Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (25 page)

I read Laura’s reactions as she opened the door.

I’d gambled on her still being in bed. What would she have to get up for while suspended from her job? She was dressed in a plain T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Her expression went from shocked to happy to nervous.

“I was worried about you,” she said. “I was out all night trying to figure out where you’d been taken to, until Gaines called.”

“She say anything else?”

“Just that you were okay.”

I stepped inside the doorway, and she moved over to make room but didn’t step back into the house. I leaned in and kissed her slowly, playfully kneading her lips between mine. “It was my fault we split up,” I said. “A lot of things were my fault.”

She pulled back and her face aimed for surprised again. “What’s gotten into you?”

“I’m awake.”

I left it at that. I walked through into the living room. It was still as it had been the other night. She wasn’t joking about the sofa; it was leaning at an angle, one of the legs collapsed inward.

“Not, uh, that I mind.” She followed on, running her hand through her bedhead hair. “But if you’re planning on kissing me again, I think we should both have showers. Your clothes smell like you slept in them.”

“Funny, that.”

She smiled like she used to, when we first met. I flashed back to drinking with her after a sergeant exam, both of us trying to earn a promotion out of uniform and into higher-up jobs. Twenty-somethings playing at being teenagers, shooting each other glances and pretending to be indifferent. Good times. Laura went into the bathroom and shut the door. Soon I heard the shower running. While I waited I sat on the chair—the sofa looked like too much of a risk—and thought through the rest of the day. If everything lined up the way I was thinking it would, then there would be plenty of time later for Laura and me to sit down and have our own version of
the
talk. I hoped there would be that parade now that I had an idea of what I wanted.

She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a bundle of towels and shuffled into the bedroom. I stepped into the bathroom, the room filled with steam and heat, and ran cold water over my face. I felt alert and normal. After I showered, I changed back into the same clothes for the second time that day. They still smelled, but they would have to do.

Out in the living room Laura was dressed as she had been when she’d turned up at that hotel that first night. She was leaning against the window, looking into the room, and she did her own version of the Gaines eyebrow flick. “What’re you brooding about now?”

“You. Us.” I sat for a while trying and failing to read her face. “You were right, you know. When you got me that shrink, Guthrie. After the riots and the old man in the street. I went away.” I tapped my temple. “And I took our happiness with it.”

“You’re so sweet when you overthink things.”

“I think it’s about time I start overthinking the
right
things. When Gaines told me you’d turned her, that you were building a big case off it, I don’t know—I think it suited me better to think you were crooked. It was easier, you know? I could pretend everything was your fault. By the way, this whole undercover thing with her, was it official?” She shook her head. “So that’s why Becker doesn’t know?”

She shook her head again, but this time it was a confirmation. “I saw the chance when that Polish dealer came in, and with everything that was going on at work I knew there was no way I’d get permission, certainly not quick enough to pull it off. I thought it would be quick. Hook him, get to Gaines, find the suppliers, make the case and get out. Get my promotion.” She smiled at that, the part of the plan that had worked. “But then I saw I could go deeper, and Gaines was opening up to me, so things got blurry. I went too deep.”

I hoped that wasn’t true. I needed to. Not for the first time, I was pinning my own hopes of salvation on being able to pull someone else clear. She’d broken so many rules and told so many lies that, even if we handed the police the perfect case, she would still have to be investigated. She might never wash away the stain. She’d been carrying this around for years, and rather than help, I’d come along and forced her into covering up multiple murders. I owed it to her to fix things.

“We’re almost done,” I said. “And you might get that big case. But we’ll need to cross a few more lines first.”

She leaned forward, and her eyes lit up. “Trouble?”

“Probably.”

“Pepsi, get your ass out of bed.”

I was standing at his door again. This time with Laura at my side. It turned out she didn’t have a gun. Undercover cops are never quite as useful as you’d think. She
did
have
a much better car than my father’s bug, though, so we’d driven over to Pepsi’s house in air-conditioned comfort.

Pepsi opened the door looking to be in much the same state as he had the last time. He was wearing a different T-shirt, and jogging pants rather than boxers, but the look of scruffy tiredness was just the same. I stepped forward but he didn’t give way. He looked from me to Laura.

“But she’s—”

“A cop, deal with it.”

I stepped in, and this time he moved. Laura followed me, and I heard her suppress a laugh at the mess the place was in. The sleeping people had gone, but the room was in the same state of curtain-drawn dusk, with a large pizza box on the floor. The DVD case for
American Beauty
lay open and empty on the floor beside a half-eaten box of chocolates. Not what I would have thought was a Pepsi film. Any conversation we’d had about movies had always drifted to explosions or Scorcese. I turned at the sound of someone coming down the stairs, and saw a woman wearing nothing but a bathrobe. She looked to be in her early twenties, and her hair looked like it had been very expensively styled the night before. When she saw us she smiled with embarrassment and stepped back up out of sight.

