Born on the 4th of July

by Heather Graham Pozzessere

  “Well,” Jackson murmured, “we’re opening the world again, so it seems, but not that many people are anxiously pouring into cemeteries.”

  “She came early, right?” Jackson asked.

  “She loves the early morning hours,” Cameron said. “She always did. Oh, as a teenager, she liked to go to rock concerts or out late with friends to movies or whatever, but she was never one to stay out all night or even late. The cemetery opens at 9:00 for the day when the front and back gates open. She’s here for opening. Brings coffee and flowers.” He hesitated. “We used to like to sit in the back garden together and have a cup of coffee and just talk. We started it when she was a little kid. It wasn’t coffee then—that started in her later years in high school—but we both loved coffee. Good and strong and rich and dark.”

  “But she shares a nice memory with you now,” Jackson said.

  Cameron smiled and nodded. “My buddy Joe was a fisherman. When he died, he was cremated. His ashes were scattered off the end of a pier at a bait shop and bar he loved that was always populated by a bunch of old salts. For years we’d all go and empty a can of beer into the water. Except for old Bart McIntyre. He’d only empty a few ounces into the water because he said Joe would be damned mad at him for wasting a whole can of beer. Who knows who was right? Joe did love his beer, and he could be frugal, too.”

  Jackson smiled again. “We all have our ways of honoring those we loved.”

  Cameron looked stricken again. “We have to find her!” he whispered.

  “We will,” Jackson told him.

  He needed to call out the troops. Adam, he knew, would be taking all the necessary steps to make a search of the cemetery legal, but it was difficult when their only witness was . . . buried in the cemetery.

  Cameron looked around and shook his head. “I swear, I saw him go behind the Hartford mausoleum, and then . . .”

  “You were standing behind the MacInnes mausoleum when Angela saw you.”

  “Right—so he ran across the path and in this direction.”

  He paused, looking at the three mausoleums in the immediate area, trying to determine which might have been out of sight to someone standing where Cameron had been.

  There were three. Miller, Rosser, and Glenville.

  He studied the three.

  Two were gated; one, the Miller family mausoleum, was gated and sealed.

  He headed for the Miller family vault, reaching through the bars, and tapping on the cement that covered the entry to the mausoleum. He ran his fingers all around the seal, trying to determine if it was any kind of a false front.

  The last interment in the mausoleum had been that of Frederick Miller, and he had passed away over ten years ago. The seal appeared to have been in place that long.

  “No trick door, huh?” Cameron asked. He smiled ruefully at Jackson. “I’d have thought you’d have gone for the easy ones first.”

  “Process of elimination,” Jackson murmured.

  He was heading over to the Rosser mausoleum when his phone rang.

  It was Corby.

  “Hey, Dad. Where was Mom supposed to be?”

  “She was going to the office and to see what she could find out, and then she was going to go and sit on the bench between the office and the old chapel.”

  “Yeah, the lady in the office said Mom was there, but that she left. And she isn’t out front here anywhere.”

  “She has to be there. Somewhere. There is a little bench between the office and the old chapel. She should be on the bench.”

  He felt his heart sinking as the icy grip of fear threatened to encase him.

  Angela . . .

  Was expecting any day. Annie Green was expecting . . .

  Any day.

  Why the hell had he left her alone? A woman had been kidnapped.

  They both took their work seriously, the risks that they each took. She never wanted to be treated as anything less than equal, and she was equal, an excellent agent, a puzzle-solver, trained in martial arts, a crack shot, but . . .

  That made no difference now.

  Jackson could only feel what Cameron was feeling, what Annie Green’s husband must be feeling.

  Pure terror. The icy grip of horror that he wouldn’t be fast enough, intelligent enough, that something terrible would happen . . .

  He had to get a grip. He didn’t want Corby feeling the same sense of panic that had seized him. And if he was going to find Angela and Annie Green, he had to be the best agent he knew how to be, careful and deliberate.

  He couldn’t allow himself to panic!

  “Corby, that was where your mom was supposed to be. Can you put Adam on?”

  “Dad! What could have happened—”

  “I don’t know.” Again, he reminded himself he had to behave in a sane manner for Corby’s sake.

  “You know your mom,” he said. “She found something to investigate and she’s—investigating.”

  “Right, but—why isn’t she answering her phone?”

  “I’m not sure, son. I’m not sure.”

  He had dealt with so much in his years as head of the Krewe—and in the years before that. But now, he felt the sheer panic that any man would feel.

  Control it, you have to control it! He told himself.

  “Corby, put Adam on, please.”

  “Right. Dad, listen, I’m coming to you. We’re coming to you. Mom isn’t here. Adam told me why he and Josh were picking me up and not you guys—that a pregnant lady was seized in this cemetery. Dad, they got Mom, too.”

  He could hear the tears in his son’s voice.

  “Corby, we have to stay cool and calm; we have help. Annie Green’s father is with me—”

  “Dead father.”

  “Right.”

  “Adam has been arguing with people. They want to interview the witness.”

  “Okay, I need to speak with Adam. We do need to move quickly. We need to think like Mom, Corby. You know how she tackles problems, looking everything up.”

