interest happening, and we decided we were too close to the area. I drove back up the street, to where we had a nice view of the grounds over the relatively small wall. We could see the loading bay and a few idle trucks. No sign of life. Just the security lights at the corners of the building.
“Nothing going on,” I said, as I killed the headlights.
“Yeah, well, I did say trusting that stoolie was a bad idea.”
“Nah—” I mumbled. “He was telling the truth. I could tell when I was walking round the main office today. Something just didn’t feel right.”
“Doesn’t mean we’ll be getting any action,” Sully said.
“We’ll give it a few hours. I’m of the impression that if they’re making hot merchandise in there, they’ll want to shift it on a regular basis.”
We kept ourselves busy with a deck of cards. It was the best part of two hours before we saw a small truck pull up beside the steel gate. It was now past midnight and we were getting a little restless. The truck waited five minutes. No one left the vehicle and the headlights stayed on. Sully had a pair of binoculars almost suctioned to his eyes, but I could see just fine. I didn’t become an expert marksman by relying on scopes alone.
“It’s opening,” Sully said. “I mean, the shutters of the loading area. Someone’s coming out.”
I squinted. It was a little hard to see in the darkness and the lights around the grounds shone away from the loading bay. However, it wasn’t long until a larger, more intense beam of light appeared. The main automatic floodlight that stood erect not far from the steel gate was triggered as two men came out from the shutters of the loading bay. They waited with their hands in their pockets. I couldn’t quite make out the faces, so I grabbed at Sully’s binoculars.
As I looked beyond the wall, and directly into the face of one of the men, I grunted. “Well I’ll be.”
“You recognize them?”
“Just one. It’s Graham Rudd.”
“The research guy?”
I nodded. “Not sure about the other guy.”
We watched as the steel gate pulled in completely. The truck remained idle for another two minutes, until a further three vehicles pulled up beside it. Two men in each, but my eyes were only interested in one, as he stepped out of the driver’s side of a Lincoln MKZ. It was him, the mystery man outside our beach house.
“That’s the guy,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“What do we do?”
“Let’s watch and see what happens.”
The six men from the cars crowded around the truck at first. A black guy banged on the window and gave what seemed to be a high five to the driver. My mystery man waited around by the gate, while the others then walked up to Rudd and his companion. Words were exchanged, and soon enough they were signaling the truck into the loading bay. The driver carefully reversed in, and then backed up all the way to the platform before the shutters.
All of the men had firearms; some of them sub machine pistols. The guy with Rudd had a revolver set inside a holster around his waist. Some serious firepower. Something Sully and I couldn’t really go up against. Not without a rifle anyway.
My mystery man mingled with Rudd and his companion, while the five other thugs brought out forklift trucks from inside, each carrying a pallet full of sealed wooden boxes. They took it in turns to level up to the back of the truck, and lift the goods securely on board. There appeared to be some discussion during the final load. I could only guess from such a distance, but I suspected they hadn’t thought the process through. Unable to get the forklifts up and onto the truck, the thugs had only lifted the pallets onto the rear end, and there wasn’t enough width to fit the final load.
While this played out, Sully was taking photographs with his camera. He assured me the zoom lens was up to the job, and either way, we had proof Graham Rudd was involved. Of course, we still had to prove what was going on.
“How do you want to play it?” Sully said. “I think the main truck’s pulling out and your man is getting in one of the idle trucks for the last pallet.”
I rubbed my chin and considered it. “Let the main truck go. We’ll follow my man in the lone one.”
“What about the factory?”
“We can come back to that.”
“I don’t see Kacie or Melissa. That’s probably a good thing.”
“Probably.”
The main truck pulled out of the loading bay and drove slowly down the street, away from us. Meanwhile, four of the thugs got back into their cars. The passenger from the mystery man’s Lincoln joined him in the truck with the single pallet. They followed the main truck at a distance. The man with the revolver disappeared back into the factory with Rudd and the loading bay’s floodlight switched off. We let the mystery man gain a few hundred yards before we pursued.
The key to tailing someone is to keep an inconspicuous distance. This is infinitely more difficult during nighttime, when the vehicle you’re tailing can easily spot your headlights in their rear view mirror.
Another key is to keep a greater distance when you’re tailing in less populated areas. On busy streets, the driver you’re tailing has other distractions, and not just cars. Lights from buildings, pedestrians—anything to shake their paranoia of being followed. There was none of this for three blocks, which is why I nearly lost him as he pulled onto the freeway. After that, it was child’s play. Or so I thought.
The truck was making good time toward LA, and showed no signs they were aware of us. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized my abilities were far from foolproof.
They turned off the freeway and made for an unmanned gas station, with no other cars in sight. I made the right move by driving straight by, but it was already a lost cause. The passenger of the truck got out and began firing at my Lexus. He hit the back windscreen by the time Sully and I had ducked.
I skidded and we both c
limbed out the driver’s side, keeping low to the ground. I didn’t like the idea of using my Lexus as a shield, but we had little choice.
“I’ll go round the rear,” I said. “Cover me.”
Sully nodded. He carries a PX4. Smooth as silk and a reliable cover weapon. I took cover at the rear wheel. I lifted my head out and two shots went past without alarm. I managed to get a line on the two of them by placing my head to the ground and looking underneath the trunk. The mystery man soon joined his partner. He was holding a pistol in his right hand, but he didn’t seem interested in aiming the weapon in our direction. After another two shots and some obscenities from his partner, it went quiet. The partner went down to the floor with a thud, but not because Sully or I had hit him. The mystery man had hit him over the head with the butt of his pistol with tremendous force.
The mystery man dangled the pistol lazily with his finger in between the trigger guard.
“Come out,” he said. “I’m not here for a fight—Ader York.”
I looked at Sully, who shook his head, as if to say it was a trick.
The mystery man threw his pistol to one side.
“No funny stuff,” he said. “Come out—I’m an FBI agent.” He held out his ID, complete with the badge.
I looked at Sully one more time, and then came out of hiding. We walked up to the man and took a closer look at his ID. Sure enough, the badge was real. Federal Bureau of Investigation - Department of Justice.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
“My name’s on the ID. Didn’t you notice? You’re a detective, after all.”
“The question wasn’t literal, dumbass. What are you up to? What were you doing outside our beach house?”
“I can’t explain, not now. If I stay around too long, they will figure something’s up.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. You explain to me right now, or I’ll shoot you in the knee, and I’ll claim I had no idea you were FBI. Our word against yours, two to one.” I nodded at Sully and he nodded back in agreement.
The FBI agent, whose name on the ID was Craig Swanson, sighed and glanced down at the thug, unconscious on the floor.