Blood Truth Page 4

  “Why?”

  Seventy-five percent of the surveillance I did involved people cheating on their mates. But I tracked the mates, not their bed buddies. Tailing a private person for another private person was a different game. And sometimes dangerous. Motives were important. Some PIs had unknowingly or knowingly tracked down people who were targeted for murder by their clients.

  Kim didn’t have murder in her heart, but she was human. She might confront Sophia and things could turn ugly.

  “Because she’s a private person. She’s not related to you or a business partner. It’s unethical.”

  “Rick. I’m about to start a family.” Her voice pitched high and cracked. “I need to know what kind of environment I’m bringing this child into. If my husband involves himself with men like Peter Stone, I need to know. If he’s a cheater, I need to know. If it’s all a mistake, I need to know that, too. I have life-changing decisions to make soon.”

  “Does Jeffrey know you’re pregnant?”

  “No. I found out the day after I saw his text to Sophia on his secret phone. I’m not telling him until I discover whether he’s still the man I married, or someone else.”

  Kim had told me she was pregnant, but not her husband. In some ways, that could have made me feel good. I felt awful. How could you start a family with a man you didn’t trust?

  Start a family. Colleen and I had talked about starting our own before she died. Well, when we weren’t yelling at each other those last few months. Before then, when things were good. Other than being married to Colleen for two years, I hadn’t felt a part of a family since before my father died eighteen years ago. Kim deserved to feel confident in starting her own.

  “I need your help, Rick.” Kim’s voice softened. “You’re the only person I trust in my life right now.”

  I wasn’t sure I warranted Kim’s trust, but she’d always had mine. She’d never failed me—even when I’d wished she had, so I could have taken an easier out.

  “Okay.” I’d pick up her case again—after I closed one that had been with me for over twenty-five years.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PHIL GREETED ME at the counter when I returned to San Diego Safe.

  “The safe is ready for you to open.” He led me into a work room in the back. The safe sat on a wooden workbench. Unopened.

  “Why didn’t you open it?”

  “It’s not my business to look at what people have hidden away from the rest of the world.”

  Apparently, it was my business to find out what my father had hidden away from the rest of the world, including his family, for at least twenty years.

  Phil went out into the showroom and closed the door behind him. I felt like I’d been left alone for a private viewing of a loved one. I guess I had. All that remained from my father, other than his LJPD badge, which sat in my sock drawer, was in this safe.

  I put my hand on the handle, but didn’t open it right away. My father had died a drunk nine years after he’d been kicked off the La Jolla Police Force. The reasons were never made public, and my father never gave me an explanation. Rumors of him being a bagman for the mob swirled in the winds of whispers behind my family’s back. Did the safe hold the verification of the rumors? I’d lived almost three decades not knowing. Did I really have to learn the truth now? Ever? Why squelch the tiny flicker of hope I’d held onto for all these years?

  I’d chased the truth my whole life. No matter the cost.

  I pulled open the safe door.

  The narrow safe had one shelf, forming a lower and upper compartment. An oily rag folded around something sat in the lower compartment. I pulled out the rag and unfolded it like I was unwrapping a deli sandwich. Inside was a gun. Old-timers often stored handguns in the oily rags they used to clean their weapons.

  The gun was a Raven MP-25 semiautomatic pistol. A pocket gun that could fit in the palm of my hand. Also known as the original Saturday Night Special. Cheap guns produced in the 1970s after the import of such were banned by the Gun Control Act of 1968. Where there’s demand, the free market—and the black one—will supply.

  I’d never seen the gun before. My father had had five or six guns that I knew of, but none of them had been a Saturday Night Special. My mother sold them all after he died. I wrapped the gun up in the cloth and put it back into the safe.

  The top compartment held two sealed letter envelopes. One a couple inches thick and the other thin. I pulled out the thick envelope and looked for an address or any kind of markings. Nothing. Blank and slightly yellowed. I didn’t open it. I knew what was inside. I just didn’t know how much.

