The Blood Dahlia (The Dark Angel Mysteries Book 1) Page 4

  Gina’s ruby red glossed lips wanted to answer, but something held them back at first. Through the pout she answered, “Well, no.”

  “So, other than she is missing, according to her father, do you have any information of her being in trouble? Anything at all that tells you she is not sitting on a beach in Cancun with some tanned hunk named Juan?”

  Her head dropped to where her chin almost smacked into her collarbone. The compression on her neck muffled her reply, “No.”

  Lynch spun around on the sofa and laid back down. “Then, tell you what. As soon as you have any information that she is in trouble, you come see me. Until then, I am going back to bed. You found your way in here; you can find your way out.”

  He closed his eyes as he heard her heels thudding on the floor, out of the room. Before she left, she gave one last shot, “I am not sure why I ever cared for you.” When the door shut, Lynch thought to himself, That was a long time ago, in another life.

  7

  “Bruce, I don’t want to have to visit you. I have always liked you, so how about you pay up on your bill?” tension dripped off of every word and Lynch wanted it to be that way. He needed that to come across loud and clear, like a perp he was sitting across the interrogation table from. The only difference here was, the other person couldn’t see his face.

  “How ’bout I buy you a round at Stiffies and we call it even?” a wary voice said over the round speaker that sat next to the now mostly empty bottle of scotch on the desk. Mounds of papers, that Lynch hadn’t looked through in years, surrounded it. The most he had touched any of those were to push them around to make room for more papers, his scotch, or if he needed his desk for any extracurricular activities while in his office. The latter was something he hadn’t done in quite a while, kind of lost the interest.

  Lynch thought over the offer and then gave his calculated and measured response with a little more tension in his voice. “So, a drink covers 1,100 credits? Seems in that exchange I will be about 1,098 credits short, don’t ya think?” His tone bordered on hostile, like it used to just before he took the role of bad cop to Lucas’s good cop.

  “Hey, it’s the best I can do,” the voice pleaded from the round speaker.

  Lynch didn’t wait this time. There was no need to give an impression of considering the request. He dropped the tension from his voice and spoke as if he were addressing an old friend. “Well, if it is the best you can do, I guess that is what it has to be. Can I have that drink this afternoon?”

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the call before the voice asked, in a panic, “This afternoon? Why this afternoon? I have something else this afternoon.”

  “Because as soon as I hang up with you, I am calling Michael and telling him who has been paying me to keep tabs on him and his deliveries. After that, I am not sure you will be alive much longer than today.”

  “Wait! Wait!” exclaimed the voice.

  “Call me about that drink!” Lynch yelled through the pleas to wait, and then slammed his hand down on the speaker, disconnecting the call. He had no intention of making that call. It would be bad for business.

  Bruce Reynolds was a small-time crook. Even that word, crook, might be too strong a label. He ran a local expedited delivery company. It started out as honest work, and he made a living going into areas of town none of the others would. It was tough going at first. Drivers quit right and left after being robbed of their cargo, at best, and being roughed up during the robbery, at worst and most common. Of course, these deliveries cost the shipper just a bit more than the average charge, they categorized it on the invoice as hazard pay. The drivers never saw the hazard pay. They never saw the 10% extra Bruce was making when he added a little something extra to his deliveries either. After the loss of several ‘valuable’ deliveries, Bruce made a deal with the local families that ran the streets. He would help them deliver their cargo of choice, under the radar and off the books, if he received a little kickback for his risk, and they gave his drivers safe passage.

  It worked out well, and even earned him a spot on the local news as one of the business leaders not deterred by the violence of the east side of New Metro. The Chamber of Commerce honored him as businessman of the year in 2051. Of course, neither mentioned the other cargo he was carrying stuffed inside his normal deliveries. All of this attention caused some of his competitors to ask questions. The person one of them asked was Lynch.

