The Red Zone

by Tim Green

  "What do you think?" he said, then taking a bite and chewing while he waited for her response.

  "As Luther's lawyer, I think Vivian Chase or Martin Wilburn likely set Luther up. They got him to the scene of the crime, tipped off the rangers that his car was there, and got someone else to kill Chase," Madison said. "If Luther didn't do it, and of course that's what we have to believe, I think there's a good chance either Vivian or Wilburn knows who did. Each of them has a motive, and each of them may have had the ability to get Luther to go to the beach that morning."

  "How could Wilburn have gotten him there?" Chris said.

  Madison hesitated, then admitted, "I don't know yet."

  Madison picked up a slice of pizza and bit into it. Chris began chewing again as well, staring out into the parking lot where the heat shimmered like jet fumes on a runway. His faraway look gave Madison the impression that he was in some kind of a trance.

  After a while she said, "What are you thinking?"

  Chris's eyes came back inside the restaurant and focused on Madison. "You don't want to know," he told her. "I'm still thinking like a cop."

  Chapter 32

  Lieutenant Kratch agreed to meet with Madison in his office on Thursday afternoon. He had never refused an interview with a defense attorney. Kratch liked to know the enemy. When Madison walked through the door, Kratch was busy hammering away on his computer. A Camel cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth as he worked, and gray flecks of ash speckled his keyboard like dirty little snowflakes. Even Kratch couldn't keep himself from squinting through the smoke to get a better look at the attractive attorney. The springs in his chair screeched in complaint as he rose to shake her hand.

  "Sit down," Kratch said pleasantly His coat was off and the unbuttoned long sleeves of his rumpled beige dress shirt wheeled like signal flags as he turned with a gallant sweep of his arm, directing Madison to a beat-up chair alongside his desk.

  Madison protested against the foul air with a gentle little cough, then sat. "Thank you for seeing me, Lieutenant."

  "Please, call me Kratch," Kratch said as he politely smashed what was left of his cigarette butt into a glass ashtray overflowing with a mountain of ash. He looked up with a smile, showing Madison his big yellowing teeth, reminding her of a pumpkin-headed scarecrow. His left eye wandered her way and then back into space. She locked her own eyes on to the other side of his face.

  "I have some information that I think you may find disturbing," she told him, getting straight to the point.

  Kratch leaned forward, his tall pale brow furrowed with mock concern.

  "As you know, on the day Evan Chase was murdered," Madison said, "Luther Zorn's car was nearby, in the north parking lot of MacCarther National Park near Lost Tree. Mark Berryhill, the state attorney, is convinced that Luther was also there. I'm not conceding that he was, but if he was, I think he was there because he was set up.

  "What bothers me," Madison continued, "and I'm sure it will bother you, too, is that one of your detectives apparently called the ranger's station the day before to suggest that someone check the north parking lot in the early hours of the following morning. My investigator spoke with the ranger who responded to that call. He said the man who contacted him was a detective from this office, a Detective Gill, and that same detective called him the day after the murder to see if 'by coincidence' he'd seen anything unusual. Of course the ranger told him about the parking ticket. But it was Gill, twice."

  Madison watched Kratch's face, carefully ignoring his bad eye. It was the rest of his expression that would tell her what she wanted to know. She was used to reading faces in depositions, during jury selections, and at trials. Kratch, however, puzzled her. She thought she saw uncertainty, but it might have been anger. Either way, the lieutenant was doing his best to keep his emotions in check.

  "There's more," Madison continued. "Gill and his partner were the same people who found the scuba gear. I don't know if you're aware, but he never bothered to have that gear dusted for fingerprints. I checked with Mark Berryhill, and he said there was no lab report."

  "Are you suggesting something untoward, Ms. McCall?" Kratch said slowly, raising an eyebrow as he spoke.

  It was Madison's turn to lean forward. She set her jaw, narrowed her eyes, and spoke in a low firm voice. "I'm suggesting that you have a detective working for you who knew Evan Chase was going to be killed as well as the fact that Luther Zorn's car would be in that parking lot. I'm suggesting that he called the rangers station to make sure that someone else would be there to confirm that Luther's car was on the scene, someone independent of the Sheriff's Department, who could issue a ticket or confirm the presence of a car like Luther's."

