The Dark Circle, page 18
“Is that important?”
“Whoever is behind the casino doesn’t want to be connected with his death,” I said. “Whatever roads we follow going forward, I think they’re going to lead back to Stoneberry. It’s almost certainly where the cult met for the orgy. And I know from what Diana Larrimore said that Frank Bull was not the leader of the cult. He only worked for him.”
“His friends and associates will be coming for you,” said Lauren.
“So we need to eliminate their threat before they eliminate me,” I said.
That night I endured another awful nightmare. As always, it started in Afghanistan with the betrayal by the provincial governor that led to my three men being tortured, mutilated, and murdered. But at some point, I found myself in Paris, when Diana Larrimore was sixteen and beautiful. I witnessed her own nightmare, and then I was lying with her in her grave after Hirka’s friends finished burying her, and I was struggling desperately to breathe.
I bolted awake, pouring sweat, my bandaged chest heaving with pain. Lauren was lying close beside me. Her soothing voice whispered in my ear, “It’s all right, Jake, it’s all right.”
I slowly calmed down until my breathing became regular again.
“One day at a time,” she whispered.
The next day I achieved a new milestone by walking all the way around the cavernous apartment without having to stop to hold onto something. After a second circuit, I began to feel my balance coming back.
“Jake Cantrell runs the three-hour mile,” called out Lauren on one of my passages by, and I showed her my middle finger.
I was recovering from the workout in one of the overstuffed easy chairs when she brought me a glass of orange juice and sat down next to me. I could see she had something on her mind, but the silence went on for a long time before she turned to me and said, “Do you ever think about wanting kids?”
I laughed.
Her brow furrowed and she said, “Seriously.”
“Okay,” I came back. “I thought about it a lot when I was in Afghanistan. Before my deployment, the woman I loved gave me a silver dog tag engraved “To Jake, from your constant heart.” We were supposed to get married as soon as I got back.”
“Did you let her know how you felt about having a family?”
“I never got the chance,” I said. “A few months later, I got her Dear John letter saying she had fallen in love with another man. He happened to be my best friend at the time. It hurt.”
Lauren stood up and walked to the window overlooking Brattle Street.
“I’m sorry, Jake. That had to be terribly rough.”
“What about you?” I asked. “What’s your fiancé like?”
“My ex-fiancé,” she said … I met him in Paris when I was a grad student there. He was an attaché at the American embassy, tall, handsome, gallant, kind. We were good together but then …”
“But then?”
She came back to my chair and gazed down at me.
“I fell in love with you, stupid.”
* * *
That afternoon, a male nurse removed the big bandage taped around my chest and replaced it with two small compression bandages that fit over the entrance and exit wounds.
It allowed me to wear a shirt comfortably again, and I put on a short-sleeved navy pullover from the batch Lauren had bought for me at a Bean outlet, along with khakis, jeans, socks, and underwear. It felt good to get back to living normally again.
“What do you want to do with this?” asked Lauren at one point, standing with a blue tote bag and holding it out with disgust on her face. When I unzipped it, the stale, metallic odor of dried blood rose from the tote. I dumped the contents in the kitchen sink.
“It’s what you had in your pockets when they stripped your clothes off in the helicopter,” she said.
There were three guns, and two of them were mine, the Colt .45 and the Czech .32 semi-automatic. The third one was Hirka’s Colt Python .357 magnum. The other two items were blood-stained cell phones.
I recognized mine immediately. A few seconds later, I realized that the other one must have been Diana Larrimore’s. I remembered picking it from her pile of clothing after shooting Hirka, before I began crawling on my hands and knees across the barn floor.
A twenty-watt bulb went on over my curdled brain.
“I wonder—” I began before Lauren interrupted me.
“—if you’ll need a pressure washer for those things,” she finished.
“What if the names are in the phone?”
“What names?”
“Diana Larrimore’s little black book that she talked about before Bull murdered her. It’s probably a long shot, but a lot of people put contact files in their phones, right?”
“Just about everybody,” said Lauren, “but they’re always password protected. We would need someone who has the technical capability to extract them.”
“That’s easy. Billy probably has every spook decoding toy on the market,” I said.
“I hate to say it,” she said, “but you already owe him two bottles of Jack Daniels for saving your life.”
“It could get expensive,” I agreed.
39
Lauren carefully cleaned the dried blood off the cell phone and gave it to one of Billy’s operatives. A day later, he called to say he was sending over Wayne Burpee. I asked if Wayne was bringing me tomato seeds, and Billy said he was his best decoding specialist and would report to us on what he had found in the phone.
Billy also said to destroy my old cell phone and give it to Wayne. He would have a new one for me with an untraceable number and better security protections. He urged me to be very careful in sharing the new number. I assured him I would.
By then I was feeling stronger and ready to leave the Cambridge apartment as soon as Lauren and I thought it was safe to do so. I wasn’t prepared for the decoding specialist when he appeared at the door to the apartment.
