by D. A. Keeley
Her thoughts had drifted to Tommy because she planned to miss dinner with him. Again.
Tommy was eating with Lois, who was making shepherd’s pie (delicious, but with far too much salt) and crepes for dessert. Given the menu and Tommy’s love for his grandmother’s French-Canadian cooking, Peyton almost felt no guilt about missing the evening meal with her son.
Almost.
But she did feel guilty. Had seen Tommy little in the past twenty-
four hours. Worse, now, driving back to the Donovan home, she couldn’t say she was providing for him because she knew Mike Hewitt would never okay overtime for a fishing expedition. And that’s what this was: another round of interviews with Dariya Vann—just short, she knew, of harassment—which explained her street clothes and the use of her own vehicle. Off duty, just dropping by, she’d say.
She hit her blinker and slowed to turn onto the Donovans’ street. The truck in front of her turned first, and in the flash of his rearview mirror, she spotted Ted Donovan.
She slowed, leaving space between her Wrangler and Ted’s battered Ford pickup. He pulled into the driveway but stopped short, brakes yelping. Peyton rolled past, catching a glimpse of what led to the sudden stop: Dariya Vann, wearing only a T-shirt and pants in the evening’s crisp air, shoes untied, stood in the middle of the driveway, holding a garbage bag.
She pulled to the curb at the end of a row of vehicles, five cars away from the two men. This far north, the sun set early during winter months, and dusk was upon them.
Ted climbed out of the truck, approaching Dariya.
Dariya turned to look at the house. Leaned to see in the kitchen window. Nothing. Then he turned back to Ted, whose expression was all business.
Peyton sensed the moment and leaned to roll down the passenger’s window.
“I was wondering when we’d get a few moments alone,” Ted said extending his hand. “The bank called. Thanks for separating the accounts.”
Dariya didn’t shake hands. “There were always supposed to be two accounts.”
“You don’t trust me?” Ted said.
“It’s been a long time,” Dariya said.
Ted nodded. “And people change.”
“Like you?” He pointed at Ted. “My son was seasick.”
Ted tilted his head. “What?”
“Aleksei was seasick. And you do nothing. He tell me that.”
“That’s not true, Dariya. You’re exaggerating.”
“No. She say same this morning.”
“Who? The Border Patrol woman? You’ve always exaggerated, you know that? You were like this twenty-five years ago. Remember? Your brilliant goddamned idea? Remember that? Except you left the fucking country. And I got stuck with the merchandise.”
Instinctively, she reached for her iPhone to record the conversation. But fifty feet away, the recording would be spotty at best—and maybe even impermissible in court. She slid the phone back into her pocket and leaned closer to hear, peering out the passenger-side window.
Dariya stepped back, shaking his head, disbelieving. “Got stuck with it? You? You loved it.” His face was red, his finger pointing, shaking inches from Ted’s chest. He struggled to find the words “This was all your idea. You the expert.”
“Yes,” Ted said, “I am. Even more so now. And I’m saying I’m the one who has done the hard work here. So much work that I should get two-thirds.”
“Two-thirds?”
“Yes, twenty.”
Dariya took a step back, obviously confused. He started to speak but closed his mouth.
“What is it?” Ted said. “Think about it.”
The sun was setting rapidly now, but she saw Dariya’s face color. “You fucking think—” he blurted.
“Keep your voice down.”
“I’m taking it back. My son here. Think all of that easy? Is that what you think?”
“You speak the language, Dariya. But I have the contacts. I found the buyer.”
“And I met with her. Negotiated price.”
“And in a few days,” Ted said, “it will be off our hands for good. But let’s be clear, I located her, Dariya. I reached out to you, sent you to her. I gave you the details, told you what it was worth, estimated what we could get.”
Peyton watched as they stood looking at each other, neither man speaking for what seemed like minutes.
“Listen,” Ted said, “I gave up everything. We both know that. You’ve had a network TV job. Look at me.” Ted waved a hand before him, inviting Dariya to look at his shirt front: the same outfit Peyton had seen him in that morning, but now the shirt was covered in motor oil. “This is my journalism career,” Ted said. “Oil stains and grime.”
“That not my—”
“Fault? Is that what you’re going to say?”
Dariya nodded.
“I know it’s not your fault. I know that. But there was nowhere to move here. I turned down an offer in a major city. And then I quit. Where could I go? I couldn’t take it with me. And I’ve been responsible for keeping it all these years. Especially after your fiasco.”
“The boat overturn.”
“And two hundred million dollars are on the bottom of the ocean,” Ted said. “Jesus Christ, what a waste. Look, I’ve cared for mine.”
“The boat overturn. I almost died.”
“Well, I took care of mine. And it’s come at a price. I even had to put in central air.” He stopped. “I can see you don’t give a shit. At least I appreciate it. More, I’m sure, than the buyer.”
Dariya smiled then and shook his head. “No. Not more than him. His daughter tell me he special. Waited his life to get it. Now he’s dying.”
“She’s granting his last wish?” Ted thought about that. “Makes sense.” He nodded, thinking. “So that’s why she’s willing to buy. She and her old man would know they can never sell it. I wondered about that. It’s because they don’t want to sell it.”
