Caballo Security Box Set

by Camilla Blake

  “Mrs. Winn,” Akker began, waiting for a heartbeat to see if she would pay attention. She didn’t seem too keen on responding, but when he said her name again, she finally focused on him.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “We need to ask you about the night your husband died.”

  She seemed surprised at first, then sad. She glanced at the staircase that was positioned to her right as she sat on the couch. She shook her head, biting her bottom lip briefly.

  “I don’t talk about that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a bad memory.” She got up and stumbled over to the bar, pouring herself another generous drink, bringing the entire bottle back to the couch with her. “Jimmy was the love of my life. A good man. A strong man. But he was weak at the end.”

  “You mean falling down the stairs?”

  “No. I mean…” She stopped, taking a drink from her glass as she fell onto the couch. She splashed a good portion of the liquid from her glass over the front of her blouse, but you could hardly tell because of the dark fabric. “Jimmy was the love of my life.”

  “You said that.”

  I leaned forward on my knees a little. “Why don’t you tell us about Jimmy?”

  Mrs. Winn smiled sweetly. “He was so handsome when he was young! Dark hair, dark eyes. He had a lot of Italian in him, you know. We met when I was in graduate school. He was a beat cop and I was parked illegally in front of the university. He threatened to give me a ticket, but settled for taking my number instead.” She giggled. “That was back in the days when you had to actually write your number on a piece of paper. We didn’t have cell phones to call each other with, or text, or whatever it is you young people do these days.”

  “Where did he take you for your first date?”

  She smiled, leaning back into the cushions on the couch. “The park. He didn’t have a lot of money, so he took the makings for sandwiches from his mother’s house and made us a nice picnic. He even brought me flowers he stole from someone’s garden!” She giggled. “Imagine, a cop doing something like that!”

  I smiled, thinking I’d done some pretty big things for Ox today.

  “It must have been romantic.”

  “Oh, I hated it. Always hated gestures like that. But there was something about Jimmy… I just couldn’t resist his charm.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “It was beautiful, really, our courtship. He took me to the strangest places, all these places I would have hated if anyone else took me. Fast-food restaurants, and drive-in movies. I was a caviar and roses kind of girl, and he was a French fries and stolen flowers kind of guy. But it was beautiful.”

  She swallowed the last of the liquid in her glass and sloshed more in, more of it going on her slacks than anywhere else.

  “We only dated a few months before he proposed. I always knew we’d be together forever.”

  “You were married a long time.”

  “Nearly thirty years.” She nodded, that grief-stricken look touching her face again. “He was the love of my life,” she whispered, tears beginning to fall from her eyes.

  I got up and moved beside her, sliding an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry to make you think of something so painful.”

  She nodded, her forehead pressed to my shoulder for a second. But then she straightened and poured more vodka in her glass before taking a deep swallow.

  “Would have been perfect, our life, if it were not for what happened to Odette.”

  “Your daughter?”

  She nodded. The grief on her face this time was different, more pure. “She drowned, right there in front of a dozen people. We all just stood there, not understanding what was happening until it was too late. I watched my daughter drown and I was laughing.” She shook her head. “Jimmy was telling stories and everyone was laughing. I glanced at the pool, saw her across the way, splashing around under the water. I thought she was being dramatic. She did that, you know?” She sniffed hard, more tears filling her eyes. “I thought she was trying to get attention. She was—just not the kind I thought.”

  She took another drink. And another.

  I thought I might have had a drink if I was her in that moment.

  “That must have been very difficult.”

  “Very.”

  I glanced at Akker. He was watching us, looking as uncomfortable as a man could be in that sort of situation. He pointed to the back wall, suggesting he might leave to look around the house. We’d briefly discussed it in the car—how he might find Mr. Winn’s former study and see if he could find any paperwork about the money-laundering scheme. I gave him a slight nod and watched as he quietly left the room.

  Mrs. Winn didn’t even notice. She was filling her glass again.

  “You were lucky to have two other children.”

  “They couldn’t replace my Odette. She was such a special child, my firstborn.” She sighed. “A little drama queen, but she had her good side, too.” She drank a little more. “Used to give me the sweetest hugs without any encouragement, like she just wanted to be close to me. It was sweet.”

  “I wish I could have known her.”

  “She’d be thirty now. A grown woman with a family of her own.” She shook her head. “Neither of my sons has married. I don’t think I’ll ever have grandkids!”

  “I’m sure you will. Someday.”

  “Children are a blessing. I should have had more, but after Odette…” She sighed. “Jimmy’s heart wasn’t in it.”

  “He was a cop?”

  “For fifteen years. Best in the precinct.”

  “And then he opened Caballo?”

  “He wanted to be his own boss, and he wanted retired cops to have a safe place where they could go for work, a place where there wouldn’t be the disrespect some of them found once they left the force. He was good to his brothers in blue.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “My Jimmy was a damn fine man.” She held up her glass as if giving a toast. “His only fault was his gambling. Fucking horses!”

