Last Witness

by Glen Carter

  “Never.”

  Gee-man was configured with no surprises. There was a private V-berth up front, a galley on the starboard, and an aft cabin with a queen-size bed. The head came with a shower that Jack inspected for height. He was impressed. She had luxuries like a decent flat-screen television, as well as a nice size stove and refrigerator. Malloy boasted he had enough battery juice to run a U-boat.

  “You’d need it,” said Jack, punching open the door of a small microwave.

  Five minutes later they emerged from down below and took seats on the aft deck. Malloy popped open another beer and offered a refill to Jack. “One at a time, thanks.”

  The marina had a spectacular view, which Jack was soaking in when Malloy spoke. “I expect this isn’t a social call.”

  Jack wondered how Malloy was going to react when he showed him the contents of his carry-on. There was a file containing a number of photographs, including several that Dwayne had doctored with software he hacked from Scotland Yard.

  “I like their stuff better than the FBI,” he had said. “More intuitive on flesh tones and musculature atrophy. And then there’s the disfigurement, a whole other ball of wax. Excuse the pun.”

  The end product was simply amazing. So compelling that Jack had no problem making the decision that brought him to Panama City. To Buck’s Marina. To Ed Malloy. Kaitlin was all too familiar with the imperative that drove her husband. CNS had cast him aside and now the network would regret it dearly. She had given him a long wet kiss, looked him deeply in the eyes, and wished him a hunter’s luck. Her life was also about to become a blur of interviews and deadlines, but they had agreed to meet in Miami in a few days.

  Jack decided now was as good a time as any to show Malloy the goods. He suggested they move down below to the galley and a few minutes later Malloy had cleaned a spot at the dinette. Jack then unzipped his carry-on and slowly extracted a manila file folder.

  Malloy pushed his beer out of the way and slapped the table. “Christ—how about a damn drum roll.”

  Jack ignored the remark. “There was the one photo, remember.”

  “I’ve seen this movie, Jack.”

  “Patience.”

  “Get on with it.”

  Jack opened the folder revealing the first of a series of eight by-ten photos.The top one was the original already seen by Malloy after Dwayne salvaged the image from Storozhenko’s film canister. Malloy frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  Jack jumped at the opening. “About thirty seconds after his head explodes. Kennedy’s well on his way to Parkland by now. The people, they’re in a panic and running towards the grassy knoll, running towards the sound of gunfire because they believe there’s someone there. Simple crowd dynamics. It’s possible the shooter is there and they want to see. No one wants to miss that, so they run towards the grassy knoll where they’re sure the shots were fired.”

  “Agreed. Where are you taking this?”

  Jack waited a second to make sure Malloy wasn’t lagging, then he placed his finger on the figure of Art Rickerby, the AP photographer they identified after Mesner processed the image. “Nothing about this guy seems funny to you?”

  Malloy was irritated. “Oh, I don’t know, Jack. A news photographer at the scene of Kennedy’s assassination. How strange that is.”

  “Precisely,” Jack said curtly.

  Malloy pushed back from the table. “Precisely what?”

  Jack was relishing it. “This man, this adrenalin driven news photographer, is walking away from the stockade fence, in the opposite direction of where the action is focused. Remember, he’s heard the shots too. He should be running with the crowd towards what might be the best picture of his entire career. A shot of the person who has just mortally wounded the President of the United States. Maybe even a takedown.” Jack watched Malloy intently. “Instead, he’s bugging out of there.”

  Malloy nodded, but was still confused. “So you’re saying Art Rickerby, a veteran photographer with Associated Press is somehow connected with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?”

  “No,” Jack replied, tapping the photograph. “I’m saying this is not Art Rickerby.”

  Jack was enjoying the look of excitement on Malloy’s face.

  The retired FBI agent took a swallow of beer. He grabbed two more from the icebox, snapped both of them open, and gave Jack a look that said he could kiss him or kill him. “I hate to admit it, but you’remaking sense.” Malloy was suddenly energized but he needed more.

