Winter Frost (A Chris Matheson Cold Case Mystery Book 2) Read online

  “Elliott says the two hitmen sent to take out Tristan Faraday had been sent by Lurch, the tall man. After I had left Murphy’s place, he’d called one of the assassin’s phones. Murphy pretended to be the hitman and Lurch admitted to being the one who had walked into the FBI and stolen the evidence from Blair’s murder. He said someone named Jenn gave the order.”

  “I know Jenn is a pretty common name,” Helen said, “but what do you think the odds are that the Jenn who hired Ralph and Tony isn’t the same one who hired Lurch and the two assassins who tried to kill Murphy’s brother-in-law?”

  “Jenn is one busy lady.” Chris uttered a chuckle. “I wonder how loyal she is to Stu Dunleavy. When Ripley and I walked into the Dunleavy place, I remember Stu telling her to call a guy named Burnett to take care of a situation ASAP.”

  “Does anyone know how tall this Burnett is?” Helen asked.

  Chris dropped back onto the bed. “We have a whole lot of nothing.” He stared at the ceiling fan above his head. “Jacqui told me that they interviewed the communications chief’s assistant. Remember Les Monroe?”

  Helen leaned over him. “The guy who committed suicide by shooting himself in the back three times?”

  Chris looked up at her. “She told Jacqui and Francine that Blair had found some sort of report on the mainframe from Lithuania.”

  “Lithuania? Does anything happen in Lithuania?”

  “Blair was archiving communications from all the different stations in the region. Lithuania was one of them,” Chris said. “Whatever was in that report upset a lot of people. The chief of station, Ned Schiff ordered Blair and Monroe to delete the report and forget about it. They refused because of what was in it.”

  “What was in it?”

  Chris shrugged of his shoulders. “Whatever it was had to be big because Daniel Cross traveled all the way to Switzerland to demand that they bury it—a trip for which Murphy says there’s no paper trail. Someone had to exert a lot of authority to bury a flight from the United States to Switzerland.”

  “Maybe it was a flight on one of Leban Slade’s private jets,” Helen said. “From what we’ve uncovered, he has a stake in this.”

  “Murphy and Elliott caught up with Daniel Cross at his gym and Elliott mentioned being the pilot. Both Cross and Schiff were so upset that they had them thrown out of the gym.” He shook his head. “Not the actions of innocent men.” He looked at Helen. “I think Cross killed Monroe and Schiff covered it up. They even killed the medical examiner who refused to go along with the cover up. They tried to kill Blair, which was why she ran off to France. Like us, they thought she’d been killed in the terrorist attack. When she came out of hiding, they finished the job.”

  “What was in that report that cost so many people their lives?” she asked.

  “I wish I knew.” He took in a deep breath. “The problem is that these people are so powerful and have such deep connections. They don’t care who they kill or whose lives they ruin—just so that they can keep their power. No one can touch them.”

  “No one is untouchable,” Helen said.

  “Thank you, Elliott Ness,” Chris said. “But this time I think we’re beat. They stole all of the evidence of Blair’s murder. She had to have that report or whatever proof she had of what they had done in her purse. They got her purse. Her cell phone. The physical evidence from the murder. Ripley and I searched Blair’s room and we found nothing. I think someone got there before us because we didn’t even find bank statements.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have a bank account,” she said. “She was living off the grid.”

  “Something in my gut ...” His voice trailed off. “Are they corrupt? Yes, They’re also murderers. But how can we possibly bring them to justice when we don’t even know what their motives are?”

  “I don’t know, but we can’t give up.” Helen laid her head on his chest. “Otherwise, Blair would have spent the last three years away from her family and died for nothing.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her.

  “Daddy!”

  Emma ran across the floor. They parted just in time for the little girl to land between them. Sterling leapt onto the pillows.

  “I thought you went home,” Emma said to Helen while snuggling against her.

  Helen gave her a warm hug. “I forgot something and came back.”

