Sandusky Burning, page 20
I shrugged. “I didn’t see any cameras, but I was severely groggy and out of it when I woke up. I am assuming the interior ones are concealed in a ceiling fan or smoke detector, based on the camera angles,” I said. I took a tortilla chip, dipped it in salsa, and ate it. The salsa was milder than I preferred.
“So, they taped you last night,” he stated. I nodded. “Doing what?”
I felt my face flush. I took another drink, slower this time to avoid another round of brain freeze. “Well, there was this girl I vaguely remember from the bowling alley. We chatted briefly at the bar. She must be on the payroll. The pics show us leaving the alley, arriving at the cabin, and going inside. Then there are pics in the bedroom that are problematic,” I said.
Mike stared at me for a moment, then looked away. “Damn, Brady. Seriously?” he asked, taking a big chug of his beer. He casually wiped away a bit of the foam from his upper lip that had settled on the salt-and-pepper facial scruff.
“The thing is, I was dead on my feet. Like a zombie. Some of the bar pics show Sam clearly propping me up. I don’t think there is any way I did something with the girl. The pics look staged.”
“You sure?” he asked, dipping a chip.
I nodded. “Pretty damn sure. I saw still shots, which were selected most likely because I look like I’m awake. I was passed out, but my eyes would occasionally open. Think of people who black out; they sometimes drift between states of consciousness. I bet if I got the raw video footage, it shows me in a motionless stupor. That is why they just printed pictures and didn’t show me a video,” I said.
Mike appeared to be thinking about it and nodded. “Still pretty damning, though?” he asked.
“Damn right. This is a relationship breaker. If these get back to my wife ...” I said, taking another sip. “I can’t let that happen.”
“So, what was the point? What do they want? Was there some sort of blackmail threat?” he asked.
“He didn’t make one. So, are we thinking the next step is a demand for money?” I asked.
“I’m going to be blunt. You don’t seem like a high-dollar-value target. I’ve seen your finances. I know your salary, what you have saved, and what you own. What is he looking to get from you monetarily that is worth the effort?” he asked. I shrugged. “It has to be something to do with your job. Do you have something of value you can get from work?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I have a clearance. But it doesn’t give me what I would call access to valuable intelligence. Would someone like Randy be able to use the data I could provide?” I asked.
“I tell you what, I would not underestimate that guy. He has a plan. He orchestrated that setup last night very easily. You were taken down without a fight. Those guys have done this before. I bet you he can use those cabins whenever he needs to,” he said.
“So, Travis is in on this. There is no way Randy is secretly rigging shit up without him knowing,” I said, taking another sip.
“Have to assume Travis’s people are involved. If Chuck is, there are others,” he said. I nodded and ate another chip.
“You need me to dig into this for you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No, I’m not getting you wrapped up in this,” I replied.
“I’m already associated with you, bud. I’m sure someone on his crew saw us leaving together tonight. If they have surveillance capabilities, then they know when we come and go,” he said.
“I appreciate your willingness to listen and give me your observations. That’s all I need. I will work this out,” I said.
“I ran into that Sam character in the office. He got in my face, nothing major. I was able to get his last name, Crenshaw.”
“Got in your face?”
“We jawed back and forth a little. He definitely has a chip on his shoulder."
“Okay, so we have his last name, that may help.”
“Yeah, you mentioned he said he was a marine last night, so you should have background data on him on your work systems, right?”
“Maybe. I have to be careful. I have access to military records, but I have to watch how I pull the data. Everything I do leaves an audit trail. Sometimes I pull batches of records, so if I can pull his records as a part of a larger data query, it may not raise any red flags.”
“There may be something useful we can use. He seems like a local who failed to launch, maybe in his forties. You should be able to narrow it down if you are doing a name search.”
I nodded, although I doubted I would find anything useful. I wished I had access to civilian records. I was fairly certain Sam had his share of run-ins with law enforcement over the years.
“Listen, Brady. You have a family. You have a career. Somebody is fucking with that right now. You can’t sit back and get played. You have to figure out what they are doing and get ahead of it,” he said, leaning across the table. I didn’t have a response.
“They are going to find a way to sink their claws into you even deeper. You need help. I don’t mind helping. Next time they ask to meet, I can hang back and follow you to see what they are up to. That is counter-surveillance. I used to do this shit for a living,” he said.
“You didn’t come to Sandusky to babysit me. You don’t really know me. You don’t owe me anything,” I said, finishing my drink. I desperately wanted another one but decided not to.
“It ain’t about me owing you anything. You are a veteran. People are targeting you. Honestly, this is giving me something to do. I haven’t had a purpose in a long time,” he said, shrugging. He leaned across and clinked his beer glass with my empty margarita glass.
Chapter 5
Saturday, June 20
Sam 4
3:05 a.m.
I was pacing the hall upstairs, waiting for Randy to arrive. This was going to be ugly. This was a risk that was always out there, but that didn’t make it any less scary when it happened.
I heard Randy’s motorcycle pull up and the back door open a few minutes later. I deactivated the alarm. Randy climbed the stairs. He would be taking his time; he was slowing down a little and wouldn’t want to risk taking a spill.