  The lights were on now, and somewhere up the dock music was playing. Something with a sexy Latin beat. Jack was wondering whether Barbie and Darbie were getting into the grove. Maybe they were Malloy’s friends. The years hadn’t been too destructive on his physique, and in the fraternity of boaters, babes like them might cut you some slack. None of this mattered to Jack, except he fancied himself a keen observer of the human condition.

  Jack revealed the second of the photographs. It was a large close-up taken from the original. A face. Swarthy features that said Mediterranean or Latin blood. Dark eyes looking directly into the camera. There was defiance there, maybe anger. You wouldn’t know for sure unless you knew the personality behind the pixels. Then there was the disfigurement. The man’s left ear was gone. Ruined flesh, barely visible, maybe the result of bloody trauma. Jack had checked. Art Rickerby had suffered no such injury.

  Molloy studied the photograph like a coroner studied the bullet holes on a fresh corpse. “You’re right,” he said, a declaration that had the weight of Hoover himself. “But there’s a camera, and he doesn’t look like your average civilian out for a snapshot of the President’s day.”

  “Agreed,” Jack said. “A man with a camera who might have been caught up in a horrible event and was momentarily turned in the wrong direction when this photograph was taken.”

  Malloy was suddenly downcast.

  Then, Jack revealed a third photograph.

  Jack told Malloy it had been Mesner’s work. Jack had posed the question but Dwayne deserved the credit.

  “Who is this guy?”Mesner had said.

  “I can’t say,” Jack had replied. “This is the only shot I’ve seen of thisman. Maybe because he was on the fringe of the chaos right after the killing, when everyone was focused on the grassy knoll.”

  Mesner nodded. “Yes, but that doesn’t explain why he’s nowhere to be seen before then. If he wasn’t standing there with everyone else when the shots were fired, where the hell was he?”

  Logical question. The answer was potentially explosive. That’s when Jack had asked his friend whether a task could be performed. The look on Dwayne’s face made Jack realize how stupid the question was.

  “Wow,” Malloy exclaimed as he examined the finished product. The third shot was a head and shoulders treatment of the original photograph. Full frame. An older face. Slicked-back greying hair, thinning at the temples, a deeply lined forehead, and fleshy dark eyes. Jowls that bracketed a full mouth and a chin with a movie actor’s cleft.

  “I’ve seen this kind of work before,” Malloy said. “Standard tricks used by the bureau to track down perps who have changed their appearance or have aged.”

  “Scotland Yard, too,” replied Jack.

  Malloy grunted and adjusted the photo for a closer look. “So what we have here is a photo of a photographer who was at Dealey Plaza, computer aged to what he would look like today.”

  Jack shrugged; disappointed Malloy wasn’t leaping at the possibilities. Dwayne had offered to hack into the bureau’s mainframe to gain access to its vast database of bad guys. Maybe find a match. Jack told him definitely not. He picked up the photo. “What would Special Agent Malloy do with a lead like this?”

  For a moment Malloy thought about it. Jack knew it was a thread he wouldn’t be quick to pull. He had already invested plenty with little return and he’d understand if Malloy chose to back off. After all, the photo might be nothing more than an historical novelty, another artifact for the Si
xth Floor Museum at the schoolbook depository.

  Malloy took the photo. “Mesner must have been chomping at the bit to hack a dozen databases with this.”

  “Yes, he was,” Jack replied. “But unleashing Dwayne could have consequences we don’t need.”

  Malloy nodded. “I can make a call.”

  Jack smiled widely. “What’s for dinner?”

  An hour later Malloy served up respectable fish chowder. Jack ate two large bowls and was eyeing a half eaten chocolate cake on the counter. “You bake?”

  Malloy shook his head. “The guy who owns the marina. His lady friend.”

  “Buck?”

  “Yes. As in Buck’sMarina.”

  Jack told Malloy about his encounter with Buck.

  “He’s a good man,” Malloy said. “But not the social type and he doesn’t care much for reporters.”

  “What’s with the tattoo?”

  Malloy slowly recited. “10-23-19-83-6-22.”

  “You’ve got a good head for numbers.”

  “Not numbers.”

