During the summer, Hunter had spent countless hours trying to find out who was behind the plot to kill Haley and her family. While he continued his investigation, he decided for the time being, killing Colonel Pirolli, who ran Global Security, would not eliminate the threat. Hunter had concluded that Pirolli was not acting on his own, and whoever was paying him would just hire another ‘security’ outfit to do their dirty work if he was eliminated. Once Hunter was satisfied that Lena and Haley were settled and reasonably secure, he would pay the Colonel a visit and find out what he knew.
In the meantime, Hunter had contacted former associates, men and women like him who worked as contractors providing “security services,” and computer hackers he had encountered who had also worked the seedier side of the business, anyone who might have heard rumors about the murders, or the kidnapping, or anything connected to the Montgomery family. So far none of his contacts had yielded any leads.
Although Hunter believed that relocating to Philly provided the safe haven he needed to continue his mission, he knew that until he uncovered the identity of the individual, or individuals, hunting Haley, people with resources who hired the killers, neither Haley, nor Lena and her family and himself, for that matter, would truly be safe.
So far, the senior Montgomery and his ex-wife were the only possible suspects. But why would Haley’s grandfather want his son and daughter-in-law and his granddaughter dead? As to Montgomery’s ex-wife, Hanna Chao, without something more definitive, it just did not feel plausible to Hunter.
The next morning, they began their new life as a family- a married couple and their niece -who had relocated to Philadelphia as part of the Dijonari Export Company’s expansion of its operations. The Port of Philadelphia had become a principal destination for South American produce shipments. Primarily as a result of Lena’s business acumen, the company had become a major supplier of Chilean fruit, in addition to the tomatoes her father’s farms exported to the U.S.
Their back story, Hunter’s designation as legal guardian for his half-sister’s daughter, and the decision to move from Caracas to the States to provide the child with a safer environment and better educational opportunities, should satisfy the curiosity of most people about how this interracial, international combination of individuals had come together.
Hunter had selected the Episcopal Academy in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, a suburb in Chester County, 15 miles west of Philadelphia as the best choice of a private school for Haley. Episcopal, was not only one of the top academic schools in the area, it also had a broad diversity of students from all over the world, Asians, Europeans, and local children from prominent families. The only common trait among the students was their high IQs and their parents’ wealth, as tuition was over $50,000 a year. The only exceptions were scholarship students whose tuition was subsidized. Hunter believed Haley’s unique circumstances would not single her out.
After a few weeks of exploring Philadelphia - visiting the Liberty Bell and other historic sites in ‘Old City, having lunch at the Reading Terminal Market, running up the steps at the Art Museum and taking selfies while standing next to the Rocky statue - they were getting ready to go to the new students’ orientation at Episcopal Academy. Haley was wearing her new school uniform, a blue plaid skirt and white top with ‘EA’ embroidered on it. “I hate it!” she exclaimed when Lena told her it was a school requirement.
“I’m sure you’re not the only one who feels that way,” Lena told her.
“Hunter, do I really have to go there?” she asked sweetly. Haley knew which of her guardians was the soft touch.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to suck it up.” He knew the child was feeling anxious about her new school.
When they entered the auditorium, they joined about 50 students of varying ages who were beginning their matriculation at the start of the fall term. After the introductory speeches, they were coupled with the Thurman family, Walter, Ophelia and their ten-year-old daughter Andrea. The two girls quickly bonded; they both hated the school uniforms.
As the adults trailed their children on the tour of the facilities, they discovered that they were neighbors; the Thurmans lived on Overbrook Road, a few blocks north of Sherwood Road where Hunter, Lena and Haley lived. Lena told Ophelia they had just relocated to the area, and a brief summary of their false history.
“Oh my God, what that poor child had to endure at such a young age! Both of her parents are gone. I can only imagine how horrible it must have been,” Ophelia exclaimed.
Lena nodded, “She still has her moments. But children are resilient. She adores Hunter. He was very close with his sister.”
Hunter and Walter were also sharing their backgrounds. Walter was the Chief Executive of the Urban League, and Ophelia was a sergeant on the Philadelphia Police Force.
“I was a little concerned about the lack of diversity among families at the orientation. Except for us, there were only two other families of color there,” Hunter commented.
“Actually, minority students make up around ten to fifteen percent of the student body, about the same percentage as Chinese and students from other countries,” Walter explained.
“Our oldest daughter Desiree graduated from Episcopal last year. She’s at Penn now. She loved it here.”
Walter told him their middle child, Lucy, decided she didn’t want to go to the same school as her older sister. She was a freshman at CAPA, the performing arts public high school in Philadelphia. He was grateful Episcopal had given Andrea a partial scholarship.
By the end of the tour Lena and Ophelia had exchanged contact information. The families would carpool the girls to and from school.
As Hunter drove them home, Haley was chattering away about her new BFF. So far, so good.
12
September 2015, Louden County, Virginia
With Haley and Lena secure in their new life in Philadelphia, Hunter decided he needed to take a more aggressive approach to finding out who was trying to kill Haley. It was time to confront his former boss Colonel Pirolli, who was the most likely source of intelligence.
