ON Fire (An Ozzie Novak Thriller, Book 5) (Redemption Thriller Series 17)

by John W. Mefford

  “You are correct.”

  “So, whoever shot you, or the person who hired him, may not know I received the same text messages. Or it could be personal to you.”

  I nodded, thinking it all through for about the twentieth time. In some respects, I felt as though I’d just taken a long, winding path and ended up right where I’d started.

  Right now, my best hopes of gaining more information centered on Riya Patel. The likelihood, though, of that meeting turning up anything noteworthy had to be a percentage that was lower than my calculus grade in high school—as in single digits. I told Tracy about the upcoming lunch meeting just to give us both a smidge of hope.

  “Anything else to bring up before I take off?” I asked, my positive energy already greatly reduced.

  “Well, if we can find that source, we’ve got a shitload of information all queued up. I think we have three sidebar stories.”

  “About?”

  “I didn’t know this until I did the research, but the lobbyist profession is this strange paradox of numerous rules and regulations, but they don’t have any real teeth. Rarely is anyone ever charged and prosecuted.”

  I nodded.

  “So, the big concern in recent memory has been the Foreign Agents Registration Act from 1938, which requires an explicit listing of all political activities by lobbyists on behalf of a foreign entity.” He pointed his pen at me. “Did you know that this new law came about after a PR specialist named Ivy Lee received twenty-five grand a year from something called the German Dye Trust to provide advice on how to convince American officials to allow for the rearmament of Germany?”

  “You’re quite the historian.”

  “That’s over four hundred grand in today’s dollars.”

  If I was nodding, I stopped. “So this Lee guy was making the big bucks.”

  “Many of them do, but here’s the kicker. Most lobbyists don’t register under the FARA, but there’s nothing done to them. No penalties, not even a slap on the wrist.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Since 1966, only seven have been prosecuted, and out of that, one conviction.”

  “How the hell do they get away with it?”

  “Well, the Department of Justice has told us that their FARA team is small and poorly funded, and they rely on voluntary compliance.”

  “That’s like asking an amateur golfer to count a stroke every time he kicks the ball a few feet.”

  “Believe me, my dad plays a lot of golf. In general, golfers have a much higher ethical standard than lobbyists.”

  “At least we found one profession with lower approval ratings than lawyers.”

  “Don’t forget politicians, and many politicians are lawyers. I have one quote where someone says that working in Congress is the farm league for working as a lobbyist.” He chuckled. “It’s a fucked-up system, Ozzie.”

  I raked my fingers through my hair and got to my feet. “I’ll let you know if I learn anything from Riya.”

  28

  I’d spoken—or attempted to speak—to Riya Patel for the last five minutes, and she’d already taken three phone calls. She didn’t bother stepping away from our table, which was situated about ten feet from a roaring fire inside one of the finer lunch establishments in the city, Odd Duck. She spoke in her native Indian Hindi language, which I couldn’t understand. Lip reading wouldn’t help me here.

  I waited patiently, drank from my lemon-infused water, and glanced at the people around us. This was a nice place. New American cuisine. Whatever that meant. But the place had a nice crowd, and the ambience was killer.

  Riya, who looked to be in her early thirties, was radiant. Her long, black hair shimmered from the fire. Her skin appeared to be etched from coffee-colored stone. She wore a blue tweed suit that one might call professionally alluring. The whole color palette worked perfectly.

  “I’m sorry about the disruption, Mr. Novak. I promise that won’t happen again.” She smiled with her perfect teeth and lips and face, setting the phone right next to her fork, as if it were critical to the dining experience.

  “Again, call me Ozzie.” She didn’t seem to want to be on a first-name basis—I’d asked her to call me Ozzie at least three times since we’d spoken. But hearing the name “Mr. Novak”… I felt like looking over my shoulder to see who she was talking to. “Thanks for meeting with me, Riya.”

  She clasped her hands—she had long fingers and a French manicure—and rested her forearms on the table. “I knew this would be necessary. First, the police this morning.”

  “I have friends on the force. Was it detective, uh…?”

  “Porter?”

  “Rick Porter. Know him well.”

  “He was just ensuring he understood the timeline the night for when Pamela…you know.”

  “The timeline,” I repeated.

  “So, you work for Franklin and his defense team?”

  Only for now, I wanted to say. I knew the story from Tracy was on hold; I just hoped it was a temporary stay. “Yes. And, despite the charges, I hope you know that there is no question about his innocence. It’s just a matter of how we prove it. His attorney’s goal is to have the case dismissed within days.” I was acting as lead cheerleader because I’d guessed she was fond of Franklin.

  She had begun to squeeze lemon into her water but stopped. “So you think I can help you prove his innocence?”

  “I’m not a cop, so you should feel comfortable telling me anything you know—not just about that night, but also any part of Franklin’s life that you’re aware of, personal or professional.”

  She went back to squeezing her lemon. “Well, I suppose you know by now that Franklin and I had recently begun having an intimate relationship.”

  You and just about every other woman he knows, I thought. I nodded and sipped my water.

