Dark Harvest (A Holt Foundation Story Book 2)

by Chris Patchell

  “Find anything interesting?”

  “Not much here.”

  Just then, they heard the rear door open. Marissa looked at Seth. He held his fingers to his lips and slung a protective arm in front of her, shifting her safely back behind him. Once she was out of harm’s way, he left the bedroom.

  “Oh!”

  It was a young voice. Accented. Male. Marissa eased out of the bedroom.

  A man stood in the doorway with his hands held in the air, startled by their presence. A colorful bouquet of carnations lay at his feet, alongside a Hershey’s chocolate bar.

  “Who are you?” he asked, his dark eyes shifting from Seth to Marissa and back again.

  “Who are you?” Seth asked, using his authoritative cop voice.

  Eyes wide with alarm, the boy froze like a spooked deer poised to flee.

  “Rico Pham,” he said, gaze bouncing around the apartment. “I was . . . uh . . . looking for Becky.”

  Rico was young, in his early to mid-teens. He was a handsome kid with large, dark eyes, well-defined features, and a slender build like he hadn’t quite filled out yet. A scabbed-over cut split the center of his bottom lip, and Marissa saw some discoloration and puffiness around his left eye. Healing bruises. She should know. She’d had a few of her own, courtesy of her second ex-husband.

  “You have a key to her place?”

  Rico glanced toward the door longingly, like a suspect hoping to flee. Anticipating this, Seth shifted a foot to the right, effectively blocking his path.

  “Becky gave it to me. Sometimes I need a place to crash.”

  Marissa wondered if the need to have some place safe to go had something to do with the bruises on the kid’s face.

  “Are you police?” Rico licked his lips and glanced toward the door. Seth didn’t answer the question.

  “Are you Becky’s boyfriend?” Marissa countered.

  “Well, no. I mean . . . we’re friends.” Rico shoved his fists into the pockets of his worn jeans and stared down at his sneakers.

  “How do you know Becky?”

  “We worked together at Jimmy Macs. She’s a waitress there. I washed dishes and bussed tables. When I saw the lights on . . . well, uh . . . I thought she was back.”

  “Back?”

  “I heard she was missing.”

  “Do you know anything about that?”

  Rico bent down to pick up the flowers and the chocolate bar. His hands shook as he set them on a nearby table.

  “I’ve been worried about her. She says the baby likes chocolate, so I get it for her sometimes. Are you helping to find her?”

  “We’re trying.”

  “Everybody loved Becky,” he said. “She was so nice. Even to someone like me.”

  “What do you mean, someone like me?” Marissa asked.

  An intense look of shame crossed Rico’s face, and his gaze dropped to the floor. Marissa felt bad for the boy and decided not to press. Seth wrote down Rico’s name and address and let the kid go. Marissa locked the door and turned back toward Seth.

  “He seems a little young for her, don’t you think?” Seth asked.

  “For what? You think they were sleeping together?”

  “He had a key to the place,” Seth said. “And he’s probably only a year or two younger than she is. Who knows? One thing is for sure, though, he’s either innocent or really smart.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Only an innocent man or a really smart man would show up with flowers and chocolates for a girl he made disappear.”

  Chapter 6

  After locking up Becky’s apartment, Seth and Marissa took separate cars back into the city. The steady drizzle of rain kept traffic moving at a sluggish pace, and it was just after noon by the time he parked near the Smith Tower. His stomach growled, as if he needed another reminder that he’d skipped breakfast. He thought about calling Marissa to see if she wanted to grab lunch at a little pub down the street but decided against it. Fresh from Becky’s apartment, he felt a keen sense of urgency.

  Becky had been missing three days now, and with her due date only weeks away, there was no time to waste. He needed to hunker down with Henry and the rest of the team to strategize their next steps.

  He knew why the police were focused on the boyfriend. Homicide was the second leading cause of death among pregnant woman. Emotions ran high with the baby’s due date looming large, and the pressure might have caused Nathan Maddox to snap. Had Becky confronted him for being a deadbeat dad? Had they argued? Seth needed to construct a clear timeline. There were so many loose ends to follow up on.

