The wall on either side of the flat-screen TV is covered with corkboard. Pinned to it are skillful drawings, maps, photographs, elaborately detailed directions, and a cursory review is all it takes for me to know what I’m looking at. A home invasion. One that would end in flames.
And I can’t let Fran see this. But I can’t prevent it as I hear her footsteps, and then she’s walking in.
“Backup is on the way . . . ,” she stops midsentence when she sees what I’m looking at. “Good God . . . What the . . . ?” stepping closer, stunned.
“I’m sorry you had to find out like this. That either of us did . . .”
“Is that . . . ?”
“Afraid so. I know it’s hard to take . . .”
Shocked, she stammers, “But why . . . ?”
“I can’t tell you for sure, and we may never know definitively. But likely it’s been in the works for months at least. And my family was the primary target. Or I am,” and possibly also Carme but I’m not going to bring her up.
“And what? My family’s just effing collateral damage?” Fran’s fear turns to fury.
“Possibly. This was supposed to go down three days ago. December 5th at 0200 hours as you can see from one of the schematics.”
“And it would have been just Easton and me,” her flashlight whites out the drawing of her family’s small cottage on the other side of the garden from where my parents and I live. “Tommy was out of town, still is . . . Not that it would have mattered,” she says about her accountant husband who hasn’t been home for a while.
“The gas cans we saw out back in the shed are for more than just the generator,” I tell her, and I don’t need to spell it out.
Neva’s personal fixer planned to torch Chase Place after taking down all of us, probably with one of his machine guns. And Fran looks like she might throw up.
“If he’s the dead guy inside the Denali, then he’s not hurting anyone again,” I reassure her.
“Who else could it be?” she declares.
“It’s him,” I agree. “And the reason he showed up around here is because of Neva Rong.”
“Good luck proving it.”
“We never have and probably won’t,” I reply, and that’s how it feels.
She gets away with murder, and has for years.
“But why would he kill himself?” Fran has her back to me, standing rigidly in front of the corkboard, directing her light at everything on it. “Since when do psychopaths commit suicide?”
“They don’t usually,” and I can’t tell her the truth about what really happened at the Point Comfort Inn. “But they’re afraid of getting caught. Maybe he had reason to think that might be in the cards,” and I sound like quite the profiler as I continue to steer her wrong.
“Based on what I’m seeing in here, he wasn’t very worried,” she replies angrily. “He doesn’t seem like someone who felt anything at all, good God! At 0200 hours this past Thursday,” she repeats, incredulous. “All of us would have been home asleep. Except for you,” almost accusingly. “You would have been safely tucked away at Dodd Hall.”
“But he couldn’t have known that when he was making his plan,” I reply as a matter of fact. “Even I didn’t know I was going to end up there,” I point out, and the reality of what might have happened is unthinkable. “That was a last-minute plan because of the cyberattack,” I offer more misinformation from my origin story.
Fran doesn’t know and never will that I wasn’t isolated in Dodd Hall simply because NASA got hacked. There’s no reason to think that Neva or her hired killer were tipped off about what was in store. He may have tracked me to the Point Comfort Inn but he didn’t know anybody would be waiting behind the ice machine.
He hadn’t a clue that my sister was working out of a room there or she couldn’t have ambushed him the way she did.
“. . . I saw what was in the bathtub right before I walked in here,” Fran is saying as I hear car engines outside the trailer.
Blue and red lights throb around the edges of blackout shades, and I hear the thudding of car doors, of footsteps in a hurry.
“And the weapons, the homemade cement anchors,” Fran says. “God only knows how many people have vanished without a trace,” she’s a dark shape in the doorway as boots sound on the porch. “This was someone we didn’t stand a chance with!”
“It’s best not to dwell on it,” I return to the desk with its 4 drawers, shining my light on the top left one, sliding it open, not letting on how surprised I am.
