by Diane Capri
Flint walked the few steps to the sidewalk and rapped the knuckles of his left hand on the door of Room 15. A heavy curtain covered the window. The room’s air-handling unit below the window was rattling loudly. The door stayed closed.
He knocked again and reached with his right hand to grasp the handle of his Glock. He pulled the weapon out and held it ready by his side. No one opened the door.
He glanced left and right along the sidewalk in front of the rooms. He saw no one. The heavy curtains on the windows blocked all interior light, assuming anyone was stirring inside.
Had Manning lured him out here and then thought better of it? Or had someone—Crane or his men, or Shaw, or someone else—reached Manning first?
He raised his left fist and rapped harder on the door. He called out, loud enough to be heard over the rattling air handler, “Manning! Open up!”
The door to Room 16 opened. Flint turned swiftly toward the noise. A heavyset man wearing a tank-style undershirt and a pair of jeans stepped out. He was barefoot.
“Are you Flint? I’m Manning. Sorry I didn’t hear you over the noise of this contraption.” He kicked the rattling air handler with his bare foot. “They moved my room after we talked. Something wrong with the toilet in that one. I’ve got coffee. Come on in.”
Manning hadn’t shaved in several days. His eyes were bloodshot. Curly gray hair erupted from his skin and protruded everywhere that wasn’t covered by the dingy white undershirt.
The top of Manning’s head was bald. The rest of his gray hair was gathered into a pink rubber band. The ponytail hung halfway down his back.
Flint glanced around the inside. The room was a standard two-bed layout. It was large enough for two chairs, a small chest of drawers, a television, and a combination open closet and vanity with a single sink. The toilet and tub were in a separate room left of the vanity. A cheap plastic drip coffee maker waited on the laminate countertop beside the sink.
He followed Manning inside, but he didn’t release his grip on the Glock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Manning poured the coffee into two eight-ounce Styrofoam cups and handed one to Flint. He didn’t offer powdered cream or cheap sweetener, which made Flint like him a little bit.
“Thanks.” The coffee tasted bad. No surprise there.
“I’m too old to be doing this job. When I get back from San Diego next week, I might just hang up my keys.” Manning gestured to one of the chairs and sat down heavily in the other. He swallowed a gulp of the coffee. “I’ve got to be at the yard in an hour and on the road before seven. What do you want to know?”
“Everything you know about Laura Oakwood.” Flint had no clue what Manning might be able to offer. He was here because he’d run out of ideas.
“For starters, I don’t know where she is now.”
Great.
Manning tipped up his Styrofoam cup and drained the coffee from it. “But I can tell you where she told me she was going. Maybe that will help.”
“It’s a place to start.”
Manning nodded. “Canada. She said her dad’s family was there. Said her aunt might help with the baby.”
Flint felt no satisfaction in knowing his talk with the Wolf Bend principal might be paying off. The last thing he really wanted to do today was fly to the still-frozen north country. Flint was a Texan. He hated the cold. “Where in Canada?”
Manning shook his head. “See, at the time, I didn’t know about the robbery. I picked her up because she had a baby with her. The weather was miserable. Cold and rainy. And she was limping. People limp for all kinds of reasons. I didn’t know at the time that she’d been wounded somehow. I was running north as far as Denver so I offered her a ride. Like I’d done a hundred times before and hundreds of times after. Gets lonely out there on the road. Sometimes a hitchhiker is good company for a few miles.”
Flint nodded. He’d been a hitchhiker and he’d picked them up more than a few times, too. He understood the allure on both sides. “Did she say anything about where she was running from?”
“Yeah. She said she’d been living with that bunch of whack jobs out on Clovis Ranch. With her boyfriend. Said she was desperate to get away. Said they were vicious to her. Said her boyfriend had stopped a few of the others from raping her a couple of times, even when she was pregnant. How sick is that?”
“Did she tell you anything about the baby?”
