CAPTIVES

Sunday, April 12th, 2009 | Uncategorized

A new “Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” adventure

That Monday, I woke up at 9:00 AM, not hung over for some reason, came downstairs and poured myself the first of what I thought would be a great many bourbons. The silence was overwhelming.

I sat on the couch, took a sip and remarked to no one in particular, “One year, three months, twenty-one days.”  That was something I always knew.

No matter how drunk I got, and I often got really drunk a LOT during that time, I could always tell you exactly how long it had been.

I knew it like I knew my own birthday.

That was the day I got the call that three airplanes full of people returning from that international celebration in St. Peter’s Square of my last case(the celebration that I refused to attend) had encountered a freak storm, suffered some kind of catastrophic engine failure and had gone down in the middle of the Atlantic. There were no survivors.

Communication with each plane was maintained until the end; later on, I heard the final recordings of each of the pilots and flight crews myself. I could hear the terror in their voices along with the muffled screams of the passengers.

Weeks later, degraded wreckage was found here and there on the bottom of the ocean and definitively traced to each of the planes. So there was no question about what happened and no bodies were ever recovered.

One more thing.

One of those planes was Air Force One.

Nicky and Paul were dead.

Add to that the fact that every friend and every professional associate I had ever known, along with their families, had also been on one of those three flights.

Except one.

Vice-President Dale Price was going to fly to Rome with his wife Heather and their children when he came down with a bad case of the flu. He didn’t want the Vatican to postpone the event, he didn’t want his family to miss it and since he only wanted to sleep his flu off, Heather and the kids flew to Rome without him.

And never came back.

There was considerable debate about where to hold the internationally-televised memorial service until I forcefully decided, “It’s going to be held at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington and it’s going to be a Catholic service. NOBODY else!!”

“Thanks, big man,” Price quietly told me. “But why?”

“Because I said so. And because I don’t want the memories of my…my…wife and my…” Oh God, I thought, just let me get it out. “my…little…boy…anywhere near the NatCat.”  Pope Benedict XVI flew over and led the service himself.

Dale and I stoically made it through the thing. He took Communion; I, of course, didn’t.  Given my life, it seemed eminently fitting.

Then the two of us were flown by helicopter to the crash site and landed on an aircraft carrier. We each tossed a bouquet of flowers into the water and then spent the next three hours silently staring at the ocean and not giving a rat’s ass who saw us cry.

It was only after that that our tailspins began. Price immediately announced that he would not run for election in his own right and desultorily finished out my wife’s term.

After he left office, Dale returned to Detroit for a few days before deciding that he couldn’t live there anymore. So he sold everything he had, dismissed his Secret Service protection(“If they cap me, they cap me, WHAT THE HELL DO I CARE?!!“), bought some land in Alaska, built himself a cabin and said goodbye to the world.

I visited him there once. He wasn’t thrilled to see me because it reminded him of the past so I only stayed a few hours. For several months, I got postcards from him from time to time but I haven‘t heard anything from him for quite a while.

Although moving to Alaska is something that I still think very hard about doing, I stayed in Missouri. Huge crowds used to gather at the mansion but eventually left me alone. I wanted to sell the place and find the same kind of peaceful spot to die that Dale had but this had been…our home…and I couldn’t allow strangers to live there.

Cards and letters by the millions came in but I didn’t read any of them. Pictures of Nicky and Paul or the three of us together along with family videos were packed away. All the awards and Congressional medals I’d been presented over the years were packed away as well. Looking at those damned things made me sick.

What did I do with myself? I worked in our garden. I taught myself to cook a whole lot better. And I regularly made fresh flower arrangements for the kitchen table. Just in case, you know, they…came…you know.

I read a lot. Histories, mostly. Fiction stories with happy endings just saddened me. I tried to read the Bible but couldn’t read past Genesis 2:18 without sobbing for hours.

I’d known loneliness; it had been my entire life before I married Nicky. But now it hurt exponentially more than it ever had before.

“Why is it okay for me to be alone, Lord?” I’d ask the ceiling when I got to that verse. “HUH, LORD?!! DIDN’T CATCH THAT!! DID YOU SAY SOMETHING?!! WHY?!! WHY, LORD?!! WHY?!!”

Then I’d throw the Bible against the wall. Sometimes it sat on the floor for weeks.

I drank way more than I ever had. Any hour of the day or night and almost anything could set it off. Even though I knew what it would do to me, I’d get the family pictures and videos out from time to time. Every single time I did, I passed out on the couch.

A radio station here once played Donovan’s song “Atlantis.”  I hadn’t heard it in years. Good thing too because its refrain, “Way down below the ocean, where I want to be, she may be,” literally kept me blasted for three days straight.

Was I an alcoholic? Probably. But I didn’t even remotely care.

