Page 53 of The Children of Eve

CHAPTERXXXVII

Bern made the transfers, the first directly to Díaz’s nominated account and the second to escrow. He could have arranged to cheat her on the remaining $75,000—it wouldn’t have been hard—but they had enough difficulties without alienating someone with knowledge of Urrea’s financial operations. As long as the intel she provided was solid, Bern was content to see the rest of the money released.

Yet when the material began to come through, he wondered whether Díaz was attempting to stiff them after all. A fucking Bible company in Nashville, Tennessee: What could that possibly have to do with anything? But further emails showed that Díaz’s instincts were correct. Shortly after the arrival of the funds from Mexico, the Nashville Codex Corporation had acquired portable freeze dryers, ultraviolet- and infrared-filtered light sources, and equipment for atmospheric monitoring and modification, including a pair of portable nitrogen and oxygen generators. For reasons beyond all human understanding, Blas Urrea had, it seemed, commissioned the Nashville Codex Corporation to recover the lost children.

The flow of information from Díaz paused. Bern waited for the next anonymized email message. It arrived within seconds.

WANT MORE? RELEASE THE NEXT $50K.

By the time their business was concluded, Devin Vaughn was $100,000 poorer and Elena Díaz was $100,000 richer. Bern didn’t begrudge the woman a single cent, even if Vaughn might. Díaz had saved them a huge amount of effort and thrown in additional financial details that would have cost Bern a small fortune in bribes to banking and business contacts had he been forced to source them for himself.

The owner and president of the Nashville Codex Corporation was a former Methodist preacher named Varick Pantycelyn Strawbridge Howlett, his first three names being those of early leaders of the church and the last his patronymic. Díaz’s investigations revealed that the Reverend Howlett was ninety-three years old and currently residing in an assisted-living facility for those suffering from dementia, which meant he was unlikely to be accepting blood bounties from Mexican crime lords.

Tennessee was one of the less expensive states when it came to dementia care, which didn’t mean it came cheap: Howlett’s accommodation at Shining Stone Senior Living in Murfreesboro cost $7,000 a month. Howlett’s account was safely in the black, and the $7K arrived regularly—religiously, even—in Shining Stone’s account on the third of every month. The nominal payee was the company’s retired accountant, himself in his late seventies and a resident of Palm Springs.

As for the Nashville Codex Corporation, it was, despite its name, a limited liability company rather than an actual corporation, which meant it had a simpler legal structure and less formalized accounting and tax-filing processes while remaining a separate entity from its owner. In other words, as long as someone fulfilled the minimum legal requirements, Howlett could eat soft food and believe he was the reincarnation of John Wesley for all the interest Tennessee’s Department of Revenue might have taken in the NCC’s activities.

Díaz had traced the Shining Stone money trail back through a series of companies and roadside churches—all of the former existing only on paper, and most of the latter rejoicing only in rodents and insectsfor their congregation—and come up with one recurring name: Eugene Seeley. It was Seeley who had, via the NCC and certain shell entities, rented or purchased the equipment itemized in the first section of Díaz’s email. The receipts specified, presumably at Seeley’s instigation, that it was required to preserve and treat “fragile manuscripts and bindings.”

Díaz’s paperwork showed that Urrea’s wasn’t the first such large payment received by the Nashville Codex Corporation, though it was the only one used to source specialized storage and transportation equipment. According to the records, sizable payments to the NCC were biennial, or annual at most. A number were derived from Latin American financial institutions less scrupulous than her own, and Díaz had helpfully added, in brackets, the cartels or criminal organizations with which they were most closely associated, many of them connected to the PCC, the Brazil-based Primeiro Comando da Capital, Latin America’s dominant organized crime and narcotics syndicate, with which Blas Urrea’s cartel was aligned. Eugene Seeley, it transpired, was the go-to guy in the southern United States for Latino reprobates, but to what end?

Bern printed off the most relevant documents and marked salient names and figures with a red pen. He then drove to Manassas, only to be told by one of the foot soldiers, Marek, that Devin Vaughn was in his basement and had left orders not to be disturbed. Bern had long ago decided that any such orders did not apply to him and brushed past Marek, who knew better than to try and stop him.

Bern descended noisily so that Vaughn would know he was on his way. The stairs spiraled, and the basement’s interior was not visible until Bern reached the final steps. He had not been down there since the arrival of the child. Vaughn had invited him to visit her, but Bern was still too incensed to accept. Vaughn had taken the refusal personally and the invitation was not renewed. In fact, Vaughn ordered that nobody was to enter the basement without his permission, a permission that had not been offered or requested since.

