Chapter 23
A
minute later, Lana comes out of the strategy room toward us.
“Don't tell her,” MJ whispers.
“Not now. But at some point, we'll need Eddie to ID Cole as the guy who offered him a thousand dollars.”
“We got a little more information on Cole,” Lana says when she reaches us, “but it only confirms what you learned from your contacts, MJ. He's a low-level foot soldier in the Family trying hard to move up and get made quickly. The fastest way to do that is to make a kill.”
Now I feel as sick as MJ looked when we first arrived. “But why Bethanie? Why not her dad?”
“We still think her dad is the target. Wait here a minute while we get a team together to go bring in her family.”
“Damn,” MJ says when Lana leaves. “It's looking bad for your girl, no matter what your mom thinks.”
“She thinks the same thing we do. She just said that so I won't freak out.”
“So we need to figure out why Cole would want your friend instead of her father 'cause we know that's why they sent him out here. Once we know that, we come up with the plan to find him, right?”
“Right.”
“And you have a theory, the one you explained back at your house. He'll use Bethanie as ransom to make her pops turn himself in to the police.”
“Ransom. That's it, MJ.”
“That's what?”
“I just came up with another theory. Cole came out here to kill Mr. Larsen, found out he won the Powerballâ”
“Wow. You didn't say they were that rich. That explains a whole helluva lot, then.”
“But not everything. Powerball money still won't keep the Boss out of jail, which is why Cole was sent. Maybe he figured he could get the money
and
kill Mr. Larsen, so he's holding Bethanie ransom.”
“But that won't help him take over the Family like my contacts told me was the word on the street,” MJ reminds me.
“True.”
“Maybe he's like Donnell. Remember how he was going to rob your boss and use the money to start up his own Down Homes operation in Denver? Could be Cole is doing the same thingâusing your friend to make Larsen testify
and
set him up with bank so he can go back and take over the business. He can buy a lot of friends in the Family with that kind of money.”
“That's brilliant, MJ.”
She's no Rhodes scholar but when it comes to criminal minds, MJ is Stephen Hawking smart.
I notice MJ looks a lot less worried about being in the interview chair. Maybe that's the secret to getting her to see cops aren't all badâletting her be on the same team. I'm about to offer her my seat when I see Lana through the window of the strategy room waving us over. Right away, MJ looks nervous again.
“Relax, MJ, we aren't the ones in trouble this time,” I tell her.
When we get into the room, Lana introduces us to the detectives.
“It's okay, guys. I told my CO everything. I had to, there was no way around it.”
“Young ladies, this is quite some detective work you're doing here. We want you on our team, but first we need to talk about confidentiality.”
“You can trust Chanti. She's protected my cover as well as any partner would,” Lana says, which would make me grin like a fool if I wasn't sick with worry over Bethanie.
“I don't doubt it. But I understand you have a history, Miss Cooper.”
“Ancient history,” MJ says in her tone that warns people to back down or a butt-kicking is about to ensue. Luckily, Lana steps in.
“I trust MJ equally,” she says, surprising us both. “She helped us with that burglary ring last month and saved Chanti's life in the process.”
Her boss accepts Lana's word on MJ and I but still makes us sign some kind of form saying we have to keep police secrets. It's second nature for me to keep secrets since I know how important it is to Lana's safety, and someone would have to torture MJ to make her ever admit to helping the cops. Right now she's probably just as worried about her street cred as getting Bethanie out of trouble, maybe more. Even though she's given up the life, not everything goes away.
“Tell me about that phone call you had with Bethanie,” Lana says, checking her watch. “It's been about an hour, right?”
I know she's asking for the time because the clock has begun to tick. If Cole made her get off the phone because he's worried someone's onto him, common cop wisdom is that we only have twenty-four hours to find her. That's the magic hour when things start to go bad for a hostage, even if she doesn't realize that's what she is.
“It sounded like she was at an amusement park when I called her.”
“This late in October?”
“I guess she's not in the state.”
“Could it have been a video arcade?”
“A what?” MJ asks.
“Whatever you kids call them now, like Dave and Buster's.”
“No one but little kids and old people go there,” MJ says. “Well, not real old, but like your age.”
Lana frowns at that statement.
“It didn't sound like that. It was more like the sounds of one of those traveling carnivals that set up in parking lots for a couple of weeks in the summer. The kind you wouldn't let me go to when I was a kid because you thought they weren't regulated enough.”
“If she's in the country, that doesn't leave much. Florida, maybe Southern California,” Lana says. “It's getting too cold everywhere else to run an amusement park.”
“You think they might not even be in the country?” I ask.
“It's something we have to consider. But first I'll check on amusement parks open this time of year. Anything else?”
