by Matt Lincoln
I blew a raspberry as I stared at it—a file for a middle-aged woman in Maine who was friends with Chester and Ashley before they disappeared. She’d been dodging my calls.
“That’s a happy thought,” Birn said sardonically, swiveling back around in his seat and reaching for one of his own papers, though they weren’t stacked on his desk like mine were. Rather, they were spilling all over the place across it, even branching out into Muñoz’s territory a bit, though she didn’t seem to mind.
A phone rang, the sound emanating from Diane’s office, and with a huff, she disappeared back inside.
“I don’t know what she has to complain about,” Muñoz said bitterly after she had gone. “At least she can get away from them by locking herself in there.”
This was true enough, though I had more than an inkling that Diane was also sleeping in her office more nights than not, which meant that she was even more overworked than we were. Not good news, considering how uninspiring that work had been lately. This case had predictably turned out to be a marathon instead of a sprint. No one had been on another case in ages.
“Hey, so what about that map you told me about?” Holm said, whispering as he leaned forward again. “The one from the Hawthorne house.”
The Hawthorne house was where we found all the artifacts from the Dragon’s Rogue, along with the carcass of a fake version of the ship the Hollands had intended to use to get me off their trail.
The map was another story, seemingly hand-drawn by the pirate Grendel. My hope was that the marked locations on it along the eastern coast of the United States and its surrounding islands, and even parts of Canada, would lead me to the Dragon’s Rogue once and for all.
“What about it?” I asked, hardly paying attention as my eyelids began to droop at the thought of spending another long day going through files and trying to get in touch with people who had no intention of talking to me.
“Well, you kept saying weeks ago that you were going to go to every location and figure out where that ship is,” he said, his excitement growing as he spoke.
“It’s not that easy, Holm,” I sighed, shaking my head and looking up at him from the Maine woman’s file. “For one thing, it’s a really old map, and the marked locations aren’t exactly what I would call exact. I’ll need an expert to help me figure out where they are.”
“So do that!” Holm cried, though not loud enough that the FBI agents could hear. “Tessa’s friend can help you, right?”
He was speaking of George, the old man who Tessa Bleu had enlisted to help me track down Grendel’s journal in the first place while I was in New York covertly helping MBLIS deal with some funding issues caused by the mob there.
“Yes, but I’d need to go see him to do that,” I sighed. “I already had Percy look at it while I was in New Orleans, too. His expertise is books, though, so he couldn’t tell me much. He did confirm I have the real journal now, though.”
Percy was a friend of George’s who helped me figure out that the first journal sent to me from Virginia was a fake. He was a nice old man, and I’d been glad to see him again and overjoyed that I had the real journal this time, but it disappointed me that he couldn’t help with the map.
“What are you two whispering about over there?” Birn asked us with a mock tone and look of suspicion.
“Leaving us out of anything fun?” Muñoz added, calling out to us past her partner.
“More fun than anything we’ve got going on here these days,” Holm shot back with a twinkle in his eye.
“Ah, they’re talking about that ship again,” Birn said with a knowing nod. “When are you going to let us in on all that action, eh, Marston?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, turning my torso around in my chair to face him.
“Come on, now, we know the Hollands are after that ship of yours, too,” Birn pointed out. “So now it’s official business. Diane said as much when she got off the phone with you when you were in Virginia.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, still not quite catching on to his meaning.
“So, when are we going to get out there and find it?” Birn asked, rubbing his long hands together expectantly. “I call shotgun.”
“I… I…” I sputtered, not sure how to respond to this.
“Ah, look, he doesn’t want to share,” Muñoz teased, shooting a pouty expression my way.
“That’s not it,” I said defensively, though if I were honest with myself, it was true.
The search for the Dragon’s Rogue had been passed down to me from my grandfather, and for a long time after he passed, it had become something of a solo endeavor for me in my free time. Then, when the remains of the ship’s original owner, an ancestor of mine named Lord Jonathan Finch-Hatton, washed up in a cave off the coast of Miami to be found by an unsuspecting photojournalist, Tessa had become a large part of my search.
Sure, others had gotten involved here and there, most notably Holm being that he was my partner. But by and large, I thought of this as a thing for Tessa and me to share together. I supposed that it was only natural that more people would be brought into the fold now that the Dragon’s Rogue was connected to a big MBLIS case.
“Come on, now, why don’t you talk to Diane about it?” Holm asked, latching onto this idea with predictable enthusiasm. “We could all go out to one of those places on the map and try to track this thing down. Or at least you and me, if she doesn’t want to spare us all. She can’t say it’s not related to the Holland case since they’re looking for it, too, and it’s not like we’re getting anything done here.”
“We are getting something done here,” I said with an exasperated sigh. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but the more we go through these files and chase down bad leads, the closer we get to the one that’s actually going to pan out. Taking half our labor force or more off of that is a big ask.”
