Broken (10 page)

Chapter 13

Davies
stared at me in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“They killed her,” I said. “I don’t know why, but it’s
the only explanation for that phone call. They know they fucked up, but they
still want your money. That’s why they put Anna on the phone.”

Davies shook his head and looked to Emerson for help.
“Chandler? They killed her?”

Emerson bit his lip. “I’m sorry, sir, but I am forced to
agree with her interpretation of events. It’s the only thing that makes sense
to me.”

“She could have been hurt,” Davies suggested. “Maybe she
couldn’t talk for some reason. If they’d…drugged her, maybe to keep her quiet?”

“Anything’s possible,” I told him, “but I don’t think
it’s likely. She might have been trying to get away…”

“She wouldn’t leave Anna.”

“Then maybe she tried to fight the kidnappers. She could
have overheard their plans. Maybe she took Anna and made a run for it. I don’t
know.”

“Dead?” Davies asked. “Dead.” He stood up and turned his
back to us, stepping off the pagoda onto the lawn. He took a few steps and
stopped, putting his hands on his hips. I could see he was breathing hard,
trying to keep his emotions in check. Men who had gotten to his position didn’t
cry in front of other people. That just wouldn’t do.

Emerson started to stand up. I put a hand on his arm.
“Give him a minute,” I said. He glared at me and shook my hand off. “You don’t
need to like me,” I said, “but just trust me on this one, all right? He needs a
minute to himself. I’ve done this kind of thing before. I’ve done it a lot.” I
could have elaborated, but that was all Emerson needed to know about me.

He hesitated for a moment, then sank back down in his
seat. We waited as Davies paced around the lawn. His body language was making a
journey from shock and sadness to anger. I’d seen this before, too. A storm was
coming.

Davies turned abruptly and stalked back to the pagoda.
The good-natured playboy in the Tommy Bahama shirt was gone. Now I finally saw
the man who had the steel it would have taken to build his criminal empire. The
lamb was gone. Now I faced the lion.

He pointed a finger at Emerson. “Trace that fucking
account. I don’t care what you have to do.”

Emerson glanced at me as if he wanted me to help him
somehow. “Sir, I…”

Davies seized the side of the table in one meaty hand
and flipped it over, sending it and the laptop computer crashing to the ground.
“I don’t give a
fuck
about the Swiss!” he shouted. “
Someone
knows
where that money is going. I don’t care if you have to get on a plane and fly
to Zurich. Find them and get them to talk!”

Emerson put his hands in the air in a gesture of
surrender. “But given the bank secrecy laws there…”

“Start cutting some balls off and we’ll see about the
fucking secrecy laws!” Emerson opened his mouth again but Davies was having
none of it. “What the fuck are you still doing here? Go!”

Emerson shot me a terrified glance, then stood up and made
a beeline for the house, scooping up the laptop as he went. I wouldn’t have been
entirely surprised if he was going into the house to shop for one-way plane
tickets to somewhere very far away.

Davies turned to me, nostrils flaring. “And you,” he
said. “Do you really call yourself a fucking detective?”

I stood up and took a step toward him, getting close
enough that I could smell his breath. “Choose your next words carefully,” I
said.

His eyes burned as he looked down at me, and I knew he
was torn between threatening me and pleading with me. Finally his gaze
softened. “Find my daughter,” he said quietly. “Bring her back to me, and I
will give you anything you want.
Anything
. Do you understand me?”

I held his gaze for a moment, then looked away, considering
my options. I could see Emerson scurrying into the house. He might well need a
change of underwear once he got in there. I might have found that funny
earlier, but now I actually felt sorry for the man. It was hard to imagine
Davies treating employees well when he felt they’d failed him. He seemed like
the kind of guy who would take a more violent approach to management.

I looked back to Davies. “I’ll find your daughter,” I
said. “I’ll find her because she’s a little girl that needs help. Not because
you’re telling me to. I’m not afraid of you.”

“Fine,” he said.

I nodded at the house. “Anything he finds on that bank
account, you let me know.”

“As soon as I know anything, you will too.”

“I’m going to go,” I said. I wasn’t sure what the hell I
was going to do next, but I wasn’t going to get anything done hanging around
Davies’s estate. “I’ll check in soon.”

