“Fire away.”
“First, have you done any cleaning or thrown anything away?”
“Oh, no. That’s not my job. We have people for that. My job was to figure out if they’d really flown the coop.”
“Good. Second, would you have any objections to us doing a fairly thorough search of this cabin? I mean, looking in all the cabinets, drawers, waste cans, the garage, and so forth?”
Mark rubbed his chin as he thought about it. “Weeeeelllll… that couple deserves their privacy and all. And I don’t know why you’d want to…” His face lit up. “Of course! You want to make sure there’s nothing that would threaten the security of your bigwig!”
Meyer gave a slight nod as if Mark had tumbled onto the answer.
“Help yourself. I got nothing but time tonight. Poker game got cancelled and wife’s out of town. And nothing to steal here now.” He reached into his coat and Buddy tensed again.
Mark pulled out a cigar.
“I don’t need to follow you folks around. We usually show cabins during the day, but hell, this started out weird already. I’ll just go out to the front porch and smoke this thing while I finish going over the paperwork. Take your time.”
“Any chance you’ve got another one of those cigars?” Buddy said. “I’ll be happy to pay you for it.”
“Hell, son, these things are cheap as dirt.” He reached in and pulled out the little box of little cigars. “Help yourself. I got a lighter.”
Smart, Buddy. Rear guard is rear guard.
When they’d left, we began.
I activated my comm. “Dawn, we’re going to be awhile here. There’s no action, but we have the opportunity to fully search the cabin. See if you can talk Kimmy into going home with you. I’d really rather have her as far from this fucking place as possible and watched by three people I trust.”
“Alright, dammit, I’ll go,” Kimmy said.
What the hell? There was a pause.
“I’m sorry Johnny, I was showing her how it worked and why she couldn’t see it on me and… bad timing,” Dawn said. “I copy that we’re off for home.”
“Roger, wilco!” I heard in the background.
This kid was going to be a handful while we had her. Never mind how we were going to handle what we were going to do with her over the long term.
I sent Meyer out to question Mark about the identities of the “couple” who had leased the cabin, including whether he had anything that could positively identify them and find clues that could lead us to their current whereabouts. Meanwhile, Jen and I searched the cabin. There wasn’t a lot to find. The place was obviously fully furnished, including pots and pans and stereos and TVs and WiFi Internet. Some “cabin.” They’d apparently done a good job of taking all of their own belongings.
“Something,” I said from the bedroom closet. Jen joined me and I handed her one of those thingies that the airlines put on your luggage to let the computers move it to the right plane.
“Ronald Coleman,” she read. She smirked at me. “Probably not THE Ronald Coleman.”
“And maybe Ronald Coleman wasn’t one of the recent inhabitants of the cabin,” I said. “Still, it’s the only thing I’ve found. They apparently even bagged up the trash from the can outside.”
We kept at it.
“Something,” Jen said. I went to her.
She pointed to a notepad on a desk blotter. It was blank. I looked closer and saw indentations.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “The old pencil trick?”
“Works in the novels,” she said.
I hugged her. “That was smart. It might be nothing, but it was still smart as hell.”
She smiled up at me.
And those two things were the only two damned things we’d found. Had we been real cops we’d have had a forensics team here with us, fingerprinting the hell out of the place, checking for DNA evidence, and so forth. But we weren’t real cops, and we couldn’t afford to involve LAPD at this point because then that organization would be party to whatever we were going to do. Still…
I called the chief and explained where we were.
“Do you think you have enough to go on?” he said.
“Very thin,” I said. “We have an airline luggage tag with a name on it. We have a phone number and an address on a note pad. Either could have been left by someone other than the last occupants. We’ll soon have copies of the paperwork signed by the couple that leased this place. So far, that’s it.”
Silence for a while, then: “Run with what you have, Johnny. I appreciate your keeping the department clean for now. Among other things, if you didn’t it would seriously limit your options. Anyway, that place has got to be lousy with fingerprints and tying a set we can match to the crime would be… well, I don’t have to tell you. On the other hand, if we could do a match and then Kimmy could identify him as one of the… bastards in question…”
I thought about it. I really, really didn’t want to put Kimmy in that position. On the other hand, if we ran dry it might be the only way to get at least one of the… bastards.”
“Your call, Sir,” I said. “I want these guys, but I also want to protect Kimmy – emotionally as well as physically.”
“Run with what you have, then. Keep me informed, please,” and he hung up.
—
Amazingly, we were able to get the paperwork that had been completed for the cabin lease. As the leasing business owner, a short slightly plump brunette woman named Marty Johnson had explained, leases were not public records. And it could bite her in the ass civilly if it came out that she’d shared her paperwork with me. But she was pissed that they’d run off without notification and without telling her that she could rent the property again. And she was hoping for a new lessee.
Also, I schmoozed her.
“So,” she said, “basically you’re concerned that they caught wind that your, um, client was after that particular cabin.”
“Basically,” I said.
“And how would they have known that?”
“Well, our client doesn’t have the tightest lips in Los Angeles. Others know that he was planning to lease a cabin here.”
“And this is one of the biggest and best we have, is that it?”
“Kind of.”
“And you security people need to lock absolutely everything down, right?”
“Right.”
She took a sip of Bourbon. “I called the LAPD on you,” she said. “Because you told me that you were a cop there. You got rave reviews.”
The process for answering such calls had been set up when we went to work for the chief.
“You know, if you were still a cop, you’d need a warrant to coerce these papers from me.”
“I know,” I said.
“But I like you. Swear to me that this will never come back to bite me in the ass.”
“I swear.”
She stood up. “Okay, I’ll trust you. I’m going to make the copies myself because I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing.” She started to walk out, then turned back to me.
“Oh, Mr. Rand?”
“Yes?”
She smiled. “You can personally bite me in the ass if you wish to.” She walked out.
Oh, man… Two things I knew. I was not going to bite her in the ass.
And I was going to lease her cabin for three months. It was the least I could do.