by Leslie Wolfe
“I’m not using, Baxter, I swear. You can test me once this is over.”
“Okay, fine,” I replied, unconvinced. If he believed Snowman was going to kill him in the next few hours, what was that commitment really worth?
“Why didn’t you tell me about the IAB investigation?” he asked. “Who’s the bigger liar, partner?”
My shoulders fell under the weight of my arms as I let them drop from my hips. Why did I, really, keep it from him?
“Because I couldn’t bring myself to believe you could’ve done this. Why, Holt? Why did you steal the cocaine?”
“Damn it, Baxter, I don’t have time for this now!” he shouted. “Grill me some other time, turn me into the IAB if you damn well please, but lay the hell off me already.”
I watched him splash some water on his face at the kitchen sink, then strip off his clothes and put on clean ones. His ribs were bruised badly, and his left shoulder hung lower than the other, a sign of trauma. Yet he didn’t care; he was about to turn himself into the hands of a psychopathic killer with a grudge, in less than five hours.
And he was going to die.
Unless we could find Meredith before then.
I excused myself and went straight to the bathroom. As soon as I locked the door, I took out my phone and texted Fletcher.
“Do something,” I wrote. “Send patrols to knock on every door in Henderson that doesn’t belong to a middle-class family with an impeccable record and three kids. Find those cell phone users. Find that house.” I hesitated for a moment, my fingers lingering above the screen, then added. “I need everything there is to know about Snowman Klug and the show he’s running on the Strip.”
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, then heard a chime. “On it,” was the reply I got from Fletcher. I steadied myself, thinking through what I was about to do, step by step. Was I making a mistake? Probably, but I was desperate.
He’d lied to me, more than once, but I wasn’t going to let him die for it.
I took a deep breath and got out of the bathroom and walked over to Holt. He’d finished loading a small duffel bag with enough guns and ammo to start a neighborhood war and had extracted a wad of cash from an empty coffee tin.
I gave him a long, sideways stare and said, “We’re going to my place next.”
25
Resources
Thirty-five hours missing
Fletcher sat behind his desk, slurping loudly the remnants of soda from a can with the help of a thick, green straw. When he started sucking more air than fluid, he tossed the can into the trash and popped open another one he took from his drawer. Satisfied, he gulped thirstily about a third of the fizzy liquid and burped discreetly into his hand.
He didn’t take his eyes off the screen the entire time, mulling in his mind the best course of action under the circumstances. He usually would’ve called Holt and dumped his findings in the detective’s charge, but with his daughter missing, he wasn’t really a viable resource. Baxter was out there with Holt, helping him. That left Fletcher by himself to deal with a potentially homicidal, crooked cop.
He had no idea what he should do. If he took the case to his captain, a slew of questions would arise, items best left unanswered, at least for a while. The alternative, however, was to let a crooked cop go about his business undisturbed, a couple of days after being paid off to make someone disappear. Maybe it wasn’t too late for that someone.
He shouldn’t’ve let himself get drawn into this off-the-books mess. Good intentions paved the road to the unemployment line, possibly the yellow line, the one behind twelve-foot fences, ornately decorated with rolls of barbed wire. He’d never been so scared in his life. What if he made the wrong judgment call and people would die?
Fletcher scratched the roots of his curly hair right above his right ear and whistled, pushing his anxiety away, happy for a brief moment that the precinct was almost deserted. It was after 7:00 PM, and every cop in the city was out there looking for Holt’s daughter, asking questions, pressing informants, banging on doors. At least he could think in peace.
When he least expected, the composite sketch of the cop who Meredith and Casey had seen conducting business in the men’s room of the Perdido Club had returned a match. A sergeant from Sector A by the name of Pete Mincey. He had twelve years with the force; this was going to get ugly.
He stared at Mincey’s photo, displayed on his main screen in a view from the LVMPD employee database that he’d accessed with special approval from the sheriff. He could try to speak to the sheriff about it, but what would he do other than delegate the case to Captain Morales? And the captain would have questions, more questions than the sheriff had asked, starting with why he’d gone over his head straight to the top honcho for approval.
“Argh… crap,” he muttered, “this is going to get ugly.”
“What’s going to get ugly, Fletcher?”
He jumped out of his skin and turned around so quickly he almost fell off his chair. A quick tap on the keyboard made Sergeant Mincey’s service photo disappear from his screen, but it was too late.
“Um, Captain, n—nothing, really,” he replied, flustered, stuttering badly. He breathed and counted to three in his mind, invoking whatever form of zen he could think of. The man standing next to the captain was the scariest of the two because he was the unknown. A tall, well-built, black suit, white shirt, and gray tie in his early fifties, with an uncompromising look on his face rounded off with a disappointed smirk barely visible in the twitch of his upper lip. “What can I do for you, Captain?” he managed to ask in a casual voice.
“How about start talking, Fletcher?” the captain replied, pulling out a chair and straddling it.
