Sebastian had McAllen plant a tracking and listening device into Randall Francis’s cell phone the first time he visited Galiano. He had then listened in on Randall’s every call and had traced all the calls. They soon had the black ops contact in Seattle, Cordele in Anchorage, and Parsons in Fort McMurray.
To ensure that they had eyes on the ground, they enlisted two of Grace Fairchild’s nephews. One was in the Arctic Oil Camp, the other in Fort McMurray. They had not been able to stop the murders of Constance and Marc Lafontaine and Alicia and Kevin. The murders, they had learned, had been the result of the Lafontaine’s’ greed—they had never suspected the Lafontaine’s would try to shake the oil company for a million. Sebastian called their deaths instant Karma—the result of a bad decision. McAllen called them stupid.
They wished they could have stopped the deaths of Alicia and Kevin. The two young Americans were adamant that they would never carry cell phones, contending that cell phone waves were bad for the brain and could cause cancer and eventually kill. Had they had a cell phone, McAllen could have warned them about Fuentes. Now they were dead. The only consolation—their deaths had galvanized the world against dirty oil. Nothing says it like a fuck-you finger from a tar pond.
The irony of their new home was that everything in it had been purchased using the five million dollars they received from Ironstone for the initial implementation of polywater. They were supposed to receive another five million when the process was reversed. McAllen had needed a company like Ironstone to get him close to the major oil fields. The company had done its job well, but McAllen had an alternate plan, which was playing out in the room around him.
Sebastian was at his many consoles with his earphones on. He watched voice traffic on a screen and listened in with his headphones. He adjusted his dials to listen to background noise or inflections in voices. He was a perfect listener as he was paranoid, always thinking that people were saying something more than they really were. McAllen loved Sebastian’s paranoia—it had saved their skins when Sebastian had overheard the plan for the intended attack on his island.
Percy watched several computer screens that tracked satellites and alerted them the moment any satellite was in their area so they would know to stay inside. Percy was the firewall, the guard. He watched systems and kept watch over any possible leaks.
Theo watched stocks, commodities, and oil futures on his screens. His headphones blared the Stones, “Can’t get no satisfaction.” He had been given the two million left over after their purchase of the house, the boat for Grace, and the computer equipment. His job was to build the two million into twenty million then two hundred million. He knew exactly how. He hummed along with the music.
Grace was in the kitchen. Her chubby brown face was angel-like in a smiling concentration as she cooked a West Coast bouillabaisse that simmered with clams, mussels, halibut, salmon, and crab. She wore ear buds and swayed gently to an old Bruce Coburn tune, “Wondering Where the Lions Are.”
Grace could not be happier. She had her boys back again. They looked good as they concentrated in their prospective areas, all in one room where she could see them. They looked like the young men she had comforted back in the seventies, with the same energy. Sure they had gray hair, and age spots on their hands, and some had little bellies that hung over their fatigues, but they were vibrant, full, their eyes were clear. She had never been as attracted to them as she was now. She would probably sleep with one of them tonight.
Sebastian called McAllen over to join him at his computer console, and as McAllen walked over, he admired the view. Percy had picked a perfect spot. They could watch ships pass out in the channel and see the pair of eagles that had made their home amongst the tall pines that surrounded the cabin.
“So, what’ve you got, Sebastian,” McAllen said as he sat down beside him. He had put his Seattle Mariners hat back on and was wearing an old tee shirt and a pair of jeans. He was never comfortable in battle fatigues.
Sebastian looked up from his screen and took off his headphones. “You know, I’ve been listening to this head honcho who’s been calling the stockbrokers in New York from Seattle, and he’s never sounded right.”
“Meaning . . . what?” McAllen asked. As he sat down beside Sebastian, he could not get over his resemblance to Willy Nelson. All Sebastian had to do was braid his long gray hair into pigtails and he would be a match. His shaving lotion was always something that smelled of patchouli from the hippie days.
“Well, I’ve run some diagnostics on the voice through my sound mixer, and the highs and lows don’t match a man’s voice,” Sebastian said. He adjusted the many silver amulets and bands on his forearms, something he always did when something was bugging him.
“Again, I’m not getting what you mean,” McAllen said. He loved his friend Sebastian deeply, but half the time he never understood him.
“Okay, here’s the skinny on this. When I do a voice analysis on this caller, I keep getting a high pitch. The analysis is telling me that this voice is being masked. Now, a masked voice is nothing new, but this is a gender mask.” Sebastian pointed to the oscillating screens on his computer as if this fact would be more than evident to anyone with a brain.
“So you’re basically saying that our caller from Seattle is a not a man but a woman,” McAllen said. He was happy he had finally gotten Sebastian’s point because he hated going around and around with him in conversations.
“Correcto mundo, my friend. And the voice recognition put the voice into the older age group—somewhere around mid-sixties,” Sebastian said. His eyes lit up, shifting from their usual soft gray to azure blue.
“Hmm, that’s interesting. You got anything else?” McAllen was staring at the computer screen as if it were an oracle that could provide further revelations.
