by Matt Lincoln
“That’s different,” she scoffed, immediately averting her eyes from mine. “I’m the director.”
“Oh, okay,” I laughed, meeting Holm’s eyes across the desk from me and stopping myself from laughing some more.
“Anyway, now that Sylvia and Lamarr are coming back, I thought maybe the two of you could take some time off,” Diane suggested. “I know that you’ve been talking about going up to Virginia to see that museum, Ethan, and you’re always going on about needing to go fishing, Robbie. You’ve had a difficult series of missions, and we can hold the fort down here without you with the others back.”
“I don’t know…” Holm said hesitantly. “I wouldn’t want to not be here when we get a hit on the Hollands.”
We hadn’t heard anything about the Hollands’ current whereabouts. Raids of many of their investment properties had turned up empty, and the warnings we’d sent to every airport in, well, everywhere, hadn’t led to anything noteworthy. They were bound to show up at some point, though, and I shared Holm’s reticence about not being here when that did happen.
“I’ll call you the second I hear anything, I promise,” Diane said dryly. “I know you just might quit in protest if I didn’t, and either way, I’ll need you on that case when it does come up.”
“I’m still not sure…” Holm said, frowning slightly. “Maybe we should at least wait until Birn and Muñoz come back, just to make sure they’re up for it, or they don’t change their minds. And to give them a day or two to re-acclimate after everything.”
“I agree,” I said with a nod. “Besides, I still haven’t heard back from Tessa, and I promised her that I’d take her with me when I went to Virginia.”
“Suit yourselves,” Diane said with a sigh and a shrug as she made her way back to her office. “I swear to God. It’s like pulling teeth to get someone to take an actual vacation around here. Nowhere else on Earth…”
She continued grumbling as she shut her office door behind her, and Holm and I both burst out laughing. We all knew that Diane loved our work ethic and wouldn’t have things any other way. She just enjoyed ribbing us, almost as much as we enjoyed shooting it right back at her.
“Still nothing from our photographer friend, huh?” Holm asked, referring to Tessa Bleu, an old friend of mine who had been there when I found the original remains that started my journey toward discovering the Dragon’s Rogue in my adult life.
I’d been toying with finding the ship for much longer than that, of course, as looking for the old pirate ship had been a pastime of my grandfather, who had raised me after my parents died. It wasn’t until Tessa and I discovered that the Dragon’s Rogue’s original owner, Lord Jonathan Finch-Hatton, was an ancestor of mine that I realized just how connected my family was to the ship after all.
“Yeah, nothing,” I confirmed, unable to keep the disappointment off of my face as I stared down at the open file that was still in my hands, a picture of Ashley Holland’s painfully make-upped face spread across the page in black and white. “But that’s to be expected, I guess. It’s not every day you get an assignment to go into the Yukon, of all places.”
“Takes going off the grid to a new level, for sure,” Holm chuckled.
Tessa was a photojournalist and spent her days going on exciting and sometimes dangerous missions of her own, though hers were in search of fascinating stories and wildlife instead of drug lords. Even so, we had more than a few things in common and had hit it off right away after meeting for the first time.
Tessa had been there when I found Finch-Hatton’s remains, when I found another pirate ship, the Searcher’s Chance, and when I’d helped take down that New York mafia and restored MBLIS’s funding. We hadn’t seen each other since that New York trip, however, as she was based there and I was based in Miami, and we both made a habit of traveling all over the place for work.
We hadn’t been out of touch for so long before, however, and it was making me nervous. Not only did I want to get up to Virginia and get to the bottom of this whole mess with Grendel’s journal, but I also wanted to talk to Tessa again, tell her about everything that had happened since we last spoke before I left for my New Orleans mission, and hear all about her trip across the remote parts of Canada. She’d been in Nova Scotia before heading to the Yukon, after all.
I’d been checking my phone and email almost feverishly as I tried to get back in touch with Tessa. She’d warned me that she’d be out of cell and Wi-Fi range for an indeterminate amount of time, but this was stretching on longer than I’d anticipated.
“Maybe you should just head up to Virginia while you can and see what you can find out,” Hold suggested, clearly seeing how lost in thought I was. “I’m sure Tessa would understand.”
I was sure she would, too. But I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I promised her that she would be there, and I won’t go back on that. Besides, you’re not wrong about Birn and Muñoz. They’ve been through the wringer, and if they come back too soon, I don’t want to leave Diane hanging out to dry without the agents she needs, especially if a hit on the Hollands turns up.”
Holm checked his watch.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “And it doesn’t look like anything else is going to happen around here today. You want to grab a drink at Mike’s before heading home for the day?”
“No, I’m good,” I said, shaking my head and grabbing up the file’s contents and stuffing them into the accompanying fat manila folder. “I think I’m just going to go home early. Look through the files some more and maybe try Tessa again.”
“Suit yourself,” Holm said with a shrug, waving goodbye to me as he headed out the door.
2
Ethan
I called Tessa again as I made my dinner, a frozen, pre-prepared steak that I just threw in the microwave, along with some leftover mashed potatoes from the night before. Predictably, she didn’t answer.
