The Letter Keeper

by Charles Martin

  “What choice do we have?”

  “My gut tells me this guy wants to bleed me slowly. This is just the first cut. Nobody goes through all this simply for a good giggle. Somehow we’ve got to get in front of him.”

  I could hear Bones scratching his beard. “If he knows we’re on to him, then why sell the funeral? He knows. So why keep up the charade? But if I walk in there and tell all of them it was a ruse, we lose all credibility.”

  “Which is exactly what this guy wants.”

  Bones muttered in agreement. “He’s trying to cause those who’ve placed their faith in us to lose their faith in us.”

  “Delay it. We don’t need to put them through the emotional torture of a funeral if we can prevent it. Tell them I got called away and we need to tend to Clay. Buy a week.”

  “Agreed.”

  Three days had now passed since the explosion, and I’d only slept in fits. Moments here and there. So I returned to my storage shed, pulled the door down, collapsed on my cot, and caught a few hours’ sleep, knowing Bones would call me if anything showed.

  Twenty-four quiet hours passed. I tried to sleep, but every time I dozed off, helplessness woke me. On the morning of the fourth day, my phone rang. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Try me.”

  “Remember the party house in Palm Beach that was destroyed?”

  “The one where I found Casey?”

  “Yep.”

  “Let me guess . . . Casey’s tracker just came online. At that house.”

  “And this time with a pulse.”

  Gone Fiction had been blown to pieces, so a water approach wasn’t feasible unless I rented or stole a boat, which I didn’t have time to do. So I threw a leg over the bike and began riding east. Twenty-seven minutes later, I was staring at the house.

  Last time I’d been here, the house had been destroyed by the party of all parties. There were motorcycles in the pool, giant lizards and monkeys running around the backyard, two feet of water in the living room, and a human bowling alley upstairs. Since then, the house had been bought by someone else and placed under renovation. If $2 million had been inflicted in damage, they were improving it by $4 million.

  Bones spoke in my ear as I parked the bike. “The tracker is still reading a pulse.”

  I glanced at my phone. “I see that.”

  Given the enormity of the project, twenty-four-hour security had been stationed at a guard gate. The guard was reading a comic book and eating potato chips. I skirted the guard house, hopped the fence, and made my way inside. The improvements made the house unrecognizable, but I crept upstairs, through the second and third floors, and into the loft apartment where I first found Casey.

  The water was not running and there was no steam. But I did find a body lying in the shower. A live person. A beautiful girl. Maybe fourteen. But she wasn’t Casey any more than the mannequin was Ellie.

  I knelt and gently shook her. She rubbed her eyes, sat up, and stared at me. A little bit shocked. Slightly afraid. But also looking like a fish out of water. The necklace was hanging around her neck. I pointed. “You mind telling me where you got that?”

  She protected it with her right hand. “Guy gave it to me.”

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “Same guy.”

  “What happened?”

  “He paid me to sit here. Said somebody would be along in about thirty minutes. I was tired so I laid down. Am I in trouble?”

  “No. Did you know the guy?”

  She shook her head.

  “Ever seen him?”

  Another shake.

  “You live far from here?”

  “Forty-five minutes.”

  “Can you get a ride home?”

  “Don’t need one. That’s my brother in the security shack. He lets me sit by the pool on Sundays when no one’s working. This guy came up and gave me this and offered us both money to keep quiet.” She proffered the necklace. “Is this yours?”

  I stared at it. Then her. “It was.”

  She took it off and handed it to me.

  I closed her fingers around it. “You keep it. I don’t think the previous owner is going to want it anymore.”

  I stepped outside. Bones had heard all of that, so I didn’t need to fill him in. “What now?” I asked.

  Bones was silent. When he did speak, his frustration was evident. “I got nothing.”

  “We’re chasing our tails here.”

  Bones agreed. “Wild-goose chase.”

  I glanced at my phone but the screen was blank. No signals. No trackers. “Bones? There are three scared girls and one scared woman out there right now. We need a break. Or I’m afraid I’m too late.”

  “If you were doing to us what is currently being done to us, what would you do next? Where would you fake the tracker?”

  “One of two places: either my rock off Key West or my island.”

  “One is about a nine-hour drive from the other.”

  I agreed. “We’ve got a fifty-fifty shot at being right.”

  “You’re three hours from Key West.”

  I could make it by sundown if I hurried.

  I drove south down U.S. 1 over the Card Sound Bridge and then through the Keys. If I couldn’t make the trip by boat, then motorcycle would be my second choice. Although I’d rather have Summer sitting behind me.

  I drove quickly. Paying little attention to speed limits. I drove through Islamorada, where the traffic had cleared for some reason, so I gave it more throttle. The last time I looked down I was traveling 127 mph.

  I reached Key West at noon and rented a hotel room overlooking my rock jutting up and out of the water like a submerged Volkswagen on the southern end of the key. From my perch on the second story, I could see anyone coming or going, so I spent the afternoon staring at the rock where I’d spent hours purging my soul.

  Toward evening, Bones called. “Anything?”

  “Tourists.”

  “You sure you’d pick that rock if you were him?”

