Special Agent Tom Lange Box Set

by T. J. Brearton

  “Until I know for sure, I’m being overly cautious.”

  “Isn’t this unusual, though? Taking civilians involved in a case into your home?”

  “It is. But, given the circumstances, it seemed like the right call.”

  “I’m not questioning your judgment, just wondering if you’ll get in trouble for something like this.”

  “Probably. But I think we’re in uncharted territory.”

  “I didn’t know there was any of that left.”

  “Uncharted territory?”

  She nodded, keeping a straight face despite their banter. “Yeah.”

  They both lapsed into silence, and Tom pictured Coburn, flopped out of his Camaro, the stars glinting in the sky above.

  When he focused on Heather again, he found her staring at the gun tucked against his ribs.

  “Where do you keep your weapons?”

  “This one stays with me.” He lifted his arm so she could get a look at the lightweight Glock.

  She blinked, asked, “Is that a good gun?”

  “It’s got a short frame, a heavier trigger pull than the other Glocks. Made by an Austrian manufacturer, they’re reliable, good in the heat . . .” He trailed off, sensing that she was no gun enthusiast. Neither was he, especially, it was just part of the job. “I have one other. I keep it downstairs in the garage, secured by a cable inside a locked cabinet. Nothing anyone can get their hands on except me.”

  She looked at him, slowly nodded, and he thought she was finally showing some real fatigue.

  “Let’s try to get some rest, alright? We can talk more in the morning, and I’ll explain what I can.”

  She nodded again, tried to stifle a yawn with her fist, then stood up from the table. He led her into the living room and waited at the bottom of the stairs. When he turned back, she was looking at his wall again.

  Her eyes seemed to trace the web of yarn connecting events, people, and headlines. She pointed to the picture in the center. “That’s Palumbo?”

  He neared her, hoping she’d continue on upstairs. But she squared her shoulders with the wall, took a step toward it. “Yeah that’s him.”

  “But you don’t think he’s got anything to do with this anymore.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  He zeroed in on an aerial shot of the dog track, showing the grandstands smattered with a few patrons, the tiny shapes of dogs cutting lines through the muddy track. A newspaper article taped beside it focused on the dwindling returns dog racing brought the track owners, and the use of high-stakes power to keep the money coming in.

  Then another article, this one on a shooting in Tampa, linked to drug traffickers. A third, from the Tampa Bay Herald, linking the chain of drug distribution to the track. Tom had highlighted several portions which referenced the involvement of the Everglades County vice and narcotics bureau. There was an inset picture of Sergeant Danny Coburn.

  Tom was staring at it, thinking about Coburn’s now fatherless kids, when Heather spoke.

  “Didn’t we pass the track on the way here? It’s, like a mile away. Coincidence?”

  Tom didn’t know how to answer. He’d looked at several places after making the decision to leave Naples, and chose his new home for multiple factors. But there was no denying that close proximity to Palumbo’s dog track was one of them.

  Heather asked, “You always take your work home with you like this?”

  “This was my first assignment.”

  “So you wanted to hit it out of the park.”

  “A woman was found dead in Rookery Bay. Carrie Anne Gallo?”

  Heather sat down on the couch facing the wall. She seemed wide-awake again, the fatigue gone. “I remember that. I read about her. It was after I’d been down here a few months. That was you, huh? Who was she? Or can’t you say?”

  He eased onto the couch beside her. “She’d been a prostitute and was stripping at a club in Tampa. Palumbo owned the club.”

  “Oh, okay,” Heather said, the lamplight catching her eyes. “I see.”

  “My case intersected with a pre-existing County VNB investigation on Palumbo, which is ongoing.”

  “Right, right . . . So you state guys, you handle that stuff, huh? A murder case, a body in the water? I always thought you went after white collar crimes, police corruption, things like that.”

  “That’s part of it. There’s also domestic security, Governor Protection — what I was doing until just recently. But criminal investigations — IFS — that’s a big part. A lot of what we do is help with multi-jurisdictional cases.”

