by Matt Lincoln
“It’s not perfect anymore,” Alice said softly, and I got the sense that Tessa had unwittingly hit on a sore spot for these two.
“Have you ever had any contact with these men other than that time you ran into one of them on the beach?” I asked, skipping right over this testy exchange and changing the subject.
“I brought them cookies when they first got here,” Alice said, wincing at the memory. “I just thought I’d welcome the new owners to the neighborhood.”
“That’s when we first started feeling uneasy,” Tyson explained.
“They took the cookies, but I felt weird the whole time I was there,” Alice explained. “There was this guy there who was ordering all the others around, and he was kind of weird—talking in hushed tones with the others. And I saw that he was carrying a gun. That made me really uncomfortable. Then I saw a few of the others with guns, too, and I just didn’t like that at all. This is a quiet neighborhood! Why are people walking around their own home with deadly weapons like that? It just seemed kind of like a gang or something.”
I exchanged a glance with Tessa. It sounded more and more like the Hawthorne house had something to do with our case.
“Did you ever report this to the authorities?” I asked the couple.
“I work for the city, so I talked to a couple of guys at the office,” Tyson shrugged. “They agreed it was weird but said it probably wasn’t illegal, and I didn’t want to make a fuss about it. News travels fast around here, and I didn’t want these guys mad at us for reporting them if nothing came of it.”
“I understand,” I said, thinking of how quickly gossip spread with someone like Paulina around. “Was that the only other time that you guys interacted with any of them?”
Tyson and Alice exchanged another even more worried look this time.
“Yes,” Alice said, staring down at her hands. “For us, anyway.”
“What does that mean?” Tessa asked, leaning forward with a confused look on her face again. “Has someone else spoken with them?”
“Well, what spooked us the most was when the kids saw a couple of them,” Tyson said softly, and Alice looked like she was just about to burst into tears at the mention of it.
I couldn’t blame her, and a chill of anger bubbled up in the pit of my stomach. I hated it when kids got involved. Everyone did. Even Tessa tensed beside me on the couch.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said softly. “Is this what happened in the backyard?”
Tyson gave his wife a questioning look.
“I mentioned something when you were upstairs,” she explained to him before turning back to me. “And yes, that’s what happened in the backyard.”
“The kids used to love playing out there,” Tyson added. “It’s part of why we bought the house in the first place. It’s so great back there. The kids can run and play as much as they want, and there are trees to climb and stuff. There’s not enough of that in the modern world. Most kids are always on their smartphones or tablets. The idea of raising them somewhere like this appealed to us.”
“I understand,” I chuckled, agreeing with him completely. “I was telling Alice before that I would’ve killed to grow up in a place like this. A forest and the ocean? You can’t beat that.”
“So you get it,” Tyson said, seeming pleased with this response. “But yeah, we don’t even let them go out there anymore, even supervised. It’s not safe. Not now.”
“What happened?” Tessa asked gently, leaning forward and placing a hand softly on Alice’s wrist across the table.
“We don’t know, exactly,” the woman sighed, looking up at us again. “The kids are young, and we asked them questions, but we’re still not sure we’re getting the full story.”
“What they told us doesn’t exactly make sense,” Tyson explained apologetically. “You know kids. They make fanciful stories out of everything. And our kids have even bigger imaginations than most.”
Okay, now I really had to hear this story. But I waited patiently for the couple to continue, not wanting to put too much pressure on them and letting them set their own pace.
“I went outside one afternoon to call them in for lunch,” Alice continued after taking a deep breath. “This was a Saturday over the winter break for the holidays, so they didn’t have any homework to worry about. They’d been out there all day, and I didn’t think much of it. It was a good day, too. We hadn’t heard any construction from the Hawthorne house all morning, which is rare.”
“You’d never been concerned about these people coming onto your property before?” Tessa asked, and both of the Carltons shook their heads.
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Tyson said quickly. “We have a state-of-the-art security system all around the property, and if I ever saw any of them here myself, I would’ve roughed them up pretty good.”
I was a little skeptical of this, by the skin and bones look of him, but I didn’t voice this.
“Anyway, the kids didn’t come in when I called them,” Alice said, looking like she might cry again. “So I went looking, and when I found them, I saw two of those guys from the Hawthorne house disappearing into the trees. And they had guns, too, just like they did when I went over there myself!”
“Did you talk to them?” I asked, a little sharper than I intended, and I had to remind myself that the Carltons’ kids were safe upstairs watching a movie and clearly hadn’t been hurt when this happened.
“I called after them, but they didn’t answer,” Alice said. “Then I tried to chase them, but I couldn’t find them, and I didn’t want to leave the kids alone.”
I gave the small woman an appraising look, unable to picture her running after a couple of goons with firearms. Maternal instinct was indeed a powerful thing, apparently.
“Why didn’t these men set off your security system?” I asked Tyson.
“I guess they were beyond the bounds of our property,” Tyson sighed. “We told the kids not to go that far, but I guess they got curious. I blame Miles, our boy. He’s an adventurous one. He is always getting in trouble at school for breaking the rules, too.”