On the phone, Billy had told me Wayne Burpee was a genius. My first reaction after meeting him was that he looked about fifteen years old, with a sallow, ferret-shaped face, and green- and gold-dyed hair on an almost emaciated body. He probably weighed a hundred and ten pounds and was wearing green and gold coveralls over bare feet. He was carrying a green and gold backpack.
“I take it you’re a Celtics fan, Wayne,” I said.
He nodded and then gave me a sour look and said, “Is that phone yours?”
“No, I took it from someone who was killed.”
That seemed to make him feel a little better. He emptied his backpack on the dining room table. Along with the phone and a flash drive, it held a fairly thick folder that he opened to reveal a stack of printed pages.
“I’m surprised Mr. Spellman put me on something like this,” he said. “Nothing was even coded. All I needed to do was hack the password.”
“So what was in the phone?” I asked.
He patted the folder on the table in front of him.
“Three separate contact files, names, email addresses, and telephone numbers. The first one has over three hundred contacts. The other two are much shorter. The names in each contact file were alphabetized by whoever compiled the lists.”
“Anything else?” asked Lauren.
“The person’s calendar going back a year or so … also a lot of photographs and videos were saved in other folders,” he said, and suddenly looked uncomfortable again. “You should know I hate pornography. An electronic device starts out clean and ready to help people communicate. It’s sacred. It should never be corrupted. I hate people who do that. This cell phone was loaded with shit, mostly young girls.”
A fierce kind of innocence registered in his face. He obviously believed cell phones had a soul. It wasn’t much crazier than a lot of other religious beliefs in this world.
“Sorry you had to see it, Wayne,” said Lauren. “We’re trying to find the people responsible for those pictures and put them in jail.”
“The video material and photographs were corrupted at some point,” he added. “We’re attempting to restore the clarity in the lab, and I’ll forward those files to you as soon as the work is completed.”
“Thanks—it’s important,” said Lauren.
“There was a lot of other stuff, and I printed it out like I was asked,” he said, getting up to leave. “But I wish I had never seen this phone. Anyway, all the files are on the flash drive.”
Before he left, he pulled another cell phone out of his green and gold overalls and handed it to me with a printed card listing the phone’s number and password.
“This one is clean,” he said, as if he thought I might be planning to use it in another sex ritual. “Treat it with the respect it deserves,” he ordered.
When he was gone, Lauren and I divided up the contact files and began scanning the lists of names. We focused first on the two shorter lists. I could see from the area codes that most of them were located upstate, principally in the capitol region of Albany.
“Aside from Frank Bull and Arthur Hirka, I don’t recognize a single name,” I said.
“Me either,” said Lauren.
Together, we tackled the biggest contact file of nearly three hundred names. Based on the official email addresses of a number of them, they were people who worked for government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. There were also a lot of names that sounded like businesses.
“There are a half a dozen members of Congress on the list,” said Lauren, “a couple dozen state legislators, and a ton of local elected officials.”
“It doesn’t mean they’re dirty,” I said. “They could simply be lobbying targets. We need someone who might know if and where they fit in the power structure.”
“Your friend, Fab?”
“We can certainly trust him, and if he doesn’t know these people, he can probably find out about them from those who do.”
When I dialed Fab’s cell number from the scrambler phone, it rang a dozen times without going to voicemail. I was about to end the call when someone finally answered. Several seconds passed with silence at the other end.
“Fab?” I said. “This is Jake.”
I could now hear someone crying.
“It’s Kelly,” came her voice finally. “He’s hurt bad.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“At my apartment,” she said. “He didn’t want to go to the hospital.”
“Who did it?” I asked, figuring I already knew the answer.
“All because of your goddam dog,” she shouted. “He went over there to feed your goddam dog, and they beat the hell out of him.”
It wouldn’t have helped my cause if I told her I was recovering from a gunshot wound. Her man came first. I heard a rasping sound and then Fab’s voice.
“They were waiting for you, Jake,” he said, his words a little distorted as if he was having trouble pronouncing them. “There were three of them.”
I wanted to ask about Bug but thought better of it considering his condition.
“Your dog was gone,” he said, as if he knew what I was thinking.
“Are they still watching you?”
“I called Kelly to pick me up after they left, and she brought me back here. If they followed us, they’re better than good. I think we’re safe for now.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“I’ve felt worse.”
“Stay there for now. The cavalry is on the way.”
“I’m going back,” I said after ending the call.
“We both are,” said Lauren.
40
At five that afternoon, we arrived back in Groton in a rental car and went straight out to the cabin. I didn’t know what to expect after what had happened to Fab, so I first scouted for strange cars parked along the lake road.
Not seeing any, I pulled in at my next-door neighbor’s cottage. He only came out after Memorial Day—rarely even then—and had showed me where the key to the front door was hidden. It allowed me to periodically check up on his place.
I left Lauren locked behind the stout front door and with the .32 semi-automatic. Carrying my .45, I moved slowly through the tree line of blue spruce that separated his property from mine. Before emerging from the other end, I stopped to observe my cabin for a few minutes. Nothing moved behind the windows or outside the cabin. I walked toward it.