  “Like me. I work in Everglades County, live in Lee County. That it?”

  Tom felt a heat creeping up his neck, the way she was looking at him.

  “What else?” she asked.

  He blinked. “What else? What else do we do?”

  She tilted her head toward the wall. “About this. You said it was a vice narcotics case. So have you been assisting them? Or opening your own case? You just told me you were on Governor Protection . . .”

  “We really should get some sleep.” But he didn’t move, and neither did she.

  “Where’s your family?”

  Tom clucked his tongue and ran a hand over the back of his neck. He kneaded the flesh there, looking down.

  “Wow,” Heather said. “That’s a telling response.” She turned back to the collage. “I’m remembering more of this now. Reading about it . . .” She rose from the couch and moved toward the wall, toward one of the clippings. “Nick Lange?”

  Nick’s mention twisted Tom’s gut.

  She read from the clipping, her lips moving, just whispers. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh . . .”

  She slowly returned to the couch, sat down. After a silence, she asked, “Is that your brother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “His death had something to do with the case, I take it? With Palumbo?”

  She was blunt, and he was feeling more and more uncomfortable. But it wasn’t her fault. He’d brought her here, he was the one with his work splattered all over the wall in his living room. She deserved an explanation.

  “Nick got into debt with Palumbo and allegedly went to work for him to pay it down. When vice narcotics closed in on Nick, he ran.”

  She absorbed this and leaned against the couch cushion on her side. “That’s got to be tough. Palumbo still out there, business as usual, investigation ongoing . . . so, can I ask you?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Nick owed money to these people, and he passed — how does that work? Is debt inheritable like that?”

  “It’s complicated, but, the short answer is, no. Not in this case. Not legally.”

  She blew some hair out of her face, sighed, and said, “I don’t mean any offense, but this has ‘conflict of interest’ all over it.”

  “I know it does.”

  “Yet here we are.”

  “Here we are.”

  She looked into his eyes. “Were you and Nick close?”

  “I guess so.” He watched as she pushed off her shoes, brought her bare feet up onto the couch.

  “Is this okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “So, you and Nick . . .”

  He let out a breath, feeling some of the day’s tension ebbing. “We grew up as foster kids. From when I was eight, to eighteen.”

  “Where? Around here?”

  “No. Westchester County in New York. In New Rochelle, and later in Yonkers.”

  She nodded. “I wasn’t far from there. In Nyack. But you probably know that.”

  “I do.”

  “What was foster care like?”

  “It was okay. We got separated at one point.”

  “That had to be tough.”

  He took a breath, let it out slow. “I didn’t like being without Nick. But then we came back together — I was turning fourteen — and we lived with the Johnsons.”

  She raised her eyebrows, inviting him to share more.

>   “Marvin Johnson. He was a pastor. And his wife Monique. They had two kids of their own who’d already grown and gone off to college. Which was a big deal. Then when Nick was old enough to leave, he ended up hanging around the area. He got an apartment, waited the two years for me to be eighteen.”

  “Then you moved down here together?”

  “We messed around up there for a couple years, then we came down. Nick got into real estate, I went to school. Then I started up doing this.”

  Heather brushed a strand of hair away and smiled softly. Her level of comfort was disarming. He was used to court-appointed psychiatrists and stuffy offices, being obligated to talk about himself. He’d never shared these things with anyone outside of that. Not even with Katie.

  “How often do you think about him?”

  “Every day.” Tom stared down at his cut hand, which seemed to be healing. “You know what’s funny is, Nick’s real estate website is still up. I drafted an email to the host server to ask them to take it down, but then I ended up not sending it. Even his Facebook page is still there . . .” Tom looked up at her. “What about you? You must think of your husband every day, too.”

  “I do. And I see him in the faces of the girls. It’s unbelievable how hard it is, how it never goes away. People say it leaves a hole in your life, but for me it’s like a wall. Your thoughts turn there, and there’s this wall, preventing you from seeing that person, from talking to them, from touching them. Like they’re not dead, but away somewhere, and you don’t know where, and can’t get to them.”

