by J. A. Jance
Deb gaped at him for a moment and then turned uncertainly to Joanna. “Are you sure about this, boss?” she asked.
“I’m sure,” Joanna said. “Let’s do it.”
When they stepped out of the vehicle, Joanna led the way.
“Good evening, officers,” their host said cordially as they made their way up the winding wheelchair ramp that led to the porch. “It’s rather late. What seems to be the problem?”
“We’re here about your son, Mr. Machett,” Joanna said.
Momentary shock registered on his face followed by resignation. “I see,” he said. “Come in. I was just having a sip of cognac. Care to join me?”
“No, thank you,” Joanna said. “We’re on duty.”
He rolled his cart into the house and then waited by the door until they both walked past. After closing it and turning the dead bolt, he directed them into a large living room, where several well-worn leather chairs were grouped around a coffee table in front of a river rock fireplace. On this late-spring evening it was laid with an unlit fire.
The coffee table was made from a single slice of polished wood that must have been cut from an ancient tree trunk. From the way the chairs were arranged, it was clear that one spot at the table—the one closest to the fireplace—had no chair. Lyle rolled past them and stopped his cart in the empty space, where a bottle of Courvoisier and a single snifter with a layer of amber liquid awaited his attentions. Beside the snifter sat a marble ashtray. An empty pipe lay inside the ashtray with a packet of tobacco and a book of matches positioned nearby.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely honest with you when I came to see you this afternoon,” he admitted.
“We noticed,” Joanna said. “It turns out we weren’t entirely honest, either. That’s why we’re here.”
Lyle picked up the pipe and proceeded to load and light it. Watching him, Joanna was struck by how thin he was. Dressed in clothing in her office he had seemed much larger. Now she saw him for what he was—a painfully thin, scrawny old man.
With the pipe successfully lit, he picked up the snifter and leaned back in the cart. “All right,” he said, “who goes first?”
“Let’s start with why you came to see us today,” Joanna said.
“That’s easy—because I wanted to find out as much as I could about what happened to Guy,” he said. “There are some bad people in my past that I need to avoid. I wanted to know if they were behind what happened. You and Detective Howell here were very coy and didn’t give anything away. I didn’t learn a thing.”
“It’s an active investigation,” Joanna said. “We’re not supposed to discuss it.”
“Fair enough,” Lyle said. “Your turn.”
Joanna decided to go for the gold. “We’re prepared to discuss it now,” she said. “We changed our minds because we believe you to be in danger. We know, for instance, that you’re in the witness protection program. It seems likely that Guy’s death has something to do with that.”
Lyle nodded. “Can you tell me exactly how my son died?” During his visit to the Justice Center he had managed to make them believe his interest in Guy was that of a friend or acquaintance. That was no longer true. The grief on Lyle’s face was as naked as the rest of him.
Joanna took a deep breath. “Guy was tortured before he was murdered. Someone used a stun gun on him over and over. When that didn’t give them what they wanted, they tried waterboarding and apparently went too far. The M.E. found bruises on his body that suggest they tried to revive him at some point. Which also suggests that, even with the waterboarding, they didn’t find what they were looking for.”
A pained expression crossed Lyle’s face. “You’re saying Guy didn’t give me up?”
“We don’t believe he did.”
Now Lyle’s face contorted in anguish. There was a basket on the front of the cart with a small leather packet in it. When he regained his composure, he opened the packet, pulled out a hankie, and blew his nose. When he finished, he shook his head.
“I’ve been in witness protection for close to thirty years,” he said, “living here most of that time. In all those years, nobody’s called me Mr. Machett until just now when you showed up. How did you figure it out? Guy and I went to great pains to cover our tracks.”
“Not great enough,” Joanna observed. “One of my investigators happened across a photo of both your father and your son. At the time Guy was a boy and your father must have been about the age you are now. The resemblance between you and your father is remarkable. But what really set everyone looking for you is your daughter,” Joanna said quietly.
