James Grippando - Beyond Suspicion

“That’s not it.”

“Are you afraid to say how you feel about me, Jack?”

“No.”

“Then say it. Say it on tape.”

“Stop playing games.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Damn it, Jessie. I just don’t want to do this.”

“You big chicken. Look, I’m not afraid. I can look straight into the camera and tell you exactly how I feel.”

Again the speakers hissed throughout the conference room, a pregnant pause before Jessie’s final words on tape.

“I don’t want to live without you, Jack Swyteck. I don’t ever want to live without you.”

Rosa hit end, and the tape clicked off. She looked across the room and said, “Well?”

“Well, what? It’s lovers’ banter. People say that all the time: I don’t want to live without you.”

“Sure. And probably ninety-nine times out of a hundred it means simply that they’d rather live with you than live without you. But in that rare case, it might have a more literal meaning: If the choice is between death and living without you, then death it is.”

“Those words are said in thousands of bedrooms every day. I’d rather die than lose you, blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t mean they’re going to go off and kill themselves.”

“Most of the time, no. But sometimes it does.”

“This was almost eight years ago.”

“You don’t know what happened in Jessie’s life after your split. Her life could have been one long string of personal disasters from the day you broke up.”

“You’re overlooking the fact that she’s the one who dumped me.”

“Did she? Or did you force her to break it off by refusing to tell her how you felt? You said it yourself, she wanted to get back together with you six months later.”

“Stop the pop psychology, okay? This tape, that relationship-it’s all old news. And everything you’re saying is totally speculative.”

“Don’t knock it. If you’re indicted for murder, this just might be your defense.”

“Yeah, right. Old girlfriend carries a torch for over half a decade. Makes me a joint holder of her bank account, leaves me a pot of money in her will, and doctors up an old tape of us making love, all just to give me motive to kill her. It’s ridiculous.”

“Listen to me. From the very beginning, we talked about how Jessie might have been trying to make a statement by killing herself in your bathtub. Well, maybe the statement she was trying to make is simply this: ‘Jack Swyteck killed me.’”

“You’re serious about this? You think she killed herself and framed me for doing it?”

“Think about it. The trick only works once, but it could be the perfect frame-up. Kill yourself, but do it in a way that makes it look like someone else did it. If it’s done right, it’s ironclad. The real killer is beyond suspicion.”

Jack took a seat, thinking. Maybe he had overlooked a plausible defense, perhaps even the best defense, all because he feared his wife’s reaction to his past with Jessie. “I swear, every time I think I’m getting my arms around this thing, it slips away from me.”

“That’s good. I’m not saying an indictment’s inevitable, but if the worst comes to pass, confusion is the wellspring of reasonable doubt.”

“For my own sake, I’d kind of like to know the truth someday.”

“Would you?”

“Of course.”

“Then maybe you will. Let’s just hope it doesn’t scare you.”

Jack nodded slowly, saying nothing as he watched Rosa remove their copy of the old audiotape.

•

Katrina Padron had blood on her hands. It was all in a day’s work. The vial had leaked in her hand. One of the idiots at the mobile unit had failed to seal it properly, something that occurred far too often in the shipment of product from the source to the distribution warehouse. Mishaps were inevitable when dealing with untrained workers. What else could she expect? A month earlier the crew had been operating a video rental shop, next month they might be hawking gemstones. For now, it was human blood. Diseased blood. Lots of it.

Thank God for latex gloves .

Katrina was in the back of the warehouse, scrubbing her hands with a strong soap and disinfectant, when her assistant emerged from the walk-in refrigerator. He was dressed in a fur-lined winter coat and carrying a box large enough to hold a dozen vials packed in dry ice and wrapped in plastic bubble wrap.

“Where’s this one going again?” he asked.

“Sydney, Australia.”

He grabbed a pen and an international packing slip. “I saw a travel show about Sydney on the TV a while back. Isn’t that where England used to send its worst prisoners?”

“A long time ago.”

“So that means everybody down there descended from some guy who was in jail.”

“Not everyone.”

“Still, prison is prison. You’d think they’d have enough AIDS-infected blood already. What do they need us for?”

Katrina just rolled her eyes. Morons, I work with. Total morons.

He sealed up the box with extra tape and attached the shipping label. “All set. One Australian football ready for drop-kick shipment,” he said as he went through the pretend motion.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“What do you think, I’m stupid or something?” He removed his coat, hung it on the hook beside the big refrigerator door, and started for the exit.

“Hey, genius,” said Katrina. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

He turned, then groaned at the sight of the unfinished paperwork in her hand. “Aw, come on. I’ve been in and out of that refrigerator for three hours. Can’t you at least do the invoicing for me, babe?”

“Only if you stop calling me babe.”

He winked and smiled in a way that was enough to make her nauseous. “You got it, sweets.”

She let him and his remarks go. It was easier that way. She wasn’t planning on working this job forever, and if she wasted her time trying to get others to do their fair share she’d never get home at night. The paperwork wasn’t really all that time-consuming anyway. One genuine invoice for a legitimate purchase and sale of diseased blood, four phony ones to fictitious customers for extremely expensive inventory that never existed. Bio-Research, Inc., had just enough employees, just enough inventory, and just enough sales to look like a real company that supplied real specimens for use in medical research. It was anything but real.

Most amazing of all, the blood business was a huge step up from her first job.

A dozen years earlier she’d come to Miami from Cuba by way of the Czech Republic, having spent four long years in Prague under one of Fidel Castro’s most appalling and least known work programs. At age seventeen, she was one of eighty thousand young Cuban men and women sent to Eastern Bloc countries to work for paltry wages. The host countries got cheap labor for jobs that natives didn’t want, and Castro got cash. Katrina had been lured across the ocean by the prospect of exploring a country outside her depressed homeland. Once there, she’d ended up seeing little more than the inside of a sweatshop and the two-bedroom apartment she shared with seven roommates. Not even the wages were as promised, which only galvanized her determination never to return home to Cuba. In time, her sole mission devolved into nothing more than getting out of Prague alive.

At times even that had seemed too lofty a goal.

“Katrina?”

She looked up from her paperwork to see her boss standing in the doorway. Vladimir was strictly a front-office guy. He didn’t usually spend any time in the warehouse. Especially since they’d gotten into the dirty-blood business.