Robert's Requiem Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  CHAPTER ONE

  ATLAS MIRONOFF STOOD in the center of his new warehouse and struck a pose reminiscent of Benito Mussolini or Saddam Hussein. His eyes scanned across the expanse of the warehouse, taking in what he’d accomplished in less than a week.

  Just four days ago he opened the door to this vast empty building and saw nothing but potential. He knew it would be perfect. With some minor work, he could bring industrial organization and volume to his side business, incalculably raising the return he’d receive on what was going to become his prime operation.

  One-hundred eighty-thousand square feet of opportunity, of growth, of efficiency in an inefficient, but highly lucrative, business.

  And here he was, six days later, his imposing figure front and center of the warehouse; his cold, expressionless face watching dozens of employees bustling about in torrents of activity.

  To his left, chain-link fencing sectioned off a full third of the warehouse was sectioned off, with open floor behind the fencing. Next to it, four rows of small plywood boxes, each about eight by 10 feet.

  Plywood walls completely closed off the final third.

  Perfect. Mironoff blushed, he couldn’t help himself. Looking at this space, and picturing his future wealth, was too exciting. He raised his hand and ran his thick fingers across the stubble of black hair sprouting on his head. His left hand slid across an eye, making sure no one could see his emotions.

  This warehouse will make all the difference; it will open his way to more revenue, more profit. It promises to be the key to unlocking real success, yacht success, tell-the-world-to-fuck-off success.

  The bottlenecks keeping him from fully maximizing sales had always been an impediment to growth, but no longer. He’d needed space to hold incoming supply, organize and sort it for his different customers, then efficiently move the product out and deliver it. Here it is, in this huge warehouse on the river in Pascagoula, Miss. A warehouse that had been empty and unused for who knows how many years.

  It wasn’t easy finding such a suitable location, but when he learned a customer of his security services company had some buildings laying fallow, he knew opportunity was hitting him upside the head like a two-by-four.

  He crossed his arms over his barrel chest, his huge biceps bulging––a threatening appearance and in contrast to his face which, despite the scars on his left cheek and chin, looked almost childlike and giddy at that moment. Like a kid in a candy store for the first time, imagining the unlimited sweets to be plucked and savored soon.

  A shadow appeared in the periphery of his vision. Someone was trying to get his attention.

  He turned and saw Chad Broussard, a gangly twenty-something-year-old from Virginia that Mironoff thought of as his top lieutenant. Broussard’s primary job was checking the incoming product, sorting it to match each customers’ request.

  It was an important job, and Broussard did his job well, seldom pestering Mironoff with unnecessary problems.

  Mironoff slowly turned his head towards Broussard. Judging by the expression on Broussard’s face, this must be a big problem.

  “We got this new girl,” Broussard said. “She’s trouble.”

  “Trouble? How trouble?” Mironoff said in his jumble of dialects and accents, the result of a childhood in Eastern Europe, Venezuela, and other places he never revealed.

  “She got a phone. Called someone.”

  Mironoff’s face reddened. The cold in his eyes turned from November storm to permafrost. Broussard took a deep breath and prepared himself for what was next.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MONTANA STONE, “TANA” to anyone who knew her, looked at the Pinterest page on her iPad. The room was remarkably similar to her own living room: the room shown on her iPad had a similar wall of windows and seemed to be about the same size as her own.

  She thought she liked the way the room looked, a cozy, over-stuffed sofa looking out on garden flowers and a green lawn through gauzy curtains. The room was bright and airy, making Tana imagine afternoons spent with hot tea and a favorite book in her hands. A chair for reading at one end of the sofa, perfect for Tension Tamer tea and maybe a P.D. James book or something by Grafton, with an end table and lamp next to it.

  The chair on Pinterest was white, and Tana had found a chair nearly identical at the furniture store in Pensacola. A sofa similar to the one in the photo was more difficult, but she’d found an acceptable compromise at a store in Mobile.

  She studied the room. As near a carbon copy of the Pinterest design as possible.

  But having now assembled her living room using the new furniture and new curtains, something wasn’t right. She studied the sofa, then the chair. Then the curtains, the matching set ordered from the supplier cited on Pinterest.

  Something about it felt wrong. Made her feel wrong.

  She slowly walked to the curtains and wrapped her fingers around the fabric, rubbing the silky surface. She closed her eyes. Thoughts of ripping the curtain down filled her mind, followed by the satisfied feeling of watching bits of threads in the air as the fabric is shredded. She envisioned little motes of polyester softly gliding in the living room air, swirling around her as she moved.

  In her mind’s eye, the little bits of fabric sparked into flames. Tana imagined the little flames combining, growing into larger and larger little fires, eventually igniting the curtains, the chair, the sofa. They combined into a blaze that grew, consuming the front window, then the house, then Tana herself.

