I nodded.
Jo had been here at the police department a lot more than I had lately. I avoided anything this loud and public as much as I could. It was a thousand times worse than the bar I’d just taken a beating in. People came and went; people waiting to be processed were shouting, and phones were ringing off the hook. People from all walks of life were in there, some waiting to be booked, some making complaints. Jo directed me back behind the desk where we waved our contract credentials to the desk sergeant before being buzzed through the door. We walked down the hall towards the holding and interrogation areas.
The district that Susan was in wasn’t the largest, but it had four large interrogation units. Two of each shared a two-way mirror. The other two units had a similar setup across the hall. We found Susan, Pete, and Special Agent Landon there. Landon was grilling Sasha while the detectives were watching. Susan saw me, winced, and gave me a nod to enter the room. Pete saw the goose egg and the start of a bruise and actually smiled.
“Has she said anything?” I asked them.
“She didn’t know it was you,” Susan said softly.
“Landon told him that it almost killed you, and she got pretty upset. Want to tell us how you know the perp?” Ralston asked me.
“You want the X-rated version or the PG version? Susan knows the PG version already, I’m sure,” I said, taking a seat in a metal folding chair. Susan sat, but the other two kept standing and sometimes pacing while listening to Landon’s muted voice coming from the speaker.
“So you had sexual relations with this woman?” Pete asked me.
“Yeah, we met at the sports bar. I took her home and it happened,” I told him plainly.
“Ok,” Pete said and faced the glass.
“Has she talked about why she was stalking and taking pictures of Caroline Taylor?” Jo asked, her nose almost pressed to the glass.
Probably so she could ignore me. She still seemed pissed.
“She said she was hired to follow and take pictures of Caroline by somebody claiming to be a political rival who wanted to one-up the mayor in the coming election,” Susan told me.
“Does that sound plausible?” I asked her, not really sure, because politics weren’t my thing.
“It’s done all the time. If what she’s saying is true, all we have on her is working without a PI sticker,” Pete replied, his voice thick with loathing.
That sound I knew—the bullies had used that tone often when talking to me. It wasn’t to be mistaken for pity; more like they were scraping something nasty off the bottom of their shoes, so they could stomp on your head some more.
“I need to talk to Jarek,” I heard Sasha’s voice drift up from the speakers.
I stood and walked to the glass. Special Agent Landon Sorenson threw his hands up in frustration and came to the glass, standing right in front of me. He shrugged his shoulders, probably watching his own reflection but knowing we were back there.
“You want to?” Susan asked me.
“Get the FBI out of there and I’ll go in with Jarek,” Jo said, looking first at Susan and then at Pete.
They both nodded, and I realized I was about to enter a room with two women I’ve had a relationship of sorts with. This should be fun; Jo had expressed an intense dislike of Sasha at their last meeting.
“Landon,” Pete said into an intercom box.
The FBI agent nodded and headed to the door. He stepped into room where we were all standing.
“Dude, you got worked over pretty bad,” he said, taking in my face.
“Three guys,” I told him.
“How’d they look afterwards?” he asked with a chuckle.
Prick.
“I don’t know, they were unconscious when we left,” Susan said. Jo smiled.
I know it wasn’t due to my hands, but it shut up Sorenson. That was fine with me, so I kept quiet.
“You sure this is going to be ok?” Susan asked me.
“I’m not sure having Jo in the room is going to help or hurt. Are there speakers so she can listen in at the door? Or would—”
“Why don’t you want me in there?” Jo interrupted.
“I don’t know if we have time for this, but if I can’t focus on one person, I might miss some sort of detail. Besides, she asked for me, and the more I think about it, the more I think I should go in alone.”
“He’s got a point there,” Pete told us.
“You think I’d be a distraction?” Jo asked, in a low, deadly voice.
I hesitated a moment too long and her eyes narrowed. “Fine,” I said. “Come on in, but please just do so to keep me safe. Let the conversation go where it will and maybe we can find a clue as to where Caroline is being held.”
“That’s better,” Jo said, reaching for the door.
Jo went into the interrogation room first and I caught Sasha’s surprised look as I entered. I got a smile, and then Sasha’s gaze rested on Jo, who went to the corner, folded her arms, and glowered.
“I’m sorry, Jarek,” she said. I pulled the chair out across from her and sat down lightly, the bruises on my stomach painful.
I shrugged.
“I thought it was going to be somebody else, or even the guy who hired me, like his goons or something.”
Again I said nothing. An old interrogation technique my father told me about. Say nothing, stare straight ahead, and if you listen long enough, they will tell you everything you want to hear. The silence is unsettling, if you can hold your tongue long enough…
“I really am sorry. Listen, the guy who hired me was a former cop. I didn’t question why he wanted me hired. He was out of work for an IAB investigation and wanted to outsource some of the legwork. I took the job, figuring it was easy money. I had no clue that he was going to kidnap her,” she said.
I said nothing and folded my hands on the table. I met her gaze for a moment and then focused on the pad of paper and pen on the table, ignoring her.
“Jarek,” she said, her hand reaching out to touch mine.
I pulled my hands back at the last second and she missed. I looked up to see her hurt expression.
