Mayhem, Mystery and Murder Read online

  The hopelessness of my search didn’t really strike me until I ran down Lester Lauderford’s last known address, which turned out to be a motel on the outskirts of Orlando that had changed hands three times since 1973. What finally emerged from that stop was my decision, after a futile search on the Internet, to seek professional assistance.

  I settled on a private investigator in Orlando, itself, on the assumption that that was probably as good a place as any to find the kind of help I needed. Again, I could see no reason for giving the full details for why I wanted to find Lester, but otherwise I provided all the information available, which the investigator and I agreed wasn’t much. I had that last known address, a general description of what he looked like in 1973, a photo from that year’s Sentinel, the fact that he had suddenly come into a large sum of money and that he had seemed to have purposely dropped all contact with his home town friends, neighbors and relatives.

  The PI, who was as unmemorable looking as the average Lauderford, was quite frank in admitting that there probably wasn’t much he could do for me. “A social security number might have helped some, but even that could be useless around here, if the person you’re looking for really wanted to disappear.”

  I was puzzled by that, having assumed that a social security number was something like an indelible tattoo that just went with the person, and I said so.

  The investigator laughed at my naiveté. “Florida is a refuge for all kinds, ranging from people who are in witness protection programs, to ex-mafia who don’t want people to know about their old contacts, to some who merely want to get lost. Even rich types who just don’t bother ever collecting on their social security. From what you’ve told me so far, this guy seems like a mix, but I’m willing to try if you’re willing to spend the money. If he’s still using the same name, then there’s the possibility he’s joined clubs down here, or opened a bank account. Maybe even taken out a driver’s license. But, if he’s changed his name, nothing short of an all-points bulletin from the FBI will rout him out. And even that might not work.”

  Having gone this far, I decided the retainer he asked for was a large enough amount to provide me with the feeling I’d done my best. I gave him my e-mail address and, as I left his office, I was already formulating my plans to see what Florida had to offer. That even included a trip to Disney World. There was little during that time to remind me about either genealogy or Lester Lauderdale, except for the notice I received that Mary-Anne’s blood sample had arrived safely, and that I would have an answer to my question in a few days.

  It was roughly a week after I’d hired the PI, and at about the time I was starting to feel homesick for my familiar surroundings back on the West Coast, that I received a message on my laptop from the investigator. As it turned out, Lester Lauderford had not changed his name, was in residence not twenty miles from his original address in Orlando, and was still alive. But just barely.

  The last paragraph of the message read, “He is now in a long-term care facility, suffering from both lung cancer and Alzheimer’s. I spoke to one of the doctor’s there, and the prognosis is very poor. They don’t expect him to live much longer. If you wish, you can make an appointment to see him, but he will probably not be very coherent.” What followed was the address and phone number of the medical center.

  Within moments after reading the email, I called and made an appointment to see Lester the following day. From what I could make out, that formality wasn’t particularly necessary, since visiting hours seemed to extend to all twenty-four hours of the day. I had given my name and indicated I was a cousin of the patient, but even that seemed to be superfluous information from the viewpoint of the hospital staff. Evidently, anyone could visit anyone, anytime.

  What followed after I hung up was one of the stranger moments in my life. After having spent the better part of a month on this quest, I began for the first time to seriously evaluate what I was doing and why. I even went to the extent of writing out the evaluation on my laptop, a process I’d found frequently helped to clarify my thinking. Within moments I had centered in on the core notion that had been driving me. Lester Lauderford had met Sarah Lauderford on one of his forays to the West Coast, and he had suddenly seen in her a way where he and his wife could cash in on the large insurance money without the usual formality of having the subject of the policy die.

  Why he had chosen her, was a mystery probably explained by the fact that a missing person that far away from Ipswich would never be connected with the accident. Perhaps Sarah at least resembled his wife in height and weight, and certainly she must have been enamored with him, making it easy for him to convince her he was unmarried or had left his wife, or whatever. I had also assumed, very early in my search, that Lester with the help of his wife, or at least with her connivance, had killed Sarah and then passed the body off as his wife’s in a clever way that masked its true identity.

  It was while I spelled that out for myself that I began to see how weak my deductive process was. I was assuming that somehow Lester had been able to persuade Sarah to come to Ipswich, that he had managed to keep her presence a secret from the small-town neighbors and had then manipulated her into driving the car, having somehow ensured that it would go off the road and into the ravine. Put like that, the whole notion became ridiculous. The questions that scenario raised were enormous. How could he have gotten her to drive the car? How could he be sure no one would come across the crash before he got there? How could he be certain she didn’t survive the crash? I had visited the site of the accident, and I could easily believe that brakes—suitably tampered with by someone who was knowledgeable about cars—would very likely go out on that steep curve. But there were far, far too many imponderables beyond that.

  As I turned off the light that night and tried to quiet my mind sufficiently to get some sleep, I became convinced the accident had been as Lester had described it, that the sheriff’s suspicions were groundless, that mine were even more so, and that Sarah Lauderford had indeed gone off with a man unknown and was now living somewhere under her married name—or had died peacefully of natural causes after leaving Centerville.

