Trace Evidence, page 4
They didn’t want to get married. They didn’t want to be tied to each other forever, raising a child together. Hell, by the time everything was over, they weren’t even speaking to each other. Josh realized it was because they both felt guilty. Ashamed. They’d accidently created the possibility of a new human life together. And they’d ended that possibility without giving the child a fighting chance to make it in the world.
How could any relationship be the same after something like that?
The whole situation had made him swear off women for a good long time. He’d had a few hookups here and there since Veronica. But no one he’d been remotely serious about. He found he liked it that way. He liked being single. At least, until the right woman came along. He never wanted to go through an experience like Veronica’s abortion again as long as he lived. Once was more than enough.
And then he lost his job. The debts. Well, what did he have to offer a woman, anyway? He was glad he didn’t have a child to support, too, even as he wondered what might have been with the baby that would never be.
Would that emptiness go away eventually? Sure it would. Lots of people had abortions without a second’s remorse, didn’t they?
His two college fraternity brothers were completely different. Dan and Skip had moved on with their lives. Grown up. Both were involved in serious relationships.
Dan was dating a woman he’d met in college, and they seemed serious enough. A destination wedding was planned for next year. Josh couldn’t remember the location. Someplace exotic, no doubt, knowing Dan.
Skip was already married, with a baby. Cutest little girl on the planet and probably a genius, too, according to Skip. Debbie was pregnant with their second child. A boy this time. Skip loved them all like crazy and he seemed exceedingly happy with the whole arrangement.
But to Josh, Skip’s life looked like a tight noose around his friend’s neck with an anvil attached to the other end of the rope.
He shook his head. Nope. Josh just wasn’t ready for family life. He thought he would be someday. Maybe. He shook off the melancholy. He had plenty of time for those decisions. Skip and Dan had made the leap too soon. They were only thirty.
A Toyota SUV appeared in the distance and turned onto the long driveway to the private airstrip, kicking up dust all the way. When the red beast approached, Dan was driving with Skip slouched in the passenger seat.
Josh grinned. Typical. Skip had been an amiable passenger, one way or another, for as long as the three friends had known each other.
Dan parked the big Toyota in the dirt parking lot, and the two began collecting their gear. Josh went over to help.
“Where the hell you guys been?” Grins and man hugs and backslapping came next. Josh was a little surprised at how relieved and happy he was to see them. These two were like family to him, the only family he had since his parents died in a car wreck a few years ago.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dan said. He lifted the hatch and hauled out duffel bags and equipment. “Like you’ve been here more than ten minutes.”
“Sorry, my bad,” Skip said, laughing as he hauled his stuff out of the SUV. “Debbie was freaking out at the last minute, begging me to stay home. I swear, when she’s pregnant, she’s just a bundle of nerves. All worried about me and the kids. I keep telling her I can take care of myself, but—” He shrugged.
Josh slapped him on the shoulder and gave him another short, manly squeeze. “Good thing she didn’t know you in college. She’d have been freaked out every minute.”
“Like the time you bungee jumped off the clock tower on campus,” Dan chimed in.
“Or the time you chased those thugs that grabbed your wallet in Chicago,” Josh added.
“Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m a family man now. I have to be more careful.” Skip shook his head and frowned. His words were serious, but he joked, “Honestly, I don’t know what Debbie would do without me. How would she survive?”
“She’d find a decent guy like Josh here to take care of her,” Dan replied, in the way of men whose insults were accepted as affection.
“Stop fooling around with a screwup like you.” Skip laughed. “Yeah, like that would ever happen.”
“What?” Josh said, his arms full of gear. “Debbie loves me better than you, anyway.”
They had collected all the gear now and were headed toward the plane, docked on the other side of the grass landing strip. Josh had already checked everything out and prepared for takeoff. They wouldn’t need to stop to refuel. They should reach Red Maple Lake well before nightfall, with enough fuel for the return trip.
The three friends continued to joke and tease each other while they loaded the Cessna and strapped themselves in, but Josh took his flying responsibilities seriously and they knew it. As he worked his way through his preflight checklist, they quieted down.
Before starting the engine, he buckled up. The harness didn’t cinch all the way tight. The webbing slid off his shoulder. He shoved it back into place. He wasn’t going to cancel the trip because the belt wouldn’t tighten.
“Ready?” he said. He didn’t wait for a reply before pushing the throttle forward. The roar swamped all other noise. The yoke shook in his hands. The big propeller fought the air. It was a battle the propeller was winning. A thousand feet later, he pulled back on the yoke and they were airborne.
-
Chapter Six
Houston, Texas
Sunday
After he dropped Maddy off, Flint was too restless to sleep, even though recuperation time was exactly what his sore muscles needed after The Sea King case. Underwater work was always tough, even when he was in great shape.
He should do it more often.
His stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten anything for way too long. His body was still burning calories like a campfire gobbling dry kindling, but his refrigerator was as empty as his belly. A quick trip to the drive-thru diner solved his problem.
He carried his food and a liter bottle of water through to his desk and fired up his laptop. He started with basic online information searches about Veronica Beaumont. Google returned twenty-six million results in less than half a second. Impressive.
He inhaled the first hamburger as he perused the list of articles.
Beaumont had been named to several lists of wealthy CEOs since her first appearance five years ago, when her tech company went public and she became an instant millionaire. Before that, she had been named to Houston’s Top 40 Under 40. A quick review of her list-mates revealed the usual suspects. Many of them were brats with rich daddies he knew personally.
Beaumont’s tech success story was familiar by now to people who followed the industry. She was still in college in Chicago when she came up with her LookBook idea for a software program that focused on people in the fashion business. She developed the software program to connect her and her friends to the fashion icons she adored at the time.
Expansion had been exponential and fueled her growth.
Flint shook his head. She was a savvy businesswoman, but everything about her online persona proved she’d been shallow all her life.
Still, Beaumont was in the right place at the right time and her software took the fashion and social networking worlds by storm. These days, she was a powerhouse multi-millionaire on her way to becoming a billionaire. The more he read about her, the more convinced he became that she was everything he hated in a client.
Sure, she was rich. That didn’t bother him. In fact, extreme wealth was a plus because he liked to get paid. He’d grown up in poverty and he’d escaped. He didn’t intend to go back. The problem with Beaumont was that she was a demanding, cold female used to getting her own way and having everyone around her kowtow to her every wish.
None of that was going to work with him. Not even close.
He moved on to information about her private life as he gobbled the second hamburger.
Before relocating to Houston, where her son was born almost eight years ago, Beaumont had lived in Chicago. Flint found the official birth certificate for Jamison Beaumont. The boy’s father was not listed on the birth certificate or anywhere else.
School records were sealed, which slowed his search. He’d finished his second burger, most of a large pack of fries, and the water before he found what little information existed in the school files.
At that point, Flint stopped prying. He didn’t need to search for more data about Veronica and her son until after he talked to her, and maybe not even then. He saved his research and polished off the fries before he moved on to the work he had been planning to begin tomorrow. Work he had been avoiding for far too long.
A year ago, he had met a man who had claimed to know his mother. Within minutes of taunting him with that information, the man died.
Flint had ignored the claim, but it continued to nag him. The question popped into his dreams sometimes. When he was tired. Or idle for too long between jobs.
He wasn’t interested in a new romance to fill his thoughts, so he handled the problem by taking on more work. Most days, he simply shook the unwelcome intrusions from his head.
He had lived thirty-three years without knowing his parents. His mother had abandoned him when he was an infant. For more than three decades, he’d had no desire to find her or to know who she was. That system had served him well enough. There were plenty of advantages to not being bogged down by family. Why mess with success?
He’d always believed he could find his parents, if he’d wanted to.
But he’d never felt the urge.
He was an heir hunter. The best in the business. He knew that people gave up their children for good reasons, and he respected that choice.
As for his own situation, he was happy enough. He wanted for nothing. If his parents had chosen to abandon him, he was better off without them.
He nodded, pushed away from the desk, and carried the trash from his meal into the kitchen where he stuffed it into the compactor. Nobody nagged him to eat off plates or do the dishes. Being alone had its advantages, particularly for a man in his line of work.
He was beholden to no one. And he liked it that way.
Felix Crane had changed all that when he’d taunted Flint on a cold and snowy mountaintop.
Crane had tried to hire Flint, but he’d refused the case. Crane didn’t take it well.
“I knew your mother,” Crane had said.
He was the first, last, and only person who had ever made such a claim in Flint’s entire life. The moment he’d heard the words, he’d known he wouldn’t be able to ignore them forever.
At the time, Flint had other things to worry about. He and Crane had faced off, weapons aimed. Big money was at stake and Crane would have said anything to win.
So Flint shrugged off the taunt.
That was then.
The claim had bugged him more than he let on.
Now, a year later, Crane’s words rested in the back of his subconscious and refused to be forgotten.
I knew your mother. What did Crane mean by that? Were they lovers? Something else?
The obvious thing would be to follow up.
Obvious, but not possible since Crane was dead.
Flint was a man of many talents, but conversing with people beyond the grave was not a skill set he had managed to perfect. Unfortunately.
He found a crystal glass and poured a healthy four-finger portion of single-malt scotch. He added a couple of large ice cubes and returned to his desk.
He tapped his right knuckle against his teeth and looked at the laptop screen.
A man like Crane was easy to investigate. He had been in the public eye far too many times. Billionaires often were. Privacy was not possible and usually not even remotely desired.