I stopped seeing doctors. Any pains or conditions were either let alone or self-medicated away. I had no reason to hang around and nothing and no one to hang around for.

Did I consider suicide? Many times. But something always stopped me, something always said, “Please don‘t do it.”

So while I wasn’t going to kill myself, I also wasn‘t going to make any effort to prolong my life. If God wouldn’t take me to be with my wife and my son, I wasn’t going to try extra hard to stick around the Earth.

I basically just existed, waking up in the morning, going to sleep at night and rarely seeing or talking to anybody. Since all the first-line Christian investigators were dead, I got case requests all the time, all of which I rejected and few of which I even read.

Dear God, I hated life. More than anything in the world, I only wanted to bring both my career and my life to a close. And I may just have brought it off.

Except for that evening.

The walls of the mansion were closing in and I hadn’t drunk too much so I drove over to Bill(not IB)’s. Since Bill and his family had come back from Rome on Air Force One at Nicky‘s invitation, superstar bartender Kathleen Lundquist owned the place now.

She never charged me for drinks. She rarely spoke to me. Not because she was mad at me or uncomfortable or anything. If I wanted to talk, she was more than happy to oblige. When I didn’t, she left me alone. She unfailingly knew which approach to take.

I don’t know how or why but Lundquist always understood me. Always.

But that night, as soon as I walked in the door, Kathleen immediately made me a bourbon-and-soda and said, “Somebody was just here asking about you.”

I was uninterested. “Oh yeah? Who?”

“No idea. She wouldn’t give me her name. Hot blonde.”

“I used to know lots of hot blondes. Married one of ‘em.”

“I know. But this one was…I don‘t know, something just didn‘t sit right. She kept asking me if you were coming in. I told her I didn’t know.

“She ordered a glass of wine and held it really strangely. She left an hour ago and it’s how she left that scares me.”

“What happened?”

“Two men came in the place and told her she was coming with them. She looked terrified and pleaded with them to leave her alone. One of the regulars tried to intervene and was cold-cocked for his trouble.

“I pulled out that Walther semi-automatic Bill gave me for Valentine’s Day and got two guns pointed back in my face. Then one of the men smiled and winked at me, they hustled her into a car and left.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Right after they left. They said they’d be right down. But nobody’s been here yet.”

I sipped my drink and wearily asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Could you at least find out who she is? Maybe we can interest the FBI or something. You’ve got your own forensics lab, don’t you? Maybe you can run down the prints or get DNA from the glass.”

Crap, I thought. Anybody else and I would have said no, I‘m done with it, find somebody else, leave me alone. Unfortunately Lundquist owned me, she always had and she always will. “Where’s her glass?” I asked.

“On the table right behind you,” Kathleen replied. “Nobody’s touched it.”

I glanced at it. “Got a bag or something?”

“Sure,” she said, handing me a small paper bag.

I downed the rest of my drink, carefully put the wine glass into the bag and drove home. I did have my own forensics lab, top of the line, but I hadn’t used it in a long time.

I put on some rubber gloves and got to work. Whoever this person was had left several almost perfect fingerprints on it. It almost looked like this person was trying to leave prints for someone to find.

I swabbed the rim for epithelials and got enough of a sample to run a DNA test. While that test was running, I scanned the prints and then ran them through the National Fingerprint Database.

Ten minutes later, I got a hit. One Joanne Cansilio of Warson Woods, Missouri. She’d been in the database because of some penny-ante stuff back when she was in high school. She’d been clean ever since.

And I had no idea who she was.

I e-mailed her photo to Kathleen and then immediately called the bar. “Did you find out anything?” Lundquist asked.

“Yeah. Got your lapper there?”

“Of course.”

“I just e-mailed you something. Is that the woman?”

“Just a second.” After a brief pause, Kathleen came back on the line and said, “That’s the one. Do you know her?”

“Not even remotely.”

“Chris, she was absolutely sure that she knew you. She asked me ‘He comes here a lot, doesn’t he? He used to come here a lot. Do you know how to contact him?’ five or six times.”

“I’ve got a few more things I can try. I’ll keep you posted.”

I made myself a bourbon-and-soda and paced around the room. Something was not right. Why would this person go to a place where I was known to hang out and ask for me if she didn’t know who I was?  Why wouldn’t she tell Lundquist her name?  And why didn’t I remember her?

Prior to becoming president, Nicky had developed the National Fingerprint Database for the government. The NFD has one security feature that not even Nicole knew about because she asked me to come up with one and not tell her or anybody else.

In order to be able to determine if the NFD had been tampered with, the entire database is periodically copied and archived off-site on rotating servers(I came up with two more which I also didn‘t tell Nicky about; my password would always work and my searches would never be recorded). So I searched for Ms. Cansilio in the database archives.

