Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  “I don’t expect you to believe any of this,” he said. “And the only reason I’m telling you any of it is because if you do believe it, then you’ll understand these people aren’t ordinary. If anyone can find your son, they will. They won’t do it in any conventional sense, Suki, but they’ll do it.”

  Suki didn’t know whether to laugh, pat him on the back, and placate him about his delusion, or lunge out of the car and run like hell. Instead, she did nothing. She had known plenty of bullshit artists in her decades in the movie industry—she was married to one of the masters of bullshit—and felt certain that Blake wasn’t in that category. But if he wasn’t, then what the hell was he?

  “So in this scenario that you’re describing, you chose to stay in 1968 while Mira, Annie, and Shep returned to their time. That would mean that you aged as though you had been born in the early fifties.”

  “Yes. There are still a lot of details we don’t understand about what happened and about the repercussions. Shep developed acute claustrophobia. Annie seems to have become more psychic. Those effects may just be the surface. And we aren’t sure yet about Mira. Based on a couple of remarks she has made, I think her abilities may be changing somehow. But she doesn’t talk much about it.”

  “So these repercussions are because of this time sickness you mentioned?”

  “Maybe. It could have been caused by a virus, like herpes, and once you catch it, the virus never leaves your body. It’s just there. Or it could be related to something else entirely. We just don’t know enough.”

  “What happened to Wheaton?”

  Blake rubbed his jaw and shrugged. “A younger version of Wheaton escaped. The version of Wheaton that I knew, who took Annie, died.”

  “How is that possible?”

  He shrugged and didn’t answer immediately. “Sliding Doors. Did you see it?”

  “One of my favorites. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a choice and that choice results in two different probabilities.”

  “It was the same thing with Wheaton, except there were a lot of choices, a lot of possibilities. Shep and Mira cite quantum physics when they’re explaining it. The Many Worlds Theory. But me? I just think about Sliding Doors.”

  “Why did you stay back in the Sixties?”

  “I wasn’t about to go back to my family. My old man was an abusive alcoholic, my childhood was pretty bad. I was Wheaton’s heir—and he had plenty of money, property, goods. I had quite a bit of knowledge about the future of the stock market, land, that kind of thing, so I made a lot of money through the years.”

  He touched her arm, a soft, almost hesitant touch, yet it electrified her skin. “Tango Key is…” He paused, struggling to find the right words, the right description. “An anomaly. Inexplicable, mysterious, both a riddle and an answer. Mira, Shep, Annie, Nadine, Goot, their circles of friends… all of them are part of whatever’s happening here. And now you and Adam are part of it too. You’re connected to the island’s magic. You can deny it, you can rant and rave and even leave. But in the end, it always comes back to this place. It’s like myth. It grabs hold of you and won’t let go.”

  They were in a parking lot now, the engine silent, the windows open to the humid summer air. And right at that moment, she felt as if she had been inducted into some secret society, a circle of alchemists or ancient magicians, a weird X-File that even Scully and Mulder had failed to decipher.

  “Your thoughts?” he asked after a few moments.

  Surrounded by the surreal, the inexplicable, the ridiculous, she started laughing. She laughed until tears coursed down her cheeks. She laughed because she didn’t know what else to do, and Blake laughed too. At some point during all that nervous, silly laughter, she grasped his hand, the hand that was missing a finger that had been cut off in 1968, even though he’d been born in 1985, and clung to it like a drowning woman clutching a rubber ducky in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  Chapter 14

  Research

  In the weeks since Sheppard had moved out of Mira’s place, his office had expanded into the staff room and now looked like a small apartment. Two couches, a fridge, a two-burner stove, sink, shower, TV, and a conference table for six. The office was wireless and it was working.

  With a pot of fresh Cuban coffee and a platter of snacks to fortify the group—Mira, Suki, Blake, Goot, and himself—he brought Suki and Blake up to speed on the investigation and the night’s events. He also passed out copies of the police artist’s rendition of the man known as Spenser Wickett and Spenser Titnble.

