Sweet Dreams (21 page)

"Well, I was in the hospital and just got out a few weeks ago. Don't think I don't know what you tried to do!"

"Don't get all hot with me, kid. You just shut up and listen," The man on the other end did not like being accused of anything. "I'll get you your money; do you remember the KOA campground where you met us the first time?

"Yeah, I know the one, the same one you used to get me the package?"

"That's the one. You go past that, and you will see a road off to your left, a dirt road. Take that, and it will take you to a cabin about a mile down that dirt road. Meet us there in two hours, and you'll get what's coming to you."

Pat hung up the phone and handed it back to Mark. "Yeah I'll get it, all right."

"They'll kill you, you know," Mark said.

"Yeah, I figured, so now what?"

"Well, you see that sign up ahead?" Pat sat up and looked as a KOA sign came into view.

"Guess we'll be a little early."

"Yup," Mark saw a dirt road coming up on the left, and the truck they were following disappeared. "So you better pick whose side you are on, because it might get ugly."

186 AARON

"You do what you've got to do; I'll stay in the car." Pat said. Maybe the kid was not as dumb as he looked after all. ________________________________________

KIRK LOOKED UP AT the CSI building from the rental car that Geoff had rented for them earlier that morning. It was a dark blue Ford Mustang with a sunroof and all the extras. The CSI office looked a lot different than he had imagined it would look. The walls were brick with a simple design and two small windows on either side of a single glass front door. The building was a one story square box with bad landscaping in the front and a bent handicap sign looking at them sideways through the early morning air.

Geoff opened his door, got out, and started to walk up to the front door. He looked back at Kirk making a cloud of steam, which he puffed out, and motioned for him to hurry up. They had caught an overnight flight from Detroit and had arrived a few hours before daybreak. Kirk was beginning to like having Geoff along; he could always get cars or good deals on hotel rooms, with a discount through the magazine he worked for, but he would never tell him that.

As they went inside, a withered middle-aged receptionist who had a bad case of smoker's voice met them. She greeted them with a half smile and pointed them in the direction of Cassy's office.

The inside of the building was bland and small, the lights flickered off and on from lack of maintenance, and the pictures on the walls looked like they were from the 70's. They came to a wooden door that had a sign posted on it that read Cassy Meyers. Kirk knocked and was greeted by Cassy, who just

DREAMS

187

looked at him without expression.

"May I help you?" she said.

"Yeah, I wanted to go over an old case with you," Kirk forgot that he looked a lot different than he did a year ago.

"It's me, Kirk Weston."

She looked at him as if trying to remember who he was. By the look on her face, Kirk knew he would need to help out. Pulling back his hair and smashing his beard down he scowled and pushed out his belly, trying to look fatter than he really was. "This ring any bells? I lost weight, and I need a shave and a hair cut."

Cassy looked confused, and then smiled as she recognized who he was. "Oh, Detective Weston! You were on the David's Island case, right?"

"Yeah, that's the one,"

"Okay, wow, you do need a shave, and a haircut. For a minute I thought you were a bum looking for a handout. The weight looks nice, what did you do, go on some boot-camp diet thing?"

Kirk chuckled. "Something like that."

Cassy stood up and pointed to the two chairs in front of her desk, motioning for them to sit down. "So who is this?"

Geoff held out his hand and smiled, making his patchy beard crinkle. "I'm Geoff, a friend of Mr. Weston, good to meet you."

"And you, so what brings you down my way, Detective?"

She sat down behind a cluttered desk in a big, black, highbacked chair. The office was about ten feet wide and just as deep. Pictures covered the walls and were tacked up with pushpins and tape; they looked like something you would see 188 AARON

under a microscope, with blood samples and pictures of hairs and fingerprints and a few Kirk couldn't place.

"Well, I wanted to get some information about the case and see everything you gathered during your investigation. I'm trying to tie up a few loose ends and wondered if you have anything on it still lying around?"

"Hmmm, well, I think I have the file still, but most of it I gave to the FBI after we were done with it. I might have something, though. Hold on, I'll go look."

She got up and walked over to a tall file cabinet that sat in the corner of her small office. Opening up the second drawer, she flipped through some files until she came to the right one.

"Yup, here it is, or at least my findings, anyway."

Closing the drawer, she sat down again, opened it up, and went through the papers inside. "So I thought this case was closed. Did they reopen it?"

Geoff jumped in. "No, we have reason to believe that there is something else going on, but the FBI deemed it as an accident of food poisoning. We just wanted to find out what you think based on what you discovered."

She looked at Geoff and then back at the file. "Well, I did find it odd with all the evidence that I uncovered that they would still come to the conclusion that it was an accident."

"What did you find out about the second drug? Did you ever find traces of it in the victims?" Kirk asked.

"No, but we did find something interesting in the sewn-in notes. They are made of a cloth that we can't trace. It is some sort of disintegrating fabric. Most of our samples are gone with only a few pieces of thread left."

"Weird," Kirk rubbed his long beard. "Is it toxic in any

DREAMS

189

way?"

"You know, we didn't check it for toxicity, but that is a good idea, I didn't think to check seeing as it was not food or anything that they could consume." Cassy looked at the file and thought for a brief moment. "You know, if it puts off a gas or fume of some sort as it disintegrates, that could be the missing piece of the puzzle!"

Jumping up from her chair, she asked Kirk and Geoff to follow her. She walked out of her office and down the hall, where she led them to a long staircase that led down to the basement. The basement looked like it belonged to a bachelor, not a branch of the police force. Boxes were stacked along the walls and the air smelled like mothballs and old dust. Flipping on the lights, she hurried over to a small room off to the right that was filled with metal locking drawers. They looked like security boxes, but a little bigger in size. Looking at the numbers on the front of each one, she ran her finger down to one almost at the bottom.