  Jack’s forehead wrinkled. “I still hate puzzles.”

  Malloy let him off the hook. “October 23, 1983. 6:22 a.m.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Absolutely,” Malloy replied. “Buck was on sentry duty that morning. The delivery truck crashed through the gate and detonated the equivalent of twelve thousand pounds of TNT. He spent six weeks in a coma.”

  The bombing of the US Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport had changed everything. Two hundred forty-one people were killed that day, the bloodiest for the Corps since Iwo Jima. Malloy told Jack about the guilt Buck carried for not being able to stop that truck. The hellish years afterward. The booze, the disastrous marriages, and the dishonourable discharge after he had flamed out. “History Channel ran the old news footage a while back,” Malloy said. “Buck stayed drunk for four days after taking a sledge to his television.”

  Jack had felt the same brand of anger. He’d wandered into an editing suite not so long ago and stood there quietly while an editor rolled through video of a bombed out restaurant in Cartagena, stocking the tape into his hard drive, unaware that Jack was behind him, stone still. Such destruction. So many killed that night. Jack’s survival had been a miracle. Kaitlin’s too. For weeks she had been mourned as dead, vaporized in the explosion. It was because of Jack they were in that doomed restaurant. He identified with Buck in the same way a convict doing short time identifies with the hopelessness of a lifer.

  Jack tried to comprehend Kelly’s need to have the worst moment of his life etched into his skin, knowing that the ink was superfluous. Jack reached for his cellphone.

  “What you doin’?”

  “Need a cab and a hotel. Thanks for dinner.”

  “Stick around. There’s plenty of space in that aft cabin. And we got a busy day tomorrow.”

  Jack considered it for just a second. “Why not,” he said. “The best sleep there is. On water.”

  Five minutes passed when Jack was stretched out in the aft cabin and Malloy called out to him from the galley. “Got a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How’d you figure out the Rickerby thing?”

  “Monkey work,” was all Jack said.

  22

  The next morning, Jack awoke to the smell of frying bacon. He climbed out of the aft cabin and had a cup of coffee thrust into his hands. “Morning. How do you like your eggs?” Malloy said.

  Jack mumbled a response and made his way up the steps into the daylight. Humid. Hot, on a breathless morning. The ocean was flat and very blue as though someone had spent the night applying a fresh coat of paint. Jack had slept well and the coffee wasn’t bad. A young couple walked by on the dock pulling an overloaded cart. “Great day,” the man said cheerily. Jack nodded his agreement and watched them till they stopped four slips down at a flybridge called Saucy Bitch. It was going to be another scorcher and for a moment Jack thought about Scoundrel freezing her keel off in water that was not nearly as pleasant. A couple of times he thought about relocating her to the Bahamas, but that would have meant spending less time enjoying her company. He’d need more coffee soon.

  Malloy was reading his mind when he emerged from down below carrying a fresh pot and two plates loaded with food. For a moment neither man spoke. Then, between forkfuls, Malloy told Jack about the call he’d placed while he was still asleep.

  The man Malloy had spoken to was putting his “ass in a sling” but had agreed to run their photographs through the Bureau’s database. “The Bureau has this face recognition program,” said Malloy, looking over his shoulder as if he had just revealed a state secret.

  Jack was going to tell him the technology was old hat now, but why bother.

  “He’ll run them through the system but there are no guarantees.”

  The photos were also on Jack’s laptop, and he figured they could simply email the images to Malloy’s FBI contact. He wondered whether Gee-man’s slip came with anything aside from power hook-up and cable, like maybe a jack for the Internet. What were the chances?

  Turned out the place was wired. After finishing breakfast, Jack took a quick shower and returned topside cradling his laptop. He ran his Ethernet cable to the power and cable post on the dock and in a few seconds was connected to his email. He opened a new message and attached a number of files, including a tight shot of the young mystery man and several different computer-aged versions. He asked Malloy what he wanted to say in the body of the message and then fired it off to his mole. Malloy hadn’t told his contact much. He needed to know if the face in the photos was a match for any of the Bureau’s vast digital warehouse of perps and suspects for as far back as he could go. Of course it was only a start. There were an infinite number of pools they might theoretically have to fish before getting a strike. Inmates, the military, and any other organization that kept mug shots and the like. It was a stretch, but Jack was an optimist, at least up until that point where optimism became a fool’s crutch.

