Sandra Brown - Play Dirty

“What’s your plan?”

“Haven’t got one. Go on some kind of search engine, I guess. See if I can find this address. Start with city of Dallas, move to Dallas County, expand to the whole damn state if necessary.”

“Is that your top speed?”

He typed by hunting and pecking. He looked up at her over his shoulder. “Are you faster?”

They switched places. She sat in the desk chair. He braced his arms on the back of it so he could see the monitor. She was a much more proficient typist. “Manuelo didn’t write down whether it was Lavaca Street or Road or Lane,” she remarked. “We’ll have to try them all.”

“How many Lavaca Streets, Roads, et cetera do you think there are in Texas?”

“Hundreds?”

“That’s my guess, too. And Rodarte’s got better computers and more people.”

“Can I make a suggestion?”

“Be my guest.”

“Tax records. Every property is taxed.”

“You think a person who provides fake documents to illegal immigrants pays property taxes?”

“The taxes would be assessed. Whether or not they’re paid is another matter.”

“Okay. Are there tax records online?”

“We’ll try. Tax assessor records for Dallas County?”

“Knock yourself out.”

She began searching for such a website. “Tell me about Bill Bandy.”

The request surprised him, and for a moment he didn’t say anything. Then, “What do you want to know?”

“How you met. How you got involved with him.”

He gave her a condensed version. “When I got in over my head, he introduced me to a syndicate. They canceled my debt, in exchange for a few interceptions, fumbles. Nothing that couldn’t happen to any quarterback on any given Sunday.”

“Bandy betrayed you.”

“The feds offered him probation in exchange for setting me up, and I’ll bet they didn’t have to twist his arm too hard.”

“There’s a Lavaca Street in Dallas, but the addresses have three digits, not four,” she reported.

“Try Lavaca Road.”

“The newspapers said that Bandy delivered the two million to your Turtle Creek condo.”

“True. He was wearing a wire. Second I took the box of cash from him, agents came busting through my front door, read me my rights.”

“You were put in jail?”

“Yes,” he said tightly, remembering the humiliation of that experience. “Wyatt Turner got me released on the condition that I give up my passport. Soon as I got out, I went looking for Bandy.”

Laura stopped typing, turned and looked up at him.

“Right. It was a stupid thing to do. But I was furious. I guess I wanted to frighten him into thinking he was as good as dead for setting me up.” He cursed himself under his breath. “What a goddamn fool I was. When I got to Bandy’s place, the door was open. I went in. I almost walked out without seeing him. He’d been stuffed between the back of the sofa and the wall. His neck had been wrenched so hard his head was practically facing backward.”

“Who killed him?”

“I’m sure the Vista boys were behind it. They wanted him silenced, so he couldn’t give them up like he had me.”

“They could’ve killed you, too.”

“I think they thought it would be more fun to keep me alive, let me be charged with Bandy’s murder. I’m sure it was them who tipped off the cops.”

“How did they know you were going to be at Bandy’s place?”

“I guess they figured I’d go after Bandy, at the very least to tell him how disappointed I was in him,” he said with sarcasm. “I was still kneeling beside the body when two squad cars showed up, responding to an anonymous 911 call from a pay phone, they said.”

“Vista was watching you.”

“Obviously. And if you could see this guy called Bennett, you’d think he could sit through a tornado without blinking. Anyway, here I was, facing federal charges of racketeering and illegal gambling, and there was my bookie, the one who’d ratted me out, dead on the floor.

“Enter Detective Stanley Rodarte, who’d been dispatched to investigate the crime scene. He came in and introduced himself, told me what a great ballplayer I’d been, and what a shame it was that I’d turned crooked. Then he looked at the body, looked back at me, and started laughing. It seemed that open and shut.”

“No address like this on Tarrant County’s tax records, either,” Laura said.

“Denton? What’s on the western side of Tarrant?”

She consulted a map on the screen, where the counties were delineated. “Parker.”

“Try that, too. Damn,” he said, looking at the map and realizing the scope of this effort. “This could take all night.” He consulted his watch, wondering if Rodarte had already isolated the address and was speeding toward it.

“It wasn’t the open-and-shut case Rodarte thought it would be,” Laura said.

“Bandy’s back room had been torn all to hell. Ransacked. My prints were on the sofa, the wall behind it-hell, I was kneeling beside his body when the police arrived. But they couldn’t place me in that back room, hard as Rodarte tried. The grand jury found it impossible to believe that I would avoid leaving prints or other evidence while ransacking the place, then take off gloves before killing Bandy. And if I had, where were the gloves?”

“Why was his back room ransacked?”

“Rodarte is of the opinion that Bandy had money squirreled away in there somewhere and that I helped myself to it.”

Again she turned and looked up at him. “But you didn’t have any cash stuffed in your pockets at the time, did you?”

“No. But it wouldn’t necessarily have been cash I was looking for. It could have been a bank account number. A combination to a safe. Something I could commit to memory. Later, when I was out of prison, I’d have a treasure waiting for me.” He looked at her hard. “Just so you know, I never went into Bandy’s back room. I didn’t know what was or wasn’t in there. As far as I know, he didn’t have any funds stashed away for a rainy day.”

Quietly she said, “I didn’t ask.” She turned back around and, after scanning the information on the monitor, said, “There’s no Lavaca anything in Parker County.”

Griff opened the duffel bag and removed Manuelo’s map. “Pull up that map of the state again.” She did. When it appeared on the monitor, he tapped a spot. “That red crayon star is here.” He pointed to the southern tip of the state. “Somewhere between Mission and Hidalgo.”

“We assume that’s where he entered the country. Lord, how far is that from here?”

“Four hundred miles at least. Probably closer to five.”

“Lots of counties.”

“Yeah, but I’d bet his contact wouldn’t be too far from this area. Say Manuelo came north through San Antonio and Austin.”

“Basically following I- 35.”

“Basically. Let’s concentrate on the counties immediately to the south of Dallas-Fort Worth.”

“Hood, Johnson, Ellis.”

“Check those and work your way down.”

They found it in Hill County. “Griff! There’s a Lavaca Road in Hill County. On the outskirts of town it turns into FM 2010. We thought it was a house number!”

He leaned over her, and she pointed it out on the screen.

“What town is that?” he asked.

“Itasca.”

“Repeat that,” Rodarte said.

“Itasca.”

“Where the hell is that?” He was driving with one hand, holding his cell phone to his ear with the other.

He’d had a desk cop back at the police station searching for the address Griff Burkett had rattled off to him before hanging up. Thanks to a satellite and technology he didn’t understand, Laura Speakman’s cell phone had been tracked to a movie theater. Before he could even get excited about it, they’d found the damn thing lying on the parking lot pavement.