As I drove northeast, back toward Midway Airport, I pondered what I should and shouldn’t tell Webb. I didn’t want the Secret Service to step into my case. I was still undecided about what to do when I dropped my day rental back at Midway and prepared to go in and do battle with the airlines to get on an earlier flight back to Cleveland. Man, am I ever beginning to hate traveling!
The best Southwest could do was to put me on standby on a flight that left Chicago about 2 hours earlier than my original flight. I still had a few hours to kill. I went off in search of food.
As I settled at a table with my tray, I pulled out my cell, intending to call Webb and get it over with. He’d be waiting on some sort of word about my meeting with DeShawn Dawes. The blinking message light caught my attention. I dialed my voicemail up and was shocked to hear the voice of a very distraught sounding Mel asking me to call her back ASAP.
Wow, she sounds very upset! Concern cancelled out hunger. I put my as yet unwrapped sandwich in my go bag, dumped my fries in the trash and then took my bag, drink and phone off to find a more private place to give her a call back. The Transportation and Safety Administration came to my rescue. A polite, bubbly young woman, as yet unjaded by the rigors of working for the TSA, showed me to one of their tiny interview offices after I showed her my badge and ID. It was sparse but it would do.
“Mel? It’s Dana. Is everything okay? What’s going on?”
“Where are you Dana?”
“I’m in Chicago like we talked about. Why?”
“I know that! I mean, where are you, exactly?”
“I’m at Midway waiting for a flight back to Cleveland.”
“You need to get to the safest location possible and we need to talk… and not on cell phones!”
“Yes we do need to talk. I’m in the TSA offices here right now so I’m perfectly safe. Let me go borrow a landline though and I’ll call you back from that. Where are you?”
“My office at the department.”
“Okay. Sit tight. I’ll call right back.” I hung up and stepped out into the hallway. There hadn’t been anyone in the front area when I first came in with the TSA officer. I stepped toward the back and found someone who directed me to another office with a phone. I took a deep breath and dialed the Muskingum County Sheriff’s Office. Holly put me through to Mel.
“I’m back. What’s so secretive that I had to call you from a landline?”
“Dana, two guys in a vehicle with Illinois plates tried to kill me today.”
“What!”
“They ran me off the road into a stream and then they started shooting.”
“Are you all right?” My heart felt like it was about to beat right out of my chest.
“I’m just a little banged up but I’m fine. The Zanesville P. D. caught the van and took two men into custody. I don’t have any information about them yet. There were witnesses but I don’t have any details from them either. The county prosecutor is already involved so I’ll be kept out of the official investigation. I’m pissed off, stuck in my office for the time being and mega frustrated right now and I’m worried sick about you!”
“Mel, I’m fine. I’m in a safe place.”
“Good to know but you can’t stay there forever.”
“I’ll have a TSA agent escort me to my gate. Security is tight here. I’ll be fine… at least, until I land. I don’t know that anyone knows my flight arrangements but Gene but I’ll make sure I have an escort when I land in Cleveland too.” I better have someone check out my car in the long term garage too…
“You might be safer to hide out in Chicago than to come back here!”
“Be serious! Mel, I can’t hide! I’m a federal agent!”
“I know, I know. I just don’t want to see you hurt.”
“I learned some things here that could break my case wide open. They involve some people and places that may be in your jurisdiction.”
“May?”
“Yes, may. I don’t have names or exact locations but I do have far more to work with than I had before.”
“Like what? Give me something to work with myself here!”
“Well, for one, I know that the ringleader of this operation, Relic, is in Ohio. I don’t know if he’s in your area exactly, but he’s Ohio based which narrows down the scope of the hunt quite a bit.”
Mel whistled low but didn’t say anything.
“I also have a line on how the trucks are getting unloaded there and then disseminated from the county and the same location probably ties into the counterfeiting ring as well. The problem there is, I don’t have a pinpoint location and our previous surveillance wasn’t tight enough to get that info but I do know where to start looking.”
“Well, if your surveillance had been a little tighter, this probably all would have been a done deal by now. We’ll just have to put our heads together and figure it out.”
“We? Mel, you’ve done enough. There’s a bounty on your head! You just keep laying low. My team and I will take it from here.”
“You know as well as I do, that I have more knowledge of this area than any ten men on your ‘team’ will ever have. If you want that big shipment, your time is running out. I’m willing to help, so let me help. Besides, I may have some information myself.”
“What do you know?”
“It may be nothing or it may be something. I can’t be sure until I do some digging. Just answer me one question?”
“What’s that?”
“Could Relic be a woman?”
I was totally taken aback by her question. I’d never thought about it. “I don’t think… maybe… I honestly don’t know.”
“Does the gang have female members with responsibilities beyond standing by the male members?”
“Yes. This gang does. The GD are run very much like a business operation. A woman could be in charge of a crew, a gang branch, an operation... I’m just racking my brain trying to remember if I’ve ever heard Relic specifically referred to as a ‘she’.
