Dead and Gone (A Thriller)

by William Casey Moreton

  Indeed, Harris Shelby was snoring loudly.

  Dexter stood at the foot of the bed, gun in hand, savoring the moment. The senator had no idea what was in store for him. The gun had a silencer attached to the barrel so that no one outside the room would hear it being fired. He unzipped a pocket on the backpack and removed a syringe and a tiny bottle of clear solution. He pushed the needle through the lid and pulled several cc’s of solution into the plastic cylinder of the syringe. Then he tapped the needle and pressed the plunger to removed any air bubbles.

  He raised the gun and aimed it at Shelby’s head, and with the other hand reached over to a lamp on a long table against the wall and touched the switch. The lamplight seemed blindingly bright compared to the prior darkness. Shelby twitched suddenly, shielding his face from the light with an upraised palm.

  “Wake up,” Dexter said through the ski mask.

  The senator froze. He stared at the gun aimed at his face.

  “It is in your best interest to keep your mouth shut,” Dexter said. He watched Shelby’s eyes drift toward the door. “One word is all it would take. Then I’d blow your head off. I wouldn’t hesitate to do it, Senator. Do you understand?”

  Shelby nodded slowly, reluctantly.

  Dexter held the gun steady as he reached down and flung the bedding aside, leaving Shelby exposed. Shelby was dressed only in his boxers. His legs were outstretched.

  “Hold still,” Dexter said, stabbing the needle of the syringe into the flesh between two of Shelby’s toes and compressing the plunger.

  “Who are you?” Shelby growled through gritted teeth.

  “I’m nobody,” Dexter answered.

  “What are you putting in me?”

  “Just a little something to encourage you to cooperate.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Go to sleep, Senator. We will talk again very soon.”

  Dexter pulled the needle away and dumped the syringe back inside the pocket of the pack. Shelby immediately felt the room begin to sway and tilt. Then everything around him faded to black.

  * * *

  The contents of the first syringe was intended to simply make Shelby docile enough for Dexter to get him out of bed and into a chair and tie him down. A second syringe contained a drug designed to encourage Shelby to reveal any information he was asked for. This was injected into his upper arm as he slowly came out of the deeply hazy state produced by the first injection.

  Dexter had prepared a list of questions. When Shelby was lucid enough to respond coherently to the interrogation, Dexter began the process, speaking slowly and deliberately so that Shelby could hear and understand, then answer accurately.

  The Q&A session lasted half an hour, at the end of which, Dexter was confident that the plan had been a success. He was seated at a table by the window with a laptop open and a jump drive plugged into a USB port. He had used the hotel’s wifi access to connect to several banks around the world. Based on the technical information Shelby had provided under the spell of the designer pharmaceuticals injected into his arm, Dexter had been able to move a hundred million dollars into more than a dozen offshore numbered accounts. He was suddenly a very wealthy man.

  Dexter closed the laptop and zipped it back inside the pack.

  “Thank you for your assistance, Senator,” he said when the transfers were complete. “It’s been great doing business with you.”

  Shelby was still in a haze, his head rocking back and forth on his shoulders. All of his answers had been provoked by the drugs and completely involuntary. He would have no memory of the conversation. Part of the beauty of the drug was that his memory of the past twelve hours would be wiped clean like it never happened. None of that really mattered to Dexter because he didn’t intend for Shelby to wake up. That’s what the third syringe was for.

  He uncapped the needle and filled the cylinder with a toxic solution that would cause the body to shut down and the heart to stop within ninety-seconds. The drug was powerful and death would be painless.

  “I’m kinda sad to see you go out like this, Harrison,” Dexter said, without a hint of empathy or sentimentality in his tone. “You might have made a great president, but now we will never know. That’s too bad, but that’s how it goes sometimes, right?”

  Dexter grinned as he thrust the tip of the needle into Shelby’s arm and injected the toxin. Shelby’s eyes were so heavy he couldn’t make eye contact. Within a few moments his body started to relax as the drug was carried along by his bloodstream. Dexter watched with great interest as his eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled back into his head. Then Shelby’s head rocked forward and his mouth gaped open. That was how he died.

