Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) (21 page)

“Sal…”

“She was pregnant with that French-Canadian bastard's child when she signed the divorce papers. Dammit. Do you know what that feels like? To know those two are going to have everything, even
that
? Our child was barely cold before she was having his.”

“Sal, I’m sorry.”

“Andre can have her,” Sal spat and jerked his hand away. “Those last few months, it was like she was dead already. If she didn't have a pulse, I would have buried her. Now, she's trying to bury me. Dammit.”

“I'm going to fix this, Sal. And I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure those children come home.”

He studied me carefully before nodding. “I can see you believe that. I don't know if it's true or not but I trust you enough not to get in your way. If you say I'm better off here, then don't expect any problems from me.”

I nodded and stood. There were still questions I could ask, things that would help, but I thought I had pushed him hard enough. He looked exhausted enough that he could probably pass out on one of those hard cots in the jail below without any problems. I was pretty tired myself but I'd promised Nina I would stop by first thing. “I'll keep in touch,” I promised. “If you think of anything else that might be helpful, have them call me.”

I arrived at the Garcia residence just before ten to find Valentino out on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette. There were deep, black circles around his eyes, indicating that he hadn't slept any more than I had. His hair was disheveled and he was wearing last night's clothes without any shoes or socks. The only accessory Valentino had bothered with was a pair of reflective sunglasses that he raised when I pulled in only to drop as soon as I got out of the truck. He took a swig from the beer sitting next to him. “Where's your car,
gringa
?”

“Waiting on a part to come in,” I said and glanced over at the two cars up on blocks in his driveway. “You work on cars?” He grunted something that sounded affirmative and took another drink. I frowned. “Isn't ten a little early to be drinking?”

“I started at six,” he said and stood. “Chanter told me about Sal being in lock up. He don't deserve that, you know. Him and Elias, they were like this, man. Like this.” He held up two crossed fingers. “Closer than brothers. And Sal and Leo, man, fuck that, too.” Valentino drew a hand over his unshaven chin. “He don't deserve the hand he got dealt. Sal would've been a way better father than I ever could've been.”

“Valentino—”

“Don't you fucking try to make me feel better,
gringa
. I don't want to feel better. I want to find the fucker who destroyed my family and that's the only reason I'm even talking to you.”

“Valentino, I know you don’t want to talk about it but I know about Elias’…” I tried to think of a gentle way to put it. “…alternative lifestyle.”

He glared at me but didn’t say anything, just polished off the bottle.

“Who was Maria really? A friend? A contact?”

“I don’t fucking know,” he finally admitted. “She was trouble. I didn’t trust her. She shows up and my boy goes missing and then my brother gets ganked? Then, suddenly, she’s nowhere? She did it, gringa. That bitch destroyed everything.”

Valentino finished his cigarette while I stood there in silence. There wasn't anything I could say that would make him feel better; he was right about that. At this point, Leo had been missing five days. Statistically speaking, the longer he stayed missing, the less likely we were to find him. The likelihood that we would find him alive was even lower. All in all, things looked pretty bleak for the Garcia family. But I had a good team that was focused in the right direction now. The warning I had received the day before was proof of that.

When he was sufficiently finished smoking and drinking while I stood there waiting, he gestured for me to follow him. “Come on, then. I'll show you where he crashed.”

The inside of the Garcia residence was vibrantly colored and buzzed with the energy of a troubled home. Updated furniture and a big screen plasma TV gave testament to Valentino and Nina's small business success, though all of that money was doing little to comfort them now. Valentino brought me through the living room and back a short hallway to a bedroom. Inside, I found one of those upscale convertible crib models and a folded up camping cot. A cardboard box sat in the middle of the room filled with odds and ends.

“Leo and Elias shared a room?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I wandered forward into the room. Folded out, the camping cot would have taken up most of the rest of the room, leaving only a narrow space for walking. If Elias had been there when Leo was taken, there was no way Elias could have slept through it. “The night Leo was taken, was Elias home?”

