by Matt Lincoln
“I’d say good to meet you, but well…” I said, giving them a half-grin.
Diane shot me another look, and that was the end of that.
“So here’s the deal, we’ve been able to track down several aliases the Hollands have used to buy up real estate along the United States coasts and on some islands,” Diane continued, turning her attention back to the board. “We’ve done this by correlating real estate sales with times that Chester and Ashley Holland have been caught by security cameras near the properties in question. Then we’ve identified patterns and managed to link them to the aliases.”
“That’s good work,” I said, nodding appraisingly at the board as I finally got a chance to look at the newspaper clippings, and thinking that I would’ve liked to be in on this part of the investigation instead of stuck back there with Birn and Muñoz. “You found the sales in newspapers?”
“Some of them, yes,” the guy with the coffee stains, Smith, confirmed. “That’s the easiest way to find ‘em since a lot of local newspapers report on this stuff, especially in smaller towns.”
“Okay, so have any of these other aliases gotten us closer to figuring out where they are now?” I asked since I had my priorities straight. Who cared about old news when these guys were trying to kill us in the here and now?
“Unfortunately, no,” Diane said with a huff, clearly not liking admitting this. “But at least it finally feels like we’re getting somewhere.”
I had to admit that that was something, at least.
“Okay, then,” I said. “So how many of these aliases are new? We already knew about two, right? Three if we count their real names. If Chester and Ashley Holland even are their real names, that is.”
“I doubt they are, honestly,” Diane said, biting her lip as she looked over the board again. “These people are too damn smart to use their real names for much of anything. And yes, we had three before, including ‘Chester and Ashley Holland.’ Now we have six.”
“Six, that’s good, that’s good,” I said, nodding some more. “Do we have any hits on those names other than what’s on this board?”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Diane said, turning away from the board and walking over to a nearby table that had a giant stack of files on it. She heaved them up and dumped them all into my waiting arms, causing me to drop my now-empty water cup on the floor.
All the FBI guys started snickering again.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I whined to Diane, my shoulders slumping under the weight of all the files. “I was about to go take a nap.”
“Oh, is Robbie missing out on his nap time?” Smith joked in a mock baby voice, and I immediately regretted saying anything about how tired I was at all.
“Then go take one,” Diane said flippantly. “Just drop those off with Birn and Muñoz on your way.”
I stared at the enormous pile, and a flicker of curiosity arose within me. I was a dead man walking because of how little sleep I had gotten. That was true. But it’d been hours since we’d had anything resembling something interesting to look through, and I didn’t want Birn and Muñoz picking all the good stuff out of it while I was asleep.
“No, no, I’ll be fine,” I said, hating myself even as I said the words. “I’ll start looking through it now.”
“That’s what I thought,” Diane said, smiling at me and patting me on the shoulder before striding back to the board and those aggravating FBI agents.
I sighed and stumbled back to the little room in the back where Birn and Muñoz were still looking through the last batch of files.
“Hey, I thought you were…” Birn started to say when he saw me come back in, and then he caught sight of what I was carrying. “Aww, man, you can’t be serious. There’s more? We’re not even done with this batch yet, not that it’s done us any good.”
“There actually might be a lead this time,” I said, dropping the files down on the table with such force that they fell over, spreading across the whole of the long table, and collapsing back into the chair that I had made my home for most of the day.
I quickly caught Birn and Muñoz up to speed on what had happened out by the whiteboard, including my unpleasant little run-in with the guys from the FBI.
“Those God-” Muñoz started to say, shaking her head and gritting her teeth and looking like she was about to unleash a sea of expletives on our friends from the bigger agency. But Birn placed a hand on the inside of her elbow and stopped her short.
“Now, now,” he said in a gentle, almost teasing tone. “Diane’s right. We have to figure out how to get along with our new friends for the time being. And that starts with what we say about them behind closed doors.”
“You think they’re not making fun of us when we’re not there?” Muñoz asked angrily. “Just look at what they’ve been saying to Holm’s face!”
“We can be better than them, no?” Birn asked, raising his eyebrows at each of us in turn.
“Fine,” Muñoz snarled, though she didn’t look at all happy about it, and I just nodded and grabbed the nearest file for myself.
It was about a couple by the names of Nolan and Patricia Jones, who had a lot of investment properties in smaller cities and towns along the east coast.
I perused through the thick file and several others like it on the same alias for what felt like hours. My eyes drooped, and more than once, I may have drifted off into a light sleep, dreaming that I was still reading because that’s how monotonous my day had become.
Until finally, something caught my eye.
A purchase in Newport News, Virginia. An old house the couple had wanted to refurbish for rental purposes. I blinked at it and then ran back out into the main room without so much as a word to Birn or Muñoz.
“Marston’s case, Marston’s case!” I screamed as I ran into the room, making Diane nearly jump out of her skin as I jutted the file beneath her nose.
