Hostile Witness

by Leigh Adams

  It was in the middle of all this that Kate realized they had brought no food. And a quick check of the cabinets showed that there wasn’t much besides pasta, bottled water, enormous bags of tortilla chips, canned foods, and a processed cheese food that was dispensed like whipped cream from a pressure can. Frank loved tortilla chips. So did Jack. Kate hated them unless they were covered with melted cheese and accompanied by salsa.

  Kate wouldn’t have said she was nervous or frightened, just achy from all that time crouching down on the floor of Tom’s car, but when the cabin’s phone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “It’s me,” Tom said when she picked up. “Are you all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Kate said. “We don’t have any food, but we’re fine. What have you found out?”

  “I’m sorry to say that we don’t have much. Someone talked to the school. Turns out they have security cameras at the front doors, but they point at the front doors, and that means—”

  “We’re not going to get a picture of the car,” Kate said.

  “I took down everything Jack said about where he was dumped, and we think we’ve identified the area. We’re in between shifts. The morning guys will go out first thing tomorrow morning and see if they can get anything else useful. Oil slicks on the road. Tire tracks on the shoulders.”

  “Won’t there be hundreds of those kinds of things out there by then? There must be cars going back and forth all the time.”

  “Not really,” Tom said. “If it’s where we think it is, it’s very isolated. Not a commonly used road. Whoever dumped him wanted to scare you, but that doesn’t mean that he wanted to be seen. And it gets worse. I don’t know if you heard, but Evans—”

  “Is dead,” Kate finished for him. “It was on the radio while we were driving up here, but I only heard the last little bit of the story. Now that we’re out at the cabin, I couldn’t find out any more.”

  “It was a massive heart attack, maybe half an hour before he was supposed to give a press conference. They are doing an autopsy and will check for every known possibility, but it turns out he’s had the heart condition for years.”

  “And I’d be paranoid to think it was anything else.”

  “Not paranoid, just probably wrong,” Tom said.

  “Listen,” she said again. “I was thinking on the drive. You should go back and talk to Lucy Leeds, the woman who lives next to Flanagan. The woman I was talking to that night.”

  “We’ve already talked to her,” Tom said.

  “I know,” Kate said. “But there’s something. There really is. I can feel it.”

  “I’ll check around first thing in the morning,” Tom said. “You should go off and get some sleep.”

  “Right.”

  ***

  It was one thing to be told you should get some sleep or even to admit that you needed the sleep. It was another thing to actually get it.

  Kate was exhausted, but being exhausted didn’t help. Frank made the world’s most peculiar dinner out of tortilla chips, canned kidney beans, and the pasteurized processed cheese food. Jack found this wretched mess absolutely wonderful. He got one of the other cans of cheese food—there were six of them in the cabinet—and squirted the stuff directly onto his tongue.

  “Why don’t we ever get this at home?” he wanted to know.

  The travails of the day notwithstanding, Jack was in a good mood. Kate let him be in a good mood and even eat yet another can of cheese food. Then, when it seemed too dark to be anything but midnight, she shooed him off to bed, and Frank shooed himself.

  In no time at all, Kate was alone in the cabin’s small living room, staring at the blackened fireplace that had no fire in it, willing herself to fall asleep.

  Several hours later, Kate gave up.

  She moved herself to the small table in the kitchen area of the cabin, got paper and a pen out of her bag, and made herself write out everything she knew about the case so far. She wrote out everything she could think of about the kidnapping of Chan Hamilton and the burning down of her “cottage” and about Ozgo and his time in Afghanistan. Then she wrote a third list. This one consisted of everything she had learned that night she’d talked to Richard Hamilton.

  Three lists.

  She hoped that she could make a connection among these three lists and that in the connection, a solution could be found. And that solution had to be the answer to a single question: why was everybody, including the police and the prosecutor, so intent on prosecuting Ozgo for the kidnapping of Chan Hamilton and the torching of her house?

  Kate was convinced, like Tom, that Ozgo was being framed. She got her cell phone from her bag and opened up her contact list. Then she picked up the receiver to the landline and placed a call.

  A moment later, Mike Alexander’s voice came on the line. “What the fuck?” he said. “Somebody damn well ought to be dead.”

  “Mike?” Kate said. “It’s Kate Ford. I—”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Mike said. “It’s two thirty in the fucking morning. Are you out of your mind?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I didn’t realize it was that late.”

  “You realize it now,” Mike said.

  “They convicted Ozgo yesterday,” Kate said. “Did you hear that?”

  “I was in the courtroom when the verdict came back. You can’t tell me you’re surprised. A scrambled cat could have seen that coming a mile away,” Mike said. “They had good evidence. I heard it. If you’d come to court more often, you’d have heard it too.”

  Kate closed her eyes and counted to ten. There was no point getting into that argument now. She opened her eyes again and stared at the wall.

  “The last time we spoke, you were going to look into some things,” she said. “Things about Almador, General Solutions, Robotix, and the whole incident where Turner died.”

  “Robotix?”

  “The robotics company.”