Valentino rubbed the back of his head. “He went out for drinks and came home with that Maria
chola
. We had words about it, just like I told you. The chick left around two and Elias came in and slammed the door. I know Leo was here then because I heard him crying when the slam scared him.” He hesitated and rubbed at his throat. “Elias sang him back to sleep. He didn’t have no rock star voice but he wasn’t bad, neither.”

It was the first nice thing Valentino had ever said about his brother in my presence. I turned around and studied him. Behind those big sunglasses, it was difficult for me to guess at how upset he was before. Now that he was talking, I could hear the strain in his voice, the tightness when he spoke of Elias. On closer inspection, I could see blotchy patches of white and red on his cheeks. Valentino would never admit it, especially not to me, but he had been crying.

He cleared his throat. “Nina came in to check on Leo at six and that's when we realized he was gone. Elias was gone, too, so I thought...” He trailed off, sniffled and then rubbed his nose as if it were just allergies. “Elias didn't come back until almost dark and I told him if I ever saw him again, I'd kill him.”

I put my hands in my pockets and stared down at the life reduced to a box and a handful of bad memories. “He went to Sal's place after that,” I told Valentino. “Where he stayed up all night concocting a plan to save your son and win back your trust. According to Sal, Elias tore out of there just a few hours before I found him, determined to do just that.”

Valentino turned around and put his back to me. “Sal never told me that.”

“If I'm right then Elias wasn't the perpetrator but a witness. He knew his killer. His killer believed he was some kind of savior. Elias had a drug in his system that Doc Ramis believes was part of an experimental treatment plan to cure him of his werewolf affliction.”

“
Dios mio
, Elias. Why didn't I see it? Why didn't you come to me?”

“Sometimes, the people we're closest to can hide their darkest secrets from us the most effectively,” I said and thought of Alex. “Especially when they believe your love comes with conditions.”

Valentino put his hand over his mouth and stood there in silence for a moment. “Everything he had is in that box,” he told me at length. “I'm not going to stand here and watch you go through it 'cause I got better things to do but don't you go messing any of it up.” With that, he marched off and left me alone with the box.

Human beings are collectors by nature. We spend our entire lives building up a collection of junk, to the point where most of us have junk drawers in our houses and totes full of extra crap in our closets. A lot of Americans rent storage units to hold all the possessions they don't use on a regular basis and most of us have more clothes and shoes than we can wear in a standard week. Consumerism tells us this still isn't enough. We must have
more
. More will make us happy, make us rich, fill that empty void that is gnawing away out our insides. All those things ever do is make us more miserable. Some of the happiest people I've met have been those with the
least to lose. Sitting there, going through Elias' box, I liked to think he must have died in a state of relative overall happiness.

The box contained a single spiral bound notebook full of song lyrics and shopping lists. I flipped through it and nothing jumped out at me so I sat it aside. There was a little ceramic cup with pens and pencils inside. Jingling around in the cup, I found twenty-two cents and three tabs off of beer cans. His wallet was a well-worn bit of leather with an ID, a prescription discount card and a receipt for two bottles of soda and a snack cake at the local gas station. Nothing useful. I sat it aside. At the bottom of the box, I found something that didn't match the rest of Elias' minimalist lifestyle: an expensive, top of the line model smart phone.

I picked up the phone and flipped it over, realizing it was the exact model Hunter had been begging for when his birthday rolled around in a few months. I'd priced it and quickly decided against it. There was no way I was going to drop seven hundred dollars on a phone for an eleven year old boy.
Elias didn't hardly have two pennies to rub together
, I thought, searching the box for a charger.
He didn't even have a job. How did he afford this?
I plugged in the phone and settled down against the wall to see what I could see only to curse when the stupid thing asked for a password. For nearly a half hour, I sat there, trying to guess Elias' password and came up empty.

“You find anything?” Valentino asked from the doorway.

“Just this phone,” I murmured and typed in yet another wrong password. “It's a pretty expensive model. Mind if I ask if you know where he got it?”

“Beats me. Elias didn't have much. Didn't even have his own bank account. He was always bumming fives off of me. Got to the point where I was letting him work off what he owed me by helping me fix up cars at the garage.”

“I don't suppose you know the password then either, huh?”

