Chad was out the door before the truck stopped. He used the sampling kit Riley had brought and collected several dirt samples from various places around the entrance. He handed the bagged samples to Riley. “I’m going in to talk to the clerk. Do you have the ability to run a search and see if the Del Mar Corporation has any property in San Bernardino or Riverside counties?”
Riley nodded and went to talk to the two cops. They got back into the unmarked car and used the computer-like console to stab in some letters. As Chad started toward the food mart, Riley returned and caught his arm.
“Let me do the talking for once, okay? This is my investigation after all.” When Chad looked at him in his unyielding fashion, Riley said, “I want to save your brother, too. And if Kinnard is guilty of what you say, no one has a bigger interest in seeing him jailed than the Beverly Hills Police Department. Before he does any more damage.”
Unlike Pucker Ass, Chad had learned through too many tough investigations and dead ends to trust his gut. Trey was in imminent peril. He could sense it. But he nodded reluctantly and let Riley lead the way in.
As he passed under an overhang high enough for big rigs, Chad noticed the tiny cameras trained at each of the pumps. Gas retailers always installed them now, so they could prosecute deadbeats who tried to sneak off without paying. The question was, would they share? Riley was right. He was better suited for this part of the investigation.
The same morning, after a restless night missing Chad, Jasmine drove toward Roger Larsen’s office, unaware that she was tailed several cars back by an expensive but nondescript black Land Rover with dark windows. She wondered where Chad was but figured the best thing she could do now was help the investigation.
As she pulled up outside Larsen’s expensive but discreet office, she decided it was a good thing she’d just completed her corporate law class because she knew exactly the document to look for. There were many ways to shield the leadership of a shell entity, but the articles of organization had to be signed legally by the managing member.
She entered the office, relieved to find the receptionist apparently away. She called, “Roger, are you here?”
Larsen walked out of his inner office, a delighted smile on his face. “Jasmine! I’m so happy you stopped by just in time for you to take me for coffee.”
Jasmine accepted his quick kiss and gave him her best smile. “I’d love to, Roger, but I have a paper due in a week for my corporate law class. I was wondering if you’d mind if I borrowed a couple of your law books?” When his smile faded she added hastily, “But maybe we could get takeout and you could give me some pointers on how to argue my brief? I love that little Thai restaurant up the street. That is, if I’m not interrupting. It opens early and I’m starving. I love their egg noodle dishes with chicken.”
Larsen’s smile appeared again. “Sure, I didn’t have time for breakfast. What would you like?” He went to put on his jacket, but Jasmine shook her head. “It’s hot for this time of year.”
He hung the jacket back on the rack inside his office and went to the door. “Back in a jiff.” He exited.
The second he was gone, Jasmine snatched a ring of keys out of his pocket, went to his locked files, and looked under the D’s. She skimmed through them.
Next she tried the K’s. She snatched out the file marked, “Kinnard, Thomas.” But there was only a white sheet in it marked, “Removed to confidential files.”
She slammed the file closed and searched the office. She looked through his desk, but it only held office supplies. She spied a tiny closet and opened it. Inside was a much heavier vault-type file cabinet with a sturdy lock. She tried all the keys, but none fit the lock. Frustrated, she looked in his desk. Slammed the drawer. No keys. Then she snapped her fingers. She’d heard tiny keys rattling in his pocket more than once. She looked in a hidden, zippered pocket in his suit jacket and pulled out a strange key with an octagonal shaft and head. She tried it in the vault filing cabinet inside the tiny closet. It turned smoothly. She found a file marked “Kinnard, Thomas.” It was very thick.
There it was. Her heart sank at this tangible proof of Thomas’s involvement in land fraud and probably in Trey’s disappearance. She skimmed through a thick stapled pile labeled, “Incorporation Papers, Del Mar Corporation,” but she knew Larson would be back any moment, so she didn’t have time to read the file. She went to the copier, unstapled the thick sheaf of papers, and inserted them in the sheet feeder.
