by David Grace
“You told the kids on the YouTube video that you were looking for your daughter. What happened to her?”
Half a dozen questions popped into Virgil’s head – What YouTube Video? Why do you want to know? What’s this all about? Who are you? but he pushed them all aside.
“Her mother took her and ran away.”
“Why?” the girl, Elaine, he reminded himself, asked in a tone that was half a question, half a challenge.
“She was afraid. She became obsessed with criminals and my job and her fears and . . . I don’t know, everything. She turned our house into a fortress, but it wasn’t enough. . . . Like I said, she was afraid and she snapped, and she just ran away.”
“You said that you looked for her, your daughter,” Elaine said after a little pause. “For how long?”
“Always. I’ve never stopped looking for her.”
“But you’re, you were a Marshal. Why couldn’t you find her?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil answered, his voice tinged with guilt. “I don’t know how Helen was able to hide her so well.” Virgil shook his head in defeat, then looked back at the girl. “Why are you asking all these questions?” he said, his voice turning harsh. “Do you know something about her, about Nicole?”
The girl took another half step back and it seemed to Virgil that she was about to turn and run. “Please!” he pleaded, “If you know something, anything, please tell me.”
Elaine paused, saw the desperation in his eyes, and in that instant she knew that everything her mother had told her about him had been a lie.
“Please,” Virgil pleaded. “Do you know something about Nicole? Anything? Do you know where she is?”
For a moment Elaine stood there, frozen, then she took a step closer and stared up at him.
“I can tell you two things,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Her name is now Elaine, and at this moment she’s standing right here in front of you.”
And then she was in his arms.
Chapter Sixty-One
NINE MONTHS LATER
Troy Warner pulled off the 40 just on the Texas side of the New Mexico line. The station was barely more than a few self-service pumps fronting a cold beer, junk-food emporium at the head of a sun-baked parking lot, but Warner was hungry and he needed to pee. He’d just turned off his engine when a black Monte Carlo slid past him and pulled into one of the slots at the side of the building where there weren’t any windows. Two guys got out and each took a long lazy look around.
Warner recognized them instantly, not their names, but who, or rather what, they were. He had seen hundreds of men like them in the joint – hard men, merciless and cold. Troy figured they couldn’t see him through his cab’s tinted glass, but he ducked down anyway, just to be sure. The driver’s gaze fastened on his Peterbilt 579 for a second or two then slid on by.
The driver said something and a moment later his passenger pulled a sawed-off twelve gauge from the back seat and covered it with a nylon jacket. They began to close the doors then something spooked the driver and both men jumped back inside. Troy twisted around and saw a glitter of chrome two-hundred yards down the frontage road. A few seconds later an Oldham County Sheriff’s cruiser approached, and the men in the Monte Carlo disappeared from view. The patrol car parked near the front door and two deputies in khaki uniforms got out and headed inside. Troy saw one of them wave to the clerk, a heavy-set woman with puffy blonde hair, and head for the soft-drink cooler.
Troy expected the two punks to take off as soon as the deputies were out of sight, but the Monte Carlo stayed right where it was. A few seconds later Troy saw the driver’s face peek above the edge of the glass then sink back down.
They’re going to wait until the deputies leave and then take the place down, Troy thought. They must be up against it, too broke or hungry or low on gas to move on to a safer score. Which means that they probably aren’t planning on leaving any witnesses alive.
He thought about that for almost a minute. Nothing was keeping him here. He could pee in a bottle and grab a burger someplace on down the road. It wasn’t his problem. Then he saw the driver’s eyes slip back up above the dash. He pressed the “9” on his phone and was surprised to see that he had two bars. He paused for half a second then pressed the “11.”
“Nine-eleven operator. What is your emergency?”
