Stalking Steven Page 16

  “But I was at work all day,” Diana protested.

  “They may not have realized that,” Mendoza said. “With the note, maybe they thought you’d be home. Maybe they figured this would take you out of the house at a predetermined time, and they could get in.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea,” Mendoza said. “But I think I should come home with you and check things out. Just in case.”

  Diana nodded. Obviously she was just fine with that. I would have been fine with it, too, if it had been my house under possible attack.

  “You can drop me off at the Apex on your way past,” I told Diana, since that suited me just fine. “And if you still want to hear that recording, you can stop by the office any time tomorrow. Someone’s there from nine to five, pretty much. Rachel, if not me.”

  She nodded. Mendoza gave me a suspicious look. “I’d have thought you’d want to come with us. To see for yourself.”

  Was that a subtle—or not so subtle—insinuation that I was nosy?

  I gave him a sweet smile. “I have other plans. I left Edwina in the penthouse alone, and I don’t want to be gone that long. She isn’t that used to the place yet. And the floor-to-ceiling windows are a little scary.”

  Not to mention that the rugs were white. But probably better not to actually mention that.

  Mendoza still looked suspicious, but he nodded. “Let me take that for you.” He reached for the bag. Diana handed it over, and we all headed for the exit.

  “I’ll meet you there,” he told Diana when we were outside. “Don’t go inside until I get there.”

  She promised she wouldn’t. He turned to me. “Good night, Mrs. Kelly.”

  There was something pointed about the words. Something along the lines of, ‘I want you to go home and stay there, and not give me any more trouble tonight.’

  “Good night, Detective,” I said politely. “Be careful.”

  He grunted. I hid a smile as I watched him walk across the plaza with the duffel hanging from his hand.

  “Come on,” Diana said, tugging on my arm. “I want to get home to see if Steven’s there.”

  He probably wasn’t, although I didn’t want to say that. So I went obediently to the car, and got into the passenger seat.

  The trip back to the Apex was just as uneventful, but took longer than the trip to the Arena. The streets were filled with people and cars going home after the hockey game, so it took us more than twice as long to make the short drive.

  As we crept along the city streets, I had the idea that someone might run up to us from one of the sidewalks and yank the door open and demand the bag of money.

  But of course the car doors lock automatically, so there’d be no yanking. Anyone yanking on the door would meet resistance. I did scan the crowds on my side of the street as we drove, though. A couple of women with long, blond hair merited a second look, but other than that, I didn’t see anyone of interest. And of course no one actually ran up to the car and asked for the duffel. A good thing, too, since Mendoza had taken the bag when he left.

  Diana pulled up in front of the Apex and I slipped out of the car. “Call me when you get home. Let me know if you find anything.”

  “Are you sure I shouldn’t wait until tomorrow? I don’t want to wake you.”

  “I’m not going to bed for a while yet,” I said. “But if you’d rather, you can send a text. I just want to know if anyone’s there. Or has been there.”

  She nodded. “I’ll do that. Sleep well, Gina.”

  “You, too,” I said, while I reflected that it would be a while before I saw my bed.

  What I’d told Mendoza was actually valid. Edwina was new to the condo, not used to it, and I probably shouldn’t leave her alone any longer than I had to. So I went upstairs and got her, before I called Rachel to tell her that the Arena Sting was over, and I was on my way to Stella’s to meet her.

  “How did it go?”

  “Nothing happened,” I said, while I put Edwina in the passenger seat and shut the door. “Nobody came for the money. We stood there for thirty minutes while the Arena emptied out. Then Mendoza took the duffel bag with the newspaper in it and left.”

  I opened my own door and slid behind the wheel. “He had this idea that maybe the whole thing was a setup to get Diana out of her house for an hour or two. If they wanted access, they could have gone there at any time during the day, but maybe they didn’t realize that. Anyway, he went home with her to see whether anyone had been inside while she was gone.”

  I reversed out of the parking space and drove through the garage toward the exit. “At this point I’m in the car and on my way south on Granny White Pike. I guess I’ll get to the nightclub in about twenty minutes or so.”

  “I checked how to get up to the apartment complex behind the nightclub,” Rachel said in my ear. “Here’s what you do.”

  She gave me directions for how to end up on top of the little bluff behind Stella’s. I memorized it all as best I could and told her I’d call her back if I got lost. Then I hung up the phone and concentrated on getting to where I was going.

  Because it was late and the roads were mostly clear of traffic, it took less time than I’d thought. I drove into the apartment complex just as the dashboard clock clicked over to midnight, and made my way past the buildings, between the rows of cars parked tail ends out. Most everything was dark, but here and there was the glow of a window or the blue flicker of a TV. A woman with a small dog scurried in front of us and disappeared between two cars, over to a lighted staircase. Edwina pressed her snub nose against the inside of the passenger window and rumbled deep in her throat, but she didn’t bark.

  “Good girl,” I told her.

  She wagged her stubby tail and turned her attention toward the front as the car rolled slowly forward.

