Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

  “And men.”

  “Why not blood too?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Fifty thousand.”

  “That is not a trivial amount.”

  “But can you get it?”

  “Of course.”

  The imam slung his weight back into a standing position and walked across the room to a small table in the corner. He opened the drawer and removed a cash box the size of a large dictionary. With his back to Ariana he punched in the combination and opened the top.

  Ariana’s hand reached the cash before the imam’s. The imam grabbed for Ariana’s wrist and found himself with his arm pinned behind his back, hand empty.

  “I have never seen your trained side. Very impressive.”

  “You have no idea,” Ariana replied.

  “Take what you need.”

  Ariana smiled as she took the box back to her seat on the sofa. She counted out fifty thousand in neatly stacked hundred dollar bills wrapped in thick rubber bands. Then she threw two additional stacks on the pile. “Just in case,” she added as she put the box on the cushion next to her.

  “You know, when I first heard about you, I doubted whether it was true. You play a housewife and mother very well.”

  “Not everything is as it seems.”

  “This is very true. In your case, anyway. I assume by the presence of your neighbor that a plan is underway.”

  “Yes. We are past the point of no return.”

  “Have you covered your tracks?”

  “I have been preparing for years. The most recent developments are just icing on the cake.”

  “How many men do you need?”

  “Six if I can have them. Less if there are less available. I need young men with unshakable faith.”

  “I have several in training. A few even speak your native tongue.”

  “I need native faith.”

  “I will give you the best I can find.”

  “How much time do you need?”

  “I need them by next Tuesday.”

  “Then you shall have them by next Tuesday.”

  “Where?”

  The imam thought for a moment. “There should be a pencil and paper in the cash box.”

  Ariana handed them to him and the imam scribbled an address. He handed the note to Ariana, who read it. “Are you serious?”

  “The owner is one of the faithful.”

  Ariana stood expressionless until the imam spoke again. “I assume this is the last time we shall meet.”

  “This will be the last time. If we see each other again, the outcome will not be good for you.”

  “Then I wish you well.”

  Chapter 47

  Wellesley, twenty minutes outside Boston when the traffic moves, was still ten minutes away after an hour of bumper-to-bumper. Between Natick and Newton, the quaint town of Wellesley was home to the eponymous all-women’s college catering to elite intellectuals and average intellectuals with elite family pocketbooks. At over forty grand a year, Wellesley was one of the most expensive schools in the country.

  And while downtown Wellesley had remained a bastion of wealth, an idyllic slice of New England Americana, the surrounding area had spent the last two decades being consumed by the ugly dragon of urban sprawl. Wellesley, a sanctuary of knowledge and wealth, now rested firmly in the beast’s stomach. The town square was still picturesque, but two miles down the road, across from the rival cross-town high school, the new Super Wal-Mart had tarnished the remnants of the small town atmosphere. Only the college’s three billion dollar endowment was keeping the city planners at bay, the threat of more strip malls at a distance.

  Lisa read the map on her lap as Clark weaved among some of the most hostile drivers on the planet. By all accounts, New York drivers were tame in comparison to their northeast corridor neighbors who took delight in tailgating, cut-offs, and middle-finger salutes. New York drivers were tough, but Boston drivers relished in rudeness. Rush hour in Bean Town was not for the faint of heart. Clark swerved away from a monster pothole and into the next lane of traffic. Eyes wide, Lisa glanced out the driver’s window for a close-up view of a delivery truck covered in road salt and winter grime, the metal side of the vehicle close enough to wipe clean with her sleeve.

  She scooted over in the direction of the driver’s seat as Clark found his lane again. Ten minutes later they pulled in front of a two-story, white frame house with no garage. A chain-link fence enclosed the treeless front yard. The white siding was in need of a fresh coat of paint and the gutters sagged from the edge of the roof.

  “Number 812. That’s us,” Clark said to his girlfriend, zipping his jacket before opening the door and exiting into a balmy single-digit wind-chill.

  A student in a Boston College sweatshirt opened the door after three knocks. “Yo,” the student said, his voice trailing off as he realized his visitors were strangers.

  “Good morning,” Clark said. The young man in the BC sweatshirt with screaming red hair looked through bloodshot eyes at Clark with suspicion. His eyes then turned to Lisa and his face perked up.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Clark Hayden and I’m looking for someone who used to live at this address. I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  The student looked at Clark suspiciously. “Who’s your partner?”

  Lisa stepped forward and pulled out her IRS badge. “IRS criminal investigator, Lisa Prescott.”

  Clark longed for a badge to flash.

  Lisa’s badge had its intended affect and the sleepy young man on the other side of the doorway took a huge step towards coherence. Police at the door tended to scare most people. The IRS at the door made people tighten their sphincters.

  With the resident’s full attention, Clark plowed forward. “I’m a graduate student at Virginia Tech. You can Google me if you want. I’m on the robotics team; there should be a picture of me out there.”

  The student looked behind himself into the house and around the room.

  “Can we come in for a minute? It’s freezing out here,” Clark added.

