Wrongful Death (11 page)

SLOANE KILLED TIME
drinking a cup of coffee at an outdoor table in Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, a three-city-block mall, which was like sitting in the front row at a theater performance. Though raised in foster homes throughout the San Fernando Valley, Sloane had spent little time in Southern California since enlisting in the Marine Corps at seventeen. Coming back never felt like coming home. It felt like being a tourist at a theme park. Everyone, it seemed, had a healthy tan, toned body, and flashed the perfect smile for a chewing gum or toothpaste commercial.

Growing up, Sloane felt something of substance was missing from his surroundings, but soon realized what was missing had nothing to do with the scenery. As he got older, a hole began to develop inside of him that he could not fill. He had never been abused in any of the foster homes, but he also had never been loved. No one tucked him in at night or gave him a hug. When he brought home his report card, nobody patted him on the back for a job well done. Athletic, he played both basketball and baseball in high school, but no one sat in the stands watching with pride and joy. No one waited for him outside the locker room. He had friends, and an occasional girlfriend, but he wasn’t often invited to homes and he sensed when he met parents that they were wary of him, like a stray dog. Not knowing his background, they had no way to judge his temperament, and he wasn’t of much help.

“Where were you born, David?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Did you know your parents?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“No relatives? What about grandparents or aunts and uncles?”

“No, sir, I’ve never met any.”

“Rebecca says your parents died in a car crash.”

“I really wasn’t old enough to remember it.”

“Well, Rebecca says you’re a fine basketball player.”

“I try, sir.”

At that point the father would usually hand his daughter a quarter. “Call me if you need to. I’ll be up waiting for you.”

Sloane had contemplated trying to find his biological parents, but when he was young, he had no money to pursue the matter, and when he did have the money, he decided he didn’t want to know. They had not wanted him and had made no effort to contact him. Sometimes it was best to let matters lie. At Foster & Bane he’d settled into a routine of work, taking comfort in his successes, and trying
not to think too often about things he could not control. Then Joe Branick’s package turned everything inside out and upside down. Sloane could no longer sit back, passive. He needed to know why Branick had sent him the package, and his true identity. But meeting his father, Miguel Ibarón, had only widened the hole.

“You used me, and your abuse killed my mother and all those people in the village that night. Because of me those men came and killed everyone, and they may just as well have killed me, because for the past thirty years I might as well have been dead.”

“You had the power,” his father had said.

“I was your son. You were supposed to be my father. You were supposed to protect me, to take care of me. But you used me to pursue your hatred and politics.”

“God gave you a gift, a wonderful gift. You were the instrument to bring the people out of centuries of oppression and poverty. You were to deliver the Mexican people from so much misery, so much pain and suffering.”

“And instead I’ve only caused them more.”

AT QUARTER TO
eleven, Sloane left a tip on the table under a saucer and walked through the Promenade to a black slate high-rise at the corner of Third Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. He pulled open the glass doors and crossed the lobby. The guard standing behind a security console asked him for photo ID and slid a clipboard and pen at him. Then he picked up the phone.

“I have a David Sloane here to see Ken Mills.”

Sloane considered the alphabetical list of businesses beneath the glass but did not see “The Law Offices of Ken Mills.” The guard hung up, handed Sloane back his license, and came around the console to step to the elevator bank, inserting a key into a lock on the wall. The elevator doors pulled apart.

“Are the elevators always locked?” Sloane asked, thinking it unusual to lock down the elevators in a public building during regular business hours.

The guard held the door as Sloane stepped in. “Just the lobby.”

“I don’t know the floor or suite,” Sloane said.

“Ninth floor. Take a left off the elevator and a right down the hall. It’s the third door on your right.”

Stepping from the elevator on the ninth floor, Sloane again noted no sign on the wall identifying the companies in the various suites. He followed the guard’s directions to an unmarked door. When he stepped in, two men in jeans and tight-fitting polo shirts stood in the reception area.

“David Sloane?” The recessed lights reflected off the man’s shaved head. “Do you have some identification, please?”

“I just showed my identification to the guard downstairs.”

“We’ll need to see it again.”

Sloane tried to keep it light. “Do you think I changed identities in the elevator?”

Neither man smiled. Sloane flipped open his wallet and showed them his license.

“Are you carrying any weapons?” the bald man asked.

“Weapons? No. Should I be?” Again, his attempt at humor elicited no response.