“Are you sure that’s the only way?” Lena asked after he disclosed his plan. “You said we’re safe here. No one knows you own the house, or that you have any connection to Philly.”
He gave her a sympathetic smile and said, “Yeah, but it doesn’t look like whoever’s behind this is going to stop trying to find us. Pirolli has to know who they are, who’s paying him.”
“Can’t you hire someone? You have the resources.”
He took her in his arms, “You know I can’t trust anyone,” he said softly.
She nodded, “Please be careful. We need you; I need you.”
That evening he left for Leesburg, Virginia. He knew Pirolli lived in a gated community, consisting of 100 pretentious mini-mansions in a suburb in the horse country of Louden County. By 6 am the next morning he had parked his rented jeep on the side of the road on a hill west of the front entrance to the development. From his vantage point he could watch, without being seen, how the security force conducted the gate security procedures, and time the patrol routes they used throughout the complex. After a few hours he concluded the gated community’s security measures were perfunctory, and its personnel were ill equipped for the task.
Later that day, he met with a sales agent to inquire about purchasing a house in the community. He explained that his employment was in a highly competitive field, and he needed a secure environment. The agent showed him the Equestrian Farms’ brochure, and directed Hunter to the section that described the security measures, including the schematics for the electronic alarm and surveillance systems.
The sales agent assured him Equestrian Farms used the latest state of the art equipment for home security. Hunter knew the sales pitch was completely bogus and the surveillance equipment was a cheap set up that could be easily compromised.
From Google maps he had located the Colonel’s property, a large colonial, with a grand façade that resemb
led Tara, the plantation house in the movie “Gone With the Wind.” It was located on the rear perimeter of the development. A fitting house for the pompous asshole he thought.
There were three gates that provided ingress and egress to the complex; only the main gate was manned. Over the next three days he returned to his post. From his observations he became familiar with the traffic patterns, noting in particular the times service vehicles passed through the main entrance. The lax security allowed the daily work crews, the groundskeepers and country club staff to use the owners’ automatic gate, without passing directly past the security window. He also watched the closest gate to the Colonel’s property and noted the times he left and returned.
On the afternoon of the last day of his surveillance, Hunter followed the landscaper to the roadhouse where he had stopped the previous two days. He entered the bar and sat down next to a man with a bandana wrapped around his forehead who was having a Negro Modella and chatting with the bartender. Hunter looked around the room. It was packed with day workers, predominately Chicanos, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, and a smattering of Negros.
“Cerveza,” he ordered, and pointed to the man to his left and held up two fingers.
When the bartender returned with two bottles of Negro Modella and placed one in front of the man with the bandanna he nodded in Hunter’s direction, and said, “Gracias.”
They both drank their beers in silence for several minutes. “Un momento, por favor?” Hunter asked, breaking the silence.
The man gave him a questioning look.
“Do you speak English?” Hunter asked.
He nodded.
Hunter placed two twenties on the bar, held up two fingers at the bartender, picked up his beer, pointed to a table near the back of the room, and walked away.
The man followed him carrying the two beers and sat down across from him.
“Que?” the man with the bandanna asked as he studied Hunter with suspicious eyes.
“I saw you driving your crew into the Equestrian Farms the past several days. I have a business proposition.”
“Senor, me and my men have steady work at the Farms,” the man replied.
“I understand. I don’t need landscapers,” Hunter said.
“Then what is it you’re asking?”
“I just want a ride into the development.”
The man’s eyes narrowed and his face darkened.
Hunter held up a hand, “Please hear me out.”
“Do you know the man who owns the big house at the back of the development? The one who calls himself the Colonel?”
The man’s expression left no doubt that he held the Colonel in distain.
“So, you’ve dealt with him?” Hunter asked.
He nodded.
Hunter continued, “He owes my employer a great deal of money. He welched on a debt. My boss sent me to remind him. I’ll give you $5,000, if you let me ride in with you and your crew tomorrow morning.”
The man’s eyes widened and he paused, “It must be a lot of money he owes your boss.”
“It is.”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to get in trouble,” he paused and looked around the room. “Some of my men are illegal.”
“I understand,” Hunter said and handed the man a bulging envelope.
The next morning at 6:30 am, the landscaper’s truck drove through the owners’ gate. Hunter sat in the passenger’s seat next to the crew chief. He was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt like the rest of the crew. He wore a canvas hat with a wide brim and a red bandana across his forehead.
The crew was mowing the median and edging the grass along the properties on the back road. Hunter watched as the Colonel backed his Porsche out of his garage and drove through the back gate.
When the grounds crew took their morning break, Hunter drifted away. He hid in the shrubbery behind the house. After the landscapers drove away and he was confident the residents from the neighboring property to the left of the Colonel’s house, the only one with a partial view of the back of the house, were gone, he approached the rear deck.
He avoided the camera that was positioned high up on the corner of the building, and crawled under the deck. He removed the cover on the junction box and studied the maze of wires and cables. Hunter knew the house was hooked up to the development’s security system.
