Chapter 1 Butler
We’d been back from Taug for six weeks when I heard about Justin Parnavic’s death. He was—or, had been—the commander of the base on the moon where we’d recently seen action. Because of how my life has played out, I’m probably a bit more inured to death than most people, but this one struck me pretty hard. Maybe because I’d seen him recently or because it came unexpectedly. Taug had always been peaceful until recently, and I’d thought that when I left there, we’d put it back together so that would continue. Apparently not.
As with a lot of my information, I got the news from Ganos. She knew everything, often before it hit public media. In this case, her sources had been mainstream—in her words, “mundane, but effective.” Parnavic had gone down in a crash that the military had categorized as a mechanical failure. Four dead—everyone who’d been onboard the small craft. I thought about it constantly for a day or so, but like most things that happen far away and don’t affect us directly, it didn’t stick with me much beyond that. Other things came up and pushed it back into the depths of my mind with all the other death and bad things that lurked there. If I let that stuff sit at the surface, I wouldn’t be able to function.
Not that I found myself overly busy. My normal routine at home on Ridia 2 consisted of going to Mac’s gym two or three times a week, working in my vegetable garden, and reading a lot of books. The garden was mostly a dig up and replant job since we’d missed harvest for a lot of the produce during our trip and stuff had rotted on the vine. Or the deer got it. But in this case, anything they ate, I didn’t have to clean up, so I’d give them a pass.
My big event of the week came on Wednesdays at four in the afternoon when I met Mac for drinks at Moop’s. It probably sounds like a boring life, and maybe it is. But boring is nice sometimes. Nothing exploding, nobody trying to kill me. Or, if they were, they were at least being subtle about it.
So it came as a surprise when I woke on a Saturday morning to find that something had tripped my new security system in the night. Mac had immediately upgraded everything I had when we returned from Taug. I’m pretty sure we paid extra for rush installation. It was mostly legal—which was saying something considering my recent life—though it probably skirted the edges of some of the rules on lethal force. And maybe taser drones. Mac had become obsessed with those after he’d seen Alanson operate them on Taug.
The system hadn’t woken me, which meant that it hadn’t assessed the threat as serious enough for that. But any incursion was enough to mess with my head, and I’d promised Mac that I’d act with an abundance of caution when it came to security matters. I called him, first thing, even before I made my coffee. I’d just finished it twenty minutes later when he came through the back door without knocking.
Mac had on running shoes, shorts, and a stretchy t-shirt with Mac’s Gym on the front that might have been half a size too small, muscles bulging. I couldn’t make fun of him for it. It made for good advertising.
“You get to finish your run?” I asked.
“Nah. I broke it off at the five-kilometer mark when you called.”
“Sorry.” Saturday was his distance day. He’d probably planned on fifteen.
“Don’t worry about it. I work in a gym. I’ll make it up later—this is more important.” I had my doubts about that, though I’d shared them often enough with Mac that I didn’t feel the need to raise them again now. On the other hand, given how little running I did these days, maybe security was more important.
“Did the cameras pick anything up?” asked Mac.
“I didn’t look. I figured I’d wait for you, and we’d
check it together.”
“Let’s fire it up.” Mac moved to the far side of the living room and pushed the camouflaged activation button. A section of wall slid up and a terminal folded down. He entered a six-digit code on the keypad along with his thumbprint and the metal casing that protected the screen slid away.
I’m pretty sure I mentioned that my security system might be a bit over the top.
Mac played with the interface for a bit while I went to the kitchen to make him a cup of coffee. I didn’t need to watch over his shoulder—I’d hate if he did that to me, and he’d show me whatever he found anyway.
“Here it is,” he called. “Zero two twenty-one. Someone breached the perimeter.”
“Someone? Or something?” I walked over to him and set a mug of black coffee on the side table. It was a reasonable question. The AI in the system was supposed to screen out animals, but it wasn’t perfect, and the deer messed with the sensors almost as much as they messed with my garden. I hate deer. They’re basically giant rats with better PR. I’d asked Mac if we could set the system up to terminate them on site, but he’d said no. Sure. He picks that to show self-restraint about. That was fine. I’d been joking about it anyway.
Mostly.
Mac sat back so I could see the screen. A dark figure stood in the trees, clearly silhouetted from a streetlight in the distance behind them. Not a deer. “Definitely someone,” he said, emphasizing what I could already see for myself.
