Текст книги "Hidden Order: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Brad Thor

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

CHAPTER 31

“When we get there,” said Cordero as they approached Park Street Church, “let me do the talking. Unless, of course, you also have interrogation experience.”

Harvath held up his thumb and forefinger close together. “One or two. But I’m lost without jumper cables and a bucket of water. Why don’t you do the talking when we get there.”

She was starting to believe there might be more truth to the remarks he made than he let on.

They parked in front of the Orpheum Theatre and played dodge-car crossing Tremont Street. Harvath had never seen a tweaker in person before. In fact, the only reason he was familiar with the term was because a buddy of his at Taser had told him about them. Before the company learned to lock their dumpsters up, local tweakers used to dumpster-dive behind their facility and scavenge parts.

Twitching for days on end with tons of energy and fine-motor skills, they had figured out how to, sort of, rebuild Tasers from the broken and discarded parts they had found in order to resell them on the street for drug money.

The Frankenstein devices they created were not only incredibly unreliable, but also incredibly dangerous. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating, albeit scary accomplishment.

Harvath had seen pictures of the ravages meth could visit upon people. Some of the before-and-after photos of young women were particularly heartbreaking. Not only did the drug rob them of their good looks, but it rapidly aged them, with some looking like they were seniors when they were only in their twenties and thirties. It was described as a high so irresistible that it hooked nearly everyone on the first try.

Despite being exposed to them all the time growing up in Southern California, Harvath had never been a drug guy. The only better-living-through-chemistry he allowed himself was from the three B’s—beer, bourbon, or the occasional Bordeaux. You always knew what came out of a bottle. Not many alcohol companies got nailed for “stepping” on their product.

Walking up to the two ladies from South Boston, Harvath immediately noticed their overabundance of nervous energy. It had been drilled into him to look at people’s hands and they were both doing oddball things. If he had been working a rope line as a Secret Service agent, he would have bounced both of these two. One was scratching her thighs raw while the other touched the tips of the fingers of her right hand to her thumb and then reversed the process and did it again.

The closer he got, the more makeup he noticed they were wearing. Skin lesions were a nasty side effect of the drug and they were both covering up some big problems. You’d have to be out of your mind to pay either one of these women for sex. He could only imagine what their teeth looked like. “Meth mouth,” as it was known, was a rapid decay of tooth and gum and a hallmark of crystal meth abuse.

Cordero introduced herself to the two officers and then to the two young women. They appeared to be in their mid-twenties. One was tall, but skinny as a rail, with stringy blond hair. Her name was Agnes. She looked like a local college girl who gone away on spring break, partied every night with no sleep, and was now home looking for the party to continue.

The other girl, Brittany, was shorter and still had a little bit of meat on her. Now that Harvath could see her up close, he realized her skin wasn’t that bad. She just wore a lot of makeup because that was her style. She had hair blacker than Cordero’s—undoubtedly made possible only by some very serious dye. She complemented it with black nail polish, black lipstick, and lots of eyeliner and mascara. It was the full-on Goth look and she had a short black miniskirt, tight black top, and vintage flea market jewelry to match.

Right away, it was obvious that Agnes was the talker. She was so loquacious Cordero almost couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Normally, standard procedure with witnesses was to split them up so they didn’t pollute each other’s stories. Agnes, though, was the only one who had seen the deceased with her customer last night. Brittany hadn’t seen anything and Harvath favored keeping them together. Cordero had explained what she was going to ask and he wanted to study how Ms. Piss and Vinegar reacted.

Cordero was amazing. Not only was she an excellent interrogator, she was also a pro at understanding the Southie dialect, much of which was like a foreign language to Harvath’s ear—all except the F-word, which this young woman dropped with abandon. She used it as a verb, a noun, an adverb, and an adjective. Not even in the military had Harvath heard someone’s speech so peppered with it. Cordero was old-school and didn’t care for it and warned the young woman to clean it up. To her credit, she did, though it was obviously difficult for her and she still slipped up from time to time.

Eventually, Cordero brought the conversation around to a description of the john.

“He was average,” said Agnes. “Not too short, not too tall. You know. Average.”

