Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3)

by Bertrand, J. Mark

  “Sir, if you operate a motor vehicle in the state of Texas . . .”

  “Was I speeding? Do I have a brake light out?”

  “Sir, if you can just cut me some slack here. License and registration?”

  Something in Farouk’s manner seems to reassure Nesbitt. The only part of him visible to the cameras is the back of his head. He slumps a little and sighs loud enough for the microphone to pick it up.

  “You need to understand something. I want you to listen carefully. You are interfering with a U.S. government operation. I’m working directly with the Central Intelligence Agency. You understand what I’m telling you, officer?”

  Farouk sends another micro-glance toward Silvestri. When I was in uniform, there were some heady late-night traffic stops, but nothing like this. If a guy I’d pulled over started telling me he worked for the CIA, I’m not sure how I would’ve handled it. I probably would have laughed. To his credit, Farouk stays professional. Maybe he’s too nervous in front of his training officer to show what he’s really thinking.

  “Sir, I’m going to need your license and registration to call this in.”

  He doesn’t come out and say that he’s going to confirm Nesbitt’s story, but his words are carefully enough chosen to be interpreted that way. Despite his belligerence, Nesbitt’s hand appears in the window, extending his license toward Farouk. Then he reaches toward the glove compartment and returns with an insurance card. Farouk tells him to sit tight, then returns to the patrol car, disappearing from view.

  My next step in this situation would probably have been to administer a Breathalyzer. Whether you smell alcohol or not, when a driver claims to be a secret agent, that’s probable cause in my book. Maybe Farouk signals something to Silvestri. The training officer takes a couple of steps toward the cruiser, then stops. He seems to nod, as if to say message received. Then he turns on his heel and approaches Nesbitt’s window.

  I’ve watched the video countless times by now, but never on a large screen. The enlargement renders the details as boxy pixels, but even so, I notice something this time that I’ve never observed before.

  As Silvestri makes his approach, Nesbitt’s head is clearly turned. Up to this point, only the back of the head was visible, but now I can see the darkened cavity of an eye and a mouth. He is watching the training officer as he advances.

  And Silvestri does something I never noted before, too. Like Farouk, he rests his hand on the butt of his pistol. As he passes across the spotlight’s beam, his right hand is brightly illuminated. I can’t make out the individual digits, but the gesture is too familiar for me to miss. He pops the thumb break securing his gun into the holster, then flips it free. This is the sort of thing a cop might do if he’s expecting to have to draw.

  I pause the video and go back to the computer, doing a search that cross-references the shooting and the term thumb break. Instead of the hundreds of results that came up earlier, this time there are only a few. The first one takes me to a blog post with screen captures from this moment in the video. Red lines overlay the image, illustrating the significance of the movement. The title of the post reads, EXECUTIONER COP GETS READY FOR THE KILL. So at least I’m not the only one to have noticed.

  Back in front of the television, I advance the video a few frames at a time. Silvestri never lifts his side arm out of the holster. He also never removes his hand from the butt. There’s nothing to suggest he’s a would-be executioner. Then again, he’s clearly prepared to draw his weapon.

  “You have no justification for doing that!”

  The tone of Nesbitt’s voice sounds different to me. He’s not arguing about the traffic stop. He’s protesting that popped thumb break. I feel certain of that. It’s the perceived escalation of force that sets him off this time.

  Silvestri’s reaction is a little surprising. On the big screen, it’s clear that as Nesbitt speaks, the training officer’s face turns. He looks away from the driver, back toward the patrol car. Back toward the camera. I pause the video and run it back. The resolution is poor, but I’m sure there is a change in the face, a momentary fullness signifying the backward glance. Why would he take his eyes off a belligerent driver at such a critical moment? To check on Farouk, perhaps? To make sure he’s ready to provide backup should it be necessary? That makes sense. I can even imagine myself in the same situation making a similar mistake. But watching again, what it really looks like is this: Silvestri’s about to make a move and he’s checking behind him to see if anybody’s looking.

  It’s ridiculous, of course. He’s a training officer, brimming with experience. Even if the conspiracy theorists are right and he’s about to attempt an assassination, a glance over the shoulder isn’t enough. He would know the camera was filming everything he did.

  The muzzle flash from Nesbitt’s pistol looks huge on screen, out of all proportion to the tiny size of his .32 caliber ammunition. The flash is caused by unburned power hitting the night air. Erupting in Silvestri’s face, it must have been blinding. He reacts like a blindman, stumbling backward, falling on his backside. Only after he’s on the ground does his gun clear the holster. I remember it differently, the training officer firing from the ground, but watching closely this doesn’t appear to be the case. It’s Farouk who flies into action, Farouk who’s already rushing forward, his bullets shattering the windows of Nesbitt’s Merc. As far as I can tell, the training officer never even fires. Nesbitt slumps forward, just the top of his head visible on camera. He’s dead, struck in the neck by one of Farouk’s .40 caliber rounds.

  When the footage ends, I sit with the controller pressed against my cheek, contemplating a replay. I thought I knew what I was going to see. For the most part, I did. But that gesture of Silvestri’s, the backward glance, coupled with the release of his thumb break . . . I’m starting to have my doubts.

