“It’s right up here,” Gormon said.
The path turned right and led to a weathered brown shed with a pair of barn doors at the front. Gormon walked up and pulled the pin securing the closed doors. I saw no lock, no men with machine guns guarding the so-called tunnel, no cameras, no nothing. Gormon might have been right in stating that driving to the property was a waste of time. He pulled the doors open. Our group stepped into the shed, which was no bigger than one you’d see holding a couple lawn mowers or a riding tractor in someone’s backyard. The walls inside were entirely empty. The floor was concrete with a round, elevated door looking as if it should be on the top of a tank or a submarine. The door was definitely overkill.
“Open it up,” Beth said.
Gormon knelt over the combination lock and turned the dial. He tried pulling open the handle—the door didn’t budge. He tried again and again—it still didn’t budge.
“Use your key,” Bill said.
“Oh. Um, yeah. Let me try that.” He pulled the key from his pocket and tried to stick it into the hole. “Dammit!” he said. This is the key to the damn lock on the back of the cabin.” He let out a long breath and shook his head. “I can try calling Brad and see if he can give me the new combination. We don’t really get good cell-phone reception out here, though.”
“Try the combination again,” I said.
“It has to be changed. It’s not working. I guess I can try again.”
I watched as he spun the dial left to eight, right to twenty, and left to six, and I remembered him saying that the combination was the month and date the shelter was finished. I figured he was entering the eighth month, August, and 2006, which was wrong, from what he’d previously said. “I thought the last number of the combination was four,” I said.
“Huh?” he asked.
“You said that the combination was the month and year that it was built. Before that, you said it was built in 2004. You just entered six as a last number. Plus, I’m pretty sure combinations go right, left, right. Mind if I have a shot here?”
“Yeah, whatever I guess. Like I said, it’s not my shelter so I’m not really familiar with the lock.”
Gormon stepped aside, and I spun the dial to the numbers and pulled the handle. I heard a click, and the handle pulled down.
“Well, how about that?” I said.
“A regular safe cracker,” Bill said.
I pulled the big metal door open and stared down. The steps, about ten of them, went down into total darkness.
“Someone have a light?” I asked.
“There’s electricity down there,” Gormon said. “As soon as you get down, there’s an overhead string for the lights on the ceiling.”
“Right,” I said. I started down the steps, reached the bottom, and raised my hand, searching for the light string. I found it and yanked.
A string of four lights hanging from the ceiling illuminated the room. The walls, floor, and ceiling were concrete. A few miscellaneous rugs covered the floor and stopped before the back wall, which contained shelving in the center, a plywood rectangular room the size of a coat closet with a door on the left and a large gun safe on the right. The right wall was covered in more stocked shelving. The left wall had a couch, a chair, and a bunk bed. The total room size was roughly forty feet deep by ten or twelve feet wide, with an eight-foot ceiling.
I walked to the far wall, inspecting the items on the shelves—water, canned goods, MREs, board games, and books. My eyes went up to see some kind of ventilation via some screened circular holes near the top corners of the underground structure. I went to the small squared-off plywood room resembling a closet, and I pulled the door to peek inside. A portable commode stood in the corner.
I looked over the shelving on the back wall, which was filled with more canned goods, and stepped to the gun safe. I pulled the handle on the door, which didn’t budge. I stood for a moment and stared at the safe. It looked to be a fairly standard standing gun safe with a combination lock at the front. Huge metal straps and bolts anchored into the concrete wall behind it secured it in place. I heard feet coming down the stairs and looked over my shoulder to see Bill.
“It’s a shelter,” I said.
“Yeah, one hell of one, too,” Bill said.
He walked toward me, running his hand along the items on the shelves.
“See, I told you it was a shelter. Talk about a waste of time,” Gormon said. “Can we go now?”
I looked back to see Gormon halfway down the steps. He continued down with Scott at his back.
“You guys were ready for doomsday, huh?” Scott asked.
“Yeah, I guess. Brad had this built. It’s his deal.”
Bill came to my side near the back wall. He pulled the door open on the closet with the commode, closed it, and walked to the safe. He rapped his knuckles on the metal door. “Do you have the combination for the gun safe here?”
“Nah. Never had that,” Gormon said.
“Why would you have the combination to get into the shelter but not the combination to protect yourself once you’re in?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know. Whatever. I don’t have it,” Gormon said. “Can we go? My mother is probably wondering where I am.”
“In a minute,” I said.
“Come on. You saw what you needed to see. No tunnel—the girl fell for some bullshit. I mean, if the two would have drug me up here, they probably could have lived in here for a few months and defended themselves with the guns if anyone came looking, but that’s it.”