  Suki stared at the picture, the blood drained from her face, and she suddenly said, “I’ve seen this guy. In April, I think it was, I was in the grocery store. It was crowded. I came around the end of an aisle and this cart slammed into mine. It jarred me and I… I glanced up and there he was. Just staring at me. In this picture, his eyes are all wrong. He has really intense, piercing eyes. They creeped me out. He creeped me out. Anyway, he apologized and then hurried on past me.”

  “Do you remember seeing him at any other time?” Mira asked.

  Saki shook her head. “Not after that. I’m not sure about before April. But even when he ran into me in the grocery store in April, I knew I’d seen him before. I just can’t remember where or when.”

  “Maybe it will come to you as we move along here,” Sheppard said. “Our guy was on the island yesterday afternoon. He gave a DVD to one of the reporters outside your use, Saki. It’s a home video of him and Adam. If you prefer not to see this, I…”

  Her face went hard. “I want to see it.”

  Sheppard dimmed the lights, turned on the DVD player, and the TV screen lit up. The seven minutes and seven seconds of video seemed to pass with an agonizing slowness. At one point, Saki asked him to pause it. She got up and walked over to the TV screen, studying one of the clearer images of Adam and his kidnapper.

  “There’s something so eerily familiar about this guy, but I… I can’t place it. Can you make prints of this image, Shep?”

  He said he would, and she sat down again and watched the rest of the DVD without saying anything. When he turned the lights back on, Mira looked at him strangely, frowning. He didn’t know what it meant.

  Sheppard flipped the chalkboard around so they could all see it. “We’re about to do something in here that’s outside of Bureau protocol. So what happens in this room has to stay in this room. Each of you will have access to every database the Bureau has at its disposal. With five of us working various databases, we’re going to find what we need much more quickly. And here it is in a nutshell.”

  He pointed at the chalkboard. It held two lists: every component of information that they needed and the database and password where it might be found. “We know that Spenser C. Timble or Spenser C. Wickett is the man we want. That’s not his name now, but we need everything we can find on him when he was these two people. We need the history of Suki’s house and who lived there when there was a fire. The Mango Hill house is old, built around 1940, so we have a lot of years to cover. But those years can be narrowed somewhat.

  “Mira believes this guy is between the ages of thirty and forty and that he was four to six years of age when he was taken from the Mango Hill house. That would put us somewhere between 1964 and 1974. Let’s extend it a couple Y years on either side, say from 1962 to 1976, just to be sate. Once we know who owned the house when our guy Spense lived there, we’ll have more information to go on.

  “We know he’d been watching the Nicholses for quite some time, learning their routines, their habits. We’re fairly certain he used a boat to take Adam from Tango to someplace else. But his scrutiny of the family was seriously compromised by Danielle, so I think it’s pretty safe to narrow our boat search to vessels that have been in the Tango marinas since Danielle. We need the type of vessel and owner.”

  “What about coves?” Blake asked. “There’re a lot of boats in the coves around the island. They’re unregulated.”

  “If you drop anchor within three
miles of the Tango Key coast, you’re required to register with the county. That law has been in effect since 9/11.”

  “Just because he’s supposed to register doesn’t mean he would,” Goot remarked.

  “I think he tries to follow rules as closely as he can without endangering himself,” Mira said. “That’s how he has stayed off the grid for so long. Given his history with names, he probably uses several names in his life now. Maybe he has one name for his license and registration and another name for the title to his home, to pay his property taxes, that kind of thing.”

  “How do we know he owns his home?” Blake asked.

  “I got an impression of a two-story house, on water,” Mira replied. “He owns it. I’m sure of it.”

  Blake nodded. “I’ll do the search for boats.”

  “I’d like to research the house history,” Suki said.

  “I’ll do the search for Wickett Timble,” Goot said.

  “And I’m going to play with this artist’s software” Mira said, “and come up with a likeness of the redhead I saw him with.”

