From A Dead Sleep

by John A. Daly

  I end the note with, I’m sorry. I wish I was the man who you deserved.

  I set the note along the forest floor and begin a second one—this one to the FBI office in Las Vegas who knows more about Moretti than pretty much anyone besides me. I quickly scribble a frantic note that I hope to look like it was written under distress, explaining to the Feds that I’m an associate of Moretti and witnessed him murder a woman at a mountain home near Lakeland. I tell them that I also saw them take a man named Kyle Kimble deep into the forest and return without him. I tell them that I fear for my life and am being watched closely by Moretti’s men, and that I hope they’ll find the enclosed information useful if something happens to me. I sign the letter, “Valentino Greco.”

  One last mind-fuck to absolve Lisa from any act of revenge if things don’t work out this morning as planned.

  I dig back into the leather bag and retrieve two legal-sized manila envelopes, one of which I had planned on using to send a signed contract to Moretti’s new partner. I write the Las Vegas address for the FBI on one of them, knowing it by heart from the identification I’ve carried around in my wallet for the past few years. The note and the ledger go inside. The other note goes in the envelope I address to the cottage. I write both as legibly as I can to ensure they get where they need to go. I secure an abundance of postage to each, using up all of the first class stamps that I have.

  I seal the envelopes with long licks that are dry from thirst and stack them across a nearby stump, then pull the purple stocking cap from my head. I hold it to my face and inhale, absorbing Arianna’s scent as a reminder of what could have been. I shove it into my brief bag and begin raking away at a patch of wet dirt beside an overturned tree, using my fingers as picks to dislodge rocks and earth. Once I’ve created a hole satisfactory in size, I shove my bag into it and begin refilling the hole with dirt. When I realize that I’ve still got the page of newspaper in my coat pocket, I add it to the grave, pound it down under the loose dirt, and place a large rock over the disturbed terrain. I thought about just tossing the stuff in the river, but if it’s found, it will only prompt questions that will distract from the scenario I’ve created.

  I wash off my hands in the river, then watchfully venture my way across the range toward the mailboxes, alternating my attention between the ridge to the east and the bridge. I keep low, ready to drop behind the tall grass that lines the dirt below me at a moment’s notice.

  I reach the boxes and survey the road more closely now that I’ve got a clean view. Nothing. An American flag stems out from the lone mailbox that stands next to a yellow, plastic newspaper box labeled, “The Winston Beacon.” I was right. I’m in Winston.

  I open the mailbox to find a couple of outgoing letters, which is good. The resident won’t check the box again until the mail’s been picked up. I add my mail to the pile.

  A minute later, I stand alone at the center of the bridge with my hands in my pockets and my shoulders relaxed, feeling totally exposed and unhindered. I’ve spent the past several hours using the terrain of the forest for protection, but now it’s as if it’s releasing me from its guard and returning me to the outside world. My concentrated stare switches from one side of the road to the other, assuring that no one else is around to share in the moment. The sun is peaking up above the tranquil mountain range to my left and its greeting warms my face. Just a few hours ago, I wasn’t sure I’d see another sunrise. I’m thankful it’s such a brilliant one because it will be my last.

  Beyond the mountains, lakes, and state lines is Lisa, probably tired after a restless sleep of wondering why I haven’t joined her yet. The world as she knew it is about to turn upside down, but she’ll pull through. Maybe she’ll even find a way to forgive me some day.

  I peer down over the guardrail that stems up from the edge and gawk at the power of the rushing water below. Its force is awe-inspiring, and I’m confident it will take me where I need to go. It will also take mercy on me and finish me off if the bullet doesn’t.

  Again I check for oncomers and see none, but not knowing how well the road is traveled, I decide that I best hurry along. I step over the railing and plop myself down on a post, taking a moment to gander at the dry blood along the palm of my hand—a mixture of mine in Arianna’s. I hope I see her soon, both of us now free of her master’s grip.

  I can’t say for sure what’s in store for me, though. If there is an afterlife, what will mine be like having killed a man? My letter will fool the Feds, but it won’t fool the Man upstairs. I say a quick prayer and ask whoever’s listening for forgiveness before I reach into my back pocket for my wallet. I open it and am greeted by a photo of Lisa and me, both wearing stocking caps and standing together, cheek to cheek, in front of a snowy basin. Smiles light up both of our faces, as a reminder of happier times. Ironically, it was taken not all that many miles from where I sit now.

  Things might have been so much different if I wasn’t me. I’m not a good person. I never have been.

  I set down the gun along a post beside me, stand up, and balance myself along the edge of the bridge with my heels firmly planted on solid wood. The wallet goes back in my pocket that I button up to make sure there’s an easy way of identifying me after the screams of children downriver announce my arrival.

  I retrieve the gun and raise it carefully up behind my head. My arms tremble, and I fight back the impulse to drop the piece from my hands and climb back to safety. The barrel of the gun is flat against the back of my head, centered where I’m certain it will do the job. I stiffen my body and lean forward like I’m about to engage in a leap of faith, trying to put as much distance between my head and the bridge as possible before I pull the trigger. I feel the spray of the rapids inviting me forward, and I squeeze my finger.

