Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (13 page)

He wondered how close Jessica was with her uncle and if their relationship was at
all similar to the one he had shared with his Uncle Zed. Was he a mentor to her?
Someone she admired? Maybe they weren’t tight at all and merely saw each other once
a year, around the holidays.

“Hell, for all I know, they hated each other,” he said out loud.

When he heard the sound of a car engine approaching from the road, he used the edge
of his hand to scrape away frost from his side window. He spotted Jessica’s long
red hair through the glass of a white Chevy Cavalier that pulled erratically into
the parking lot.

Sean switched off the ignition and climbed out of his car, immediately feeling the
bite of the cold. The temperature was warmer than earlier, but couldn’t have been
any higher than the twenties.

His stomach felt tight as he approached Jessica’s car, now parked at a space not
far from the front of the building. Fears over how she would take his intervention
into her life made him tense, but he felt he had something to offer her—even if it
was something small. And maybe, just maybe he could convince her of the one thing
he had never been able to convince Lisa of—or
anyone
for that matter: that he cared.

Jessica ascended out of her car quickly, her hair a bit frazzled and her purple coat
unbuttoned. She was wearing sunglasses. Her thin hand gripped the handles of a brown
purse whose strap she didn’t bother to toss over her shoulder. She was clearly in
a hurry to get inside.

“Jessica!” Sean shouted.

Her head spun toward him, her face blank. She was probably expecting to find a co-worker
who was on the way inside as well. Instead, she found a tall, large man who raised
his hand in a timid greeting.

It seemed she had trouble recognizing him at first. She raised her hand to her forehead,
using it as a visor to marginalize the bright glare of the sun, which Sean’s large
frame was partially eclipsing. Her scrutinizing eyes appeared to be tracing the outline
of his body. He knew that at any second she would realize who he was.

When he was within only a few yards, he opened his mouth to speak, but all that came
out was a loud yelp when he felt his foot catch a patch of ice under the snow. He
lunged forward to solidly plant his other foot and keep his balance, but it found
ice as well.

As he crashed down to the unforgiving asphalt, he caught an image out of the corner
of his eye of Jessica instinctively reaching out her hand to try and grab his. She
was unsuccessful, only managing to lose her sunglasses when they fell from her face.

Sean lay there for a moment, sprawled out along the snow-covered blacktop and digesting
the bitter sting of embarrassment, before climbing to his feet.

Once he lifted his head to meet Jessica’s distressed eyes, he watched her face twist
in sour recognition of who he was. Her shoulders drooped as if she was carrying a
twenty-pound dumbbell in each hand. Her gaze rose to the sky and her breath appeared
to leave her lungs in a heap. She was clearly not excited to see him.

“You’re forgiven, okay?” she said in an agitated voice as he stood upright.

“What?” he replied. Indiscriminate patches of snow gripped the front of his pants
and coat.

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

His eyes narrowed.

“You know,” she began, constructing her impending statement in her mind before continuing,
“I’m sorry I was short with you the other day, but you’ve got to get over it. Are
you really this sensitive?”

He scoffed at the suggestion that he was sensitive
.
He was a lot of things, but
sensitive
wasn’t one of them—not in any traditional
sense of the word, anyway. He realized
she was referring to the communication problem they had had from the previous night.

“I’m over it,” he said bluntly.

Before he could continue, he noticed what appeared to be a sharp discoloration under
her left eye—mixture and black and green. It looked like a shiner. She also seemed
to have some mild swelling on the left side of her lip. He was sure it wasn’t there
the previous night.

“What happened to your face?” he boldly asked.

She tilted her head and countered him with a denouncing glare. “I fell on the ice,
but not as gracefully as you just did.” She clearly read the suspicion etched across
his face, so she continued. “Don’t worry, Mr. Coleman. No one’s abusing me. I really
did just fall.”

He nodded his head in acceptance.

“Why are you here then?” she asked. “You’ve already donated twice this week. You’re
done.”

He took a moment to breathe, and then said, “I want to talk to you about Andrew Carson.”

Her eyes froze on his. All expression slowly drained from her face. Her mouth gaped
open and her complexion turned as white as the snow that garnished the scenery around
them. Her purse fell from her grip and landed on the ground beside her sunglasses.

It was a reaction even more dramatic than what Sean had envisioned. “Your uncle,
right?”

Her eyes danced in multiple, random directions, seemingly losing their sentience,
as her lower lip began to quiver. When she aimlessly took a few steps backwards,
Sean grabbed onto her arm, fearing she was about to topple over.

She nodded her head. “You know about my uncle?” she said, her eyes squinting as she
glared at him.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, trying to determine if she could stand without his
assistance. “I caught you off-guard here. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to help.”

It seemed as though every new word that left his mouth drew an added level of confusion
from Jessica, so he started from the beginning. He explained to her how he had seen
the
Denver Post
article over her shoulder in the back office and noticed how much
it had upset her. He told her that he’d later read it, saw her picture, and figured
out who Carson was to her.

“I have a law enforcement connection,” he said. “He says they’re making good progress
on the case and that they have a suspect in Andrew’s disappearance.”

She still appeared to be in partial disarray, now leaning on her car for support
with her hands on her knees. She stared at the ground and forced herself to take
a couple of deep breaths. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “When you first brought up his
name like that, I thought that…” She hesitated, glancing up at him.

“You thought what?” he asked, his face now displaying confusion.

“That
you
had something to do with his disappearance.”

“Excuse me?”

Jessica shook her head, letting her gaze fall to the ground again. “I’m sorry. It
just sounded like you were going to demand a ransom or something.”

Squinting, he let the choice of words he had used bounce around his mind. “We don’t
communicate well, do we?”

