Pushed to the Edge (SEAL Team 14)

by Mathis, Loren

  “I think there’s a ‘but’ coming?” Joshua asked, raising his right brow up at her in curiosity.

  “Yeah. But it just doesn’t fit his pattern of behavior. I mean, this is a kid who to all extents and purposes was a good kid. He excelled at school and from what I’ve heard from officials at the high school he attended, he was poised to be accepted into pretty much any college that he wanted to attend. Why would he risk everything to get involved with a gang?”

  “Sometimes teenagers do stupid things, Victoria. It’s sort of like a rite of passage. Reach fourteen years of age, and then fall into a few years of perpetually stupid behavior.”

  “I’m just not getting that vibe from what I’ve been able to research about him. He doesn’t seem to have had any enemies.”

  “Obviously, he had at least one enemy. Unless, the police have indicated that it could have been a case of mistaken identity? You know, wrong place, wrong time?”

  “There’s no indication of that, but it’s possible I suppose.”

  Joshua took that moment to stand up from the table and walk over to her.

  “Hey, what’s up?” she asked as Joshua looked down at her. He didn’t answer her; he just took her hand and lifted her up to her feet.

  “I’m glad that you’re here,” Joshua said softly, looking into her eyes before leaning down to kiss her softly on her lips.

  “Me too,” she said. Her breath caught in her throat. God, he was such a gorgeous man. Inside and out.

  “And maybe I can distract you from your research for a little while, huh?”

  “Maybe you can. But maybe I can distract you tonight,” Victoria said, taking his hand. He pulled her to her feet. “You know, I have something else planned for you. Something special.”

  “Oh really now?” His beautiful brown eyes were sparkling as he looked down at her. He reached one hand out to touch the top of her breasts that were peeking out from her negligee. A sweet shiver of anticipation swept through Victoria as Joshua lightly touched her breasts and then leaned down to kiss her.

  “Mmm hmm. I think you’re going to like it.”

  Joshua laughed. “Hun, I’m damn sure I’m going to like it.”

  This is what happily ever after feels like, Victoria thought as she led the way into his bedroom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  V

  ictoria was finally back on semi-good terms with her editor. He still wasn’t satisfied with her current progress on her investigations, however. He was pressuring her to make her stories in the next few days or cut them loose.

  After all the time and effort that she had put into her investigations, dropping her stories really wasn’t much of an option. If she did, her career would be taking at least three steps back. Besides, she felt that there was something there.

  Today, Victoria had an interview with Kevin Frasier—a friend of Antonio Ortiz. Victoria had managed to speak briefly with Lou Kinley after getting his work number from Ms. Ortiz. The call had been a wash. The young man had denied having had contact with his former friend in the weeks leading up to Antonio’s murder. He had also denied having any information about who could have wanted his friend dead. Victoria didn’t believe him. Despite his words, he had sounded stressed and nervous. It was investigatory reporting 101: sometimes the way a person said words were more important that the actual words themselves. Lou Kinley was lying to her.

  Victoria had decided to move on to Antonio’s other childhood friend, Kevin. Kevin had only agreed to speak with her on the condition that she would not record their conversation or mention his name in any of her future reporting. She had requested to meet Kevin at a neutral, non-threatening location—a local coffee shop in downtown San Diego called LION Coffee. Whenever Victoria visited the city, it was one of her favorite hangouts. As typical of many indie coffee shops, the patrons were generally an eclectic bunch.

  When Victoria got to the coffee shop, she saw that Kevin was already sitting outside on the patio. He was smoking a cigarette. Since the shooting, Kevin had graduated from high school and moved to San Diego to attend a small, junior college. His long, blonde hair was done up in dreadlocks. He had a jagged scar on his right forearm and a generally disorganized appearance. He looked like an interesting mix of a 1960s hippie and a 1990s surfer boy. She didn’t know if he would throw her the “peace” sign or say “hella” every other word.

