J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

Bridger’s tip leaves me thinking that faith was misplaced.

I try to call Bea and find out what’s going on, but I keep getting her voicemail. The last time I paid a surprise visit, she wasn’t expecting me, which made following her from the field office parking garage to her suburban cowboy bar a piece of cake. I’m not in the mood to take so much trouble now. Besides, I like to shake things up.

After parting with Cavallo, I drive downtown to Bea’s office, showing my badge at security and explaining who I’m there to see. Nobody bats an eyelid. Phone calls are made and a stout woman in pinstripes with an electronic earpiece assures me that Special Agent Kuykendahl will arrive momentarily. Instead, the door to her basement lair opens to reveal a broad-chested All-American with a blond crew cut and perfect teeth. He beckons me through, leading me down the same path I took the first time, explaining in the corridor that Bea is his boss.

It’s a strange thing to realize that someone as young as Bea, someone who looks so adolescent, can command such men. The All-American speaks of her in hushed tones and with great respect. There’s a note of pride at being a member of her team, reminding me of the esprit de corps that Wanda Mosser once inspired in her tough-guy subordinates.

“Did you know Brandon Ford?” I ask him.

He swipes us through the security door. “I’ll let you talk to her about that.”

Last time, the bullpen was empty. Now half a dozen officers are gathered around the conference table with Bea at the head. Behind her, a large portable whiteboard is covered in photographs and handwritten notes. When she sees me, Bea flips the board over to conceal their work, but not before I see the faces of the six paramilitaries whose new identities Hilda kept on file: the curly-haired Brandon Ford, James Lodge of the skull-shaped ring, and four others. One of the four is circled in red, a question mark next to his face.

It’s a reasonable assumption that one of these men could be John Doe. Six to begin with, then subtract Lodge, who murdered my partner and was killed in turn. That would leave five, but the night they descended on me in the Hummer, there were only four, including Ford himself. So where was the missing man? Could he have been dead all along, cooling off in Bridger’s refrigerator with some oil stains on his leg?

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I say.

“Everybody, I’m sure Detective March needs no introduction. As you know, he is assisting us on this one, though unofficially thanks to a certain altercation with one of our targets.”

With the exception of one agent who appears to be in his forties, Bea’s team looks as young as they do eager. Like her, they don’t fit my idea of the G-man mold. Maybe that’s because they work in a specialized field, or maybe she chooses underlings who resemble herself. The outlier is the older guy, who has enough starch in his shirt and steam on his creases to make J. Edgar Hoover proud. He stands to shake my hand. When Bea leads me back to her office, he follows behind us, pausing at the door.

“You need anything, boss?” he asks.

“March might want some coffee. No? Then I guess we’re fine.”

He looks me over before pulling the door shut.

“He seems like a very accommodating guy,” I say.

She slumps in her chair like a teenager, crossing one leg over the other, stretching her hands behind her neck. “If it was up to him, he’d be sitting at my desk.”

“So that’s how it is.” I take a seat.

“That’s how it is. Now, what are you doing here? We agreed that I’d call if I needed anything from you.”

“I remember our agreement a little differently, but never mind. I assume Hilda is tucked away somewhere? The thing is, Dr. Bridger says you paid him a visit. Now he’s wondering what’s going on. You should have included me in that conversation.”

“He told you why I was there?”

I nod. “I assume, looking at your board out there, that the visit was successful.”

She sits up straight, tucks her legs under the desk. “You saw that, huh? It doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to keep you in the dark. In fact, I’m pretty proud of the way my people have come through on this. I doubt Houston’s finest could have done any better.”

“How so?”

“Dr. Bridger was not such a big help,” she says. “He couldn’t match any of the files up to the body on his slab, said there wasn’t enough to go on. But he did throw out an idea. The John Doe died of cardiac arrest, but apparently with the kind of torture he went through, that’s not a given. You can endure something like that without your heart giving out, I guess. This guy may have had a heart condition-”

“Is there anything in the files about that?”

“They’re not that thorough. But we did some checking and we found out that one of these guys, Robert Johnson, was admitted to the hospital two years ago, complaining about an irregular heartbeat.”

Johnson, Ford, Lodge. Such generic names. Designed so their owners could pass unnoticed through life.

“They put him on a monitor and diagnosed it as stress,” she says. “That’s good enough for me. According to his stats, he’s about the same height as Brandon and they’re in the same age range. I think Johnson is who you found on the basketball court.”

“Then why did the database say it was Brandon Ford?”

“Here’s my theory: Brandon saw an opportunity and he took it. None of his paramilitaries were on my radar screen, but he was. If that body was identified as him, he could walk away and none of us would even know to look for him, because we’d think it was him we buried. But after his ‘death,’ he must have gone back to his office for some reason-maybe to pick up the money we gave him. He figured out you were there-maybe you tripped some kind of signal without realizing-and he knew he had to get everything out of there or you’d realize it couldn’t be him dead on the slab.”

“So you’re saying that Ford killed his own man and planted the body to make us think it was him?”

“I’m not saying that. I don’t know-”

“And Ford on his own wouldn’t have the juice to rig that DNA match.”

“Like I said, it’s theory.”

“Here’s something else to put in your hat. There’s an earlier victim, a man by the name of Chad Macneil. He was murdered last year down in Buenos Aires. The cops there didn’t release all the details, but we’re working on that. What we do have suggests that Macneil’s hands were skinned just like Robert Johnson’s-assuming you’re right about him. So the question then becomes, can you place Brandon Ford in Buenos Aires when that murder occurred?”

“Can you give me the dates?”

“I can do better than that.” From my briefcase I produce a photocopy of the autopsy report on Macneil. “We’re working on getting an official copy of this. Maybe you’d have more pull as a Federal agent?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

She flips through the pages, her face clouding. Before I walked in, she was confident she had a handle on things, and now that handle’s yanked itself right off. There are questions I’d like to ask her. I’d like to know how much her team knows about what’s going on, if she’s leveled with them about her relationship with Ford or not. From what I saw earlier, there don’t seem to be many secrets in here. Maybe she’s found a way to cover her exposure, or at least to limit the fallout. If it’s true the old man of her team wants her job, she wouldn’t put everything on the table unless she was fairly certain neither the inappropriate relationship nor the missing quarter million could come back to bite her.

“Was there anything else?” she asks.