Chain of Custody

by Carol Ericson

  Nash took Emily’s hand and led her back to the police presence. “Sorry I couldn’t rescue you sooner.”

  “Actually, that was just what I needed.” She patted her stomach. “That tea had a calming effect. Why are we going back to Brett’s trailer?” Emily scuffed her feet in the dirt.

  “We’re not. Officer Soltis is giving us a ride back to my truck in his squad car.”

  “Did they find anything? Any clues?”

  “None that they shared with me.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it? They’re not going to share anything with us.”

  “Shh.” Nash squeezed her hand as Officer Soltis trudged toward them.

  She and Nash scooted into the back seat of the squad car while Soltis got behind the wheel. “Sorry you both have to ride in back. It’s policy.”

  “Understood, Officer.” Nash rapped a knuckle on the wire screen separating back from front. “Thanks for the ride.”

  A few minutes later, Officer Soltis dropped them off at Nash’s truck, and Nash swung his pack into the back seat. Before taking the wheel, he pulled two phones from his pocket, dropped one on the console and powered up the other.

  Emily wrinkled her nose and picked up the other phone. “What’s this?”

  “That—” Nash turned the ignition “—is Brett’s phone that I took from his pocket before the police got there.”

  Her jaw dropped as she clapped the phone to her chest. “Is that what you were doing in there all that time?”

  “I figured once Detective Espinoza arrived on the scene, he’d make everything off-limits to us. So, I took a few liberties.” He lifted his shoulders. “We can always give it back and say we took it in the shock and confusion.”

  “You did that for me, didn’t you?” She tapped the phone to wake it up. “I know you never would’ve taken those...liberties if I hadn’t harassed you about leaving Wyatt with DCS.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  “The battery will be dead in seconds.” She picked up a charger plugged into a port in the truck and held it up to her face, squinting at it in the dark cab. “This’ll work.”

  Once she’d plugged in Brett’s phone, she folded her hands in her lap, around Wyatt’s pacifier. “I’m so scared for Wyatt. Why is that baby so important? Whoever took him can’t possibly believe Wyatt is Brett’s son, right? Brett is now dead. If those two thugs who were looking for Brett found him and killed him, what interest could they have in Wyatt? They presumably got what they wanted.”

  “Let’s look at the other possibility. Wyatt is Lanier’s son and Brett was telling the truth—Jaycee and then Brett were looking to blackmail Lanier with this knowledge.”

  “I can’t believe I ever trusted that man...took money from him.” She leaned her head against the window and bumped it against the glass once. “But if that’s the case, Lanier’s in the clear with both Jaycee and Brett dead. Why would he need Wyatt? Nobody else is going to blackmail him. Nobody else needs to know Wyatt is his son.”

  “I don’t know what the guy is thinking.” Nash poked at the phone charging in the cup holder. “Maybe he told Brett. I think his phone is sufficiently juiced.”

  Emily pinched the phone between her fingers and tapped it. “We lucked out. He doesn’t have a password.”

  “Check his texts first.”

  Emily touched her fingertip to the message icon and scanned the sparse numbers. “This must be a burner phone, like Jaycee’s was. None of these messages have names associated with them, just numbers, and he has no contacts stored.”

  “Probably why he didn’t bother with a password. Can you figure out who he’s texting?”

  “He doesn’t have many messages and not a lot of history. Either it’s a new phone or he’s been deleting them.” She swiped at a few of the messages. “These texts are pretty cryptic—nothing like ‘Let’s blackmail Lanier’ or ‘I’ll meet you at the border.’”

  “Damn. Thought I’d hit the jackpot with that phone.”

  “It was a good idea.” She tapped the photos, but apparently Brett hadn’t been interested in taking any pictures of his son. She scanned a few of the standard apps on the phone, her gaze tripping across an unfamiliar icon with footsteps on a blue background.

  She opened the app, which launched a map with a red dot positioned on it. With her fingertips buzzing and her heart racing, she enlarged the map on the phone.

  She squealed and twisted in her seat, shoving the phone in Nash’s face.

  He jerked the steering wheel. “Whoa! I’m driving here.”

  “You did hit the jackpot, Nash. I know exactly where Wyatt is.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nash gave Emily a quick glance from the corner of his eye. She’d taken Luna’s hippie-dippie, new age pronouncements a little too seriously. “What, you’re communing with Wyatt now and he’s sending you his location through the airwaves?”

  She poked him in the arm with the phone...hard. “Look at my face. Would I be this excited without good, logical reason?”

  He peeled his gaze from the dark road ahead and shifted it to her face for a peek at her glowing eyes and smile that practically reached from ear to ear. “You’re serious. What did you find on that phone? A clue?”

  “Better than a clue. Remember how Brett tracked us to Tombstone?”

  “Jaycee had put a GPS tracker on Wyatt’s car seat.” His fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “But we removed it and Wyatt’s not even in the same car seat.”

  She tapped her head. “You’re a little slow tonight, Dillon. I’ll put it down to the late hour and the desert driving. Brett obviously thought that was a good idea because he put another tracker on the car seat from DCS.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “He has an app on his phone. It’s live and it’s tracking something heading up north to Phoenix.”

