by J. R. Rain
And the psychic hit I got from him was an unusual one: Mr. Aaron King had a secret. A big secret.
He caught me looking at him and and gave me a beautiful smile, complete with twinkling eyes. I found my heart beating a little faster.
Aaron King and Spinoza (I never did catch his first name) passed on eating and instead sipped from oversized drinks. Men and their oversized drinks. Sheesh. They examined the photos while I recounted the events of the last few days, beginning with the first phone call from Maddie, my discussion with Chad, my conversation with Detective Hanner, Maddie’s second call, the meth lab and dead body, the Happy Meal, and the video surveillance.
“All this from a wrong number,” said Aaron. God, I loved the lilt to his voice. A hint of an accent. Melodious. A beautiful and agonizingly familiar voice.
“Probably not a wrong number,” said Spinoza. The man spoke as if it were a great effort. As if it took all his energy and strength to form the words. If ever there was a man who needed a hug, it was him.
Knighthorse nodded. “Your number was programmed into the phone. No way a kid that young finds you in the phone book.”
“Could be our guy’s phone,” said Spinoza.
Knighthorse looked at me. “Any reason why a six foot five black thug would have your number programmed in his phone?”
“Maybe he’s looking for a good time?” I said.
Knighthorse grinned, and so did Spinoza. I think. Aaron King chuckled lightly.
“Maybe it wasn’t his phone,” offered Spinoza.
“Her mother’s?” said King.
I nodded. “Maybe her mother gave it to her before her death.”
Spinoza said, “Maybe she suspected something bad might happen. If so, she wanted her daughter to have it in case of an emergency.”
“And she pre-programmed it with Samantha’s info?” said Aaron King. “Why not the police?”
“Or maybe she took it off her mother’s dead body,” said Knighthorse, and the expression that briefly crossed his face was one of profound pain. Knighthorse, I realized, knew something about dead mothers. His own dead mother.
Jesus, we’re all a mess, I thought.
“And you don’t recognize the woman?” King asked me.
“No. And her name doesn’t show up in any of my case files.”
“Did you check all your case files?” asked King.
“All my files are in a database.”
Knighthorse and King whistled. “Maybe I should get me one of those,” said the old guy, winking at me in such a way that my stomach literally did a somersault.
Spinoza plowed forward. “Still, that doesn’t mean the mother, what’s her name—”
“Lauren,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean Lauren didn’t look you up prior to being killed. Maybe she knew something was wrong.”
“Or something was about to go wrong,” said King.
“Right,” said Knighthorse. “She looks you up in the Yellow Pages, punches you in her phone for a later call.”
“But never makes the call,” I said.
“Right.”
“Maybe the mother tried calling you, Samantha,” said Spinoza. “Perhaps you were her last call.”
“Except you were too damn busy with your database to pick up,” said King. He winked at me, and I elbowed the old guy in the ribs. He chuckled again.
“If so,” said Knighthorse, “then perhaps you were the last call she ever made. And if the call came through as blocked, which can be done automatically, then you would have no record of the call.”
“It’s a theory,” I said.
Knighthorse said, “And then all the daughter had to do was hit redial.”
“And she would call me,” I said.
“Bingo.”
We let that theory digest for a few seconds. Then Spinoza sat down his oversized drink. No doubt his normal-sized bladder was bursting at the seams. “So let’s hit it,” he said.
And we did. But first he went to the bathroom.
Chapter Thirty-one
Private investigators seem to hold a certain allure for many people. I get that. TV has certainly made the work appear glamorous; after all, there’s something exciting about being a lone wolf (no pun intended), working when you want, living on the edge of society, and catching the bad guys. The adventure. The excitement. The mystery.
Sorry folks, but fifty perfect of P.I. work is following cheating spouses and doing background checks. And even then, the background work is getting sparser and sparser, thanks to so many new internet sites that do the work for us.
But, yeah, every now and then we do get a juicy case. And it can be fun. Especially when you do help those in need.
More often than not, P.I. work takes great patience, especially when you’re watching a subject at home for days on end. Or when you’re beating down doors looking for leads.
Like we were doing now.
Canvassing a targeted area will eventually turn up something. With enough people pounding doors and stopping people on the streets, someone, somewhere will recognize the man in the picture.
Canvassing is painstaking and frustrating at best, hopeless and infuriating at worst. And just when you think you couldn’t knock on another door, or stop another stranger on the street, someone starts talking, and that someone will tell you exactly what you need to know.
