Acoustic Shadows (9 page)

Sally raised her hand, palm down, fingers spread, and rocked it back and forth as if to say, ‘a little’.

‘Okay,’ said Thiery. ‘Do you know if she had a boyfriend or any other friends who she may have gone to, or who may have come here to get her?’

Sally shook her head side to side, emphatically.

‘Do you know if she had family?’

Sally shrugged her shoulders weakly.

‘Okay. Do you know where she came from?’

Sally scribbled three words on the pad and held it up to Thiery:
School Employment Records
.

Thiery nodded. ‘We’ve looked. All her records list is an address in Washington, D.C. When we looked into that through the postal service, all we got back was another name: Harriet Blackstone. Did she ever mention that name?’

Sally shook her head.

‘Were you aware of Erica ever having a gun, or carrying one in her purse? Did she ever mention owning a gun?’

Sally started to shake her head, ‘No,’ then wrote on the tablet again:
No. But always had her purse. Even the lunchroom.

Thiery nodded as he read the note. When he looked back to Sally, he could see whatever the nurse had given her was beginning to take effect. Her eyelid drooped and she settled deeper into her pillow. Drool with a red tint dampened the dressing that covered the right side of her face.

Thiery smiled and took her hand again. ‘Okay, Sally. We’re going to leave, but I want to thank you very much for your help today.’

Sally regained consciousness for a moment and shook her head as if to say: I wasn’t much help, then stopped as if she remembered something and held up a finger. She picked up the pad again and wrote:
Said didn’t have a boyfriend. Never talked about family. And always wore running shoes, even with dresses.

Thiery read the note and nodded. ‘Well. That is unusual, isn’t it? I mean the shoe thing. Huh. Okay, Sally. You get some rest. You’ve been a big help. I’m going to leave my card here on the night stand. You can have the nurse contact me if you think of anything else. Okay?’

Sally nodded, then her head fell to one side as she succumbed to the pain medicine.

Back in the hall, after they’d closed the door, Dunham said, ‘I didn’t want to bother you while you were talking with her, but I got a text from my admin coordinator at headquarters. She told me to call a Carol Dowling. She’s the mother of one of the kids in the class. She says her little boy has mentioned something to her. She thought it might be helpful.’

Thiery listened, but his thoughts drifted to something that was beginning to needle him since he’d mentioned ‘Harriet Blackstone’ to Sally. As a boy, and even into his young adult life, he’d been fascinated with magic. He had regaled his parents and friends with card tricks and sleight of hand, and he’d shared that knowledge with his own children as well. In college, they had called him ‘Magic Man’ because everyone knew of his hobby; when he threw the football, they said he ‘could make it disappear’. He had read about and absorbed the lives of all the great magicians, and was completely mesmerized by them. He knew their given birth names as well as their theatrical ones. For instance, Houdini, arguably the greatest magician and escape artist ever, was born Eric Weisz. Harry Blackstone, Jr, the son of ‘The Great Blackstone’ was one of the most successful magicians of his time. Both men were specialists in making things disappear.

Now, he was looking for a woman who had disappeared, and it dawned on him that her name sounded a lot like Eric Weisz, and the only name they found associated with an erroneous address she’d given on her employment application was also assigned to a ‘Harriet Blackstone,’ which sounded very much like Harry Blackstone.

Could that be coincidence?

‘Excuse me, Agent Thiery,’ said Dunham. ‘Did you hear me?’

Thiery snapped out of it. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking of something. Good. Yeah, we should go talk to the boy.’

Julio Esperanza had gathered his crew of hitters. These were people he could count on. People he had wanted to use before, but his father had advised against it. Emilio wanted Julio to keep a low profile, use someone with no name recognition in the national or international market. Someone who was expendable, and without links that could be traced back to them. That’s where Shadtz had come in. The disposable killer. They’d had luck with this tactic before, but Julio knew lightning never struck twice in the same place.

Shadtz had been a badass, but couldn’t hold a candle to any of these people, all of them experienced in their craft on an international scale. Maybe when he was healthy he could’ve, but that was why he’d taken the hit in the first place. An enforcer more than a button man, doing the occasional hit, but more often twisting fingers or cracking heads when someone was slow to pay their weekly ‘protection’ fee. He was a palooka, too: a heavyweight way past his prime and low in the IQ department. But, he was expendable and had no ties to the Esperanzas, so he got the job. And, as he was terminally ill, he also had one of the most desirable facets they were looking for: nothing to lose.

Now, with Emilio’s trial set to begin again next week, they were down to the short hairs.

