Page 38 of Sundowners
By the time I made it to the PD, it was near five and my dress shirt was choking me. This was exactly the kind of work I wanted to do, the kind of help I wanted to provide, but imposter syndrome was strong. My family had always done such a good job of treating me like the fragile kid that it was a shock to be going in on this as my tita’s peer.
“Sup, Junior,” I heard from behind me as I climbed the steps.
I turned to find Rey in street clothes.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were off today?”
“I’m part of the plainclothes detail. I hear we’ve got some hotshot professor coming in to consult on the case.” He pulled on my tie and I smacked his hand away while he laughed his ass off.
“Can you at least pretend you’re not an asshole for five minutes?”
He reached around and held the door open for me and then showed his ID to get us buzzed in.
I’d been in the department countless times, but this time everything seemed stark, grim. I was used to coming in as the wonder kid and having the officers make a fuss over me, not dressed in a suit and being led through the desks to the conference room rather than around the outside of the main room to the break room or roll call before a ridealong. This was serious, and I hoped I could deliver what they were hoping I would.
“Roman,” Tita Vanessa said as she greeted us. She gave me a side hug and then showed me over to the table where there were stacks of folders next to a laptop. “This is Ross Sterling, the other detective working the case with me. You know Grant and Tompkins,” she said, gesturing to two other patrol officers I’d met over the years. They looked up from files and waved, and then all eyes looked expectantly toward me.
“Hi,” I said lamely. When no one spoke, I turned to Vanessa. “You said you had a lead?”
“Yeah,” she said, clicking on the laptop and projector. “We ran the names of the four men from the Boardwalk and while nothing showed up on first look, we dug a little deeper and found that two of them had Spanish passports and one of them is from Monaco. They’re here on work visas.”
She flashed through their info and pics on the screen, and I rested a hand on the back of a chair.
“You shared with us that you researched an organization called La Mente in Spain?” Sterling asked me. I hadn’t met him before, but Vanessa had spoken highly of him.
“Right. The Order of the Mind, it’s a religious organization. They have a series of learning centers throughout Europe, and I found stories of their existence in South Africa and Monaco. Their literature states ‘we educate our members to better themselves through mindfulness and learning to serve a greater good, and we use our tithes to support improvements in medical science.’
“They’re very secretive, so I was only able to read a few articles about them, read some police reports, and I spoke to several families and members of the Catholic church who claimed there were multiple children that had been seduced by the group and then disappeared. Eventually I’ll try to go to South Africa and Monaco as well, definitely before writing my book, but in the meantime, I want to finish my dissertation and degree.”
“I can’t see where there would be a link between something like that and this type of bullying behavior,” Sterling said. He crossed his arms and his legs in front of him and leaned back in the chair.
“La Mente studied the effects of fear on health and they allegedly put their recruits through months of psychological torture, teaching their initiated members how to use fear to control and manipulate new recruits, who in turn would learn their methods. It was all part of biological research they were conducting through their biotech company.”
“One of the suspects is employed by a biotech firm in Santa Clara.” Sterling shrugged. “Maybe there’s something there.”
I took a seat. “Vanessa, will you put up their information again?”
“Please,” she muttered.
“Please?” I gave her a smirk, and she laughed. Guess she’d always be tita, even if we were at work.
They all had shaved heads and they were all wearing white t-shirts in the pictures, but these were definitely the four men from the Boardwalk.
“Can we get more information on them? Where they’ve lived the past five years, whether they’ve gone to school? How old are they?”
“Jonathan Aldridge, Dominique LeMonde, Sacha Bernard, and Federico Diego. They’re all between twenty and twenty-five, according to their passports.”
“Perfect age for recruitment. If they’ve got markers like behavior problems, home schooling, isolation, mental health concerns, substance abuse…you may be looking at prime indicators of vulnerability.”
Four hours and four slices of pizza later, we had written up profiles for the four men and we’d found employment records showing the four of them were employed by the firm BioBourne. This was too much of a coincidence. They had to be connected somehow to La Mente. The bioresearch firm was too close of a link to ignore.
Rey and the other two patrol officers were going to be hanging out downtown and at the Boardwalk in the evenings for the next few nights, and Vanessa and Sterling were going to visit BioBourne tomorrow and then see if they could interview the four men, although there was talk of putting that off, to let them feel the pressure and see whether they would act again.
As I was packing up my computer and cleaning up my pizza mess, Vanessa walked over and placed a hand between my shoulder blades.
“You did good, Ju—Roman. Thank you.”
“I hope it helps,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. I appreciated her not using my nickname. “I’ll keep digging, but La Mente is locked up tight. I’ll go back through my notes and see if there are any other connections.”
