Vengeance: A Reece Culver Thriller - Book 1

by Bryan Koepke

  “Well, I guess having a name is better than nothing,” Reece said.

  As he continued onward, he kept considering why the file of a long-cold missing-persons case would be missing. It could have been misplaced. That sort of stuff happened. But it stuck in his craw, all the same. This attractive woman decides after all these years to look up her mother, and that happens to be a file that is missing from the police records.

  Well, he thought, sighing, he knew the woman worked in health care. He’d just head over to the hospital. They’d have records on Tracey Roberts—or at least he hoped so.

  Chapter Seven

  A new white Ford van took the Garnet Road exit, southwest of Tulsa. The driver eyed himself in the rearview mirror and smoothed his shaggy windblown hair with the palm of his hand. He turned into the Motel 6 he’d spotted and parked near the entrance. The driver pulled a large black handgun from the center console and shoved it into a black leather satchel on the passenger’s seat.

  He pulled the hood of his dark gray sweatshirt, a twin to the one he’d bought for Owen Roberts, over his hair and got out. He walked with an air of purpose into the motel office. He frowned when the young acne-faced clerk asked for his driver’s license and credit card, and instead slid a crisp hundred-dollar bill across the counter.

  “This should take care of one night, and the rest is yours,” the man said, staring at the young clerk coldly. He instantly jotted down the name John Doe in his motel log next to room number fifty-six, and slid a green fobbed room key across the counter.

  The driver made his way to the bright orange steel door of the motel room and, once inside, went immediately to the window to close the curtains. He turned on the light and retrieved a towel from the small motel bathroom. After placing the towel lengthwise on the bed, the driver took his clothes off and folded each article into a neat pile on the towel as he undressed.

  The hot water of the shower felt good on his muscled frame, but the cheap motel soap was hard to work into a lather despite the massaging of his strong hands. He rubbed the bar firmly upon the thick white hair of his scalp, trying to loosen any remnant of blood spatter that remained after dismembering the body. He’d caught the blackjack dealer writing e-mail to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What kind of crap was that? he thought as he continued washing. A grim smile lit his face as he pictured the chainsaw he’d purchased at the hardware store. That made the task of inserting the dealer’s six-foot frame into a blue plastic fifty-five gallon drum manageable. Now he was sucking up fish food in the Arkansas river.

  The driver emerged from the steam-filled bathroom energized and pulled on a fresh pair of underwear and a white button-down shirt he’d picked up. The garment bag he’d brought with him in the van had a lone drip of dried blood, but the navy blue suit coat and matching dress pants inside the bag had remained pristine. He wrapped the towel on the bed over the his old clothes and placed them into the clear plastic garbage liner from the cheap brown wastebasket next to the TV stand.

  He doubted anyone did any diving into this motel’s Dumpster.

  Chapter Eight

  The large hospital where Tracey Roberts had once worked in the ICU took up half a block or more on the east side of 61st Avenue. Reece found a spot in visitor parking, and made his way into what looked like the administrative section of the mammoth red brick building.

  He found a receptionist’s window with the title “Medical Records” and approached.

  “Excuse me, I’m looking for some employment records,” Reece said. “Would you be able to help?”

  “It depends whose records, and how old they are,” the woman snarled, pushing up her bifocals.

  “The records are for a client of mine who worked here. A nurse in the ICU,” he said, holding up his identification.

  “What were the dates of employment?”

  “She worked here during 1989,” he answered. He had barely finished when he was greeted with a cackling laugh. The woman turned her back and wandered off down a long aisle.

  Reece stood at the window, not sure if she’d return. He had a mind to walk though the door labeled “Records” to his right. He heard what sounded like the same woman talking in the distance behind several large shelves. He heard her say “1989” and break into laughter.

  Reece clenched his fist. She was patronizing him. He hated that and considered hopping over to the other side of the counter to shake some sense into this rude person. Why walk away and blow me off?

  Instead, he left the counter and continued down the hallway looking for help. An older woman was coming toward him with a stack of medical records under one arm. She was short but sturdy with gray hair and thick glasses hanging from a chain around her neck.

  “Excuse me,” he said, reading the name Joan off of her badge.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m looking for a historical employment record. Would you be the right person for that sort of thing?”

  Joan walked off without saying a word, and Reece wondered if the hospital was going to be a dead end. He watched her open a door on her right and turn back.

  “Come this way,” she said. They walked by several rows of records neatly stacked in large yellow racks.

  “What year is your historical record?” Joan asked.

  “It’s 1989,” Reece answered, smiling at her.

  “I was here then. What was the employee’s name? I might have known him.”

  “Tracey Roberts. She was a nurse here for a short time.”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar,” Joan said. “That’s a long time ago, however. If we still had those records they’d be downstairs. I was going to take lunch now, but if you have a few minutes we could go take a look.”

  “Sure,” he said. They went to a reception desk, where he signed in and was given a visitor’s badge. They walked down long hallways filled with sick people lying on gurneys, and Reece remembered why he disliked hospitals so much. Almost all of his previous visits were associated with pain, with damage to some part of his body, and the only thing that stayed the same regardless of which hospital he’d visited was the smell.

