A Trace of Hope

by Blake Pierce

  Keri pulled into the short gravel driveway just off the road and hopped out. She walked slowly up to the security gate, taking in the impressive privacy measures Cave had employed. The house might not be massive but the safety precautions were. The gate itself was wrought-iron and easily fifteen feet high, with curled spikes that pointed outward toward the street.

  A twenty-foot, ivy-covered stone wall surrounded the property as far as the eye could see, with what appeared to be three additional feet of electrified fencing above that. She counted at least five cameras mounted on the walls and attached to high branches of several trees just inside the property.

  Keri pushed the “call” button on the keypad next to the gate and waited.

  “May I help you?” a middle-aged female voice asked.

  “Yes, Keri Locke here to see Jackson Cave.”

  “Does Mr. Cave know you’re coming, Ms. Locke?” the voice asked.

  “I doubt it,” Keri said. “But I suspect he’ll still be willing to see me.”

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Keri stood by the gate for another thirty seconds, staring at the ocean in the distance, listening to the wind whistle through the leaves of the trees. She hadn’t seen a single car pass by in the time she’d been there.

  “Please come in,” the voice finally said as the heavy gate slowly creaked open.

  Keri drove her car just inside the gate, parked, and walked toward the front door of the bungalow. As she got closer, she saw that her initial impression of the place had been wrong.

  What had appeared to be an unassuming one-story cottage on a cliff overlooking the Pacific was actually a multi-tiered home built into the cliff itself. From where she stood, she could see at least three floors and an indoor/outdoor pool, but it was possible there were even more below.

  The front door opened and Jackson Cave stepped out to greet her. Apparently he was just finishing up a call as he was putting his phone in his in pants pocket. It was not quite 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning and yet he looked immaculate. His thick black hair, with sunglasses nestled softly in it, was already slickly combed back like he was channeling Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

  He wore tight, light blue jeans, a black sweater rolled up to his elbows to reveal his wiry, tanned forearms, and laceless black loafers. He smiled at her with his disturbingly white teeth, which made his over-bronzed face seem even more unnatural. His smile always came across as a sneer but that might just have been for her. Maybe he had a more genuine smile for other people. Somehow she doubted it.

  “Detective Locke,” he said, spreading his arms wide in welcome, “had I known you’d be stopping by, I would have prepared breakfast.”

  His voice dripped with all its usual smarm, but she noticed something she rarely saw in his piercing blue eyes—uncertainty. He didn’t have any idea why she was here. She had him off-balance.

  She was tempted to come back at him with a snarky reply. It was her default position. She was as good at getting under his skin as he was at infuriating her. But that wasn’t the goal today. She needed to appeal to, if not his sympathy, at least his self-interest.

  She needed to persuade him that if he was able to return Evie to her, she would leave him be. She needed to convince him that she was not his enemy; that she was not, as Anderson had put it, the “bad guy.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cave,” she said, trying to sound pleasant but not unctuous. “That’s very kind. But I actually already ate—pounded back two coffees too.”

  “Ah, well come in then,” he said, visibly surprised by her innocuous reply. He’d clearly been expecting something more biting. “You can tell me what brought you so far west so early on a weekend morning.”

  He held the door open for her and she stepped inside a vast living room that was as warm and welcoming as Cave was not. The Polynesian-themed design with bamboo-style paneling was charming, as was the wicker-inspired furniture and the open indoor fire pit. The entire room was windowed with views of the ocean and mountains in every direction.

  “This place is gorgeous,” she marveled despite herself.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I designed it in conjunction with a hotel magnate client from Fiji. He builds private estates in this style over there. This is a hut to him.”

  “If I were you, I’d live here all the time,” Keri said, meaning it.

  “Bit of a commute though,” he said, unable to keep the sarcasm from dripping into his voice.

  Keri bit back the urge to suggest he just have a helipad built. It would be counterproductive and it was possible he already had. Instead, she looked around the parts of the house that were visible. The kitchen was massive, with a center island larger than her entire apartment kitchen. Part of a dining room could be seen off in a corner with a table that looked to be made of marble.

  She saw a hallway that must have led back to the bedroom wing and thought she heard voices coming from that direction. A Hispanic woman in her forties with her hair tied back in a bun opened a sliding door and stepped inside from the small deck.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked, and Keri recognized the voice from the gate intercom.

  “No thank you. I’m good.”

  She smiled and then turned to Cave.

  “Mr. Cave, I was going to go back and make sure your other guest is doing all right?”

  “That’s fine, Gracie,” he said as she headed for the hallway. He turned to Keri. “Please sit down. I had a client over for dinner last night. It got late so I let him stay in the guest room overnight. I think he’s just starting to stir.”

  “Ah, I thought I heard something back there,” she said as she sat in one of the wicker chairs.

  “He might have been talking in his sleep. Or maybe it was his stomach growling.”

  He cackled at that last line. Keri didn’t get it. He seemed to realize he had breached the decorum of the moment and snapped back into character almost immediately.