  “Great.” Sheppard nodded, pleased they had each found a niche. “I’ll check on every house purchase between Tango Key and Big Pine for the last year. Somewhere in all this information, we’ll find connections, links. Help yourselves to food, more coffee, or a couch if you need to rest. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Recently, Sheppard had read an interview with legendary physicist John Wheeler in which he speculated that information was at the root--’Of all existence. He contended that the essence of anything—from a stone to a star to an atom—lay in the information it contained. Wheeler was referring to the notion that the universe is participatory, that it adapted to man just as man adapted to the universe. In much the same way, Sheppard believed that the key to finding Spenser Wickett Timble, or whatever name he used now, was to immerse themselves in the flow of information he had generated over the course of his lifetime—and then to interact with that flow.

  Sheppard decided to start his search with the first six months of 2003. Based on Mira’s impressions, he eliminated Tango Key from his search criteria and requested a list of waterfront-home purchases from Key West to Big Pine Key. To narrow the search, he asked for cash purchases only. The list was absurdly long. Where had all these people made their money anyway? In the illicit drug trade? The dot-com boom? Inheritances? Politics? Lobbying? Oil?

  He copied the list into another program and broke it down four different ways—alphabetically, by date, by island, and by purchase price, and printed everything out. He brought up detailed street maps for each island and placed the homes at their appropriate addresses. He automatically eliminated homes in gated developments; it seemed unlikely that their guy would invite the scrutiny of security guards, cameras, passes, and the other types of scrutiny that gated communities used. Also, docks in gated communities wouldn’t be very private.

  Even if Spenser had cleaned up financially during the dot-com boom, as Tina Richardson had said, would he spend a million bucks on a home? He had survived all these years by maintaining a low profile. However, given the price of real estate in the Keys, Sheppard doubted there were lots left in the Keys for less than a million, never mind homes. So even if Spenser had bought a home in the million-dollar range, it wouldn’t be out of step with what was normal for real-estate prices here.

  Sheppard scanned the printout of homes listed by price: They ranged from $450,000 to five million. He began at the lower end, 450K to 750K, and paused, wondering if he should eliminate the corporate owners. If a lot of the home owners were involved in illicit activities, then they might be hiding behind offshore corporations. He decided to keep the corporate owners and run searches on them later. He now had over two hundred homes, a staggering number. And where was he supposed to go from here?

  It would take days to run a check on every corporation, address, owner. And they didn’t have days.

  Until he had another block of information, he had reached a dead end.

  He printed out five copies of the list and passed them out. “This is as far as I can go with what we’ve got,” he said.

  “I’ve got something,” Suki exclaimed. “Maybe this will help. May 17, 1975. Here come five copies.” She passed them around as they slid from the printer.

  Local Boy Still Missing,

  Mother in Coma

  TANGO KEY. No one knows what happened to Spenser Longwood, 6, or to his mother, Joy Longwood, 30, a math teacher at Tango Key High. She lies in critical condition in the burn unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. She was found unconscious by firefighters yesterday morning, May 16, in the driveway of her home at 243 Mango Hill Drive. She was airlifted to Jackson and hasn’t regained consciousness. Her son, a student at Tango Elementary School, is missing.

  According to Detective Glenn Kartauk of the Tango Key Police Department, the cause of the fire that destroyed several rooms in the Longwood home hasn’t been determined yet. “At this point, we don’t have any leads about the whereabouts of Spenser Longwood. We are hopeful that Mrs. Longwood will regain consciousness and be able to provide details about what happened.”

  If you have information concerning the events at Mango Hill Drive, please contact Detective Kartauk at 305-555-9862.

  Included in the article were photographs of Joy and Spenser Longwood.

  “Oh, my God,” Mira said softly. “This is the presence I saw in Adam’s room. And the detective’s name… how would you all pronounce that?”

  Sheppard grinned and snapped his fingers. “Car talk. That was the phrase you picked up. This guy is car talk. Now we just have to track him down.”