  To satisfy his growling stomach, he hustled down the street to a local deli. He picked himself up a meatball sub and grabbed Marissa a spinach salad to go.

  The foundation was quiet as he entered, and Seth frowned. For a team trying to solve a case, it felt like there wasn’t much happening. He spied Marissa sitting at her desk, staring despondently at her computer monitor.

  “Lunch in the conference room?” he asked. She nodded. He pulled Henry in too. Soon, all three of them were gathered around the table. Seth slid Marissa’s salad to her. She caught it and peeled the plastic lid off.

  “Aw, what did you bring me, boss?” Henry asked, leaning back in his chair and tossing his hands up over his head.

  Seth smirked. He wasn’t Henry’s boss, and the idea of the hacker respecting any sort of hierarchy or authority was laughable. This morning’s scene with Evan was proof enough.

  “Did you eat?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Here.” Seth grabbed the plastic lid from Marissa’s salad, flipped it over and set half the meatball sub on top before shoving it down the table to Henry.

  Seth took a bite and turned toward the whiteboard.

  “Learn anything from the cops?” Henry asked.

  “Nothing we didn’t already know. They’re focused on Maddox.”

  “No surprise there,” Henry said, chewing on a wad of sub.

  “Maybe they’re right,” Evan Holt said from the conference room doorway. Seth waved him inside. He took a seat beside Marissa and angled his sober gaze toward Seth. “Do we have any reason to think he’s not to blame? Are we focusing our resources on the wrong case?”

  “Weren’t you the one saying this morning that we needed to find her?” Henry asked and cocked an eyebrow at Evan. “Have you changed your mind?”

  Evan didn’t answer.

  “No, this case is important,” Marissa said. “Becky’s baby could come anytime now. Her mother is out of her mind with worry. Even if the cops are right about the boyfriend, if we can do something to find her faster, we owe it to her family to do so.”

  Evan nodded. Everyone wanted a good outcome. Only Seth looked grim.

  “I don’t want to sound dramatic, but in my experience, missing person’s cases are one of the hardest to solve. I’ve investigated a number of them throughout my career, and I treat every one like a homicide.”

  The color drained from Marissa’s face, and she dropped her gaze to the table. “So you think she’s dead?”

  “I didn’t say that, but these cases are very, very serious. You can’t afford to overlook a single thing. Most times, the person responsible for the abduction is someone the victim knows. Those are the easier cases to solve. Cases where the kidnapper is a stranger are much, much harder. Let’s hope we’re not looking at one of those. Either way, the one thing Becky doesn’t have is time, so unless the perpetrator screws up and leaves some evidence behind, it’s going to be tough.”

  Silence hung like a storm cloud over the conference room table as the full gravity of Seth’s words sank in.

  “Thanks for the pep talk, boss,” Henry said, in a lame attempt to lighten the mood. Half-hearted chuckles broke the tension, and Seth continued.

  “So, if we follow the premise that Becky was abducted by someone she knows, Maddox is definitely the best suspect we’ve got,” Seth said. “He’s got motive and opportunity. We k
now that Becky’s last phone call was to Maddox before she disappeared. Cell phone data tells us that when the call connected, Maddox’s phone pinged off a cell tower in the vicinity of her last location, which blows holes in the alibi he gave Garcia. What Garcia doesn’t have is any hard evidence. So while the police are busy digging into Maddox, we need to check out the kid at Becky’s work. Henry, see what you can find out about Rico Pham. Works as a dishwasher for Jimmy Macs.”

  Seth wrote the name down on the whiteboard while Henry typed it into the search screen on his laptop.

  “Kid seemed jittery,” Seth said. “What did you think, Marissa?”

  “Nervous, yes. But I thought his concern for Becky seemed genuine.”

  “Were they hooking up?” Henry asked.

  “It’s possible,” Seth said. “And if they were, it’s also possible the baby might be his.”

