Rogue Justice (25 page)

"On what?" she asked.

"Whether or not it involves criminal activity."

"Fair enough, I'll let you decide." As Zora told her story, the details came tumbling out just as she'd rehearsed them over the past hour or so. It was, without question, a monumental mess, that now included murder. What she didn't say, of course, was that plans were already in motion to actually
go after
an orca... and soon.

Rosekrans took a deep breath. "Okay, let me see if I've got this straight. You're saying Dr. Kincaid told the GM in Seattle his killer whale was dying and gave him forty-eight hours to inform the Feds. The next day, some nefarious stranger threatens to harm your mother unless you go out and
capture
a killer whale. Then, Katrina ends up at the bottom of a cliff, the victim of foul play. And now this phone call out of the blue from the governor's office."

Zora's anxiety deepened. "I don't believe in coincidences, do you?"

"No, I sure as hell don't," Rosekrans replied, stiffening noticeably. "Never have, never will. And I don't like what's going on here, not one bit."

"Okay, so what now?" Zora said, urging him on.

"To be honest with you, Ms. Flynn, I'm not exactly sure." He pulled a pen and business card from his pocket, jotted something down on the back of the card. "But since my hands are clearly tied at the moment, I suggest you call this number. It belongs to a Seattle detective. He just might be able to help
both
of us."

Zora looked at him skeptically. "I don't know, I—"

"Look," Rosekrans said, his tone a bit harder. "Most cops I know have a bag of tricks. This guy's got a whole arsenal. And he can be trusted. Clean and mean as we like to say in law enforcement. But just remember, you didn't get this from me."

Zora nodded, took the card, and moved slowly back down the hall. She was a bit bewildered by the curious exchange, but thoroughly convinced that the threats to her mother and the murder of her friend
had
to be linked. And she felt confident the DA knew it, too. Now, it was time to tell Mickey. His sister was dead, after all. He had a right to know. Besides, she remembered he had experience in such matters. Try as she may, though, she couldn't remember what it was. She straightened her shoulders, walked purposefully into the waiting room... and began talking.

Chapter 27

31 March, 11:55 PM PDT

Olympia, Washington

Inside Mitchell Chandler's study, Savannah Sokolov, Colby Freeman, Preston Tradd, and Darnell Atwater were pondering many of the same things. They had gathered around a crackling fire, but there was nothing warm or cozy about this midnight rendezvous. In fact, the mood was tense, the fatigue palpable, everyone grim-faced. No one spoke.

Atwater was about to say something when Chandler burst into the room. He flopped down in his favorite chair, noticeably on edge, outrage etched into his face. Leaning forward on his elbows, he clasped his hands together so tightly his knuckles turned white. He drilled Atwater with a piercing look and barked, "What the fuck happened, Darnell?"

Atwater stiffened, stared straight ahead. "I don't know, Mitchell. I've never had a problem with any of my operatives before. Iago's record is impeccable, he—"

"Not anymore, it's not," Chandler hissed.

"An unfortunate accident," Atwater countered, attempting to make a case for what he'd coldly referred to earlier in the evening as collateral damage. "Iago said the woman went ballistic, shouting rape or some goddamn thing. Then, she started scratching at his face, spit on him. He pushed back and she fell, hit her head. It just happened, that's all."

Chandler glanced at Savannah, saw the fury boiling in her eyes. They'd been enjoying a quiet dinner when Atwater called with the shocking news about Katrina Kincaid. Reluctantly, Chandler had then passed on the news to Savannah. She'd reacted angrily, ripping into him like a woman possessed. She said she'd given Atwater explicit instructions that Katrina was to be treated with kid gloves. Instead, she was now dead.

Agreeing it was a royal clusterfuck, Chandler decided his only recourse was to cash in a formidable chip with Governor Spencer Ryan, one he'd been holding for just such an occasion—namely the governor's affinity for playing the ponies, or any other game of chance, for that matter. Over the past year, Ryan had run up a huge debt which Chandler had covered with a check drawn on the same offshore account used to pay off Zora Flynn. Now it was time to square things, with help from the governor's own private security force. After a rather heated phone conversation, Ryan agreed to make the call.

Clusterfuck, indeed,
Chandler thought.

"Now before we go any further, I want everyone in this room to understand why there can be no more screwups. And I mean
none
." Chandler paused, looking hard at each face. Savannah had been on the receiving end of this rant before, but it was essential the others heard it now. "When I was chasing Charlie all over Nam, the prospect of dealing with whining, paper-pushing bureaucrats drove me up the fucking wall, what with their goddamn statistical models and shit. Of course, they had absolutely no concept of what war was really all about. War is one continual series of fuckups, which means there's no such
thing
as a 'statistical model.' I lost a lot of good men because of those clipboard-carrying assholes. You with me so far?"

Affirming nods all around, except from Savannah. She stared into the fire, unblinking.

Chandler continued. "So, I survived that sorry chapter in our country's history and what do I do for an encore? I get into the movie business. Now, making movies is even
more
fucked up than war, if you can believe that. The egos are immense and it's a bottomless money pit. What I'm getting at here, people, is that theme parks seemed like the antithesis of all that crap. Theme parks are happy places, right? Our guests have fun. They learn things. They leave with smiles on their faces. 'We bring the kid out in you,' that's our motto. On top of all that, we employ a lot of people. What are our summer numbers up to now, Colby?"

Freeman opened a thick folder in front of him, his hands trembling just a bit. "We peak at right around twenty-one hundred here in Seattle, sir." He then rifled through several pages before stopping. "Let's see, here it is. Corporate-wide, we're talking about thirty thousand."

