Mermaids in the Pacific (Peyton Brooks, FBI Book 2)

by M. L. Hamilton

  Peyton nodded and reached for her coffee. She could call Stan Neumann at the precinct. If anyone was able to find a trace of this kid, Stan would be the man...she grimaced at her own rhyme. But calling Stan meant he’d have to tell Marco and Marco would probably get angry that she was using his people to do her job.

  She braced her head with her hands. Why was everything leading back to Marco today? Why the hell couldn’t she get him out of her mind?

  “Peyton?”

  Peyton glanced over her shoulder at the door. Margaret was leaning inside.

  “You have a visitor?”

  “A visitor?” She rose to her feet. “Who?”

  “He says to tell you Barnabas is here. He was cleared downstairs.”

  Peyton’s expression hardened. Okay, now this was going too far. She gave him her card out of guilt and sympathy, but she didn’t expect him to use it the very next day. She felt Bambi and Tank’s eyes on her, but she ignored them, walking to the door.

  “Who’s Barnabas?” asked Bambi, but Peyton waved over her shoulder and kept going.

  When she turned the corner into her office, she found him fingering things on her desk, in particular the cold files she’d been working on. When he saw her, he took a step back, throwing up his hands. She pushed the files back into her in-box and glared at him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his face filled with regret. “I was looking for a picture of your ex-fiancé. I just wanted to see my competition.”

  Peyton straightened, but her expression didn’t soften. “Why are you here?”

  He reached for something on the corner of her desk and held it up. It was Pickles’ dog cookies. “I thought Pickles might like these back. They got mixed in with my groceries when that guy with the pickup truck carried them in.” He pressed his hands together in a gesture of supplication. “I’m sorry, Peyton. I really didn’t mean to snoop or anything. It’s just you won’t give me the time of day and I figured this guy must be a god or something.”

  Peyton’s expression softened. “He’s mortal.” She reached for the cookies. “Look, Mike, I’m flattered by this attention. I really am, but I’m just not in a good place right now. Marco was a part of my life for nearly nine years. It’s just not that easy to get over him and I don’t want to make you think differently. This just isn’t going to happen. I’m sorry.”

  He started to say something, but Radar appeared in the doorway. He took in the scene – Mike standing on the inner part of Peyton’s desk, Peyton on the outside. “What’s going on?” he demanded in that Radar tone of his.

  Mike’s face shifted to panic. “Uh, I, uh…”

  “This is Mike Edwards, Radar. He just came to give me cookies.”

  Radar frowned at the box. “What?”

  “For my dog.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Radar crossed his arms over his chest. One hand held a file. “I’m all ears.”

  Peyton gave him a bewildered look. “It’s a long story.”

  “Do I look like I’ve got some place to be?”

  Mike acted like he wanted to bolt.

  “Well, you’ll have to hear it another time. Mike was just leaving.” Peyton crossed around the desk and placed her hand on Mike’s shoulder, urging him to the door. He circled around Radar, but Radar didn’t budge. Peyton pushed him in the back and he squeezed out into the hallway.

  He hesitated on the other side. “If you change your mind, you know how to reach me.”

  Peyton smiled. “I appreciate it.”

  “Bye, Peyton,” he said, offering her a lift of his hand.

  “Bye, Barnabas,” she answered, watching as he headed toward the elevator, then she turned back to Radar. “What was that about?”

  “I don’t like civilians on our floor.”

  “He was cleared.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “He’s ex-army.”

  Radar narrowed his eyes. “Does it look like that matters to me, Sparky?”

  Peyton sighed. “We can’t find anything on Finn Getter, except a social and a birth certificate. The good news is there’s no death certificate, so he’s still out there somewhere. He was born in Ogden, Utah. Bambi and Tank are trying to find traces of him on social media.”

  “Social media?”

  “Facebook, etc. It’s what the youngin’ do nowadays.”

  “Is that a shot at my age?”

  Peyton held up a hand.

  He jerked his chin toward the door. “Close it.”

