“Oh, Teddy, that’s horrible,” Cat said. She shuddered and stiffened against me.
I continued. “The task force agents rifled through all the police station paperwork. They took the lack of records of any crime as confirmation of the theory that I am on the take. They had me go with them to Spanish Camp and poked around there. They knocked on doors in The Settlement asking questions, probably about whether I was a crooked cop. And they got nothing from any of it.”
“Because there was nothing to get,” Cat chimed in.
“That’s what I thought. That’s what I still think. But all this talk of drug smuggling, and no other good explanation for the recent crimes, makes me wonder if drugs might be a factor.
“Take Anthony,” I went on. “He gets his ganja somehow, and has for years, without anyone, including me, discovering how, or when, or from whom. He has to have some connection to a supplier. And he was beaten while deciphering a code book for me, a book that might have had information about drug trafficking in it. Maybe he had no intention of deciphering the book, or maybe he intended to mislead me about its contents.”
“Maybe the book was not the reason he was beaten,” Cat suggested. “Maybe he was beaten to keep him quiet. After all, the Methodist church is not exactly a secret hideout. Anyone could have seen him there and taken the book just to throw you off the track.”
“If that’s correct, it would still leave me nowhere with a theory for a motive. And drug smuggling would be more plausible if there were some other evidence to support it, if someone had seen or heard something unusual, a boat at sea, an after-dark beach landing, people sneaking onto the island.” I had the hopeless feeling I imagined one might have before a suicidal leap from a cliff. “But I’ve heard nothing like that. And what about you, Cat? You fly over Anegada all the time. Have you seen anything out of the ordinary?” The leap, and I was in free fall.
“I almost always fly in from the southwest, Teddy, from St. Thomas, so I fly mostly over water. But, no, I’ve seen nothing unusual.” The legato throb of her pulse against me betrayed no concern, a sharp contrast to my tachycardic heart.
“I need another drink,” Cat said. “What about you?” And with that she was up, bustling over to the low table that held the rum, splashing more in both glasses.
She brought the drinks back, handing mine down as she stood over me. “This has gotten you all tense, lover. You need to relieve that tension. I can help you with that,” she said, straddling me, the tail of her shirt sliding above a silken thigh. In a moment we were having sex, brutal, animal copulation, Cat above, all thrust and heat.
As we moved against each other, we both knew. I knew Cat had a part, some part, in the enterprise responsible for Kelliher’s murder and De Rasta’s beating. Cat knew her secret flights were no longer a secret to me. We silently grappled and sweated as if combatants locked in a battle for our lives. In the end, the silence was broken by our mutual outcry, but the cry was different now than in the past, wary and suppressed, and we parted without another word.
Chapter Twenty
The fresh start of a Monday morning loses some of its appeal when you awake realizing that your impression that your mistress is a drug-running killer is not just a bad dream. Add a wife surly because she has to work an unscheduled breakfast shift, a teenage daughter whining about the lack of stylish designer clothing in Tortola and the need for a thousand-mile shopping excursion to Miami to correct this injustice, and a son who announces out of the blue that he now knows the exact mechanics for making babies, courtesy of his best friend, Malvern “Mullet” Soares, and you have a roaring start to the week.
The domestic segment of the morning’s difficulties was disposed of, temporarily, by the dispersal of adults to jobs and kids to school. I decided to start the workday by tackling the drug-running-killer-mistress issue, which arguably fell into the category of business, not to discount its significant domestic implications. Some quiet reflection at the police station seemed to be a good starting point.
When I arrived, the building was empty, a note taped to the door explaining that the administrator was taking a sick day. Pamela Pickering was certainly blameless for needing a mental health day after the trauma inflicted by Agent Rosenblum and his men. Her absence provided an opportunity to use the computer in her office without unnecessary and potentially embarrassing questions about why I was searching for information on VI Birds’ sexy female helicopter pilot. And pecking away at Pamela’s sticky computer keyboard sure beat my previous plan for the morning of staring at the peeling mustard-yellow paint on the wall while trying to come up with a way to explain my suspicions of Cat to the deputy commissioner, and the guaranteed fallout of that explanation.
