Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (25 page)

Before Lumbergh could respond, Redick held up his hand and continued.

“Sean’s house and Oldhorse’s house both fall outside of incorporated Winston. That
means that I technically have jurisdiction over both crime scenes. I didn’t want
to pull rank on you, Gary, especially with how much you’ve helped us with other cases—”

Lumbergh interrupted. “But you’re going to, aren’t you?”

After a moment, Redick answered. “Yes. Once my deputy returns, we’re taking Martinez
over to County. We’ll get him processed and question him there. You’re too close
to this. I suggest you concentrate on finding your brother-in-law. If Martinez knows
anything about it, we’ll get it out of him.”

Without giving Lumbergh a chance to protest, Redick turned his back on him and made
his way to the front door. He tugged at his radio, bringing it to his lips before
disappearing out the front door to the porch.

“Sure you will,” Lumbergh muttered.

Chapter 20

S
ean sat on the cement floor with his back flat against the freezer door. He hoped
to hear movement from the outside room if anyone approached. His teeth sank into
the peach he held. Its juices felt good sliding down his parched throat, as did the
swig of water he took afterwards from one of the plastic bottles.

He thought hard about his captor’s reaction an hour earlier when he’d mentioned Norman.
The name had clearly rattled the man, but the insinuation that Booth was in a position
of power put him at ease. Sean wondered if Booth was merely a bit player in a large
hierarchy.

He thought about what had happened back at his home. Jessica had been wired with
a listening device. The man who had busted in had heard their conversation, probably
from a hiding spot in the back of Jessica’s car. With Jessica wearing an earpiece,
he had likely even been feeding her questions.

Maybe
he
was the big kahuna—not Booth. Maybe everything that had happened was about
this man covering his
own
ass.

Sean stopped breathing when he thought he heard a faint sound from the other side
of the freezer door, a couple of footsteps before things went silent again. He carefully
pressed his ear to the door.

“Sean!” he heard his name called in a forceful whisper. It was a woman’s voice. “If
you can hear me, don’t react or say anything. Just tap on the door. There’s a camera
inside there. They can see you, even in the dark, but they can’t hear you.”

Though her purposely-muted voice made it difficult to tell for sure, he believed
the voice belonged to Jessica. He hesitated for a moment, thinking about whether
or not he should play along. In his current predicament, he decided he had little
to lose. He nonchalantly used the back of his knuckles to give the door a rattle
before taking another bite of his peach.

“Good,” he heard her say. Her voice was barely audible. “Listen Sean . . . I’m so
sorry that all of this has happened. Believe me. None of it was supposed to happen.
You were just trying to help me. I know that.”

He knew then that it was indeed Jessica. He felt his chest tighten. There was no
way of telling if the apparent appeal for forgiveness was genuine or if it was just
another deception being played out for an unknown purpose. She had already tried
to manipulate him once. Maybe this was more of the same.

“I promise you. You’ll be set free of all of this,” she said. “We just need another
day. Two tops. After that, they’ll blindfold you and drop you off somewhere just
outside Winston. It will be like none of this ever happened.”

He silently scoffed at the notion, taking a second to ponder the identities of “they.”
He placed his hands over his face and tilted his head forward, letting whoever might
be watching him on a hidden night-vision camera believe that he was either resting
or stressing over his fate.

“Where’s the camera?” he asked, just loud enough so that he was confident she could
hear him. “I won’t let them see me talking.”

After a few moments, he heard reluctance in her voice as she responded. “The center
fan of the evaporator.”

It’s what he had suspected. The room was too bare for it to be anywhere else.

He slowly stood up and raised his arms in the air, stretching his back and faking
a yawn before turning his shoulders to the back of the room where the evaporator
hung.

“We can talk now,” he said. “What the hell is going on, Jessica?”

Again, there was some hesitation before she responded. “I can’t tell you what’s happening.
Just believe me when I tell you it’s for your own safety.”

