“Maybe she won’t. Let’s give it a try, though, and see what happens.”
“And you’re comfortable doing this without a warrant, without any kind of backup?”
I smile. “You’re the one who said the time for warrants was over.”
We cross the street on foot, dodging a dog walker with three canines on the leash. Entering the lobby, we’re enveloped by cool air. The manager’s office is tucked into a compact but stylishly appointed suite of rooms just off the elevator on the first floor, immediately behind the tenant mailboxes. Bea dazzles the manager, a slender and serious-looking woman in her fifties, with a flash of her FBI credentials, and within five minutes we’re all three peering down at a computer screen with all the rental information on file for the seventh-floor safe house. The name on the lease is Hillary Mendez.
“Oh yes,” the manager says, “I remember her. She lives down on Galveston Island and wanted a pied-à-terre here in the city.”
“You have a number where you can reach her?”
She points to the screen. “And her home address, too.”
I copy the information down, even though the address is likely to be a sham. As I write, Bea starts explaining how we’re concerned that something might have happened to the apartment’s occupant and so we need to take a look inside. Without asking any questions, the manager opens a key box on the wall.
We take the elevator up and head down a thickly carpeted corridor, pausing at the apartment door. Before trying the key, the manager knocks three times and calls out. There’s no response, so she opens it up.
The apartment is quite small, just a studio with a kitchenette and bath, sparsely furnished, with a breathtaking view thanks to the fact that the back wall is entirely glass. Bea motions the manager to stay put while we have a look around. There are two rolling suitcases on the floor next to the bed, their panels unzipped, and toiletries scattered on the bathroom sink along with a blow dryer and an unplugged curling iron.
“Somebody’s staying here,” Bea whispers.
Now comes the tricky part. I turn to the manager and start to improvise some kind of halfway convincing story. Bea cuts me off.
“We’re going to stay here and wait for her to come back,” she explains. “And we need you to keep this entirely confidential. It’s a matter of homeland security. Thanks for your cooperation.”
The woman teeters on the threshold, looking simultaneously dazed and excited. Then she springs forward and presents Bea with the key.
“If you need anything—” she begins.
“We’ll let you know.”
When she’s gone, we close the door. Bea goes straight for the luggage, looking for anything packed away underneath the clothes. She finds nothing in the first case. From the second, she produces a zip-around pouch full of passports, currency, credit cards, and driving licenses, all bearing Hilda Ford’s face but with different names including Hillary Mendez. She puts everything back in place, then shakes the bag over her head in triumph. I motion for her to keep looking. In one of the internal pockets, wrapped in a silk slip, she finds a stack of file folders identical to the dossiers on Brandon Ford and myself.
“Look at this.”
We spread them out on the bed, open to the photos. There are five in total, all of them men in their mid-twenties to late-thirties. I pat my jacket pocket, removing the now-familiar photo. Brandon Ford flanked by two buddies, with Hilda in the background. I lay it on the bed among the folders.
“This one here,” I say, tapping the man on Brandon’s right. “That’s him.” I show her the folder with his photograph. “And the one on his left, that’s him over there.” I slide another folder alongside.
“They’re all using false identities.”
I lift one of the folders, holding the image close up for inspection.
“You recognize that one, too?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I hand her the folder. “That’s the one I killed.”
———
A brooding silence descends as we wait. I sit at the window, listening to the rumble of traffic on the street below, the sun warm on my hands, my face, my closed eyelids. I can hear Bea perched on the edge of the bed, quietly browsing through the dossiers, trying to make sense of what this means. I haven’t told her about my run-in with Ford on Allen Parkway, about the voices of the men who came after me, no doubt the same ones whose files she holds on her lap. If they were Englewood’s team, as I assumed, why does Hilda have their dossiers? Obviously she created their new identities, just as she created Jeff’s. That’s her specialty, he said.
“I should have known about this,” Bea says. “I should have dug deeper to begin with. I just accepted everything they told me. I made it easy for them.”
“It won’t be easy for them anymore.”
“No,” she says. “Not if I can help it.”
I open my eyes. She’s holding all the files in a thick stack, her knuckles white. From across the room, her sinewy, boyish muscularity and the random twists of hair spouting around her temples make me think of a kid in school, stumped by the test.
Sometimes my thwarted fatherly instinct comes out. I’ll find myself connecting, albeit awkwardly, to substitute children like Carter Robb, maybe even Cavallo. Not that I’m old enough to have fathered either of them, but I can imagine Carter as the grown-up son I never had, imagine Cavallo as the daughter who was taken from me. It’s stupid, I know, but maybe it explains some things.
Looking at Bea, I feel none of that. Her broad, unlined face is just a cipher. She could just as easily be carved from stone. And the funny thing is, I bet if I asked about her job, how she gets along with her colleagues, what they think of her, I’d hear a story not unlike my own. We’re a lot alike, I suspect, and that’s why we can sit in a room together and both feel alone.
“You know something—”
She silences me with a finger, then tilts her head toward the door.
