by Sydney Bauer
God he was good, thought Professor Stuart Montgomery. He could pick them, couldn’t he? Brilliant actually, his sense for women – uncanny, genius! For it was he who had seen the potential in her in the first place, rescued her from the second-class obscurity that befell many of America’s more intelligent members of the minority classes and taught her, by example, the art of ‘pulling one out of the box’.
Good Lord, he laughed to himself, as he sat sipping a rather diluted Earl Grey provided by an appreciative prison guard by the name of Jack (or was it Mack?) whose daughter was born with a hole in her heart and who was most grateful for some considered and learned advice. Jack had kindly granted him some further privacy in the cold seclusion of Suffolk County Jail’s interview room three, despite Karin having left over half an hour ago.
At first her proposal seemed ridiculous. Totally obnoxious. But further consideration proved to it to be quite inspired. Cavanaugh of all people! He had no idea how she had managed it. I mean, what on earth would have convinced the poor sod to take him on? Perhaps she convinced him of her husband’s innocence, perhaps he was still in love with her, perhaps they were bonking each other stupid in that $500 per night hotel suite the Professor was no doubt paying for, but in all honesty, he couldn’t give a toss because his wife’s first husband was just what he needed.
Cavanaugh was the highly respected, all-American goody-two-shoes who last year defended a black woman against the accusations of a powerful white Senator. He was the sandy-haired local boy with a reputation for defending the underdog, and the Professor was more than happy to play the underdog, if that was what the scenario required. After all, America loved an underdog and right now he was in need of the savviest PR make-over in history.
Cavanaugh was not the obvious choice – but as Karin had so astutely identified, that indeed, was the beauty of it. He was smart enough; charismatic in a middle class sort of way that reeked of that ‘sensitive but macho’ sentimentality that Americans, in all their colonial immaturity, seemed to treasure. He was not from a blue chip firm – in fact, he was not even partner in his own, he had never sought high profile cases for the publicity, billed a client more than the going rate or, Montgomery suspected, worn an Italian suit in his whole entire life.
And then there was the obvious advantage – the fact that he was the first husband, the man unceremoniously dumped by his wife for a surgeon so much older, smarter and richer. If Cavanaugh, of all people, could not only acknowledge but fight for the Professor’s innocence, then surely the rest of America could deign to do so as well? He was innocent until proven guilty, after all – a fact that every man and his star-spangled banner had failed, at least so far, to acknowledge.
And so he would play along for, in the end, he had nothing to lose for three very simple reasons.
Firstly, Karin would leave him – and it was necessary, at least at this point in time, to keep his wife firmly by his side.
Secondly, he knew Karin was right; he was an ambitious manipulator who knew how to work the Washington system – and as such also knew those who had orchestrated his demise must hold positions of significant power in the upper echelons of government. These were intelligent, covetous, influential people who, he had no doubt, had devised what they saw as a foolproof strategy to achieve their goals. He was not just a convenient fall guy, but a superlative scapegoat whose entrapment they had coordinated from the very outset, and as such, he knew these people were dangerous – extremely so, and would stop at nothing to reach their objectives. He had his suspicions regarding their identities but he would have to tread carefully when it came to exposing them. For, and he was sure of this, one wrong move would end his life. That is why Karin’s choice of attorney had been so intuitive. From what he knew of Cavanaugh, he was not afraid of taking on the ‘big guys’ and big these guys were. As big as you get on the benchmarks of power and greed.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he hoped that his wife was also right about one other thing, and as he sat here, alone, in this cold desolate space, he aspired to the notion that there was some small degree of compassion, some tiny morsel of humanitarianism somewhere deep inside of him that would ideally justify a . . . well, he supposed it was a miracle. He had witnessed miracles. His profession had given him the gift of seeing the unthinkable, observing the unexplainable and beholding a reality built entirely on faith. He was not a religious man, but he was smart enough to accept that logic and science did not always rule the day.
