The Negotiator

by Dee Henderson

  “So in order to explain Nathan’s blackmail, we need to find a link between Tony Jr. and Ashcroft,” Dave proposed, glancing around the table.

  Marcus nodded. “Yes.”

  “This is like looking for a needle in a sprawling haystack,” Susan commented, opening a box they had yet to go through. “Dave, which do you want? Tony’s O’Hare personnel records or the investigative notes for the charges that weren’t filed?”

  “Personnel records.”

  The room was quiet but for the turning of pages.

  “Marcus, didn’t you say Tony’s wife was named Marla?” Susan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She also worked at O’Hare in the baggage department, the same time as Tony. They must have met there.”

  “Really? Anything in the cops’ investigation about her?”

  Susan checked the records. “No.”

  “The background check we did showed only two parking tickets for her, nothing else, so I guess that’s not surprising.”

  “Found it.” Dave pulled out three blue pieces of paper. “Guess who wrote a recommendation for Tony to work at O’Hare? None other than Ashcroft Young.”

  “You’re kidding.” Kate reached for the pages Dave offered.

  “Didn’t they bother to check who his references were from?” Graham asked, astounded.

  Dave tapped the top of the sheet. “Business owner. Isn’t that novel?”

  Marcus looked at the timeline. “Ashcroft made the recommendation from jail?”

  “Bold fellow, isn’t he?” Dave checked the dates. “He would have been three years into his ten-year sentence.”

  “So he was trying to run his operation from jail.” Marcus said.

  “Yes.”

  “That explains the what of the blackmail. Tony worked for Ashcroft moving drugs, and somehow Nathan learned about it,” Lisa concluded.

  “It’s a reasonable hunch. So where’s the evidence now? Nathan’s dead. At Nathan’s home? His office? Tucked away somewhere never to be found?” Graham wanted to know.

  “It’s going to be rather hard to get a search warrant for a victim’s home with what we’ve got,” Dave remarked.

  “We can put cars watching both places. If the evidence exists, Tony may try to retrieve and destroy it,” Susan suggested.

  “Good idea.” Ben reached for the phone.

  Kate got up to pace the room. “Is it worth killing for? Even if convicted, Tony was looking at what—ten years in jail, out on parole in seven? A decent plea bargain, he’s out in five. Why pay almost two hundred thousand and then commit murder to stop that kind of possible conviction?”

  Marcus shook his head. “It doesn’t add up.”

  “Exactly. We’re missing something. Something big. We just scooped up a little minnow, and a catfish is still lurking in this muck.”

  “Of all the…” Kate nearly exploded out of her chair a short time later.

  Everyone around the table looked up. “What?” Dave asked, speaking for all of them.

  She looked at the trial binder as if it would strike out and bite her. “Ashcroft went to jail for a decade for distributing cocaine. Would you like to guess who his partner was?”

  Dave could see the anger in her eyes, glowing hot.

  “Tony Emerson Sr.” She bit out tersely.

  “Your father was dealing drugs?” Dave said slowly.

  “He cut a deal with the DA; he got five years’ suspended time and three years’ probation for testifying against Ashcroft. The judge apparently tossed part of the search warrant evidence against him on a technicality, and the DA decided that his testimony against Ashcroft was worth the deal. I don’t believe this. Talk about a pot calling the kettle black. They should have put him in jail and thrown away the key.”

  Stephen offered a slight whistle. “Ashcroft would have been out for Tony Sr.’s blood.”

  “Put someone in jail for ten years, yeah, he’d hold a grudge. Tony Sr. was lucky; he died in a car accident while Ashcroft was still in jail,” Kate concluded.

  “Anything suspicious about the accident?” Dave asked.

  “He was driving drunk, and he put his car into the side of a tree.”

  Dave nodded. “It’s an interesting link. Does it tell us anything?”

  “Just personal family history,” Kate replied grimly.

