by K C Ames
Dana spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at home in Casa Verde alone. She was a bit jumpy, thinking she was seeing Greyson Bay around every corner of the house.
Although she insisted that Benny didn’t have to come down to Mariposa Azul Beach, she was excited as he drove up the driveway and parked by her carport.
Benny arrived with a gym bag with a change of clothing and asked Dana if he could stay the night in the guest room.
“You don’t have to stay here. I’ll be fine, and I have Ramón keeping his eyes peeled.”
“I know, but it will make me feel better if I stick around here for a night or two versus being at my beach house wondering if he was coming for those books.”
“If Greyson is involved, he’s probably not here running around. He sends his crook to do his dirty business. I’m sure he’s still in New York. But thank you, because I won’t lie, I am feeling a bit jumpy here by myself with him still out there.”
They decided that even though it was late, that Dana should call Detective Rojas on her mobile phone to let her know about everything she had found out about Chris Longo’s custom-order burglary business and that one of his clients, Greyson Bay, was the man she was using to appraise her collection of first-edition print books.
“Did she seem interested?” Benny asked after Dana hung up the phone.
“Yes, but she needs to discuss it with Picado in the morning, so who knows if they’ll do anything more with it. She said the fact that Greyson is in the States means there is nothing they can do about it. And that his name hasn’t come up at all during their investigation.”
“He’s set it up so he’s like the Teflon Don and nothing sticks to him,” Benny said.
“She was being honest with you, and she doubts Picado will authorize doing much about this since the case is closed. Chris Longo broke into your store to rob it. Barry Shy walked in on it, so he kills him. Then he was killed in a mugging gone bad while cavorting in the dangerous red light district zone before leaving the country, so Picado views it as karma meting out justice. Case closed.” Benny shrugged, not finding much fault with his line of thinking.
Dana suggested she should just call Greyson Bay. “Put him on the spot. Ask him flat out.”
“Remember what I said about poking bears? If he’s really mixed up in all this, perhaps it’s best not to show our hand and let him know that we have our suspicions about him. We’ll call the FBI liaison office in the morning and let them look into it. So we’ll have the OIJ and the FBI aware of it. We’ve done our part as citizens. Let the professionals handle it.”
Dana sighed.
“I know you’re right, but it’s frustrating. I just want to hear his voice. Does he sound the same, or does he sound like he’s worried or scared?”
“Well, it’s almost one in the morning in New York, so at least sleep on it.”
The next morning, Dana and Benny drove to the Qué Vista for breakfast. It was early, so it was just them and a tourist couple from Germany and two members of the Gossip Brigade, Doña Chilla and Doña Marta. The other two members, Doña Amada and Doña Luz, were not morning people.
They chatted briefly with the tourists. They were heading back to Germany the following day. Then they chatted up the old ladies.
“Good morning, young ladies,” Benny said. He was met with laughter.
“Aren’t you the charmer,” Doña Chilla said.
“He’s a lawyer, fake flattery must be part of the curriculum that they teach in law school,” Doña Marta said tartly.
“Come on now,” he said, smiling.
“Be thankful she spared you one of her lawyer jokes,” Doña Chilla said.
Doña Marta cleared her throat and grinned. “That reminds me… do you know how many lawyer jokes are in existence?”
“Three. All the rest are true stories,” Benny said, beating her to the punch line.
“You’re no fun,” Doña Marta said.
“They teach us all the lawyer jokes in law school too,” Benny said with a wink as Doña Marta shooed him away like a fly and Doña Chilla laughed out loud.
Dana was amazed how being warm and personal seemed to come effortlessly to him. Dana was an introvert who had to make an effort to get to fifty percent of Benny’s outgoing personality. She stood there watching the banter with a smile on her face when Doña Chilla turned to her.
“How are you doing, honey? You must be awfully excited to have your bookstore open and that the awful man who killed Barry is dead.”
“I’m excited and a little worried about starting a new business under such dark clouds,” Dana said.
“Well, I’ll be there when it’s open, dear.”
“Me too,” Doña Marta added. That was nice of them. Two customers on opening day. Better than none. Dana smiled and thanked them.
Dana and Benny had breakfast. Benny had scrambled eggs, ham, plátanos maduros, and gallo pinto, while Dana opted for banana pancakes.
They ate silently, watching the waves drift in and out on the sand from the restaurant’s deck. The warm air was sizzling, already serving as a harbinger of the heat that was to come later on in the day at full force.
Thirty-Two
After breakfast, Benny dropped off Dana at Casa Verde. They chitchatted a bit with Ramón, who was working on his new landscaping project by the front gate.
“Oh, those are beautiful flowers,” Dana cooed.
Ramón was going to transform that lonely patch of grass into a beautiful tropical flower bed which would be one of the first things visitors see when they drove onto the property.
They talked a while about the flowers and his plans for the patch, then she turned to more serious matters. She filled him in on what was going on with the possibility that Chris Longo might have had an accomplice who was still out there on the loose.
“This other man is in the States, so I doubt he’ll risk coming into the country to try to steal those books or hurt me. He’s not that dumb or greedy,” Dana explained to Ramón, who seemed concerned for her safety.
