Past Perfect

by Richard Stockford

  Past Perfect

  By

  Richard Stockford

  Copyright 2015 Richard Stockford

  Thank you for purchasing this book.

  Although set in an altered version of the author’s favorite town, this book is purely a work of fiction. The characters and events described herein exist only in the author’s mind and are not intended to represent real people, places or events.

  Thank you for reading and respecting the hard work of this author.

  Acknowledgements

  I offer my heartfelt and eternal thanks to the many people who have supported and assisted my humble writing efforts with special appreciation to an encouraging family and WGTW.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  From Past Master

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Eleanor Gaylord’s blonde hair glowed like a halo in the thin fall sunlight slanting through her bedroom window. She loved Halloween; the make-believe threats and forbidden treats, the smell of burning leaves in the crisp fall air and, most of all, the delicious sense of anonymous mischief in the moonlight. On this October thirty-first late afternoon, she sat quietly in her room, humming happily as she stitched the last seams in her son’s costume. At thirteen, Sebastian would no longer tolerate kids’ costumes, so she had made an elegant mask and cape of black velvet to go with black leather boots, black pants and a black silk shirt. With the antique rapier he had found in the attic sheathed at his belt, he’d make a most convincing highwayman, she thought, grinning inwardly, picturing his serious attempt at adult behavior. This was the other thing she loved about Halloween. Time alone to fabricate the texture of her family’s memories, to fuel the holiday anticipation, make it special for the people she loved.

  She glanced at her watch, hurrying now to finish before the taxi arrived at four o’clock to take her to the airport. A week in Chicago with her brother and his family would be a welcome break from the social rigors of her husband’s grinding political campaign.

  Eleanor Gaylord had entered the world as Eleanor Duffy in 1942. The daughter of the lead sawyer in one of James Gaylord’s lumber mills, she brought an ethereal beauty to her first job as a secretary in the mill office that caught the eye of young Montgomery Gaylord, the newest generation in the Gaylord Mills dynasty. They were married in 1963 and if Eleanor, deferring to Montgomery in all things social, never felt truly at home in her role as lady of the manor, she never failed to do her best to complement the faultless grace and respectability of the honored family name. Her gentle beauty and undemanding demeanor provided a soft touch to the formality of wealth. When Montgomery’s political career took hold and eventually led him to the State Senate in 1970, she remained the perfect genteel foil to his increasing granite irascibility.

  By 1975, the Gaylord household consisted of Eleanor and Montgomery and their two children, Sebastian and Pauline, along with Annie White Montgomery’s younger sister, who occupied one wing of the gigantic house with her husband Walter and son Chester.

  Today, Eleanor was alone in the house, her family scattered between school, work, and shopping. When they all returned home that evening, they puzzled over the black velvet cape on the floor of her empty bedroom, needle and thread still hanging from its last stitch, but she and the luggage that had been standing in the front hall were gone as expected. What they didn’t expect was that Eleanor Gaylord would never be seen again.

  **************************

  The soft glow of the brass lamp cast a small island of light in the sea of dark. Annie White hunched over her writing desk scribbling rapidly, the letter’s composition rehearsed a thousand times in her mind. Ears tuned to catch the slightest sound outside her closed bedroom door; her fear was made more real by the writing of it. Finishing the hasty letter, she folded it carefully but hesitated before sealing it in its envelope. Stomach contracting in nervous cramps, she closed her eyes, searching for guidance. This was a point of no return, the closest she had ever come to facing the disaster her life had become, and the monster that had invaded it.

  Annie and Montgomery had grown up at the Gaylord Estate, and had inherited it jointly upon the death of their parents. Annie had a modest trust fund and an entire wing of the huge house, where she lived with her husband Walter White and their fifteen year old son Chester. With Walter’s income from his work as an accountant, it was an easy life.

  Then, the idyll shattered. Annie’s sister-in-law - no, more than that - ‘Dear Eleanor’, the sister she’d never had, vanished without a trace. Two days after Halloween, her brother had called from Chicago with the chilling news that she had not arrived as scheduled. Montgomery, who was in the middle of a two-week stay at the state capital, returned home angry and indignant. The Gaylord name and political connections rated first class attention and he got it quickly. Police came; local officers and inspectors, State Police detectives, and finally FBI agents. They searched the house and the grounds and when that proved fruitless, they called in dogs and did it again. They questioned everyone again and again while waiting in vain for a kidnapper’s call, shadowy men with rolled-up sleeves, hunched impatiently over hastily wired telephone extensions, but in the end there were no calls. There were no calls, no clues and finally nowhere left to look. Within a week, the attention waned, replaced by speculation that perhaps Eleanor had simply fled the smothering embrace of her increasingly constricting marriage. Finally, even the speculation ended and the last vestiges of Eleanor vanished from the Gaylord home, swept away by growing official indifference and Montgomery’s acrimonious refusal to even discuss her disappearance. He took the loss of his wife stoically, more bothered and embarrassed than sad, but Annie’s grief was boundless, staining her life in shades of black and gray, haunting her dreams, and she never stopped believing that Eleanor had met her death that day at Gaylord Manor. At first, she called the investigators every day, demanding news, pleading for the case to remain open, and then weekly, but finally, when Montgomery told her that she was drawing embarrassing attention to the family and his career, she settled for the occasional private chat with Bangor Police Chief, Avery Thomas, who was a childhood friend and not unsympathetic.

