Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  It went on to give some background on the cop who had been killed—a guy named Moses Tate. He was an eight-year veteran who had been written up once for being too lenient on speeders. The article included a number of quotes from Tate’s best friend on the force, Manuel Martínez, who vowed to investigate the matter thoroughly. There’s a photo of Martínez in the middle of the article. He’s an earnest-looking guy in his early thirties.

  I scroll back to the top of the page and check the date of the article. August 29th of last year. That’s thirteen months before Manuel Martínez perished with his wife and kids on the flight to Honolulu.

  The last two articles in Jiménez’s email are brief, just a couple of paragraphs each. One describes the conclusion of the investigation into the shooting of Patrolman Moses Tate: it was the act of a delusional individual whose many run-ins with the law left him with a bitter resentment toward cops, and whose mind was deranged by years of heavy drug use. The other article describes the execution-style death of Wilma Juarez’s husband. He really did take thirty bullets just hours after he was released on a bail bond.

  I call Alfonso Jiménez down in Dallas.

  “Why’d you send me this?”

  “Because you asked all the right questions and your boss is connected to the FBI. Now let me ask you something. That guy Juarez, the drug runner who got all shot up, he had a number of priors. Why would they let him out on bail?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Who put up the bond?”

  “Your buddy Ramón Ramírez,” he says. “Why would a cartel bother bailing someone out and then shoot him thirty times over twenty thousand dollars?”

  “I’m not familiar with the cartels,” I say, “but I hear that’s how they operate. Big displays of violence keep everyone in line.”

  “Uh-uh,” says Jiménez. “It cost them fifty grand to bail him out. Why would they spend fifty thousand to make a point about twenty thousand?”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “That’s just it,” he says. “I don’t know. But Brandon Robertson was a friend of mine, and he was talking to the FBI. I think he knew something.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Do you know who he was talking to? Was it a guy named Lomax?”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “How about Rollins?”

  “Mitch Rollins,” he says. “That’s the guy.”

  “He’s Lomax’s boss. Anything come of it?”

  “No. Nothing. Robertson was upset about it.”

  “From the video I saw, he looks like the kind of guy who took his job seriously.”

  “Yeah. He was.”

  “Hey, I want you to do me a favor,” I say. “Can you get me a credit card statement?”

  “Maybe. Does it have to be evidence-worthy? Because you’ll need a warrant for that.”

  “No. I’m just looking for a lead. I got a Visa card, belongs to a guy from Illinois named Charles Johnston. He used it to buy a plane ticket for a passenger on that Honolulu flight, and I’d like to know what else he bought.”

  “Give me the number,” Jiménez says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  28

  I’m not able to get much background on Mitch Rollins. He’s been with the Bureau for close to thirty years. He’s married, and his kids are past college age. He lives on the other side of the Potomac, in one of those neighborhoods in McLean that was affordable when he moved in, back in the late 1980s. Now you need two incomes to buy into an area like that.

  A couple years ago, when the house was nearly paid off, he took out a $300,000 second mortgage. Last year, he took out a $200,000 home improvement line of credit. I take a drive over Chain Bridge and head up Dolly Madison Boulevard, past CIA headquarters in Langley. Rollins lives near a public elementary school, in a neighborhood of luxury cars and perfect lawns. A quick drive by his house shows me it hasn’t had any obvious improvements in at least a decade. And there’s a For Sale sign out front.

  When I call the number on the sign, the realtor tells me her seller is motivated. She’s a gossipy type, so I chat her up for a while. Seems Mitch and his wife are getting divorced. She hints at money troubles. Maybe that’s why Rollins is hanging on to a job he no longer cares for.

  Just as we’re wrapping up, another call comes in. I thank the realtor for her time and pick up the second call.

  “Hey Freddy?” It’s Julia Brook. Something’s up. I can hear it in her voice.

  “Julia? Where are you?”

  “Fredericksburg. I’m on 95, heading up to DC.”

  “What for?”

  “I want to pick up some stuff from Anna’s apartment.” Her voice is high and tense, with an unsteady quaver.

  “You mind if I join you?”

  “That’s why I was calling,” she says. “Can you meet me there?”

  “Yeah. You sound nervous. You all right?”

  “I don’t know, Freddy.” The line is quiet for a few seconds, except for the background noise of the car on the highway. “You know, I went into work this morning. At the florist.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And there was a letter. It arrived a few days ago, but I hadn’t been in until today.”

  “OK.”

  “It was from Anna.” Her voice is trembling.

  “What’d it say?”

  “Nothing. It was her phone. She put it in a regular envelope with ten stamps across the top and mailed it. The screen is shattered.”

  “Does the phone still work?”

  “It does. I charged it and turned it on, but it has a passcode and I can’t get in.”

  “You sure it’s Anna’s?”

  “I’m pretty sure. It was her handwriting on the envelope. There was no return address.”

  “Where was the postmark from?”

  “San Francisco. I tried unlocking it, but—”

  “Is it an iPhone or an Android?”

  “Android,” she says. “What difference does it make?”