  “Something.” His heart slowed its thudding. “How do you know it’s Wyatt’s car seat or even Wyatt?”

  She twisted her mouth and studied the phone’s display. “What else would he be tracking? He used it to find us in Tombstone, and it must’ve given him the idea to do it again in case someone grabbed Wyatt—he just didn’t figure he’d be too dead to make use of it.”

  “Okay, that makes sense. If the GPS is attached to the car seat, we can lose Wyatt as soon as whoever has him switches car seats.” He wagged his finger at the phone. “Can you tell where he is in Phoenix?”

  “You mean, can I tell if he’s at Lanier’s home or office?”

  “Exactly.”

  “He’s not at Lanier’s office, at least not the one I went to. I’d have to look up his home address to see if he’s there, but if he knows the Pima County Sheriffs are looking to talk to him, I doubt he’s going to have Wyatt at his home.”

  “Espinoza said Lanier was out of the country. I wonder if that’s even true. He could’ve had his office lie for him, or he lied to his office.”

  “But why, why, why?” Emily pounded a fist on her knee with every why. “He could let it all go right now. I’m certainly not going to suggest DCS do a paternity test on Lanier. I don’t care whether or not he’s Wyatt’s father, and I’m certainly not interested in blackmailing him.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “What do you mean?” She tucked her hands between her knees. “You think he sees me as a blackmail threat? He wouldn’t have hired me in the first place if he thought that.”

  “When he hired you, it was under false pretenses. The way he’s acted the past few days by not contacting you, he can’t keep up the ruse as the concerned father anymore. He realizes by now you’re not buying his original motive.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. I don’t know what he wants—and that worries me.” She ran her finger along the edge of the phone in her lap. “But now we know
where he has Wyatt.”

  “We need to tell the police, Emily. We have to give them this information so that they can formally move in on Lanier.”

  She grabbed the phone, her lifeline to Wyatt, and hugged it to her chest. “We know this GPS tracking app on Brett’s phone is significant, but they don’t know that. Do you think the police can get a warrant to search any of Lanier’s properties in Phoenix based on a red dot on a phone?”

  Nash rubbed his jaw. He’d never considered himself a blind rule follower—until he collided with Emily and her “anything goes” approach to policing. No wonder she got fired from the force. She hadn’t even told him the full story of how she tried to nab the accomplice of her father’s killer, but he could guess how things went down.

  “Look, you have a point, but if things don’t go the way we plan them to, we could really screw things up for the police if we go in willy-nilly.”

  “Me, you—” she pointed to herself and then leveled a finger at him “—we don’t do things willy-nilly. We’re a good team, Nash.”

  He reached over and ran a hand down the black, stretchy material of the leggings covering her thighs. “I know you want to rush in with guns blazing to save Wyatt, but we could be putting him in more danger.”

  She pressed the phone against her cheek. “Does this mean we’re not driving up to Phoenix right now and zeroing in on this red dot?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that. The closer we are to Wyatt, the better, but we have a few things to do first and it doesn’t mean we can’t get the police started on what they need to do.”

  “We have to take care of Denali for one thing.”

  “Kyle and Meg will take him again, but I do want to swing by my house and grab a bag and a few other things.”

  Emily practically bounced in her seat. “And then it’s on to Phoenix...and Wyatt.”

  “I don’t want you to get your hopes too high, Emily. That red dot—” he pointed at the phone clutched in her hand “—could just be the car seat, probably is the car seat. It doesn’t mean Lanier, or whoever has Wyatt, is going to keep him in that car seat.”

  The light died from her eyes, and her fingers curled even tighter around the phone so that the veins popped out in her wrist. “I know that. I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “I know, sweets, and I don’t want to be the voice of doom and gloom, but I don’t want to watch you crash.” He thumped his fist against his chest. “That’ll rip my heart out.”

  She covered his clenched knuckles with her hand. “I know, but I have to hold on to something. When my dad was killed, the one thing that kept me going was the belief that I’d track down the guy who could’ve stopped it. That thought gave me hope, gave me a reason to carry on. I need that now.”

  The knife that had been embedded in his gut ever since Jaycee’s murder twisted a little more. Emily needed Wyatt to feel whole. He couldn’t do that for her. If they failed to bring him home safely, what then? She’d forever associate him with that failure.

  He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the soft skin on the back of it.

  “Then I guess we’d better find that baby and bring him home.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes for the rest of the trip back to his place, her tight grip on that phone the only thing that indicated she wasn’t sleeping.

  The glow of Paradiso arose from the desert floor like an oasis, and Nash adjusted his speed as his truck approached the turnoff.

  When he rolled up to a stop sign and put on the brakes, Emily opened her eyes. “Pack, take care of Denali and get moving, right?”

  “That’s about the order of things. I don’t think we should stay at your place in Phoenix, do you? Lanier may be watching your apartment.”

  “Maybe, but as far as he knows, I’m off the job and I don’t have a clue about him.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t bank on that. If he’d contacted you in a normal manner, he could get away with that level of cluelessness, but he must know that you think his response was odd.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not going to play it like that with him ever.”