“She said the baby was sick. That was why she needed to find her aunt. She needed help with the baby.”
Flint nodded slowly. “How is it that you remember all this so well? It was more than twenty-five years ago.”
“I dropped her off in Denver. I never heard from her again after that.” Manning looked down into the coffee sludge. He lifted the cup and tried to drain it a second time. “But a few weeks later, I was on another run and I stopped at Mildred’s Corner again. I usually stopped there whenever I drove that route. That’s when I found out about the robbery. And about her boyfriend and the woman, that customer, getting killed.”
Flint nodded again, mainly to keep him talking.
“At that point, I probably should have told the cops about picking her up. But they didn’t come around asking me. And I didn’t have any idea where she’d gone to.” Manning walked to the vanity and poured the rest of the coffee into his cup and started a new pot of the vile brew. “Runaways tell some big stories, and most of them aren’t true. So I didn’t know if she’d gone on to Canada or not. And that damn Clovis Ranch bunch. They were human trafficking back then. We just didn’t know to call it that. Few weeks after the robbery, local sheriff had already been out there and questioned everybody a few times. They’d identified the second gunman. Some guy the boyfriend knew. Guy turned up dead, I guess.”
Flint nodded again. He had questions, but he let Manning play out his story the way he’d rehearsed it first.
“She’d already been through a lot. Maybe I felt sorry for her.” He hung his head. “She was in big trouble already with that sick baby and her boyfriend dead, and nothing anybody did to her could bring those people back. And it was really Oscar’s fault that they died, anyway. And I was on the road.”
Manning shrugged his big, hairy shoulders. “I dunno. The whole thing was already over by the time I knew it had happened. I guess I just figured there wasn’t anything I could do.”
Flint quickly sorted through all that. Manning didn’t think Oakwood had been the second gunman. That much was clear. Scarlett could be wrong about that, but the blood evidence supported her theory and not Manning’s. Not that he intended to enlighten him.
He focused on one particular piece that might have mattered to Oakwood now. “What do you mean it was Oscar Tuttle’s fault that two people in the store died?”
“He was a hothead. Always had been. And he was having an affair with that woman, the customer. No question about that. That had to be why she was behind the counter with him instead of in front of it where a customer should be. And if I know Oscar—and believe me, I knew him—he was trying to impress his date when those two came in looking to rob the place. Those kids might have interrupted something, if you catch my drift.” Manning stopped to breathe. His belly expanded. “Oscar could have just given them the money. That’s what Mildred would have done. No amount of money is worth killing over, you ask me.”
“You never told anyone you picked her up?”
Manning shook his head. “Oscar never did a minute’s jail time for killing that baby’s dad. That dead woman was a mother, too. Oscar never owned up to ruining her family’s life, either. Maybe Laura knew about the robbery and that’s why she was running, but it didn’t seem right to me that a sick baby should have to go through anything else, when it was Oscar killed her daddy.”
Flint understood Manning’s desire to stay out of it. He’d harbored a fugitive, but as far as he knew at the time, Oakwood was not one of the gunmen. “Where did you pick Laura up?”
Manning looked down at the spotted ca
rpet. He leaned his forearms on his thighs and clasped his hands together. The coffee pot stopped dripping. The aroma of fresh-brewed java filled the room, but Flint already knew the coffee didn’t match its promise.
“I picked her up at Bette Maxwell’s place. Just at the road, at the end of the driveway.” He raised his head and looked at Flint. “I’d picked up kids there before. There was a little bench there because the bus system had once run along that road. Laura and the baby were sitting there. She waved me down.”
Flint had interviewed hundreds of witnesses and he was a good judge of them. Manning was telling the truth. Mostly. But he’d left something out. Something important. “Was she sitting there at Bette Maxwell’s place by herself? Just her and the baby? Hoping for a ride?”
Manning stalled. He shuffled over and refilled both coffee cups and shuffled back. Maybe he was trying to decide how much to tell. Or maybe something else was bothering him. He didn’t answer the question.
