Dead on Arrival

by Mike Lawson

  ‘I said, something’s wrong here,’ Stan said. ‘This guy’s never taken this long a lunch break before, and his boss, he’s always outside walkin’ around, doin’ something.’ Stan was silent a minute, then picked up his radio. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘is everything okay on your side?’

  ‘Yeah, haven’t seen a thing. But why the hell is this guy still inside the office?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t like it,’ Stan said. ‘I’m going down there.’

  Emma, DeMarco, and Stan were standing in the parking lot of the motel where they were all staying. Harry was making a phone call.

  ‘Emma, I’m sorry,’ Stan said. ‘I just never figured, in a place like this, that she’d impersonate a cop. I never figured it would be a she. Jesus, I fucked this up. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘I never thought it would be a woman either,’ Emma said. ‘She’s probably been watching him for a couple of days, and if we hadn’t had mental blinders on, we would have seen her. Son of a bitch!’

  ‘And, Jesus, she just shot the shit out of him,’ Stan said. ‘He sure as hell told her whatever she wanted to know.’

  When Stan had entered the junkyard office, he saw the owner first, the Indian who owned the place. He had a single bullet hole in his forehead. He’d been lucky. Jubal had also been shot in the head, but before that he’d been shot half a dozen times in both knees with small caliber bullets. The killer had used a silenced weapon, probably a .22, and it looked like she’d just kept shooting Jubal in the knees until he told her everything she wanted to know.

  As soon as Stan saw the bodies, he called Emma, then called 911. Calling 911 may have been a mistake because it was three hours before the cops would let Stan go. He didn’t tell the cops that he and DeMarco had been watching over Jubal or that they’d seen the killer. All Stan told the cops was that he’d come to the scrap yard to get a part for a car and that just as he’d driven into the place he’d seen a sheriff’s car leaving.

  ‘What do you think Jubal told her?’ DeMarco said.

  Before Emma could answer DeMarco’s question, Harry walked back to the group. He’d been using a pay phone near the motel office. ‘She didn’t kill the cop. They found the patrol car, and the cop was inside the trunk, gagged, in her underwear, out cold. She’d been hit on the head, hard. Right now she can’t even remember her own name.’

  ‘Could you identify her?’ Emma asked Stan.

  ‘The killer?’ Stan said. ‘Yeah, no doubt about it. I got a good look at her.’

  ‘I saw her too,’ DeMarco said. ‘But in profile and she was wearing sunglasses. So—’

  ‘No!’ Emma said. ‘You can positively ID her. And don’t you dare say otherwise. When we catch her we’re going to say we have two eyewitnesses who saw her walk into that office in a cop’s uniform, and that nobody went in there again until Stan found the bodies.’

  ‘Got it,’ DeMarco said. ‘But what do you think Jubal told her?’

  ‘I know what he told her. He told her the picture was a fake, that Patsy Hall had the picture made by some NSA guy, and he told her the name of that waitress in Winchester. I’ve already called Hall and told her that we blew it …’

  ‘Oh, man,’ DeMarco said. ‘I’ll bet Patsy was pissed.’

  ‘… and I called someone to go pick up that waitress and hide her and her kids until we can figure out what to do next.’

  ‘Do you think Hall’s in danger?’ DeMarco said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Emma said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So now what?’ DeMarco said.

  Emma didn’t say anything. The four of them – Stan, Harry, DeMarco, and Emma – just stood there in the motel parking lot like a small group of friends trying to decide where to go for lunch. Or maybe like friends who had just eaten a very bad lunch.

  ‘What will Lincoln do?’ Emma said. DeMarco could tell that she was talking to herself, thinking out loud, playing a game of chess with Oliver Lincoln two thousand miles away. ‘He could kill Patsy, just to eliminate a threat. Same with that poor waitress. Or he could have Patsy snatched and tortured and make her give up the NSA guy who made the picture.’

