Winter Frost (A Chris Matheson Cold Case Mystery Book 2)

by Lauren Carr

  “Because our families scare the hell out of us,” Ray said.

  “That’s why Elliott isn’t here,” Bruce said.

  “Elliott?”

  “Elliott Prescott,” Jacqui said. “We aren’t sure who he’s retired from.”

  “He could tell you,” Ray said, “but then he’d have to kill you.”

  Francine leaned into Murphy to whisper, “He’s dating Chris’s mother.”

  “That’s one church lady who knows how to scare the hell out of you,” Ray said. “Elliott couldn’t come up with a lie good enough to get out. He’s interrogating Doris to see if she may know something to help us.”

  “Chris’s late father was a founding member of the Geezer Squad,” Bruce said. “Kirk Matheson was a captain with the state police. He got shot in the line of duty and Doris insisted that he retire. He was going stir-crazy, so she got him to join a book club here at the library.”

  “That’s where he met Elliott,” Jacqui said. “They became best buds.”

  “Then, they got kicked out of the book club,” Bruce said.

  “How do you get kicked out of a book club?” Murphy asked.

  “They’d only read the crime fiction books and then they’d go off on tangents about how much the writers got wrong,” Francine said. “Doris expelled them from the group, and so they started their own club. Retired law enforcement only, and they’d read nothing but crime fiction.”

  “But I don’t see any of you reading books,” Murphy said.

  “Well,” Bruce said with a coy grin, “we’ve been busy.”

  Murphy laughed.

  “But we can’t let our families know about it. Doris can be one tough cookie on the outside, but on the inside.” Jacqui shook her head. “She was devastated when Kirk had that heart attack. Christopher is her only child. If she knew some of the stuff he’s done for the club—”

  “She’d castrate him,” Ray said.

  “Our families would be worried sick about us,” Jacqui said.

  “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Murphy said. “Better for your families to think you were going off to a nice safe library to meet with your book club than to know that you were digging into real life murder and mayhem.”

  The library director’s office door opened. Chris and Helen emerged.

  “Is everything okay?” Francine asked upon seeing the red in Helen’s eyes.

  “Considering.” Chris pulled out a chair for Helen to sit at the table. He sat next to her with Sterling on the other side of him. After introducing Murphy to her, he asked the other members of the book club, “I take it you’ve been spending the night trying to find out if the state department made a mistake, or did they conspire to fake Blair’s death?”

  “I think they conspired to fake her death,” Helen said. “Your mother told us that Blair’s body had accidentally been cremated.”

  “That’s true.” Chris let out a breath. “I forgot about that. They explained it as a clerical error. Since the body had been cremated, there was no way for me to identify her.”

  “Which means you wouldn’t have noticed that it wasn’t her body,” Jacqui said.

  “If the state department helped your wife fake her death,” Murphy said, “why?”

  “A cover up, of course,” Francine said.

  “To what end?” Chris said. “Blair was a simple communications officer. She wasn’t a spy or—”

  “Maybe she was a killer,” Ray said. “From what little bit Francine and I have been able to uncover, something rotten was going on in Switzerland.”

  “Denmark,” Jacqui said.

  “No, Switzerland,” Ray said.

  “But the saying is, ‘There’s something rotten in Denmark.’”

  “The murder happened in Switzerland,” Ray said.

  “Which is where Blair was assigned,” Chris said. “What murder are we talking about, Ray?”

  Ray tossed a photograph that he had printed up from the internet along with a story to the middle of the table. Jacqui picked up the papers and taped them to the whiteboard. The man in the photograph was a middle-aged, heavyset man. He had a thin patch of hair around the sides and back of his head with a shiny bald spot on top.

  “According to records, Blair Matheson was killed in Nice on Bastille Day three years ago,” Ray said. “She was a communications officer with the state department stationed in Switzerland.”

  “Now tell me something I don’t know,” Chris said.

