Off the Grid by Robert McCaw

Author:Robert McCaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

KOA’S DAY BEGAN with a call from a police officer assigned to check on the Campbell property. Someone had broken into the old house and ransacked it. They’d reportedly done a thorough job, dumping every drawer and searching even the tiniest spaces. The extent of the damage suggested that the searchers had not found what they sought, but Koa sent the crime-scene team back to determine what, if anything, was missing.

Everything about the Campbell murders gnawed at Koa, but nothing haunted him more than the mystery of identity. Elian Cervara had become Arthur Campbell. But Elian Cervara had been unwilling, or more likely unable, to discuss his family with Raul Oshoa. Elian Cervara had purported to come from a Catalan family living in Cuba but spoke Caribbean Spanish. And he’d spoken Russian or some Slavic language to Gwendolyn during their car ride with Howie. Koa wanted to know this mysterious man. What he’d done. What secrets he’d harbored and what he’d fled when he’d come to live as a recluse in Volcano Village.

Piki had entered the couple’s fingerprints into the FBI’s IAFIS system. The CIA spook Alderson had come storming into Koa’s office about Gwendolyn’s fingerprints, but Koa had heard nothing about Arthur’s prints. He called Piki, who reported no known record on either of them.

Given Gwendolyn’s CIA background, Koa wasn’t surprised that her prints weren’t in an accessible database, but that didn’t explain the absence of a report on Arthur. The military fingerprinted everybody, including Special Forces soldiers. As a Delta Force guy, the military had undoubtedly classified his fingerprints, but Arthur had been living in Volcano, and therefore out of Delta Force, for well over a decade. Koa couldn’t understand why his fingerprints would still be protected.

He felt sure the chameleon behind the Elian and Arthur aliases had harbored secrets, mysteries anchored in his life before his land purchases from Raul Oshoa. Those secrets had to come from his military service—they were most likely Delta Force secrets. The wily lizard had reduced his secrets to some tangible, but cleverly hidden, form. Caught and tortured, this human reptile had kept his secrets to himself. Now someone, most likely his killers, searched for Arthur’s hiding place.

He tried to put himself in Arthur’s shoes as he thought of the possible hiding places: Liechtenstein, the Cayman Islands, Hawai‘i. In Koa’s experience, people kept their treasures close. If nearby, but not in the house, maybe the secret lay hidden in the forest. And, if Arthur had arranged the purchase of two adjacent parcels in separate trusts in different offshore countries, the twin purchases must have been intended to conceal Arthur’s relationship with the rear acreage.

So if the chameleon were clever, he would have hidden his secrets on the 240-acre parcel, land not legally linked to him or to his home. The house property served as a gateway to the rear property, and the camera system guarded the back acreage, allowing the chameleon to watch for trespassers. Koa guessed that Arthur had buried his stolen treasures somewhere deep in the forest.

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