  Michael Anderson owned A1 Deliveries. To say he had fared far less successfully in his attempts to run short range deliveries on the east side would be sugarcoating it. Lynch knew of three drivers that were pulled from their rigs and shot in the street. The last anyone saw of their trucks was when they pulled out of the frame of the security cameras that recorded the drivers being murdered.

  Michael approached Lynch and asked him if, as an ex-cop, he had heard anything about how Bruce’s company managed to not be targeted by the east side violence. Lynch hadn’t, but he was coy about it and said he may have heard something here or there. Nothing firm though. Over a half-hour in the spacious comfort of Lynch’s ratty office, just on the edge of the side of town that was of so much interest to Michael, he hinted at this and that and dropped a few suggestions he could look into it. Michael took him up on the offer for the bargain price of 1,000 credits. Lynch really didn’t have any idea of how many hours it would take to get to the bottom of the matter here, but 1,000 was a nice round number he liked.

  He spent about a week kicking over the rocks and cans he used to back in his days on the force, but learned little. No one gave him any straight answers, but they all made one suggestion. Follow the trucks. So, one night he did just that.

  He went home. Totter had made him roast beef for dinner. It was one of those nights he was thrilled that she was a robot and not a human with feelings, or worse, a wife. Totter wasn’t offended at all when he cut a slab off the roast, threw it on two pieces of plain white bread, and walked out with the sandwich in one hand and a bottle of scotch in the other. He parked his car around the corner from Bruce and Son Expedited Deliveries. His sons had abandoned their father in the family business years earlier, but he hadn’t updated the sign yet. Lynch waited for one of their trucks to head out with deliveries for the night. It wouldn’t be hard to pick their trucks, they were a putrid combination of green with yellow lettering, and were old-fashioned museum piece diesel trucks, not the electric models of the last couple of decades. The only question would be which truck was heading to the east side of town.

  It wasn’t more than a few minutes after he parked and took his first bite of two dry pieces of white bread and savory moist roast beef, that two trucks pulled out of the yard and down the road. Which one to follow was the question now. They stayed together for a while and then one took a turn toward the interstate and Lynch said, “Thank you.” He followed the one not heading out of New Metro.

  Through twenty six stops, and 3 bathroom breaks, Lynch followed the truck, staying just far enough back and out of sight to avoid any suspicion, not that he expected the driver to worry about people following him. The twenty seventh stop was the interesting one. The driver stopped, went into the back of the truck, and stayed in there longer than he had for any other stop that night. When the driver emerged, he carried two small brown paper wrapped packages. He hopped down out of the truck with the packages and looked up and down the road before he walked across to the front door of a dilapidated warehouse. The old sign, which hung from three of its four attachment points on the front façade, had faded to the point of not being readable anymore. Lynch sincerely doubted there was any business operating out of this building. He could see from the road the roofline had collapsed in on itself, leaving the rust and graffiti covered exterior walls as just a shell.

  The driver knocked twice, but didn’t wait for the door to open. He placed the packages on the ground, checked the road again, and then ran back to his truck, pulling off in a hurry. Lynch didn’t follow, he wanted to see who
came to retrieve the packages. He finished off the rest of his sandwich while he waited, but after the last bite, his patience was gone, along with the sandwich, and he got out of his car and took a few steps toward the door. The area was desolate, but he moved slowly to be sure no one was around. One step at a time, he moved closer to the door, each step he listened for any sound. With no sound or anyone in sight to stop him, he stood at the door looking down at the packages. There was only one way to answer the question in his head. He picked up the package and squeezed it. It was a familiar feeling, and he pulled out his pocketknife and made the smallest cut in one corner of the brown paper that he could. A few specks of white powder fell out. “Ah ha,” he thought as he put the package down where he’d found it to avoid crossing the wrong person. This was just an investigative mission, not an offensive.