  Madison had caught Kratch off guard, but he knew exactly how to deal with the kind of full-frontal assault she had just launched. His mouth turned into a sneer and his words oozed with contempt. "Let me tell you something, lady. No one, and I mean no one, comes into this office and accuses someone in my department of being involved in a conspiracy like this with the shitty little theory you're trotting out!"

  Kratch pointed one of his long bony fingers at Madison's nose.

  "You may be some kind of big-deal bitch lawyer in Texas, lady, but this ain't Texas. This is my territory you're in, and you better just take your theory and stick it where the sun don't shine. We don't have dirty cops in Palm Beach County."

  Madison stood to go, but continued to hold the lieutenant's stare. When she felt certain that she'd communicated her determination she turned for the door. "I can see you've taken this personally, Lieutenant," she said. "I hope that doesn't mean that you're trying to do more than just protect one of your own. I dropped in on your captain just a few moments ago. He told me that you normally don't attend to individual cases, but that apparently when the call went out to dispatch a homicide detective in this case, you answered the call, four captain said that it wasn't unheard of for you to do something like that. I understand its not all that uncommon if you're close to a crime scene. But I wonder, why were you so close by when the call came in?

  "Know this, Lieutenant," Madison concluded. "I'm not going away. And I am going to find out what the hell's going on."

  If phone, fax, and modem lines could burn, Chris Pelo would have started a conflagration in Mel Rosen's offices. He spent all Thursday in high gear, making calls and darting through the Internet, accessing places that most people didn't even know existed. At seven-thirty that evening, he remembered that he was supposed to meet Madison at the hotel restaurant for dinner. He crammed a stack of printouts and fax sheets into his briefcase and headed for the door. Only Mel Rosen himself remained in the office. Chris could hear the low tones of a phone conversation through the closed door as he passed by the old lawyer's office on his way out.

  Twenty minutes later Chris left his Taurus in the broad circular drive of the Royal Palm Beach Hotel. Liveried valets strode confidently in and out of the main entrance. Above was a brilliant gold dome bordered by an ornate pattern of red, blue, and green terra-cotta. One of the valets wished Chris a good evening and took his car. It was as fancy as anyplace Chris Pelo had ever seen, let alone stayed in. Madison, however, seemed quite at ease, even sitting alone in the elegant four-star restaurant waiting for him, sipping a glass of Chardonnay. Chris felt upstaged by the well-dressed diners, and by the regal bearing of the maitre d' and the waiter. He loosened the tie around his neck/and ordered a beer anyway.

  "Sorry I'm late," he said to Madison as the waiter sauntered off for his drink.

  "No problem," she said. "It gave me a chance to think. Lets order, I'm starved. Then we can talk about what we've got."

  Chris nodded in agreement. There wasn't a single entree on the menu that appealed to him, so he ordered chicken something.

  Madison told him first about what she'd learned from Putman, the ranger, and then went on to describe her meetings with both Kratch and his captain.

  "Sounds like Kratch has the latitude to do pretty m
uch whatever he wants, a golden boy," Chris said. "When that happens with a cop, watch out. He can do no wrong. He's right, Madison, we're on shaky ground. We can't go accusing a police officer of being involved in a murder conspiracy for making a call like that to the ranger's station and then following up the next day with an inquiry. It's a reach, but it's plausible and the benefit of the doubt belongs to the police."

  This disturbed Madison. "Chris, you were the one who said anything was possible . . ."

  "I know, I know. But I said that between me and you--"

  The waiter brought Chris his beer and poured an inch of it into a tall frosted glass before setting the bottle down on the thick white linen tablecloth. When he'was gone, Chris took the bottle off the table and drew a long swig from it.

  "I should have explained to you the way a police force works from within," he said, setting down his drink. "If Gill is a dirty cop who's involved in a murder, he's certainly not going to hesitate to fabricate some evidence to support his story. And, if Kratch is some way involved . . . he's a lieutenant. That's not a guy you want to mess around with, as he put it, when you're on his territory. A bad lieutenant is the kind of guy with the powe* to have you pulled over and arrested for the kilo of cocaine he had planted in your car. I'm sorry. I should have been the one to talk to Kratch."

