Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  “Excuse me,” she said when she reached him. “It’s Mike Alexander from the Washington Post?”

  Mike shot her a look of exasperation that changed quickly to one of interest. “You’re the woman who fainted in court the first day,” he said.

  Kate sat down. “That’s right,” she said.

  “You work for Almador.”

  “Right again. I’ve been thinking about you. You don’t usually do local crime stories, do you? I thought you specialized in government corruption.”

  “This is the biggest game in town at the moment,” Mike said. “What about you? You come in every day with that cop.”

  “No,” Kate said. “I’m just interested in the trial. And I’ve been looking at some things I’d think you’d be more interested in.”

  “Like?”

  “Like government corruption,” Kate said. “Like General Solutions.”

  “There isn’t a whole lot of difference between General Solutions and Almador. They’re pretty much the same company.”

  “I know that,” Kate said. “And I know for a fact that Turner wasn’t killed when and how the papers reported he was, including your paper. And I think it’s connected with some kind of scam General Solutions is running on the government.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Jed Paterson.”

  Alexander sat back. “Is that so?”

  Kate sighed. “You could look into it. It’s right up your alley.”

  Mike shrugged. “I’m on a story. And you work for Almador.”

  “Think of me as a disgruntled employee.”

  It was the right thing to say. Now Mike was interested.

  He asked for her number and handed Kate his card. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “That’s where you reach me if your disgruntlement gets a little more expansive.”

  ***

  She had no idea if she’d really convinced Mike to look into the death of Turner, but she’d given it a try. She couldn’t do this all herself.

  The problem was what to do next. She threaded through the streets on her way back to the small side lot and her car. When she got there, she opened it up and got in. She sat behind the wheel and got her phone out of her bag. She opened her search history and found the Facebook page for Dalton Brayde. That’s where she had left things at the courthouse, when she’d decided she’d taken too much time searching while Tom was waiting for her. Then she ran through the pros and cons of this idea.

  Brayde was only a backup plan, a secondary resource in case her investigation this evening came to nothing. Unfortunately, even as a secondary source, he had to be approached carefully. She couldn’t just march up to him somewhere and present herself. Her first quick search for Brayde had come up with the kind of details she’d expected from what Tom had already said about the man. There were dozens of images of Brayde with one woman after another, with whole little clutches of women in various bars around the Washington, DC, area. The pictures led to captions. The captions led to stories. The stories were all accounts of wild nights, but the wild nights didn’t always happen in the same places. That was how she had ended up on Facebook.

  She had her own Facebook account, but she didn’t want to use that one for this. Brayde almost certainly wouldn’t be able to recognize her from a picture, but if she used her own name, he could Google it, and it might result in a story about her episode on the first day of the trial. Kate couldn’t risk the possibility that any connection would look suspicious.

  She opened her picture file and went through it frame by frame. Almost all her pictures were of Jack, Frank, or her either together or in individual shots. The picture she wanted was the very last one. It showed a Kate a good five years younger than she was now dressed in a black silk cocktail dress so sheer it almost didn’t look like material.

  She went back to Facebook and began the process of creating a new account. She called herself Kaitlyn Plymouth. Why not? She allowed herself to put in the details of her own life, leaving out the marriage and Jack.

  She uploaded her picture, finished creating her account, and then looked through the friend suggestions the site threw up. On a whim, she sent requests to all twenty of them and then to another thirty that those requests generated.

  The gambit worked almost immediately. She’d barely finished the next round of requests when six of her requests were accepted.

  She stopped at a hundred because she had to stop somewhere.

  Then she brought up Brayde and sent a friend request to him.

  She was still looking at the page, wondering what she expected to get out of what she’d just done, when Frank’s ringtone chimed.

  “Katie?” he said, sounding strained. “Katie, something’s happened. I’ve called the police. Everyone is all right, but you have to get back here right away.”

  “Jack?”

  “No, Jack’s all right. I’m all right. Get back here now. Will you do that? Wherever you are.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Yes, of course. I’m in the car right now.”

  “Don’t talk on the phone when you drive,” Frank said. “Just get back here.”

  He hung up.

  Twelve

  Kate was almost all the way home before she stopped thinking the worst. Even though her father had told her that Jack was all right and that whatever the crisis was had nothing to do with him, she didn’t entirely believe it until she turned onto her own road and saw, from just ten houses away, what the immediate problem had to be.

  It was impossible to miss. She was on the long end of the T, and her townhouse was right at the end of it. Her townhouse’s big front window was . . . gone. Kate could see jagged shards of glass along the edges of the frame. She switched her attention to the police car in her driveway and the policewoman talking to Frank.

  Jack was there, too, sitting on the front steps. He was not hurt, though he did look royally annoyed.

  Kate didn’t see Tom until she was pulling into her driveway next to the police car. She cut her engine, leaped out of the car, and headed straight for the policewoman. As she did, the woman’s partner leaned out the broken front window and said, “We should at least take fingerprints, even if it’s going to be useless.”

