JD05 - Conflict of Interest

by Scott Pratt

He reached into the envelope one last time and retrieved a folded piece of paper.

  “This is where I’m staying. Room number and phone number.”

  He laid the paper down among the other things, stood, and shuffled to the door. I watched him. He stopped and turned back to face me.

  “I’m sorry, Joseph,” he said. “I’m truly sorry.”

  And then he was gone. I turned and headed for the bathroom to retrieve Sarah and try to offer her some comfort, or to let her comfort me.

  CHAPTER 15

  You can’t miss what you’ve never had. I kept repeating those words to myself. You can’t miss what you’ve never had.

  Sarah had actually taken the encounter with the man who called himself Jack Dillard better than I thought she would, at least on the surface. At one point she smiled and looked at me with wet, gleaming eyes and said, “Who’d a thunk it?” But that was Sarah’s way. Her primary psychological defense mechanisms were sarcasm and dark humor, usually ladled out with a thick dollop of profanity on top. I loved her deeply, though, and was concerned that the shock of what she’d learned that morning would send her back into the abyss of drug and alcohol abuse. She assured me it wouldn’t, and when she left she said she was going to work the rest of the day and then head straight to the babysitter’s to pick up Grace.

  I sat behind my desk for awhile, thinking about what had just happened. I wanted to call Caroline – she was my best friend and my counselor – but before I did, I wanted to try to think it through on my own. Growing up without a father was something I’d never really allowed myself to dwell upon, at least not consciously. There’d been pangs of envy and regret when I was young, when I’d see other boys with their fathers or hear other boys talk about their fathers, but I didn’t wallow in self-pity. I stayed busy, I worked hard, and I avoided self-examination. My mother, on the other hand, was embittered by the Vietnam War and spent her life thinking that politicians, generals and defense contractors – the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower had spoken of when he left office – had robbed her of her husband. She rarely mentioned my father, and when she did it was invariably followed by an acid-laced diatribe against the government. I wondered how she would have felt if she’d known he’d abandoned her, that he’d abandoned all of us and was living in Malaysia with another family.

  I like to think I derived one important benefit from growing up without a father, though. I became an attentive and loving father to my own children. I had no regrets about the way Caroline and I had gone about raising them. We’d made some mistakes, certainly, but as the old saying goes, children don’t come with instructions. I could look back on the two decades-plus that Jack and Lilly had been alive, and I knew that I’d done everything I could to help them become independent, to help them find their own way in the world, and to let them know that I loved and supported them. Jack had been gone for five years attending college and playing baseball and I missed him terribly, but whenever I thought of him, I felt a sense of pride and satisfaction. It was the same with Lilly, who was now married, raising her own daughter, and working while her husband attended medical school. I wondered whether I might have taken fatherhood for granted somehow if mine had been around when I was young. There was no way of knowing.

  You can’t miss what you never had. You can’t miss what you never had. The words kept running through my mind like a mantra.

  The beep of my cell phone brought me out of the trance. It was a text from Richard Monroe. It said, simply, “What now?”

  I got up, went into the restroom, splashed some cold water on my face, and looked in the mirror.

  “Deal with the old man later,” I said out loud. “You have a child to find.”

  I texted Richard back and asked him to lose the reporters again and come to the office. He showed up in twenty minutes and said he and Mary hadn’t gone back home. They’d gone to a close friend’s house instead. Mary was resting, still under the influence of sedatives her doctor had prescribed. It was certainly understandable. Her father’s money was now gone along with her daughter and the situation seemed hopeless. I told Richard I thought it would be best to inform the police about the money being taken and he reluctantly agreed. He asked me to handle it, which meant I would soon be having an unpleasant exchange with either Leon Bates or the FBI.

  We spent the next couple of hours organizing the list Richard had emailed me into columns of friends, professionals, business contacts, and a column I labeled “miscellaneous.” We talked about each one briefly, and the more we talked, the more I realized what a daunting task it would be for me to effectively cover the list. Even if I could, there was no way of knowing that the person who had kidnapped Lindsay was on the list. Still, there were several people that interested me and I wanted to talk to all of them. My biggest concern was time. How much longer would Lindsay be alive, if she was still alive?

  “I don’t care all that much for Charles or Earl, but they’re supposed to be very good at what they do,” Richard said when we took a break from the list. “And if they are, then who – or what – are we up against? I feel like the kidnapper is toying with us, but at the same time, because he’s toying with us, I feel like Lindsay is still alive.”

  I nodded my head and must have smiled unconsciously.

  “What?” Richard said. “Did I say something funny?”

  “No, no. I was just thinking about something my wife said yesterday. She feels the same way you do about Lindsay being alive, and judging from experience, I tend to take her intuition pretty seriously. So what does Charles’s company do? Mary said something about risk management. Is he in the insurance business?”

  “Security,” Richard said. “Mostly human security, as in protecting business executives and diplomats in foreign countries. They do a lot of high risk work in dangerous places. One thing I’ve heard Charles talk about is ransom kidnappings in South America and Mexico. That’s one of the reasons I was okay with leaving the police out of it. Charles used to talk about his business when Mary and I were first married. He doesn’t say much any more, though.”