  They took an elevator down for what seemed like twenty minutes, and on the way Reece learned that Joan had worked for the hospital for thirty-seven years, and was going to retire soon up on Lake Ten Killer. It made him think of his mother, who had recently bought a home on Keystone Lake west of Tulsa. He made a note to visit her while he was in town.

  The elevator doors opened and they walked down a dark damp hallway toward a distant room she said was where they archived the records.

  “The morgue is over there to the left down that hallway. I hate coming down here alone. You’d think I’d get used to it, but even after all of these years this place still gives me the creeps.”

  They passed a narrow passage leading to the morgue. A shrill wine came at them from nowhere. They stopped, and he tried to place the sound. Joan looked over at him with wide eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said, and then turned and hustled back to the elevator. The noise was continuous, as when construction workers rip sheets of plywood. Reece watched Joan disappear into the elevator. He guessed it was the kind of saw they used to cut open bodies during an autopsy. He continued down the hallway until he came to a single steel door with the words “Records Archive.”

  Reece tried the handle but it was locked. He walked to his right, down another hallway that seemed to lead to some unfinished part of the hospital. There were no doors, so he turned around. He searched the basement for a quite a while, and was about ready to call it quits when he found a door that exited into the back alley behind the building.

  He stepped out welcoming the bright afternoon sunshine, and followed the red brick exterior toward the area where he thought the medical records might be. Reece came to a loading ramp with a door beside that read “Medical Records Archive”. He rang the bell and waited until the door cracked open and a face appeared. “You got to go around to the front, mister,” a short, pudg
y man with wisps of blond hair on the sides of an otherwise bald head said.

  Reece put his hand against the door to avoid having it slammed in his face. He knew enough now to fabricate a plausible fiction.

  “I’ve been up front. I checked in with Joan in Medical Records. I’m here to continue my search.”

  “What did you say your name was?” the man asked, pulling the door open a little farther.

  “Reece Culver.”

  “Are you with the hospital?”

  “No, I’m an investigator,” Reece said, holding up his ID.

  “You working some big murder investigation or something?”

  Reece kept quiet and followed him through a second door into a football field–sized room with high ceilings and tall steel shelving units that reminded him of the aisles at a warehouse store. He stopped and turned back toward the janitor.

  “There haven’t been any murders in the case that I know of.”

  “Okay, mister, I got work to do. Don’t take anything, but if you need to make copies, you can use the copy machine over there,” he said, pointing at an office area on the far side of the room. “You can let yourself out the same way we came in.”

  Chapter Nine

  A bright yellow cab pulled to the curb. George Kendall and Crystal stepped out from under the covered atrium outside the Omni Majestic Hotel in Saint Louis. Large drops of rain pelted George’s gray raincoat. He grabbed the door and waited for Crystal to go in. He followed her into the cab, and after slamming the door said:

  “Take us to 2222 Market Street, please.”

  The driver headed away from the curb with his windshield wipers working wildly to clear the rain.

  “You two don’t look like G-men to me,” the driver, said looking at them in the rearview mirror.

  “We’re worse than G-men. Now mind your damn business, and take us were we want to go,” Crystal said, smiling at George. The cab pulled up to the curb in front of the FBI building, and Crystal stepped out. George reached over the seat to pay and joined her on the curb.

  “Are you having a bad day or something?” he asked, following Crystal into the lobby. She stopped, looking at the interior of the building. George caught up with her.

  “I’m fine, I just hate this town. It’s either six hundred degrees outside or raining cats and dogs.”

  “St. Louis is a fine town. Besides, a few days here will help you appreciate what we have back in Denver.”

  They went to the counter and signed in. The clerk asked to see two forms of official identification. Crystal looked at the man and he pointed to a posting of acceptable credentials. She read the list - “US Passport, Birth Certificate, Voters Registration Card, US Government ID badge, Social Security Card”.

  “Here use this,” George said sliding his Denver federal center Id badge and Social Security card toward the clerk. Crystal reached into her coat and found her badge and after a quick search located a Voters Registration card in her purse. The clerk signed them in and told them that Special agent Stephen Cox was waiting for them in the Dovetail conference room on the forth floor.

  Crystal and George stepped off the elevator each wearing blue and white visitors badges. George recognized Cox’s secretary Rhonda, and they followed her into a large room with a conference table, and fourteen blue chairs. At one end there was a computer desk beside a gray steel file cabinet with a red and white magnet in the center of the top drawer that read, “Classified.” Crystal took a seat next to George, who sat across from a stocky man with bushy gray hair and thick glasses, reminding her of Theodore Roosevelt. At the head of the table sat Special Agent Cox, the District Commander of the St. Louis FBI Organized Crime Task Force. He had a blond buzz cut and a gaunt face that she knew was a artifact left over from his days as a long distance runner. On the opposite side of the table sat three other men.