  Peyton eased it shut. “What’s up?”

  He held out the file to her. “Look at this.” His features grew even grimmer.

  Peyton took the file and opened it. The name at the top was Franklin Thatcher. She scanned the various reports, feeling her stomach knot. Arrested for statutory rape at age eighteen for having sex with a minor who was thirteen at the time. Arrested again for molestation at age twenty-four for having sex with a fifteen year old. There were no more arrests, but a probation officer had found him with a sixteen year old when he was thirty-three. The girl claimed they were married, produced a marriage license with permission signed by her mother, and the probation officer hadn’t been able to do a thing about it.

  Peyton flipped back to the first arrest and searched for the city of record. Her breath caught. Ogden, Utah. The next time he was arrested, he’d set up shop in Santa Cruz.

  Peyton lifted her eyes to Radar. A muscle ticked in his jaw. “This guy’s a predator, Radar.”

  Radar nodded.

  Peyton searched through the file and found a picture of him. Franklin Thatcher was a tall, spare man, even in his youth, with an unruly mass of wavy brown hair, large brown eyes, a long chin, and a scar running through the middle of his upper lip. Peyton looked closer.

  “He had a cleft lip.”

  Dropping the file on the corner of her desk, Peyton grabbed the box of letters from Finn out of her bottom drawer. She thumbed through them until she found the ones she wanted. “Read this.” She thrust one of them at Radar.

  He took it and read, while she continued searching.

  “Little Gina, Ezekiel, two more children he doesn’t name. They had trouble eating. They had to have surgery.”

  “He never says what’s wrong with them, Sparky.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Isn’t it obvious? They had cleft lips.”

  “You don’t know that. You’re speculating.”

  “Am I, Radar? Am I really? Franklin Thatcher is the father of these children.” She slapped a hand on the file. “He’s raping these girls on that ranch, Radar.”

  Radar finished reading the letter. A light knock sounded at the door and Margaret poked her head inside. “Sarge wants to see you, Radar.”

  Radar looked up at Peyton, carefully folding the letters. “Tell her I’ll be right there.”

  Peyton could feel her heart beating faster. She knew what Radar feared, but something horrible was happening on that farm and they needed to investigate it. Finn knew something was wrong. There are too many deformities for it to be coincidence. Peyton felt sure the mermaid had been born on Horizon.

  Radar reached for the file on Thatcher and opened it, sliding the letters he held into it. Closing his eyes, he let out a heavy sigh. “Let’s go talk to Sarge,” he said.

  * * *

  Rosa studied the file, her forehead braced on a hand, her fingers spread across her brow. As she read, she twisted her lips to the side and pursed them. It was a contemplative pose, but Peyton wasn’t good at sitting still. She shifted on the armchair, crossing one leg over the other, then shifted the other way, re-crossing her legs.

  Beside her, Radar sat, his hands gripping the arms, his head tilted back – his meditation pose. Peyton hated him for it, her eyes roving over Rosa’s desk. She started to reach for a business card holder on the corner, but Rosa beat her to it, moving it out of the way.

  Gripping the arms the way Ra
dar did, she found a string dangling from the fabric on the arm of the chair. She started to pull it with the fingers on her left hand, sliding her fingers up to the top when it got too long. Unfortunately, it wasn’t coming to the end like she thought it would, but it was making a small pile in her hand. Peyton’s eyes widened and she wasn’t sure what to do.

  She tried to glance over the side of the chair to look at it, but she couldn’t see anything. Bending forward as if she were going to tie her boots, she tried to peer under the chair, but that didn’t do much good. It looked like the whole arm was coming unraveled.

  She straightened and tried to shove the thread back into the fabric, but the minute she started to pull her hand away, it pooled against her fingers again. Swallowing hard, she tried to break it, but it was too strong. Shifting in the chair, she brought her other hand over and tried to snap it between both hands, but that didn’t work.

  Twinning it around her index finger, she caught the end at the arm of the chair and yank quick – once, twice, three times, but it didn’t break. She was going to have to use her teeth.

