Stalking Steven Read online

  “I don’t suppose this would fall under the same criteria as Araminta Tucker’s house,” I said.

  He glanced over. “Excuse me?”

  “You went into Araminta Tucker’s house to look around yesterday.”

  “It was next door to a crime scene,” Mendoza said.

  I looked around. “This might actually be a crime scene. If Zachary was attacked here.”

  “We don’t even know that Zachary was here,” Mendoza said.

  “We may not be able to prove it. But I’m pretty sure he was. I told him to check out any clubs he found where a Russian girl might work, or might have worked. It makes perfect sense that he’d check out this one. But we can ask him.”

  “Later,” Mendoza said. He had his head tilted back, and was looking up under the eaves of the building. After a second, he pulled out his badge and opened it up. “Police. Open the door.”

  I tilted my head back, too, and squinted up into the darkness under the overhanging eaves. After a second I could make something out. “Camera?”

  Mendoza nodded.

  We waited a little longer. Nothing happened this time, either. Either no one was inside—most likely—or Mendoza’s badge did nothing to convince them that they should open the door for him.

  “Guess we’ll have to come back later,” I said.

  He shot me a look. “I might be a little busy. I have an operation to set up at the Arena tonight.”

  Oh. Right. I’d forgotten about that in the excitement. “Thanks for reminding me. What do you want me to do?”

  “Go home,” Mendoza said, moving away from the door and around the building. Since he was still talking, I was forced to follow. “Take your little dog with you. Don’t come back here alone. If they beat up Zachary, they won’t be happy about you coming around asking questions.”

  I trotted behind him toward the car. “I meant about the Arena thing. The money drop. Or the newspaper drop, I guess. What do you want me to do?”

  He stopped next to the sedan. “Go home. Take your little dog—”

  “Thank you.” Sheesh. “I heard you the first time. You mean, I’m not supposed to be at the Arena tonight?”

  “No,” Mendoza said. “I’ve got it.”

  “Don’t you think Diana might want some moral support?”

  He sighed. And then he unlocked the car doors and opened mine. Instead of getting in, I watched as he walked around the front of the car to his own side. “We’ll stay out of your way.”

  “Sure you will.” He opened his own door and slid behind the wheel. The door closed with a decisive thump. I was just about to follow suit when a car took the turn into the parking lot and bumped to a stop next to us.

  Chapter 13

  The driver was a man around Mendoza’s age, but a lot less good-looking, with a prominent nose and lank, brown hair that fell across his forehead. “Help you?”

  Mendoza must have decided to let me handle it, because he didn’t get back out of the car. I turned to the man. He was looking me up and down in a rather unpleasant way, and then he addressed a comment, in a language I didn’t know, into the car. I guess he had a buddy in the passenger seat. While I couldn’t understand the words, the gist was crystal clear. It was a comment on some part of my anatomy, or maybe the overall package, and something about it seemed to amuse the gentlemen. If I can use the term loosely.

  I ignored it. As one has to. “I’m looking for someone.”

  He gestured to the building. “We’re closed.”

  “I can see that. I’m looking for information about my son. He might have been here yesterday. Hold on.”

  I fumbled my phone out of my purse and flicked through the photographs until I came to a selfie we had taken last week, on our first day in the office. Me in the middle holding the phone, with Rachel on one side of me, and Zachary on the other. I showed it to the man. “There he is.”

  He looked at it. “Don’t know him.”

  “Are you sure? Someone told me he might have come here last night.”

  He didn’t answer, and I added, “Would you mind if I ask your friend?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, just took a step past him and leaned into the open doorway. The man in the passenger seat might have been the first guy’s brother, and maybe cousin. Same big nose, same deep-set eyes, same brown hair.

  I shoved the phone in his face. “See? My son. With the red hair and freckles.” I was perhaps emphasizing the resemblance a little too much, since I was afraid there wasn’t enough of one. So I moved on quickly. “Have you seen him? Maybe yesterday?”

  He shook his head. “No.” And pushed my hand back, and me out of the car. But not before I had seen three other people in the backseat.

  Girls. Or young women.

  It was just a quick impression, but they were all pretty and blond. And stewed together in the rear of the car like three herring in a can. Behind some sort of divider between the front and back seats.

  I pretended I hadn’t noticed them, and straightened. “Are you sure you haven’t seen him?” I shoved the phone back at the first guy. He took a step back.

  “Listen, lady…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and tried my best to channel motherhood, “I’m just worried, you know? He didn’t come home last night.”

  He said something else I didn’t understand—was it Russian?—but the gist of this, too, was all too obvious. Maybe he’d gone home with a girl, and what kind of mother was I, anyway, who didn’t let my little boy grow up and be a man?

  “That reminds me,” I said. “Do you have a girl working here called Anastasia?”

  He shook his head, but I think I saw something flicker in his eyes for a second. Although I admit it was hard to tell. They were dark and very deep-set, under prominent brows.

  I wondered whether I should ask about Tatiana, but if she was one of the girls in the backseat, it might be better not to.

  I dropped my phone back in my purse. “Thank you for your time.”

  He grunted.

  “I’ll get out of your way and let you open up your establishment.”

