PART VII THE MISSING INVESTIGATOR #2
‘How have these families managed to keep all this secret for so long?’ I asked. ‘How do you maintain one hundred and fifty years of absolute silence? For instance, how do you keep -employees quiet?’
‘Longstanding ties, money and, if necessary, fear. Their staff members are well paid and quite often the sons and daughters of former staff members—plus, they share the same antebellum worldview as the families. Any employee who threatens to step out of line and expose the families quickly disappears. Having said all that, the biggest threat to their secret is not people.’
‘What is it then?’ I asked.
‘The weather,’ Brewster said simply. ‘Hurricanes especially. When a hurricane hits, the families have three choices:
‘One, sequester their slaves somewhere on their own property, in an underground chamber or storm cellar of some kind.
‘The second option is to kill all the slaves and destroy the -bodies. The families call this a culling, but it’s very rare and they don’t like doing it, not because it’s murder, but because it means the loss of valuable property.’
‘And the third option?’ I said.
‘Evacuate the slaves to some other property, like that of a related family. This was what ultimately got me into trouble because I actually witnessed a slave evacuation.’
He explained.
‘Long story short, my investigations in 1988 into the missing prostitutes from Dallas ultimately led me to the Dearborn family.
‘I was surveilling the Dearborns in Texas when Tropical Storm Arlene hit Louisiana in 1993. When Arlene was bearing down on Cameron Parish, the Kingmans called the Dearborns because they needed somewhere to evacuate their slaves, somewhere out of the state.’
‘The Dearborns helped them out,’ I said. I also noted the year he’d mentioned: 1993. After working on his case for five years, Brewster had vanished in 1993.
‘They sure did,’ he said. ‘And I was watching. I’d tapped the cell phone of one of the Dearborn kids—that kinda thing was much easier back then, before smartphones came along—so I was waiting when everything went down.
‘I watched it all. I saw a cattle transport truck leave the Kingman estate in Victorville—I mean, this was a big fucking truck normally used to move several dozen bulls and cows, but I could just make out through the slats that it was filled with people—maybe fifty of them—and it was escorted down the I-10 by a motorcade of sheriff’s cars and motorcycles to the Texas border.
‘When the motorcade came to the border—to the bridge that spans the river near Orange—another motorcade was there to meet it, this one made up of Texas state troopers. It escorted the cattle truck all the way to the Dearborn estate up in east Texas.
‘I was following them at what I thought was a safe distance. I was wrong. Just after I saw the cattle transport enter the Dearborn estate, a couple of pickups followed my car but I lost them and got away. Or so I thought. A few months later, a warrant was issued for my arrest on bogus child porn charges.’
Brewster fell silent.
He stared at his feet.
‘Been on the run ever since. I ask myself every day, why did I take it so far? I’m a 75-year-old man and I can’t even watch my granddaughters play soccer. All for four women I never even found—’
A sharp buzzing noise cut him off.
Brewster leapt to his feet, gun up.
The buzzing had come from a wall-mounted video unit inside the kitchen, the kind connected to a doorbell camera.
‘Did you bring anyone else with you?’ Brewster hissed, suddenly suspicious.
‘No,’ I said.
‘No,’ Audrey said.
He put a finger to his lips.
‘Quiet. ’Cause someone just rang the doorbell to my other apartment.’
We gathered around the little doorbell screen.
There were actually two such screens and I realised that Brewster had installed the screen for apartment 2C’s door camera in this apartment.
On the black-and-white screen, I saw the landing outside both apartments.
Six men were gathered in front of 2C.
They were all armed with silenced pistols and assault rifles -fitted with suppressors.
The lead man wore a ski mask and gripped an HK416 rifle, a weapon popular with US special forces.
‘They must’ve followed you!’ Brewster hissed angrily.
‘No-one followed us,’ I insisted. ‘I’m sure of it.’
And I was sure.
After what had happened to me after Pine Hollow and the polo fields, I’d been extra careful while driving, watching for multiple tails, including different cars taking over from one another.
None had.
‘Then how did they find me?’ Brewster whispered.
He hurried over to a drawer.
As he did, I watched the screen.
On it, as one masked man acted as lookout, one of the -others broke the lock on apartment 2C’s door and they entered it military--style, covering each other expertly.
Brewster came back to me gripping a yellow paddle-like magnetometer wand similar to the kind TSA agents wave over people at airports.
‘Hey—’ I began.
He waved the wand over my body.
Of course, it beeped at my hip when it detected my gun, the one I’d taken from Roke in the mine.
