Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3)

by Jim Heskett

  My mouth had gone dry. My palms sweated. Panic raced through my veins.

  In a few seconds, I was able to think. Why did I feel this way? I hadn’t trusted Susan or Dad, had decided they were just as evil as IntelliCraft. So why was I so upset about them being murdered?

  I went back to the flash drive folder and right-clicked on the file. Brought up the properties window. According to the meta-data, this video had been created six hours ago. Susan and Dad had been murdered early this morning.

  And now I was getting ready to meet the man who’d done this at the La Quinta in Westminster.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I told Rodrick to meet me an hour early at the La Quinta. I waited outside for him and called Grace to talk about the video.

  “Are you okay?” she said, after I’d told her.

  “I don’t understand why it upset me so much to see what happened to him. It’s like… I think there’s no room in my head to feel a certain way, and then I’m proved wrong.”

  “At least you know you feel something.”

  “But why?” I said. “I gave up on him so long ago. Why do I feel any pain at all?”

  “Whatever he did, and however he left it, he was still your dad. I can’t imagine watching a video of my dad dying. Or that watching a video of anyone dying wouldn’t leave a mark.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “When are you coming here?” she said, and I could hear the urgency in her tone.

  “Soon. Very soon. I just have one more thing to do, and I think it’s going to make a big difference. I think it’s finally going to be over.”

  “What you’re planning… is it safe?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m not in any danger.”

  I promised myself that was the last lie I’d ever tell my wife. And I meant it. If this plan worked, I wouldn’t have to lie because I’d be by her side forever, taking care of her and our son.

  We said our goodbyes, and I went back to staring at the La Quinta parking lot. I counted the out-of-state license plates on the cars within view. Quite a boring game, but I needed something to settle my nerves. I needed more boring activities in my life.

  As Rodrick’s car pulled up, the phone in my pocket vibrated.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Candle.”

  “Detective Cross. What can I do for you?”

  “Do not meet with him.”

  My stomach lurched. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. Don’t go through with this meeting with Thomason. He’s savage, Candle, in a way you can’t comprehend.”

  “How the hell did you know I was meeting with him?”

  “There are still a great many things you don’t understand. Did you know that Kareem hired Thomason to help them develop the guidance software? Omar was the engineer, Kareem became the product manager, and Thomason was the sales guy. Frank Thomason was IntelliCraft employee number four.”

  That explained one mystery, when Dad had mentioned the four original founders of IntelliCraft.

  “Edgar Hartford may have been the CEO,” Cross said, “but Thomason has been pulling the strings for the last twenty years. He’s a vicious, brutal man, and he’s done far worse things than murder to get what he wants.”

  I knew that for a fact, after seeing the video this morning. Of all the people from the company I’d encountered, only the sick and twisted trainee Darren seemed anywhere close to being as blatantly sociopathic as Frank Thomason.

  But then, a more pressing thought bubbled up: why was Cross warning me about him?

  “You’re not with the company, are you, Cross?”

  “IntelliCraft? Absolutely not.”

  “You’re working against them.”

  “Of course I am. If you weren’t so pig-headed, you would have figured that out long ago.”

  Rodrick parked and got out of the car. He paused, looking at me.

  Now I understood why Cross had been so lenient with me, letting me leave the state with only a minimal lecture, not hassling me about my statement as much as he should have. An impartial cop would have hauled me in for questioning every other day until all the facts were sorted.

  If he was aligned with my dad, that meant Cross would have wanted to keep anything that incriminated him and Susan quiet.

  He would have managed to get my case in his caseload so no one else could dig deep and uncover suspicious info about IntelliCraft. I’ll bet he’d been throwing the FBI off IntelliCraft’s trail too, to keep the truth from coming out. “So you were with my Dad and Susan.”

  “Yes. We’re trying to help you, Candle. We’re going to end all of this, in our own way.”

  I noticed he’d used the present tense. Sounded like he didn’t know they’d been murdered last night, and I didn’t have time to go into details about all that. I’m sure he’d find out on his own, soon enough.

  Maybe I could use Cross to my advantage. If things with Thomason didn’t go as planned today, I still had the flash drive in my pocket. Maybe Cross could do something with that.

  “If that’s all true, where were you when the fake Detective Stan Shelton was harassing me? Why didn’t you do anything about that?”

  “Different precinct, and I didn’t know him. From what I understand, Shelton was a real cop. He had ties to IntelliCraft somehow. I was in Texas that week, helping your dad with his plan.”

  “Helping him and Susan fake his own death.”

  “That was part of it. I came back right after I heard about Wyatt Green so I could be sure I oversaw your case. I know you’re taking a lot on faith, but I’m one of the good guys.”

  I wanted to believe him. I did. I needed someone on my side. “If you know my dad, what does he look like now?”

  “He had his chin and his nose done.”

  “What did he do to his chin?”

  “It’s a little more pronounced, with a bit of a cleft.”

  I paused a few seconds. “Okay. You want to help me, Detective Cross? First, tell me the truth: are you a real detective? You’re not some kind of double-agent, working for the government or something like that?”