  “There’s a hole in the ground here somewhere,” Corby said.

  Jackson winced. There were holes in the ground everywhere here—it was a cemetery that was a few hundred years old, but—

  “Corby, you’re right. I think there is a really, really big hole in this place somewhere. Think like Mom. Don’t come to me. Get back in the car with Adam and call up every old map you can of this place. There are lots of holes here, but we’re looking for one really big hole. See what you can find.”

  “But Dad, I should be searching—”

  “Think about Mom,” Jackson said softly. “You know her; you know how she works. Listen to me, I’m going to call in and get Jon Dickson and others working on similar cases. And they’ll see what they can figure out at the home office. But you think like your mom. Remember, that’s how you two got to know one another, you’re so much alike. You find out everything you can about this cemetery.”

  “I . . . yes, I will! Dad, this place is so old. There could be all kinds of tunnels beneath the ground. I mean there are graves, but maybe there were catacombs for . . . for people like me, people of color. Maybe there’s a place where people were accepted to be buried or . . . I don’t know. But I will find out what I can.”

  Jackson thought if there were tunnels beneath the cemetery, someone would have known. It would be part of the history of the place. But he was happy to have Corby working on the situation, doing something other than going crazy.

  And he just might be right. Corby was like Angela—the kind of kid who could follow any little Internet clue and get somewhere.

  “Perfect, Corby, get on it. And please, I need to speak with Adam.”

  Adam got on Corby’s phone.

  “Adam—"

  “I’m on it. But we’re law enforcement and we have to do things legally. I will get what we need; I just need a little time. I’m having a few problems here as it’s private property. According to the woman in the office, Angela was in there. Then she
left.”

  “They have cameras.”

  “Just at the entrances.”

  “We need whatever they have anyway.”

  “They’re not very cooperative, and they know their rights,” Adam said. “But . . . I know people, too. We just have a witness who isn’t . . .”

  “Living,” Jackson said softly.

  The ghost of Cameron Adair was watching him; he’d heard Jackson’s conversations. He looked at Jackson and said quietly. “I swear to you, I am telling the truth.”

  Jackson nodded at him. “I know. And I think they’ve taken Angela, too.”

  “No!” Cameron appeared stricken; he appeared to feel it was his fault that another woman had been taken, too.

  Of course, there might have been something that had distracted her . . .

  No. Jackson knew his wife. No matter how distracted she might become, if she had been able to, she would have called him by now.

  Something had happened, something that had taken her completely by surprise.

  “Adam, we need to see the footage from the front. Get it, please. And do something that gets whoever is in that front office to cooperate.”

  “There’s only one person in the office,” Adam said. “Her name is Merissa Hatfield. She claims there’s another cemetery worker on the grounds today. The man who makes sure maintenance is up to par and manages the peaceful Victorian landscaping—there are rules on what can and can’t be left at graves, apparently. Anyway, she claims he would have seen something if something had happened.

  Anyway, I’m getting a warrant. I’m on my own phone right now on hold. I’ll get the footage as soon as possible. We’ll know who came into the cemetery—and who went out of it.”

  “Call Jon Dickson for me, will you? He’s pretty amazing at quickly getting information on other kidnappings and events that might be similar, that might give us something. I was going to do it myself, but if you--”

  “Will do.”

  They ended the call.

  Jackson looked at Cameron, hating what he was going to say, but knowing he was right.

  “They were taken for the babies,” he said. “Two pregnant women. There must be an illegal agency out there selling babies. The good thing is this--they’re both going to be all right. For now. No one is going to risk their lives until those babies are born. But we must find out where they were taken to—before they’re moved from wherever they are to somewhere else.”

  Jackson headed over to the next mausoleum, the Rosser mausoleum.

  Cameron Adair followed him.

  It was bigger than the Miller mausoleum and the first interment had been in 1841. Names had been chiseled into the stone. The first lettering was wearing away but still just legible. Harold Burton Rosser had been born in 1788 and died in 1841, and was the founder of the Rosser Ironworks.

  Since Harold’s passing all those years back, twenty-eight members of his family had joined him.

  Jackson tested the gate; locked. But the lock was new; it was a combination lock.

  He stood on the little stone path in front of the large iron gate—of course iron.

  He could see through the bars.

  At the end of the mausoleum was an altar with a statue of Jesus. Someone obviously visited the mausoleum; there were also fresh flowers laid at the foot of the altar. There was a bench in the middle of the place or rather a pew, one that would allow five or six people to sit and reflect before the altar.

  The side walls were lined with sealed shelves that, he assumed, held the twenty-eight members of the family who had been interred in the mausoleum.

  He backed away and walked around the mausoleum noting the height, the structure, the stone angels that played various instruments on the gothic arches above the front entrance, and the back of the structure where there was no entrance.

  He came back around.

  “We’d see them through the grate; we’d hear them,” Cameron said.

  Jackson shook his head. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “We need to break the damned lock.”

  “It may come to that,” Jackson said briefly. “I’ve got to see that third mausoleum.”

