White Ghost Ridge Read online

  “Well, are we any nearer to finding out what’s going on here, Mendoza?”

  Mendoza sighed. “No, sir. If anything, the case has got more complicated. I doubt this Simon guy killed his meal ticket. Still think we should talk to him though. He knows something. That’s clear. And we still don’t know what INTENT means and I’ll wager that it’s important.”

  “Agreed.”

  “What now?”

  “You go ask the janitor for the security tapes. Take them back to the station and study them. I want to know who came in, how long they stayed, what time they left. I’ll track down this Simon guy, see what he knows. Stay out of Benson’s way. As soon as he realises our connection to Carter you’ll be writing parking fines and I’ll probably be suspended until Kowalski gets back and deals with me.”

  When they reached the lobby, Mendoza turned to Locklear.

  “Do you think we’ll prove Carter is innocent, sarge? I can’t stand the thought of him locked up. He won’t survive prison – Carter’s just not made of that stuff.”

  Locklear dug his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans. “Then we better get busy.”

  Chapter 4

  It wasn’t hard for Locklear to find Simon Caird. The man had a record consisting of one prior for prostitution and one for possession. He was also wanted for questioning for robbery of a rich old widow in his hometown of Tucson, Arizona. She had been paying Caird for his company. Caird had skipped town before the case progressed any further. Locklear had found out by calling in a favour from a station secretary he used to know before she moved from New York to Tucson with her Arizonan husband. An outstanding arrest warrant was still in operation on the man in his home state. Caird was facing his third strike which explained the pressure he presumably put on Holton not to press charges for assault.

  Locklear parked across the street from the rundown house Caird rented and watched the house for a while. He needed to determine if Caird was alone. He didn’t think the petty criminal was particularly dangerous but he wasn’t sure about his associates and whether any of them might enjoy putting a bullet into a cop’s head for fun. When he saw no sign of activity, he locked the car and walked slowly across the road. He crept up the three stones steps and listened at the door but heard nothing.

  Locklear unhooked his gun, pulled back the screen door and knocked loudly.

  The cheap wooden door, which had a large indentation at foot level, opened halfway. A thick security chain thwarted Locklear’s plan to rush into the house before Caird had time to refuse a visit but he knew instantly that the man in front of him was Alec’s ex-lover. Meara’s description of the man was good but gone were the fancy clothes and neat attire. Caird was dressed in dirty jeans and a torn T-shirt. He was barefoot and unshaven and smelt of beer and cigarettes. In seconds, Locklear read the shocked expression on Caird’s face and knew the man was about to close the door. He forced his foot inside but Caird kept pushing the door until, with no other option, Locklear pulled back his limb. The door slammed and Locklear listened while the back screen door screeched. He ran around to the side of the unfenced and unmowed yard and raised his piece just as Caird reached the top of the seven-foot wall of wire which ran at the back of the property.

  “Get down!”

  Caird kept his hands on the top railing while he considered his options: try to get over the fence and get shot doing so or drop to the ground. He decided to drop.

  He raised his arms and waited for Locklear to speak.

  “Lie on the ground – put your hands behind your back,” Locklear ordered.

  “Who are you?” Caird asked.

  “Detective Sergeant Locklear – Richmond PD. I’m here to talk to you about your friend, Alec Holton.”

  Caird studied the man’s appearance – his worn jeans, his unpolished boots, his surprisingly neatly pressed shirt. He studied the man’s face for even longer than he studied his clothes. In particular he focused on his hair, thick black hair which was too long for a cop and his dark brown eyes which gave little of his intention away.

  “You’re not a fucking cop.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You’re one of them Indians that’s after Alec.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that most Native Americans find the name ‘Indian’ offensive?” Locklear said, despite sometimes using the term himself.

  Caird didn’t reply.

  “Lie on the ground. Face down.”

  “Don’t kill me, please. I don’t know anything. I swear. All I saw was a few emails. Honest.”

  Locklear reached towards his back pocket, pulled out a pair of handcuffs and cuffed the writhing man. The screen door opened and a heavily pregnant woman came out onto the back porch. Locklear focused in on her hands. They were empty save for a lighted cigarette.

  “Who’s that?” Locklear asked.

  “My fucking sister.”

  The woman laughed.

  Locklear pulled Caird to his feet and dragged him towards the house.

  “Anyone else in there?” he asked.

  “Just my two-year-old kid,” the woman replied, grinning.

  Locklear pulled Caird closer to where the woman stood until he was close enough to see the small lines around her eyes and the circle of white powder caked to her nostrils. Despite her advanced pregnancy, the woman was painfully thin. She pulled on her cigarette and blew smoke into Locklear’s face. Locklear stared at the heart-shaped pearl earrings in the woman’s ears which were at odds with her cheap clothes and bleached-blonde hair.

  “Our kid,” she added, glancing at Caird as he continued to writhe against Locklear’s firm grip.

  “You sure made a fool of Alec Holton,” Locklear said to Caird as he pushed him into the house. A half-snorted line of coke lay on a glass coffee table beside a rolled-up $20 bill. “And I don’t only mean the fact that you were spending the money he gave you on coke. I mean because he thought you and he were a couple. I’d say he had no idea you were straight and that you had a family.”

