Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (19 page)

“Get us there, but get us there in one piece,” said Lumbergh in as calm of a voice
as he could muster. His teeth mashed a wad of gum as he reached under his jacket
and pulled his Glock from its open-top holster. He quickly checked its action.

“How would he know that Sean’s your brother-in-law?” asked a breathless Jefferson
as he pumped the gas pedal and sent fountains of slush high into the air behind them.

“Let’s hope that he doesn’t, and that there’s nothing to this.”

Jefferson’s tongue protruded from his mouth as he negotiated the twists of the snow-covered
road. A trail of sweat ran down the side of his face.

Lumbergh tapped his foot nervously on the floorboard, feeling his own heart beat
against his chest. “When we get there, I’ll take the front and you circle around
back. Got it?”

“Are you okay with your arm?”

“I’ll be fine.”

When they rounded a bend, the white crest of Sean’s roof came into view. Once they
jetted past a row of trees, the rest of the small building revealed itself. Sean’s
car was parked out front.

“Be okay,” Lumbergh mumbled under his breath before realizing that his officer hadn’t
yet begun to apply the brakes.

They were coming in way too fast for the road conditions.

“Jefferson!” Lumbergh wailed.

“Shit!” cried the officer. He pinned the brake pedal to the floor with a stomp. His
wide eyes consumed the sight of the rapidly nearing Nova. He grasped the steering
wheel vice-like and Lumbergh braced his body as best he could. The cruiser veered
at a widening angle.

Lumbergh closed his eyes and clenched his teeth before a loud collision brought the
men’s slowing momentum to a dead halt.

“Dammit!” Lumbergh moaned, seeing the dented rear of Sean’s car pressed up against
his side of the cruiser. He turned to Jefferson, whose mouth was left dangling open.
The officer’s wide eyes apologized profusely to his boss.

“I’m going out your side,” stated Lumbergh, his mind having already moved past the
wreck. “Get out!”

The two men quickly but awkwardly climbed outside of the vehicle through the driver
side door. As Lumbergh circled around to the opposite side of the car, he noticed
a pair of tire tracks in the snow that belonged to neither them nor the Nova.

Jefferson let out a loud cough and looked to his boss for direction.

Holding his gun out in front of him, Lumbergh motioned Jefferson around to the back
of the building. Shotgun in hand, the officer disappeared from view. Lumbergh trotted
to the front door. He checked the doorknob and found it locked.

“Sean?” he yelled, pounding the wooden door with the back of his clenched fist. “You
in there?”

No answer.

“Jefferson?” he cried out.

He heard the officer reply after few seconds. “The rear door’s busted open back here!
Hang on!”

“Shit!” Lumbergh snarled. He took a few steps, training his gun on the front door
and waiting for Jefferson to secure the inside.

It was taking longer than it seemed it should, and Lumbergh desperately began praying
that Jefferson wasn’t standing there in shock over the sight of his brother-in-law’s
dead body. His mind was a busy intersection of horrific thoughts and unconscionable
consequences.

“Talk to me, Jefferson!” he cried out, his heightened voice trembling.

“I’m near the front door!” came Jefferson’s muffled reply from inside. “He’s not
here.”

Those three words allowed a deep breath of relief to escape the chief ’s lungs, but
only before the officer continued.

“Something’s wrong, though. There’s blood, and the place has been trashed.”

Jefferson unlocked and opened the front door, and Lumbergh slid in. The men quickly
made their way down the hallway from the front area to the living room where it smelled
strongly as if something was burnt.

“Careful,” warned Jefferson, taking wide steps at the end of the hallway. “There’s
broken glass.”

Lumbergh’s eyes shifted from the shattered picture frames that lay in a clump on
the floor to the overturned stove, now cold, that had left a large black singe mark
across a portion of the hardwood floor. Sean’s phone and its unhooked receiver were
lying close by. “You said there was blood?”

Jefferson pointed to a dried crimson puddle on the floor not far from the stove.
It wasn’t large, likely coming from a superficial, non-life-threatening wound. Whether
or not that wound belonged to Sean, Lumbergh had no way of knowing.

