Down the Rabbit Hole

by F J messina

  They talked for a while, about the weather and other unimportant pleasantries. Sonia was fully aware that she and Brad were in a gentle place of just getting along. The rolling hills and beautiful farms passed by, and things felt comfortable. She wondered if they looked like a married couple, or at least some sort of couple, to the passengers in the cars that passed. She was enjoying that feeling until her phone cooed like a pigeon. Her heart skipped a beat when she looked at the screen: THANKS FOR LAST NIGHT. ARE YOU AVAILABLE FOR LUNCH?

  Brad kept his eyes on the road. “Who’s that from?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Just Jet wishing us luck.” Sonia wanted to ignore the text and get her phone back into her purse as quickly as possible. She realized, however, that if she didn’t respond to Johnny’s text, it wouldn’t be very long before he called. Damn, that would be bad.

  “I better respond. You know how Jet can get if you don’t deal with her right away.” She was trying her best to be nonchalant.

  Brad looked down at his side-view mirror. “Actually, no I don’t. But go ahead.”

  As she typed her message on her phone, Sonia felt totally self-conscious. It was as if Brad could tell what she was typing, even though he was sitting on the other side of the car.

  BUSY NOW. PROBABLY HUNG UP FOR THE REST OF THE DAY AND EVENING. MAYBE WE CAN DO DINNER TOMORROW NIGHT. I’LL GET BACK TO YOU SOON. She hit “SEND.” As soon as she had, she realized that she hadn’t responded to his comment about Monday night. Crap, she would need to send a second text. Sonia felt like the letters on her screen were red hot as she typed, LAST NIGHT WAS REALLY GREAT, while Brad sitting right next to her. When she was done typing, she shoved her phone into her purse as fast as she could.

  40

  As they approached Elizabethtown, Sonia checked the screen of her laptop. “Looks like he’s made the turn onto I-65 South.”

  Brad bobbed his head. “Not surprising. I’m thinking he’s done with his deliveries and he’s on his way back home, wherever that is. We’ll just keep staying with him until he leads us there.”

  Sonia looked out the passenger window. “What if he doesn’t stop?”

  “What?”

  She turned and faced Brad. “What if he doesn’t stop? I mean . . . I need to stop.”

  “Why?” Brad’s voice was rising.

  “Well . . .”

  “Well, what?” Brad’s eyes glanced quickly to Sonia, then back to the road.

  Sonia’s eyes fell to the hands in her lap. Her foot started tapping. “Well, I’ve got to pee. And I’m hungry, too.”

  “You mean you didn’t pee before we started this? And you didn’t eat anything either?” Sonia was all too aware of his frustration.

  “I was just too wound up in the morning.” Now it was Sonia’s voice that was rising. “All I’ve had to eat is a croissant . . . and several cups of coffee.”

  “Damn.” Brad shook his head and an exasperated sigh fell to his lap. “Okay, we’ll scoot off here in E’Town and get you to a McDonalds. But that better be the fastest pee in the history of the world. And while you’re in there peeing, I’m buying you a burger and some fries.”

  “I’d rather—” Seeing Brad’s scowl, Sonia just swallowed her words. She wanted to bark right back at him, but something held her back─maybe the sense that she probably should have thought things through a little better before starting this mission.

  At the intersection of I-65 and The Bluegrass Parkway, Brad maneuvered the ‘Vette up the off-ramp and onto a busy street. It was just two-tenths of a mile to the McDonalds, but being on a busy road and having to turn left across lots of traffic, Brad seemed really frustrated. As soon as they got into the McDonalds parking lot, Brad zipped into the first available parking space. He reached across her lap and opened her door. “Go, go.”

  Sonia certainly felt a sense of relief being able to use the ladies room. At the same time, she was becoming more and more pissed. What the hell? Did he think I wouldn’t need to pee for the next two or three days? And does it really take any longer for me to get a chicken sandwich than a burger? Damn him. It’s like he’s the only one on this trip; like he’s the only one who counts.

