Blood Trails (The Heir Hunter Book 1)

by Diane Capri

  Flint nodded and pushed his chair into place at the table. “Why do you think Steve Tuttle might know something about this missing woman?”

  “Mildred’s is what passes for a town around here, Michael. Folks hang out there. Talk. Make friends. And Mildred was better than a local newspaper. Knew everything about everyone,” she flashed him a pointed look, “and didn’t mind sharing.”

  “Sounds like it’s too bad I can’t talk to Mildred.”

  “Steve isn’t as friendly or as well liked as his mother. But he might be willing to help. Most folks will help take care of people around here. Have to. Place is too hard to live isolated from what little company exists.”

  The helo was flying directly over the house, hovering, the pilot seeking the best place to land. The house’s metal roof seemed to dance with the vibrations. The noise was deafening.

  “One other thing. If she wasn’t one of your kids, do you think this girl could have been living with a local cult?”

  “Maybe. I’ve chased ragtag cults off my property more than once. They’re unsanitary, for one thing. Bad behavior. Thieves and such. Lot of drugs involved. I kept them away from my kids as best I could.” Bette cocked her head and tapped her index finger against her cheek to help her think back. “Your girl could have been living with one of them, I suppose. Hard to say. It’s not like they kept a list of members or anything, I’ll bet. Lord knows, there’s been too many young people gone missing because they got involved with the wrong crowd.”

  “Who would know about cults living in the area back in 1989? Besides Mildred, I mean, since I can’t figure out how to communicate with the spirits.” Flint smiled and Bette rewarded him with another big laugh.

  She seemed to think about the problem at bit more. “Our local sheriff was pretty short-staffed back then. Current one still is. We didn’t have a lot of crime around here, other than the petty stuff, which can be pretty annoying. But he’d have been aware of the cults or anybody else just hanging around, causing trouble. You could have asked him about it, but he died a few years ago, too. Throat cancer got him.”

  Flint nodded. “I see.”

  And then she put her hand on his arm and looked directly into his eyes. “Michael Flint. You listen to me. Your mother was not a drug user. And she wasn’t involved with one of those crazy cults either. Her situation was entirely different.”

  His head snapped back as if she’d slapped him. What the hell was she talking about?

  “You’ve come back to ask about your mom, haven’t you, Michael?” Bette smiled across her dear, sun-wrinkled face, which looked like nothing so much as a dried apple. “I hoped you would.”

  Flint nodded. He crossed his legs and folded his hands on his knee. “Tell me what you know about her, then.”

  “Not much. Back then, closed adoptions were the rule. Women gave up their babies and never saw the children again.” She shrugged. “That’s the way it was.”

  “I understand.”

  “She brought you here when you were about two months old. She wanted me to adopt you and keep you here. But I couldn’t adopt you. The state wouldn’t have given me a baby back then. And you were too young for me to take care of at the school. I wasn’t set up for infants.” She paused and bowed her head for a second. Then she looked up again. “I told her you couldn’t stay here, but I’d find a good home for you. She made me promise I’d get you back when you were old enough. Assuming you weren’t adopted before then, of course.”

  “I understand,” he said again. All he planned to do was to hear the full story. Or as much as she knew of it. And then he’d put this all behind him. He had work to do.

  “She said she didn’t mean to get in the family way. Said she wasn’t married to the fellow. Said they couldn’t get married, but she didn’t say why. She was very upset about leaving you. Said she was a school-teacher, and she’d get fired if they found out she had a child.” Bette patted his hand and he covered her small, wrinkled claw with his palm. “By the time she left here, Michael, she was so upset. She cried and cried. She didn’t want to give you up. I know she didn’t. I just tried to make her feel better. I told her you’d be here for a few weeks while I found you a better home. I told her she could come back and get you any time.”

  “But she never did come back for me, did she?”

  Bette shook her head. “Don’t judge her too harshly, Michael. That’s the way things were back then. I took good care of you, like I promised. You turned out okay, didn’t you?”