Her eyes widened as the same realization that had dawned on me dawned on her, and she took the file from my shaking hands.
I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, dialing for Marston immediately.
The call didn’t go through. He didn’t have a signal.
24
Ethan
Tessa and I couldn’t get much out of the Carltons after that. They were too shaken up, and I didn’t even bother to ask if I could talk to the kids myself. I knew that they wouldn’t allow that. They were too overprotective, and to be honest, I didn’t blame them.
So we thanked them for their time, and I gave them each a copy of my card before we headed back out to stroll back to the restaurant parking lot where we’d left our rental car.
We were heading down the stairs and back to the beach when the noise started.
It was faint at first, so much so that I barely noticed it, and the sounds blended in with the roar of the ocean waves as Tessa and I walked arm in arm along the beach just as we had on our way there.
Then the loud clangs coming one after another became impossible to deny.
I stopped dead in my tracks and felt Tessa’s grip around my arm tighten, her fingernails digging into my skin.
“You don’t think…?” she started to ask, glancing over at me with that familiar gleam in her eyes. But she didn’t finish her thought. She knew by the look on my face that we were each thinking the same thing.
“Where else would those sounds be coming from?” I whispered, moving my free hand down to where my gun rested at my side once again.
We took a few more cautious steps forward, and then a few more, and then a few more, until the clanging sounds overwhelmed the sounds of the thick waves crashing against the shore, sprinkling saltwater on my exposed skin and sending water droplets up my nostrils.
“I can see how that would get annoying, especially at night,” Tessa murmured sympathetically. “Especially with kids trying to sleep through it.”
“Yes, I can imagine,” I agreed. “Though I don’t really want to.”
> “What are you thinking?” Tessa asked, glancing over at me again. “What they said about an old pirate ship and buried treasure…?”
Her voice trailed off again, and I knew that it was because she didn’t dare voice her hope out loud. I didn’t dare to do it, either, though I was thinking the same thing.
Could the Dragon’s Rogue be here, in Virginia after all? It would explain why Grendel’s journal had ended up at the nautical museum in the first place. Tessa had been right about that. But somehow, that didn’t seem right to me. It seemed almost too easy, somehow. I’d expected a long march to the finish line, combing through clues and other documents once I found the journal. Could it be possible that I’d stumbled upon what I’d been looking for for so long without even getting to the real journal first?
“I don’t know,” was all that I could manage in the end in response to Tessa’s question. There was nothing else that I dared to say. It was too much, too fast. I wasn’t a superstitious man exactly, but I didn’t want to test fate either.
We were coming up on the steps that led to the Hawthorne house then, and the clanking construction noises were growing louder by the second.
“Seems strange that they would be doing so much construction for so long, even on an old house,” Tessa said as she cast an almost wistful look in the direction of the steps.
A chill ran up and down my spine as I followed her gaze, reminiscent of the one that had gripped me earlier when I first saw the house.
The fog was even thicker now, making the house itself even more difficult to make out. Whereas the image had been clear at this angle and distance before, now the creepy old structure was shrouded in a haze of darkness even right up close. It made me even less inclined to step foot on the property than I had been before.
Tessa, unfortunately, had other plans. She stopped in her tracks and began to pull me toward the steps, that glint in her eye now all-encompassing in her pursuit of the story, as always.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I said hurriedly as I tried to pull her back with me, but she was unrelenting, and she’d caught me off guard.
Before I knew it, she was on the second step up, and I was following right behind her, not wanting to let her go it alone under such uncertain circumstances.
“What, are you scared?” she asked, grinning down at me with her hand still loosely resting in mine as I did my best to stay at the foot of the stairwell.
I didn’t like the look of those things, and even less the house they led up to. I didn’t like the look of them at all.
“Uh, yeah, a bit,” I admitted.
“Come on, Agent Marston,” she teased, shooting me a goofy smile. “This is your job, isn’t it? And your case? Don’t tell me that if I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t be running up there already, guns blazing.”
I stopped to consider this for a moment. If Tessa wasn’t here, and I had Holm with me so that I wasn’t going it alone, would I check out the Hawthorne house tonight? I wasn’t sure. The place gave me the creeps, with or without Tessa, there was no doubt about that. But this was an invaluable opportunity.
I shook my head to clear it and pushed away these thoughts.
“No, it doesn’t matter,” I said, pulling on Tessa’s arm gently. “It’s getting dark, and I’ll come back tomorrow with a team of officers. It’s not worth the risk tonight, especially when neither of us has a cell signal.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket with my free hand just to make sure and had to bite back a curse when I saw that my words were true. I still didn’t have a single bar to work with, and I doubted that Tessa could say any different.
“Come on, there’s something weird going on here right now,” Tessa said, nodding up the stairs in the direction of the house and all those noises.
“That’s my point!” I cried, thinking that this woman was actually insane, though I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that loved her enthusiasm. “There’s something weird going on here and walking into the middle of it without any backup is a fool’s errand.”