I caught the shadow of a proud smile hiding on the corner of the man’s lips and had to suppress a laugh. Tyson, no doubt couldn’t betray his pride in his kid’s curiosity in front of his wife, but I couldn’t blame him for having it in the first place. A sense of adventure was a good quality in a kid, within reason, of course.
“Yes, they had gone out past our property,” Alice confirmed. “There’s a big rock that we use as a landmark, and they blew right past it, climbing trees.”
“What did they tell you happened with the men?” Tessa asked, worry papered across her face.
“They said that the men came up to them and started asking them questions about the area,” Alice said, shaking her head as if she didn’t understand any of this. “Asked them if they’d ever been out on the water and if they’d ever heard any legends about some kind of buried treasure at school. Miles, he was going on and on about some old pirate ship. I still think he made it all up himself. He’s always been fascinated by that old Hawthorne house and its ghost stories. He was never as afraid of the men as we were. He thought they were interesting.”
I stared over at Tessa, and I saw the flash of recognition that was no doubt crossing my own face mirrored on my own. A pirate ship. Buried treasure. This all sounded more and more promising.
“Has he ever heard anything about those things?” I asked, not bothering to try to keep the excitement out of my voice. “Have you ever heard anything about an old pirate ship?”
“What?” Alice asked, blinking at me in confusion. “No.” Tyson also shook his head.
“Did they say anything else?” I asked.
“No, nothing,” Alice said, shaking her head. “But we never let them go outside alone again.”
23
Holm
It had been a long twenty-four hours. I hadn’t slept in nearly two days, and the world was starting to swim around me
as I sat in a small room in the Miami police station closest to the MBLIS office.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Birn asked from where he sat beside me, clapping me on the shoulder. “You look like you’re about to keel over, and you’re no good to us exhausted.”
I looked at him hesitantly. I hadn’t been comfortable taking a break since what happened to Diane and me the night before at the office when the goon in the ski mask had attacked us. What with Birn and Muñoz still not fully recovered from their ordeal down in the Keys and Marston running off to find buried treasure in Virginia, I knew that Diane needed me awake and alert.
But Birn was right. I was awake, but I wasn’t alert anymore. I needed to get some shut-eye.
“You’re not wrong,” I admitted, suppressing what felt like my hundredth yawn in as many minutes. “You think you two can hold down the fort for a couple of hours?”
I glanced between Birn and Muñoz, who had both been camped out with me in the back of the police station since mid-morning, guzzling coffee and energy drinks and going through the endless files that the police had sent over. Diane didn’t help us. Instead, she spent her time talking to the big wigs and the other agents out on patrol with the police officers who were hunting down our would-be attackers.
“Sure thing,” Muñoz said kindly, shooting me a smile. “You deserve a break.”
I felt bad because we all needed a break. But at least Birn and Muñoz had gotten some sleep the night before, while Diane and I had been up all night talking to the police. I wasn’t sure if Diane had gotten any rest herself, but I doubted it. We hadn’t seen her since the afternoon when she’d popped her head in to tell us that the FBI had arrived, and they’d be in to talk to me soon and take a witness statement.
That had been nearly five hours ago, and no one had been in since, except for the lackeys who brought us more of the files to look through, and they hadn’t been able to tell us anything despite our ruthless questioning.
The files were interesting, in a way. Well, that was a lie that I told myself to keep myself awake as I went through them, if I was honest, but each time I opened a new one, I hoped that it would be interesting, giving us some kind of tidbit about the Hollands’ location. But nothing had turned up yet, and we each made sure to look at every single file in case one of us missed something the first time.
You could say that I wasn’t exactly happy with our progress, though I tried to keep in good spirits for the other agents’ sakes.
The files were mostly from the Atlanta airport. We were still on that lead, unfortunately, as nothing new had turned up yet. As the busiest airport in the world, there were seemingly endless documents and security tapes to go through. We got the cream of the crop, the stuff that someone else had flagged as potentially having something worth finding, and yet still nothing had turned up, and the volume was overwhelming.
I stood up and stretched out my whole body, allowing myself to admit a loud, satisfying yawn that coursed through my whole body.
“I guess I’ll just go lie down on one of the cots,” I said, knowing that the police station would have some tucked in a back room somewhere for just this purpose. “Let me know if you find anything.”
“Will do,” Birn said sardonically, his lips popping on the end of the phrase and his tone making it clear that he expected nothing even remotely helpful to show up in any of these files.
I didn’t really expect anything to turn up either, if I was honest, but there was always a possibility, so we kept at it.
All day, I’d been wanting to get myself out in one of the patrol cars with the other agents, getting out from behind a desk so that I could feel like I was actually doing something. But Diane wouldn’t allow it. I was needed here. She would tell me that every time I asked, just in case a suspect showed up and I needed to do a lineup, even though I barely saw the guy who attacked us, or if someone else came to interview me about it.
