by Lawson, Mike
And then Mahoney surprised him. Mahoney was normally too self-centered to be attuned to the feelings of others, but it was as if he knew what DeMarco was thinking.
“By the way,” Mahoney said, “Molly’s going to do the time for what she did, she’s just not gonna do it in a jail cell.”
“What do you mean?” DeMarco said.
“I talked this over with Mary Pat this morning. I . . .”
“You told her Molly was guilty.”
“Yeah. Basically. I mean, I didn’t tell her what happened to Ted or McGrath or any of that stuff. She’d never stand for that; she’d turn me in. But I told her that Molly had helped with the insider stuff and the only reason she didn’t go to jail was because I pulled some strings. The funny part was, Mary Pat didn’t act surprised. It was like she’d known for some time that Molly was guilty but was afraid to say it out loud or admit it even to herself. So me and Mary Pat, we sat down with Molly, and Mary Pat told her what she was going to do to make things right. She didn’t give her a choice.”
“What did you decide?” DeMarco asked, and Mahoney told him.
And DeMarco thought: Yeah, I can live with that.
“But there is one other problem,” DeMarco said.
“Aw, Christ!” Mahoney said. “Now what? Won’t this fuckin’ thing ever end?”
“Kay Kiser resigned from the SEC when Molly got the deal. She might talk to the press.”
“She can talk to them, but that won’t change anything. Not with Campbell’s confession. And Sawyer and the guys at Justice, they aren’t going to admit to anything. But what really bothers me is her resigning. We need people like her, Joe. She’s smart and she’s tough and she’s incorruptible. The government needs her. The country needs her. What does she want? What can we do to make her stay?”
The strange thing was that DeMarco knew that John Mahoney, a man who was corrupt in so many ways himself, actually meant what he’d just said: that the country needed Kay Kiser.
63
Barbara Jane watched the lawyer as he walked away from the pool. He was a few years younger than her, maybe ten, and he was a cutie. She’d told him to come to the house for the meeting, and then told the maid to send him out to the pool when he arrived. She wanted to meet him at the pool because that way she’d be able to wear a bikini and flash her tits at him when she put her top back on.
She was proud of those puppies, and every once in a while she liked to take them out for a walk.
She’d told her cute young lawyer that she was divorcing Bob right away, and explained to him that Bob wouldn’t be contesting the divorce in any way. Her lawyer had probably been surprised that she was moving so quickly—Bob had been arrested less than a week ago—but not as surprised as Bob had been. Yep, she’d done nothing but surprise lawyers lately, including dumb ol’ Bob who was a lawyer, too.
What an idiot. He hires a man in his seventies who’d had a stroke to kill Melinda Stowe, and told the man to kill DeMarco as well, because DeMarco had talked to Stowe and made a tape recording. Apparently the killer was supposed to find out where the recording was and destroy it. When DeMarco captured the geezer, it wasn’t long before the cops found out that his gun had been used to kill Stowe and he made a deal and gave up Bob.
She met with Bob briefly after his arrest. She didn’t ask him why he did the dumb thing he did, but he started blubbering about how he wanted the VP job and how he had to get rid of Melinda Stowe because if he didn’t Mahoney would have eventually used the information against him and undermined all his plans. “I figured Orville Rate, being an ex-cop, would have been able to pull it off,” Bob had said.
Then he said: “But we can still get Mahoney. You know, leak the information about the casino canceling his daughter’s marker like we talked about.”
And that’s when she explained to Bob that there wasn’t going to be any we. She wasn’t about to have him hanging around her neck like a stinking, dead albatross. She said that as long as he didn’t contest the divorce, she’d pay for his legal costs, which were going to be staggering. But if he did contest the divorce, and since he had barely any money of his own, some snot-nosed public defender might be the one representing him against an accomplice-to-murder charge.
As for Mahoney, she said, just forget about him. The charges against his daughter had been dropped, but more important, she’d read that the man who ran the Atlantic Palace Casino had disappeared—and without him, it would probably be impossible to prove that Molly Mahoney ever had a marker with the casino. She concluded by saying, “So you’re just going to have to take your medicine, Bob. But I’ll get you the best lawyer I can and maybe he’ll keep you from getting the needle for killing Melinda Stowe.” She wondered if tough-on-crime Bob was happy that Arizona still had the death penalty.
My God, what a scandal! The media went berserk: you couldn’t turn on a television set without seeing pictures of her and Bob, and the phone had been ringing off the hook with reporters requesting interviews. All Bob’s colleagues in Congress were saying how shocked and dismayed they all were. She saw one clip of Mahoney, shaking his head gravely, saying how the stress of politics could often drive people to do unimaginable things.
One of these days, but not right away, she might run for Bob’s seat. And whether she was in Congress or not, she just might go after John Mahoney—and she was a whole bunch smarter than dumb ol’ Bob.
