Thomas Prescott Superpack (2 page)

Chapter 3

I opened the door to the large Philadelphia apartment to the distinct ring of my cell phone. I extracted my cell from under the middle, olive drab, sofa cushion and flipped it open, “Prescott.”

“Is this Detective Prescott?” Came a harsh deluge.

“That’s
ex
-detective Prescott.” At least according to the three documents I had to sign, initial, and lick.  

The voice softened a bit. “Right. This is Charles Mangrove. I got your number from Dwight Stully.”

Dwight Stully had been my chief at the Seattle Police Department and was still my main contact with the world of law enforcement. The name Mangrove sounded familiar and I hoped I was talking to the long-lost, twice-removed, third-cousin, of the Mangrove I suspected. “Any relation to the Charles Mangrove who happens to be Deputy Director of the FBI?”

“One in the same. One in the same.”

Oh, boy.

Charles continued, “Listen, I’m calling in regards to these killings up in Maine. Are you familiar with them?”

I only knew of two killings, but from my experience,
them
, was an overtone for three or more. If I were smart, I would have hung up the phone. But I wasn’t smart. Cunning, yes. Deft, sure. Competent, probably. But smart, well, the jury was still out on that one. I said, “Sure, the two gals who got hacked to shit. What’s this have to do with the FBI?”

“You mean three gals. This morning they found a third. She was killed on an island off the coast of Maine called Campobello. Campobello is Canadian territory.”

“So why isn’t the Royal Caribbean Mariachi Band taking over?”

“You mean the Royal Canadian Mounted Police?”

I guess Charles took my silence as some sort of nod and persevered, “Actually, it’s Interpol’s jurisdiction.”

I was confused, but I was used to being confused when working with the FBI. “You skipped the part about how it landed in the hands of the Far Below-average Intelligence Agency.”

He laughed. “Dwight told me you were a smart ass.”

Cunning-ass, get it straight. “Yeah, well it keeps people on their toes, and it keeps me from killing myself. Send old Dwight my regards next time you see him.”

“Will do. I’ll tell you how the case landed in our lap. Interpol has their hands tied with about fifteen hundred terrorist threats and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about a brother who hacked up his sister and a couple other girls. They think they’re pawning this off on us, but we need the publicity.”

The big picture was starting to come into focus and it wasn’t a Picasso. “And you’re calling me to get my tailor’s number?”

“Right. Listen, we want to hire you to augment the investigation. Glease told me a little about you and it seems to fit with what I’ve heard; you’re a prick, but you’re a smart fucking prick.”

Cunning fucking prick. Say it with me.

I asked Chuck, “Is that who I’ll be working with?”

“Yep. You’ll be working directly under him.”

I didn’t like working under anyone, but if I had to, there were worse people to work under than Wade Gleason. “Who else is on the team?”

“Guy named Todd Gregory. Young guy. Graduated number one from Georgetown a couple years ago.”

“Sounds like my bio ten years ago, and look how I turned out.”

He laughed again and said, “You’ll have FBI status and the government will pay you a healthy stipend.”

“First off, I don’t want FBI status. I have a reputation to uphold. And secondly, what exactly is the government’s idea of a healthy stipend?”

“Five hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.”

Five hundred magoombas a day. Their balls must be deeper in the meat grinder than I thought. I said, “You can call me an FBI consultant.”

“Deal. You have a fax?”

I rattled off my fax number and Charles said, “I’m sending you the information packet and autopsy reports the Bangor Police Department forwarded me from the first two murders.”

Sure he was. I would get about a fifth of what the Bangor Police Department sent the FBI. The Feds are an odd bunch. They recruit you to help them out, then go to great lengths to ensure you don’t know jack squat. I’d always hated when the suits came in and stripped a case from me and I inquired, “Who had the baton before it was passed to you idiots?”

He laughed again. Wow, three for three. If only my dates went as well. Charles said, “I talked with the Bangor medical examiner, some lady named Dodds. She was understandably upset when she found out we were stripping the case. We could use a feminine eye and her forensic background will be incomparable, so we decided to keep her on as part of the task force. Part of our new image.”

New image, my ass. I cut to the chase, literally. “When does my flight leave?”

It was raining and my doorman, an old black gent named Hale, and I huddled under the apartment building’s long balustrade. Ten minutes later, Hale had successfully hailed me a cab. I can just picture Hale’s reaction to the results of his job aptitude test when they told him his occupational dreams were limited to doorman or weatherman. Nevertheless, Hale threw my bag in the trunk and wished me a safe trip.

The cabby delivered me to Philadelphia International in less than ten minutes and I rewarded him with a crisp fifty. He seemed quite appreciative and I was wished a safe trip, yet again. The woman at the American Airline’s desk asked to see my driver’s license, handed me a ticket, and I was wished a safe trip for a third time. I checked my back for a sign that read,
Going on Unsafe Trip
, but it must have fallen off.

I walked to the terminal and handed my ticket to a computer with light brown hair and a large mainframe. The computer directed me through black curtains to a nicely cushioned window seat. Holy fucking hand baskets, the Federal boys shelled out for first-class. If it wasn’t an off day in my rotation, I would have shit my pants.

I’d flown first-class on one other occasion and I remember noticing they kept the best looking flight attendants up here and the gargoyles and gays back in coach. A twenty-something knockout, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes, appeared from thin air and asked if I would enjoy a preflight cocktail.

A preflight cocktail?
I never knew such a thing existed. I ordered a whiskey sour and my flight attendant theory placated, I extracted the fax documents from my attaché case.

My drink came and I flirted shamelessly with the stewardess (her name was August but she was born in November, talk about irony), until she broke away to do the preflight announcements. A few minutes later we were in the air and Manhattan was just a postage stamp on a postcard. August jumped on the intercom and informed us we were cruising at an altitude of 31,000 feet. I was going to apprise her I was cruising at 31,000 feet, 8 ½ inches, but I didn’t feel like getting sent to coach.

