Footprints of the Dead (Tom Gabriel #1)

by Tim Ellis

  “It’s different between her and me. She doesn’t like me, and I don’t like her.”

  “Okay. I’ve got enough on my plate right now without Allegre giving me grief as well.”

  They had to visit three places before they found the rum, ginger, and cherry tobacco mixture that made up Allegre’s Black Cavendish Virginia.

  At the hotel, they walked straight to Allegre’s apartment.

  She was sitting on her veranda with a scowl. There was an extra chair set out. It wasn’t a rocking chair, but it would do. He sat in it, and put the tobacco on the small table next to her half-full glass of cloudy lemonade.

  Rattlesnake snorted at him.

  She passed him a folded piece of paper.

  He opened it up and read it what it said. He nodded, stood up, and left.

  “I thought you haggled really well then,” Rae said as they walked back to the hotel room.

  He passed her the folded piece of paper.

  “Two thousand five hundred dollars! I coulda got it down to a thousand.”

  “I’m sure you could, but I took her at her word that the quote for the repairs was reasonably accurate. You said she needed to save face – this way she did. We’re friends again now. Not as before, but we know each other a little better.”

  His cell rang.

  He pulled it from his pocket.

  It was Mona.

  “Which button do I press?”

  She pointed to the right-hand one.

  “Hi, Mona.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Got it,” Mona said. “Judge Robb says ‘Hi’ back at you. She hopes you’re enjoying your retirement.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “That’s what I told her. So, there’s a few of us on our way to speak to Henry Appling. I thought I’d let you know.”

  “And what about the other things?”

  “Did you happen to notice how many hands I had at lunch?”

  “Just asking.”

  “The handgun and license plate are in the system. Kate Hanney in the Evidence Unit is going to ring me when she has anything.”

  “And then you’ll ring me?”

  “You think I have nothing else better to do?”

  “But you’ll call when you’ve found that hole in the basement, won’t you?”

  “It’s gonna take us a few hours to reach Appling’s farm, you know.”

  “I know, but you’ll call when you get any news?”

  “You sound desperate, Tom.”

  “I’ll wait for your call, shall I?”

  The line went dead.

  He was desperate. In the past, he’d always been in charge, at the centre of the investigation. Nobody did anything without his say-so. He wasn’t used to being a spectator, watching other people make a mess of things. Not that he didn’t trust Mona . . . well, he didn’t – he didn’t trust anybody.

  They were in the hotel room.

  Tom put the coffee on.

  Rae yawned and stretched. “I think I’ll go back to –”

  “Later.”

  “Do you realize –”

  “I want to go over everything we’ve got, just to make sure we haven’t missed anything, and I need your help to do that. You can crawl back into your bed later.”

  “Crawl is right. I could sleep for a month, I’m so tired.”

  “Get everything out. Let’s use the table this time. My knees object to crawling on the floor.”

  “Yeah, they’re a bit knobbly, aren’t they?”

  “Did I say you could comment on my knees?”

  Rae giggled.

  While Tom made the coffee, Rae piled everything on the kitchen table.

  “Is this still relevant?” she asked rolling out the reverse of the Michael Jackson poster.

  “We need a new one,” he said. “They’re in a round tube in the bottom of the wardrobe in the bedroom.”

  She walked along the hallway into the bedroom.

  Ten minutes passed. He hadn’t heard from her, so he followed her into the bedroom.

  She had a dozen posters rolled out on the bed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t make up my mind which one?”

  “This is not about posters. Pick one, and let’s go.”

  “But there are some real gems here.” She held one up. “Take this one for instance . . .”

  “Okay, we’ll take that one,” he said reaching for it.

  She snatched it away. “No, not this one – it’s Waffle from 1992.”

  He reach for another one. “What about –”

  She snatched that one away as well. “God, not that one. It’s Love Story in Blood Red by G-Spot.”

  He shook his head. “I think you’re forgetting who those posters belong to. You have a minute to choose one, and then I’m going to rip them all up.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Fifty seconds,” he said, as he turned on his heel and returned to the kitchen.

  She came back to the kitchen clutching a poster to her chest. “You’re a philistine.”

  “Put it on the table and start drawing a spider diagram. Put ‘Missing Children’ in the centre this time – that’s what this investigation is really about.”

  She did as she was told.

  “Now, let’s identify everything we’ve found out that relates to the missing children, and see if we can’t piece some pieces together.”

  Rae began copying down all the things they knew from the old diagram, and the new information they’d discovered. She wrote everything, so that it formed a circle all around the centre, and then drew lines to each point.

  As she wrote everything down, and created links with all the different pieces of data, Tom ran each piece through his mind to try to bring some sense to it all.

  It had all started with Mercy Hebb going missing. She had been investigating twenty missing children who had disappeared from all over Florida. Someone had tried to make it appear as though the abductions weren’t connected, but Mercy Hebb had somehow identified a pattern.

