The Negotiator

by Dee Henderson

  “ Stephen, you’ll bring out to the house anything Marcus missed?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks. Let’s go, Ladybug.”

  Kate swung back to Marcus. “Great, now you’ve got Dave calling me that. Did you even tell him what it means?” she demanded.

  Marcus rocked on heels, arms folded. “That you’re either a lady or a bug depending on how annoying you are? Sure, I told him. You’re buzzing like a mosquito at the moment.”

  “Try a bee. You are about to get stung.”

  Marcus just grinned. “Nice to have you out of your funk. Go get back to work, Kate.”

  Seventeen

  Let’s solve this case. The answer has to be somewhere in these piles of data.” Dave heard Lisa from his vantage point at the base of the stairs where he was waiting for Kate to appear and wondered with some amusement how he had managed to miss the fact Lisa was the bulldog of the O’Malley clan. It was Saturday morning; the case had become stuck, and Marcus had recommended last night that it was time they shook things up—hence the invasion.

  Dave’s formal dining room had become a mini war room.

  Marcus apparently had some serious strings he could pull, for seven large boxes of files now sat against one of the dining room walls—copies of everything that could be found on Wilshire Construction, Tony Emerson Jr., Nathan Young, Ashcroft Young, and Henry Lott.

  Lisa, Jack, and Stephen had trailed Marcus in the door, helping him carry the boxes. How Marcus had managed to get clearance for them to see the files, Dave didn’t want to know and wasn’t going to ask. He had thought it was a full house only to have Franklin and Graham appear next from Kate’s office, and then Susan and Ben from his. He was beginning to feel like a poorly paid doorman. If the ten of them couldn’t make sense of the data, it wasn’t there to be found.

  Dave paced at the base of the stairs, beginning to think Kate was intentionally stalling.

  Grinning, Marcus leaned against the doorpost beside him. “Waiting on a woman is a very bad sign.”

  He had to smile. “Lay off, Marcus. If Kate figures that out, my goose is going to be royally cooked.”

  Marcus laughed. “Lisa sent me for Post-it notes and masking tape.”

  “Do I dare ask what for?”

  “Probably not.”

  Dave thought for a moment. “Try the top left drawer of my desk.”

  He sipped his coffee and wondered what it took to get out of this family once you were in. It didn’t take much effort to realize the crowd now plotting strategy in his dining room had adopted him. No, maybe it would be better to make this a permanent arrangement. With Jennifer getting married, the family would balance out four girls, four guys. But if he dated Kate, the numbers would tip five to four in the guys’ favor. His grin widened. Kate would be ticked.

  “What are you grinning at?” She stopped one step up from him.

  “Nothing.” He let her take his coffee. “Sleep okay?”

  “Fine.”

  He wondered how true that was but didn’t push it. “Good.”

  She tilted her head. “Where is everyone?”

  He turned her toward the dining room. “There.”

  “Then I guess I had better get to work.”

  “I noticed you’re stealing my coffee again, but I’ll let you get away with it this time.”

  “It needs more sugar.”

  “Why do you think I let you have mine rather than let you fix your own?”

  She disappeared into the dining room with a laugh.

  “There is nothing on this security tape that shows Tony Emerson messing with that laptop.” Jack set the tape on the dining room table and dropped back into a chair.

  Lisa, on the other side of the table, looked up from her printouts. “You’re sure?”

  Dave looked up from the case file he had been reading to listen to Jack’s conclusion.

  “I’ve been through it three times. There is a total of eight minutes and fifty seconds where the laptop is not in view; six minutes of that was when it was with Peter Devlon, so I can’t rule out that Tony didn’t touch it. But there is nothing here that proves he did, only that he did meet with Nathan Young.”

  Dave watched Lisa scan the large pieces of easel paper taped to his dining room wall, find the right purple Post-it note, and remove it. A yellow Post-it note went up in its place. Lisa was playing colors. Every piece of data was labeled—red for guilty, green for innocent, and yellow for inconclusive. It was a crazy way to work a case, but he had found after an hour her visual system worked. At the moment, with half the questions eliminated, Tony looked circumstantially guilty.

