by Brad Parks
So that explained the $50,000 loan Tommy found in his background check.
“She said she was prepared to take this thing as far as it could go,” Anne finished.
Jeanne, who had managed to sit quietly through this whole exchange, was itching to add her input.
“Can you think what it would have been like to be Nancy?” Jeanne said, with tears welling in her eyes even as her voice stayed flat. “With this … this animal saying those things? And putting his hands all over her? You’re a man. I’m not sure you know what that would feel like.”
I get this a lot, of course. People assume that because I’m a privileged white male, I am utterly incapable of understanding discrimination or persecution in any form. It’s tough to convince them otherwise without sounding totally disingenuous-“but I have a friend who’s Jewish” doesn’t get you very far-so I ignored Jeanne and turned back to Anne. Somehow, she had to know something that would confirm the identity of Caesar 710.
“Had Nancy told you about her complaint to the National Labor Relations Board?” I asked.
“Well, yes … sort of. When Nancy first came to me about this-and, mind you, she wouldn’t tell me who it was-I said her first step was to take it to her employer’s human resources person. But I don’t think she got a very satisfactory response.”
“Well, yeah, if the problem was at the diner, I can’t imagine she would have,” I said. “A mom-and-pop restaurant like that doesn’t exactly have a human resources department.”
“Well, whatever happened, I told her the next step was the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission-the EEOC. But Nancy was very union proud, as you know. And I think she wanted to feel like she was getting some kind of solution that way. So she insisted on taking it to the NLRB. But I don’t know if she heard back from them before she was killed.”
That pointed the arrow back at Jackman because Nancy was a unionized employee of the Eagle-Examiner. There was no union presence at the State Street Grill. But why would the NLRB visit there?
“Well, the NLRB isn’t being very forthcoming,” I said. “I had a Freedom of Information Act request put in today, but I’m not optimistic that’s going to get them to open up.”
I returned my attention to the cover page of the complaint and found myself staring at the captioning on top. I wind up reading a fair amount of legal documents, and something about this one struck me as a little sparse. Then it hit me: it was the lack of codefendants. Generally, with these kinds of lawsuits, the plaintiff at least starts off with a big pile of targets, whether they’re named individuals, corporations, or just John Does.
“If Caesar is Gary Jackman, why not sue the paper as well?” I asked. “Even with times as tough as they are in the newspaper business, the Newark Eagle-Examiner still has much deeper pockets than Gary Jackman personally. And if Caesar is Gus Papadopolous, throw in the diner. It’s not as rich as the newspaper, but it’s something.”
“I told her the same thing. Nancy said she didn’t want to hurt Caesar’s business, just Caesar himself.”
I tried to stop the alphabet soup-NLRB, EEOC, IFIW-that was sloshing around in my brain and instead concentrated a bit more on the “Caesar 710” riddle. Clearly, the “Caesar” part wasn’t leading me anywhere. But what about the 710? Was it a date-July 10? An address of some sort? In the old movies, wasn’t it always a locker number at a bus station?
“I’m still trying to untangle this ‘Caesar 710’ thing,” I said out loud.
“I thought Nancy would tell me when the time was right, so I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I just assumed maybe it was initials of some sort.”
Initials? Of course. Initials. I started writing “A, B, C…” down one side of my pad, then “1, 2, 3…” next to it. The 7 lined up with G. The 10 lined up with J.
“GJ,” I said. “Gary Jackman.”
* * *
There was more to discuss with the Marino family, but the mini grandfather clock in Nancy’s living room-big hand on the VIII, little hand nearing the VI-told me there was no time to do it right now. If I was going to make my date with Jim McNabb at six o’clock, I had to clear out. I made my apologies, and the sisters Marino said they understood, practically shooing me out.
“I know you said you didn’t have copies of this,” I said, handing the complaint to Anne. “But do you have a file you could e-mail me?”
“Sure. I think Nancy has it on her computer here. It might take me a few minutes to find it on there, but I’ll send it to you.”
“Great,” I said, giving her the e-mail address connected to my iPhone.