  She opened her eyes and released her clenching grasp on the curtain. She took in a deep breath and exhaled. Two more times…that’s what they’d said to do when feeling stressed or overcome by emotion, right? Three deep breaths.

  After exhaling the third deep breath, she grabbed the curtain again and yanked on it, pulling hard. She tore the curtain from the wooden rod extending across the windows, letting it fall in a heap on the floor.

  She calmly stepped to the other curtain and ripped it down, too.

  After stuffing the ruined curtains in a garbage bag, she threw in a pillow from the sofa. She also snatched a small, wooden carved dog from the end table that looked so sweet in the Pinterest page, and violently threw it in the bag.

  “Can’t take this,” she said quietly while she stalked the room for more victims to add to the garbage bags.

  She continued restlessly picking up and dropping things into the garbage bag. She stepped through her front door with the filled bag, her eyes tired and unfocused. She walked to the garbage can at the side of her house. She stood by her garbage can for several minutes before lifting the bag and dropping it in.

&n
bsp; “Can’t take having this around me.”

  She drifted back into the house and walked to her kitchen, then walked back into the living room. Then she went back to the kitchen and returned to the living room––two more times.

  The third time she returned, her eyes took in the room as if for the first time. “Better,” she said, looking about, trying to convince herself.

  She picked up her iPad and looked again at the Pinterest page. Such a wonderful room, so well put together.

  Tana stood behind her new sofa and ran her hands across the back, staring out the windows spanning the front of the room. The fabric was textured, thick threads that rubbed back against her fingertips. It was nice and relaxing to just stand here and feel the fabric.

  Her mind shot back to a memory of doing the same thing in her parents’ home in Missouri. Images of the dull plaid fabric of her mother’s new sofa that was bristly and rough. Tana was stroking the sofa while tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “We’re not going to let that happen, Graciela,” her father was telling her mother. He stood over Tana’s mother as if she was a child herself, barely over five feet tall like Tana was now. Her long dark hair covered her face, and cascaded over her father’s thick forearm. Tana remembered one of her mom’s caramel-colored arms slinking around her father, gripping as tightly as she could.

  And Tana was crying, but she didn’t know why.

  She shook herself out of the moment and looked down again at the sofa. It’s not mom’s sofa, it’s new and soft and mine, she reminded herself. She suddenly began pacing about the room, her pent-up energy needing a release.

  She sat in the sofa, then got up and went to the chair. Then returned to the sofa.

  She was eight months from her job as a crime analyst in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, ten months from the day she saw the body of her father, John Stone, on the floor in front of the plaid sofa.

  She stood and paced again.

  Her new life on the Gulf Coast wasn’t helping her move past that day as well as she’d hoped.

  She collapsed into a wooden dining chair at the reclaimed table that served as her desk. It was a small, rectangular dining table someone had tried to send to the garbage dump but Tana snatched it from the curbside. She ran her hand across the pitted surface of the table, feeling the edges of areas where chunks of finish had come off. She used the nail of her index finger to pick at the edge of the finish, and scratched at it until a flake peeled away from the wood.

  She continued to pick at the table, focusing on her breathing and trying to avoid falling into another of the storms raging inside her, what she’d come to call her “head-icanes.” The storms that took over and blocked all of her other thoughts, storms that swirled in her head and left her often feeling lost and confused.

  Sometimes, the storms helped her find connections and patterns.

  Why had the curtains made her so angry? She knew she wasn’t a “girly-girl,” that’s for damn sure. She always told herself she’d never be that kind of woman.

  But she seemed to like clutter and sweat and just a bit of dirt.

  She picked off another chunk of finish from the table top. The flake popped off the wood underneath, then hit a thick folder near the corner of her desk. The folder had a big Stockton County Sheriff’s Office logo printed on the front, with the words “Case File” below it. Inside were reports of a series of armed robberies that had occurred along the interstate highway in the northern part of the county. Investigators had been working on them for months, making little or no headway towards solving them.

  That’s when White Sands Chief of Police Jett Jeanrette suggested they contact Tana.

  He assured them that Tana’s experience in St. Louis could be helpful. He also reminded the county folks that it was Tana who stopped a serial killer named Joey Beaumont in White Sands.

  But Jeanrette didn’t ask Tana before he did. He just assumed since she’d been able to help stop a killer, that she’d be able to tie up these robberies.

  Sure, no problem. Let’s go pick at that scab. Thanks, Chief Jackass.

  He did that two weeks after he’d last spoken to her. After he’d tried to confine her, tried to manipulate their budding relationship. Two weeks after she’d told him to go to hell.

  Tana had applied her 20-years experience as a crime analyst in Police Intelligence in St. Louis to find the serial killer, but it cost her: she was almost killed and her only real friend was nearly murdered—and Jett only listened to Tana when the killer lashed out at her.

