by Matt Lincoln
“Oh, no,” I said quickly as I approached him, shaking my head. “I’m taking some of that time off after all. Tessa called me last night. She has some time to head to Virginia to deal with the journal thing. I was just letting Diane know I would be gone and making sure that she could spare me.”
“Ah, I think we’ll manage without you,” Holm scoffed, waving a hand in the air dismissively and cracking a grin. “You don’t think you’re that important, do you?”
“Well, Diane did put Birn and Muñoz on desk duty,” I pointed out with a half-grin of my own.
“Desk duty?” Holm repeated with a grimace. “Man, after all that they’ve been through, they come back, and she puts them on desk duty? That’s got to hurt.”
“It’s for their own good,” I chuckled. “Birn’s still a laundry list of injuries, and I doubt Muñoz is much better. They both should’ve taken more time.”
“You’re one to talk,” Holm said, arching an eyebrow at me, and I laughed. “You got shot in Haiti and went on another mission without sitting still for all of two days.”
“Fair enough,” I relented. “Though my injuries weren’t nearly as bad as theirs. And I am taking some time now.”
“Taking some time to go on a mission of your own design,” my partner said dryly. “Just like the last two times that you took time off.”
“That first one didn’t count,” I said, holding my hands up and shaking my head. “We were actually trying to go on vacation then. A case just got in the way.”
“You’re trying to convince me that it’s better to not even try to use your time off to… I don’t know, take time off?” Holm asked, raising both eyebrows at me this time.
“I guess that wasn’t the best retort,” I chuckled, realizing how this must’ve sounded. “But either way, this won’t be like New York. Just a research expedition. No funny business.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Holm scoffed, rolling his eyes at me.
“I guess I deserved that,” I muttered.
“No new breaks then, I take it?” Holm asked, gesturing at the front doors to our MBLIS office.
“Actually, there was,” I admitted, feeling more than a little guilty that I was running off to look for the Dragon’s Rogue with Tessa when my colleagues might need me on the Holland case. “A possible sighting at the Atlanta airport a couple of days ago. The picture’s pretty fuzzy, though, so we can’t be sure that it was them. And they only really got a decent look at the man, if that.”
“Damn, really?” Holm asked, his eyes widening slightly at this news as he fiddled with his car keys between his fingers. “And you’re running off on us now, Marston? More leads for me, I guess, with Birn and Muñoz on desk duty. Still, I’m surprised you’d leave all the good stuff for me.”
“Well, the lead’s not that great, actually,” I said quickly. “And Diane promised to call me the second any new information came in. I’ll just be a short flight away. You’re not stealing any cases from me. Mark my words there.”
“I guess I’ll just have to keep sharing the glory with the likes of you, then,” Holm remarked with an exaggerated sigh, examining his fingernails.
“I guess you’ll just have to figure out how to manage it,” I laughed, shaking my head at him.
“So tell me about this lead,” he said, his eyes wide and his demeanor suddenly serious again. “You said they were seen two days ago? Why are we just hearing about this now?”
“Don’t ask,” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Or at least don’t ask Diane. She’s been complaining about it all morning, and she wasn’t exactly happy about it when she was on the phone with the FBI guy.”
“Wait, are they trying to stiff us again?” Holm asked warily, placing his hands on his hips. “They’re keeping intel from us just so they get this case for themselves? Even I’m surprised at that.”
“No, no, no,” I said quickly, shaking my head. “Nothing like that. Their process is just slower there because they cover more ground. Diane explained it to us. Just because she’s not happy about it doesn’t mean she actually blames them. Didn’t stop her from yelling at the guy on the phone, though.”
“Classic Diane,” Holm chuckled, rolling his eyes. “So are we sure it was them?”
I quickly got Holm up to speed on the whole situation, and his reaction was no different from mine or Birn’s had been.
“And yet you choose this troubled time to leave us to look for buried treasure,” Holm said in mock disappointment when I was finished, shaking his head at me and putting his hands on his hips.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I sighed. “Look, you joke, but I don’t feel great about it either. But I already told Tessa we were going, and she’s on her way to Virginia now! Besides, Diane kept telling me that it was fine and I should go, even when I kept offering to stay.”
“I guess you won’t be that far away,” Holm shrugged. “But don’t think for a second that I won’t hold this over your head for the rest of time.”
He pointed at me and broke out into another grin, and I laughed and shook my head as I clapped his shoulder.
“Hold down the fort while I’m gone, okay?” I asked. “And call the second anything interesting happens. I mean it. Even if Diane doesn’t want to bother me with it, I’m counting on you to keep me updated. I don’t want to miss a thing.”
I gave him a stern look.
“Alright, alright, I promise,” he assured me with another laugh.
“I mean it,” I reiterated, pointing at him this time. “No hanging out on me just because you want all the credit for yourself. This case is too important not to have all of us on board.”
“What do you take me for?” Holm asked, pressing a hand to his chest and acting as if he was offended, but he was smiling.
“Do you really want me to answer that question?” I asked him.
