Brotherly Love

Prologue

Section 1: At Home in Naples, Florida

Section 2: Taking It on the Road

Section 3: Seth Settles in Seattle

Section 4: Blood Spills and Cream Rises

Section 5: Lost and Found and Lost Forever

Epilogue

Prologue

Billy Donavan turned to face the man pointing the gun at him. The late afternoon sun, low in the sky behind his captor, only added to Billy’s confusion. Was the otherworldly aura surrounding the gunman the result of the sun’s backlighting, or was this Billy’s first glimpse of the afterlife? An eye-blink later and Billy’s confusion had passed; he knew he was a trigger-pull shy of being shot.

This afternoon’s escape through the backcountry had left Billy scraped and bruised. He was clearly in pain, but his suffering was more complicated than the sting of abraded skin and the pain of bruised limbs. His suffering originated deep inside a broken psyche.

Billy was as surprised as anyone at the violence that seemed to result from his noble intentions. From his perspective, he had been executing a well reasoned plan, one that would bring financial reward and, more importantly, the paternal recognition that was so important to him.

For Billy, the killings had seemed like watching the unexpected scenes of an original movie unfold. He was convinced that a body double, a stand-in, was acting for him; the carnage, so necessary, was all being done in the third person. Billy was certain that he wasn’t evil, the killings, carried out as he suspected by an evil stand-in, should have left him blameless.

Billy wasn’t frightened at the prospect of being shot and left for dead on the forest floor. He could imagine the dappled sunlight blanketing his lifeless body, allowing him the peace he would never know in life. Instead, what bothered Billy most about his present predicament was being judged by another, measured against someone else’s moral code. Adding to his disappointment, his captor was also his co-conspirator, his partner, who had always been his protector.

The sun’s rays reflecting off the pistol’s chromed barrel, the taut tendons of the gunman’s finger exerting an increasing pressure on the trigger; Billy knew that his end was near. It shouldn’t end this way, he thought, we were so close. And then the blinding light, a final joyous millisecond of freedom from his madness, and no more.

Section 1: At Home in Naples, Florida

Chapter One: Home is where the Hat is

Man do I hate business travel. Seth Hunter grumbled, as if his was a unique dislike.

For the past three days, Seth had been in Miami, across the state from his home in Naples, on Florida’s other coast, the Atlantic, attending an international conference on eco-terrorism. As an invited presenter at the conference, Seth had given an overview of his current ecological research. The Environmental Protection Agency, the project’s sponsor, had taken a last minute stand on how much of Seth’s research could be presented to the conference attendees. This in no small way had diminished Seth’s joy at sharing his research findings with his research colleagues.

Those guys over-classify everything. How am I supposed to pass my findings to others in my profession; semaphore, pig Latin? It’s not like I am the keeper of state secrets! The fate of the free world really doesn’t hinge on my research findings.

The EPA obviously didn’t see it the same way. Sam Waterhouse, an EPA project manager, had told Seth that the expected findings, as outlined in the project proposal, would have national security implications and therefore that information must be kept confidential.

I bet Sam never even read the draft findings I sent to him. Seth was still unable to let go of his latest brush with bureaucracy. Despite his pleading, the confidential classification had stuck.

Seth’s paper, The Impact of the Catastrophic Release of Crude Oil on the Coastal Ecologies and Economies had drawn a sizable crowd of interested listeners. The size and encouragement of the audience had made it even more difficult for Seth, feeling the actor’s adrenalin rush of the moment, to keep in compliance with the EPA’s security concerns.

The presentation could have gone worse, given the gag order that they put on me. Apparently even a broad brush description was interesting to the audience, Seth said to himself, in typical self-deprecating fashion; unable to fully acknowledge the unqualified acceptance of his presentation.

National security interests had been the central theme of the conference. It appeared as though the conference organizers had purposely chosen, through the selection of presenters and materials, to create an atmosphere of questioned allegiance, a ‘whose side are you really on’ a ‘spy-versus-spy’ feel to the event. By the final day, all the conference attendees were showing the strain of their heightened security awareness.