As a mere special constable, I had no access to any closed police databases, either international or those of the RVIPF. I considered calling Rollie Stoutt to ask him to search those restricted sources for information on Cat but quickly discarded the idea. While I might count on his indifference to prevent any interference with my investigation, a request for him to actually do something might be a catalyst for a conversation with the DC, a can-of-worms unveiler I wished to avoid.
In the end, I opted for the public access route, and after two hours on the Web was rewarded with a shattering headache and no worthwhile information of any sort about Mary Catherine Wells. I medicated myself with two aspirin and decided to go over the results of my search from a few days before to see if there was anything of value I had missed.
Ten minutes later I was staring at the grainy photograph of Cat and her fellow pilots from Desert Storm. Looking at the .38 Smith & Wesson holstered on her hip, I had to wonder if it was the weapon that had turned Paul Kelliher from faux biologist into crab bait. Cat spoke about the gun so affectionately in the Houston Chronicle article that I had to assume she would still have it. It was probably unregistered, and with the ease of gun ownership in the US, probably hidden in her apartment in St. Thomas. But I had no basis for ballistics testing of the gun even if I could access it, and no bullet or bullet fragment from Kelliher’s remains to compare it with.
I reread the article hoping for something, anything, to jump out at me. Seeing again that Cat had lived on Puerto Rico, I tried to find information on the army base there and learned that the base, Fort Buchanan, had closed as an army facility in 1966. Cat would not have been born at that time. While the article said she had lived in a number of other places in her youth, any information on her in those places was not available through a search under her name.
I decided to try her father’s name, hoping to obtain information on Cat through him. The first search result about Neville Wells was his obituary from the archives of the Winfield Daily Courier of Winfield, Kansas. The details of his years from 1941 to 1991 were compressed into one paragraph, a half century summarized in prose as austere as the Kansas plain:
Neville Wells passed away March 1, 1991, at his home in Winfield. He was born January 2, 1941, in Detroit, Michigan. A career army pilot and Vietnam veteran, Mr. Wells is survived by a daughter, Mary Catherine Wells, who is currently serving with the US Army in Operation Desert Storm. Funeral arrangements are through Swisher-Taylor & Morris Funeral Home in Winfield. Interment will be at Highland Cemetery.
No memorial or church service was mentioned. No surviving spouse or relatives other than Cat were named.
The next search result fairly popped with information about Neville Wells’s military career. Chief Warrant Officer Wells was on the “Dead After Tour” name list of a veterans group, the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association. Clicking on his name revealed that his unit was the Sixty-Eighth Assault Helicopter Company, with which he served two tours in Vietnam, ending in 1965. His helicopter’s in-country call sign, “Hamburger 5,” was even noted.
A link to a site maintained by another veteran of the Sixty-Eighth AHC contained photocopied pages of the unit history written during the war, together with a wealth of photographs. CWO Wells was referred to in several port
ions of the unit history by his nickname, “Tree-Level Neville,” a reference to his favorite tactic of flying at treetop height to avoid enemy antiaircraft fire.
There was a photograph of CWO Wells, with his flight crew, in front of their UH-1 Huey, dripping jungle and thatched hooches in the background. He carried the Smith & Wesson .38 he would later give to Cat in a shoulder holster. His name and the names of the rest of the flight crew had been typed along the bottom of the photo with a manual typewriter, the letters slightly askew.
The anonymous webmaster of the Sixty-Eighth AHC site made up for in enthusiasm what he lacked in organizational skill. The site was a mishmash of photos, histories, lists, and notices of reunions. Paging through, I stumbled on a section entitled “Post-Tour History,” which detailed many of the unit members’ lives after their time in Vietnam. These biographical summaries were not in alphabetical order. Some consisted of paragraph after paragraph describing later military postings, marriages, education, children’s names, dates of discharge, and civilian jobs. Some contained only a name and date of death.
