Truth or Dare

by Fern Michaels

  “Amen,” Maggie said solemnly.

  Chapter Nine

  The Post reporters dutifully answered all the questions the local Virginia authorities asked them, stressing the fact that they hadn’t touched anything inside the building other than bumping into the coffin that led to the accident with Agnes Twitt, who slept peacefully her forever sleep by the front door. It took one of the officers twenty minutes before he lowered the top of the coffin. No one seemed to care about the pearls that were askew around Agnes’s neck but Dennis, who walked around asking someone to please take care of the matter. No one paid the slightest attention to his pleas.

  Ninety minutes later, Maggie put her foot down. Hard. “We told you everything we know. There is nothing more we can do here. We need to leave. You can get in touch with us at the paper or call us personally at the BOLO Building. The number is on each card we turned over to you. We all gave you our personal cell-phone numbers as well.”

  A young officer who looked like he wasn’t old enough to shave nodded and thanked them for their help, saying they would be in touch but reminding them they all needed to go by the station to sign the statements they’d just given. The gang agreed and climbed into the van. Dennis pressed hard on the gas as they flew out of the parking lot. No one paid attention to the scenery or the Best Western as Dennis whizzed down the road.

  “Someone should say something,” Maggie groused. “I’ve been doing all the talking, it seems.”

  “That’s because you never shut up and forever tell us you are the boss, so we are just doing what you want us to do. Make up your damn mind already,” Ted growled.

  “What do you think they are going to do with the . . . the . . . deceased?” Maggie asked.

  Espinosa raised his hand. “I know the answer to that because I asked. Last Stop before Heaven is where the local authorities send all their Jane and John Does, and the county pays for burial. In other words, the indigent. Supposedly. Which does not compute to me because of that Springfield casket that goes for 25K. LSBH is one in a chain of close to three hundred throughout the country. The coroner himself told me that. He also said this was so far out in the country that most people opt to use funeral homes in town closer to where they live. The indigent get buried in pine boxes or cremated. There were all those . . . jars lined up in that one room, so I guess what he said is true, as he should know. He is the coroner, after all.”

  “What’s going to happen to Agnes and the other four?” Maggie fretted.

  “They’re calling the Dylan Funeral Home in Alexandria to come for the deceased. There’s a ton of paperwork someone is going to have to go through to . . . you know, notify next of kin if there are any and to find a new home for all those jars. This is not sitting well with me, guys,” Espinosa said. “In point of fact, it’s making me sick to my stomach.”

  “You need to get over yourself, Joe. We’re reporters; we’re supposed to be able to handle anything we report on,” Ted said, but there was no conviction in his voice.

  “We’re here!” Dennis shouted, as the gates to the alley behind the BOLO Building opened up. The moment the iron gates clanged shut, he let loose with a loud roar. “Safe!!”

  Everyone started talking at once. “Why are we here? I Thought we were going to the farm! No one is here! The lot is empty!”

  Dennis looked around, befuddled. “You told the officers we were coming here, and this is where we could be reached. None of you said anything on the drive here,” he said as they were exiting the van.

  “Easy, kid! We’re all in a daze here in case you haven’t noticed. Let’s just get back in the van and head out to the farm. It’s not your fault. I’ll drive this time,” Ted said.

  Dennis was the last to climb aboard. He felt foolish until Maggie wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “If it’s any consolation, Dennis, I didn’t even know we’d arrived until you yelled, ‘Safe’! We’re all having a bad day here, so don’t take it personally.”

  Espinosa clapped him on the back to show that he agreed.

  Dennis felt better immediately, so he leaned back and closed his eyes, pretending sleep, while his mind raced around thinking about what the four of them had just been through.

  Forty-five minutes later, Ted steered the van through the gates of Pinewood. The sound of all the dogs barking was like music to his ears. The kitchen door opened as Jack, Harry, and Abner stepped out onto the small porch, the dogs clustered at their legs.

  “Hurry, get in here before you drown,” Charles called out. “Fergus just washed and dried all the towels from earlier.”

