A Trace of Death (A Keri Locke Mystery--Book #1)

by Pierce, Blake

  Keri switched topics. She could tell that bouncing around was keeping Artie uncomfortable, which was good.

  “Ashley’s been hanging out with a guy with long blond hair,” she said. “He’s the singer in a group called Rave. Have you ever seen Ashley with him?”

  The man nodded.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “He’d hang around out past the bleachers where some of the equipment sheds are,” he said. “Ashley would go there and meet him after school sometimes.”

  “To have sex?”

  “And sometimes more,” he added.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, I got suspicious that they were dealing drugs or something, so I started keeping an eye on them. A couple of months ago I snuck up on them. They had actually broken into one of the sheds. When I looked in, they were, you know, having intercourse.”

  “Did you take video of it?”

  Artie looked horrified.

  “No. I told the guy to get the hell off school grounds. He got this real angry look on his face, like he was trying to scare me or something, but I didn’t back down. I told him to leave, now, and never come back. He looked like he wanted to punch me but he didn’t try. Good thing for him because I was ready for it. In the end he just left. Ashley went with him. The next day she begged me not to tell anyone what I’d seen. I told her I wouldn’t as long as her boyfriend stayed off campus.”

  “When was this?”

  “Early last week.”

  “Did he ever come back?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What about any of that made you think they were dealing drugs?” Ray asked, reminding him why he’d started the story in the first place.

  “Oh yeah. After they left the shed that day, I noticed some vials on the floor, like four of them. It seemed like too much for just personal use.”

  “Could you tell what it was?”

  “They were all white powder. Could’ve been coke, heroin, maybe meth. I’m no expert.”

  “Did you turn it in?”

  “Are you kidding? That girl’s father is a United States senator. What if she said it wasn’t hers and I’m left with all these drugs in my possession? Who are people going to believe? Who’s got more power? I tossed the vials in the trash and moved on.”

  *

  Five minutes later, back in the car, Keri drove silently back to the station, lost in thought. Ray finally broke the silence.

  “It seems that the stories from Artie North and your boyfriend are a tad contradictory.”

  “You think?”

  “Who do you believe?”

  “Do I have to pick? Maybe they’re both lying. All I know is my brain is fried. Every lead we get ends up leading us back to the beginning. And if she was taken, she’s running out of time.”

  “Are you starting to doubt that?”

  “Ray, I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  Suddenly her phone rang. She put it on speaker and an unfamiliar female voice said, “Keri Locke?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name’s Britton Boudiette. I’m a friend of Ashley Penn’s. I’d like to meet with you right away if that’s possible.”

  “What about?”

  “About some stuff I’d rather not get into over the phone. Please. It might be important. Don’t bring anyone with you. Just you.”

  Keri took down her info and hung up. Then she turned to Ray and said in a cynical tone she didn’t even know she was capable of, “Don’t bring anyone with you? In the history of law enforcement, has anything good ever resulted from that sentence?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Monday

  Night

  Twenty minutes later, after dropping Ray back at the station, Keri pulled up in the alley behind Britton Boudiette’s house, flashed the high beams three times like she’d been asked, and then killed the lights and the engine.

  Almost immediately, a female figure came out from a back bedroom of the house onto a second-story deck. She worked her way down the structure to the ground level, hurried over to the car, and quietly got in the passenger side.

  Keri felt ridiculous. She was having a secret meeting in her car with a fifteen-year-old girl in the middle of the night. If the kid’s parents found out, she wondered if they could press some kind of charge against her. She put the thought out of her mind and tried to take Britton seriously.

  The girl was African-American, pretty, and athletic—currently dressed in flannel cartoon pajama bottoms and a pink T-shirt. She got right to the point.

  “Ashley would kill me if she knew I was meeting with you. You absolutely, positively have to keep this on the down low. You can’t tell anybody that I ever talked to you.”

  “I won’t, unless absolutely necessary,” Keri assured her, essentially promising nothing. Britton seemed satisfied anyway.

  “Okay,” she said. “I honestly don’t know if any of this is going to help anything. Ashley’s been sort of crazy lately.”

  “How so?”

  “She has this new boyfriend, Walker Lee, who’s the lead singer of Rave, which you probably never heard of but is a very cool band who just released their first single, “Honey.” It’s pretty awesome. Anyway, Walker’s been a terrible influence on Ashley.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, it started with him getting a fake ID for Ashley, so she could come to the clubs and watch the band. Then there was drugs and drinking, not a lot, nothing crazy, but, you know, Ashley’s only fifteen.”

  “Britton, you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” even though Walker being the source of the fake license was news to her.

  Britton seemed to waver for a moment, then went on.

  “Then they started committing thrill crimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing malicious or violent, just stuff for the adrenaline high, you know? Two weeks ago, they stole a car and went joyriding. They’ve been having a lot of sex in public places where they could get caught. And last week—do you know where the Nakatomi Plaza is on Avenue of the Stars?”

  “Yes.”

  Keri knew it well.

