The Trees Beyond the Grass (A Cole Mouzon Thriller) (15 page)

CHAPTER 40

BACK AT THE
HOTEL, Cole jumped sideways on the bed and closed his eyes for a second.
What does the FBI want?
Finally he reached into his pocket and pulled out the small slip of paper his sister had given him, flicked it open and read the number. He dialed it slowly, pausing before he hit the last number. The phone rang several times without an answer. Finally, a recording came on. “You have reached Agent David Leas of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. Please leave your name and number and I will return your call promptly.” The ‘beep’ came quickly and Cole had to clear his throat before talking. It hung up on him.
Shit.
Now he felt stupid, like a boy who calls a girl but is too nervous to speak. Worse yet, he felt it made him look
guilty.
Guilty of what, was the question. Perhaps the movie execs had discovered that bootleg movie he downloaded last week.
I didn’t watch it, promise!
He punched in Leas’ number again and caught the beep with a clear throat, leaving his name and number, inviting him to call when he finally landed in Charleston.
Well, the waiting is sure going to suck
.

Cole turned back into the bed. He didn’t have to wait long. Fifteen minutes after Cole’s message, Agent Leas returned his call. He was finally in town. When questioned, he refused to speak over the phone about the reason for his calls, wanting to meet in person. They arranged to meet at six p.m. across the street at City Lights Coffee, the hipster coffee place Cole had passed by earlier. That gave Cole thirty minutes to prepare himself for the likely interrogation.

CHAPTER 41

COLE WALKED INTO
City Lights and admired the retro décor of old jars and 50s mugs. It reminded him of hipster spots in Denver and Portland. He had no clue who he was looking for. Agent Leas said he would find Cole, as he knew what he looked like.
Great, the FBI has my pic,
ran through Cole’s head when that was said. Not a surprise, but still… The recent news of the NSA tapping phones and internet was no big surprise to him. He had long figured that anything typed, mailed, or spoken over the air was fair game whether they wanted to admit it or not. It didn’t mean it didn’t still make him uncomfortable.

“A cappuccino, please.” The tattooed cashier turned to the machine behind her to make his order when he heard his name spoken. He turned and was greeted by a man, maybe six feet tall, average build with creamed-coffee skin. He was older, perhaps early forties. “Agent Leas?” Cole twisted his head up at a slight angle as he spoke.

“Yes, David Leas. Thank you for your time, Mr. Mouzon.”

“Of course. Would you like anything before we sit down?” Cole turned back as the tattooed girl was returning with his coffee.

“Coffee, black for me.” Cole placed and paid for the order. He never minded picking up the tab, especially for servicemen and officers. After collecting Leas’ coffee, they found a small couch and chair in the corner with a retro coffee table between them. Taking opposite sides, they sat.

As Cole was getting settled on the old red velvet couch, Leas inquired, “Mouzon? Is that French?” He was ‘creating rapport,’ a 101 trick for cross-examination that Cole himself used in his cases. Small talk typically permits a witness to relax and spill their guts, good and bad, or at least make conflicting statements.

Cole nodded his head after taking a sip. “It is. French Huguenot to be exact. My family came from Ville de Mouzon during the persecution in France, back in the late 1600s, and settled in Charleston. Ultimately, they possessed large parts of South Carolina, with a great-grandfather or uncle mapping the state so well, the map was used until just last century.”

“Oh, wow, so your family had been here some time?”

“Indeed, Agent. They fought with the Swamp Fox, as in the movie
The Patriot,
in the Revolutionary war, and to some extent in the Civil War. Though, much like my French pedigree, that property was lost some time ago. My dad was a poor farmer’s kid. To listen to him tell of seeing chickens through the living room floor is something to hear.” Cole’s words were crisp as he spoke very formally. He wasn’t willing to get casual with Leas.

“Huh, but you came out okay. I mean, you’re a lawyer right? And a good one, from what I hear.”

Cole gave a short laugh. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I like poor rumors like that. But, yes, I did come out okay. I have a great family. Now, Agent, are you going to tell me why you’ve flown to Charleston to interrupt my vacation, or what?” He’d had enough idle chatter. It was time to discover the agent’s interests.

“Mr. Mouzon, I’m here to talk to you about Tony Patrick. How do you know him?”

“Who?” Cole’s faced squinted into an obvious question mark.

“Tony Patrick, in Dallas, Texas.” Leas patted a short stack of files laying beside him to emphasis his statement.