Outside, Roger Larsen walked up to his door, whistling. He carried a large takeout bag from the Thai restaurant Jasmine liked, but before he could enter, a hand fell on his arm. He turned, startled, to see one of Thomas’s gang members glaring at him. “Why is the chica here?”
Roger scowled. “She just needs my help with a legal brief for class.”
The hood muttered something that might have been “pendejo,” but aloud he said, “Check your files, cabrón. She’s helping the Texan. He’s staying at her place. The jefe doesn’t trust her anymore.” He smiled, a gold tooth gleaming to match his heavy gold necklaces. “If we go down, you go down.”
In Riverside, Chad kept his mouth shut as Riley questioned the clerk.
“So you haven’t noticed any of the eighteen-wheelers that have stopped here in the last eight hours?” Riley’s voice was higher than normal with his skepticism.
The bored middle-aged female clerk, a victim of her own ennui, gave him a look universal among quick-stop gas station employees. If you’re not buying something, go away, don’t bother me. “You got any idea how many eighteen-wheelers stop here in a day?”
Riley flashed his badge a second time, but this display of authority had no more effect on her than the first time. “We need to see the surveillance footage, then. This is important, a man’s life is in danger—”
“Then you got a warrant, right?”
Riley sighed. “Let me talk to the manager.”
“I am the manager.”
“Then let me talk to the owner.”
“Corporate store. Lunchtime. Besides, they take days to get back to me about this kind of thing. Come back this weekend.”
Finally, Riley’s by-the-book temperament was fraying a bit at the edges. “If a crime is committed because you wouldn’t help us, you could be held—”
Chad caught Riley’s arm to shut him up before he got the word obstruction out. He tilted his hat back and turned on the Texas charm. “We’re right sorry to bother you, ma’am, but the missing person is my brother, and I’m a Texas Ranger about to lose my badge if I don’t find the little peckerwood and get him home so I can get back to my job.”
Now, she looked impressed. “A real Ranger? Like Tonto and everything?”
Barely, Chad managed not to roll his eyes. “Yes. I even have my horse with me. Would you like to see him?”
She nodded eagerly. Motioning to another clerk to cover the register, she followed them outside. Riley had parked the rig on a grassy sward beside the parking lot, and Chester, scenting the newly mowed grass, was pawing at the trailer bed in his eagerness to get outside. He stood patiently as Chad haltered him, backed out more patiently than usual, and immediately began cropping the grass, ignoring the woman who tentatively stroked his neck.
”He’s beautiful. I’ve always wanted a horse.”
“Stand back and I’ll show you how he rears on command.” Chad waited until she and Riley were at a safe distance, then raised his right hand high in the air, a command Chester had known since he was a foal. Whether he’d obey was another matter.
Chester took a last ripping tear at the grass, but when Chad patted his withers and raised his hand more authoritatively, the quarter horse obediently reared, his front legs pawing at the air. The clerk’s eyes got wide, and when Chester came back down, he must have sensed her awe because he began prancing in place without command. The clerk clapped.
Chad whispered into a sensitive, flickering ear, “Show off. Good job.” He led Chester back into the trailer, used
the tie-down, and then shut and locked the tailgate.
He went up to the woman and removed his hat, turning it in a circle in his hands as he talked. Less Texas twang this time, but even more sincere. “This is how it is. Our parents died when I was barely out of my teens, and I mostly raised my brother since he was a youngster. He and I haven’t always seen eye to eye because he’s the artistic type, and I’m, well . . .”
“My grandmother was from Texas. She used to talk funny, too. She told me my dad was a ring-tailed tooter when he was little.”
Chad nodded. “Yes, something like that. Anyway, we argued, and he came out here to be with a girl but disappeared before I could find him. I’m pretty sure if we don’t find him in the next twenty-four hours, well . . .”
The clerk nodded. “You’ll never forgive yourself.”
Even more adamantly, Chad nodded. “We promise not to tell anyone we saw the footage. We understand it’s against company policy and if we had more time we’d bring a warrant.”
