by Josh Karnes
Chapter 24
Isla de Vieques, Puerto Rico
James was awestruck. He was completely taken off-guard. How does he know? What does he know? James thought.
After the call came in from Lieutenant Ramos yesterday, Ray Ortiz was assigned to the case and opened a new missing persons file. He began by looking into the family. He quickly found the U.S. Customs and Immigration report of their entry into San Juan, which identified exactly who they were dealing with. None of the Gradys had any kind of criminal record, but there were plenty of other records. It appeared that the majority of the family's income came from James's engineering job with an outfit in Houston called TCP Compudyne, where he earned barely six figures. Ortiz learned that they were sued a couple of years ago and owed big money from it and then suddenly paid it all off without any apparent source of extra pay. Now a working-class family of five was on a reasonably expensive vacation and it didn't feel like they were on any kind of tight budget. Something was up, and Ortiz wanted to know.
Ortiz had crafted his question to intentionally put James off balance, maybe keep him from protecting himself as effectively.
“What money are you talking about?”
“Come on, James. There's no use in hiding, we're going to find out eventually. Might as well come clean now.”
He doesn't know, James thought. He's fishing.
“Mr. Ortiz, you are going to have to be more specific,” James said, bluffing.
“Listen, James. We're trying to find your son here. See this file?” Ortiz held up a paper, “See that first number? Seventy-nine. That means 'missing person.' Now, we need to be sure that that shouldn't say seven, which is 'kidnapping.' Family shows up on luxurious island resort, suddenly no longer in half a million dollars of debt, spending money like it grows on trees? That sounds like someone with a lot of money. But I checked your bank accounts, retirement, stock options, 401K, the works. Looks like you're living above your means.” James just looked at his hands. He didn't respond. “I'm not from the IRS, Treasury, Secret Service, SEC, not with the DEA. We're not trying to nail you for whatever it is that paid for this trip and paid off your settlement debt two years ago. We're just trying to find your son. That's my only goal here. But to do it, I need to know what I'm dealing with.”
Kidnapping. Could that be? Could it really be that Joseph was kidnapped? No way. Nobody else knew about his money. Nobody would kidnap the son of an engineer from Houston. But Ortiz had brought up a good point. Should he come clean? Would Ortiz really look the other way? Did the FBI investigate this kind of thing? Would they turn him over to the IRS? And if he didn't come clean, what had Melissa told them? Or what would she tell them? The boys didn't know the details, so he didn't have to worry about keeping their story straight. But Melissa knew exactly how much money they made on their arbitrage deal and precisely how they did it. Would she tell? Did she hate James enough to send him to prison?
“Mr. Ortiz,” James began, speaking deliberately. He was being recorded after all, and making a statement to a federal agent. He would say as little as possible. “It's true that a couple of years ago I was given enough money to pay off our settlement debt. But this didn't make me 'rich' and there's no way this would make us a target for kidnapping.” That was at least partly true, or part of the truth.
“You were given half a million dollars?”
“The debt was more like three hundred K.”
“Excuse me, James, but do you really expect me to believe that? Who gives you three hundred thousand dollars? Did you write out a receipt?” Ortiz said sarcastically.
“How is this important to finding Joseph? You just said you are not interested in how I got the money. I just told you that it's not enough to have made us rich. You saw our bank account. If even the FBI doesn't think we have a ton of money, then how would some random kidnapper think differently?”
James had a point. Ortiz wasn't going to get anywhere with more questions, even though his gut told him that where there was smoke there was definitely fire. But he needed the Gradys to be on his side and to be honest and forthcoming if they were to have any chance of finding Joseph, so he decided to drop it. For now.
“Alright, Mr. Grady. But before we move on from this, I need you to be dead straight with me. Again, I'm not here to investigate you for any wrongdoing, unless somehow you are directly involved in your son's disappearance, which I sincerely doubt. But if you are somehow crossways with the criminal element, I need to know that right now if we hope to find your son. Drug deal gone bad, double-crossed the wrong money launderer, didn't make a payoff you were supposed to make, I don't know. There's lots of bad guys who would take your kid as leverage. Doesn't have to be the ordinary rich-guy-ransom deal.”
“Mr. Ortiz, believe me. There is nothing, nothing, like that. We are just an ordinary family on vacation here. It's just like I said before. We needed a vacation. We came here to Vieques because it's beautiful and peaceful. This is not exactly Monaco or the Seychelles. Americans go to Puerto Rico because it's the Caribbean on the cheap. I have an ordinary job and don't have anything to do with any criminals.”
“So not you, but your wife? Maybe your kids? One of your boys have a run in with a pot dealer? Your wife play bunco with a gangster's wife? Something like that?”
“Dude, seriously. No. No way. Nothing at all like that.”
“Okay James. I believe you. You know, I had to ask. Kidnapping is a very real threat, although not as bad here as it is in many other places for Americans. I'm still not going to really rule it out one hundred percent, but I'll move it to the bottom of the list. Unfortunately, that leaves very little on the list for us to investigate.”
James tried not to breathe a sigh of relief. But he knew he was not really out of the woods. He was under the microscope. If they didn't find Joseph in the next few hours, and if this Ortiz had any more time to dig, James had no doubt he'd find something. Someone would say something. One of the kids would say “foreign currency” or Melissa would say “James's other bank account” and Ortiz would be all over it. If this drags on for a week, James is done for. He carefully considered what he had just stated, on the record, to a federal agent. As far as he could recall, everything he had said was true, but hardly the whole truth. So maybe he wouldn't add “lying to a federal officer” to his list of offenses.
“Mr. Grady, I think I have enough for now.” Ortiz stopped the recording and put his phone back in his pocket. James reached to collect his passport. “Thank you for your candor,” Ortiz said. “I may have more questions. I will need you to be available to work closely with us on this. We're all after the same thing: to find your son.”
James nodded, and they both rose and exited Ramos' office. Across the hall, Mark and Eli appeared to have finished their statements and someone had brought in some food. Melissa and the boys were eating and chatting with each other, along with Morales and Ramos. “You can stay here, go back to your hotel, whatever, but we are going to buckle down and find Joseph. We have a lot of work to do this afternoon,” Ortiz said to the group.
“What can we do to help?” Melissa asked.
“Just be available when we have questions or if we need you. Keep your cell phones handy and charged up. Stay nearby so we can get you quickly if we need you.”
With a minimum of grumbling, the Gradys all filed out of the police station and left the FBI agents and Ramos there in the conference room.
“Allison,” Ortiz began, “I need you to begin tracking their phones. We need to monitor the calls and text messages coming in and going out. Also, to the degree we can, try and get a location history on the phones. I know tower coverage may be iffy here, but I want to know if any of them leaves the island. Set up an alert if any of them hit on a known criminal phone number.”
“On it,” Allison Morales said, as she hunkered over her laptop.
“Lieutenant Ramos, I need you to coordinate with the police in Fajardo and Culebra. We need to do a canvass of
those areas like you did last night at the marina here. Let's use local resources there.”
“Got it,” Ramos replied, and he left for his own office.
Ortiz then sat down at the conference table, confident in having delegated the urgent matters, and began his own task: find out what was going on at Isla Roca.