by Chuck Dixon
“I’m not sleeping. I have dreams,” Levon said.
“Nightmares?”
“Memories.”
Dr. Ayres nodded.
“It’s not me so much that I worry about. It’s my little girl. I’m, I guess you’d say, a single father? She worries about me.”
“So, these dreams don’t cause terrors? Sudden waking?”
“No, Doctor. Nothing like that.”
“You’ve tried medications?”
“Xanax. Zoloft. Ambien. A few others. They make me feel like I have a blanket over my head. There has to be another way.”
“You don’t like the side effects of the drugs?”
“I’m trying to be good father. That won’t happen if I’m gooned up on sedatives all the time. Only, the insomnia and memories don’t help either. I feel like I’m pulling away from her. You understand?”
“Yes. I think I do. Have you thought of keeping a journal?”
“Like a diary?” Levon said, looking into the doctor’s eyes.
“Diaries are for teenage girls. I mean a record of your thoughts. Maybe if you put these memories of yours on paper, organized them from random thoughts into a narrative. It might help you make more sense of them. Put them into context and, hopefully, put them into the past. What branch of the service were you in?”
“Is that important, Doctor?”
“No, not so much.”
“You think writing down my thoughts would help. It might work. And, to be honest, I’m all the way up in Hermon. I can’t be driving down here to Millinocket every week. It’s a two-hour trip. If a journal would help me work things out then I could just see you now and then.”
“Certainly. But we still have twenty minutes to this session so if you wanted—”
Levon rose from the edge of the chair and reached back for his wallet.
“The girl out front handles payments.” Dr. Ayres jumped from his seat with a hand up.
Levon took him by the wrist and pressed a wad of cash into his hand.
“No thanks, Doctor. We’ll handle this between ourselves,” Levon said and showed himself out.
Dr. Ayres reseated himself and piloted his chair back behind his desk where he unfolded the cash. It was four times his usual hourly rate for therapy.
“Cathy!” he called.
Cathy, with a quizzical expression, appeared in his doorway .
“Can you get me the contact details for Joshua Randall?” he said, sweeping the cash into his middle desk drawer.
“Who?” she said, tilting her head.
“My last patient. The man who just left here,” Dr. Ayres said, losing patience with his idiot sister-in-law whom his wife made him hire.
“Was that his name? He handed the contact forms back without filling them in,” she said and turned to go back to the solitaire game she was playing at the reception desk.
5
The evergreen trees loomed close on either side of the road, stretching up to join the night sky above to form a tunnel of dark around them. The twin beams of the Dodge Ram's headlights stabbed ahead with no answering lights coming from the other direction as far as the eyes could see. The two-lane cut across the county as straight as a string through mile after mile of uninterrupted pine forest.
“Smells like snow,” Merry said from where she was buckled in on the passenger side.
“Since when can an Alabama girl smell snow?” Levon said at the wheel.
“I’m a Maine girl now. A Maniac,” she said and smiled.
“Not with that accent.”
“What accent?”
“That biscuits and gravy drawl of yours, little honey child,” he said, laying more syrup on his voice for effect.
“You sound like a Squidbilly!” she said laughing.
He had no idea what that was.
“You find everything on your list?” he said.
“Sure did. Everything go okay at the dentist? I forgot to ask,” she said.
“No cavities,” he lied. No need to tell her he saw a therapist. He’d left her for the hour at a place that served breakfast all day. Her favorite meal. She deserved a little spoiling, and waffles and berries with cream was what she wanted. She’d been working on a placemat puzzle when he got back. It was slow in the afternoon with the leaf peepers long gone and winter closing in. A waitress sat in the booth working the puzzle with her. Levon left an eye-popping tip before father and daughter departed to do some shopping.
They’d driven down 95 to Bangor, the first time they’d seen anything like a real city since moving up to Lake Bellevue. Levon lied to the doctor about living in Hermon just as he’d lied about almost every other detail of his life other than having a daughter and living with a mind filled with ugly memories.
Outside Bangor they explored a big box outdoor mall and loaded up the Ram with groceries and necessaries for the long winter ahead. They bought case lots of canned goods and frozen vegetables and fruit. Cases of juice and powdered milk. As many cartons of eggs as they thought would keep. Splurged on some frozen pizzas and ice cream tubs. Big family packs of chicken, beef, fish and a Virginia cured ham for Christmas day. Bags of fresh potatoes, carrots and onions. All paid for in cash. It would stay cold in the back of the Ram with the thermometer at thirty and heading down.
They agreed to separate for thirty minutes to buy surprises for each other for Christmas. They met in front of an office supply store the size of a hangar for a jumbo jet. Merry had a bag under her arm from Barnes & Noble. Levon had already slipped back to the truck to hide his package. The telltale shape would give away the surprise. He’d also made a quick trip into the office supply store to pick up a Moleskine journal and bag of pens.
They stopped at a Wendy’s for dinner before setting out on the long ride back home to Bellevue. They picked up some extra burgers and fries to take along. With winter coming on it would be a long time before they saw fast food again. Even reheated it would be a treat for Merry. Then back north on 95 for their new home.
