Promised Box Set

by James Kipling

  Another few strides took him upstairs to his bedroom where he changed into a tracksuit and a baseball cap. David paused for a few minutes to dial from his cell phone. While it rang he pulled a .357 magnum and a black duffel bag from the back of the closet.

  “Hello,” someone finally picked up on the other end.

  “It’s happening. You know how to get in and what to do.”

  There was a click as the person hung up the phone. He’d expected it. There was no time for chit-chat. He stuffed the gun into the bag and bounded down the stairs. There he stuffed the rest of the items into the bag. Finally, he sighed and walked towards the front window overlooking the gateway.

  It was getting dark so it was just a matter of time before everything fell into place. He poured himself a drink and turned the lights on downstairs. He also put on some music and waited. Fifteen minutes had passed when he heard the back door open. He went to the door leading to the back lawn where a man close to his height, slightly graying around the edges and similarly built was waiting.

  “Any trouble?”

  “No, the neighbors are still on vacation.”

  “No one saw you?”

  “No,” the man replied.

  David smiled. The plan was in motion. They’d practiced it many times so there shouldn’t be any glitches. It was risky, having the man park on the street on the other side of the suburban neighborhood, going through the neighbor’s yard and scaling the fence. However, this guy was used to scaling fences. Now it was his turn to go out the way his friend had come in.

  It wasn’t as easy as he thought. His near carbon copy was twenty years younger than him so it took three tries before he finally got over, duffel bag first. A rip told him he’d torn the crotch of his pants and landing on his behind reminded him how old he was. He’d done it before, but the last time was four months ago. He’d not been to the gym much lately so he wasn’t as fit as he should be.

  The neighbor’s house was awash in darkness. Stealthily he moved towards the side of the house and quickly through the gate. He was sure he was unseen because the house to his immediate right was also in darkness. He only stopped to take a quick breath as he scouted the street in both directions before heading casually towards a white Corolla parked a few houses up the street.

  ****

  He deliberately leaned against the window where he knew his silhouette would be seen easily. His sipped the scotch and tried not to grimace as the golden liquid burned the back of his throat. Being more of a beer man himself, he was tempted to gargle the expensive liquor. Peeking through a slit in the curtain he could see the black SUV across the street. The boss is right, he thought. He is definitely under surveillance.

  Nervously he left the window and turned the lights out. The boss would be long gone by now so it was time for him to make his departure before the boss’ son got home. David had told him the boy would be home late and he had to be out before then.

  Leaving the porch light on, he got behind the wheel of David’ car. The remote door slid up smoothly as he pressed the button on the little white device. He slowly backed out making sure to give them a good view. After leaving the private suburban street he pulled onto the 295 and picked up speed.

  As he headed towards Los Altos, his cell phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Have you left yet?”

  “Yeah, I’m on the highway now.”

  “Are you still being followed?”

  “I think so. There’s a pair of headlights behind me and they’ve been there since I left the house.”

  “Good. Make sure you’re relaxed. Don’t go getting all nervous and start driving erratically or anything. Turn the stereo on, listen to some music,” David advised.

  Not a bad idea, he thought, doing as he was told. He heard the auto locks click in place. Then he smelled it. A sweet sickening odor stuck to his nostrils and his head became light. Before he passed out he saw the car heading towards a lamp post. He didn’t feel the impact and was already gone when the car burst into flames.

  David heard the impact, then nothing as the heat damaged the man’s cell phone and the call was dropped. He turned off his cell and threw it in the dumpster outside the Saratoga Inn. It was quiet enough and just outside Cupertino. No one would be looking for him there. They’d think he was dead for a while yet – plenty of time for him to get away clean.

  He paid cash for the room and collected his keys. He wasn’t sure what to do about Lucas. The kid would think he was dead but maybe that was better for him. He would almost certainly learn the truth, but maybe it would be the kick in the pants his son needed to get himself together. Whatever money left in their legitimate accounts would undoubtedly be seized forcing Lucas to get a real job for the first time in his life. David almost regretted that he wouldn’t get to see the look on Lucas’s face when he figured that out. Any sorrow he might feel at the loss of his father would almost surely be dashed away when he realized the truth of his financial situation. If the kid had shown any ambition, David might have thought about teaching him a thing or two about his real occupation. But it wasn’t something that could be half-assed; it was a way of life.

  ****

  Agent Boon’s driver brought the SUV to a stop. Someone dialed the police while he staggered from the vehicle. Twenty years of chasing Allan Peters gone in a single explosion. He stood, weak in the knees, watching his suspect go up in flames.

  The police were quickly followed by a fire truck that doused the burning vehicle. Boon watched as they pulled the charred remains of the driver from the car and placed them in a body bag. As he made mental notes of everything from Peters’ arrival at his house to what was happening at the moment, something didn’t feel right. He walked over to the body bag and asked the coroner to stop.

  “I need to take a look,” he told the man holding the clipboard. “I’m FBI; he was my case,” he added, holding up his ID badge.

