by Linda Howard
“Maybe someone at the Buffalo Club saw her and was interested, wanted to find out where she lived and how to contact her.”
“Someone who figured she’d never come back to the club and that was the only way he’d have of finding her? Someone who also happens to know the mayor?”
“Okay, so it’s a thin idea. Do you have anything better?”
“No, all I have are the little hairs on the back of my neck, and they’re standing straight up.”
“That’s good enough for me,” said Howard. “From the accent, I know you’re not from around here, but I can’t quite place it. You’re not just a small-town chief, though. What’s your background?”
“SWAT, in Chicago and New York.”
“Guess your little hairs have seen their share of action.”
“They’ve never been wrong.”
“So what do you want us to do?” asked Todd. “There’s nothing to go on, no direction.”
“Not yet. For now, I just want to make sure she’s safe. The good news is, the address on the registration is for her mother’s house. There’s no official record now of her real address, unless someone has the strings to find out from the utilities—which the mayor does, with the city water department, but unless he knows she’s moved, he has no reason to ask.”
“Can you get into the files, take out that information?”
“The water bills are computerized. I’m no hacker, so I can’t get into the system from outside, but maybe I can from the inside. What about the phone and electricity companies?”
“I’ll see what I can do about blocking that information,” Todd said. “And she needs to have her number unlisted, or any bozo can call information and get it.”
“I’ll handle that,” said Jack. “I don’t know what I’m looking for, I don’t know why anyone would want to track her down, and until I do know, I want a shield around her.”
“We’ve been working a situation for a couple of years now. If things come together, Howard and I will be busy and won’t be able to help. You know how it works. But until and if the case breaks, we’ll do what we can to help.” Todd drummed his fingers on the desk. “Off the record, of course.”
“Of course. Just friends helping friends.”
EIGHTEEN
Jack drove back to Hillsboro, returned the truck to his officer, checked that Daisy was safe at the library, and filled the rest of the day handling the myriad details that cropped up every day in a police department, even a small one. He left the office at the usual time, drove home, cut his grass to kill some time, went in and showered, then called his office phone to make certain Eva Fay had gone home. Sometimes he thought she spent the night there, because she was always there when he arrived and no matter how late he stayed, she stayed later. As a secretary, she was damned intimidating. She was also so good at her job he’d have loved to see her transplanted to New York, to see what kind of miracle she could work on some of the precincts.
There was no answer at his office, so it was safe to go back. His car was in the driveway, plainly visible to anyone who looked. He left a bar light on in the kitchen, a lamp on in his bedroom upstairs, and one on in the living room. The television provided background noise, in case anyone listened. There was no reason for anyone to be watching his house, at least so long as whoever was after Daisy didn’t find out about his involvement with her, but he wasn’t taking chances.
At twilight, he got a few items he thought he might need and slipped them into his pockets. Wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and another cap—this one plain black—he slipped out his back door and walked back to the police department. At this time of day almost everyone was inside for the night, having finished the chores around the house, eaten supper, and settled down in front of the tube. He could hear the high-pitched laughter of some youngsters chasing lightning bugs, but that was one street over. Maybe there were some folks sitting on their front porches, enjoying the fresh air now that it wasn’t as hot, but Jack knew he was virtually unrecognizable in the deepening twilight.
His second-shift desk sergeant, Scott Wylie, looked up in surprise when Jack entered by the back door, which was the way all the officers came in. It was a quiet night, no one else around, so Wylie didn’t even try to hide the fishing magazine he was reading. Jack had come up through the ranks, so he knew what it was like to work long, boring shifts, and he never gave his men grief about their reading material. “Chief! Is something wrong?”
Jack grinned. “I thought I’d spend the night here, so I can find out what time Eva Fay comes to work.”
The sergeant laughed. “Good luck. She has a sixth sense about things like that; she’ll probably call in sick.”
“I’ll be in my office for a while, clearing up some paperwork. I was going to do it tomorrow, but something else came up.”
“Sure thing.” Wylie went back to his magazine, and Jack went through the glass doors into the office part of the building. The police department was two-storied, built in a back-facing L, with the offices in the short leg facing the street, while the officers’ lockers and showers and the evidence, booking, and interrogation rooms were on the first floor of the long section, with the cells on the top floor.
Jack’s office was on the second floor, facing the street He went in and turned on the lamp on his desk, scattered some papers around the desk so it would look as if he’d been working—just in case someone came up, which he doubted would happen—then he got a key from his desk and silently went down to the basement, where a short tunnel connected the ED. to city hall. The tunnel was used to transport prisoners from the jail to court for their trials and was securely locked at both ends. Jack had a key, the desk sergeant had a key, and the city manager had once had a key, but it was taken from him when it was discovered he was giving his girl-friends tours of the place.
He unlocked the door on the RD. side, then relocked it when he was in the tunnel—again, just in case. The place was dark as a tomb, but Jack had a pencil flashlight with a narrow, powerful beam. He unlocked the door on the other end, and left this one unlocked, because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone in city hall after five P.M. The basement was silent and dark, just the way it should be.
