by John A. Daly
“Are you going to make us guess on the rest of that story, Martinez?” asked Redick.
The prisoner’s lower lip trembled. He used the back of his arm to wipe away the dampness from his face.
“Alvar Montoya killed him,” said Lumbergh. “Didn’t he?”
Martinez snarled and lunged forward, latching his hand onto the bars in front of him and showing his teeth. “Right in front of me, Chief. September thirteenth, 1993. He beat my father to death, right there in our living room, and I just stood there and watched. I couldn’t move! I didn’t do a fucking thing!”
Lumbergh turned to Redick, who raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment.
Martinez continued. “All my father was guilty of was selling a half-dozen joints on Montoya’s turf. He was just trying to make a living to feed his family! He was just trying to put food on our table.”
His chest rose up and fell steadily while the rest of him remained still. His eyes were wild and irrational.
“Before he turned to leave, he looked at me . . . and he smiled. That bastard smiled with his those big yellow teeth of his! ‘Marranito,’ he said. When my mother came home, she found me kneeling in my father’s blood beside him.”
A grimace distorted Redick’s face. “Then why in the hell have you been carrying on all this shit with the chief and his family? He killed the man who killed your father, for God’s sake!”
“No he didn’t!” Martinez screamed out in primal fury. His face was red and twisted. He grabbed onto the bars before him and slammed his head into the steel. Four or five times his skull rattled the cage before blood from the earlier wound on his head began pouring again. “He was the same child that I was that day! The same baby pig! He didn’t kill Montoya. His Indian friend did! My mother called me a coward for not trying to stop the man who was murdering my father, but you were no better than me. You were worse! You took the credit for what a better man did—the man who saved your ass!”
Lumbergh could feel Redick’s confused gaze bearing down on him from behind. He knew he had some explaining to do, but that was the least of his worries at that very moment.
Blood drained down Martinez’s face between his eyes before streaming to either side of his nose. When it reached his mouth, he continued. “I wanted to see for myself what you did when you faced the terror of another Montoya coming to hunt you down. I wanted to see if you would be the same sniveling coward that you were that day. You did just what I thought you’d do; you had Oldhorse hover over you like some parent protecting his child from monsters underneath his bed!”
The blood that had been boiling under Lumbergh’s skin finally erupted. He launched forward and reached through the cell’s bars, latched onto Martinez’s head and yanked it hard into the steel. Martinez wailed in pain. Lumbergh kept up the pressure, trying to defy physics by attempting to pull the man’s head through the bars with nothing but brute force.
Redick moved to intervene.
“Stand down!” Lumbergh snapped at him. “I swear to God, Richard, don’t you put your hands on me right now!”
The derangement in Lumbergh’s eyes kept Redick at bay for the moment.
Lumbergh knew the truce wouldn’t last long. His head spun back to Martinez. “That’s why you planted a bomb in Oldhorse’s house? You were going to kill him so he couldn’t help me take down some sick fuck that’s not even after me?” he yelled. “All because I didn’t live up to some superhero expectation you’ve been carrying around in that fucked up head of yours?”
Martinez screamed in pain at the bars pressed up against his temples. After a lot of squirming, he finally managed to jerk his head loose from Lumbergh’s one-handed grip. His eyes bulged and his hands clutched the sides of his head.
“I don’t give a shit what you think of me, Martinez,” Lumbergh growled, his jaw locked as he glared at the intern. “All I care about is getting my brother-in-law back. You saw what happened to him. Your bullshit game is over. You’re going to prison. If you want to catch any kind of break on the things you’ve done, you need to start talking! Now!”
Martinez fell to his knees, erupting into a hideous cackle that seemed to switch between laughter and sobbing. “The red fox has him now, Chief,” he blathered. “She brought him back to her den.”
Lumbergh leaned forward, his strained eyes blinking. “What are you talking about? What red fox?”
“You’re the legend, Chief!” Martinez bellowed. “You figure it out!”
His head lifted up to face the overhead light fixture at the center of the room. He glared at it in wonderment like an infant enthralled with a mobile hanging over his bed. His lips moved, but only whispers and babble drifted out.
“Why were you at Sean’s house last night?” Lumbergh yelled. “What did you see?”
Martinez now appeared to be in a hypnotic state. His eyes no longer recognized Lumbergh. Instead, they were transfixed on the ceiling while gibberish continued to drop from his mouth.
Lumbergh swore loudly and made a beeline for a nearby desk. He grabbed a chain of keys from its top, sorting until he found the one for the cell. The moment he spun back around, he felt Redick’s hand wrapped around his wrist.
