Back from the Brink

by Emery Hayes

  “The ice man is her brother?”

  He nodded. “People are complicated, aren’t they? You think you’re holding a puppy in your hand and what you actually have is a jackal.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Adelai caused trouble. Luke Franks didn’t like that his brother was dating an undocumented alien. They came to blows over it. But blood is thicker than water, isn’t it?”

  “Franks accepted it?”

  “He chose life over death,” Gates corrected. “Matthew Franks came to town. Brought his girl with him—”

  “Adelai?”

  “Yes, real name Adila Amari. And that was a mistake, bringing her. Coming at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her brother, Faris Amari, followed and was rounded up by the wrong cops and put to work scaling the border. No easy feat in this backcountry. But Amari was in good physical shape, and young. He was promised many things, including that he could keep his life and that of his family. And they provided a signing bonus—twenty-five thousand dollars in cash.

  “Amari kept the money. He completed his first run and came back for more, but he was a man with a conscious and he kept thinking there had to be a way out. He wanted to return to college, he wanted citizenship. He thought he could get both those things from us.”

  “He approached you?”

  Gates nodded. “He walked right into our office in Helena. Put it all on the table. Green and Luke Franks included. And he had the presence of mind to keep a copy for himself. We think we’ll find it on his body, or, more likely, he passed it off to his sister before what would have been his next border crossing. And we’d like access to both.”

  “Both Faris and Adelai?” Nicole felt unease shift through her. Adelai was quite popular, but with the wrong people.

  “What Faris gathered, it’s enough to put the whole ring behind bars.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He fed me a few pieces of the evidence he’d collected.”

  “And you think Adelai has this evidence?” Nicole asked. It made sense.

  “BP thinks so. Either way, they’ll want to cover their bases.”

  “They want the ice man and Adelai.”

  “Exactly, which is why we need to get to both of them first. And, as luck would have it, you have both tucked away right here in Blue Mesa.”

  “Our ME isn’t finished with Faris Amari,” Nicole said, stalling as she scrambled to identify why she felt a strong need to protect Adelai Amari. Why she wasn’t about to serve her to Special Agent Devon Gates. “There’s a science to defrosting a frozen corpse.”

  “I know. So what I’d really like right now is to move your ME along a little faster.”

  “You’ve talked to him?”

  “I met with your ME when I first rode into town. He wasn’t eager to please, and he Googled chain of authority before he’d even speak to me.” Gates laughed. “He new to the job?”

  “He’s a good man and running to catch up.”

  Gates nodded. “Well, he’s thorough. I don’t think he missed a thing.” Nicole heard respect in Gates’s voice. “Maybe you could talk to him about his bedside manner, though. The man needs to learn how to share.”

  Nicole met his gaze and kept hers deliberately reflective. Rocks could have bounced off of them.

  “Or not,” Gates conceded.

  “What are we looking for?” Nicole asked. “A USB? An encrypted link? A key?” And would any of that have survived months on ice?

  But Gates shrugged. “Any of it. All of it. That’s why I talked to your ME. I wanted to go through Amari’s personal effects, but he refused. He hadn’t gotten much off the vic yet and he wouldn’t take an x-ray. Not until the time is right.”

  “Damaged evidence doesn’t hold up in court,” Nicole pointed out.

  “True.”

  “How long has Faris Amari been working for you?”

  “He came to us on October twelfth.”

  That was a long time—six months—for a secret operation to be conducted right under her nose, and she didn’t like it.

  “Get over it,” he suggested. “We’re playing nice now and it’s getting us somewhere.”

  He was right. She could apply Band-Aids to her wounded pride later.

  “Green and Monte go back a long way,” she said. “All the way to Isle of Royale.”

  Gates nodded. “True. That was before Green ascended to region chief. And not long after that, he got Monte to join him here.”

  Two men decorated for heroism in the same battle.

  A bond forged from horrific loss.

