Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

Venice explained, “The kidnapper called Porter Falk from a payphone along the highway and made a ransom demand for five hundred thousand dollars—more money than the Falks could possibly pull together—with the standard threat not to involve the police. Porter called his lawyer, and then they put the wheels in motion to get Security Solutions involved.”

  “What were the directions for ransom delivery?” Dom asked.

  “They were bogus, as I recall,” Jonathan said. “A suitcase of money left under a tree in some park in rural New York.”

  “In three days,” Boxers added. “That was the real warning bell. They didn’t want the money right by God now the way most assholes do. They gave us too much time.”

  “That made me think that it wasn’t about the ransom at all,” Jonathan said. “That was just a delaying tactic.”

  “Delaying for what?” Dom asked.

  “Sex trade,” Boxers said. “When it comes to kidnapped kids, if it ain’t about ransom, then it’s about sex.”

  “We moved heaven and earth on that case,” Venice recalled. “We even got help from Doug Kramer. He wasn’t chief yet, but he pulled some strings for us.” Currently, Doug Kramer was the chief of the Fisherman’s Cove Police Department. Jonathan wasn’t sure exactly how much Kramer understood of the details of Security Solutions’s covert activities, but over the years, Jonathan had seen indicators that the chief knew more than he let on.

  “Actually the entire company got involved in that,” Jonathan said. “We worked a lot of leads, wore out a lot of shoe leather. A fingerprint from that payphone—one of many fingerprints—led us to look into Stepahin.”

  “The guy was sort of a nobody,” Venice read from her notes. “Petty criminal, in and out of jail seven, eight times. He was the beneficiary of bad police work, lazy prosecutors, and generous juries. I don’t think we knew about the others in the mug shots until after the fact, did we?”

  “No, we just pretty much stayed focused on Stepahin,” Jonathan said. “The harder we pushed, the closer we got to him. We finally tracked him down to a crappy little farmhouse in the middle of a field outside of Nowhere, Ohio.”

  “They tried to put up a fight,” Boxers remembered. “It was in the mix that Stepahin got away. We found the boy in a stone cellar that was accessible through a hatch in the basement floor.”

  “How was he?” Dom asked.

  Boxers looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Dom looked to Jonathan, who warned him away with a flash from his eyes. Don’t go there.

  “Okay,” Dom pressed, “you said there was a sex ring. Did you find other kids there as well?”

  “Jesus, Padre, let it go, will you?” Boxers said.

  Jonathan explained, “Apparently, we missed a few others by a couple of hours. But we had our PC, so it was mission accomplished.”

  “And the others?”

  Boxers was turning red.

  “I called Wolverine to let her know, and then we declared victory.”

  “We should have kept investigating,” Boxers said. His voice resonated with barely controlled fury.

  Jonathan didn’t bother to reply. What was done was done, and that was a long time ago. He decided to change the subject. “So, Ven, do we have any idea why Stepahin was back in town?”

  Venice leaned back in her Aeron chair and crossed her arms. “That’s not the question you should be asking.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. He’s something of a miracle man.”

  Jonathan recognized that she was dangling bait, but he chose not to go for it. Given a few seconds, Venice would explode if she didn’t share whatever the interesting tidbit was.

  She grinned. “He died nine years ago.”

  * * *

  Jed Hackner cocked his head and scowled. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

  “What’s not to understand?” Pam said. She’d stopped by his office to update him on the results of the shoe leather she’d been eroding in her search for answers in the Ethan Falk case. “There are no records of the man he killed. None.”

  Hackner offered a tired glare. “Anything more on the kid?”

  Hastings shook her head. “Now that he’s lawyered up, it’s tough to get much beyond his juvie record. Petty stuff. Acting out. His parents divorced when he was thirteen, and by the time he was seventeen, they were both dead. Dad of suicide and mom of breast cancer. With Ethan being as old as he was, he aged out of foster care before he could really even get into it. Not that it mattered because by all accounts, he was what you might call a free spirit.”

