Cross Cut (21 page)

I cleared my throat and said, “That sounds to me as if you don’t think Lynch’s murder had anything to do with Cristescu or Gillham and Mane. What about Melissa?”

She nodded, but held out a palm. “On the contrary, I think it had everything to do with Gillham and Mane. But I also believe such events are a mere side issue to what has been going on for the last three years.”

“You can’t just call Melissa a side issue,” I said. “Side issue or not, what the hell does this all have to do with what happened twelve years ago?”

Ryder rose from her chair and made her way over to the aquariums. One of the automatic feeding systems had jarred. She frowned at it, and then turned to us. She avoided the central question without flinching.

“That’s enough questions for tonight, I feel. It is unfortunate we have had so many interruptions that we keep avoiding the important tasks. Tomorrow, we will get to the bottom of the murders.”

“What about Melissa, are you coming with us?” Sully asked.

“No—I, have to wait in. I’m expecting a phone call.”

I got up from the sofa and gave a childish snort. “Don’t strain your ass too long waiting in for it.”

She frowned while Sully tried hard not to laugh.

“Pah!” she said. “It is too late to do anything worthwhile. And I do not wish to spend all night in Westminster stalking a dirty factory.”

“I think the phrase is stakeout,” I said sarcastically.

“Pah. Goodnight. You too, Sully.”

Two pahs in one minute, I was on form. She deserved it, and so did I.

She turned her head and gave her attention to the rightmost aquarium, and the feeder. Sully and I nodded to each other and attempted to leave the room.

“Oh, Ader—” she said.

“Yeah, I know, lock the door.”

26

We stopped at the local store for supplies. We had no idea how long the night would turn out to be, and Sully always required a snack or two. He wanted to bring along beer, but I didn’t waste time explaining how idiotic that would be.

Before we headed over to the address Doreen Sharp had given me, we drove east to Irvine Lake. In retrospect, it would have made more sense to have given Melissa a disposable cell phone, however, you may recall I didn’t have one on hand at the time.

I drove up to Sully’s cabin and parked the Lexus some fifty yards away. We got out and made our way toward it. Sully was already helping himself to the chips we bought.

“You know, that Lexus of yours will stick out like a sore thumb. Sure ain’t no stakeout car,” Sully said.

“Who cares, it’ll be dark. Stop eating those chips and wait out here a sec.”

I left him behind while I knocked on the door of the cabin. I got no answer, so I knocked again and called her name. Still no answer. I tried the door knob and the door opened. Inside, the place was as empty as it was last night when we brought her here. None of the lights were on, and the fire hadn’t been lit.

“Sully, get over here,” I called out.

We looked around, inside and out, and didn’t find a thing.

“The hell is she?” I said.

Sully was poking the fire. He returned the poker and moved into a small, closet-like room in the corner. He came back out and shook his head. “The fire hasn’t been used, and, it doesn’t look like any power from the generator has been used either.”

I didn’t move for a while. The natural reaction in a situation like this would be to cry missing person to everyone you knew. Clearly not an option in our case, seen as Melissa was, for the time being, a fugitive. While I stood about vacantly, Sully had moved outside. He was walking across the dirt track that leads away from the cabin. It was dark and only the headlights from my Lexus allowed us to see the cabin without difficulty. Trees nearby rustled in a slight breeze. I was comfortable when I'd arrived, now I was unsettled.

“Did you tell anyone else to come here?” Sully said.

“No, why?”

“Because, there’s a third set of tire tracks.”

I walked over to Sully, who pointed them out. Sure enough, a foreign set of tracks, different to the ones I had made presently and the night before.

Sully’s legs creaked as he bent down to take a better look. “They’re not yours, that’s for sure. Someone else came here in the last twenty four hours.”

“And they took Melissa,” I said worriedly.

Sully looked back at the cabin and mumbled, “Hmm.” He shook his head. “Not so sure. There’s no sign of a struggle inside the cabin. If anything, it looks like she left with whoever came here. Either that or she was disabled with zero struggle. Is any of her stuff in the cabin?”

“No, it’s all gone.”

“She left without a struggle—but why?”

Why was indeed the question on my mind. There was also the fact that neither the fire nor the power had been used, which could mean she’d left not long after arriving.

“What shall we do?” Sully asked.

I sighed. “What can we do? We can’t exactly call the police.” I paused for a second, and then changed my mind. “Or can we—”

“What are you, kidding?”

I took out my cell phone and considered the option. I decided it wouldn’t hurt any, and that I could trust Kacie Cordell. But, given the week’s proficient use of surprise, I’m not sure why I expected it to be that easy. Truth be told, as the phone rang out, I was surprised, but not because no one answered. It was because after the first few rings, I could hear something behind me. The ringing. It was a standard ringtone belonging to an iPhone.

Sully and I looked around and located the noise coming from the bushes at the bottom of a knoll beside the dirt track leading to the cabin. It kept ringing, and I looked at Sully, and he looked back at me, with a rather cold and confused stare. To confirm what we had already assumed, I ended the call, and, without a moment’s hesitation, the ringtone stopped.

We stood for a while, motionless, not saying a word. Sully then rooted around in the bushes, pulling back branches and leaves, while I stared at my phone. He found the iPhone—belonging to Kacie Cordell. He held it up to my eye line. The screen was cracked and caked in mud.

“What the hell is that FBI chick’s phone doing here?” he asked.

I didn’t really know how to answer, as I didn’t know what to think. Kacie had been here, and Melissa was gone—what did that mean? As a detective, the first job is usually to state the obvious. In this case, it would mean, quite simply, that Kacie had taken Melissa. But I didn’t want to believe that.