The central point, driven home countless times over the three day period, was that the eco-terrorist threat potential was real and should be taken seriously. Scientists who were working on environmental research had to be aware that the information that they produced could be used by others with destructive aims. Seth rarely chose to view the world from the perspective of the dark side of human behavior. His perpetual optimism was his strong suit, but it didn’t take a Ph.D. to understand that his computer simulations detailing the environmental and economic impact of an offshore oil platform release could be useful information for eco-terrorists targeting our energy resources. Until the last few days though, ecological research and terrorism had seemed like such improbable bedfellows.

Fourteen years in the business, ten of those years of contracting with the EPA; Seth had made a good living addressing the environmental problems that were important to him. Everyone knew that he was an exceptional marine ecologist. His was the science of discovery, but not ivory towered. His science kept Seth firmly rooted in the very real coastal ecologies.

But marine ecological research was not Seth’s only gift. He was also a superb information scientist. It was his view that the world in which we live could best be characterized as a series of structured problems to be solved by the effective filtering of available information. Seth knew how to initially structure the problem and then adaptively seek out the necessary information and weed out the unnecessary, connecting loosely related stores of information in a way that uniquely solved the problem at hand. At this Seth had few equals.

But Seth didn’t reserve his unique problem solving skills for workday use only. He saw them as an everyday tool. Even simple everyday problems like deciding what to order from a restaurant’s menu were put through his analytical machinery. His overly geekish approach to everyday decisions, menu selection for example, had not been a plus for his dating life. By date’s end, Seth had too often heard the words anal retentive and control freak directed at him. He was painfully aware of the down side of his gifts on his poor excuse for a social life.

Seth Hunter knew he was a nerd, but he still thought of himself as fully functional. His beach-boy good looks, on first meeting, diverted attention from his basic egghead nature. His scientific self had overtaken his laid-back surfer-dude persona somewhere in Seth’s late twenties. Seth Hunter was no longer the devil-may-care youth that he had once been, but he still managed to address his adult demands with a boyish charm. Sun-tanned and athletic looking at thirty-eight, Seth showed a minimum of world-weary wear and tear.

Seth was on the last few miles of the hypnotic road homeward. He unconsciously ran his free hand through his just noticeably thinning, sandy-brown hair. Momentarily taking his eyes off the road, he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. His normally smiling, happy-go-lucky visage was now creased with frown lines. More accurately worry lines, Seth corrected his self-assessment. A side effect of the eco-terrorism conference was that Seth’s current level of threat awareness was near paranoiac.

It’s not like Seth had been living in a vacuum. He’d heard the news reports, and lately it seemed, nearly hourly updates, concerning the terrorist threat, but he had always assumed that the targets of the terrorists were human, or organizational—not environmental. The environmental attacks would be aimed at the short and long-term disruption of our land’s abundance, the purity of the water, land, and air. Ultimately the effects of the environmental attacks would propagate up the food chain, impacting, at the least, the quality of human life, conceivably even taking human lives.

They’d ruin the Keys, poison the Gulf, they’d screw it up for everyone. No gain—financial, philosophical, anything—is that important! Seth fumed. But after what he had heard at the conference today, he knew that there was a dark side; and those on that side did not agree with Seth’s environmental priorities.

Seth pointed his Ford Explorer north onto US 41, the highway that ran parallel to the Gulf Coast beaches now visible out of his driver’s side window. As he crossed a bridge over one of the many backwater inlets in the area, Seth looked to his left, where he had an unobstructed view stretching out into the Gulf waters. A dolphin leapt from the water, a regular occurrence here, its sleek body silhouetted against the setting sun. I can’t let that go away, Seth said, adding a few more worry lines to his already furrowed brow, as if a measure of his resolve.

Seth turned left off the beach road and into his driveway and pulled the SUV under the carport. His house, a single story of faux-Spanish motif, drew most of its character from the plant-covered stucco wall that bordered the front of the property. The six-foot-tall wall was broken at its approximate mid-point by an arched stucco and tile front entryway. A colorful mosaic of a beach scene crowned the apex of the entryway. A wrought-iron gate, with stepping stone path beyond, allowed entrance to the lush, tropical courtyard just inside the walled property. A terracotta-tile roof provided the only other notable Spanish accent. The house was bordered on the right by Seth’s driveway and carport.

