Sweet Hearts

by Connie Shelton

  “This thing may be old but I knew there was a reason I never fully upgraded.” She pressed the power button and warned Beau that it might take a few minutes.

  “Hey, it’s not any slower than the stuff the county gives us.” He held out the disk and she inserted it into the drive.

  When the directory came up it appeared to contain only one file, a very small Word document. “This can’t be much,” Sam said as she opened it.

  On the screen appeared two terse sentences:

  Find someone you can trust in law enforcement. Have them go to 1800 Front Street NE in Albuquerque and retrieve the items in Box 99.

  Sam and Beau stared at each other, each with the same huh? look on their faces.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Tito obviously didn’t know who to trust or he would have named someone. The only Feds I know are Jonathan and Rick.”

  Sam stared at the screen. “Tito reported to Rick Wells and yet he didn’t entrust him with this. I know—that was then and this is now, but should we maybe check this out before getting anyone in the agency involved?”

  “How are—?” Beau’s eyes traveled to the carton beside the monitor. “That key!”

  Sam grabbed up the small box with the Purple Heart in it. The key with it could belong to nearly anything and she hadn’t thought to question it earlier. It made sense that Tito would put the disk and the key close to each other but not so close that it was obvious they went together. She took the key out and returned the medal to the box with the other personal items.

  “I’m thinking we need to make a quick trip to Albuquerque,” she said. “Would it be a horrible breach of ethics if we got there the same way we just now got here?”

  Beau groaned at her sneaky little grin. “Well, we’re dealing with information that got a man killed, and it involves some pretty high levels of the federal government.”

  “And it would be a lot quicker. We could be there and back before dinner.”

  He rolled his eyes at that suggestion but didn’t argue.

  “Let me call out to Marla’s house real quick.” While Beau locked the back door, she dialed the number and told Diane Milton that something had come up and that she would stop by with something for Marla in the morning.

  “That’s fine, Sam,” Diane said. “She’s awfully tired right now anyway. It’s been a hard day.”

  Never in her life had Sam experienced the thrill of making the long highway drive in such record time, but she took a deep breath and braced herself. A few times she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. It was mid-afternoon when they hit the edge of the big city and Beau took full advantage of his lights and siren to cut through the clog of early rush hour. Fighting a queasy feeling in her stomach, Sam pushed the buttons to program the address into his GPS and to study the little map that came up.

  He cut the emergency gear when they got to the correct street, and Sam picked up the brass key as they approached the mail drop location. It was one of those places where you could rent a box for years at a stretch with no questions asked and no one clearing the box and stamping “Return to Sender” on your stuff. The perfect place to send things that you didn’t want anyone else to touch. They walked inside together and it took only a minute to find Box 99 and unlock it.

  “Good thing he rented the largest box,” Beau said as he pulled open the door. The cubbyhole was stuffed full. As he pulled out handfuls of envelopes, Sam cradled them in her arms. When the metal compartment was completely empty, they carried everything out to the cruiser.

  “Let’s just make sure there isn’t some kind of ‘more mail at the counter’ type of notice in here before we leave,” Beau suggested.

  Sam handed over half of the unruly stack and they began straightening and organizing. Some of the envelopes were a bit ragged and dirty, some felt thin as if they were nearly empty while others were fat little packets. All were addressed in masculine writing, the return address was the same as the delivery address, the one where they sat right now, and the postmarks coincided with the ones she remembered from Marla’s greeting cards.

  “Looks like this is all of it,” Beau said, handing his portion back to her.

  “So, now what?” Sam said. “I still don’t think you want to turn Tito’s secret information over to just anyone. We really need to go through all of it and find out what it says before we’ll know who to trust.”

  “There’s at least a day’s worth of reading here.”

  She nodded. There went her Sunday but she wasn’t about to drop her interest in the case at this point.

  “I don’t really feel like staying over in the city, finding a hotel or whatever. Do you?” he asked.

  “Nah. I can’t handle these clothes much longer either. So . . . home, James?”

  He backed out and joined the flow of traffic. As the evening rush became more oppressive he succumbed to the temptation and switched the strobes on again. They arrived back in Taos, as Sam had predicted, in time for dinner.

  She’d called the bakery and made sure Jen had things under control. Another call to Kelly let her daughter know that she was heading to Beau’s for the night. They picked up a bucket of chicken, retrieved her truck from the lot at the funeral home, and headed for his place.

  Once she’d changed into flannel pajamas and they’d each polished off a couple pieces of chicken, Beau brought out his pocket knife and began slitting open the envelopes. Sam automatically began sorting the mail by postmark date and she soon had four neat stacks of well-ordered mail.

  Beau started with the first envelope, which had been mailed about a week after Tito’s disappearance.

  “Listen to this,” he said. “Quote: ‘Can’t believe it. Close call. Espinosa knows something, not sure how he found out. He nearly had me in Taos. Now I don’t dare contact anyone. The only thing I can think to do is start documenting. Got this mailbox, will send evidence as I get it. This way, if I’m dead someday, eventually someone will come across my findings. I’ve rented the box for a year. Will renew it if necessary. I listed my mother as the contact person but I don’t want her involved.”

