He peered over at his wife. After she bundled her hair up on her head, tendrils from her springy curls slipped down around her face and neck. Fascinating woman – homemaker, interior designer, gardener, wife, cook extraordinaire, researcher, former executive, awe-inspiring lover -- a compendium of many layers and capabilities. He loved and admired her more than he ever thought possible. With reluctance, he turned his attention from his wife back to his monitor, but an idea struck him.
“When you did the mine exploration research last year, do you remember any info about wells on the property?” he asked.
She kept her focus on the screen, made a little mark in the online spreadsheet and sat back to think. “Three as I recall. One in use for the existing home. An old one over to the side of the house and another old well by the entrance to the old mineshaft. Check the original maps Brian retrieved for us and the architectural drawings and plot for the house filed with the county or the town. Trying to unearth another hiding spot?”
“Won’t hurt to inspect the old well holes unless we find the team went over them last year. By the way, the phone records for the known Fuentes numbers will arrive tomorrow. Terry is setting up a database for us. Moll and Brian are in the Midwest making another major pitch for their company.”
“I want to stick with this inventory until I have been through it, then I’ll review those snapshots and other documents once they are scanned. We should assemble a family tree for the Fuentes, noting which relatives are still living along with any info we can find on each person,” Ivy said, reaching up to tuck back a particularly wayward curl that made its way down her cheek.
“Ivy, thanks for working with me.”
“We’re in this together,” she said with a smile. “I’m not sorry to be working on case research again, even if I am tired of these Fuentes.”
Over at the Lindquist Estates, Mathew shadowed Callie and Rick on crush and press, which was often collectively referred to as just crush. As new techniques or considerations popped up, he jotted notes in a little spiral pad he carried in his shirt pocket. With her more advanced understanding, Callie asked questions about the nuances of how Rick planned to handle this year’s harvest as he considered the merits of the grapes.
The odor of ripe fruit lay around them like an invisible miasma cloying in its sweetness. The doors of the production building stood open and fans overhead ran to keep the temperatures constant. Working here, he better understood the way the building contained different rooms to protect the maturing vintages. He stood by the feeding station for the crusher as he now loaded boxes with Fred, dumping white pinot grapes into the hopper, one neat plastic crate at a time.
A big auger de-stemmed the grapes and lightly crushed them before shunting the collected fluid off to a tank. The grape skins and pulp passed down to the presser, which squashed out more juice and stored it for settling overnight. Unlike white grapes, red grapes fermented with their pomace to provide color and tannins. The vats were stirred several times a day since the skins floated to the top.
Callie thrived at the vineyard. She picked up a little tan since returning to Oregon, and her stressed expression gave way to sunny smiles, although today she seemed troubled. When they stopped for lunch, she told him John Henry wanted to meet with both her and Susannah to talk about getting back together.
“What will you do?” Mathew asked. He could feel himself tighten up with concern that Callie would even consider John Henry’s request.
“Discuss it with Susannah when I pick her up at school,” Callie said cautiously, her brow furrowed in a frown. “I do not want to go back or even meet with John Henry, but I have to consider her feelings.”
“Callie, you can’t go back to him. The man is verbally abusive and mean to you.”
“You didn’t know him when times were better. I did. Even so, I don’t want to go back,” Callie said, her eyes filling with tears. “But I worry -- is it right for me to deprive Susannah of her father?
Mathew’s lunch swarmed in circles in his stomach all afternoon as he waited to hear back from Callie. When Susannah appeared, she cast off her usual reserve and surprised him by running over and throwing her arms around his waist.
“We’re staying. We’re staying. We’re staying,” she chanted, laying her little head against him, showing the most affection for him since the kidnapping rescue. “I have been so afraid I would have to go back.”
Mathew understood then that Susannah had been holding back her affection for him because she was afraid the move to Oregon was temporary, and he would be forced to disappear from her life. He squatted down and pulled Susannah into a hug.
“This is your home now, with your mother, your Great Aunt Sassy and your Great Uncle Rick.”
Susannah pulled away to peek up at his face. “And you. My not-uncle-but-still-great Mathew.”
He smiled back at her and nodded, then he glanced over at Callie whose radiant countenance told him how happy she was about Susannah’s decision. She beamed at him and waved, going back to work with extra energy in her stride. He had to hope the miserable John Henry would not fly up to coax Susannah into coming back or to attempt to coerce Callie into returning. The very thought made him more protective of Callie. How long should he stay as only her friend? Should he ask her out on a real date?
Mathew breathed in deeply as Susannah turned to run to her uncle. Flipping cartons into the other side of the crusher, Fred shouted across the machine, “You made a conquest with the little one, bossman. Time to make a move on the mother. A woman like that, she no be alone too long before the men line up down the driveway.”
Even as he glared at Fred, Mathew chewed on the echo of his words. Was he delaying for Callie or because he was afraid of commitment? After crush, he decided to ask her out to dinner up in Portland and take a risk.
The next morning Steve cursed as he clicked off his cell phone. Ivy glanced over at him with a questioning expression on her face.
