A Stranger on the Beach

by Michele Campbell

  Besides, Aidan couldn’t even be certain that the accusation was false. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember the events of that night after he walked out into the storm. He was starting to think a piece of flying debris must’ve smacked him in the head, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. The problem was, that left him not knowing what had happened. If they asked him to swear on a Bible that he was innocent of Jason Stark’s murder, he’d have to decline.

  As Aidan walked into the visiting room, he realized there was nothing he could say to excuse himself. He’d hold his brother’s hand and thank him. Then tell him to go home and hug his kids and forget about Aidan. He was a lost cause.

  He had that whole emotional conversation with himself. Then he got to the table and saw that his visitor wasn’t his brother at all. It was Brittany Pulaski, Samantha’s sister, the catering manager at Harbor Gourmet. He had no idea why she was here.

  Aidan sat down across from Brittany and stared at her.

  “Brittany. What are you doing here?”

  Brittany was two years older than Samantha, and pretty, with the same gray eyes and curly dark hair. They’d been good friends back in high school. But after Matthew died, Samantha’s whole family turned their backs on Aidan, including Brittany. In recent years, she’d thawed some. Brittany would now say hi when they crossed paths. She’d even hired him for that bartending gig at Caroline’s house. Though, look how that turned out. The Pulaskis were bad luck for him, it seemed.

  “Hey, Aidan. How you doing?” Brittany said.

  “Uh. Not great.”

  “Yeah, well, I won’t take a lot of your time.”

  “Whatever. I got nothing else to do,” he said.

  He squinted at her, puzzled.

  “I came because Samantha asked me to deliver a message.”

  “Oh. Samantha knows about this? You told her?”

  Samantha had gone away years ago, right after Matthew died. She moved to Pennsylvania, where her grandparents lived, and never came back. Aidan hadn’t spoken to her since.

  “I didn’t have to tell her. She saw it on TV. You’re famous.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Great, just what I wanted. What’s the message? She’s relieved they finally got me?”

  “No, not at all. The opposite. She wanted me to tell you how sorry she is.”

  “I don’t need her pity.”

  “It’s not pity. She wants to apologize.”

  “What for? This isn’t her fault. She broke my heart years ago, but that’s water under the bridge now,” Aidan said.

  He realized he meant it. Finally, Samantha was in the past. The spell she’d cast over him had been broken by somebody else’s spell. A more powerful witch. Did he never learn?

  “Not for breaking your heart,” Brittany said. “She’s sorry she didn’t speak up for you back in the day. She feels bad about that. When Matthew died, she was still a kid, and it was all too much for her. She freaked, she ran. She wants you to know she regrets how she behaved. That she left you in the lurch.”

  Right after Matthew died, Aidan had begged Samantha to come forward to back up his claim of self-defense. The prosecutor was coming after him with some ginned-up story of how he killed his best friend with his bare hands in a fit of jealous rage. It was a lie. What happened was Matthew’s fault. Samantha and Aidan met in the cave down on the beach, where they’d always gone to be alone together. Samantha was tearful, apologetic, begging Aidan to take her back, begging forgiveness. Then Matthew showed up, and he wasn’t looking to apologize. He was the one in the jealous rage, not Aidan. Matthew started the fight. Aidan only defended himself. Samantha could have told them that, but instead she abandoned him. That was truly when she broke his heart.

  “It’s true. She did abandon me. My life went wrong then. I went to jail when I should’ve gone to college. Never got a decent job since. And here I am again. I’m not saying that’s Samantha’s fault, though. Most of it’s on me.”

  “Samantha can’t change the past, Aidan, and neither can I. But she asked me to help you.”

  “You? How can you help?”

  “There’s something I never told you, that struck me as weird at the time. I thought of it again when I saw that woman’s picture in the paper, and I told it to Samantha.”

  “The woman? You mean Caroline Stark?”

  “Yes. I told my sister, and she made me promise to tell you. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Okay. I’m listening. What is it?”

  “Remember when I hired you to work a bartending gig at her party?”

  “Yeah, but don’t go feeling guilty about that. You offered me work, and I took it. The mess that came after—that was my own stupidity.”

  “Okay, but—I can testify that this lady was after you, Aidan. She had the hots for you back then. I know that, because she requested you for the party. Not just asked for you. She insisted. I don’t know whether that helps or not. But, in the papers, they’re making you out to be a stalker. I know that’s not true. Caroline Stark came after you hard, and I’m willing to say that in court.”

  “It’s true, Caroline came after me. But that was later. We didn’t meet for real until she came into the Red Anchor for a drink one night, maybe three or four days after that party. Before the party, she saw me once on the beach, but she didn’t know me from Adam.”

  “You’re wrong. She definitely knew you before the party or she never would’ve asked for you like that. I had Eddie Morales lined up to work Mrs. Stark’s job that night. He’s my main bartender. Caroline Stark called me and instructed me to fire him and hire you instead, or else I wouldn’t’ve done it. Aidan, she asked for you by name.”

