Retreat

by J. F. Gonzalez

  Some things were best left unsaid.

  CHAPTER 46

  One Year Later, Federal Court Building, Harrisburg, PA

  Court was in recess and security was tight.

  Carl White was escorted to the cafeteria by his lawyer and court-appointed security guard. They were in a section of the building commonly marked off by spectators and jury members, where high-profile defendants were often escorted to private conference rooms, the lavatory, or the cafeteria during lunch and recess. Despite that, the long, wide hallway that led from the courtrooms to the cafeteria was still busy. Lawyers dressed in suits and carrying briefcases walked past, hurrying to their next court appearance. Criminal defendants from all walks of life huddled with family members and friends or legal representation, most dressed up for court. It was a familiar scene to Carl, who was being tried separately from his ex-partner, Jake Chambers.

  “I need a pit stop,” Carl’s lawyer, Ben Ferguson said. Ben was in his early sixties, with grizzled-looking white hair and a mustache. He was wearing a gray suit. They stopped just outside the men’s lavatory. “Just give me a minute. You need to go?”

  “I’m fine,” Carl said.

  “Okay.” Ben stepped into the bathroom.

  Carl’s security guard was a man in his mid-thirties named Chris Hodges. Chris was African-American, of average height, but with a weight-lifter’s physique. His uniform was always sharply pressed. His threatening demeanor was belied by his personality, which was mellow and easy-going. Carl liked talking to Chris when they were alone together. Chris seemed to like asking Carl for advice on money, ironically enough.

  “So what do you think about what I told you last week?” Chris asked, once Ben stepped into the bathroom. “You think what I want to do is feasible?”

  “The annuity for your grandfather? Absolutely. It’s the only sound thing you can do.”

  “Gramps is pretty adamant he doesn’t want it, though. He doesn’t want to pay taxes on it.”

  Carl sighed. “The taxes are minimal. The money the fund will earn through interest alone will be more than enough to take care of the taxes. In fact, he’ll save more money on it than where he has it now. You said it was a low yielding savings account, right?”

  “Yeah.” Chris nodded. “He probably earns about two hundred dollars a year on the interest.”

  “He can easily earn forty grand a year in interest from the accounts we talked about setting up for him. The taxes on that interest would be around the same as what he’s paying now for taxes on the house, the utilities, the gardener, the home owner’s association, all this on a house he isn’t even living in anymore. His money is just being pissed away. You know that, right?”

  “I know that, and you know that, but he refuses to accept it. He says he wants his money where it is.”

  “Even if his tax bill winds up being the same as all those other expenses put together?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And he doesn’t pay income taxes now, right?”

  “Nope.”

  Carl frowned. Chris had told him that his grandfather’s income came from social security and a small pension, which wasn’t enough for him to pay federal or state income taxes on. The old man simply didn’t want to pay anything in to the government, even if he wound up making more money in interest than what he was collecting from his retirement accounts. He had five hundred thousand dollars sitting in a low-yielding savings account and another two hundred thousand in cash stashed in a bank safe deposit box. “Did you look into that will?”

  “Nah, I still gotta do that,” Chris said. He was standing casually with his back to the crowd of passersby. Carl was standing close to the marble wall, not even paying attention to who was coming and going past them—to him, they were all lawyers and other defendants, most probably guilty of what they were accused of.

  “So what’s keeping you from doing it?”

  “The time.” Chris mustered a smile at Carl. “Nine hour days here, then an hour drive to and from work, dealing with the kids, the wife, the house, that all takes a toll, man.”

  Carl smiled back and was just about to respond when a female voice floated from behind him. “Spill the beans on Wayne Sanders and you’ll get off light, Carl.”

  Carl started, heart leaping in his chest and whirled toward the sound of the voice. Chris saw the look on his face and instantly went on guard. “What’s the matter?”

  “Who said that?” Carl was looking around at the crowd of passersby, all those dark colored suits merging into a sea of people that all looked the same, all dressed the same, with no discernable features except...

  A flash of burgundy retreating toward the stairs that led downstairs. She was carrying a tan attaché case, dressed in a hip-hugging business suit, shoulder-length hair artfully done. He couldn’t see her face, but he recognized her by some kind of instinctual feeling. It was her. Anna King.

  “Over there!” Carl said. He started toward the stairs and Chris held him back.

  “What?” Chris was tense, on alert.

  “That woman! Going down the stairs! She’s the one that stole the money!”

  People around them began to look in his direction but Carl didn’t care. He tried to dart forward again and was restrained by Chris Hodges. Another security guard stepped forward to assist. And as Carl watched Anna retreat down the stairs, perfectly in place with the sea of people on their way downstairs and out the building, he began to panic and shout that they were letting her get away, they needed to catch her! And by the time Ben returned from the bathroom, charging out as he heard his client’s panicked voice, the woman Carl was certain was Anna King had already left the building and was walking down Walnut Street to the train station with a satisfied smile on her face.

