Velocity (Karen Vail #3)(35)

He leaned in close, looked up at something off to his right, then turned back to the camera. “If you’re watching this, something must’ve happened to me.” He lowered his voice and his eyes danced from left to right, suddenly avoiding the lens.

“I . . . this is Sergeant Raymond Lugo of the St. Helena Police Department. Everything I’m about to tell you is the truth. If you’re watching this . . . I have to assume you’re law enforcement. I need you to . . . I need you to look after my wife and son. Please promise me that.” He glanced up at the camera and then canted his eyes downward again.

He took a deep breath, covered his face with both hands, then dropped them to his lap and extended his neck. Staring at the ceiling.

“C’mon, Ray,” Dixon said under her breath. “Get to it.”

“In October, my wife, Merilynn, and my son, Mario, were kidnapped. I got a call. This guy said he had them, and he’d kill them unless I did what he wanted. He proved he had them. I—I had no choice.”

Lugo looked away, licked his lips, kept his head down as he talked.

“He told me. If I tell anyone at work, he’d kill them. If I call in the FBI, he’d kill them. If I told the media . . . he’d kill them. And he said he had a way of finding out if I told anyone at work. He knew I was a cop. I couldn’t . . . ” He looked up at the camera. “I couldn’t take a chance he was telling the truth.”

His bottom lip quivered, and he bit down to arrest its twitch.

“He had them,” Lugo finally said. “For two days. He called back and I, I made a deal with him. And he let them go. Left them by the side of the road in front of the fire station, near the Sheriff’s Department.

“I looked at video, tried to figure out who this guy was. I spoke with Merilynn. And my son. Tried to get any information I could to find this fucker.” He wiped at his face with both hands, sighed deeply, and sat back into the couch. He was far from the camera now, but his voice was still audible. “He told me not to look for him, that I’d never find him. And . . . and that no place was safe. If I did anything wrong—tried finding him, reporting it, he’d find Merilynn and Mario again. Only this time they wouldn’t be coming home. He’d kill them. And it wouldn’t be pleasant.” His eyes narrowed in anger, then he sat forward, leaning closer to the lens in a way that distorted his facial features.

“I couldn’t find anything, I got nowhere. But the deal I cut with him. I thought it might give me some clues as to who he was. I thought maybe there was some way I could track him based on the info he wanted me to get for him. Finally I found something. But he knew and he called me, warned me. The only warning I’d get, he said. Stop immediately or he’d kill them. And me.”

Vail put her hands on her hips. “What the fuck were you doing for him, Ray?” she shouted, as if it would do some good. No one seemed to mind. They all wanted the same question answered.

“I thought that if I got that kind of a rise out of him, I must’ve been on to something. It had to do with a guy I knew, César Guevara.”

Vail and Dixon eyed each other.

“The guy wanted info on César,” Lugo continued, “from the police database. Not just ours, but the Sheriff’s Department’s, too. So I ran the stuff he wanted. Then I started looking into César’s business. He runs a mobile bottling company out of American Canyon. I know César from when we were kids, working the vineyards. But the kidnapper is somehow tied in with him because he called me right after I went to see César and started asking questions. He said he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, that he didn’t know a big white guy who drives a van. But that’s all I had on the kidnapper. That’s all Merilynn and my son could tell me. He spoke English like a native, no accent. And that was it.

“An hour after visiting César, the kidnapper called me. I knew I was on to something. What it was—I didn’t know. But . . . ” He turned away and said, “I was too afraid to look into it. He said he’d find us. Another state, another country, didn’t matter. He’d track us down.”

A noise behind him. Lugo twisted his torso. What looked like Merilynn in the background, entering the room. Lugo reached out his hand, splayed fingers covering the webcam, the screen darkening. Fumbling. Raised voices. Lugo’s body leaned left, then the video cut off.

They waited a few seconds before Dixon blurted, “That’s it? Please, tell me there’s more.”

They continued to stare at the screen, but the progress bar at the bottom struck the endpoint and then the video started from the beginning. Brix stuck out his index finger and clicked the mouse. Windows Media Player closed.

Vail looked up. Her eyes searched the conference room and came to rest on the clock. It was now almost 5:00 PM. Damn it. She grabbed her temples, took a deep breath, and coughed. Then she sat down heavily on a nearby chair.

Burt Gordon walked into the conference room. His eyes scanned the others in attendance and seemed to have no difficulty reading their body language. “Bad?”

“I’m not sure how to characterize it,” Brix said.

“Bad sounds about right to me,” Austin Mann said. He filled Gordon in on what he’d missed. “There’s no good way to look at it. Question is, what did Ray know, and when?”