  ‘But Patsy will say you made the picture,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘But Lincoln doesn’t know that,’ Emma said. ‘Lincoln knows only what Patsy told Pugh. So Lincoln will think – assuming he can even get to Hall – that the best thing that will happen is she’ll give up the name of the NSA guy that made the picture, which he now knows for sure is fake. But then what? Does Lincoln go after the NSA guy? Does he try to kidnap and torture him and get him to hand over all the files he used to make the fake picture? No, it’s just too much. It’s just too hard.

  ‘Plus Lincoln thinks Patsy’s just a blackmailing cop, not someone trying to put him in jail. He’ll think that once she hears Pugh was tortured and killed, she’ll be too scared to come after him again.’

  Emma kicked at the parking lot asphalt with the toe of her boot and chewed her lower lip for a moment. ‘Lincoln’s not going to do a damn thing at this point,’ she said. ‘With Pugh dead, there’s no solid connection between him and the attacks. And Lincoln now knows the picture’s a fake. Certainly an expert could either prove that or make a good enough case to put doubt in the mind of a jury. So, Lincoln’s just going to wait and see what happens next. I would if I was him.’ Emma paused, her brain spinning, looking for a way to recover from their failure, then she just shook her head in disgust and said, ‘Shit!’

  ‘Maybe we can use Hall for bait,’ Stan said. ‘You know, get her to spook Lincoln somehow and when he takes a shot at her … Well, I swear, Emma, we won’t—’

  Before DeMarco could object, Emma said, ‘No. I’m not putting her and her family at risk. Or at any more risk than they already are.’

  DeMarco looked over at Stan. ‘Are you sure you got a good look at that woman, the shooter? I mean, she was wearing a hat and sunglasses, and you saw her for only a few seconds.’

  Stan stared at DeMarco. As Stan was wearing sunglasses, DeMarco couldn’t see his eyes, but he didn’t have to see Stan’s eyes to know that Stan was pissed.

  ‘I said I saw her,’ Stan said to DeMarco. ‘When she stepped out of the car, she looked straight at me. You would have noticed if you hadn’t been worried about bugs crawling up your leg. Then, when she turned to go into the office, I saw her in profile.’ Stan paused before he said, ‘If I saw that broad again, I’d recognize her.’

  ‘Okay,’ DeMarco said. ‘Then I think we have maybe one chance – and it’s a long shot – to tie Lincoln to this woman.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Emma said.

  ‘Well, Lincoln had to talk to this woman. Maybe he contacted her by phone or by e-mail or through a middleman, but he’s been under continuous surveillance by the FBI ever since Pugh was arrested.’

  ‘Ah,’ Emma said.

  69

  As he and the boy traveled about the country – it was truly a beautiful land, so rich and so green – they spoke often of martyrdom.

  Where he had been before – places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Indonesia – it was easy to find martyrs. Men and women, boys and girls, husband and wives, fathers and mothers – there were many willing to give their lives for their faith. But here in this country, even among the devout, it was difficult to find people who were truly committed. The men in Baltimore, they had said they were willing to die, but he could tell they hadn’t been. They were willing to murder but not to die.

  But the boy, he believed.

  They had discussed many times what the Koran said about those who died in the service of God, and the boy could quote the words flawlessly, the words that promised that a martyr would be married to fair females with ‘wide, lovely eyes.’ The boy always blushed when he said that, which made him laugh.

  It was a shame that the boy would still be a virgin when he died.

  But they spoke of more than what the Koran said about martyrdom. This was an intelligent child, and they discussed the strateg
ic value of martyrs, how they were the most powerful weapon they had in their battle against the infidel. It was in these conversations that the boy became the most animated. He grasped completely the terror that the martyrs caused, particularly in this country.

  He was sure it would be written later that an impressionable teenager had been brainwashed by an evil man. And he wondered himself at times if the boy was willing to die simply because he was depressed by what had happened to his father and the realization that whatever dreams he once had would never be fulfilled. But he didn’t think so. He was convinced that this boy believed. He had the true faith.

  He talked also of his own death. He said that he too would die a martyr and he would most likely die in this country, far away from his wife and sons. He said he was looking forward to that day – he could hardly wait for that day – but he had been commanded by Sheikh Osama to postpone paradise until all his tasks were done.

