Un-Connected (6 page)

We sat for a while longer, drinking cold
southern tea and eating spicy Bar-B-Q.

I found my mind wandering back to the day Rebecca
and I had met, when she’d been sitting outside the auditorium where I’d taken
my CPA exam. I’d finished the exam and had headed out. Her smile had first
caught my eye—she’d smiled at me so big when I’d first come out of the
door—until she’d realized I wasn’t who she had expected to see.  Then she
stopped smiling and then smiled at me a little.

“I didn’t mean to disappoint you. Please
don’t stop smiling on my account.” I had said.

“Sorry, I thought for sure you were my
sister. She seems to finish every test first.”

“Hello? HELLLLLOOOO!” Deb was saying.

I realized Deb had been trying to get my
attention. “Sorry... I didn’t mean to drift off there.”

            Deb
and I worked together on a plan to contact the FBI. She threw away the first
prepaid cash phone, and she bought another one and activated it for me under
another name. I used it to talk to the guy from the FBI.  We talked several
times and each time we talked, it would be for no more than two minutes. He
said he had equipment that would tell him if someone was listening anywhere on
his end or mine or anywhere in between. With that said now the question was
whether we could trust him? It was still too scary for me.

Deb normally turned her phone off at night
and put it on a charger. The next morning we were going over the truck doing
our pre-trip checklist.  Just about ten minutes after she turned her phone on,
a black SUV pulled into the parking lot. When I saw it, fear ran through me.
One glance at her and I knew she was terrified. After pausing for just a
minute, it headed straight for us. I yelled to her to turn off her cell. Then I
said we should turn off everything else electronic.

Then another fear swept over me. What if
someone had put a bug on the truck somewhere? But they would have to know the
truck was ours first. Had they done that? Once she turned her phone off, the
SUV slowed and then began to weave in different directions. It was her phone
they had tracked. Just then a black helicopter passed slowly overhead. It was
really quiet like it was in stealth mode or something.  We didn’t hear it
coming and that scared me even more.  We were somewhat hidden on the darker
side of the truck, but I was petrified.

“Get in,” she whispered.

We started rolling ever so gently and lazily
out of the parking slot. She had her phone up to her head just talking away.
She was telling someone about Uncle Willy’s drinking problem. Her face was pale
and flushed. Her phone was off, but she was acting a phone conversation as if
her life depended on it, and we were hitting the road. I was hidden down in the
floorboard, and she was whispering what was happening. We slid right past the
black SUV with her not looking their way except out of the corner of her eye.
It was scary. She couldn’t see anyone in there. Thankfully, they didn’t seem
interested in her truck. They seemed to be checking out all the motor homes,
cars, and SUVs coming in and out. There were quite a few.

We didn’t talk for almost an hour. We were
both scared. I told her she could drop me off. She didn’t need to risk her life
for a stranger.

“I am not a quitter, and I could not leave
another human to those thugs.” She said and pulled a handgun out from under the
seat and handed it to me. “Right now I am more afraid of them than I am of you,
and I want you to have a fighting chance if they catch up with you.”

We agreed we both needed to lay low for a few
days. I bought a hat with a wider brim so when I was around other people or
cameras I could hide my face better. She turned her phone on for two minutes at
a time to get messages. We left all of our phones off most of the time. She
changed the number on her original phone and made double sure it was unlisted
and registered it using her middle name with no
D
in front of it. She
called her essential customers and gave them her new phone number. One good
thing came out of it, though.  Now Deb knew for sure I had been telling the
truth.  She was on my side for real.

            As
I continued to try to alter my appearance, I grew quite a beard. Deb asked me
if I looked real clean cut when I was wearing a suit and tie everyday and
working as an accountant.

            I
told her I had.  My hair was short and it was a nice cut with a small part.  It
looked very conservative and typical of the industry.  She said I should go to
the opposite of that and look hairy.  I needed to let my hair grow to at least
my jaw line.  I could wear a hat or head band.  With a beard, long hair and
dark skin, I would look very different.  She helped me with the hair dye as my
hair got longer. The driving all day wasn’t doing anything good for my gut, but
some of the work that went along with the job was helping to build some
upper-body strength I didn’t previously have.  When I was pushing a pencil and
pounding a keyboard it didn’t give me much exercise.

