The Specter

by Saul, Jonas

  Clive leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. His stupid mistake of letting Frank Weeks steal his luggage will now cost him two of his men and at least a million dollars in cleanup.

  “Just do it. Leave the second you get Jessica’s email. Go to the nearest employee’s house from where you are and start down the list. I want it all done within twenty-four hours or faster.”

  “I won’t start until I see half a million wired to me. Send the email, I’ll receive it on my cell phone as I’m driving. Each body will get a photo for confirmation which I will email back to you. I’m going to my car now. Send what you have and I will watch for the money.”

  Clive held the phone to his ear, but Nick had already hung up.

  “Jessica,” he shouted, tossing the phone to one side.

  The door opened and she stepped in.

  “Email Nick everything on the staff at the strip club. He will need their full names and home addresses. Also, wire him five hundred thousand dollars immediately. I’m going to take a small nap but I want up by four in the morning. When I wake, have someone here for me. I’d prefer more boyish looks this time. Be discreet. You know what to do. Go now.”

  The door shut and Clive reclined in his chair, shutting his eyes, a smile on his lips.

  His Toronto troubles were about to be a memory. Soon, everyone involved in the fuck-up would be dead, and his secret would remain just that, a secret.

  Chapter 18

  Detective Folley rubbed his eyes and groaned. He and Angela Wheeler had stayed up all night grilling the witnesses. A sketch artist had been called in to draw the face of the rich British man the bouncers and the waitress had told them about from four nights ago.

  One of the detectives recognized the sketch and, using Google Images, brought up a British man who lived in Moscow on a computer screen. Each bouncer in succession agreed that the man on the screen was the same man who had entered the House of Lancaster four nights ago and left with Joanne Stevens and Jan Elliot. Folley also found out that the two men in holding cells downstairs, whom no one could identify, were with the British guy that night.

  The man was identified as Clive Baron, who appeared to be a hard man to track down. Angela Wheeler had ordered a full search on the man’s background. She wanted to know everything she could about him. It wasn’t long before his name popped up in connection with human trafficking, money laundering, and murder.

  According to information readily available on the Internet, he owned the largest yacht in the world, Divercity, 560 feet long. It cost him over three hundred million dollars. He owned homes in many cities and traveled around the globe on his private 767 jet. Baron had never married and had no kids.

  Spanish authorities once named Clive Baron in a money laundering case, which was handed off to the Russians for further investigation. As far as Angela and Detective Folley could find out, nothing more had been done about that case.

  Other than rumors and assumptions, Baron appeared squeaky clean. Too clean. Whatever he was up to, it looked like Folley and Angela wouldn’t be getting too close to him anytime soon.

  “So what happened?” Folley asked. He grabbed a pencil and started tapping it against the wooden top of his desk. “What do you think happened? The two men in the holding cell, why did they try to kill everyone at the club after being seen with Baron? Or maybe that was the point.”

  Angela leaned against Folley’s office door. “I have no idea what’s going on. I do know that this case just got a hell of a lot bigger. This is going to have to be shuffled upstairs. Whatever the reason those two thugs downstairs had to destroy that club is beyond me. Nothing is making sense. In all my years in homicide, I haven’t seen anything like this. There has to be a reason to kill this many people in such a short time frame.”

  “Unless they’re terrorists. Maybe we should call the FBI in on this. Get their take. Maybe the Americans have a file on those two downstairs.”

  “I don’t want to do that just yet.” Angela’s face was stoic. “Isn’t there another angle? I’ve got a lot of dead bodies on my hands and little evidence, but the case just wrapped up if we can determine those two downstairs did all of it.”

  Folley dropped the pencil and picked up the Rubik’s Cube on his desk. He leaned back in his chair and spun the colors out of order. He hated that Aaron had bested him so easily. “I want to look into this case a bit more. I want to know who’s pulling the trigger. If Baron was just here in Toronto, did he personally kill any of the people found at Casa Loma? If he did, we can file the arrest warrant and send it to Russia where we can request him extradited.”

  Angela pushed off the door and faced him. “We’ve got the murderers downstairs in the holding cells. Aaron said he had footage of those two taking his sister and he saw them at the airport the morning Gary Weeks was taken. They were found unconscious with C-4 on them and the guns that were fired inside the club. The DJ is dead. We’ve got first degree murder. It was planned and executed with the explosives placed strategically. Who’s to say Baron has anything to do with it? Going after him makes this case way too big. The kind of big that means we loose the collar.”

  “I think Baron has everything to do with this.” Folley dropped the Rubik’s Cube and picked his pencil up again. He hoped Angela wouldn’t notice him fidgeting.

  “On what grounds?”

  “My hunch is those two guys work for Mr. Baron and they’re here cleaning up for him.”