“She kept saying she was so happy and excited to tell me why, and how her parents wouldn't be able to tell her what to do anymore.”
“Any ideas what was making her so happy?”
I couldn't tell Lana that it might be because she and Cole had finally done the deed after she'd been trying to seduce him for a couple of weeks, so I told her I didn't have any idea because it was true. I'm pretty sure there's something else going on besides losing her virginity.
After MJ and I share our newest theories with Lana and the rest of the team, they work on revising their strategy to bring in Mr. Larsen. In the meantime, they tell me to look through some of the surveillance photos to see if I recognize anyone else in them like I did with Cole. They show MJ to an office where she can make a call to her Atlanta Homies to see if they might have any more information. I imagine MJ must be breaking out in hives right about now, having to call her ex-gang members from a police department, even if it's from her cell phone and they'd never know. Unless they have one of those GPS tracking wall grids like on TV. I'm guessing a low-rent gang called the Down Homes probably doesn't, but that didn't keep MJ from looking like she was going to the gallows when she left the strategy room.
I'm looking through some surveillance photos taken of the Family when I come across some of a wedding. The way the Boss is smiling, I'm guessing it's his daughter, and that's confirmed when I see more photos of them together. I know I watch too much TV, but I wonder if he's happy for his daughter or if her marriage just made him more powerful because her new husband is also part of a crime family. See how my mind wanders, even at a time like this? For all I know her husband could be a schoolteacher or a bank teller. From what I can tell, it doesn't matter to the new bride what her husband does for a living because she looks so happy, like she doesn't have a care in the world even though her family is a bunch of criminals.
Is love what it takes to make you not care about who a guy really is, or if you do know, to still not care? From the little Lana has told me about my father, that's how I came to be. She hooked up with someone she knew she shouldn't have. Isn't that exactly what MJ did when she became her boyfriend's getaway driver? She even told me that's why she joined the Down Homes in the first placeâbecause the boy she loved was a member. It's the very reasonâor excuse, Tasha would sayâthat I never had a boyfriend before Marco. I don't want to ever be so stupid over a guy that I lose my mind and good sense. What if Bethanie is that stupid crazy about Cole? Worse, what if she knows what he's about and is going along, like those people with Stockholm Syndrome?
Something about thinking the Boss's daughter could be marrying a bank teller, a counter of money, plus Cole's fascination with having Bethanie teaching him how to gamble, and the sounds I heard in the background during Bethanie's calls give me an idea. My TV addiction helps me come up with the idea, too.
“Lana,” I yell too loudly because she and her team are just at the next table over. “I need to see some surveillance tape of one of the casinos.”
“Okay, wait a minute and I'llâ”
“Really. I need to see them now.”
Lana's boss looks at her like
You raised this unruly kid?
but Lana knows I'd never talk to her like that unless it was do or die and I was really onto a clue. She ignores her boss and walks over to the TV and puts in a DVD.
“Is it muted? I need audio.”
Lana turns up the volume and now I know for sure.
“That's the sound I heard. They weren't at an amusement park when Bethanie called. She was calling from inside a casino. A Las Vegas casino.”
“How do you know it's Las Vegas? Could be Black Hawk. He may have gone up there looking for Larsen.”
“Because that's how Cole got her to go with him without a fight. That's why instead of being terrified, she's acting like being kidnapped by a Mafia dude is just the bestest thing in the world. He told her they'd elope to Vegas and she was crazy enough, or in love enough, to believe him.”
Chapter 24
O
n the drive to the Larsens, I imagine what I'll say to them but come up with nothing. What do you say when you're part of the reason someone's kid has gone missing? I mean, that's how they'll see it even if I tell them Bethanie was leaving with Cole without my help and at least this way we're still in contact with her. That's why Lana tells me to wait in the car while she and her partner tell the Larsens what's going on, and then she'll come out and get me when she thinks it's okay. Maybe if MJ had come along with us instead of staying back at the department I'd have stayed in the car. But she didn't and I don't. The minute I see Lana get inside the house, I follow.
I'm in luck; they left the door unlocked. I'm just inside the foyer so I can hear everything but they can't see me. Unfortunately I can't see them either, so I just have voices to go on to tell who is there.
“I know why y'all here, and I never thought I'd say it but I'm almost relieved,” Mr. Larsen says.
“How do you know? Have you made contact?” Lana asks.
“No, but I gotta feeling it won't be long and I'd rather it be y'all calling than them.”
“Mr. Larsen, I think there's some confusion here.”
“I'm not confused. Y'all here to take me into protective custody.”
“We should never have run in the first place,” Mrs. Larsen says.
“Yeah, right, Lola Mae. That ain't what you said when we went down there to cash in that ticket,” Mr. Larsen says.