For her part during the interview, Brittany kept her mouth clamped tight as she ground her teeth back and forth. Harvath couldn’t tell if it was from nervousness or the meth. Considering her eyes were dilated, he figured she’d recently used, which only made her harder to read.

He had been trained in the Secret Service to watch for micro-expressions: small, almost imperceptible facial cues that indicated when a person was lying or under a tremendous amount of stress because they were concealing the truth or intent upon doing harm. It was a great tool to use in interrogation, but considering the condition of their current subjects, it might just be a waste of time.

That changed, though, when Cordero asked about the man’s hair. “He was wearing a skally,” Agnes replied, “but you could still see his whiffle.”

Harvath had no idea what a skally or a whiffle was, but Brittany did, and even in the midst of her drug-induced fidgeting, he saw her shudder.

“Hold on a second. What the hell is a whiffle and what does it have to do with whatever a skally is?” he asked the detective.

“A skally is a type of cap,” she replied.

“Like a baseball cap?”

“No. More like a driving cap.”

“And a whiffle?”

“It’s a tight haircut with clippers. Kind of like a military crew cut.”

The revelation took Harvath aback and his silence encouraged Cordero to continue the interview.

He waited until Cordero was done and then suggested they speak with Brittany alone. Agnes, of course, was keen to keep on talking. The patrol officers humored her and moved her toward the street so Harvath and Cordero could talk with Brittany.

Cordero went from good cop to bad cop so fast that Harvath almost got whiplash. She’d been downright congenial with Agnes, but then again Agnes was cooperative. The moment Brittany refused to engage, Cordero went nuclear and it scared the hell out of the young woman.

“You want to see what he did to your friend Kelly?” she pushed. “Let’s go now. C’mon. They just fished her out of the Charles. She’s still lying on the dock under a plastic tarp. He’s got a special signature, this guy. You haven’t eaten breakfast, have you?”

Brittany shook her head.

“Good, ’cause I don’t want you puking all over your shoes. We’ll take my car. You’re okay with that, right? Kelly was your friend. You want to say goodbye, right? Even if somebody comes up with the money, it’s going to have to be a closed casket service. This’ll be more personal for you. Friends should say goodbye, right? Face-to-face, as it were.”

Brittany continued to shake her head and Harvath saw her jaw tighten as she ground her teeth harder.

Cordero moved closer, deeper into her personal space. “If you think Kelly’s going to be this guy’s only victim, you’re wrong, sweetheart. She’s not even his first. You want Agnes to be next? Better yet, how about if it’s you?”

The young woman said nothing.

“See this man next to me?” the detective asked, nodding at Harvath. “He came to Boston to stop this guy. But that’s not going to happen unless you cooperate.”

Brittany’s gaze shifted to Harvath.

“Nobody needs to know you told us anything,” he said. “You’re not in any trouble here. You’ve got a chance to do something right. You can help us catch the person who killed your friend.”

“I don’t want you to catch him,” the young woman stated.

Harvath tilted his head to hear her better. “You don’t?”

“No. I want you to kill the motherfucker.”

“What did I tell your friend about that language?” Cordero interjected.

Brittany shot her daggers, while Harvath held up his hand for the detective to back off. “I understand how you feel,” he told Brittany. “There are quite a few people who’d agree with you, but we need to focus on finding this guy. Anything you can tell us, no matter how small, will help.”

The woman shifted nervously from her left foot to her right, looking back and forth between Harvath and Cordero. Finally, she settled her eyes on him and began to tell her story about the man who had photographed her yesterday in the cemetery.

Cordero took copious notes while Brittany recounted her tale. The F-bomb got dropped multiple times, but the detective was smart enough to let it go. Now that the young woman was cooperating, interrupting her narrative would have been a mistake.

It was obvious that Brittany cared not only about what had happened to Kelly Davis, but about stopping Kelly’s killer. She hadn’t seen the john who picked her up that night, but the man described by Agnes sounded exactly like the man who had assaulted her. Neither Harvath nor Cordero had reason to doubt the young woman. She had been incredibly forthright, even admitting to having solicited the would-be killer.

Cordero asked her several follow-up questions. When she was done, Brittany asked, “You’re not going to bag me for the solicitation, are you?”

“No,” the detective replied. “I’m not. I appreciate your cooperation. Is there anything else you can think of, anything at all?”