And found nothing. Her record said she’d been in some database or other for at least ten years but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there at all. Her name didn’t even turn up.

I silently sipped my bourbon for several minutes. Then I ran the prints again, searching both the current and archived databases at the same time.

Fifteen minutes later, my monitor displayed the words POSSIBLE SYSTEM COMPROMISE. Briefly, what happened was that the software had found the same set of fingerprints on two different records.

I clicked on “Display Both Records.” The first record was Ms. Cansilio’s.

The second changed everything.

I then ran searches using every parameter I could think of, all of which gave me the same result. At that point, the DNA test was completed. My heart pounding, I picked up the sheet of paper from the printer and looked at it.

“My God,” I whispered.

Confirmation.

I called Lundquist. “Kate? Johnson,” I said, quickly and intensely. “Listen up. If anybody asks if I was there today, tell them no. And if anyone wants to know where I am, you have no idea. Got it?”

“Uh…yeah, okay, sure.  But why, Chris?” Lundquist replied, mildly alarmed. “What’s going on? What did you find out?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I told her and hung up.

Later that evening, since I couldn’t sleep at all, I got back on the computer and arranged a flight to Fairbanks, Alaska for the following day. Next morning, I put the printouts into a folder, stuffed it, my lapper and a few other necessities into a gym bag and drove to Lambert Airport. I arrived in Fairbanks around 5:00 PM and found a room.

Next day, I hired a bush pilot to fly me out to Dale’s cabin. His property was next to what the government had renamed Lake Price in his honor. Price’s cabin sat in a beautiful valley fifty yards or so back from a lake surrounded by two ranges of mountains.

Dale didn’t expect the plane and ran toward the lake, stopping only when he saw me get out. He was clearly not happy. “What the hell do you want?” he demanded in a low, vaguely menacing voice.

I knew I had to choose my words carefully. “I need your help.”

“With what?”

“An…anomaly.”

Dale stared at me for a long time before declaring, “Come on up.”

At my request, the plane hung around, the pilot casually tossing a fishing line into the water. Price and I went into his cabin. He poured two stiff bourbons and handed me one. “So you‘re here because…” he told me with more than a little annoyance..

I settled into a chair. “Three days ago,” I said, “I went to Bill(not IB)’s to knock back a few. The current proprietor, Kathleen Lundquist…”

“Hold it,” Dale interjected. “Bill and his family were on one of those planes?”

“Air Force One.”

“Aw, son of a…”

“Anyway, Lundquist informed me that a woman had just been in the place asking about me over and over. Said she knew me and everything, she kept asking Kathleen when I might be coming in, but she wouldn’t give her name.”

“So what?”

“So this. Two guys came in and took this woman with them. Lundquist says she didn’t go willingly and that the Webster cops weren’t interested.

“Lundquist knows I still have the lab so she asks me to try to ID the poor kid so the FBI can be alerted. I take home the woman’s wine glass.

“I get four perfect prints off the glass and enough epithelials to run a DNA test. While the DNA’s running, I run the prints through NFD.”

“What did you get?”

“This.” I handed Price the file for Joanne Cansilio.

He glanced at it and handed it back to me. “Do you know her?”

“Not at all.”

“Then what the hell’s the problem?!”

“Did you know that my…”–I choked up; damn, I thought, I couldn’t even refer to her indirectly–”…wife developed NFD before she was elected president?”

“Of course!”

“Did you also know that she asked me to come up with a security feature for the database and never tell her or anybody else what it was?”

“No. Never knew that.”

“Periodically, the entire database is copied and archived at servers off-site. So I expanded my search to cover the current and archived databases and discovered two things. One was that Ms. Cansilio’s file didn’t exist a little over a year ago although the current file said it had been in the system at least ten years.”

“What was the other?”

“The other was that when I ran the prints through both the current database and the archives, I discovered that Ms. Cansilio’s fingerprints used to belong to somebody else. The DNA test confirmed it.”

“Who?” asked Dale. I looked away, got up, refreshed my bourbon and sat back down. “Damn it, Johnson, who the hell was it?!!”

I took a deep breath, exhaled and handed Price the other fingerprint record along with the DNA printout. “Her.”

In all the years we had worked together, I had never seen Dale so scared. He took one look at both sheets of paper, threw both to the ground and backed slowly away from them as if they were particularly poisonous snakes.

“No. No. It’s not possible!!“ Dale screamed. “IT’S NOT POSSIBLE!!” Then Price poured himself a triple bourbon and drank it with two violently trembling hands.

Dale knew how thorough and professional I was. He knew that there was no doubt whatsoever about the truth of what he had just seen.

A few days before, in a seedy bar in Webster Groves, Missouri, fingerprints and DNA had been left by a woman who had been dead for a little over a year.

Heather Price.

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