  By noon the heat was oppressive. Things were picking up around them as people began arriving for the weekend. Malloy talked with several of them while Jack kept a low profile working on his laptop inside the cabin. He couldn’t get to all his emails and the messages on his cell but he definitely put a dent in them.The cancellation of Our Time was still generating reaction, most of it angry. Friends and colleagues were calling to ask how he was doing and Jack had managed to call most of them back to thank them for their concern. Then, Jack called his agent, Lou Perlman, who had some bad news. “The chairman of the board is saying publicly you were gassed because the show wasn’t breaking any stories.”

  “You know that’s bullshit. Hardly a week went by we didn’t have an exclusive. Assholes.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, Jack, but the chairman’s taking some heat in the press. You know. A network full of bean counters who don’t care a whit about good journalism, that kinda thing. A group of shareholders wants a meeting with the brass. If you like I can issue a statement on your behalf.”

  Jack preferred to take the high road and told him so. “What about the Nova thing?”

  “They’re biting but want to know whether you’ve got anything you can bring to the table.”

  He told Lou to “stay tuned.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Later.”

  “By the way, where the hell are you?”

  Jack danced around it, promising to stay in touch. Then he ended the call.

  An hour later Barbie and Darbie stopped by to say hello and invited Jack and Malloy over for beverages. Malloy smirked. “They must be smitten with Mister Television,” he said. Jack filled him in on developments at the network. His recent status as a journalist “between gigs.”

  “Evil and stupid bean counters,” Malloy had declared, offering condolences which seemed much too funereal, but Jack thanked him anyway. It was mid-afternoon when Jack checked his email again. Nothing fr
om the Bureau mole, but there was a note from Kaitlin saying she missed him and was looking forward to their rendezvous in Miami. Jack felt a pang of guilt for even thinking about taking Barbie and Darbie up on their offer. Malloy told him the sleek cigarette boat was a drug smugglers toy, along with the two lovelies.

  It was four o’clockwhen Jack’s laptop beeped with a new message. Just four words. Jack read them, unable to mask his disappointment. “No matches. Any photo.”

  There were about a gazillion digital files at the FBI and the mystery man had matched none of them.

  “What did we expect?” Malloy said, getting up to stretch. “An easy hit. That’s not the way it happens. You can grow old hoping for that kind of luck.” Pacing now, rubbing the back of his neck. “The fellow existed. We know that. Alive or dead, there’ll be records of who he was—or is.”

  Shade brought cooler temperatures for which both men were thankful. Sweat dried on sun-drenched skin. Jack ran fingers through his hair and stared at the laptop screen.

  “There’s a guy at Langley who had a kid disappeared—a drug thing,” said Malloy. “I met him at an inter-agency thing way back when. I ran some interference for him with the locals in Vegas and they picked up his boy. Maybe saved his life. He owes me.”

  “Sure, make the call,” Jack said, and then jumped off the boat. “Need to take a walk.” A moment later he found a quiet spot at the end of the dock where he sat, swinging his legs over water. Malloy, of course,was right. On both counts. Nothing was going to fall into their laps, but the man was flesh and blood with a history and footprints. The mystery man was certainly real to Helena Storozhenko. The story tugged at him, like the tableau of unreal elements, which he could not ignore. What if? Those two words again. What if a forgotten snapshot opened new doors on the assassination of John F.Kennedy? What if the mystery man with a camera at Dealey Plaza had moments earlier cradled a rifle? Jack summoned the man’s face. Eyes that betrayed something other than shock, which he should have felt in the seconds after Kennedy was murdered. Who was he, and why did he appear so bloody calm? Jack felt a chill despite the heat. He spied a school of tiny fish in the water beneath his feet. They darted around, evasive. Like the truth. He was certain that truth would reveal a hell of a story, which he had every intention of telling.