Indefensible (37 page)

Chip settles into his desk chair like a sack of grain, except grain doesn't emit a long soul-weary sigh. “Dorsey's people gave him to me. He's got a rap sheet of petty shit, brought in for questioning a hundred times, but no big convictions. We never connected him to the Randall/Phippin matter. He seems to be connected to Percy Mashburn.”

“Mashburn? I thought Mashburn was small potatoes.”

“We all did. We were wrong. Mashburn franchises these little meth labs, but he's somehow involved in the overall flow of goods.”

“Shit, Chip, you never told us.”

“Just now figuring it out.”

“My God, you know we just gave Mashburn a walk on meth charges for cooperating?”

“Oops.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Almost nothing. He's got money. He lives in a big house in the hills with big south-facing windows.”

“So in this conversation,” I say, holding up the transcript, “who is Spawner talking to?”

“We don't know.”

“What's it all mean?”

“It sounds like they think Scud spilled his guts to you, so someone wants to kill you to nip any prosecution. But since you're a federal agent, it's a hot job, so they've got someone from out of town.”

“What's it mean, ‘transpond him'?”

“Weird shit,” Isler says. “There have been some suspicious deaths around the country. Car plunged off a bridge someplace out west—”

“San Jose,” Chip says.

“No, someplace else. Terrible accident; whole family killed. Witnesses say the car was sideswiped by an SUV. Turns out the guy was a hot property.”

“A naughty businessman who'd agreed to cooperate,” Chip says.

“And a house fire,” Isler says. “Everyone killed. The strange thing is, the guy somebody might have wanted whacked, another hot property, was just an overnight guest. It was his sister's place. He'd stopped in for the night on his way someplace else.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And a few others. Guys with troubles,” Isler says.

“Big guys,” Chip says.

“Big in terms of the trouble they've gotten themselves into. Risk takers, and one day they just kill themselves. Nobody thinks too much about it because, you know, they were under so much stress, until one of these deaths doesn't sit right. So this city cop in . . . Where was it, Chip, Texas?”

“Right. Texas.”

“He smells a rat, so he has the guy's car taken apart piece by piece.”

“Piece by piece.”

“And they find this transponder. It's an electronic gizmo, sends out a blip. You enter it into your GPS, and you can see where the guy is, twenty-four/seven. Or where his car is, anyhow. Easy to make it look like an accident or a suicide when you can follow a guy's every move,” Isler says.

“Take your time; wait your chance.”

“So after this Texas cop figures it out, cops all over the country start looking at the cars of guys who were big and died in accidents or fires or suicides, and damned if these transponders didn't show up in a handful of cases.”

“Thing is,” Chip says, “every one they've found has been in a
different part of the car. One was tossed under the backseat, one was welded inside the frame. And everything between.”

“Suggesting,” Isler says, “whoever is doing the hits has some local schmuck plant the thing ahead of time.”

Chip and Isler stop. Their narrative is spent, leaving me blinking in the newly constructed reality that someone not only wants me dead but is taking pains to get me there. Maybe if I'd been in a war, like Upton and Kendall and, yes, even Scud and Seth, the idea wouldn't be so hard to swallow. Or if I'd been a real cop, like Chip and Dorsey, who've probably been in standoffs with bullets zinging. But I haven't.

“When did you get this?” I ask, holding up the transcript.

“This morning.”

“So all this week, when you've been trying to reach me?”

“Other matters,” Chip says, moving his eyes uncomfortably toward Isler.

Oh yes, I forgot. Being a murder target temporarily drove from my mind that I am also a murder suspect. Everything is relative.

“Now what?” I ask.

“We're moving your car to a remote location out of town. Hopefully, this guy will find it a promising place to make his move. Then we'll take him.”

“Right now,” Isler says, “we'd rather you not go home or back to your office. If you need anything, we'll send a guy in as a furnace repairman to get it.”

“What about this Spawner guy?”

“We're looking for him, and when we find him again, we'll bring him in for questioning. He ought to be a useful source. To put it, you know, understatedly.”

