Never Coming Back (41 page)

I pulled the Challenger into Texico Mexas—a fast-food restaurant on Pecos, east of the airport—just after nine. At night, this far from the Strip, Las Vegas was like any other West Coast city: low-rise buildings; small, two-color billboards; orange sodium lights running off into the darkness. After I'd got off the phone to Emily, Soto had phoned through to my room and asked me to join him. He said his girlfriend, Ellie, worked here on weeknights, and she'd get us a thirty percent discount on our food. I never considered myself much of a food snob, but Tex-Mex wasn't really my thing. I'm not sure it would have been Soto's either if it wasn't for Ellie. Yet it wouldn't have been the right thing to have turned him down. He'd led me to the bodies of the girls, so at least I could try to process it, and he'd watched my back at the station when I'd needed it. I owed him this.

Inside, I spotted him in a booth at the back.

A waitress asked if she could seat me, but I told her I was fine, and weaved across the restaurant. “How you doing?” he said, getting up from his seat and shaking my hand.

“I'm okay.”

But, even though he didn't know me, he could see that wasn't the case. One of the ways I'd been so successful in my work was through suppressing my emotions, knowing when to keep them concealed and when it was fine to let them drift. Even if I paid lip service to it, I couldn't bring myself to pretend everything was fine.

I couldn't describe how I felt.

Words had once been my gift. But not now.

We sat down and talked for a while about where the police investigation was, and Soto said he'd spent most of the day on the phone to his friends in the department. “It's just like you said,” he told me, fingers around a beer bottle. “It stretches far and wide.”

I nodded. “Graham was a powerful man.”

A woman came over a couple of minutes later, and when I saw her name badge, I realized this was Soto's girlfriend, Ellie. She was in her late thirties, small and slim, auburn hair tied back from a porcelain face. It wasn't hard to see why he'd taken a shine to her. She seemed quiet, almost shy, but she had the kind of smile that lit an entire room.

“Are you in town for long?” she asked me.

I glanced at Soto. He obviously hadn't got to the stage where he talked about his work with her. “I'm not sure,” I said, smiling. “Probably a couple of weeks. We'll see.”

She asked what we wanted, and we both ordered chili.

“How long have you two been dating?”

They looked at each other, and I could see the answer immediately: not long. They had the kind of glow you only really saw in couples right at the beginning of their journey. Things started to develop after that, not for the worse, just in a different way.

“It's been four and a half months,” Soto said.

“That's great.”

“What about you, David?” Ellie asked.

“Me?”

“Have you got someone to go back to?”

I paused. “Not at the moment, no.”

Ellie disappeared back out into the restaurant, and Soto and I started talking about the case again, then moved on to baseball, which I knew nothing about, and the recession, which I knew more of. I remembered, in 2007, I'd arrived in Vegas before everything had gone south. As I ordered a third beer, the edges slowly started to fall away. I rated alcohol alongside Tex-Mex—I could take it or leave it—but, tonight, it was going down well.

“So, I wanted to tell you something,” Soto said after a while, faintly, something moving in his eyes. Then it was there in his face, plain, like it was written in neon. “It's about the girls. I don't know whether this will help or not, but you deserve to know.”

I slumped back in the seat. “What?”

“I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, I just—”

“What is it?”

He hesitated. “You remember I said Cornell had a man down at Henderson Airport? That was how he was able to transport everything in and out of the U.S.?”

I nodded.

“Well, I wasn't totally honest with you.” There was no hope in his face, just a starless dark. “I told you I'd followed him to the airport that one time, during the two weeks I tailed him. Well, that wasn't true. I
tailed him for a lot longer than two weeks and I followed him to the airport maybe seven or eight times.”

“Just get to the point,” I said, hearing a hopelessness in myself now.

“One time, he chartered a plane out of the country and he didn't come back for a week. He'd gone out to organize the kidnap of that family you talked about.”

“So?”

“So he came back one day ahead of them.”

I didn't say anything.

He looked at me. “I watched him return the next day, waiting for those girls to come off the plane. I'd checked in with Henderson, managed to get them to tell me which planes were due in, and when I heard there was one coming in from the UK, I knew it had to be something to do with him.” He swallowed, pushed his beer to one side.

“Carlos . . .”

“Listen to me
,
”
he said. “In the airport, he had to act normal. He had to be a regular passenger; a guy waiting for his two daughters to get off the plane, or whatever. It didn't matter if he knew a man who could get them through immigration. It didn't matter if this guy knew who he
really
was. Everywhere else in the terminal, he had to be normal. He couldn't make a scene. So, as soon as he saw them coming, he did things like give them a kiss and take Olivia's Mickey Mouse doll from her and play with it, because he thought that was the type of thing a father might do for his child.”

