Gia Santella Crime Thriller Boxed Set: Books 1-3 (Gia Santella Crime Thrillers)

by Kristi Belcamino

  Baumann was coming down the stairs when I got to the lobby.

  “Door to the roof is locked from this side. Probably illegal and a fire hazard. If these guys went to the roof to get away from fire, they’d be in trouble.” He sounded angry.

  “I guess I’m not surprised the mayor is an absentee slumlord.” I was angry, too, and not only about that. This whole exercise was a waste of everybody’s time.

  A dead end. I’d wasted precious hours that should’ve been spent finding Sasha.

  “What next, boss?” Baumann said.

  “Ha.” But I thought about it. “I have an address for King. It’s in your town. You mind swinging by there on your way home to see if anything seems suspicious.”

  “Sounds good.” He started to walk away and then turned back.

  “Hey, it was a good lead. We needed to check it out.”

  I shrugged. He smiled and headed toward the Powell Street BART station.

  Baumann was cool about it, but I could tell he’d wished he’d stayed home in his nice warm bed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  FEELING DEJECTED, I started out toward Russian Hill. I would hit the last address on my walk home. I stepped onto Mason Street, the unofficial border to the Forgotten Island part of the Tenderloin. But I would’ve known the difference. It was as if this neighborhood had a darkness that surrounded it. I remembered the creepy feeling I had the other day around there.

  The streetlights were broken and the entire area felt remote and forlorn, even though I knew less than a block away Market Street was bustling.

  Glancing at my sheet of paper, I read the address: 240 Turk Street. I squinted in the near darkness to see if I could spot a building with an address. Most of the buildings didn’t have addresses, which was another bizarre aspect of the Forgotten Island.

  Nearly all the buildings were abandoned with boarded-up windows and doors.

  The building closest to me had half of an address 23 ... So, I knew I was close. I found another numbered building and that’s when I looked up.

  The address matched. It was the abandoned building that had given me the creeps the other day. But now as the fog cleared, it didn’t look abandoned. The twelve-foot-high chain link fence was shiny. Getting closer, I examined the lock on the gate. New. I glanced up at the windows. If someone were inside with some type of light I would never know. The windows were black with curtains or shades or something else.

  The rumble of a vehicle nearby sent me scrambling. I raced across the street and ducked into a deep dark doorway of an old liquor store with the sign hanging from one bolt. Tucked in there I knew I was invisible. I pressed myself against the wall as the vehicle’s headlights turned onto the street, briefly flashing my way. The far reaches of the beam glanced against my boot, which I pulled back even further into the shadows.

  The vehicle rolled into sight. It was a black SUV. My heart thudded. The driver got out to unlock the gate, but it was on the other side of my vantage point, so I couldn’t see him or her, only a dark figure. I stretched my neck out, but couldn’t get a glimpse of the license plate from my hiding spot unless I stepped out into the street. I shrunk back into the doorway: another car was coming down the road.

  A black sedan with dark tinted windows stopped right in front of me and waited for the SUV to enter the fenced parking lot. The SUV pulled into the parking lot, followed by the sedan. A passenger—someone all in black—jumped out and locked the gate behind the two vehicles. A huge garage door creaked open and the vehicles disappeared inside. Before the door closed, I glimpsed a metal staircase across a vast open and empty space.

  Once again, I eyed the fence. If it weren’t for the barbed wire dangling down on my side, I would scale that baby in a second and go snoop around.

  Meanwhile, I’d wait to see if the vehicles came out any time soon. I glanced at my phone. Past five in the morning. Which also meant thirteen hours until James was going to his superiors, putting Sasha’s neck on the line. Damn it.

  Sasha’s disappearance was connected to the mayor and a black SUV and this building was connected to both. I was right where I needed to be.

  It is during those times when all seems to be lost that the true warrior digs deep down inside and finds his true strength and purpose. He will unerringly know when he is doing what is right and true and just.