The second man, whose hair looked to be the product of the bad peroxide job Carolyn spoke of, asked, “May we search your briefcase?” It didn’t sound like a request.

Sloane handed the briefcase to him. “Is all this really necessary?”

“It is if you want to see Mr. Mills.”

Sloane did, which was why he also tolerated a pat down. He retrieved his briefcase and followed the bald man past an empty reception desk to a closed door at the end of the hall. The man
knocked twice and pushed open the door. For an instant Sloane wondered if Carolyn had screwed up: The man getting up from behind the futuristic glass and tube desk looked nothing like the ball-busting attorney on the cover of
California Lawyer
with the no-nonsense expression. He looked tired, haggard, like a slightly overweight actor in an indigestion commercial with a thinning hairline. Dark bags sagged beneath his eyes.

“You have an awful lot of security, Mr. Mills.”

Mills’s smile had the sad quality of someone greeting guests at a funeral. “I’m sorry about the inconvenience. I needed to be sure you were who your secretary said.”

“Who else would I be?” Sloane asked.

“Someone trying to kill me.”

CAMANO ISLAND, WASHINGTON

C
harles Jenkins leaned on a garden hoe and contemplated the square patch of dirt where he had planted his vegetable garden every year for the past thirty-two years. Though it remained too early to plant, it was not too early to pull the weeds, turn over the soil, and cover it with black plastic to “cook.” In years past he would have taken to the task with vigor. In years past he would have looked forward to it. In years past he didn’t have a beautiful, twenty-eight-year-old woman living with him.

He looked across the field to the house he had rebuilt from the foundation up. After the fire that destroyed the four-room caretaker’s shack that he had lived in for thirty years, Jenkins had debated whether to rebuild at all. The ten-acre parcel wasn’t exactly the happy home of his youth. The property had largely been his escape from the world, and likely would have remained so had Joe Branick not sent Alex to deliver a file Jenkins long believed had been destroyed. Just seeing the package after so many years had taken his breath away.

“Where did you get this?”

“I told you. Joe Branick gave it to me—”

“How did you know him?”

“How?”

“Tell me. How did you know him?”

“He was a friend of my father.”

And that had triggered another recollection, one of a young girl with cascading dark curls riding her bike in the driveway of a family home in a wealthy suburb of Mexico City. Alex Hart’s father had been an expert on Mexican politics, history, and revolutionary groups, and Jenkins and Joe Branick had consulted him often trying to determine the identity of el Profeta, the man believed to be behind much of the uprising in Mexico’s southern states. Unfortunately, Jenkins and Alex didn’t get the chance to reminisce for long. She had not only brought Jenkins the file, she had also, unwittingly, brought the men whose job it was to recover and destroy it. Jenkins and Alex had managed to escape, but not before the men had burned his home to the ground and killed his two Rhodesian ridgebacks, Lou and Arnold.

Inside the manila package were the reports Jenkins had generated each time he slipped into the village in the mountains of Oaxaca to hear the young boy speak. Speculation was that el Profeta was using the boy to stir the uprising, and that determining the boy’s identity would eventually lead them to the man. They never got that far. The sermons had been mesmerizing; the crowds listened as if viewing a revered actor on a Broadway stage. Even Jenkins had found the boy’s sermons intoxicating. And that had been the problem. His reports had been too believable, too convincing; the boy became more than just a boy. He became a threat. Jenkins never could shake the guilt that his reports had been responsible for the loss of so many lives in that village—men, women, and children, so many children. For thirty years he had been unable to forgive himself.

Sloane’s forgiveness when the two men first met was the initial step to his healing.

“I was responsible,” Jenkins had said that night. “My reports convinced them you were a threat. It was the reason they came to the village that night.”

But Sloane had only shaken his head. “No. The man responsible was the man who sent me out to preach his hatred. You know who he is, don’t you? He was my father, wasn’t he?”

Still, forgiving himself and learning to love again were two different things. Jenkins had questioned whether it could ever really work between him and Alex. It wasn’t just the discrepancy in their ages; it was whether he could ever truly live in the present and forget the past. The healing had not been immediate. After Alex came to live with him, they had some rocky moments, but in time she had given him hope that, at fifty-three, he could forget the sins he had committed, and replace them with new memories created with her.

