The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay, good. Moving on, the story that came through to us was . . . Well, it’s certainly a different version of events than we’re familiar with. And it included some new details about the documents Mr. Dupree has been withholding from us. I assume you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” I said earnestly.

  “Would you mind repeating what you told your fiancée, just so I make sure I’ve gotten this all correct?”

  Mitch glanced at me, his annoyance plain. This was a betrayal of the time-honored no-snitch code. I didn’t care. If it got me even three inches closer to walking out that front gate at FCI Morgantown, I was going to throw him under the bus and run over him until his face had tread marks on it.

  I reiterated for the agents a condensed version of what Mitch had told me. As the amateur lawyer in me suspected, Agent Hines was particularly interested in the deposit slips. I told her what I could.

  When I was done, she turned to Mitch.

  “Well, Mr. Dupree. That is certainly more detail than we were ever able to get out of you. Do you care to confirm what Mr. Goodrich has told us?”

  Mitch had an ugly set to his jaw. His bottom teeth were showing, clenched against his top lip. When he spoke, it was with venom in his voice.

  “Oh, so now you want to talk to me?” he said. “You people. You didn’t want to hear a thing I had to say when I tried to tell you what was really going on at USB. But now you’re interested? After you’ve thrown me in jail and ruined my life? Forget it. Forget it now. Forget it later. I have nothing to say to you.”

  Agent Hines took this in placidly. The elementary schoolteacher had dealt with petulant third graders before.

  But she could be as calm as she wanted, and it wouldn’t placate Mitch, who was beyond fuming. I suppose I would be too, were I in his situation: wrongfully convicted of a crime that I had actually tried to prevent from happening.

  The problem was now, his rage had made him myopic. He was so dug in against the FBI—so insistent he didn’t give them any kind of victory—he couldn’t recognize what was truly in his best interests.

  I had to get him to see that by turning over these documents, he would really be helping himself and his family.

  And mine.

  I wasn’t going to stress that part, of course. But I still suddenly felt like I couldn’t properly say what I needed to as Pete Goodrich.

  He needed to hear it from Tommy Jump. Agent Hines had already started in on her next angle of attack, but I interrupted her. “Actually, Agent Hines, would you give me a moment to talk to Mitch? I need to be honest with him about some things.”

  Straight-shooting Lia appraised me with curiosity but simply said, “Sure, go ahead.”

  I turned myself to Mitch and began, “The first thing you need to know is . . .”

  And then I dropped the Pete Goodrich West Virginia mountain lilt.

  “My name isn’t Pete Goodrich,” I said in my normal voice. “I’m not a history teacher. I didn’t rob a bank. I don’t have a wife and three kids. More or less everything I’ve ever said to you about myself is a lie.”

  I paused there, to see how he was taking this. He was giving no indication of having a reaction to it either way, so I continued:

  “My name is Tommy Jump. I’m an actor from New Jersey. I have a pregnant fiancée and a worried mother, and that’s about it. I was hired by the FBI to come here and see if I could figure out where you stashed those documents. They paid me seventy-five thousand dollars, with the promise of more if I was successful. Except the guy who I thought worked for the FBI, because he was a childhood friend of mine and because I trusted him, turned out to actually be working for the cartel. Obviously, I didn’t know that when I first came here. I really did think I was working for the right side.”

  An actor knows few things better than how to read an audience, and none of them had expected this twist. David Drayer must not have mentioned this part. Which made sense, because that would have been admitting his own underhanded role.

  “This past weekend, my fiancée figured out the truth and came here to warn me. Then she went and spoke to this prosecutor, and here we all are. The point of all this is not merely that I’m an idiot and that I’ve been lying to you this whole time—I’m sorry for that, by the way. The point is that this cartel isn’t going to stop looking for those deposit slips. They’ll throw as much money and as many people at it as they need to. And they’re only going to get more creative and more ruthless about how they do it. They failed with me, obviously. But they’re going to try and try and try again until they succeed.

  “The moment they find what they’re looking for—and someday, they will—it would be over for you. That scenario ends the same way every time. So let’s think about a different scenario, one where you turn the documents over to the FBI. I know you don’t like the FBI, and I don’t blame you. But think about what they’ll do with the deposit slips. They’ll use them to destroy the cartel. Destroy it. Completely. El Vio would either be dead, because he didn’t allow himself to be taken alive, or in a supermax prison, where he’d be shut off from the rest of the world. His employees would either be dead, in prison themselves, or working for whatever pestilence arises to take New Colima’s place. It would take some time, obviously, but eventually there wouldn’t be anyone left with both the will and the means to kill you. You wouldn’t have to look over your shoulder anymore. You’d be free. Truly free. So come on, just give them the documents and let’s go back to our families.”

  I looked at Mitch hopefully. My words had swayed him. There was no question. He wasn’t as angry.

  At the very least, he seemed to be thinking it through. His banker’s brain was trained in risk assessment and loss prevention. What I had just laid out appealed to those disciplines.