“Believe you?” He placed the palms of his hands on the door and arched his back.
“Why the hell should I believe
anything
you say? You lied to me about Carson, and
then you showed up at my house to con me.” He shook his head before continuing. “You
shocked the shit out of me, tossed me in a trunk, and you and your boyfriend brought
me here! So tell me again: why should I trust you!”

He took a deep breath, forcing some composure so his anger wouldn’t be recognized
by the watching eyes above.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she replied.

“Who gives a shit? How about answering the rest of what I just said?”

After twenty seconds crept by without a response, he called out Jessica’s name and
thought he could hear her crying.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he said in a more restrained tone.

“Sean,” she began through her sobbing, “have you ever had anyone in your life that
you would do
anything
for? Someone who you cared about and loved so much that you
would stop heaven and earth for them?”

The earnestness of her words oozed down into the depths of his soul, nearly leaving
him speechless. For the briefest of moments, he forgot where he was, how he had gotten
there, and to whom he was talking. “No.”

Silence followed.

He regained his sense of self-awareness and told her that there was no one worth
covering up a murder for, and that Andrew Carson’s family deserved to know what happened
to him. Holding him captive would only make matters worse for her and the people
she was trying to protect.

“You don’t understand what happened that night,” she answered.
“Everything went wrong.
Andrew Carson was an innocent man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and
there was nothing we could have done about that.”

“Don’t waste time telling it to me,” he said. “Let me out of here and we’ll go to
the police together. Tell your story to
them
. End this now.”

“I can’t!” she shot back, her voice trembling. “We’ve come too far. We’ve waited
too long. In a day or two, all of this will be over and you’ll be returned home—safely!
I promise!”

He lowered his head in frustration.

“I have to leave now, or else I’ll be missed.”

“Wait!”

“Two days, Sean. Tops. Then you’ll be free.”

He growled and pounded his fist against the door. He then bit his tongue and tempered
himself, worried he would alert the eyes above that he was talking to someone. He
heard Jessica scurry away.

Sean hadn’t been able to convince her to set him free, but the conversation hadn’t
been totally fruitless. He now knew that he was under surveillance. He began formulating
a way to use that knowledge to his advantage.

Chapter 21

F
rom his office window, Lumbergh watched the cloak of dimness from the early winter
sunset steadily drape over the row of old family-owned shops across the street. They
had long been part of his view, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had taken
a moment to just look at them.

Each sun-faded building had a quaint, handwritten “sale” sign inside its dusty window.
Most entranceways hosted one or two decades-old gumball machines that invited young
customers to nag their parents for a quarter or dime.

He watched on as Lupe Cordova, the kind, elderly owner of Winston’s only Mexican
restaurant, closed up shop. She was wearing a thick purple coat, and her shoulders
were tight against her body. The temperature had dropped dramatically over the past
hour, a sign that the expected storm was about to roll in. Snow had already begun
to fall.

Cordova’s place was more of a hole in the wall than a full-fledged restaurant, only
large enough for one table inside. Most of her business came from her popular breakfast
burritos that she made every morning. She wrapped them in foil and always had them
ready for people to stop in and pick up at the beginning of their day.

As he watched the old woman fiddle with a ring of keys from her purse, Lumbergh was
tormented with the undeniable reality that the rest of the outside world was carrying
on as normal.

People were getting back to their lives following the 9/11 attacks. The horrific
event had changed Lumbergh, as it had so many others
who watched in terror the footage
of men and women forced to leap to their deaths from the World Trade Center. It made
him more protective than ever of the things most important to him, and it forced
him to question the notion of bringing a child into such a world; Diana and he had
discussed children often.

For many, the passing months and a presidential administration that seemed in control
of the situation brought some ease and normalcy. At that very moment, however, Lumbergh
felt contempt for that composed world, recalling that he was a part of it just a
few days earlier when Alex Martinez had treated both he and Jefferson to a couple
of Cordova’s burritos. They had had a nice conversation about their lives that morning
as they sat at a small table in the police station, chowing down and drinking coffee.