“You still have my number?”

“Yeah.”

He took a deep breath. “My daughter is ten years old…”

“Don’t try to play that card a second time,” I told him.
“I said I’ll find her, so I’ll find her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” I hesitated, not sure if I should say the
rest of what was on my mind. “Look, this whole thing is fucked now. We know it
and they know it. They want to get as much money from you as they can, but…”

“You think they’ll kill her?”

“They’re aren’t going to want a witness,” I said. “They
want the next transfer, and maybe they think they can get another one out of
you after that, but we all know this can’t last forever. The clock is ticking.
If you’ve been holding anything back, anything in reserve…”

He shook his head. “No. My cards are on the table. I
understand what’s at stake here.”

I hoped he did. There was no guarantee that the girl was
alive even now. The kidnappers could be clearing out of their hideout and
heading for the border at this very moment. They could collect their last two
million from anywhere in the world. The only question was whether they thought
they could extend their run after that. Was it worth it to them to try and find
out?

In three days we’d know for sure whether Anna was alive.
I desperately wanted to find her before that. I was sure it was all the time
she had.

Chapter 14

I started
to drive home but pulled over at a gas station in Del Mar when I felt myself
starting to shake. I spent a moment in the car with my eyes shut, palms pressed
against my temples. It wasn’t withdrawal. I was still too well in the bag for
that. I wasn’t sure how to describe what I was feeling. Stress? Panic? My skin
felt like it was on too tight. If I’d been just a little bit crazier I might
have taken a razor blade and tried to cut some vents in it. Just to give myself
a little more space.

Do you really call yourself a fucking detective?

I had, once. I’d been good at it, too. I didn’t get
promoted because I was good at networking or had friends in the right places. I
wasn’t and I didn’t. But I closed cases. I did it fast, and I never gave up.
Not until the last one, anyway, when I’d finally been beaten.

My right wrist, the one the Laughing Man had broken, had
started to ache. It hadn’t acted up in a long time. I wonder if I’d strained it
during the night, maybe stumbled during my blackout and caught it awkwardly on
something. Or was it psychological? Maybe. It made very little difference. Pain
was pain.

The gas station had a small market inside. I decided to
go in and find something to deal with the dryness in my mouth. They didn’t sell
liquor, which was what I’d really gone in hoping to find, but I settled for a
bag of chips and a bottle of soda. I wasn’t sure how long I had been living off
of junk food, but it hardly seemed worth it to waste my money on real food when
I never kept anything down for long.

I sat in my car for a while and thought about my
situation, eating the chips one-by-one. Why had I agreed to help Davies? It
wasn’t that I didn’t want to find his daughter. I really did. But I knew
nothing about working kidnapping cases. As much as I hated the idea of giving
up, I had to admit I was the wrong person to be doing this.

But Davies had nobody else. Even if he was willing to
call in the police, they might well be more interested in getting a team from
their organized crime unit into his place than they would be in helping him.

I needed help. I needed another cop to talk to. Dan
would be able to give me some advice if I called him. He’d be pissed at me for
lying to him earlier, but at least I knew he’d talk to me once he got done
yelling at me. And if he did try to get someone else from law enforcement
involved, odds were they’d never get past Davies’s front gate.

I’d have to deal with the yelling, I decided. But I’d
never managed to find my cell phone. Had I left it in the car at some point? I
checked the glove box and the storage compartment under the armrest but came up
with nothing. Frustrated, I got out of the car and looked under the seats, and
then in the back, running my hands into every crevice I could find. Nothing.
The phone wasn’t in here.

I put the car in gear and headed back to San Diego. Once
I was home I was definitely going to find that phone. I’d tear my house apart
if I had to. There were only so many places the damn thing could be.

But instead of looking for it, I used the house phone to
call Dan’s number, holding my breath as his line rang. It was time to come
clean. But it was a woman’s voice that answered the phone. “Who is this?” I
asked. Dan wasn’t senior enough in the department to have a secretary.

“It’s Sarah,” the voice replied. “Nevada, is that you?”

“Yeah. Hi, Sarah.”