“Chief, I don’t think Sean left here on his own,” Lumbergh heard his officer state.

“Why do you say that?”

“There’s a bunch of footprints and tire tracks out back. From multiple people, I
think. It looks like they dragged someone out of here.”

Lumbergh quickly pushed his way past Jefferson and made a beeline for the back door.
He took note of the splintered frame along the doorway and carefully maneuvered his
body in a way that kept him from stepping on the plethora of prints embedded in the
snow. It wasn’t easy with one arm but he managed once he holstered his gun.

Jefferson watched him from inside the doorway. His head was lowered and there was
nervousness in his eyes. Lumbergh didn’t know if his disposition stemmed from Sean’s
disappearance or the officer’s epiphany that he had smeared away some of the prints
with his own feet when he hastily entered the building.

If it was the latter, Jefferson’s worries were unwarranted. There were tracks everywhere—plenty
of clean imprints, though the rising temperature from the morning sun was beginning
to deform them.

Two deep lines along the snow likely came from the heels of Sean’s shoes as he was
dragged outside and pulled into the vehicle whose tracks matched those from the front
of the building. They had circled around to the other side.

Lumbergh made out two sets of footprints—one quite small and the other of average
size.
Did Montoya have help?

“Jefferson, go back through the house and out the front door. Don’t use Sean’s phone.
It’s evidence. From the car, get the county sheriff on the line. Let him know what’s
going on. Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes. The conditions have changed. We need all available resources on this. A forensics
team and someone who can hopefully match up these tire tracks to a specific type
of car. We’ll need to circulate those pictures of Montoya. Is Martinez still in town?
Can
you reach him on the radio and have him swing by the office, make some copies,
and bring them over?”

“Yeah. I think he’s still around. But aren’t those pictures old and out of date?”

“They are but they’re all we’ve got. They’re better than nothing.”

Jefferson disappeared back inside.

After squatting down and examining the tracks closer, Lumbergh noticed just how narrow
the smaller set of footprints was. They almost looked as if they could belong to
a woman. A minute later, he went back inside to better scrutinize the damage caused
by the apparent scuffle.

There were no shell casings anywhere on the floor. It appeared that the fight didn’t
escalate beyond that of a brawl, but it was a wild brawl. Sean didn’t go down quietly.
If there had just been one unarmed intruder—even Montoya himself—he likely wouldn’t
have stood a chance against a man of Sean’s size and propensity to use his fists.
But with two people, it seemed they had eventually overwhelmed him.

If Montoya simply wanted Sean dead, he would have killed him there and left his body
behind to be found. There had to be more to the game, and Lumbergh could only fathom
that Sean was being used as a pawn to toy with him, perhaps draw him out into the
open in order to fulfill his sick hunger for revenge.

Lumbergh carefully scrutinized the living area, looking for any shred of helpful
evidence among the broken and overturned decor—something that could link the perpetrators
to wherever they had taken Sean. Nothing immediately presented itself. He did find
something that piqued his curiosity though.

The burn mark along the hardwood floor—the one left by the overturned stove . . .
It was wet. Saturated, in fact. A blue rubber bucket, probably taken from under Sean’s
kitchen sink, was lying on its side just a few feet away.

It appeared that during the fight the floor had caught on fire
and someone had put
out the flames with a bucket of water. Clearly, Sean wouldn’t have been in any condition
to do it, so it had to have been done by one of the intruders. The big question was
why
? Why would someone who had burst into Sean’s house to kidnap him bother saving
his home from going up in flames? If anything, letting the fire burn would have destroyed
evidence of what had happened to Sean.

When Jefferson reentered the room, he opened his mouth to speak but Lumbergh cut
him off.

“When they get here, make sure they check this bucket for fingerprints. If we can
identify who it is that’s helping Montoya, that might help us figure out where they
are.”

“Got it, and the boys at County are on their way. There’s something else though.”

Lumbergh raised an eyebrow.

Jefferson led him around to the north side of the house, away from the road and the
two entrances of the building where all of the outside action had taken place. The
north side faced nothing but forest.