“DNA shows the bones are of siblings, most likely half-siblings,” he said.
“What?”
“Share one parent, not both.”
“So the mother fooled around,” Ivy said.
“Or the bodies are of two half-brothers. Given their penchant for hiring actors to impersonate them, the bodies may not be the Fuentes,” Steve said with a deep sigh. “We’re going to exhume the remains of the parents, examine their chromosomes and rerun the analysis on the cadavers from the New Mexico house, isolating the genes from each recognized parent.”
Ivy noted Steve no longer referred to the men killed in November 2014 as the Fuentes. “How long before the court order is signed?”
“The paperwork will be submitted to the court this afternoon. I doubt anyone will contest the order, so the judge should sign it in a day or two. Just in case, the FBI staked out the cemetery with the parents’ graves. They have strict orders to detain anyone who approaches their gravesites.”
“You think this is another twist added by the brothers?” Ivy asked.
“Might be,” Steve replied. “You discovering anything in those photographs?”
“Someone, I am guessing the mother, annotated each of the old photos with names and the date taken. Most of the ones I found so far are now deceased. Three to follow-up on. Two may be neighborhood pals. One might be a cousin.”
“What’s his name?”
“Her name is Annetta,” Ivy said as she pulled up the images of the four cousins on her screen and motioned Steve over. “She appears in multiple snapshots during their childhood, particularly with Cristo as they became older.”
“Pretty. Not curvaceous,” Steve said, leaning over Ivy’s shoulder to stare at the image and pointing to the skinny Annetta.
“After the twins turned 17, she isn’t in the snapshots. Three years later, this pic shows the three brothers and another guy who is called Julio. He appears a few times later too.”
After blowing up a photo of Julio and the last one of Annetta on her scree
n, Ivy put up her fingers to block Annetta’s long wavy hair.
Steve bent down to stare at the photos. “And then she transformed into a he?”
“Possible. Note the facial structure and the smile,” Ivy said and took her fingers away.
“I’ll ask the Bureau to run an image comparison and age Julio and Annetta with their electronic software to how he/she will appear in 2014. From the aged versions, I’ll schedule passport comparisons of both personas. Now we have a new person-of-interest. Anything else?”
“Their Uncle Rodrigo, Annetta’s father, was killed in a drive-by shooting around the time she stopped appearing in the prints,” Ivy said.
“See what you can find on Rodrigo. I’ll run his name and any data you find through the criminal databases. Will you work up a chronology listing births, deaths, dates, and so on?”
“Started that along with the family tree. Let me go through the rest of these images and I’ll shoot you a copy. Will hit places like Ancestry.com too,” Ivy said. “One other photo that I found is of two other young men taken around 2002. Names are shown as Ricardo and Maximillian Machado, and the annotation says ‘nephews, leaving for college.' I’m not finding birth records.”
“Could be a later wave of Cuban immigrants after then President Clinton decided to set a quota for Cuba. Wasn’t Machado the Fuentes’ mother’s maiden name?” Steve asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll take those two on to see what I can find. Anything else?”
“Just a question,” Ivy said. “I’m not finding anything in the files about the contacts on the Fuentes’ cell phones. Wouldn’t the takeover team have researched those? Seems like they would be good leads to their underworld associates.”
“I did see a report on that. 90% of the phone numbers were abandoned as soon as the arrest was announced. The names the phone companies had were bogus. None had more than first names or nicknames in the Fuentes’ list of contacts. Of the remaining 10%, a few arrests were made. There weren’t a ton of them. Maybe a half dozen suppliers and about five stateside folks who took the product. Then another group of people like a talent scout in Hollywood for actors, a shady sort of temp labor company in Mexico, and then it goes to mostly legit businesses. I can let you know where the report is.”
“No need. What I can’t understand is why the brothers left their personal stuff, such as the photo album, if they staged their demises.”
“Make the pretense more convincing,” Steve said. He was impressed by Ivy’s findings. “If you became an FBI agent, you’d be in the Bureau’s upper stratum.”
“At least on the investigative part. The actual ops are unnerving.”
He nodded. “No matter how many times I went out, my abs tightened up right before an operation. Never sure if the sensation came from excitement or fear. Might be a combo of both.”
“Promise me one thing,” Ivy said, catching his eye with her commanding tone.
“Ivy, I will not take part in any required action against the Fuentes or any other perp unless you agree to my involvement. However if we are under threat, I will defend you and anyone else in the line of fire.”
“Time to get out in the sun.” Ivy walked over, pulled him to his feet and led him outside to the lower patio. “Kiss me, Agent Nielsen. Kiss me long and slow and give me your pledge again.”
Chapter 14
Down in Caracas around ten in the evening, Cruze waited with Julio in their rental car at a deserted genetic research clinic to learn the study’s outcome on the two femurs and Cruze’s sample. A car came up the street, turned into the lot and parked. The doctor they communicated with a few days before stepped out. He nodded and walked in silence to the building, unlocking the front door and relocking it behind them, before escorting them to his office.
“Sit down, please,” the geneticist said. “You wanted to know if these femurs came from your siblings, yes?”