  The second envelope had a slight bump in the bottom of it. I put my fingers on the bump. It felt like a key. I stared at the envelope for a few seconds, then finally opened it. The key was slightly longer than a house key and had square teeth on one side. It looked like it went to a safe deposit box.

  Another secret waiting to be revealed.

  I ripped open the envelope full of money. It held hundreds and fifties. Too many to count now, but a lot of money. I ran my hands inside both compartments to make sure there was nothing else inside the safe. There wasn’t. Thank God. I’d seen enough.

  The ledger with the dates and dollar amounts I’d found in my father’s den as a kid wasn’t in the safe. But plenty more was. A gun, a large wad of cash, and a key to a safe deposit box. The tools and rewards of a cop on the take? Probably. I felt that tiny flicker of hope I’d carried most of my life turn to smoke.

  I put the cloth-wrapped gun in my jeans pocket and stuffed the envelopes into the front pocket of my sweatshirt. I opened the door into the showroom, and Phil was waiting for me.

  “Did you find what you needed?” He went back behind the counter.

  “I guess.” A candle bell to snuff out the flame.

  “I can repair the hole I drilled and reset a new combination and you’ll have a workable safe again.”

  “No, thanks. I don’t have any need for a wall safe.” I kept my secrets inside. “You can keep it if you can find a use for it.”

  “Sure. Thanks. I’ll take $50.00 off your bill, so the total is a hundred and fifty.” He smiled for the first time that morning. “Will that be cash or charge?”

  I had a twenty-year-old envelope stuffed full of cash. I pulled out my wallet and swiped a credit card through the electronic reader. I didn’t know where the money in the envelope came from or what my father had done to earn it. But I knew it was dirty.

  I’d killed four men and broken plenty of laws in my thirty-seven years. The police had ruled the killings justified or taken credit for them for their own purposes. Or never found a body. I’d taken the law into my own hands, but never for personal gain. I’d done it because I lived by the code my father had taught me when I was a child: Sometimes you have to do what’s right, even when the law says it’s wrong.

  Somewhere along the way, my father forgot about the what’s right part and just focused on the wrong.

  * * *

  Midnight greeted me at the front door and sniffed at the pockets in my jeans and sweatshirt. He smelled something different on me. Decades-old sin. He followed me upstairs to my office. I took out the gun and envelopes and put them on my desk, then sat down.

  I opened the envelope full of cash and started counting. Fifteen grand in hundreds and fifties. The hair on the back of my neck spiked. The amount stunned me. A fair amount of money now, a lot twenty-five years ago. When my father had died of cirrhosis of the liver eighteen years ago, my family was barely getting by. I was on a full-ride football scholarship at UCLA, but I worked in a restaurant in the summer and off-season and sent money home to my mom. My father never held a steady job again after he was fired from the La Jolla Police Department. Fifteen thousand dollars would have paid a lot of delinquent bills.

  What did he do to earn that much money and why did he keep it hidden away when it could have helped his family? I had a feeling the answer to the first question had something to do with the a
nswer to the second. The possible answers to the questions scared and saddened me.

  And, now, what was I supposed to do with the money?

  I couldn’t pretend the money was a lucky windfall and go out and spend it on something stupid. Or even something smart. I put the envelope of cash in a desk drawer. After I finished with Kim’s case, I’d give the money to charity. The only way I knew to make that dirty money clean.

  I opened the other envelope and poured out the key onto my desk. The key had Diebold Inc, Canton Ohio imprinted on one side of the tab. The other side had S335. I’d never had a safe deposit box, but I was pretty sure this key went to one.

  My father had banked at Windsor Bank and Trust in La Jolla. He’d sometimes take me there as a kid when he’d cash his LJPD paycheck. I didn’t know if he had a safe deposit box. Apparently, he did. If not at Windsor, then somewhere else. But would the box still be active? Safe deposit boxes aren’t free. You have to rent them. Someone had to pay the rent, and my father had been dead for eighteen years.

  If I somehow found the safe deposit box and it was still active, what would I find inside? More wads of fifties and hundreds? Another Saturday Night Special? Did I really need more proof to confirm what everyone else already knew?