“Wait. So, how would they have defended themselves?” Scott asked. “If their plan was to take you up here to get in, and there was no tunnel, defending themselves implies that you would have got them into that safe.”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe they would have broken in or something. I’m just spitballing here.”
“Why don’t you call your buddy and get the combination?” Scott asked.
“He isn’t going to give me that to give to anyone without some kind of legal document making him do so. Warrant or something. That seems like a lot of work for no reason. I mean, come on, why are you guys busting my ass about this? It’s a damn safe with a couple of rifles inside.”
“So you know what’s inside?” Bill asked.
“I’m just guessing. Geez, you guys,” Gormon said.
“Can I have a try at the lock?” I asked.
“Whatever,” he said.
I tried the same combination from the top door, and the door swung open.
“You are a safe cracker. I’m in awe,” Bill said.
We looked in at an assortment of assault rifles and handguns. The top shelf was filled with ammo.
“Looks like a couple MAK 90s, Chinese AK-47s,” Bill said. “Oh, check these out. Hard to find these.” He reached down into the bottom corner of the safe and brought out what looked like a pistol with a stock and an elongated folded-over barrel.
“Kel-tec, right?” I asked. I’d seen the weapon a number of times at various gun shows over the years. It looked like a pistol converted into a small assault rifle. It used handgun ammo and magazines.
“Yup, and it looks like he has a couple of them in here.” Bill spoke quietly. “You can’t tell me that he didn’t know the combination was the same. We should probably get the numbers run on all of these to make sure everything is on the up and up. It could be why he wouldn’t open it. The guy has been a bit chatty with the repeating that none of this is his.” Bill set the weapon back down in the safe.
“Agreed,” I said.
“Okay, you saw inside of the safe. Can we go?”
“We’re going to make a record of these serial numbers, to make sure everything checks out.” I looked at Bill. “I’ll read them off. You jot them down.”
“Sure,” he said. Bill pulled a pen and paper from his inner suit pocket.
I reached over and grabbed the first rifle—it felt connected or hooked to its standing slot in the safe. I gave it a bit of a yank
and heard a click as the back of the safe swung open. A draft blew past me. I pulled what was supposed to be the back of the safe open the rest of the way and stared down a tunnel leading back as far as I could see.
“Well, son of a bitch.” I glanced back toward Scott. “Cuff him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
We’d been back from Montana for a week. The news of the tunnel and the connection to Nick Frane and Molly McCoy couldn’t be missed. You couldn’t log onto the Internet, grab a newspaper, or flip on the television without catching some kind of coverage. Our team kept our faces from the press for the most part, but they did their damnedest to hunt down everyone else that had anything to do with the investigation. I caught Agents Gents and Makara on television a few times, and the same went for Agent Kronke. Lieutenant Whishaw had been on the front page of a paper I picked up—the photo was from a press conference he’d held outside the sheriff’s department and detention center. Hell, I even saw a news clip from the woman with the glasses at the campground, stating how she’d had interactions with the couple, which was a direct contradiction to what she’d told us. Frane was dead, and McCoy was in custody, so the investigation, for us, was closed.
I was clicking away at my computer keyboard, bringing up screen after screen of investigation files—I’d already read each top to bottom multiple times. When I felt someone standing over my shoulder, I glanced back to see Beth gnawing on the end of a pen.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. Right now, it’s a bunch of odd murders. All this year. All Miami. Which has almost double the amount of homicides this year than last.”
“Shootings?” Beth asked. She nodded toward the screen, which showed a man with a bullet wound in the center of his forehead.
“Some shootings, some other ways. They kind of all look a bit suspicious.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, victims are mostly gang related or criminals in some form or another. They all look to have some form of a violent offense on their records.”
“I think the risk of getting killed comes with the profession,” Beth interrupted.
“Right. Well, first, there are no suspects in any of these cases besides rival gangs or past associates. Yet, there isn’t anything that would directly point to either. These men were all found dead without anything that could be described as evidence anywhere. No murder weapons, no signs of struggles, no prints, nothing. Here’s what trips my radar, though.” I pulled up a case file on a man named Marlon Brewer. I windowed the screen and brought up his rap sheet beside it. “Cause of death, blunt-force trauma consistent with a bat.” I pointed at the man’s priors. “He’s got an assault with a deadly weapon charge that was pled down. The weapon was a baseball bat. Here’s another.” I brought up the same screens—rap sheet and case file—for a man named James Marsch. “He had a prior for stabbing someone. The cause of death was multiple knife wounds.”
Beth leaned over my shoulder and stared at the screen. “Are there more like that?” she asked.
“I’m just starting with it, but I found another couple that are the same COD as past offenses.”