  Suddenly the subordinate was the master. Where Luther's world was football and hers was the courtroom, this world obviously belonged to Chris. As ugly and as frightening as it sounded, what he was saying made perfect sense. Crooked police were a hundred times more dangerous than the most ruthless criminals. They had the law on their side.

  "So what now?" she said.

  "There's nothing we can do about Gill and there's nothing we can do about Kratch," Chris told her. "Let's just move on. I've got some things you won't believe. By the way, Mark Berryhill called. He wants you to call him first thing in the morning."

  Chris began recounting his day by informing Madison that Charlene King was still missing. He had no line on her whatsoever.

  "The kid is in a foster home right now," he told her. "In fact, when I spoke to Luther this afternoon, he said he wanted us to start seeing if we can get temporary custody for him. I don't think the chances are very good, considering the fact that he's been indicted for murder. I told him that, but he insisted I try, so there's a woman in Mel's office who I've got working on it."

  "I tell you what I can't come close to doing," Chris said in obvious frustration, "is get ahold of Vivian Chase.

  "She's completely insulated," he explained. "She won't answer her phone, and when I went by to see her, they stopped me at the gate and said she wasn't accepting any visitors. I asked Berryhill about her, and he hasn't even spoken to her. He did say, though, that her attorney had informed him that she was going to be leaving the country but would make herself available upon subpoena. We may want to think about deposing her soon."

  Chris then launched into the tawdry details of Vivians past, the strip club, her first marriage, her divorce, and her marriage to Chase. "It doesn't make her a killer, but she's a climber, and a good one."

  "It's certainly not inconceivable for someone like that to be involved in something like this," Madison commented.

  "Yes, but wait until you hear about Wilburn," Chris said, stopping abruptly when the waiter suddenly appeared with their food. Neither Chris nor Madison paid any attention to what was being set in front of them. Their silence let the waiter know he was unwanted, and he quickly departed with a disapproving frown.

  "Martin Wilburn," Chris began, "has a spotless past."

  Madison's disappointment was evident. She was wrong again. She started in on her food while Chris spoke.

  "In fact, he's too spotless," he continued. "I checked his real estate holdings and found that he owns an expensive condo on the Intracoastal in Palm Beach. The place has a mortgage with Gold Trust for about seven hundred thousand and change--"

  "How did you get that?" Madison interrupted.

  "Easy," Chris said. "Even a novice can get mortgage information on anyone in the country through Nexis online. The thing a lot of people can't get is someone's Social Security number, but I got into Gold Trust's records and got Wilburns. Once you've got a Social Security number, and you know your way around the IRS information system and the FBI system, there isn't much you can't find out."

  "That's kind of scary," Madison said in an offhand way as she politely dabbed her mouth with the napkin she took from her lap.

  "It is," Chris told her. "Anyway, Wilburn was born and raised in Atlanta. He grew up in a rough section of town, but got a scholarship to a private school called Peers on the north side of the city. Wilburn went from Peers to Marist, and from Marist to Morehouse College. His freight was paid along the way because of his intelligence. After he graduated from Morehouse he went to Memphis State to get his MBA. For his first three years after graduating, he filed no income tax returns. I've got to believe he was involved in some kind of criminal activities. Drugs, prostitution, white-collar crime, who knows? Those are the only things I can think of that would explain no tax returns. That or being homeless."

  "Why do you think he was a criminal?" Madison inquired. "You said he had a clean record."

  "He does," Chris said, "but it wasn't always clean."

  Madison was intrigued.

  "You see," he explained, "there's a guy I knew from CID who has a brother that's a lieutenant with Memphis PD. The brother helped me get into their system. I figured, you know, I'd see what was up. It didn't make sense for a guy to go through all that schooling, stay in Memphis, but file no tax return like he wasn't making a red cent. Only someone with something to hide would do that.

  "Well, when I punched up Wilburn's name in the Memphis PD system, I got an empty file."

  "But why have a file at all?" Madison said, arching her eyebrow.

