Stolen Power

by Peter O'Mahoney

  He walked over to a grandiose armchair opposite, practically a throne, a chair worthy of Hugh Hefner, and sat down. “I don’t know.”

  “Does she get along with Millie?”

  “Well, no. I think she finds her an inconvenience. To be fair, Millie doesn’t get along with her either.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “Millie is a lot like her mother—feisty and with an angry streak. That didn’t sit well with Ruby. I’ve been seeing Ruby for around six months, and the first couple of months I tried to bring Ruby and Millie together, but it didn’t work. For whatever reason, they never ended up getting along.”

  I ignored the obvious that Chase himself was the problem and reason for this.

  “Do you think Ruby is capable of hurting Millie?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, but I suppose the truth is I don’t know. She isn’t the deepest soul I’ve ever met, or the most intelligent.” He shook his head again and looked away. “Over the past month, she wouldn’t even come to the apartment when Millie was here. She wanted me to give full custody of Millie to Tanya. Asked me to do it several times, in fact.”

  “When did she first ask you to do that?”

  “Last month.” A realization sunk into his head, and he stood, pacing back and forth. “She couldn’t, could she?” He pondered the thought for a moment, like he was pitching the scenario, weighing it in his head. “No, I don’t think she could, but she could’ve hired someone.” His hand tightened into a fist. “She didn’t want Millie around. She wanted to move to LA, and for me to fund her little Instagram life.”

  “She doesn’t have her own money?”

  “Not a cent to her name. Her father is a mechanic and her mother is a nurse. A real low-class life and background.” He raised his finger in the air. That annoyed me as well. “Maybe, that’s why she wants the money. Yeah, that’s why she wants the million dollars. To fund her move to LA. She wants me to pay her the money and then take off to LA without me.”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “She wants to continue to live the lavish life without me. I should’ve seen it. I should’ve seen that she was going to use me. It was always going to happen. Well, she’s messed with the wrong person this time. She will curse the day she ever crossed me, ever crossed Chase Martin.”

  He said the last bit with an arrogant emphasis, like he was underlining his own name and really wanted to add ‘the great’ in front of it too. He certainly had a high opinion of himself and his own stock value but all I saw in front of me was a loser of the highest order, despite how many zeros there were after the balance of his bank account. The measure of a man was not, and never would be, how much money he had.

  His face was registering anger now, which had its uses, but for now I wanted him to be rational so I decided to try to calm things down.

  “We don’t know it’s her yet. She’s a suspect at the moment, that’s all. Is there anywhere she would’ve kept Millie, while she goes about her daily business?”

  “‘Business?’ Hah!” he scoffed. “Posting those stupid photos all day isn’t a business!” He continued to pace the floor. “But no, not really. She still lives with her Mom and Dad, near their mechanic shop. Dirty place. Her mother and father wouldn’t stand for it. They hate me, but they seemed to be good people.”

  The intercom buzzed.

  We stared at each other.

  Chase looked at his phone, opening an app that gave him streaming footage of the front door. “It’s Damon. Millie’s Grandfather.” He looked worried. “What am I going to tell him?”

  I shrugged. “Can you just ignore it, pretend you’re not home?”

  “Oh.” He leaned his head back in realization. “He was supposed to pick up Millie today for a few hours. I forgot.”

  The intercom buzzed again.

  “Tell him that Millie is at a play date with a friend and you’ve forgotten to tell him.”

  “That’s it.” Chase clicked his fingers and pointed his index finger at me triumphantly. “Of course. Good thinking, Jack.”

  He buzzed Damon into the building, and within a few minutes, he was at the apartment door.

  “Damon.” Chase greeted him with a solid handshake. “Come on in. So sorry but I forgot you were coming today. Millie is at a playdate at a friend’s place. I should have let you know but it completely slipped my mind, what with the deluge of work I have going on at the moment: lots of new clients, lots of new opportunities, you know the sort of thing.”

  Damon raised his eyebrows slightly. He was clearly ex-army. A spotless polo shirt tucked into his ironed jeans, white sneakers that were cleaned recently, perhaps even daily.

  He was immediately suspicious of my presence.

  “This is Jack. A friend of mine.” Chase introduced us.

  We shook hands. His grip was strong.

  “Pleased to meet you, Damon.”

  “Friend?” He raised his eyebrows again. “You’re not the usual type of friend that Chase has. Usually, his friends are blonde, twenty-years old, and have had a lot of cosmetic surgery.”

  “That’s me,” I said with a wry smile. “Except the blonde bit, obviously.”

  He laughed. The tension was broken.

  “Army?” I asked.

  “For a while. Ten years. Then I left and became a mechanic. Not a lavish life like this.” He opened his hands wide to indicate his disdain for Chase’s opulent life. “You risk your life for your country and you never get paid like this. But you wouldn’t understand that, would you, Chase? What was it that you said to me once? That it’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter. I guess the rest of us just aren’t as smart as you, hey Chase?”

  “Life isn’t fair,” Chase added. “And it’s very unbecoming of you to blame me for my obvious success. I’ve worked hard for what I’ve achieved, and I won’t apologize for it, to you or anyone, Damon.”