  “Kevin Frasier?” she asked as she approached him, reaching her right hand out in greeting.

  “You’re the reporter?” he asked hesitantly, before shaking her hand.

  “Yes, Victoria Sanchez. Thank you for meeting me here.” Victoria sat down in the seat opposite of Kevin at the small, round metal table. It was a hot day outside, so Victoria was grateful that Kevin had chosen the table that was situated under an outdoor umbrella. Since recording the interview wasn’t an option, Victoria took out a pad of paper and pen to take notes.

  “So, this is about Tony?”

  “Yes. I’m investigating the events surrounding Antonio Ortiz’s murder. Antonio’s mother mentioned that you were one of her son’s best friends. That you all had known each other since grade school?”

  “Yeah. We grew up together around the way.”

  “Did you speak with or have any interaction with Antonio in the days prior to his death?”

  “No, at least not in the few days right before. The last time I saw him in person was a couple of weeks before he died.”

  “Did he have any enemies that you know of that would have wanted to do him harm?”

  “Antonio was a good guy. I don’t remember him ever getting into a fight with anyone. He never caused any trouble.”

  “His mother mentioned that Antonio had started a new job a few months prior to his death. Do you know anything about that? Like the name of the company where he was working and what type of work he did?”

  Kevin looked across the table, past Victoria and over at the sidewalk. He took a long drag on his cigarette and squinted his eyes as if he had been staring directly into the sun for too long. Tapping the end of his cigarette on the patio table, he looked down, watching the charcoaled ashes fall to the ground.

  “Antonio was a good guy,” he said, his blue eyes gazing back into Victoria’s eyes.

  “Yes, you mentioned that.”

  “He just wanted to help his mom out, you know? He saw how hard she worked. She wanted to help him pay for college. But she worked as a waitress at some run down ass café near the projects. She could barely afford to keep the lights on in their apartment and the two of them fed.”

  “So, that’s why Antonio got a new job? To help out his mother?” Victoria asked, breaking the silence that had ensued when Kevin stopped talking for a moment.

  “Yeah. He figured that he could earn enough to help his mom out and save a little bit for college. He was real smart, you know. Way smarter than me. I’m just going to a junior college, but Antonio had close to a 4.0 grade point average senior year. His SAT scores were ridiculous. He could have gone anywhere he wanted—Cal Tech even.”

  “Where was he working at, Kevin?”

  Victoria watched as the young man blew out a long breath, and then took another long drag of his cigarette. Victoria found that she was holding her breath. Waiting. She wasn’t sure of what exactly she was waiting for. She had no idea what Kevin Frasier was about to say, but she had a feeling that it just might be the lead that she had been looking for to blow this case wide open.

  “He was working for a shipping company.”

  “A shipping company,” Victoria frowned, scribbling the information down onto her notepad. “Did he ever tell you the name of the company? You mean a shipping company like UPS?”

  “Yeah. He said he was working for the Henning Shipping Company.”

  “What?” This tidbit of information was so shocking the Victoria actually blinked. She had to be hearing him wrong. “You mean the Henning Cooper Company?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ar
e you sure?” Kevin Frasier definitely now had her total undivided attention.

  “Yeah, I’m positive. He was real excited about it when he landed that job.”

  “Do you know how he found out about the position? Was it a part of some sort of internship for school?” It was possible that the Henning Cooper Company had set up some sort of internship program for local schoolchildren. Large companies were always setting up those types of programs for the good publicity that they provided. And given the financial situation of Antonio’s family, he probably wouldn’t have been too picky about what the internship position was.

  “No, it wasn’t part of any type of formal program. He said that he heard about the opening from one of his cousins. I didn’t think too much of it. His cousins were a bunch of losers—half of them were selling dope and what not.”

  “How did his dope-dealing cousins find out about a job at the Henning Cooper Company? Why would they even want to hire a seventeen-year-old boy?”

