by Jordan Dane
"Like I said, you'll need an A-game, even if you have to borrow one."
"Look, Slick, I've got an investigation to conduct. And as much as I've enjoyed our little one-sided rendezvous, I've got things to do."
After taking a sip of his coffee, he looked across the table at her cup.
"But you haven't touched your cappuccino."
"I only drink with friends."
The gloves were off. No sense allowing him to monopolize her dance card. She had better things to do.
"So why this cryptic little game, Slick? You won't share your name or the identity of your so-called benefactor, yet you're chock-full of professional courtesies. Surely you have better things to do with your time than waste mine."
After a faint sad smile, the man slipped on his sunglasses, preparing to leave.
"I wanted to meet you. To find out why a homicide detective gets assigned to a fire investigation."
Finally, all his cards were on the table, a well-played hand thus far. But now, he was fishing. He knew she worked homicide but had no idea about the body found in the old theater. Interesting. It appeared she still held a card up her sleeve.
And latex gloves in her pocket.
"Well, imagine that. I guess there're things you don't know." As she spoke, Becca slipped on one of her gloves under the table. "But a resourceful man, such as yourself, will find out soon enough. I have faith in your abilities."
She reached across the table for his coffee cup with her gloved hand and without ceremony, dumped what remained of his Java onto the sidewalk by their table. Her sudden move drew a flicker of indignation in his eyes, one that quickly faded.
"Two sets of fingerprints on this cup, yours and the waiter's. Thanks for making my job so easy."
Becca stood, cup in hand, not waiting for him to make the next move. With a low intimate voice, she leaned over the table, her face inches from his. Close enough to see through his expensive shades.
"And that bulge I detect? You'd better be damned glad to see me . . . and have a permit to carry that weapon. If not, you'll find the next time we meet, I won't be shy about using my handcuffs."
For the first time, the guy looked as if she had caught him off guard. But the instant was gone in the flick of his eyelash.
"Shy doesn't suit you." He stood and smiled. Cockiness had been replaced by an element of sadness in his expression. Yet in a seductive gesture, he leaned toward her. Reacting on pure instinct, she closed her eyes and focused on the moment. The warmth off his skin and his subtle cologne triggered her imagination.
Becca's heart stopped. Instead of the kiss she expected, his soft whisper teased her ear.
"I would have been disappointed if you hadn't made a move for my prints. I look forward to seeing you again, Rebecca."
After setting a hundred-dollar bill on the table, he turned and walked away, back the way he had come. She watched until he melded with the foot traffic on the street, her heart still pounding with the rush of his intimacy.
After a long moment, Becca gave in to a smile as she gazed down at the coffee cup—her clever coup. She would enjoy discovering the name of her mystery man and the identity of his benefactor. And she'd have a front-row seat to gauge their reactions when she sprang the news of a dead body found at the Imperial. That should melt GQ's cool facade.
He'd done his homework. Now, time for Becca to do hers.
A half-eaten burrito, wrapped in foil, lay atop Becca's desk. The smell of refried beans and old coffee filled her nostrils, almost a distraction. But nothing would divert her attention. She was a woman on a mission. Even though Dani was never far from her thoughts, it felt good to be working a case again.
Most detective work was a painstaking grind, picking apart every detail until a thread of motive could be followed and backed by irrefutable evidence. But it all began with the identification of the victim. So to start her thread, Becca jumped online to retrieve what information she could. She determined the time period for the original theater fabrication and the subsequent renovation through the public record filings for construction permits. This gave her a time frame within which to perform an extensive search of the archives for old missing persons cases. With her investigation narrowed by time period and females by age, she came down to five cases.
One of those had been declared a hoax. The young woman had eloped with an older man. Case closed. Two had turned into murder cases when the bodies were later found. One of those was still open. That left two cases. Becca made a note of the case numbers and submitted an electronic request to have the records pulled. Cases older than five years were archived in the bowels of the County Courthouse, not stored with the newer Evidence Unit on South Frio Street. It would take time to locate the boxes.
