by D. A. Keeley
Copyright Information
Destiny’s Pawn: A Peyton Cote Novel © 2016 by D.A. Keeley.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First e-book edition © 2016
E-book ISBN: 9780738748856
Book format by Teresa Pojar
Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Cover Illustration by Dominick Finelle/The July Group
Editing by Nicole Nugent
Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Keeley, D. A., 1970– author.
Title: Destiny’s pawn : a Peyton Cote novel / D.A. Keeley.
Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Midnight Ink, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003094 (print) | LCCN 2016006725 (ebook) | ISBN
—9780738742250 (paperback) | ISBN 9780738748856 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Border patrol agents—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction
Classification: LCC PS3603.O773 D47 2016 (print) | LCC PS3603.O773 (ebook) |
—DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003094
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Manufactured in the United States of America
This book is for my mother, Connie Corrigan.
Acknowledgments
Thanks, as usual, to Kevin Stevens, deputy chief of the US Border Patrol (Ret.), for his insights and feedback. The generosity he offers me by sharing his knowledge and time is greatly appreciated and always makes books in this series better.
Thanks also to attorney Marcus Jaynes of Landis Arn & Jaynes for answering a year’s worth of questions on immigration and political asylum applications; to Adam Stoutamyer of the Maine State Police for insights into Maine marijuana laws; to commercial fisherman Mike Link for information regarding shipping routes and some history into stowaway travel from Eastern Europe to Nova Scotia; to Kim Sprankle for serving as my undaunted advanced reader; to my agents Ginger Curwen and Julia Lord for being everything to me from advanced readers to cheerleaders, advisors, and friends; to Nicole Nugent (editor), Beth Hanson and Katie Mickschl (publicists), and Terri Bischoff (publisher) at Midnight Ink, for your wisdom, support, and belief, respectively; and, of course, a sincere thank you to Lisa, Delaney, Audrey, and Keeley for your laughter and love.
Power is only vouchsafed to the man who
dares to stoop and pick it up.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
prologue
The first time Michael saw it, the doll intervened.
Six years old, he followed his uncle Ted, who’d offered to watch him while his parents were at dinner. Ted tucked him in, read him a story, and closed Michael’s bedroom door when he left.
Then Michael heard the stairs to the third-floor apartment creak. And he panicked.
Was Uncle Ted leaving him alone?
In the dark?
This night, as a nor’easter blew into Aroostook County from Canada, Michael wouldn’t be left behind. Not in the dark house. He was out of bed and following. The narrow, panelled stairway to the upstairs apartment was outdated and dark, lit by a single hanging lightbulb.
The floorboards creaked again.
“Uncle Ted?” Michael’s voice was a whisper in the dark. His bare feet padded up the stairs.
His uncle never allowed him up there. “My personal things are up here.” He’d always closed the door behind him quickly. Even his father concurred: “It’s your uncle’s space. Leave him be.”
But this time, aware of his in loco parentis responsibilities, Ted left his apartment door open, unaware his young nephew crept behind.
Three steps from the top, Michael crouched, peering over the top step, seeing his uncle’s flashlight pointing beneath the sofa. Michael could hear windswept snow like sand against the windows. His uncle held the flashlight between his teeth as he tugged a wooden box out from under the couch.
First Michael saw the thick plastic, then red felt. Then he saw something else. His eyes widened and narrowed as he struggled to comprehend the beauty.
Absently his hand brushed something in the dark stairwell. He turned, still crouching, his eyes falling upon the porcelain doll. The figurine beside him had a disfigured face, years ago having melted in the summer heat and frozen during winter before the attic was converted to Uncle Ted’s temperature-controlled apartment.
To six-year-old Michael, she looked like the face in the trick mirror at a circus—elongated and frightening. He gasped and recoiled, accidentally knocking her down the stairs.
He bounded down them behind her, the sound of his footfalls drowning in the wake of the doll’s crash. He was in his bed, feigning sleep, by the time his uncle descended, picked up the pieces of the doll, and checked on him.
As Michael lay in bed, he heard his uncle reclimb the stairs to his apartment, the place Uncle Ted had lived since March of 1990.
“Stay out of Uncle Ted’s apartment,” his mother would reiterate many times over the years.
And so the apartment door remained locked.
But in the ensuing years, Michael had learned where the spare key was. It’s like visiting a secret place, he wrote in his diary. Feels like I’m time-traveling when I go up there. Feels like I’m meeting a deity.
And as he grew older, the wooden box spawned his fascination with history. And with art.
one
Monday, March 3, 2:35 p.m., near the Canadian border
By the time she heard him behind her, he’d gotten so close that she instinctively reached for her Smith & Wesson .40 as she turned to face him.
