Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  “I could say that I’m not cynical, just realistic, but that’s what you’d expect me to say. Let’s just say that I have a touch of cop’s disease: I tend to think that all of humanity is scum. That’s because most of the humanity I run into is scum.”

  She had her cheek pressed to the window glass when she became aware of her surroundings. She sat up and looked around. They were surrounded by rolling hills. There were white rail fences lining the roadside. She had no idea where she was.

  “What are we doing exactly?” she asked him.

  “Wondered when you were going to get around to that,” Tom said. “Thought I’d let you talk yourself out before I brought it up. See all the land around here, on both sides of the road? That’s the Hamilton estate.”

  “Richard Hamilton’s estate?”

  “That’s the one. And about half a mile in the direction we’re heading, there’s a fork in the road. Take the right branch, and you end up at the cottage.”

  “How can we be going to Chan’s cottage? It’s private property, isn’t it? And it burned to the ground. I saw the pictures.”

  “It is private property and it burned to the ground,” Tom said, “but at the moment, it’s also in the hands of Richard Hamilton’s insurance company. We’re going to meet a man named Ignazio Arnoldi. He’s the company’s prime arson investigator.”

  “I don’t understand. Don’t insurance companies refuse to pay off when there’s any suspicion? And this isn’t even suspicion. Everybody knows it was arson.”

  “Well,” Tom said, “in the first place, you probably don’t want to try to pull anything on Richard Hamilton. He represents a lot of businesses and a lot of power. And in the second place, insurance companies do pay off in cases of arson as long as the arson wasn’t committed by the person holding the policy or at his or her instigation. It’s Ozgo who’s supposed to have torched the house. And then there is the possible third person.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “Yes, of course. The third conspirator or whatever he was.”

  “Whatever he was is the question,” Tom said. “That’s what Iggy is trying to find out. That’s what I’m trying to find out. Because I think Jed Paterson is a psychopath.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s the gate,” Tom said. “I can see Iggy’s car from here.”

  Tom parked their car well down the long drive, and as soon as Kate got out, she could see why. There was nothing left where the house had been. The massive residence had been cleared away. There was nothing left but dead and uncultivated ground.

  The cottage had been a cottage only by comparison with Richard Hamilton’s house. Kate could see the outlines on the ground where the cottage had been, and it was six times the size of her townhouse.

  The man standing near the top of the hill was tall, gaunt, and didn’t look anything like somebody who would be called “Iggy.” If Kate had been asked what she thought his profession was, she’d have gone with the sinister second-in-command or a mad scientist from an old B horror movie. But he also had shirt cuffs that were just a little frayed, as if he was sliding down the income ladder, or else too preoccupied to pay attention to his clothes. Kate noticed he had no wedding ring.

  The man looked up as they came closer. He didn’t bother to hail them until they were only a few steps away.

  “Tom,” Iggy said in a flat accent that sounded nothing like Virginia. “And this will be Miss Ford. Ms. Ford. However she wants me to put it.”

  “Kate,” Kate said.

  Iggy nodded, then turned back to look at the empty space where the cottage had been. “They’re going to start putting up the new one any day now. And then I won’t even be able to come here and commune with the spirit of the arson.”

  “Will it matter?” Tom asked him.

  Iggy shrugged.

  There was a set of old-fashioned lawn furniture across the yard from where the cottage had been. Tom strode over to the picnic table and sat down on one of the benches.

  “Iggy here agrees with me,” he said. “It was Jed Paterson who masterminded the kidnapping. When Richard Hamilton refused to pay up, Paterson torched the house to show Hamilton what could happen to Chan.”

  “Who’s Jed Paterson?”

  “The guy Chan was dating at the time.”

  “But Chan was in the house,” Kate protested.

  “She was, and Iggy can’t ignore it,” Tom said. “Because if she started the fire, his company isn’t going to have to pay out.”

