Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) (19 page)

It’s the mustache that does it.

Old days
is right.

The summer of 1986, to be exact. I was just twenty-four years old, younger than Jeff is now. A first lieutenant assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division at Ft. Polk, living off base in nearby Leesville, Louisiana. We all knew we had to assist him with whatever he requested, but none of us knew his real name. One of the sergeants, taking into consideration the facial hair, dubbed him Magnum.

I knew Nesbitt after all. And what I remember, I do not like.

Interlude : 1986

The housing block
where the cabana boys were quartered wasn’t difficult to locate, not once I started looking. The trick was making do without the help of Sgt. Crewes or anyone likely to report back to him. The man had ears all over the base. I spent a few hours each night camped out in my car, keeping an eye on the block with a starlight scope, all without the sergeant’s knowing. My first surveillance.

I never saw Magnum there, but I spotted a couple of guys I took to be handlers. They escorted the group when it left the building, functioning more like tour guides than guards. Occasionally they went out on errands, returning with groceries or beer or, on one occasion, a van-load of women in high heels and skimpy dresses. Through the scope I couldn’t make out any features—either of the men or the prostitutes they’d procured. That night in particular I left with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Good-time girls on base?” Crewes said in mock horror. “Something’s gotta be done. Next thing you know, there’ll be dancing.”

“I’m just asking.”

I’d brought up the subject without explaining my interest, saying I’d heard from some of the investigators that it was getting to be a problem.

“You never struck me as the puritanical type, sir.”

“Last time I checked, it was illegal.”

“So it is,” he said thoughtfully. “So it is.”

A day later I was standing at attention in front of Maj. Shattuck’s desk, with the major looking right through me. He didn’t need to say a word, but he did anyway.

“March, I thought we’d gone over this. I told you to steer clear of the man. I told you to have nothing to do with him, that he was dangerous. Do you know something I don’t?”

“No, sir—”

“Because you must
think
you do, otherwise why go against me on this? I was looking out for you, son, and you’re throwing it in my face.”

“No,
sir
!”

“What other explanation is there?”

A long silence.

“Explanation, sir? For what, sir?”

Shattuck gave me a withering look of disgust. He opened a file folder lying on the desk before him, wrote a note inside, then slid it away. “From now on, Lieutenant March, you will follow my instructions. You will not have any contact with that man. You will not go anywhere near the housing where his people are quartered. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You must have a pretty high opinion of your abilities,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

I did, but I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to ask who’d informed him, though I knew the answer had to be Sgt. Crewes. Subtle as I’d attempted to be, I’d given the game away with my questions. I also wanted to know what harm it did to keep an eye on things. Something was going on under our noses that the major didn’t like any more than I did. In fact, while my feelings had been conflicted, he knew that Magnum meant trouble from the start. So why warn me off like this?

“You have nothing to say?” Shattuck asked.

“No, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

———

I was tempted to drive by the housing block that night, not to stop but to roll by casually and give the place a glance. But I thought of all the other cars parked on the street and remembered the warrant officer who’d been trailing Magnum from the
PX
. There was no point in bringing aggravation down on my head.

I managed to clock César a couple of times on base, though. Whenever I did, tagging along to see where he was heading. In the mornings I jogged through the picnic tables in search of random encounters, but the cabana boys had moved their party elsewhere.

The one time I spotted Magnum, it was at a bookstore off base. He was browsing through the high-tone foreign policy journals shelved by the newspapers, the ones nobody ever bought, so I ducked into the history section to avoid being spotted. It didn’t work. When I looked up from a volume on warfare in the classical world, Magnum was staring at me from across the store. He winked, then disappeared out the door.

I dropped the picnic detour from my morning path, returning to my old route. On the sidewalk at a quarter past seven, I jogged past a couple of parked cars in front of an officers’ housing unit, swinging wide to avoid a woman who was slipping an overnight bag into an open hatchback. A few steps later I stopped and turned. She shut the hatch before noticing my presence. Her hand went unconsciously to the stud in her nose.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You remember me, don’t you?”

“Of course,” she said, smiling, though I could tell she didn’t. “Good to see you.”

I shook my head. “I’m not a customer, ma’am. We ran into each other about a week ago. You were bolting out of a car, and there I was.”

“Oh.” The smile faded. “That was you? Are you all right? I didn’t—no, of course I didn’t. How could I? Hurt you, I mean.”

