Hot Start

by David Freed

  “Hello?”

  “Roy’s murder had nothing to do with big game hunting,” she said. “The police have the wrong man.”

  The voice on the other end was low but most definitely female, gravelly, like someone who smoked. She sounded about thirty, possibly younger. Her accent told me she was European, Baltic most likely.

  “I take it Roy was a friend of yours?”

  “What would ever make you think that?”

  “Friends usually refer to each other by their first names.”

  The screen on my phone read, “Blocked.”

  “I saw you,” she said, “on the news.”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “This is the digital age, Mr. Logan. Anyone can get anyone’s number.”

  A breeze picked up out of the north. There was nothing cooling about it.

  “Why call me up in the middle of the night and tell me this about Roy? What makes you think I care?”

  “Because you do.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  “I am sure. Men are like books,” she said, “and I’ve read just about all of them. I can tell just by looking, which ones care only about themselves. This, sadly, is most men. Then there are the others. They worry. About the world. About the mark they will leave on it. They defend the underprivileged. They do good deeds. They stop car thieves in parking lots. You are one of those men.”

  I asked her what her name was. She told me I didn’t need to know.

  “When you roust a guy out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, the Buddha says you’re obligated to give him your name. It doesn’t have to be your real name.”

  “The Buddha did not say this. You say this.”

  “OK, you got me. I just need something to call you. For purposes of this conversation.”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “Mary.”

  “Mary. As in the Virgin?”

  She laughed.

  “So, Mary, if hunting exotic animals had nothing to do with Roy Hollister’s murder, as you say, what did?”

  “Before I tell you, you must promise me one thing.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “In the end,” Mary said, “the guilty will be made to pay. You must promise me.”

  I’d seen enough of the world to know it didn’t always work that way. Evil people get away with evil things plenty. In the end, crime and punishment share about as much in common as car seats and cattle.

  “I’m sorry, Mary. I can’t make that promise.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “This is what I thought you would say.”

  She hung up.

  Was there any truth to her claim that Roy Hollister’s livelihood, bagging big game for sport, had nothing to do with his slaying? Maybe. Maybe not. But if Mary was right about one thing, it was that I did care—too much at times. Sleep eluded me as I stared up at the stars and pondered her call.

  Motive is what any good intelligence collector focuses on when pursuing the unknown. What compels a killer to do what he does? Answer that fundamental question and you can answer all the others—his true identity, his location, his allegiances. If Hollister’s killer had been motivated by reasons other than animal rights, then it seemed logical that animal rights activist Dino Birch had nothing to do with it. Why had “Mary” called me? What specific knowledge did she possess to assert so adamantly that investigators had arrested the wrong man? Why was she so bent on punishing the real killer? I wondered if she was one of the young women in the group sex photograph Kang had shared with me. My brain swirled with questions. One of them was answered less than an hour later after I went inside, took a cold shower, and opened my laptop.

  There was the usual junk e-mail—offers of erectile dysfunction pills and scams from Nigeria (“Congratulations, you have inherited one million euros!”). Two prospective flight students had written me, saying they were interested in taking introductory lessons. But it was the entry with the blank subject line, the one from RanchoBonitaMe@gmail.com, that caught my eye.

  “Only an honorable man,” it began, “would have told me he couldn’t promise.”

  The e-mail alleged how Roy Hollister’s safari chartering service had taken a big hit when the economy tanked in 2008 and had never fully recovered. To shore up his dwindling income, Hollister had begun using his Citation to ferry $10,000-a-night European call girls to mostly New York and Washington, with occasional trips to Houston—anywhere a powerful politician or captain of industry desired a discreet booty call. The operation had not escaped the scrutiny of US law enforcement agencies. Facing indictment from a federal grand jury and hoping to avoid prison time, Hollister had entered into plea bargain negotiations with Justice Department officials. Somebody had silenced him and his wife before he could begin dropping names.

