Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  “I’ve seen them. There’s something a little off about them, I think. They always seem to be looking out their windows. Sophia says they’re paranoid because the neighborhood women keep ringing their bell and throwing rocks at their windows. To be honest, if I lived in that neighborhood, I’d be a little paranoid too.”

  “Or it’s another family with deep-seated psychological problems. I wouldn’t drink the water in that neighborhood. Just sayin’, man.” Nutsbe raised his eyebrows for emphasis. “I ran them through the system because Lynx popped in to tell us about your adventure at the gun shop. She suggested I give the Sheppards a quick look-see.”

  “I’m mostly interested in last night’s cellphone conversation with the mystery contact.”

  “Yeah, you’re going to want to hear this.” Nutsbe pulled up a file.

  “777RFT6Y6.” Sophia’s voice warbled. “This has got to stop. I can’t handle anymore.”

  “We’re almost to the finish line. You can’t stop now. Everything you’ve been working for is right within reach.”

  “I’m serious. I can’t.”

  “Before you say any more, you should know that Aml Al Ahr has been captured.”

  There was a long pause with the sound of tap water running in the background.

  “Is he dead?” Sophia whispered.

  “I hope so, for his sake,” came the woman’s reply.

  “Red, please hear me, I don’t want to be involved anymore.”

  “You’re being weak. And this is not a time for weakness. We are too close to the finish line. I need to know. Did you talk to Nadia about the tablet?”

  “No, the information came to my attention by mistake. I thought the obvious, that they’d realized the truth. I informed you, and that’s the scope of my interaction. There would be no reason to talk to Nadia about it.”

  “We’ve picked up on some chatter that makes us concerned about the transaction. You have a security group, Iniquus, working with you. Did you mention this to them?”

  “How do you know about Iniquus? Of course I didn’t mention it to them or anyone else. Only you. Iniquus was assigned as protection for Peru. They have no interest in anything other than securing the site at the boiling waters and protecting Nadia and me on our travels.”

  “That’s what I needed to know.”

  The line went dead.

  Thorn had joined them while the brief recording played. “Nutsbe and I did some digging last night. Aml Al Ahr was an academic who worked with a different consortium along the same lines as AACP. They work to save artifacts in Middle Eastern war zones. He was traveling to a planning meeting in Turkey when he was captured. He’s been gone for about forty-eight hours. How did Sophia act after that phone call?”

  “Like she’d taken a blow to the ribs. She was a mess yesterday.”

  “She’s not great this morning either. She’s been crying almost since she woke up.” Nutsbe checked his watch. “About an hour and a half ago.” He dragged the small window he had up into the center of the monitor and expanded it.

  Sophia sat on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, with a box of tissues in her lap, sniffing and wiping her nose.

  Thorn shook his head at the visual. His voice was defeated when he said, “So our takeaway is that Sophia kept the information from Nadia as she was told to do.”

  “Nadia didn’t bite at her hook?” Brian asked.

  “Not as far as we can tell. We haven’t picked up on anything that looks like Nadia’s trying to broker a deal, or that she paid any attention to the information after it was sent out. Her only calls went out to her mom, her sister, some friends. She doesn’t go much of anywhere. She looks clean as a whistle.”

  “Sophia was talking to a woman named Red, that’s a new piece.” Thorn folded his hands behind his head. “Whatever is in play is about to be over with. Luckily, it’s the FBI who has to connect the dots. Solving the puzzle isn’t part of our contract, just gathering the surveillance. Good damned thing too. I want as little to do with that takedown as possible.”

  “I hear you, brother,” Nutsbe said. “If that tablet makes its way to the US, and the FBI tracks it to its new home, there’s definitely a case to be made that puts Sophia in the driver’s seat.”

  They all sat quietly for a long moment.

  “Good, then we all agree that sometimes our job fucking sucks.” Nutsbe scratched his thumb between his brows and looked over at Brian. “Talking about things that suck, yesterday, after you and Lynx took off after Sophia, I went to find that stalker-chick, Marla. She was grocery shopping and walked away from her purse for a moment. I took her wallet out to my car, photographed it, and put the wallet back, all without her being any wiser. Surprising that someone so trusting could be such a shit.”

