A gigantic man with a bald head and dark skin emerged from an illegally parked truck on Drayton Street. “Tull? Tully, where are you?”
At the sound of her name, Tully pushed Luke away. The man left the truck running and bore down on them fast for someone that big.
“Tull, are you alright?” He approached Tully and sized up Luke. “Only called me. He said you were acting funny.”
“I’m fine, Jules.”
“Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.” He said it looking at Luke. The two men squared to each other.
“No, Jules. I’m two blocks away. I’m okay.”
“All the same. C’mon, Tull.” Jules placed his bulk between the two of them and slung his arm around Tully’s shoulders. “You’re drunk and walking around with strangers. You’re not fine.” He glared at Luke.
Luke took a step back, chastised. He’d started feeling protective of this woman he barely knew. But his fleeting notion of protecting her from some unsavory truth withered next to that of a close friend protecting her without the ulterior motive of getting her into bed. Jules led her away without another word.
Luke watched as they walked to the beat-up Dodge. Jules helped her in and slammed the door shut. As he walked to the other side, Tully gave Luke a sad look from the safety of the cab.
Luke turned and walked into the shadows of Forsythe Park without waiting for them to drive away.
TWENTY
Luke reached out to the nightstand. The light spiked into his eyes, and he slammed them shut. Squinting, Luke read 4:12 AM on his phone. Once the alcohol wore off, sleep became dodgy. He rolled over and kicked off the covers that had tangled around him as he tossed in bed.
He went to the sink for a glass of water, then lay back down. After another twenty minutes of racing thoughts, he gave up and slung his legs over the edge of the bed. He tried to rest his face in his hands, but his back was so tight that pain spiked up his neck. Instead, he stood to stretch then began to pace.
Before long, he pulled on wind pants and a wrinkled t-shirt. If he wasn’t sleeping, it made no sense to stay in his dismal, sterile hotel room. He could pace at the office and get some work done.
Luke slipped on his sneakers without tying them and grabbed a tattered leather briefcase. It held every document he and Thad had deemed sensitive. Anything they wanted to keep from Greg went in the briefcase and back to the hotel each night. A discouragingly small amount of paperwork.
He took the stairs three at a time and pushed the door open into a warm Lowcountry night. Even a party town like Savannah had settled down by this late hour. Or early hour. The traffic on Bay Street had dwindled to nothing but an occasional taxi. The streets took on an eerie feel. Without cars whizzing around, the city had a different aura. Streetlamps were the only technology competing with the ghosts.
Luke walked two blocks to the office entrance and swiped his card key. Productivity was looking good for the day. No one else would show up to work on a Saturday morning. Greg would be golfing, and Thad was in Atlanta. The rest of them didn’t matter. With the exception of Susie, they hardly talked to him anyway. Given the choice between Luke and Thad, people usually talked to Thad.
The scanner beeped again and the door by Susie’s desk clicked open. Luke left the hallway lights off and walked to the break room. He flipped on the light and put his bag down long enough to start a pot of strong coffee. Then he continued to the broom closet.
Leaving the office door open, he threw his bag on Thad’s chair and sat down in his. He closed his eyes listening to the whoosh of the air conditioner and the whir of the computer booting up. For a moment it was soothing. Until it wasn’t. He usually liked the quiet, but this was a little too quiet. Thoughts get louder when nothing drowns them out.
The fact that she bothered him so much irked him. She was nothing special. There were plenty of other women to occupy his time. More beautiful and successful than Tully Meara. He never had a hard time finding a date, but there was never a woman he couldn’t forget. That woman clung to his train of thought like moss to a river rock. Every useful thought was interrupted by one of her.
“Shit,” he said out loud, needing to say something, anything. He stood and stretched, then went to the break room. He came back with a full mug of steaming black coffee and put on some old school blues to drown out the distracting thoughts.