Occasionally, when I looked in a mirror, I
didn’t see Ben Raines. I saw a trucker I didn’t know.  I had a feeling I wasn’t
the only one beginning to like the new appearance of this trucker. I sometimes
caught Deb looking my way with a small smile, and at times it made me feel
guilty—guilt that I was alive and Rebecca was not. But other times the thought
of Deb smiling my way made me smile a bit, too.

Chapter 5

Networking

Now there were three of us working together,
we thought, and we might be getting some light shed on the situation. Jim was
the assumed name of the FBI agent. He was tracking something down my wife had
been working on. I had no idea what he could be talking about. She wasn’t a spy
or detective or lawyer. She was a court reporter. She heard and saw things lots
of other people saw and heard but nothing private.

“Maybe she got a transcript wrong and someone
was hurt by it or went to jail,” I told them. “But it can’t be that because she
was always so careful. She recorded everything and went over her transcript
while listening to the recording to verify. She also sent copies of the
recordings along with the transcripts so they could verify she had transposed
verbal testimony correctly. That could not be a cause for murder anyway.”

Jim and Deb agreed with me.

One day Jim asked, “Do you recognize the name
Leon Dickenson?”

“Yes. He is an old man in a nursing home Rebecca
helped out from time to time.”

Jim said Rebecca’s and Leon’s names were on a
suspicious encrypted note they found and decoded.

I had begun to like Deb and trust her more
and more. We were really good friends and she and I were sharing more and more
of our life story in little bits as they fit with what we were talking about.  It
is amazing how you get to know someone when you are in the cab of a truck with
them twelve hours a day. She was pretty, so part of it was easy, but I felt
guilty when any warm feelings came to me. But they were coming more and more
often.  At first I felt I was betraying Rebecca. She had been murdered, and we
had not brought justice to her killer.  But she had been gone for over a year
by now so my feelings were torn but I was in transition.

Anyway, Deb was too busy and scared, and I
was too scared to think of much else. My new name was Sam Adams not Samuel, and
I didn’t make beer. I told Deb I believed a prominent name stuck in peoples
mind more than one which was hard to say or spell. Once someone knew me as Sam,
they would be less likely to think I was someone else. I hoped it would make it
less likely they would connect me with the guy from Fairfax.

Lots of truckers remembered my name quickly.

We got to California, and Deb decided
we
should work our way up the coast to Seattle. That sounded good to me because
she wasn’t talking about putting me out. We had not seen any black SUVs or
black helicopters for several days and were beginning to get into a work
cadence. But we never totally relaxed, and we would talk a lot about being safe
and watching out for the bad guys.

We stayed together walking to and from the
truck or anywhere there weren’t a lot of people around. We kept our handguns in
our duffle bags or close at all times. I got a fanny pack and started carrying
my gun in it. I worried about getting in trouble with the police by carrying a
concealed weapon without a permit, but Deb had one. If they caught me, the
least of my problems would be a concealed weapon. We were way more afraid of
the black SUV people than we were of the police, so we went on very carefully.

We both wore our fanny packs and carried our
guns when we went running.  And we stayed together.  After the first week I
could make five miles but it was so hard I was nearly sick.  But by week four I
could keep up with her at the pace she wanted to run.

I had enough highlights in my hair that I
didn’t look anything like I did in the accounting office. I made sure I was
darker skinned. I worked outside without a hat or shirt on when I could or lay
out on those rare occasions when we were waiting on something. I used tanning
beds if we were laid up over a weekend somewhere, or I used tanning spray when
I had no better options. I kept my hair about jaw length as Deb had suggested
so I was not that clean cut accountant.

“I ran into another FBI agent who is working
on several cases of elderly people disappearing,” Jim said. “No bodies, no
blood, and sometimes no records of them having been alive the last five or ten
years. It was really strange stuff. Would either of you be willing to talk to
him?”

