Secure Location

chapter Fourteen

Early Monday morning, Cruz got Jana dressed and fed her breakfast in the hotel restaurant. She was barely finished with her pancakes when Elsa came to pick her up. It was a tearful reunion, on Elsa’s part. Jana was all smiles and gave Cruz a big kiss. He watched them drive away and then did something that he’d never expected to do—not in a hundred years. He initiated a background check on Meg.

He dialed and Sam answered on the fourth ring. “Vernelli,” he said, his voice rough.

“It’s almost eight o’clock your time, partner,” Cruz said. “Get your sorry self out of bed.”

Sam sighed. “Claire and I took the red-eye back from Omaha. She wanted to spring the news about the baby to her parents in person.”

Cruz had only met the Fontaines once, at Sam and Claire’s wedding. They’d been nice enough but rather reserved. “How’d that go?”

“Better than either of us might have expected.”

That was no doubt a good thing because if the Fontaines had given Claire even a moment of grief, Sam would have told them to stuff it and he’d have whisked his new bride away from Nebraska and back to Chicago. “How’s Claire feeling?”

“As long as I embrace my role of saltine cracker-bearing slave, it’s all good,” Sam said. “What’s going on with you? How’s Meg?” he asked, his tone careful.

Cruz understood the caution. Sam had lived through the death spiral that Cruz had started when Meg had suddenly announced she was leaving. “Meg’s okay. I mean, she looks great, she’s doing really well in her job, she...” Cruz couldn’t finish. He sucked in a breath. This was his best friend. “She’s in trouble, Sam. And I’m not sure she’s telling me the truth.”

There was silence on the other end.

Cruz barged on. “I need your help. I want to know everything about Margaret Mae Gunderson Montoya that there is to know. I’m not sure what’s important and what’s not, so don’t leave anything out.”

“Consider it done. I’ll be in touch.”

Cruz disconnected the call. When he’d talked to Myers the night before, the man had told him that the blood on Meg’s desk had been analyzed. The good news was that it wasn’t human. It was canine. But not from just one dog. Three dogs. The bastard had killed three dogs. They figured he’d somehow managed to collect the blood and then he’d smeared it across Meg’s desk.

They were dealing with somebody who had a screw loose. Technologically sharp, yet bent. It was a scary combination. He hoped the guy didn’t build bombs in his basement.

Cruz punched an address into his GPS that he’d gotten from Tom Looney’s employment application. The man had worked at a factory before he’d been hired on at the hotel. He’d listed his supervisor as H. Looney. It wasn’t that common of a last name and Cruz was betting on the fact that H. Looney was some kind of relation.

Who hopefully knew just where Tom Looney could be found.

When he arrived at the small shop and asked for H. Looney, the woman at the front desk pushed a button and the overhead page went out. “Haney to the front. Haney to the front.”

In less than a minute, a fifty-year-old man who was wiping his hands on a grease rag poked his head around the door. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m Detective Cruz Montoya. I’m looking for Tom Looney. I know he used to work here.”

The man nodded. “He’s my nephew. He worked here for a couple years after he lost his job at the prison.”

There hadn’t been anything on his application about working at a prison. “What did he do at the prison?”

“Maintenance supervisor. I guess it was budget cuts. He’d worked there a couple years.”

Maybe. Or maybe he’d screwed up there, too, and didn’t want anybody checking those references. “I stopped by his house yesterday. The woman living there didn’t seem to know where he was.”

The man smiled. “Donnetta. Now that’s a hard nut to crack. She’s Bertie’s sister. Tom’s mother,” he added. “I’m his uncle on his daddy’s side.”

“Where’s your nephew now?”

“Doing maintenance work at the food plant south of town, on I-37. It’s a good job.” Haney Looney reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a worn billfold. He opened it and thumbed through a stack of business cards, pulling one out from near the bottom. “Here. He gave this to me just a couple weeks ago.”

Cruz took the card. “Okay. Here’s the deal. I’m going to pay your nephew a visit. I don’t really expect you to keep this conversation to yourself. I understand how family works. But understand this. If he suddenly goes AWOL, I’m not going to reflect positively upon that.”

“I’m not going to call him. He’s a man. Or at least he says he is. He can answer his own damn questions.” The man turned and left the room.

It took Cruz thirty minutes to get to the food plant and another fifteen to work his way past the guards at the various entrances. The place was tied up tighter than Fort Knox. A sign of the times for sure. No manufacturer in their right mind wanted to make it easy for someone to get inside, tamper with some product and make a couple hundred people sick before the company could get the product off the shelves.

He asked the receptionist to get a manager. She pushed a button, spoke into her headset and in just minutes he was invited into the offices.

The manager was a woman, probably close to fifty. She wore blue pants, a blue shirt and a white lab coat. Cruz gave her his card, explained that he was investigating a crime and that he needed to talk to Tom Looney. She didn’t ask any questions, just led him to a conference room.

It took Tom Looney ten minutes to get to the room. He was wearing a hairnet over his ponytail and there was a pair of safety glasses in his pocket. He was also sweating.

Cruz didn’t waste any time. He slid another card across the table. “I’m here to talk to you about some trouble that Meg Montoya has been having.”

Looney didn’t say anything.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Cruz said. “I don’t much care. But I’m thinking your employer might not like the idea of you needing time off unexpectedly to give a statement to the police.”

