by Jim Heskett
A burst of irritation darkened Carter’s face. Or maybe confusion? Harry still couldn’t tell. The drunk man seemed to grow increasingly tired of answering questions, and his expressions were colored by a slack visage, unwashed and covered in stubble.
“How do you know it was even his? You said Lukas didn’t own the cabin, right? How do you know he wasn’t squatting there, and it was all someone else’s stuff? Sounds like you’re spouting off a bunch of accusations without any proof of anything.”
Harry shrugged and sat back. “I understand you want to stick up for your brother. No one is here to slander him. I’m just trying to find out what happened.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“There’s only one more question, then. Were you here at home last night?”
Carter sat still for a moment as if frozen, then blinked. “No, I was in Eureka last night. I went to dinner at my mom’s and then stayed over there.”
Harry stood and Serena broke her broody paralysis, taking a step toward Harry.
“Wait,” Carter said, wiping rough hands down his cheeks to blot the tears. “Lukas broke into the new barbershop yesterday morning, right? That’s what started all this? I mean, that’s what I’ve been hearing, at least.”
“That’s correct.”
“And that barber, Kemba Wood, is he a suspect?”
“I couldn’t tell you how the police are viewing him.”
Carter took a break to blow his nose on a dirty t-shirt that had been sitting on the floor. “Is that the same Kemba Wood who used to play pro ball?”
Harry might’ve been suspicious at the deep knowledge of an incident not even 48 hours old, but that was how small towns worked. If he’d had dinner with his mother in Eureka Springs, she could’ve recounted most of the events to him.
“Yeah, he used to play in the NFL.”
Carter grunted. “Look up the Texas Tech Dorm Underground Railroad. It won’t be easy to find. Then you’ll find out the skinny about your barber.”
Harry flashed a look to Serena, who appeared to be just as vexed as he was at this new information. But he said nothing about it as he thanked Carter for his time and left the house.
15
Harry poured himself an iced tea from the pitcher in the fridge, then he stared at the bottle of Lake Verna Bourbon sitting on the counter. Harry had bought the bottle soon after his mother’s passing, and he thought he would need it in those first few days of aching grief. His wife had already left for Hong Kong and his son was living on-campus at school in Oklahoma, so Harry had been all alone.
But he hadn’t needed it. Or, at least, he hadn’t indulged the idea he needed it. More than half the bottle sat there. Every once in a while, Harry vowed to drink himself stupid after a bad day, and he usually couldn’t make it more than two drinks toward his goal. He’d get lightheaded and silly, and he’d start thinking about how bad the hangover would be the next morning. In effect, Harry was too chicken to go full throttle with booze. But he did sometimes misjudge his intake, take a wrong turn on Tipsy Avenue and accidentally end up on Sloppy Drunk Boulevard.
He shrugged and added a splash of bourbon and then a pinch of ginger. Harry didn’t know if the drink already existed and had a name, but it felt right. And it tasted nice, too. Sweet and tangy. In college, Harry had a friend who mixed up a different complex drink every single day. The friend called himself an alcoholist, and Harry had always liked the term. He envisioned someday—maybe after retirement—becoming an alcoholist and gaining a fine knowledge of cultured drinks.
Harry returned the bottle to the cupboard where it would sit next to bottles of gin and liqueurs his mother drank that Harry would never touch. Some of those bottles were purchased in the last century. He knew he should rid the house of the stuff he’d never consume, like he should rid the house of the adorable porcelain figurines in the display cases. Or the crocheted pillow collection in the sitting room. Did Harry Boukadakis even need a sitting room? Nope, not at all. He did most of his sitting in the basement.
But that was a project for another day. Selling all of his mother’s possessions would mean two things: 1) that he would finally have to say goodbye to her, and 2) he would probably make enough money to pay for improvements to the house. He liked citing lack of money as an excuse not to do that work.