  For the briefest of seconds, I find my sight unexpectedly glimpsing back up toward the bridge. It stalls on the peculiar image of a man with his hand reaching down to me. It fades when the biting cold water devours my last breath.

  I hope the man was an angel.

  Chapter 41

  “You’ve been keeping me very busy, Chief,” said Dr. Laura Venegas before diluting a reserved grin from her lips, quickly deeming it inappropriate.

  The sun above them hung brightly, though the morning air was still cool down by the shaded bank of the reservoir.

  She read no acknowledgment from Lumbergh that he’d even heard her remark. His tired eyes from a sleepless, highly stressful night were transfixed on the contents of the yellow, partially transparent body bag that was sprawled out along the padded stretcher propped up between them at the roped-off crime scene. The corpse inside was barely recognizable from the picture in the corner of the well-preserved driver’s license that the chief held in his gloved hand. The wad of gum trapped in Lumbergh’s mouth hadn’t been gnawed from the moment he’d opened the dead man’s wallet handed to him by the doctor’s assistant.

  Venegas, the county medical examiner, tugged at the zipper, sealing off a short, open section at the top.

  “Not by choice, I assure you,” replied Lumbergh after a delay long enough that Venegas had nearly forgotten its reference.

  From upside down, she glanced at the photo of the thin, blonde-haired man staring straight ahead and asked Lumbergh who he was.

  His eyes lifted to meet hers, displaying a level of seriousness that unsettled her. “His name is Kyle Kimble. He appears to work for the Las Vegas branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Which means, I probably won’t be working this case by the end of the day.”

  It meant far more than that to Lumbergh, though. It meant that whatever his brother-in-law was mixed up in went way beyond a drunken conflict and a retaliatory act of murder. In all of his years as a crime investigator in Illinois, the chief had never experienced anything close to this. Three dead bodies, one of them a federal agent. A sadistic killer of two of them on the loose, and the man who most likely
held all of the answers—his own brother-in-law—missing and probably on the run.

  “Any idea how long he was in the water?” he asked before glancing down at his own matted shirt that he’d been wearing for over twelve hours.

  “It’s hard to say for sure,” she answered, pulling back the hood of her white medical examiner’s jacket. She brushed a strand of her long, black hair from her eyes. “Two or three days probably, judging by how bloated he is.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The stick of gum in Lumbergh’s mouth began churning again. “Let’s just say that I have reason to believe that this man went into the river, up by Winston, on Saturday morning.”

  “And?” she replied with a shrug of her shoulders.

  “My point is that . . . that’s only a few miles upstream. There was a big event out here that morning. That yearly fishing thing.”

  “Yes, the contest. I was here with my son. They had a record turnout, I believe.”

  “Exactly.”

  He dropped the contents of the dead man’s wallet into a Ziploc bag before pointing his finger toward the large and tranquil reservoir that stretched broadly beyond the shoreline laying just a few yards short of where the two of them stood. The grand, inverted image of Beggar’s Basin reflected along the rippling water. “There were people everywhere, yet no one found this man until this morning.”

  “There’s a simple answer for that,” said the doctor with a knowing twinkle in her eye. “His body got hung up somewhere. The way his limbs are mangled, and the way his clothes are all torn and stretched out . . . He probably got snagged on a downed tree or something and was tossed around like a hooked bobber that someone cut loose from their line. He probably broke free after a couple of days and ended up here last night or this morning.”

  The chief nodded his head in deference to her expertise.

  “I’m glad his trip was delayed,” she added. “I don’t think there would have been enough money in the county budget to cover the counseling expenses for a few hundred children if one of them had reeled him into shore.”

  He let himself chuckle before his expression went eerily blank. She noticed the alteration of his disposition and wondered if she had just said something that had led him adrift or if the stress of the past twelve hours was taking its toll on the lawman.

  It was the realization that the body, in all likelihood, should have been carried to Beggar’s Basin right around the time of the highly publicized event. The revelation invited a fresh perspective worth contemplating. Up until just then, it had made absolutely no sense to the chief why a man would commit suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head. However, an explanation was suddenly unwinding and emerging, just as the body itself had done that morning. What if he wanted to be found that morning, and wanted it to look like he had been executed by someone else? In Illinois, Lumbergh had investigated more than one murder in which the body had been disposed of somewhere away from the location where the actual killing had taken place. Never, in any of those cases, was there ever identification left on the body. A murderer didn’t typically want his victim to be easily identified. In this case, however, it was as if the discovery of the man’s I.D. was the desired result.

  “I’m going to head on out, if you don’t mind, Chief,” Venegas said, robbing back his attention for a moment. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, as you know. How’s your wife doing?”

  He nodded. The arch of his eyebrows suggested that he was being genuine when he told her that Diana was taking things better than one could expect.

  “Any word on her brother?”

  With a deep sigh, he answered, “Not yet.”

  “He’ll turn up.”

  He noticed her attention shift to something over his shoulder.

  “Meagher’s back,” she announced.

