* * *
It was a few hours later when Robert showed up at the hospital to visit his brother.
“She’s gone,” David said.
“Who’s gone?”
“Bronx. She was released this morning. Her father took her back to New York – said she’d be safer there.”
Robert could tell that his brother was upset. “I’m sorry to hear that. I could tell that you had a – a connection with her.”
Robert wanted to change the topic to something more positive, but he had nothing. “I’m afraid I’ve got more bad news. Somebody broke into our room and stole our computers.”
He didn’t get a reaction from David. He could tell he was still thinking about Bronx. The silence was making Robert uncomfortable, so he just kept talking. “I’ve already gone down to the tech shop in the university bookstore. They sold me a brand new laptop – said I didn’t have to pay for it until I get the money from the insurance company for the one that got stolen.”
Again, nothing but silence.
“I need it for my classes,” Robert continued. “Do you want me to get one for you?”
David seemed to suddenly realize he’d been asked a question. “Sorry, what?”
“Do you want me to get you a new laptop to replace your computer that got stolen?”
“I’m not sure,” David said. “They say I might be in here for a few more days. I’ve already missed a week of classes. I don’t know how I’ll ever catch up.”
“I’m sure your profs will cut you some slack. Getting shot is a pretty good excuse for not handing in a few assignments on time.”
The conversation about computers made David think about the one hidden in his soccer bag. “Do you know where my soccer bag is?”
“I have no idea. I don’t remember seeing it at the residence.”
“No. I had it with me at the bus stop when I got shot. Do you know what happened to it?”
“Well, if it was at the bus stop, the police probably have it.”
“Either that, or the lady with the dog took it.”
“Lady with a dog? What are you talking about?”
Robert hadn’t been there when Detective Tremblay had questioned David about the shooting and nothing about her had been reported in the newspaper, so he was completely confused.
“Can you tell the detective I need to see him again? Go ask the nurse. She’s got the number to call him.”
Robert had no idea what was going on, but headed out to find the nurse.
“And ask him if he’s got my soccer bag?” David yelled.
* * *
“I hear you may have remembered something else,” Detective Tremblay said when he showed up at the hospital a few hours later.
David sat up in bed. “Good, you’ve got my soccer bag.”
The detective put it on the corner of the bed. “Yes, we found the laptop hidden in the bottom of the bag, but the only fingerprints we found on it were yours.” He handed David the laptop. “What’s on the computer?”
“Nothing. I just wondered if the lady with the dog took it.”
“Apparently not. I have something I want you to look at.” Detective Tremblay pulled some pictures out of his pocket. “These were taken by a security cam outside of a pub a few blocks away.” He showed David the first one, which had a time-stamp of 7:46 p.m. and showed a blond lady with a dog. “Is this the lady you saw?”
The picture mostly showed the parking lot outside of the pub, so the picture of the lady walking on the sidewalk was pretty small.
“Yeah, I think so,” David said.
The detective showed David another picture, this one a blown up image of just the lady. “Do you recognize her?”
Although the picture was a close-up, the pixilation of the photograph seemed to distort it. “She looks familiar, but I can’t really say who she is.”
“Take your time,” the detective said.
David studied the photograph. “No, I don’t know who it is.”
“Well, she was definitely there at the time of the shooting. We have another picture of her walking back in the other direction at 8:41. That’s a long walk for such a small dog. And she’s carrying a pretty big bag – big enough to hold a gun and some CDs. No one would carry a bag like that just to walk their dog.”
“I think that’s her,” David said. “And I think that was the dog that was licking my face.”
The detective gathered up the pictures and put them back inside his pocket. “Why don’t you show me what’s on the computer?”
David wasn’t sure he should. “I don’t think it will work without an Internet connection.”
“I’m sure we can find one,” the detective said. He went to the door and waved to the nurse. “Where’s the nearest Internet connection?”
“None of these workstations have it,” the nurse said, pointing at the computers at the nurse’s station, “but there’s one just down the hall. We use it all the time.”
“Feel like a little walk?” the detective asked David.
David sensed that no wasn’t the answer the detective was looking for. He started to get out of bed. Since the shooting, he’d only walked the few steps to get up to go to the bathroom and that was with a nurse holding on to him.
When the nurse saw him getting up, she came racing over. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” the detective said. “David here was just saying how he felt like stretching his legs.”
The detective grabbed the laptop in one hand and held onto David with the other. The nurse grabbed David’s other arm as they helped him walk down the hallway to the little alcove where there was a computer with an Internet connection.
“I think we’ll be okay from here,” the detective said to the nurse after they helped David sit down.
The nurse wasn’t sure if she should leave or not.
“I’m fine,” David reassured her.