  “Thus the record,” Hackner said.

  “Exactly.” Pam took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you what, though. There is nothing in that kid’s past that even hints at violence.”

  “He certainly made up for lost time.” Hackner’s body language said that he was ready to move on to something else. This case was something north of a slam dunk, and he’d started to shift papers on his desk. Then he looked up at Pam, who continued to watch him. “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?” Pam said, matching his tone. “This case reeks of bad things.”

  Hackner sat up straight, then leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. “What it reeks of is a closed case. We’ve got about a million eyewitnesses and a confession. I’m not a lawyer, but I think that’s all very good for us.”

  “I mean the rest of his story. About the kidnapping, and the rescue and the abuse? Where is that all coming from?”

  “I don’t know. Delusions, maybe? Wasn’t it David Berkowitz whose dog told him to kill? Maybe Ethan Falk has a talking dog. Or a goldfish. I never did meet a trustworthy goldfish.”

  Pam smacked his desk with her palm. “Are you seriously going to tell me that your inner Sherlock is not going nuts over this?”

  Hackner smiled. He wasn’t a bad guy when he wasn’t being an arrogant asshole. Presently, he was skating through the no man’s land in between. “My inner Sherlock is a pragmatist. We build the prosecution’s case. Let the defense fend for itself.”

  Pam recognized a lost cause when she saw it. She stood.

  “Don’t look so glum,” Hackner said. “There are plenty more cases to solve.”

  The details of this case bothered her. She’d seen the look in the kid’s face when she arrested him. If she was going to be a party to sending a young man away to become an old man in prison, then she owed it to him to dig a little deeper.

  A bizarre childhood story combined with the lack of identity for the man he killed was at least two too many levels of oddity. Plus, she believed Ethan’s story.

  If the kidnapping happened, then it left evidence. All she needed to do was find it.

  * * *

  Jonathan caught himself gaping, his mouth open just wide enough that he was sure he looked stupid. Venice laughed at what she saw, and he snapped his jaw shut again.

  She continued, “Okay, died is the wrong word. Evaporated is better. According to what I’ve pulled together off of ICIS, the decedent in Braddock County is in fact no one. He never existed. His fingerprints trace to nothing.”

  “What about facial recognition software?” Jonathan asked.

  Venice shrugged with a single shoulder. “Death does funny things to a face, as you know,” she said. She tapped her keyboard. “I can pull up the death photo for you.” The screen blinked and a dead guy appeared, the standard naked shoulders-and-head photo from every autopsy. His eyes drooped, one an unfocused slit and the other a bloody hole, and his facial features sagged from lack of muscle tone.

  “Look familiar to you?” Dom asked.

  Jonathan looked to Boxers, whose scowl spoke for him. What, are you kidding me?

  “I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “I could be talked into either a yes or a no. That was a long time ago.”

  “That was a lot of people ago,” Boxers added with a chuckle.

  “This gets better,” Venice said. She leaned in toward the table, as if to re
veal a secret. “According to official documents and records, even the guy we know to have been Stepahin in fact never existed.”

  Dom rattled his head. “Okay, I’m lost. How can you know that if there’s no record? I mean, how can you prove the negative?”

  Venice beamed as her fingers returned to her keyboard and started to fly. “Because I’m a thorough researcher,” she said. She hit enter with a flourish, and the big screen blinked to reveal a list of a bazillion files.

  Jonathan’s shoulders sagged. With all the windup he’d expected a bigger delivery. “Um, what is that?”

  “Those, Mr. Grave, are copies I made of all the research we did on Stepahin.” She widened her eyes and leaned in again, as if expecting applause. Exasperated, she pointed to the screen with both arms outstretched. “This is all the stuff that no longer exists. Wiping it from the Interwebs doesn’t delete anything from my files and my backups.”

  Jonathan smiled. Yet more evidence that all the countless thousands of dollars he’d spent over the years to build Venice’s Fortress of Solitude hadn’t been wasted. “And if I know you as well as I think I do, one of those files is a summary of what you gleaned from all the other files.”

