The Case Of The Cupid Caper

Preview

Dreams aren’t real, or at least that was what I’d been trying to tell myself for the past few weeks as the dreams that had been occupying my nights began to seem very real. I supposed the dreams had actually begun this past December after my dad had been in town, but they’d increased in velocity and intensity over the course of the past few weeks to the point where I wondered if it was even safe to go to bed.

“Tess, wake up.”

I could feel someone pulling me forward. Not knowing who’d grabbed me in the dark, I fought to get away. Strong arms held me down as I struggled to free myself from my unseen captor.

“Tess, it’s Tony. Wake up, sweetheart.”

I felt a weight on my body that pinned me to the mattress until my urge to fight began to dissipate. I opened my eyes. “Tony?”

“It’s okay.” My boyfriend, Tony Marconi, said as he reached over and turned the bedside light on. “You were having another dream.”

I took several deep breaths and then nodded as I waited for my tears to cease, and my heart rate to slow. While the dreams had become more frequent as of late, they were always the same. I was a little girl, sleeping in my childhood room. My father would come into the room to tuck me in, although, in reality, it had always been my mother who’d performed this chore. I’d feel safe and warm and oh so happy in my dreams, but then as quickly as he’d entered my dreams, my father would be pulled from my arms. I’d reach for him, but just as my fingers were about to touch his arm, he’d burst into flames and perish in the raging inferno.

I supposed having the dreams was understandable. For years, I’d believed my dad, Grant Thomas, a truck driver, had died in a fiery crash. When the incident first occurred, I’d had dreams similar to the dreams I was having now, but over time, the pain and fear had faded, and the dreams became nothing but a memory. Of course, looking back, the fact that Tony and I found ourselves smack dab in the middle of something neither of us understood was probably the outcome of a series of events that had been set into place years earlier.

My dad died when I was twelve. When I was fifteen, I was nosing around in the attic of the house my brother, Mike, and I lived in with our mother and found a letter I believed to be encrypted. That letter had been stashed in a book that had been stored with some items my dad had tucked away before he died. Believing the letter could somehow provide an answer to the questions I’d been dealing with since his death, I decided to try to break the code. After dozens of failed attempts, I realized I had no choice but to enlist Tony’s help. As it turned out, the letter hadn’t been encrypted at all, but our search had led us to uncover some anomalies in my father’s death, which is what I’d suspected all along. We decided to keep our search to ourselves as we continued to dig. It took thirteen years, but eventually, Tony found a photo of my dad that had been taken three years after his reported death. That photo seemed to prove what I’d instinctively known. My dad hadn’t died in a fiery crash as I’d been told but was very much alive.

Once we found that first photo, Tony and I continued to dig. We found additional photos and proof that my dad was alive and kicking. He was no longer using the name Grant Thomas, and we found evidence that he hadn’t used that name before meeting and marrying my mother. This caused me to question the real identity and job description of a man who seemed to be so much more than just my father.

As time went by, additional clues began to pile up. The more we learned, the bigger the threat we seemed to pose, and eventually, unidentified men started coming around to warn us away. Of course, that only made me want to find the answers we sought even more desperately than I had in the beginning, which led to my first face-to-face meeting with my father more than a year after Tony had found that first photo. The meeting had been brief. Mike had been in the hospital, and my dad had shown up outside the building to check on Mike’s status and to warn me to give up my search for the answers I sought. He’d told me that there were men who were piggybacking on Tony’s search who wanted him dead and posed a threat not just to him, but to Mike, my mom, and me as well.

After that sixty-second encounter at the hospital, I did as he asked and stopped looking for answers. At least for a while. Then this past Christmas, two years after Tony had found the original photo of my dad alive, Star Moonwalker, a woman, who at the time, I believed to be my half-sister, wandered into my life. As it turned out, Star and I weren’t related, but it had been my father who’d been traveling with her mother when she was born, and it had been my father who’d dropped her off at a church after her mother had been shot and killed days after her birth. As odd as the whole thing sounds, things got even odder the more we dug.

While Star Moonwalker might not have been my half-sister, we were connected. It turned out that the reason my father had been traveling with her mother was because he’d been helping her escape from a billionaire named Layton Henderson. According to what we’d uncovered, Star’s mother, Ivana Kowalski, had worked for Layton Henderson for several years before becoming pregnant with Star. About eight months before she became pregnant and ran away, she was transferred from her job in his import/export business to his facility in Hungary, which presently deals with artificial intelligence, but at that time, dealt with the manipulation of human intelligence utilizing a variety of methods. We knew that Ivana became pregnant and left the facility, and assumed she’d left without permission. She came to the United States using the alias Polly Davis. Once in the country, she traveled with my father, who, interestingly, had been Henderson’s head of security before running off with Ivana.