  “Only other thing I could think of would be Sisters of Mercy, but what does Marie have to do with either Angel or Summer?”

  “No idea. But it’s worth a look. How far away are you?”

  “I can be there in a few minutes.”

  I drove east along the island to what was once the driveway of Sisters of Mercy Convent. The driveway had been gated and every cabin boarded up. Evidently with the death of their last sister, the state took it over and had done nothing with it since. I hopped the fence and took the coquina drive to the main house and cabins. Grossly overgrown, this place was one hurricane from erased. I wound through to the beach and walked to what had been Marie’s cabin. The doors were boarded up and someone had thrown rocks through the windows. I didn’t like looking at it.

  Behind me I heard footsteps. When I turned, Sister June stood staring at me. Smiling. Hands behind her back, she was barefoot and looked as if she’d been gardening. “Looks like you healed up,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I waved my hand across the landscape. “Thought you’d left.”

  “Lord brought me here. He can take me away at the time of His choosing.”

  I prompted her. “You seen anybody other than me nosing around here?”

  She placed a small metal box in my hand. “They said to give this to you if you showed.”

  My heart sank. We’d been outflanked again. “Did you know them?”

  She shook her head. “Couple of guys.”

  “When?”

  “Earlier today.”

  “They say anything?”

  “Only that you’d be showing up and to give this to you.”

  I opened the box, and Summer’s Jerusalem cross glistened in my palm. Three seconds later, the tracker lit on my phone screen and began registering a pulse. Two seconds later, my phone rang. Bones. “Call you right back.”

  Sister June looked up at me. “You look tired.”

  I nodded. “Probab
ly am.” I lifted the necklace and gently hung it on her neck. She stared down at it, then at me, resting her fingers on the diamond. “I haven’t worn jewelry in over eighty years.”

  I kissed her on the cheek, took a last look around, and returned to my bike.

  Bones answered on the first ring. I said, “Nothing here. It’s like this guy is reading our mail.”

  “Agreed.” Bones was silent a minute.

  I paused. “Bones, if the tables were turned, what would we be doing to this guy?”

  “We’d be inside his communication.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ours is near impenetrable.”

  “Maybe, but I think he’s in it. I think he’s listening right now.”

  Bones paused, sucked through his teeth, and hung up. Which told me everything I needed to know. I pulled onto U.S. 1 with Jacksonville through my windshield. I had eight hours of seat time ahead of me, but I had one stop to make first. At the first roadside cellular store, I bought two burner phones. Single-use cell phones. If used rightly, they could eliminate the problem we might be having. The challenge came in telling Bones the new number without using the old.

  During my training at the academy, Bones had prepped me for this. We’d used it a couple times since and the remedy was simple: I’d buy a new phone and use the old to text him the number—with one difference. The number I texted him was the actual number + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 and so on. So a 904 area code was actually 027. Bones, meanwhile, would dig up his own burner and call me back immediately on my new number with his new phone before anyone had a chance to trace it. I’d then give him the number of the second burner verbally and throw away the first. Seems paranoid but it works.

  I texted him the number. He called one second later and I gave him the new number, then I disassembled the first phone and tore the SIM card in two as my second phone was ringing.

  I answered, “We good?”

  “Yep.”

  He didn’t waste time. “Where’re you headed?”

  “My island.”

  “You think that’s next?”

  “I have no idea, but I can’t sit here twiddling my thumbs. I’m about to lose my mind. A hamster on a wheel.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  I circled Jacksonville on 295 and exited at Heckscher Drive. Thirty minutes later, I walked through the woods and crossed over to my island in knee-deep water.

  Quiet met me. As did footprints that were not mine. Voices soon followed.

  I climbed into the arms of a live oak tree that spread out over the trail and leaned against the trunk, the afternoon sun hanging behind me. Two men walked nonchalantly toward me. When they were below me, I dropped on the first one and turned out his lights, then turned my attention to the second, who looked shocked to see me. I needed him to be able to talk and think, so I flipped him, dislocated his shoulder, stuck my finger into one eye, and dragged him to the water where I held his head below the surface.

  After a minute, I pulled him up and asked him if he was ready to tell me what I wanted to know. When he cussed my mother, I returned him to the water for another ninety seconds.

  This time when I lifted him out of the water, he coughed and choked and continued berating my lineage. This continued a few minutes. In the water, out of the water. Finally, I dislocated his other shoulder, rendering him helpless, at which point he read the writing on the wall.

  As expected, he didn’t know much. Hired goons. They worked in teams of two, had no idea who was giving orders or where they were. They got paid cash weekly in a drop box with new phones. These teams functioned like independent terror cells—no two cells knew what the other was doing. And only one man knew the number of teams. This duo had been hired to drop the necklace at what remained of the chapel and take off.

  I left them tied to each other and made my way to the chapel where the necklace hung on a rusty nail sticking out of the charred coquina walls. I laid it in my palm, and three seconds later Bones called. “Any sign of Angel?”

  “No. Just the two guys who left it.”

  “They know anything?”

  “Only what they were told.”