  The redheaded BC student just stood there, his toes peaking out from the shredded fringe of his jeans.

  Lisa added her soft touch. “Relax, we are not interested in you, your taxes, or whatever weed you may have stuck between the couch cushions.”

  The BC student stepped back from the door and Clark and Lisa walked into the room, hurriedly shutting the door behind them. Beer cans were scattered on the small dining room table in the corner. Pieces of newspapers littered the sofa. A small lamp with a crooked shade stood precariously next to the sofa. There wasn’t a text book in sight.

  “You live here, I take it…”

  “I hope so. Otherwise I would have some explaining to do.”

  “You rent this place?”

  “Lease with an option to buy.”

  Clark ignored the smartass statement. “Who’s the owner?”

  “The old woman next door. Mrs. Crowley.”

  “Is she around?”

  “She is, like, ninety. She’s usually home. She takes a walk in the afternoon. But I don’t see her outside much when it’s this cold.”

  “How are Mrs. Crowley’s faculties? Is she lucid? Forgetful?”

  “Well, she doesn’t forget when the rent check is due, if that tells you anything.”

  Lisa laughed a little.

  “Do you get along with her?”

  “She’s a little hard of hearing, which makes her a pretty good neighbor. She doesn’t complain about noise at night. Why, did something happen next door?”

  “No. Well, not that I am aware of anyway. I’m looking for information on a neighbor of mine in D.C. She disappeared and I’m trying to dig through her past a little to see if I can locate her.”

  The young man’s eyes darted between Lisa’s and Clark’s.

  Lisa asked another soft question. It was something she had learned in her IRS
interrogation course. When you run into resistance, ask a simple question. Soften them up a little.

  “How long have you been living here?”

  “This is my second year, so about three semesters.”

  Clark pulled out a sketch of Ariana that Mr. Stanley had drawn with the same easel he had drawn a portrait of his wife. “I know this is a long shot, but have you ever seen this woman around?”

  The redheaded student grabbed the picture between his freckle-laden hands and quickly handed it back to Clark. “Never seen her before.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I would remember if I had seen a woman in a hijab around here. There might be a few at Wellesley, but I don’t spend much time there, obviously. You have to have a female escort just to get in the gate.”

  “I’d think it would be a good place to meet women,” Clark said.

  “Wellesley girls don’t date BC guys. They go for Harvard all the way. Everyone knows it. Until a few semesters ago, both Harvard and MIT used to send buses to Wellesley to pick up girls for the weekend. These buses would come right to the main gate on Friday night and drive the women across town. On Saturday and Sunday another bus would come and drop the girls back off. I imagine some of them got shagged all weekend.”

  Clark had a lot to say but bit his tongue. Girlfriends tended to suck the testosterone out of most male conversations. On the surface, at least.

  “You see any other Muslim women around?”

  “There are a few Muslims at BC, but they are nice people. Quiet. Only one or two wear a hijab. And the woman in your picture there isn’t one of them.”

  Clark pressed. “She would have been younger than she is in the picture.”

  “Dude, I haven’t seen her.”

  Lisa knew it was time to cut their losses with BC’s finest.

  “Which side is Mrs. Crowley on?”

  “The ugly green house to the right. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  A minute later, Mrs. Crowley opened the door and looked up at her visitors from her hunched position. She had a small cane in her left hand, the decorative end of the walking stick wrapped in a ball of old fingers and wrinkled skin.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Crowley. My name is Clark Hayden, and this is my girlfriend, Lisa. We are looking for a tenant of yours who used to live next door.”

  “You with the police?”

  “No, we live in Washington D.C. and we’re trying to locate a neighbor of mine who has gone missing.”

  “You should call the FBI. They handle missing people.”

  “I have, but there are national security issues at stake which prohibit the authorities from assisting with this parti-cular investigation.”

  “The FBI won’t help?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Then just say so. No reason to get all fancy pants on me with your national security issues and authorities crap,” Mrs. Crowley said, barking the last part of the sentence out in a reasonable impersonation of a TV detective.

  Lisa laughed.

  “Well, come on in, I’m not trying to heat the rest of the neighborhood.”

  Clark and Lisa stepped up the single stair and wiped their feet before entering the warm house.

  Mrs. Crowley moved across her small living room with ease. Clark wondered if the cane was for show, or for smacking people upside the head.

  “Please have a seat.”

  Mrs. Crowley liked flowers. More specifically, she liked roses. On the wall over the rose-patterned sofa was an oil painting of a large bouquet of the same. The throw pillows on the rocking chair were knitted with another bouquet of a slightly different color. The upright piano on the far side of the room was covered with rose-patterned doilies, on which a small vase of glass roses gathered dust.

  Clark took a seat on the roses on the sofa. Mrs. Crowley put her weight into motion in the rocking chair. The room was hot but Mrs. Crowley had on a sweater and a shawl, the latter of which was a light blue, nearly the same hue as her hair.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” she said with a pronounced Boston accent. “Some tea?”

  “Whichever is easier for you,” Clark answered.

  “What kind of answer is that? Boiling water is boiling water.”