  Dexter cut him loose from the chair and removed a large nylon bag that had been folded into a tight bundle inside his backpack. He wrestled Shelby’s body into the bag and zipped it shut. Then he dragged the body to the window where he had entered and clipped a carabiner onto a stout loop on one end of the bag to prepare it for the journey up the side of the building. He stripped out of the Lycra outfit and dressed in something casual from the senator’s suitcase and put the ball cap back on his head. He leaned out the door to check the hall and saw no one. Everyone was asleep. As expected.

  He took an elevator up and again found his way to the roof. It was labor intensive hauling Shelby up by the rope. More so than he had imagined. He did the work hand over hand, sweat dripping from his reddened face. At last he managed to haul the heavy nylon bag up over the cement ledge, then collapsed, out of breath, lying on his back and staring up at the sky.

  Dexter had a laundry cart ready. He emptied out the bath towels and hoisted the bag with Shelby’s body over and in. It was an awkward effort, the weight of the body shifting and flopping. Then he covered the body with the bath towels and pushed the laundry cart to the service elevator for the brief ride to the hotel’s basement.

  The door opened and he was pleased to see no hotel staff working there at the moment. He transferred the body to a large Dumpster and shifted the garbage around inside to distract curious eyes. The process took less than a full minute. He glanced around nervously, his pulse racing. He needed to return to the room and get some sleep.

  He used the senator’s key to enter the senator’s room. He took a shower and vomited until there was nothing left to purge. His hands were shaking. He had actually done it. It seemed impossible. He wanted to smile but felt too sick inside. He needed to get some sleep. Tomorrow would be a big day. When he woke up he would no longer be Dexter, he would finally be Shelby Harrison. He had awaited this moment for a very long time.

  CHAPTER 31

  I awoke to the crackle of thunder.

  The lights were still on. The apartment was quiet. Outside it was still dark. I leaned forward on my elbow to gaze across the New York cityscape. I love this city so much. It is a place of endless exploration and mystery. I’ve lived in the country and could never return. I will die in a place like this, but hopefully not any time soon. It was already raining.

  It was still very early. I’d slept only a few hours. My head felt thick and my eyes didn’t want to open. I staggered to the kitchen to put coffee on. The rooms felt empty and devoid of life. My best friend had lived here. Without his presence it was just some random piece of New York real estate. I took a cup of coffee and strolled casually to the bathroom attached to the master bedroom. The bathroom where Terry had died. I sat on the toilet with my coffee and stared across the tile floor at the bathtub. My vision blurred as tears swelled. It was a beautiful bathroom but felt cold and sterile. A movie played in my head of how it might have happened, Terry standing in the tub, then losing his footing and falling, the back of his head striking the edge of the tub. The movie replayed. It would have happened quickly, with no time to react. That’s the way accidents happen. In the blink of an eye. Accidents happen everyday, some fatal, some not. It’s luck of the draw, I guess. Terry could take the same fall another hundred times and walk away with nothing more than some
bruising and a gargantuan headache. But this particular time his ticket had gotten punched and the blow was fatal.

  I set my coffee on the bathroom counter and walked over to the tub. I stepped in, one foot and then the other. There were police markings where the forensic people had done their work. The bottom of the tub was mostly dry, just a few remaining beads of water that hadn’t managed to drain when the plug was pulled. I stood facing the hot and cold knobs. The movie in my head began to play again, but this time I was the star, and I went through the motions, imagining one foot slipping out from under me as my weight shifted. I simulated tilting backwards, then squatted in the tub until I was in a sitting posture, then put my legs out straight and rested my head against the lip of the tub. This was supposedly how my friend had come to rest a few nights ago. It gave me chills.

  Slipping on a wet surface was an everyday occurrence. There was nothing sexy about it. Other than dying in your sleep or choking on a chicken bone, it seemed like the most anticlimactic way to check out. I was certain Terry was sitting on a cloud somewhere looking down, very pissed.

