J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“Is there any paperwork on these?”

Lorenz pulls open a file cabinet in the corner. “There’s a bunch in here, depending on what you’re looking for.”

On the shelf inside the safe, twenty-round boxes of Wolf 5.45 x.39mm hollow points are stacked on top of each other.

“It doesn’t matter now,” I say, putting the rifle back. “But we should probably make a call to ATF. I’m not sure what the procedure is when a gun dealer is deceased, but I don’t think leaving these here is a good idea. How’d you open the safe?”

“Same combo as the one at the house. I found it in his bedroom nightstand.”

“So where’s this psycho wall?”

He points the way to the back office. I go inside, flipping on the lights. This is where Ford must have conducted business. The desk wraps around one corner with custom cabinets overhead, the doors ajar from Lorenz’s search. The computer hums inside the footwell, but the twenty-inch monitor on the desk is dark, an add-on camera clipped to one side. On the opposite wall there’s a corkboard covered in news clippings.

“Take a closer look,” he says.

Some of the clippings are from the Chronicle , some are from the Houston Press . Some are printouts from the Internet, the URLs stamped on the outer margins. All of them concern the same story, and they are covered in ink underlining and bright yellow highlighting.

“You remember that incident?” Lorenz asks.

I nod silently.

Earlier this year, an HPD patrol car pulled over a man speeding on Allen Parkway after midnight. The uniforms-a rookie and his training officer-handled everything by the numbers. The rookie went to the driver’s window while the trainer approached the other side. After shining his light into the car, the rookie exchanged words with the driver and then returned to the patrol car to run the license. All of this was captured on the dashboard cam.

While the rookie was out of the way, his trainer approached the driver’s window. On the video, which was played over and over on the local news, the trainer suddenly backpedals and starts to reach for his side arm. There’s a flash from the window, an orange tongue of flame, and the trainer rolls backward onto the pavement. He draws and fires while the rookie runs forward with his own weapon drawn, also firing.

He approaches the driver’s window first, making sure the threat is neutralized, then goes to the trainer and helps him up. Thanks to his vest, the trainer is bruised but otherwise fine.

Watching the footage, things happen so fast. It’s all straightforward and undramatic, the way fights mostly are. If you weren’t paying attention, you might mistake the trainer’s motion for a clumsy fall. The stakes were life and death, but they don’t look it on camera.

When the uniforms made their report, the story got strange. According to them, the driver had refused to give his identification, claiming he had immunity. He told the rookie he worked for the CIA. Then he’d changed course and handed his license over. His name was Andrew Nesbitt, aged sixty-one, a well-off retiree with a house in River Oaks. When the trainer approached, sensing something wasn’t right, Nesbitt grew combative and paranoid. He accused the officers of pulling him over without justification-and then, without warning, he produced a gun. It was a.32 Walther PPK, weapon of choice for James Bond.

“The guy wasn’t just delusional,” Lorenz says, lifting the corner of one of the clippings. “He was some kind of con man. He was, like, the president of the retired intelligence officers’ club. Even the real spooks believed he was one of them.”

“That’s a theory. It’s always possible he was telling the truth. There’s no law that says retired case officers can’t go nuts like everybody else. I bet they’re more prone to it than most.”

“But the government denied he’d ever been in the CIA.”

I crack a smile. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

Judging from the Internet printouts, the usual conspiracy theories must have started proliferating the moment the story broke. Ford tacked up a forum post providing an ersatz history of the former spook’s club in Houston, claiming that dozens of high-ranking officers have retired to the oil capital over the years, putting their experience to good use advising on overseas operations. According to one blog, Nesbitt was a prime recipient of drilling dollars, while according to another he had a well-documented history of mental-health issues. The Houston Press had run a feature that summarized all the possibilities, and the annotated spread made up the center of Ford’s psycho wall.

“This is all pretty interesting, Jerry, but I don’t see why I had to come down and view it in person. I’ve heard of this shooting. I’ve seen the video. Our guys were in the right. No matter who this Nesbitt dude was, he drew down on a cop. End of story.”

Lorenz goes to one of the open cabinets and pulls out an orange-covered, spiral-bound Key Map. A scrap of paper marks one of the laminated pages. He opens it on the desk and turns the map to face me. His finger thumps down to a green patch near the middle.

“That’s the park where we found Ford’s body,” he says.

“Let me see that.” I study the map. “And it was marked like that when you got here?”

He nods his head.

“So Brandon Ford marked the page where his body was dumped? Like he knew in advance that’s where he’d end up.”

“You’d think so, right? But no, that’s not what it is. Here-” he takes the book back-“ this is why he marked it.”

I lean closer. He taps on a section of Allen Parkway curving through the map grid. When he moves his hand, I can see an X drawn over the road.

“That’s where Andrew Nesbitt was shot?” I ask.

He nods again. “And that’s not all, March. Remember when I sent you out into the woods and you had your fall? I thought if we followed the direction that finger was pointing, we’d find the severed head. But I was wrong. The fact is, if you follow that pointing finger-”

“You end up on Allen Parkway.”

And I’d seen it, looking through the weedy hurricane fence that night. I’d seen it without realizing the significance. The pointing finger had not led me astray; it guided me. I just didn’t know enough to make the connection.

Now I’m beginning to.

What I have is this: an unorthodox FBI agent telling me lies about the death of a man whose skinned finger, when his body was discovered, pointed straight to the site where another man, claiming to work for the CIA, had died in a gunfight with the Houston Police.

“So what’s the next step?” he asks.

“Let me think.”

The guns in the safe. The story that Ford was down in Corpus Christi. Bea Kuykendahl, a.k.a. Trixie, riding shotgun while he dropped off his kids. While that was going on, he kept a room here at his office dedicated to the shooting death of Andrew Nesbitt and the many conspiracy theories swirling around the event.

It all fits together somehow, assuming I have enough of the pieces. The bloody finger is pointing, the finger is guiding, the only question is where. I have to follow it. I have to think. It all fits together if I can only figure out how.

Camped in Brandon Ford’s office, I tell Jerry everything: the early morning meeting with the FBI, my suspicions about the match on Ford, the ex-wife’s description of Bea. He listens silently and doesn’t ask any questions. When I’m done, he just looks at me.

“Well?” I ask.

“I feel like you just showed me your psycho wall. No offense. It just sounds a little crazy, that’s all.” He cocks his head toward the clippings. “And this is crazy enough.”