  “That can’t be. Caroline didn’t know my name then. Well, wait a minute. She knew my first name. But not my last name, or where I worked.”

  “I’m telling you, she did. She said she wanted Aidan Callahan from the Red Anchor to work her party. She said she knew you from the bar and liked your style, thought you’d add flair to the event. I told her I had someone else slated in, but she didn’t want to hear that. She told me to drop Eddie and hire you instead. It was like, if I wanted her business, I better honor this request.”

  “I’m certain Caroline didn’t come into the Red Anchor until after the party. You’re mixed up on the timing.”

  “How could I be? Something like that, I’d remember. You’re not nobody to me, Aidan. With the history we have, I pay attention to what you do. Me and Samantha, we talk about you sometimes. We keep tabs. Some rich weekender chick comes in asking for you, I’m gonna remember.”

  “You thought I was sleeping with her?” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “I wondered. I thought, maybe you got yourself a sugar mama.”

  “Well, I didn’t. I wasn’t sleeping with her.”

  He paused, remembering his lawyer telling him to keep his mouth shut. But he couldn’t resist.

  “Not then,” he said, and wanted to kick himself. Caroline had her hooks in him so deep that, after everything that happened, he still felt the need to brag about their relationship.

  “I don’t know what happened between you and that woman,” Brittany said, “but I want to help. Samantha’s married, you know. She’s having a baby in December. She feels bad that—well, she feels bad. And so do I. You should tell your lawyer what I said.”

  “I will. Thanks for coming.”

  As he watched her walk away, Aidan thought about what Brittany had said. He believed her now, but he didn’t know how to process the information. Caroline had known his full name and requested him to work at her party. Why would she do that, and what could it mean?

  54

  Jess put on her power pantsuit for the team meeting at the prosecutor’s office. She reminded herself to speak in a low register and not to fiddle with hair. People were always telling her that she looked too young to be a lieutenant, and Vernon Mays already wasn’t satisfied with her work. She needed to appear mature and professional while delivering th
e bad news. Not only had Jess failed to locate Caroline Stark, but new evidence she and Mike had developed suggested that their star witness might be implicated in her husband’s murder. It was really just a maybe. Jess still had faith in Caroline. She was hoping for good news from the crime scene team to shore up Caroline’s credibility. Like Aidan Callahan’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, or the recovery of Jason Stark’s body with some forensic tell that Callahan was the murderer.

  As Jess got off the elevator and marched toward the conference room, Mike Castro stepped forward to intercept her.

  “You have a golf game after the meeting?” she said, looking him up and down.

  He’d taken the opposite sartorial approach from Jess, dressing down in khakis and a polo shirt. Guys could get away with that, and people still paid attention when they talked.

  “Give me a break. I worked late last night and went out early this morning to serve a subpoena. This was the best I could do,” he said.

  “Just kidding.”

  Vernon Mays walked by with Phil Nadler, the head of the crime scene team.

  “You two joining us?” Mays said.

  “Two minutes, boss,” Mike said.

  Mike waited until the others were out of earshot before speaking.

  “Listen, I hit pay dirt, but you won’t like it. Bad news about Caroline.”

  Jess blanched. “Is she all right?”

  “I didn’t find her dead if that’s what you mean. I didn’t find her at all. Her phone is off, and she removed the SIM card. Not only isn’t she using it to make calls. It’s not accessing data or pinging cell towers or anything. She’s off the grid, and deliberately.”

  “That is bad news. But why do you think it’s deliberate?”

  “Because. There’s something worse.”

  “Ugh, go ahead. Tell me.”

  “When I couldn’t track her using her phone, I started analyzing the numbers she called for leads. The number she called the most in the days leading up to the murder? An insurance company. Two days before the murder, a new insurance policy was taken out on Jason Stark’s life in the amount of five million dollars, with Caroline as the sole beneficiary.”

  Jess kicked the wall. “Two days. Two days?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Mike, two days. That looks like she killed him for money.”

  “Yeah. No kidding.”

  “Aw, shit. I really believed everything she told me. Hey, you don’t think this could be a coincidence, do you?”

  “Seriously? You can’t be that naïve, right?” Mike said.

  “Two days means she’s involved.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “I can’t believe she’d do it.”

  “Why not? The husband cheated. She’s got a new guy. They get the insurance money and run off together. It’s classic.”

  “I remember something. When Aidan grabbed Caroline in the police station, he asked her if she killed Jason.”

  “Why would he have to ask? He was there,” Mike said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “But it suggests she was involved, right? We have to tell the team about the insurance policy. It’s too big to keep it quiet. Mays will hate this.”

  “Or else he’ll love it. More publicity.”

  In the conference room, Vernon Mays asked everyone to introduce themselves. There were more people present than Jess had expected, including officers from the crime scene team, an assistant prosecutor, and a federal prosecutor and an FBI agent. Jess had no idea why those last two were here, since there was no federal angle to the case that she knew of.