The flight was only about an hour and fifteen minutes and I needed to get cracking if I were going to know my one-fifth backwards and forwards. I read all twenty fax pages and noticed the autopsy photos were mysteriously MIA. I’d been on the case for all of one hour and twelve minutes and the Feds were already flaking out on me. They probably figured sending me first-class would cancel out their lack of geniality. Dickheads.

The gist of the reports was as follows: two women had been raped, beaten, turned into jigsaw puzzles, and their eyes taken as door prizes. The most intriguing nugget was the first victim, Ingrid Grayer, had been pregnant, and the DNA showed the father was the brother, Tristen Grayer. Tristen was the prime suspect, whom of which the
New York Times
had dubbed, “The Mainiac.” There was a small write-up on him, which would have been more poignant had it read, “We have no information at this time.”

The plane landed and I walked out into the Bangor International Jetport corridor, realizing I’d left the fax documents in the seat pocket in front of me. Whoops, looks like someone had their leisure reading for the next flight.

Anyhow, there wasn’t much I could do at this juncture, so I bought a book by Michael Crichton called
Timeline
I’d heard had been made into a bad movie. I found the airport bar, Arriv
Ale’s
, and retreated to a far corner. Fortunately, the bar’s service was better than the bar’s name, and within ninety seconds I had an Irish coffee in front of me and a club sandwich on the way. I read about fifteen pages of the Crichton novel, which I didn’t understand because I was one of the few people on the planet without a Ph.D. in quantum physics, and polished off the club.

I’d just started over on page one when two guys appeared over my left shoulder. They were
both clad in dark suits with black ties and I had the eerie feeling I was on the set of Men in Black III.

If I had two words to describe each of the people before me they would be: short & pretty and tall & black. I’d actually worked with tall & black on a couple cases prior to this one, and we hadn’t hated each other, which is a rarity with me. I can be a touch annoying.

I stood up and extended my hand, “How’s it going Glease? Been what, a year and a half?”

Wade Gleason smiled, revealing teeth almost too white, and said, “How can I forget. You lost a hundred dollars to me in a game of one-on-one. My wife wanted to thank you personally for a lovely night on the town. Speaking of which, you and that Jennifer girl ever get hitched?”

“Nope. She left me for a Dalmatian two weeks before the big day.” A lie, but not far off.

It appeared as though Wade had no intention of introducing me to short & pretty and I asked, “Who’s your caddie?”

Wade did a poor job of suppressing a smile and introduced the two of us. Todd Gregory was no taller than five-three and would probably get carded when he tried to vote come this November. I shook Todd’s petite and presumably freshly manicured hand and said, “What’d you do, slip the bouncer a fifty?”

His smile muscles were clearly atrophied, as he made no reaction to my jest and said dryly, “You’re funny, I heard you were funny.”

I looked at Glease and threw him my best “You’ve got to be shitting me, is this guy for real look,” and said, “You’ve got to be shitting me, is this guy for real?”

The three of us settled into a black Caprice, which are only driven by mobsters and FBI agents, and I was disappointed when the driver said his name was Tim and not Fagioli.

I was trying to get a feel for how much involvement I would have in this case and said, “So let me get this chain of command straight. It goes Director Mangrove, then you.” I pointed at Gleason in the front seat. “Then me.” I pointed to myself. “Then Fagioli.” I pointed at the driver. “Then that guy.” I pointed to a bum sleeping on an airport bench. “Then his babysitter.” I pointed at Gregory to my right.

Gregory didn’t laugh and I was beginning to wonder if he was hearing impaired. Gleason said, “Actually it goes him, then me, then you.”

Gregory stared out the window, letting the implications of the news sink in. It was difficult to talk with my black Armani dress shoes touching my tonsils, but I somehow managed, “You mean to tell me this little shit is Special Agent-in-Charge?”

“It’s part of our new image.”

“I can’t believe this sack is SAC. Glease, you’ve been the Denzel of the suits for twenty years and now they got you working for Michael J. Fox’s little brother. How in the hell are you okay with that?”

Gregory turned his gaze from the window and said, “If Wade is Denzel Washington and I’m Michael J. Fox. Then who exactly does that make you?”

I wanted to say, “I’m Brad Pitt you fucking idiot,” but I wasn’t that big of a badass, so I
said, “I’m Stephen Baldwin.”

Glease couldn’t contain himself and erupted in laughter. I added to my buddy Todd, “And I said you were Michael J. Fox’s little brother, not Michael J. Fox.”

I spent the next hour and twenty minutes ogling the continuous landscape called Maine. Red firs, yellow maples, green spruces, orange—you name it. It made every snapshot my eyes had taken in the past seem black and white. When God painted the world, Maine would be the area where he dabbed his brush to rid the excess paint. Layers of greens, swimming with yellows, sleeping on reds, hiding from oranges.

Another thing I noticed was as you move north along the coast, it was as if you were traveling into the past, America circa 1960. (It appears the state of Maine was a couple decades behind its 49 counterparts, well 47, I imagine the Dakotas are much the same.) Electrical cables ran for miles along the country highway and I had the quiet feeling the car was racing the current, and possibly time.

We stopped at what appeared to be a station of sorts and after reflecting back on my conversation with Director Mangrove, “Campobello is Canadian territory,” I deduced it was a border crossing.

See that, one part cocky bastard, two parts astute detective.

I opened the car door and realized how darkly tinted the windows had been. The sky was not overcast, but a perfect cobalt blue. Glease grabbed his attaché case from the trunk and the two of us made our way to the small group congregating near a sign reading, “Roosevelt Bridge.”