Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  “Let the clarification be noted,” Evans said. “Now, you were a homicide detective on the night of April twenty-fourth of last year?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were on duty and in the station at eight fifteen of that evening.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened at eight fifteen on that evening?”

  “I took a phone call from a woman who identified herself as Chan Hamilton.”

  “You took this call yourself?”

  “Yes,” Flanagan said. “It was directed to me by the uniformed officer who first picked it up.”

  “Did you in fact identify this caller as Chan Hamilton?”

  Flanagan hesitated. “I was more convinced than not that the caller was Chan Hamilton. I couldn’t be absolutely sure until—”

  “Never mind,” Evans said. “What did the caller tell you?”

  Kate sat forward. Had Evans really said “never mind”?

  “She said she was Chan Hamilton, daughter of Richard Hamilton, and that she was being held hostage in her house on the Hamilton estate by a man named Kevin Ozgo. She said she thought he was going to kill her.”

  “Objection!” the defense attorney said, jumping out of his seat.

  “Objection overruled,” the judge said. “We discussed this yesterday, too, Mr. Brayde.”

  Evans looked like he wanted to hit something.

  “Mr. Flanagan,” Evans said. “Did you investigate the accusation?”

  “I sent two senior detectives out to investigate,” Flanagan said. “Thomas Abbott and Kyle Lord.”

  Evans tugged on his lapels. “No more questions at this time, but I will be recalling this witness at a later date.”

  The defense attorney jumped up and began hammering at Flanagan. Kate thought he looked familiar.

  ***

  When the court finally broke for lunch, Tom was suddenly swarmed by uniformed police officers. He managed to untangle himself, and he and Kate got out of the building after only a few minutes and headed straight for the same place he’d bought her ice cream the day before. Then he ushered her into one side of a booth.

  Tom took the menus from the waitress and handed one over. Kate looked at the menu and opted for a hamburger with avocado with onions and a glass of water.

  “I was worried you would be the kind of woman who counts calories,” Tom said. “That’s some serious not worrying about calories. I approve.”

  “I want you to explain it to me,” Kate said. “Just what went on there?”

  The waitress came back with Kate’s water and Tom’s Coke. “Tell me something first,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Why is an employee of Almador attending this trial?”

  “I’m not an employee of Almador,” she said. “I mean, I am, but not exactly. I was working there two days ago, and then I made a mistake, and they put me on a month’s unpaid leave. So I am, but—”

  “What kind of mistake gets you suspended from a place like that?” Tom said.

  Kate launched into an explanation of what had happened and why. “I know better than to use those computers for anything but what they’re there for. The government departments go completely ballistic if you do that, and they should. It’s really hard to keep security tight enough so that we don’t all blow up. As far as I know, when this month is over, I’ll never work for Almador again. I may not work for any security company that does work with the government.”

  The waitress was back again. She had Kate’s hamburger. She also had Tom’s order, which included not only a hamburger but a large order of French fries that glowed oddly red under the bright lights.

  “Cayenne fries,” Tom said. “Want to give one a try?”

  Kate took the fry Tom was holding out to her. It was very, very red. She bit off half of it. Her tongue felt as if it had been sliced by a razor blade.

  “Oh,” she said, swallowing quickly.

  “That’s what most people say,” Tom said.

  Kate put the uneaten half of the fry on her plate. “I think that may be a weapon of mass destruction,” she said. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on? I promise you I’m not going to report back to Richard Hamilton.”

  Tom was contemplating his burger. “How much do you know about the night Chan’s house burned down?”

  “I know what everybody else knows,” Kate said. “Chan phoned the police. The police went out to investigate. Between the phone call and then, Chan got tied up and gagged with duct tape. And then there was the fire.”

  “Do you know who Kevin Ozgo is?”

  “He was some guy who had served with Rafael Turner in Afghanistan,” Kate said. “Chan was in love with Turner and he was killed in combat, and this guy showed up and she gave him a job because that would be doing something to honor Rafael. But Ozgo was always in really bad shape, right from the beginning. Odd, you know, and off.”

  “PTSD,” Tom said.

  “I guess,” Kate said. She thought back to Ozgo in the courtroom. “You can see what he’s like now. That’s definitely PTSD.”

  “You never saw them before?”

  Kate shook her head. “Chan never comes to the Almador offices. Never. Even Richard Hamilton only comes every once in a while, usually for meetings. Ozgo would never have a reason to. If he was anything like what he is now, I would have remembered him.”

  “I never saw him before this, either,” Tom said. “The first time I laid eyes on him was the morning of the fire. He was a mess.”

  “You mean you saw him in jail?”

  “I saw him in an interrogation room at the department,” Tom said. “Through one-way glass. I never got into the room to talk to him, and I’ve never spoken to him. They switched Bill Flanagan onto the case almost immediately.”

  Kate considered this. “That isn’t all that strange, is it?” she said. “He must have had a lawyer by then, right? He wouldn’t be talking to anybody.”

  “He didn’t have a lawyer at the time,” Tom said.

  “So why didn’t you talk to him?”

