by David Archer
Like Jim, she had suddenly had a change of heart just a few days before she was due to testify. Her excuse was that her memory wasn't as good as it had been when she was young, and she couldn't remember for sure just whom she had seen selling drugs. When she was shown the video she herself had taken, she insisted that she couldn't remember doing so.
The video would have still been fairly damning evidence on its own, but without eyewitness testimony as to when and where it had been created, it wouldn't have been terribly difficult for a defense attorney to get it thrown out. The prosecutor had finally decided to dismiss the charges, and Mrs. Swinson's home was vandalized several times over the next few weeks.
Sam found her out in her garden, down on her knees and carefully pulling the weeds that were threatening to choke out her late-summer crops. He introduced himself and showed her his ID, and she smiled as she invited him to come and sit on the porch.
Once they were seated, Sam asked her why she had changed her mind about testifying, and at first she gave him the same song and dance about getting old and losing her memory that she had given to the prosecutor. When Sam mentioned Carlos McAlester, though, the look in her eyes told him he had struck pay dirt.
“That boy,” she said, “he a bad'n. Why, I want you to know he come up in here, right up in my house, and he told me if I didn't shut my mouth, he was gonna shut it for me for good. I told him, I said I'm an old woman, I done lived a long time and I ain't afraid of him or nobody else. He said he didn't figure I'd be afraid of him for myself, but then he reminded me I got kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, and he made it clear if I didn't forget about what I seen, he was gon' go after them.” Suddenly she had a tear running down each cheek. “That's why I changed my story. I didn't forget nothin', but I had to take care of my family, you know?”
Sam nodded, and showed her the photo. “I do know, I know exactly what you mean. Somebody is trying to make me stop asking questions, but I was able to make sure my family was safe, so I'm still asking. Mrs. Swinson, do you have any idea who might have sent him to see you?”
“I know exactly who it was,” she said. “I told my daughter Melanie about it, she works down at the City Hall, and she said it was the lawyer them boys hired.”
Sam's eyes lit up. “And did you happen to get his name?”
The old woman nodded her head. “I sure did,” she said. “It was the one as got the big county job, now, name of Whitaker.”
Sam thanked her and made his way back to the car. He had just backed out of her driveway when his phone rang. It was Indie calling, and he answered quickly.
“Sam,” Indie said without preamble, “you were right. Whitaker got a big deposit, almost thirty thousand, on the seventeenth of that month. On the twentieth, Carlos McAlester deposited ninety-five hundred dollars to his account.”
“That's fantastic, Babe,” Sam said. “You got a pencil and paper handy? I got several more for you to look over.”
He read off the dates relevant to the list of recanted witnesses, and Indie fed the information into Herman. Since Herman had already hacked its way into Whitaker's and McAlester's bank accounts, it only took him a few minutes to correlate the data.
“Okay, you gave me eighteen dates. On fourteen of them, Whitaker made a deposit to his account within two or three days before, and McAlester made one the day after. I'm starting to see a pattern, here, Sam.”
“I see it, too,” Sam said. “Okay, here's another name. Roland Maxwell, lives over on Shoshone. See if you can find a bank account for him, and whether any of those dates precede a deposit to his accounts.”
“Okay, but that will take a little more time. Do you know how many banks there are in Denver? Way too many. I'll set Herman to digging, but then we're fixing to head out to the Universal Studios Park. Or do you need this like ASAP?”
“No, that's okay. It'll just be more evidence of Whitaker's involvement in McAlester's activities, and if we can take down another of his leg breakers, so much the better. You girls go on and have some fun. How's your security detail holding up?”
Indie laughed. “Jennifer is doing fine, but the men are all taking turns being wrapped around Kenzie's little finger. You haven't seen anything until you've seen three heavily armed men riding on the spinning teacups. Two of them are constantly watching around for any trouble, while the third one is doing everything he can think of to spoil your daughter rotten. I had to threaten one of them yesterday, he was trying to buy her a third bag of cotton candy.”