  “Sociopaths hit high on the narcissism scale,” Thorn said. “I’m assuming she thinks she’s so in control that no one would dare do anything to her. Her guard is always down.”

  “Good that you have that info now.” Brian lifted his chin toward Nutsbe. “The magistrate was asking for defining information, social security number, date of birth, and all we had was a physical description, name, and address.”

  “You didn’t have her name. Her ID doesn’t say Marla Richards. She’s Mary Johnson from Texas. I checked her driver’s license, and it was issued a year ago, before she moved to Virginia. I sent everything, including her wallet photos, to the research techs to see what they could come up with. My services included ingratiating myself to the research hounds by bringing pastries from La Bouche. They said they’d put me at the head of the queue.”

  “Above and beyond, thanks.” Brian gave Nutsbe a fist bump. “What time are Andersson and Finley getting here?”

  “Noon. It’s hard to ask them to get up too early on a Sunday morning. Most folks call this a day of rest, you know.”

  Thorn gave a one-sided smile. “Rest is for wimps.”

  “Sophia’s on the move.” Nutsbe flipped the camera and watched her gather her purse and keys and head out the door. He panned out. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Thorn and Brian both looked at Sophia standing on her driveway. Even from the side view they could see she had a perplexed look on her face.

  “Check the van. Is there something wrong with the van?” Thorn asked.

  “I had the alarm set to high last night, nothing passed the infrared line.”

  “She’s in her car now, let’s see where she’s headed. Five bucks says it’s chai.” Nutsbe pulled up a spilt screen that put the van on a GPS map. Out of the neighborhood. A U-turn. Back into the neighborhood, back into her driveway. Now she was jumping out of her van, slamming the door shut, her face red with anger. She had her phone in her hand.

  “Who’s she calling?” Brian asked.

  “That’s the non-emergency police number,” Nutsbe replied, tapping his computer to turn up the volume.

  “What is the nature of your call?”

  “My name is Sophia Abadi. I recently had a restraining order taken out against my neighbor. This morning I woke up and my garden is missing. My flowers are all gone. I was driving out of my neighborhood, and I saw that all my flowers are now planted over at Marla Richards’s house. She obviously has to have broken the restraining order for her to have been on my property destroying my garden.”

  “I’ll send a police officer to your address to take a statement. Please stay at your home and wait until they get there. Do not confront the neighbor on your own. We’ll handle this.”

  “What the heck?” Thorn swatted Nutsbe’s arm.

  Nutsbe moved to a different camera to bring more of the property into view. “I’ve got no visual.”

  Brian thought about the beautiful garden of perennials that Sophia said had been planted to keep her mother-in-law calm after her son’s brain injury. He imagined vast stretches of dirt and holes that looked like a prairie dog colony lived there. “Have we got anything on camera to take to the police?”

  Nutsbe began s
crolling through what he had. “I didn’t get any flags…”

  “The flowers were there when I left last night. They aren’t there now. Unless a ghost reached down and yanked them up by the roots, something went wrong with the perimeter,” Brian said.

  Nutsbe finished his task. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “Okay, here’s part of the problem. Stop on that image.” Brian put his finger on a bush at the top of Joe’s property. “That’s where I have a sensor, the other one is way back here. There was nowhere to put it until this tree. That angle protects the driveway and sidewalk, but cuts off the whole garden. Someone in this area, here,” Brian pointed to the spot, “wouldn’t have been picked up.”

  Nutsbe turned toward Brian. “But you installed night vision cameras. They would have recorded the heat signature of someone or something in the garden.”

  “Something?” Brian asked.

  “Not as in ghost activity, as in animal,” Nutsbe clarified.

  “Not here in the front,” Brian countered. “Her property dips down a hill. In order to get the cameras to read what was next to the house, I had to angle them in such a way that the top third of her property was cut off. Getting a camera into range, I’d have to set it on her chimney. There were always too many eyes to make that a smart move.”

