She had defended him with one hand and dug the foundation out from under him with the other.
I wondered if it had been Paris who dropped the dime to the INS regarding Javier. She had been with Trey the night before. He might have told her he believed me to be a private investigator, and that he had found me conversing in fluent Spanish with the one Jade employee left who might have known something valuable.
Or perhaps Trey had called them himself. For reasons of his own. I tried to picture him as one of the kidnappers. Had the years of debauchery so warped him that he might consider kidnapping a girl to be a game?
The afternoon was already half-gone as I turned down the road to Paris Montgomery's house. In the dense woods of rural Loxahatchee, much of the light had already fallen victim to the long shadows of tall thin pine trees.
I drove past the house Paris lived in to the cul-de-sac where I had nearly shot Jimmy Manetti the night before. The half-built houses had been abandoned by their work crews for the day. I parked my car, took the Glock out of its hiding place, and made my way back down the road, ducking into the cover of trees as quickly as I could.
The house was much like Eva Rosen's: a pseudo-Spanish seventies rambler with mildewed white stucco and a cedar shake roof crusted with moss. I let myself in a side door to the garage, which was stacked with the property owner's lawn equipment and Christmas decorations. The money-green Infiniti was not there.
The door into the house was locked, and the lights on the security system panel showed that the system was armed. I walked around the exterior of the house, looking for an unlocked door, a partially open window. No luck.
Through the living room windows I could see a nasty once-white shag carpet and a lot of cheesy 'Mediterranean' furniture no one from the Mediterranean would ever have laid claim to. The TV looked almost as tall as I was and had every kind of symbiotic machine hooked up to it-VCR, DVD, Dolby sound system with a bank of stereo equipment that looked like something from NASA.
I went around the side yard to the back, where a big redwood hot tub sat inside the requisite caged patio, along with an assortment of tacky patio furniture and sun-starved plants. The screen door was not locked, but the sliding glass door into the dining room was secure. I could see mail on the dining room table: magazines, bills.
A second sliding glass door at the far end of the patio led into a bedroom with orange shag carpeting. The drapes were pulled back, revealing a king-sized bed with a red velvet spread. A painting of a naked woman with three breasts and two faces hung above the ornate, fake wood headboard. A TV sat on an open-sided stand at the end of the room. I checked the titles on the stack of videos on the bottom shelf and wondered if I was the only person in south Florida without a collection of porn.
Somewhere beyond the yard, the engine of a piece of heavy machinery had fired up with a throaty growl. My luck someone had come back to the construction site down the road and was about to bulldoze my car.
The backyard was dim with shadows, but the sky above the treetops was still an intense blue. The racket was not coming from the direction of the new houses down the road, but from beyond those trees, beyond Paris Montgomery's backyard, to the west.
A large motor grumbled constantly, the intermittent crunching and chewing of materials being fed through some big machine. A mulch grinder, I guessed, and I almost turned away. Then I paused.
Landry had said there was a sound of heavy machinery in the background of the video showing Erin being beaten by her captors. A sound Erin hadn't been able to remember when he'd asked her about the place where she was held.
I walked toward the back of the property. Dense with young trees and wild bamboo, vines knitting all of it together, the back border of the yard was a jungle that would have eventually swallowed up the yard and the house if allowed.
The thump and grind of the machine grew louder. A truck engine revved and the beep-beep-beep of warning sounded as it backed up.
Trying to see through the curtain of greenery to the property on the other side, I almost missed it. The thing sat in the tangled growth like an ancient ruin. Gray and rusted, once an alien thing that had become almost an organic part of the landscape over the course of time. A trailer. What might have been a construction boss's office once, with a window on the end of it that was coated with dirt on the inside. Someone had scratched through the filth with their fingertip, writing a single word: HELP.
51
Life can change in a heartbeat.
I had nearly missed it. I had been a heartbeat from turning and walking away. Then, there it was: the real reason Paris Montgomery had taken this shitty house too far from the show grounds. I had thought she had come here to be away from prying eyes, and I was right. But her affair with Trey Hughes was not the only thing she had wanted to hide.
The trailer squatted in the overgrowth like something from a bad dream. The sight of it evoked memories I wished I didn't have.
Adrenaline runs through my bloodstream like rocket fuel. My heart pounds like a piston. I'm ready to launch.
I pulled my gun and moved in close along the side of the trailer. Only when I was right on top of it could I see the path where someone had walked around the end to get to the twisted, rusted metal stairs that hung off the back side of the trailer.
Despite the fact that the sun hadn't touched this yard in an hour or more, and the temperature was in fact cool, I was perspiring. I thought I could hear myself breathing.
I've been told to stay put, to wait, but I know that's not the right decision… wasting precious time… It's my case. I know what I'm doing…
I felt the same push now. My case. My discovery. But a hesitation, also. Apprehension. Fear. The last time I had made that decision, I had been wrong. Dead wrong.
I leaned back against the side of the trailer, willing my pulse to slow, trying to slow my thought process, trying to shut out the emotions that had more to do with post-traumatic stress than with the present.
Paris would have rented this property months ago, I reasoned. If this place had been chosen because of the privacy, because of the trailer, that extended the period of premeditation to before the season had begun. I wondered if Erin had been chosen for her job because of her potential as a groom or as a victim.
My hand was shaking as I pulled out my phone with my left hand. I dialed Landry's pager number, left my number and 911. I called his voice mail, left Paris Montgomery's address, and told him to get here ASAP.
And now what? I thought as I closed the phone and stuck it in my pocket. Wait? Wait for Paris to come home and find me in her backyard? Let opportunity and daylight pass, waiting for Landry to call me back?
It's my case. I know what I'm doing…
I knew what Landry would say. He would tell me to wait for him. Go sit in my car like a good girl.
I've never been a good girl.
It's my case. I know what I'm doing…
The last time I had thought that, I had been very wrong.
I wanted to be right.
Slowly, I went up the metal stairs that over time had sunken into the sandy earth and settled away from the trailer, leaving a gap of several inches between the two. Standing to the side of the door, I knocked twice, and called out 'Police.'
Nothing happened. I couldn't hear any movement within the trailer. No shotgun blasts came through the door. It occurred to me Van Zandt might be inside, hiding out until he could catch his plane to Brussels. He might have been Paris Montgomery's partner in it all, helping her to oust Jade and secure her place in Trey Hughes' life, while Van Zandt indulged himself in his hobby of dominating young girls. Perhaps the ransom was to have been his fee for helping to ruin Don Jade.
And Erin's role in the game? I wasn't sure now, in light of what Landry had told me about the videotapes of