“Yeah, well, tell them not to spoil her too much, that's my job.”
Sam talked to Kenzie for a moment, and heard an entirely different version of the spinning teacup story in which she made it spin so fast that all three of the men turned green. He told her to spin it even faster next time, make sure they really felt it. After a moment, she gave the phone back to her mother, and Sam and Indie said their goodbyes.
The phone hadn’t even made it back into his pocket before it rang again, however. This time it was Karen Parks calling.
“Hello,” Sam said.
“Sam, I took Charlie in to visit his mother this morning,” Karen said. “He told her that you helped him figure out that she probably wasn't the one who killed his dad. Sam, I was amazed at how much that kid loves his mother. Anyway, after I heard that, I had to go to the prosecutor and explain that our chief witness wasn't going to be reliable.”
“Oh-oh,” Sam said. “How did she take it?”
“Monica? How do you think, she went through the roof! She actually tried to tell me that Ms. McAlester had sent someone to scare the kid into changing his story. I made it quite clear that I knew better than that, and that in my opinion, we've got the wrong person in jail. She told me to keep my opinions to myself.”
“Well, I didn't figure that would be enough to get Candy out,” Sam said. “On the other hand, her attorney will have a field day with it. Your prosecutor should know there's no way she's going to get a conviction, not with all the issues with evidence and the other possibilities.”
“I told you, Monica is a politician. She's not going to give up until we hand her proof of Ms. McAlester's innocence, or a locked-up case against the real killer. And speaking of that, are you getting anywhere?”
“I'm coming up with enough to show a pattern, that Whitaker would receive a large payment just before one of your witnesses changed his story, and McAlester or another leg breaker would have a chunk of money the day after. I can even tie Whitaker directly to a couple of cases. I'm just trying to find the missing link that connects him to Carlos's murder. Right now, I'm thinking that maybe Carlos became a liability in some way, and Whitaker had him taken out of the equation. You can help me out a little bit, if you can figure out where Roland Maxwell was on the day McAlester was killed.”
“Roland Maxwell? I know that name, where do I know that name from? I can't think of it right now, but it'll come to me. Let me get off the stupid phone, and I'll see what I can find out.”
“Hey, so what's going to happen to Charlie?”
“Well, since he insists on not going back to his grandparents, DHS says he has to go into a foster care situation for now. They took him after the visit, and he'll be staying in one of the group homes for a while.”
“I'll bet that's gonna suck,” Sam said. “You never hear anything good about the foster care system. Okay, I'll let you go for now. Hopefully one of us will come up with something soon.”
Sam tucked the phone into his pocket again, and drove the Corvette to the next address on his list.
14
The next three people Sam talked to wouldn't tell him anything, and he began to get frustrated. The only hope he felt he had for proving Candy innocent was to find out who actually killed her ex-husband, and he was pretty convinced that it had to have been Whitaker or one of his people. Without more to go on, however, there was not much chance he'd be able to prove it.
After leaving the last of the three, Sam was feeling discouraged.
It was already past noon, and he was getting hungry, so he pulled into a Taco Bell and ordered lunch. He picked it up at the window and decided to simply sit in the car and eat.
He had just finished eating when a car pulled into the parking slot to his right, and a well-dressed man got out and opened the passenger door of the Corvette. Before Sam could react, he had sat down in the car with him, and Sam saw the gun in his hand.
“Mr. Prichard,” the man said, “allow me to introduce myself. My name is Randall Whitaker, and I understand you're asking some questions about me.”
Sam looked at Whitaker. “This is a little out of character for you, isn't it? Actually coming after someone yourself, rather than sending one of your soldiers?”
Whitaker smiled. “I'm here myself, Mr. Prichard—may I call you Sam? I'm here myself, Sam, because you and I have some mutual interests. You're trying to find out who killed Carlos McAlester, and so am I. I thought it might be smart if we work together, rather than becoming enemies.”
