The Indigo Brothers Trilogy Boxed Set

by Vickie McKeehan

  Klaus dozed off, only to wake to a frenzy of hammerhead sharks circling the launch. In his dazed mind, he could hear them swimming through the water, even bumping up against the raft. Blinking at the sight, he heard another noise coming from his right. The sound was the surf pounding, breaking onto a sandy beach. Was he dreaming? Had he conjured it up in his imagination?

  Even though he could barely make out the shoreline in the dark, he started shaking his crew awake.

  “Zander, wake up. Land!”

  Like lifeless shells, the men tried to see what Klaus saw. Thinking the captain might be delusional, Zander squinted into the blackness. “Is land really nearby?”

  “We’ll have to paddle hard to outswim the sharks to get there,” Klaus pointed out. “There aren’t enough oars.”

  “I’m too weak.”

  “We have to try anyway. It’s our only chance,” Klaus returned. “Use your arms and hands if you have to.”

  The idea of that with sharks in the area was more than a little unnerving. But if land was out there this close, Klaus had to persuade them to try for shore. With all the energy he could muster, he started paddling toward the beach.

  His men did as he did.

  Once they got within twenty meters—although they could barely walk—they dropped out of the rafts to stumble their way onto solid ground. Somehow they managed to reach the sand before collapsing.

  Klaus could make out a light in the distance, maybe a city, at the very least it might be someone’s campsite. It occurred to him they would soon be rescued. Knowing he couldn’t let anyone find his journal, he’d have to find a place to hide it. Looking around what amounted to nothing more than a deserted island, the prospects were bleak.

  But with his last bit of energy, he picked himself up off the sand. Dog-tired, he teetered down the beach clutching his leather case to his chest. He spotted a jagged outcrop of rocks that jutted high enough to stand above the high tide mark. He heaved and poked at the rocks until his fingers bled. But he was able to carve out a small cavern large enough to hold his messenger bag. He jammed the leather attaché into the hole. Since the crevice went further back than he thought, he shoved it as far back under the pile of rocks as it would go. Once the bag was out of sight he began filling the entryway back up with rocks and anything else he could lay his hands on until he was sure no one could find it.

  He climbed back down on the sand and dropped on all fours. Using his hands to cover up his footprints and tracks, he made sure there was nothing that led to this spot. Only then did he head back to what remained of his crew.

  The men slept there on the beach until mid-morning when a shore patrol stumbled upon them. Out of the forty-five-man crew, only a dozen of his men had made it to this spot. Klaus didn’t know how many had died on the sub or how many had died in the water.

  He knew one thing for sure. He was alive, and for him, the war was over.

  The patrol loaded them all into trucks and drove them to a base near Charleston, South Carolina. It was there Klaus learned they had washed up on land known as Folly Beach.

  Klaus cackled with laughter and turned to Zander. “How appropriate. We came all the way from Germany on a mission of folly. It’s only right we end up on this Folly Beach.”

  “They’ll interrogate us, Klaus,” Zander said, fear in his voice.

  “They will. But we will tell them nothing.”

  For months, the Americans asked questions. Klaus told them the same thing over and over again until he was sick of the story. The ship had experienced a bad battery fire on board. He’d made the decision to scuttle the boat, then and there. He even pinpointed the location of the sub, but he painted a picture that was much farther out to sea and much farther south. He even gave them a longitude and latitude somewhere between Miami and the Florida Keys.

  When he stuck to his story and refused to budge on the facts, he was flown back across the water to England where there were more interrogations. But he never altered his tale.

  Finally, in October 1946, Klaus was released and sent back to Germany. It took him another two years to track down the survivors of U-492, including Zander.

  His final act for his homeland was to eliminate each of them, one by one, so only he knew the details of U-492’s final mission, the precise location of where the sub rested. And what she carried.

  After that, Klaus worked his way back to America, inventing the story that he just wanted to pay his last respects to his lost comrades. The story worked. In the winter of 1949, Klaus finally made his way back to Folly Beach.