"Got it."

Pulling out a small key that was taped to the inside of the file that she had carried down with her, she opened the box and pulled it out. Inside was a small plastic bag with a few strings of off-white thread in it. "This is all that's left of them; I think I have enough to run a few tests on it."

"Great. How long will it take?" Kirk asked

"A few hours, you can wait, if you like, or come back. I'll run them right now,"

"We'll stop by in one hour; we still need to run a few errands." Kirk thanked Cassy, and they headed back up the staircase and out to their rental car.

After they were on the road, Geoff looked over at Kirk and 190 AARON

asked, "What do you think?"

"Well, it could be the break we need, but we still really don't know how they died. And one thing confuses me,"

"What's that?"

"If they handed over all that evidence, why did they ignore all the signs that led to foul play? It doesn't make any sense."

"It is a little odd, with the note and all. You would think that they would jump all over a thing like that." Geoff shook his head then looked out the window.

"I think we need to find out exactly who had access to that file in the FBI."

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"Not sure yet, but I'll find a way."

Chapter Fourteen

tracks leading through the snow that covered most of the road like a white blanket. The rolling hills were covered with pine trees and patches of quaking aspen running up the draws. The dirt road looked more like a goat trail and the ruts were deep but with the packed snow, it made it possible for Mark's BMW

to make it through without scraping the bottom of the undercarriage. Mark drove slow over the crunching snow and wondered what he was going to do if he found what he was looking for. He knew without hand delivering the criminals to the police himself, the case would stay closed and lost to the memories of the public, and then again he wondered if there was something else going on, some sort of cover-up to protect someone or something.

He went over the items he had put in his car right after he 192 AARON

had the conversation with Detective Owens, the one where he was all but told to never come back and to forget about the socalled accident. Zip-ties, a shovel, and some plastic, he also filled a gas can with gasoline and had a lighter in his pocket, which he bought from the Zip Trip. He didn't smoke so he bought a pack of Marlboro lights just to make it look like a normal thing to purchase a lighter and a gas can full of gasoline, you just never know. He thought of how crazy he must be to go into an unknown place where there were people who thought it was okay to bomb supermarkets.

His adrenaline started pumping when he saw a cabin down in a small valley at the end of the winding road. The road crested a small hill, and then dropped down to the other side spilling out into a small valley that was tree lined on all sides. The log cabin had smoke billowing from the stacked stone chimney and a few out buildings off to the west side, one looked like a storage shed and the other one looked like it was an outhouse. Mark found a wide spot in the road and pulled the car off as far as he dared, he could not afford to get stuck, just in case things got bad.

Mark sat in silence for a moment trying to gather his thoughts; he remembered how K smelled and that special smile that she saved for him only and how he felt with her in his arms. He thought about Samantha and her blond hair bouncing as she ran to meet him at the door after a long day at work. She was so innocent and perfect, so full of life and now she was dead and nothing in the world would bring her back. Mark flipped on the radio, tuning it until he found a station that was playing opera; he did not know why but in times of stress, it was the only music that seemed to clear his head. He

DREAMS

193

closed his eyes and listened as the rich sound filled the car. After a few minutes, Mark shut the car down, got out, and took the keys with him. He walked around to the passenger side and opened the door, and pulled out two fresh zip-ties from his pocket.

"Hands,"

"Come on, I'll be good, I swear!" Pat squealed. Mark grabbed Pat's wrist, slipped a zip-tie around them, and reached across the seat, attaching his wrist to the steering wheel. "You better be here when I get back," Slamming the door shut, Mark popped the trunk and grabbed a handful of shotgun rounds and shoved them into his pocket. The shotgun sat in the back seat where it waited to see some action like a bomb ticking away for the exact moment to explode. Mark put a few more zip-ties in his other pocket and shut the trunk lid. Opening the back door, he grabbed the shotgun and asked Pat if he knew how many there might be.

"Don't know--I only saw three, but there could be more."

Three.

Mark shut the door and started down the road on foot cradling the shotgun in the crook of his left arm. After about ten minutes of hiking and moving from tree to tree in the crispy snow, Mark could see the cabin through the trees, standing backed up to the side of a mountain that closed off the small valley. The snow was too loud next to the road so Mark made his way deeper into the woods in order to keep hidden from view of the cabin windows and anyone who might be looking out.

His heart was racing as he crouched in the snow holding his shotgun in one hand. The cabin was just beyond the next 194 AARON

row of pine trees. He could see the gray pickup truck sitting next to a brown Chevy extended cab that was even more beatup than the gray one. Mark studied the cabin and the trucks for a few minutes and didn't see any movement coming from either. He pulled up his collar on his jacket as he made his way closer to the cabin. He could see smoke coming from the stone chimney and a stack of wood sitting next to the front door, it had the faint odor of coffee and hickory.

The cabin looked like any other log cabin Mark had seen in the woods on the drive down; he even used to go to one similar to this one when he was a kid back home on summer vacation with his parents. The place was square and only had a main living room and one bathroom. Some of the nicer ones had a separate bedroom, but most of them just had bunk beds in one corner, which made up the sleeping area. Angry violent thoughts flooded Mark's mind as he made a dash for the gray pickup, and as he got to it, he slid to the ground and crawled under the truck. His heart all at once went down to a normal heart rate and his nerves calmed down, his breathing slowed and his blue eyes sharpened.

In one quick movement, he rolled under both trucks, stopped at the edge of the front porch, and looked up at the clear blue sky as he lay on his back in the dirt and snow. Jumping to his feet, he leaped onto the porch, without a sound and lowered his shoulder, and went crashing through the front door like a raging bull.

The three men inside sat stunned for a brief second as Mark broke through, sending wood splinters flying and flooded the dimly lit cabin with bright sunlight. Two men sat