The Replacements (10 page)

My mind kicked back into reality and my attention returned to the car with Mack. Mack kept his foot on the accelerator, passing all the other cars. They'd found Micah dead in a car about eighteen years after I'd seen him out in front of that shack in the desert. Eighteen years without a spirit was a long time to spend in hell.

“You read this entire file? The car they found Micah in two years ago, was it a black and gray GMC?” My voice came out in a croak.

“Don't remember.”

I went back into the file and found it. A rental. A cherry-red Rent-a-Wreck Toyota Corolla.

“He died two years ago of natural causes,” Mack said,
“cardiac infarction according to the medical examiner. Positive ID with fingerprints.”

The man died of a broken heart
.

“Don't you find it odd that the car was found in a grocery store parking lot in Montclair? The same city Sandy Williams was taken from?”

Mack took his eyes from the freeway and glanced at me. “Yeah, I guess you're right. Nobody thought to look into that. It was a natural death, for crying out loud.” He took his foot off the accelerator, looking to change lanes, get off, and turn around to go back to Montclair.

“No,” I said, “Keep going. We've come this far, let's check it out.” He looked at me again, this time not questioning my judgment, and put his foot back on the gas pedal.

I took the cell out and dialed Barbara Wicks.

“What are you doing?” asked Mack.

“I'm going to get someone working on Micah's rental car.”

“We can do that as soon as we finish this fool's errand out in the desert.”

Mack still lived by the old team's doctrine created by Robby, who stole it from the FBI: Don't show anyone your cards. Don't give anyone any information or intelligence that will assist them in catching your crook. The Violent Crimes Team cracking the case first had forever remained the number one goal.

“Good morning, Leon,” Barbara said, with a smile in her voice.

So, the ‘Leon' moniker was prearranged
.

“I'm just getting into this case, but I need to have someone track down—”

“Hold on, let me get a pen,” she said. “Okay, go.”

“Micah died of natural causes—”

She cut me off. “We already checked and rechecked that. Autopsy confirmed natural causes and positive ID with fingerprints—two years ago—it has nothing to do with our current situation.”

The heavy fatigue gnawed down my patience to a ragged nub. I waited.

“Leon?” she said.

“Micah died in a car.”

“And?”

“In a parking lot in Montclair.”

“Shit.”

“Have someone check out the rental car. Go back and see who rented it and get an address.”

“Right. Son of a bitch. How did we miss that? I'm on it.”

“It was two years ago, and sometimes the obvious hides in plain sight.”

She lowered her tone. “Thanks, Bruno. Where are you guys?”

“It's probably a dead end, but we're almost there, so we're going to check on something. I'll keep you updated.”

“And I'll let you know what this lead turns up.”

Twenty minutes later, we rode the rolling Old Woman Springs Road with her gentle rise and fall. Mack let me have quiet time as I read some of the thick file. Outside, the passing terrain looked familiar and, at the same time, it didn't. The last time out here, I'd been too unfocused to take in any permanent landmarks. Until we came to the shack. “Right there, pull in right there.”

“How do you know? There aren't any numbers I can see.”

“That's Micah's truck parked out front.” The truck didn't look as if it had moved in all those years, but it had. Mack zipped in. The undercarriage bounced and squeaked from the uneven dirt. He stopped behind the truck. A cloud of dust caught up and overtook us, turned the light dim for a second. Mack leaned over, opened the glove box, and took out a gun. He tried to give me the blue automatic, a Glock 9mm.

“No, I'm not going to shoot anyone here.”

“How do you know?”

“How can I, if I don't have a gun?”

I got out as Mack shoved the extra gun under the seat and followed.

The stucco on the shack's exterior walls wore puke beige paint with little cracks turning to fissures that let the wind and cold and heat inside. The desiccated wood door hung on rusted
hinges. The one window, thick with dust and grime, didn't allow visibility in either direction. The door opened before I knocked. An old crone of indeterminate age stood in a faded floral dress, ragged at the hem from dragging the ground. Her hair, wiry gray, stood out at all angles. Her tired eyes didn't care who visited. She said, “He's not here. He left a long time ago.”

My hand instinctively went to the sheriff's badge on the chain around my neck. Before I could speak, Mack jumped in. “Sheriff's Department, ma'am, you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

She stepped out and closed the door behind her. Mack and I looked at each other. Her maneuver was common among crooks who didn't want their contraband discovered. Or wanted to hide kidnapped children inside. My heart rate increased. Not this easy, it couldn't be this easy.

“Are you talking about Micah Mabry?” I asked.

“Who else would I be talking about?”

Mack said, “We're looking for Jonas.”

“What's
he
done?” she replied.

“Have you seen him recently?” I asked.

She looked from Mack back to me. “No, not for ages.”

Mack started to say something. I held my hand up, stopped him, and asked, “What is your relationship to the Mabrys?”

“None of your damn business. Get off my property. There's nothing here for you. I told you he's not here.”

I said, “Micah Mabry is dead.”

She swayed a bit and put a hand out and grabbed the door frame for support. Her voice lost its force, “When…how?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “You didn't know. He died of natural causes two years ago.”

“Come in, come in. I need to sit.” She opened the door to a musty dimness the sunlight tried to penetrate. We followed her inside.

No children watched television or hung out waiting to be rescued. The square room's naked concrete floor contained
a ratty couch, an easy chair, and a swayed, rope-slat bed. The place smelled of cinnamon and sweat. In one corner sat a dorm refrigerator with a hot plate on top. Tidy and organized, the shack held the bare minimum for survival, with nothing left for comfort or luxury. She went over to the easy chair, sat, and rocked and looked off into the distance.