“I’ve got my big-rig parked here at Millie’s Shake Shack just off the forty about ten miles east of the New Mexico line. You’ve got two Oldham County sheriff’s deputies inside the store, but what they don’t know is that there are two guys with a sawed-off shotgun parked around the backside of the building just waiting for them to leave. I think maybe you should tell them that, and if I were them I’d be careful because I don’t think these guys are fooling around.”
There was a brief pause then the operator came back on the line.
“What’s your name, sir?”
Every fiber of Troy’s being told him to hang up, ditch the phone, and run like hell. He waited half a second then said, “My name’s Troy Warner. I’m out in the parking lot in a red Peterbilt pulling a silver trailer.”
There was another pause.
“Thank you sir. Please remain where you are.”
A couple of minutes later the deputies ran out the front door and circled around to the back of the building. A minute after that the sawed-off boomed like a cannon, and Troy scrunched down behind the firewall until the shooting stopped.
It was almost dinner time by the time he had given his statement and was back on the interstate, riding high above the asphalt, heading west. For a minute he tried to identify the strange emotion singing in his blood. It was a good feeling, happy. He thought about it some more and, finally, he knew what it was.
He was free.
* * *
LOS ANGELES TIMES NEWSPAPER
METRO SECTION – PAGE 11
Lawyer Victim In Carjacking
Criminal defense attorney Martin Fitch was seriously wounded Tuesday afternoon when an armed man accosted him on Cancelara Drive. Mr. Fitch’s vehicle, a 2015 Mercedes Benz S500, was pursued by Los Angeles police and county sheriff’s deputies. After a ten-minute high-speed chase the driver lost control and crashed near the intersection of Warren Avenue and Durning Road.
The driver, Aaron Watkins, was transported to the Los Angeles County Hospital with serious injuries and has been charged with felony assault, armed robbery, and attempted murder. Watkins is reported to have a long criminal history and had been released on bail two days before his arrest after being charged with the alleged armed robbery of a Glendale branch of the Bank of America.
Mr. Fitch is being treated at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and his condition is listed as critical. Hospital representatives have refused to comment on whether or not Mr. Fitch is expected to survive his wounds.
About The Author
David Grace has written seventeen novels. To see a list of his other books and to read free excerpts from them, visit his website, DavidGraceAuthor.Com, by CLICKING OR TAPPING HERE.
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Print editions of David Grace’s novels are available for $9.99 and ebook editions are available for $4.95 from Amazon.com.
Here is an excerpt from David Grace’s novel, Death Never Sleeps:
DEATH NEVER SLEEPS
CHAPTER ONE
Detective James Timothy “Big Jim” Donegan leaned forward and peered into the wood chipper. His flashlight penetrated about three feet down the chute and stopped at the point where the victim’s thighs disappeared into the blades.
“Never was built to do a load like this,” the Parks & Rec guy muttered, shaking his head at the misuse of his equipment. A piece of masking tape with the inked name, “Woody,” was pasted to his hard-hat’s brim. “See, this is a model 900. She’s only supposed to be used for brush and branches and stuff like that. This lady,” Woody waved idly at the torso protruding from the h
opper, “she would need at least a model 1200 to, you know . . . .” Woody shrugged and looked back at Big Jim.
“To completely grind her up?” Big Jim suggested. Woody gave him an uneasy nod.
“Yeah, well, you know, the right tool for the right job,” Woody muttered and stuck his head down into the chute. After a brief pause he frowned and turned back to Big Jim. “Boy, she’s stuck in there real good.”
“How hard is it going to be for us to get her out once the Coroner is finished?”
Woody tilted his head to one side then glanced over at his toolbox.
“I can try putting this guy in reverse. If that doesn’t work I’m gonna have to disconnect the belt.” Woody reached for the start button but Big Jim grabbed his wrist.
“The Coroner has to examine the body first. He’ll give you the go-ahead when he’s ready.”
Woody looked anxiously around. “Which one is him? I got a crew waiting on this guy.” Woody patted the chipper’s sheet metal side and elicited a dull thump.