After she left, David asked the detective to pull the Internet cable from the back of the computer that was there. Then he plugged the cable into his laptop.
As soon as he turned on the computer, it prompted for a password. David stopped to think, and then hummed the limerick to himself that he had created to help him remember it. When he hit the enter key, the computer continued its startup sequence.
“Negotiating protocol…”
“Securing communications channel…”
After a few more seconds, “Welcome, Goliath” appeared on the screen.
“Who’s Goliath?” the detective asked.
“I am,” David said. “That’s my code name.”
“Retrieve instructions,” David typed.
After a few seconds, a message appeared on the screen.
“Watch out for the second shooter.”
“What does that mean?” the detective asked.
“Not really sure, but I think it was telling us to look for the second shooter in the files that the U.S. government released about the Kennedy assassination. The professor said he’d looked at the files – said he knew who the second shooter was.”
“That’s probably why they killed him – and tried to kill you.”
David looked at the detective. “Now, that they’ve got the CDs back, do you think they’re still going to try to kill me?”
“I don’t know. If they really wanted you dead, the lady with the dog could have finished the job. But I’m going to leave an officer outside of your room here until we know for sure. You never actually looked at those files, did you?”
“No, but maybe they think I did.”
“I’ll try to figure out a way to get the word out that you don’t know what was in the files. Maybe that will take the heat off you. I’ll try to leak something to the press.”
“I know,” David said. “My dad’s girlfriend is a reporter – with the Chicago Tribune. I’m sure she’d help – she already helped me when I was in Chicago.”
* * *
“I w
as wondering if you and your girlfriend would mind coming over to the hospital,” Detective Tremblay said when he called Henry. “We need your help with something.”
“Is David okay?”
“Yes, he’s recovering just fine.”
Henry was confused. “Laura was just about to head to the airport to fly back to Chicago. Why do you need her there?”
“I’ll explain everything when you get here. It’s important.”
Henry and Laura showed up about half an hour later. “What’s going on?” Henry asked from the doorway.
Detective Tremblay waved for them to move into David’s room and closed the door behind them. “We’re not sure, but we think there’s a chance there may be another attempt on David’s life.”
Henry looked shocked. “Why?”
“We think this whole thing was a professional hit related to some files pertaining to the Kennedy assassination. The professor told David that he had decrypted the files and that’s why they were meeting – so the professor could give David the CDs. Whoever shot them, took the CDs.”
“So if they got what they were after, why would David still be in danger?”
“Because they may think David saw what was in the files. The professor told David he had looked at the files and knew who the second shooter was. We think that’s why the professor was killed.”
Henry looked at David. “Do you know what was in the files?”
“No. But they don’t know that.”
“That’s why we think David may still be in danger,” the detective said.
Henry looked like he was going to faint. “So what are we going to do?”
The detective looked at Laura. “We need someone to leak the fact that David never saw what was in those files.”
Laura suddenly realized why she had been invited to this meeting. “And you want that person to be me.”
“Precisely,” the detective said. “But it has to look like you found out this information all on your own. If they know I fed it to you, they’ll never believe it and they may still come after David.”
“I don’t like it,” Henry said. “You have to protect David.”
“We will,” the detective said. “But we can’t protect him for the rest of his life. They’ll keep coming for him as long as they think he knows what’s in those files.”
Laura reached over to comfort Henry. “He’s right. In my research for this story, there’s been a lot of potential witnesses who have died mysterious deaths – hit and runs – weird explosions.”
“Do you think you can write the story without making it look like a plant?” the detective asked.
“I’m sure of it,” Laura said, “but I’ll have to name David as my source to give the story any kind of credibility. You’ll also have to give me something that no one else knows – something not already given to the local press.”
David looked at the detective. “The lady with the dog.”
* * *
Laura camped out in David’s room for the next few hours while she wrote the story. She showed it to the detective when she was done.
“I think this will work,” Detective Tremblay said. “How quickly can we get this in the papers?”
“I’m going to call my editor now, but I’m pretty sure this will be front page material. He’s pissed at me right now because he thinks I’ve let the stories we’ve been running on the JFK conspiracy die when I came up here. He’ll wet himself when he sees this. Is there a place around here where I can send this to him?”
“There sure is,” the detective said.
He led Laura down the hall to the little alcove with the computer and the Internet connection. Laura unplugged the cable from the computer and plugged it into her laptop. She sent the story to the Tribune and then called her editor to let him know it was there.
“He says it’ll run front page tomorrow,” Laura said to the detective when she ended the call with her editor.
“Great,” Detective Tremblay said. “I hope this works.”
As Laura bent down to put the Internet cable back into the computer, she glanced down the hallway and was caught by surprise by what she saw. She was sure that it was Todd talking to one of the nurses. She bumped her head on the side of the computer stand as she quickly tried to stand up. When she looked down the hallway again, he was gone.