  It took him half a day to find the outcrop of rocks where he’d hidden his satchel. Fortunately for him, things had changed very little in the years since he’d left his journal.

  He had to dig through the sand and rocks again, his hands bleeding just as they had that day four years earlier when he’d left it among the rocks. To his shock and amazement, the leather briefcase was still there. Like welcoming an old friend, he rubbed a thumb over the insignia and the lettering with his name on it.

  During the years he’d been imprisoned, he’d learned that the two saboteurs had never even attempted to complete their mission. Something was very wrong there. He’d had plenty of time to commit their faces to memory and think about what he’d do when he finally caught up with them.

  Klaus fully believed that he’d crossed paths with two rats looking to get out of the war. Nothing more. He’d find them one day and settle the score. But first he knew where he could find help and the money for what he wanted to do. He booked passage on a ship to Argentina. It was time to see his brother.

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Justice

  Hollings cleared his throat. “I’m fairly certain that last part, where they were rescued off the beach, was added much later to the journal. If you’ll study the handwriting, it changed. The entries of that time period were written in different colored pen than the rest.”

  Nervously, Hollings drank deep from his can of Diet Coke and glanced around the room, waiting for the group’s reaction.

  Mitch spoke up first. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little disappointed. I was expecting more. This sounds an awful lot like the stories related to the lost city of El Dorado, the city of gold.”

  “Edgar Allan Poe said it best,” Garret offered with a sigh. “Over the mountains of the moon, down the Valley of the Shadow, ride, boldly ride…if you seek for El Dorado.”

  “That’s just it. How do we know the U-boat captain, who fancied himself a writer, wasn’t just bored at sea and made up this entire story as he went along?” Jackson pointed out.

  The professor smiled. “I would almost agree with you that the journal might be more fiction than a real representation, except for one simple historical fact. Martin Bormann, secretary to the Deputy Führer, enacted a plan in 1943 called Aktion Adlerflug. In English it translates to Project Eagle Flight. Think about that for a minute. A full year before Klaus begins his own smuggling operation, the deputy secretary is already in the process of moving valuables out of Germany and getting them to South America, ostensibly to set up a New Germany.”

  Garret nodded. “Ah, the operation to move gold and other assets through Spain and on to safe havens overseas for the sole purpose of starting up German controlled companies there in anticipation for after the war.”

  “Like with Mercedes Benz,” Mitch noted. “I’m aware of that. The automobile manufacturer was specifically meant to begin operation in Buenos Aires. It’s still in operation today.”

  Hollings adjusted his glasses. “That’s right. The move there was huge. It was the first plant for Mercedes outside Germany’s borders. To make sure his plan succeeded, Bormann went so far as to acquire his own Spanish shipping company and an Italian airline to move the goods. In addition to that, liquid assets were trucked through France to Spain and from Spain to Argentina by none other than…”

  “The determined U-boats,” Jackson finished. “That gives the story slightly more credibility.”
<
br />   “Exactly. Then after the Allies invaded France and cut off the land route, Bormann used private airplanes to accomplish the same thing until the end of the war. Most of the treasure was never recovered. Some believe General Perón took most of it to finance his rise to power in Argentina as well as his luxurious lifestyle. There’s no direct evidence of that, mind you. But I might add that Bormann continued to live openly in Buenos Aires well after the war was over due to his friendship with the Peróns.”

  Mitch blew out a breath. “Or maybe there’s a simpler explanation. Some of it ended up at the bottom of the ocean like U-492.”

  “We may never know for sure,” Hollings admitted.

  Raine chewed her lip. “If Klaus took this book with him to Argentina, and it was written in a code Klaus was used to using, then why didn’t he tell his brother Walter and Walter’s sons the approximate location of the sub?”

  “There’s only one explanation for that. Bad blood,” Mitch asserted. “If the story’s true, and Klaus made it to Argentina, the brothers might no longer have been as close as they were during the war. For Klaus to unload those kinds of details, he may not have trusted Walter completely, certainly not Walter’s sons. He most likely would’ve held back on the finite, specific details.”

