Taking Liberty (39 page)

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I didn’t recognize the shorter of the two. I was hoping it would turn out to be Cornsilk. It wasn’t. He was a wiry punk with beady eyes and bad teeth. Looked Russian – if there was such a look. No idea what part he played in this charade, other than the fact he had a snubnosed pistol pointing at me. But I knew the taller one. He had the mincemeat face and gangly physique of a middle-aged bare-knuckles fighter. Two hundred pounds of gristly muscle and gnarly knuckles.

“Fillmore?”

It was all I could do not to gape like an idiot.

“Brother,” Fillmore acknowledged with a nod. “This is one for the books, isn’t it? I should have known it was you causing all that commotion down there.”

His face. His voice. Definitely Trenton Fillmore. But he had no right being here – not after being shanked to death in Springfield. No right being anywhere other than in a morgue.

He nodded at Engel. “You’re wounded, brother. What happened?”

“An altercation. Quinn killed Locklear and fed Sergei to my dogs. Tried killing me, too. Guess I took a through-and-through in the shoulder.”

Fillmore’s gaze returned to me. “Gabe? Really? Such violence is beneath you. Shame on you, brother.”

“You’re supposed to be dead,” I growled.

It was a stupid statement – borne from stupidity – and everyone in the room knew it.

“I’m supposed to be many things: an accountant, a fighter, a lover. Dead isn’t one of them.”

“Maybe not yet.”

That won me a half-smile. “Somehow, I don’t think you’re in any position to make threats.”

“Let her go.”

“Then what? We all live happily ever after, give each other hugs and kisses and depart as friends? Promise to meet up next year for catch-ups?” He shook his head. “Let’s be honest here, brother, I’m never going to be on your Christmas card list. You and me, we’re from different worlds. No amount of brotherly love is going to change that. Me, I’m a realist. You, you’re a romanticist. And that marriage ain’t never gonna work out.”

I was thinking furiously. Keen to keep him talking. Buy time while I figured out exactly how to extricate myself and Rae from the mess I’d got us in.

“So why bring us here, Fillmore? If you wanted us both dead it would have been quicker letting Cornsilk finish what he started. What’s the score with you two, anyway? You make lousy bedfellows.”

Fillmore dismissed my comment with the flap of his hand. “Gary Cornsilk is incidental. An annoyance. Let’s not waste what little time we have left talking about that fly in the ointment. Let’s talk about us, this. You’re the great Celebrity Cop, brother; I’m sure you can conjure up a better line of questioning than why I brought you to Alaska. Which, by the way, is to kill you. Both of you. You left me with no choice where that’s concerned.”

“We all have choices, Fillmore. Our choices define us. They make us who we are.”

He snickered. “Textbook Springfield. How nice. If that’s true, all I can say is you’ve made a great deal of bad ones in your time, brother.” He nodded at Engel.

Engel twisted the knife, forcing me to my knees.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“What’s the alternative? We all go to prison for a very long time, some of us to death row, while you two love birds fly off into the sunset? This is the end of the road, brother. There’s no way out of this for you. See what I mean, brother, about your grip on reality being tenuous at best?”

Fillmore’s Russian comrade kept his snubnosed pistol on me, came over and slapped a manacle around my wrist, effectively anchoring me to the iron loop in the floor.

Staked to the boards, like Rae, with Rae.

Immediately, I reached out and grabbed her hand. “Stupid question: you okay?”

She nodded, sharply, and I could see she wasn’t. There was dried blood in her nostrils and on one edge of the duct tape. More signs of bruising near her hairline. I squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, but I could feel the weakness in her grip. Feel her shake deep inside. Either Fillmore or Snakeskin had slapped her around. Worked her over. I made a vow to do the same to them, and worse.

“I’ll get us out of this, Rae. I promise.”

She didn’t look like she believed me. Not sure I did either.

“Fillmore, you know me. We share a connection.”

“You mean I stopped the crazy ass natives from taking a bite out of your crazy ass? And why? To stave off the boredom, mostly. That’s right, brother. It was all about the entertainment for me. From day one I knew all about you and your hidden agenda. I knew who you were and why you were. It was fun, playing along with your game. But make no mistake – that was the extent of our connection.”

“The Bureau knows where I am. They keep track of all our cell phones. They’ll be here any minute. You won’t get away with this.”

It was a pathetic attempt to sound fierce. It failed.

Fillmore still had the snicker Scotch-taping his lips. “But I already have gotten away with it, brother. As far as the authorities are concerned, I died in the Fed Med on Christmas Eve. Apparently, I’m due for a warm send-off in the New Year – or at least some unfortunate soul is. Cremation destroys all the DNA, you know. No one any the wiser.” He smiled. My friend from the Fed Med, alive and well, smiling through his false teeth. “Who would have thought we’d end up here? We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? No doubt you’re dying to find out how I came back from the dead.”

I’d already figured most of it out.

