Don't Look for Me

by Mason Cross

  My phone was on the passenger seat of the Ford, and I glanced at it occasionally, impatient for a single bar to appear on the reception. It’s funny how quickly we’ve become accustomed to being contactable anytime, anywhere. It felt like I’d traveled back in time two or three decades. By the time my phone registered a sign of life, I was almost back to Iron City. I pulled off the road and got out of the car. It was full night now, the stars impossibly clear in a sky that seemed too big.

  I called Sarah’s number. She picked it up on the first ring.

  “She’s gone,” I said simply.

  “What do you mean gone? Gage still has her?”

  “No. Carol jumped him and got away.”

  Got away with something, too, I was betting. The something that Trenton Gage was interested in. Now that I had time to reflect on the previous hour, I could recall what I had seen in the little room in the derelict building. It was like a still picture in my mind’s eye. A doorway partially bricked up, broken through by the sledgehammer that lay on the floor nearby. A new safe in the old wall; its door open, its contents gone.

  That was why they had gone to Corinth, to hide the Ellison diamonds.

  “How far away are you?” From the urgency in her voice, I could tell Sarah had news of her own.

  I looked down the road ahead. I could make out the lights of the gas station on the edge of Iron City, no more than a mile away. “Not far.”

  “Then hang up now and get over here. There’s something you need to see.”

  Five minutes later, we were in Sarah’s room at the hotel. She handed me her tablet and for the second time in a few days, I found myself looking at a picture and wondering how much trouble it meant.

  The framing and low picture quality told me it had come from a store surveillance camera of some kind. Probably one of those cheap units that captures ten frames a second rather than full motion video. It showed a woman turned slightly away from the camera wearing dark glasses. She was wearing a coat and carrying a small bag. The color was oversaturated, so on the evidence here, the woman’s hair could have been either brown or red. I was betting on red.

  “I take it this is who I think it is?”

  “I’m pretty sure it is, yes.”

  I stared a little longer at the image. The background was hazy; looked like a sidewalk somewhere. That was about as specific as it was going to get, in terms of pinpointing a location. I turned my eyes from the screen to look at Sarah, waiting for her to elaborate.

  “You remember the cop who called earlier?”

  “Costigane, the guy investigating the Ellison job.”

  “He called me again tonight. He knows Freel is dead, they found the body a couple of hours ago. He pretty much ordered me back home. I had to agree to meet him tomorrow evening at six in Vegas. Anyway, before that, he started asking me some more questions about Freel. He told me about the investigation into the Ellison heist. How they were looking at Freel, and there were a lot of loose ends.”

  “There always are.”

  “That’s what he said. But one of the early lines of inquiry was this woman.”

  I motioned for her to go on. I had a bad feeling about what was coming.

  “When they looked back at the security tapes, they found the same woman hanging around the store on three separate occasions. She never goes in; she never buys anything. After they found Rayner Deakins and recovered most of the take, the investigation was deprioritized, so this was one of the loose ends that never got followed up.”

  That was enough. I didn’t need Sarah to continue. Everything began to click into place neatly, and I started to wonder why this hadn’t occurred to me before.

  “Blake, I know this sounds crazy, but ...”

  “It doesn’t sound crazy at all,” I said. I looked back at the image on the screen. The woman in the dark glasses was just close enough to the crappy quality security camera so that you could see her expression. It was entirely calm, composed. Unreadable.

  “Then you think she could have been involved? As in, not just because of Freel?”

  “She still is involved,” I said.

  47

  Gage had hurt his right arm in the fall, and everything below the elbow felt numb with occasional bursts of pins and needles. Not a break, but a trapped nerve, maybe. His fall had been broken by some empty wooden packing crates. The damage would have been far worse if he had hit the stone floor of the basement directly. The reduced function in his arm meant that it took Gage a while to break through the sealed basement door. By the time he got back up to ground level, Carol’s friend Blake was long gone.

  He touched the rapidly-swelling bruise on the side of his head and winced. Despite the sudden reversal of his fortunes, he thought the trip hadn’t been a total loss. Now he knew exactly why Walter and his men had wanted to track down Freel, and he knew this job was more than worth his while. Earlier on, after he had killed Freel, he had harbored thoughts of cutting his losses and moving on. The revelation of what had been in the safe had made him very glad he had stayed the course. From what he remembered of the coverage of the Ellison heist, much of the take had been recovered, but what was missing was valued in millions. Enough for a new start. Enough for a lot of new starts. He understood now why McKinney, and Freel, and then Carol had risked so much to keep the secret. A sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, and then some.

  And Carol had outdone her late husband and his friend. Not only had she stayed alive, she had used Gage to retrieve the diamonds. He had underestimated her, that was for sure, but she had required a good deal of luck. Had it not been for the intervention of the guy who called himself Blake, she would never have gotten the drop on him. Who the hell was he? A friend, according to him; merely somebody she used to know according to her. Whoever he was, he didn’t know about the diamonds. He had given that away—he was only interested in finding Carol. Gage didn’t know why. Maybe she had stolen something from him, too. And then he remembered the concern in his voice inside the old building. The threat he had made over the phone. Ex-boyfriend perhaps. The jealous type.