Harry walked his briefcase and iced tea drink into his dungeon, the only place in the house he actually felt comfortable. In his subterranean lair, he had rigged one wall screen to replicate the daylight cycle, since the lack of basement windows made this floor feel outside of time. He watched digital stars appear in the LCD’s night sky, and sipped his drink. He almost felt normal.
As he stood in the middle of the room, a ding came from his computer and Harry slid into his leather gaming chair. “What do we got?” he asked as he pulled down his eyelid so the retinal scanner could unlock his computer. The machine clicked and whirred, the lights blinked and flourished.
There he saw it: an email from a former work colleague within the United States government. As an ex-employee, Harry had been locked out of many of the systems he used on a regular basis. With abundant government resources, finding people or information theoretically happened at the snap of a finger. Civilians—like present day Harry Boukadakis—weren’t so lucky.
But Harry had called in a favor, and now he had an email in his inbox with the subject “Texas Tech Dorm Underground Railroad.” There had been no information about it via public internet searches and even in the corners of the dark web where Harry knew where to tread.
He clicked on the email.
Hey Harry-
So, I looked up the underground railroad. It’s not what you were thinking. Kemba Wood was actually part of a criminal conspiracy inside the Murray Hall dorm at Texas Tech during his junior and senior years. It began as a way to sell and distribute exam answers to students, and then it spilled over into drugs and other things. Somehow, Wood’s lawyers were able to cut him a deal that involved no jail time and an expunged record. And with his promising NFL career ahead of him, some very diligent people erased it from his past.
I know you’re just doing your job, Harry, but I would proceed with caution with this guy. See the attached docs for more info.
-E
P.S. Last week in our game, Danny rolled a natural 20 and critted a green dragon, banishing it to the elemental plane with one hit from his celestial sword. It was epic. Wish you could’ve been there.
Harry read over the email a few times as the reality of the situation sank in. At first, he was distracted by the thought of missing such a cool moment in the ongoing D&D campaign he used to run with his east coast friends. When Harry had moved away, he’d given the group his blessing to continue the game with a new Dungeon Master. While he hated saying goodbye to his campaign world, he knew it’d been the best thing for the group, since they had all decided not to transition the game from in-person to online. No reason to kill their fun just because he couldn’t play at the same literal table anymore.
After a few seconds of contemplation, the pieces of the email fell into place. Kemba the barber hadn’t been honest with Harry. He kept thinking of Kemba’s expressions, replaying specific things the large man had said. All those empty reactions, long pauses. Harry had attributed the blank moments to Kemba worrying about his business, but it would be easy to view all of it in a different context.
Also, who was he talking to on the phone moments before the break-in? Harry had so far been unable to get an answer to that question. Maybe the phone call was important, or maybe it had been nothing more than a spam call Kemba had accidentally answered instead of sending straight to voicemail.
Also, he was now thinking he couldn’t—or shouldn’t—ask that of Kemba directly. Harry had to assume anything the barber had communicated to be suspect.
He scanned through the attachments to find supporting info, some of it redacted, some of it as plain as day. If Harry wanted to expose the Dorm Undergro
und Railroad, he had enough info to bust it wide open. Not that anyone would care now about a decades-old scandal involving an ex-player.
But when Harry clicked through to the last document in the zip file, he gasped. This one had nothing to do with Kemba Wood. At least, that was how it appeared at first. Instead, this document was a W-9 signed by Lukas Maslow for a landscaping company in Springfield, Missouri. Ten years ago.
“Now we’re cooking,” Harry said as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Renewed energy made his eyes open wide and set one foot tapping on the floor. For the first time since he’d started, Harry could now see the possibility of linking two puzzle pieces together.
Within a few minutes of digging through various records, he had a fuzzy picture of Lukas’ time in Missouri. He had signed the W-9, but then there was no payroll history, which meant he’d been paid in cash. That made Harry’s job harder, but not impossible.