I rise quickly, moving across the room, positioning myself inside the bathroom while Bea sets aside the stack of files and slips into the corner to the right of the door. We make eye contact. Bea holds a collapsible ASP baton in her hand, a wicked smile on her lips.
Here we go.
The door swings open. A short, plump woman laden with plastic shopping bags walks through, heading straight to the kitchenette. She hoists the bags onto the counter, peels off her sunglasses, and pauses. Her head turns toward the bed, toward the stack of files.
“Hello, Hilda,” Bea says, pushing the door shut.
In the photo I’ve been carrying, Hilda Ford is a hard-looking, ashen-faced woman with demon eyes. In real life, she has a dimple on one cheek and a crooked smile. She gives off a comfortably aged, grandmotherly vibe, and if she’s shocked to find two unexpected visitors in her safe house, she doesn’t let on.
“Hello yourself,” she says, dragging the words out like she’s trying to recall a forgotten appointment. “Bea. And you—” she turns my way—“I recognize you. You’re Roland March.”
“That’s right. You made a file on me.”
“And I see you’ve been sneaking through my files.”
“You got careless, Hilda,” Bea says, moving forward, slapping the baton against the palm of her hand. “You thought I wouldn’t find you.”
The older woman shrinks back at Bea’s approach, and I have a terrible premonition of sudden violence, Bea’s arm lifting and the baton crashing down. I edge myself between them to head off the possibility. Seeing this, Bea smirks.
“Why don’t you have a seat, Hilda?” I ask. “We need to have a little talk.”
“You set me up,” Bea says. “You lied to me.”
“That’s not true—”
“You told me Brandon was dead.”
Hilda smiles sweetly, her palms turned up. “I thought he was. I only told you what I believed myself. I was trying to help.”
“Then why did you disappear?”
“Not because of you, dear,” Hilda
says.
She trails past the bed, glancing around as if the room is unfamiliar, finally settling herself on the chair I recently vacated by the window. She wears a flowery capped-sleeve top, stretched tight across her thick arms, and boot-cut jeans with little sparkles down the side. There’s nothing threatening about Hilda, nothing to even suggest the sort of work she’s done or the secrets she must have been privy to over the years.
Bea puts the tip of her baton on the arm of the little sofa and makes a show of collapsing it back to its original size. Then she slumps onto the cushion, leaving the last chair for me. I scoot it over, positioning myself between Hilda and the door. It’s force of habit. I don’t anticipate her making a run for the exit.
“I knew Andrew Nesbitt,” I tell her. “Were you aware of that?”
“Yes, I was. But I’m surprised you are. He went looking for you a couple of years after your first meeting, to see if you had ripened up. And lo and behold, you were out of the military and working as a Houston cop. He didn’t have any use at that time for a Houston cop, but he kept you in mind. He told me he figured he could make something out of you.”
“I’ll bet. Do you know what it was he wanted to give me?”
She strokes thoughtfully at the fold of skin beneath her chin. “I have an idea what it might have been, but no more than that.”
“Can we back up a minute?” Bea says. “Who are you talking about?”
“I’ll let Hilda explain.”
“Andrew Nesbitt was my boss,” she tells Bea, “before you were my boss.” She’s using the slow, clear enunciation of a first grade teacher. “It was Andy who brought our little family together, and Andy who gave us work to do.”
“He worked for the CIA,” I say.
Hilda tilts her head, acknowledging this might be so.
“And so did you?” I ask.
She smiles. “I’ve done some things here and there. I give people new lives. I’ve been doing it a long time. It’s gotten harder in some ways and a whole lot easier in others. Documents are a snap. It’s all the computers that pose the challenge now. That’s why I called to warn you, Bea, because I knew that my work for Brandon was only going to hold up for so long. If the police dug past the middle of 2002, things would look a little fishy. And if they ran his DNA, well, like all my boys, Brandon was ex-military. They were sure to find out who he was.”
“Only we didn’t,” I say. “The database came back with the fake identity.”
“Which is why I had to disappear. There are people who can fiddle things like that, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. You shouldn’t, either.”
“You’re talking about Tom Englewood? I’ve met him.”
Her smile hardens and she doesn’t reply.
“Again,” Bea says, “why do I feel like I’m the only one who’s not in the picture?”
I explain to her about my meeting with Englewood, watching Hilda’s face for any reaction. For context, I have to bring in Nesbitt’s shooting and the investigation that followed, along with the official denials and the conspiracy theories. Hilda sits through this placidly. When I start talking about the headless body in the park, she leans forward a bit. The pointing finger puts a frown on her face. Once I’ve traced the line between the finger and the stretch of road where Nesbitt was killed, her jaw is hanging open. I’ve got Hilda’s attention.
“On that same stretch,” I say, “on the same night I met with Englewood, Brandon Ford and the other men in those files of yours took a shot and me and ran me off the road. They were either trying to kidnap me or kill me, and I imagine either scenario would have ended up the same way.”
“In that case, you’re lucky to be here.”
“What Bea and I both want to know is, what’s going on?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“At the beginning.”
