There’d been another murder that summer. Poor Debbie had barely gotten a mention in the papers, but Jonathan Traynor III, a senator’s son, had gotten plenty of play. Both murders had remained unsolved for most of those years, up until the Traynor case had gotten busted wide open and the Gold girl had been found to be a piece of collateral damage to the main event.
Dax had seen and heard about incidents a lot worse than those two murders in the intervening years, but Gold and Traynor had died in his neighborhood while he’d still been young enough to be horrifyingly awed by violence, with both murders being lurid enough to have instantly attained the status of urban legend and seal themselves in his memories-gang rape, heroin, a little strangulation, and a bullet to the brain. Right in the heart of Denver.
Life was funny. Dax had known the guy who’d gotten sent up for Traynor’s murder, wrongly it had turned out, had known him a whole lot better than he’d ever known Jolene Talbot. Hawkins had been his name. They’d boosted a couple of cars together with a kid named Quinn as part of a crew running out of lower downtown. Then that whole crew had gotten busted and sent up to juvie on a job Dax had been slated to work. The bust had pretty much scared him straight on the car boosting business.
Fortunately, there’d been plenty of other trouble to get into, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t missed any of it, right up until a Denver police officer, Loretta Bradley, had suggested, strongly, that the
U.S. Army might be a better place for him than the streets of Denver or one of her jail cells.
Apparently, from what and whom he’d seen in a lot of far-flung places over the intervening years, she’d given that advice to a lot of lower downtown’s grand theft auto wizards.
Loretta was a lieutenant now, and she’d been right. The army had been a good place for an eighteen-year-old kid who’d been on the verge of upgrading into felonies beyond his successful, and therefore undocumented, forays into boosting cars.
The Honda moved again, and Dax kept up. He could see the lights of Denver spread out across the horizon and spilling onto the dark plains to the east, but no matter how much sprawl the suburbs provided, Denver was a small town, especially if you’d grown up running her streets.
Hawkins, Quinn, and a guy named Creed-he’d crossed all their paths at some point during his time in the army and during his last few years in the Middle East, before he’d gotten out of the military. He hadn’t seen Dylan, though. From a few oblique asides, he’d surmised that the boss of the chop shop had gone a slightly different route. More spook than operator, it didn’t appear that Dylan Hart spent much, if any, time in BDUs.
The one guy he hadn’t seen since he’d left Denver was J. T. Chronopolous, but he’d heard the rumors about a couple of operators on a black op in Colombia a few years back, about one of them having three scars across the top of his shoulder-and he’d thought of the car thief he’d used to know. Given what the other guys had ended up doing, he’d always kind of figured there was a fair chance that guy in Colombia had been J.T. He hoped to hell what he’d heard hadn’t happened to anyone he knew, though, especially someone from the Steele Street crew, especially J.T. But someday, he was going to have to check it out and get the real story.
Hell, they’d all been running so damn wild on the streets as kids way back then.
Not all the wild kids were on the streets, though. He’d found a whole passel of them in a private prep school in Colorado Springs, Folton Ridge Academy. He’d been down at the school taking pictures of four of the students, all girls, all about seventeen years old, all brunettes, all on the Folton Ridge Flyers field hockey team. He’d gotten their names by matching the photos he’d taken with those in the school’s yearbook, and then gotten to know each of the girls up close and personal through their on-line profiles and the accompanying chitchat messages posted between them and their friends.
If Dax ever had kids, he’d only have two words for the on-line chitchat, post-your-picture-so-yourfriends-can-find-you Web sites: no way. Not if hell froze over. He knew the one girl’s bra size, which was not the information he’d been looking to gather. On the plus side, by sifting through their messages, he’d determined that two of the girls were pretty nice kids. Three of them were good students. All four complained about their coach. One of them had freckles and thought they made her look fat.
Dax thought that maybe it was the extra twenty pounds she was carrying that made her appear plump, but he was no expert on teenage girls and didn’t want to be. He’d survived that territory once by the skin of his teeth, as a teenage boy, and he wasn’t going back except in the driver’s seat, though truth be told, he’d never met a father yet who thought he was in charge of his teenage daughter’s life. Quite the opposite-teenage girls seemed to rule whatever planet they were residing on, which was exactly how he remembered high school being: girls in charge, boys going in circles standing still.
Of the four Folton Ridge girls, both of the nice ones had been in their rooms last night. The other two had started out in the boys’ dorm with a fifth of vanilla vodka and ended up half-naked in a hot tub at a private house near the Broadmoor Hotel with a whole bunch of Folton Ridge boys, half a dozen townies, and, from the uniforms he’d seen littering the deck, a couple of cadets from the Air Force Academy.
Dax knew hell-bent-for-disaster when he saw it, and the two Folton girls had been leading the pack. They were wild ones, a fact he had thoroughly documented with the long lens on his camera.
Four Folton Ridge field hockey players, varsity, and one of them was the girl he needed. He wouldn’t know for sure which one until Easy got him the name from Burt’s Chicago connection. They should have had it before he’d ever gone to Colorado Springs. If they didn’t have it by morning, he and Easy were going to be walking into the payoff with Bleak without their ace-in which case he’d be winging it.
Nothing new there, but he preferred the sure shot when he could get it.
Sure shot, hell. Uncle Burt had never had a sure shot in his life, and this mess Dax and Easy were trying to pull him out of had been screwed up from the get-go. They hadn’t been able to get Otto to commit to coming to Denver any earlier for the “deal of a lifetime” they’d concocted strictly to set him up, and they’d held Franklin Bleak off as long as they could. That bastard was done with Burt Alden. Tomorrow, five A.M., was the drop-dead date on the money Easy’s father owed, and she and Dax had ended up in the middle of the time crunch.
Never again, that’s all he could say. Esme wanted her father paid up, shut down, and exfiltrated. Ex-filleted was more like it as far as Dax was concerned. He didn’t care where Burt Alden landed, the old man was going to find a bet, and a scam, and trouble-and probably a little stolen art. Uncle Burt was good at that. Dax had to give him some credit.
His glance slid to the folder lying in the passenger seat. He’d found the girls-four girls, four sets of photographs, and endless pages of on-line chitchat. He’d combed through all of it, compared the photographs to the pictures he had of Franklin Bleak, and he had a guess as to which of the varsity girls called Franklin “Daddy”-and Daddy Franklin wasn’t going to be happy to see the photographs Dax had taken of his girl in that hot tub.
Bottom line, though, Dax could have photographed her serving tea to the queen, and it would have been enough to push Franklin Bleak off center and off Burt Alden’s back. No one was supposed to know Franklin Bleak had a daughter. The facts of the girl’s connection to him had been buried deep, and for good reason. Franklin was the kind of guy with a lot of enemies and no known weaknesses to exploit-except her.