A lot had happened since the time Ivana had run away from Henderson, but at this point, both Ivana and her daughter were dead.

After we discovered the background relating to the woman who seemed to have been connected to whatever was going on with my father, Tony and I widened the parameters of our search. Eventually, Tony received an email containing the name Darwin Norlander. As it turned out, Darwin Norlander had been an associate of Layton Henderson until eight months before the email had been sent, at which time the two had gone their separate ways. We began to suspect that Norlander might have been the man behind Star’s death but needed proof. I supposed, based on the way things worked out, we’d never get that proof, but given the fact that Norlander was looking for my father and would most likely have killed Tony if given the chance, Mike, Tony, and I all felt that Norlander was the killer we’d been looking for.

Our research eventually led to a showdown at Tony’s home just before Christmas. Norlander had shown up at his house, needing Tony’s help finding my father. I’m sure once Tony did as was asked of him, Norlander planned to kill him, but my dad showed up at the eleventh hour and saved the day. Of course, as soon as Norlander was good and dead, my dad disappeared, and the dreams I’d been having started showing up almost every night. At this point, I didn’t know where my dad was or how his activities from the past might continue to affect us, but based on the dreams that seemed to serve as some sort of a warning, I doubted whatever was destined to happen, had completely played itself out.

“Can I get you some water?” Tony asked, still holding me tightly.

I shook my head. “I’ll get it. I think I’m just going to get up.” I glanced at the clock, which read four twenty-two. “I doubt I’ll get back to sleep anyway.”

“I’ll get up with you,” he offered. “We can curl up on the sofa in front of the fire and wait for the sun to make its way over the horizon.”

“You don’t have to get up with me. You had a long day yesterday, and we’re going to have a long day today. You’ll be exhausted if you don’t go back to sleep.”

“I want to get up with you. I’ll make us some coffee, and once we wake up a bit, I’ll rustle up something for breakfast.”

I appreciated the fact that Tony always got up with me when the nightmare returned, which had been happening more and more frequently as of late. The interruptions to my sleep pattern had been taking a toll on me, and I knew Tony was worried about my overall health.

“I feel like these dreams have a purpose,” I said to Tony after he handed me a cup of freshly brewed coffee. My cats, Tang and Tinder, curled up on the sofa with Tony and me, while my dog, Tilly, and his dog, Titan, curled up in front of the fire and went back to sleep.

“What sort of purpose?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve considered the fact that my subconscious mind knows something important that my conscious mind has blocked. I suppose the dreams could be my subconscious needling me to pay attention to something I otherwise might not have.” I took a sip of the coffee before I continued. “Another explanation is that I’ve developed psychic powers in the past few months, and I’m channeling something which has already happened or will happen in the future.”

“I’m not sure that you’ve developed psychic powers in the past few months, but I do think the whole thing we went through at Christmas with Star and your father might have left a deep impression you haven’t fully dealt with yet. Maybe the dreams are simply your way of figuring everything out.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps. It does seem like things have grown increasingly complicated since we found the first photo of my father.” I laid my head on Tony’s shoulder. “To be honest, I feel like we’ve only exposed the tip of the iceberg. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s like I know somewhere deep inside that something truly horrific is going to happen, and when it does, I’m going to realize I should have seen it coming. When this horrible thing happens, I’ll realize that if I had seen it coming, I would have been able to stop it from happening.”

“It sounds like you are taking on a level of responsibility that perhaps is not yours to bear.”

I turned my head and glanced at Tony. “Isn’t it? I feel like, in some cosmic way, everything that has happened since we found the first photo is my fault. I know that Star hired a detective and went looking for answers to her past independent of my searching for answers to my past, and logically nothing I did or didn’t do would have changed the outcome of that situation. Still, I can’t help but feel at least partially responsible for what happened. I know it isn’t logical to feel this way, but none the less, it’s how I feel.”

“I can see that you are becoming even more stressed than you were when you first woke from the dream. Maybe we should talk about something else for a while,” Tony suggested.

“That would be nice, but I’m much too distracted to think about anything else right now. I can’t help but wonder if my dad is still alive. I know he was here in December, and that he was alive and well then, but he had very bad men after him, and we haven’t heard a word from him since. I really thought after everything that happened, we would hear from him. The fact that we haven’t has me terrified.”

