Nothing to Hide drm-3

by J. Mark Bertrand

  He approaches the driver’s window first, making sure the threat is neutralized, then goes to the trainer and helps him up. Thanks to his vest, the trainer is bruised but otherwise fine.

  Watching the footage, things happen so fast. It’s all straightforward and undramatic, the way fights mostly are. If you weren’t paying attention, you might mistake the trainer’s motion for a clumsy fall. The stakes were life and death, but they don’t look it on camera.

  When the uniforms made their report, the story got strange. According to them, the driver had refused to give his identification, claiming he had immunity. He told the rookie he worked for the CIA. Then he’d changed course and handed his license over. His name was Andrew Nesbitt, aged sixty-one, a well-off retiree with a house in River Oaks. When the trainer approached, sensing something wasn’t right, Nesbitt grew combative and paranoid. He accused the officers of pulling him over without justification-and then, without warning, he produced a gun. It was a.32 Walther PPK, weapon of choice for James Bond.

  “The guy wasn’t just delusional,” Lorenz says, lifting the corner of one of the clippings. “He was some kind of con man. He was, like, the president of the retired intelligence officers’ club. Even the real spooks believed he was one of them.”

  “That’s a theory. It’s always possible he was telling the truth. There’s no law that says retired case officers can’t go nuts like everybody else. I bet they’re more prone to it than most.”

  “But the government denied he’d ever been in the CIA.”

  I crack a smile. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

  Judging from the Internet printouts, the usual conspiracy theories must have started proliferating the moment the story broke. Ford tacked up a forum post providing an ersatz history of the former spook’s club in Houston, claiming that dozens of high-ranking officers have retired to the oil capital over the years, putting their experience to good use advising on overseas operations. According to one blog, Nesbitt was a prime recipient of drilling dollars, while according to another he had a well-documented history of mental-health issues. The Houston Press had run a feature that summarized all the possibilities, and the annotated spread made up the center of Ford’s psycho wall.

  “This is all pretty interesting, Jerry, but I don’t see why I had to come down and view it in person. I’ve heard of this shooting. I’ve seen the video. Our guys were in the right. No matter who this Nesbitt dude was, he drew down on a cop. End of story.”

  Lorenz goes to one of the open cabinets and pulls out an orange-covered, spiral-bound Key Map. A scrap of paper marks one of the laminated pages. He opens it on the desk and turns the map to face me. His finger thumps down to a green patch near the middle.

  “That’s the park where we found Ford’s body,” he says.

  “Let me see that.” I study the map. “And it was marked like that when you got here?”

  He nods his head.

  “So Brandon Ford marked the page where his body was dumped? Like he knew in advance that’s where he’d end up.”

  “You’d think so, right? But no, that’s not what it is. Here-” he takes the book back-“this is why he marked it.”

  I lean closer. He taps on a section of Allen Parkway curving through the map grid. When he moves his hand, I can see an X drawn over the road.

  “That’s where Andrew Nesbitt was shot?” I ask.

  He nods again. “And that’s not all, March. Remember when I sent you out into the woods and you had your fall? I thought if we followed the direction that finger was pointing, we’d find the severed head. But I was wrong. The fact is, if you follow that pointing finger-”

  “You end up on Allen Parkway.”

  And I’d seen it, looking through the weedy hurricane fence that night. I’d seen it without realizing the significance. The pointing finger had not led me astray; it guided me. I just didn’t know enough to make the connection.

  Now I’m beginning to.

  What I have is this: an unorthodox FBI agent telling me lies about the death of a man whose skinned finger, when his body was discovered, pointed straight to the site where another man, claiming to work for the CIA, had died in a gunfight with the Houston Police.

  “So what’s the next step?” he asks.

  “Let me think.”

  The guns in the safe. The story that Ford was down in Corpus Christi. Bea Kuykendahl, a.k.a. Trixie, riding shotgun while he dropped off his kids. While that was going on, he kept a room here at his office dedicated to the shooting death of Andrew Nesbitt and the many conspiracy theories swirling around the event.

