by Mike Lawson
“When was he court-martialed?” Emma asked Latisha.
“The same time Bill Brayden was CO of the Eleventh at Andrews.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Emma said.
“And speaking of Brayden,” Latisha said, “there is one more thing. I did an Internet search because I was curious about him. A few years ago, Spear Industries did a job in Colombia, upgrading equipment on La Esmeralda Dam on the Batá River. This one Colombian activist, a guy named Manuel Concha, claimed that Spear Industries bribed people in the Colombian Ministry of Mines and Energy to get the contract, and Spear awarded a local transportation subcontract to a company owned by one of the drug cartels. There was a big brouhaha in the Colombian media, lawsuits were filed, and so forth. Then Manuel Concha, the guy who started the whole fracas, disappeared, and folks claimed that the cartel killed him because of the noise he was making about them.”
“What does this have to do with Brayden?”
“According to Manuel Concha, Brayden was Spear Industries’ bagman. He was the guy who bribed the bureaucrats, and he was the one responsible for the cartel’s trucking company getting the contract.”
“Huh,” Emma said.
Latisha said, “The thing is, Emma, Spear Industries operates in some pretty rough places, places in South America and Africa where there’s so much corruption that bribery is just one of the costs of doing business. If Manuel Concha was right about what Brayden did in Colombia, maybe he’s Spear’s go-to guy when it comes to stuff like that. Brayden may have been squeaky-clean in the air force, but when he went to work for Sebastian Spear, he had to learn how to play a different game to be successful. I’m just sayin’.”
25
This time Bill Brayden met Hector Montoya in the parking lot of a Catholic church in Fairfax, the lot empty on a hot weekday afternoon. Hector was leaning against the fender of a bright orange Trans Am equipped with a spoiler, and Brayden wondered if the money he’d given Hector for killing DeMarco had financed the car. Hector was shirtless, the tattoos covering his torso on full display, and Brayden couldn’t help thinking: The Illustrated Man.
Brayden got out of his car, slamming the door, but before he could chastise Hector for failing to kill DeMarco, Montoya said, “Yeah, yeah, I know. My guys fucked up. Sorry about that.”
Sorry about that?
“Can you get another shot at him?” Brayden asked.
“Maybe, but it’s not gonna be easy,” Hector said. “They’re keeping him in a cell twenty-four hours a day, and there’s a guard stationed outside his door.”
“So what are you saying? Can it be done or not?”
“I don’t know. I need to talk to my main guy in there. Let me do that, and if it’s doable, we’ll do it. If not, I’ll let you know and return half the money you gave me.”
“I don’t give a damn about the money,” Brayden said. “And I’m willing to give you more if necessary to get the job done. Like if you have to bribe someone.”
And Brayden meant that. Spear could afford to pay whatever it cost, and considering the stakes—namely the possibility of him and Spear going to jail—money was absolutely not a concern.
Four hours later, Hector Montoya texted Brayden: It’s doable.
Brayden was happy to see Hector’s response—and was surprised that he hadn’t asked for more money. You can just never tell about people. Hector may have been a tattooed gangbanger and a murderer, but he apparently had some sort of skewed moral code.
26
Neil looked somewhat better now than the last time Emma had seen him. If not exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, he was at least functioning. She wondered if in addition to sleeping for a couple of hours he’d popped a pill or two.
“Go,” Emma said, meaning for Neil to get on with telling her whatever he’d learned about Lynch and Brayden.
Neil tapped a keyboard and one of the monitors on his desk flickered to life.
“Financially, Lynch is barely keeping his head above water. He was married for eight years, has two young kids, and his wife divorced him for physical and emotional abuse not long after he got out of the air force. She got everything in the divorce. The house, all the money they had in savings, the one car they had at the time, and she gets three-fifths of his government salary for alimony and child support. He now lives in a one-bedroom rat hole in Alexandria, and he’s still paying off a loan on a used Ford Focus he bought four years ago.”
“Did you look at his phone records?” Emma asked.
