No.
He would spend the next day catching up on some sleep so he could stay sharp. Then he would have to prepare for what awaited him. He would have to practice, refine his skills.
Chapter 31
EAGLE, ALASKA
Monday, July 1st
SERGEANT MEREDITH PLANT put her hand over her bulging belly and felt the baby kick. It was occurring more frequently as the pregnancy entered the third trimester but it still weirded her out. No matter how many baby books she read, how many birthing classes she took, or how many YouTube videos she watched about expectant mothers, it was always strange for her to think that there was a little human growing inside of her.
She and her husband, Marcus, had decided on waiting until the birth to know the baby’s sex. Well, it was more of Marcus’s idea—Plant had actually wanted to know. It seemed logical to know. How would they know which type of clothes to buy? What color to paint the baby’s room? But Marcus insisted; he loved uncertainty—while Plant was the polar opposite. Maybe it came with the job. She spent her days sifting through mounds of evidence, examining, cross-examining—trying to obtain hard facts and proof.
But like most of her days in the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, facts could be scarce, proof even scarcer, and finding cold hard evidence was usually nonexistent, especially when it came to finding missing persons.
The ABI was still a small branch of law enforcement in a state that could physically cover almost a third of the Lower 48 in physical size alone. Plant and her coworkers were overworked and understaffed, their caseloads monstrous. Earlier in the day, she’d received word from her lieutenant that six more missing person reports had been filed in her jurisdiction in the three days she’d been gone.
Six more MPRs that would probably never be closed.
Drifters, thrill seekers, or end of the roaders who slipped between the cracks of society and would never be heard from again.
Plant’s phone vibrated; she reached into her pocket and checked it. It was a text from Marcus, wondering if she would make it home in time for dinner that night.
She sighed and gazed out the window of the VPSO’s office at the dwindling volunteer crowd on the waterfront. They’d started three days ago with almost a hundred boots on the ground. Everyone had been so eager to search for Cassandra Gale and William French. Now, the white food tent sat deserted, the boats moored at the docks, gone.
She would be leaving Eagle in two hours with Trooper Ross. The bush pilot, Rutledge, who had flown Ross in from Tok, said that he could fly Ross to Tok and then Plant back to Fairbanks. Trooper Vance would have done it, but he had prescheduled time off in Anchorage for the next couple days to visit family.
Plant was dreading the meeting that was scheduled to begin in ten minutes. The lab back in Anchorage had come back with inconclusive results on the evidence from the campsites. Cassandra Gale’s .357 pistol had been too contaminated with prints to give a definitive conclusion on who had handled the weapon. They’d pulled Cassie’s prints from it, James Gale’s prints, Ross’s prints as well as Tobeluk’s, all of whom were already documented to have handled the weapon. Interestingly enough, William French’s prints had not been on the gun, but again, that brought more questions than answers. There was a litany of various circumstances that could have led to that gun being in that bag. But no proof.
Cassandra Gale’s coat and the mysterious canister came back inconclusive as well. The blood on the jacket had been animal blood, not human. And the canister was still a mystery. The lab technicians suggested they send it down to their parent lab in Dallas, Texas, for further tests. Plant had given them the green light to do that earlier in the day.
The only piece of evidence that came back conclusive was the condition of the tents in both campsites. The lab determined without a shadow of a doubt that the tents had been ripped by a serrated blade, not by animal claws.
The question was why?
Plant had interviewed close to thirty people in the town and village of Eagle.
She’d interviewed the grocer at the trading post who had sold Cassandra the sandwiches, and anyone who had seen Cassie’s green Tundra enter the town.
Nothing came of it.
Plant herself had spent the better part of a day in each of the campsites and pored over the evidence at night. She’d searched and re-searched Cassandra’s green Tundra a dozen times and pulled no valuable evidence or incriminating fingerprints.
Then there was the security footage pulled from Clinton Creek as well as all the interviews she’d conducted with Ned’s logging crew. She had gone across the border with Condon to interview patrons at the Northern Breeze. All stories corroborated with one another.
Nothing new kicked up.
Everything cleared Ned, Darlene, Curtis, and Jake.
Condon had done his due diligence, and even Sherry Pruitt had done a fantastic job pulling up criminal history of the Northern Breeze crew as well as their border crossing records. Everyone’s criminal histories were squeaky clean. Jake and Curtis hadn’t crossed into Alaska in over a year and Ned and Darlene did so only every so often to camp in the region.
They were clean even though James Gale was convinced of their guilt.
Plant didn’t know what to think of James Gale. He was a whole other story, the reason she was dreading this meeting. She would have to tell him it was all over. That she was leaving, that Ross and Vance were leaving. If he wanted to continue the search, he’d have to do so out of his own pocket.
It broke her heart. It really did.
Even after everything that James Gale had done—his aggressiveness and rash decision-making—Plant really felt for the guy. It was evident how much he loved his daughter and how far he was willing to push the envelope to get her back. Over the course of the last few days, he’d made noise about wanting to get the FBI involved.
She surmised that he would soon head down to Anchorage and try.
