Red Rock Island (Damian Green Book 1) (26 page)

“After we book him into jail,” Gonzales replied.

“I’m going to throw some tap water on his face to wash out that pepper spray,” Ariana said, unable to stand the guy’s agony any longer.

“Officer Gonzales, can you take the man outside so we can wash his eyes out? I don’t want any more mess on this floor,” Damian said.

In short order, after multiple buckets of water the man’s pain was reduced. He still couldn’t see, but that would return in time.

Before he was hauled away to jail by another state police officer, he was asked his name again. He knew he was screwed both by his ex-partners and by the fact he had red dye on him which meant he would be bullied in jail. He had nothing to lose by snitching on his former partners. He supplied his name and theirs as well. He’d never met the men before so he didn’t know if he had their real names.

“Mi nombre es Ricardo Garcia Corona,” said the man in custody.

Damian wrote the name down to do research on later. He hoped it was the guy’s real name. He said a little more to Gonzales, but Damian’s Spanish was so limited he couldn’t follow it. He looked over at Hermione to see if she was following the conversation. She nodded at him seeming to know his question.

“Ask the man who or what was the target in this house? Was it one of us or were they looking for stuff to steal?”

Damian listened to the questions and answers vowing when he returned to California to learn Spanish. It was a useful language and sheer laziness of brain had been the reason he hadn’t learned it by now. Hermione moved closer to him and translated in a low voice.

“He says they were going to take all three of us and that there were four men assigned to the job,” Hermione translated.

“Ask him how we were going to be transported out of here,” Damian said.

“Why,” Hermione asked clearly puzzled by Damian’s question.

“I don’t understand how seven of us would fit in a car. Were we going to be thrown in the trunk on top of each other or was another car going to arrive to assist in our transport? That tells us that more than the original four men are involved in this case.”

“Okay,” Hermione said then she asked Damian’s question.

The conversation went on longer than Damian expected, but then Hermione seemed satisfied with Mr. Corona’s response. Officer Gonzales was also taking notes on his responses.

“He said he was unaware of a second car, but he wouldn’t be in the know if there was one. They were supposed to tie us and gag us but not hurt us.”

“Does he know any of the names of the other people in on this job?”

Hermione asked the question, but her response made him think they were fake names as one of them was Jose Garcia, likely the most common name in Mexico.

The security dude re-entered the room with a tablet that he’d fetched from his car. “I have the footage of the attack on your house.”

Damian and Officer Gonzales gathered around the tablet and they watched the four men arrive in a car. Three of them had hats on, and their faces were poorly captured by the video tape; the fourth man was the one under arrest. He must have been the sacrificial lamb as it was clear they sent him first into Damian’s house.  His face had been clear on the tape as he had no hat on to block the view. One of the other three men picked the lock or had a key.

“Can you send all the footage to my email address right now,” Damian demanded. “After you do that, let’s slow the video down at the front door and perhaps we can ask your suspect how they got into the house as it looks like they had a key.”

The security company representative took a moment to forward the email he’d received from his command center to Damian and then they went back to watching the thugs’ entry into the house.

“It appears as though they had a key,” Damian said. “Let’s ask our suspect that question and what kind of weapons they were carrying. It’s not like they could break into someone’s house and they would willingly allow themselves to be kidnapped.”

Gonzales asked the suspect those questions and then Hermione followed with one of her own, “Who’s Michael?”

Chapter Forty Two

Damian and Ariana froze when they heard the kid ask the question as it told them she hoped perhaps her father had engineered this kidnapping. They waited for the man to answer holding their breaths. Then they both let the breath out when they realized the conversation was in Spanish and they would be unable to understand his answers.

“I don’t know who hired us or who Michael is. I don’t recall hearing the men mention that name.”

“They mentioned it when they were searching the house,” said Hermione firmly.

“Look lady my eyes hurt so bad I didn’t hear anything and besides the alarm sounded. The only thing I heard was they were leaving without me.”

“Who’s Michael?” asked Gonzales.

“He’s a friend of ours that gets carried away with pranks, but this seems too elaborate even for him to pull off,” replied Damian. He could hardly admit that he was Hermione’s father.