  Someone made a coughing sound.

  Peyton glanced over and found both Rosa and Radar staring at her with raised brows. She gave an anxious smile, nodding at Rosa’s desk. “Do you have scissors?”

  Without removing her hand from her forehead, Rosa grabbed the scissors and held them out to her. Peyton cut the string, passing them back, then she didn’t know what to do with it. She balled it up and on a whim, shoved it in her pocket.

  Rosa and Radar continued to stare at her.

  Peyton shrugged and sank back on the chair, folding her hands in her lap and gripping them tightly.

  “This is troubling,” said Rosa, lowering her arm.

  “Trouble would be a step up from what I fear,” answered Radar.

  “I don’t like cult things.”

  “Me either.”

  Her eyes shifted to Peyton. “Why do you think the mermaid came from here?”

  “The birth defects. I think either they’re interbreeding on that farm, or Thatcher’s messing with every woman there and passing his genes on like gangbusters.”

  Radar made a grunt of disapproval at her colloquialism, but Rosa smiled.

  “Still, we can’t definitively link the mermaid to Horizon,” Rosa said.

  “No, but we can go to Horizon and look for Finn. We need to question him.”

  Rosa considered that.

  “I’m certain they have guns,” said Radar. “And based on the use of hemp, I’m thinking they grow pot illegally too.”

  “Have Tank see if they have a grower’s license.”

  “We did. They don’t.”

  “But we don’t have proof they’re growing pot?”

  “We have the fibers from the baby’s blanket,” said Radar. “The ones Igor found. He’s verified it as hemp.”

  “But we can’t prove it came from Horizon.”

  “We have witnesses who told us to look at the Horizon women,” offered Peyton.

  “Circumstantial at best.”

  “But enough to get a warrant.”

  Rosa studied her. “Okay, Brooks. If you can get a warrant, we’ll give it a shot.”

  Peyton started to rise, but Radar cleared his throat again. “With all due respect, Sarge…”

  “Go on.”

  “If we go in there hot, they’ll come at us hot. We don’t have enough evidence to get a full search warrant. We need something more. I need something more.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I need to know the weapons we face, the numbers – we don’t have any of that.”

  “So what are you suggesting, Radar?”

  Radar glanced at Peyton. “I think we should go in there just the four of us.”

  “That makes me nervous,” said Rosa.

  Radar shrugged. “I’m not saying we don’t have the full fire power of the FBI behind us, but I think if we go in there in full force, there’s gonna be shooting.”

  “How are you going to get on that property without a warrant?”

  “We go to the gate and we ask to speak to Thatcher. Tell him we’re trying to find Finn for questioning on a crime,” offered Peyton.

  “And if they won’t let you on the property?”

  “They let a patrol officer on the property before.”

  Rosa turned back to the file and studied it. “I wish you could have gotten those women to talk to you. Maybe we go that route again.”

  “That’s a week away. I can’t stand the thought of those girls enduring another week of torment.”

  Rosa picked up Finn’s letters, reading.

  Radar drew a breath, held it, then released. “Sparky’s right, Sarge. Something’s not right on that farm. I’m convinced of that after talking to the librarian. She knows more than she’s letting on.”

  “If there are guns on that farm and things get chippy, you and your team could be dead in seconds.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “But you still think this is the way to go?”

  “I think it’s the only way to go. Maybe I’m the only one who needs to go on that farm at first.”

  “No!” said Peyton, turning toward him. “You? You’re the one who doesn’t want to go.”

  “Sarge is right. There’s a risk.”

  “Well, you’re not taking it alone.” She looked away from him, crossing her arms on her chest. “You and me can go in.”

  “That’s comforting. You’re my backup?”

  “I’m good backup.”

  Rosa smiled. “I think you need to ask the rest of your team, Radar. I want our guys stationed just outside this Horizon place and I want you wired. If things get chippy, they go in hot like you said.”

