House Arrest

by Mike Lawson

  Which Emma knew meant Lynch spent his time in the service mostly as a gate guard or arresting drunks. But she wasn’t surprised that he’d been hired by the Capitol Police. The Capitol Police would give hiring preference to veterans, and particularly veterans with prior experience in security work.

  “And right before Brayden retired from the air force, he commanded the Eleventh Security Forces Group at Andrews, and Lynch was in the Eleventh at the same time. But that’s all I got, that Lynch was a grunt and Brayden was his commanding officer for a year or so. Brayden may not have even known the guy when they served together.”

  “Is Lynch the only Capitol cop who served in the air force?” Emma asked.

  “No. There were more than a dozen. But they were black or female. One guy was six foot eight. Another six foot four. One guy DeMarco’s size works full-time as a bean counter in the Capitol Police office on D Street. Another guy, only two inches taller than DeMarco, is in charge of the guards assigned to the Library of Congress, not the Capitol. Emma, you told me to look for cops with some connection to Spear, and Lynch is the only one I could find.”

  “What does Lynch do at the Capitol?” Emma asked.

  “He’s just a guard. Perimeter guard, entrance guard, that sort of thing. Basically doing the same thing he did in the air force. He’s received weapons training, anti-terrorist training, knows what to do in a lockdown situation, but it’s the same training every other guard gets. He started as a GS-3, and five years later he’s a GS-5 and still guarding the doors. He’s not an overachiever.”

  Neil tapped his keyboard and a photo of Lynch appeared on the monitor closest to Emma.

  “He doesn’t look anything like DeMarco,” Emma said.

  Lynch was ten years younger than DeMarco and had a porcine nose, thin lips, and brown eyes. He was also almost completely bald, and what little hair he had left was dark like DeMarco’s but shaved close to his skull. He was one inch shorter than DeMarco and five pounds heavier.

  “How did you connect him to Brayden in the first place?” Emma asked.

  “Spear Industries’ website identified the company VPs, and there was a brief bio for each of them, which is where I learned that Brayden was an ex–air force security officer. Then, when I started looking at the Capitol cops’ personnel files, I came across the fact that Lynch was also ex–air force.”

  “Well, I need more, a lot more. I have someone at the Pentagon who can peek into Brayden’s and Lynch’s military files. I want you to start digging deeper into their lives as civilians.”

  “Jesus, Emma, I’ve been up all night. I need some sleep.”

  She looked at him—actually she glared at him—but she had to admit that he didn’t look good. “Fine,” she said. “Go lie down on the couch in your office and sleep for a couple of hours, then get back to work.”

  Neil opened his mouth to say that he needed more than two hours, but Emma said, “Neil, Joe was almost killed yesterday. He was stabbed. We have to get him out of that jail as soon as possible.”

  22

  Emma returned to her car, where she sat for a moment, tapping her fingernails on the steering wheel.

  All she felt sure of was her first assumption—that the killer had been a Capitol cop. But as for Lynch being the killer, the only thing that made him a possible suspect was that he and Bill Brayden had both had jobs in air force security at the same time. That was all she had. And although Spear was a likely suspect for murdering Canton, someone else could have conspired with a Capitol cop to kill Canton. For that matter, it was possible that a Capitol cop could have some motive of his own for killing Canton. And when it came to John Lynch and Bill Brayden, she didn’t know if they even knew each other, let alone if they would be willing to commit murder. Whatever the case, the Spear-Brayden-Lynch connection was all she had, so she’d run with it until she hit a wall or something else occurred to her.

  Before starting the car, Emma made a call to a woman named Latisha Thomson. Latisha was a civilian, a GS-14-level employee, who managed a group in the Pentagon dealing with procurement, stocking, and disbursement of spare parts for army field equipment, like tanks and personnel carriers and cannons. But when Emma met her, Latisha had been a twenty-two-year-old GS-3 civil servant who had two kids, ages two and three, and had been one of several secretaries who worked for her. Latisha had had only a high school degree but was extremely bright and doing her best to improve herself. At the same time, she was timid and had no self-confidence.