“He’s on his way. Take a break and I’ll let you know when he gets here.”
Woody gave the protruding torso a final, nervous glance then wandered back to his truck.
Big Jim gazed past the milling uniforms and spectators stretched out behind the yellow tape. The sycamores at the edge of the park had begun to bud out with pale green shoots. The jacarandas were even farther along though it would be a couple of months before they gowned themselves with purple blossoms. A raven, scenting fresh meat, cawed at the cops from high in an old black oak.
Needing to find some distraction from the awful scene, Big Jim imagined flowers and flapping leaves and children at play, and smiled. Life was too short, he reminded himself, to abandon beauty, even on a day like this. Especially on a day like this.
“We’re going to need a crew to sift the remains.” Big Jim snapped back to the present and saw his partner pointing at the mound of chopped meat and bone in front of the chipper. “If the killer had any sense he sent her purse through the blades ahead of her.”
“What’s your take on this, Chris?” Big Jim asked.
Chris Hunter knew that the question was a test. Everything Big Jim did was intended to teach him something. Sometimes it was about being a cop. More often it was about life in general, a subject that Chris found perpetually confusing. Guns, forensics, computers, software, forms, reports, laws, rules — all of those things he could master without breaking a sweat. He was comfortable with rules and regulations. More than comfortable. The truth was that he required them for the world to make any sense to him. It was people who confused him. Why they did what they did was a mystery that Chris Hunter feared he would never solve.
He looked again at the body, the gray skin, the eyes so clouded that their color was almost gone.
“Prostitute,” Chris began, answering Big Jim’s question, “early to mid-twenties, former heroin addict, not speed, central or eastern European ancestry, possibly Romanian, maybe a little farther east. She’s been in the U.S. less than three years so I’d guess that she’s maybe twenty-two or so. Strangled to death before he put her into the machine.”
Big Jim cocked his head a little to one side and Chris realized that he had surprised his mentor.
“Run it down for me,” Big Jim ordered.
Chris couldn’t completely stop himself from giving Big Jim a brief smile.
“The marks on her throat and the petechial hemorrhaging say ‘strangulation’ loud and clear. A ligature of some kind. We’ll have to wait until the bruises fully develop to get a better idea of the size and type.
“The tracks on her arms say ‘smack’ but they’re three to six months old so it looks like she’d recently gotten herself clean. The teeth don’t show any signs of meth. The hair is auburn and her eyes were gray, so that pretty much rules out Hispanic. She’s got high cheekbones and facial dimensions that are typical of Slavic ancestry. She’s cut the tips out of her bra so her nipples show through her blouse so, again, hooker. When I looked in her mouth I saw Eastern-European dental work on one of the back molars. Most of the pimps around here keep their girls hooked so they’re easier to control but this one looks like she was in pretty decent shape so she hasn’t been in the trade for more than a year or two.”
“Why do you figure she was in her early twenties?”
“The eyes,” Chris said, glancing at the corpse. “The skin is still smooth and tight. The Life ages a woman real fast. By twenty-seven or eight they’re already developing crow’s feet and bags, which she doesn’t have.”
“What if she didn’t get into the business until she was in her mid-twenties and she’s been a working girl for only a couple of years?”
“No,” Chris said, shaking his head, “they won’t bring over anyone older than twenty or so. Fresh girls are the moneymakers. If you start with someone in their mid-twenties they’ve only got a year or two of good earning power left before the Life wears them out so much that they get sent down to second string. It’s like the NFL not wanting a quarterback over thirty-five.” Chris froze when he saw Big Jim’s frown. Had he said the wrong thing, again? Chris replayed it over in his head and tried to figure out where he had made his mistake. Did football teams hire quarterbacks who were over thirty-five? How old was Drew Breeze?
“Good job, Chris,” Big Jim said after a little pause and gave his partner an encouraging nod. Chris instantly smiled back, pleased that he had not let Big Jim down after all. “So, Chris, any idea who she worked for?”