  I stood up and stepped out. I leaned against the counter and sipped my coffee. Terry had an amazing laugh. Big and bold and full of charisma. His personality attracted people like a magnet. Nobody told a story like him. That was one of the things I knew I’d miss most. He could describe an afternoon at the DMV and make it sound like a charming adventure. He had never taken life very seriously. I already missed his laugh.

  * * *

  Dexter opened his eyes. He had not slept at all. His mind wouldn’t settle. It was still dark out, still hours before dawn. He was alone in bed, alone in the room. He glanced around at the shapes and shadows, then stared at the ceiling. He had a big day ahead. There was much to accomplish, and none of it had to do with campaigning for political office.

  His real name, of course, wasn’t Dexter. It wasn’t Harrison Shelby, either. His real name was Terry Burgess. The road to this moment had been long and complicated, and it had required infinite patience. Terry stared at the ceiling and attempted to quiet his breathing as reality began to fully sink in. He was beyond the point of return. He had now killed two men.

  He pushed the top cover aside and sat up, swinging his feet to the floor. A few short hours ago he had murdered his brother and hauled him to the roof before disposing of the corpse. His brother had been asleep in this very bed. Harrison had never seen it coming. The plan had been subtle but brilliant. They had been identical twins, so now Terry could simply slide into his brother’s life and no one would ever know the difference. He didn’t intend to require Harrison’s identity for long. This was only a temporary arrangement.

  The senator’s cell phone was on the nightstand. Terry picked it up and scrolled through the list of contacts in the address book. The drugs he had injected into Harrison had provided a wealth of information. In fact, the drugs had worked far better than Terry could have ever imagined. Harrison had never seen his face because of the ski mask. What would he have thought or said if he had? They hadn’t spoken in years. It would have a been a shock to know he was dying by his own brother’s hand.

  One small crucial nugget of valuable information Terry had gleaned from the drug-altered conversation with Harrison was the name of a man in Washington, D.C. His name was Felix.

  Terry had known very little about his brother. They had never had a true relationship. Only during a short span during college had they spent any time around each other at all. The same was true of Hank as well. Hank was the third brother, the triplet, the youngest of the three. Though Terry’s knowledge of Harrison had been limited, he had believed he knew enough to develop some very strong suspicions about the man’s nature based on Terry’s personal awareness of himself. This awareness told him that Harrison was greedy and wouldn’t be able to be married to a vastly wealthy woman without being tempted to embezzle money from her, slowly and systematically. It turned out his suspicions had been spot on. Under the spell of the drugs, Harrison had confessed to stealing a hundred million dollars from his wife and hiding it in dozens of international bank accounts. Then, prompted by a series of precisely worded questions, Harrison had listed the account numbers, as well as the ID’s and passwords needed to access the money in each account. Felix in Washington was the computer whiz who had moved the money around the world and the only other person on earth aware of the existence of the missing millions.

  Terry wanted the money. His plan was to take the money and disappear. Doing so had required killing both of his brothers. He had done it without interference from sentimentality. Killing Hank had been simple, and he could still see his younger brother lying dead in the bathtub of the apartment, his neck having snapped upon contact with the edge of the tub. Harrison, of course, had been logistically more complicated and infinitely more risky, but Terry had risen to the challenge without hesitation. Chasing the hundred million dollars had been a thrill from the outset.

  He set Harrison Shelby’s suitcase on the bed. There were several hanging bags with suits lined up on the metal rod in the closet. He dressed in one of Harrison’s suits and checked himself in the mirror. The suit was Armani. Terry looked and felt like a million bucks. No one would be able to tell them apart. If he wanted to he could walk through life as Harrison Shelby and no one would blink an eyelash. But Terry didn’t want Harrison’s life. That wasn’t his goal. He had no interest in being married to that rich bitch and wasting his life like a piece of meat being ground up by political machinery. He simply wanted to fade away and vanish into paradise without a care in the world.