After flicking through this section for almost an hour, I came to the bio for Neville Wells. According to its unnamed author, CWO Wells was posted to Fort Buchanan in San Juan, Puerto Rico, after his tours in Vietnam. He was honorably discharged from the army in 1966, reenlisted in 1970, and served in Germany, Hawaii, and Japan before his second honorable discharge and retirement in 1987. The fact of retirement was the last information in the bio, Wells’s death in Kansas having escaped the author’s notice.
All this provided little additional information pertaining to Cat. It did serve as confirmation of her youth spent as an army brat, bouncing from post to post, although it appeared likely she was born in the gap between Neville Wells’s discharge in 1966 and his reenlistment. If the Houston Chronicle article about Cat was accurate, her time living in Puerto Rico would have been when her father was not in the military. There did not appear to be any significance to this.
Four hours of searching had only succeeded in increasing the intensity of my headache. The ancient history I had unearthed about “Tree-Level” Neville Wells was a waste of time. I took this as further confirmation that, as a policeman, my investigative techniques left much to be desired.
I rummaged through the top drawer of Pamela Pickering’s desk, searching for another dose of aspirin. Frustrated in that search as well, I leaned back in her chair with my hands over my eyes, willing them to rest in the hope that my headache would abate on its own. The warm part of the day had arrived. I dozed through the dull throb at the base of my skull, drifting through a dream of Cat in the jungles of Vietnam, Smith & Wesson in hand, haggling over a drug deal with a corrupt ARVN general.
Then the telephone began to ring in my office across the hall.
Chapter Twenty-One
I cannot remember the last time there had been an unexpected call made to my office telephone. A truly unanticipated call, not in response to an inquiry made to headquarters, not scheduled in advance, was blue-moon rare at the police station. If an Anegadian ever wanted to reach me, a CB radio is what was used. And no one who was not an Anegadian ever wanted to reach me.
Three steps and I was in my office. The ringing seemed to stop, and I stared for a second at the heavy black government-issue phone. Had I imagined the ring? Then it rang again, and I realized the ringing had not actually stopped. I had moved so quickly time seemed to slow between rings.
I snatched the dusty receiver from its cradle. “Anegada Police Station.”
“Special Constable Creque, please,” said the pleasant, Midwestern American voice on the line. The connection was poor, with a bottom-of-a-barrel echo.
“This is Special Constable Creque,” I said.
“Ah, Constable, this is Detective Sergeant Donovan, from the Boston PD Missing Persons Unit. We spoke last week,” the voice said, the last statement half a question, almost asking if the speaker was remembered.
“Yes, Sergeant Donovan, good afternoon. What a pleasure to hear from you. To what do I owe this honor?”
Sergeant Donovan tried to be matter-of-fact, but there was a trace of professional pride coming through in his answer. “I think I’ve found your Paul Kelliher, or rather the person who he actually was.”
“The person he actually was? You mean he was not using his real name?”
“That’s right. His real name was John Ippolito. Paul Kelliher was a ghost identity he assumed.”
“A ghost identity?”
“The identity of a deceased individual taken by someone to conceal their true identity, Constable,” Donovan explained. “In this instance, Paul Kelliher was the deceased individual.”
Sergeant Donovan launched into his explanation. “It took a few days to put this all together, but as nearly as I can confirm, the real Paul Kelliher was born in Putnam, Connecticut, in 1945, son of James and Mabel Kelliher. His father died in 1950, and shortly thereafter, Mabel moved to Boston with young Paul. She remarried in 1962 to a Boston native, a high school teacher named Charlie Abreu. Sometime later that same year, Paul obtained a Social Security number, probably because he got an after-school job and was required to have one.
“In November 1962, Charlie Abreu legally adopted Paul, who became Paul Abreu. The entire family, Charlie, Mabel, and young Paul, died in a house fire on Christmas Eve 1963. Being during the holidays and wiping out an entire family, it made all the papers in Boston. The family was buried together in Mount Hope Cemetery in Mattapan. I went there and saw the marker.