  Tom started eating French fries one after the other, as if his mouth were made of tin. “That’s a very good question,” he said, “and the short answer is because I wasn’t the assigned detective on the case. But that’s the kicker, because I was the assigned detective on the case.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. I was next up on the roster. The captain called and told me I was going to head that investigation. When I got down there, though, I wasn’t. The decision had been rescinded. Flanagan was going to head that investigation.”

  Kate frowned. “They did that without telling you?”

  “I think they probably tried to get hold of me before I came in,” Tom said. “At least, they say they did. My cell phone was unnaturally silent. So I showed up, I asked where Ozgo was. I was told he’d been brought up to interrogation room B. When I went up there, Flanagan was already in there with him.”

  “Did they give you any explanation?”

  “Sure they did. They said that this was a very high-profile case, that they already had Richard Hamilton on their necks. Flanagan was the ranking homicide investigator and already a public figure, so they thought it would look better if they had a known entity on the case.”

  Tom had actually finished his enormous hamburger. Kate wasn’t a third done. “It must have been infuriating,” Kate said.

  “It wasn’t just infuriating. It was maddening. You don’t put Bill Flanagan on a case if you want to get the damned thing solved. The man hasn’t run a case for at least a decade. They pair him up with people who actually know what they’re doing to make him look good in public. He’s also pretty good at handling the press. He looks good on television. He’s glib. He can give a press conference that takes the heat off for days. But he couldn’t solve a murder, or an arson, or a kidnapping to save his life.”

  “Did they pair him with people who knew what they were doing?” Kate asked.r />
  “No,” Tom said. “They gave him a team of junior officers, every last one of them wet behind the ears. At least two of them I can almost guarantee you aren’t going to last a full year as detectives. The uniforms are going wild. They’re convinced that the whole thing is a setup.”

  “What kind of a setup?”

  “Ah,” Tom said, “now we come to the sticking point. The best guess in the department is that Reggie is hauling Richard Hamilton’s water. And that Hamilton wants Ozgo’s scalp, whether he kidnapped Chan or not.”

  Kate had pushed her plate away. It still had two-thirds of a hamburger on it. Tom reached across for the plate.

  “Do you mind if I—?”

  “Go right ahead,” Kate said.

  Tom took the hamburger and went at it. It kept him quiet for a few moments. Kate was amused by the blissfully happy look on his face.

  Eight

  Sometimes, things go right.

  It had been days since Kate had felt that her relationship with Jack was anything but erratic, troubled, and heading for disaster. Sometimes she’d felt as if she was spending more time feeling guilty about Jack than loving him. Sometimes Jack appeared to be closer to forty than fourteen.

  And then, for no reason, it was all right. Jack was home when Kate got home herself, sitting in the living room with Frank playing Risk. When she called out to him, he responded cheerfully, and Frank responded with no trace of vagueness or confusion.

  Kate was early enough to cook dinner herself. She ended up staring into the refrigerator for a minute and a half without coming up with a single idea.

  She walked into the living room and said, “Maybe I should order pizza.”

  Jack and Frank barely looked up from their game. Jack had the dice in his hand. “Make it two pizzas,” he said. “Make them extralarge.”

  “He’s a growing boy,” Frank said. He was staring at Jack’s hand.

  Jack tossed the dice and crowed.

  “Exactly. Exactly what I was looking for.”

  Kate had never understood Risk.

  She did understand pizza, though, and she called their favorite place and put in a delivery order for two extralarge pizzas with everything on them.

  “You should have heard the kids at school today,” Jack said, sitting down at the kitchen table when the pizza came and taking enough to feed Kate for three days. “Grandpa gave a talk at the senior center this morning. Clarice Mortimer’s grandmother was there. She texted Clarice at lunch that she shouldn’t be allowed to talk to me because Grandpa was probably teaching me all this stuff about hand-to-hand combat and how to kill people efficiently, and you never know what’s going to happen, so—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Kate said. “That awful woman in the school psychologist’s office, Mrs. Carlson, wants to talk to me.”

  “Nah,” Jack said. “She called me in for a fishing expedition, but it didn’t go anywhere. I mean, I don’t know anything about hand-to-hand combat. And Clarice is an idiot. I did point out that she can’t go around saying she supports the troops if she thinks the troops shouldn’t talk about anything they did as troops. Grandpa was a troop.”

  “Some time ago,” Frank said.

  “You know what the real problem is?” Jack said. “Mrs. Carlson thinks smart people are psychotic.”

  In the last two years, Kate had come to hate her. To say that she didn’t get Jack was like saying that rutabaga plants didn’t get algebra.

  ***

  After dinner, Kate told Frank to take his cup of coffee out into the living room, and she cleaned up the kitchen. Considering the day she’d had, she ought to be exhausted. Instead, she felt restless and moody. She loaded the last of the glasses into the dishwasher and went into the living room.

  “I’m going to go play on the computer for a while,” she told Frank.

  He barely looked up.

  The room where she kept the computer had been advertised as a “study,” and at first, Kate thought she would use it to do some work at home. Instead, it was Jack who mostly used it. He had his own laptop, but he liked to use the study’s desktop and the workstation with its expanded surfaces when he had a large project. Kate found Jack’s debris everywhere.