“We catch you at a bad time?” Laura was straight into cop mode, putting Pepsi on the defensive. “She know what you do for a living?”

“No, it’s—she’s—I mean—” His voice rose to a squeak. “What do you want?”

“I need to see your client list again,” I said. “And relax, she’s with me.”

He stood on the spot and fidgeted. His hand went to scratch his crotch but then he thought better of it. His shoulders sagged, and he waved us toward the stairs. I led the way with Laura following and Pepsi bringing up the rear. At the top of the stairs I turned into the room we’d been in the other day. I heard Pepsi turn into another room and hold a hushed conversation; the chatter got faster and I could tell that whatever was being said, the woman was winning.

He stepped back through to join us in the small office, looking like a scolded child. He waved at the laptop. “Help yourself.”

I lifted the lid of the laptop and it came to life. The client list screen was already opened and showing a head shot of an attractive young Indian woman, with slim lines and a pretty face. Laura suppressed another laugh, and I recognized the woman from the other room.

“What do you want this time?” Pepsi’s voice was almost a whine.

“You said Jelly used your talent for some of his videos, right?”

“Yes.”

“I want to see which addresses the talent was sent to.”

He nodded. I stepped aside so he could get into the computer files. A second later, he opened up a spreadsheet. He scrolled down, and on the left-hand side I saw names of film companies move by. He stopped at Jelly’s company, Studio Noir, and double-clicked. That loaded up a second page with a list of six addresses. Three of them were in industrial units, places that had probably been rented out temporarily for the duration of a shoot. One of them was the office in Wednesbury. One was Jelly’s flat on the Moat Farm estate. The other had the same postcode as the Moat Farm estate, but with a different final digit. Something about it was familiar, but my memory had to fight through the drugs I’d been on.

“What’s that one?”

Pepsi leaned in to follow my finger. “I think that’s Simon’s address. Jelly’s partner in the company. They live right by each other.”

Bingo.

And then my memory found what I was asking for. I pulled my notebook out of my jacket pocket and found what I’d written down the last time I’d been here. I read an address on my page and then compared it to the screen. It was the same address.

“Show me that woman again—Joanne.”

Pepsi typed in a name, and the entry from the other day loaded. Joanne Rhys. The hooker who had vanished into thin air after a booking with the Cartwrights. The possible source of the blood I’d found at their place. I looked again at the name and the calm, proud features. And then at her address at the Moat Farm estate.

The same address where Pepsi had sent talent to do filming.

The same address as Jelly’s business partner, Simon.

Click.

Matt had said Simon’s girlfriend worked with them, even that she’d starred in a few videos. Branko, too, had asked me about her when I’d visited the studio, although I hadn’t known who he’d been talking about at the time.

I waved the notebook at Pepsi, and pointed at the two different entries of the same address on the laptop’s screen. “Do you never cross-reference any of these things?”

He didn’t hold back from scratching his crotch this time. I guess we all have nervous tics. “Never saw the need.”

I pushed past him and headed for the stairs.

Laura followed. “Where next?”

I held up the notebook over my shoulder as I walked.

“The Lost City.”

“You going to fill me in?”

Laura drove as we headed back to the Moat Farm estate. I was in the passenger seat, thinking through our next move, trying to connect all the dots in a way that might save all of our asses.

“It was the obvious answer the whole time,” I said. I thought back to my Dad’s story about the first time I’d watched
Planet of the Apes
and missed the fundamental point
.
“It was always going to be. Gaines helps get Jelly set up with his video company. In return he films people she wants to lean on. But he’s not stopping there, because he’s Jelly. He’s filming anyone he can, looking for something good. But he’s not a technical guy. He’s the idea, the blag. The guy who figures out who to film and how to profit from it. So someone else was involved. He needed them to set up the equipment. Especially since Jelly was
in
one of the videos, it has to be true.” I cursed myself under my breath. “That ‘someone else’ must have been his business partner, Simon. Then there’s this third, Joanne Rhys, who seems to be Simon’s missing girlfriend. They all worked on this together then they get something really juicy—”

“Me and Veronica.”

“Exactly. Although, maybe not. I mean, that would have been Jelly’s plan from the start, he’s a schemer, so as soon as he got something on you and Gaines he would have set his blackmail plan in motion. But one of them also contacted the cartel, which means they found out about the higher-ups somehow. Maybe they found a fresh angle to work while they were setting you up but it turned out to be too big for them, and they got burned.”