  Sonia walked out of the ladies’ room. She looked up to see Brad walking out of the men’s room at the same time. She gave him the “So . . . ?” look. He tugged his pants up. “Since we were here . . . . I didn’t want to have to stop again.”

  They walked to the counter. Brad turned to Sonia “What do you want?”

  Sonia pursed her lips and looked at the menu on the wall. Oh, now it’s ‘what do you want?’ you bastard. “Just the chicken sandwich, grilled, some fries and a water, please.” She brushed a wisp of hair out of her face. Why the hell am I being so compliant?

  Brad ordered a Big Mac, fries and a coke. By the time Sonia filled their drinks, Brad had the food bag in his hands. “C’mon, let’s hustle. We’ve got to get close to that truck right away.” As soon as he got the ‘Vette back onto I-65, he pushed his own speed close to eighty miles an hour.

  Sonia looked at her watch and realized the whole stop had taken only twelve minutes. Still, at an average of sixty miles per hour or more, that put the truck at least twelve miles further ahead of them. She could understand why that made Brad uncomfortable. The GPS range was only fifteen miles. “I’m sorry I had to stop, really I am. I’ll be better about it the rest of the trip.” She knew she hadn’t handled things perfectly, still, it bothered her to have to apologize.

  “Don’t worry about it.” His voice was gentler, accepting. “He’ll have to stop sometime soon as well, and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to be changing his route until he gets to Nashville.”

  Okay, Dunny, thanks. Sonia recognized the shift in his demeanor and was glad for it. Still. Damn Jekyll and Hyde. Why is it that every time we get in a comfortable place he suddenly pushes me away─on purpose?

  Around four thirty-five in the afternoon, as Brad and Sonia approached Bowling Green, Kentucky, I-65 curved, and Brad pointed to an unusual building. “That’s the National Corvette Museum. Every Corvette in the world is made in that large building just next to it. Of course, the museum lost three of them.”

  “Really? How do you lose three Corvettes?”

  “Sink hole.”

  “Sink hole? In a museum?”

  “Yup. Great big hole opened up right in the middle. Makes you wonder if the Good Lord doesn’t like Corvettes or something.”

  The mood in the car had maintained its pleasant sense of camaraderie since the food stop, and Sonia started to consider that maybe it was time to tell Brad about the insights her computer program had led her to. She started slowly. “You know, I think I may have turned some very important information with that computer program.”

  Brad cocked his head and glanced very briefly at her. “I thought you said it was just pointing out a few new directions that might be worth pursuing.”

  “Well, actually.” She took a breath. “I think it could be more than that. I think I may have discovered who’s running the whole thing.”

  Brad looked at Sonia, then back to the road. Sonia saw his eyebrows furrow. “You know who the boss is?”

  Sonia struggled to keep her voice calm and level. “Well, not exactly. I don’t know his name, but I think I may know his code name, the name he uses in the emails.”

  “Well . . .?” It rang in her ears like a one-word command.

  Sonia turned toward Brad, as far as she could with her seatbelt on. The smell of their McDonalds dinner masked the normally rich smell of the leather in the ‘Vette’s interior as she spoke. “Okay, let me start from the beginning.” Because of her position, Sonia felt her foot wiggling rather than tapping. “You remember that with help from your secret colleague we were able to get inside the organization’s network, right to all of its emails─including way back to old emails.”

  “Right.”

  “But when I spent the weekend trying to make sense of who was talking to whom, the number
of messages was overwhelming, and the program I wrote just kept giving me too many possible connections. I was sure there was some important stuff there; I just couldn’t ferret it out from all the other stuff.”

  Brad looked at her. “And?”

  “And, this past weekend, it struck me that computers never fail us, we fail them.” She kept her eyes on him, though he didn’t return the gaze. “We don’t get the answers we want because we don’t ask the right questions. I had been looking for emails that were sent or received at times that matched the few benchmarks I could put together from my previous surveillance.”

  He checked his mirrors. “And that didn’t work. I get that.”