  “Did something happen between you?”

  “Not really. Mary let a few things slip about him, things about how he treated her mother. I asked him about it a couple of years ago when we were all on vacation in Belize and Charles and I were both half in the bag. It didn’t go well. We haven’t talked much since.”

  “But Mary said she worships him. That’s the word she used. Worship.”

  “I know, and she does, at least to an extent. He’s a decorated Marine aviator and a multi-millionaire, a self-made man’s man. In a lot of ways, he’s a daughter’s dream. It’s a complicated relationship, but that isn’t so unusual, is it? A lot of fathers and daughters have complicated relationships. We’ve never really gotten into it that deeply. Mary and I have been happy and I didn’t see the point in pushing it. She seemed to be doing just fine – we seemed to be doing just fine – until this happened.”

  “Do you want me to share information with your father-in-law and Botts? Do you want me to keep working with them to try to find Lindsay after what happened yesterday? I guess it would make sense since they have experience with ransom kidnappings and know how to track people, but there are going to be problems with the police from now on. As soon as they find out about what happened, they’re going to start yelling and screaming and threatening to arrest people for obstruction of justice and interference with an investigation.”

  As if on cue, I heard the buzzer that told me someone was walking through the front door. I got up and walked to the small foyer and was confronted by three men wearing ill-fitting suits and ugly shoes. Only cops wore suits and shoes like that, and because the suits were decent quality and none of them were fat, I knew they were FBI agents.

  The one leading the way was Slavic looking – sandy-blond hair cut like a politician’s, icy, green eyes, pinkish complexion and an equine face. He was a couple of inches taller than me, thick-chested, broad-sho
uldered and strong-necked. I stopped a few feet from him and we locked eyes the way a couple of bulls would lock horns.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” I said.

  “I understand you delivered three million dollars in ransom money yesterday,” the Aryan said. “Three million dollars that wound up being stolen by a man who had already kidnapped a child.”

  “You must be Special Agent Dedrick,” I said.

  “I’m your worst nightmare right now, lawyer.”

  “I’m terrified. Do you mind if I ask how you obtained this scurrilous information?”

  “From the kidnapper, pretty boy. I had a little trouble understanding him, though, because he couldn’t stop laughing.”

  Richard Monroe stepped out of my office and into the foyer. Dedrick eyed him suspiciously for a couple of seconds before turning his attention back to me.

  “Do you think you can just waltz in and take over a kidnapping investigation?” Dedrick said. “Because if you do, you’re—”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Monroe have hired me to represent them,” I said. “If you have anything more to say to them, you’ll have to go through me.”

  “I want their cell phones,” Dedrick snapped.

  “Then get a warrant.”

  “I’ll have it in a couple of hours.”

  “Really? And your probable cause will be what? You have no idea who the kidnapper is so the parents must have something to do with it?”

  “My probable cause will be that they obstructed justice and interfered with a federal investigation.”

  I turned and smiled at Richard. “See? What’d I tell you?”

  “You find this amusing, do you?” Dedrick said.

  “No, I find it tragic,” I said, “but I’ve been around this block as many times as you have and I know when a cop is blowing smoke. The Monroes have no legal obligation to cooperate with you in any way, especially since you’ve openly accused them of being involved in their daughter’s kidnapping. You’ve made them suspects, and that gives them rights. One of those rights is to tell you to go piss up a rope, and right now, that’s what they’re inclined to do. So I’m going to ask you politely – one time – to please get out of my office. Mr. Monroe and I are busy.”

  The muscles in Dedrick’s jaw started twitching and a vein popped out in the middle of his forehead. I noticed his left hand as it closed into a fist. It was good to know that his buttons were so easily pushed. He was angry and off-balance, so I decided to give him another nudge.

  “Go find Lindsay Monroe,” I said. “Go do your job.”

  He took a step toward me and, for a second, I thought he was going to take a swing at me.

  “I’ll find her,” he hissed. “I’ll find her, I’ll find the kidnapper, and I’ll find the money. And while I’m at it, I’m going to find a way to have you disbarred and thrown in jail where you belong.”

  “Sometimes I think being disbarred wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” I said. “At least I wouldn’t have to deal with badge-toting muscle heads who think they know the law and get off on making empty threats.”

  He glared at me while his buddies shifted uneasily behind him. After several seconds, he turned abruptly and walked out the door with his little entourage in tow. I turned and looked at Richard, whose face had taken on the color of bleached bone.

  “That went well,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER 16

  Later that afternoon, I drove to the East Tennessee State University campus to an appointment I hadn’t told Richard or Mary about. Tom Short, a forensic psychiatrist whom I’d worked with many times in the past, was waiting for me in his office. Tom was a short, wiry academic with a neatly clipped gray beard and a pipe that he used like a pacifier. He never lit the thing, but it was almost always in his mouth. He was sitting at his desk staring at a computer screen flanked by two shaded lamps. He turned his head when I walked in and peered at me over his reading glasses.