The house itself was otherwise of typical beach house construction. Houses, in this price range in the tropics, all came with thin exterior walls of stucco, and all had reasonably boxlike floor plans. The reason that Seth had bought this property was not for the basic house design, which served his bachelor needs well enough; it was for the lot that it was situated on. The simply inspirational view of the sun setting over the Gulf of Mexico was the major factor in his decision to buy the property. But what sealed the deal were the Gulf waves that lapped the shore only 100 feet from his back door. At the end of the day he could come here to relax, drink his frozen Margaritas, and watch the dolphins play. It was as close to paradise as he could get on his salary, and the bonus was that this vacation dream was available to him every day.

Seth locked his car door behind him and absent-mindedly walked from the driveway to the house’s back door entrance. As he approached the sliding back door, his gut told him something was wrong. His instincts, not normally his strongest suit, were screaming at him. The open screen to the sliding glass door at the rear of his house was not as he had left it. Seth Hunter, fastidious to a fault, distinctly remembered sliding the screen door closed behind him when he left three days ago for the conference in Miami. Dropping the overnighter that he had just removed from the SUV, still cooling in the driveway, he used his free hand to open the buckled flap on his laptop carrier and removed his house keys from the Velcro-flapped pocket inside. He inserted the key into the locked sliding glass door and let himself into his house.

Is anybody here? Seth asked in a loud voice, more intended to give any uninvited house guests warning of his arrival, than to pose the actual question. After allowing suitable time for either a socially acceptable answer like, Aunt Hattie here, we just had to escape those dreadful New York city throngs; you don’t mind do you?, or, alternatively, to hear the noisy departure of the seriously uninvited, Seth stepped inside the house and into his kitchen. The thought that anyone actually criminally trespassing might take a dangerously more aggressive stand had never entered Seth’s mind.

Seth looked around for other telltales that might indicate that someone had entered his humble abode, and finding no signs of such, moved through the kitchen into the dining room, where he dropped his overnighter on the floor and deposited his laptop carrier on the IKEA work table that was the centerpiece of his sparsely outfitted home office. He removed his laptop and related contents from the carrier and plugged the power supply adapter, printer cable, wireless router and external hard drive back into their sockets. He then booted up the laptop, waited the requisite time and, reflexively checked his email. Several messages were in queue. After a few seconds of indecision, Seth determined to postpone dealing with the outside world.

Looks like all is well … still, Seth said, speaking to the four walls, and now for a little well-deserved refreshment. Seth had become quite accustomed to talking to himself, making public his internal dialog, a habit derived, in part, from his absent-minded professor persona and partly from his live-alone, single male lifestyle.

Seth moved with practiced efficiency to, in rapid succession, the pantry shelf serving as his liquor cabinet, where he removed a well-sampled half gallon bottle of Tequila and a mixing glass; to the refrigerator, where he collected the Cuervo Margarita mix; up to the freezer where he scooped out a mixing glass full of cubed ice; to the kitchen counter top that served as his bar, where he added all the ingredients (the exact proportions determined over a prolonged period of ‘testing’) to his nearly new, stainless steel consumer remake of an industrial strength blender. A few whirrings of the blender later and Seth headed back out the sliding back door, to the once brightly-colored, but long since faded, fabric and aluminum chaise lounge, with its cup holder built-into the arm rest. The chaise was as he had left it, perfectly positioned for soaking up the late day sun, now setting over the Gulf of Mexico.

Seth, intent on giving closure to his three day trip to Florida’s east coast, and even more focused on treating himself to some well-deserved, rehydrating refreshment after such a parching road trip, deferred inspecting his entire house for intruders. Instead, he preferred to believe that his initial shouted queries and noisy libation preparations would have driven off any sensible sneak thief. Seth, in the moment, chose to believe that the open screen door was the act of an errant paperboy, a meter reader run amuck, any explanation that could be easily dismissed and not delay his well-deserved relaxation. That negligence, a last minute loss of focus, would cost Seth.

