by Jason Winn
Contessa took the box and placed it on her lap. She produced a cigarette and patiently waited for Corrado to light it.
“You’ll need to take this off to war to create a bit of misdirection, shall we say.” she said. Tendrils of smoke opened the box and removed a rose with blue petals.
Caymen smiled.
“Your target has a large operation and four children that I know of. Take him out and as many of his progeny as you can manage. Leave this behind when you’re done.”
The smoke returned the rose to the box and Contessa snapped it shut.
“One more thing, Mr. Darrow. How did you know I was here?”
“You were next on Ms. Churchill’s list.”
Chapter 41
Madison loaded the last of the Moonmilk ingredients from the restaurant supply shop into her trunk. Her arms ached and sweat trickled down the back of her neck. She was exhausted from being up all night. All she wanted to do was pass out in a chair and sleep for a week.
She handed the shop’s scruffy-faced stock boy a C-note for helping and got into her car. The scent of stale coffee filled her nose and the driver’s seat eased the kink in her back.
She was about to start the Audi when her phone buzzed. It was Sarah.
“What now? I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Hello to you, too,” said Sarah.
“Sorry. I feel like I’m about to drop dead. What’s up?”
Sarah ignored her snipe. “You may want to have a look at this.”
“What?” asked Madison.
“Sean called me. Something just dropped on YouTube, Instagram, all over the net.”
A text with a link to Twitter popped up on her phone. Madison clicked it. A video of a city street appeared. Cop cars flew into view, screeching to a stop in front of a building marked Omaha Chemical Bank. Police officers jumped from the cars, guns drawn. A man dressed in black with a white ski mask stormed out of the bank carrying several fat shopping bags. The cops shouted something at him, probably “drop the bag of money and get on the ground.” Ski mask kept walking toward the cops, who in turn became more animated. The robber stopped in the middle of the street. The cops’ pistols and shotguns turned into white flares. Some of the cops fell to their knees. The man ran off. No one chased him. Bystanders cautiously walked over to help the cops, most of whom were writhing on the ground, doubled over, their hands folded tightly against their chests.
“Oh, shit,” said Madison.
“Uh-huh.”
“Sean’s sure this isn’t some sort of movie promo, viral video thing?”
“He says it was shot by some security camera from a laundromat in Pittsburgh. He found the original poster’s account and he’s just some guy who posts food videos, probably works there folding clothes. Nothing else like this. Maddy, I think this is something,” she lowered her voice as if they were sitting in public together, “magical. And now it’s on the Internet. I don’t think this is a good thing.”
No, it most certainly was not a good thing. No shit, Sarah! But Madison decided to take a more measured tone. “No, I think you’re right. Meet me at the house.”
“There’s more.”
“Christ. What?”
“Sean’s been going through the old client notebook, and a few of them were murdered yesterday. The NYPD police report said they were killed execution style in their homes, like something done by professionals making a statement.”
To whom? Me?
“We’ll worry about that later,” said Madison.
“All of them had the same last name: Molden.”
“I said, I don’t care. We’ll worry about that later.” This wasn’t the time to be fretting about some pile of corpses up in New York.
Madison ended the call and fired up the engine. She sped out of the parking lot, headed for the mansion.
Chapter 42
Shelby’s car came to a stop before a small white house at the end of a long driveway in rural Maryland. It looked like a farmhouse, with a porch that spanned the front of the house and wrapped around the sides. Upon seeing a parked car in front of the detached garage, she considered turning around and driving back to the main road. But as she studied the car for a moment, she noticed it was covered with dead leaves. It hadn’t been driven in months.
Double-checking her pistol, she crept out of her car, making sure to leave it unlocked in case she needed to make a hasty retreat. The atmosphere around the house felt dead. The grass was knee high with plumes of seeds at the ends. Damp piles of leaves rose up around the porch steps. And the only sound was that of the trees that surrounded the yard, rustling in the summer breeze.
After calling in a few favors, Shelby had found the house of the mysterious Col. Nathan Trask. His Army records were sealed so she’d had to turn to the bureau’s civic database, which didn’t care who you were, janitor or super spy. If you were an American citizen, you were in the databases. All Shelby needed was a name.
Secure in the thought that no one was home, She did a sweep of the yard. Outside of a few startled birds and one tree frog, there was still no sign of Trask or his family. The personnel file had listed his wife, Lori, daughter, Cynthia, and son, Joshua.
The puzzling thing was that Trask’s information had been updated three years ago when he renewed his Maryland driver’s license. His wife, Lori, hadn’t shown up in any records for years. It was if she and the children had just dropped off the face of the earth. Maybe moved to another country? Not out of the question with Trask’s military background. Someone gets posted overseas, the family sets down roots and moves back there when the circumstances are right. Trask had been posted to South Korea and Germany in his career, so it was possible he and the wife had had a falling out and she moved overseas, but how likely was that, really?
The other possibility, and far grizzlier, was that someone—Trask, in this case—had murdered them. Shelby hoped that wasn’t what happened to them. She’d have a lot of explaining to do if she’d just stumbled upon a family killer, while driving about in the Maryland countryside.
