Blood Trails

by Diane Capri

  “Why not?” Flint glanced at his watch. Time to go. He dropped the robe onto the plush gray carpet and dressed while she talked.

  “Because Felix Crane holds the backup option and he’s already put the money in escrow. As soon as Shaw’s option expires, the prize is Crane’s. End of story. Everybody knows they hate each other.” She paused for a quick breath. “Crane’s a client, too, and he’s no teddy bear either.”

  Felix Crane was another name Flint recognized. A mean son of a bitch, by all accounts, just like Shaw. They were well matched in every respect. His background and his net worth were similar to Shaw’s, give or take an oil glut or shortage or two. Their rivalry was legendary. Biblical, even. Just like she said.

  “Standing between warring giants isn’t a healthy way to live, Scarlett. Those guys have the morals of a ravenous lion. Either one will eat you alive without even thinking about it.” He picked up his watch, slid his wallet into his jacket.

  “You got that right. I don’t know what started their blood feud, but I’ve been in the same room with those two and I can tell you, the experience is not pleasant.” She stopped to draw another quick breath. She’d been a competitive swimmer once. She could hold a lot of oxygen in those lungs. “If Shaw doesn’t come up with Oakwood’s signature on that consent form before the final bell, he loses. There’s no way he’ll allow that to happen. No way. He’ll do whatever it takes. Whatever. You understand?”

  “We’ll figure it out. Someone knows where she is. Nobody simply disappears. Not remotely possible.” Flint tossed the rest of his things into a bag and glanced around the suite to be sure he’d left nothing of value. “Send me everything you’ve got so far on the Oakwood woman. I’ll read it on the plane.”

  “Already done. I don’t want to talk about this stuff on an open line, but I sent my summaries in encrypted files to your secure server this morning so you’d have the info before Shaw called. Didn’t you read them? You finished that French woman’s painting job yesterday, didn’t you? What the hell have you been doing since then, anyway?”

  His jaw tensed. “Not much, thanks to you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, blowing off his complaint.

  Flint hated to owe anybody anything. Owing Shaw a favor was so far from ideal the distance might exceed a round-trip ride to Mars.

  “Send me everything you have on Crane, Shaw, and whatever you can dig up on this so-called blood feud, too. I’ll take a look.” He kept his voice even. “I’ve gotta catch a plane.” Five minutes later he was on his way to Heathrow. The French woman would have to wait.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Houston, Texas

  Sunday, 6:35 a.m.

  After more than ten hours of uneventful flight time, the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner landed in Houston. He’d read Scarlett’s materials until he had a clear understanding of the Oakwood case file. The situation was odd for an heir hunter like Scarlett. Most unlocated heirs weren’t actually missing at all. Maybe they’d moved without a forwarding address, or changed names, or skipped out on a bad debt, or even died in a different city from the one they’d lived in before. With a bit of time and diligent searching, those people could be located and Scarlett was nothing if not tenacious. She was good at the job.

  But the Oakwood woman’s situation was completely different. Oakwood had actually vanished, and Scarlett had developed a solid theory to explain her disappearance. If Scarlett’s theory was true, then she’d been right to bring him into the case. She’d never find Oakwood on her own before Tuesday’s deadline.

  He’d read through Scarlett’s notes twice, and then he slept in the first-class cabin bed for the rest of the flight. When the captain announced their initial descent into George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Flint used the toilet and shaved in the minuscule sink. He was the third passenger to deplane.

  Inside the terminal, ten feet from the security checkpoint, two well-dressed, bulky white men stood together, feet braced apart, hands clasped in front. Both wore sunglasses. One was bald and a bit taller than the other. Flint’s jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. Private security, no doubt. Had to be. These guys were too ugly to be anything else. Law enforcement and three-letter agencies were more diverse these days, too.

  Shaw must have sent the two escorts for insurance, worried that Flint wouldn’t show up. Which was more than insulting.

  He didn’t feel like being escorted anywhere at the moment. He’d promised to meet with Shaw, but he would do the meeting and everything else on his own terms. The sooner Shaw figured that out, the better.