Vance’s Cessna buzzed in low over the Yukon River, heading for the airport. It would be another ten minutes before he got here. Soon, the Attlas’ dinghy pulled into the docks followed by the crew from the Northern Breeze.
This whole investigation was winding down, the doors were closing. This case would just be another thrown in the stack of unsolvables along with thousands of others. She wouldn’t tell James Gale that of course. She’d tell him what she told all the grieving family members of the missing. That the case would remain open and worked on by a team in Fairbanks.
It was a half-truth.
The case would remain open, and a team would be assigned to it, but, unless more evidence appeared, the case would remain stagnant.
There was one aspect to all this that still nagged at her and would certainly cause headaches when she returned to Fairbanks. And that was Max Tobeluk, the VPSO.
Max Tobeluk was gone, and like it or not, Plant felt somewhat relieved. She had chewed him out rather harshly a few days before for his drinking and general insubordination. But what had the guy expected? He had a drinking problem and a problem with authority.
When they searched his house after he took his VPSO vehicle and fled, they found the place a sty with most of his personal belongings gone.
Plant registered the VPSO’s vehicle missing, and even had one of her guys try to locate Tobeluk’s location via his cell phone but he must have ditched it.
Oh well, Plant thought. The vehicle would turn up eventually and Tobeluk would probably turn up, too. Most likely in a hovel in some faraway village. He’d be arrested, stripped of his titles, and charged.
But that was the AST’s problem now, not hers.
Her problem was telling James Gale and his family that the ABI could no longer stay in Eagle looking for Cassandra.
Sometimes, more often than not, this was a thankless job.
Ten minutes later when everyone assembled out in the VPSO parking lot, Plant thanked everyone for their help. She apologized that she would have to be leaving and told the Gales what sh
e hoped to accomplish in regard to the case when she returned to Fairbanks.
Surprisingly, the Gale family took the news in stride.
After Plant finished her speech, James Gale walked up and thanked her.
“I’ve decided to go to Anchorage,” Gale said. “I’m going to talk to the FBI.”
This didn’t surprise Plant. Usually after families had exhausted their own resources and the resources of the local authorities in search of their missing, they’d want to reach out to the feds.
Plant blamed it on the movies. The FBI were always the heroes, the men and women you turned to as a last resort.
She didn’t have the heart to tell Gale that it would be a dead end.
“I can make copies of what I have and fax it to their Anchorage office,” Plant said. “When are you thinking of going?”
“Whenever I can get a pilot to fly me down there.”
“Vance said he was heading to Anchorage tonight, didn’t he?” Ned said, overhearing their conversation.
Vance, who had been talking to Ross, perked up at the mention of his name.
“That’s right,” Plant said. “Elliot, would that be all right if you took Mr. Gale with you to Anchorage?”
“Sure, I don’t see why not.”
Gale thanked the trooper, then thanked Plant again for her help and went back to Emily and Peter Trask.
Plant again felt sorry for them. Emily Gale’s face was red and puffy—she looked like a woman at the end of her rope—and that wild-looking husband of hers looked like he could fall asleep standing up. Plant checked her watch and gestured to Ross.
“Almost ready to go, Glenn?”
“Rutledge said we need to leave soon, there’s a bit of a storm getting into Fairbanks tonight that he wants to beat.”
Plant said her personal good-byes to Ned, Darlene, Ned’s men, and the Attlas before following Ross to his truck and heading out of Eagle.
She gazed at the bloated brown water of the Yukon and wondered when she’d be here again, when the next unfortunate soul would go missing in this forgotten place.
* * *
Ned Voigt watched Trooper Ross and Sergeant Plant drive out of Eagle and felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Not a massive weight, though; there was still plenty to worry about.
The most urgent matter was that James Gale was now traveling to Anchorage. Yermakova needed to be contacted about this change of plans immediately.
For the last two days, she’d insisted on updates every two hours of Gale’s whereabouts.
That meant that Ned had to keep the secure tablet on him at all times as he aided in the search. It also meant that he, Darlene, Jake, or Curtis had to be in some sort of close proximity to Gale at all times. That hadn’t been tricky, though; it was as if the Gale patriarch wanted to be around them.
The man obviously still suspected Ned and his crew.
Two aspects of this whole debacle that still irked Ned were that Tobeluk seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth and that Yermakova had notified him that another team was being sent to Eagle.
Another team.
This of course made Ned incredibly nervous, so much so that he and Darlene had nearly fled on their own the night before. When he asked Yermakova to elaborate, she had been sparse in her reply, other than saying Ned’s group would be acting in a supporting role with the new team.
It was Darlene who’d persuaded him to stay and wait it out. She reasoned if things went south, they’d demand to be extracted with this new team and start a new life somewhere else.
Somewhere warm.
But still, Ned wasn’t sharing his wife’s relaxed attitude. He was feeling uneasy about the whole damn situation.
Elliot Vance approached Ned as the Gales walked to the shoreline. Vance kept his voice low. “You okay with me taking him to Anchorage, boss?”
Ned hadn’t told Vance anything about the new interest in Gale.