“You sorry we moved way out in the back of beyond, honey?” Levon asked. He flipped on the high beams. This road was notorious for collisions with deer and even black bear.
“Nope. Those teachers were asking a lot of questions,” she said, leaning forward to twiddle the dial on the radio to find a fresh station as they drove out of range of the one she’d been listening to.
“So, homeschooling is okay with you?”
“Well, my teacher sometimes falls asleep in class,” she said with a sly glance his way.
“Sorry, honey.”
It was true. His nights were snatches of sleep interrupted by his own racing thoughts. But a half dozen math flashcards and he was out like a light. It was a good thing that Merry was an eager learner and a self-starter. She got that from her mother. He monitored her tests and organized the curriculum he’d bought at a Learning Center in Bangor. But she did all the reading on her own and was moving through fifth grade at a steady clip. And the teachers at the school she’d attended under the name Mary Tallmadge were a nosy bunch. They wouldn't let up on their personal lives and what the Tallmadges were like at home. Merry had to spend as much time inventing answers for them as she did on her homework. The stress was showing on her to a degree that even Levon, as preoccupied as he was, noticed.
She was excited when her father came up with the idea of them packing up and taking off farther north to a resort community where they could be anonymous tourists all summer and reclusive locals during the cold months when the population fell to include only those hardy natives willing to face the brutal weather and utter isolation. He was Mitch Roeder now and she was Moira Roeder. They’d lost his wife and her mother to cancer a few years back. That part was true and no one they met was tactless enough to ask questions about that. And any reply they made to questions would be heartfelt and honest because they were mostly the truth. This was upstate Maine. People might wonder but they’d never ask. And, mostly, they never even bothered to wonder why a da
d and daughter with Dixie accents picked the desolate center of Maine to call home. People came to this state to get away from their problems, not to be pestered about them.
“You sure you don’t miss having friends?” he asked.
“I didn’t really make any back at Lewiston. ’Sides, there’s kids at the lake in the summer, right? And Carl and Giselle live nearby. They’re pretty cool,” she said, sitting back in place after locating a fuzzy Radio Disney channel on the radio.
“What makes them cool?”
“Well, Carl has all those comic books and he lets me read them. And Giselle’s a couple years older than me but she promised to teach me to ski cross-country.”
“I guess they’re pretty cool then,” he said.
She leaned forward and turned her head to look up at the lowering sky.
“Now it looks like snow,” she said.
And it did. The sky above was dense from horizon to horizon with thick cloud cover bringing an early dusk. There was a tang to the air as the barometer fell.
Merry was asleep in her seat and breathing gently when the first flakes fell hours later. He reached forward to snap off the hiss of the radio; the last stations had been left miles and miles behind. Levon listened to the wipers move before him and watched the swirling flakes gray in his high beams piercing the black between the ranks of pines down the lonely forest road that was taking them home.
6
Bill Marquez was all innocence and golly-gee when ADC Blount informed him that the IRS had taken an interest in the Corey Blanco murder.
What Bill didn’t tell his boss was that he’d back-doored this one by telling a friend at Treasury what he found down in Costa Rica. Word got around about a team of professional criminals with a line on the stolen Blanco fortune and six kinds of hell erupted all over DC. A task force was formed and Treasury sent some marshals down to San Carlos. Not to miss his own party, Blount sent Bill back down with some Bureau forensics guys to help out and share in any good news. It was still a Treasury case so there’d be no blowback to the LA office if they came up with nothing to show for the trip except new tans.
Truth was, federal agents weren’t really detectives. Certainly not homicide. And Bureau agents were barely cops. More like lawyers with guns. But there were a few former city cops among the T-men and two of them had worked in big city homicide divisions. Tony Marcoon in Philly and Ben Greco in Chicago. After a few days of work around the Blanco villa the two former collated what they’d found and told the story.
“The actors came in by sea. We have a shit-ton of witnesses north and south and no one saw anyone strange on their private beaches that night,” Ben Greco started. He had a PowerPoint set up in a vacant house they were borrowing with the permission of the absent owner and the local Costa Rican law who were sitting in. The group was seated in a media room using the big screen for the presentation. On the screen were the images on Greco’s laptop with windows for a layout of the home, map of the coast and pictures of the crime scene.
Tony Marcoon stepped in, prompted by notes in an open book before him.
"One neighbor was having a party on the adjoining beach to the north. An all-nighter. Lots of potential witnesses. Nobody saw anything. To the south we have a paranoid dude with credentials almost as shaky as Blanco's. He has motion lights on his house that are set to light up if anything bigger than a dog passes by. No lights that night. And he has cameras that caught nothing but surf and seagulls."
"They came in off the ocean. By boat or raft or what?" Bill asked. He was seated by Captain Salas who was trying to hide his enthusiasm at being included in the fast-moving briefing. His English was strictly grammar school and Bill was providing translations sotto voce as things went on.
“They could have used a fucking submarine. The local coast guard are doing what they can but you have to understand there’s a lot of pleasure craft in these waters. These guys could have hopped on a Zodiac off a yacht or fishing boat and come ashore and no one would have seen or heard a thing,” Ben Greco answered.