  “So if Klaus never revealed the code, then Dietrich and Hugo wouldn’t have been able to learn much from the journal. That’s why Duarte’s focusing his dives in the wrong spot. If they’re looking south in the Keys, which they are, they’re way off the mark,” Raine reasoned. “Duarte has to know that by now.”

  “I’m sure he’s aware his crew’s definitely wasting time diving in all the wrong spots. And it’s pissing him off royally,” Mitch stated.

  Raine studied Mitch’s face. “What are you thinking?”

  “It amazes me that Hugo had Klaus’s journal in the first place and Dietrich didn’t. He must’ve stolen it away from his brother very early on, at a young age, maybe hidden it away somewhere and took off, leaving his family behind in Argentina. I’m just trying to figure out the reason for the break in brother loyalty. Either way, when the brothers did have the book in their possession, neither Dietrich nor Hugo was ever able to crack the code sufficiently to uncover the sub’s location, not even approximate. It took Professor Hollings Bishop from Florida State University to do that.”

  Hollings beamed. “Well, I had incentive. I do want to write that book now more than ever. What will you do now that you have the approximate longitude and latitude?”

  Mitch sent him a smile. “We begin the hunt and lure in the local rats for the kill.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Justice

  Before they could set out on a treasure hunt, though, there were a few loose ends to tie up. Namely meeting with the state police. They expected to butt heads with the team from Tallahassee. But surprisingly, Paul Briggs, along with the two seasoned detectives he brought with him, was willing to sit down in a conference room at the police station—the same station Sinclair had abandoned a day earlier—and reach out to the family.

  “I know you think you’ve tied up this case for us in a great big bow,” Briggs began. “But we still have a lot of work to do.”

  Mitch’s tone sharpened. “Yeah, like make a few arrests.”

  Neither Alejandro Fargas nor Turner Grey, the two detectives sharing a conference table, cared for the dig. The older guy, Turner, seemed especially insulted. “What would you have us do? Go around arresting people just because you deem them guilty? It doesn’t work that way. We need rock-solid evidence.”

  But Mitch wasn’t backing down. “In this case, there’s a cop involved. I’m guessing that means you need double the evidence before you take out the handcuffs.” When he detected a simmering aggression in the older guy, Mitch altered course. “Okay. Fine. Then tell me, Detective Grey, what took your department so long to get here? After Dack was killed we figured the state police would react for sure and be down here the next day. It never happened.”

  Briggs looked around the room, picked up on the hostility between the two parties. The captain understood it to a certain extent. But he needed to nip that resentment in the bud on both sides. It wasn’t getting them anywhere, so he decided honesty was the better way to handle the situation. “Anniston and Sebastian warned me this wasn’t a typical case. I should’ve listened to them then. You’re right. Once I lost Hawkins on the ground here, I should’ve known something bigger was in play. I’m afraid we had to do some housecleaning of our own through Internal Affairs before we could act. Once we got rid of the baggage dragging us down—”

  “You mean Sinclair’s buddies,” Mitch corrected.

  Briggs steepled his fingers, sitting behind the former chief of police’s old desk. “And then some. The corruption that’s been happening here for decades ran deep, deeper than anyone could’ve predicted. Under Buchanan’s leadership, coupled with Sinclair’s complicity, and the mayor’s, the collusion complicated matters. Bring in men like Baskin and Dandridge, who have long histories of going out and making things happen for the guys at the top, and suddenly you realize you’ve built a solid wall of greed, fraud, and bribery that works like a well-oiled machine. That’s hard to topple.”

  “When you put it like that, you make it all sound so impossible to bring down,” Garret commented sadly. “Why didn’t anyone see what they were doing and try to stop them? The only one who even halfway tried was my dad.”

