“But I doubt we could ever prove it,” Josephs said.
“But why would they bother killing them? What do they get out of it?” Danielle demanded. “Chief Corcoran turned the three drug parcels over to the State Police.”
Josephs looked startled and Santana sucked in a breath. “Oh, crap!” Josephs breathed.
Danielle looked first at Santana, then at Josephs. “Petty Officer First Class Josephs,” Danielle said slowly, each word as crisp and sharp as cut glass. “Tell me what the hell is going on.”
“I thought you knew,” Josephs said weakly. “Those bags didn’t contain drugs; they were full of baking powder. We think Corcoran switched the bags. I mean, he had all the time he needed. He took the real drugs and gave the phony bags to the State Police. The State cops had no idea what the real bags looked like, so how were they to know?”
With that, it all abruptly fell into place. Danielle finally understood, understood all of it.
And what she wanted to do.
She felt something awful and dark uncoil deep inside her and raise its head, knew that if she took this path some part of her humanity would die and that her soul would be scarred for the rest of her life.
Knew it for a certainty.
And embraced it.
She turned slowly to her mother, and saw her own resolve staring back at her.
“Yes,” Céline Dumas said simply. “Yes.”
Chapter 72
Dreams and Worries
A week passed. Luc Dumas came home from the hospital, but then went back when a blood clot formed in his hip. Frank Finley contracted a lung infection and the doctors kept him hospitalized so they could monitor him more closely. Calvin slept a lot and when he woke, he was listless. Dr. Goodwin, the staff psychiatrist, urged Danielle to keep him in the hospital for a few more days. Danielle could only agree – she could not risk losing her second child.
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Police Chief Michael Corcoran was euphoric. The State Police had taken the three bags and discovered they held only baking powder. As far as he could tell, there was no investigation into him or the North Harbor police. Quite the contrary, they were being touted as heroes. Everyone who could identify him as being part of the drug smuggling was dead. The real drugs would stay hidden away for a while, but then he and his boys would quietly sell them to the biker gangs and have enough money to live anywhere they wanted. He worried from time to time that his men wouldn’t be able to keep their mouths shut, but if he got wind of any problems, there was a fix for that, and Corcoran was the man to do it.
In the meantime, Corcoran had a police department to run. And at the end of the day, he would sit on his patio and stare across the bay, feel the warm wind on his face, sip his beer and dream of what was to come.
Life was good.
Chapter 73
A Long-Distance Phone Call
Danielle knew what she wanted to do, but not how to do it.
She spent two fruitless months searching the Internet, but if the answer was there, it eluded her. She drove to Portland and consulted a research librarian at the public library, but only succeeded in scaring the poor woman when she fully described just who she was trying to reach.
“I don’t know how to find his phone number,” she complained to her mother.
“Well, of course, dear,” Céline replied. “If it were readily available, then everybody would be calling him. No, you have to ask yourself, who knows the number of a man who doesn’t want his number known?”
She gave this some thought. Two days later, when the answer struck her, she kicked herself for not thinking of it earlier.
They met for coffee the following week, at a small coffee bar in Augusta, surrounded by college students and legislators.
Howard Honeycutt asked after Frank and lamented that he had left the DEA.
He hasn’t left, not really,” Danielle told him. “Give him another month and he’ll get bored and antsy. There’s nothing for him to do at home. He can’t be a cop in North Harbor, not while Corcoran is still there. Be patient, Howard, he’ll come back soon.” She leaned forward. “Only this time, no more undercover work,” she said intensely. “He’s done his bit. Just let him be an agent, for God’s sake. And whatever you do, don’t send him to Mexico.”
Honeycutt looked at her curiously. “Is that why we’re having this coffee?” he asked kindly. “So you can negotiate the conditions of Frank’s employment?”
“No, not that.”
He gave her a long, studied look. “Then why?”
She told him what she needed.
His eyes widened and he sat back, gazing at her with a mix of astonishment and horror. “Why on earth would you want to talk to him?”
She stared back at him wordlessly.
Honeycutt shook his head. “Danielle, I can’t-”
“Yes, you can, Howard,” she said, steel in her voice. “And you will. You owe us that much.”
“No, I can’t,” he said. “It’s confidential information pertaining to ongoing investigations.”
Then he got up and walked out.
Dispirited, Danielle drove home to North Harbor, unsure of what her next step would be. In the movies she would employ some super-secret computer hacker and have the phone number within a few hours, but she didn’t know any super-secret computer hackers and had no idea how to find one.
She went home, had two glasses of wine and went to bed in a funk.
Two days later, the letter came. It was unmarked, with no return address. She opened it up and found a piece of cheap note paper, which contained a single name and a Massachusetts phone number. She thought for a long moment, then copied the name and number onto another piece of paper, which she put inside an old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. She burned the original and sent a quiet prayer of thanks to Howard Honeycutt.
