Cold Aim

by Janice Cantore

  He checked his phone. There was a page of requests—clients looking for girls, and one urgent request from his best client, probably the only person in the world he would call a friend. Cyrus. That was the one he called back.

  “What’s up?”

  His client cursed. “You heard about the bust?”

  Ice shook his head, though he was on the phone. “I’ve been traveling.”

  “Ice, we have a problem. They took down a whole cell. Mesa is gone.”

  Ice sat. This was big. A lot of his girls went straight to Mesa; it was like an airport hub for his clients. This was going to hurt business, that was for sure.

  “Wow, how’d that happen?”

  “Feds got lucky. Look, that’s not important. I’ve got a job for you.”

  “I’ll be collecting girls as—”

  “No, put that on hold. I want you to find a piece of merchandise the Feds took from the compound in Mesa. Chevy took something that belongs to me and I want it back.”

  Ice knew that name. Chevy, aka Roberta. He’d procured her for Cyrus . . . he had to think about how long ago. Two, maybe three years—it all ran together. She was trouble from the beginning, too smart for her own good, and Cyrus had let her get too close, the silly old fool. Chevy had almost been allowed into the inner circle. Ice had noticed that as Cyrus aged, he was taking more and more chances, getting more and more sloppy. Now his little pet had taken something from Cyrus and presumably given it to the Feds. Ice digested this information. The Feds took everything when they served a warrant and pounced on anything incriminating.

  “How do you know she didn’t already give it to the cops?” he asked.

  “I’m talking to you, aren’t I? Besides, it compromises you as well.”

  Ice felt anger surge as it often did when his safety was threatened by other people’s stupidity. Even though this man was a friend, Ice really only trusted himself. That was why he liked to work alone. He counted to ten as he realized that he couldn’t be compromised that much. His clients didn’t really know him—they only thought they did. Even his friend only knew a fraction about him and what he did with his time.

  “What is it?”

  “My iPad with all my business information on it. Get it back. This is worth a couple of rocks to me. An extra one if you terminate the thief. I’m not even concerned about collateral damage. Do what you need to do. Scorched-earth time.”

  Three rocks. Briefly, Ice saw all those zeros and held his breath. Three million dollars. The figure even chased away the question of how Cyrus was stupid enough to leave his tablet where the girl could get it. Ice waited a beat, never wanting to appear overeager. But that was enough money to buy himself some leisure. The older he got, the more he thought about fading into the sunset on some tropical island somewhere. Now was his chance, if he could find the tablet and the girl.

  “You have any information about where the girl was taken?”

  “She’s on the West Coast somewhere, I think. I’m priming the pump. I’ll find out soon enough. I’ve got Digger out beating the bushes. I’ll text you any information I get.”

  “All right, I’m in. I’ll contact you on a different phone when it’s done.”

  “Good. I’ll send you a down payment. Terminate the brat. I want pictures.”

  A few minutes later Ice watched the balance in his bank account swell. Then he went to work, hacking, digging, determined to find out all the particulars of the Feds’ case against Cyrus and the girl who’d just earned him so much money.

  When he stopped to eat and finish the rest of a cold pizza, Ice turned on the news. There was still a trickle about him and the murder in an abandoned house. The cops in San Jose were asking for help and had set up a tip line, but he could tell interest was already fading. The first forty-eight were rapidly ticking away. They’d never find him.

  He picked up his tablet again and searched every site he could for more information on the bust in Mesa. For the first time in a long while Ice felt fear. Not fear for himself—he could disappear and never be found; no one really knew him—but fear for his best client. Cyrus was really more than a client; he was a surrogate father as far as Ice was concerned. The Feds were hot on his trail, that was for sure, and if this news report was accurate, they’d built quite a strong case against him.

  He almost picked up the phone to warn Cyrus, but stopped. Cyrus must know the danger he was in. That was why he wanted Chevy and everyone around her dealt with. He had contingency plans. He might have already flown out of the country. The girl was a small part of the whole case. Taking her out might not help the larger fight.