  “If you want to know what happened,” the e-mail stated, “I suggest you contact the FBI. They know the truth, but I trust them not at all. This is why I called you. The FBI is a sheepdog, yes, but even the sheepdog can be bribed with treats. Even the sheepdog can be made to look away. I believe that you, Mr. Cordell Logan, cannot.”

  It was signed, simply, “Mary.”

  We made fun of the FBI at Alpha. Lawyers with guns, we’d call them. Jealous wives are more resourceful investigators than the average field agent, we’d say. Which is to say, I had no good, current contacts inside the bureau who could tell me how much, if at all, the FBI knew of Hollister’s alleged pimping activities or the details of his death and that of his wife’s.

  I did, however, know someone who undoubtedly knew folks at FBI headquarters. Gaining his assistance would not be easy.

  SEVEN

  The answer wasn’t no. It was hell no.

  “At least wait to find out what the favor is I’m asking for, Buzz, before blowing me out of the water,” I said, sitting on my landlady’s back porch.

  “Some cojones you got, Logan, asking me for help on anything after the way you screwed me over.”

  “Screwed you over? All I said was . . . Standby one, Buzz. Moving.”

  Mrs. Schmulowitz brought me out a glass of orange juice with ice in it, along with an affectionate pat on the cheek. I mouthed “thank you” and switched the phone to my other ear, waiting until she went back inside her house.

  “All I did,” I told Buzz after she left, “was tell you that I wasn’t ready to re-up on a permanent basis. That’s hardly screwing you over.”

  “Says you. Jesus Christ, Logan, I put the band back together, only there’s nobody on lead guitar, no John Lennon.”

  “Actually, George Harrison played lead—not that I’d expect an opera fan to know such things.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s rear end whether Godzilla played lead! You stabbed me in the back. Simple as that.”

  To be clear, Buzz is the ex-Special Forces, Pavarotti-loving, eye-patch-wearing hard-ass big brother I never had. It was Buzz who essentially broke me in when I became an operator. It was Buzz who’d taken an aviator proficient at killing from the air and taught him how to kill on the ground. More recently, after riding a senior analyst desk at the Defense Intelligence Agency, he’d been put in charge of Acme Consulting, a small, clandestine intelligence unit that operated under corporate cover out of a major Midwestern city and answered directly to the White House. Buzz wanted me to come work for Acme and I did, briefly, carrying out a covert mission to Vietnam that turned out to be substantially more involved than I’d anticipated going in. I wasn’t ready to jump back full-time into his world. I was still emotionally spent from my time at Alpha, from Savannah’s death, and told him so, which didn’t go over well. Buzz was a man who didn’t like being told no. Ever.

  “You know I wouldn’t ask the favor, buddy, if it weren’t important,” I said.

  “Buddy? Oh, I see. Now it’s buddy? Buddies don’t leave buddies in the lurch, Logan. I was counting on you and you bailed on me. Why should I lift a finger to help you?”

  “Because we share history.”<
br />
  “Batman and Robin share history. Baskin and Robbins share history. Hell, even Kermit and Miss Piggy share history. You don’t see any of them cutting and running on their buddies.”

  “What if I told you that your boss, the president, is looking at a potentially embarrassing situation, a big one, and that if you don’t help me, it could get ugly real quick.”

  Silence.

  “Buzz, you there?”

  “I’m listening.”

  I told him about the Hollister murders, Dino Birch’s arrest, and the call from my former father-in-law. I told him about the explicit photograph I’d seen of Hollister and Congressman Pierce Walton, and about the late-night communications from the woman who called herself Mary. I told him what she’d told me, about the alleged international call girl ring, and how she intimated that the FBI was clued into all of it.

  “She said the FBI are sheepdogs and that sheepdogs can be bribed.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning the bureau knows what’s going on and is covering it up for some reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does this have to do with the president?”

  “The special agent in charge of the FBI serves at the pleasure of the president. If half of what this woman told me is true and it leaks out, it won’t be pretty for either of them.”

