“Ever since 9-11 and the anthrax scare, the post offices have upped their security procedures,” added Rheingold.
“Oh, of course.” Once I saw the pair of them out of the shop, I had barely enough time to finish dressing before I was due to meet the gang. Composing myself, I rehearsed my story, should the state police come knocking at the door. I went over it again and again, so I would know my script by heart. And when I felt like I had it all under control, I went out for a few drinks and some laughs with my friends.
Saturday afternoon, when my back ached from sitting at my computer, knocking out another chapter, I took a break. Dressed in a pair of jeans, a sweater, faux fur vest, and my boots, I got into my car and drove up to Kittery, Maine, in search of some kitchen utensils. I figured I’d hit a couple of the cooking outlets.
There was a lot of foot traffic between the malls. I took my time, enjoying the sunny winter day and the pleasant exercise as I bounced from shop to shop.
About five o’clock, I stopped for a cup of coffee. As I sat in the shop, sniffing the aroma of hazelnut, I was in the moment, feeling confident and happy to be where I was. And that’s when Tristan Dunlop strolled in and made a beeline for me. He even sat down at my table like we were the best of pals.
“Heard you got cozy with the FBI, Riley, after you took some naughty pics of Paul Darlington. How long were you and the guy doing it?”
“What?” Even as I said that, I remembered Alton Wheeler’s words and adjusted my attitude. “You’ve got your information all wrong.”
“Do I? My sources are pretty well informed.”
“I didn’t even know Paul Darlington and I certainly wasn’t dating him.” I kept my voice as even as I could.
“Riley, you surprise me. I thought you were hot for rich guys.”
“Hardly. Not my thing.” I gave a non-committal shake of my head.
“You’re telling me you don’t like money?” Tristan was poking around, trying to get a reaction, but I couldn’t read him. What did he really want?
“Not particularly.”
“I’ll bet that’s not true at all,” he insisted, tapping his finger on the table that separated us.
“Afraid it is.”
“Rumor has it you were with Paulie when he was hit.” He seemed determined to pursue this, so I decided to set the record straight as best I could.
“Not true. I was walking a friend’s dog and Paul’s hand was sticking out of the Dumpster.”
“So, what? You saw the guy who put it there?” He really wanted to know about that body.
“Didn’t.” I shrugged. Draining down the last of my coffee, I swallowed hard. All I wanted to do was get away from Tristan. “Well, you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got to be going.”
“What’s your hurry?” He stood up, prepared to follow me. “Let me buy you dinner.”
“Tristan, as nice an offer as that is, I can’t. I have plans for the evening. Now, I really do have to be going.”
“I’ll walk with you,” he insisted.
“Please don’t. I have things to do and I don’t really have the time to chat.”
“I’ll carry your bags.”
“Not necessary.”
“Don’t walk away from me, Riley.”
“Sorry,” I said calmly as I headed out of the coffee shop. I made my way across the mall, stopping a couple of times to window shop. I knew, long before I saw his reflection in the store window, Tristan was following me, just as I knew that if I continued on and pretended not to see him, he would still stay with me. My heart was pounding inside my chest as I stepped into the Bali outlet. Bras and panties hung from racks all around the store. On the walls, on the stands, it was a respectable woman’s version of Victoria’s Secret, with flannel nighties and soft bathrobes. Not a peek-a-boo peignoir in sight. Let Tristan come in here, I scoffed. He’d stand out like a sore thumb. Someone was sure to call the cops to complain about the creepy guy lurking in the corner
And then I remembered that card that Agent Rheingold gave me. Technically, this wasn’t really about the case, but since Tristan did mention the photos I sent to Boston and the murder of Paul Darlington, I decided I had an excuse for at least asking him for advice.
Pulling out my wallet, I flipped through it, searching for that business card with the FBI logo on it. It was nowhere to be found. That’s because it was sitting at home, on my dresser, right where I left it. I sighed heavily, feeling even more like a doe in the headlights. But I still had Alton’s phone number, didn’t I? Maybe he could give me a suggestion about how I could get home safely.
My fingers trembled as I punched in the numbers written on that piece of paper. Alton answered on the fifth ring, just as I was about to hang up.
Chapter Five --
“Hi, I don’t know if you remember me, but....”
“What’s wrong, Riley?” He cut right to the chase.
“I’m at the Kittery mall and Tristan won’t leave me alone. I don’t know what to do.” I found myself on the verge of tears, totally terrified, as I explained my predicament. The reality of being stalked sunk in as the conversation continued with Alton. He asked me to describe the behavior in detail. We kept talking as the minutes ticked away. Finally, Alton said something odd.
“Riley, I want you to walk out to your car now. I want you to get in it and drive away. Can you do that?”
“What if he tries to run me off the road?”
“He won’t do that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I just removed his distributor cap.”
“Excuse me?” What did that mean exactly? “You’re here in Kittery?”
“Can you trust me just this once? Get in your car and drive away.”
“Okay.”