The young woman was quiet for a moment and then responded. “That’s pretty much it.”

Cordero looked at Harvath. “Anything you want to add? Any questions I missed?”

Harvath’s eyes had drifted down to Brittany’s hands again. “I do have one question.” Looking up at the young woman, he asked, “You’re right-handed, correct?”

The young woman nodded.

“So when you tried to slap him, you did it with your right hand, which is when he caught you by the wrist and twisted your right arm behind your back?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Harvath removed a wedge of cash from the pocket of his trousers and peeled off two hundred-dollar bills. Brittany’s eyes widened at the sight of the money. Pointing at the tarnished metal cuff on her right wrist, he said, “Detective Cordero could seize that as evidence, but I’d like to rent it from you. I only have one condition.”

The young woman looked at the cuff and then back up at Harvath. “What is it?”

He peeled off two more hundreds and held all four bills out for her. “You and Agnes stay off the street until Detective Cordero and I catch this guy. Deal?”

The wheels were turning in the young woman’s head. She was undoubtedly doing some sort of calculation and it wasn’t about how many holy candles she and her pal could purchase with that kind of money. Finally, she replied, “Deal.”

After tucking the money away, Brittany removed the cuff and placed it into the handkerchief Harvath had retrieved from his jacket.

He then let her rejoin her friend, while Cordero phoned her department to make sure they had the young woman’s complete arrest record in the system.

Satisfied, Cordero asked the ladies for a few more details, including contact information, and then gave each of them her business card along with her cell phone number on the back. With that, the patrol officers were asked to drive the women back to South Boston.

“You’re definitely not a cop,” the detective said to Harvath, as they watched the cruiser pull away from the curb and head toward Southie.

“Why’s that?”

“Because outside of a drug buy, no one hands over that kind of cash for something the law empowers them to take.”

Harvath shrugged. “Just because something is legal, doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing to do. Trying to keep those kids off the street for a couple of days was the right thing to do.”

Cordero shook her head. “They’re junkies. They’re going to burn through your four hundred dollars in the blink of an eye. But hey, if it buys you a good night’s sleep.”

Having seen what he had of this killer, Harvath doubted he was going to be able to sleep well anytime soon. Even if the money kept Brittany and Agnes off the street for only one night, it would be worth it.

Though he didn’t yet have physical proof that the woman pulled from the Charles River had been killed by the same person as Claire Marcourt and Herman Penning, his gut told him that he was right on the money. It also told him something else. The killer was losing control.

CHAPTER 32

FORT BELVOIR

VIRGINIA

Bob McGee had spent the better part of his career engaging in risky operations, but the minute Lydia Ryan explained her plan, he told her it was off-the-charts stupid. It was one thing to screw up and have Phil Durkin triangulate on them that way; it was something entirely different to openly invite him to come kill them, and that’s what he had felt Ryan was doing.

Just as the porch light came on, and just in case she hadn’t internalized it the last one hundred times he had said it, he stated, “This is going to go down as the mother of all bad ideas.”

“You’re overestimating your prowess in this category,” she replied as someone inside unlocked the door.

“Like hell I am” was the last remark McGee made before the door opened. He had decided to stand behind Ryan not so much because he didn’t want to appear imposing, but because if the person on the other side was armed and the rounds began flying, Ryan would suffer the fate she so rightly deserved for this idea and function as his bullet sponge while he took off running. He turned out to be wrong, but not about the being armed part.

Colonel Brenda Durkin had opened the door with her Beretta M9 pistol just out of view. One of the last people she ever expected to see on her doorstep, much less in the middle of the night in a bathrobe, was Lydia Ryan. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“We’re in trouble. Can we come in?”

The woman looked at the man standing behind Ryan as if deciding what to do, and then stood back and opened the door the rest of the way. “Of course you can.”

They sat in the kitchen, where the closest thing to coffee Durkin had to offer her guests was Diet Coke. Both Ryan and McGee accepted. Grabbing three bottles out of the fridge, she brought them over to the table and sat down.

“When I told you if there was anything I could ever do for you,” said Durkin, “I didn’t actually think you’d show up at the house. I figured maybe you’d call or send an email.”