Alex had convinced him that the property was too beautiful
not
to rebuild. Then she designed their new home, adding a second story with three bedrooms, an indication she wanted to expand more than just the square footage. She wanted a family. She had also reconfigured the downstairs. What had been Jenkins’s bedroom became a library with built-in shelving to encourage him to rebuild his collection of classic books and movies lost in the fire. But as with his vegetable garden, Jenkins no longer had the same motivation; the books and movies had also kept him living in the past.

He was ready for the present.

After rebuilding, he’d started to feel a bit like Tom Hanks in the movie
Cast Away,
a man stranded on an island wanting to get back to civilization. David had provided him that opportunity.

When Sloane moved to Seattle to be with Tina, Jenkins invited
them to a barbecue to celebrate the grand reopening of Chateau Jenkins, and the two men became reacquainted sitting outside on the deck smoking cigars.

“It must have been a lot of work,” Sloane had said, considering the house.

Jenkins nodded. “It kept me busy.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“With your free time.”

Jenkins shrugged. “Hadn’t thought about it. Why?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Forget what?”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“Why don’t you let me decide what I might be interested in?”

“I need to talk to a number of illegal immigrants who once worked at a Pacific Northwest Paper plant.”

“You need someone to find them.”

“Let’s just drop it. These guys disappear. They travel through tiny communities in eastern Washington and move with the planting seasons. I’m told they rarely maintain an address long. You’re busy.”

“You don’t think I could find them?”

“Maybe you could just find me someone—you know, like a private investigator.”

“Three days.”

“What?”

“If I don’t find them in three days, all of them, you don’t owe me a dime.”

Jenkins had found all four men in two days. He also knew Sloane had offered him the job because Alex convinced him that Jenkins was bored and in need of something to do. He was, and just being off his island had helped Jenkins to further
bury the sins of his past, perhaps in a shallow grave, but buried nonetheless.

A dog’s bark aroused him from his thoughts. Sam bounded through the tall grass barking at the two recently purchased Appaloosas. Alex had expressed interest in a horseback trip that retraced Chief Joseph’s failed flight from the U.S. Cavalry to Canada, but Appaloosas were a requirement to participate. Initially, Jenkins had leased them from an elderly woman who owned a ranch two hours east of Seattle in Ellensburg, a thousand-acre spread, complete with four houses and a private landing strip. Alex had enjoyed the ride so much they bought the horses for future years, and brought them back to Camano, which hadn’t sat well with the two Arabians he’d boarded for ten years.

Jenkins considered his watch and dropped the hoe, uninterested in the garden. Halfway across the field to the house Sam appeared at his side, panting, tongue hanging from the side of her mouth. He walked up to the porch, removed his shoes, pulled open the door and glided across the freshly waxed hardwood. In the kitchen he filled Sam’s bowl with breakfast and took it back outside onto the porch. She stuck her head in the dish before he’d even removed his hand, her jowls flapping furiously. Finished, she looked up with sad brown eyes as if to ask, Is that it?

Jenkins never recalled Lou or Arnold melting his heart with a look, but Sam could get him to do just about anything with her sad-eyed, droopy-eared face. Maybe it was a female thing.

“I can sympathize,” he said. Alex had them all on diets. She’d cut Sam’s meals in half.

Jenkins looked through the plate-glass window before reaching into his pocket for the bone-shaped doggy treat. He kept the biscuits hidden in his office drawer, but always carried a couple in his coat pocket. Sam hesitated.

“Don’t tell,” Jenkins whispered. “We’ll both get in trouble.”

She stretched out her neck and gently took the treat from his hand, then trotted off around the side of the house.

Jenkins checked the time on his cell phone, pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket, and punched in the number. It rang twice.

“Shirley? It’s Charles Jenkins.”

When Shirley didn’t immediately respond in her chipper-as-a-bird tone, Jenkins sensed trouble. “I don’t know who you are, Mr. Jenkins, but I know you don’t work for the
Times
,” she said curtly. “I called this morning and—”

“The
Times
? Shirley, I don’t work for the
Times.
”

“I thought that—”

“I work for the
Post-Intelligencer
,” he said, indicating the second of Seattle’s two daily newspapers. He could have used other means to find the National Guardsmen who had served with James Ford, but sometimes the best source was the easiest source. Shirley worked in the National Guard’s public affairs office. Up to that point she had been willing and helpful.

“But I thought you said—”

“A lot of people make that mistake. Listen, I don’t want to cause you any concern or get you in any trouble. Here’s the number of my editor in the newsroom. Why don’t you call?”