  Kate sat down on the other side of the picnic table from Tom. “I don’t know,” she said. “It sounds so complicated. Either way.”

  “My point exactly,” Iggy said.

  “It seems elaborate. Burning down a big house like this just to try to scare Hamilton,” Kate said. “It doesn’t sound like what a real person would do.”

  “Also my point exactly,” Iggy said. “There’s too much in all of this that feels as if it isn’t real. Of course, Tom has his own theory.”

  “It’s not a theory. It’s Occam’s razor. Ozgo almost didn’t make it out of the fire. You’ve got to consider the possibility that Ozgo wasn’t supposed to make it out of the fire.”

  “The business implications of that one are beyond me,” Iggy said.

  Tom shrugged. “You guys would still have to pay out. My idea is a lot more in line with the kind of people they are. And were. Ozgo couldn’t plan his way out of a paper bag in the shape he’s in. And from what I’ve managed to dig up about him before the events in question, he couldn’t ever.”

  “I’ve never disagreed with you about Paterson,” Iggy said.

  “Then you’ve got to admit,” Tom said, “he’s the best candidate we have for devising a kidnapping and extortion scheme and carrying it out. And nobody who’s ever dealt with the man would want to go on dealing with him if they didn’t have to.”

  “Wait.” Kate looked across the lawn. “So this Jed Paterson was the one people saw coming out of the house before the firefighters got to the scene?”

  “There was a footprint on the ground that definitely belonged to him,” Iggy said. “He was here sometime around the fire.”

  “Of course he was here,” Tom said. “He was dating Chan. He’s a good match for what I’m looking for, too. Former Navy SEAL. Spent some time in Afghanistan and Iraq. And a world-class whack job, the scary kind.”

  “I think I’ve seen him,” Kate said suddenly.

  “What? How?”

  “The day I got into all that trouble at work, first thing in the morning when I came in. There was a man walking by the side of the road. And then in one of the pictures of the fire I found, there was a man in it who I was sure was the same guy.”

  “There was all kinds of evidence he’d been at the cottage,” Tom said, “but it didn’t matter, because he’d been at the cottage before. There was nothing to say he’d been there that night.”

  “There’s a story about Paterson that’s been going around for years,” Iggy said. “They say he was in charge of intel on an operation in Afghanistan, and he deliberately faked his reports. He underreported the resistance they were going to face, reduced it to half of what it was, just so he could go ramming his people in there to make a big splash about how he could conquer anything. Like he was setting himself up for a Medal of Honor.”

  “They were onto him,” Tom said. “He didn’t get away with it. Assuming it happened at all. Since he’s been out of the service, he’s been arrested half a dozen times on domestic abuse charges. Never convicted, of course, but arrested. And very strange things happen to anybody who gets him angry. Some guy tried to pick up a girl Paterson had his eye on one night in a bar. Guy comes out of the bar to find his Porsche ripped apart like a dinosaur had gone after it. Pieces of the thing on the ground and mangled up like something had chewed them. Leather upholstery torn to shreds. The thing was in a parking lot full of security cameras. The cameras were all disabled. The cops did the usual. No fingerprints, no DNA, nothing.”

&
nbsp; “What’s worse than a psychopath? A trained psychopath,” Iggy said. “And the navy knows how to train them.”

  “The clincher, for me,” Tom said, “is that Paterson needed money. Paterson always needed money. Most people would say he had a gambling addiction, but I don’t think that’s what it was. It was the risk-taking thing. Most people who take risks do it for the thrill of it. I think Paterson did it to prove something. That he was in control of the universe.”

  “Now he sounds like the wacko you were talking about in the beginning,” Kate said.

  “Yeah,” Iggy said, “but he was wrong, and he ended up half a million dollars in the hole to some very bad guys. And the only reason they didn’t collect immediately is that they were almost as afraid of him as everybody else was.”