There is a knock on Chip's door, and a scrawny red-haired man stands there holding a big file box. “Hi, Mr. Davis, I have personal items from your car. How you doing?”

“Fine, um . . .”

“Sparky.”

“Of course. Sparky. Sorry, I've got things on my mind.”

He puts down the box and leaves. Sparky the AV nerd. I suspected him as our snitch for a while.

Isler leaves. Chip looks sorrowful. I should be a good friend (especially since he seems to have saved my life) and make this easier for him. But I can't. I don't want to be arrested. I don't want to be a suspect. I don't want to go to prison. In my briefcase, I have a handwritten summary of all my evidence against Upton. I planned to deliver it to TMU, but with Chip about to bring the hammer down on me, I'll give it to him. Maybe it will change his mind.

“I've been trying to reach you,” Chip says. He looks miserable.

“I apologize. I've been evasive.”

“You figured out why?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry,” he says. “If there was anyone else . . .”

“But there is,” I say. I take the summary from my briefcase.

“Not really, Nick. You're thinking of my men's group, right? All nice guys. But.”

I stare at him.

“I know you held my hand all through the divorce,” he says. “Now this. Can't really blame you.”

I'm wondering if he's lost his mind. He was staring at his own fidgeting hands, but now he looks at me, and he sees that I don't have any idea in hell what he's talking about. “Sylvia,” he blurts.

I stare.

“The woman I'm seeing. Was seeing. She broke it off.” His voice cracks. “I'd even bought the ring.”

“Chip, Chip,” I say in my most soothing voice, “you should have called.”

But he did call—a dozen times, at least. Poor Chip. He never used to be this way. Or rather, he hid it deep inside his imposing six-two, 240 pounds of badass, gun-carrying, frown-wearing, Miranda-reading, family-neglecting, conservative-voting, football-watching federal-agent persona. We've been friends for a decade. I remember a briefing on Medicare fraud. Half a dozen agents and four attorneys in the Bureau's conference room. When business was finished, everyone started talking
about the most recent high school shooting in some distant state, where an apparently normal kid from a good home brought in a gun and opened fire. And this big bland agent I'd never met said, “Poor parents.” And we all started talking about the victims' parents. And this agent says, “Yes, them, too. I meant the shooter's parents.”

This guy was clearly outside the norm.

Several days after that, I saw him testifying in trial. When he was done, I caught up with him on his way out of the building. “Agent d'Villafranca,” I said. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.” We hit it off, became friends. But now, poor guy, he sometimes seems lost. Did his divorce make him weird or the other way around?

“And I'm not even a suspect, am I?” I say quietly, thinking aloud.

But Chip hears me and scrunches his brow, and his composure surges back. “Nick,” he says in an angry voice, but he's not angry, he's just overcompensating for that moment of emotion, “what in the hell are you talking about? A suspect in what?”

A
cross darkness, I hear the rhythm of Lizzy's breathing. So many times I've lain here listening to her. When she was young, she'd sleep snuggled beside me. Now she's across the room, but I still tend to wake up in the night whenever we're at the cabin to hear her breathe—to experience the pleasure of lying here like this, inhaling the darkness and cautiously swapping workaday cares for this peacefulness. I assess things, and they usually balance out to the positive.

Tonight is different. Now the darkness is an unbounded landscape for the anxiety and sorrow at play in my head. The crimes have mostly resolved themselves, but I don't like all the answers. Scud Illman and Seth Coen buried Zander Phippin, of course: Zander's blood in Seth's boat gives us proof. But with Seth and Scud both dead, we have no evidence that they were the ones who tortured and killed him, and no leads to whomever else might have done it. As for the other crimes, I thought Upton was our snitch, and I thought he killed Scud. But now there's Maxy. He is the key. His prints in Scud's car tie it all together. Maxy is no doubt Maxfield Parrish of the mysterious calls Scud made on Kendall's cell phone. Maxy, who has had a decade to work his contacts and build his organization. A decade to whack anyone who got in his way. I'm sure Maxy was the go-between for the hit on Zander. The most significant thing about Maxy is that ten years ago, back before he disappeared, he was undercover for the troopers. He knows who's who; he knows who's dirty. He worked both sides. Who better than Maxy to recruit a snitch from within the troopers? Maxy is the key. With Scud and Seth dead, he's the last thread for us to bring the whole thing down. We need to find him.

