by Mike Lawson
After Orson Mulray died, Nelson had been released back into the hands of Arlington County. He was still under indictment for the liquor store robbery, and the prosecutor decided that since the newspapers had reported that Nelson was dead, it was no longer necessary to keep him isolated in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains protected by Virginia state troopers. On the other hand, the prosecutor didn’t want Nelson placed in the Arlington County lockup with other prisoners awaiting trial: a man in a wheelchair was just too vulnerable and too noticeable. He eventually concluded it would be best for Nelson to be placed in a motel under a phony name and guarded around the clock by Arlington cops.
This arrangement suited Nelson fine.
Nelson asked his jailers if he might be permitted a visitor, a guy he’d served with in Iraq. The prosecutor mulled this over and said, “Sure, why not?” Nelson was cooperating, and if he were being kept in the county lockup, he would have been allowed visitors.
So Nelson called a guy name Dan Ingraham, and asked Ingraham to drop by so they could bullshit about the bad old days. Ingraham was delighted to hear from Nelson. When most of his left leg was blown off by an IED, Nelson was the guy who had dragged him out of the personnel carrier and saved him from being burned to death.
“But I need you to do me a favor,” Nelson said.
“Sure, man, anything,” Ingraham said.
When Ingraham arrived that evening, the cop guarding Nelson frisked him to make sure he wasn’t carrying a weapon. He also looked inside the bag that Ingraham had brought with him. In it were chips and dip—and a half-gallon of Jameson’s.
Nelson invited the cop to join him and Ingraham for a couple of drinks. In the time the cop had been guarding Nelson, he had revealed that he was a member of the Virginia National Guard and was an Iraq war vet, too. So Nelson said, “Come on. Have a pop or two with us. Who’s gonna know?” “Ah, what the hell,” the cop said, and entered the motel room.
The cop, mindful that he was going to be relieved by another cop in five hours, sipped his whiskey slowly, but Nelson and his one-legged friend drank like there was no tomorrow. They didn’t talk about combat or guys who died or guys they’d killed. They talked about the funny stuff that happened over there, about the time a sergeant named Riley came back from R&R with a tattoo of a heart on his ass and the name Marlee inside the heart—and how Riley couldn’t remember getting the tattoo and didn’t know who Marlee was. They talked about an Iraqi kid who had enough pirated DVDs to start a Blockbuster store and a female soldier who kicked the shit out of a Ranger when the Ranger told her she ran like a girl. Nelson started to tell a funny story about Kelly but got too choked up to finish it.
At one point, Ingraham excused himself to go to the bathroom. The cop, still thinking like a cop, went into the bathroom after him and looked around to make sure Ingraham hadn’t left anything in there. The cop didn’t notice that the bathroom window was cracked open a couple of inches, and if he had noticed he probably wouldn’t have cared. The bathroom window wasn’t big enough for a guy Nelson’s size to crawl through, and if it had been, what would be the point of a guy in a wheelchair crawling out a window, anyway?
Getting Nelson into the same room with Fiona so the FBI could record a conversation between them was a problem. If Nelson—a man she thought was dead—showed up at her condo, Fiona probably wouldn’t let him in. If he rolled up to her in a restaurant, all Fiona had to do was walk away, or up a flight of stairs, and Nelson would be unable to stop her or follow her. So they needed to find someplace for Fiona and Nelson to meet where Nelson would at least have a chance of keeping her there long enough to make his pitch.
The FBI began following Fiona to learn her habits and see if they could figure out an appropriate meeting place. She was no longer working at Mulray Pharma, so her office was out of the question. She had lunch and dinner at restaurants almost every day, but varied the places where she ate. She spent a lot of time shopping in high-end stores and going to spas, and joined an exclusive country club and began taking golf lessons, but a golf course was not a good venue for Nelson. She also met with a real estate agent and twice flew to Florida to look at homes that were for sale. The last one she looked at was right next door to the place where Tiger Woods used to live.
One thing she did that puzzled the FBI agents following her was spend a lot of time with a high-priced consultant who managed campaigns for various politicians. No one could figure out why Fiona was visiting the consultant unless she was planning to run for office, but it was hard for people to imagine her doing that. Only DeMarco disagreed; he said Fiona would make a perfect politician.
