Deadly Waters (27 page)

LXXI

11/16/10 23:20 PST

“What are you drinking, friend?” Bob Mathers asked John Taylor as he sat on the empty stool next to the drunken businessman.

“Glenfoidich, my man,” said Taylor, “the hearty gem of the Highlands.”

Bob ordered a double for both himself and his new acquaintance, and Taylor was but too happy to accept his hospitality. “Can we go somewhere to talk?” Bob asked him.

Taylor was aware they were in a bar in downtown San Francisco and that there were plenty of men about who asked that question of other men. “Sorry,” said Taylor. “I have nothing against you people. Your way is not my style. I think, if I’m not mistaken, you’ll find one of your bars next door.”

“No,” said Bob. “I want to talk to you about Wayland Zah.”

An hour ago Taylor had been telling Mondragon of the unquiet souls walking the earth in search of final justice. Now a stranger had sought him out and was speaking to him a name that had haunted him since that terrible night in Bluff when he had watched the young Navaho die. Taylor felt the leather stool slipping beneath him. His internal organs seemed to soften, and he had to stop to gather in the air he needed to breathe out his next words.

“Are you an angel...something like that?” he whispered to Bob.

“Something like that,” said Bob. “We need to be out of here before your friend over there wakes up. Come on. I won’t harm you. I promise. I only want to talk. I think you need to talk too, sir.”

“Yes,” said Taylor and vigorously shook his head, “I need to say some things.”

Taylor needed glass upon glass of liquor to steel himself for the trip with the stranger into the San Francisco November night. He remembered--or perhaps he dreamed it--that there was a light rain falling as they walked back to his car. Taylor also thought he saw his suburban home and that he talked far more than he should have.

In the morning everything was certain again. He awoke on his sofa, and the security man Trey was sitting next to him. John had reached the point in his life when he no longer awoke with a hangover, but rather had only an upset stomach and a taste in his mouth as though he had been chewing on a gob of steel wool.

“You OK, sir?” Trey asked him.

“I had the strangest dream,” said Taylor and rolled himself to an upright sitting position. “What time is it?”

“Nine thirty-seven, in the morning,” said Trey, ashamed to admit it.

“Where’s that guy?” asked Taylor.

“What guy? asked Trey. “Did he put something in my Coke?”

“I had the strangest dream,” repeated Taylor and rubbed his weary eyes. “He was young, in his thirties, I guess. About thirty-eight. Kind of shabbily dressed in a gray jacket. Had short hair like he was in the army. Is my watch on top of the TV?”

Taylor had noticed that John’s Rolex was gone from his wrist. He and Trey made a quick search of the living room and then of the dresser drawer where John kept his five other expensive timepieces, along with his diamond and emerald cuff links. All of them were missing.

“So the guy was just a thief,” said Trey, relieved that the stranger had not been something worse. “You know, Mr. Taylor, it would be good idea if you and me didn’t mention any of this to Mr. Mondragon. A man can always get new watches, but, wow, you know, it might kind of upset him if he knew we’d been careless like this. Agreed?”

LXXII

11/18/10 10:08 PST

Felix Collins went to his front door after he had logged off the Internet and had stuffed the notebook full of credit card numbers underneath his sofa.

“Coming!” he yelled to whomever was knocking. “Doing a little housekeeping.”

An afterthought caused him to toss a blanket over the computer terminal, although a hard corner of the CPU emerged through a corner of the coverlet. Felix opened the door a couple inches to see his visitor, taking care not to open it enough to grant the visitor a view of his home’s interior.

“Ah, Officer Mason,” he exclaimed. “Long time no see. What brings you out here to Barstow?”

“The name is Mathers, Felix,” said Bob. “I’m not a cop anymore.” He brashly pushed past Felix and entered the ill-kept desert trailer house.

“You have a warrant?” asked Felix. “I know my rights. Not that I’m involved in any of that computer fraud stuff anymore. Did I tell you I found Jesus while I was in Folsum? The terms of my parole say I can’t even own a modem. I really learned my lesson. I’m a changed man. You sure you have a warrant? Why didn’t I hear you drive up?”

“I have $2,000 and eight names,” said Bob and handed Felix a bundle of large bills from his pants pocket and a piece of paper bearing the names.

“Is this a sting?” asked Felix. “I was playing solitaire,” he said of the computer under the blanket. “Haven’t been on the Net for six years, no siree.”