From the bag, he pulled out a stack of manila file folders. He pulled his own working folders from the bottom. One contained a spreadsheet with five years' worth of cataloged phone calls between John Cade and a collection of friends.
It was a who’s who of businessmen, lobbyists, and politicians. Saying John Cade could sniff out power players was like saying Pele could play soccer. Cade knew his business and he knew it well. And his business was not saving the environment.
Except for a hand full of celebrities, the entire list had one thing in common. They preferred to stay low key. Powerful elite that shook hands and steered the world from behind closed doors. The most influential centers of government and commerce were represented. New York and Washington, although LA had a fair representation as did the South.
Congressman Jonathan Noble had recently been appointed to chair the Ways and Means committee. Senator Raymond Schiatta was favored to win the upcoming mayoral election in NYC. A 9th Circuit Court judge, three Fortune 500 CEOs, and a musician not famous enough for Luke to recognize him without Google’s help, but popular nonetheless. Cade didn’t swim in the shallow end.
Luke clicked through a few more pictures and saw Cade with President Obama at a fundraiser. A few pictures later he stood smiling with Henry Onessa, a man many saw occupying the White House in a few short years.
Gala after gala, Cade and his wife walked the red carpet with the biggest names in business, industry, and entertainment. Pictures of him with politicians were not as readily available online. But the phone numbers in Luke’s folder left no doubt they existed somewhere.
Luke imagined the walls of Cade’s luxurious riverside home filled with pictures of him in expensive hunting gear, posing next to the more discreet on the list. All of them tolerating his sycophantic fawning because he could deliver whatever unsavory request they had.
Which meant something illicit. Rich, powerful people had staff to cater to their every whim. Cade delivered something that they couldn’t have their yes-men do. Anything is for sale if the right price is on the table. John Cade just brought the table.
“You need something, you go see John,” Luke muttered to himself.
Cade’s time in Istanbul had been his start. He must have discovered his talent for connections and decided to make some money. The culture of secrecy in the good ol‘ boys club worked for Cade, and he exploited it. Luke felt a flicker of respect for the man. There was no way he was as dumb as Luke thought. Cade was deliberate and careful.
Respect was soon replaced by repulsion when he thought about Twomey. Lucrative government contracts and political favor were one thing. A politician killed by opposing interests, by a hitman so professional the cops didn’t look twice, was something else entirely. Covering up the murder of soldiers, that was unforgivable. Luke vowed he would burn for it.
Luke crossed off the celebrities and musicians. This case had a distinctly political feel to it. Satisfying illegal sexual desires or befuddling the IRS didn’t seem like the right place to spend his time. The CEOs and judges would bear a look, but it wouldn’t take much to eliminate them. Shocking secrets were never buried that deep. Just ignored.
They all had deep pockets. Every pocket Cade was in was deep. Very deep to pay for his well curated connections, but Luke wasn’t interested in the pockets. Luke wanted the provider. The other side of the penny. He pulled out a highlighter and turned to page 12 of 204. It was going to be like drilling and blasting inch by inch, but that’s how he would find them.
Thad had imported his fragmented, emailed document into an electronic spreadsheet. Then he had attempted to teach Luke how to u
se the spreadsheet. After Luke made the lines go all squiffy one time, he printed it out and went old school highlighter on it. He’d pay more attention next time Thad tried to teach him technology.
An hour later, Luke’s coffee was cold, and the lines of numbers and names kept going fuzzy. He began to regret his decision to come to work. While he was tossing and turning, work sounded like a relief. Now that he was doing this mind-numbing work, tossing and turning sounded nice. At least then he could think about her without distraction.
He decided he’d give it one more cup of coffee before he quit. See if he could clear his head enough to keep going. Come morning, he would be exhausted, but he had nothing better to do than sleep all day. Then he’d be ready for another night of drinking in his new favorite party town.
Luke reached for his mug. In his sleepy haze, he misjudged the distance and knocked it over. Brown liquid shot across the file folders, pooling on the paper.