And it was DeMarco who finally came up with the perfect place for Nelson and Fiona to meet—and the reason he came up with the solution, as opposed to all the cops and lawyers, was that his idea was somewhat illegal. DeMarco suggested they simply stick Nelson in Fiona’s condo while she was out and, when she came back home, he would be there waiting for her. The lawyers pointed out that this would mean that Nelson would have to break into Fiona’s place, to which DeMarco responded a) who gives a shit and b) he wouldn’t really have to break in. And the FBI found out that DeMarco was right. The maintenance man in Fiona’s building, after being told what the FBI was trying to do, said he’d be happy to let Nelson into Fiona’s condo. He said the bitch was always threatening to fire him and didn’t tip worth shit.
The FBI set up their recording equipment in the condo of a woman who lived on the sixth floor, the floor below Fiona’s. The woman was chairman of the condo board and had had a number of disagreeable encounters with Ms. West. Unlike the maintenance man, she was too refined to call Fiona a bitch, but she said she’d be delighted to assist the FBI in any endeavor that might result in Fiona no longer being a tenant.
The FBI coached Nelson extensively on what he was to say to Fiona; they wanted him to focus on Phil Downing’s murder and the attempt to kill DeMarco in the liquor store. The lawyers figured if they could make a case against Fiona for those domestic crimes, they might be able to go after her for things she had done for Mulray Pharma overseas. They had Nelson practice for several hours with a female FBI agent who pretended to be Fiona.
Nelson told the agents he liked the way they were going about things —taking their time, thinking things through. It was the way he and Kelly used to operate: lots of surveillance, practice, and preparation. The FBI agents felt a little uncomfortable being complimented by Nelson.
When the FBI guys were satisfied Nelson was ready, two agents drove him in a wheelchair-accessible van from his motel in Arlington to another motel in Wilmington. The following morning, the agents rolled him into Fiona’s building and took the elevator to the sixth floor, where two FBI technicians and a Justice Department lawyer were waiting. The technicians taped a microphone to Nelson’s chest and made sure all the recording equipment was working, and then the agents took Nelson by elevator to the seventh floor, where the building’s maintenance man was waiting. All tenants were required to give the building’s management firm a key so they could gain access to the condos in the event of some sort of emergency, and the maintenance guy used that key to open Fiona’s door.
Nelson rolled himself into Fiona’s lair.
While Nelson waited for Fiona to return home, he helped himself to the food in her kitchen. He polished off a whole container of duck liver pâté, which he spread on crackers as thin as Communion wafers. He also found a bottle of Dom Pérignon in the refrigerator. He didn’t normally drink champagne, but he did know that Dom was very expensive. So he opened the bottle and sat there sipping the most expensive booze he’d ever had in his life and thought about Kelly and their place in Montana as he waited for Fiona.
Three hours later Fiona opened the door, and when she walked into her living room she immediately saw Nelson sitting in his wheelchair. Naturally, she reacted like a person who was seeing a ghost—because she thought she was indeed seeing
one. The first words out of her mouth were an inarticulate stream of babble, consisting of “What? What? What the hell? What are you …”
Nelson said, “Yeah, I’m alive, you cunt.”
The Justice Department lawyer, one floor below, frowned when she heard this. Nelson was supposed to let Fiona talk—it was imperative that Fiona at least admit that she knew Nelson.
“What are you doing here?” Fiona said.
This was when Nelson was supposed to go into his carefully prepared spiel, saying that he wanted money to remain silent and not testify against her. He would have to tell her how it was that the papers had reported him dead and how he came to be in her apartment, but the FBI had prepared him to deal with those issues. Nelson, however, didn’t launch into his spiel.
The next thing the technicians, the lawyer, and the agents on the sixth floor heard was Fiona saying, “No. Wait. No. We can work this out.” Then they heard two gunshots. The agents went running out of the sixth-floor condo and up the stairs to Fiona’s floor. The technicians manning the recording equipment heard Nelson mutter something, and then heard a third shot.
“What did he say?” the lawyer asked.
“He said hooah or hoo-haw, something like that,” one of the technicians said.
“I always thought the damn guy was being too cooperative,” DeMarco said to Emma. “We should have seen this coming.”