“I guess not,” he chuckled. “But seriously, I’ll call you if anything happens, I promise. And I’m sure that Diane will too.”
“I don’t know. She’s been angling for us all to take a breather for a while now,” I pointed out. “And like most perfectionists, she has a tendency to think she can do it all on her own.”
“That is true,” Holm relented. “Though, to be fair, she could probably run the office all on her own if she wanted to.”
“I don’t know about that,” I chuckled. “But she might certainly try. Anyway, yeah, I won’t be that far away, and I can meet you anywhere if we catch a case.”
“Just watch, the second you land in Virginia, you’re just going to have to turn back around and fly somewhere else to go after the Hollands,” Holm teased. “Or some other weird drug lord who turns up.”
“There has been a lot of them lately,” I chuckled. “But yeah, that would be on point for me, wouldn’t it? To land and then just have to turn around.”
“It would,” Holm laughed. “Or to run into a bunch of trouble when you get to Virginia. Either one.”
I laughed along with him, but this still did concern me, especially after my strange phone call with the museum manager that morning. I didn’t want to get Tessa in any more trouble than I already had, and Holm wasn’t wrong that it was in character for me to run into trouble wherever I went, even if he was joking about it.
I briefly thought about telling Holm about the phone call but didn’t for some reason. Maybe I was afraid of jinxing it. I wasn’t sure.
“I should get going,” I told my partner, clapping him on the shoulder and heading toward my car. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Not too soon, I hope,” he called after me, echoing my own concerns, and that stuck with me as I drove all the way back to my houseboat.
7
Ethan
I hadn’t brought most of my things with me to the office, though I now wished I had. For some reason, even though I knew that Tessa was going to land at least an hour after I did, I was eager to get to the airport and well on my way to Virginia. Part of me worried the longer I stayed i
n Miami, the higher the chances of something going wrong with this whole thing with Grendel’s journal or with the Hollands.
This didn’t make any logical sense, of course, but I’d be lying if I said that Holm’s and my missions to Haiti and New Orleans hadn’t instilled me with a trickle of superstition.
There was a perfectly logical explanation for everything that happened there, of course. At least that’s what the MBLIS lab techs, Bonnie and Clyde, had said, with gleams in their eyes as they discovered the inner workings of this strange new drug. But still, I’d seen some things that’d stuck with me. You don’t exactly get over seeing a zombie, whether it was like the ones from the movies or not.
So when I got to my houseboat, I ran in quickly and gathered up my things in a small suitcase, including the fake version of Grendel’s journal.
I weighed the book in my hands, heavy with the thick leather-bound cover and the weight of time on its pages. Or the appearance of time, at least. That old book repairman Percy had said that someone had gone to great lengths to make the journal look old, but that didn’t mean that it actually was old.
I ran my thumb across the uneven pages on the book’s side, debating whether to open it and begin to comb through it again. But I shook my head and came back to my senses, throwing the journal on top of my clothes in the small suitcase. Ordinarily, I would’ve given more care to an artifact like that, but it was a fake, and I was pissed about that at that point. The journal was close to useless as anything other than proof that it had been sent to me in the first place, and if it got a little crushed in the middle of some in-flight turbulence, oh well.
I gave a little smirk at this thought. As much as I’d obsessed over the fake edition of the journal to no avail over the past several weeks, I kind of relished the idea of it getting knocked around a bit. Not enough to cause any real damage, but enough to be noticeable.
Not that the journal could feel pain, but still. It was a nice thought, at least.
Once packed up, I headed back out to my car and straight to the airport, only giving my little houseboat a cursory glance as I left it behind.
I had a while to wait once at the airport and passed my time by grabbing some lunch and looking out the window, and watching other passengers pass me by.
I didn’t pull the journal back out, to my own surprise. I decided that I’d obsessed over it too much with too little to show for it over the past few weeks. Now, I could just enjoy a bit of downtime as I waited for my airplane.
It didn’t last, predictably. It only took an hour for me to pull out my tablet and begin surfing the web for Chester and Ashley Holland. I let it slide, telling myself that at least I had taken a little time for myself, and I wasn’t combing through that dumb journal again.
I’d searched for the Hollands before, as had everyone else at MBLIS, no doubt. The couple had a small but not insignificant digital footprint, with a few social media profiles to sell their well-crafted personas.
I maneuvered to Ashley’s Facebook account and clicked through photographs of her and Chester on a beach somewhere, laughing and smiling and sipping Margaritas. They looked normal if a little too superficial and spray-tanned. As far as anyone else knew, they could be just about any upper-middle-class American couple on vacation.
Except they weren’t. A closer dig at the social media profiles revealed that these people seemed to be on some kind of endless vacation, traipsing around the world, and especially the eastern coast of the United States, lounging on beaches and basking in the hot sun wherever they could find it.
They never said where they were in their posts, but I was familiar enough with the ocean to be able to pick up on some clues. There were pictures on Little Torch Key. That one was all too familiar to me as I watched Chester in a video walk down the same beach that I had chased a gangbanger not so long ago while he wildly shot at me in the sand.