“Come on. You can’t really consider this a valuable use of our time?” Holm complained, gesturing at the lopsided pile of files sitting atop his own desk.
“Of course it is,” I shot back. “But I agree it doesn’t feel like it. Diane warned us that it would be like this, remember? We have to get it done. This is an FBI’s Most Wanted List case now. There are going to be more dead ends than we can count. That’s how we work a case like this.”
“You can say that again,” Birn said sullenly, swiveling back around in his chair to face his own desk and files. “Dead end, after dead end, after dead end…”
“After dead end,” Muñoz finished for him sullenly.
“Come on, will you just talk to Diane about it?” Holm pleaded.
“No,” I said quickly, with a curtness to my tone that communicated this was the end of the conversation. “Besides, the Hollands are on the run now. They’re probably not even thinking about the Dragon’s Rogue anymore.”
The truth was, I’d already talked to Diane about it shortly after I got back from New Orleans, and again a couple of weeks before that day. Both times, she’d emphasized that she needed all hands on deck here in Miami until further notice. She was right, of course. The Hollands probably had put their search for the ship on hold for now, so sending us off to look for it on agency time wouldn’t do much to help us find them.
“They could be, though,” Holm quipped, unable to help himself. “We don’t know that for sure. They could be somewhere on that old map as we speak.”
“And if they are, what we’re doing here will lead us to them just as well,” I replied. “The difference is that if we go, we’re missing out on the opportunity to find them if they aren’t one of those places, but somewhere else entirely.”
Holm opened up his mouth as if to respond, but I cut him off.
“That’s it, Holm,” I said. “We’re needed here. And we have work to do.”
3
Ethan
We worked in silence for a couple of hours until it was the time that most people in Miami were probably waking up to make their way into wo
rk. As much as we’d been working late on this case, we’d also been coming in early.
The FBI agents weren’t quite so silent, however. They were constantly humming with energy that we didn’t seem to have. Holm had joked more than once that they might’ve sucked it right out of us and taken it for themselves.
Diane said that it was just a different way of operating. The FBI was used to this kind of slog. They thrived on it, even. We were used to catching the bad guys and then moving on to the next case in a clean-cut fashion.
We were also accustomed to always being on the move and catching up on our sleep in between cases. These guys sat at their desks more often than we did, but they also never seemed to hit a lag in their workload. Apples and oranges, I guessed.
I also got the sense that they liked infringing on our territory. They wanted to be the first ones to catch a big break in this case. It was a weird competition for them, and it was infecting everyone’s attitude.
By the time Diane reemerged from her office around eight in the morning, my eyelids were drooping again. I sent several more messages the way of the woman in Maine, as well as half a dozen others on the New Orleans list, and then I pulled out my laptop to sift through their social media accounts.
Most of them were still active since I started contacting them. This told me that they likely weren’t involved with the criminal side of the Hollands’ operations after all. They would’ve gone dark if they had been, just like Chester and Ashley themselves.
That didn’t mean that they wouldn’t have something useful to tell me, even if they didn’t understand what it was they knew. Then there were those select few who had abandoned their digital footprint in recent weeks. Those interested me even more. That all made the fact that they weren’t forthcoming with me all the more annoying.
I’d gone to see several of them personally over the past several weeks if they were in Florida or any of the surrounding states. None of those had been able to tell me much, except for one guy from Tampa, who I hadn’t been able to find at all. He was one of the ones who had also gone dark online, so he was at the top of my list of people who were probably involved in the criminal side of things in some way.
What I’d learned from the contacts mostly corroborated what we already knew: that Chester and Ashley Holland were just one of several sets of carefully crafted personas that these two individuals had adopted over the years and that they mostly dabbled in real estate as a cover for their drug operations.
The corroboration was helpful in that it painted a clearer picture. But I was itching for something more immediately interesting, and I knew that everyone else was, too, regardless of the agency from which they came.
This is why when Diane came back out of her office, positioned herself at the front of the room, and clapped her hands loudly to get all of our attention, all chatter and sleepiness in the crowded room died down at once.
“Thanks,” she said with characteristic gruffness, nodding to us in thanks. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with Interpol.”
“Interpol,” I heard Muñoz breathe, not exactly quietly, and just like that, the whole room was abuzz again, leaving Diane clearly annoyed that she’d thanked us so soon for being quiet.
“Interpol?” Birn asked, his characteristically booming voice carrying over all the chatter. “As in Europe?”
“Do you know of another Interpol, Agent Birn?” Diane asked coolly, rolling her eyes at him.
“I mean, no, but Europe? We haven’t dealt with them before, have we?” he explained.
“Not that I’m aware of, and certainly not in my tenure here,” Diane said, casting a wary glance in the direction of the FBI agents. “But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t more than capable of rising to the challenge.”
Birn immediately shut his mouth at this, realizing what he’d done. The last thing we wanted was to remind the FBI that we were a smaller agency with less experience and resources than they had. This was our case, and they were just helping—no reason to give them ammunition to steal it out from under us.
