by Brad Parks
That meant Whipple was making money both ways. If he had ten million shares he sold short, the thirty-dollar drop in ApotheGen shares had netted him roughly three hundred million. But then, as ApotheGen’s price shot back into the nineties—or beyond—that was another three hundred million. Or more. It would put the Whipple Alliance well on its way to another banner year of returning huge profits for its clients and huge commissions for the celebrity fund manager.
“That’s a great story,” I said. “Can you prove any of it?”
“I already have, if you just think about it for a second,” Mark said. “That short sale contract was in my name. Where would a guy like me get the leverage to enter into a contract of that size with anyone? You think I could stroll into a bank and say, ‘Hey, look at me, I’ve got five grand in my checking account and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar house that’s upside down, but you got my back for a contract that, if it goes the wrong way, could end up costing me millions, right?’ My collateral for that contract was Andy.”
I felt my fists balling. “So if I have this right, Andy learns I’m the judge on the ApotheGen case and says, ‘Hey, help me kidnap your brother-in-law’s kids and I’ll make you rich?’”
“Yes and no. Andy thought he would be able to bribe you by offering you a piece of the action, because that’s Andy’s world. He thinks money can buy anything and anyone. I told him you weren’t programmed that way and told him he could go ahead and fire me but I wasn’t going to cooperate. It was Karen who said, ‘No, no, no, if you lose your job we’ll lose everything. Think about the kids.’ She really thought with Andy blackballing me I’d never be able to get another job, or at least not another job that would pay even half as well. She was already doing the math that we’d lose the house and probably go bankrupt. But she also knew you weren’t going to take a bribe. So she came up with this kidnapping scheme.”
“You’re lying,” Alison spat. “Karen would never do that.”
“You don’t know your own sister very well.” Mark turned toward Alison, looking her in the eyes even as the blood continued to ooze from the cut near his own. “Don’t you realize how much she resents you? I mean, we all laugh when she’ll bring up the band trip to England. But look deeper than that. You were always the one people made a fuss over. Jenny had the friends, but you had everything else—the looks, the grades, the résumé. Do you know what it was like being your older sister but living in your shadow? The funny thing is, I think she had actually gotten over it for a while. But then you guys had to move down here, and you were this constant reminder of all the things she wanted but didn’t have.”
“That’s absurd,” Alison said.
“Oh, come on. We live on a quarter acre. You live on this huge piece of waterfront property. She’s married to an IT geek. You’re married to a federal judge. She’s unemployed. You’ve got this fulfilling job. It’s like you’re everything she’d thought she’d be but isn’t. You know I’m right. And she was finally figuring out that there weren’t any six-figure jobs in benefits administration waiting for her down here. She knew she was staring at this future where we were going to be just like everyone else, struggling to make ends meet, praying the cars didn’t break down because we couldn’t afford to buy new ones, and she . . . I mean, do you know how much it humiliated her to accept that quote-unquote ‘loan’ from you guys when the heat pump broke?”
He spat a bloody glob of phlegm and saliva on my carpet. “So at first it was, ‘We have to do this. We have no choice.’ But then she got to like the idea of having six million bucks squirreled away. It was like this was what she had been entitled to all along, and now she was going to get it. She started talking about how we were going to tell everyone that I had gotten a nice raise and that I was finally being recognized for all my good work, and then we were going to buy new cars, new furniture. I couldn’t talk her out of it. It got to the point where Andy was going directly to Karen with the details. I told them both they were nuts. But Karen was gung ho, and with Andy’s money behind her, she thought we’d get away with it easily. I don’t know what you’re talking about with Turks. The guys Andy hired are Macedonian.”
I thought about Karen’s actions throughout. During that first family meeting, she had insisted we “do something.” That way, she would be the first to learn if we actually were doing something proactive. When she discovered I was out chasing a hunch that first Saturday morning, which she would have learned when she called Alison to apologize for her boorish behavior at the Living Museum, she immediately had the kidnappers text me and bring me back home. Probably because she didn’t want me investigating anything on my own.
Next, she had established the night watch over our house, which was a nice way for her to keep tabs on us—one out of every three nights, anyway—while putting herself even more in control of our investigation, or lack thereof. It also might give her some plausible deniability if things did unravel because, look, she was the one protecting us.
There was also her insistence, after she saw the Emma torture video, that I go to the FBI—all the while knowing I wouldn’t, because she already knew how dead set Alison and I were against police involvement. But, on the off chance I had the idea of going to the authorities behind Alison’s back, at least Karen would be the first to know.
Then I flashed back to the video we had seen of her delivering Sam and Emma to the kidnappers. It was fiendishly brilliant in that it seemed to support the story she had told us. But there was nothing in it that contradicted Mark’s version of the events, nothing that proved she was being forced to do what she did. All it really told us was that she was driving the van when the kids were taken, which she could have been doing voluntarily.
And, of course, there was no audio. For all we knew, Boris and Alexi were saying, All right, thanks, Karen, see you later.
