Without Warning (22 page)

“He came home on leave, about two months before he died. I saw him then.”

“Not since?”

“Not since when?” she asked, confused by the question.

Rather than confuse her further, I took out the enlarged copy of the picture that Jimmy Osborne had given me. The quality was not great, but the faces could be clearly made out.

“Do you see him in this picture?”

She looked at it, and I could see her catch her breath slightly. Simmons noticed it also, and he leaned over to see the photo as well. “That’s Richie,” she said. “In the back.”

“You’re sure?”

“At one point we were going to be married,” she said, as if that said all that needed to be said, which in fact it did.

“At one point?”

“We broke up; Richie had problems with the concept of monogamy, though I’m not sure why it’s your business. What the hell is going on?”

“This photograph was taken four years ago.”

It didn’t take her any time at all to do the math. “Bullshit.”

“Maybe we’re wrong, maybe that’s not Richie Drazen. But there is no question about when the photograph was taken. It was four years ago.” I was positive of that; the photo showed the capsule, as well as Votto, the workman who wound up buried with it.

Collins had been standing the entire time, but she sat down heavily into a chair, as if she was so stunned that her legs were having trouble supporting her. “It can’t be.”

“Believe me, I know that better than anyone,” I said. “I was there when he went overboard. It is not possible that he survived, yet there he is.”

She pointed to the scar. “What is that on his face?”

“He was cut there in … in Singapore.” I didn’t want to say it apparently happened while he was committing two murders. The scar looked different than when I had seen it … probably because it had been bleeding then, while his face was contorted in fear and rage.

“Wilton,” Simmons said, remembering where I said I was from. “Is this about that capsule thing?”

I told him it was and that the photograph was taken at the ceremony to bury the capsule.

“So Richie came back from the dead and is murdering those people? Is that what you’re saying?” she asked, clearly not agreeing with that scenario.

“I didn’t come here to say anything. I came here to ask if you know how this could be possible.”

“Well, I don’t,” she said.

I believed her; there seemed to be little possibility that she was lying. Her circumstance as a cop, the fact that she was married, her obvious surprise at what I was saying,… all of that convinced me she was telling the truth as she knew it. But there was still the possibility of getting information from her.

“Where did you meet Richie?”

“Right here,” she said. “He was stationed at Kittery for a while.”

“Is this where he called home?”

She thought about it for a moment. “I wouldn’t say so. He was born in Indiana, but he was in a military family, so they moved around a lot. He used to tell me how much he loved Maine; before and after Kittery he was stationed at the Navy Operational Support Center in Bangor.”

“Did he have a place up there?”

“I think he said something about having a cabin at one point. I don’t know what happened to it, or where it was.”

The only other information she was able to provide was the name of someone that Richie talked about. They served in the Navy together, and she thought he lived near Bangor. His name was Robbie Fister, but she didn’t know where I could find him.

“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry to barge into your life like this.”

“You think he committed those murders in Singapore?” she asked.

“Honestly, I never looked into it. I shot him because he was coming after me with the pole. After that, it didn’t seem to matter.”

“But maybe now it does?”

I nodded. “Maybe now it does.”

“If he’s somehow alive,” she said, “I want to know about it.”

“If he’s alive, the whole world will know about it.”

The rank and file reporters for the
Wilton Journal
were frustrated. Matt Higgins could see it; he felt and understood exactly what they were going through. Katie’s disappearance had made the story personal to them, and every day that went by without her safe return was a terrible one. She was more than a boss to them; she was family.

So they saw themselves as having two jobs: they wanted to report the story, but they also wanted to investigate it. In doing so, maybe they could find out something that could lead them to Katie.

While the story already had all the makings of one that would attract national attention, Katie’s kidnapping had put it over the top. Even though the
Journal
was a small-town paper, other media outlets rightly saw Katie as a member of their fraternity, or in this case sorority. On a basic level, many of the journalists felt violated; it was not supposed to be life-threatening to simply pursue a story.

So partly because there was so much competition, the revelations by the
Journal
were becoming few and far between. The days of Matt dropping a reporting bombshell each morning were over; he was struggling along with everyone else. He had lost his dominant position, and the same could therefore be said of the
Journal
.

Most of the problem could be attributed to Jake Robbins stepping back from the case. It moved the center of operations to the FBI, where Matt certainly didn’t have the kind of access he had to the Wilton police. If the FBI wanted to leak something, and they were certainly not above doing so, they’d go straight to a place like the
New York Times
, not the
Wilton Journal
.

Also missing were further additions to the side story that Matt and his people had developed, which revealed Jake to be at the center of all of it. With Jake in self-imposed isolation, that angle was basically removed, and with it another piece of the paper’s dominance.

So Matt dug harder, and he came up with a beauty, one that energized everyone on the staff. Jake had claimed that Katie called him; it was believed that he had turned the message tape over to the FBI.

Matt didn’t report on what Katie had said, or why she had been allowed to call. All he reported was that the call confirmed that Katie was being held prisoner, at some still unknown location.

The story was quoting an anonymous source, but Matt felt confident enough to run with it. He was careful to say that Jake was alone when he received the call, leaving conspiracy, anti-Jake theorists to speculate about whether Jake had arranged the call that he received. Matt was careful not to say that in any way, but it was there for anyone who looked deep enough.

The story was a stunner, but no one was more shocked than Hank Mickelson. The first call he made after reading it, even before heading into the office, was to Jake Robbins, at home.

“Is the story true?” Hank asked.

“What story is that?”

Hank paraphrased what Matt had reported that morning, the main item being Katie’s call to Jake. Jake confirmed that it was true.