While she waited, Becca knew how to fill her time. GQ's dark eyes spurred her on. He had a name, and she'd find it. After leaving the sidewalk bistro, she walked the man's coffee cup back to the theater. A CSI tech bagged it and would process it for prints. And she obtained the recording of the rabble of onlookers outside the theater. She watched it several times, committing each face to memory. Yet she had to shake her head when she noticed that her mystery man had done a vanishing act. Cagey bastard.
"Guess you don't care for the limelight."
Luckily, the tech doing the recording backed up his work with a detailed listing of the license plates with the makes and models of all vehicles—GQ's license plate among them. She ran his tag through the Department of Motor Vehicles. According to DMV, the car was registered to Global Enterprises, a corporation she knew nothing about. She ran a check of the name against local businesses. Still nothing.
"Not what I expected," she muttered as she sat back in her desk chair.
But before she redirected her attention, Becca returned her focus to the ownership history of the Imperial Theatre.
"Let's see what's floating out in cyberspace." Moving to the edge of her seat, she popped her knuckles like a concert pianist.
Nearly oblivious to the ringing phones, conversations, and people traffic through the bullpen of the homicide division, she sat at her metal desk, fingers tapping her keyboard. She knew her first step would be the property ownership records. If she found the owner of the Imperial, she could zero in on her mystery man—killing two buzzards with one stone. In most cases, she would have hit pay dirt searching the county tax assessor's records, but nothing doing. Her research only produced the name of a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and restoration of historic buildings for cultural use. She had to dig deeper, back to the original owner.
On a lark, she keyed the Imperial Theatre and San Antonio into an Internet search engine.
"Thank God and Al Gore for the Internet." She smiled, bathed in the pale light off her computer monitor. She scored 360,000 records.
Becca tried a couple of other queries and a more advanced search to fine-tune the hits. Eventually, her persistence paid off.
"Bingo."
An old newspaper archive contained an article announcing the dedication of the Imperial as a historic building, complete with photographs taken at the front of the structure. A bright sunny day. With a twinge of deja vu, Becca remembered reading the article when it was first published. Less than a year ago, the mayor and the elite of San Antonio had gathered for the occasion. Even though the photo held many smiling faces in the foreground, one set of dark eyes lurked in the shadows of the theater entrance, behind the key players. And he looked anything but happy.
No name for her mystery man in the caption, but she was one step closer to identifying him. Becca searched the article for any name construed as a benefactor "affiliated" with the property.
"Gotcha. I'd say ownership constitutes an affiliation, wouldn't you, Mr. Crypto?" Her success produced a smile that faded when she read the name of the theater owner aloud. "Hunter Cavanaugh. Thanks for the warning, Slick. When you said he was powerful and nasty, you weren't kidding."
Cavanaugh had a reputation
. Good and bad. On the surface, he appeared to be a high-powered member of the community with far-reaching political ties. She had no idea the extent of those connections. Somehow, Cavanaugh had parlayed old family money into an international conglomerate focused on the travel industry. A sudden turn of good fortune? Becca stared at the archived photo displayed on the computer monitor, looking at the eyes of Hunter Cavanaugh.
"I'm not a big fan of coincidence."
Since Cavanaugh donated the theater to a nonprofit charity, shifting title to another organization, her insurance fraud angle bit the dust. Of course, she had to confirm the details, but the man wasn't exactly hurting for cash either.
This time, Becca did a search on Global Enterprises and the name Cavanaugh. She scored numerous hits, printing out press releases, financial documents, and newspaper articles on a merger between Cavanaugh's travel company and Global Enterprises, almost three years ago.
"What do we have here?"
She knitted her brow and lowered her chin, staring at her computer screen. Once again, a familiar face skulked in the background of another newspaper photo. Eyes she would know anywhere. Only this time, Cavanaugh was nowhere in sight. Another suit posed in the foreground.
"You sure get around, Slick."