“You want to let us in on the secret?” Lana asks.
Mr. Larsen lets out a big sigh, like he's thinking he might as well just come clean. “The Sunday before the police told us about the deal to testify against DeLong, me and Mama had bought us a Powerball ticket. When that ticket turned out to have the winning numbers on Wednesday, we decided we didn't need no help from the police. With all that money, we could go into our own protective custodyâchange our names, get out of town, live on cash. No one can track you if you never have a job and pay everything in cash.”
“So you thought,” says Mrs. Larsen. “The cops found us, and they ain't the only ones.”
“You think DeLong has found you, too?” That's Detective Falcone, Lana's partner. I'm guessing DeLong must be the guy they've been calling the Boss this whole time.
“I think somebody is on our tail and it ain't the cops. A week ago, I spotted a car out front, one house down, early on a Sunday morning. Folks around here use their garages, and this car had been parked outside all night. The windows were all frosted over.”
Score one for me. That
was
Cole watching the house that morning I went to see Bethanie.
“Then here come another car pull up in front of my house,” Mr. Larsen continues. “A man gets out but soon as he notices the car with the frosted windows, he gets back in his car and takes off. That's when I run down to see if I can tail him. By the time I get out the garage, the car that had been there all night was gone, too.”
Take my point away. I didn't realize that first car I saw leaving Bethanie's street was part of this story and didn't pay attention to what it looked like. In my defense, it was really cold that morning and I was just trying to get someplace warm.
“Did you catch up with them?” Lana asks.
“Naw, I lost 'em.”
“That's probably a good thing. These guys are dangerous,” Falcone says. “How about a plate?”
“No plate, but I can describe both cars. The one what was here all night was a silver Porsche. The guy he scared off was driving a blue Jag.”
Bethanie told me the guy waiting for her in her favorite parking spot that day was driving a Jag. Cole scared him off that day, too. At the time, I doubted how preppie Cole could scare off a serious thug but clearly I underestimated him. How could I know he was the right-hand man of a crime family boss? Now I'm wondering why this guy in the Jag keeps showing up, and why Cole has to keep running him off.
“Then there's a boy been sniffin' around my daughter. First I thought he was just some con artist after the money. That's one place we went wrong. It's hard when you never had nothing to keep pretending like you still don't have nothing after you win all that money. Could be we was a little too flashy with our newfound wealth.”
“Yes, I can imagine.” I bet Lana's looking around at Mrs. Larsen's interior design choices right now. “What made you think he might be after something more than money?”
“Can't say exactly. When you been in my trade for as long as I have ...”
“You mean hustling?”
“I like to call it entrepreneuring. Anyway, I've been around enough cons to get a sense of it. I never met this boy, I only know his name is Cole, but the way he pulled my daughter into his confidence so quick made me worried.”
“Well, that brings us to why we're here. It isn't exactly for the reason you think, I'm afraid,” Falcone says. “We came about your daughter.”
“She oughtta be here by now. She stayed the weekend with a school friend of hers while we were up in the mountains taking in the scenery.”
“You mean the poker tables, don't you?” says Mrs. Larsen. “Boringest place I ever been to. Didn't even have nowhere to shop, did they, Josephine?”
I'm wondering who Josephine could be until I hear the person they've been calling Molly, the maid, answer in agreement. I knew that was a fake name, just like Tiny and the Larsens.
“Truth is, we starting to get worried 'cause she's a couple hours late,” says Mr. Larsen. “But soon as she gets home, we'll all go with y'all wherever we need to go to get that protective custody. I'm tired of looking over my shoulder.”
“We get to keep the lottery money, right?” Mrs. Larsen asks.
I can't stand waiting in that foyer another minute listening to the Larsens and their belief that Bethanie is coming through the door any minute, so I come out of hiding. Mrs. Larsen sees me first.
“Chantal, where you come from? This here is the girl Bethanie stayed with over the weekend. Did Bethanie go upstairs without even coming in to see us? These kids and their manners,” she says to Lana.
Lana looks at me and I shake my head. I should be the one to tell them, at least that's what I thought when I stepped into the living room. But now I can't make the words come. They're all just staring at me, waiting, expecting some explanation, but then I see in Mrs. Larsen's eyes that she is slowly figuring out something is wrong. Mr. Larsen is, too, and stands up as if that will make everything clear to him. Lana takes over and I'm relieved.
“Please, sit down. Unfortunately, you were right to suspect this young man. We think he was the driver of that silver Porsche and that he was indeed watching your house, probably for some time.”
“I knew we should have hired some real protection 'stead of your cousin Tiny,” Mrs. Larsen says. “Always so cheap. A real bodyguard would have noticed somebody casing us all that time.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Larsen, that's not all of it,” Lana says, and pauses a second before she continues. “We believe your daughter has left town with him.”