  “We’re going to start with a report from our colleagues from the feds,” Mays said. “Assistant U.S. Attorney Vargas and Special Agent O’Reilly are working a Russian mob case that has a surprising connection to our murder. Their investigation is ongoing, so what they say doesn’t leave this room.”

  He turned to the AUSA.

  “Melanie, the floor is yours. I understand you have a PowerPoint?”

  “Thank you, Vern. Good morning, everybody. Yes, one moment.”

  The AUSA stood up and walked to the lectern. She was early forties and confident, with sleek, dark hair, wearing a tailored dress and high-heeled leather boots—the sort of professional woman Jess wanted to be when she grew up. She put an organizational chart with photographs up on the screen. The heading read, KUNETSOV ORGANIZATION, NEW YORK CELL. Jess’s gaze was immediately drawn to a photograph of a dark-haired woman in the second row. The woman wore heavy eyeliner, and the label under her picture read, GALINA MOROZOVA. Galina. The Russian mistress. Jess’s eyes followed an arrow that led sideways from Galina’s photograph to a picture of a handsome, dark-haired man. She looked at the name printed underneath that picture, and gasped.

  Mike caught Jess’s eye and shrugged. “What’s the point of this?”

  “It’s Jason Stark,” Jess mouthed, pointing at the screen.

  “When I saw the reports of your murder case in the papers, I immediately reached out to Vern,” AUSA Vargas said. “For the past two years, we’ve been investigating an organized cell of undocumented Russian nationals operating in the U.S. and Canada, led by a man named Victor Kunetsov. The Kunetsov organization primarily focuses on human and weapons trafficking. However, like all criminal organizations with substantial illegal proceeds, money laundering is a major part of their operation. Jason Stark, your murder victim, was one of our targets. We believe he laundered over fifty million dollars of the organization’s money through his hedge fund, working with this woman, Galina Morozova.”

  Mike whistled. Jess raised her hand.

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” the AUSA said.

  “Caroline Stark told us that her husband had a Russian mistress named Galina. Is it possible that this was simply a romantic relationship?”

  “It may also have been romantic, but we’re certain about the money laundering. Peter Mertz, who’s the head of the hedge fund that Jason Stark worked for, reported Stark to the SEC several months ago when he discovered substantial irregularities in the accounts Stark handled. The SEC brought in a forensic accountant, who made the connection to our case through a complex series of transactions that I won’t go into here. I assure you, the evidence against Jason Stark is very strong. Plus, there’s more. We surveilled him.”

  The prosecutor clicked through a series of surveillance photographs. The man in the pictures was tall and handsome, with silvering dark hair and a chiseled face—far better-looking than Jess had imagined Jason Stark to be, based on Caroline’s descriptions of a marriage gone dead and sour. Then again, Caroline had not been entirely truthful, had she?

  “These are surveillance photographs of Jason Stark with Galina Morozova on three separate occasions in the past month,” the prosecutor said, clicking through slides.

  She stopped at a slide that showed Jason Stark getting into a blue Audi on a busy Midtown Manhattan street.

  “I draw your attention to this photograph of Galina picking Jason up outside his office in Manhattan. On that day, we followed the two of them to an important meeting at an auto parts store in Queens, which you see here, and again here. Jason and Galina walked through the store to a small parking lot in the rear between the building and the garage. In that parking lot, they met with the top enforcer for the organization. We don’t have great photos from the meeting because our operative was stationed down the street and would not have been able to access the rear parking lot except on foot. But he observed Mikhail Volodin exit the auto parts store not long after Stark and Galina left the place. Here’s a photo of Volodin exiting, and here’s his mug shot where you get a good look at him. Not someone you’d want to run across in a dark alley.”

  The mug shot on the screen showed a hulking bodybuilder type with a shaved head and a long, puckered scar on one cheek.

  “We suspect Volodin of involvement in upwards of twenty homicides. We believe the purpose of the meeting at the warehouse was for Volodin to threaten
Jason Stark’s life. Your victim stole money from the wrong people. Stark skimmed several million dollars of the Kunetsov organization’s money when it passed through the hedge fund. We intercepted phone calls between Galina Morozova and her boss indicating that they were threatening to kill him if he didn’t pay it back.”

  Jess raised her hand again. “Wait, I’m confused. Are you saying these mobsters were involved in Jason Stark’s murder?”

  “That possibility is exactly why we’re here. Right now, I can’t prove that the Russians killed Jason Stark, but it would certainly be consistent with their MO to whack somebody who crossed them. And Jason Stark crossed them. I’d like to hear your evidence. If your evidence is weak, or could support my Russians doing this, I’d propose adding this murder to my conspiracy and racketeering case.”

  “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” Vernon Mays said. “You want to take over?”

  “Jason Stark’s murder would become part of the Kunetsov case. I’d cross-designate you as a federal officer, Vern, so you could still handle the murder.”

  “Work with the feds. Okay, I like that,” he said, nodding.

  “Wait a minute,” Jess said. “This can’t be right. We have eyewitness testimony that Aidan Callahan murdered Jason Stark, and forensic evidence to back it up. So, Stark’s murder can’t be connected to your case.”