  Nesbitt was clearly worked up. Based on the way things actually went down, there’s no question he was also in the wrong. If I’m right about him seeing Silvestri release the thumb break, though, it helps explain why he thought his only course of action was a preemptive strike. And that backward glance really bothers me. It looks like the unconscious action of a guilty man.

  ———

  Troubled by my new doubts, I shower and shave. The water makes the scrapes and nicks on my hands and legs burn, scrapes and nicks I didn’t realize I even had.

  “You’re getting too old for this,” I tell the reflection in the steamy mirror.

  I towel myself dry and do some stretching exercises on the bedroom floor, trying to limber my leg for the day. Bending over, I can just touch the ground without bending my knees, but there’s a nasty pull all down my leg. It feels like a bamboo shoot has been jammed down through the muscles. All I have to do is push the stretch a little further and the pain grows intense. The way it travels along the sciatic line, I imagine digging my hand through the tissue, grabbing hold of the nerve, and yanking it out.

  The stretch exacerbates the discomfort at first. After I walk it off, I can feel the leg relaxing into a prickly numbness, about as functional as it gets.

  I’ve known cops who had to retire based on back injuries. There’s so much weight to carry, so many demands that even a plainclothes detective can’t keep up. In my mind, there’s always been something pathetic about such cases. I’ve always wondered if the guys whining about their bad backs weren’t goldbricking. Now I’m one of them.

  And the stupidity of the fall still gets to me. A man urges me to be careful, and because he’s younger than me and I’m feeling conscious of my age, to defy his expectations I take a leap that ends up confirming both his assumption and my worst fear.

  Given time, a man can adapt to just about any pain. I can live with this if I have to. That’s what I tell myself. I can live with it until the day that I can’t.

  After I’m dressed, I head downstairs again. Part of me wants to call Wilcox back and get him to watch the video with me. Either he will tell me I’m crazy or he’ll s
ee what I see. If it’s the latter, I reckon he will feel duty-bound to take a second look at the case. I’ll warn him about giving out Tom Englewood’s number, too. That’s a good way to get people killed.

  Not that I want to put ideas in Wilcox’s head.

  Seeing him again stirred up some feelings. Maybe I’m yearning for the old days when we were still partners and the world seemed so uncomplicated.

  The old days.

  That was a phrase Jeff used last night. He had insisted that Nesbitt and I were acquainted, that we knew each other from “the old days,” whatever that means. Once the thought lodges in my head, I can’t get it out.

  The only photos I remember seeing of Nesbitt were in the newspaper just after the shooting. They didn’t ring a bell at the time, but I wasn’t expecting them to. It’s always possible we knew each other by sight or that—considering his penchant for cloak-and-dagger—I knew him by a different name.

  Back to the computer, back to the interminable search results. I click around until only images are displayed, then only the ones with decent resolution. There seem to have been two pictures of Andrew Nesbitt circulating at the time of his death. The more common one depicts a jowly, balding man of sixty with capped teeth and crow’s-feet. His button-down collar bulges at the sides, framing the knot of a regimental tie. I stare at the picture, but there’s nothing familiar.

  In the second image, which appears only on a few sites and seems to have been produced in an effort to verify his intelligence claims, a younger Nesbitt stands in a receiving line, shaking hands with the first President Bush, former Director of Central Intelligence. The photo appears to date during Bush’s reelection campaign, so there’s no direct tie to the CIA. His face is leaner and more handsome, his hair thick and jet-black. He sports a full Tom Selleck mustache.

  It’s the mustache that does it.

  Old days is right.

  The summer of 1986, to be exact. I was just twenty-four years old, younger than Jeff is now. A first lieutenant assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division at Ft. Polk, living off base in nearby Leesville, Louisiana. We all knew we had to assist him with whatever he requested, but none of us knew his real name. One of the sergeants, taking into consideration the facial hair, dubbed him Magnum.

  I knew Nesbitt after all. And what I remember, I do not like.

  Interlude : 1986

  The housing block where the cabana boys were quartered wasn’t difficult to locate, not once I started looking. The trick was making do without the help of Sgt. Crewes or anyone likely to report back to him. The man had ears all over the base. I spent a few hours each night camped out in my car, keeping an eye on the block with a starlight scope, all without the sergeant’s knowing. My first surveillance.

  I never saw Magnum there, but I spotted a couple of guys I took to be handlers. They escorted the group when it left the building, functioning more like tour guides than guards. Occasionally they went out on errands, returning with groceries or beer or, on one occasion, a van-load of women in high heels and skimpy dresses. Through the scope I couldn’t make out any features—either of the men or the prostitutes they’d procured. That night in particular I left with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Good-time girls on base?” Crewes said in mock horror. “Something’s gotta be done. Next thing you know, there’ll be dancing.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  I’d brought up the subject without explaining my interest, saying I’d heard from some of the investigators that it was getting to be a problem.

  “You never struck me as the puritanical type, sir.”

  “Last time I checked, it was illegal.”

