Zack's Zest: A SEALs of Honor World Novel (Heroes for Hire Book 24)

by Dale Mayer

  He strode forward, turned, and introduced the two officers who came in behind him. With stone-face countenances, uniformed and armed, both men stood and studied Zadie and Zack. Then one pulled out a notepad and fired off questions. She did her best, answering what she could.

  When she finally ran out of steam, they turned and started in on Zack. She poured coffee for the two of them and one for Bonaparte, deliberately not extending the invitation to the cops. She knew in a large part of this country, such friendship or socializing might have been the norm, but not here. And certainly not now.

  She sat in place while the questions carried on over and around her. She looked at Bonaparte to see him studying her. She gave him a warm smile. “It’s all catching up to me,” she whispered.

  “Do you need to go lie down?” he asked, concern clouding his voice. “When did you last have your pain pills?”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “I’ve no idea,” she said. She patted her pocket and then realized they were likely in the bathroom where she’d last taken them. “I probably left them upstairs,” she said, yawning.

  “Well, maybe you need to take your pills and then lie down for a nap,” Zack said, turning to look at her. He turned back to the cops. “If there is nothing else, gentlemen, here is our contact information. You can contact us if you have more questions.” Zack very determinedly moved the men back outside. When they were out and down the steps, standing and talking to themselves, Zack waited in place until the cops turned and headed toward the gatekeeper’s cottage again. Then Zack turned and glared at her. “You haven’t been taking your antibiotics either, have you?”

  “I might have forgotten,” she admitted. “It’s not exactly been a peaceful couple days.”

  “No, it hasn’t. Come on. Let’s get you up to bed,” he said. He marched over to the stairs and waited until she caught up.

  “What if I don’t want to?” she asked. She started up the stairs and accidentally rolled her ankle over slightly and cried out.

  Instantly Zack swept her up into his arms and raced up the stairs, carrying her.

  “You know something? It’s one thing for Bonaparte to do that,” she said, feeling dizzy as the railing raced by. “But he is a whole lot bigger than you.”

  “He is bigger, not necessarily stronger,” Zack said. He carried her to the bed and laid her down, then walked into the bathroom to check. “Yes, you left them here on the counter,” he confirmed, opening the bottles, taking out the required amount of each, and brought her a glass of water. She struggled to pull back the top blanket so she could get underneath. He put the water and pills down on the night table, pulled the blanket back, and helped her stretch out. Then, while she was still propped up, he gave her the pills. She took them obediently like a child, then stretched out. He covered her up with the blanket. “Will that be warm enough?” he asked.

  “It will be fine,” she said. “I just need ten minutes.”

  “No, you need a couple hours, if not several nights,” he said. “The leg won’t heal if you are always stressed out.”

  “Well, it’s been a pretty stressful day,” she said.

  He nodded. “Do you mind if I go give your mother’s room a good hard search?”

  “Doesn’t matter if I mind or not,” she said, “but thank you for asking. I know you would go do it anyway.”

  He gave a bark of laughter. “I do try to not step on people’s personal toes, if I can avoid it.”

  She gave him a wave. “Go do what you need to do.”

  “Will do,” he said. “Sleep well, and please don’t disappear on us.”

  “Not planning on it,” she murmured. And then her eyes closed.

  *

  He tiptoed out of her room, gratified when he could hear her slow, deep breathing. She’d been through so much in such a short period that it would take days, if not weeks, for everything to calm down. That she now had a missing father who was presumed dead, and a mother she needed to bury, not to mention settling the estate, there would be no end of headaches. Had the property even been owned by the parents, or had the government seized it as they froze all bank accounts due to his illegal political activities? If the property was in the mother’s name, that could make things easier on Zadie as far as legal ownership. Especially if her father’s body was never found.

  Zack walked into her mother’s room, turned on all the lights, opened the curtains, and systematically started at the top of the dresser, and worked his way down. He found all kinds of clothing, small personal effects, and some documents. He put everything in a pile on the bed and worked his way through. The first dresser was half empty, but the second one was full of winter clothes, heavy stuff. He checked behind the dressers for secret drawers, small compartments, basically anything that would hide any information that could help them.

  When he heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, he looked out the room and called down softly, “Bonaparte? She’s sleeping. I’m in here, checking her mother’s room out further.”

  Bonaparte joined him. “This is ghoulish and opulent,” he said to all the brass scrolls and heavy red painting and all the wallpapers.

  “It’s her parents’ room,” Zack supplied. “I found some stuff but not enough yet to give us any answers.”

  “What are the questions we are actually looking at?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just have a suspicion more is here.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “I’ll take the bathroom.” He entered the bathroom, and, by the time Zack had gone through the second dresser and was working on the one night table, Bonaparte joined him. He went through the other night table. “All kinds of information here,” he said, “but I don’t really know what might be important.”

  At that, Zack checked behind the other night table and found something as his hands stroked across the wood. He took the lamp off and moved the clock and few other small sundry items, which he dumped into the drawer, and then he pulled it forward. “Well, things like this for a start.”