“I’m so glad you called. I was meaning to…”

“Sorry,” I interrupted. I had no desire to talk about my
last trip in to the station or what had happened to Todd. “Is Dan around?”

“He’s out at a crime scene.”

“Oh.” I frowned. That was poor timing. Captains didn’t
go out to a lot of crime scenes, unless something political was going on, or if
something very unusual had happened. “Anything I need to know about?”

“No, he’s just mentoring some junior detectives,” she
said. “You know how he does.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s that kind of guy.”

“He really is.”

Sometimes I thought I heard more than professional
admiration in Sarah’s voice when she talked about Dan. I wondered if he had
ever noticed. Probably not. Even if he had, he never would have done anything
about it as long as she worked for him. It was against department regulations,
and even if it hadn’t been he’d have found it inappropriate. He’d wait until
one of them resigned, or transferred to another division, before he made a
move.

“Do you want to go out and take a look at it?” she
offered. “I can give you the address. I think he’d like that.”

I suppressed a chuckle. “That’s okay, Sarah. I’m sure
he’ll be fine without me.”

“I didn’t mean he needed help. It’s just that he cares a
lot about you, and he thinks working would be a good thing for you.”

They had apparently discussed this before. “Okay. Hey,
Sarah?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever worked a kidnapping?”

“No, I never had the chance. Unless they’re domestics
most of those go right to the FBI.”

I’d known that, of course. Most kidnappings involved
children, and ever since the Lindbergh case in the 1930’s, the FBI had
jurisdiction over those. Police officers didn’t have many opportunities to work
kidnappings, at least in this country. I’d just been hoping maybe I’d get lucky
with the question.

“Let me run this by you,” I said. “You kidnap someone.
You’re holding them for ransom. Under what circumstances would you kill them?”

“None, until the ransom has been paid. You lose all your
leverage if you can’t come up with proof of life when you’re asked for it.”

Unless you had another victim, of course. Then you had
at least
some
leverage. It gave them incentive to keep Anna safe, at
least until they thought it was too dangerous to keep her alive anymore.

Like if Emerson was inside a possibly bugged house,
making phone calls to Switzerland to try and get bank information out of
someone.

Shit.

“Of course you might kill the victim by accident,” Sarah
offered. “Maybe during a struggle? Are we talking about any case in
particular?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem.”

“Hey, Sarah?”

“Hmm?”

I took a quick breath. “I was kind of rude to you the
other day when I came in to the station,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I heard her breathing catch. I wasn’t exactly known for
making apologies, even before I’d been a drunk. After a pause she said, “It’s
okay. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay.” I hadn’t planned on worrying. It had just seemed
like something I ought to say to her.

“Nevada? I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I was talking
to a friend of mine and…” I heard her hesitate.

“Sarah?”

“My old Training Officer, you remember Paul? He runs
this A.A. meeting. It’s only for cops, and…”

I hung up on her.

Chapter 15

Five
minutes later I called Sarah back. “When is this meeting?”

“Really?” she asked. She sounded like I’d told her I
just landed on Mars and discovered it was populated by magical talking kittens
who wanted to throw her a birthday party.

“When?”

“Hang on,” she said. “I have to go back to my desk.”

I gave her time. It wasn’t like I had anything else to
do.

A minute later she picked up the phone again. “Every
weekday at 5:30. Weekends at 1:00.”

“Where?”

“It’s at the old Lutheran church on 16
^th
Avenue. You know it? It’s the one you can walk to from here.”

It sounded familiar, but I figured if it was that close
to police headquarters it would be easy enough to find. “So, what, you just go
in the front door and they sit there in the pews?”

“No,”’ she said. “You go up the main steps but there’s a
door on the left hand side next to the front doors that goes into a little side
room. They use it for A.A. meetings and Bible study, those kinds of things.”

I was curious how Sarah knew all of this but she must
have anticipated the question. “Most of Paul’s old trainees went with him when
he got his twenty-year coin,” she said. “It was a big day for him.”

“Okay. 5:30?”

“That’s it. Paul said you’re welcome to go in and just
listen…”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I said, hanging up
on her for the second time. Listening was exactly what I needed to do right
now.

