Missing: The Body of Evidence Read online

  ‘She can hear you, and she says to follow your instincts.’

  Dora’s head slumped forward. Nancy gazed at her in stunned silence. Gradually, she raised her head.

  ‘Sorry, dear, she’s gone. I need to rest now. Please, call for Jayne to see you out.’

  Nancy thanked her and made her way outside the room. The visit posed more questions than she had answers. Jayne met her in the hallway.

  ‘How much do I pay for the session?’

  ‘Nothing, unless you want to leave a voluntary donation?’

  Taking some bills from her purse, Nancy dropped them on the coat stand and hurried to her car. There were no tears; just a feeling of warmth that maybe there was a life after death, and her mom maybe watching over her. In the confines of her car, Nancy sat pondering over the revelation, finding it hard to take in and looking for logical reasons to dismiss the idea that her dreams were her spirit going on some kind of journey. She sat back and closed her eyes. The lyrics for the Westlife song played over in her mind, together with images from the You Tube video.

  Nancy opened her eyes and gripped the steering wheel. Astral travel... Astral Chemicals!

  Chapter 52

  Nancy turned off at West Washington Boulevard, and drove through the gates of Angelus Rosedale Cemetery for her meeting with Bill. She followed the winding cracked asphalt road to her pre-determined clandestine meeting. With sixty-five acres of open ground save for the tombstones, the occasional palm tree and a few trees, there was not much hope of hiding their presence. On the positive side, she reckoned, if anyone was going to set up surveillance, they would be easy to spot.

  He had chosen his spot well. A clump of trees and bushes afforded some cover. Nancy pulled over and stopped her car, leaving the engine idling. With five minutes to spare, she climbed out of her car and onto the sun burned grass. Nancy stretched her legs and looking out into the distance, she did a three-sixty to reconnoitre the area. She could not be sure if it was wise, meeting Bill. Nancy felt for her gun, tucked into her jeans waistband. The feel of the cold steel gave her a surge of confidence.

  She felt stupid at her dark thoughts, that someone who had been a friend for the last fifteen years could be a threat. But, aware that her dad had bad thoughts about Bill, and his advice to trust no one, she thought it best to err on the side of caution.

  A car the same colour as Bill’s approached. She watched it follow the winding road, until she could determine it was the same model as the one driven by Bill. The hairs on her neck bristled and she wiped the sweat from her palms down the side of her jeans. Her muscles tensed, until, with some relief, she caught sight of Bill’s face through the windscreen and her stance loosened. He stopped his car behind hers and opened the passenger door.

  ‘Hi, Nance, get in.’

  She gripped the top of his car-door frame and hesitated.

  ‘Best we talk outside. It’ll be better to keep an eye out.’

  His age showed as he struggled to haul his frame out of the driver’s seat to join her.

  ‘What’s the secrecy all about?’

  ‘Well, we’re not supposed to talk during your suspension for one. Last thing I want is for them to stop my pension.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose. Have you talked to Kyle?’

  ‘No, but stop worrying about him. It’ll all be sorted out once you’re out of this mess. You need to concentrate on your own skin. Who do you think is setting you up?’

  She thought that she could hardly tell him, he could be in the frame, and wondered how he knew to tell her not to talk on the telephone about their meeting. Nancy decided against telling him she knew about the surveillance team monitoring her apartment. If he was somehow part of the set up and on a fishing expedition, she was not about to let him reel her in. Her fear was that he might be carrying a wire to record the conversation.

  ‘Not got a clue. But Logan says they’ve found Dean, the guy who deposited the money in my account and they’re picking him up today.’

  ‘You’ve not heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘They found him with his throat cut.’

  ‘What... Oh shit?’

  Nancy stood akimbo and froze, slack jawed, her brow furrowed in anguish.

  ‘It’s not all bad news; they’ve arrested the gang leader.’

  ‘Jesus, what good’s that to me? Have you any idea who may be behind all this?’