  Now, a year after Eleanor’s disappearance, Chief Thomas had retired, replaced by a stranger, and Annie finally knew the answer to the mystery that covered her home like a phantom shroud. With a profound sense of finality, she sealed the envelope, and carefully printed a name on the back. Omitting the address, but adding a six-cent stamp, she slipped the letter into her purse, turned out the light and returned to her room to lie awake in anticipation of the dawn.

  Chapter 1

  Kashif Amini chambered a round in the old Ak-47 folder and, grinning at Jennifer Ennis’s habitual wince, slid the weapon down into
the foot well. As hard and dependable as Jennifer was her distaste for firearms never ceased to amuse him. He glanced back at her brother, Pauli, in the back seat. “Check your pistol,” he said. “Make sure the safety’s on.” Pauli was a good soldier, but Kashif wasn’t taking any chances.

  It was seven fifty-five on a sunny Wednesday morning, and the three of them were sitting in a battered 1994 Chevy Malibu convertible waiting for the Bangor branch of the East Coast Credit Union to open. Kashif had bought the car from a down-state wholesale lot for four hundred dollars and spent an hour topping off the fluids, tinkering with the engine and replacing a bald tire. The car was a throwaway, but it needed to be reliable for a critical few miles. The night before, Pauli had stolen a half dozen front license plates from a neighborhood across town, and this morning they had attached one to the back of the Chevy. They were parked, engine idling, three rows back and down a little ways from the credit union in the small strip mall off Hammond Street where it nestled between a hobby shop and a game store. They’d been sitting a little further out, eating McDonald’s breakfast burritos and drinking milkshakes, when the three female employees entered the credit union, the first at seven-fifteen, and the last two at quarter of eight. This was the fourth day in the last week they had watched the Credit Union’s opening routine.

  It was exactly eight o’clock when newest teller, Ellen Dosty, flipped on the front lights and unlocked the door. Jennifer glanced at Kashif and dropped the car into drive.

  Eight a.m. and Millicent Comeau was already bored. At thirty-three, she’d been with the credit union for twelve years, working her way up from teller to branch manager, and working her salary up from a desperately needed pittance, when she and her husband were just out of college and struggling, to a moderately satisfying income which they no longer really needed. Dave had done very well in the investment business and, childless, they were both ready to kick back and relax. She was idly thinking about sailboats when the first customers of the day drove up outside.

  Jennifer pulled smoothly to a stop in the fire lane in front of the credit union, and Kashif and Pauli pulled ski masks down over their faces as they stepped out onto the sidewalk. They pushed through the door brandishing their weapons and yelling.

  “Hands up,” screamed Kashif, swinging the muzzle of his AK-47 between Ellen Dosty and head teller, Bethany Cooper. “Now, now, now, up where I can see ‘em!”

  In a well-rehearsed movement, Pauli was already around the end of the teller’s cages and into the short hallway behind. Jennifer had done a quick reconnaissance in the building two days previously, asking about opening an account and taking literature from the rack by the door, and then diagramed the floor plan in Kashif’s apartment. He kicked open the door to Millicent’s office and pushed her at gunpoint through her entrance to the back cage area.

  “Open the drawers,” he screamed. “Open ‘em now!” When the two cash drawers slid open, he yelled at the terrified women to get on the floor. Millicent and Ellen dropped where they stood, but Bethany hesitated, her left hand edging down toward the concealed button by her keyboard, until a thunderous ten-round burst from the Kashif’s assault rifle showered her with bits of plastic and broken ceiling tile. She dropped to the floor, not knowing that she had risked her life to send an alarm that Millicent had already sent.

  Millicent had hit the button at her desk, reacting quickly when she first saw the ski masks through her office window. With the three women cowering under Kashif’s rifle, Pauli quickly looted the cash drawers, dumping their contents into a maroon gym bag he’d pulled from his belt, and then yanked Millicent to her feet and threw her against the big safe built into the back wall of the room. He turned and bent to place the muzzle of his Sig 9mm against Ellen Dosty’s temple. “Open it, or she’s gone,” he said. The horrified woman leaped to swing open the heavy door, and ten seconds later Pauli was raking the banded stacks of bills into his bag. Two and one half minutes after they had entered the bank, Pauli was out the door, followed by Kashif who backed slowly to the entrance, then screamed, “Allahu Akbar,” before sprinting to the waiting car. Seconds later, Jennifer was pulling sedately around the corner, leaving the mall by the side entrance as sirens sounded in the distance.

  “You just had to shoot that thing, didn’t you?” said Jennifer, looking in the mirror at Kashif, who was now in the back seat.

  “You gotta get their attention,” he grinned. “We’re ok, and nobody got hurt.” Actually, the real reason he’d brought the automatic weapon was in case a cop car got behind them now. Firing it in the credit union had been an impulse and his grin widened as he recalled the looks on the women’s faces. “It’ll be a while before that bitch reaches for an alarm again,” he said.