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” Hank asked, obviously upset by the situation. “How the hell am I supposed to keep on top of this case if you withhold something like that?”

“I gave it to Bennett,” Jake said. “They have the analytical capabilities, and turning over things like that is part of my deal with him.”

“I don’t give a damn about your giving it to him; of course you should. But why freeze me out?”

“I didn’t want it to be in the paper, at least not yet,” Jake said.

“Yeah? Well how did that work out?”

“Not so well. Apparently the great FBI ship has leaks as well, though I wouldn’t have thought the
Journal
would be the recipient.”

“What did she say?”

“That she was being held prisoner, by someone who is out to get me. She didn’t say who that was, or where she was being held.”

“So he let her call?” Hank asked. His anger seemed to be dissipating somewhat as I shared the information with him.

“No question,” Jake said. “What I can’t figure out is why. There seemed to be nothing for him to gain, except maybe letting us know that she was alive. There would have been other, less risky, ways to do that.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think they’re playing with me. They’ve been playing with me from the beginning. But it beats the shit out of me why.”

“Jake, I want to help, OK? It’s my goddamn job to help, and you know how I feel about Katie. So you need to trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Jake said, which was the truth. And at that moment, there were very few people he could say that about.

Robbie Fister thought I was nuts. Which, when you look at it from his perspective, wasn’t far off. I was there to ask him if he had seen a dead guy, and since it wasn’t a séance, he found it to be fairly bizarre.

I had made the decision on the way up to Bangor not to beat around the bush and try to read into his response. There was so little chance that this would amount to anything that I wanted to get it out there and over with. I didn’t have time to fool around, and neither did Katie.

“Richie died years ago,” Fister pointed out, thinking I might be unaware of it.

“His body was never found, and he has been seen since.”

“Not by me. But if I do see him, I’ll kill him myself.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, he owed me money.”

“How much?”

Fister shrugged. “Couple hundred bucks. It ain’t a lot now, but it was a hell of a lot when we were on duty.”

“Were you on the ship when he was supposed to have died?”

“No, I got my discharge a couple of months earlier. I heard he took a dive to get out of going to jail.”

“Something like that.”

“So you think he may have faked his death to get out of the murder deal?”

“Always a possibility,” I said. “Who were his friends? If he were still around, who would he have contacted?”

“I think he had a girlfriend, not from around here. She thought he was going to marry her, but there was no way.”

He was probably talking about Sergeant Collins, who told me about Richie in the first place. Neither of them was proving particularly helpful. “Why not?” I asked.

“He just wasn’t the type. Richie had more women than he knew what to do with,” he said, smiling at the memory. “Best thing I can say about him is that he was willing to share.”

“So no one else?”

He shrugged. “Not that I remember. Richie didn’t talk about home that much, and if he did, I wasn’t taking notes, you know?”

“Okay, thanks for your time,” I said, standing to leave.

“I don’t think you’re going to find Richie,” Fister said. “I think he’s fish food.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if he was alive, he would have come around asking for money.”

Since I was already in the area, I decided to stop at the Navy Operational Support Center, where Drazen was stationed when he was in Bangor. It was the last and longest stateside assignment he had before going overseas.

I asked to see the commander, and the reaction I got was the same as if I stopped in at the Vatican to see if the Pope wanted to grab a piece of pizza with me. The closest I got was one of his public relations flunkies, who spent five of the six minutes that I was talking to him telling me how important it is to them to be helpful to local authorities.

The sixth minute consisted of his promising to look into the matter, and that proved to be just as insincere as the five minutes that preceded it. Nothing whatsoever was going to come of any of this, so I left.

Next stop was the local police precinct, where the captain on duty also had no clue who Richie Drazen was, or where I could find him. The only difference was that he seemed to genuinely want to help, so he called in at least a half-dozen officers to see what they could contribute.

One of them knew Drazen. It wasn’t an intimate relationship, though. It started and ended with the cop having arrested Drazen on a drunk and disorderly in a local bar, one night at two in the morning. Of course, the arrest took place while Drazen was alive, so it wasn’t particularly meaningful to me.

But he was at least able to give me something else to do. He checked the files and learned that the other person arrested that night, an apparent friend of Drazen since they were on the same side in the fight, still lived and worked in Bangor. His name was Danny Stearns.

So I went to see Danny, who said that he last saw Drazen two years before he died. They weren’t real close, because he said that Drazen was a piece of garbage who deserved what he got.

So the trip could be summed up as no one knew whether Drazen was alive, no one thought he was alive, no one saw him alive, no one cared if he was alive, and no one particularly wanted him to be alive.

Richie Drazen left quite a legacy.

I stopped at a diner on the outskirts of town, because all this lack of progress was making me hungry. Their menu bragged about their fried chicken, and even though it’s fair to say that Bangor, Maine, is not exactly the fried chicken capital of the world, I took a chance and ordered it.

Before the waitress brought the food, my cell phone rang. It was Mary back at the office. “Jake. I got a call for you; she says it’s important.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. She’s says it’s about Richie Drazen. Isn’t that the guy…?”

Mary and others in the department knew the story about Drazen; it had been chronicled in many stories about my career. “Put her through,” I said.

The woman on the line sounded stressed. “Chief Robbins? My name is Gail Hendricks. I heard you’ve been asking around about Richie Drazen.”

“Did you know him?”

“We were going to be married,” she said, adding herself to a rapidly growing fiancée list. “But that’s not why I’m calling.”

“Why are you calling?”

She hesitated briefly; I got the feeling she was nervous. “Because I think I saw him. And I think he may have seen me.”

“When?”

“Maybe three months ago.”

“I’d like to come by and talk to you about this,” I said. “Where are you?”