  The computer code he found on a Post-it Note on Mercy’s desk he’d given to Harry Hill, who had been killed because of it. Mercy Hebb’s apartment was then broken into and searched, and the St. Augustine Record was burnt to the ground. He’d been slow to catch on to the fact that someone was following them, and then he found the bug attached to the Dodge.

  “We never did go and see Mr. Franchetti,” Rae said.

  “Phone him now. Let him know we’re still on the case.”

  She put the cell on speaker phone and rang Franchetti.

  “It’s Butterfly, Mr. Franchetti.”

  He said, “I was beginning to think . . . well, you probably don’t want to know what –”

  “Tom Gabriel’s here.”

  “Okay. So, why are you ringing?”

  Tom interrupted. “We’re just calling to let you know that we’re still on the case.”

  “Is there a story?”

  “You bet, Mr. Franchetti. It’s about child –”

  Tom put his hand on her shoulder to stop her talking. “We’ll be in contact when we’ve got the full story. How are things at the paper?”

  “You had to ask, didn’t you? They’re rebuilding the place from the ground up. While you’re out there having a holiday, Butterfly, the rest of us are crammed into a couple of temporary cabins trying to get a daily paper out.”

  “It’ll be worth it, Mr. Franchetti.”

  “It had better be.”

  The call ended.

  “He didn’t sound very happy. Why didn’t you want me to tell him about the story?”

  “There’s a news blackout remember. He’s a reporter, in the business of selling papers, and he’d just love to put something in the paper about a forthcoming exposé on child trafficking by Ray Franchetti and the very beautiful and intelligent Butterfly Raeburn.”

  “Hey, my name’s going first, but I liked the way you described me.”
/>   “He’ll find some excuse to put your name second.”

  “He’ll be carrying his nuts in a barrow if he does.”

  “Shall we continue?”

  “Isn’t it time for bed yet? I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep.”

  He checked Carrie’s clock. It was quarter past six. “No, but it’s time for dinner. I still haven’t bought any food in. Let’s eat in the restaurant.”

  “I could go to bed while you’re eating.”

  “Or you could come with me and watch me eat.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “A good meal will sort you out.”

  ***

  “It’s about time you rang again,” he said to Mona. He and Rae were walking back to his room after dinner. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten me.”

  “I had, until Kate Hanney rang me from the Evidence Unit.”

  “And?”

  “Before I tell you about that –”

  “What’s that I hear in the background?”

  “A helicopter.”

  “You’ve got the big guns out then?”

  “You know I don’t have any big guns. What I do have is a Mexican stand-off and a horde of press. The helicopter belongs to NBC News.”

  “What happened to the blackout we agreed on?”

  “I have no idea. One minute we were trying to get Appling and his family out of the house – did you know he has a wife and two children?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s threatening to kill his family and then himself if we don’t back off and leave him alone.”

  “In the meantime, he’s probably destroying all the evidence.”

  “I can’t help that. The FBI are here, and I’m not in charge anymore.”

  He didn’t want to chew her out, but it wasn’t really what he had in mind when she went up there to arrest Henry Appling. Any evidence that she might have acquired by surprise will have gone the way of the Dodo.

  He tried not to sound disappointed. “So, what’s happening?”

  “Not a lot. An FBI negotiator is trying to sweet talk him out of there, but Appling isn’t having any of it. I think I’ll be here for the foreseeable future, and I have you to thank for that.”

  “What about the little girl’s body?”

  “If you recall, there was an agreed order to the search warrant, which was your idea, if I’m not mistaken. If there’s a hole in the basement, I get to do as I like. No hole, no search. I haven’t been able to get into the house to find out if there is a hole yet.”

  “I don’t understand what happened,” he said. “You knock on the door and arrest him. What could be simpler than that?”

  “I wondered how long it would take before you started pointing your grubby little finger in my direction.”

  He let out a laugh. “My finger is clean, and it’s not pointing in your direction. I was just wondering what happened, that’s all.”

  “What happened was Appling saw a long line of police and sheriff cars heading toward his property. He worked out the odds of us popping in for waffles and lemonade, and then went and got his shotgun. I didn’t even get the chance to knock on his door. I told him I had a search warrant, and it’d be in his best interests to come on out. He emptied both barrels into the air, which caused us to duck slightly . . .”

  He smiled at the thought of everyone groveling in the dirt. He’d been in similar situations. “Yeah, I can imagine.”

  “He said that if anyone comes anywhere near his house, he’ll kill his wife and kids first, and then turn the gun on himself. It was then that I called up the FBI and said, ‘Come on over and join the party.’”

  “Not really what we had planned.”

  “You bet. And what’s worse, is that this place is a million miles from anywhere, and I haven’t eaten yet.”

  “I could tell you what I had for dinner if it’ll help?”

  “It’ll help me decide to lock you up when I get back.”

  “What did Kate Hanney say about the handgun and the license plate?”

  “Not long after she began running the fingerprint-matching program, two government agents turned up. They flashed their badges and confiscated everything relating to the handgun. They said that if she knew what was good for her, she should forget that she ever saw a gun or them. Needless to say, she has no memory of me giving her a handgun for analysis or the two agents turning up.”