  The sun would be up soon. He needed to get ahead of the day. He stared out the window at the city and called Felix. The call went to voice mail so he dialed again. This time Felix answered. He sounded half asleep.

  “What time is it?” Felix said.

  “Time to wake up.”

  “I was having an amazing dream.” His speech was slurred.

  “Sorry, dream time is over.”

  “Harry?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Hey, man, is….is there a problem?”

  “No problems,” Terry assured him. “I just need you to push some cash around for me.”

  Terry heard him grunt as he switched on a lamp and rose from bed. Then he heard water running in a sink.

  “Um…yeah, easy breezy, man,” Felix said. “Which account?”

  “All of them.”

  Felix was silent a beat.

  “How much? And where do you want to move it?”

  “All of it. I have some new account numbers for you. Dump the money into the new accounts and then burn the paper trail. Take your usual fee and give yourself a nice little bonus. I need it done within the hour.”

  Another small silence. Felix knew better than to ask too many questions. His job was to keep his eyes down and do as told.

  “Not a problem. Can do,” Felix said. “I will just need your user name and passwords for each account, Harry.”

  “Of course,” Terry said, ready with all the information Harrison had provided, along with the wiring info for the new accounts.

  Terry waited as Felix logged in online and jumped through the phalanx of security measures for each bank. A lump formed in Terry’s throat as he listened to the chatter of the computer keyboard over the telephone line.

  Felix confirmed the details when the transactions were complete.

  “Good work,” Terry said. He wasn’t sure about small talk. Clearly his voice was familiar enough to be passable for the senator, but he had no idea how chummy Shelby had been with Felix. The hacker struck him as an interesting guy, but he was still just a voice on the line and he had to be careful. It was important to keep the conversation brief and strictly business. Move the money and get off the phone before he flubbed something and Felix had the chance to get suspicious.

  “Is that it?” Terry asked.

  “That’s it, dude.”

  “Go back to bed and forget this conversati
on ever happened.”

  “Done and done,” Felix replied.

  Terry dropped the call and logged onto his laptop, verifying the deposits in his new accounts online. There it was! One hundred million dollars. Every dime of it. Just sitting there. A string of digits in cyberspace. Terry could barely breathe. He couldn’t believe he had pulled it off.

  Now all he had to do was catch a flight out of the country and find a place to hide.

  * * *

  There was a problem with Senator Shelby. His schedule for the day was crazy busy and there wasn’t time to waste, but he wasn’t feeling well. Apparently, it wasn’t something small. Word quickly spread that Shelby had spent the morning puking his guts out.

  Blake McConnell was coming out of his skin. They had carefully choreographed the day, and already they were having to make cancellations before they’d even stepped out the door. McConnell was on his fourth cup of coffee by 6 a.m., buzzing from room to room, screaming into his cell phone, barking orders, glaring at anyone who dared to make eye contact. McConnell had his heart set on a White House staff position, and had no intention of letting something as ridiculous as the flu dash his dreams. A physician had been called in but Shelby refused to come out of his room. He just needed sleep, he insisted. The doctor waited patiently in the lobby.

  McConnell had spent a few minutes in Shelby’s room and seen the vomit on the floor and the bed. He almost did some vomiting of his own because of the stench.

  Shelby said he couldn’t get out of bed. He’d be fine tomorrow, he assured them. Clearly he’d picked up one of those damn bugs somewhere and needed twenty-four hours to sleep it off. McConnell tried to argue with him but it was a short discussion. The physician was sent away without seeing the patient.

  Behind the locked door of his room, Terry felt fine. He was seated at a table by the window, hunched over his laptop, making final travel preparations for the coming days. He had no intention of campaigning for anything, and so he had needed an excuse to not follow through with Shelby’s hectic day. The solution had been to feign illness. This was accomplished easily enough with a bottle of Ipecac. It was an over-the-counter product found at any corner pharmacy and was used to induce vomiting. Terry had twisted off the lid and cringed as he ingested the brown liquid. It tasted like tree sap.