If the church was where I thought it was, it was only a
fifteen minute drive away. I looked at the clock. I wouldn’t make it on time,
but that wasn’t important to me. I didn’t care if I missed their opening
ceremonies, or whatever it was they did there.

 It turned out to be easy enough to find. I went up the
steps and found the side door just as Sarah had described it. For a brief
moment I considered knocking. Was that what they did? Would a slot open in the
door and I’d need to say a secret password, like getting into a speakeasy
during Prohibition? Then I decided I didn’t actually care all that much if I
broke their protocol. I opened the door and stepped inside.

The small room on the other side of the door smelled
like coffee and desperation, although it’s possible the desperation was just
me. The room was small and square, with a dozen chairs arranged in a circle. On
my right near the door sat a table with a coffee maker that held half a pot of
black coffee. Someone had brought in doughnuts. Whether they were being ironic
or had just wanted a snack, I didn’t know.

Eight of the chairs in the circle were occupied. A
heavyset man had been reading from a laminated sheet of paper as I’d entered. I
only caught the words “personal inventory” before he glanced up at me and
stopped abruptly. “Good
god
,” he said.

I tried to place him but couldn’t. I’d had enough
notoriety on the force that most cops recognized me immediately, but I never
socialized all that much. I’d been something of a recluse even before I’d
started drinking.

A few of the others I recognized. Mike Brown had been a
detective in Robbery but had been busted down to patrolman for, believe it or
not, drinking on the job. Jason London worked Narcotics. He was in his mid-forties
but looked older, substance abuse having done a number on his skin. Not all of
the Narcotics guys got out clean.

Three of the cops were in uniform. I didn’t recognize
any of them. Too young.

An older man with a neatly trimmed white beard stood up.
I recognized him as Sarah’s Training Officer but I wasn’t sure we’d ever
actually met. Paul…Wilson? Wilkins? Something like that.

“Nevada,” Paul said. He had a grandfatherly tone that a
lot of people probably found comforting, but it just made me want to punch him
in the face. “Come in. Have a seat.” He motioned to one of the empty chairs.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Paul smiled gently. “This is a safe place, Nevada.
You’re with friends here.”

“I don’t have time for this,” I said. I held my hand up
like I was a student in class and wanted to ask a question. “Hi, I’m Nevada,
and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Nevada,” two of the cops responded automatically.
The rest just stared at me.

“So we’ve established that,” I said. “Great. Good job,
everyone. I’ll say a bunch of Hail Marys later. Right now, I’ve got a case I
need help with.”

Paul took a step forward, raising both hands patiently.
“We don’t talk about the job here, Nevada, except for as to how it affects our
sobriety. We’re here to support each other with our disease.”

“You know what?” I asked. “That’s great. I support that.
I really do.”

“Okay, then…” he glanced at the empty chair meaningfully,
then back at me.

“But I’ve got a little girl out there who is going to
die if I don’t find her,” I continued. “I mean, she is literally going to die,
and very soon. Right now I need a room full of cops more than anything else.
So, let’s take a vote.” I turned to the assembled drunks. “Who wants to talk
about the twelve steps, and who wants to help me save a child’s life? Everyone
for working the steps, raise their hand.”

Nobody raised their hand. I nodded. “Okay, it’s no votes
for doing the steps. Now, everyone who wants to save a little girl?” I put my
hand up. Nobody else did. Two of the patrol cops exchanged a confused glance.

“What the fuck?” I asked. “Am I speaking goddamn Chinese
here?”

Jason London raised his hand slowly. I pointed at him.
“Right there! We have a winner!”

Jason gave Paul a plaintive look. “Maybe we could hear
her out?”

“I’m not sure we have a choice,” Paul said. He went back
to his chair and sat down. “Why don’t you take a seat, Nevada, and you can tell
us what’s going on.”

I sat. For the next fifteen minutes I laid out
everything I knew about the case, from the moment Chandler Emerson had arrived
at my doorstep until the moment I’d crashed Paul’s A.A. meeting for help.
“Sorry about that,” I added, nodding at Paul.

“You were never known for doing anything the
conventional way,” Paul acknowledged. “I used to wonder if that was why you had
so much success as a detective.”