Randy didn’t look at me, walking past me to unlock his door. He looked exhausted. I forgot his age, but he was looking old, with his cheeks sagging and dark-black bags underneath his eyes. He was wearing a Cleveland Browns baseball hat, a gray sweatsuit, and black tennis shoes.
He unlocked it and walked in, not even holding the door for me. It almost shut before I scrambled and stopped it with my hand.
Randy walked over and turned on the lamp on his desk, not bothering with the overhead lights. He rubbed his face, leaning back in the chair.
“Throw on a pot of coffee,” he said, yawning. I left, made a pot, poured some into Styrofoam cups, added cream and sugar to his, and went back upstairs. He buzzed me in, and I handed it to him.
“Two creams, two sugars?”
I nodded. I took a sip of my coffee, black as usual. If you liked your coffee with a bunch of crap added to it, you didn’t like coffee, you liked the crap. Starbucks made liquid desserts and called it coffee.
Randy took a drink, jerking slightly as he burned his mouth. He blew on the coffee and took another small sip. He sighed loudly, looking up at me.
“Do I need to wand you?” he asked.
I stood up and took my T-shirt off. We all knew there were advanced devices that did not require physical wires to be on me, but he didn’t wand me. He nodded. I put my shirt back on and sat down.
“So, let’s hear it,” he said.
I breathed in deeply. “Al took one of the Romanian girls over to the Island at around 1800 yesterday ...” I said, but Randy interrupted me.
“Cut the military time bullshit. I can barely keep my eyes open here,” he growled.
I glared at him for a minute. This was going to be painful. “At 6 p.m. yesterday. Anka. She had a date at the Islander, in one of those duplexes,” I said.
“A group party?” he asked.
“Two guys. The rest of the party is coming in tomorrow ... today, I mean. Saturday,” I said. It was after 0300 hours and most definitely Saturday morning now. “He dropped her off at the dock, and they were waiting in a golf cart.”
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Jack Webster and Will Schultz. Thirty-somethings. Data ran backgrounds on them, they are from Columbus. Financial planners,” I said.
“Al left with their full payment and returned to the marina. He dropped the cash in a bowling alley locker. Anka was going to ferry back in the morning. About an hour ago, I got a call on my burner. Webster was in a panic. The girl’s dead. He was going into detail, but I cut him off. He was blubbering about his life, his wife, his kids, etc.,” I said.
“Where is the body?” he asked.
“In the back bedroom of the duplex,” I said.
“Anybody else know about this?” he asked.
“Don’t think so,” I replied.
Randy took another drink from his coffee. He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling for a long time. “Okay, well this is going to take some doing to unravel. This Friday night date just got a world more expensive for these clowns. Do they have a burner?” he asked.
“No. But they called from a landline. Any outgoing calls traced will just hit my burner number, which will be a dead-end as soon as I dump it,” I said.
“Positive?”
“Yes, Data verified the number as a landline out of the duplex.”
“Okay. Dial them up on your burner and give it to me. Make sure you dump that burner later today when this is cleaned up,” he said.
I called the duplex. Someone picked up, and I handed the phone to Randy.
“Is this Webster? Yeah. Listen, don’t worry what my name is. You need to just listen. Right now, priority one is canceling your other buddies coming out. Can you do that? I know. Okay, I will get you in a different hotel. Lemme make a few calls. No, we can’t risk an early arrival. Okay, I’m sending a few guys over later this morning,” he said, taking another drink of coffee.
“Just cover her up. Is there any blood? Okay, good. My guys will be there, and you let them in. Don’t let nobody else in, you hear me? No maids, no maintenance people, no one. Don’t go nowhere. Don’t drink any alcohol. Don’t go for a walk outside. Nothing. You sit there and watch TV until they get there. Then you cooperate. You do everything they say. Everything. Once they finish with you, you guys will go to the other hotel I’m booking. Then you will forget about it and go about your weekend. Don’t sulk and don’t run your mouths, unless you want to be calling your wives from a jail cell on the island explaining what happened. There will be a big bill for this. It is costing me a lot of money to clean this shit up. You hear?”
Viktor 3
9:15 a.m.
Sullivan was not happy to see me. Nobody was ever happy to see me. Maybe Elena back in Bucharest. But maybe she pretended because I paid bills.
When I woke up and looked in the mirror, I was not happy to see myself. My face was whiter than normal. I thought because red-faced Americans who lie in the sun are everywhere and that made me look pale. Some cooked their skin with lamps. So stupid. Paying money for the skin cancer.
I left the RV and started walking to the front of the campground. It was sunny, so I put on dark sunglasses. I was driving a big gray Chevy Express van that belonged to Randy.
We could have met at Cloverleaf, but Randy wanted me to pick him up. Our RVs were across the street from each other, but Randy did not want me to show up at Sullivan’s camper and have neighbors see us leave together. So, we were to meet at the end of the street. I unlocked the van and got in.
It was a warm, clear day, with a little bit of wind. It would be better for it to be dark and cloudy, to match the work we had to do.