“If he approaches you, if he asks who you were talking to all this time, you tell him it was a conversation with your mother. Keep the talk general, impersonal. And then get in the car and drive away.”
It took all my courage to follow Alton’s directions. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing this. But there was something reassuring about the man, and I didn’t want to feel afraid anymore.
And that’s how I came to be an employee of the FBI. Not an agent. Not a clerical worker. Not a lawyer or an accountant. It was that degree I had in information science that was so appealing to folks in Washington. It was my work as a librarian in Hambleport that got them interested in me. But above all, it was my historical research on the Underground Railroad that sealed the deal. You see, the FBI was running that task force to find the missing informants along the North Shore. And folks knew this was all about the business of smuggling the drugs into the country, delivering them to the regional distributors, and getting them out to the customers. My research skills came in handy, but it was my ability to sort though the facts that turned up gold.
There was another side of the coin, an ugly one that surfaced later. Businessmen like to maximize their profits, and when those large commercial ships off-loaded their cocaine and marijuana, they were sailing away empty. Hambleport’s magnates of industry could hardly accept that premise. It flew in the face of all the well-taught principles of business management taught at schools like Harvard, Northeastern, and BU. They needed an outgoing cargo, and they found one. Guns. Not just any guns. Weapon caches used by criminals to murder. Guns found on the street by corrupt cops. Guns with serial numbers filed off. Guns stolen from manufacturers’ shipments. Illegal guns. That’s really what drew the FBI into the case. The drugs were not only destroying lives here in the United States, the guns were destroying lives in places like Somalia, the Gaza Strip, and even Afghanistan. Wherever terrorists had a need, the guns were sent. The FBI had uncovered a long-hidden secret in Hambleport. It was once a hotbed of radical activities, dating a lot farther back than the bombing of its tiny courthouse in 1976. It really only takes a spy or two to compromise national security when there is so much corruption to protect. Hambleport was ripe for the picking, and that
’s what the spies did. The money flowed in, the political connections grew stronger, and Hambleport got itself on the map for all of its seacoast charm and cultural opportunities. But behind the fancy facade and the expensive homes, it was a town built on the tears of the oppressed, the silenced citizens who were powerless to protest. Move away if you must get out. That seemed like the only option to many. But for those with ties dating back to the early days of smuggling, it was the destiny to which they were born. For them, their lives depended on the success of that smuggling. Tristan Dunlop was such a scion. So was Paul Darlington. But it was Patience Darlington Franzen’s husband who proved to be one of the most dangerous men of all. Bob ran a very cover operation out of North Shore Technologies. It took me seven years of hard work to get close enough to find out the truth.
You see, Bob was trained as a chemical engineer. He took that training and came up with a novel way to smuggle vast amounts of cocaine and other liquefied drugs out to the distributors for reprocessing in “recycling” operations allover New England. Bob created a formula to hide the cocaine in fake liquid crystal display screens. Not only did the electronic components appear to be legitimate, by shipping them to “recycling” plants, under the guise of removing the dangerous toxins and non-biodegradable materials, Bob Franzen made North Shore Technologies appear to be a legitimate provider of LCD displays.
In fact, he did have a crew that made such a product. They worked the 7-4 shift every day. It was the two night crews that actually turned the powdered cocaine into the plastic-encased LCD displays. And when the business got so successful that it outgrew its Hambleport facility, Bob didn’t panic. He simply expanded the company to include a solar battery division. Before long, not only were they recycling the brand new products before they ever actually got to market, they were doing it in quantities that would blow your mind, if you’ll pardon the pun.
By now, I expect you figured out that Alton was actually one of the FBI agents on the highly classified task force. When Tristan Dunlop made me the object of his obsession, it wasn’t because he thought I was irresistible. It was because my research on the Underground Railroad had set off alarm bells in Hambleport and people scrambled to find a way to knock me off my feet. The plan was for Tristan to stalk me, to scare me off. I would move away and the people in charge of security for the drug industry in the town would breathe a sigh of relief. Only trouble was that the FBI had no plans for me to go anywhere. And what the FBI wants, the FBI usually gets, especially when the deputy director personally runs the task force.
The thing about having a degree in information science is that I know how to look things up. I’m used to helping kids do the research for their school papers, their homework, and even the occasional science fair. The FBI thought the skill would come in very handy, and they set about to create a back channel. They were counting on me to use my writing skills to put the information into stories that I could then ship off to my “literary agent”, Marge Kelfer, who would supposedly shop the manuscripts around to various book publishers. What folks in town didn’t know was that all those rejection slips I got were actually just confirmations that the information was received. There was, in fact, a plan in place to publish a couple of novels through a legitimate publisher, but that was more for cover than anything else. Over the first seven years I did this, I was constantly sending out revisions of chapters my agent thought were “too weak” or “lacked focus”. Marge would give me notes on what the editors she shared the novels with had provided to her. In reality, there was never any Marge. She didn’t exist. You had to know the key to decipher the messages on those letters back and forth. That was because Washington knew just how determined Hambleport’s illustrious families were to hold onto their drug empire, even as it undermined national security.