It had become very close to ritual, Seth’s post-work Margaritas with accompanying backyard shuffle down to the Gulf waters. Seth could sit back in his tattered beach furniture, here, just beyond his house’s modest deck. He could bury his feet in the cool sand and idly speculate. ‘Idle speculation’ was Seth’s code word for his mental state of focusing on nothing in particular; of clearing the mind, in order to let it direct itself. This was not to be confused with daydreaming. Seth will not allow his tightly wound self that slacker’s diversion. Or at least I won’t label myself a slacker, Seth said, smiling, amused at the self-improvement available in a simple label change.

The after-work drink at the Gulf’s edge may have been Seth’s typical workday wind-down, but today has been anything but a typical workday. In his mind, he replayed the various agencies’ warnings about the very likely attack of eco-terrorists. The possible targets identified at the conference included the offshore oil reserves, drinking water supplies, the everglades habitat, and others. With recalibrated hindsight he was now beginning to second-guess his cavalier dismissal of the possibility that the open screen door to his house may have more meaning than a paperboy’s poor delivery skills. Seth’s slow to rise to vigilance was however, being rapidly overtaken by the lethargic effects of fatigue and alcohol.

Someone wanted something that Seth’s arrival would bring. From their location inside the house they’d watched Seth pull into the carport, they’d listened to him set up his computer, mix his Margaritas. And now the two of them, their weapons at the ready, hiding in the double closet in Seth’s spare bedroom, could begin their intended work: stealing files from Seth’s computer. The man who had engaged the services of these computer-savvy, street criminals’ would receive the pilfered files and pay them for their efforts, but these two had been in the ‘business’ for a while and they suspected that their employer was working for another.

Having heard the sliding back door open and shut and after a few minutes of hearing no sounds hinting at occupant activity within the house, the two dared to venture beyond the confines of the closet.

It was my good luck to bump into that guy at the bar, the big man whispered to his smaller companion. Hit it off right from the start, but never expected work out of it. Still, he had no fucking idea when this guy here would be home. He said I wouldn’t have anything to worry about until tomorrow morning. Hell, if Margarita man out there hadn’t shown up, I couldn’t even have gotten the files. This guy only has a laptop; he doesn’t even own a desktop machine. All the files that he wanted me to get are on his laptop and that wasn’t here until 30 minutes ago, said the big man, commenting on the amateurish execution of this crime plan. Well, no harm, no foul. Let’s just get those files. speaking to the other. They walked quietly into the dining room and Seth’s open, booted laptop.

The warmth of the setting sun and the hefty dose of alcohol in his oversized Margarita caused Seth’s eyes to slowly shut, as three days of postponed adequate sleep closed in. Reclining in his lounge chair, Seth looks down the length of his private dock. The dock was rickety, but still standing, all the way to its far end fifty feet from the shore. In his dreamlike, near-sleep state, Seth imagined that he saw two men attempting to board his sport-fishing boat that was tied up at the end of his dock. Seth’s mind, seeded with the conference warnings, visualized swarthy, middle-eastern looking men, their heads wrapped in turbans and clothed in flowing white robes.

Seth’s rational mind, rapidly shutting down, sluggishly struggled to make sense of what it thought it was seeing. Is this yet another example of my overly-active imagination? Seth wondered. He already knew that he would register ‘highly suggestible’ on any hypnotherapist’s score card. Seth’s mind was struggling to hold onto these conscious thoughts, as his eyes continued to close, the eyes’ supporting muscles increasingly relaxed. He wasn’t feeling threatened by the intruders that he had visualized; instead, he felt mildly entertained by what he assumed to be the vivid creations of his own imagination. He was quite prepared to repel boarders as he drifted off into his swashbuckling dreamland, under the waylaying influence of his liberally splashed tequila drink.

