J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

So I tell him everything I know about the case. I tell him about Englewood and the attempt on my life. I tell him about Bea’s relationship with Brandon Ford and how we managed to track down Hilda. I recount the whole convoluted tale of intelligence networks and couriers and false identities. He listens without interruption. Maybe he doesn’t know what to say.

“There are more dossiers,” I tell him. “Including one for the man I killed. According to that, his name is James Lodge. I wrote down the info. There’s an address in Meyerland.”

“You have a file on him?” he asks, incredulous.

“Bea has all the files. And the informant. She’s using her resources to try and locate the men on that team.”

“But when they tried to run his DNA, they came back with nothing?”

“Hilda created the false IDs, but she’s not the one who gave us the match on Brandon Ford. That had to be Englewood pulling the strings.”

He lets out a long sigh, then goes quiet for a while. I understand how crazy it all sounds. I realize, too, the complications that all this unsubstantiated, unverifiable information introduces to the black-and-white world of a homicide investigation. Is he supposed to walk into Mosser’s office and declare that the John Doe we have identified as Brandon Ford really isn’t, because the real Brandon Ford is still on the loose-only he isn’t really Brandon Ford? Is he supposed to assign the name James Lodge to the second unidentified corpse on my say-so?

“I’m putting you in an awkward spot, I know. But that’s the spot I’m in. I don’t know what else to do.”

“You’re not supposed to be doing anything. And I’m worried about you dragging Cavallo into this. You’re not doing her any favors.”

“She’ll be fine. Wanda likes her. How is the new captain doing, anyway?”

He sighs again. “She’s riding me, March. Making sure I know who’s the boss.”

“That’s just her way. Don’t let it get to you.”

“When she gets wind of what’s going on, things are gonna be bad. She’ll want your head and mine if we’re not careful.”

“So we’ll be careful,” I say. “It would be nice if you could get Internal Affairs off my back.”

“Listen, I’m worried about this Englewood character. If he’s as all-powerful as you’re making out, why have I never heard of the man?”

“They know who he is in Internal Affairs. Maybe you should ask around over there, kill two birds with one stone.”

“Maybe. In the meantime, try not to drag Cavallo down with you, all right? I’m already shorthanded as it is.”

The next morning, my throbbing leg wakes me up while it’s still dark. I swing my feet onto the floor, try to do some stretches. There’s a spot in my lower back, just to the left of my spine, where I can dig with my fingertips and with enough pressure force the muscle to give just a little, to start to relax. The floor creaks under my weight and Charlotte turns in bed.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “Here, let me do that.”

She has me lie flat on the bed, then, kneeling beside me, works her finger into the nerve.

“Breathe out,” she says. “Try to relax.”

Her hands are cool against my skin.

“Does this hurt?”

“It’s fine,” I whisper, though it does hurt some.

After a while she adjusts her angle, pushing deeper. I feel the tightness at the back of my thigh. As she leans down, her hair brushes against me.

“There,” she says, “I just felt it let go.”

I let out a long breath, lying as still as I can. She sits back, then sinks onto the mattress beside me, running a finger up the length of my arm.

“I could stay home today,” she says. “We could spend it together. It’s been a long time.”

“I thought you had a meeting.”

“Meetings can be rescheduled.”

The idea sounds appealing, spending the morning in bed, dragging ourselves up for a late lunch, maybe getting in the car and just driving. Escaping. I bend my leg at the knee, bringing my foot up as high as it’ll go and there’s no pain anymore, just a pleasant numbness. I straighten my leg out, close my eyes, and lapse back into sleep.

When I open them again, a faint light filters through the blinds. Through the open bathroom door I hear the drum of water against the shower wall and feel the humidity in the air. I can just make out Charlotte’s form behind the foggy, spray-flecked glass. I throw the covers back and go downstairs to make coffee, then bring her up a steaming mug. Wrapped in a white towel, her hair clinging in damp tendrils to the side of her face, Charlotte takes the coffee with a smile and asks what we’re going to do with our day.

“I thought we would sleep late, but I guess not.”

On my nightstand, my cellphone starts to buzz. The ring grows progressively louder until I pad across the room.

“It’s Cavallo. I better take it.”

Fifteen minutes later, I’m dressed and out the door. Charlotte walks me out, still nursing her mug. “Maybe next time,” she says, and I peck her on the cheek. She puts her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me down for a proper kiss.

– -

“I don’t have any sympathy for you,” Cavallo says. “I’ve been up for hours already. Buenos Aires is three hours ahead of us, and he sent this stuff over first thing. It’s lucky for you that he called to let me know or it would be still sitting on the fax machine.”

She stifles a yawn, then glances at her watch. Her hair is still damp and her makeup, applied in the car, is minimal. With a cop’s instinct for greasy spoons, she has commandeered a booth at a diner on Yale just a few minutes from my house, where she’s spread out official-looking faxed pages, all in Spanish, and some crime-scene photos-printouts muddy with toner. Her Español runs rings around mine, so I leave it to her to translate.

“I’m impressed you got anything out of them.”

“The Federal police were no help at all,” she says. “Too many hoops to jump through. This is all courtesy of a journalist down there. Turns out there’s an English-language newspaper and Brad Templeton knows one of the reporters. I dropped his name and here we are.”

Brad Templeton, a former journalist turned true-crime author, is an on-again-off-again contact of mine. Since our falling out last year, the relationship has been decidedly off. But Cavallo’s better than I am at maintaining lines of communication.

“I’m impressed,” I say. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to even ask him.”

I turn the crime-scene photos to face me, peering down at the body of Chad Macneil.

For two innocent weeks in 2008, in between updates on the presidential elections, before word of the impending worldwide financial crisis broke, the nightly news in Houston obsessed over the disappearance of Chad Macneil, a former Arthur Anderson exec who had transformed himself post-Enron into a freelance money manager with a rumored net worth in the tens of millions. He sat on a couple of boards, but otherwise kept a low profile, devoting himself full-time to the creation of wealth. As his privileged clients whispered to each other over cocktails, Macneil worked wonders with other people’s money.

What those clients didn’t know was that for months Chad Macneil had been the subject of a fraud inquiry and that investigators believed the case was so strong they were on the verge of making an arrest. In the middle of lunch at The Houstonian, Macneil received a tip-off by phone, probably from his attorney. He excused himself and wandered off in the direction of the restroom. The last he was seen was on surveillance video, collecting the keys of his Maserati from a valet. Macneil disappeared, and so did a sizable chunk of his clients’ money.