by Graham, Jan
“You said you had four working the case. What’s the other guy doing?”
“I’m running interference, tracking down the leak, feeding the enemy information I want them to have, and being the perfect boss to everyone else in my unit.”
Christian laughed as Trevor spoke. That was the second smile in as many minutes, and the man nearly made a joke.
“Well, you can have anyone from my team you need, within reason, of course. If you need to store information anywhere, I can clear a drawer in my filing cabinet in the office if you like. Other than that, is there anything else you think I can do at this stage?”
“Well, there is one thing. Even though Steve has been our main liaise with this woman so far, they have a bit of a, how shall I put it…tenuous relationship. She doesn’t trust him. Hell. She doesn’t trust anyone. So when he finds her, I need someone to offer her a deal she can’t refuse. Steve can’t do it. Apart from her distrust of him, he doesn’t have the rank. I can’t go because it’s too risky for her if I show up wherever we decide to hide her in case I’m followed.”
“Consider it done, just let me know when you need me. And if Steve needs backup at any stage, tell him I’m in the loop.” Christian looked at Trevor, who nodded in reply. “I’ll leave all contact up to you from this point. And as they say in the movies, this conversation never happened.”
Christian stood to leave. As he reached the door, Trevor spoke once more.
“Just before you go, I want to apologise for anything I may say within the next few minutes that you may consider offensive.”
As Christian walked from the office with a wry smile, he heard Trevor call out behind him.
“Don’t walk out on me you arrogant son of a bitch. You better believe I’m serious about this…keep your guys out of my way, Shore, or I’ll take you down with your fucking team.”
“Bite me, Duncan.” Christian didn’t look back. Instead, he raised his middle finger in a gesture of defiance as he walked away.
Trevor Duncan returned to his office, slamming the door for creative effect. He loved the fact that the whole wall shook, the tremor vibrating through the closer desks to his office. If anyone was in doubt that Trevor was pissed, the slam of the door should convince them he was for real. He only ever slammed the door when he was truly angry. Trevor knew Christian was a good man to have on his side. He was close to Steve, which would ensure that protecting his friend was a priority. And now that he had agreed to assist in convincing Angel to work with the police, he was sure she would agree. Christian was a damn good-looking bastard. Trevor was convinced that Christian could charm snakes if he needed to, so one scared woman should be no trouble at all.
He sat back down at his desk and went over the Intel he had been gathering on one of his team. Detective David Markham had raised some suspicion in recent weeks due to his conduct as part of the Hastings investigation. Trevor had told Christian he had no suspicions about who the spy in his ranks was, but in actual fact that had been a lie. Trevor consoled himself with his standard excuse of need to know, and Christian Shore didn’t need to know, at least not at the moment.
Trevor recalled the day about two weeks ago when he had pulled Steve Jax off Markham in the middle of the office. That was the day Trevor knew his whole case had gone to hell in a hand basket. It was a few days after Steve had returned from seeing Angel Wylde and she had given him Barnard’s hidden artillery, along with numerous other items to aid their investigation. It was also the same day information had been leaked to Hastings that Angel knew the house was bugged and was now working with the police to bring him down. Of course, the information was inaccurate. She hadn’t agreed to anything and had only just found out about the surveillance herself. The fact that the information was wrong hadn’t stopped an infuriated Adrian Hastings from placing a bounty on the woman’s head.
A quarter of a million dollars brought a lot of people interested in taking her out. It was also the day his undercover guys had to be sent into hiding, their covers blown by the same creep who had leaked the information about Angel.
Luckily Angel had disappeared by that stage. The fact she had told Steve she believed Hastings would kill her gave Trevor some hope that she was alive and had simply run for her life. But, the longer she was gone, the more his hope faded. He was tracking her bank accounts, and there had been no activity on them. The last transaction had taken place three days after she went away. It had been from a destination south of her address. That was all they had to go on. The cheap Toyota she had bought herself after Barnard’s death hadn’t been found, but she also had not accessed any of her bank accounts to buy fuel, either. Her disappearance was a mystery.
If nothing else, Steve losing his cool and attacking Markham had caused Trevor to look more closely at the detective, and had also given him the excuse to say Steve was now on leave for personal reasons. Attacking a colleague certainly showed a level of stress that could be interpreted as an officer needing a break. The more he found out about Markham, the more Trevor wished he had let Steve bust his face up some more before dragging him off the man. As it was, Markham had walked around with a black eye and busted lip for a good week after the fight.
Markham had conducted the initial search on Samuel Barnard’s home after the supposed suicide. He had come back with nothing, stating the house was thoroughly checked and was clean of anything incriminating. At the time Trevor had dismissed a few snide remarks from the uniform branch that had been used in the initial search. He regretted that he hadn’t questioned them further in relation to comments like “if that’s how the drug squad search suspect premises, no wonder there are never any arrests.” At the time Trevor had dismissed the comment. He had no reason to doubt Markham’s efficiency or his integrity to the team.
