On the bus trip from Virginia to New York, one woman thought she knew him but couldn’t quite place his face. It was this immediate familiarity that made strangers accept him. Men wanted to share a drink with him and use the time to reflect on their ho-hum lives, so-so loves, and missed opportunities. Women were more direct. They wanted to take him home, cook him a hearty meal, rub him down, dress him in satin robes, and tend to his psychological bruises. He was looking for neither connection. His needs were more basic.
Upon arriving in New York, he checked into an SRO in Greenwich Village, paid cash for one week, and made himself at home. Because his likeness appeared on the front covers of every supermarket tabloid, he applied a razor blade to two distinctive moles, grimacing tightly as he sliced them away, uttering nothing, and covering each with spots of bathroom tissue. Afterwards, he jumped onto a lumpy mattress, stretched out on his back, tucked hands beneath his head, and listened to a couple make torrid love in the room next door. After the grunts and groans died down to satisfying moans, he reached for a bottle of whiskey and tipped it back. He was probably turning into an alcoholic, something he vowed would never happen to him like it did for his father and his grandfather before him.
The taxi sailed over the Brooklyn Bridge, tires rumbling on pavement. Traffic was heavy, even this early in the morning.
For most of his life he felt apart but never so alone as these days. Everywhere he went, people seemed to be in a gay mood, even those down on their luck. He envied their outwardly carefree lives, smiling faces, friendly exchanges, and shared laughter, and tried to figure out what made them the lucky ones and him the loner. He had always been on the outside looking in. Even when he was with people he called friends, he often saw himself from their point of view, picturing an odd sort of fellow who spoke very little, and when he did, was given to sarcasm. He rarely mentioned his childhood or his dreams for the future. A man who doesn’t have an anchor in the past cannot make plans. Eventually he gave up trying to be like everybody else, or wanting to belong. Now he didn’t have to. He lived for the moment. Eating meals at a table for one, drinking to forget, laughing to hide his regrets and remorses, and if he got lucky, loving a woman for a single night of comfort.
His nighttime dreams were vivid. Of being on the road. Of traveling through the heartland before veering subtly south. Of trekking over desert roads and through mountain passes. Of reaching the outskirts of Tucson. Of pushing on another twenty miles, hitching a ride when luck would have it and hiking in between. Of arriving at the sturdy ranch house built by his grandfather. Of Aunt Jacci coming to the door, taking him into her arms, and smothering him with dry kisses. My God, my God, was all she said. I can’t stay long, he replied. She understood, put an unsteady hand to her brow, and motioned him quickly inside. He sat at the kitchen table of his youth, partook of good home cooking, healed his mental and physical wounds, caught up on sleep, and after a few days, got back on the road, always looking over his shoulder to see if Sergeant Detective Jaime Benedicto was on his tail.
With a jerk, he would awaken in the dank, dark, unfamiliar room, sweating with fear, and breathing in the putridness of a parade of other lonely men who had slept in the same bed before moving on as he would move on.
Jack was going to pay a price for his narrow escape from the cop. Since he didn’t want to be labeled an incompetent at best or a bungling fool at worst, he would have kept his last encounter with an escaped felon between himself and his god. Jack hadn’t seen the last of Sergeant Benedicto. It presented a problem. Several logistical problems.
Someone tagged Jack Coyote an enemy of the state. Sent out an order. And left him hanging out to dry for crimes he didn’t commit. He had to clear his name. Find the people who did this to him. And bring them to justice. His kind of justice. Vigilante justice. Taking the law into your own hands requires a plan. It also requires anonymity and freedom of movement. His goal was to get both. If he didn’t, Benedicto was going to track him down and put him away for good. For a man like Jack Coyote, life in prison was as good as a death sentence. As long as he drew breath, he couldn’t let it happen. Two simultaneous events witnessed from two perspectives yield two different outcomes. It was a paradigm only an astrophysicist can solve. Or a thief. Or a hacker.