He soundlessly climbed the stairs; the door at the top had no lock. He eased it open, listened, then put his eye to the crack and looked for light where there shouldn’t be any. Nothing. The place was empty.
More relaxed now, he opened the flimsy lock on the water department door—the city really needed to replace its locks, it only took him a few seconds to get in—and booted up the computer. The system wasn’t password protected, because it wasn’t on-line. He clicked on Programs, found Billing, and opened the file. Bless their tidy little hearts, everything was cross-referenced between account numbers and names. He simply found Daisy’s name, clicked on it, changed her address to his, saved the change, and closed the file. Bingo.
That taken care of, he backed out of the operating system and turned off the computer, relocked the door behind him, then made his way upstairs to the mayor’s office. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he sure wanted to look around.
Like his own office, there were two entrances to the mayor’s: one through Nadine’s outer sanctum, and a private, unmarked door a little farther down the hallway. The locks here were much better than the locks on the door at the water department.
Jack decided to use Nadine’s door, on the theory that she might think she’d accidentally left it unlocked. Repeating the process he’d used at the water department, he took a small set of probes and picks from his pocket, then put the penlight in his mouth, crouched down, and went to work. He was good at picking locks, though until tonight he hadn’t been called upon to do so since moving to Hillsboro. When people asked him about his SWAT training or any of the action he’d seen, they never asked about any specialty training he might have had on the side. He always downplayed the action part—hell, he wasn’t a Rambo, none of them were, though there were always a
few who let their heads get too far into the mystique—and kept quiet about some of the training, because it seemed smart to keep something in reserve.
The lock yielded in about thirty seconds. Normal citizens would be alarmed at how easy it was to open locked doors; they thought all they had to do was turn the key and they were safe. Unfortunately, the only people they were safe from were the people who obeyed laws and respected locked doors. A lowlife would break a window, kick in a door; Jack had even known them to crawl under houses and saw holes in the floor. Alarm systems and burglar bars were good, but if someone was determined to get inside, he’d find a way.
Witness himself, breaking into the mayor’s office. Jack grinned as he slipped through Nadine’s office, holding the penlight down so the beam wouldn’t flash across the windows, and tried the door into the mayor’s office. It was unlocked; that meant one of three things: Either Temple had nothing to hide, he was so careless he didn’t deserve to live, or he made certain there was nothing suspicious here to see. Jack hoped it was the first but figured it was the third.
Working fast but systematically, he went through the trash and found a wadded piece of paper with Daisy’s tag number scribbled on it, but nothing else interesting. He smoothed out the paper, it was a sheet from the memo pad printed with Temple Nolan at the top, the same memo pad that now rested on top of Temple’s desk. It followed, then, that the mayor had been here in his office when someone called asking him to run that tag number.
A quick search of the mayor’s desk turned up nothing. Jack surveyed the office, but there were no file cabinets, just furniture. All the files were in Nadine’s office. There were, however, two phones on Temple’s desk. One was the office phone, with a list of extension numbers beside it. The other had to be a private line, so Temple could make and receive calls without Nadine knowing.
It was a long shot, but Jack took a tiny recorder out of his pocket, hit redial on the private phone, then held the recorder to the earpiece, recorded the tones, and quickly hung up. He had a pal who could listen to the tones and tell him what number had been dialed. Next he hit *69, and scribbled down the number the computer provided. It wasn’t a local exchange, so the last call Temple had received had not been from his wife asking when he’d be home for supper. Jack tore off a few extra pages of the memo pad to make certain no impression was left behind, wadded up the extras, and dropped them into the wastebasket. The trash would be emptied before Nolan came to work, not that he was likely to go through his own trash, considering there was nothing interesting in there except Daisy’s tag number, which Jack also dropped back in the trash.
That was all he could do tonight. Taking out a handkerchief, he carefully wiped all the surfaces he had touched; then let himself out through Nadine’s office. He went back through the basement tunnel, up to his office, where he restacked all the papers he’d scattered on his desk so Eva Fay wouldn’t realize he’d been here when she wasn’t, turned out the light, and locked up. Everything was just the way he’d found it.
He went out through the back; things were a little busier now than they had been before; an officer had brought in a drunk driver, a big guy who stood about six-six and weighed at least three-fifty. When Jack came through the doors, both Sergeant Wylie and the officer glanced at him, their attention momentarily distracted, and the drunk saw his chance for an escape, ramming his shoulder into the officer and sending him flying, then lowering his head and charging straight into Wylie’s stomach.
It had been a while since Jack had seen any action. With a whoop of sheer joy, he joined the melee.
It took all three of them to subdue the big guy, and they had to resort to some rough stuff before they got him down. It was a good thing the guy had been cuffed, or someone would have been really hurt. As it was, once they had him down and hog-tied, Sergeant Wylie felt his ribs and winced.
“Anything broken?” Jack asked, wiping blood from his nose.
“I don’t think so. Just bruised.” But he winced again when he touched them.
“Go get them checked out. I’ll handle things here.”