Harry hacked into the landscaping company’s website in no time and found a treasure trove of information sitting in text files on a page deep on the site. Employee files. Harry was shocked how sloppy their security was for the site, and he wanted to fire off an email to the webmaster so he could fix it. But then, he realized he only learned this by hacking it, so informing the webmaster probably wasn’t the smartest move. Maybe an anonymous email sent from an airtight VPN. Harry decided he would make himself a note to deal with it later.
Lukas’ employee files didn’t contain much info, but there was one note regarding Lukas being “written up” for being late. It had mentioned the shift leader needing to drive to pick him up at a ranch outside Springfield. This was the only mention in the files about a specific location; Lukas’ address had not been indicated on the W-9 form.
Harry looked up the address to find a large property in the flatlands of Missouri, like a compound with multiple buildings. Pushing deeper, Harry found a name: New Day Church of the Sinner. The NDCS, as they were referred to in government documents, was a religious group previously under investigation by the FBI. They had been accused of being a doomsday cult, a sex cult, and a money laundering front. None of those charges had stuck, but they definitely had an air of suspicion around them. The report concerning them made heavy use of the word “alleged.”
“Lukas was in a religious cult,” Harry said, mostly to see how the words sounded out loud. It made sense. A man with a stunted intellect and judgment? A perfect candidate for assimilation into a dogmatic organization. He wouldn’t be smart enough to know they were manipulative. It also helped explain what Carter Maslow had said earlier, about Lukas showing up and telling Carter he had been “living his life wrong.” If Lukas had gone religious, he could have returned without informing his brother, if he then considered his brother’s lifestyle to be sinful.
If true, how did he get back to Eureka Springs, and how did he end up isolated in a cabin in a holler? It made sense from a functional standpoint. All those hiding spots, nooks and crannies… the holler was a perfect place to move around unseen for months or even years. The census-takers didn’t delve too deep into the backwoods.
Harry sighed and returned to the map, and when he zoomed out a little, he noticed something interesting: the ranch was only two miles down the road from St. John’s, a major hospital.
Like a lightbulb flicking above his head, an idea formed. Harry wasn’t a football guy, but he knew enough. He knew many of the players were involved in charities, and he embarked on an internet rabbit-hole pursuit to discover if Kemba had any links.
And it turned out Kemba Wood was involved with a charitable organization that purchased supplies for kids in hospitals. Mostly books and toys and other “normal items” kids lacked while undergoing inpatient care.
But sometimes, the NFL players involved visited hospitals to interact with the kids as part of the charity’s publicity. There had been a media blitz, with pretaped segments filmed to air during pre-game shows.
And, nine years ago—during the period Lukas Maslow was most likely living at the NDCS compound two miles from St. John’s Hospital—Kemba Wood visited that very same hospital during a tour.
“Holy crap,” Harry said. “They could’ve met way back then.”
It was thin and non-conclusive, but coupled with the numerous blank spots in Kemba’s short time living in Eureka Springs, Harry only believed one thing for certain: he didn’t know the barber as well as he thought he did.
16
Harry yawned as he drove through the holler, while Serena operated some sort of tiny torture device on her fingernail cuticles. She squinted, making her eyebrows knit together.
“Does that hurt?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Not really. Or, maybe it does, but I’m immune to it by now.”
As he navigated dirt roads rapidly descending and ascending the hills, Serena grabbed the bag from the back seat. She drew one of Harry’s cameras, a white cube smaller than a baseball. “How do you hide these white cameras in the woods?”
“I was going to wrap a layer of duct tape around to make it sticky, then rub them in the dirt, then mush leaves and pinecone bits onto them.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’ll work to keep them hidden?”
“Oh, I have no idea if it’ll work. I’ve never done this before.”
Serena blew out a sigh, then drew a camouflaged bandanna from her purse in the back seat. She tore off three strips. She wrapped the piece of fabric around the body of each device, tying it off like a scarf, concealing almost all the white. “If these are at eye-level, the ruse probably won’t last for long. But it should work.”