“According to Vice, Johnny-Boy Watkins is running the girls from here down to just this side of The Beach.” Big Jim’s face clouded upon hearing Johnny-Boy’s name.
“She looks a little rich for Johnny-Boy and the word is that he gets most of his girls out of Thailand via the Philippines. I would figure Gregor Rostov for someone like her.”
“No, his girls mostly work out-call in Montclair, Ardenwood and High Oak. They usually don’t get this far south in The Valley.”
“She could have been grabbed up in High Oak and brought down here to be dumped,” Big Jim said, half-seriously, half to make Chris lay out the steps in his logic.
“She was strangled before he put her into the chipper and it rained two days ago. If he’d driven her over the lawn we would have seen tire tracks. That means he either carried her or she walked. If he was big enough to carry her then her weight added to his would have left impressions in the grass and there aren’t any, so she walked in and he killed her here.”
“He still could have grabbed her up in High Oak or maybe Hidden Valley and driven her down here, couldn’t he?”
Chris frowned, struggling to put his thoughts into words. “We’re a fifteen minute drive from High Oak. She’s been on the job for a couple of years and if she got into a John’s car up there and he tried to drive her all the way down here she would’ve been kicking and screaming most of the way.”
“Maybe she was.”
Chris shook his head. “Her nails weren’t broken and there’s no bruising on her wrists and no tape residue. She didn’t put up a fight and she wasn’t tied up. She met him here in the park. That means she was either freelancing or she was one of Johnny-Boy’s girls.” Chris looked at Big Jim expectantly.
“I can’t argue with that,” Big Jim said, giving Chris a little smile. “So, OK, what’s our next move?”
“We have the uniforms canvas the area, and after the Coroner finishes with the body we have a talk with Johnny-Boy Watkins.”
“Did you put some pictures of her on your phone?”
“First thing.”
“All right, we’ll interview Johnny-Boy after lunch. Otherwise he’ll piss me off so much it’ll ruin my appetite. . . . There’s the Coroner. Broken nails or no broken nails, make sure he bags her hands. I’ll tell Woody that we’re almost ready to get her out of that contraption.”
After one last glance at what used to be a young woman and now was only a drugged, brutalized, exploited and murdered corpse,
Big Jim ambled toward the Parks’ Department truck and tried to think happier thoughts.
CHAPTER TWO
The Department had switched from Crown Vics to Chevy Malibus and, as usual, Chris drove so that Big Jim could scan the sidewalks for gang-bangers, druggies, hookers, pimps, lookouts, dealers, parolees and other persons of interest, not so much to bust them as to keep up on who was doing what to whom.
“See that kid with the red hair?” Big Jim pointed to a beefy guy in his early twenties carrying a bag of groceries. Chris took his eyes off the traffic for a quick glance.
“Who’s he?”
“He used to boost cars for a bunch of crooks operating out of a warehouse near the Port. Now he’s the cook at Salciccio’s.”
“The bar on Western?”
“They serve food too. He’s studying to become a pastry chef. He makes one hell of an Alsatian apple pie.”
Chris didn’t know what to say. Big Jim was always coming up with stuff like that, oddball comments out of the blue. Chris knew that Big Jim was getting at something but he didn’t know what. It wouldn’t do him any good to ask. He knew that Big Jim wanted him to figure it out on his own. Half the time Chris felt as if he was a contestant in a game-show with Big Jim tallying the score.
“How do you know him?” Chris asked.
“His name’s Terry Connelly. I collared him sliding a Slim Jim into a 500S over in Ardenwood. I was visiting a lady friend and practically tripped over him on the way back to my car. He could’ve run but he didn’t. He just looked at my tin and held up his hands. He could’ve taken a swing at me with the Slim Jim and maybe done some damage. I sure as hell didn’t have any backup. As I was busting him I was thinking, ‘Hey, Jim, what are you getting yourself into here?’“