A few minutes later, I saw Sullivan walking down Starling. He walked to the passenger side. I reached over and unlocked the door from my door panel. He got in and closed the door.
“I am Viktor,” I said as I backed the vehicle up. He did not say anything. He did not look at me. We pulled past the security booth.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
I ignored him. “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “So, what am I doing here?” he asked quietly. It was the kind of quiet that angry men have.
“You are running an important errand with me.”
Brady 14
9:25 a.m.
I was very close to pulling the plug on this thing. It was on the tip of my tongue a half-dozen times. The concept of being stuck with this goon all day was ridiculous.
I received a call around 0600 hours from Sam. He needed me to do him a favor. I told him to fuck off. He laughed. Then he threatened.
After the call, I wasn’t able to fall back to sleep. Since Mike had given me Sam’s last name, I decided to do some research. I logged into my work laptop and opened the system where I could search PAF payees.
The name “Sam Crenshaw” was relatively unique. But I wasn’t sure whether his full first name was Sam or Samuel. The program was on a mainframe and antiquated, so sometimes it took some creative wild cards in the search criteria to obtain the desired results.
Directly searching would be risky if my activity was audited. I devised a fictional situation where a call was misrouted to me from the PAF customer helpdesk call center. A veteran named Sam Crenshaw received a USMC tax form, even though he had been out of the military for decades. Strange stuff like that happened.
My initial search returned a shortlist of “Samuel Crenshaw” records nationwide with birth years from the period in which Sam would have reasonably been born, from the mid to late 1970s. I assumed he was from Ohio, but adding that constraint narrowed the list down to nothing. There were no Samuel Crenshaws from Ohio in the database.
I used a wildcard for the first name, searching “S*”. That returned one Ohio record, a “Simon Crenshaw”. Born in February 1977. I clicked on the name and started reviewing the information.
Simon Crenshaw’s home of record at enlistment and at discharge was Sandusky. That had to be the Sam I was looking for.
Sam/Simon was a marine all right, but not for very long. Thirteen months served and then an unceremonious dishonorable discharge. I shook my head. This dope was out waving the marine flag 24/7 but had only done a little over a year and got a dishonorable. If he possessed any integrity at all, he wouldn’t have mentioned his service to anyone, ever. Yet he flaunted it with his apparel and a USMC bumper sticker on his Suburban.
I logged out and showered. I went outside and drained the gray water. I came back in and lay back down in bed, staring at the ceiling and worrying incessantly.
I should have bit the bullet and took the pictures back to Cleveland. Shown them to Marcy, explain what I thought happened, and hope for the best. Give Randy and Sam/Simon the middle finger and go about trying to piece my life back together.
Then again, the photos would be the straw that broke the camel’s back with my marriage. Understanding that the pictures were exponentially bigger than just a straw, that those pictures were more like a steel beam dropping from the top of a skyscraper on top of the camel’s back.
Now I was being coerced into doing something else. An “errand.” What it was I had no idea. It couldn’t be good. But maybe if I just did that for them, they would leave me alone. Right.
A few hours later, there I was, trapped with this Euro clown in a work van. Viktor wore a pair of ridiculous convenience store–quality sunglasses. They reminded me of the kind the elderly wear, oversized and wrapping around the side of his face.
I looked into the back of the van. There was a large blue rectangular plastic tote, maybe six feet long by two feet wide. There were also two large tanks, about half as tall as a standard residential water heater, which had hoses and spray nozzles attached at the top, and a large black gym bag. I decided not to ask about any of it.
He drove up Nickle Drive and took a right onto Columbus Road. He turned on the radio and tuned in a local pop station.
“I assume we are going to the park,” I said, staring out the window.
“Not inside. We will be taking a ferry to an island,” he said with a thick accent.
“Why?” I asked.
“You will find out soon,” he said, smiling. He turned onto the causeway.
“How about I find out now?” I asked, blatantly irritated.
He laughed and shook his head. “Today you are the lowly employee, and I am boss. We do an errand, and you are done,” he said.
The traffic backed up about halfway to the park, three lanes of slowly moving vehicles.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“I am from Romania,” he said, in a mockingly majestic voice, pushing his chest out with exaggerated pride.
A memory of Thursday night returned. I remembered the girl at the bar spoke with an accent.
“That girl in my pictures from the bar was Romanian. Is she a friend of yours?” I asked. He shrugged. “What was her name? It is a nice racket you guys have going here.”
“It is your fault you drank yourself stupid and got burned,” he said, shrugging. “You Americans cannot hold your liquor.”
“I can hold my liquor just fine. Whatever you guys spiked my drink with is a different story. What was that?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said. He looked over at me, pulled down his sunglasses, raised an eyebrow, and actually winked. I gritted my teeth and looked out the side window.
As we approached, the traffic continued to inch forward, and the security booths came into view. We were surrounded by hundreds of cars filled with people who were excited to spend a gorgeous summer day at the amusement park with their friends and families, and I was driving there with this thug on some secret mission.
Two Jet Skis were traveling parallel to us in the cove, gliding across on the calm blue-green water. Large, colorful metal roller coasters rose above the northern skyline. A digital sign above the booths advertised season pass specials.