“Well, let me go deal with the Hampton guys,” Fran says as she leaves. “Hey!” she calls out to them from the hallway. “There’s two of us back here, and the power’s turned off! The stuff you’re most interested in is in the living room, the kitchen . . . ,” she lets them know as I open other drawers, lifting out shooting logs, dozens of them.
The pocket-size notebooks are identical, each with a black cover neatly dated and numbered in white Magic Marker. Some haven’t been used, the rest are inside ziplock sandwich bags containing small plastic trinkets I recognize as Cracker Jack toys. Not new ones but from the good ole days when you never knew what fun prize might await inside the box of caramelized peanuts and popcorn.
There are whistles, charms, rings, figurines, games, stickers, mini comic books that bring back memories, most of the journals meriting but one prize. But some baggies contain multiple tiny trophies including the one for the hitman’s planned attack on Chase Place. The accompanying log, Number 42, was started in early September when he “made another drive-by” of my family’s farm.
“. . . It’s going to be challenging but not impossible, very important not to rush as these aren’t the typical quarry,” he writes in the precise penmanship of an engineer. “I believe in this case the key is to create a diversion that causes the targets to leave the residences, thereby eliminating all of them in one sweep,” he completely objectifies us. “That way I don’t have the headache of dealing with burglar alarms, a screaming kid and all the rest . . .”
He goes on to describe his clever idea “of borrowing the cat, then bringing it back at the appointed time, and letting it loose,” he pens. “I could do something to make sure it starts yowling, and lights on, everyone up and out. Welcome home, kitty, kitty! And that’s all she wrote. Ha . . . !” He seemed to enjoy his journaling.
Flipping through pages, I find mentions of him visiting our property in the dead of night, watching windows, learning our routines and habits, making certain he carried no “electrical gadgets” that could be detected. He’d leave his truck out of sight not too far away, and when he mentions “making friends with the cat,” meaning Fran’s orange tabby named Schroeder, I can barely stand it.
The 7 brightly colored vintage prizes the hitman picked for us are figurines of a uniformed policewoman and a cat. A pencil sharpener. A typewriter. An airplane. A rocket and an astronaut. It’s not hard to know who Neva Rong’s hired gun had in mind for each, and obviously, he’d been gathering intel for a while.
There are 42 shooting logs, one per job, and the 79 Cracker Jack toys indicate how many victims. The entries begin on March 13, 2013, ending on December 4, certain dates shocking in what they imply.
28
I START WITH the most recent completed job. And as disciplined as Neva’s hired thug may have been to stay off the radar the way he did, his fatal flaw was he couldn’t resist preserving a detailed record.
No doubt it was the best part of his violent fantasies, allowing him to savor and relive his vile accomplishments. It’s apparent that he was obsessively careful and meticulous, never in a rush to get the job done “just right.” He planned months in advance in some cases, and was quicker on the trigger in other “less intense jobs.”
He doesn’t identify hi
s victims, their addresses or occupations, and he didn’t need to for me to know who he’s talking about when I skim his account of the double hit in the Houston area 7 weeks ago. The first victim was Hank Cougars, Number 40, a beer mug charm included with his log. Referred to as an “intoxicated male,” he was out of work, lived in a trailer and drove a 2016 silver Denali.
On October 28 at 2 o’clock in the morning, the hitman “picked the trailer’s back door lock,” he writes. “I was able to use a bobby pin. Stupid people who don’t believe in dead bolts!” He then entered undetected to discover his intended victim passed out in bed. “I finished the job with a pillow, butchering the body at the major joints, taping up everything in trash bags” as if it were a deer he’d hunted.
Renting a boat, he weighed down the remains with anchors, dropping his morbid bundles into Trinity Bay. He camped out in the dead man’s trailer for the next three nights, and on Halloween he set out in the stolen Denali after his real target and reason for coming to Houston. Pandora aerospace engineer Noah Bishop was inside a bar the hitman doesn’t name but I know he’s talking about Woody’s.
