The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 1-3: Redemption Thriller Series 7-9 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set)

by John W. Mefford

  “I’m working on it, trying to understand everything I can about the people involved and their motivations.” I almost held my breath, wondering how she’d take that comment.

  She paced across the floor twice, not saying a word, then she stopped in her tracks and flipped on her three-inch heels. “Use your relationship with the detective, that Polish fella.”

  “Stan,” I clarified.

  Another annoying snap of her fingers. “Yes, him. Get as much inside information as possible. And try to make sure they don’t get distracted by other possible scenarios. Miguel admitted he killed his foster brother, so let’s get on with justice.” She walked to the door, and then glanced over her shoulder. “I can’t tell you how much pressure I feel from high-ranking officials in Austin. No one wants to see another bad headline involving CPS, and that includes our state attorney general. This is on you to fix, Ivy. Don’t let me down, or I’ll…” She pressed her lips together, then quickly walked out of my office.

  “How’s that for a confident pat on the back?” Kari said.

  I shook my head. “The only way I’ll get a pat on the back is if I’m sitting on a windowsill ten stories high. Then she would say I ended my own life because of the tragedy I’d caused.”

  Kari’s face became pinched. “That’s creepy, Ivy. Where do you come up with some of the shit that comes out of your mouth?”

  “Just a crazy imagination, I guess.”

  We got back to work, looking into Russell’s life. “Works for Spit and Shine, a software company that focuses on car washes. It’s based out of San Francisco,” I said, running my finger across the sentence with the information. “Says here in Joanna’s notes that he travels ten to fifteen days a month. He’s in sales.”

  “He was out of town when all of this went down, right?”

  I nodded while scrolling farther down the screen, thinking more about what I’d just read. I then opened another window and did a search on Spit and Shine. I found their website at the top of the results, as well as links to Morningstar and other firms that offered analyses on companies.

  “Why are you looking at Spit and Shine? Kind of a strange name, if you ask me,” Kari said.

  I heard her, but I was too focused on deciphering the financial data on the screen. “S-A-S,” I said while clicking on another link.

  “And that is?”

  “They’re a public company, and that’s their symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.”

  “Don’t tell me you want to buy stock in their company?”

  “Hardly.” My eyes scanned the screen, then found the latest data on their financials. “It says here that Spit and Shine had a year-over-year profit of six point eight percent last year on sales of just over a billion. That profit was up by twenty-two percent from the year earlier.”

  “You actually understand all of that?”

  “They’re just numbers,” I said. “Anyway, it means that Russell Gideon is working for a profitable, growing company. Also says here that they expect to expand into twenty new markets both in the US and South America over the next two years.”

  “Why do you care?”

  I shifted my eyes to Kari, who was now playing with a celery stick. “Right now I’m just pulling in as much data as possible. But one early thought I had was…the house the Gideons lived in. It’s not in the nicest part of town. A basic three-bedroom tract home. Older furniture and carpet. Doesn’t sound like the home of a sales guy who’s banking, does it?”

  “I guess you’re right. Maybe he’s just not very good at selling.”

  “Could be,” I said, thinking more about Russell’s good looks. “Need to look at his W-2s in Joanna’s file.”

  I clicked twice, entering the Financial Support section of the electronic file, then clicked again and watched the little wheel spin for what seemed like an eternity. Kari’s eyes narrowed on her celery stick, as if she were giving it some type of strange hex. I nibbled on another strawberry until the .pdf file finally opened.

  It didn’t take me long to find the information I was looking for, but Kari spotted something else first. “It shows Russell’s employment at SAS here on this page,” she said, tapping a fake nail to the screen. “And then down here, it shows his wife, Gwen, worked at the local middle school in the cafeteria.”

  We glanced at each other; she was likely wondering, as I was, if there was any significance to that fact. “Show me the money,” I said, looking for his total gross income. “Bingo!” I moved the cursor over the figure.

  “Six digits for Russell,” Kari said. “And a healthy six-digit sum at that.”

  “And then his wife made barely twenty grand,” I pointed out.

  “Every penny counts…especially in my household.”

  “Money doesn’t go as far as it used to, but I saw no mention of anyone in the family with any type of costly health issues, things like that.”

  Kari tilted her head. “So what are you thinking?”

  “I’m not sure. Just trying to see if we’re missing something in all of this data.” I sat back, stared at the cobweb in the corner of my office, and tried to refrain from picking at my nails. I rarely went there, but I could feel the anxiety stacking up.

  “You look like you’re in serious thought.”

  “I am.” I brought my hand down, smacking the cracked plastic cover on the arm of my chair. “When I saw Russell, he was dressed well. Crisp, gray slacks and a black-and-white-striped sweater, and his shoes looked new. But his wife the previous day looked like, to me, maybe someone on a Goodwill budget. Monique, his daughter, wasn’t much better with her Gothic look. The most expensive thing on her might have been her nose ring.”

  “So all the money goes to Russell, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Their house seemed like it was a throwback to the 1980s, Kari. Maybe he controls all aspects of their financial lives. I’ve seen it before, where the wife only gets an allowance while the husband has free rein to do with the money as he pleases. If he wants to take his buddies out for a round of golf, he does it. If he wants to do five happy hours a week, he does it.”

