Concrete Evidence (47 page)

Ricky had been born in Canada. His father was Cuban and mother French Canadian. Ricky wasn’t a natural-born American. Hell, he wasn’t even an American citizen.

By constitutional law Ricky Guerrero couldn’t be President of the United States of America.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-
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E
RICA LOOKED AT THE PICTURE
of Edward Drake in shock. He should have told her he’d worked on the Thermo-Con project. He could have saved her hours and hours of fruitless research. She considered bringing the photo to Lee but stopped herself. Here it was, only his second day as top man in the office and the FBI was wreaking havoc. This could wait.

She reached for the second envelope. Funny, but the results of the DNA test hardly mattered now. The FBI was collecting their own evidence and had already told her they weren’t interested in this because the results wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law. Regardless, she would now find out if a Menanichoch tribal member had licked the envelope she’d found on Jake’s boat.

She broke the seal and carefully read the cover letter. The lab technician explained an abnormality in the results. While they were looking for genetic markers of the same heritage, they’d noticed substantial overlap, to the degree that they’d run a second test. The second test was conclusive: Sample A, the bone found in the Thermo-Con basement, was a matrilineal match with the DNA of Sample B. She felt lightheaded and oddly afraid as she understood Sample A was Joseph Talon’s mother.

Sample C was even more disturbing. Sample C was an exact match of Sample B. Sample C, taken from the envelope she’d recovered in Jake’s cabin, was none other than Senator Joseph Talon.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-
T
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L
EE SAT IN A CONFERENCE
room with two FBI agents, watching as they dissected the network. He pointed to a section of code and told the agent to stop. “That line is broken. Ninety-nine percent of the time it wouldn’t matter, because the line isn’t usually run on startup, but when a user forces the program to run that bit of code, the program must skip this whole sequence.” He pointed to hundreds of lines of code that followed.

“What’s the sequence that’s skipped?”

He studied the following lines of code. “Network Log-in,” he said after a long pause. “If a hacker can access that line, they can bypass security and enter the network without anyone knowing they’d been there.”

The younger agent looked at him with suspicion.

“I’m good at what I do,” he said.

He glanced up to see Erica waving to him from the window next to the door. He got up and met her in the hallway, closing the door behind him. “You going home?”

“Yeah. The Thermo-Con research arrived, but it can wait.”

She looked upset, but given everything that had transpired in the last few days, he couldn’t blame her. He pulled her against him and held her for a long moment. He couldn’t quite believe how crazy he was about this woman. “I love you. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

“Good,” she said. “I need you.”

This was real. The lies were behind them.

“Thank you,” she murmured against his lips. “For everything you’ve done for me.”

“For us.”

She looked unsure but repeated, “For us.”

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

She gave him a melancholy smile. “I’m still figuring things out, I guess. It’s going to take some time for me to process all that’s happened.” She paused. “Lee, I’m curious, did the senator know you were pretending to be an intern?”

“No. He didn’t know a thing. I nearly had a heart attack when you showed up at the restaurant where Joe and I were having lunch. I was worried you’d call me your intern and introduced you as my girlfriend because he thought we’d met through JT, not the office.”

“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”

“We didn’t want his opponents to claim he had anything to do with the business or investigation. The last thing Joe needs is to be accused of being part of a nonexistent cover-up.”

“You were protecting him.” She flashed a wry smile, then shook her head.

“It’s over now.”

“But no one from the company has been arrested.”

“When the employees in Iraq start talking, we’ll know who was involved.”

“Lee, have you considered the possibility
Joe
is involved?”

Her words hit him like a lightning rod, and he dropped his arms, releasing her. Alarm crossed her face, followed by hurt, and worst of all, fear.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m tired. I should go.”

“No, I’m sorry. You just surprised me, that’s all.” He reached for her, but she was stiff, tense, and didn’t relax against him. “The answer is no. I’ve never considered Joe a suspect. He wouldn’t be involved in something like this.”

“But if Sam Riversong could be involved, why not Joe?”