“Okay. I can follow all of that. But we’re taking a massive leap from that to everybody being dead and to us all being at the hotel. What are you pulling it all together with?”

I gave her what I hoped was a rakish smile. “With chewing gum and guesses. I know Jelly. I don’t know Joanne or Simon, but I know three people in a blackmail scam is about two people too many. Maybe they fell out over what to do with whatever they found? Maybe this was never the epic conspiracy we thought it was. The stuff with the cartel? Their plan to double-cross Gaines just got exposed quicker because of it, since they felt forced to move on the casino just in case the reported leak had the potential to scuttle their master plan. Maybe this was always about a few blackmailers who fell out with each other.”

“What’s the world coming to when you can no longer trust blackmailers and extortionists?”

“Exactly.”

“You have nothing to support all of that, though.”

“Not yet.”

“You’re loving this, aren’t you?”

We pulled onto the estate and followed the maze of roads as they wound between council flats and semi-detached houses. The car’s navigation system issued instructions in a polite nasal voice from the dashboard, but I waved for Laura to keep moving when it directed us to pull up in front of a house on a crowded street. We parked a few hundred yards past Simon’s address on a side street and walked back, keeping an eye out for the twitching curtains of nosy neighbors. Things seemed pretty dead so I wasn’t too worried about potential witnesses. Before we’d left Laura’s place I’d told her to bring kitchen gloves, and we slipped them on as we walked up the driveway. Both matching in our bright pink rubber gloves.

“I’ll follow your lead,” she said, falling back a step. “I’m new to this.”

“And I break into houses all the time?”

“Probably more than me, yes.”

This was true.

The front door was on the side of the house. I pressed the doorbell and waited. There were no sounds from inside, and my spidey-sense stomach was tingling.

“You have your warrant card?”

Laura said, “No. They took it when they suspended me.”

“You have anything that looks like a warrant card?”

“No. I have a photo ID driver’s license and a gym membership card. Aside from that, it’s all credit cards.”

“If anyone answers the door, wave your gym card at them fast and blag, keep them talking. They won’t invite you in, but it’ll buy me some time.”

“What for?”

“That thing I do all the time.”

I continued on around the side of the house into the backyard. The yard was split into two, and I guessed the house must be two flats, upstairs and downstairs. I hoped there was nobody upstairs to hear me breaking in. The windows at the back were all double-glazed, and too firm to be pulled open. They were recent, too, and the glass would be strong. It would make too much noise to try to break one. The back door looked to have been fitted around the same time, and was the same tough white plastic. I tried the handle but it wouldn’t budge; the door had a double lock.

I felt a flash of irritation, and realized I wanted to show off to Laura, play the bad boy, let her see how expert I was at breaking into houses. It’s amazing the way men can twist themselves in knots. I saw movement in the window too late to duck. I stood frozen as someone stepped into view inside the room, where they wouldn’t be able to miss me.

It was Laura.

She waved.

I walked back round to the door, which was ajar, waiting for me. I stepped inside, and Laura leaned round the door from the room she was standing in.

“They keep a key under the mat,” she said, holding up a silver house key.

“Nobody really does that,” I said.

“And yet.” She wiggled the key in the air.

I waved it away, pushing down the fact that I felt upset about not getting to show off my skills. Laura was in the living room. It was sparse but clean, with laminate flooring, bookshelves, and a few hundred DVDs stacked in an alcove in the far wall. The furniture was the same as in Jelly’s flat. Someone had gotten a bulk discount. There were nicer touches to this flat though, potted plants, drapes over the furniture, one of those dishes full of pebbles that people seem to like. There was a framed photograph on the table of Joanne and a man I had to assume was Simon, with a shaven head and round face, both of them wearing big smiles. Without a word we started going door to door.

The first door we opened showed a bad situation of a sort—a hideous lime green bathroom that hadn’t been updated since the seventies. “This should be a crime scene, right here,” I said.

Laura shook her head. “And with the living room looking so nice. Maybe she never came in here?”

We went room to room, finding a messy kitchen, and empty living room, and then the jackpot. It was a bedroom-cum-office. At one end of the room was a modern-looking double bed resting on a laminate floor, with mirrors on the wall on either side. The other half of the room, where we were stood, was carpeted and had a work desk piled high with a mess of cables and a desktop computer on snooze.

I sat in a leather chair before the desk and pressed a few keys on the computer, waiting for the screen to wake up. It showed editing software loaded with the latest footage, some schoolgirl fantasy piece that I had no interest in watching. Nobody would be finishing the editing, that was for sure. I clicked the software program closed, getting a kick out of choosing not to save the work.

