Terminal Secret

by Mark Gilleo

  “They were. There were four jurors on the second floor, four on the third floor and four more on the fourth floor.”

  “Go on.”

  “Pretty early in the case, I woke up with a man standing over my bed. He had a gun and an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “A good look? Nope. It was dark and I didn’t turn on the light. He told me enough things about myself to let me know he was legitimate. A legitimate threat. I was forced to make a decision right then and there.”

  “And how did you receive the money?”

  “It was in a nice leather bag. The man standing over my bed showed me a picture of it on his phone. The bag was in my bedroom closet, in my apartment. The bag was still there, as promised, at the end of the trial.”

  “And then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When did you know you weren’t the only one who had been paid off?”

  “During the trial. After the man visited my hotel room, I got a strange vibe among some of the other jurors. I mean, when you’re sequestered, life is pretty boring. You’re not supposed to discuss the case. Television is limited. Most of the shows you can watch, you watch as a group. No news is allowed. No Internet. Boring as hell. A couple of the jurors with family were allowed the occasional visit, but for the most part we spent a lot of time watching court-approved movies and engaging in small talk. Spend enough time with anyone and you start to get a feel for them. In the days after the man with the gun paid me a visit, I noticed some of the other jurors were acting differently.”

  “How?”

  “People were less nervous. I noticed that some of the jurors were more relaxed. I noticed it in myself too.”

  “You weren’t more nervous someone was going to find out?”

  “If they were going to find out, it wasn’t going to be from me, and that was all I cared about. There’s a lot of pressure at a murder trial for a drug lord. I was given an out. I knew what my vote was going to be. After I made the deal, the rest of the trial was surreal. It was like I was watching a television drama from the front row.”

  “You let a guilty man walk free and in the process you became a criminal yourself.”

  “It turned out just fine.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Tyrone Biggs walked free but eventually he was shot and killed. If we had found him guilty in the H2O trial, me and a few other jurors would probably be dead and Tyrone would be in prison for life at the taxpayers’ expense.”

  “Did you know that after the H2O trial, Tyrone did go to prison. After you let him walk, some jury found the balls to do the right thing.”

  “Or maybe the courts figured out how to properly protect a sequestered jury. Not let gunmen into the hotel rooms.”

  “I’m not going to say I agree with you, but you do have a valid argument,” Dan conceded.

  “Look, I spent a few months wrestling with what I did. Then I got over it. I sleep well at night.”

  “There was no justice for the families of the victims.”

  “Tyrone is dead. He received street justice. DC doesn’t have a death penalty. Our decision to let him walk probably expedited his departure from this planet.”

  “Judging by the body count of the other jurors, someone doesn’t feel the same way you do.”

  “Apparently.”

  A waiter slowly approached the table and made eye contact with Frank. Frank looked towards Dan for approval and Dan nodded. The waiter stepped in and whispered in Frank’s ear. Frank listened and looked across the restaurant. “I’ll be there in a moment,” Frank replied to the waiter, who spun and returned to the crowded floor.

  Dan felt his phone vibrate in his pocket for a second time and again ignored it. “Just a couple more questions,” Dan added.

  “Go ahead.”

  “How much of the money were you able to launder through the restaurant?”

  Frank froze. “What are you suggesting?”

  “You know exactly what I’m suggesting. After the trial, both Sherry and Carla started working here. Add to that Marcus Losh, Sherry’s baby daddy, and yourself, and that makes four jurors all connected directly or indirectly, to this restaurant. I don’t think it was entirely coincidental.”

  Frank dropped his voice to a near whisper, the din of the restaurant almost overpowering his words. “During the trial, Sherry and I became friends. We had adjoining rooms in the hotel, with one of those doors in the wall between the rooms. We weren’t supposed to open the door, but we did. Like I said, it was boring. Anyhow, we became friends. We talked a bit and discovered we both worked in Georgetown. She worked down the street at The Friendliest Saloon in Town, and I worked here. It was a common connection that let us relate to each other. At the same time, Sherry had become friends with Carla. Somehow those two connected the dots that each of them had been paid at the trial.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Sherry. At any rate, Sherry and Carla both knew each other had been paid off, and I assume Marcus told Sherry, who probably told Carla.”

  “And after the trail Carla started working here?”

  “Carla lost her job and Sherry mentioned that maybe I could get her a position. For the waitstaff, the money is decent here. On a good night, a waitress can clear a few hundred dollars in tips alone.”

  “So Carla started working here first?”

  “Carla started and then Sherry quit working down the street. She came on board a few months after the end of the trial.”

  “How about Marcus?”

  “He never worked here. He was an electrician. He was also unreliable.”

  “And how did Carla and Sherry know you had been paid off?”

  “I got involved with Carla.”

  “You and Carla had a thing?”

  “For a while. She eventually told me she had been paid and I told her the same.”