“There. Look!” said Jefferson, pointing his meaty finger at the snowy ground.

There was another pair of footprints that led up to the building’s side window. They
were definitely of a different tread than the others and were too small to belong
to Sean. They came in from the forest, then led back out the way they had come.

“Who in the hell was this?” Lumbergh muttered.

He carefully made his way across the snow to the window, careful not to step on the
new prints. He peered inside the window and found that it had a direct view of the
small laundry room at the rear of the building—the one Lumbergh had just passed through
when he stepped in from outside. He spun his head back to the tracks and began walking
parallel to them as Jefferson watched on.

“Is there a
third
person mixed up in this?” Jefferson shouted,
cupping his hand to
his mouth so the chief could hear him as he distanced himself from the building.

Lumbergh nodded. “I don’t think so,” he said softly, more to himself than Jefferson.

His narrow eyes followed the tracks closely. He walked through clusters of leafless
trees, where the snow grew deeper. He lost his balance a couple of times, pressing
his good hand to the packed snow to keep from falling. Eventually, the footprints
led him to a small clearing where he spotted another set of tire tracks that led
back out to the road he and Jefferson had flown down earlier. The tracks were relatively
small and close together, suggesting that they belonged to a compact car.

Lumbergh pulled a fresh stick of gum from his jacket pocket and replaced the exhausted
wad in his mouth. Its wrapper, now blanketing the old piece, quickly went into his
pocket.

He followed the tracks out along the road. They seemed to lead back toward town amidst
numerous other tracks that were partially peeled away by the plow that came through
earlier that morning. Lumbergh walked down the shoulder of the road and back to the
building where a surprised-looking Jefferson spotted him.

“Where did you come from?” he asked.

Lumbergh told him where the tracks had taken him.

“I don’t get it,” the officer admitted. “Who do they belong to?”

The chief shook his head. “I don’t know, but whoever it was doesn’t appear to have
been part of what happened to Sean. The tracks look just as fresh as the others though.
I wonder if they saw who took him.”

“And this person didn’t call
us
?” Jefferson quickly responded. “I was at the office
all night. Anyone seeing something like a man being kidnapped would have called that
in. Don’t you think?”

“You sure would think so,” said Lumbergh. “Maybe they showed up right before or right
after. Either way, they still might know something useful.”

Jefferson shook his head, his face contorted in confusion. “But who in the hell would
park their car in the woods, sneak up to Sean’s house, and peep in through his window?”

Lumbergh’s face tightened. His eyes glared through his officer’s face.

“What? What did I say?”

“Jefferson, give me your keys,” said Lumbergh. “You wait here for everyone, okay?”

Jefferson was confused. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could utter a
word, Lumbergh snatched the key ring from his outstretched hand.

Lumbergh walked quickly over to the cruiser, shoved the key into the ignition, and
reached into the glove compartment. He pulled out a walkie-talkie and tossed it in
the air over to Jefferson. “If the others get here before I’m back, you call me.
All right?”

Jefferson nodded.

“I’ll be back soon.”

Lumbergh cranked the engine and drove forward slowly, peeling the cruiser’s dented
door away from the back of the Nova. He watched Jefferson’s wincing face in the rearview
mirror—his reaction to the sound of metal rubbing on metal. When Lumbergh was clear
of all obstacles, he sped up and tore down the road, a single hand clutching the
steering wheel in front of him.

Chapter 15

L
umbergh repeatedly beat the locked door with a clenched fist, cursing under his
breath as he impatiently waited. He twisted a glance back over his shoulder, taking
a second look at the gray Ford Contour parked out front. He eyed its tires.

The pattern of the tread outside Sean’s place wasn’t legible due to some melting
that morning, so Lumbergh couldn’t say with certainty if they had come from the Contour.
They sure looked the right size, though.

A sneer plagued his face. He could barely keep the anger stewing deep within him
from pouring out and erupting into barbaric demands for the man inside to present
himself. He finally heard movement from inside the home, and when the door slowly
opened with a timid creak, Lumbergh pushed himself inside.