Deb and I discussed it and felt a better
situation would be for questions to come through Jim. We didn’t want exposure
with too many people, even if they were FBI. His supposed name was Mike, but we
didn’t want to talk to him unless it was essential. We were still very scared.

Days and weeks turned into months and then a
year. I took over the truck and trailer maintenance. I did the daily checklist,
but I also learned from every repair shop where we laid over. I asked about
everything and learned about Cummins, Detroit, and Caterpillar diesel engines.
I learned about brakes and air lines and lighting.

Deb had a very good safety rating before, but
it was getting better. And I got to sleep in the top bunk now. Man it was a
relief. It is a wonderful thing to have a good comfortable bed. But I kept the
sleeping bag close. If the black SUV started showing up again, I intended to
grab it and lead them away from her. No use the two of us getting killed.  Now
I was relatively certain she wouldn’t kick me to the curb or turn me over, so I
really started to sleep well.

We laid over in Seattle one weekend, and I
was able to get a birth certificate, a driver’s license, a passport, and a
carry permit all from the state of Texas. I was an official Texan. I was
officially Sam Adams. I was told even in Texas it would look good because they
would have me in the state’s computer within days. I just shouldn’t go to Texas
in fewer than two weeks. Soon I would be able to drive. No one would guess this
truck driver had been a CPA.

I got a real phone, and I opened a checking
account. I sent a bill to Ben Raines for $10,000. I called Ben’s parents and
asked them to pay the bill if there was enough money, and pay what they could
if not the full $10,000. Sam Adams became a family friend to Ben’s parents, and
we talked as often as we wished. About a week later the Ben Raines estate paid
$7023.01 of the debt he owed to Sam Adams. So I had some money in my account,
and it wasn’t taxable because tax had already been paid on it. We agreed to sell
the house Rebecca and Ben had owned. Everything in it would be sold except
personal stuff after each family got what they wanted, and then they would
split the proceeds.  They would call Rebecca’s parents and make arrangements
for them to get into the house and get whatever they wanted.

Also I would be calling Rebecca’s parents and
Sam Adams would be one of their new friends as well.  The equity in the house
with the rest of the estate paying Sam what was owed him. And since he had been
a “friend of Ben and Rebecca’s,” by extension he would be their friend. They
would all have to remember to talk about Ben and Sam keeping their names
separate. Especially since we were sure the killers were listening.

But we weren’t able to relax. We were
constantly looking over our shoulders. We jumped every time a black SUV
appeared anywhere. Another thing that gave us the creeps was Jim called and
said Mike had died in a traffic accident. He said it looked suspicious to him.

Well, that did it for me. I was never going
back to Fairfax. I had changed, and I wasn’t going to take any chances. Now I
was afraid to talk to Jim. I was afraid to talk about my old life or people I
knew. There were some wonderful people, but I didn’t want to die or cause them
to die at the hands of some cruel strangers.

“Please don’t let me get into trouble where
they’d fingerprint me,” I asked Deb, “and please don’t take me to the
Northeast,” I was so done with there until my name was cleared.  Probably
forever.

Some of her customers were big regional or
national carriers. I started talking to the yard foremen while she was working
the truck. They told me who to contact so we could get the better loads. I
began to negotiate repair contracts. When we dropped a load at a location that
had a repair shop, then we could get repairs done there rather than going to a
stand-alone shop. Their shop rates were closer to cost, and we paid about half.
Sometimes we got really good loads to Pennsylvania or Ohio. It was farther
northeast than I really wanted to go, but as long as we stayed away from
Virginia and DC, then I wasn’t too scared about where we went. The shop in
Carlisle charged us forty-five dollars per hour, for example. It was their
internal-fleet-budgeted shop cost.  I was very thankful for that.

I was becoming a trucker. Deb taught me how
to back into a parking space in a parking lot or a warehouse dock, how to parallel
park, and perform other maneuvers a truck driver had to know how to do. Now we
were together spending twenty hours a day in the same cab and getting to know
each other even better.

About the only time we were apart was when I
was taking care of repairs or trying to get better loads or Deb was doing
chores.  Or she was doing our laundry now and I was washing the truck.