  ‘Well, it’s a long shot, but I have my own conspiracy theory. Let me run something involving Astral by you.’

  Her back stiffened at mention of the name.

  ‘What about Astral?’

  ‘Look, when you mentioned Astral Chemicals before the Piru Street operation, I wasn’t honest with you. I have heard of them, but it was a long time ago.’

  He shuffled his feet and looked down at the ground.

  ‘It goes back to just after I made detective and my partner Jim was found hanged under a bridge. God rest his soul.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with Astral?’

  ‘According to the death certificate... nothing.’

  He gripped his nose and flushed it out on the asphalt.

  ‘It’s a long story, but it all goes back to the Kennedy assassinations.’

  ‘Awe, come on, Bill, you’re not gonna fill me with a load of crap about another Kennedy conspiracy theory.’

  ‘No, I’m just going to tell you what I know. You make up your own mind.’ He closed the passenger door on his car, leaned with his back against the body and continued. ‘Jim picked up on a lead, but no one in authority wanted to know, so he followed it up in his spare time until he became obsessed. Long and short is, he found out about a government program set up during the cold war. America discovered the Russians were working on mind control and set up their own project, codenamed, Astral. The Kennedy administration wanted to cut funding, saying they didn’t believe in all the psychic mumbo jumbo. The goons set up a corporation to market some of the drugs they concocted to aid the program and kept it going. The program was buried so deep out of sight of the administration, I don’t think even the top people in the CIA knew all they got up to. That’s as much as he told me. He said if anything should happen to him, he kept a file inside his mattress, but after his death, I searched for it and it wasn’t there, just the tear in his mattress.’

  ‘So what are you saying, Oswald and the guy who killed Bobby Kennedy were part of this program and had their minds brainwashed.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything. All I am saying is, if you search the internet, you’ll find the mind control program is alive and kicking, but they don’t give it a name. Hell, they even developed a contraption for the Iraq war, it sent out messages that were picked up in the subconscious of Iraqi troops telling them to surrender.’

  ‘But why the name Astral?’

  ‘I guess it’s because they recruited people with psychic abilities. I watched a television documentary in black an’ white, which claimed some of the guinea pigs could project their mind to travel to secret installations and draw pictures from what they saw on the inside.’

  ‘Thinking about it, I’ve seen that documentary.’

  Nancy’s head began to throb at a cascade of jumbled thoughts and trying to relate them to her situation. Her head bowed and she held her face in her hands.

  ‘Mind blowing, isn’t it?’

  A recollection came to the fore, from the words of CIA agent Blondie, when she had asked if they were in involved in Blue Book stuff and he had replied. ‘It’s called mind over matter, as in we don’t mind, because you don’t matter.’ Nancy removed her hands from her face and raised her head at the irony of Blondie’s words.

  ‘Jesus. So that’s why you told me to forget the case with the professor?’

  ‘In a nutshell... yeah, and because you didn’t listen, I reckon it’s them that set you up with the punk that deposited the money, and as a backup in case their attempt to kill you and Kyle at the cabin failed.’

  ‘But why
Kyle?’

  ‘Either collateral damage, or because he had voiced his concerns that maybe the janitor’s death was connected with the professor and that he hadn’t committed suicide.’

  ‘Damn, Bill, how do I get out of this mess?’

  ‘Stop digging, accept whatever happens with internal affairs, lay low, get married, have kids and live a long life.’

  Tears welled in her eyes at the frustration she felt at his last words.

  He reached out and took her in his arms. When they broke, she detected tears in his eyes.

  ‘Damned hay fever.’

  He shrugged his shoulders and turned to walk to the driver’s side of his car. ‘Listen, I have to go. Be careful and heed my words, stay low. We’ve got another five days before internal affairs interviews me.’

  ‘Wait... where do you and Logan know Dad from?’

  He pulled open the car door, and looked annoyed at the question. Ignoring her request, he climbed onto the driver’s seat, opened his glove compartment and handed her a miniature Dictaphone through the open passenger window.