  “Indeed,” she said.

  “How about a photo?” Boxers asked. “Before we go too deeply down a rabbit hole, do you have a picture of the guy from eleven years ago? One that’s not a mug shot?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. More clicks, and there was the photo of a man who looked nothing like the monster that he was. “This is from his driver’s license.”

  “The one for which there is no longer any record,” Dom said. He looked like he may have been on the verge of understanding.

  “Exactly,” Venice said.

  Dom looked at Jonathan. “Can someone actually do that? Make all traces disappear? I mean, that must involve hundreds of thousands of records, and then there’s the tangents off of those primary records. How could anyone do that?”

  “Not just anyone could,” Jonathan said. “But we both know someone with the skill set and resources to make it happen.” He kept his glare burning on Dom.

  “Wolverine?” the priest guessed aloud.

  “The one and only,” Jonathan said. “Give her a call for me, will you? Let her choose the meeting spot, but don’t tip your hand too far.”

  “Since when don’t you trust Wolverine?”

  “I trust her just fine,” Jonathan said. “I just think that if she knew where my head was taking me, she might refuse to show up.”

  Chapter Seven

  In the hierarchy of Catholic cathedrals, Saint Matthew’s in Washington wouldn’t fall into anyone’s top ten. It wasn’t even the most majestic in the Nation’s Capital, dwarfed as it was by the Washington National Cathedral in the Upper Northwest. Jonathan often wondered how the Vatican sat still while the Episcopalians won the contest for the most beautiful house of God in town. Still, a cathedral was a cathedral, and this dark stone structure on Rhode Island Avenue was impressive, but it had a dreary look about it. Perhaps its most famous moment occurred on November 25, 1963, when the cathedral served as the setting for President John F. Kennedy’s state funeral. Fifty years was a long intermission between big moments.

  Or so the public thought. If walls could talk, right? The Our Lady Chapel inside the cathedral was in fact one of the spookiest—read clandestine—locations in all of Washington. Some years ago, Irene Rivers, director of the FBI and affectionately known to Jonathan as Wolverine, had spent hundreds of thousands of unaccounted-for taxpayer dollars to make the chapel a black hole for surveillance teams. DC was a town of alphabet agencies that didn’t trust each other. Irene believed that Bureau headquarters had been infiltrated years ago by the CIA and the NSA, with listening devices in every corner. For the most part, that didn’t matter—more times than not federal agencies pulled on the same oar in more or less the same direction—but some things and some assignments were so secret that the information needed to be one hundred percent contained.

  Accordingly, Jonathan had spent a fair amount of time here in the chapel, learning the details of things he wished he didn’t know, all under the watchful glare of the Blessed Virgin.

  Jonathan was what Dom D’Angelo liked to call a convenience Catholic. Raised in the faith by a single father who was now serving a life sentence in a supermax prison, cynicism ran like blood through his veins. He found comfort in the thought of a God who created the universe and sent His Son to die for mankind’s sins, but often his faith was strained by his up-close familiarity with all the evil that escaped God’s notice. On those occasions when Jonathan was dispatched to set things straight—often dispatched from this very chapel—he felt confident that he was doing the work of the angels, but the Rite of Confession gave him reassurance. Still, given the number of people who had died at his hand—irrespective of the fact that they were evil and needed to die—his disdain for hypocrisy would not allow him to attend Mass anymore. He hoped that God understood.

  The chairs in the Our Lady Chapel served as a kind of penance in their own right. Wooden and wobbly, the blond bentwood chairs provided no support for your arms, and felt like they might collapse at any moment. Jonathan considered standing, but realized that while awaiting the arrival of a famous personality for a clandestine meeting, it was best not to look too anxious.

  Jonathan had met Irene Rivers a long time ago, back during her days as a special agent. She’d had a family emergency, and she’d reached out to Dom for assistance. Dom, in turn, reached out to Jonathan, and bad things happened to the bad guys. Since then, as Irene advanced through the ranks in the Bureau and all of her communications were subject to public review, Father Dom had become their communications pipeline. Even the director of the FBI was afforded privacy when it came to communications with her priest.