The front door had been smashed off its hinges and lay flat on the floor. Inside, the place had been wrecked. It looked like malicious destruction, something carried out for pleasure while they were waiting for me to arrive.
I quickly went through the rooms. All the glasses, cups, and plates in the kitchen lay shattered on the floor, alongside the scattered contents of the refrigerator. In the bedroom, all my clothes had been removed from the bureau and the closet and dumped on the bed. They reeked with the odor of urine. The books and personal photographs in the living room had been torn apart.
In truth, I had nothing of significant value in the place aside from Bug and, more recently, her new roommate, but there was no sign of them. I went out the porch door and briefly searched the woods up to the small ravine that marked the edge of the property line. They weren’t there.
I walked back to my neighbor’s cottage and told Lauren what I had found. She wondered if her apartment hadn’t been vandalized too, but a call to the Journal relieved her mind. Everything was safe there.
I drove to Kelly’s apartment, taking the time to explain to Lauren for the first time that she and I had been lovers until I broke off the relationship about three months earlier, and that she was now engaged to Fab. I said she was in her mid-forties, but didn’t go into the attributes that had made her a Playboy calendar girl twenty five years ago.
“At least you weren’t engaged like I was,” she said, smiling.
* * *
Kelly lived in a townhouse development called College Heights, which was near the St. Andrews campus and consisted of about thirty units on two floors. The architectural style was simple modern, with a picture window in each one facing out on the playground of an elementary school.
Kelly’s ground floor unit was screened by mature hydrangea bushes. I checked the parking lot and didn’t see anything worrisome there. We had stopped at a bakery, and Lauren had a bag full of bread and pastries.
Kelly had obviously been watching for us and opened the door before we knocked. I hoped there wouldn’t be any verbal fireworks, considering how worked up she had been over the phone.
I shouldn’t have worried. When I introduced Lauren as the publisher of the Groton Journal, I saw Kelly’s eyes give her a quick assessment, taking in the loose-fitting, black pants suit, with the only patch of color being the red silk scarf at her throat.
It wasn’t serious competition to Kelly’s own sleeveless white spandex bodysuit, cut off at her thighs and augmented by white high heels. It set off her honey tan and left nothing to the imagination with regard to her still stunning, long-limbed figure.
“Please come in,” she said politely. “Fab is in the bedroom resting.”
The apartment was immaculate, as always, with fresh lilies in a vase on the coffee table. The aroma from a pot of chili on the stove wafted from the kitchen. She made superb chili.
The bathroom off the tiny living room was just as I remembered it, with the knitted image of Barry Manilow still on the toilet bowl cover. The bedroom hadn’t changed either. Fab was lying in the big bed with his head and shoulders propped up on a supersize pillow.
Surrounding him was Kelly’s collection of stuffed animals and figures, a dozen or more, including Kermit the Frog, Barbie, Ken, Cinderella, Princess Di, Bambi, and several of the seven dwarfs. I could hear the echo of her voice after one of our lovemaking sessions when she said, “Jake, tell me you’ll always love me and that we’ll never get older.”
“You look beautiful, Buddy,” I said looking down at Fab.
His eyes fluttered open, at least the one that still could. The other was swollen shut and as red as a rotten apple. I could see why his voice had sounded slightly distorted on the phone. His jaw had been knocked slightly off-kilter. They had given him a serious beating.
“Fuck … you,” he managed to get out with a grotesque attempt at a grin.
“Why couldn’t you feed your own goddamn dog?” demanded Kelly, her anger surging back as she viewed his ruined face.
“Jake was badly wounded,” said Lauren.
“I don’t see any wound,” said Kelly peevishly.
“He was shot in the chest,” she said, “and is still in recovery. We came back here as soon as we got word of what happened.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Fab.
“Would you recognize them if you saw them again?” I asked.
He nodded and said, “For sure the guy who did this.”
He held up his left arm and turned it over. The cluster of circular burn wounds ran all the way up from the back of his hand to his shoulder and looked like the suckers of a giant octopus tentacle.
“The guy who burned me smokes Cuban panatelas and looks like a surfer on steroids, with a bushy blond hairdo,” said Fab. “He did all that with the cigars while I was tied up on the couch for the three hours and they waited for you. He enjoys it.”
“What kind of car were they driving?”
“Muscle car … Pontiac GTO.”
“I’ve met Goldilocks,” I said. “We’ll reciprocate when we catch up to him.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
“Fab, I could use your help again.”
Kelly strode across the room and stood in front of him, as if blocking the idea with her physical presence.
“No way,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“What do you need?” said Fab.
I told him about the contact lists we had retrieved from the cell phone files. I didn’t give him any of the background on Diana Larrimore or the details of the shoot-out and her murder. It would only put him in more jeopardy.
“We believe some of these names are involved in sex trafficking and may be investors or shareholders in the Stoneberry Casino,” said Lauren. “Do you recognize any of these people?”