  It all fits together somehow, assuming I have enough of the pieces. The bloody finger is pointing, the finger is guiding, the only question is where. I have to follow it. I have to think. It all fits together if I can only figure out how.

  CHAPTER 8

  Camped in Brandon Ford’s office, I tell Jerry everything: the early morning meeting with the FBI, my suspicions about the match on Ford, the ex-wife’s description of Bea. He listens silently and doesn’t ask any questions. When I’m done, he just looks at me.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “I feel like you just showed me your psycho wall. No offense. It just sounds a little crazy, that’s all.” He cocks his head toward the clippings. “And this is crazy enough.”

  “This doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up?”

  He smiles. “It does now. Look-are you hungry? ’Cause I’m starving. I skipped lunch coming out here.”

  “Jerry, will you stop and think a minute? I need your help putting all this together. This Agent Kuykendahl, my gut tells me she’s trying to hide something big.”

  “Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. I can’t do this on an empty stomach. Lemme run down the street and pick us something up, okay? I think there’s a Five Guys-”

  “Not again.”

  “Come on,” he says. “You can choose the next place.”

  There’s no chance of getting him to focus, so I let him go. He promises not to take long, and I can hear him chuckling to himself as he heads down the hall. Like he’s happy to get away. It occurs to me he hasn’t had a sit-down with Hedges yet. He doesn’t know there’s already a cloud over the day.

  The door shuts behind him and I get down to work. I left my briefcase at the office, so I have to use my new phone to take pictures of the wall. They come out good, better than my three-year-old point-and-shoot, in fact. Maybe it’s time to upgrade.

  With that done, I start pulling the clippings down one at a time. I read through the content, especially where Ford underlined and highlighted things, then stack pieces on the desk. Lorenz had called this a psycho wall, but it’s really a mind map, a visual scheme illustrating Brandon Ford’s obsession. Or to be more precise, his investigation. He was compiling information about the Nesbitt shooting, about the man’s alleged background-but why? Whatever his motives, this inquiry of his must have led to his death. Which means that if I can understand the wall, it might lead me to his killer or killers.

  Once the wall is dismantled and stacked, I go to the computer. We have an excellent forensic computer specialist named Hanford, and he’d probably want me to leave this to him. I take a look anyway. The screen comes to life with a shake of the mouse. In Ford’s email inbox, there are more than fifty unopened messages. I scan them quickly. Mostly junk. Nothing from Bea Kuykendahl.

  There is, however, an email from Sam Dearborn, sent after my visit to him, asking Ford to give him a call. Strange, since he already knew that Ford was dead. Reviewing the conversation in my head, though, I realize I never made my interest in Ford clear to Dearborn. A sign of my misgivings about the case? Perhaps.

  The door opens down the hall.

  I check my watch and call out: “I thought you were coming right back.”

  Silence.

  I wheel around in Brandon Ford’s chair, my hand moving to my holster.

  “Don’t,” a voice says.

  The only th
ings visible in the doorframe are part of a man’s head-mostly hidden by a black balaclava, only an eye showing-and the barrel of a pump shotgun.

  “Draw that gun and you’re dead,” he says.

  My hand wants to move. My heart’s racing, my vision tunneling, my aim fixing on him. The voice in my head saying Go, go, go.

  But he’s holding that shotgun steady, using cover like he knows what he’s doing. I will my hand to relax. I move it away from my side arm.

  He leans further into the doorway. The fluorescents raise a shine on his synthetic mask.

  “Stay calm,” he says. “Lift your hands. Put them flat on the desk in front of you.”

  As he speaks, a second man crosses behind him and enters the room. He levels a black pistol in my face, circling to my left so as to leave the shotgun’s line of fire open. If I drew now, there’d be no way of taking them both, assuming I could beat the twelve-gauge in the first place, which is unlikely.

  “I’m a cop,” I say.

  “Do what I tell you and you’ll still be a cop when we walk out of here.”

  “You’re in charge.”

