In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (5 page)

He managed to obtain a fake driver’s license, social security card, phony birth certificate and high school and college transcripts. He’d spent a lot of money on fake electrician and plumber’s union cards, and carried phony membership cards in the Kiwanis and Jaycees.

And he’d hidden himself—buried himself—in small towns across the northeast and midwest where he thought no one would think to look for him.

Gazing at the blank wall before him, he somehow knew Annie was at that very moment delving into a past he wanted to keep buried. A past that had nearly killed him. A past he wished dead and buried, as he thought his life had been after the attack.

“Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone, darlin’?” he growled, his eyes bleak with fear and betrayal.

He thought back to all the articles she had found and read, and a shiver went through him. Annie was a smart woman, a very intelligent woman, and she had no doubt put two and two together and had come up with an answer he knew must have stunned her. Combined with what had happened to Kyle and his reaction to it, he realized she knew something similar had happened to him. She had even asked him if it had.

And there had been the tools of his profession: handcuffs, leather sap, night stick, and other paraphernalia left over from his early days with the Florida Highway Patrol before he’d been recruited by the DEA.

He closed his eyes. Despite the fact he did not want to tell her about his past, or what had led up to it, he could see he would have to. Lies between them did not set well with Gabe, and he knew she deserved the truth, but the whole truth, nothing but the truth, was something Gabe was not prepared to tell; nor would he ever be. Sometimes, he knew, the truth could be worse than lies. But a portion of that truth was going to have to be told that night.

Making up his mind to tell her as much as he dared made for a very edgy rest of the day for Gabe. His tension showed up in the shortness of his speech, the vague and annoyed look in his normally bright eyes, the unaccustomed rudeness that made his fellow workers look at him with surprise.

Annie stared at
the fax in her hand. Whatever she had expected, it was not what she had received. The reported attacks on officers who worked in the Florida Panhandle, the beatings, shootings, and deaths were grief-inspiring. Most of the time, there was a picture of the officer and a shot of his or her assailant accompanying the article. Now and again there was an attached obituary as well. Ms. Johannsen, or more likely her intern, had been very thorough.

But there was no mention of a Gabriel James in any of the clippings. He had not been on the police force there.

There was, however, a two-inch blurb.

Dateline Pensacola:

James Gabriel Tremayne, the Federal Drug Enforcement Agent who disappeared on November 19th of this year, was found early Tuesday morning as he staggered drunkenly along Berryhill Road in Santa Rosa County.

Lt. Amos Bellew of the agency’s public affairs division was quoted as saying: “The officer’s fine. Just fine. He went on a drinking binge and holed up in a vacant house near Spencerfield and Berryhill Roads in Pace. This isn’t the first time we’ve had problems with Tremayne, but it will be the last time.”

According to sources within the agency, possible disciplinary suspension charges are pending against Tremayne, who has admitted to being an alcoholic.

There was nothing else concerning the matter. No further articles were among those faxed. But there was a hastily scribbled note  attached to the original article.

According to our sources, the note explained, Tremayne had been missing for four weeks when found wandering along a county road in neighboring Santa Rosa County. He was taken to the hospital in Milton for examination and was later brought back by ambulance to Pensacola where he was admitted to The Pavilion, a chemical dependency unit here. He stayed there nearly two months undergoing treatment for heroin abuse and was subsequently fired from the D.E.A. Scuttlebutt suggests that Patrolman Tremayne had a serious drinking and gambling problem, but no one knew he was into hard drugs.

As a matter of fact, those who knew him said he was almost militant about those who took drugs of any kind. When he was found wandering along the road, he was dazed, in the hard throes of withdrawal, and appeared to be terrified of those around him. He was also badly bruised and scraped around both his ankles and wrists as though he’d been tied up. There were other bruises on his upper arms and torso.

Official word says he went on a binge, but a source at the police station in Milton thinks Agent Tremayne was kidnapped by the very people he’d been investigating and that was their way of getting back at him, by getting him hooked on heroin. It happened to another D.E.A. agent here awhile back so that isn’t as farfetched as it might sound. Let me know if you want this pursued. I find it all very intriguing. Someone is lying about what really happened to Agent Tremayne.

“Tremayne,” Annie breathed. Her eyes glazed.

Right after they had first married, she had found a high school class ring in a box of Gabe’s belongings. On the crest of the ring was scrolled Benedictine Military School and the year 1971. Inside were the initials JGT.

“Who’s ring is this?” she had asked her husband.

Thinking back on it now, Gabe’s reaction had been a bit strained, a touch hesitant as he had taken the ring from her. He’d polished the ring against his sleeve, looked at it for a long moment, his eyes narrowed, then shrugged.

“Jeff Teague’s,” he’d told her. “We went to college together and I somehow wound up with his ring.”

“Why didn’t you give it back to him?” She had watched him toss the heavy ring back into the shoe box from which she had extracted it. He’d shrugged again as though it was of little importance.

“Lost touch with him.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

As she remembered it, Gabe’s lips had tightened. “Used to live in Savannah. I don’t know where he is now.”

“What about his parents? Do they—”

He’d cut her off with a grimace. “They died our sophomore year. It was lucky Jeff was there on a scholarship.” He’d turned away, his back rigid, and nothing was ever mentioned of the ring again.

Annie laid the fax paper on the desk and stared out the picture window in front of her. She shook her head.

In the three years she’d known him, she’d never seen him take a drink, neither had she ever smelled alcohol on his breath. Looking down at the fax once more, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was because her husband had at one time been an alcoholic.

Nor did Gabe gamble. The good Lord knew Kurt had tried to con him into many a game at his house. Of course, if Gabe had a problem with gambling, that would explain why he never took Kurt up on any of his weekly poker games. Why tempt fate?