Chad waited. Behind the clerk, Riley gave Chad a thumbs-up. Chad just kept twirling his hat. Maybe there was something to this patience gig after all.
The clerk sighed. “Okay, come on in back, but if you tell anyone, I could lose my job.”
As it turned out, the convenience store had the latest surveillance equipment, which not only recorded each vehicle arriving and departing with a time stamp, it had a search function for an individual plate. Riley typed in the first of the two numbers they’d logged that night at the warehouse in South El Monte. Nothing. But the second one . . . The footage automatically flickered and stopped on a nondescript navy blue big rig, but they both recognized it.
The two men who jumped down from the cab didn’t look familiar to either of them, but they were definitely of the right age, gender, and look to be part of the South Side gang. As they let the five-minute footage play, they watched closely. When the men came back, one rapped on the side of the trailer and laughed coarsely. Then they got back in and drove off—east.
Chad frowned. “Isn’t that toward Palm Springs?”
“Yes. You record it?”
Chad had filmed the footage as best he could with his cell phone, holding it up to the small TV screen, but it had been dark when it was recorded. “Yes. Can we put out an APB?”
“With what probable cause? This is Riverside.”
“The Riverside cops—”
“Returned to duty when we struck out at the diner. They have their own cases.”
Chad stared at the frozen frame of the big rig. “Trey’s in that truck. I know it . . .”
“We saw no sign of Trey, and this vehicle came up clean, registered to an LLC duly recorded by the State of California when we ran the plates.”
Chad pounded his fist down on the small table so hard the monitor jumped. “Goddammit, my brother is on that truck!”
Riley sighed. “Let me talk to the captain. Maybe he’ll call the CHP.”
Immediately Chad sat down and looked at the footage again. He slowed the digital speed and watched everything in slow motion. Once, twice . . . what was that? He forwarded frame by frame as the truck drove out of the lot, lurching over the rough edge of the pavement. Chad squinted, pausing the footage. What was that? Something flying out of the cab area, nowhere near the tires. Wishing the parking lot light were brighter, Chad used the close-up function on the recorder to blow up the cab section as the truck drove out of the lot.
There it was, blurry but recognizable. The little wad of paper towels and the faintest glimmer of gold, falling from the cab section as the truck exited the station. The packet fell out of the frame, but when Chad panned back, he could see it must have landed roughly in the same area where the kid had said he’d found it.
Riley came back in. “CHP is shorthanded with all the budget cuts. Without something tangible, the captain said—”
Chad zoomed back on the packet, removing it from his pocket as he froze the frame. He held it up for Riley to compare, indicating the time stamp, about eight hours ago, as he moved forward frame by frame, showing Trey’s tiny SOS gleaming for one precious second in the light. It was a spot-on match for the packet he held. “How about a piece of solid-gold proof?”
It was after lunch when Jasmine walked inside her apartment, happy with the papers secreted in her huge shoulder bag. She had the outline of a decent brief, too. Roger had seemed less upbeat when he came back with the takeout, but she’d been careful to leave things as she’d found them. He’d wandered his office, even opening the small closet door, as they talked through her legal argument, opening and closing his desk drawers only to give her a highlighter. He’d paused once at his copier, staring down at something.
Only then did she realize his copier had a page counter. Her heart sank as that hadn’t occurred to her earlier, but surely he didn’t track his copies that closely. His smile seemed a bit fixed when he turned toward her, but she circled one of the cases she was referencing in her notes and asked a question. He answered calmly and she dismissed her concern that he knew she’d been snooping.
Now, in her apartment, she pulled the organization papers from her bag and read them carefully. There it was in black-and-white: Thomas Kinnard, managing member through a chain of several LLCs. When she was sure she held the most incriminating evidence linking him to the Del Mar Corporation, she hesitated, wondering if she should leave the docs out or give them immediately to Chad. But since she didn’t know where he was, it was probably smarter to show them to Riley first; she knew Riley would go through the proper evidence management.