  One day, Latisha showed up for work with a black eye. Emma asked her what had happened, and Latisha muttered something about a cabinet door. Emma thought, Bullshit, but didn’t say anything. A week later, Emma noticed that Latisha had a split lip and was moving as if her ribs might be bruised or broken.

  Emma called Latisha into her office and bluntly asked, “Who’s using you for a punching bag?” The answer, not surprisingly, was Latisha’s ex-husband, Clayton. She’d divorced Clayton a year ago, but he’d get drunk, show up at her place, scream at her, smack her around, and take the cash she had in her purse. Sometimes he’d rape her. She’d gotten a restraining order, which did nothing to stop him. She’d even had him arrested, and after Clayton was released from jail, he came back and slapped her around again, asking how she could be such a bitch to do this to the father of her children. She told Emma she was thinking about moving out of the state. If she didn’t move, she was afraid Clayton was going to kill her.

  That night Emma and two Delta Force soldiers followed Clayton from his job at a car wash to a bar. The soldiers were both about six foot three and could bench-press 350 pounds. Clayton was a small, wiry man, about five seven, and Emma thought he just looked stupid.

  Clayton left the bar three hours later, and before he could get into his car to drive drunk to wherever he was going, Emma parked a van next to him and the soldiers, wearing ski masks, manhandled him into the back of the van. Inside the van, they gagged him with duct tape, placed a hood over his head, and handcuffed him. Half an hour later, they walked him onto a twenty-two-foot sportfishing boat moored at a marina on the Potomac River. Emma steered the boat into the middle of the river, a couple of miles downstream of the Lincoln Memorial. It was a cold night in January, snowing lightly, and Emma figured the water temperature was about forty degrees.

  Emma motioned to the soldiers, and they took the hood off Clayton’s head, ripped the duct tape off his mouth, and undid the handcuffs. Then they yanked off the ski jacket he was wearing, sat him down on the gunwale on the port side of the boat, and loomed over him, still wearing their masks. Clayton was terrified—who wouldn’t be?—and his eyes seemed to be about the size of hard-boiled eggs.

  He said, “Who are you? Why the fuck you doing this?”

  Emma, who was not wearing a mask or disguised in any way, said, “Clayton, your wife works for me. She’s an extremely valuable member of my staff.”

  “Latisha?” He said this as if he couldn’t imagine his ex being valuable to anyone.

  “Yes, Latisha. I can’t have her showing up at work looking like she’s gone ten rounds with a middleweight. Or in your case, a lightweight. So in the interest of national security—”

  “National security?”

  “Yes. In the interest of national security, a decision has been made that you have to go. We discussed—”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Senior people in the Pentagon. Like I said, Latisha’s important. What I started to say was that we discussed having you arrested again, but because you’re stupid and you’re a drunk, we decided that wouldn’t do any good, and you’d just keep beating Latisha up.”

  “I don’t get it. What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you have to go, Clayton.”

  She placed a hand in the middle of his chest, shoved, and Clayton went backward off the boat. The water sucked the breath right out of him, so cold it almost stopped his heart.

  Clayton screamed, “I can’t swim! I can’t swim!”
>
  “I know,” Emma said. “Why do you think we threw you in the river?”

  While trying to keep his head above water, Clayton started flapping his arms, trying to do what he’d seen swimmers do to stay afloat. Before his head went under a second time, Emma threw him a life preserver attached to a rope. He grabbed it, and the Deltas helped him back on board.

  He lay on the deck, choking, and when he was finally able to speak, he said, “I swear. I won’t bother her no more.”

  “Sorry, it’s too late for that. And I don’t believe you,” Emma said. “The reason we pulled you out was I forgot to remove your wallet. Silly me. The river’s running hard, and I imagine your body will end up in Chesapeake Bay and eventually be eaten by sharks, but in case you’re found, I don’t want them to ID you. That’ll just cause complications.”