Having studied the schematics, he knew exactly how to disconnect Pirolli’s house from the complex’ system. Within minutes of removing the junction box cover Hunter had loosened the power wire from the leads that led into Pirolli’s house. He frayed the wire to make it appear that it had not been tampered with, and checked to make sure he had disconnected the premises from the source before replacing the cover and accessing the Colonel’s house. The entire break-in took less than five minutes.
For the next several hours, he searched Pirolli’s home without success, and tried to access his computer, looking for a clue, anything that would lead to who was behind the plot to eliminate Haley and her parents. At 6:45 pm he heard the garage door open and the Colonel drive into the garage. Hunter was in the man’s study, sitting behind his desk waiting. The previous three nights he had watched Pirolli from the tree line behind the development. The man followed the same routine every night. He entered his study, walked to the bar, poured himself a generous drink and sat down at his desk.
* * *
What Hunter did not know was that Pirolli had outfitted his house with a more sophisticated security system that was separate from the development. When Hunter accessed the premises, Pirolli received an alert that he had an intruder. The tiny camera in the study captured Hunter sitting at his desk. Instead of calling the police, Pirolli decided to deal with it on his own. He finally had the bastard. How dare he think he could come into his home! Pirolli would show him how a real man responded to an invasion of his sanctity.
Pirolli entered the study and switched on the light.
“Good evening, Colonel,” Hunter said,
Pirolli feigned being startled. When Hunter stood up he pointed the Taser he was holding in his left hand at him and shot three bursts of 300 volts and 4.5 milli-amps at Hunter. The shock of the currents running through Hunter’s body knocked him off his feet and rendered him unconscious.
Pirolli walked over to where Hunter lay on the floor and laughed. The older man leaned over the unconscious intruder, grabbed him by his shoulders, and tried to lift Hunter off the ground. He barely budged the man, whose two hundred pounds of dead weight refused to cooperate.
Pirolli routinely bench pressed more than two hundred pounds, he boxed at a gym three days a week beating men twenty years younger than him, and he ran marathons. The Colonel refused to concede that he could not get the motherfucker off the floor and secure him to a chair. He pushed the chair away, stepped around Hunter, reached under his arms and lifted. For the next several minutes he labored at his task nearly getting the unconscious man’s body almost high enough to drop him in the desk chair.
Refusing to acknowledge the futility of his mission, Pirolli continued to struggle, as sweat poured in rivulets down his face and his heart pounded wildly in his ears. He gasped for breath; his mouth was dry, as he expended his last adrenalin-induced wave of energy to his task. There was no way he would allow this punk to defeat him.
He exalted when Hunter’s body began to move, ignoring the sudden sharp pains in his chest. When he finally succeeded in shoving the much larger man halfway into the chair, an excruciating pain, like a bolt of lightning burned across his chest. A half-second later the searing flame flashed up his shoulder and neck, seizing his jaw and burning into to his brain like the fuse on a bomb. His legs buckled, he dropped Hunter to the floor, and fell dead on top of him.
* * *
Through the fog of agony, Hunter felt pinpoints of searing pain across his chest, arms and neck, like someone had repeatedly jabbed the white-hot tip of an andiron on his body. There was a great weight pushing down on him, crushing his chest and pinning h
is arms to the floor. He couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t move. Where was he? What the fuck happened?
He blinked his eyes, trying to focus; there was an inert body on top of him. He squirmed out from under the body. It was Pirolli! The memory of horrific pain flooded his consciousness when he saw the Taser threads that had burned through his shirt.
Pirolli’s dead eyes stared back at him. There was drool on the corpse’s chin, and dried mucous from his nostrils on his upper lip. His features were frozen in shock, or was it pain? Had someone shot him? No, there was no blood.
Hunter had to get the fuck out of there. He stood slowly and checked himself. Aside from the burns he was ok. He was still wearing the latex gloves and head and shoe covers he had put on when he broke into the house. He picked up the Taser that lay next to the dead man. Whatever had happened to Pirolli, Hunter didn’t want whoever found him to wonder about why there was a weapon near his corpse.
His eyes swept the room. He picked up his hat and bandanna, and the tool kit he had used to disconnect the security system and jimmy the lock. When he was satisfied there was nothing there that connected him to the house he left.
It was still dark as he walked along the back wall, disconnected the perimeter cameras, making it look like an animal had chewed on the wire, and crawled under the unmanned gate, making sure to avoid any security patrols. As he made his way to his jeep, he cursed his hubris. He realized he should have taken further precautions. Somehow Pirolli had known he was there. He was damn lucky the man hadn’t captured him. He had no doubt the cruel bastard would have tortured him to find out Haley’s whereabouts.
With the Colonel’s death, he was back to where he began. Who was behind all of this? Who wanted Haley dead?
13
Three years later, Overbrook Farms
Hunter was parked in the lot at the Overbrook Regional Rail Station waiting for the 4:20 pm train from Devon to arrive. When the train cars rolled to a stop, the conductor stepped off the third car from the front, followed by Haley and Andrea. The girls waved goodbye and the conductor nodded at Hunter, happy to see that he was there to drive the children home. The two girls, along with other Episcopal students, had been regular passengers on the train for the past two years. The conductor felt responsible for his charges and would delay departure from the station if there was no one waiting.
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