  I stared at my island and sank my head in my hands. Five days had passed and we were out of trackers. While we were speaking, my regular cell phone began pulsing in my pocket. I read the caller ID but didn’t recognize the number. Ordinarily, I’d send it to voicemail. This time I pressed Accept. When I did, I heard voices speaking in what sounded like a hollow room. I put my phone on speaker and immediately held it next to my burner so Bones could hear. The voices were muffled and unintelligible—as if the phone had been dialed but shoved in a pocket. Echoing in the background, I heard a harsh woman’s voice I did not recognize saying something like, “Hurry up.”

  Then I heard what could only be Summer’s voice saying, “What’s your hurry? You headed to a midnight ballet?”

  The woman responded with laughter and then something verbal that sounded like, “Oh yeah, I forgot you were once a dancer,” to which Summer responded, “You wouldn’t know a midnight ballet if it started in three days beneath the stars.”

  I smiled. That’s my girl! Summer had found a way to tell me what I needed without letting her captor know she was telling me. Evidently she’d stolen a phone and dialed me. Everything I needed was in her statement.

  Summer didn’t have to reinvent the wheel because we’d dry-rehearsed this during our last time together in the Keys. When Summer offered to go on a date with the mysterious man on the Daemon boat in an attempt to locate Angel, we’d created a system of text phrases to pass me info without informing whoever might be looking at her phone.

  Our story and code had been simple. Summer was a designer from Los Angeles. On a long-needed break. A workaholic dealing with a painful breakup. Amber, my new name in her contact file, was her assistant, holding down the fort while they readied some line of clothing for next month’s release. So Summer would text me instructions about seemingly nothing but use color words to let me know she was okay. Any color was a good sign. But the moment she used either the word black or white, then things had gone badly and she needed immediate evac. Bring the cavalry. If at any time she sensed Angel’s presence, or had any information about Angel, she would tell me the stars were beautiful last night. If he brought her somewhere and there were other armed men, she would tell me not to worry, that she’d be home in that many days and we’d talk about it then. So three men meant she’d be home in three days. Four men meant four days and so on. Lastly, if he brought her to a place where there were other women, and Summer believed those girls or women to be there against their own will, she would tell me their number as it related to the number of days before the clothing release.

  So “Use the red silk and turquoise belt” meant all was well. “You should have seen the stars last night” meant Angel was in play. “I leave in three days and we’ll have five days to get ready for the show” meant three bad guys and five girls. And any mention of black or white meant things were not good. Come running. Lastly, the nuclear option was one word: ballet. No particular reason other than it is so different from anything else. Ballet meant things are bad and he knows about me.

  When we finished with our code debriefing, Ellie had shaken her head and asked, “Is all that NCIS stuff really necessary?”

  I remember saying, “I hope not.”

  Ellie had scratched her head and asked, “So what’s the worst thing she could say to you? Like the world has come to an end . . .”

  I had responded quickly. “Midnight ballet.”

  Summer had just pressed the nuclear option while adding to it the fact that they had three captors and the girls were with her. Now if she could just leave the call connected long enough for us to track it.

  I whispered the number to Bones, who no doubt spoke it to Eddie, who then began a trace. Thirty seconds passed while I listened to both calls. From Summer I heard more muffled voices, shuffling, and then what sounded like large truck eng
ines starting. Finally, Bones whispered, “Got it!” I dared not speak into Summer’s phone, but I let the call remain active.

  Eddie read the location. “Murph, they’re about seven hundred miles north of us. Highway 90. Just out of Sheridan, Wyoming. About to cross into Montana.” He paused, reading something off the screen. “Traveling forty-eight miles per hour.”

  “They’re still in the truck?”

  “They’re in a vehicle. I’m not sure what kind.”

  “Bones?”

  “Get to the airfield. Plane’ll be waiting.”

  I exited the island on foot, jumping over the two goons who had turned on each other. I promised them I’d call somebody in a couple of days—after the mosquitoes and ticks ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the road, I cranked the bike and put the island in my rearview. Forty minutes later, I ran across the tarmac, climbed into a G5, and the pilot closed the door behind me.

  Three and a half hours later, we landed outside of Billings, where Bones met me with a rented Suburban and Gunner. Who was almost as glad to see me as I was him. Eddie was there, too, and he fed me the latest GPS coordinates from Summer’s phone. I charted an intersect course, which would take less than an hour, and Eddie connected my phone with his server so I could follow her phone in real time.

  It was a long hour. Even Gunner was quiet.

  We drove past Last Stand Hill, where Custer made his final miscalculation, costing his life and the lives of his men. I tried not to make the connection.

  Given that we now knew there were three bad guys, their need to stop and sleep was significantly less than mine. With too many unknowns I kept driving and tried not to solve problems with too little information. To occupy myself, I studied every truck and vehicle that passed me headed northbound. Just after daylight, Summer’s phone stopped on Highway 90 and sat dormant for several minutes.

  Bones texted me. They’re at a truck stop. Seven minutes away.

  I pulled into a parking lot where close to seventy tractor trailers sat parked in uniform rows behind a well-lit gas station buzzing with people and cars. The tracker was accurate to three feet, so I followed the light on my phone, which brought me to a tour bus that looked like it was owned by rock stars. Million-dollar plus. Easy.