I can’t tell you how many times over the years I have received packages in the mail that were clearly intercepted before they reached me. Any counterintelligence agent will tell you never to keep anything on your premises that you can’t afford to have fall into the wrong hands. Over the years, I was carefully trained in the art of being a counter-spy. That need grew out of the realization that as the Soviet Union fell, a number of intelligence officers in the KGB, GRU, and similar agencies were suddenly out of a job. The drug cartels snatched up the best of the best. All that secret agent stuff went into helping the drug cartels fly under the radar, utilizing the newest technologies and the contacts in criminal organizations.
A funny thing happened to Hambleport long before I got there. As the end was nearing for the Soviet Union, a number of Russians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans, all former Communists, began to migrate to this little seaport town. It was a pattern that did not go unnoticed in Washington, given the knowledge that Hambleport was so entrenched in the smuggling business. It wasn’t that hard for investigators on the task force to begin to identify the folks passing through on their way to new employment. They came to the town to get their bona fides, their cover stories. These were carefully crafted by real spies and fortified with the help of North Shore Technologies and Tristan’s company, Dunlop Threat Tech, who claimed the workers as their own before sending them off to work at any of a number of the jobs involved in the massive drug trafficking operations. As the money poured into the coffers of Hambleport’s finest families, the industrial park continued to grow. In order to protect the ever-growing drug processing operations, the hierarchy continued to build facilities out there, just off I-95, and instead of deliberately over-expanding the companies to the point where they attracted venture capital or raised red flags with the IRS, the bosses chose to take a very different route. They began establishing small business models, with rarely more than thirty employees in each company. The benefit of this structure was that it allowed them to control all of the security for the industrial park. On the rare occasions when they rented a space to a non-Hambleporter, the small business owner soon found himself or herself plagued with all kinds of business problems, from poor employee relations to embezzlement and theft to industrial sabotage. Every year, small businesses in the industrial park folded, and it was chalked up to business owners who were inexperienced or who had products that just weren’t viable in the marketplace. To the untrained eye, Hambleport’s business community looked vibrant and attractive, but if you looked past the glitz and the successful sales marketing blitz, you would see the pattern that was so important to the powers that be in town. The failed businesses were all owned by people outside the loop. They were exploited to provide cover for the organized crime in Hambleport. And it was my job to keep track of all that.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Alton Wheeler wasn’t his real name. It was Dixon Wolders, and it turned out he wasn’t married after all. And yes, we did hook up. In fact, we made a regular practice of it. Only problem was we couldn’t do it openly, at least not at first. Our first real opportunity came when Dix offered to buy out Mr. Lawson, right after he had a heart attack four years ago.
The only reason Mr. Lawson had a heart attack was because he found someone in my apartment at noon on a Thursday, while I was in the Wexler Library, reading “Where the Sidewalk Ends” to a group of giggling youngsters. It was Mindy who alerted her elderly master to the intruder. She must have heard the man tiptoe up the stairs.
I got home a little after three. By then, the ambulance had taken my landlord to Walden General. The only reason I knew anything at all had happened was because there was a note taped to the wall by the back stairs, telling me to contact Lieutenant Grabowski at the Hambleport Police Department. I climbed the stairs, stunned, noting the blood spatters closer to the top landing. What the hell had happened here? I called Grabowski’s number immediately.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded. My whole body was trembling.
“There was an intruder in your apartment. Your landlord interrupted him.”
“Oh, dear Lord. What was the intruder doing in there?”
“We’re not really sur
e, Ms. Horner.”
“Did you catch the man?”
“Kind of.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mr. Lawson struggled with the intruder. There was an altercation.”
“And?” The way the details were coming out, my apprehension was quickly growing. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“In the midst of the struggle, Mr. Lawson felt he was at risk of losing his life.
“So?”
“He claims that the person tried to throw him down the stairs. In order to prevent that from occurring, he gave the man a shove, and the intruder went tumbling down the stairs.”
“How is Mr. Lawson?” To tell you the truth, I didn’t really care about the intruder at that moment in time. The only person I cared about was my elderly friend.
“He suffered a heart attack. According to the hospital, he’s in stable condition. We’ll wait a few days to take his report for the coroner’s office.”
“Why is the coroner involved?” By this time, I was totally confused. Mr. Lawson was still alive.
“The man Mr. Lawson pushed down the stairs died at the scene.”
Chapter Six --
“He did?”
“Yes, miss.”
“How horrible.”
“Yes, miss.”
“You’re going to give me even more bad news, aren’t you?”
“I am. The man in your apartment was Tristan Dunlop.”
“That son of a....”
“So, he wasn’t there at your invitation?”
“God, no! The man’s been stalking me off and on for a number of years. What was he doing in my apartment?” I must admit I was confused. Why was Tristan there?
“Stalking how?”
“Following me around. Being belligerent when I refused to date him. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Any chance your landlord tried to take matters into his own hands, maybe lure the guy to your place?”
Run for Your Life, Riley Horton!: A Page 4