No mercy

by John Gilstrap

  “An Indian burial ground,” Jonathan grumped.

  “A Nike missile launch facility. It’s all in the public record. Back in the eighties and nineties, we got rid of all our Nike missiles, and the sites went up for sale. This one, on Apocalypse Boulevard, was bought by Secured Storage Company out of Wilmington, Delaware.”

  “Interesting company name,” Boxers poked. “I wonder what they do.”

  “ Delaware,” Venice stressed. Clearly, she was frustrated that they hadn’t already leaped to where she was going. “Carlyle is a Delaware company.”

  Jonathan coughed out a laugh. “Jesus, Ven, half the companies in the world are Delaware corporations.”

  “Which makes it that much easier to do the search,” she countered. “Secured Storage Company is a subsidiary-several steps removed, of course-of Carlyle Industries. They’re the same company!”

  Finally, Jonathan got it. “Missiles mean underground storage magazines,” he said. “That’s where Carlyle was storing the GVX.”

  “When the Hugheses went there to get it, there must have been an exchange of gunfire,” Dom said.

  “So what’s with the phone call to 9-1-1?” Boxers asked. “And if there someone was shot, why un — call?”

  “Because they didn’t want the publicity,” Jonathan explained. “Every state requires gunshot wounds to be reported to the police, mandating some kind of investigation. That’s the last thing a company like Carlyle would want.”

  The room grew silent except for JoeDog’s snoring as they each put the puzzle together for themselves.

  Finally, Jonathan test-drove his own theory aloud. “Desperate to get their kid back, the Hugheses reach out to Angela Caldwell. She points them in the right direction, and pays for the decision with her life. Obviously, they visited her at her house, or else their fingerprints wouldn’t be all over the place. Then they went to this Apocalypse Boulevard place and took what they needed for ransom.”

  “Shooting the place up while doing it,” Boxers said.

  “Right,” Jonathan agreed. “So now the Hugheses are hiding somewhere. They can’t call the police without walking into a murder charge, and they’ve either stashed their GVX somewhere, or they’refolder. “Facial recognition software turned up bupkis on your pal Leon Harris. Absolutely nothing. So, I decided to run the other faces. This is what I got.”

  Gail waited for him to open his file and select a facedown piece of paper. She turned it over and saw a mug she vaguely recognized. She scowled and waited for her answer without asking the question.

  “The priest,” Jesse said. “From the video. You are looking at one Father Dominc D’Angelo, pastor of St. Katherine’s Catholic Church in a place called Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia. Don’t ask where it is, because I don’t have a clue. The picture you’re looking at is from a fund-raiser for something called Resurrection House. It’s an orphanage, sort of, for kids whose parents are serving time in jail.”

  “How sweet,” Gail said.

  “Hey, it’s a start,” Jesse said. Then he smiled. “But it’s only the beginning. Clearly Leon and Father D’Angelo know each other, right? So I thought I’d search the Internet for the cross section of Dominic D’Angelo and Fisherman’s Cove. Actually, there were more hits than I would have thought. For a priest, he really gets around on the rubber chicken circuit. He’s like a fund-raising machine. He’s also a psychologist, for what that’s worth.”

  “Is it worth anything?”

  Jesse shrugged. “I suppose if you’re crazy, but not so much for us right now.”

  “Then why-”

  “Stay with me. I’m getting there. I wasn’t finding anything to link him to Leon, and I traced him back as far as I knew how to trace. Finally, I found an alumni newspaper from the College of William and Mary from sometime in the mid-eighties. They were running some kind of a retrospective of the Good Old Days, you know?” His smile broadened, and he slid another sheet face down to Gail. “And look what I found.”

  With a sense of real anticipation in her gut, Gail turned the sheet over and found a picture of two clearly intoxicated college students. The clothing styles spoke of the last days of disco. These two boys were laughing heartily, hanging off each other in that way that you never see in guys who are much beyond their teens.

  “Don’t you see it?” Jesse prompted.

