Authors: Chuck Dixon
“We surmised it was Señor Blanco. They brought him here and he opened the safe for them,” Salas said.
“Almost a million in Yankee dollars here. About the same in Euros. And God knows how much in bonds and jewelry. I’d say they didn’t find what they were looking for.”
“Why not take what is lying here for the taking? Most of it is untraceable, no?”
“Because whatever they were looking for makes even what’s on the floor here look like chump change,” Bill said and flipped open a passport with the pen tip. Mrs. Blanco was young and pretty. Pretty enough to take a good passport photo.
“
Que
? Chump change?” Sala said, peering over Bill’s shoulder at the open passport.
“
Poco poco
.”
“I see. Chump change.”
“Blanco opened the safe for them. What they wanted wasn’t here. So they tortured his kids to make him talk. He had a heart attack and spoiled their plans. Stress, probably.”
“But he let these men torture his children for a very long time,” Sala said, recalling the autopsy report.
“Maybe that’s the kind of hard man Blanco was. Or maybe seeing what they were doing tripped his heart off. Maybe they kept on going hoping the wife knew what they were looking for. I’m betting she didn’t. They left here empty handed.”
“Jesus Maria. What were they looking for?” Sala sighed.
Bill Marquez stood and replaced his pen in his jacket pocket.
“Corey Ray Blanco got away with over seven hundred million dollars from investor fraud and outright theft. Subtracting this house and whatever he spent on his wife and kids the past decade still leaves a shitload of cash somewhere. These men were after that. The whole enchilada.”
“
Que
?”
“An enchilada is like a burrito, I guess.”
Sala laughed at that.
“Yeah. Right. ‘The
whole
enchilada’ means everything. They want it all.”
“And your FBI will send more agents to try and find the men who did this thing? These men will be far away from Costa Rica by now. I do not have the means to pursue this any further.”
“I’m going to tell you the truth, Captain,” Bill said. “My bureau could give a shit about the men who killed this family. But my government has more than a few agencies who’d like to find Blanco’s money. All I have to do is convince them it’s worth looking for.”
“And you? What do
you
wish to find?” Sala said, studying Bill’s eyes.
“I want the animals who could do something like this. And I want them soon. Because I don’t think this is the end of all this. I think it’s just the start.” Bill excused himself to make satellite phone calls to a few numbers back in the States.
4
“I wish you’d make yourself comfortable,” the thin-faced, bearded man said to him.
“I am comfortable, Doctor,” Levon said.
“You can call me by my name. Justin.” Dr. Justin Ayres smiled where he sat lounging back in the swivel chair he’d pulled from behind his office desk in order to sit closer to Levon.
Levon scanned the room. An office with a few too many personal touches to be entirely professional. Bookshelves packed with text books and file folders in standing plastic cases. There was a Superman action figure next to a framed photo of Dr. Ayres kayaking through white water. A potted plant by the window, fronds stretched to reach through the slats of the partly open blinds. The desk, an antique or heirloom, was stacked with file folders held together with rubber bands. An open laptop occasionally made muted cartoon noises.
They sat that way for a while. Not talking. Levon unmoving yet kinetic. Dr. Ayres smiling easily over templed fingers, eyes on Levon’s face.
“You mentioned post-traumatic stress,” Dr. Ayres said after a while, giving up, for now, on having his new patient call him by his first name.
“I’m not sleeping. I have dreams,” Levon said.
“Nightmares?”
“Memories.”
Dr. Ayres nodded.
“It’s not me so much that I worry about. It’s my little girl. I’m, I guess you’d say, a single father? She worries about me.”
“So, these dreams don’t cause terrors? Sudden waking?”
“No, Doctor. Nothing like that.”
“You’ve tried medications?”
“Xanax. Zoloft. Ambien. A few others. They make me feel like I have a blanket over my head. There has to be another way.”
“You don’t like the side effects of the drugs?”