  “He can’t complain. I also used some of that money for expensive acting lessons. Looks like his investment paid off,” Caird sneered.

  The woman laughed out loud. It was the throaty, deep laugh of a heavy smoker. A child began to cry in an adjoining room but she didn’t move.

  “See to the fucking kid!” Caird barked.

  The woman stared a cold hard stare at Caird before she turned to leave the room.

  “Wait,” Locklear said. “Before you go, you’d better give me those earrings or I’ll be taking you as well as your boyfriend downtown.”

  “What for?”

  “Receipt of stolen property.”

  Despite her swollen belly and without, Locklear noticed, as much as even a slight change of expression, the pregnant woman walked swiftly over to Caird.

  “You bastard! You said you bought these for me!” She slapped Caird’s face and then tore the earrings from her ears and dropped them into Locklear’s waiting hand.

  The woman dropped her thin body into a worn armchair and seemed to forget the crying infant in the next room. She lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. Locklear watched as her hands began to shake. He could see the woman come down from the line she had obviously snorted earlier – her elation slowly being replaced with feelings of agitation and anger.

  “What did he do?” she asked Locklear.

  “He’s wanted for questioning about the murder of his, and your, meal ticket.”

  Caird pulled away from Locklear and turned to face him. The look on his face told Locklear that the con artist had no idea Holton was dead.

  “What?He’s dead? Murdered?”

  “You know he is.”

  “I swear I didn’t know – I didn’t kill him.”

  “I’d say he did it OK,” the woman said. “When’d it happen?”

  Locklear didn’t answer. He could see the disappointed woman was trying to draw him into a domestic and he didn’t have time for games. Her st
eady supply of money had just dried up and clearly she had little other use for Caird.

  “In fact, today is the first time he’s been here for about a week,” she added.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Nat?”

  She stood and smiled at Caird and then walked towards the door of the room where the infant had continued to cry.

  “Don’t rush back with him,” she said to Locklear. “I don’t care if I never see that loser again.”

  Locklear waited until she returned with the infant on her hip. He focused on the thin black-haired child and the dirty clothes he was dressed in.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me, boy,” she said as she swayed.

  That one line brought Locklear back more than half a century. He stood and stared at the woman as though he had woken from a dream. He took in her emaciated frame, her shoeless feet, her worn face that might once have been beautiful and her dilated expressionless black pupils, before shaking himself free of a memory he had tried hard to forget.

  “Well, get on, Geronimo, get him out of my face,” she jeered.

  Locklear lifted his phone and asked for two cars. One to take Caird downtown and one from Child Protection Services. He hoped that CPS would take the kid somewhere he would be safe. The unborn kid he could do nothing for. He closed the phone and stared at the woman but all he saw was his mother’s dark, doleful eyes staring back at him.

  Less than twenty-four hours after Locklear interviewed Lee Carter in the interrogation room, Simon Caird was seated in the same chair in the same room with the same cop staring idly at the wall. That was where the similarities ended though as, while Caird wore the expression of a man who knew he was in trouble, he was no stranger to interrogation.

  Locklear stared hard at the man, trying to decide which tactic would get him furthest, especially as he knew he was running out of time. He had looked in on Carter when he got back to the station and the man looked like death. He was refusing all food and drink and, according to the night sergeant’s records, had been heard sobbing in his cell, begging to see his wife. The rostered sergeant had taken almost all of the quiet man’s clothes and had put Carter on suicide watch, moving him to a cell which was checked every fifteen minutes to ensure the anxious man did not attempt to take his own life. The thought of that upset Locklear deeply. He knew Carter was innocent and he was never wrong.

  “Where were you last night?”

  Caird smiled and rocked back on his chair until its front legs left the floor.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “You’ll get one,” Locklear retorted. “When I’m ready.”

  “Guess we’ll be sitting here all day then cos I’m not saying shit to you until I speak to a lawyer.”

  Locklear stared at this man who had made a fool of the victim. He wondered how someone could do that, prey on the vulnerabilities of a lonely man and not show as much as an ounce of remorse now that he was dead.

  “I saw your record, Caird. Even if you don’t go down for this, you’re wanted on charges of robbery in Arizona which will be your third strike. I’ll make sure you’re escorted on the next flight back to Tucson where you’ll face prison. It’ll be a long time before you see your family again. Your kid will be born while you’re behind bars.”

  The smug smile slowly faded on Caird’s face but he regained his composure quickly.

  “You saw that bitch. She ain’t no prize. Wouldn’t mind a break from her.”

  “And your kid? Looks like she doesn’t give a damn about him.”

  The earlier image of Caird’s girlfriend swaying back and forth came back to him but, instead of Nat, it was his mother standing in the kitchen of their rented home, swaying on her feet in front of him. It was just after another boyfriend had decided to leave them. He had liked the man but he could no longer remember his name. There had been a lot of names to remember. Some he remembered more, for all the wrong reasons. “It’s just you and me, boy,” she had said as the man’s car spun away from their trailer-trash home and her words had filled him with dread and fear. Alcohol had been his beautiful mother’s poison as it was to become his. He shook his head and managed to block his mother from his thoughts.