“We did know they could turn up anywhere,” I reminded everyone. “This isn’t entirely unexpected.”
“Did they turn up, though?” one of the FBI agents, a surly guy named Smith who was the one who spilled coffee on Holm when they first arrived, asked. “What did Interpol say?”
“We don’t know anything for sure, yet,” Diane said cautiously, giving a deferential nod to Smith, which I could tell even from the opposite desk made my partner’s blood boil. “We’re right not to get ahead of ourselves.”
“But what do we know?” Muñoz asked.
“We think they were spotted in Scotland,” she said, pursing her lips as this news sent the room abuzz all over again. Then, holding up both her arms and motioning downward with her hands, “Settle down, settle down. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Scotland?” Holm repeated over the chatter, which was now abating for the third time in as many minutes. “What the hell are they doing in Scotland?”
He shook his head and looked over at me in disbelief. This was interesting. I’d give him that. I knew theoretically that the Hollands could be anywhere, but for some reason, I’d always assumed they would turn up camped out on some island somewhere, not in Europe.
“That’s what we don’t know yet, though it’s not out of the question that they own property there, too, under aliases we haven’t uncovered,” Diane explained with a shrug.
“More aliases?” Birn asked. “How can there be more aliases? These people have going on twenty identities apiece already!”
“They’re sophisticated operatives,” an FBI agent named Dobbs pointed out in a suitably pompous tone. “This kind of thing isn’t unheard of in our line of work.”
Holm rolled his eyes and made a gagging motion in my direction, but I motioned for him to stop. The FBI agents were facing us, after all, given that Diane was standing in front of our desks. We didn’t need them hating us even more than they already did.
“This is all of our lines of work,” Diane said, giving Dobbs a pointed look, and he shut his mouth. As much as the other agents liked to mess with us, they seemed terrified of Diane. With good reason, too. She was nothing if not intimidating. And she knew her stuff to boot. There was no messing with her, and while she was watching, there was no messing with her agents, either.
“How do we know this isn’t just another dead end like everything else we’ve been working on?” Muñoz asked, and she had a point. I reminded myself not to get too excited about this too quickly. Otherwise, we might be in for a letdown. We were all itching for a big break, but looking for one where it wasn’t would just waste valuable time.
“Good question,” Diane said, nodding approvingly to her. “Apparently, Interpol’s had this lead for a while and is just now bringing it to us since they’re pretty sure it’s not a dead-end at this point.”
“Wait, they’re not giving us everything when they get it?!” Holm cried in protest. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work, is it?”
A few of the FBI agents behind us snickered, and I turned around long enough to shoot them a dirty look of my own.
“That’s how it works with the tip line here, but not internationally,” Diane explained, shaking her head and giving the other agents another look of warning, as well. “They have to sort through their own tips and follow up on them since they’re the ones in the area.”
“If they gave us everything, we’d be swamped with dead-end leads we couldn’t even figure out were dead ends because we wouldn’t be able to follow up on them,” Agent Corey, who was slightly nicer than the other ones by my estimation, explained in a tone that wasn’t unkind. “Unless you want to be flying all over the world on a wild goose chase that you have no chance of winning.”
Holm looked like he might not actually be opposed to that setup, and knowing him, he probably wasn’t, but there was no denying that this wasn’t a great strategy for
finding the Hollands.
“Got it, thanks,” I said, forcing a smile in Corey’s direction.
“Are there a lot of international tips, though?” Birn asked, his brow furrowed thoughtfully. “I would imagine that more Americans are paying attention to the news on this case than anywhere else, given that this is where the Hollands are actually from.”
“And where they committed crimes,” Muñoz added. “With the exception of some islands of the US coast.”
“That’s true,” Diane relented with another curt nod. “And international agencies certainly aren’t getting the volume of incoming tips as we are here. But they’re getting a fair amount. Remember, we put out calls about these people to every friendly government and intelligence agency in the world. We knew they could have fled anywhere their money would take them. And they have a lot of money.”
“So what did they say?” I asked, impatient to hear exactly what was going on with this lead. My tiredness and annoyance with the FBI and the slow roll of this case had suddenly left me. We might finally be getting somewhere, and my mind was buzzing with all the different possibilities.
“Well, I talked to a guy in Scotland who’s been working on this lead for about a week,” Diane said, and I noticed that she looked a little more invigorated herself now, and at this point, the persistent bags under her eyes slightly lessened. “A guy in a small town along the coast called in and asked about the Hollands. He’s seen their pictures on the news at a bar one night and recognized them. He sounds like an odd character. He doesn’t even own a TV himself.”
It sounded like I might like this guy.
“Sounds like a crackpot,” Holm said, predictably.
“That’s what they thought,” Diane said, letting slip a low laugh. “It took them a while to follow up, actually, but the guy kept calling.”
“How long’s a while?” Birn asked warily, and Diane let out a sigh.
