Echoes of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  The receptionist greets us with a harried look and quickly ushers us into a modest adjoining office. Detective Ross Feng is standing in the center of the room and greets us with his contagious smile, though the upturned corners of his mouth seem subdued this morning. Turning, he introduces us to a slight yet strikingly beautiful woman standing beside him.

  “Steps, Jimmy, this is Canela Perez, the congressman’s sister.”

  “Call me Ella,” she says quickly, extending a hand. Her voice is steady and calm, but you can sense the tension haunting her words. “Ross tells me you’re part of an FBI tracking unit?”

  Jimmy nods. “That’s correct, ma’am—”

  “Ella,” she insists.

  “Ella,” Jimmy confirms with a tip of his head. His face is warm and kind, one of the fifty-faces-of-Jimmy that I’ve come to know over the years. This one is reserved for victims and their families, and there’s nothing contrived about it because he genuinely feels for them.

  Ella cuts straight to the point: “Can you find my brother?”

  Jimmy glances over at me, then nods his head slowly and firmly. “We can. We’re pretty good at both tracking and investigating, and the intelligence analyst that assists us is one of the best in the Bureau.”

  “And what about Jason? The detective tells me you found him dead last night?” As she finishes, a single tear scuttles down the side of her nose, and she brushes it away impatiently.

  “I’m afraid that’s true. We don’t know the cause of death yet, but it was likely due to lack of oxygen.”

  “How?” she asks incredulously.

  Jimmy hesitates.

  “Please,” she presses, the word coming out desperate.

  Jimmy glances at me, then nods. “I’m going to tell you something, but I need you to understand that it’s confidential case information, at least for the present. Can you assure me that your office won’t share it with anyone, even the congressman’s colleagues?”

  “Of course. You have my word.”

  As he unfolds the events of the previous night—our dark foray in the graveyard—her lower jaw begins to quiver. Her eyes grow hollow, as if bereft of happiness or even the hope of happiness. When Jimmy finishes, her knees are shaky, and Ross helps her to a chair.

  It takes Canela a moment to compose herself, first staring at her hands, then at the arm of the chair, and finally at us. Glancing from face to face, her mouth opens wide and I half expect a great wailing moan to issue forth. Instead, three whispered words walk across her tongue and spill upon the carpet: “Jason was claustrophobic.” Her whole body gives a convulsive shake.

  It’s the kind of shiver you give when a cold, invisible finger runs down your spine.

  * * *

  Jimmy and Ross fill her in on the less horrifying details of the investigation, emphasizing the considerable resources that California, Bakersfield, and the US government were prepared to throw at this case until the men were found.

  “Did you know the others well?” Jimmy asks as he finishes.

  “Enough to call them friends. I’ve known them since Marco was in college; since they were all making fly-fishing lures together for Caddisco.”

  “Caddisco?”

  “Marco’s company, named for the caddis insects that most lures are modeled after.” Looking from face to face, Ella takes in our confusion. “I’m so sorry. Of course, you don’t know how this annual fishing trip began, or the company that gave them all their start.”

  She shakes her open hands next to her ears, the type of gesture one might make when not thinking clearly. “My mind just won’t stop,” she says in a low voice. “It keeps dragging me down to the worst conclusions, the worst possible ending. The only time I can even focus is when I think of those earlier times.”

  “Tell us about them,” Jimmy says in a soothing tone. “Tell us about the fly-fishing and the company they started.”

  “You don’t want to hear—”

  Jimmy cuts her off gently. “We do. The only thing we know about the congressman is what’s in this file.” He holds up Diane’s hurriedly gathered notes. “We’d love to know more.”

  She almost smiles at that, then her whole body seems to relax as she pushes back in her chair, a storyteller preparing her words.

  “Marco began tying lures when he was sixteen. He was awful at it and must have lost a pint of blood that first month. But the one thing about Marco”—she smiles—“is he just doesn’t know when to quit. The more times he got poked, the more determined he became, and it wasn’t long before he was turning out some nice-looking flies. After that, they just kept getting better and better.

