Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

The other odd thing about the Cuban was that she was a beautiful woman who seemingly had no interest in sex. He suspected she was near forty. She had a lush figure, a flawless light-brown complexion, and long lustrous black hair. Lincoln had certainly made the effort to bed her, but she refused to have anything to do with him in anything other than a business capacity. And because he needed to know about her for professional rather than personal reasons, he’d had her followed on a number of occasions. She may have had lovers when she was a teenager, but Lincoln had known her since she was twenty-five, and in all that time she had never dated or lived with anyone that he had been able to discover.

‘I want a man either incapacitated or dead,’ Lincoln said. ‘If he had some sort of accident that put him in the hospital for a couple of months, that would be all right, provided there was no doubt that what happened was an accident. You can kill him if that’s easiest, but you have to make certain that it doesn’t appear that he was the target; he must be collateral damage. For example,’ Lincoln said, ‘if a bus were to plow into a crowd standing on a corner and he was part of the crowd, that would be acceptable.’ Lincoln smiled when he said this; he didn’t really expect her to run the man down with a bus, but she didn’t smile back. She didn’t have a sense of humor either. He would really find her quite tiresome if she wasn’t so good at what she did.

‘How much?’ she said

That was always the first question she asked. No who or where or why or when, but always how much ?

‘Seventy-five thousand,’ Lincoln said. Lincoln thought it appropriate to keep half of what the client was paying, and after she tacked on her expenses — and padded them — her bill would be close to a hundred thousand.

As if they were both reading from a script that they’d read from many times before, she said, ‘Plus my expenses.’

‘Don’t I always pay your expenses?’ Lincoln said.

‘Last time, when I asked you to pay for my shoes, you argued with me.’

‘Well, I thought that was rather petty of you, billing me for that item. It wasn’t my fault that you got Mr Potter’s blood on your shoes and had to burn them.’ Actually, Lincoln had given her a hard time about the shoes because it amused him to do so. She always presented him with a written expense report detailing every dime she spent on a job, and he always pretended to study it carefully before he paid her. Afterward she would destroy the report while he watched.

‘It was a job-related expense,’ she said.

‘If you say so,’ he said, just to tweak her.

She glared at him for a minute, then said, ‘When do you want this done?’

‘Immediately, of course. Why do you think you’re being paid so much?’

Upon his return from Boston, DeMarco’s small brain trust once again assembled in Fat Neil’s office to compare notes and report on what they’d learned.

Emma opened the meeting by looking at DeMarco’s bloodshot eyes and saying, ‘You look like hell.’

‘Thank you,’ DeMarco said, and proceeded to give his report. ‘Autopsies on both Rollie Patterson and Donny Cray were inconclusive,’ he said. ‘Rollie had a fresh needle mark in his left thigh, which could have been used to inject some heart-attack-inducing substance into his body. The problem is that Rollie was allergic to everything on the planet except oxygen, and he self-injected to keep from sneezing himself to death. Bottom line, no toxic substances were found in Rollie’s body.’

‘Which means nothing,’ Emma said. ‘I can think of three or four things that could cause a heart attack and not leave a trace.’

DeMarco wondered if Emma had considered using one of those ‘three or four things’ on Christine’s dog, but he didn’t ask.

‘As for Donny Cray,’ he said, ‘the ME’s report noted nothing inconsistent with an idiot not wearing a seat belt and wrecking his car. The problem here is the ME. The guy who did Rollie’s autopsy is supposed to be super good. The one who did Donny Cray’s lives in Winchester, Virginia, and is primar ily a pediatrician. Add that to the fact that Jubal Pugh is a violent character who lives near Winchester. There’s the possibility, if Pugh’s involved in this, that he might have influenced the ME’s report.’

‘Do you have any evidence that Pugh is involved?’ Emma said.

‘Absolutely none,’ DeMarco said. ‘Finally, the air marshal. I met with him, and it was like talking to a slab of granite. I know the guy’s planning to retire soon and when I met him he was looking at a powerboat catalog. I think he was tipped off about Youseff being on that plane and paid to blow him away, but nobody’ll ever get it out of him.’

‘Did the air marshal ask to be put on the same flight as Youseff?’ Emma asked.

‘No. I had a guy at Homeland Security ask the same question, and he was told that Blunt had been scheduled for three weeks to be on that flight.’

‘All that means,’ Emma said, ‘is that if someone forced Youseff to attempt the hijacking, they just made sure he got on Blunt’s flight.’

‘I guess,’ DeMarco said. The way his head felt, it was hard to make sense out of anything. ‘What’d you get on Blunt’s and Patterson’s finances, Neil?’

‘Nothing noteworthy, no large changes in either man’s accounts, which in the case of Rollie is problematic because it leaves open the issue of how he was able to buy his new RV.’

‘Both these guys could have been given a bucket of cash,’ Emma said. ‘And if Rollie was still alive, he’d say that he didn’t trust banks and had been saving for years to buy his RV and had been hiding the money under the bed.’

‘So in conclusion,’ DeMarco said, ‘I got shit.’ He almost added: and the worst hangover of my life, thanks to the Catholic Church .

‘I talked to Mustafa Ahmed’s niece,’ Emma said, ‘a sweet girl named Anisa. She wouldn’t tell me anything, but my gut says something happened to her. And I think she was recently garroted.’

‘Garroted?’ DeMarco said. ‘You mean strangled.’

‘Yes, with a wire, a garrote. There was a deep ligature mark around her throat. I gave the girl the name of a Muslim woman who would vouch for me, and I know Anisa called the woman a couple days later, but she never contacted me afterward. So to repeat what Joe just said, I got shit.’

‘What did you learn, Neil?’ DeMarco said.

In a cooler next to his desk, Neil kept Popsicles. He opened the cooler now and pulled a grape Popsicle from the box, taking his time in removing the paper. He just drove DeMarco nuts. As he sucked on his Popsicle, Neil gave his report.

‘Let’s start,’ Neil said, ‘with the good senator, William Broderick. If our assumption is that Broderick is paying somebody to cause these terrorist attacks, an assumption I personally find hard to accept, it would take a lot of money. So in the case of Broderick, I looked for cash outflows: large blocks of stocks liquidated, CDs cashed out, bank accounts substantially reduced, et cetera. I found nothing. The problem, of course, is Broderick could have sold something, like a home or a yacht, and put the cash from the sale in an offshore account or in an account under a false name, and I wouldn’t be able to see it.’

‘Isn’t the property he owns listed on his financial disclosure statements?’ DeMarco said. People above a certain rank and holding certain positions in government are required to file financial disclosure statements that identify investments and sources of income for the person and his spouse. DeMarco, however, wasn’t of sufficient rank or importance to be required to file such a statement, so he didn’t really know what was on one.