“Lord have mercy,” both Larsens say at the same time.
“The good news is we believe she's well, and in fact, she may have gone with him willingly.”
“Why would she do that?” Mrs. Larsen asks.
Now it really is my turn to speak up.
“If I could take a look around, mainly in her room, I might find some clues to where Bethanie might be.”
“You won't be looking around nowhere. Why you need clues to tell me my child spent the whole weekend with you?” Mrs. Larsen says, each word getting higher pitched than the one before it, reminding me of Squeak.
“Because she didn't really stay with me over the weekend. I was just ... I covered for her because she wanted to be with Cole.”
“You helped this boy kidnap my child?” Mrs. Larsen looks at me like she might come over and strangle me where I stand, and I almost can't blame her.
I can tell Lana is trying to figure out if she should blow her cover even more than she already has just by being here as a cop and not undercover, and let them know she's also my mother.
“We sent her over to your place thinking you might talk some sense into her about this boy, and you help him steal her away from us?”
I don't know any other way to say it than to just say it, so I do. “She was going with him whether I helped or not. She was always saying she never got to be a regular girl, always on lockdown, never having a boyfriend, because ... well, she said you were very overprotective, Mr. Larsen. She never told me why, and once I figured out you won the Powerball, I thought it was about your money.”
Mr. Larsen looks stunned. “You knew about the money?”
“Not because she told me. I figured it out myself. She was always protective of you, too, even when I tried to get her to tell me what was going on. Then I realized this goes back to long before the money came along. I mean, she'll be seventeen in a couple of days and never had a boyfriend or even a real date, but with her looks, boys are always coming on to her. My experienceâmy mother's line of workâmade me suspect your being so guarded over Bethanie had something to do with what you did for a living, which I also knew had nothing to do with the oil business.”
“What all this got to do with you helping my child's kidnapper? Shouldn't we be out looking for them? I ain't got time to listen to this child tell me what I did wrong as a parent.”
“What Chanti is trying to say will make sense in a minute, but it's important.”
“What you know about her?” Mrs. Larsen asks Lana. “She's just some girl over at that rich school on a scholarship. Here I thought I was protecting Bethanie from the wrong element and I'm sending her right into the wolves.”
“I know her because she's my daughter.”
“What the hell is going on?” Mr. Larsen asks. “Nothing I heard so far makes a damn bit of sense.”
Lana gives the Larsens a quick rundown on how I got to be involved in their case, and ends by telling them to trust me because I'm a good detective, too, even if no one's paying me for the job. So I finish what I was trying to tell them.
“You had Bethanie on such a tight leash, overprotective was an understatement. I know from Lana's work that usually only cops and criminals are that paranoid. I knew you weren't a cop, and I didn't get the feeling you were a criminal, either, but you probably associated with some. Then when I suggested Cole was after your money, you seemed relieved. That meant you were afraid he was capable of much worse than being a con artist. I connected that with your gambling habit and I figured you owed some scary people a lot of money, and probably on the regular. When I learned about Lana's case, I just put it all together. There were lots of other clues, but that doesn't matter now.”
Both Larsens look deflated. Before they were angry and ready to kick buttâmine, Cole's. Now they look angry and scared.
“So she went away with this boy to get back at me for protecting her?”
“Some of it to get back at you, but a lot of it because she's in love.”
“What's a girl who never been on a date know about love?” Mr. Larsen asks.
His wife gives him an answer. “That's why she fell so easy. We did wrong, keeping her apart from things every girl should have.”
“It was wrong that I lied and covered for her, but I did it for what I thought was a good reason. She was going to be with him anyway, but at least I'd be in contact with her. I never guessed she'd run off with him.”
“You spoke to her today?” Mrs. Larsen asks.
“I did, and at this point I think she has no idea Cole was sent by the Boss. She actually sounded very happy when we spoke.”
“But now we're working against a clock,” Lana says. “I'm surprised he hasn't contacted you yet. Chanti thinks he may have told her some
Romeo and Juliet
story to make her leave with him, but that he really has kidnapped her. He wants something in return for her.”
“Whatâmoney?”
“I have a few theories on that. Money to pay back the Boss what you owe him, plus a lot of interest. Your word that you won't testify against the Boss. Or maybe he wants to force you to testify so the Boss goes to jail and he takes over the Family.”
“A punk kid like that? He could never take over the Family becauseâ”
Mrs. Larsen cuts her husband off. “We'll do it, give him the money, turn ourselves in to the cops. I'll trade myself for her, whatever we need to do.”
“You might have to do all of the above at some point but right now I just need you to let me walk through the house,” I say. And without waiting for an answer, I leave the room.