“Who the hell is this?” Cervantes blocked the doorway with his thick frame, arms folded over his chest. He eyed Sam, looking like he wanted to spit on my partner’s shoes.
“Sam Foster.” Sam stuck out his hand. He didn’t accompany the gesture with his trademark smile. Cervantes didn’t accept the handshake. Still, Sam kept his hand out for a good fifteen seconds, making the moment that much more awkward. The two men engaged in a stare-off I was certain would end up in an MMA-style brawl. Would Sam’s height-advantage give him the upper hand, or would Cervantes’ stocky build prevail? I’d put my money on Sam.
“Mitch, glad to see you made it.” Pennington tossed a casual glance at Sam as he walked toward us. “We think we got something we can use.”
They’d sent a black and white and an ambulance to the woods. The officers took Seth back to the station. The ambulance drove me to the hospital to get checked out. There was no way out of it. Even if the paramedics had relented, Sam insisted I get checked out. I’d be of no use heavily concussed. Six stitches later they released me and we made our way over to the station.
Pennington and Cervantes went straight to work on Seth. They’d already pounded the guy on previous occasions, and knew his weaknesses. And now he’d assaulted an officer, albeit an out-of-state one, which gave them a huge bargaining chip.
“Come on, let’s get a secure room.” Pennington motioned us to follow. He glanced at Sam again. “Who’s your friend?”
“My partner from back home. Sam Foster.”
Pennington offered a quick nod-smile gesture in Sam’s direction. “If you’re half as good as Mitch, I think you’ll be an asset here.”
Cervantes muttered something under his breath as he shot his partner a look that said he questioned what the hell Pennington was thinking letting Sam join the conflicting team we’d created.
“Not now, Cerv,” Pennington said. “You can address your concerns with me when we’re alone. There’s just too damn much to do right now.”
We entered a small conference room that looked like the type of place they brought a family to give them bad news in the hospital. Maybe they did the same here. The light blue walls were accented with calming paintings done in pastels. A vase on the round table was filled with fake lilies. I wondered if it was a quiet room, or something. A place the cops here could go when things got to be too much for them.
Everyone took a seat and Pennington proceeded to tell us what had gone down with Seth.
“He was hiding near the house. Claims he was watching it, making sure no one came along and vandalized the place. Says that he was sure we missed something inside. Cerv pushed him on this, but Seth wouldn’t give us a clue what it might be. Just a feeling.”
They hadn’t the time to leave the station, so the clue inside was probably nothing. Something had to have happened while Seth waited.
Pennington continued. “Seth noticed a van pull up sometime late afternoon. A man got out, went around the back of the house. Seth changed his vantage point, saw the man go inside. Seth gets into the back of the van and hides under one of those heavy moving blankets.”
“Get the hell out of here,” I said. “Seth did this?”
“Tougher than we thought,” Cervantes said.
“Or stupider,” I said. “So, what happened?”
“The man gets back in the van and drives off. Stops a few times. Opens the back after one stop and tossed some heavy bags inside. One landed on Seth, he had to keep from yelling out.”
“What was in the bags?”
“I’m getting there,” Pennington said. “After a while, the ride gets rough, like they’re off road.”
“Took him to the woods.” Sam leaned over his forearms.
Pennington smiled and nodded. “You’re quick.”
“Well that explains why the asshole was out there today,” I said. “But why’d he attack me?”
“He thought you had been following him and were going to arrest him,” Cervantes said.
“I don’t like the guy’s meddling,” I said. “He’s always on the outer fringes of where the action is. Like he knows what’s going to happen before anyone else.”
“We’ve said the same thing,” Pennington said. “But him being in the back of the van isn’t all we got from him. Check this out.”
Cervantes pulled five photos from his bag and placed them on the table, facing Sam and me. They were shots of a couple bags of dirt, some fertilizer, lye, and calcium nitrate.
My stomach tightened and I felt my head go light. “You think she’s dead? All this was to bury her and get the body to decompose as quickly as possible?”
“We can’t know that until we have the van,” Cervantes said.
“We think there’s an alternative here.” Pennington seemed excited over the news. I sensed he cared about Cassie almost as much as I did. If he feared she was dead, his manner would be different.
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
Pennington pointed to the fertilizer. “See that brand? It’s a local store. I have a small plot next to my house. Grow my own vegetables. Quarter-acre farming… Something the wife and I like to do together. Anyway, that’s the store where I shop.”
“Local place,” Sam said. “Probably know all the employees pretty well, huh?”
Pennington nodded. “Same ten people have worked there for all the years I’ve been going. I called over right before you guys got here and spoke with one of them. Then I emailed scans of the photos of what was found in the back of Novak’s van, along with a picture of Novak.”
“Success?” I asked.
“A few of them recognized him.”
My pulse quickened in anticipation. “What’d they say?”
“We got them on a conference call,” Pennington said. “Might’ve been better to go do it in person, but we felt waiting for you to get here and then heading over would waste an hour we might not be able to afford.”
I’d had all the drama I could take for the day. I wanted him to get to the point, but he insisted on dragging this out. “So, what’d you find out?”
“No one person could give us all the details, but it seems Novak has a need to talk about himself. Maybe he’s trying to get the women to loosen up around him so he can decide if they are worthy enough to be one of his victims.”
“Why do you say that?” Sam asked.
“They knew the most details,” Cervantes said. “The men at the store couldn’t tell us much.”
“That’s right,” Pennington said. “He’d revealed more to the women about himself and what he was doing with everything he bought.”
Cervantes pulled a notebook and mechanical pencil from his bag. I spotted the Mont Blanc white star emblem on the cap from across the table. Four hundred bucks was some pretty serious coin for a cop to drop on a pencil.
“Here’s what it all boils down to,” Cervantes said. “Novak has a greenhouse or multiple greenhouses on a plot of land that he maintains somewhere between here and Charleston. Records search shows no indication that he’s the owner of the property.”
“You mean he’s working it for someone?” Sam said.
“Might be squatting,” Pennington said. “Or it might in fact be his land. But the public records search shows nothing in his name.”
“What about Mark O’Connell?” I said.
Pennington shrugged. “I’m not familiar with that name.”
“We learned that Novak has a history up in our area,” Sam said. “The guy we used to clean up the gas station footage, he recognized Novak as O’Connell from a case he worked years ago.”
Pennington straightened. “And he’s sure it’s Novak?”
“He pulled out the old file,” Sam said. “We saw the photos from over a decade ago. Same guy. No doubt about it.”
Pennington repeated Novak’s alias as he rose and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a while. Cerv, fill them in on the plan.”
Cervantes closed his notebook and leaned back in his chair, taking an exaggerated deep breath as he soaked in the new information. This could be it. The one piece of information they’d been waiting for. He exhaled toward the ceiling as his head tipped back.
“What’s up, Cervantes?” I said. “What are you planning from here on out?”
“It’s a long shot, at best,” he said. “There’s so much land to cover. A hundred miles in a straight line. Then you gotta figure forty miles east to west.”
My ears and cheeks started to burn. “If we gotta get out there with bloodhounds to find her, then that’s what we do. We owe that to Cassie.”
Cervantes stared at the ceiling for a few moments before lowering his gaze to me. He held it there for several seconds. “Yeah, Mitch, we do.”
“Great, glad you agree with me.” I attempted to hold back the sarcasm from my tone. “So, what the hell are we gonna do about it?”