  Then she did. The caption identified them by name. The dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty on the left was a younger version of Father D’Angelo. And the shirtless blond Adonis on the right was a very young Leon Harris-only his name on the page was Jonathan Gravenow.

  “Oh, my,” Gail beamed. “Look what you found. Nice work, Jess. Wonderful work. Now we have a name for the face.”

  Jesse shook his head. “Actually, we don’t,” he said. “Jonathan Gravenow doesn’t exist. Nowhere in the world.”

  “But I just saw him.”

  Jesse’s smile got even broader. “No,” he said as he slid a third sheet of paper across the desk, “you just saw Jonathan Grave.”

  This new sheet of paper looked to be articles of incorporation for a company called Security Solutions, a Virginia corporation headquartered in none other than Fisherman’s Cove.

  “This one was a little tricky,” Jesse said, exuding pride. “Jonathan Gravenow was the only child of Simon Gravenow. Does that name ring a bell, Miss FBI?”

  It didn’t ring a bell, name to Jonathan Grave, and he joined the Army. Twenty years later, he owns a private investigation company. Now, what kind of investigation firm do you suppose a former Army guy might run?”

  This time, Gail saw it immediately. People like that were exactly the folks who would get into the paramilitary business. The kind of business that might specialize in rescuing wayward hostages. It was time to find Fisherman’s Cove on the map and make a plane reservation.

  She was about to say something to that effect when her phone rang. Even as she reached for the receiver, she had the sense that she should have ignored it.

  Thirty seconds later, she cursed herself for not listening to her instincts.

  Venice didn’t try to conceal her pride for what she’d accomplished. “I knew you’d want to track the Hugheses,” she said, “so I worked the problem. I was hoping that they’d done something really stupid like using their credit cards, but obviously they haven’t, or the police would have been all over them. They’ve been pretty smart. The only record of unusual behavior is their withdrawal of twelve thousand dollars and change from their savings account. Pretty much wiped out their cash supply.”

  “That’s their traveling money,” Boxers said.

  She continued, “I tried tracking the cell phones owned by each of them, but they’ve either turned them off or thrown them away. Either way, there’s no signal to triangulate on.”

  Jonathan asked, “What about the number I called at the end of the 0300 mission?”

  “That’s one of those prepaid disposable jobs-thank God you called it, or we’d have nothing even to look for-but it’s turned off, too. Even so, it got me thinking. If they know enough to keep their cell phones off and to use prepaids, then they’d probably buy more than one of them, right? One for Stephenson Hughes and one for his wife, Julie.” She waited for the nods. “So, with a little help from a friend of mine in the telephone company, I did a search on the telephone numbers that were called by Stephenson’s prepaid, and guess what I found?”

  Jonathan feigned patience because it was easiest. “What?”

  “That he called another prepaid disposable phone.”

  “The wife?”

  “That would be my guess. Anyway, those calls-there were three of them altogether, beginning shortly after your call to Stephenson, with the last one about thirty hours ago-gave us a routing to look at.”

  “Where the signals began and ended,” Dom explained.

  Venice nodded. “Exactly. And it got interesting. The other end of the call-the receiving end in every case-was from different locations, starting in Ind
iana, and moving in a rough line north and east. The originating end of the calls all came from the same tower combinations in southwestern Pennsylvania.”

  “Pittsburgh?” Jonathan asked.

  “Not Pittsburgh per se,” Venice said, “but from that general area. In the mountains.” She reached under the coffee table and found the atlas that Jonathan always kept there, and sear became even more animated. “That part of the state is in pretty tough shape economically. You don’t have neighborhoods like we know them. Up in the mining country there are lots and lots of old homesteads, but they tend to be on big tracts of land. Dozens of acres, if not hundreds.”

  Jonathan found his patience waning, but he hung in there.

  “I know, I know,” Venice said, reading his body language. “Get to the point. Well, I am, believe it or not. Because the land tracts are so large, there are only a few that could possibly be the source of Stephenson’s signal.”

  “Unless he’s decided to bivouac,” Boxers said.

