by Steven James
“Idols.”
“Yes. Or anything that we place between ourselves and the Lord Jesus Christ. Even demons believe in God, but they do not love him. They tremble. Love must lie at the heart of any person’s relationship with God or that relationship means nothing, and the only way to show love to God is through obedience. Even in Protestant circles, faith is not recognized as enough. ‘And though I have all the faith necessary to move mountains—if I am without love, I am nothing.’”
“First Corinthians thirteen.”
“Very good. Perhaps you haven’t lost your love. Perhaps you’ve simply lost your bearings.”
She knew she could never obey her way into heaven, that it was a gift offered to her, but she could at least understand where the priest was coming from. And he did have a point.
“What else should I do?”
“I would give you penance, but would you do it?” he asked somewhat skeptically.
“I’m . . . I’ve never done penance. I’ve always been taught that Jesus provided all the penance we need.”
“And that is a good Baptist answer.” From someone else, the words might have come across as sarcastic or judgmental, but from this old priest, it sounded to Christie more like a compliment than anything else. “Obey the Lord,” he told her. “Trying to feel more love toward God is not the pathway to a deeper love. Obedience is. God has heard your confession. He loves you. He forgives you. He awaits you.”
She had another question that she didn’t necessarily think he would be able to answer but wondered if he just might, if the Lord might have revealed something to him. “Will God heal me?”
“Perhaps it is not your body that is the most in need of healing. Perhaps you need to tell God, ‘I do love, help my lack of love.’ Go in peace.”
He spoke a few words over her in Latin, and though she didn’t understand them, she took them to be a blessing and thanked him before she left the confessional.
And though she was glad to have had the chance to speak with him and share what was on her heart, she did not feel peace as she walked away. Instead, she felt fear—fear that she would never regain the warm love that she used to have for God. And also, fear that she might decide she didn’t even want to love a silent God who left her alone to suffer.
37
Sasha Daye rented a townhouse with a back door that exited to a fire escape. I waited there, around back, while Greer took the front door.
The footprint of the building was minimal, so from where I was, I could hear him identify himself as a federal agent as he knocked on the door, asking for Miss Daye.
But then, rather than hear a door opening, I caught the sound of hurried footsteps inside the house, coming my direction. A moment later, the back door flew open, and even though I was ready for her, she nearly managed to get past me.
“Hold on, Miss Daye.” I snagged her shoulder. “Stand still, or I’m going to have to—”
But she didn’t stand still. Instead, she stomped severely on my left foot and tugged to get free. Pain shot up my leg, but I didn’t let go. Instead, I twisted her wrist around and drove her to her knees.
“Easy.”
“You can’t do this,” she gasped.
As elusive and agile as she’d been while fleeing from me at the cemetery, I didn’t want to take the chance that she would rabbit again, so I cuffed and frisked her. She had no weapons, but she was carrying a hefty roll of hundred-dollar bills.
By the time I was hauling her to her feet to take her back into her townhouse so we could chat, Greer had made it around to my side of the building.
Together, we led her inside.
“Listen to me,” she fumed once the door was closed behind us. “I’m DEA.”
“What are you talking about?” Greer asked.
“Deep UC. And you two idiots might’ve just blown my cover.”
“You have your credentials?”
“Of course not. What do you think? If Blake found out I was a federal agent, I’d be dead within the hour. Call my supervisor.”
“Blake?” I tried to piece together her involvement with him. “Is he why you were at Jon’s funeral?”
“Blake’s the reason for all of this.” She gave us a name and a number and Greer put the call through.
While he waited to get transferred, Sasha glared at me. “You have no idea how much of my work you just put at risk.”
“Tell me about the money.” I kept one eye on her as I studied the inside of the townhouse. Her place was simply furnished but had a touch of class and expensive-looking, somewhat erotic artwork that might well fit for a high-end escort. Maybe she was lying about being an undercover agent.
“Evidence,” she replied tersely. “I’ll need it back.”
After Greer spoke with someone on the phone, he informed us, “They’re transferring me now.”
Sasha gave him an alphanumeric authorization code, and he repeated it to the person on the other end of the line.
Well, if she wasn’t an agent, she certainly knew an awful lot more than she should have.
At last, when the verification was complete, Greer listened for a moment, and then said to Sasha, “Your boss wants to talk to you.”
She shook her head in aggravation, then turned to the side and held out her wrists to remind us that they were cuffed. “Well, bring it here.”
Greer passed his cell to me, and I held it up to Sasha’s ear.
“Yes,” she said into the phone. “They just showed up here. No, it’s . . . I will . . . I don’t know. I hope not . . . Okay, yeah. I understand.”
She nodded to me that she was done, and I ended the call.
“Satisfied?” she asked us.
Greer indicated to me that he was. I was on the same page. I returned his phone to him.
If she was a deep-undercover DEA agent, then it certainly explained why her prints came up as unavailable when I sent them through the system.