  “I thought you went to bed.” Chris tickled the little girl.

  “Mommy won’t stop singing,” Emma said between high-pitched giggles.

  “Are you fibbing?” Chris’s face screwed up with doubt. “She wasn’t singing when I was down there.”

  “She is now.”

  “Let’s go see.” Chris took Emma’s hand.

  Emma took Helen’s hand and the three of them, hand-in-hand, marched down the stairs, with Sterling taking up the rear. They could hear the melody of the song drifting up the stairwell. The music was so loud that it drew Doris and Nikki from the family room below.

  “I thought you went home,” Doris said when she saw Helen descending the stairs from Chris’s room.

  “I forgot something,” Helen said.

  Doris shot her a wicked grin.

  “Mommy won’t stop singing.” Emma trotted into the room and pointed up at the clock. “She sings to me every night, but usually it is only one song. Now she’s singing all the time.”

  “She’s been singing on the hour all day long,” Doris said.

  “Must be a short in the music box,” Chris said.

  “It’s not an electric clock,” Helen said. “Maybe it’s a broken spring in the mechanism.”

  “Then it wouldn’t work at all.” Chris picked up the clock from the shelf. Unlike earlier in the day, the melody continued after he had picked it up. He turned it over and touched the turnkey.

  The music stopped.

  “There. All fixed.”

  When he took his fingers off the turnkey, the music continued.

  Doris giggled. “I don’t think so, Christopher.”

  Chris studied the clock. The back was secured with tiny Philips screws. Chris sent Nikki to the kitchen for a screwdriver.

  “You’re not going to break Mommy, are you, Dad?” Emma asked while hugging Thor.

  “I would never break Mommy,” Chris said. “I’m just going to convince her to sing a little less.”

  “Maybe she’s trying to tell you something,” Doris said.

  “Tell me what?” Chris asked as he took the screwdriver from Nikki.

  “Never give up,” Helen said in a soft voice.

  Chris dropped into the small chair at Emma’s desk and unscrewed the six screws securing the back of the clock—handing each one to Doris. Then he turned it over and shook off the back. As the back fell loose, he peered at the gears and inner workings inside. “I don’t see anything.”

  In search of troubleshooting instructions, he turned the back over. Instead of instructions, there was a key taped to the underside of the back panel.

  “Is that an extra turnkey?” Nikki asked as Chris peeled it off the plate.

  The small silver key was too big to be a music box turnkey, but too small to belong to a house or vehicle.

  “Chris! I wish we had more time!” Blair yelled to him while boarding the train after he had shot Leonardo Mancini. She said it again before the doors slid shut.

  “I wish we had more time,” Chris murmured to himself. “She was telling me to look at the clock.”

  “What’s it to, Dad?” Nikki asked.

  “I think it’s a safety deposit box key.”

  Emma was more interested in the clock. She picked up the silent clock and frowned at the angel on top. “Mommy’s not singing anymore, Daddy.”

  “I think it’s because Daddy finally got your Mommy’s message.” Helen squeezed Chris’s hand.

&nbs
p; Despite exhaustion setting in after a full day in the city, Bruce and Elliott were alert enough to notice a dark vehicle parked behind thick brush in the turnoff along the Shenandoah River. As Bruce drove his dark red SUV across the bridge crossing the Shenandoah River, both men stopped talking to sit up and take notice.

  It was close to ten o’clock at night, but the moon cast enough light to reflect off the river to catch on the passenger side windows.

  “Used to be a time that homeless folks would live in campers along the river.” Elliott shook his head. “Never saw anyone living out of an eighty-thousand-dollar SUV before.”

  Bruce turned onto the road along the river to take them to the Matheson farm. “Maybe we’re getting paranoid, but they seem to be parked in just the right spot to keep an eye on the farm.”

  They caught sight of two men dropping down low in the front compartment as they drove past.

  “Just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean that folks aren’t out to get us,” Elliott said.