She let out an unexpected spasm of laughter, and then held her hands to her face
where tears began to stream. She asked if the suspect was in custody and Sean answered
no. He explained that the police were looking for him, and that they were confident
they had the right guy.

“They have no idea where my uncle is, do they?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, taking from her tone that she had already accepted that she’d probably
never see him alive again.

“Do you know the suspect’s name?” When he said nothing, she looked up at him through
moist eyes and asked again.

“No,” he finally answered, knowing such information could spell
bad things for Lumbergh
and also jeopardize the investigation. “I don’t know anything else.”

She nodded. He could read the skepticism in her eyes.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Coleman,” she said. “Thanks for letting me know. My family
will appreciate hearing that progress is being made.”

He nodded. “You’re welcome.”

She squatted down to pick up her purse and sunglasses, prompting Sean to try and
help, too, though he was too slow. She brushed a strand of her long, bright hair
behind her ear as she rose back up to her feet.

“Let me know if you hear anything else, okay?” she asked reservedly.

“Okay. Do you have a phone number?” He tried not to sound too eager.

“Just call GSL. I’m at extension 106. If you leave a message on my voicemail, I’ll
get it.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but before he knew it, she had already turned her back
on him and was heading toward the front door of the building. He thought she might
turn around and glance back at him as she stepped inside, but she didn’t. She disappeared
through the door.

Sean turned to the sun and stared up at the blue sky above, feeling the warmth press
against his face while the rest of his body still felt cold. He closed his eyes.
The sun’s hospitality almost seemed to be commending him for doing a good deed, though
he found himself questioning if he had done much of anything at all.

He worried that bringing marginal comfort to someone he barely knew risked further
straining his already labored relationship with Lumbergh. At least he hadn’t given
out the name.

He strolled back to his car in no particular hurry, taking some guilty satisfaction
in believing he had at least changed Jessica’s
impression of him. He had left her
better than he had found her, or so he worked to convince himself.

He propped open the driver’s side door of the Nova, which was heavy from the frosty
weather, and slid inside. The car’s shocks made a faint buckling noise as he did.
When he peered into his rearview mirror to check the traffic on the street behind
him, he found his own eyes staring back at him. Their hazel depths expressed a nagging
discontent that he tried to look away from but couldn’t. He
hadn’t
done enough. Not
yet.

Instead of twisting his key in the ignition, he leaned to his side and began wading
through all the food wrappers, receipts, and crumbs that lined the floorboard until
he found the newspaper article that Toby had printed out for him. It had slid off
the passenger seat earlier.

He traced his finger from paragraph to paragraph until he spotted the residential
address where Andrew Carson had gone missing. He opened his glove compartment and
dug through a collection of old street maps, many of which he had inherited from
his uncle’s business, until he found one for Greeley, Colorado.

When he rose back up above his steering wheel and glanced out his windshield, he
spotted Jessica. She was standing outside, a good distance off at the back corner
of the plasma building. He only had a partial view of her. Snow-covered limbs from
a nearby tree that sprung out from an island in the parking lot obstructed his view.
If it weren’t for the color of her hair, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed her
at all. He watched her gaze back and forth across the parking lot in a sweeping motion,
and he wondered if she was looking for him. Did she have more to say?

He thought about stepping back out and waving to her, but when she pulled a cellphone
from her purse and began punching numbers on it, he stopped himself.

Wrinkles formed on his forehead as he sat still, letting his curiosity
captivate
him as Jessica held the phone tightly to her ear. It made sense that she would want
to quickly call her family and fill them in on the news Sean had told her, but her
body language didn’t seem right for that. She wasn’t carefully relaying information
to whomever she was talking to. She seemed upset. Panicked. She tossed her free hand
up in the air as she spoke.

What Sean saw didn’t resemble calmness or relief. It looked like desperation.

Chapter 9

T
he afternoon traffic heading east along Interstate 70 wasn’t bad. It rarely was
during that time of the week. Fridays were the day when scores of travelers made
their way west up from Denver to the high country for a weekend of skiing or snowboarding.
They’d pour into the resort towns, gallivanting around in their turtleneck sweaters,
drinking hot chocolate throughout the day, and boozing it up at night. Few people
were headed in the opposite direction, so Sean met little resistance on his way down
to the suburbs.

From Denver, I-25 to Greeley wasn’t quite as forgiving. Sean had beat rush hour,
but some unexpected construction and inexplicable pockets of congestion left him
snarling and pounding his fist against the steering wheel a number of times. By the
time he reached the Greeley city limits, it was bearing down on four in the afternoon.
He began to doubt that his trip had been worth the trouble. The narrow winter day
would begin to turn dark in just over an hour and he had feared that the search parties
looking for Andrew Carson may have already given up for the day.

A camera man from a local news network, who was tethered to an attractive woman reporter
in front of Carson’s house, directed Sean to an open field area about a half mile
away. That’s where the volunteers would be doing one final sweep.

Minutes later, Sean was trouncing down a steep gully through a collection of about
sixty bundled-up men and women of different ages. Some were carrying homemade walking
sticks made from
broom handles and tree branches, using them to poke through shrubs
and lumps in the snow. A few were wearing orange vests.

“Okay, let’s get together and try one more stretch while we still have enough light!”
a female voice sounded off in the distance. “Bring it in! Bring it in!”

About halfway through her shouted instructions, Sean figured out who was speaking.
She had long dark hair and was wearing a blue winter coat. When he drew closer to
her alongside several others, he recognized her as Katelyn Carson, Andrew Carson’s
daughter. She looked just like she did in the picture he had seen in the paper. Next
to her was her boyfriend. He looked the same, too. His shoulders rode high, his arms
were pressed to his sides, and his hands were jammed in his pockets, as he tried
to keep warm. The sour expression underneath his fogged-up glasses suggested that
he’d been ready to leave for some time.