Fic Post: Unraveling [Shelter/Without a Trace crossover]
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Title: Unraveling, Chapter 9
Author: dragontatt
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Neither Shelter nor Without a Trace belong to me. No profit is being made from this work of fiction, and no disrespect is intended.
Word Count: 2068
Shaun closed the front door quietly - the thought of standing there watching Martin drive off without him make his heart pound - before sitting down at his desk. He slid his laptop closer, thumbed the ‘on’ button determinedly and stared at the screen while it booted. The wallpaper that came up was a picture of Zach and Cody, both in their board shorts, doing double-bicep poses - the grimace on Cody’s face as he struggled to appear manly usually made him grin but this time all he could do was stare at the tiny bemused smile on Zach’s face.
He blinked back an angry rush of tears before bringing up his browser - just because he’d reluctantly agreed when Martin had said it’d be best if he didn’t accompany them to Portland didn’t mean he wasn’t going to anything.
---
As soon as Martin started the SUV, Danny was on the phone - his first call was to the airport to verify their departure time. He’d been prepared to charter a private plane if there weren’t any seats available when he’d checked flight times earlier over a hurried dinner, but luckily for his nerves there had been at least two slots on an evening flight on an actual real plane. Good - if he had to fly, he’d rather do it on a plane that didn’t look like a toy.
Once that was done he called the state police to update the APB with Cody’s information. They still had no license number, still no idea on the number of suspects, but at least they had a definite make and model of vehicle, along with the identifying PDX bumper sticker.
At the end of the conversation he repeated in a careful tone what he’d told them the first time, “Suspects have a hostage, a 24 year old white male, six foot tall, brown hair, but suspects should be considered possibly armed and definitely dangerous.” It was always a hard call, how to balance protecting the life of a hostage against the life of a law enforcement office. He hoped it wouldn’t come down to that.
One last call before heading into the airport - he dialed the local NCIC office. It wasn’t very likely, but they still had to check to see if there were any unidentified dead bodies that matched Zach’s description in the last 30 hours.
Martin listened intently from the driver’s seat as he made his way to the short-term parking lot at LAX.
“Yeah, our MP is a 24 year old white male, six-feet tall, brown and brown.” Danny tapped his pen impatiently against his pad as he waited for an answer.
“Yeah? Well, our guy has several tattoos…your guy have any?”
Martin’s hand clenched on the steering wheel and he paused before reaching out the window for the parking stub.
“No? Well, that’s good to hear. Can you call me back at this number if you get any bodies that do match? Thanks.”
Danny hung up his phone and said, “No unidentified bodies matching Zach’s description in the last 48 hours, so there’s that at least.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Martin said wearily and drove into the lot.
---
Shaun googled ‘Alan Grenier’ just to see if he could find anything interesting. His first few hits were some French author he vaguely remembered from his college days, the next were about some folk singer from Vermont, then there were the requisite Facebook pages. But before he started clicking on any of those, he spied some links near the bottom of the page from the Portland Gazette and he nodded to himself in satisfaction.
Shaun wasn’t too surprised to see Alan had been picked up a couple times for drunk driving, once after crashing his car into a telephone pole when he managed to miss the driveway to his apartment complex.
He was surprised, though in retrospect maybe he shouldn’t have been, to see he’d been arrested once on suspicion of domestic abuse, but the charges had been dropped when his live-in girlfriend, Jeanne Taylor, had sworn it was an accident.
He guessed there had been no previous complaints or 911 calls, or else Alan would have been prosecuted anyway. But he had at least been arrested and his mug shot displayed in the newspaper for all the world to see. Shaun hadn’t seen Alan since that day at the house in San Pedro when he’d had to pull Zach off of him. But the face that stared back at him from the mug shot was much the same - a little skinnier, a little more sullen. Angrier. It wouldn’t surprise Shaun at all to find out Alan did have something to do with Zach’s kidnapping. He just didn’t know what that something was yet.
---
Martin came in low and to the left, close on Danny’s heels. The local cops brought up the rear, mostly as a courtesy. They did drive them here from the airport after all. After years of busting down doors, you got a feeling about these things and at first glance Martin was sure the unlit apartment was empty, though they cleared all the rooms as a matter of course, flipping light switches up as they went.
Nope, not a soul in the residence but something sure as hell had gone on ‘cause the place was trashed. Martin holstered his gun before saying, “You think Jeanne was just a lousy housekeeper?”
Danny nudged a dirty brown couch cushion lying in the middle of the floor with one polished loafer - it had been slit up the middle and the stuffing ripped out. “I don’t think even she was this bad, somebody was looking for something.”
“I’m betting on the money and the drugs,” Martin said as he circled the living room, kicking aside a pile of newspapers and empty pizza boxes, toppling some bottles half-filled with stale beer and old cigarette butts at the same time.
Martin wasn’t really surprised the apartment was empty, or that it had been trashed, not after hearing the short and not-so-sweet version of the life of Alan Grenier and Jeanne Taylor from the uniforms on the drive in from the airport.