  He placed his big hand over her small one on the table. “Yes, I did, Bette. I turned out just fine. Thanks to you.”

  Bette grinned from ear to ear. Her eyes were glassy. She cleared her throat. “Well.” She cleared her throat again and blinked her tears away. “Well, that’s all I know about her. She didn’t leave her name. I never saw her again.”

  “Did she tell you where she was teaching?”

  “I’ve talked to so many young girls over the years.” Bette cocked her head and closed her eyes. Thinking, maybe. When she opened her eyes to look at him again, she said, “West Texas, somewhere? I’m not sure. I might be confused about that, Michael. But that’s what I seem to remember.”

  “You don’t have any records or anything, I guess.”

  She shook her head and pressed her lips into a straight line. “We never had many records and the ones we had were shipped to Austin when we closed the school a couple of years ago. I’m sorry.”

  “Was her name Flint?”

  Bette laughed out loud. “Lord, no. I have no idea what her name was. She said your name was Michael and we kept it for you because you looked like such a little angel. And Flint because you were as stubborn and hard as they come, even back then. You’d fall down and bleed but you never uttered a sound. You were tougher than rocks.”

  “I still am, Bette.” He patted her hand again. “I’ve gotta go.”

  They rose and she hugged him again. “Good-bye, Michael.”

  “Until I see you again.” He gave her one last squeeze.

  The helo had landed. The noise from the front yard overwhelmed the conversation completely.

  He stood and walked around to her chair and took her into his arms. She cried on his shoulder a bit. “It’s okay, Bette. I promise.”

  He wasn’t sure whether she could hear him or not. But she raised her head and gave him a little kiss on the cheek. She talked into his ear. “Come back and see me soon, Michael. Maybe I’ll remember something else about your mother. I’ll try. You’re a man now. It’s normal that you’d want to know.”

  Normal for some men, maybe. But not for Flint. Nothing about his life had ever been normal. He lived in the moment. Always had. Always would. He liked it that way.

  As for his birth mother, experience had taught him that parents who leave their kids have good reasons for doing so. Flint believed he was better off than he would have been if his parents had made a different choice. He was better off not knowing what their reasons were. No need to know, no desire to know. Simple as that.

  Maybe he should find out what Bette wanted to tell him while she still could. But not today. He slipped his sunglasses into place and strode through the door into the dust storm out front.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A Harrier Jump Jet would have better served his purposes, but the four-bladed, twin-engine Sikorsky S-92 was the fastest helo Flint had easy access to without calling attention to his plans. With a competent pilot, the Sikorsky could cover the distance from Bette Maxwell’s Lazy M to Wolf Bend, Texas, in under two hours. The downside was deafening noise and teeth-rattling vibration levels.

  Drake waved Flint over to the Lincoln. The Sikorsky’s rotor wash and big engine volume made conversation difficult. “I can’t pilot the helo today. I’m not even close to 100 percent. Can you handle the Sikorsky from here? Or do you want my pilot?”

  “Do I know him?” Flint peered into the helo, but all he could see was the guy’s back and the bubbles of his headse
t.

  Drake shook his head. “Name’s Phillips. Freelance. We’ve used him before. Just your kind of guy. Trained in the Navy. He was a SEAL. Knows his stuff. All business. No chitchat.”

  Flint flashed a thumbs-up. “You can pick me up when we get back to Houston.”

  “Will do.” Drake returned the thumbs-up.

  Flint touched Drake’s forearm to grab his attention. “That envelope the courier gave you while you were waiting for me outside Scarlett Investigations this morning is in the back of the SUV.” Drake nodded. “Hand deliver it to Scarlett yourself, okay? Do it first thing. Soon as you get back to Houston.”

  “Will do.” Drake stood aside and Flint joined the pilot in the helicopter.

  Phillips grinned, lifted his palms in question. Flint got seated and settled his headset and flashed a thumbs-up. Phillips’s electronic voice in his ear parodied a flight attendant. “Sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.”

  Flint grinned back. He checked his watch. Less than forty-five hours until Shaw’s option expired and Crane would win Juan Garcia Field by default.