  He didn’t respond and Heather closed her eyes. “I don’t know what you do with that. Two years, and I still don’t know. I guess you get used to having that wall there.”

  She suddenly blinked and sat up. Tom tensed and leaned toward her. “What is it?”

  Heather looked toward the stairs. “I thought I heard Abby.” She swung her legs off the couch and slipped on her shoes, cocked her head. “Maybe not. But, I better head up.”

  He stood as she got to her feet and moved through the living room. She glanced over as she began ascending the stairs. “Good night, Tom. Thanks for talking.”

  “Good night.”

  She paused with her hand on the banister. “What’s next?”

  “What’s next is I’ve got a new lead. Tomorrow I’ll talk with my supervisor and director, and we’re going to figure this thing out. ‘Gnome sayin’?’”

  She smiled as she drifted up the stairs and out of sight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SATURDAY

  Culpepper had left at dawn, after keeping out of sight in the shadows and lush vegetation crowding the door; Tom stood in front of the townhouse, dressed in sweatpants, t-shirt, sandals. Just another guy out for a morning smoke in case anyone was watching. Like the woman walking her little Yorkie as the sun came up. Tom raised his hand in a wave. She seemed to hurry her pace and the dog yipped.

  Blythe’s Crown Vic came up the street and pulled into his driveway.

  “When did you start that up again?” She scowled at the cigarette as she got out.

  “I’ll quit soon.”

  She handed him a new phone. “There’s your replacement.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Matt said that—”

  He placed a hand on her wrist. “Hang on. Not here.”

  Her eyes closed in a long blink. “Jesus, Lange . . .”

  Between townhouses was a walkway bisecting swathes of mid-size shrubs, Formosa lavender Azaleas. Tom gestured to a short, wrought-iron bench as a gecko darted across their path. Blythe gave him another look that said you’re crazy and sat down.

  Tom mashed out his cigarette on the ground and tossed it in a nearby can, took a seat beside Blythe.

  “So,” she said, “Matt had a look at your phone, tried to trace the call, no luck — there’s no phone in service with that number. Also, the number that sent you the text last night is different from the one in Heather’s phone from the morning of Declan’s murder.”

  “But they’re both 945.”

  “We’re watching all the towers, if any phone pings from a 945, we’re having a look. It’s thousands of phones.”

  “How is Turnbull handling this?”

  “Handling what? That you’ve absconded with a witness in a murder case and her two daughters? Won’t say where they are? He’s about an inch away from hauling you in, Tom, reassigning you. Again.”

  Tom nodded at the door into his place. “They’re inside.”

  Her eyes widened. “You brought them home?”

  “No one knows, and that’s the point. This is gated, twenty-four hour security—”

  “You mean the retired rent-a-cop who stared at my tits when he let me in?”

  “There’s a camera that took a shot of your license plate for one thing.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “You’re not using these people as bait Tom?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What about the agent with you? Culpepper?”

  “I trust him. He’ll be back a little later. He’s getting their things; he’ll be careful no one follows him.”

  Blythe stared off at the shrubbery, but Tom knew she wasn’t thinking about the Arboricola landscaping. He pointed at the small case she was holding. “What’ve you got?”

  She sighed and unzipped it, pulled out two dossiers, handed them over. “Pierce did the legwork on this. He started with a hundred and forty-two Chevy Tahoes in Lee County with plates beginning 18-E. One hundred forty-two registrants, twenty-six with some sort of record, just two felons, Daryl Trenton and Todd Whitcomb.”

  Tom looked at pictures of Whitcomb first — a mug shot, plus two candid photos, one of Whitcomb on a boat, and another of him and a young woman. According to his record, Todd Whitcomb was a rapist. The young woman pictured was one of several who’d filed charges against him. He owned a 2014 Chevy Tahoe.

  “He’s a registered sex offender,” Blythe said. “He’s also a financial manager living on Sanibel Island.”