Alan had done a short stint as a house painter when the pair had first moved from San Pedro but that didn’t last long - apparently Alan had a bit of a temper and had lost that job after taking a swing at his foreman over something or other. The cops had been called in when he refused to leave the site but no official charges had been filed. After that he’d had a series of hard-work, low-pay jobs - overnight stock clerk at a big box grocery store, janitor, and finally he’d been loading tractor-trailers at a downtown brewery - all back-breaking, no respect jobs that he’d eventually quit for one reason or another.
Jeanne, on the other hand, had two jobs, waitress and check-out clerk, and she worked hard and steadily the whole time. Probably a whole lot harder than she would have had to work if Alan had managed to keep a job.
And then of course there was the domestic violence complaint. Jeanne called 911 once and when the cops had shown up she’d had a fat lip and eyes red and swollen from crying. But even though the cops had investigated, she had steadfastly refused to explain exactly what happened, and for whatever reason, no charges had been formally filed against Alan.
One of the uniforms walked in from the back bedroom in time to ask, “You think they found what they were looking for?”
“Naw,” Martin said with a shake of his head. “If they had, they wouldn’t have driven all the way to LA to kidnap Zach.” A stray thought tickled at the back of Martin’s mind. “We need to find out when the last time anybody saw these two was.”
“Yeah,” agreed Danny absently as he kicked his way across the trash covered floor. In one corner of the room was a small TV sitting on an upended milk crate - its screen had been smashed in with a beer bottle who broken neck was still sticking out of the hole it had left behind. He frowned at the milk crate before lifting the trashed TV carefully by its handle and setting it on the floor. He tipped the crate over to expose a rectangular wooden box next to a small blue bong half-filled with filthy water. Danny flipped the lid off the box with one finger - inside was a couple of lighters, some rolling papers and a small baggie filled with what could only be weed.
“Huh,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “Not much here, pretty obvious it’s for personal use only. But it does prove at least someone in the house has a bad habit or two.”
“A little worse than you know,” Martin said. He’d been standing on his tip-toes and running his hand along the shelf in the coat closet. He pulled out a small rectangular box that had American Eagle emblazoned across the top and showed it to Danny before giving it a shake. There was a small clinking inside, and Martin pulled off the top to reveal three lonely cartridges lying sideways in the otherwise empty box. He flicked at them with one long index finger.
“9 mil,” he said, before handing the box off to one of the uniforms absently. “So, let’s see, Alan, and maybe Jeanne, decide to rob their dealer, ‘cause we all know how well that always works out.”
Danny snorted in amusement and took up where Martin had left off. “Dealer comes looking for his stuff but can’t find Alan - or Jeanne,” he conceded, “so he tears the place apart. But when he can’t find anything he drives all the way to LA to kidnap Zach?”
He shook his head. “That seems off somehow.”
Martin looked at Danny from where he’d been staring at the far wall, at the only real personal touch in the whole apartment, a tiny glint in his eye. “You’re right, ‘cause they didn’t go all the way to LA to kidnap Zach - they were after Cody.”
He pointed at the wall, where a framed picture of Cody, standing with a proud grin in front of the Allesandro Elementary School, hung in a glossy black frame, school name in full view. Martin had seen that same picture, complete with matching frame, before - in Shaun’s apartment. He turned to stare at Danny, eyebrows raised, before going on, “The truck showed up at Cody’s school before any place else we know of, right?”
“Damn, Fitz, you have a point.” Danny stared back at him a moment. “You think - ”
“Going after Cody now would make them the stupidest kidnappers in history,” Martin interrupted. “But you never know.” He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket as he walked by one of the cops on his way to the front porch. He held the phone to his ear, murmuring, “C’mon, c’mon,” until there was a quiet, “Hello?”
“Hey Shaun, how’s it going?” He grimaced and tapped his forehead with a clenched fist. “I mean - ”
“Everything’s the same, except my mom’s mad at you two for skipping out on seconds of her home-cooking,” Shaun finished with a chuckle.
“Oh wow, did you apologize for me?”
“You know I did.” Shaun paused and then went on, “So - did you find anything out at Jeanne’s place?”
“Well, they’re not here, and from the looks of things they haven’t been for a few days. We’re going to stay though tomorrow at least, check with employers, neighbors, friends - you know the drill.”
“Yeah, of course.”
Shaun sounded like he was getting ready to ask another question so Martin went on in a rush, “Listen, Shaun, I don’t want to scare you, okay? But I just want you to know it’s really important that you keep a close eye on Cody while we’re gone.”
There was a pause, then Shaun said, “You think whoever took Zach was actually planning on taking Cody at first, don’t you?” Shaun sounded resigned, like he’d already thought of it on his own, and had tried really hard to deny it.
“Makes sense, especially if whoever it was wanted leverage against Jeanne to get his stuff back. Seems to me Zach might just have been the back-up plan.”