"Thirty thousand," Chandler repeated. "Now that's a lot of goddamn jobs, isn't it? And I
care
about jobs. I really do. We give back to the communities in other ways, too. We support local charities, dish out truckloads of free tickets, and provide good homes for the animals. Marine mammal parks are a good thing, right, people?" Another long pause. "Wrong! Because I've got myself a dead whale, a dead woman, and a million hungry fire ants waiting to crawl up my ass.
Activists
they call themselves. Well, they're like the fucking gooks. They don't work from checklists and they don't operate by any rules. Are we getting what's wrong with this picture?"

"We get it," Savannah said coolly.

Chandler's grim expression softened. "Very well, then. Darnell..."

"Sir."

"You said your man left no evidence behind. Are you absolutely certain of that?"

"Positive. The cops are chasing shadows here."

"By cops, you mean Port Townsend PD?" Savannah asked.

"Yes, small force, couple of detectives."

Chandler managed a smile. "So we're dealing with Barney fucking Fife and Goober then?"

Atwater nodded.

Chandler said, "Okay, good. They'll be no match for the governor's boys. What about the woman's files? Anything incriminating there?"

"Mostly research documents and medical reports," Atwater replied. "Nothing to indicate she was doing anything other than treating the sick whale. And from what I understand, that was no secret."

"What about her computer?"

"Iago checked. It was clean."

Chandler turned to Freeman. "You must have had phone calls and e-mail exchanges with her."

"Yes, of course, sir," he said. "In fact, I got a message from her just before..." Freeman glanced over at Atwater. "Before Darnell's man paid her a visit, that is. I didn't call her back, though, so there's no way she could have known about Samson's death. And she didn't hear it from the head trainer, either. I checked with her."

Savannah shot Chandler a disdainful look, a volcano poised to erupt.

"Then, they've got nothing," he said, attempting to diffuse Savannah's rage. "But it doesn't change the fact that we need to dispose of the whale's body right away and bring in his replacement. What's the latest with our boat captain, Tradd?"

Tradd snapped forward in his chair. "Well, sir, she flew down from Sitka this morning as planned. So far all systems are go."

"And she still knows none of the details at this point."

"Right, sir. She said it will take her a couple of days to pull everything together, get her crew here, line up the boat, all of that. She'll be given final instructions then."

Savannah threw Chandler one of her all-knowing looks this time, flipping the script on him. "Look, Mitchell, you're asking a lot of this woman, you must know that. Disposing of Samson's body is one thing, but capturing another whale, then delivering it safely to the park... it's a
hell
of a lot to ask."

Chandler did not like having his authority or his ideas questioned, but he had to concede the point. Nothing new there. Savannah was almost always right. "Maybe so," he said. "But if anyone can pull it off,
she
can. Thelma and Louise rolled into one, remember?"

"Yeah, and we both know what happened to them." Savannah left unsaid the fact that the legendary movie outlaws had soared off a cliff in a blaze of glory.

There was a long silence.

Atwater then waded in. "There's something else you need to know, Mitchell."

"Jesus, what now?" Chandler said.

"We put a tail on Flynn, like you asked. One of my men picked up her trail at a car rental agency in Port Angeles. Turns out she's a friend of the deceased."

"Son of a bitch," Chandler screamed, glaring at Tradd. "Did your people not know that?"

Tradd shook his head slowly, stared down at his hands as if he were comatose.

"Forget Barney Fife," Chandler shouted, the anger rising inside him. "I've got the goddamn Keystone Cops on my payroll. Where is Flynn now?"

"She spent a couple of hours at Dr. Kincaid's lab near Sequim," Atwater replied. "She left around six o'clock and headed back to Port Angeles. There, she met up with a man we assume to be the other boat captain. They had dinner together, then she retraced her route. I'm guessing she was planning to stay at her friend's house in Port Townsend, but ended up at the Courthouse instead. Right now, she's at a local funeral home. Sheriff's deputies took the body there."

"How did she find out about the Kincaid woman?" Chandler asked.

"No idea. Somebody obviously called her. She took off like a bat out of hell at the turnoff. "

Savannah added, "Look, if the two women were friends, then Zora Flynn knows about Samson, at least that he was dying. Trust me on that one. And for sure she'll connect the dots, figure out where the captured whale is going and why."

"Maybe so, Savannah," Atwater said evenly. "But it doesn't change anything, not really. Look, it makes sense that Flynn would seek out a killer whale expert, right? Friend or no friend. And there's not a shred of evidence linking Kincaid's death with her treatment of the whale."

Chandler thought long and hard before saying, "Then you better make damn sure you keep close tabs on the mother."

"Twenty-four-seven," Atwater replied confidently. "Trust me, Mitchell, we're all over it."

Savannah's face twisted in sudden fury, then she exploded off the couch, her hands firmly planted on her hips, her eyes on fire. "What in God's name does Zora Flynn's
mother
have to do with any of this?"

Chandler flinched at a stab of pain that struck his temples. Savannah's reaction was precisely the reason he hadn't mentioned this part of the plan to her, one that relied on another of Sun Tzu's cunning strategies:
If the goal is to make your adversaries listen, first seize something that they love.
And Zora Flynn, he knew, dearly loved her mother. So he'd danced around the truth, attributing the captain's cooperative nature to the sizeable donation made to her charity in Nepal, which of course had been Savannah's idea to begin with. But Chandler knew the real story would come out, sooner or later.