The Officer gave him an angry look and said, “I hope you do not plan to waste the resources of the Yucatan State Police on a prank.”

“My family and I were terrified and hiding in our safe room. We certainly didn’t think this was a prank.”

Gonzales motioned to the other State officer that arrived to put Mr. Corona in the back of his vehicle and take him to jail. It appeared as though he was going to walk off without fingerprinting the scene or doing any other evidence collection. Wow, thought Damian. Okay then he’d make his own fingerprint kit and see if he could identify the suspects from his lab at home. Their vacation spoiled, he was going to cut it short by a day and head home now after he collected any evidence in the house. He’d study the video to locate the surfaces these guys might have touched.

Four hours later but still mid-morning, they boarded the jet to return to California. Damian doubted he would ever hear from Officer Gonzales and so before he left he collected all of the forensic evidence he could think of. He didn’t own a DNA machine and he’d admit that he didn’t know good evidence processing techniques so he would have to send it out to a private lab and wait a week or so for results at a fairly high cost as he had about ten specimens.

As for the fingerprints, he unfortunately didn’t have all ten fingers printed for the suspects, but Mexico did collect fingerprints and he thought he could hack into their database to do a match. He had no idea how comprehensive it was or whether he might need Hermione’s help translating Spanish. It would put him in a difficult position as he shouldn’t be teaching the kid how to hack into computer systems. He’d see if he could figure it out on his own.

He debated telling Natalie about this incident, but he didn’t have a good explanation for Ariana and Hermione, but he sure could use her help as a former detective. He looked over at Hermione and she was looking out the window, with one hand on Miguel. Disappointment was written on her face. She had been having such a great time scuba diving; she was thrilled with what she saw underwater and it appealed to her swimmer’s heart.

Damian said, “Next time we’ll go scuba diving near the Great Barrier Reef. That should be far enough away to keep us safe from whoever wants to make our acquaintance.”

Hermione looked over at him and asked, “Is that far enough away from the bad people?”

“Yes. Australia is a little harder to visit if you’re a shady character. We could also fly into Papua New Guinea and rent a sailboat and sail to the reef. That would make us even harder to track.”

Hermione brightened at that idea, “That sounds like a plan and Miguel would like sailing, although we would have to watch he didn’t routinely jump overboard just to get a swim in.”

Ariana smiled at that idea, “That does sound like fun. Maybe we could do that at Christmas since I assume that it’s winter there since they’re below the equator.”

“It is winter, but this is a better time to go because it doesn’t rain a lot and the water is still warm to dive. So maybe we can think of that trip in August before Hermione goes back to school. I’ll look into sailboat rentals and a way to get there.”

“That’s awesome!” Hermione said. “It’s good to have something to look forward to.”

“Have you been sailing before?” Damian asked the ladies. Both shook their heads ‘no’.

“I haven’t either, but there’s a first time for everything,” Damian replied.

“Do you think the police will catch the men who broke into our house?” Hermione asked.

“I don’t know,” replied Damian.

When Hermione continued to look at him, he added, “I doubt it. Officer Gonzales was smart in one area, but I don’t think he has the resources at his beck and call like an American police officer does.”

“Are you going to solve the case?” she asked.

“I hope so. I’m going to consult the detective I mentioned before and explain that I was either here on business or to scuba dive and what happened. I don’t plan to mention you or Ariana. Then I’ll tell her what the Mexican State Police did and the evidence I have in my possession and see if she has any ideas that I didn’t think of.”

“Okay,” Hermione said and then she returned to brooding while looking out the plane’s windows. 

The plane hit a few minutes of bad air pockets and the two women had a momentary look of panic, so Damian said, “Ladies, I had two different pilots check out this plane as well as a metal detector and I hired a bomb sniffing dog to search the plane before we boarded. This should be just routine air turbulence.”

No sooner had Damian finished the sentence, the pilot announced that air traffic control advised them if they ascended another five thousand feet, they could avoid the turbulence. 

Everyone relaxed with that announcement.

Chapter Forty Three

With the return to the bay area, life returned to normal. Ariana was working with Damian to locate space and set up his company. He formally interviewed Angus and Haley informing them of his business plans and projected salary and job duties for each of them. Both accepted and were given start dates of two months hence as in the case of Angus he wanted to give his current employer plenty of notice and train his replacement and Haley along with Trevor had to find housing that would accommodate their commutes to two different bay area cities. The third person that Damian had in mind accepted as well.