  Gage touched a finger to the cut at the side of his head. The bleeding had stopped, and his arm was working okay through the numbness, but right now he needed painkillers and some rest. Both would have to wait a while. He made his way to the edge of town, stepped onto the broken asphalt of the highway, and started walking.

  48

  Like an idiot, I hadn’t even considered the possibility Carol had been lying to me not just to protect Freel, but herself as well. She didn’t just know or suspect something about Freel and the heist, she knew it all. She knew exactly where the diamonds were stashed, and somehow she had suckered Trenton Gage into taking her right to them. Helped along the way by yours truly.

  I thought back to the first time I had laid eyes on Carol Langford, in the lobby of a midtown skyscraper, en route to a meeting with her boss. She had been harassed and abrupt, but I had immediately liked her. Sure, there was an immediate physical attraction, but it was more than that. I had instantly liked her as a person. She had been ... good. As simple and as complicated as that. I tried to reconcile this with the woman who I now realized had ripped off a corporate jeweler, shrugged off the murders of her partner and husband, and then sucker-punched a cold-eyed killer who looked like he was a missing part of Mount Rushmore. I didn’t know whether to feel shocked or impressed.

  I could tell Sarah was going through the same process, as she stared at the picture of Carol from the security footage.

  “Here’s what I think happened,” I said. “Carol and Freel were involved in the heist, that’s pretty obvious. That’s why those men came after them. Not because Freel was a witness, but because Carol and Freel were part of the gang, and they ripped off part of the take. The rest of it has been recovered. The only thing left is two million dollars’ worth of loose diamonds, which we can be pretty sure is what they stashed in Corinth.”

  Sarah didn’t say anything for a while. She shoo
k her head.

  “I can’t believe that. Maybe it’s ...”

  “A coincidence?”

  She grimaced. “No, not a coincidence. Maybe she didn’t know about Freel’s involvement. Or what if Costigane is wrong about Freel, or was trying to railroad him? What if he witnessed something to do with the job and the people involved knew about it? That would explain why they ran, why this guy was looking for them.”

  “But it wouldn’t explain why they were quite so keen to track them down. The single suspect the police found is dead, and the trail has gone cold on the rest of the diamonds. Why pay a professional to stir up trouble? You would just as likely force them into going to the cops.” It was my turn to shake my head. “No, Freel and Carol took the diamonds. It explains why they came here, why they stopped in Corinth. And it fits with what Gage said: Carol took something. Something he was interested in.”

  “It just ... it doesn’t fit with the Carol I know. Knew.”

  After a moment, I said quietly: “You mean the Rebecca you knew?”

  “That’s not the point,” she said sharply. But I thought it was exactly the point.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. I understood her reaction. But at the same time I knew that if it hadn’t been for my personal connection with Carol, I would have started thinking along these lines much earlier.

  “Okay, so it’s a theory,” she admitted after a moment. “If you’re right, maybe they realized somebody was closing in on them back in Summerlin and that’s why they left.” She puffed her cheeks up and blew out in bemusement. “I guess you never really know what’s going on next door, huh?”

  “This is why I don’t like to have neighbors,” I said. “Sarah, we have to find her. She’s in deep and unless we can get her out of this ...”

  I didn’t finish. I didn’t need to.

  “Okay,” Sarah said after a minute. “For the sake of argument let’s say you’re right. Carol—or Rebecca, or Lara freaking Croft, or whatever her name really is—is some kind of master criminal, and now she’s on the run with a couple of million bucks’ worth of diamonds. In that case, you’re right, we need to find her and talk to her. But where would she go now?”

  I got up and paced the room while I considered Sarah’s question. I was relieved to be focusing on an area where I was more comfortable: working out where someone in a certain situation might go under a given set of circumstances is my bread and butter.

  “Well, that’s what makes things interesting. If she has the diamonds, she’s going to be easier for us to find.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Before, we had no real idea why she was running, or what kind of resources she had.”

  “Exactly. Now she has unlimited resources. She’ll be impossible to find.”

  “No, her resources are very limited indeed right now.”

  “Two million bucks? I should be so limited.”

  I grinned. “You think so? When was the last time you tried to buy a house with a bag of diamonds? Or a plane ticket. Or a Big Mac.”

  She slapped a palm off her head. I sympathized. We were both playing catch-up here. “She needs to sell the diamonds quickly.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “She needs a fence, and not just any fence. A professional operation, big enough to deal with the volume and experienced enough to be comfortable with the risk. But Gage showing up wasn’t exactly plan A, even though they anticipated the possibility. They hid the take from Ellison in Corinth so it would be safe. I’m guessing they knew there was a real danger someone would track them down.”

