Forgotten Place

by LS Sygnet

  Therein was the problem. It was all about the win on the side of angels, which gave the demons of defense their greatest weapon.

  "They should've given the guy a medal instead of disbarring him."

  I reached over the seat and bumped Devlin's shoulder with a fist. "You're my kinda guy, Dev."

  "As I recall, the perp in that case tried to file a civil suit. It was a mess," Ned continued. "I think it was dismissed or some sort of sealed settlement was reached. Carlos was none too pleased. I heard his business took a bit of a hit over the whole deal."

  "Carlos?"

  "The other brother," Ned told me. "He's the one who still has the practice in Darkwater proper."

  "Why would a union lawyer be handling a criminal case?" Devlin connected a couple of dots that hadn't occurred to me yet.

  "Court appointment," Ned said. "After that case, the judges were very picky about nabbing someone with a license to practice law who happened to have the misfortune of standing around in the right place at the wrong time. Poor old Dayton didn't know the hornet's nest he stepped into on that one."

  Devlin slowed and signaled at my driveway. The front gate was already wide open.

  "No!" I rasped. "We're too late. Datello's already been here."

  Chapter 41

  It sickens me a little to realize that my first emotion was an overwhelming sense of grief for my beautiful home. I was certain, even as Devlin killed the lights on the Expedition, that we would find nothing but a burned out husk when the circle drive looped around the prepared ground where next spring I planned to have a water fountain built.

  To my surprise – all of our surprise actually – not only was the house intact, but the OSI officers were in the courtyard that buffered my front door from the real world.

  "Stay," Devlin shot a look over his shoulder.

  I didn't listen of course, even though hours earlier I had offered a compelling bit of evidence there are no atheists in foxholes when I promised God all sorts of stuff if he'd only save Johnny's life. I had no intention of keeping a foolish promise to behave and never do anything stupid again. It wasn't stupid; it advanced the case. Even though the back of my head, still oozing a little bit of blood through Maya's stitches, and Johnny's frontal lobe and memories were both casualties of the war with Datello.

  Ned shot me a look and Devlin simply focused on Darnell's men.

  "Why is the gate open?"

  They looked at each other and pulled weapons.

  "You didn't know?"

  "It's not exactly in sight, ma'am."

  I pushed past them but Devlin stopped me with his large frame. He stepped in front of me. "You're not charging in there, Helen. Not until we've thoroughly searched the grounds and determined that no one forced entry."

  "You're being ridiculous. The alarm would've sounded if someone went inside."

  Ned concurred with Devlin. "Would it? These guys got past your gate without triggering any high-tech bells and whistles. You," he pointed to one of the OSI guards. "Call the officer guarding Ms. Ireland. Make sure they're safe and stay put. Detective Mackenzie and I will circle the house and look for signs of entry. Keep Detective Eriksson here and from entering this house until we've cleared the property."

  "Yes sir."

  "I'm going with you," I said, "or I'm going through this door right now and –"

  "Fine," Devlin gripped my upper arm and dragged me along with him. "We'll go left. You go right. We'll meet in the back of the house."

  "There are four points of door entry excluding the garage and the front door," I said. "I presume you would've heard the garage door open."

  The other guard nodded.

  "As for window entries, it would be a lot more difficult to breech the house that way. The door entries are all equipped with alarm boxes. The windows are not. After entering, they'd have thirty seconds to find the alarm box and enter the code to disable the signal that would alert my security company and the police."

  "Agreed," Ned said. "Let's go."

  I suspected which door had been breached before we left the front courtyard. My heart sank when the door to the family room off the lanai was ajar. The security panel showed the alarm system had been disabled.

  "You knew," Ned whispered. "It's the closest entry to the office."

  "He's got Ireland's files."

  "Datello will recognize those pages, Helen," Ned said, "and he'll know that we've seen them too."

  I made my way carefully to the office door and flicked the light switch. Devlin's shoulder brushed mine when he pushed past. "I don't get it."