  “Still, it may be a good idea to stay in a hotel in Phoenix.”

  “I agree.”

  He pulled into his driveway, beating sunrise by at least an hour.

  “I hope Denali isn’t going crazy.”

  “Uh-oh, looks like he got out front.” Emily powered down her window and called out, “Hey, boy. It’s all right. We’re back. Don’t run off.”

  The headlights of the truck picked out the dog as he loped across the front of the house, his tongue lolling from his mouth, his mismatched eyes luminescent in the glare.

  “How the hell did he make it to the front of the house?” A tickle ran across Nash’s flesh as he glanced at the cameras on his house. He hadn’t checked his security footage since their trip to the border. He made a grab for the back of Emily’s T-shirt. “Hold on, Emily.”

  His words came too late. She slipped from his grasp and opened the door of the truck, hopping out onto the driveway, her sneakers crunching the gravel.

  Nash clawed at his phone and his gun on the console and burst from the truck. Denali staggered toward him, whimpered and collapsed at his feet.

  “Emily!” His gun now cocked and ready, Nash vaulted over the dog and charged toward the back of the truck.

  A figure moved out of the darkness and a low growl sounded close to his ear. “Drop it, or she dies now.”

  Two other shapes stepped into the lights from the back of the truck, and a cold fear gripped Nash as he made out a man, one arm wrapped around Emily and a gun to her head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Emily wriggled in the man’s grasp, but the cold metal of the gun pressed against her temple stopped her in her tracks...along with the look of rage stamped on Nash’s face.

  “I’m all right. I’m all right, Nash. Just do as he says.”

  The man who had accosted her at the motel sneered at Nash. “And I say drop your piece and head inside for some civil conversation.”

  Nash’s eyes flashed once before he dangled his gun from his fingers and let it fall to the ground.

  The man scooped it up immediately and waved it at Nash. “Everyone inside.”

  “The dog?” Nash folded his arms and widened his stance.

  Emily’s heart jumped. What had they done with Denali? He’d been out here running around and then disappeared on the other side of the truck.

  “We just sedated him with a tranquilizer. He’s not dead.” The man nodded to her captor. “Let’s move, Danny.”

  While her guy, Danny, kept the gun on her at the bottom of the steps, Nash unlocked his front door. The man who now had Nash’s weapon prodded him in the back with it, and they both walked inside the house.

  She knew and Nash knew, one aggressive move on Nash’s part would result in a bullet in her head.

  Danny pushed her toward the porch, and she stumbled, bracing her hand on the top step. She could’ve easily swung around on this goon and disarmed him, but she had no clue what kind of position Nash was in at this point. She didn’t want to get him killed.

  Grabbing her T-shirt, he pulled her up and shoved her again.

  She ground her teeth together. “I can walk myself. Stop pushing me.”

  “Danny, basta. That’s enough.”

  When Emily walked into the house, her gaze flew to Nash, sitting at the kitchen table, his own gun trained on him, his jaw set in a hard line.

  “My name is Gustavo.” His mild tone made it sound like he were visiting for lunch instead of holding them at gunpoint. With his other hand, he pointed to the chair next to Nash’s. “Sit down. We just want answers. Nobody needs to get hurt.”

  “Yeah, like Jaycee? Like Brett?” Emily plopped down in the kitchen chair. “What do you want now? Both of them are dead. Weren’t you
after Brett all along? Well, you got him.”

  “We didn’t want that skinny junkie dead...or we didn’t care one way or the other.” Gustavo narrowed his dark eyes. “He took drugs and money from us, hijacked one of our mules just coming across the border.”

  Nash ground out between his teeth, “And you were willing to use a baby to get him to turn over your property.”

  “We use what’s at our disposal, Agent Dillon, just like you do.”

  Nash snorted. “So, what? You killed the poor bastard when you found out he didn’t have your product? What did you do with the baby?”

  Emily held her breath and curled her feet around the legs of the chair. Of course she and Nash wouldn’t let on that they had an app to track Wyatt. These two would never tell them where they’d sent Wyatt.

  The man’s bushy eyebrows, incongruous paired with his shaved head, slammed over his nose. “The baby is missing?”

  Emily said, “Nice try. You killed Brett and took the baby. We know. We were there in that trailer to see your handiwork.”

  He stroked his chin. “We didn’t kill Fillmore, and we didn’t take the brat. We figured someone killed him for our stash of drugs, and we thought you could tell us who.”

  Nash hunched forward, his hands on his knees. “You’re telling me you didn’t kill Brett Fillmore and take that baby.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you, amigo. We didn’t kill the girl, either.”

  “You would say that.” Emily crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out her legs, crossing them at the ankles. “You’re talking to a Border Patrol agent—not a good idea to confess to any crimes.”

  Gustavo lifted his shoulders. “Think what you want. The junkie killed his girl. Maybe he thought she was gonna rat him out. He killed that social worker, too, and took the baby, and then someone killed him, took the baby and our property.”

  Danny, still pointing a gun at her, cracked a gap-toothed smile and spoke for the first time. “We want our stash and you want that baby. Looks like we’re on the same side.”