Three Degrees of Death

by Allen Kent

  Aside from the occasional help with interpreting for the mothers at school, these rare visits to the apartments were the only opportunities I’d had to use the language since returning to town. I didn’t let this one pass.

  “I am most grateful,” I answered, “and would be honored to join you—but not this evening. Some other night, perhaps. I am trying to get someone ready to help with this search for Miriam.”

  “You cannot go?” Lilia asked plaintively.

  I explained about the lawsuit.

  “Who then?” Yusef asked.

  “If I can find a way to afford it, I plan to send Officer Torres. Her brother is the other missing student.”

  “Yusef’s face clouded, but Lilia looked at him hopefully. “She helped when the Sayegh brothers came here after us,” she reminded him. “She was very good. And with her brother missing, she will do all she can to find the children.”

  “They are not children,” Yusef growled. “And why were the two of them off by themselves?”

  “That brings me to the new bit of information I mentioned,” I said hesitantly. “Grace’s family received a text a few hours ago that indicated it was from Danny. It said they were alright, but that they had decided to leave the rest of the group and travel with a couple who wanted to take them down into England.”

  The Haddads stared at each other in disbelief, then Lilia burst into tears. Yusef’s face was turning scarlet.

  “Miriam would not go of her own choosing,” he bellowed. “The boy has taken her against her will.”

  “Have you received anything from her? A call or text?”

  “Not in two days,” her mother sniffled, “and she has not answered our messages to her.”

  I leaned toward them, dreading what I had to say and choosing to do it in English. “We have some reason to believe the boy didn’t send the text. We’ve called the Scottish police to see if they can trace where the message came from.”

  “Oh,” Lilia sobbed, fully understanding what I had said. “What has happened to my daughter?”

  Yusef wrapped an arm about her shoulders. “If not the boy, who would have sent the message?” he demanded.

  “Do you know of any new efforts by the Sayegh family or others to try to get to you again?”

  Lilia stopped her sniffling and looked at her husband with red, worried eyes. “Have you heard anything, Yusef? Anything you have not told me?”

  He shook his head dismissively. “They think I am dead. How would they know I survived their last attack? And why would they go after Miriam instead of coming here again after me?”

  “Because they know how dear she is to you,” Lilia murmured. “And that many people are protecting you here.”

  Yusef glowered at his wife. “If they know anything, it is because of what you say to your family there. And now our daughter is missing.”

  Lilia reddened and lowered her eyes.

  “Yusef, we really don’t know that,” I told them, hoping to ease a little of the woman’s pain. “I called Agent Rosario and he isn’t aware of anyone leaving Idlib that might be after Miriam. He promised to do all he can to help. I just wanted to see if you knew of any threats.”

  Yusef grunted and shook his head. “I know of nothing. When would your deputy go?”

  “If I can scrape the funds together, we will send her tomorrow if we can get flights.”

  Yusef’s jaw tightened, but he said what I had come to hear. “I will pay. We have saved the rent money from the apartment upstairs. Make the reservation for her. I will pay you back.” Lilia closed her eyes and mouthed a silent, grateful prayer.

  “It may be expensive on such short notice,” I warned.

  “That cannot be helped. We need someone there as quickly as possible who can find my daughter. Are these Scottish police any good?”

  “I believe they are,” I assured him. “And Grace is better trained than I am to help. Thank you for being so generous. We have no budget for that kind of travel.”

  “Our family understands that this is not your department’s problem to solve,” Yusef agreed. “So we are most grateful to you for offering what help you can. We wish you well with your lawsuit. We have not been here long, but we know about the Greaves men. People here do not trust them.”

  “I hope the court doesn’t either,” I said as my phone buzzed. The text was from Marti and I passed along the message. “We found a reservation for tomorrow. It will get Grace to Scotland the morning of the next day.”

  Lilia unclasped a silver chain from her neck that displayed an ornate Syrian Orthodox crucifix. “Please,” she said, handing it to me. “Send this with her. And tell her she goes with our blessing.”

  9

  We spent the drive to the Springfield airport talking through every step Grace might take from the time I left her at security until she met Erin Graham in Inverness. Marti had booked Grace into Edinburgh and printed off train schedules for the three-and-a-half-hour trip from the Scottish capital to the city in the eastern highlands.

  “So, why am I going to Amsterdam?” she wondered, scanning Marti’s printed itinerary.

  “All the flights had two stops. This was the shortest time. You don’t leave the secure area in Amsterdam. Just check the big board listing flight departures when you get off the plane and find the Edinburgh gate. They may run you through baggage check again, and you will have to show your passport. But you will have all the boarding passes you need.”

  She grinned at me nervously. “Can I say I’ve been to Amsterdam if I don’t get out of the airport?”

  “Depends on who you ask. Some travel purists would say no. As far as I’m concerned, sure.”

  “What do I do about money? Will they take dollars?”

  “When you get into the main terminal in Edinburgh, you’ll see ATM machines. They work just like they do here but will give you money in British pounds. Take a taxi to the train station, buy your ticket, then find the platform and boarding time for Inverness on the big board. Erin will meet you when you get off.”