  My first action, following a breakfast of ham with grits, toast, coffee and orange juice, was to make a reservation on the next flight out to Atlanta and then on to California. After that I had time on my hands and debated with myself concerning the scheduled visit to the medical center. I finally decided that a brief stop on the way to the airport would help to give closure to the entire matter.

  Coddersley Hospital and Long Term Care Center was as depressing as I had anticipated it would be. A large, sprawling building consisting of two massive wings, it must have been much like other such establishments housing the retirees who come to Florida to spend their golden years and end up there in their final decline.

  In Lester’s case, the decline had come to an end. I wasn’t terribly surprised to learn he had passed away late the previous evening. The doctor who gave me the news included his condolences. I thanked him while assuring him that I was only a remote cousin. Though I was now thinking entirely of exiting gracefully and going off to the airport, I couldn’t help but notice the rather peculiar expression on his face. My own quizzical look elicited an even more peculiar response.

  “I also happen to be treating Mrs. Lauderford, and she heard that a relative was coming in today to see Mr. Lauderford. For some reason, she seemed very upset on hearing that. I wonder if you might be willing to drop by her room in the other wing? Maybe you can reassure her about whatever is bothering her. She’s also suffering from lung cancer, by the way. I’m afraid they were both heavy smokers, now paying the price for that addiction.”

  I was now only half listening to what had become a monologue, as we went off to see a Mrs. Lauderford I had assumed must have died in a car accident thirty years ago. Of course, I told myself as I followed the doctor, the answer was that Lester had remarried. The moment I entered the room I was aware the patient was alert in spite of be
ing linked to an oxygen bottle and breathing only with great difficulty. There was no sign of Alzheimer’s here. I was transfixed by the eyes, one blue, one brown.

  Later, as I sat at the airport entering a few notes into my laptop, I had to recognize there really had been no confession, no admission that either Sarah or Lester had been instrumental in the accident that had taken the life of the first Mrs. Lauderford. But it was easy to fill in the blanks. Lester had indeed found a way to collect his wife’s life insurance, exactly the way Sheriff Delaney had envisioned. What neither of us had realized was that Betty’s death opened the way not only to get the money but also for Lester to marry a successor who had been chosen months beforehand.

  The lower right corner of my laptop alerted me to a new email. It was a note from the Chicago lab informing me that the full details of the blood test results would be mailed to me, but that the conclusion was, “The two blood samples are almost certainly not from close biological relatives.” I smiled at the conclusion, mentally erased the “almost” and switched over to my genealogical chart, where I substituted 2004 for the question marks following Lester’s name. I decided to wait with Sarah’s, even though her doctor had told me she was very unlikely to live more than a few days.

  I also made a mental note to send a letter to Sheriff Delaney. Then, for some reason, I noticed my knee was feeling much better.

  BOMB!

  Back when I was a kid growing up in South Chicago, I never dreamed that having a Lebanese father and a Syrian mother would turn out to be an asset. But my ancestry paid off big-time when I sat down across from Timothy Fisher at a San Francisco sidewalk cafe on that warm September morning.

  He bought my cover as a Mid East terrorist—hook, line and sinker. Of course, being an FBI agent, I’d been provided with excellent cover. Even so, he was nervous and kept looking around at our neighbors, the only ones at the time being a young couple who, hands across their table, were obviously and hopelessly in love.

  “I’ve got the money,” I told him, assuming that might help to calm him down.

  It didn’t. He kept scanning the street. “I’m not interested,” he said. And that surprised me.

  What he said next surprised me even more, until I realized he was talking about my supposed Iranian connections and not about the Bureau. “I know who you’re working with, and I know you can get a hell of a lot more than the ten thousand you’re carrying around in that briefcase. Well, I’ve got something to offer that will cost you fourteen million, and you and your friends will think you’ve died and gone to heaven when you find out what it is.”

  I snickered. When my boss sent me out on this little expedition, he was assuming there were actual explosives for sale. What he didn’t know was what I was quickly concluding by this time. The offer was coming from a kook.

  “OK, so you don’t believe me. Well, look at this.” He picked up a shoebox-size package sitting at his feet, put it on the table, flipped open the lid and pulled out what looked like a gob of play dough—not much larger than a baseball.

  I’d seen a lot of explosives during training, and this chunk of material could have passed for some of the plastic material that used to be produced in Eastern Europe. But, for sure, no one would have paid ten thousand dollars for that gray-blue blob, so I raised an eyebrow. Even so, since I had nothing much better to do, I decided to at least hear him out.

  What he told me next made me sit up straight. His contempt for the money I was carrying, his description of this new explosive, his repeat of the fourteen-million dollar price for three kilograms of the play-dough-like substance, and his producing the stub of a train ticket to show he’d come to San Francisco by train and not by plane—all that convinced me.