  “I don’t see how POTUS gets dinged,” Buzz said. “Fine, so the head of the FBI steps on his meat because some of his guys step on theirs. Wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe he gets canned. Maybe he quits for ‘personal reasons,’ to ‘spend more time with his family.’ Either way, no harm, no foul on this end. It ain’t like the voters expect the president to know what everybody who works for him is up to twenty-four/seven.”

  “Actually, Buzz, they kind of do.”

  Buzz exhaled in an agitated way. “You’re right,” he said, “I suppose they do.”

  “You do know who Congressman Walton is, right?”

  “Vice-chair, House Foreign Affairs Committee. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Logan.”

  “He’s also one of the president’s biggest fund-raisers. He’s slept in the Lincoln bedroom. He goes joyriding all the time on Air Force One with his ‘good friend,’ the president. He’s rumored to be in line for a cabinet post.”

  “I just told you, Logan, I know who the guy is.”

  “Then you know if a whiff of this gets out, Walton’s the last guy your boss wants his name next to on the front page of the Sunday Times.”

  A strained pause. Buzz knew I was talking sense. “So what do you want from me?” he asked finally.

  “I want to know who this Mary is. I want to find her and talk to her, face-to-face, determine what she really knows. And I need to know what the FBI knows.”

  “Why’re you doing all this, Logan? For your former father-in-law?”

  “Not so much for him.”

  “More for Savannah, her memory. Am I right?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She’s gone, Logan, and she ain’t coming back. The sooner you accept that fact and soldier on, the better off you’re gonna be.”

  His words stung. I didn’t need the lecture.

  “I’m not just asking for a favor, you knuckle-dragging idiot,” I said. “I’m trying to do you one too. If you can’t see that, then we have nothing more to say.”

  Again there was silence. Again Buzz exhaled, only this time, I heard defeat in his tone.

  “If I agree to do this,” he said, “you have to do something for me.”

  I thought he might demand that I quit my day job and come to work for him, as I once said I would. He didn’t.

  “I want you to get some help. Go talk to somebody. A shrink, a monk, a guru. Death happens, Logan. You gotta get past her. You gotta move on.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said, “and the help.”

  Without having classified intercept protocols on my phone, I knew that Mary’s call and her e-mail were all but untraceable. Any tenth grader with a smartphone and basic understanding of communications technology can easily mask her identity over digital airwaves. Buzz said he would tap into intelligence files and make some back-channel inquiries, but advised me not to hold my breath. He held out little hope of finding her. He was more optimistic about finding out what the FBI knew.

  “I’ll put in a call or two to a couple of guys I’m buddies with down at Quantico,” he said. “They’re both dialed in. If the bureau’s involved in any of this, they’ll know.”

  “I am in your debt.”

  “When were you ever not, Logan?”

  He had a point.

  THE COLLEGE kid gripped the Ruptured Duck’s steering yoke with both hands like he was choking out his professor.

  “It’s important we fly the airplane with our left hand,” I said, “keeping our right hand free to control the throttle and fuel-air mixture controls.”

  The kid’s name was Brandon. His acne-ravaged cheeks were blanched of color. “I’d really, seriously, totally like to go back now,” he said.

  Scheduling the introductory lesson had been a mistake, as it had been two days earlier with Joy, the joyless accountant. It was easily ninety-five degrees inside the Ruptured Duck’s cockpit while the air, a percolating cauldron of convective currents, bounced us like popcorn all over the sky. I should’ve told the kid when he called that we could do it another day, but he seemed excited to the point of insistence and I was looking for a distraction that morning from my haunted past.

  “Please,” Brandon said, “let’s just land, OK?”

  “No problem. I have the airplane.”

  He surrendered the yoke, reached for the airsickness bag I’d handed him before we took off, and promptly off-loaded lunch. I counted my blessings. The truly sick ones usually don’t make it to the bag. Usually they heave onto the floor of the airplane.

