Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3)

by Jim Heskett

  I knew she’d been too generous before I left to help Omar. She’d practically forced me to go. I’d believed that I was doing the right thing and that I could succeed against IntelliCraft.

  Why did I think it would be any different this time?

  “But you can’t keep running off like this, okay?”

  I nodded and gripped her hand. “This is the last time. I can’t stay here with you. They’ll be watching me, and you’ll be safer if you’re not where I am. Does that make sense?”

  She was on the verge of tears. “You need to check in with me, several times a day, okay? And not texts. I want real phone calls.”

  “Actual phone calls? That’s not like you.”

  “This is a special occasion. Just do it, please?”

  “Okay. Make sure you only answer phone calls from one of the prepaids. Any numbers you don’t recognize, let it go to voicemail.”

  She took the list of phone numbers I’d scrawled on a notebook sheet and showed it to me. “I will. But you need to tell me the whole truth about what’s going on this time, okay? No keeping me out of the loop because you think I might be worried. I’m a big girl, and I can handle it.”

  “Okay. I promise. Constant checking in. You’re going to be sick of hearing my voice.”

  I tried to smile, and she tried to smile, but neither of us pulled it off well. If ever I could think of the perfect words to say, that would have been the time. But nothing brilliant tumbled out of my mouth. Just dead air.

  “Did you check in with that detective who was looking for you? Cross?”

  “No, I still need to do that. I’ll call him when I get back.”

  Janine came down the stairs and shot me a cold look as she picked up another suitcase, before going back upstairs.

  “I’d call it déjà vu,” Grace said, “but it’s exactly what’s happened before. I’m sitting here, telling you to come back to me, and to be safe. Can you do that? Please don’t do anything to put yourself in danger.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Use your head. If you’re not sure, don’t do anything.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to come back to you. I’m going to end all this, and get them out of our lives. Forever, this time.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rodrick drove me back to Denver, and I told him most of the story, carefully excluding some details, like how I’d snapped Glenning’s neck. And that Omar’s death was because of my interference. I couldn’t face up to that fact myself, so I didn’t want to open it up for discussion.

  “None of this makes sense,” Rodrick was saying. “Maybe they’re drug smugglers. You know, being based in Texas. Maybe it’s all a cover for moving stuff in and out across the border.”

  “That seems reasonable,” I said as we sped along the highway. “I can see them doing all these terrible things for heroin or cocaine.”

  But I couldn’t imagine Kareem and my dad being involved in that. Or maybe that was why they’d been forced out of the company. Start making software, but the board decides that heroin might improve their profit margins.

  But if so, why would the two of them war over that? Could Kareem have been in favor of striking out with his own drug side business, and my dad had wanted to stop it? But if Dad wasn’t involved any longer, why would he care about what Kareem did or didn’t do?

  Unless it was the opposite, and Kareem had been still inside IntelliCraft, and Dad was working to expose the truth about the company. Or maybe it wasn’t about drugs at all. I didn’t understand what could have been on that memory card if it were drugs. I couldn’t imagine that Mexican drug cartels emailed invoices.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t find a line of logic that gets me there. I need more information before I come to any conclusions.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe I can contact my dad and Susan and get them talking.” I should have taken the opportunity to get answers when I had them in front of me, but that was before Thomason’s intervention. I’d had the foolish notion I could leave all that behind in Texas.

  He slipped on the cruise control and looked at me. “I want to help.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, but he kept staring. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “The timing is perfect, buddy. I’m off work all week long. You say this could be dangerous, well, I want to help. I’ve known Grace for a long time, and she’s not just my employee. She’s my friend. You’re my friend too.”

  Seemed a little strange for him to be so forward and so willing to put himself in danger. He said we were friends, but it’s not as if we were close. He still seemed afraid of me.

  I agreed because it didn’t seem like he’d back down. Told him the best thing he could do would be to keep an eye on Grace, make sure she was safe and no one was arousing any suspicion at the condo.

  He pulled into the parking lot at Enterprise car rental. “Before you go, I just want to tell you they’ll be fine up there in Keystone. Nobody knows about that place.”

  I shook his hand and offered my thanks. I believed him.

  I rented a car and paid cash. Not that it did me much good because I still had to give them a copy of my license. Being Tucker Candle was proving to be dangerous enough by itself, I didn’t need to leave a paper trail for anyone to follow. Maybe I could get a fake ID somehow.

  “Ooh, great idea,” I said to the dashboard of the rental car. “I’ll just roll down to the nearest high school and find some kids in hoodies hanging out at the smoke hole and ask them. What’s up guys? Hey, I promise I’m not a narc, but do you think you could score me a fake ID?”

  Traffic was light, but a wet snowfall had turned the streets to mush. Once I was back at home, I dialed Susan. She didn’t pick up.

  “Susan, it’s me. You don’t recognize the number, I get it. I need you to call me as soon as possible, though.”

