Notorious (18 page)

It was less than thirty minutes from a town, but remote nonetheless. Few people lived up there full time.

It might just be time for a day trip.

The case had become far more interesting. Lies, money laundering, murder. Ben would be furious with her because this was going to take time, but she didn’t care. Jason’s murder had grabbed her and she wouldn’t be able to let go until she solved it.

Max left her hotel and drove toward Sequoia Hospital. Almost immediately, she noticed that she was being followed. Or was she being paranoid? Maybe the break-in while she’d been in Kevin’s apartment had thrown her for more of a loop than she thought.

After a couple of turns, she didn’t think paranoia was to blame. The car was a white Mercedes with partially tinted windows. With the angle of the early morning sun, she couldn’t make out any distinguishing characteristics of the driver. There was no front license plate, a violation of state law unless it was a new purchase. The car looked new, but she wasn’t a good judge with cars.

She drove straight to Sequoia Hospital. The Mercedes passed by, but she still thought it had been following her.

Max checked in at the desk for a visitor’s badge. She had to give the name and room number of the person she was visiting, but no flags were raised. The desk told her to check in with the second-floor nurse’s station, but Max ignored that request. She didn’t want anyone questioning her right to be there.

She caught the nurses at a busy time as meals were being cleared and visiting hours had just started. Max slipped into room 242. It was a two-bed room, but right now Dru was alone. She looked small and pale on the stark white sheets. She had a breathing tube in her nose. Max had a flash of sitting next to her in the parking garage, holding her scarf on the girl’s abdomen, blood seeping through her fingers. That she’d survived defied the odds. She was a fighter, and Max hoped she still had fight in her. If Dru came clean, Max would move heaven and earth to help her.

Max looked at the chart in the slot next to the bed. Dru had been downgraded this morning from critical to serious. Max couldn’t read everything, but it appeared that the surgery had lasted six hours to repair damage, her lung had been punctured but after twenty-four hours in recovery she’d regained consciousness.

Dru opened her eyes as if sensing there was someone watching her. “Hey.” Her voice was low and gravelly.

“Don’t talk.” That was a dumb thing to say. Max planned to ask questions. She sat down on the chair next to the bed. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“You. Thanks.”

“Dru, I need to ask you some questions, but I shook his head. “ personPM think I know the answers and I don’t want you to get upset or work yourself up, okay? So I’m going to tell you what I think happened, and if I’m wrong, squeeze my hand.”

She nodded. She looked defeated but emboldened. Someone had tried to kill her but she survived. That changed a person, and Max was counting on that change to be for the better.

“Your ex-boyfriend J. C. Potrero used you to launder money from DL Environmental. I haven’t figured out what his scam is, but I will. The car that nearly ran me over in the parking garage, driven by who I think stabbed you, is owned by Rebecca Cross. She’s a teacher at Cañada College. Do you know her?”

Dru nodded once.

“I think that J. C. or Rebecca found out that Detective Santini came to talk to you and felt you were a liability. You know something they don’t want the police to know. Did J. C. kill Jason?”

Dru squeezed Max’s hand. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

“That’s okay. Was this money laundering scheme to hide donations to DLE?”

She shook her head.

“Were they getting money somewhere else but saying it was from DLE?”

She nodded.

Max’s stomach flipped. She was close. She thought about Evergreen—construction was ripe for graft and corruption. Maybe they planned on robbing the construction site and Jason got wind of it—but that didn’t feel right. Still, she asked, “Were they robbing construction sites using DLE to launder the money?”

“No. No.”

The machine Dru was attached to started beeping as her heart rate rose.

“Shh, Dru, don’t get yourself upset. Okay?”

“Pot.”

“Potrero?”

Dru shook her head. “They have a pot farm. I don’t know where.”

Drugs? This was all about drugs?

“And Jason found out? Maybe tried to help you?”

She shook her head again. “Jason didn’t know. I don’t know why they’d kill him.”

“But they did kill him, right?”

“I don’t know. I swear.”

Her heart rate was going up again.