“I know,” Ryan replied, opening her Coke. “I would never have come like this if it wasn’t serious.”

“Wait a second,” McGee interrupted. “You two actually know each other?”

Durkin looked at Ryan before responding. “I needed to make sense of my marriage, or what was left of it at the time. The only way I could do that was to meet Lydia and have her tell me, face-to-face, that nothing had happened between her and Phil. She was kind enough to do so.”

“But you still left him.”

“Our marriage had been over for a long time. Would it have been easier to end it if Phil had been having an affair? Probably. That’s why I had wanted to meet Lydia. As soon as I saw her, I was convinced they’d been having an affair. I mean, look at her.”

“Yeah,” Ryan replied, extending a clump of her ruffled hair and tugging on the lapel of her dirty robe. “Look at me.”

Durkin smiled. “Then we sat down and started talking. I wanted to believe she was sleeping with Phil because then I could blame him for everything, walk away, and never have to acknowledge my role in the fact that our marriage collapsed.”

“I threw a wrench in that plan, though, didn’t I?”

“You did. In fact, you caused me to take a deep, hard look not only at my marriage, but myself. Getting divorced was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but it was the right thing. Phil Durkin is a colossal asshole. Had Dante known that son of a bitch he would have invented a whole other circle of hell for him.”

“So what you’re saying,” McGee replied with a grin, “is that you’ve moved on. It’s all behind you at this point.”

Brenda Durkin laughed. “I guess that’s the Scottish in me. We can hold a grudge like nobody’s business.”

“If it’s any consolation, I agree with you. Not about the grudge, but about your ex being a colossal asshole. I told Lydia she should have dumped him in a shallow grave. In fact, I even offered to dig it.”

“I came close to digging one for him many times myself, but in the end, he dug his own. That’s the way it should be.”

McGee and Ryan nodded. Brenda Durkin was right.

“So why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” the Colonel said, and with that, Ryan filled her in on their story.

They talked until just before dawn. It was agreed that if they were going to hole up in her house, Brenda Durkin needed to act as if nothing had changed. That meant not missing her morning group run and not calling in sick to her position at the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. The one thing she decided to do differently was to park her car in the driveway so that McGee’s 4Runner could be kept out of sight in her garage.

Ryan tried to grab a couple of hours of sleep, but it came in fits and starts. When she finally gave up and came downstairs to the kitchen, she found McGee had had about as much luck as she had. He was sitting at the table with a Diet Coke, a café-au-lait mug full of Lucky Charms, and the television tuned to some Animal Planet program.

“Just once, I’d like to see the little guy at the back of the herd kick the lion’s teeth in,” he said as Ryan got a Diet Coke for herself and sat down next to him.

“Any word about what happened last night?”

McGee picked up the remote and clicked back over to one of the local news channels. “Not really. There was a brief mention of a car fire, but that was it. My guess is that local law enforcement kept the press from getting too close and didn’t give them much in the way of details.”

“Which means they probably don’t have much themselves.”

“Or they’ve been told not to talk.”

She took a sip of her drink and set the bottle back on the table. “What about the men you shot at your place?”

“I don’t think that’s going to make the news.”

“Why not?”

“Because I live alone. If my neighbors had heard any shots, they would have already called the cops.”

“But somebody is going to be looking for those men.”

McGee took another bite of cereal and wiped the milk from his mustache. “Of course. You know the game. When they fail to report in, a team will be sent out to check on them. They’ll show up at my place dressed like exterminators, utility workers, or some sort of contractor. They’ll have a big van with a name and backstopped phone number emblazoned along the side of it, so the neighbors won’t get suspicious.

“They’ll walk the perimeter and peek in the windows. At some point, they’ll muster up the courage to break and enter. That’s when they’ll find the bodies and will have to decide what to do.”

“Meaning, sanitize your place like it never happened or try to use the scene against you.”

McGee nodded and through another mouthful of cereal said, “I hope they sanitize it. I haven’t had a cleaning lady through that place since Reagan was in office.”

Ryan studied the crawl along the bottom of the TV screen, trying to pick up any updated information. “So what do you think? No news, then, is good news?”

“I don’t know. Maybe this thing doesn’t reach as high as we feared.”