  It was actually called Fox Plaza but it was often referenced as Nakatomi Plaza because that’s what it was called in the movie Die Hard, at least before it blew up. The thirty-five-story skyscraper was located in the heart of Century City, a west-side enclave known for law firms and talent agencies.

  “They hid out in the building until it closed,” the girl said. “Then they spent the night up at the top, drinking wine and smoking pot. The next morning they snuck out. Ashley’s parents thought Ashley was sleeping over at my house that night. I covered for her but between you and me, I didn’t like doing it.”

  All this was interesting but if it was getting Keri anywhere, she couldn’t see it.

  “Here’s the worst part though,” the girl said. “Walker recently bought a gun.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s in some kind of trouble. I think someone’s after him, and maybe him plus Ashley, I’m not sure. She said it had something to do with Walker losing some drugs he owed to someone. That’s the main thing I wanted to tell you. She might be mixed up in something. I don’t know. I do know that they were planning on running away to Vegas.”

  “To become stars of the music and fashion worlds, right?”

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s more to escape whatever it is that’s going on here.” The girl exhaled. “Ashley’s parents don’t know any of this and you have to promise not to tell them. I’m only telling you because something in all this may be behind why she disappeared.”

  Keri patted the girl’s arm.

  “You’re doing the right thing.”

  “Does any of it help?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe—”

  “There’s one more thing that you should know,” the girl said. “This is something that you absolutely have to promise to not
repeat because Ashley told it to me in the strictest secrecy.”

  “I understand,” Keri said, again making no promises.

  The girl studied Keri for a moment and then said, “Ashley’s mom, Mia, comes from a lot of money. Her parents—meaning Ashley’s grandparents—used a law firm here in LA for all their legal work, Peterson and Love. Do you know it?”

  Keri nodded. It was one of the largest law firms in the city, very political, with several branches in other states. It had been around forever.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, well, they used their pull to get their daughter, Mia, a job at the law firm when she was fourteen, in the summer, between ninth and tenth grade. She did photocopying, ran errands, shelved books, and stuff like that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, Stafford was a partner in that firm at the time,” the girl said. “He was thirty that summer. Anyway, he got Mia in his office one night after everyone left and he deflowered her.”

  “Deflowered?”

  “Yeah, that means she was a virgin at the time,” Britton said earnestly.

  “Oh, right.” Keri tried to keep a straight face.

  “Don’t get me wrong, it was consensual, but he was a full-grown man, a lawyer no less, and Mia was just a kid. She got pregnant. He wanted her to get an abortion but she refused and ended up having the child—Ashley. After that, Mia and Ashley moved to Paris for seven years and then came back here. Mia was twenty-two when they came back and Ashley was seven.”

  “This is…I don’t know…wild,” Keri said.

  “Trust me, I know,” the girl said. “Mia and Stafford struck things up again after that long gap and eventually they got married and he formally ‘adopted’ Ashley. He never technically denied being her birth father but by adopting her, most people just assumed he was her stepdad. Anyway, it was Mia’s idea for Stafford to get into politics and she funded his campaigns. That’s how he became a senator. No one outside their inner circle knows that he is actually the blood father. If the public ever found out how their family was created, his political career would be over. Mia confided all this to Ashley, who then told me when she was a little tipsy one night.”

  “I don’t see how this fits into anything,” Keri said.

  “I don’t either. I just thought you should know that Stafford isn’t as squeaky clean as he’d like people to think. Personally, I don’t like him.”

  *

  After making sure Britton got safely back to her bedroom, Keri headed back to the station. On the drive she realized something. Mia may have wanted Keri to be heading up the case because they had a bond. But when Stafford backed her up, it wasn’t because he thought she was the best person for the job. It was because he thought she was the worst.

  If someone was going to end up snooping around in their lives and possibly stumbling on some of their secrets, he wouldn’t mind if that someone was a rookie detective, an emotional basket case, someone who’d been reprimanded multiple times in her short career. If things went south, she was the perfect scapegoat. Keri realized she’d walked right into his trap.

  And she had a bigger problem. She had no idea what else he was hiding.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Monday

  Late Night

  Pulling back into the parking lot at the station, Keri saw that the media had taken over the place. They swarmed her car until two uniformed officers moved them out of the way enough for her to drive into the lot. Luckily there was a gate separating the employee lot from the general one so they couldn’t get too close.

  As she walked from her car to the side entrance, blinding flashes of camera lights and shouted questions all merged together. Even if she’d wanted to answer their questions, she couldn’t tell them apart from each other. It was all just noise.

  Glancing at the digital clock as she entered the bullpen, Keri saw that it was well past eleven. If Ashley really had been abducted in that van right after school, by now she could be as far away as San Francisco, Phoenix, Tijuana, or even Las Vegas.

  She walked to her desk, noting that almost no one looked up at her. Some people appeared to be focused intently on their work. But other people seemed to be intentionally avoiding eye contact.

  Ray was poring over files at their shared desk. She plopped down in her chair and sighed deeply. Suddenly she felt enormously tired.

