Shelter for Sharla Read online

  “Does McCutchen know about all of this too?” Cruz asked Estevez, breaking into Carter’s thoughts.

  “Oh, yeah, but that mofo, he crazy, man. I stay away from him, man. I don’ want nothin’ to do wif dat boy, knowwhatI’msayin’?”

  Cruz nodded along as he spoke. “Well, okay then. And you have no idea where he wrote down the coordinates for the burial site?”

  “Nope. But it gotta be somewhere in da stuff wif his wife and kids. No other place it could be.”

  “And did they know where the wife and kids were?” Carter asked.

  “Nope. Dey been lookin’ for ‘em all dese years, but I hear dey found ‘em. Ain’t dat funny, boy? I hear dey in Ken-tu-cky,” he said, emphasizing each syllable in a way that made Carter want to punch him. “Dat girl of Kent’s, she got a birthmark on her face. Dey lookin’ for her. Say she a college kid. Who ever guess Kent’s girl go to college?”

  The sheriff felt sick. That’s what La Tana del Lupo was doing―looking for those coordinates. They’d been looking for a while, and they’d finally found the kids. So many things were running through Carter’s mind that he couldn’t speak. He just wanted to get out of the prison and in the car with Cruz so he could voice everything he was thinking to see if he could be right about any of it.

  His thoughts were interrupted again by Cruz. “I think we’re done here. Thank you for your time, Mr. Estevez. I’m going to the warden right now to talk about your bathroom duty, and I hope I can get that for you.”

  “You’d better, FBI man. Nothin’ in life is free. Don’cha know dat?” Estevez laughed loudly at his own joke and Carter was sickened again. All he could think of in that moment was Sharla, the kids, and getting some fresh air into his lungs. The stale air in the prison interrogation room had become stifling.

  As soon as Estevez was led out, Cruz turned to Carter. “You okay?”

  “No. No, I’m not. I need to get out of here.”

  “Okay. Come on. You can wait out front while I go talk to the warden.” He let Cruz deposit him at the front doors by the desk, and as soon as Cruz was out of sight, he propped his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands.

  “Hey.” He looked up to find a young guard standing over him. “You okay?”

  “Not at all okay.”

  “Got some bad news, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Carter didn’t even know how to articulate what he was thinking and feeling.

  “This place doesn’t help. First two weeks I worked here, I went home sick every day. It’s … a scary place to be.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Do you need some water? Or a soft drink?”

  “No, no. I’m fine. But thanks for checking on me.” Cruz appeared just as the words left Carter’s lips, and he stood to go.

  They’d no more than closed the car doors when Cruz said, “You’re looking a little shaky, bud.”

  “I am a little shaky.”

  “And I know why. Let’s get the hell off the grounds and stop somewhere to talk.” Carter started the car, drove to the checkpoint, and cleared the gate. Two miles down the road, he pulled into the parking lot of a dollar-type store and stopped. “Talk to me, Carter.”

  “God, Sharla and the kids … This is serious shit. The Italian really believes that somewhere in their home are the coordinates for the burial site. He wants them before anybody else finds them.”

  “Yeah. That means he’s going to be rattling cages and shaking trees.”

  “Yeah. And they’re the trees.” Carter ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “What do we do? Put them in protective custody?”

  “So far, nobody’s hurt either of the kids or Sharla, or even attempted to.”

  “But Tamara …”

  “Tamara was an unexpected casualty. They didn’t want her dead; they wanted to use her.”

  The sheriff shook his head in disbelief. “But in the meantime, as they looked for her, they poisoned dozens of college campuses with their rhetoric and drugs.”

  “I think they’re probably using kids to move illegal firearms too.”

  Carter’s eyes popped open even wider. “Holy shit. This is … Cruz, we’re going to need some help with all this.”

  “We can handle it, but we’ve got something very, very important we’ve got to do first.” When Carter gave him a sideways stare, Cruz pursed his lips and set his jaw before he spoke. “We’ve got to find those coordinates.”

