Secure Location - By Beverly Long Page 0,51
spoke. “The hotel employed four men from the prison through the A Hand Up program. I live with one of the men. He told me about it.”
The pieces were starting to click together. The uncle’s strange comment—“He’s a man or at least he says he is.” The missing work experience on the job application. Cruz leaned forward. “You used to work at the prison. But you got fired from there for having a personal relationship with one of the inmates, didn’t you?”
The man nodded. “Look. I don’t want any trouble at this job. I work with a bunch of rednecks. It’s bad enough to be a gay man but to be a gay man living with an ex-con is just asking for trouble.”
No doubt about that.
“You lost your job at the hotel, too,” Cruz said.
“That was for a totally different reason. I missed too much work.”
“Why?”
“My partner was ill. He needed surgery and couldn’t drive for several weeks. He had therapy appointments afterward and there was nobody else to take him. I ran out of vacation time.”
Cruz knew that if Looney had told Meg the truth, there was a high likelihood that he’d have kept his job. But he understood the secrecy. This was Texas, after all.
“Meg has had some other things happen. Do you have any idea of who might want to antagonize her or hurt her in some way?” Cruz asked.
The man shook his head. “She’s a good person. Probably the nicest manager I’ve ever worked with. I was the one who told her about the A Hand Up program. She knew I had some personal connection but she never pried. I can’t see anybody wanting to hurt her. I guess the only advice I could give you is to talk to her secretary. That woman’s a bitch.”
* * *
CRUZ TURNED HIS attention to finding Troy Blakely. The guy had worked at the jewelry store for over a year. He had to have had lunch in the area, or maybe dropped off some dry cleaning. The possibilities were endless. People left tracks everywhere.
He hit pay dirt at his fourth stop—a small Thai restaurant. The waitress, a tired-looking thirtysomething blonde, looked at the picture and smiled. “He used to stop in a couple nights a week. Always had a beer while he was waiting for his food. Nice enough guy, although there was something about him that gave me the creeps.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“A week or so ago.”
That surprised Cruz. There were a lot of places to get Thai food. If he wasn’t working in the area, was he living nearby?
“Anything unusual?”
“I asked him if he’d found work. A few months back he’d lost his job at this big hotel.”
“Had he?”
“I’m not sure. I remember his answer because it was sort of weird. He said it didn’t matter because he was finally going to be able to fix everything.”
Fix everything.
It could mean a thousand things. “He ever have a conversation with anybody else while he was waiting for his beer?”
She shook her head. “No. I suppose I was the only one who paid much attention to him. To be honest, I felt a little sorry for him. When he first started coming in, which was probably a good year ago, he’d said that his parents had died recently—the way he talked about them, I got the impression that they were really close.”
“His parents live in San Antonio?”
A door slammed near the rear of the restaurant and she started wiping the counter in earnest. “I need to go help put away stock,” she said.
“His parents?” he prompted again.
She wrinkled her brow. “Some small town two hours away. Hollyville. Haileyville. Something like that.”
Cruz discreetly passed her a fifty-dollar bill and a card with his name and number. “Thank you. If you remember anything else, please call me.”
It took Cruz five minutes to locate Haileyville, Texas, on the map. He didn’t bother to plug the address into his GPS. It was a hundred miles west, then a short twenty miles north—main highways all the way.
He grabbed coffee and two candy bars from the gas station and settled in for the trip. He was barely at the outskirts of San Antonio when he called Meg.
“Meg Montoya,” she answered
“How’s your day?”
“I had a couple meetings and quite a bit of voice mail and email to get through.”
His idea of hell. He hated the bureaucratic nature of police work that required writing reports and documenting endless conversations. Hated going to meetings where