64
It was ten p.m. and DeMarco was sitting on a stone bench on the terrace on the west side of the Capitol. As he sat, he sipped cognac from a Styrofoam cup. At his feet was the bottle of Hennessy that he normally kept in the file cabinet in his office. The cognac was for medicinal purposes—for moments like this, when he felt the need to heal his soul.
It was a clear, cloudless night, and the weather was balmy, and DeMarco had an unobstructed view of the National Mall, from Washington’s obelisk, across the Reflecting Pool, all the way to Lincoln’s bright, white, shining cube.
He loved Washington at night.
He took a sip of cognac, relieved he didn’t have to tilt his head to the right. Delray’s cousin—and now DeMarco’s new dentist—had put a crown on his cracked tooth and charged him only six hundred bucks as opposed to the thousand his previous dentist would have charged. One thing for sure: he was going to pay the bill on time. He didn’t need Delray showing up to collect; he didn’t ever want to see Delray again.
Then there was Tina Burke, sexy mother of two. Did he want to see her again? Maybe Alice was right—maybe he’d reached an age when he should be thinking beyond the end of his dick. He thought about that a moment longer, took another sip of brandy, and pulled out his cell phone—but still couldn’t decide if he should make the call.
“I want to talk to you,” a voice said.
He turned his head toward the person who had spoken. It was Kay Kiser. He had no idea how she’d found him, but he suspected Kiser could track down just about anybody she wanted to find.
“Hi,” he said. But he was thinking: Aw, shit.
“Are you proud of what you’ve done?”
“Do you want some cognac?” he said.
She started to say something, to spit out some stinging retort, but then she didn’t. “Yeah,” she said, and sat down next to him.
He filled up the Styrofoam cup he’d been drinking from and passed it to her. She took a sip, then another, and passed the cup back to DeMarco.
“So thanks to you Molly Mahoney gets a free pass,” Kiser said. “And basically Campbell does, too. Well, are you proud of yourself?” she asked again.
“No,” he said—and he wasn’t. And his answer probably surprised her. “But Molly’s not getting a pass, Kay. She’s not going to jail but she’ll be doing something a whole lot harder than a couple years in some country-club prison.”
“What’s she going to do?
” Kiser said.
DeMarco told her.
Kiser nodded, just like DeMarco had done, probably saying to herself the same thing that DeMarco had said: I can live with that.
“But Campbell, he goes into witness protection. You call that justice?”
“He’s not going into witness protection. He just thinks he is.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t tell you. All I can tell you is that Campbell’s going to prison and he’s never going to spend a dime of what he stole.” He paused then he added, “And McGrath’s dead.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“I can’t tell you that either. All you need to know is that Richard Praeter and Doug Campbell and Rusty McGrath won’t be committing any more crimes, and Doug Campbell’s going to jail and losing all the money he stole.”
She just looked at him. He could tell she believed him—and she was smart enough to know that it wasn’t in her best interest to know any more than she’d just been told.
“So it’s all over, Kay. You won.”
Kiser took the cup back from DeMarco and sipped again.
“I hate these people,” she said after a while.
“What people? Campbell and McGrath?”
“All the people who game the financial system. All the Wall Street crooks. They steal billions more than some ghetto kid who knocks off a liquor store, and they destroy people’s lives. And when they do get caught, half the time they don’t get convicted because the cases are so goddamn complicated that the average juror can’t understand them.”
“Is that why . . .”
“My dad worked for a company called Clemson Fasteners. They made stupid screws and bolts and rivets, things like that. He went to work for them when he was eighteen, and along the way he got some education and rose through the ranks. He was the first person in his family to hold a job where he didn’t work with his hands. But when he was sixty-two, just a couple years away from retirement, it comes out that the CEO had been understating expenses, hiding debt, overstating the profits. All the usual crap companies pull when they’re trying to keep their stock price up and the company afloat. I mean, this wasn’t Enron big. Only a couple thousand people were affected. But my dad lost his job and he lost his pension, and because he was sixty-two years old, he couldn’t find another job. He went through his savings in less than two years. After he declared bankruptcy, he sealed off the garage with towels and started the car and killed himself, and my mother was the one who found him. She died of heart failure a year later. So I hate these people and I’m going to spend my life putting them in jail.”
“I thought you resigned.”
“You don’t know what Mahoney did?”
“No. What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been at the SEC for a long time, but I never really wanted to be there. The SEC investigates and regulates, but when we find somebody who’s committed a serious crime, the guys at Justice are the ones who prosecute. After I’d been at the SEC only a couple of years, I realized I needed to be over at Justice if I really wanted to make a difference, but I’ve pissed off so many people at Justice, I knew they would never give me a job. At least not the one I wanted.
“But today, I got a call from the attorney general. That wimp. He’s going to put me in charge of their criminal division. The job just miraculously opened up. The guy who had the job—the guy who agreed to the deal that Molly got—he’s going off to teach at Harvard. So I get his job, and it’s the job I’ve always wanted.”
