by Sean Black
Lock nodded.
Li clicked on the link. It opened in a separate window in the corner of the large monitor that was still filling with incomprehensible text.
A video player popped up in the new window. For the first few seconds there was black screen then Carmen appeared. She was standing alone in a darkened room with a light directed at her. She looked tired, but otherwise in good health. There was no sign of any bruises, cuts or abrasions that he could see.
She stared straight down the lens. “This is Carmen. As you’ll see from the newspaper I’m holding, I’m currently safe and unharmed. You will receive further instructions soon.”
The video ended less than half a second after she had uttered the last syllable. It cut back to black, then finished.
Li was staring at the screen. He tapped at some keys. He turned round to face them. “Good call. They had it set to auto-delete from that website as soon as it was viewed. But, don’t worry, I saved it.”
That he’d made the right call didn’t mean Lock was happy. They had the video, and it might contain clues that would lead him to Carmen. But it wasn’t anything he could count on.
Li startled as the cell phone rang. It was still hooked up to his cable.
“You want to get that?” he asked Lock.
“Answering won’t mess with what you’re doing?” Lock asked him, wanting to be certain.
“No, it’s all good.”
He picked up the cell phone. The number had been withheld or it was unavailable. Not an uncommon occurrence.
He tapped the answer icon and raised the cell to his ear in case it was a client, or something private. “Yes?”
There was a rush of static that stung his still buzzing eardrum.
“Mr. Lock?”
The voice at the other end of the line was distorted. It sounded male, but beyond that he couldn’t make out any details. He waved at Li to record it, if he could. Li shot him a thumbs-up.
“Speaking.”
“That message was to be deleted for a reason. Mess us around again, or try to figure out who we are, and we’ll kill her. Am I understood?”
Suddenly the hot, stuffy room was icy cold. “I understand,” Lock said.
The line went dead. His mind was racing. Not just with how much smarter and more sophisticated they were than he’d given them credit for. But he was also wondering how, having taken this risk, he could turn it to his advantage.
He doubted the video Li had managed to download would yield anything useful. Certainly not a location that would be specific enough to help them find the room. But the LAPD weren’t to know that.
25
Chance pushed her hands through the slot in the cell door. She really needed to do something with her nails, she thought. They’d gotten badly chipped in the fight with Ginny Browell, then the guards. Not that she could hope for nail polish any time soon. Not in the SHU (solitary housing unit), where all but the most basic essentials were denied.
She watched as the cuffs snapped tight around her wrists. The guards were mad at her. She knew they’d be getting their ears chewed off by the warden because he was getting his chewed off by his bosses. And they were getting their ears chewed by a bunch of politicians in Sacramento. All because she’d done the world a favor and taken out that scumbag rapist Browell.
The world was upside-down crazy, she told herself. Always had been for her. All she could do was ride the wave, stay true to the Fourteen Words, do her best by God, and see where that wave took her.
As instructed, Chance pulled her cuffed hands back through the slot and turned to the wall. The cell door opened and guards moved in. Six of them.
“Six of you for little old me?” she said.
“Stay facing the wall. Hands up on your head. Keep them there too. Legs spread.”
Soon her feet were shackled, her cuffs and leg chains hooked to a belly chain. She shuffled out into the corridor. At the meshed observation windows of every other cell door she saw the faces of women from her unit. They screamed words of support as she was led down the corridor and into a small side room.
Inside there were two detectives from the local police department, a man and a woman. They introduced themselves. Chance was polite in return. There was no reason not to be—they were just doing their job.
“So,” the woman said, “would you like to tell us in your own words what happened here earlier?”
Chance smiled sweetly. “Not without my lawyer present. I am entitled to a lawyer, right?”
“Of course,” said the guy.
“Oh, and before y’all ask any more questions, I’ll be pleading not guilty. So you can save yourselves a whole bunch of time and air asking me your questions because I ain’t going to be telling you anything.”
With that, Chance tuned out. If they said anything else, it didn’t appear to register. After a few more minutes, the guards came back to return her to the SHU.
26
Detective Stanner hard-stared at Lock across his desk. From the way the vein on his forehead was pulsing, Lock made an educated guess that he was beyond annoyed.
Lock had just challenged whether the LAPD should retain control of a major headline-grabbing investigation. Stanner didn’t like it. Lock didn’t blame him, but he was doing what would help Carmen. Right now that was devoting more resources to finding her. More specifically, federal government resources in the shape of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“How can you be so sure she was in Colorado?”
Lock wasn’t. In fact, there was no clue on the video as to where it had been shot. But out of state meant the Feds could be involved. So Lock had decided to stretch the truth.
“And this video they sent you, it deleted as soon as you watched it?” Stanner asked.
Lock tossed his cell phone across the desk to him. “Look for yourself, or have your tech guys check. You’ll both find I’m not lying.” Well, not about that, anyway.
Stanner grabbed the phone from the desk, and got up. “Oh, we will.”
