Favors and Lies

by Mark Gilleo

  “And I’m sorry my mother is going to prison for the rest of her life.”

  “Good luck, my son. I don’t exist. Shoot me now or chase a ghost forever.”

  “Ghosts are becoming my specialty.”

  Dan stared into his mother’s eyes, wondering how the woman who raised him had lost her moral compass. Maybe she’d never had one.

  “The only solution with a happy ending includes you telling me where Reed Temple is. I know he must be close,” Dan said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It took me twenty-some minutes to get from Alexandria to this house on the night Vicky and Conner died. In that time, someone had to get here, remove Conner, and kill Vicky. In twenty-five minutes, tops. Someone had to be close.”

  His mother remained silent.

  “Last chance for directions to my friend Reed Temple.”

  “I cannot help you.”

  Dan looked down at his watch and then out the front door at the gray BMW in the driveway. Then he smiled.

  “Yes, you can,” Dan replied. He reached into his pocket and removed a handful of zip ties. “And it won’t require you to move.”

  Chapter 44

  —

  Dan removed the key ring to his nephew’s Nissan hatchback from the Welcome Home plaque near the back door of his sister-in-law’s house. He plotted out the plan in his head and checked the time on his watch.

  He opened his cell phone and dialed.

  “Sensei, it’s Dan.”

  “How do you like the SUV?”

  “Oh, it’s great. Rides like a charm. Any chance you have LoJack?”

  Gary Raven fell silent, but Dan could hear bodies falling on the mat in the background, dispersed intermittently with a combative yell.

  “What happened?”

  “Your SUV was borrowed. I need you to provide its current location. You claimed it had all the bells and whistles. I assume that includes LoJack, and whatever version of remote-access software you installed.”

  “Give me a second,” Gary Raven replied. “I am on the mat. I have to boot up the computer.”

  Dan stood in the dark near the entrance to the back door of his sister-in-law’s house and counted the seconds until he heard Gary Raven’s voice. He eyed an old sweatshirt of his nephew’s hanging on a hook near the back door and looked down at himself and his attire. Tattered, dirty, and bloodied. He removed the sweatshirt from the hook and pulled it over his head while he waited for Gary Raven to return to the phone.

  “You there?” Gary asked.

  “Yep. Tell me you got it.”

  “In the alley behind Twenty-Ninth Street, a block south of R Street, Northwest.”

  “Thanks,” Dan answered. “Is your insurance on the vehicle current?”

  “Yes. And I don’t want to know why you are asking.”

  “If you don’t hear back from me in the next forty-five minutes or so, report the car as stolen.”

  “Will do.”

  “Thanks, Sensei,” Dan said. He hung up, placed his cell phone on the top of the refrigerator near the back door, and walked out the rear to his nephew’s car.

  —

  Reed Temple pressed the lock release button on the key ring for the security-laden Mercedes SUV and threw his bag in the rear hatch of the vehicle. One bag was enough. Everything else he needed on his new assignment would be packed with white gloves and shipped to his final destination at taxpayers’ expense. It was a perk of the job. Diplomatic personnel, official and unofficial, spent half their lives waiting for the arrival of their furniture. He whistled quietly as he closed the lid on the trunk. He patted the breast pocket on his suit jacket one more time, smiling broadly. A forty-minute ride to the airport, an overnight flight to Kuala Lumpur with a connection in Tokyo, and he would vanish into a new assignment in Southeast Asia. In forty-eight hours he would be sweating through his pressed linen shirt, sipping an umbrella drink on a sidewalk café somewhere between Jakarta and Bangkok.

  He threw himself behind the wheel of the car, turned the ignition, and straightened his tie in the mirror. The car’s engine went silent and he turned the ignition again. No clicks. No chugs.

  Reed Temple’s eyes danced across the displays on the dashboard looking for an indication to the car’s mechanical hiccup. By the time he saw the thin wire drop from above his head and disappear beneath his chin, it was too late. Reed Temple clamored for his neck, his fingers insufficiently strong to pry the wire away from his crushing larynx and constricted jugular. Dan, behind the driver in the backseat of the SUV, pulled downward, his body weight sinking into the foot well. His forearms, beneath his nephew’s old sweatshirt, were taut with strain.

  Reed Temple’s flailing arms scratched at the headrest. For a brief moment, Dan allowed himself to be seen in the rearview mirror. His eyes locked with Reed Temple and there was recognition that it was over. There would be no escape.

  Reed Temple’s flailing right hand found his coat pocket and managed to remove his semi-automatic government issue as blood filled his throat. His head arched back, beckoning for room that was not available. Grappling for life, Reed Temple raised the gun and fired backwards, aiming at Dan through the headrest, the only available angle on his assailant. The gunshot illuminated the car for a split-second and Dan’s heart rate increased. Blood slowly began to drip from the back of Reed Temple’s head, running down the back collar of his suit jacket.

  Bulletproof headrests, indeed, Dan thought.