  We landed without incident, the kid still green around the gills. I apologized after we taxied in.

  “Maybe we can try it again another time,” I said, “on a nicer day.”

  Brandon was a premed major just up the road at UC Rancho Bonita whose grandmother had left him a small inheritance. He was too serious, she’d told him before she passed; he needed to enjoy life, not sit inside and study all the time. Somehow he’d decided that learning to fly was the answer to grandma’s concerns for his well-being.

  “Probably not,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “probably not.”

  Down the flight line, Eric Ivory was lying on his back, on a wheeled mechanics crawler, degreasing the belly of a twin-engine Beech with his orange “Immaculate Wings” panel truck parked next to the plane. The truck’s radio was cranked up—Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” was playing, which seemed appropriate given the weather. He paused to watch Brandon wobble into the park lot before getting up and walking over, grinning, wiping his sweaty face and dirty hands on a towel black with grease.

  “Another satisfied customer?”

  “It’s what I do,” I said, chocking the Duck’s front tire. “Poor kid barfed like a sailor on leave.”

  Ivory grinned. “That was always my problem. Took a few flying lessons and puked every time. I was scared to death. All I ever heard from my mother was how dangerous flying is.”

  “Flying’s not dangerous, Eric. Crashing is dangerous.”

  He laughed, holding his left arm. “Speaking of flying, check out this bad boy.”

  Strapped to his wrist was one of those oversized pilot watches that are the rage these days, with all the dials and the buttons that tell you the various phases of the moon and what time it is in Myanmar. I’ve never known a real aviator who wore one, except maybe in a singles’ bar.

  “I wonder how much that thing weighs,” I said, trying to find something nice to say about it.

  “Beats me,” Ivory said. “Picked this bad boy up online for 700 less than I would’ve paid at the mall. One hundred p
ercent titanium. They’re indestructible.”

  I didn’t need a fancy chronometer, or my own twenty-dollar Casio for that matter, to know that it was time for lunch. My stomach told me so. I asked Ivory if he wanted to go grab a quick bite somewhere, but he declined. He needed to finish detailing the twin Beech and the Beech owner’s Porsche, he said, before it really got hot.

  “I’ll take a rain check,” Ivory said.

  “Assuming it ever rains around here again.”

  There was a hole-in-the-wall Mexican dive close by the airport and popular among locals called Tequila Mockingbird. Heat wave or no heat wave, something told me a giant, smothered green burrito was waiting there with my name on it.

  LIFE IN a small town means you run into people. It’s rare when you go to the bank or the drug store and you don’t encounter someone you know personally or have seen before. So it was at Mockingbird’s. Sitting at a corner table were two city council members. Hunkered over a plate of fish tacos on a stool at the counter was a clerk from Kinkos who’d once made copies for me. I recognized the hoop in her eyebrow.

  “What’s going on, Logan?”

  I turned as I waited in line to order. Standing behind me in board shorts, flip-flops, and an LA Dodgers T-shirt, was Pete McManus, his Oakleys propped atop a dirty blond crew cut.

  “Not much, Pete. How’re you?”

  “Can’t complain. Well, actually, I could about this heat we’re having, but what good would it do, right?”

  “That’s the problem with the weather. Like Twain said, people always complain about it, but nobody ever does anything about it.”

  The late Roy Hollister had employed two on-call commercial pilots to fly his Citation when he didn’t feel like flying it himself. One of them was McManus. We had a couple of things in common, Pete and I. Both of us were tall and strikingly handsome (I kid). We were products of the Air Force Academy, though he’d graduated sixteen years after I had. That’s where the similarities ended. I’d opted to fly fighters following primary aircraft training. Pete had chosen multiengine transports. He’d fulfilled his military service, then gone to work flying regional jets for American Eagle and United Express. I’d never thought to ask him how he’d ended up flying for Hollister, though I always assumed it was between furloughs with the air carriers.