“Of course. The only phone he has is a cell phone—no landline—and he never called or received a call from Bill Brayden or Sebastian Spear. That is, he was never called by any number registered to Brayden, Spear, or Spear Industries.”
“Bank accounts?”
“He’s got three hundred bucks in a savings account. I guess that’s his rainy-day stash, and God help him if it pours. His government check is automatically deposited into his checking account, then three-fifths of it is automatically redeposited into his ex-wife’s checking account. Lynch’s own checking account is usually overdrawn by the time he gets his next paycheck.”
“Brayden?” Emma said.
“William Brayden went to work for Spear right after retiring from the air force. He was initially hired as the deputy to Spear’s head of corporate security, then a couple of years later became the head guy. Based on his tax returns—and by the way, I owe a guy at the IRS a grand for this information—he makes an outstanding salary, but it varies between two fifty and five hundred K. I don’t know why it varies so much, and five hundred thousand seems excessive for a security honcho.
“The other thing about Brayden is he’s made the news a couple of times and not in a good way. Spear Industries was doing a job in Colombia, and a guy named Manuel Concha claimed that he bribed—”
“I already know about the Colombia job and Concha. What else?” Emma said.
“In Nigeria something similar happened. Spear Industries was accused of bribing a government official, and Brayden was named in a lawsuit, but nothing ever came of it. He also testified once before a House committee. Some congressman got pissed off because a company in his district didn’t get a job that was awarded to Spear, and he accused Spear of rigging the bid. Spear was called to testify, but instead of Spear showing up, Brayden came with a couple of lawyers. I don’t know how Spear could ignore a congressional subpoena, but he did, and the investigation went nowhere. So what I’m saying is that Brayden might do a few things for Spear that cross the line, but killing a U.S. congressman is a big step up from bribing a corrupt African bureaucrat.”
Emma held up a hand and said, “Be quiet, Neil. I need to think.”
Emma closed her eyes.
She had a theory: that Sebastian Spear, who hated Lyle Canton because he blamed Lyle for Jean Canton’s death, decided to kill Canton, just as he said he would at Jean’s funeral. So Spear’s fixer, Bill Brayden, hired John Lynch—a man of questionable character, living barely above the poverty line—to kill Canton and frame DeMarco for Canton’s murder. And they probably planned in advance to kill DeMarco right after he was arrested, ending the likelihood that the FBI would hunt for another suspect.
But why did they decide to frame DeMarco? Why him of all people?
The answer to this question was that they didn’t start with DeMarco. They didn’t pick DeMarco as the “framee” and then look for a killer who matched his appearance. They started with the killer, who may or may not have been John Lynch. Emma figured the big advantage they had when it came to finding a person to frame was Russian cyber-warfare expert Nikki Orlov.
In 2014, the Chinese hacked into OPM personnel files and obtained information on about four million federal employees, most of whom had security clearances. Why the Chinese did this, and what they did with the information they stole, was never determined. What the Chinese did in 2014, however, was pertinent because Emma imagined that Nikki Orlov could have done the same thing: hacked into OPM’s files
looking for someone about John Lynch’s size who had unlimited access to the Capitol. He would have ended up with a list of several hundred people—and then it was just a matter of selecting one of them.
Emma could imagine Spear/Brayden/Orlov looking at congressmen and their aides and probably finding several candidates who had some personal reason for disliking Canton. They may have considered people with criminal records, like maybe one of the Capitol’s janitors or maybe a lobbyist with a shady past who spent a lot of time in the Capitol. Ultimately, they settled on DeMarco, this mysterious lawyer who dwelled in the subbasement and was the son of a Mafia killer. They also learned that DeMarco was in some way connected to Mahoney, and given how much Mahoney hated Canton, that would have provided another reason for picking DeMarco. How they found the connection between Mahoney and DeMarco wasn’t clear. Maybe Orlov had looked at DeMarco’s and Mahoney’s phone records. Whatever the case, and most likely after a considerable amount of research, they decided that of all the white guys who worked in the Capitol, DeMarco was the perfect patsy.
