Before I Wake (42 page)

“God is good, Rae. Men have free will and often do evil. God has freewill and constantly chooses to do good. That’s the difference between us. God is good. Men have a bent toward evil that won’t change unless we appeal to God to take us in hand and make us good again. And since only a small fraction of men ever think it worth laying down their will to ask for God’s goodness instead, we end up with days like this.”

“God not stopping something like this is God being good?”

He so understood the emotion behind that question. He saw violence every day on the job and yet went to church on Sunday to worship God and proclaim Him as good and perfect and loving.

“God is passionate about good happening in this world, not evil. I’m convinced of that. God hates what happened here, Rae, the same way He hates divorce, and He hates injustice. But He won’t destroy people to proactively prevent them from doing evil things, nor will He destroy them today after they have done evil things. Not until His great patience has extended to them every chance and opportunity there is to change and become good again.”

“I may buy that in my head, Nathan. But it still feels so incredibly cold to the rest of us. He says He loves us, and yet He lets our lives get destroyed by others and seems to do nothing about it. I don’t understand God.”

Nathan smiled at the depth of that emotion in her voice. “Yeah. I appreciate that level of emotion too. When love your enemies to us sounds impossible, and to God it sounds like the obvious thing to do—it should be obvious how deep is the gulf between man and God. Only someone who is fully good can understand a being who is perfectly good by His very nature.

“It’s not a lack of love, God’s vast patience. It’s not an eternity of this, Rae. He knows days like this badly hurt the innocent, and there will be a day He’ll say for the sake of the innocent, ‘My patience is eternally over.’ Evil around us may last a lifetime, but it won’t last past that final judgment. And in the vastness of eternity, these few decades of life will eventually be seen as just the blink of an eye. Evil will cease to be a part of our lives in heaven. Think about that future, and don’t worry so much about this one. This life you just live one day at a time and trust God to take you through it.

“God showed up in person in Jesus to say ‘I get it; I really do know what is happening here. I feel your pain having lived through it Myself. But trust Me. Eternal life is very different than this.’”

She thought about it and eventually just nodded. “Thanks. I don’t necessarily think that solves my problem with today, but at least it wasn’t a cardboard answer.”

Nathan smiled. “I’m not good at answering adult questions; it’s why I stick to ten-year-old boys. They prefer to talk about King David and how he used a sling and a rock to kill Goliath or how he dealt with the lion and bear coming for his sheep.”

Rae smiled. “They’ve got a teacher who is a good role model.”

“Let’s hope I can be. Sometimes I wonder.”

Nathan considered the last of the orange soda and poured it out.

“Where are you heading now?”

He tried to put together a plan. At the moment he was interested in just sitting here. “Will is getting warrants for Isaac Keif’s apartment. I’ve got to find an Andrew Grayson that works for the management side—he hasn’t been accounted for yet. The coroner thinks he has some information teased out of those notebooks from the lab that I should hear.”

“And tomorrow they operate on your arm.”

Nathan grimaced. “I sincerely hope not. But yes, I work tonight, because tomorrow afternoon someone in a white coat is going to be ordering me around and dictating my life.”

“I saw Sillman a few minutes ago. He sounds pretty certain the shooters can be found and this can be wrapped up by this weekend.”

Nathan smiled. “I pay him to be optimistic.” He pushed snow with his boot toe and found another layer of reserve energy. “ I’ve got to go. Anything I can do for you before I disappear?”

“I don’t like it when you bleed on me.”

“Sorry about that. I don’t think I can promise I won’t ever do it again.”

“I know.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Go back to work.”

Nathan sat there for a moment considering that. “Okay.”

He pushed to his feet, adjusted the sling, and headed back to work. He glanced back when he reached his car and saw her smiling at him. “Okay,” he whispered to himself.

43

Will drove them to Isaac’s apartment. Nathan scanned the warrant paperwork one last time, then pushed it into his jacket pocket. It would cover the searching of any e-mail or files they could locate as well as personal belongings.