  “I don’t suppose she took the names off their badges or the department they worked for?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think someone’s covering their tracks. Did she manage to find out anything before they arrived?”

  “The fingerprints don’t belong to any human being living or dead, and the gun doesn’t exist.”

  “I guessed as much. It makes you wonder why they even bothered to pay her a visit.”

  “Sooner or later, Kate would have found a fingerprint match. You know what she’s like.”

  “There’s more going on than what we’re seeing,” he mused. “You’ll call me if there are any developments?”

  “If I haven’t passed out through lack of food and sleep.”

  ***

  It was seven forty-five by the time they returned to the task of cataloguing all the clues.

  Tom continued to run it all through his mind as Rae wrote the information down.

  Osip Lemontov and Juris Balodis had been ordered to kill them, but Rae had shot Lemontov, and Balodis had wound up a dismembered corpse in a dumpster – failure always had a price.

  They’d found three names highlighted in Mercy Hebb’s address book: Dulcie Carrick, Ophelia Andrews, and Elly Nolan. After visiting Dulcie Carrick’s place of work, they found her dead in her apartment. Her ghost had warned him that Mercy didn’t have much time, and that whoever was responsible for her disappearance was destroying the evidence.

  “We still haven’t been to see the other two women that were highlighted in Mercy Hebb’s address book,” Rae said.

  Tom nodded. “We’ve got nothing going on tomorrow; we’ll do it then.”

  “What about Mona?”

  “What about her? She didn’t sound optimistic that the stand-off would be resolved anytime soon. And even if it is, what they find inside the farmhouse might not provide us with any answers.”

  “Okay.”

  Next, they’d spent the night in the Antonio de Natali Art Gallery, where they found a pink rucksack and a 2001 diary belonging to Katherine Everett, age eight and three-quarters, an assortment of children’s clothes, and some camp beds. While they were trapped in one of the basement rooms, they’d also heard what sounded like a truck. Were children being shipped out?

  He’d found Oscar Gibson’s phone number in Lemontov’s wallet, and after illegally obtaining the man’s bank and phone records and the details of his Internet activity, they’d discovered that there was a link to the Antonio de Natali Gallery, that he liked child pornography, that he had a secret computer on which his log-in name was JerryQ, and that he’d sent a considerable amount of coded emails to hundreds of people with the addresses: @limbo.net. Gibson also had a second bank account in the name of O.B. Gibson, which contained over $17 million with hundreds of deposits of $25,000, $35,000, or $45,000 from numerous numbered accounts, and no withdrawals. Were these receipts for children? The amounts were the same as they’d found in the decrypted page from the set of accounts. Who did the accounts belong to?

  If Oscar Gibson wasn’t at the centre of what was going on, he was very close to it. It was a shame they’d lost him when he entered the house last night. Maybe tomorrow night they could stake out the rear of the house, and see if Gibson comes out again. Was the poker game a regular occurrence? Did Gibson slip out the back way every time? The only way he could get the answers to those questions was another stake-out.

  “Nothing from the maths student in England?” he asked.

  Rae’s tablet was on charge. She st
ood up and retrieved it. “You think I’ve had time? I’m beginning to feel like a zombie. If I start getting the urge to eat human flesh, I’ll blame you.”

  “Is that what zombie’s eat?”

  “That and fries. You know nothing important, do you?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Oh my God, she’s cracked the code,” she said staring at the tablet screen.

  “But does it help us?”

  “She says that they’re using Paradise Lost by John Milton to encrypt their emails.”

  “A sick joke by someone,” he said. “Has she decrypted all the emails?”

  Rae laughed. “All we asked her to do was crack the code, not do all our work for us. She’s decrypted the first email I sent her and sent us a PDF copy of Paradise Lost. Do you want to decrypt the rest?”

  “I wouldn’t want to deprive you of that pleasure.”

  “I thought not.”

  “What does the email say?”

  15: Thank you for the package. Be in touch soon. 0183649

  “Not earth shattering.”

  “What did you expect – the details of their complete operation and who the board of directors were in the first email we come across?”

  “That would have been good.”

  Rae typed a reply back to the woman.

  He continued with his musings.

  There was the Hummer and its attempts to run them off the road – not once, but twice. The license plate, handgun, fingerprints, and the government agents. None of it seemed to fit with all the other stuff, unless there were some powerful people involved in child trafficking.

  They’d determined that the abductions went back to at least 2001 after visiting Katherine Everett’s home address and talking to the neighbours, and Rae doing a lot of work identifying the missing children between 2001 and 2007.

  He pulled out the list of Gibson’s parking/speeding tickets that Mona had given him at lunch and scanned down the locations. They were no help. If he’d been trying to place Gibson somewhere on a date and at a specific time, they might have been of some use. He noted that Gibson had been photographed by a traffic camera three days ago, and highlighted it. He’d get Mona to ask for a copy – it might be the one piece of the jigsaw he was looking for.