Unfinished Business (10 page)

Grimaldi conceded my point.

“There’s a truck stop just down the street
from Gabe’s. And there’s certainly plenty of room in a semi-truck
to tuck someone away.”

“That’s why I contacted the company he
drives for. They checked the GPS on the truck and said it’s in
Kansas.”

“A long-distance truck driver,” Dix said,
“could easily have made Kansas between now and last night at
eleven.”

Grimaldi nodded. “I have a call in to the
Kansas State Police. They’ll keep an eye out for the truck and pull
him over if they see him. Just to make sure he’s alone. And I sent
Spicer and Truman to check out the warehouse where the second guy
works. Just in case.”

“What about the most recent guy?” I wanted
to know. “The one who was released last month?”

He sounded like the best option to me. If
nothing else, the timing worked. Because, yes, even if someone
hadn’t realized until Christmas that Rafe worked for the TBI, that
was still six months ago. A long time to wait for revenge. And
surely it doesn’t take six months to figure out how to abduct
someone?

“Eugenio Hernandez,” Grimaldi said. “On the
face of it, he seems unlikely. His arrest wasn’t even related to
the Gonzales investigation. He just happened to get himself caught
with a prostitute.”

“That doesn’t sound like anything he could
blame Rafe for,” I said.

Grimaldi shook her head. “There’s something
weird about it, though. Hernandez spent several years in prison.
Excessive for someone just picking up a hooker. Usually, paying for
sex is a misdemeanor. I think it carries a maximum sentence of six
months.”

“The girl was underage,” Wendell said,
closing the folder and pushing it across the table. “Not much
under—just a couple of months, if memory serves—but legally under
eighteen. That ups the sentence to 1-6 years automatically. And he
had a knife in the room. Hadn’t used it on the girl, but it was
there. That added some time, as well.”

“You were involved in it?”

Wendell nodded. “Rafe called me and I called
the cops. We had to keep it off the record at the TBI, so as not to
spook the brass. Didn’t want nobody thinking the boy was going
soft, or that he was willing to throw the whole investigation over
a streetwalker. But Hernandez was a predator. Little Ginger wasn’t
the first prostitute he picked up.”

Little Ginger? My nose wrinkled
involuntarily.

“So Rafe was worried about her?” I asked.
“That’s why he interfered?”

Wendell nodded. “But Hernandez said she’d
told him she was legal, and she had the fake ID to back it up. We
couldn’t prove otherwise. And we couldn’t find anyone else to
testify against him. So we took what we could get, to get him off
the streets for a while.”

“Then I guess it’s possible this guy figured
out that he had Rafe to thank for sending him to jail, and he
decided to get even?”

“Anything’s possible,” Wendell said, and on
that note, the door opened again, and the boys filed back inside
the room.

“No dice,” Jamal announced. “There’s no blue van with those letters
and numbers in the license plate. In any order.”

He put a piece of paper on the table.

“So either,” Clayton added, “Einstein here
don’t remember as well as he thinks he does—”

José used his well-developed shoulder to
knock him sideways. Clayton staggered.

“Boys,” Wendell said.

“—or the owner of the blue van helped
himself to someone else’s license plate.”

“Or the license plate expired,” Grimaldi
said. “While the owner of the car was in jail, for instance.”

The boys exchanged a glance. “You got
somebody in mind?” Jamal wanted to know.

“Go do another run on expired plates,”
Wendell told him. “See what you can come up with. And hurry.”

“Yessir.” They scrambled over one another to
get back out the door, like a litter of puppies.

“They’re cute,” I told Wendell, with what
felt like my first genuine smile of the day.

“They’re a pain in my ass,” he told me. “And
in your boyfriend’s.” He scratched his head. “Course,
he
was
a pain in my ass ten years ago, too. And he turned out all
right.”

Yes, he had. “I just hope he’s OK,” I said.
“If someone took him—” and put him in a van, or a semi-truck, or a
warehouse somewhere, “anything could have happened to him.”

“He ain’t easy to kill,” Wendell said. “You
know that.”

I did know that. But he wasn’t invincible.
If someone had gotten the drop on him, he was just as mortal as the
next guy. I’d seen him get shot, and I’d seen him get stabbed. And
he bled, just like anyone else.