  Bonaparte looked over the bed and could see a taped envelope against the back of the night table. Zack quickly pulled it free of its tape, while Bonaparte checked the other one.

  “Only yours has it,” he said, “and that is the mother’s side of the bed.”

  Zack pulled out the envelope and quickly opened it up, dumping the contents onto the bed. They were all pictures of Zadie’s father with other women in very precarious positions. Zack whistled. “Wow! This is interesting. So she was keeping tabs on him.”

  Bonaparte looked at him, frowned, and replied, “Why do you think?”

  But Zack knew. “Remember? Zadie said that her mother was very busy with all the paperwork, but she was quietly abused for a long time. The woman I saw didn’t have any bruises, so I’m not sure of the last time he beat her. But something like that”—he pointed to the photos—“might have stopped the beatings and had her take on a merrier role with the money. Maybe she was blackmailing him.”

  “That would be a twist,” he said. They put all the photographs back into the envelope. “How involved do you think she is?”

  “I don’t think she was directly involved in these criminal activities, but I think she might have been systematically moving a lot of his money without his knowledge.”

  “For Zadie?”

  “Yes, I think so,” he said. “Maybe she was thinking she could get away. Maybe we were wrong, and she was planning to leave him. Or she hoped that, when he went down, she could survive.”

  “Well, the survival instinct is pretty strong,” he said. “We still have to get a hold of the paperwork and the accounts.”

  “For that, we need her phone,” Zack said. He put the night table back, placed it a little farther away, and then carefully removed all the blankets and sheets, lifted the mattresses, and checked underneath each one. Then they pulled the bed away and checked behind the headboard. As they moved to replace it, he lifted a pillow, and a phone fell out. “Eureka,” he said a
nd held up the phone so Bonaparte could see.

  “You still have to get into it though,” he said.

  They finished their search and put the bedding back somewhat right. He sat down on the edge of the bed and flipped through the phone. It was a pretty simple swipe combination, and, when he had it opened, he said, “I’m in. It’s just a matter of what to do next.”

  “Check her email first.”

  When he opened up the email, there was a fair bit of business and personal stuff going on. He went to one of the search engines, opened it, and checked the history. Sure enough, banking information was all over the place. “Well, hopefully with this we can get into the accounts.”

  “Do you think that this property will be sold?”

  “Depends if the Turkish government has a lawsuit against her father, in which case, they might seize the property,” he said. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “I’ll get Levi to look into it,” Bonaparte said. “The best case would be if Zadie had enough to get started someplace else.”

  “If she could sell this place, it’s probably worth quite a bit,” he said. “But, between this phone and those photos, I’m getting a whole different idea about her mother. I’m kind of sorry she’s passed on. I’d like to have talked to her.”

  “She sounds like she got a backbone somewhere along the line.”

  “Likely, yes,” Zack said, as he tapped the photographs. “Nothing quite like a woman scorned. Especially when she has proof to show him.” They gathered up the material they’d found into one pile, and he added the phone to it. “Now, the last closet,” he said, looking at it. “I haven’t done that closet,” he said, pointing to the bolted one.

  Bonaparte quickly went through it. They opened the big huge closet full of clothes and went through pockets, outfits, one after the other. “Very high-end stuff here,” Bonaparte said. “Designer suits, designer shirts, nothing here is under a thousand dollars.”

  “You’ll probably find nothing here under five thousand dollars, if not thirty thousand dollars,” he said.

  They brought down boxes from shelf after shelf and checked. There was one up at the far corner, which was a hatbox. He pointed up to it and asked Bonaparte to grab it. It was the last thing up there when he brought it down. He took the lid off and they both whistled because the inside was stuffed with wads of cash.

  They looked at each other, and he shook his head. “This house is a gold mine!” he said. “Better put that over with the other pile.”

  And, with that done, he took another quick look through to make sure that they hadn’t missed anything. By the time they had gone through the shoes and whatnot, Zadie’s father’s dresser was left. Knowing it could be another gold mine, they quickly but thoroughly went through it, checking out everything. At the end of the day, they found nothing there.

  “I think this was her room for stashing stuff,” Bonaparte said. “His room was in the office.”

  “Right, we have to check those laptops too. What do you think about staying here?”

  “I don’t know. She needs to rest,” he admitted. “So do you.”

  Zack turned and stared at his partner. “The day is running out. Why don’t you go grab four hours in the spare room? I’ll check on the security system and make sure we don’t have any uninvited visitors.”

  With the search ended, Bonaparte studied him for a long moment and then said, “It’s probably a good idea. I need to crash.” He turned and walked around the hallway to the far side where a spare room was. He opened the door, leaving it open, and dropped on the bed. He rolled over, pushed the pillow under his head, and closed his eyes.

  Zack laughed. “You are one of the few people I know who can drop off to sleep like that.” But Bonaparte was already past answering.

