The address linked to Pedro’s driver’s license was the right-hand side of a duplex not far from where Les Hilton had lived. There were no lights on in the house nor cars parked in the driveway, and Pedro wasn’t answering the phone.
Or the door.
Michael looked at Maria. Asked what she wanted to do.
“Is kicking the door in out of the question?” Maria asked.
“We don’t have exigent circumstances,” Michael said.
“Carla being kidnapped isn’t exigent enough?” Maria said.
“You know what I mean,” Michael said.
Maria did know. But she wasn’t up to admitting it out loud.
They went back to the car and considered their options. The thought of sitting there and waiting for Pedro to come home was unbearable. Maria couldn’t sit still while Carla was being held. She had to keep moving, but she hadn’t the slightest clue where to go next.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Michael said.
“About what?”
“About the five-million-pound weight sitting on your shoulders,” Michael said.
“No, I don’t want to talk about it,” Maria said.
“Millie sent me the crime scene report for that shack in California. They’re still waiting on a full ME report, but there were no bodily fluids other than blood,” Michael said.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Maria said.
“All I’m saying is that if this is the same person, Carla is just strapped to that chair. She’s terrified, and she’s alone, but there’s no reason to suggest anything else is going on right now,” Michael said.
“We can’t know that,” Maria said.
“We know criminals like this have patterns,” Michael said.
“We can’t be sure,” Maria said. Tears formed. Her throat stuck. She turned away from Michael and balled her firsts and pressed them against her eyes.
“How did you find Ariella?” Michael asked.
“Her uncle called me. Gave me two addresses,” Maria said.
“How did he find those addresses?”
“Not a clue, and he isn’t answering the phone,” Maria said.
“Think it through. How could he have found those addresses?”
Maria shook her head. She couldn’t even be sure of the man’s name much less how he had found out about the houses. It had to be something related to technology, of that much she was sure. But that wasn’t going to help her out. She dealt with people, not computers.
“Is it connected to Les in any way?” Michael asked.
“There’s a company Les was investigating. They’re corporate landlords. They buy and rent out single-family homes. Dunleavy was looking into them. He also found some numbers that he thought were folio numbers,” Maria said.
“Like tax records for plots of land?” Michael said.
“Why am I the only person who doesn’t know what they are?” Maria said.
“What about the folio numbers?”
“They didn’t correspond with any plots of land. Dunleavy looked them up,” Maria said.
“Where were the numbers?”
“We found them in notebooks in his office. I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything in those things. I’m sure they’re connected, but it’s like he wrote them so people couldn’t understand them,” Maria said.
“So who could help us understand?”
“Pedro. But he is avoiding all of us, and I’m starting to wonder if he’s involved in some way,” Maria said.
“Anyone else? Was Les married? Did he have a girlfriend?” Michael said.
“He’s divorced. Been divorced for a little while,” Maria said.
“We should ask her,” Michael said.
“The ex-wife? What’s she going to know?”
“You got a better idea?” Michael said.
Cassie picked up on the second ring. She sounded tired.
“Did you catch someone?” She asked.
Maria found herself caught short. She’d been so busy searching for Ariella and freaking out over Carla’s kidnapping that she’d almost forgotten why she was on this case in the first place. The vicious murder of Les Hilton. A man with his jaw knocked clean off of his face in his own living room. A man who, for all of his flaws, was a doting father of a young girl. There was more at stake here than the woman Maria loved. Sure, Carla was her focus, but Maria wasn’t the only one dealing with loss. She needed to remember that.
“I haven’t solved the case yet. To be honest, it’s turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected,” Maria said.
“Les was a complicated man. Some days I wonder what I ever saw in him, other days I wonder why I ever let him go in the first place,” Cassie said.
“I’ve been going through his files. Trying to figure some things out, but the files don’t seem to make much sense. I was wondering if you knew of a code he used or how he kept notes,” Maria said.
“Newspaper files? Like things for his stories?” Cassie said.
“Yeah, there are initials and some things that look like doodles. We can’t make heads or tails of it,” Maria said.
“Yeah, he was very paranoid about people getting into his files, so he used initials instead of names, so he’d always have deniability. The only thing he didn’t have to worry about using code for was numbers because he had dyscalculia,” Cassie said.
“I feel like I should know what that is, but I don’t have a clue,” Maria said.
“It’s like dyslexia for numbers. He had a hard time counting, and whenever he wrote out numbers, he’d scramble them. I couldn’t let him pay bills. He wrote a check out for eight hundred and thirty-one dollars once when it was supposed to be one hundred and thirty-eight dollars,” Cassie said.
Maria thought about the numbers and how Dunleavy said they had to be portfolio numbers, but they didn’t correspond with any properties.
“That might be very helpful, Cassie. I’m going to get back to work, but I’m going to check in with you soon with a status update,” Maria said.
“You sound stressed,” Cassie said.
“It’s been a long day,” Maria said.
“Thank you for working so hard on this case. I know Les wrote an article about you that was unflattering, and I’m sorry,” Cassie said.
Maria found herself shocked by how much she appreciated the apology. A little thing like that shouldn’t matter at all, but hearing it had made her feel grateful and guilty all at the same time.
Maybe if she’d just focused on finding Les’s killer, none of this would have happened. Maybe she needed to think about whether or not she’d let her feelings about Les affect her work. Something else to kick her own ass about later. Now she needed to get Dunleavy to take another look at those numbers.
Dunleavy picked up on the second ring. He sounded as tired as Maria felt, but he was at the station and could pull out the notebooks.
“They might be scrambled. See if you can find out if any of those numbers match the house we raided but in a different order. Then try to rearrange the numbers according to the scrambling of that number,” Maria said.
“You think that’ll really work?” Dunleavy said.
“I haven’t got a clue, but it’s the only idea I have right now,” Maria said.
“I’ll call you back,” Dunleavy said.
Michael was standing a few feet away looking up at the darkening night sky. The neon of the strip was creating a halo of light at the center of the valley. He turned back to Maria. Asked her what she thought about this lead.
“We should get ready. The problem isn’t going to be getting to her. The problem is going to be getting her out,” Maria said.
“Vegas isn’t the California scrubland. There won’t be clear lines of sight, and he didn’t have time to take her far. She has to be close,” Michael said.
Maria felt a deep sense of despair in her gut. She’d already failed once. She couldn’t fail again.
The twenty minutes they waited for Dunleavy to call back felt like hours. Maria and Michael didn’t talk because there was nothing to say. Either this was going to work, or Carla was probably going to die. Maybe she was dead already. Maria pushed the possibility out of her mind. The only way out was forward. She was just waiting to be told where forward was.
When Dunleavy called, he had five addresses. One of them was the house they’d raided the day before in East Las Vegas. Three of them were addresses Maria didn’t recognize. But the last one she recognized as soon as Dunleavy said the street number.
“Send cars to the middle three. I’ll take the last one,” Maria said.
In the car, Michael asked where they were going.
“To my brother’s house,” Maria said.
“Your brother’s?”
“Yeah. We sold it to a corporation a few weeks ago,” Maria said.
“Shit,” Michael said.
You don’t know the half of it, Maria thought.