A popular NASA watering hole near Johnson Space Center, the place was hopping with Halloween-related events. A lot of hopeful astronaut candidates were in town for the next round of interviews at Johnson Space Center, including my sister. I’d been there the week before for the same thing because NASA wanted us separated to see how we would do without each other.
The night of October 31, Carme and Noah happened to be at Woody’s but not together, and some of this I know from what Dick told me earlier in the week. My sister was in a private room with other astronaut candidates. Noah was at the bar with a female colleague and friend from Pandora’s Houston facility.
At almost 10:00 p.m., he, his friend and Carme ended up in the parking lot at the same time. They got into an argument that likely was fueled by alcohol. Soon after, my sister returned to the restaurant while Noah drove his friend home, dropping her off. He didn’t go inside the house, and headed in the direction of his Shore Acres neighborhood, the hitman following.
Waiting until they were on a dark, deserted residential street, he sped up and “passed the target’s vehicle, dropping 6 tire spikes out the window. What an embarrassment of riches, three flats!” he fairly chortles. “A clean shot to the head, and they might find him and his rental car some day at the bottom of Clear Lake. Or maybe they won’t . . . ,” he concludes in log Number 41, accompanied by a toy pistol.
Since Halloween night there’s been no sign of the Pandora aerospace engineer alive or dead, and that’s caused considerable trouble for Carme. Under a cloud of suspicion, she’s wanted for questioning at the very least. I don’t know why she and Noah Bishop were arguing or if they knew each other. But she’s not the one who disappeared him.
Neva’s hitman did, eliminating him the same way he had Pebo Sweeny several months earlier on August 7. In his case, it wasn’t a job but “an obstruction to progress, and a means to an end,” I read in shooting log Number 39, a toy figurine of an owl inside that baggie.
Sweeny is described simply, unimportantly as “an elderly male living alone on a remote property in a trailer park in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia.” After the hitman “choked him out and prepared him for disposal,” he rented a 21-foot Sailfish motorboat. “Other than being hot, it was a good ride,” he says, adding that all went according to plan when he deposited body parts in the Chesapeake Bay.
Next, he cruised around the eastern edge of the peninsula near Plum Tree Island, swinging around into Back River, passing by my family’s farm, what he refers to as the “Big Prize.”
“I’m going to give you dates and general locations for each,” I say to ART as I get ready to pack up the logs and their Cracker Jack treats. “What we’re looking for is anything unusual that might have happened. Deaths, injuries, other types of violations and intimidation.”
A drowning in Kiln, Mississippi . . . A house fire in Las Vegas . . . two more in Houston . . . A jump from a balcony in Orlando, Florida . . . Accidental falls from heights in New York City and Seattle, Washington . . . A questionable suffocation with a dry-cleaning bag in Ogden, Utah . . . A pipe bomb in Silicon Valley . . . A drive-by shooting in Pasadena, California . . . One in Huntsville, Alabama . . .
ART shows me tragedy after tragedy, almost all of them occurring in locations that are hubs in the aerospace world. I monitor the depressing crawls going by in my smart lenses, realizing not every victim died. There are multiple nonlethal cases of break-ins, vandalism, arson, blasting a shotgun through someone’s window, of muggings, maimings, and the implication is obvious.
The hitman was a thug, a goon, and killing wasn’t his only assignment or goal. It wasn’t his intention Christmas Eve three years ago when he followed his targets “into a tunnel that runs deep under the water, ships passing over on top of us . . . ,” he writes, and I don’t have to flip through many pages of notes and diagrams to know exactly what happened on the worst night of Fran Lacey’s life.
Driving home with Easton who was three at the time, they were returning from supper and a candlelight service in Portsmouth. It was close to midnight, he was asleep in his seat as they crossed under the Chesapeake Bay, the 4-lane tunnel empty except for the pickup truck that passed them.
