Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3)

by Bertrand, J. Mark

  ———

  My phone rings before I get back inside, Lorenz calling from Brandon Ford’s office.

  “There’s a safe here,” he says, “with a couple of rifles inside. There’s something else down here, too. I think you should come take a look.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure . . . a shrine? Newspaper clippings, photos, kind of a psycho wall.”

  “Snap some photos of it in situ, then bring it all down here.”

  He hesitates. “I’d rather you meet me. You’ll see what I mean.”

  Instead of heading upstairs again, I go straight to the garage. It takes twenty minutes to get there, and another five to circle around, retracing my path along Westheimer until I figure out which of the half-empty low-rise office parks is the right one. The building’s storefronts house a couple of pawnshops, a check casher, and a seedy-looking lingerie boutique. A sign in the parking lot lists the businesses inside. Brandon Ford’s name doesn’t appear.

  I park next to Lorenz’s car and go through the glass doors into a small air-conditioned entry with a row of mailboxes on one wall. Down a tiled corridor I hear the splash of a water fountain. As I follow the sound, the air grows humid. The corridor opens into a cathedral-like atrium, open in the center, its terra-cotta expanse filled with blinding sun from the overhead skylights. Around the shadowy perimeter, two floors of office space face the lobby like the split levels of an old-fashioned motor court.

  The smell inside reminds me of when I was a kid and my aunt would lock me in the car on a hot day with the windows cranked down just an inch. As my eyes adjust, I see the water fountain, hedged in by thirty-year-old plastic bushes.

  After ascending a flight of stairs, I find the right door. Lorenz answers on the first knock, like he’s been waiting at the threshold all this time.

  “It’s like a time warp out there,” he says.

  The space Brandon Ford rented consists of three rooms. The reception space up front houses an empty desk. On the right, there’s a hallway that leads to two offices. The front one contains the gun safe, its thick door hanging open to reveal a couple of black rifles. I peer inside. Tucked in back I find a short-barreled AK with a folding stock. This particular variant is called the Krinkov. To possess a short-barreled rifle of this sort legally, Ford would have had to jump through some NFA hoops, and it would only be transferrable to others willing to qualify the same way. I detach the banana mag—which is empty—and pull the breach open to make sure it’s unloaded.

  “Is there any paperwork on these?”

  Lorenz pulls open a file cabinet in the corner. “There’s a bunch in here, depending on what you’re looking for.”

  On the shelf inside the safe, twenty-round boxes of Wolf 5.45 x .39mm hollow points are stacked on top of each other.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I say, putting the rifle back. “But we should probably make a call to ATF. I’m not sure what the procedure is when a gun dealer is deceased, but I don’t think leaving these here is a good idea. How’d you open the safe?”

  “Same combo as the one at the house. I found it in his bedroom nightstand.”

  “So where’s this psycho wall?”

  He points the way to the back office. I go inside, flipping on the lights. This is where Ford must have conducted business. The desk wraps around one corner with custom cabinets overhead, the doors ajar from Lorenz’s search. The computer hums inside the footwell, but the twenty-inch monitor on the desk is dark, an add-on camera clipped to one side. On the opposite wall there’s a corkboard covered in news clippings.

  “Take a closer look,” he says.

  Some of the clippings are from the Chronicle, some are from the Houston Press. Some are printouts from the Internet, the URLs stamped on the outer margins. All of them concern the same story, and they are covered in ink underlining and bright yellow highlighting.

  “You remember that incident?” Lorenz asks.

  I nod silently.

  Earlier this year, an HPD patrol car pulled over a man speeding on Allen Parkway after midnight. The uniforms—a rookie and his training officer—handled everything by the numbers. The rookie went to the driver’s window while the trainer approached the other side. After shining his light into the car, the rookie exchanged words with the driver and then returned to the patrol car to run the license. All of this was captured on the dashboard cam.