“I think we’ve already jeopardized this case enough, Gary,” he said with eyes burning a hole through the chief. “You’re not putting your hands on him again. Let’s get this back into some realm of the law.”
Lumbergh yanked his hand away. He glared at Redick, nearly choking on his own breath, fighting back the urge to shove him out of the way.
“Listen,” Redick began in a restrained tone. “We’ve got this guy on what he did to Oldhorse and your officer. We don’t want to screw that up. He poses no threat to anyone anymore. You’re safe. You’re wife’s safe. There’s no bogeyman out there with the last name of Montoya coming after either of you.”
Lumbergh winced in annoyance at Redick’s words, shaking his head but knowing deep inside that there was nothing amiss with the statement. “He knows what happened to Sean.”
“Maybe,” replied Redick. “But think about this for a minute.” He nudged Lumbergh into the hallway out of earshot from Martinez before he continued. “Think about this: When you take Montoya out of the equation, what are we left with? Some nut responsible for shooting your officer and blowing up your Indian friend. That’s awful, but that nut’s now in our custody. Whatever happened to Sean is totally unrelated.”
“Who cares if it’s unrelated?” Lumbergh shot back, his face twisted in aggravation.
“Just hear me out. All we know about your brother-in-law is that something happened at his place, someone got hurt, and someone was taken out to a car. For all we know, a couple of his friends came over last night, they scuffled after having too much to drink, and then went somewhere else.”
“Sean doesn’t have any friends!” Lumbergh shouted, his fist clenched. “And he hasn’t had a drink in months. Someone broke through his back door, for God’s sake! These weren’t people who were friends with him.”
Redick held his hands out in front of him, trying to cool Lumbergh down. “Please listen to me,” he said calmly. “Could some people have broken in because Sean didn’t answer the door? Maybe they came over for a visit, saw hi
s car was there, and were worried that he wasn’t answering the door. Maybe they broke in and found him hurt and passed out so they took him to an emergency room.”
Lumbergh’s tilted face twisted in disbelief. “Why are you doing this, Richard? You know that’s not what happened. All of your investigative training and instincts tell you that’s not what happened.”
He recognized the disingenuousness in Redick’s changing demeanor as the sheriff tried to convince him that his mind had been poisoned by the fear of a man as dangerous as Lautaro Montoya on the loose and seeking vengeance. He listened to him suggest that there was likely a perfectly reasonable explanation for Sean’s disappearance that had nothing to do with foul play. When the sheriff reminded him that Sean hadn’t even been missing for twenty-four hours yet, Lumbergh could no longer silently entertain the display.
“I get it, Richard,” he said in a composed tone that seemed to catch Redick by surprise. “In that cell over there, you’ve got a tightly wrapped package—a bullet point on your resume. You’re not going to give that up for Sean Coleman—the town joke.”
Redick’s eyes narrowed angrily. “I’m not willing to let the man who injured and could have killed two men—two friends of yours—off the hook for what he did just because you refuse to do things by the book.”
Lumbergh shook his head. “But you were willing to give me some leeway when you thought it might lead to a bigger fish, weren’t you?”
“That’s different and you know it. And if Martinez is telling the truth, and you kept Oldhorse’s name out of the police file on the Alvar Montoya shooting, you’ve already got more than one problem on your hands.”
Before Lumbergh could respond, Redick held up his hand and continued.
“Sean’s house and Oldhorse’s house both fall outside of incorporated Winston. That means that I technically have jurisdiction over both crime scenes. I didn’t want to pull rank on you, Gary, especially with how much you’ve helped us with other cases—”
Lumbergh interrupted. “But you’re going to, aren’t you?”
After a moment, Redick answered. “Yes. Once my deputy returns, we’re taking Martinez over to County. We’ll get him processed and question him there. You’re too close to this. I suggest you concentrate on finding your brother-in-law. If Martinez knows anything about it, we’ll get it out of him.”
Without giving Lumbergh a chance to protest, Redick turned his back on him and made his way to the front door. He tugged at his radio, bringing it to his lips before disappearing out the front door to the porch.
“Sure you will,” Lumbergh muttered.
Chapter 20
Sean sat on the cement floor with his back flat against the freezer door. He hoped to hear movement from the outside room if anyone approached. His teeth sank into the peach he held. Its juices felt good sliding down his parched throat, as did the swig of water he took afterwards from one of the plastic bottles.
He thought hard about his captor’s reaction an hour earlier when he’d mentioned Norman. The name had clearly rattled the man, but the insinuation that Booth was in a position of power put him at ease. Sean wondered if Booth was merely a bit player in a large hierarchy.