“Whitaker, I know enough about you and what you're doing to make the thought of doing anything with you cause me to be ill.” He reached slowly into his pocket and withdrew the photo of Kenzie. “After getting this, what could possibly make you think I'd be willing to work with you in any way?”
Whitaker's eyebrows lowered, and he took the photo from Sam's hand. He looked at it carefully, and then raised his eyes back to Sam's face. “This is not my doing, Sam,” he said. “Someone else is trying to scare you off, not me. I can assure you I don't want you to drop this case.” He passed the picture back.
Sam watched his face carefully. “Why is that? Isn't it likely to expose you and the things you do?”
“Since you know what I do, you know that I tend to always get what I want, so that doesn't worry me. Now, here's the situation, Sam. I didn't kill Carlos, nor did I have him killed. Good grief, why on earth would I get rid of the tool that had made me more money than anything else? Carlos was excellent at what he did, and he had a particular knack for making evidence disappear, or making it say what we wanted it to say. It will be a long time before I find anyone who can fill his shoes. The problem for me is that, since I didn't have him killed, the very fact that he is dead causes me some worry. I think we both know his ex-wife didn't do it, simply because there was enough animosity between them that he would never have let her get close to him with a knife in her hand.”
“He let somebody,” Sam said. “Maybe he just didn't see it coming.”
“I'm going to tell you something that not many people know,” Whitaker said. “Carlos McAlester was probably one of the toughest men I've ever met in my life. I've seen him take down as many as a half-dozen opponents at once, and all without ever touching a weapon of any kind. It was sort of a pride thing with him, that he never used anything but his own hands and feet. I've seen people pull knives on him, even a gun once, and each time he simply took it away and then proceeded to beat the guy senseless. For anyone to get close enough to stick a knife into his chest, we absolutely have to be talking about someone he was foolish enough to trust completely. That wouldn't have been his ex-wife.”
Sam sat there and looked at Whitaker for a moment, letting the things he was hearing tumble about inside his head. If Whitaker was telling the truth, then Carlos would've been a hard man to kill under any circumstances. The theory that the killer had to have been someone Carlos trusted was once again making a lot of sense.
“Any idea who he might've trusted that much?”
Whitaker shrugged. “I can think of a very few people, one of them being myself. A couple of others are men like him who work for me, but neither of them would have any reason to want Carlos dead. Quite the opposite, because any time they needed backup, it was always Carlos they asked for. There is no way they would have done anything like this. Even if they were jealous of him, it would have been biting off their nose to spite their face.”
Sam chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. “The kid, Charlie, he mentioned that Carlos had a girlfriend, but he didn't know who it was. Do you?”
Whitaker's eyebrows went up. “A girlfriend? He had dozens of them; the guy could get just about any woman he wanted. He dated models, doctors, lawyers, even one girl who works for the cops, but as far as I know, none of them were anything serious. If he had a steady girl, I don't know anything about her.”
“He seems to have had one, but he didn't let his son meet her, or even know her name. My guess is that she was probably married or involved with someone,” Sam said, “because he kept Charlie out of sight whenever she came over. The kid always had to go to his room and close the door. He said he snuck out once and saw her from the back, but all he knew is that she had long dark hair.”
Whitaker shook his head. “Like I said, I don't know anything about her. Carlos and I weren't exactly friends, and we didn't run in the same circles.”
Sam nodded, and took a different angle. “Okay, you say you're trying to figure out who killed him, too. What about the girl at the coffee shop drive-through? When I asked her if she had seen Candy, and I can't believe anybody could forget that hair, it was pretty obvious to me the girl was afraid to admit that she'd been there. Someone warned her about talking. That wasn't you, either?”
“Nope,” Whitaker said. “Look, I've got no interest in seeing an innocent woman go down for this murder. I want to know who actually did it, because if it was in any way related to—let's just say, related to my activities—then I need to know who I'm dealing with. Maybe you should put some pressure on that girl to find out who scared her off. Sounds to me like there might be a connection to the killer.”