  “But here’s the thing,” Kate said. “I listen to all this and it doesn’t matter either way. I mean, okay, maybe this Jed Paterson kidnapped Chan Hamilton and Kevin Ozgo—he’d have to kidnap them both, wouldn’t he?”

  “Not necessarily,” Tom said. “He could have kidnapped Chan but worked on Ozgo from the military angle. The kid’s obviously messed up beyond hope. Maybe he accepted Paterson as a military commander and trusted him.”

  “All right,” Kate said, “but it’s still all messed up. Why would somebody like Paterson bother to kidnap Chan? If he was in hock, why didn’t he just offer his services to someone or get out of the country? He sounds like he could make a pile of money as a mercenary and would get the thrills he has been missing.”

  “I told you,” Tom said. “She sees right into the middle of things. That’s why I wanted her to take a look at it.”

  “Take a look at what?” Kate asked.

  “You really can’t look at it anymore,” Iggy said. “The house is gone.”

  There was a part of this that Kate really didn’t like. “I think you should get your real partner,” she told Tom. “You’ve got a partner, right? That’s whose seat I’ve been taking. He’s got to be a trained detective. He’d know more about this stuff than I do. I don’t know anything about how to investigate a crime.”

  “My partner,” Tom said, “is a very good man who thinks I’m nuts. He isn’t even interested enough to come to the trial. And I’ve already twisted my captain into a pretzel getting permission to keep looking into this. I need someone with a good mind and a first-rate ability to pay attention to detail. I’ve been listening to you for days now, and you pick up on more than anyone I’ve ever encountered.”

  Kate didn’t know if she believed this or not, but she allowed herself to be helped to her feet.

  Then Iggy began marching his way around the side of what used to be the house, forcing them to catch up.

  “It’s odd what happens with fires,” Iggy said. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. You’d think, with the firefighters tramping in and out and the hoses with the power nozzles and what have you, you’d think everything would be smashed about and upended. But it doesn’t work that way. There are always a few things that are left the way they were.” Then Iggy stopped moving and pointed to what looked to Kate like plain dirt.

  “Right here,” he said, “was where the front door was. And if you walk just four steps this way,” Iggy headed four steps toward the back, “you can imagine a hall table in the foyer. And on that hall table was a small stack of magazines that had come in the mail. And on that stack of magazines and the wood just underneath it, there was a cigarette burn.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s all he found,” Tom said. “There’s supposed to have been an arson. The state of Virginia has charged Ozgo with arson and the attempted murder of Chan Hamilton because he tried to burn down the cottage while she was tied up inside it.”

  “But all I’ve ever found that could be the cause of the fire,” Iggy said, “was a cigarette burn on that stack of magazines. Nothing else. No accelerant. Nothing.” Iggy paused, and then added, “Just one more thing.” Iggy took her wrist in one hand and tugged her in a direction.

  “Look at this,” Iggy said, stopping. “Look right here. What do you see?”

  Kate opened her eyes. What she saw wasn’t much: an indentation in the ground. It wasn’t what Iggy was pointing to.

  “You’d be amazed at what we can do in a lab these days,” Iggy said. “I’m not saying it’s like CSI, you get that, right? That’s fiction. But we can do a lot in a lab, and we did it with this.”

  “Mmm,” Kate said. She let herself overfocus. She had a feeling there was something here she should have caught. She went from left to right: the grass was unevenly cut near one of the two large trees; the tiled patio with the gas grill also had pet bowls and the pet bowls were bright red with paw prints painted on them; the second of the large trees had a broken branch down toward the lawn—

  And then there he was.

  A man. Dressed in black. Looking at them.

  And that man had distended earlobes.

  Kate didn’t think twice. She turned toward the figure and took off. But she was too late. The man slipped off the lawn and into the tree cover beyond and disappeared.

  Ten

  Kate sat silently in the passenger’s seat, completely seething; they were pulling into the driveway of her townhouse before either of them spoke.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s bugging you?”

