THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: STRESS TESTING

When DEA agent Michael Dace vanished, of course, the response from the agency was significant. He was listed as on vacation, but even a cursory examination of his spending and mobile internet usage revealed he was nowhere near where he said he was supposed to be (Merrick, Long Island, New York), when he disappeared. Or on vacation; from his point of view, at least.

Day one after his vacation return date, he doesn't come in. Day two. Day three. It wasn't until the Monday after that someone got wise and went by his place in Jersey City to find it cleared out. Then I got the call.

It's almost always like this.

I ran down things like that for the DEA and others. It happened more than you think in our line of work. After all, in what other job did you routinely stumble across an Altoids tin filled with uncut diamonds, or the wall of a trailer stuffed to the brim with bundles of 100 dollar bills? People took stuff. People skipped.

Wabasso Florida is a pit stop on the Atlantic coast that is the convergence of a highway, the ocean and a half dozen significant roads. It wasn't hard to find his trail there. Four witnesses claimed he had flashed his badge, questioned people, and acted as if he was on duty. He wasn't hiding. He wanted word out, at least locally, so people might come to him.

The story he put out was something like this: he was A DEA agent searching for someone named Damante Argin who was wanted in New York for various drug crimes and was thought to be hiding in the area. This man was dangerous. Anything who knew anything should come see him.

None of this was protocol. Argin brought up no hits on NCIC. No known link to Dace. No social media hits. Nothing.

But Michael Dace seemed different. Decorated. A successful field agent for the Newark New Jersey DEA office with nine years in his pocket. He had successfully investigated and litigated a dozen cases in that time, and was behind at least one significant bust. Quiet, but driven. Clever but obsequious.

Nineteen days after he vanished, after filing five reports, I found the trailer on the coast on Pelican Island, just across the inlet from Wabasso. What led me there were a half dozen calls from Dace's phone to a dead number which turned up on a hit with Hertz. Someone named Damien Agee had rented the trailer 26 days before at the Melbourne Orlando Airport and had used the number Dace had called (it was a burner bought in a 7/11 in Avon Park, Florida 37 days before).

Some calls to friends and then to a desk in BellSouth pinged that phone somewhere on Pelican Island, near Sandpoint road. For me, doing this is the same as a taxi driver turning on the meter, or a dentist asking a patient to open wide. This was the point where things generally opened up and revealed themselves to me. Truth be told, it was never really that hard.

People leave wakes in this world.

Across to Pelican Island in the early morning. Birds wild in the trees. The heat coming up. Storm clouds gathering out to sea. Alone, on a sand choked road near the beach, there it was. A double-wide, parked on the side of the road in the shade of the trees. Tow unhooked. Windows shuttered. No car. Dark. Door locked.

I sat across the way on a stump and watched the trailer for fifteen minutes, while the sun came up, eating a sliced apple. I hadn't learned patience as much as had it pounded into my head through long hours like this. But it's amazing what will happen sometimes if you wait.

Anyway, nothing happened, so I went in.

At first, I didn't know what I was looking at. It looked like someone had torn down a rotten, moss eaten building and had stacked the wood in piles in the trailer, leaving only a narrow walkway along the length. The trailer was stifling and hot and stunk of plants, and had an earthly, strange smell underneath.

Then I saw the dirt covered shovels and the burner phone on the tiny kitchen counter.

The wood were coffins. And then I saw the bones. Some had been pulled out and stacked on the kitchenette table. A skull. Some finger bones. Some teeth.

Gun out, to the bedroom. I supposed the fresh bones — all but  scraped clean of all flesh — were Dace's. Without touching anything, I checked the skull and there were two silver fillings on the upper left molars. It was Dace. I found his clothing and phone carefully placed on the bed, the phone with the battery removed.

I backed out of the trailer and gathered myself as the sky turned grey. I had seen worse things. I made some calls.

Later, at the Kissimmee airport, a little girl wobbled on one foot smiling at me, and I smiled back, waiting. She was a sweetie. I spoke briefly with her father. He was ex military. We compared notes and matched up some things we had in common.

The little one kicked up a fuss about ten minutes before they were to board a flight for Mexico City, and I said, no problem, I could watch their stuff. When they left, I switched Dace's phone to silent, went over and placed it in the little girl's Dora the Explorer backpack, deep in a pocket where no one would find it easily.

They boarded their plane a little later.

While I was waiting in line for elite boarding, my phone rang.

Newark DEA.

"Yeah boss, I was just going to call in...it's a bust down here. I got nothing."