James Grippando - Beyond Suspicion

When the housekeeper was gone, Rosa turned to face her guests. Her expression was noticeably more relaxed, as if Felix the Artist had done his job, but her delivery was still quite serious. “I’m told we could see target letters as early as tomorrow, indictments by the end of the week. Two defendants, one basic charge: Murder for hire.”

Theo said, “I heard that on the news two hours ago. You sure you’re getting your money’s worth here, Jacko?”

“Just listen.”

Rosa continued, “It’s important for us all to agree that anything we say in this room is privileged. This is one setting in which it’s worth stating the obvious. This is all joint defense.”

“Of course,” said Jack.

“Theo?” asked Rosa.

“Whatever Jack says.”

“Wrong answer,” said Rick. “Jack’s not your lawyer. I am.”

“Like I said. Whatever Jack says.”

Rick grumbled. “I can’t represent someone under those circumstances.”

Jack looked at his friend and said, “You have to listen to your own lawyer. Not Rosa, and not even me. Those are the rules.”

“If you say so.”

“Good,” said Rosa. “Now that that’s settled, let’s talk turkey. Rick, tell Jack and Theo what you found out.”

Rick scooted to the edge of his chair, as if sharing a national-security secret. “Dr. Marsh is represented by Hugo Zamora. I know Hugo pretty well, pretty good guy. I called him up and just asked him point-blank, hey, what did your client tell the grand jury?”

“I thought grand-jury testimony was secret,” said Theo.

“It is, in the sense that grand jurors and the prosecutor can’t divulge it. But a witness can disclose his own testimony, which means that his lawyer can, too.”

Jack asked, “What did Hugo tell you?”

“The most important thing has to do with Dr. Marsh’s testimony about the threats against Jessie Merrill. Marsh did testify that Jessie was in fact threatened before her death.”

“That’s fantastic,” said Jack. “That corroborates exactly what I’ve been saying all along. The viatical investors threatened her.”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marsh didn’t say that it was the viatical investors who threatened Jessie. He said it was Theo.”

“Theo? What kind of crock is that?”

Rick continued. “Marsh claims that Theo met with Jessie the night before she died and told her straight out that if she said or did anything to hurt Jack Swyteck, there would be hell to pay.”

Jack popped from his chair, paced across the room angrily. “That is so ridiculous. The man is a pathological liar. The very idea that Theo would go to Jessie and threaten her like that is… well, you tell him, Theo. That’s crazy.”

All eyes were on Theo, who was noticeably silent.

“Theo?”

Finally, he looked Jack in the eye and said, “You remember that night we met in Tobacco Road?”

“Yeah. You were playing the sax that night.”

“And you said Jessie Merrill admitted to the scam but told you to back off or she’d tell the world that you were part of it, too. You were all upset because she and her doctor boyfriend were so damn smug. And so I says maybe we should threaten her right back. Remember?”

“What are you telling me, Theo?”

A pained expression came over his face. “I was just trying to scare her, that’s all. Just get her and Swampy to back down and realize they can’t push my friend Jack Swyteck around.”

Jack felt chills. “So what did you do?”

“That’s enough,” said Rick.

Theo stopped, startled by the interruption. His lawyer continued, “This discussion is taking a completely different track from what I expected. As Theo’s lawyer, I say this meeting’s over. Theo, don’t say another word.”

“Theo, come on, now,” said Jack.

“I said that’s enough,” said Rick. “I don’t care if you are his friend. I won’t stand for anyone pressuring my client into saying something against his own best interest. You told him to listen to his lawyer, not to you or to Rosa. At least play by your own rules.”

“Let them go,” said Rosa.

Theo rose and said, “We’ll get this straightened out, man. Don’t worry.”

Jack nodded, but it wasn’t very convincing. “We’ll talk.”

Rick handed Jack a business card and said, “Only if I’m present. Theo has counsel now, and you talk to him through me. Those are the new rules.”

Jack could only watch in silence as Theo and his new lawyer turned and walked out, together.

•

Katrina switched on the lights at 8:00 A.M. As usual, she was the first to reach the combined offices of Viatical Solutions and Bio-Research, Inc. That hour to herself before nine o’clock was always the best time to get work done.

And it was the best time to snoop.

She walked by her work station in the back, past the filing cabinets, and down the hall to Vladimir’s office. The door was locked, but a little finesse and a duplicate key solved that problem. She was sure she was alone, but it still gave her butterflies to turn the knob and open the door.

Over the past eight months she’d had her share of close calls. Rifling through the files of a money-laundering operation was dangerous work. Sam Drayton was a prick, and she hadn’t gone undercover with any illusion that the U.S. government would bail her out of trouble. Truth be told, she’d gotten everything she’d wanted from the feds, which was nothing more than a chance to get inside the Russian mob without risk of going to jail. Katrina had her own agenda, and she was closer than ever to reaching it-at least until Theo Knight had come along. With him sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, time was truly of the essence.

She walked carefully around Vladimir’s massive desk to the computer on his credenza. It had taken nearly sixteen weeks of casual conversations about his mother’s birthday, his dog’s name, his old street-number in Moscow, but finally she’d cracked his password.

She typed it once on the blue screen, then again at the prompt: kamikaze.

It stood for “Kamikaze Club,” a Moscow bar where Russian mobsters used to gather with their well-dressed mistresses to get smashed on vodka and bet on the fights. Young men were pulled off the streets, thrown into the ring, and ordered to slug it out with their bare hands. Only one would walk out alive. The loser ended up in a landfill, eyes gouged out, jaw torn off. After five impressive victories, Vladimir earned himself a job as a bodyguard for a vor v zakone, “thief in law,” the highest order of made men in the Mafiya.

Katrina logged on to his Internet server and scrolled down the e-mails he’d sent over the last week. She recognized the usual money-laundering contacts, but this morning her focus was on that shipment of blood to Sydney. The buyers had requested a specimen from an AIDS-infected white female, but the only blood in their vault was typical of junkies, filled not just with AIDS but also hepatitis, and any number of parasites and street illnesses that made their blood unsuitable for strict AIDS research. Somehow, Vladimir had come up with three liters of AIDS-infected blood from an otherwise clean source.

Only then did Swyteck’s theory about that woman in Georgia seem not so cockeyed.

The fifth e-mail confirmed it. The message was to an investor in Brighton Beach, written in Vladimir’s typical bare-bones style, the less said, the better. “Insurer: Northeastern Life and Casualty. Policy Number: 113855-A. Benefit: $2,500,000. Decedent: Jody Falder, Macon, Georgia. Maturity date…”

The date chilled her. All within a matter of days, Vladimir had fresh, AIDS-infected blood to ship to Sydney, and his viatical investors were in line for a big payday. It hardly seemed coincidental.