  “Now, I hope you understand that I’m not the kind of woman to sleep with a married man. It’s just not me, not how I was raised.” She paused, lifted her eyes. She was looking for a response, so I gave her another nod.

  She was still looking at me, so I added, “I understand. I do.” Hopefully my reassurance would encourage her to proceed.

  It did.

  “Earlier that night, we had a nice get-together in Franklin’s suite, celebrating the tremendous success of our joint efforts. Franklin is quite good at his job.”

  “I’ve heard. A big win for the Indian fish industry.” I inwardly cringed, thinking how strange that sounded—had I come off too sarcastic?—but she didn’t seem to notice. “So, at the end of the party, he slipped me a note saying he wanted to drop by my room and say hello a little later.”

  “A note. What did it say?”

  “Just your typical love note. It was cute.” She smiled, lifting one of her shoulders as if she were being courted by the quarterback of the high-school football team.

  “And he showed up at what time?”

  “Just after midnight.”

  “What time had the party ended?”

  “Pretty early. Maybe ten.”

  So, Franklin had apparently intended all along to go for the trifecta—Pamela, Riya, and then Elaine. “Did you know he was also sleeping with Pamela Connor?”

  A deep sigh. “I think I didn’t want to notice. Looking back, I can see some flirtation there.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Her tone was defensive.

  Perhaps Miss Perfect didn’t want the moral guilt associated with having an affair with a man who was also screwing a lot of other women. I had to keep up the friendly rapport, though, if I had any hope of her opening up to me. “Once you learned about Pamela, did you feel hurt or betrayed by Franklin?”

  She looked off, her eyes glistening from staring into the fire. “I suppose a little. I knew he was divorcing his wife. I don’t live in the fantasy world, not at all, but a little bit of me wondered if Franklin and I might have something special.”

  A special disease, maybe. “How long did he stay in your room
? I’m assuming that’s where he met you?”

  “My room, yes. Well…” She put a hand to her mouth as if she were holding back a giggle. “One of the reasons I thought Franklin and I were more or less exclusive was because of his zest of intimacy.”

  If I were a comedian, I was sure there was a joke in there somewhere, particularly “more or less exclusive” part. She’d spent too much time around lobbyists, apparently.

  “So you slept with each other.”

  “Twice.”

  My hand dropped to the table, rattling the silverware. “Twice that night?”

  “Don’t look so surprised. We have a connection.”

  The waiter arrived with our food. She took a bite of her salad and slowly chewed before adding, “He probably doesn’t want me to share this with you, but he takes the little blue pills to give him a boost.”

  “Ah,” I said, making sure I didn’t smirk. He’d admitted to being a sex addict. Maybe that was one of the few times he’d been telling the truth.

  We confirmed that he left her room by about one a.m., which would then fit in with the timeline of him arriving at his home around one forty. The video showed Franklin on the fourteenth floor around four in the morning, but his wife had said he was in bed with her, having sex. Still wasn’t sure how to tackle that huge time gap.

  Thus far, Riya had confirmed the timeline. Having another person validate it, of course, made the video that much more questionable. But it was time to see if Riya could produce anything substantive. I pulled out my phone and showed her the copy of the note that Franklin had received: You’re a lying, cheating bastard. Change or you will die.

  Her jaw dropped when she read it. “Franklin was being threatened?”

  I pocketed my phone. “Any idea who would want to see him dead? Or, to take it a step farther down conspiracy lane, who would set him up for murder?”

  “From what I’ve read, Pamela was strangled, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s very personal. Perhaps it was someone she knew. It’s easy to look at Franklin and the women in his life, as if someone had a vendetta against him. While I’m not ruling that out, have you looked at Pamela’s life? Actually, maybe she had a boyfriend who found out about her and Franklin’s fling.”

  I dipped my head, acknowledging her thought process. “You make a good point. I should look into it.”

  “You mind telling me what happened to your face?”

  I decided to be transparent and tell her the story about the attempt to kill me at the auto shop.

  “So, you probably wanted to meet with me to see if I was aware of any larger conspiracy…maybe something that Franklin might have shared with me.”

  “You read me like a book.”

  She lifted a forkful of salad but didn’t take a bite. Instead, she set it back down on the plate and leaned toward me. “I don’t know of anything specific.”

  I could feel my eyebrow inch upward.

  “Honestly, I don’t. But do you understand what people will do for money?”

  “I’ve heard stories.”

  She snapped out a laugh that had nothing nice or cordial behind it. “Big money, big companies, will do almost anything if someone stands in the way of their profit.”

  “Sounds like you have firsthand knowledge. Who is your employer, again?”

  “I have two jobs—one for the Ministry of Foreign Trade and one for a large fish-trading company based out of India.”

  “Double-dipping?”

  “It’s more in the open in India, at least to a degree. My biggest issue is with those who discriminate against women. Sadly, it’s pervasive in our culture, and not just in terms of pay.”

  “Sexual harassment?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. It’s more like abuse…sexual, emotional, even physical. India is changing for the better, but progress is so very slow.”