  “Done,” said Radar, pushing himself to his feet. “We’ll get set up today and go in tomorrow bright and early.”

  “And if they don’t let you on the property, Brooks here is gonna sweet talk a warrant out of a judge, right, Brooks?”

  “Right, Sarge.”

  Radar made a derisive grunt.

  Peyton rose also. “You know I’m all kinds of sweet,” she told him, following him to the door.

  “The hell you are. You’re prickly as a cactus.”

  “Which happens to be all sorts of sweet inside.”

  “Brooks?” said Rosa.

  Peyton paused in the doorway and looked back. “Sarge?”

  “Be careful out there. Radar’s right. These things go south in a hurry. Don’t drop your guard for a moment. And whatever you do, Brooks, damn it, don’t surrender your gun.”

  Peyton gave her a nod, but her stomach felt like it was in knots.

  * * *

  Peyton found Maria and Cho already sitting at a table, sipping some wine. They rose when she hurried over to them. She was glad she’d taken the time to go home and change into a little black sheath dress with heels. The interior of Dosa was filled with elegant woods, rich scents, and low lighting.

  Maria kissed her on the cheek and Cho gave her a hug, then he reached over and filled a wine glass for her. While he did that, Maria gave her a critical once over. “You’re too thin.”

  Peyton lifted her wine glass. “You’re always telling me I’m too fat.”

  “I’ve never said that.”

  “You’ve always compared my ass to a large animal of some kind. Water buffalo, I think, was the last one.”

  “That’s not calling you fat.”

  Peyton gave Cho a wild-eyed look. He smiled and shrugged.

  “You need a new black dress. Abe and me gotta take you shopping.”

  “I’m still paying off the last shopping trip you and Abe took me on.”

  “That was for work clothes. We need other things now.”

  “What other things?”

  Maria stared hard at Peyton’s breasts. “A new bra for one thing. You lost so much weight, you don’t got nothing up there anymore.”

  Cho made a choking sound and lowered his
wine. Peyton gave Maria another wild-eyed stare.

  A waiter approached the table, passing out a single sheet of paper. “Have you dined with us before?” he asked.

  Peyton shook her head.

  “Pick one thing from each course.”

  “Wow! I’m not sure what to pick.”

  “May I make recommendations for you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “The kale and mung salad is a wonderful starter. Opens the palate. I particularly like the summer uttapam with caramelized onions and sweet peppers. And for the third course, I recommend the lamb.”

  “No, no lamb. I’ll take the lotus root kofta. Everything else you suggested is great.”

  “Excellent selection.”

  He turned to Cho and Maria. Cho ordered for the two of them, while Maria shot daggers at Peyton. After the waiter walked away, Maria leaned toward Peyton. “Why are you still eating vegetarian? That’s why you’re so thin.”

  “Maria,” pleaded Cho, but she ignored him.

  “You could have gotten the lamb. We’re buying.”

  “I don’t want lamb. I’ve never been big on lamb. Besides, I’m not that thin. Why are you carping at me? Is this why you asked me to dinner?”

  “No.” Maria glanced around the room, then narrowed her eyes on Peyton. “You’re still eating vegetarian because of him.”

  Cho slumped back in his chair, grabbing for his wine glass.

  Peyton swallowed hard and looked away. Today had been particularly difficult for her. She’d missed Marco all day and she didn’t need Maria poking her finger in it.

  “Answer me, Brooks.”

  Tears stung Peyton’s eyes and she reached for the napkin, twisting it in her hands.

  Cho glanced over at her, putting a hand on Maria’s back. “Go easy, okay?”

  Maria left her seat and popped over into the seat next to Peyton, pulling her into her arms. “I want you to be happy, Brooks. I hate seeing you like this.”

  Peyton pressed her forehead to Maria’s shoulder, fighting for composure. “I just miss him so much, Maria.”

  “I know.” Maria rubbed her hands down her back. “I know you do, but you’ve got to pull it together. You’ve got to get that fight back in you. That’s why I give you a bad time.”