She had also used her considerable technical skills to see if anyone could find anything on herself and her twin sisters, all three who had left Sandville decades ago in the company of two elderly relatives. There was nothing. She wondered if it would still be possible today for three children from an impoverished background to completely disappear without a paper or digital trace. She doubted it. But she had long believed that her mother was relieved that the children were gone. How many times had her mother had told her and her sisters that they were only a burden.
Giving up on the possibility of falling back to sleep, Mackenzie crawled out of bed and pulled on some fleece sweats. After switching on the coffee maker, she settled on the couch with her iPad and did a quick check of her e-mail.
Next she opened the planning document and flipped to the Threats page. The first item on the page was labeled Possible Identification. She clicked on the link and another page appeared. On the left was a picture that she had taken the day before. On the right was a photo she’d carried with her for years, the last class picture from Consolidated High. She had scanned it into a jpeg while still in California. She held the iPad up to look closely at the grainy black-and-white image of a young teen whose eyes looked almost too large for her narrow face. The girl had short hair—a jagged cut, inexpertly done with kitchen scissors by her mother or grandmother. The thin smile displayed buckteeth beneath an asymmetrical nose, the result of a fall from a tree a year or two before. There was never money for a visit to a doctor. Her grandmother had straightened it as best she could and packed it with cotton until it stopped bleeding.
Mackenzie looked at the face on the other side of the screen, 20 years older, perfect teeth, and a retroussé nose—her first substantial investment after she entered the world of work. Her hair was luxuriant and carefully styled, and her once soft blue eyes were now green. The little girl voice had disappeared years ago; intense voice training starting in high school had enhanced her rich contralto. And there would be no recognizing her diction, now educated, cosmopolitan.
For this project, she’d thought it essential to hide her identity. Even before the physical transformation, she’d been fortunate on that issue: she’d been given a new identity long ago, when her great aunt rescued her and her sisters from her alcoholic and feckless mother. As she passed back and forth between the before and after photos, Mackenzie concluded that it would be difficult for anyone to make a visual tie between her and that delicate little girl of 20-some years ago.
The second link on the page was Be Invisible. She clicked on it and looked at her notes. Mackenzie was well aware of the impossibility of anonymity in a small town. Small towns are not like New York or San Francisco or other major cities where it is so easy to be just one of the crowd. Other than the realtor who sold her the house, Mackenzie had done her best to avoid local businesses. She did all of her shopping in Traverse City. She’d bought the most commonly seen vehicle on the road, a two-year-old Subaru. Her red Beamer convertible, an attention grabber, was safely tucked away in the garage of her condo in California.
Local Law Enforcement was the third entry on the list. She scanned the few lines of notes. Cedar Bay village had one policeman who worked a nine to five, 40-hour week; Mackenzie’s home was just beyond the village limits. The Cedar County Sheriff’s Department provided most of the police protection for the region. In her survey of newspaper articles, she had determined that the department was, along with the other units of local and state government, underfunded and understaffed. Ray Elkins was listed as the sheriff. She typed his name into Google. There were dozens of entries, most from the local paper, and most from stories concerning local police matters. She read through the entries on the first and second page and looked at a couple of pictures of Elkins. Just another middle-aged cop, she thought.
Finally, she thought about Richard Sabotny, the biggest threat, and the reason she was here. She had been searching for him for years, wasn’t even sure he was alive. And then suddenly he was back in Cedar County, a decorated veteran and reputed soldier of fortune living very publicly in a trophy house on the bay, his driveway running off a major highway.
Putting down the iPad, she leaned her head against the couch. The black early morning was fading to gray. She could just begin to see the white caps rolling toward the far shore. She was filled with angst, not knowing where to start, but feeling an overwhelming need for action.
15
Ray was in his office before 8 a.m., first attending to routine paperwork and then perusing Al Capone’s Michigan: The Secret Lost Treasure, as he sipped from a large insulated mug of espresso and hot milk. He thought he had followed Hannah’s instructions on how to use the espresso machine exactly, but found with the first few attempts he wasn’t getting the crema to form on the top. He poured all of the failures into his travel mug, topping them with four successful shots and a large quantity of hot milk from his feeble attempt at making micro foam. He added four spoons of raw sugar that had come in the box with the espresso machine.
Vincent Fox’s book was a fast read. The opening chapter dealt with his growing up in Chicago. He described his neighborhood and Catholic grade school education—including a few detailed accounts of run-ins with the nuns, yardstick-wielding Sisters of Holy Mercy charged with civilizing and Americanizing the children of immigrants. Ray noted that most of Fox’s text was vague and generic, containing experiences common to the lives of most people living in America’s industrial cities early in the century.
In the second section of the book, Fox explained he was a kid of the streets when Capone first spotted him. He began by running errands for Big Al, and soon, while still in his teens, he became one of Capone’s personal drivers.
Ray googled “Capone” to check the dates. As his daughter had already mentioned, Fox was far too young. But it was engaging fiction. Fox was a skilled storyteller.
In the final section of the book, Fox described how Capone came under increased scrutiny after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. With the coming of Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, Capone began to worry about the possible destruction of his empire. In an effort to protect his immense wealth, he started to collect gold coins, not trusting paper money. And not trusting banks—which were, of course, subject to thievery from both bank robbers from the outside and employees and managers on the inside. He devised a plan to bury his fortune in a number of locations along the shoreline of upper Michigan, from Frankfort to Petoskey, including the offshore islands. Fox went on to claim that most of the gold was buried north of Frankfort and south of Leland, as well as on the Manitou Islands. He provided a blurred vision of 11 treasure sites where he had participated in burying bags of gold coins, explaining that they had always worked at night, usually coming ashore from boats.
Each of the 11 sites was given several pages, but Ray quickly noticed that the first one was a template for the next ten. They were all variations on a theme, a word processing file worked and reworked in a less than convincing fashion. The descriptions, as Fox’s daughter had suggested, were indistinct. Almost any piece of coastline could fit: sand, trees, dunes, small streams. The place to start digging would be more from the imagination of Fox’s readers than anything he provided in Al Capone’s Michigan: The Secret Lost Treasure.
Ray was still pondering the possible effects Fox’s fiction might have on readers when Sue Lawrence arrived, thunking her travel mug on the conference table and dropping Simone into the one upholstered chair in the office. Simone immediately jumped out of the chair and ran to Ray, demanding to be picked up.