  She drank from the glass, swallowing so much that I could see her throat muscles working. She’d drunk nearly half a bottle of vodka since we came in. I couldn’t understand how she was still able to answer my questions. Her blood-alcohol level must have been astronomical!

  “Tell me about the night he died. How did it happen?”

  She was quiet for a minute, her eyes cutting to that staircase again. “I should have moved. Seeing that stupid thing every day, going up and down it all the time… it feels like walking on his grave.” Big tears began to fall from her eyes. “I loved him, really I did.”

  “I know.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t said it was for the best. They said if he closed Caballo, they’d find him, and they’d do something so much worse.”

  My heart stuttered a little. I knew I had to proceed carefully here.

  “I know you loved him,” I said softly, squeezing her shoulders. “I know you were just trying to protect him.”

  “I was.” She was crying openly now, clear mucus coming from her nose. She didn’t try to wipe it away, but let it run, even drinking a little of it along with the vodka in her glass. “I thought I could convince him, but when it became obvious I couldn’t, I knew I had no choice.”

  “Ox and Oliver were in the room.”

  “No. They were in the kitchen, doing the dishes. I could hear them.”

  “You were upstairs?”

  “I ran up there, told Jimmy I would leave him if he didn’t listen to me. He followed, screaming at me to stop being stupid. He wanted to pack us all up, wanted us to start over new somewhere else. He apologized for not doing it sooner.”

  “What made him want to leave?”

  She finally brushed at her cheek with the back of her hand, moisture and mucus coming away with it. She wiped it on the leg of her slacks.

  “He said it was getting too big, that it was out of control. He said they would all get
caught if he didn’t shut it down now. He said he was too old to go to prison!”

  “What was too big?”

  She glanced at me, studied my face a minute. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I shouldn’t tell you this.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s something about you.”

  “Can I tell you something?” I brushed a piece of hair out of her eyes that was bothering me more than it was bothering her. “I think I might be falling in love with your son.”

  “Which one?”

  “Ox.”

  Her eyes brightened. “Is that right? How nice. Ox hasn’t had a girlfriend in a very long time!”

  “I think the way you felt about Jimmy all those years ago when he took you on that picnic—do you remember?—I think I feel that way about Ox.”

  She smiled big, leaning close to kiss my cheek. It was a wet, sloppy kiss. “That’s wonderful! A little happiness. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for my boys!”

  “Ox is in trouble right now, Mrs. Winn. He needs our help, yours and mine.”

  “Trouble?” She frowned, her eyes unfocused as she tried to look at me. “What kind of trouble?”

  “There are people after him, people who want to hurt him. I need you to tell me the truth about Jimmy’s death so that I can help him, so I can stop those people.”

  “I know who you’re talking about,” she said in a low, almost sleepy whisper. “You’re talking about Major Patrick.”

  I didn’t think my heart could take much more of these harsh shudders.

  I knew that name. I knew… Suddenly all the pieces made connections I hadn’t wanted them to make.

  “Tell me what happened to Jimmy the night he died,” I whispered, barely able to get the words past the painful lump in my throat.

  “He wouldn’t back down. He wouldn’t listen to me. I had to push him.” She whispered, too, like a child who thought we were playing a game. “I had to stop him before they did.”

  “Was Ox there? Did he argue with Jimmy that night? Did he touch him?”

  “Ox was in the kitchen with Oliver. They were doing the dishes.”

  Her voice was growing drowsy again. I supposed she had finally reached her fill on the vodka. I held her upright with my arm around her shoulders, reaching around to smack her cheek a little.

  “One more thing, Mrs. Winn. Who was driving the car the night Devon Garfield was killed?”

  “That boy? Prom night?” She made a sound, like a snore.

  “Mrs. Winn?”

  “I was driving. But Oliver… he’s such a good boy. When I asked him, he was more than happy to take the fall for me. He knew I wouldn’t survive in a place like that. I’m not the right color palette to wear orange.”

  She fell asleep, her snores unmistakable now. I carefully propped a couple of pillows behind her back and let go, arranging her head so that if she were to vomit, she wouldn’t aspirate. We were going to need her alive in the months to come.

  I pressed a button on my phone—which I’d conveniently placed on the coffee table—thus sending a recording of the entire conversation to Cheryl’s computer. Then I went in search of Akker.

  “I’m not finding anything.” He slammed a desk drawer, dust flying from the top of the desk as he did. “I don’t think anyone’s been in here in a while.”

  I walked over to a bookshelf beside the desk. My fingers moved along the spines of the books, touching the soft leather-like spines of some first editions, the more cloth-like spines of some cheap paperbacks. When I came to a series of copies of Black Beauty, I stopped.

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Enough.”

  Akker glanced at me. “What are you looking at?”

  “Ten copies. Some of them are really cheap.”

  “I think it was Odette’s favorite.” Akker came up behind me to look. “I vaguely remember Ox mentioning it once.”

  “He talk about Odette a lot?”

  “Not really. He was only six when all that happened. I don’t think he remembers her well.”

  “Does he like the book?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t think so. It’s not really his kind of thing.”

