by Lee Driver
CHAPTER 4
Dagger was up early the next morning. Tai Chi out on the deck at six, then a round with the punching bag in the garage until seven. He shaved but it was useless because he always had a five o’clock shadow. With his dark hair, dark eyes, and danger oozing from every pore in his body, it was no wonder he was pulled aside at airports.
In his eyes the world was black and white and the only gray areas you could find were in his bedroom. Gray and black were the colors he lived in and dressed in. Not only did Sara add beauty to his life but she also added color. It was her house so she could pink it up anyway she wanted. There was pink and mauve in the living room, the Florida room, her bedroom. But his bedroom was his domain and it bled chrome, black, and gray.
One wall in his bedroom was mirrored and directly in back of the gym equipment. But the wall was deceiving. Dagger flipped open the lid on a fake thermostat and punched in a code. A door in the wall popped open. Dagger entered a sizeable vault which housed his arsenal, a printing machine that had been known to spit out counterfeit checks on more than one occasion, and a filing cabinet containing paper for such counterfeit purposes. There were also bundles of cash, not counterfeit.
Across from the filing cabinet was a table. Above the table a map lit up with blue lights indicating major towns. But it was the two blinking red lights orbiting the globe that Dagger was interested in. Every day he checked to see if the satellites had shifted their locations. Five years ago there had been just one satellite, one that Dagger had been instrumental in helping plummet from the sky. But within five years BettaTec had managed to install two satellites. These were state of the art.
The government thought they were communication satellites. Dagger knew better. One red light stayed on a trajectory over the Northern Hemisphere. The second red light covered the Southern Hemisphere.
Ever since he saw his name handwritten in the margin of the phone book at the Embassy Suites the first thought that came to Dagger’s mind was BettaTec. Had they finally located him? But they couldn’t have. Looking at it logically, he had covered his tracks too well. Demko had wanted to hire him, not kill him…at first. Why did it change? He tried to think back to something Dagger had said or did that made Demko snap. Or was Demko just trying to confirm his identity? Dagger’s first inclination was to pick up and run. If he stayed on the move, he could keep one step ahead of them. But he was so damn tired of running.
“Dagger?” Sara poked her head in the doorway. “Padre’s here.”
Sara plied Padre with coffee and cake while Dagger tried to mentally tick through the list of reasons why Cedar Point’s top detective decided to pay him a visit. Yes, Padre was a friend but Padre only came to chat or meet him for a beer after working hours. And usually it was because Padre needed his help. Had someone witnessed Simon and Skizzy dumping the body in the quarry.
It was his early years in the seminary that gave Sergeant Jerry Martinez the nickname of Padre. He had felt his time could be better spent in law enforcement making sure people followed the Ten Commandments and received their just punishment rather than simply preaching them. Padre had what he called a high forehead. He would never say he had a receding hairline. Just shy of five foot ten, Padre was one sonofabitch you never dared to cross. Criminals had learned that the hard way. His quick, friendly smile gave suspects the impression he was their friend. Then he swept in for the kill. Padre could smell a lie like bottle flies could smell rotting flesh. He also believed in keeping his friends close and his enemies closer which is why Dagger felt Padre asked for his assistance in certain cases. Dagger not only looked dangerous but he also looked like someone who operated just below the radar. Padre had zeroed in on him not long after Dagger arrived in town.
Padre shoved a piece of gum in his mouth and started chomping and mashing it to death.
“Quit smoking again?” Dagger always knew when Padre was trying to cut down. His gum wrappers increased. He pulled a mug from the cabinet and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Sara busied herself emptying the dishwasher. “I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I finish.”
“Don’t leave on my account, Sara. Matter of fact, you might be able to clear up a few things.”
“So this is an official visit.” Dagger smiled at the detective. “And here I thought you missed us.” He raked his collar-length hair back into a ponytail and wrapped a band around it.
“Sara I definitely miss. But you?”
