Three_Deception Love Murder Read online

  The next card revealed a large bright red heart, amid a background of clouds of rain, pierced directly through with three long swords. This card she placed to the right of the first.

  “Your time with this man is over,” she stated emphatically as she pointed at the reversed king card. “There is no going back.” Raising her head, she brought her hands up and wiped them quickly together twice as if to say “Done.”

  The next card she placed to the right of the three of swords. She sat there for a minute or so studying the card.

  “Listen carefully and understand what I say. The Wheel of Fortune,” pointing to the card she had just placed down, “is highly symbolic. In each corner are winged creatures who stand for the fixed stable signs, Leo, Aquarius, Taurus, and Scorpio. The creatures all have wings, you see? This represents stability amidst change and movement.”

  Looking up she engaged my eyes and then down again.

  “The book each holds and reads from is the book of Wisdom,” she said and pointed to the book read by each figure. “Here the snake descending on the left side of the wheel is the Egyptian God of Evil. See him slithering and chasing Hermes the Anubis the sign of wisdom, as Hermes ascends on the right side of the wheel. Evil trying to chase away wisdom and you must not let it. You understand?” she asked.

  Not knowing what else to do, I nodded.

  “The Sphinx at the top of the wheel represents a mystery and riddle. A Middle Eastern person or the Middle East shall be involved in some mystery you must solve.”

  Okay, now she was totally going off the reservation. I did not know anyone of Middle Eastern descent nor could see how the Middle East would be a part of my life. I was now losing interest, this was totally bogus and Eloise would pay.

  Stopping to study the card further she continued. “The middle wheel represents a formative power and it will make more sense with the next card I turn over so let us reserve information and read them together.”

  As she studied the card further her left hand went back to the reversed King of Swords card and she lightly touched the outline of the man. Raising her eyes to meet mine with concern and to make sure I heard her she lightly grabbed my hand. “You cannot stand still, you must move forward. You must move forward! There are external factors that are influencing your situation that may be unknown to you and outside your control. Accept and adapt. You understand? Accept and adapt!”

  I nodded my head in affirmation as I did not want to be the cause of the poor woman having a stroke over getting some message to me so I repeated; “Accept and adapt.”

  “Good,” she said and patted my hand.

  The next card she laid again upside down portrayed a man obviously of royal blood dressed in a garish purple robe, with gold and grapes adorning it as decoration, sat proudly upon a throne of gold. An enormous crown with jewels sat on his head. His left foot which was clad in armor easily and forcefully compressed the severed head of a dragon, much like Dante’s Renaissance bronze statue of David stood as the victor of a fight on the head of Goliath. The king’s left hand showcased an enormous coin with a five-corner star in the middle, the sign to me of evil and the other a gold scepter. Cocky, arrogant, confident, a man of formidable power and wealth.

  Agnes touched the card lightly and looked at me. “This is a man who will do anything for money and cares only for material possessions. He holds his money tight, look here how he grasps the coin in his left hand. He comes from or lives in a foreign land. A land of old. Look, see the castle in the background here on the right, see the turrets? He is a foreigner. His reach is far and deep, see the vines crawling around him? His power is not good. You must take heed of this. He is dark-haired and of a powerful build.”

  When she was sure I grasped her warning, she turned the next card. My breath hitched and my heart pounded in my chest. Something clawed at the back of my neck and squeezed as if to hold me in place and force me to look at the card. It was as if someone had placed ice upon my spine. I began to feel numbness in my fingers.

  I tried to look away from the medieval tower that pitched atop a craggy mountain. But all I could focus on was lightning from all sides striking the building as flames licked from the windows. Desperate people jumped from the tower trying to flee the destruction and turmoil. Placing her right hand on the card Agnes closed her eyes as if to draw something from the card.

  “Total destruction,” she warned. “Do you see the crown being blown off the top? A land having been ruled by kings is set for destruction. The gray clouds are the clouds of misfortune that rain on everyone indiscriminately. Do you see the Roman number XVI? That is sixteen, remember that number.”