  “I’ll do that,” Goot said, and went to work.

  “Wait, there’s more,” Suki added. “Joy Longwood died on May 19, 1975. In an article several months later, the Gazette ran a follow-up on Spenser’s disappearance. Kartauk was still on the case, but nothing had turned up. A year later, there was another follow-up. The boy was still missing. No mention of Kartauk.”

  Sheppard took it all in, filing the facts away in his head. “Suki, we need to know when Joy bought the house, where she came from, anything and everything that’s pertinent. Newspaper databases are good. We subscribe to a dozen archives. All the passwords and log-ins are on the board.”

  While she worked the archives, he went into the Social Security database and entered Joy Longwood’s name and date of death. While the search engine churned away, he glanced through the house-purchase list for Longwood, found nothing, and did a property records search for Longwood in both Tango and Monroe counties. No Longwood. Too easy.

  But the SSA was more helpful. Her DOB was listed as February 3, 1945, place of birth New Haven, Connecticut. Armed with that information, he got her Social Security number and ran it through every database to which the Bureau had access, and through some federal databases he had access to only because his boss had arranged it years ago.

  From 1970 to 1975, Joy Longwood filed taxes as a single mother, with one deduction for her son, C. Spenser Longwood. But between 1968 and 1970, she had two deductions—Spenser and another son, Lyle, both boys born on the same date, August 27, 1969. Twins. What happened to Lyle? And who was the father?

  Sheppard ran the names and dates of birth of the sons through ancestry.com, one of the bureau’s subscription services, but only Joy Longwood was listed as a parent. When he searched for a death entry on Lyle, nothing turned up.

  Another dead end?

  “Okay, here’s the deal on Kartauk,” said Goot. “It looks like he left Tango Key in the early eighties to teach criminology at the University of Florida. He was involved in the search for Adam Walsh, acted as a consultant on John Walsh’s TV show, and that subsequently led to a consultant position on CNN.”

  “So as a result of the Longwood case, he became a recognized expert in criminal law,” Blake remarked.

  “Looks that way. And then he went on to teach at the University of Florida. Here’s his e-mail a
ddress and a department number.” He ticked it off. “But it’s summer, so who knows where he is?”

  Just as Sheppard finished dashing off an e-mail to Kartauk, there was a knock at the door, then: “Hey, Shep. It’s Charlie Cordoba. You going to unlock the door or what?”

  Everyone exchanged glances. Sheppard rolled his eyes and spoke quietly. “We share, but not everything. Not about Kartauk.”

  They all nodded in agreement.

  “Hold on, Charlie,” Sheppard called, then unlocked the door, opened it wide, and grinned. “Busted.”

  Cordoba’s eyes swept around the room. “What the hell? My men are out there busting their butts in overtime, and you five are mighty cozy in here, in the air-conditioning.” He pinned Sheppard with his dark, weasel eyes. “What’s going on, Sheppard?”

  “Pull up a chair, Charlie, and we’ll fill you in.”

  “Got a list of boats and owners for every single marina on Tango and for all the vessels that have dropped anchor in the coves in the last six months” Blake announced.

  “Great. Print out six copies. Suki, anything else?”

  “She bought the house in 1970, went to work for the school system the same year. I still can’t find anything on where she came from.” She flashed a smile at Cordoba. “We’ve made headway, Charlie.”

  “Wonderful,” he drolled.

  Sheppard prepared a folder for Cordoba that included everything except information on Kartauk, and handed it to him. “Here you go, Charlie. See if you can come up with anything else along these lines. I think we’re calling it a night here. Good work, people.”

  But Cordoba didn’t get up. He opened the folder and started paging through the material. Sheppard ignored him. “Goot, is eight too early for you in the morning?”

  “No, amigo, I’m cool.”

  “Excuse me, but my men have been on duty all night, keeping an eye on the docks and the marinas,” Cordoba said.