  ‘Maybe another time. Keep this with you always. You never know when you may need to record a conversation.’

  Nancy stood watching him drive away, wondering why neither Bill, nor Dad wanted to talk about what they knew of each other.

  Chapter 53

  Booked into a motel, having bought some blonde hair dye on the way, Nancy collapsed on the bed exhausted. Her mind flipped over events, not wanting to believe any of the situations. An alternative… astral travel… secret mind control program… Kennedy conspiracy and magnetic aura, for Christ’s sake? All spun around in her mind until she felt as though someone had twisted a corkscrew into her skull and extracted her brain.

  Her stomach didn’t fare much better when the realization dawned she had not eaten. The words, ‘magnetic aura’ alluded to by Dora stuck in her thoughts like a fly to jelly, buzzing away, frantically trying to escape, but the notion simply would not go away.

  The paper clip in the office and the compass spinning to her touch skipped through her mind. Then the purple patch on the televisions and the monitor screen when interviewing Kelly. Everything pointed to her having some capacity to produce a static electric field beyond the norm. She wondered if this could have caused the glass to shatter in the doorway, the truck’s windshield; and somehow her aura had caused the MRI scan to malfunction.

  Curiosity drove her to the mirror in the bathroom. Placing her hands on the hand bowl, she raised her head and stared at the mirror. Holding her breath, her eyes popped with the strain that she thought would induce some kind of result. Nancy broke wind and snickered. Nothing else had happened, but then she expected nothing would and slapped her cheek with her palm.

  ‘Bah, stupid idea, girl.’

  She touched the side of her head with her fingers. The pain she had suffered had gone. All the events had happened when she had been under severe emotional stress and her headaches were at their height. She wondered if these factors could have played a part. Quickly she dismissed the idea, preferring to place more significance on logical explanations, but the doubt remained. The only thing that seemed feasible was that the shady astral program played a part in events. Nancy knew that she needed to find out where their base was and what was so secret that they could possibly be involved in murder and destroying her career.

  Nancy picked up the hair dye, scoffed and tossed it in the wastebasket.

  ‘No way.’

  With the young gang member murdered, the event had its bad and good side. On the one hand, he would take the secret as to who killed him to his grave and on the other hand, he wouldn’t be around to testify his lies against her. His death could hold some clues as to who was behind the attempt to frame her, and she decided to take a ride and to phone Logan from a payphone. She headed to her car.

  After a twenty-minute ride, Nancy pulled into a gas station and parked. She loaded the payphone with coins, dialled Logan’s number and he picked up the call.

  ‘Hi, it’s Nancy. I was just wondering if there were any clues as to who had murdered the guy who tried to frame me.’

  ‘How did you know about the murder?’

  Nancy wanted to end the call and to pretend it had not happened, but she knew she had messed up with repeating what Bill had told her.

  ‘Never mind that, have you any clues.’

  He ignored the question.

  ‘Where are you, we need to talk. Your car is at home but no one answers. Tell me where you are and I’ll have someone pick you up.’

  Warning bells rang. What they were doing, offering to go to her home and pick her up, meant only one thing. She was a suspect for something, and they needed her to come in for questioning, but with Bill delaying his interview, she reckoned it could not be about the case against her.

  ‘I took a bus ride to get some medication. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

  He didn’t answer but started to ask questions about her health. The questions were totally out of character and she took it into her head he was trying to have the call traced.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve run out of coins. Speak to you tomorrow.’

  Nancy placed the handset in the cradle, aware that she was visibly shaking. She grabbed a sandwich pack, a carton of juice, asked for a new operator card for her cell phone, paid for them, rushed to her car, and drove away at speed.

  After ten minutes of driving, she pulled over to the sidewalk. Tearing at the packaging, Nancy grasped and devoured the sandwich, hardly taking the time to chew. There hadn’t been time to phone her dad and she needed to talk to him. Aware Logan had her cell phone number; she knew she had to change the operator card. Fumbling to take off the back of the phone, she caught the ON switch and the message function sounded. Turning it over, her heart skipped. The screen displayed a text message from Kyle.