  "Neither do I." All the boxes of Ireland's notes had been removed. "Are we missing something? Has this been about one of his cases after all?"

  Ned looked near the multipurpose office machine – fax, copier, scanner, printer where we'd left the pages we suspected were important, where the lot of them remained. "Or they figured that stack of papers was exactly what we thought it was at first. Test pages. Gibberish."

  "But that would mean Datello didn't tell his men what they were looking for."

  "Helen," Devlin said, "they've been looking for a disk for all these years. Do you think that any of them, even Southerby, is aware of its contents? Datello is probably operating on a need to know basis. Nobody needs to know he was about to rat out his uncle. He'd as likely paint a target on his back as let that become common knowledge."

  I snatched the pages off the desk and picked up the phone. Darnell answered on the second ring.

  "Your men allowed someone to break into my house." Nice greeting, huh?

  Darnell responded with a snarled, "What?"

  I brought Darnell up to speed. "You need more men out here. Ireland is safe. Her guard apparently snoozed through the break in, because Datello's men came in and made off with David Ireland's files."

  "I'll take care of it. When are you coming back to the hospital, Helen?"

  "I'm not."

  "You should be here. Things aren't what you think, Helen."

  "No? Was he not asking for someone who died before I arrived in this city?" Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Ned and Devlin slip out of the office, no doubt to check on the occupants of the house. At least that's what I wanted to believe.

  "Yes, he asked for Gwen."

  "Then my presence there is moot. He doesn't know me. He doesn't remember anything that happened over the past six months. In many ways, it's a blessing that he lost all of that. I suspect it wasn't making him very happy."

  "But he's –"

  "I've got a case to close, Darnell. You may as well hear it from me directly. I came here to get Danny Datello, and I won't stop until it's done. One way or another."

  "What does that mean? One way or another? Helen, don't do anything stupid –"

  I hung up the phone and gathered the printed pages. Dev and Ned were outside in the kitchen. "Let's get back to CSD. I want to see if Forsythe has found a way to open those files."

  On the way across town, I started reviewing the faded sheets of numbers again. "They all end with EX2012. I see nothing that distinguishes one from another." The urge to toss them out the window was strong. "No wonder these were left behind. They're likely as meaningless as they..."

  "What?" Ned unbuckled his seatbelt again and turned around.

  "The first line of each page. Did you notice this?" I started reshuffling the pages. "The numbers are sequential in the first line. One through whatever to reach the right margin, followed by another page that starts with two and so forth."

  "Then they're not meaningless," Devlin said. "There's an order to the pages."

  "Fantastic," I muttered, "I've figured out the first one or two digits on pages filled with hundreds of numbers. Somebody better tell Datello to run for the hills. We're about to crack this one wide open."

  My sarcasm elicited a couple of frowns. Devlin didn't respond to it. Ned took the mature route of the diplomat.

  "That's not exactly true, Helen. We know more about these
pages than you think. They have a sequential order, but there's something else they all have in common."

  "Yes, printing on a crappy, obsolete machine."

  "No," he pointed patiently to the page in my hand. "They end with the same notation."

  "Right, the abbreviation for the fifth commandment. That's surely helpful."

  Devlin caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. "We've assumed all along that the reference simply linked to David's case, that the EX2012 was the code identifying parts of the whole. He had similar codes for his other cases, right?"

  "Sure," I nodded, unsure where he was going.

  "What if it means something else? I mean, it's obvious that it ended up being the clue that his wife used to point us in the direction of where the disk was hidden, but does that rule out that Ireland didn't use it to mean something else too?"

  "Like what?" Wariness leeched into my tone.

  "I don't know. A way to figure out what all the numbers mean," he said.

  "Forsythe will probably have better luck finding a key code on the disk. I doubt very much that Ireland would've been so careless to put his key code on the pages we've got here."

