Abducted: A Jake Badger Mystery Thriller (11 page)

Chapter 21

Thursday Afternoon

Alex and I got to my office a
little before three. Mildred was just getting ready to leave and wanted to know
if she should go ahead and take Wilson with her. I told her Wilson could stay
with me. She gave Alex the note that she'd put it in a small plastic bag. We
opened it and read it.

HER SINS OR YOURS?

The more I thought about it,
the
more sure
I was that it was not really a question
but a message ...
She was taken because
of your sins
. Someone who had a grudge against me had taken Monica.
But who?

Alex put the note back in the
plastic bag and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.

“So,” he said, “how do you
want to attack this thing?”

“I've got all my case
histories in the computer. I've got them filed chronologically. I'll run down
the list and print off the ones I think are
possibles
.
Once we get a stack, we can look through them in more detail.”

“Sounds good,” Alex said.

While I started on my files,
Alex brewed himself some coffee and me a mug of tea. He took Wilson for a walk
and called Papa's Pizza and ordered an extra large twenty-inch pizza to be
delivered at five thirty.

The cases I selected for
review were those where I had sent someone to jail or prison or made someone
very angry. When I finished, I had twenty-four files to print. Before making
the list, I hadn't really been aware of how many people I'd pissed off in the
past three and a half years.

“Long list,” Alex said.
“You’ve pissed off a lot of people.”

“It’s one of the few things
I’m good at.”

“Shall we get started?”

“Actually, I have something I
have to take care of first?”

I explained about Heather’s
dilemma.

“I’ll come with you,” he
said. “If brute force doesn’t work, I’ll put the fear of the FBI into the kid.”

We were going to have to go
over my case list together anyway.

I called Heather on the way.
She told me where to meet her. She didn’t want her mom to know what we were
doing so she wanted me to pick her up at the library. She had it all worked
out. She and her friend Ashley would walk to the library. Ashley would stay at
the library and Heather would direct me to where Ryan worked.

Turns out
Ryan was
an athlete,
a wrestler, Heather explained. He worked at a place called, The Big Sports
Store, a stand alone sporting goods store in an older section of Santa Monica
that at one time might have been referred to as downtown. We parked on the
street. Heather went in with us to point him out.

“That’s him,” she said,
pointing.

“Okay,” I said, “you go back
to the car.”

Ryan was a big guy for a
seventeen-year-old. Six foot, two hundred pounds. Most of it muscle. Alex and I
headed in his direction.

“I’ll get him outside,” Alex
said. “Then you can put the fear of God into him.”

Sounded like a good plan to
me. We needed to get him somewhere private, somewhere where there were no
security cameras.

Alex approached him and
flashed his badge long enough for Ryan to get a good look at it.

“Ryan Anderson?” Alex asked.

“Yeah.”

“We need to talk,” Alex said.
“Let’s go outside.”

“Well, I can’t right now.
It’s not my break time.”

Alex gave him a cold, hard
stare. “When the FBI says step outside, you step outside.”

“Uh, well, um, okay. Sure. I
guess so.”

“You go out the back way,”
Alex said. “Wait in the back for us. We’ll be around in a minute.”

Ryan nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

Ryan headed off toward the
back of the store. Alex and I went back out the front entrance. As we went
around to the back of the store, I looked for security cameras. There were none
down the side of the building, but there was one monitoring the back entrance.
We stopped at the back corner of the building and called Ryan over.

“What this all about?” he
said, as he stepped around the corner of the building, out of camera range.

I grabbed him by the front of
his shirt, swung him around and slammed him up against the side of the
building. His eyes went wide and his respiration jumped way up.

“So you like to scare little
girls, huh?”

“What? What are you talking
about?”

I slapped him across his
face. A slap is good to get someone’s attention. No blood, no broken bones. But
it stings a lot and it’s humiliating.

“I’m talking about Heather
Edgewater. Your sister Linda told you about her and you said some very ugly
things to her.”

Ryan’s respiration was up
even higher. His eyes were the eyes of a frightened young man.

“Takes a big tough guy,” I
said, “to scare a twelve-year-old girl, doesn’t it?”

“I … I di … didn’t hurt her.
I was just trying to scare her so she’d leave my sister alone. I didn’t hurt
her. I swear. I wouldn’t hurt a little girl.”