He thought about what had happened back at his home. Jessica had been wired with a listening device. The man who had busted in had heard their conversation, probably from a hiding spot in the back of Jessica’s car. With Jessica wearing an earpiece, he had likely even been feeding her questions.
Maybe he was the big kahuna—not Booth. Maybe everything that had happened was about this man covering his own ass.
Sean stopped breathing when he thought he heard a faint sound from the other side of the freezer door, a couple of footsteps before things went silent again. He carefully pressed his ear to the door.
“Sean!” he heard his name called in a forceful whisper. It was a woman’s voice. “If you can hear me, don’t react or say anything. Just tap on the door. There’s a camera inside there. They can see you, even in the dark, but they can’t hear you.”
Though her purposely-muted voice made it difficult to tell for sure, he believed the voice belonged to Jessica. He hesitated for a moment, thinking about whether or not he should play along. In his current predicament, he decided he had little to lose. He nonchalantly used the back of his knuckles to give the door a rattle before taking another bite of his peach.
“Good,” he heard her say. Her voice was barely audible. “Listen Sean . . . I’m so sorry that all of this has happened. Believe me. None of it was supposed to happen. You were just trying to help me. I know that.”
He knew then that it was indeed Jessica. He felt his chest tighten. There was no way of telling if the apparent appeal for forgiveness was genuine or if it was just another deception being played out for an unknown purpose. She had already tried to manipulate him once. Maybe this was more of the same.
“I promise you. You’ll be set free of all of this,” she said. “We just need another day. Two tops. After that, they’ll blindfold you and drop you off somewhere just outside Winston. It will be like none of this ever happened.”
He silently scoffed at the notion, taking a second to ponder the identities of “they.” He placed his hands over his face and tilted his head forward, letting whoever might be watching him on a hidden night-vision camera believe that he was either resting or stressing over his fate.
“Where’s the camera?” he asked, just loud enough so that he was confident she could hear him. “I won’t let them see me talking.”
After a few moments, he heard reluctance in her voice as she responded. “The center fan of the evaporator.”
It’s what he had suspected. The room was too bare for it to be anywhere else.
He slowly stood up and raised his arms in the air, stretching his back and faking a yawn before turning his shoulders to the back of the room where the evaporator hung.
“We can talk now,” he said. “What the hell is going on, Jessica?”
Again, there was some hesitation before she responded. “I can’t tell you what’s happening. Just believe me when I tell you it’s for your own safety.”
“Believe you?” He placed the palms of his hands on the door and arched his back. “Why the hell should I believe anything you say? You lied to me about Carson, and then you showed up at my house to con me.” He shook his head before continuing. “You shocked the shit out of me, tossed me in a trunk, and you and your boyfriend brought me here! So tell me again: why should I trust you!”
He took a deep breath, forcing some composure so his anger wouldn’t be recognized by the watching eyes above.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she replied.
“Who gives a shit? How about answering the rest of what I just said?”
After twenty seconds crept by without a response, he called out Jessica’s name and thought he could hear her crying.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said in a more restrained tone.
“Sean,” she began through her sobbing, “have you ever had anyone in your life that you would do anything for? Someone who you cared about and loved so much that you would stop heaven and earth for them?”
The earnestness
of her words oozed down into the depths of his soul, nearly leaving him speechless. For the briefest of moments, he forgot where he was, how he had gotten there, and to whom he was talking. “No.”
Silence followed.
He regained his sense of self-awareness and told her that there was no one worth covering up a murder for, and that Andrew Carson’s family deserved to know what happened to him. Holding him captive would only make matters worse for her and the people she was trying to protect.
“You don’t understand what happened that night,” she answered. “Everything went wrong. Andrew Carson was an innocent man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there was nothing we could have done about that.”
“Don’t waste time telling it to me,” he said. “Let me out of here and we’ll go to the police together. Tell your story to them. End this now.”
“I can’t!” she shot back, her voice trembling. “We’ve come too far. We’ve waited too long. In a day or two, all of this will be over and you’ll be returned home—safely! I promise!”
He lowered his head in frustration.
“I have to leave now, or else I’ll be missed.”
“Wait!”
“Two days, Sean. Tops. Then you’ll be free.”
He growled and pounded his fist against the door. He then bit his tongue and tempered himself, worried he would alert the eyes above that he was talking to someone. He heard Jessica scurry away.
Sean hadn’t been able to convince her to set him free, but the conversation hadn’t been totally fruitless. He now knew that he was under surveillance. He began formulating a way to use that knowledge to his advantage.
Chapter 21