  Dave dug his fingers into the back of his neck. Kate didn’t look surprised her father had been mixed up in dealing drugs. It was a hard image of her past.

  “Do you want me to finish the transcript?” he asked, not sure how to deal with the anger, justified anger, she was feeling.

  “No.” She pulled her chair back to the table with a sigh. “I’ve got it.”

  Twenty minutes later he saw her sit up straighter and pull the trial binder toward her. “Now this is interesting.…”

  “Got something?”

  “Yeah. Ashcroft’s bank accounts were frozen—pretty standard stuff, but the guy who originally fingered the accounts and actually triggered the entire investigation? It was Nathan.”

  “Nathan turned his brother in as a suspected drug dealer?” Dave asked.

  Kate nodded. “He sent a letter to the DEA showing a list of suspicious deposits into one of his brother’s accounts. It’s what triggered the investigation that eventually sent Ashcroft to jail. Tony Sr.’s testimony was used so they could raise the charges to cocaine distribution, not just money laundering.”

  “So Nathan is into blackmail but won’t touch drug money.”

  “Protecting his banks?” Lisa asked.

  “Or kicking his brother where it hurts,” Marcus remarked.

  It was shortly after 5 P.M. when the last of the folders were closed.

  “So what do we think happened?” Lisa asked finally, looking around the room. Dave could tell no one wanted to say what was clear to all of them.

  Marcus looked over at Kate, his expression one of quiet sympathy. “Tony Jr. was being blackmailed, forced out of business. That’s motive. He used explosives from his own company. He met Nathan at the airport and was able to plant the bomb. That’s means and opportunity. Tony Jr. thought Nathan would be taking the private jet, he never intended to kill all those people. That removes the overkill. He’s disappeared, not normally the act of an innocent man. That’s what the evidence suggests. It may be wrong, but that’s what is here. The feud between Ashcroft and his brother is also there, but I think it’s unrelated to the events that happened on Tuesday—it was an ongoing family feud, and they are both dead. It’s Tony.”

  Dave listened to him quietly summarize what would go to the DA and knew the case was there. There were still problems. How Tony Jr. knew what type of laptop Nathan carried. Why he had placed the calls to the tower if his intended target was a private jet. But the case was there. He watched Kate drop her head into her hands. She had to hate this job about now.

  He kept hoping something would break in her favor, and yet every day that passed, the situation just got worse for Tony Emerson Jr. and therefore her. How long before the stress she was under broke her? She didn’t have God to lean on. She was trying to get through this on her own strength, and he knew it couldn’t be done.

  Dave just hoped she didn’t push him away before that crunch time came. He needed to be there for her. It was the one point in time her need for the gospel might overcome her resistance to it.

  Lord, please, help her yield. She needs You. She’s just too stubborn to realize it. It’s breaking my heart to watch her go through this and know I haven’t been able to reach her with the gospel. What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I get her to listen?

  Dave looked over at Kate as she wearily ran her hands through her hair and then began packing away the files in front of her, and he suddenly realized just how badly he had handled the entire problem of faith.

  He had been pushing too hard.

  He had seen so much emotion in Kate during the last few days he had assumed her decision about God would be a
n emotional one. It wouldn’t be. That wasn’t Kate. It would be a decision made with her heart and her head. Rather than give her the time she needed to ask questions at her own pace, he had been pressing for the decision. “Put God at the center of your life.” It had been the totally wrong way to handle that moment of vulnerability on her part, and he had lost an opportunity to simply tell her God cared.

  In wanting everything at once, he risked losing everything—that was the bottom line. It was time to back off and get his own act together. Kate needed a friend. It wasn’t his job to convince her to believe. God knew best how to draw her to Him. Dave knew that.

  It was painful to wait. He wanted the freedom to circle around the table, draw Kate into a hug, and let her rest against him until that strained look on her face disappeared. He could physically keep her safe despite her protests, but at the moment there was little he could do to keep her emotionally safe.

