Dead Simple (16 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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“
W
hy would someone want to keep people out of the lake?” Liz asked Blaine when they were back inside the house, Sal Belamo standing guard outside in case whoever Liz had seen watching them from the hillside returned.
“To keep anyone from finding out what’s down there would be my guess.” With her help, he had just finished dressing the wounds inflicted by the barbed wire; nothing very deep, but painful all the same.
“Leaving us where?”
“With this for starters.”
Blaine laid the jagged piece of wood he’d snatched from the water on the kitchen table.
Liz studied it closely. “There’s something carved into it … .”
Blaine lifted the piece of wood up and moved to the counter. He found some vinegar and worked it around through the old grooves to reveal letters forming a name followed by a date:
H. CULBERTSON
January 1863
“It looks like some kind of plaque,” Liz said, as Blaine scrutinized the letters more closely.
“A mounting plaque,” Blaine acknowledged. “This must be the name of the builder and the date he delivered whatever it was mounted onto.”
“So what’s this have to do with my father?”
“I think he figured out what Rentz was up to. This might help us figure out the same thing.”
“Not alone it won’t.”
“I also found these,” Blaine said, and he produced the gold coins his bazooka had stirred up from the bottom.
Liz’s eyes bulged. “So there really is treasure under that lake … .”
Blaine joined her in gazing down at them. “Let’s find out.”
 
“
T
he entrance is on the other side,” Liz said, when Blaine led her down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the rear of the National Archives building ninety minutes later.
“For tourists only,” Blaine told her. “You want to do some research, this is where you go.”
“Really?”
“Surprised?”
“Most of the men my father trained don’t have much use for research.”
“Hobby of mine,” Blaine quipped. “On weekends.”
“Most of the men my father trained have other ways to spend their weekends.”
Inside, after signing in, they went straight to the eleventh floor, where the military archives were housed. There Blaine explained to an archivist that they were looking for any reference to a master carpenter named H. Culbertson, circa 1862. The man didn’t look terribly optimistic about the prospects, explaining it would take some time to come up with all the required records, until Blaine produced a nondescript ID that looked like a library card. The archivist gave him a longer look, straightened his shoulders, and took his leave.
“Let’s go,” Blaine said, taking Liz’s arm gently.
“Where?”
“Central Reading Room, to wait for our material.”
“Man said it could take a while.”
“Half hour at most.”
“Because of that card you flashed him?”
“It tends to quicken the process. Standard government issue.”
“There’s nothing standard or government about you.”
“I’ve got friends.”
“After six months away?”
“Cards like that don’t come with an expiration date.”
 
T
he archivist delivered a wheeled cart to them in the spacious, woodlined Central Reading Room forty minutes later. The cart contained a
dozen sleeved containers called Hollinger boxes, packed with Northern military manifests from the Civil War listing the various orders and shipments produced to advance the war effort. The archivist had flagged a trio of instances where the name of H. Culbertson, a master carpenter on retainer to the North, came up. But none were from the time that fit the mounting plaque.
Blaine and Liz spent the next two hours seated across from each other at a long wooden desk, paging through the manifests in search of a delivery close to the January 1863 date. Blaine was halfway through his third book when he found it.
“A dozen heavy-load wagons,” he said suddenly, tightening his gaze at the manifest open in the shallow light before him. “According to this, Culbertson produced a dozen heavy-load wagons for a work order dated October 1862 and delivered them in January 1863 to a Colonel William Henry Stratton.”
Liz leaned closer and turned the book toward her. “Looks like Colonel Stratton took delivery of something else on the very same day,” she said.
“Four keg chests,” McCracken read.
“Keg chests?”
“Large strongboxes.”
“Perfect for carrying gold coins—is that what you’re thinking?”
“Especially since I saw what looked to be the remains of one of those keg chests on the bottom of your lake.”
 