  While the rookie was out of the way, his trainer approached the driver’s window. On the video, which was played over and over on the local news, the trainer suddenly backpedals and starts to reach for his side arm. There’s a flash from the window, an orange tongue of flame, and the trainer rolls backward onto the pavement. He draws and fires while the rookie runs forward with his own weapon drawn, also firing.

  He approaches the driver’s window first, making sure the threat is neutralized, then goes to the trainer and helps him up. Thanks to his vest, the trainer is bruised but otherwise fine.

  Watching the footage, things happen so fast. It’s all straightforward and undramatic, the way fights mostly are. If you weren’t paying attention, you might mistake the trainer’s motion for a clumsy fall. The stakes were life and death, but they don’t look it on camera.

  When the uniforms made their report, the story got strange. According to them, the driver had refused to give his identification, claiming he had immunity. He told the rookie he worked for the CIA. Then he’d changed course and handed his license over. His name was Andrew Nesbitt, aged sixty-one, a well-off retiree with a house in River Oaks. When the trainer approached, sensing something wasn’t right, Nesbitt grew combative and paranoid. He accused the officers of pulling him over without justification—and then, without warning, he produced a gun. It was a .32 Walther PPK, weapon of choice for James Bond.

  “The guy wasn’t just delusional,” Lorenz says, lifting the corner of one of the clippings. “He was some kind of con man. He was, like, the president of the retired intelligence officers’ club. Even the real spooks believed he was one of them.”

  “That’s a theory. It’s always possible he was telling the truth. There’s no law that says retired case officers can’t go nuts like everybody else. I bet they’re more prone to it than most.”

  “But the government denied he’d ever been in the CIA.”

  I crack a smile. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

  Judging from the Internet printouts, the usual conspiracy theories must have started proliferating the moment the story broke. Ford tacked up a forum post providing an ersatz history of the former spook’s club in Houston, claiming that dozens of high-ranking officers have retired to the oil capital over the years, putting their experience to good use advising on overseas operations. According to one blog, Nesbitt was a prime recipient of drilling dollars, while according to another he had a well-documented history of mental-health issues. The Houston Press had run a feature that summarized all the possibilities, and the annotated spread made up the center of Ford’s psycho wall.

  “This is all pretty interesting, Jerry, but I don’t see why I had to come down and view it in person. I’ve heard of this shooting. I’ve seen the video. Our guys were in the right. No matter who this Nesbitt dude was, he drew down on a cop. End of story.”

  Lorenz goes to one of the open cabinets and pulls out an orange-covered, spiral-bound Key Map. A scrap of paper marks one of the laminated pages. He opens it on the desk and turns the map to face me. His finger thumps down to a green patch near the middle.

  “That’s the park where we found Ford’s body,” he says.

  “Let me see that.” I study the map. “And it was marked like that when you got here?”

  He nods his head.

  “So Brandon Ford marked the page where his body was dumped? Like he knew in advance that’s where he’d end up.”

  “You’d think so, right? But no, that’s not what it is. Here—” he takes the book back—“this is why he marked it.”

  I lean closer.
He taps on a section of Allen Parkway curving through the map grid. When he moves his hand, I can see an X drawn over the road.

  “That’s where Andrew Nesbitt was shot?” I ask.

  He nods again. “And that’s not all, March. Remember when I sent you out into the woods and you had your fall? I thought if we followed the direction that finger was pointing, we’d find the severed head. But I was wrong. The fact is, if you follow that pointing finger—”

  “You end up on Allen Parkway.”

  And I’d seen it, looking through the weedy hurricane fence that night. I’d seen it without realizing the significance. The pointing finger had not led me astray; it guided me. I just didn’t know enough to make the connection.

  Now I’m beginning to.

  What I have is this: an unorthodox FBI agent telling me lies about the death of a man whose skinned finger, when his body was discovered, pointed straight to the site where another man, claiming to work for the CIA, had died in a gunfight with the Houston Police.

  “So what’s the next step?” he asks.

  “Let me think.”