  Mike had stopped talking. “Just a minute,” he said. Kate could hear him moving around and springs creaking. He was getting out of bed. “You should be grateful I’m not married,” he said when he came back on the line.

  “Did you find out something new about how Turner died?”

  “No,” Mike said. “You were right about that. There doesn’t seem to be any hard information. But that other stuff you were telling me about? General Solutions does reconstruction of army facilities and infrastructure in war zones. Something gets bombed, General Solutions goes in and builds it back up. It’s the reconstruction projects that are interesting,” Mike said. “They’ve been doing a lot of work for the US government reconstructing facilities that have been hit by enemy fire in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

  “Also on stuff hit by friendly fire,” Kate said.

  “I’m sure they work with every contract firm out there,” Mike said, “but that isn’t the point. Contracting generates public documents. Government bids out on anything they want to hire a private company to do. People submit bids. Those bids and the general outline of the assignments are public records.”

  Kate felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. “And the stuff for General Solutions is classified?” she guessed.

  “Not exactly. For at least half the projects General Solutions took, there is no evidence and no reason there should be any contracts to send.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t link the construction to any military action, strategic or tactical. One day there’s a bridge and the next day the bridge needs to be rebuilt. It’s as if the stuff just fell down by itself.”

  Kate frowned. “And that’s significant?”

  “It’s not so much significant as it is odd,” Mike said. “One of the things in these records is always a set of pictures of the facility or whatever it is that needs to be repaired. The pictures are all there. And from what you can see in the pictures, the reconstructions were all justified.”

  “Okay,” Kate said.

  “But there’s som
ething else,” Mike said. “On the few occasions where there is an explanation, it’s always collateral damage.”

  “Collateral damage?” Kate said. Then she worked it out. “That would have to be friendly fire incidents, wouldn’t it?”

  “But that’s not what’s been bugging me about this. In every case where the reason has been put down as a collateral damage, there’s been direct evidence from embedded reporters about the attack. Actual, live, existing reporters witnessed the attack. What do you think about that?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “I suppose it’s not all that odd that the military is trying to hide friendly fire incidents. It’s embarrassing for them. It generates a lot of bad publicity. How many incidents are we talking about?”

  “Twenty-four in a two-year period.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s about right,” Mike said. “There weren’t that many IED attacks in the same period. And what’s more, I checked other contracts and other companies, and no other company is showing those kinds of lopsided stats. It’s all General Solutions. Look, I really wish I understood your obsession with this,” Mike said. “Not that I’m complaining. It’s a good thing I didn’t brush you off completely. There’s a lot of interesting information here that I can use. But it needs to be more than statistics.”

  “They’re going to put Ozgo in prison, and he’s going to go completely crazy,” Kate said. “And I don’t think he did it. I don’t think he killed Turner or even was responsible for him being killed. I think he was framed to cover something up.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said.

  “All right, all right,” Mike said. “The case is over. I’m going to have some time on my hands over the next couple of weeks. I don’t mind looking into this. If something is being covered up, it would be a big fucking deal for me to find out what it is and get it published first. But friendly fire incidents aren’t going to cut it—unless we’ve been having a lot of them, more than usual, And in all the digging I’ve been doing, I haven’t come across anything that would fit the bill.”

  Kate thought about the friendly fire. About the photo of the drone her father bookmarked for her. About her last day in the office. About the systems all going crazy. Her mouth was dry. “Did you check out Robotix?” she asked him.

  “I did check out Robotix,” Mike said. “And all I found was lots of stuff about robots that can clean your pool or vacuum your house—and one new one that’s going to mow your lawn.”

  “What about their drones?”

  “What drones? They don’t have any drones.”

  “Then you’re not looking in the right place.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “What?”

  “Fine. I’m up already; I might as well look into it.”

  Twenty

  Tom got to the cabin with four enormous porterhouse steaks just in time to start cooking dinner. At that time, Kate had heard from Mike four more times.

  “You’ve got to ask yourself what would be worth all the fuss,” she said as Tom and Frank put the steaks on the outdoor grill and started tussling over charcoal. Jack was standing to the side of the grill, handing over equipment whenever he was asked for it.

  “A high-profile war hero died in a friendly fire attack? I’d say that was good enough reason by itself,” Tom said.

  “But it isn’t,” Kate insisted. “Look at what we’ve got to explain here. If you’re right, and Ozgo is innocent of attempting to kidnap and kill Chan Hamilton, then you’ve got this vast apparatus in play to frame him. Somebody got to the police department and the prosecutor’s office. They took you off the case. They hid or destroyed evidence that might have proved Ozgo innocent. They went through with an entire, elaborate trial—”

  “And they got what they wanted,” Frank pointed out. “They got Ozgo declared guilty. But why not just kill him like the rest of his team?”

  “We’ve got to look at this as taking place in two layers,” Kate said. “The first one is Chan Hamilton. She’s convinced that Ozgo is in some way responsible for Turner’s death. Why shouldn’t she be convinced? It’s what everybody’s been telling her. It’s what Ozgo himself has been telling her. She’s convinced, and she wants revenge. She gets herself an accomplice, and they stage the kidnapping. Chan blames it on Ozgo, and then we’re in court.”

