The glass-fronted house was very similar to the one he’d shared with Carrie. In fact the resemblance was eerie. He scanned the decks but no one was sitting on them and all the doors and windows were shut. There had been no cars parked outside either. The new owner must be using it as a weekend getaway or vacation home.
Steps led up to a small wooden gate and the house. He climbed them, hopped over the gate and walked up to a side window. Inside, the house seemed cold and antiseptic. It told him everything and nothing about Mendez.
His cell phone rang. He clicked the answer button.
‘Mr Lock?’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Yes.’
‘I got a message that you wanted to speak to me.’
Ten
Marcie Braun’s retirement hadn’t taken her very far. She lived a shade off the beaten track, about thirty miles inland from Santa Barbara in a small Cape Cod-style house with stables and a paddock.
Lock found her clearing out a horse stall with a pitchfork. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. She straightened when she saw him, one hand moving to massage the small of her back. ‘So, you want to go get Charlie Mendez, huh?’ she said, with a smile, after he had apologized for disturbing her. ‘You do know what happened to the other guy who went looking for him, right?’
Lock nodded.
‘But you still think it’s a good idea?’
‘I don’t know if it is or not, Detective Braun, but a girl is lying in a hospital bed in Los Angeles and she asked me to help her.’
Marcie Braun seemed unsure what to make of him. A long moment of silence passed. ‘Call me Marcie.’ She nodded to the horse manure. ‘I’ll finish up, then why don’t you come into the house and we can talk?’
Lock sipped coffee as the retired detective settled at the big pine kitchen table and spread out a thick folder. She sighed as she flicked through the thick stack of papers inside. ‘Funny, this was the only case where I took a copy of the paperwork when I left the job. Guess it was Mendez skipping bail like he did. Made the whole thing feel unfinished.’
‘How long were you with the job?’ he asked her.
‘Too long. I thought coming to work in Santa Barbara would be a nice way of making the transition to retirement after the LAPD.’
‘It wasn’t?’ he probed.
‘I guess it was until the Mendez case. Lot of good cops in the department. Good people to take care of too. But you didn’t come out here to listen to me reminisce, did you now?’
‘Did you know Mendez before it went down?’
Marcie threw back her head and laughed. ‘Every cop in Santa Barbara knew Charlie and everyone in Santa Barbara knows the Mendez family. They’ve been here for a long time, lot longer than I have.’
‘The judge know them?’ he prompted, even though he knew the question was taking him on to dangerous ground.
Marcie’s easy smile fell away. ‘If you’re suggesting what I think you are then all I’d say is that’s a pretty serious charge to lay against a judge.’
‘So why’d he bail him?’
Marcie shrugged. ‘If you’re asking whether Charlie being from that family helped him, then of course it did. It would be naive to think anything else. This is America, right? Land of equal opportunity, but having big bucks makes you that little bit more equal. I’m sure you know how it goes, Mr Lock. If you’re rich in this country you’ll be treated a little differently from the rest of us. Not because you’re rich — hell, with a jury that might work against you — but because you can pay for a better defence. Charlie had really good lawyers. The kind of people who could persuade someone that black was white and two plus two makes five. I mean, that’s why they cost a lot of money, right?’
‘And the judge?’ said Lock.
Marcie blew on her coffee. ‘There you go again. Why don’t you ask me straight out? Do I think the judge was bribed or someone called in a favour? No, I don’t. I think he was talked into making a mistake. There’s no small-town conspiracy here, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
He decided to let it go. He believed her and he wanted to get back to Charlie.
‘But the Police Department had come into contact with Charlie Mendez before?’
Marcie made a face. ‘Sure, when he was younger. He was a kid with everything handed to him on a silver platter. A player. He got into some scrapes. Nothing serious, though.’
‘What kind of “nothing serious”?’ he prompted.
‘Being drunk in public. Shooting off his mouth. A couple of assaults. Always kids smaller than him or when he was with his buddies. Never liked the look of a fight he might lose.’
‘Anything of a sexual nature?’
Marcie took a sip of coffee. ‘That was what was weird when his name came up. I mean, like I said, he was a player, had an eye for the ladies, but he was good-looking, rich. You wouldn’t think he’d’ve had to drug someone, although in my experience rape isn’t usually about the sex.’
‘So why do you think he did it? Some kind of power trip?’ Lock asked.
‘I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff, being a cop. And you want to know what all those years on the job taught me?’
He nodded.
‘When it comes down to the really bad shit, some people are just fucked up.’ She got up and emptied the dregs of her coffee into an old white ceramic sink, then turned on the faucet. Her eyes fell to the folder she had passed to Lock. ‘There’s some more recent material in the back.’
‘Concerning?’
‘Stuff that makes no sense to me.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as the last place he’s been seen.’ Marcie sighed. ‘I mean, if you skip bail, and you have more than money than God, why not pick a country that has no extradition treaty with the United States?’
Lock decided to play devil’s advocate. ‘Not many of those left, and Mexico has worked out pretty well for him so far. Whoever he’s paying to take care of him down there seems to be doing a pretty good job.’
‘If he’s still there,’ said Marcie.
‘You think he might have left?’
‘I know I would have.’
He thought about it. If Charlie Mendez hadn’t been spooked enough by the first bounty hunter to relocate, he must have a good reason for staying where he was. Obviously he felt safe down there. ‘What about the family?’ he asked. ‘They have any ties to Mexico? Business interests?’
‘Apart from the name, none that anyone in the department knew about, although with old money like that it’s difficult to be sure. There are shell corporations and trusts and a bazillion layers you have to get through. Everything they have is privately held.’
‘You have any idea who’s looking after him?’
Marcie pursed her lips. ‘Well, from the way they dealt with Brady, it looks like narco-traffickers. But you probably guessed that. The girl you caught at the hospital was a Latina gang member?’
Lock wondered how she knew that, but not for long.
‘I made some calls when I heard Melissa had been shot,’ Marcie said.
‘Gang ink.’
Marcie picked up the folder and passed it to him. ‘A lot of people have been hustling to get Mendez returned. But you know how it goes — the more time passes, the more likely it is they’ve moved on to other things. We have a lot of border issues and, with everything that’s going on down there, Mendez is hardly a priority.’
The folder felt heavy in his hand. ‘Thanks for everything.’
Marcie smiled. ‘I sure hope you bring him back. He’s a dangerous man to have running around.’
Eleven
At his hotel opposite the Greyhound bus terminal in the centre of Santa Barbara, Lock ordered a club sandwich and some mineral water while he worked methodically in his room through the witness statements in the file Marcie Braun had given him. There was nothing new, although reading it in detail made what had happened seem more real — in a way that urged him to cause serious physical harm not only to Charlie Mendez but to his smarmy high-powered defence lawyers.