At the New York Public Library, he combed through back issues of the New York Herald Tribune and searched obituaries for names of young boys who died twenty to thirty years ago. He found several candidates and settled on one who fit his new persona: eight-year-old John Holden Fox. He went back to his room, hacked his way into a database, and tracked down the boy’s Social Security number. He opened a personal mailbox with a street address and apartment number under the name John H. Fox, text notification and forwarding services included. He wandered through residential neighborhoods and stole utility bills left in curbside mailboxes. He filled in a preprinted lease form purchased at a local office supply store. He applied for a non-driver photo ID using the Social Security number of the deceased child, a signed lease backdated two years, and two utility bills doctored with a graphics program available on the internet. Once he received the freshly minted ID, he found a forger recommended by someone in the hacker community and had him backdate the ID by one year. Then he appeared at the office of Vital Records, provided his identification card, paid the required cash fee, and walk out with the certified long-form birth certificate of the resurrected John Holden Fox. Using this document, he opened a checking account in Fox’s name, deposited five thousand dollars in cash, and signed up for a debit card. After purchasing a roundtrip ticket to Grand Cayman, he visited the office of a passport service company, where he provided the birth certificate, the ID card, the airline ticket, and two photos of his handsome face. Five days later, the debit card and the expedited passport arrived in John Fox’s mailbox. He repeated the exercise for two other aliases.
Finally he used the services of a local lawyer, signed papers employing the name he was born with, and overnighted them to Martin I. Devlin, J.D. Inside the package was a letter instructing his defense attorney to open the sealed envelope contained within only when and if the sender was confirmed dead and his remains returned to his family. The envelope included a farewell letter of love and gratitude along with John Jackson Finlay’s Last Will and Testament, which bequeathed all assets foreign and domestic to Jacci Wilcox Coyote.
The taxi dropped him off at the international terminal. One hour later, John Holden Fox boarded a jet bound for George Town, Grand Cayman.
3
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Monday, August 11
VICTORIA KIDD WAS rudely awakened by the vibration of a cell phone sitting on the bed stand.
Nestled beside Alex Acosta, beautiful enough and young enough to be her son but old enough and skilled enough to be her cameraman, assistant, protector, bed partner, and constant companion, she opened sand-encrusted eyes to sleepy slits and gazed upon him. She let the phone whine. If it was important, they’d call back. For now, she wanted to feast upon her man, reposed in peaceful dreams. His distant Mayan ancestors were wholly vivid in his profile, delicately outlined against the darkness and rendered as if by a sculptor’s hand. His lean body and broad chest were constructed for climbing mountains and ancient pyramids. He harbored a delicious heat that kept her warm in winter and restless in summer. She was going to keep this man. There was no other for her.
The phone stopped ringing.
She lay her face against his chest, silky with nighttime moisture. She kissed his skin, aromatic with the essence of a grandee who would never bow down to men of higher station but would kneel at the pristine toes of a beautiful woman. In the slight stretch of his sinewy body, he began to protest, very insistent and quite irritable. He didn’t appreciate his sleep being disturbed. His groan turned into a moan of pleasure. She kissed him full on the mouth, left some love elsewhere, and impatiently reached for the phone, which rang anew.
She mumbled a sleep roughened, “Yeah.”
“Holy hell. Say that again.”
Her informant repeated the message, added a few salient details, and appended his tipoff with a firm, “But you didn’t hear it from me.”
“From who?” The caller disconnected. She sat up, ruffled her sleep-tangled hair, and swore to herself.
“What is it?” Alex asked, his speech slurred but his eyes alert.
Vikki looked down into those eyes. By day, they were fathomless black, but in the darkness of the bedroom, they were deep purple and consumed with concern. She spoke a name familiar to them both. “John Sessions.”
He propped himself up by an elbow, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Coyote’s boss?”
“Jumped off the roof of HID headquarters. Seventeen stories straight down. Authorities are already claiming it was suicide.”