“The actors gained entry to the property. We have no clear count on how many we’re talking about here. They either took care of the two guards first then entered the house or there could even have been enough of them to split up and perform the two tasks simultaneously,” Tony said.
“The alarms were bypassed but they may not even have been on. Estimated time of death on the guards, and they were the first to die, is early evening. Just as it was getting dark. So the house probably wasn’t buttoned down for the night. Time of death for the others was several hours later, estimated. Four hours inside. Seven hours outside,” Ben said paraphrasing his notes.
Up on the screen was a slideshow of photographs taken by Sala's team. Corey Blanco with his head slumped forward as though he'd merely dozed off in his chair. His wife was limp in her chair against the duct tape restraints. Her mane of blond hair hid her face inside the tight confines of the plastic bag secured over her head. The house maid's face was mottled black with broken blood vessels, and her swollen tongue protruded against the suffocating plastic like a snail looking to escape. As bad as they were, it was the photos of the children that made even the most hardened agents turn their heads away. One of them, a T-man (woman actually) whose days were spent examining counterfeit currency for flaws and patterns, rushed from the room to get noisily sick in another room. One tough US Marshal motherfucker had tears on his face as he forced himself to look at the garishly lit photos projected on the state-of-the-art big screen.
"Yeah," Tony said. "These are sick fuckers we're looking for. But they're pros. This was a professional start to finish. Ex-military or established gang. A tight crew that doesn't take naps in the getaway car or brag to strangers in a bar about scores. No DNA. No prints. None of these guys took a dump or a piss while they were in there."
“Make no mistake. We want these guys. We want their asses. Our masters in DC and Quantico may have a stiff prick for the Blanco cash but it’s these assholes we want. They are the key to finding the cash. Find them, any of them, book them and press them and we’ll find the money,” Ben put in. Iron and fire in his words. He had kids of his own from two marriages. The man was outraged.
“That’s just it, guys. Did they get the money?” Bill Marquez said, holding one hand over the other on his lap to keep from raising it like a second grader in math class.
“What’s that mean?” Ben said without rancor.
“I don’t think they got jack shit. I think they walked out of here with blue balls is what I mean. Put the house diagram up again,” Bill said, standing. Tony tapped keys. Bill walked up to the screen and began pointing to spots on the house layout that reappeared, much to everyone’s relief, in place of the murder photos.
Bill said, “They had Blanco open the safe for them. I think he did it first thing. Maybe thinking this was just a home invasion. But what they wanted isn’t in the safe. What they wanted is the big bundle. So they take Blanco back to the big room where his family and the housekeeper are already strapped down. They make threats then they start to make good on the threats.”
“On the kids. So does Blanco still hold out a while?” Tony Marcoon asked.
“We’ll never know. The man was hard-hearted enough of a son-of-a-bitch to take the life savings away from old people and families. But you have to think that was all business. They start on his own children and maybe he wants to fold, wants to give them anything to make it stop. In any case, I think his heart gave out before he could give them anything.”
“Then the señora,” Ramon Salas spoke up from his seat.
“Yeah. I shared some of this with the Captain before. They keep working on the kids hoping that the mother knows what they want. She doesn’t. It’s hours of this but she has nothing to give them. They finally kill the remaining four and then leave, going back out to sea the way they came. Empty handed.” Bill showed his audience the palms of his hands.
“That’s fucked up. For us and for t
hem. There’s no angle for us. If they got something then we could be on the lookout for large sums of cash being moved. If what you’re saying is what happened then there’s no handle,” Ben Greco said with disgust.
“Maybe they didn’t get Blanco’s secret,” Bill said. “That doesn’t mean Blanco didn’t leave something somewhere. Just not here in the Costa Rica house. Maybe not the hard cash but a way to the cash. This house is loaded with leads if we know where to look. If we find what they were looking for we can get to it before them. We can be waiting for them.”
“He’s right,” the female agent with the twitchy stomach said, returning to the room, a damp washcloth held against the back of her neck.
“Nancy Vargas. Special agent, Treasury,” Ben Greco said by way of introduction.
“I work forensic accounting. This murder shit is too real for me. But what we have here is numbers and paper trails. Corey Blanco dropped off the grid a decade ago. We’ve never been able to pick up a thread on him. But this house is a start. Even paying with cash there’s legalities to consider. He had to use a name and that name ties to other names and other places. It’s the first square on the board. We just need to find the rest of the squares and figure out what the board looks like.” She took a cautious sip of ginger ale from the glass by her seat.
“I sucked at math,” Tony Marcoon said, grinning.
“Blanco might have other properties. We need to find out if he moved around at all and where he went and who he had contact with. We don’t know what the assholes we’re looking for know now. Maybe they learned something, the location of the next square,” Nancy said.
“You think he has other houses somewhere? You think the money’s there?” Bill said.
“I think he left himself options. Back doors. Escape contingencies. Blanco was smart. He got away with it and he knew he’d have to hide the rest of his life. He’d have planned for that,” she said.
“Find his hiding place ahead of these fucks and we’ll be waiting for them when they stick their hand in,” Ben Greco said.