by J. B. Turner
‘What is there to know about me?’
‘You want this story bad, don’t you? You want to make a name for yourself, don’t you?’
‘Every journalist does. But I want to help you as well.’
‘I know you do.’
Craig went quiet again. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. ‘I know a man who knows something about Joe O’Neill’s case.’
‘Who is he?’
‘A police officer. He may be able to help you.’
‘In what way?’
‘He was linked to the police inquiry. He kept in touch with Jenny and myself after O’Neill was acquitted.’
‘I need to speak to him.’
‘Look, this was nearly fourteen years ago, after Jenny was raped. I don’t know if he is even alive.’
‘Do you think he might still be in touch with Jenny?’
‘Might be. I don’t know.’
‘Doesn’t she say?’
‘I don’t want to talk about Jenny. She’s suffered enough.’ Suddenly Craig’s tone was sharp.
‘You got a name for this police officer?’
‘I can’t go telling you that. You’re the journalist, aren’t you? You should know all about keeping sources confidential.’
‘I understand.’
Deborah made a mental note to track down Jenny Forbes. It was time.
She wondered if Jenny would put her in touch with the mysterious police officer. Was he sympathetic to Craig’s cause? Why didn’t Craig just give her the name? Was he scared that Erhert’s men were listening in?
Craig leaned forward. ‘I must warn you, my dear, that if you pursue this you have to be very careful.’
‘Why?’
He just stared back at her, the blacks of his eyes now pinpricks. And Deborah remembered Goldberg’s last words of warning.
‘I understand,’ she said.
‘I wonder if you do. Anyway, you want to know how I spend my days? My conversion to the straight and narrow? Might be useful for a feature.’
Deborah ignored the new, cynical tone. ‘I’d like to find out a bit more about your past. Tell me about your involvement in the war. Your lawyer just said you—’
‘Miss Jones, I’ve got trouble remembering what I did yesterday, let alone remembering that long ago.’
‘You were in the British army. Where did you fight, for example?’
‘I can’t see the point in raking up that sort of stuff.’
The conversation ended as the siren wailed.
Craig spun around. Two burly guards came through the door behind him. ‘What’s all this about?’
Deborah heard one guard saying, ‘Lockdown.’
Craig still had the phone pressed to his ear as he faced away from the plastic barrier. ‘My interview’s just started.’ The guards hustled him away, and the receiver fell from his manacled hands and swung to and fro in the empty booth.
Craig turned round. He looked anxious. Deborah barely heard him say the word ‘Careful’ again, muffled as it was by the Plexiglas. Then he disappeared through the steel door.
The interview was over.
• • •
Erhert escorted Deborah back to her car, his hand briefly touching her back. She tensed up as soon as he did it. ‘I’m sorry about that lockdown situation, miss, but you know how it is.’
‘Not really.’ She suspected that the whole thing had been orchestrated to interrupt her interview with Craig.
Erhert didn’t shake her hand before he turned and walked away. ‘Gimme a call if you need anything else,’ he said, heading back into Raiford.
Deborah’s heart was pounding as she got in her car and headed off. She felt angry with Erhert and with herself for not getting anything more precise from her interview.
Things had been going well until the interruption.
She pulled over to the side of the road outside the Raiford archway and took out her cell phone. She punched in Sam Goldberg’s direct-line number at the office.
‘Get anything from Craig?’ He sounded tired.
‘Not yet, although I think I made progress.’ She watched a group of New River inmates coming back from the fields. A red Chevy cruised past heading north, driven by a scruffy white man. He wore shades and a baseball cap pulled low, elbow out of his window.
‘He mentioned some police officer who kept in touch with Jenny Forbes and himself until O’Neill was acquitted. But he clammed up when I mentioned the war.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got nothing more than a pile of dust.’
‘I’d still like to follow it up.’
Silence. Deborah wondered if Goldberg was going to pull the plug on her story. She’d only have herself to blame. ‘How do you plan to do that?’