  Dan held tightly until Reed Temple stopped twitching. Then he maintained pressure for another ten seconds. When he released his grip on the wire around Temple’s neck, a sharp crease remained in the dead man’s collar, neatly dissecting a spot just above the double Windsor.

  Dan moved the wire, raising his hands back over Reed Temple’s head. He retracted the garrote to the wristwatch and returned the bevel to the face of the timepiece.

  He looked around once and exited the car, sweating, pulse elevated. He walked towards the dark end of the alley and turned right where it intersected with another alley running perpendicularly. He was back in his nephew’s Nissan hatchback ten seconds later. Six minutes after that, he pulled into the rear parking spot behind his sister-in-law’s house.

  He entered the backdoor near the kitchen, took off his nephew’s sweatshirt, and put it back on the hook. He reached up and removed his cell phone from the top of the refrigerator and checked the time. Twenty-seven minutes, round-trip.

  Chapter 45

  —

  Dan walked back into the living room and found the wingback chair in the corner empty. The zip ties were cut and lying on the carpet. He reached down and picked up the evidence, stuffing them in the same pocket he had removed them from earlier. He noticed the plantation shutters had been closed, concealing the view to the outside. Dan pushed open the shutters and eyed the gray BMW still parked in the driveway. He glanced away from the window and noticed his mother’s walking cane resting against the wall on the other side of the chair. Everything is a lie . . .

  Dan exited the front door with no attempt to conceal his presence or intention. He beelined it across the manicured lawn and crossed the street to the police cruiser. Detective Wallace lowered the window and Dan motioned towards the back door. Sue was still in the passenger seat and turned towards the rear as Dan landed in the back of the car.

  “Did you see anyone leave the house?” Dan asked.

  Detective Wallace adjusted the rearview mirror until Dan’s face was in view. “No one left the house once you went in. But then again, you should know that given you were in the residence.”

  Dan rubbed the lump on the back of his head. “I was momentarily incapacitated. Someone hit me from behind. When I regained my faculties, the house was empty.”

  “You were ambushed from behind in a living room with the lights on?” D
etective Wallace asked sarcastically.

  “Yes.”

  “Who else was in the room? I could see a partial silhouette in the chair. Until the blinds shut.”

  “The woman in the house was my mother.”

  “The driver of the gray BMW, which I followed from Langley, is your mother?”

  “That is correct.”

  “I thought your mother was dead,” Sue responded.

  Detective Wallace turned at the waist from the driver’s seat and stared at Dan. “You want to explain?”

  “It caught me off guard as well.”

  “And?”

  “And what? For ten years I thought my mother was deceased. She is not.”

  “And she works at Langley?”

  “Let’s not act completely surprised. It is one of the few employers where death doesn’t mean the end of your employment.”

  “Does she have anything to do with Nguyen’s death?”

  “Not in any way that could be proven.”

  “She could be charged with illegal entry.”

  “She probably had a key and it was her daughter-in-law’s house. But it doesn’t matter. You have to find her to charge her, and she won’t be found.”

  “What about the guy who ordered Nguyen’s murder?”

  “He was gone by the time I got inside. My mother implied that I missed him by a few minutes.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Dan felt the heat of the detective’s stare and knew his lies were transparent. Dishonesty by those being questioned was a shared occupational hazard both men could smell in high wind.

  “Take us to the nearest hospital, Detective. We need to be treated for shock. We have been through a lot this evening. We need medical treatment. I am starting to feel cold. Dizzy.”

  Dan looked at Sue and winked subtly.

  Dan watched as Detective Wallace eyeballed Major’s driver’s license resting on the dash of the cruiser. Then his eyes again met Dan’s in the rearview mirror. “Let me call it in.”

  Dan closed his eyes as the car moved down the street. At the stop sign at the end of the block, the radio in the detective’s car chirped out a BOLO for a stolen black Mercedes Benz SUV.

  Chapter 46

  —

  Dan relaxed in a chair at a round table in the back corner of the bar room. From his vantage point, he had a complete view of the room—every entrance, every exit, every table, every chair, every TV screen, every character.

  Detective Wallace entered the room through the arched doorway and Good Time Charlie himself acted busy, shining glasses with a white towel at the bar. Wallace nodded at Ginger who was sitting on the same barstool where she had launched her sales pitch on their earlier encounter. Ginger winked and asked, “Did you change your mind, Detective?”

  “Not yet,” Wallace replied, looking around for Dan and spotting him as Dan raised his hand. Detective Wallace assessed the room and its patrons as he approached the table, belly arriving first.

  “When I said I wanted to meet with you, I didn’t expect to meet here,” Wallace said, now surveying the football games on the TV screens.

  “I wanted to catch the games. I had a couple of people to talk to. And a detective friend of mine wanted to meet. I thought I would handle it all at the same time.”

  “Are we friends now?”

  “We did smoke a peace pipe, if I recall.”

  “We did.”

  “But I think we can do it for real this time,” Dan said, smiling. He pulled two cigarettes from his pocket and pushed one across the table.

  Detective Wallace looked down at the temptation and then up at Dan.