“I told you, I’m not a cop any more. Haven’t been for a long time,” said Bob. “I’m sure you can hack into a few files and find a biography to go with each of those names. I need their backgrounds, their education, work, and family histories, where they’re living now, and if they’ve recently come into any money. I’ll be back in two days. You’ll do it, ‘Cat Man,’” he said, using Felix Collins’ old hacker handle, “or I’ll have a talk with your parole officer.”

“You know,” said Felix, “the Cat Man was really somebody else on the web selling bomb kits. I had nothing to do with that.”

”As I remember it,” said Bob, leaving as abruptly as he had entered, “we had enough evidence on the fake immigration documents and the credit card scams to send you to prison. We didn’t need to pursue the homemade bomb racket.”

“And good day to you, Mr. Mathers,” said Felix to Bob’s back as the former cop walked out the front door.

“Erin Mondragon and John Taylor of San Francisco, Colonel Michael Method of the US Army, Edward Harris of Wisconsin, Abraham Wilson of Washington State, Kenneth Greeley of Alabama, and Mr. and Mrs. William Thorpe, formerly of Seattle,” Felix read from the paper Bob had left him. He wwondered what they were wanted for as he took the lists of credit card numbers from underneath his furniture.

LXXIII

11/19/10 13:30 Arizona Standard Time

In the envelope the FedEx man brought to Rebecca Mathers’ door was $10,000

wrapped inside a note from her husband that read:

I am onto something and will not be home right away. This should hold you and Katie over till I get back.

Love, Bob

He did not tell her that the money was half of the $20,000 he had gotten when he sold Taylor’s stolen watches and cuff links.

Becky had wished to be a faithful Mormon wife since she was a young girl of twelve at summer Bible camp. She had sat among the other children at evening campfire and watched the older couples holding hands while an elder standing next to the firelight had spoken to them of the sanctified bonds between man and woman that lasted forever, and she had known on that golden night that this was what she wanted in her life. A quarter century later she was thinking the angry, even vulgar thoughts church teachings prohibited a pious wife to think. She put the money her husband had sent in a high kitchen cupboard her daughter could not reach and, in spite of her anger, she prayed that nothing happened to Bob, at least not until she could get her hands on him.

LXXIV

11/20/10 18:29 PST

“First things first: three of these names you won’t have to worry about,” said Felix Collins to Bob Mathers as the two of them settled in front of Felix’s computer monitor. “They’re dead.”

“Natural causes?” asked Bob.

“Yeah, it’s pretty natural to die when you’ve been shot in the head a couple times,” said Felix. “I found a story on them in the
Seattle
Times
.” He typed in the newspaper’s site name and went to the archives section to bring up a front page story from May 6th of that year.

“Everett: Three people authorities identified as the owners of the Stone House Bed and Breakfast, were this morning found murdered inside the business they had created only seven months ago.”

“Jesus,” Bob said.

“It gets worse,” said Felix and scrolled the story down his screen. “They were killed in one spot, in a back room, sometime during the night. This follow-up story two days later identifies them as Mr. William Thorpe, 68; Mrs. Joyce Thorpe, 62; and Abraham Wilson, 70.”

“Each shot three times in the head,” said Bob.

“Now tell me right from the beginning, officer--I mean, Mr. Ex-officer--this investigation you’re doing doesn’t have anything to do with the mob.”

“This has nothing to do with the mob,” said Bob.

“In the joint, the really scary guys told me this was how they said a pro does a hit: three slugs in the head,” explained Felix.

“Their killer may have been a pro,” said Bob. “He’s not a wise guy pro. What’s this?” he asked and read some more.

“’An acquaintance who asked his name not be used claimed that Wilson, a retired machinist who founded the business with his two friends, often told paying guests wild stories about training soldiers in South America.’”

“That’s why they killed them.”

“Who’s they?” asked Felix. “What kind of strange shit are you getting me into?”

“Some very bad people did this,” said Bob. “I really can’t say much more about them, because I don’t know. What about the other names I gave you?”

“These two were easy,” said Felix, showing Bob some hard copies he had taken from the Internet. “Even you could have found these guys. Erin Domingo Mondragon and John Stasten Taylor Jr. were born rich. Mondragon’s people were the oldest of old money; they had farmland in the Central Valley going back to the Spaniards. He and Taylor were at Stanford together. Lived in the same dorm. Taylor’s great granddaddy and every Taylor boy since has been in the import-export business up in Frisco. Specialized in Asian luxury goods.