“Well,” Sasha said impatiently, “can you please get these cuffs off me and save me the trouble of having to pick them?”
I removed the handcuffs, and she rubbed her wrists in annoyance.
“This is called a joint task force for a reason,” Greer noted, a bit abrasively. “We weren’t notified that the DEA was running a side op on this.”
“Why do you think Blake is always one step ahead of us? In the past he’s compromised two people from the FBI—two that we know of.” She laid a heavy emphasis on those last four words.
It was true that Blake had gotten to an FBI SWAT member and one of the lawyers from our Office of Professional Responsibility. However, now she was dead and the SWAT guy was in prison.
She informed us that her last name wasn’t Daye after all, but MacIntyre. Her first name actually was Sasha, a technique undercover agents sometimes use so they respond instinctively when their name is spoken rather than hesitating as they evaluate whether or not the person is addressing them. That momentary hesitation can sometimes be the difference between being made and staying alive.
Sasha went on. “My supervisor decided we couldn’t wait around and let Blake continue to import drugs and expand his human trafficking network while he got all the information he needed from inside sources.”
“Alright,” I said. “I hear you. Tell us what you know.”
“He’s smuggling in a new synthetic. It’s a drug similar to cocaine in the way it affects the brain. It’s even more addictive, though, and can cause a person to be less inhibited and more aggressive. Like cocaine, it’s a benzoic acid ester. The chemical structure is similar to cocaine but has an extra carboxyl group on the tropane ring and they’re adding to the fluoride—”
“Hang on,” Greer said. “In English?”
“Basically, it’s found as a white powder just like cocaine. You can snort it or shoot it up. But it can be synthesi
zed and molded into different shapes that hold their form until they’re powdered once again.”
“Selzucaine?” I asked.
“You know about it?”
“It was found in Jon Murray’s system.”
“Interesting. I didn’t know that.”
“Sasha,” I said, “why’d you run from me at the cemetery?”
“In case they were watching—especially after you identified yourself to me as a federal agent. You didn’t leave me any choice.”
“And why were you there in the first place?”
“Looking for Reese.”
“Reese?”
“A chemist from Phoenix. Works for a pharmaceutical firm down there. I don’t know exactly how he’s connected to Blake, but we think it has to do with synthesizing or distributing the Selzucaine. Blake has someone named Ibrahim who’s working with Reese. I’m not certain what they have planned, but from what I was able to overhear, it’s going down this week.”
“If Reese is developing the Selzucaine, that would explain his connection to Blake.” I was processing everything in reference to what Mannie had told me yesterday. “But why would he attend the funeral?”
“I’m still working on that.”
“Maybe our senator here has his hands in the drug-smuggling business?” Greer suggested.
“It’s possible,” she acknowledged. “I expected that either Blake or Mannie would be keeping an eye on things—I just didn’t know that Mannie would show up there on Amber Road. And then there was that accident. I just thank God the driver is recovering.” She sighed heavily. “I witnessed Blake kill a man. Aaron Jasper. Blake shot him in the head because he was stealing from him and because he’d contacted someone called the Matchmaker.”
“The Matchmaker?” I said. “Who’s that?”
“Don’t know. We don’t have any files on anyone using that name, and looking online hasn’t helped any—there are just too many search results for the word ‘matchmaker.’ Believe me. I’ve got nothing, and I’ve been at it for two hours already this morning.”
“And Blake killed Jasper for contacting him?”
“And for not being faithful. He did it before I could stop him. I’m sure Jasper was no Boy Scout, but Blake played judge, jury, and executioner. No matter how corrupt the guy was, he deserved better than that.”
“Why didn’t you arrest Blake at that point?” Greer asked.
“The opportunity didn’t present itself,” she said somewhat evasively.
“Do you have any idea where Blake is right now?”
“He has a condo he uses, but he moves around a lot. Besides, it’s not just about locating him, it’s about getting access to his contacts, to his accounts. We bring him in now, we shut down his business for a couple of days or maybe a week or two. And then the people he works with just regroup and go at it again, as strong as ever. He’s being financed from somewhere. That’s who we want. Whoever’s at the top of the food chain.”
From our research, we knew that after Blake took on the persona of an infamous terrorist named Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir, founder of The Brigade of the Prophet’s Sword, he started to receive funding from terrorist organizations. At times, it seemed like he was playing one side against the other, getting money from the jihadists and also benefiting from arms sales to private security firms contracted by the military to fight extremism.
But some of his money also appeared to flow in from the tech sector. Murky ties. Offshore accounts. Nothing solid.
If there’s a lot on the table, you can be pretty sure that there’s also a lot going on under the table. All too often where you find money you find corruption. It’s as if the two things are joined at the hip. It may take some time, but dig deep enough into one and you’ll most likely find ligaments connecting it to the other.