“Is ready to move?”
“To be moved?” Ted said.
Dariya nodded.
“Almost,” Ted said. “But I want twenty, Dariya. I’ve earned two-thirds.”
“My son, my trip.”
“We had to use your son. He’ll understand. Someday. That’s not a big deal. And, Christ, if you don’t want him to know, he never has to find out.”
“Me. I know. You aren’t a father.”
“So?”
“So I use my son for this. Send him here.”
“For a better life.”
“That only part of it. I know what I done. I used my son.”
“You can argue with your conscience all you want. I want two-
thirds, Dariya. It’s my contact.”
“Ted”—Dariya’s voice was soft in the night, but even in that one word Peyton heard something reminding her of Aleksei’s statement about being knocked down (I got up. I will always get up.)—“if you take twenty, I kill you.”
Ted heard it too. “Whoa.” His hands went up defensively. “Slow down, Dariya. This isn’t life or death here.”
“Ted, my wife need a lot of”—he searched for the word—“treat.”
“Treatment?”
“Yes. I get my money, Ted.”
Ted looked at him, nodded once. Then he moved to the wooden stairs leading to the third-floor apartment. Dariya walked to the line of trash cans. Peyton was low in her Jeep. When she heard the lids clatter and footsteps receding, she looked up.
Dariya re-entered the house. But as he did so, someone—wearing jeans, a hoodie, and a dark jacket with a yellow emblem on the collar—rounded the side of the garage.
The person stood in the driveway, head down, thinking about what had been said. After several moments, whoever it was walked to the front door.
ten
Wednesday, March 12, 2:3
5 a.m., near the Canadian border
Michael Donovan killed the engine, clicked off the headlights, and walked to the tailgate of his battered parts pickup. He dropped the tailgate and struggled to slide out the six-foot-by-five-foot felt-lined case. It was six inches thick.
He’d taken extra precautions, wrapping the whole thing in thick plastic, making it even more bulky and awkward to carry. He placed it onto a sheet of quarter-inch plywood he’d taken from the basement and into which he’d drilled two corner holes and added a piece of rope. Towing the sheet of thin plywood, he started the long walk toward the shack.
He knew he wouldn’t reach it for close to an hour, and the woods at night were dark and full of odd noises. But he had no other choice. His uncle had said in a few days they’d be getting rid of it. And Michael couldn’t have that. He hadn’t decided what to do about it yet. He knew the item’s value, monetarily and intrinsically. Knew all about it’s godlike creator. About the act committed twenty-five years ago, a brazen deed. And he’d thought long and hard about those who committed the act. About how, ironically, that had enabled him to have access to it all these years. He’d spent nights staring at the ceiling, thinking about his uncle, speculating about his mother and father.
Perhaps more than anything that was what he needed—to know his mother and father weren’t involved in what Uncle Ted and Dariya Vann had done. Was that realistic? His father was the businessman in the family. And it all seemed beyond Uncle Ted. Uncle Ted owned art books. Michael had seen them, even read most of them. And Uncle Ted had taken the recent trip to Paris and Germany. Was that trip related to this?
It didn’t matter. Not now. Not as Michael trudged down the trail toward the shack. What mattered was hiding it.
At the shack, he dragged the box inside. He pulled a chair across the room and stood on it as he positioned the box in the space above the ceiling. And, as Michael had read, after nearly four hundred years, not much could damage it, especially in a temperature-
controlled setting. Summer would bring humidity. (He knew why Uncle Ted’s apartment had been kept at precisely seventy degrees all these years.) Of course, the heat lamps and constantly-running portable heater made him nervous. He would have to move it shortly.
The entire drop took two hours. Back at his pickup, he started the engine and wondered how long it could stay in the shack.
Hopefully long enough for him to figure out what to do with it.
3:10 a.m., 7 Drummond Lane
He knew his way around the house and crept into the guest room where Aleksei had stayed. He knew the door would creak. So he turned the knob gently and slowly pushed the door. Inside, he padded across the room until he stood over the bed.
Then, with a stiff index finger, he poked Dariya once on the chest, a firm jab.
“Get your ass out of bed and follow—”
But Ted Donovan never finished his sentence.
In one swift motion, Dariya sat up in bed, his hand emerging from beneath his pillow, the four-inch blade stopping an inch from Ted’s nose.
A desk chair scraped the floor when Ted leaped back.
“What are you doing here?” Dariya said, his throat dry, the words rasping. He stood up, the knife falling to his side.
“Put that away. Who sleeps with a fucking knife under his pillow?”
“Someone whose house was blow up.”
“You’re fucking crazy. Come with me, you asshole.”
Ted didn’t wait to hear Dariya’s reply. He walked down the hall and up the stairs to his apartment.
It took several minutes, but Dariya finally climbed the stairs to Ted’s apartment. The door was open, the lights on.
Ted was pacing, rubbing his face with his hands. He looked up and stopped moving.
“You leave your knife downstairs?” He went past Dariya, pulled the door closed, and locked it.