Ideally.
So the four of us hit the pavement and, using a street map, centered our efforts on four different quadrants surrounding the meth house. I had the northeast section, which included a lot of rundown apartments, rundown homes, and a handful of motels. The guys didn’t like me running off on my own but I reminded them that I was a highly trained federal agent. They didn’t like it, and made me promise to keep my cell phone and pepper spray handy. I didn’t have any pepper spray, but the old man Aaron, gave me his.
I checked with Danny once, confirmed that Anthony was still sleeping, checked with my sister, confirmed Tammy was safe and sound at their home, and then hit the pavement.
And hit it hard.
* * *
We did this for four hours.
I questioned dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of people. I sensed that many of the young men recognized the man in the picture. None of them were talking. I would make them talk if I had to. I remembered where all of them lived.
Sometimes I don’t play by the rules. Sometimes I make up the rules. Someone was going to talk, whether they wanted to or not.
A few of these men let be known that they didn’t appreciate me walking around and asking a lot of questions. One of these men might have threatened me. One of these men might have soon thereafter suffered a broken finger.
Might have.
I handed out all the fliers I had, each one with my cell phone number on the bottom and a promise that the call would remain confidential. And at the end of the night, with no one talking and the neighborhood shutting down, the four of us reconvened at the McDonald’s. We discussed our options. We all felt we had hit the area pretty hard. Most of us felt someone knew something but wasn’t talking. We all agreed that unless someone started talking soon, we would have to take drastic measures. None of us talked about what those drastic measures were. I suspected each of us had our own definitions.
Knighthorse and Spinoza would both be back tomorrow morning. I would be back in the evening. Aaron King had a lead or two he wanted to follow up tonight. He insisted on following up alone, stating he would use his old Southern charm to get the information he needed. He even winked. Hell, I was charmed ten times over.
As I stepped into my minivan, Knighthorse pulled up behind me in his classic Mustang. He cranked down his window and said he’d heard from someone on the street that a mean, dark-haired lady had broken some gangbanger’s finger. His eyes narrowed. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?” he asked.
“Everything but the mean part. It’s not nice to threaten a lady.”
He threw back his head an
d laughed. “I knew you were a badass.”
“Badder than most.”
“Hey, that’s my line,” he said, winking. He rolled up his window and pealed out of the parking lot.
Spinoza followed behind in his nondescript Toyota Camry, a car much better suited for investigations than Knighthorse’s eye-catching classic Mustang. He nodded at me and told me we would find her. I thanked the deeply troubled man for his help, and secretly hoped he would find himself.
As I started up my minivan—a vehicle even better suited for long surveillances—Aaron King sidled up to the window. His eyes twinkled. As if he was in on a private joke. Or if he knew a secret. I rolled down my window.
“We’ll find that girl,” he said. “I have a daughter. I can’t stand the thought of a little girl alone and scared and possibly abused.”
“I have a daughter, too,” I said. “And a son.”
But that was all I could get out. My voice caught in my throat.
Aaron King angled his beautiful face down into my window. “Is there something wrong, lil’ darling?” he asked.
“No, I—” But my voice did it again. Or, rather, my throat did. It shut tight, and all I could do was shake my head.
But there was something so tender, so serene, so warm about Aaron King. I felt myself opening up to him, responding to him. Connecting with him.
I tried again. “My son...” But, dammit, that was all I could say. Even those words came out in a strangled choke.
Aaron reached through the driver’s side window and gently touched my chin. “Hey, even highly trained federal agents cry,” he said.
And I did. Hard. Much harder than I thought I would around a stranger. Aaron King let me cry. The hand he used to touch my cheek now reached around and patted my head and shoulders gently. He was a loving grandfather. A man with a big, beautiful heart.
And when I was all cried out, he rested his forehead against the upper window frame. “I’m sorry you’re sad, lil’ lady. But everything’s going to be alright.”
Some of the McDonald’s yellowish parking lot light caught his eyes, and when he smiled again—a smile that was so bright that it lifted my spirits immediately—I got the mother of all psychic hits. So powerful...and so mind blowing. So much so that I was certain I had made it up.
No way, I thought.
But the hit persisted. His name wasn’t Aaron King. At least, not the name the world knew him by.
Unbelievable.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Samantha Moon. And you can tell me about your son then.”
