Border Crossings: A Catherine James Thriller (17 page)

He leaned in towards her, “Catherine, I can never repay you for what you did by finding her, but I need you to listen to me, now.  I am her father.  My life, our life, was about raising our child and seeing her on to have her own family, raise her own children, and live a full and complete life.  That’s gone, now.  All we have left is finding the truth.  We can’t do that if you hide things out of a misguided sense of protection.  We’re parents who lost our child.  There’s nothing left to protect us from . . . the worst has already happened.  Now we have to pick up the pieces and make them fit.  Otherwise, there’s no moving on from this.  And we can’t do that without knowing everything.”  He reached out and put his hand on her arm, “Everything.”

She didn’t want to say it, but she knew she had to.  She didn’t want Jim to know how bad it was, but if she didn’t tell him, nobody else was going to, and it was things he might need to know when dealing with the authorities in finding Taylor ’s killers or talking to the press.  He was right.  He needed all the pieces or there’d never be any way of putting them together again.  “Taylor was
asphyxiated
and she had ligature mark on her wrists.  The gunshot came after.”  She heard herself say the words as if in a dream.  “And there were drugs in her system like they’re saying, though I don’t think anyone believes she consumed them of her own free will.  More like she was drugged to make her more easily subdued, which is precisely what they were trying to do in the club to begin with, for that matter.”

Jim stared at Catherine blankly for what seemed an eternity.  He could barely wrap his mind about it.  He’d believed she’d been killed early in her ordeal, quickly.  He thought it had likely been a kidnapping gone awry after the incident in front of the hotel . . . maybe Taylor had fought and they had shot her right off before asking for a ransom, or maybe they caught her trying to escape early on, but, no.  If they drugged her into a stupor, tied her
hands . . . . he suddenly understood all too well the horror that had happened to her.  He jumped up and threw his glass against the door, shattering it.  He punched a computer monitor on the desk, cracking it and sent it sliding off the desk onto the floor.

Catherine thought for a moment of stopping him but she knew at this point it could be cathartic for Jim to release his pent-up frustrations.  This was a rage that needed to come out.

He let loose an angry and desperate howl and swiped everything off the desk into a nearby bookshelf, his face flushed, the veins in his neck pulsing.

“Jim,” Catherine said.  “Amy.”  She was asleep upstairs and while Catherine wanted to see Jim express his anger, she knew he didn’t really want to wake his wife.

It took a moment, but he was able to sit back down again and composed himself as best he could, his hands shaking furiously.  Catherine sat quietly, occasionally stirring the ice in her glass around.  Finally, he was calm enough to speak again through choked back tears.  “They’re going to get away with it.”  He looked at her, helpless, his eyes watery and red pained.  “Whoever did this . . . they won’t find them.  They’re out there somewhere, watching all this on the news, laughing to themselves.  They’re going to get away with it and there’s not a damn thing I can do, is there?”

“They won’t get away with it, Jim.”

“What can we do?” he asked her, the tears in his eyes falling before he quickly and angrily wiped them away.  “You’ve got the boy who saw these people, but what good is that with no suspects?  They’re probably long gone to some backwater village nobody’s ever heard of.”  Jim looked at her.  “I have to ask you a favor, but you can say no if you want.”

“I won’t,” said Catherine.

“Whoever did this to her,” started Jim.  “I have to find them.”  Catherine merely nodded.  “I know you have a business to run, Catherine.  But if you could spare some more time . . .” he knew he was asking more than what was right.  But he did so, not for himself, but for Taylor.  “We wouldn’t have found her without you, Catherine.  And I don’t think those people down there are going to find these people.  You’re the only person I know who has connections there and can actually get something done.  Amy and I have quite a bit saved.  We plan on paying that reward, but we’ve still got nearly two hundred thousand in our combined retirement accounts, not to mention the savings we were keeping for Taylor’s tuition and rent.”