  “Other fishermen soon started offering him money for his flies, and once he figured out there might be a profit in his new hobby … well, the businessman in him blossomed. A year later, he paid cash for a little red Pontiac Fiero—drove my mother crazy with that thing.”

  Ella looks up at me—deduces that I don’t know the first thing about cars—then turns to Ross. “You remember the Fiero? The little two-seater sports car?”

  “Sure.” Ross smiles. “I pulled over a few in my day, and it was always some crazy teenager behind the wheel.”

  Ella nods. “Then you know what I’m talking about. In any case, Marco was hooked on lures”—she gives an apologetic shrug—“no pun intended. By the time he got to college, he was able to pay for his courses, books, and a nice off-campus apartment. The only problem was that the orders were starting to come in faster than he could fill them. That’s when he brought on Noah Long.”

  “Were they friends, or was Noah just an employee at that point?” I ask.

  “Oh, friends! Noah was Marco’s first friend at college. They were tight, those two, even talked about getting an apartment together, but Marco likes his privacy. This was around the time the business really started to take off. Some fishing magazine heard about Marco, and aside from being impressed with the lures, they liked the human-interest side of the story. You know, a kid putting himself through college on a kitchen-table business.

  “When the article ran, the orders started pouring in. Wade and Jason were hired, and Marco started focusing more on marketing. There were other employees who came and went, but it was the four of them who were the constant: they were the business.”

  She takes a drink from her water bottle and reflects a moment.

  “As it turned out, spring break that first year came in March. That was the first time the boys made a trip together to the Upper Kern. Marco wrote the whole thing off as research and development—which it was! They had a bunch of new designs they wanted to test out. Still, it was so much more than just testing lures. They came back different men; better men. It was a bonding experience that they turned into an annual pilgrimage, one that continues to this…” Her voice trails off.

  After taking another drink, this time gulping, she sets the bottle down, and I see her hand tremble ever so slightly. This seems to bother her, and she pulls it into her other hand and clenches it, determined to be brave.

  “By their senior year,” she continues in a softer voice, “Caddisco had grown into a trusted brand with a reputation for quality—the kind of quality that makes a brand valuable. So, when one of the big-box sporting establishments came around offering to write a big check, the boys talked it over and decided to sell. Marco insisted on splitting the proceeds four ways, and each of them walked away with a high six-figure payout, and that was after taxes.” She tries to smile. “I think that was when Marco decided he didn’t like high taxes.”

  She looks up and makes eye contact with each of us in turn.

  “That’s what started it all. It was the sale of Caddisco that launched them on their careers. All except Wade, I suppose. He just wanted to be a cop or a lawyer and ended up being both. And since it doesn’t take seed money to be a cop, he bought himself a house instead.”

  She pauses for a long moment, her eyes intent on the far wall as if seeing things there that were hidden from the wo
rld, visions among shadows.

  “Marco went off to UC Davis School of Medicine; Jason got hired by an accounting firm in San Francisco and later relocated to San Jose, and Noah”—she pauses and lets out a great sigh—“he packed his car and spent the next month driving to Wall Street, seeing the sights on the way.

  “I had a thing for him back in those days,” she adds with a matter-of-fact shrug. “Just a schoolgirl crush, I suppose, but the kind that hurts for years.”

  A knock at the door disturbs them and the receptionist pokes her head in, meekly advising Ella that she has another visitor.

  Rising, Ella moves to the door as a man enters and extends a hand toward her. He’s about Jimmy’s age—early-to-midthirties—but without the energy and bounce. And where Jimmy has a full head of black hair, this guy is starting to thin out on top and there’s already a touch of gray at his temples. He’s wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a red power tie. His shoes look like they’ve been dipped in shellac and buffed with the Golden Fleece out of Greek mythology. I swear you need sunglasses to look at them. But then, Jimmy says I tend to be hyperbolic—a nice way of saying I exaggerate. In any case, it doesn’t take me more than a split second to peg the newcomer as a Fed.