  The next day he reported back to Michael what he’d found. Lynch had assumed Bruce was buying his company's safety with cash payments delivered at night to one of the local families. Inserting himself as a primary component of their supply chain was quite original, Lynch hadn’t given him enough credit to be that creative. Michael was appreciative of his work and paid the agreed upon rate.

  The world is full of irony, a fact that Lynch appreciated and enjoyed. A year or so later, Bruce found his deliveries on the east side encountering some challenges. Several of his drivers reported seeing A1 Deliveries trucks making runs in those areas late at night. So, he came to Lynch to ask a familiar question. Much like the conversation with Michael, he danced around knowing anything, even though he had already surmised that he had cut himself a deal that undercut Bruce. After enough dancing, he agreed to take a look for the fair price of 1,100 credits. The large rotund man, who wore enough jewelry on both hands to make a single finger worth 1,100 credits, grew red-faced at that fee. He stewed on it, before agreeing to the fee without agreeing that it was a fair price.

  A loud ring echoed from the speaker. Lynch let it ring a few more times before he finally hit it with his hand. He didn’t say anything and spun his chair around to look at the window while he let the person who called him swing in the silence.

  “Lynch, are you there?” the voice said, but Lynch did not respond.

  “Answer me god damnit,” the voice said again, but still more silence.

  “Alright, damn you. 1,100 credits. I will have them in your account within the hour.”

  Lynch reached back and held his hand over the speaker. He said, “A pleasure doing business with you,” and then slammed his hand down, cutting the call off.

  From behind him another voice said, “Why beat Bruce up for 1,100 credits when I have a job that can get you 100,000 credits?”

  8

  Lynch spun around and asked, “Is this about the poor little rich girl again?” Sarcasm and irritation dripped from every word.

  The tall, leggy blonde, in the black mini dress that barely covered her chest or her butt, standing in his doorway, was not amused. Not much Lynch said amused Gina anymore. His quick, but jagged, wit used to bring an amused smile across her face, or a little annoyed laugh. He remembered how pleasant that smile looked, but that was a different time, and they were both different people now.

  “Yes, it is,” said the ruby red lips, from the face plastered in makeup. Her usual daytime crown of over-teased hair, with color changing gel in it, sat proud atop her head.

  “I told you I wasn’t interested, but,” Lynch leaned back in his chair. The spring under him creaked and groaned its protest against his girth. His hands clasped behind his head. “I assume since you are here, you have learned some detail that tells us she is in danger or some kind of trouble.”

  Gina’s eyes were connected with his own when he turned, but now they gazed past and through him. He wondered for a second if she had been using, but knew she never did when she was “working”. Something her mentor once taught her. She told her using while “working”, was a great way to be cheated, hurt, or worse.

  “Remember, I said I wouldn’t be interested until…”

  In that instant, she came back to the room with him and cut him off while shaking her head. “Yeah, yeah, I remember. You don’t need to remind me. Just thought you would like to know what he is offering to anyone who finds her. A couple of black shoes were walking around this morning asking.”

  While she didn’t have any news on the girl being in any kind of danger, and the amount was interesting, but not motivating for Lynch, one detail got his attention. The spring in his chair squeaked again as he leaned forward and placed both elbows on his desk, having to shove a few papers back to make room. “Cops? Just patrol beat officers?” he asked.

  “Yep, two beat cops asked me this morning, and another two this afternoon. Each showed me her picture on a missing poster with the reward amount under it. The picture was the same her father showed us yesterday.”

  It wasn’t normal protocol for beat cops to canvas the area for a missing adult. A child is one thing, but not an adult that just hasn’t called her father in a few days. This girl was nineteen, but there was one way the rules could be bent, money. Her father had tons of it. If he knew the right person, he could sway them to enlist a few beat cops to ask around.

  It would be easy for Lynch to dismiss this as a “money talks” situation. Hell, more people than he could count had tried to bribe him at one point or the other when he was on the force. Now he just calls it a salary. A little part inside his brain, the small speck he calls intuition, sang out to him though. It didn’t feel right. There was nothing he could put his finger on to back that up, not yet, but much of his detective career was built on following the direction of that little voice in his head.