  By dawn, I was crunched in the corner of the doorway, numb and cold and stiff, barely able to keep my eyes open. That’s when I heard a screech and opened my eyes in time to see both vehicles pulling out of the gate. This time I could see the driver. He looked military. His hair was shorn and he wore all black clothing and sunglasses even though the sky was only now beginning to lighten. He was nondescript. Indistinguishable in any way. Completely average.

  If I saw him again, I wouldn’t recognize him. Instead, I stared at the back window of the sedan as it rolled past. Was the mayor inside?

  My phone buzzed right then and I looked down at the text that appeared. Baumann.

  “King place quiet. Will wait til 7.”

  “Thx,” I texted back.

  I felt helpless. Sitting back, watching and spying was not helping us find Sasha. Unless she was in the building. Something they wanted to hide was in that building. The fence and padlocked gate made that apparent. Besides the garage door, there were no other obvious ways to enter the building. All the doors were boarded up.

  Feeling desperate, I did something probably foolish. I stepped out into the street after the sedan had passed, standing in the middle of the road. The vehicles were three blocks away, but I saw the brake lights flash once before I stepped back into the shadows.

  Come on. Come back. I would throw myself in the passenger door. I would pretend to be hit by the car. I would try all the doors on the car. Anything to see if the mayor and his smug face was sitting in the back seat. I waited but the car didn’t stop. The rumble of the vehicles grew distant and then disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EVEN THOUGH I’D INTENDED to head home and sleep a few hours, it now seemed like a waste. I didn’t have time for that. Instead, I headed to Darling’s salon. I found her in the back. She looked a little more presentable than the last time I’d seen her. Her hair was back on her head in silky black curls and her Cleopatra eyes were made up to perfection.

  Django ignored me. He probably thought I’d abandoned him and that he was now Darling’s dog. Hell, maybe he was. When I first walked in, he’d looked up with interest and then put his head back down on his paws and closed his eyes. I couldn’t blame him. I was terrible at relationships. Even the dog knew.

  Darling was on the couch sipping coffee and watching the morning news.

  “Where’s Precious?” I asked, narrowing my eyes suspiciously.

  “She’s sleeping in at my place. She’ll be here, soon.”

  I told her what I’d learned about the mayor’s business holdings in the Tenderloin, hoping she might be able to shed some insight.

  She looked off in the distance, thinking. This was the old Darling I knew. The strong, smart woman who’d grown a multi-million-dollar business from nothing.

  “Sasha wrote a story that was going to ruin the mayor, so he must be behind her disappearance—is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “Have you gone to his house?”

  “I haven’t,” I admitted. “But only because I know he lives there with his wife and kids and I think it’s unlikely he’d let any of his other activities near them. But it probably wouldn’t hurt to have someone go there and put a tail on him.”

  Mentally, I kicked myself for not thinking of this earlier.

  I hid my shame by pulling my mug of coffee to my face and taking a long sip. When I put the mug down Darling was staring at me with wide eyes.

  “I spent last night awake lying in bed thinking of everything Sasha said to me the past two weeks. I was trying to remember every word. I don’t know, but I think maybe all the
people disappearing lately in the Tenderloin, I think she was also looking into that.”

  “Go on.” I sat up straighter.

  “When I was concerned about the missing people she said, ‘Nonna, don’t worry I’m working on a story that makes sure these people never hurt anyone again.’”

  Missing black homeless or poor. All from the Tenderloin. A fake Antifa group. Kraig King. The mayor and his re-election campaign. Sasha’s story to ruin the mayor.

  What was the connection? Was the mayor behind the disappearances? I had a hard time believing even a scumbag like him would stoop that low. Unless it was some Good Samaritan program where he was taking them off the streets and transplanting them somewhere like Swanson Place. My idea.

