by Beverly Long
She didn’t know if that was supposed to make her feel better or worse that she hadn’t been fooled by some slick cyber-creep. “How long?” she asked. “How long has this been going on?”
“For almost six months,” Myers said.
She mentally reviewed the termination dates of Hawkins, Looney and Blakely. Six months ago they’d all still been working at the hotel. Oscar Warren had also been there. She looked at Cruz’s face and knew that he’d already gone through the same exercise.
“Where do you normally keep your laptop?” Detective Myers asked.
She shrugged. “At home, usually. I bring it to work occasionally.”
“When it’s at work, do you have it with you? Do you take it to meetings?”
“No. I leave it in my office. I’ll use it during my lunch hour. Sometimes I’ll stop at a coffee shop on my way home and jump on the public Wi-Fi. I don’t see how this could have happened, I have a password on it.”
“There are programs that can break a password in seconds. Child’s play for somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
“Charlotte would have had access,” Cruz said. “Because of his relationship with her, Hawkins probably did, too. You said that you’d come back to the office and he’d be hanging around.”
She nodded.
“And Looney was in Maintenance and Blakely in Security. Both with access to a master key that could have been used to unlock the office when both you and Charlotte were away.”
Her head was spinning. “Yes.”
“Oscar Warren?” he asked.
She shook her head. “We didn’t give keys to any of the people from A Hand Up.”
“Slater would have had a key,” Cruz stated.
“What?” Meg asked.
“I’ve been focusing my attention on these four white men. One because of his jail record and three because their employment was terminated within the last year. But maybe it’s a white guy with a whole other agenda. I don’t want to be stupid and overlook somebody.”
Cruz had never been stupid. “It’s not Scott,” she said.
“Nobody gets a free pass, Meg. Nobody.”
She needed the free pass. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “It was nice to meet you,” she said, looking at Greta. “Thank you for coming to stay with me.”
“Do you want me to get Jana?” Cruz asked.
Meg didn’t want to disturb the little girl. She shook her head. “She can sleep with me.”
Five minutes later, she heard the doors and knew that Detective Myers and Greta had left. Seconds later, Cruz was standing at her door. “Sleeping?” he asked quietly.
She could pretend. “No,” she said.
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. The lights were all off, with the exception of one dim light from the bathroom. His shape was visible but she couldn’t see the expression on his face. She could feel warmth roll off his big body.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I think so,” she lied. “I’m sorry about this, Cruz. Sorry that you got dragged into it and that it touched Jana. I never meant for that to happen.”
“It’s not your fault, Meg.”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. What if it really was her fault? What if it had something to do with what had happened to Missy?
They sat there in the dark for a long moment. Finally, Cruz shifted. “Is there anything you haven’t told me, Meg?” he asked, his voice soft.
She swallowed hard. “Of course not,” she said. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But just a few minutes ago, right before Myers and Greta left, you had the strangest look on your face. Like you were thinking of something.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Look, Cruz, I’m really tired.” She rolled over, giving him her back.
And she didn’t start to cry until he’d left the room.
Chapter Fourteen
Early Monday morning, Cruz got Jana dressed and fed her breakfast in the hotel restaurant. She was barely finished with her pancakes when Elsa came to pick her up. It was a tearful reunion, on Elsa’s part. Jana was all smiles and gave Cruz a big kiss. He watched them drive away and then did something that he’d never expected to do—not in a hundred years. He initiated a background check on Meg.
He dialed and Sam answered on the fourth ring. “Vernelli,” he said, his voice rough.
“It’s almost eight o’clock your time, partner,” Cruz said. “Get your sorry self out of bed.”
Sam sighed. “Claire and I took the red-eye back from Omaha. She wanted to spring the news about the baby to her parents in person.”
Cruz had only met the Fontaines once, at Sam and Claire’s wedding. They’d been nice enough but rather reserved. “How’d that go?”
“Better than either of us might have expected.”
That was no doubt a good thing because if the Fontaines had given Claire even a moment of grief, Sam would have told them to stuff it and he’d have whisked his new bride away from Nebraska and back to Chicago. “How’s Claire feeling?”
“As long as I embrace my role of saltine cracker-bearing slave, it’s all good,” Sam said. “What’s going on with you? How’s Meg?” he asked, his tone careful.
Cruz understood the caution. Sam had lived through the death spiral that Cruz had started when Meg had suddenly announced she was leaving. “Meg’s okay. I mean, she looks great, she’s doing really well in her job, she...” Cruz couldn’t finish. He sucked in a breath. This was his best friend. “She’s in trouble, Sam. And I’m not sure she’s telling me the truth.”
There was silence on the other end.
Cruz barged on. “I need your help. I want to know everything about Margaret Mae Gunderson Montoya that there is to know. I’m not sure what’s important and what’s not, so don’t leave anything out.”
“Consider it done. I’ll be in touch.”