Cruze nodded.
“Be aware chromosomal studies are not always absolute, but may be open to interpretation. I did run the comparatives multiple ways so as to isolate the genomic material the same as your own.”
“Your conclusions?” Cruze asked.
“The larger one is from your identical twin brother. I am sorry,” the doctor said with a sympathetic tone.
Cruze slumped back in his chair as the significance of the man’s words sank in. He harbored a little hope Cristo might yet be alive so that even as he grieved, a part of him yearned for his brother. When he glanced over at Julio, he realized this news also made him despair.
“The other one is intriguing,” the doctor continued. “I believe he is your half-brother, but the protein sequences show many similarities.”
Cruze sat in silence absorbing this confirmation of the death of his brothers. What was this issue with the distorted genetic makeup? “Eduardo is my brother. My parents devoted themselves to each other.”
“I can only tell you what we find in the samples.”
The doctor walked through the charts, indicating the likenesses and the differences.
“Would these patterns result if a close relative fathered the child?” Julio asked in an undertone.
The doctor nodded. “What you ask is plausible even probable.”
Cruze turned to his cousin, his resentment rising. Why did Julio ask such a question? His mother fool around? Not imaginable.
“Stay calm,” Julio murmured. “Thank you, doctor. Now we want the bones and the file.”
“The rest of my payment?”
Cruze handed him a heavy envelope. The doctor left the room and came back with a wrapped package. Cruze smoothed the wrappings with his hands and slid it into the duffle he brought along. Julio put the report into his slim briefcase.
“You destroyed all documentation, paper and electronic?”
“Wiped clean. No record of the work I did for you. I am known for my discretion.”
Once in the car, Julio headed back to their hotel in downtown Caracas. They rode in silence, each of them mulling over the implications of the findings. After a few blocks Julio said. “When we are back in our suite, we must talk.”
Cruze peered over at Julio, realizing he possessed unshared insights from all those years ago during the mixed-up time when Annetta had vanished, and her father was shot to death. What a horrible year! The same year of his arrest and his time in juvie. Eduardo’s kidnapping had happened then too. For the first time, he wondered if the events were somehow connected. He leaned his head back on the headrest, probing his memory from those days for a thread to bring each event together, back in those months when spring had turned into a hot, humid Miami summer dominated by sadness, anger and desolation. The world whirled around him as his secure adolescence ended not by winding down, but by a series of explosions.
Emotions tore around inside of him, guilt at leaving his brothers to what turned out to be horrible fates, anger at the agents who had killed them, loathing of himself for not wanting to jump into revenging his brothers’ deaths. The loss of the fortune they had accumulated was of no consequence. If only the FBI had taken the money and let his brothers escape. But they had killed Cristo and Eduardo. He must take some action. Now there was this mix-up on the DNA. How could Eduardo not be his full brother? His mother would never have cheated on his father. He refused to believe that of her. It was simply not in her character.
Cruze collapsed forward in the passenger seat, with his hands pressed against his head, trying to hold his thoughts together and force back his emotions. He wanted to yell out his anguish until he went hoarse. He wanted to get out of the car and run until he fell down exhausted. He wanted to turn the clock back and travel through time to save his brothers. But he would do none of those things, even if he could. He inhaled deeply once, twice, three times and sat back up only to hear Julio tell him that they had a car tailing them.
The next day Steve took a swim before lunch, after concentrating on the Fuentes case since four in the morning, stopping on
ly for breakfast. Nearing the end of his freestyle exercise, he noticed that someone stood at the far end of the pool. He finished the lap and stopped, took off his goggles, let his eyes refocus and realized the person was Callie. A quick smile flitted across her face and disappeared as she wove a strand of hair around her finger.
“I can wait until you finish your workout,” she called out in a high, thin voice.
“Four more laps.” He put the goggles back on, completed his workout with a slower, cool down backstroke, bounded out of the lane by the far end, toweled off and put on his navy terry-cloth robe. He walked back to where Callie stood balanced on one foot the way a child might when nervous.
“Hey Callie, you here to talk with me?” he asked.
“About Mathew,” she said, her voice still thin with concern. “Do you want me to come back later?”
“It’s warm today. Let’s sit outside.”
They pulled two lawn chairs over to a sunny spot. Callie sat in silence, twisting her hands together. She was an attractive woman with her long dark hair and brown, almost black eyes. Her high cheekbones set off her other features, making him wonder if Native American blood might be part of her heritage. When she shrugged off the burdensome mantle John Henry had heaped on her shoulders, he expected her to blossom into a beauty, becoming even more eye-catching over time in the way Ivy flourished as she embraced this next third of her life.
“The quicker you get out what you came to say, the sooner you will be out of the agony of not speaking,” Steve said.
“You’re Mathew’s best friend, right?”
“He could be my son. Did he do anything out of line?”
“He asked me out to dinner,” Callie said.
“Can’t say that is out of line. If you don’t want to go, tell Mathew and tell him why,” Steve said, although Callie must have more on her mind than she was saying.
New Growth (Spook Hills Trilogy Book 2) Page 13