Trace Evidence, page 12
“We’d offer to fly you out, but there’s nowhere to land the helo over at the resort.” Kevin looked over his shoulder and turned back to Flint. “You can make it back before nightfall in your Polaris, but you need to get going.”
Flint nodded. “We’ll be on our way then.”
“The fastest route is to take the driveway and stay on it until it connects with a rougher path that leads almost straight up, toward the road.” Kevin waved in the general direction away from the Red Maple Lake Resort. “Then head west once you get to the road. You’ll see a sign for the resort after about an hour.”
“Thanks,” Drake said.
Flint shook hands with Kevin. “Until we meet again, Dr. Hayes.”
Kevin looked a little green, like a kid who had been told to eat spinach.
He’d find Dr. Hayes again. Kevin was a doctor. A healer. He was the weakest link in the chain of whatever was going on out here. Flint was sure these three knew more than they were telling. What he didn’t know was why they were being so secretive about events that had happened so many years ago. But he would find out.
Flint belted into the passenger seat, and Drake rolled away from the house down the driveway.
With Drake’s driving skills and Kevin’s directions, they soon reached the connecting path and headed up, away from the lake.
“So you figure Kevin Hayes was the doc who worked on Hallman’s friend, Skip,” Drake said, once they reached the connecting path.
“Doesn’t take a genius to figure out he was here. When I confront him next time, I’ll have more data.”
Drake nodded, but his full attention was focused on driving. The path was barely marked and even with the headlights on, it was difficult to stay between the ditches. The ride was rough and the bouncing Polaris was no more comfortable now than it had been on the way to the Wilcox place.
After a while, Drake asked, “You figure Ruben Vega was the one who threatened Beaumont?”
“He fits her general description well enough, and he looks like the type who would do something like that.” Flint nodded. “He’s a little bit older than the man she described, but six years have passed. I’d put money on him.”
“Vega could be an executive instead of a thug.”
“Yeah.” Flint nodded again. “But that’s not likely. And there was definitely something going on back there. They know more than they’re telling.”
The Polaris was moving almost straight up now. Flint and Drake were pushed back in their seats by gravity. The Polaris strained to pull up the mountainside. Drake had the steering wheel to hold onto, but Flint was bounced around like a kid without a car seat.
Drake said, “One thing for sure. It wouldn’t be easy to walk anywhere to get to or away from that house. Josh Hallman must have been one hell of an outdoorsman.”
“Maybe.”
“So Hallman crashed the plane, killed one friend, drugged the other one, got to the Wilcox place, and no one was there. So he broke in. He stole the equipment he needed and hiked out.” Drake seemed to be trying the theory on for size, as if it would make more sense if he said it aloud. But he shook his head. “Nope. Doesn’t track.”
Flint agreed. “More likely that he and his friends made it out of the plane and up to the Wilcox place. Someone was there. Probably Dr. Kevin Hayes, at least, given Skip’s injuries.”
“But then what happened? Wilcox has a helicopter. They could have flown up to Tahoe to the hospital. Gotten medical care. Still be alive.”
“But they didn’t. His friends died. We think Hallman got away.”
Flint murmured to himself, “Where did Hallman go?”
“Why did he go anywhere at all?”
“What?”
“If he didn’t kill his two friends, why didn’t he stick around? Was he running from something or toward something?” Drake glanced at Flint briefly before the Polaris bounced into a deep rut, forcing him to pay more attention to the drive.
Now that he’d seen the situation firsthand, Flint had been thinking the problem through.
Suppose Hallman’s friends had been killed and he ran from the killers. It was a reasonable hypothesis.
Hallman had military training, so he was somewhat experienced in wilderness survival. He might have had enough equipment and food to carry him through the journey.
But most of his stuff had gone down with the Cessna. So where did he get the gear he needed to walk away from the Wilcox lodge, if that’s what actually happened?
And escape would have been more complicated if he’d been injured, as his friends were. He could have died out here in this forest. If he’d wandered off the path, his body might never be found.
The Polaris struggled to crest the last rocky outcrop before they reached the road. When Drake pulled onto the shoulder of the winding two-lane, Flint almost cheered.
A few seconds later, Flint’s satellite phone chimed to notify him he’d received a message. He pulled out the phone. The message was from his source. File #4 delivered. Extremely time sensitive.
He typed, Roger that and pushed the “Send” button, but the temporary signal had already vanished. He dropped the phone into his pocket. The message would go out the next time it found a signal.
The Polaris wasn’t equipped for road driving, but Drake kept on the road anyway. They traveled eleven miles before they saw the turn to the Red Maple Lake Resort. They never encountered another vehicle or another person.
“Now what?” Drake asked.