Lyle’s face fell. “My daughter?” he repeated. “I’ve done everything in my power to keep Selma and Liza out of it.”
“Are you aware that Liza’s mother is dead?”
“Was she murdered, too?”
“As far as I know she died of natural causes.”
“Guy told me Selma was in hospice. I’m surprised he didn’t let me know she was gone.”
“He may not have known,” Joanna said. “The phone records we’ve found show only a single call between Liza and Guy. That call was placed to him at his office several weeks ago. By that time, someone may have been monitoring Liza’s phone calls.”
“Monitoring her phone calls? Spying on her? After all these years, why would they do that now?”
“We believe it’s about the money,” Joanna said.
“What money?”
“In the past month or so, a large number of very old one-hundred-dollar bills were put back into circulation in and around Great Barrington. The bills were far enough out-of-date that a local banker asked the Treasury Department about them. Eventually those bills were traced back to your daughter.”
“Crap!” Lyle exclaimed. “I gave Selma that money to help her take care of the kids. It wasn’t meant to put anyone in danger.”
“I take it you know about the money?”
Lyle ran a hand over his eyes as if trying to block out a memory. “Of course I do. It’s money I stole from people I worked for years ago—mob-related people. They were moving drugs and money up and down the East Coast. They bought a bakery to use as a front for their business and used the bread trucks for cover. I drove one of those trucks. The amount of money involved was astonishing. Since there was so much going back and forth, I decided no one would be the wiser if some of it disappeared.”
“You stole from the mob?” Deb asked.
Lyle nodded. “It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I’d skim only one or two bills out of packages full of hundreds. Most of the people on both ends of the deals weren’t that bright. They were generally also greedy and in a hurry, which meant they’d end up counting the packages but not the bills.”
“How long did this go on?”
“A long time, and I wasn’t the only one doing it, either. The drivers were the chumps running all the risks. We were the ones out on the highways with loads of illegal drugs and money, and we thought we deserved a little extra compensation. That worked fine until one of the drivers got too greedy. Once they figured out he was skimming, the guy was history.”
“They murdered him?”
Lyle nodded. “No one ever found his body, but they located the car. It was full of bullet holes and spattered with blood. That sent a message to everybody involved. Since I had been in on the ground floor of the skimming, I had amassed a fair amount of cash. Instead of waiting around for the hit men to come after me, I went to the feds with what I knew on one particular crook and asked for a deal. They offered me witness protection.”
“You, but not your family?”
Lyle bit his lip. “I had a girlfriend,” he said. “I could take one but not both.”
“In other words, you chose the girlfriend?”
Lyle sighed and nodded. “I had to. Trying to take the kids along would have been too complicated, although I hated leaving Guy behind.”
“You hated to leave Guy,” Joanna said, “but what a
bout Liza?”
“Hell, she wasn’t even mine. Selma put the screws to me. She was pregnant and claimed I was the father. I shaped up and married her, but as soon as I saw the baby—eight pounds two ounces and supposedly two months premature—I knew she had lied to me. I wasn’t about to go off into my new life dragging along a wife who was a liar and a kid who wasn’t even mine. I told Selma I had a girlfriend and I was leaving her, but it’s not like I left them penniless. I deeded over the house so they’d have a place to live, and then I gave Selma a crapload of money. I told her I was paying my child support in advance.”
A hard lump of anger formed in Joanna’s gut. She disapproved of fathers who abandoned their families.
“Did Selma even know about the witness protection program?”
Lyle shot Joanna an appraising look before he answered. “No,” he said finally. “She did not.”
“What happened to the guy you testified against?”
“I never did—testify, that is. The guy died, supposedly of natural causes, before the case ever came to trial. I never had to go to court, but by then a couple of the other drivers had bitten the dust, too. I didn’t dare go back.”
“Probably a good decision,” Joanna observed drily.