  After a pause, he looked at Agent Hines and asked, “Are you recording this?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I think maybe you should start,” he said.

  She reached into her suit pocket, pulled out her phone, tapped it a few times, then set it on the table. To make things official, she announced the date and setting, then introduced herself and the other people in the room.

  “Okay, Mr. Dupree,” she said. “You are now on the record with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Go ahead.”

  “All right. I just want to make sure I understand this properly. If I hand over these documents, I will be considered a cooperating witness, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Hines said.

  “And what would the FBI be prepared to do for me?”

  “We could probably improve the last offer we made you.”

  “Improve it how?” Mitch demanded.

  “Well, now that we understand just how potentially valuable this evidence is, I think we could see clear to recommending you be released with time served. From there, I assume you would want WITSEC for you and your family, and we would enter you in that program if you wished.”

  “That would be a start,” Mitch said. “But that’s not good enough. I’d want you to promise that you intend to pursue a case against Thad Reiner and seek the harshest possible penalties for him and any others at USB who knew about his scheme. I’d want a written apology from the FBI, saying it was wrong to prosecute me, acknowledging that I was a hundred percent innocent, admitting that you were totally and completely incompetent.”

  Agent Hines briefly pursed her lips—the only show of emotion she had yet allowed herself—then shifted her face back to neutral.

  “If your evidence corroborates what you’re saying, we would acknowledge any mistakes we may have made,” she said.

  “In writing.”

  “In writing,” she repeated.

  Mitch sat there, staring her down, enjoying this small moment of vindication, anticipating the larger one that was to com
e.

  “So, time served, WITSEC, a case against Reiner, and a letter of apology in exchange for the documents,” he said. “Do I have that all right?”

  “With the aforementioned caveats, yes,” Hines said.

  I was holding my breath and thinking of Amanda. Of our baby. Of no longer having to wash convicts’ undergarments. Of getting on with a quiet, ordinary, blissfully boring life.

  And then Mitch smiled maliciously and said, “Yeah, go to hell, it’s still not happening.”

  The bastard. That whole setup was just his way of twisting the knife after he plunged it into all of us.

  Mitch Dupree wasn’t giving up anything. Which meant I was going to lose nearly a decade of my life before I was again a free man. I actually moaned.

  “I’m glad we could get that on the record,” he said, enjoying himself. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have time to serve.”

  He shoved his chair back at an odd angle and stood up. He was making for the door, leaving us all a little stunned.

  Then Chris Hall, the blond agent, opened his mouth for the first time.

  “Mr. Dupree, you might want to wait a moment,” he said.

  Mitch wasn’t slowing down. He already had his hand on the door handle. Hall was pulling a piece of photographic paper out of a folder and placing it on the table. It was glossy eight-by-ten picture of a petite woman with frosted blond hair.

  Dupree’s wife.

  And she had a gun in her hand.

  CHAPTER 49

  Mitch still had his hand on the door, but he was no longer moving in the direction of the hallway. He had turned his body back toward the table.

  “What . . . what’s this about?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you have a seat,” Hall suggested.

  “Why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “Well, Mr. Dupree, that’s your wife—”

  “I know that, asshole.” Mitch bristled, then looked at Hines. “Stop the damn recording.”

  Then he turned his gaze on me. “Do you know anything about this?”

  “Not a thing,” I said. “I swear.”

  Mitch was still near the door. He had yet to take a step back in our direction.

  “Have a seat, sir,” Hall said, this time more firmly.

  Whatever brief argument Mitch was having with himself soon ended. He walked back to his still-warm chair. He sat.

  “Okay,” he said. “Start talking.”

  “I think you’re aware we’ve been keeping an eye on your wife,” Hall said. “Not all the time. We don’t have the staffing for that. But we occasionally go by her new house and point a parabolic her way. And we’ve had a sporadic tail on her in the hopes that she leads us somewhere we don’t know about yet.”

  Mitch’s jaw muscles flexed as his back molars ground together.

  “A few days ago, on Saturday night, we had an agent on her. We often find that subjects who suspect they may be followed are a little more careless on weekends, because they think we’re not going to be working. Anyhow, we captured an interesting series of photographs. To be honest, we weren’t really sure what to do about them. Especially once Mr. Drayer approached us on Monday. They were . . . an inconvenience, really. Maybe you’d like to have a look.”

  Hall began placing glossies on the table. They were all this odd shade of green, like they had been shot in the dark by a night-vision camera. But they were plenty clear. The first showed Natalie Dupree in the driver’s seat of a Kia, parked in front of a vast brick house adorned with white columns.

  “I believe you’re aware that’s Thad Reiner’s residence,” Hall said.

  Mitch didn’t reply. In the next photos Hall placed down, Natalie had the gun in her hand. Then she was returning the gun to the bag.

  “She’s about to break the law for the first time right here,” Hall said. “In the state of Georgia, you’re allowed to carry a handgun in your residence or your vehicle. But the moment she steps out of the vehicle with the handgun on her person, she needs a carry permit—which, according to records, she doesn’t have. It’s only a misdemeanor. But it’s a start. So here we go.”