“He . . . they . . .” I corrected myself. It was too dark to determine gender. “They came in from the front? How much did video capture?”
“Running that now.” It would take a few seconds, because the system would pull from all thirty-five cameras and piece together the entire incursion.
I let out a sigh. Just what I needed. While the intruder might not have meant me harm, we absolutely had to treat it like they did, which would be a giant pain in the ass. I didn’t even have to watch the video to know that much.
“Here we go.” Mac stood so we could both get a good view of the screen at the same time.
The dark figure entered the tree line about thirty meters
west of the driveway. It was difficult to judge height or weight without something to compare it to, but the system would produce that as well, so I didn’t worry about it. A brief moment of light caught their face, hidden by a dark facemask—the kind that people use in the winter. Winter was around the corner, but the weather last night hadn’t been nearly cold enough to merit a face covering. They walked mostly straight toward the house, only varying course to pick their way around trees and the small bits of brush that had grown back since the last time I had it cleared. They stopped between two larger trees and stood there for at least a minute, not advancing any farther, which would have triggered more active defense measures—not just sensors and cameras. I couldn’t say for sure, but they seemed to be staring at the house. At least in that direction. After a bit, they turned and left the same way they’d come in.
Once it finished, we stood there for a few seconds in silence before Mac reached forward and shut the screen off. We weren’t done with it, but we didn’t need it for the moment.
“What do you make of it?” I asked. “Could just be someone who got lost.”
“Dressed like that?” asked Mac. He was right, of course. “What worries me is that they seemed to know your system. Knew how far they could come in without triggering active countermeasures.”
“That might be a stretch,” I said. “We can’t say that for sure.”
“No,” Mac allowed. “Not for sure.”
But, again, his assertion felt correct. “So what’s the point of it?”
“They could be casing your place. Evaluating your defenses for a later attack.”
“If so, why show themselves so blatantly? It just gives us warning. It looked like they almost wanted to be seen. They didn’t do anything to try to avoid the cameras.”
“They didn’t,” Mac said. “Maybe they were tracking them—figuring out where the cameras are so they could avoid them in the future.”
“But you’re going to move them,” I said.
Mac shrugged and nodded. “True.” He moved them regularly even without a specific reason.
“Which any pro would know, so either they’re a total
amateur, which makes them less of a threat, or they’ve got a different purpose.”
“Sending a message?” asked Mac, more to himself than to me.
“What’s the message?”
He ignored my question. “Maybe they dropped something out there. We’ll know more once we comb the area.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to make a big deal of this, but no chance Mac would let it go, so I might as well ride with it. “You going to bring in help?”
“Yeah. I’ll call Castellano. Maybe another guy. Get them to help me go through the woods and see if the visitor left anything behind.”
“Pull up what the system has on the intruder. I’ll fire it over to Ganos to see if she can do any magic with it.”
“Roger.” Mac flipped the screen back on and keyed in some requests. “1.71 meters tall. 76 percent likely they’re male.”
“That only describes about twenty percent of the planet,” I said.
“It tells us something, though,” said Mac. “For a system as good as yours to only have seventy-six percent confidence . . . that’s not an accident. The intruder purposefully worked to conceal that information.”
I frowned. “You sure?”
Mac gave me the look that noncoms give officers when the officer asks a stupid question.
“Right,” I said. “Of course you are. So, a pro.”
“At least in that aspect. It’s worth looking into.”
“Sure. I’ll have Ganos run a search on anybody who might be on planet who fits the bill.” It seemed like a search for the letter O in a field of zeroes, but it didn’t hurt to try. If anybody could turn nothing into something, Ganos could.
“I’m going home to change,” said Mac. “Do me a favor, and don’t wander outside of your security system until I get back?”
“I won’t,” I promised. I actually meant it.
Chapter 2 Mac
I Don’t look for trouble. I can see why people might not believe that, given how often it finds me. And that’s fair. I own it. I’ve made some decisions in my life that ensure that trouble and I . . . well . . . we’re never too far apart. Funny thing is, when I joined the military, I was trying to get out of trouble. That worked out great.
