Under the Color of Law (18 page)

Stay out of this. Agent Perry doesn't like you. I don't know what that's about. But if you're smart, don't give him an excuse to play hardball."

"Charlie can be obnoxious," Kerney said.

Powers shrugged.

"There are over twenty-two thousand special agents in the Bureau, Chief, and there is no charm-school requirement for academy applicants."

Kerney walked down the post office steps. Powers had deliberately warned him that he was being watched. That made Frank's other assertions seem highly questionable.

While his wife skied the mountain, Randall Stewart kept an eye on his two young sons, Lance and Jeremy, as they practiced on the kiddie slope.

The boys, ages six and eight, had improved their technique this season, but they were at least a year away from being able to ski the more difficult intermediate runs.

Stewart's interrogation by the FBI agent had put him into a total panic, and the only thing he could think to do was leave town for a while.

Springing the idea of an impromptu skiing trip on his wife hadn't been easy. Lori liked everything planned and orderly. Keeping up a cheery front, Stewart had prevailed with Lori by pointing out that her business was slow this time of year, both children were doing extremely well in school, and it was time to be a little more spontaneous about family fun before the boys were grown and gone.

He booked a suite in a lodge in Red River, high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Taos, packed up Lori's Volvo, and drove the family out of Santa Fe as soon as he possibly could.

As Lance, his youngest, took a spill and got up laughing, Stew art tried to contain his worry about the threats the FBI agent had made. To have his affair with Phyllis exposed would most likely mean the end of his marriage, and to be branded a suspected traitor would surely destroy his career. He had no doubt that the threats would be carried out if he ever mentioned anything at all about the envelope.

Still stunned by the memory of his interrogation, he shook his head in an attempt to wipe it out of his mind. He looked up just as Lori came down the mountain, and fixed a smile on his face when she approached.

"There's eleven inches of new powder on top of the mountain," she said, eyes dancing, waving at the boys.

"It's wonderful."

"Aren't you glad I talked you into this?" Randall asked.

"Very," Lori said, brushing his cheek with her lips.

"It's your turn on the slopes. But you'd better get up there before the storm closes in. I'll take the boys back to the lodge and get something whipped up for lunch."

"I'll be back in an hour," Randall said, reaching for his skis.

"It's dinner out tonight, just you and me. I've made reservations and the lodge has found us a sitter."

"This is a lot of fun," Lori said.

"That's what I wanted to hear," Randall said. He kissed his pretty wife, wondering why he'd been so stupid about Phyllis Terrell. He watched her gather up the boys, and ski them off to the lodge, a short distance away.

Randall turned his attention to the mountain. A good, hard run was just what he needed. Work up a sweat. He got in the lift line and a woman joined him on the chair.

"Have you skied Red River before?" she asked.

Randall nodded and looked at the woman. Rather ordinary in appearance, he guessed her to be about his age.

"Several times."

"Some people who just came down the mountain said the Cat Skinner run is excellent. Have you done that?"

"It's rated difficult," Randall said, nodding.

"Are you a good skier?"

"I am. But I've never skied here before and I'd rather follow someone down who knows the terrain. Would that be an imposition?"

"Not at all," Randall replied.

The woman flashed a big smile.

"Super."

They got off the lift. Randall waited while the woman adjusted her bindings.

People flowed around them and skied off.

"New equipment," she explained apologetically as she buttoned up.

"Cat Skinner is to the left," Randall said.

"Lead on," the woman said.

"Get me pointed in the right direction and I'll beat you to the bottom."

Randall smiled at the prospect of some friendly competition.

"We'll see about that."

A third of the way down, Randall Stewart picked up good speed. He caught some air on a small bump and the woman stayed right with him.

The woman took a quick look back. No one was behind her. She ran Stewart off the powder and into a tree. The glancing impact sent him careening, spinning wildly on his backside, his left ski twisted awkwardly under his body. He slid to a stop and tried to get his leg untangled, but the pain was too intense.

The woman reached him as he lay in the snow under some trees out of sight of the run.

"Jesus, why the fuck did you run into me?" Stewart asked, panting from the pain.

The woman took a handgun from inside her parka, bent over, slammed it full force against Stewart's forehead, and heard his skull bone shatter.

That should do it, Agent Applewhite thought, as she watched Stewart's breathing slow and finally stop.

The snow fell harder now as the cloud dipped over the mountain. Soon their ski tracks would be completely covered.

She turned away from the body and continued her run down the mountain, feeling a rush of adrenaline as she cut through the fresh powder.

Detective Bobby Sloan returned to headquarters, took possession of an empty office assigned to the crime prevention unit, and spent the rest of the morning and part of the early afternoon going through the paperwork in Father Mitchell's briefcase, viewing some of the videocassettes found in the locker at the college, and sampling excerpts of what looked to be at least ten hours of audio tapes Mitchell had also stashed in his briefcase.

In a general way the video- and audiotapes Sloan previewed explained a good deal about Mitchell's research. The priest had been probing into intelligence matters. But it was hard to see what his focus was.

Mitchell had conducted interviews about the U. S. Army School of the Americas, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the National Security Agency, the U. S. Army Intelligence and Security Command-Sloan now knew what INS COM stood for-and a host of other agencies that included the departments of state, treasury, and defense.

A number of interviews touched on a government institution he'd never heard of before, a Joint Military Intelligence College that offered undergraduate and graduate spy-craft degrees to care fully selected military and civilian intelligence personnel.

It was all eye-opening, informative stuff about the scope of government intelligence operations. But it was also all over the map, and Sloan couldn't get a handle on what the priest had been trying to accomplish.