  “You think Becky is lying about the father?” Marissa asked. “Just because she’s unmarried and pregnant doesn’t mean she’s a slut. Or a liar.”

  Seth knew this must be cutting close to home for Marissa. Like Becky, she had been a young single mom once too.

  “But she might be desperate. Becky’s mom said that Becky had fallen hard for Maddox. It’s possible she’s using that baby as a way to hang on to him.”

  “And if this Rico guy does have feelings for her, he could have done something stupid out of jealousy,” Henry said, looking up from his screen. “Or if the baby is his, having Becky pass it off as Maddox’s might have sent him over the edge.”

  “There’s no way we’ll be able to answer the question of paternity,” Seth said.

  “Well, that’s not strictly true,” Henry argued.

  Seth groaned. He knew where this was going. “There’s no way of knowing whether Becky is carrying Maddox’s baby, short of breaking into his dorm room and stealing his DNA. Is that what you’re suggesting, Henry?”

  “You know what they say: there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  Seth sighed. Just once he wanted to be wrong. It was as if Henry was allergic to doing the right thing.

  “That would be breaking and entering. Even if we did sink to those depths, we don’t have the baby’s DNA, so it’s a dead end. Let’s see if we can figure out where Rico was the night she disappeared.”

  Henry glanced back at his screen and let out a low whistle that got everyone’s attention.

  “Well, what I can say for sure is that he has good reason to be nervous.”

  “Why’s that?” Evan asked.

  “He entered the US three years ago on a student visa that has expired.”

  “He’s in the country illegally,” Seth said, writing this fact down on the board. “It would explain why he was twitchy. Keep digging. Let’s see what else you can uncover.”

  “Yes, sir.” Henry flipped Seth a mock salute.

  Seth took another bite of the sub and chewed thoughtfully, his gaze still on the board.

  “We need to find out why someone would want to make Becky disappear. In any crime, you’ve got about three motives. Sex. Money. Power.” He wrote all three down on the board.

  “Sex seems most likely,” Henry said. “At least for Rico and Maddox.”

  Seth drew a line from the word sex to Rico’s name. He stared at Nathan’s picture for a second or two and shook his head.

  “From everything we’ve heard so far, Becky was more hung up on Maddox than he was on her. He’s a good-looking kid and a football star. There’s no way he has trouble getting girls, so I don’t see sex as a motivating factor for him. Money, yes, but sex, no.”

  Seth circled money and drew a line to Nathan’s picture. “So where does that leave us?”

  “Power doesn’t seem to fit,” Marissa said. “She’s an eighteen-year-old waitress. Aside from the hold that baby has over Nathan, she’s got no power over anyone.”

  The group agreed.

  Seth finished his sub, balled up the foil wrap and tossed it into the garbage can. He wiped his hands and looked back at the board.

  “What are we missing?”

  “Evidence. A body. All we’ve got at this point are theories,” Henry said. “We’ll check out the kid, but then . . .”

  He shrugged his shoulders. Silence hung heavily over the room as each member of the team contemplated Becky’s situation.

  “Welcome to police work, Henry. Our job is to assemble a narrative that explains the case and see what we can prove. Any other ideas?”

  Everyone shook their heads. Seth capped the whiteboard marker and placed it on the table.

  “Now we go to work. And Henry, let’s try to keep it legal.”

  Henry didn’t answer. He winked at Seth and closed the lid to his laptop.

  “We need to distribute more missing person flyers,” Evan said. “Jessica was supposed to make copies. Marissa, could you do it?”

  Marissa’s eyebrows arched over her clear blue eyes.

  “Why? Because you fired Jessica, and I’m the only woman left on the team?”

  Henry slapped his hand over his mouth to stop himself from spewing a mouthful of water across the table. Evan’s jaw dropped.

  “I’ll do it,” Seth said. “Got a second, Evan?”

  Marissa picked up her things and followed Henry out of the conference room. Henry cast Seth a curious glance, but Seth ignored it, waiting until he and Evan were alone.

  “How much do you know about Henry’s methods?” Seth asked.

  “As little as I can manage.”