O
n the second floor, they ordered the military records of William Henry Stratton from an archivist in the Microfilm Research Room. Once again the material was delivered to the Central Reading Room; only a single Hollinger box this time, twenty minutes later. But the results were considerably less impressive.
“Maybe there’s more,” Liz said when she finished studying the records on the chance Blaine had missed something.
“If there was, we’d be reading it,” he returned, massaging his eyes. “There’s no record of this Colonel William Stratton commanding any mission in early 1863. In fact, there’s no record of Colonel William Henry Stratton at all after late 1862.”
“Could he have died?”
“That there’d be a record of.”
“You don’t look surprised.”
“Because I don’t believe Stratton existed after early 1863.” He slid his chair closer to hers. “Let’s put together what we know. According to the manifests, Stratton took delivery of those wagons and keg chests on January 11, 1863. Assume whatever unlogged mission he was on took him into Virginia.”
“A Union brigade heading south with heavy cargo?”
“Say they were taking a back route in the hope they wouldn’t run into anyone from either side. Problem was the regiment ran smack into the teeth of that legendary blizzard instead and sought refuge in the nearest shelter they could find.” Blaine stopped and looked at her. “In a barn, maybe.”
“The one you found remnants of under the lake …”
“A lake that didn’t exist until Bull Run flooded the valley the day after the storm stranded them.”
Liz nodded. “Swallowing up the troops, and whatever they were carrying, forever. Stratton never completes his mission, but since there was never any record of it …”
“History pays no attention,” Blaine completed.
“Until Maxwell Rentz, up to his eyeballs in debt and facing bankruptcy, somehow figured out the same thing we just did. Then he concocts a story about plans to build a resort and buys up all the land around the lake to keep anyone from realizing what he is really up to.”
“But then his plans ran into a snag, didn’t they?”
“Me,” said Liz.
“And then Buck. Only problem is that Colonel Stratton wouldn’t need twelve heavy-load wagons to transport four keg chests full of gold coins.”
“Meaning … ?”
“Meaning he must have been carrying something else too.”
Liz flipped absently through the last pages of Stratton’s military record, coming upon a grainy, tattered photograph of a powerful-looking man in a sharply pressed Union officer’s uniform. She lifted it closer to her tentatively, the color washing out of her face as she traced the line of the handlebar mustache that curled over Stratton’s upper lip.
“You look like you recognize him,” Blaine said.
“I do.” Liz finally looked up again, expressionless. “Maybe I did see a ghost, after all: it was Stratton who was watching us from that hill this morning.”
“
W
e had some FBI men here a few days ago,” the highway patrol detective named Huggins told Will Thatch outside the police station in Akron, Ohio, where the massacre had taken place. “Down from the Cleveland office,” Will said, thinking fast. “I’m in from Washington.”
The detective looked him over. “By yourself?”
“That’s right.”
Huggins studied him closer, then just shrugged.
Two hours after jotting down the license plate on the car belonging to the two men who had shown up at his hotel, Will had met with a man named Bob Snelling on a bench in Gramercy Park. He had gone through the Academy with Snelling a lifetime ago, and the two of them had come into the Bureau together. Snelling, the only person Will had any contact with from his former life, ran a successful security firm now. He had lent Will money a few times, which Will had never paid back, and on a few other occasions had kept tabs on Will’s family for him.
Will had phoned Snelling and asked him to run a trace on the license plate. Ninety minutes later, Snelling had requested this meeting—on the other side of the city from his office.
Approaching his old friend seated on the park bench, Will thought he had the look of a man already eager to leave.
“Sit down, Will,” Snelling greeted, not bothering to rise or extend a hand.
“What is it?”
“This some kind of joke?”
“God, no.”
“Then are you sure you wrote the numbers on the license plate down right?”
Well, Will thought, he hadn’t been wearing his glasses, but he’d gotten close enough to the plate to touch it.
“Yes. I am.”
Snelling looked jittery. “The combination makes it a government plate; I’ve been around enough to know that. And it’s not hard to track down the specific branch; I’ve been around enough to know that too. FBI, Justice, ATF—you name it. Each has its own distinct register for accounting purposes.” Snelling looked a little pale. “I made some calls, ran your plate through the system to see who it belonged to.”
“And?”
Snelling stopped fidgeting. “Nobody, Will. The plate doesn’t exist.”
“You just said—”
“I know what I said. It’s a government plate, but it doesn’t belong to anyone I can access, and I can gain access to
everyone.”
“What are you saying?”
“These people you’re mixed up with are buried deep. You know how it works.”
“Not really.”
“The deeper they’re buried, the less people have access. Sometimes
nobody
has access.”
Why would someone like that be protecting Jack Tyrell?
“You say something, Will?” Snelling asked him.
“Just thinking out loud.”
“I’d do it quieter, if I were you, and I’d lay low for a while.” Snelling finally stood up, looking relieved.
Will stood up too. “Wait a minute, you haven’t even asked me what this is about.”
“Because I don’t want to know.”
Will rummaged through his coat for the folded copies of the obituaries he’d accumulated in the library. “But I’ve got something else to show you.”
Snelling started to walk off. “Maybe you didn’t hear me. I’m not interested.”
Will caught up with him. “It’s Jackie Terror, Bob. He’s back. You’ve got to help me find out why.”
Snelling laid a forceful hand on Will’s shoulders and pushed him from his path. “No, I don’t.”
“Someone’s protecting him. I don’t know how, but the answers are in these somehow,” Will insisted, flapping the obituaries before him. “I can’t find them alone.”
Snelling stopped and swung around. “Then don’t look.”
“Bob—”
“And don’t call me anymore. People like the ones who own those cars tend to know when you’re looking into them. That means they’ve probably already got tabs on me. I let things cool down, maybe they figure it was an innocent mistake.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Drop this, Will. Whatever it is, drop it.”
This time Will had let Bob Snelling walk off without a fight. He thought of him again as he faced Detective Huggins. Will had had a thousand dollars to his name at the start of today, a significant chunk of which went to pay for his plane ticket to Cleveland and the rental car that had gotten him to Akron.
“I thought you boys traveled in teams,” the detective said now, an edge of suspicion creeping into his voice.
“Task forces, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m advance. We’ve got some leads. If they play out, you’ll get your task force and then some.” Saying just enough to make Huggins figure there was more on his mind.
Satisfied, the detective moved toward a padlocked door erected as part of a temporary repair job on the ruined front of the police station. Will breathed easier when Huggins fished a key from his pocket and popped the lock open.
“I got the case file in my car,” the detective said. “Photos too. We moved all the prisoners. Sons of bitches are the only witnesses we got left alive. Bastards that did this killed six cops for no reason. I been over the security tapes a dozen times. You can’t see much, but you can tell they were smiling the whole time.”
 