  “So we still don’t know how the bomb got into the briefcase,” Dave observed.

  “It’s circumstantial that it was Tony Jr. It could just as easily have been Peter Devlon,” Jack replied.

  Lisa looked over the unresolved Post-it notes. “Okay. What about Wilshire Construction? Do we have any leads on why Tony’s company was having such serious cash flow problems?”

  “Stress serious,” Marcus added from the other end of the table. “From the bank records on the line of credit, it looks like he lost almost a quarter of a million dollars in the last year. I’m surprised the bank didn’t pull the plug on him months ago.”

  “The records I’ve got make it pretty clear his suppliers were beginning to demand cash on delivery, no longer willing to extend even thirty days of credit,” Susan offered.

  “You ought to read the union contracts,” Stephen added. “Two months ago they forced Tony to renegotiate the contracts so that medical insurance and retirement payments would be made weekly, concurrent with paychecks.”

  “Had he ever missed those payments?” Lisa asked.

  “No.”

  “Then the unions either knew or suspected something,” Lisa concluded.

  Stephen nodded. “Looks that way.”

  “So what was going wrong? Lack of business? Cost overruns?”

  “He’s busy, and I have yet to find any particular job that is hemorrhaging red ink,” Ben noted.

  “But he was laying off people,” Lisa interjected. “Correct?”

  Franklin nodded. “Seventeen in the last three months alone. This business was running on fumes, and he was juggling every week to keep it floating.”

  “I think Tony was paying off someone.” Kate dropped that fact into the room, and it landed like a bombshell.

  Dave studied her pensive face for a moment. “What did you find?”

  She set down the company books she had been paging through, looking at her notes. “I’m honestly not sure. It looks like nothing at first, just another subcontractor. But it’s odd. There aren’t invoices for materials on file as there are with every other subcontractor, just reimbursements. It’s like the subcontractor doesn’t really exist. And when I dig deeper, the payments each month keep adding together into nice round numbers. Five thousand, ten thousand, spread across a few checks. This last month for example: two checks, the first $2,046.11 for cement; the second, $2,953.89 marked lumber.”

  “Five thousand dollars. Pretty convenient.”

  “Exactly.” She turned pages in the registry. “It’s been going on for months.”

  Jack walked a nickel through his fingers, thinking. “I don’t get it—if someone was bleeding Tony dry, wouldn’t he get angry at the person squeezing him, not the banker holding his line of credit?”

  “You would think so,” Lisa agreed.

  “Unless they were one and the same,” Marcus said quietly. He looked over at Dave. “Can we get the canceled checks for those last payments, see how they were endorsed?”

  Dave nodded and reached for the phone. “I think we had better. Kate, what are the check numbers?”

  She wrote the numbers and amounts down, then slid her notebook over to him.

  A red note went on the board. Blackmail was a pretty good reason for murder.

  “Okay, we’ve got two new stickers to resolve—who was blackmailing
him, and why?” Lisa commented.

  “Kate, when did the payments start?” Marcus asked, reaching for the blue binder that was the last bank audit for the First Union Bank.

  She hunched over the table, paging back through the check registry. It took her several minutes to find it. “Nine months ago. It looks like October 15 is the first payment for $9,500.”

  “And you think he paid out how much? Roughly?”

  Kate did some quick calculations. “Maybe two hundred thousand, give or take.”

  “And all the checks below the federal notification amount of ten thousand dollars—so even if they were converted and deposited as cash, there would be no immediate trail,” Marcus both stated and asked.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Yes. Banker knowledge. Or someone who launders drug money.”

  “Exactly.” Marcus started thumbing through the accounts.

  Kate glanced at Graham. “Didn’t Henry Lott claim in his interview that he suspected Wilshire Construction had been used in the past to launder drug money?”

  “Yes, but I talked to narcotics, and it was old news. They’ve checked periodically, and the business has been clean ever since the kid took over.”