I pushed my chair away from the table. The
legs moved across the floor with a screech. “Sorry. I just... I
have to go.”

Wendell didn’t say a word about the break in
my voice. “The boys and I’ll keep trying to track down the blue
van. If it don’t show up in expired licenses, we’ll go outside
Davidson County to the rest of the state.” He turned to Grimaldi.
“You got the trucker and the warehouse under control?”

She nodded. “Eugenio Hernandez has an
address listed with his parole officer. I didn’t bother with it
earlier, since I didn’t think he was really a contender. And I
don’t guess there’s much chance he’s got Collier there, if he’s got
Collier at all. But someone should check. I can send Spicer and
Truman, or...”

“The boys and I’ll do it,” Wendell said.
“It’ll give’em something to do. Make’em feel like they’re
contributing.”

It seemed to me like they were already
contributing. I wanted to contribute, too, although I knew that
between them, the police and the TBI had the situation well in
hand. “Can we come with you? And wait outside? Just in case?”

Wendell glanced at Grimaldi before
answering. “Sure, darlin’. I don’t think we’ll find him there,
but...”

“But just in case.”

He nodded. “I’ll go hustle the boys. Text me
the address.”

“We’ll see ourselves out,” Grimaldi said.
“And meet you there.” She gestured Dix and Mother toward the door.
“Let’s go.”
“Do the two of you want to come with us?” she added when we were
outside in the parking lot, standing between her police issued
sedan and Dix’s SUV. “I can take Savannah with me and bring her
back if the two of you have had enough.”

I could just imagine Dix’s reaction to the
suggestion that he should take Mother back to the house on Potsdam
Street and stay with her while Grimaldi and I went looking for
trouble. “We’ll come along, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Grimaldi said, “as
long as you stay out of the way and let the TBI handle things.”

Dix’s voice was cool. “Of course,
Detective.”

“We’ll stay in the car,” I added. “I don’t
want to interfere. I just want to be there in case they find
him.”

“They won’t find him,” Grimaldi said. “If
this is our guy, and I’m not sure it is, he won’t be stupid enough
to keep your boyfriend somewhere where we can find him this
easily.” She stalked toward her car.

“She didn’t tell us where to go,” Dix said,
and opened his mouth to call after her.

I put a hand on his arm. “Let’s just follow.
She’s upset. She feels guilty.”

Dix glanced at me. “Why? She didn’t do
anything.”

“It’s part of the job,” I explained. “Law
enforcement. They feel guilty when bad things happen. Even if they
know they can’t be everywhere and do everything. They still feel
they should have been there, then.”

One of Rafe’s rookies had been killed
earlier this year, and I knew Rafe still blamed himself. I blamed
myself, too, since it had been my ex-husband Manny Ortega had been
following when he got shot. I knew it wasn’t my fault, that it was
the fault of the person who killed him, but I still felt
responsible for Manny being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And if I felt that way, just imagine how Rafe felt, when it was he
who had told Manny to be there.

“Just drive,” I told Dix and crawled into
the backseat. “If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll find him.”

Dix muttered something—no doubt it was along
the lines of what Grimaldi had said—but he didn’t say it out loud.
Mother prudently kept her mouth closed, as well, when she made her
way into the front seat.

Eugenio Hernandez’s address turned out to be a small tract house in
the Woodbine area.

Woodbine is an older neighborhood southeast
of downtown, but not as far south as, say, Antioch or Brentwood.
And it’s densely populated. The lots are all about forty feet wide,
and there are houses on most of them. Not a great place to keep a
hostage, in other words. Not unless Eugenio Hernandez had prepared
himself with an underground, soundproof dungeon, and that was
unlikely.

Grimaldi parked up the street a couple of
houses. Dix rolled to a stop behind her sedan just as my phone
rang. I pushed the button to answer the call. “Detective.”

“It’s the blue house on the other side of
the street,” Grimaldi said, her voice tinny through the
speakerphone. “I don’t see a car.”

I didn’t, either. There was a driveway from
the street to the house, that ended in a carport. The carport’s
back wall was solid, so it wasn’t possible to pull around behind
the house. And both carport and driveway were empty.