“But what if you come back tomorrow and there’s no one here?” Tessa complained. “We know there are people here now, so let’s go and talk to them. Just a chat. They don’t know we’re a threat.”
“They do if they know anything about what we did to their friends in that library today,” I protested, but my voice was drowned out by another, altogether unexpected sound.
A child’s cry. A boy’s, by the sound of it, though it could’ve been an older girl, too, I supposed.
Tessa and I both froze, and our eyes met. The Carltons hadn’t mentioned seeing or hearing any kids in the area. Except for their own, that was.
As if on cue, Tyson and Alice Carlton came running down the beach toward us, a little girl resting in the man’s arms and a glassy look on his face in contrast to his wife’s hysterics.
“Our son!” she cried, bounding up to me and nearly tripping in the sand. “Agent Marston, our son, Miles, we can’t find him anywhere!”
Well, that settled that argument. I at least was going into the Hawthorne house tonight.
“Have you called the police?” I asked the couple sharply, remembering that they had a landline that got service all the way out here.
“No,” Tyson managed, his voice coming out weak and hoarse. “We didn’t even think about that. We just knew you were close and ran. We didn’t want to leave her.”
He propped his daughter up on his hip. The girl looked confused and scared all at the same time, and silent tears were streaming down her face. She was wearing a nightgown, and it looked like sand had gotten everywhere in it just from running across the beach with her dad.
“Hi, I’m Ethan,” I said, walking over to her and giving her a kind, non-threatening smile. “Do you know where your brother went?
“He heard you talking about pirates,” she said, sniffling and wiping the tears off her cheeks. “At the haunted house. So he went looking for them himself. He said that if he found the bad guys for you, maybe you’d give him the buried treasure!”
The little girl said this as if it made all the sense in the world, but her parents looked nothing short of bewildered by it.
“What buried treasure, sweetie?” her father asked her. “What are you talking about?”
“The buried treasure the men told us about, in the forest!” the girl said earnestly, looking over at her mother. “The day you got all mad and said we couldn’t go out there anymore.”
“Do you know about any buried treasure?” Tessa asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head and sticking her thumb in her mouth. “But ever since then, Miles has wanted to find it. You just wouldn’t let us go outside, so he never got to try until now.”
“But why now?!” Alice cried, looking like she wanted to grab the little girl and shake her, but she didn’t.
“Because he wanted to help the police,” the kid said again, talking to her mother as if she was the little kid who wasn’t understanding properly. “Just like I told you.”
I stepped back and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath.
“You heard him yell, didn’t you?” Tyson asked, his voice almost breaking as he looked between Tessa and me. “You heard that, too, right?”
I glanced back at Tessa but didn’t answer, skipping right over the question.
“Look, you all need to go back to your house and call the police,” I said quickly. “Lock all your doors, make sure your security system is set, and tell them to come to the Hawthorne house with as much backup as they can spare, fast. Tell them the same people from the museum today have your son.”
“What?” Alice asked, pressing her hands to her mouth in alarm. “This has to do with that? Those people have my son?”
Tyson somehow looked even more ashen-faced now than he had before.
“Look, you just have to let me handle this, okay?” I said gently, giving her shoulder what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll get him back. I’ll go get him ba
ck for you right now. You just have to do as I tell you. We’re losing time every second we waste talking.”
“Alright,” Tyson said weakly, nodding in an almost manic way. “Alright.”
He grabbed his wife’s hand with his free arm and began to drag her along behind him at a jog back toward the house.
“Well, go on,” I told Tessa, noticing that she was still standing there on the first step. “Go with them.”
“Are you kidding?” she asked, giving me an exasperated look. “No way.”
“They’ll need someone to look after them while they wait for the police,” I argued, knowing even as I said the words that this was a weak argument.
“They have a state-of-the-art security system,” Tessa said, rolling her eyes. “Plus, if you think you’re going in there all by yourself… well, let’s just say that you would be very wrong.”
I opened my mouth to argue some more, but she cut me off. The Carltons were already out of sight by then.
“Come on. You said yourself that we’re wasting time arguing,” she said, beginning to climb the stairwell again. “Now I’m going up there. The question is, are you coming with me?”
I groaned and nodded and began to follow after her up toward the creaky old house shrouded in mist.
25
Tessa
Tessa found herself half annoyed by Ethan’s protests against her direct involvement in this case and half flattered. The MBLIS agent had always been keen to keep her out of trouble, regardless of the fact that his attempts never worked out for him, but he seemed even more hellbent on it than usual this time. She figured that he must be getting fond of her. She was getting fond of him, too.
Together they climbed all the way up the long, winding steps laid against the side of the sandy cliff. It felt like it was half beach, half mountain at a certain point, and by then, sand had made its way into every nook and cranny of Tessa’s clothing, most notably between her toes.