“Yeah? Well, aren’t you a fine
upstanding young man. Wouldn’t hurt a little girl. But you would call her names
and tell her about all the sexual things you were going to do to her, wouldn’t
you?”

He started to cry.

“Oh, shut up, you stupid
little crybaby.” I pulled him away from the wall and slammed him up against it
again. “If you ever speak to Heather again,” I said, “or even go near her, I’ll
find you and make you regret it. You understand me?”

He nodded vigorously.

“Say it.”

“I understand. I won’t speak
to her again.”

I held him a moment longer,
my face in his so he could see the anger in my eyes. When I was sure he was
sufficiently frightened, I let go of his shirt. Then I said, “The FBI’s
watching you, Ryan. But if you go near Heather again, when they find you, there
won’t be enough of you left for them to prosecute.”

Alex and I left him standing
there and went back to the car. I don’t know how long he waited before going
back into the store. Heather was waiting impatiently in the car.

“He won’t bother you again,”
I said, after getting into the car.

“I wanted to watch,” Heather
said.

“That wouldn’t have been
appropriate,” I said. “You wanted me to scare him. He’s scared. Be satisfied
with that.”

“Okay,” she said grudgingly
after a moment. “Can I at least gloat to Linda?”

“Absolutely not,” I said,
turning around in the seat to look at her. “No one can know this happened.
There will be all kinds of problems if anyone knows this happened. You have to
be satisfied knowing that I just scared the crap out of him and that he will
not bother you again. Is that clear?”

“You mean you could get in
trouble?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Okay. I don’t want you to
get in trouble. I won’t say anything.”

We dropped Heather off at the
library and got back to my office by five. We sat down and went to work. The
pizza came at five thirty. We kept working while we ate. After two hours, we had
come up with five people who might have been holding a serious grudge against
me. Four of the five had gone to prison. I did not know whether they were still
in prison or had been released. I called Frank, apologized for calling him
after hours, and asked him to check for me. He said he would, and would get
back to me. I gave him four of the five names.

“So what about this other
guy?” Alex asked, “this Cole Randolph. What's his story?”

“Cole Randolph,” I said, “had
been a B list TV actor as a young guy in the nineteen sixties. What he lacked
in talent, he made up for in luck. He'd married a beautiful, talented actress
and they’d had a beautiful daughter, Julie Randolph, who inherited not only her
mother's looks, but her talent as well. The mother had died tragically in an
automobile accident when Julie was only seven. Cole had raised Julie and she
had been a much sought after child star in TV and movies.”

“Cole was her manager. Julie
was a multi-millionaire by aged twelve. However, her agent, Linda Hampton,
happened to see some financial statements and there weren’t as many millions as
there should have been. Lots of Julie's money was unaccounted for. Her agent
called me to look into the matter.”

Alex did not interrupt as he
listened to the story. He knew there was more and waited for me to give it.

“Turns out,” I said, “that
Cole had not only a hefty coke habit, but also a serious gambling addiction. He
bet on everything. He was actually a good gambler with a good winning
percentage. But he tended to reinvest his winnings in bigger bets.
You do that long enough
,
you lose some big
ones
. In the end, it can be expensive. For Cole Randolph, the temptation
to tap into his daughter's millions was too big. He stole from his daughter. I
caught him at it. He lost everything, including his daughter. At fourteen, she
sued for emancipation and won. The court appointed a temporary guardian to
supervise her activity and financial concerns until she reached age eighteen.
Her father went to jail, two years and probation and pay back what he stole. He
claimed that he never
stole
anything.
As the business manager with authority to sign on the account, he argued that
he had merely borrowed the funds. Given how he spent the borrowed funds, the
court disagreed with his interpretation of the events. He blamed me. He made
threats. Cole fancies himself a tough guy. He's big: six two, two twenty-five.
He'd had some martial arts training.”

“So, it's possible,”
Alex
said, “that he's so angry at you that he's taken Monica
in order to draw you in.”

“Someone is,” I said. “I
don't know if it's this guy or not, but we have to check him out.”

Alex got up and poured
himself some more coffee. He sipped it as he paced across my office. He was
thinking. He turned to me and said, “Maybe we're not going back far enough.
This actor
guy ...”