  ‘You’re the lucky one,’ he told the boy.

  70

  Catching Jubal Pugh’s killer turned out to be fairly simple.

  The hard part was trying to explain to the FBI and the marshals in the Witness Protection Program what Emma, DeMarco, and four retired Special Forces guys had been doing in Montana in the first place. Once they got past the point of the FBI screaming at them to come clean, and Emma screaming back that watching Pugh wasn’t a federal crime, they finally got around to talking about the person who had killed him.

  Stan hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d gotten a good look at Pugh’s killer. They sat him down with an artist, and in a couple of hours the artist produced a sketch that Stan said was spot-on. They showed the sketch to DeMarco, and he said, Yep, that’s her, but the fact was that DeMarco had gotten a much better look at the woman’s ass than her face. If they had asked him to describe her ass to the sketch artist, he was willing to bet he could have done just as good a job as Stan did with the face.

  The FBI then showed the sketch to all the agents who had been keeping Oliver Lincoln under surveillance the last four months, and two of the agents said the woman in the sketch owned a Cuban restaur ant in Miami, and ten days before Pugh was killed Lincoln had visited the restaurant and had a long talk with the owner over a glass of brandy.

  The owner of the restaurant was Bianca Teresa Elena Castro, no relation to Fidel. Ms Castro had entered the United States on a raft made out of two-by-fours, canvas, and tires when she was fifteen years old. Her mother was a hooker, and good old Mom had put young Bianca out on a street corner when she was thirteen; Bianca told immigration officials that she had been forced to have sex with all the men on the raft in order to be allowed to go with them. After spending two years in a camp near Little Rock, Arkansas, the girl was released into the custody of a woman who claimed to be a cousin but who actually ran a brothel near Jacksonville, Florida. Between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Bianca was arrested twice for prostitution but never did jail time. After that she dropped off the face of the earth insofar as official records were concerned, until she was twenty-six, when she applied for a business license to open her restaurant. The Bureau examined Bianca’s finances and concluded that she lived well within her means, all of her income apparently coming from the proceeds of her restaurant.

  Then the FBI did the sort of the thing that it is very good at. Agents started looking at surveillance tapes of people going into the Miami International Airport in the ten days prior to Jubal Pugh’s death. After looking at a lot of tape and talking to a lot of people, they could prove that Bianca had entered the airport six days before Jubal Pugh died and purchased tickets under the name Maria Hernandez. Bianca – Maria – had then taken a plane to Spokane, Washington. Thirty agents descended on Spokane, showed Bianca’s picture to car rental agencies, and found a kid at an off-terminal lot who remembered Bianca because ‘she was one fine-lookin’ piece.’

  Records showed that Bianca used the Maria Hernandez ID to rent a car. Mileage logs for the rental car showed the distance she traveled was consistent with a round-trip from Spokane to Victor, but this was not conclusive. Next the FBI looked at motels in and near Victor to see if Maria Hernandez had rented a room. No joy. So the FBI platoon started questioning motel clerks and maids and found one young clerk who recognized Bianca’s picture. He said the woman paid cash when she checked in and used the name Elena Mendoza. She never showed him an ID or used a credit card, but the clerk was positive that the picture of Bianca Castro was Elena Mendoza. He remembered her because ‘she was hot!’ – young men out west being fairly consistent in both their appreciation and their description of members of the opposite sex.

  Gotcha! the boys from the Bureau said. They had two eyewitnesses who saw Bianca in a deputy sheriff’s uniform enter the junkyard office at the time Jubal Pugh was killed. They had statements from those witnesses that no one had entered the office after her or before the bodies were discovered. And they had proof she’d traveled to Victor and had stayed there. Yep, they had more than enough to arrest and convict Bianca Castro for the murder of Jubal Pugh, and they hadn’t even started gathering whatever evidence they might find when they searched her house.