The next day, she kissed her husband on the cheek and told him she had to drive to Boston to see an old college friend. Instead, she drove to Worcester, Massachusetts, stopped in a discount electronics store and purchased a burner phone. She paid cash for the phone and wore a hat and thick-rimmed glasses to disguise herself, but knew she couldn’t count on it. Then she drove to Greenfield, Massachusetts, staying off any toll roads. Once there, she found the town green and parked beside it. She opened the phone, made sure it was activated, and dialed the number she had been given.
______________
Salvador Garcia was second in command to Bruno Banderas. The late, great Bruno Banderas. Salvador was now in charge of the biggest Dominican gang in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts. His gang sold heroin throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.
Or would, if they had enough to sell.
Two months earlier, a shipment of one hundred and fifty pounds of H had been seized by the cops and the DEA, and the cream of the crop of Salvador’s gang had been killed. One rumor was that the cops actually captured the gang members, and then shot each one in the back of the head. Salvador didn’t doubt it. The cops had also announced that the “drugs” they seized turned out to be nothing more than baking powder, but that was bullshit. That shootout had been like a fuckin’ war, and nobody would go through that over some damn baking powder. Nah, the truth was the DEA or the cops took the drugs and sold it themselves. Fuckin’ government.
Salvador wanted payback. Somebody had to suffer.
And, maybe even more importantly, he needed a new shipment, because he was almost out. Running on empty. And if he couldn’t supply the biker gangs in Maine and New Hampshire soon, real soon, someone else would, and that would be the end.
When the phone rang, he ignored it. It rang and rang and finally one of his boys picked it up. He listened for a moment, then said, in surprisingly good classroom English, “Never heard of him.” But before he could hang up, the person on the other end said something that made his eyes widen. He turned to Salvador. “Boss, I think you want to take this. Some bitch says she knows where the missing Maine dope is.�
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“Are you the guy in charge?” A woman’s voice. “The boss?” The voice was sorta sultry, sorta rough. It made Salvador feel a little tingle.
“Yeah, who is this?” he asked sharply. Unlike many of his colleagues, Salvador had been born in the United States. His mother was a teacher and his father a dentist. Salvador was a good student and went through two years of college before dropping out due to boredom. He didn’t take to crime because he was forced into it by poverty or coercion. He took up the life because he liked it. Liked the swagger, liked the thrill, liked the money, and liked the women. Within two years he went from a slightly geeky teen with acne to a street hood with lots of money and an endless supply of drugs. And suddenly, finding sexy young women was not a problem.
To his surprise, killing was not a problem, either. When he joined Bruno Banderas’ gang, Salvador caught Banderas’ eye when he nonchalantly walked up to a rival gang member who was selling drugs on Banderas’ turf, and shot him twice in the head with a silenced .22. Salvador had expected to feel upset or agitated or something unpleasant at his first kill, but instead he had felt…horny.
Banderas took one look at him and laughed. “You be okay,” he said proudly, and rewarded him with Alicia for the weekend. Alicia was fifteen and petite, with long dark hair and inviting brown eyes.
Now, while he found this mystery woman’s voice attractive, he schooled himself to business.
“Who is this?” he repeated.
“I’m someone who can make you a lot of money,” she said.
“I don’t need no more girls, I got plenty,” he said.
She chuckled. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m talking about real money.”
“You said you know where the Maine dope is?” Salvador asked with surprising softness. He was re-evaluating this woman. She sounded confident, not like a crackpot or a doper. No bluster. Slight Maine accent. Spoke well. Educated. All in all, she sounded like someone who knew that she knew something he didn’t.
Besides, he didn’t waste bluster on someone he couldn’t reach out and hurt.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you I did, so I will tell you something better,” she said.
Salvador snorted dismissively. “Sure, I’m all ears.”
“I can give you the name of the man who stole the dope from Bruno Banderas,” she told him. “I can give you the man who killed Banderas. Isn’t that what you really want?”
Salvador sat up straighter. “And what you want?” he asked, consciously ratcheting down his syntax to remind this bitch that she was playing on his turf now.
“Me?” she laughed. “Oh, I want something you’ll be eager to give me.”
Now he was puzzled. “I’m getting impatient,” he demanded, reverting back to the more refined language of his parents. “Talk sense.”
“The man you are looking for is the Chief of Police of North Harbor, Maine. His name is Michael Corcoran.” She rattled off his address. “You may have to persuade him to tell you where he’s hiding the drugs he took after he shot Bruno in the head, but if I were you, I’d look around his yard. He’s done a lot of landscaping recently.”
Salvador looked at the phone in disbelief, then brought it back to his ear. “Lady, who are you.”
“Oh, just a friendly lady who wants to help,” she said. “Everybody needs friends, right?”
Salvador said nothing for a moment, still trying to figure out what was going on. The mystery woman spoke into the silence. “But there’s one more thing; I don’t want you selling that heroin in the State of Maine, got it? Enough good people have already died because of that crap. If you try to sell it in Maine, I’ll make sure things go badly for you.”