“Congratulations,” DeMarco said, and he was being serious. He also wondered how Mahoney had been able to make the attorney general do what he wanted, but he didn’t really care and he wasn’t going to ask.
Kay Kiser stood up, all six feet two inches of her, and looked out at the National Mall, her head moving slowly as she took in all the government buildings surrounding the Mall. She was probably imagining the corruption occurring daily inside those buildings.
Kay Kiser was looking at a target-rich environment.
While she was looking at the buildings, DeMarco was looking at her. She was a pretty woman, but what struck him at that moment was the character in her face. She was going to be somebody, somebody that history would remember. One day he’d pick up a magazine, and there she’d be on the cover, older, her hair gray, and he’d be able to say: I met her once.
“I just wanted to let you know, DeMarco,” Kiser said, “that I’m going to be watching you and John Mahoney. And if I ever get the chance to put you in jail, I will.”
DeMarco filled his cup to the brim with cognac.
65
Emma was sitting on her patio, surveying her domain. Her lawn was a lush green carpet, her trees were pruned, her bushes neatly trimmed. The heads of pretty flowers were pushing their way up through the soil.
Emma was pleased.
She turned her head when she heard her backyard gate open. Even the sight of DeMarco couldn’t totally dampen her contentment.
He sat down in a chair next to her without saying anything.
“Is it all over?” Emma said.
“Yeah, except for one thing.”
“Molly Mahoney,” Emma said.
“Yeah.”
“So what did you do?”
He told her. The complete truth this time.
Maybe Emma wasn’t quite the Puritan he thought she was. She didn’t seem at all disturbed by what had happened to Ted Allen or Rusty McGrath, and what was going to happen to Douglas Campbell.
“But what happens to Molly?” she said.
DeMarco told her. Emma didn’t say anything for a moment, then she nodded. “Okay. But if you ever lie to me again . . .”
Epilogue
Molly pulled back the canvas flap and stepped outside her tent.
It was a beautiful morning, the air crisp and clean, and the mountain —that incredible mountain—was visible in the distance. By noon the temperature would be over a hundred and the flies would start to swarm and the wind would begin to blow, but the mornings here . . . She’d never experienced such glorious mornings.
She’d been in Tanzania for six months now. She had endured the heat and the flies and the dust—and the dying. So many people dying, every day, mostly children. But after six months she was . . . what? Used to it? No, not used to it—you could never get used to it—but she could accept it. She did what she could and that was all she could do, and she accepted that some Higher Power must have some reason for all the suffering.
She had gotten a job with UNICEF. That was the deal she made with her mom. Three years with UNICEF. More time than she would have spent in prison for insider trading. But she already knew that when her three years were up, she was going to stay with the organization. She was going to make this her life.
UNICEF focused on children and mothers, providing health care and education. Another thing UNICEF did was work with poor communities to build clean water and sewer systems and, being an engineer, that was her job. And when she couldn’t do her job because she couldn’t get pumps and pipe and everything else she needed, she helped out in the hospital. Some days all she did was hold the hands of children who were dying.
But for the first time in more than a year, she felt good—about herself, about what she was doing, about everything. She hadn’t had a drink in nine months and would never drink again. Her complexion was perfect, her eyes were clear, and she’d gained back the weight she’d lost. Most important, she had peace of mind. She couldn’t believe that she had been so addicted to two small plastic cubes.
All that was behind her now: the gambling, the drinking, the lying. Everything was behind her—and everything was ahead of her. One day at a time.
She walked toward the mess tent to get breakfast, wondering what breakfast would be this mor
ning. Yesterday it had been rice and a plant that looked like a tomato but wasn’t. The supply plane was overdue, as always.
As she entered the mess tent, she saw the new doctor, the Italian, the one who’d arrived a week ago. He had gentle eyes, a cute gap between his front teeth like Omar Sharif, and arms and shoulders that looked like he should be holding a pickax instead of a scalpel. She’d caught him looking at her yesterday and he’d actually blushed. An Italian who blushed. Will wonders never cease?
He reminded her of DeMarco.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank James Donahue, Greg Alwood, and Dee Henderson for answering various questions related to the SEC, subpoenas, e-trading, and insider trading. Any errors related to SEC procedures and other legal matters associated with insider trading are mine alone.
Daniel Caine, a friend and real-life lawyer, who graciously permitted me to use his name as Molly’s lawyer in this book. I also want to thank Dan for being such a big supporter of my books.
Kay Kiser, in a raffle in support of the Jefferson Oregon Library, won the right to have a character in this book named after her. I want to thank Kay for allowing me to use her name and Linda Baker of the Jefferson Oregon Library for contacting me regarding the raffle. In the same way the government could use a few more folks like the fictional Kay Kiser, we can also use more people like the real Kay Kiser who support our local libraries.
Jamison Stoltz, my editor on all the DeMarco books, save two. He always improves my books, but his comments on this book were especially astute, and it’s a much better book because of him.