  “You are not going to believe—”

  “Save it, dear, for when we can all pay attention down below,” Charles said as he handed out towels. Only Jack noticed Cyrus slinking off to his spot under the table. The big shepherd hated folding towels.

  “You guys look . . . oh, I don’t know, like you just saw a ghost, green around the gills, if you like that cliché,” Abner said flippantly. “Coffee is fresh. Sandwiches are wrapped in the fridge.”

  “Food! Food! Is that what you said? Don’t ever say that word out loud in front of me ever again. Do you hear me? I’ll probably never ever eat again for the rest of my life,” Maggie wailed dramatically.

  “We aren’t hungry,” Dennis said.

  “No, we aren’t hungry,” Ted and Espinosa said in unison.

  “Everyone dry?” Not bothering to wait for a response from the foursome, Charles headed for the secret staircase to the war room, where they could get to work.

  Cyrus was first in the parade, Lady staying behind with her pups to do her job, which was to guard the premises and make sure no one approached the door that she guarded by lying down on the mat in front of it. Her pups took up their positions and went to sleep.

  Outside, the rain continued to pour down like a tsunami.

  Down below in the old dungeons that now housed the war room of Pinewood, the gang saluted Lady Justice before they took their seats at the huge round table, where they immediately started to babble and talk over one another for a good fifteen minutes. Somehow, it all made sense to the gang when they finally wound down, and Jack said, “So this is where we are right now. I think this is also the moment when Charles will give us his favorite Leo Tolstoy quote: ‘The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.’ ”

  “Thank you for that, Jack,” Charles said tongue in cheek. “It truly does apply here. There is no immediate rush on anything at the moment. The children are safe. I think we can all agree that is paramount. Their mother is on the way. So we have time on that. Patience is something none of us have, and that’s okay to a point. We now need to focus on the Karas brothers. Abner has more to say on that subject, which he will share with the rest of us shortly.

  “Maggie’s report on the Last Stop before Heaven establishment right now is what we need to discuss.” Like Myra and Annie, Charles never referred to the photo journalist by his last name and always called him Joseph. “Joseph is going to show us all the pictures he took on the big screen. We all need to look at them carefully; then we’ll discuss everyone’s opinion. Next up will be Abner, who has been in constant contact with his . . . ah . . . colleague, Philonias Needlemeyer. From there, we will go wherever we need to go. You have the floor, Joseph.”

  “I’ll put the pictures up, and Ted can narrate.”

  “I haven’t been in all that many funeral homes, but this one appears to be the same as the ones I’ve seen. By that I mean the areas that the public see. Lots of velvet draping behind where the caskets are set up for viewing. They, the caskets, sit on gurneys. With wheels that lock. The lids, covers, the tops, whatever they’re called, are in two pieces. Only half is open to view . . . uh . . . the upper extremities.

  “The place smelled. Like incense and dead flowers, and there were plenty of those around. If I had to take a guess, I don’t think the owners have been gone long, a few days at the most. Dennis said this license Joe is showing you now is bogus because there is
no raised seal, so who knows if Eli and Ethel Oberman are the true owners or not. Or if the persons who were running the funeral home were really named Eli and Ethel Oberman.

  “There are ramps everywhere and no steps. I don’t know if that’s a handicap law or not. The few funeral homes I’ve been in had no ramps. I don’t know if that’s important or not. If it weren’t for the ramp, Agnes Twitt wouldn’t be where she is by the front door in the picture you’re now seeing,” Ted said, as a picture of the deceased appeared on the screen. “What happened was, we couldn’t get to the handles quick enough and the casket got away from us and she . . . well, what she did was kind of . . . bounce in the air and fall back and that’s why she . . . she looks like what you’re seeing.”

  A new picture appeared on the screen, the room where all the caskets were lined up. “This is where we think the kids were kept. Or at least they slept in . . . in them. The covers or whatever you call them were mussed up. Carrie was right when she said they slept in boxes. To a kid, a casket would seem like a box.”