Chapter Two: Reporting a Crime

Seth awoke suddenly. His eyes were wide open, but his brain seemed to be in slow motion, as he tried to make sense of his situation. The sun has set and, from the itchy lumps on his arms and legs, he guessed that he has provided sustenance for the local mosquito population for at least several hours. Note to self, Seth mumbled, only two ounces of tequila at a time, unless, of course, a knockout is the desired effect. He struggled to get up from the beach chair and head back into the house. All the lights were off in the house and yard on this clear but moonless night; just as he had left them. Still barefoot, carrying his sandals, Seth weaved his way from the beach to his house, negotiated the two steps up to his deck and, with his eyes still adjusting to the darkness, nearly walked into the sliding glass door. Seth stood on the deck feeling for the sliding door’s handle, his night vision improving with each passing second as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Seth’s fingers had closed around the slider handle and he was about to pull the door open when he heard voices coming from inside his house. He released his grip on the door handle and instinctively placed his hand over his brow, shielding his eyes from any interfering reflections. He was peering through the glass of the back door, straining to see any activity inside, when he realized that in his single-minded focus on listening to the voices of the intruders he had neglected a most obvious survival rule. That survival rule, contextually stated: Never stand in front of a glass door looking into a darkened room unless it is your intention to provide a conveniently silhouetted target for anyone with criminal intent, who just may be looking out that glass door. Seth immediately leapt, kangaroo-like, sideways.

Not the most life-prolonging thing I have done recently, Seth assessed his most recent faux pas. He quickly ducked out of view around the corner of his house and was mentally taking account of his situation when he realized that, true to nerd form, he still had his cell phone on his belt. His first thought was to call 911. After pushing in the initial number 9 on the lighted cell phone keypad, he unexpectedly hit the end call button. The Hardy Boy in him had awoken.

Seth heard the voices of what sounded like several people talking inside his house. He listened more closely and was sure that he heard two distinct voices and speech phrasings. The intruders were talking quietly. Seth was quite certain that one of the voices was Hispanic, probably Cuban. Identifying a speaker’s geographic background from his or her speech inflection was something that, given a reasonable speech sample, Seth was quite good at. The second speaker was even more soft-spoken than the first, but Seth was sure that he detected a Southwestern drawl. If the speaker would just raise his voice, Seth knew that he might be able to identify an even more specific locale behind the accent.

I wonder what would happen if I surprised them by dialing my own land-line phone number. I’d like to see what the bastards would do then, Seth said, fool-heartedly refusing to be the powerless victim. I’ll just watch how they deal with that, Seth smugly whispered to himself, as he quickly scurried along the side of the house stopping just beneath a window that looked into his dining room where he could cautiously watch the intruders’ activities and still remain hidden from their view. Now that his eyes were nearly adjusted to the dark, Seth would be able to observe the would-be burglars’ reactions to his call; with any luck he might even get a look at their faces. Seth touched the numbers on the keypad, cringing as each of the pressed numbers sounded feedback beeps. The beeps sounded much louder to Seth tonight, under these circumstances, than they did in the office. He waited a few seconds and then peered inside again to reassure himself that the men inside had not heard him dial. They seemed to be preoccupied with something at his work desk in the dining room. He ducked back down beneath the window and hit the talk button on his cell phone and after the first ring raised his head again for a better view into the house. He waited for the intruders to respond in some way to the ringing phone that Seth could now clearly hear coming from inside the house. He saw, to his amazement, the larger of the two figures, whose outline was now clearly visible, pick up the ringing phone.

Hello, boss? an American Southwestern voice drawled into the mouthpiece. The distinctly Southwestern voice of the man who had answered the call validated what Seth had initially heard in the second voice. Seth immediately pressed the end button and got off the phone. He could still hear the voice from inside his house repeating, Hello, who’s there? Boss, is that you? as Seth edged toward the neighbor’s yard and out into the street where he began walking away from his property at a pace that was in direct proportion to his fear, while, at the same time, dialing 911.

Chapter Three: Seth, Meet Sarah

The emergency hotline folks really do respond quickly, Seth thought, as he watched the two police cars arrive in front of his house. At least they had not used their sirens. Seth interpreted the sirens-off, lights-only arrival of the squad cars as a police policy tradeoff. The element of surprise when responding to a breaking and entering call was of obvious value in capturing the perpetrators, but surprise could have a downside: Police officers injured by shots fired by panicked criminals, and on occasion, panicked victims, were not uncommon.