“Cole Randolph.”

“Yeah. He doesn't feel right.
I agree we need to check him out, but I don't think he's our guy.”

“I know,” I said. “Doesn't
feel right to me, either. You think it might be someone from my agency days?”

“You took down some serious
people when you were an agent,” Alex said. “We ought to at least look into it.”

“Okay. Let's look,” I said. “But
all those files are at your office.”

I locked up my office. Alex
drove his car; I drove mine, Wilson riding in the front seat with me. I let
down the passenger window so he could stick his head out and enjoy the
summertime smells. He was happy.

On the way, I got a call from
Patty.

“Have you made any progress?”
she asked.

“Actually, we have,” I said.
“Not anything we’ve done, though.” I told her about the two notes and what we
were now thinking.

Patty was silent for a
moment. Then she said, “Jake, you have to know that if that is what happened,
Monica would never blame you for her being taken. And neither do we.”

“That’s very kind of you,
Patty. I appreciate you saying that.”

“Do you think there will be
more notes?”

“I think there might be. If
they are after me, then they want me to find her.”

“Then they’ll have you,” she
said.

“That’s their plan, I think.”

“So you have to turn the
tables on them so that instead of them getting you, you get them.”

“Something like that,” I
said.

More silence. Then, “Be care,
Jake. Find her. But be careful.”

We arrived at the FBI
building a little after eight. My cases had been archived. While Alex pulled
them up, I went to the break room and got coffee for him and tea for me. He
activated the big wall monitor so we could both read the information on the
screen. By eleven thirty, we had three possibilities.

Chapter 22

Thursday Night

The first person we came
across who might be holding a very big grudge against me was Evelyn Darwin. The
case had involved interstate banking fraud. Evelyn and her daughter
Diane,
were draining the bank accounts of senior citizens.
They would contact seniors, say they were working with their bank to add
additional security protocols, get their personal account information and then
move that person's money out of their account into an offshore account in the
Caymans. They’d stolen millions. It was the first major case I broke as an FBI
agent. In a moment when I’d been alone with mother and daughter, they offered
me a third of what they had stolen. My share would have been well over a
million dollars. They also offered themselves, in a tropical paradise. Access
to either of them or both whenever I wanted it in a Caribbean beach house we
would share. They were both
good looking
women. A
different investigator might have taken them up on it. I didn't. The Darwin
ladies were arrested and convicted. The daughter, who had a degree in computer
programming, was the
brains
of the operation. Mom was
just helping out. Evelyn, the mom, was sentenced to five years. Diane, the
daughter, was sentenced to twenty. Two years into her sentence, Diane was
killed in prison. Evelyn blamed me and swore she’d kill me. She’d gotten out of
prison two and a half years ago but had made no attempt on my life. But maybe
that’s what she was trying to do now.

The second case was not so
much a person of interest as a gang of interest, a motorcycle gang called
Brothers in Arms. I'd led a sting operation where I, along with two other
agents, had bought serious quantities of marijuana, meth, and coke. Then we'd
busted them. Five gang members and the president of the club, Nick
Jarman
, were arrested and convicted. After the conviction,
Nick sent a message, delivered by one of his gang members, that when he got
out, he'd be coming to see me. According to the records, Nick had been released
six months ago.

The third possibility was the
daughter of a man I’d had to shoot. His name was Harvey Connors. His had a
daughter named Lindsey who had vowed that one day she would kill me. Her father
was a psychopath who had planned to blow up a family in Encino if the governor
did not sign a pardon for all the people in jail or prison for nonviolent sex
crimes. He claimed that since sex was a normal part of life, nonviolent sex
could not possibly be a crime. Lindsey, who we suspected was engaging in carnal
relations with her father, agreed with him. We had been watching the father as
his rhetoric had turned to accusations and then to threats. We had thought we
were keeping pace with him, but he'd gotten ahead of us. He’d taken a family, a
husband and wife and three children, hostage and had their house rigged to blow
up. We had tracked his cell and had him cornered in the house. He had let me in
the house to talk with him. I'd let him take my service weapon and was trying
to talk him into giving up and telling me how to disarm the bomb. He wouldn't.
He began to get agitated and started making additional demands. I knew if I
could get the bomb squad in the house, they could disarm the bomb. But I had to
get control of him first. Turned out not to be an easy thing to do. He was threatening
to shoot the father. I had a small backup weapon of which he was unaware. He
took his eyes off me for a moment to look at the father. I pulled my backup weapon
and shot him. We got the family out and the bomb squad disarmed the bomb with
two minutes to spare.