  Cameron was looking at him, stricken—and furiously hating the fact he was dead, just a revenant, and unable to break the lock itself.

  “Listen to me,” Jackson said quietly. “They have my wife and your daughter. I’m damned determined to get them back. When I break in, I need to be sure I’m getting somewhere before they get local cops and other agents out here who won’t break the law but will drag me in for destruction of private property. You understand? I have to be sure about what I’m doing.”

  Cameron nodded gravely. “The next one. Glenville, the Glenville mausoleum,” Cameron said.

  Jackson was already walking to it.

  The Glenville structure was newer; the first interment had been that of Richard Crew Glenville, born 1810, deceased 1888.

  Maybe the Glenville family had purchased their iron gate from the Rosser family; it appeared to have been made at about the same time with the same design, though it was not as rusted.

  A similar combination lock was on the gate.

  Jackson wondered if the cemetery issued the locks—and perhaps recommended the Rosser family ironworks when old gates disintegrated and new gates were needed.

  There was no altar in this mausoleum; four family members had been interred in sarcophagi that sat in the center of the floor. They appeared to have been sealed for years.

  There were no flowers—no signs anyone came here to pay respects to the family that had gone before them.

  Jackson hunkered down.

  “What are you doing?” Cameron asked him.

  “I’m checking the floor,” Jackson said.

  “The floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “For--?”

  “Whatever we’re looking for, it’s not here. If someone gained entry into a vault or mausoleum with your daughter—and my wife—it’s not this one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The dust on the floor hasn’t been disturbed; no one has come in here in ages, possibly years.”

  “Ah.”

  Jackson walked back toward the Rosser mausoleum.

  He stared at the gate again and dropped down.

  “Dust?” Cameron asked him.

  “Yes. And no. People have been here. Whether they’ve come to honor the dead or use the dead, I don’t know.”

  Jackson stared at the combination lock.

  Of course, it would be illegal for him to break the lock. But two women were missing.

  His phone rang. He nodded grimly to the ghost of Cameron Adair and answered the call. It was Jon Dickson, one of the Krewe’s newest agents and a man Jackson highly respected. Jon was good in the field and behind a desk.

  “You may be on to something,” Jon told him briefly. “Over the past two years, four pregnant women have disappeared. All have been in their last trimester, all have been in good health, and not one has ever been seen again. One disappeared from Fredericksburg, Virginia, one from Arlington, one from the National Mall, and one was last seen in St. Michael’s, Maryland. All were alone at the time of their disappearance—either meeting friends or waiting for their husbands. All disappeared clean as a whistle; and missing persons reports had been filed, but you know how it is when an adult disappears without a trace. Not one credit card belonging to any of them has been used. It’s as if they were whisked up in a spaceship; all are ongoing local investigations.”

  Jackson felt his heart sink. He was horrified to believe the kidnappers had taken the women, waited for their infants to be born . . .

  And then, as the infants were sold into new families through illegal adoptions, the mothers were . . . disposed of. Killed. No longer necessary to the operation, and far too dangerous to have walking around on the streets.

  “Whoever this is, they’ve crossed state lines,” Jackson said. “Gather everything; we’re taking it over as an FBI
investigation. I’m going to get Adam back on the line. I want to rip this cemetery from stem to stern, even if our witness is a dead man.”

  Cameron Adair was staring at him as he spoke.

  “Annie’s due in a few days. Maybe even on the fourth of July,” he said. “Everyone was so happy. A baby—born on the 4th of July.”

  Angela was due within the week, too. They knew the baby would come when she was ready, be it the 3rd or the 5th of whenever, but it had been fun to have a 4th of July due date.

  “Cameron, stay focused for me. I’m going to need your help,” Jackson told him.

  “I heard you and put two and two together,” Cameron continued. “They’re going to sell the babies—and kill the mothers.”

  “We don’t know that’s what they’re doing,” Jackson said quickly. “We don’t know . . . anything yet. Except that Annie and Angela have disappeared. We’re going to find them. You heard me; we’ll tear this place apart if we have to. Your daughter and my wife are safe for the time being; they haven’t given birth yet.”

  “This kind of trauma . . . can bring on a birth!”

  “We’ll find them.”

  Cameron looked around the cemetery. “Friends! I have friends,” he said. “I need to find someone . . . someone else who might have seen something.”

  “You do that,” Jackson said. He put a call through to Adam; yes, state lines had been crossed. They were taking over. Here and now.

  Jackson slipped gloves on; it was time to play with the combination lock. If he could get it open, he could get in . . .

  And say that it had been standing open.

  And if not . . .

  He’d shoot the damned lock. He was being thoughtful and methodical. And thoughtfully and methodically . . .

  He was thinking it was time to do what was needed; forego permission and seek forgiveness later.

  One way or another, he was getting into the tomb.

  *

  Think like his mother!

  Corby had his tablet out and thanks to his mom, he had Internet access anywhere. He’d been good at computers himself, but as Angela’s son, he’d learned so much more. She helped all the agents in the field, finding out information about suspects with an unbelievable skill at maneuvering all the Internet had to offer.