I started looking in the desktop folders, opening the files one by one. Laura squatted down beside me, pointing at ones and suggesting other searches I could do. In a folder marked “Soylent Green” we hit pay dirt.

I scrolled through the files, saved as small video clips, and noticed each one had a corresponding folder full of the raw footage. Some had names and descriptions; some just had dates or initials. I clicked the one marked “Perry,” and a clip started to play of two men on a sofa. One was Jelly, and he had his hand down Chris Perry’s trousers. Jelly started to pull Chris’s clothes off and I closed the file. It was exactly what Chris had talked to me about at the library. I kept clicking and found lots of business meetings in offices and some in restaurants, with the zoom microphone picking up the chatter. I also saw town planners taking bribes, councillors talking about giving preference on planning permission to people in return for holidays or cars. There were videos of Joanne talking to drunken public officials, coaxing them into giving up secrets and making taped confessions. There was one with my name, and Laura grabbed the mouse, clicking the file and loading footage of me sitting in my car. It looked like I was asleep, until Claire’s head bobbed up briefly into view between me and the steering wheel.

“
Interesting
,” Laura said.

I closed the file and dragged it to the trash folder before opening more videos. The dates and initials opened up files, some of people I recognized, some I didn’t. Some in acts that were legal, others in acts that would get them arrested.

When I clicked one labeled “VGLM” I found a clip of Gaines and Laura. They were sitting in Casa Mia after hours, and the camera appeared to be inside with them. Jelly clearly had ways and means of getting anywhere. Laura passed a file across the table to Gaines, who smiled, took the file, and opened it. Something was then passed back, a small package. It could have been anything, but anybody looking at it would instantly assume it was cash. Then they both drank wine and the conversation went on.

I closed the file. It was pretty damning but without audio it only told so much. Alone, it didn’t seem like enough to start the whole ball rolling and prompt Jelly to blackmail Veronica. I clicked another file, marked “VG2.” It was poor-quality footage, filmed through a window into a living room. Gaines was on a sofa, sharing her lips and hands with a woman whose face was blocked by the angle of the furniture. As Gaines sat up and leaned back, inviting the other woman forward, the camera moved, as whoever was filming must have stepped to the side, trying to get a better angle.

Laura leaned in and closed the file.

“Let’s give her some privacy,” she said.

I nodded and dragged the clip to the trash. I was feeling dirty after skimming these videos. I didn’t know how someone could make a living from selling people’s privacy. Suddenly drug dealing and murder didn’t seem so bad. I deleted the one of Laura too.

“Empty the trash,” Laura reminded me.

I clicked to empty it, and we waited while the progress bar crawled along the screen. There was a file that was labeled “MP1.” I clicked it and the video clip opened. The camera was aimed at the waists of two people deep in conversation. Laura turned up the volume, and we could make out an argument.

“Listen,” the first voice said, rattled. It sounded like Jelly. “All we’re saying is—”

“I don’t care what you’re saying. You listen.” The hand of the second man jabbed at the belly of the first. “You give me that video or I’ll have you fucking killed, got it?”

Jelly stepped back, almost out of frame, and his hands went out in a calming gesture. “Listen, Mr. Perry—” Laura looked at me and mouthed the name. “There’s no need for violence.”

“Veronica put you up to this, didn’t she? Try and force me into a corner? You thought you could come to me with this alone? I’ll fucking kill you, and I’ll get her, too.”

The clip went black.

Laura and I sat in stunned silence. We looked at each other, smiles spreading across our faces. She shook her head. “Was that—”

“Police and Crime Commissioner Perry making threats to two people’s lives? I think it was, yes.”

“You don’t think—”

“That he did all this? No. Jelly and his crew were more dangerous to themselves then Perry could ever be. We have three people involved in making these, it looks like: Jelly, Simon, and Joanne. Five if the Cartwrights were in it before they went to the hotel. We know for sure three of them are dead, and when I went to Studio Noir after Jelly’s death to look around, Branko was there trying to mop up blood and Simon was nowhere in sight. So if we’re lucky Branko took out number four in our little group, and now we just need to find the fifth. But Perry here has given us a way to wrap all of this up nice and neat. This is your way out.”

We high-fived. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. This video, coupled with the financial trail Gaines had planted, was our golden ticket. Laura could use it to get her job back. I could use it to get the charges against me dropped, and maybe use it as leverage to get the police to back off Gaines. I still needed to figure out how to stop the cartel coming in, but that would surely be child’s play after bringing down the whole West Midlands Police establishment.

I dialed a number into my phone. A harassed-sounding voice answered on the fourth ring.