  “Okay. So we have three people, all jurors at the same trial, working at the same restaurant, and a fourth person in the picture with another hundred thousand dollars. Did you know for sure if any of the other jurors had been paid?”

  “Like I said, I only suspected it from their behavior during the trial.”

  “So the four of you decided to use the restaurant to legitimize your money.”

  “Yeah. We have five thousand dollars in tips moving through here on any given night. It was a slow process, but a few hundred here, a few hundred there. Spread it out over a couple of years and the dirty money is clean.”

  “How much is left?”

  “None. We finished a couple of years ago. It worked out.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “Any idea who’s killing the jurors?”

  “Wish I did.”

  “What about the families of the kids who died?”

  “None of them stood out as killers. Most of them were wealthy, white-collar types. And I felt for them. I truly did.”

  “But you felt for yourself more.”

  “That I did.”

  “I have one more question. You’ve changed your appearance since the trial. I obtained courtroom drawings from the trial and none of the jurors look like you. I assume you were the guy we referred to as the Unabomber. Longer hair. Long beard. A bit like ZZ Top, if you remember the band.”

  “You can thank Tyrone Biggs for the change in appearance.”

  “Why? Did he take you to the barber?”

  “No. Not at all. I saw him once at a basketball game when the Lakers were in town. I got good seats from one of the beer reps that services the restaurant. Tyrone Biggs was there with some of his posse. He was sitting a few rows closer to the floor. At some point during the game he looked back and we made eye contact. He smiled, nodded, and gave me a salute.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I nodded back and then left at the end of the quarter. Shaved my head and beard the next morning.”
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br />   “But he already knew who you were.”

  “He knew who I was, obviously. But that doesn’t mean I needed him recognizing me in public. I mean, what if I was out with my mother, or a new girlfriend? It was something I didn’t want to have to explain.”

  “So you changed your appearance.”

  “Well, I couldn’t delete myself from his memory, so I figure changing my appearance was the next best thing.”

  The corners of Dan’s eyes tightened and Frank pushed his chair back a few inches. A long uncomfortable silence followed and the waiter who had visited the table minutes before approached again, stopping several feet away.

  Frank glanced at his employee and asked Dan, “Do you mind if I step away for a moment? I have a customer who is demanding to see the manager.”

  “Go ahead,” Dan replied, shoving his hand into his pants pocket and removing his phone. “I need to make a call.”

  *

  Dan punched in a phone number from his recent call list and listened to two rings before a deep baritone voice bellowed out, “Detective Wallace here.”

  “Good evening, Detective. Three calls in ten minutes? It must be important.”

  “Your girl skipped out.”

  “Which girl?”

  “The bank robber. The one with the home detention monitor. She’s out on the town. We received an alarm notification from the transmitter at her apartment that she had exceeded the range for the home detention device. A police unit arrived on the scene about an hour ago and confirmed she is no longer at her apartment.”

  “What about her daughter?”

  “The daughter is home. Apparently your client hired a babysitter before she left.”

  “Are you tracking her?”

  “As we speak.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In Georgetown. Her location is static. Either she ditched the ankle monitor or she’s not moving. We are arriving on the scene of the last signal transmission now…”

  *

  Dan saw the police lights flicker faintly through the front of the restaurant and the hair on his arms rose to attention. Instinctively, he dropped his phone, stood, and pulled his Glock from the holster in the back of his waistband. He scanned the restaurant for Frank, his head moving right and left. Dan’s hearing faded as his tunnel vision focused on the kitchen manager on the far side of the floor. Dan’s heart rate spiked as he watched Frank approach a small table near the front window of the restaurant, next to the oyster on the half-shell display.

  Dan’s eyes dipped to the woman seated at the small window-side table and his legs began rushing through the bar. “Down,” Dan yelled in a primal command that silenced the massive room, freezing most patrons. “Down,” Dan repeated, raising his gun and breaking into a sprint.

  Dan cut through the panicked crowd, focused on the table at the front of the restaurant. He saw Amy’s mouth gape as she recognized Dan charging towards her. She watched in frozen bewilderment as her attorney covered the floor of the restaurant in quick strides. Frank, who had followed Dan’s verbal instruction and lowered his head, slowly regained his posture as Dan parted the sea of scrambling restaurant patrons.

  Dan reached the table in time to watch helplessly as the front window shattered and Frank’s body began to spin. Amy screamed as Frank’s torso hit the old wooden floor and crimson spilled over the chest of his kitchen apron.

  A second bullet whistled by Dan’s ear and Dan moved in the direction of Amy’s chair. He reached his client and grabbed her bone-thin arm in a vise-like grip.

  A third bullet hit flesh as Dan yanked Amy out of her seat onto the floor. Dan immediately recognized the baritone voice of the struck victim and looked up as Detective Wallace fell through the remaining glass of the front window and came to rest on the ice-filled oyster display.