“Jesus.” Though Alex wasn’t a religious man, he crossed his chest and said a more pronounced, “Jesucristo.”
Vikki began to shiver. She couldn’t be shivering. It was a hot August night, and even if the air conditioning had been set to subzero temperatures, she shouldn’t have been this cold. Or this unnerved. She wasn’t the kind of woman given to sentiment. She didn’t cry at weddings or funerals. She avoided sick people in hospitals. She never accepted invitations to baby showers. And never sent flowers to anybody for any reason. No one could accuse her of being mushy or emotional or given to tears or sorrowful laments. When life kicked her in the shins, she laughed at the improbable, the absurd, the ludicrous, even the downright tragic, each with equal regard and without prejudice.
Now she laughed and laughed and laughed until her laughter woke up her teenage daughter, who poked her head into the bedroom and asked a tepid, “You all right?”
“You should know by now, darling, I’m never all right.” She threw the covers aside, got out of bed, gave Grace a reassuring squeeze, and went off to take a hot shower, afterwards dressing in her most overbearing journalist garb while rehearsing in her head the questions she planned to ask the authorities and anyone else she could hunt down to get answers that made any sense. Because this didn’t make sense. John Sessions was a rolled-up sleeves kind of guy. Respected, from what she heard. Diplomatic. Even-tempered. Smarter than most of those cockroaches of cynicism who haunted the halls of government power, skulking out opportunities and saluting felicitously rather than efficiently doing the jobs they were paid for. He was also a young man, maybe not the youngest kid on the block, but with a wife and kids and a mortgage and everything to live for. He shouldn’t have died so young. Or so senselessly.
Before leaving, she told Alex not to wait up.
“I’ll come with you,” he said groggily.
“You’ll go back to bed. Everything’s fine.”
He rolled over and was instantly asleep.
Grace was waiting for her downstairs, pacing, arms crossed, dressed in a man’s t-shirt reaching to her knobby teenaged knees. She was a worrier. Like her father.
Vikki patted her on the cheek and told her the essentials, leaving out the gruesome details.
“It has to do with that Coyote guy, doesn’t it?”
“Nothing you should worry about.” She pulled Grace into her arms and left a moist kiss on her brow. “Now go back to bed.”
“I won’t sleep.”
“I’ll be home before you know it.”
Vikki didn’t believe what her informant just told her. A man simply doesn’t jump off a roof two hundred feet above ground level. Certainly not from the roof of the building where he works. If he were distraught enough, he might stick the barrel of gun into his mouth and pull the trigger. Or take an overdose of sleeping pills. Or hang himself from a doorknob. No, she decided, a man doesn’t willingly jump off a roof. She could think of only two logical explanations of how it could have happened.
One. Sessions set up a clandestine meeting with someone he trusted. They went to the roof for privacy. They got into an argument. Words escalated into a physical altercation. In the tussle, Sessions lost his balance and fell, plunging to his death.
Or two. Sessions set up a clandestine meeting with someone he trusted. Someone else came. A hired killer who caught him by surprised and threw him over the parapet to his death, afterwards wiping his hands with satisfaction and disappearing into the night.
John Sessions was pushed because he knew something. He was about to blow the whistle. He had become a liability. And liabilities are always expendable.
4
Annapolis, Maryland
Monday, August 11
WHEN JAIME BENEDICTO arrived at the scene of the crime, turmoil was on the breakfast menu.
A squadron of police cars formed a protective ring around a square city block, roof lights flashing in the smudgy early morning. Summer air was tumid, heavy and stagnant, squelching sounds and voices, making everyone and everything move sluggishly. Reporters were gathering like flies on a carcass. Curiosity seekers, many of whom worked in the building, hovered at a distance, unable to gain access until the crime scene was gone over for evidence. Everyone mumbled to each other in undertones of dread. Some wanted everything to get back to normal as quickly as possible, no matter the human tragedy lying mere yards away but efficiently cordoned off. All were thanking God for sparing them. For many, this could be one of their comrades-in-arms, a man whose name they probably knew but hadn’t yet been informed.
