Checkmate (Caitlin Calloway Mystery Book 2) (15 page)

“Not a wink,” Val answered honestly. “But it’s my job to find
him. If I bring him back to Connecticut in a body bag, so be it.
Anyone who hurts kids gets what they deserve. I’m not real
particular what condition they’re in when I bring them in. I need to
track down his ex-wife. Looks like I’ll be out of your hair soon.”

“Promises, promises.” Mills chuckled.

Val began to review the file. If Caitlin Calloway was half the
cop she was on paper, the city was lucky to have her. Graduated
from the academy near the top of her class. After completing her
probation period, she did indeed take a bullet, two in fact. Somehow
Calloway had managed to take down the shooter before he shot her
partner, Max Sampson. Val was confused by the lack of information
regarding the incident. She made a note to make a couple of calls.
She could ask Mills, but she figured her earlier questions made her
leery of her intentions. She kept looking at the file. Perhaps digging
a little deeper would give her the answers she was seeking.

When CC was eight, her older brother Donald committed
suicide. Young Caitlin found the body. A couple of months later,
her father, Joseph Calloway, died in a car accident. Apparently, he
fell asleep at the wheel of his Buick after pulling back-to-back
double shifts at his job with GE. Thanks to the insurance company
constantly questioning the circumstance, it was confirmed that he
did indeed fall asleep while driving home from work.

“Poor kid,” Val couldn’t help saying. She kept reading. The
next time Caitlin Calloway showed up in the system was a report
she made to an Officer Francis Donnelly, accusing her new
stepfather of trying to do things to her that were highly
inappropriate.

Val felt a little more at ease after she finished reviewing the
file. There were a couple of gaps in Calloway’s history that had
caught her eye.

She hoped that Beaumont had simply bolted, probably off to
Mexico or Canada. She had already alerted her contacts North and South of the border.
She just had to be sure that she wasn’t hunting for a corpse. She’d
meet with Calloway tomorrow, just as a formality. Her next stop
was a visit to Beaumont’s ex-wife.

“Mills?”

“Yup?” She grunted before turning to her.

“The file is a little vague about Calloway’s on-duty injury.
What’s up with that?” She cringed when she felt the entire room
tense up. Each member of the task force returned her question with
an icy stare. “Okay. Did I do something wrong?” She didn’t think
the question was out of line. It wasn’t even pertinent. Val was
simply curious. She wanted to kick herself for that pesky overly
inquisitive streak in her. “Come on, Mills. I’m not trying to start
trouble. Just between us gals, I’m curious. A cop takes a bullet and
it’s just a blurb in her jacket?”

“Look,” Mills said in a hushed tone and took a seat beside her.
“It’s kind of…”

“Hey, I was just curious.” Last thing Val needed in her line of
work was to piss off one of the leading Fugitive Task Forces in the
country. “I don’t need an answer.”

“It was a routine traffic stop,” Mills said quietly. “She was
green. Just finished her probation. According to Sampson, the guy
just starts shooting. Calloway was down. Max said they never saw it
coming. He didn’t have time to react. He’s staring at this piece of
shit aiming a gun at him, and Calloway got off a shot and took him
down.”

“She killed him?” she asked, thinking that was what had
provoked the strange response. Then again if she had chances were that she wouldn’t have been able to keep working the streets. Justified shooting or not a cop that wet behind the ears would have found themselves riding a desk for a really long time.

“Nope. The reason her jacket is a little light on the incident is
because the guy was a CI.”

“The punk was a confidential informant? So, when she pulled him over he panicked,” she said. “Still doesn’t explain the lack of info.”

“A very special informant. Feds asked us to keep the whole thing under wraps. Calloway did as she was told. Sampson got his gold shield. Never even made the news.”

“Great. They covered it up.” Val grunted with disgust. “Well, she must love working with Feds. I’m screwed with her. What happened to the snitch?”

“Shot outside of a bar in Southie, never found the shooter.” Mills shrugged as if it was no big deal.

“No shortage of suspects, I’m sure. You weren’t kidding when you said Calloway took one for the team. She’s never going to talk to me.”

“To lock up her stepfather? She’ll work with you,” Mills said. “Told you before, Calloway’s a good cop.”