W
ill didn’t know what he expected to find here. Not revelations certainly, nor clues as to where Jackie Terror headed off with Mary Raffa in tow, ready to get their garden of death going. He was looking for a feeling, a scent. Something to follow after all these years away.
The inside of the station had been cleaned up for the most part, but there were still plenty of bulletholes dug in the walls. The glass security wall hadn’t been replaced, and the desks looked as though they hadn’t been touched since the massacre; turned sideways or spilled over by men seeking cover desperately.
“Here’s the file.”
Will hadn’t noticed Huggins enter. He took the manila folder from him and drew out the eight-by-ten still photos that had been produced from the security tape.
By all accounts Jack Tyrell had proceeded to the cells alone, leaving the Yost brothers to finish up the slaughter. The still shots caught them only from behind, but that was enough for Will to recognize Earl and Weeb in different poses, leaning over the desks where the outgunned cops had hidden. A few of the pictures showed the twins with submachine guns in their hands. At least two showed a smoke trail burning from their muzzles, the slight blur caused by the motion of the barrel firing.
Will suddenly stopped amidst the toppled and turned desks, having involuntarily retraced what must have been the Yost brothers’ murderous path.
It’s your fault, you dumb son of a bitch! All this happened because you let Jackie Terror get away … .
He felt the old hate welling in him, self-loathing as much as detestation for Jack Tyrell. Will was dead too; nobody had gotten around to burying him yet, though. All chewed up inside, the world eating away at him. Will blessed at last with his chance to bite back.
“You got an office I can use?” he said suddenly to Huggins.
“Yes.”
“Computer?”
“Sure.”
Will Thatch made for the door, shoulders high, suit no longer looking like an old sack draped over his frame. “Then let’s get going.”

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