  This is more bullshit I don’t need, Tana told herself.

  Besides, she came to White Sands to get away from police work, to stop being the weird woman who used her confused and obsessive thinking disorder to figure out what bad people were doing.

  She stared at the Sheriff’s Office logo on the folder. A gold, five-pointed star against an American flag. Her eyes traveled from point to point around the star, then locked onto the center of the star where “Sheriff’s Office” was emblazoned, breaking down the design elements and analyzing the color choices (red for strength; blue for fidelity…but why gold? Why always gold?).

  She shoved the folder into a corner of her desk. Again, three deep breaths to slow her heart rate.

  Robberies were her specialty in St. Louis. Or rather, where her specialty until two robbers broke into her father’s home and murdered him. Two robbers whose trail of violence she’d missed when analyzing a series of break-ins in neighborhoods near her father’s house.

  There was always a challenge in getting into the mindset of criminals—the easiest were addicts in need of money for drugs; harder were the desperate ones just needing quick cash. The worst did it for thrills and were even more difficult to analyze and anticipate.

  Another deep breath. And again.

  Each time she thought about the file and the big logo on it, she felt a shortness of breath.

  She reached out and pulled the folder back out, staring again at the cover.

  Finally, she flipped it open and began reading. She read through the reports, twice, and studied the notes made by investigators.

  She read it all a third time.

  There was something wrong about the way these robberies were going down––the pieces weren’t fitting in her mind, no matter how she tried to push them together to make some kind of narrative. She wasn’t seeing the solution.

  Tana pulled open a drawer and grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil. She returned to the front of the folder and began reading a fourth time, her hand scribbling words as she read.

  Two men…guns…ski mask…no money taken…balaclava…food aisle…

  After the fourth time through the reports, Tana dropped the pencil and suddenly pushed herself away from the desk.

  She stood, closed her eyes, and did more deep breathing.

  She tossed her notes inside the folder and slapped the cover closed. She needed new window coverings, not another case.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BLACK HAS SHADES. Or, at least, the black of night on the Gulf Coast does.

  Robert Gulliford, a three-year veteran of the White Sands, Alabama, Police Department noted this as he cruised along Intracoastal Boulevard. Warm September air was blowing in through the open windows of his patrol car, fueling his wandering mind.

  The road was all but empty, giving him the chance to consider the three levels of black ahead of him: the macadam black of the road below darker onyx sky, with dark ebony shadows of trees in the distance.

  Katydids and crickets chirps filled the air. They were the only sounds heard at 4 a.m., except for the smooth, low rumble of the Dodge Charger Pursuit Robert drove.

  He cruised at a leisurely pace, passing quiet neighborhoods and vacant lots to his right; to his left, a tall embankment that separated the roadway and much of the town of White Sands from the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a wide canal built to enable ships to pass from Mobile Bay to Perdido Key, in Florida, and eventually all acros
s Florida without having to enter Gulf waters.

  He slowed and pulled into a small strip mall. The Charger rolled through the parking lot as Robert used a spotlight to inspect the businesses for any signs of break-ins or bums. He used the spotlight’s handgrip to maneuver the beam across the store fronts, momentarily illuminating them. There was a used clothing store featuring last year’s shorts and tops—“Good as New! $5”; a barber shop with a dated political sign in the window that confirmed Robert’s suspicion the place catered to men who were one, if not two, generations older than he; the red-and-gold trim of the Jade Dragon Chinese restaurant where he once watched a cockroach wrestle half a green bean across the floor; and an insurance agent’s office devoid of any personality.

  Nothing was amiss. Nothing is ever amiss.

  Robert had come to understand the ebb and flow of night-time shifts in White Sands. After Labor Day was a quieter time of the year in the resort community, falling between the heavy summer season and the arrival of winter’s “snow birds.” In September and October, if there isn’t a party to break up or a crash on a highway by 1 a.m., you’re in for a long, quiet night. The seven-member police department is seldom tested on these nights. Often the biggest challenge is avoiding carelessness…or napping.

  But still, you still never know what’s around the next corner.

  Satisfied in the security of the Towering Palm Shopping Center, Robert pulled back onto Intracoastal Boulevard and headed towards the next place to check, White Sands Masonry Supply, about a mile and a half further up the road.

  Shortly after turning back onto the road, Robert noticed a small picnic area atop the canal embankment. The table was more inviting than the drive to the masonry supply, so he crossed over the median and pulled to a stop on the northside of the road. He picked up the police radio microphone and pressed the button to initiate contact.

  “Dispatch, this is Unit 251,” he said. “Reporting 10-10.”

  Static filled the radio’s speaker momentarily, then stopped.

  “OK, Bobby, let me know when you’re back on,” the voice said.