“Does it really matter? I mean, aren’t you just assuming it was a male?”
She has me there. “Yes, you’re right.” God, I hate admitting that!
“Look Dana, if you come blazing in here with gang task force officers rousting gang members like you were planning, trying to get to this man or this woman – whoever – you’re going to stir up an even bigger hornets’ nest than we already have and the actual operation you’re trying to find and shut down will just go silent for a while. Meanwhile, we’ll have nothing but a gang war against the establishment on our hands.”
“If we play this low key, we may catch them thinking they scared me off after my dunk in the creek.” She sighed. “Of course, we don’t know how much they know about you and your team but, if you talked to that lawyer and to the younger Dawes, then it’s likely too late. You’ve probably been made.”
“The lawyer bolted Mel. We’re looking for him. DeShawn Dawes is a different story. He’s really just a kid they’ve used. If he’s pressed, he’ll spill the beans, but I don’t think he’s gang himself or that he has full gang status in the joint.”
Mel jumped back in, “Dana, what do you make of the lawyer disappearing?”
“It appears voluntary but I just don’t know. It implies that he may be in over his head with this gang but it may be completely unrelated. So far, nothing is as it appears” …
“Tell me about it! Uggh!”
“What are you suggesting we do? How do we play this “low key”?”
“You find that lawyer or you have someone there track him down. He may really have carried that hit order. At minimum, he probably knows something about where this stuff comes in and gets transported from.” Mel paused for a minute.
“Mel?”
“I was just thinking; you guys know most of the route, right?”
“Yes.”
“You know the shipment’s moving on or around the 21st. You use agency assets in the states on the route on and around that date to watch for trucks from the Demons run trucking company. Keep local cops out of it. You don’t want a show of force spooking these guys and blowing your case.”
“No show of force my ass! Mel think about it. That could take a hell of a lot of manpower! That’s probably not going to happen!”
“Then find the lawyer ASAP or let’s get to Relic first!”
“Arrg!” She thinks this stuff is simple… “Let me just run right out and corral them both!” I was being sarcastic but I just didn’t care.
“I’m being serious Dana. Look, let’s regroup. Let someone else find the lawyer. For your part, you think about this: When you get back to Cleveland, put a small team together for an op here. Come down to the county and quietly set up a task force HQ based out of our offices here. We can provide security for you and an intimate knowledge of the area. You can do ground or aerial surveillance – whatever it is that you do. We’ll nail the distribution point. For my part, I’ll work on figuring out if Relic is who I’ve stumbled upon hearing that she may be. If it is the person my intel gave me, a soft approach may net her fairly easily.”
“Nothing about this case has been easy Mel.”
“True. I guess nothing worth doing ever is, Dana.”
“Also very true.” My mind wandered and I thought about Mel, the woman, rather than about the job at hand. I physically shook my head to clear it. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately but I really needed to focus fully right now. I knew I couldn’t avoid Mel’s obvious feelings for me forever or my own growing ones for her despite all my attempts to squash them but I had to back burner them for a while longer.
Mel was silent for a beat herself and then she asked, “So when’s your flight?”
“I’m on standby for one in about an hour and a half. If I can’t get on that, I’ll be on one that leaves two hours after that. Either way, I’ll be in late tonight. If I get the earlier flight, I’m going by the office first to get started strategizing with the team.”
“Watch your back Dana, please?”
“I will. You do likewise.”
“Mel I don’t know what time…”
“I don’t care what time it is. You call me!”
“Is that an order?”
“It’s concern. Please, call me tonight.”
“Yes ma’am!”
Chapter 20 – Finding Relic
Mel
I paced my office, thinking, for several minutes. There was plenty of spare room in this building to let a small task force work out of here. Some offices in the facility where my office is have been empty for years. Budget cutbacks had eliminated jobs and left parts of the building to be taken over by dust mites with some areas used only for storage. Housing and hiding the existence of Dana’s team shouldn’t be a problem.
My mind skipped ahead to other things. Still pacing, I began to think more closely about Delores Chappell. She lives literally around the corner from Kris and I and the kids. We’ve known her, forever and a day, as my mom likes to say. She’s an eccentric older lady who has her good days and her bad days. One day, she’ll be pleasant enough but, the next, get her on the subject of local property taxes or some such thing, and it’s off to the races. She isn’t a fan of anything that costs her money that she doesn’t want to spend!
When I think of her as eccentric, I mean it in an affectionate way. She’s very well known as one of the towns several packrats. These days, they call them hoarders, but the newfangled term doesn’t fit Delores. She’s a highly organized pack rat. Everything has a place and everything in its place. She buys out clear plastic container sales at Wally World in Zanesville.