‘I need some help… I felt he was hinting at something important.’
Goldberg went quiet for several seconds. Then he let out a long, wheezy sigh. ‘You mean you have a hunch?’
‘Yeah, a hunch.’
‘I like hunches. What do you need?’
‘I need to find Jenny Forbes. Fast. A number, an address. She might be able to help if she’s still in touch with this guy.’
‘Why didn’t you get the details from Craig?’
‘Got kinda edgy when I mentioned her. Obviously it’s a sensitive issue. I’m sure he doesn’t want me interrupting her life. Also, I reckon Mr Craig didn’t want to talk on the phone about this police officer.’
There was a short pause. Then Goldberg said, ‘How about Larry Coen? He’d find her.’
Yeah, that would work, Deborah thought. She liked the Herald crime reporter. His contacts were legendary—from crime families in Little Cuba to senior FBI and CIA sources within Quantico and Langley. ‘That’d be great.’
‘Gimme a few minutes. I’ll get back to you.’
Deborah killed the call and sped off. Her mind was racing. She was relieved that she hadn’t screwed up. Goldberg was still on her side. Just.
Deborah accelerated off the old road and a warm breeze blew through her hair. She switched on a local radio station. It was the standard country music. It reminded her again of Brett’s parents.
She headed south on 301 and wondered if her boss would call back.
Fifteen minutes later, he was on the line. ‘You’re in luck Jenny Forbes lives in Key West. I’ll phone through her full address when we get it, hopefully in the next thirty minutes.’
‘I’m on my way,’ she shouted above the traffic. ‘I appreciate it, Mr Goldberg.’
‘Okay. Remember, only speak to me.’ He hung up and Deborah wondered why he was so reluctant to let anyone else know what she was working on. She hadn’t heard of any other reporter being asked to follow such a procedure. Was he just being protective?
Deborah put her foot on the accelerator. She felt good despite the eight-hour drive ahead of her. She turned up the music and smiled at the corny lyrics. Above her, the northern Florida sky was blood red.
Her stomach rumbled and she realized that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
She glanced in her mirror and saw the red Chevy again, crossing lanes, two cars behind her.
Her stomach knotted.
Hadn’t it been headed in the opposite direction when she was outside Raiford?
4
Just before midnight, Senator Jack O’Neill sat at his huge mahogany desk in the wood-paneled first-floor study of his mansion in Naples, southwest Florida. He was jet-lagged and fatigued but was enjoying the balmy breeze, which blew through partially open French doors. The expensive silk drapes that his wife had bought billowed, while outside in the darkness pelicans fought over scraps. He wished he could just forget everything and stay where he was, but he couldn’t stop preparing for the forthcoming election—strategy meetings, pollsters, and wall-to-wall business breakfasts.
He felt anxious, not getting enough sleep. His gaze was drawn to a FedEx parcel, which lay u
nopened amid a clutter of important papers on the desk, and he knew that the election and his workload—as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—wouldn’t allow him to relax.
O’Neill sighed and adjusted a large table lamp on his desk. Then he gazed at a gold-leaf-framed photo of his dead son.
Confident eyes and a big grin—that was how he would be remembered. O’Neill couldn’t believe that it had been over twelve years since his only son had been taken from them. July 18, 1990—the date was burned into his soul. It seemed like a matter of weeks, not a dozen years. Time meant nothing anymore.
O’Neill switched on his computer and lit up a cigarette, trying to focus again on work. His reflection in the monitor was frosty from the pale blue glow of his screensaver. His suit was creased after his overnight flight from Saudi Arabia.
He undid his waistcoat and exposed his paunch. He knew he’d let himself go since Joe died. But he was way past caring. He took off his tie and dropped it on the floor. He then ran his hands through his slicked-back gray hair and yawned, unable to remember the last time he had slept.
He looked again at his son’s handsome face and slowly exhaled a stream of smoke.