Valentino dug his own cell out of his pocket. “No, but I know someone who can crack it in five minutes flat.”

* * * * *

Ed walked in twenty minutes later. He didn't look like he'd slept, either, but he'd at least changed his clothes. He wore a wrinkled up, blue t-shirt that read TIME LORD IN TRAINING. I handed him the phone. He broke out a cable that connected it via USB to his laptop, sat down on the floor next to me and adjusted his glasses. “Give me ten minutes.”

“You're not doing anything illegal are you, Ed?” I asked leaning in closer.

Ed pursed his lips and shrugged. “I could do a hard reset but you'd lose all the info stored on his phone unless he's got it backed up through a third party site online. Then I'd have to try to get into his online accounts and answer a bunch of security questions using social media updates for source material. It's time consuming. This way is easier.”

“What exactly is
this way
?” I tried to lean around him to get a look at the computer screen but Ed shifted away from me.

“I don't roust you out of a level sixty-six dungeon raid the weekend before a major expansion release to tell you how to do your job, do I? Back off and let me work
my
magic.”

I still didn't know how the kidnappers had gotten access to the house so I stood and started pacing the room, thinking about it. There was a window but the house had central air so there was no reason it would have been left open overnight. Besides, it was a storm window with a screen and child-locks on it. That window wasn't even going to open easy from the inside, let alone from six feet off the ground, since Valentino's place sat on a slight hill. By all accounts, the front door had been locked.
Maybe Elias let the kidnapper in
, I reasoned.
He did seem to know them
. It took me about three seconds to decide against that. Even if that was the case here, Elias couldn't have let the kidnapper into the Greenlee or Summers house. There was something else at work, something that I wasn't seeing.

“Okay,” said Ed, disconnecting the phone from his laptop and holding it out to me. “I changed the lock code, too, in case it locks up on you again. It's two eight five nine.”

“Thanks, Ed,” I said taking the phone. “You're a life saver.”

For a loner, Elias had a lot of contacts in his phone. Some of them were suspiciously labeled only with two or three letter combinations. The only ones that were full names were members of the pack and people around town plus one more: Maria Castilla. “Bingo,” I said and tapped on the contact. A new screen came up displaying a picture, a phone number and a birth date. The number was obviously a fake unless Maria Castilla had the same phone number as Tommy Tutone's Jenny at eight six seven five three-oh-nine. It was the picture that mattered to me. “Holy hell,” I muttered.

“Something the matter?” Ed asked.

I ignored him and turned to Valentino. “Valentino, I need to-”

“Just take it,” he said cutting me off. “You do what you gotta do.”

I rushed out of the house, dialing my own phone as I hustled toward Sal's truck. Tindall picked up after the third ring. “Tindall.”

“Maria's last name is Castilla,” I told him and climbed into my car. “And that's not her real name. She is a
he
.”

“Eh?” said Tindall. I could hear the confusion in his voice. “What's that now?”

“That's why we couldn't find her. She was the last one before Sal to see Elias alive. She was who Elias was hanging out with. She's our missing link. Probably a witness, too.”

“Slow down, Judah,” Tindall urged. “Just tell me what I need to find this...person.”

“I'll text you a picture and you can put out an APB.”

I started to hang up but Tindall shouted for me to wait a goddamn minute. “What do you want me to do if I actually find this girl…guy…whatever?”

“You don't do anything without calling me first, you understand? You can't spook her.”

“Sure,” Tindall scoffed in a dismissive tone. “And what are you going to do while we do all the actual police work?”

“I'm going to go check out Aisling,” I told him and hung up.

I glanced back down at the smile in Maria's photo and thought,
I've got you, you bastard.
All I needed to do was go to Elias' favorite haunt and show his picture around. Someone there was bound to know his real name. Once I tracked down the elusive Maria, I could put together the rest of Elias' story. There was only one last little bit to figure out. For everything I knew I still didn't know how the bad guy was getting in and out of the houses without being detected or where he was holding the children. I couldn't move on him until I could be sure that things were in place to perform a proper rescue. If I was right, though, the answer was waiting for me at Aisling.