Outside, the temperature had actually backed off slightly, mostly because the sun had been blotted out by an ominous-looking line of dark clouds. The thunderstorms that would hopefully break the back of the heat wave were rolling in from the hills of Pennsylvania. After a brief bit of fireworks, it would be a nice night in New Jersey. In more ways than one.
As I drove into downtown Newark, I began working out some things. Jackman, faced with a sexual assault lawsuit from an already difficult employee, had decided he could rid himself of both problems with one action. Gus Papadopolous’s involvement was, admittedly, still unclear to me. I’d have to leave that to Owen Smiley to sort out.
At the first light I hit, I picked up my iPhone, which I had stashed in the Malibu’s cup holder, to see if Anne had sent me the file. She hadn’t. There was just an e-mail from Lunky, telling me the NLRB had, as expected, denied his FOIA request.
I returned the iPhone to the cup holder. The NLRB would be a battle for another day. Assuming I could get myself reinstated at the paper, it would probably be fought by the very Eagle-Examiner lawyers who were used to doing Jackman’s bidding. They’d probably enjoy the task of prying loose evidence of Jackman’s guilt.
I was just a few blocks away from the National Newark Building when my iPhone began singing out its new mail song. At the next light, I grabbed my phone to have a look. It was the file from Anne McCaffrey. Someday, I thought, a printout of this file would likely be marked as evidence in a murder trial-if it ever went to trial. Maybe Papadopolous would admit to helping Jackman and agree to testify against him in exchange for less jail time. Jackman would know he was done for and grab the best plea deal he could get.
Jackman might end up with something short of life in prison. No matter. He would be ruined all the same.
At precisely six o’clock, I pulled up in front of 744 Broad and called Jim McNabb’s cell phone. He answered with an ebullient, “Hey, Carter Ross!”
“Hey, I’m outside your building.”
“Great, I’ll be right down.”
I used my short wait to forward Anne’s e-mail onto Lunky, my amateur cryptographer, just to see how long it would take him to crack it. I wrote “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!” in the subject line, figuring he’d appreciate the Shakespeare reference more than most. In the body of the message, I wrote, “Professor Langdon: A code for you to crack. Who is Caesar 710? See enclosed.”
As I hit the Send button, Jim McNabb came strolling out of the building, still dressed in the same suit he had been wearing at the funeral. I stowed the iPhone back in the cup holder.
“Jim, I just want you to know, I really appreciate this,” I said as he sank heavily into the passenger side of my car.
“Well, I gave it a lot of thought,” he said. “And I just decided this is the right thing to do.”
“Good. This thing might move fast. Have you been in touch with your lawyers for when the cops come to question you?”
“Not yet. I’ll worry about that later.”
“Okay. Where are we heading?”
“Just start driving north on Broad Street. We’re getting on 280.”
I did as instructed, pulling into traffic that was moving quickly out of town. Everyone was trying to beat the storm home. The sky was now some combination of green, black, and blue, the kind of sky that makes you want to take the kids and the hogs down into the cellar. And I don�
�t even have kids, much less hogs. Deadline isn’t that fat.
“Hey, did Nancy ever mention anything to you about a sexual harassment complaint against Jackman?” I asked as we merged onto the highway.
“Sexual harassment?” he said.
“She was about to file this civil lawsuit against the guy.”
“Against Gary Jackman?”
“Looks that way. She referred to him as ‘Caesar 710’ in the complaint, like some kind of code in case someone intercepted the document. But it’s him, all right. Sounds like he was a real dirtbag, hitting on her, not taking ‘no’ for an answer, putting his hands in places she didn’t want them.”
“You don’t say? Isn’t that something. I had no idea.”
“Yeah, I guess she was pretty secretive about it.”
I let it go at that. We drove in silence for a while, passing over the Passaic River.
“What about the NLRB?” I asked. “She ever say anything about going to the NLRB with a complaint?”
“Not that I heard. But it’s not like I was her closest confidant, you know?”