Bern paused on the last step. Vaughn was kneeling before the child,leaning in so close that his face was just inches from hers. Only the glass prevented them from touching, skin to skin. Vaughn turned to look at him, and Bern understood, truly and for the first time, what it meant for a man to be haunted. Behind Vaughn’s empty gaze, ghosts walked.

“What is it?” Vaughn asked.

“We know who’s coming.”

CHAPTERXXXVIII

Angel and Louis weren’t noticeably keener on early mornings than I was, so I gave them some time to come to terms with the reality of another day before I got in touch. Instead, I headed home, eased myself of the burden of a bladder’s worth of Dunkin’ coffee, and caught up on some paperwork. Shortly after eleven, and to protect Jason Rybek, I drove out to BrightBlown’s farm and asked after him, only to be told by the woman at the front office that Rybek had been in touch to say he was ill and would be taking a few days off. I’d been practicing my expressions on the way and had perfected “annoyed but not necessarily shocked.” I gave it to her now, and received an apologetic shrug in return. I was about to leave, all bases covered, when Donna Lawrence arrived.

“I was going to call you,” she said. “Jason is taking time off, but I have his permission to share his cell phone number with you, should you wish to reach out.”

I took down the number for form’s sake. Lawrence removed two bottles of water from a refrigerator and handed one to me. The bottles were made from recycled plastic and the water probably flowed from Eden itself, pure as the driven snow, pure as Donna Lawrence’s soul.

“I feel that we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” she said, “though I’m not sure how. Why don’t I show you around? Who knows, we might even convince you to loosen up and try some of our products.”

Now that she believed Jason Rybek was safely out of the way and any efforts to trace him were destined to end in frustration, she was happy to play the gracious host. But I was also sure that Lawrence had been in contact with Devin Vaughn or one of his intermediaries since last we’d met. In Vaughn’s position, I’d have encouraged her to find out what the investigator might already know about Wyatt Riggins and his activities. I didn’t see any downside to playing along.

The most straightforward means of approaching Vaughn would have been to knock on his door down in Virginia, specify that I liked my coffee with milk, no sugar, and invite him to fill in the blanks. That would also have been a fast way to incur broken ribs and a concussion, or potentially something more terminal, depending on what Vaughn might be trying to hide. If every conversation was also a transaction, there was no point in arriving empty-handed. Should I decide to approach Vaughn directly, I’d need leverage. Taking a look at his operation in Maine, and hearing what someone who was effectively an underboss might have to say about it, was a step in the right direction.

The farm was alive with noise as we walked. A construction crew was clearing an area to the north, destined to be the site of a new production facility twice the size of the existing buildings combined. Lawrence showed me inside one of them, a long windowless barn divided into separate rooms in which cannabis plants were growing in elevated trays under LED lighting. I could no longer hear the sounds of the backhoes and excavators, only the quiet hum of the units that controlled the temperature. Lawrence explained that these plants were either at or near the end of their growth cycle. Next to the growing area was a curing room, where the plants would be dried before the flowers were trimmed, separated from the leaves, and the two products bagged for distribution to the main store in Portland, a smaller store in Bangor, or to independent outlets supplied by BrightBlown.

“That seems like a lot of weed,” I said, as Lawrence closed the door behind us.

“It is, but not as much profit. We were running at a loss for the first eighteen months, though we’re now in the black. Capital costs are high, and finance is hard to come by because lenders don’t want to be associated with cannabis or are prevented by statute from lending to our industry. Then there are taxes to be paid, but we’re excluded from claiming certain credits and deductions; we’re unable to trade across state lines; and, as you intimated when we first met, we have a glut of competition, both legal and illegal. We’re expanding because we’re optimistic that we’ve weathered the worst of the bad times, but we’ve been wrong before. We thought that when the Democrats returned to power, it would mean a loosening of federal restrictions, and that didn’t happen.”

I nodded along politely, but everything she told me had to be viewed in the context of a cash business—one, what’s more, that was allegedly being used by Devin Vaughn to launder money. It wasn’t that Lawrence was lying, just that she wasn’t presenting the complete picture. We stopped on a rise to take in a view of the whole farm. To the east stood a shuttered coffee truck surrounded by picnic tables.

“We’re going to add a pizza van for the summer months,” said Lawrence. “We want BrightBlown Farm to become a destination for tourists and locals alike.”

“It’s all very idyllic,” I said. “I hope Devin Vaughn will come up here to cut the ribbon personally.”

“I asked around,” said Lawrence. “That name wasn’t familiar to anyone I spoke with.”

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