Suddenly, it cut in front, and as Fran hit the brakes, her tires blew, two of them as it would turn out. One of those strokes of bad luck that happens in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in this case the wrong person offered roadside assistance. Or that’s been the assumption.
00:00:00:00:0
THE MAN in the pickup truck stopped, and Fran remembers him as broad shouldered and tall, clean shaven and bald.
Maybe in his 30s, maybe older, she wasn’t sure after the fact. He had on a Bass Pro Shops fishing cap, amber-tinted glasses, and she didn’t get a good look at his face. She didn’t have time to think about the pistol in her fanny pack before he temporarily blinded her with a blast from a powerful LED flashlight while shoving a gun to the back of her head.
Forcing mother and son into the cargo area of Fran’s disabled SUV, he zip-tied and gagged them. She remembers that he did all this silently and with astonishing speed, spending at most 10 minutes with them. Possibly as few as 5, then he cut the engine, turned on the flashers, and she heard him speed off.
Later she would tell me it seemed like an eternity as she lay there, her heart hammering, trying to free herself to no avail as she listened to the occasional car going past, nobody stopping until a state trooper did. The entire incident lasted no more than an hour, and from the beginning the story hasn’t made a lot of sense.
I never completely bought that robbery was the goal. The man in the fishing cap took nothing but the cash in Fran’s wallet, less than 50 dollars, and didn’t want her Walther PPK pistol or police credentials. Your average Joe criminal wouldn’t leave either or think of using a high-lumen flashlight to disable someone.
Since no tire spikes were recovered from the scene, I can only conclude that he collected them before leaving. Rather much like gathering his brass after shooting someone, and I don’t know if Fran’s going to feel better or worse when I tell her. Returning to the living room, I find it grandly illuminated in battery-powered lighting.
The trailer doesn’t look any more inviting, maybe less as I pass through to the loud tearing and rattling of heavy paper. Camera flashes are going off, police dressed in protective Tyvek wrapping up weapons and ammunition, and carrying them outside to a crime scene truck.
I walk out the open doorway, down the porch steps, making my way through the sloppy wintry mess as a K-9 unit pulls up, diesel engines rumbling, the sound of the dog barking reminding me of Mr. Owl. I find myself scanning the trees, the sky, looking for him at the same time I wait to hear from Lex.
If I don’t pretty
soon, I’m going to do something about it, and I hope he and Nonna are okay. I head toward a cigarette glowing like a tiny orange coal, Fran by her Tahoe with Major Pepper, and I remember that after the incident in the tunnel, she started smoking again and swearing more than ever.
She quit going to the gym and church, eats and drinks whatever she wants, can be as mean as a snake, and won’t get away with any of it forever.
“So much for a Sunday night when most people are furloughed or having fun,” I say when I reach them. “It’s no wonder I have no social life,” my same lame joke, and truth be told I don’t have a social life on any day or night of the week.
“You never know what’s in your backyard,” Major Pepper says grimly, and it’s rare he’s not in uniform.
Dressed casually in corduroys, a ski jacket and boots, he’s busy on his phone, bombarded I can tell. Second in command of the Hampton Police Division, he also works closely with NASA, is in his 50s, nice looking, and drives a racing-yellow Corvette.
“This was a good find, Captain,” he says to me with a congratulatory nod. “Good job following up on a tip,” as if that’s all I did.
“I’m not seeing much that’s good about it except there’s one less a-hole in the world, I guess,” I reply, and I ask Fran to open the back of her truck so we can put away our heavy gear and weapons.
I think we can do without ballistic helmets and vests, gas masks, submachine guns, and she locks them up. I tell her I need a moment alone, and we walk through snow and slush to my Chase Car as ART turns it on, and I make my secret motion to free the locks.
“What have you got?” Fran eyes the bags of journals I’m carrying. “And where are you taking whatever it is?”
Spin (Captain Chase) Page 23