  Sonia wished he would look at her, though she knew he couldn’t. “So, I thought and thought about a better way to pose the question, and this is what I came up with: instead of asking who sent or received an email at a certain time, I developed a program that sorted out messages that contained some reference to time, references like, ‘in one hour,’ or ‘at one o’clock.’ Then I made the program connect those emails to the any of my benchmarks, based on the time differential between when they were sent and the actual benchmark.

  Brad flicked one hand. “I’m lost.”

  “It’s like this. Someone sends an email that says ‘I’ll be there at one o’clock,’ and if one o’clock is one of my benchmarks the program makes the connection.”

  Another quick glance in his mirrors. “Your program could do that?”

  “Yes, it could. It was tough to get it to isolate the phrases inside the emails since there are so many ways of phrasing things and hundreds of emails. But once it did that, connecting them to my benchmarks was easy as pie . . . for a computer program.”

  He finally turned and looked at her. “Amen, sister. So, this really led to something?” There was a question mark on his face.

  “Well, you tell me.” Sonia squared herself in her seat. She was starting to feel like she was in control. “You know how we had some sense that whoever was at the beginning of the process might be using the code name Toro and that we thought there was a chance that Forty might be located at Dahlia Farm, making it most likely Steve Hollings?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, among the seven emails the program isolated, most of which were absolutely irrelevant, was one was sent to Forty and it said, “be there in an hour and twenty minutes.”

  “So?” The side-view mirror again.

  “So, it was sent at 2:45 PM. And almost exactly one hour and twenty minutes later, at 4:07, my notes indicate that a black Lincoln Continental showed up at Dahlia Farm. A thin, blond man with his hair slicked back and a goatee stepped out of the car and went directly into the barn. At 4:18, just eleven minutes later, the guy got back into the car, and he and his driver took off. Nothing else happened on the farm until six minutes after nine, when the police arrived with lights and sirens and the whole place erupted into mass bedlam.”

  Brad looked quickly at her. “So, you think that the guy who showed up had sent that message, telling them he would be there around four, and that’s when he showed up? To do what?”

  “First, yes I do think the blond sent the message. And more importantly, so does my program. Second, ‘To do what?’ I don’t know. But it could be that he was sent to check in, or came to give an order or something. Trust me, I saw the guy. He was no messenger. It was more like he was the guy in charge. And I believe he may have come down, checked things out, and then given the order to kill Hensley.”

  “Whoa.” Brad bobbed his head.

  “After that, he gives himself plenty of time to get back to wherever he came from, and no one knows that Hensley’s been done in until this guy is safe and nowhere near the scene of the murder.”

  He glanced at her. “And you figured all this out from your computer program?” Sonia could see the twinkle growing in Brad’s blue eyes.

  Sonia lifted her chin. “No. I figured it out using deductive reasoning . . . based on the information my computer program generated.” She turned to him. Her confidence shifted momentarily to real questioning. “Do you think I’m way off base?”

  “Actually, no, I don’t.” His eyes were on the road, but his voice was clear and strong─and supportive. “It sounds plausible, very plausible, if your program got it right. So, who is this guy?”

  She was reveling in his reaction, but the next answer was difficult. “That’s the thing. His code name is Sofia.”

  “Sofia?” He cocked his head. “A woman’s name?”

  “I know. It’s confusing.” Her head wagged. “Maybe a woman named Sofia sent this guy. But then again, they’re all using code names, so it’s not likely that the woman in charge, or who might be in charge, used her real name.” She sighed. “I just don’t know.”

  Brad was silent. Sonia knew that he was pondering the whole scenario.

  “But I’ve got more.” She waited for his reaction.

  “You do? Well . . .” He was clearly into this.

  “Okay. So, I tried to find a town or city that was about an hour and twenty minutes from the farm. Actually, it wasn’t very hard for me, because I grew up in Cincinnati, which is, roughly, an hour and twenty minutes away from Lexington. So, using that as a reference, I sat down with my Rand McNally road atlas and plotted a circle that would take you about an hour and twenty minutes away from Lexington. I wanted to catch every possibility, and it was easier on that then on Google Maps. Then I started looking at all the towns and cities that were close to the perimeter of the circle.”