  Kari slowly raised an eyebrow. I noticed she had shredded the celery one sliver at a time.

  “Nice work on the vegetable.”

  “I hate that crap.” She sighed. “And I’m not going to eat one more piece of celery in my life.”

  I held out my fist, and she bumped it. “Good for you.”

  The room quickly became quiet again, my mind back on the case, on Russell.

  “As pissed as he was at me, his personality seemed contrived.”

  “You keep digging,” she said.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “But I don’t see what this does for Miguel.”

  My eyes went back to the screen, and I clicked back on the original window with the core background data on the Gideons. “Hold it.” I sat up in my seat. “Russell’s top reference… It’s his boss at Spit and Shine. We’re putting in a call to Mort Heller.”

  I asked Kari to shut my door, and I dialed a number with a 415 area code.

  17

  A cold rain pelted the large bank of windows to my right. I stood in the gym and gazed out at the wet street, where a red, flashing light illuminated the few pedestrians who rushed by, but my eyes focused on a man holding his son close to his chest. The child looked to be around four years old. The father took off his Spurs cap and placed it on his son’s small head, obviously trying to protect him from the rain. But what really struck me was their expressions. Something had caused both of them to smile as if they’d just heard the funniest joke or seen something humorous. Regardless, I could practically hear their belly-laughs, even in the rain, even with nighttime temperatures in the forties.

  Their bonding moment warmed my heart. It was something I’d never experienced as a kid growing up. Not once in all of my foster-home stops.

  A sharp elbow nudged my arm. “Only you would be distracted by some father and his son running in
the rain,” Zahera said.

  “Was I that obvious?”

  “As a heart attack,” she said. “But it isn’t like anyone else noticed. So much jabbering going on.”

  I turned around to face the front of the workout room, where another twenty women had gathered for our first self-defense class. Zahera had been dragging me to the gym for the last several weeks, trying to convince me that my stress could be reduced if I took the time to put in a good workout. I’d been the good soldier for almost two months, but it didn’t seem like the spinner classes and resistance training had made much of a difference to my restless sleep patterns. I did enjoy seeing a modest difference when I looked in the mirror, admitting that I might have a few muscles on my body. As a skinny, tomboy-ish kid, most people saw me as anything but imposing. Little did they know, I could do twenty pullups at age ten. In at least one respect, I’d been lucky in the DNA lottery.

  Only in the last year or so had I really allowed myself to think about my bio-parents. They had given me up, and I had to believe it was for the better, at least for them. As for my disturbing experiences, no one could have predicted that.

  “You okay?” Zahera asked as the two instructors walked into the room, carrying dummies and various knee, elbow, face, and crotch pads.

  “I’m good. Just have a lot on my mind.”

  “When don’t you, girlfriend?”

  I thought again about my phone conversation earlier with Russell’s boss.

  “Hey, didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “No worries. You know me; my mind never stops.”

  “You were talking to me about your conversation with Russell Gideon’s boss when I had fifty pounds over my head. I had to zone you out so I wouldn’t let the bar drop on Bert and Ernie,” she said with her cute giggle. Zahera had named her breasts Bert and Ernie. I didn’t really understand her naming convention, but her hourglass figure was darn-near perfect. I used to be envious, but I’d accepted it, knowing I could go through twenty augmentation procedures and still never look like her.

  “Yeah, I had a brief but enlightening conversation with Mort Heller.”

  “Do share.”

  “To cut right to it, he said that once Russell and his family were officially approved by CPS as a foster family, he told Russell that he could and should drop his travel to no more than five days a month.”

  Zahera lowered her head. “And that’s significant because…?”

  “Gwen Gideon, his wife, made a comment the day her son was killed. She was histrionic, really losing it, and she said her husband was out of town again…as if he was always traveling for work.”

  “So his boss said he didn’t need to travel more than five days, and his wife said he’s on the road all of the time. Something doesn’t sound right.”

  I nodded. “I know she was under great stress when she said it, so it’s possible she could have been exaggerating. But if it’s true, the question is why.”

  Zahera twisted her full lips. “I’ll play devil’s advocate. Maybe Russell felt some subtle pressure from management—like, while he technically wasn’t required to travel, he felt he had to in order to meet his sales quota.”

  “I wondered that as well,” I said. “Still, it’s worth investigating further.”

  “How?”

  “Stan, that’s how.”

  “You think he’ll take the time to dive into Russell’s background? I thought the lead detective was pushing for a formal charge on Miguel.”

  “He is, but I know Stan pretty well. It might take some convincing, but he was at that restaurant. He saw what I saw. At least I hope he saw what I did.”

  A door opened behind us, and a rush of wet wind came swooping in. A few of the ladies stepped away from the entrance, rubbing their arms. A girl entered, removing her hoodie so that her dark hair fell down her back. She was at least ten years younger than everyone else in the room, and her workout clothes consisted of a tight pair of jeans with holes in the knees and old, wet sneakers.