Lyle seemed to sense her change in attitude. “I didn’t leave her broke,” he said as if that should exonerate him. “Selma was supposed to use the money. I never expected she’d just hang on to it. Do you have any idea how much was left?”
“It must have been a fair amount. The detective I talked to from Great Barrington estimates Liza spent at least forty thousand in cash fixing up Selma’s house. We initially thought the people targeting Liza and her friends were looking for the money. After talking to you, I’m convinced that’s wrong. When the money started surfacing, whoever is behind all this must have thought you were the source of it. I believe you’re the one they’re really after, and they’re killing people along the way, including Liza’s landlady, her boss, and your son—all in hopes of finding you. For all we know, Liza may be dead by now, too, or she may just be on the move. She vanished the day after Selma’s funeral and hasn’t been seen since, but the last time some of her coffee money was reported, it surfaced in Gary, Indiana.”
“Coffee money?” Lyle asked. “What’s that?”
“The bills may have gotten moldy at some point. Coffee beans are what paper restorers use to get rid of the smell of mold. As recently as Friday, alerts purportedly from the Treasury Department went out to banks all over the country asking them to report the appearance of either old and/or coffee-smelling bills.”
“Purportedly?”
“We’ve learned that Friday’s alert didn’t come from anyone in D.C.; it was routed through a server in Poland.”
“So the alert was bogus?”
Joanna nodded. “Even though it didn’t come from the Treasury, that doesn’t mean we can rule out Treasury Department involvement. When the questionable bills first surfaced in Great Barrington, a concerned banker reported them to a Treasury agent named Cesar Flores. I asked Amos Franklin, the detective back there, to get me a copy of the banker’s correspondence on the topic. He just sent it to me. I’d like you to take a look.”
Joanna pulled out Deb’s phone and turned it on. After locating Amos Franklin’s text, she passed the phone to Lyle. He squinted at it and had to enlarge the image several times before resorting to a pair of reading glasses. Joanna watched the movement of his eyes as he scrolled through the document. When his eyes stopped moving, she noticed an unmistakable twitch in his jawline.
“Did you recognize someone there?” she asked.
“No,” he said too quickly. “Not at all.”
Joanna had learned to play poker at an early age. Her father, D. H. Lathrop, had taught her the ropes. He had also tutored her in the art of recognizing a tell, and this was clearly one of those. Three people were dead, including Lyle’s own son. The young woman who considered herself to be his daughter was, if not already dead, then certainly in danger. Yet, instead of helping them, Lyle Morton sat there, looked Joanna in the eye, and lied about it.
Joanna took the phone back and reread the message herself, paying close attention to the names listed on the cc lines at the bottom. Finally she pocketed the phone.
“You referred to the people you worked for as ‘bad people.’ We need names, Lyle. I tried asking the guy from the Marshals Service about them, but his lips are sealed.”
Lyle didn’t answer immediately. Joanna waited him out.
“I’m not supposed to talk about them,” Lyle said at last. “There were two brothers—the Millers. The older one—the one I worked for—was called Big Jim. His much younger brother had a birthmark shaped like a moon on his face. His name was Johnny, but everybody called him Half-Moon.”
Deb, who had been busily taking notes, came to attention. “You mean Half-Moon Miller, the mobster guy who’s currently on trial in Boston?”
Lyle nodded. “That’s the one.”
“Have you been asked to testify against him?”
“No, I’ve been out of the loop for too long. I wouldn’t have anything useful to add.”
“Maybe they were worried that you might,” Deb suggested. “The appearance of that money right around the time the trial was starting might have sent ripples in every direction. It could have been reason enough for someone to want to take you off the board.”
“Are you sure none of the names in that letter rang a bell?” Joanna asked.
“No,” Lyle insisted, shaking his head. “There was no one there I knew.”