  Trying to quell my shaking did no good, I was living in the moment. I shook in my chair. I wanted to run but something bolted me there to the chair and the room became dark and the air became stagnant.

  The final card. Thank God. In the background, a large sun was spreading its warmth and light upon four sunflowers that were growing and thriving within a stone wall. The face on the sun passive but at least it was not like one of Edward Munch’s elongated faces of torment and screams of despair. In the forefront, a golden-haired happy child sat upon a white horse, arms outstretched to embrace the future as an orange banner fluttered in the air next to him.

  Letting out the breath I had no idea I was holding, I waited for her words.

  “Trust in this man, trust in his balance. He is your future. Let yourself be drawn to his warmth, honesty, and enthusiasm. This is a man who is enlightened and will show you the road ahead among your hardship, the light to follow the dark. He is your future. He holds the key to your fundamental being.”

  Slowly sitting back in her chair, she reached for my hands. Her hands’ paper-thin skin and protruding blue veins held mine. Her marble blue eyes swimming in a sea of whitish yellow cornea engaged mine. As her thin dry lips started to formulate words my heart raced, my hands started to shake and my hearing became acute. Watching her mouth and only her mouth, studying the errant longish white hairs on her chin she started to speak.

  “He,” pointing to the reversed King of Swords, “is already lost to you. He belonged to someone else and now the murder of crows has taken him. Three destructive men surround you,” she said with a wave of her hand as if to indicate she saw these men as an atmospheric ethereal presence in the room.

  With that, she blew out the candles and all that was left was a gray stream of smoke.

  The cards revealed a dire path to my future that I wished I could erase, but there was no delete button in my brain.

  Pushing the thoughts of my card reading aside, I had no further excuses to stay in bed. I had to deal with my bad decision of drinking two bottles of wine the night before to try to erase the sense of doom I felt after leaving the card reader’s home.

  Slowly rising from my warm, cozy bed, I made my way to the bank of six windows. The view from my bedroom window looked upon a lush landscape ending at a lake of still water.

  The aroma of hazelnut coffee filled the hall from the already prepared coffee and grounded me to the present as I made my way to the kitchen.

  I checked the house phone caller ID and my cell phone again. Still no word from Jude. After all the calls and texts to him with no response, his message was loud and clear. His dark behavior recently outweighed any of the good times we had together over the last three years.

  Screw him. I’ve decided we’re most certainly done.

  I glanced at last night’s dishes that were piled in the sink. Spaghetti with crusted red sauce stared back at me from the dishes that were no longer submerged in suds. Yuk.

  Last evening, I had planned a dinner with Eloise at a nice quiet restaurant to discuss how I had set the wheels in motion to leave Jude. Our evening was supposed to be about celebrating new beginnings and joy. Eloise had decided to hijack me to attend the tarot reading instead. The revelations from the reading were so dire that I canceled our dinner plans preferring to drive home and wallow in my depression a
lone.

  Instead of surf and turf, I consumed a quick and easy meal that involved boiling water, opening a jar of sauce and two bottles of wine at home. Did I drink all that wine myself? No wonder my head throbbed and my stomach burned this morning.

  The termination of our relationship meant I could no longer enjoy Jude’s home. I would miss the splendor of this house.

  Leaning over the sink to clean the dishes I looked out the large window. Like me, the house was in need of a tender touch. The gray shaker shingles had flakes of paint that were noticeable when they moved with the slightest breeze. Harsh Maine winters and the high winds that swept to the house from the lake had damaged the shingles. The dull white trim could use a little extra care too. The red door that led to the mudroom was perfect. Each fall, a fresh coat of glossy fire engine red was reapplied on the outside inviting good chi. My pride and joy was the brilliant flower bed which brought life and color to the shadowed area. Yes, I would miss the plants I had planted the previous springs.