“This next part is speculation, but it’s educated speculation, because I’ve seen a number of these cases. This kind of identity assumption happens more than the average person would expect. My speculation is that our man, sometime in the late 1990s, decided he needed another identity, for whatever reason. He visited Mount Hope Cemetery searching for headstones of males born in approximately the same year he was born. He found Paul Abreu and somehow obtained a death certificate for him. It wasn’t hard to do, in the days before 9/11. A friend who works in the city registry division, or maybe a few bucks passed along with a story about putting together a family genealogy, was all it would take. From there, he checked public records, found the probate case and maybe even the adoption proceedings, and learned Paul’s place of birth and birth name.
“So next he made a trip to the Putnam city clerk’s office with a request for a certified copy of Paul’s birth certificate. Maybe he produced a false ID, maybe he sold a sob story to a small-town clerk, or maybe he paid a bribe, but when he left he had real ID as Paul Kelliher, in the form of a birth certificate.
“Even better, between two different states and two different surnames for Paul, no one notified the Social Security Administration of the real Paul’s death. The Social Security number remained listed as active and somehow, God only knows how, our ghost got the number. He then had the golden tickets to a new identity—a name that is somewhat distinctive but with a nice common Boston Irish sound, no close relatives alive to stumble onto his use of the dead teen’s name, a genuine birth certificate, and an active Social Security number. From that point forward he can easily get a driver’s license, passport, and any other identification he needs or wants. He can invent a wife, family, job, and life story that he can use in a place like your British Virgin Islands with impunity because his paperwork is correct and no one has a reason to disbelieve any of it or even check it out. Until he turns up dead.”
“It’s amazing that someone would go to that extent to conceal his true identity unless he had something serious to hide. Did you learn any reason why he would do this?” I asked.
“No, Constable, looks like it’s up to you to fill in the blanks on that.”
“Just how did you connect all this to John Ippolito?” I asked.
Donovan chuckled softly. “Normally, Constable, I don’t reveal my trade secrets, not even to the folks at the BPD. A touch of mystique is great for old Sergeant Donovan’s reputation with the bosses arou
nd here. But I guess I can make an exception, given your distance and my impression that you are a good guy in a tough spot.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, wondering how he could tell I was in a tough spot.
Donovan went on. “Your guy had his ghost identity all set up, except for one thing, the thing you need more in the United States of America than almost anything else.”
“What is that?” I bit when he paused for effect. Detective Sergeant Donovan could be theatrical.
“Credit. You are nothing in twenty-first-century America without the ability to get credit. You can hardly exist without a credit card, to travel, to rent a car, to buy a plane ticket. So, I have this contact at Experian.”
“What is Experian?” I asked sheepishly.
“Jesus, Constable, it must be like living in Mayberry in 1950 down there. I gotta come and visit sometime.”
“You are always welcome,” I said, and meant it.
“Anyway, Experian is one of the big credit reporting agencies. You can’t get credit without a report from one of them, and they know more about the average American than the FBI, NSA, local cops, and their own mama will ever know.
“I had my contact at Experian run a credit report on Paul Kelliher,” Donovan continued, now on a roll. “She used the Social Security number that had been issued for Paul Kelliher in Boston in 1962. Maybe not quite kosher for my contact to do, but she and I, well, we go a long way back, and I once did her a favor by marrying her and an even bigger favor by divorcing her. She tells me Paul Kelliher has a credit history a yard long. But the personal info in the report showed a different address than the one you gave me from his passport application and driver’s license.
“I was so excited by the new lead that I offered to thank my contact by buying her a drink, but she declined, suggesting I do my drinking alone, like I did when we were married. With nothing better to do, I decided to take a cruise over to the credit report address, 319 D Fulton Street in the North End. Hauled my somewhat-outta-shape carcass to the apartment on the top floor of the building, a three-story walk-up; knocked on the door; and, surprise, nobody’s home.
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