“Oh, I don’t think—”

“I insist.” Jenkins provided the number and the name of his editor. “Call and confirm. Then call me back, okay?”

He hung up and hurried inside the house, climbing the stairs. “Alex? Alex?” Halfway up, he heard Alex’s cell phone ring. At the top of the stairs he heard the water for the shower. He grabbed her phone from the nightstand and pushed open the bathroom door, fanning the steam. “Alex?”

“Shut the door. You’re letting all the hot air out.”

Jenkins pulled back the curtain. She was massaging a head of shampoo. Suds dripped down her forearms and elbows. Ordinar
ily he wouldn’t have even noticed the shampoo. “You’re the news editor at the
P.I.
and I’m working on an assignment about national guardsmen injured in Iraq.”

“What?”

“News editor.
P.I.
National Guard. Iraq.” He flipped open her phone and held it up for her.

“I’ve got soap in my eye,” she whispered.

Jenkins shook the phone at her.

She stuck her head out the curtain, one eye shut tight. “News Desk, Hart.” She made circles with her hand indicating she wanted Shirley to get to the point. “Yes, he works here.” She started to wiggle, the soap burning. She spoke quickly. “It’s a feature piece about Washington national guardsmen injured or killed in Iraq. We’re going to run it front page.”

Jenkins covered the receiver. “Don’t oversell it.”

She gave him a one-eyed “If looks could kill you’d be dead” stare. He put the phone back to her ear.

“Yes, we’re very excited about the project. What? Oh, yes, it is raining here. It’s not? Well, it must be coming your way. There’s my other line. If you have any questions please feel free to call back.”

Jenkins flipped closed the phone just before Alex screamed and buried her face in the streams of water. By the time he reached the bottom of the staircase his cell phone rang.

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

BEING IN LOS
Angeles, it would have been easy for Sloane to conclude that Ken Mills received some perverse pleasure from making himself appear important enough that someone would want to kill him, but Mills had spoken the words without melodrama or theatrics.

“Who would want to kill you?” Sloane asked.

Mills gestured to one of two black mesh chairs shaped like pears, and returned to his desk. The office was spacious, a small conference table in one corner, a black leather couch along the wall. Despite the office’s being on the west end of the building, presumably with a million-dollar view of the Santa Monica Pier and the Pacific Ocean, the blinds were down.

Mills sat. “After the news articles and television reports about the lawsuit, I started to receive hate mail and telephone calls—people calling me an unpatriotic terrorist sympathizer. I’ll spare you the four-letter words. Those we pretty much dismissed as the crazies. When I began receiving death threats at home, the FBI told me to get an unlisted number. It got so bad I had to pull my two daughters from school and send them and my wife out of the area.”

“And you hired private security,” Sloane said.

“I don’t go to the bathroom now without an escort. When they inspected my house they found bugs everywhere, my bedroom, the bathrooms, the phones, my car.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a black spherical object about the size of a quarter. “This one we found above a ceiling tile in the men’s room down the hall. They sweep the office every morning and use a device to scramble my conversations in case anyone is pointing a directional microphone at the windows.”

Sloane looked at the closed blinds and realized that the same people who could point a directional microphone could point something far more lethal. No wonder the guy looked uncomfortable. “And you believe it’s because of the lawsuit on behalf of the veterans?”

Mills shook his head. “I filed that lawsuit nearly two years ago. The threats didn’t start until I named the corporations that did business with Saddam. How much do you know about our history in Iraq, Mr. Sloane?”

“A fair bit.”

“Then you know more than most Americans.” Mills paused, as if considering where to begin. His voice took on a professorial tone, comfortable with the subject matter. “Iraq started batch production of chemical agents in the 1980s, relying heavily on precursor chemicals from foreign suppliers. Any guesses which countries supplied those chemicals?”

“The ones that made up the UN Security Council. I read the article.”

Mills drummed his fingers on his desk. “I know it’s hard to imagine now, but back then it was politically and militarily advantageous to use Iraq as an ally against a mutual enemy.”

“The Ayatollah Khomeini,” Sloane said. “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

Mills nodded. “We chose Saddam’s despotism over the Islamic fundamentalists who had overthrown the Pahlavi monarchy. Our defense intelligence feared that if Iraq fell, it would have a catastrophic effect on the entire region, including Saudi Arabia. So President Reagan sent an envoy to Baghdad. You might recall seeing pictures of that person shaking hands with Saddam.”