Bad News Travels
- Автор: Суэйн Джеймс
- Серия: Lancaster & Daniels #3
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Thomas & Mercer
- ISBN: 978-1-5420-1644-5
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Bad News Travels». Краткое содержание книги:
No sooner do they arrive than suspicions are aroused. There’s the pair of Russians who seem to be watching every move the family makes. A final, cryptic phone call Martin Daniels made to his granddaughter. Strange blood evidence on his estate. More than $1 million missing from Martin’s account. And his cell phone, wiped clean, along with clues to a double life. To Beth, it’s disturbingly clear: the man she loved was a stranger.
As she and Jon delve into Martin’s past, they have no idea where the secrets will take them. Or how dangerous it will be to expose the conspiracies, the cover-ups, and the terrible truths of Martin’s life — and death.
“I always read my texts.”
“Exactly. We all read our texts, regardless of where we are, and who we’re with. We can’t help it. Your father was receiving texts that contained porno videos of men that your father personally knew. That was why he was looking at them. He wanted to see who’d gotten snared in the trap.”
“Back up a second. Who was sending these videos?”
“Either Katya or the Sokolov brothers. They’re all in this together. They were blackmailing your father.”
“So they caught my dad in a compromising situation.”
“Yes. Katya turned a room in her basement into a love nest, and I believe she secretly videotaped your father having sex. Then the blackmail began. That’s where all the money in your father’s bank accounts went.”
She considered what Jon was saying. It all added up, except the part about the videos being of her father’s friends. That came out of left field.
“How are my father’s friends caught up in this?” she asked.
“I think the Russians are blackmailing them as well,” he said.
“Based on what?”
“Piece together what we know so far. The Sokolovs brought three young Latin women to Saint Augustine on a private plane. You told me those women didn’t have any luggage, and were slaves. I think they were sex slaves.”
“They were the bait.”
“Correct. They were introduced to different men at wild parties at Katya’s house, with the purpose of having sex with them. The men were secretly videotaped, and later blackmailed.”
“Which is why there were cameras all over that house,” Daniels said. “The women would get the men drunk, pull them into a room, and have sex. It didn’t matter which room, because they all had hidden cameras.”
“That’s right. The house was rigged to trap them.”
“This all makes sense, Jon. I’m on board.”
“There’s more.”
He paused to take a long swallow of beer. When conducting an investigation, she’d learned that it was impossible to ever know the true story. All an investigator could do was take the available evidence and construct a plausible story. That story then became the truth that the case would be built upon. Jon was as good as anyone at doing this, and his theories usually held up.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.
“I think these men decided to fight back, and didn’t pay the Sokolovs their ransom money right away,” he said. “That’s when the mummified hands started showing up on people’s doorsteps. The Sokolovs were sending a message.”
“And the men caved, and paid them off.”
“I think so. Except your father. I think he must have held out. So the Sokolovs started sending him text messages that contained videos of his friends in compromising situations. It was their way of putting pressure on him to pay up.”
“Do you think he gave in to their demands?”
“I do. If he hadn’t, the videos of him and Katya would have been posted online by the Sokolovs, and we would have heard about them by now.”
“So my father wasn’t addicted to porn.”
“No, he was not. He was a victim.”
She wiped away her tears with a napkin. Her father was a proud man, and she could see him doing what Jon had described. In the end, he had given in to the Sokolovs’ demands, and the shame of his transgressions had led him to take his own life.
“I still don’t understand how Sykes plays into all of this,” she said. “You don’t think he was stupid enough to fall into the same trap as my father, do you?”
“I do. Sykes was also being blackmailed by the Sokolovs. The video proves it,” he said.
“How can you be sure? Maybe he had a fling with one of those girls, and it got videotaped. That doesn’t mean he was being blackmailed.”
“No, it doesn’t. But the other lies Sykes told are proof enough.”
“What lies?”
“Sykes never mentioned to us that he knew your father, yet it’s obvious they were acquaintances by the way your father reacted when he saw the video of Sykes having sex with the girl. Your father wouldn’t have reacted like that if he hadn’t known Sykes.”
It was excellent deductive reasoning, and she kicked herself for not seeing it.
“Good call,” she said. “What else?”
“When we talked to Officer Spencer about the mummified hands, Spencer said that there were six victims. He immediately backtracked and said there were five. That’s not the kind of fact that a police officer would get confused. I think Spencer was hiding the name of the sixth victim from us.”
“You think the sixth victim was Sykes.”
“Correct.”
It was too neat a conclusion, and Daniels shook her head. She remembered seeing a number of framed citations hanging on the walls of Sykes’s office. Police officers didn’t receive those unless they were good at what they did.
“I can’t see Sykes being drawn to that house, and being lured into having wild sex. He’s too experienced to fall for something like that,” she said.
“I agree. Sykes is too experienced. I think the video was shot in another location. One where Sykes felt safe enough to let his guard down.”
“Where?”
“This is just a guess.”
“Go ahead.”
“Remember the photographs on your father’s laptop of the local B&B? It’s been bugging me why he had those. Maybe one of the rooms was outfitted with hidden cameras, and Sykes was drawn there and secretly videotaped.”
“You have no proof of this.”
“No, but why else did he have those photos?”
“It’s a stretch. You couldn’t outfit a room in a B&B without the owners knowing about it. They would see the equipment being brought in.”
“The owners are involved.”
“That’s a real stretch.”
“Not really. Remember the Russian couple that sponsored Katya into this country?”
“The Vasileks.”
“Right. They own a B&B in Fort Lauderdale. I’m thinking they might have done this before.”
As every investigator knew, there were no coincidences in police work. But knowing something and proving it were entirely different things.
“Let’s say you’re right, and a local B&B was used to trap Sykes,” Daniels said. “How do we find out which B&B was used?”
“Easy,” he said. “We’ll use the internet.”
Part Four
Carrie, Like the Horror Movie
Chapter 31
Lancaster walked out of the restaurant and retrieved his laptop from the trunk of Beth’s rental. When he returned to the patio, a fresh beer awaited him.
“You shouldn’t have,” he said.
“You deserve it. Now show me how we’re going to do this,” Beth said.
Her laptop sat on the table, the photo of the bedroom in the B&B with the four-poster bed and floral wallpaper they’d found on Martin’s computer on its screen.
He placed his laptop beside Beth’s, and powered it up. Taking a seat, he saluted her with his bottle and took a healthy swallow.
“I think I know what your plan is,” she said.
He worked on his beer and waited for her to finish.
“You’re going to visit the websites of the different B&Bs in Saint Augustine, and compare the photographs you find on the sites to those stored on my dad’s computer,” she said. “If you make a match, you’ll know which B&B was used to trap Sykes.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“I think your plan is flawed.”
He continued to drink and said nothing.