“Agent, I have no clue who you’re talking about.”

“Are you Facebook friends with him?” Agent Leas played dumb, knowing that the status on Patrick’s account in Dallas said they weren’t.

Cole reflected, mining his head for any reference to a Patrick. Images of his account flickered across his eyes. “I’m not seeing it, but I can’t say for sure. I mean, it’s possible. I have several ‘Facebook friends’ that I have never met, have never talked to. Hold on a second…” Cole took out his phone and opened the Facebook app. As he typed in P-A-T, it auto-filled to Leslie Patmeric, nothing else. “It looks like I’m not.” Cole looked up at Agent Leas. “Let me pull up this guy’s profile picture and see if I recognize him…” Several ‘Tony Patrick’ listings appeared. Scrolling through them, Cole said, “Nope. Not anyone I’ve met.”

“Hmm, you have never met any of those guys?”

Cole shook his head. “Sorry, Agent. If I have, I certainly don’t recall, and it wouldn’t have been anytime soon. I haven’t been to Dallas in a couple of years. Why do you ask? Did he say he knew me?”

“No, no he didn’t say that, but he isn’t saying very much anymore. He’s dead.”

Until that point Cole had been coasting. He was an interrogator himself, and little shook him.
But, dead?
That got his attention.
Shit, shit, shit… who are my alibis? Ann will suck at this.

Cole choked out a few more words. “Excuse me? And how am I involved in that?” His eyes tightened again as he waited for the answer.

Leas leaned in some. “Well, it seems your profile was open on his computer at or immediately after the time he was killed.” The term
killed
stuck in Cole’s head.

“You mean to tell me that Mr. Patrick was Facebook-stalking me when he was killed?”

“No. Not exactly. We actually think the killer accessed your profile
after
killing Mr. Patrick.”

Cole’s mouth dropped. “What! Who the hell would want to look at
my
profile? I mean, I’m not a Facebook whore. It’s pretty rare that I post.” Cole was getting anxious and confused. The idea of some killer checking out his profile was unacceptable. “Do I need to call my credit card company or something? I mean, are they trying to steal my identity?” A much darker possibility had crossed his mind but he was hoping it wasn’t true.

“Mr. Mouzon, there was also a travel site pulled up and…”

Cole’s mind raced.
Shit, shit, shit…

“Whoever it was checked flights to Denver the same night Mr. Patrick was murdered.”

…SHIT.
Cole covered his eyes in disbelief of what he was hearing. “Officer… Sorry,
Agent
, are you telling me that a murderer is in Denver looking for me?” He had no clue why he whispered the last few words.

Agent Leas leaned across the coffee table, his coffee still in both hands. “Mr. Mouzon, we can’t rule that out.
And
… we can’t rule out that they found out you are here in Charleston. We’ve pulled the last-minute bookings between Dallas and Denver, Dallas and here, from the day of the murder till today; and we will keep monitoring those until we figure out where the person is. That should help us narrow suspects in that murder.”

Cole took a big swallow of his cappuccino and quickly realized it was still a bit too hot. The roof of his mouth blistered.
Great!
But the distraction helped him calm down. The mental wall went tightly up. A cold, unemotional state passed over his body. His brain went into silent overdrive, thoughtless but humming, ready to process the next piece of information it was given.

It was a coping mechanism he had always possessed; from what, he had no clue. He once again envisioned all his personal feelings, emotions, and thoughts being crammed into the crevice from which they had seeped and it ‘cleared the room’ for his cold, analytical side to work highly efficiently. As a lawyer it worked perfectly for Cole to ‘zone in’ on a case and its facts, which he then could release when he got home. But at times it had become hard to release, leaving him isolated from everything around him…trapped by his own protector.

“Agent, you being here tells me there is more than one body. I did criminal defense and represented a few alleged murderers, including a serial murderer or two, in my day. The FBI thinks there is a serial murderer out here, doesn’t it?” Cole’s words were parsed like some newscaster…too formal for the setting.

He knew, contrary to popular belief, serial murderers rarely kill across state lines. They have a territory or ‘comfort zone’ defined by an anchor point, usually their home, place of work, or another similar place. When they do kill in multiple states, it is usually a product of confidence through past success or from fear of being caught. And when they do, the FBI steps in. Otherwise, the local police handle it all with maybe some advice from the FBI.