  Flint glanced across the terminal. He timed his steps to merge into the crowd of passengers flowing past after disembarking from another gate.

  Fifty feet along the corridor, he looked back. Shaw’s men followed, as expected. Suspicion confirmed. They were here for him.

  Flint strode the long hallways toward the escalator to ground level, careful to stay inside the herd. He peeled off at his usual exit and hustled outside. Houston’s springlike air warmed his skin after London’s damp had chilled deep into his bones. He resisted the urge to stretch like a cat in the sunshine.

  He’d called a car service from the plane. The SUV he’d ordered waited at the curb along with Alonzo Drake, the best driver on the planet. Flint climbed into the black Lincoln Navigator and closed the rear passenger door behind him. He met Drake’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Let’s go. Now.”

  Drake replied, “You got it.”

  The limo pulled away seconds before Shaw’s security detail emerged from the building. Flint looked back to see the two exit the terminal. He observed the way they moved. They weren’t quick. The one with hair favored his right leg, the way an aging athlete does, as if old injuries remained painful.

  They stopped moving and stood together on the sidewalk. One had a cell phone to his ear, probably calling to report mission failure. Flint smiled.

  The victory was temporary. Shaw’s men would camp out at his house until he showed up, but that was okay. They’d chosen to collect him at the crowded airport because it served their purposes, not his. He would handle them in his own neighborhood, where he’d be free of surveillance and witnesses.

  Flint settled into the backseat for the thirty-minute drive to Houston’s downtown historic district. The morning sky promised a warm day and plenty of sunshine.

  Drake lowered the privacy partition between the seats and met Flint’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “Since you don’t have the painting, I’m guessing things didn’t go so well in London.”

  Flint shrugged. “I didn’t expect to bring it back with me. But you’re right. I didn’t get what I went after.”

  Drake grinned. “How’s the amazing Ginger?”

  “I didn’t see her.” Flint’s relationship with Ginger was casual. They liked each other well enough, but he wasn’t the love of her life. Which was fine with him.

  “Want me to drop you at Market Square Park?” Drake’s phone was ringing.

  “Perfect.” He’d walk home, as was his habit. He enjoyed the exercise.

  Drake raised the soundproof partition and answered his phone. The conversation lasted for the rest of the drive. He pulled the limo over to the curb in the middle of the block. The park was crowded with people enjoying the perfect weather.

  Flint waited for a stream of cyclists to pass before he grabbed his bag and stepped out. He was on the move before the Navigator rolled away behind him.

  Flint traveled quickly through the early morning crowd, dodging vehicles and pedestrians. When he stopped for a traffic light before crossing the street, he caught a whiff of cigar smoke ahead of the middle-aged man who approached from his left and stood beside him. He was dressed casually, but his blazer and polo shirt were both silk, and his khakis were equally expensive.

  “You’re Michael Flint, aren’t you?” His voice was gravelly, like he’d spent years drinking bourbon along with smoking cigars like the one he held between his fingers. He extended his right hand. “I’m
Felix Crane.”

  They shook hands. Crane’s grip was firm, his handshake strong, businesslike. The traffic light changed. Flint stepped off the curb and Crane walked with him.

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Crane spoke around the short cigar clamped between his teeth.

  Flint kept moving. “I’m afraid I’ve got another appointment.”

  “With Baz Shaw.” Crane nodded. “I was hoping to talk with you first.”

  “About what?” Flint glanced toward Crane, who easily kept up with Flint’s rapid pace. The guy was in good shape for a man of his age and obviously bad lifestyle habits.

  “Laura Oakwood. Baz wants you to find her. That would be a mistake.”

  Flint slowed. He didn’t want Crane to follow him home and the only alternative was to handle him now. “Why?”

  “Stealing from desperate women is not what you’re about. Or so people say.” Crane puffed the cigar and blew a perfect smoke ring. “Hear me out. At the very least, you’ll know more about Shaw’s motives than you do now.”

  Flint stopped and faced him. “And what is it that you want from me, Mr. Crane?”