  Kate came to a stop next to Frank. “I’m Kate Ford. I own this townhouse. What—?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Frank said. “A rock came right through our front window.”

  The policewoman turned to her and smiled a little grimly. “It was almost certainly a deliberate case of vandalism,” she said. “The rock in question is still sitting in the living room, if you want to look at it. It’s much too large to have landed there accidentally. It couldn’t have been thrown up by a passing car, for instance. We’ve been trying to discover if there is anyone who may be holding a grudge, maybe a neighbor you might be having a dispute with.”

  “I don’t even know the neighbors,” Kate said. “I say hello to them if I see them, but I haven’t had a whole conversation with any of them since I moved here. I’m not even sure I know their names.”

  “Possibly somebody at your place of work?” the policewoman asked.

  Kate shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m on pretty good terms with the people I see there on a daily basis. My manager is a bit of a jerk, but I don’t think he hates me. And besides, why would he do something like throw a huge rock through my window? I’m going to go in and look at the mess for a minute.”

  She turned her back on Tom and practically ran to her front door, passing Jack on the way up the steps.

  “There’s glass everywhere in there,” he told her. “We’re going to be picking glass out of our asses for months.”

  Kate didn’t stop long enough to tell him to watch his language. She went on through and into the foyer and then into the living room.

  The policeman in the living room was standing in front of the window frame and talking into a cell phone. The living room was beyond being a mess. The rock was—

  It
was her healing stone. Her own healing stone. The one Richard Hamilton had taken from her only last night. Her throat began to constrict.

  There was glass everywhere. It crunched under Kate’s feet as she walked. Kate could see shards and glass powder on the couch, on the two side chairs, and on the small table that held the television set. The television set was intact, but a lamp had fallen over. Kate went to it automatically to make sure the bulb hadn’t broken, because these new light bulbs had to be disposed of immediately if they cracked.

  “Please don’t touch that,” the policeman said as Kate leaned over to check.

  Kate straightened up. “You’ve got to check them,” she said, feeling stupid. “They’ve got mercury in them, and if they crack, they could make someone sick.”

  “Just a minute,” the policeman said. He took a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket and put them on. Then he leaned over and picked up the lamp, turning it around and around until he could see every part of the light bulb. Then he put the lamp down on the floor again. “Okay. It doesn’t seem to be broken.”

  “Are you expecting to get fingerprints off the lamp?” Kate demanded. “I thought you said the rock was thrown from the outside. Why would there be fingerprints on the lamp?”

  “You can never be too careful,” the policeman said stiffly.

  Kate gave up and went back outside. A police van had just driven up, and the policewoman had approached it to talk to the technicians. Jack was still on the stairs, and Frank was talking to Tom, who was watching her.

  Kate paused next to Jack. Jack looked up at her and shrugged.

  “I told you before,” he said, “if you’re going to lie to people and use me as an alibi, you have to tell me about it first. Second time you lied to him. He’s a little pissed.”

  Frank and Tom had both turned and were looking at her. Kate sighed.

  She walked over to the two men, barely noticing the march of the crime technicians into her house.

  “I don’t see why they’re going through all this,” she said. “A rock through a window. They aren’t going to be able to collect much evidence.”

  “Tom and I have been having a conversation about you,” Frank said. “For instance, about where you’ve been today.”

  “You saw the line at the impound lot.”

  “And that was it?” Tom demanded. “You spent all this time getting your car out of impound? Five or six hours?”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing?” Kate demanded, turning to face him for the first time. “You think I’ve got a secret life? You think I’ve got something going on I don’t tell my own family about?”

  “I think you’ve been freelancing, that’s what I think,” Tom said. “I think you’ve been playing private investigator—I think that’s what you were doing last night, I think that’s what you were doing today, and I think that’s why there’s a rock sitting in the middle of your living room.”

  Another van pulled up and parked at the curb. It belonged to Ace’s Windows, the same company Kate had used to get all the back windows in the townhouse changed to vinyl only two years ago.

  “I called the glass people,” Frank said mildly. “They can’t get a new window in until Monday, but they’ll board the thing up to last ’til then.”

  “They won’t be able to do that until the forensic people are gone,” Tom said.

  “Were the forensic people your idea?” Kate asked.

  “Why don’t I go over and talk to the glass people?” Frank said. “They’re going to want some money.”

  “Somebody has to knock some sense into your head,” Tom said.

  “I’ve got sense in my head,” Kate said furiously. “You’re the one who told me you thought Ozgo was being set up. I believe that, too. And there’s so much strange stuff going on and nobody is paying attention to it.”

  “I’m paying attention to it,” Tom said. “And I’ve seen the rock, Kate. It’s your rock. You had it in your bag that first day when you felt faint or whatever it was in court.”

  “All right,” Kate said.

  “Somebody took the trouble to get hold of something that belonged to you,” Tom said. “And that means that this rock through this window is not random. Somebody was targeting you.”