I'm wide awake. Falling back to sleep is out of the question, so
I get up and grope for a sleeping bag, get a beer from the cooler, and slip outside as quietly as possible. It's very dark, but I find my way to the dock and walk haltingly out to the end, feeling along the edge with one foot so I don't get disoriented and walk right off into the lake. I settle into my Adirondack chair, arrange the sleeping bag over me, open my beer, and surrender to the sorrows, regrets, and self-recriminations dished out by my unleashed angst.

It is late Saturday night. Just yesterday I searched Kenny's apartment, though nobody knows I was there. Just yesterday I found Colin's picture on the exploited-child database. Just yesterday Dorsey told me they found traces of Zander Phippin in Seth Coen's boat. Just yesterday he told me that the new suspect in Scud Illman's murder is a ghost named Maxy; yesterday Chip told me that a professional killer, whose specialty is making high-profile deaths look accidental, wants to kill me. Just yesterday Chip told me I was never a suspect in Scud's death.

It is quiet on the lake but not silent. I hear occasional watery plinks when fish surface or bugs submerge. An owl hoots, but it is far away, and the sound has only now separated itself from all the subliminal things you hear without hearing. A deer or a skunk or a raccoon moves through leaves over near the driveway.

My Volvo is spending its weekend in a garage at a rural retreat a hundred miles from here, which, the Bureau believes, is just the sort of place the killer likes. An agent in sunglasses, a guy my size and hair color, and accompanied by an unmarked escort, drove the Volvo there directly from the FBI building. I last spoke with Chip at about four this afternoon; the killer hadn't struck yet, they hadn't found the transponder, and the guy, Spawner, who planted the device, seems to have vanished.

Something huge splashes across the lake.

The Bureau loaned me a car. It has tinted windows with reinforced everything. I drove it out the gate of the FBI garage and straight to the lake. I spent last night here alone, then this morning, Kendall and Kaylee picked Lizzy up in Turner and drove up to spend the day.

The girls did great. Kendall and I did okay. Our relationship has gone, in quick order, from that of wary opposing counsels, to attorney and client, and now to two guys whose daughters are friends. The haughty Kendall, whose sanctimony is reassuring when discussing my legal woes, is pretty irksome as a social companion. Kendall remains, alas, Kendall. I like him better than I did before, but I still can't say I enjoy his company outside the office. He adores his daughter, Kaylee, though, and is obviously enchanted with Lizzy for befriending her. So long as Kendall and I focused on the girls today, we got along fine.

Kendall and Kaylee were planning to leave after dinner, but the girls were writing an adventure story. Lizzy would feed ideas to Kaylee, who'd add a twist of her own, and Lizzy would write it down.

Maybe the sisters entered the dragon's cave,
Lizzy suggested.

Yes,
Kaylee yells.
They went into the cave, and there were mushrooms everywhere.

Edible mushrooms?

No! Poisonous mushrooms. You die from just even touching them.

So Lizzy wrote:
Hand in hand, the sisters tiptoed into the cave where Goreyclaw the dragon lovingly dusted off the skulls of everyone who ever brushed against the beautiful turquoise caps of his deadly mushrooms.

Perfect,
Kaylee said, and she tipped over sideways, laughing.

Kaylee didn't want to leave. Lizzy suggested Kendall and Kaylee stay in Flora's cabin for the night. It was agreed. I set them up with bedding.

Thinking of Kendall and Kaylee reminds me of Platypus, for some reason: how bereaved he is for his granddaughter. If Dorsey's people find any trace of Brittany in Seth Coen's boat, I'd like to tell Platty myself. Give it the personal touch. If Scud was pimping his own stepson for kiddie porn, and if he also shot pics of Brittany, that makes him a pretty compelling suspect in Brittany's disappearance. I think of Mrs. Illman's answer when I asked if she killed Scud:
I wish I had.
Right now that's how I feel, too.