I checked the surrounding driveways, as
well. There was no blue van anywhere.

The house itself appeared to be deserted.
The curtains were all closed, and the grass looked ankle high. The
mailbox was open, with a pile of circulars hanging out.

“Here comes the TBI,” Dix said, watching in
the rearview mirror. I turned to look out the window as a white SUV
with the TBI logo pulled into the driveway and stopped. Wendell
slid out of the front seat along with Jamal, while José and Clayton
extricated themselves from the back. All four of them congregated
at the rear of the vehicle, out of sight of the house, where they
strapped on Kevlar vests and pulled on SWAT jackets in spite of the
heat. Each of them grabbed a gun and checked the magazine, and then
they made their way up to the house. Wendell sent José and Clayton
to slide along the wall in the front, while he and Jamal
disappeared around the carport to the back. A few seconds later,
Clayton and José vanished around the other corner, as well.

We sat and waited, with the car pumping out
cold air. I could hear Grimaldi breathing through the phone, but
she didn’t say anything.

“You can come over to our car if you want,”
I offered. “We’ve room for one more.” I’d just have to move the
booster seat into the trunk.

“Thanks, but I’m fine here. I doubt we’ll be
here long.”

My stomach growled, and Mother glanced at me
over the seat. Bodily noises are unladylike, in case you
wondered.

“I’m hungry,” I said defensively.

“You can eat something,” Grimaldi told me
through the phone.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said. “I was
talking to my mother.”

“You’re pregnant,” Grimaldi told me. “Tell
your mother you get to eat.”

“You’re on speaker. I think she heard
you.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “Well,
you can get something to eat after we’re finished here.”

“I can’t wait,” I told her honestly. “I know
that’s horrible, to think of food when my boyfriend—my fiancé, my
baby’s father—could be dead, but I’m starving.”

“You’re pregnant,” Grimaldi said again,
while Mother looked pained at my admission. “You have to eat. Not
eating is bad for the baby.”

“What kind of food do you want?”

She hesitated. I guess she was thinking she
should just keep working instead of taking time out to eat. But
then there was Dix. “We’d love it if you would join us, Detective,”
he said.

Mother looked less than delighted, of
course, but then she always did.

“Let’s talk about it later,” Grimaldi said.
“They’re coming back.”

They were. All four of them, coming around
the house. Alone, and sauntering, so obviously they hadn’t found
Rafe or Mr. Hernandez inside.

In front of us, Grimaldi exited her car. I
scrambled out of the backseat of Dix’s, and ran to catch up.

“Anything?”

Wendell shook his head. “Someone’s been
there recently. There’s beer in the fridge and dirty dishes in the
sink. But the towels are dry and nobody’s taken out the trash for a
couple days.”

“Was there any clue at all that he knows who
Rafe is or was targeting him?” I asked.

“None. He coulda gone out for a drink. He
coulda gone out to find another hooker. He coulda driven to Panama
City Beach for some sun and sand. There’s just no telling.”

“And no way to know whether he had anything
to do with Rafe’s disappearance.”

“No,” Wendell said. “Sorry.” He holstered
his gun, and the rookies followed suit.

“That was awesome,” Jamal said. And added,
“Not that we were looking for Rafe. Rafe’s cool. I don’t want
nothing to happen to Rafe. But that was awesome!”

Clayton and José nodded. Wendell rolled his
eyes. “Get in the car,” he said. “She don’t need to hear you three
talking about how excited you are to be doing this. Show some
respect.”

“I just did,” Jamal protested. “We’re real
sorry about Rafe, lady. We don’t want nothing to happen to him.
We’ll keep looking till we find him.”

Clayton and José nodded. Two pairs of brown
and one pair of blue eyes gazed at me with patent sincerity.

“We can stake the place out tonight,” José
said. “See if dude comes home.”

Wendell hesitated.

“Call it a training exercise,” Clayton
added.

The two pairs of brown and one blue
transferred themselves to Wendell, who blinked and turned to
Grimaldi.

The detective shrugged. “I was going to tell
the south precinct to have whoever patrols this area drive by a
couple times overnight, and call in if they see a light on or a car
in the driveway. But if your boys want to practice, that’s fine
with me.”