Months later, Steve Jax walks out of the same house with an arsenal that would make any terrorist nervous, mobile phones, a small amount of drugs, written documentation that Barnard was the main stockist for Hastings’s dealers in the local area, and the address of a lockup that Barnard had used. The lockup had more information about the drug family along with artworks, cash, and cars that Barnard had purchased presumably for his retirement. Much of the paperwork was now being used by Steve to try and track down further evidence against Hastings. Evidence that would hopefully secure that elusive bloody ledger that everyone wanted, but no one seemed to be able to find. Trevor and Steve hoped that by following the paper trail they now had for Barnard, they would also discover Angel along the way.
The ineffectual search on Barnard’s home had been the first nail in Markham’s coffin. The evidence Steve found had supplied more. Markham’s phone number had been in Barnard’s mobiles. One phone had even listed Markham’s mobile and direct office line numbers as “our man.” Trevor was now painstakingly checking both incoming and outgoing calls from Markham’s phone records to see if he could correlate calls on or close to dates where information was known to have been passed on. Having to do things without a large team was definitely a pain in the arse, but until he either nailed Markham as their leak or found out if anyone else was on Hastings’s payroll, Trevor had no other option but to take the slow road.
Trevor stared at the disposable mobile he had purchased to contact Steve Jax on. Dialling the number of Jax’s secure mobile, he decided that if nothing else, he could give Steve the good news that Christian could now be used as backup if he got into a bind and needed help. Trevor was concerned for Jax, not that he would let anyone in on his fears. The longer he kept him following the paper trail of Samuel Barnard, the more danger Steve was in. Eventually, someone would pass on information to Hastings that Steve was still working the case, and with little backup and no computerised paper trial at head office, that would put Steve in more danger than Trevor liked to think about.
“Yeah?” Steve’s voice boomed down the line.
“You don’t sound very happy. What’s wrong?” Trevor knew that Steve could be a grumpy shit, but he was usually more po
lite than “yeah” when he answered the phone.
“I’m sick. Some prick has given me the flu throughout my travels. I’m bunkered down in a lovely home that our friend Sam seems to have built and kept well hidden. I’m going through paperwork he has here. The only interesting thing so far is that the title deed to the house was changed to the name of Ms. Angel Wylde about three weeks before good old Sam kicked off. Her car is here by the way, the one she said was taken by Sam and never returned. I’m going to stay here a couple of days and see if she turns up. There isn’t any evidence she has been here so far, but I might get lucky. Besides, I need to stay quiet for a bit and recover.”
Steve sounded worn out, and Trevor contemplated bringing him back in.
“Do you need to come back in? How safe are you at the moment?” Trevor knew the answer he would get the moment he asked the question.
“I’m fine. The house is in the middle of the bush. I don’t think anyone connected with Hastings knows it exists, and it has a security system to die for. Not that it was on when I arrived, but I’ve activated it now. Anyone attempts to come in and I’ll be given plenty of warning to get out. So, what did you ring for?”
“Shore is now backup if you need help and I can’t be contacted.”
“Excellent, my man Christian, I hope he punched you fair in the face when you accused him of being our spy.” Steve seemed to sound happier as soon as the news was delivered.
“He understood why I had asked. No punches were thrown. And when you find our elusive lady, he will do all negotiations regarding the protection of her.”
“Bad move, man, once he sees her he’ll want to put her into his bed naked and never let her out of his sight. He has a way with the ladies, you know.” Steve’s laughter was both pleasant and surprising for Trevor.
“I’m sure he will remain professional at all times, Steve, and if he doesn’t, then you will be there to protect our young lady’s virtue.”
“She’s not a character out of a Jane Austen novel, Duncan, and Christian Shore is definitely no Mr. Darcy either. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Steve was still laughing when Trevor ended the call.
Steve reclined himself in the high-back leather office chair he had been snoozing in when Trevor had called. He felt like shit and had spent the last twenty-four hours rummaging around a house that looked like it could have been owned by a multimillionaire rather than a criminal. From all of Steve’s investigations in the area, and that mainly entailed chatting to the general store owner and chemist at the two-horse town not far from where the house was located, Steve felt fairly certain that Barnard was the only person to have used the house. No one seemed to be aware that Barnard had a woman in his life, and they had never seen a woman stay at the house. Steve had been told that Samuel’s father had lived in the place until twelve months ago, when he had passed away at the age of ninety-two. Apart from the father and Samuel, no one else had ever passed through town and gone to the home.
The other thing that Steve found interesting was that everyone knew Samuel as Sam Barnes. All the correspondence in the house confirmed that was the identity Barnard had used in relation to the house and its previous ownership. It certainly gave Steve more confirmation that this was Samuel Barnard’s safety net in case he ever needed to disappear. The store owner had described him as “good old Sam Barnes” and had regaled Steve with stories of Sam’s community spirit. Paying for the old community hall roof to be repaired, bringing his dad down to the Christmas street party every year, and supplying the beer for them all to enjoy.
Steve was sure they thought his laughter at the comments was due to the hilarity with which they spoke about Sam. In actual fact, Steve laughed at the image of a man who would cheerfully slit a man’s throat and bury him in a shallow grave being liked by a tiny country community. Of course, they knew and liked “good old Sam Barnes,” not the hired hit man Samuel Barnard.