  At the very end of the development, where the parking lot ended in a grassy lawn and then a line of scrubby trees, I found Rachel’s white car. She had found a parking space that wasn’t marked with a number for a unit, and had pulled into it. The space next to her wasn’t marked either, and I slotted the Lexus in there and turned off the engine. Silence descended.

  Nothing moved. The lady with the dog had gone inside. The branches of the trees rustled a little as they scraped together. And there was the far-away hum of cars down below us, on Nolensville Road.

  “Stay here,” I told Edwina and opened my door. “I’ll be back.”

  She wagged and watched me get out. As soon as I’d shut the door, she jumped across the middle console into my seat and pressed her nose against that window while her pop eyes watched me walk the few feet to Rachel’s car and try the door handle.

  The car was locked. I bent and peered through the window.

  Empty, too.

  I straightened again, and peered into the trees. She must have gone off already.

  Nothing for me to do but follow, I guess.

  I made my way across the grass, and straightened my shoulders before I plunged into the darkness between the trees. “Rachel?”

  “Over here.” Her voice came from the right of me, and I changed direction and headed that way. After a few steps, I could see her huddled against the trunk of a tree near the edge of the bluff.

  I picked my way over to her, careful to put my feet on solid ground. “How long have you been here?”

  “Just a few minutes,” Rachel said. She gestured. “There’s nothing going on down there. People coming and going—mostly going—but nothing to see.”

  I peered over the edge of the bluff down into the parking lot behind Stella’s.

  As I’d surmised, we had a perfect view of the back door from up here. The only issue was the distance. Hard to get a good look at anything when you’re a football field’s width away and thirty feet above.

  Luckily Rachel had remembered her binoculars, and I had transferred mine from the glove box in the turquoise convertible I used to drive to the glove box in the Lexus when I bought it. Those binoculars had
come in handy when I was skulking around behind David and Jackie-with-a-q. Now they had a chance to be useful again.

  I put them to my eyes and fiddled with the knob in the middle. The back door at Stella’s sprang into view as sharply as if I’d stood ten feet away.

  There was nothing going on. The door was shut, and I didn’t see anyone moving around. The parking lot was about half full. The black sedan from earlier—at least I figured it had to be the same black sedan; it looked similar—was parked a few feet away. The rest of the cars were parked mostly around the front and sides of the building.

  I counted. There were seventeen cars in the lot, including the sedan. I knew that one had had five people in it when it arrived. If the others had brought between one and four people each, we were looking at a crowd of sixty or so inside the club.

  Time passed slowly. Cars went by down on the road, fewer and fewer of them the later it got. Slowly, the parking lot below us emptied out. We’d hear a burst of sound as the front door opened, and a second or two later, a person—or two or three—would scurry across the parking lot to a car, get in, and drive away. From where I was sitting, it looked like they were all male.

  Rachel nodded when I said so. “Looks that way.”

  “Makes me worry what those poor girls are doing in there.”

  “I could tell you what I think,” Rachel said, “but I’d rather not.”

  I’d rather she didn’t, either.

  We sat in silence as the lot emptied out. When the last car but the black sedan had driven away, Rachel got to her feet and stretched. “If I go now, I can probably get down there before they leave.”

  She probably could. It wasn’t a long drive. “Don’t you want to watch them come out?”

  “I assumed you wanted to know where they’re going,” Rachel said. “That means one of us has to follow them. And I figured that would be me, since you wanted to be up here with the binoculars.”

  “And since they’ve already seen me. If they catch you, you can make up some story about what you’re doing. If they catch me, they’ll know I’m following them.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Rachel said, dusting off her posterior. She was dressed in yoga pants and an oversized sweater: one of the very few times I’d seen her in anything but a frumpy but perfectly appropriate business suit. “I have my phone. We’ll keep in touch that way.”

  That sounded good to me. “Don’t get too close to them.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Rachel said, “but it isn’t the best time of day to follow someone, you know. There’s not much traffic. I can stay back, but I’ll still probably be the only car behind them.”

  Until I joined the hunt, and then there would be two of us.

  “Just do your best,” I said. “Once you’ve driven a few minutes, as long as I’ve caught up, you can peel off down a side street, and I’ll stay behind them for a while, and then, when you get behind me again, I’ll peel off and you can follow. It’s known as a two-vehicle leapfrog.”

  Rachel didn’t say anything, but she looked impressed. At least as far as I could tell in the dark.

  “You’d better go,” I reminded her. “Before they come out.”

  She nodded. “I’ll text you when I get there.”

  She crunched off through the dry leaves and twigs. To anyone nearby, she probably sounded like a buffalo, but since we weren’t really worried about anyone up here noticing us, I didn’t say anything about it.

  Half a minute later, I heard her car drive off, and I devoted myself to the surveillance of Stella’s while I hoped that Rachel would get down there in time.

  Chapter 15

  I didn’t see her arrive down below. But a few minutes after she’d driven off, my phone alerted that I had a text. I’m in the McDonald’s parking lot. They’re open 24 hrs.

  Good, I texted back. And it was. An excellent place to be. Nobody—specifically the two Russian men—would think twice about anyone being there. Not if the store was open around the clock. I’ll let you know when they move.