And so, he would sit and wait and pray that that one piece of action he undertook alone and under pressure on the night of Tom Bradshaw’s death – that one act of hope of which no one was aware, would be enough to save him. It was idealistic nonsense, of course, for surely he would have known if what he had done had made a difference, but he prayed above all else that this was one of those times when reason and commonsense gave way to faith and conviction, when slim chances were given their time of day, and the pure power of ‘truth’ was enough to set things right.
There it was again, the banging. But now it was getting louder, more aggressive.
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
King had had enough. Ramirez was obviously not in his makeshift office which sat adjacent to King’s own north-facing enclave in Boston’s downtown FBI offices. He had no idea where his boss was, and was sick of taking his messages every time Deidre, his ‘none-too-happy to be displaced’ Washington-based PA, decided to slip out for a fag.
‘Jesus, man,’ said King, rounding his door to see his Evidence Response Team Chief Howard Hackenbacker pounding on Ramirez’s locked office door.
An Evidence Response Team – or ERT – is a group of highly-trained and well-equipped FBI personnel who specialise in organising and conducting major evidence recovery operations. They manage the identification, collection, and preservation of forensic evidence at crime scenes – and then send the evidence to the FBI’s world-renowned Laboratory in Quantico for analysis.
‘He’s obviously not in there, Brains, maybe you could leave a post-it on his secretary’s desk instead of trying to break his door down.’
Howie Hackenbacker got the name of ‘Brains’, not just because he was razor sharp, but also because he resembled the character of ‘Brains’ from the 1960s hit TV show Thunderbirds. It did not help that the character ‘Brains’ – an animated puppet with big blue ‘Coke bottle’ eye glasses – had once given himself an alias of Mr Hackenbacker in one of his dangerous investigatory adventures, and that Howie sported a pair of turquoise-rimmed glasses of his own. Anyone would think the guy liked the moniker, and was just trying to play true to form. Which, knowing Howie and his genius eccentricities, was most likely the case.
‘No, Simba,’ said Brains, his red cheeks clashing with the thick aqua rims. ‘I’ve had enough. First of all I find out he took a piece of evidence from the locked bags which were in my office at the time, and then I discover he sent said piece to Philadelphia – to a private forensics laboratory of all places – to be examined by an independent DNA Analysis and Latent Print Unit without paying me the courtesy of a heads up. I mean, seriously,’ said Hackenbacker, shaking his head, ‘the guy has had his nose half way up his ass ever since he got here, but the fact he thinks our FBI team in Quantico so incompetent that he has to fast track this piece to an independent crew, well, it’s beyond insulting.’
‘Whoa . . .’ said King, moving down the corridor towards Brains, checking the curving hallway was empty along the way. ‘Are you saying ADIC Ramirez took a piece of evidence from your office and then sent it to a commercial lab for analysis without telling you?’
‘That’s exactly what I am saying. But in the end, the joke is on him because the Philly guys mislabelled the package figuring Ramirez must have been in evidence response. So it ended back in my office after all. So I open it and . . .’
‘You opened Ramirez’s mail?’
‘Hell, yes. It was addressed to evidence response, wasn’t it? And if I failed to read the name on the fr
ont then . . .’ Brains allowed himself a half smile and King could not help grinning back at his opinionated friend. Ramirez’s holier-than-thou attitude had not won him a lot of friends around the Boston office.
‘So?’ said King, dying to ask what was inside the controversial package.
‘So,’ said Brains, still mad as hell but enjoying this camaraderie with the boss he did respect. ‘ADIC Ramirez spent all that time and effort and money shipping the piece only for his independent geniuses to come back with a whole load of nothin’. The piece – a Bible from Bradshaw’s hotel suite – is covered in prints. Well, obviously, considering it was a hotel room Bible, but none of them belong to the ex-VP.
‘In fact the Philadelphia dudes don’t identify any of the DNA on the Bible, not even the traces of semen they apparently found on page 1267, smack in the middle of St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.’ Hackenbacker took delight in the look of distaste on King’s face. ‘Yep, some sick fuck sat in his hotel room and jerked off while reading the Good Book. Must have been Good News for him, right?’ Brains let out a laugh.