  Cruz tried to make small talk all the way back to Kentucky, but Carter knew what he was doing and he was having none of it. He fucking well didn’t feel like talking. One thing was certain. If they could find the coordinates, unearth the money and the body, and expose the whole thing, the Italian would be in a shit ton of trouble. But they’d have another problem on their hands―full-blown, all-out gang war between Los Lobos and La Tana del Lupo. What was the right choice? Find it all and expose the Italian? Or find it all, but suppress the information about the ring finger? Of course, letting the two gangs fight it out until they killed each other off was an attractive idea, but the collateral damage of civilian casualties would be huge, and they didn’t want that.

  It was early Sunday morning before they pulled into Carter’s drive. Cruz had told him several times that they should stop and stay the night, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep driving, to get home, to check on Sharla, Chelsea, and Lionel. He’d talked to her and texted her several times, but he didn’t dare tell her anything. He also talked to Glen and asked him to keep watching her and to ask the Hopkinsville police chief to do the same. His friend assured him they would. That was the best he could ask for.

  They headed off to bed. Carter could hear Cruz snoring even through the wall, but he couldn’t close his eyes. His mind was churning, thinking of all the info they’d gained, the crimes that had been committed, and the hatred between the two gangs. He had one small shred of hope. It appeared Estevez knew nothing about Imogen’s death or Sharla taking in Tamara and Lionel, and they certainly hadn’t told him. He knew those guys still talked to the outside, and the less the Italian knew about them, the better. It was bad enough that Angelico had found them. He was most certainly the one who was either following Sharla or had someone doing so.

  By the next morning, he was a wreck. All he could think about was Sharla, Chelsea, Lionel, and their safety. That was what he really wanted to work on, but Cruz had other ideas. “Get hold of Sharla. We need to start going through her sister’s things.”

  It took a trip to the hospital to pick up a key from Sharla, but by lunchtime, they had the lock off the self-storage unit and were loading boxes in Carter’s truck. They weren’t hard to spot―they all had Imogen’s name on them. There were about twelve of them, and it struck Carter as extremely sad that a life could be reduced to a dozen boxes.

  It seemed hopeless. Nothing but random stuff filled the boxes, one box after another. There were a few ribbons and a trophy from high school, four high school yearbooks, and a box of pictures of all kinds. Carter sifted through them in the conference room of the department. There were kids, and he could tell they were Tamara and Lionel. There were also some pics of who he assumed was Imogen with Taliq. If they were wedding pictures, nothing formal had taken place. It looked like they were at a courthouse. Many were pictures of two young girls with an older couple, and as he stared at them, he realized it was Imogen and Sharla with their parents. God, Sharla looked just like her mother! And Imogen looked just like their dad. He thought for a few seconds about his own mom and how he needed to talk to her, to explain why he hadn’t introduced Sharla earlier and how it had all come to be, but that would have to wait. Finding what they were searching for, getting to the bottom of the whole thing, was all he had time to do. They had to find those coordinates, but it was almost impossible with the wealth of pure junk they were going through.

  There were only two more boxes when Carter opened one of them. “Bingo.”

  “Yeah?”

  Carter looked
up at Cruz and grinned. “Journals.”

  “Now I’m getting hopeful,” Cruz said and reached in for a handful of them. “Might as well dig in.”

  The first one was obviously written when Imogen was in middle school. She talked about some boy named David and how cute he was. She bitched about her mom making her clean the kitchen after dinner by herself for a week for talking on the phone when she wasn’t supposed to. There was a whole detailed section about how she skipped school by getting on the bus, getting off at school, and slipping away instead of going inside. She threw them off for several days because the school bus driver swore she was on the bus, which she was. Carter had to hand it to her, she was successfully sneaky. But nothing in the journal was anything more than the ramblings of a young girl.