  She picked up three empty cans of Dr. Pepper and eight empty cardboard boxes of Hot Pockets. Then she sat down at the computer and booted it up.

  Once the computer was up and running, she opened Google. Then she paused.

  She cast her mind back over the day. The thing that struck her most, the thing that she couldn’t get out of her head, was Ozgo’s face. There he was, looking so terribly alone in the courtroom, looking so lost.

  Kate typed “Kevin Ozgo” into the search, and it returned 22,566,471 hits. The first results page was mostly stories about the kidnapping, the arson, and the trial. Kate added “bio” and tried again. She looked at pictures of Chan’s enormous “cottage” on fire and of Chan and Ozgo in front of the blaze, Ozgo in handcuffs and Chan off to the side being tended to by an EMT. Chan looked blank. Ozgo looked as shell-shocked as he had in court. There was another picture, an inset, of Chan and Turner together, back when they were first seeing each other and Turner was not yet deployed. Turner was wearing a dress uniform.

  Kate went back to looking at the pictures of the fire. There was one that looked like nothing but a crowd of rubberneckers milling around the front lawn. Something at the edge of it caught her eye. She enlarged the picture as far as she could and leaned closer to make sure.

  There was a man, all in black, standing very still. Kate was ready to swear he was the same man she had seen on the road near the Almador parking garage on the day she ended up getting suspended.

  Kate clicked back to the web results. The first site up was Wikipedia. She passed over it.

  The next site was the Washington Post. She clicked on that. What came up was a page with multiple pictures and multiple links, apparently one of a set of pages devoted to reporting on the crimes and the trial. The byline read, “Mike Alexander,” and Kate filed the name away to check up on later.

  Born in Balfour, West Virginia, on May 23, 1993, Kevin Ozgo was the seventh of nine children to Cassie Lee Ozgo. His father is unknown.

  There were pictures, including one of the mother and all nine children sitting at a picnic table. Kate recognized Ozgo, but she also recognized one of the other children, a heavyset girl with her flat hair in a rubber band. She was the one who had been in court this morning.

  It made her feel a little better that Ozgo had at least some family with him. It also made her feel miserable. Here they were, people who had no damn luck at all, as her father would have put it. Even the army, the one thing that usually provided an escape for people born in circumstances like this, hadn’t provided it for Ozgo.

  Kate went back to the text.

  Enlisted in the army at eighteen. Deployed to Afghanistan almost immediately after basic training, where he met Rafael Turner. Turner, being from West Point, was an officer. Returned to the United States injured. Six months recovery. Deployed again.

  Kate finally found the information about the last deployment, the one in which Ozgo had been injured and Turner had been killed.

  Turner and a few men were on a routine run between Kabul and Herat in Afghanistan. They were traveling by jeep at night, four US soldiers and two Afghanis. It was supposed to be a safe stretch of road. There had been no incidents on it for weeks. They were driving along an open stretch, nothing ahead of them or behind.

  The attackers, dressed in the flowing white of Afghan insurgents and brandishing American-made machine guns using American-made ammunition, had come from the sharp hills rising up alongside the road.

  The whole thing was over in a couple of minutes. Turner was dead, along with three of the other Americans and one of the Afghanis. The other Afghani was mostly unharmed. Ozgo, the only living American, was badly scarred and deaf in one ear. The Afghani gave what information he could, but Ozgo gave no information worth having. Along wi
th his physical wounds, he had been psychologically devastated, so much so that it had been weeks before he could follow even a simple conversation for a few minutes.

  He’d had nothing to say about the attack at all. It might as well have happened in another universe, except for the fact that it explained the mental state Ozgo was in now.

  Kate sat back. She had heard that story, long ago, when Turner’s body had first been flown back to the United States for burial in Arlington. In that telling, Ozgo had been a blank “he” rather than a star player and participant.

  Kate found the URL for the official army historian’s office and loaded up the page. The Department of Defense had taken its own sweet time figuring out how to operate on the Internet, but once it had, it had gone all out. There were interactive tutorials on the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. There was a slideshow with music telling the story of World War II.

  Kate kept clicking through links until she found what she was looking for: the section devoted to ongoing projects and investigations. She found Afghanistan and scrolled carefully through 2013.

  A couple of minutes later, she was through, and there was nothing. There was no mention of the attack in which Turner and four others had been killed. There was no mention at all of Turner, never mind Kevin Ozgo.

  She went through again. Same result.

  Kate minimized the window and brought up a new tab. This time, she went directly to the Department of Defense’s main public website. She tried the casualty lists. Nothing. She tried the timeline of the war. Nothing that corresponded to the famous attack, and nothing that mentioned either Turner or Ozgo.

  She tried to think of explanations that weren’t entirely crazy, and she couldn’t come up with any.

  She went back through newspaper archives. She tried Stars and Stripes. She tried cable news archives.

  In the end, all she could find were obituaries of Turner, including some showing the closed-casket burial at Arlington with Chan in attendance, looking destroyed.