  “So, you interested?” Gina asked in between two smacks of the gum she worked in her mouth.

  “Got one of those flyers?”

  She reached into the top of the skin-tight black dress, if you could call it that. Somewhere deep inside it, between her natural assets, she found what she was searching for. With the same elegance as the previous night, she flipped out her Scroll. A quick search through the contents ensued before she swiped her figure toward Lynch’s desk. The single round speaker in the middle dinged and then the flyer appeared two inches above and slowly spun around.

  It read.

  Sarah Tyson -19 years old.

  5 foot 7 inches. 110 pounds.

  Blonde Hair. Blue Eyes.

  One tattoo. A heart with an arrow through it. No text.

  Last seen leaving her Southside Apartment on Vine Blvd at 7:00 pm, two nights ago in a white Autoride with tinted windows on her way to class at City College.

  Anyone with information should dial 911

  Reward: 100,000 credits for her safe return

  His eyes studied it and her face with renewed interest. The Autoride detail was interesting to him. That company had records of every ride ordered, every pickup, and every drop off. They would know exactly what car picked her up, and where it had dropped her off. Of course, that assumed it was a real Autoride.

  His detective senses kicked into gear as a ton of questions flooded into his mind. It wouldn’t be hard to pull off a fake Autoride. The person would just have to remove any markings or anything that tied them to that car, then program it to pick her up and take her some place. Since the destination is already set when one picks you up, you never have to interact with the system once inside. The rider wouldn’t have a clue until it either took too long to arrive at the expected destination, or it delivered them some place different. Another person could hide in the front seat to subdue her once she entered. The ease at which such a ruse could be pulled off might be disturbing, but it was not the most disturbing thought in his mind at the time. If someone did set this up, they would know she used one to go to class, at that time, on that night. They knew her. To say it piqued his interest would be an understatement.

  “I have seen that face before, so you are taking the case.”

  Lynch pulled his attention from the rot
ating image and leaned back in the chair, producing another squeak. He let his shoulders fall as he put both of his hands in his lap and twittered his fingers back and forth together, feigning a lack of interest. “Not at all. No one has approached me about any case. I was curious, that was all.”

  9

  Having a piqued interest translated into eating the wonderful beef stew Totter had prepared, at the desk in his at home office that he never used. It had been so long since he’d last used it; he struggled to turn on his home terminal. Totter reminded him that he unplugged six years ago when he started to paint the room, a task he never got past the prep work for, as evident by the blue tape still on some of the molding throughout the room.

  Once the terminal was up, he sat there in his button-up white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, topped off his scotch no rocks, and dug into his research. The brown tweed jacket he wore to the office was slung over the side arm of the green sofa he has never sat on. He bought it thinking clients could sit there if he ever met with them at home.

  First, he dug into Sarah Tyson’s background. No police record, not even something that supposedly would have been expunged from her record. She didn’t have a driver’s license and, as you would expect, no traffic or parking tickets. Her travel record was extensive, though. Seems she spent any time not in school traveling the world, along with several weekend trips.

  Western Europe was her favorite destination. France, Paris, and Cannes, and Milan were at the top of the list for both her break-time travels and weekends. Las Vegas was another of her favorite weekend destinations. Scattered among those destinations were a few trips to Japan, South Korea, Russia, Turkey, India, and Dubai. All the playgrounds for the rich and famous. The ones that didn’t fit were China, where travel between the States and China was prohibited, and the same with Iran. Why would she go there?

  Lynch wouldn’t be so curious about someone’s travel schedule under normal conditions, but these were not normal conditions. Her father was Jester Tyson, of Tyson Tech, one of the largest military subcontractors in the world, not to mention worth a boatload of credits. That makes her, and the rest of her family, a target on so many levels, both domestic and abroad.