  The bag was zipped halfway up and he undid it and pulled the sides apart. The face was burnt beyond recognition, revealing melting skin, bones, and teeth. The suit had melted into the body so there was no way he could search the victim. He noticed the hands were bare. Allan Peters always wore a diamond ring on his left pinky finger. It was an insignia for his college fraternity. He never took it off. Boon noticed him wearing it earlier that evening as he entered the driveway of his house, the light from the garage glinting off the familiar stone.

  Boon cordoned off the car and asked for a thorough search of its contents. He also asked the coroner to do a search of the victim to recover the ring. His instincts told him that the ring was neither in the car nor on the body. He called his superior and arranged for a team to head to Allan Peters aka David Warner’s house as soon as possible. They were to gather anything of a suspicious nature or that could link him to his past or give insight into where he might be headed. Agent Boon’s gut was calling the shots.

  He went to the morgue with the body and stayed while the coroner did a preliminary search before heading over to the house. He was confident the body was a decoy but he still had to prove it. If not, the investigation would be over and all his hard work would have been in vain.

  The Cupertino police department was already searching Allan Peters aka David Warner’s house with a few of Boon’s colleagues. They found two scotch glasses on the bar in the drawing room. The agents bagged them and continued their search. They found nothing more beyond a partially empty safe in the den containing passports for David Warner, Lucas Warner, and a Trevor Mills.

  There were no files, computers, or anything that gave an indication of where David might have gone if he was indeed, not dead. The house was cordoned off because the owner was presumed dead and his death was under investigation.

  “He’s good,” Boon mumbled to his colleague. “Probably has a secondary location under another alias somewhere nearby.”

  The man looked at his partner curiously. “You don’t believe it’s him, do you?” />
  “Not for a minute.” Boon was convinced David had deliberately faked his death with the FBI as witnesses. If Boon wasn’t careful, the man would get away with it. “We need to get the DNA comparisons on the glasses and the body as soon as possible.”

  “What if you’re right?”

  “Then we need to find the bastard. He’s gotten away for too long. If it turns out the man in the car isn’t Peters, then he’s his latest victim.”

  The samples were sent to the lab to test against DNA gathered from the remains in the accident. Peters’ DNA was already in the FBI database so all they had to do was match it. Boon was told they’d gotten intact bone marrow samples from the body. He would get the results within twelve hours so all he had to do was sit tight and hope he was right. Or wrong. If the body in the car really were Peters, it would be over; unsatisfied maybe, but definitively over.

  After the Cupertino officers left, Boon stuck around a while longer. He didn’t know what he was looking for but he hoped to find something. He was looking through the closet of the master bedroom when a man burst in, demanding to know what was going on.

  “You must be Lucas. I’m Agent Boon with the FBI,” he flashed his badge.

  “What’re you doing here? Where is my father?”

  Boon noticed Lucas looked jittery but dismissed it as normal under the circumstances; the sudden appearance of the FBI clearly wasn’t something his father had prepared him for. Lucas kept running his fingers through his hair and shifting from one foot to the other. “Let’s go back downstairs and have a talk, shall we?” Boon suggested.

  “What’s going on?” Lucas faced Boon as soon as they were in the drawing room.

  “Do you know where your father might be?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him in two days. Why?” Lucas’s face turned white.

  “You father isn’t who he says he is,” the Agent started. He wasn’t sure how to approach the subject so he thought he’d ease into it as best he could.

  “What do you mean?” Lucas demanded of the man. He made a step towards Boon as an agent stepped forward at the same time. Boon held up his hand at his colleague who, in turn, retreated.

  “We’ve been investigating him for more than twenty years. He disappeared on us some time ago but we recently found out he was living here under an alias we didn’t know.”

  A puzzled look crossed Lucas’s face but he said nothing.

  Boon continued, “His real name is Allan Peters and he is wanted—”

  Lucas cut him off. “No, my father is David Warner. You guys have made one big-ass mistake,” he laughed a hollow laugh.

  “As I was saying, he is not who you think he is.”

  “Do you have proof?”

  Boon produced the same file he had shown Zoe Dunmore and shoved it toward Lucas. The young man perused the contents then shook his head. “No, I would have known. He would have told me; I’m his son.”

  “Well, I doubt he lied about that. But as far as his name is concerned… The DNA results will be back in a few hours. That should confirm it.”

  Lucas was baffled. “DNA? You have his DNA?”

  “We have Peters’ DNA on file and we just collected some samples here. If it’s not a match then…” he trailed off.

  “Then what?” Lucas inquired.

  “We’ll see,” the agent replied. He wanted to say, ‘then your father is dead’, but held back.

  Boon didn’t mention the accident lest he was right about the decoy. It made no sense to tell Lucas his father was dead only to turn around a short time later and explain that he wasn’t. The whole thing was a mess and Boon was anxious to get it cleaned up so they could move onto the next step in this relentless chase. He’d spent twenty years dropping everything to chase a ghost instead of spending time with his family. All he wanted now was to retire early and get to know his kids again.