Val closed the file and thanked Mills. She didn’t miss the way every cop in the room was looking at her. She wasn’t bothered by the harshness in their eyes. She had pried into the life of one of their own. She was certain there were cops in that room who didn’t like Calloway. CC Calloway may have been a good cop, but she was also a lesbian who was outdoing most of her male counterparts. Despite any prejudice they may have harbored, she was still a cop. Val, on the other hand, was a Fed. It took her a long time to realize that locals didn’t like working with Feds, no matter how important the case. She packed up the rest of her stuff and headed back to her hotel.

After a long hot shower, she broke out her cell phone and laptop. She had to find Albert Beaumont. That was priority number one. She ran through the list of possible scenarios. If he was smart, he headed south: Mexico, Virginia, or Florida. Florida would be the best choice for someone Beaumont’s age.

“He could blend in,” she said aloud. “Retiree sick of the snow. He’d need a new identity. But he can find work. There are folks who will gladly pay a nice elderly man under the table to help him supplement his Social Security.” She wished Ricky were there, if for no other reason than she felt a little silly verbalizing her theories to no one. Deciding she needed a little objective input, she picked up her cell and called him.

Val Brown and Ricky Samaria had been friends since their days at Annapolis. They had been through things that most people only read about in spy novels. When she left the Navy, Ricky, along with their close knit circle, followed. She joined the marshal service, and he went to Quantico.

“What’s up, Brownie?” He used his pet name for her. “No good looking women in Boston?”

“Like you care,” she said and laughed. It hadn’t taken either very long back in Annapolis to realize the secret they shared. It was before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” For some reason, neither she nor Ricky had been asked. At first they thought it had been an oversight. One they had been grateful for. If asked, they would have had to lie. Lying was a violation of the honor code. But no one asked.

Later they would realize they weren’t asked because no one wanted them to answer. They, along with three other classmates, were being groomed for something bigger. In the end, the hypocrisy got to Val. Pushed into a corner by a bigoted redneck who happened to be a rear admiral, she outed herself.

The navy chose to ignore her admission. Odd, because ever since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was instituted, the military was flushing anyone and everyone who might be gay right out of the service.  Still, Val Brown had always been much more than her file read. The government had no interest in allowing that information to be leaked out. The navy rested on semantics. Neither she nor her superior officer had used the exact words that would end her career. She was allowed to join the Shining Star program and retire. Now she was as out as she could be without losing her benefits.

“Ricky, I need you to look into some names for me.”

“Don’t you ever do your own work?”

“And yours most of the time,” she teased him. “I don’t know why the FBI puts up with your crap.”

“Is this your way of sweet talking me? I thought you needed a favor.”

“Fine, you big hunk of gorgeous manhood. Us lowly marshals don’t have the same access to info you big bad FBI agents do. Give a helpless girl a break.”

He laughed. “Who are you tracking?”

“Albert Beaumont. Took a hike from Gibbon Home, Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was doing ten to twenty for a level three.”

“Child molester? Why didn’t you say so? Okay, I’ve got his file. Arrests in Ohio, Maine, Indiana, and twice Connecticut, which should have gone down as a third strike. Got out for good behavior and reoffended less than two months later.”

“I’ve got all that,” Val said. “Most of those happened in the seventies. Nothing stuck except the one in Ohio. He did three years.”

“Slap on the wrist. Then nothing until Massachusetts. Stepdaughter accused him of trying to get funny with her.”

“Again, I’m on all that.” Val tried to hurry him along. “I’ve had the team watching the usual spots: bus stations, train stations, the airport, and every no-tell motel in the area. I’ve got nothing. Don’t tell me what I can find by going through the usual channels. I need your superior hacking skills. I need to get this guy.  The stepdaughter who reported him is a cop now.”

“Good for her,” Ricky muttered. Val listened to him furiously typing. “Couple of domestic calls. Seems your cop took a baseball bat to the pervert when she was all of nine years old. She did it more than once. DSS investigated. Nothing happened. They bought the party line that the kid was upset because Albert was trying to take her father’s place.”

“Ricky, move into this century.”

“The first cop, Francis Donnelly, took an interest,” Ricky muttered. “By the time he tracked down Beaumont’s history, the family had moved to Rhode Island.”