  Lord, give me patience with her, please. I need more of it than I have. Her own pace, Yours, not mine, because I can’t handle a failure…not on something so important to the rest of my life.

  Eighteen

  Her family thought Tony Jr. had done it. Somewhere inside there had still been the glimmer of hope that the O’Malley clan would look at the data and find something to change that initial hypothesis; instead, they had found proof to confirm it. Kate accepted it because she had no choice.

  Jennifer was due into town tomorrow afternoon. Kate was glad now that Dave had convinced her to invite Jennifer to stay at his house. She talked to Jennifer every day, but it wasn’t the same. She wanted the excuse to put her time and energy into Jennifer instead of this case, to be useful to someone instead of being the focus of pity. The O’Malleys didn’t mean it, but they were drowning her trying to fix the problem. Kate needed to hear Jennifer’s perspective.

  “Kate.”

  The back patio overlooking the rose garden had become her favorite retreat, her spot of territory in Dave’s domain that she had appropriated as her own. Kate didn’t have to think here, didn’t have to consider what was going on in the investigation. At least for a few moments she could forget. She turned her head with some reluctance at Dave’s interruption.

  He took a seat beside her on the lounge chair. “You once said you wanted a good steak, a cold drink, and a nap, not necessarily in that order. You still interested?”

  She saw something in his expression she had not seen before, a deep sympathy, a heartfelt wish to share the pain and take it away, and she drew a deep breath as she felt his words penetrate her sadness. He had remembered, practically word for word. She didn’t think she would ever smile again, but this one reached her eyes. “Yes.”

  His hand brushed down her cheek. “Close your eyes and start on that nap. I’ll wake you for dinner in about an hour.”

  It was a quiet dinner, eaten on the back patio, finished as the stars began to shine. Kate carried their dishes into the kitchen while he closed the grill; then she slipped upstairs for a moment. She owed Dave something, owed herself something.

  When she returned to the patio, he handed her a bowl of ice cream.

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure”

  She ate half of the ice cream before she opened the topic she was still uncertain about raising with him. “I read the book of Luke the other morning.”

  “Did you?” He sounded pleased but continued to eat his ice cream, didn’t leap all over the comment as she had been slightly afraid he would do. Maybe they had both learned something from that last aborted conversation. “What did you think?”

  “The crucifixion was gruesome.”

  He was silent for several moments. “A cop using the word gruesome. It helps to see that scene with fresh eyes. As time goes by, it becomes easy to say He was crucified and immediately go on.”

  She set aside her ice cream. “I’ve got some questions I need answered before I talk to Jennifer.”

  “Sure.” He opened the top of the carafe to see how much coffee was left, refilled his, and after a nod from her, refilled hers.

  “It might be a long conversation.”

  “Discussions about Christianity should never be sound bites. I’ve got as much time as you want to spend.”

  “When it is over, I still won’t believe.” She felt compelled to warn him.

  “You don’t now, and I still like you.” He smiled over at her, and he actually sounded relieved. “Would you relax? I don’t mind questions, Kate.”

  She realized her shoulder muscles were bunched and forced herself to let go of the tension. The fact she could talk about a crime easier than she could this subject annoyed her. “That’s one thing that struck me early on about you; you’re comfortable with what you believe.”

  “I am. Jesus encouraged honest questions. In Job, God says, ‘come, let us reason together.’ What do you need to ask?”

  She appreciated the simplicity of what he offered. Not a lecture, not pressure. A sounding board. She so desperately needed that tonight. She flipped through her notes for a moment in the light from the kitchen, then closed the spiral pad and set it aside. “I need some context. You believe Jesus really lived.”

  “I do. Roman historians of the time wrote about Him. Agnostics will argue over who He was, but even they concede there was a man named Jesus.”