The ground sloped downward as she rounded the house, preventing her from seeing into the first-floor windows.
She climbed the back stairs. The boards creaked under her feet, sounding like gunshots in the calm. Cupping her hands around her eyes, Shelby peered into the windows off the back porch. All she saw was an empty kitchen and family room.
She tried the back door. The knob turned, but the deadbolt above it held the door closed. This gave her an excuse to pull out her lock-picking kit. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d even practiced with it, but the basics didn’t change: use the tension bar (a small L-shaped piece of metal) to move the lock’s cylinder to the right. Then insert the rake, which looked like a mini harpoon, to move the key pins into a position where they would allow the cylinder to rotate. It took her thirty seconds to open the lock.
Still got it, girl.
Proud that she remembered her training, Shelby pushed the door open and walked into the kitchen. The space was immaculate, as if a maid had been through there that morning, save for the thin layer of dust on everything. There was not a pot, plate, or glass out of place. It almost looked as if the house was ready to be sold, except for a few kids’ backpacks on the kitchen table. The air was devoid of the stench of rotting trash or mildew.
An office hung off the small kitchen, to her left. Shelby walked over to it. The space looked like a repurposed pantry. She found a light switch and took in the cramped room, lined with shelves of books, with a single desk, chair and a small filing cabinet. Mail, postmarked from six months ago, was stacked neatly in a pile, next to a file folder marked King Mountain Spa report.
King Mountain. The words resonated, and Shelby remembered the slip of paper she’d pulled out of the purse back at Camp Peterson.
Her heart raced as she flipped through the folder’s contents. Inside were printouts of shipping information, cargo weights, fuel costs, flight times, payment tra
nsfers.
Drugs, it had to be drugs, or weapons.
None of it made any sense, until she got to the last page, where a line noted three crates of “Moonmilk” included in the last flight manifest. Shelby’s blood ran cold.
This had to be about drugs, codenamed Moonmilk. Nathan Trask was into some sort of black ops drug research project. He had a falling out with his superiors, and started selling the Moonmilk to dealers outside of the country. Simple. Now the question was, what the hell exactly was Moonmilk? There was no mention of her, Dana, or Madison, which was both a relief and frustrating at the same time. She folded the papers up and stuffed them into her purse. She was way past giving a shit about illegal search and seizure.
Back in the kitchen, a glint of broken glass caught her eye on the floor in the main hallway. It seemed out of place in a home this organized. Was there a struggle of some sort? Nothing else seemed broken or amiss. There was no pet food or water bowls on the floor.
No pets to knock it over.
The next thing that got her attention was the rust-colored stain on one of the double-doors leading out of the kitchen, opposite the door to the office. While she was no crime scene expert, it looked like dried blood.
Ignoring the shattered glass, Shelby made for the room on the other side of the double doors. They slid apart. A shock ran down her spine and she instinctively put her hand on her holstered pistol.
A figure stood in the dim room, a woman wearing a robe, as still as a mannequin.
“Hello?”
The woman, or whatever it was, remained still and silent. Below her was a dining room table, and two other figures—these looked like children—sat in chairs.
Shelby fought the urge to walk up and touch them. Why would Trask have mannequins in his dining room? Her thoughts drifted back to her days in the academy, when she was in a class about serial killers. Agent Ibanez had told the class about a killer by the name of William Cooley who had poisoned his family and stuffed their bodies, like taxidermied animals, placing them in various spots around the house. He told the neighbors they’d left him and moved to Flagstaff.
Now Shelby had to know: were these real or fake people? She walked up to the woman, who had long hair that appeared to be wet, and wore a faded red bathrobe. She held a comb over the young boy’s messy brown hair. Shelby touched the woman’s cheek. The skin was cold and felt like granite. Shock and confusion followed by awe gripped her as she touched the shoulders, then the hands of the figures.
Shelby backed away—and then she heard the sound of someone coming through the front door.
Rapt with curiosity, Shelby had completely abandoned her situational awareness. She should have checked the rest of the house, before inspecting whatever these things were.
“Hello,” a man’s voice called out.
There was no point in running. She’d been seen for sure. With careful, practiced motion, Shelby pulled her pistol free of the holster. She was going home tonight, over anything else. This obsession of hers was not going to cost her her life. She raised the sights to her eye and slid back toward the kitchen.
“Colonel Trask, you in here? The door was unlocked. It’s Al Connolly.”
Shelby stole a quick glance into the hallway and saw a short old man standing there. He wore khaki pants and a white polo shirt. Al’s head snapped to his right and he locked eyes with Shelby before she could duck behind the door.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “Nate must have left the front door unlocked. You his girl?”
Wary of the man’s disarming smile, Shelby kept the pistol trained on him.
“Who are you?” she asked. There was far too much weird shit in the dining room for her to trust this man, especially with how familiar he seemed to be with “Nate.”
“Senator Albert Connolly, and I’ll thank you to stop pointing that at me.” His face went stern, radiating power and confidence. Most people threw their hands up at the sight of a gun barrel, yet Shelby may as well have been pointing a soup ladle at him.