  “And you found?” His eyebrows were raised.

  “Mostly I found a whole lot of nothing. Very rural southern Ohio, very rural south-central Kentucky, and one other big─.”

  “Of course, Louisville.” He turned to her and smiled.

  “That’s right.” She smiled back. “Both Louisville and Cincinnati are about an hour and twenty minutes away from Lexington.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t quite give us what we need, does it?” He furrowed his brow. “I mean, we know, or think we know, that Sofia came to Dahlia Farm, or sent someone, from either Louisville or Cincinnati. We think he, or the guy Sofia sent, came there to give final approval to the disposal of John Abbott Hensley, maybe because he had stumbled on the drug operation.”

  “Yes. That’s what I think too,” excitement rose in her voice, “that Hensley stumbled onto the drug operation. I went back to my notes, and when Hensley arrived at the farm he seemed happy and carefree. Then he started over toward the barn, where, as you recall, the feed and hay truck was sitting. And now that I think about it, perhaps it wasn’t that Hollings was trying to show Hensley something out in another field like my notes had indicated. Maybe it was that he was simply trying to keep Hensley from going into the barn.”

  Brad’s head bobbed. “Makes sense. It really does. But which city did he come from, and how do we figure out who the hell he is?”

  Sonia turned toward Brad again. She was enjoying taking charge of the conversation. “And here’s something else. Do you remember I spent several days out at the farm trying to catch Marcos Torres in the act?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I finally went back to my notes from the first day I spent out there, a day in which I felt nothing important had happened.”

  “And…”

  “And a black Lincoln, very much like the one I saw on the day Hensley was killed, showed up on the farm that first day. Nothing much happened with it then. The blond guy wasn’t in the car, and the driver was only there for a few minutes.” She paused. “But I just can’t help but think those two cars are connected.”

  “Maybe, but . . . ?”

  “Well, if they are connected then I’ve got something else to tell you that could be crucial.”

  Brad looked at her. “Don’t hold back now. Tell me.”

  “Look, because things weren’t so busy, so complicated, and because unlike Kentucky, the ‘Great State of Ohio’ has decided that people should have
license plates on both the back and front of their car, I got the license plate number of that Lincoln. That might lead us to the one that showed up the day they killed Hensley.”

  “You got a plate number?” His voice was full of excitement.

  A big smile crossed Sonia’s face. “I got a plate number. It’s, let me see here,” She pulled her phone out of one of the cup-holders. “It’s MDB-619.”

  “Awesome, babe. Incredible.” He smiled. But then he said, “You’ve been sitting on that information the whole time and haven’t said anything?”

  Brad seemed excited, but there was something in his question. To Sonia, his tone implied that she’d screwed up.

  Sonia turned her head forward, her voice tightened. “Well, it just didn’t seem important until the program got me started making some other connections.” She wasn’t going to let him take this away from her. This was her information she was bringing to the table. Information her hard work had developed.

  “Plate numbers from a car that showed up at the murder scene didn’t seem important?”

  Now he sounded incredulous, but Sonia wasn’t going to take it. “It wasn’t a damn murder that day, was it? And it wasn’t the same car that came the day Hensley died. It all just didn’t come together in my mind until the program led me through the whole process. No way I screwed this up.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it.” Brad’s voice was upbeat, but Sonia was convinced that he was pissed. Then again so was she. She was the one who had generated this information.

  After several moments of tense silence, Brad said. “Listen, that’s how it goes in this business. We’ve all watched hundreds of TV shows in which something unimportant finally pops into the mind of the hero and he says, ‘Wait a minute. I just remembered. The dog didn’t bark.’ ”

  “What?” She cocked her head.

  “The dog didn’t bark. It’s a famous line from a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The reason he figured out who done it was that the dog should have barked and it didn’t.”