  She thought about what she had read that morning, then slowly began to think out loud. “If I accept the premise that God exists and that He created everything, it is logical to infer He would be able to do what He liked with His creation—heal someone who was sick, still a storm, raise the dead—the things I read about in Luke. The power to create grants the power to control.”

  “You surprise me.”

  “Why?”

  “You easily accept the premise that God could exist and do what the Bible claims He did. Most people want to say there is a God and yet dismiss the miracles as something that didn’t occur.”

  “The Bible has to be all true or all false. Otherwise, it would be everyone’s interpretation. There is no logic to that.”

  “It’s all true.”

  “If it is, then I have three initial problems with what I’ve read.”

  “What are they?”

  “God should be just. Yet Jesus did not receive justice. He was innocent and God allowed Him to die. God should be consistent. Jesus healed in Scripture every time He was asked; yet Jennifer believes, prays, and is dealing with cancer. God should care. From what I’ve seen during my life, He does nothing to intervene and stop violence. Either God is not involved, or He has an ugly side.”

  “The mysterious plan of salvation, unanswered prayer, and the character of God. Not a bad threesome. Most theology students would have a hard time articulating a better list.” Dave sipped at his coffee.

  “To answer your first question about justice, you have to understand God’s mercy. He is both just and merciful in equal measure. Why did Jesus say He came?”

  She flipped through her notes. “That story with—” she hesitated on the name—“Zacchaeus? Jesus said He came to seek and save the lost.”

  “Part of the mystery of salvation is that to save the lost, us, Jesus had to die in our place.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “The people that killed Jesus, what would justice say they deserved?”

  “To die.”

  Dave nodded. “Yet Jesus chose to forgive them. Why?”

  “He was showing mercy.”

  “You don’t like that word.”

  She rolled one shoulder. “It denies justice.”

  “You instinctively feel the great quandary. How can justice and mercy exist in equal measure? To ignore the penalty, justice is shortchanged. To ignore mercy, people have no hope once they have done wrong—and we have all sinned.”

  “They can’t exist together as equals.”

  “Kate, God didn’t shortchange justice to grant mercy. He paid the full price Himself.”

  She thought that thro
ugh. “He was innocent when He died.”

  “Exactly. Jesus can forgive sins; He can extend mercy because He already paid the full price justice demanded. He took our punishment.”

  “If He paid the price for everyone, a blanket forgiveness, then mercy is larger than justice. They aren’t equal.”

  “Earlier in Luke, Jesus warns—unless you repent, you will perish. God’s wrath against those who reject the sacrifice His Son made will be fierce. There is restraint now, to see who will accept, but on the day Jesus returns, the judgment will be final. Those that haven’t accepted the mercy extended to us by Christ’s sacrifice will face justice.”

  “Is that restraint total? God allows anything to happen now, regardless of how innocent the victim?”

  “I can understand why you feel God is too hands-off. The plane is a pretty vivid example of the violence man can do to man. God really meant it when He gave man free will to do either good or evil. He allows sin because He allows our choice. But He is not standing back, uninvolved. I know prayer makes a difference.”

  “Then why hasn’t it made a difference for Jennifer? According to Luke, Jesus healed everyone who asked Him.”

  “Do you remember the parable of the widow and the judge?”

  “The only person who could help her was the judge, so she pestered him until he gave her justice.”

  “Jesus told the parable because He wanted to remind us to pray and never lose heart. He knew we would wrestle with unanswered prayer. If God decides no, or not now, does it mean He is not loving? He does not care? He is not capable? Jesus knew we would not always understand God’s plans. He simply assured us not to be discouraged but to keep praying.”

  “Jennifer having cancer, that is supposed to have a noble end?”

  “God is allowing it today for a reason. He may tomorrow decide to cure her.”

  “Then how do you know He is loving?”

  “Because the Bible says God is love. You take Him at his word, even if you don’t understand the circumstances. It’s called faith.”

  Kate tried to wrestle through the conflicting emotions. “There is nothing easy or simple about being a Christian.”