He wasn’t going anywhere… the bulldog was there to stay, with an appetite for his rear end.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Fletcher replied, feeling the urge to set his hair in order. He fumbled with some loose curls that were getting in his face, but he couldn’t do much. They were too short to tuck behind his ears, yet too long to keep out of his eyes.
The captain groaned and exchanged a brief look with the man in black. “Why don’t we start with the two fake cops who kidnapped Meredith Holt, shall we?”
“Yes, what about them?”
“The BOLO on them and their car came from your system ID, Fletcher, and that was before anyone knew Holt’s kid was missing.”
He stared at the ceiling for a brief moment, thinking hard what to say not to dig his hole any deeper than it already was. Then he stared at the carpet for another moment, but the stained surface offered no answers either.
“I sometimes do that,” he managed to reply. “I put BOLOs into the system for the detectives I work with.”
“From home, after leaving early because of health problems, son?”
He lowered his head. There was no point; the captain wasn’t an idiot. But the secrets he was keeping weren’t his to share.
“We’re on the same team here, Fletch,” Morales said. “We all want the same thing: Holt’s daughter returned safely and the people who took her locked up behind bars.”
Fletcher shot the man in the black suit a side glance. “Who is this?” he asked the captain. Before he could share anything, he needed to know.
The man took a step forward and extended a hand. “Special Agent Glover, FBI CARD team, assigned to Holt’s case.”
He swallowed hard. “What can I do for you?” he asked, hoping they’d stop with the questions and just ask him to trace a phone number or something.
“We need to know what Detective Holt is up to, where he is, what he’s keeping from us. We believe,” Glover shot the captain a quick glance, “that the detective has been in contact with the kidnappers all this time.”
Fletcher stood and raised his hands in the air, lowering his head at the same time. “Listen, I don’t want to cause any—”
“Sit down,” the captain ordered, and he complied. The tone of his boss’s voice did
n’t leave any room for negotiations.
“Let’s start over,” Glover said. “Do you know where Detective Holt is?”
He shook his head. He really didn’t know, and he felt grateful he didn’t have to lie.
“What are they having you work on?”
He bit his lip; there was no escape from the two men, no way he could talk them into giving it up and going away.
“Are we on the same team, Fletch?” the captain asked, menacing undertones seeping into his voice.
He nodded, then cleared his throat and said, “Henderson. Holt has a lead about a large property with a garage, somewhere in Henderson. I started to narrow it down, but so far I couldn’t identify it.”
Glover signaled Captain Morales, who left his chair and approached him. Then Glover whispered in his ear, “If Holt trusts this kid, let’s work through him. Let him be the interface. We’ll give him resources, everything he needs.”
Fletcher pretended he hadn’t heard a word from the two men’s whispered conversation, and looked away, waiting, refraining from biting his fingernails. Those resources the fed had mentioned sounded awfully good. His systems didn’t have anywhere near the horsepower of federal databases and facial recognition applications. The carrier-integrated tools they used to locate mobile phone users and triangulate their positions at various times were second to none. Maybe cooperating with them wasn’t such a bad idea, and he probably could keep his job if he did.
“Do you have a way to communicate with Baxter and Holt?” Glover asked.
He stared at the man, still weighing his choices, then looked at the captain quickly.
Morales nodded impatiently.
“Y—yes, I think so.”
“They carry burner phones now?” Glover asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Glover said with a quick, pained sigh. “Call this number,” he added, offering a Post-It note with numbers scribbled on it. “Karyn is our technical analyst, the best in the entire field office.”
“Now?” he hesitated, not knowing what they expected him to do.
“Yes, now, she’s standing by.”
A moment later, he was talking to a sharp analyst with a nasal, drawn-out, Texas drawl who ran searches faster than he’d ever seen before. It took her under two minutes to identify the two men who had taken Meredith, once he’d shared with her the best image he could get from the surveillance video.
“Okay,” Karyn said after a chime was heard on the open line. “I give you Rudy Huber, posing as Officer Beasley, and Jeremiah Foley, impersonating Officer Greer. A long list of priors for both model citizens, mostly drug-related. Huber has a couple of B&Es and a battery charge too. BOLOs out. Oh, you might want to know that Holt was Huber’s arresting officer.”
“How did you get them so fast? My search has been running since yesterday,” he blurted, completely forgetting about the captain and SA Glover. “My system couldn’t get more than four facial match points; the images were too grainy.”
“Our system extrapolates and cleans it first, then assumes a certain degree of facial symmetry, and constructs the points you’re otherwise missing. What else do you need?”
Fletcher looked at the captain with the excitement that kids have when they unwrap a new and fantastic toy. Then he stared for a moment at the desk phone, wondering how far he could take this newfound collaboration.
“There’s a GPS tracking chip, high-end tech, I can send you the specifics. I need to track and hack into all the chips in the batch it was sold with. We need to locate the ones currently in use.”
“Send the serial number over,” Karyn replied.
He emailed her the info in a message devoid of subject or any other content except the serial number she needed. When he looked away from his screen, the two men were frowning at him.
