Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  “I see these guys are right at home here,” Jolie said.

  She felt at home here, too.

  Jolie moved Rocky and Rudy to Landry’s place. There, she checked her e-mail. She’d changed all her passwords the moment she’d plugged the thumb drive into Rand McNally’s computer. Now she configured the new laptop the way she wanted it, and moved all her files from the thumb drive.

  Whatever documents Jolie had left behind in her old computer were likely to be in the hands of the enemy.

  Jolie had no doubt that if someone had actively tried to track her movements, they would have found her if she’d stayed on the lake much longer. But she guessed that the sheriff’s office had other problems. Like, for instance, their own little crime wave in Tobosa County. In a short period of time, Rick Connor was shot to death at a militia checkpoint, another two militia members killed a few days later, and now the head of the militia had been found murdered on National Forest land. Being a militia member was a good way to get killed.

  Since Kilbride’s murder had taken place on National Forest land, Jolie was certain there would be an investigation by the federal government.

  And of course there was her own homicide case—Dan Atwood.

  And her own disappearance.

  If all this didn’t bring the Feds, what would?

  In the meantime, she wanted to clear up the one thing that truly nagged her: who killed Dan Atwood, and why?

  Did Jace kill him for confiscating the Camaro, or was it the fact the hapless deputy was poking around the ag farm that led to his death?

  The theory Jolie was operating under at the moment was that Atwood was undercover. She’d tossed around the idea that Rick Connor had been his replacement, that they’d both been DEA agents. From Cyril, she knew Rick Connor was with the DEA, but did that mean Dan Atwood could have preceded him?

  He might have just been a wannabe. By now, whatever he’d been investigating—if he’d been investigating anything at all—would be hard to reconstruct. She didn’t have access to his notes, his files, his laptop. Whatever he’d had was gone, either packed up by family, or, worse, packed up by the sheriff’s department.

  Was Dan Atwood a dead end?

  Probably.

  All she could do was keep at it for a while longer.

  But first, she’d take Rocky for a walk down to the pier.

  Chapter 28

  Cyril Landry drove into town for lunch. He stopped at the McDonald’s on George S. Patton Boulevard. It was the noon hour, prime time for McDonald’s customers, and the place buzzed with conversation. It was a regular zoo. The level of babble was at its high-water mark—exactly what he wanted. He sat at a table in the corner closest to the restrooms, and rested a fast food bag on the postage-stamp-size table.

  Eric came in and sat down opposite him. “Hey, bro,” he said.

  “How’s your van? Sound system okay?”

  “Yeah, but you know music these days,” Landry said. “Not a whole lot of good stuff out there. How you doing?”

  They talked about various things. Wives, kids, football. What the traffic was like on Route 38. Eric balled up his Big Mac wrapper and shoved it in the bag, held up a finger, and groped around in his pocket for his phone. “Gotta get this,” he said. “You go on ahead.”

  Landry nodded, picked up the bag, and crumpled it into a ball. “You up for some pool later?”

  “Yeah, I want to check out Dos Cabezas.”

  “Stupid name for a bar, you ask me.”

  Eric nodded, but it was clear he was busy on the phone.

  Landry walked past the garbage can and pushed his balled-up napkin and butcher paper through the small swinging door, but pocketed the bag.

  He drove back to the motel. Inside, he checked everything twice—Santa Claus had nothing on him—and went into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the fan. He also turned on the shower.

  Only then did he put in the earphones and listen to the recording. He started just short of forty minutes in.

  The conversation was short—terse, even—between Miko Denboer and someone named “Randall.”

  It soon became clear that Randall was high up in the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, DC. Landry took note of Randall’s phone number the old-fashioned way: by writing it down on a notepad.

  Randall wasn’t convinced that Miko Denboer knew nothing about the death of his undercover agent, the man who went by the name of Rick Connor.

  “This has really fucked us up here, do you know that?”

  “I told you not to send him out here. It was an accident and that’s—”

  “An accident? It was your kid who shot him. Point-blank!”

  “He’s a paranoid schizophrenic.”

  Landry got the impression that Miko Denboer had said this about a thousand times during his life—or at least in the last five or six years.

  “Is that what I should tell the family?”

  “He knew the risks. DEA agents are an endangered species. You know that. I told you we had everything under control.”

  “I think we’re done here.”

  Denboer said, “No, we’re not.”

  “I haven’t seen one damn thing—”

  “You saw the video, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what? You think we faked it? Do you want to get on a plane and come out and see what we’re doing here? Talk to the guy who built this?”

  “I thought he went back to Pakistan.”

  “Yeah, but I can have you talk to him.”

  “How would I know he is who you say he is?”

  “You could trust me,” Denboer replied.

  “We have a long way to go for me to do that. I need to go. We’ll be in touch.”

  The man on the other end hung up.

  “Don’t wait too long,” Denboer muttered.

  Then there was a dial tone.

  Just then, there was a knock on the door. Eric came in. “Where are you, dude?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  “What—?”