*** Chapter 26 ***
“Professional Hit Tied to JFK Assassination” the headline read in the Tribune the next day. The story had been picked up by several newsfeeds so it also appeared in multiple newspapers across the U.S. and Canada.
It was a brilliant piece of journalism. It described how four people had been gunned down by professional assassins, how the mysterious “lady with a dog” had scooped up the murder weapon and the CDs containing information about who actually killed JFK and vanished into the night. It also told how the body of one of the assassins had been stolen from the morgue.
The main source for the story was identified as David Shaw, one of the victims of the shooting, who the reporter had secretly interviewed while he recovered in hospital. It described how Professor Nigel Livingston had viewed the files that showed who actually killed JFK, but how the assassins had ended his life before he could show the files to David, and now David wondered, along with the rest of the world, what actually happened on that November day in Dallas, 1963. The story had quotes from Detective Tremblay denying the validity of any of the facts reported in the story and simply stating that their investigation was ongoing.
In subsequent TV interviews, Detective Tremblay played his part perfectly by being “visibly upset” that anything had been leaked to the press. The detective hoped his performance would convince the assassins that David posed no further threat to them.
There was even a TV interview of a very embarrassed chief of police denying that a body had gone missing from the morgue. That part wasn’t acting at all. Detective Tremblay hadn’t informed the chief of the plan, something that he was sure would be discussed in detail at his next performance appraisal.
“Do you think it worked?” Henry asked the detective.
“I’m not sure. I’m going to leave an officer on duty here at the hospital to watch over David for the next few days. If David does know anything about the JFK assassination, they’ll wonder why he didn’t already tell the press. Hopefully, they’ll conclude that he doesn’t have anything to tell and they’ll let him get on with his life.”
The detective turned to Laura. “Thanks for your help. You may have saved David’s life.”
“I think you deserve most of the credit, for coming up with the plan in the first place. All I did was write the story.”
As Laura was heading out of the hospital, she noticed one of the nurses filling in a patient’s chart at the station. She was sure it was the same nurse she had seen the night before.
“Can I help you?” the nurse asked.
“I saw you talking to a man in the hallway here last night. Can I ask who that was?”
The nurse looked confused. “I’m not sure who you’re referring to. We get a lot of people through here.”
“He was tall, just over six feet tall – dark hair.”
The nurse still looked confused.
“Very good looking,” Laura added.
“Oh, him,” the nurse said, her face flushing a little bit. “Yes, I remember him. He didn’t give a name. He was asking about David Shaw’s condition – said he was a friend of the family. Is there a problem?”
Laura looked concerned. “I’m not sure.”
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Detective Tremblay said to the chief. The detective had been called in to explain how the information about the missing body from the morgue had been leaked to the press. “It would have come out eventually anyway. I thought it might help save the kid’s life.”
“You made our whole department look like the Keystone Cops,” the chief said as he stomped around his office. “Now I’ve got to explain how a fucki
ng dead guy got up and walked out of the morgue without anyone noticing.”
“I’m sorry,” Detective Tremblay said again. “Do we know how they actually pulled it off?”
“Some blond lady showed up and said they needed to do a second autopsy – said they might have missed something in the first one. She showed ID saying she was from the Coroner’s office. She signed the body out – it all appeared legit.” The chief sat down at his desk and put his head in his hands. “We’ve even got a security cam picture of her – except the Coroner says he’s never seen her before in his life.”
“Can I see the picture?”
The chief opened the file on his desk, pulled out the picture and threw it at the detective.
As soon as he saw it, the detective knew who it was. “That’s the lady from the crime scene – the lady who took the murder weapon and the CDs – the lady with the dog.”
“Are you sure? This lady looks twenty years older than the one with the dog.”
The detective pulled the picture of the lady with the dog from his coat pocket and placed the two pictures side-by-side. “She must be wearing makeup to make herself look older, but look – look at the hair – it’s identical. It’s obviously a wig.”
The chief took a closer look at both pictures. “We are the fucking Keystone Cops.”
* * *
David was getting restless. He was feeling better and better with each passing day, but he was also bored to tears. “Are your sure you can’t get me a TV or an Internet connection?” David asked the nurse.
“I’ve already told you – this is a recovery room. You can only get those things in regular rooms on the ward. You’re lucky – most people that are in here are unconscious.”
“Then can you move me to a regular room?”
“No, the police have said you’re supposed to stay put until they say otherwise.”
David threw himself back onto his bed. “Do you think I could take my laptop down to that alcove down the hall, so I could use the Internet connection there?”
The nurse was growing tired of David’s whining. “Let me ask.”
The Second Shooter Page 16