Another thing Emma could now understand was why Lyle Canton was killed four months after Jean Canton died. Spear may have hated Canton and probably wanted him dead as soon as possible, but it would have taken a long time to plan the murder and locate the person to frame.
Emma opened her eyes.
Yes, she had a logical and plausible theory.
What she didn’t have was one shred of evidence to support it.
27
Emma told Special Agent Russell Peyton—who she could tell had been hoping never to see her again—that she wanted to take another look at the surveillance videos showing the killer approaching Canton’s office. When Peyton asked her why, she said, “I’m just curious about something.”
With Agent Alice Berman again watching her, Emma looked at the videos to see if the killer was recognizable as John Lynch. She wasn’t concerned about the fact that Lynch was an inch shorter than DeMarco and bald. Lifts in his shoes and a wig would have been all he needed to solve those small problems. But whoever had killed Canton had been able to disguise his features adequately by hiding beneath a baseball cap and placing his hands over his face and turning his head away from the cameras at strategic moments.
She noticed in looking at the videos a second time that there was a choreographed quality to the killer’s movements. She could imagine him rehearsing in a gymnasium, counting his steps as he practiced the moves to hide his features from the cameras—as if someone had placed footprints on a dance floor, so he’d know precisely when to turn. And again she was certain that framing DeMarco had taken a long time to plan—and the planning had been perfect, in that, so far, she’d been unable to identify the killer as John Lynch. In one photo, it appeared as if the killer had a double chin—DeMarco didn’t, Lynch did—but Emma had to wonder if she was seeing things that weren’t there because she knew DeMarco was innocent. After wasting an hour studying the videos, she thanked Peyton and left, ignoring him when he asked if she’d be back again.
Emma decided, standing on the street in front of the Hoover Building, virtually on the FBI’s doorstep, that she was going to commit a crime.
A small crime, but a crime nonetheless.
Her grand theory—built solely on logic and the lack of alternative suspects—was that Lynch and Orlov were connected with Canton’s death and the framing of DeMarco. The problem remained, however, that she still had no evidence that they’d done anything illegal or conspired in any way. According to Neil, there were no records of Lynch communicating with Orlov, Spear, or Brayden. Lynch’s fingerprints had not been found on the gun or the uniform the FBI had found in DeMarco’s office. From the videos that she’d just looked at for a second time, it wasn’t clear that Lynch could have been the killer instead of DeMarco.
But there had to be something. For DeMarco’s sake, there had to be.
One possibility was to see if Neil could somehow prove that Orlov had hacked Mahoney’s phone to send the text message to DeMarco. Or maybe Neil could prove that Orlov had raided personnel files to identify DeMarco as the person to frame. But she doubted that Neil would be successful. Orlov wouldn’t have left a bread-crumb trail for Neil to follow, because Orlov was a genius.
John Lynch, on the other hand, was not a genius.
So Emma decided that she was going to do something the FBI couldn’t do without a warrant: she was going to search John Lynch’s apartment to see if she could find any evidence connecting him to Canton’s murder. Maybe she’d find paperwork related to the fake insignia patch, like a sketch used to make the patch. Maybe a copy of Canton’s schedule, which a security guard would have no reason to have. Maybe a receipt for the gun used to kill Canton or the clothes the killer had worn. Maybe a key to DeMarco’s office or anything at all related to DeMarco.
Yeah, maybe. But not likely.
If her theory was right—that extremely bright people like Spear and Orlov had developed the plan to frame DeMarco—she doubted that they would have overlooked any detail.
But she was still going to break into Lynch’s apartment. What else could she do?
Before driving to Lynch’s place in Alexandria, Emma went home to get a few things she would need. She then called the general number for the Capitol Police, saying she worked for a collection agency and needed to speak to Lynch. She was informed, rather rudely, that Lynch was on duty at one of the entrances and unable to come to the phone. Which confirmed what Emma had wanted to know: that Lynch was at the Capitol and most likely wouldn’t be home until the end of his shift.