  I had to get going because I hated being late. I had just finished the last swig of coffee and my cup was hovering over the soap when the phone rang, ripping through the silence of the kitchen.

  Cillian my Adjunct teaching partner’s name was displayed on the caller ID.

  “Hey, Cillian, what’s up?” I answered the phone a little too chipper.

  “Thought I would check on you. You okay?” Was he a mind reader?

  “Crazy night with Eloise and I’m getting ready to leave now. I should see you in class ready to teach in about an hour,” I said.

  “I’ve got an apple strudel muffin with your name on it.” I could tell he was smiling, by the way his voice filtered through the phone.

  “Guard it with your life,” I said hoping my stomach would accept it in an hour.

  “Will do,” he returned.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was ready to leave. Still no call from Jude. I made an appointment before class to speak to Dean Buchanan. I had to give him a heads-up the journal article was in jeopardy and might not be written. He spoke about the article with great pride at the last faculty meeting so this would not be a welcomed announcement.

  I glanced toward the lake and noticed three large menacing black birds sitting on the dock. They sat stone still. Watching. Challenging me. I armed the house alarm and hit the key fob to open my car door. As I drove away I checked my mirror and they were gone as if they were never there.

  Cillian

  I LOVED MAINE’S COAST. THE landscape was rugged and one could become mesmerized observing the waves as they crashed against the jagged rocks. In selected areas and in a certain light, one could mistake the sky and landscape for the backdrop of the English romantic painter J.W. Turner known for expressive landscapes and often violent maritime paintings. Only Turner could blend beauty and violence so detailed that you could study his paintings for hours.

  The closer to the sea I drove, the heavier the smell of brine hung in the air.

  Boats bobbed in the water like toys in the thrashing sea as men worked on their boat decks, catching the daily fare. This was life in Maine.

  Today, as I drove along the coastline, I noted the dull yellow and grayish wash that streaked across the sky. The cruel gray sky promised there was a fierce storm brewing. Although it had yet to rain, the atmosphere was such that I could imagine the feel of rain pelting against my skin like little needles. Unlike a warm sunny day where it was easy to get lost in mindless unstructured thoughts, turbulent days such as this helped me focus.

  I valued my job with the FBI Art Crimes Team. The assignments were normally fast-paced and did not require relocation from my D.C. home base very often. This assignment started with my expectation that arrests would be made within a month. Six months later, we were no closer to arrests or dismantling the growing art crime network. So, I remained implanted as adjunct art history professor at the university. I’d been paired with Emma Collier. The target of my unit was Jude White, Emma’s boyfriend.

  Maine had become a comfortable home base, and I’d miss it when I left, but every assignment ends and we were getting close to an end.

  A ring blared from the dashboard jolting me from my autopilot mode of driving. I accepted the call on the steering wheel through Bluetooth as I answered, “O’Reilly.”

  “Morning, Cillian.” It was Thad Matthews, my boss. His tone was the usual terse manner in which he spoke.

  Thad had plucked me from a lucrative but unfulfilling job in the world of art insurance and retrieval. I walked to the beat of my own drum, and in opposition of my father’s career coaching, I majored in art history and criminal justice both undergraduate and at the graduate level. After graduation, I was invited to apply for a job in an insurance fraud company that blended my knowledge of art and skills as a budding criminologist. The part of my job that intrigued me the most was the why and how of theft. I enjoyed the puzzle. Although I would love to say the law was a calling, in truth, one day I just woke up and decided to apply to law school. While still working the insurance job, two years later I finished law school at an accelerated pace. However, I knew I’d never take the path of trial law ever. I ended up adrift and my career indecision took a toll on my marriage. Fate is fickle, or so they say. I was assigned a case working with the FBI. I became acquainted with Thad Matthews while working that case, and at the resolution he extended an offer to join the FBI Art Crimes Team. I accepted and never regretted it.