  Venice waved a dismissive hand. “Trust me,” she said. “He didn’t. He decided instead to use an old family home up there in the woods.”

  “ His family?” Boxers asked.

  “Why haven’t the police found him?” Jonathan added.

  She beamed. “Because it’s deeded to Alistair DuBois,” she said. “Not to Stephenson Hughes.”

  Jonathan recoiled. “Who the hell is Alistair Dubois?”

  “Stephenson Hughes’s mother’s father.”

  “Holy shit,” Boxers barked.

  Dom laughed. “Isn’t she amazing? Honest to goodness, it only took her about forty-five minutes to piece all of this together. I watched her do it.”

  Jonathan’s mouth gaped. “What kind of twisted logic gets you to places like that?”

  She shrugged. “I cheated. I started with the assumption that he had a plan that made sense.” She shot a look to Boxers. “One that made more sense than bivouacking, anyway, which meant that there was probably some property that they had access to. If that were the case, then I figured that it would be family property, else how would they know about it? Based on that assumption, I started with the tax records for the most likely tracts, and then I worked backward through a genealogy search. The answer came pretty fast.”

  Jonathan gaped. “You never cease to amaze me.”

  She beamed.

  “You up for doing some more magic?”

  Her face fell. “Like what?”

  “Like finding me everything you can about a place in West Virginia known as Brigadeville.” It took less than a minute to share the spotty information he’d learned from Andrew Hawkins.

  Venice scowled. “That’s not much to go on.”

  “You saying you can’t?” Jonathan asked.

  “I’m insulted,” she said.

  “I thought you might be.” Jonathan looked at his watch. “It’s seven-fifteen now. Let’s meet again in three hours and see where we are.”

  Now she looked shocked. “You know it’s seven fifteen in the evening, right?”

  Jonathan stood. “Three hours and fifteen minutes, then. You, Box, and I will meet up in the office at ten thirty.” He looked to Boxers. “That work for you, big guy?”

  He stood, too. “Doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of choice.”

  “Then I’m communicating,” Jonathan said. “Now, if y’all don’t mind, I’d like some time alone.”

  The mood in the room. Her eyes should have been closed-or nearly closed, with perhaps a half-moon of iris showing above or below her eyelid. The flaccid flesh of her face should have brought her thin nose and high cheekbones into sharp relief. In Jonathan’s mind the dead never looked at rest so he didn’t expect that, but he did expect a look of peace. With the frowning muscles as lifeless as their smiling counterparts, he expected a deathly smoothness to her face.

  Yet he found none of that.

  Ellen’s face was barely a face at all; it was a bloated purple eruption of battered tissue. On her left side, the one closest to Jonathan, the cheekbone, eye socket, and brow had merged into a blood-filled globe. In the middle of the mass, the slit that was once the opening between her lids appeared to be glued shut. The angle of her jaw told him that it had been badly broken and wired back, and the odd cast of her lips was a clear indication that her teeth had been broken.

  Looking at her like this, Jonathan understood why no one wanted him to be here. No one should ever have to see a loved one in a condition like this. Emotion blossomed behind his eyes, but it wasn’t driven by sadness. There was some of that, sure, but the redness of his eyes was all anger, as was the tightly locked jaw and the fists that he didn’t realize he’d clenched. He inhaled deeply and noisily, suddenly aware that for a long while he hadn’t been breathing at all.

  “Sir, are you all right?” Jimmy asked. He looked terrified that he might have to care for the living instead of the dead.

  Jonathan glared at him, at the long thin neck. Inexplicably, he thought how easy it would be snap it. One blow was all it would take. Or one violent twist. In his mind he could see himself doing it.

  He shook the thought away. This wasn’t a time for violence. Certainly not against this clean-cut kid who’d tried every way he’d known to keep Jonathan away from this very moment. No, the time for violence would come later.

  “I’m fine,” Jonathan said, returning his gaze to Ellen.

  “You don’t look fine,” Jimmy said.