  He felt his heart beat steadily in his chest, but was that due to Shaw’s ticking clock or the vibrating Sikorsky? Flint didn’t really care which of the tycoons won this contest. But he’d promised Scarlett he’d find Oakwood before the deadline, and if Shaw lost because Flint failed to deliver what he’d promised—he wouldn’t go there. He’d never failed and he’d never let Scarlett down, and he wouldn’t start now.

  Flint watched Bette Maxwell’s ranch shrink as the Sikorsky lifted into the air. He had to admit she’d aroused his curiosity with all that talk about his mother. Maybe he cared about his origin story more than he realized.

  He shook his head rapidly. No. Everybody came from somewhere. DNA might be destiny, but it was what you did with your life that mattered. His mother couldn’t be bothered with him? Well, he couldn’t be bothered with her, either.

  He’d been heir hunting, skip tracing, and looking for all manner of missing people and things long enough to know that sometimes the smartest thing was to apply the sleeping dogs doctrine and let it lie.

  The best method he knew of for finding someone like Laura Oakwood was to crawl inside her head for a while and feel the world the way she had. The moment he’d seen the maps and the photos of Wolf Bend, he’d understood why a young woman like her wanted to escape the place. One look at the cute teen in the cheerleader uniform explained why Rosalio Prieto wanted to go with her. The pregnancy would have chased them out of town ahead of her father’s shotgun, but her father had died a few months before and the timing suggested she wasn’t pregnant when they left, anyway.

  The rest of Scarlett’s file held more motivation for the runaways, if more was needed. Laura’s mother had died the year before graduation. Cancer, the long and painful kind.

  From the statements Scarlett’s investigator had gathered, friends and neighbors said Laura’s dad was already depressed and drinking himself to death long before his wife passed. So there was nothing anchoring her to Wolf Bend. No pull factors and lots of push factors.

  Laura began dating the cutest of the local bad boys, Rosalio Prieto. Dangerous looking and a year older. He owned an old car. A couple of days after Laura turned eighteen, on an ordinary Thursday afternoon, they left Wolf Bend in Prieto’s car. The vehicle was found a couple of days later, but Laura and Rosalio never came back.

  There had to be more to that story. She wasn’t pregnant yet, so why did they leave on that particular day? And where do two teenagers go without a car? Wolf Bend wasn’t the kind of place where anyone could live in the shadows. Back then the entire population was only 1,237 souls.

  Laura had no siblings. Rosalio came from a larger family. Two brothers and a sister, still living in Wolf Bend. Maybe someone would talk if Flint pushed the right buttons.

  Flint looked down from four thousand feet. The land below the Sikorsky became drier and more barren as they flew the southwest course.

  Almost two hours into the flight, Phillips turned on his headset and pointed off to the right side of the helo. “Ladies and gents, welcome to Wolf Bend, Texas.”

  Flint had already seen the satellite photos of the place. Wolf Bend was nothing but a few unremarkable buildings in the middle of nowhere, Southwest Texas. Total population was barely twelve hundred people today. The town was larger once, but the boom times had ended long before Laura Oakwood was born. She’d only have known the lean years.

  The downtown occupied land at the intersection of two blacktopped Texas roads. Three, maybe four, low block buildings occupied land on all four corners. A blinking traffic light anchored the center of town, such as it was.

  His research said most of the younger people who lived here went to work in the oil fields over in Mount Warren, in the next county. The ones with good jobs often packed up and moved closer to the fields.

  Residents remaining in Wolf Bend tended to fall into three camps: the down-and-outers with no choices, the ones who’d been there too long to leave because Wolf Bend had always been their home, or the ones who had nowhere else to go.

  If Laura Oakwood had stayed here, what kind of life would she have had? A pretty desperate one, Flint figured. Desolate didn’t begin to describe the place he saw from the helo’s viewpoint.