Much to his surprise when he informed Hermione about the work he and Ariana were doing and her potential future as a summer intern, she wanted in on the research immediately. Damian spent a week discussing his theories for his wave technology and energy storage so that she would understand the physics principles at work. Then he cut her loose to work on the idea while he divided his attention between the new company and his ongoing investigation into the incident in Mexico.

He spoke with Officer Gonzales perhaps a week after he returned to California and gained no new information. He didn’t know if it was because the man had no information or if he was culturally not inclined to share. Meanwhile, the security company that protected the house sent him video footage of the driveway. They also maintained the security for two other houses in opposite directions from Damian’s. From that footage, he gleaned that they came from the south and returned to the south. The license plates were stolen on the vehicle and there appeared to be no other van lurking nearby that would have transported the three of them. He was stuck with the theory that the three of them would have been deposited into the trunk of the single car involved in the raid… or perhaps, he and Ariana would have been killed and only Hermione would have been deposited in the trunk.

He was able to gain the vehicle identification number on the car and learned it was registered to someone known to associate with the Los Zetas gang. Cozumel was considered a crown jewel by the Mexican government given the amount of tourist dollars generated there by visitors. They had largely kept the gangs out of the city to keep tourists safe and in fact there were no U.S. State Department warnings about visiting that Mexican city.

In the end, Damian didn’t know if theirs was a random kidnapping effort or if they were the target. He processed the fingerprints but they were random criminals according to the Mexican fingerprint database that he’d hacked into. Finally, in an effort of desperation to solve this mystery, he met with Natalie to go over the evidence.

“You mean to tell me you had a kidnapping attempt on your life a month ago in Mexico and you’re just now asking for my help? Dammit! The evidence could have dried up by now,” Natalie said. “Don’t you trust my detective skills, Damian?”

“Of course I do and always will as you quickly solved my family’s murder.”

She let go of her anger with his response and said, “Show me what you have.”

After much thought, she could think of no new avenues to explore and so the mystery remained. Was this in some way related to Hermione’s parents or were the potential kidnappers after a well-heeled American family?

At the end of their discussion once they’d exhausted every last potential avenue of investigation, Natalie approached a new topic.

“Ah Damian remember when you analyzed the cold cases for me and picked five that I should focus on first?”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh, guessing what was coming in Natalie tone of voice.

“Can you give me the other three to work on now with the reasons why they jumped to the top of your computer algorithm list?”

“Sure, Natalie, and I’ll help where I can, but my plate is really full at the moment. You know I’m setting up a new company. I also made a promise to myself to invent a better DNA analyzer than the one you have now. I won’t be able to help you as much as I did with the first two cases.”

“That’s fine, Damian; I appreciate any help you can give me. Good luck with your new company. Haley talked about it a little last weekend when they were over for dinner and she’s real excited to work for you. Trevor is both proud and excited for her. He wishes you were operating the company closer to San Jose but he gets why you picked where you did.”

He and Natalie parted ways, traveling in opposite directions to return home. He had a lot to think about on the return home. He was frustrated that with all his brilliance he could not solve the mystery of Hermione’s parents nor the mystery of what went down in Mexico. He was excited to be reaching a turning point in his life. Impulsively he stopped at a florist on his way home to buy flowers. He needed to have a one-sided conversation with Jen and the girls about where his life was taking him and what the future might have in store for him. Instead of the usual red roses in a wreath, this time he was fortunate to find three leis. The scent of gardenias filled the cab of his truck.

That evening as the sun set over the Golden Gate bridge, the fog began to roll in. Usually the fog won the race and served to block the sunset, but not tonight. He sat on the edge of Red Rock Island, Bailey and Bella at his side, and tossed the three leis onto the bay. By the time he finished his conversation with his deceased wife and girls, the sun was long gone and the moon was now in a race to show itself before the fog blocked that too. He sipped some tea in a tumbler that kept it warm and petted his two companions.

What new adventures would appear in his life tomorrow?

~The End ~