John Gilstrap - No mercy

“An Indian burial ground,” Jonathan grumped.

“A Nike missile launch facility. It’s all in the public record. Back in the eighties and nineties, we got rid of all our Nike missiles, and the sites went up for sale. This one, on Apocalypse Boulevard, was bought by Secured Storage Company out of Wilmington, Delaware.”

“Interesting company name,” Boxers poked. “I wonder what they do.”

“ Delaware,” Venice stressed. Clearly, she was frustrated that they hadn’t already leaped to where she was going. “Carlyle is a Delaware company.”

Jonathan coughed out a laugh. “Jesus, Ven, half the companies in the world are Delaware corporations.”

“Which makes it that much easier to do the search,” she countered. “Secured Storage Company is a subsidiary-several steps removed, of course-of Carlyle Industries. They’re the same company!”

Finally, Jonathan got it. “Missiles mean underground storage magazines,” he said. “That’s where Carlyle was storing the GVX.”

“When the Hugheses went there to get it, there must have been an exchange of gunfire,” Dom said.

“So what’s with the phone call to 9-1-1?” Boxers asked. “And if there someone was shot, why un — call?”

“Because they didn’t want the publicity,” Jonathan explained. “Every state requires gunshot wounds to be reported to the police, mandating some kind of investigation. That’s the last thing a company like Carlyle would want.”

The room grew silent except for JoeDog’s snoring as they each put the puzzle together for themselves.

Finally, Jonathan test-drove his own theory aloud. “Desperate to get their kid back, the Hugheses reach out to Angela Caldwell. She points them in the right direction, and pays for the decision with her life. Obviously, they visited her at her house, or else their fingerprints wouldn’t be all over the place. Then they went to this Apocalypse Boulevard place and took what they needed for ransom.”

“Shooting the place up while doing it,” Boxers said.

“Right,” Jonathan agreed. “So now the Hugheses are hiding somewhere. They can’t call the police without walking into a murder charge, and they’ve either stashed their GVX somewhere, or they’refolder. “Facial recognition software turned up bupkis on your pal Leon Harris. Absolutely nothing. So, I decided to run the other faces. This is what I got.”

Gail waited for him to open his file and select a facedown piece of paper. She turned it over and saw a mug she vaguely recognized. She scowled and waited for her answer without asking the question.

“The priest,” Jesse said. “From the video. You are looking at one Father Dominc D’Angelo, pastor of St. Katherine’s Catholic Church in a place called Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia. Don’t ask where it is, because I don’t have a clue. The picture you’re looking at is from a fund-raiser for something called Resurrection House. It’s an orphanage, sort of, for kids whose parents are serving time in jail.”

“How sweet,” Gail said.

“Hey, it’s a start,” Jesse said. Then he smiled. “But it’s only the beginning. Clearly Leon and Father D’Angelo know each other, right? So I thought I’d search the Internet for the cross section of Dominic D’Angelo and Fisherman’s Cove. Actually, there were more hits than I would have thought. For a priest, he really gets around on the rubber chicken circuit. He’s like a fund-raising machine. He’s also a psychologist, for what that’s worth.”

“Is it worth anything?”

Jesse shrugged. “I suppose if you’re crazy, but not so much for us right now.”

“Then why-”

“Stay with me. I’m getting there. I wasn’t finding anything to link him to Leon, and I traced him back as far as I knew how to trace. Finally, I found an alumni newspaper from the College of William and Mary from sometime in the mid-eighties. They were running some kind of a retrospective of the Good Old Days, you know?” His smile broadened, and he slid another sheet face down to Gail. “And look what I found.”

With a sense of real anticipation in her gut, Gail turned the sheet over and found a picture of two clearly intoxicated college students. The clothing styles spoke of the last days of disco. These two boys were laughing heartily, hanging off each other in that way that you never see in guys who are much beyond their teens.

“Don’t you see it?” Jesse prompted.

Then she did. The caption identified them by name. The dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty on the left was a younger version of Father D’Angelo. And the shirtless blond Adonis on the right was a very young Leon Harris-only his name on the page was Jonathan Gravenow.

“Oh, my,” Gail beamed. “Look what you found. Nice work, Jess. Wonderful work. Now we have a name for the face.”

Jesse shook his head. “Actually, we don’t,” he said. “Jonathan Gravenow doesn’t exist. Nowhere in the world.”

“But I just saw him.”

Jesse’s smile got even broader. “No,” he said as he slid a third sheet of paper across the desk, “you just saw Jonathan Grave.”

This new sheet of paper looked to be articles of incorporation for a company called Security Solutions, a Virginia corporation headquartered in none other than Fisherman’s Cove.

“This one was a little tricky,” Jesse said, exuding pride. “Jonathan Gravenow was the only child of Simon Gravenow. Does that name ring a bell, Miss FBI?”

It didn’t ring a bell, name to Jonathan Grave, and he joined the Army. Twenty years later, he owns a private investigation company. Now, what kind of investigation firm do you suppose a former Army guy might run?”

This time, Gail saw it immediately. People like that were exactly the folks who would get into the paramilitary business. The kind of business that might specialize in rescuing wayward hostages. It was time to find Fisherman’s Cove on the map and make a plane reservation.

She was about to say something to that effect when her phone rang. Even as she reached for the receiver, she had the sense that she should have ignored it.

Thirty seconds later, she cursed herself for not listening to her instincts.

Venice didn’t try to conceal her pride for what she’d accomplished. “I knew you’d want to track the Hugheses,” she said, “so I worked the problem. I was hoping that they’d done something really stupid like using their credit cards, but obviously they haven’t, or the police would have been all over them. They’ve been pretty smart. The only record of unusual behavior is their withdrawal of twelve thousand dollars and change from their savings account. Pretty much wiped out their cash supply.”

“That’s their traveling money,” Boxers said.

She continued, “I tried tracking the cell phones owned by each of them, but they’ve either turned them off or thrown them away. Either way, there’s no signal to triangulate on.”

Jonathan asked, “What about the number I called at the end of the 0300 mission?”

“That’s one of those prepaid disposable jobs-thank God you called it, or we’d have nothing even to look for-but it’s turned off, too. Even so, it got me thinking. If they know enough to keep their cell phones off and to use prepaids, then they’d probably buy more than one of them, right? One for Stephenson Hughes and one for his wife, Julie.” She waited for the nods. “So, with a little help from a friend of mine in the telephone company, I did a search on the telephone numbers that were called by Stephenson’s prepaid, and guess what I found?”

Jonathan feigned patience because it was easiest. “What?”

“That he called another prepaid disposable phone.”

“The wife?”

“That would be my guess. Anyway, those calls-there were three of them altogether, beginning shortly after your call to Stephenson, with the last one about thirty hours ago-gave us a routing to look at.”