  “You got me, lady. I remember asking him one time why he was even taking advice from his cousins. He had never seemed all that close to them before. I mean, he was real close to his Uncle Romero, but not so much to his cousins. His uncle was like a father figure to him after his own father died.”

  “Did he tell you what type of job he was doing for them, specifically? His mother mentioned that he may have been a driver.”

  “He helped moved some packages for them. On some weekends, he would drive down to the coast, to Galveston. He used his Uncle Romero’s car to go on some runs. It wasn’t like something he devoted a lot of time to or anything. After he first started working there, he didn’t say too much at all about it.”

  What the heck? This didn’t make any sense, at all. Why would the Henning Cooper Company need to hire someone like Antonio Ortiz to deliver items for them?

  “Do you know what type of packages?” she asked, her eyes focused on Kevin’s face, looking for any ‘tells’ that maybe he wasn’t being completely honest with her.

  “Yeah,” he cleared his throat before saying, “Look you cannot mention that I told you this. I don’t want my name in the paper. I don’t want to be questioned by the police. I’m trying to start my life over, a new start.”

  “You have my word that I’ll keep you as an anonymous source, Kevin. If the police find out about you, it won’t be from me.”

  “Okay. He didn’t know what he was transporting at first. He thought that maybe it was just extra items that weren’t accounted for during the first transports from the containers. It wasn’t a big deal. He would just do a few runs for them on the weekends. He would go down to their port in Galveston, load up his Uncle Romero’s truck and then drop off the packages to wherever they told him to. They were paying him some serious cash. I’m not talking about a $7.50 per hour job like at McDonald’s. They would pay for his driving expenses—so gas mileage—and at least a few hundred dollars cash.”

  “Just for a delivery?”

  “Yeah, just for delivering the packages. Crazy, right? So one weekend, I went with him. Galveston was like a four-hour drive from Dallas, and he was tired of making the trips by himself. I thought what the hell. Driving down to the coast for a weekend isn’t a bad way to kill some time.”

  “Did you just go with him this one time? When did you make this trip with Antonio?

  “Yeah. It was just one time. Really, it was just a few weeks before he was shot.”

  “So it was just you and Antonio on that trip?”

  Kevin hesitated several seconds before saying, “No. Our friend Lou Kinley went with us too. It was just supposed to be a fun weekend trip. To be honest, Lou and I were a little bit jealous of Antonio. I mean, he had this great new job and they were paying him mad cash just to transport some boxes around.”

  Now the pieces were starting to come together about Antonio Ortiz’s mystery job. And Victoria always loved it when her hunches panned out—Lou Kinley had been lying to her about not seeing Antonio in the weeks leading up to his murder.

  “So what happened during the trip?”

  “The drive down there was great. We left early that morning, so we got there around noon. Lou and I helped Antonio load up the truck, and then we made six different stops that afternoon.”

  “Did you look into any of the packages?”

  Victoria peered closely at Kevin. He brought his hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette up to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose, and lowering his head. “Yeah. We looked. Antonio didn’t want to. It was my idea. I started joking with him about how no one gets paid that much money to transport legal stuff. I convinced him to open up one of the packages …”

  “And?” Victoria prodded him as he trailed off.

  Kevin looked back up at Victoria, a sorrowful look on his face. “Drugs. I think either cocaine or heroin. It was a white powder. I mean, we had delivered at least fifty of those 18”x12” boxes. That’s a crazy amount of product.”

  “Where did you deliver the packages to?”

  “We drop the boxes off at two warehouses and four office buildings.”

  “Do you remember the addresses?”

  “I’m not sure. I sort of remember what one of the warehouse buildings looks like. It’s been such a long time though. I don’t think I could be sure.”

  Kevin’s revelations had completely rocked Victoria to her core. She hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that the two murders that she was investigating had in any way been connected. Who would think that a rich, powerful, former U.S. Congressman would have this type of connection to a poor, Latino kid from West Dallas. Normally, those two worlds just didn’t cross. Victoria knew that personally.

