It was no surprise she’d ended up working for Hobbs. She was small and wiry and had the ability to get into a lot of tight spots, and she was already a thief. Despite her appearance at the moment, she had the looks to survive by moving from one bad relationship to another if she needed to. The odd time Tain had seen her when she’d been cleaned up he’d hardly recognized her.
“And they’re all involved with this? Bobby? Eddie? Kurdy?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t know about Kurdy. That day I saw the two girls, they’d sent me down for some cleaner. As soon as I saw them I grabbed what I needed and got out of there, but I dropped a jar on the stairs. Kurdy started comin’ down and Eddie lost it. I think he mighta beat him half to death, but Bobby stopped him.”
“You think Eddie didn’t want him to see the girls.”
“Not those ones. Kurdy, he’s got a thing for young girls.”
Tain had heard. “But you figure Bobby knows.”
Jenny shrugged. “Eddie does whatever Bobby tells him to. It’s always been that way, since they were kids. Thing is, seeing Eddie go at Kurdy like that, that was scary. Eddie was the kind of kid who tried to be cool but wasn’t, you know what I mean?” Her eyes had a faraway look for a moment. “I used to think he was a nerd, a real loser, but he coulda been real sweet. If it weren’t for Bobby. He wasn’t mean the way Bobby was.”
“Any chance you can find out more? Where they’re keeping them?”
She shrugged again. “I-I don’t know. I’ve only seen a few of them.”
“But the dates?”
“Eddie’d get real funny when they had one of the girls there. I guess ’cos I work with the other ones sometimes, they weren’t worried about me. Probably just didn’t want Kurdy touchin’ them, you know? But Eddie’d get edgy. I just kinda knew when they had a girl there.”
The waitress returned with the bill, and Tain reached for his wallet. As he put the money on the table, he looked at Jenny, still sneaking glances around the room, unable to let her guard down long enough to eat a simple breakfast.
“If it’s too much for you, Jenny, we can pull you out now.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ll get you out. See what we can do to set you up with a place. Vancouver. Victoria. Give you a fresh start.”
“But those girls…”
Tain looked her straight in the eye. “Jenny, you’ve done a brave thing. The crimes on Reserves are a huge problem, and we want to do anything we can to stop the drug trade. What you’ve told me should be enough to put a major trafficker out of business permanently. You deserve a second chance.”
The hard lines on her face softened and her eyes glistened with unshed tears. “But you said yourself, if I’m not there, they’ll work it out.”
Tain nodded.
“So I need to be there for at least a few more days.”
“Okay. But then we’ll talk about a new home, job training. Maybe college.”
Jenny offered him a wry smile. “Sometimes, you just gotta accept that not everyone’s meant for an easy life.”
He was tempted to say few were, but kept the comment to himself. “I know you’ve been trying to help us put a stop to this for a while now, and we’ve let you down. You never did say why you decided to talk. What was it, Jenny?”
She stood and paused a moment, then reached down and patted her stomach, then started walking toward the door. As Tain got up and followed her out, he wondered if Jenny would be strong enough to make a fresh start, strong enough to make a better life for herself and her child, or if she’d find herself caught in the cycle of prostitution and poverty that she’d been raised in forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Eighteen months ago
“The night of the raid, it all went bad.”
Tain’s voice drifted off. They’d been in the car for almost an hour, his story interspersed with long silences, but Ashlyn didn’t push him. She kept driving, waiting for him to tell her the rest.
“The trucks were by the book. Instead of pulling them off the road or holding off on the shipment, they dumped every bit of contraband they had and scheduled a clean load.
“Jenny wanted out after that, and at first, I worried about pulling her. We could guess they knew they had a leak, but we didn’t know if they knew who it was. If I did pull her out, they’d know it was her and they’d be out on the streets, free to try to track her down. And leaving her where she was had risks because I couldn’t figure out how they found out about the bust.” Tain shook his head. “I finally pulled her out.”
Ashlyn glanced in her side mirrors. They were all alone on a logging road that wove into the mountains a few miles out of town. She pulled the car over. “You did the right thing.”
Tain looked over at her. “Jenny jumped at the sound of someone sneezing three apartments over from hers. She couldn’t shake the fear. She didn’t know anybody. She’d spent so long thinking she’d never amount to anything, hearing her mother tell her she was useless.” He turned to look out the window. “She believed it. And she thought she’d spend the rest of her life waiting for them to show up.”
“So why not get it over with.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s what she thought.”
Ashlyn thought about what he’d told her. “It was Jenny’s tip that connected a group of missing girls. The bust went bad, but you pulled together the files and persuaded Sullivan to listen to you.”
Tain shook his head. His mouth opened, but then he closed it and didn’t speak.
“What happened?”
“I went to Summer. She talked to the press.”
“You mean, you told her you thought you knew where her sister was and nobody was investigating?”
He looked at her. “I let it slip. I had a lead. A lot of girls had gone missing, but now that there were a few white girls, we stood a chance of getting the funding for a proper investigation.”
