C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

“My guys showed up at Judge Moreland’s house. The judge was furious. He called the mayor, who called the chief, who just called me. The judge says Garrett was home all night with him, and he refused to send his son to answer questions. He said Mr. McGuane here is harassing him because of a legal matter and that Cody Hoyt is a rogue cop who is completely out of control. The chief asked me why I was even associating with you, Cody.”

Cody shrugged.

“Fuck you two,” Torkleson said, standing up. “I’ve got a wife and a little girl and a lot of years ahead of me. I can’t let you screw that up.”

“I’ve got a wife and a little girl, too,” I said. “This is about trying to keep us together.”

He wanted to launch into me, but Cody stood up and put his hand on Torkleson’s shoulder.

“Look what this tells us,” Cody said. “It tells us a lot. It means the judge is aware of what Garrett is up to. We’ve been wondering about that-are they working together or apart? Now we know. At last we have some clarity, even though this is about as bad a turn as we could get.”

Torkleson shook Cody’s arm off, his face still red. I felt sorry for him even as I contemplated what Cody had just said.

“Gentlemen, are you here for Brian Eastman?”

None of us had heard or seen the surgeon approach from the double doors down the hall. He was short and thin, wearing blood-soaked green scrubs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking any of us in the eye. “Mr. Eastman has passed.”

“He’s dead?” Torkleson asked.

“It was probably for the best, in a way,” the doctor said. “With that kind of brain damage, he could have never functioned again.”

I sat back in the chair and covered my face with my hands.

We’d lost our friend.

We’d lost our advocate.

We’d lost our friend .

Cody’s eyes streamed tears. “Man,” he said, “I wish I hadn’t have been so hard on the guy earlier. He didn’t deserve it.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING going on at the office. It wasn’t a conspiracy of silence, where everyone seems to know what’s up except the victim. It was simply that under the circumstances-a closed door meeting in the CEO’s office that had started early before the staff arrived and was still going past 9:00 A.M.-some kind of trouble was indicated. The halls, offices, and cubicles were silent. No animated conversations, no laughing. Just tapping on keyboards from every office. I saw Pete Maxfield, the PR guy, walk down the hall to the break room tugging on his collar, as if the heat were turned up. He looked like he felt guilty for something. On my way to get coffee, I ducked into Linda Van Gear’s office to ask her what was happening. She always knew, but she wasn’t at her desk.

I asked Cissy the receptionist when Linda was expected back.

“Oh, she’s here,” she said. “She’s in a meeting with Mr. Jones.”

“Who else is in there?” I asked.

“Mr. Doogan from the mayor’s office.”

My mouth went dry.

BRIAN’S FUNERAL WAS SET for Friday. Because of his prominence in Denver, his murder was front-page news. Mayor Halladay appeared on the steps of city hall and said he was both mournful and angry at the same time and that the community had lost a great man. When a reporter from Channel 9 asked him if it was a hate crime because of Brian Eastman’s well-known sexual orientation, Halladay exploded, saying if it was, he would personally make sure the DA charged whoever did it with the maximum penalty under the law. The mayor declared, “Denver will not tolerate hate!” He was followed by the Denver police chief, who said the department was pursuing every lead, and he was confident there would be arrests before the week was out. I knew through Cody that Torkleson and the cops had no more evidence than the day before, but the chief was assigning several more detectives to the case, and they were interviewing everyone they could find in LoDo who might have seen Brian or the assailants that night.

Melissa was in a stunned funk. Brian was her best friend, and he was simply gone . “He gave his life for us,” she said through tears. I didn’t know how to respond, so I simply held her. While I did, I looked at Angelina in her walker, wonderfully oblivious to what was going on. She’d never see her uncle Brian again, and there was no way to explain that to her.

Cody was splitting his time between our house and his. The media contingent that had been staking out his block had dispersed, likely so they could follow the Eastman murder. When I saw him, he seemed so quiet it was as if he wasn’t really there at all. I couldn’t tell whether Brian’s murder had knocked him speechless or he was deep in thought formulating a plan-or both. I do know he was combing through Brian’s call log one number at a time. He used our computer to cross-reference the numbers, and he kept a running list of numbers and names as he found them.

I worried that Jeter Hoyt might just show up since he’d kept the envelope, and was happy to hear that a terrific winter storm had hit Montana and dumped eighteen inches of snow.

CISSY LEANED INTO my office and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Jones would like to see you in his office.”

I took a deep breath, pulled on my jacket, straightened my tie, and went to get fired.

“HAVE A SEAT, JACK,” CEO H.R. “Tab” Jones said. I could tell by the way Linda smiled sadly at me when I entered the office that my assumption had been correct.

“You know Jim Doogan,” Jones said, as Cissy stepped out and closed the door.

I nodded. Doogan shook my hand. He seemed almost kind. Despite it all, I still kind of liked him.

“Linda,” Jones said, “do you want to tell Jack what we found out this morning?”

Jack, Linda would say, the police say you’ve been implicated in the murder of a man named Pablo ‘Luis’ Cadena. They also say you went to Montana last weekend to hire a thug to intimidate an eighteen-year-old boy.

Instead, she said, “Malcolm Harris was arrested this morning at Heathrow Airport before he boarded the direct London-to-Denver flight.”

“ What? ” That one came out of nowhere.

Linda looked to Doogan to pick up the story.

Doogan said, “Your friend Malcolm Harris is suspected of being a very big fish in an international pedophilia ring. Apparently both Scotland Yard and Interpol have been working on this case for a couple of years, and today they pulled the trigger and made dozens of arrests all across Europe. Harris is considered to be a kingpin of these sickos. They’re talking real bad stuff here, Jack. Buying and selling not just kiddie porn but actual children, group sex trips to Asia, about as bad as it can get.”

I flashed back to Harris’s long foray to the “office” behind the bar in Berlin, how he’d come back flushed. Did Fritz-no doubt a pedophile himself-have photos of children back there on his computer? Or maybe even a child? Oh, God. I cringed and felt physically sick.

“Are you okay?” Doogan asked me.

“He did seem a little off to me,” I said. “I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. And I had this urge to pound the crap out of him that sort of came from nowhere.”

“A little off?” Jones said, raising his eyebrows.

“Give him a break, Tab,” Linda cut in. “I knew Malcolm long before Jack came on board. I always thought he was strange, but I never would have suspected this.” She laughed drily. “Lots of people we work with are strange.”

I thought, the way he looked at that picture of Angelina and thought he’d seen her before. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but now I figured he’d seen so many photos of little girls that he was simply confused, that bastard.