And then there’s Butler. Look up trouble in the dictionary, and there’s his mug staring back at you. But I love the guy, and here’s the thing: While I don’t look for trouble, I learned my lesson that first time. I don’t run from it. I also know it when I see it. When someone came onto Butler’s property two nights back, that was trouble. Butler didn’t see it that way, but there was nothing new in that. He has the luxury of looking past stuff. Because he has me.
And that was trouble of a different kind. At least if you listened to my therapist, which I mostly did. He said that I needed to figure out who I was outside of the military. Outside of Butler. That I used my dedication to Butler as a coping technique to avoid spending time with myself. He might have been right. He had a lot of fancy diplomas on his walls and seemed pretty smart. On the other hand, he’d also told me that you can’t solve every problem in life by punching someone in the neck.
So clearly some of his advice was suspect.
Right now, I had to focus on the current trouble: we hadn’t found anything to add to what we knew the first morning after the intrusion onto Butler’s property. Ganos had even looked into it and come up blank. Nothing. She and I had never really seen eye to eye—we’re too different. And things had become extra weird between us since I left her behind on Taug and she got kidnapped. Sure, I’d saved her after that. But she had scars, and I blamed myself for them. But whatever baggage we had, she’s the best there is when it comes to finding information. So for her to come up blank? That meant something. For now, it meant that I needed to keep looking. Something would show up. It always does, even if you don’t see it until it blows up in your face. But I still had a gym to run, and right now that meant a completely different kind of trouble in the form of one of my regulars: a fit-looking woman named Judith Strand.
Judith was a forty-something woman with blonde hair and a fully paid-up membership. And not one of the discount specials we ran at the beginning of the year to entice people with ill-conceived new year’s resolutions. She’d joined about a month ago and paid full price. Her husband had a membership too, though he’d never been in. Judith came in five times a week and had a smile for everyone. She addressed even the part-time staff by name. Today, she was staring at her leg press machine like it owed her money. That might not sound like trouble, but here’s what I know about running a gym: if you want to keep it running, you better keep your forty-something-year-old woman clients happy. They’ve got the time and money to spend on memberships, and if they like you, they tell their friends.
I was working alone at the moment—Sandra had needed the morning off and wouldn’t be in for another forty-five minutes—but I left the front desk unattended and made my way past the cardio machines to where Judith sat on the press machine.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
She looked up at me. “Oh. Hey, Mac.”
“Workout going okay?”
She looked at the unmoved weights. “Yeah . . . I’m not really into it today.”
“That doesn’t sound like you. Something wrong? Anything I can help with?”
She sighed. “It’s nothing.”
It was definitely something, but I didn’t know how hard to push. If I kept at her and got her to open up, she might end up telling me about some
problem that she had with Mr. Strand. As much as I wanted to keep my clients happy and coming back, I didn’t want it enough to get involved in that. “You sure? It’s not like you to short yourself on leg day.”
She gave me a half-smile, but it seemed forced. Something was really bothering her. “Janie didn’t come home last night.”
“Oh . . . I’m really sorry.” Janie was her oldest daughter—seventeen or eighteen, if I recalled correctly. “No idea where she might have gone?”
“None. This isn’t like her.”
I nodded. In my experience, a lot of upper middle-class parents didn’t have a great handle on what was and wasn’t like their kids, but I knew better than to say that. Besides, I didn’t know Janie beyond the couple of times she’d come to the gym on her mom’s guest pass, so who was I to say anything? But then, I was standing there, and I had to say something. It was too awkward not to.
“Anything I can do?” I regretted saying it immediately. What was I going to do?
She scrunched up her face, probably wondering the same thing: how a muscle-headed gym owner could help with a kid who stayed out overnight. “You know anybody who finds people?”
“Uh—” I mean . . . I did, in theory. But not the way she needed. Finally, my brain caught up with my mouth. “Can you hire a private investigator?”
“My husband said I was overreacting and that we didn’t need to hire one. Said she’d come back on her own.”
Guy sounded like a dick, but maybe I didn’t have all of the story. Still . . . probably a dick. Just playing the odds. “What are you looking for?” Another dumb question, but she seemed distraught, and I couldn’t walk away.
“I don’t know.” She wiped her face with her towel, though she wasn’t sweating. Drying her eyes. “I’m not very smart about stuff like this. I just want to know that my daughter is okay.”
I took a few seconds. It really wasn’t my business, and I had the whole thing with Butler’s intruder to deal with. But I found that I didn’t care that it wasn’t my business. “I might know someone who could look into it.”