The school shooting might have been less obvious than the previous hit, but it had failed, and the fact was, this loose end had to be dealt with. All the other loose ends had been taken care of. But, not the nurse. She didn’t know everything, but she knew enough to make the connections that would put Emilio away for the rest of his life. She’d worked for him – taken care of him – for eight years. In the first trial, she seemed almost hesitant to testify against Emilio, but, after what they did to her family, she wasn’t going to hold back next time.

If the cops hadn’t screwed up by using some inadmissible forensic accounting evidence, his father would still be in prison. But, some various pay-offs and a phalanx of high priced attorneys had fought tooth and nail and found the tiny glitches in the evidence chain from the first trial. Then, some testimony that should have been ruled hearsay was ‘discovered’, and finally, with at least three jurors coming forth to say they felt coerced by the district attorney’s office, the judge allowed the appeal, and Emilio was set free, at least, temporarily. Money could buy freedom, at least, for a while.

Emilio could not leave Las Vegas, which was fine with him. He was ordered to be on house arrest, wear the ankle bracelet – the ‘dog collar’, he called it – and the place he’d chosen for his ‘jail’ was his penthouse suite in the Bellagio Hotel. Close enough to keep an eye on his holdings in Mexico, but far enough away to appear to be an old man living it up before his health, or the law, finally caught up with him.

For three years, his attorneys had been filing motions to delay the next trial. The judge in his first trial had since retired and moved to Florida – buying a beachside mansion that belied what a federal judge earns – so it was going to be a fresh start with nothing to jam them up. Except the nurse. Again.

One by one, the hit men had flown into Orlando. Julio had his driver pick them up and bring them to the hotel his secretary had booked for them: the Gaylord Palms.
What kind of name was that?
Julio wondered.

The first to arrive was De De Davies, a button man from Canada. Julio had used him before and had high confidence in him. He was a quiet but deadly monster, standing some six and a half feet tall. His shaved head blended seamlessly with his shoulders, the neck lost between. He had black eyes, slightly crossed, but no one kidded him about that. In spite of his horror-movie stature, he spoke eloquently with a deep, French accent, and was very good at tracking people and hacking computer systems; his huge sausage-like fingers dancing over the keyboards like spiders.

The Lopez brothers came in from Mexico City where they took contract work from every drug kingpin that wanted someone dead. And there were plenty. Alejandro was always Alejandro, never Alex, but Eduardo was Eddy. They looked similar, with their curly, black, coiffed hair, flawless coffee skin, and perfect ivory teeth that made them very popular with the ladies. But, they were as different as night and day when it came to killing.

Alejandro was strictly a gun guy, an excellent shot with pistol or rifle, but definitely a quick, distance killer. Eddy preferred knives and working up close. He enjoyed torturing his targets; take them out nice and slow, play with them like a cat messing with a lizard for a few hours. Take a foot off here, a hand off there. What was the hurry, after all? Once you were dead, you were dead. It was just too quick for Eddy and, while it made everyone uncomfortable around him, there were those who admired his particular skills. Julio Esperanza was one of them.

The last to arrive was someone Julio did not know well, but De De Davies had recommended her. Anichka Drakoslava had worked directly under General Ratko Mladic as an ‘intelligence officer’ in charge of interrogating Bosnian prisoners. She was an Albanian in origin and could speak seven different languages. She now lived in Venezuela where she’d been able to avoid prosecution for war crimes for some fifteen years. Her status and abilities were legendary among those who knew of her: the KGB, the CIA, MI6, and Mossad. Now, in addition to her unusual ‘interviewing’ skills, she also carried around a feeling of rejection that angered her and made her more dangerous than she had been previously. At five feet eleven inches tall, and trained in the Israeli martial art of Krav Maga, she was not a good person to have walking around, pissed off, unless you needed someone dead.

One by one, they gathered at the hotel, changed into swimwear and went to the pool, as directed. The Lopez brothers fitted right in, with their svelte physiques and South Beach looks. Anichka did, too. With her killer body and Eastern European accent, she was exotically gorgeous as she ordered a mojito at the pool bar. Davies, however, was a fish out of water. He looked like an overweight pro-wrestler as he sauntered by the crowded pool, his MacBook tucked under his elephantine arm. Sweat ran off him in rivers.

Julio met them at the bar.

‘When do we move?’ asked Davies, impatiently.

Julio looked him over, then glanced around to make sure no one was listening to them.

‘There are a million law enforcement officers still swarming the area. And the media. We’ll give them a few days. Americans have memories as long as their cocks: very short; so they will lose interest in this ‘event’ and move on.’

‘Then why did you summon us so soon?’ asked Anichka. Her voice drew the attention of the Lopez brothers, who obviously admired her in her tiny bikini. They immediately whispered a bet to each other on which one would nail her first.

Julio answered, ‘I thought you might like to go to Disney World first.’