“Yeah, I’m curious about that,” Val said. “Not all of them moved. Caitlin Calloway was still enrolled at Beachmont High. Her mailing address remained the same. But from what I’m looking at, the Beaumonts sold the house. Except for school, She’s off the grid for another three years. The next mailing address I can find is when she started college. She was living with her uncle, Michael Anthony Calloway.”

“Bookie.”

“Really?”

“Middle level, not big enough for us or the mob to give a damn about. And not small enough to fly under the radar.” He quickly explained.

“One of my questions is where was this kid?” Val tried to sort it out. “She wasn’t with the family and she wasn’t living in the old house. I can’t find a connection between her and the new owners. A family by the name of Nacster.”

“You think there’s another relative that might be hiding Beaumont?”

“Possibly. I’m also curious as to where a fifteen-year-old girl was living for all that time. Tell me about the bookie.”

“Michael Calloway, better known as Mac C, holds court at the Lucky Seven in the West End,” Ricky said. “Caitlin moved in with him and enrolled in Suffolk University. Graduated on time, not at the top of the class but not the bottom. Entered the academy, did well, not outstanding. Oh? She did us a favor back in eighty-nine.”

“Yeah, I heard about that one.”

“Arrested Jeffrey Charles West back when she was still a beat cop.” He sounded impressed. “Nice collar. Simon Fisher was another piece of work. She has an above-average closure rate. Nothing odd in her jacket, except she did threaten a drag queen once.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A Brad Quinn performs drag at Jacques Cabaret, on Broadway.”

“Oh? Interesting. According to Caitlin’s niece Emma’s birth certificate, that’s her daddy. Okay, I’ve got a couple of things that are bugging me. We have a possible sighting of Beaumont hopping on a bus heading north. If he knows about his granddaughter, I’m afraid he might try and get a little revenge,” she said. “Then there is the ex-wife, Maria Beaumont. I’m coming up empty. All I got is she divorced Beaumont’s sorry ass just after his first arrest in Connecticut. Then nada.”

“Okay.” Ricky’s voice turned serious. Val listened to his furious typing. “I got her.”

“Where is she?”

“Waltham, Massachusetts.”

“How far is that from here?”

“Right around the corner. About thirty miles or so. She’s flying under the radar all right. Went back to the maiden name Gallagher. She’s waiting tables off the books at a restaurant called The Watch Factory. Lucky for you, the IRS is looking at them or we wouldn’t have found her. Before he bolted, did Beaumont make any friends?”

“No,” Val said. “He kept to himself. Did his therapy. His advisor said Beaumont was typical. Said all the right things in group. Outside of group, he swore up and down he was framed. He told more than one of his neighbors that his bitch of a stepdaughter used her badge to set him up. Two weeks ago, he went off to work. Had a roofing job. Never checked back in. Like I said, I’ve got a maybe of him heading towards Boston. If he was smart, he would have headed south and disappeared.”

“With an ex-wife, the daughter, stepdaughter, and granddaughter all living in the area…”

“You have to wonder if he’s planning on paying a visit to one of them,” Val said. “I’ll pay a call on the ex-Mrs. Beaumont in the morning. Thanks for the help, Ricky.”

He emailed her all the info he had collected. She needed sleep. Nothing new there. Flying by the seat of her pants was a constant in her life. The truth was, she enjoyed it. What she didn’t enjoy was failure. The upside of her job was everyone she was seeking for the most part already had their day in court. It wasn’t like in the movies. These people were criminals, no ifs, ands, or buts. On the rare occasion, her job allowed her to cross paths with someone like Stevie Calloway.

In the beginning, she had been looking forward to meeting Caitlin, the older Calloway sister. Brooks had built her up so much, Val was almost convinced that the detective was a figment of his imagination. Caitlin was okay. Not what she expected. Stevie, on the other hand, was a woman she wouldn’t mind spending a little time with.

She couldn’t help smirking while she thought of just how she might enjoy Stevie’s company. She perused the file that summed up the young web designer’s life. Born Stevie Joanna Beaumont to Albert and Maria Beaumont. Her older half-sister, Caitlin Calloway, was awarded custody of her when she was sixteen. A wall of blue showed up at the custody hearing with records proving that her loving father had a long history as a sex offender and her sister was a decorated police officer. A restraining order had been filed against both of her parents shortly thereafter.