Graham, Jan - Finding Angel [Wylde Shore] (Siren Publishing Ménage and More) (44 page)

Months later, Steve Jax walks out of the same house with an arsenal that would make any terrorist nervous, mobile phones, a small amount of drugs, written documentation that Barnard was the main stockist for Hastings’s dealers in the local area, and the address of a lockup that Barnard had used. The lockup had more information about the drug family along with artworks, cash, and cars that Barnard had purchased presumably for his retirement. Much of the paperwork was now being used by Steve to try and track down further evidence against Hastings. Evidence that would hopefully secure that elusive bloody ledger that everyone wanted, but no one seemed to be able to find. Trevor and Steve hoped that by following the paper trail they now had for Barnard, they would also discover Angel along the way.

The ineffectual search on Barnard’s home had been the first nail in Markham’s coffin. The evidence Steve found had supplied more. Markham’s phone number had been in Barnard’s mobiles. One phone had even listed Markham’s mobile and direct office line numbers as “our man.” Trevor was now painstakingly checking both incoming and outgoing calls from Markham’s phone records to see if he could correlate calls on or close to dates where information was known to have been passed on. Having to do things without a large team was definitely a pain in the arse, but until he either nailed Markham as their leak or found out if anyone else was on Hastings’s payroll, Trevor had no other option but to take the slow road.

Trevor stared at the disposable mobile he had purchased to contact Steve Jax on. Dialling the number of Jax’s secure mobile, he decided that if nothing else, he could give Steve the good news that Christian could now be used as backup if he got into a bind and needed help. Trevor was concerned for Jax, not that he would let anyone in on his fears. The longer he kept him following the paper trail of Samuel Barnard, the more danger Steve was in. Eventually, someone would pass on information to Hastings that Steve was still working the case, and with little backup and no computerised paper trial at head office, that would put Steve in more danger than Trevor liked to think about.

“Yeah?” Steve’s voice boomed down the line.

“You don’t sound very happy. What’s wrong?” Trevor knew that Steve could be a grumpy shit, but he was usually more polite than “yeah” when he answered the phone.

“I’m sick. Some prick has given me the flu throughout my travels. I’m bunkered down in a lovely home that our friend Sam seems to have built and kept well hidden. I’m going through paperwork he has here. The only interesting thing so far is that the title deed to the house was changed to the name of Ms. Angel Wylde about three weeks before good old Sam kicked off. Her car is here by the way, the one she said was taken by Sam and never returned. I’m going to stay here a couple of days and see if she turns up. There isn’t any evidence she has been here so far, but I might get lucky. Besides, I need to stay quiet for a bit and recover.”

Steve sounded worn out, and Trevor contemplated bringing him back in.

“Do you need to come back in? How safe are you at the moment?” Trevor knew the answer he would get the moment he asked the question.

“I’m fine. The house is in the middle of the bush. I don’t think anyone connected with Hastings knows it exists, and it has a security system to die for. Not that it was on when I arrived, but I’ve activated it now. Anyone attempts to come in and I’ll be given plenty of warning to get out. So, what did you ring for?”

“Shore is now backup if you need help and I can’t be contacted.”

“Excellent, my man Christian, I hope he punched you fair in the face when you accused him of being our spy.” Steve seemed to sound happier as soon as the news was delivered.

“He understood why I had asked. No punches were thrown. And when you find our elusive lady, he will do all negotiations regarding the protection of her.”

“Bad move, man, once he sees her he’ll want to put her into his bed naked and never let her out of his sight. He has a way with the ladies, you know.” Steve’s laughter was both pleasant and surprising for Trevor.

“I’m sure he will remain professional at all times, Steve, and if he doesn’t, then you will be there to protect our young lady’s virtue.”

“She’s not a character out of a Jane Austen novel, Duncan, and Christian Shore is definitely no Mr. Darcy either. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Steve was still laughing when Trevor ended the call.

Steve reclined himself in the high-back leather office chair he had been snoozing in when Trevor had called. He felt like shit and had spent the last twenty-four hours rummaging around a house that looked like it could have been owned by a multimillionaire rather than a criminal. From all of Steve’s investigations in the area, and that mainly entailed chatting to the general store owner and chemist at the two-horse town not far from where the house was located, Steve felt fairly certain that Barnard was the only person to have used the house. No one seemed to be aware that Barnard had a woman in his life, and they had never seen a woman stay at the house. Steve had been told that Samuel’s father had lived in the place until twelve months ago, when he had passed away at the age of ninety-two. Apart from the father and Samuel, no one else had ever passed through town and gone to the home.

The other thing that Steve found interesting was that everyone knew Samuel as Sam Barnes. All the correspondence in the house confirmed that was the identity Barnard had used in relation to the house and its previous ownership. It certainly gave Steve more confirmation that this was Samuel Barnard’s safety net in case he ever needed to disappear. The store owner had described him as “good old Sam Barnes” and had regaled Steve with stories of Sam’s community spirit. Paying for the old community hall roof to be repaired, bringing his dad down to the Christmas street party every year, and supplying the beer for them all to enjoy.

Steve was sure they thought his laughter at the comments was due to the hilarity with which they spoke about Sam. In actual fact, Steve laughed at the image of a man who would cheerfully slit a man’s throat and bury him in a shallow grave being liked by a tiny country community. Of course, they knew and liked “good old Sam Barnes,” not the hired hit man Samuel Barnard.

