Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
CAL
Cal landed in an old gold-mining town in southern Oregon.
He checked into a bed-and-breakfast where the innkeeper showed him to the only available room and commented on Cal’s luck.
It was tourist season. Give it a week and they’d be booked solid through autumn.
Cal had faked a smile. The old man hadn’t known the half of it.
The next day, he made a trip to the local Walmart and stocked up on essentials. He could be anyone he wanted. That was a freeing thought in front of a display where t-shirts with stupid sayings exploded from cubby holes and amassed on the carpet tile floor.
He’d never be a man who wore graphic t-shirts, though, so Cal opted for a pack of solid colors and picked up a burner phone too.
What it lacked in bells and whistles, it made up for with big buttons for clumsy fingers.
Like a phantom limb, he still sometimes reached for his belt clip, though his phone was on the nightstand at home and surely drained of life.
On his fifth day there, no one bothered him much. At breakfast, he kept to himself as couples came and went. They’d survey him with pitiful smiles, and Cal released them from the burden of conversation with his nose in a newspaper.
The fifth day bled into a fifth night as the sun moseyed toward the horizon.
The town’s main drag boasted a few restaurants and shops that sold tchotchkes already covered in dust. The tavern was the place to be, though it didn’t have a sign out front.
Someone told him a storm carried it away and the owner didn’t bother with a new one.
“Signs say what’s ahead. No use if you already know. ” Tough to argue that logic.
A bell hanging over the tavern door announced Cal’s presence.
One of the bar backs—a pimply teenage kid—ran a ratty mop over sticky floors and greeted him with a nod.
Giant tube TVs hung in each corner and hummed the baseball game on mute.
A mold-speckled drop ceiling rounded out the cavernous space.
At the bar, a few locals bullshitted with the owner, Rudy, who’d lived in the town his whole life.
He’d relayed that fact with exuberant pride the first night Cal drifted in.
Rudy and the regulars never asked questions, but instead would chat with Cal about nothing of consequence as he gnawed on onion rings and sipped pale ale.
Rudy pointed to the back where pock-marked dart boards clung to the wall and an ancient jukebox glowed in the corner.
“Your friend’s back there,” he said over the buzz of a mostly empty bar. “I’ll bring your usual.”
Cal thanked him and wove past the high-top tables to where Kingsley Bright watched the ball game in a red t-shirt and faded jeans.
A tall, Black man, he greeted Cal with a firm handshake and a warm smile.
Cal had never met him before, but over the course of his career, encountered plenty of FBI agents who left a sour taste in his mouth.
Most liked to talk in circles around him.
Some were difficult to read. Others had an agenda.
From the jump, Kingsley seemed cut from a different cloth.
After Rudy dropped off a round of beers, Cal raised his bottle to Kingsley. “Here’s to working together,” he said.
“To working together.” The bottle necks clanked in salute, and Kingsley asked, “You settling in okay?”
Cal took a long pull from his beer and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “More or less.”
It was the polite thing to say. Turmoil had ripped through his life, and settling in suggested Cal had landed on his feet. In reality, he drifted on the wind, lost and unable to catch his breath.
He expected Kingsley to delve straight into business, but casual conversation flowed with little awkwardness.
Over beers and hot wings, they chatted about their family lives.
Kingsley showed Cal pictures of his wife and two sons.
Over a second round of beers, Cal unearthed memories of Helen and Amelia, the ones where humor triumphed over sorrow and he could talk past the lump in his throat.
Kingsley roared with laughter, and for the first time in so very long, Cal laughed too.
The regulars paid them curious stares with small-town bullshit easy to read. Two other men sat at the bar but kept to themselves. They weren’t regulars or townies, so Rudy served their drinks with a sideways glance he reserved for strangers.
“As much as I’ve enjoyed this, I think we outta talk business,” Kingsley said. “I’ve pieced together what I can from Agent Kranski’s notes but was hoping you could fill in some blanks. First and foremost, I’m wondering about Rich Dauer’s friendship with Philippe Velasco. It seems they were close.”
Cal drew a long breath. The topic still sizzled with raw emotion, a live wire never buried.
“Philippe was just another client. At least, that’s how Rich explained it. Eventually, routine business turned into gifts, dinners, vacations. Attorney-client privilege protected that friendship. I never got far when I asked about it.”
“And Rich’s relationship with the Moriartys?”