  That was when I made a decision that changed my life and probably a lot of other lives as well. I signaled to the lovers, who closed in on Fisher. In moments, Special Agents Julie Shill and Lewis Wheaterby had him handcuffed, and we were all off to headquarters. I insisted on interrogating him first before actually booking him. Julie didn’t like the idea, but Lewis shrugged. She liked it even less when I said I wanted to be alone with our prisoner in the interrogation room. But I was in charge and she had little choice.

  As soon as the door closed behind the pair, I handed Fisher my cell phone. “Now, listen carefully. I want you to call whoever you’re working for and tell him the deal is on. Tell him I’ll be on the East Coast with fourteen million dollars to pay for the three kilos. Have him set up the time and place.” Then, I added. “No codes, no hemming and hawing. Just a straight story.”

  Fisher smirked. The smirk disappeared when I took out my automatic, racked a shell into the chamber and explained, “We’re just about to struggle for my gun, and then it’s going to go off accidentally. You’ve got fifteen seconds to figure out what will happen and to make that phone call. Oh, yes. I should also mention that you’re going to be in my personal custody for the rest of the day. It would be very unfortunate if your phone call alerted them.”

  He made the call. It didn’t alert them.

  Five hours later I was sitting in the FBI Director’s office in DC. Being a poor peon, way down in the ranks, I’d never met Dwayne Lockhardt before, and my first impression wasn’t exactly favorable—even though what he was saying would look good on my record. “Congratulations, Udafi. Fisher hasn’t stopped talking since you left Frisco. We’ve located the warehouse where the bomb materials are stored, and we’ve had verification that they’ve developed a new and extremely dangerous explosive.”

  Maybe I’m just imagining things, but I was convinced the Director was kind of unhappy to think a lowly agent had stumbled across a major bomb-making organization the Bureau didn’t even know existed. What he said next fed my imaginings. “I was asked to have you flown in.”

  Oh hoh! I’d wondered about that. Pressure from above. And then Lockhardt began none to subtly briefing me to cast the Bureau in the best possible light at the coming interview. So I prepared myself for a session with the Attorney General. It wasn’t until we were ushered into the Oval Office that I realized the interview wasn’t going to be with the AG—and that the directive requiring my presence had come from a lot higher up.

  The President looked much the way she did in her photos and on the tube. A bit more tired, perhaps, but few people wouldn’t have recognized her immediately. She rose and shook hands with me, the Director and with the bomb expert who had accompanied us, then waved the three of us over to some comfortable chairs.

  Lockhart didn’t waste time on preliminaries. “What we are faced with, Ms. President, is a new and extremely explosive substance. It’s being produced by a group of individuals who are trying to market it to international terrorists. Dr. Lee,” he nodded toward the expert, “will describe it to you and explain why we consider it to be one of the most horrifying instruments of terror ever invented.”

  Dr. Lee was tall for a Chinese and almost skeletally thin. His voice had a high pitched rasp that grated on my nerves. What he had to say grated even more. “Our San Francisco office hasn’t had much opportunity to test the material, but what Agent Udafi wrote in his report is, if anything, an understatement. A small amount of this substance, placed in the unpressurized portion of an aircraft—baggage compartment, wheel well, fuel tank—will explode at somewhere between fifteen and twenty-thousand feet. Exactly at what altitude the explosion would occur would depend on various factors such as rate of climb, air temperature, moisture, etc. No timer or cap or other detonating device is necessary. This explosive is completely self contained.”

  He paused for what I suspected was effect, then went on. “Another feature making this material unique is that there is no possible way you could make it explode if we had some right here at this moment. If you were to throw it into a fire it would burn slowly, like green wood. If you hit it with a hammer, you would simply squash it. If you tried to detonate it with a cap, it would merely fizz. On the other hand, it can be easily packed into a toothpaste tube an
d is totally undetectable by any known scanning devices. And that amount would be sufficient to blow a large hole in the side of an aircraft.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the FBI director broke in to anticipate some of the President’s questions. “Fortunately, we now know where the explosive is stored and who the people are who are trying to sell it. There’s a large warehouse in the industrial district just outside of Baltimore. The ingredients for the bomb are gathered there, and we know at least three kilograms of the finished product are stored in the building and are being readied for sale to the highest bidder. The building is under close surveillance at this moment. We’re using our most sophisticated listening devices to make sure everyone connected with the group is in the building, especially the inventor of the explosive, a physicist named Fitzroy Jamieson.”

  Holding up his cell phone, he added, “I’m in contact with the surveillance team, and as soon as we have confirmation of Jamieson’s presence, we’ll move in.”

  The President leaned forward and asked, “How many people are involved?”

  “We’re almost certain there are only five, but we’re pursuing that line of investigation to make sure.”

  “Assuming we’re successful in apprehending them, what’s to prevent others from putting together the same kind of explosive?”

  “I think Dr. Lee can best answer that question, Ms. President.”

  Lee immediately filled in. “Our preliminary analysis indicates at least some of the ingredients are extremely rare. For example, an essential component is element 122, which is so new it doesn’t even have a name yet. One of its isotopes—the one used in this explosive is very long-lived, with a half-life of one hundred-and-seventy-three days. That places a time limit on the effectiveness of the material.”