  But it was personal now—Ice understood that. The girl had betrayed Cyrus in a big way. She deserved her fate. And there would be collateral damage, Ice could see that already. The Feds were obviously trying to hide her. She would be guarded. None of that mattered to Ice. He’d track her down and take care of the problem. He’d worked for too long with Cyrus. Failure was not an option.

  Ice opened a beer. Cyrus had sounded more agitated than Ice had ever heard him. Sitting on the bed, he muted the sound on the television to think, watching the screen but not really seeing it. His thoughts took him back over the years to when he and Cyrus had met. It was through Boss Cross, the man who had literally pulled him up out of the gutter. Ice had grown up as Royal Redd. As the son of two drug addicts, he’d never really known his parents. They’d surrendered their parental rights when he was three years old. For six years he lived with his alcoholic maternal grandmother. But her death to cancer when he was nine was the end of any charade of stability.

  It was also the end of his conscience. Tossed into a foster home with the first name Royal and the last name Redd, he was teased mercilessly. He learned to fight and steal to survive. A boy named Sue had nothing on a boy named Royal Redd.

  He bounced from foster home to foster home until he turned seventeen. By then he’d learned to support himself by theft and con. Con especially energized Royal. He’d honed his ability to sell any illusion he tried and to make people believe him. The most important discovery he made was that his looks got him things from women. At eighteen he’d had three women strung out and turning tricks for him. That was where he’d met Cross.

  Cross had pulled up in a stretch limo looking for girls. Girls, not women. Royal found him one, and a partnership was born. Royal learned to do whatever Cross asked: procure girls, deal with problems, anything. Then he’d been sent to find a witness, and he thought his way out of a difficult situation, and Royal earned his nickname Ice.

  “You are Ice.” Cross had beamed. “I don’t think Devo could have thought on his feet like that.” The girl had slipped through his fingers, but Cross was certain she’d surface sooner or later. But in twenty-five years, that hadn’t happened.

  Ice never dwelled on his first failure. She was probably dead in a gutter, he thought now, brushing away any regret. Thinking about the one who’d gotten away made Ice renew his vow to find Chevy by whatever means necessary.

  If the partnership with Cross had changed his life—and he’d been all over the world with Cross and his man Digger, who’d become his mentor—it was Cyrus Beck who had given Ice purpose. By the time Cross got tripped up by kiddie porn, Ice was freelancing. He’d learned how to speak fluent Spanish, and he’d become a master at procuring women and girls for Cross’s vast network. Cross had even created a new identity for Ice, complete with a forged driver’s license and a bank account.

  Cross’s arrest and subsequent death had rocked him hard. Ice couldn’t figure out how the canny Cross had let it slip that he had so much kiddie porn for the Feds to find. He believed someone had betrayed Cross, and it made him furious. At first, he’d wanted to find the leak, deal with the person who’d betrayed Cross. But then the Boss killed himself, and for a brief time, Ice was adrift.

  Then Cyrus stepped in and saved Ice from aimlessness. Cyrus had been there the night Royal earned his chops and called Ice ever since, and Royal like
d that.

  He liked thinking of himself as cold as Ice. Nothing bothered him, and nothing could touch him. He believed he was smarter than any cop, especially a Fed.

  His phone dinged with a text. Ice punched in his code and saw that Cyrus had texted him a brief message.

  FBI Agent Bass recently traveled to Medford, southern Oregon, went private, so my bet is he’s hidden the girl there somewhere. Suggest you check it out.

  Ice knew that Bass was the agent who’d made catching Cyrus his personal crusade. At one point Cyrus had played around with the idea of having Ice take Bass out, but at the last minute backed off. As Ice reread the text, he thought maybe Cyrus had made a mistake. Bass was like a pit bull, hanging on to Cyrus’s leg, desperate to take him down. It would be best to put Bass down first. The thought of killing an FBI agent didn’t bother Ice in the least.