CHAPTER 20
After 9/11, Hilda says, Andrew Nesbitt offered her good money and steady work if she would relocate to Texas, where he’d set up a private security company and started selling his services back to the government. He needed her particular skill set because one of his sidelines involved putting together a team of ex-military operators for contract work, men whose records were dubious enough to raise red flags on a background check. He was also keen to keep a low profile, and not just because secrecy came second nature to him. His presence in Houston would draw resentment from a much larger and longer-established rival, Tom Englewood’s firm, which had for years offered the benefit of his rich network of international contacts to the city’s oil oligarchs. The more successful Nesbitt was, the more pressure Englewood could be expected to exert. If the new company intended to operate under his nose, they would need to be discreet.
During his time spearheading U.S. efforts to suppress the drug growers and traffickers of Latin America, Nesbitt had done a lot of talent scouting in the pool of military and intelligence personnel. Having once observed the man who would become Brandon Ford whip a handful of Colombian conscripts into a ruthlessly efficient counterinsurgency squad, Nesbitt decided to build the new team around him.
Because he was paranoid by nature, Nesbitt also chose to limit his face-to-face exposure, instead using Hilda as the go-between. For convenience, she wove her own new identity and Brandon Ford’s together. No one on the outside would question constant contact between a mother and her son. Ford’s profession as a dealer in exotic firearms served a similar end. He could legally acquire whatever equipment was needed without raising undue suspicion. Plus, he enjoyed the work. The rest of the paramilitaries were fixed with similarly flexible occupations, jobs they could leave for weeks, even months at a time without making a ripple.
Hilda became their de facto den mother, organizing their living arrangements, seeing to their needs. She’d never married or had children, but when Brandon indulged his ill-fated relationship with Miranda Ford, fathering two kids whom he subsequently abandoned, she embraced the grandmotherly role.
“I was a better grandmother to those boys than he was ever a father,” she says, but with a smile that reveals real affection for her pseudo-son. I can only imagine the strange emotions at work in that chain of relation between the true and false parents.
Hilda’s feelings about Brandon became very conflicted. On the one hand, she grew fond enough of him to run interference with Nesbitt whenever there was friction between them. On the other, she resented the source of that friction, which was Brandon’s ambition. Where Nesbitt wanted him to operate in a clearly defined cell, he aspired to larger things. There was more opportunity, he told her, in the intelligence side of the company, building networks and selling the information gleaned in the form of reports and analyses. Nesbitt jealously guarded that aspect of the operation, however. The more Brandon pushed, the more suspicious his boss became.
“These arguments could be very awkward for me,” she says. “What I wanted was to keep everyone in our little family happy.”
Listening to her describe what sounds to me like a criminal organization or at the very least a mercenary one, I am struck by how normal it all seems to Hilda. For her, the nature of the work never changed, only the employer did—and even there, it was more a change in status than degree. She had worked for Nesbitt when he was government-sanctioned, and she continued after he went freelance. Not that different, I suppose, from a cop who retires only to hang out his shingle as a private investigator. Not that different apart from the secrecy and the lawbreaking, that is.
For Hilda’s “little family,” the status quo was disrupted not by conflict but by opportunity. Nesbitt was presented with a chance to bring down the competition, Englewood’s firm, and this led him to overreach.
“What kind of opportunity?” I ask.
“He never confided the details to me. What I gathered, though, was that someone had information to sell, and he wanted to be paid in services. If Nesbitt would do a certain job, he would get the information. What the job was, I never knew.
Whatever it was, Andy kept me out of the loop and he kept Brandon out, too. The first effort failed, so he had to come up with Plan B, and that’s when we got involved.”
Plan B resulted in the creation of an intelligence network. Why this was necessary, or even relevant to the quid pro quo deal that inspired it, Hilda doesn’t know. But Nesbitt managed to place someone deep inside the Gulf Cartel, using Brandon as an occasional courier to collect reports. And what reports they were! The quality of this intelligence stunned them all, as did the appetite for it in government circles. Nesbitt’s insider mapped the internal workings of the cartels with so much precision it began to seem that no aspect of their operations was off-limits to him. Needless to say, his reports became a hot commodity.
Although he was the natural person to use, Brandon turned out to be a bad choice to use for courier. His first taste of intelligence work whetted his appetite. He started coming up with a host of new angles, insisting that Hilda pitch each one to “the Old Man” only to have them shot down. Selling weapons to the cartel and then selling intelligence about the transactions to law enforcement was Brandon’s big idea, one that he revived once Nesbitt was out of the picture.
“And now we come to the point,” she says. “Andy’s death.”
He was a victim of his sudden success. There was no way to keep what he was doing quiet once every decision maker in Federal drug enforcement was on the distribution list for his reports. With the exposure came increasing paranoia. Nesbitt brought new people into the organization. He took extra precautions when making contact with Hilda and discussed the possibility of cutting Brandon out of the loop entirely. He was preparing a new courier, he said, and taking measures to guarantee that his network wouldn’t get away from him.
“Why was he so concerned?” I ask.
“Because someone put it into his head that he was going to be assassinated. And he was convinced it was the police who would carry it out.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Even so,” she says, “look what happened.”
Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) Page 20