I took the phone from Sully and looked into the call history. The last call she made was last night—or rather, early morning, twenty minutes after midnight. Probably half an hour after she had left the beach house after our drink at Ellie’s.

“What is this?” I said, somewhat rhetorically. “I was with her less than twenty-four hours ago.”

“Have you been in touch with the FBI? Maybe she double-crossed you and took Melissa in.”

I shook my head.

I wasted no time in dialing the FBI section of the federal building. I only had two numbers, one of which was the inquiry line, which wouldn’t be manned at such an hour. The other was a direct line to a desk phone. I had no idea to whom it belonged. It was just a random line I had used once before when I required it. Knowing my luck, they would have had the decorators in and switched the line to the Director’s Office.

It took a while, but an agent answered and said, “Hello, Special Agent Crawley.”

“Yes, hi,” I said. “Can I speak to Special Agent Kacie Cordell?”

“She’s not in today. How did you get this number?”

“Not important. You’re saying she hasn’t come in at all? Did she call in sick or something?”

“No—she’s AWOL as far as I know. Now listen here, who are—”

I hung up before he could finish. I put my cell phone back in my pocket and shook my head at Sully. “She didn’t bring Melissa in. Hell, she didn’t bring herself in. She didn’t go into work this morning.”

“What does that mean, then?” Sully asked. “What was she doing here?”

“Hell if I know. I sat across her at a bar last night and she didn’t seem out of sorts.”

“You sure? You didn’t give away Melissa’s location?”

I shook my head at first, but then it hit me. “Shit.”

“What?”

I rubbed my head as if it was sore. “We drove in my car. If she had a second or two, she could’ve checked my onboard GPS. It logs my travel history.”

“What were you thinking?” he said with a sigh.

“I trusted her.”

Sully sighed again. “If she didn’t take her in—then what are we looking at here?”

I shrugged. Sully started to walk up and down. On the odd occasion, he can get mild hysteria when it comes to speculation.

“Jesus, Ader, what if she’s a bent agent. I mean, think about it, who else was in a prime position to plant that evidence at the restroom in the first place?”

“No—that’s not Kacie.”

“You say that, yet she’s already duped you. The lack of commotion here makes sense, too. All she had to do was knock on the cabin door and make out she was arresting Melissa. Doubt she would’ve resisted.”

It was a decent theory, but I still wasn’t buying it. I turned around and kicked a stone at my Lexus in frustration. “Nerks!”

“What should we do?” Sully said.

I stared at the starless sky for a while and considered our options “Stick to the plan, I guess.” It hurt saying it more than it did thinking it.

“With Melissa missing?”

“Well, I don’t see how we can possibly track her now. And either way, it makes no difference. Let’s say Kacie did take her—where would she be? Either in prison—not much we can do about that. But that seems unlikely, given Kacie’s mysterious absence from work. The other option—if she really is bent, she will have taken Melissa to those who tried framing her, so the best thing we can do is go to Gillham and Mane tonight and hope we find something.”

“What about Kendra, you gonna ring her?”

I shook my head. “Nah. What’s she going to do, pray on her ass all night?”

27

We didn’t really speak on our way to the Gillham and Mane factory. Sully didn’t know Kacie or Melissa as well as I did, so who was he to be handing out suggestions?

But, the more I drove, the more the thought was bugging me. Melissa had left that cabin not long after Ryder and I had dropped her there. That was a fact. Kacie Cordell had been there, also a near certain fact. Beside mine, there was only another set of tire tracks outside the cabin, and Kacie hadn’t taken Melissa back to the FBI.

There was only one other explanation I could conjure, and that wasn’t pretty either. The explanation was that Melissa had initially agreed to go quietly, then, outside the cabin, she somehow got the better of Kacie, and made off in her car. It would explain the smashed phone, and it wouldn’t be the first time Melissa had apparently protected herself in a crisis, using force.

For five minutes I clung to the theory that perhaps Melissa had fled before Kacie even got there last night. But that didn’t do much to explain Kacie’s absence at work, or why she had dropped her phone.

We were about a mile from our destination when Sully began to inspect Kacie’s phone some more.

“What are you looking for?” I said.

“Anything bogus. Calls and numbers—texts.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing curious. She doesn’t text much. And I can’t see anything in her numbers, other than she is one of those people that gives everyone a damned nickname. But I doubt she’s going to have a contact under the title, ‘Romanian mafia.’

“You don’t say,” I said in a low mumble. “Who did she call last night?”

“This morning?” Sully said, correcting me. “Someone called Amy.”

I ran the name past my brain and couldn’t think of anything.

“Do you think she made the call before whatever happened at the cabin?” Sully said.

“Dunno, maybe. Midnight’s an odd time to call for anything else. Dial the number, see who this Amy is.”

Sully complied, by pretending he had found the phone and wanted to return it to its owner, which was partly true. After the conversation, which I couldn’t quite decipher by only hearing Sully’s polite, non evasive questions, he shook his head.

“Just a friend by the sounds. She did get the call last night, but heard no one on the other end. She hasn’t seen or heard from Kacie in weeks.”

I nodded and sighed. “Goddamnit.”

Sully nodded back. “Yeah, I retract my earlier thought. Sounds more like Kacie was the one who was abducted. She made a desperate call, and dropped it in a struggle. Although, I fail to see why she’d call a friend at midnight. Why not her headquarters or whatever?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think Melissa panicked and took her ride?”

“Don’t think so. Maybe somebody else was there.”

“There were no other tire tracks.”

“So what? There’s such a thing as walking.”

“How would anyone find the place, though? Sounds like a stretch to me.”