  Angela dismissed him with a wave as she leaned on the door. “You watch too many Jason Statham movies. People are people. They kill in fits of rage and they kill because they’re sick in the head. Sure, there are professional killers, but you’re talking hired guns, not Clive Baron. You really think someone as rich as Clive would need to travel around the globe in his private jet murdering people in various countries? With that much money, he could relax for the rest of his life.”

  Folley stood from behind his desk. “Angela, you’re tired. You’re not thinking this through. Those two downstairs aren’t going anywhere. We’ll meet up later this afternoon or tonight and process those two even if we don’t have their names. We’ll find out who they are after sending out their pictures to every major police station in Europe. My guess is we will ID them once we contact Moscow or London. Although, the one guy looks Jewish, so maybe they’re Israeli, who knows.” He paused to drop the pencil back into its holder. “Get some sleep. I will too. Then we’ll see what Moscow has to say about Clive Baron. It’ll be morning for them when we come back tonight.”

  “What about Aaron Stevens? I still need his statement.” She paused, lost in thought until her eyes focused on him again. “If what you say is true, Aaron may be in danger. We sent the waitress home. What if she’s in danger too? This might not be over. We have to consider that.”

  “True, but I think the perps are downstairs cooling their heels. No one’s going after anybody else.”

  “If this is as big as it looks like, you can’t be sure,” Angela said.

  “You’re right, I can’t. But we don’t have the manpower to protect everybody who worked at the strip club.”

  “If Clive Baron is involved, we need to find motive. I mean, what makes him kill like this? If it’s enough to expose himself this much, it must be seriously important to him.”

  “True, but remember, if those two downstairs weren’t interrupted by Aaron and his friends, no one would have been able to describe Clive to our sketch artist. Therefore, Clive felt he was home free.” Folley approached Angela. “Go home. Get some sleep. Let’s meet back here later.”

  As Angela left, her long hair cascaded past her shoulders in lazy curls. It was like she had come from the hairdressers even though she had just pulled an eighteen-hour shift. Her shoes clicked on the tile floor as she walked down the hall.

  Folley shut his office door, then sat and leaned back in his chair, wondering where Aaron was. The license plates on the vehicles in the strip club’s parking lot had come back. It looked li
ke there was a connection to Aaron with the camper van which was registered to Daniel Smith, a known associate of Aaron’s from his old karate gym. Two uniforms had gone over to Daniel’s house, but had failed to locate him yet.

  So far, after hearing the witness statements, Aaron had three friends with him and they saved everybody and then ran off. Getting Aaron’s statement would help clear up why Aaron was there in the first place. He had to have had prior knowledge of the strip club attack, because he showed up just in time, ordered everyone out of the building and said something about the place blowing up. The 911 recording was clear enough to pick up his words but not clear enough to hear the entire sentence.

  The cops needed to know whatever it was that tipped Aaron off. Maybe Aaron knew how Baron was involved.

  Which would mean Aaron’s life was still in serious danger.

  Chapter 19

  In front of Aaron, family pictures adorned the walls of the hallway in the waitress’s home. The living room was to his left, and some kind of parlor room with a billiard table to his right.

  And here I thought the strippers made all the money. For a waitress, she sure has enough stuff.

  “You take cream in tea?” she hollered from up ahead. “Or do you want coffee?”

  “Cream works,” Aaron shouted back.

  “In what?”

  For a moment, he missed what she meant. “Oh, in tea.”

  He followed the hall to a large kitchen with a large chandelier over a cherry oak kitchen table.

  “Wow, this is some place. It’s so nice.”

  She stood by the counter, dipping tea bags in the cups. “You sound surprised.”

  “Well, it’s just, I don’t mean anything by it, but …”

  “You don’t think I make enough money to afford it.”

  “Well, no … what I mean is—”

  “It’s okay,” she said, stirring cream into the tea cups. “This is my parent’s house. I moved back in after my marriage fell apart a year ago. They’re on vacation in Hawaii right now.”

  “Oh, nice place to go,” Aaron said, hoping they’d talk about something else.

  She extended a cup of tea to him. “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  He took the proffered tea and half smiled, not ready to talk about Joanne quite yet.

  “My name’s Julie. You’re Aaron.” She stuck her hand out and he shook it. “Sorry about being a bitch to you yesterday. That’s what I was told to do.”

  “Told? By who?”

  Aaron sipped his tea. Peppermint wafted up his nostrils as the hot water burned his tongue.

  “Come, we’ll sit in the living room. I’ll tell you everything I know. Maybe you’ll get some closure.”

  Aaron sat on the loveseat, which backed up to the wall to give him an ample view of the house, the front window and the door.

  Julie sat in the chair to his right and placed her cup on a coaster on top of the coffee table. Aaron did the same.

  “I’m really scared,” she said.

