Meant for Her (12 page)

Any doubts about Julie’s departure vanished in an instant. Julie and Gwen were running for their lives.

Running for their lives, from me.

“It’s Christmas Day, sir,” Hank bit off the words, barely restraining his frustration with the older man.

“What goddamn difference does that make?” he barked. “You work for me, Jared. Not forty hours. All the fucking time. Do I make myself clear?”

Hank fought against the desperate need to verbally rip apart his superior officer. He concentrated on breathing in and out, feeling the air fill his lungs, and heard himself say, “Of course, sir.”

“Where are you on the McDowell case?”

“Julie’s still working on the cipher.”

“You’re sure she would tell you if she solved it?”

Not anymore.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do what you have to in order to earn her trust.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I mean,” Barstow chuckled, a dirty throaty noise that disgusted Hank, “she’s a beautiful woman, Jared. She just lost her father and she’s vulnerable. Do what you need to do to ingratiate yourself with her.”

Hank felt nauseous and angry, self-loathing warring with indignation in his blood.

That’s what Julie thinks I did. She thinks I betrayed her.

Barely trusting himself to speak, Hank didn’t respond at all. In his mind, his fist connected with Barstow’s face. It was all he could do to remain silent.

“One more thing.”

“What?”

“What the hell are you doing at the Albany airport?”

“Sir?”

“Don’t play with me, son. Now, I’d like to know,” he drawled out, “why you’re touring the goddamned Northeast without updating me on this fucking case. I shouldn’t have to call you to find out your fucking flight itinerary. Do you understand me, Jared?”

Realization dawned clear. “You have a GPS on my car.”

“Of course I do.” The admiral snickered. “And you’d better start explaining.”

 ~~~

“I remember her,” said the young man at the rental car counter. He had a swatch of dyed blonde hair amidst masses of brunette curls. “Did she do something wrong?” He held his hand to his chest, wide-eyed.

Hank had been showing Julie and Gwen’s pictures around to ticket agents and car rental employees for nearly an hour. It had taken thirty-five minutes to have their pictures sent from DMV in the first place.

“When was she here?”

“Just before lunch. Let me pull up the transaction.” He typed efficiently into his computer. “Eleven twenty-two. She rented a light green Honda Odyssey. What did she do?”

“I’ll need the license plate number.”

“Of course.” He leaned over the counter and whispered, “Was it a robbery? There was a bank robbery right down the street last week.”

“No.” Hank looked at his watch, which read 3:34. They had more than a four hour jump on him. At least they were driving, not halfway to Mexico on an airplane.

“It has Illinois plates, number F73 8M1. I’ll write that down for you.” He grabbed a purple sticky note and looked at Hank from under his lashes. “Did she skip bail? I won’t tell anyone.”

“I can’t discuss the details. Thanks for your help.”

He straightened and handed Hank the paper. “Is there anything else I can do for you today, sir?”

“No, that’s all.”

He pulled back the note before Hank could grab it. “Airport security has surveillance footage, if that would be helpful.”

“Really?”

The clerk nodded, allowing him to take the paper, then leaned over again and whispered dramatically, “Was it a
murder
?”

 ~~~

The airport security office was small and outfitted with a limited supply of dated equipment. Hank sat in the darkened room as a white-haired man in a blue uniform shirt held down a fast forward button on what looked like an old VCR.

“There’s one more feed from the south parking lot,” he said.

Julie must have parked in the quadrant of the parking garage not covered by the first three tapes Hank watched. He rubbed his forehead against the throb that was beginning to take over.

Just when he was convinced that this tape was yet another dead end, he saw his SUV pull right in front of the camera. “That’s it,” he told the security officer. “That’s the truck.”

The officer rewound the tape and began again, when the truck first entered the camera’s field of view. Hank could clearly see Gwen driving, and as she pulled in, Julie sitting in the passenger seat. What were those things in her lap?

He watched as Gwen got out of the truck, presumably to go rent the minivan. Julie remained behind, working on something.

