Megan
Detective Bustamente and I were seated in Vicki’s small living room, explaining why we were there and why we suspected her boyfriend had been involved in the zoo thefts, when a sweet, soft voice sounded from off to the side.
“Daddy stole Sarki? A rhino, too?”
We turned to see a young girl standing in the hallway. She had her mother’s coppery hair, but while her mother’s blue eyes were full of regret, the girl’s hazel eyes were full of tears.
Her lip trembled. “Daddy told me he was going to be good now.”
Vicki waved her over and pulled her close, one arm wrapped protectively around the girl’s back and the other cupping her head. She bent her head down and spoke quietly into her daughter’s ear. “I’m sorry, Harper. Daddy messed up again.”
While we realized the girl needed comforting, it would have to come later. There’d been no reported sightings of the truck and trailer. We needed to find Fleming now.
Bustamente asked, “Do you have any idea where he might be, ma’am? Where he might be taking the rhino?”
Still encircled in her mother’s arms, Harper turned to face us.
Vicki shook her head and answered the question. “I got no idea at all.”
Bustamente exhaled a loud breath. “But he’s in your pickup, right? The black Dodge with the camper shell?”
“I suppose he is,” she said. “Only it’s not black anymore. Someone took a key to it a while back and he had it repainted white. They damaged the camper top, too, so he took it off.”
I threw up my hands. “That’s why nobody’s spotted him!” Law enforcement had been looking for a black truck with a camper shell, not a white truck without one. I was fairly certain the person who’d scratched up the truck was none other than Fleming himself, but there was nothing to be gained by pointing out to Vicki what a deceitful man she’d been living with. She seemed to be getting that point all on her own.
I pressed the button on my shoulder mic and contacted dispatch yet another time. “That black truck with the camper shell everyone’s looking for? Turns out it’s a white truck with no top on it.”
Dispatch quickly issued an update.
Bustamente and I exchanged glances. We both realized the blunder over the truck’s color had cost us quite a bit of time and given Fleming an advantage. He could be thirty or more miles from Fort Worth now, in any direction, increasing the search area exponentially. There were untold numbers of places to hide a rhino in that square mileage.
Harper stared intently at me as I told Vicki how we’d tracked Fleming before coming to her house. “We pinged his phone and found him at Page Road, but we got separated when a train came through. After that, we lost the signal on his phone. He must’ve taken the battery out. We have no way of knowing where he and the rhino are now.”
Harper spoke now. “You can tell where somebody’s phone is at?”
“Yes,” I told her. “Cell phones give off a signal that can be traced.”
She tilted her cute, coppery head. “So if my phone was in Daddy’s truck, you could find it?”
Bustamente and I exchanged glances again. Hopeful ones, this time.
I addressed Harper, keeping my voice upbeat and calm. “Is your phone in your daddy’s truck, honey?”
She turned her head and looked up at her mother, her eyes bright with worry.
Vicki ran a hand over her daughter’s hair. “It’s okay if you left it there. I won’t be mad this time.”
Relieved, the little girl turned back to me and nodded.
Bustamente was already on his cell, calling the tech team back. “What’s your phone number, sweetie?”
Harper stood up straight and proud. “I got it memorized.” As she called out the number, the detective repeated it to the techies.
The detective drummed his fingers impatiently on his knee as he waited for them to give it a try. I was equally anxious, my knee bouncing like a railroad piston.
A minute later, Bustamente said, “They’ve got it. He’s on the 820 loop at Camp Bowie Boulevard.”
I updated dispatch with the information.
“Roger that!” called the helicopter pilot over the airwaves.
The loop ran through the neighboring suburbs of White Settlement and Lake Worth. I asked dispatch to give their departments a shout, too. We needed as many eyes as we could get looking out for Fleming and his endangered cargo.
“Will do,” she said.
We waited in virtual silence for word to come in that someone had Fleming in their sights. Come on! I willed my fellow officers. Get that bastard!
Derek’s voice came over the radio a few seconds later, his siren audible in the background. “I’m on the loop near Chapin Road. I should be on him soon.”
A flash of white-hot fury threatened to incinerate my insides. I’d busted my ass on this case, and Derek would get the glory? The same guy who’d summoned me to the Fiesta Mart claiming he’d spotted Fabiana and Fernando when all he’d seen were some parrot piñatas? I could handle another officer nabbing Fleming. But Derek? Grrrr!
I took a deep breath, extended my baton, and twirled it to calm myself. Swish-swish-swish. I added my mantra. Peace be with me. Peace be with me. It didn’t help. I still wanted to take my baton to Derek like he was one of those piñatas.
Bustamente, who was still on the phone with the techs, banged a fist on his knee. “Not again!” He turned to me. “They’ve lost this signal, too.”
Harper looked from the detective, to me, to her mother. “What does that mean?”
Vicki answered for all of us. “It means they don’t know where Daddy is anymore.”
Harper turned to me. “Maybe he’s going out to that place with the horses.”
The detective and I looked to Vicki for details. She shrugged. “I don’t know a place with horses.” She looked down at her daughter. “What are you talking about?”
The girl toyed with a length of her hair. “Daddy took us out there last weekend,” she told her mother, “after we went to the zoo.”
Bustamente asked, “Do you know why he went to the horse place? Did he talk to anyone?”
Harper continued to run her little hands down her hair, a soothing mechanism just like my baton twirling. “I don’t know why. He didn’t talk to anybody. He just drove real slow and looked around.”
Had he been scouting out a hiding place for Mubanga? Or maybe making a dry run to the delivery point? It seemed possible, even probable.
“Where is the horse place?” Bustamente asked the girl.
“It’s in the country. You go on that road between the airports.”
The road between the airports … Was she referring to Highway 199? Also known as Jacksboro Highway, the road ran between the airfield at the military’s joint reserve base on the west side of Fort Worth and Meacham Field, a smaller airport northwest of downtown. The airports were miles apart, but the flashing beacons and the planes flying in and out of them would be visible from a car traveling Highway 199. The road intersected Loop 820 not too far north of where Fleming was last pinged. But from there it wasn’t far to county roads and open land with big barns where it would be easy to conceal a large animal.
“Harper,” I said, “if we got in the car, could you show us where your daddy took you?”
“I think so,” she said. “I always look out the window and see things.” In other words, she might spot some landmarks that would help us find her father and rescue the rhino.
I stood. “Harper, do you want to help save Mubanga?”
Her worried eyes brightened. “Yes!”
I swung my finger to indicate the door. “Then let’s go!”