  “I have so many questions” she murmured anxiously. “Do I tip the taxi driver? Can I reserve a seat on the train? Will the people’s English be like what I hear on Doc Martin? I can’t understand half of what they say.”

  It had been years since I’d been to England—a month-long break from interpreting duties in Bahrain when Adeena and I had gone to the part of England called the Cotswolds on what we jokingly called our “pre-wedding honeymoon.” We had traveled the country using BritRail and stayed in B&Bs, using the time to plan a future that her death in a Baghdad hotel bombing hadn’t allowed. The memory was more painful than I expected, and I had to turn away for a few seconds to let the emotion pass. Grace had learned to recognize the moments.

  “Oh,” she murmured sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

  I forced a reassuring “You’re going to be fine on this trip” smile back into place before I turned.

  “Yes. You should tip just like you do here, though Americans usually tip more than Europeans. None of the people who help you will object.”

  She gave me an understanding grin.

  “Reserved train seats? I think you can when you book the ticket. And I don’t think you’ll have any difficulty understanding people. But while I’m thinking about it, be careful not to accept help from someone who comes up to you and offers it. If you need directions or information, find a uniformed airport or railroad worker. They’re used to questions from visitors and can tell you what you need to know.”

  She fingered through the sheaf of pages Marti had printed for her. “You’re making me nervous again,” she muttered. “Two of our kids are missing, and you’re telling me to watch out for strangers.”

  I reached over and squeezed her arm. “It’s one of the safest places you could travel,” I assured her. “Much safer than big cities in this country. You’ll do fine.”

  There was little business at the check-in counters, so we skipped self-check-in and had an agent
tag her bags and print boarding passes. She had stuffed the items she wanted to keep with her into a small backpack that she hugged tightly against her chest.

  “Do you have any liquids with you? Your toiletries in a plastic bag? When you go through security, get those out and put them in a bin with your shoes.” I knew I sounded like the TSA officers who I often found so irritating.

  “I got it,” she said with her own note of irritation. “I’m on this.”

  “Okay, then—you’d better get through security.” I did what I had wished to do every day since we had started working together but had avoided because she was my chief deputy. I pulled her into a tight hug. “Call me when you get there and at least once a day to let us know what’s going on. I’ve given Rosario your number. I’m gonna miss you,” I whispered and found my eyes getting misty.

  She let me hold her longer than I expected, then eased away. When she looked up, she was blinking hard. “Thanks for everything, Tate,” she said softly and stretched up to give me a quick kiss. Then she turned and walked quickly toward the security line, adjusting her boarding pass and passport for the desk agent. I waited, but she didn’t turn back.

  Mara Joseph’s office is in the Troop D State Police Headquarters on Kearney Street. While I was in Springfield, I figured I might as well stop in and see what she and the patrol were planning to do about this lawsuit. But while I took I-44 across to Highway 65 going south, all I could think about was that kiss. It was more of a hurried brush of the lips than a real kiss. But she could have chosen a handshake or a quick peck on the cheek, and she hadn’t. It had followed a hug that was the closest the two of us had ever allowed. Was this her way, when she knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other for a week or more, of saying, “When I get back, I’d like this to be a different kind of relationship?” Which was ironic, since I had decided before leaving town to go see the one person who complicated it.

  During my first year on the job when Nettie Suskey was found dead in her trailer down in Blackjack Holler, I asked the state patrol for some investigative help. Their answer was Mara Joseph, a petite firecracker of a woman with short brown hair, a pretty face, and a suburban St. Louis attitude about most things rural. While working together, I had managed to convince her that we weren’t all a bunch of redneck hayseeds and, in the process, become pretty fond of her.

  We’d ended up spending a night together at my place, a night I had thought was pretty spectacular and a big step toward getting over the crippling pain of losing Adeena. Mara had worried that it looked too much like the beginning of a relationship between a country sheriff and a woman who could never give up being a short MetroLink ride from the Italian restaurants in the St. Louis district called The Hill. She had been jilted once by a lover who decided there was someone else in his life who interested him more. In my life, she saw that possible someone as being Grace Torres It was that concern, in fact, that first got me thinking seriously about how I truly felt about my chief deputy.

  I had tried to keep the thing with Joseph alive, and she had dropped occasional hints that there might still be some live embers in the fire. But her transfer request to St. Louis still sat on her commander’s desk, waiting for a spot to open back in the city. It was the Grace-Mara dilemma that had taken me up onto Webber’s Mountain for a reading—the one at which the sisters had cryptically assured me it would work itself out.

  I found Joseph poring over a copy of the notification of filing of the lawsuit. She looked up and smiled grimly as I pushed into her office.

  “Well, if it isn’t the accessory to the crime,” she muttered. “I didn’t believe I could think less of the Greaves, but I was wrong. I can’t say I’m sorry that LJ is dead. But I sure as hell wasn’t expecting this.”

  “I’m not sure why this should surprise you. As my friend Darnell said about them,” I reminded her, “the men didn’t have a spit of goodness between the two of them.”

  Joseph nodded her head toward a chair in front of her desk and glared across at me. “I’m surprised some attorney would take the case. LJ turned that shotgun on me. The patrol cleared me. What kind of complaint do they think they have?”