“I met the FBI agent working on Mike’s case,”
Jim called to say. “He had proven it wasn’t an accident, but he couldn’t
determine who had killed him yet.  His name is “Stan” and he’s begun to work
Mike’s cases. Stan started asking about Rebecca and Leon. He found out Leon had
put Rebecca’s name on his banking account and had given her power of attorney.”

“She had never mentioned it to me.” I said.

"Stan told me it was because she had
pledged confidentiality, and Leon didn’t want anyone but her to know about the
deal.” Jim replied.

“OK,” I said thinking out loud. ”So what? She
helped out an old man, and he gave her power of attorney and probably made her
executor of his will. And somebody would kill her over that? It didn’t seem
probable, and even if so, why would it implicate me? This is getting stranger
rather than clearer. …Jim, why haven’t you turned me in? Does it mean you
believe I’m innocent?”

”Yes, I’m sure you didn’t do it. But more to
the point, I don’t’ have you in custody, and I can’t arrest you very well over
the phone.  And since I don’t know where you are and won’t ask, then I can’t
drive up on you,” he explained further.

One night Deb wanted us to shower first and
eat later. It was OK with me. We worked very well together and had become good
friends. She paid me a fair cut of the truck profits for my driving,
maintenance work, and bookkeeping. I had almost no expenses, so I was getting
Sam Adams’s financial house in order. I had been with Deb now for almost two
years, and though I had been fearful, having her in it with me made it much
easier to take.

I got done with my shower earlier than Deb
did as usual, and I went ahead and got us a table in the restaurant. I was
reading a paper when she came in. She wore a skirt that came almost to her knee
and a teddy with a jacket over that. My heart nearly stopped. I hadn’t really
looked at her in a long time. At least not that way. She was beautiful.

I told her she shouldn’t have dressed the way
she had because she might have to kiss me later. She smiled but didn’t answer
me.  She seemed pleased that I had noticed how she dressed.  She wanted me to
notice her as a woman now and not just a friend or truck driving partner. 

The rest of the evening went pretty much the
same as other evenings with us talking to each other and then being repeatedly
interrupted by others who wanted to talk. That’s all that changed that night,
but it did change. Our relationship was different now, and I didn’t know where
it was going. I didn’t bring up the kiss again, and neither did she, but I
thought about it several times and caught her looking at me, probably thinking
about it.

“Stan found an agent from Texas, “Tex,” who
was finding the same things he and I are,” Jim said on his next phone call.
“Elderly people were disappearing. No bodies, no blood, and no signs of
struggle. In some cases no evidence they had ever lived. 

Or they were in nursing homes and would die
suddenly when they appeared to be stable.  They didn’t disappear but seemed to
have died prematurely.  Some of the nursing home workers would be surprised.

Tex found something else. Every now and then,
the person who disappeared wasn’t elderly. The three of us talked but couldn’t
put anything together or make any connections.”

One day Deb asked, “Would you like to go
halves with me on another truck?”

My first thoughts were she wanted us to split
up, and each of us would have a truck to drive. I didn’t like the idea of her
and me going separate directions.  What was she talking about?  My thoughts
raced trying to find the best answer, but I went back to an old principle. I
needed to get all the facts. I asked how she envisioned it would work.

She said she knew a lot of truckers and could
find one who would be a good driver. I was relieved to find out she wasn’t
trying to get rid of me. She reasoned if she and I bought a truck and paid
cash, then our overhead would be really low, and we could make money when other
truckers couldn’t.

“OK, but what happens between us. I mean how
does it change you and me?”

“We would be partners, silly. You put up half
the money and I put up half. We split the expenses and the profit.”

I sat in silence, relieved she wasn’t trying
to put me in another truck. I liked being a team driver with her. When we had a
layover somewhere, we could run around together and have fun. It was a lot
better than being alone for one thing, and having
her
with me was better
than anyone I could imagine. I was really enjoying her company and was
wondering if we weren’t getting closer.  Besides I was still sure I needed
someone to cover my back.  Life was a little quieter, but this was too much to
handle alone.