She went to the map on her wall and lifted the edge. Behind it was a small safe where she kept her spare cash. Strippers dealt mainly in cash, and she hadn’t trusted banks since she’d learned in law school all the shenanigans they used to siphon off other people’s money. She put the incorporation papers inside and locked the safe, carefully smoothing the map back in place.
Now she only had to share the news with Chad. She couldn’t wait to see the look on his face. But would he be strong enough and honest enough to admit it when he was wrong? And where was he, anyway?
Hours later after she’d bathed and decided to nap before her shift, Jasmine sat up in bed yawning, automatically reaching for Chad, hoping he’d returned, but his side was cold. She was alone. She was sure he was off working his leads after their dalliance. For a second, she had to battle back tears, knowing that despite the explosive sexual chemistry between them, she’d always be only a dalliance to him. But she couldn’t think about that now. She tilted her head, listening.
What had awakened her? She rubbed her eyes and quickly stepped into a skirt and blouse, listening tensely. There, the sound of books being tossed to the floor. Her heart skipped a beat. She went to her closet to get the baseball bat she kept for self-defense and tiptoed to her door. She opened it a crack and peeked outside. Three men, efficiently searching her living room and not even trying to be quiet, which didn’t bode well for her. Her car was outside; they had to know she was here. She’d glimpsed the broken lock in the front door.
She closed the door, desperately wondering what to do. Her cell phone was next to the bed, but she had a feeling it was far too late to call 911, and no telling where Chad was. She’d taken self-defense classes and thought she could handle maybe one man, perhaps two, but certainly not three.
Quietly, knowing it wouldn’t deter them long, she latched the flimsy bedroom door lock and went to the second-story window. It dropped onto an awning that she hoped would take her weight. Slipping the cell phone and her small wallet into her skirt pocket, she was struggling with the stubborn window latch when her door crashed inward under one kick. She raised the bat for leverage and spread her feet for stability.
When Montoya entered behind the first man, she was glad she had the bat, but with a sinking feeling, she knew it probably wouldn’t do her much good. This guy was bad news. “You. Did Thomas send you?”
“Hola, chica,” came the deep Lat
ino voice she’d heard a few times before. “Where’s your boyfriend?”
The other two guys approached, pinning her in from opposite sides. Jasmine swung the bat, connecting with an outstretched hand, but it was a glancing blow. As the man flinched away, howling, he held his hand against his chest and snicked open a switchblade with his free hand, but Montoya shook his head.
The other guy grabbed the bat with both hands and when she struggled to hold on, kicking and biting, he slapped her. Her head snapped around and her grip loosened. He snatched the bat away and flung it against her dresser. It broke the mirror. They pulled her, still struggling, into the living room. She looked around and saw they’d just begun to toss her place. She didn’t have much of value outside the vault, which luckily they hadn’t found, but then she saw Chad’s clothes were scattered and his extra pair of boots had been flung on opposite sides of the room. The ringleader shook her slightly. “Where’s the Ranger?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Why should I? He’s not my boyfriend.”
“No?” That cold black stare appraised the rumpled sheets on the bed, which were visible through the open bedroom door. “How is it they say in Texas? All hat and no cattle.” The leader grabbed his crotch. “I’ve seen you dance. I’m a bull, puta. You will see.”
And just as she drew breath to scream, Jasmine felt her lips smashed into her teeth by a brutal hand. She was dragged, still kicking and her cries for help garbled against a tough palm, toward the door, where the third guy taped her mouth with duct tape.
CHAPTER 15
Chad paced the parking lot, waiting for the APB to yield a sighting of the navy big rig. Their title search had revealed two locations owned by the same LLC that had registered the truck. Nothing under the name of the Del Mar Corporation, which didn’t surprise Chad. Only problem was, the two warehouses were in opposite directions, one in a remote area farther out the I-10 near a town called Indio, and the other north toward Las Vegas.
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