  But if that were the case, he would be blabbing it all over the city. Every TV station would feature Evans and his bushy gray eyebrows. If I knew anything about the mayor, it was that he was the quintessential politician. Every move was calculated and geared to boost and bolster his public image. From the make-up he wore at the gym (in case there was a photo op) to the finely tailored blazers he wore to stroll the beach, the mayor was all about the promotion machine.

  Thinking of Sasha’s pinky toe back on my dining room table, I had a hard time believing he would either participate in, or condone, violence of that caliber. One time, he’d been asked to give a statement about a severed hand found floating in the Bay. When a reporter had shown him a picture of it, he’d visibly cowered and turned green, looking as if he were trying not to vomit. He found the world’s dark underbelly, which included the Tenderloin, distasteful.

  The pinky toe.

  Of course, I’d avoided telling Darling that detail. I couldn’t, because deep down inside I knew I had caused it. By going to the police I’d effectively maimed her precious grandbaby. She had been so against me going to the cops in the first place. I’d made a colossal mistake.

  The only way I could possibly make up for it would be to bring Sasha home safely. Darling was watching me after I finished speaking. I’d become lost in my own thoughts. She was looking at me as if I held the secret keys to the kingdom. It was too much.

  But I had made her a promise. I shook off my fears and doubts and thought about what we knew again. At the core of it all was someone’s desire to stop Sasha from running a story in the newspaper. But what was the story?

  “This is all an effort to kill Sasha’s story. But what they don’t seem to know is that the editor doesn’t even have the story. I don’t want to tell her kidnappers that we don’t even have the story because then any leverage we have is gone. Baumann says Sasha never filed it. It’s probably somewhere on her laptop, which is missing.” I stood and looked around the office. “Darling, did she ever mention places she worked, maybe a coffee shop where she took her laptop to write or something like that?”

  Darling scrunched up her face thinking. “She sometimes brought her laptop here if she was writing on deadline,” Darling pointed to a small desk. “And one time she brought it here to help me with some computer stuff. I’d forgotten to save and then spilled some water on my computer. Lost the whole darn file.”

  “That’s the worst.”

  “Yes, but my grandbaby is so smart. She showed me how to use her Dropbox to make sure everything I did was saved.”

  I froze. Sasha used Dropbox. I tried not to get too excited.

  “Do you guys share a Dropbox account?”

  “Yes,” Darling said. “Why?” And then she leaped to her feet as she realized. “Oh, Lordy! It might have her story!”

  Within seconds, Darling had logged in to her computer and then the Dropbox account.

  The fourth file down was Sasha’s. It was labeled “Sunday Story.”

  That was it.

  I closed my eyes and said a little prayer to a God I wasn’t even sure I believed in. Then we clicked on the file, opened it, and read, sitting side-by-side. Darling read out loud in a low murmur.

  At the end, we both sat back stunned.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus. Sasha got herself mixed up in some evil, dark shit.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.” ― Angela Y. Davis

  THIS QUOTE WAS AT THE top of Sasha’s story. According to her sources, the mayor was raking in stupendous campaign contributions from shell companies run by King, whose full name was Kraig Kristopher King, Jr.

  It all made sense. Sasha was supposed to meet King that night. KKK.

  He owned dozens of companies under two business names: Kraig King Industries and Kraig King Jr. All the shell companies I had seen in the mayor’s campaign contributions all had either KKI or KKJ in them.

  In return for the financial payoff, King had promised to “help” the mayor “clean up” the Tenderloin, as the mayor promised in his campaign platform. Sasha had an off-the-record source confirming this. In other words, King’s men were murdering the downtrodden people of color in the Tenderloin.

  While Sasha’s story stated there was no proof that the mayor about the methods used to clean up “aka ethnic cleansing,” she had other people saying there was no way the mayor hadn’t known. I agreed.

  King had targeted the down-and-out people in the Tenderloin. The homeless. The poor. But only if they were people of color. It was so evil it didn’t seem real. But I knew it was.