Ashlyn closed her eyes. He’d poked the racial hornets’ nest himself.
“And ever since then you’ve been distancing yourself from the Native groups lobbying for answers.”
Tain stared straight ahead. “It’s an explanation, not an apology.”
She felt the corner of her mouth tug into a smile and looked down until she could straighten her face. What she’d come to expect from Tain was just that, and here he was, giving her more answers than she’d asked for, but she still didn’t know why. He wasn’t seeking her approval.
“I know you didn’t leak the information to the Native leaders.”
“How?”
“It’s still in your desk drawer.”
He turned to face her. “That’s what you were doing at the office this morning. How do you know I wasn’t waiting for things to cool down, or I didn’t make a new set of copies because you’d seen those ones?”
She paused. “Because I know who’s been leaking information to the Native leaders.”
Tain’s eyes widened. “Who? How?”
Ashlyn held up her hand. “You first. You fabricated the report of Jenny’s disappearance?”
“It was the only chance we had to protect her. If the men she’d been working with thought we believed she’d been abducted, maybe they wouldn’t try to track her down.”
“Or maybe they’d be more determined than ever to silence her. They’d know they didn’t have her.”
Tain leaned back in the seat, staring straight ahead. “I guess that’s what happened. It was a mistake.”
“But you thought it might throw them off. Make them think you were looking in the wrong direction.”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.
He’d tried to find a way to protect Jenny Johnson, whose disappearance was used to finally launch the task force. Winters had been following up, investigating. Tain’s former partner.
“What did Winters have to do with it?”
“He didn’t know.”
“But something happened?”
What he didn’t know was that she, thanks to the file she’d found in Nolan’s desk, already had most of the facts. What Tain was telling her merely hung the meat on the bones, connected the dots. She’d seen the pieces of the puzzle, but Tain had put them together in a way that made it all make sense.
“Winters was good. Nolan’s good too, not that I’ll admit it to him. I hid the information that connected the cases because Winters started to piece it together. He was reading up on the failed bust, and he started digging on the shipping company.
“One morning, he called and said he had something on Bobby Hobbs and he wanted to see how tough he was. It was the day I’d found out Jenny was back in town, and I was on my way to talk to her.
“At first, he was angry. He said it was just like me to never be there to back him up, while I left him to do God knows what.
“Then he blew it off and said not to worry about it, that Nolan was supposed to be starting that day and he’d take him instead.” Tain paused. “I should have talked him out of it. When I was on my way back to town, I saw Nolan outside the station, talking to Sullivan. I’d never even met him before, but I knew it was him, because of”—Tain’s face twisted for a second—“something I’d seen once. Different case. The way my gut twisted, I headed straight out for the shipping company.
“I found Winters’s car partway back to town. Someone had taken a shot at it, and when the bullet hit him he’d lost control.”
“Was there a search?” She didn’t remember hearing about the incident, and the attempted murder of a fellow officer was something every RCMP officer would know about.
Tain shook his head. “I called for an ambulance. Winters, he was in and out. All he said was they’d roughed him up. He passed out again before he could tell me who. It wasn’t until we got his car back to town and started going over it that we found the bullet, and by then it was too late to search the woods. I was worried about a neck injury, and I thought the blood was from hitting his head, so I didn’t move him, and I didn’t realize…
“The doctor confirmed that some of the injuries were from the car accident, but that there was pre-existing head trauma and indications he’d been kicked in the chest. Whatever happened out there, Winters barely got out alive.”
“And that still wasn’t enough to go after them?”
Tain shook his head. “When he came to, he didn’t remember what had happened. Sullivan thought Winters had been following up on a lead for my case, but Winters hadn’t told me anything. He didn’t have anything solid. Sure, Sullivan sent Campbell and Aiken out there. They asked if anyone had seen Winters, and they said no. They let them take a look around.”
“So it all looked clean, there was no proof, and Sullivan didn’t realize it connected to the task force investigation.” Ashlyn thought about that. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened.”
“No? You mean, like I can’t blame myself for what happened to Jenny?”
“We don’t know what happened to her.”
“You talked to Mrs. Wilson yourself.”
“She told me about Jenny in the cabin a few weeks ago, but she wouldn’t even tell me which of you Jenny had been talking to. I have no idea why she thought the body at the inn was Jenny’s. She didn’t give me any evidence, Tain.”
“She didn’t have to,” Tain said. “I saw the tattoo on the ankle. It wasn’t all burned off.”
Ashlyn frowned. “But there was no record of a tattoo in the file.”
Tain leaned back against the seat. “She’d gotten it a few months earlier. Only people who would have likely known would be Bobby and Eddie, and nobody questioned them. I saw it when I talked to her at the shack. A butterfly. ‘Something beautiful and free.’ That’s what she said.”
And short-lived.
“But…you didn’t ID her to Sullivan.”