“I’m deeply hurt.” Dagger actually had a fondness for the cop. They had been in a number of scrapes together and Padre was always watching his back. But he didn’t doubt for a minute that Padre would toss the book at him if he thought he were guilty of something. Padre was a by-the-book cop. Strange friend for a guy who had tossed out the book years ago.
“Do you know a guy by the name of Lee Connors?”
“Should I?”
“He gave our department a call a couple days ago asking if we could recommend a private detective. I gave him your name. Course, I respect your privacy and didn’t give him your address. When I asked him for his number so you could call him, he hung up.”
Dagger took a sip of coffee then grabbed the carafe and refilled their cups. “Guess I should thank you. Did he give any hint what he wanted?” He gave himself a mental pat on the back for ripping out the phone book page with his name scribbled on it in Connors’ hotel room.
“I was hoping you could tell me.” Padre gave that steely eyed glare Dagger had seen so many times.
Dagger shrugged. “Never saw him.”
Sara pulled knives from the washer and dried them with a towel before placing them in the knife holder. Her gaze drifted from Dagger to Padre then back to Dagger.
“Hmmmm.” Padre snapped the gum like a truck stop waitress. “What if I told you the cab company has a record of dropping off Mister Connors on your doorstep?”
Shit.
“Oh,” Sara said and smiled shyly. “Was that him?” She dried her hands on the towel and said, “I told him Dagger wouldn’t be home for a couple hours. He never said who he was, didn’t want to wait, and then he left.”
“He walked back to town?”
“I offered to call a cab but he had his phone on him and said he would call. He never got inside the gate. Being here all alone I didn’t want to let him in.”
“No, no. Of course not. Unfortunately, the cab company doesn’t have a record of picking him back up.”
“Maybe he hitched a ride,” Dagger offered.
“Hmmmm.” Padre wadded the used gum in an empty wrapper and pulled out a fresh stick. “And this was yesterday?”
“In the morning.” Sara went back to emptying the dishwasher.
“Well then.” Padre thanked them for the coffee and cake and stood. He started for the door then stopped, one finger raised. “There’s just one problem with that story.”
“What’s that?” Dagger noticed the sound of plates hitting the counter had ceased. He stood to walk Padre out, to keep the cop from zeroing in on Sara.
“Some airport workers found Connors’ body stuffed in the trunk of his rental car.”
Sara and Dagger both stared at Padre, waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop.
“He had been dead for two days.” Padre chewed, looked from Dagger to Sara and smiled. “Did he look dead to you?”
“Do you have his picture?” Sara walked over to Padre. He handed her what looked like an enlarged drivers license photo.
“Seems to me, if he had a rental car he would have driven himself here,” Padre pointed out. “And, number two, how can a dead man appear on your doorstep?”
“That’s not the man I saw on the monitor at the gate,” Sara said. “Doesn’t look anything like him.”
Dagger looked at the photo of Lee Connors. He was hefty, a middleweight contender with a broad face and flattened nose. “I’ve never seen him before.” And he hadn’t. It de?nitely wasn’t the guy who had died on their living room floor.
“Is it necessary to involve Sara?” Last thing Dagger wanted was to have a sketch of Demko plastered on the evening news so whoever had sent him would know he hadn’t completed his assignment. That could bring all kinds of people into town.
“Got a problem with that?” Padre looked from Dagger to Sara. “Or do you have something to hide?”
Dagger smiled. “Sure, Padre. The guy threatened me, I killed him and had Skizzy dump the body in the limestone quarry, but not before some bomb planted in the guy’s neck blew his head off.”
Padre threw back his head and roared, a loud, boisterous bellow. “Oh, Dagger. Always the comic.” He slowly ran his hand from his forehead down to his chin, the smile quickly fading as if his hand were doing the facial transformation. “I’m not amused.”
CHAPTER 5
“The forehead was a little higher,” Sara instructed the artist. Jimmy Cho pounded the keyboard, a lock of hair falling across his forehead. Sara glanced over her shoulder at Dagger. “You don’t have to hover. You didn’t even need to come.”