He cursed and jumped up. He grabbed the folders by the spine to shake the coffee off onto the carpet. In his haste to save them, a clump of papers flew out of a folder and scattered across the floor.
He ripped open Thad’s top drawer and pulled out the take-out napkin stash. It wasn’t the first mess they’d made in the broom closet. With the napkins, he sopped up enough of the coffee to run to the break room for real paper towels and a spray bottle to clean up.
Ten minutes later the office still smelled strongly of coffee, but he had the mess in the garbage can. Luke knelt to retrieve the papers he’d dumped on the floor. They were from one of Thad’s folders, and Luke didn’t remember seeing them before. He flipped through.
They were police reports. Different formats indicated they were from different jurisdictions, but the information on the front of each report was similar. Victim blocks, suspect blocks, addresses, dates, and all the basic information. He pulled one out and looked at it.
It was an incident report for an unattended death ruled a suicide by the medical examiner. Luke pulled another out. Suicide. Another, overdose.
Son of bitch. The kid had actually been working. Luke shook his head and smiled. Here he thought the kid was flirting with Susie all the time, but he was actually pulling in cases for them to review. Luke decided to tell Thad he'd done a good job when he got back. Not directly. The kid would never shut up about it.
Luke counted the stapled bundles. There were thirteen. He had no idea how far Thad had gotten in his queries, but the fact that any jurisdictions had sent reports was heartening.
That reminded him. He opened his email and pulled up the incident report Sandra had sent and hit print. He’d forgotten all about it. It went on top of Thad’s pile, then Luke went to refill his mug. His cross-eyed highlighter orgy was about to take a different direction.
When he sat back down, he pulled out a fresh legal pad. Carefully avoiding his mug, he pushed everything to the side except the stack of police incident reports and the legal pad.
None of the police reports, including Sandra’s, seemed interesting. Nothing notable stood out and the investigations appeared to be well conducted and written out in detail, per typical agency policy. Nothing to see here. But nothing was what he’d expected to see.
In the left-hand margin of the legal pad, he wrote a column with every report date. Fourteen cases spanning a period of roughly ten years. He highlighted everything within the last five years. That trimmed it to nine cases.
Luke turned to his screen, hesitated, then clicked on the ‘date’ column. He pumped his fist when the spreadsheet cooperated and ordered itself by date newest to oldest. He could narrow his search quickly now.
Energized, he flipped a page and wrote the date of the senator’s untimely demise at the top. The second date also got its own page. Soon he had nine pages with a single date at the top. Luke randomly decided to look at a three-month window on each side of the police report dates. Every name called within that range went on the page, except for the numbers Luke knew by heart now. Like Cade’s wife and his lawyer.
He started with Twomey. Luke flipped back to the first page and scrolled down to his preselected date range. Luke felt confident that after Twomey sent a blackmail threat along with whatever ‘proof’ he had, any professional hit would have been carried out with relative quickness.
Assuming Cade used his phone to communicate that is. If they met in person, maybe travel related credit card charges would yield some information, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that because he probably wouldn’t get a warrant for it. Email would be even harder.
When he was done, he sat back and dragged his fingers through his hair. He had over two hundred names to background check. Or in this case, Google, because anything else would alert Greg. Plus, he didn’t have enough probable cause to start pulling criminal histories on all these randos. Google it was.
He grabbed his mug and realized it was empty. The sky was brightening, and a big yawn wracked him. For two hours now he’d been engrossed in his work, hunched over his desk. Bed sounded good. Then something occurred to him.
“Idiot,” he hissed at himself.
His fingers went to his keyboard, then he paused. Luke typed Pete’s number into the spreadsheet. Nothing. He exhaled in relief before he realized he had been holding his breath. Did he not want to find out? Or was he barking up the wrong tree entirely with this whole Easton thing? Whatever the reason, he was relieved to find that connection did not exist. At least not today. He pushed his chair back and took his mug to the break room only to find out the coffee pot was empty too.