Ned said quietly, “I’m going to need you to keep your burner phone on you. I want developments every two hours on James Gale’s location; is that going to be possible?”
“I got a family thing in Anchorage.”
“Cancel it. I’ll triple your rate for the time you’re there.”
“What’s the sudden interest in the old man?”
Ned flirted with the idea of telling Vance that a new team was being flown in, but decided against it. It was need to know. And Vance didn’t need to know. “Can you do what I’m asking?”
“Sure, boss.”
“Good. I want to know where he stays, where he eats, where he shits. You get the point?”
Vance said he did and walked to his motel to collect his stuff.
Ned made eye contact with Darlene, then both of them gazed out at James Gale who was walking to the shoreline with Emily and her husband.
Surely, it wasn’t going to end well for this family. Not with all the attention Yermakova was affording them.
Ned needed to get back to the room and update her on the latest developments, then go over their escape plan if things went south.
* * *
“And what should we do, Dad?” Emily said, huddling under the massive arm of her husband.
“Continue the search with Petit and Cronin. I shouldn’t be gone more than a day or two. Make sure Maverick is healing okay.”
“The search is done, Dad. What do you think we’re going to find that we haven’t found already? What’s the point of being here if there is nothing to find? We should come with you to Anchorage.”
“No, I want you here—it’s too much to ask Trooper Vance to take all of us in his plane. Help Petit and Bill—”
“They don’t need my help, Dad,” Emily said, with a tone of finality. She ducked under her husband’s large arm and stormed off back to her room.
Gale looked at his son-in-law. “You watch over her while I’m gone, Pete.”
“I will, Jim,” Peter Trask said, quietly.
Gale sighed as he looked back to the parking lot where Petit, Bill, and his men were gathered. Beyond them were the Attlas and the Northern Breeze crew.
Gale waved over Petit and Cronin. When they got to the shoreline, Gale said, “I want you two to do something for me while I’m gone.”
“Anything,” Petit said.
“I want some eyes on the Northern Breeze for the next few days. Maybe have a couple of your boys that you trust cross the border and hang out. I want to know if anything unusual springs up.”
“Still don’t trust them?”
“Not a chance.”
“You got it, Jim.”
“You think the FBI will be able to do anything?” Bill asked.
“Probably not, but what other choice do I have?”
An hour later, Gale was sitting in the passenger seat of Vance’s Cessna, gazing down at the little township of Eagle, and battling a feeling of failure.
For the first time since Dennis Price called him six days before, Gale began to come to grips with the fact that he might never see Cassie again.
The contents in his back pocket seemed to burn through his jeans. He knew if the FBI was a dead end, he always had the possibility of opening that envelope and calling for help.
If everything failed, he would make that call.
He would make the damn call.
Chapter 32
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
TVERSKOY DISTRICT
BUTYRKA PRISON
GENERAL SOKOLOV LOVED having the light so bright that he could see everything: the fascia, the microfascia, the tendons, the ligaments, every popped artery and vein, every drilled kneecap and elbow. He loved seeing it all, but especially he loved when they could see it.
Sokolov felt more alive than he had in decades. So much so that it had been almost impossible for him to sleep over the last forty-eight hours.
Tonight—to squelch his excitement—he’d had his men drive him to Butyrka Prison in the Tverskoy District in central Moscow.
&nb
sp; Other than Lefortovo, Butyrka was Sokolov’s favorite place to indulge in his favorite pastime: wet work.
While the cellars of Lefortovo offered the sterile, white-tiled rooms that resembled his late babushka’s bathroom, Butyrka was different. It still had that old Soviet quality about it: The plumbing was the same from the twenties, the walls made of plastered concrete, etched with the nail marks of centuries of desperate prisoners. The cells were freezing and smelled like piss and shit. If the walls could talk, they’d speak of Mayakovsky, Dzerzhinsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Bauman. Traitors, betrayers, collaborators, and backstabbers.
How many had died in these cells? In these basements?
It was impossible to know.
Nearly ten years before, it had been General Viktor Sokolov who had advised the president to make an example of the degenerate and dissident lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who dared go against the Russian government. The little twerp had accused the state of kleptocracy, large-scale fraud and theft. Magnitsky lasted 358 days in Butyrka and died from torture and lack of medical care.
A pity. Well, not really.
International backlash did follow, then the Magnitsky Act was passed—punishing the Rodina.
No problem, though; that act would soon be squashed under the Motherland’s might.
Sokolov put the power drill on the long metal table and wiped the gore from his surgical apron. The naked man cuffed to the steel chair in the middle of the concrete room had passed out. Urine ran down his bleeding legs and pooled at his feet.
Sokolov had requested this dissident journalist specifically from the undesirable cells.
To the rest of the world, the unconscious man had already died from a fire in his apartment two months before. A gas leak. A subsequent explosion. The man’s charred body was found in the rubble, two of his back molars discovered untouched. Sokolov’s elite team, the Vympels, had done the dirty work. The charred body had come from a dead refusenik from Lefortovo, the molars pulled from this very journalist during his first hour in Butyrka and planted amid the rubble of his scorched apartment.
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