  He didn’t say anything else. I moved past him toward Mendoza’s car. And I admit the back of my neck was crawling a little. The whole situation was creepy. The two men were creepy. The fact that they had three young women stuffed into their back seat was a bit creepy. And the fact that I believed Zachary had been here last night, and had gotten beat up for his trouble, made the whole thing more than creepy.

  Until I was actually inside the car with the door closed, part of me was worried that they wouldn’t let me leave.

  “Go,” I told Mendoza as soon as the door was shut behind me.

  He went. “You OK?”

  “More or less.” I watched in the mirror until we were out of sight of the nightclub, and told him, “Turn around. And go back the other way.”

  He shot me a look.

  “Just do it,” I said. “I’ll explain in a minute.”

  I’m not sure what he thought, but he did it. On the next block, he waited for a gap in traffic and made a U-turn that put us on the other side of the road, going back toward the nightclub.

  “Here.” I pointed to the parking lot of a fast food restaurant. “Pull in.”

  “You have a craving for a Big Mac?”

  Yuck. No. A Big Mac would add a good half hour to my workout tomorrow morning. And that was in addition to the half hour I had to add from not working out today.

  “I want to see,” I said. “They had three girls in the backseat of that car. Young women. Late teens, early twenties. Blond. Pretty. I want to see what they do with them.”

  Mendoza didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much to say, I guess. The implications were pretty clear to both of us.

  Unfortunately, what we could see wasn’t much. By now, the car—a black sedan; why are they always black sedans?—was on its way around the corner of the building.

  “Taking them in through the back,” Mendoza muttered.<
br />
  So it seemed. And much smarter of them. The parking lot ended in a retaining wall. There was nothing behind the building but a hillside, and on top of that, maybe an apartment complex. A couple of two-story brick buildings with blank walls facing us. Barely visible behind a scraggly line of trees.

  “If we were on top of that hill,” I began.

  Mendoza nodded. “No way to get there before they’re inside, though.”

  No. They had probably moved their cargo through the back door already. By the time we could figure out how to get up to the apartment complex and make our way into the trees, there’d be nothing to see.

  “Do you want to go ring the bell again?”

  “It won’t do any good,” Mendoza said. “But I think I might want to have a talk with this guy I know in Special Investigations. And maybe ICE.”

  “Immigration and Customs?”

  He nodded.

  “Trafficking?”

  “We’re not immune from it,” Mendoza said. “A lot of what goes on is interstate trafficking. Young American girls selling themselves—or being sold by their pimps—at truck stops up and down the interstates. But we see our share of foreign trafficking, too. It isn’t all that long ago that Special Investigations shut down a string of Asian massage parlors that were a front for prostitution.”

  I hadn’t heard anything about that, but I’d take his word for it.

  “It happened in the spring,” Mendoza said. “You weren’t interested in crime then.”

  I guess I hadn’t been. I’d been the happily married trophy wife of David Kelly, with no idea that my husband had already taken a mistress and was juggling both of us until he could see his way clear to divorce me.

  I scowled. “It’s not that I’m particularly interested in crime, you know. All I was supposed to do, was figure out whether Steven Morton was cheating on Diana.”

  Mendoza nodded.

  “It wasn’t my fault that somebody got killed next door.”

  He shook his head.

  “And if it hadn’t been for Edwina walking around loose, I wouldn’t even have known about it.”

  He shook his head. His lips were twitching.

  “Things have gotten a little out of hand. But it’s not like I can leave Diana to figure this out on her own at this point. She asked me for help.”

  “Of course,” Mendoza said, and sounded like he meant something else entirely.

  I folded my arms across my chest and stuck my lower lip out.

  Across the street, nothing happened.

  “We might as well go,” Mendoza said. “I’m guessing they’re in there for the rest of the night.”

  I guessed the same thing. “Are there any other places we should look at while we’re down here?”

  There was the Russian-sounding seamstress and the vet who’d had their business cards next to the card for Stella’s. But it wasn’t likely that either of them had been open when Zachary set out on his errand last night.

  Mendoza shook his head. “I’ll take you back to your car.”

  He put his own into gear and reversed out of the parking spot. We headed back up Nolensville Road toward Southern Hills, where Mendoza found my car and slotted his into the empty space next to it. “There you go.”

  “You’re not coming up?”

  His brows drew down. “You’re going up to see Zach?”

  “I thought I might,” I said, with a glance at the dashboard clock. I still had almost an hour before Rachel left the office. Enough time to check on Zachary and see whether I could get confirmation that he’d actually been at Stella’s last night. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind, but independent corroboration would be nice. “Unless you’d prefer that I don’t?”

  He would clearly prefer that I didn’t. However, before I could remind him that it was a free country and that I would be paying for Zach’s hospital stay, he turned off the car. “I’ll come with you.”

  “I was going to tell you what happened,” I said, but I got out of the car, too. We walked toward the entrance side by side.

  Upstairs, Zachary was dozing in the same hospital bed as earlier. He was alone. If he’d been my son, or rather, if I’d been his mother, I would have been by his side. Zachary’s mother was nowhere to be seen.