The one thing that Steve liked about little communities such as this one was that everybody knew what was going on and who was in town at any time of the day and night. Gossip can be a bad thing, but in the case of a little country community like this, it very often kept people safe. Steve had been seen driving through town on his way to the house. By the time he returned to the little township, everyone had heard that there was someone at the big house on the hill, but it wasn’t Samuel. Steve easily passed for a young man that could be a relative of Samuel’s. He was tall and thin with long, sandy hair, and sharp, angular features with piercing blue eyes. A tattoo that was clearly visible covered his whole forearm. He rode a bike and displayed an air of confidence similar to the man he was asking about. Steve knew that on appearances alone, a tall, confident, tattooed, bike-riding young man would trigger enough similarities to ensure the belief that he and Samuel were related. And it did. Steve had been open and said he was looking for Sam, that the rest of the family were concerned they hadn’t heard from him for a few months. From that moment on he had no trouble being told any detail he asked about Samuel’s activities.
According to the people he conversed with, Sam Barnes hadn’t been around for a few months, which coincided with his death and backed up Angel’s complaint that he had taken her car and not returned it. The general store owner had waved to Sam about lunchtime as he rode out of town on the bike. He also said he expected him to return a few days later to return the bike to storage and pick up his car, another fact that corroborated Angel’s statement about Barnard’s usual behaviour. It also confirmed her insistence that someone must have been at the house to take Samuel’s bike. Steve was in the process of trying to track the bike, and he had found its new owner, who had bought it legitimately from a motorcycle dealership. In the past few months, the bike had also been in the hands of not only the dealership and its current owner but four different auction houses, none of which seemed to be able to lead him to whoever sold it in the first place. The paperwork was all signed by Barnard. Unfortunately, Barnard had been dead a week before the initial auction house bought it from him.
At the moment though, his priority was trying to crack the computer password for the laptop he had found in the study. The information it contained could be invaluable. He’d cracked the safe code expecting to find the ledger they were looking for but had only found a substantial amount of cash and paperwork along with deeds to the house. He thought about Angel. He hoped she was still alive. If she was, at least the house and cash would be some consolation for the way she had been treated over the five years. Barnard had owned her. Steve knew that they could claim the home didn’t have anything to do with Barnard. It had originally been owned by good old Sam Barnes who, for unknown and noncriminal reasons, had transferred ownership over to Angel. Hopefully that would be enough of a loophole for government officials not to claim it under proceeds of crime laws. Besides, Angel needed to be compensated for the crimes Samuel Barnard committed against her.
Steve had never felt guilty over anyone involved in a case before now. Angel had changed all that. Initially he had assumed that Angel was just a silly bimbo that had shacked up with Barnard and turned a blind eye to what he did for a living so that she didn’t have to pay for drugs anymore. The fact that he had learned she was clean and had no drug history had confused him at first, and then he had come to realise she never appeared in any of the dealings with Samuel’s associates. He had finally decided that maybe Angel, despite her nice, sweet outward appearance, had enjoyed the thrill of living with a bad boy, and the violence inflicted on her was simply part of their deal.
Once he went onto surveillance duty, he had to revise his opinion of her once again. Steve still had nightmares about the last time he had heard Barnard attack her. The terror in Angel’s voice as Barnard raped her, with what Steve now realised had been a shot gun, haunted him. DNA tests of the weapons Angel had given him had found vaginal fluid matching Angel’s DNA on and in the barrel of the gun. One of the knives, obviously the knife kept especially for her, had substantial traces of A
ngel’s blood all over it. The words of the other detectives on surveillance the night Angel had been raped still echoed in his head. “This sort of stuff happens often. We’ve been told not to interfere.”
Still, Steve had tried to interfere. It ended with him cuffed to a seat inside the van, and the next day a verbally violent altercation with his boss, Trevor Duncan, had taken place. Even though Trevor agreed he didn’t like what was happening to Angel, he maintained the stance that Angel was in the house of her own free will, and therefore what was being done to her did not have bearing on the case at hand. The surveillance could not be compromised simply because Angel did not leave her violent spouse. It wasn’t until Steve had given Trevor the ownership papers Barnard had for Angel that Duncan had changed his mind.
The fact that Steve’s hands had been tied did not sit well with him. In one of the last conversations he had with Angel she had told him she was on nobody’s side because they were all the same. The memory of her statement and the look of betrayal he had seen in her eyes made him sick to the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t blame her for the belief and distrust she had. The police hadn’t protected her. In fact, it appeared throughout her life, no one had ever helped her. Steve desperately needed to find Angel. At this point, he didn’t care if she testified for the police or not. He just needed to know she was alive, and he needed to make sure she was safe. If that meant using his contacts in the criminal world to get her a new identity and paying for her to go to another state or country, then he’d do it.
Steve had failed Angel on so many levels. He made no excuses for himself. He should have acted as soon as he realised what was going on. He was becoming increasingly consumed with the knowledge that he should have done something to help her. And if he didn’t find her, or God forbid, if she was dead, Steve knew the guilt of his inaction would slowly eat him alive.
