Untraceable

by Laura Griffin

  “Some sort of probate issue,” she said. “Told me he was handling Melanie’s father’s estate. That she just inherited property in west Texas.”

  “You think he’s legit?”

  “Seemed to be.” Alex remembered the way he’d handled his cowboy hat, removing it indoors and placing it brim up on the table. “I checked him out. He’s registered with the state bar. And Martindale-Hubbell lists him as a partner with a firm out in Midland.”

  Nathan reached for the shoes sitting beside his closet. He sat down on the bed beside her, and the mattress sank. “What about the inheritance?” he asked.

  “State has a record of a Midland County man by the name of James Bess passing away several weeks ago. Melanie never told me much about her family, except that she wasn’t on good terms with them. It seems to fit.”

  He propped his foot on his knee and tied his shoe. “So that’s your big lead? A lawyer who is who he says he is?” He stood up and reached for the belt coiled on the dresser, right beside his Glock.

  “That wasn’t all I did today.”

  “What else did you do?” He quickly put on his belt and threaded it through his holster.

  “I followed Coghan.”

  His hands stilled on the buckle. He stood there, watching her, and the scowl on his face would have been scary, even without the bruise.

  “What?” she asked.

  “It ever occur to you that a cop might just notice you tailing him around all day?”

  “I did it from a safe distance.” She omitted the part about breaking into the man’s truck to plant a GPS she could track with her cell phone.

  Shaking his head, he finished buckling and adjusted his gun. “And what’d you find out?”

  “He made some weird pit stops.”

  “How do you mean, ‘weird’?”

  “Well, he’s a narcotics cop, right? Head of some task force?”

  “Yeah.” He rested his hands on his hips.

  “So… I’d expect him to spend his time at the police station,” she said. “Or maybe in the really crime-infested neighborhoods, doing drug raids and stuff.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He spent half his day over in Captain’s Point. In his personal vehicle.”

  Nathan muttered something she couldn’t hear as he walked out of the bedroom.

  She followed him. “Don’t you think that’s a little upscale? I mean, Captain’s Point isn’t exactly a hive of nefarious activity.”

  Nathan went into the kitchen and jerked open the fridge. He grabbed two cans of Red Bull and handed one to Alex. This was dinner, apparently.

  He leaned back against the counter and popped open his can. “I’m not really following how Coghan spending the day in Captain’s Point means he murdered his wife.”

  “It doesn’t. I just think it was odd. Don’t you?”

  “I think your theory’s odd.” He took a long swig, then set the can down on the counter. “Not only that, I think you’re underestimating who you’re dealing with. You don’t think Coghan’s eventually going to notice you tailing him around town? He probably already knows his wife hired you just before she left. You’re aware of that, right?”

  “So?”

  “So the guy’s probably pissed off.” He glanced at his watch and grabbed his car keys off the counter. “I have to go now.” He stepped closer and gazed down at her. “We can talk about this again tomorrow, but leave Coghan alone, okay?”

  “I haven’t told you the best part yet.” Alex pulled a clear plastic bag from her back pocket and handed it to him.

  His dark brows knitted together. “What’s this?”

  “An earphone,” she said. “Like, for an iPod. I found it at the house last night, on the floor. Then everything went sideways, and I forgot about it until I was getting dressed this morning. It was in my pocket.”

  Nathan held the bag up and studied the white plastic earbud.

  “You see that brown stuff on there?” Alex pointed at the bottom part, just above where it looked like the wire had been cut. “I think it’s blood.”

  Nathan shot her a glare and handed back the bag. “Just what are you planning to do with this?”

  “We can have it tested, try and find out who the blood belongs to.”

  Nathan shook his head and looked away.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t some TV show, Alex. I can’t just order up a DNA test whenever I feel like it.”

  “But this is important evidence.” She held up the bag again. “Look at that and tell me you don’t think that’s blood on there.”

  He shrugged. “Sure, maybe, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means we have evidence,” Alex protested. “If it’s Melanie’s blood, it proves something violent happened to her just before that fire. Or maybe the blood might belong to her killer.”

  “Alex.” He gazed down at her again, and she bristled at the condescending tone of his voice. “Do you have any idea how backlogged our crime lab is? DNA tests are time-consuming as hell, not to mention expensive. Typically we don’t even do them unless we’ve got a suspect charged and on his way to trial.”

  Alex’s stomach twisted with disappointment. She wasn’t sure if it was what he was saying or how he was saying it that bothered her more.

  “You’re telling me you won’t do this,” she said. “You won’t even consider what this evidence could mean—”

  “It’s not evidence!” he snapped. “Alex, you broke into some house, you picked up someone’s personal property, you removed it from a supposed crime scene—”

  “It is a crime scene. You said it was arson—”

  “Now you want me to send it to the lab and ask for a DNA test? And then what? It doesn’t matter whose blood it is, if it even is blood. There’s no chain of custody. The evidentiary value of it is zip.”

  She stepped back, stung by the harshness of his words. He wasn’t even willing to consider the fact that she’d found something important. He was too caught up in all the standard procedures.