  “Well, Detective Locke,” he said, more reserved now as he sat down opposite her, “I have to say, this has been our least…combative conversation in recent memory. Care to end the suspense and tell me why we’re both minding our P’s and Q’s?”

  Keri took a deep breath.

  This is it. The sink or swim moment. Make it a good one, Keri.

  “Okay, Mr. Cave. I’m going to tell you why I’m here. But when I do, I’d like you to open yourself up to the possibility that what I’m saying is true, that my intentions are genuine, and that I don’t have any kind of angle.”

  “Are you suggesting, Detective Locke, that you haven’t always been forthright in your dealings with me?” he asked almost coquettishly, leaning in. He clearly didn’t buy what she was selling.

  “I am. I’m telling you that I haven’t always been straight with you, just as you haven’t always been totally honest with me. We’ve been playing this game for a while, now, Jackson. But it’s a really dangerous game. And I’m tired of playing. I just want to go home. And here’s the thing. I want to take my little girl home with me.”

  Cave pulled back suddenly at the words “little girl” and the playful smile disappeared from his lips.

  “I have no idea what you’re talkin…” he started but Keri held up her hand.

  “It’s okay,” she said, making sure to keep her voice calm and free of blame. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I think we got off on the wrong foot way back when. You represented Alan Pachanga, a child abductor who had kidnapped a missing girl I was after. As you know, my daughter, Evie, was abducted as well.”

  Cave flinched but didn’t speak. Keri considered that a good sign and continued before he changed his mind.

  “And I think I poured all my vitriol about losing her onto you because you were defending a man who kidnapped children and my daughter was kidnapped. That wasn’t fair to you. You were just doing your job, after all. I think I fixated on you for a while as being part of my problem, blaming you for everything that was going wrong in my
life, when it wasn’t really about you at all. You were just someone to project my own fears and frustrations on, you know?”

  Cave settled back into his chair, letting her words sink in. The creak of the wicker was almost comforting as it broke what was otherwise complete silence. He was squinting at her, almost as if there was a glare coming off her. Keri didn’t know what to make of it. Finally he spoke.

  “I have to say, this comes as a surprise to me, Detective,” he said, his voice a mixture of suspicion and bewilderment. “And you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical. After all, for the last year, you’ve been hounding me, interfering with my business, casting aspersions on my character. I have reason to believe you may have even committed a crime by breaking into my offices and stealing confidential files. And now you’re telling me that you’ve had this epiphany and that you see that I’m not really so bad and you’ve misjudged me?”

  “No, I wouldn’t go that far,” Keri admitted. “We’re laying our cards on the table here, right, Jackson? I don’t think I’ve misjudged you. I know the kind of people you work for and I’m not a fan. I know what your business is. We can at least be honest with each other about that. What I’m saying is the fact that you defend people I find reprehensible doesn’t mean you are responsible for the abduction of my daughter or anything that’s happened to her since. They can be separate things. And I want you to know that I lost sight of that for a while. But I see it now.”

  “And what gave you this sudden insight?’ he asked, acid-tongued, not realizing that even asking the question suggested vulnerability.

  Keri took another deep breath. This was her last card to play. If it didn’t work, if he didn’t fold, she feared she was done for.

  “Coy Trembley,” she said quietly.

  “Who?” he asked, though his eyes grew wide with recognition.

  “Your half-brother, Coy Trembley.”

  “How do you know about him?” he demanded, looking around the empty room of his secluded mountain retreat as if someone might overhear.

  “I was doing research on you and I came across the case. I figured out what happened, Jackson. Once I understood that case, the accusations he faced, what ultimately happened to him, it made it a lot easier for me to understand why you do what you do.”

  “You’re working me,” he said unconvincingly.

  “No, Jackson. I get it. I understand that you saw your brother wrongfully accused of a terrible crime and decided to dedicate yourself to ensuring that didn’t happen to other people. As the mother of an abducted girl, I hope you realize that not all those who are accused are innocent. But I also have to accept that you’re doing this because, in and among the guilty, are some innocents. And there aren’t very many people willing to put themselves on the line to defend them. You’re one of those people, Jackson. And I respect that, even though it’s hard. Sometimes it’s really hard, especially when the guilty go free. You can see why it’s hard for me, right?”

  “I know it can’t have been easy for you all these years,” he conceded.

  “Thank you for that,” she said. “I think that’s the first step here—for us to stop seeing each other as the enemy. I mean, sure, professionally, we’re on opposite sides. But I had to stop thinking of you—the person, Jackson—as the bad guy and just start seeing you as a man doing his job to the best of his ability.”

  “I am trying to do my job,” he said.

  “I know that. I just lost sight of it for a while. And I hope that you can stop seeing me as the bad guy. I’m not your enemy. I don’t want to bring you down. I accept that I will win some cases and lose some and that you and your law firm will exist independent of that. My focus is no longer going to be on you. Hell, I’m not even sure I’m going to stay on the force much longer.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The truth is, I’m kind of burned out, Jackson. I did this all to help people, sure. But it was also a way to find my daughter. If I could just do that, the rest of it would just kind of fade away, you know. Because I know she’s still out there and all I want is to be with her again. Part of me would like to try to go back to just being a mom, making lunches and volunteering in art class. If I had that, being a cop wouldn’t seem so important anymore.”