  “Maybe I dropped it on the road,” Kate said. “Maybe somebody came by and picked it up.”

  “‘What were you really doing last night?” Tom demanded.

  “I was doing what I said I was doing,” Kate insisted. And it was true, too, as far as it went. Kate couldn’t see how it would be possible to tell him about Richard Hamilton without taking the whole situation to a level that she didn’t want to think about.

  “So what are you not telling me?”

  Before she could answer, Frank walked up and the mood broke.

  “The glass people want to talk to you,” he told Kate, “and the policewoman, too. Jack and I have already given statements.”

  “You were here,” Kate said. “Did you see anything? Were you in any danger—?”

  “We were both in the back. Jack was on the computer, and I was in the kitchen.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “Okay, I’ll go talk to them.”

  “I don’t like you freelancing, Kate. I don’t like you looking into this thing when I’m not around. You can get yourself into serious trouble. That rock is the beginning of serious trouble.”

  “I know,” she said, backing up. “I’ve got to go talk to these people.”

  ***

  If Kate had been the kind of person who drank alcohol in quantity, she would have done it that night. It was the longest night of her life—except for one year when Jack was a baby and had been running a high fever; she had been convinced he was going to die that night. Jack and Frank weren’t interested in cutting her any slack.

  “I said I thought you should take an interest in it,” Frank said, “not that you should go running all over the place acting like Nancy Drew. And I don’t think Tom is going to enjoy being Ned Nickerson.”

  “Ned Nickerson was hopeless,” Kate said flippantly, desperate to escape to her bedroom. “He’d haul off to save Nancy from the villains and get caught himself, and then Nancy would have to save him.”

  “Beside the point,” Frank said.

  Kate managed to get into her room without too much more talk, but that didn’t help either, because as soon as she did, she realized she was never going to sleep. The past two days had been insanely informative, and she couldn’t stop the various elements from whirling through her mind.

  And at the middle of it all was Kevin Ozgo, who either had or had not caused the death of Rafael Turner, who either had or had not kidnapped Chan Hamilton, who either was or was not being railroaded on the charges for which he had been brought to trial.

  Kevin Ozgo. In some ways, he seemed like the least significant character in the whole mess. He wasn’t a high-level operative in the military contracting trade. He wasn’t a rich kid with a family full of entitled jerks to help him along. He hadn’t even been an officer in the United States Army.

  All the things Ozgo was accused of doing would have been done much more plausibly by Jed Paterson. Kate never got more than a sideways look at Paterson and the way he operated, but he scared the hell out of her. And both of the times she had actually set eyes on him, he’d looked menacing and dangerous.

  The other thing that drove her crazy was the incident with Richard Hamilton. He’d been absolutely right. It was a breach of half a dozen laws and a hundred regulations for her to have been in that room with that computer without clearance. The fact that Ballard hadn’t bothered to pull her clearances didn’t change that. And the fact that she had been there with a camera phone was a breach of even more laws and regulations.

  At three o’clock in the morning, she gave up on sleep. The house was quiet. She went out into the computer room and got printer paper and pencils.

  She wrote down whatever she remembered from the attack on Turner’s men. If something sini
ster was going on with the trial of Ozgo, certainly the friendly fire incident would be at the center of it. The most important of those things was that Turner, although killed in a raid, had not been killed in a raid led by Afghan insurgents. Instead, he’d been brought down by a General Solutions operation that had then been covered up at a level usually reserved for the secret assassinations of heads of state. The question was, why? Friendly fire incidents were not uncommon, even ones carried out by contractors. War wasn’t a board game. Things went wrong.

  Of course, the military would not like to admit that there had been such a huge screw-up and that they’d ended up killing people on their own side. The thing was, though, that the military usually documented these incidents. This time, somebody had given out false details not only of the nature of the incident but also of the date, time, and place where it had happened.

  Maybe that was the key. Maybe the date, time, and place had been changed because it wasn’t possible to completely cover up what had gone on. Maybe if you knew those things, you could look through open and public sources and piece the whole thing together.

  That would have to mean that there was something about this friendly fire incident that was different and far worse than other friendly fire incidents.

  But by then, Kate was beyond exhausted. All she could think of was Paterson, Turner, and the shriveled, terrified figure of Ozgo in the courtroom.

  Somehow, Ozgo had to be the key to it all.

  Look at it this way, she told herself. Maybe the raid wasn’t an accident or a matter of somebody’s incompetence. Maybe Tom was right. Maybe the raid was on purpose. Maybe Paterson or the people he was hooked up with had a reason to want to be rid of Turner.

  It was one hell of an idea, and it only made sense if the cover-up went through the highest levels of the Pentagon.

  ***

  Frank was in the kitchen when Kate walked in. He had eggs and bacon out and cooking, which smelled wonderful but also felt like an assault on her senses. She looked up at the wall clock and saw that it was almost exactly noon.