“Is she alive?”
“I… I don’t know.”
Jake put a pen and notepad on the table. “Write down the name of it and the unit number. Be quick about it.”
He was satisfied to see Brecken’s hand tremble as he wrote the information.
Jake snatched the pad off the table and made for the door, jogging straight to Ruiz’s office.
“I was just coming to find you,” she said.
“The son gave us the location of a storage unit on Florida Ave. Let’s go.”
“Let me know,” Avery called after them.
“Will do.”
Chapter Twenty
Jake waited while Ruiz grabbed a pair of bolt cutters from the corner of her office, and then she followed him to his SUV. On the way to Florida Avenue, she called in the Emergency Response Team for backup and requested EMS at the scene.
“You keep bolt cutters in your office?”
“I’ve needed them before, and it’s easier to have my own than to find some when I need them.”
He was almost afraid to ask, “When have you needed them in the past?”
“Similar situation to this. A few times.” She looked over at him. “What’d the kid say about Luna?”
“After he claimed he knew nothing about her or her whereabouts, we told him he’d be charged as an adult and was looking at a long stretch in prison with men who wouldn’t take kindly to him harming a young girl. That seemed to get his attention, but he says he had nothing to do with anything that might’ve happened to her.”
“Sure, he didn’t.”
“The kid gave me the creeps. Said the nastiest stuff about women, raised by an incel father who was done dirty by a Stacy who married her douchebag Chad.”
“The custody battle between them was intense,” Ruiz said. “A search of our database brought up numerous calls for assistance from the mother, which led to a restraining order against the father that he regularly violated.”
“Why didn’t this come up when we did a search for him earlier?”
“It was filed under domestic incidents, which don’t show up during a routine search. He was held for three weeks at one point and told to stay away from her and his son, but he refused to.”
“How’d he end up with custody, then?”
“The kid kept running away from home and turning up with the father, so the courts finally gave the kid what he wanted.”
“That’s crazy.”
“The mother agreed. She filed numerous lawsuits against the District and the courts that never went anywhere because the kid was old enough to say he didn’t want to live with her. The father demanded that all the charges against him be dropped because he was acting in his son’s best interests. The court dropped the charges with warnings for him to stay away from his ex-wife and her new husband or face new charges.”
“She might’ve been better off losing custody of that kid. He’s a real prize.”
“Who knows what he would’ve been like if he’d been raised by his mother instead of his incel father?”
“True.
“She was done dirty in this case.”
“I want to talk to her.”