The only blot on Mondragon’s record is a conviction on tax fraud in 1998. He did a year and some change in Boron federal minimum security prison. Taylor’s got a couple DUIs on his record, nothing more. Both are divorced. The strange thing about them is they’ve both become not just rich, but really, really rich in the last two years. Their stocks made money hand over fist; big insurance claims went their way; they landed all kinds of sweetheart business deals. Here’s some of it,” he said and handed Bob another stack of hard copies he had taken from on-line magazines. “I can find you a ton more stuff on these two, if you want. Did I include their addresses in there?”

“I already know where they live,” said Bob.

“What do you need me for then?” asked Felix. “You wanted to give a couple grand to an old friend?”

“How about the other three?” asked Bob.

“Yeah...” said Felix and ran his tongue across his lower lip as he handed Bob another set of papers. “You know, Mr. Ex-officer, I usually don’t do cops favors. I’m going to make an exception here, because I like you so much, and I’ll give you some really useful advice you should listen to: Stay away from this next guy; he’s got spook written all over his record. Colonel Michael Method graduated University of Illinois in 1964, with honors; did the ROTC thing and became an officer and Special Forces right from near the beginning of the outfit in the Sixties. Knows seven languages. Taught at College of the Americas. Did something in Laos during the war there; no one knows what; that part is all blacked out, as you can see. Did two tours of duty in ‘Nam, has a shitload of decorations and was in something called Operation Phoenix.

“Then there’s nothing. I went through backdoors in every kind of file you can think of, and this guy’s record is gone. Nothing is listed until he becomes a full colonel in 1984. There’s nothing after that. This isn’t just a spook, my man, this is Casper the Fucking Ghost. He’s got at least thirty-three years of active duty between then and the time of his mandatory retirement at age fifty-five, and it’s buried so deep dynamite couldn’t uncover it.”

“Did he retire? I don’t see anything about that,” said Bob, examining the mere four pages in Method’s record. “He has to be in his sixties.”

“Guys like this don’t retire,” said Felix. “They either get killed or kicked out. Look at this,” he added, directing Bob to the last page. “No known address. Last residence was in northern Idaho. I checked it out; the little town doesn’t exist.”

“What about the other two?”

“We at least know where they live,” said Collins, who had a couple more pages for Bob. “Kenneth Abner Greeley is another interesting guy. He’s a sharecropper’s son, joins the Army in 1962, and learns how to fly copters. He’s another Vietnam vet. Unlike our friend the colonel, everything Greeley did there is on the record. He drops off the radar screen in the Seventies, when he had a charter service back home in Alabama. In 1988 he turns up in a crashed Electra loaded with rifles somewhere down in Honduras. He does a deuce in a Honduran prison. I bet that was fun.”

“Could he be involved in drug smuggling?” asked Bob.

“Not a chance. He was an intelligence operative like Method. Get this: when he was in jail, everybody who’s anybody says they know nothing about him. The CIA, the NSA, the whozit and the whatsit say they’ve never heard of him, but the State Department negotiates to get him out. Then Greeley doesn’t do much of anything for over a decade. Two years ago he somehow has enough money to start another charter service back in Alabama.”

“His address?” asked Bob.

“Old Greeley lives in Alexander City, between Birmingham and Montgomery. His charter service appears completely legit, by the way. He only goes up a couple times a week, and that’s by appointment. He has two little planes and teaches locals how to fly. I can’t make any connection between him and the two rich guys in California or the three dead folks in Washington state, but I bet you dollars to doughnuts he and the colonel crossed paths someplace in Spookland.”

“Which brings us to the last name,” said Bob.

“Edward James Harris doesn’t look like he belongs on this list,” said Felix. “His dad did go to college with Mondragon and Taylor. He was Mondragon’s roommate no less.”

“I didn’t know,” whispered Bob.

“Ed Harris went to MIT, became an electrical and a mechanical engineer. Worked for McDonald-Douglas for three years, later worked at a little kit airplane company his father ran. In 1996 the old man killed himself, shot himself in the mouth. I don’t have any idea what the younger Harris did from 2004 to 2009, but now he’s up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, building kit airplanes like his old man did. Cutting edge, high-tech stuff. He sold one of his first planes to Kenneth Greeley. He’s come into money, too, like the others, including the dead ones. You need more?”

“No, unless you can find some more on this colonel,” said Bob. “You did well, Felix.”

“You won’t be talking to any parole officer then?” said Collins.

“Not yet,” said Bob as he headed for the screen door that separated Felix’s residence from the Mojave Desert. “I’ll be in touch.”