  Chris, Doris, and Helen sat around the kitchen table with the key, not unlike a tiny centerpiece, resting in the middle.

  Emma had been disappointed that the clock had stopped playing the melody. Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought that it would never sing again. “Nonni, why did Daddy decide to kill Mommy?” she asked Doris.

  Chris put the clock back together and turned the turnkey. To everyone’s relief, the angel proceeded to sing. Helen was probably most relieved that she didn’t have to arrest Chris for the homicide of an angel.

  With the mystery of the singing angel solved, Nikki went off to her room, leaving them alone to openly discuss the key hidden in the clock that Blair had delivered to Emma.

  “An educated guess would say it’s a safety deposit box key.” Doris got up from the table to inspect a pair of headlights that flashed in the window as Bruce’s SUV rolled up to the house.

  Elliott jumped out of the passenger side. “Woman, I hope you got your pistol handy.” He ran up the steps onto the porch.

  “Annie’s right here.” Doris patted her robe pocket where she had stashed a pearl-handle twenty-two-caliber handgun. She gave him a kiss. “We’ve had an exciting development.”

  “We have, too.” Elliott jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Did you know that you were under surveillance?”

  “Again?” Doris squinted across the front pastures toward the river. “Or is it still?”

  Bruce joined them on the porch. “I think we should stay tonight and keep watch in shifts. We know what these people are capable of.”

  Elliott agreed. “What developments have you made here on your end?”

  Doris gave them a demure smile. “We think we found a key to a safety deposit box that Blair had rented.”

  It took only seconds for Bruce and Elliott to join them around the table. While Doris recounted the discovery of the key to them, everyone in the kitchen stared at it as if it had the power to stand up and confess to everything it knew.

  “Okay,” Bruce said, “you found it taped inside a clock that Blair had sent to Emma.”

  “And the clock came from Europe,” Helen said.

  “Does that mean the safety deposit box is in Europe?” Elliott frowned. “I don’t know if Jessica Faraday would be so generous as to lease us a jet to search all of Europe for one safety deposit box.”

  “I don’t think the box is in Europe,” Chris said slowly. “The clock was not sent to Emma from Europe. Ivy Dunleavy delivered it to her.” He looked across the table to Doris. “Don’t you remember, Mom? Emma’s fifth birthday was ten days after Blair was supposed to have died. Ivy Dunleavy showed up at the party with the clock. She told us that Blair had sent it to her earlier and had asked her to deliver it to Emma on her birthday.”

  “But today, the Dunleavys told us that Blair showed up right after her funeral,” Elliott said. “She had to have been staying with them when Emma had her birthday.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Most likely, she smuggled it out of Europe, hid the key inside, and gave the clock to Ivy to deliver to Emma,” Helen said.

  “The clock was a trojan horse,” Doris said.

  “But what good is the key if we don’t know what safety deposit box it goes to?” Elliott said. “We didn’t find any paperwork in Blair’s room to tell us what bank—”

  “Bank of America,” Helen said with a sense of excitement. “Doris and I went through Blair’s things today. She had her accounts with that bank. Since she was familiar with them, she would have gone there first to get a safety deposit box.”

  “We had our joint accounts with them,” Chris said. “I think we should start there.”

  “The banks won’t open again until Monday,” Bruce said, “about the same time that Daniel Cross’s confirmation hearings begin. Unless we find some evidence of wrongdoing, the committee will just go through the motions to confirm him.”

  “I wish we had more time.” Chris’s chair scraped across the floor when he pushed back from the table and ran up the back stairs to his room.

  “Yeah, I wish we had more time, too,” Bruce said. “Everyone thinks Cross is God’s gift to national intelligence.”

  “He’s really a killer,” Elliott said. “You should have seen the look on his face tonight when we told him we had proof he had been in Switzerland. He’s a psychopath.”

  “Problem is proving it,” Elliott said. “He’s got all the right people running interference and covering for him.”