  EPILOGUE

  They watched the news coverage together, in Joe Taylor’s spacious living room.

  Over a year after the incident at Bent Creek that had brought them together, she still hadn’t told Joe her real name yet and he was okay with that. There was a lot about Joe Taylor she liked. She was warming up to him faster than she would have imagined. Mark Copper was warier than her, and even he was gradually warming up to Mr. Taylor’s genuine nature, his heart-felt and honest demeanor. His unfailing support.

  Today it was just the two of them, relaxing on a lazy Friday afternoon. Joe had worked from his home office this morning while she had worked out in his home gym, then touched base with Mark via Skype in her bedroom at the other end of the house. She could tell Mark was excited. They had worked hard to bring the Bent Creek board and most of the club members down. And it wouldn’t have been done without Joe’s support, and the help of Dean Campbell and Clark Arroyo, too.

  “You want something to snack on while we wait?” Joe asked. He was dressed in tan khaki shorts and a white sleeveless T-shirt. He was barefoot. He looked more like a middle-age beach bum than a rich entrepreneur.

  “Sure. Any of that cut fruit left?”

  “Yep. I’ll go get it.” Joe left the living room and headed to the kitchen.

  On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was talking to a member of the United States Senate about the upcoming criminal verdict expected to be handed down today in what had become known as the Bent Creek Investment scandal, so named due to the fact that all the defendants were board of directors of the Bent Creek Country club in Willow Grove, Wyoming. All eight board members had been tried together. The Bent Creek case was merely one of several cases the United States Justice Department had brought up against various players on Wall Street as a result of the near financial meltdown in the US and global economy over the past few years.

  She watched the news, noting that the Senate member was merely doing talking points, same old same old. Joe returned a moment later with the fruit bowl and a veggie tray, leftovers from a social mixer he’d hosted yesterday for Clark, Dean, and Brian Gaiman, who they still kept in touch with and had settled in nearby Glendale after taking a job at one of Joe’s companies. Clark had left this mo
rning for preliminary work on another job, something Joe was keeping to himself for now, but she had a strong idea of what it might be.

  She plucked a strawberry from the fruit tray and bit into it, savoring the taste. Joe headed back to the kitchen to prepare drinks.

  Her mind went back.

  Despite her refusal to tell anybody her real name, they’d been drawn together in an instinctual sense of comraderie. Upon leaving Bent Creek, they’d immediately flown back to California on a chartered private jet Joe had leased. Once in the privacy of his home, everybody’s guard went down. Brian was still on edge from his close shave; Joe had retreated upstairs to his room, she assumed to grieve over the confirmation of his daughter’s murder—Dean had told her in quiet tones on the plane ride the cliff notes version of why he’d been checked in to Bent Creek under an assumed name. She’d understood perfectly. She’d been hired by Bent Creek under her own assumed name, for completely different reasons.

  In the weeks that followed, Joe would retreat to his room to grieve privately, usually well after eleven o’clock when he turned in for the night. She could hear him sometimes while she sat downstairs in the spacious living room, watching TV with the sound turned low. Joe Taylor’s house was huge—over eight thousand square feet of living space—but in the dead of night it was hard not to hear him. He would lose control of his emotions and weep heart-rending sobs that touched her, bringing her own emotions to the surface. But she never let her own emotions spill out of her the way Joe did. She couldn’t allow them to. To do so would make her vulnerable, and she couldn’t afford that. Not now. Maybe later, but not now. She would know when the time was right. Only then would she grieve for her own loss, which Joe’s sobs reminded her of every time she heard him.

  She’d almost learned Bob’s true identity almost immediately after arriving at the house, even though he never formally introduced himself to her, nor did Dean or Clark ever formally make the introductions. She just learned that his real name wasn’t Bob Garrison, that his real name was Joe. She learned this while listening to him talk to Dean and Clark and heard them refer to him by this name a few times. In the days that followed he just became known to her as Joe, and she began referring to him by that name. In days and weeks after the Bent Creek event, she learned that Joe had reported to his estranged wife that he couldn’t learn what happened to their daughter, Carla, and that it was best she be declared legally dead. From what Dean told her later, his ex-wife hadn’t taken that news well at all. “Their marriage didn’t end well to begin with,” Dean said. “It’s been made worse with Carla’s disappearance. It’s best that she never learn what happened to Carla.”

  She agreed.

  She was aware of the loose plan to frame Earl Sanders with the murders of Alan Smith, Dale Lantis, and Rick Nicholson. She’d known about it when she surmised Clark had cut a few pieces off their bodies and taken them with him on their flight back to California. In the weeks that followed, she didn’t monitor the situation that close, but she knew enough that this physical evidence was planted at Earl’s home by Clark a few months later. She’d also learned that Dean had apparently talked Joe into planting Carla’s DNA at the Sanders home, to tie her disappearance to him. “He won’t dare look at you in court, nor will he call you out, either,” Dean had exclaimed. “Because to do so would be opening him up...would be opening the rest of them up, to what really happened at Bent Creek. If he were to open that Pandora’s Box, he might as well be signing his own death warrant.” Dean had then shown Joe copies of the contract everybody had signed; they had been stored on the Bent Creek servers, in a secure folder that Mark Copper had gained access to. It was pretty clear from the dense language in the contract that revealing any of the culinary secrets of the Bent Creek elite would be granting the squealer an instant death sentence. Reference was made to an unsolved murder from 1998 in which a wealthy family was slaughtered in their rural Iowa home. The case remained unsolved, the perpetrator never caught.