  In a panic, she turned off the phone, not knowing if they could trace her from the brief moment she had pressed the ON button by mistake, though she suspected they could. Tossing the phone on the passenger seat, with her foot pressed hard on the gas pedal, she accelerated, burning rubber and sped off down the road. Her heart rate gathered speed in tandem with the engine picking up momentum. A safe distance between her and the gas station, she pulled over and turned down a side street, parked between two cars and turned off the ignition and lights. Nancy slouched down into her seat, her heart still beating rapidly as a reaction to what Kyle may have sent as a message. She picked up the cell phone and stared at the blank screen, her finger hovering over the ON button.

  It was not just the fear of being located that worried her if she switched on the phone. Thoughts that she would find a ‘Dear, Jane Doe’ message, that Kyle was calling off their relationship, sent her mind in a spin. Her sweaty hands started to shake. She could hear the sound of her heart beating and felt cold shivers run through her body as adrenalin kicked in once again. A pain slammed her in her chest and she grimaced. The immediate thought was a heart attack at the relentless assault of adrenalin flushing through her body. She groaned and then whimpered.

  ‘Help… Mom. Please help.’

  Her eyes moistened. She grasped at the source of the pain near her left shoulder and wondered if it was God’s way of ending her torture. Nancy slumped forward, banging her forehead on the steering wheel, still gasping at the pain and breathing rapidly.

  Chapter 54

  The pain in Nancy’s chest intensified, spreading to her stomach. She slouched down in her seat, grimaced and reached out for her cell phone. Her mind fought the pain through furrowed brow and eyes squeezed tight, drifting through recollections of a life filled with nothing but isolation. She dropped the phone and held her stomach with one hand while still grasping at her chest. If it was her time, she thought it ironic she would die alone with her thoughts, in the same empty universe she had lived her life in, without anyone giving but a fleeting-damn.

  A voice in her sub-conscious told her not to be so stupid. Her morbid asp
irations at resigning to her fate came to a halt, at the realization it was probably heartburn, no doubt brought on by devouring the sandwich. Through the tears, laughter, she fought the pain until it subsided, leaving her saying a silent thank you to her mom and breathing in rhythmic shallow breaths until the stabbing finally dissipated. The voice had been correct; she was stupid, with the source of the pain in her chest nowhere near her heart.

  Nancy wiped her moist eyes, and feeling composed, twisted the ignition key. She manoeuvred her car from between the parked cars and set off in the direction of Compton. Briefly, she touched the butt of her gun in her waistband. Eyes fixed on the road ahead she drove with a determination and a plan to find where Astral was based. Even in the familiar territory of South Central, it wasn’t time to relax. Graffiti on walls flashed by and mapped out the gang territories, changing from one corner to the next. Children posted as lookouts stood guard, more concerned for rival gangs encroaching on territories than a police hit, mountain bikes and cell phones at the ready.

  Ominously, as she turned down a side street, a pair of sneakers, laces fastened and strung over the telephone cables crossing the road above in her vision, told her the likely fate of an intruder crossing the line. Undaunted, but wishing she had the usual backup of a partner, she pulled over at a dilapidated block of apartments.

  The smile of a young African American boy greeted her. No more than ten-years old, he sat on the steps to the apartments with a friend.

  ‘Five-dollars to look after your car,’ he said, and playfully elbowed his friend, who gave him a dig in the ribs in retaliation.

  ‘I’ll go one better. Five dollars now for your friend to look after the car, and five dollars for you to knock on number two. After knocking, wait outside and when I return, I’ll give you both another ten dollars to share.’

  The twenty dollars must have sounded too good to miss and his friend held out his hand for the first instalment. Nancy handed it over and the other boy walked ahead of her holding out his hand.