  “Good. Now, keep your hands flat on the desk, and without lifting them I want you to stand up. If you lift your hands, you’re dead.”

  He delivers the instructions calmly with just the hint of an accent-East Texas, maybe, or Louisiana. The man with the pistol says nothing. He just stands in the corner of the room, covering me. I glance his way, trying to burn the details into my memory. He wears a tight balaclava, too, and a gray T-shirt that leaves his nut-brown arms bare. There’s a gold ring on his left middle finger. A metallic skull with red stone eyes. Jeans and tan lace-up boots. I catch a smell of musky cologne on the air, the scent intensified by his stress.

  “Don’t sit there all day,” the man at the door says. “Get up.”

  Keeping my hands flat, I rise into a crouch. The pain in my leg flares up. I try to ignore the sensation. It feels wet, like if I put my fingers to my thigh, they’d come away bloody.

  “Okay. Now you’re going to stay like that while my associate takes your gun. This is for our safety and yours. If you try anything, I won’t hesitate.”

  “I won’t try anything.”

  The second man lowers his gun and tucks it into his waistband behind his hip. He approaches obliquely, removing my SIG from its holster in a practiced motion. Then he rests the muzzle against my back while his free hand roams over me.

  “Where is it?”

  “Left ankle,” I say, my throat tight.

  He stoops slightly, tugs my pants leg up, and slides the.40 caliber Kahr out of my molded ankle holster. A tremor runs up my spine. My skin feels clammy with sweat.

  Once he has both guns, the man fades back into the corner. The one with the shotgun finally reveals himself. He steps toward me, bringing the muzzle almost to my face. All I can see is that gaping hole, but I get the impression of a broad chest and thick forearms all blurred behind it.

  “We understand each other,” he says. “Now here’s what we’re gonna do. I want you to come around the desk and go over to that corkboard. I want your nose in that corner and your hands on the wall. When I say go, you lift your hands over your head and do it.”

  A drop of sweat runs down the side of my nose, hitting the desk.

  “Go.”

  I lift my hands off the desk. They leave damp prints. I raise them and straighten up, ignoring the needles in my hip and back. Unsteady on my feet, I shuffle around the desk, past the stack of clippings to the bare corkboard. In the corner I rest my hands on the two walls, staring into the crevice where they meet.

  “This is a mistake-”

  “Don’t bother with the speech,” he says. “We’re taking what we came for, then getting out of here. If you don’t move, everything will be fine. If you do. .”

  The second man, the one with the skull ring, sniggers.

  “Shut up,” the Shotgun says. “Open the desk and find a folder or something to put all this stuff in.”

  I hear them moving behind me, gathering the clippings and putting them away. Then there’s a sound of moving furniture, metal scraping metal.

  “Are we taking this whole thing?” Skull Ring asks.

  “Just pop it open and take out the hard drive.”

  “You got a screwdriver?”

  “Just do it, okay?”

  A sudden crash makes me jump.

  “Don’t you move!” Shotgun yells.

  More crashes-they’re banging the computer on something, trying to break open the housing. Skull Ring huffs with the effort, but finally wrenches away the metal and starts digging inside. My shirt sticks to my chest. All I can think about is not moving, keeping calm, storing every detail away in my head. Not the sound of a trigger pull, not the explosion, the stench of blood, the darkness, the death and the nothing.

  Live to fight another day. Live to fight another-

  “Keep your hands on the wall. Don’t try to follow us.”

  I hear them backing into the hallway.

  “Leave my guns,” I say.

  “Yeah, right. You’re keeping your life. Be content with that.”

  Footsteps in the hall. I turn my head. They’re gone. With effort I take my hands from the wall. The front door of the office slams shut.

  I let out a breath. I crouch down, hands on knees. Gotta get myself under control. Gotta do something. I stare at the carpet between my shoes. The pant leg rucked up over my empty holster.

  The switch flips. I go cold.