“Really?” Her face lit up, and I have to admit that when it did, it warmed my cold, dead heart just a little.
“Sure. Off the books. I’ll ask them to poke around and see what they find. If they find her, great. If they find that something’s wrong . . . not that I expect that,” I added quickly, “then you’ll have the information, and you can decide if you want to take more drastic action.”
She considered it for a few seconds. “Thanks, Mac.” She looked like she wanted to hug me. I took a step backward to forestall that.
“Of course. No problem.” I left her to her lift and when I got back to the register, I called Butler. I’d signed up for the job, but he had the skills and contacts for this, and he owed me enough favors where I’d never run out.
“Hey boss. I need a favor.”
“Of course. What is it?” He probably thought I was going to ask him something about the intruder. Surprise!
“I need help finding a girl.”
“Wait . . . what happened to Cassie?”
“Very funny,” I said. Cassie was my girlfriend, and nothing was wrong with that as far as I knew. “Another girl.”
“Okay, but Cassie isn’t going to like it.”
“Can we cut the dad jokes for a second?”
“Ouch,” he said. “Something serious?”
“Maybe. The daughter of a client is missing.”
There was silence at the other end of the connection for several seconds. “Okay . . .”
“Nothing like that,” I said. “I just want to see if you can ask Ganos to dig around and see if she can drum up something on where the kid might have gone.”
“Oh. Right,” he said. “Why didn’t you call Ganos?”
“She’ll be more inclined to do it if it comes from you.”
“You think?”
I didn’t think. I knew. He did too. “Yeah. Either way . . . could you do it?”
“Sure. What can you tell me about the kid?”
“Name’s Janie Strand. Daughter of Hank and Judith Strand. They live at 14 Everlight Circle in Brockton.”
“Nice address.”
“Yeah. Her dad’s a physician, I think. Surgeon, maybe. I mostly know the mom. She’s here at the gym now. Leg day.”
“Ganos isn’t up yet, so this may take a bit.”
“Sure. I’ll meet you at Moop’s this afternoon. Let me know then.”
“Will do.”
Moop’s was Almost empty when I arrived—four people at one table, two women in the corner booth, and one loner at the bar. The slack patronage didn’t surprise me since I showed up at 3:50 on a Wednesday afternoon. Butler hadn’t arrived yet—he’d be there in ten minutes, almost on the dot. The colonel was nothing if not punctual. I took a stroll around the room, surreptitiously checking faces on the people there. I didn’t know the foursome, but I recognized them as having been there before. Locals. Jake was at the bar. That left the pair of women as unknowns—one in her thirties, one mid-twenties, both in business clothes. Definitely not from around here. Normally I’d have marked them as low threat, but the incursion at Butler’s had me on edge. Not that I could accost two random women. Moop liked us, but not enough to tolerate us harassing his customers, even if they clearly didn’t belong here.
I took a seat in our normal booth, facing the door but still able to watch the suspicious women, and signaled to Martha behind the bar for a water. I’d wait for Butler to order real drinks. We’d probably have beer unless he was stressed, and then he’d buy the good whiskey. I’d call it top shelf, but Moop didn’t even keep Butler’s stuff on the shelf. It was under the bar. This wasn’t the kind of place that casually served up whiskey from Ferra 3. It was a bit beyond the clientele, and they didn’t want to make people uncomfortable or put on airs. But they kept it for us, because Moop’s good like that.
I caught a glance of Butler through the window, and he came through the door nine seconds later. “How’re you doing, Martha?” he asked
“Right as rain, Carl. What’re you drinking?”
“Two beers.” He didn’t bother with a brand. Martha knew.
“Coming right up.”
He slid into the seat across from me.
“What’d you find out?” I asked, unable to wait. I’d been thinking about Janie most of the day. Not worried, exactly, but not comfortable. Once I decided to get involved, it had stuck with me. Unfortunately, I’d have to wait, because the older of the two women got up and came toward our table. Because of course she did. We were going to need to find a different bar. I should have trusted my instinct and ran them out of the place. Instead, I stood and blocked her path before she could reach Butler.
“Mac,” he said, a hint of warning in his voice. “It’s okay.”