“Really, you think you can do that?” he replied sarcastically. “I think you may be in over your head.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Salvador,” she said matter-of-factly, using his Christian name for the first time. “After all, I found your number, didn’t I? Makes you wonder whose other numbers I know, doesn’t it? Like maybe foreign numbers.”
“Hey, fuck you, lady! Try anything and-”
But she had hung up.
Salvador put the phone down, then sat there, thoughtfully staring into space.
______________
Danielle terminated the connection, put her car into gear and drove away. At the first bridge, she stopped and threw the burner phone into the Connecticut River.
She took the long way home, north on Rte. 91 to St. Johnsbury, then east on back roads to Augusta, then continuing east to Belfast and looping south around Penobscot Bay to North Harbor. When she needed gas, she paid cash and didn’t speak to anyone. It was a long trip, just under eight hours, and when she got home she was exhausted.
Her mother was waiting for her. She handed Danielle a glass of red wine and raised her eyebrows in question.
“It’s done,” Danielle told her, then took a gulp of the wine. “God forgive me, it’s done.”
“God will forgive you,” Céline said. “Or I’ll give Him a piece of my mind.”
Danielle looked across the harbor to the open ocean beyond. “He’s out there, Mom. Somewhere. I’ll never hold him again, never hear his voice, and it breaks my heart.” She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. “I wish to God we never came back here.”
Céline stepped close to her daughter and put her arm around her. And tried, as best a mother could, to ease her pain.
And bleakly hoped that someday, somehow, she would be able to ease her own.
Chapter 74
A Reckoning
The next day Danielle and Céline took turns watching Corcoran’s house from a vantage point on a hill four hundred yards away. They were dressed in brown and green clothes, and armed with a Roxant Authentic Blackbird 12-36X zoom spotting telescope, mosquito netting to keep away the black flies and give them some concealment, two bottles of water, four bananas, and two large coffees– Café Mocha for Danielle and Gingerbread Latte for Céline . And a burner cell phone.
Nothing much happened. They watched Corcoran leave his house and drive away to go to work, then come back at dinner time. He ate dinner on his patio, then went inside. The two women crept away, unseen.
They were back in position at dawn the following day. They watched Corcoran take his breakfast on his small patio, then drive off to work again. An hour after he disappeared, they watched as two men stepped from the woods and approached the house. They cautiously looked through the windows before bending to work on the lock on the front door. One man stayed outside while his companion went inside. After fifteen minutes, he emerged, carefully pulling the front door closed behind him. They walked into the woods and disappeared from view.
“Wait for Corcoran to come back, or go now?” Danielle asked her mother.
“I want to see it through,” Céline replied.
At five o’clock, Corcoran’s car came up the gravel road and he pulled into his small garage. He let himself in the side door and forty minutes later came out with a beer and a plate of food and took his customary position on the patio.
Danielle focused the spotting telescope on the far side of the house and watched as eight men emerged from the tree line, four carrying rifles of some sort and the rest pistols. Céline, too impatient to wait for her turn with the telescope, dug out a pair of Carson hunting binoculars from her knapsack and held them up to her eyes.
“Ahhh,” she said. “The guests have arrived.”
The eight men split up and went around the house from opposite directions, catching Corcoran by surprise as he ate his chicken cacciatore. He tried to fight, but one of the men struck him on the head with the butt of his rifle, then they dragged him inside.
The two women waited. They figured thirty minutes was about right. When it was time, Danielle sighed, looking sad, relieved, triumphant, and drained. She pulled out the burner phone, checked to make sure she had a signal, then called the administrative number of the State
Police, not the emergency number.
“Hello? Yes, I’m calling because I just heard screams and gunshots from the little house at the end of Banner Road in North Harbor.” She paused, turning her face to the sky and closing her eyes. “No, no, I didn’t call the local police, I think this is a State Police matter. No, no, I won’t give you my name, I really don’t want to be involved.”
She hung up.
Céline touched her on the shoulder. “Time to go, dear.”
They packed their gear, scoured the ground to make sure they left nothing behind, and melted into the bushes behind them.
They were too far away to hear the screams.
Chapter 75
In Case There’s Not a Hell
Howard Honeycutt stopped by the house two days later. It was a wet June day, with a cool offshore wind. He shook out his umbrella and left it standing in the front hallway after Frank and Danielle Finley welcomed him in.
“Would you like some hot coffee, Howard?” Danielle asked.
“Coffee would be great, particularly if you can put a little whiskey in it,” he said, adding by way of explanation: “Need some warming up.”
They sat down in the living room, with Honeycutt taking a grateful sip of the coffee. “Even summer can be cold in Maine,” he said. “I’ve half a mind to put in for a transfer to Arizona.”
Finley snickered. “You like being top dog, Howard. You’re not going to give that up unless they promise you the Regional Directorship in Arizona, and that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.”
Honeycutt’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Allow an old man his dreams, for Christ’s sake.” He peered at Finley. “You are looking positively rested, Frank. You let me know when you’re ready to come back and do some work. You know you can pretty much pick your job.”
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