  “Wha-, what?” Clayton said, his teeth chattering.

  “Get his wallet,” Emma said. One of the soldiers did, and Emma said, “Good. Now chuck him back in the water.” The soldiers did.

  Clayton started screaming again, and slapping at the water, and somehow he made it over to the stern of the boat and grabbed onto the swim step. “Don’t kill me. I’ll leave her alone.”

  Emma said, “I don’t believe you, Clayton.” To the Deltas she said, “Pry him loose and throw him farther away from the boat.”

  “No. You can’t do this. I swear to God, I won’t go near her again.”

  Emma pretended to think this over and said, “All right. But if you do, if you do anything to her or your children, I’m going to find you, and the next time I’m going to attached a block of concrete to your feet before I throw you in. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, I understand. I swear to God I won’t—”

  “Shut up,” Emma said.

  They hauled Clayton out of the water, gave him a blanket so he didn’t die of hypothermia, and dropped him off at the marina. Before they let him go, Emma looked into his wallet to make sure he had enough cash to catch a cab back to his car. The last thing Emma said to him was, “I will come for you, Clayton, if you don’t behave yourself.”

  Latisha went on to get degrees in accounting and business administration and then began hopping from one job to another within the Department of Defense until she reached the position she held today. Her children were both college graduates, one a dentist, the other a CPA. Clayton, who never contacted Latisha again, ironically died by drowning five years after Emma pushed him into the Potomac. One night he drank too much, passed out, and landed facedown in a pothole that contained no more than three inches of water. God’s a prankster.

  So when Emma called Latisha’s Pentagon office and said she needed something, Latisha, without hesitation, said, “Just name it.”

  Emma said, “I want you to take a look at the personnel records of a retired air force colonel named William Brayden. He commanded the Eleventh Security Forces Group at Andrews toward the end of his career, and he’s now head of corporate security at a company called Spear Industries. I also want you to look at the file of a noncom named John Lynch, who was in the Eleventh when Brayden was the CO.”

  “Am I looking for anything in particular?” Latisha asked.

  “I just need to get a handle on these people. What kind of airmen were they? Did they have discipline problems? Did they leave the service because of some kind of scandal or legal issue? In other words, I’m trying to find out if there’s anything in their history that would lead you to think that either of them could be a bad actor.”

  “What kind of bad actor?”

  “The kind who would commit murder.”

  “Oh,” Latisha said.

  Emma knew that with the jobs Latisha had held at the Pentagon for the past twenty years, she wouldn’t have any problem getting access to a couple of personnel files. And Latisha never asked why Emma wanted the information.

  Had Emma asked Latisha to donate a kidney, Latisha would have performed the surgery on herself.

  23

  Emma was allowed to meet with DeMarco in the same conference room where he’d met with his lawyer. Unbeknownst to DeMarco, the guards had received an epic ass-chewing from the sheriff, who told them that a lot of people were going to be fired if DeMarco so much as bruised a toe while in their custody. It was for this reason that the guards decided it would be better if Emma met DeMarco in the conference room and not in any area where there might be prisoners walking about with toothbrush handles sharpened into lethal spikes.

  Emma was already seated when DeMarco entered the room, and she saw him wince as he sat down and his hand move unconsciously toward the wound on his left side.

  “How are you doing?” Emma asked.

  “Couldn’t be better,” DeMarco said. “Got a roof over my head, three hot meals a day, and scintillating companionship. What more could a man ask for?”

  DeMarco’s attempt at humor couldn’t disguise the stress he was under. His skin was so taut it looked as if his face would crack if he smiled.

  “Do you have any idea why those men attacked you?”

  “No. I haven’t been in here long enough to make any enemies. The only inmate I’ve spoken to since I’ve been here is Lazlo.”

  “Who’s Lazlo?”

  DeMarco explained that Lazlo was an inmate the size of LeBron James who’d been assigned by the warden to protect him, and if it hadn’t been for Lazlo he’d most likely be dead. “He was almost killed,” he concluded. “I need to find out how he’s doing.”