Lynch’s apartment building, located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Alexandria, was a three-story redbrick structure with peeling hunter-green trim. Steel bars covered the windows on the first-floor units. The front door to the apartment building didn’t lock, and Emma could see marks where someone had used a tool to force the door open. She figured that management had grown tired of fixing the door and left it to the tenants to protect their own apartments.
She took the stairs to Lynch’s unit on the second floor and immediately saw that his door had two locks—a main lock and a deadbolt lock—but neither posed a problem. She pulled a small leather case from the back pocket of her jeans and took out the appropriate picks. Lock picking had not been part of her DIA training; Emma had hired a tutor.
The interior of Lynch’s apartment was what she’d expected: a small, poorly kept space filled with much-abused secondhand furniture. The dishes from Lynch’s breakfast were in the sink, and a greasy frying pan was on the stove. There was no dishwasher in the kitchen, and the stove and refrigerator were a quarter century old. Clothes and newspapers were strewn about the living room, and on the kitchen table was a pile of unopened mail.
There were only two closets in the place, one near the front door and one in the bedroom. The closet near the front door contained coats and jackets and hats, a suitcase, and an upright vacuum cleaner that she suspected was used infrequently. On the shelf in the closet were half a dozen unlabeled boxes. The small bedroom closet was filled to capacity with clothes, shoes, and boots, including three uniforms for a Capitol cop.
As small as the apartment was, however, Emma knew it was going to take her at least two hours to search it thoroughly. She put on a pair of thin plastic gloves and got to work. The primary purpose of the gloves was not to prevent leaving fingerprints but to keep her hands clean while she was searching a dusty, grimy living space.
Lynch didn’t have a computer in the apartment—he probably couldn’t afford either a computer or Internet service—so there were no computer files to look at. He didn’t even have a desk. He kept recently paid bills, bank statements, and his auto insurance policy in a cardboard box on the floor near his television set. There were no papers in the box, however, that pointed to any involvement in Canton’s murder—like a convenient brochure from a company that made insignia patches.
She checked the pockets of all the clothes in both closets. She loo
ked inside every shoe and boot. She removed every box on the closet shelves to examine its contents. She flipped through magazines, including Lynch’s porn magazines, to make sure there was nothing between any of the pages. She looked inside every cereal box and every pot and pan in the kitchen cabinets. She removed the lid on the toilet tank. She probed sofa cushions and Lynch’s mattress to see if anything might be sewn inside. She lay facedown, holding her breath to avoid a dust bunny attack, and searched beneath the bed. She looked through the garbage in the garbage can beneath the kitchen sink.
In the cabinet under Lynch’s kitchen sink, partially hidden by a bucket containing dishwashing soap and other cleaning products, she found a steel, fireproof lockbox. The box wasn’t locked, however. What would be the point? If intruders couldn’t open it easily they would just take it with them and open it later, as the box was heavy but small and portable. The main purpose of the box was to protect the papers inside it in case of a fire.
Inside the lockbox, Emma found Lynch’s important papers: his birth certificate, his Social Security card, the title for his car, his discharge papers from the air force, and a hundred dollars in cash. She found only one unusual thing: a passport that had been issued to Lynch only two months ago. She doubted that Lynch, who was practically broke, had obtained it because he was planning some exotic foreign holiday. If he’d been involved in Canton’s murder, however, he might have decided that having a passport would be prudent in case he needed to leave the country.
She continued searching and noticed a heating grille inserted in the living room floor, which made her think of the evidence planted in the ventilation grille in DeMarco’s office. She removed the grille and saw that the duct below the cover went straight down for about four inches and then turned where it was connected to a sheet-metal elbow. She put her arm into the duct and reached beyond the elbow—and her fingers touched something. She grasped the object and pulled it out. It was a phone. A cheap flip phone, most likely a prepaid disposable phone.