  "Why not?" Ned asked. "How many people have had access to those documents over the years? Nobody thought they were anything of value. Even we nearly missed their importance, Helen. Let's face it. Even knowing that they're linked to what he knew hasn't put us an inch closer to figuring out what they mean."

  I pulled open the door in the console between the front seats and dug through the contents until I found a small notebook and pad. I scrawled the one bit of information we clearly had in the case, the scripture.

  Exodus 20:12 – Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the lord thy God giveth thee.

  I began scratching letters off the verse and writing them below.

  Vowels: A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y. Exodus 20:12 – Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the lord thy God giveth thee.

  My brain started calculating the consonants, B, C, D, F, G, H, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, V, W, X. "We're missing J, K, Q, Z."

  I scrutinized unintelligible rows of numbers. The lines were mostly long strings of enormous numbers, except for two, rows 20 and 12. "It can't be a coincidence."

  "What?"

  I thrust the first page under Ned's nose. "What jumps out at you on this sheet?"

  "Numbers. Poor print quality –"

  "The numbers themselves, Ned."

  Devlin's eyes darted over to the page. "Two lines with spaces between numbers."

  "Exactly."

  Ned's finger skimmed the page, and I knew he was counting lines, just like I had.

  He blew out a low whistle. "Lines twelve and twenty. Look at that."

  "We're missing exactly four consonants and no vowels if you look at the text of the scripture and count the alphabet. Notice that the numbers ten, eleven, seventeen and twenty-six don't appear anywhere on those two lines."

  "Which means what?" Ned asked.

  "It's a code based on the fifth commandment," Devlin said. "What does it say, Helen?"

  "Seven, nine, twenty-one, nineteen, five, sixteen, sixteen, five, sixteen, one, fourteen, five, twenty, twenty, one."

  Ned was scratching the numbers into his notebook. "Giuseppe Panetta."

  "No. Way."

  Devlin pulled off the street and spun around to join Ned in staring at me. "That name means something to you?"

  Oh, how would I ever explain this without spilling the beans about my father's unknown darker history? Giuseppe Panetta was a name I heard Dad curse on more than one occasion. The sulci in my brain scrunched and quivered with the effort of recall. I must've been eight or nine years old.

  The quiver of fear's bow shuddered through me. Is this about Datello's father or mine?

  Fingers snapped in front of my face. "Helen?"

  "I – it's probably nothing."

  "Start talking," Ned said.

  "My dad was a cop. I remember him bitching about Panetta slipping through the cracks of the legal system when I was a kid. I mean, I was too young to know why or what he'd done, what any of it meant. It made Dad angry. That's what I knew."

  "How young?" Ned snatched the page out of my hand and continued jotting numbers.

  "Eight, maybe nine years old. It's got to be a coinci–"

  "April 10, 1979," Ned said. How old were you?"

  "Seven," I whispered. "Not quite eight."

  "Wonder what CTF means," Ned finished the translation of the string of numbers.

  "Line twenty is written differently, even though it sticks out like a sore thumb," Devlin said. "There's no space between four and one, but there's no forty-first letter of the alphabet. We don't have a zero in the key code either, not to mention that looks like a minus sign before a seventy-two. Is that a period separating those numbers? The ink is so faint, it's hard to tell."

  CTF. CTF. The conversation with my mentor popped back to the front of my thoughts. Southerby promised to deliver names, dates, coordinates where the bodies were buried.

  "Oh," I breathed. "CTF."

  I pulled out the iPhone and opened the Google Earth application. "Read me those numbers, including where you think you see decimals, Devlin."

  He started, "Four one period, zero four three six two seven – Ned, is that a period or a comma?"

  "Comma," Ned replied.

  "Comma, minus seven two period, eight six three three eight eight."

  I tapped in the coordinates and hit search. Three heads crowded together and watched the location zoom into focus on the screen.

  "Smack dab in the middle of Long Island Sound," Ned said. "Holy shit, Eriksson. We've got names, dates and coordinates for where the bodies are buried, don't we?"