We neared the entrance to the New Jersey Turnpike, and I got into the left lane, thinking that’s where we were heading. But McNabb corrected me.
“No, no, stay to the right,” he said, pointing to Exit 17A, which went toward Jersey City.
The end of his sentence was partially interrupted by the insistent screeching of my iPhone, telling me I had a new e-mail.
“Is that the new model?” McNabb asked, eyeing it covetously.
He went to grab it, then stopped himself short. “You mind?” he asked.
“No, go ahead.”
It was so dark, it was almost like nighttime. And my headlights were only doing so much good. We were driving through an industrial stretch of Harrison-or possibly Kearny, you never quite know. We were about to pass under the eastern and western spurs of the New Jersey Turnpike. I couldn’t imagine what bar we’d find this way. McNabb obviously hung out in some old blue-collar dive.
“I got the older model, but I’ve been thinking about upgrading,” he said as he fondled my phone. “I told you, I just love all this technology stuff. Here you are, driving along at sixty miles an hour, and you just got an e-mail from … Lunky?”
“Oh, that’s just what people call him around the office. He’s one of my colleagues, Kevin Lungford. Would you mind opening that?” I said. “Lunky likes puzzles, so I sent him the sexual harassment complaint and told him to figure out the whole ‘Caesar 710’ thing.”
“Yeah, no problem,” McNabb said, cleared his throat and began reading:
“Mister Ross, this is almost too easy. The ‘Caesar’ is a reference to the Caesar cipher, one of the oldest cryptology methods known to man, so named because Caesar used it to communicate with his generals. It’s really a simple form of alphabetic substitution, but with a three-letter shift down. So while ‘7-10’ would make you think G and J, it is actually J and M. The person in this complaint has the initials J.M.”
“J.M.,” I said out loud. “Who’s J.M.?”
There was only one person in Nancy’s life I could think of whose initials were J.M., and that was Jim McNabb.
Who was now pointing a gun at my head.
McNabb trained the barrel of the Smith amp; Wesson an inch above Ross’s ear. All the idiots who watch too many movies always stick the gun at the target’s temple. But while that might do the job, it also might send a bullet racing through one soft part of the head and out another soft part without ever hitting anything hard enough to make it expand. It was only when expanding that a bullet did the full, flesh-tearing damage that would guarantee killing a man.
McNabb felt the tension of the trigger against his right index finger and reminded himself to stay calm and take deep breaths. He didn’t think Ross would make any sudden moves. Ross didn’t seem like the type to do anything that irrational. But McNabb wanted to make real sure that if the guy tried anything, he wouldn’t get very far.
What amazed McNabb-thrilled him, actually-is how thoroughly unaware Ross had remained, right until the very moment the gun came out. Ross knew about the sexual harassment, the NLRB, even the Cadillac Escalade. Yet for all his supposedly honed reporter’s instincts, Ross had never been able to put it all together.
McNabb had played a role in that, of course, having spun that marvelous bit of fiction about Gary Jackman and the threats. None of it had ever happened, of course. Oh, there had been a meeting between the Eagle-Examiner’s publisher and representatives from the IFIW that Thursday afternoon, and it spilled into the evening. But it had just been another negotiating session. It was not followed by any trip to any bar. That one fabrication had kept Ross off track.
But McNabb knew it wasn’t going to work forever. All those twisted little lies were eventually going to get straightened out.
So he spent the afternoon preparing for a visit to “the bar,” finding the ideal place for everything to go down, planning the route, thinking about what he’d say, anticipating how his adversary might react. They were only a few hundred yards away from their destination when the e-mail came in.
The e-mail was, admittedly, a wrinkle. McNabb couldn’t simply make Ross disappear now, as he had planned. There was too much of a trail that might be followed-if someone started looking at Ross’s e-mail, if someone plied answers from the NLRB, if someone pulled all those loose strings …
But no, Ross was the only one who was even close to tying them together. And the poor sap wasn’t going to be alive to tell anyone about it.