“I didn’t mean to. Why won’t you talk to me, dammit?”
“Because you used him to insert yourself into the case,” Jo said from the corner.
Sasha looked shocked and then she nodded. “Yes, I did. I met Martin at that bar, and I was there hoping to find him and tail him. Instead, I ran across you. I’d heard all about you and what you’ve been doing with your Dad’s company. I’m sorry to hear he passed,” she said, once again putting her hand on the table as if I would take it. I didn’t.
“I’d heard rumors that your company had taken the case for the Mayor. Since I wasn’t positive it was Martin, and the IAB investigation was still ongoing, I thought I’d find some evidence first. When that didn’t happen, I sent him an email demanding the rest of my payment, since my target had been kidnapped. He probably assumed I was as dirty as he was,” Sasha finished. “Sorry Jarek, I didn’t mean to use you like that, but I did have fun. Fun I’d like to repeat someday?” It sounded like both a statement and a request.
The flirt and sexual tension almost sizzled in the air between us. Still, I said nothing and kept my face blank. It could be real, or it could be another ploy. Until the cops and FBI checked things out, she was still being investigated.
“What is the guy’s name anyways? This Martin guy?” Jo asked. “We’ve not been told yet; we just got back in from getting Jarek cleaned up after you had him jumped.”
I let Jo take the lead. She was taller than me, she was slender, and she exuded a predatory aura. One that intimidated even men in many situations. I was pretty much immune to it, as I held no illusions regarding what she could and couldn’t do. I’d followed her military career out of curiosity and discovered that Jo had been with the military police. Her transition into a PI’s office was probably even easier than going traditional law enforcement because of the differences. In her rough and tumble days as
an MP, she’d even further honed her hand-to-hand skills and was an expert marksman to boot.
Rarely did she carry a gun or use it, but if she had one right now, I thought she might use it on Sasha.
“Yes, Martin Fuller,” she said, looking at me and ignoring Jo as much as she could.
“Is he the one who kidnapped Caroline?” I asked, breaking my silence.
“I think so. I tried to tell the FBI that, and they won’t let me help. They keep asking me the same questions over and over.”
“We saw you at the bar with him. You two seemed rather close,” I told her.
“Not as close as you and I,” she said. Jo made a coughing, gagging noise that sounded an awful lot like “bullshit”.
Sasha and I both shot her a look and then our gazes met again. She reached out once more, and I let her touch the top of my hand. I tried not to move and focused on her eyes. If she was trying to psych me out and throw me off, I wasn’t going to fall for it. Make a person uncomfortable, tell them something. They focused on the discomfort and relented easier. Cops did that all the time when interrogating a suspect. Turn up the heat, make it freezing. Lights on, off. It was all a ploy.
Was this a ploy?
“We’ll get to that later and perhaps schedule something to discuss that further, but in the meantime—”
“Jarek,” Jo said loudly.
“But in the meantime, how do you get in touch with Martin and—”
“I can track him,” Sasha said, shocking us all into silence.
The PA in the room crackled and Sorenson’s voice came through: “Repeat that.”
“I said I can track him. That moment at the bar when I ducked his kiss, I planted a tracking bug on the back of his collar. I’ve been trying to tell you for an hour and a half now; I’m one of the good guys. As soon as my subject was kidnapped, I’ve been trying to track her down from my side. When I saw the black SUV following me to the bar, I made one last-ditch effort to find him and thought you guys were goons he’d hired. That’s why I told those drunks—”
“I believe you,” I told her, pulling my hand free and standing up, stretching.
“You would,” Jo muttered, almost too low to hear.
“So you planted a bug on him. Where is the receiver?”
“That’s the tricky part. That’s why I need you,” Sasha said, batting her eyelashes at me.
My head was pretty messed up and my eye all but swollen shut, but her flirtations were having an effect on me, even though I knew I looked like the Elephant Man.
“How can you have a tracking bug but no receiver?” Jo asked, uncrossing her arms and stalking to the table like a big great cat.
“They were his. He’d asked me to put a GPS tracker on her car, which I did. He gave me two more in case I got closer, but I never had a chance to use them before she was kidnapped. Maybe I can help undo what I did by accident? That’s why I needed to talk to you.”
“Jarek,” Susan’s voice called over the PA.
“I’ll be back,” I told her and headed to the door.
“You coming?” I asked Johanna.
“No, I think I’ll keep our mutual friend here company,” Jo said, sitting down, her entire body tense.
“Please don’t hurt her,” I asked softly.
That made Jo look up at me sharply. I shrugged and left the room to find the two detectives and Special Agent Landon waiting for me.
“While we were all following Martin and Sasha there, another call came into the Mayor’s house. They want 2.5 million dollars in cash. They’re going to call back with a drop. We traced the phone to an old Chinese restaurant. Owners claim they had no clue somebody was using their line, and we found where they had cut into the phones out behind the restaurant.”
“First a degausser, and now cutting into land lines to make the calls,” I mused, and thought of the possibilities.