Jefferson had shared the news that he and his wife were getting back together after
a months-long separation. Martinez had talked about some of the classes he was taking
at school and one of his teachers. It was likely another false story from a seasoned
liar, but Lumbergh planned on looking into it anyway. He couldn’t remember what he
himself had added to the breakfast conversation that day.

The memory was replaced with the sound of his wife crying. Her trembling voice was
still fresh in his mind from the phone conversation he had just had with her. He’d
delayed telling her about her brother’s disappearance all day, hoping the deputies
at Sean’s place would find something useful—any sort of a lead to move on. After
his spat with Redick, Lumbergh had even driven over to assist in the deputies’ search.

Their findings were insignificant, at least from a timeliness standpoint. They took
a blood sample from the floor and pulled some fingerprints from the bucket. It was
better than nothing, but the evidence would take time to process and no one could
know if the results would be of any help.

The deputy investigating Martinez’s motel room hadn’t found
much either, other than
more proof of the intern’s obsession with his boss. Tape after tape of news reports
and interviews were skimmed through. They all pertained, in one way or another, to
the Montoya shooting. There was nothing that suggested Martinez knew anything about
where Sean had been taken.

Lumbergh had placed a call to Chihuahua, Mexico, to inquire about Martinez’s mother.
He discovered that she had passed away on January 5, which was probably what had
brought Martinez back across the border for a few days.

His mother had died likely believing her son to be a coward, and that a police chief
in Winston, Colorado, could be his saving grace. It was a belief she had apparently
tortured her son with to the point that he had eventually snapped.

Lumbergh had also placed a call to check on Oldhorse and Jefferson at the Lakeland
hospital up north. Jefferson was doing well. Oldhorse had a longer road ahead of
him, but the doctors were confident he would make a full recovery except for some
significant scarring. They’d successfully pulled a large piece of shrapnel from his
thigh and he was now resting.

Martinez had completely clammed up. He’d lawyered-up, too, by the time Lumbergh had
returned to the police station. Lumbergh suspected Redick had nudged him into it—either
wittingly or unwittingly. Regardless, all Martinez had been doing for the past hour
or two was staring up at the ceiling and making an occasional moaning noise. At times,
he seemed to be trying to communicate with the overhead lights. It was as if whatever
warped crusade he was on to torture Lumbergh through the threat of Lautaro Montoya
for a perceived act of betrayal had been permanently derailed. Now he could no longer
process his surroundings with any clarity or coherency.

At least he knew Diana was safe. With Martinez in custody and the Montoya threat
turning out to be a sick hoax, she was no longer in danger. Lumbergh was looking
forward to seeing her and holding
her again, but with the storm rolling in, he’d
told her to stay at her friend’s house. Additionally, with the whereabouts of her
brother unknown, he wasn’t sure how he could face her.

The key to finding Sean was still Martinez; Lumbergh had convinced himself of that.
As the police chief sat alone in mind and spirit with his shoulders hung low in the
darkness of his office, he knew in his heart and gut that Martinez had seen who had
taken Sean. He may have had nothing to do with the abduction, but he had seen it,
and that was important.

Lumbergh felt some pain returning to his shoulder and reached into his desk drawer
for his prescription bottle. When he opened its lid and found only a few capsules
left inside, he realized for the first time just how quickly he had been going through
the supply.

“What am I doing?” he whispered to himself.

He shook his head, and then replaced the lid and shoved the bottle back inside his
desk. He decided at that moment that keeping his head clear was worth dealing with
the physical pain.

When he slowly swiveled in his chair to turn to the front of his office, he took
notice of the missing glass inside the door. He recalled the details of his confrontation
with Sean from that day. Sean had been looking for information on the Andrew Carson
case and had managed to see the prime suspect’s name and mug shot on Lumbergh’s computer
screen.