A King's ransom

by James Grippando

  Agent Carreras looked at me and said, “Explain to me again how Mr. Ochoa came to tell you all this.”

  It made me nervous, that being the first question. “Like I said, I threatened to go to the state attorney. He pulled a knife. There was a skirmish and. . well, I sort of forced it out of him.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean ‘forced’?”

  “In the fight he broke his wrist.”

  “And then what? You threatened to break his other one if he didn’t talk?”

  “No. The wrist got caught up in the garbage disposal.”

  Carreras leaned back, stroking his mustache. “I’m having trouble visualizing. How does that happen?”

  “I sort of forced it in.”

  “Did you turn it on?” he asked, grimacing.

  I felt as if I were shrinking before their eyes. This was the cross-examination I’d feared, the reason I couldn’t possibly have called Ochoa as a witness in my hearing. “I only threatened to turn it on.”

  Once again they exchanged glances. “I see,” said Nettles.

  Carreras leaned forward, elbows atop his desk. “Let me get this straight. Your evidence so far comes from a fired employee who promised to say bad things about his former employer if you would pay him fifty thousand dollars, and who ultimately ended up spilling his guts after you threatened to make his left hand suitable for Hamburger Helper.”

  “I’m not proud of the way this came to light. But it’s not a case of a disgruntled former employee making up horrible stories about the company that fired him.”

  Nettles put his notepad aside and said, “We’ll check it out.”

  “You have to check it out. There could be thirty other policyholders at risk if you don’t.”

  “I said we would. We will.”

  “I’m not hearing much conviction in your voice.”

  “My apologies.”

  I came to the edge of my seat, moved by anger. “The FBI needs to understand, I took a million and a half dollars less in settlement money from these bastards so that I’d be free to talk to you. They were willing to pay me three million dollars to keep my mouth shut. Doesn’t that tell you something? Every minute you delay gives them another minute to pressure Ochoa into shutting his mouth forever. You need to talk to him, you need to get the names of those other policyholders, and you need to warn them.”

  Carreras rose and extended his hand. “Thanks very much for the information. We’ll take it from here.”

  We shook hands. “I’d like to know what happens. Will you keep me posted?”

  “As best we can.”

  Nettles led me out of the office, down the hall, to the lobby. The elevator doors opened. He thanked me once more as I stepped inside. I stopped the doors from closing and said, “Please, you need to follow through on this.”

  “Like we said, we’ll take it from here.”

  “You know, I wasn’t kidding about what I said in there. It cost me a million and a half dollars to come here and talk to you. I wish I could say it felt worth it.”

  He said nothing as I allowed the elevator doors to close between us.

  Mom had Jenna and me over for dinner. We ate outside at the round, glass-topped patio table by the pool. It had been intended as a celebration dinner of sorts, but no one was fooled into thinking it was time to celebrate yet. I wasn’t sure what the FBI was up to, but I would have liked more assurances on the follow-through, just for the sake of the other policyholders who were potentially at risk.

  We did have our money. The funds had been wired directly to the same Bogota account we’d used for the last trip. Alex and I would withdraw the cash when we got there, and she’d again work her black market contacts to convert pesos to dollars. Funny, only a month ago the mere mention of a currency black market would have made me suspicious, but I now realized that it was just a fact of life in Colombia, and not just for the kidnapping trade. Thank goodness I had Alex, who was savvy enough to watch out for counterfeiters.

  By eight o’clock Mom was finished with dinner and fed up with mosquitoes. She went inside. Jenna and I lit up a citronella candle and watched the moon rise.

  “Thought any more about Duncan?” she asked.

  “Only constantly.”

  “Still think he’s ‘A Friend’?”

  “It’s hard to imagine any lawyer doing that. Ethically you can’t betray your own client, no matter how despicable they might be.”

  “A lawyer doesn’t have to help a client commit murder. If those kidnappers kill your father, the blood is on the hands of the insurance company, if you ask me. Maybe Duncan sees it the same way.”

  “Maybe.”

  She sipped her chardonnay. “You think one and a half million will get your dad home?”

  “Alex is pretty nervous.”

  “I didn’t ask what Alex thought. What do you think?”

  “If Alex is nervous, I’m nervous.”

  The sliding glass door opened behind us. I turned and saw Mom coming toward us, her head down.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked with concern.

  She stopped at the edge of the swimming pool, then looked at me and said, “Guillermo said no.”

  “What?”

  “I called him to ask if he could loan us the other half of the ransom demand.” She was staring past me, a vague expression in her eyes. “Said he just can’t do it.”

  Without another word, she retreated into the house.

  Jenna said, “I’m sorry, Nick.”

  “I expected that. Guillermo’s own wife told me he was a cheapskate.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “The only thing we can do. We’re going to get my father home for a million and a half.”

  She refilled her wineglass, no response.

  I looked away, shaking my head. “This makes me sick.”

  “What?”

  “Here I am, worrying that I settled too cheap. Somewhere across town, I bet Maggie and Duncan are out celebrating this very minute. Another success story. Damage under control.”

  “So you don’t think Duncan had his epiphany in the end?”