  My cases until now were straightforward and reflected the axiom that if you followed the money, you always found your target. But this case was like an enigma wrapped in a riddle. There were so many interconnected subplots that suggesting a satisfactory result for everyone was nearly impossible.

  My current case originated involving Jude White as a Department of Homeland Security matter with possible terrorist involvement. The theory was that Jude White produced forged art and Dmitri Roselov, his business partner, sold the art. Through this enterprise, they helped fund terrorism. Dmitri Roselov, a London art dealer with ties to Russia, had been placed under scrutiny by MI5. His game? He laundered money.

  The Brits watched him as he made his way across the ocean to the United States, but he never stepped foot on US soil. Dmitri was much like a spider who began his web with a single thread to form the basis of a structure. Much like the insidious spider, Roselov watched, waited and released a length of his spider web into the wind to see where it would land.

  The tangled web landed in Maine. Jude White latched on and anchored the free end. Together they built the bridge Roselov needed to set up US ties. Thus, through multiple agency cooperation, White became the target of the FBI’s Art Crime Team as well as the Organized Crime Unit for money laundering.

  White had been a small fish in a big pond and wasn’t originally on any federal agency radar. Local law enforcement believed he was involved in the transportation of stolen paintings, but they could never put the stolen property in his hands to make an arrest. The police watched him, but resources could not be dedicated to him. He was too low level. Until Roselov appeared in Maine. Then interest regarding Jude White grew, and now it had grown beyond Maine and reached across the Atlantic Ocean and most recently the Persian Gulf.

  Now, both Roselov and White were in the crosshair of coordinated teams from Homeland, US Customs, and the FBI. As an undercover agent I had built a path leading to him through my job with Emma.

  The British and American governments exchanged information. The facts gathered revealed that Roselov and White’s enterprises had spanned the globe. The commonality that bound them together involved laundering money through art theft and forgery. We believed the end game was to fund terrorist activity, black market organ harvesting, and sex trafficking worldwide.

  I had to figure out how to kill this snake. But how did we go about killing that snake? Was it better to infiltrate the belly of the beast or destroy it from the outside in? That would be the simplest plan, but doing so meant there would be collate
ral damage. Emma was in the collision zone, and with that, she would become collateral damage.

  “Thad, buddy. What’s up?” I asked.

  “Last night, a bank in Boston got a Homeland flag. There was a cyber-attack on the bank that disengaged the safe deposit vault remotely by hacking into their system. By the time the alarm finally engaged, we couldn’t tell if the box Homeland flagged and tagged was compromised,” he advised.

  “Interesting,” I replied. But it wasn’t interesting. Not yet.

  “Yes, it is interesting. The bank manager had the pleasure to speak to none other than our Emma Collier. A box registered in her name landed on a Homeland property list to watch. Agent Sam Thomas with the Organized Crime Unit will keep us in the loop. Right now, cyber is working out the details of how they breached the system. Thomas plans to interview Dr. Collier tomorrow. She said the box isn’t hers. Thus, raising the question that someone may have appropriated her identity to open the box. Justice could take this on, but Maine has concurrent jurisdiction over identity theft crimes. We decided to let them handle the identity theft question for now. Local law enforcement officers Marino and Chavez will meet her tonight to take a report,” Thad replied.

  “So, what’s the story?” I asked confused.

  “Right now, I’m getting bits and pieces. Apparently, the box in question had a lot of activity over the last two years, and then it went dormant for a bit. However, it was last accessed a week ago by Dr. Collier,” he continued. I could hear him shuffling papers in the background.

  “So, what did Emma say about this when they contacted her?” She hadn’t mentioned it.

  “When the manager called Dr. Collier to arrange for her to verify the contents, she said it wasn’t hers. She said she never had and had no use for a safe deposit box. Short of dropping the F-bomb, I think it was clear she disavowed the box. In no uncertain terms.” Thad chuckled. “Got a little testy with the bank manager from what I was told.”