  He punched southern Oregon into Google and checked out Medford and the surrounding area. Small town, small potatoes. If the girl were there, it’d be a cinch to find her. Another text came through: Maybe Shady Cove?

  “Hmm, is that a town?” Ice asked out loud.

  He typed, Why there?

  Then he put that name into his search and found it. A check of Wikipedia told him that Shady Cove, Oregon, was a dinky place, population just over three thousand. A recent news article from another nearby small town, Rogue’s Hollow, indicated the area had been devastated by a fire just days ago.

  We’ve searched hotels in Medford, Ashland, can’t find any indication Bass stayed either of those places. Grants Pass is another possibility, but this Cove place, it looks like a place they think we’d ignore, came the answer from Cyrus.

  Ice thought about that. Cyrus might be right. In any case, the town would have Barney Fife–type cops, he bet. Yeah, if the girl were there, he’d find her.

  It would be child’s play.

  12

  Several days passed before Tess could review the thumb drive Alonzo Bass had left her. She’d wanted to get to it sooner, but there had been so much to do after the fire, she’d had to sideline it.

  After all evacuation orders were lifted, she’d been busy with organizing fire cleanup and helping the families who’d lost everything in the fire. The threat of shifting weather added urgency to her task. Cold and rain—a lot of rain—were forecast soon, and they had to hurry to prevent landslides from destroying more in the burn area. The city council raided an emergency fund to help with the cleanup. The new mayor, Pete Horning, decided on what he saw as the most cost-effective way to proceed with the job. His thinking was that this was a transition time for seasonal workers. Summer work was winding down and winter work had not yet fired up. He felt there would be plenty of people eager and available to help for a week to ten days.

  Tess was wary of the idea for a lot of reasons, but it was the first time in her tenure as police chief that she saw unanimous agreement on the part of the city council. And an ad in the paper asking for temporary help, promising a little better than minimum wage, had brought in a surprisingly large number of applicants. The city council would oversee the program, reviewing applications and hiring people to start ASAP. Rogue’s Hollow employed one maintenance person and he was on vacation. The county stepped in to help with the program, offering a man from their public works to supervise the team, along with a work van, a trailer, and tools.

  The cooler weather assisted the final dousing of fire hot spots, but as the rain started to fall, there was even more urgency to the cleanup work. Déjà vu, Tess thought, reminded of what typically happened in California—summer fires, then winter landslides. Places where the loss of vegetation might lead to those landslides needed to be dealt with. A lot of the work would be filling and placing sandbags; some of it would be mulching, shoring up bare spots.

  One property that required assistance was Arthur Goding’s. Though his home and outbuildings were spared from the flames, the historic logging camp behind his house had been completely destroyed by the fire, along with a lot of brush in the canyon. Denuded hillsides could funnel a deluge of muddy water straight onto his property.

  Tess and Mayor Horning toured all of the properties that needed help in order to make a priority list for the crew to follow. The day they visited Goding’s home, a light rain, slightly more than a mist, was falling, foreshadowing that more was promised soon.

  “Be happy your house is safe,” Tess offered. “After all, with all the ATVs in your garage, that would have been quite a loss.”

  “And you’re first on the list for a work crew to come through and help with the canyon,” Horning told him.

  “Thanks, I appreciate that. I’ll help too, of course. I can fill a sandbag as well as the next guy.”

  Monday, with the council in full hire mode and nothing left for Tess to do in regard to the fire, she ducked into her office after shaking water off her raincoat and settled in to review the information from Bass. He started out with an unfortunately familiar story, as far as Tess was concerned. Over the years Tess had come across many young women whose names could be interchanged with any of the girls rescued by the raid in Arizona.

  Victim was recruited at sixteen by a good-looking guy who claimed to care for her. At that time she was unhappy at home. He spent a few months grooming her, wooing her in a way, before the real purpose he had for her became clear. Since the day she willingly went with him, she’s been sold over and over again for sex from one end of this country to the other. Usually at big sporting events—the Super Bowl, World Series. Poor kid doesn’t know which end is up.