Looney shook his head in apparent disgust. “I don’t know what some crazy guy attacking her at the fundraiser has to do with me.”

Now that was interesting. To the best of Cruz’s knowledge, the incident hadn’t made the papers. “How do you know about that?”

The man’s face got red. He hesitated, chewing on his top lip. “I know someone who was there.”

“Define someone.”

The man pursed his lips. Finally, he spoke. “The hotel employed four men from the prison through the A Hand Up program. I live with one of the men. He told me about it.”

The pieces were starting to click together. The uncle’s strange comment—“He’s a man or at least he says he is.” The missing work experience on the job application. Cruz leaned forward. “You used to work at the prison. But you got fired from there for having a personal relationship with one of the inmates, didn’t you?”

The man nodded. “Look. I don’t want any trouble at this job. I work with a bunch of rednecks. It’s bad enough to be a gay man but to be a gay man living with an ex-con is just asking for trouble.”

No doubt about that.

“You lost your job at the hotel, too,” Cruz said.

“That was for a totally different reason. I missed too much work.”

“Why?”

“My partner was ill. He needed surgery and couldn’t drive for several weeks. He had therapy appointments afterward and there was nobody else to take him. I ran out of vacation time.”

Cruz knew that if Looney had told Meg the truth, there was a high likelihood that he’d have kept his job. But he understood the secrecy. This was Texas, after all.

“Meg has had some other things happen. Do you have any idea of who might want to antagonize her or hurt her in some way?” Cruz asked.

The man shook his head. “She’s a good person. Probably the nicest manager I’ve ever worked with. I was the one who told her about the A Hand Up program. She knew I had some personal connection but she never pried. I can’t see anybody wanting to hurt her. I guess the only advice I could give you is to talk to her secretary. That woman’s a bitch.”

* * *

CRUZ TURNED HIS attention to finding Troy Blakely. The guy had worked at the jewelry store for over a year. He had to have had lunch in the area, or maybe dropped off some dry cleaning. The possibilities were endless. People left tracks everywhere.

He hit pay dirt at his fourth stop—a small Thai restaurant. The waitress, a tired-looking thirtysomething blonde, looked at the picture and smiled. “He used to stop in a couple nights a week. Always had a beer while he was waiting for his food. Nice enough guy, although there was something about him that gave me the creeps.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“A week or so ago.”

That surprised Cruz. There were a lot of places to get Thai food. If he wasn’t working in the area, was he living nearby?

“Anything unusual?”

“I asked him if he’d found work. A few months back he’d lost his job at this big hotel.”

“Had he?”

“I’m not sure. I remember his answer because it was sort of weird. He said it didn’t matter because he was finally going to be able to fix everything.”

Fix everything.

It could mean a thousand things. “He ever have a conversation with anybody else while he was waiting for his beer?”

She shook her head. “No. I suppose I was the only one who paid much attention to him. To be honest, I felt a little sorry for him. When he first started coming in, which was probably a good year ago, he’d said that his parents had died recently—the way he talked about them, I got the impression that they were really close.”

“His parents live in San Antonio?”

A door slammed near the rear of the restaurant and she started wiping the counter in earnest. “I need to go help put away stock,” she said.

“His parents?” he prompted again.

She wrinkled her brow. “Some small town two hours away. Hollyville. Haileyville. Something like that.”

Cruz discreetly passed her a fifty-dollar bill and a card with his name and number. “Thank you. If you remember anything else, please call me.”

It took Cruz five minutes to locate Haileyville, Texas, on the map. He didn’t bother to plug the address into his GPS. It was a hundred miles west, then a short twenty miles north—main highways all the way.

He grabbed coffee and two candy bars from the gas station and settled in for the trip. He was barely at the outskirts of San Antonio when he called Meg.

“Meg Montoya,” she answered

“How’s your day?”

“I had a couple meetings and quite a bit of voice mail and email to get through.”

His idea of hell. He hated the bureaucratic nature of police work that required writing reports and documenting endless conversations. Hated going to meetings where decisions never got made. Hated listening to consultants who couldn’t find their butts unless someone put a dollar sign on them.

“Lucky you,” he said. “Hey, I’m headed out of town. I got a lead on Troy Blakely. His parents lived in Haileyville. It’s about two hours west of here.”

Meg knew exactly where Haileyville was. It was thirty miles from her hometown of Maiter, Texas. They’d gone school shopping there and Christmas shopping, too. It was significantly bigger than Maiter, although that wasn’t saying much. Probably had ten thousand residents. Maiter had boasted they’d hit a thousand when the Wyman triplets had been born.

Cruz’s trip shouldn’t make her nervous but it did. Nobody in Haileyville was going to be talking about something that happened twenty years ago, some thirty miles away.

“Will you be back tonight?” Meg asked.

“Yes. I’d really appreciate it if you would either be in your office or in our rooms. Please don’t leave the hotel.”

“I won’t,” she said. She didn’t need to leave the hotel in order to do what needed to be done.

“Thank you,” he said.

She disconnected before she did something stupid like beg him to be careful. Then she pulled out Detective Myers’s card from her purse and dialed his office number.

“Myers,” he answered.

She could just see his stubby, nicotine-stained fingers grabbing his desk phone.

“This is Meg Montoya. I need to tell you something.”