No Escape

by Heather Lowell

  “They don’t come on duty until after midnight, ma’am,” the security guard told her.

  “Are you sure? No one comes in earlier?” Tessa asked.

  “No, ma’am. The D.A.’s office and some of the others complained about being disturbed by the cleaning crews when the employees were working late, so now none of the janitors comes in until after midnight.”

  Tessa clenched her hands around her black leather briefcase, which now held her only copies of the information pertaining to Kelly Martin’s rape investigation.

  As she walked to her car, she tried to imagine if Sledge Aiken would have the guts to pay a man to dress in a janitor’s uniform and go through her desk. And what he hoped to achieve by that act.

  Because all he’d really done was put Tessa on alert. And make her more determined than before to see Aiken in an orange prison jumpsuit.

  Chapter 14

  Santa Monica, California

  Tuesday morning, March 2

  Tessa heard a loud, persistent noise and rolled over with a groan. She swatted at her alarm clock, then squinted at the time. Six. But she hadn’t set the alarm that early—in fact, she hadn’t gotten to sleep until well after two. She frowned in confusion as the noise started again.

  Phone.

  Who the hell was calling her number—twice—at this un-godly hour? She sat upright, thinking abruptly of Kelly.

  “Hello?” Her voice was husky from sleep.

  “This is Luke Novak. I was wondering if you would have breakfast with me before going in to work. I have something important to discuss with you.”

  “What?” Tessa asked. She wasn’t anyone’s idea of a morning person, and was having trouble getting her brain working after only a couple hours of fitful sleep last night.

  “I have information about Kelly Martin that I think you will find interesting. I’d like to discuss the case further with you,” Luke repeated patiently.

  “Uhh—”

  “Say ‘yes,’ Tessa.”

  “Yes, Tessa.”

  He chuckled. “Then I’ll meet you in two hours at that little coffee shop by the courthouse. The place with the great buckwheat pancakes.”

  Tessa mumbled a reply, then hung up the phone and dragged herself into the shower. She turned the water on full cold and stood shivering under its stream, trying to wake up her body, if not her brain.

  She’d been up late copying Kelly’s medical files, rape kit report, and the details of the investigation to date. She’d also scanned Kelly’s pictures into her home computer, though she knew that was of limited use. Still, it would have to do until she could get the photos professionally duplicated. That way, if any more of Kelly’s information went missing, they’d have a backup copy stored in a safe place.

  Which did not include her office at work. The more she thought about last night, the more she saw it as a positive thing that someone had rifled through her papers—it showed she was making someone very nervous.

  Good. That meant she was digging in the right place.

  Luke ordered a pot of coffee and sat back in the corner of the vinyl booth to wait for Tessa’s arrival. He whistled a quiet tune and tapped his fingers in time on the table. An elderly woman seated across the aisle caught the action and smiled. He nodded and smiled back.

  Not wanting to analyze too closely why he’d been looking forward to this meeting, Luke took out his notebook to review the information he had gathered since speaking to Paul Jacobi on Sunday. When a bell jingled daintily over the front door, he looked up to see Tessa removing her sunglasses. She saw him and hesitated, just briefly, before making her way to the booth.

  As she got closer, Luke saw the deep circles under her blue-gray eyes. Her face was a little paler than he remembered, too. And there was a tightness to the way she carried herself that told him she was both tired and stressed.

  Not that it made any difference in her efficient walk and the swing of her nicely curved hips. It just showed in the set of her shoulders and the grip she had on her black briefcase. Something was gnawing at her.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like hell. Hot date last night?” Luke asked.

  “Is there a right way to take that comment? Besides, you’re the one who dragged me out of bed at the crack of dawn. What do you want?” Tessa was never at her best before morning coffee, which she hadn’t had time to make before leaving this morning. L.A. commuters had paid the price on her way to the coffee shop and now she was happy to turn her temper on Luke Novak.

  “Efficient and to the point, as always. That’s what I like about you, Swiss.” Luke pushed a cup across the table to her, then motioned to the carafe of coffee at the end of the table.

  “I like it, too. So why don’t you get to the point,” Tessa said, snatching the carafe and pouring liquid caffeine into her cup. She could almost feel the dull headache behind her eyes easing its grip as she took a huge gulp.

  “You’re grumpy in the mornings—that’s so cute.” Luke grinned when she scowled at him. “All right, enough teasing. And I’ll use short sentences with small words so you can follow. I’ve looked further into Kelly’s story, and it seems like both of you could use some help.”

  Surprised, Tessa lowered her cup to the table with a thump. “Why did you look into Kelly? How was it possibly any of your business, since you turned the case down because you didn’t believe me?”

  “It’s not that I didn’t believe you—”

  “But you didn’t believe Kelly, I know,” Tessa finished. “What’s changed?”

  “I’d like to help you, but I can’t do that if you’re grilling me. Do you want to argue about bad first impressions, or do you want to prosecute the rich jock who raped an eighteen-year-old girl in his Hollywood Hills home?”

  Tessa raised her eyebrows as she took another sip of coffee. Apparently Luke Novak had done enough investigative work to realize that Sledge Aiken was a real loser, one who was more than capable of the crime of which he’d been accused.