I held open my jacket, revealing the holstered weapon for Brewster to see.
‘Arms out,’ he ordered. ‘This’ll also pick up radio waves. Trackers, AirTags, bugs.’
I spread my arms. ‘I think I’d know it if someone put an AirTag on me—’
The wand beeped.
Over my left wrist.
Over my beloved Casio G-Shock watch.
I froze in surprise.
‘What the hell?’ I breathed.
Brewster glared at me. ‘You were saying?’
Genuinely perplexed, I yanked off the watch, pulled out my Swiss Army knife and snapped open its screwdriver.
How had this happened?
Putting a small radio-wave bug inside a watch was actually very clever, especially when the subject—me—was a male. Women are easier to track with bugs because you can slip a chip into the seam of a handbag or into jewellery like earrings, rings or necklaces.
Men don’t carry handbags or wear much jewellery. But they almost always wear a watch.
But how had someone put a bug in my watch?
Using the screwdriver, I pulled off the back face of my Casio . . .
. . . and there it was.
A tiny radio chip.
A bug.
How had—
And suddenly I realised.
In my mind’s eye, I saw it.
I saw my watch lying on its side in the porcelain tray on the dresser beside the bed that I awoke in at the Kingmans’ statue property on Maple Drive.
The Kingmans and their lackeys had had a whole night to implant a bug in my watch.
They’d known each step I’d made ever since.
It explained how they’d found me so quickly at both the Catholic property in the swamp and at the mine behind the alligator farm in Florida.
Damn.
I’m not often outsmarted so completely but these bastards had done it.
In my defence, this also vindicated my two stays at the Motel 6 next door to the high-voltage substation: the electromagnetic cover of the substation would’ve scrambled the bug’s signal, probably saving Audrey’s and my lives.
Voices from the next apartment made me spin.
The six masked men had finished their sweep of the apartment.
‘Sir, he ain’t here,’ a muffled voice said on the other side of the wall. The wall was thin and the three of us could hear him easily.
The leader’s voice said, ‘He has to be. The chip says he’s here.’
Thankfully, their radio chip wasn’t precise enough to distinguish apartment 2C from 2D.
But they knew I was close.
It wouldn’t be long before they tried the other apartments.
I felt bad for Bill Brewster. I’d literally brought his enemies to his doorstep.
I had to get them away from here.
I crouched, quickly unzipped my backpack and extracted my second cheap aerial drone from it.
I extended the drone’s propellers and opened the rear window of the apartment.
Sea air rushed in and I saw the big railway bridge stretching away to my left over the river. A long freight train was rumbling across it.
I placed the radio chip that had been in my watch inside the drone’s fuselage and, using the remote, started its propellers.
The little drone buzzed to life and took to the air, whizzing out the window toward the bridge and the train.
I flew the drone low over the tracks, bringing it quickly to the last carriage of the freight train.
Instantly, a voice in the other apartment shouted, ‘Sir! I got movement on the tracker! Looks like he’s running! He just appeared on the tracks out back! He’s going for the train!’
I landed the drone on that carriage and powered it down.
So far as the Hammer’s men knew, I’d run after the train and jumped aboard the last carriage.
Next door, the team leader’s voice yelled, ‘Roscoe, Charlie, Marv! You three go after that train on foot! Make sure he doesn’t double back across the bridge. Buddy, Ricky and me’ll take the trucks and catch the train on the other side of the river.’
Rapid footfalls could be heard outside, diminishing as the team of assassins ran down the stairs and left.
I turned to Bill Brewster.
‘Sir, I’m so sorry to have brought these people back into your life. We’ll leave you now.’
Brewster scooped up a sports bag. ‘I’m leaving, too. Always had this go-bag packed and ready.’
‘I have one of those, too,’ I said. ‘I like to be prepared.’
He gave me a look.
‘You a little weird, son, but I like you, so listen to me. This thing ruined my life. The same people who destroyed me are hunting you now. You need to make a choice: run or finish it.’
‘Then I’ll finish it,’ I said. ‘If I’m gonna go down, I’ll go down fighting.’
He shook his head. ‘I remember when I thought like you did. Good luck, son.’
Then he drew a pistol, threw open the door and raced away down the stairs.
Audrey and I hurried out, too. By the time we reached the street, Brewster was nowhere to be seen.
We dived into our van.
‘Where to now?’ Audrey asked.
‘Angola,’ I said. ‘We need to talk to Cyrus Barbin again.’