  "Exactly, and my guy's brother confirmed that something was wrong. The thing is, sometimes when a bust is made, the DA will work a deal if the bad guy turns into a rat. The police will sometimes wipe his record clean. He gets off, but you get a bigger fish. It happens all the time."

  "It never happened with one of my clients," Madison said. "I've never heard of that."

  "It's not the kind of thing that happens once a lawyer is involved," Chris explained. "It's the kind of thing you do with a guy before the lawyers show up. If there's a deal to be cut, it's cut right away This isn't the kind of thing anybody wants to go public with or have any kind of record of. Its generally a good policy because you can usually bring down a bigger criminal. If its drugs, for example, youll give away the street dealer if he can help you nail his distributor. But no one wants to make a big deal out of it because sometimes the small guy you let go ends up whacking some high school students as they get off the bus three weeks after you let him walk. Its bad politics, so if you do it, you do it quietly."

  "So do you have any idea what Wilburn was up to?" Madison said.

  "I have no idea," Chris told her, "but it gets better.

  "After electronically dropping off the face of the earth for three years, Martin Wilburn reappeared as an employee of Ibex Corporation. Ibex started filing 1099s with the IRS for Wilburn where he worked steadily until about seven years ago, just a few months before he bought a ten percent interest in the Marauders, for fifteen million dollars in cash."

  "So how could a guy who worked for three years, doing who knows what, then for several more for this Ibex Corporation, buy part of a football team?" Madison asked.

  "Exactly," Chris replied. "I checked the newspaper archives and found that Wilburn was billed as a young black entrepreneur from Memphis who had recently moved his corporate business to West Palm Beach. He was a perfect candidate. He had the cash, he was black, which was good PR for the NFL, since players are always complaining that there's no black ownership in the league--and he was suddenly a West Palm resident. He had it all, and from what I could gather from the newspapers at the time, Chase nee
ded the money because his real estate empire was floundering. Wilburn paid top dollar. Apparently no one ever thought to ask what his corporation did, or how he ended up owning it. The paper called Wilburn's company the Bonell Corporation, but as far as I can tell it was just a dummy company. Whatever assets it had were bought out by another corporation called Carnco. Its a privately held corporation whose only listed director is a lawyer from a big firm in Memphis. I have no idea who owns the stock. Bonell doesn't even exist anymore. There's got to be someone behind Martin Wilburn who's got all the money but for some reason wants to keep a low profile."

  "Can we find out who?"

  Chris thought. "No. Whatever deal transpired between Chase and Wilburn and this Bonell Corporation is private business. It's not like the Marauders is a public company And now, ten percent of the team is owned by whoever controls this Carnco. There are probably only a handful of people who know the truth."

  "Chris," Madison interrupted, "keep going, but eat if you want to."

  Chris looked around uncomfortably at their opulent surroundings.

  Madison understood. She waved her hand and said casually, "Cody talks while he eats all the time. I could care less. Go ahead and eat while you tell me the rest."

  Chris gave her a thankful smile and began scraping the gunk off his chicken. "This is the good part--of the story . . . and the chicken. The last line I really had on Wilburn was this Ibex Corporation. So, I called directory information in Tennessee and got the number for Ibex. I called and asked the receptionist who the president was, figuring he might tell me something about Wilburn. She told me the president was a guy named Kevin Pallidan. I called back a few minutes later using a different voice and asked for Pallidan like he's expecting my call. When I got his secretary I told her my name and that I was an attorney calling from Florida. Then she asks me if I'm with Sheriff Emmit Stone.

  "I didn't know if it had anything to do with anything, but I figured what the hell," Chris said, pausing to wash down a mouthful of food with his beer. "You're going to like this. I told her, yes, I was with Sheriff Stone. I tell her I'm surprised he called himself. Then I ask her when he called. She tells me it was several days ago and I act puzzled before I ask her if he said where he called from. She says, 'Canal Point, I assume. Isn't that where you are?' I told her I was and she put me through to Pallidan. He wouldn't tell me anything. Said he was part of a new management team brought on board after Ibex was bought out three years ago. Said he never heard of Wilburn. I don't know if he was telling the truth or not. He seemed like a pretty cool customer.