  Chapter 53

  The number of emergency vehicles responding to an officer down in the middle of Georgetown was nothing short of spectacular. Police cars with flashing lights blocked every cross street for a half-mile, from the Key Bridge to Foggy Bottom. The six ambulances on the scene were four more than the number of injured, not counting the customer suffering a panic attack and the restaurant’s designated oyster shucker who was injured by a shard of flying glass.

  For his heroics, Wallace was strapped to the gurney with an oxygen mask and an EMT assigned to each limb. The wound through his shoulder produced copious amounts of blood and curses, neither of which would be fatal.

  Dan was providing his statement to two uniformed officers when Detective Fields interrupted. “I need him for a minute.” The two officers nodded and moved towards the next available witness, plucking one from a huddled group around a large circular dining table.

  “Thanks for the rescue,” Dan replied. “How’s Wallace?”

  “He’s going to be fine.”

  “You should go to the hospital with him.”

  “I don’t think he wants me to.”

  “You should still go.”

  “I don’t think he wants to go either.”

  “I’m sure of that.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Dan replied. “But my bank robber client just forfeited the right to spend her remaining days with her daughter, which is sad. I don’t think any judge is going to overlook her walking away from home detention for a dinner in Georgetown. Much less for serving as a distraction in a professional hit.”

  “She probably didn’t have a choice. If she helps us find the killer, maybe we can find a sympathetic judge.”

  “That’s a long shot. Do you know what she said to me after I pulled her to the floor?”

  “No, what?”

  “She said she wasn’t worried about leaving the house because she knew I would find her. She thought I would track her if she left her apartment and that I would be there to protect her.”

  “Technically, you did.”

  “Technically, Wallace did. I was late. Just ask Frank the manager.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I could have done things differently. I could have let you know I was coming here. I could have told Wallace I recognized Frank as one of the jurors on the list he sent me. I could have told Wallace that I knew he was alive.”

  “Let it go, Dan.”

  “When it’s done, I’ll let it go.”

  “Well, it’s almost done. We finished going through the juror list this afternoon. Frank’s death leaves only one juror still alive, and you know who that is. Eleven of the jurors from the H2O trial are dead. But not all of them were murdered. Two died of natural causes. One from a heart attack. One drowned near Rehoboth beach. The nine other jurors were either killed, or died under mysterious circumstances.”

  “I assume we have someone watching the congressman’s wife.”

  “We have a couple of marked and unmarked patrol cars keeping an eye on things at the Wellington residence.”

  “Good, because I don’t have time to protect her.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to need the list of witnesses and family members of the victims from the H2O shooting. I’m going to take that list back to the hospice.”

  “Why? We already checked the list against the hospice employees and volunteer list.”

  “Something Frank said before he was shot made me think. Something about why he changed his appearance after the Tyrone Biggs trial. I wanted to check something.”

  Emily pulled out her phone, accessed her email, and sent the attachment. “The list is in your inbox.”

  “Thanks. Do you mind running interference for me? I’ll make myself available later if anyone on the force needs anything.”

  “Sure. But why do I get the impression you’re about to go off the reservation?”

  “Women’s intuition.”

  *

  Dan walked into the waiting area of the Capital Community Hospice and the receptionist behind the desk smiled and spoke. �
��Pepper is expecting you,” the woman said, motioning for Dan to proceed to the director’s office. Dan did as instructed and knocked on the open door, his knuckle hitting just below the gold sign with Pepper Hines engraved in plain text.

  “Come in, come in,” Pepper Hines said in his buttery-smooth voice.

  “I’m sorry to keep you here so late.”

  “Not a problem. Not a problem at all. I’m happy to help. You said it was urgent.”

  “It is urgent. As you may have heard, a police officer was shot earlier this evening in Georgetown.”

  “I just saw it on the news,” Pepper replied. “Horrible. Just horrible.”

  “You’re probably unaware the police officer who was shot this evening was the same one who visited you here late last week. His name is Detective Earl Wallace. He is a good man.”

  “I wasn’t aware. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “The good news is that his wounds are not life-threatening.”

  “That is good news.”

  “The bad news is I believe the person who shot Detective Wallace is the same person behind several other killings. The same person we were looking for in our earlier visit to this hospice.”

  “I provided you with all the information we had. What else do you need? I’m an open book. You can have access to anything you want.”

  “I don’t think that will help.”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  Dan reached into his pocket and handed Pepper Hines a piece of paper. “This is a list of family members and witnesses from a trial that occurred seven years ago. It was a murder trial resulting from a shootout at a club on the DC Waterfront called H2O.”

  Pepper Hines glanced at the paper and Dan continued. “There are nearly ninety names on that sheet of paper. We compared the names on that list to the list of hospice employees and volunteers you provided us. We couldn’t identify a match.”

  “You want to go through the names of the Hospice employees and volunteers again? We can do that right now,” Pepper offered.

  “No, that won’t be necessary or beneficial. But I do want you to go through the witnesses and family members of the victims of the H2O trial and tell me if you recognize any names.”