  “So now you believe us. Why?” Tessa asked.

  “I don’t believe the whole story.”

  “At which point do you get lost?”

  “I believe the starstruck innocent making her way to Hollywood bit,” Luke said. “I get lost at the point where she leaves the bus station.”

  “So you don’t think this girl could be staying with her cousin while she tries to get a recording contract, then meets up with the rich jock who attacks her?”

  “See, that’s the first problem. Do you know the name of the person who lives with Kelly—her cousin, right?”

  “His name is Jerry,” Tessa replied.

  “Jerry Kravitz, to be precise. And I was interested to discover he doesn’t have any known cousins, nor do his parents have any siblings that I’ve been able to find. So much for lie number one,” Luke said.

  “Are there more than one?”

  “I’ll say. Like the credit card numbers that Kelly had. I ran them to see what popped up.”

  “How did you do that? I didn’t give you that information,” Tessa said. “You son of a bitch—were you the one who searched my office last night?”

  “Back up a sec. Someone tossed your office?”

  Tessa looked into Luke’s eyes to measure whether he was telling the truth. All she saw was concern and anger, along with sincerity. Based on that, and his sterling reputation in the state, she figured she could relax.

  “So maybe it wasn’t you,” she said. “But someone dressed up as the building janitor and rifled through the files on my desk last night.”

  “Was anything important taken?” Luke asked.

  “No, just the sheet of paper with the photocopies of the credit cards we found in Kelly’s bag. Everything else was in file folders locked away in my credenza. I think I scared the guy away when I came back to my office unexpectedly after a late dinner,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t mean to doubt your story. But how do you know the janitor didn’t just kn
ock stuff off your desk and put it back in the wrong order?”

  She explained about her discussion with the security guard, and the fact that no cleaning staff came on duty until much later, then told him about Sledge Aiken’s veiled threat about files disappearing. “Unfortunately, I can’t prove anything. I’m just looking at it as a relatively cheap lesson about keeping irreplaceable files on my person instead of leaving them at the office.”

  That wasn’t how Luke was looking at it. To him, it meant that the players involved in this case were serious enough that they were engaging in surveillance of an officer of the court to track her movements. And they also weren’t above risky behavior to get information they wanted.

  “I don’t like this,” Luke said.

  “I’m not fond of it, either. But there’s next to nothing I can do except make sure it doesn’t happen again. Anyway, if you didn’t take the papers from my office, how were you able to look up the credit accounts in question?”

  “I have a good memory. And I’m on retainer with several of the local banks and major credit card companies, so I have access to their databases. All I had to do was run the names and pull recent credit card activity.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing too wild. Some clothes, online purchases, and a lot of charges at a place called Club Red. Most of the cards had a balance of several thousand dollars on them, not enough to set off alarm bells. But there aren’t any restaurant charges on the cards, even though Kelly said they were given to her by the management at the restaurant where she works. So where did she get the cards?”

  Tessa sat back as she turned the new information around in her mind. “It’s still possible Kelly could be telling the truth about these men having left their cards at a restaurant—maybe the charges just haven’t appeared on the cards yet.”

  “I suppose anything is possible,” Luke conceded. “But I don’t think that’s all that was going on with those cards. And I think you know I’m right. So why are you making up lame excuses for this kid?”

  Tessa poured a third cup of coffee—it was going to be that kind of day.

  The kicker was that she believed Novak, not Kelly. At least with respect to the credit cards, and staying with her “cousin” Jerry Kravitz. She’d always felt something was off with a cousin who would let Kelly go out with Sledge Aiken, then let the girl be abused while she was living under his roof. She just hadn’t pushed Kelly hard enough for answers, probably because she had known she wouldn’t like them.

  “How did you find all this out?” she asked Luke. “That’s a lot of threads to unravel in a short period of time.”

  “To start, I sent MacBeth to visit Sledge Aiken at his favorite sushi bar in Hollywood. Apparently, he always heads over there when he gets back from out-of-town trips. So MacBeth hung out at the bar in his favorite undercover disguise—bleached blond, trust fund frat boy. On the second night, he was able to talk to our favorite football player. He blew MacBeth off—got really angry, actually.”

  Tessa winced, thinking of her boss’s warning to stay away from the football player and not irritate him further until they had a stronger case against him.

  “Don’t worry, there’s no way MacBeth can be traced back to you. He’s a damned chameleon. But Aiken said something important as he was leaving,” Luke continued.

  “What?” Tessa asked.

  “He said that whatever he got from Kelly was ‘bought and paid for,’ and MacBeth should ask Jerry if he didn’t believe it. Even gave him a phone number and said Jerry would clear up everything. I put that information together with the name Jerry Kravitz—who, by the way, popped as the owner of the pager Kelly carries. It turns out he’s also the owner of the home where we think Kelly could have been staying. The address for the phone number Sledge gave to MacBeth and the address on the pager records match. Both belong to Kravitz.”

  “Where did you find out about the pager? And how did you get Jerry’s full name? Kelly wouldn’t even tell it to me.”