“Meaning up to the DNI, General Johnson?”

McGee nodded. “But the flip side could be that, thanks to the Jordanians and you asking questions about your old team, you’ve surprised them and now they’re scrambling to pull their act together.”

“In order to do what?”

“If they’re willing to try to kill you, then they’d be willing to do anything, including framing you.”

“Framing me for what?”

McGee shrugged. “Depending on how high up this thing goes, you could wind up as the shooter on the grassy knoll.”

“Except for the fact that I wasn’t even born.”

“They’d find away around it, believe me. They think of everything.”

“But what about you and me? What were they going to do, kill us and just dump our bodies out there in the woods?”

He sucked the milk off his spoon and set it down on the table. “I patted down all the hitters I splashed at my place. One of them had a key fob. After I tossed my go-bag and a couple of other items in my truck, I went outside to make sure there wasn’t another team waiting for me. As soon as I felt it was safe, I kept pressing the unlock button on the fob. I finally found their vehicle parked not far from my place.”

“Was there anything inside?”

“Anything that could ID them? No. Just some picnic crap.”

Lydia looked at him. “What do you mean, picnic crap?”

“A blanket and a basket with a couple of glasses and a bottle of wine.”

“So no ID, but tons of firepower and a picnic basket? Doesn’t that seem odd?”

“All of this seems odd to me. Why? What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that could be part of a cover story. Maybe they were going to make it look like you and I were having a picnic out in the middle of the woods and got shot.”

He thought about that for a moment. “Or better yet,” he replied, “how about a murder-suicide? You kill me and then turn the gun on yourself. Not only would Phil Durkin’s problems be solved, but he’d be able to play the I-told-you-Lydia-Ryan-was-crazy card all the way to the Agency bank.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t put it past that son of a bitch.”

“I’m just speculating, of course.”

“No,” Ryan replied. “You’re right on the money. That’s exactly what he would do.”

“I don’t think either of us can be sure. Maybe the stupid picnic basket was some part of their cover.”

Her eyes narrowed as a question came to her mind. “You said there was a blanket and two wineglasses. What else was there?”

“I don’t know. I was in a bit of a hurry to get out of there, but I guess there was some food and a couple of bottles of wine.”

“What about an opener?”

“Yeah,” McGee recalled. “It wasn’t the type with the arms, though. It was a fancy, pocketknife style. Expensive-looking, you know, with that brass bee on there from that French knife-making company.”

“Laguiole.”

“That’s it.”

“Did it have a wooden handle?” she asked.

He nodded. “It did. Why?”

“Because that was my corkscrew. That son of a bitch took it, or had someone take it out of my apartment. That way, even if the police did a half-assed investigation, they’d find the empty box I normally keep it in back in a drawer in my kitchen.”

“That would make it look a lot less like the picnic was staged.”

“And more like we had undertaken it willingly,” she said, finishing his statement for him. “What kind of wine was it?”

“Give me a break, Lydia. I don’t know the first thing about wine. That’s always been your thing. I’m a bourbon guy. You think I stood there and read the labels?”

“Keep it simple. Was it red? Was it white?”

“It was dark,” McGee responded. “All I saw was black bottles with black frickin’ labels.”

She didn’t need to ask him anything more about the wine. She knew what it was. “OneHope red,” she stated. “It’s the same wine I drink at home.”

“There you go. Killing, framing or both, they’re not above anything.”

“Which means we’re racing against two clocks—whatever plot the Jordanians have uncovered, as well as whatever Phil Durkin has planned for us.”

“All the more reason for us to figure out what he’s up to and put his balls in a nice little box with a big pink bow.”

“The question, though, is going to be who do we deliver the box to?”

“It all depends on what he’s doing and what we can make stick,” McGee replied as he picked up the remote and turned back to Animal Planet.

There was a new program on. It was showing home videos of people who got too close to animal enclosures at foreign zoos. Suddenly, Ryan got an idea.

“How much cash do you have?” she asked.

“I have five grand in my go-bag. Why?”

“Because we can’t use credit cards and you need a new suit.”

McGee looked at her. “I do?”

Ryan nodded. “We’re going to go rattle a very big cage, but before we do, I want to see who’s throwing the meat into it.”