Fillmore – or his employers – hadn’t bought the services of Jefferson and Bridges to kill Fillmore. They’d pressured them to fake Fillmore’s shanking. Forced the prison guards to turn the other cheek while Fillmore had set the scene. O’Dell was a part of it. They’d made the prison doctor falsify the paperwork afterward. Maybe had him smuggle in a bag of blood beforehand, to make the scene look convincing. O’Dell had shipped out Fillmore’s body, but switched it with another on the way to the Greene County Medical Examiner. Probably a down-and-out lookalike with a fresh and fatal knife wound to the stomach. Jefferson had rented out the motel room in advance, as a planned halfway house. Somewhere Fillmore could ditch his prison-issue khakis and take stock. Then, to cover everything up, Fillmore had blackmailed Jefferson and Bridges to kill O’Dell – maybe because he’d got jumpy and was having an attack of conscience. O’Dell had to be silenced, permanently. Only a matter of time before Jefferson and Bridges followed suit, which they had.

“I know the how,” I said through grinding teeth. “It’s the why I don’t get.”

Fillmore spread his hands. “Take a look around you, brother. This is the why. This place and the business we ran through it. Thanks to your friends at the Justice Department, it’s been on hold since my detention. Meanwhile, we’ve lost millions of dollars, including some very lucrative contracts.”

“The human trafficking ring,” I realized. “This is your base of operations. And you’re the brains behind it.”

It was one of those dawning moments when the smoke clears to reveal the wasteland and the loss suffered. Fillmore had hid in plain sight. Fooling not just me but the rest of Stone’s team. The Bureau had been peeking in the wrong Dumpster from the start.

Trenton Fillmore was a fake.

“I can’t take all the credit,” he said. “There has been a recent change in management – for the better. With this captain now at the helm, our ship will soon be back on course.”

Ferrying sexual slaves into the country.

Everything was unfolding in my mind. Pieces of the puzzle interlocking to form an uncomfortable picture of Russians shipping abducted teenage girls over the Bering Sea. Maybe meeting up with Engel’s motor yacht in international waters. Girls and dollars changing hands. Fillmore and his cronies using Engel’s remote motel-sized mansion house to imprison the girls while Engel used his medical experience to keep them in good health for prospective buyers. Locklear keeping the peace and the rest of the Kodiak PD out of their hair. A simple setup running like a high-end sports car. Everyone paid handsomely for their troubles and everyone happy. Everyone except for the kidnapped girls, that is.

Then the mass grave had been discovered by chance out in the Santa Ana Mountains, with dead girls found in varying stages of decomposition. The FBI had been brought in, begun an investigation. Stone’s department taking the lead.
Operation Freebird
had poked its nose into Fillmore’s business. He’d reached out to a disaffected federal employee – the spy inside Stone’s camp; someone like Lee Bishop – and made whatever deal he had to use him as an information channel. With the mole’s help, Fillmore had kept the operation one step ahead of the Feds. Then the FBI had caught a break: they’d somehow linked Fillmore’s accountancy practice to major funds being laundered through the sale of the Russian girls to rich white guys in and around the LA area. They’d picked him up on a technicality and interrogated him about his employers. Fillmore had kept his lips sealed. Stone had come up with the plan to install me at the Fed Med, then detain Fillmore there for evaluation. Given me the task of jimmying the information out of him.  

I shook my head. “They say it’s the accountants who run the companies. It must have come as a big blow when they picked you up for tax evasion.”

“Let’s just say, it was more than a minor inconvenience.”

“You thought you were untouchable,” I said, keeping him talking. “Then your FBI insider got wind of the Akhiok homicide and Stone’s plan to have me investigate it. It must have messed up your plans: my imminent departure to the very place from where you were conducting your illegal enterprise.”

“Brother, my lawyers were working on having me out by the New Year.”

“But news of the FBI’s interest in Akhiok forced your hand. I guess you have Cornsilk to thank for putting you under the microscope. That’s the one thing I don’t understand: you and Cornsilk. Sounds like a marriage made in hell. Speaking of the devil, where is he? Where’s that milky-eyed bastard?”

Fillmore nodded to his Slavic sidekick. The Russian went over to the mattresses stacked on their sides against the wall. Pulled the first one down to the floor to reveal a burned body seated in the lotus position. It was the same crisped corpse I’d seen on the examination table in Engel’s clinic –
my son!
Engel had brought George’s remains out here and stuffed them unceremoniously in the corner of the room.

I felt my stomach draw into a knot and adrenalized rage surge through my veins.

“I know what he did, Fillmore. Stop playing games with me. Tell Cornsilk to get in here.”

“That is Cornsilk.”

I baulked. Saw Fillmore’s indifferent expression, and knew from it that he was deadly serious.

Didn’t make any sense.

I stared at the blackened body, at the cracked flesh and red-marbled skin, at the milky white eyes staring blankly from lidless sockets on a melted face. One noticeably whiter than the other.