  The next one he picked up had a cover decorated with hearts and flowers, and he dreaded that. Sure enough, it was high school, and it was awful. To his horror, she wrote a detailed account of the night she lost her virginity in the bed of a pickup truck behind the football stadium after the game. She only mentioned the boy by his initials, QB, and then he realized―quarterback. She was a pretty girl, so she got one of the popular, important players to look at her. He dug out one of the yearbooks and looked in the back. One inscription caught his eye: To Imogen, one of the most funnest girls I’ve ever known. Stay sexy, babe. He looked at the name and then flipped to the athletic pages. Sure enough, the boy was the quarterback of the high school football team. Guess my powers of investigation are intact, he laughed inwardly as he put the yearbook back and went on through the journal. It yielded zip.

  The next one he picked up was different. It was blue, a light shade like the rest of them, but there was a difference―there was nothing on the cover. Just plain light blue. He flipped it open and started to read.

  June 7 – Taliq and I went to the park today with Tamara, but I wish he hadn’t gone. He fussed at her the whole time. When I mentioned it in the car, he slapped me hard. I hope Mom and Dad don’t see the finger marks. The journal entry went on in that fashion until Carter was sick of it. He dug farther into it. Nothing. Just the same kinds of things.

  Reaching for another one, he opened it and found a much different kind of journal, even though it was pretty and colorful on the outside like the others. Some of the entries were true entries, but some were rambling and incoherent, things he couldn’t make any sense out of. On at least a couple of pages were grocery or drugstore lists. Thumbing on through it, he found long periods where the pages were filled with the usual, and then two or three here or there with the weird stuff. It seemed totally random. When he got to the back, he looked at the last entry: March of the year the robbery occurred. Flipping back through it, he saw nothing that gave him pause, so he went back to the end. That was when he saw it.

  The bottom of the page almost appeared empty, but there were marks there, very light pencil marks, three lines of horizontal lines and two of vertical. Five in all. There was no pattern that he could discern, and it didn’t look to be a binary kind of thing. “Hey, take a look at this.”

  Cruz crossed the small space and stared at it. “Well, that’s odd.”

  “Yeah. I have no idea what they are. Almost looks like somebody was counting something, but there are no diagonal lines, so that can’t be it. Wonder if it’s some kind of calendar markings minus the calendar?”

  “I suppose that’s possible. Got a date on it?”

  “Not really. The last date was in March, barely three months before the last robbery, but there was one that month.”

  “What were the dates on the robberies again? Do you remember?”

  “One was in November of the previous year. One in January. And one in March. If that was intended to be a pattern, looks like they missed a month.” Carter thought about it for a minute. “Maybe that’s what set Angelico gunning for the guys. Maybe he wanted another robbery in May but they balked.”

  “Could be. Maybe he was mad at them, and when he asked why they hadn’t carried it out, Kent blasted off about having the money from the first three and not needing more?”

  That made sense to Carter. “Maybe. Sounds like a good theory. Wish I’d asked Estevez about that.”

  Cruz shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what set Angelico off―something did. Enough to try to get three men killed. I’m guessing if he got them arrested, he was going to promise to get a release for the first one to flip on Kent.”

  “But they knew nothing.”

  Cruz nodded. “Exactly.”

  “I’m not leaving this here. I’m taking it with us.” Carter slipped the journal into his messenger bag and headed out of the office, Cruz right behind him. “I’m pretty sure this is what we’re looking for. Now to see if anybody can figure it out.”

  “Our code breakers think it’s a binary code of some sort, but we can’t figure out what. It doesn’t make sense.” The voice of James Maddux, San Antonio FBI office’s chief analyst, came rolling out of the phone. “But we’re still working on it. We’ve put it into several translation devices, but so far, nothing.”

  “Okay. Thanks. We appreciate it. Let me know if you crack it.”

  “Will do.”

  “And that’s that,” Cruz said, reaching for the phone and turning off the speaker.

  “At least they’re working on it.” Carter was frustrated. They’d had the journal for two days and nobody had been able to figure it out. He’d stared at it for hours himself, but nothing had come to him.

  Cruz grabbed his jacket. “I’m having dinner with Sam and Dahlia. Wanna come along?”