Agent Leas looked down and then into Cole’s eyes. “I am here to make sure that there are no more bodies. Do you get that? And that means I need your help.”

“What can I do? Until just now I had never really heard of this Patrick guy. Who are the others? Can you connect them to me in some way?” Cole waved his arms in frustration as he asked.

Agent Leas shook his head. “Directly, no. But, well…let me ask you this. Do you have a scar on your right lower back?”

CHAPTER 42

H
OW DID HE
know about my scar?
Cole was still staring at Agent Leas, running this question through his mind. He put his large mug down on the coffee table and moved his right hand around his back to touch it.

Speaking in skeptical words, Cole asked, “Why do you ask?”

“From your look and the fact that you just checked it with your hand I’ll take that as a yes. The others, all three, had scars in the same spot. I’m going to take a wild guess as say it’s small, maybe an inch high and wide, with what appears to be a ‘P’ inside the box. Am I right?”

There was a long pause before Cole answered. “No. Mine’s a large gash, about the same size as you mentioned, but there is no box. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. I was playing with cousins at my Granny’s. We were horse playing on a tall pile of top-soil for her garden and I fell against her joggling board.”

“Her what?”

“It’s a Charleston thing; think yoga ball from the 1800s. A very long, flimsy board suspended at two ends, painted Charleston green. You sit and bounce on it. I think it turned into some dating tool or something; but like most things Charleston, it sticks around because, well… it’s old and we like old. Granny’s had a broken corner, so when I fell against it, it cut my back. But why are you asking about my scar?”

“Mr. Mouzon…”

“Please, call me Cole.” Cole felt weak in permitting the Agent to call him by his first name. It went against his rules of engagement. But he justified it since the guy appeared to be here to actually save his life.

“Thank you… Cole, do you remember that happening?”

“Well, no. I was like maybe one and a half, two when that happened. I can’t recall that far back. But my mom can certainly tell you all about it. From what I understand, she about killed my cousins and my Granny switched them good from what I recall.” Cole’s childhood is where his memory failed him. He had tried to access it many times as a teen. But, it was just black until he was maybe three or four. He could never remember a time Ava wasn’t his mother. The only image he had of Libby Mouzon, his birth mother, was that of her picture in an old gold frame in his grandmother’s home.

“Mr… Cole, the other three, they had similar scars. None of them knew each other and they came from different parts of the country. I read some files on the plane that indicate, well… They indicate all three were kidnapped somewhere between the ages of one and two and disappeared for up to a week before being found. When they were found, they had a scar, the same scar you have, though it sounds like yours was removed.”

Cole shook his head in disbelief. “Dude, are you fucking crazy? I wasn’t kidnapped as a kid.” This was more than he had ever expected when he scheduled this coffee date, and he was just trying to digest it. He leaned back into the couch as Leas turned slightly to pull something out of a pack of folders held together by a red rubber band. He withdrew a folder with some Post-it flags and passed it to Cole, who immediately speed-read through the pages.

Just pages in, Leas added, “Cole, you
were
kidnapped when you were two. It’s all in there. It took some digging at the Mount Pleasant Police Department by our guys, but, at least from what it says in there, you weren’t injured by horseplay. Someone snatched your mother and you and you both disappeared for five days. Like the others, you had been branded with a ‘P.’”

Cole’s head hurt.
What was he saying? Kidnapped?
But he had no memory of that…just blackness.

Leas kept going. “The scary thing, if it can get any scarier, is that your mother and you, and the other kid, appear to have been the first kidnapped, branded, and then released across the country between 1982 and 1983. Your mother was tortured and died, but only after escaping with you and one of the boys. In all the other cases, the parent or parents were killed, slaughtered. And it was only here, with you, that more than one kid was taken at the same time.”

Kidnapping, branding, release
…
escape.
The words circled in Cole’s head like flies. No amount of mental swatting would knock them down so he could think. He placed his hands on either side of his head, looked down, and closed his eyes in deep thought. The wall was partially down and he was trying to push it back up.

Agent Leas was patient, letting Cole take it all in. He had been here before in other cases and learned that the best approach was a slow one.

Cole’s steely persona, momentarily shaken, was back. He looked up and placed his hands on his knees. “So, what are we going to do about this? From the sounds of things someone is out to collect what escaped thirty, thirty-one years ago? Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to go down like that. Point me in his direction and then get out of the way.” Cole’s anger was seeping out.