Crane had fathered four children, according to Flint’s quick research, three daughters and one son, all older than Flint. The daughters lived in Europe somewhere. Not completely untouchable, but not as easy to confront without a lot of travel hassle.
Flint wasn’t especially interested in globetrotting to track down whatever connection Crane might have had with his mother, even assuming Crane’s daughters would know. Which was a long shot, at best.
There was an easier option.
The son.
Jasper Melvin Crane.
What a hideous moniker for a kid, although it probably suited the adult fairly well.
Flint cocked his head and flipped through the images on the screen. Jasper’s mother must have had some strong genes, because Jasper was a good-looking guy.
If you liked the lean and smarmy type.
Plenty of women did.
As he continued flipping through the images on the screen, he saw many such women on Jasper’s arm at one event or another. He was taller than his father and, odds were, he was less controlling. Maybe that elevated him to chick-magnet status.
But probably it was the oil and gas business gushing money.
When a boy grew up in his father’s long shadow, two outcomes were common. The boy could become aggressively violent or passively aggressive. Either would get him noticed by his dad, which was the only thing most boys wanted.
Approval was good, but attention was better.
Jasper looked like the kind of man who’d mastered the passive aggressive style long before his dad relayed the business baton to junior.
Flint curled his lip and held the scotch a while on his tongue.
He liked a man to behave like one. Stand up for himself. Take his licks for it if he lost the fight, but fight like a man in the first place.
Jasper didn’t look like the fighting kind.
Flint shook his head. Hard to believe this was Felix Crane’s kid. But he had seen the birth certificate. This effeminate dandy was Crane’s son. No doubt about that.
Jasper was now the head of Crane’s oil empire. He’d inherited everything when his father died. He was already living in the mansion and working for the company before he inherited it. But now he had what had eluded him all the years his father was alive. Control.
According to the financial news reports, Jasper wasn’t doing such a great job. But the kid had only been in charge for a year. He still had plenty of time to turn into as lethal a snake as his father had proven to be.
Question was, did Jasper know anything about his old man that Flint couldn’t discover through other means? Meaning, would talking to Jasper make Flint’s search for his own mother easier and faster, or precisely the opposite?
A quick phone call to the man could elicit the information Flint wanted, if Jasper was inclined to share. But in Flint’s experience, that kind of call never worked. He’d need to see Jasper in person and encourage him to tell what he knew.
Which had a slim chance of success.
Or he could find the information another way.
So, alternatives first. Leaving Jasper for later, if necessary. He might be able to avoid the man entirely.
Hope lightened his mood.
Flint eventually located the background data he was looking for on old man Crane.
Felix Crane had been born in Mount Warren, Texas, an oil boomtown back in the day. He’d grown up there in the rough-and-tumble way of such places. He’d cut his teeth on the oil business, living with his parents until he left for college.
When he graduated, he returned to Mount Warren to work in his father’s oil company for several years afterward. He started his family there and took over the family business when his father died. Just like Jasper.
Flint leaned back in his chair and sipped the scotch. Given the time frame, if Crane actually had known Flint’s mother, he could have known her in Mount Warren.
Or at least it was a reasonable place to start looking.
Flint had been to Mount Warren once. Booms and busts in the oil business had come and gone since Crane’s time.
Now, it was a small, depressed town deep in West Texas.
Thirty-four years ago, when Flint was conceived, the town’s permanent population had waned from the oil boom days. Small city, small population, not many women of childbearing age.
If Flint’s mother had known Felix Crane in Mount Warren, finding her would be fairly easy.
Which presented an entirely new set of issues.
Flint stood and paced the room.
Briefly, he considered his uncharacteristic indecision.
His instincts were solid. He’d relied on them to keep him alive for a very long time. He thought of himself as a point-shoot-aim kind of guy.
His experience and training had provided him with everything he needed to solve the relatively minor puzzle of his mother’s identity.
Hell, he could have done that years ago.
The problem was that he didn’t know whether he wanted to solve that particular riddle. Everything kept coming back to that point.
He shook his head and drained the last of the scotch from the glass. As a kid, maybe he’d wondered about his parents. Maybe he’d wanted to find them. Maybe he’d harbored normal childhood fantasies about being reunited with his mother and father.
And maybe not.
If he’d had those desires and fantasies, he had no memory of them.
Not that he had amnesia or anything. He’d just never thought about it. Not even once.
His earliest memories were of living with his foster mother, Bette Maxwell, at the Lazy M Ranch and Boarding School. It was the only home he’d ever known.
Like most kids, he remembered very little of anything before the age of four or so. But as far as Flint was concerned, his life began when he was eight.
That was the year he met Katie Scarlett.
She had arrived at the Lazy M when she was ten. She was already a holy terror, just like Flint. They became inseparable almost immediately.