I didn’t move. The woman took the hint and stopped, but she leaned around me in an exaggerated fashion that was almost comical. I took the chance to look for weapons. None that I could see. I glanced at her partner, but she had her head in her device, not even watching us.
“Colonel Butler?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
“That’s right,” he said.
“I’m Elizabeth Young. I work for Meridian Resources. Can I sit?” She glanced at me. “Your man can frisk me, if he wants.” She could have made it sound silly, could have even made it sound suggestive, but she didn’t. She was legitimately ready to let me pat her down.
Butler looked at me expectantly.
“She can sit,” I said. “Just keep your hands on the table.”
“I will,” she said. And she did. “I’ll get right to the point,” she said, as I took the seat across from her, next to Butler.
“I’ll get to a point of my own: I’m not a fan of being approached in bars,” said Butler.
“I understand and respect that. We messaged. Multiple times. We even sent standard mail. You didn’t respond to any of it.”
“Maybe that was a hint.” He smiled as he said it, mostly joking. But not totally. “You didn’t come to my house recently, did you?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “That seemed even more over the line than walking up to you here.”
“Okay,” said Butler. “Just checking. What can I do for you?”
“Recently my company—”
“Meridian Resources,” said Butler.
“Right. We’ve started working with some old friends of yours.”
“That so? Which friends?” From his tone, he was thinking the same thing as I was. We had some friends who often proved somewhat less than friendly. I adjusted myself in my seat so I could get up faster.
“A group of Cappans.”
Butler didn’t say anything. He just studied her. I didn’t have to say anything because that’s not my job, which was good, because it stunned me as much as it appeared to stun him. The silence got a little awkward, and after a few seconds she continued, “We thought that if you came to work with us, we could do a lot of good together.”
“I’m retired,” he said. He kept a straight face. I mostly did too. It was funny though, the idea of him being retired.
“You don’t have to stay that way. Give us a chance. Come see what we do—I think you’ll be interested.”
He considered it—or at least pretended to. I couldn’t say for sure which. “I’m going to pass. Thanks.”
I stood, and Elizabeth Young got the message and stood too. “I’ll leave you my card. We’re pretty resourceful. Reach out if you change your mind.”
“Sure,” he said.
She put it on the table. “I’m serious—it doesn’t have to just be about what we want. Anything we can help you with, you get in touch.”
He looked at the card, but didn’t respond. After a few seconds, she went back to her table. The other woman stood as she approached, and the two of them promptly left.
“That was weird,” he said.
“You think they had anything to do with the intruder on your property?” I asked.
“I don’t like coincidences, but when she denied it, my gut says she was telling the truth.” He thought about it a few seconds longer and then
must have decided he’d discussed it enough and shifted gears. “So, Janie Strand. It’s not good.”
I immediately forgot the uninvited woman. “Not good how?” With Butler, that phrase could mean anything from ‘hiding out on her parents’ to ‘mauled by a bear and dead in a ditch.’ He was the king of understatement.
“Looks like she ran away. She’s almost certainly left town.”
“Oof. That is not good. We sure?”
“Pretty sure. Ganos broke into her home computer and found a record of her talking to someone about getting a ticket to Cranston.”
Cranston. The closest metropolitan area to our small town—about a million people in population. Though close was relative since we lived in the middle of nowhere. It was about three hundred kilometers, and not a straight shot. About a four-hour drive. “Ganos say who Janie was talking to?”
“Yeah. Guy named Frank Green—but that’s not his real name. Just what he used to talk to her.”
“Scammer?” I asked.
“Lowlife. Real name, Frank Figeroa, also known as Figs.”
I nodded. Yeah. The mix of suburban girl and city lowlife wasn’t good. “What kind of lowlife?”
“Hard to say. Multiple arrests, only one conviction. Suspended sentence for possession of a controlled substance.”
“Ganos found all of that already?”
Butler shrugged. “She’s Ganos.”
“Remind me never to cross her.” Or to never cross her again.
Martha arrived with our beers, and Butler lifted his in acknowledgment of my wisdom. “Did Ganos say why Janie took off to meet him?” I asked.
“Romantic meet-up, probably. They’d been chatting for a couple of weeks.”
“So, this guy chats up a well-off suburban girl, lures her to the city . . . could be legit.” Probably not.
“Could be,” Butler allowed. He didn’t believe it either.
“Fake name, criminal record. It probably isn’t.” ...
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