Veil of Civility

Chapter Forty-Three

"It's Allan Ayers, Senator," a voice said, David Kemiss having removed his cell phone from his jacket pocket and answered a call. "I've found it."

Kemiss smiled. You could always rely on a bureaucrat to be spineless. It was in their nature and Allan Ayers was no different. Thirty-six hours after his threat to fire the man, Ayers had been back on board and had been helping Castellano locate McIver's cabin. "Where is he?"

"I centered my search on areas within a hundred miles of Roanoke and I paid special attention to the areas northwest of Roanoke since that's the direction McIver was last heading when his wife was known to be with him—"

"I didn't ask where you centered your search, Allan. I asked where he is."

"Greenbrier County, West Virginia, sir, near a small reservoir known as Lake Sherwood."

"You're sure?"

Ayers was silent for a moment. "As sure as I can be without actually seeing McIver there. The property's registered owner is a corporation out of the Grand Cayman Islands called Kirkgrim Incorporated. I've run the company name through every search engine and program I can think of and the only thing it seems to be associated with is this property. There's no tax returns, no website, nothing. It's just a holding company with one property, which is pretty unusual, especially in as remote a location as this Lake Sherwood."

Kemiss took a seat at his desk and drummed his fingers on the smoothly polished mahogany as he thought things through. McIver had disappeared twice now, so it certainly made sense that he was hiding somewhere nearby his home in Roanoke. Kemiss was familiar with Greenbrier County. It was the home of one of the finest resorts on the east coast of the United States. He had spent many weekends there and the surrounding area was definitely remote enough to make a good hideout. That being the case though, the resort attracted many high profile guests and the cabin could easily be a getaway for someone entirely different, someone who had a legitimate reason for hiding their ownership of the property and who just enjoyed living off the grid for a few days here and there.

"There's one other thing that makes me a little more sure it's his," Ayers continued. "The name Kirkgrim, it's an Irish folk legend about a ghostly dog that protects graveyards, sir."

"Then it's him. It has to be. Make me a file with all the pertinent information on this place and forward it to my email," Kemiss said, deciding that whoever owned the cabin would just have to forgive him if he was wrong. "I'll handle it from here. Call me the minute you find anything else."

He closed the cell phone and returned it to his pocket. Who should he call now? If he called Kreft, then it was a certainty that whoever was at the cabin would be slaughtered, and if it wasn't the McIvers then that could cause even more trouble than they currently had. But if he called Robert Evers and had a team of federal agents raid the place, there was a chance the McIvers could be taken alive, and that was problematic as well. He picked up the receiver of the SCIP-enabled phone on his desk and allowed his finger to hover over the dial pad for a moment as he considered his options. Making a decision, he dialed a number and waited. "It's Kemiss," he said when the line was answered. "I think we've found him."