  “Quiet.”

  Eric joined him.

  A few minutes later Denboer made another call. The phone on the other end rang and rang before picking up.

  Dead air.

  Someone on the tape said, “Shit!”

  Landry recognized the voice. It was one of the Army guys with the satellite van—his name was Mark.

  A voice in the background said, “What?”

  “I can’t get a reading. There’s no way I can pinpoint where he’s talking from. No location here.”

  “What?”

  “What I said! There’s no location here. In the US. No way to find them.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Shitfire! It’s a Dead Site.”

  “Dead Site? What are you—?”

  “The number,” the first Army guy said. “We traced the call to this number—it’s legit.”

  “So?”

  “The number is in New Guinea.”

  “New Guinea?”

  “Papua-New-Fucking-Guinea!”

  Eric looked at Landry. “What was that about?”

  “Sounds to me like the call was rerouted.”

  “On purpose?”

  “What do you think?”

  “They know we were listening in?”

  “Maybe they’re just being careful—on general principles.”

  “Or they know the United States Army is listening in.” Eric whistled. “What was that all about?”

  Landry said, “Looks like Miko Denboer’s playing both sides of the street.”

  Chapter 29

  Jolie woke to a stomach upset. Maybe it was the food she’d had at the little cubicle of a Chinese restaurant she’d visited last night. Qu
easy, she decided to take it easy and hang out with the two beasts on the couch watching movies. But her mind kept going back to Dan Atwood.

  More than one detective she’d worked with had called her a dog with a bone.

  She realized she needed to think about Atwood in another way. Any other way. She’d been fixated on Dan being some sort of undercover agent. It fit neatly enough that part of her wanted to believe it. Dan Atwood was interested in the Valleyview Experimental Agricultural Station, Dan Atwood had confiscated Jace Denboer’s Camaro, and Dan Atwood was found buried in a bean field at the farm. All of it fit perfectly. But maybe she was making too much of him. He could have just been a deputy who had crossed the wrong person and ended up in the bean field. A traffic stop gone wrong, maybe.

  But where was his car?

  She’d been through the file before. Atwood did not check out a sheriff’s unit the night before he failed to show up for roll call the next day. His shift had been during the day, not at night. Whatever Dan Atwood did, he’d used transportation other than his department vehicle. Jolie had looked him up in DMV when she got the case. He owned a green 2008 Ford Escape SUV with a New Mexico license plate number, which Jolie had duly recorded and logged a few hours trying to track down. She’d put in time checking car ads, craigslist, police and sheriffs’ databases, tow companies, and junkyards, but the whereabouts of Dan Atwood’s Ford Escape remained a mystery. Like his family background and next of kin.

  She’d operated under the theory that he’d left town for some reason—possibly because he’d been threatened by Jace Denboer. That was before his body was found in the bean field.

  Someone had killed him and buried him there. But Jolie was no closer to figuring it out than she had been when she had the official information sources at her fingertips.

  A great, big goose egg.

  She’d been through every salient piece of paper, every contact, official and otherwise, every friend (all three of them), every ex-girlfriend (she’d driven to El Paso to talk to her), and had mined every little piece of information she could beg, borrow, or steal. She’d hoarded that information like a raven salting away shiny things in its nest. She had been thorough; she had been beyond thorough. Tireless. Obsessed, even. But the case petered out, anyway. There were no leads.

  None.

  She drifted off to sleep and woke feeling much better. The TV was still on, Inside Man, on CNN.

  Morgan Spurlock. The fast-food guy who did investigations into certain businesses and companies.

  Here in the west, “The Inside Man” had a different connotation. “Inside Man” was the serial rapist who had wreaked havoc in three, maybe four, states. He had escalated to killing his latest victims.

  Jolie had worked the case with Vicki Dodd, who worked sex crimes.

  It occurred to Jolie that neither one of them had looked at the web pages of the victims. Well, maybe Vicki had.

  She called up Vicki.

  To say Vicki was surprised was an understatement. “What happened?” she asked. “Where’d you go?”

  “I had to get away.”

  “Yeah, I know. The stress.”

  Jolie accepted the gift she’d been given. “The stress. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. To be honest, I kind of . . . lost it. I’m trying to get the nerve to come back, but I need more time. Can you keep this a secret?”

  “Sure I can.”

  Jolie was fifty-fifty whether or not she believed her. But what was Vicki going to do? Nobody liked making waves there. Especially not the female deputies and detectives. She’d sensed that she wasn’t the only person who was uneasy about things in the department. There was a cadre of guys who had the sheriff’s ear, and the rest were merely rank-and-file employees.

  Jolie said, “Did you ever look at Karin Stokes’s web page? Did she have one?”

  “I think I did. It was a while ago, though.”

  Jolie sensed uncertainty in Vicki’s tone, along with resentment. Jolie could hear muted clicking.

  Then: “If she had a page, it’s been taken down. Let me look . . . nope. There’s nothing there . . . wait.”

  “What?”

  “This is weird.”