  I’d never met her, but I found myself developing quite a dislike for the woman.

  Zachary blinked at us when we stepped into the room. It seemed to take a few seconds before he recognized us. “Oh,” he said eventually, his voice scratchy. “’s you.”

  I smiled brightly. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the bruises on his face looked even worse than they had just two hours ago. “We’re back.”

  Zachary looked blank.

  “We were here a couple hours ago,” Mendoza told him, and moved closer to the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  Zachary shrugged.

  I stepped up next to Mendoza. “We had a look around, trying to figure out what happened to you. Or who did this.”

  Mendoza added, “Susan at the Russian grocery store says hello.”

  Zachary looked nonplussed for a second, before he nodded.

  I pulled the business card for Stella’s out of my bag. “Do you remember seeing this? Did you go there?”

  Zachary looked at it. It seemed to be hard for him to concentrate. Or maybe his memory was shot.

  It was even possible he might have a concussion. Mendoza hadn’t mentioned it, but maybe he didn’t know, either.

  “I think,” Zachary whispered, “maybe…?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Mendoza gave me a look and I dropped the card back into my purse. “You mentioned Tatiana. Who’s she?”

  Zachary’s eyes got that vague look again, that indicated he was trying to remember. His pupils were tiny, probably a result of whatever was going into his arm from the clear bag hanging above his bed.

  “A girl. I met her…” He trailed off.

  “At the club? Stella’s?”

  “Yeah…” After a second he added, “Maybe.”

  “OK.” Mendoza must have realized, as I had, that this wasn’t getting us any forwarder. “Have some rest. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Everything at the office is fine. Rachel is taking care of the dog. I’ll take her home with me. Edwina, not Rachel.”

  The corners of Zachary’s lips turned up. At least I’d made him smile.

  “You’ve missed some things while you’ve been laid up here,” I added. “Tonight Diana’s supposed to bring a hundred thousand dollars to the Arena downtown, in exchange for Steven. The ransom note came this morning.”

  Zachary’s mouth dropped open.

  “I’ll stop by in the morning and tell you all about it.”

  He nodded.

  “Get some rest,” Mendoza told him. “We’ll be back.”

  Zachary nodded and closed his eyes obediently. We tiptoed toward the door and out.

  Back in the parking lot, Mendoza said, “I’ll go see to the arrangements for tonight.”

  “I’ll go pick up the dog and check in with Diana,” I said. “And if she wants my company, I guess I’ll see you later.”

  “Hopefully that won’t happen,” Mendoza said, dashing all my hopes, “but if you’re there and you see me, pretend you don’t know who I am.”

  Seriously? Was I that much of an embarrassment? “Why?”

  He looked at me as if the answer was obvious. “Because I don’t want to be made for a cop. Just another hockey fan.”

  Ah. Yes, that made sense.

  “If I see you, I won’t bat so much as an eyelash,” I said. “You’ll be dead to me. I promise.”

  His lips twitched. “You don’t have to go that far. Just ignore me. And tell Diana to do the same.”

  I promised I would, and we went our separate ways. He headed for downtown to make arrangements, and I headed for the office to update Rachel and rescue Edwina.

  Rachel was shocked and appalled, of course, when she heard
what had happened to Zachary, and stated her intention to stop by the hospital later to spend some time with him. “I can’t believe his own mother wouldn’t be there with him. Why, if he was my baby…!”

  I nodded. “It’s horrible. Did you know that his mother kicked him out? Did he tell you?”

  “I wondered,” Rachel said. “I saw all the clothes in the back of his car. And his computer. And some other belongings. It looked like he was carrying most of his life around in that car. But I didn’t want to ask and make him feel bad.”

  I nodded. I’d noticed the clothes, too—I had assumed he was planning to do laundry, so I hadn’t even been as quick on the uptake as Rachel—as well as the pizza box in the office: the same pizza box he’d taken home for dinner two nights ago. I should have figured it out sooner than I did. “We’re going to have to work something out. He’ll be in the hospital for another day or two, but when he gets out—with cuts and bruises and a punctured lung—we can’t have him sleeping in his car.”

  Rachel agreed. “That wouldn’t be good for him.”

  “He can stay here, I guess. Once we figure out what’s going on with Steven and the Russian girl, and there’s no danger in it. Although I’d prefer for him to be somewhere safer. And more comfortable.” More comfortable than both the car and the office couch.

  Rachel nodded.

  “I can’t take him to the Apex with me,” I said. “If his mother had a problem with him working for me, she definitely wouldn’t appreciate it if he moved in with me. And anyway, I only have the one bedroom.”

  “I have two,” Rachel said. “I could take him in, if he wanted. But he’s a grown man. He’d probably prefer his own place.”

  He probably would. “We’ll have to talk to him about it, I guess. Once he’s out of the hospital and he can think straight again. Right now, he’s too out of it to string more than a couple of words together.”

  Rachel tsked.

  “We did find the place where we think he was last night. We went to the Russian grocery store he told me about, and the clerk said he’d been there. And there was this business card on the bulletin board.” I pulled it out of my purse and put it on Rachel’s desk. “We went there, but it was closed up tight. But just as we were about to leave, this car drove up.”