Desperate Crimes (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 11) Read online

  DESPERATE CRIMES

  A Bill Travis Mystery

  by

  George Wier

  Copyright © 2016 by George Wier

  Published by

  Flagstone Books

  Austin, Texas

  Desperate Crimes—A Bill Travis Mystery

  First Ebook Edition

  March 2016

  Cover design by Elizabeth Mackey

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  BOOKS BY GEORGE WIER

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  BOOKS BY GEORGE WIER

  The Bill Travis Mysteries

  The Last Call

  Capitol Offense

  Longnecks & Twisted Hearts

  The Devil To Pay

  Death On the Pedernales

  Slow Falling

  Caddo Cold

  Arrowmoon

  After the Fire

  Ghost of the Karankawa

  Desperate Crimes

  The Jim Rains Thrillers

  Cold Rains

  The Elysium Chronicles

  Murder In Elysium

  Sentinel In Elysium

  Standalone Novels

  Long Fall From Heaven (with Milton T. Burton)

  Errant Knight

  Science Fiction

  The Vindicators: Book One — Last Defense (with Robert A. Taylor)

  Captains Malicious — Book One of the Liberation Series (with T.R. Harris)

  Steampunk

  1889: Journey to the Moon (with Billy Kring)

  1899: Journey to Mars (with Billy Kring)

  Anthologies

  ’14: A Texanthology

  Lone Star Noir

  DEDICATION

  For Sallie, the light of my life.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There are no do-overs. Once the dice are thrown there’s no retracing the trajectory, no way of altering the arc or the force with which they’re thrown—or, to use a golf analogy, there are no mulligans. When they come to rest, the pips showing are set in concrete, graven in stone, and The Fates have made their decree.

  But then there’s Todd Landry, a guy who never knew the rules and so didn’t bother to pay any attention to them.

  Todd gives my oldest natural daughter, Jennifer, piano lessons. Or rather, he used to, up until the day he disappeared from the Earth.

  “But I like him, Daddy,” Jennifer said. We were in our back yard raking compost into the fence-high pile.

  “I know you do, sweetheart. Are you still giving the recital on Saturday?”

  “Not without Toddy,” she said. Jennifer is eight years old, and she’s sharp as a whip for eight. “Daddy, this pile of stuff stinks.”

  “It’s supposed to,” I said. “It’s compost. Mom needs it to grow her tomatoes.”

  “I’ll never eat tomatoes again if they grow in this stuff.”

  “Wise,” I whispered under my breath. I knew firsthand the contents of the pile.

  “What about it?” she asked me.

  “What about what?” I stopped and leaned against the rake, swept the sweat off of my forehead with a rolled-up sleeve.

  “I want you to find him for me,” she said.

  “Jen, Daddy is not the Police Department. I work and bring home money to pay for piano lessons. Your older sister, however, is a member of the Sheriff’s Department. Maybe she can find him for you.”

  I got a frown and pursed lips from that.

  “You never do anything,” she said, and turned to stalk off.

  I found myself lurching forward. I grasped her shoulder and she stopped and turned around.

  “Did Mr. Landry tell you it was okay to call him Toddy?” I asked.

  “I called him that from the first day, I think,” she said. “He never said I couldn’t.”

  “Okay. Okay. And he never called you or Mom back this whole week? You guys made a lot of phone calls, if I recall.”

  “No,” she said. Then, suddenly, she burst into tears. Between her sobs I barely made out the words, “We even went to his house again and again.”

  “Oh, come here, honey. It’s okay.” Jennifer threw her arms around me and squeezed me tight. The tears were real, and there were a lot of them. “Look, maybe he had to go out of town. Maybe somebody got sick or something. It could be one of a hundred things.”

  “No, daddy. It’s something bad. I know it. He would have called me.”

  She looked into my face with pleading, tear-strewn eyes.

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I suppose he would have. Let’s go in the house and see if we can make some phone calls and find him. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and I’d rather do that than make compost.”

  She nodded slowly. “Thank you, daddy.”

  Innocently enough, that’s how it all started. With little girl tears drying on my neck, and a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach that I could not explain. Unfortunately, those feelings are usually right on the money.

  *****

  Trying the phone was a no go, as I knew it would be. We were in my study, which is essentially my office away from the office. Jennifer sat on my suede leather couch and waited as I listened to the phone ring and ring. Meanwhile she watched me. I kept expecting the phone to roll over to voicemail or an answering machine...or something. No dice. Jennifer slowly shook her head. She knew.

  I hung up the phone. “You and mom weren’t able to leave a message either, were you?”

  “Uh uh.”

  I thrummed my fingers.

  I thought about driving over to Todd Landry’s condominium. It wasn’t far away and I had the time. But I knew it would be a waste of time. Trekking over the same ground is always like that—it gives you the illusion that you’re doing something, when in actuality all you’re doing is wasting precious time.