‘Hold on, Brains, Ramirez asked the private team to check for Tom Bradshaw’s prints on the hotel room Bible?’
‘Yeah – and not just Bradshaw’s, Richard Ryan’s as well.’
‘Ryan? Why in the hell would he do that?’ asked King, now completely confused.
‘You got me. Now if he asked them to check for Montgomery’s prints that might have made sense, given the Bible was by the bed next to all the other evidence. He seems to forget that we were the ones who collected the evidence in the first place – and it was our guys in Quantico who found Montgomery’s print on the plastic syringe cover – the same little piece of evidence that helped him get his indictment. But the Bible was never sent to the FBI Laboratory for testing,’ continued Hackenbacker. ‘Believe me I checked.’
‘But that still doesn’t explain why the independent lab didn’t check for Montgomery’s prints. Maybe Ramirez figured prints or no prints it doesn’t affect our case one way or another,’ said King. ‘The plastic is more than enough to link him to the murder weapon. Whether or not the Professor has a penchant for praying while he kills is kind of irrelevant. So why would Ramirez . . . ?’
Brains followed King’s lead. ‘. . . check for Bradshaw’s and Ryan’s prints? Maybe he was after something else.’
‘What do you mean, Brains?’
‘Well, after its run through DNA analysis the Philly dudes sent it to their Questioned Documents Unit. By the looks of their notes, they were asked to go to town on this one – side lighting, ESDA and VSC2000.’
Side lighting, electrostatic detection apparatus and video spectral comparator 2000 were all techniques and equipment used to detect the presence of indented writing. The VSC2000 not only detects invisible indentations on paper, but it can also decipher the writing, render it visible and differentiate between inks and papers by their optical qualities.
‘Which was also a big dead end,’ said Hackenbacker. ‘Given all of their tests turned up zip.’
King was confused. ‘So Ramirez wanted to know if Bradshaw used the Bible as a resting pad,’ he said. ‘If he wrote something in it, or on top of it, or . . .’
‘Or if he was investigating some “X File” and relaying messages to aliens by tracing over specific letters in some system of supernatural binary code. Who the fuck knows?’ said Brains. ‘Whatever the case, your boss suspected Bradshaw used that book for more than just reflection. But in the end it came up blank, so I guess he was chasing his tail, which I am convinced he has by the way, along with a pair of horns and a pitchfork.’
‘Brains?’ interrupted King, his head now spinning with questions.
‘Yeah?’
‘Do me a favour, will you? Re-bag the Bible in its original package and leave it on Ramirez’s desk.’
‘What? And deny me the pleasure of fronting the boss on his sneaky evidential pickpocketing?’
‘I’m sorry, Howie. I know how much you love to “front” but . . .’
‘It’s okay, Simba. I’ll have other opportunities.’ Brains understood at once. King had bigger fish to fry and Hackenbacker was not about to stand in his way if it meant delivering a bigger kick to Ramirez’s pompous ass.
King’s first reaction was one of anger. The bastard lied to him. He told King that the Bible had not been included with the other ‘bedside table’ evidence – and worse still King had unwittingly parleyed this lie to Mannix. ‘The Bible is a non issue,’ he had told his detective friend. ‘The evidence bag was mislabelled. The FBI tabled six items, not seven.’
Bullshit.
And why the hell would Ramirez be checking the Bible for Bradshaw’s prints? And for CIA Director Ryan’s? And what was with the extensive indentation tests? It just didn’t make sense.
King was an experienced agent with almost eleven years on the job. He had been recruited from the Chicago PD at the age of twenty-four, back when he was young, enthusiastic and determined to ‘make a difference’. Of course, now he wasn’t so young but the enthusiasm to set things right was just as keen, maybe even keener considering all the crap he had witnessed over the past decade. He wouldn’t call himself jaded, but the FBI had certainly taught him that trust was something to be earned, and right now his Washington boss was not exactly swimming in a pool of mutual confidence.
Worse still, King knew that, more often than not, when someone told one lie to cover their tracks, there were usually others that went along with it. There was the chance Ramirez was investigating a top secret tangent of the investigation at the Chief of Staff’s request, but knowing his boss as he did, he was pretty sure that wasn’t the case. Ramirez was up to no good and King was determined to find out exactly what it was.