  “Yet this copy is the only thing on this entire bookshelf that doesn’t have dust on it.” I carefully removed the book from its place on the shelf, moving it like it was a million-dollar first edition instead of a Reader’s Digest condensed version. As the book fell from the edge of the shelf into my hand, I could feel that it wasn’t as heavy as the size of the volume suggested it might be. What I found inside was… unexpected.

  Or maybe not.

  “What is it?”

  “The key to everything.”

  Chapter 16

  Ox

  I’d been at it for so long, my shoulder hurt like hell and I was sweating like a damn pig! Did pigs even sweat? I couldn’t remember, but the saying bounced around in my head and felt right. Just a few more inches. I’d gotten the wire inside the key ring half a dozen times, but each time it popped right back out. Once, I’d managed to move the keys back about half an inch, but then the wire came out. I had never done anything so damn frustrating in all my life! Patience had never been my best virtue, but I was going to get this if it killed me!

  I’d rolled the wire out to the very end and doubled it up, making it stiffer by twisting it around itself as carefully as I could, convinced the damn thing would snap in half and leave me with two pieces too short to reach the keys. But it stayed in one piece, and it did seem stiffer.

  I moved the hook. Tried to get it in the ring. The problem was, the keys were sitting at such an angle that there was just a teeny bit of space where I could hook the damn wire. I had to get it just right and then the weight of the keys jerked the wire free and I had to try again. Over and over. What was that Biblical story about the man who kept pushing the boulder uphill only to have it roll back down? Whatever it was, that was me in this moment.

  I could have given up. I should have given up. But I kept thinking about those cops going after Kinsley, or Oliver, or Skylar… It was the stuff of nightmares. I couldn’t let the people I loved get hurt because of something my father did a million years ago!

  Again.

  “Right there,” I whispered, setting the hook right over the curve of the key ring. Slowly, so slowly, I tugged the wire toward me, watched as it, painfully slowly, buried itself into that teeny, open space. I stopped, taking a deep breath, trying to keep my aching arm from pulling too hard. “Just… careful!”

  I pulled. The hook stayed where it belonged. I pulled again. Slowly the keys began coming toward me, sliding across the top of the counter. I had to really fight against the urge to yank the damn thing, fully aware that yanking would just make the hook come loose, forcing me to start all over again. I’d been there once before. Or maybe two or three times before.

  Slowly.

  I was never going to do anything this fucking slowly ever again!

  But it was coming. A half inch at a time. And then… I gave it a yank and the keys fell into the sink as my body jerked back. I began to laugh, a hysterical sound.

  I could reach the damn sink!

  I grabbed the keys and unlocked the cuffs. Two seconds it took. After hours of trying to get the damn keys, it only took two seconds to unlock myself.

  First thing—I ran to the bathroom. After relieving myself, I took one long, last look at the place, hoping to never see it again, and then ran out the front door. I thought of the stories I’d read as a teen of the little girl who ran away from this place, her father calling for her as she did, how she couldn’t find a road, couldn’t find a house. She’d walked for miles and miles, they said. Her feet were covered in sores, her little body bruised and scratched. But she’d finally found a farmer, who rescued her from her mentally ill father.

  Fifteen years ago, there was nothing out here. I couldn’t imagine little Lucy surviving that long walk. All the reporters were shocked by it, walking part of
the steps she must have taken, showing the viewer how incredible it really was. She’d gone such a long way for an eleven-year-old kid.

  Was that why she brought me here? Because she thought if I escaped, I’d have too far to go to get help? What Kinsley didn’t understand, though, was that the area had built up a bit since then. There was a convenience store a mile from here; I remembered seeing it when she’d driven me here. I would be back in San Antonio within the hour.

  What I would do when I got there, I wasn’t quite sure. I’d figure it out.

  Chapter 17

  Kinsley

  “She confessed to it all?” Akker stared at me like he couldn’t believe a word I’d just told him. “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “Hell.” He leaned back behind the wheel of the SUV and stared out the windshield. “I think Ox should hire you to get information out of people. You seem to have the touch.”

  “She’s an alcoholic old woman. She’d probably tell a passing pedestrian if he looked at her right.”

  “But if I’d known it would be that easy, her house would have been the first stop I made this morning.”

  “We didn’t have a real appreciation for what we needed this morning.”

  “True, but—”

  “All that matters is that we have it now.”

  He nodded. “We should get back to the office so that we can listen to it, decide where to take it.”

  “Then I’ll go get Ox. Time to bring him in.”

  “Yeah. Maybe get him a good lawyer, someone who can use his mother’s confession to take down a few of those bad cops.”

  That was the thing, though. I wasn’t sure we had what we needed to take down those dirty cops. Yet taking down those cops had become my priority. Now that Ox was out of danger of being arrested, I needed to find a way to make sure all those cops went down without endangering Caballo. That was going to be the trick.

  Akker’s phone rang. He tugged it out of his pocket, his expression telling me right away that it had something to do with Brock. He answered, listening silently for a second. Then he disconnected.