  “Did you know Les Monroe, chief of communications in Switzerland, died just the day before?” Ray said.

  Speechless, Chris stared across the table at him.

  “Les Monroe was Blair’s boss,” Ray said. “His body was found in his home on the same day she was supposedly killed in a terrorist attack. No one noticed the dead guy in Switzerland because the terrorist attack in Nice sucked up all the oxygen in the airwaves.”

  “What was the cause of death?” Jacqui asked.

  “Officially,” Ray said, “the cause of death was suicide.”

  “What was not made public was that the poor guy somehow got rid of the gun after shooting himself in the back three times,” Francine said. “I found that out from one of my old sources.”

  “How reliable is that source?” Chris asked.

  “Very.” Francine slapped a sheet of paper down on the table. “He got a copy of the medical examiner’s original report.”

  “Will this medical examiner—” Murphy asked.

  “Medical examiner’s dead,” Francine said. “Killed in a house invasion less than three weeks after Monroe’s suicide.” She made air quotes when saying the word “suicide.”

  “This isn’t sounding good,” Murphy said. “This isn’t sounding good at all.”

  “Would Blair have been capable of—” Bruce started to ask Chris, only to find him vigorously shaking his head.

  “No,” Chris said. “Never. Blair would never have killed anyone for any reason.”

  “No offense, Chris,” Bruce said, “but during my career, I’d seen a lot of nice looking, wife and mother types in my court room who ended up being cold-blooded killers when they felt it suited them.”

  “I know,” Chris said. “I’ve ended up on the wrong end of a gun against those very types, but Blair was not like that. I know enough to be able to spot someone who, when backed into a corner could pull the trigger to kill someone. Blair is not one of them. My mother? Yes. Blair? No.”

  The members of the squad quickly nodded their heads to the reference. Sterling placed his front paws on the table and howled in agreement.

  “My point is, I don’t believe Blair would have killed anyone, let alone her boss and then go on the run,” Chris said. “If she got into trouble, she would have come to me.”

  “With all due respect, Chris, from what I’ve seen tonight, she has been in trouble and never came to you,” Murphy said.

  “Are you sure, Chris?” Jacqui asked. “Is there any doubt in your mind? Could the woman you saw in the metro be someone else?”

  “No!” Chris slammed his palm down on the table. “She’s the mother of my children. We were married over twelve years. I know my wife.”

  In silence, Helen shifted in her seat to move away from Chris. She dropped her eyes to her hands in her lap. Noticing, Jacqui and Francine exchanged solemn expressions.

  “If the woman you saw was your wife, then she couldn’t have been killed in that terrorist attack,” Bruce said. “That’s what you’re saying, Chris.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Which means she’s been alive for the last three years,” Jacqui said.

  Chris nodded his head in agreement.

  “But she never notified you that she was alive,” Jacqui said.

  “Never.”

  �
�Why would she do that? Why would she let those little girls think their mother was dead?”

  Chris stared at Jacqui.

  “Lesser of two evils,” Murphy said in a strong voice while reaching for a slice of pizza. “It was safer for them to believe she was dead than to know she was alive and become vulnerable to whoever was after her.”

  “But why?” Chris asked. “I keep coming back to the same question. Blair was just a communications officer. She was a techno geek—one step up from a clerk—and she hated that. She worked with office equipment. She managed communication transmissions and data.”

  “She archived communications data.” Ray jabbed a finger into the air.

  “She did that. Yes.”

  Ray shook his finger. A chuckle grew from deep in his chest while he used his other hand to bring up information on his laptop.

  “Ray’s onto something,” Francine said.

  “How long ago did Blair go to Switzerland?” Ray asked Chris.

  “Four years ago. She left in August and was killed—well, she wasn’t killed—”

  “The next July,” Ray said. “She was there eleven months. Did she tell you what she was going to Switzerland for?”

  “It was classified,” Chris said. “Everything she did was classified.”

  Ray looked at Chris from under his thick gray eyebrows. “But she was going to Switzerland to work on one specific project for the state department.”