  We went back to our surveillance. To tell the truth, I was starting to get tired. It was getting close to two in the morning. I’d been up since just after six. And it had been an eventful day. The only things that kept me awake were the chill in the air, and the moisture that was slowly seeping through the knees of my jeans from their contact with the ground.

  I was about ready to give up when something finally happened. A rectangle of light opened in the darkness and then was extinguished quickly. It stayed on my retinas for a while, as such things do, as I reached for the binoculars and lifted them to my eyes.

  Yes, there they were. One man in the lead, with… was that a gun in his hand?

  Surely not. I mean, normal people don’t walk around with guns, do they?

  Or maybe, if they’re operating successful nightclubs and transporting the night’s take, they do.

  He had a bag in his other hand, that might be full of money. It didn’t quite have the dimensions of Diana’s duffel, but there’d be room enough for a fair amount of newspaper in there.

  Or maybe there was another—or additional—reason for the gun.

  He opened the passenger door of the black sedan, and put the bag on the seat. Then he closed the door again. And opened the door into the back. And walked back to the door into the nightclub.

  The girls filed out and over to the car, where they scrunched together in the back seat. He slammed the door after them and went around the car and got behind the wheel. Meanwhile, his associate locked up before getting into the passenger seat. I saw the movement when he transferred the money bag from the seat to the floor before he sat down.

  The lights came on. I grabbed my phone and texted Rachel. Get ready. They’re moving.

  She didn’t respond. I hoped that meant that she was getting ready, and not that anything had gone wrong.

  Down below, the black sedan pulled around the building and out of sight. I refocused the binoculars on the opposite side of the street, and saw Rachel’s car pull into traffic.

  Time to go.

  I jumped to my feet—not as quickly as when I’d been twenty—and made my way toward the Lexus. And while I’d like to think I didn’t sound like a buffalo moving through the brush, I wasn’t anywhere close to quiet, either.

  Edwina was thrilled to see me, of course, and I had to nudge her over into the passenger seat before I could get in. Then she kept insisting on sitting on my lap, and I had to keep pushing her over into her side of the car. It wasn’t until I was down on Nolensville Road, that I was able to dig my phone back out of my pocket and dial Rachel.

  “Where are you?”

  They were well out of sight by now, of course. It had taken me several minutes to get down here. By now, both cars might be several miles away in several different directions.

  “Going east on Harding,” Rachel’s voice said in my ear. “Probably headed for the interstate.”

  This was good news, in a way. It was bound to be easier to follow them there, undetected, than on the smaller, mostly empty roads.

  On the other hand, it would be easier to lose them there, too.

  “Just keep the phone on,” I told her. “Put it on speaker and leave it in the console or somewhere, so we can stay in touch. I’ll try to catch up.”

  I dropped the phone in my lap, where Edwina wouldn’t be likely to trample it, and stepped on the gas. The SUV shot off up Nolensville Road toward the intersection at Harding.

  When Rachel announced that they were passing the interstate—without turning onto the ramp—I was still two blocks behind. “Where are you going, then?”

  “Looks like straight ahead,” Rachel said. “Toward the airport.”

  Hopefully they weren’t headed there. Hopefully they were just going toward the airport, not actually to it.

  “Any other cars around?”

  Rachel said there weren’t.

  “I think I can see your taillights up ahead. Turn off somewhere, s
o they think you aren’t following them. I’ll take over for a while.”

  “Roger,” Rachel said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m turning.”

  She was. I could see the car ahead of me start to signal and then go off to the right. Much farther ahead, the taillights of the sedan were winking in and out as it navigated through the industrial area on the other side of the interstate. Up above us, a plane was coming in for landing, so close I could almost see faces in the lighted windows. I pushed down on the gas and sped up.

  By the time I had the sedan more reliably in my sights, Rachel reported that she’d turned around and was behind me. “I can’t see you, but I’m coming.”

  “I’m probably good for another couple of minutes,” I said. “We’re getting close to Murfreesboro Pike, though. More traffic, but they may notice if I turn the same way they do. It might be best if you’re ready to take over then.”

  Rachel said she’d speed up and be ready. “Just don’t lose them.”

  I promised I wouldn’t and we carried on.

  On Murfreesboro Road, I let the sedan go right while I went straight. Then I spent a couple of minutes finding a place to turn around—it wasn’t easy, since I had strayed onto airport property, and they like you to follow the road in a big circle around the terminal instead of turning around. As a result, both the sedan and Rachel were way ahead of me by the time I got back to Murfreesboro Road.

  “They’re turning east on Bell Road,” Rachel reported.

  “I’m nowhere near Bell Road,” I told her. “You’re just going to have to turn, too, so we don’t lose them. I’ll try to catch up.”

  “I’ll do my best to be inconspicuous,” Rachel said.

  “Please. These are the guys I think beat up Zachary. We don’t want them to notice us.” Just in case they beat us up, too.

  Rachel agreed that we didn’t. She followed them onto Bell Road toward the lake while I scrambled to catch up.

  By the time I took a left on Bell, Rachel had followed the sedan onto smaller roads. She read them off to me as she wound her way through the neighborhoods southeast of the lake behind the sedan.