  The tension was back. Thick in the room like a dirty fog that lingered heavy and oppressive.

  We stood there for a few moments, three men who wouldn’t take a backward step, until finally Chase moved things forward.

  “I’m sorry, Damon. I forgot you were coming today.” Chase put his hands in the pockets of his chinos. “How about you come around next week and play with Millie?”

  “I’m disappointed she isn’t here. She’s all I’ve got to look forward to at the moment,” Damon responded and turned to me. “I haven’t got long left, you see. I’m ill. The doctors reckon I’ve got six months, but I’ll be gone before then.”

  He looked back towards Chase. “So a missed playdate with my only granddaughter is a big deal for me. After all, how many do I have left in such a short period, before neither of us can see each other again. I know we don’t always see eye to eye, but next time I’d ask you to respect that fact, and make sure this doesn’t happen again, for her sake more than mine.”

  Chase sort of grunted a non-committal response.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your illness,” I said to Damon.

  “It’s alright. My wife went a few years ago, and apart from Millie, I haven’t got that much else left here. I’m looking forward to seeing my wife again.”

  I admired his faith. I didn’t quite know where I stood on that front. I wanted to believe, who wouldn’t in my shoes, but I didn’t want to delude myself either.

  “Look, sorry to be blunt,” Chase interrupted. He wasn’t sorry. “But Jack is here on business, so I’ll give you a call when Millie’s available.”

  “Thanks.” Damon nodded to Chase. “Nice to meet you, Jack.”

  He shook my hand again, it felt like he was almost sizing me up.

  Chase shut the door behind Damon, waited a few moments, and then turned back to me.

  “What’s next? Should I be putting pressure on Ruby?”

  “Not yet. If it’s her, we don’t want her to hurt Millie.” I walked towards the door. “Casey and I are going to investigate further, so right now, sit tight and get the money ready.
I don’t want it to come to that, but time’s running out so it might. And I need you to be ready for that possibility.”

  Chapter 9

  Investigating had changed a lot over my career.

  When I started twenty-five years ago, the internet was something that nerds talked about, downloading their pixelated images at a painfully slow speed. Facebook wasn’t around to catch up with friends, Wikipedia didn’t exist for general research, there was no Amazon or Goodreads to leave witty and punchy five-star reviews of your favorite book, and young boys had to go to their father’s adult magazine stash for a look at a naked woman.

  The internet had changed everything about our lives, making the world so much smaller. Paradoxically simpler but also more complex at the same time. Sometimes I harped on about the easier days before it’s development, but it had its purposes.

  I found out more about Hugh Guthrie’s first court appearance in twenty minutes than I could’ve in a whole day investigating in the years gone past.

  The result sent me into a tailspin of shock.

  The man who provided the gun to my wife’s killer, the man who I held responsible for her murder, had made an appearance before the court, and had his murder charge thrown out.

  With the aid of the internet, I researched what happened. The clearance on one of his search warrants wasn’t authorized by the right person, and the evidence had to be thrown out. There was one administrative error after another, almost like they wanted him to get off. Officially, the case was thrown out because five main pieces of the evidence couldn’t be used, but it was all linked back to the incorrectly filed paperwork. Part of me wondered if Guthrie himself had a hand in achieving that outcome. A few dollars there, and a few dollars here, and who knows what could’ve been achieved? Guthrie was certainly cunning enough to try it.

  Before the murder of newscaster Brian Gates, Guthrie had manufactured a documentary about school shootings, in an effort to arm the teachers, and had pushed a young man to his breaking point. The teenager used a gun provided by Guthrie to shoot up the school, and in the process, murdered my wife.

  Despite the fact that he admitted to me that he set the whole thing up for the purpose of a documentary, the police couldn’t pin that on him. I had his recorded confession, however it was thrown out of court because it was obtained under potential coercion.

  I had no other evidence, however I rested on the fact that he would at least go down for the other murder.

  Now that was out the window as well.

  The rage that built inside me threatened to explode, but I kept it at bay with deep breathing exercises.

  This was no time to lose control. There would be plenty of time for that later.

  Now, I had to focus on saving a little girl.

  It was true what Ben had told me—Chase Martin’s list of fraudulent activities was as long as my arm. Nothing stuck, of course, but the accusations were available on the internet, where disgruntled investor after disgruntled investor lined up to give account of his activities. Rather tellingly, many of his accusers voiced concerns of censorship, with stories of other websites having been closed down after serious legal threats from Chase’s lawyers. The ones that remained were new postings, only a couple of months old and in all likelihood, they would be deleted before long too, keeping cyberspace clean of accusation so he could strike again and some poor unsuspecting victim.

  A bit more digging and I was starting to get a profile of Chase Martin that suggested he was a scammer from way back. Despite a fairly unimpressive grade point average, he had managed to land a place at a pretty good college, all thanks to a reference from some wealthy lady he did gardening for on the weekends as a teenager, and it seemed she had paid his tuition fees as part of the bargain. She was a former academic and a patron of the college, no doubt he charmed her into thinking of him as the son she never had. That, or he was providing some other services for a lonely divorcee which she paid for with something other than cold hard cash.