  Tom moved on to the next guy, Daryl Trenton. Trenton’s file included a mug shot, and one still shot pulled from a video camera. The image showed a man in a baseball cap and dark sunglasses in the midst of a hold-up.

  “And that’s a convenience store in Immokalee. Trenton is doing five years for armed robbery.”

  Tom flipped to the last page and saw Trenton’s driver’s license and vehicle registration. He was the proud owner of a 2009 Chevy Tahoe, jet-black. But he wasn’t driving it anywhere, not from behind bars.

  “He could be loaning it out,” Tom said. “Anyone could be driving that Tahoe with Trenton in jail.”

  “Correct. Or maybe it’s just sitting in a yard somewhere with a blown gasket.”

  “What about stolen vehicles?”

  “I thought you’d ask. Only one report of a stolen Chevy Tahoe for Lee County. It belonged to this man, Larry Boyle, a school teacher in North Naples.”

  Tom looked at the stolen vehicle report, taken by the Lee County Sheriff’s Department. “This was filed in early December. All this stuff keeps coming back to two months ago, or thereabouts.”

  He sensed her mounting frustration and she crossed her arms. “Either one of them strike you as working for Palumbo? Or maybe Vasquez? Come across one of them in your extracurricular activities? I see you’ve set up your new place a stone’s throw from the dog track.”

  “I’ve never seen them before. Whitcomb doesn’t fit in. Maybe Trenton? But doubtful. Palumbo’s guys don’t go around robbing convenience stores. But that doesn’t mean Trenton isn’t involved with what’s happening.”

  She tapped the paperwork with a short fingernail. “You think either one of these guys is smart enough to pull off what happened with Heather Moss? One’s a rapist, the other’s a thug robbing a convenience store. They’re hacking county jail security, procuring potassium cyanide, rolling around with AR-15s?”

  “We won’t know until we look. Maybe Whitcomb — you’ve go
t to have some brains to manipulate money. But I don’t think it matters — Brian Hamer was the one used for his technical skills. I found the Fusion packaging at Iowa Schnell’s trailer park. Don’t you see how it’s going? Hamer provided the technical know-how, then he was murdered. Coburn’s unit was hacked, supplying the info on Declan who is then murdered, too. One of these guys just does the short work. Some kind of muscle, maybe.”

  “How exactly did Coburn have information on Declan? He was wiretapping him? So he was a suspect.”

  “No. Like I said last night, Declan wasn’t on their list, they weren’t surveilling him.”

  “Last night was crazy. Refresh my memory.”

  “There was a hack into the data on Palumbo, including the bulk collection. You know how a StingRay works by mimicking a cell phone tower, right, it turns your phone into a tracking device without having to go through the phone company. But the StingRay is imprecise; it’s like a trawler net and collects information from all the phones in range — it can tell you strength of signal, unique identifying numbers on the hardware, even the calls being made at the time, the data being used, the internet being surfed.”

  “But they didn’t find evidence Declan was working with Palumbo. They found the pornography. And then they were hacked.”

  “Exactly.”

  She shifted a little, turning toward him as she followed the line of thought. “Maybe Palumbo has gotten tech-savvy, or uses Hamer, and hacks Coby’s unit. And he finds out that Declan is a pedophile. Even Palumbo has his standards. So then he kills Declan.”

  “And we’re back to Palumbo waiting until he goes to jail, which seems unnecessarily complicated. Like you said last night, this whole thing has just got us going round and round, chasing our tails, and maybe that’s part of the point.”

  “Part of what point?”

  “I’m still working that out. But, look, Coby sounded like he didn’t think it was Palumbo, either. I think he was about to tell me who he thought it was — but then he left. The drug was already having an effect on him. What is the autopsy showing?”

  “It’s currently inconclusive,” Blythe said. “But two labs are working on it. Declan’s pill was a gelatin ampule. Hamer drank some; they haven’t shown how yet. Same poison, three different mediums. Coburn’s chew was laced with KCN — potassium chloride. How the hell did it get into his chewing tobacco?”