  Sarah was nodding. “So they hid the diamonds, then took the place down in Quarter. They probably thought they could wait until the heat was off, until they felt safe, and then go back for them. But that’s ail changed now. Carol isn’t going to be able to get top dollar for them anymore. She just needs to move them for the best price she can get.” She paused and then shook her head at the absurdity of it. I knew what she was thinking. She had known Carol for months, spoken to her every day, and had never once suspected what was going on.

  She shook her head. “It’s too risky. She’ll go to ground again, wait until things settle down.”

  “No,” I said. “She won’t want to risk hiding them again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Two reasons. First, Gage is on her trail, and he won’t give up while he knows she has the diamonds. He’ll find her again. I know that from spending five minutes with him, and she had a lot longer in his company, so she knows it too. Either she gives him what he wants, or she offloads the reason he’s looking for her and gets clear. The second reason is more psychological. She came very close to losing it all tonight. She’ll take less than they’re worth rather than risking losing them again. She knows the longer she hangs on to them, the thinner her luck wears. Like Freel—his luck wore out yesterday.”

  Sarah’s mouth dropped open and I realized she knew something I didn’t.

  “She doesn’t want to be left empty-handed,” she said, as though to herself.

  “What?”

  In answer, she got up and retrieved the laptop we had taken from Freel’s house. ‘I completely forgot about it after Costigane called, but I found something else, and it makes a lot more sense now.”

  Thirty seconds later, Sarah was scrolling through the emails she had recovered earlier in the day. She opened the message she was looking for and turned the laptop to me so I could read it.

  Come to the new place, noon on Friday. Not empty-handed.

  FD

  “They were setting up an exchange. This must be the guy who’s buying the diamonds,” Sarah said. “It’s just a pity we don’t have a name or an address. Freel obviously would have known where ‘the new place’ was.”

  “I can’t do anything about a name,” I said, “but maybe we could do something about the other thing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If they were very careful, this won’t work. But if people were careful all the time, I would be out of a job.”

  I had made use of this little trick before. The information you see in the common-or-garden email communication is just the tip of the iceberg. Every email contains a header with details of the routing of the message and the original IP address. The email from “Vegas Office” was no exception. The metadata quickly told me that the email had indeed originated in Las Vegas, and gave me the ISP the sender used.

  I opened another browser window to access a tracing widget, and copied and pasted the relevant lines of code from the email, holding my breath. A second later, I was looking at an address.

  122 Wilston Street, Las Vegas.

  When I searched for the location, it showed a building in downtown Vegas home to a list of small businesses. On the third floor was a business called “FDC Partners.” There were no details anywhere about what FDC partners did.

  Sarah and I exchanged a glance.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “Something obviously spooked Freel last night and he set this meeting up. It all comes down to whether Carol knew about the meeting. If she did, we have a pretty good idea of where she’s going to be at noon tomorrow. If she didn’t, we still have to assume she needs to cash in, and maybe this is the guy she’ll contact. Either way, she’s going back to Vegas.”

  “You don’t think that would be too risky? The people she and Freel double-crossed are probably back there. To say nothing of the police.”

  “That could be an advantage. They won’t expect her to come back.”

  “But still, it’s like walking into the lion’s den.”

  “I’ve had to catch up quick, just like you,” I said. “I think the woman who we’re discussing wouldn’t shy away from a little risk. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think the woman I knew six years ago would, either.”

  “It’s a high stakes gamble for her. And for us, betting everything on her going back there. If you’re wrong, we may lose our chance forever.”

&n
bsp; “You’re right. It is a gamble. But if we’re going to gamble, I guess we picked the right town.”

  49

  “So how do we find her?” Sarah asked. “I mean, even if you’re right about where’s she’s going, Las Vegas isn’t exactly the kind of place where somebody new in town is going to stick out, you know?”

  Blake had opened up the map they had bought at Grady’s Rest Stop again, and had spread it across the floor. He was crouched down, gazing at the territory around them. “You’re right,” he said. “And we don’t have a lot of time. So that means we put Vegas to one side for a minute, and start with the one thing we absolutely know for sure.”

  “Oh good,” Sarah said drily. “There’s something ‘we’ know for sure now?”

  He looked up. “Your other friend in the police, not Detective Costigane. You think he’ll do us another favor?”

  Sarah folded her arms. “Kubler? What did you have in mind?”

  Blake got to his feet and looked around the room for something, stopping when his eyes alighted on a small notepad and pen on the bedside table. He grabbed the pen and sat on the edge of the bed. His hand hovered over the paper, clutching the pen. He closed his eyes tight.

  “What are you ...”

  She stopped talking when she realized Blake was concentrating hard on something. He reminded her of some hokey old black-and-white movie she had seen last month, the expression on the face of a medium summoning an ethereal presence at a séance. Was that what he was doing?

  And then his eyes opened and the pen hit the paper. He wrote something on the notepad with careful deliberation. When he was done, he ripped off the top sheet and handed it to her, and she saw that it was a license plate.

  “This is Gage’s car,” he said. “The Chrysler, the one she took.”