  The guns in the safe. The story that Ford was down in Corpus Christi. Bea Kuykendahl, a.k.a. Trixie, riding shotgun while he dropped off his kids. While that was going on, he kept a room here at his office dedicated to the shooting death of Andrew Nesbitt and the many conspiracy theories swirling around the event.

  It all fits together somehow, assuming I have enough of the pieces. The bloody finger is pointing, the finger is guiding, the only question is where. I have to follow it. I have to think. It all fits together if I can only figure out how.

  CHAPTER 8

  Camped in Brandon Ford’s office, I tell Jerry everything: the early morning meeting with the FBI, my suspicions about the match on Ford, the ex-wife’s description of Bea. He listens silently and doesn’t ask any questions. When I’m done, he just looks at me.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “I feel like you just showed me your psycho wall. No offense. It just sounds a little crazy, that’s all.” He cocks his head toward the clippings. “And this is crazy enough.”

  “This doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up?”

  He smiles. “It does now. Look—are you hungry? ’Cause I’m starving. I skipped lunch coming out here.”

  “Jerry, will you stop and think a minute? I need your help putting all this together. This Agent Kuykendahl, my gut tells me she’s trying to hide something big.”

  “Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. I can’t do this on an empty stomach. Lemme run down the street and pick us something up, okay? I think there’s a Five Guys—”

  “Not again.”

  “Come on,” he says. “You can choose the next place.”

  There’s no chance of getting him to focus, so I let him go. He promises not to take long, and I can hear him chuckling to himself as he heads down the hall. Like he’s happy to get away. It occurs to me he hasn’t had a sit-down with Hedges yet. He doesn’t know there’s already a cloud over the day.

  The door shuts behind him and I get down to work. I left my briefcase at the office, so I have to use my new phone to take pictures of the wall. They come out good, better than my three-year-old point-and-shoot, in fact. Maybe it’s time to upgrade.

  With that done, I start pulling the clippings down one at a time. I read through the content, especially where Ford underlined and highlighted things, then stack pieces on the desk. Lorenz had called this a psycho wall, but it’s really a mind map, a visual scheme illustrating Brandon Ford’s obsession. Or to be more precise, his investigation. He was compiling information about the Nesbitt shooting, about the man’s alleged background—but why? Whatever his motives, this inquiry of his must have led to his death. Which means that if I can understand the wall, it might lead me to his killer or killers.

  Once the wall is dismantled and stacked, I go to the computer. We have an excellent forensic computer specialist named Hanford, and he’d probably want me to leave this to him. I take a look anyway. The screen comes to life with a shake of the mouse. In Ford’s email inbox, there are more than fifty unopened messages. I scan them quickly. Mostly junk. Nothing from Bea Kuykendahl.

  There is, however, an email from Sam Dearborn, sent after my visit to him, asking Ford to give him a call. Strange, since he already knew that Ford was dead. Reviewing the conversation in my head, though, I realize I never made my interest in Ford clear to Dearborn. A sign of my misgivings about the case? Perhaps.

  The door opens down the hall.

  I check my watch and call out: “I thought you were coming right back.”

  Silence.

  I wheel around in Brandon Ford’s chair, my hand moving to my holster.

  “Don’t,” a voice says.

  The only things visible in the doorframe are part of a man’s head—mostly hidden by a black balaclava, only an eye showing—and the barrel of a pump shotgun.

  “Draw that gun and you’re dead,” he says.

  My hand wants to move. My heart’s racing, my vision tunneling, my aim fixing on him. The voice in my head saying Go, go, go.

  But he’s holding that shotgun steady, using cover like he knows what he’s doing. I will my hand to relax. I move it away from my side arm.

  He leans further into the doorway. The fluorescents raise a shine on his synthetic mask.

  “Stay calm,” he says. “Lift your hands. Put them flat on the desk in front of you.”

  As he speaks, a second man crosses behind him and enters the room. He levels a black pistol in my face, circling to my left so as to leave the shotgun’s line of fire open. If I drew now, there’d be no way of taking them both, assuming I could beat the twelve-gauge in the first place, which is unlikely.