“You didn’t hurt me. But I was concerned. You got out of there in a hurry.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

“The man in the car. His name is César, right?”

She shrugged. “If you say so. Look, I should probably get out of here.” She nodded at the houses behind me. “This is supposed to be a surgical strike, you know? In and out. No witnesses.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

It was the wrong question to ask. Her cheeks flushed and she started digging in her purse for the car keys.

“No, wait. I’m just trying to help. I want to know what was going on in that car.”

She got the door open, then paused to laugh. “You really are sweet, you know that? I could tell you what was going on, but I wouldn’t want to corrupt your morals . . . or put any ideas into your head.”

“You should be careful around that guy.”

“No kidding,” she said. She slammed the door and drove away. For the second time I watched her go. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. A student, maybe. She had a nice car, wore decent clothes, didn’t look at all like my idea of a prostitute. Not that I subscribed to any heart-of-gold hypothesis. Not that I romanticized the underworld or its inhabitants. She just seemed too . . . something. Too
real
to do what she did.

I hadn’t gotten her name. I hadn’t written down her license plate number or anything like that. There was no way of tracking her down after the fact, declaring my identity and giving her some kind of warning to stay off base. With nothing but a sense of confusion, a sense of uneasiness to go on, I took a few steps and kept on running.

I should have tried harder than that.

My un
ion attorney,
no stranger to officer-involved shootings, meets me in advance of my official sit-down with Internal Affairs, telling me he’s expecting a walkover. “You’re in the clear on this, no question. If they want to make out that excessive force was used, the fact that you were unfamiliar with the weapon should answer that.” I wish I could share his confidence. As we file into the interview room, I scan the
IAD
office for Wilcox. He’s nowhere to be seen.

The detective with the tan lines on the side of his head conducts the questioning, with a colleague waiting in the wings to take notes. I brace myself for a grilling, remembering his demeanor at the hospital, but my attorney’s assessment proves prophetic. We work through the events leading up to the shooting step-by-step, without hostility. He asks the questions, I answer, and he moves right on without challenging what I’ve said. After a few minutes, we’re in a comfortable rhythm. My attorney relaxes into his chair.

“Let’s take a break,” the detective says once we’ve gone through the story beginning to end. He sends his colleague out for coffee, then splits for a bathroom break.

The attorney smiles. “I think that went well.”

“I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

When the interview resumes, three more
IAD
personnel sit down across the table, bringing their total to five. The newcomers are armed with old case files, every shooting I’ve been involved in going back to my days on patrol.

“You’re no stranger to this process,” the tan-lined detective says. “Some cops go through their whole careers without firing a shot in anger. You’re not one of them.”

The attorney’s done his homework. “All of those shootings came back clean according to this very department. You’re not suggesting Internal Affairs dropped the ball, are you?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. It just seems like, if you’re accustomed enough to the process, maybe it gets easier and easier to pull that trigger.”

“It’s hard to imagine any officer in Detective March’s situation acting differently.”

“Perhaps. We’re just concerned that what we’re seeing here is a pattern.”

The lawyer suggests this is something to explore in post-trauma counseling, not an
IAD
interview room. They spar back and forth in a passionless, technical way, like chess players making well-known moves, fully anticipating each rejoinder. I’m not sure exactly what purpose is served. After ten minutes, they arrive at a draw and agree to suspend the match—for now.

“What was that all about?” I ask in the hallway.

The attorney shakes his head. “What they’re saying is, We’ve got nothing, but we’re not ready to let it go. I was hoping we could get you back to work. Unfortunately they’re going to drag things out as long as possible.”

“And how long is that?”

“It all depends,” he says.

“On what?”

“On whether they find anything or not.”

———

Wanda receives my update on the Internal Affairs situation without surprise, thanks me for dropping by, and dismisses me with a wave of her hand. “Until they give you a clean bill of health, I don’t think you should be seen around here.” I ask halfheartedly about administrative duties, not wanting to be stuck at my desk. She doesn’t even respond.

“I’m just gonna check in with Cavallo,” I say. “Make sure she doesn’t have any questions about the case load.”

Cavallo’s work space looks serene and tidy, all the paperwork stacked just so. She motions for me to wait as she finishes up a phone call. From her end of the conversation I surmise she’s going back and forth with the crime lab about the priority of evidence. She hangs up the phone with a satisfied smile.

“The thing I love about homicide is all your requests go to the top of the list.”