  “So it is,” he said thoughtfully. “So it is.”

  A day later I was standing at attention in front of Maj. Shattuck’s desk, with the major looking right through me. He didn’t need to say a word, but he did anyway.

  “March, I thought we’d gone over this. I told you to steer clear of the man. I told you to have nothing to do with him, that he was dangerous. Do you know something I don’t?”

  “No, sir—”

  “Because you must think you do, otherwise why go against me on this? I was looking out for you, son, and you’re throwing it in my face.”

  “No, sir!”

  “What other explanation is there?”

  A long silence.

  “Explanation, sir? For what, sir?”

  Shattuck gave me a withering look of disgust. He opened a file folder lying on the desk before him, wrote a note inside, then slid it away. “From now on, Lieutenant March, you will follow my instructions. You will not have any contact with that man. You will not go anywhere near the housing where his people are quartered. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You must have a pretty high opinion of your abilities,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  I did, but I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to ask who’d informed him, though I knew the answer had to be Sgt. Crewes. Subtle as I’d attempted to be, I’d given the game away with my questions. I also wanted to know what harm it did to keep an eye on things. Something was going on under our noses that the major didn’t like any more than I did. In fact, while my feelings had been conflicted, he knew that Magnum meant trouble from the start. So why warn me off like this?

  “You have nothing to say?” Shattuck asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  ———

  I was tempted to drive by the housing block that night, not to stop but to roll by casually and give the place a glance. But I thought of all the other cars parked on the street and remembered the warrant officer who’d been trailing Magnum from the PX. There was no point in bringing aggravation down on my head.

  I managed to clock César a couple of times on base, though. Whenever I did, tagging along to see where he was heading. In the mornings I jogged through the picnic tables in search of random encounters, but the cabana boys had moved their party elsewhere.

  The one time I spotted Magnum, it was at a bookstore off base. He was browsing through the high-tone foreign policy journals shelved by the newspapers, the ones nobody ever bought, so I ducked into the history section to avoid being spotted. It didn’t work. When I looked up from a volume on warfare in the classical world, Magnum was staring at me from across the store. He winked, then disappeared out the door.

  I dropped the picnic detour from my morning path, returning to my old route. On the sidewalk at a quarter past seven, I jogged past a couple of parked cars in front of an officers’ housing unit, swinging wide to avoid a woman who was slipping an overnight bag into an open hatchback. A few steps later I stopped and turned. She shut the hatch before noticing my presence. Her hand went unconsciously to the stud in her nose.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You remember me, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling, though I could tell she didn’t. “Good to see you.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not a customer, ma’am. We ran into each other about a week ago. You were bolting out of a car, and there I was.”

  “Oh.” The smile faded. “That was you? Are you all right? I didn’t—no, of course I didn’t. How could I? Hurt you, I mean.”

  “You didn’t hurt me. But I was concerned. You got out of there in a hurry.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “The man in the car. His name is César, right?”

  She shrugged. “If you say so. Look, I should probably get out of here.” She nodded at the houses behind me. “This is supposed to be a surgical strike, you know? In and out. No witnesses.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  It was the wrong question to ask. Her cheeks flushed and she started digging in her purse for the car keys.

  “No, wait. I’m just trying to help. I want to know what was going on in that car.”

  She got the door open, then paused to laugh. “You really are
sweet, you know that? I could tell you what was going on, but I wouldn’t want to corrupt your morals . . . or put any ideas into your head.”

  “You should be careful around that guy.”

  “No kidding,” she said. She slammed the door and drove away. For the second time I watched her go. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. A student, maybe. She had a nice car, wore decent clothes, didn’t look at all like my idea of a prostitute. Not that I subscribed to any heart-of-gold hypothesis. Not that I romanticized the underworld or its inhabitants. She just seemed too . . . something. Too real to do what she did.

  I hadn’t gotten her name. I hadn’t written down her license plate number or anything like that. There was no way of tracking her down after the fact, declaring my identity and giving her some kind of warning to stay off base. With nothing but a sense of confusion, a sense of uneasiness to go on, I took a few steps and kept on running.

  I should have tried harder than that.

  CHAPTER 18

  My union attorney, no stranger to officer-involved shootings, meets me in advance of my official sit-down with Internal Affairs, telling me he’s expecting a walkover. “You’re in the clear on this, no question. If they want to make out that excessive force was used, the fact that you were unfamiliar with the weapon should answer that.” I wish I could share his confidence. As we file into the interview room, I scan the IAD office for Wilcox. He’s nowhere to be seen.

  The detective with the tan lines on the side of his head conducts the questioning, with a colleague waiting in the wings to take notes. I brace myself for a grilling, remembering his demeanor at the hospital, but my attorney’s assessment proves prophetic. We work through the events leading up to the shooting step-by-step, without hostility. He asks the questions, I answer, and he moves right on without challenging what I’ve said. After a few minutes, we’re in a comfortable rhythm. My attorney relaxes into his chair.

  “Let’s take a break,” the detective says once we’ve gone through the story beginning to end. He sends his colleague out for coffee, then splits for a bathroom break.