After skimming the article, she printed the material and reread the pages. On the surface, the New-York-based Global Enterprises invested in resorts abroad, with some domestic locations. On paper, the merger made sense. But when the article told of how the corporate head, Joseph Rivera, had been accused of racketeering, Becca smelled money laundering. Rivera's case had been dismissed on a technicality, no doubt through the efforts of high-priced legal help. The name Rivera didn't ring a bell, but after reading the story, she came to one conclusion. GQ had connections to the mob. With his ties to the heavy hitters of New York as well as to Cavanaugh, her gut told her he might be pulling double duty. Could he be working for more than one boss?
At first, Becca saw Cavanaugh's link to mob money as one of the reasons his travel business diversified and flourished. But from what she knew about Cavanaugh, the man had too big an ego. He wouldn't stand for a spy operating in his midst or welcome any interference from an outside source in the form of someone he deemed lower on the food chain. Cavanaugh might be fueling the engines of the Mafia train with GQ on board for the ride, doing his dirty work. That kind of combo was dangerous enough, but she didn't want to get caught in the middle of a turf war. Something didn't add up.
The news story made her stomach lurch for another reason. A personal one. How could she have been so wrong about her mystery man? She had sensed the danger but overlooked it, finding something redeeming in his eyes. She had to admit it. A more powerful urge had overruled her better judgment. The man rattled her, touched her in a way she had never experienced. If he stood in her way, could she ignore her personal feelings to do her job?
"Only one way to find out." Becca heaved a sigh. When her desk phone rang, she answered, "Montgomery."
"Hey, Rebecca." She recognized the voice of Sam Hastings, her CSI guy. "Those fingerprints on the coffee cup? We ran 'em against NCIC without any luck, but through AFIS, we got a hit off firearms registration. Your boy's name is Diego Galvan and he's got a permit to carry concealed in Texas."
The FBI's National Crime Information Center contained computerized criminal justice information, available to law enforcement twenty-four/seven. And the state's Automated Fingerprint Indexing System had been created to store fingerprints from a myriad of sources, from the private to public sector. AFIS also linked with a national repository system maintained by the FBI, allowing law enforcement to perform national criminal record searches—all in the spirit of cooperation. But not every state participated in the effort. So even with the high-tech assistance, criminals still fell through the crack in this multijurisdictional computerized world. Becca made a note of Galvan's name in her casebook.
"I'll send over my findings. Anything else you need on this?" Sam asked.
As Becca listened, her request for the archived missing persons cases arrived. Two boxes were shoved onto a corner of her desk. After adding her initials to a receipt log, she smiled and waved to the delivery kid, keeping up her end of the conversation.
"No. Thanks for the quick turnaround. I'll do a little more digging on my own. Later."
Now she had a name. Becca would cross-check it against other data sources to get a better picture of the man. She knew her search for Diego Galvan should take a backseat to the old case files, but it had become personal—and she knew it. Instead of going through the boxes right away, she got back on her computer, hoping to find greater insight into her mystery man. An hour later, she was no closer to answers.
"Damn it!" Another blind alley in her research into Galvan's background.
Becca justified the search as part of the case, but in her heart, she knew the truth. His dark eyes haunted her, dared her to dig deeper. The more Galvan eluded her, the more she dug, letting her stubborn streak get the better of her.
A New Jersey driver's license and two credit cards went back six years or so. Prior to that, he was a ghost. Becca peeled away layer after layer, and still she couldn't get a glimpse of any pertinent history. His tax records might reveal something, but that would take time to retrieve and a warrant signed by a federal judge. For a person of interest, she didn't have enough reason to justify the intrusion into his background, so she remained focused on the data at hand. No traffic citations or warrants outstanding. She had already learned that his current vehicle was registered in the name of Global Enterprises, but so was his insurance. Nothing to trace there. And to add to her frustration, for every record she uncovered, Becca found a different post office box.
The guy lived in plain sight but off the grid.
"You're good, Diego. Real good. Did Cavanaugh finance your disappearing act or someone else? Top-notch stuff."