“Yeah, the caller isn’t even in Seattle but in a little golf resort in Palm Springs.” Sebastian fairly beamed as he presented the information. “I’ve been running a search software program since I got the Seattle number, and the calls are being covertly redirected.”
“What the fuck, you mean we have a senior citizen running a black op from Palm Springs?” McAllen laughed as recognition dawned on him.
“If my software program is correct, then yeah,” Sebastian said.
“Holy shit boys,” McAllen called out to the rest of the men in the room. “We got ourselves one hell of an adversary. We need to get us some eyes down there. Hey Grace, you have any relatives down in the Palm Springs area?”
Grace poked her head up from behind the stove. She could just be seen over the steam of the bouillabaisse that was filling the cabin with an intoxicating aroma. “Hell Mac, you know I got relatives everywhere. Remember, my people were here first.”
“Yeah, you always remind me of that—about every ten minutes or so. We need someone to get a visual of this person, and get the background. Damn this is getting good.” McAllen was grinning; he loved the hunt just as much as everyone else in the room.
“Hey, I’m on it, just as soon as you eat this amazing dinner I made,” Grace said. She brought the steaming pot of bouillabaisse to the large table. Percy and Theo busied themselves with filling wine glasses, putting out bowls and cutlery, and cutting up sourdough bread that had just come out of the oven. Sebastian turned away from his computers and put the Grateful Dead greatest hits album on the sound system. Jerry Garcia sang, “The friend of the devil is a friend of mine.”
After they had taken their places at the table, they lifted their wine glasses. McAllen looked at each of them and smiled. “Here is to the world, as we know it, and how it needs to become.”
They clinked glasses and dug into Grace’s fabulous feast. The light was fading in the channel. A pod of killer whales swam slowly by, chasing a school of salmon that was swimming for its life. Two eagles circled overhead, hopeful the salmon would surface in their attempts to escape the whales.
22
Detective Mueller Was Resting In his room at Arctic Oil Camp.
It was 6:00 p.m. He was tired. The bodies had been tagged and bagged and shipped to Anchorage for autopsies. All personnel who could have come in contact with the victims had been matched to flights and shift records. Three names had come up: James Rice, Frank Starko, and Jason Stubik. Troy had instantly suspected Frank Starko, as the man looked like a compact version of a wrestler. Starko had a thick neck, a well-muscled frame, and fit the type that could break a man’s neck.
Mueller and Troy had tried to establish some connections between the dead security guard and the two dead Canadians. There were none. No leads. No one had ever seen them talk to each other. Detective Mueller’s mind was clicking over motives. He usually determined them quickly when he got to a crime scene. This was different. Three deaths, all by the same supposed killer—and yet they seemed unrelated.
He could hear the shower running in the bathroom. He knew that Franklin was in the room next door. He imagined her square features, water dripping down her breasts and legs. He got an erection—he was not remotely interested in Franklin. Since he had been in rehab, and off the booze, and on a multitude of vitamins, his sixty-two-year-old penis had a mind of its own.
His dreams had changed as well. He used to have nasty dreams when he did drugs and drank alcohol; there were snakes and alligators and all manner of creatures that consumed him at night. Now, there was a recurring dream. This dream was the worst of all. He was in a courtroom, and the judge was always one of his ex-mothers-in-law. The jury was made up of his three ex-wives, plus all the women he had pissed off in his life, and the prosecution was his ex-fathers-in-law. They did not need to speak. Their eyes accused him. When he looked left and right at his defense attorneys, they at first looked like Johnny Cochrane and Robert Shapiro, and he would think he had a chance. He was wrong; his defense attorneys were his ex-bartenders. The jury always wanted to hang him.
His cell phone rang by his bedside table. He grabbed it and answered, “Hello, Detective Frank Mueller.”
“Hello, Detective, this is Detective Bernadette Callahan, with the Special Crimes Unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Fort McMurray, Canada, calling. I must say you were a hard man to track down. Your detective squad in Anchorage told me how to find you.”
“Well, I understand the Mounties always get their man, and you found me, so how can I be of assistance, Detective Callahan?” Frank Mueller was glad to take his mind off his erection and his strange dreams—and of course, a female voice was always welcome.
“We seem to have some crimes in common,” Bernadette continued after a short pause to assess Detective Mueller’s tone. “I was informed by a newspaper reporter from Anchorage that you have two Canadian homicides who both worked for Clearwater Technologies. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that is correct—so what is your connection?” Frank asked. He was wondering how the reporter had gotten the information, as he had received a text message regarding what Chief Wilson had said in the news conference; there had been no mention of Clearwater in the text.
“Well, I have two dead Americans who turned up in a tar pond here in Fort McMurray this morning, and they both worked for Clearwater,” Bernadette said. She waited while the information sunk in with Mueller.
He sat upright on his bunk and almost hit his head on the small bookshelf over his head. “Do you have anything else on Clearwater?” Mueller asked. He grabbed his notebook from beside his bed and started to jot down the information.