“Listen,” I said to Sasha. “I know you have orders to wait so you can try to track down Blake’s associates, but if you have any idea where he is, we need to move on him—especially now that Mannie is free. If we can get both of them, I think Mannie might work with us and give up the contacts you’re looking for.”
She didn’t respond.
“Can you get us to Blake?”
Though she took her time answering, at last she did. “Yeah. I think so.”
While she pulled up the material we needed, Greer spoke with DeYoung about getting an FBI SWAT team dispatched, and I phoned Ralph to fill him in on what we’d learned.
Once we had DeYoung’s approval and the address from Sasha, I realized that, despite how badly I wanted to be on the incursion team, the location wasn’t anywhere near us. SWAT would get there long before we would—and this was time-sensitive. If Blake was there, we needed to move on him right away before he fled or changed locations again.
“I’m not going to make it there in time,” I told Ralph.
“We’ll go in heavy. We’ll get this done.”
“Right. If possible, get me an eye on things. Have one of the SWAT guys send a video feed to my FDD account either from his body camera or helmet cam. We’ll watch things go down from here.”
“Roger that.”
“This is the best shot we’ve had in a long time. Good luck.”
I logged into my Federal Digital Database account and waited for the live footage to come through.
Finding Sasha this morning might’ve just been the break we’d been waiting for.
38
Timothy Sabian had a restless night, and when he finally rolled out of bed, it was nearly ten o’clock. He wandered into the kitchen to get some breakfast and saw the typewritten note waiting on the table: Look downstairs.
His heart clenched. Someone had been in here. Someone had left that note for him.
That’s not true, Timothy. You know that’s not true. You left this note here yourself.
“No. I didn’t. I wouldn’t have.”
But you did.
“I don’t go in the basement. Just like Emily didn’t after that night when Elena was killed.”
You haven’t even written the end of Emily’s story yet. Go and see. Go and see what’s in the basement.
The wiring downstairs had never been completed. The floor had never been poured. The ceiling panels had never been put up. The walls were still rough, unpainted cinder blocks. Although there was one bulb above the stairwell and one at the base of it, Timothy grabbed a flashlight from the drawer just in case he needed the extra light.
He eased the door open and flicked the switch. Yellow, jaundiced light fell across him and washed faintly through the stairwell. His breathing was quick and tense as he took the steps one at a time deeper into The Place He Did Not Want To Go.
He wasn’t sure what to expect or what he might find, but even when he got to the base of the stairs and looked around, he saw nothing out of the ordinary—just piles of boxes, half a dozen crates of discarded books, a broken chair, an old table, and a dust-covered filing cabinet filled with notes of research for his novels.
Everything where it should be.
Nothing that didn’t belong.
Except.
There.
A shape in the far corner of the basement near the old furnace that had never worked since the day he moved in here.
He targeted the form with his flashlight.
A body. A woman. She was lying on her side facing the wall and wore the same clothes Julianne had been wearing last night when she was at the pier.
And so.
But what had happened after that, after their encounter by the docks?
You put her in the trunk, Timothy. You brought her back here.
“Miss Springman?” he said softly.
She didn’t move.
“Julianne.” Timothy edged closer. “Are you alright?”
The woman didn’t stir.
He
approached her warily, then knelt beside her and rested a hand on her shoulder. Gently, he rolled her onto her back so he could see her face.
Oh yes. It was her.
And yes, she was dead. Her discolored skin left no doubt about that.
You did this, Timothy. You killed her.
“No, I wouldn’t have. She was going to help me. I would never have hurt her.”
And yet here she is. Now what are you going to do?
He couldn’t leave her down here. He couldn’t keep her here. He had to get rid of her.
“I’ll call the police. I’ll explain everything. I’ll tell them that someone left her here, that someone is trying to set me up.”
No one will believe that. Not with your history of mental illness. You’ve been violent in the past. You can’t tell anyone. If the police find out what you did here, they’ll send you to prison. Or back to the White Shirts Place. Lock you away there forever.
Even though Julianne appeared to most certainly be dead, Timothy felt for a pulse, then leaned close to see if she was breathing, just to be absolutely sure.
No response.
“I’ll wrap her up in a blanket. I’ll take her somewhere.”
No, you’ll leave prints. You’ll leave DNA. You can’t take that chance. You need to put her someplace where she’ll never be found.
He thought through the possibilities—placing her in the river, burying her in the woods somewhere. The Adirondacks? He really had no idea. How do you get rid of a body?
Lonnie would know. If only he were—
Maybe it’d be best not to move her anywhere. Leave her down here. Bury her here.
“But this is my house. This is where I live. I could never stay here knowing she’s down in the basement.”
You can’t move her out of here. What if you aren’t careful enough? Bury her here, then make sure you haven’t left any evidence that you two ever met. Nothing in your house, nothing in your car.
Timothy took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then scratched at the bugs that were crawling incessantly across his arm.
It was as if his skin were giving birth to them. Always always always more and more and more.