He shrugged. “I know Joe. He’s a man of integrity. But I don’t know Sam.” He saw the shuttered look in her gray eyes, and a disturbing thought occurred to him. “Erica, you need to be careful who you say things like this to. It’s okay to talk to me, of course, but every reporter in the country wants to interview you. Anything you say—to anyone—could be quoted to a reporter. You can’t say you suspect Joe. He’s innocent, but your suspicion could kill the campaign.”

She cupped his face between her hands. “I should go. I love you, Lee.” She kissed him with surprising urgency. “Remember that I love you.”

He watched her leave, feeling troubled. She sounded like she didn’t expect to see him again.

E
RICA SLIPPED THROUGH
the parking garage and made it to her car without any of the reporters noticing her. She supposed wearing her hair down was a disguise of sorts. On the drive home, she considered what she would do, reeling from what she’d discovered.

Before talking to Lee, she’d gone through the Thermo-Con file and read every article she could find about the missing boy and his mother. She’d come to one inescapable conclusion: Joseph Talon was Ricky Guerrero. He and his mother disappeared from Fort Belmont in November 1952 and were reported missing one day before the Thermo-Con house was poured. She knew from the senator’s biography that was around the time the orphaned Joseph Talon arrived at the Indian boarding school. No one knew the exact date because when the school burned, all the records were lost.

But more important than his false background was the fact that Joseph Talon was behind the smuggling. There could be no other explanation. At first she’d worried Lee was involved, but logic ruled him out. Without Lee, they wouldn’t have raided Novak’s boat and found the money. And JT would never have set Lee to find the smugglers if he were involved. He’d have sent in someone incompetent, someone to perform a token effort to allay suspicion. JT was also clear.

She’d wanted to tell Lee everything, but his reaction to her question was sharp, vehement. He wouldn’t believe Joe was guilty without concrete evidence.

The envelope wouldn’t convince him any more than it would convince the FBI or a jury. Only she had seen the envelope in Jake’s cabin; only she knew the photos of artifacts from the Iraq museum had been inside. If she told Lee what she knew without solid proof, he’d be angry. Her accusations could be a fatal blow to their nascent relationship. And Lee was the only person in the world she had.

She could see the satellite trucks parked in front of her building from the 395 exit ramp. The press had arrived. She passed her building as she tried to decide what to do, and ended up pulling up to the curb three blocks away.

She could probably get into her building through the parking garage without being seen. Or she could go straight to the front door and stop and make a statement. Maybe then they’d go away. But what would she say? What sort of horrid questions would the reporters ask?
How does it feel to fight two armed men and then watch sniper bullets blow out their brains?

She stared at the tall antennas on the vans parked in front of her building and wondered why anyone would crave media attention. She didn’t want her fifteen minutes. She didn’t want fifteen seconds.

But the YouTube clip of her fight with Jake and Marco had convinced the world she wasn’t the drug smugglers’ accomplice, and she was grateful for that, because while the FBI might have eventually been convinced of her innocence, the rest of the world, not having access to the evidence, would not have been so forgiving.

People could review the same evidence and form conflicting opinions, but they trusted what they saw with their own eyes. Just as she trusted what she knew, because she’d found the envelope.

An idea struck her with the force of a blow. She might not want her new fame—notoriety, really—but she could use the media attention to trap the senator.

T
HE REPORTER TOOK
E
RICA’S
call immediately and accepted her offer of a private interview with gushing excitement. Erica met the woman in front of the fish market a few blocks from her apartment. The ambitious newswoman was even more eager than she’d been last Wednesday morning, when she stood in front of the casino and spoke of the Aztec Room and Joseph Talon.

Erica outlined what she wanted. The reporter called her producers, and within minutes, they acquiesced fully to every condition, causing Erica to marvel at her change in circumstances.

Erica Kesling wanted a camera hidden in her apartment with a live broadcast feed?

No problem.

She promised a scoop the networks would kill for?

Excellent.

How about three hidden cameras?

In the end, they agreed on two.

Thirty minutes later, Erica, the reporter, and a cameraman drove into the underground garage and parked in her usual space. She led them up to her eighth-floor apartment. The cameraman hid one camera inside a throw pillow on the sofa and the other in the living room curtains.

Everything was perfect. The reporter and cameraman left for the remote-operations van already parked in front of the building. They’d begin broadcasting when Erica gave a prearranged hand signal.