  More pictures appeared. “File room. We didn’t touch those at all. We did look inside each cabinet. All of them were full. Either a lot of dead people went through there, or those were the files for the kids who passed through. No way to know. We were just getting into it when the doorbell rang, and all those men appeared with their story of their grandfather dying. That’s when Agnes Twitt rolled down the ramp and slammed into the door. Trust me when I tell you there was no dead grandfather. The guys looked like thugs who had come there to do some serious work, like cleaning out the place. And we didn’t get a chance to explore the back, where they . . . where the crematorium is.”

  “Ted, you forgot the room with the jars,” Dennis said.

  “No, I didn’t forget. Joe didn’t put it up on the screen. Let’s see it!” Ted said.

  Espinosa scrolled through his camera till he found what he was looking for, and in seconds, the room appeared on the big screen. What looked to be well over a thousand jars, some large, some small, in different colors with labeled names on the tops that were sealed shut made everyone in the room blink.

  “I’m not sure about this, but I think I read somewhere that you have to pay to have a funeral home store . . . display, don’t know the correct term for a person’s remains. Most people take their loved one’s ashes home with them. I have a friend I went to school with who keeps his parents’ ashes on the top shelf of his bedroom. I don’t think I could do that,” Ted said in a strangled-sounding voice.

  “So, that’s it?” Charles asked.

  “Pretty much. I took some pictures of the empty parking lot, the landscaping, the front of the building, the sign, but that’s it, yes,” Espinosa responded.

  “Anyone have any questions?” Charles asked. There were no questions. “Then I guess it’s up to Abner to tell us what he has if anything. You have the floor, Abner.”

  “Look, I’m not a miracle worker here. I can only go by what’s out there to find. First, and to me the most important, is the BOLO out on Allison Bannon. Every law-enforcement agency in this crazy alphabet city is on the hunt for her. I assume you haven’t heard anything more, Harry?”

  “She said she would call. That lady knows what she’s doing. Somehow or other, she will find a way to get here because she knows we have her kids, and that’s the only thing on her mind right now. We just have to wait for her to call.”

  “I’m on top of the different agencies, and so are my . . . colleagues. I’ll hear the minute there is a sighting of any kind, real or not. Trust me on that. I’m also working on the husband angle. It would appear, and Phil agrees, that he is a traitor and on someone else’s payroll besides the CIA’s. For Allison to run like that without her husband pretty much buttons that up where I’m concerned.

  “I was on the Net with Phil most of the night. I’m going to call him in a bit and put him on speaker, so you can all hear what he has to say. He said there is no history, no legend created for the Karas brothers. It’s just not there. What he was able to pick up was the day the brothers made their entrance into the world in Paris, France at the age of twenty-two. He said it was as if they had been born that very day. Now, he did hack into the passport records. This you might find interesting. The brothers are forty-eight, according to their passports and international driving licenses. So, twenty-six years ago, they stayed in France for close to six years. They lived high in a villa with a houseful of servants. They rarely ventured out, and when they did, it was with a retinue of many. Then, when the six years were up, they stormed the international scene. They were handsome, charming, charismatic, spoke many languages, and had money to burn. They did not entangle themselves with women. Occasionally, they were seen and photographed with beautiful women, but there were no relationships anyone talked about. This is when they started to travel extensively, never staying in one place more than a few days at a time.

  “Phil backtracked the slave-trafficking stats, and that’s when it all started to heat up. Every agency under the sun was on it, but no one has been able to trace the source. But, with the aid of all our colleagues, Phil and I have come to the conclusion that wherever they traveled, either before, during, or after, a group of children went missing in the vicinity. That they are responsible is just a theory, nothing more. But I strongly agree with it. Back then, the agencies went public, asking for the citizens’ help. When that didn’t work, they shut down and kept it all close to the vest.”

  Jack leaned forward. “I do not understand how so many children could have gone missing without the world’s going crazy. Where are the parents? I’d leave no stone unturned if I had a kid and he or she got snatched. I’d be screaming my head off to the authorities, and now, with social media, I just don’t see why there is not more of an uproar. Someone needs to explain that to me. The only thing I ever see on TV is that guy John Walsh,” Jack said, anger ringing in his voice.