  I poke my head into the hallway to be sure it’s clear. Then I race into the next office to the open gun safe. I torque the banana mag out of the Krinkov and grab a box of ammo. I start jamming rounds past the mag’s sharp metal lips. My hands are scraped, torn, but I keep loading. When the box is empty, I fit the mag into the little AK and pull the charging handle. The folding stock is already in place.

  Running now, confident, invincible, with the assault rifle’s butt in the pocket of my shoulder, I push through the office door, scanning left and right with the muzzle. They’re already downstairs, disappearing into the corridor at the end of the atrium.

  Adrenaline pumps through me, dispelling all pain. I glide ahead, descending the stairs in twos, sprinting past the fountain and into the corridor, with no thought but catching up to them, no thought but making them stop.

  I reach the entry. I can see the parking lot outside. The bright sun.

  Gunshots ring out.

  I throw myself into a crouch, slamming into a wall of mailboxes. But there’s no shattered glass. No one’s firing at me. I get up and take a few steps forward. Through the glass I see them outside. One of them, the muscled shotgunner, disappears behind an open car door on the far side of the lot. The one with the skull ring is just standing closer, between my own vehicle and the one next to it. His mask is hiked up over his eyebrows, his right arm extended toward the pavement.

  Outside, I advance in a crouch, my finger alongside the Krinkov’s trigger. His back is to me. Looking over the cars, I can only see his head and upper torso. As I hook around the back of my car, I see him clearly. My Kahr shines in his hand, the muzzle pointing downward. On the ground between his feet, lying in a tangle with his gun in one hand and a Five Guys bag in the other, Jerry Lorenz spits blood and glares upward at the coup de grace.

  “Police!” I scream.

  Skull Ring turns. We’re maybe four feet away from each other. I mash down on the Krinkov’s trigger.

  His gray T-shirt erupts in a pink haze, his body jerking wildly. He staggers backward, rolling, and I advance. The thump of the gunstock against my shoulder feels good and right. The man falls. The gun goes silent. It’s empty and smoking.

  A car screeches past us and I glance up in time to see the driver. Through the window I can see the outline of his unmasked face framed by a curly mane of hair.

  “March.”

  I throw the Krinkov down. Get on my knees beside Jerry.

  His chest
.

  Two-no, three wounds. Thick, bright blood coming out in tidal surges, soaking his shirt. A line of blood down the side of his mouth.

  “Don’t talk,” I say.

  I put pressure on the wounds as best I can. I call for help. Traffic races past on Westheimer, oblivious to what’s happening.

  Underneath me, Jerry’s gone pale. His eyes have an unnatural brightness. He’s going. I scream for help again, afraid to take my hands off of him, afraid he’ll slip away if I do.

  “Come on, Jerry, don’t do this. Don’t leave me. You’re gonna be okay.”

  He tilts his head and spits, trying to clear his mouth.

  “Don’t talk. You don’t have to say anything.”

  He looks up at me. “My kid.”

  “I know, Jerry. It’s gonna be okay. Just stay with me.”

  His eyes bore into me. I keep talking, keep reassuring, and then my eyes cloud and my throat fills with phlegm.

  “Jerry, no.”

  Under my hands, his body is still.

  Behind me, I hear footsteps on the blacktop. A hand touches my shoulder.

  “We saw everything,” a man’s voice says. “We called the cops and an ambulance. They gonna be here soon. You better get out of here, man. The cops are on the way.”

  I shrug free of him. I slump against the car.

  “I am a cop.”

  He steps back, showing me his palms. “It’s cool, man.” Glancing down, his face goes blank and he starts retreating.

  I sit there, sticky with my partner’s blood, watching his wounds glisten in the harsh shine of the indifferent sun. My head tilts back. My eyes close.

  I long for the sound of sirens until they come.

  CHAPTER 9

  They find me in the long antiseptic breezeway, where the nurses left me half an hour earlier, working on my hands with a reddened towelette. I see them in my peripheral vision. Only one of them advances, his footsteps echoing on the glossy floor. The shoes come into view. Black wingtips with a military shine. He settles his weight next to me and sighs.