  Chris galloped down the back stairs and into the kitchen with a gold watch in his hand. “Ivy delivered this watch to me at the same time she gave Emma the clock. I could not understand why Blair would buy me a watch because I don’t wear them. Not only that, but she had it engraved with ‘Darling Chris, Fly Away with me. Your Angel, Blair.’”

  “‘Fly’ is the name of the melody the clock plays,” Doris said. “She was pointing at the clock with the watch.”

  Chris pointed to the engraving. “Below her name she has the date June twenty-eight, two-thousand-and-four.”

  “Is that your wedding date?” Elliott asked.

  “No, it’s not our wedding date,” Chris said. “All these years, I’ve thought she’d gotten our wedding date wrong. Now that we have this key, I’m thinking it’s the safety deposit box number. Zero. Six. Two. Eight. Zero. Four.”

  “What a clever woman,” Bruce said with a chuckle. “She used a two-part security method. It’s not an uncommon technique used in intelligence circles for the most sensitive classified information. In the military, they’ll give only half of a safe combination to one intelligence officer, and then give the second half to the other one. That way, if one goes rogue, he can’t access the information without the other guy.”

  “What if they both go rogue?” Doris asked.

  “Or if one guy dies suddenly?” Elliott asked.

  “We won’t go there.” Bruce picked up the key. “The key is the first part. If the people she was running from got their hands on the key, it would be useless without knowing where the box is or what it goes to.” He picked up the watch. “She put that information on the watch and made sure you got it. If the bad guys got the watch and figured out the message on it, it would be useless without the key. The only way to access whatever it was she hid in that safety deposit box is to have both parts—” He placed the key on top of the watch. “—which she entrusted to you, Christopher.” He handed them to Chris.

  “Blair wasn’t as dumb as I thought,” Doris said.

  “Not so fast,” Bruce said. “Let’s not get our hopes up. First thing we need to figure out is what name did Blair use to get a safety deposit box. Blair Matheson was declared dead on Bastille Day three years ago.”

  “That’s right,” Helen said. “She’d need to have some identification.”

  “She had an Australian passport,” C
hris said. “Charlotte Nesbitt. She got the box under that name.”

  “Even with the key, you’re going to have a problem,” Bruce said. “Did Charlotte Nesbitt have a husband.”

  “Yes, she did.” Chris took the burner phone from his pocket and hit the speed dial to connect him to Murphy.

  “I thought you’d quit,” Murphy said without further greeting.

  “I’m back,” Chris said. “I need an Australian passport.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Elliott and Doris insisted on taking the first two-hour shift of watching the vehicle surveilling the house. That left Chris and Bruce to take over at one o’clock in the morning. Chris was running on pure adrenalin. Sensing that they were nearing the truth, he doubted if he would be able to sleep if he were free to go to bed.

  From his laptop, he launched the program to his home security system. After leaving the FBI, he had installed a security system on and around the farm. The entire one hundred acres was covered by hidden cameras. While his primary objective was to catch uninvited visitors with less than honorable motives, the cameras also helped to keep track of the horses when he put them out in pastures away from the barn.

  Shortly after putting in the system, a newly acquired horse disappeared. Chris assumed the mare had been stolen until he checked the security recordings. The horse had jumped the fence and galloped off with a herd of deer. After a week, he was finally able to track her down to the buck with whom she had become infatuated.

  From the program, Chris adjusted the angle of a camera perched in a tree next to the far corner of the front pasture. He zoomed in on the license plate of the SUV. It was a Virginia registration.

  He recalled Helen telling him that the two hitmen claiming Stu Dunleavy had hired them, were from Baltimore, Maryland.

  He texted the license plate number to Ray with the message: Can you run a check on this plate? Staking out our farm. 2 men. Seem to be different league than 2 Mom and Helen caught. From Virginia.

  As he pressed the send button, the burner phone rang. He recognized the number in the caller ID.