Jimmy chuckled at that comment. “If you were my girl, do you think I would let you walk in here alone?” He jutted his chin toward the sea of desks surrounding them. All work had stopped. Men were seated at the desks or perched with one cheek on their desktops, all eyes on Sara. The yellow floral dress she wore brought out the bronze color of her skin. Her dark hair shined with a multitude of sun-streaked highlights.
“How sweet.” Sara smiled at her admirers.
Dagger let out a loud huff. “Can we get on with it?”
“I can handle myself, Dagger.”
“That’s why I came.” He nodded toward the hungry males. “To protect them from you.”
Jimmy laughed but when he saw that neither Sara nor Dagger was laughing, his laughter faded.
“HEY!” Padre bellowed from his doorway. “Isn’t anyone working? Have all crimes been solved? All case files worked?”
The detectives scurried back to their chairs and started making calls or banging on their keyboards.
“Yes, that looks just like him,” Sara announced. The computer monitor showed a man with thinning hair, a nose slightly bent, eyes a soft brown.
Padre stared at the screen, then folded his arms. “Sara, that’s me.”
Sara checked the screen. “You think so?” She looked at Dagger. “Does that look like Padre?”
“Nah. Padre has less hair.”
“He was wearing sunglasses so I’m not sure of his eye color,” Sara clarified. “Jimmy put in whatever color he wanted. And I only saw the face briefly on the monitor so I’m sorry I don’t remember more distinct features.”
Padre was seething. Dagger could tell by the way his jaws were clenched.
“I want to see your surveillance tapes. And don’t tell me, Dagger, that you didn’t save them.”
“I didn’t save them.” Dagger gave a hapless shrug. “Sorry.”
Padre pointed toward a doorway. “In my office. Both of you.”
“Did you want me to print this out?” Jimmy asked. His question was met with an icy glare. “Okay. Maybe I’ll just save it.”
“Sit,” Padre ordered. He closed the office door saying, “Let me get this straight. Dagger, you weren’t home when this man showed up at the gate. Sara, you thought he looked like me.” He sank onto the chair behind his desk and slowly rocked for a full minute while studying them. Finally, he leaned forward and clasped his hands on the desk. “Let me tell you what I think happened. This guy kills Connors, maybe for the use of his room. Robbery wasn’t a motive because Connors had his wallet on him. So maybe he needed a place to hide out, use the hotel phone. Although missy here says he had a cell phone and was going to call his own cab.”
“Did you trace the cell calls from that…?”
Padre glared at Dagger. “Did I ask you to speak?” He waited through several seconds of silence. “I think my only link to Connors’ killer is through you.” He looked directly at Dagger. “Now, I can understand you fudging the truth a little, Dagger. But I would have never believed that you would manipulate this sweet, innocent woman to lie for you. That is unconscionable.”
“I didn’t lie, Padre.” Sara’s voice didn’t display hurt as much as anger. Instinctively her right hand found its way to her mouth and she started chewing on a knuckle, a nervous habit she had acquired since dipping her toes outside of the reservation land. “He did look a little like you in the few seconds I had to look at him. He wasn’t much taller than the monitor so he didn’t have to bend down to speak into it. That would make him around your height, maybe a couple inches shorter. I didn’t see any gray hair but the receding hairline is deceiving. He could be coloring his hair but his face wasn’t that lined, not like…”
Padre’s raised eyebrows dared her to comment on his age.
Dagger held up a finger. “Can I talk now?”
Padre dragged his eyes from Sara to Dagger.
“What about the cameras at the hotel and the airport parking garage? Besides, the cab company could have lied. Your man could have driven Connors’ car with the body in the trunk over to my place, then driven to the airport to dump the car.”