  “When you came to my office, you had that photocopied sheet of the credit cards found in Kelly’s purse. You also had a phone number written across the bottom of the sheet, with the initial “K” next to it. It didn’t take much to trace that number back to a pager and the person who paid for it—Jerry Kravitz.”

  “You make it sound like an oversight that I didn’t do the same.”

  “No, I figure you just hadn’t gotten around to pushing Kelly for that type of information yet because you were trying to build a trusting relationship with her.”

  “Yes. But I also have to follow procedures. I can’t just go digging into a private citizen’s life without due cause—I’ve got to obey the rules,” Tessa said.

  “I know you do,” said Luke. “That’s why I’m a good person to have on the case. I have a freedom of movement that you don’t. And I’m able to do things like talk to Jerry Kravitz without causing a stir.”

  “You actually talked to Kelly’s cousin? Or whatever he is?” Tessa asked.

  “MacBeth did, while still in his disguise. He was waiting for Jerry to get home, and had a chance to talk to some of the neighbors first. They said they started seeing a girl matching Kelly’s description about a month ago, but didn’t know much about her. She stayed in during the day and mostly went out at night.”

  “Sledge Aiken’s neighbors also started seeing Kelly come to his house about a month ago. What’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know. MacBeth tried to question Jerry when he arrived after midnight, but he was less than helpful. He got combative, talked about interference in private lives, and wanted to know where Kelly was.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a nice person,” Tessa said.

  “He’s not. MacBeth described him as sleazy and rude, and said that as he left Kravitz was calling Kelly all kinds of names. He was very angry at the way Kelly is disrupting his life and business, and he wants her back.”

  “I wonder if he’s the one who hit Kelly,” Tessa said. She explained to Luke about the girl’s facial injuries. “Are you sure they’re not cousins? I’ve noticed in my line of work that a lot of families treat each other worse than perfect strangers.”

  “There’s no indication of any relatives from a basic background check of Jerry Kravitz’s records. He’s an only child, and both of his parents were as well,” Luke said.

  “Then why would a really sweet eighteen-year-old girl be staying with him? I mean, if he was her boyfriend, wouldn’t Kelly have just said that?”

  “Like I said, she seems to be lying about a lot of things.”

  “But not everything. We did a polygraph, and she passed most of the tough questions—she was raped, and Sledge Aiken was the one who did it.”

  “What was she lying about?” Luke asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I’m going to find out.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “You can’t,” Tessa said. “The D.A. can’t just bring in a private investigator and bypass the police completely. There are rules and procedures governing this type of case.”

  “Don’t forget, I’m on retainer with a third party that’s involved—the credit card companies. As far as I’m concerned, talking to Kelly is the first step to investigating a potential fraud case. There’s no way I can look into that crime without understanding who Kelly is and what she’s been up to.”

  “But I haven’t filed any fraud charges, so there’s nothing to investigate. I don’t need your help.”

  Luke shrugged and tried to look apologetic. “Unfortunately for you, I know about the credit card irregularities. As a paid contractor for the banks, I’m obligated to pursue this aspect of the case—with or without your help. I just thought it would be best if we could work together instead of tripping all over each other. I have a feeling whatever I uncover with respect to the credit cards will be related to what happened to Kelly. I think she’s a young kid in over her head.”

  It seemed fairly logical to Tessa. Still, she was surpri
sed at the amount of information Luke had been able to uncover in a few short days on the case. Police channels took so long, and they had barely scratched the surface in more than a week. In a few days, Luke and his man had managed to turn up a connection between Sledge Aiken and the man with whom Kelly had been staying—information that could take the case in a whole new direction.

  She was beginning to think it might be worthwhile to have Luke around to work on the case, as long as he could be controlled.

  “Can any of your information be used for my investigation?” Tessa asked.

  “I don’t think we have anything for the courts yet, but it does let us know we’re moving in the right direction. When the victim is telling lies, that’s kind of tough to figure out.”

  “Look, I don’t care whether Kelly’s story has holes in it or not. I said I’d take her case. I gave her my word. I’m not going to abandon her just because things are getting tough,” Tessa said.

  Luke heard loud and clear the echo of pain from Tessa’s childhood, which was going to make things difficult. But part of the job he’d agreed to with Paul Jacobi was to ensure that those emotional scars didn’t cloud Tessa’s judgment today.

  “If you’d look at these pictures, you’ll see that Kelly really was being abused,” Tessa said, sensing his hesitation. She took out a file and let Luke read through the emergency room doctor’s findings. She watched his face turn hard as he flipped through the Polaroid photos cataloging Kelly’s bruises and injuries.

  “Dammit. You don’t have any DNA evidence, or real physical signs of rape. The only sure way to convict is to get Aiken to plead guilty or find a witness to corroborate Kelly’s story.” Luke shook his head. “I don’t see that happening. Maybe we can try to squeeze ‘Cousin’ Jerry for information on what happened, but…”

  “The police are already looking into Kelly’s background and so forth. I’ve struck out with the judge on getting a restraining order, and am no closer to pressing charges against Aiken than I was a week ago. You’re the investigator—where do you recommend we start?” Tessa asked.