With methodical care, Jaime lumbered out of his county squad car, squared the campaign hat of authority onto his head, tugged the front rim over aviator sunglasses, and trudged across the street. He craned his neck and squinted upward, all the way to the bottom of the sky. The uninspired steel-and-glass skyscraper dominated the street, its girders interlaced with tinted glass panes, the lines soaring heavenward, and the perspective leading to an obscure terminus obliterated by morning glare. He tried to pinpoint the exact spot of wingless departure for a man desperate enough to go in a way that was utterly incomprehensible for most people. Unless like Jaime, you understood the darker side of human nature. He came from a harsh and bumpy background where he had to fight just to stay alive. Since becoming a cop, he had seen desperation on countless faces. Many men reached a point in life where the future did not exist, or if it did, was too awful or hopeless to imagine.
You cannot bake a cake when the only ingredient in your hands is dirt. Death is often the only way out.
And still, Jaime could not imagine any man taking a leap from some twenty storeys high. Two-hundred feet is a long way down. Four seconds lasts an eternity. When jumpers step off the ledge, they think they are flying into oblivion and will turn into angels, sprout wings, and arrive in heaven before impact. Death awaited all men. For some, it would be more painful than for others. Striking concrete is sudden and destructive. In a split second, the body goes from traveling at the speed of a fast-moving truck to full stop, the physics of inertia causing internal organs to tear loose from flesh. Over a career spanning nearly twenty-five years, Jaime witnessed many autopsies of jumpers, victims who usually leapt from overpasses onto highways, or from bridges into high-tide waters. Typically, they experience lacerated aortas, livers, and spleens; broken ribs, smashed hearts, and lungs; shattered sternums, clavicles, pelvises, and necks. Skull fractures were common, with brains reduced to jelly. One second, these hopeless men and women are human. The next they go splat, everything spilling out in a torrent of blood and guts. Jaime couldn’t imagine a worse way to go. The upside, if there were an upside, was that their earthly troubles evaporated within seconds of arrival.
At the scene of this mishap, if it were a mishap and not a murder, the Annapolis police force was out in full force, rerouting traffic around the gory scene. It was relatively easy for Jaime Benedicto—Sergeant Detective of the Homicide Unit for the Severn County Sheriff’s Office—to find his way into a throng of uniformed police officers and ask for and find the detective in charge.
>
Sergeant Detective Jerry Davis was a towering man. His round face was sun-darkened. His eyes squinty. His posture slumped. His belly rotund. His expression foul. He was giving orders in quiet tones of authority. He seemed a methodical man, an unexcitable man. Jaime introduced himself.
“You’re on the Coyote case.” Davis had an operatic voice matching his size. “Recognize the name. You want to know if this is connected.”
The victim’s body had been shielded from curious onlookers by the breeze-ruffled sides of a crime scene tent. It gave the victim a modicum of dignity while also allowing investigators to gather evidence and medics to prepare the remains for transport.
“Oh, I think it is, don’t you?” Jaime said.
“Logic would dictate, but then you never know.” He crooked his finger for Jaime to follow.
They entered the tent. The body hadn’t been moved. It lay where the man, a man no longer in the physical sense, crashed headfirst onto pavement. Jaime expected no less than what he saw, a middle-aged person—male by the looks of his clothing—reduced to a pile of bones and viscera, but still a man with loved ones to grieve his loss and wonder why. He moved his hand athwart his chest in the sign of the cross, a fleeting habit of old, but a gesture meant with fellow feeling. All men deserved respect.
“As far as we can tell,” Davis said, “and preliminary findings concur, he jumped around three in the morning. Cabdriver called it in. We found this.” He walked Jaime to a spot a few feet away. On the ground lay a battered fire extinguisher. “We’ll have it checked out for latents. Doubt there’ll be any. Almost looks like he held onto the thing all the way down, bless his soul.”
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