Joel Goldman - Shakedown

“Why would Rice call him?”

“He didn’t. Phone was stolen. We don’t have any idea who Rice called.”

“Let’s go back and ask him,” I said.

“Too late. He hanged himself in the prison laundry. Happened last night. I just heard about it an hour ago.”

“Shit. I just talked to his ex-wife. She didn’t say anything about it. She must not have gotten word yet.”

“She’s the ex-wife, not the wife, which takes her off the next-of-kin list.”

“Someone should let her know before she reads about it in the paper.”

“You want to volunteer,” Grisnik said, “be my guest. Telling the family, even the exes, is the worst part of this job. You can have it.”

I hung up and shook. It was a mild ripple, a reminder of the condition my condition was in. I wondered if the news of Rice’s death had triggered the tremor, a reaction to guilt over the possibility that my visit had literally scared him to death. If that was the case, I must not have felt too guilty since the tremors were short-lived. I didn’t feel responsible for Rice’s death. On that, I agreed with his wife. Rice had chosen his road. I was doing my job.

On a purely statistical basis, Rice’s death should not have been a surprise. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in prison, which sounds pretty grim until you realize there aren’t a lot of other ways to go. The rate is not as bad as in jails, where suicide is the leading cause of death. People don’t stay in jail long enough to die for other reasons. They either get out or graduate to prison.

Despite the numbers, Rice didn’t strike me as suicidal, even though he ran the gamut of human emotions when I saw him. He was a wheeler-dealer, the kind of person who would never throw in the towel, and the prison laundry was an unlikely place to give up unless he had help.

Of all the emotions Rice had displayed, it turned out that the most honest one had been fear. The only time he was afraid was when I asked him about the sale of his house and car. Though neither of us mentioned him by name, Colby Hudson had hovered over our conversation like a curse that had now come true.

I hadn’t learned anything that would convict Colby of a crime, but I doubted that the truth, whatever it was, would set him free. He’d gone on a buying binge that he couldn’t afford on his FBI salary. He was the one person who knew about the surveillance camera in Marcellus’s house and who matched the description of the man I thought I’d seen running from the murder scene, and who had been sitting at the right hand of Javy Ordonez, late of this world. I didn’t know whether he was Forrest Gump, who managed by sheer coincidence to show up at every pivotal moment in the history of this case, or whether he was the man behind the throne, but my litany of suspicion was enough to give any Internal Affairs investigator a blue-diamond woody.

I couldn’t separate my suspicions of him from my knowledge that he was cheating on Wendy. Tanja Andrija had neither admitted nor denied having an affair with him. That didn’t matter. Colby was having an affair with her even if she wasn’t having one with him.

On that score, I realized that Wendy had me dead to rights about my relationship with Kate. I had been unfaithful to Joy. I shook again, this time from shame. I was judging Colby more harshly than I had judged myself. Truth and righteousness had become silent casualties in my rationalized world.

My cell phone rang. Caller ID said it was Ammara Iverson. I was anxious to talk with her, hoping that she’d been able to get me copies of Thomas Rice’s file.

“Hey,” I said, “great timing. Any luck with the Rice file?”

“Sorry. I’ve been jammed up.”

“I know you’re busy, but the sooner the better. How’d it go with the polygraph?”

“I’m guilty of having sexual fantasies about Denzel Washington. Otherwise, I’m in the clear.”

“Good to know. What’s up?”

“Have you heard from Colby lately?” asked Ammara.

“Not since I saw him at lunch yesterday. Why?”

“He didn’t show up for his polygraph.”

“Did you try to reach him?”

“Troy tried his cell and his home phone. When he didn’t answer, Troy told Ben Yates. Yates sent two agents to Colby’s house. He wasn’t there. The lock on the back door had been jimmied. They went inside, where they found some cash and drugs. The U.S. Attorney is getting a search warrant.”

“Why? They’ve already searched the place.”

“Colby not showing up, together with the jimmied back door justified the entry into the house. Make sure he was okay and all that.”

“Are you telling me that the cash and drugs were sitting out in plain sight?” I asked.

“All I can tell you is what was found inside the house. Now that we can’t find Colby and there’s evidence of a crime, we’ve got to do a full search that no one can complain about later, if there is a later.”

Ammara let her last words hang, reminding me of our conversation yesterday.

“And what?”

She paused. I could hear her take a deep breath. “I called Wendy before I called you. Just in case Colby was at her place and had overslept.”

I started to shake, worse than from guilt, worse than from shame. My heart raced out in front of the tremors. I stumbled over my words.

“Has she heard from Colby?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her. She didn’t answer at home or on her cell and her boss said she didn’t show up to work. I’m sorry, Jack, we can’t find either one of them.”

There are things we know and things we don’t want to know. When what we know is too hard to handle, we convince ourselves that we can box it up, stick it someplace we can forget about, and then, magically, we won’t know it any longer. Then we protect ourselves with a lie-what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

I have never forgotten the pain of losing Kevin. It had hardened into a callus around the unhealed hole in my heart. But I had put away the unspeakable immobilizing fear and the cold rush of primal panic that swept over me when I first learned that my neighbor had taken him. That’s what I had hidden in the box that Ammara had just opened and it reentered my system as swiftly as snake’s venom.

Wendy wasn’t a young child and Colby Hudson wasn’t a sexual predator. She might have gone shopping and he might have gone fishing. They might have eloped. Someone might have planted the drugs and cash in Colby’s house. Anything was possible and nothing was certain except that I was scared, as frightened as I’d been that day in Dallas.

The disappearance of a child always mobilizes action. Everyone can identify with the child’s vulnerability. There are no gray areas, only outrage and a secret, shameful gratitude of those who join in the search that it wasn’t their child.

It would be different with Wendy and Colby because no one knew whether they were victims or suspects, though Ammara’s unspoken subtext implied that the Bureau believed that Wendy might be the former while it was more likely that Colby was the latter. Colby’s status would be confirmed when the paperwork for his purchase of Jill Rice’s car and house was discovered in the search of his home.

It wouldn’t take long for Troy Clark to run the same traps I had. He’d find out that I had used a phony ID to visit Thomas Rice and that Rice died less than twenty-four hours later. He’d trace my Detective Funkhouser alter ego to Marty Grisnik, who could only give me so much cover without getting his tit caught in the wringer. And he’d find out that I had braced Jill Rice. He’d lock up Thomas Rice’s file before Ammara could copy it and I’d end up answering questions about withholding information and obstruction of justice, shakes or no shakes.