  “Coffee would be great. Thank you.”

  “See? How hard was that?”

  Clark now suppressed a laugh. The charming coffin-dodger was definitely using her cane to crack skulls.

  “And for you?” Mrs. Crowley asked Lisa.

  “Coffee, black. Please.”

  Mrs. Crowley walked to the kitchen and returned a moment later. “So, how can I help you this morning?”

  “I’m looking for information on someone who was a tenant of yours next door.”

  “I‘ve had a lot of tenants. Some of them good, some of them bad. Which one are you looking for?”

  “Ariana Amin.”

  “Ariana?”

  “You recognize the name?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Crowley said, wringing her hands together. Clark pulled a photograph from the manila folder and handed it to Mrs. Crowley. “Is this picture Ariana Amin?”

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “She listed your house next door as her address in her INS documentation.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “Well, for starters, she’s dead.”

  Clark tried to not look startled. Lisa took over the questioning after a brief pause. “What do you remember about her?”

  “She was quiet. Kept to herself, mostly. She had two roommates, but I am not sure how friendly they were. She hung out with other young women from time to time. Used to see them stop by and pick her up.”

  “Wellesley students?”

  “Hard to say. There are so many colleges and universities in the Boston area. Harvard, UMass., MIT, Boston University.”

  Lisa nodded and Clark pulled out the hand drawn sketch of his former neighbor. “Was this girl one of her roommates, or maybe a friend?”

  Mrs. Crowley looked at the picture through her bifocals. “No. I don’t recall having ever seen her before. Who is she?”

  “We aren’t exactly sure. Her name, as far as we can tell, is also Ariana Amin.”

  “What did she do?”

  “We don’t know exactly.”

  “Then why are you looking for her?”

  Clark looked at Lisa, who nodded. “I think she killed my neighbors and then vanished.”

  Lisa spoke with officialdom. “We call her an ‘unsub,’ or Unidentified Subject.”

  “Thank you for the bullshit explanation,” Mrs. Crowley said.

  “What can you tell me about Ariana’s death?”

  “Well, she disappeared. They found her abandoned car burned out in a remote area near Marlborough. They never did find her body.”

  “Did anyone come to claim her belongings?”

  “Someone did, yes. I can’t remember if it was a brother or a cousin, but it was someone around the same age, maybe a little older. It wasn’t her father, I don’t think. That, I would have remembered.”

  Ms. Crowley paused.

  “The police figured she was kidnapped and murdered. Buried in the woods. There are a lot of trees in western Massachusetts, a lot of places to dispose of a body.”

  “Is that what the police said?”

  “That is what I said. The story was all over the news for weeks. The car was burned to a skeleton and there wasn’t much left to investigate. The police came to interview me and they interviewed some friends of hers, but it was routine.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, let me see. It was in April 1998. I don’t remember the date. Sometime around Easter.”

  The boiling teapot brought Ms. Crowley to her feet. She went to the kitchen and Lisa and Clark could hear the rattling of china, the refrigerator closing, the soft clanking of silverware.

 
; “April 1998.”

  “I heard,” Clark said.

  Lisa looked at the file from the INS. “The last document in the folder is her naturalization certificate. It was awarded April 17th, 1998.”

  “So she stole her identity?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “So who is she?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Chapter 48

  Clark sprawled on the queen bed in the Holiday Inn near Newton, Massachusetts waiting for Lisa to finish blow-drying her hair in the bathroom. He turned off the TV and checked the weather on the back page of the local section of the Boston Globe. Old man winter was still feeling ornery, and the forecast for the rest of the week was calling for more arctic air.

  He glanced at the weather map of the U.S. and allowed himself to wonder what it would be like on a beach in Hawaii. After a month of ice and snow, Waikiki would be perfect. Clark flipped back to the second page and perused the small hodgepodge of one paragraph articles. The first story was about a sixth grader who came to school with a loaded .44 magnum. Dirty Harry goes to Show-and-Tell was the title of the news snippet. The second article caught Clark’s attention and his stomach sank as he sped through the opening sentences. The burned out remains of missing NASA scientist Paul Cannon’s BMW had been found in a remote suburb of Northern Virginia. The scientist, a Boston native and MIT graduate, had been employed by NASA in Greenbelt for seven years and was considered a pioneer in new energy propulsion systems. The missing man had also once held the record for reciting Pi to the 10,000th decimal place. That’s where I recognize the name, Clark thought.

  Clark reminisced about his attempt to recite Pi and then his mind jumped back to the opening sentences. A missing man with a burned out car found in a remote area.

  Clark felt cold sweat bead up on his neck. “No fucking way.”

  Chapter 49

  Sealed in the sleeping quarters, Ariana, Syed, and Karim waited. Per protocol, each person wore a military-grade Hycar gas mask with a polyurethane shield lens. Each mask had a nosecup to prevent fogging and a standard mechanical speaking diaphragm which allowed the wearer to speak clearly without undo effort. The head harness was adjustable without the need to deal with unwieldy rubber straps. When it came to warfare, Uncle Sam had the best gadgets.