  Monte was working for Green but with Baker. He was gathering evidence that could incriminate his boss, or simply end his career. He was the man in the middle, and it must have been a tight squeeze. She said as much.

  “Not when your only allegiance is to justice,” Gates said.

  But that was about as black and white as could be, and most people functioned inside the gray, in the mire of human emotions, loyalty included.

  “How did you lose Monte?”

  “We underestimated the BP and the terrain. We were occupied across the lake. We already suspected that Baker was dead, but we still had fifty pounds of fentanyl on the loose.”

  “You had to stay with the drugs.”

  “You understand it’s lethal? Not if but when it will kill? And I can tell you when, just minutes after it hits the streets. And not just one or two vics, but thousands. Possibly tens of thousands just from that fifty pounds.”

  “You cut him loose.”

  “And hoped that Monte could help himself.” He held her gaze, his holding regret but not a speck of doubt about the decision. “We didn’t like it either.”

  “Did he call over the radio? Did he ask for help?”

  He shook his head. “One transmission,” he said. “Short and sweet. ‘An approaching vessel. No running lights.’ ”

  “And that transmission went directly to BP dispatch?”

  Gates nodded. “We had tapped into their transmissions, of course, and that was the only message from Monte that gave us concern.”

  Green had kept that from her. She was not surprised. Not even disappointed. No, she was furious.

  “My forensics people found a hair on the party boat that belongs to Adelai Amari,” Nicole said.

  “Really?”

  He tried to hide his hand, but the man was hopeless.

  “Poker isn’t your best game, is it?” she challenged.

  “I can’t put all my cards on the table.”

  “You’ll have to if you want our cooperation.”

  Gates sat back and propped an ankle over his knee, considering her.

  Eventually he nodded. “We know Monte’s alive because we saw him later. He’d somehow taken control of the party boat, and he had Adelai Amari with him.”

  “Where?”

  “He was motoring north. He stopped at a private dock, and the girl got off.”

  “Adelai and her baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what did Monte do?”

  “We were pulling out. We were down to two hands, and that was suicide.”

  “You left him out there,” she said. “You left him in the cross hairs.”

  23

  When Nicole pulled into her designated parking spot at the station, it was ten after seven. She’d returned with Gates to the forensics lab, and together, with Arthur leading them, they had gone through the evidence so far accumulated—including the reports on the BP skiff and the party boat—and she had answered his questions. When that wasn’t enough, they had all taken the elevator to the garage on the first floor and she and Arthur had given Gates a visual inspection of both boats. Arthur was about as welcoming as MacAulay had been, based on Gates’s comments on the warm reception he’d been receiving.

  “Definitely a chill in the air here too.”

  “The door won’t hit you in the ass on your way ou
t,” Arthur invited.

  Which Gates took in stride. “Well, you’re nothing if not consistent.”

  “We’re a hell of a lot more than that,” Arthur said.

  “You don’t have to convince me,” Gates said, and meant it. “It’s the reason I’m here.”

  “Should have shown up sooner,” Arthur groused.

  “We did; we just didn’t announce ourselves.”

  “Some would perceive that as trespassing.”

  Arthur was being nice. Nicole had been working on a mental list of formidable complaints. Her favorite—skulking.

  “Not some,” Gates returned. “All. It’s a damned-if-you-do kind of situation.”

  Arthur nodded. “I can see how that would be the case.” He softened a little. “Both hulls are abraded. Let me show you.”

  And Gates had slipped on a pair of latex gloves and taken a close look at the damage on the skiff and the party boat. He looked inside the compartment where the drugs had been stored and asked if Arthur had taken samples from either boat and tested for the presence of fentanyl.

  “Wiped clean, as far as we can tell,” Arthur said.

  Gates thanked Arthur for following through on that, and seeing as the AG was playing nice, Nicole left the men alone to finish up with the evidence she and Lars had already learned all about that afternoon. She had a lot on her plate and little time to tackle it.