  “Call in a favor,” Jennifer said.

  “How did you get to be so smart?” I asked.

  “Mom.”

  “Oh. That makes sense.”

  I thought about it for about two seconds, then called the only person I knew that could help.

  “I recognize the number,” he said. “How are you doing, Bill?”

  “Fine, Hank. Listen, I’ve got a favor to ask.” Hank Sterling is perhaps one of my oldest living friends. He’s a former client who used to blow up things and make artwork out of the wreckage. Nowadays he’s a freelance private investigator. One of the worst kinds, too, in that he never knows when to quit.

  “I’m sure you do have a favor to ask, otherwise you wouldn’t have called me. What’s it this time?”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “A missing person thing.”

  “Todd Landry,” he said.

  “How did you—”

  “Easy enough. I’ve been staking out his place for the past
week. I’ve seen Julie with one of the kids—I think it was Jenny—drive up, get out and go knock on his door. The last time they left a note.”

  “That’s interesting. And all too coincidental. Why are you staking out Todd Landry?”

  “Because,” Hank said, “he’s missing.”

  “That’s a good reason. Who’s your client?”

  “Now why should I tell you that?” he asked.

  “Because I asked you,” I said. “Also, because Jennifer would like to know.”

  “Why would Jennifer like to know?”

  “Because he’s her piano teacher, and she likes him.”

  “Those are good reasons. I’d rather not talk about it on the phone. Can we meet somewhere to talk? Somewhere where there’s no chance of someone hearing us?”

  “You don’t trust your phone,” I said. Silence followed. “All right. Meet me at my office in thirty minutes.” I looked up to see Jennifer standing in front of my desk, her eyes wide. I knew what that meant. “And I’m bringing Jennifer with me.”

  “That’s fine,” Hank said. “See you in thirty. But you’re not going to like it.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, but Hank had hung up.

  *****

  It was no hard sell to Julie that Jennifer be allowed to go along with me. She was in Megan’s bedroom and the two of them were going through her clothes, picking out what she had outgrown and thus what needed to be replaced. Megan was already a very wise and knowing six years of age, and she had opinions about everything, especially her clothing. Julie sat on the side of the bed. The new baby, Claudia, had arrived and Julie had to remain within earshot, which was why Jennifer and I had compost duty for the foreseeable future. All had been quiet for the last six months since we came back from East Texas and a run-in with a creature that was out of this world. But that’s another story. Me? I like things quiet.

  “Jenn, you be sure that daddy doesn’t get into any trouble,” Julie told her as she folded a pair of small blue jeans and stuffed them into a sack.

  “I’ll watch out for him,” Jennifer said.

  I looked down at Jennifer and frowned. “Don’t...get any ideas,” I said. She smiled wickedly.

  We trundled down the stairs and out to the front driveway where she halted abruptly. She turned toward me slowly.

  “Dad,” she said. “Please tell me that we are not taking your car.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “The Mercedes is in prime condition. I had an engine overhaul recently. Sure, the AC doesn’t blow all that cold, and the heater doesn’t blow all that hot, but she’s yar.”

  “What does ‘yar’ mean?” she asked. “You’ve said that before, and neither me nor mom could find it in the dictionary.”

  “It’s an old sailing term. It means that she’s good for tacking into the wind.”

  “I guess one day I’ll find out what that means, too. Can’t we take the Expedition?”

  “No,” I said.

  She slowly shook her head.

  “You don’t approve.”

  “It’s...embarrassing.”

  “Not as embarrassing as you explaining to Mr. Sterling why we were late. Come on, kiddo.”

  Jennifer followed me across the green grass, albeit with a great deal of reluctance.

  “One day,” I said, as she climbed in and sighed loudly, “you’ll have kids and you’ll get to embarrass them.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hank was right. I didn’t like it.

  Jennifer sat at my desk like she was the boss, and Hank and I sat in the two chairs opposite her.

  “So you haven’t heard from your client in the last four days,” I said.

  Hank shook his head.

  “And your client is Todd Landry.”

  He nodded.

  “He hired you to stake out his place in the event that someone came looking for him, but now he’s gone without a trace.”

  Hank continued nodding.

  “Any idea where he is?” Jennifer asked.

  Hank shook his head.

  “Let me ask the questions, honey,” I said. Jennifer leaned forward and put her head in her hands and looked up, as if the ceiling were something worthy of study.

  “The trail is cold, Bill,” Hank said.

  “How cold?”

  “Four days cold.” He reached in his pocket and took out a cellular phone and handed it to me.

  “Is this Landry’s phone?”

  “It is. The last time I couldn’t get him on the phone, I tried tracking him down with GPS. For some reason he had the GPS feature turned on, which in itself doesn’t make any sense because he was trying to hide. Anyway, I found the phone in the grass on the side of the highway going out of town. But no Landry.”