“Theoretically,” I say.

There hasn’t been any progress on the Ford homicide, she tells me, and the last she heard from the team investigating Lorenz’s death, they hadn’t come up with an identification on the man with the skull ring, either. “Your open
IAD
case is the only thing keeping them from declaring victory. If they could, I think they’d just as soon call it even and go home.”

“Theresa, I need to bring you into the loop.”

Her eyebrows rise. “Meaning what? You’ve been holding something back?”

“We can’t do this here. Can you get away sometime? And I need you to do me a favor, too. I’m a little wary about approaching Wilcox directly, but you two got along when we were all working to bring down Reg Keller. I want you to set up a meeting with him so I can crash it.”

“You’re asking for a lot.”

“In return I’ll give a lot back. I have some new information that leads me to believe we missed something the first time around with Keller. It might have a bearing on your case. Since Wilcox did all the digging into Keller’s finances, we need his cooperation.”

“You think ambushing him is the way to get it?”

“I tried knocking on the front door.”

“He wouldn’t answer?”

I catch Wanda watching us through her open door. “I’ll tell you later. Just set something up and call me, okay? I’ll be eternally grateful.”

To her credit she doesn’t make me beg. We’ve been down this road before. Without losing any of her skepticism or even bothering to hide it, she still agrees to help out. “But if you have been holding back on me . . .”

———

The meeting takes place in a downtown deli, one of the many that serves the lunch throng before closing up shop at three o’clock. They’ve commandeered a table for two and pulled up a third chair as if expecting someone. Wilcox doesn’t look surprised to see me. Cavallo must have tipped him off to the plan, uncomfortable with the idea of luring him under false pretenses. The fact that he’s still showed up is a good sign.

“You want anything?” Cavallo asks, lifting a half-eaten sandwich.

I shake my head. “There’s a question you have to answer, Stephen, before we can go any further. The other night after we talked, when you called me back with Englewood’s number, were you telling the truth about remembering him after the fact?”

He shifts in his chair. “Look . . .”

“Just answer the question.”

“Yes and no,” he says. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because Englewood tried to have me killed.”

They both freeze.

“
What?
”

“After I left him, some guys in a black Hummer ran me off the road on Allen Parkway. They came down the embankment with guns drawn, and I had to hide in the bushes or they would’ve shot me. The only person who could have tipped them off is Englewood, and you’re the one who sent me to him.”

“You think
I
set you up?”

“I don’t think anything. I’m just asking the question.”

Cavallo sips her drink through a long straw, her eyes darting back and forth like she’s watching a show.

Wilcox gives her an incredulous look. “Are you hearing this?”

“There were shots fired on Allen Parkway,” Cavallo says. “Patrol responded, but nobody was on the scene. They did find some skid marks. That was
you
?”

“Off the record, yes.”

“Well, I had nothing to do with it,” Wilcox says, “and I’m shocked you would even have to ask. All the time we worked together and you still don’t have a clue about what makes me tick.”

“I could say the same thing. But you said ‘yes and no.’ So explain the ‘no’ part.”

He curls in on himself, crossing his legs, tightening his arms over his chest, like the diagram labeled
CLOSED
in the body-language handbook. But he does talk. After our conversation, he says, it occurred to him to phone a colleague who’d worked the Nesbitt shooting, not to pump the man for information on my behalf but to report the contact. “I figured they’d want to know if questions were being asked.” Less than five minutes after that call ended, Wilcox got a call from Englewood, asking that his number be passed along. “Explaining all of that back and forth would have been too complicated.”

“So you lied to me instead.”

“I didn’t lie,” he says, his cheeks flushed. “I paraphrased.”

“Can one of you tell me who this Englewood guy is?” Cavallo asks.

We exchange a look and Wilcox shrugs. “You go ahead,” he says.

I summarize what I know about Tom Englewood, repeating his metaphor about the governmental High Road and the corporate Low Road, and that leads into an explanation about Andrew Nesbitt and his contested shooting.

“Why this matters to you,” I tell her, “is that when we found our headless John Doe on the basketball court, Lorenz noticed that the body was arranged with the finger deliberately pointing. He thought maybe if we followed the dotted line, we’d find the head. But just before he was killed, he worked out the real significance of that pointing finger.”

“Which was?”

In answer I produce a page from my own Key Map, identical to the one taken from Brandon Ford’s office, indicating the crime scene, then tracing the direction of the line until it intersects with Allen Parkway. “This,” I say, tapping the map, “is where Nesbitt was shot.”