“What time did you pick her up at Bette’s?” The robbery had happened at 11:32 p.m. on a Sunday. Had he found her there in the middle of the night, miles from the crime scene?
Manning didn’t say anything else for a good long while, leaving Flint to work things out on his own. But he didn’t know enough to figure it out. Not yet.
Manning had confirmed a few of Flint’s deductions, though. Laura Oakwood had headed toward Canada. But that wasn’t specific enough to find her. Canada was a big country. He needed more.
She’d been at the Clovis Ranch and her story about escaping the abuse might have provided a motive for the robbery, and it explained how Oakwood and Prieto knew all about Mildred’s Corner store. But it didn’t suggest she’d made any friends while she was there or tell Flint anything about where Laura Oakwood was now.
Manning confirmed that the baby was with her, so Flint was on the right track there.
Unfair as it might seem, whether or not it was Oscar Tuttle’s fault that Prieto and the customer were killed was irrelevant to the law. Oscar was deceased now. He’d probably never have been prosecuted, anyway. Whoever John David had been, he wasn’t the second gunman inside the store. The blood trails proved that a woman was there. DNA would establish that the woman was Laura Oakwood. She was guilty of felony murder because both deaths occurred during the course of the felony robbery and she was the one who shot the customer.
“Why did you call me back?” Manning’s motive niggled Flint. He probably wouldn’t be charged with witness tampering or even aiding a fugitive after all this time. But he was taking a risk he didn’t need to take.
Manning didn’t reply.
“You’ve avoided all this for almost thirty years. Why get involved now?”
“I’ve always wondered what happened to that girl and her baby.” Manning shrugged and returned his gaze to the floor. “And if she has money coming, well, the baby deserves that much, doesn’t she?”
“Who said she had money coming?”
“That’s why you’re trying to find her, isn’t it?”
“What makes you say that?”
Manning looked up. He pushed his chin forward. “Well, that’s what you do, right? You find people who have the right to inherit things?”
“You don’t seem like the type of guy who’d have looked me up on the internet.” Flint cocked his head. “Someone must have told you Laura would be coming into money if I find her.”
Manning didn’t reply.
“A couple of land men share that info with you? Paxton and Trevor?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know those guys. Sorry.”
“So who told you? I’m not leaving here without an answer, Manning.”
“It was Bette. She called me after you left.” He shrugged. “She said we needed to help you find Laura and help the baby. She wants to be sure they get the money they’re owed.”
The answer didn’t surprise Flint as much as maybe it should have. “And how do you know Bette Maxwell?”
“Bette and I have been together for a long time. She’s told me a lot about you and Katie Scarlett.” Manning chuckled and the chuckle led to wheezed coughing. “I met you both once, years ago, at the Lazy M. When we were all a lot younger. Bette says you two were a couple of little hellions.”
Flint grinned in an effort to keep the conversation flowing. “Can’t argue with the facts.”
“And there’s the money. The donation you promised.” Manning’s laughter had died and he’d turned serious again. “Laura Oakwood was the reason I started reporting human trafficking to the Road Warriors hotline.”
“I don’t get the connection.”
“Before I picked up Oakwood, I’d give folks a ride and when they left my rig I never gave them much thought after that. But when I found out she was running from the law and I thought more about her limping, I figured she might’ve been involved in that robbery somehow. Even knowing Oscar Tuttle was probably the one at fault.” He lowered his head again for a moment before he looked directly into Flint’s eyes. “Well, I didn’t want to help the criminals. I wanted to help the victims, you know? Even if I couldn’t figure out which was which. So now I call it in. Let the experts sort things out. It takes money to do what they do. And lots of it.”
Flint ran all of Manning’s ramblings through his head, testing his theories, comparing to the facts he’d already confirmed. Most of what Manning said rang true, and the bits that didn’t were probably too old to matter.