  “Did that teen Deep Throat have anything earth-shattering to share?” he asked her without looking up.

  “She offered some juicy gossip. But nothing that changes things as far as I can tell. What are you up to?”

  “Looking at past cases,” he said. “Trying to find similar MOs, black vans, whatever.”

  “Evie’s case in there?”

  “Yeah, but I skipped it. The pattern didn’t seem to match,” he said, then finally looked up at her. “Do you disagree?”

  “No. This guy was much more careful and deliberate than Evie’s abductor. Other than the van, almost nothing else matches up between the cases.”

  Ray nodded.

  “How you doing, Arrietty?” he asked. She could tell he was concerned. She tried to put a brave face on it but she couldn’t even think of an insulting nickname comeback.

  “I’m okay—just tired and frustrated.”

  “No missing time lately?”

  “Not in the last few hours,” she assured him. “I just feel like we keep hitting brick walls. I know that somewhere in all the crap we’ve been sifting through is an actual clue that will get us to Ashley. But it’s hard to see it right now.”

  “Well, plaster a smile on your face because our fearless leader is headed this way.”

  Keri looked up to see Lieutenant Hillman walking toward them.

  “Anything new, Sands?” he asked brusquely.

  “No sir; just looking through old cases for connections.”

  “Locke, what about you?” he asked, avoiding mentioning the fact that she’d been removed and reinstated on the case within a matter of hours.

  “I just met with a friend of Ashley’s who said Stafford Penn had an affair with Mia when he was thirty and she was fourteen. She said he’s Ashley’s father. It might affect his next campaign but I’m not sure how it helps us. Either Artie North or Walker Lee is lying about their interaction but again, I’m not sure that getting the truth on that question gets us any closer to finding Ashley.”

  “We’ve got tails on both of them,” Hillman told her, “but so far neither one has moved. We’re working on getting warrants for the call records of everyone we’ve interviewed tonight to see if there’s anything out of the ordinary but that’s still a few hours away. In fact, I’m not sure there’s anything either of you can do for now. I recommend you both head home and try to get a few hours of shuteye. I’m going to need you both somewhat fresh to go over those phone LUDs tomorrow morning.”

  “Maybe I’ll just crash in the break room,” Keri said.

  “That wasn’t really a request, Detective Locke. Ashley’s former boyfriend, Denton Rivers, is bonding out as we speak and he’s been squawking to his lawyer about police brutality. They’ll be coming through here in the next five minutes and I don’t want a scene where he starts yelling or pointing you out.”

  “But sir—”

  “But nothing. I’m already certain they’re going to talk to the press on the way out. I don’t need that kid all riled up when he does it. If he sees you, he will be. So go home. I’m leaving in ten minutes myself.”

  “What’s going to happen with that, by the way?” Ray asked.

  “My understanding is that his drug dealer, Johnnie Cotton, admitted to assaulting him. Trying to bring a complaint alleging that he was hit in the same spot on his head on the same afternoon by both his dealer and a cop, all while being under suspicion for abducting his girlfriend? Does that sound like a winning case to you?”

  “No sir,” Ray said, smiling.

  “To me either. But the less fuel we add to their fire, the better. That’s why I wa
nt both of you gone now.”

  “Yes sir,” Ray said, standing up.

  “Yes sir,” Keri repeated, doing the same. They walked briskly for the exit.

  “I’ll see you both here at six AM,” Hillman shouted after them. “We should have the LUDs by then.”

  “You want a ride?” Ray asked her. “I know you said you were tired. Just leave your car here. I could even crash at your place…on the couch. We could go in together tomorrow.”

  “Thanks for the offer but I’m cool. I need to stop at the ladies’ room anyway. I’ll see you at six.”

  Ray looked like he wanted to say something else but stopped himself and just nodded.

  “See you at six,” he agreed and walked out the door to the parking lot.

  *

  Keri waited in a bathroom stall for fifteen minutes to be sure both Ray and Hillman had left.

  When she returned to the bullpen, it was mostly empty. Suarez was still at his desk, typing up reports. Edgerton, the detective who loved all things tech, was doing some kind of cell tower triangulation that Keri didn’t completely understand. A detective from Vice was taking a report from a john who said he’d been robbed by the prostitute he’d been with. A homeless guy sat handcuffed to a bench in the corner. He’d defecated on the car hood of a guy he claimed had tossed coffee on him. The car owner, who looked like a real jerk to Keri, seethed as he waited for an officer to take a report. Keri hoped it would be a while.

  She made her way back to her desk as unobtrusively as possible and sat down. She wasn’t going home. And she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep in the break room, no matter how tired she was. There was a teenage girl in desperate need of her help and she couldn’t let her down. Somewhere there was a connection that would solve this case. Keri only hoped she could find it in time.

  She grabbed one of the case files on Ray’s desk and started rifling through it. There were no obvious similarities. She picked up another one and got more of the same. She slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes for a few seconds. Then she picked up a third file—nothing.