From a Dead Sleep (42 page)

“I don’t know, Jefferson. We’ll hopefully find out soon. Get going on it.”

Once his handheld transmitter went back to its base, Lumbergh leaned across his seat to take a gander down at the raging water again. A sense of neglect sputtered off the walls of his stomach. He could have had a search and recovery team at the river by late morning on Saturday to scour its path. If Dr. Venegas was right and the body had been snagged up somewhere, there’d have been a good chance that it would have been found. He fought the urge to place the blame squarely on Sean Coleman’s shoulders as the boy who cried wolf one too many times, but Sean was not the chief of police. It was Lumbergh’s own inaction that had prolonged the exposure of the truth of what happened that morning. He even worried that his dereliction may have led to the additional events of violence transpiring in his town.

A burst of CB static interrupted his thoughts. A familiar voice that was not Jefferson’s poured through the speaker.

In an accelerated tone, he heard his wife broadcast, “Gary, Sean called here. He needs your help!”

Chapter 46

W
hen the man he knew as Josh Jones strayed off of the main highway and headed west onto Platte Road, Sean found himself questioning whether the airport in Manistee was his destination after all. He hoped he’d just been wrong, but feared that Jones had realized that he was being followed and was now leading them God knows where.

The traffic was much thinner along the two-lane road, which made him uneasy. There were no automobiles in between him and Jones, so Sean was careful to keep his distance. Adding to the unsettling sensation Sean felt in his gut, Jones had slowed down his pace to that of the speed limit.

“I don’t like this,” stated Lisa, leaning forward a little in her seat. She had lowered her sun visor in front of her in an act of discretion. She worried that if they got too close, Jones might make out her face and blonde hair in his mirror. “What if he recognizes your car?”

“He’s never seen my car,” he quickly rebuked.

“You don’t know that for sure. This is a mistake! What if he’s leading us into some type of trap or back to more of Moretti’s men? We should just pull over to the side of the road at the next gas station and call the
local
cops this time.”

He said nothing, but he was sure she could read the irritation in his eyes.

“Why is that such a bad idea? I’m certain your brother has contacted them by now. They know what’s going on.”

“He’s my brother-
in-law
, and I’m not letting this guy out of my sight.”

She let her back drop against her seat. She closed her eyes and her fingers went to her forehead as if she were battling a migraine. She whispered under her breath, “What was I thinking?”

Sean bit down on his lower lip before subtly nodding his head and saying, “A lot of chicks fall for the wrong guys.”

She twisted her body toward him and cocked her head to the side with an expression on her face that exemplified her displeasure with the remark. “I meant what was I thinking
when I got back into this car?
I should have stayed at that gas station back in Traverse City and waited for the police.”

He threw a hand into the air. “I told you that you could have!”

Her eyes drifted back to the road. She obviously didn’t have the strength or will to argue. Instead, she mumbled something to herself about not thinking to grab her cellphone when Sean whisked her out of the cottage. If she had, Josh Jones most likely would have been in custody by then.

“That Marty guy, from back at the guard station . . . I think there’s a good chance he’s all right.”

It was a completely unexpected and quite miraculous remark, and considering the look he saw cross her face, not far from the thoughts flashing through her mind. Her lips lifted open a bit and her eyelids flickered.

“I thought you might want to know that,” he added.

She silently scrutinized his demeanor, but his stoic expression was unreadable. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, there wasn’t any blood on the uniform that the asshole in front of us was wearing. He may have just stolen it from a locker or something.”

“But Josh Jones knew his name.”

“I know, but he kept saying Martin, while you called him Marty. My guess is that people that know him call him Marty. Right?”

She nodded her head.

“Yeah, our boy in the Volvo probably just read Martin off of a name badge. I don’t think he and the guy in your kitchen knew exactly what they’d find at your house. They wouldn’t risk a murder beat just to get inside the wall and look around. I think the old guy was as surprised to find you there as you were to have him show up at your door.”

She absorbed his logic, then brushed her hair over her shoulder and glanced out her window at an old, abandoned drive-in movie theater that rested along a large lot of dirt. The speakers and their poles were missing, but the large, peeling screen still towered above the flat, open land.

“Are you guys pretty tight?” he asked.

“Who?”

“You and Marty.”

Her face soured. “Why would you ask that?”

Sean kept his eyes to the road and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I’m pretty sure that if I worked from that guard station where Marty worked, and didn’t get very close to the people driving in and out through my gate, I can’t imagine any of them would be able to identify my uniform when I’m not the one wearing it.”

He noticed the rise in her eyebrows when he flashed her a quick glance. Before she could respond, he continued. “I’ve worked a few guard stations in my time, you know,” he said in a way that implied he was bragging about the experience.

“No, I didn’t know that,” she said with an eye roll.

He continued. “Plus, I noticed two mostly empty wine glasses on your kitchen counter. With your husband out of the state . . .”

“Yes, Mr. Coleman,” she interrupted in annoyance. “I know him a little better than the other residents. Okay? But it’s not what you think.”

Sean pursed his lips and he fought back the urge to smirk. “I wasn’t thinking anything. I just thought you might want to know that he’s probably okay.”

Lisa felt embarrassed, but at the same time a little impressed. If she had judged Sean by his appearance and demeanor alone, she wouldn’t have concluded him to be particularly intellectual. Contrarily, he seemed brighter than how he presented himself. At the very least, he was a keen observer. He’d known almost immediately back at the cottage that something wasn’t right about Josh Jones. And despite no one believing him in his own town, he was able to figure out the identity of the man he’d seen on the bridge, even if it meant driving halfway across the country to confirm it.

“I think you might be selling yourself short as a security guard, Mr. Coleman. You’d make a good investigator.”