  “I think we all feel like that. Where do the Karas brothers, if it turns out they are responsible, get the children they’re selling? Are they orphans, foster kids, kids off the street? Tell me where?” Ted asked in frustration.

  “All of the above. The hue and cry in the Asian and European countries is not what it is here. A lot of the kids are the throwaways. The ones no one wants, which is sad to say. Then there is the Net, where all kinds of crap is posted that kids see and believe. Young women offered glamorous jobs overseas, a life of richness and fame. They fall for it. What we found out also are blond young women are at the top of the list. Little blond girls go for so much money it’s sinful.

  “Phil read me a statistic that made me run for the bathroom. He said a ten-year-old blonde with good teeth, and he stressed good teeth, goes for several million dollars. The buyer or buyers, as in plural, use her till she’s fourteen or fifteen, depending on her breast size, then put her out on the sex circuit. By that time, the years of drugs and decadence generally lead to death by age seventeen. The same thing for the older ones. The fresh ones are used up by twenty-three or -four. Then they go on the circuit, too. It’s a filthy, rotten business.”

  “But how . . .” Dennis tried to speak.

  “It’s all done on the dark side of the Web, the underbelly. Dennis, you have no idea what goes on there. I can truthfully say I wish I didn’t know,” Abner said.

  “But everything points to the Karas brothers, right?” Charles asked.

  “Yes. Points to. No proof. Phil’s wife and former hacker, PIP, which stands for Pretty in Pink, has a theory that Phil and I both more or less agree with. It’s just a theory, understand that.”

  “Well, what is it?” Jack demanded.

  “We think the Karas brothers were given their names by the masterminds behind all of the child trafficking when they plucked them out of nowhere. Then they took them to France, where, as I told you, they stayed for six years. PIP thinks they were schooled in every phase of life to turn them into what they are today, the charming international playboys with money to bu
rn. She also thinks, and this is where we all three agree, that the brothers were hypnotized, or if you like the term programmed better, go with it, and they have no memory of their life before they were taken to France. I don’t know too much about hypnotism or being programmed, but from what I’ve read, the process has to be reinforced from time to time or their real memories would come back. I know it sounds crazy and way out there, but still, it does make sense since we have nothing better to go by.”

  “That is so . . . preposterous!” Maggie stuttered as she grappled with what she’d just heard.

  “No it isn’t. It makes perfect sense,” Jack said. “More sense than anything we have come up with. Think about it. They’ve been literally programmed. That has to be another reason why they travel with the entourage they do, so no one can get close to them. I guess what we’re saying is that they oversee the operation, but their hands are clean. So we now also have to find the masterminds behind all of this, not just the Karas brothers.”

  “Correct. And for doing what they do, they get to lead the life they lead. And before you can ask, no, they do not have a conscience. That was wiped out. The answer to the other question you haven’t asked yet is yes, they probably had as extensive plastic surgery as you can get these days, not back then, to fool all the facial-recognition programs. As I said, they were born the day they were picked up from wherever they lived. Somewhere in Europe would be my guess,” Abner said.

  “How do we fight this? What can we do? Where do we start?” Harry finally said.

  No one had an answer.

  “I guess we have to wait for Allison Bannon to get in touch. She and her team have been on this case for years. I hate saying it, but it looks like she’s our only lead right now,” Harry said.

  “There is one other thing. Phil, PIP, and I all agree that the Karas brothers are on the move. As of this morning, they were registered at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Buckhead in Atlanta. They rented three entire floors for three weeks. They had a full week to go on their reservation when they packed up and left. Several hours ago, to be precise. They did pay for the whole week for all three floors. We have Phil to thank for this information, wizard that he is. Like I said, they’re on the move. Phil is waiting for some satellite to go overhead to pick them up. Seems he has a contact at NASA that . . . ah . . . helps him out from time to time.”