  Still, even though there was this connection between Henning and Antonio Ortiz, there was no real indication that Henning had anything to do with the boy’s death. Unless …

  “Did you all take any of the drugs, maybe? You said that you delivered fifty boxes, maybe you all thought that if you took a little bit it wouldn’t be missed?”

  “Not Tony. He wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “You said ‘Not Tony.’ Does that mean that you or Lou took some of the product?”

  “There were still a few more boxes left when we made the discovery. We had one more drop off site to go. Tony was freaking out. He had really thought that there wouldn’t be anything illegal in the boxes. He couldn’t believe that he had been transporting heroin all this time. Who would think that a big-time shipping company like that would be in the illegal drug trade, you know?” Kevin took a long shaky breath before continuing. “Well, anyway, Lou got the bright idea to take some of the drugs. He figured that he could do some easy sells on the side and make some extra cash. So when Tony was in the front of the truck, Lou put some in a bag. He didn’t think anyone would notice.”

  “You didn’t tell Antonio about this?”

  “No. Lou promised to give me some of the cut. He didn’t take a lot. I didn’t think anyone would notice either. And I needed the money too.”

  Victoria didn’t say anything for a long moment, just stared at him silently before asking, “Do you think that Antonio was murdered because Henning and his associates found out that the drugs were missing from the shipment?”

  Tears were now freely streaming down Kevin’s face. “Yeah. Yeah I do. Who else would have wanted Tony dead? He was a good guy. Lou and I were supposed to be his best friends. And we got him killed,” he choked out before leaning forward, cradling his head in his hands, and letting out an anguished sob that would have broken even the hardest heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “

  Devin. I think that you need to look into the real possibility that Richard Henning or one of his business partners from the Henning Cooper Company had Antonio Ortiz murdered.”

  “Well hello to you too, Victoria. Have you ever heard of knocking before you enter?” Devin asked, the sarcasm dripping from his voice.

  Victoria was back in Dallas, Tex
as for the time being. It was in the early afternoon and she had just arrived at the Dallas Police Department. She was bone-tired from all of the traveling to and from California that she had been doing for the past few weeks. Fortunately, Joshua was still in California and not yet on another mission. She could not wait to finish her investigations and news articles so that she could hurry back to him. She had a crucial, in-person meeting with her editor right after her meeting with Detective Sage.

  Devin was looking bone-tired himself. He was wearing a rumpled white dress shirt, black trousers, and a glare. His gray eyes were bloodshot and his dark brown hair was tousled. Victoria felt sympathy pangs for him, he looked beyond exhausted.

  Victoria knew that his wife, Carrie, had recently given birth to their second child—so between fatherly duties and investigating a myriad of homicides, he was starting to look more than a little haggard around the edges. There was nothing quite like juggling a screaming infant and dozens of homicide cases to zap the energy right out of you.

  He had been in the middle of filling out paperwork when Victoria barged into his office. The Dallas Police Department had recently made a lot of new hires, courtesy of an increased budget, and Devin had been “upgraded” to this space. It was unusual for a detective to have an office that closed with a door. That being said, Devin’s “office” wasn’t much to look at. It was about the size of a broom closet. Actually, Victoria had seen larger broom closets. The room didn’t even have a window.

  Devin was seated behind his medium-sized, double-pedestal steel desk. A large vertical filing cabinet was crammed in the back corner. The whole room had a 1960s vibe to it, complete with stale air and nausea inducing fluorescent lighting. The only features that brought it back into the Twenty-First Century were the desktop computer and the contemporary photograph frames on the desk, which showed Devin with his wife and their two children.

  “I’m serious, Devin. I think that someone from the Henning Cooper Company hired someone to get rid of Antonio Ortiz,” Victoria said, sitting down in the chair in front of Devin’s desk.