“Spill it, Fletcher,” the captain said. “What’s with the chip now? Wasn’t this evidence found on the Mojave body? A totally different case?”
“Ah, you don’t know about the correlation,” he muttered. The captain scowled at him, probably to remind him whose fault that was. He cleared his constricted throat and explained. “Meredith Holt and Alyssa Conway, the Mojave victim, were both taken by those two,” he said, pointing at the screen where the mug shots of the two fake cops were displayed. “These cases are related; if we find Alyssa’s killer, we’ll find Meredith.”
SA Glover glared at Fletcher, then at Morales. “Unbelievable,” he groaned. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner? This entire team should be charged with obstruction.”
The open phone connection crackled with some static when Karyn came back.
“Okay, so typically these GPS chips are manufactured and wholesale-released in batches. Retailers buy a batch or a part of a batch, then split it up and sell the individual units,” Karyn said. “I’m willing to bet a bucket full of cold beer on ice the perps bought the exact same batch the manufacturer released. No one blows up and repackages batches of product just for fun.”
“Then, can you hack into the batch this one came from?” Fletcher asked. “I need all those dots lighting up nicely on a map.”
“Sure can, but it will take a while. I’ll be in touch.” She ended the call without saying goodbye, just as Fletcher wanted to ask for help in tracking the mobile phone users who’d strolled through the Mojave. As soon as the captain and the fed were out of his hair, he’d call her back.
Glover pressed his lips together and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, giving him a menacing look. “What else do you know about this case, Mr. Fletcher? Who was that cop on your screen earlier? And how the hell did you get access to search the employee database?”
26
Gear
Thirty-five hours missing
Holt drove fast on Flamingo Road, heading for my place, after I’d pleaded with him for at least one full minute without repeating anything. He didn’t cave until I twisted his arm and said, “If you want my help with this, we’re going. You’re not the only one who needs to pack up some gear.” Then I used the tiny fraction of influence I still had on my partner to force two candy bars down his throat and a venti cup of extremely strong coffee. Where he was going, Snowman wasn’t exactly going to greet him with a set table and a comfy bed.
I shuddered when I remembered where he was going. I had confidence in my abilities and even more in his. He was a former Navy SEAL, who didn’t need much help from anyone on any given day, and that included me. However, he was going to face a motivated enemy who had enjoyed more than five years of revenge planning time. So many things could go wrong.
I pushed the thought aside and forced some optimism into my voice. “What was with the gunpowder?”
“Huh?”
“That cocaine brick was packed in gunpowder and vacuum sealed. I can understand vacuum; no particles make it out of the package if there’s no air to carry them, but why the gunpowder?”
“It throws off drug-sniffing dogs’ noses, or so I’ve heard.”
“Were you expecting a raid at your place?”
“You never know,” he replied grimly. “Never know what to expect.”
We rode in silence for a while, a thought gnawing at my mind and leaving bleeding wounds behind it.
“Why did you turn off your phone, Holt? Fletcher and I were the only ones who had that number.”
Tense muscles danced under his cheeks. “You would’ve found me and stopped me,” he eventually said.
“From what?”
“From trying to find her.”
The man was behaving like a complete idiot. That was the only possible conclusion. Because the alternative, that he didn’t trust me worth a damn, was too painful to consider.
“No, you twat, I would’ve helped you, like I’m doing now.”
He didn’t reply; he kept his eyes on the road but reached out and squeezed my hand. My eyes moistened.
“If that bloody phone of yours were on,” I continued as if nothing had happened, “you wo
uld’ve learned we’d made some progress. The composites came back from your friend, the federal marshal, and Fletcher is running a search for that son of a bitch. Then I heard Mrs. Hardin, Casey’s mom, was raising hell at the precinct with an expensive lawyer in tow, screaming you detained her daughter illegally. Which, by the way, you kind of did.”
He shrugged.
“The captain told her off, I heard, then she had the misfortune of running into Anne on her way out. You want to know what happened?”
Another shrug. “Yeah.”
“Rumor has it that Anne dragged Mrs. Hardin into the morgue and made her take a look at Alyssa’s body, then told her if she wanted Casey to take the next available slab, she’d be happy to call you and ask you to release her kid.”
Holt’s lips fluttered, stretched into a smile that defied the tension on his face. “She’s really something, your friend, Anne.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“You never told me, what’s the story with you two? You seem to have a special connection that goes beyond cop and coroner.”
I felt saddened for a moment. He’d always pried into my past, into my relationship with Anne, and wouldn’t let go. That spoke volumes about his cop nose, his talent as an investigator, but considering the pile of lies he’d poured on me lately I felt irritated by his question.
I breathed and looked at him for a moment. He needed to know that trust was possible between two partners. Maybe then he’d reciprocate and wouldn’t lock me out anymore.
“Anne flew helicopters in Afghanistan,” I said, my voice sounding frail, trembling. “Two people were the top helo pilots in their unit; one was Anne, the other was my husband, Andrew.”