So where to start?
Ramirez had included his Boston counterpart in most aspects of the Montgomery investigation and up until now, despite Ramirez’s arrogance, King had felt like part of the team set on convicting the man responsible for Tom Bradshaw’s death. But, when he really thought about it, when he sat down and picked the investigation process to pieces, he realised that most of the time Ramirez had collated the evidence single handed. He had conducted interviews alone, made telephone calls behind closed doors, presented statements as fait accomplis and simply reported to King what he had discovered, adding the new findings to their growing list of damaging evidence against the Professor.
One incident in particular came to mind – Ramirez’s insistence that he interview Eleanor Caspian, Oliver Caspian’s widow, solo. Mrs Caspian was the one who told Ramirez that she had no knowledge of her husband’s Saturday visit to Montgomery, during which, according to the Professor, Caspian asked for the stronger pain relief. The fact that Mrs Caspian had denied any knowledge of her husband’s visit and later failed to find any of the OxyContin at their home after her husband’s death had basically formed the backbone of their argument that Montgomery concocted the Caspian story and filled the OxyContin script himself. King had taken Ramirez’s version of Eleanor Caspian’s account as gospel, mainly because he had no reason not to. Until now.
King leapt up from his busy but ordered walnut veneer desk and shut his office door. His assistant was still at lunch, and with Ramirez and his PA both absent he felt confident enough that he would not be overheard. He retrieved his note book from the top right hand drawer and immediately found the number. He dialled the DC code, punched in the seven digits that followed and waited for someone to pick up – not exactly sure how to play this without alarming the elderly widow and, perhaps more importantly, preventing Ramirez from finding out that he ever made the call.
‘Hello,’ said the accented male voice on the other end of the line.
‘Ah, hello, my name is Special Agent Leo King from the Boston FBI. I was wondering if I could speak with Mrs Eleanor Caspian?’
‘I think she is already gone.’
‘Gone? Ah, forgive me, but who is this?’ asked King. ‘Are you a friend?
Do you work for Mrs Caspian?’
‘My name is Ivan. I am the removalist,’ said Ivan, obviously not pleased with having to deal with King’s volley of questions.
‘Removalist? Is Mrs Caspian going somewhere?’
‘Why else would she need a removalist?’ said Ivan, making no attempt to hide his displeasure.
‘Look Ivan, is Mrs Caspian there or not? I need to speak with her urgently.’
‘You wait. I see.’ Ivan had obviously had enough of the friendly banter.
King waited for what seemed like an eternity when he finally heard someone pick up the receiver at the other end.
‘Hello? This is Eleanor Caspian.’
King gave his credentials and began by asking the widow where she was moving to.
‘Brussels,’ said Eleanor Caspian.
‘Brussels!’ exclaimed King, unable to disguise the surprise in his voice.
‘Yes, Special Agent King. My daughter and her family live in Belgium. Kate works for UNICEF, she was recently promoted to the position of America’s foremost UNICEF representative in Central Europe. You may have heard of her.’
King had. Kate Caspian Cole was an intelligent woman who had a reputation for being a tough lobbyist for greater UNICEF funding. He hadn’t made the connection with Eleanor and Oliver Caspian, until now.
‘Your daughter is a credit to you, Mrs Caspian.’
‘As she was to Oliver.’ King could hear a tremor of grief in the elderly woman’s voice but his guess was Kate Caspian Cole had inherited her ‘chutzpah’ as much from her mother as she had from her late father.
‘I’m sure,’ King went on. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Caspian, but I was wondering if Assistant Director Ramirez told you that you may be needed to testify at the Montgomery trial. If you are in Europe I am afraid you may need to . . .’
‘Assistant Director Ramirez told me it was unlikely I would be needed at trial – that my statement should be more than enough. But I can return for any testimony if necessary, Special Agent King. I was a great fan of the late Vice President and as I told Assistant Director Ramirez, I am happy to assist in any way that I can.’