  “I’m a cop,” I say.

  “Do what I tell you and you’ll still be a cop when we walk out of here.”

  “You’re in charge.”

  “Good. Now, keep your hands flat on the desk, and without lifting them I want you to stand up. If you lift your hands, you’re dead.”

  He delivers the instructions calmly with just the hint of an accent—East Texas, maybe, or Louisiana. The man with the pistol says nothing. He just stands in the corner of the room, covering me. I glance his way, trying to burn the details into my memory. He wears a tight balaclava, too, and a gray T-shirt that leaves his nut-brown arms bare. There’s a gold ring on his left middle finger. A metallic skull with red stone eyes. Jeans and tan lace-up boots. I catch a smell of musky cologne on the air, the scent intensified by his stress.

  “Don’t sit there all day,” the man at the door says. “Get up.”

  Keeping my hands flat, I rise into a crouch. The pain in my leg flares up. I try to ignore the sensation. It feels wet, like if I put my fingers to my thigh, they’d come away bloody.

  “Okay. Now you’re going to stay like that while my associate takes your gun. This is for our safety and yours. If you try anything, I won’t hesitate.”

  “I won’t try anything.”

  The second man lowers his gun and tucks it into his waistband behind his hip. He approaches obliquely, removing my SIG from its holster in a practiced motion. Then he rests the muzzle against my back while his free hand roams over me.

  “Where is it?”

  “Left ankle,” I say, my throat tight.

  He stoops slightly, tugs my pants leg up, and slides the .40 caliber Kahr out of my molded ankle holster. A tremor runs up my spine. My skin feels clammy with sweat.

  Once he has both guns, the man fades back into the corner. The one with the shotgun finally reveals himself. He steps toward me, bringing the muzzle almost to my face. All I can see is that gaping hole, but I get the impression of a broad chest and thick forearms all blurred behind it.

  “We understand each other,” he says. “Now here’s what we’re gonna do. I want you to come around the desk and go over to that corkboard. I want your nose in that corner and your hands on the wall. When I say go, you lift
your hands over your head and do it.”

  A drop of sweat runs down the side of my nose, hitting the desk.

  “Go.”

  I lift my hands off the desk. They leave damp prints. I raise them and straighten up, ignoring the needles in my hip and back. Unsteady on my feet, I shuffle around the desk, past the stack of clippings to the bare corkboard. In the corner I rest my hands on the two walls, staring into the crevice where they meet.

  “This is a mistake—”

  “Don’t bother with the speech,” he says. “We’re taking what we came for, then getting out of here. If you don’t move, everything will be fine. If you do . . .”

  The second man, the one with the skull ring, sniggers.

  “Shut up,” the Shotgun says. “Open the desk and find a folder or something to put all this stuff in.”

  I hear them moving behind me, gathering the clippings and putting them away. Then there’s a sound of moving furniture, metal scraping metal.

  “Are we taking this whole thing?” Skull Ring asks.

  “Just pop it open and take out the hard drive.”

  “You got a screwdriver?”

  “Just do it, okay?”

  A sudden crash makes me jump.

  “Don’t you move!” Shotgun yells.

  More crashes—they’re banging the computer on something, trying to break open the housing. Skull Ring huffs with the effort, but finally wrenches away the metal and starts digging inside. My shirt sticks to my chest. All I can think about is not moving, keeping calm, storing every detail away in my head. Not the sound of a trigger pull, not the explosion, the stench of blood, the darkness, the death and the nothing.

  Live to fight another day. Live to fight another—

  “Keep your hands on the wall. Don’t try to follow us.”

  I hear them backing into the hallway.

  “Leave my guns,” I say.

  “Yeah, right. You’re keeping your life. Be content with that.”

  Footsteps in the hall. I turn my head. They’re gone. With effort I take my hands from the wall. The front door of the office slams shut.

  I let out a breath. I crouch down, hands on knees. Gotta get myself under control. Gotta do something. I stare at the carpet between my shoes. The pant leg rucked up over my empty holster.