Would Joe have made him a grandfather by now? He imagined his son playing basketball with his kids in their huge garden as he looked on, proud as any dad could be. His wife Rose would’ve loved that. She adored kids more than anyone. That would never happen. Not now. Not ever.
O’Neill gazed across the darkness of the bay and dragged heavily on his cigarette. Joe’s death still haunted him. Every waking hour of every day, or so it seemed, he thought of him. The nights were the worst. Sometimes he didn’t want to wake up. Sometimes he didn’t sleep, and walked around the huge gardens outside his home. In many ways he was a prisoner, locked away from the world.
He liked his privacy most of all. No one came knocking. And that was a small consolation.
His house was located in a nature preserve, part of an exclusive gated community, shrouded by mangrove and palm trees, and could not be viewed from land or sea. At night, infrared surveillance cameras swept the bay and the deserted, sleeping streets.
The seven-bedroom Mediterranean-style property with terracotta roof tiles and Moorish archways was the finest home in the enclave, which boasted a swanky golf and country club.
Some of his neighbors’ homes also overlooked Cocohatchee Strand, a pristine nature preserve. Others had access to their own private beach and the Gulf of Mexico. The streets were quiet, which he liked, as he couldn’t abide noise since Joe died.
O’Neill let his mind drift to another concern.
He’d heard that a Miami Herald reporter had interviewed William Craig, the man who’d killed his son. Hal Lomax, his director of media relations, had contacted him while he was in the Gulf. The specter of a story about Craig appearing in a respected newspaper brought back all the old memories. It was the last thing he needed. He just wanted to forget.
He wondered what sort of article she’d write. Would it be sympathetic to Craig? Would it try to resurrect the original allegations about Joe?
His mind flashed back to his son’s rape trial. He remembered arriving outside the Richard Gerstein Justice Building in downtown Miami on the day Joe was finally cleared. It was a flawless November morning in 1989… blue skies and balmy temperatures, and he was flanked by his wife and Joe’s lead counsel, Marty Sanderson, a silver-tongued top-drawer defense attorney he’d been advised by his old friend, John Richmond—who lived across the bay—to hire. TV cameras and microphones pressed in on them as police helped them push their way through. It was the trial of the year. Maybe the decade. The only son of Senator Jack O’Neill, charged with raping a high-profile Miami lawyer, Jenny Forbes. He sat loyally by his son’s side throughout the three-week trial, feeling his every twitch during the evidence. But what bothered him most, what he still remembered vividly, was the look of rage and anger in the young woman’s eyes as she was cross-examined, humiliated in front of the world.
What also bothered him was that Sanderson had made her out to be a woman with ‘loose morals’, implying that she was having sex with every man she encountered. She admitted she couldn’t remember what happened the night she was in the bar with friends. Joe’s lawyer went for the jugular. He wiped the floor with the prosecution team. He exposed mix-ups in the DNA evidence, the ‘unfortunate ‘ recollection of events by Ms Forbes and the shady nature of some of the witnesses including a black transvestite who claimed he saw his son taking her from the bar, semi-conscious.
Jack O’Neill’s son came across like any young man his age. He admitted he had a weakness for nightclubbing and drinking. This played well.
The controversial trial sparked headlines across America. Much navel-gazing and hand-wringing from civil-liberties groups on prime-time TV about the ‘appalling suffering’ of Joseph O’Neill. Right-wing shock jocks castigated the ‘authoritarian’ elements within the police and legal establishment.
The last thing that Senator O’Neill remembered about that day was Jenny Forbes breaking down in court, and her grandfather William Craig—the man who killed Joe eight months later—wrapping a protective arm around her as she sobbed on his shoulder. He might even have glanced across at Joe.
O’Neill sighed. If only he had known what was to come.
He stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and looked at the paper mountain strewn across his desk. It was the last thing he wanted to see.
Where should he begin?