  Pauli giggled. “We got a lot,” he said, voice high and reedy with adrenalin. “We musta’ got thousands.” He was clutching the gym bag tightly to conceal the trembling in his hands.

  Kashif Amini checked the safety on his rifle and watched the road behind them for pursuit. ‘Yeah, they’d done all right,’ he thought, ‘for starters’.

  Alarms at opening and closing times do not get police dispatchers too excited. Malfunctions and forgetful employees account for hundreds of false alarms every year in a small city and, although each one is answered, they tend to get treated as routine. The call that went out from Bangor Police headquarters was one of several that morning, laconic, business as usual. ‘758, ten seventy-eight, 336 Hammond Street. 732, assist’.

  The two west-side beat cars responded and started toward the alarm location. Under ideal circumstances, they would have been approaching the scene from different sides but, in this case, the two officers had been drinking coffee together behind the Universalist church, so they started toward the credit union (after carefully stowing their coffees) together under pulsating blue strobes.

  Patrolman Cory Lindquist was a second year officer assigned to Bangor’s northern-most patrol area that day. In the front seat of his cruiser with him was his dad, Jimmy Lindquist, who had retired from the department in 1993. Jimmy Lindquist was one of those likable old-time cops whose major achievement was longevity, and now at age seventy-three and ten years a widower, he took some small pleasure in flouting the department’s rules against civilian ride-along’s, badgering his son into the occasional lift downtown.

  Like his father before him, Cory was not especially curious by nature, and somehow lacked the gene that pulls most cops towards trouble like a magnet. He was paying little attention to the radio, thinking he would leave his father at the senior center and then head into the station to drop off a burglary report, when he turned onto Ohio Street and fell in behind an old Chevy convertible. He had just an instant to wonder about the bright sparkling of flame over the Chevy’s trunk before his windshield exploded into an opaque web of shattered glass and his cruiser skidded sideways off the road.

  Of all the radio calls guaranteed to grab the undivided attention of any police officer, ‘ten seventy-four’ or ‘officer needs assistance’ leads the list. It is universally understood that the assistance requested is urgent in nature, the situation dire and, not to put too fine a point on it, probably a matter of life and death.

  When Officer Lindquist finally managed to get enough air past his badly bruised ribs to croak “ten seventy-four, Ohio by Thirteenth” into his radio, he virtually assured the successful escape of Kashif Amini and the Ennis siblings. Every police car in the city vectored in on his location, expecting to find at least a gunfight in progress. Instead, they found a wrecked cruiser, a shot-up old man and a dazed Cory Lindquist throwing up in the ditch.

  Chapter 2

  Detective Lieutenant Thomas Clipper waited for the uniformed officer to unlock the door, then carefully stepped past him into the East Coast Credit Union. Clipper was a muscular 190-pound six footer with brown hair and hazel eyes. He had the long arms and large hands of a cruiserweight boxer, and a generally pleasant disposition that served to disguise his remorseless pursuit of t
he bad guys. At thirty-six, he had been in command of the Department’s Criminal Division for three years.

  The credit union’s main area was a rectangle with the teller’s cages dividing the room down the long axis. Clipper spotted the glitter of empty cartridge casings in the far right corner, and a five-by-six foot area of blown out ceiling tile gaped like a broken tooth over the center of the tellers’ counter. ‘Oh, oh,’ he thought, walking over to take a closer look at the brass. Lifting one case with his pen, he checked the head stamp. ‘7.62 x 39’ - - foreign military. He could see Detectives Ken Thomas and Allan Oaks with three white-faced women through the window into an interior office, and made his way in that direction, entering the office through a broken doorway. “Hi,” he said to the women, “I’m Lieutenant Clipper. Who’s the manager?”

  Millicent Comeau stepped forward, mutely introducing herself. Fit and tan, dressed in an expensive-looking business suit, she managed to look the part of a manager while still obviously in a state of shock.

  “Please do whatever you need to do to shut down for the rest of the day,” Clipper said. “Our priorities will be to get a look at your security tapes, get statements from the three of you, and collect whatever we can find in the way of physical evidence. And, we’ll need to know exactly how much they got, but we should be out of your hair by the end of the day.”

  Millicent nodded at a credenza in the corner of her office. “The security recorder’s in there, and I’ve already notified my regional manager. He’s on the way up from Belfast.”

  Ken Thomas checked the security camera recorder while Allen Oaks took Bethany Cooper into another office to start the interviews. He’d already quizzed the three on the descriptions of the robbers and put that information out to the other units.

  Clipper went out into the front room in time to meet Dave Adams, Bangor’s crime scene specialist and Cameron Shibles, one of two F.B.I. agents based in Bangor, coming through the door. Bank and credit union robberies generally fall under federal jurisdiction, but their investigations are usually done by team approach. Such was the case in Bangor, with Shibles content to supply technical and logistical help where needed, allowing Clipper’s squad to do the legwork. Prosecution would be handled at the federal level.