  She gazed down at the bag in her hand, at the brown smudge on the cord. Anyone could see it was blood. What if Melanie never turned up and this was the only evidence out there that something bad had happened to her?

  “Fine.” She shoved the bag back into her pocket. “If you won’t investigate this case, then I will.”

  She handed back the can of Red Bull. “Thanks for dinner,” she said, and strode for the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The sky was still dark and likely to stay that way for another half hour when Alex pulled into the almost-empty parking lot. Nathan watched her swerve around a pothole before sliding into a space beside his Mustang. She got out of her car and slammed the door.

  “Morning, sunshine,” he said.

  She eyed him grumpily over the roof of her Saturn. “Is this place even open yet?”

  “It will be when we’re done.”

  “Done what?”

  He walked over to where she stood, hands on hips, scowling at him in the drizzle. He glanced at her feet and saw that she’d followed the directions he’d given her over the phone twenty minutes ago.

  “You wore your Nikes,” he observed.

  “You can’t be serious about that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s raining. And who in the world exercises at this hour?”

  “It’s barely sprinkling.” He smiled. “Don’t be a wuss.”

  “I’m absolutely a wuss. I need coffee.” She glanced longingly over her shoulder at the café. A light had come on and someone was taking down chairs, but the sign still said CLOSED.

  “Thirty minutes.” He draped an arm over her shoulder and steered her toward the lakefront trail. “Then we’ll have breakfast and talk over your case.”

  She thrust her chin out.

  “I’ll go easy on you,” he added. “Four miles, max.”

  She snorted and shook off his arm. But then she pulled her ankle back behind her and
started stretching her quadriceps. “You’ll be lucky to get a mile out of me. I haven’t jogged in ages.”

  They waited for a break in traffic, then crossed Lake Austin Boulevard. When they reached the sidewalk, he broke into a trot. She joined him soon enough, and he shortened his stride so she could keep up. She was a small woman. Petite, some would even say. But Nathan never thought of her that way, probably because of the force of her personality.

  “How do you stay in shape?” he asked, as they veered off the paved sidewalk to the gravel path that hugged the shoreline.

  “What makes you think I’m in shape?”

  “You look it. And you have the gear, too, so you must do something.”

  “I have all kinds of gear,” she said. “You never know when you’re going to need to tail someone to the gym.”

  But Nathan wasn’t buying it. She was barely breathing hard, and they were moving at a good clip. He increased his stride and led her onto the concrete pedestrian bridge. Cyclists blew past them. Early morning traffic whooshed back and forth on the car bridge just above. On the other side, they veered left onto the trail that paralleled the lake’s south side. Traffic was sparse today. Looked like the cool, damp weather was keeping everyone snug in their beds at home. He glanced at Alex.

  “How’d your interview go?” she asked, and he caught an edge in her voice. Or maybe he’d imagined it.

  “Good.”

  “You get your confession?”

  He hadn’t imagined it.

  “Yeah.” He looked over again, but her face was unreadable. He guessed she was still pissy about their canceled dinner plans. Maybe he should feel smug about that.

  Or maybe he should have his head examined. Alex Lovell wasn’t the type to sit around pining for a man to go to dinner with her.

  Hell, for all he knew, she already had a boyfriend. He should probably just ask her.

  “How’s business?” he asked instead.

  “Busy,” she said. “Lots of insurance work lately with the economy down like this. No one wants to pay anybody.”

  “Including you?”

  She sniffed. “I get my bills paid.”

  He’d bet she did. She was tough.

  Except when it came to Melanie Coghan.

  “How about you?” She shot ahead of him to squeeze past an overhanging tree limb. When he reached her side again, he noticed she’d picked up the pace.

  “Busy.”

  “I keep reading about gang shootings in the paper.”

  “Some of that,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of turf wars, drug deals gone bad. Plus the regular ration of crap.”

  “City’s expanding,” she said.

  But that wasn’t all there was to it. Even given the swelling population, crime was on the rise, gangs were making inroads, the murder rate had spiked. APD was hiring new recruits as fast as they could get them, but that didn’t seem to help. There weren’t enough old guys like himself. Not that thirty-eight was old, necessarily, but they needed more experience out there. Anyone with more than five minutes on the job was stretched thin.

  Sure, there were good days—the collars, the confessions. The feeling of deep satisfaction when someone actually went to trial and got put away. But there was the bullshit, too—the never-ending paperwork, the plea bargains, the perps who went to jail, then got spit right back out onto the same streets to pull the same shit Nathan had nailed them for the first time. With every new arrest, Nathan was feeling like he was winning the battle but losing the war.

  By the time they reached the second pedestrian bridge, his T-shirt was soaked through, and not with rain. Alex was in the lead now. He’d told her four miles, and she seemed to be holding him to it. The fact that she knew the trail told him she wasn’t as much of a stranger to exercise as she let on.

  Another fifteen minutes, and they were back in the parking lot. Nathan untied his car key from his shorts and unlocked the Mustang. He tossed Alex a white towel from the duffel he kept in the backseat. Then he stripped off his wet T-shirt and pulled on a dry one. He caught Alex checking out his chest as she blotted her face, but she quickly looked away.