I nodded, too dumbfounded to speak.
He winked at me. “Go take care of your son.” And then he reached through the window and gave my chin a small boxing jab, smiled at me again, and walked back to his own car.
A Cadillac.
Might as well have been a pink Cadillac.
Chapter Thirty-two
Still reeling from my encounter with Aaron King, whose real name, of course, wasn’t Aaron King, I found myself at the Wharton Museum.
Danny had promised to call me immediately if anything came up, and since I hadn’t received a call, I might as well keep working, right? And with Aaron still working the case in Buena Park, I thought it was best to tackle some of my paying work.
I might be undead. I might drink blood. And I might be one hell of a freaky chick, but I still needed to feed my kids and pay my bills.
Still in my van, I removed my secret stash of foundation make-up, which I often applied heavily to my face and the back of my hands. I may not show up in mirrors or on surveillance video—weird as hell, I know—but the make-up still did. And after a long night of pounding doors and breaking fingers, well, I wasn’t sure how much of my make-up was still in place.
I had already been introduced to the head night security guard, whose name was Eddie. Eddie was a heavy-set Hispanic guy who seemed as cool as cool gets, and oozed a smooth confidence. The way he carried himself, you would have thought he looked a little more like George Clooney and a lot less like Chris Farley.
Then again, I always did think Chris Farley was a cutie.
We were in Eddie’s office, which was just inside the main doors of the museum. His office looked a little like Mission Control, minus all the nerds in white short-sleeved, button-down dress shirts. There were ten monitors placed in and around his desk, all providing live feeds from within the museum. While we sat, he cycled through some exterior cameras and some back-room cameras. All in all, there were over twenty cameras situated throughout the small museum.
Eddie leaned back in his swivel chair, a chair that looked abused and ready to give out. I was sitting in a metal foldout chair he had grabbed from a storage closet behind him. The cold metal was almost as cold as my own flesh.
Eddie, to his credit, rarely took his eyes off the monitors. There was a Starbucks coffee sitting next to a keyboard. The keyboard had old coffee stains on it. I wondered how many keyboards Eddie had fried spilling his coffees.
“Would you mind telling me about the night the crystal sculpture was stolen?” I asked.
He shrugged defensively. “Like any other night.”
I waited. Eddie stared at the monitors. Apparently that’s all I was getting.
I said, “So nothing out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing other than our back-room cameras suddenly stopped working.”
“Did the theft take place in the back room?”
“Wow, you’re good,” he said, still not looking at me. “It’s no wonder they hired you.”
I ignored the remark. “How long were the cameras not working?”
“Twenty-one minutes.”
“Did you catch this immediately?”
He shook his head. “Both pictures were frozen in place. How they did it, we have no clue. But the image looked fine, until I noticed the timer had stopped.”
“And how long until you noticed that?”
“Thirty, forty minutes.”
“Long enough for the egg to be stolen.”
“Yes.”
“Could have happened to anyone,” I said.
He squinted at me, trying to decide if I was being as big of an asshole as he was, and finally decided that I wasn’t. He relaxed a little. “I guess so, yes.”
“Where in the back room did the theft occur?”
He pointed to one of the images on the screen. “There. The shipping and receiving room. We had just received the collection from the artist himself.”
“And does the artist know of the theft?”
“Not yet, as far as I’m aware.”
“When is the exhibit set to debut?”
“One week.”
“And the cameras caught nothing?”
“Not a thing.”
“Was anything else stolen?”
“Just the crystal egg.”
I knew the museum had insurance to cover such a loss, but there was no insurance to cover one’s reputation. From what I understood, the theft would be a black eye that the museum could ill afford.
I said, “Other than security guards, does anyone else work the night shift?”
“No, although sometimes the docents and museum staff put in late hours, especially when a new exhibit is about to open.”
“Were any of the museum staff working the night the sculpture was stolen?”
“Yes, but they had left hours before.”
“How many security guards typically work the night shift?”
“We have four working after hours. Ten when the museum is open. We only have three working tonight.”
“Why’s that?”
Now Eddie looked pissed. “No clue. Thad never showed.”
“What’s Thad’s full name?”
“Thad Perry.”
“Was Thad working on the night in question?”
“No.”
“Has he ever not shown up before?”
“Never.”
“So you would call this unusual behavior?”
“Extremely.”
“May I have a list of the names and numbers to all four security guards working that night?”