I could easily imagine Karen, cagey Karen, betting the I’m-just-the-helpless-housewife routine, combined with the story about the scary men and the video to support it, would be enough to protect her from prosecution if things went bad. For our benefit, she had added the flourish that Alexi and Boris sounded Turkish, because she knew that would play into our preconceived idea that Justina was somehow involved.
Which she wasn’t, of course. She never had been.
Alison wasn’t saying anything. But I didn’t need to hear her words to know she was believing him. Or at least seriously considering it. Her body language said it for her.
“Alison,” I said. “I think we need to talk to Andy Whipple.”
“I agree,” she said. “But who is going to get him in here?”
All I said was: “Blake.”
SEVENTY-TWO
Blake Franklin had made a career out of being charming, eloquent, and persuasive. And if anyone could sweet-talk Whipple in here without Whipple even knowing he was being sweet-talked, it would be the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
After all, Blake had been the one who taught me a simple truism that had since served me well, whether in the US Senate, the federal judiciary, or the local Food Lion. And it went like this:
If you want to get a man to do something for you, appeal to his ego.
Blake did it better than most. He could also approach Whipple without it looking strange. It would just seem like one powerful, important man gravitating toward another one. And I was thankful that, unlike the rest of the gallery, who couldn’t make claims about national security, the senator still had his cell phone on him.
Two rings later, he picked up. I could hear from the background noise that he was in a crowded hallway.
“Hey there,” he said. “Are you going to get things going again soon? I don’t mean to complain, because it’s not like I paid for this ticket, but we’re getting bored with all the intermissions.”
“I will. I need a favor first.”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Do y
ou know Andy Whipple?”
“Yeah, he was just chatting me up earlier. I think he’s convinced if he keeps talking to me, he’ll be able to completely undermine what little is left of Dodd-Frank.”
“I need to see him in my chambers, right now. Could you please tell him I’m a big, big fan of his, that I’ve seen him on TV, and that I really just wanted to meet him?”
“Is any of that true?”
“Not remotely. But he’ll believe it coming from you. It relates to that life-or-death family thing, so I’m going to need you to make it convincing.”
Blake considered this for a moment. “All right. I’ll give it my best.”
“Thanks.”
I ended the call and returned my phone to my pocket.
“Jeremy, would you mind manning the front door and escorting Whipple in here?” I asked.
“You got it,” he confirmed, and disappeared into the reception area.
This left just Alison, Mark, and me. Mark had his head bowed. His breathing was still rough. Alison was staring bullets at him.
“You really don’t know where Emma is?” she asked.
“I swear, I don’t. Karen doesn’t either. Andy hired these two Macedonian guys, a couple of scary-looking bastards. Supposedly they’re wanted by Interpol and God knows who else. I have no idea what rock he found them under. I just know he’s paying them five thousand dollars a day for their services, so they must be pretty good at . . . whatever it is you would say they do.”
Alison pelted him with a stream of curses and insults that ended with, “How could you do that? How could you let Emma be held by men like that? She’s your niece. She loves you. She trusts you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Mark took a deep breath. “Look, I know this is no excuse for what we’ve done. But Emma really is safe, okay? The men were under strict orders not to harm the children. We gave them money to feed the kids. We set up these rules: no tying the children up, no striking them, no—”
“They sent us a video where they were torturing Emma!” I yelled, before remembering where I was and quieting myself. “It looked like they were administering a series of shocks. You call that not harming the children?”
Alison didn’t wait to hear more. Her arm flashed in the air and she slammed the gun into Mark’s face, taking a chunk out of his cheek.
Mark yelped. Alison pressed the barrel of the gun to his forehead. Her lips were drawn back to reveal her teeth. Her index finger, which she had previously kept parallel to the barrel as a precaution, was now resting on the trigger guard.
“That wasn’t how it was supposed to go,” Mark said quickly, looking more at the gun than at Alison. “That was a mistake. And we told them in no uncertain terms not to do that again. Look, the main thing is, she’ll be fine in the long run. They were never going to cut off any body parts or . . . anything like that. The deal we worked out is that the moment they see the verdict has been posted, they release her near the Patrick Henry Mall and tell her to go find a cop or a security officer or whatever. It will all end well.”
Alison leaned more of her body weight against the gun, grinding it farther into Mark’s skull. He reflexively turned to the side, but that only meant the gun was now aimed behind his ear. There was venom in Alison’s eyes, which had squeezed down to slits on either side of a nose that had wrinkled with rage. She moved her finger from outside the guard to inside, curling it around the trigger. One twitch, and half of Mark Lowe’s brain was going to be on my carpet.
“You’re a total moron, you know that?” she said. “You really think those Macedonian guys are going to leave her alive out of the goodness of their hearts? The moment they see that ruling is up, they’ll kill her. As far as I’m concerned, you can die along wi—”
“Alison, no!” I said.
I leapt toward her, grabbed her wrist, and forced it down, so the gun was pointing at the floor.
“Let go of me,” she said, struggling to free her arm from my grip.