  “If you guess the passcode wrong too many times on an iPhone, it erases itself. Androids don’t do that.”

  “Freddy, why would she send me her phone?”

  “She wanted you to have it.”

  Because something told her she might not come back from that trip. I believe what Anna told me, that she didn’t know about the bomb. But she did believe Lomax was waiting for her on the other end of that flight, or at least she thought he was, and she was scared to death of him.

  “Freddy…” Her voice breaks. “I have to pull over.”

  “Julia?” No answer. “Julia!” She doesn’t respond, but I can still hear the background noise. I wait, and when the highway noise dies down a bit, I can hear her sobbing. After a minute or so, she picks up again, and she sounds even more rattled.

  “Freddy, someone just called this phone. Right before I called you.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But he said, ‘I knew you weren’t on that plane. You know I’m going to find you. It’s just a matter of time.’ And then he hung up. I think he thought I was Anna.”

  “You sound just like her. What number did he call from?”

  “999–999–9999.”

  “That’s not a real number.”

  “No shit!” Now she loses it. “Freddy, where the hell is my sister? What the fuck is going on?”

  “Meet me at Anna’s apartment,” I say. “Call when you get close. And if you start freaking out, pull over. Don’t kill yourself on the way up here.”

  It takes her a couple seconds to respond. “OK, Freddy.” There’s no life left in her voice.

  “And turn that phone off. All the way off, OK?”

  I don’t want the phone sending her location information back to Google and Uber and the phone company, and God knows how many other places. From there, the Feds can get it. Lomax can get it. Like he said, it’s just a matt
er of time.

  29

  It takes Julia an hour and a half to get from Fredericksburg to Adams Morgan. I’m waiting with the property manager when she arrives wearing jeans and a white cotton blouse, with a black leather bag looped over her shoulder. It’s almost five p.m., and the Indian summer air is starting to cool. She’s calm now. Serene, as people often are after all the emotion has been wrung out of them. The property manager, a sturdy Salvadoran guy in his thirties with thick hands and thick black hair, says, “Wait, you’re Anna’s sister, right? You look just like her.” How often does she have to hear those words?

  He offers his condolences in the elevator, and Julia gracefully accepts. He wears the same silver crucifix as Anna. He says these terrorists are bad people, and God will punish them. You don’t honor the Lord by killing his children. They’ll realize their mistake when they have to explain themselves to Him. Their hell will be their understanding of what they’ve done, and when it dawns on them, their grief will be deeper than Julia’s. I can see his words don’t comfort her, though they seem to reassure him. I step in front of him on the way out of the elevator, because I want to get a look at that deadbolt before he opens the door.

  My little toothpick fragment is gone. As he slides the pitted key into the lock, I ask him if he’s been in the apartment since Anna died. He says no.

  “Who else has a key?”

  “No one,” he says. “Unless Anna gave her spare to a friend. You can’t duplicate these. Not at the hardware store.”

  I ask him if Julia can keep the key for a few days. He says sure, gives us his card, and leaves.

  The main room of the apartment has a light oak floor and cheap rug with a grey-green Persian pattern, the kind of thing you might find at Lowes or Walmart. There’s a sofa with one end table, and another table by the windows, covered with books, candles, and unread mail. To the right are a small kitchen and closet. To the left is the bedroom. The door is open. The queen-size bed is neatly made in white.

  Julia seems to know exactly where to go. I follow her into the bedroom. She slides open the top drawer of the dresser and stares for a second. Then she looks at me.

  “She kept a journal,” Julia says. “Look.”

  In the front right corner of the drawer, which is packed with women’s underwear, there’s an empty rectangle that looks like it once held a stack of books. I put my hand into the empty space and feel around through the clothing. When I look up again, she’s staring into my face, calm and determined, and she says in a tone that tells me there can only be one answer to this question, “Are you going to tell me now? Where’s my sister?”

  I examine her for a moment, trying to gauge her mood, how volatile she may be. I don’t want another encounter like the one I had with Anna.

  She seems calm. A little worn out, even, like the shock of that phone call took everything out of her. Her eyes show the same quiet intensity they did at Anna’s funeral, when she asked me why I kept speaking of Anna in the present tense. She knew. And she knows now.

  “She’s alive,” I say.

  She swallows hard and puts a hand on the dresser to steady herself. She takes a few deep breaths through her nose and nods. I wish I had that ability to calm myself.

  “Where is she?” Her voice is barely above a whisper, and it’s quavering. Her body starts to tremble.

  I shake my head and say, “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?” She’s trying to keep a lid on it, but her anger is rising.

  “Because if whoever’s after her gets to you, I don’t want you to be able to tell him.”

  The anger drops and the calm determination returns. “Him,” she says. “You know it’s a him. Who’s after her?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Don’t you lie to me, and don’t evade me either. I know you’re not a liar, Freddy Ferguson. I saw that in your eyes at Anna’s funeral. Where is she? Who’s after her?”

  “You remember that FBI guy at the funeral?”

  She has to think for a minute, so I give her a little prompt. “The one who was leaning in on you when he talked. His name is Lomax.”