  “That note he slipped me could have come from the heart or it could have been pure showmanship. You just never know with Duncan.”

  “If you’re having doubts, you should follow your gut instinct.”

  “My gut tells me that someone needs to be punished for this.”

  “That’s up to the FBI now.”

  “I just didn’t get the feeling that they’re going to run with it.”

  “Then before you go to Bogota, call the state attorney.”

  “The problem is, the more agencies I get involved, the more likely it is to get in the news.”

  “Quality Insurance deserves all the bad publicity it gets.”

  “Of course I’d love to see the media rip these people to shreds-Ochoa and Maggie and whoever else had a hand in it. But it’s not as simple as just calling a reporter. I’m seriously worried how my dad’s kidnappers might react if they hear all about the unraveling of this scandal on CNN. Maybe these same thugs thought they were going to have two, three, five more victims sent their way. They won’t be inclined to cut my father’s ransom in half if they think he’s the end of the gravy train.”

  “I’m not saying you should alert the media. Just go to the state attorney, ask her to please keep her investigation confidential until your father is released.”

  “Have you ever heard of that working?”

  “I see your point.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Jaime Ochoa handled thirty policies besides your dad’s. I’m not saying that thirty other people are going to end up kidnapped, or ten more, or one more. But do you want to leave that to chance?”

  I looked at the moon and sighed. “I guess there’s no reason to give the FBI an exclusive on this. I’ll call the state attorney in the morning.”

  She reached across the table and took my hand. “That’s
the right decision.”

  I squeezed her hand and said, “It feels right.”

  “You should go with it, then. You should always go with what feels right.”

  Our eyes met, and I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convey a double meaning, but her words, her touch, had definitely sparked me. For the first time since our breakup, something finally felt right to me. “Jenna, before I go to Bogota again, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say.”

  “What?”

  She didn’t pull her hand away, which warmed me inside. “You remember that day we went cycling in Kennedy Park, and you got mad about the way I reacted to the idea of us getting married?”

  “Let’s not go back there, please.”

  “I only wish you would believe that I’d already bought the ring. I didn’t propose marriage just to keep you from leaving me.”

  “I know that.”

  “You know?”

  “I don’t know, but I believe you. The thing is, Nick, that wasn’t our whole problem. It really came down to what each of us was willing to do to make this relationship work. I completely changed the direction of my own career to move to Miami with you. As soon as we got here, you basically gave me up for yours.”

  “That’s the old Nick. Or more like the temporarily insane Nick. I wasn’t that way in law school. We were great back then. Remember?”

  “Yes, I do. That’s why I came to Miami with you.”

  “I just got caught up in the whole Cool Cash mystique. For a while.”

  “And now the kidnapping has you feeling otherwise.”

  “It’s not just that. It’s the egos, the twisted values, the Gilbert Joneses of the world and ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ ”

  “Who?”

  “All I’m trying to say is kidnapping or not, I was finally coming to my senses. The last thing on earth I wanted to be was the next Duncan Fitz.”

  “I wish I’d heard you say that six months ago.”

  “Better late than never, right?”

  She smiled weakly, saying nothing. I wondered if her silence was a sign of a rekindling inside, or if she was simply too kind to tell me “Too little, too late.”

  The swimming pool glistened in the moonlight. Shadows of a flickering candle flame danced slowly against her hair. At that peaceful moment I did know one thing. I would happily sit there by the pool and hold her hand just as long as she’d allow it.

  64

  Around nine I dropped Jenna off and went home to get ready for my trip. Alex and I had a noon flight that would get us into Bogota in plenty of time before our third Sunday-morning ascent of Monserrate. I hadn’t looked forward to any of the radio contacts with the kidnappers, but this one had me especially apprehensive.

  I packed my bag in ten minutes, then sifted through the mail to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important. Next I scrolled through a flood of e-mail messages between Mom and a network of family friends that stretched across the country. The e-mail that caught my eye, however, wasn’t one of hers. It was from someone who used an eight-digit number as a screen name, which gave me pause. The last time I’d opened an e-mail like this one, it had turned out to be from Jaime Ochoa.

  I clicked the mouse, and the message popped onto the screen.

  “I know where Matthew Rey is,” it read.

  I stared at the words. It was the same e-mail message that Jaime had sent to me at my office right after the kidnapping. This time he’d added a teaser. “Come see me, and I will show you.”

  I printed the message and checked the time of delivery: 5:12 P.M. Just a couple of hours after the court hearing. My gut wrenched, wishing only that it had come two hours before it. I’d been so afraid to subpoena Jaime as a witness for the hearing that I’d decided to play the bluff. I’d been certain he would have come down with a convenient case of amnesia or, worse, told the judge that I’d shoved his hand into the disposal not in self-defense but simply to coerce a false confession. Things had gone badly between us at yesterday’s encounter, but perhaps things had just gotten out of hand. Perhaps I’d misread him.

  Perhaps he was “A Friend.”

  I got up quickly and grabbed the keys to my Jeep. I had to pay Jaime one last visit.