“I’m trying to be good father. That won’t happen if I’m gooned up on sedatives all the time. Only, the insomnia and memories don’t help either. I feel like I’m pulling away from her. You understand?”
“Yes. I think I do. Have you thought of keeping a journal?”
“Like a diary?” Levon said, looking into the doctor’s eyes.
“Diaries are for teenage girls. I mean a record of your thoughts. Maybe if you put these memories of yours on paper, organized them from random thoughts into a narrative. It might help you make more sense of them. Put them into context and, hopefully, put them into the past. What branch of the service were you in?”
“Is that important, Doctor?”
“No, not so much.”
“You think writing down my thoughts would help. It might work. And, to be honest, I’m all the way up in Hermon. I can’t be driving down here to Millinocket every week. It’s a two-hour trip. If a journal would help me work things out then I could just see you now and then.”
“Certainly. But we still have twenty minutes to this session so if you wanted—”
Levon rose from the edge of the chair and reached back for his wallet.
“The girl out front handles payments.” Dr. Ayres jumped from his seat with a hand up.
Levon took him by the wrist and pressed a wad of cash into his hand.
“No thanks, Doctor. We’ll handle this between ourselves,” Levon said and showed himself out.
Dr. Ayres reseated himself and piloted his chair back behind his desk where he unfolded the cash. It was four times his usual hourly rate for therapy.
“Cathy!” he called.
Cathy, with a quizzical expression, appeared in his doorway .
“Can you get me the contact details for Joshua Randall?” he said, sweeping the cash into his middle desk drawer.
“Who?” she said, tilting her head.
“My last patient. The man who just left here,” Dr. Ayres said, losing patience with his idiot sister-in-law whom his wife made him hire.
“Was that his name? He handed the contact forms back without filling them in,” she said and turned to go back to the solitaire game she was playing at the reception desk.
5
“Smells like snow,” Merry said from where she was buckled in on the passenger side.
“Since when can an Alabama girl smell snow?” Levon said at the wheel.
“I’m a Maine girl now. A Maniac,” she said and smiled.
“Not with that accent.”
“What accent?”
“That biscuits and gravy drawl of yours, little honey child,” he said, laying more syrup on his voice for effect.
“You sound like a Squidbilly!” she said laughing.
He had no idea what that was.
“You find everything on your list?” he said.
“Sure did. Everything go okay at the dentist? I forgot to ask,” she said.
“No cavities,” he lied. No need to tell her he saw a therapist. He’d left her for the hour at a place that served breakfast all day. Her favorite meal. She deserved a little spoiling, and waffles and berries with cream was what she wanted. She’d been working on a placemat puzzle when he got back. It was slow in the afternoon with the leaf peepers long gone and winter closing in. A waitress sat in the booth working the puzzle with her. Levon left an eye-popping tip before father and daughter departed to do some shopping.
They’d driven down 95 to Bangor, the first time they’d seen anything like a real city since moving up to Lake Bellevue. Levon lied to the doctor about living in Hermon just as he’d lied about almost every other detail of his life other than having a daughter and living with a mind filled with ugly memories.
Outside Bangor they explored a big box outdoor mall and loaded up the Ram with groceries and necessaries for the long winter ahead. They bought case lots of canned goods and frozen vegetables and fruit. Cases of juice and powdered milk. As many cartons of eggs as they thought would keep. Splurged on some frozen pizzas and ice cream tubs. Big family packs of chicken, beef, fish and a Virginia cured ham for Christmas day. Bags of fresh potatoes, carrots and onions. All paid for in cash. It would stay cold in the back of the Ram with the thermometer at thirty and heading down.
They agreed to separate for thirty minutes to buy surprises for each other for Christmas. They met in front of an office supply store the size of a hangar for a jumbo jet. Merry had a bag under her arm from Barnes & Noble. Levon had already slipped back to the truck to hide his package. The telltale shape would give away the surprise. He’d also made a quick trip into the office supply store to pick up a Moleskine journal and bag of pens.