“And why you fell so far,” said Jason London.

I gave Jason a look that suggested I’d like to see him fall
from a great height. After a moment he looked away. Nobody ever won a staring
contest with me. People didn’t like what they saw in my eyes.

“It’s weird for a kidnapping,” one of the plainclothes
cops said.

I snapped my fingers and pointed at her. “You are?”

“Miranda Callies.” I cocked my head at her. I’d never
heard her name before. “Gang unit.”

“Why is it weird, Miranda?”

“You said the men on the phone were Mexicans?”

“It’s a guess from the accent. They spoke Spanish. I’m
no expert; they honestly could have been from anywhere.”

“I heard kidnappings are pretty common in Latin
America,” one of the patrol cops said. Everyone looked at him and he shrugged.
“Fine, I saw it on National Geographic.”

“They
are
common,” Miranda said. “They’re damn
near endemic in some areas. It’s the target that’s weird.”

“Davies is rich,” I told her. “I saw him transfer two
million dollars out of his bank account without breaking a sweat, and it wasn’t
the first payment he’d made.”

“Lots of people are rich,” Miranda said. “But lots of
people aren’t going to send a small army of killers after you once you’ve
collected your ransom.”

“Davies will go to war,” said Jason London.

“And it’s not just about the money,” Miranda continued.
“He
has
to kill them just to keep his reputation intact. Whoever did
this, Davies is never going to stop looking for them. And when he catches up to
them he’ll skin them alive and FedEx what’s left of them to their families.
Then he’ll kill their families.”

“You would have to be suicidal to take him on,” said
Paul.

“What if you were bigger and stronger?” asked one of the
patrol cops.

“It still wouldn’t be worth a war,” Miranda said. “It’d
be much easier to go find a rich businessman and kidnap him. Then you ransom
him to his family. In some places they even sell insurance for that kind of
thing. Do it in certain countries and you won’t even need to worry about the
police if you cut the right guy in for a share. There are lots of easier ways
to get that much money.”

I nodded. I’d definitely had the right idea in coming
here. Working with a roomful of cops was giving me insight I’d lacked before,
and if helping me wasn’t the reason they’d come here today, there were worse
ways they could be spending their time.

“How did they get into the condo in the first place?”
Paul asked.

I looked at him and frowned. I’d pondered that question
as well. “What do you mean?”

He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “You said someone
took two furniture crates into the building, stuffed the woman and her daughter
inside, and then took them out of the building that way.”

“Yeah. I figured she would have opened the door to tell
them to leave and the kidnappers must have forced their way inside.”

“But that doesn’t work,” Paul said. “It’s one thing to
walk up to your house with a box and knock on the door, but the Davies woman
lived in a secure building.”

The guard would never have let them past, I thought.
He’d have called up to check it with Heather and she’d have told him right away
she wasn’t getting any furniture delivered. The guard should have turned the
kidnappers away while they’d still been in the lobby.

So how did the kidnappers make it to her door in the
first place? Had someone paid off the security guard? That was an interesting
thought. If so, it meant there was someone else I could question.

I stood up. “I have to go,” I said. “You guys have been
great. I mean, for a bunch of drunks.” I frowned. “You know, that came out
wrong. Seriously, thank you.”

Paul stood up. “I guess there’s no point in asking you
to stay,” he said. “We meet here every weekday at 5:30 for an hour. If you want
to come back…”

“Probably not.”

He went into his wallet and pulled out a business card.
“Take this, at least. My number is on there.” He handed it to me.

I looked at the card. It had his first name, a telephone
number, and, “This says you’re a friend of Bill W.”

“That’s right.”

“Which one of you is Bill W.?”

He smiled gently. “Come back sometime and I’ll tell you
about him.”

His voice had the same tone Christians use when they say
they want to tell you about Jesus. I shrugged, intending to flip the card into
the garbage as soon as I stepped outside, but instead I tucked it into my back
pocket. “I do appreciate the help,” I said.

 “Tell us how it works out,” one of the patrol cops
said.

“And good luck,” Mike Brown added.

“Thanks,” I said. Odds were I was going to need it.