  Crane’s mouth lifted and his eyes crinkled at the corners, but the effect was more sneer than smile, as if he’d won the first round of their match. Which he had.

  He clapped Flint’s bicep with an open palm. “Let’s get that coffee. I won’t keep you long.”

  Crane probably would have preferred an Irish coffee or something stronger in a local bar, but Flint gestured toward an outdoor café half a block down the street. “We can grab a cup there.”

  The café was busy with the Sunday-morning breakfast crowd. They found a table near the back still cluttered with the last patron’s dishes. Yellow congealed eggs mixed unappetizingly with ketchup on the plates. A harried waitress picked up the mess. “What can I get you this morning?”

  “Black coffee,” Crane said.

  Flint held up two fingers. The waitress nodded and hurried away. He waited.

  “I’ve checked you out. Your background is as shadowed as your life, isn’t it? Orphaned as an infant. Parents unknown. No siblings. Raised yourself. Marines. Then Secret Service or CIA or deep-cover FBI for a while, some say. Privately self-employed now.” Crane rested his forearms on the table, the smoldering cigar still clinched between the stubby first and middle fingers of his left hand. His nails were well manicured. Maybe he’d been a wildcatter once, but those days were long behind him. “Word is, you’re the go-to guy when the situation calls for brains as well as brawn. You find people when everybody else has tried and failed and given up. You take a hefty fee for the job, too.”

  Flint did not reply, but he secretly acknowledged the results of Crane’s background check. Not completely true but close enough to his cover story to be unsettling. He made a mental note to bury those files even deeper.

  “Laura Oakwood is the kind of woman who should be simple to find. But she’s not,” Crane said, narrowing his eyes against the smoke’s updraft as he puffed again. “We figured she was dead. Turns out there’s no evidence of that, either.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Flint wondered how much Crane actually knew about Laura Oakwood, and how he’d acquired his information.

  Crane blew out a long stream of smoke. “Pretty clear that she doesn’t want to be found.”

  Flint ran through a quick review of Scarlett’s solid work. In early efforts to find Oakwood, she had begun with the standard checklist of searches for unlocated heirs. National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, tax rolls, property title searches, census, and other public records had all turned up nothing.

  The next level—private databases, social media, and skip-tracing methods—also came back empty. Oakwood had very little family history to check. Scarlett came up empty there, too.

  Scarlett’s team took to the field. They performed basic private investigation work—last known address, knocking on doors, talking to neighbors and merchants in Oakwood’s old neighborhood. No one had seen or heard from her in twenty-eight years. Or so they claimed.

  An heir hunter less skilled than Scarlett would have concluded that Oakwood was, indeed, dead. It seemed the only possible answer. Except that normal dead people eventually leave a paper trail. Laura Oakwood’s paper trail, such as it was, ended in 1989 when she was eighteen and living in Wolf Bend, Texas.

  At that point in her investigation, Scarlett had tried another approach. She’d turned farther back in Oakwood’s personal history, to the last few months before Oakwood left home. Which eventually led Scarlett to believe that Laura had participated in a convenience store robbery where two people were murdered, and then she’d vanished.

  That was when Scarlett had hit the wall and turned to Flint as a last resort. Scarlett hated to admit defeat—particularly to Flint.

  “Ms. Oakwood’s apparent desire for privacy doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Shaw. He thinks she’d like to know about her inheritance because everyone would want to know they were entitled to fifty million dollars.” Flint paused and leveled his gaze at Crane. “While there might be people on the planet who feel otherwise, I suspect Mr. Shaw is right, don’t you?”

  Crane’s bushy gray eyebrows knitted together over the bridge of his substantial nose. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t know Baz Shaw, do you?”

  Flint cocked his head. “I don’t know you either.”

  “Fair enough.” Crane paused while the waitress poured coffee into two thick white mugs from a black plastic carafe. She left the pot on the table and scurried off. “Baz and I grew up together in West Texas. Known him all my life. My daddy knew his daddy and our granddaddies knew each other before that. Point is, I know everything there is to know about Baz Shaw. You don’t.”