Cruz disconnected the call. When he’d talked to Myers the night before, the man had told him that the blood on Meg’s desk had been analyzed. The good news was that it wasn’t human. It was canine. But not from just one dog. Three dogs. The bastard had killed three dogs. They figured he’d somehow managed to collect the blood and then he’d smeared it across Meg’s desk.
They were dealing with somebody who had a screw loose. Technologically sharp, yet bent. It was a scary combination. He hoped the guy didn’t build bombs in his basement.
Cruz punched an address into his GPS that he’d gotten from Tom Looney’s employment application. The man had worked at a factory before he’d been hired on at the hotel. He’d listed his supervisor as H. Looney. It wasn’t that common of a last name and Cruz was betting on the fact that H. Looney was some kind of relation.
Who hopefully knew just where Tom Looney could be found.
When he arrived at the small shop and asked for H. Looney, the woman at the front desk pushed a button and the overhead page went out. “Haney to the front. Haney to the front.”
In less than a minute, a fifty-year-old man who was wiping his hands on a grease rag poked his head around the door. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I’m Detective Cruz Montoya. I’m looking for Tom Looney. I know he used to work here.”
The man nodded. “He’s my nephew. He worked here for a couple years after he lost his job at the prison.”
There hadn’t been anything on his application about working at a prison. “What did he do at the prison?”
“Maintenance supervisor. I guess it was budget cuts. He’d worked there a couple years.”
Maybe. Or maybe he’d screwed up there, too, and didn’t want anybody checking those references. “I stopped by his house yesterday. The woman living there didn’t seem to know where he was.”
The man smiled. “Donnetta. Now that’s a hard nut to crack. She’s Bertie’s sister. Tom’s mother,” he added. “I’m his uncle on his daddy’s side.”
“Where’s your nephew now?”
“Doing maintenance work at the food plant south of town, on I-37. It’s a good job.” Haney Looney reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a worn billfold. He opened it and thumbed through a stack of business cards, pulling one out from near the bottom. “Here. He gave this to me just a couple weeks ago.”
Cruz took the card. “Okay. Here’s the deal. I’m going to pay your nephew a visit. I don’t really expect you to keep this conversation to yourself. I understand how family works. But understand this. If he suddenly goes AWOL, I’m not going to reflect positively upon that.”
“I’m not going to call him. He’s a man. Or at least he says he is. He can answer his own damn questions.” The man turned and left the room.
It took Cruz thirty minutes to get to the food plant and another fifteen to work his way past the guards at the various entrances. The place was tied up tighter than Fort Knox. A sign of the times for sure. No manufacturer in their right mind wanted to make it easy for someone to get inside, tamper with some product and make a couple hundred people sick before the company could get the product off the shelves.
He asked the receptionist to get a manager. She pushed a button, spoke into her headset and in just minutes he was invited into the offices.
The manager was a woman, probably close to fifty. She wore blue pants, a blue shirt and a white lab coat. Cruz gave her his card, explained that he was investigating a crime and that he needed to talk to Tom Looney. She didn’t ask any questions, just led him to a conference room.
It took Tom Looney ten minutes to get to the room. He was wearing a hairnet over his ponytail and there was a pair of safety glasses in his pocket. He was also sweating.
Cruz didn’t waste any time. He slid another card across the table. “I’m here to talk to you about some trouble that Meg Montoya has been having.”
Looney didn’t say anything.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Cruz said. “I don’t much care. But I’m thinking your employer might not like the idea of you needing time off unexpectedly to give a statement to the police.”
Looney shook his head in apparent disgust. “I don’t know what some crazy guy attacking her at the fundraiser has to do with me.”
Now that was interesting. To the best of Cruz’s knowledge, the incident hadn’t made the papers. “How do you know about that?”
The man’s face got red. He hesitated, chewing on his top lip. “I know someone who was there.”
“Define someone.”
The man pursed his lips. Finally, he spoke. “The hotel employed four men from the prison through the A Hand Up program. I live with one of the men. He told me about it.”
The pieces were starting to click together. The uncle’s strange comment—“He’s a man or at least he says he is.” The missing work experience on the job application. Cruz leaned forward. “You used to work at the prison. But you got fired from there for having a personal relationship with one of the inmates, didn’t you?”
The man nodded. “Look. I don’t want any trouble at this job. I work with a bunch of rednecks. It’s bad enough to be a gay man but to be a gay man living with an ex-con is just asking for trouble.”
No doubt about that.
“You lost your job at the hotel, too,” Cruz said.
“That was for a totally different reason. I missed too much work.”
“Why?”
“My partner was ill. He needed surgery and couldn’t drive for several weeks. He had therapy appointments afterward and there was nobody else to take him. I ran out of vacation time.”
Cruz knew that if Looney had told Meg the truth, there was a high likelihood that he’d have kept his job. But he understood the secrecy. This was Texas, after all.
“Meg has had some other things happen. Do you have any idea of who might want to antagonize her or hurt her in some way?” Cruz asked.
The man shook his head. “She’s a good person. Probably the nicest manager I’ve ever worked with. I was the one who told her about the A Hand Up program. She knew I had some personal connection but she never pried. I can’t see anybody wanting to hurt her. I guess the only advice I could give you is to talk to her secretary. That woman’s a bitch.”