“What state?”
“Vermont. And full disclosure, I should say ‘former senator.’ And you are?”
“Shelby Painter, FBI.”
“Oh, one of Jack Reed’s people.” He was referring to the current director of the bureau, Mr. Reed.
“That’s right. What are you doing here, Mr. Former Senator Connolly?” She still hadn’t lowered her pistol.
“Well, I was looking for Colonel Nathan Trask. He and I have some old business to discuss.”
“Does it have anything to do with the three statues in the dining room?”
There was a long pause. Connolly’s eyes shot in all directions.
“Is it a woman and two children?” he asked.
Shelby could feel her face turn red and her heart start to pound in her chest. This man seemed to know a little too much about the dining room. She tightened the grip on her pistol.
“Turn around and place your hands on your head,” she shouted. “Do it now.”
“You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into, young lady. Put the gun down and we can talk about it. I’ll add that my friends in the car are here to protect me at all costs. That includes agents of the FBI, so please put the gun down and let’s relax. Here.” He raised his hands high above his head, making his shirt raise above his belt. Shelby could see tight, bare skin. He turned around, slowly. “No weapons. Happy?”
Faced with people she couldn’t see and no backup, the supposed former senator was giving her little choice.
“You can keep the gun out if that makes you feel safer, just please stop pointing it at me, and I’ll forget you threatened to arrest me. And by the way, where are your credentials? And why are you here?”
That pushed a button in Shelby—he had just attempted to change the power dynamic between the two of them. She finally lowered the barrel and reached for her identification. She flashed her badge and ID to Mr. Connolly and the tension seemed to drain from the room.
Mr. Connolly pulled out his Senate ID card and presented it to Shelby. She’d seen them before in a brief on cyber security. It looked real to her, although she still didn’t recognize him from her time working for the government.
“You can Google me, if you like,” he said with a wide smile. “Here, I’ll do it for you.”
He pulled out his phone and Googled himself. His Wikipedia page came up.
“This mobile internet thing would have been real handy when I used to travel around the country. No one back in the 80s would believe you were a senator, unless you were in your own state. Right,” he said with a big sigh, holding up his phone. On the screen was a younger version of him, with an American flag in the background.
“Now do you have any idea where Colonel Trask is?” asked Connolly.
Shelby relaxed a little more, seeing the picture. “No. I came here looking for him. I thought this was his address.”
“It is,” said Mr. Connolly, “but he seems to have disappeared. Let’s have a look at what you found in the dining room. Is it bodies?”
Mr. Connolly stepped through the living room and into the dining room. “I’ll be damned,” he said, rubbing his chin. “That explains a lot.”
Chapter 43
“Explains what?” asked Shelby.
Mr. Connolly took a long look into Shelby’s eyes. “I’ll tell you, but only if you’re one hundred percent honest with me about why you’re here. You understand me? I’ll know if you’re lying to me.”
Shelby felt he was sincere. Although he was a politician, and they were not exactly the sterling examples of honesty. But, what choice did she have? She needed to get to the bottom of why her family was mentioned in those burnt papers. What was Moonmilk or the Ajax Project? And what did Nathan Trask have to do with all of that and a former senator from Vermont. The problem seemed to grow at every turn.
Fuck it.
Shelby felt like she was about to go over the top of the world’s tallest roller coaster, without a safety
harness. She would just have to trust Isaac Newton that she wouldn’t fly out and die screaming. She went on to tell Mr. Connolly about the explosion, the papers with her and her sisters’ names on them, the words Rose Widow and Moonmilk, and then the police cover-up, all the while leaving out her police friend, Carol’s, name. She wanted to shield her from trouble. However, it was pretty obvious to her that Connolly was a man with far-reaching power.
There was another long pause, as Connolly stared at Shelby and then at the frozen family that shared the room with them.
“That’s some story,” he said, finally. He wrinkled his forehead and let out a gust of air. “Yes, Nathan was into a lot of things. Things I hoped would never come back to me. I’m going to sit down for my part.” He walked into the living room and sat down on to the couch with a small, old man groan.
“How badly do you want to know about what you found? Because it is a doozey.”
Shelby had tried to brace herself for bad news when she set out on this investigation. She knew something sinister was at play here, but the clues didn’t lead to anything concrete.
Shelby sat in an easy chair. “Let’s just have it.”
“Oh well, someone has to know. Because unless someone finds Trask, I’ll be the last to know. And from the sounds of it, things can’t stay that way. I’m sure you’ve heard of all the crazy projects and experiments the US government has done in the past, the ones that were made public anyway. MK Ultra, the sterilization projects, exposing our troops to radiation, the psychics of the 70s and 80s.” Connolly grinned and put his hand on his forehead. “Psychics, what the hell was the CIA thinking? You know they had psychics in rooms, nice places, paid them suitcases full of money, just to tell us what they ‘saw’ the Russians were up to. What a waste. You’ve heard of all of that, right?”
Shelby had. She nodded, not wanting to interrupt.
“Well,” he continued, “there’s a bigger one, bigger than all the rest. Are you ready for it?”