  I set the phone on my nightstand, slipped under the down comforter, and patted the cold side of the bed where Grace always slept. My hand slid up to her pillow, where her head had made a small indentation. I ran my hand around the indentation, feeling for any stray hair she might have left. Didn’t find any.

  ***

  The next morning, I called Detective Cross, knowing it wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation.

  “Cross, here.”

  “This is Tucker Candle.”

  He paused. “Mr. Candle, this is quite a timely call. I was just contemplating putting out a warrant for your arrest. You were supposed to check in with me a week ago.”

  “I know, and I’m very sorry about that. I’ve been in Texas. My dad’s estate took longer to handle than I thought it would. Plus, I lost my cell phone.”

  He sighed. Probably heard that line all the time. “We still need to clarify a few things in your statement.”

  My heart pounded. I was about to take an incredible risk. Maybe I was making this call on a prepaid supposedly-untraceable cell, but what I was about to do could have serious consequences if it didn’t work. “Can I trust you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can I trust you? Something has happened, and I need someone I can trust.”

  A few seconds of silence. “What are you talking about?”

  “First, I need to ask you a few questions. I need to know who you really are.”

  He laughed a little. “Mr. Candle, I don’t think you’re in a position to—”

  “Where did you go to college? Do you have a degree?”

  He paused. “Okay, fine. I’ll play along. I went to Florida State, where I received a degree in criminal justice.”

  “And where was your first job as a cop?”

  “Chicago, downtown. I was a beat cop before I moved to Denver. I was promoted to homicide detective four years ago. What does this have to do with anything?”

  I’d already done the research last night, and his story checked out. I’d looked deep enough that faking all of that info would ha
ve been an enormous task. Had found his high school yearbook photo, even. I only wished I’d done the same research when fake Detective Stan Shelton had walked into my life a month ago. “I’m ready to trust you now.”

  “Whatever, Mr. Candle. If you have something to say, you better get to it.”

  I didn’t hear anything in his tone that made me question what I was about to do. “The people who took my wife—”

  “Wait. People? Are you saying someone other than your next-door neighbor was involved in kidnapping your wife?”

  “Yes. Is it true that there is an FBI investigation into IntelliCraft?”

  He hesitated. “I’m not at liberty—”

  “Please, Detective Cross. Alan only kidnapped my wife because some people from IntelliCraft made him do it. All of these dead people were current or former IntelliCraft employees. And they’re after me right now because they think I’m in possession of stolen company secrets.”

  “You should be careful when you make statements like that,” he said.

  “Please, help me. Is there an FBI investigation?”

  “Some agents were here to look at my files on the kidnapping case the other day. But as to any ongoing investigation, I can’t comment on what I don’t know.”

  “There is an IntelliCraft employee named Frank Thomason. He’s the Director of Sales. He’s in Denver right now, and he’s threatened to kill me and my entire family if I don’t play along.”

  Cross remained silent. His silence spooked me, and I had an urge to hang up. This was a bad idea. Maybe his whole backstory had been faked, however difficult it seemed to do that. Had I just tipped off IntelliCraft that I was talking to law enforcement, which would trigger some series of actions of raining hellfire on their end?

  “You should meet me for a coffee,” he finally said. “Let’s get together and we’ll talk about this.”

  This was all wrong. His tone, his words, his hesitation.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve made a mistake. I shouldn’t have told you anything. Please forget what I said. I’m not sleeping well, and I think I’m still upset about what happened to my wife.”

  I ended the call, and my shaking hand slipped the phone back into my pocket.

  I realized that since the police took the stun gun and the gun I’d briefly possessed after shooting Darren and Shelton into evidence, I didn’t have anything at the house to protect myself.

  Except the baseball bat. I’d forgotten about it.

  I ran upstairs and went prone next to the bed to hunt around for it. I’d never played, but when Grace became pregnant, I went on a home-safety kick for a few days, and thought we needed something for the house. Not a gun, though, because I never liked the idea of keeping one in the house. Thought I was more likely to accidentally shoot myself or someone I knew than use it to stop a robber.

  Ironic to think of that now, considering how quickly I’d learned to become numb to pulling a trigger. How many people had I killed in the last month? Darren, Shelton, Wyatt Green, Glenning, the coyote, and that unnamed IntelliCraft thug who’d burst into the shack near the border.

  Six people. Six notches on a bedpost.

  I couldn’t see more than a couple feet under the bed, so I blindly reached out. Nothing on one side, so I went to the other and kept digging. I pulled out shoe boxes, extra blankets, but no baseball bat. Maybe Grace had gotten rid of it and hadn’t told me.

  When I sat up, I noticed one of the shoe boxes had a picture of my mother taped to the front of it. In the photo—a yellowing Polaroid taken by my dad that had been hanging on our fridge for years—she was standing in front of their first apartment, mugging for the camera. Empty laundry basket in one hand, bottle of detergent in the other. She looked beautiful, trim and slim and wearing makeup only to do laundry at the apartment building’s coin operated washer and dryer.