“Hold up, Mr. Mou… Cole. The worst thing you can do is go off half-cocked and seek out this person. From what we know so far she acts slowly and either watches or studies before she acts. I doubt she has had enough time to get here and do that sufficiently to feel comfortable acting. Comfort is a big deal to these fucked-in-the-heads. So, let’s just think about this. Have you noticed any suspicious people, has anything suspicious happened lately?”

COLE LIKED HIS
idea better. He had represented enough criminals to know how to take someone out successfully and get away with it. But for now he would agree to work with Agent Leas. Cole rested his chin on his left fist, which was being supported by his knee, and shook his head. Unfolding his fist and running his fingers down his five o’clock shadow, Cole thought harder. His mind flicked through images of the last few days like album covers in iTunes, each hour a different image that he could process in microseconds. His photographic memory wasn’t always perfect, but if he paid any amount of attention to something, that image was locked in his brain for life. Great for arguing treatises and law, tragic consequences for his personal life. Being right rarely resulted in the best outcome. So he had learned to play dumb,
a lot
.

He said ‘she.’ His scan of memories uncovered nothing significant. “No. I haven’t picked up anything. Can you tell me anything about the others, I mean as to their final day or days that might be playing out with me right now? No, wait!” Cole remembered the note that he thought Ann had sent. He turned to his right hip and started patting. Agent Leas was getting interested in what Cole was feeling for as he dug into his front pocket. “Is this related? I found it in my hotel room this morning. It just says… SHIT! It says, ‘I’m before you.’ He’s here, Agent, isn’t he? He’s here and has been in my room. Admit it. You’ve seen this note before. And, a woman?”

Leas let out a deep sigh and then looked up, having seen inside the linen letter just handed to him. “Yeah. Both victims had similar notes. And video from the second confirms that the last person to be seen with Mr. Patrick was a woman…blonde.” Cole rubbed his head; it was throbbing as Leas spoke.

He took a deep breath. “So is this the sign that she is about to act? What’s the M.O.?”

“Honestly, we have no clue. You say you got this one this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, from what we’ve been able to determine, it was only at the time of death that both of the previous notes were delivered to the prior vics, so this is a change.”

“What the hell? So I’m being played with? I’m supposed to wait like I’m in
The Ring
or something, anticipating my death?
FUCK YOU
!” The whole café went silent and looked at Cole for leaning his head back and howling that out in public. The tattooed waitress gave him a ‘eat shit’ look and then went back to wiping the counter.
Clearly it wasn’t impressive to her.

“I’m putting police protection on you. And I know you’re here only for vacation, but I don’t recommend you go back to Denver. You’re already here. I’m here. And it appears that Charleston may have been where this all started.”

Cole rubbed his eyes; all this had worn him out. “What do you want me to do, Agent?”

“Where are you staying tonight?”

“I’m staying next door in the Omni. The killer clearly already knows that since he…I mean, she, left me a note.”

“You can’t stay there. Can you stay with family tonight? We can sneak you out tonight and she will lose your trail for a while until we can figure this out.”

“Agent, I can’t expose my family to this. If this crazy is coming to kill me, I don’t want my family in the fire.”

“You have to trust me; it would just be for a night or so. Your sister is a cop, isn’t she? A pretty damn good one from what I’ve heard so far. Stay with her.”

“She has my nephew; that is the worst option.”

“Cole, she’s already agreed. I talked to her before walking in here. I didn’t fill her in on all this. I just let her believe what she had already thought, that some ex-client was on the loose and your name popped up on a hit list. She is cool with it and you are NOT staying in that hotel again.”

Cole crawled off the couch, whispering “Fuck you,” in Leas’ ear as he passed by on the way to the counter with his empty mug. He knew that if his sister had gotten involved he had already lost this argument. But it didn’t mean he had to like it.

FROM THE GUCCI
store across the street Poinsett had watched it all, and she didn’t like what she had seen. The FBI agent from Dallas was here, in Charleston, and was clearly trying to mess up her plans. She’d wanted a challenge, and, more importantly to let the Taker know, but she had gotten more than she had planned for.

Whatever he told Mouzon, it wasn’t taken well. And Mouzon had shown the guy her note. It wasn’t that she didn’t think an investigator would be looking into her vics, but that he got a jump on her and frustrated the hunt pissed her off.
Make lemonade out of lemons.
She’d wanted a challenge and it looked like she had just been given one.