The officer, Enoch Stanfield, had a fat lip and a rapidly swelling eye. He was trembling slightly from adrenaline overload as he soaked his handkerchief at the watercooler and held the cold cloth to his eye. “God, I love this job,” he said in an exhausted voice. “Nowhere else would I have the opportunity to get the shit kicked out of me every day.” He eyed Jack. “You sounded like you were having fun, Chief.”
Jack looked down at the big drunk, who had gone to sleep almost as soon as they got him hog-tied. Gargantuan snores issued from his open mouth. “I live for days like this.” Jack was abruptly exhausted, too, though he wasn’t shaking like Stanfield.
He had to call in another officer to help them drag the drunk into the tank to sleep it off. He also called in one of the medics to check him and make sure he was okay, that the big guy wasn’t in insulin shock, or something like that, even though the Breathalyzer indicated that he was simply piss-assed drunk, a diagnosis with which the medic concurred. A cold pack was put on Stanfield’s eye, a stitch in his lip, and another cold pack on Jack’s left hand, which was beginning to swell. He had no idea what exactly had happened to hurt his hand, but that’s the way it was with fights: you just threw yourself in and took stock afterward. By the time he had everything organized, including a replacement for Wylie for the rest of the shift, it was almost ten-thirty, the third-shift officers were there to take over, the second-shift officers were all there except for Wylie, and a couple of the first-shift guys had heard the excitement on their scanners and had come over to take a look. After all, it wasn’t every day the chief got involved in taking down a D and D, drunk and disorderly.
“There’s no way Eva Fay won’t hear about this,” he said glumly, causing general laughter.
“She’ll raise hell, you being here without her on duty,” Officer Markham, a twenty-year veteran with the force, said tongue-in-cheek.
The men, Jack realized, were thoroughly enjoying the situation. It wasn’t often the rank and file got to see their chief get down and dirty. There had always been a hint of reserve in them that wasn’t due just to difference in rank; the biggest part had been that he was an outsider. His wrestling with a big drunk had made them feel he was one of them, a regular cop despite his rank.
To top it all off, he had to walk back home. He could have had one of the guys drive him home, but then he’d have had to come up with a reasonable explanation for why he’d walked over in the first place, and he didn’t want to deal with it.
The house was just as he’d left it. Nothing seemed disturbed or out of place. He went straight to the phone and called information, to see if he could get the number of the mayor’s private line in city hall. There was no such listing, which didn’t surprise him. Next he called Todd Lawrence, who answered on the third ring with a sleepy “Hello.”
“I got the address changed,” he said. “And I used call return on the mayor’s private line to get the number of the last call to him, and redial to record the tones of the last call he made.”
“You’ve been a busy little boy.” Todd sounded more alert.
“This gives us two numbers to check out Think you can find out what the mayor’s private number is and get those records, too?”
“Too? You want me to get telephone records on three numbers.” It was stated as fact.
“What else are federal friends for?”
“You’re going to get your federal friend’s ass fired.”
“I figure my federal friend owes it to Daisy.”
Todd sighed. “You’re right. Okay. I’ll see what I can do, maybe call in some favors. This is completely off-record, though.”
Next Jack called Daisy, though a quick look at his watch told him it was just after eleven. She’d probably gone to bed at ten on the dot, but after all his efforts on her behalf that day, he thought he deserved at least a brief chat.
“Hello.” She didn’t sound s
leepy; she sounded tired, but not sleepy.
“Are you already in bed?”
“Not yet. It’s been an . . . eventful night.”
“Why? What’s happened?” He was instantly on alert.
“I can’t turn my back on him for a second, or he’s tearing something up.”
“ ‘Him?’ ”
“The dog.”
The dog. Jack heaved a sigh of relief. “He doesn’t sound very well trained.”
“He isn’t trained at all. Killer, no! Put that down! I have to go,” she said hurriedly.
“I’ll be right over,” he said, just before she hung up, and didn’t know if she heard him or not. He didn’t care. He grabbed his keys, turned off the lights, and went out the door.
Daisy was exhausted. Her mother had called her at three P.M. and said tiredly, “Jo and I are taking the puppy over to your house. At least the yard is fenced in and he can run there. We’ll stay there with him until you get home.”
“Oh, dear.” That didn’t bode well. “What has he done?”
“What hasn’t the little devil done? We’re run ragged just trying to keep up with him. Anyway, we’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
When she got home at ten after five, both her mother and Aunt Jo were dozing in the living room, while the puppy slept between her mother’s feet. He looked so adorable, lying on his belly with his back legs stretched out behind him, like a little bearskin rug, that her heart melted.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she crooned. One heavy eyelid lifted, his little tail wagged; then he went back to sleep.
Aunt Jo roused. “Thank God you’re home. Good luck; you’ll need it with this little devil. Come on, Evelyn, let’s git while the gitting’s good.”
Evelyn sat up and looked ruefully at the puppy between her feet. “We called Miley Park to see if maybe there was something wrong. She just laughed and said he might be a little excited at being in a new place, but that golden retriever puppies are nonstop mischief until they’re about four months old. Well, he does stop when he’s sleepy.”