“Can we zoom in and see what she’s doing?”

The other man pressed buttons on the archaic machine, and the image on the screen became cropped and grainy. “Is that better?”

“No.”

The security officer laughed. “It’s not like you see in the movies, is it?”

Hank thought of all the high tech security equipment he was used to dealing with, but kept that to himself. “No, it’s not.” He watched on screen as Julie wrote something, unable to see exactly what she was doing. Ten minutes later, Gwen returned with the van.

It wasn’t until Julie threaded the rings onto the new paper towel roll that he realized what she was making.

The cipher wheel. She must have broken the code!

But when? She had trusted him up until this morning. If she had discovered the key before then, she would have told him. It must have been right around the same time as Barstow’s call, maybe even at Marianne’s house.

Hank dialed as he continued to watch the screen. “Ma. The notepad on the counter. Use a crayon or a pencil or something to see if you can read what was written on it last.”

“Hang on, let me find a pencil.” There was a long pause. “There are all these letters and numbers down the side… then the word ‘beautiful’ at the bottom with some numbers written under it.”

Hank bent his head in a moment of gratitude to the universe. “Read them to me,” he said to his mother.

His next call was to Chip Vandermead, though Hank hated to call him with Melody not doing well.  He answered on the first ring. Hank told him it was the Leopold Cipher and that the keyword was beautiful. It took Chip only moments to plug the information into his computer.

I AM NOT DEAD

I CAN PROVE MY INNOCENCE

BUT NEED YOUR HELP

MEET ME AT UNCLE LEOS

Chip was even able to cross-reference McDowell with Leo, pulling up several hits in the case file of one Leo Basinski, an immigrant from Uzkapostan whose last known address was just outside of Washington, D.C.

 ~~~

The highway was virtually deserted, given the lateness of the hour and the holiday.  Hank made his eyes wide and blinked several times to say focused on the road.  His mind kept going back to the hotel room in Jacksonville, with a body in the bathtub that someone now wanted him to believe
was not
Commander John McDowell.

Why had been so quick to assume it was his body in the motel room in the first place? Without positive identification, it was a bad judgment call on his part to have jumped to that conclusion, no matter how obvious it seemed at the time.

Sloppy. That’s what it was.

One fact remained. Commander McDowell was involved in this case somehow. He might even have been the one to shoot the John Doe in the bathroom, or set the fire. Maybe both. And who was the dead man, if not the commander himself?

Hank thought of Julie, no doubt elated by her father’s miraculous rise from his assumed grave. For her sake, he hoped McDowell was innocent of any wrongdoing and would find a way back into her life.

He doubted it, but he hoped.

A black and white checkered flag on the GPS screen showed he was getting close to his destination.

Protocol said he should have called Barstow about Leo, but now that the admiral was flying blind without that GPS, Hank wanted to keep him in the dark. No way in hell was he tipping his hand until he knew for sure Barstow wasn’t a threat to Julie.

 ~~~

Leo wasn’t really her uncle. Julie vaguely remembered him from her childhood as a short, dark-haired man with glasses, who wore too much cologne. Their family would have brunch at Leo’s restaurant every month or so, with the occasional dinner at his home.

Her eyes scanned the row of brownstones, many decorated with Christmas lights for the holiday. The women walked in the road until they reached a shoveled driveway, allowing them access to the sidewalk without stepping through snow. Several doors down, a particularly frightening iron gargoyle sat atop a stone pillar, just as it had in Julie’s childhood.

“I always hated that thing,” she said, reaching it and pausing to consider its gruesome mouth and fangs.

“It really isn’t befitting the architecture, is it?” asked Gwen.

The women climbed the steps to the door and Julie knocked, exchanging a nervous glance with Gwen as she did.

“Maybe no one’s home,” said Gwen.

Julie shook her head. “I can hear the TV.”

“Knock louder.”

At Julie’s uncomfortable look, Gwen stepped forward and pounded on the door. A moment later, a bald man with thick glasses and a hunched gait opened it. He stood before them, staring at Julie for too long without speaking.