  While at college, he managed to buddy up to rich kids with connections so that, despite barely passing, he managed to land a very sought after position as soon as he graduated, with the family investment firm of one of his supposed friends. After 10 years, he started his own firm and managed to con a bunch of clients into following him. His former employers tried to sue for breach of contract, but he had it well planned and they couldn’t quite pin it on him.

  Poor investment choices led to most clients returning to their former firm within the year, but that didn’t matter, because now he had his formula: scam his investors, get his payout, move on.

  His love life followed a similar pattern. Chase Martin certainly was shaping up to be a nasty piece of work.

  From what I could see, it seemed that he’d run the yearly scam for five years—setting up a new company in another country, convincing suckers to invest, and then declaring the business bust.

  “I’ve just found something.” Casey stormed into my office, frantic, waving her phone in the air.

  “The new iPhone?”

  “Ha ha, very funny. I’m gonna need a pay rise for that!” She grinned mischievously. “Any chance?”

  I laughed.

  “Oh well, maybe you’ll change your mind after you see this. I’ve turned up something on the case.” She smiled. “A photo.”

  She turned to my computer, tapped a few keys and brought up the internet on the screen.

  “How did you know my password?” I asked.

  “Are you serious?” she asked. “It’s ‘Claire123’. You’re like an open book, Jack.”

  “A good book, I hope? A five-star book?”

  “Something like that,” she said with a smile.

  I shrugged. She was probably right.

  “The computer said I needed a password at least eight characters long,” I said. “So I tried ‘Snow.White.and.the.Seven.Dwarfs,’ but it was already taken.”

  “That’s a terrible joke. And you didn’t deliver it well either, Jack. Not that you ever do.” Casey shook her head. “However, I did hear an expert on the news this morning say that in five years computers will have completely replaced paper. Well, I thought, that guy has never tried to wipe his butt with a laptop.”

  “Ha ha! Your joke was so much better than mine.”

  “They always are, Jack, but don’t give up.”

  Casey logged into her Facebook account and clicked on a link.

  “I spent the morning looking at all the photos that were tagged with this location, or any location around the area, and painstakingly studied each photo. There were over a hundred photos tagged near the playground, and I studied each of them. Most of the photos were of kids on the swings, kids climbing trees, kids running around chasing a ball.”

  “Sounds creepy.”

  “If I was an old man that lived alone and I was studying pictures of children in playgrounds, then yes, it might’ve been creepy.” She tapped a few more keys. “Look at this photo.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “The picture is of a girl about to come down the slide, but look closer, over her right shoulder.” Casey tapped the keyboard again, and zoomed in on the background.

  “It’s a van parked near the playground.”

  “And standing outside of that van is a little girl, and she matches Millie’s description. Blonde hair, white coat, looks around five years old.”

  I sat forward. Casey was right. We had a lead.

  The picture was blurry, the face of the girl wasn’t clear, but it had to be Millie. She was outside the playground gates, looking at the back of the van, of which the door was slightly ajar. I stared at the photo, but couldn’t make out what she was looking at.

  “Any other photos?”

  “Not that I could find. I even contacted the profile of the person who posted this, but they only took one photo that day.”

  “Who does the van belong to?”

  “The van has a faded sign on the door for an old mechanic sh
op called ‘The Top-Notch Service Garage.’ I searched the internet for it, but found nothing. Then I called around the old-fashioned way, and found that the garage went out of business five years ago, and they operated out of two places. A gas station in Lincoln Park that has since been bought out by a large corporation, and a small warehouse in North Chicago, around an industrial area.”

  “And who bought the new warehouse?”

  “It was never sold.”

  I thought for a moment, then reached for my book of contacts.

  I picked up the phone, dialed the number of an old contact who lived in North Chicago. Jason Chapman was a former cop who owed me a lot of favors, and his knowledge of the area, and the people who lived in it, was second to none.

  “Hasn’t been activity in that area for years. It’s dead over there. All the warehouses closed after some sort of safety scare, chemical spill or something, can’t remember the exact details, but I think the new owners couldn’t afford to clean it up,” Chapman spoke quickly. “Probably five years since that place was used, and there must be five or six warehouses there. You could hide anything in that area.”

  “Trouble?” I asked.

  “Only if you go looking for it,” Chapman replied. “And Jack, knowing you, you’re going to go looking for it.”

  Chapter 10

  Barely even a sound cut through the area, which we arrived at in the fading light of dusk.

  It was the sort of place I half expected a tumbleweed to roll through. But even the wind refused to stir and there was nothing natural here either. Nature had turned her back on the area with even the birds seemingly staying away, as if the very air itself around the place was defiled and toxic. Sometimes places have a real, yet difficult to define, atmosphere, an eerie presence that transcends logic but strikes nonetheless at something deep and primal inside of us. So it was today, at the disused warehouse complex, which had a strange, almost unhealthy and invasive feel about it, like you might pick up a serious infection from a casual visit.