The one thing that Steve liked about little communities such as this one was that everybody knew what was going on and who was in town at any time of the day and night. Gossip can be a bad thing, but in the case of a little country community like this, it very often kept people safe. Steve had been seen driving through town on his way to the house. By the time he returned to the little township, everyone had heard that there was someone at the big house on the hill, but it wasn’t Samuel. Steve easily passed for a young man that could be a relative of Samuel’s. He was tall and thin with long, sandy hair, and sharp, angular features with piercing blue eyes. A tattoo that was clearly visible covered his whole forearm. He rode a bike and displayed an air of confidence similar to the man he was asking about. Steve knew that on appearances alone, a tall, confident, tattooed, bike-riding young man would trigger enough similarities to ensure the belief that he and Samuel were related. And it did. Steve had been open and said he was looking for Sam, that the rest of the family were concerned they hadn’t heard from him for a few months. From that moment on he had no trouble being told any detail he asked about Samuel’s activities.

According to the people he conversed with, Sam Barnes hadn’t been around for a few months, which coincided with his death and backed up Angel’s complaint that he had taken her car and not returned it. The general store owner had waved to Sam about lunchtime as he rode out of town on the bike. He also said he expected him to return a few days later to return the bike to storage and pick up his car, another fact that corroborated Angel’s statement about Barnard’s usual behaviour. It also confirmed her insistence that someone must have been at the house to take Samuel’s bike. Steve was in the process of trying to track the bike, and he had found its new owner, who had bought it legitimately from a motorcycle dealership. In the past few months, the bike had also been in the hands of not only the dealership and its current owner but four different auction houses, none of which seemed to be able to lead him to whoever sold it in the first place. The paperwork was all signed by Barnard. Unfortunately, Barnard had been dead a week before the initial auction house bought it from him.

At the moment though, his priority was trying to crack the computer password for the laptop he had found in the study. The information it contained could be invaluable. He’d cracked the safe code expecting to find the ledger they were looking for but had only found a substantial amount of cash and paperwork along with deeds to the house. He thought about Angel. He hoped she was still alive. If she was, at least the house and cash would be some consolation for the way she had been treated over the five years. Barnard had owned her. Steve knew that they could claim the home didn’t have anything to do with Barnard. It had originally been owned by good old Sam Barnes who, for unknown and noncriminal reasons, had transferred ownership over to Angel. Hopefully that would be enough of a loophole for government officials not to claim it under proceeds of crime laws. Besides, Angel needed to be compensated for the crimes Samuel Barnard committed against her.

Steve had never felt guilty over anyone involved in a case before now. Angel had changed all that. Initially he had assumed that Angel was just a silly bimbo that had shacked up with Barnard and turned a blind eye to what he did for a living so that she didn’t have to pay for drugs anymore. The fact that he had learned she was clean and had no drug history had confused him at first, and then he had come to realise she never appeared in any of the dealings with Samuel’s associates. He had finally decided that maybe Angel, despite her nice, sweet outward appearance, had enjoyed the thrill of living with a bad boy, and the violence inflicted on her was simply part of their deal.

Once he went onto surveillance duty, he had to revise his opinion of her once again. Steve still had nightmares about the last time he had heard Barnard attack her. The terror in Angel’s voice as Barnard raped her, with what Steve now realised had been a shot gun, haunted him. DNA tests of the weapons Angel had given him had found vaginal fluid matching Angel’s DNA on and in the barrel of the gun. One of the knives, obviously the knife kept especially for her, had substantial traces of Angel’s blood all over it. The words of the other detectives on surveillance the night Angel had been raped still echoed in his head.
“This sort of stuff happens often. We’ve been told not to interfere.”

Still, Steve had tried to interfere. It ended with him cuffed to a seat inside the van, and the next day a verbally violent altercation with his boss, Trevor Duncan, had taken place. Even though Trevor agreed he didn’t like what was happening to Angel, he maintained the stance that Angel was in the house of her own free will, and therefore what was being done to her did not have bearing on the case at hand. The surveillance could not be compromised simply because Angel did not leave her violent spouse. It wasn’t until Steve had given Trevor the ownership papers Barnard had for Angel that Duncan had changed his mind.

The fact that Steve’s hands had been tied did not sit well with him. In one of the last conversations he had with Angel she had told him she was on nobody’s side because they were all the same. The memory of her statement and the look of betrayal he had seen in her eyes made him sick to the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t blame her for the belief and distrust she had. The police hadn’t protected her. In fact, it appeared throughout her life, no one had ever helped her. Steve desperately needed to find Angel. At this point, he didn’t care if she testified for the police or not. He just needed to know she was alive, and he needed to make sure she was safe. If that meant using his contacts in the criminal world to get her a new identity and paying for her to go to another state or country, then he’d do it.

Steve had failed Angel on so many levels. He made no excuses for himself. He should have acted as soon as he realised what was going on. He was becoming increasingly consumed with the knowledge that he should have done something to help her. And if he didn’t find her, or God forbid, if she was dead, Steve knew the guilt of his inaction would slowly eat him alive.

Chapter Twenty

Angel lay curled under the blankets in Daniel’s bed. He had insisted that she stay in bed after making love that morning, stating that she still looked quite pale. Angel hadn’t argued because she was not only pale, as Daniel had observed, but she was also nauseated and tired. The latter two symptoms she had kept mum about, knowing that Daniel would insist she come to the hospital for a checkup if she mentioned them.