“Stop it,” said Catherine, angry.  She’d been slapped by what he’d said and stood up to let him know it.  “Why do you think I’m here, Jim?  You can’t hire me like this is a job.  This isn’t about money.  This
is about what’s right and wrong.  I’m not here because I feel obligated or because I’m expecting to be paid.  Don’t insult me, Jim.  This could never be just another job for me.  The people who did this have to be found, or they’re going to do it again, Jim.  They killed Taylor, they killed a homeless child, and they tried to kill me and that child’s friend.”  She knelt down in front of him and grabbed his hand, squeezing it hard.  “This is about right and wrong,” she told him again.  “I’m staying because I want these people found and punished, because that’s what’s right and just.  Don’t you dare think you need to offer me money to stay.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I know you have your own life, though.  You have a successful business to run . . . “

“It can run itself at this point,” Catherine said.  “Believe me.  I’ve got a secretary that can run that office blindfolded without me.  She’s not a lawyer but she knows more than most attorneys out there, and my associates know what they need to do while I’m out.”

“They almost killed you,” Jim said, looking at his friend in awe.  “I’ve got no right to ask this, Catherine, and I know it.  But I can’t live with doing nothing.”

“Neither could I,” she said.  “And that’s the point.  We’re in this together, all of us.”

Jim leaned back in his chair.  “I don’t know how I’m ever going to repay you, Catherine.  Honest to God, I don’t.”

She returned to her seat, her heart still racing.  She knew he didn’t mean to offend her but the idea that he could even think she was here for the wrong reasons had stung.  “Don’t thank me just yet.”  She watched him with her striking eyes.  “I have a condition, and you’re not going to like it.”

Jim looked at her curiously, “What’s that?”

“You and Amy can’t go back with me.”

“Like hell,” started Jim, but Catherine cut him off.

“Hear me out.  Besides the fact that she’s heartbroken and in shambles and you’re needed here to take care of her, you won’t be any good to me if you do come.  Your face has been plastered all over the news.  We couldn’t take two steps down there without everybody recognizing you.  Nobody who might know anything would talk to us.  Not to mention we’d be shadowed everywhere by the media.”  She shook her head, “No, it just can’t happen, Jim.  It’d never work, especially with Julio, the boy, with me.  Your presence would put him in danger.  We don’t have a right to do that to him.  I’ve got to be a ghost down there, never seen until I’m ready.  It’s bad enough I’ve been seen as much as I have.  It’s got to be this way, Jim.  Nobody is going to talk to someone who is going to bring unwanted attention.”

Jim wanted to protest, but Catherine’s words were powerful.  He knew she was right.  “What will you do?”

“Start shaking the trees and see what falls.  I’m going to do everything I can to find whoever did this.  I’ll make some calls, put pressure on the authorities, and make them stay on it.  We’ll find out what really was behind her abduction, who it was and why Taylor was their target.  And we’ll clear her name.  We’ll expose this for what it is, not what the powers that be down there are trying to make it look like.”

“I want these people caught, but don’t want to see you go down there alone.  They’ve already tried to hurt you once, Catherine.  I can’t ask you to go there without us.”

“I won’t be alone, remember?  I have a friend down there now with Julio.”

“Who?”

“His name’s Matt.  We’ve known each other for years as well.  Longer than I’ve known you, in fact.  It’s kind of a long story.  If things get dangerous, though, I’ll be safe with him.  Trust me, he’s the kind of guy that’s used to being in bad spots.”

“What’s he do?”

“Well,” started Catherine, “That’s kind of a long story, Jim.  And it’d probably be a little difficult to explain.”

“I’d really like to know you’re in good hands, Catherine.  I would never have asked you to stay and help without me and the authorities down there with you.”

“Okay,” she told him.  “Well, Matt’s basically a soldier for hire.”

Jim was taken aback.  “A what?”

“He’s a veteran marine who now works on and off for security companies.  You know, escorting diplomats, providing security detail for wealthy foreigners, etc.”

“You mean he’s a mercenary?” Jim asked.  “Are you serious?”