I continued to shuffle through the file as I ate. The meal was rubbery but decent as far as microwaveable dinners were concerned. I washed it down with canned beer from my fridge.
I’d practically memorized the Hollands’ file by then. Neither Chester nor Ashley had so much as a speck on their record, not even so much as a parking ticket.
At first, this was just further proof to me of their status as criminal masterminds, as related to me by the gangbangers we’d busted in the Keys. Then I realized that such a spotless criminal record was pretty much impossible, even for high-class types like the Hollands.
They were both in their early fifties, though they looked young for their age, no doubt the result of their money and regular fancy skin treatments, by the look of them. There was no way someone of that age had never gotten so much as a speeding ticket in their lives. No, there was something else going on here.
The problem was, I couldn’t figure out what it was.
There was a lot of information in the thick file, to be sure. Every real estate deal that the Hollands had ever made—or at least every legal one—was detailed in its pages. Years and years of taxes were there, too, and other dealings with banks and foreign investors. There was a lot there, and some of it shady. But it was all technically above board, according to our financial advisors and the other agencies.
The problem was that clearly, it wasn’t all above board. This meant that the Hollands had somehow found an excellent way to hide what they were really up to in plain sight, as evidenced by the fact that their purchase of Melody Key was nowhere to be found in that file, or any file for that matter.
Holm and I had spent a good chunk of the past few weeks looking into that deal, to no avail. The former reality star confirmed that it was, in fact, the Hollands who purchased the island from him, but they’d called themselves the Shaws when they talked to him. There was no record of them as the Shaws that we could find anywhere either, including relating to the purchase of Melody Key.
It was virtually as if the deal had never happened, except for the cash they�
��d given the reality star and the title that was now in their fake names. Their fake names that didn’t show up anywhere else on the record.
And then I kept coming back to those records under their real names, or what we thought were their real names, at least. It occurred to me as I finished off the last of my steak that Chester and Ashley Holland might not be their real names, either. Why else wouldn’t they have at least a measly speeding ticket to their names?
Even I had gotten a ticket or two in my time, mostly for parking somewhere too long. I’d gone ahead and looked myself up just to make sure they showed up on my record, and they did. I found it somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible that neither Chester nor Ashley had ever been pulled over, even for something mundane.
I finished off my beer and crushed the can in my fist, taking my eyes off the file for what felt like the first time in hours. I pinched the bridge of my nose and shook my head.
Maybe Diane was right, and I did need a vacation. She and Holm weren’t wrong about my more obsessive tendencies, and those tendencies had come out in full force recently, both with my search for Grendel’s journal and with the Hollands. Or the Shaws, or whatever their real names were.
Right when I was about to throw in the towel and maybe message Diane to tell her that I was going to go off and lounge on a beach somewhere for a few days, my phone started buzzing where I left it on the other side of my kitchen table in the houseboat that I called home. The table vibrated from the movement.
I anxiously picked it up to find that Tessa was on the caller ID. Suddenly, I found myself nervous. I hadn’t talked to her for quite some time, and I realized that it had gotten to the point where I’d built our next conversation up in my head a bit.
And so that’s how I found myself staring down at my phone as it rang, unable to bring myself to answer it.
Finally, when I realized that it was on its last ring before going to voicemail, I panicked and flipped it open, pressing the receiver to my ear.
“Hello,” I said, gulping down my anxiety and trying to sound cool and collected.
“Ethan!” Tessa cried, her voice bubbly and full of infectious joy at hearing from me again. “It’s so good to hear your voice. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch sooner. I just got your email today.”
I had to wrack my brain to remember what email she was talking about since it had been so long since I sent it, nearly a month at that point. I remembered that before leaving for the Keys with Holm, I had given up on trying to catch Tessa by phone and sent her a long email detailing everything I had learned about Grendel’s journal in New Orleans, namely, that the one sent to me from the mysterious PO box in Virginia had been a fake.
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said, clearing my throat and shifting in my seat to regain my senses. “I figured you were out of Wi-Fi range or something, and you’d get back to me when you could.”
“Yes, well, you won’t believe what I’ve been up to,” she said excitedly. “Though it sounds like you’ve got more than a few stories of your own to tell. Why don’t you start? So you’re sure that guy George told you to see in New Orleans said the journal was a fake?”
George was a friend of Tessa’s who I had met while I was in New York and had directed me to the Virginia museum in the first place. When the journal turned up, the old man directed me to a colleague of his, Percy, in New Orleans. There, I found out that I didn’t actually have Grendel’s journal after all.
I went on to tell Tessa the whole story about Holm’s and my trip to New Orleans, how we had taken down the drug lords there, found Lafitte’s ship, and rid the world of the Haitian zombie drug that had popped up on our previous mission once and for all. And, of course, how Percy had told me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the journal sent to me by that mysterious stranger in Virginia was a fake.
“Well, I’ll be,” Tessa sighed when I was finished with my tale. “That’s even crazier than I was expecting!”
“Crazier than the last one?” I asked, referring to Holm’s and my trip to Haiti, where we had first discovered the strange drug that had been at the center of both our missions before Birn was taken.