“How did he get the gun?”
DeMarco told her what the Arlington prosecutor had told him. The night Nelson’s buddy, Ingraham, visited him, Ingraham must have brought the little .32-caliber semiauto with him. While Nelson, his pal, and the cop were all drinking and joking together, Ingraham went into the bathroom and opened the bathroom window, and after he left he drove to the back of the motel and dropped the gun through the window and onto the bathroom floor. Then Nelson hid the gun somewhere—taped it to the bottom of his wheelchair, stuck it in his diaper, or maybe just sat on it. Nobody ever thought to search Nelson for a weapon, and Ingraham—a guy whom Nelson had kept from burning to death—denied knowing anything about a gun, and his fingerprints weren’t on it.
“He was planning to kill Fiona all along,” DeMarco said. “The guy used us by pretending to cooperate, just hoping he’d have the chance to get close to her. If he hadn’t been able to get a gun, he would have found some way to get his hands on her and then he would have snapped her neck or strangled her. I think the reason he really wanted the gun was to kill himself, and the gun just made killing Fiona easier. I guess he thought that life in a wheelchair really wasn’t worth living. Or maybe he just couldn’t live with the awful things he’d done.”
“I don’t care why he killed himself,” Emma said. “But I think he figured that a life without Kelly wasn’t worth living.”
Epilogue
The FBI agent read Bernie his Miranda rights and asked if he understood them. Oh, yeah, he understood them, Bernie said—and he also understood that he was screwed.
The Bureau had traced the phony kidnapping bulletin on Hobson back to his IT pal at the FBI—and his pal gave up Bernie in a heartbeat. He admitted that Bernie gave him money to issue the bulletin, and phone records showed that Bernie had called him.
The FBI agents told Bernie that they were going to convict him for being an accomplice to Bill Hobson’s murder, but Bernie figured no way in hell would that ever happen. The Bureau didn’t have a clue who killed Hobson or any way to connect Bernie to his death, and Bernie wasn’t about to tell them anything about Mulray Pharma. He would have told them about Mulray and Fiona if that would have helped him, but as Orson Mulray and Fiona were both dead, Bernie figured talking about Mulray would just give the FBI more information they could use against him. There was no point digging his grave any deeper than it already was.
So Bernie’s plan—if you could call it a plan—was to stonewall the FBI. He wasn’t going to say a damn thing. All they could prove was that he’d called his buddy at the Hoover Building—they couldn’t even prove the money the guy received came from him—and then it was just his buddy’s word against his. So maybe he’d go to jail for being an accomplice to issuing a phony bulletin—he wasn’t even sure what category of crime that was—or maybe not. But one thing he knew for sure. All that money he got from Fiona … well, that was gone. His goddamn lawyer was going to get every penny of that trying to keep him out of jail.
Albert Morehouse was surprised that after Ike Clancy killed Nelson—or tried to kill Nelson—the guy who sent him the letter sent him the other half of his payment, the two hundred fifty grand he’d promised. He didn’t have to do that, because Morehouse had no idea who’d written him the letter.
Morehouse also wasn’t sure what happened with Nelson. He heard a rumor coming out of the warden’s office that Clancy didn’t kill Nelson, that the state troopers just took him away, but the next day he saw an article in the paper that said Nelson was dead. If Clancy had killed Nelson, however, they would have charged Clancy with Nelson’s murder—but Clancy was never charged. The warden just tossed him into the hole for ninety days.
And Clancy never told anyone that Morehouse had offered him a week with Carly Mendez to kill Nelson—and Morehouse didn’t know why. Maybe Clancy figured the other guards would make his life hell if he gave up Morehouse—or maybe ratting out an accomplice went against whatever personal code of honor an asshole like Ike Clancy had. Whatever the case, Albert Morehouse had half a million dollars to get out of debt and help with his wife’s future medical expenses—and the only reason he did was due to the integrity of two criminals.
It was a shame his wife’s HMO didn’t have that sort of integrity.
General Omar Bradley loved his new human—a short creature that wore her hair in pigtails. She had a high, squeaky voice and called him Doggie, and she spent a lot more time playing with him than the sad man with the round stomach who had called him Brad.