  “We’ll get started in just a minute,” a female instructor named Lulu said. She then went over and spoke with the girl, whose coffee-colored eyes scanned the room with a bit of unease.

  I found myself moving in their direction, wondering if the girl was actually there for the same reason as the rest of the ladies.

  “I can pay you forty tonight, and then by next week I can try to scrounge up another forty. Will that work for you?” the girl said, counting out soggy dollar bills.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s forty-nine plus tax if you pay one class at a time.” Lulu was built like a tank, and her demeanor was just as rigid. I got the feeling she didn’t think this girl belonged with the rest of us.

  Rain slapped at the windowed front door, and all three of us looked that way for a moment. The girl rolled her eyes. “Look, it pretty much sucks outside, so how about I pay you the forty just to let me hang out? I won’t listen to a word you say. In fact, I’ll just go hang out in the locker room.”

  Lulu placed her hands on her hips. “Uh…no. I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t trust me, do you?” the girl said, her tone laced with attitude.

  The instructor gave her the once-over. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Really, bitch?”

  I quickly stepped in between the two girls. “Can I help?” They both gave me a look that said I was the opposite of help.

  “This young lady is about to leave so we can get started.” Lulu waved a hand at the door. “We have a lot of ladies who are truly interested in learning about self-defense, the way of Krav Maga.”

  “I want to learn that too, dammit. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “Great,” I said, more cheerfully than probably was warranted. “The more women who understand how to defend themselves, the better.”

  “But she doesn’t have the money for the class. We’re a business, not a charity.” The instructor gave me a forced smile. “I’m sure you understand.”

  “I’ll pay the difference of what she can’t pay tonight,” I said before thinking it through.

  “Hold on, lady,” the girl said to me, backing up a step. “I don’t take donations. I can take care of myself.”

  “Of course,” I said. “You can pay me back next week or the week after. Whatever fits into your budget.”

  She held her gaze on me for a good ten seconds, probably trying to figure out if she could trust me.

  “Look, I just want us women to stick together. I was once young and didn’t have much money. It’s kind of like going back in time to help myself out.”

  “That’s weird,” the girl said. She peered over my shoulder to the other women, and I turned to follow her gaze. Zahera waved and smiled.

  “That one’s a little too nice.”

  “She’s fine. She’s my friend, Zahera. By the way, what’s your name?”

  She licked her chapped lips. “Cristina Tafoya.” She extended her hand and gave me a quick handshake.

  “Ivy Nash.”

  “What the hell kind of name is that?”

  “I get that all the time.” I turned back to Lulu. “Just add it to my monthly bill, please.”

  Lulu smirked, then made a note on sheet of paper and walked toward the front of the class.

  I told Cristina she could throw her wet jackets over in the corner. She did that, then used a band from her wrist to tie her hair back. We made it back over to Zahera as the instructors got the class started.

  “For those of you who are new to the gym, I’m Lulu,” the instructor said, “and this is my dummy, Daniel.” He held up a hand, and all of us laughed. “Actually, we’ve been teaching this class for four years, so he’s had plenty of practice being a dummy. Can you tell the ladies why you’re so willing to play this part, Daniel?”

  He cleared his throat and took a step forward. “My sister was beaten and raped while walking back to her dorm four years ago. She froze in the face of danger and didn’t ha
ve the knowledge, confidence, or skills to get herself out of the predicament.”

  Pausing for a moment, this man who looked like Adonis with rippling muscles across his chest, shoulders, and forearms, brought a hand to his mouth, his eyes moist. I could hear other women around me let out empathetic sighs.

  “When I went to visit her in the hospital, li’l sis wasn’t the same perky, happy-go-lucky person. She was broken. It took her a good two years of therapy to slowly come out of her shell, to not jump at every little sound, to not be afraid if the lights went off when she was alone. During her recovery period, I asked her what the most difficult part was. She said that besides being pissed at the person who ruined her life, she was most upset at herself for not fighting back.”

  He stopped for a moment and peered across the room. No one moved. We all just stared at Daniel, the only sound coming from the clink of weights in an adjoining room of the gym.

  “That’s right. She was pissed for not fighting back. Do you want that to be you when you’re walking home tonight, or next week, or two years from now?”

  Every head that I could see was shaking a “no.”

  “Do you want that to be you?” he asked with more intensity.

  Heads shaking more emphatically.

  He took a step forward, jabbing his finger at the floor, his face turning red. “Do you want that to be you?” he yelled.

  A second passed by.

  “Fuck no!”

  The roar of Cristina’s voice caused me to flinch. She raised a fist to the ceiling, rocking back and forth. Now all eyes were on her, including a few that weren’t blinking.

  Daniel clapped. “That’s what I like to hear,” he said, pointing at her. “Now let’s get started.”

  The attention turned to Lulu, but I took a glance at Cristina. I could see the sock of her big toe poking through the top of her black canvas Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers. Her faded jeans had pen marks all over them, her nails were nothing more than nubs. Her body language spoke volumes—her jaw was set, her eyes on high alert. She seemed both apprehensive and defiant. I was convinced she lived on the streets. I was probably the only person in the room who had any idea what she might have been exposed to…or forced to do.