“Isaac was listed in Peggy’s notebook,” Will pointed out. “He was a friend of Prescott’s grandson. He’s involved. Why else cross the picket line and risk the wrath of friends, except to get access to a shipment? A day’s wages isn’t enough to explain his actions. He’s most likely our inside shooter.”

“I’m leaning that way,” Nathan agreed. “But he may have left the plant earlier in the day when news of the closure came down, and that means he might be the outside shooter, or he may simply be the guy picking up a few bucks to move a can out of the building occasionally.”

“Are you sure you want it being just the two of us knocking on his door?”

“With vests on and caution, but yes, just the two of us. I’m not having another officer get shot at today. If Isaac is our guy, he’ll have split town entirely by now. Who are you thinking for the second shooter?”

Will crossed through downtown and turned into the block where houses had been divided into duplexes and most turned into rental property. “Isaac hasn’t been hanging around with anyone in particular that I am aware of; he’s either at the tile plant or the chocolate shop or working on his car. It doesn’t fit that it is Andrew Grayson—I think the guy just picked up his wife and got away from the trouble for the day, probably went to see family. And if the shooter was involved only because of the drug tie-in and not the strike, then maybe it is someone who doesn’t even live in this town.” Will parked behind the house they were interested in.

“We just walk up? His entrance is that west door,” Will pointed out.

“We just walk up.” Nathan confirmed his vest was tight. He pushed open his car door. “Did your wife have words for you about today?”

“Not many. She wanted to know why I hadn’t called to tell her I would be missing dinner.”

Nathan looked over the roof of the car. “Truly?”

Will smiled. “A standing question with her. When she doesn’t mention the fact I missed a meal with her, I’ll start to worry about the marriage. She’s fine. I don’t think she ever thought I was in much danger.”

They walked together up the path toward the door.

“She got so many details at the café for what happened; she was telling me facts about who did what that I didn’t even know myself. She just said, ‘I heard the sheriff got shot’ and went on from there to talk about how Mrs. Vernham suddenly had twenty-two people bursting in her front door to take cover and how much excitement that was in her day.”

“One of us probably needs to apologize to Mrs. Vernham in the next day or so.”

“You got elected,” Will pointed out.

“I keep wishing I could forget that,” Nathan replied. He turned serious, studying the house they were approaching. He moved into position to the side of the door, waited for Will to get into position, and he reached over and knocked.

They got no answer.

Nathan knocked again. “This is the police. We have a warrant to search these premises.”

A neighbor appeared to see what the shouting was about and Nathan pointed him back into his house.

“Kick it in.”

Will stepped back and obliged. The door had decent locks but a poor frame, and the wood splintered.

Nathan moved left to sweep the rooms, and Will went right.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

* * *

“He was back here, at least briefly,” Will decided.

“I agree.” Nathan could still see the snow tracks that glistened with water leading from the kitchen back to the back bedroom. The signs of someone frantically opening drawers and cupboards were everywhere.

“Clothes are cleared out. The chest is open; the underwear drawer is empty.”

“Think he grabbed his bag and got out as fast as he could?”

“I don’t see much care taken in the leaving.”

Nathan put in a call for Sillman to join them. They would need to sort out anything they could find for where Isaac was heading. A few hours too late, but at least they knew one person they were after.

“What’s this?” Will leaned over the beat-up sofa in the living room and then shoved aside the piece of furniture. A sledgehammer rested on the floor, and the wall had a nice hole in it, about knee high. “Stash site.”

“I’d say.”

Will got down to check out the busted wall with his flashlight. “Cash. More than I’ve ever seen in one place before.” He reached up into the wall and pulled a plastic wrapped bundle out from between the studs. He reached in and found another one.

Nathan walked over to watch. “How much is in there?”

Will tried to get a look into the wall. “Possibly several more bundles. I can’t reach that high.”

Nathan picked up the one near him and tore through the plastic wrapping. He held one of the dollars up to the light. “Real bills. Security stripe, watermark, and all look like used bills, not new. Isaac must have taken what he could carry and left the rest. Or he took the twenties and left the smaller denominations. This package looks like ones and fives.”

