Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) (33 page)

I snatch the book up, the same copy Magnum was reading the morning I jogged past him at the picnic table.
Can you keep a secret?
And to my surprise, in blue ballpoint just inside the cover is written the name
ANDREW NESBITT
.

That confident trickster and talent spotter, grooming future dictators for the good of democracy, a would-be puppet master whose own paranoia became his undoing, who never settled the debts he owed to justice and didn’t live to see the red harvest his deeds put in motion. Like a jeweler gazing through his loupe, he had seen something in me all those years ago, some flaw of character that led him to believe I would go along with concealing a woman’s murder. And then he’d seen something else and, after a lifetime, sent me a message by way of his torturer, hoping to put that second flaw to use, my willingness to travel on the other side of the line that keeps good men on the path and bad ones in check, to balance his sheet while avenging the death of a nameless woman in 1986, and every woman who came after her, and all the rest. I look in vain for a place to set the book down. Finding none, I take it with me. Full circle and a fitting end to a story I never intended to be a part of, let alone to tell.

Life imitates art, and vice versa.
Nothing to Hide
was inspired by a true story. Houston police really did pull over a man who claimed to be a retired
CIA
agent, the man really was shot and killed by the officers who stopped him, and a bit of a mystery ensued when the government denied all knowledge of him—despite the fact that he’d been active in the city’s network of former intelligence officers for years. Andrew Nesbitt, of course, is pure fiction. When I decided it was time to send Roland March into the murky waters of the paranoid thriller, the true story served as inspiration. What do I make of the
real
mystery? I have no idea what to think.

Books are written long before their publication date. When I completed the manuscript for
Nothing to Hide
, I had no idea that Bea Kuykendahl’s reckless gunrunning operation would prove so prescient. Though it was inspired by my research into the
ATF
’s Operation Gunrunner, which Reg Keller mentions just before the bloodbath in Matamoros, I worried that plot would strain credibility. Then reality came along and lent a hand. Throughout 2011, following the death of a
DEA
agent in a cartel-related shooting in Mexico, details emerged of Operation Fast and Furious, a Gunrunner-related sting that supplied American arms to the cartels. The fallout from the resulting controversy is just beginning.

Throughout the Roland March novels, details from real life have been woven into the fictional world March inhabits, starting with the crime lab scandals that plagued Houston law enforcement for so many years. Television crime fighters have it so easy. From their slick accommodations to their up-to-the-minute technology, the flawed reality of modern law enforcement rarely intrudes. For March, by contrast, homicide has always been a hard slog. He is, to borrow Henry V’s phrase, a warrior for the working day. I like him all the more for it, and I hope you will, too.

J. Mark Bertrand

Autumn, 2011

J. Mark Bertrand
has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. After one hurricane too many, he left Houston and relocated with his wife, Laurie, to the plains of South Dakota. Find out more about Mark and the
ROLAND MARCH
series at
jmarkbertrand.com
.

THE ROLAND MARCH NOVELS

Back on Murder

Pattern of Wounds

Nothing to Hide

Beguiled
*

*with Deeanne Gist

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