“I believe you.” Max did—she believed that Dru didn’t know whether J. C. or Rebecca killed Jason. But Max could see a possible scenario unfolding, where Jason found out his friend Dru was doing something illegal and confronted her ex-boyfriend. It was something an overprotective big brother might do, and from all the e-mails she’d read between Dru and Jason, that fit their relationship. She wanted to ask about the documents Dru had sent Jason before he graduated, but Dru was fading, and Max didn’t want to jeopardize her recovery. Still, she needed to find out what Jason meant about the trees.

“You said that Jason was obsessed with the trees at Atherton Prep. That something was odd, holes in the trees.”

“Trees? I said that?”

“Yes, Saturday night when I found you.”

Dru took a moment to collect her thoughts. The machine that monitored her heart and breathing also seemed to slow down. Good. shook his head. “. She ou>

“Jason was acting weird all week,” Dru said slowly, her voice scratchy. “He spent hours at ACP, walking the campus, doing nothing.”

“You know this how?”

“I heard Brian and Roger talking about Jason’s strange behavior. And I saw it myself. Brian said he thought Jason was on drugs, but I think he was just mad at Jason.”

“Because Jason went behind Brian’s back to bid on this project with Jasper Pierce and Gordon Chu?”

Dru stared at her as if she were a mind-reader. “How did you know?”

“Research.” No sense telling Dru she’d broken into her house.

“So Brian said to Roger that Jason was talking about the trees, or something that was happening under the trees. Holes in the ground.”

“Do you know which trees?”

“Not then, but later, when I moved my desk to the site, Roger told me it was the trees along the west fence, Jason would walk through them then ask Roger if anyone from his crew had messed with them. Roger said no. He didn’t really even have a crew then.”

That confirmed what Jasper had told her the night before.

“Do you think that’s why Jason was at ACP the night he was killed?”

Dru thought for a long minute. “Yes. He was waiting for something. He said something like … I’ll figure out who’s messing with my site. I think that was it. But that was days before Thanksgiving. I didn’t think about it.”

“And you never told the police this.”

“I didn’t really remember, or I didn’t think it was important.” She looked pained. “Believe me, I cared about Jason. I wish I’d fallen for him instead of J. C. Jason wanted to get together, but…” Her voice trailed off. Max knew exactly what she’d been thinking. Jason was the good boy, the college grad, the straight-and-narrow boyfriend who was marriage material. J. C. Potrero was the bad boy who excited her and made her feel powerful and on the edge.

Max had been there, done that. She completely understood.

“One more thing. How did J. C. and Rebecca find out Nick Santini came to talk to you?”

Dru closed her eyes. At first Max thought she’d fallen to sleep. Then she said, “Whitney and Amy. All of us were getting paid by DLE.”

*   *   *

Max loved spring in the Bay Area. Seventy-five degrees, light breeze, blue skies. While she loved living in New York City, nothing beat the California climate. The drive up to Phleger Road reminded her that sometimes, she needed a break. Even if it was a short drive into the mountains.

She looked around for the white Mercedes, but she hadn’t seen it in the hospital parking lot, and it wasn’t following her now. She debated telling David about it, and decided she would—when they talked or when he returned, whichever came first. If she saw it again, she’d reconsider.

She realized that the college where Cross taught was only fifteen minutes from her property. To get to her home in San Mateo was less than thirty minutes in the other direction. If they had a pot farm up here, it was bold—though the mountain wasn’t extensively populated, there were plenty of hom#at fd pes and weekend cabins, bikers and hikers.

As soon as she turned onto Phleger from Cañada Road, she realized she had a problem. It was not only a private road, but gated as well.

The road itself was about three miles from Cañada to Skyline Boulevard, but completely uphill from where she was. The property in question was one mile east of Skyline, and from there had a more or less even terrain.

She drove to a strip mall and found a sporting goods store. She had sneakers in her bag, but no clean running clothes. She bought a fanny pack, sweatpants, T-shirt, and windbreaker, changed in the bathroom, and drove up to Skyline Boulevard. There was no place to park on the edge of the road, but less than two hundred feet from the private road was a high-end restaurant. She’d eaten here before—delicious food and an amazing view. That it was both remote but close to the city made it doubly attractive for special nights.

It was closed on Mondays, which was good for Max, so she parked in their lot and stretched.