  A warrior’s rage must always be directed toward fighting for that which is right and just and not as a reaction to a personal battle.

  My blood was boiling.

  These fuckers were targeting the weakest and most vulnerable people in our city. Many of the homeless people I knew ended up on the streets because something stood in the way of their access to resources for addiction and mental illness. Sure, there were a few who made choices that led them there and were the bad eggs, but they were the minority on the streets.

  Darling was holding her heart when we finished reading the story.

  I turned toward her computer again. “Do you mind?”

  She just nodded.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll just be a few minutes. I’m going to send out a few emails about what we found.”

  After I was done, I told Darling I had to run, but would be back in touch soon.

  “You bring back my grandbaby.” She was furious. Her patience was spent. I didn’t blame her. Time was running out.

  Outside the salon, I called James. The street sounds, the trains, the cars, the people, made it hard to hear, but I welcomed the distraction. It would make my story believable.

  “We found her. Thanks for all your help. I’m so sorry to bother you. It was all a big misunderstanding. I’m about to step into the BART station, so I might lose you. You know how college kids are. She was off with a boy.

  I cringed at my lie and for making Sasha seem so flaky. But it was necessary.

  After rambling, I waited. It was silent.

  “James?”

  “I don’t believe you.” He didn’t sound angry, but his voice was firm.

  “That’s crazy. You have to believe me.” I shot a frantic look around. I could grab that homeless woman and pay her to talk. “Want me to put her on the phone?” It would be a huge gamble. The homeless woman probably sounded like she was one hundred years old and might even go off script. I held my breath.

  “I’ve got a better idea.” He sounded so smug. I closed my eyes.

  “Why don’t you send me a picture, a selfie of you guys together. Maybe even do a Facetime with me ...”

  I cut him off. “James? The BART train is coming. I’m having a hard time hearing you. James?” I rubbed my sweater across the phone. “Are you there? If you can hear me, here’s the plan: I’ll meet you at my apartment at eight. If you can hear me still, plan on being there—we’re having a celebratory dinner and you can meet her yourself.”

  Without waiting for an answer, I clicked off. I stared at the fog rolling into the Forgotten Island in the distance. I was going to need ever
y second to find Sasha. If James believed me—in other words if I was really, really lucky—I’d just bought myself an extra two hours.

  But I’d never been lucky.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  EVEN THOUGH SOMEWHERE in San Francisco the sun had risen, the Tenderloin remained dark and gray, saturated in a thick, low-lying fog that obscured any structure more than a block away.

  I pulled up the collar of my leather jacket and suddenly my lack of sleep from the night before hit me. My head swam and I felt dizzy with fatigue. I stumbled a little over a crack in the sidewalk and caught myself. A woman with a briefcase gave me an odd look. Finally, I stepped into the Forgotten Island neighborhood. The building loomed before me like an ominous specter. The misty fog drifted before me. Every few seconds, an eerie breeze would part the fog, momentarily revealing the building.

  I was grateful for the Forgotten Island’s permanent layer of fog. It would provide cover. I eyed the fence, walking along it and looking up. The corner was my spot. There was a thick metal pole there. In addition, the fence dropped down a little there before it disappeared into the wall of the building. I shrugged off my jacket and started to climb.

  When I neared the top where the coiled barbed wire fence bent toward me, I wrapped my arm in my thick leather jacket and tried to swat at it. It bent a little but sprung back. Grabbing my multi-purpose tool with one hand out of my jacket pocket, I unfolded the needle nose plier attachment, which was supposed to work as a wire cutter. I pressed as hard as I could and basically put a little crimp in the barbed wire. Then I took out my serrated knife and hacked at it. It merely scratched the wire. That’s when I realized I wasn’t dealing with your ordinary run of the mill barbed wire. Time for Plan B.

  Unwrapping my arm, I shook out my jacket, and, holding on with one hand, swung it up and over the barbed wire. It stuck. Perfect.