  Carter shook his head. “Thanks, but nah. I’m betting when I get home, Sharla’s there.”

  “Want me to stay with them tonight so you guys have the run of the house?” Cruz asked, grinning.

  “No need. I’ll probably come back here.”

  “No! You should get some rest! We’ve been working night and day on this. Take a break. It’ll come together. Our analysts are the best. They’ll get it.”

  “But what if they don’t?”

  Cruz rolled his eyes. “Okay then. You want to sit here and stare at that paper all night, you go right ahead. I’m getting some rest. Catch up with you later.” With a backhanded wave, he was gone.

  Carter stood and stretched, then grabbed his own jacket and headed to the house. Sure enough, Sharla’s car was in the driveway. “Something smells good in here!” he called out as he opened the door.

  “Good! I didn’t burn it too badly!” she yelled back, laughing. When he stepped into the kitchen, she met him with a smile and a big wooden spoon in her hand. “Hi!”

  “Hi.” The kiss she gave him was a welcome bit of paradise in an otherwise shitty world. “Have a good day?”

  “Good enough. You?”

  “Still haven’t had any movement in that development.” He hadn’t told her what they were working on, so if anyone asked, she honestly didn’t know. That was best for her safety.

  “Bummer. Maybe you’ll get a break tomorrow. How does spaghetti sound?”

  “If it tastes as good as it smells, it’ll be delicious.” How ironic―I’m eating Italian food while an Italian is terrorizing my world, his brain muttered and he almost laughed. “Back in a minute.”

  Changing into a pair of jeans and a tee, Carter looked in the mirror and finger-combed his hair. When he padded sock-footed back into the kitchen, Sharla had plates on the table and was pulling hot bread from the oven. “You really went to a lot of trouble. Anything I can do to help?”

  “Yeah. Get some dressing out of the refrigerator. I want Italian, of course. Get whatever you like too. Oh, and the grated parmesan.”

  Italian sounded good to him, so he pulled the bottle from the refrigerator’s door and grabbed the can of cheese. She’d already placed the salad plates on the table, and the salad was green and leafy and looked delicious. “Wow. This looks … wow. Babe, you didn’t have to―”

  “I know, but I was hungry for spaghetti and I like to have a
salad with it. And nobody―nobody―cooks spaghetti for just themselves. If you’re going to do it, there have to be leftovers.”

  “Won’t be any tonight. I plan to eat every bite,” Carter announced as he sat down and placed the dressing and cheese on the table.

  But he didn’t. There was way too much, and he realized she’d made enough for Cruz in anticipation of him being there. She hadn’t asked where he was, but he knew she wondered, so he told her. He got a frown in return. “Pity. I wanted to get to know him a little better.”

  “Oh, Chelsea’s ‘mom, get to know that good-looking guy’ routine get to you after all?” he asked and grinned.

  “No. He just seems … interesting. He has somebody, right?”

  “Yeah. Her name’s Mickie and from what I can tell, the guy’s totally smitten.”

  “That’s sweet. I don’t know anybody else who’s totally smitten with somebody except me.”

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Carter cried in mock argument. “I’m totally smitten with you!”

  “Oh, you are?”

  “Yeah. I am. But you already know that.”

  “So what are we doing tonight? Watching some of that sitcom on streaming? Going to the grocery? Rolling around in your bed for a few hours?” she asked and winked.

  He knew she was going to have a fit. “No. I’m going back to the office.”

  “Carter! What the hell? You’ve been there for two days, and you’ve barely taken a break! Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  How could he explain to her that in one blinding second, he could unravel the puzzle and all the pieces would fall into place? “Babe, there’s so much paperwork with this case that if I don’t stay on top of it, it’ll get out of hand. But it’ll be over soon, I promise.”

  “But I miss you,” Sharla whined. That kind of whining was very unlike her, and he wondered if he was pushing his luck.

  “I know. I miss you too. But we’re too close to solving this to just walk away. I’ll figure it out.”