  “What does that mean?” Sam asked.

  “Probably had to fill out some kind of rental contract and since he didn’t have a home address once he skipped out, the company would send the remaining mail to Marla if the contract wasn’t renewed and there was anything left in the box. I don’t know. That’s my guess.”

  “Hmm . . . probably so.”

  “As long as Tito renewed the box, the mail could just continue to pile up. I could verify by questioning the manager there, but my guess is that at some point Tito realized this would be a long-term thing and he just paid the rent for five-years or so—maybe longer.”

  “It would explain why no one ever cleared out the box even though the mail stopped coming.”

  Beau picked up the next envelope in sequence, but Sam found herself getting impatient. Some of the later ones were bigger. They had to contain more information. One was a padded mailer, the kind with bubble wrap on the inside. Like a kid at Christmas she couldn’t stand waiting for it.

  She reached for it and ripped it open by the little tab. Inside was a scuffed leather-bound book, no wider than an index card. The covers were well worn and the pages were held closed by a rubber band, which broke and flew across the table when she touched it, hitting Beau in the chest.

  The pages of the small book contained Tito’s tight handwriting.

  “Whoo—we may have just hit the jackpot,” Sam said.

  Chapter 33

  Sam turned to the first page. The same handwriting filled it but nothing made sense. The letters and numbers formed some kind of code. She flipped through the entire book but it was all the same.

  “That thing looks like it’s been through the wringer,” Beau said, eying the small notebook.

  “Or hidden in someone’s dirty sock for a long time,” Sam said. “But what can we do with it? It’s written in some kind of code.”

  “Let’s
keep going. Maybe the rest of the letters will help explain.”

  Sam hated to admit it, but he was right. Without some kind of code key, the little book would do them no good. She sighed and reached for the next envelope in the chronological stack.

  The letters kept them going until well past midnight, each reading and sharing new information as it came out. Eventually, though, they were both struggling to keep their eyes open and when they finally fell into bed somewhere around two they didn’t even have the energy to do more than cuddle into a ball in the center of the king-size bed.

  When Beau’s alarm went off at five, he groaned and rolled over, but Sam found herself alert with that kind of adrenaline exhaustion that could keep a person going who was way past tired. She tucked the covers close to him and made her way in the pitch-blackness to the bathroom where she borrowed his robe off the back of the door and snuggled into it.

  Downstairs, she reheated some coffee they’d brewed the previous evening and stared at the nearly-finished pile of Tito’s letters. They’d learned that during some of the years Tito was gone he’d actually lived among the cartel in Mexico and continued to gather evidence, but since the dangerous men were with him 24/7 he couldn’t contact anyone. He would occasionally mail these handwritten pages he’d clandestinely created whenever he was able to cross back into the States, at the same time he sent the cards to his family. It must have been awful, living in fear for his life, keeping the little leather journal hidden somewhere on his person, praying that he wouldn’t be discovered, knowing that if they figured out what he was doing they would murder him without a second thought.

  His trips back to his homeland were rarely unaccompanied. He skipped around when he could but could never check in with his DEA contacts, not knowing who would help him and who would rat him out to the cartel. And he could never see his family; the risk was far too great to them. He’d somehow found out, more than a year after the fact, that his wife had died. Sam cried openly when she read the letter where he detailed that. But since there was nothing he could do about her death, and knowing that Jolie was safe with her grandmother, he’d stayed silent and in hiding.

  Mainly, he gathered evidence in hopes that when the day came, he could present a strong enough case to take the entire gang out at once. Including those bad apples within the Agency who’d threatened his very existence.

  Now, Sam tucked her feet up onto the sofa and held the warm coffee mug with both hands, tempted to get into the final few letters that they hadn’t finished but thinking she should wait for Beau. One cup of coffee later, she felt too jittery and impatient to wait. She reached for the top letter in the stack.

  Two lines into it she felt an electric jolt.

  The proof is documented in my notebook, he’d written. I don’t dare spell out the code here. Anyone finding this would know where I am and who I’m working with. So I’m going to write it out and mail it in a series of short messages.

  What followed were a few lines of his cleverly constructed code—partly letters and numbers, with a few math symbols and small cryptic designs thrown in. It was almost like stenography in places, where one little curlicue represented an entire word; at other times numbers meant letters and vice versa. The letter in her hand covered less than a third of the alphabet. Sam dropped it and grabbed for the next letter.

  It, too, covered a few letters of the alphabet plus a few whole-word translations. She flattened that page, as well, and opened the rest of the envelopes. Spread over ten separate communications, Tito’s special code was revealed. He’d invented symbols to represent places. Special codes for dates and times. An ingenious plan to avoid the most common repetitions that allowed code-breakers to solve puzzles easily.

  She picked up the small leather book and flipped it open again. It would probably take weeks to decipher it all, word for word. But when it was done, she had no doubt that the evidence therein was complete and thorough. From the key sheets, she found symbols for names, and two of them jumped out at her: Rick Wells and Javier Espinosa.

  At a glance, she could tell that those two names featured heavily in the book of secrets, often together.

  She and Beau truly had discovered the bonanza.