“Yeah, I thought of the same thing. I'll be visiting her shortly.” He cocked his head to one side and looked Whitaker in the eye. “You do know that the cops are on to you, now, right? And not just because of me; they've been hearing rumors about you for a while. You send your muscle to intimidate witnesses, force people to sell what they don't want to sell. You can't get away with things forever.”
Whitaker grinned. “Rumors don't worry me, and anyone you've been talking to won't be willing to testify. You can trust me on that, and take it to the bank. I'm pretty well insulated, Sam, and well enough entrenched that you'd never get a prosecutor to take me on, anyway. One of the nice things about being the go-to guy for the wealthy and influential is that you always know where plenty of bodies are buried. You might have stumbled across a few cases where my fingerprints might show up, but there are hundreds more you'll never find. Let's just say that some of those involve the very people who would make the final decisions about whether to mess with me.”
Sam sat quietly for a moment, then grinned. “So you're untouchable, then, right? Okay, fine. If I can't bring you down, then I want you in my debt. I'll find out who killed Carlos, but you owe me a favor. Fair enough?”
Whitaker laughed out loud. “Oh, Sam, I knew you were a lot more like me than you let on. Deal! You find out who killed Carlos and make sure they can't bother me in the future, and I'll give you not just one favor, but two. Doesn't matter what they are, you need something done, I'll get it done.”
Sam nodded and held out a hand. “Good enough. Just one caveat on this—if I ever find out that you've actually had someone killed to accomplish your goals, all bets are off. I'll come after you with everything I've got.”
Whitaker shook Sam's hand. “That's the one thing I'll never do,” he said. “Believe it or not, I don't think I could live with myself if I went that far. I like power, but not at the expense of a life.” He turned and got out of the Corvette, slid back into the driver seat of his own car and backed out.
Sam continued to sit in his car for a moment, thinking over the conversation he had just had with Whitaker. If there was one thing Sam Prichard didn't believe, it was that any criminal could truly be untouchable. He may have to wait a while to nail Whitaker's hide to the wall, but he promised himself that the day would come when he would see the man standing before a judge who wasn't af
raid of him.
On the other hand, if he was telling the truth, then Sam now knew that he could eliminate Whitaker and his cronies from his list of suspects. That didn't really narrow the field, since Whitaker himself seemed to think that the killer might have been someone connected to one of the people he had pressured.
Pressure. That reminded Sam of the girl at the coffee shop, and he started the Corvette and backed it out of the slot. Sammy's was only a short distance away, and Sam was walking up to the counter only fifteen minutes later.
There was a different girl at the counter. “Hi, and welcome to Sammy's.”
Sam smiled. “Hi, there. Is Brittany around?”
The girl nodded. “Yeah, just a moment, she's in the back.” She turned and stuck her head through a doorway. “Brittany! There's someone here looking for you.”
“Just a sec,” Sam heard Brittany call out. He stepped to his right so that a new customer who had come in behind him could get to the counter. Brittany came to the doorway with a smile, but she lost it the moment she saw Sam.
For a split second, Sam thought she was going to turn and run, but then she steeled herself and walked up to him. “You were looking for me?” Brittany asked him defiantly. “I already told you, I never saw that girl.”
Sam smiled and nodded. “Yes, I know you did,” he said softly. “The trouble is, I also know you're lying, and that makes me think someone has told you that lying is the thing you should do. Now, you seem like a pretty nice girl, and I'd hate to see you get in trouble for withholding evidence in a murder investigation. The way I understand it, that can get you a pretty serious prison sentence, like two or three years. I've got a feeling you can't afford that kind of trouble, so I thought I'd come back and give you a chance to get out of it.”
Brittany's eyes went wide. “I—I-I'm not lying,” she whispered. “I don't know why you would think I am, because I'm not. I absolutely did not see that girl last Sunday morning.”