  "CTF, coordinates to follow," I said. "There's no question how Datello would get his hands on this information. And I don't doubt for one second what he planned to do with it."

  I relayed my conversation with David Levine. "They were certain that Southerby was their deep throat informant."

  "But it was really Datello." Devlin slammed his hand into the steering wheel. "He'd kill to keep the family from finding out what he planned to do. I'm guessing there's not a prison strong enough to contain Sully's rage if he found out he was ratted out by one of his own."

  "Undoubtedly," I said. The nagging bits of worry drifted away from me. Dad would've never been stupid enough to share such details of a crime with anyone. Nor did I believe he'd lift a finger to help a guy like Sully Marcos. I thought again about his influence on Johnny, understood that the gun in Marcos' waste facility was no random act on Johnny's part. Dad had led him there for a specific reason. But what was it?

  Suddenly, I wished more than anything that Orion hadn't gotten the past few months zapped out of his brain. I wanted to talk to him, to drag the truth about his conversation with Dad out of him. Instead, I'd have to put what little bits and pieces I knew together on my own and try to figure it out.

  I tapped over to the phone application and dialed Forsythe's office.

  The line rang. And rang. And rang some more. No voicemail. After a few minutes, I heard a recording. The number you are trying to reach is temporarily out of service. Please try again later.

  "CSD," I rasped, "we need to get back to CSD right now!"

  No explanation was necessary. Devlin threw the car into gear and screamed through the sleepy Christmas Eve morning in Darkwater Bay.

  Chapter 42

  The sound of automatic gunfire was muffled in the morning city mist. The lights of police vehicles were eerily amplified. I clutched Ned's left arm when he pulled his gun. "Wait. We can't just roll into a firefight."

  Devlin slowed down and pulled out his phone. Shelly Finkelstein was on the line in a second. "What's going on at CSD?" he tapped the speaker function so we could all hear.

  "We got an emergency call eight minutes ago," Shelly said, "from security at the morgue. They
said someone was trying to breech the building. Gunfire erupted. We sent backup including SWAT. Where are you?"

  "About a block away. We can see the lights and hear the bullets," Devlin said. "Sounds like it's pretty intense."

  My eyes darted around the neighborhood, wondering if the enemy was sending reinforcements in as well. A black Escalade eased slowly from a driveway and inched past us, headlights off. I grabbed Devlin's arm and jerked it hard. His cell phone clattered to the floor between seat and center console.

  "Dammit, Helen!"

  "That Escalade! Follow it!"

  "What? Why?" He struggled to position himself to retrieve the phone, an awkward proposition to be sure.

  "Because I saw Danny Datello leave Don Weber's press conference in one exactly like that. Go! Go now!"

  He abandoned the phone call with Shelly and whipped the SUV around in the street and sped up in pursuit.

  I called Shelly back on my cell and filled her in on what we knew. "I know he is in that Escalade. He sent men to the hospital trying to find me. He sent men to my house to steal David Ireland's files. When the disk wasn't found, they showed up at CSD to steal whatever it was they knew we found when Ireland's body was exhumed. He's following this, Shelly. He's not taking any chances that someone else gets their hands on that disk."

  "Keep him in sight, but do not apprehend him until I tell you we've got sufficient support, Helen. They're using automatic weapons at the ME's office. Stay on the line and keep me posted with your location. I'm going to make another call."

  I kept the phone pressed to my ear and listened to Shelly dispatching patrol, calling Central Division, Bay View, even Fielding. Before I knew it, cars flanked my Expedition. Two more were in front of the Escalade. More trailed behind us, probably in front but I couldn't see that far in the fog.

  The cars beside us moved up to flank the Escalade and two behind us replaced them at our sides. I peered out the window. The officer in the vehicle looked vaguely familiar, holding the steering wheel in a white knuckle grip. His face was grim and stony. We all understood how wrong this could go in a hurry. God only knew what kind of entourage accompanied the man in the vehicle ahead.