  Thin shafts of sunlight showed through the barren tree branches outside, casting faint shadows across the pasture. In the still air she heard the horses whinny softly. It must be after seven.

  She picked up the letters with the code and the little leather-bound book and dashed up the stairs.

  “Beau, wake up! I’ve discovered the answer!”

  He moaned and she felt badly about waking him. He’d put in such long days recently. But when he saw the letters in her hand his eyes came fully open.

  “I haven’t translated any of the book yet,” she said, “but in this code . . .” She shuffled through them. “Rick Wells is the mole inside the DEA. Tito says the coded messages in the book give all the evidence.”

  Beau rubbed at his eyes and then squinted at the letter she held out to him.

  “I’ll bet that Tito’s messages get more explicit toward the end of the book. Can I try it?”

  He nodded. “I’m going to take a quick shower. Is there any coffee?”

  “I’ll have it ready when you get downstairs.”

  She dashed back to the kitchen, excited over the find, and dumped the old coffee to start a new pot. At the dining table she spread out the ten letters which revealed Tito’s code. He’d purposely not put them in any alphabetical sequence, so it was slow going. Sam figured there was no real need for her to translate the whole book—the authorities would do that anyway. She turned to the final page, wanting to know Tito’s thoughts as he neared the end of his investigation.

  The date on the last page corresponded to the postmark on the envelope from which the small book had come. One letter at a time she figured it out and wrote it down.

  When Beau came downstairs ten minutes later, smelling like fresh soap and shave cream, she pointed to the page.

  “This is what I have so far. We need to get Jonathan Ernhart in on this,” she said.

  “He’s not involved?” Beau asked.

  “Look through the code sheets. There are symbols for Rick Wells, for Javier Espinosa, for a bunch of other names. Nothing for Ernhart. If Tito didn’t make a code for his name, I’m thinking he’s not mentioned in the book. Therefore, not involved in whatever was going on.”

  “Makes sense,” he said as he walked into the kitchen and poured coffee into his mug.

  “Beau, there’s something else. In his final letter, the one that was mailed about two years ago, Tito spells it out. He thinks Wells might kill him. He says, quote, ‘Rick Wells and a few others in Washington are in this up to their necks. I have to go to DC and find out. To pinpoint them I’ll have to come out of hiding, and that’s going to be dangerous. Details are in the book. Wish me luck.’ ”

  “Well, we have to tell someone. This is more than my office can deal with. Your idea of calling Jonathan Ernhart is a good one.” He set a fresh mug of coffee on the table beside her.

  While Sam reorganized the letters, Beau made the call. She heard him say something about meeting at his office in thirty minutes.

  “I thought he went back to Albuquerque yesterday,” she said.

  “Nope. He stayed at a hotel here. Something about Javier Espinosa. I didn’t ask a whole lot at this point because I’ll see him pretty soon.” He caught the look on her face. “We’ll see him pretty soon.”

  The squad room was empty when they arrived, although Sam could hear voices from the other end of the building where the two holding cells were. Ernhart arrived first and was waiting near the front desk. Beau offered coffee, which they all declined, and then showed the FBI man into his office. He closed the door firmly, Sam laid the stack of Tito’s correspondence on the desk and they took seats.

  Beau laid it all out for Ernhart: the computer disk, the mail drop, the years’ worth of documentation Tito Fresques had accumulated.
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  “Sam actually came to the parts where Tito revealed his coded system for keeping evidence,” he said, holding up the small leather book.

  When Jonathan looked at her Sam met his gaze. “I’m sorry to say that he names Rick Wells as the mole inside the DEA.”

  Ernhart shook his head and stood up. “I’d like to say that I don’t believe it, Beau. But there have been a few recent signs.”

  He paced the length of Beau’s small office.

  “Little things he said about Tito when we began this investigation. A couple of comments about Javier Espinosa.” He rubbed at his temple. “I just didn’t put it all together.”

  “The book has a lot of references to Espinosa, too,” Sam said. “It will take awhile to translate the whole thing, but I spotted the code mark for his name.”

  “The bureau has code-breakers we can put on it. With several people working it, we can probably decipher it pretty quickly.” He stopped in mid-pace. “We’ll have to move on this pretty fast, I think. Rick has been acting jumpy lately. Yesterday at the funeral, I couldn’t figure out what was eating at him.”

  An image materialized to Sam. “He drives a black Suburban, doesn’t he?”

  Ernhart nodded.

  “I’ve had two really close calls in traffic in the past week, once in Albuquerque and again on the road north of Taos. Both involved a big dark SUV.”

  Beau stared at her.

  “Sorry I didn’t mention it. You’ve had a lot on your mind.”

  He gave her a look that basically meant we’ll talk about this later.

  “Rick travels back and forth between Washington and Albuquerque. But this week he’s been in New Mexico,” Jonathan said, starting to pace again.

  “So, what now?” Beau asked. “We need a plan.”

  Jonathan flopped back into his chair and blew out a long breath. “First, we pull all the names we can get from this book. There will have to be warrants. It would be a mistake to arrest one of the suspects and not get them all. Timing is going to be crucial, to be sure no one is able to phone or text a warning to the others.”