  Lumbergh thanked the doctor and helped her and her assistant wheel the body into the back of their van before turning his attention to the approaching pickup truck with turret lights attached to its roof. In the driver’s seat was Chief Pete Meagher, the one and only member of the Rinkshaw police department. The nearby town of Rinkshaw was dwarfed even by Winston in population, and Meagher’s title as police chief was a part-time position. He also ran a hardware store in town. Technically, he had jurisdiction over the Beggar’s Basin area.

  Lumbergh liked Meagher, mainly because the man knew his weaknesses. They were close in age. Meagher was a bit older, but far less experienced. His duties were primarily confined to addressing the occasional domestic dispute or managing traffic in and out of the reservoir area for events.

  He’d worked with Lumbergh on a couple of occasions and was always more than happy to cede the leadership role to him. When a body turned up in the water that morning, however, something he’d recently read in the Lakeland paper triggered the belief that he might actually be able to play a useful purpose in the investigation.

  He’d left the reservoir for his house to retrieve the paper shortly after Lumbergh had arrived on the scene.

  Lumbergh watched Meagher’s head twist back and forth between him and the medical examiner’s van that he’d noticed was on its way out.

  “Hold up! Hold up!” he yelled out his open truck window after skidding to a stop. He waved his hand in the air. The van slowed down.

  “Pete!” shouted Lumbergh. “It’s okay! I’ve got an I.D!”

  Meagher nodded that he understood and let the van pass him by. After parking beside Lumbergh’s Jeep, he hustled on out of his truck and jogged over to his Winston counterpart. Meagher hadn’t a uniform, just a red flannel shirt with jeans, cowboy boots, and a badge. A Colorado Rockies baseball cap sat high on his head. He quickly unfolded the newspaper he’d shuffled between his hands when sliding his truck keys into his front pocket.

  “Is it him?” asked Meagher.

  He held up a page with a decent-sized black and white picture. It was a close-up, candid shot of a man with short, brown hair and wearing a white t-shirt. The headline above the picture read, Local Shop Owner Missing Since Friday.

  “No, it sure isn’t, Pete,” answered Lumbergh. He held up the identification card of Kyle Kimble so Meagher could see it. Meagher squinted and gave it a close look. His eyes quickly widened.

  “FBI?” he yelped before taking a step back. “He was a G-Man?”

  “It looks like it. I haven’t called it in yet.”

  “Should we have moved him? Shouldn’t we have talked to the Feds before letting Doc Laura take him away? They might have wanted to look over the crime scene first.”

  Lumbergh shook his head. “He wasn’t killed here. I’m sure they’ll check him out at the examiner’s office. Mind if I see that?” He pointed to the newspaper.

  Meagher handed it over.

  “I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about this,” said Lumbergh with a wrinkle in his face that resembled a wince.

  “The guy’s girlfriend didn’t report him missing until Sunday. Seems they were going through a rough patch. They hadn’t talked in a couple of days.”

  Lumbergh skimmed the article.

  “Chad Grimes. That’s an interesting name.” After reaching the bottom of the page, he looked up at Meagher. “It doesn’t say anything in here about him and the girlfriend being in a fight?”

  Meagher clarified: “I gave them a call up there in Lakeland before I left the house, you know, to let him know we found someone. I guess I jumped the gun.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Do they have any leads?”

  Meagher snickered and shook his head. “What? You don’t think you’ve got enough on your plate right now?”

  A gasp of air left Lumbergh’s lips, and he said, “I suppose you’ve got a point there, Pete. The sheriff ’s office is taking over on the two from yesterday, though. I’m too close to it. They said I should take some time to grieve with my family. I guess that will have to hold off until tomorrow. So, do they have any leads in Lakeland?�
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  “There’s a kid. A teenager who busses tables up at the Elk-Horn Grill. It’s just a couple doors down from Grimes’s shop.”

  “Yeah, I’ve eaten there. Good salmon.”

  “Oh yeah, the best. Anyway, he was hauling some trash out back Friday night. He saw a dark gray, maybe a black sedan speeding down the back alley and onto the main street. Lakeland’s finest believe it went down not long after Grimes was last seen closing down his store.”

  “What kind of sedan?”

  “The kid didn’t know,” Meagher answered. He removed his hat for a moment to scratch his forehead before continuing. “Kids don’t know their cars anymore, do they? They just ain’t interested in that stuff these days. All they care about are video games.”

  “Probably no license plate then either, right?

  “No number. The kid didn’t think it was all that suspicious at the time, but he did notice that it had out-of-state plates.”

  “Where from?”

  “Nevada. Blue mountains under an orange sky.”

  Lumbergh’s heart skipped a beat. “Nevada? The dead agent, Kyle Kimble . . . He’s from Las Vegas.”

  Meagher stood back and watched the gears in Lumbergh’s head grind for a few seconds, then asked, “Are you thinking they’re related somehow? Do you think the FBI is here in Summit, maybe helping to search for Grimes?”

  “No. They wouldn’t be part of a missing person’s case this early unless they suspected a kidnapping. I’m sure the boys in Lakeland would have mentioned that to you if that was the case. Besides, Kimble was killed before Grimes was reported missing.”