Ground Truth by Rob Sangster Read Free Book Online Page A

thoughts about that traumatic experience sometimes prevented Jack from keeping his head in the game. When that happened, he shook his head and concentrated on the work in front of him. At the moment, he was drafting a licensing agreement for NorCal Power to import tidal turbine technology from a firm in Holland when the phone rang.
    “It’s District Attorney Calder, sir,” his temporary secretary said.
    “Please put him on.”
    “Good morning, Mr. Strider. I’d like you to meet me at the Park Pacifica Riding Academy in Hillsborough at five o’clock today. It’s important.”
    “Of course, but why at a riding academy?”
    “I bought a show horse for my daughter, and I’ve never seen her ride him. She’s training this afternoon, so I can kill two birds with one shot. See you there.”
    During the next six hours, Jack thought about the upcoming meeting. Calder’s staff must have gone through all of Peck’s files by now, so Calder would be ready to back off. The price Jack had paid for Peck’s crimes had been heavy, but at least it wouldn’t get worse.
    During the drive down the peninsula to Hillsborough the air began to smell fresher, the sky looked bluer.
    He was a few minutes early, so he sat in the top row of bleachers looking down at the sawdust and dirt ring where six teenage girls were being instructed by a young man in a black turtleneck. Hooves thudded rhythmically as horses circled the ring. The musky smell of sweat was laced with the sharp tang of urine.
    He spotted Calder entering the far end of the arena and saw him catch the eye of a girl with long black braids, wearing a red T-shirt. She smiled, and then her attention went back to her instructor.
    Calder climbed the bleacher steps to where Jack waited.
    “Mr. Strider,” he said brusquely and sat down. “I’ve had my best men investigating the circumstances of H. Peckford Strider’s death. Now I’m going to tell you what we’ve learned, part of it anyway. Pacific Dawn started its final voyage from the port of Salina Cruz, Mexico, a refinery town south of Acapulco. It was loaded with tin, zinc, and sugar. Even though your father owned that ship, we still can’t prove he was criminally responsible for the deaths on board. In fact, he had structured his whole importing business to avoid personal liability for anything. So the million dollar question is why would he kill himself?”
    “I’ve asked myself that a hundred times,” Jack confessed. “The only answer I’ve come up with is that he was a respected judge about to be tainted by a tragic event. He’d have been humiliated. Maybe that was more than he could take.”
    “You’re wrong. Pacific Dawn had made many trips carrying human cargo, so I decided to find out what had happened to all the people who had reached San Francisco alive. The ship’s crew couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell us anything except that vehicles showed up to take the human cargo away. So I started over, looking at everything we had. I found out that my investigator who examined your father’s home computer had been blocked by password protection. I brought in our IT specialist to break through the password. That gave us access to almost all of the folders, and we found nothing useful in any of them. According to the IT guy, your father must have had a professional encrypt the remaining three folders. It took quite a while for my man to decipher the encryption, but he finally cracked it.” Calder paused and studied the girls cantering around the perimeter of the ring, and then looked back, eyes full of contempt. “That’s how I found out why your father pulled the trigger.”
    The sounds of the arena vanished from Jack’s consciousness. Calder’s tone warned him to brace himself.
    “It’s all there,” Calder said. “Peck Strider bought girls in Mexico and brought them to San Francisco, Sacramento and San Jose. They were kept in secret dormitories with handlers who raped them repeatedly to break them down,