“Interesting. That would make me believe that, if that is in fact what is going on, it’s someone with prior knowledge of their crimes.”
“Like I said. I’m just getting started with it. I need a lot more information before I can make a decision here.”
“Okay. Let me know what happens on that.”
“Sure,” I said.
Beth glanced at the clock on the wall. “I need to go. I have to pick up Scott at the airport.”
“He comes in tonight?” I turned back toward the computer and brought up another file.
“Yup. Two-week trial run. We’ll see. If it all works, he might try to transfer here. Are you and Karen still on for dinner Friday night?”
I double clicked on a folder on my computer’s screen to open a file of photos. “That should be fine,” I said.
“All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Mmm hmm,” I said. My attention was fully back on the case files in front of me.
I clicked through one after the other of those I’d separated from the total number of homicides in the city. I began going through each file again, top to bottom. Then I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. I slid it out and glanced at the screen. It was a text message from Karen, telling me to call her on the drive home as she needed me to pick her up a few things. The message also said, “Hurry your ass up.” I let out a breath and shut down my computer, planning to continue in the morning.
I slid my chair back from my desk, pulled open my desk drawer, and grabbed my keys. I walked to Ball’s office and stuck my head inside. He leaned back in his chair, scratched at the side of his gray hair, and clasped his hands behind his head.
“I’m taking off,” I said. “The wife has instructed me to hurry my ass up.”
“Sure, Hank,” he said. “Did everyone else leave already?”
“Yeah. Bill and Scott bugged out about a half hour or so ago. Beth left within the last few minutes.”
“Is everything that we needed to take care of on the Molly McCoy and Nick Frane investigation done?”
“All our paperwork was wrapped up earlier. Officially done on our end.”
“Okay, good. Do you have something you’re digging into? It looked like you were glued to that computer monitor most of the day.”
“Well, I’m trying to see if I can connect a string of killings in Miami.”
“This isn’t something that came through here, is it? I don’t remember anything in Miami.”
“No, this kind of came about by chance. There was a conversation between me and my old superior in Tampa, the number of homicides down there in Miami came up in passing. Worst since the drug wars of the eighties, and they have more than a handful that are suspicious. No evidence at all, and CODs match up with things these people had as priors.”
“Really?” Ball asked.
“Yeah, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at yet, so I need to do a little more digging in. If it comes up as something, I’ll get it to you.”
“Okay, yeah, I’d be interested in seeing that. Did you end up hearing about any changes in Gormon’s story?”
“No. I asked my wife earlier when we spoke. As far as she knows, he’s still pleading ignorance.”
“You’d have to think, with the other two property owners in custody, one of them is going to flip somehow on the others—give up whoever their connections were on the other side, suppliers, everything. It’s probably just a matter of time.”
“Sounds about right,” I said. “The property owners in Canada are also in custody. Chance of them singing, as well.”
“Who the hell would have thought running those two down would have led to that?” Ball said. “I guess some good came out of it by getting that hole shut down.”
“Yeah, but these two left a hell of a lot of damage in their wake, damage that can’t be repaired. That’s not even taking into account what Frane did prior to going on the run. A lot of lives affected.”
Ball was quiet.
I rapped on the office’s door frame. “I’ll catch you tomorrow.”
“Sounds good, Hank. Have a good night.”
“You too,” I said.
I left the building, hopped in my Jeep, and made the drive home. Karen called twice on the drive, once to tell me to grab a bottle of wine and again to tell me to hurry up. I parked the Jeep outside and walked into our townhouse. I knew I wouldn’t be getting my welcome-home greeting from Porkchop. If I knew my dog, he was at Karen’s feet, watching her cook. The smell of the food Karen was cooking filled the air inside our home. I walked to the kitchen. Pans sizzled, and steam rose from a pot on the stove. Karen had her hair pulled back and an apron tied around her waist. Porkchop sat directly at her knee, staring up at her. He gave me a quick, dismissive glance and went back to staring at Karen, hoping for anything to drop to the floor.
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I ran my line of sight across the countertop—salad, the fancy plates, a small loaf of bread and oil, the nice wine glasses. Something was up. I quickly checked my mental calendar and confirmed that it was neither our anniversary or either of our birthdays.
“This looks like quite the production you have going on,” I said. “What occasion did I forget?”
“None.”
“So you’re trying to butter me up for something, then?”
“Not at all. I just wanted to have a nice dinner, a glass of wine… I don’t know, maybe talk a little.”
The phrase talk a little grabbed my attention.
“What’s the topic of this talk?” I asked.
“You caught that part?” Karen didn’t lift her eyes from the pan she was stirring in front of her.
“I did.”
She looked up at me and smiled. “Adoption.”
The End
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