  The first FBI agent who interrogated Bianca didn’t realize it, but he said one thing that was pivotal in getting Bianca to give up Oliver Lincoln. Actually, he didn’t really interrogate her – he made a speech. In his speech, he laid out all the evidence against her and told her she was going to get the death penalty for killing Jubal Pugh and the Indian who owned the scrap yard. He added, ‘I’d suggest you hire a very good lawyer.’

  Bianca concluded that there was no way she was going to waste her money on a lawyer. She knew the FBI had her cold for killing Pugh, but they couldn’t get her for killing Rollie Patterson. Most important, they had no evidence at all that she had planted the fire bomb under the bed of Senator William Broderick’s mistress. She wished she hadn’t popped the guy who owned the scrap yard, but when it came to Jubal … hell, he was a drug dealer who had been involved with the fake terrorist attacks and the deaths of at least eight people. No one cared about him. And she was so glad she had just knocked out the cop in Montana instead of killing her as she’d originally planned.

  So she told the FBI she was willing to deal. No more than twenty years in prison, she said, and she had to be eligible for parole in ten. Twenty years was plenty of time for killing Jubal and one junkyard Indian. But in addition – and this she said was a deal breaker – the government had to agree not to touch her assets and allow her time to move her money into long-term investments before she went to prison. If they didn’t agree to that they could threaten to throw her in jail forever, and she still wouldn’t tell them a thing.

  The Cuban was forty-two years old. If she served twenty years, she’d be sixty-two when she got out of prison, younger than that if she could get paroled. Her mother was still going strong at sixty-seven and her grandmother had been ninety-two when she died. Bianca came from a line of long-living whores, and her greatest fear had always been being old and poor. So she’d take the twenty years, provided she got to keep her money.

  The FBI agreed to Bianca’s terms – and she gave them Oliver Lincoln.

  71

  Nick Fine – Senator Nicholas Fine – beat them all to the punch.

  Fine found out that Oliver Lincoln was going to be arrested long before the FBI placed the handcuffs on his wrists; he found out as soon as Bianca Castro gave him up. And as soon as he did, he called a press conference.

  Fine looked very good standing behind the lectern, dressed in a gray suit, tall and lean, devilishly handsome with his arched brows and his perfectly shaped goatee. The cameras loved him – as did more than a few female reporters.

  Fine told the assembled news hawks that he had just come to a ‘very disturbing realization.’ He said that after he was appointed to fill William Broderick’s seat in the U.S. Senate, he eventually got around to looking at how much money was available in Broderick’s war chest. Well, Fine said, he
was shocked – absolutely shocked – to discover that Broderick had vectored approximately eight million dollars to an account in the Cayman Islands. The fact that the money had been sent to an offshore account – well, that just smelled of ‘monkey business,’ he said.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Fine said to the reporters, ‘just two days ago I discovered that the account in the Caymans belonged to a man named Oliver Lincoln.’

  A reporter’s hand shot up. ‘How were you able to find out that the account belonged to this man? I thought that’s why people put their money into offshore accounts, so nobody could figure out who the money belonged to.’

  Fine chuckled. ‘A United States senator is not without influence, sir. I simply called up the president of the bank and told him that I very much wanted to know the name of the owner of the account. I don’t remember my exact language, but I may have hinted that it would be a grave mistake for the bank to, ah, annoy me.’ (The bank president later admitted that he did indeed tell the senator the name of the account holder, believing it was, in this very, very special case, in the bank’s interest to ignore its normal disclosure policies.)

  ‘Anyway,’ Fine said, ‘the name Oliver Lincoln tickled something in my memory. I remembered when Senator Broderick attended one of his first Senate Intelligence Committee meetings he asked me who Lincoln was, and I said I didn’t know. And I didn’t. As aide first to Senator Wingate and then to Senator Broderick, I didn’t attend all Intelligence meetings, because some of those meetings were limited to the principals, depending on the classification level of the subject matter. After that, I remember Senator Broderick asking me to provide him with the minutes from past Intelligence Committee meetings, some going back as far as ten years. I didn’t question why he wanted to see them. He was, after all, my boss.