  “They’re half full already,” she said.

  “Best pancakes in town.”

  “Really?” She sounded surprised. “It looks like a dive.”

  “It is.”

  Alex tossed back his towel. He locked his car and led her into the restaurant, where the hostess he knew gave them a booth in the back corner, which was his preferred spot.

  Alex slid in across from him, and he felt a warm shot of lust. Her brown eyes were bright and alert now, and her cheeks were pink with all that freshly oxygenated blood. Just like the other night, he could see the shape of her breasts through her damp T-shirt.

  “Y’all ready to order?”

  He snapped his attention to the waitress.

  “Pecan pancakes, link sausage, orange juice, and coffee,” Alex said.

  “Whole wheat or buttermilk?”

  Alex made a face. “Buttermilk. Definitely.”

  “I’ll have the same,” Nathan said.

  When the waitress left, he looked at Alex. “I’ve got some questions for you before I can really dig in on this thing.”

  She leaned back in the booth. “Shoot.”

  “I need to know the exact day Melanie left town and the exact day you last heard from her, if you can remember.”

  “October fifth, January third.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. I just reconstructed the timeline from phone records.”

  “Okay, and where’d you move her?”

  “I told you,” she said. “Florida.”

  “Whereabouts, exactly?”

  “Orlando.”

  He watched her, looking for the telltale signs that she was lying. Nathan was good at gaining people’s trust. And he knew that, for whatever reason, he hadn’t fully gained Alex’s.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’re being straight with me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know. Why wouldn’t you?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “I spent about an hour on your case yesterday. Airline has a record of Coghan heading up to Portland the weekend of November fifth.”

  “So?”

  “And an apartment locator in Salem ran a credit check on Melanie on October eighteenth. A cable company in Salem did the same for her a week later. I’m guessing if I took the trouble to look, I’d find some ATM debits in Oregon right about that time, too.”

  “You would,” Alex said.

  “But she was in Florida.”

  She arched her eyebrows and looked at him impatiently.

  “Just making sure.” He leaned back and watched her. She was good. Thorough. She’d been just as good and just as thorough on the last case he’d seen her work, the case of Courtney Glass, who now happened to be married to Nathan’s partner. Courtney had gone to Alex last fall when she was flat broke, neck deep in trouble, and looking to disappear. Alex had helped her. Both Hodges and Nathan had searched high and low for Courtney but had turned up nothing but dead ends. If Courtney hadn’t slipped up, she might have stayed lost forever.

  The coffee came, followed by two plates heaped with steaming pancakes. Nathan welcomed the distraction. He didn’t much like remembering Courtney’s case. He particularly didn’t like how it ended with Nathan inadvertently leading a hired gun straight to Alex’s door. The fucker had been looking for Courtney, and thought Alex would give up her client’s whereabouts after a good beating.

  “Coghan’s trip up to Portland,” Alex said now as she poured syrup over her pancakes. “We can assume he was looking for Melanie?”

  The scar above her lip moved as she talked, and Nathan watched it, feeling the familiar anger. He pictured her in her office, all cut up and bruised, and his gut tightened.

  “Nathan?”

  “I never assume anything. I’ll have to check it out.”


  “I also planted some bogus ATM transactions in northern California, just after she left.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Friends in the area,” she said. “I sent a couple of them Melanie’s ATM card. Told them to make a withdrawal, FedEx the card back, then go have a drink on Melanie for their trouble. I wanted to make it look like she was moving around the region, looking for a place to settle.”

  She gulped down some orange juice, and he watched her, wondering where she’d picked up her trade. This niche business of hers was like a civilian-run witness-protection program. And despite the complexities involved, she seemed to have a handle on everything.

  “Did Coghan have any travel to California?” she asked. “Maybe he rented a car or dropped one off?”

  “I didn’t see anything. But like I said, haven’t spent a lot of time yet.”

  “Let me know what you find out.”

  “What is it with you and these basket-case women, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, if business is good, why take all these crap cases? They’re dangerous. And they don’t pay.”

  She shrugged. “Not everything’s about profit.”

  “I thought you were a businesswoman.”

  “I am. My insurance cases pay me nicely.”

  He studied her face, trying to see past the attitude. Finally, he shook his head. “I don’t get you.”

  She leaned closer, and he caught the gleam in her eyes. He’d struck a chord.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “When you get called to the scene of some murdered woman, who’s the first person you look for?”

  “Husband or boyfriend.”

  She nodded. “And if the victim was in an abusive relationship, odds are even higher that’s who killed her. Some women try and get out, but that’s when they’re in the most danger. These guys don’t exactly take rejection well.”

  “So you step into the middle. You have any idea how reckless that is?”

  “Not reckless,” she said. “Carefully calculated. My clients follow my advice, they get free.”

  “So what happened with Melanie?”

  She looked away. “I’m not sure. I thought she understood the danger of coming back here. I can’t figure out why she did.”