They stopped at a Wendy’s for dinner before setting out on the long ride back home to Bellevue. They picked up some extra burgers and fries to take along. With winter coming on it would be a long time before they saw fast food again. Even reheated it would be a treat for Merry. Then back north on 95 for their new home.
“You sorry we moved way out in the back of beyond, honey?” Levon asked. He flipped on the high beams. This road was notorious for collisions with deer and even black bear.
“Nope. Those teachers were asking a lot of questions,” she said, leaning forward to twiddle the dial on the radio to find a fresh station as they drove out of range of the one she’d been listening to.
“So, homeschooling is okay with you?”
“Well, my teacher sometimes falls asleep in class,” she said with a sly glance his way.
“Sorry, honey.”
It was true. His nights were snatches of sleep interrupted by his own racing thoughts. But a half dozen math flashcards and he was out like a light. It was a good thing that Merry was an eager learner and a self-starter. She got that from her mother. He monitored her tests and organized the curriculum he’d bought at a Learning Center in Bangor. But she did all the reading on her own and was moving through fifth grade at a steady clip. And the teachers at the school she’d attended under the name Mary Tallmadge
were
a nosy bunch. They wouldn’t let up on their personal lives and what the Tallmadges were like at home. Merry had to spend as much time inventing answers for them as she did on her homework. The stress was showing on her to a degree that even Levon, as pre-occupied as he was, noticed.
She was excited when her father came up with the idea of them packing up and taking off farther north to a resort community where they could be anonymous tourists all summer and reclusive locals during the cold months when the population fell to include only those hardy natives willing to face the brutal weather and utter isolation. He was Mitch Roeder now and she was Moira Roeder. They’d lost his wife and her mother to cancer a few years back. That part was true and no one they met was tactless enough to ask questions about that. And any reply they made to questions would be heartfelt and honest because they were mostly the truth. This was upstate Maine. People might wonder but they’d never ask. And, mostly, they never even bothered to wonder why a dad and daughter with Dixie accents picked the desolate center of Maine to call home. People came to this state to get away from their problems, not to be pestered about them.
“You sure you don’t miss having friends?” he asked.
“I didn’t really make any back at Lewiston. ’Sides, there’s kids at the lake in the summer, right? And Carl and Giselle live nearby. They’re pretty cool,” she said, sitting back in place after locating a fuzzy Radio Disney channel on the radio.
“What makes them cool?”
“Well, Carl has all those comic books and he lets me read them. And Giselle’s a couple years older than me but she promised to teach me to ski cross-country.”
“I guess they’re pretty cool then,” he said.
She leaned forward and turned her head to look up at the lowering sky.
“Now it
looks
like snow,” she said.
And it did. The sky above was dense from horizon to horizon with thick cloud cover bringing an early dusk. There was a tang to the air as the barometer fell.
Merry was asleep in her seat and breathing gently when the first flakes fell hours later. He reached forward to snap off the hiss of the radio; the last stations had been left miles and miles behind. Levon listened to the wipers move before him and watched the swirling flakes gray in his high beams piercing the black between the ranks of pines down the lonely forest road that was taking them home.
6
What Bill didn’t tell his boss was that he’d back-doored this one by telling a friend at Treasury what he found down in Costa Rica. Word got around about a team of professional criminals with a line on the stolen Blanco fortune and six kinds of hell erupted all over DC. A task force was formed and Treasury sent some marshals down to San Carlos. Not to miss his own party, Blount sent Bill back down with some Bureau forensics guys to help out and share in any good news. It was still a Treasury case so there’d be no blowback to the LA office if they came up with nothing to show for the trip except new tans.
Truth was, federal agents weren’t really detectives. Certainly not homicide. And Bureau agents were barely cops. More like lawyers with guns. But there were a few former city cops among the T-men and two of them had worked in big city homicide divisions. Tony Marcoon in Philly and Ben Greco in Chicago. After a few days of work around the Blanco villa the two former collated what they’d found and told the story.