“I’ve gotta get in the shower.” Manning stood and moved toward the small bathroom. “Any chance you can give me a lift over to my rig? They’ll have it loaded and I can get on the road. Won’t be much out of your way.”
“Yeah, sure. Get dressed. We’ll drop you off.” Flint left the cup with the cold coffee on the table. “Come on outside when you’re ready.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Dawn kissed the sky with daylight and the promise of more heat as the day developed. Flint stood on the sidewalk in front of the Texas Inn and dialed from a fresh burner phone to the one he’d given Scarlett last night. It was early but she’d be awake. Maddy was an early riser.
On the fourth ring, Scarlett picked up. “Yes?”
He recognized weariness in her tone. She’d probably worked through the night, too. “Are you alone? Away from ears and eyes?”
“I wouldn’t have answered this phone otherwise.” Like she’d said, she was good at covert ops. He hoped she was good enough.
“I’m short on time,” Flint said. “Have you seen the option?”
“What?”
“The written document that Shaw claims gives him the right to the Juan Garcia Field when we find Laura Oakwood and get her to sign over her rights. Have you seen it?”
The silence on the other end of the line was all the answer he needed.
“Can you get it?”
“Why? We don’t care about the contract. All we care about is our assignment, which is to find Oakwood before two o’clock tomorrow.”
“So the question is, how did Shaw get that option? Where did it come from? What did he pay for it?”
“Again, why do we care?”
“It’s odd, isn’t it?”
“In what way?”
“Shaw and Crane both go after the same field. They both have a colorable claim of right.”
“So?”
“That field is out in the middle of nowhere. The owners are people they don’t know. How did they even know to look for the owners? How in the hell did they become aware that the field existed?”
“They’re oil men. This is their business. They’re always looking for growth, like any business. They figure out where the oil is, and they go after the rights to it. You know how this works, Flint.” Her tone became increasingly exasperated as she spun her answer. “Somebody brought this field to their attention, and then they both wanted it. They chased down all the owners and got it all worked out down to the very last holdout, and that is Laura Oakwood and now they can’t find her. Bu
siness as usual.”
Flint said nothing. Her theory made sense. But that didn’t mean it was true.
Maybe Shaw and Crane were just a couple of billionaire jerks trying to find something to fight about, too. But that didn’t ring totally true to him either.
She said, “Don’t we have enough rabbit holes we’re chasing down without you adding another long list of nonsense?”
“Just do me a favor, Scarlett. Get a copy of that option. I want to see it.”
“I thought you’d quit this job.”
“I did.”
“Yeah, right.” She blew a long stream of exasperation out through her mouth. “You might as well tell me. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know exactly. Just a feeling, I guess.” Which was true and not true at the same time. “But this is a lot of trouble to go to for a single missing girl, isn’t it?”
“She’s not a girl, Flint. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s a very rich, very powerful missing woman—she hasn’t been a girl since she killed that woman at Mildred’s Corner. Or maybe even a long time before that.” She paused. “She’s not a lost lamb you need to save. Remember that.”
Traffic had picked up along the road in front of the Texas Inn, making it difficult to hear on the cheap phone. He blocked his left ear with his palm. “Get a copy of the option, Scarlett. Send it to me. I need to see it.”
“I’ll try. I’m not sure how long it’ll take. Shaw’s on his way to Montana. That’s where he and Crane are meeting to bury the hatchet, I guess. At The Peak Club. Lot of money at stake, so they wanted a posh place. They’ve planned a big party with all their cronies. Everybody skis and drinks and they have some sort of annual hunt and there’s some gambling involved, most likely. They’ve got some sort of backslapping handover blowout planned. Or something. Whatever billionaires do to celebrate.”
The Texas Inn parking lot was still empty, but several of the businesses along the street had begun to show signs of life. Manning would be out shortly. “Tell me what progress you’ve made on the other matters.”