The Lopez brothers laughed. ‘
Si
,’ said Eddy. ‘Let’s go see Mickey Mouse.’

‘It’s your dollar,
El Jefe
,’ said Alejandro.

Anichka sneered, her eyes glinting in anger. She saw their macho Latino types in Venezuela every day and was not impressed. She liked her men a little more … strange.

‘You watch the news today, Julio?’ asked Davies.

‘Not really. I don’t watch much television,’ Julio said, thinking of his father, who never stopped watching it, and whose phone calls he had been avoiding all day.

Davies snapped open his laptop and hit a button. The Internet headlines displayed a picture of Erica Weisz. ‘Our target is on the run,’ he said.

Julio sat up straight, looking intently at the small screen. He removed his sunglasses and ran his hand through his hair. ‘
Mierda
,’ he said.

Gloria Shadtz got off of the plane in Tampa, rented a car with a GPS, and typed in Frosthaven, Florida. It was beginning to rain as she drove east on Highway 60. The road was long, two-lane, lined with cow pastures and tiny towns that grew up around the phosphate mining industry like old western mining towns that died slowly after their natural resources were depleted. Her emotions were mixed as she drove.

She hadn’t heard from her estranged husband in almost two months. It wasn’t unusual for him to stay away for weeks at a time, but he usually called to see how Randy was – their twelve-year-old son born with Down Syndrome – at least once a week, when he was out of town. Her husband no longer lived with her and Randy, but he visited his son regularly. In that respect, he was a good man. Being a guy who worked most often as a barroom bouncer, whom she caught diddling barmaids on enough occasions she finally threw him out, made him not such a great husband. Still, he provided for Randy, if not her, as best he could for a guy with a prison record and no real job skills.

Yesterday, Gloria had picked up Randy from the special education school where he spent his days after she’d worked at the bar where she’d met Frank a lifetime ago. She’d made dinner and was cleaning up when she heard Randy saying, ‘Daddy’s on the TV, Mama! Daddy’s on the TV!’

The news was on. Gloria dropped her plate when the picture of Frank popped up, the anchor saying he was involved in an elementary school shooting. He had been shot by one of the teachers. She swallowed dryly, quickly changed the channel, and got Randy to bed, telling him that, ‘Maybe Daddy is doing movies now.’

Then, a knock on the door. When Gloria went to answer it, no one was there, but a fat envelope that hadn’t been there when she’d come home from work was placed on the stoop. She saw a man walking away quickly and thought she’d recognized him as one of Frank’s bar buddies; a little guy they called ‘Owl’ because he stayed after everyone else left the bar and mopped floors to earn a drink.

She opened the package and almost fainted. There was a note that read, ‘Use this to help Randy. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better husband. Good-bye, Gloria. Frank.’ Her eyes filled with tears as she counted the bills in the package. Fifty-thousand dollars, all in tens and twenties.

Gloria called her sister and asked if she could watch Randy for a few days. Her sister had not seen the news. Gloria heard her gasp as she shared the news that Frank was involved in a school shooting in Florida.

‘Are you sure it was him?’ she queried. ‘I mean, what would he be doing in Florida, number one? And number two, why would he do something like that? He was a shitty husband, but I always thought he was pretty good with kids, especially Randy.’

‘I … I know,’ said Gloria, sniffling. ‘I don’t understand it all. But, I need to go down there and see that … he gets buried, or something, right?’

Sara Logan had just got out of the shower when her phone range. It was Miko Tran, a technician and wannabe field agent at the FBI’s forensic lab who never failed to grab research requests when he saw them come in from Logan.

‘Tell me something,’ said Logan.

‘Okay,’ said a hopeful voice on the other end. ‘Looks like we’ll be able to piece that hard drive back together after all. We’re starting to extrapolate some of the data. How are you, Special Agent Logan?’

‘Good, good, good,’ said Logan, impatiently, then, ‘I’m especially interested in any emails you can find.’

‘Of course, Agent Logan. It’s part of our protocol now— ’

‘Then call me when you get your job done,’ she said and hung up. She was frustrated, torn between calling Thiery to give him the good news and fantasizing about where that could take them. Their prior dalliance had almost destroyed her marriage and, worse, had hurt Thiery. He’d obviously been in love with her; she wasn’t sure ‘love’ was the first thing that came to her mind about him when she recalled the nights they’d spent together. Thiery had filled a need in her that her husband could not. But Thiery had baggage; the two kids she had no interest in mothering. Still, when it ended, she’d lain awake too many nights thinking about his dark eyes, the wide shoulders, that chest with the hair she loved to run her fingers through.

Logan found herself breathing heavy, an ache in her loins, and decided she needed a cool shower.