She takes the map, studies it, then does her own impression of closed body language. “That’s a pretty big thing to omit from your report.”

“I didn’t,” I say. “Bascombe knows.”

“Well, he didn’t say anything to me.”

I tell her about our visit to Bea Kuykendahl’s basement office at the
FBI
, then produce the file on Brandon Ford, opening it up to the photograph.

“There’s something else. You told me they haven’t identified the guy I shot. The fact is, I got a look at the other one without his mask. The same man was there the night I was run off the road. He seemed to be the group’s leader.”

“And you have a description?” Wilcox asks.

“I have more than that. I have a photo.” I tap the picture on the table in front of me. “It was Brandon Ford.”

“But . . .” His voice trails off. “What?”

Cavallo doesn’t say a word. She just glares at the photograph.

“So what you’re saying . . .” Wilcox struggles with his thoughts, not wanting to speak them out loud. “Didn’t the
DNA
come back with a . . . ?”

“The lieutenant knows all this?” Cavallo says. “Wanda’s gonna crucify him.”

“You can’t say anything to Wanda.”

“March, I can’t
not
say anything.”

“This has to stay here. It can’t go beyond this table. I wanted you both here because I feel like I can trust you, and you both have a stake in this.”

“Not me,” Wilcox says. “It’s none of my business.”

“According to Englewood, it is. He told me something interesting as we were saying goodbye. He figured I wouldn’t live to share the information. He said we had a mutual friend, Reg Keller, and that he was an investor in Keller’s operation. Now the three of us brought Keller down, but it was you, Stephen, who uncovered all the financial shenanigans related to his shell company. So yes, you do have a stake, because in all that work you seem to have missed something. I think we all did.”

“What do you expect from us?” Cavallo asks.

“Very quietly, without raising any suspicion, we have to reopen that case. We need to know what the connection between Keller and Englewood was. And we need to see if anyone knows where Reg Keller is now.”

Wilcox shrugs. “Argentina, I thought. That’s the rumor.”

“That’s old information,” Cavallo says. “And it was never more than speculation. The guy who swindled Keller out of his money—Chad something—”

“Chad Macneil,” I say.

“Right. When he turned up dead in Buenos Aires, people thought it was Big Reg settling the score. I don’t think there was anything more to it than talk.”

“We need to find out. Can you check into that?”

She gives me a frosty look. “I think my days of carrying water for you are pretty much done, Roland. This was the last straw. Jerry was my friend.”

“Mine, too. I mean that.”

Neither one of them looks very convinced. I knew it would be hard, and I knew there would be some resentment to overcome. Somehow, though, I’d imagined that my revelations were strong enough in themselves to win both Cavallo and Wilcox over. Now I begin to wonder.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” Cavallo says. “I’m going to have to think it over. Frankly, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I’d feel comfortable withholding information from Wanda. You told your boss everything, so why shouldn’t I tell mine?”

“Do you think she’ll listen?”

“That’s not the point.”

“If I were you,” Wilcox tells her, “I wouldn’t say a word. The one part of this story I can attest to is this: there’s an enormous amount of outside pressure on the Internal Affairs investigation. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but I’d say there have to be some powerful interests involved. If it’s true that Ford, your homicide victim, is alive and kicking, and the database still came back with a match . . . well, I don’t know what to think about that. But I’m not gonna breathe a word about it, if you know what I mean.”

“Because you don’t believe it?” she asks.

“Because I don’t know what to believe.”

“Listen,” I say. “I’m not asking either one of you to walk out on the limb with me. Only I can’t do this alone, not from the outside. What it comes down to is this: do you trust me?”

Silence.

“I’m serious. Do you trust me?”

Cavallo frowns. “It’s not that I don’t—”

“Then help me. Simple as that. Theresa, you can find out if there’s anything concrete linking Keller to the murder in Argentina. Stephen, you can search for the connection between Keller’s finances and Tom Englewood.”

“And what about you?” Wilcox asks.

“Me? I’m on leave.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I do have a lead to follow up,” I say, thinking of the safe house. “There’s a guy who used to work for Nesbitt who’s turned me on to something. According to him, there was a package Nesbitt wanted me to have, only it was stolen. But look at this.” I reach into my briefcase for the file on myself. “It’s identical to the one on Ford, so they come from the same source.”