“Why you locking the door?” Dariya asked. “It’s three thirty in the morning.”
“It’s been locked for twenty-five years. You, of all people, should know that.” Ted stayed near the door. “Where’s the knife?”
“Under pillow. It’s the middle of the night. What you want?”
Barefoot, Dariya wore only the pants he’d worn that day and a white undershirt. Ted saw no bulges in his front pockets.
“Turn around. Let me see your waistband.”
“What?”
Ted repeated the instructions.
Dariya shook his head but did what he was told.
Satisfied that Dariya left the knife downstairs, Ted moved closer. “Got something to tell me, asshole?”
“It middle of the night. Drunk?”
“What?” Ted said.
“Drunk?”
“Am I drunk?” Ted inched closer. He could smell Dariya’s breath. “No. But I am mad. Mad enough to kill you, you motherfucker.”
“What? What are you talking?”
“Where were you all day?”
“Meeting with DHHS about Aleksei.”
“All day?”
“Ask Bohana. She with me.”
Unconsciously, Ted stepped back. Hadn’t expected that answer. Was Bohana in on it? Impossible.
Or was it?
Then it happened. The surge of anger, his own hand flashing, arm outstretched. In a second Ted’s fingers were a vise clamped around the smaller man’s throat.
“It’s not here. Where is it?”
Dariya, gasping for breath: “Let … me … go.”
“It’s not fucking here,” Ted said. “I checked on it yesterday, and I got up to piss and for the hell of it, thought I’d check, and it’s gone.”
Dariya’s eyes refocused, and Ted knew the diminutive Ukrainian understood. He also saw the genuine confusion in Dariya’s eyes. His clenched fist went limp. Dariya stepped away from him, gulping air.
“Don’t you touch me. Next time I kill you.”
“It’s fucking gone, Dariya. You hear me?”
“Where?”
“You tell me, asshole.”
Dariya shook his head, realizing now. “You think me …”
“Who else?”
“Why would I stay here?”
“If you took it? Where the hell else would you go?”
“I don’t even know where you hid, Ted.”
Ted thought about that. In his rage and panic, he hadn’t considered that obvious fact. The man had lived in Ukraine; how could he know where the hiding place was?
“Yeah, well, no one does. But you’re the only one who knows I had it. And you had all day to look for it. No one else.”
“Apparently not,” Dariya said, surprising Ted with his formal English.
Ted turned from him and went to the third-floor window, blackened from the room’s interior light. He stood squinting against the night sky—and noticed Michael’s pickup missing from the driveway below.
8:30 a.m., Main Street, Reeds
“If it was warmer,” Stone Gibson said, “we could walk the bike trail.”
“It would have to be much warmer.” Peyton took his hand as they walked past the old hotel near the corner of Academy and Main streets in downtown Reeds. “There’s still a foot of snow on the bike trail.”
He looked at her hand in his. “I’m on duty,” he said.
“Well, I’m not. And you’re not in uniform, so we can hold hands. We actually look like two regular people.”
“With normal, civilian lives. Imagine what that must be like.”
“Boring,” she said. Peyton’s cell phone chirped. She recognized the number.
“When you’re as old as me,” Stan Jackman said in lieu of a greeting, “you have contacts in lots of places.”
“You found something?
“My friend in the Boston FBI office did. Dariya Vann ever mention Emerson C
ollege?” Jackman asked.
She wasn’t walking anymore. And she wasn’t holding Stone’s hand now. “No,” she said. “Emerson College in Boston?”
“Yeah. If there’s a connection, that’s it. Ted Donovan and Dariya Vann were both at Emerson in the fall of 1990.”
“Were they in classes together?”
“Peyton, I just started looking into it.”
Stone was looking at her, eyebrows raised.
“But you’re known as a miracle worker,” she said, “so I expected you to be further along.”
“Of course,” Jackman said. “You think they’re moving something. I read your shift report. What makes you think that?”
“I overheard a conversation.”
“Illegally tapped or spied?”
“Overheard,” she said.
“So spied,” Jackman said.
Stone was smiling now, correctly guessing what Stan Jackman had said.
“I overheard them talking. Ted talked about finding a buyer, and Dariya spoke about negotiating the deal. He said Dariya left the country and left him holding the merchandise.”
“And Stone found some pot plants near where the boy was found?”
“Yeah, but only six plants. I don’t know that Stone’s find has anything to do with it. They were talking about locating buyers. And my sense was they’d had trouble finding one because of resale challenges.”
Jackman was silent for a moment, then said, “If the operation is much larger than we think, and they’re selling pot out of state, resale would be hard. And that would make sense. Why truck it in to, say, Boston when you can get something home-grown nearby?”
“Whatever it was,” she said, “it’s been a long process. Ted Donovan was talking about sacrificing his TV career for this.”
“I don’t know what that’s about,” Jackman said. “Neither man has a criminal history or anything I see involving pot.”
“He’s not sacrificing his TV career for six pot plants.”
“Has Maine DEA looked into the shack?” Jackman asked.
“I don’t think Maine DEA is going to.” She looked at Stone.
Stone shook his head. “They don’t want it. I’m handling it.”