  As for Chevy . . .

  Victim one was taken out of the stable of girls and brought to the boss. For two years she enjoyed a position at the top, was flown around the world in a private jet, and was treated as a favorite sex slave.

  Tess grimaced as she read the narrative about the bust in Mesa. Some of the girls who were rescued actually fought the cops, such was the nature of their brainwashing. She thought about Chevy and her angry attitude. Would the girl continue to cooperate?

  Tess was nervous about the case in general and Chevy specifically.

  In Mesa, Beck turned the tables on Agent Bass. He made a preemptive court appearance to answer the charges before the warrant could be served. Tess watched snippets of the press conference online. Beck’s sanctimonious lawyer claimed the charges were trumped up by his client’s political enemies. The claims were all baseless, blah, blah, blah. And the preemption did the trick. Despite the fact that the charges were all serious felonies, Beck’s apparent willingness to cooperate was enough to convince the judge, and Beck was released on two million dollars bail with an ankle monitor. He couldn’t get out of surrendering his passport, though. But Tess knew there had to be a leak for him to be able to preempt Bass like that. The man should be in jail, not on monitored release.

  She spoke to Bass briefly. He was stunned but not down for the count. They were still working on breaking the encryption of all the files on the tablet stolen by Chevy. Once they did that, it might tell them a more horrifying story and get Beck remanded.

  She’d heard in news reports that Beck’s attorney decried the whole operation as a witch hunt. He was screaming about his client’s rights being violated and threatening all kinds of motions to get everything thrown out of court. Part of what he claimed was that the entire search was a violation of his client’s privacy and his constitutional right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure because Chevy stole it. This was a predictable move, but it was anyone’s guess if he’d be successful. Bass didn’t think so.

  “This guy is scum and he will fall, iPad or no iPad.”

  Tess hoped he was right. After reading through everything on the drive, she realized that Bass had been chasing Cyrus Beck for the majority of his career. Obsession?

  In any big case, there was a fine line between obsession and dogged determination. From everything Tess read, she saw Bass as meticulous and careful. He dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s.r />
  You can never have too much evidence, she thought. Sometimes a preponderance of evidence helped avoid a trial because the bad guys would accept a plea. Tess never liked the idea of lessening charges for any reason, but nowadays juries were unpredictable. They watched too much TV and wanted everything wrapped up with a neat and clear DNA bow.

  She wondered about Chevy, if she’d be a credible witness. Tess hadn’t talked to her, but Oliver had. It was a good thing that Bass had approved Oliver being let in on the secret. The girl asked to talk to someone, “like a priest or a counselor,” after almost insisting that she be let go, that she didn’t want to testify against Beck, who she was certain still loved her. Oliver defused the crisis. He had a way of talking that made people stop and think.

  “She’s wounded and angry,” Oliver told Tess after the episode. “Sadly, she thinks she’s in love with Beck, and she’s having doubts about stealing the tablet. She hopes Beck will forgive her for that. But her emotions are a seesaw. It’s good she’s hidden and can’t contact him. I’m afraid she’d go back to him if she could.”

  “Will she stay in the shelter?”

  Oliver held his hands out.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if she tried to leave. I hope Takano is prepared for that,” Tess said.

  Oliver nodded. “Stockholm syndrome. I’m sure you’ve dealt with that.”

  “I have,” Tess agreed. Too many women stayed with abusive men for reasons often complicated and twisted with unhealthy emotions.

  Tess knew that in domestic violence and human trafficking, a sick side effect was that women believed themselves to be in love with their abusers. In the case where her father had been murdered, the woman had been put in the hospital five times by her boyfriend. That was before a law was passed to allow the state to prosecute when the victim was unwilling. Not that it mattered in her father’s case; the woman refused to prosecute every single time.