However, he was willing to bet the farm that Mitchell's murder was directly tied to his research. That at least gave Sloan a start on figuring out the motive for the killing.

Mitchell had kept copies of some important personal and professional documents in the briefcase. His army retirement papers showed that his last posting had been at the School of Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia. There was a letter from the secretary of the army to Mitchell's mother, expressing condolences regarding the death of the priest's brother, another letter from a U. S. embassy official that reported the colonel had been attacked and killed by bandits, and a copy of the resignation letter Father Mitchell had submitted to the college where he'd been teaching. The priest had quit his job a month after his brother's death.

Sloan pawed through an envelope stuffed with credit-card, hotel, and airplane-ticket receipts. Mitchell had been doing some whirlwind traveling during the last three months, taking short trips to places like San Antonio and Tucson, and many longer jaunts to Washington, D.C." and Georgia.

Sloan arranged everything by date to get a clear picture of Mitchell's schedule, then totaled up the charges, which ran over five thousand dollars. Bobby wondered how the priest had been able to pay for such travel on a retired major's pension.

Sloan fanned through a pocket notebook filled with the names and addresses of people Mitchell had kept track of. He'd known a hell of a lot of folks scattered all across the country. Some addresses correlated with the places Mitchell had recently visited, some names had stars or checkmarks next to them, and some entries had been crossed out.

Bobby put the notebook aside and went through two correspondence files from the briefcase. One held six years' worth of letters Mitchell had written to the secretary of the army requesting more specific information about the death of his brother under the Freedom of Information Act. Each request had been turned down. All Mitchell had received for his efforts was an official army criminal investigation report that basically repeated the facts contained in the letter from the embassy.

The second file contained letters to the Armed Forces Records Center in St. Louis demanding the release of his brother's military service records.

Those requests also had been rejected. There was, however, a recent letter from a former officer who'd served with Mitchell's brother when he had been deputy commandant at the U. S. Army School of the Americas.

The correspondent wrote that he had no information that would be helpful to the priest but wished him good luck with his research.

From his time in the service Sloan knew that immediate family members of deceased veterans were, by law, entitled to those records. What was the army hiding about the brother's death?

Mitchell had kept his checkbook in a briefcase sleeve. Sloan scanned through the entries. Two five-thousand-dollar deposits had been made the past three months.

His retirement pay went into the account automatically. From the looks of the checks Mitchell wrote, he lived frugally and was a heavy supporter of a group that politically opposed the continued operation of the School of the Americas.

Sloan filled out evidence inventory sheets and then got on the Internet and started surfing for supplemental information that might help him fill in some of the blanks. When he was done, he checked the clock.

Day shift was over, and he hadn't even started writing up his supplemental report.

Bobby decided to talk to the chief first. He dialed Kerney's extension and the chief picked up immediately. Sloan started talking about Mitchell's briefcase filled with intelligence goodies. Kerney cut him off and told him to meet him in the staff parking lot with the evidence in five minutes.

Sloan toted everything out the back door. The chief was waiting in his unit with the motor running and the passenger door open. He got in, wondering where in the hell they were going and why. Kerney's jaw was tightly set and his mouth formed a thin, compressed line. Sloan decided it was probably better not to ask.

Kerney took Sloan to the downtown library, where they settled into the second-floor audiovisual room. Bobby gave him a quick review of the Mitchell evidence.

"Also, Brother Jerome told me that an envelope mailed to Father Mitchell was missing from his office," Sloan said, "so we've got a connection between the homicide and the burglary."

Kerney gazed out the window that overlooked Washington Avenue and the bank building across the way.

"Don't you think it's odd that we have two homicides involving national security?" Kerney asked.

"According to what I heard, the feds took that issue off the table in the Terrell case," Sloan said.

Kerney turned away from the window.

"Two things you told me put it back on the table. During his military career Ambassador Terrell served as commandant of the School of the Americas and later was the commanding general of army intelligence."

"That's interesting," Sloan said.

"Do you think Mitchell was trying to get something on Terrell?"

Kerney sat in a straight-back chair and shook his head.

"I don't know.

Mitchell's brother was at the School of the Americas long after Terrell's retirement. But he was killed while serving as a military attache in Venezuela.

That raises two additional points. Embassy attache assignments are heavily geared to intelligence gathering. And Terrell is a member of a trade mission to South America."

"You're racking up a whole lot of coincidences here, Chief."

"Give me your thoughts on Mitchell's research."

"It's a real slumgullion. At first I thought Mitchell was concentrating his investigation on the murder of his brother in South America, six years ago. That seemed to be what got him started. He left his teaching position right after his brother's death and wrote dozens of letters to the army trying to get more information about it.

The army stonewalled him."

Sloan took a sip of coffee from the jumbo-size takeout container the chief had bought him on the way to the library. It was cold and bitter tasting.

"But when you watch the videos you'll see that they jump from one subject to another, so I don't know where Mitchell was going."

"We can start with the fact that Mitchell didn't buy the story of his brother's death," Kerney said.

"Okay, at the very least a cover-up took place," Bobby said.

"Maybe the priest's brother wasn't whacked by banditos who simply wanted his cash and his car. But based on what I saw on the videotapes I watched, that theme isn't even touched on. There's an interview that concentrates on vague accusations that the army has been burying a sizable amount of money for the last five years in DEA aid to Colombia.

There's a Q and A with a U. S. Treasury official about drug money being laundered through banks in Panama. In another tape a retired army major is talking about the time he spent at the Fort Benning School of the Americas with the priest's brother that doesn't reveal diddly."