  I took the first bite of my burger. It tasted delicious, but I really wasn’t very hungry. I washed it down with water and kept us on track.

  “The stories you’ve heard…anything involving hiring a hit man?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s rather ambiguous.”

  “Well, lobbyists like to tell war stories, to embellish. So, nothing I can verify.”

  I nodded, wondering how much I could really trust her. “Did Franklin ever tell you anything about a deal he brokered between a pharmaceutical company based in Austin called Vista Labs and the FDA?”

  Her phone rattled on the table. She looked at the screen and tapped at it. “I’m going to ignore it. Franklin enjoyed talking about his victories…we all do in this business. That’s maybe what attracted us to each other, that semblance of power.” She cleared her throat, as if she were rethinking why she’d jumped into bed with Franklin. “I don’t recall him mentioning Vista Labs, though.”

  I showed her my final card, the text messages from the Franklin journal.

  “What does all of this mean?” she asked, her expression looking like her salad wasn’t settling well.

  I asked if she recognized the name “Calvin Drake.”

  She paused, twisted her full lips.

  “He was CEO of—”

  She snapped her fingers and finished my sentence. “Vista Labs. Now I remember seeing some headlines on that guy. A real jerk, from what I recall.”

  “A murderous jerk.”

  “Are you saying Franklin worked with this person?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “So you take on his murder case and then get these text messages.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you’re wondering if this is all connected to some other deal he was working on.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. I’m looking for something, anything that might help me figure out who is behind any of this crap.”

  She took in a full breath and then released it. “I wish I could help you out.” She looked down for a moment.

  “What is it?”

  She briefly bit on her nail. “Ozzie, I really don’t know anything…” Her last word lingered.

  “But?”

  “Well, I’ve spent a lot of time here in the US and traveling across Europe.”

  She paused. I waited.

  “I guess I’ve heard…rumors.”

  “That sounded more like a question.”

  “Because they can’t be proven.”

  “Embellished war stories?”

  “Something like that.”

  I put my napkin on the table. “You’re killing me, Riya. Tell me.”

  She sighed. “It’s Big Pharma.”

  “Large pharmaceutical companies?”

  A stiff nod, then she looked around and lowered her voice. “Big Pharma…the companies are bitter rivals…until they’re not.”

  I tilted my head, similar to Rainbow when Mackenzie had been screaming wildly.

  “It’s kind of like how the tobacco industry has acted in the past,” she said. “When these Big Pharma giants have a similar interest, they band together.”

  “I’d assume they have joint lobbying groups.”

  “They do, as well as PACs. But I’ve heard they might have more than that.”

  “Like…”

  “I really don’t know. Just rumors of them maybe having some type of association to get things done.”

  “You mean get things done that don’t involve noble professionals like lobbyists?”

  She put a finger to her nose.

  “And you think they’d endorse killing?”

  “Formally, no. But if the stakes were high enough, they would sell their own mother into slavery.”

  Made perfect sense. Companies that were created to heal the sick were actually in business to profit from those very same people—that was sadly ironic. But to murder in support of that profit goal? I don’t know. That seemed like something you might see in a Jason Bourne movie, not in the real world.

  The check came, and Riya grabbed the bill first
. “I can write it off,” she said.

  “I can make Franklin pay for it.”

  She handed it to me and smiled. “He really wasn’t that good in bed. I tried to convince myself he was, but he wasn’t. I was too caught up in the power and excitement of working together on this exciting project.”

  I paid, and we walked out together. I handed her my business card.

  “If I can recall anything else, I’ll let you know,” she said without me asking.

  I began to walk off, but she grabbed my arm.

  “Ozzie, I didn’t mean to be cryptic about the topic we discussed in there at the end.”

  “Okay.” I wasn’t sure what else I could say.

  “It’s just that I’ve learned in this business it’s difficult to see who your friends are and who your enemies are. Know what I mean?”

  Her phone immediately rang. She took the call, while I waved goodbye and walked to my car—actually Nicole’s car, a silver four-door sedan. Once inside, I blew warm air into my cupped hands and let my thoughts marinate in the silence. Had she just given me a lead? Or was it more of an opinion based upon a few rumors and war stories? I needed to review Franklin’s client list and look for more connections to pharmaceutical companies. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to look into Pamela’s personal life.

  One other thing was on my mind. I started the car, turned on the heat, and dialed a recent phone number on my cell. Porter answered the line and quickly said he had about thirty seconds before he was due in a meeting. I told him my concerns about Noah.

  “Verifying a criminal record through that little PI database can be problematic,” he said.

  He used the term “little” in a demeaning way, but I was just happy he hadn’t dismissed my concerns. “How so?”

  “Well, from what I understand, it doesn’t show if a person is called in for questioning regarding a crime. Or, maybe a person was charged, but evidence came to light that dismissed the charges.”

  I looked across the parking lot and saw Riya finally walking away from the restaurant toward a sea of cars, her phone still at her ear.

  “Are you saying that in a generic sense,” I asked, “or do you have a particular feeling about this Noah guy?”