John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

“Did you say no?”

He gave her a don’t-be-an-idiot look. “The ‘say no’ ship had sailed long before then,” he said. “I was in far too deep to play that kind of game. So I swallowed hard and made the first payment. Then, on my way back, about three miles from making the drop, I got pulled over for speeding. Seventy-eight in a sixty-five. Funny how some details just stick with you, isn’t it?”

Gail stole this thunder: “That created a record,” she said.

“It did exactly that. It was just a routine traffic stop, I know. Nobody’s going to think twice. But then if someone gets hit, they’re going to start checking records.”

That’s exactly what they’d do, Gail thought. After a murder, one of the first investigative tasks is to check moving violations in the area. “Did you have a criminal record?”

“No, but I had a high profile. When you’re a mobster’s lawyer, people notice. You’d be surprised how many people are jealous, in fact. So that next week, I was a basket case. I scoured newspapers and the Internet looking for something about a murder, but I never saw it. Then I got the order to make the second drop.”

“But no one was ever killed?”

“Not that I knew of. Still, I was spooked. I didn’t want any more blood on my hands, so I sent Marilyn Schuler to make the delivery. She wouldn’t do it unless I told her what was in the package, and when I did tell her, she sort of freaked out. She didn’t know what it was for, of course, but it was still a lot of cash. She insisted that she’d only go if I let her boyfriend come along to protect her.”

“That would be Aaron Hastings?”

“Right.” He leaned forward. “Only the money never arrived. Marilyn and Aaron disappeared. I didn’t realize that things didn’t happen until over a day later when I got word from Arthur Guinn that there was one very pissed off, very bad man who wanted his money.” Navarro closed his eyes and cocked his head, as if the memory had become painful.

“You didn’t tell him about Marilyn?” Gail said.

He shook his head. “Looking back on it, it’s hard to believe I was that stupid; but telling him would mean confessing that I had given the job to my assistant, and God only knows what would have come from that.” He sat straight again and spread his arms wide. “Besides, I didn’t think she could be so stupid as to steal from the Slaters. Then she turns up dead, and the money and Aaron are both missing. Only nobody knows about him. Just like that”-he snapped his fingers-“I’ve got the mob and this ‘very bad man’ looking for me, and I’ve got nothing to give them. So I disappeared.”

Gail scowled as she listened. “You’re a rich guy. Why didn’t you just make up the difference out of your own pocket?”

“Because I was convinced that I was dealing with a professional killer. I’m still convinced that I was dealing with a professional killer. Every scenario I ran through my head ended up with me dead. Especially because I didn’t come clean with what happened in my very first phone call from Arthur.”

“So you panicked,” Gail summarized.

Navarro shrugged. “I prefer to think that I reacted the only way that made sense at the time.”

Gail took a moment to catch her notes up and then to review what she’d written.

“There’s more,” Navarro said, interrupting her thoughts.

He had her attention.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think through all of this,” he said. “Thank God for the Internet. The amount of the payment I shuffled gnawed at me like an ulcer. That kind of money means something way bigger than any mob hit. That’s special money, requiring the services of a special killer. Expertise is expensive in any line of work, right?”

Gail nodded. “So the Slaters wanted someone dead in a big way.”

Navarro looked horrified. “The Slaters? Oh, lord no, this kind of hit wasn’t ordered by the Slaters. They were merely the middlemen. Someone wants someone else dead, you go to your local crime family and you work out a brokered deal. I laundered the money that they had already laundered once. Presumably, the contractor on the other end of the transaction laundered it a couple more times to make it damn near untraceable.”

Gail was lost. “So why are the Slaters even looking for you?”

“Well, they had to cover the loss, didn’t they? They had to make good on the transaction, or else the very bad man would have an issue to settle with them, and no one needs that kind of heartache. But to cover their hind parts, they’d want to make sure that every stakeholder knew that I’d fumbled the ball.”

Pieces still were not fitting for Gail.

“That’s your government connection,” Navarro said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. When she didn’t get it, he sort of growled in frustration. “The government was the customer.”

A glimmer of comprehension now.

“Well, not the government, per se,” Navarro corrected himself, making a twitchy wave-off gesture. “More like a powerful individual within the government.”

Gail found herself leaning forward in her chair.

“Remember when I said that when they asked for the second payment, no one had been killed? Well, I realized that I wasn’t looking at a big enough picture. I’d been assuming that the hit would happen near the site of the money drop. Then I realized that for that kind of money it could have been anywhere. That’s when it got scary.”

Gail waited for it. The dramatic exposition was wearying, but given the man’s years without human interaction, she tried not to show frustration.

“Do you keep track of Washington politics, Ms. Bonneville?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. I try very hard to avoid them.”

“Then perhaps you don’t remember the South Dakota senatorial campaign from that year. The one between Lincoln Hines and-”

“Didn’t he commit suicide?”

“So you do remember. Yes, the common assumption was that he had committed suicide, but there are those who say that he would never do such a thing. His family, for example.”

Gail rolled her eyes. “Ah, conspiracy theories. You gotta love ’em.”

“What was it that Henry Kissinger told Richard Nixon? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t trying to get you. You should look at some of the theories. Beyond what many say is a lack of suicidal motivation, there were issues with the positioning of the body, and with fibers found on his clothes and such.”

“As is frequently the case,” Gail said. Armchair detectives were the bane of every real investigator’s life. “Trust me. If those fibers and the rest were relevant, there would have been a prosecution.”

“How about if the prosecutor was of the same political party as the dead man’s opponent? And the sheriff in charge of the investigation, as well.”

Gail laughed at the absurdity of it. “So the opponent kills his competition and he just talks everyone into covering up his crime? Forgive me, Mr. Navarro, but it just doesn’t work that way.”

Navarro remained unfazed. “I’m not suggesting a conspiracy, necessarily. In fact, I’ll stipulate that it probably wasn’t such a thing. But perceptions inform assumptions, and assumptions drive investigations, do they not?”

“Of course, but-”

“Hear me out. People suggest that the candidate who officially died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound was in fact murdered. Among the most logical suspects would be the man who stood the most to lose. The incumbent, no less, whose departure would throw the political balance in the Senate to the opposing party. So, your highly placed, very dapper and charming suspect says that the charges are ridiculous, that he would easily have won the race, even though the poll numbers at the time indicated that such might not be the case. Besides, he had an ironclad alibi for the time of the killing. Under those circumstances, where would your investigative instincts likely take you?”