Padre punched the intercom on the phone. “I already have a call in for those tapes.” When the intercom was answered, Padre told Jimmy, “You can print out a copy of that sketch now.” He punched the intercom off just as the phone rang. Picking up the receiver, he barked out, “Martinez…yeah, Chief.” Padre leaned back in his chair, the receiver pressed to his ear. His eyes studied the ceiling as he listened. “We told the cardinal’s people we’d give him a police escort from the airport to the hotel. They are hiring their own bodyguards for the event…yeah…who’s going to bother a cardinal? It’s not like the Pope is visiting…yeah… okay…I’m on it.” Padre hung up with a shake of his head. “Chief is expecting demonstrators against pedophile priests. Guess some people don’t feel the church is doing enough.” Padre saw Jimmy through the glass partition and waved him in.
“I made two copies.” Jimmy placed the computer sketch on the desk. “I added sunglasses.”
Sara leaned over for a closer look. “Yes, that looks just like him.”
Padre studied the image for a few seconds, pressed his lips in disgust, then pulled out an identical pair of sunglasses from his pocket. “Gee, they look just like mine.” He glared at his visitors. “Now get out of here. All of you.”
Dagger gunned the Lincoln Navigator from the parking lot. He punched the hands-free phone and listened to the phone ring three times, five times, seven times. “Come on, Skizzy.”
“Hey, I’m busy here.” Skizzy’s voice blared from the speaker.
“Just tell me you decrypted the guy’s Emails.” On their way to the police station, Dagger had dropped off Demko’s computer at Skizzy’s shop.
“Sure, and I built a high-rise in my spare time. This one ain’t so easy. I may have to hack into one of the anagrams to get some assistance.”
“FBI, CIA, NSA, I don’t care which anagram you hack into, just get me something.” Dagger punched the END button. “I don’t like the fact that this guy was looking for me.”
“Who else would have given out our address?” Sara asked. “If Padre claims he didn’t and you aren’t listed in the phone book, who else besides Simon and Skizzy?”
Dagger thought about that for several seconds, then swung a U-turn on a busy downtown street eliciting numerous horn blasts.
The Hideaway was a shot-and-beer joint. Dagger had lived in a small apartment above the bar when he first arrived in town. He had operated his P.I. business out of that apartment and it was where he had first met Sara. She had walked in with information about the murder of an undercover cop. At the time he didn’t know how she obtained her information, didn’t know about her unique a
bilities, but he followed up on her leads and discovered a jewelry and art theft ring based inside the Cedar Point Police Department. In the melee, a wolf had been injured, its leg shot off. And just as Dagger was preparing to put a bullet in the wolf ’s head to end its misery, the strangest thing happened. Instead of a wolf, what was lying at his feet was Sara. To say he was shocked was putting it mildly. But his biggest shock came later as Sara lay on her grandmother’s bed. Sara’s leg had grown back.
Dagger fingered his black cord necklace. He could feel the turquoise stones that served as the eyes in the wolf head pendant and remembered the filmy eyes of Ada, Sara’s grandmother who had looked more like a great-great-grandmother. She had been the only family Sara had left and seemed relieved that someone else knew of Sara’s gift. Ada promptly died the next day leaving the necklace and a note pleading for Dagger to watch out for her granddaughter, a young woman who had barely left the confines of their reservation land, and was as much afraid of humans as the wolf and hawk were. Dagger had changed all that. Sara now knew self-defense and could shoot a gun as well as he could.
“What are you smiling at?” Sara asked, her smile radiating from the passenger seat.
“Just wondering how many more gray hairs we gave Padre.” He parked the Navigator at the curb and they slammed out of the vehicle.
The Hideaway smelled of beer and sweat. If the wood floor ever got a washing it would probably disintegrate. Toby Keith’s voice oozed from the juke box talking about loving this bar. Two men swaying at the end of the chipped and bruised bar were bellowing along with Toby. Men playing pool stopped to leer at Sara, their cue sticks hovering over the pool table.
“Well, well. Slumming, Dagger?” Casey stood behind the bar looking more like a bouncer gone to seed. What might have once been a muscular forty-eight-inch chest had given way to beer and gravity and hung over his belt like yeast-raised bread.