“Have it your way, Mr. Morton,” Joanna said abruptly, then she stood up. “Come on, Detective Howell. Since Lyle here isn’t going to help us, we’re done. No need to show us to the door,” she added when Lyle made as if to accompany then. “We know the way.”
Deb didn’t speak until they were back outside “What just happened? I thought we were going to take him into protective custody.”
“Screw protective custody,” Joanna muttered. “Lyle Morton may be in witness protection, but he’s also a lying piece of crap.”
“He lied?” Deb asked. “About what?”
“About recognizing one of the names on that correspondence,” Joanna said. “If we can figure out which one, we’ll be a whole lot closer to figuring out what’s going on.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
“I’m going to call the U.S. Marshals and locate Mr. Stephens. He may not have a line on everything there is to know about the Miller operation, but he’s on the right side of the country and has better sources than we do. One of the names in that banker’s letter hit Lyle Morton where he lives, and we need to know which one it is.”
CHAPTER 27
BACK IN THE YUKON, JOANNA USED DEB’S PHONE TO WORK HER way through the U.S. Marshals Service until she finally found a duty officer who knew the score. Once Joanna explained the situation, he put the call through to Agent Stephens.
“I thought you said your phone was dead.”
“It is. This one belongs to someone else. Now, do you want to continue to argue or are you interested in knowing why I called?”
“Why did you? I’ve already sent agents to look in on Mr. Morton.”
“Is this a cell phone or a landline?” Joanna asked.
“Cell.”
“Give me the number. I need to text you something. Once you read it, you can call me back.”
“Okay,” Stephens said grudgingly when he called back a few minutes later. “I’ve seen the letter. What about it?”
“I showed it to Lyle Morton,” Joanna explained. “One of the names on the cc list got his attention, but when I asked him if he recognized anyone, he lied about it.”
“So?” Stephens said. “Lots of people lie. Is that any reason to wake me up in the middle of the night?”
“It is when the guy who’s lying happens to be in your witness protection program. It is when people are dying because your precious Lyle
Morton poses a threat to someone. My first choice is an unknown someone who is hooked in with Big Jim and Half-Moon Miller, the guys Anson Machett used to work for back in the day. My best guess is that it’s also someone who went under everybody’s radar back then and is still under the radar now. I need to know who that person is, and so do you.”
Knowing he was making up his mind, Joanna waited through the long silence that followed. “Okay,” Stephens conceded finally. “I’ll look into it. Should I call you back at this number?”
“No,” Joanna said, “use mine. This phone belongs to one of my detectives. I’ll be home in about an hour and I’ll be able to charge mine then.”
Joanna handed Deb her phone. “Thanks,” she said. “I believe I’m over my temper tantrum now.”
Almost two hours after leaving the Whetstone Retreat, Joanna was back home at High Lonesome Ranch. After locking away her weapons and plugging in her discharged phone, Joanna made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, poured a glass of milk, and settled down in the breakfast nook for a solitary late-night meal that certainly didn’t qualify as dinner. With Jenny’s dogs locked in her room, only Lady padded into the kitchen from Denny’s room to keep her company.
Half an hour later, when Joanna tiptoed into the bedroom, she transferred the phone over to her bedside charger. Sunday was supposedly a day of rest, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Once undressed and in bed, she was still too wound up to sleep. Unable to the switch off her brain, she tossed and turned as her thoughts bounced back and forth from case to case and problem to problem.
She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the idea that her hometown might also be an incubator for a fourteen-year-old wannabe serial killer. And how was it that a Boston mob case that had been making nationwide news for months had now inserted itself into Joanna’s relatively mob-free Cochise County? Bringing someone like Roger Stephens into the equation was a gamble, but if someone in the upper echelons of the Treasury Department was involved in Guy Machett’s horrific murder, Joanna’s small-town police agency would be at a distinct disadvantage in dealing with them. She understood that people sometimes used fire to fight fire, so didn’t it make sense to use feds to fight feds?