  With a sigh, Chris nodded his head.

  “What are you on to, Ray?” Bruce asked.

  “I think she was archiving old communications data,” Ray said. “Remember Eric Snowden? The traitor who dumped a bunch of classified NSA records across the globe.”

  “Some people think he was a hero,” Francine said.

  “Whether he was or not is irrelevant to this case,” Ray said. “Point is, when Eric Snowden dumped all that classified information and took off with who knows what else he had, our intelligence system took a serious hit. We had to scramble to come up with bigger and badder encryptions to protect our communications systems because Snowden had showed everyone our cards.”

  “And Blair worked in communications,” Murphy said.

  “Based on the timing, she went to Switzerland to work on a project about the same time our intelligence systems were undergoing a major encryption upgrade,” Ray said. “I’ll bet money that’s what she was working on.”

  “Blair wasn’t a cybersecurity engineer,” Chris said.

  “I’m talking about the major headache that all of our embassies and bases had to go through afterwards. Let me explain it this way.” Ray lay his hand on Francine’s laptop. “Suppose you’ve always worked with one type of laptop—an android type. You have everything on it.” He reached over to his state-of-the-art laptop. “Then, you upgrade to a more sophisticated system. But not everything on your old computer is compatible with the new system. Now what do you have to do?”

  “You need to clean out and organize your data,” Francine said. “Archive what you don’t need to transfer to the new system, so that you don’t bog it down.”

  Ray jabbed his finger up into the air. “And that is what was going on in the intelligence community at the same time that your wife went to Switzerland to work on this classified project! There was so much data that had to be sifted through. American bases and embassies were divided into regions. Switzerland was the home base for Central Europe. Countries in that area were sending their data to Switzerland to be compiled onto a database mainframe. How long was she going to be gone?”

  “Two years. Probably three,” Chris said.

  Ray clapped his hands together and pointed at Chris with both fingers. “That’s what she was working on! We’re not exactly talking about backing up a laptop onto an external drive and tossing it into a drawer. There was a ton of data—historical information that needed to be examined and converted to the new system and archived. She would have been working with a couple of other officers under the chief of communications.”

  “The same chief of communications who ended up committing suicide by shooting himself in the back three times?” Murphy said.

  “The very same,” Francine said. “Les Monroe.”

  “I think you’re on to something, Ray.”

  “Right now, this is all speculation,” Bruce said. “We need confirmation that Blair was working on that project before we can move forward in that direction.”

  “How much communications data would she have been going through?” Murphy asked. “How far back are we talking about?”

  Ray shrugged his shoulders. “There’s no telling. There was a total overhaul of the intelligence community’s communications systems. Some of those smaller countries were probably still working with carrier pigeons.”

  Chris and Murphy exchanged long glances.

  “Like you were saying, Jacqui,” Chris said, “Blair allowed us to think she was dead. She went underground and was safe. But then something happened to make her come out of hiding.”

  “I guess,” Murphy said with a heavy sigh, “based on what you’ve been able to dig up, I should come clean with what I know.” His eyes met with each of theirs before landing on Chris’s. “Nothing that I say can leave this room until our investigation is over.”

  Each member of the squad exchanged silent glances before Chris asked, “What have you been holding back?”

  “This case does involve national security,” Murphy said. “I need everyone’s word that there will be no leaks.”

  They nodded their heads in agreement, except Francine. Finally, under the group’s stern glare, she sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “I agree.” She shook her pen at Murphy. “But Blue-Eyes here is giving me an in-depth interview for my blog after we break this case wide open.”

  Every head at the table jerked around to face Murphy. “I guess I can agree to that.”

  “Now that’s out of the way,” Chris said, “spill it, Blue-Eyes.”