“I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Julie, John McDowell’s daughter.”

“I know.” Said the old man, coughing loudly. It was a thick sound, and it made Gwen grimace.

“Is my father here, Leo?”

He glared at Gwen.

“This is my aunt, Gwen Trueblood.”

Leo shook his head.

“Why not?” asked Julie.

He opened his mouth to speak and coughed several times instead. When he could manage, he said, “Just you.”

“It’s okay,” said Gwen, turning to face Julie. “You can do this without me.”

Julie nodded, taking strength from her aunt’s words.

“I’ll be in the car.”

Leo waited until Gwen was back inside the vehicle before he stepped back for Julie to enter.

The small room was stale with the smell of boiled vegetables and cigar smoke, its blinds closed to the outside. An overly loud, outdated television played
Wheel of Fortune
.

“In the basement,” he said, leading the way through a tiny dining room with a bowl of fake fruit and a built-in corner hutch.

Leo opened a narrow door, gesturing for her to go ahead.

The stairway was poorly lit, and Julie held on to the low handrail as she navigated the steep steps.  Leo closed the door behind her, cutting the meager light in half and making her start. Her feet stopped moving as she gave her eyes time to adjust to the darkness. There was a smell of damp earth and something foul that Julie couldn’t place. She began to descend again, the temperature dropping with each step down.

As she slowly made her way to the basement, she couldn’t help but feel she was headed underground like the damned. This was not a place of resurrection, fresh and new, but a place of desperation and despair. She realized with fear that her father might not be here at all, and resisted the urge to turn back.

In her mind she saw a picture of her father, dead in a motel room. She hadn’t been able to really believe he was dead until this very moment, when she was just steps away from the promise of him alive.

What the hell’s the matter with me?

Ahead of her, the staircase ended on a square wooden landing. A wall of packed earth faced her, a thick invasive root visible in the densely packed clay. Julie neared the bottom step and her head lowered enough to see the basement. Time itself stopped moving, the air around her fixed and still.

A slick smile spread across his lips. “I knew you’d come,” he said.

Chapter 9

Gwen sat in the green minivan staring at the light over Leo’s door. The bulb was yellow, making his doorway standout from every other on the street in an odd display of color. Another person would have thought nothing of that light, but it bothered Gwen like an ice cube that doesn’t float to the top of the glass.

Something isn’t right inside that house.

She considered knocking back on that door and attempting to talk her way past Leo, but her gut told her to stay put—at least for now. She tapped her foot with uncharacteristic nervous energy and waited, whether for Julie to return or for the decision to go in after her, she didn’t know.

Her mind wandered over her beloved niece. Gwen was fiercely protective of the woman she had become, and knew Julie’s heart was fragile where her father was concerned. John McDowell had never worked especially hard to spare his daughter pain, and it was with great effort that Gwen had kept her dislike of the man a secret from Julie.

She remembered with lucidity the teenager she had taken in when John abandoned his daughter. Gwen had been on her own emotional journey after David’s death, unsure at the time if she could provide the girl with what she would need to heal.

Julie had been devastated, grief for her mother still oozing and raw, before her father left her as well. In his wake, a formal investigation followed that soon focused exclusively on her as a potential colluder, or at the very least, a threat to national security.

Gwen stood steadfast by her side, fending off Navy investigators and media reporters like wolves at the door, working to help Julie keep from shutting down emotionally. Teaching her to trust her own instincts, rely on herself again. Together they spent hours just talking, often walking through the Vermont hills that surrounded the farmhouse.

On one of their walks, a year after Julie’s arrival, they came across a mother deer and her fawns grazing in an open meadow. Gwen’s big yellow dog was grazing in the grass alongside them.

“Well, would you look at that,” said Gwen. “It looks like Zeke has made some new friends.”

The women watched the scene in silence for some moments.

“It’s like us,” said Julie. “You’re the deer, and I’m the dog.”

Gwen tilted her head. “What do you mean?”