  Aaron nodded. He was scared too, but lost on what to do next. He hadn’t been admitting it to himself, but he was seriously scared. He was almost shot last night.

  “I think those men wanted to kill everyone because of what Frank said.”

  “Frank? You mean Frank Weeks?”

  Julie nodded and reached for her tea, her hand shaking.

  “My sister called me and left a message the night she disappeared,” Aaron started. “The message was unclear but I heard the name Weeks and I heard vodka, something about a ferry and David Hornell. She said she was scared and that someone was coming after her. I later put it together that David Hornell was the ferry that took people over to the Toronto Island Airport. I discovered that Weeks referred to the brothers who worked at the airport. The vodka angle isn’t clear yet, but the shooter last night said, ‘It was all about vodka.’ Does any of that coincide with what you know?”

  “All of it.” Julie sipped her tea again. “The day before the British guy showed up, Frank came to the club like he always does. Except this time he seemed high or something, very happy and jumping all around. What was unusual was he had endless lap dances with …” She paused. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Just tell me. I know what my sister did.”

  “Well, Frank kept having dance after dance. One of the bouncers asked Joanne if everything was okay because the girls have to dance on stage too. They have to take their turn but Joanne stayed with Frank. I served him that night.”

  She set her tea cup down and leaned back in her chair. She collected herself, adjusted her pants, moved her hair from her shoulders and started again.

  “Frank confided in Joanne. She told me and one of the bouncers after midnight that Frank had stolen luggage at the airport. He said no one would ever know it was him. I think what got everyone killed was what was in that suitcase.”

  “What was in the suitcase?” Aaron asked.

  “Apparently there had been thousands of dollars in cash and some sort of documents that belonged to an alcohol distillery or something.”

  “That’s the vodka connection. It has to be.”

  Julie nodded. “Sounds like it. But what I don’t understand is, no one kills this many people for ten thousand dollars. If it was millions, maybe, but not thousands.”

  She was right, Aaron thought. The deaths weren’t motivated by money. It had to be the papers found in the suitcase. Or it could be the fact that someone stole from a rich guy and he took it personally. There really was no way for anyone to know except for the guy doing the killing.

  “Can you remember if Frank talked about the documents? Was there anything important in them?”

  “He did mention that it was brilliant. I brought over his third beer of the night around eleven and he said to Joanne that the files were genius. ‘Who would’ve thought. Those scientists.’ Something like that.” She narrowed her eyes, lost in thought. “Wait a second … there was something he said to your sister as I walked away. It was hard to hear as the music was so loud.” Julie looked back at him. “Something about it had been going on for a long time. I heard the word ‘years.’ Then he said, ‘the guy is getting crazy rich because of it.’ I walked out of earshot by that point. I’m pretty sure that was it.”

  “You may have the answer. Whatever was in those documents may be enough to kill for. Do the police know any of this?”

  She shook her head and fidgeted with her hands on her lap. “I gave them my statement about what happened at the club last night. That was all I could think about. I didn’t think what Frank said to Joanne was all that important.”

  “I think it’s what got him, and a lot of other people, killed.”

  Julie’s parents kept a nice house. They looked like they had money. What happened to Julie that she would have to work in a strip club?

  Julie had long curly hair down past her shoulders, beautiful teeth and a wicked smile. How he hadn’t noticed how smoking hot she was before was a testament to how much stress he was under.

  “Can you tell me what the cops think about last night?”

  “I was waiting for you to ask. I thought that was the reason you followed the cop here.”

  “You saw me?” Aaron asked, surprised.

  “Sure. I knew your Nissan right away after yesterday morning when the bouncers headed out to scare you.”

  “And you didn’t tell the cop? You weren’t worried about me?”

  She shook her head. “Not after what you and your friends did for us last night. I’d be dead if you hadn’t come searching for answers and that’s what I told the cops. You’re a hero. They’re looking for you to get your version of events, but that’s it, as far as I know. Even the bouncers are happy you put them all to sleep, otherwise they would’ve tried to play hero and gotten shot.”

  Relief swept over him. “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that. I thought they’d be gunning for my head. I just wasn’t getting any answers.” Maybe it was time to
meet up with Folley and tell him everything. “I guess I should be going. I probably need to get down to the police station to give them my statement too.” He stood and slipped his hands in his pockets, suddenly shy in her presence.

  “Yeah, I could use some sleep.”

  “Me too. I slept in my car last night. After everything went crazy, I didn’t know what to do or where to go.” He stepped around the coffee table and started for the front door. “Are you going to be safe here?”

  She nodded, her eyes shutting for a prolonged moment in her own subtle way. “Yes, as far as everyone’s concerned, they’ve caught the bad guys.”

  “But what if the bad guy just sends someone else? I’m not trying to frighten you, but that’s what I would do if I was the bad guy.”