by Leigh Adams
“I thought they weren’t even a hundred percent sure Evans was murdered,” Jack said.
“We’re sure, we just can’t prove it,” Tom said. “There was definitely methamphetamine in his body, but how it got there, nobody can prove.”
“But Flanagan they can prove?” Kate asked.
Tom nodded. “You were right about talking to Lucy Leeds. Once you get her started, she can’t shut up. She saw Paterson’s car over at Flanagan’s house half a dozen times, and she saw it there right after we left that Sunday night. And she took down the license plate. Paterson and Flanagan both got into Flanagan’s car, but it was Paterson who was driving.”
“I bet her dad’s going to be sorry he gave her that trust fund,” Jack said, still staring at the television screen. “She’s practically calling him a traitor on national television.”
Tom sighed. “They’ve arrested him, and Mike’s paper snagged a doozy of a picture with Hamilton doing a perp walk. But if Richard Hamilton was the head man behind that scheme, it’s going to take a long time to prove it.”
“Because Hamilton is an evil genius?” Frank asked.
“Because he would have known better than to touch anything that could tie him to it, even in a little way,” Tom said.
“What about Paterson, though?” Kate prompted. “Hamilton introduced Paterson to Chan.”
Tom said, “Paterson represented himself as somebody who had known Turner in Afghanistan. Chan was still mourning Turner. Paterson was a decorated war hero. How was Hamilton to know the man was a complete psychopath?”
“Do you honestly think that was what happened?” Kate asked.
Tom put hot dogs on the stove grill. “Of course I don’t, but that’s the story Hamilton’s putting out, and with Paterson dead, there’s no way to disprove it. Hell, Hamilton won’t even have to lie much. He’ll just have to leave a few things out. And he isn’t doing any talking; his attorney is.”
“But he did let himself be in contact with Paterson,” Kate said. “If Paterson had lived, he could have blackmailed Richard Hamilton.”
“Probably not,” Tom said. “If I were Hamilton, there would have been somebody who dealt directly with Paterson and gave him his instructions about Ozgo. Richard Hamilton would have been represented as the contact of a contact, not anybody involved in the faked friendly fire accidents and not anybody who knew anything about them. Just someone who could be tricked into getting Paterson into Chan Hamilton’s good graces and therefore in touch with Ozgo.”
“I hate it,” Jack said. “What’s the point if you don’t catch the bad guy?”
“Technically, we don’t know that Richard Hamilton is a bad guy,” Tom said.
“Of course not,” Kate said. “Just because he owns the major interest in all the companies involved in the fake friendly fire attacks and he’s the one who was making the most money from them, why should that mean anything?”
“It’s not the same as beyond a reasonable doubt,” Tom rebutted.
“Kate was right about just about everything, though, wasn’t she?” Frank said. “I was reading a statement from that new district attorney, that Hobart Helms guy, and he presented it just the way Kate says it was, and she got to it first.”
“Just be glad Hobart Helms is just a temporary district attorney,” Tom said. “He’s an idiot. Just about everybody in homicide hates him. But, yeah, he’s not such an idiot that he doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it. And Kate was substantially right about everything. The deal was that General Solutions, using Robotix military drones, was destroying United States and Afghan property, and then General Solutions got hired to reconstruct that property. And the contracts they got to do those reconstructions were expensive ones, with money falling all over the place and lots of corruption built in. When they could manage it, they got as many people out and away as they could. Sometimes they couldn’t manage it. When that happened, they sent in Paterson and his people to clean up. Meaning kill everyone in sight. A lot of the time, they got away with claiming it was an enemy attack if nobody was alive who’d seen it. Other times?” Tom shrugged.
“Can’t you get sued for saying things about people on television that you can’t prove are true?” Jack asked.
“You’ve got to have malicious intent,” Frank said.
“You don’t call this malicious intent?” Jack gestured toward the television.
Chan was standing up. “I will prove that my father, Richard Hamilton, was the mastermind behind a scheme to defraud the United States government and murder American soldiers, all to increase the profits of major corporations of which he is the controlling stockholder and executive.”
“There she goes,” Tom said.
Tom brought the hot dogs to the table and sat down to start constructing them. “The incident with Turner was different,” he said. “He was famous because he was dating Chan. If Paterson had been anybody else, he might have considered the possibility that he’d be safer not killing Turner, at least not right away, no matter what Turner had seen. Instead, he seems to have gone about the mission completely routinely. He gets his people down there. He sees the patrol that isn’t supposed to be anywhere near the place. He starts taking people out. But other troops had seen the flash of the drone attack, although they don’t seem to have recognized that it was a drone, and those troops had called in the medics. Everything happened fast. There were too many people around to do a proper mop-up job. He’d just killed a man with news value and a girlfriend who could get him lots more publicity once he was dead.”
“And the unit,” Kate reminded him. “There was an entire unit.”
“Not an entire one,” Frank said. “It was about six people of that unit that got killed in that particular attack. The military ought to be looking into the way those six soldiers were kept presumptively alive.”
“They wouldn’t have stayed alive forever,” Kate said. “The idea was to cover the fact that they’d all died at the same time. And to make sure the families didn’t have information about the real incident. I think they’d have been declared dead eventually. They’d just ‘die,’ if you know what I mean, individually and in places far away from Afghanistan.”
“And you know that for sure?” Tom said.