He stared at me, uncertain.

“He could act normal,” Soto went on, “he could put on an act. But the girls . . . they couldn't. They were shit-scared. I could see it in their eyes. Whoever had sent them out from the UK had obviously threatened them, told them not to say a word, but the little one, she was in tears, and the older one just kept telling her everything was going to be okay.”

“I don't want to hear the rest,” I said to him.

“You do.”

“I
don't
.”

“Believe me, you do.”

I just stared at him.

“Next minute, everything went to hell.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked off, beyond my shoulder.

I followed his line of sight and saw he was looking at Ellie, taking a tray of food to a table just down from us. She smiled at him, he smiled back—a small, tight smile; maybe not a smile at all—and then he turned back to me and it fell from his face.

“Suddenly, security swarmed on him—like, seven or eight guys—and he ended up getting separated from the girls. Just got dragged off around the next corner.”

“Why?”

“I found out later, someone had called in an anonymous tip. Someone from the UK. They'd told the airport Cornell had drugs on him.”

Rocastle
.

I remembered his words to me:
I told Annabel I'd make it right
.

“I didn't need to know those girls to know they were in danger.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I guess it was just instinct,” he said, ignoring me. “He didn't have any drugs on him, so he was in and out of wherever the security team took him pretty fast afterward.”

Next to me, Ellie arrived at the table, carrying our food.

“But by then it was too late for him. They were gone.”

She put down our plates of chili.

“I just did it, automatically, but then, after a couple of weeks, I started to realize I couldn't trust anyone. I didn't know who was working for Cornell, even in Metro, didn't know who he had on his payroll and when I was being watched by his people.”

“What are you talking about?”

“So it's been my secret for ten months.”

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I realized it wasn't just Ellie that had come to the table. There were others, just behind her, who had followed her across the restaurant.

I turned in the booth.

And, suddenly, they were standing there next to me, sisters holding each other's hands, the eldest one with a smile on her face that was like looking in the mirror.

I felt my heart swell up.

Felt tears blur in my eyes.

And then Soto said, “David, I want you to meet Annabel and Olivia.”

In the interests of full disclosure, and if you hadn't noticed already, I should probably admit to altering the history and geography of Devon's Start Bay area ever so slightly. I hope I've managed to do it without causing offense, while also remaining true to a very special part of the world. For those who may be interested, the village in which Raker grew up is based closely on Torcross, while the tragic events of Miln Cross were inspired by the real-life story of Hallsands. Five thousand miles west, Las Vegas has remained (largely) untouched, with only some very minor adjustments made for pace and clarity. But, here, I must give a special mention to Peter Earley's
Super Casino: Inside the “New” Las Vegas
(2000), which is a brilliant account of modern-day Las Vegas. I was fortunate enough to visit the city in the early stages of my research; on my return,
Super Casino
answered almost every question I forgot to ask. It comes highly recommended.

Finally, the character of Daniel Kalb is completely
fictional.

When I said to my editor Stefanie Bierwerth and agent Camilla Wray that I wanted to do something different in
Never Coming Back
, I'm sure they were reaching for the prayer beads the moment I put the phone down. But, if they were worried, they never showed it, and their unswerving support and editorial brilliance has made Raker's journey to Devon (and Las Vegas) smoother than I could possibly have hoped. I must also give a special mention—and thank you—to Rowland White, who stepped in while Stef was away, and who has worked so hard for me from the minute he first read the manuscript.

In truth, there are so many people at Penguin who have done such amazing things for this book, my only disappointment is that I've never had the chance to thank them all in person. I hope I can rectify this in the near future, but in the meantime a massive thank you to everyone for putting in the hours on my behalf, from sales through to marketing, from PR to editorial and beyond. I'm also indebted to the team at Darley Anderson, particularly Clare Wallace and Mary Darby in foreign rights. Most people only get to see the book when it's done, but my family get to see it (or at least its effects) when it's far from finished and things aren't going
quite
as well. So thank you to Mum and Dad for always being there, to Lucy and Rich for the same, and also to the Weaver family, the Linscotts, the Adamses and the Ryders. But, most of all, thank you to Erin, who surprises and amazes me every single day, and to Sharlé, who never complains when Raker and I head off into the hills together for months at a time, and without whom none of this would be
possible.