Unfinished Business (22 page)

“I’ll go get Savannah settled,” she told
Naomi, “with the computer next door.”

I nodded.

“But before we do that, I want you to
understand something.” She waited for Naomi to look up before
continuing. “That could have been you back there. I’m sure you
realize that.”

Naomi’s eyes overflowed, and she nodded
rapidly.

“For reasons of his own, he wanted a redhead
last night. If he hadn’t, he might have picked you. You’re just his
type. His likes young women. And he likes doing what he did to your
friend.”

Naomi nodded, sobbing again.

“I don’t want to go to work tomorrow morning
and have to ask one of your friends at the truck stop to identify
your
body.”

Naomi shook her head. Tears spattered.

“I want you to stay here and think about
that,” Grimaldi said, “while I go next door with Savannah. When I
come back, we’re going to have a talk. About where you came from
and what you’re doing here and what made you leave. And whether
there’s a reason you can’t go back, or whether I just need to buy
you a one-way ticket home.” She paused for long enough to let that
sink in before she added, “But one thing I’m not doing, is sending
you back out there for this nut-job to find. Not only are you just
the type he likes, he knows you saw him yesterday. I wouldn’t be
surprised at all if he came back for you tonight.”

She didn’t wait for Naomi to answer, just
turned to me. “Let’s go.”

We went. Out of the room and into the
corridor with the sound of Naomi’s terrified sniffles in our
ears.

“She’s lucky,” I said.

Grimaldi nodded. “I don’t know whether she
has any idea how lucky, but I think showing her the body went some
way toward driving that point home.”

Yes, indeed. “I hope she has somewhere safe
to go. That she isn’t from an abusive home or anything. Or that she
wasn’t kicked out, like she said Kelly was.”

Grimaldi nodded. “There are places I can put
her if she doesn’t have a home to return to. But I hope so,
too.”

She opened the door to the computer room.
I’d spent some time there before, looking through mugshots. It had
been last fall, with Rafe in the wind and another scary Hispanic
man hanging around, looking for him. A few hours of searching had
helped me pinpoint Jorge Pena. Now I guess I’d get to do it
again.

“First thing I want you to find me,”
Grimaldi said, showing me to a work station, “is a mugshot of
Eugenio Hernandez, and mugshots for at least five other men that
look similar. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they did;
they’re just there to make sure she can pick out Hernandez.”

I nodded and took a seat. “What if she
can’t?”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Grimaldi leaned in to get the computer set up for me. “We can make
the connection between your boyfriend and Hernandez without it, but
I’d appreciate a positive ID.” She straightened. “The printer is
over there in the corner. When you have your six or eight printed
out, bring them to my office so she can look at them.”

I nodded.

“After that, you’ll start looking at
runaways and Jane Does.”

Lucky me
.

“I’m on it,” I said, flapping a hand. “Go.
Deal with her.”

“Don’t take too long.” Grimaldi headed for
the hallway. I stuck out my tongue, but didn’t say anything. She
closed the door, and I turned to the computer.

Finding a picture of Eugenio Hernandez was a
simple task. He was in the system from when he was arrested four
years ago. There was even an updated photo from just a month ago,
before he was released.

In both, a set of hooded, dark eyes peered
out at me from under heavy brows. He’d had very little hair even
before he was arrested: just dark fuzz covering his skull. The nose
was long and appeared hooked, and the mouth was wide but the lips
thin. It wasn’t a handsome face, and I thought I could see cruelty
in it, although that could have been my imagination, and based on
what I knew about him. He certainly wasn’t someone I’d want to get
involved with, and if I’d been forced to sell my body at truck
stops, his wasn’t a car I’d have wanted to get into. But I guess
when you’re in that position, you can’t be picky.

I printed out both pictures, and then went
to work finding others I could put with them. That didn’t take
long, either, since there were a lot of Hispanic or
Hispanic-looking men in their thirties in the database. I even came
across Jorge Pena, and decided I might as well add him to the mix.
He was dead, but Naomi didn’t know that, and he fit the general
description of the guy who had driven off with Kelly last night. I
knew from experience that he was taller than medium height—if an
inch or two shorter than Rafe—but that wasn’t part of the mugshot,
either.