“Somehow, they found out about the bust. The Native leaders started talking, and they knew things I hadn’t told Summer. There was a leak in the department, and we didn’t know who it was. The best chance we had of finding the leak was by withholding information and planting false leads and seeing what happened.”
“And the search warrants you were trying to get…”
“Blind Creek Inn and the staff building where Jenny lived.”
“But you had nothing more than an anonymous tip.”
“Nolan wouldn’t budge.”
“You’ve been working with Sullivan, still trying to find a way to take down the smuggling operation?”
Tain paused. “Yes. But that’s it. Just because it was my lead.”
“Does Sullivan know about Jenny?”
“Not that she wasn’t really missing.”
“Tain—”
“I went to Native groups to get funding to hide Jenny. I kept it all off the books.”
God, what a mess. He’d done everything he could think of to make sure nobody found out that Jenny had talked, and it had still gone horribly wrong.
“You never told Sullivan there was a link between the smuggling operation and the missing girls?”
“How could I? I didn’t have any proof.”
“What I don’t understand is, why did you tell me to go through the missingpersons files,” Ashlyn said.
“I couldn’t find them. You were spending most of your time in office, and it was the one place you were probably safe.”
“Did you know Nolan had them?”
Tain shook his head. “All I knew was that Nolan was suspicious about the task force, and after Winters got hurt on the job he started digging.”
“He found out you’d put together the names of the girls, and that someone was leaking information to Native leaders, put two and two together but came up with six.” Ashlyn thought about her first night in town, remembered the look on Tain’s face when he’d seen Nolan talking to Summer. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t trust him. Nolan was brought in after the investigation started. He doesn’t live here. He couldn’t have tipped anyone off about the failed bust.”
“I just thought it was better if people thought I was difficult, that I didn’t have any idea who was involved.”
“You didn’t want them to think you were getting close.”
He held up his hands and said, “Huh. Thing is, I’m still not close.” Tain looked at her. “I know Nolan’s not involved, but he’s still hiding something.”
Tain had put a lot of cards on the table, but she hadn’t offered him the answers she’d found. To his credit, he hadn’t pressed her. At a guess, he was feeling vulnerable and had reached out to the one person he knew was clean, who had nothing to hide.
When she looked up, he was watching her. She reached for the bag she’d tossed in the backseat and pulled out the files that she’d set on top.
After she found the one marked KAITLIN COLLINS she passed it to him and watched as he flipped it open and read it wordlessly. When he was finished he looked up at her.
“It doesn’t explain everything.”
Ashlyn reached into her pocket and removed the messages Constable Melissa Keith had left on her desk. “You called 911 the night of my accident. You know Nolan went to the Johnson house.”
“He’d been suspicious for a while and he’d started asking questions. If he’d been looking for the abductors instead of looking for the leak, he might have solved this already.”
“Not without the missing pieces,” Ashlyn said. “That day in the woods, when we found the first bodies. You tried to get rid of us.”
“To make sure you didn’t find anything that would lead you to Bobby Hobbs and Eddie Campbell.”
“But why, Tain? If we had the evidence we could have gone after them.”
“We still don’t know who leaked the information. If someone at the station heard, and they were involved…”
/>
It could jeopardize everything.
“Hell, for all I know they got spooked and that’s why they’ve been dumping bodies.”
She thought about what Keith had told her, about Nolan transferring to the task force before Tain.
“Nolan started after the main group, but before you did. Was he part of the team, or was he investigating the team?”
Tain paused. “I don’t know.”
“But you thought it was possible.” Ashlyn stared out the window for a moment. Tain hadn’t just tested the limb; he’d crawled all the way out onto it. His fate was in her hands. No matter what his reasons, he’d contributed to filing a false report and withheld pertinent information about an ongoing investigation from his supervising officer. “If he was investigating the team, it was Aiken, Campbell and Oliver he was looking at.”
Tain nodded. “He probably stirred it up with me so nobody would be suspicious.”
“You’d be the one they’d watch. You had the original lead on the smuggling.” She thought about what he’d said. Everything fit. It all made sense, except one thing. “Why tell me this now?”
Tain looked down at his lap and remained silent.
Ashlyn reached over and touched his arm. “The bullet in my dashboard. It wasn’t meant for me, was it?”
“I don’t think so.”
She reached over the seat and removed the other file she’d found in Nolan’s desk, the one she’d never dreamed of finding, and passed it to Tain.
“You need to read this.”
He took it from her silently and she watched as he opened the folder and started reading.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Eighteen months ago
Ashlyn parked in the driveway next to the cabin she was staying in and walked to the door, where she performed the automatic tasks of inserting key in lock, twisting the doorknob and entering the house. As she pulled off her shoes she heard a vehicle nearby and glanced out the window. Nolan had parked his Rodeo and was heading inside. Ashlyn left her shoes in the hallway, then walked down the short hall, tossed her coat on the kitchen counter and returned to the entrance. It wasn’t until she bent down to put her shoes on the shelf in the closet that she noticed the floor.
Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers) Page 26