  “I wasn’t exactly truthful earlier when I said I knew nothing about this case going into it tonight,” Murphy said. “A couple of weeks ago, the judiciary majority chair, Senator Graham Keaton received an anonymous letter. The sender stated that she had information critical to national security. There was a burner phone in the envelope. When she called, she verified her credibility by giving the investigator the name of a missing CIA operative and the date she had gone missing. That was the same date that Les Monroe died.” He sighed. “Our team knew about Monroe’s murder. That case has been cold from the very beginning. When Senator Keaton’s investigator verified Anonymous’s information about the operative, my team was brought in. We thought Anonymous was the agent—that maybe she’d gone rogue or had been captured by a hostile government and had managed to escape. I was assigned to be at the meeting to back up the investigator and tail the operative afterwards to ascertain the situation.” He glanced at Chris. “Instead of a missing CIA agent, we ended up with a communications officer who was supposed to be dead and a dead international assassin who can’t tell us who’d hired him.”

  “There was a leak somewhere between Senator Graham Keaton and the meeting.” Bruce chuckled. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Washington, I think it’s time I meet up with one of my old pals on Capitol Hill.”

  “These people play for keeps,” Murphy said with a shake of his head.

  “No offense, Murphy,” Bruce said, “but we’ve all had experience with people who play for keeps.”

  “Not the type of muscle these players have.”

  “I think you should elaborate, Murphy,” Chris said.

  “It’s class—”

  “We’re not active duty soldiers who have to blindly take orders and ask no questions,” Chris said. “Everyone around this table came here tonight because they care about me and my family. But they also have loved ones. You o
we it to them to give them all the facts so that they can make informed decisions about whether they want to stay in or back out while they still can.”

  “We already gave our word to be discrete,” Francine said. “There’s no way we’re going to get to the truth with only half of the facts. Cough it up, Sweet Cheeks.”

  “Don’t make us bring out the big dog.” Ray jerked his chin in Sterling’s direction.

  Sensing their attention, Sterling lifted his head from where he had slipped it into a pizza box. Caught red handed in the act of sneaking a slice of cold pepperoni pizza, he flipped the lid the concealed his snout and sent the box sliding across the table. His hat fell to the floor. His eyes bulged as he looked around the table. If he sat very still, maybe none of them would notice the crusty goodie spilling out of both sides of his mouth.

  “He can be quite scary when he’s on his meds,” Bruce said.

  Murphy took his time looking around the table.

  Yellow Dragons sounded like the name of a wannabe street gang in some big city borough. But they weren’t any made up street gang in some fictional movie. They were real—enough to be listed in the Pentagon’s classified listing of highly skilled death squads. Murphy had the bruises to prove it.

  “Murphy, I can assure you that what you tell us won’t leave this room,” Bruce said.

  “Have any of you heard about the Yellow Dragons?” Murphy asked in a quiet tone.

  “The yellow dragon is the zoomorphic incarnation of the Yellow Emperor, who is the center of the universe in Chinese religion and mythology,” Jacqui said in a matter-of-fact tone. “The Yellow Deity was conceived by a virgin mother, Fubao.”

  “Do you mean in the way Mary conceived Jesus by the holy spirit?” Chris asked.

  “Not exactly. Fubao became pregnant after seeing a yellow ray of light turning around the Northern Dipper.” Seeing their puzzled expressions, Jacqui said, “Don’t any of you read anything besides crime books?”

  “Are you saying this Chinese virgin got pregnant from star gazing?” Francine said.

  “There was a little more to it than that.”

  “The Yellow Dragons, an ultra-secret, highly trained group of assassins, mercenaries, whatever you want to call it, have named themselves after this powerful deity,” Murphy said. “They believe they are blessed with their exceptional fighting skills. They go into each mission believing that they are destined to succeed. Sources say their training is more like torture. If you survive, you’ve been blessed. If you don’t …” He shrugged his shoulders. “The Yellow Dragon has deemed you unworthy, therefore, you die. They mark their soldiers with a tattoo of a yellow dragon on the back of their neck with its claws around your throat—kind of like the dragon having your back.”