  “What?”

  “It says, ‘The Diary of Karin Stokes.’ I’m gonna open it up.”

  Jolie typed in the same sentence.

  A website came up, but it was blank. Everything had been removed.

  Erased.

  “Nothing,” Vicki said.

  “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So it’s like King Kong.”

  She could hear the smile in Vicki’s voice. “How big is King Kong?” She answered for herself. “Not as big as people think he is.”

  They disconnected.

  Jolie stared at the Google URL window on her laptop screen. Her idea didn’t work.

  She tried Carla Vitelli.

  There were several references to her as an FBI agent—testifying in court cases, articles on busts, etc. Jolie went through them but found nothing of interest at the moment.

  One thing she’d never done was try a Google search for Dan Atwood. She typed his name into the box and hit “Return.”

  There were a number of Dan Atwoods to choose from. She tried a shortcut, hit “Images” under the bar and suddenly a sea of faces came up. Most of them were other men. One, a good-looking thirtyish man, dominated the page. But there was Dan Atwood, her Dan Atwood, just one image, among the better-known Dan Atwood and his other namesakes.

  Her Dan Atwood held up a trout in front of a lake. The photo looked recent. He looked like himself. Impossibly young. Wet behind the ears. Almost goofy. He wore a striped T-shirt and held the trout high above his head.

  She clicked on the photo and got a larger view. Beside it was the legend “Visit Dan Atwood’s Page.”

  Jolie typed in the URL and a page opened up. There was nothing on it except another hyperlink.

  The hyperlink said, “Guests.”

  Jolie clicked on the link.

  A page opened up. There were three more links embedded in the web page. One said, “Erin Locke.” Another link said “Anita Loyoza.”

  And the third said, “Carla Vitelli.”

  Jolie hit the link for Carla Vitelli.

  Carla’s face filled the right-hand side of the website’s banner. It was sunset, and her complexion took on the glow of the orange rocks around her. Her long, gold-streaked hair was ruffled by the wind, and a perfectly manicured hand shaded her eyes against the dying sun. Her stunning eyes, in this light, were the color of amethysts.

  In Jolie’s inexpert opinion, this was a professional photo. She thought that Dan Atwood must have found it elsewhere and co-opted it for his banner.

  Jolie opened up another page, Googled Carla Vitelli, and once again hit “Images.” There were numerous photos of her. She must have done some modeling—many of them were professional photos. They didn’t look too old, either. She certainly wasn’t dated by her hairstyle. Jolie quickly found a shot of Carla among the sandstone rocks at sunset.

  Jolie scrolled down. There were a few entries, many of them describing Carla Vitelli and her job as an FBI agent. Photos of recent busts, photos of her cool and beautiful in jewel-colored suits in courtrooms, and photos of her house.

  Her house in Albuquerque.

  From across the street.

  And there she was driving by in her car—

  From the street.

  And several photos of her with men. In restaurants, on the street, in their cars or hers. On her balcony, sitting around a garden table. Food and wine.

  Plenty of men.

  But no photos of Carla Vitelli and Dan Atwood together.

  Jolie went back to the Dan Atwood page and opened up “Anita Loyoza.”

  The page fil
led up with photos of a beautiful young woman whose face was familiar.

  Jolie knew why. Anita Loyoza was the young mother from Tucson who disappeared and was later found buried in the desert.

  This wasn’t a harmless crush. This wasn’t even stalking.

  This was a freak page.

  She’d seen them before. Of women who had been raped, or killed, or were targeted by someone. She’d seen a few serial-killer freak pages in her time—people getting off on the murders of women, mostly.

  Jolie could well imagine the people who dropped in here.

  Dan Atwood.

  She saved the page and went back to Carla Vitelli.

  There was the street view of Carla’s house. And an aerial view of Carla’s house. Zooms of her windows, her yard. Photos of her walking to her car. Different outfits, different weather. Spy stuff.

  Actually, the tipping point was that a whole web page was devoted to Carla Vitelli.

  She went back to Loyoza’s page. The same thing. Many photos of her, taken, no doubt, from a telephoto lens. Many photos of her grave in Evergreen Cemetery. Many photos of the mourners, also from a telephoto lens.

  The same with the third victim, Locke.

  Dan Atwood wasn’t a victim.

  Dan Atwood wasn’t hapless.

  Although he was careless. A lot of predators were. It never ceased to amaze Jolie how few serial killers bothered to cover their tracks. So many of them got tripped up by something mundane, or downright stupid. But even then, thanks to the random nature of their predation in a country jammed with people—many of whom wandered from place to place—serial killers got away with their crimes for years. Some of them were never even discovered, let alone caught.

  He was either the guy who killed these women, or the pal of a guy who killed these women.

  Jolie took another walk with Rocky down to the pier to clear her head, but her head wouldn’t clear. Dan Atwood had fooled them all.

  Or at least he had until he’d run into someone stronger and more dangerous. Whether or not that was Carla Vitelli, or her brother, or both, Jolie had no idea.