  “I hear you quit,” Dan replied.

  “Every month.”

  “Three years for me. But I’ve been battling a strong craving for one lately. And I don’t like smoking alone.”

  “It’s against the law to smoke indoors in a public venue in the state of Maryland.”

  Dan glanced around at the necks of patrons cranked upward towards the TVs. “You are outside of your jurisdiction and I don’t think the owner would mind if we smoked just one.”

  Wallace pulled a lighter from his pocket and leaned over to light Dan’s cigarette. Dan inhaled slowly and blew the smoke upward. “Holy crap that is good.”

  “Don’t blame me if you pick up the habit again.”

  “Just one. Just today.”

  “Celebrating?”

  “Something like that.”

  Wallace leaned back in his chair and inhaled.

  “So what’s on your mind, Detective?”

  “You can call me Earl.”

  “I could, but I like the sound of ‘detective,’ Detective.”

  “I had a few questions for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You want to tell me what really happened on Friday night?”

  “You know I spent most of the afternoon yesterday with the Alexandria police and a roomful of suits who didn’t identify themselves. I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. I was drugged, kidnapped, and held hostage in the basement of a house that I own. My intern, who was really an employee of the CIA, was also held captive. We escaped. Fled for our lives. One of the kidnappers was shot. Another was incapacitated by his own man. A third kidnapper departed the scene. We thought there was a connection between the car you were following and the kidnapper who escaped, and we followed that assumption to my sister-in-law’s house. There I met my deceased mother. You can imagine my surprise. I was obviously not in the right frame of mind. I was in shock. My behavior was clearly erratic. We were subsequently treated at Georgetown University Hospital for shock and stress, as you are aware, being you provided transportation.”

  “Helps to have an intelligence agent corroborate your story.”

  “She corroborated a story that no one believes. The entire crime scene was sterilized. There is no report of any bodies being found at the Stonewall Jackson residence. There is no official police report at all.”

  “So you are just being labeled crazy.”

  “Crazy and alive. I can live with that.”

  “I have friends on the Alexandria police force who tell me there was only one body found in the house. Took three guys and a winch to get him out of an old well. All off the record, of course.”

  “I believe that.”

  “They said his face was torn open.”

  “It wasn’t pretty.”

  “Things could have turned out worse for you. You got lucky. You could have easily been killed. Dumped under the Promenade. Who knows, your body could have been found in a stolen car with a gunshot wound to the head and a crushed larynx.”

  “That would be one way to go.”

  “There seems to be a lack of interest from the press on that story as well. Curious circumstances, really. A man in a stolen vehicle dies of a gunshot wound while on his way to death by strangulation. From what could be determined at the crime scene, the victim was being strangled from behind and attempted to shoot his assailant who was to his rear. The bullet ricocheted off the bulletproof plate in the headrest and entered the victim’s skull.”

  “Incredible,” Dan said, inhaling another drag and tipping the ash from the cigarette into an empty beer bottle on the table. “Sounds like a murder-suicide.”

  “I have been investigating death and dismemberment for a quarter of a century. Never seen anything like it. Have you?”

  “No.”

  Detective Wallace leaned forward and stared at Dan through the smoke trailing off the cigarette in his mouth. “You sure you don’t have any information on the subject?”

  “You aren’t implying I was involved, are you? I was inside a house you were observing.”

  “I am aware.”

  “And I was
incapacitated. I had the injury on my head to prove it.”

  “Yes, you did. Of course, that injury could have existed already. A fresh injury.”

  “What about other evidence, Detective? Strangling a person from behind takes strength. It would also require some kind of weapon. A rope, perhaps. I mean, you could strangle someone from behind with a standard chokehold, but not if the headrest was in the way. Certainly not if the victim had a handgun at his disposal.”

  “No weapon. The ligature marks indicated something thin, but strong. Like a piano wire.”

  “I don’t play the piano. Nor do I own one.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I guess that is two suspects down. You know, DC is a dangerous city. Another reason I live in Virginia. One bridge crossing away, but another world entirely.”

  “Hmmm,” Detective Wallace replied, exhaling.

  Dan put a finger in the air, pointed at the beer bottle on the table, and then changed his finger configuration to order two more drinks. The two men smoked in silence until drinks arrived. As the waitress walked away, Dan reached into his pocket and removed a thumb drive.

  “You might find this interesting.”

  “What’s on it?”

  “Voice recordings. Everything you need for everyone involved. I have the person responsible for Nguyen’s death admitting that he has the detective’s badge sitting on his mantle at home.”

  Detective Wallace’s eyes watered. “I already got his badge back. And his detective’s notebook.”

  “You would have needed a search warrant for that.”

  “I only needed an address and you gave me his driver’s license.”

  “Skirting the law?”

  “No more than you.”

  Dan nodded and then took his hand off the thumb drive. “I assume you can get that to the right people. I understand you aren’t very popular with the federal agencies already. Maybe you know someone at the Washington Post who would be willing to write up a story and run it for you.”