  With him down and a stack on the bed already for Zadie to go through, Zack picked up the stack and carried it to her room, putting it on the floor just inside her room. Then he went downstairs, rechecked that all the doors and windows were securely locked. At one of the keypads for the security system, found at the front door, he read the instructions, and he found a note right beside it on how to shut it off.

  That blew him away because, if you leave the code to shut off the security right by the keypad, that’s like asking to get robbed.

  In the distance through the rear kitchen window, he could still see activity around the cottage where the old couple had been murdered. The two cops they had pretty much kicked out of the main house were still working on the caretakers’ cottage.

  Zack went into the office and started searching. Now that he had a better idea of various things that were hidden around the place, he went through the piles of stuff, straightening them up, taking a look at various photos. He eventually put things back into the filing cabinet—in the wrong order of course because he had no idea the way they were otherwise.

  But on one of the folders he caught Zadie’s name. He pulled it out, checked out the inside to find it appeared to be a history of Zadie’s life. He quickly photographed it to send to Zadie later, if she wanted to see it, then left it on top, and put the rest away. At least when somebody came in here checking the office, it would not look like it had been completely destroyed. He wondered why the cops didn’t check out the house or at least this room when they were here earlier to take their statements. Zack had to wonder about their investigation skills at this point.

  With everything cleaned up as much as he could, he went through the drawers in the cabinets against the wall and opened up more of the cupboards and found a strongbox in one. He unlatched it and found more money. Shaking his head, he put it back and kept on searching for more things.

  And then came across another safe. He stared at it in shock because a big one had been in the desk, but this was a small wall safe. Usually if one safe was found, nobody bothered to check for a second one. Except people like him. Zack wasn’t the best at safecracking, but he’d give it a go. It was a simple three-digit tumbler, and it took him a couple minutes to figure it out, but then he worked silently, hearing the tumbling on the inside. When he finally got it opened, he realized it held yet more documentation. He pulled it out, but everything was in Turkish. He didn’t understand a word.

  The file wasn’t thick, but it looked important. He took photos of everything and sent it to Levi, then put it back and left the safe itself open. With the cupboard closed above, he slowly headed out and did another pass around the house, searching outside the windows to get a lay of the land.

  The property had lots of trees and lots of places for people to hide. Going back into the kitchen, he made tea, and, as he watched out the back as several police vehicles pulled away from the cottage. Maybe they were done. If that was the case, it was possible their attackers would head in this direction soon. Although the cops had been a diversion over there, it might have been something he would have tried earlier, had he been the intruders. No real way to know.

  As Zack checked his watch again, Bonaparte had had two hours of sleep, two and a half actually. Zadie’s nap was a good three and a half, heading on four hours. But both of them were exhausted and could use twice as much.

  He searched the kitchen cupboards for the tea stash, found something that made a passable cup, and, although he wasn’t hungry, he went into the fridge, looking for more. He found a big slab of cheese, and he cut himself a thick wedge.

  He wanted to go outside and check the grounds, but he didn’t want to leave the two of them sleeping inside. Finally he settled on a chair where he could keep watch on the better part of three sides of the house all at once, full of windows.

  When his phone buzzed, he pulled it out to see a message from Levi. Call me. He quickly dialed.

  “Well, that’s an interesting set of paperwork you handed me,” Levi said. “The government of Turkey will be very appreciative of it. It would help them prosecute several corrupt people.”

  “It was in a small wall safe.”

  “Well, lo
ck that safe back up and keep the images,” he said. “I’ve already contacted somebody who will come tomorrow morning.”

  “Providing it’s one of the good guys coming,” Zack joked, explaining about the cops, about the cottage. “I think they are almost finished there though. There is no sign of any cop vehicles, but I can’t guarantee somebody else wasn’t left inside.”

  “That’s to be expected,” he said. “It takes time.”

  “The other two are asleep, so I’m on watch.”

  “Keep her safe because, given this political stuff you just sent me, if any of his rivals or the people he dealt with knew that this material existed, you can bet that house would go up in flames,” Levi said.

  “That’s not something I want to think about,” he said. “Did you look into any problems with the ownership of this house?”

  “No problems. Her father transferred it to her mother’s name about four years ago, so the government or the state shouldn’t have an interest in the property,” he said. “Zadie is the sole beneficiary of her mother’s will.”

  “So it is her house?”

  “Yes, and everything in it.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “Quite a bit of stuff is here, and I’m sure there is more to find.”

  “Probably is, but you found a gold mine with that government corruption documentation, so you should take another run through the office and make sure nothing else is there.”

  “I haven’t been through another whole filing cabinet yet,” he said.

  “If the scanner has an automatic feeder, just start sending it,” he said.

  “Some of the files are mixed up because the office had been destroyed. But I managed to get most of it back together again.” He got up and walked with his tea into the office, turned on the light, and said, “I do have a whole drawer of files here,” Zack warned him.

  “Shuffle them into the feeder,” Levi said, “and start sending them.”