  Cave looked at her closely. He seemed to be studying her. Beyond that, she couldn’t read his expression. She couldn’t tell if he believed her or not or if he even cared.

  “So what exactly is it you’re asking of me, Detective Locke?” he said.

  “I’m asking if you could put the word out. I know you have many clients who know many people. I’m hoping one of them might know where Evie is and might be willing to convey to whoever has her to simply drop her off at the closest precinct or bus station or whatever. I just want my daughter back. I won’t investigate who took her. I won’t open a case. Hell, I’ll even turn in my badge if that’ll make a difference. I’m asking you to please let people know that. Tell anyone you think might know anyone who knows anyone who knows anything about where she might be. Wouldn’t it be nice to be on the same side for once, Jackson?”

  A clatter from the hallway grabbed their attention. Gracie was assisting an obese man in his sixties wearing a robe far too small for him into the living room. His purple briefs were poking out below the belt and a bird’s nest of mottled chest hair was exposed above. He looked half-awake and hung over. At least now Keri understood Cave’s joke about the growling stomach.

  His small remaining tufts of gray hair stood up like mini-Mohawks atop his head. His face was ashen and he had deep creases in his face and multiple chins. His eyes were tiny black dots. He looked vaguely familiar. When he saw Keri, his eyes widened a bit and he made a clumsy attempt to cover himself up.

  “Detective Locke,” Cave said, assuming the vocal stylings of a dinner party host, “this is Herbert Wasson, the chairman of the Wasson Media Group. Herb, this is Detective Keri Locke of the LAPD.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Wasson mumbled. “Didn’t expect others.”

  “It’s all right,” Keri said. “I was just going anyway.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Cave said and they both stood up.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Keri said to Wasson as she headed toward the door.

  “Yeah,” the man replied. He seemed to want to say something else but couldn’t think of anything appropriate and instead plopped down on the loveseat with his legs splayed out.

  “Thank you for stopping by, Detective,” Cave said, now officially back in controlled mode.

  “Thanks for hearing me out, Jackson,” she said, trying to keep the personal connection alive. “And let’s both try to remember to see each other not as the enemy but as two people just trying to get by. I think it would lower both our blood pressures a lot, don’t you think?”

  “You’d be surprised what a consistent regimen of long-distance running can do for your blood pressure, Detective. I swear by it.”

  “I’ll keep that idea in mind,” Keri said as warmly as she could. “Thanks, Jackson. And please don’t forget what I said about reaching out to people you know. I’d really appreciate it. I’m just looking for a fresh start, you know?”

  “I know you are,” he replied, his voice even, his eyes cold. “Thanks again for stopping by, Detective.”

  “Please, call me Keri.”

  “Okay then. Now be careful heading back down the hill. Some of those turns are really sharp, Detective.”

  He closed the door before Keri could respond. As she walked back to her car one thing was clear. She hadn’t sold him. He still viewed her as the enemy. And her daughter was still destined to pay for it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Keri should have sensed something was wrong earlier.

  But she was lost in thought on the drive back down the hill. All she could think about was how Cave had called her “Detective” right after she’d said he could call her Keri. She thought of how his eyes had gone cold, as if he’d intentionally
squeezed the humanity out of them.

  As she navigated the sharp twists and turns of the switchback road, she wondered if she’d ever connected with any part of him, if there’d ever been a chance that he might return Evie to her. It had seemed for a half moment that he might. But then it was gone. And she was certain she’d never get that moment back. She refused to think about what that meant for her daughter.

  As she banked sharply left, Keri realized she was riding the gas way too hard and pumped the brakes. The speed limit sign read “20” and she’d been pushing forty, far too fast even when her head was clear. The car behind her slowed down too, as if chastened by her return to sanity.

  She looked farther in the distance of her rearview mirror but didn’t see Ray. That wasn’t a shock. It was hard to see too far back with all these hairpin turns. And she’d been going so fast that it would have been hard for him to keep up anyway. But the car behind her was doing a pretty decent job of it.

  And that’s when the feeling that something was off hit her. She looked at the car in the mirror again, and though she couldn’t place it, something about it felt familiar. It was scratching an itch in the back of her head that she just couldn’t quite reach.

  Now that she thought about it, it was also the only other car she’d seen on the road since she’d left Cave’s place. And there was the strange, simple fact that it was so close. Cars rode each other’s bumpers all the time in LA, even in the mountains. But this wasn’t that. The car behind her didn’t seem like it was riding close behind in an attempt to pass her. It seemed like it just wanted to stay close, to keep her in sight, to not lose her.

  Keri tried to get a good look at the driver but the sun visor was down and all she could tell was that the person was wearing black. She was surprised that whoever it was could even see out the front with the visor in the way.

  She banked hard right at the next curve and got a good look at the body of the car in her side view mirror. That’s when the itch in the back of her head tumbled to the center of her brain.