  “Special Agent Kip Weir, FBI,” the suit says as he gently shakes Ella’s hand, speaking as if he were an undertaker consoling family rather than a federal agent. His eyes cast about and find me, Jimmy, and Ross staring back at him. Dismissing me and Jimmy immediately, probably because we’re wearing jeans and polo shirts, he focuses on Ross, who at least has a tie that complements his shirt and slacks.

  Closing the eight-foot gap in a few strides, Special Agent Kip Weir extends a hand to the detective, who takes it and introduces himself. Then, gesturing at Jimmy, he says, “This is Special Agent James Donovan and his partner, Magnus Craig. They’re with the Special Tracking Unit.”

  “Call me Jimmy,” my partner says as he shakes hands.

  “I’m Steps,” I say when it’s my turn.

  With introductions complete, Kip glances around, as if unsure of the situation. “So, Special Tracking Unit…?”

  “We were asked to come down and see if we could help,” Jimmy clarifies. “Are you out of Bakersfield or the Sacramento Field Office?”

  “Sacramento,” Kip replies dismissively, obviously still sorting out the pecking order in his head. “Sorry, it’s just … I wasn’t told we’d asked for any help.”

  “We got a call from DC.”

  Jimmy could’ve said that the director of the FBI called the previous morning and asked us to come down, but he doesn’t operate that way. Referencing DC without getting specific is an easier route. Kip will assume that his boss’s boss made the call, which makes it their idea. That makes it more palatable. It’s a diplomatic move on Jimmy’s part, and a good way to avoid stepping on toes. We learned a long time ago that a low profile is the best profile.

  Jimmy and I give Kip the rundown on our visit to the river the previous day, throwing in copious amounts of tracking lingo. Then we work our way forward to the perplexing discovery in the morgue and the unfortunate exhumation of Jason Norris.

  “Damn,” Kip whispers when we finish.

  It’s a fitting word.

  Damned might be a better one … or maybe that just applies to me.

  12

  Every cop has a rhythm and flavor when it comes to conducting interviews. The basics are instilled at the academy, but many go on to more advanced training, such as the Reid technique or something based on the PEACE model. In the end, a good interview is just a conversation, and everyone converses differently.

  For most, it’s not just the questions, but the order of the questions. It’s not just the intonations, but the body movements that accompany them.

  My lovely fiancée, Heather, can pull truth from me with the ease and skill of a pickpocket. It’s not just her honed interview style, but her ability to reach beyond the words to find meaning in posture, ear tugs, and eye movement. She’s a necromancer when it comes to body language and uses her magic to mercilessly separate the truth from the lie.

  The point is, while training gives you the tools, everyone develops a process based on the person’s specific skill set and experience. Some like to focus more on building rapport first, while others dive right in. The best interviewers change their technique depending on the situation.

  In the end, the true measure of an interviewer is results.

  Kevin, one of my buddies back home, once told a suspect that in addition to being able to get DNA from epidermal cells, science had advanced to the point where a lab could identify specifically where those skin cells came from.

  None of this is true. Not yet, anyway.

  Kevin went on to tell the suspect that epipenial cells come from the penis and nowhere else, and so he found it odd that the suspect’s epipenial cells were in the victim’s underwear. This, despite the suspect’s adamant and frequent denials regarding sexual contact.

  “That’s kind of weird, right?” Kevin said as he finished … and then he just leaned back and waited for an explanation.

  The guy confessed almost immediately.

  * * *

  Kip Weir is not a good interviewer—no disrespect to the guy.