“That being said, it just makes sense for all of us to keep our eyes and ears open for the next few weeks,” Benny added.
“I will, Don Benny,” Ramón said, smiling wide and holding up his razor-sharp machete.
Dana laughed nervously. Benny gave him a big thumbs up.
“Ramón thinks he’s a Roman legionnaire or something,” Dana said as she and Benny walked side by side towards the main house.
“As you’ve seen, the campesinos are handy with a machete. There have been many reports of campesinos, drunk on Cacique Guaro, turning a drunkard bar brawl into a gladiator battle with their machetes.”
Dana looked at him wide-eyed. “You must be kidding.”
“Nope, I’m serious. It happens from time to time in the rural areas,” Benny said, holding his hand up in the air as if he was being sworn in to testify in a court of law. “But don’t worry, Ramón doesn’t even drink. But, like Mr. T would say, I pity the fool that breaks into Casa Verde and tries to do you harm. I’m sure Ramón would slice him up like ham in a deli.”
“Gross,” Dana said, stifling a smile.
“Besides, I have my own equalizer,” Benny said, pulling a case from his gym bag. He opened it to show her his pistol.
Guns made Dana nervous. She had read somewhere that the odds were greater of the assailant turning the tables and shooting the victim with their own gun than the other way around.
“Those make me nervous,” Dana said.
“Nothing to it if you know how to use one. It’s just a tool, like a hammer.”
Dana shrugged. She had a machete-wielding Ramón outside of the home and a pistol-packing Benny and claw-packing Wally indoors, protecting her. If Greyson Bay was really behind everything and he was dumb enough to try and hurt her, he would probably regret that decision right quick.
Since Benny was supposed to be in the city, he had several back-to-back calls that he had to make for work, and he also needed
to grab some documents he had left at his beach house, so he told her he would be back in a couple hours, since he was planning to spend the night in the guest room until the whole Greyson Bay situation was figured out.
“Don’t worry, I’m fine. It’s broad daylight, and I have Ramón and his machete outside and Wally and his claws inside.”
Benny smiled and left, promising to be back in two hours tops.
Dana went to her study to start working on some new marketing materials for the new grand opening of the bookstore, since all other marketing stuff had an opening date that had come and gone.
Wally strutted his way into the study. He looked up at her on the computer and meowed loudly, stretching and yawning. He then rubbed up against her legs. “Good kitty,” Dana said absentmindedly without even looking at the cat as she typed away on her laptop.
Wally wasn’t one to be ignored. He jumped up on the desk in one move, startling Dana. “Dang you, Wally, you’re going to give me a heart attack doing that.”
He shoved his head into her hand and meowed. Dana was sure he just said something along the line of, Don’t care. Pet me, now. So Dana did as he instructed.
She had set up a playlist of old-school Miami Sound Machine. Before Gloria Estefan became the Gloria Estefan singing about conga, she was a member of Miami Sound Machine, singing beautiful Spanish ballads that reminded Dana of The Carpenters.
The music set, she began to tap away on her computer as Wally demanded more attention. After a few minutes, she sat back to look at the graphic she had been working on. The text read GRAND REOPENING.
Then it dawned on her that there was never a grand opening, since the bookstore was never open and closed for a grand reopening. She deleted RE and added NEW. She looked at the flyer: NEW OPENING. Better, she thought. Wally meowed in agreement.
The bulk of the work for the opening had already been done. She just needed to update the materials.
She had been at it for almost two hours when her phone rang. She picked it up and looked at the display. She saw the 650 area code. It was Bucky. She leaped for the phone, causing Wally to scamper away.
“Sorry, Wally,” she said, grabbing her phone from her desk. “Hey, Bucky.”
“Are you at home?” There was an edge to his voice that made the hairs on Dana’s arms stand straight up.
“Yes, why?”
“Are you alone?” Again, the tone of his voice was so unlike Bucky. The usually happy-go-lucky forty-year-old going on twenty sounded scared.
“No, well, kind of. What’s up?”
“Sorry, I’ll explain in a sec, but what do you mean, kind of?”
“I’m alone in the main house right now, but my caretaker, Ramón, lives in his own house on the property with his wife, Carmen. And Benny had to leave for work for a couple hours, but he’ll be back and he’s staying here in the guest room until we get this all sorted out. You’re freaking me out, Bucky.”
“Sorry, it’s just, well…”
“Bucky, just say it!”
“I threw all the emails from Greyson Bay that you forwarded to me into my custom grinder to look for clues, any additional information that might not be clear looking at an email as a regular recipient.”
“What did you find?”
“I looked at the data in the header of the emails, which is hidden.”
Dana knew all about email headers. The metadata was tucked away, and most email-reading programs required the person to click on a button to reveal that hidden information.
“As I’m sure you know, there is a lot of useful stuff in there, like the routing information of all emails including the sender, recipient, and date, but the part of the header I’m most interested in is the part that provides information on the route an email takes as it is transferred from one computer to another. Following?”
“Yes, got it.”
