The Fugitive Grandma

Chapter 54 - Backup Files

At night, Rebecca worked out of her office in the spare room of her apartment. She knew the clock was ticking and that at any minute she could be pulled from the case by Captain McCullers, for any number of reasons.

Over the past several days, Rebecca had gradually and discreetly brought most of her files on the case home from the office. In one box, she had all the information she’d compiled on Lester Cummings over the years. There were records of the nonprofit corporation certificate for Shady Palms, including the name of a phony church that listed one of Cummings’s companies as a primary donor. There were printouts of old newspaper articles about Cummings, plus failed indictments and aborted investigations dating back to his Indian casino days in the early 1990s. Many times, she’d heard prosecutors refer to Lester Cummings as the one that got away.

On the front edge of a manila file folder, Rebecca stapled the business card of Ted Chang, a prosecutor she knew in the district attorney’s office. She was sure Ted had been personally involved in several attempts to indict Cummings on gambling and racketeering, though he had never been able to bring enough evidence to a grand jury. She thought about her conversation with Frank and her premise that the district attorney’s office would want evidence against Cummings enough to make a deal with the Valentines. She hadn’t been bluffing or overselling when she told Frank that. It was something she sincerely believed.

The second manila folder on her desk included the details of all her research into the Valentine crimes, starting with the Shady Palms robbery. This included reports on the break-in of Dr. Whittier’s office, the supermarket holdup, and the truck hijackings a night earlier. The reports contained a combination of eyewitness accounts, forensic analysis, copies of Stella’s handgun registration, plus the transcript of an interview with a man arrested by police in Santa Ana who had confessed to selling Stella fake driver’s licenses and birth certificates.

There was also a photo that she’d taken from Stella’s room in Shady Palms, with Johnny, Frank, Millie, Elmer, Silvia, Vince, and his daughter, Sabrina, all gathered together in the backyard of Stella’s house around a plastic picnic table. Rebecca remained convinced that the people in this photo were the key to everything. They were her last, best hope to locate the Valentines with the scant time remaining.

Rebecca’s desk also contained a third folder. This last folder had never been inside the station. It was compiled independently, without the knowledge of Captain McCullers or anyone else on the police force. This last file contained notes of her meetings with Lowry, Riggs, and Perez, as well as transcripts of conversations that she’d secretly recorded. There were also photographs of Riggs and Perez tailing Frank.

And it included research detailing Great American’s past record of managing security contractors. There were articles she’d pulled off the Internet on lawsuits settled in other states stemming from claims of excessive force and wrongful deaths of alleged shoplifters and employees charged with stealing. This last folder had Brenda Sugarland’s business card clipped to the front.