She jogged down Skyline until she reached the private road. Based on the parcel map she’d downloaded to her phone, there were only six property owners off Phleger. Like she suspected, most of the mountainside was owned by the county or state, and the owners maintained the road because it was gated. Cross’s property, which had been gifted to her by her grandparents years ago, was less than a mile down the road. Max tucked her phone into her fanny pack, along with a water bottle, Taser, and identification, glanced around for any nosy observers, then quickly hopped the metal gate.

If anyone questioned her, she would simply saying she was jogging the five miles down to Cañada Road—she checked her map and while it was three miles as the crow flies, it was definitely longer with the twists in the road. She was pretty certain they’d had trespassing joggers and bikers on this narrow road—so narrow that there were stretches where two cars couldn’t pass.

She spent so much time on a treadmill at the gym she forgot how much she enjoyed running outdoors in fresh air. She kept an easy pace, not knowing what she might encounter.

She heard no one, saw no cars or people or bikers or joggers. She was twenty minutes from Redwood City, but she felt like she was in the middle of nowhere. It was truly awesome, yet at the same time a bit disconcerting. She’d broken one of her rules—loose as it was—that she’d always let Ben or David know where she was headed when she was following an investigative trail. A few times she’d been in sticky situations, but she’d always managed to get herself out just fine. She was smart and resourceful, and this was her life. She knew it the minute she started the journal when Karen disappeared in Miami. In fact, the anniversary of Karen’s disappearance had just passed while she had been with Marco in Miami. Karen was never far from her thoughts, which both bothered Max and comforted her. If she didn’t forget what happened to Karen, if she was still looking for evidence, still looking for her remains, then Karen would never be forgotten.

The road Max ran down gently inclined, with a few slight hills and steeper dips. Nothing she couldn’t handle, but she had to watch her step. The road wasn’t well maintained and there were potholes and rocks in her path. Worse, there was a steep drop-off to her right. Max wouldn’t say she was afraid of heights—she was more afraid of falling.

Max turned along a forty-five-degree curve and saw a steep driveway up the north side of the mountain. It, too, had a gate on it and no address, but based on her map this was the Cross property.#at fd p

There was barbed wire fencing along the top of the gate, making it impossible to climb. There was no easy way to get around it.

She walked down the road until the mountainside was less steep. Looking carefully for poison oak—it was common here, she remembered from her youth—she found a place she could scale without too much effort.

There was fencing here, too, but most of it had fallen down. Still, Max was careful as she climbed over the half-buried barbed wire.

Five minutes later she found herself looking down onto the curving driveway. The trees on this side of the mountain were dense, providing a natural canopy, while the mountain side wasn’t as steep as on the south, making the land easier to access.

Max wasn’t an expert on the drug trade, but she knew that pot farms were big business, especially in the far northern reaches of California. Here, so close to a big city, it was rarer to find outdoor farms, which made this area strategically located. They’d need a storage shed that could be used for drying out the plants when harvested. Which meant electricity or generators.

She suspected that there would be some sort of surveillance system unless Cross and Potrero had a caretaker. Or both. She wanted to find evidence of the pot farm, take some pictures, and then get out of here. Confronting drug growers wasn’t a smart move.

She listened to her surroundings. It wasn’t as quiet as she originally thought. Birds mostly, a distant motorbike or quad that faded away to a faint echo as she listened, and the rustling of trees as the breeze gently moved the air. Fortunately, she’d be able to hear any vehicle long before it approached, so she felt confident about walking along the driveway.

Max scrambled down the side and started walking along the narrow, unpaved road, hyperalert for any sounds. She was startled when she soon came upon a small, rustic cabin. She pulled back into the redwood trees and surveyed the place. No cars, no people, nothing to suggest anyone was here.

Confident she was alone, she left her hiding spot and walked up the porch. All the blinds were closed. Through one narrow crack she made out a table and chairs, a couch, a door on the left. She heard a faint hum and, for a time, thought it came from the house—but it sounded too loud to be a refrigerator. She walked around the house then noticed a barn on the far side of an overgrown clearing, half-concealed by redwoods and birch trees of all sizes. She approached the barn and the hum grew loud enough that Max recognized it as a generator.