  Wayne’s point was well made in this legalese.

  Dean had tried to pry her own name out of her but she’d refused, calmly telling him they could call her Anna for now. “I have my reasons,” she’d said. Dean had tried a few more times, then suddenly stopped. She wondered if Joe had asked him to stop, but wasn’t entirely sure.

  Regardless, Joe had unofficially let her stay in one of his guest bedrooms. That first night she’d been shown a room near a cluster of bedrooms at the south end of the house. Dean and Clark had taken two of them, while Brian had been given a bedroom on the north end of the property. Joe’s own suite was on the other side of the estate. Private. A few nights later, after their plans were made and back stories were committed to memory, Dean departed to resume his life. Due to the rules of his probation, Brian Gaiman had to return to Wyoming. Joe sent Clark with him for protection. She didn’t find out until later that one of Dean’s first jobs upon arriving home was to work some magic in getting Brian Gaiman off of probation. Once that goal was accomplished, Brian was whisked back to Pasadena and a room was ready for him in Joe’s home. She and Brian became surrogate brother and sister in the months that followed. Brian passed the time by taking several college courses online, under Joe Taylor’s name, with Joe’s blessing. Computer network security and maintenance. As expected, Joe moved him into a job in this field with a company he owned, Vertex, an internet company in Burbank. Brian slid into the role easily. He’d been given the job shortly after the screws had been tightened on the Bent Creek cannibals, as Joe had taken to calling them.

  “Bent Creek Cannibals,” she said as Joe entered the living room bearing drinks.

  “Very apt name for them, don’t you think?” He handed her a glass of lemonade.

  “It is.” She took a sip of the lemonade. Perfect.

  “Isn’t it about time for the verdict to be read yet?”

  “You know how these things go. Especially since no cameras are being allowed in the courtroom. They’ll probably make an announcement from outside as the verdicts are being read.”

  Joe nodded. They’d been following all the court cases closely. Earl Sanders had pled not guilty to four counts of murder and was convicted three weeks ago in an Orange County, California court. The sentencing trial was currently underway, with the prosecution aiming for a death penalty. Carl White and Jake Chambers had been found guilty in separate trials on multiple counts of fraud in their hedge fund case and sentenced to two hundred years, and one hundred and eight years respectively in federal prison. She had observed Carl’s trial close up and from afar. Her parting shot to him at the courthouse—having gained access to the federal building under another nom de plume thanks to Mark Copper’s expertise—had been orchestrated by Dean and Joe. If Carl dropped dime on Wayne and the rest of the board, who were currently not cooperating in any of their trials, the secrets of the Bent Creek Cannibals would break wide open and the ball would not only roll, it would roll downhill faster, picking up other perpetrators and other members as it went along. Joe had his reasons for wanting all of them to pay—from the core members to the occasional high roller who was let into the exclusive club. Subsequent research from the data procured from Bent Creek’s servers and Jim Munchel’s computer records indicated that there were over two dozen people that had paid to be members at any given time over the last decade; these members had not been present when Joe infiltrated the club under the Bob Garrison pseudonym, and surveillance undertaken by Dean and Clark in the year since indicated that they were not only laying low, they were doing everything they could to distance themselves from the core members in custody. It had been Joe’s plan to have Carl sing to the prosecutors, but that hadn’t happened. Instead, Carl’s blowup at court had caused a delay in his trial. When it resumed, Carl had been even more tight-lipped. He’d been quickly found guilty on all counts against him and sentenced.

  “You know they’re going to be found guilty, right?” Anna said.

  “No, I don’t know that,” Joe responded. H
e took a sip of his lemonade. “But I hope they are.”

  “If they are, what then?”

  “We move to phase two.”

  “What’s phase two?”

  Joe nodded at the TV. “Looks like the first verdict is in.”

  She turned to the TV. Wolf Blitzer had interrupted his talk with the Senator to a live feed outside the New York City courthouse. A middle-aged woman in a burgundy power suit was standing before a podium, addressing the cameras and throngs of reporters. “...I am very happy to report that the cases of the People versus Emily Wharton and the People versus Wayne Sanders on multiple counts of fraud, embezzlement, and other matters relating to the Bent Creek case have resulted in the verdicts we were hoping for. For Emily Wharton, she has been found guilty on all charges. Wayne Sanders has been found guilty on all charges. There is a Mr. Robert Barker, also named as a defendant, who was also found guilty...”