  Wolverine leaned on Jonathan frequently to do jobs that no government could ever confess were necessary, and for which the legal penalties were huge. Jonathan trusted her with his life not just because she had proven herself to be scrupulously trustworthy, but also because their shared dirty laundry was of a nature and scope that would bring both of them down if either betrayed the other.

  Jonathan had arrived at their appointment twenty-five minutes early—not because he’d planned to, but because the vagaries of traffic between here and his home in Fisherman’s Cove made more specific planning difficult. More times than not, he wound up being as much as twenty minutes late. He’d considered killing time out on the street for a while, but between the chill, his lack of hunger, and the fact that he was already pretty tweaked on coffee, he decided it was better just to sit and wait.

  When he heard the massive front door open behind him at precisely two o’clock, he knew that Wolverine had arrived. She was a precise kind of lady. He fought the urge to stand and greet her because, again, this was supposed to be a meeting that never happened. The church wasn’t full, but it wasn’t empty, and reunion scenes attracted attention.

  Besides, some choreography was so carefully scripted that it needn’t be watched to be seen. Wolverine would be preceded and followed into the church by her security detail, all in dark suits with pigtails cascading from their ears and expressions that hinted at constipation.

  Jonathan listened as the footsteps grew near. Then they stopped.

  “Excuse me, sir,” a stern voice said from behind.

  Jonathan turned in his chair to look up at exactly the image he’d been expecting. “Hi,” he said.

  “I need to see some identification,” the agent said.

  Jonathan hated this element of the law enforcement community. He was tougher than they would ever be, and had endured more life-threatening situations than they could imagine even in their wettest dreams, but he understood that his role was to be deferential. More specifically, his role was to appear intimidated, but that was a step too far. The deference soothed their ego, and at the end of the day made everything go more smoothly.

  Jonathan r
eached to his back pocket, withdrew his wallet, and produced a driver’s license that identified him as Richard Horgan. A different pocket held a set of FBI credentials that were as real as his missions for Uncle Sam, but it was never a good idea to flash them in the presence of agents whose creds were official all the time.

  The agent took more time than was necessary to review the driver’s license, his eyes dancing back and forth between the picture and Jonathan’s face. It was another intimidation move.

  And Jonathan had had enough. “Are you having trouble with the big words?” he asked.

  Cue the icy glare. Good lord, these guys were predictable.

  “Are you carrying a firearm, Mr. Horgan?”

  Jonathan shifted his eyes from the questioner to his partner, who looked familiar. They’d danced this tune together in the past. “Really?” Jonathan said.

  “It’s all right, gentlemen,” said a familiar voice from beyond the guards.

  “Forgive me, Director Rivers,” the first guy said. “But I saw something under his jacket that looked like the printing of a firearm.”

  Irene Rivers smiled in a tolerant way. Jonathan recognized it as her tell for being about to lose it. “He is the man we’re here to meet,” she said. “That means you show him all the courtesy and consideration that you would show me.”

  Security-boy looked wounded. An aspect of government service that Jonathan did not miss was the ease with which a single oh-shit could wipe out a lifetime of attaboys. Even the gentlest rebukes could end up derailing a career.

  “I know you’re just doing your job,” Irene said, backing off on the sharpness of her tone. “Rest assured that Mr. Horgan is a friend of mine.” She sealed it with a smile. “Now, take your positions, both of you.”

  In unison, the security detail turned their backs and took on the posture of toy soldiers, standing close enough to block others from entering the space, but far enough away that the discussion would not be overheard. Jonathan found it significant that Irene trusted her security detail little more than she trusted the general public.

  Jonathan stood as she crossed the threshold into the Our Lady Chapel. In a different circumstance, he’d have greeted her with a friendly hug, but where the wall had eyes, a professional handshake was a better choice. “Hi, Wolfie,” he said. “It’s been not nearly as long as either of us would like.”