  “Him?”

  “Yeah, him. Did you recognize his voice when he called Anna’s phone today and threatened you?”

  “He…” She cocks her head a little, looks down at the floor, thinking. “No. Maybe it was him. I don’t know. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the funeral, so I don’t remember much. To be honest, what I remember most about that day is you.”

  “Didn’t he give you the creeps?”

  “He did, kind of. I mean, that’s not the kind of attention you want at your sister’s funeral. But I put it out of my head. Why is he after Anna?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “Did she tell you?”

  “I’m not sure she fully understands it herself. She gave me some leads. I’m still digging into them.”

  “Is she OK?”

  “She’s safe, for now. But if it comes out that she wasn’t on that plane, the FBI will pull her in for questioning, and she thinks Lomax will…” I stop short.

  “Will what?”

  “You know what line of work your sister was in. It’s not hard to get into a bad situation. You don’t have many people to turn to, and the ones who are supposed to look out for you aren’t much better than the ones who are trying to hurt you. You’re the property they rent out at night, and they just want to make sure their property doesn’t get damaged. But if it’s a cop, a federal agent damaging your goods, well… What can you do about that?” I remember the look of hatred in Kim Hahn’s eyes. What could she do?

  Julia pulls a pair of red lace underpants from the drawer, then another just like it, in dark blue. She examines them as if she’s trying to make sense of her sister’s life. I take a seat on the bed and explain what I’ve been able to piece together so far.

  “Lomax was working on an investigation in Texas that involved Sheldon Brown and Franklin Dorsett.”

  “Who are they?” Julia asks.

  “A couple of rich losers. Brown and Dorsett got a trip to DC to meet the Texas congressional delegation. That’s usually a political favor. For what, I don’t know yet. Maybe they wanted the Texas congressmen to introduce some legislation that would benefit their businesses. Or maybe they were just networking.

  “That was a few months ago. Apparently, Lomax kept an eye on them while they were up here. More than kept an eye on them. They did some partying with your sister and her friend, Katie Green. Sheldon Brown took a liking to Anna. So did Lomax. Dorsett seemed to like Katie. Crystal.”

  Julia looks down at the floor as she tries to take all this in.

  “Brown liked cocaine,” I say. “From what I hear, he was rolling in it. Lomax got caught up in it somewhere along the line. You ever been around cokeheads?”

  “No. I mean, I’ve seen people use it a couple of times.”

  “You know how they get?” I say. “It inflates their self-esteem and makes them feel invincible. It distorts their character. Some aspects of their personality become magnified. Other parts wither and disappear. That guy Lomax is a frat boy at heart, a pretty boy who’s used to having his way with the ladies. He carries a badge and a gun, and walks around like he can do whatever he wants and get away with it. Pump a guy like that full of coke, inflate his sense of power, and the power becomes a high he can’t get enough of.

  “When Brown and Dorsett went back to Texas, Lomax followed. Part of the investigation, I suppose. He took your sister and Katie Green with him. He told Anna he wanted her to be an informant for a federal investigation, and her assignment was to get information out of Brown. But cops don’t get involved with their informants the way Lomax got involved with her. At least, they’re not supposed to. He probably never even told the FBI about her. She was his little toy. She eventually figured that out, but by then she had no one to turn to.”

 
“What was he investigating?”

  “According to the FBI, some kind of corruption. According to your sister, it was drugs. Brown lived a pretty lavish life, and he took a lot of risks. The state cops seemed to know about him, but they never locked him up. Can I have the phone?”

  “Anna’s phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  She picks up her bag from the bed and slides out the phone with the shattered screen. When she hands it to me, my thumb hits the button beneath the screen and it lights up.

  “I thought you turned this off,” I say.

  “I did.”

  “You sure?” I show her the screen.

  “I’m sure,” she says. “Maybe it pressed against something in the bag.”

  The phone is sending GPS data out through a clear four-bar connection to the nearest cell tower, telling whoever wants to know that it’s sitting right here in Anna’s apartment.

  “You can’t get into it,” Julia says. “There’s a passcode.”

  “You look worn out,” I say. “You want to get something to eat?”

  “OK. I just… I want to lie down for a few minutes. Do you mind? That phone call creeped me out… And the drive, and just… everything. This is all just overwhelming.”

  “Take a rest if you need to. And then we’ll get something to eat.”

  I take the phone into the living room. Julia shuts the bedroom door.

  30

  A guy who really likes to hurt women wants to find a woman who’s really hurtable. He doesn’t get much satisfaction beating up a drunk who’s not going to remember it the next day. He wants to inflict some trauma and see it register. That’s where he gets his kicks. Anna Brook, for all her strength and all her problems, has a lot of soul in those blue eyes, and the depth of a spiritual seeker. There’s plenty there to hurt.

  From the time we spent talking, I have an idea what’s on this phone. Lomax told her she was an informant, and she believed that, at least initially. Her job was to gather evidence, and if she went out of her way to mail this phone to her sister, there must be something on it. And she went out of her way to text me her password along with the names of those two Texas cops.