  My dad had been a dirty cop.

  I put the key onto my key ring. That left the gun. I had plenty of my own guns. All legally registered. Well, all except for a derringer I’d taken from a dead man’s gun safe. It had saved my life, so I kept it. I didn’t need another pocket gun.

  Probably be best just to file down the firing pin and throw the weapon away. I unwrapped the Raven MP-25 and looked at it. A nasty little piece of work. I realized I hadn’t checked to see if it was loaded when I found it in the safe. I picked it up and released the tiny magazine. Loaded.

  The backstrap of the grip was abrasive in my hand. I grasped the gun by the barrel and examined the backstrap. It had scratches along it. More like file markings. My guess was that was where Raven Arms had put its serial number, and someone had filed it off.

  I set the gun down quickly like it was a live snake. Serial number filed off. Untraceable. A criminal’s gun. Or a gun a crooked cop carried to throw down at an officer-involved shooting scene in case the crook he shot hadn’t had a weapon. There wasn’t much difference between a cop and a crook in that situation. Except one might be a murderer.

  My stomach turned over and my mouth cottoned up. There wasn’t any hope left that my father hadn’t been a bad cop. The whispers had been true. It was just a matter of how bad. This was where my father’s truth had gotten me.

  I picked up the magazine to slide it back into the gun, then stopped. Years of handling guns kicked in and told me the magazine felt light. It held six rounds. I examined the clip. It had a tiny window opening vertically down its middle. I counted the bullets inside. Only four. Two short of a full magazine.

  The gun had been fired at least twice before my father hid it away in the safe. Along with the fifteen thousand dollars and the safe deposit key.

  What had been in the gun’s sights when my father pulled the trigger? And had fifteen grand been his reward?

  CHAPTER NINE

  I SAT IN my ubiquitous Honda Accord above the house in Point Loma where I’d tailed Sophia yesterday. Her car was in the driveway.

  I tried to keep my mind on Kim’s problems so I could forget about what I’d found in my father’s safe. The one he kept hidden from everyone in his home. Even his wife. After seeing what was in it, I understood why he’d kept it hidden. And who he really was. The money in the envelope bothered me, but not as much as the gun. My father had been on the take. A little graft to afford the house in La Jolla and college for my sister? Maybe. Some twisted altruism to take care of his family. But why hadn’t he spent the fifteen grand in the envelope?

  The gun was different. Darker. Depths below dirty. Malevolent.

  The two missing bullets. Where had they gone? There were plenty of innocent explanations. My father had taken it off a crook or found it on the street as is, with four bullets in the magazine. Or, he’d tried the gun out on the range, went through a magazine or two and stopped before he emptied the last clip. Perfectly reasonable explanations. Except they didn’t jibe with the man I knew.

  My father always kept his guns loaded. He used to take me to the shooting range when I was a kid, before everything turned to shit. The routine was always the same. All guns were unloaded and put in the trunk of the car with boxes of ammunition. We followed the same procedure after we were done shooting before we left the range. We reloaded all the guns when we got home.

  My father thought an unloaded gun was a less useful weapon than a hammer or a baseball bat.

  He always said if someone broke into your home, the two or three seconds it took to load your gun could get you and your family killed. He never had access to a gun that was less than fully loaded. Fully lethal.

  But, even if I could overlook the MP-25’s light clip, I couldn’t ignore the most glaring issue. Why had he kept the gun in the hidden wall safe? He kept a Colt 45 in the top drawer of his nightstand when he and my mom went to bed each night. All other weapons were stored in the gun safe in the garage. What made a cheap Saturday Night Special special enough to keep in a hidden wall safe? A Saturday Night Special that had a filed-off serial number and two missing bullets.

  The gun, the safe, the cash, the safe deposit key, all wrong. Worse than the rumors that had whirled around my childhood. Could I leave it at that? My father was dirty, case closed. Move on with a life that was perpetually stuck in the past. Mine, my father’s. Could I live with what I found if I dug deeper? And what if I uncovered a twenty-five-year-old crime? I couldn’t bring a dead man to justice. Would anyone care if I tried?