Kate picked up a paper napkin and threw it at him. “Your Hobart Helms came out and said it.”
“Nope,” Tom said. “Really listen to the man. He’s playing this as if the entire thing started when Paterson went rogue. He’s hinting that Paterson himself hacked the records. That Paterson was trying to cover up an individual act of violence, a straight-out murder.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Kate said. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Hobart Helms has a problem,” Tom said. “He’s got to explain this so that both a judge and the public will buy it. Now that Chan has admitted that she and Paterson faked her kidnapping and tried to blame it on Ozgo, Ozgo is out of jail, but the real perpetrator is dead. Helms doesn’t want anything that might confuse anybody. It’s bad enough having to explain the Byzantine plot Chan and Jed tried to pass off as that kidnapping attempt—tying up Chan, putting her in that closet, and then taping her and sending the tape to Richard Hamilton. That phone call to the police from Chan herself right before they started the fire. Then Jed kicking Ozgo in the head to knock him out so that he’d be burned to death, but that didn’t work as planned.”
“Ozgo came to and staggered out into the night,” Mike said. “I spent all day today with a guy at the Pentagon. I think he thought he was going to die.”
“Somebody over there ought to die,” Kate said. “Soldiers did die because of all this. Other people died. Flanagan died, even if he wasn’t much of a human being. Evans died.”
“They died, but I’d be willing to bet that neither one of them knew anything about the military angle,” Mike said. “They knew that Richard Hamilton was pressuring everybody in sight to get Ozgo arrested and convicted. They knew Tom here had been taken off th
e case because he wouldn’t stop insisting on seeing the forensics. They knew those forensics implicated Chan in something. They both assumed that the deal was that Chan was implicated in her own kidnapping and that she might be liable for the attempted murder of Ozgo—the way Ozgo was tried for the attempted murder of her. They just thought Richard Hamilton was trying to save his daughter.”
“So can’t they get Richard Hamilton on that?” Kate asked.
“We found the paper trail for the bribes Flanagan was taking,” Tom said. “They traced back to Paterson, not Richard Hamilton. And nothing in Paterson’s life traced back to Richard Hamilton in any way.”
“The original Teflon cowboy,” Kate said glumly.
Mike reached forward and started to look through the cartons on the table. He found the one with potato salad and dragged it over.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Richard Hamilton will get plenty of trouble. There’s our girl Chan over there. And there’s me. Hobart Helms may have to get his case out front without too many complications, but I don’t have to care about his case at all. I’m focused entirely on the military thing, and thanks to you all, I’ve got lots to go on. I’ve got so much to go on, I got a call from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself.”
“Really,” Tom said. “You have names?”
“No,” Mike admitted, “but I’m not going to need them. I can prove that those drone attacks happened and that they were deliberate. I can prove that there were kickbacks, bribes, corrupt bookkeeping. I pulled a little string, and you know what? A federal judge just ordered thousands of documents about those reconstruction projects declassified. I’ll have them tomorrow morning. And then it’s clear sailing to a Pulitzer.”
***
It was after eight o’clock and dark when Kate went out to the back patio and sat down next to Frank. With everything that had been happening to Frank over the last few months, Kate was afraid of what she might find. It had bothered her when he’d left the kitchen and taken a beer with him. He liked the company of Tom and Mike. Kate didn’t see any good reason he’d want to leave it.
When she got outside, though, Frank was sitting at the little, round patio table with all his faculties intact.
He looked up when she came out and gestured to the other chair.
“Isn’t it a little cold out here?” she asked him.
“I’m all right,” he said. “You don’t have to keep me company.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Funny thing,” Frank said. “I’m worried about you. About what you did at Almador.”
“You mean accessing classified files when I didn’t really have clearance?”
“That. And I’ve got an idea that it’s probably worse than that. It’s worse than that, isn’t it?”
“I had my cell phone on me,” Kate admitted. “And my cell phone has a camera.”
“Jesus God.”
“Daddy, it’s all right, really. Richard Hamilton had a cell phone on him, too. He’d be in just as much trouble as I would be if anyone ever found out.”
“Richard Hamilton probably has clearance.”
“Nobody has clearance for that.”
“You sounded pretty sure Richard Hamilton was the guilty party back in there,” Frank said.
“I am pretty sure,” Kate said. “But—oh, I don’t know. There’s still something odd about this. General Solutions and Robotix deliberately staged friendly fire incidents to destroy facilities that they’d then be asked to rebuild, and to keep that secret, everybody who witnessed the friendly fires had to be dead. And that time it was Turner and Ozgo, and Ozgo got out alive. So they had to find a way to get rid of Ozgo, which would have been easy if Chan hadn’t let him live on the estate. So Paterson deliberately wormed his way into Chan’s, well, into her everything, really, and fed her a bunch of lies so that she’d help him. Then he staged the kidnapping. And all of that’s true, and we can prove it. But I don’t know. It’s like I’m missing something, and whatever I’m missing is specifically about Richard Hamilton.”
“So maybe Richard Hamilton isn’t the mastermind behind the reconstruction scam?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said, nearly in despair. “I think I’d make a terrible detective. I’d never be able to convince myself that anybody was really guilty.”
“Is that what you’re going to do now that you’re at loose ends? Become a detective?”
“Let’s go in and suggest it to Tom,” Kate said. “I like to hear him scream.”