  I slid into the chair. “Do you have a lawyer yet? Has the patrol got counsel?”

  She shrugged uncertainly. “They have someone coming in from Jeff City. It’s a woman from the attorney general’s office. I haven’t talked to her yet. How about you?”

  “I’m using Able Pendergraft. He represents the county and agreed to take me on. He thinks Verl might have a case.”

  Joseph straightened in her chair, tilting her chin upward. “How? They both had weapons out and pointed at you. LJ turned on me. This was clearly self-defense.”

  “They’re claiming they shouldn’t have had to be armed—that we unlawfully deprived LJ of his right to life and violated their Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” she murmured. “Verl said you could come down—after shooting at us on the drive. Is he going to lie about that?”

  “He’ll say they told me to leave and I didn’t. And that’s basically true.”

  “We didn’t have time,” she argued. “I’d just come around the corner of that barn of theirs when he turned on me.”

  “That’s what we’ll have to explain. I imagine our attorneys will get together and talk it through with us. Able thinks they’re fishing for a settlement anyway, and we probably won’t go to trial.”

  “Okay for you,” she sniffed. “But it’s going to cost the state a bundle one way or the other and leave a mark on my record.” She hunched back into the chair. “Did you come up just to talk about this? Why didn’t you call? You’re lucky to catch me here.”

  “Naw. I brought Grace up to the airport and thought I’d stop by while I was here.”

  “Grace? Airport? I don’t think of the two as going together. Isn’t she the girl who’s never even been to Saint Louis?”

  I explained about the two missing kids and the insistence from the families that we have someone there. “I wish I could go look for them, but this lawsuit pretty well keeps me at home,” I added.

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Joseph said soberly. “I remember the Haddad girl as being pretty smart and capable. Do you think this is part of that family vendetta?”

  “It crossed my mind. Do you remember Agent Rosario at the Bureau?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I called him and he’s checking that possibility from his end. But I don’t know why someone coming after the Haddads would take the boy. He’s as smart as Miriam and much more assertive. He would add a lot of extra grief to anyone trying to abduct them both. Grace’s mother got a text from his phone after they disappeared, but it sounded fishy. With both of them gone for two days, it doesn’t look good.”

  “So Grace has gone to assist,” Joseph said with a trace of amusement. “Do you remember our conversation about experience?”

  I knew exactly what she was talking about. During one of our moments of candor when Joseph had confessed that it worried her to see Grace hovering in the background of our fledgling relationship, I’d told Mara there were a number of things that attracted me to her that Grace simply didn’t have. Among them was some appreciation for the rest of the world, experience I’d gained during my own time away from Crayton and knew I wanted in a serious partner.

  “Yes, I remember the conversation,” I confessed.

  “And what did I say?”

  “You reminded me that appreciating other places and things comes with exposure. Grace might appreciate them as much as you do if she gained more experience with them.”

  “Hmm,” Mara murmured. “I think that’s almost exactly what I said. You must have thought about it since.” She paused, watching my face carefully, then added, “She’s a pretty brave girl to be hopping on a plane to Scotland by herself when she’s never been more than a couple of hundred miles from home.”

  I tried to remain expressionless. “S
he didn’t want to go. Was nervous as hell.”

  Joseph nodded. “I can imagine. I hope she can help find the kids. But I think you know she won’t be coming back the same person.”

  10

  Dreams are crazy things. Some experts believe that what seems like it takes an hour in dreamland actually fills an hour of sleep. Others claim that your brain applies a sense of time to situations that happen almost instantaneously in your subconscious, making them feel like they extend over hours. The blast that jarred me awake at 2:00 a.m. supported the ‘instantaneous’ hypothesis.

  In the dream, I was hunched with six other Marines in an LA25 rumbling down a dusty, rutted road in Iraq’s Anbar Province. Our intel was that Al Qaeda had infiltrated a village that we thought was friendly. My job was to get permission from the local headman to search door-to-door. The guy beside me was in the middle of asking if the road had been swept for IEDs when—BOOM—the reverberation from a violent explosion shook me awake in a cold sweat, curled into a fetal clench with eyes still trapped tightly shut.

  My first thought after realizing I wasn’t pinned in an upended armored troop carrier was that someone had blown up the dam again, a repeat sabotage of the city water project that had first pulled me into an investigation involving the Haddad family. But I could tell this was coming from town—five miles away in the other direction. One hell of a blast!

  I rolled into a sitting position, let the last chill from the nightmare shiver out through my tailbone, and reached for my jeans. It was pitch dark beyond the bedroom window. Not a sliver of moon. I shook myself again, forcing my brain to come to grips with a day that was starting four hours before it expected to be called into action.

  If things followed the normal pattern, within ten minutes I’d get a call from Rocky D’Amico telling me what had happened and where I needed to be. Our two night patrol guys spend almost all of their time in their cruisers and might be anywhere. Rocky lives in town, keeps a police scanner by his bed, and knows within minutes if anything is stirring after hours in Crayton. His wife jokes that he can sleep through a thunderstorm without his snoring missing a beat. But if the scanner goes off, he’s wide awake.