  Marcus marked a page in the printout. “I think I’ve found the account. The first deposit is right—$9,500, October 18. There is over a hundred fifty thousand still in the account.”

  “Who was Tony paying off?”

  Marcus double-checked the account numbers. “Nathan. It looks like it might have been routed through another account first, but the money was definitely ending up in Nathan’s account.”

  Stephen set aside what he was reading. “What did Nathan have on Tony to be able to blackmail him like that? And why so much blackmail he put the company out of business as a result?”

  “He knew something about Wilshire Construction?” Lisa offered.

  “Even if he did, why would Nathan risk it?” Jack asked. “Wasn’t this guy supposed to be lily-white—head of some big banking conglomerate?”

  Kate nodded. “We thought so.”

  Marcus tapped the printout. “We’ve definitely found a money trail. Who could explain the reason?”

  Kate rubbed her eyes. “Nathan—he’s dead. Tony—he’s on the run.” She sighed. “Marla.”

  “Yes.” Marcus reached for the phone. “If there is a third person who would know, his wife Marla is a good bet. She got along well with Linda; let’s see if she wants to add anything to what she said.”

  Jack scanned the notes and shook his head. “It’s got to be drug related. Nothing else makes sense. Everywhere you look there’s a tag that somehow leads back to drugs.”

  Lisa lined up those notes, and there were a lot of them. “I agree, it’s there, but it’s too nebulous.”

  “All we’ve really got so far is Nathan blackmailing Tony, and Tony killing him,” Dave concluded.

  Kate closed the Wilshire books and slid them back to the center of the table. “Dave, let me see that transcript from Ashcroft Young’s trial.”

  He found the gray trial transcript binder and passed it to her. “Still think there is some link between both Nathan and Ashcroft getting killed?”

  “I just can’t buy the fact it was a fluke he was killed, too. Did we ever sit down and plot out a list of Ashcroft’s enemies?”

  “It is awfully convenient that the blackmail began a few months after Ashcroft was released from prison,” Marcus agreed.

  Dave glanced between the two of them. “You really think someone planned for Nathan to walk on that flight at the last minute?”

  Marcus shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know what I think. It’s simply…interesting…that a man who probably had a lot of enemies ended up dead.”

  Dave looked over at Ben, then Susan. “What do you think?”

  “I agree with Marcus,” Ben replied after a moment. “Ashcroft—if he came out of prison looking for trouble, he’s the type that could find it in a hurry.” Ben leaned forward in his chair and started turning down fingers one by one. “We know Ashcroft dealt drugs and at one time had a network operating through O’Hare. We know the blackmail started soon after he was released from prison. His brother is a banker. Even if we can’t prove money laundering, the situation smells like it.”

  Dave thought about it. “So was Ashcroft the intended victim?”

  Marcus smiled. “Good question. I bet we could find a long list of motives for killing him.”

  Kate tossed her pen on the table. “With Ashcroft as the target, we have known criminal activity, an unknown but probably long list of enemies, and a very big problem in the timeline. There’s just no getting around the fact Nathan was a last minute walk-on for the MetroAir flight.”

  She then gave the other scenario. “With Tony going after Nathan, we’ve got means—he had access to explosives; motive—he was being blackmailed; and opportunity—he’s on tape as one of the last two people to see Nathan.”

  “He’s also disappeared,” Lisa added.

  Kate nodded. “He’s also disappeared. But it’s still an enormous amount of overkill and a big risk that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Hold it, Kate.” Dave rapidly flipped back in his notes. “Nathan wasn’t supposed to take that MetroAir flight. Remember what Devlon said?” He found his notes from that meeting. “Nathan was scheduled to take the private company jet to New York. It wasn’t until after the meeting with Tony that he changed his mind, decided at the last minute to take the MetroAir flight.”

  “So Tony never intended the overkill,” Kate speculated.

  “Exactly.”

  “And the risk of planting a bomb—play your cards right and if those security tapes don’t convict you, they create reasonable doubt.”

  Dave nodded. “So the risk might actually have been a good gamble.”

