Page 66 of Never Stay Gone
Frank Lynn. Hatred, as pure and hot as the sun, sparked inside Shane. Had he done this?
“I got better news on that phone number Sheriff Reed gave us. It belongs to a pay phone in the parking lot of a motel on the edge of Odessa, out near the highway. It’s a come-and-go kind of place. Roach trap. Drifters and sex workers use it a lot.”
Shane scrambled to keep up. The number. The phone number Frank had called his son from the night Jessica Klein went missing.
“We went and asked the manager for the surveillance tape from the parking lot. He wasn’t interested in helping, but it turns out he’s got a few outstanding warrants, and once we reminded him of those, suddenly that tape appeared like magic. I’ve got the night of the phone call right here. What email can I send it to?”
Shane recited his email and heard her typing on a keyboard. “Done, sent. Hope it helps. I checked it out. You can see that guy you’re looking for making a call at the pay phone.”
“Did you watch the whole thing?”
“No. Just enough to see that your suspect is there. I got a lotta work of my own, Captain.”
“Right. Sorry.” He cleared his throat. Tried to think. What would Dakota ask? What would Dakota do? He couldn’t brandish corpse photos over the phone line, and Detective Cruz sounded like she wouldn’t be fazed by seeing something like that anyway.
What was Dakota’s theory of the murders? A drug angle. Frank, connected to Libby and Amber, and all three of them connected to the drug trade in some way. What about Jessica? “Hey, were you involved with the Jessica Klein investigation?”
“We all were.” Cruz blew out a sigh like a gust of West Texas wind. “Case like that, you can’t not be involved. Tell you what I think,” she said, barreling right into where Shane wanted to lead her. “I think that fiancé of hers was involved.”
Shane blinked. “Joey Carroll?” The Joey he’d held as he’d fallen apart on the floor of interview room two, sobbing so hard it seemed like his bones were going to shake right out of his body?
“Oh yeah. You met the guy? You saw that aw-shucks persona he puts on, huh?”
“I met him. We had to let him know Jessica was pregnant.”
“She was pregnant?” Genuine surprise from Detective Cruz. “That didn’t come out in the investigation. Did he know?”
“He did.” Heartbreak, a shattered man, parts of himself bleeding out all over Shane’s floor. “They were keeping it quiet, and he couldn’t bring himself to say anything, he said. Apparently they thought they’d never have kids, so they were pretty careful about mentioning anything in case they lost the baby. He’s devastated. We drove him to his parents’ farm in Pecos after we interviewed him yesterday.”
“So that’s where the roach ended up.” Despite the news, Cruz didn’t sound the least bit sympathetic to Joey. “I wondered, when our vice guys couldn’t find him.”
An alarm went off inside Shane, starting quiet but building at the base of his skull. “Vice?”
“Oh yeah. Joey Carroll has been a frequent flyer in our cells. One-off burglaries and trying to off-load crap to the black market. Boosting cars for a regional chop shop operation. Things like that. Then he got into drugs. Selling pot at first, before he made the move to heavier stuff. When he started dealing heroin, we moved in. We busted him about seven months ago, enough for a distribution charge. You wanna be a small-time burglar, spend your nights in the cell, that’s your call. You wanna push heroin in this town? We don’t have room for that. We’ve got enough problems here.”
“Why didn’t any of this come up when we ran his ID?”
“Because he was Jessica Klein’s fiancé. According to him, they were the loves of each other’s lives. And Jessica was Odessa royalty. She could pick up the phone and get things done. She was the definition of someone with friends in high places. Why do you think her missing persons investigation was so huge?”
“I know Governor Riggs was involved—”
Cruz snorted. “Involved. Cute. Micromanaged, more like. She had that Texas Ranger of hers hounding us twice a day for updates.”
Dakota. “So you never filed charges against Joey?”
“Never. The call came from high up in the department: let him go. At first, we thought maybe Joey was working undercover, that he was some kind of narcotics source. And, you know, maybe he is, but I don’t think so. Not him. So after that, we stuck some officers on his ass like glue. If we can’t charge him, at least we can make his life miserable. No dealer can deal with cops following him. We had him by the short and curlies, I thought.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s a tricky son of a bitch, but… no one deserves to have the love of their life and their baby taken from them like that. I feel for the guy, for that at least.”
Jesus.Libby, Amber, Jessica: all of them connected in some way to drugs. “Where did Joey get his heroin?” Was this the connection between Joey and Frank?
“No clue. We never figured that out.”
Presidio flashed in Shane’s memories. A group of men standing across the street, watching them come out of the bodega. Ramón, his eyes cold, telling them Amber went north with her haul, to the truck stop.You know, I hitched out of here too.
Shane’s email dinged. The video file had arrived. “Your video is here. I’m going to take a look. Thank you, Detective, for your thoughts. This was a big help.”