Luke did jumping jacks and burpees in the hall while a new pot brewed. His muscles were stiff from stooping at his computer for the last four hours. Outside, the city was waking up. A panel truck rumbled down Bull Street, and he saw a jogger stretching in the corner of the park that he could see from the break room. Maybe he’d go for a run later. He refilled his mug and got back to work.
Over half of the list were businessmen that had ties to the surrounding states. Their businesses ranged from multi million-dollar corporations to a small company that reupholstered boats.
Several calls went to charity organizations Cade had known ties to, most running some sort of vague medical sounding research. The CEO of a pharmaceutical company got a star next to his name. There were a few calls to the private school Cade’s son attended, and multiple calls to a prestigious golf country club Luke knew Cade belonged to. He might have to get in there at some point to see who Cade met with.
Two professors caught his eye. Mainly for the fact that they were the only professors on the list. Natalie Roone was an authority on art history. She was head of the School for Modern and Contemporary Art at Princeton, an NEA board member, and a personal friend of the Vice President’s wife. She was also eighty-three years old. Luke crossed her off as a player.
The other professor was fifty-four-year-old Alexander Wynn. Wynn was a prominent psychologist, although prominent was an understatement. He dominated the field. An in-demand speaker and lecturer, Wynn had authored six books, two of them graduate level textbooks.
Wynn grew up in a state housing project in North London, and scrapped his way up to number one in his class at Cambridge. A classic rags to riches story. A cursory internet search revealed a plethora of photos of the distinguished Wynn. Luke found only one photo of him with Cade at yet another red-carpet function promoted by One World. Cade had his arm around the doctor’s shoulders with a broad smile like they were fast friends. Alex looked bored.
The next snapshot showed Wynn with his arm snaked around the waist of a young model, looking considerably less bored. Wynn had traveled extensively after quitting his position as head of the clinical psychology program at Johns Hopkins. Then he took a part time position with the small local South Eastern University. He’d lived in Savannah for over fifteen years.
How convenient, thought Luke. He checked the phone list. Cade called Wynn four times in five years. The call always came from Cade. The first call happened f
our months before a case out of DC. Fourth one down on his legal pad. Over the next two years, the men talked twice. Neither of those dates corresponded to any of the police reports. The fourth call came after a two-year gap. This call occurred thirty-seven days before Twomey died.
Luke spent the next hour trolling through every psych medical publication he could find for a mention of Alexander Wynn’s name. On an old website with a green background that hurt his eyes, he stumbled across a downloadable document of Wynn’s first graduate thesis. Published in 1982, it was titled The Evolution of the Common Man. Luke downloaded it and printed it out.
By three o’clock, he had the stack of paper dog-eared and crumpled papers with large sections underlined. Luke paced feverishly in the tiny office.
He would never admit it to Thad, but Luke needed him to come back from his revelry in Atlanta. He needed to run this new disturbing information past a set of fresh ears. Luke broke free of the office and began pacing the empty hallway, his mind overwhelmed with what he read.
All traces of tiredness had evaporated. Luke decided to go for a run then hit the gym. That should clear his head enough to get back to work. It was a nice day again. Soon the rain would move in for the Fourth of July weekend. He left everything but his scan card in the office.
Two hours later and freshly showered, he headed back to the office buzzing with endorphins from his workout. He felt more energetic than he had since they got here. Now he was starving and on a mission to find some southern comfort food. Luke stuffed the folders into the briefcase. The last one rested on his phone. When he moved the folder, he saw he had missed a call.
The number was local, but not one he recognized. Quickly he finished stuffing the paperwork into the bag, grabbed the thesis and headed out the door before dialing the number back. The thick stack of paper did not cooperate, and several pages drifted to the sidewalk as he pulled the door closed behind him. He snatched them up as the line rang.
The Last Innocent Page 17