After running his prints without a hit, Becca had been stymied. His lack of a criminal record surprised her the most. She felt certain he had spent some quality time at the gray bar hotel, maybe under a different name. A jaded cop's instincts. But she came up empty.
"You haven't beaten me yet, Galvan," she muttered. "But I've almost got enough to pay a call on your benefactor, Hunter Cavanaugh."
Still, a persistent question lingered in her mind. What was the purpose of Diego Galvan's warning against Cavanaugh? He had known who she was and staged the whole thing, right down to her late-afternoon addiction to cappuccino with cinnamon. A part of her hoped he might make an interesting ally, if it came to it. But she knew better than to be so gullible. In her line of work, trust had to be earned.
Heading north on I-10, Diego Galvan watched the late-afternoon sun glisten on the surface of a man-made lake at the gated entrance to The Dominion, a prestigious residential area located northwest of San Antonio. Mist from a shooting fountain cast a rainbow across a bridge made of Cantera stone. A beautiful setting, but one he'd grown to resent. Seeing it meant he was twenty minutes from the private estate of Hunter Cavanaugh. He tightened his jaw as his stomach churned. No matter how idyllic the scene, he reacted with his usual conditioned reflex, like one of Pavlov's dogs at the ring of a bell.
Get over it. You asked for this gig.
On the last leg of the trip, vast ranchlands stretched across the interstate, bordered by mesquite trees, sagebrush, and miles of barbed wire. Cattle lolled by flowing creeks, with abandoned hay bales weathering in the sun—the hill country of Texas in all its glory. But as a hawk made lazy swirls in a cloudless sky, held aloft by an updraft, Diego found himself envious of the bird's freedom. It reminded him of the police detective who'd seen through his subterfuge.
He knew by his outward appearance, most people would see affluence and success. The carefully orchestrated facade, conjured up by Cavanaugh, reflected more on him than Diego. Yet the colorful plumage of the rooster hadn't fooled Detective Rebecca Montgomery. Although he'd been pleased by her intellect, h
er honest insight had been an embarrassment. And he was to blame for that.
"Very perceptive, Rebecca." Saying her name aloud summoned a memory of her face—spirited eyes, flawless skin, and lips that aroused his blood even now.
Don't go there, Galvan. The woman deserves better.
Jaw tight and eyes glued on the road ahead, Diego gripped the steering wheel of the Mercedes. He had taken the long way home, needing time to think. Rebecca's words stung like tequila poured into a gaping wound with a lime-and-salt chaser. If she hadn't been dead-on with her assessment, he might have laughed it off.
"Looks like he's made a hefty down payment on his investment," she had said.
The attractive detective sized him up as a man who could be bought. Diego couldn't argue the point. Her sentiments reflected the dread in his own gut. The wealth surrounding him had taken some time to get used to. But now, the attached strings weighed heavy—an anchor around his neck. Somewhere along the way, he had turned a blind eye to his conscience, in complete denial of how much he'd changed over the years. Every day, a darker side of him emerged—and he had yet to draw the line. He'd convinced himself he couldn't afford to. So much had changed, Diego wasn't sure he could find his way back from the precipice. His only way out might involve a treacherous leap.
He turned onto Citadel Drive, minutes from the elaborate front gates of the Cavanaugh estate. A mantle of oak trees gave an air of timelessness to the shaded driveway dappled by the sun. His cell phone rang as he picked up speed. Diego reached into the pocket of his suit and glanced at the display.
With a grimace, he answered. "Galvan."
"I expected a report before now." Low and intimate, the voice of Hunter Cavanaugh raised the hair on the back of his neck. "Where are you?"
He thought for a moment and said what came to mind.
"I get paid to be thorough . . . not to report to you every five minutes like some mindless sycophant." One day, Diego knew his sarcasm would get him killed. And it would probably be at the hands of the man on the other end of the line. With reluctance, he responded to the question. "I'll be there in five minutes."