Cal blinked at Kingsley. “I wasn’t aware there was one.”
“A witness identified Moriarty members at Rich’s party. The papers are painting what happened as collateral in the Moriarty-Velasco feud, but someone is doing their damnedest to keep Rich’s possible involvement out of the press.”
Cal huffed a bitter laugh. There was no better evidence that Rich was alive. Only he would care enough to keep his reputation intact at a time like that.
“As I understand it,” Kingsley continued, “Burt was concerned about Rich’s dealings with these organizations.”
“That tracks. A week before he died, Burt reached out to me wanting to meet. He said it was about Rich but didn’t elaborate.”
“Burt was ready to call foul on Rich’s friendship with Philippe,” Kingsley told him. “He thought it created an ethical dilemma for the firm, so he dug into it.”
“Dug in how?”
Kingsley surveyed the bar and lowered his voice.
“There was more to Philippe’s story than what he offered in his plea deal.
He confided to Rich that someone was quietly influencing his most trusted captains.
Those captains had plans for a coup then war with the Moriartys.
Philippe gathered all the information he could about the coup, the war plans, everything.
He compiled it into a folder, handed it off to Rich for safe keeping, then went into hiding.
The Velascos must have dirt on Rich because he coughed up Philippe’s whereabouts without much cajoling. ”
“And the folder? I assume the Velascos wanted that too.”
“Yes, but by then, Burt had the folder. He found it snooping around Rich’s office and confronted Rich about it.
Bad timing. Rich had just sold out Philippe to save his hide and had no qualms about throwing Burt under the bus too.
When Burt realized this, he reached out to Agent Kranski for help, told him Amelia had seen the folder and was in danger too. ”
Cal’s stomach knotted, sick enough that he eyed the bathroom door to measure the distance.
“Wait. Why would Amelia have seen it?”
“From what Burt told Kranski, she grabbed it on accident. No one knows how much she might’ve seen, though.”
Cal slumped in his seat. “Why wouldn’t she tell me? I could’ve helped her. And why the hell wouldn’t Rich warn me about this?”
The questions came louder than Cal intended as the bar went quiet.
“I don’t know about Amelia,” Kingsley said, “but I do know that Rich’s priority was saving face with civilized society.”
Kingsley layered sarcasm on the last bit. Above the table, civilized society was a mask of faux outrage. Beneath it, they had their fingerprints all over these organizations. Suggest too much chumminess between the Richard Dauers and Philippe Velascos of the world, and things got ugly.
“Watch who gets a burr up their ass. They’re always the most corrupt,” Cal said. “My brother, Mitch, used to say that about civilized society. He knew better than most, spent his career in Vegas PD trying to nail Liam Moriarty to the wall.”
“So I’ve heard,” Kingsley replied but was polite enough not to repeat the rumor: the Moriartys murdered Mitch Havick.
Cal had heard that same rumor as he put his brother in an early grave. Mitch had tried to fracture the Moriartys at their fault lines and watch them crumble. In the end, it was Cal’s family left fractured and crumbling.
On the other side of the room, a stranger ambled to the jukebox. With his back to them, he stared inside the machine and drummed his fingers against the frame. Kingsley turned to Cal but seemed to keep the stranger in his periphery.
“I don’t imagine the name Ivan Holt is foreign to you.”
Cal shook his head. He hadn’t heard that name in over a year. Every so often, someone said it with faltering trepidation, and Cal was never quite prepared for the dread it deposited in him. He took another swig of beer, but his mouth went dry as he spoke.
“When I worked for the district attorney’s office, Ivan was under investigation for a series of murders in California, Nevada, and Oregon. Same MO. All college-aged women away from home. Sexually assaulted, tortured, murdered.”
“Melancholy Man” crooned from the speakers and sliced through the bar’s unnerving quiet. The haunting tune sickened against the backdrop of the conversation.
“I heard the tape,” Kingsley confessed with evident shame.
The tape. It wasn’t actually a tape. It was just what folks called the recording. Everyone knew about the bodies pulled from rivers and left in fields to rot. The stories made the news, but most never knew the horror behind the headlines.
A college student in Oregon was murdered and her horrendous fate recorded—ninety minutes of begging, sobbing, and wailing until she no longer sounded human. Her murderer never spoke, only grunted as he assaulted her.
“If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to the case?” Kingsley said.