  Kate finally shook her head. “I don’t know. We’re making this kid out to be a very well-planned, shrewd, no-nerves-showing type of guy. But he doesn’t have a serious criminal record; his wife is shaking in her shoes, and Henry Lott called him that young brat. It still doesn’t compute.” She pushed back her chair with a sigh. “I need a walk and some more caffeine.”

  The news that Tony Jr. was her brother broke in the media just before 7 P.M. Kate watched the first five minutes of the special news report, then retreated as far as the rose garden and sat with her cold soda resting against her jeans.

  They had called it a day shortly after 5 P.M. so Marcus, Ben, and Graham could get to the evening update meeting. Marcus was going to fill the other investigators in on what they had so far. Kate was relieved in a way that the family wasn’t here. This was a private grief, a private pain, and it cut deep.

  “Are you okay?” Dave asked quietly, settling into a seat nearby.

  She didn’t have words, simply shook her head. She was related to a man who had blown up a plane. She couldn’t even put into words what it felt like.

  “Kate, it’s still speculation. We are so far from knowing everything that happened. You have to know we’re barely past the beginning of this investigation.”

  It was nice that he was trying to offer the reassurance, but its impact was muted by the reality. The press was screaming the news: Bombing Suspect Related to Investigating Cop. The assumptions in the story didn’t matter. “Are you sure you can keep the press away?” She asked, keeping her focus on work.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s going to get rough.”

  “I’ve dealt with worse. Kate, look at me.”

  She reluctantly turned her head.

  “It’s okay to explode. You’re worrying me.”

  Kate fought back the desire to cry. “I can’t change any of this.”

  “No. But you’re giving up. I can see it happening.”

  She reached over to squeeze his hand, hearing how badly he wanted to help her; she deeply appreciated that fact. “I’m temporarily retreating, Dave. Don’t worry. I’ll find my sea legs again. I just hate having my name plastered all over the
news.” She didn’t want to talk about it anymore, didn’t want to think about it. Tony Emerson Jr. was going to destroy her life before this was over. She was surprised Dave was not backing away from her; she didn’t have years of experience with him to generate the kind of loyalty he was showing to her.

  She entwined her fingers with his. “They are going to put me on administrative leave, move me out of this job, something,” she said quietly, admitting her biggest fear. “The pressure created by the media attention will demand it.”

  “I’ve met your boss. There is no way Jim will let that happen.”

  “He’ll try to protect me. It may be taken out of his hands.”

  Dave squeezed her hand. “If the worst case happens, and they do? How are you going to cope?”

  Kate closed her eyes, relieved he wasn’t trying to pretend it couldn’t happen. “I’ve endured worse.”

  “The O’Malleys will be there for you. I’ll be here, too.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Dave hesitated. “You should have more than your job at the center of your life, Kate. Put God in the center. He won’t shift even if everything else gets taken away.”

  Dave, if your God were there, if He cared, why is He letting my life be shaken apart? She was wrestling to understand how what she had read in Luke fit with what was going on, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it. She certainly wasn’t ready to believe. She bit her lip, not wanting to be rude but knowing she couldn’t deal with this subject tonight. She looked over at him, hoping he would understand. “Change the subject, Dave? It’s not that I want to knock what you believe, but your God is already supposed to be in the center of this, and I don’t like what I see. I’m just not up to a discussion about it tonight.” She saw him pull back as if slapped, his expression showing his hurt before it went carefully neutral. She tightened her hand to apologize even as he released her hand.

  “Sure. Better yet, I’d better go check security on the grounds for the night.” He got to his feet, his voice tight. “I’ll be a few minutes.”

  Kate watched him walk away, then raised her hand and squeezed the bridge of her nose, wanting desperately to throw something, anything, for being such a jerk. She knew how important the subject of religion was to Dave. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been thinking about what she had read in the book of Luke during the quiet moments of the last two days. She owed him the freedom to mention the subject without having her bite his head off. He’d been listening to all her problems since this disaster began, had been trying to help, and she’d just shown him she didn’t have room for his priorities.