  Now she punched her code into the back door—her private office entrance—and slipped into the station unannounced.

  Paperwork awaited her. Evidentiary reports, invitations for personal appearances and conferences, duty reports, vacation requests. She sat down at her desk and decided to split the chore down the middle—tackle the most pressing first and save the rest for tomorrow. A good plan, except she was distracted by phone calls.

  She’d spoken to both Jordan and MacAulay by cell phone. They were seated at a table at the Artemis Grill, awaiting their meals, and had made it out of Outdoor Adventures with no shortage of treasures. MacAulay promised to have Jordan home by nine thirty and himself at the morgue and elbow-deep into the autopsy of the ice man not long after that. He confirmed the visit by Devon Gates, just before he’d left with Jordan—so the special agent hadn’t been sitting on his ass the whole two plus hours he’d been in town. MacAulay had given Gates a list of the contents recovered and mentioned that Gates had been keen on having the x-rays completed first thing.

  Nicole didn’t tell MacAulay what the AG was looking for—that the real prize was big evidence contained in a small package. She figured the ME would call her on such a find.

  Nicole’s fast-fresh Cobb salad from the local drive-up had wilted beyond appetizing, but she took a few bites anyway. She sipped the coffee she’d ordered, which was room temperature. She picked up the next piece of paper from the stack—a complaint from the Silverton area. Wild horses were encroaching upon a ranch there, spooking the livestock and taking down fences. She made a note on the bottom of the page to have her assistant contact the Bureau of Land Management, which was in charge of protecting their small pod of wild horses. Then she set that aside and found her mind drifting again.

  They hadn’t gotten back to Luke Franks. Gates had taken up a chunk of her time, and Lars was catching a few winks so he could attend the autopsy that evening. She had yet to tell him about Gates’s suspicions of the BP agent.

  She took another poke at her salad, then dropped the remains in the trash and stood.

  Jane Casper had promised to stay put until Nicole had the chance to speak to her in person. She made her way to the conference room and found the deputy peering at the screen of one of the two laptops that were up and running. A printer was churning out paper dense with type and a small map. The remains of fast-food wrappers and Diet Coke cans littered one end of the long table.

  “Tell me you have something that will make my day,” Nicole said, and dropped into the chair next to her deputy.

  “Today and tomorrow too,” Jane promised, and Nicole felt her heartbeat kick into gear. She sat forward in her seat. “Really?”

  “I’ve earned every hour of overtime.” She looked at her watch. “That would be sixteen of them, just so you know I’m counting.” She smiled, and the freckles over her nose spread like a pattern of stars.

  “So let me have it,” Nicole said.

  “Numbers are my thing,” Jane said. “Lots of people see piles. I see patterns. I can pick out anomalies as easily as most people pick out socks, so some of this was easy-peasy.” She stood and walked around the table to a pile of papers. She shuffled through them and brought back several sheaves, which she spread out in front of Nicole. “I found money. Lots of it. Some explained. Others not.”

  “Who has it?” Nicole asked. She felt her breath flutter in her throat. Her time in Denver, white-collar crimes, had taught her that following money almost always led to the culprit.

  “All of them. Green. Baker. And Monte.”

  “Who has a reasonable explanation for it?”

  “They all do,” Jane said. “And then they all don’t.”

  Nicole groaned. “Stop talking in riddles, Deputy.”

  “Look at this.” She pointed to a list of deposits on a bank statement she had managed to procure after presenting the financial institutions with a signed warrant—easier to get one when the people in question were sworn officers. “They came in this morning by email, and I’ve been tracking them all day.”

  Nicole looked for the name at the top of the form. “This one belongs to Monte.”

  “Yes, and they go back a year. That’s all the judge would give me,” she explained. “If there’s cause for a deeper probe, he invited me to resubmit. I did that midafternoon.”

  “Because you established cause.”

  “For each one,” Jane confirmed.