  Flint shook his head slowly. Better times were coming, when Baz Shaw or Felix Crane acquired all the rights for the Juan Garcia Field. Flint wondered how many people around here knew about their plans. When either Shaw or Crane had their way, Wolf Bend would become a boomtown again. No one looking at the place right now could argue against such progress, and it was hard to imagine anyone would want to.

  “Do you want to set down?” The pilot’s garbled voice came through the headset’s speakers.

  “Not yet.” Flint pointed north, toward the site.

  Much of the land north of Wolf Bend had once been Juan Garcia’s cattle ranch. Ranching was a bust after the water supply dried up. The Garcia ranch didn’t look much better than anything else surrounding Wolf Bend. It looked hot and dusty and barren.

  In the 1960s, oil was discovered on the property. Garcia wasn’t interested in selling, and domestic drilling wasn’t permitted then, anyway. The full extent of the field was never explored.

  Garcia finally died a few years ago and his family wanted to sell. The business climate had improved, too, making drilling a viable business opportunity. But Garcia didn’t own all the mineral rights for the huge field. That was when Shaw and Crane and maybe a few others started trying to acquire the rights, including all the surrounding parcels.

  The Sikorsky veered northwest. They flew over the Garcia property toward the abandoned Oakwood ranch, which was immediately across the property line. The Sikorsky covered the distance in about fifteen minutes—which meant maybe a thirty-minute drive for earthbound vehicles traveling a reasonable speed, should anyone try to follow.

  “I’d like to get a better look at the place,” Flint said into the microphone. “Circle around a couple of times, okay?”

  From the air, the abandoned Oakwood ranch looked even less appealing than in the photos Flint had seen. The fences were down and the dirt driveway was overgrown. The house was a one-story wood structure with a covered porch that once ran all the way around. One side of the porch roof had collapsed onto the decking a while back. On the east side, he saw three outbuildings, probably barns, all in worse shape than the house. Otherwise, nothing but dust and weeds in the yards, front and back, and all around.

  Flint pointed his thumb down and Phillips nodded. Without fanfare, he landed the Sikorsky near the house.

  Flint removed his headset and stepped out onto hard brown earth. The temperature must have been about ninety degrees. No breeze. No clouds. The kind of relentless unfiltered sunlight that burned exposed flesh in minutes.

  The noise from the helo drowned any sounds that might have indicated life on this scorched earth.

  Phillips didn’t move from his seat or shut
down the engine. He set the Sikorsky to idling, and the engine switched to its familiar grating whine while the blades slowed rotation. He’d wait inside the helo. They’d be leaving soon.

  Every place Flint had been since he left Shaw’s office this morning had been for one purpose: he wanted a feel for the places and the people who occupied them.

  Who was Laura Oakwood? Where did she come from? Where did she go? What drove her away? Where was she likely to go next? Asking questions like these and finding the answers was what set him apart from other hunters and drove his success where others failed.

  Any heir hunter could look at old records and documents and trace family history. Any decent private investigator could knock on doors and interview witnesses. The better detectives could apply logical thinking to lead them from lost to found.

  But when they hit a dead end, even the good hunters didn’t have a feel for the missing. Didn’t know what motivated them. Couldn’t suss where they’d gone or entice them to show themselves.

  Which was why the others failed and Flint succeeded. He’d find Laura Oakwood. No doubt about it. But first, he needed to entrench himself in who she’d been. Wolf Bend was the best place to start.

  The Sikorsky’s noise became slightly less deafening while idling. Not ideal but workable. Flint preferred his hearing unobstructed, but he didn’t plan to be on the ground long enough to justify the preflight startup procedures if they shut the beast down while he explored the vacant property.

  Flint shouted, “Fifteen minutes!” He flashed all five fingers three times.

  Phillips gave him a thumbs-up.

  Flint moved away from the Sikorsky toward the house. The rotor wash had stirred up the dust and rearranged it over the weeds. As he walked, the dust settled on his boots and wafted up to tickle his nostrils.

  From this vantage point, the house looked worse than it had from the air. The reports Flint read in the files said the property had been abandoned when Laura left home.