  “Then why stake out his place?” I asked.

  “No other options. I couldn’t break in. I figured that someone would come looking for him.”

  I looked at him uncertainly. This wasn’t the old devil-may-care Hank that I used to know.

  “I know,” he said. “It was a longshot, but it was the only shot I had.”

  “Who was he trying to hide from?” Jennifer asked.

  “Bad people,” Hank said. “That’s about all I know. Something about an inheritance—lots of money from someone who died—”

  Jennifer looked back up at the ceiling.

  “She knows what an inheritance is,” I said. “She’s my daughter, remember?”

  “Right. You’ve got smart kids, Bill.”

  “Sometimes they’re a little too smart. You were saying?”

  “Somebody died. I don’t know who it was. Don’t worry, I’ve already tried to trace down who it could be by running a genealogical search on Todd Landry. I was going to cross-reference that with a Lexis Nexus search for—”

  “Someone with died leaving a lot of money,” Jennifer said.

  “Right. But the funny thing is, there’s no such person as Todd Landry. I mean, yeah, there’s a condominium lease in his name, and I’m sure he’s got a library card and all that other stuff. There are four Todd Landrys in Austin, Texas, but none of them is our Todd Landry.”

  “Hank,” I said, “Julie has known this guy for about ten years. There’s no way she would have allowed any of our children anywhere near someone who was not who they held themselves out to be.”

  “After I saw Julie and Jenny here come by the house, I started looking into that aspect of things.”

  “Is that why you didn’t alert me?” I asked. “Because you wanted to make sure that my wife was on the up and up?”

  “Nothing like that. Dammit, Bill. I trust your wife a sight more than I trust you.”

  I laughed. “Language,” I said, and pointed to Jennifer.

  “I’ve heard worse,” she said.

  “I’m sure you have,” I said, “but not from me and not from your mom.”

  “Dad, you two curse like sailors when you think no one is listening.”

  “I think you hear the bad stuff from Jessica, is what I think,” I said.

  “It’s not me being suspicious of Julie,” Hank said. “It’s about whether or not there was any side-danger to you and your family. I couldn’t see any, so I let it be.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But I still want to know everything you know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Jennifer said, “my dad and I are going to help you find him.”

  Hank nodded slowly. “I guess this is like old times, then,” he said to me.

  “It’s like new times,” Jennifer said. “Because I’m coming with you.”

  Hank gave me a sidelong look and I gave him my best smile. “From the mouths of babes,” I said.

  *****

  “What do you suggest we do first, ma’am?” Hank asked Jennifer.

  “Okay, first give me that phone, dad.”

  I slid it to her across my desk and she snatched it up. She took a moment to turn it on and let it cycle through its startup procedure.

&n
bsp; “Oh,” she said. “He’s got a lockout code in place.”

  “I wonder what it is,” Hank said, and smiled at her.

  “Hmph. Let me try something,” she said, and began tapping. After a few seconds her face lit up. “It worked!”

  “Let me see that!” Hank sat forward and held out his hand.

  “Slow down, Kemosabe,” I said. “Let the Djinni do her work. I knew she was magic.”

  “At least tell me the code,” Hank said.

  “E-D-E-D-E-B-D-C-A.”

  “That makes no sense whatsover,” he said.

  “Sure it does,” I interjected. “Tell him, Jenn.”

  “It’s the opening bar of Für Elise. It’s what I’m supposed to play at my recital next Saturday.”

  “Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”

  “You are a monkey’s uncle,” I said.

  “How did you know?” Hank asked. “I’ll bet you were the one who set the password.”

  “No,” Jennifer said. “Toddy did.”

  “Toddy?” Hank said.

  “Hush, listen and learn,” I told him.

  “He got the phone in the mail while I was practicing. He was so excited but it was my practice time. I told him to go ahead and get his phone going while I practiced. I kept messing up the music and he kept calling across the room to me: E-D-E-D-E-B-D-C-A, E-D-E-D-E-B-D-C-A. He wasn’t upset, exactly. It was like he was trying hard to be...patient. I took a guess that was what he used. I bet it was all he could think of at the time.”

  “Good call, honey,” I said. “Who’s the last person he called?”

  “It doesn’t say the name. Just a phone number.”

  “What is it?” Hank asked. He pulled out his own little Android phone and pecked away at it as Jennifer gave him the number.

  “I recognize the area code,” I said. “That’s probably in Tyler.”

  “Yeah,” Hank said. “I recognize it too. I used to do a lot of construction work up that way.”

  “You did construction work every way,” I said. “Are you going to call it?”

  “Yeah, hold your horses. We’d better use Todd’s phone, though.”

  “Right,” Jennifer said, and slid it back across my desk to Hank. “We can’t talk long, though. It seriously needs a recharge.”