There were other shots that I recognized as in the Caribbean islands, along the Florida coast, and even on the Jersey Shore. There was one all the way out in Laguna Beach, too, though the Hollands weren’t known to have owned property there.
These pictures were the biggest keys we had to where the Hollands might be, or where they might be headed, now. They no doubt knew by now that we knew where they owned property under these names. So I thought that it was somewhat safe to cross those locations off the list of possibilities, though Diane had predictably balked at this when I brought it up.
“We can’t rule out anything,” she had said. “And we can’t assume anything, either. There’s no telling what they think we know.”
She wasn’t wrong to think this, nor was the FBI wrong to have agents staking out every known Holland property in the country. If they made a wrong move, we would no doubt catch them.
But something told me, as I looked through the pictures of this seemingly carefree couple on an unknown beach that they seemed to have all to themselves, that these people wouldn’t be making any wrong moves. They were too good for that, too shrewd.
They may appear to be vapid Hollywood types making any last desperate grabs at youth that they could, but in actuality, I knew them for what they were: cunning drug lords who had managed to amass a broad network of illicit revenue streams in the United States over who knew how many years without garnering so much as a hint of suspicion their way until now.
No, these images I was looking at were just one facet of a well-crafted persona that Chester and Ashley Holland—or whoever they were, really—had cultivated over the past decade or more, judging by the age of some of their profiles.
Their friends lists were large, and I knew that the FBI had conducted interviews with many people on them. But there seemed to be no overlap between the Hollands’ social circle as above-board American real estate moguls and their secret identities as drug lords. Their friends didn’t know a thing and seemed nothing short of flummoxed by the idea that Chester and Ashley could be involved with anything like this.
The FBI continued to grill the Hollands’ social circle, but I didn’t think they would get anywhere with this. Their social life, much like everything else, was all part of the facade meant to protect them in the event that they were found out.
And that moment had arrived.
Neither of the Hollands had posted on any of their social media profiles since what went down in the Keys. Actually, they hadn’t posted since Birn was taken. That first week could’ve been written off as some downtime since they didn’t post all that often. But almost a month was longer than they had ever gone without showing off their lavish lifestyle. Something was up.
I knew that I wasn’t the only one checking up on the Hollands’ profiles. But it gave me a sense of momentum to do so, as though I might actually be accomplishing something. Not that I expected there to be any activity. It was more like the lack of activity kept confirming what I already suspected: that the Hollands were on the run and that they had been preparing for this eventuality for years, ensuring that they were several steps ahead of us the whole time.
I could only hope that we could figure out how to take a leap forward before it was too late. Letting these guys get away would set a dangerous precedent that the United States was fertile ground for foreign drug activity. We had enough problems with regional flare-ups, but a syndicated operation like this couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished.
I heard a muffled voice call for boarding for my flight and realized that a fair amount of time had passed as I’d been absorbed in my research on the Hollands.
When I diverted my eyes from my tablet screen, they were glassy and glazed over, and I realized just how much time had elapsed. I closed my tablet and stuffed it in my carry-on. I didn’t have a bag to check since I packed so light. Then I boarded my flight.
It was a small plane, headed into a small airport in Virginia, so there was no distinction between first class and coach. I lucked out and got a seat near the front and away from any potentially screaming children or obnoxious seatmates. The
guy next to me was just reading with headphones in his ears.
I closed my eyes and leaned back, trying to pass the flight in silence and let myself relax some. But my thoughts kept drifting back to the Hollands and my tablet.
Finally, right before the flight attendants were about to give their little speech about flight safety and tell us to turn off all our devices, I pulled out my phone and texted Holm, asking for a quick update on the situation at MBLIS.
“You’re impossible,” he messaged back just as quickly as I had sent my own text. “You can’t even go for two hours without working.”
“I know, I know, just tell me,” I typed back quickly. “I’m going to get in trouble with the flight staff.”
“Only if you promise not to do anything work or pirate treasure related on your flight,” my partner shot back, and I let out an exasperated little sigh that drew the ire of my seat companion, who gave me the stink eye.
Apparently, I was the bad seatmate I’d been trying to avoid. Who would’ve guessed?
“Okay, I promise,” I texted. “Just tell me.”
“They think they’ve confirmed it’s them,” Holm said, and I was immediately glad that I’d checked in. “They ruled out the smudged camera theory, at least. Still nothing on where they could be, though. Could be anywhere in the whole world by now.”
“Do you need me to come back?” I asked in another message, glancing up at the flight attendants to see if the door was closed. Yeah, no luck there. I could still make a scene and flash my badge to get out if I had to, though.
“NO!” Holm sent in all capitals. “Just chill out. Nothing’s really changed. No one’s going anywhere, and there isn’t technically a case. I told you, I’ll let you know if anything happens.”
“You didn’t let me know about this,” I shot back.
“I thought you were in the air already,” he messaged. “I was going to call you when you landed.”
“Phones off,” a droll voice came from beside me, and I looked up to see one of the flight attendants glaring down at me sternly.