They stood at the tailgate of Border Patrol Agent Peyton Cote’s Ford F-150 service vehicle. She’d been loading water bottles into the pockets of her backpack, preparing for a three-mile hike, a routine border sweep, when she’d heard his feet scuff the frozen chunks of dirt and snow behind her.
Now, facing him, she felt nearly embarrassed to be holding her weapon—the boy wasn’t much older than her eleven-year-old, Tommy.
So why did she have that feeling, the one that had befallen her hundreds of times before, the one that tol
d her something wasn’t right? She didn’t immediately reholster her .40. Her sister called it Mother’s Intuition; agents called it Field Instinct.
She shuffled her L.L.Bean leather hiking boots, her snowshoes on the ground near her feet. Behind the boy, to the northeast, was a dense, commercially owned forest of eastern pines and Norway spruces.
Peyton knew the boy had emerged from the tree line.
She also knew the woods behind him ran to the Canadian border.
It was a warm morning, one of those glorious late-winter days residents of Aroostook County, Maine, felt they’d earned on the heels of a winter that saw temperatures plunge to forty below twice this year and the snowfall total top ninety-one inches (and counting).
“What’s your name?” she asked.
Was that a shiver? Or a flinch?
She couldn’t tell, but his blond bangs swayed. His face was dirty, his pant leg torn at the knee. Red-cheeked, he’d obviously been outside for an extended period.
A wind gust hit them, and somewhere overhead, a large crow sounded. She took a different approach.
“Like to snowshoe?”
He shrugged, so she kept going.
“I love it, especially on days like this.” She pointed to a nearby tree. Sunlight turned ice-covered branches to refractive chandeliers. “It’s beautiful out here.”
He shook his head and looked down. “Very cold.”
Her first reaction was as an agent: she heard the accent. Russian? Her second reaction was as a mother: the boy wore only a hoodie, and beneath it his T-shirt collar was frayed. Where were his hat and mittens? She wouldn’t allow Tommy outside dressed like that during winter.
She left her backpack where it was and tossed the snowshoes into the truck’s bed.
“Come sit in my truck,” she said and moved to the passenger’s-side door. She opened it for him.
He looked at her. She nodded reassuringly, and he climbed in. She rounded the hood, got behind the wheel, started the engine, and set the internal temperature to seventy-two.
“Are you lost?”
“No,” he said. The skin near his eyes was pale. Dehydration? His bare hands were raw, the red skin cracked and bleeding. He rubbed them on his thighs, seeking friction to warm them. “Waiting for you,” he said.
She’d been reaching for her phone but paused. “You’ve been waiting for me?”
He looked down at his fingertip. It was split, a white half-moon open where a tiny drop of blood emerged. “For Border Patrol,” he said.
She watched him closely. He didn’t appear nervous.
“Is that a Russian accent?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Where do you live?”
He shrugged.
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“Not anymore.”
His cheeks were red, but he wasn’t out of breath—he’d been exposed to the elements of the harsh winter for too long.
“You might have frostbite. Tell me your name.”
“Aleksei Vann,” he said. “I wait to surrender.”
5:40 p.m., 12 Higgins Drive
Stone Gibson entered Peyton’s kitchen wearing a sweat-drenched T-shirt and sweatpants, toting a gym bag.
“You’re late,” she said, “and you stink.”
“Thanks for noticing,” he said and kissed the back of her neck, “on both fronts. And I’m sorry. I’m not usually late for a meal. Can I use your shower?”
“You left your razor in there,” she said. “Don’t dilly daddle. Steak tips are just about ready, and I have salad, bread for Tommy and me, and a six-pack of gluten-free Omission IPA for you.”
“Christ,” he said over his shoulder, “I’m moving in.”
She turned but just caught a glimpse of his wide shoulders rounding the corner as he headed up the stairs. She’d hoped to see his face, wanted to read his expression.
Had he read her mind?
It was nearly dark at dinnertime on this March evening. And that was an improvement: Garrett, Maine, in Aroostook County, was north of Montreal, which meant during December and January each year nightfall came early. Peyton often left the house in early-morning moonlight and returned after the 3:45 p.m. sunset.
She lit a cinnamon-scented candle left over from the holidays. The aroma mixed with the scent of garlic she crushed and put in the pan with the steak. She liked being at home, liked typical domestic activities like cooking dinner. And she liked Stone Gibson, maybe more than she wished. They’d been dating for six months. He was a state trooper, one of four assigned to Aroostook County. They’d met—Peyton was loathe to admit—when her mother’s millionth attempt to set her up with a man actually worked. Now he was a large part of her already complicated life: work and Tommy seemed all she could handle. But somehow Stone overturned her emotional apple cart. And she hadn’t minded one bit.