“We get some food and some sleep. Tomorrow, we’ll go to the crash site and check out the nearest houses along this road. I’ll get Scarlett to dig up background on those guys. We’ll take another run at them. How do you feel about San Diego?”
“Lovely city this time of year.” Drake drove down the steep grade along the lane past the parking lot where three SUVs were parked and continued down to the resort.
When they reached the front entrance, Flint glanced at his watch.
Two hours to drive the fourteen miles from the Wilcox place. Again, he wondered how long it would have taken Hallman to hike the same route. In the dark. Without benefit of the GPS. And maybe injured.
He’d find out. But first he wanted a meal followed by a good long soak in that hot tub, an excellent scotch, and a long night’s sleep.
He had a bottle of scotch in his bag. The resort was set up to supply the rest.
“I’m planning a quick shower and a nap before dinner,” Drake said when they reached the door to his room. “I’ll come to your room when I’m ready to eat.”
“Works for me.” Flint nodded and kept walking. He closed the door behind him, found the Scotch, and poured a shot into a water glass he found in the bathroom. He opened his laptop to check the three new files he’d downloaded from his secure server back at the Reno airstrip.
The fourth file, the one marked “time sensitive,” had automatically downloaded during the flight before they left satellite range. All were from the source he’d queried about his mother.
He stared at the list on the screen for a while. He drank the scotch and poured another. He took a deep breath and released it slowly.
“Okay. Let’s do this.”
-
Chapter Seventeen
Red Maple Lake, California
Tuesday
Flint opened the laptop and found the fourth file, marked “Urgent.” It contained only one sentence.
James Arthur Preston. Scheduled to die by lethal injection at Huntsville, Texas. Thursday.
He’d never heard of James Preston. His source had marked the file urgent and sent him a text to make sure he saw it. Her reasons were probably contained in the other three files.
Did he want to read them now? No.
He hadn’t made up his mind about whether he ever wanted to read them at all, but he definitely hadn’t planned to do it tonight. He’d lived his entire life without knowing. Why fix things that weren’t broken?
He poured another shot. He downed the scotch and stared at the words on the laptop screen.
Who was James Preston? What had he done to deserve death? Why had Flint’s contact believed he should know about the execution?
He’d requested an objective search for an unidentified woman, based on the limited information he’d found.
His source had known Flint a long time. Worked with him in the past. She knew what he needed to do the job. Sometimes, she could anticipate his needs, and her search had led her to James Preston.
But she couldn’t read his heart. Right at the moment, even he couldn’t say whether he really wanted to know anything she’d discovered.
His first assumption was that his original birth record had been sealed. He had the means to unseal the record, but he had to find it first. He’d tasked his source with that project, supplying the limited information he had and what he could logically piece together.
His foster mother at the Lazy M Boarding School, Bette Maxwell, had told him all she knew about the distraught young woman who had abandoned him. She’d claimed to be a schoolteacher in West Texas. She’d claimed the father was unknown.
Which was a whole different thing from unknowable.
The young woman’s story might have been true. Or not. He’d asked his source to check it both ways.
Bette Maxwell said no documents related to his origins existed at the Lazy M, and none were stored in any of the state’s files. Again, his source would confirm.
The sketchy data was a challenge, not an impenetrable wall.
Every complicated heir hunting job started with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. What he needed was a single thread that he could use to pull the secrets apart.
In this case, Felix Crane was the obvious first thread to jerk because he’d said, “I knew your mother.”
Flint used what he knew about Crane to find a way inside his bio mom’s life.
Crane had been a man of the world. He had traveled extensively and, of course, many women had passed through Texas back then.
All of which meant that Flint’s mother could have been anyone and he could have been conceived anywhere and he might have been born anywhere, too.
An average heir hunter would have stopped there, declaring the search too overwhelmingly huge. That’s when they’d call Flint. After the others had failed.
He’d begun by looking for Crane’s whereabouts during the relevant year. That’s when he got lucky.
According to his tax returns, Crane had lived that year in the West Texas town where he’d been born, Mount Warren. If Crane actually had known Flint’s mother, and if she’d told Bette Maxwell the truth about living in West Texas, they could have crossed paths there.
The first file his source provided was the result of her deep dive on public records that left no room for error. He scanned the file quickly.
Birth records for local hospitals near Mount Warren reported ten live births, and half were female. The five males were easily traced. She had checked them all.
None of those five boys grew up to be Michael Flint.
She had found twenty reported miscarriages and stillbirths as well. Doctors sometimes fudged the records at the mother’s request to cover up the birth of an unwanted child. That didn’t happen here. All the mothers were easily traced and none were likely to be Flint’s mother.
Nor was Felix Crane listed as the father or next of kin on any of these records.
His source had narrowed the options to three.
He might have been born in a hospital outside of Mount Warren.
Or, he was not born in a hospital at all, but a legal birth record was created.