“Ma'am?” Mack said. His cell rang. He stepped outside to answer it.

I got down on complaining knees and put my hand on hers. “How long have you and Micah lived here?”

“Twenty-odd years. Met him walking along the highway with a summer monsoon coming. I stopped for him.” She brought her eyes down to mine. “He wouldn't take the ride, said he needed the time to walk, said he'd already walked a hundred miles. He looked like he'd come a hundred miles. I told him I lived down the road right here, another ten miles or so, and if he wanted to he could stop to rest and have some water. He looked real bad, about to collapse. Didn't think he'd make the ten miles. To tell you the truth, I thought he'd walk right off into oblivion.”

I nodded. “What happened two years ago? Where did he go?”

“I thought he'd come back. I did. Still did, until just now, when you sauntered in fat and happy to ruin my life.”

She rocked some more and I waited.

“Two years back, his son, the spittin' image of Micah, he come drivin' up in a fire-engine-red car without any warnin', nothing, not so much as a letter. Old Micah, he never talked about any family. Didn't know he had any. Said, ‘May, this is my son.' The boy said something like, ‘Yeah, nice to meet ya,' or something, and turned back to Micah, and said, ‘Can I talk to you outside?' Rude little bastard. Maybe twenty, twenty-three, too old to be rude like that.

“Micah, he came back in and said he had ta go, said he'd be
back in a couple days. That's goin' on two years. Now you tell me he's not comin' back. I had a thing for that crotchety old man.”

The weathered skin sagged under her eyes, giving her a hound dog appearance. “I'm real sorry for your loss, May. We're trying to find his son, and we could use your help.”

“Nothin' I can do. I've had enough jabbering for one day. Now it's time for you to leave.”

“Are there any of Micah's things here? Anything with an address on it?”

“He had nothin' when he got here, and he left with nothin'.”

“We're looking for you to tell us anything, anything at all that might help us.”

She stopped rocking and looked right at me. “I can tell you that son of his was crazy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Saw it in his eyes. When you've lived as many years as I have, you can tell by the eyes.”

“What did he look like? How did he wear his hair? Did he have any tattoos?”

“He had on a pair of nice trousers, the kind you wear with a suit, but he didn't have on the suit. He wore his white button-down shirt open, no t-shirt underneath, kind of uncouth. He had two tattoos, like you said. One was very odd, that's why I remember it. A heart with a lot of detail.” She pointed to her chest over her own heart. “Only in the center, colored real bright, he had a little yellow light, and inside that was a lump of scar tissue. Right below, scrolled in nice letters, was the name ‘Bella.'”

The wound in his chest, the place his mother had shot him. “And the second tattoo?”

“Big bold black letters across his stomach.”

“What did it say?”

“Couldn't tell, his shirt flapped this way and that. And, to tell you the truth, I didn't really care. The look on my Micah's face…my Micah was hurting inside just looking at the boy. And
that's not right. That's not right, I tell you. Not for a father to act that way toward his son.”

Back outside of the dark interior, sunlight blinded me for a moment. Mack leaned on the T-Bird's fender, his arms crossed. “The old bag give up anything useful?”

“Not a thing.”

“That phone call was from Chief Wicks. She wants us back ASAP. They just got a ransom call.”

Headed toward Montclair, I put the car seat all the way back and closed my eyes. “The ransom call come from Jonas?”

“Don't know. No way to tell for sure.”

“So we don't know if Jonas has help?”

“The call came in on the hotline. Wicks played it for me.”

“And?”

“The person was all over the place, started off low and concise and worked up to manic and screaming at the end. Said, among other things, that he wants an even million. He said, ‘Three hundred thousand a piece will do it, just make it an even million.'”

I sat up.

Mack said, “Yep, sounds like he's grabbed another kid, one we don't know about. A kid some parent hasn't reported yet.”

“Three of them—those poor children,” I said.

“Bruno?”

I looked at him. “Yeah.”

“The FBI just came into it. They're taking over the investigation. We're on our way to talk to Wicks. She can't run cover for you with the Feds crawling all over the place. She's scared for you. She thinks you should head south where you belong. She thinks this was a mistake.”

“What do you think?”

He shrugged, didn't take his eyes off the road. “You do have more skin in the game than anyone else, and for no real reason.”

If he didn't understand, I wouldn't be able to explain it to him. “She get anything on the rental car?”

“Did you hear what I just said? The Feds are in this now. It's a different set of rules, all of them going against you.”

“Yeah, yeah, did they get anything on the car?”

“I didn't ask her.”

I nodded and went back to mulling over the new information. Something niggled in the back of my mind. I'd read everything in the file on Micah and Jonas, read the crime reports, the forensic reports on the kidnappings, but I had purposely been avoiding the children's profiles. I didn't want to put a face to them. I didn't want to make their lives any more real than they already were. I put my fingers on the tab marked “Elena Cortez” and knew what I would find before I flipped to her section. “What about Jonas' mother Bella?”

“She's in prison doing life times two. You think maybe Jonas went to visit her? Maybe he told her about his plans to snatch these kids? That's a long shot, but maybe.”

I muttered, more to myself than to Mack, “Not unless he has a fake ID. Felons aren't allowed to visit.” I continued to pinch the tab for Elena, too hard, not wanting to turn to the pages. Bella had shot herself in the chest, just as she had Jonas, with a .22, a small-caliber pistol that deflected off her breastbone. Like Jonas, she had come close to dying, but survived. Mack dialed his phone as he drove, got Wicks back on the line. “Hey, it's me again,” Mack said. “You might have someone go visit Bella Mabry in the joint to check and see if Jonas came to see her.”