  “And the lights were angled up after her disco show pissed the neighbors off,” Nutsbe said. “If they figured that out through trial and error, they’d know they were safe as long as they were crawling on all fours.”

  “Well we know where the flowers went. So maybe Marla-Mary-what’s-her-name will be headed for jail.” Thorn didn’t sound very hopeful.

  “You know that’s not going to happen.” Nutsbe clicked back on the screen, and they could see an officer standing in the driveway next to Sophia, listening to her tale.

  She held out the paperwork the magistrate had given her the day before. He looked it over and handed it back.

  Thorn sat forward. “I wish we could hear what they’re saying,”

  “Yeah, check out the look on the guy’s face. What’s he going to do? It’s not like the flowers have serial numbers on them. Sophia can’t prove they’re hers.”

  “He can go over and ask Marla some questions, scare her a bit. See if he can’t trick her into admitting something. He’s telling Sophia to go inside. He’s probably afraid she’ll go storming over to confront Marla, and he’ll have to dive into a cat fight.” Nutsbe shook his head. “I’d rather fight a man any day. Women? Woof, once you’ve got them riled enough to fight, they’re all kinds of vicious. They don’t have boundaries, anything they can grab, claw, or bite is fair game. I can’t blame the guy for wanting to avoid that. It’s just too early in the day.”

  Nutsbe switched the camera back to the interior of the house and turned up the audio. The doorbell rang. Sophia opened it to a woman in a swimsuit and a pair of shorts.

  “Who’s that?”

  Thorn and Brian shook their heads.

  “Sophia, why is that police officer here? He’s walking over to Marla’s.”

  “Marla’s a nut case,” Sophia answered. She stood holding the door mostly shut. She hadn’t invited the woman into her house.

  “It wasn’t enough that the sheriff crashed my party last night and put everyone in a bad mood? Now you have to ruin her pool party too?”

  “Is that where you’re going?”

  “Not until I know what the police are there for. My whole family’s dressed and ready to head over. What did you do now?”

  “Did you notice my yard?”

  The woman turned and then looked back at Sophia. “You’re blaming her for that?”

  “Well someone moved my flowers from my yard to hers. It wasn’t the Easter Bunny.”

  Nutsbe smacked Thorn with the back of his hand and grinned. “Feisty.”

  “You do know, don’t you, that her husband is having his office over for brunch by the pool? His boss. His boss’s boss. That officer just went over there in front of everyone. Marla isn’t going to take that well. I guess we’ll hang out and wait for things to calm down before we go over. Girl, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes right now.”

  The woman moved out of the camera’s view, and Sophia slammed the door shut.

  “She’s right,” Brian said. “I’m going to head over to Sophia’s.”

  “You’d better cook up a good excuse for showing up this morning. Last night’s recording sounded crystal clear, bro. She doesn’t want you there,” Thorn said.

  “Yeah? Well, if she was just some woman I knew, I’d respect that. But my job is to protect her. My excuse is that I’m taking over some automatic locks with keypads.” He turned to Thorn. “Lana was over at Sophia’s house while we were getting the restraining order, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah.” Nutsbe shook his head. “She forgot to lock the door again. Wasn’t ten minutes later that Rochester went in and tried to make himself a sandwich. Too bad Sophia doesn’t believe in keeping non-dehydrated food in the house. That was entertaining to watch though. That man cusses like a Marine.”

  Thorn pointed at Brian. “While you’re there, go talk to Joe Rochester about getting a tracker on his dad so he gets pinged when Pops steps out of the house. Lucky for everyone, this guy doesn’t wander far.”

  “Not lucky for Sophia.” Brian stood, and pulled his keys from his pocket. “All right, I’m heading out.”

  “I’ll keep a close eye while you drive and buzz you if you need to stomp on the gas,” Nutsbe said. “And hey, while you’re over there, try to find out what time her buddy Jael’s coming in tomorrow and if she plans to meet his plane.”