The third option was that no birth certificate existed.
Flint’s original birth certificate had never been located, and the amended one he carried was contained in the official records. He had used it to acquire his social security number and his passport. It passed muster with Uncle Sam.
But it wasn’t good enough for his purposes now.
Final conclusion? Obligatory record search completed. Results negative.
He nodded his approval. He hadn’t expected her to find any answers in the official records. He’d have found those himself, if they existed.
The point of the exercise had been to rule out all of the alternatives and move to the next level.
Flint refilled his scotch before he opened the second file, labeled “Mother’s Name.”
The total list of women of childbearing age in Mount Warren back then was the starting point.
His source had eliminated females under the age of twelve and over the age of fifty-five, which isolated more than a thousand names.
He closed his eyes and steepled his fingers. He conjured an image of Felix Crane in his mind and thought about what kind of woman the dashing young wildcatter might have felt something for back then.
When he found his bio mom, would she resemble the image he’d conjured? Only one way to find out.
By all accounts, Crane had been something of a ladies’ man in his youth, his source said. She guessed that he’d have been attracted to women younger than himself. She reduced her search to women over sixteen and under thirty years old.
Flint approved. If the woman who dropped her baby off at the Lazy M had been a schoolteacher, under Texas state law, she had to be a college graduate.
The list was narrowed to women between twenty-one and thirty.
She’d sorted by occupation. The sorted list contained three hundred names, mostly housewives. Fifty-three listed their occupation as teachers.
The number surprised him. It must have puzzled his source, too. The population of Mount Warren didn’t seem large enough to require fifty-three teachers. The place must have been crowded with big families.
To verify her list, she had located one high school, one junior high school, and ten elementary schools in Mount Warren.
After that, she’d pulled up the faculty rosters and matched them to the list of fifty-three teachers. By the time she’d finished, she had produced a list of ten women who could have been his mother or, at least, might have known his mother.
Flint grinned. He’d trained her to use his methods well. She’d almost begun to think exactly like he did. He felt a little proud of her.
Next in the file was a comparison of those ten women who might have been or might have known Flint’s mother, matched to their driver’s license data, including ten drivers’ license photos.
He clicked over to the next screen. He stared at the photo array.
None of the photos sent chills through his spine or anything corny like that. He’d looked at similar photo groups for clients dozens of times. They were just faces. Nothing more. So far.
He leaned forward and studied the ten images on the screen for a bit before he checked her list of death records. Two of the ten were deceased.
“And then there were eight. Who’s my mommy?” he murmured as he stared at the faces. “None of you look like me. Perhaps I resemble my unknown father, huh?”
He enlarged and studied the pictures one at a time.
Each of the eight women continued to live in Mount Warren. They had all married at one time or another. Married names appeared on their driver’s licenses and marriage licenses were included in the file.
One was a widow. Two were divorced. None were still teaching after all these years.
He felt nothing for any of them.
He returned his attention to the two teachers who had died.
One passed last year of a massive heart attack, according to her death certificate. She was survived by her husband and three sons who still lived in Mount Warren.
“Possible,” he said, as he flipped to the next screen.
“Hello, Mom,” Flint whispered.
It was this last one that riveted his attention. The one who had died thirty-three years ago.
More specifically, she had been murdered.
“Well, well.” His voice sounded dry in his own ears. He looked at the photo on the screen as if he expected her to answer his questions. She said nothing.
He closed the file and swallowed the last of his scotch.
The third file was labeled “Marilyn Baker.”
He’d been sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, legs stretched out. He picked up the glass and realized it was empty. How long had he been sitting here? He hadn’t noticed that darkness had engulfed the room and the world beyond.
His stomach growled with hunger. Where was Drake?
He pushed the laptop aside and stood to stretch. He flipped the lights on. The scotch glass was still in his hand. For a moment, he considered another drink. But his stomach felt too empty. He wasn’t looking to get drunk tonight or be hungover tomorrow.
He put the glass down and walked down the hallway. He rapped on the heavy wood door of Drake’s room. No response. He rapped again, louder, and waited.
He raised his hand to knock one last time. Drake pulled the door open while his fist was still in the air.
“You don’t need to hit me, Flint,” Drake grinned. “Sorry, man. Lost track of time.”
Flint shrugged. “After a quick shower, I’m going downstairs to eat. Any interest?”
“Give me ten minutes.” Drake closed the door again.
Flint walked back to his room and turned the shower on. He pulled clean clothes out of his bag and tossed them on the bed. The laptop waited there.
Flint plopped down and opened the third file while he waited for the hot water to come up.
Inside were several local newspaper articles about Marilyn Baker’s death.
The story was sordid. The murder unsolved. If Marilyn Baker was his birth mother, this certainly explained why she never returned to him.