  Another photo. Natalie was now out of the car, her hand on the front gate of that big brick house, her head turned back toward the street, checking one last time to see if anyone was watching. I didn’t know what was going to come next, but if I was on a jury, I would have been ready to convict. It was like a director had told her, “Actually, could you try to look a little more guilty, please?”

  Hall was clearly enjoying himself. “So now we’ve got her for criminal trespassing, because she’s entering someone’s property uninvited, with the intent to break the law. We got prints off that gate, by the way. It was high-gloss paint, so she left some nice fat ones for us.”

  In the next shot, she was striding up the front walkway. The angle was such that you could only half see her face. Her determination was still unmistakable.

  “And now we get to the felony,” Hall said, placing down four photos in rapid succession.

  Natalie Dupree aiming the gun at the house. Natalie depressing the trigger. Then Natalie with her eyes half-closed and the barrel of the gun raised slightly from the kickback. The final one was a close-up of a stone lion that had stood guard next to the front entrance of the house. It had been taken sometime later, in daylight. A small chunk of the lion’s face was missing.

  “We found the bullet, in case you’re wondering,” Hall said. “It was a little deformed, but our forensics people are good. They’ll be able to match it to the gun that fired it, no problem.”

  Mitch had been braced like he was expecting more, like this was going to end with blood-and-gore crime scene shots or Thad Reiner’s autopsy photos. Now that it had turned out to be benign—at least relative to that—he was on the attack.

  “She shot the lion,” Mitch said. “So what? Half the people in that neighborhood probably wanted to shoot those stupid lions.”

  Hall shook his head, like this somehow saddened him. “In the state of Georgia, the threatening of a witness is a serious matter.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mitch said.

  “There are two parts of the statute,” Hall said, ignoring him. “One deals with the attempted murder or threatening of a witness. It’s punishable by ten to twenty years. Was this attempted murder? There is case law where discharging a weapon at someone’s domicile can be considered an attempt on their life. It would be up to the prosecutor how to charge it, of course. Given the enmity Mrs. Dupree clearly has for Mr. Reiner, I could certainly make the case.”

  “She shot the damn lion,” Mitch repeated, practically shouting now.

  “Ah, but then we get to the other part of the statute, which deals explicitly with what we’re looking at here. It talks about a person who threatens to damage or damages the property or household of a witness. The property or the household, Mr. Dupree. In this case, we’d be talking about both. The mandatory minimum listed in this part of the statute is two years. Plus, there would be enhancements to the sentencing because she used a firearm in the commission of a crime. The statute allows for up to ten years.

  “Whatever the number, your wife would be a convicted felon. She’d be heading for the state penitentiary. We understand her parents are disabled, so Social Services would be unlikely to consider them appropriate caregivers. And according to your presentencing report, you have no other family members in the state of Georgia. Your kids would go into foster care. Children older than five are notoriously tough to place. Yours would end up in a group home.”

  “Okay, I get it, I get it, stop,” Mitch said. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Agent Hines stepped back in. “It’s really pretty simple, Mr. Dupree. Part of our deal would be that we’d forget we have these pictures. Right now, Thad Reiner suspects your wife is the one w
ho shot his lion, but he doesn’t have any evidence. We’d make sure it stayed that way. The last thing we’d want is a cooperating witness who was worried about his wife’s prosecution. Plus, once Mrs. Dupree entered WITSEC and established a new identity, it would be impractical to have her returning to Georgia to face criminal charges. It would be much easier for us if this never happened.”

  Mitch put it all together: “So basically, you’re offering me not only my freedom but my wife’s freedom as well.”

  He shook his head. His body rocked slightly with each breath he took.

  “You people are scum, you know that?” he said. “Following around my wife and then using these photos to extort me. I really don’t know how you sleep at night.”

  “I don’t like to play it this way, Mr. Dupree,” Hines said. “But it doesn’t compare to what this cartel has done. And by withholding those documents from us, you are enabling them to continue their operation. The murder, the terror, the drugs, all of it. I’ll do anything within my legal power to stop them, and I sleep just fine, thank you.”

  “Just hand over the documents, Dupree,” Hall said acidly. “It’s time.”

  Mitch actually laughed, then shook his head, a sound and a gesture as sardonic as it was resentful. He looked down at the table, shook his head a few more times, like he couldn’t believe this was happening. Then he brought his gaze up again.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time I tell you the truth.”

  He stopped. For a moment, he was a man whose finger was hovering above a detonator. Then he pressed the button:

  “The truth is, I don’t have any documents.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Like any good performer would, Mitch followed that utterly staggering bit of dialogue—I don’t have any documents—with another pregnant pause.

  He wanted to give his audience a beat to absorb this information in their own fashion. No-nonsense Lia Hines had adopted a look of fastidious concern. Tough-guy Chris Hall’s square jaw had suddenly gone asymmetrical, as if this revelation may have been too much for even his composure to handle.