  27

  Brian

  Sunday a.m.

  Brian drove slowly into the neighborhood. A steaming cup of coffee and a cup of chai were snugged in the beverage carrier on his passenger seat next to a bag with some breakfast sandwiches. Sophia needed protein to help her body deal with all the stress. He hoped like hell that she wouldn’t have another seizure. Nutsbe said he’d call if Brian needed to intervene quickly. So far so good.

  He pulled up in front of what had once been a beautiful garden, like a treasure chest brimming with jewels that had adorned the top of the hill. He hadn’t thought much about it until that moment. Gardens didn’t happen for free. Even if these were perennials, they took tending to look nice. In the great big mess of Sophia’s life, she took the time to make it look beautiful. He wondered what the impetus was. Was she keeping nervous hands busy while her boys played out front? Did she think of it as a tribute to her deceased husband and his parents? For whatever reason, she had been meticulous. Now, it looked like a roadside bomb had gone off in her yard. He felt the atmospheric change. This was a war zone now.

  Brian scanned down the road. It seemed like the guests at Marla’s poolside brunch had cleared out when the police did. There wasn’t an extra car in sight. There was no happy laughter floating in the warm air, no squeals from kids splashing in the water. The neighborhood was eerily silent. Without shifting his head, Brian let his peripheral vision scope out the windows on the Sheppards’s house. Sure enough, someone was at the upstairs window, tracking him. He bet it was weird for Sophia to know she was under the Sheppard microscope, always being watched. But what did he know? Maybe it was reassuring to her.

  With any luck, Brian could get Joe Rochester to get his dad under control, get the locks changed out so Lana couldn’t keep leaving the door unlocked, and get Marla arrested for ignoring the restraining order. But Brian couldn’t forget that tomorrow was Monday. Anything he did to scrape those monkeys off Sophia’s back today would be meaningless if that tablet came into the US and the FBI walked their intended path.

  This case was FUBAR from the minute he took the assignment.

  His phone buzzed, and he dragged it from his thigh pocket. “Brainiack here.”

  “You aren’t gonna believe this shit.” Nutsbe was laughing. “This is like a damned rollercoaster ride from hell, dude.”
/>   Brian rubbed a hand over his tightly cropped hair to stop his scalp from prickling.

  “Research earned their pastries this morning. They found Marla-Mary-what’s-her-face through a picture of her kids. I kept a gift card from The Morning Grind when I was scanning her wallet, and the techs ran fingerprints. Boom. They’ve got a match.”

  “Tell me there’s an arrest warrant out for her.”

  “Better. We’ve got both kids listed with the FBI as kidnapped by their mother. Are you ready for this? Betty Greer, from Pennsylvania. The dad was given full custody of the children, and Mom was remanded to the state mental hospital for evaluation. The children are listed in grave danger. And guess what Betty’s maiden name is?”

  “Are you freaking kidding me right now? It can’t be.”

  “Yup. Betty Ann Campbell—hubby’s half-sister who’s suing for a stake in the Campbell inheritance. Hang on. Andersson and Finley are walking into the war room. I’m putting you on speakerphone.”

  Brian leaned against the back of his Range Rover, thinking this would be an appropriate time for cigarette, though he didn’t smoke. He popped the hatch so he could look busy while he listened in to the information Nutsbe had on the kidnapped children, who had disappeared the year before. It included photo recognition of the mother and both children and fingerprints from mom and the daughter, Raina.

  “Brian, what are the kids’ names?”

  “I can ask Sophia.”

  “Hold off. They’re contacting Aiden O’Connor in missing persons for the next step. We don’t want to get anyone’s antennae up.”

  Brian could hear several conversations going at once.

  “Are you there in the neighborhood?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “The Richards’s still having their party?”

  “Negative. I think the police showing up and the ensuing screamfest was probably a buzzkill. No one’s outside but me. The Sheppards’s are doing their surveillance duty, other than that, things are quiet.”