She called Tommy in from the living room. He entered the kitchen, cell phone before him, thumbs dancing. “Hey, Mom, can we have ployes?”
“Your grandmother makes those so well that I’m not competing with her,” Peyton said. “Don’t text and walk. You’ll hit a wall. And, hey, I thought we discussed what the phone was to be used for.”
“Only to call you in an emergency.”
“So I assume you’re texting me. What’s the emergency in the living room?” She heard water running in the shower upstairs.
Tommy smiled and shook his head. “Sorry.”
“If you weren’t so cute …” She squeezed his shoulder and kissed his forehead.
“Mom, don’t do that in front of Stone.”
“If you’re bored, don’t text. Read a book.”
“I will.”
“Now, please put the salad on the table.”
He slid the cell phone in his pocket and went to the fridge. “Stone said we have a karate competition this weekend, Mom.”
“Great,” she said. “Can’t wait.”
Tommy carried the salad to the dining room table.
Peyton returned to the stove and pushed the steak around with a wooden spoon. It was done, so she took the pan off the burner, added a little more garlic, gave one last stir, then scooped the steak tips onto a serving platter to rest.
She hadn’t been the only one who benefitted from Stone’s return to Aroostook County. School had never come easy to Tommy. And the previous summer, before his dyslexia diagnosis, Tommy had begun karate lessons. Stone Gibson was the instructor. So as Peyton journeyed down fate’s odd path, attending a blind date set up by Lois of all people, Tommy had also met and was befriended by Stone.
The water in the upstairs shower stopped. Peyton carried the steak to the dining room table. In less than three minutes, Stone bounded down the stairs and took an end chair.
“Quick shower,” Peyton said. “You must be hungry.”
“I was going to slide down the banister.”
“Glad you didn’t.”
“Can you teach me how to do that?” Tommy said.
Stone winked at him. “Here’s to my favorite Aroostook County people.” He raised a chilled glass of Omission IPA.
“You must be forgetting your mother and sister,” Tommy said.
“No,” Stone said. “You guys are my favorites. You’re not crazy.”
“Are they really crazy?” Tommy leaned forward, eager to hear more.
“Foot in mouth.” Stone grinned at Peyton.
She drank her wine. “Everyone has crazy relatives.”
“We don’t have crazy relatives,” Tommy said. “We only have Gram and Aunt Ellie.”
Peyton looked across the table at Stone.
“Care to add anything to Tommy’s remark?” he asked.
She liked his boyish smirk. “We watched the Celtics game last night,” she said.
“You’re
fast on your feet, agent,” he said, smiling. He ate a piece of steak and groaned in obvious appreciation. “How was your day?”
“A thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy surrendered at the border.”
“To you?”
“Yeah. I was near the woods behind McCluskey’s Potato Processing Plant, getting ready to sweep the border, and he stepped out from the tree line and walked over to me.”
“How did he get here?”
“Long story,” she said.
Tommy rolled his eyes. “May I be excused?”
Peyton examined his plate. “Yeah. But I want you to read. No phone.”
Reluctantly, Tommy nodded and slid out from the table.
“I’m all ears,” Stone said.
“After I did a preliminary interview with the boy, I spent a couple hours on the Internet seeing what I could learn about Ukraine and what’s going on there. Then I called a professor from U-Maine at Reeds.” She sipped her red wine. “Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Ukraine was particularly harsh in a town called Donetsk, where this boy is from. The airport was demolished. I mean, it’s rubble. Still finding bodies a year after the battle there ended.”
“I hadn’t heard the fighting was that bad.”
“Some Ukrainian cities have been turned into third-world countries. Pro-Russian separatists bombed this boy’s house. Might’ve been an accident. You remember Malaysian Air MH17?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that was a Buk missile. One hit the boy’s house, and his mother was badly injured. A few days later, his father put him on a boat to Nova Scotia, trying to get him to his aunt in Garrett. He’s only two years older than Tommy.”
“Did he come through the Black Sea?” Stone asked. “Wouldn’t that take forever?”
“Not sure about all the travel specifics yet. But, apparently, the father feared for his son’s life. I brought the boy—his name is Aleksei Vann—back to the station. His English isn’t bad, but his aunt lives in Garrett, so we’re hoping to have her help us interview him in the morning.”
“Where is he tonight?”
“In DHHS care.”