“I don’t know about that,” Tessa chuckled. “I’m not sure anything’s crazier than that, to be honest. But this one gives it a run for its money, that’s for sure.”
“Alright, then,” I laughed. “I’m glad that my job is at least somewhat entertaining.”
“Somewhat?” Tessa repeated, incredulous. “I swear, Ethan, you should write a book. Or more than one. People would pay good money to hear all this stuff. I should know. It’s kind of what I do for a living. And what I write about still has nothing on you.”
“I don’t know about that,” I chuckled, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin writing a book. That’s your strong suit, not mine.”
“I could write it for you, then!” she cried, latching onto this idea. “Yes, that’s a great idea. We could sit down, and you could tell me all your stories from start to finish again, and then I could convert them all to prose. I’m telling you, you’d be a real hit, Ethan. I bet Oprah would even put you on her book list or whatever.”
“Uh, why don’t we put a pin in that for now?” I asked, not sure how much I liked the idea of telling the world my life story. Even just telling Tessa was enough to get my heart racing, apparently, though I thought that that might have more to do with her than it did with me.
“Sure,” Tessa chuckled. “So, man, the journal is a fake, huh? I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, the fake one’s all messed up with so much stuff redacted that it wouldn’t do us any good, anyway. On the other… well, you still aren’t any closer to finding the real one.”
“Yeah, I had a similar reaction,” I admitted, thinking back to how panicked I’d been when I thought that it was the real journal that someone had ruined. “But I think I’ve settled on it being a good thing. Like Percy said, the fake one is ruined. At least now I know it’s possible that the real one is still out there and could do me some good, as you said.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Tessa murmured. “So what have you been up to since you got back from New Orleans? Resting, I hope. Oh, you didn’t go to Virginia without me, did you?”
“No, I’m not one to go back on a promise,” I assured her. “But I haven’t exactly been resting, either…”
I then proceeded to tell her all about Holm’s and my trip to the Keys, and the whole mess with Birn, and how it all seemed to tie in with New Orleans and Lafitte’s ship.
“Seriously?” she said when I was finished. “I missed all that? You’ve got to be kidding me. To hell with the Yukon. I wish I’d flown down there to hang out with you. Talk about a story!”
“I wish you had been there, too,” I chuckled, silently thinking that I wished we were always in the same place instead of dancing around each other across the continent. “But I seem to have a bit of free time on my hands, so I was wondering if you’d still be interested in accompanying me to Virginia?”
“Free time?” Tessa repeated. “Don’t you have to track down these Holland people?”
“I wish,” I sighed. “But we’re having trouble tracking them down. We have a lot of feelers out with airports and other agencies, and the like. But it’s been a couple of weeks already without anything, and these things can take time. Even if that is infuriating.”
I glanced down at the still open file resting on the round kitchen table between my elbows, its numerous pages scattered about and with Chester Holland’s overly-enthusiastic picture staring up at me in black and white with an altogether forced smile on his tanned face.
Yes, perhaps getting out of here and focusing on my other obsession would clear my head to help with the Holland case. It wasn’t like I was actually going to lounge on a beach somewhere. Even if I tried, I probably wouldn’t even last as long as Muñoz.
“Well, as sorry as I am to hear that a couple of crime lords are still running loose on the w
orld, I couldn’t be happier to have an opportunity to see you again,” Tessa gushed, and I felt my own stomach flip a bit at the prospect of seeing her again. “I’ll hop on the next flight I can find. Should be sometime tomorrow.”
“That’s great news,” I said, all of my previous concerns about leaving Diane alone at the office while we were looking for the Hollands evaporating on the spot. “I’ll do the same.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I get a flight,” she said. “It’ll probably take me longer than you, considering where I am right now.”
“And where is that, exactly?” I asked, jumping at the opportunity to hear about what Tessa had been up to since Holm and I had gotten back from Haiti.
“Oh, I’m in Whitehorse,” she said, as if this should’ve been obvious to me. “It’s the closest thing there is to civilization in the Yukon. Well, sort of. Anyway, there’s an airport here. Not all that many flights, though. I’ll see what I can find.”
“So, what were you doing up there?” I asked. “I don’t think you had time to say before.”
“Oh, it’s been so interesting, Ethan,” she gushed, and I could practically see her eyes widening with excitement on the other line as she spoke. “I was looking for this rare species of moose that scientists thought was extinct, but some backpackers caught sight of a while back up here.”
“Oh?” I asked, leaning forward on my seat even though she wasn’t actually in the room with me. “And did you find what you were looking for?”
I thought about how it was the hair from a rare kind of deer native to the Keys found where it shouldn’t be that helped lead Holm, Muñoz, and me to the campsite where Birn was being held on a remote island down there. I’d developed a healthy appreciation for rare wildlife ever since. Not to mention that I loved to hear Tessa talk about her work or to talk about anything at all, to be honest.
“We did,” she said, and I could hear the grin in her voice. “It took forever, though. That’s why it took so long for me to get back to you. My team from the National Geographic and I were camped out up there for ages, trying to find it. Just when some of us were about ready to give up, I saw one. Then we spent another week chasing it and trying to find some more of its kind. There were only two of them in the end, though, that we could find.”