  Only if it was for murder.

  An untraceable gun. Two missing bullets. Fifteen grand in an envelope. A hit. A murder. A paid assassin. Had my father used the hidden gun to kill someone for money? Or was the money in the envelope from something else? Maybe my father kept the gun because someone else had used it in a murder and he was blackmailing the killer.

  The truth was unknown. Buried. Along with my father’s credo, I couldn’t ignore my own. Find the truth. No matter what.

  Movement in the driveway of 3235 Lucinda caught my eye. The white Corvette pulled onto the street and went down the hill. Top down, Sophia Domingo behind the wheel. Alone. I let her go three quarters of the way down before I followed. She hit the bottom of the hill, made a couple turns, and emptied out onto Rosecrans heading east.

  I called Moira, who was stationed outside The Pacific Terrace Hotel.

  “I’ve got her in Point Loma going east on Rosecrans. Stay put for now, but be ready to roll. I don’t want to be the only car she sees in her rearview mirror all day.”

  “Roger.”

  Sophia took Rosecrans all the way east to where it emptied onto either Interstate 8, or I-5. She took 5 North. She could have been heading to The Pacific Terrace Hotel or somewhere else. I buzzed Moira again.

  “Hustle through PB to get to I-5 North, but don’t get on it unless I tell you to.”

  “You like giving orders, don’t you?” Her voice, gravel going through a lawn mower.

  “Just to you.”

  She hung up.

  Sophia drove past an on-ramp into Clairemont and paralleled Mission Bay. A handful of sailboats waiting for wind dotted the small bay. She stayed in a middle lane as she approached the Grand/Garnet exit, which fed into PB en route to The Pacific Terrace Hotel. She wasn’t going back to the hotel.

  Quick tap on Moira’s number.

  “Get onto 5 North.”

  “I’m at the light on Bluffside Avenue about to get on the freeway.”

  “Stay on the phone and let me know when you’re on.”

  Sophia passed the Balboa exit and continued north toward La Jolla.

  “I’m on.” Moira.

  “Speed up. She just passed Nobel.”

  Thirty s
econds later, I caught view of Moira’s white Accord in my rearview mirror. She passed me, and I fell back three cars behind her and five or six behind Sophia.

  Moira and I traded places a few times over the next twenty minutes as Sophia Domingo continued up I-5 past Del Mar, Solana Beach, and Encinitas. She finally exited onto Carlsbad Village Drive and drove into downtown Carlsbad. She pulled into a shopping center and parked in front of a restaurant called Fresco. I slowed, but drove past the parking lot. Sophia exited her car and walked toward the entrance of the restaurant.

  No briefcase today.

  I called Moira, who was a hundred yards or so behind me, after I cleared the mall.

  “Pull into the parking lot of Fresco and get some lunch. Lay back in the lounge until Sophia gets seated.”

  “I’ve done this before, asshole.”

  I whipped a U-turn a block down and parked in the shopping center in front of an ice cream parlor with a clear view to Sophia’s car. Radio silence from Moira. A couple minutes later my phone pinged with a text.

  Moira: She just kissed a girl and she liked it.

  Me: What?

  Moira: She met a woman. They kissed hello. On the lips like they’ve done it before. A lot.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SOPHIA KISSED A woman? The room at The Pacific Terrace Hotel. The kimono and wine in the afternoon. Her hand on Jeffrey Parker’s leg. The two of them retreating into the hotel room for an hour and a half.

  Could I have read the situation completely wrong? Maybe Sophia was bisexual. Maybe the meeting in the hotel room with Parker had more to do with Peter Stone than Afternoon Delight. I didn’t know which would be worse information for Kim. Her husband was having an affair or he wasn’t, but was connected to Peter Stone.

  I texted Moira: “Order something they can prepare quickly and pay up front.”

  Moira: Like I said asshole, I’ve done this b4.

  Me: Try to get a photo of the other woman.

  Moira: Already have three.

  Ahead of me as usual. Didn’t mean I wasn’t still in charge.