“Stop, Alison, stop. This isn’t helping. If Blake does his job, Whipple is going to be here any second. We can’t have Mark sitting here with his head blown off. We can’t have Mark sitting here, period. If Whipple sees him before he’s in the room, he might make a run for it. He’s the one who knows where Emma is. We can’t go chasing him through the courthouse with a gun.”
Alison stopped fighting me, but her body was still spring-loaded. I kept my hand on her wrist.
“Come on,” I said. “Quickly. I really need your help. We’ve got to get Mark out of sight. Please.”
She breathed in and out, slowly recognizing that of the demons currently aligned against us, there were far greater ones than Mark. Finally, I felt some small amount of the tension ease out of her arms.
“Okay,” she said.
“Get the bathroom door open for me. We can stash him in there.”
I went around to the back of Mark’s chair and began sliding it across the carpet to my private bathroom. Once I got him settled in there, I said, “You better not make a sound, you understand? Or I swear I’ll let her shoot you.”
And then, before I left him in there, in the dark, with the door closed, I couldn’t help but add, “Say nothing.”
SEVENTY-THREE
It wasn’t more than another minute or two before there was a soft tapping at my door. It was, unmistakably, a Jeremy Freeland knock.
“Judge,” he said. “Mr. Whipple is here to see you.”
This was the moment. We were walking on a razor’s edge across the abyss now. There were a multitude of ways this could go horribly wrong, any of which would result in the end of Emma’s life. And, effectively, ours.
Had I even paused to think about that—about how close we were to catastrophe—I’m sure I would have been crippled by fear, unable to make my body respond to any meaningful commands. But we were going on instinct, moving without allowing ourselves to consider the externalities.
Alison positioned herself to the left side of the door and pinned herself against the wall, in a place where Whipple would be unable to spot her when he entered.
She gave me a thumbs-up. I opened the door. Both of Andy Whipple’s chins appeared before me.
“Hello, hello!” I said. “Come in, come in. Please.”
I backed away to give him room. With Jeremy gently herding him inside, he took a few short steps into the room.
“When Senator Franklin told me you needed to talk to me about a financial matter,” he began, “I have to admit I was a little—”
Alison slammed the door behind him, leveled the gun at him, and said, “Shut up.”
“What . . . what is this about?” he said, looking genuinely surprised and perhaps slightly indignant. No one pointed guns at masters of the financial universe.
“You know exactly what it’s about,” Alison said. “Where’s my daughter?”
“Your daughter? I’m sorry, I’m not following—”
“Stop it,” I said. “Mark Lowe told us everything.”
“Mark Lowe,” he said, as if my brother-in-law’s name were an exotic dish on a menu and he wasn’t sure he was saying it right. “Who is Mark Lowe?”
I walked over to the door of my bathroom and opened it. “This guy,” I said.
Whipple peered into the darkness of my bathroom.
“You can stop now, Andy,” Mark said in his now-hoarse voice. “They know about the stock manipulation, about the short sales. They know about the Macedonians. I told them everything.”
Whipple’s head tilted perhaps three degrees. Other than that, he was utterly impassive, to an extent that was actually chilling. In my courtroom, I have seen my share of sociopaths, people whose utter lack of feeling for others left me wondering if they were even part of the same species as the rest of us. They were like houses where all the wiring is done, except the electrician has
forgotten to make that final connection to the thing that makes us human, leaving the entire dwelling dark and unfit for occupation.
But even those people show some emotion during the course of a trial. Even if it’s just regret over being caught, or fear of the punishment I’m about to mete out, or dismay over the fact that no one seems to like them—which is difficult for many sociopaths to handle, since they’re also deeply narcissistic—I get some sense of an inner torment.
Not here. Confronted with the knowledge that one of his coconspirators had turned on him, that we were all aware of the horrific thing he had orchestrated, that we were looking at him and his rotten core with pure loathing, Andy Whipple showed no reaction other than that slight twitch of his neck.
“Shoot me if you want,” he said evenly. “But please know that whatever injury you cause to me, I’ll have double done to your daughter. And if you kill me? You’ll be killing her too. That is an ironclad promise. Those two Macedonian gentlemen won’t hesitate to slit her throat if they stop hearing from me.”
Alison’s nostrils flared. Her finger was on the trigger, but I already knew that was just for show. Whipple wasn’t bluffing. There was a reason he had amassed such a fortune. It was because he was ruthless, yes, but also because he was always thinking through various contingencies and planning accordingly.
“I suggest a fairly simple transaction here,” Whipple said. “Really, it’s the same deal I’ve been offering all along. Your daughter for a verdict. Are we agreed?”
Alison had tears pouring down her face. The gun was starting to wobble. She unleashed an invective-laced tirade that finished with: “. . . you monster. Emma is not some commodity to be traded.”
“Oh, but she is,” Whipple said. “And it might help if you think about her that way for a short time. If you do, you’ll see this is the best solution. You get your daughter back, your life back. That’s a win for you. And I make some money. That’s a win for me.”
“Steal some money is more like it,” Mark said from within the bathroom. “For every one of those short sale contracts, there’s someone losing millions of dollars. You’re a crook.”