Ten minutes might have passed before I
walked back into Grimaldi’s office with my stack of photos. “Here
you... Oops. Sorry.”

The detective was on the phone, and put up a
finger to tell me to wait. I tiptoed past the desk and took a seat
in the chair next to Naomi. The girl was still clutching a soggy
tissue, her eyes rimmed with red and her nose swollen, but she’d
stopped crying and was watching Grimaldi intently, her expression
halfway between hopeful and scared.

I must have come in just after the detective
dialed, because the first thing that happened was that she
introduced herself. “This is Detective Tamara Grimaldi with the
Nashville PD.”

There was a slight pause, and quacking from
the phone. Grimaldi nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Nashville, Tennessee. I’m
looking for Mr. or Mrs. Bradford.”

The phone quacked again, more
frantically.

“Yes, Mrs. Bradford,” Grimaldi said. “It’s
concerning Naomi.”

Quack, quack
.

“No, ma’am. She’s not in any trouble.”

Quack. Quack, quack,
quack-quack-quack
.

“Homicide,” Grimaldi said. And waited.

The phone was silent.

“As I was saying, your daughter is not in
any trouble.” I don’t think I imagined the slight emphasis on the
possessive pronoun. “Another girl her age was murdered last
night.”

She didn’t say it, but the implication was
that another family would be getting this same phone call, but
their daughter wouldn’t be all right.

“Naomi saw the killer, and is helping us
identify him.”

The phone quacked again, more subdued this
time.

“Yes, Mrs. Bradford,” Grimaldi said. “Your
daughter wants to come home.”

Next to me, Naomi nodded vigorously.

“Is there any reason she wouldn’t be
welcome?”

Quack. Quack-quack-quack!

“That’s good to know,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll
be putting her on a bus leaving Nashville this afternoon. I don’t
know how long it will take her to reach you, but I’ll call you back
when she’s on her way, and you can call your local bus station and
check with them on arrival times.”

Mrs. Bradford went off on a long speech, and
from Grimaldi’s grimacing, I rather thought it was a whole heap of
gratitude. “Yes, ma’am,” she said when she could get a word in
edgewise. “I’ll have her contact you when she’s free. Yes, ma’am.
Yes. Thank you.”

She didn’t heave a sigh of relief when she
got Mrs. Bradford off the phone, but I could tell she wanted to.
“Your parents have been worried about you,” she told Naomi, who had
tears rolling down her cheeks again now. “You shouldn’t do this to
people who love you.”

Naomi shook her head. And I guess Grimaldi
must have decided she’d torn the girl down far enough, because she
didn’t push any farther, just gestured for the pictures. I handed
them over, and she looked through them. “Very nice. Naomi.”

Naomi nodded, and Grimaldi spread the
pictures out across the desk. “I want you to look at these and tell
me if any of them look like the man who left with Kelly last
night.”

It only took a second. “Him,” Naomi
said.

“You’re sure?”

Naomi nodded. “He drove a blue van. The kind
with no windows in the back.”

Further corroboration, had we needed it.

“Thank you.” Grimaldi shuffled the pictures
back together and put them on a corner of her desk. I put the older
picture of Hernandez, the one I had held back, on top.

“I thought that might come in handy if you
go back to the truck stop to see if the woman with the red hair can
identify the man who left with Maria.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Good. Thank you. You know
what to do now?”

I did. “Look up Jane Does and runaways from
four years ago. Cull the blondes and the girls who might be
Maria.”

“Thank you,” Grimaldi said, and went back to
Naomi. “What I’m going to do, is type up a statement of everything
you’ve told me. When it’s finished, I’ll print it out and you’ll
read it and, if you agree with it, sign it. Then I’ll take you to
the bus station.”

Naomi nodded. And that’s all I saw and
heard, because I closed the office door behind me and headed back
to the computer room and my search.

The next hour was a quiet one, interrupted
only by the humming of the computers, the clicking of the printer
when I used it, and occasional muted voices from outside the door.
I don’t think the police ever really shut down, but they must be
operating with a diminished crew on Sundays, because the computer
room was empty aside from me.