To say I was annoyed was an understatement, considering that no one had interviewed me since the morning and that no lineup had been arranged. But I couldn’t blame Diane. She didn’t know that the day would get away from us without my needing to do anything but go through files.
Birn and Muñoz had complained incessantly about being stuck on desk duty, too, but that hadn’t gotten them anywhere, either. Someone had to go through the files to make sure the airport and the FBI hadn’t missed anything, and the two of them were still recovering. They were the natural choice to stay back at the station along with Diane and me.
I meandered out of the back room and out into the front of the police station, where Diane had been feverishly talking with the FBI and the police chief since the other agency’s guys had arrived that afternoon.
“Anything yet?” I asked as I walked over to the water cooler to grab a crisp drink before heading off to bed for a couple of hours. I’d asked the exact same question over and over again all day, just to get the same answer just as many times. Zip, nada, zero. Just more of the same.
Suffice it to say I wasn’t expecting much this time, either.
“Actually, will you come over here?” Diane asked in a hushed tone, waving a hand to beckon me over to her side.
I couldn’t decide whether I was pleasantly surprised or annoyed that maybe something had happened just as I was finally about to get myself some well-needed rest.
Either way, I quickly crossed over to where she stood in the center of the room, staring at a whiteboard set up there and covered in different tidbits of information about the Hollands.
I was suddenly very aware of just how heavy my eyelids were and just how much I needed some sleep, and I cursed myself internally for not being more excited to get in on the action I’d wanted all day long.
Nonetheless, I found Diane clustered around that whiteboard with half a dozen guys in suits. I had to squeeze myself in since they didn’t make room for me themselves.
Once at the board, I looked over it, trying to see if it had changed at all since the last time I’d been out there. It no doubt had, but I didn’t notice much, probably due to a combination of my fatigue and the fact that the thing looked like a giant mass of unrelated blurry photographs and newspaper clippings to me.
I stared blankly at Diane.
“Am I supposed to be looking at something?” I asked her as she was looking at me expectantly.
“These are all the possible sightings of the Hollands over the past couple of years that we’ve been able to find, mostly at airports,” Diane explained, gesturing at the left-hand side of the board. “And these are all the corresponding real estate sales.”
She gestured at the right-hand side of the board now, which bore all the newspaper clippings.
I didn’t remember those from before, so I leaned in to squint at it and get a closer look, unceremoniously knocking the guy next to me and sending a portion of his coffee sloshing around in the air as I did so.
“Hey, watch it!” the guy hollered at me, looking at me as if I was the scum of the Earth.
“Don’t stand so close then, why don’t you?” I shot back, giving him and his FBI badge an equally irritated look. Who did he think he was, getting off on treating me as if I didn’t belong there? This was MBLIS territory. He was on my turf, and here he was, acting like I was some kind of bug he wanted to squash.
“Why don’t you just go on and mosey back to your hole in the wall and do grunt work with your little friends,” the man sneered back at me, a coffee stain dripping down the front of his white shirt.
I got in a good shot at least, then, if unintentionally.
“Whoa, whoa,” the guy on the FBI agent’s other side said, grabbing his shoulder and holding him back from me.
“Hey now, don’t go acting like you don’t agree with me,” the first guy groaned, wrestling his shoulder out of the other man’s grip.
“You’d better watch it, the both of you,” I snarled, glowering at the both of them. “This stuff might fly in Virginia, but you’re in M
BLIS territory now.”
“Hey!” Diane barked, clapping her hands in the center of the group and snapping us all to attention. “What did I say earlier about us all working together? We’re not going to get anywhere on this case biting each other’s heads off, so stop acting like bullies butting heads at recess and remember you’re grown men. Start acting like it.”
“Hey, what’d I do?” I asked defensively. “I didn’t mean to knock his coffee.”
But one more look from Diane in my direction shut me up.
“Right, sorry,” the guy I’d spilled coffee on said, holding out his hand to me in a gesture of goodwill.
I glared down at it but knew that I’d have hell to pay with Diane if I didn’t take it.
“Fine,” I said sourly, shaking his hand, which was covered in coffee.
I pulled my hand back instinctively and wiped it off on my pants as the FBI guys all laughed at me and clapped the first guy on the shoulder. I gave Diane an exasperated look.
“Hey, you think that little speech was just for my guy?” she snapped at them. “Need I remind you that I outrank you, and any one of you would be off this case with one word from me.”
The guys all looked at each other uncomfortably, as if they hadn’t actually thought of this before.
I crossed my arms and gave them a smug look.
“Okay, okay, I sincerely apologize,” the guy next to me said, wiping his hand off on the hem of his shirt and then holding both his hands up in defeat. “Truce?”
His eyes met mine, and I bit my lower lip. I didn’t like this guy, not one bit. But that didn’t change the fact that I had to work with him, like it or not. And it was decidedly not.
“Truce,” I agreed, though I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“Alright,” Diane said, seeming satisfied with this. “Agent Robbie Holm, meet Agents Smith, Corey, Barns, Dobbs, Forrester, and Hunt from the FBI. They’ll be here with us at least until we catch the guy who came after us last night.”