  Jonathan didn’t answer. Instead, he turned on his heel and left the only woman he’d ever loved behind him on the gurney. He didn’t want to watch as Jimmy pulled the zipper shut again.

  On the other side of the heavy door, in the paper-and equipment-strewn office, he nearly collided with Detective Weatherby of the Fairfax County Police Department.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gail had never met the woman who stepped out of the shadows on her porch, but she recognized her on sight. “My goodness,” Gail stammered. “Director Rivers.” She extended her hand to the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the country. “What an honor.”

  FBI Director Irene Rivers returned the handshake warmly and smiled. “The honor is mine, Sheriff Bonneville.”

  Gail flushed. She found herself oddly speechless in the presence of the woman whom she admired perhaps more than any other. “Madame Director. Why are you here?” she asked, and then winced at the seeming rudeness.

  “Please dispense with the ‘Madam Directorre the other day. That must be very unsettling in a community this small.”

  “I’d think it’s unsettling in any community,” Gail said.

  Irene gestured up the steps toward the front door. “May I invite myself inside for a chat?”

  Gail gave a little start and headed for the steps. “Where are my manners? Yes, please come inside.”

  They settled at the kitchen table because that was the only room that was furnished. Irene Rivers told her that she loved the place. Gail smiled and offered a soft drink, which the director refused, and they settled in to the business at hand.

  “I know how difficult your last few days have been,” Irene started. “I’ve run high-profile cases myself over the years, and the pressure to produce results can be overwhelming.”

  Gail crossed her arms and leaned them on the table. As her head cleared from celebrity shock, she decided to resist small talk. This was not a social call, after all. “Does this meeting have something to do with the shootings?” she asked.

  Irene ignored the question. “Can I trust that what we discuss here in the next few minutes will remain in this room?”

  “Absolutely not,” Gail said, surprised to hear her own words. “Not until I know what you’re about to say. My first allegiance is no longer to the Bureau.”

  Irene arched her eyebrows and smirked. It was a look of admiration, not derision. “Why am I not surprised?” she said. She regrouped her thoughts. “Okay, then, tell me who you think the killer is.”

  Gail hesitated, but she
wasn’t sure why. “By name?”

  Irene cocked her head. “ Could you answer by name?”

  The sheriff nodded. “I think so.”

  “Then no,” Irene said. She looked a little embarrassed. “You’ll see when we’re done that I’ll need plausible deniability. Tell me instead where your deductive path has led you.”

  Deductive path, Gail thought. How very Bureau-speak. Her eyes narrowed as she weighed her options. “I must confess, Madam Dir-” She cut herself off. “I’m not entirely comfortable sharing those details. Not at this stage of the investigation.”

  “Because the Bureau has a history of, what, screwing people over?” Irene ventured. “Because we have a history of hogging credit when things go well and of passing the buck when they go sour?”

  The director’s bluntness startled Gail. “Well, yes,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you. As you might imagine, when you sit in my chair in the Emerald City you learn to trust your instincts on whom you trust and whom you don’t. In this case, I’m asking for the benefit of reasonable doubt.”

  Gail liked this woman. She had always respected Irene Rivers, and after the shoot-out that involved the death of her predecessor in the job, the whole world had come to admire the woman’s courage under fire. “Okay,” Gail said at length. “I think that our shooter is a professional of a very high order. I think that he has advanced tactical training, perhaps Special Forces, perhaps HRT or SWAT. He knows how to make a big entry, and he knows how to shoot extremely well. He also did not work alone. He appears to have arrived by helicopter.”

  Irene nodded and pinched her lower lip as she listened. “So you this.”

  This is what Alice must have felt like as she stepped through the looking glass. “And the perpetrators? I still have my constituents to answer to.”

  “Of course. They’ve left the country. You should be furious about that, by the way. You should be over-the-moon pissed that the FBI didn’t clue you in on the operation they were performing, and I’m willing to go on the record telling the world what a pain in the ass you’ve been dragging information out of us. That should play well here, don’t you think?”