* * *
CRUZ TURNED HIS attention to finding Troy Blakely. The guy had worked at the jewelry store for over a year. He had to have had lunch in the area, or maybe dropped off some dry cleaning. The possibilities were endless. People left tracks everywhere.
He hit pay dirt at his fourth stop—a small Thai restaurant. The waitress, a tired-looking thirtysomething blonde, looked at the picture and smiled. “He used to stop in a couple nights a week. Always had a beer while he was waiting for his food. Nice enough guy, although there was something about him that gave me the creeps.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“A week or so ago.”
That surprised Cruz. There were a lot of places to get Thai food. If he wasn’t working in the area, was he living nearby?
“Anything unusual?”
“I asked him if he’d found work. A few months back he’d lost his job at this big hotel.”
“Had he?”
“I’m not sure. I remember his answer because it was sort of weird. He said it didn’t matter because he was finally going to be able to fix everything.”
Fix everything.
It could mean a thousand things. “He ever have a conversation with anybody else while he was waiting for his beer?”
She shook her head. “No. I suppose I was the only one who paid much attention to him. To be honest, I felt a little sorry for him. When he first started coming in, which was probably a good year ago, he’d said that his parents had died recently—the way he talked about them, I got the impression that they were really close.”
“His parents live in San Antonio?”
A door slammed near the rear of the restaurant and she started wiping the counter in earnest. “I need to go help put away stock,” she said.
“His parents?” he prompted again.
She wrinkled her brow. “Some small town two hours away. Hollyville. Haileyville. Something like that.”
Cruz discreetly passed her a fifty-dollar bill and a card with his name and number. “Thank you. If you remember anything else, please call me.”
It took Cruz five minutes to locate Haileyville, Texas, on the map. He didn’t bother to plug the address into his GPS. It was a hundred miles west, then a short twenty miles north—main highways all the way.
He grabbed coffee and two candy bars from the gas station and settled in for the trip. He was barely at the outskirts of San Antonio when he called Meg.
“Meg Montoya,” she answered
“How’s your day?”
“I had a couple meetings and quite a bit of voice mail and email to get through.”
His idea of hell. He hated the bureaucratic nature of police work that required writing reports and documenting endless conversations. Hated going to meetings where decisions never got made. Hated listening to consultants who couldn’t find their butts unless someone put a dollar sign on them.
“Lucky you,” he said. “Hey, I’m headed out of town. I got a lead on Troy Blakely. His parents lived in Haileyville. It’s about two hours west of here.”
Meg knew exactly where Haileyville was. It was thirty miles from her hometown of Maiter, Texas. They’d gone school shopping there and Christmas shopping, too. It was significantly bigger than Maiter, although that wasn’t saying much. Probably had ten thousand residents. Maiter had boasted they’d hit a thousand when the Wyman triplets had been born.
Cruz’s trip shouldn’t make her nervous but it did. Nobody in Haileyville was going to be talking about something that happened twenty years ago, some thirty miles away.
“Will you be back tonight?” Meg asked.
“Yes. I’d really appreciate it if you would either be in your office or in our rooms. Please don’t leave the hotel.”
“I won’t,” she said. She didn’t need to leave the hotel in order to do what needed to be done.
“Thank you,” he said.
She disconnected before she did something stupid like beg him to be careful. Then she pulled out Detective Myers’s card from her purse and dialed his office number.
“Myers,” he answered.
She could just see his stubby, nicotine-stained fingers grabbing his desk phone.
“This is Meg Montoya. I need to tell you something.”
Chapter Fifteen
When Cruz got to Haileyville, he searched for funeral homes on his smart phone. There were four. The first one he tried was closed but the second one had lights on. He rang the bell. A man in his mid-forties, wearing a black suit and shiny black shoes, opened the door.
“May I help you?” the man asked, his tone hopeful. Cruz understood. In a town this size, the four funeral homes would be in fierce competition. “My name is Detective Cruz Montoya. I’m investigating a case and I’m trying to find information on this man.” He flashed Blakely’s picture. “It’s my understanding that his parents died, maybe about a year ago. Do you recognize him?”
The man studied the picture, then shook his head. “Perhaps one of his siblings handled the arrangements. What’s the name?”
“Troy Blakely.”
The man tapped his chin and Cruz saw that his nails were very clean. Probably bad for business to have embalming fluid under the thumbnail. “Now I’ve got it. You’ve got the timing right. It was almost a year ago. If you’ll follow me, we can look it up.” The man led him to a back room, done in tasteful gray and maroon. The man motioned for Cruz to sit and took his own seat in front of an old desktop computer. After a few clicks of the mouse, he stopped. “Here we are. Blakely. Gloria and Ted. Sad situation really. The woman died and the husband arranged the funeral. At the same time, he prepaid for his own services. That’s not all that strange. However, we realized he had something in mind when just three days later, we were advised that he was also deceased. A deliberate overdose on his wife’s medication.”