  “You remind me of a Timex watch,” he said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’? Remember that old saw? Nobody even wears watches these days. Cell phones have made them obsolete.”

  I smiled and reached for his hand as he stood.

  “It’s good to see you again, Tom.”

  “And you as well. You really don’t look much worse for the wear. I expected you would have aged more after... after…”

  “The gunfight at the OK Corral?”

  “I never really got the details, just what I read in the paper.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “But you’re okay about it? Nightmares? Anxiety attacks? Depression? Anything like that?”

  “Nightmares for a while, but not anymore.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. I still had nightmares once in awhile, but they were neither as frequent nor as intense as they’d been in the immediate aftermath. Tom looked at me with what I perceived as a touch of skepticism for a few seconds, but then he motioned to the chair in front of his desk.

  “Take a seat, Joe. After we talked on the phone, I decided to do some research to refresh my memory. I haven’t worked on a kidnapping case in years, and then it was just as a consultant, but since you said you think this might be the work of a pedophile, I thought I’d brush up on a few things. I’ve worked with plenty of pedophiles and I’m current on the professional literature. But let’s just sit back and take a look at this analytically, shall we?”

  Looking at things analytically was what Tom did best. As an attorney, I tried to do the same, but over the years I’d come to realize that emotion sometimes clouded my judgment. Tom didn’t have that problem. Outside the office, he was fun, especially when he had a couple of drinks in him. Caroline and I had been out with Tom and his wife, Jennifer, several times. He was an attentive and loving husband and father and he was passionate about politics and bluegrass music. Inside the office, however, Tom’s demeanor reflected his training as an academic and a scientist. There was no room for emotion.

  “Just to be sure I didn’t miss anything, we have a six-year-old girl who was taken after someone cut the screen covering a second-floor window and then presumably climbed into her room. Was there any sign of struggle in the room?”

  “Not that I know of. Just the note on the bed from what the parents tell me.”

  “So, unless the kidnapper is a neighbor, he had to get a vehicle fairly close to the house, remove a ladder, carry it to the back of the house, set the ladder up, climb it and cut the screen. He knew which room the girl slept in, obviously, so he’d done some pretty extensive reconnaissance. How far is the window from the ground?”

  “About fifteen feet.”

  “So it was an extension ladder unless he’s a ninja or Spiderman. Once inside the room, he immobilized the child, probably either by drugging her or binding her. He then had to climb out the window and back down the ladder while carrying her. He had to break the ladder down and then carry her and the ladder back to the vehicle. I assume you looked around outside, too?”

  “I’m familiar with the neighborhood, but I drove around it a couple of times before I came here and took a closer look.”

  “Is this plausible? Is it plausible that someone could have done all of these things without being seen?”

  “The house sits on a corner in the middle of downtown Jonesborough,” I said. “There’s an old county extension agent office half-a-block to the east that has a small parking lot in the back that’s accessed by a narrow street. He could have parked there. The lot is only about two hundred feet from the window and it sits on the edge of a little grove of trees. If he backed a van up to the trees and walked toward the house, he would have been in the trees for about sixty, seventy feet. After that, he would have crossed two neighbors’ back yards – about a hundred feet. Both yards have a few trees in them where he could have hidden. There are a couple of street lamps at the corner in front of the Monroe’s house, but they’re those old
fashioned lamps that are only about ten feet off the ground and are designed for ambiance more than security. You know how Jonesborough is, it’s small and quiet, very little if any traffic that time of night. So yeah, if he went in anywhere from midnight until five in the morning, he could have gotten in and out pretty easily without being seen.”

  “All right, assuming it happened the way we’re discussing, we can be fairly certain about several things. The kidnapper is male. He’s young. He’s agile. He’s strong. He’s driving either a pickup truck or a van. He’s intelligent, he’s patient, and he’s organized. He’s either a local or has been working in the area for a fairly significant amount of time. Since he has your client’s cell phone number, the chances are good that he’s either a friend, he’s worked for the Monroes directly or he works for someone – or has worked for someone – who works for them. A logical hypothesis would be that he’s in the construction business or the home maintenance business, a carpenter or a plumber or a painter or a roofer or something like that.”

  “Richard gave me a list of his cell phone contacts,” I said. “I already divided it into groups. There are some people like that on the list.”

  “I’d start with them,” Tom said. “The other thing we need to consider right now is the kind of person you’re dealing with. Criminal profiling 101 tells us that you’re dealing with a Caucasian male, early to late twenties, who lives alone. He was most likely physically, mentally and/or sexually abused as a child. He’s a social misfit. His sexual urges and fantasies have grown so powerful that he can no longer contain them within himself; he’s acting them out now. His first step was picking out a child, second step was surveillance, third step preparation, fourth step execution of the kidnapping, and now he’s actively engaging his fantasies through sexual acts.”

  I muttered a curse word and shook my head.

  “Are you alright?” Tom asked.

  “It’s just so… so disgusting,” I said. “It makes me want to find him and rip his head off, along with a few other body parts.”