  It took me twenty minutes to get to Jaime’s house, including a quick stop at my mother’s house on the way. I parked in the driveway but didn’t get out of my Jeep immediately.

  The house was completely dark on the outside, no porch light or landscape lighting. Inside, a light from the kitchen appeared to be the only one burning. From a streetlamp at the corner, eerie shadows of power poles and phone lines stretched across the lawn and front porch.

  I stepped down and stopped. I had reservations, of course. Driving up, I’d considered everything from the possibility of a cruel joke to a setup. I half expected Jaime and a half dozen of his friends to jump out from the bushes and beat my brains out with baseball bats. Perhaps I was being a little reckless. But the thing I feared more than anything was how the kidnappers might react on Sunday morning upon hearing that the ransom was being cut in half. If anyone could head off that crisis, I figured it was Jaime. I had to put my fears aside and take his offer at face value.

  That didn’t mean I was an idiot. The stop at my mother’s house had been to pick up my father’s Smith amp; Wesson.

  I walked slowly across the front lawn in the darkness. With each step, the coarse St. Augustine crabgrass crunched beneath my feet. A car passed at the intersection a half block away, howling-drunk teenagers hanging out the open windows as they ran the stop sign. The noise faded as quickly as it had come, leaving me in what seemed to be an even darker and lonelier silence. At the paved walk I turned and started toward the front door, my shadow from the streetlight reaching far ahead of me. My heels clicked, and then the soles scratched like sandpaper as I climbed the final cement steps. I raised my hand to knock, then stopped. The house seemed too quiet.

  I shook it off and knocked three times.

  I waited and listened. No lights switched on, I heard no footsteps inside. I knocked again, slightly harder. Again there was no response. Jaime’s car was in the driveway, but it was possible that a friend had taken him out for the night. Then I realized why the silence was so troubling.

  Not even the dog barked.

  The first time I’d visited, Sergeant had practically answered the door herself and nearly eaten me alive on the way out. The second time, she was chained in the yard but barked at my presence. This time, I’d driven up to a perfectly quiet house in a rather noisy Jeep, walked across the lawn, and knocked twice on the front door. It seemed strange that I’d gone unnoticed. Very strange.

  I knocked once more, this time with the base of my fist. I pounded hard, and with the third deep thud the door swung open. I stepped back, startled, but no one was there. Evidently it hadn’t been completely closed. The mere force of my knock had pushed it open.

  I stepped to the open doorway and said, “Jaime?”

  I heard nothing. I glanced again at the car in the driveway, thinking it odd that if someone had taken Jaime out on Friday night that they would have taken his dog with them.

  I stuck my head inside the dark foyer, just enough to see inside. “Jaime, it’s-”

  I froze in midsentence. From the other end of the hall, at the entrance to the kitchen, Sergeant was staring me in the face, eyes wide open. She wasn’t growling, wasn’t blinking. She wasn’t even breathing. The dog’s body was sprawled across the kitchen floor in a crimson pool of blood.

  My instincts told me to run, but I found my feet moving me in the opposite direction, into the house, down the hall, toward the lone light in the kitchen and the grim smell of death. It had been just five hours since Jaime had sent me an e-mail offering to show me where my father had gone. The very sight of his dog lying dead on the floor drew me inside for the answer I feared.

  I stopped at the kitchen and gasped.

  Jaime was hanging by the neck, twirling slowly round and round at t
he end of a rope that was fastened to the ceiling fan.

  At first I couldn’t move, stunned by the ghastly sight of this strangely elongated body. The toes seemed to reach in futility for the floor. The chin pointed toward the ceiling, yanked upward by a rope so taut that his bulging eyes had nearly popped from the sockets. The whole hideous sight just kept turning with the blades of the paddle fan right before my eyes, as if on display.

  Murder was my first thought, but then I remembered how Jaime was so afraid of prison that he would have stabbed me to death to avoid ending up like his brother, abused while incarcerated. He was cowardly enough to kill himself. But why would he have killed his dog, too? Then it hit me. This wasn’t just an escape. This was Jaime’s exit, something he’d wanted me to see. The e-mail had said that he knew where my father was. He’d invited me over to show me.

  Death was what he’d shown me. Gruesome deaths-a slit throat, strangulation.

  I nearly fell against the doorframe, sickened by the perverse and tortured message that I now knew he was sending me.

  They’re going to kill my father, I realized, almost too weak to stand.

  65

  An ambulance arrived in minutes. The Miami-Dade police weren’t far behind.

  I’d told the 911 operator that Jaime was already dead, but apparently she’d thought that paramedics would be better judges. I waited outside as they rushed in, the police just a few steps behind them. The paramedics came out with no body on the gurney, and I presumed correctly that their lifesaving work was over before it had started. In seconds the whole yard was surrounded by yellow police tape. Two more police cars pulled up, one marked, the other unmarked, both with swirling blue lights that gave the dark house the strange glow of the aurora borealis.

  A uniformed officer asked to take my statement. I hesitated. I was still concerned about Jaime and the insurance scandal making the newspapers. For all I knew, the kidnappers were Jaime’s buddies, and they might take it out on my father if they were to hear that Jaime was dead.