  “I’d like to thank everyone for coming to this meeting. I wanted to get all of you together so we all have the latest information. I’d like to go around the room and introduce everyone. On my right is St. Louis Chief Detective Mike Mobley,” Cox said referring to the man who resembled Teddy Roosevelt. “Across from him is George Kendall which all of you are acquainted with, and his assistant Crystal Thomas. Across from Crystal is Jim Messerman from the Tulsa branch of the FBI. Agent Messerman is an expert in illegal gambling operations, to his left we have Detective Ed Stevens from the Tulsa Police Department, and finally Nathan Hawk, our St. Louis–based federal prosecutor,” Agent Cox said.

  Hawk and Stevens looked like garden variety businessmen dressed in inexpensive blue suits that might have come from Sears or Pennys. Agent Messerman had deep set black eyes, high cheek bones, and jet black hair that he wore parted to one side. His business suit had a sheen to it making it looker more expensive than the others.

  “I brought you all here today to bring you up to speed on some new information we’ve obtained. During the past year Agent Messerman has infiltrated the operations of Sam Shanks, and we now have a dependable informant.”

  His secretary Rhonda dimmed the lights, and the projector screen at one end of the room lit up with a photograph of an elderly man. Crystal looked over, and saw her boss sneering at agent Cox in the dark.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a picture of our latest asset, Owen Roberts,” Agent Cox said, motioning to Rhonda. The secretary carried in a large blue plastic tray covered in muffins, donuts, and tall cups of Starbucks coffee. Crystal smiled at Mike Mobley as his eyes followed the tray of food. Mobley seemed to notice the smile and gave a grin through his bushy mustache. With his lamb chop sideburns and bright red cheeks, he resembled a department store Santa Claus.

  “Everyone, help yourself,” Cox said, grabbing the largest of two apple fritters. He bit into the concoction of apple, sugar, and dough, and seemed surprised when it broke in half, with one piece nearly missing his coffee cup. Agent Cox set the donut down, still chewing, and licked his fingers, then began talking with his mouth full.

  “This photo of our confidential informant was taken in 2005, when he was brought in for questioning by the Tulsa PD.” Crystal studied the picture, and thought grudgingly that Owen looked good for his age. She pressed a fingernail under the bed of the adjacent finger and concentrated on the pain, feeling like she could break into a cold sweat at any moment. Having Owen Roberts’ picture on the screen at the front of the room was a little too close for comfort.

  “Owen L. Roberts grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and we speculate he first met Sam Shanks in the late 1970s after becoming a regular customer at one of Shanks’s gambling establishments,” Cox said, motioning for Rhonda to go to the next slide.

  “Here’s a photo of Roberts playing poker with some as of yet unnamed companions.”

  As Crystal studied the photo of her father, she fought to control the rumble in her stomach. What if they found out? She clenched her sphincter and prayed. If I run for the bathroom they’ll know something. She nibbled at the dry skin on the top of her bottom lip. Mike Mobley stared at her from across the table. She looked past him, trying not to make eye contact.

  Agent Cox nodded his head, and Rhonda brought up the next slide. It was a family portrait in the front yard of a white house with green trim. The house Crystal grew up in with her parents Owen and Tracey Roberts. She stared at the picture wondering where her brothers Waylon and Julian were. It had been so long since she’d seen them. She felt like crying, but instead drifted into a daydream about the day they drug her away from her brothers. She’d later been told they went to a separate orphanage in the country south of Tulsa.

  “This photo, taken in 1987, shows Owen Roberts, his wife Tracey, and their three children during happier times. His wife, Tracey took the kids and left in 1989,”

  “Where was this taken?” George Kendall asked studying the photo. Crystal looked at her childlike visage in the picture and resisted the urge to bolt from the room. Her hair was dark red like her mother Tracey’s, but with her dyed blond locks and the
pale blue contact lenses she regularly wore to the office, she hoped no one would make the connection.

  “That was in St. Louis,” Cox said, gnawing on his second pastry, this one a Danish. He followed with a long sip of coffee, set down his coffee mug, and still swallowing started to speak. Crystal stared at Cox, wondering why he was in such a hurry to speak that he never finished chewing. That was what drove her so crazy when she was talking with the man she called Papa.

  “Tracey Owens took her kids to the bus station on August 9, 1989. She left them by themselves supposedly to run an errand, and was never heard from again.”

  “How do you know where she left?” Nathan Hawk asked.

  “The oldest sibling, Waylon, told us what she said before leaving. Owen Roberts is still the prime suspect in her disappearance, but the crime was never solved,” Cox said wolfing down the last of his Danish in the dim light.

  Crystal rocked forward in her seat. “Was she ever located?”

  “No, Ms. Thomas. We didn’t receive notification until a few weeks after her disappearance, and by then the trail had gone cold. Are there any other questions?” Agent Cox asked.

  Crystal sat back, fidgeting with her hands under the table. She pushed hard and felt the tip of her thumbnail lift. The pain was strong. If she continued, it would bleed. Yet the pain took her away from the fear. She remembered learning the habit in the orphanage.

  “Over the past year we pieced together Owen’s story. He’s a compulsive gambler, and we think he became indebted to Shanks between the years 1980 to 1989. Shanks put together some kind of deal with Owen. There was one theory that his wife’s disappearance was the result of the deal. We’re still speculating on what happened to her, but sometime between 1980 and the present Owen went to work for Shanks,” Cox said, picking up his coffee mug.