The daughter claimed that the
FBI had executed her father for speaking out for the rights of wrongly
convicted people. And I, she'd said, had been their executioner. She had vowed
to avenge her father's death.

“So, who do you want to start
with?” Alex asked.

“Nick
Jarman
,”
I said. “I think the Brothers in Arms have a greater capacity for something
like this than the others.”

As I drove back home, I began
feeling guilty again. I was in my own environment, warm and
well-fed
,
surrounded by friends and colleagues. I was in my own vehicle, on my way home
to my apartment, to sleep in my nice comfortable bed. Where was Monica? Was she
hurt? Hungry? Cold? Frightened? My gut told me I should be pushing this
investigation twenty-four seven. Day or night, I should be busting down doors
and rousting everyone who ever had any dealings with Monica or me until I found
her, until I held her in my arms and knew she was safe. But in real life, it
doesn't work like that. I had to be calm, methodical, calculating. I had to be
professional. I was thankful for Alex. He was helping me hold it together, even
if he didn't know he was. He was putting all the resources of the FBI at my
disposal, yet giving me enough room to operate and feel like I was the one in
charge of the investigation. Frank was helping a lot, too. It was just as I
thought about Frank that he called back.

“Got the info on those four
guys,” he said.

“And?”

“All still in prison.”

“Okay. Thanks for checking.”

“No problem. Something else.”

“Yeah?”

“Branch found a connection
between Bonito Esposito and Rachel Pipestone.”

“I thought she might,” I
said.

“Couple of years back,
Esposito did some legal work for the Pipestones. Set up an offshore
corporation. An import-export business based on Grand Cayman Island.”

“I wonder what they were
importing and exporting,” I said.

“Probably just some little
Caribbean craft items,” Frank said.

“Yeah, that's probably what
it was. Either that or it is a way to launder their drug money.”

“Couldn't be that,” Frank
said. “That'd be illegal.”

“Yeah. I'll have to ask him
about that.”

“Ask carefully.”

“Sure. I wouldn't want to
offend him.”

“You thinking that maybe
Bonito and Rachel are still working together?”

“I think we both know that's
a pretty good possibility.”

“And are you thinking they
sent the shooters?”

“I think they might have sent
both teams.”

“Both?” Frank said. “I don't
think I heard about a second team.”

I told him about the Asian
guys who were following us.

“Uncommon to have Latinos and
Asians working in the same organization.”

“That's what I hear,” I said.

“How you going to handle
this, Jake?”

“I think tomorrow
Alex and I will pay another visit to Bonito Esposito.”

I gave Wilson a
few minutes outside before we went in. I was hungry, so I had a bowl of
Cheerios. It was nearly one when I went to bed. I dreamed that Monica and I
were sailing together on the ocean. The sea was calm, the breeze was gentle,
the
temperature was perfect. I turned to check the sail.
When I turned back, Monica was gone. She’d fallen overboard. I called out to
her. I searched the water around the entire boat. I did not see her. I jumped
in the water to search for her and it was full of sharks and squid, octopi and
jellyfish, manta rays and barracuda. They rushed at me but didn’t attack,
encircling me instead, so that I couldn’t see into the water beyond them. I
called out for Monica, but she didn’t answer. I felt her presence, but could
not communicate with her. I struggled to get through the wall of sea creatures.
When I finally broke through, into the open waters, Monica wasn’t there. I felt
her presence on the other side of the boat. I dove deep and swam under the sea
creatures and the boat and came up on the other side if it. Again, Monica was not
there. I swam around and around and the sea creatures began to laugh at me. And
then there were mermaids. All of them well endowed, like Monica, all with red
hair like Monica, but none of them Monica. I swam around and around until I was
sure that Monica was not in the water. When I decided to return to the boat,
the boat was gone and I was alone in the ocean.

I awoke at five
a.m., exhausted and unsettled. I took a long hot shower to try and relax, and
then Wilson and I went for our morning run.