The first thing I did, even before starting
Grimaldi’s search for runaways and Jane Does Hernandez may have
killed four years ago, was to access the property databases I had
promised Wendell I’d check, to see if I could track down the owner
of the cabin in Wilson County for him.

It didn’t take long. All I had to do was
access the courthouse records system for Wilson County, engage the
mapping function, and then pick my way over the terrain and the
directions Wendell had provided, until I had pinpointed the
location of the cabin itself.

Once that was done, I switched from graphic
to satellite image, and then to street view. There were a lot of
trees in the way, but I was able to catch a glimpse of a shadowed
one-story building with deep-set windows and a low-slung roof.

It looked sinister, as hooded and evil as
Hernandez himself, although that, too, could just be my
imagination.

The owner of record was a man named Judd
Lincoln. And since his name was highlighted in blue, indicating he
owned other property, I clicked it. And lo and behold, I discovered
that he also owned a house in Nashville. By clicking on that record
and going to street view, I was able to determine that Judd Lincoln
owned the house in Woodbine that Eugenio Hernandez had told his
parole officer was his address in Nashville.

Since I’d gone this far, I figured I might
as well run Judd Lincoln’s name through the mugshot database. Maybe
I’d get lucky, and he was a jailhouse buddy of Hernandez’s.

But there I struck out. There was no Judd
Lincoln with a criminal record in the state of Tennessee. Plenty of
other Lincolns, but when I cross referenced, none had either the
house in Woodbine or the cabin in Wilson County as their address of
record.

Still, it was a nice coincidence, and I
called Wendell and presented it to him like a Siamese cat with a
dead mouse. He gave me the requisite pat on the head. “Good
work.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I looked him up in the
database—I’m downtown in Detective Grimaldi’s computer room—but he
didn’t show up as ever having been arrested.”

“It’s good work anyway,” Wendell told
me.

“Thank you. We found a girl who saw the dead
girl—her name was Kelly—leave with Hernandez last night. She
identified him from his mugshot.”

“That’ll help when we go to court. We all
know he did it, but someone who can put him with the girl will be
helpful.”

“And we have a lead on one of the missing
girls from four years ago. One of the other hookers said that a
Hispanic girl named Maria got into a car with a Hispanic man and
never came back. That doesn’t mean she’s dead—”

“No,” Wendell agreed.

“But I’m going to start looking through the
database for missing persons and Jane Does, to see if I can find
her.”

“Good,” Wendell said.

“How’s Rafe?”

“Asleep,” Wendell said. “He dropped off on
the way out here. No point in waking him up yet.”

No. The more rest he got, the better. “He’s
safe, right?”

“I’m looking at him. He’s sleeping like a
baby.”

“No chance that Hernandez will sneak up on
him and finish the job?”

“No,” Wendell said. “We’re keeping him
covered. And I don’t think Huron’s out here anymore. But we gotta
check.”

“Where do you think he is?”

“Dunno,” Wendell said, “but I think he used
the cabin Friday night and Saturday. He might even have come back
last night. But I think once he saw that Rafe was gone, he woulda
left and he wouldna come back again.”

I nodded, not that he could see me.

“If he had sense,” Wendell added, “he’d be
halfway to Miami by now.”

“I hope he is,” I confessed. “He’s scary.
I’d really like to believe he’s gone, and that he won’t be coming
after Rafe again.” Or after me.

“We’d all like that,” Wendell said, but
without trying to reassure me that it was so.

“You don’t think he is,” I said, “do you?”
And clarified, “Halfway to Miami?”

“I’d like to think so,” Wendell said, “but
no. I think he’s here, looking to finish the job he started.”

“So he’ll be coming after Rafe again.”

“Or you,” Wendell said. “Harder on the boy
if it’s you. Always harder when it’s someone you care about. We’d
all rather take the hit ourselves.”

Yes, but if Hernandez got his hands on Rafe
again, he’d kill him. And I certainly didn’t want that.

Not that I wanted him to get at me, either.
Or anyone else that Rafe cared about.