Bernadette filled Mueller in on how the bodies had been found, the link to the deaths on Galiano Island, and the link to Professor McAllen in Vancouver. She also told him about McAllen’s polywater substance that was supposed to wreak havoc on world oil. The last bit of information caught Mueller’s attention.
“So you think the reason behind the murders is that these Clearwater people were trying to inject this polywater substance into Canada’s and Alaska’s water systems?” Mueller finally asked. He had finally connected the dots.
“Well, that’s what we’re going with, as of now. I have the director of security down here informing our operations people to shut down anything the Clearwater people worked on, to see if they tampered with anything.” Bernadette neglected to say that there had been no we—she had made the call to do the shutdown. At present, her butt was very much on the line, as she still had not informed her chief of detectives.
“Have you found anything yet?” Mueller’s brain was starting to kick in. He was now seeing the picture of the crime in front of him. He had just remembered what Franklin had told him about Constance Lafontaine. Her hands had had a plastic substance on them. What had seemed odd now made sense, as the plastic could be related to the polywater.
“We’ve just started shutting down the plants, and the systems engineers are starting the search. They’re taking it very seriously.”
“Yeah, yeah, I guess you would. Listen, I would love to compare some more notes with you, but I need to get this information to the base manager here,” Mueller said.
“Always happy to help our American friends,” Bernadette said.
Mueller hung up and put his cell phone down. He now knew why the pieces hadn’t fit together before. The murders had been committed by an outside force—not the usual drug deal gone bad, or one person pissed with another. This was a case where forces were aligned to do serious harm to the oil fields, and someone had not responded to commands correctly.
Mueller slipped on his shoes. His feet were aching from the endless corridors of the camp he had walked. The three levels and different wings still confused him. He needed to get in front of Kearns with the information he had just received to let him know the shit they might be in.
Mueller closed the door to his side of the room quietly. He could still hear Franklin in the shower. He blocked out her image. He did not need another woody as he walked down the hall. He tried to remember which way the administration offices were. He knew that Kearns would still be there.
Troy should have been asleep by now. The Lafontaine murders had happened at the end of his twelve-hour shift. At 7:00 p.m., he was still walking the halls of the oil camp. Fatigue was there, just on the edge of his consciousness, but he wanted to locate Frank Starko.
Of all the suspects who had come into contact with the Lafontaines, Starko fit the profile of the killer they were looking for. In his personnel file picture, Starko had no smile, and his eyes looked like those of a hunter. Troy had the same eyes—it was as if he were looking back at himself.
In the past two hours, he had been everywhere in the camp: the cafeteria, movie theater, library, gym, and back to Starko’s room three times. There was no sign of him. Troy knew he would show up eventually—he had to. There was no place to go.
Bernadette put down her phone in her office in Fort McMurray. She looked at her watch—it was 8:00 p.m. on Friday night. She had just pulled a twelve-hour day, which was shorter than the fourteen to sixteen she was used to.
She was hungry. The gummy bears she had eaten from the big bag in her desk drawer had produced a sweet “whatever-in-the-hell-did-you- put-in-your-stomach” feeling. Her stomach now wanted real food: pizza, ribs, or steak washed down with red wine—the stuff that would chase her back into the gym before her ass attacked her.
She felt she had done enough for the day. She had spoken again with the sweet-talking Constable Chris back on Galiano Island, who had informed her that Professor McAllen had told his neighbors he was going to a Buddhist meditation retreat for three months. There would be no way to contact him, he had told them. The neighbors were not certain if the Buddhist retreat was in Thailand or New Mexico. The professor had been vague.
Bernadette thought that Professor McAllen’s story was either the perfect cover or the perfect alibi. The neighbors had not seen anyone else at the cabin, and the crime scene investigators had found few other prints. Perhaps the professor really was a lonely guy.
Speaking of lonely, Bernadette thought. She had done a quick Facebook search on the affable Const
able Chris Christakos. There he was, single, good looking, about thirty-eight—all of that very nice. There was a picture of him by a stream in his shorts, fishing for salmon. The guy had great legs, nice pecs. Down girl! She finally told herself.
She clicked further into his page and checked his friends. It was the detective in her. Yes, he has some nice friends on the island. But then she got to the mother and sister. Oops! The Greek mother and sister looked like they would judge her and spit her out in a heartbeat.
She thought perhaps that was why this nice Greek RCMP constable was hanging out on Galiano Island. She realized that she should make a mental note to have nothing more to do with the good-looking constable. To the mental note, she added a red flag and put some red traffic cones and police tape around it. She just hoped she would see this when her hormones kicked in.
She closed her computer, grabbed her cell phone, and headed out of her office. She glanced at the front reception—the officers were chatting, drinking coffee, and getting ready for the calls to start coming in. Fort McMurray on Friday night was fueled by young men with big bucks from their high-paying jobs in the oil sands. They would be hitting the bars by now. In a few hours, they would be drunk and stoned, and in another few hours, their testosterone would override all brain functions and the fights would break out. The RCMP officers were the referees. They joked that it was too bad they did not get paid as well as the NHL referees. Those guys did not have to deal with knives.
Polar Bear Dawn Page 12