  Briggs nodded. “One man wasn’t going to do much to stop this organization. Make no mistake, that’s what it was. I understand we might even be able to solve a couple of cold cases throughout the state once the dust settles. I’m sorry that Sinclair’s taken off, and now I’ve learned this morning that so have Baskin and Dandridge.”

  Mitch wanted to pound the table, but didn’t. Instead he kept a cooler head. “You waited too late. They’ve all left town. There’s no one around to arrest.”

  Briggs overlooked the embarrassment of it all and went on, “You’re owed an apology. I’m here to—”

  “You don’t get it,” Lenore snapped from the other side of the room. “We don’t want your apology. We want the men responsible for killing our family, taking them away from us forever. There’s a hole in our family that can never be fixed. No one can apologize for that except the men who took them from us. And I doubt that’ll ever happen. I certainly don’t intend to sit around and wait to hear it.”

  “You have a right to be upset. It will take some time to sort this all out. I understand you have much of it on tape and a witness willing to back up certain accounts of unethical behavior.”

  “Murder is certainly unethical behavior,” Mitch fired back. “And we have a lot more than that—DNA, phone records, credit card statements—we tied up a pretty package for you guys. Wendy Hollister’s even waiting in the wings, scared to open her mouth. I’m beginning to understand why. She’s looking for protection from the authorities. That’s you guys. But if you can’t find Sinclair, Baskin, or Dandridge, I’m not sure that’s something you’d even be able to do. How do you keep Wendy safe? What’s the point of her risking her life testifying when it could all come crashing down around her if one of those guys wants her out of the way?”

  Lenore was the only one who’d taken a seat at the table. She crossed her arms over her chest. “We aren’t stupid, Captain Briggs. We know this isn’t the way things are supposed to work. The family of the victims aren’t typically the ones who solve the crime. You’ve messed this thing up from the beginning. We’re a small town. If we weren’t able to trust our chief of police, your agency was supposed to step up.”

  “What do you want me to do, Mrs. Indigo?”

  “I want you to find Jessup Sinclair and the rest. I want you to make them pay for what they’ve done.”

  “That’s our goal. But we’ll need to know the location of the Hollister woman.”

  “I’ll try to persuade her to turn herself in,” Mitch promised.

  As they left the meeting Mi
tch put in a call to Walsh. “Ready to get rid of your charge?”

  “Is the sky blue? Please tell me it’s okay to dump her in the ocean.”

  Mitch chuckled. “Bring her on in. This afternoon we’ll hand her over to Briggs. Then she becomes his problem. What’s the mood of the crew? Are they up for a little party before things get serious?”

  “They’re always up for that. What they really want is a chance at Duarte.”

  “Then bring ’em in. We’re going after the gold.”

  After dumping Wendy on Briggs, they all switched gears—closer to home.

  Everyone dragged out Halloween costumes as hokey as any middle school kid might throw together. They came up with vampire makeup, painted their faces, put on eerie eyeshadow, and spent the afternoon turning the front lawn into a reflecting pool of sparkly orange and black. They hung lights around the porch, carved pumpkins, hung balloons, and finished decorating cookies to hand out. Everyone pitched in.

  They did it all for Lenore.

  By dark, the house resembled a carnival set up to entertain the neighborhood kids. Children of all ages filled the yard. From a tiny fairy princess barely able to toddle around to a scary-looking teenage nightwalker, trick-or-treaters swarmed the house. They set up games like bean bag toss and gave out prizes—plastic spiders and bugs ruled with the older set, while the younger crowd preferred noisemakers and cute gummy worms, glowing toxic green.

  For the adults, it was like a masquerade ball.

  Mitch and Raine dressed up like a pair of steampunk characters, complete with white face paint, and stood guard over a huge black cauldron handing out cups of blood-red punch laced with Sprite. They greeted Mitch’s crew, who hadn’t bothered playing dress-up.

  Walsh took one look at the crowd, all the screaming kids, and cracked, “So this is what it’s like living in domesticated suburbia, a free-for-all that deteriorates into chaos over a bunch of candy. I’m glad I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.”