It would be something a bold hacker would do. Modern phone and tracking systems didn’t need you to keep a kidnapper on the phone for long. All you had to do was answer their call. The kidnapper knew that and, if it was Martin Fuller, he - of course - would be savvy to police procedures.
“Did they put Caroline on the phone?” I asked them.
Susan nodded. “It sounded like a computer-generated voice, and then Caroline started reading off the date and headlines of today’s Detroit Free Press. She sounded wooden, sad… but it could have been the splicing of the phone lines.”
“So neither Fuller nor Sasha made the phone call,” I said.
“Kidnappings like this usually involve a team, or at least two to three people. We’ve always theorized that there’s at least two in this case,” Sorenson said.
“Can you send me the recording?” I asked Susan.
She nodded eagerly. “The FBI is working on it as well but…” she looked at Sorenson with a sorrowful expression. “But they aren’t you.”
“Special Agent,” I said, ignoring the heated discussion Jo was having with a now red-faced Sasha. “Will you permit me to take the spare tracking bug Sasha has? With it, I can figure out its frequency and try to triangulate Fuller.”
“I don’t… I’ll have to call my—”
“He’s offering to help,” Pete said.
Hold the press. Everything stop! Pete hated me, or at least I thought he did. It was hard to tell when he looked like the walrus from Alice in Wonderland half the time, and he was always saying things with either irony or sarcasm, so I could never divine his true meaning.
“As long as I can go with the equipment—” Sorenson said.
“Nobody goes into my IT,” I said firmly.
Jo stood up and stomped out of the interrogation room and joined us half a second later. She was shaking and red in the face.
“I need to keep the chain of evidence…” Sorenson was insisting.
“What?” Jo asked me.
“I don’t want him in my IT room again. I offered to crack the frequency of the tracker, and the last time, he just bullied his way in there. I don’t really like him, and the fact that I’m willing to help him should be enough for him to at least let me do my job—”
“Jarek,” she said, grabbing my arm in a vise-like grip.
That stopped me. She was upset and hurting me and didn’t realize it.
“Let him. I think time is running out. Pretty soon they are going to call with a dollar amount and set up a drop-off—” Jo was saying, but Susan interrupted.
“They already called about the money.” Susan’s words cut through the room, and Jo let me go.
“Ok,” I said after a long pause. “If you’ll take the device to Tech Support, she’ll get cracking on it for you. We’ll know everything we can within an hour or two,” I told them. I watched as Landon started to leave.
“What are we going to do?” Jo asked.
“You can keep our mutual friend entertained. I’m going to go over Fuller’s movements, financials and—”
“We have warrants out for that, but it’s going to take time,” Pete told me soberly.
“Then get me a terminal in a quiet room. I need access to your databases and—”
“We can’t do that,” Landon said, halfway out the door.
“Ok, then we don’t. Get me a terminal in a quiet place and leave me alone for a couple of hours,” I told them all.
Jo looked at me and nodded. “Though I don’t think Sasha will like any more of my company.”
“I can’t work with you watching,” I told her. “That’s a distraction I can’t avoid.”
“I can wait. I’m good at that,” she told me, smiling.
There it was again, I knew I was missing out on something, but I was too busy to stop and analyze it. I mentally filed it away to go over again later, if ever.
“What are you going to do?” Susan asked me.
“You don’t want to know,” Pete told her. “Plausible deniability.”
I nodded, shocked that it was Pete who was coming to my defense.
“Come on,” Pete said. “I’ve got a place you can sit down and work.”
I followed him out towards the main room and past booking. A man with one handcuff holding him to a bench attached to the wall jumped up as I was passing and grabbed me by the coat.
“You gotta tell ‘em I didn’t do it man. I wuz just playin aroun’.”
Pete stopped and put one beefy forearm into the man’s chest and shoved hard. He almost flew over backwards and toppled out of the bench as I hurried past.
“Sorry, I… listen, man, I liked your Dad,” he told me, leading me towards the elevators. “And you taking over the company, and the way you changed things up…”
“You think I’m ruining his legacy?” I asked, curious.
“No, well, I did. I just… here it is. Third floor,” he told me, getting in.
I followed him into the elevator.
“And you took it over and hired that Amazon woman. Suddenly you guys are so busy, and you’re such an odd duck. I don’t know how to take you, man. You seem to be on the level, but I just can’t get a read on you, and that makes me uneasy.”
The admission was surprising to me. “That’s kind of how I felt about you,” I told Pete. “You always seemed to be angry towards me, or at least dismissive.”
“I was wrong. I’ve seen how hard you’re working this case, and I know what you’re going to do. My kid does something similar for fun. When he heard you had Skye working for you, he almost… well, he’s a teenager, and she’s supposed to be some kind of legend. That’s how I know what you’re going to be doing.”
“It shortcuts things,” I admitted. “Still, get the warrants if you can.”
“We could both go to jail for this,” he told me.
“Going to jail for typing on a keyboard. How ridiculous is that?” I asked him as the elevator dinged for the third floor.
“Tell me about it. Come on,” Pete said gruffly and moved towards some cubicles in the back corner of the detectives’ office areas.
Kidnapped: A Jarek Grayson Private Detective Novel (Grayson Investigative Services Book 1) Page 9