  Spoken like a true lawyer, Seth thought.

  “You know that on any given day he’s breaking about a dozen laws and while you may be okay with turning a blind eye to what he’s doing—”

  “You’re having a hard time with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not surprised. Lizzie and I talked about that possibility when we brought you onboard. In the end, we figured that the two of you would manage to strike a healthy balance. Remember, Seth, our job is to find Becky as soon as possible, and if we have to stretch some laws to do it, well then . . .”

  Evan shrugged like it was no big deal, but for Seth, it was different. He’d spent a decade and a half upholding the law. The very nature of how Henry conducted business made his skin crawl.

  “And what if Henry’s tactics get the foundation sued?”

  “We’ll deal with it then. Is that it?”

  Seth nodded. He grabbed the flyer off the table and headed to the photocopier, mulling over the set of problems they faced.

  Evan needed to step up. The foundation was in serious need of leadership, and Henry needed to be managed with a firm hand. All this squabbling and inner turmoil wouldn’t help them find Becky.

  Chapter 7

  Nathan bumped up the speed on the treadmill. His hip was already screaming, but he’d look creepy standing around with a towel around his neck and not doing shit—like he was trying to scope out girls. Not that he wasn’t doing that too. The gym was overrun with sexy little things in their sports bras and yoga pants.

  There was a smoking hot redhead on the treadmill in front of him. Her double D’s were bouncing to the beat of her stride. They were engaging in a little flirting foreplay in the mirror. He slowed his interval and flashed a lopsided grin her way. She smiled too before her gaze skipped away.

  He almost missed his next step when someone yanked out his earbud. Nathan had been so busy working on his next conquest, that he hadn’t seen the dude coming. Lurching forward, he regained his balance and glared down at the asshole standing beside the treadmill.

  “Jesus. You trying to kill me?” he pulled the other earbud out and slowed the treadmill down to a stop.

  “Do you want it or not?”

  Amahad Rishi was a tough little mother. His wiry build was deceptively strong, and he could bench-press more than Nathan. A crooked nose and the crescent-shaped scar on his right hand were souvenirs from Rishi’s street fighting days. He had a steady following of clients as a person
al trainer for the on-campus gym, and an even more devoted set for the sideline business that put gas in his Mustang Shelby.

  Nathan stole a quick glance at the redhead. She smiled back, slowing her pace as Nathan followed Rishi out of the cardio room. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he looped the towel around his neck. Rishi checked the hallway.

  “How many?”

  “Two dozen.” Just enough to get him through to the next time he saw Maya. Her connection was better. Cheaper. Stuck in a bind, like everything else, you paid for convenience.

  Rishi tucked the plastic baggie into Nathan’s palm. Nathan took out his new cell phone and made an electronic payment. Better than the personal training session he’d supposedly paid for, the pills would provide some much-needed relief from the pain in his hip, not to mention ease the stress from the cop’s unwelcome visit this morning.

  Word was starting to spread about Becky’s disappearance. A news report had flashed on the television screen at the gym. Thank Christ there was no mention of him.

  Nathan was heading to the locker room when someone passed by. Her arm brushed his, and he recognized the redhead with the bouncy sports bra. Eyes locked on her shapely ass, he grinned.

  “You’ve got good form,” he said. Runners were always obsessed with their form.

  Slowing her pace, she pivoted toward him, a playful smile on her full lips.

  “You run like my grandmother,” she shot back.

  He barked out a laugh. Her barb was as unexpected as it was full of shit. He liked that.

  “Buy you a smoothie?”

  She tipped her head to the left, contemplating the offer.

  “I’m lactose intolerant.”

  “Okay. Coffee?”

  “I don’t do caffeine,” she quipped, but Nathan wasn’t easily deterred.

  “You’re making this hard.”

  She glanced down at the front of his gym shorts. Her gaze lingered. “Not yet.”

  Nathan caught his breath. Her amber eyes danced. She flipped her ponytail over her shoulder and propped a hand on her shapely hip.

  “If you’re done with the stupid pick-up lines, we could get out of here.”