Seth ran up to introduce himself as the homeowner who had called in the emergency. The two police officers, with pistols at the ready, were understandably cautious as they asked Seth to halt and, slowly, to produce some identification to prove that he was, indeed, the owner of the residence. While one of the officers verified Seth’s identity and address from his driver’s license, detaining him outside the house, the other approached the front door and waited there until the verification of Seth’s identity had been completed. The officer at the front door then motioned to the second to head around to the back of the house. If the intruders were still there, the second officer would be in a position to block their exit via the rear door, while the first officer entered through the front.

It was only a minute or so before the second officer, who had moved into position at the back door, yelled an all clear out back into the house. The second officer’s report was delivered in a voice loud enough so that the officer who had entered through the front door would have no difficulty hearing. As Seth watched from the courtyard in the front of his house, the two police officers met in the living room and turned the room lights on. They quickly moved to the central hallway that led to the bedrooms and began a cautious examination of each. The room-to-room search by the officers was helped by the fact that Seth, in typical nerd bachelor fashion, had left many of the rooms unfurnished, using the rooms, as required, for storing books and technical reports, and his one remaining surfboard. Seth, who had been ordered to remain outside the house until told otherwise, was craning his neck to get a better view inside his home. The two officers, having checked out the other rooms in the house, returned to the living room and motioned to Seth, through the living room window, that it was now okay to enter the house. Seth, still standing in the courtyard awaiting the all clear signal, moved cautiously toward the house’s front door.

Seth approached his house slowly, loudly, nervously, announcing his arrival before entering. Immediately he saw that both the officers’ attention was focused on his laptop computer that was sitting where he had left it on his work table. Seth had long ago stopped thinking of this area of the house as the dining room; he had never really used it for dining. In his mind, it was the location of his home office. He had spent many an evening here reviewing biological, chemical, and other analyses of the air, water, soil, flora, and fauna that made up the ecosystems of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Though, looking at his office, in the presence of the two officers, Seth felt even more like the workaholic nerd that he had become. Granted, Seth could find satisfaction in the fact that he was a foot soldier in the fight to keep the resources of this country from being depleted or ruined by what, almost always, was the thoughtless behavior of either individuals or corporations. But that satisfaction didn’t make up for his lack of an after-work social life. It had been months since he had dated. And several years since he had had a relationship that lasted longer than a few dates. As he looked at his open laptop, he heard the officer who had entered the front door verbalize what he had been thinking.

So this is your office away from the office, the officer said. Up to this point Seth had paid no attention to the gender of the two officers. They had arrived in the dark, but now, in the bright light of his living room, Seth noticed that the husky-voiced cop who hadn’t spoken much more than to ask Seth for identification when the patrol had first arrived, was female.

Sarah Kelso, a tall, dark-haired woman, had kept her gender fairly well concealed beneath her loosely fitting cop’s uniform. She had pulled back her long hair and held it in place beneath her hat as well. Seth now noticed that the silhouette of the officer was, unequivocally, that of a woman. Sarah Kelso carried herself with the telltale seriousness of a person whose daily penance is to deal with her fair share of the underside of humanity, but even that could not suppress her basic fun-loving nature, as she waited for a response from Seth to her teasing question about his work habits.

Seth attempted to nonchalantly deliver his, by now, practiced response to his apparent lack of a social life. My career does have its demands, he said, as if this was an explanation for it all, his eyes squinting just a little to read the inscription ‘Officer Sarah Kelso’ on the nameplate over the breast pocket of Sarah’s uniform

Oh, Sarah replied, a man with a mission.

Seth was relieved that the officer seemed to accept his explanation at face value. He really didn’t want this initial meeting to turn into yet another impromptu therapy session. Still, Seth thought that he recognized a certain personal interest from Officer Sarah Kelso, and hoped that her interest in him wasn’t as an oddity. That was something that would require further exploration, but for now his attention was being redirected to his open laptop by the other officer.

Do you normally leave your laptop running like this? the other officer, Derek, asked.

Well, except for when I go to bed, it’s on most of the time that I am at home. This laptop is really my work machine. During the day I have it with me at the office and at night I take it home to continue my work. Tonight, as usual, I booted my machine when I got here, retrieved my email, and then made myself a drink and decided to relax down by the water, before I began the second shift, Seth said, glancing over at Sarah to gauge her reaction to this follow-up to her earlier "office