  Kate looked away from him, out the side window. “I really did see him. I didn’t imagine it.”

  “No,” Tom said dryly. “I don’t think you imagined it.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We took it seriously, Kate. We went out and looked. We just couldn’t find him or find a trace of him. And if you’d stop and think for a minute, you’d realize that that wouldn’t make us believe you less.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s a former Navy SEAL, Kate. He’s trained to get in and out of places by stealth, and he’s also trained to plan. So if he decided to go out there, he would have scoped the place first, and he’d have had an escape route handy.”

  “And you think it makes sense he would go out there?”

  Tom looked thoughtful. “You saw Ozgo. Do you think he’s capable of planning and executing a kidnapping?”

  “No,” Kate said.

  “Neither do I. And I said so when I was still on the case. And I’ve been saying so ever since. But Jed Paterson—there’s a man who could plan and execute a kidnapping.”

  “Why would he?” Kate asked. “I thought you said he was dating Chan Hamilton. I suppose they could have broken up and he kidnapped her for the money, but then Chan would have said so. She said Ozgo did it.”

  “I know,” Tom said. “But I don’t know what it’s all about.”

  ***

  For just a moment, Kate thought Frank was going to start grilling Tom the way he’d grilled Kate’s dates when she was sixteen. What he did instead was pick up a stack of papers and announce, “I’ve been doing your work for you. I figured that if you were going to be out and about instead of getting down to business, I could at least make a few phone calls. I called the Center for Military History.”

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  “Don’t sound so pleased,” Frank said. “It didn’t help.”

  “You didn’t find out anything about the attack?”

  “Honey, I don’t think there was an attack,” Frank said. “At least, there wasn’t one at that place and time and involving those people. The best explanation I can come up with is that the press reports got the story so badly mangled that I’m looking for the wrong things in the wrong period. But even that doesn’t completely cover it, because I asked them to cross-reference it with the names of Rafael Turner and Kevin Ozgo, and I still came up with nothing. The Office of Military History has no report of any incident involving either of them. They do have half a dozen involving Turner, but none of those include a report of his being killed. They have nothing at all on Ozgo.”

  Tom straightened up. “What do you mean, nothing at all?”
>
  “Nothing at all,” Frank said. “They ran his name and it came up nowhere. He is not mentioned in any report of any incident anywhere. Not just in Afghanistan or Iraq. Anywhere.”

  Kate tried to make this fit. “You told me that every unit everywhere has to send reports to the Office of Military History at least once every three months.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said.

  “And they were in a war zone, so something must have happened to him sometime,” Kate said. “He couldn’t have spent all his time typing or in the medical tent, could he?”

  “He could have,” Frank said, “but even then he almost certainly would have been written up somewhere. Medical tents and clerks’ offices get bombed, too.”

  “So what happened?” Kate asked. “Was he never in Afghanistan at all? Did he just lie to Chan about being under the command of Turner? It doesn’t sound plausible, does it, that Chan didn’t check out his story when he showed up or that Richard Hamilton didn’t once he found out Ozgo was living in that outbuilding?”

  “I think it’s worse than that,” Tom said. “Your father said he had them run the names, and he didn’t turn up a report where Turner died.”

  “I thought that was because the press reports were badly mangled,” Kate said.

  “No.” Frank was positive. “The press reports wouldn’t matter. I asked the CMH for what they had on Turner. They had no report of his death. None. They had no report on his death in combat, or in an accident, or in a bar fight, or anything. They had no report of his dying while he was still in the army.”

  “But he’s dead,” Kate said. “There was a funeral. There was a body. And he’s buried at Arlington. Most people have to die in combat if they’re going to be buried in Arlington.”

  “There was a closed casket,” Tom said. “There was a body, but that doesn’t mean it was a recognizable body.”

  “But the army had the body,” Kate said. “It came back on one of those planes. There were reporters there and pictures.”

  “They don’t let people take pictures of the coffins coming back,” Tom said.