She knew how it sounded.  “Yes, I guess you could call him that, although they prefer ‘private security team’ I think.”

“How in the world do you know someone like that?”

She almost laughed.  If Jim only knew of some of the shady characters Catherine had met over the years.  She could only imagine what he’d think about what she was about to tell him.  “He was the man I was with before I met David.”

Jim look dumbfounded.  “You mean you used to date this guy?”  He was wondering why he’d never heard this side of Catherine’s life.  It wasn’t as though they were extremely close friends.  Hell, they rarely talked more than once or twice a year until this happened, but still, it was an unexpected bit of information.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked him, almost daring him with the first smile of the evening, still working on her Chivas.

“Yes, if you don’t mind telling me.  David never told me anything like this.”

“That’s because David never knew,” she said with a nostalgic laugh. 
Wouldn’t he have been surprised. 
“I surprised myself, to tell you the truth.  I wouldn’t have thought I’d go for that bad boy type, but I did.  I guess we girls tend to have a soft spot for them, what can I say?  Several years back some extremists had kidnapped an American in South America.  I was handling the risk management aspect for the company and they hired Matt’s company.  A ransom was paid but Matt was still tasked with tracking down the kidnappers, which he did, I might add.  We ended up dating for a while after that.”

“Really?  So what happened?”

Sitting in the quiet den with so much sadness and life’s contemplations in the air, she decided to tell Jim what she’d never told anyone before.  “What always happens with the bad boys, I guess.  He did something bad.  Well,” she laughed, “in his case that was kind of an understatement.  We had our ups and downs, you know.  He was a good guy at the core, really, but there was a reason he did the kind of work he did.  He’d been in the original Gulf War when he was still just a kid.  Got so wrapped up in the military way of life he didn’t let it go even when he was back in the real world.  That’s what led him to the kind of work he was doing when we met.  I’d have been okay with that, you know?  Except, it got the best of him.  It’s true what they say about some of the people who go off to war.  Some just can’t cope afterward.  Matt was one of them.”

“How so?”

“Well,” she sipped from her glass, now severely feeling the whiskey’s effects.  “He went crazy, is probably the easiest and most accurate way to say it.  Some rebel nuts attacked and killed some workers on a pipeline, taking two of them for ransom, typical political propaganda bullshit extremists.  It was the third such attack.  Normally they just shot from the cover of the forest and ran off, but this time they took hostages, so of course the company hired Matt’s company in an attempt to track the guerrillas down and recover the workers.”  Catherine sipped on her drink some more, “It was all hush-hush, of course.  The country’s government announced they were attempting to track the guys down, but the company understandably didn’t want to leave it up to them.  Imagine, right?” she said with a smile, “They didn’t trust the government there, either.  They figured they were more concerned about the economic ramifications than finding the hostages.”

“Yeah, sounds familiar.”

“Yeah,” she said.  “Anyway, he picked up their trail and followed them through the forest for nearly a week before finding the bodies of the Americans, decapitated.”

“They were killed?”

“Yes,” said Catherine.  “See, the oil company had paid the ransom.  That was the first thing they had done, but the extremists killed the hostages anyway for a political statement.  I remember they issued a statement via local radio saying they’d released the hostages.  Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and the missing workers’ families were celebrating, only to find out the radio station hadn’t heard the man correctly.  He had said he released the hostages, but without their heads.”

Jim merely shook his head, feeling lightheaded from the Chivas and still feeling the burning embers of his own grief inside his belly, swirling with the drink.

“Well, it gets worse.”  Her body language became more emphatic.  “Matt took it personally.  He told me later he found a picture on one of the bodies in the rear pocket, typical family photo.  Something just kind of snapped in Matt. “

“What happened?”

“He goes AWOL.  Well, the civilian equivalent to AWOL, I guess.  He continues tracking them down despite being told to come back.  Then he finds the guys, sees them all camped out.  So he sits and waits for night to fall.  They took turns standing watch, one up while the rest slept.  I think there were seven of them if I remember correctly, a small ambush team.