  I opened the box, not quite remembering what I was going to find inside. It had been maybe five years since I’d looked at it. I pulled out a collection of letters wrapped in a rubber band, the ones she’d written me when I was in college. She’d never gotten the hang of email, or so she claimed. I remembered being annoyed at the time that she couldn’t just email me like a normal person, but I did secretly enjoy getting those letters. I’d felt like a little kid, opening my mailbox at my college apartment, using my notebooks to scrawl hand-written replies.

  I flipped through the letters. She’d written them up until the day before the car accident that had taken her life. I checked the post date on the last one. The ten-year anniversary of her death was only a couple days from now.

  I’d almost forgotten, with everything else going on. Had it really been a decade that I’d been all alone, without my mother and with a father who’d been as good as dead to me?

  My pocket started vibrating and I retrieved the phone. Susan’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Tucker? Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me. This is a safe phone, I think.”

  “There’s no such thing as a safe phone,” she said. “Why were you calling? It’s not a good idea.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I need to know what was on that thing he smashed. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “He was never going to tell you that, and I can’t tell you that either. It’s for your own safety.”

  “Damn it, Susan. IntelliCraft knows about the card. They know I had it, or they think I still have it, or they think I gave it to you. Either way, they’re holding me responsible, and they’re going to tear the earth apart to find it.”

  “Knowing what’s on that card won’t keep you safe from those people. You’re just going to have to trust me on that one. Our mutual friend and I are working on a plan to end all this. I can’t tell you what it is, but I can say that the best thing you can do is go somewhere safe and wait it out. Getting in the middle of it is only going to lead to trouble for you.”

  I thought of Omar, urgently warning me that I couldn’t trust Susan. “And why should I believe what you’re saying?”

  She took a few breaths. “I don’t know. You just have to, because there’s no other choice.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I checked in with Grace, told her about the various phone calls I’d made. She warned me about trusting Cross, and I had to concede that I’d probably made a mistake telling him anything. But having a cop on my side had been too tempting an opportunity to pass up.

  The desire to reach out to law enforcement tugged at me, because they were supposed to help people; to protect regular citizens like me. Who was I to take on a company that murdered their own employees? I needed help from the guys who could legally shoot other people.

  I packed a lunch and a couple cell phones, then I spent the day driving around and thinking. I did the driving part well, but the thinking didn’t work so good.

  I went to Wash Park and sat on a bench by the water. Got a coffee from Starbucks. Parked on the street by some random grade school and watched moms pick up their kids, happy and smiling in their coats and hats.

  Through all my activities, I kept finding myself at the same problem: I had no idea what IntelliCraft was doing, and no way that I could see to figure it out. Kept hitting the same walls of thought. Without knowing what was on that card, how could I expose them?

  Whatever rested at the bottom of this whole conspiracy had to be massive.

  In the late afternoon, I found myself only a couple miles from the IntelliCraft building in south Denver. Autopilot seemed to be telling me where I needed to go next.

  Maybe my old boss Alison knew something, and I could get it out of her. I didn’t know if my keycard still worked, so I went in the front entrance, then waited for the elevator, like a visitor.

  I pressed my card against the panel. Green light. I took the elevator to the third floor, where I figured I was most likely to find her. When I stepped off the elevator, an old smell greeted me. Coffee, printer ink, and the particular fabric used in the cubicle walls.


  A wave of nostalgia hit, and I paused a second to live in those memories, some of them good ones. I had friends here, or at least, I used to. How many employees were still here? Had they laid everyone off yet, or were there still some poor schmucks coming in every day, hanging on for those last few days so they could get the severance package?

  None of that mattered anymore. My time as an IntelliCraft employee was over, even though they were still paying me. I was here for a different reason today.

  A couple of familiar faces appeared over the cubicle walls as I strode through the office. I nodded at the ones I knew, and they all offered me the same confused looks. Didn’t bother to stop by my old cube, because all my personal things had already been packed up and sent to me in bland cardboard boxes through the mail. Most of the desks looked abandoned. The motivational posters removed from the walls. A few random whiteboards and corkboards still hung in spots, but people would steal those before the final day of the office. Before all this crazy crap had gone down, I’d had my eye on the espresso maker in the big kitchen.

  I passed the Aspen conference room, where I’d had the unpleasant chat with Glenning and Thomason, pretending not to know who they were. Alison had been furious with me that day.

  At the next conference room across the hall, I found her, sitting next to Thomason.

  Their laptops were open, they were both typing. He saw me first and threw a lopsided grin at me. Alison turned her head and her mouth dropped open. She closed the lid of her laptop. Thomason stood, then Alison held out her hand, mouthing something as she got to her feet. He gave me a little wave as she walked over to greet me.

  Thomason kept wearing the smile on his face.

  Alison came out into the hall, shutting the conference room door behind her. I’d intended to be calm and rational, but something about seeing her with Thomason ignited the burner under me.

  “Tucker, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on medical leave.”