“So I opened his emails in my analyzer. The first emails you had received from Greyson Bay, when you first began to chat about the books, the IP address that was stamped in Greyson’s email headers was from the borough of Manhattan in New York City, which makes sense, since that’s where he lives. But the last few emails you received from Greyson, the IP address is not from New York City—it’s from Costa Rica.”
“What?” Dana could feel the blood draining from her. She felt lightheaded.
“He was sending those emails to you from Costa Rica. From an IP address in the Guanacaste Province in Nosara, which I googled, and is not far from where you live.”
“That’s about twenty minutes from Mariposa Beach,” Dana said nervously. “Are you sure you’re not looking at my IP address or something?” Dana knew right away that was a dumb question. There was no way Bucky had looked at the data wrong. It would be like a mathematician getting 2+2 wrong.
“I’m one thousand percent sure, girl. It’s been eighty-four hours since the last email from Greyson, so he could be back to the States by now, but you need to be very careful, because what the heck was he doing down there, right? I’m assuming he never shared that little tidbit of information with you.”
“No. On the contrary, he made it a point to tell me he was in his bookstore in New York.”
“Well, he’s lying. Why would he do that?”
“That confirms what we’ve been thinking. He wants my first editions. I was thinking he had sent Chris Longo to do the dirty work while he stayed in New York, but he must have actually traveled down here with him.”
“And the only man that could point the finger in his direction was conveniently killed in a mugging gone bad,” Bucky said.
“My left foot that was a mugging gone bad. He’s probably behind that too,” Dana said.
“You need to call nine-one-one. Do they have that there?”
“Yes, it’s also nine-one-one here,” Dana said, as if in a fog.
“Well, hang up and call the police.”
Dana sat there for a moment, stunned. She dug around her purse and pulled out Detective Gabriela Rojas’s business card. She looked at it. She figured she would call her directly than mess around with 911, since she had no idea how well it worked, especially being in secluded and tiny Mariposa Beach.
Rojas picked up after two rings. Dana told her everything Bucky had shared about Greyson Bay being in Costa Rica and about how he knew the value of her first-edition books down to the penny.
“Okay, let me take a look to see if he’s entered the country and more importantly, if he has left. Stay put in your house. You have that secured wall and front gate, so you should be safe in there. Let Ramón know what’s up, but call him. I don’t want you to leave your house until I figure out what’s going on with this Greyson Bay character.”
Dana felt a sense of calm after hanging up the phone. The detective sounded calm, confident, and in charge. But there was the fact that she was over an hour away in Nicoya. And Officer Freddy was twenty minutes away.
Dana called Benny next. She got his voicemail. Drat, he had told her he was going to be in those back-to-back calls. She left him a voicemail with the latest developments.
Next, she called Ramón on his mobile phone, which she knew he always kept in his pocket. He picked up and she told him what was going on.
“Don’t worry, Doña Dana, if anyone tries to sneak onto the property, I’ll know.”
She liked that he sounded confident, but how could he be so sure? Casa Verde sat on 120 acres of property that couldn’t be watched by one man.
Maybe Greyson Bay had already gotten onto her property and was now just waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce. And he didn’t know about Bucky and Benny and that the police knew about him. He might still believe that by killing her, she would be the last link to him.
She sat down, scared. She wished she had accepted Benny’s offer to leave his gun with her. “Oh, I’ll probably just shoot my foot with it,” she had joked.
“Breathe deep. Relax,” she began her relaxation technique. It worked well when she was stressed with
work or dealing with an annoying coworker, or when she would argue with her ex-husband, but it wasn’t working too well in calming her down with the notion that Greyson Bay was in Costa Rica and could be coming after her.
Thirty-Three
It had been fifteen minutes since she got off the phone with Bucky. And the more she thought about it, the less likely she thought that Greyson Bay was still in town. She felt goofy for freaking out so badly.
She went upstairs to wait for Benny and Rojas to call her back. She felt safer upstairs in her veranda, overlooking her property from above, sitting on her favorite chair.
She saw Ramón down below. He seemed to be standing on guard. She smiled, feeling safer.
She sat down and put the hiking stick she had grabbed to serve as a weapon just in case down on the table.
She had her laptop with her. She thought about reading a book or a magazine online, but her nerves were too much on edge to focus on reading. She did nothing but look out at her property and glance at the phone, hoping Benny would call her back.
After a few minutes, her phone trilled, announcing the arrival of a text message. She looked at her phone. It was from Benny:
On my way
She felt a relief. She always prided herself on being fiercely independent, even when she was married. It was one of the things that had affected her marriage. Her ex-husband wanted a more needy, wallflower-type wife. It was two things she never was and wasn’t keen to be, even when they had met in college; why he thought she would change, she would never know, but then again, she should have known Phil’s overbearing personality wasn’t going to change, either. Nuggets of information two twenty-year-olds in love chose to ignore.
But finding out that someone you thought you could trust might be behind the murder of Barry Shy, all over books? It seemed crazy to her. But she knew people had been killed for far less.
Dana was lost in thought when her phone rang, startling her. It was Detective Rojas. Dana anxiously answered it.