Given my current status as persona non-grata due to this case, if Delores is in fact tied into this whole mess, I couldn’t very well go marching over to her house and pay her a visit; though I’d done it many times in the past. I had to figure something else out. I honestly doubt she’s running any sort of operation out of her tiny little house right in Morelville! If she’s got anything going on that’s off kilter, it’s happening on one of the family farms or on other family property out around the area. Dana didn’t give me any details about the “line” she had on where these trucks might be going. Damn it all! What a mess!
The more I pondered it, the harder it really was to believe that Delores or the Chappell family businesses might be involved in something illicit. The family was very well known in the area and squeaky clean. Still, they did have a lot of land and some commercial holdings and they really kept to themselves. Could there really be something going on that I just don’t want to believe?
As for Delores herself, well, her home is ideally located to have at least a partial view of mine and of the state route going past my home. The two hoods driving the van could have staked out my place from hers and kept an eye on the main road too. My deputy never would have known they were there. People do talk and gossip in town but it’s likely no one paid any attention to a non-descript white work van, even with the Illinois plates. They look similar enough to plates available in Ohio that it’s likely few of my fellow denizens of the little village – if anyone – noticed. If they did, no one had, as yet, commented. Word spread so fast about my adventure in the creek that you would have thought someone would have already called the department and blabbed about anything else that was unusual that wasn’t part of what was reported by witnesses right there at the scene of my near demise!
I heard a tap on the door and then Holly popped her head in. “It’s almost dinner time Sheriff. I’m running out. Do you want me to bring you back something?”
“Aren’t you working a little late today? Or, maybe you just think I need a baby sitter?”
A guilty look crossed her face. “It’s not that Sheriff but I am worried about you… as your assistant and as your friend. Is there anything at all I can do to help?”
A thought occurred to me. “Have you ever met my neighbor Delores Chappell?”
“Chappell? I can’t say that I have. You know that other than to visit with you once in a while, I don’t hang around in your little, happening village over there very much!” She grinned.
I chuckled. Morelville was usually, certainly anything but “happening” until lately. A little of my tension was released in the exchange.
“Thanks, I needed the laugh. Actually, I may be able to use your help for something. Let’s talk about in just a bit, if you don’t mind. Why don’t you go ahead and run out and grab us some sandwiches. While you’re gone, I’ll work out a few details. I promise not to keep you here late and to be on my best behavior and stay in hiding once you’re gone.”
“Roger, Sheriff!” With that, Holly smiled again and then turned smartly on the heels of her uniform issued shoes and strode out of my office. I just laughed. It really did feel good to do that.
I sat down at my desk and pulled the county auditor’s website up on my computer. I started researching properties owned by Delores Chappell and the Chappell family. Delores owned her little house in Morelville outright. A family trust held most of the rest of the Chappell properties which were spread out around the area near the village. They consisted of the family homestead and horse farm, a feed corn and soybean production farm, a dairy farming and milk hauling operation, and several adjacent parcels consisting of hundreds of acres of undeveloped land. Parceled out from some of that same land were a few homes that were deeded out to Chappel descendants.
Address information for the family trust went to trustees Delores Chappell and her younger brother, Heath Chappell Jr. I was personally aware that Heath Jr. lived at the homestead an
d that he managed the small horse farm there and the crop and dairy farming operations at the ground level. I was quite surprised to find that he and his sister were in charge of the entire family trust.
Though Gramps Chappell, as everyone in the area had called him, and his wife June had long since passed on, a daughter and two of his sons were still living but they were well up in years. Delores and Heath were the children of his eldest son Heath Sr. who was also no longer living. I would have thought estate management would have passed on to Gramps and June’s surviving children but it didn’t in this case. The family dynamics completely escaped me. At least though, I had a starting point.
I pulled up the auditor’s aerial maps and Google Earth for all three of the main properties. The county did an aerial survey ever couple of years so the maps tended to be a bit more updated than Google and Google Earth in some instances and not in others. I usually cross referenced both to get as close as possible to current realities. I zoomed in and out on each property to see what I could see.
Nothing that I was looking at struck me as odd in any way. The farms had the expected farm buildings and the dairy farm had a few milk trucks in the most recent aerial view. I started checking the other properties too. They had a home or two scattered here and there and the usual assortment of out buildings for the area like sheds, horse stables, small barns and the like. Nothing was jumping up though to bite me and say “look at me!” This little adventure is going nowhere fast!
###
Delores Chappell is a notary public. She advertises her services by putting up business cards on the bulletin boards of the businesses around the village. Everyone in the area uses her to notarize things because she does it for nothing and she has better hours than any bank.
Holly and I created a ruse where she absolutely had to get something notarized and, as she was happening through the village and stopped to buy some snacks, she spied a business card Delores had placed at the store. That would be her ticket into ‘Relic’s Lair’, as we had laughingly dubbed it. It was such a simple plan; it would probably work. She would stop by – undercover – in the morning.