He stood, blocking Lock’s exit. To get out, he’d have to go round him. “Kidnappings are time-sensitive,” Lock told him. That wasn’t entirely true either. Not beyond the initial abduction. Once kidnappers had fled with a victim, time could be a plus or a minus, most often a plus that brought them to the table to get their money. “I want the FBI contacted now.”
He wasn’t sure if he was overselling it or not. All he knew was that Stanner looked angry enough to take a swing at him.
“It’s not your call as to whether we call in the Feds,” Stanner told him.
Lock eyeballed him back. Refusing to blink. Meeting his gaze and holding it. “Correct. And it’s not yours either.”
“It’s a matter of procedure. As soon as a person is believed to have been transported over state lines, it’s incumbent upon the relevant authority to alert the FBI, if they haven’t already been alerted.”
Glancing down, Lock saw that Stanner’s hands were bunched into fists. The gesture told him his ploy had worked. He had no choice. Procedure gave him the last word. He could try to play it down with the Feds. The more he did that, the more likely they were to take an interest.
When a five-hundred-pound law-enforcement gorilla wanted to keep hold of a case, that case became very interesting indeed to anyone else who caught wind of it. It was human nature.
27
A howling cat greeted Lock’s arrival at Carmen’s apartment. The food bowl was empty. Not a morsel left. “And what if I hadn’t come back?” he asked Merlin.
His question was answered with more high-pitched yowling. Yeah, Lock was definitely a dog guy. He dug some more dried food from the cupboard and topped off the bowl. The cat hunkered down and set to work eating. As he pigged out, Lock moved through into the living room, and powered up Carmen’s laptop.
Logging into her email account, he quickly checked the inbox around the time of their dinner in Santa Monica. There were several emails. One was from her boss, Mike
, at almost precisely the time he remembered her getting the message that prompted her to head back to the office.
He clicked the email. It was brief: Carmen, really sorry about this, but I need you to pick up the Wilder affidavit from the office tonight and review. I need someone over it before tomorrow’s meeting. Mike
So, this was the email from Mike that had sent her hurrying back to the office. Funny he hadn’t mentioned it when Lock had spoken with him. Then the crack about Lock knowing who might be behind the kidnapping. It was time that Lock had another little chat with him. This time, on his terms.
Headlights off, Lock sat in the rental car and waited for Mike. He had already made a call to check he was in his office. He’d also made a call to find out what car he drove. Now he was parked directly behind it. All he needed was for the man himself to finish work.
While he waited, he called Li.
“Hey, Li, it’s Ryan. You have any news for me?”
“On the video, no. It could be anywhere. There’s no radio or television noise in the background. No sound of any cars or anything else, so it’s somewhere quiet, but that’s all I can tell you for sure.”
Lock hadn’t expected any different. “What about the visuals?” he asked, hopeful that a closer inspection of the video would maybe reveal something similar to the items he’d invented to get the LAPD to involve the FBI.
“A room and a camera. There isn’t anything we can use to narrow things down. Sorry, Ryan.”
“Don’t be sorry. I appreciate your help on this.” It was true. He did. He was paying Li handsomely for his work, but it was at the edge of Li’s comfort zone, and it wasn’t as if he was short of eager clients. Guys like him were becoming more and more valuable as crime moved online, and everyone, private security companies included, struggled to keep up with the bad guys.
“But I do have some good news for you. Well, maybe. It’s kind of weird so I don’t know if it’s actually good news or just a dead end that these guys set up for someone like me.”
“Go ahead. What did you find?”
“Well, the email was zipped all over the place before it came to you. No way to trace its true origin, really. But they kind of messed up with the video. That’s why I’m not sure what I found is genuine.”
If they had messed up, it would have been the first time. Or maybe not. They had been reckless during the kidnapping. They could have split and tried again at Carmen’s place or somewhere else. Instead they had engaged in a gun battle that carried a lot of downside. “How’d they mess up?”
“Well, they put the video up on a hosting site. You know, some place you can upload stuff that you want to share. It was set to private so only you had access, but they still had to register an account, and they weren’t quite as slick at covering their tracks when they did that,” Li told him.
From his limited knowledge of such stuff, Lock knew that every computer that connected to the internet had a unique IP address logged somewhere. There were ways of concealing or misdirecting the address you were using if you wanted to hide. That was what most criminals did. But even then there were sometimes ways of electronically tracking it back to where the person really had been.
“Anyway,” Li continued, “these guys tried to hide their original IP address when they uploaded the video to the file-sharing website, but I managed to track it.”
Lock’s heart jumped. This was potentially huge. He’d have to do some explaining to the LAPD and the FBI as to how he’d come by the information, having told Stanner that the video had auto-deleted, but he was sure he, or rather Li, would find some elaborate explanation and baffle them with jargon. In any case, if it helped them locate Carmen he doubted anyone would care too much how they did it. “Great work, Li.”