Simon Ballard couldn’t understand how his life had fallen apart so fast.
One day he had his own private laboratory, a handpicked staff, a phenomenal salary, and his name was being mentioned as a possible—some said certain—Nobel laureate. The next day he was unemployed, evicted from his lab like a tenant who couldn’t pay the rent, and being hounded by crass reporters.
It all started with a few people having minor strokes in Thailand—people who had been part of the clinical trials in that country. He was certain—well, almost certain—the strokes weren’t caused by his drug, but without a laboratory, he couldn’t prove it. What he needed, in addition to a lab, was access to people who had been given earlier versions of the drug—the people in Uganda, Pakistan, and Peru—but the Warwick Care Centers had been closed and those people were scattered about in remote places and he didn’t even know their names. The RFID chips that had been installed in them had been removed at the same time Mulray Pharma walked away from the care centers.
When the strokes were reported, the FDA decided to withhold approval of the drug until the cause of the strokes could be determined. At that point, he fully expected that Mulray Pharma would ask him to lead the investigation—and that’s when he was fired. The new CEO of Mulray Pharma—the one the board hired to replace Orson Mulray—decided he wanted to distance the company from Simon Ballard. The CEO was concerned about lawsuits and improperly conducted clinical trials and figured that he might be able to lay all the blame on Ballard, as Orson Mulray was no longer alive to blame. And without any financial backing or a place to work, Ballard couldn’t do the research he needed to prove the strokes weren’t connected to his drug.
And, in the back of his mind, he did wonder if maybe the strokes could be related to the drug. He remembered when they got those anomalous results from some of the subjects in Thailand, and he tried to convince Mulray he needed to do a little bit more testing, how Mulray ran roughshod over his concerns in his rush to market the drug. Or at least that’s the way he re
membered things.
Then along comes Dr. Matthew Reynolds from Georgetown University, a man so arrogant he was insufferable. Reynolds had been hired by Pfizer to develop a version of the drug that was based on his techniques, but sufficiently different that Pfizer might be able to claim they weren’t infringing on Mulray Pharma’s patents. Well, Reynolds was now claiming—and his claim was backed up by a few other people with MDs and PhDs behind their names—that Ballard’s drug prevented Alzheimer’s for only a few years and that after that the drug became ineffective, and possibly dangerous. He was sure Reynolds was wrong, but again, without a lab, he couldn’t prove otherwise—and between Reynolds’ claims and the people who stroked in Thailand, the Nobel Committee was backing away from him like he was the leper with the fewest fingers.
The final straw was the TV movie. It claimed to be fiction, but portrayed characters who were obviously based on him and Orson Mulray, and it showed shadowy figures injecting old people with poison and slicing up their brains so the fictional Simon Ballard could produce his drug and the fictional Orson Mulray could rub his hands in glee as the money poured in. After the movie came out, the tabloid press began to hound him, accusing him of actually killing people to develop his drug, and they gave him idiotic nicknames like the Grim Reaper and Dr. Death. He tried to explain to the reporters that he had nothing to do with Mulray Pharma’s clinical trials, but they wouldn’t believe him, and the lawyers he hired to sue the tabloids and the movie producers for damaging his reputation … Well, all the lawyers did was take his money.
It was so unfair.
DeMarco and Brian Kincaid’s mother were waiting for him when Kincaid walked out of prison. There were puckered scars on the right side of his neck, and when he looked over at DeMarco he had to move his whole upper body because his neck didn’t swivel like it should have.
Because of Nelson’s videotaped confession—and a lot of pressure applied by John Mahoney—Kincaid’s conviction had been overturned. But the attorney in the District of Columbia who had prosecuted Kincaid for Phil Downing’s murder wasn’t about to let Brian Kincaid sue the District for ten or twenty million dollars for having been incorrectly imprisoned. As far as the attorney was concerned, his office had acted in good faith based on the evidence it had, and a jury of his peers had convicted Kincaid—and there was no proof that Kelly or Nelson killed Downing, no matter what the late Mr. Nelson said. So the attorney told Kincaid he could either sign papers agreeing not to sue the District, in which case he’d get out of jail immediately, or he could hire a lawyer and see if he could convince some judge to give him a new trial. Kincaid agreed not to sue.