Harry beamed. “Brilliant. I knew I kept you around for a reason.”
Serena made a playfully annoyed face and finished dressing the cameras. She seemed a little distracted, maybe annoyed, or just tired. Once again, her expressions were like reading a foreign language with an incomplete key. Harry felt like he’d spent time with a bunch of statues lately.
So far this morning, they’d had no sign of the two inhospitable redneck hillbillies from yesterday. Maybe today was the day they took their spittoons into the co-op for cleaning. Harry didn’t normally like to reduce people to unfair stereotypes, but those two seemed like they deserved it.
His mind drifted and he reminisced about a Florida vacation from a few years before. Harry, his wife and son, traveling down the east coast, headed for the sandy beaches of Key West. They’d encountered a particularly colorful waiter at a restaurant in North Carolina. The man had a southern accent so thick he spoke something that barely qualified as English. Harry’s family had imitated the waiter repeatedly for the rest of the trip, as a little inside joke just for the three of them. It was his favorite memory of that vacation excursion. One of his favorite family memories ever.
Harry slowed near the turnoff for the cabin where they’d found Lukas Maslow dead yesterday. Police tape had been strung up between two trees to block the entrance, but someone had already driven over it. The yellow barrier was on the ground, covered with tire marks. Aside from that, the area seemed much the same, except for the odd mist of uncertainty in the air.
“I don’t like this,” Serena said.
“I don’t either,” Harry said as he drove over the downed police tape and parked in front of the cabin. He and his bodyguard sat in silence for a few seconds. A light breeze rippled the police tape on the far side of the property. Only one length of the yellow boundary remained undisturbed.
“Cops probably drove over the tape themselves," Harry said. “It sounds like something they would do.”
“Okay, let’s think about this. If someone was here right now, what possible reasons could they have for being here?”
“Uhh, curiosity? Could be holler neighbors who saw the cops and came by to check it out. Could be people who want to retrieve their naughty items without anyone finding out, so they don’t have to come claim them at the station or see their stuff up for sale at an auction. It could be the killer, coming back to wipe away a
ny evidence left behind. That’s what I was hoping to catch with the cameras, at least.”
Harry leaned to open his door when Serena’s hand flew to grab his arm. “Wait. Let me take a look around.”
He didn’t want to wait, but he also didn’t want another lecture from Serena about how he was paying her to do a job, so he should just let her do the damn job.
“Just don’t go in the cabin, okay? I want to keep it as preserved as possible.”
She agreed and then left him to wait. Harry sat in the car, hands on the steering wheel as Serena—pistol in hand—strolled around the far side of the cabin and kept on walking. She would take two or three steps, then turn, her head swiveling up and down and all around. A scowl took root on her face and deepened with every step. She spent quite a while peering into each window of the cabin.
A minute later, she walked back toward the car. Harry couldn’t tell from her reaction if she was happy or disappointed that she hadn’t found anything untoward. She slid inside, silently, as always.
“Looks clear?” Harry said.
Serena winced. “I don’t think it is. I can’t shake the feeling there’s someone here. But I don’t see anyone, so it’s just intuition.”
“Right,” Harry said, grabbing the cameras. “I don’t see anyone, either.”
He left the car and Serena matched his pace, rolling out with him. She stayed a couple feet behind, weapon drawn. As he watched their morning shadows mingle against the dirt driveway, he felt a wave of reassurance pass over him. Nothing like having a stone-cold killer to act as a second pair of eyes. Especially since Harry’s eyes weren’t as accurate as they had been ten or fifteen years ago.
Harry first picked a tree with a front view of the cabin. He used a low-hanging branch to shimmy up to place the camera about ten feet high, nestled in the junction of a few branches. His heart thumped as he worked. As far as Harry knew, he hadn’t climbed a tree since his pre-teen years.