  “No, I’m a real cop. We’ve been over my resumé before, remember?”

  About that, I did believe him. I thought that this man—who had apparently been Dad and Susan’s partner—was concerned about me and didn’t want to see me hurt. But whatever Dad and Susan had been up to, they were gone. IntelliCraft had finally caught them and killed them. So Cross was the only person on my side, and he wanted to help. Maybe I could put him to work.

  “Here’s what you can do for me. Go up to Keystone resort. My wife and her sister are staying at Evergreen Condos, right under the main lift. Number 201. Go up there with some of your cop buddies and make sure she’s safe. Set up surveillance, or whatever it is you do.”

  “If I do that, will you call off this meeting with Thomason? Will you meet me there?”

  “Yes,” I said, hoping I could say it with enough conviction that he’d believe me.

  I ended the call and waved Rodrick over.

  “Everything okay, buddy?” he said, still eyeing me in a bit of a strange way. Must be weird to hang out with a guy when you’re in love with his wife and he knows it.

  “We’re good. Did you get a gun?”

  He shook his head. “Seven day waiting period. I thought there was a gun show in Lakewood, but that ended last week. I’m sorry. I know it’s not much, but I do have this, though.”

  He held out a folding knife. About three inches long, with a serrated edge. I folded it and slipped it in my pocket. Would have felt a lot better going in if I’d been armed, but this would have to do. Time was running out.

  “You want to go over the plan?”

  He took out his phone and held it up. Opened the voice recorder app. “You keep him talking, and I get it all recorded. But where will I be hiding?”

  “Under the bed, I think. If you can fit. Maybe the closet, but that might be too f
ar from where we’ll be sitting.”

  “Under the bed is fine with me.”

  I took out the knife again and showed it to Rodrick. “After I talk to him, I’m going to stab this through Thomason’s heart. There’s going to be a lot of blood, and he’s going to scream. If you’ve never seen anyone die before, it’s a rough experience. Something you’ll never, ever forget. Are you okay with that happening?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out in jagged wisps, and then nodded. He didn’t look ready, but probably felt he owed me.

  “So,” he said, “we’re really going to do this? And if we do this, then all of this drama goes away?”

  “Yes. We’re going to get this fucker on tape and bust this whole thing wide open.”

  ***

  I paced the room at the La Quinta. Single room, one bed, one dresser, one mirror. Set of windows on the far side of the room.

  I walked to the windows, which looked out onto a parking lot, and beyond that, the highway. The parking lot was packed full of cars, which would make a better escape route than the front if it came to that. I opened the window and poked out the screen.

  Rodrick, who was doing his own pre-meeting ritual of deep breathing up against the opposite wall, eyed me. “What are you doing there?”

  “Making sure we have options if we need to run.”

  His breathing sped up. I crossed the room and put soothing hands on his shoulders. “You don’t have to do this, Rod. You can leave now and I won’t think any less of you.”

  He shook his head. “I want to be here. Just nervous.” With a flick of his wrist, he checked his watch. “We’re running short on time. I’m going to get in place.”

  I gave him one last squeeze of the shoulders before he dropped to the floor and scooted under the bed.

  We were in place. This was happening.

  Liquid bubbled up in my throat, and I ran into the bathroom and heaved up the contents of my stomach, which wasn’t much. I held the cool rim of the toilet for a minute, spitting sour yellow bile into the bowl. My vision went a bit spotty, the ambient sounds of the room pulsing in my ears like a deafening silence.

  Of all my stupid ideas, trying to pull one over on Frank Thomason may have been the stupidest one yet. But it was all I had left. If this didn’t work, I had nowhere else to go. Nothing else to try.

  “You okay out there?” Rodrick said from under the bed.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Just cleaning house.”

  I didn’t know how to make Thomason say what I wanted him to say. How to trick him into admitting the things IntelliCraft had done. I could try to get him talking about the old days, about my dad, maybe ask Thomason if he knew him, that kind of thing.

  No, that was pointless. He’d see right through it. I needed to come at him straight on. Tell him I knew everything, then let him gloat for a while, let him get sloppy.

  Maybe he’d talk, or maybe he’d just shoot me, then find Rodrick under the bed, and kill him too. The straight-on tactic might not work either.

  Before I had time to make up my mind, a knock came at the door.

  I flashed a look back at the bed to make sure Rodrick was concealed. “Come in.”

  The door opened, and he stepped in. Looking business-sharp with a thick wool coat over his black suit. Ready to step into a board meeting somewhere and argue about year over year performance or leveraging value-added assets to maximize organic growth potential.

  “Wait there,” I said. “Shut the door behind you.”

  He obliged me.

  “Show me under your coat and your ankles.”

  “I’m not armed,” he said. “I’m only here to talk.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  He spread out his coat, then raised it above his waist and turned around. Lifted each of his pant legs in turn. “You’re a bit of the paranoid sort, aren’t you?”