But drugs?
Gabe didn’t even like to take aspirin. He didn’t smoke. As a matter of fact, once you got him going about drugs of any kind, you had to practically gag him to shut him up he was so opposed to them. Annie couldn’t believe her husband would ever willingly put drugs into his body.

Annie sat behind Leland Kassinger’s desk. There was no doubt in her mind that Gabe James was actually James Gabriel Tremayne. It all made sense to her and explained Gabe’s moody reaction to his friend Kyle Vittetoe’s brutal attack; his refusal to discuss what he had done in Florida; his violent refusal to allow her any knowledge of his former life. It explained the initials on the class ring; the police weapons in the foot locker; the newspaper articles.

Her eyes dropped to the three pages of faxed information. Before her lay a litany of murdered, maimed and missing police officers from the Pensacola, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama, area. Among them, missing, and even more importantly, probably attacked, had been James Gabriel Tremayne.

“You were hurt, weren’t you, baby?” she whispered in the stillness of the insurance office. “Someone hurt you as badly, if not worse, than they hurt Kyle.” Tears filled her eyes. “And you still haven’t dealt with it, have you, Gabe?”

Her heart ached at the knowledge her husband needed help she thought him too proud to ask for.

There wasn’t any hesitation as she grabbed the phone and dialed the
Pensacola News Journal
one more time.

Andrew R.
Tremayne frowned heavily as he sat hunched over the expanse of his polished, gold-veined malachite desk. His sharp green eyes narrowed as he read the report just handed to him. An angry, irritated sigh pushed from his lips as he read, his fingers drumming rapidly in annoyance on the top of his desk blotter. At last, having reread the report twice more, he laid it down, pushed it away from him as though it were contaminated, and sat back in his two thousand dollar custom-made, body-fitting black leather chair.

Turning his head, he folded his hands in his lap, fingers intertwined, thumbs revolving around one another, and looked out the wide expanse of his office windows at the sweeping Atlanta skyline. For a long time he said nothing, his attention seemingly held by the vista. When he finally turned back to face the man standing before his desk, the man who had just ruined what had promised to be a very fine afternoon, his voice was sharp and his eyes hard.

“There’s absolutely no mistake?” he asked. “No margin for error?”

The man shook his head. “None whatsoever, sir.”

Tremayne let out an angry hiss of breath, closing his eyes to the fury building in him. He was more than aware that when he opened his eyes to glare at the man before him, the man took a protective step away from the savageness emblazoned on Andrew R. Tremayne’s face. Putting his hands on his desk, Andrew pushed himself up and leaned toward his visitor.

“Who knows about this?”

“Just our man in the Pensacola Police Department, sir. He took the call when it came in. I didn’t think we should inform Mr. Connors until you were told.”

Tremayne nodded, squared the shoulders of his expensive suit, shot the cuffs of his silk shirt, adjusted his diamond-studded cuff links, and put his hands behind his back, lacing his well-manicured fingers together as he did. “You did the right thing, Cronin.”

“What are your orders, sir?”

The nastiest smile Mike Cronin had ever seen slipped over Tremayne’s thin lips and the silky voice, so penetratingly cold and deadly, spoke in a pleasant, conversational tone that made Cronin’s groin tighten.

“You go get him, of course.”

“Miss Johannsen?
This is Annie Cummings. I called you earlier about the police officers.”

“Yeah? How’s the article coming?”

“Fair,” Annie told the newswoman. “I just had a few questions I wanted to ask your intern about the info she gathered.”

“He,” was the clipped reply. “My intern’s a he. I don’t hire women to work for me.”

“Well, he, then,” Annie replied through clenched teeth. “Is he where I can speak to him?”

There was a long pause. “No, but whatever he knows about something, I know even more about it. What in particular did you want to know?”

“About the policeman who was missing for a month back in November of—”

“Agent Tremayne.”

“Yes, I believe that’s his name,” Annie confirmed.

“Why are you interested in him?”

Panic nudged Annie’s nervous system, and for once that morning, the lies didn’t come out quite as quickly. Her hesitation brought a sharp question from across the miles.

“He’s there in Iowa, isn’t he?”

“Who?” Annie could feel her heart pounding.

“The narc who disappeared,” came the amused reply. “He’s out there and you’re calling about him, aren’t you?” The voice sobered. “And you don’t have any notion what you’ve done.”

Annie’s eyes widened. Her hand clenched on the receiver. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

There was a disbelieving snort from the other end of the country. “I’m talking about Agent Tremayne, Miss Cummings. You call here and the next thing I know I’m getting flack from one of Andrew Tremayne’s goons wanting to know where you’re calling from and where I faxed those articles.”

Fear suddenly blossomed in Annie’s mind. “Who’s Andrew Tremayne?”

A bitter laugh sounded from the phone. “No one of any importance in Iowa, Miss Cummings, but one hell of an important wiseguy lawyer here in the South and Agent Tremayne’s older brother.”

Her mind racing, Annie heard the woman’s words as though they were coming to her from the depths of a bottomless well.
Gabe has a brother?
He never mentioned his family. As a matter of fact, he’d told her he had no living relatives left; that he was all alone in the world, having been an only child, and his parents were supposedly dead.

“Ms. Cummings?” came an annoyed bark from the other end of the line. “Are you still there?”

Annie took a deep breath before she answered. “What if he is? What if that policeman was here?”

The newswoman’s voice took on a serious directness. “Then if I were you, I’d tell him to get his ass out of Iowa, Miss Cummings. By now, Andrew Tremayne will have his men on the way to Iowa in the fastest Gulf Stream Tremayne owns to pick him up. I’d just as soon not see the boy spend the rest of his life locked up.”