For the first time since she’d met him, she noticed the man’s mouth curl into a smile—a dopey smile that he clearly wasn’t comfortable displaying. It seemed to her that he’d just heard what might have been the most flattering compliment anyone had ever paid him. He twisted his head away from her a bit in nonchalant fashion, like a young student who had just been praised by a teacher he had a crush on.

Or maybe that was just her impression, being a teacher. Her attention eased back to the car they were following. Its speed didn’t seem to fluctuate. It was as if the man behind the wheel was on a casual Sunday drive. A thought tickled her mind of how they’d left Josh Jones sprawled out on the floor, unconscious in her hallway, as well as the pandemonium that led up to that moment.

“Wait a minute,” she said out loud. “When we turned on the radio that Josh Jones was wearing, the guard we heard said that Marty wasn’t at his post and that the gate was left open. Doesn’t that mean that they
did
do something to him?”

His eyebrows arched. “You’ve got a point . . .”

She wasn’t sure what about his expression changed, but it seemed to, even if minutely. Perhaps he had considered the idea as well, but he didn’t want to lend credence to it because he was sure the thought would worry her.

She sighed, looking back out the side window. If there had been a confrontation, maybe Sean’s hope was that Marty had just gotten beat up and not killed. It was certainly her hope.

When the first police car screeched to a halt at the gated entrance in front of Bluff Walk Road, the officer found a pale, hunched over figure with short, blonde hair that was partially stained red, stumbling his way out to the road from behind an assemblage of trees. Clad only in a t-shirt and plaid boxer shorts, he’d been beaten, gagged, and still had twisted and torn strips of thick duct tape wrapped around his wrists.

Minutes later, sirens blasted their way up through the winding, flush hills of the upscale community, causing scores of birds to flee the tops of thick trees. Marty Rutt told an attentive, stout female officer the story of a seemingly kind older man wearing a hat who’d asked for directions from his Volvo at the front gate. Marty described how their conversation was cut short when he happened to glance over his shoulder and notice some movement across the screen of one of the security monitors inside the window of his guard station. Someone was scaling their way over the front wall, just about fifty yards down, out of view from the front of the station. Marty quickly apologized to the misplaced traveler and took off on foot, in pursuit of the intruder.

The athletic guard quickly caught up with who he believed to be a teenager and tackled him to the ground. The kid had brown hair, spiked in the front, and repeatedly shouted during their tussle that he was just there to see his girlfriend.

After Marty had gotten the boy pinned chest-down in the grass with a knee lodged into his back, he held up his radio to his mouth when he’d heard rapid footsteps approaching from behind him. It was the older man from the front gate.

“It’s okay. I’ve got this!” he’d shouted to the man who he’d believed had come to help him.

The man wasn’t there to assist the guard, but rather to come to the aid of the captive. Marty saw something black and shiny clasped in the fist of the man a mere second before it was smashed down along the crest of his skull.

Marty remembered little after that, other than taking some stomps to his face and ribs, and the angered voice of the older man scolding the younger one. When he awoke with a fierce, throbbing headache and gasping for breath from under a couple of cracked ribs, he found himself stripped and his arms hugging a large elm tree with his wrists bound together on the opposite side.

Chapter 47

“W
hat do you mean he doesn’t work for them?”

“That’s what they’re telling me, Chief,” answered Jefferson. “They don’t have a Kyle Kimble that works for them. The government employee number is bogus. They’re sure the ID is a fake.”

Lumbergh’s jaw tightened. “Well the man’s not fake!” he barked in frustration. “He’s got a wallet full of credit cards, a Nevada driver’s license, and a picture of him beside his wife—who’s also very real because she’s with Sean right now.” Listening to the words coming out of his own mouth was fueling his frustration. What Diana had told him about Sean only added to the fire. “And now someone
else
is dead!”

The chief was barely able to keep up with his breath. His hand was clenched so tightly to the transmitter of his Jeep’s radio that he nearly cracked its frame. He bit down on his lip and used the back of his hand to clear strands of spit from the sides of his mouth. With his teeth tightened, he brought the transmitter back to his face.

“Chief?” Jefferson said with some anxiety in his voice.

“The second you hear back from the Traverse City P.D., you get back to me! Do you understand?”

“Chief, there’s more.”

“Spit it out, Jefferson.”

“I’ve been trying to. The Feds didn’t know Kimble, but they knew the name Moretti. It really got their attention. They want to talk to you about him, the man in charge. They wouldn’t give me the skinny.”

Lumbergh’s eyes softened and he nodded his head. “Okay, I’ll be back soon.”

Moments later, he’d made it to the end of Pine View Road and it felt good to leave the self-imposed detour of dirt and gravel and be back on a paved street where he could push the accelerator down. Speeding along Colorado Road 1007, the RPM gauge steadily rose along with the chief ’s anxiety. A deficiency of modern technology at his disposal left him feeling irritated and naked. Back in Chicago, streaming a landline call through a police radio would have been as simple as pressing a button. Out of his Winston office, it just wasn’t an option. So, his eagerness to sync up with the Feds and learn of the man his brother-in-law referred to as Moretti was pulling at his chest.

“A Las Vegas big shot,” he muttered through clenched teeth as he shook his head. It was the phrase Sean had used with Diana. “What the hell does that mean?”

Whoever the individual was, the FBI in Las Vegas was aware of him, which meant he was a man of importance—most likely not in a good way.

Lumbergh experienced torment caused by the growingly familiar feeling of being left completely out of the loop, leaving him to frolic around in his own aimless speculation. He was used to being the man in the know—the man in charge. But at that very moment, the best he could do to serve any practical purpose was to get back to town as quickly as he could while he listened for updates from Jefferson. Sean, on the other hand, was right in the middle of something big and consequential, and Lumbergh prayed that whatever it was, it wouldn’t lead to anyone else getting killed.