Briefings from the Pentagon and the NSA, national security meetings scheduled for the situation room at the White House, specially couriered memos from the president, strategy documents from his team ahead of the November elections—five weeks away—and letters from lobbyists working for NASA who invited him to ‘discussions’. It seemed like a never-ending string of meetings, meetings about meetings, and more meetings.
He was sick of it. He logged on to his computer and checked his encrypted e-mails.
There was nothing of note, mostly briefings from his hardworking election team on tactics and strategy. That could all wait.
O’Neill gazed at the photo one more time. Such a precious time with Joe. He remembered the day the picture was taken like it was yesterday. A family barbecue on a perfect July day at their old home in West Palm Beach, less than forty-eight hours before he was murdered. Joe had been drinking down at Clematis with some buddies and had brought them all round. Great guys. Joe was swigging beer from the bottle. Center of attention, and didn’t he know it. No wonder he made him so proud.
His mind flashed back to Joe as a child. Back in Brooklyn. He remembered the first time he smelled Joe’s sweet, milky baby breath. Never felt happier. His career as a young Manhattan lawyer had taken off. Then he’d entered politics.
Long hours, sure, but great days.
He closed his eyes and the memories flooded back: the dirty diapers, Rose breastfeeding at all hours, her home-made bread, and the sleepless nights.
God, how he missed that time. It was the late 1960s and America was in turmoil. Rioting in all the big cities, civil-rights changes, and hippies. It seemed as though the world was going mad. It was as if he, Rose and baby Joe were the only sane people on the planet, content with their lives as America tore itself apart.
He stretched his arms and groaned. The long flight had taken its toll.
O’Neill closed his eyes for a moment and thought about the coming weeks. His heart sank. Re-election was stressful in the extreme—hitting the campaign trail across Florida. To compound matters, William Craig’s execution was scheduled around the same time. His wife was against the death penalty, as he had been, until Joe was killed. Now, well, he wasn’t sure anymore. If he were honest with himself, he’d rather not have to confront the situation. He’d prefer to let it run its course.
O’Neill’s mind flashed to the telephone call he had
received more than a decade earlier. The hard voice of the desk sergeant in Miami Beach told him that Joe had been murdered. He drove alone, in a daze. He saw the bloody neck wound first when he arrived at the mortuary. His boy’s blue-gray complexion. He remembered the shock he’d felt when he touched his cold skin and began sobbing, wishing he would wake up. He then stroked Joe’s hair, matted with blood. It reminded him of washing his son’s hair in the tiny plastic bath each evening when he returned from work. His beautiful hair…
Craig didn’t just kill Joe that day. He’d also destroyed Jack’s own will to live, and his wife Rose was now virtually a recluse.
O’Neill looked again at the FedEx package. Still there, untouched.
It’d been delivered an hour ago and left in a box outside his study as his mail always was. He’d been told to expect it from John Richmond, the man across the bay. He lifted it up and ran the tip of his index finger down the seal.
He opened the package—a video cassette.
He wondered what it was.
He slid the tape into the old VCR beneath his desk and switched the volume off. He stared at the screen. It was amateur footage. His jet-lagged eyes tried to make sense of the scene.
It looked like the video clip had been taken in an upscale hotel room. The angle at which the footage was shot gave the impression that it was covert. Just then, a man in his late forties came into view, a white bath towel around his waist. He bent over and pulled out a bag of white powder from a bedside cabinet. He then placed a small vanity mirror on the bed, and started cutting up lines of the white powder—perhaps cocaine.
O’Neill was transfixed.
The man then snorted the powder and turned to face the camera, eyes closed in ecstasy.
O’Neill freeze-framed the picture, having seen enough. He picked up his cell phone and punched in Richmond’s number. Five rings later Richmond answered. ‘What in God’s name did you send me that for?’ O’Neill asked.
‘Thought you’d want to know what he did in his spare time.’ Richmond’s accent was Brooklyn rough.