  “We already know all this,” Tom said.

  “No, we really don’t,” Kate said. “Up to now, the general opinion has been that Ozgo kidnapped Chan. If you start with the assumption that Ozgo didn’t kidnap Chan, then there has to be a reason for Chan to say he did. And I think this is the most plausible reason. Chan wants revenge on Ozgo, and big-time revenge. And she’s got Paterson hanging around, and Paterson is—”

  “What he is,” Tom said.

  Kate nodded. “But this is where it starts to get weird. When you start looking into the incident where Turner died, you get all kinds of things that are completely insane. Somebody gave the press false details about the attack and then erased or classified every single piece of information about how the attack really occurred. Including who was in it and when and where it happened. And they covered up more than that. Families of other members of that unit think their kids are still on active duty somewhere, and public records show that the same soldiers were all honorably discharged. What’s more, I talked to one of those families, and they’re getting money and letters from their soldier, even though she’s listed as honorably discharged. This isn’t the kind of thing you just do on Tuesday because you feel like it. You’re breaking literally hundreds of laws, and you’re getting yourself into the Department of Defense’s secure network to commit them. Chan Hamilton couldn’t have done any of that, and she wouldn’t have wanted to. What would have been the point?”

  Tom turned the steaks with tongs. Frank glared at him. “Maybe the two things aren’t connected,” Tom said. “Maybe Chan was getting her revenge on Ozgo, and the Department of Defense stuff was entirely separate.”

  “They’ve got a link,” Kate said.

  “What link is that?” Tom asked.

  “Jed Paterson,” Kate said firmly.

  The steaks were done. So were the grilled onions and zucchini. Frank stepped in to help Tom take all the food off the fire and put it onto plates.

  “We’re only speculating that Paterson was the mystery man on the night of the fire,” Tom said. “It might have been somebody else.”

  “Maybe it was,” Kate said, “but Paterson was there when Turner was killed. That much was in the report.”

  “You really want to tell this to law enforcement?” Frank asked.

  “What shouldn’t she tell to law enforcement?” Tom demanded.

  Kate sighed. “There are two cover-ups that are happening, but they’re connected by Paterson. And Paterson is connected to General Solutions. General Solutions is connected Almador, Richard Hamilton, and Robotix. I think I know what could be going on that would make it worthwhile for somebody to go through all this trouble to frame Ozgo for kidnapping and attempted murder. And I keep thinking that if we could explain this to Chan, she might be willing to help. Because what she wants is revenge on the people who killed Rafael, and I’m pretty sure that Paterson has something to do with that.”

  ***

  Chan Hamilton “worked” as head of the Hamilton Charitable Trust. Kate and Tom both knew this the same way the rest of the country knew it: TMZ, Entertainment Tonight, People, and all the rest of them. Kate wanted to try to see Chan at home. Tom thought that was less likely to get them what they wanted than if they saw her at work.

  “She’s living in her father’s house at the moment,” Tom said. “There’s security. A lot of security. And the man could be home or have the entire place bugged.”

  Kate let Tom have his way. The idea of coming face to face with Richard Hamilton didn’t make her very happy.

  The Hamilton Charitable Trust operated out of a refurbished antebellum ma
nsion just a mile and a half from Almador headquarters but several planets away in terms of aesthetics and ambience. Kate had seen pictures of it, but she’d never driven by to look at it, even though she was close enough when she was still working for Almador.

  “That would be nice,” Kate said, staring up at the columns across the front of the mansion. “A family that could start an entire business just to give me some work.”

  They’d arrived at Hamilton Charitable Trust just as many of its staff was coming to work.

  “Maybe she won’t even be here now,” Kate said. “Maybe she had a late night. Maybe she’ll drift in around noon.”

  “There she is,” Tom said. “I want to get to the front steps before she does.”

  Chan was making her way across a cobblestone path that led from another parking lot—probably the staff parking—to the front door. She didn’t look like she’d had a long night. Her excruciatingly expensive suit was crisp and black and perfectly tailored to her body. Her enormous Coach bag hung off her right shoulder and moved like it contained half a dozen boulders. Her hair was pulled back in a French twist and her earrings didn’t dangle.

  Tom almost didn’t make it. He had to slide in to stop her from starting up the steps, and when he did, Chan stepped back startled and then looked angry.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Chan started.

  By then, Kate had reached the two of them. Chan’s attention swung from Tom to Kate, and then she looked both startled and annoyed.

  “You again,” Chan said. “What are you doing here? What’s he doing here?”

  “What I’m doing here is routine,” Tom said. “I’m just doing some follow-up now that the trial is over with—”

  “Oh, don’t give me that horseshit,” Chan said. “The police don’t do follow-up after a trial. And if they did, you wouldn’t be the one to do it. You’ve been suspended. My father told me all about it. You tried to get this person in to talk to Ozgo, and it ended up with a mess that cost two days of trial.”