  Nicole scanned the statements. Monte didn’t seem to spend a lot of money. There were the automatic deposits of his paycheck and debits for the usual—utilities, groceries, gas, and a gym membership. There was a large deposit of the same amount made—she went back and counted—four times a year. He had a savings that dwarfed Nicole’s, and there had been no withdrawals from it in the past year.

  “He has no consumer debt,” Jane said. “His SUV—it’s a 2015—is paid off, and he has a Mastercard he doesn’t use.” Jane pointed out the card number at the bottom of the statement and its corresponding zero balance. “I included a credit check on the warrant.” She pulled that paper to the top.

  “A credit score of eight-fifty,” Nicole noticed.

  Jane nodded. “He paid off his mortgage early, with two additional payments towards the principal yearly.”

  “He had a car loan that ran its course,” Nicole added.

  “Yes, and that bolstered his credit score. What I want to know is purchase history. Did he ever use that Mastercard? If so, for what? That will show us his discipline, and his extravagances. I also want to know how far back those large deposits go.”

  “And where they’re coming from,” Nicole said. A routing number was included with the deposit as well as the acronym of a bank or business, neither of which gave Nicole a clue about origin on the surface.

  “Well, I did some sleuthing on that,” Jane said. “I have confirmation and conjecture.”

  “Tell me what you know first,” Nicole suggested.

  “The deposits are made quarterly and issued through an attorney’s office located in Austin, Texas. Each amount is twelve thousand five hundred dollars. Together, that amounts to fifty grand a year. So that’s what I know. A lot of estates are disbursed in this fashion, so that was my first checkpoint, and they’re pretty easy to confirm, but not here. I called the attorney’s office; turns out they’re big business. That’s with an exclamation point. They do nothing else. Their clients are big-chain grocery and clothing stores—I’m talking Macy’s Fifth Avenue, Saks, et cetera—a skateboard manufacturer, outdoor equipment suppliers. I put it all into the pot and started thinking about it an
d Monte and any possible connection.”

  “Did you find one?”

  “Yes.” Jane gathered up the statements on Monte and straightened them into a neat pile. “On February twenty-fourth, 2017, Monte’s wife was killed in an auto accident.” She shook her head, and a heaviness settled on her features. “Actually, she survived the crash but was pinned inside her crumpled car. Passersby stopped, talked with her, and administered what aid they could while they waited for first responders. One man tried using a crowbar to peel back the metal. It was of little use. Flames erupted from the engine area, pushing back the witnesses. The car exploded in flame.”

  “Damn,” Nicole breathed.

  “Yeah.” Jane nodded and let the silence intrude a moment longer. “The truck that hit her? It was an eighteen-wheeler, a company truck loaded with sundries. The company is a client of this attorney’s office.”

  “You think Monte sued them?”

  “I do. The truck driver had had less than eight hours of sleep in three days.”

  “Gross negligence.”

  “Yes. Standard payout on something like this is a million dollars, spread out over twenty years.”

  Nicole worked the numbers. “An exact fit.”

  “Yes. And even if it doesn’t play out this way, the attorney is legit and in good standing with the Texas Bar Association and the American Bar Association.”

  “So the money’s good, no matter where it’s coming from.”

  “Yes.” She turned over the stack of papers, revealing what looked like an email communication with a rundown of numbers. She tapped a figure at the top. “This figure, however, is an anomaly. A hundred thousand dollars, dropped out of the blue, into Monte’s checking account. It doesn’t appear on his statement because the deposit was made two days ago, at eleven sixteen AM, the old-fashioned way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Someone walked into the bank’s branch in Kalispell with a cashier’s check, filled out a generic deposit slip, and handed that and the check over to the teller. I called. The deposit was made by a female not matching Baker’s description. In fact, the teller remembers it so well because the amount was large, the woman making the deposit was not listed on the account, and she seemed strung out and crashing fast. I requested the video of the transaction, so that’s on its way. In the meantime, we can speculate.”