  “Point taken. He’d likely say the same about you.” Flint sat back from the table, legs crossed, hands loosely clasped in his lap. “How is that relevant?”

  “He wants to cheat Oakwood out of her rights in the Juan Garcia Field. Don’t seem right to me.” Crane nodded once, firmly, as if he was satisfied with his answer. “Whatever Baz offered to pay you, I’ll double your fee not to do the job.”

  “Pay me to do nothing?” Flint raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like government work, doesn’t it?”

  Crane guffawed, which turned into a hack and then into a coughing fit. He swigged the coffee to calm himself. When he regained control of his breathing, he said, “Truth is, Baz and I are planning to bury the hatchet.”

  “That so?”

  “We’ve been fighting for so long, we don’t remember what started us off. We’ve agreed. This deal will be the end. Best man wins.” Crane picked up the coffee and swigged the last of it before refilling his cup. “We’re all in. Whoever gets Juan Garcia Field gets everything.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Garcia’s too big. Too much potential. Added to current holdings, the man who gets Garcia will own everything else sooner or later and bury the other man anyway.” He shrugged and took another draw on the cigar. “Inevitable.”

  “So you’re just going to stop fighting each other? After all these years? Glasnost? Total transparency? End of the war? Winner takes the spoils?” Flint arched his eyebrows.

  “Yep. We’ll meet up and have a ceremonial handshake and that’ll be that.” Crane grinned and puffed. His eyes crinkled behind the smoke. “Last man standing. Winner take all. Nothing more to fight about. We’re too old.”

  Flint nodded as if he believed the story. It could have been true. But it probably wasn’t. Old warhorses like Shaw and Crane didn’t simply quit one day because they finally realized their war was destroying them both. Not in Flint’s experience. “Well, I appreciate the heads up, Mr. Crane.”

  “What I know, though, is that I can’t trust Baz Shaw to keep his word. If he wins, he’ll just keep fighting, trying to bury me. I win, I’ll have enough to walk away.” Crane’s steady gaze never wavered. He pointed the two fingers holding his stogie toward Flint. “You ca
n win either way. Take my offer, you get paid whether Baz finds Laura Oakwood or not. He can’t find Oakwood without you. Garcia Field will come to me. All you have to do is let his deadline expire.”

  “It’s an interesting proposition. But no. Thanks for the coffee.” Flint stood. He retrieved his bag from the floor. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Crane had asked Flint not to do the Oakwood job and he had refused. Which meant Crane had no alternative but to stop him from succeeding. Or at least he’d try.

  Flint didn’t look back, but his instinct said Crane wouldn’t follow. Chasing people down the streets of Houston wasn’t Crane’s style.

  Flint was now half an hour behind schedule. He picked up the pace and walked around pedestrian traffic toward his address.

  His residential neighborhood was popular. Sundays meant kids playing outside, dads washing cars, moms gardening. He waved to a few neighbors he recognized but didn’t stop to chat.

  As he rounded the corner of Baker Street, his earlier guess about the bulky white guys from the airport was confirmed. Shaw’s security detail was camped out in a dark brown sedan parked at the curb in front of his cozy bungalow.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Flint was due in Shaw’s office in less than an hour and he had things to do first. Although it would be faster, he couldn’t simply let these guys do their jobs and escort him to the meeting. Flint had said he’d meet with Shaw, and he would. He didn’t need watchdogs.

  Flint took the cases he wanted, when he wanted, and handled them as he chose. Sebastian Shaw might be one of Scarlett’s best clients, but he was nothing special to Flint. First chance he got, he would have that discussion with Scarlett. He’d do this job for her, as a favor or because she’d hound him until he consented. But after this, no more. The last thing he needed was to be in the middle of a war between Felix Crane and Sebastian Shaw, and it seemed there was no way to avoid the conflict on this case.

  He scanned the activity on his block. Too many people were outside enjoying the weather. Too many witnesses. He’d ask these guys nicely to go away. But if they refused, things could get ugly. He didn’t want to take them down on the front lawn. Nor did he want these jokers inside his home.