  He walked into the room and sat on the dresser in front of the mirror. I eased onto the bed, careful not to sit down too fast and crush Rodrick.

  “Your father and I used to play tennis together ever week,” Thomason said. “That man was such a cheater.”

  I folded my hands in my lap and said nothing.

  “We can talk about that another time. Since you are going to give me what I want, I thought you should know I had some people search the house in Three Rivers and claim your possessions. They’re en route to Colorado now. You may have already guessed I was bluffing with all that, anyway. We wouldn’t have let evidence of Omar Qureshi’s travels get out into the general public.”

  I stared at him.

  “Omar and I were friends, a long time ago,” he said. “I helped teach him how to speak English. You probably don’t believe this, but I was sorry to hear of his passing.”

  “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

  Thomason sighed and I caught a whiff of a peppermint breath mint on his exhale. “A few days ago, someone broke into Edgar Hartford’s house in Dallas. His personal safe was compromised, and then yesterday, he was murdered. Burned to death in his own house. Do you know anything about that?”

  I only shrugged.

  Thomason picked dirt from under his fingernails. “I can see you’re not in the mood for small talk. Where is the memory card?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  He frowned. “Obviously, we know that. We’ve searched your house, and you don’t have a storage unit or safety deposit box, at least not one in your name.”

  “How do you people keep getting in and out of my house without anyone seeing?”

  “Come on now, son. We’ve had half your neighbors on our payroll since you bought that house.”

  I laughed a little, a nervous cackle. “I’m in awe. I don’t understand how you people do it. To keep a machine this big running for so many years. All those people to pay off, and the others you had to silence. How do you manage it all?”

  He raised his palms to the ceiling. “How does anyone tackle any big project? You break it down until you’ve got all the moving parts mined out to different teams. People you can trust. Then you execute, and look for ways to increase efficiency wherever performance is lagging. You have to scale based on need, but we didn’t build a multi-million dollar business without knowing where to cut the fat.”

  So cold, so calculating.

  He focused on me. “Who did you give the memory card to?”

  “I gave it to my father.”

  He smiled at me, then shook his head. “Now that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? Heath Candle died weeks ago.”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what he did. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about the plastic surgery and him hiding out in Brownsville. I saw the video on the flash drive.”

  A subtle expression changed his face, almost imperceptibly. His eyes dimmed for a split second, and his head cocked, slightly. He didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. You think my dad actually did die weeks ago.”

  “He didn’t?” Thomason said, raising an eyebrow. “Ahh, clever man. That one slipped by us, apparently.”

  “But then who was it in the ski mask that killed them? I assumed that was you.”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. If you’re trying to trick me with false information, it won’t work.”

  But if he hadn’t, then who was it? Who could want Dad dead, if not for IntelliCraft?

  Was it Cross?

  That was the only possible explanation unless there was some other player in the game I didn’t know about. It would have to have been him, because no one else besides Susan and me knew that Dad hadn’t died of a stroke a month ago.

  But what was Cross’ angle, then? Kill Susan and my dad, and then what? Why would he betray them if he weren't working with IntelliCraft? I couldn’t find the line of reasoning that made sense.

  Oh shit. I’d told him exactly where Grace was. But why would he care about Grace? What did Cross want with her?

>   Thomason reached down, gripping the edge of the dresser. “And whatever you’re babbling about, it doesn’t concern me. All I want to know is, who has the memory card now, and who else has seen it?”

  “No one has seen it. My dad destroyed it.”

  “Well, at least Heath is capable of doing the smart thing from time to time. Certainly, he did that to protect himself, but it’s another worry off my mind.”

  I had to get back on track. I had to get him to admit what IntelliCraft did, then I needed to get the hell out of here and drive up to Keystone. “I know everything.”

  “Good for you,” he said. “I don’t really care.”

  “Selling weapons to foreign countries… you people are monsters.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about illegal activities such as the ones you’re mentioning. What’s your plan here? I know you’re not wearing a wire, because if you’d called the police, I would have found out. And even if you were wired for sound, it wouldn’t matter. I’ve admitted to nothing.”

  I stared, unable to think of what to say.

  “What do you have, then? A tape recorder hidden somewhere? In one of these drawers, maybe? A little recorder attached to the inside of a lamp?”

  I swallowed hard. He grinned. “The problem is,” he said, “that I’m so much more clever than you. Maybe you bested me once, physically, on that hiking trail in Eldorado Canyon. But that won’t happen again. Your little quest to expose the company is going to end in failure, no matter what you do.”

  “Why haven’t you people killed me?” I blurted out. “You’ll kill everyone else around me, but not me? Why am I so important?”

  He sighed. “That’s not the question you should be asking right now. The question you should be asking, my dear boy, is what are you doing here, when your wife and her sister are all alone up in the mountains?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  My jaw dropped.

  “Oh, yes,” Thomason said. “We figured that out only an hour ago. Clever boy, hiding her in someone else’s condo and paying cash for everything. But we found her anyway. There are some people on the way right now to pick her up. Phase one of cleaning up your mess is in motion.”