So McNabb-aka Caesar 710, J.M., Big Jimmy, whatever anyone wanted to call him-just needed to improvise a bit, to orchestrate the reporter’s death in a way that made it look like it was something other than what it really was. Just as he had done with Nancy.
A new scheme was already forming in his mind. And the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. He relaxed and reminded himself to breathe again. He was the one with the gun. He was in control. Total control.
CHAPTER 9
It’s surprisingly difficult to look at a gun out of the corner of your eye while driving, especially when it’s being pointed at the side of your head. But from what little I could see, McNabb’s piece was short, black, and made for the express purpose of ruining someone’s day. Gun enthusiasts go back and forth all the time about the merits of various calibers and bullets, chamber types and trigger actions. Not being a gun enthusiast, all I knew is this one would likely leave a significant portion of my brain splattered on my driver’s side window.
In my previous thirty-two years on this planet, despite brushes with some unfriendly people, I had never had a gun aimed at me from this short a distance. Or any distance, for that matter. I tried to keep walls, or at least bulletproof glass, between me and anyone inclined toward discharging a firearm in the general direction of my person.
Now here I was, with nothing but three inches of air between this gun barrel and some body parts that I preferred to keep unsplattered.
And perhaps it should have been unnerving. Or disconcerting. Or at least mildly off-putting. I certainly don’t fancy myself some kind of big tough guy impervious to bullets. I’m not especially brave in the face of danger. I have no illusions about my own fragile mortality.
Yet the only thing I felt was this strange calm. Maybe it’s just because it was all so foreign, I didn’t know how to react.
A few raindrops-big, fat, heavy ones-thwapped on the roof of the car. Then a gust of wind lashed us with another band of rain. The storm had arrived.
“Keep it nice and steady,” McNabb instructed. “Don’t try anything silly. If I feel even an ounce too much brake or accelerator, I’ll shoot.”
Up until the moment he had pulled the gun, McNabb had been his usual gregarious self. Now he seemed jumpy, on edge, neither of which were qualities I appreciated in a man with a gun.
I studied him, as best my peripheral vision would allow. His mouth had gone into the same ugly pout he had
worn when I first told him that Nancy’s hit and run was no accident. At the time, I thought the reaction was because of his friendship with Nancy. Now I knew it was because he realized he had not gotten away with his crime.
He almost did. If not for one El Salvadoran woman who liked to watch sunrises, neither of us would be in this spot right now.
McNabb had turned his body toward me, his eyes staring a hole in the side of my head where a fast-moving projectile might soon follow. I could see, now that he was twisted slightly, that he had been wearing a small shoulder holster. I’m not sure how I missed it before, except of course that it had never occurred to me to look.
Had he been unbelted, I would have simply jerked the wheel and crashed into the railroad trestle we were approaching. At sixty miles an hour, I’d take my chances. But he was wearing his seat belt. Crashing the car wouldn’t necessarily improve my situation. Sure, it might make it more likely he would get caught for killing me, because the crash would attract attention, and he might be incapacitated enough he wouldn’t be able to escape. But he’d probably shoot me as soon as he figured out what I was doing. And while it might be some small consolation for my loved ones that my killer got caught, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good from six feet under.
So I kept it steady. Like the man with the gun said.
“Slow down. Take a right here,” he said as we passed under the railroad. “Right after the bridge.”
There was an entrance to a warehouse about a hundred feet ahead. Just short of it was a small, packed-dirt road.
“Right here?” I asked.
“That’s the one,” he said.
“I’m braking now to make the turn,” I said, because I didn’t want to get shot until it was absolutely necessary.
The Malibu, not exactly an off-road vehicle, left the pavement with a jolt.
“Keep it slow,” he said. “Nothing cute.”
“You got it, Caesar.”
I used the name to try to get a small rise out of him-to see if he would rattle a little-but he didn’t show any reaction. As I gently pressed the brake pedal, the first peal of thunder boomed from somewhere nearby. I didn’t see the lightning strike that preceded it, but the storm was definitely close. Then, just as suddenly as the thunder, the rain came, hammering the car from every direction, like I had driven into a car wash.