  “He ain’t my kid. She says he is but I’m not stupid. Look, I was at home last night and every night this week. Just me and the kid. Nat started taking off in the evenings. So I stayed in. She’d probably leave the kid alone if I didn’t, so that’s where I was. Bitch was probably meeting up with some old boyfriend or something.”

  “So you care about him and there’s another baby on the way.”

  Caird did not answer.

  “I know you didn’t kill Holton, Caird. You don’t have the guts for that sort of thing and he was giving you enough money to feed your coke habit and hers too. What I want to know is why he was paying you off. If you cooperate, I’ll speak to my boss. See what I can do to ensure you don’t do time.”

  Caird shifted in his seat. “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll make sure you go down for blackmail, possession and theft of property from Holton’s neighbour. And that’s before we turn you over to the Arizona PD to face charges there.”

  Caird seemed to need a moment to consider his options. He blinked and nodded his head slightly.

  “OK. I’ll tell you what I know but if it ain’t important I still walk, right?”

  Locklear pulled his chair closer to the small metal table.

  “You better make sure it’s important, Caird.”

  “Can I have a cigarette?” he asked.

  Locklear shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”

  He pressed record on the tape recorder and announced the interview.

  “OK. So you were extorting money from Holton?”

  “I was playing him. So what? He was lonely and he was stinking rich.”

  “He wasn’t rich, Caird. He was calling his elderly mother in England for the money to keep you quiet.”

  Caird shrugged. “So what?”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “At a downturn club.”

  “Holton didn’t seem the type to go to clubs,” Locklear said.

  “Not that sort of club. High class. Discreet. Men only. Big joining fee. Likes of me was polished up and made to walk around like candy or sit at the bar looking mysterious. Good earner though.”

  “Go on.”

  “A friend put me on to it. I didn’t think I could do it at first. I mostly dealt with old ladies looking for a bit of fun but, then, a hooker’s a hooker right? I coked up and got on with it. I was only there a few weeks when Alec walked in. Could tell he was an easy mark from the moment I laid eyes on him. He had ‘desperate’ written all over him.”

  “So, what? He walked up to you and asked for sex?”

  “Doesn’t work like that. I told you. Well, not usually anyway. It was high class. I had to dress up like a dog’s dinner, speak right, have a whole story about how I was a starving actor. Owner made sure all us young guys looked like Christmas to the customers. Alec asked me to dinner. Took me to a show. Few weeks in he told me he was in love with me and that he didn’t care if I was an escort, that I could start over.” Caird laughed at the memory and licked his dry lips. “Anyway, I put a hook in his mouth and reeled him in. I bided my time before I told him about my elderly mother and her medical bills. He gave me a check to cover her costs. I came back for more. Alec paid.” He began to laugh again as another memory surfaced. “One time I told him if I couldn’t pay her medical bills I was going to have to take her out of the facility and go back to Arizona to look after her. Alec nearly died of shock. Said he couldn’t bear it if we were separated.”

  “Do you have a sick mother?” Locklear asked even though he already knew the answer.

  “Never met my mother. Except for the first few minutes of my life, I guess. My older brother told me she walked out of the hospital three hours after I was born, leaving him sitting on a seat in the lobby and me in the nursery without even a name. We gr
ew up in state care. A few foster homes, orphanages.”

  “And how was that for you?”

  “Happy times,” he said sarcastically.

  “I take it you don’t want that for your kid? For either of them?”

  “No,” Caird replied quietly.

  “So, when and how did you start blackmailing Holton?”

  “We were at his apartment one night. I heard him arguing with his cousin on the phone. Some snob in London. She wanted to know why Alec was asking his mother for so much money. He got mad and hung up on her. Drank himself into a near coma on brandy and fell into bed with his clothes on. I start snooping around.”

  Locklear shot Caird a look. “And?”

  “He had a filing cabinet so I looked through to see if he had any bank statements. I was hoping to find out just how much cash I was playing with.”

  “But you didn’t find anything?”

  “No. Then I tried his computer. I looked through his emails. Mostly work stuff. Then I found an email thread from some Indian outfit …” He started to laugh loudly and pointed at Locklear. “I thought you were one of them. I mean, I seriously never met an Indian cop before.”

  Locklear didn’t react. “What was in the emails?”

  “The oldest email accused Alec of ‘sleeping with the white ghost’. That’s all. I thought it was funny.”

  “And the others?”

  “There were three more. All a few weeks apart. Demanding that Alec return sacred property to its rightful owners. Next two threatened to inform the police that he was stealing artefacts. Last email said they were coming for him. There were no replies from Alec.”

  Locklear pondered the information. The reference to the white ghost made him think about the description of the man who had turned up at Alec’s dig site. Carter said the man was very pale with blondish-greyish hair. It was a long shot but it was something. O’Brien was still working on Holton’s computer but there was no way of knowing if it had been wiped clean and the only ‘evidence’ left would be what the real killer wanted him to find.