  He seems nice enough, but he’s obviously more of a just-the-facts-ma’am type of investigator. Warmth does not exude from him, it hides from him, despite his funerary tone. As he explains to Ella that he’s been assigned the case and that this is the FBI’s highest priority, his words are lukewarm, mechanical, rote, as if he were reading them from a flash card he carries around in his starched shirt pocket.

  Jimmy glances at me on the sly and gives a subtle what-the! grimace.

  Glad I’m not the only one who noticed.

  “Does your brother have any enemies?” Kip asks a few minutes into his questioning.

  “He’s a politician,” Ella replies.

  “So that’s a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have anyone specific in mind?”

  “One or two, plus half the country.” She crosses her arms. “It’s a polarized environment if you haven’t noticed. My brother is a pin in a world of balloons, which means he either avoids some issues entirely, or he constantly hears little explosions going off all around him. Those little explosions being people losing their minds. You should see some of the mail he gets.”

  She meant the last rhetorically, but I jump on it.

  “I’d like to see the mail.”

  She glances my way, perhaps wondering if I’m serious, then holds up a finger as she walks from the office. A moment later she returns and places in my hands a bundle of perhaps fifty letters with a fat rubber band holding them together.

  “Those are the worst of the worst. We stopped giving them to the Secret Service because Marco was worried that he was being overly sensitive, or even paranoid. I kept them anyway—just in case.”

  “This is all of them?” I ask.

  “Yeah, for this month.”

  “It’s only the ninth.”

  She nods.

  “You get this much hate mail every nine days?”

  “No.” She gives a small shake of her head. “As I said, I only keep the worst of the worst.”

  * * *

  While Special Agent Weir continues his soul-crushing interview, Jimmy and I retreat to the chairs in the reception area and start going through the stack of seething mail. If you believed the letters and their conflicting impressions, one might believe that Marco Perez was the evilest, most twisted man to walk the earth since Cain brought a rock down on his brother’s head and introduced humanity to that fresh new thing called murder.

  “Recognize any shine from the river?” Jimmy asks quietly after we’ve had time to peruse the stack and examine each letter.

  “You mean the river with a million different shines spread out over hundreds of acres and stacked one on top of the other?” I ask, perhaps a bit too sarcastically.
r />   “No, the other river.” When I look up, he just smiles. “So that’s a no?”

  “That’s a no.”

  His demeanor tells me he expected as much. Holding up a letter, he says, “This Abel Moya guy seems to be particularly upset with the congressman. I counted seven letters from him. That’s almost one a day.”

  “Maybe he has mental health issues?”

  “Why? Because he writes a lot of letters? You write a lot of letters and you’re”—Jimmy pauses to eyeball me—“mostly stable.”

  “Thank you,” I reply snidely. “But, for the record, I only mail one or two a week, and those are only to Heather.”

  “Yeah, but you’re scribbling on them all the time. Seems every time I turn my back, you’re hunched over with a pen in hand. I’m surprised you don’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.”

  I stare at him a moment. “Abel Moya?” I ask pointedly.

  Jimmy grins and holds up a small stack of Abel’s letters. “Did you read any of these?”

  “I skimmed them.”

  “He’s pretty pissed at Marco over the whole border-security issue. Doesn’t make any direct threats, but he comes close.”

  “Seems like a lot of people are pissed at Marco,” I observe.

  “Goes with the territory.”

  Glancing at the receptionist, who’s now fielding phone calls, I reach out and tap the letters in Jimmy’s hand, whispering, “I don’t recognize that yellow,” indicating the Moya letters.

  During my years with the STU, I’ve seen a lot of yellows: dandelion yellow, custard yellow, piss yellow, and minion yellow among them, but never one quite so dull and uninspiring. The shine on the letters looks like it was left to bleach in the sun and got dusty along the way. And the scratchy texture looks like the once-shiny surface of a compact disc after an annoyed cat had a go at it.

  My head tips toward the envelopes and pulsing shine. “It wasn’t at the cemetery and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t at the river … but as I said, the river was a mess.”