“Yeah, but like I said, don’t get too excited. First, it’s a general IP address that could have been used by dozens, maybe hundreds of people. There would be a lot of sifting through to see who it might be.”
“And the second?”
“Well, I was thinking it would have been uploaded at maybe a Starbucks or somewhere. But it wasn’t. The file was uploaded at a US Army base.”
“You’re certain?” Lock asked him.
“Hundred percent. Weird, huh?”
Maybe not, thought Lock. Maybe it wasn’t weird at all. Maybe it fitted with what he’d seen already. “Li, can I call you back?”
Mike was walking, briefcase in hand, toward his BMW 5-Series.
28
If Mike was surprised to see Lock, he didn’t show it. Lock guessed that was another characteristic of a good courtroom operator ‒ a passable poker face when someone sprang a surprise on you.
“You’ll have to make this quick, Mr. Lock. I told my wife I’d be home for dinner by eight.”
This guy was a piece of work. Lock would give him that. Carmen had regarded him not just as her employer but as a mentor and friend, and he was worried about his wife burning a casserole.
Lock stepped out in front of him, blocking his path to the driver’s door of his BMW. “It’ll take as long as it takes.”
Mike smirked and put down his briefcase. “I’ve spent my entire professional life dealing with criminals. Men, and women, who’ve done unspeakable things. I don’t respond to the tough-guy act. It might have worked with Carmen, but it doesn’t make any kind of an impression on me.”
Lock matched his smirk. “There’s no act. But I need the answers to a couple of questions and you’re not going anywhere until I have them.”
“This is known as false imprisonment,” he said, trying to push past.
Lock didn’t budge.
“If you persist with this, I’ll have no other option but to call the cops,” Mike said, reaching into his inside pocket for his cell phone. He started to tap in 911. “I know you’re upset about Carmen, but this behavior is completely beyond the—” He tapped the final one.
Lock plucked the cell phone from his hand, deleted the 911 call with his thumb, powered the phone down and handed it back to him. “Here. I’d hate for you to add theft to my rap sheet. Try it again and I’ll drop it. By accident, of course.”
Mike’s face flushed. Good. The dynamic had tilted. He could bluff and bluster and quote the law all he liked, but right now it was just him and Lock in an empty parking garage with no one else around. And even if someone did pass by there was nothing in his body language to suggest this was more than guys catching up before they headed home.
“This is absurd.”
He made another move to push past Lock. This time he put a little more effort behind it, like he wasn’t kidding around anymore. Unfortunately for him, neither was Lock.
Lock’s right hand came up to his throat. His right boot stomped down hard on Mike’s Italian-leather-encased left foot, holding him in place. Lock didn’t want to leave any incriminating indents from his fingers around the man’s throat so he settled for pushing his thumb hard into the trigeminal nerve at the point between the top of his jawbone and his ear. “Painful, huh?”
Mike blinked.
“It can get a lot more painful too. So you’re going to answer my questions and then you can be on your way.”
“I’ll have you arrested.”
“No, you won’t,” Lock told him. “Because you know more about this than you’re letting on.”
He let up on the pressure just enough for Mike to be able to concentrate a little more fully on his responses, which would determine how the next few minutes of his life went, and how late he’d be for dinner with his wife.
“How come you seem so relaxed about what’s happened to Carmen, Mike?”
He reached up and Lock allowed him to push his hand away. “Two words. Servando Guilen.”
“What about him?”
“Come on. Do I have to spell it out for you? Carmen is part of the key to him ducking life in Pelican Bay or Florence.”
Both were ultra-high-security American prisons. So called Supermax facilities from which escape was pr
etty much impossible. The Bay was California State, and Florence was a federal facility, located in Colorado.
“Do you really think someone like Servando is going to allow his defense team to be compromised a few weeks out from his trial like this? Right now he’ll be moving heaven and earth to work out who took Carmen and make sure they give her back.”
“And if they don’t?”
“They’ll spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders.”
“He’s told you this?”
“He doesn’t have to. And if he did, I’m not going to confirm or deny. You can try all the strong-arm tactics on him you like, but attorney-client privilege isn’t something I’ll compromise. Not with a client like this.”
What he’d said made sense. No question.
“Someone took Carmen to fuck with Servando?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you said it was connected to him somehow.”
“That’s my hunch. But it’s nothing more than that. A hunch. If someone had wanted to compromise Servando they wouldn’t kidnap Carmen. It’s way too much effort, and it could wound him but it wouldn’t make a conviction any more certain. Hell, if he wanted, he could hire any number of attorneys. It’s not as if money is an object.”
Lock wasn’t sure if the last part was true. From what he’d read about the Guilen case, the Mexican and US governments had located and frozen a number of his bank accounts and other assets. Money was almost certainly an issue.
“Okay, last question. How come you didn’t mention it was you who asked Carmen to come back into the office?”
“Oh, come on. They were following her. If they were looking to kidnap her they could have taken her from somewhere else just as easily.”