  Lucas dropped onto the sofa and stared at the photo of the wanted man Boon had given him. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the possibility of it being true. However, he’d always wondered why he didn’t know his grandparents. There never seemed to be any photos or mementos from his father’s past. Could it be that his father was a criminal? The only people who could answer these questions were the man himself or maybe his mother. After all, twenty years ago, they had been married. Wait, is my name even Lucas? he wondered. He was twenty-five. Could he have been born under a different name entirely?

  Suddenly his life had been turned upside down. Nothing was going his way and everything seemed to be spiraling out of control. First he lost the woman he loved to an accountant, and then he lost a huge chunk of money in the stock market. He had just been thinking about how his father would kill him when he realized he’d stolen cash from the safe, and now this.

  Getting Zoe back was going to be an even harder task now his father was a wanted criminal. Did she know? How was he going to tell her? Maybe when she saw what a mess he was, she’d realize how much he needed her and take him back? But she might already know. What if that was the real reason she’d broken up with him? At the thought he started pacing the room. If she knew that meant Steve knew… jeez! His mind was racing. He walked to the bar with a sudden need for a drink. Pouring it was a task as his hands began to shake.

  It was close to three a.m. when the feds left. The house felt empty without his father. He poured himself a few more drinks, trying to decipher all he’d heard earlier. Booze and exhaustion did little to make things clearer. If his father wasn’t David Warner, does that mean he wasn’t a Warner? Did that mean he didn’t really exist? Who was he? Who was this David person? He had to find out what Zoe and Steve knew. But before that, he had to ease the heaviness in his chest, so he poured a few more drinks. By five o’clock he was passed out on the sofa.

  Chapter 14

  “You let him get away? I thought you had a plan in place to arrest him and you let him get away?” Zoe was mad. Boon looked at her somewhat embarrassed as he tried to explain.

  “I told you when we met the other day that it was a delicate situation. This man has slipped through our fingers before and probably had several contingency plans ready. It is impossible for us to be prepared for all of them. But I assure you, it has only made our determination to catch him stronger.”

  “Now you listen, Mr. Boon. My father built this company from scratch. He took this man in and treated him like a brother and how did he repay him? He embezzled millions and probably killed for it!”

  “You have a murder you wish to accuse him of?” Another murder? The agent wondered.

  “Someone from the company disappeared a few years ago and it would seem he had evidence incriminating David,” she expelled a breath and sank back into her office chair.

  Agent Boon hadn’t called. Instead he had come to see her at her office the day after the accident. The DNA had come back to reveal that it was not Allan Peters in the car. The DNA on one of the glasses matched the sample in their database but did not match the sample from the body. However, the sample from the body did match the second glass.

  The accident itself had not been a simple matter either. An explosive device was found attached to the stereo. When the driver turned the music on, it released toxic fumes that were enough to overpower the driver. A collision of some sort would be inevitable. It seemed the gas line had been rigged to enhance the explosion that would occur upon impact. They also found that the vehicle had been locked as an extension of the same device. The car was rigged to execute the perfect crime. Boon highly doubted that the dead man had volunteered for such a death. The case had been ruled a homicide but since the original case was under federal jurisdiction, this one belonged to the feds as well.

  “Tell me about it,” the agent urged.

  Zoe recounted the investigations that led them to Trevor Mills and his thumb drive. Agent Boon requested a copy of the files and she complied. She couldn’t do anything more on her own so it was better leave it to the authori
ties – however incompetent they might sometimes appear.

  “I know this is a hell of a time to bring this up... but…” Agent Boon hesitated. She urged him to continue. “We believe Allan Peters was responsible for the deaths of several other people, including your mother and her two friends.”

  It took a while for her to comprehend. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” her pulse started to race and her head felt giddy.

  “Your father didn’t tell you?”

  “My father?”

  “He’s been having Peters followed. He even hired a PI to check into the deaths of his wife and friends.”

  “Oh my God. How do you know?”

  “Our surveillance team saw the guy and approached him. He’s former police so he knew better than to hide what he was up to. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you,” he apologized.

  “Sorry my ass! You let a murderer get away and you knew all that?” she pushed back her chair and stood, planting her palms on the desk and glaring at the lawman.

  “Listen, you can be angry all you want but I am assigning agents to keep an eye on you and your father.”

  That bit of information made her stand up straight. “What do you mean?”

  Boon looked at her seriously. He could understand her frustration but his main concern was keeping them out of danger. Peters was a dangerous man and he may decide to come after them if he felt his life was threatened.

  “You’re serious. Do you think he’d…?” She could not say it. It was hard to believe Uncle David would ever harm either her or her father.

  “He’s unpredictable Miss Dunmore,” Agent Boon said with deadly seriousness. “It’s a precaution we think we should take.” They might have known David, but he knew just what David was capable of.

  Agent Boon left her office with a renewed determination to find his criminal. He couldn’t blame Zoe for her reaction. The young woman was under a lot of stress and had every right to be upset. But with the new information on the missing accountant, he was pretty sure they would get him on another murder charge and they were still gathering evidence for the fifteen-year-old trio of murders. Whenever they caught him, Allan Peters would be going away for good – might even manage the death penalty.