“Same with these.”

Will picked up the sledgehammer. “What do you think?”

“I’m not planning to leave this kind of thing around for just any officer to watch over. Break it out.”

Will put a hole in the wall higher up.

Bundles of money tumbled out to the floor. Nathan got his first real look at the wall as a chunk of drywall flapped out. “Bundles between every stud? What did he do, drywall over a million dollars?”

Will poked his fingers into a gap and tugged more drywall free. “Don’t laugh. Inches per bundle times the number of stud openings in a standard wall this length—it’s probably more like two million.”

“He never spent it around this town.”

“I knew the kid was disciplined, helping his dad with the shop as he was and working the part-time job at the plant, but disciplined enough to do this kind of job and just sit on it?”

“Ambitious is more like it. He wanted to make it big by the time he was thirty and the only way not to give himself away in a small town was to be very careful about it.”

“He left a lot of money behind.”

“I’m betting it’s not personally his money. Remember those tile-plant boxes? They fit for holding a couple of these bundles. Isaac was probably receiving in money, storing it, and sending it on for someone else. A money mule.”

“Okay. That makes sense. Which means the bundles he took with him might not be his own money, and someone out there is going to be very upset with him when they realize we have this house.”

“I’m leaning that way,” Nathan agreed. “Let’s get a statewide APB out on him.”

“Where’s he likely to run?” Will asked, tugging more money bundles out of the wall to stack up on the couch.

“I suppose it depends if he’s just trying to hide, or if he’s trying to leave and get out of the country. His family is mostly around here.”

“Do you think his father is involved? The senior Keif?”

“He loves chocolate and that shop. There’s never been a suspicion the man was anything but aboveboard. Maybe a bit of this money is keeping the business afloat, but I can’t see its source being something known to the father.”

“This isn’t a new designer drug we’re seeing here, Nathan. This is an established drug business transit point—cash, drugs, not a small vial of something new they are testing. That may be almost a minor side business of what was really going on here.”

“I agree.”

Sillman joined them and stepped into the living room. “If you told me about it, I wouldn’t have believed it. What is this, his private bank?”

“Sure looks it. I need you to handle this scene, Gray, so Will and I can chase down where this guy is heading.”

“I can take it. But you’d better get someone from the DA’s office sitting here with me and someone from the bank able to open their vault tonight. This money is real; it’s not counterfeit?”

“It’s genuine US currency,” Will confirmed. “I want to know how he was managing to move this kind of cash around without someone hearing rumors of its existence.”

“He was working at a tile plant part-time, he was working for his father at the chocolate shop part-time, and he had a growing large scale drug business forming. This is one enterprising young man,” Sillman agreed.

“This kind of cash says he’s had a long-term operation going on under our noses. Or at least he’s been working for someone else for a long time.”

Will put another hole in the wall, then stopped to nod at the money piles. “You have to admit, stopping by restaurants and hotels frequently to refill free chocolate sample baskets is an awful good cover for also meeting customers who are buying drugs from you. Cash transactions, public parking lots, stopping to chat with someone he knows just looking like a chance encounter and social exchange. He was all over this town and no one would question seeing him.”

Sillman thought about that. “And working at the tile plant—he could raise the volume of product he could handle just by being able to ship in a case of contraband occasionally instead of just a can or two. Why be involved in a new designer drug? From the look of this he’s got a large business already under way.”

Nathan pulled down window shades, aware they had residents of the block now beginning to be spectators wondering what was going on at this Keif place. “What do you think? Isaac is the second guy we’re after, the facilitator? For cash he’ll move product via the tile plant warehouse; he’ll handle the distribution of product to buyers for a cut of the profits. He’ll store and ship money around. He’s a utility fielder, not someone using his own product. A designer drug isn’t his game, but maybe it is someone else’s who’s in the area and Isaac’s just willing to be of help for a price.”