“I’ve heard from him,” Tony said.

I raised my head off his shoulder. “You’ve heard from him? What do you mean you’ve heard from him? Have you been keeping things from me?”

He nodded his head slightly. “I wanted to tell you that he’d contacted me, but he asked me not to. He convinced me that telling you would put you in danger.”

“Telling me what?” I demanded. “I am right here in the middle of this. I have the right to know what is going on.”

Tony flinched. “I don’t disagree. It’s just that…”

“Just that what?” I screeched. I supposed that the sleep deprivation I’d been experiencing might have led to a slight overreaction, but my emotions were high and my need to express myself strong. “What possible reason could you have for keeping this from me? You know I’ve been having the nightmares. You know how worried I’ve been.”

“I do know, which I guess is why I decided to keep things to myself until I could look into them further.”

“I don’t need you to protect me. I need you to include me. I need you to be honest with me.”

Tony took a deep breath. He hugged me tighter as if he feared I’d flutter away. “I know. I’m sorry. I should have told you what was going on.”

“So, tell me now.”

He let out a long breath and then began to speak in a voice riddled with hesitation. “A few weeks ago, I received an encrypted email from an unknown server to an account I own that is totally secret and has only been used for a single purpose a long time ago. I knew right away that the email had to be from your father since no one else in my life has the skill required to get into this particular account. I responded to the short message, and we began a dialogue, which led to him ask me for a favor.”

“Favor? What kind of a favor?”

“He wants me to track down three people, all women.”

“Women?”

“Apparently, Star wasn’t the only baby produced by Henderson and his human engineering team back in the nineteen eighties. According to your father, Ivana Kowalski wasn’t the only mother he helped escape.”

“So, he’s looking for the other children?”

Tony nodded. “He’s looking for the other mothers who escaped, but most likely the other children as well. Although, these children are no longer children, and are in fact, all over forty by this point. He wants me to track down these individuals and then inform him of their whereabouts.”

I couldn’t help but frown. “My father seems to be very capable. Why doesn’t he simply track them down himself?”

“He told me he’s hesitant to search for these women on his own since he is being watched. The last thing he wants to do is inadvertently lead Henderson to these individuals.”

I slowly shook my head. “No. This feels wrong. You haven’t found any of these women have you?”

“Not yet,” Tony admitted. “Your dad didn’t give me much to go on. In fact, he gave me almost nothing to go on. But I have been doing some digging.”

“What if the email isn’t from my dad? What if it’s from someone associated with Layton Henderson who wants to harm these individuals and is using you to find them?”

Tony pulled away just a bit. “I did consider that, but it seemed as if this individual knew things only your dad would know. I really think the emails are from him.”

“No. He wouldn’t ask for help. My dad never asks for help, even when he clearly needs it. Besides, if the emails really are from my dad, why exclude me?”

“I told you. He wants to keep you safe. I want to keep you safe.”

I got up from my place on the sofa and began to pace around the room. “I don’t think that is what’s going on. I think the person behind the emails told you not to involve me because he or she knows that I would know stuff about my dad that you wouldn’t know. Things he should know that I could use as a test to prove his identity.”

Tony’s brow furrowed in thought. “You think that is what’s going on?”

I nodded. “I do. Let’s test that theory. Email the person and ask him something only Grant Thomas would know.”

“Okay. Like what?” Tony asked.

I paused to consider this. I needed to come up with something that only my dad and I would know. Something even Mike or my mom didn’t know. Something even the best hacker couldn’t find on the web. I also wanted to have Tony ask a question that wouldn’t tip the person on the other end of the emails off that we were onto them. If we could prove the person who approached Tony was not my father, we might still be able to use this contact with this person to gather information for our own use.

“Email the man and tell him that you are going to send him an encrypted file. Tell him that the password to that file is the name of the sick puppy in the story he made up to help me feel better the summer I got the chickenpox when my mom was out of town visiting her family.”

“Do you think he would remember a detail like that?” Tony asked.

“He’ll remember. If he says he doesn’t, then the man you’re corresponding with is not my father, if he says okay, we’ll send him an encrypted file that simply lets him know we decided to conduct our own test. If the person behind the email is my dad, he’ll appreciate that. If it isn’t my dad, at least we’ll know before we provide information to him that we wouldn’t want anyone other than Grant Thomas to have.”