  Emma said, “I think whoever framed you may have orchestrated the attack on you yesterday. And they might try again.”

  She told him the same thing she’d told Mahoney: that if DeMarco died, any investigation into Lyle Canton’s death would come to an abrupt halt and whoever framed him would get away with murder.

  “I’m sure it’s not pleasant staying in a cell twenty-four hours a day,” Emma said, “but stay there. Don’t allow the guards to take you out to the exercise area, the infirmary, or anywhere else. When the doctor needs to check your wound, insist that he come to you.”

  “I’m not in a position to insist on much of anything,” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah, you are. Mahoney has told the guy who runs this zoo that if anything happens to you … Well, I’m sure Mahoney made his point.”

  “Is Mahoney catching a lot of flak because of me?”

  “Yes, and who cares. You worry about yourself. And don’t trust the guards, either. The person who may have framed you is rich enough to buy any guard in this place.”

  “What! What are you saying? You think you know who set me up? Who is it?”

  “Not here. This room could be monitored. And I’m not sure I’m right, and I don’t have any evidence to prove it. The main reason I came here today is to tell you to stay vigilant and don’t give up hope.”

  “Well, right now, the only thing I can be is hopeful,” DeMarco said.

  Emma rose to leave, and DeMarco said, “Hey, but there are a couple of things you could get me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A miniature rock ax and a poster of Raquel Welch.”

  “Raquel Welch?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you ever see The Shawshank Redemption?”

  “You’re an idiot, DeMarco.”

  24

  Emma had just parked near Neil’s office when Latisha called her.

  Latisha said, “Bill Brayden was a good officer. He advanced steadily and rapidly through the ranks, received outstanding personnel evaluations from his superiors, and got commendations for doing his job well.”

  “Then why wasn’t he promoted to general?” Emma asked.

  “The air force was downsizing about the time he retired. They didn’t need as many generals, and he just didn’t make the cut. It didn’t help that he spent his career doing security work. That’s not a glamour job in the air force. It ain’t like flying F-16s. But he wasn’t passed over for doing something stupid. At least there’s nothing stupid on his record.

/>   “I talked to one guy who knew him. He was Brayden’s deputy when Brayden was stationed in Iraq. He told me that Brayden drove his people hard, was very ambitious, and wouldn’t allow anything to prevent him from completing an assignment. But he said Brayden was a good guy, treated people fairly, and took the heat as the guy in charge if something went wrong.”

  “What about his personal life?”

  “Married once, got divorced, been single a dozen years. He doesn’t have kids.”

  “What about Lynch?” Emma asked.

  “Lynch was a screwup. Mediocre and sometimes below-average personnel evaluations. The highest rank he ever held was E4, then he was busted back to E3 for falling asleep on guard duty when the base where he was stationed was on alert. There were comments in his file about having a poor attitude, sloppy work habits, and being disrespectful to his superiors. And he was court-martialed once but never convicted of a crime.”

  “Why was he court-martialed?”

  “For allegedly stealing ten laptops. The laptops were old ones being replaced by newer ones, and the old ones were supposed to be destroyed so some civilian didn’t end up with classified information. But he wasn’t convicted—the files I looked at didn’t say why—and a year later he was given an honorable discharge.”

  Which made Emma wonder how well the Capitol Police vetted their personnel, but then if all Lynch did was guard the doors, he wouldn’t have been subjected to the vetting performed for a Top Secret security clearance. She imagined the background checks performed for low-ranking personnel not given sensitive duties were most likely limited to record checks, which would have shown that Lynch had been honorably discharged and had no felony convictions. And who knows? Maybe after the court-martial he cleaned up his act, and someone gave him a good letter of recommendation. Or maybe he knew someone on the Capitol force who helped him get the job. Whatever the case, the fact that he was court-martialed and found innocent apparently wasn’t a reason for the Capitol Police not to hire him.