Cotton

by Paul Heald

  Thor nodded and wondered whether he himself might be in danger. “So, you think that Diana and Jacob were killed by the same person who killed the girl in Geneva.”

  “I’m certain of it at this point,” James replied. “Those emails to their parents came from Mexico, probably sent as red herrings by whoever abducted them.” His face was grim. “I think that Diana and Jacob are both dead.”

  Thor heard a loud moan, and everyone around the breakfast table turned to see Miriam, ashen faced, stumble into the room. “Jacob’s dead?” Her body sagged against the kitchen counter and her eyes flitted from person to person, looking in vain for someone to contradict her. She repeated her cry in a weakened voice and, obtaining no comfort from the surprised group at the table, staggered back into the bedroom, followed immediately by Thor.

  * * *

  While the priest was consoling his lover, Stanley was trying to decide what to do next. No one except for James, Melanie, and Elisa had any idea of his involvement in the investigation, and he could put all danger behind him by just catching a plane back to California. The longer he stayed, the more likely that someone would observe him with James and Melanie and add him to the shit list. Fleeing was the safest option, but he hesitated. Seeing the mystery through would be substantially more interesting than working on his lesson plans for the upcoming semester and, moreover, the night spent on the rocky ledge had intertwined his life with James and Melanie’s. He couldn’t leave them to their own devices now.

  The three companions debated whether it would be safe for either Melanie or James to visit their offices and whether it would be wise to tell the whole story to their bosses, now that it included a dead body lying in the North Carolina forest. They were far from consensus when Thor emerged from his bedroom with an arm wound tightly around Miriam’s shoulders.

  “We’d like to help if we can,” the priest said, “especially now that we’re after Jacob’s murderer.” The young woman next to him nodded, her eyes still wet with tears.

  The young couple sat down on the sofa together, and Melanie took the easy chair next to it. James and Stanley dragged two bar stools in from the kitchen nook.

  “Until you get things sorted out, one or two of you can stay with me,” Thor explained, “and Miriam’s mom has some room in her house. No one will have any idea where you are.”

  “That’s great,” Stanley said. “I’d like to hang around and help sort this mess out.”

  “Thanks. That buys us time to plan,” Melanie added, “but we can’t just camp out in Clarkeston forever.” She frowned and tapped her fingers on her knee. “If we knew for certain that the FBI wasn’t interested in us, then I could go in to work and do some digging on the numbers in that cell phone. Hell, if I were able to tell the US marshal’s office that I’ve been threatened, then they’d even send someone to watch my house for a while.”

  Thor looked at Miriam. “We might be able to help you out there. Miriam knows who her father contacted in Washington about Jacob. He’s apparently superconnected, and Miriam’s found his number. If her father thought that this Keefe guy had influence with the FBI, then he might have the clout to learn whether you’re in trouble with the feds or you’re just being chased by a bunch of cotton thugs.”

  Stanley thought he could see the wheels spinning in Melanie’s head.

  “Could I use your laptop?” She pointed to the device on the coffee table. “What’s this guy’s name again?” Miriam gave her the full name, and the attorney tapped and clicked and nodded her head. “Sweet. Giles Keefe is pretty high up in Homeland Security. If he’s willing, he could contact the FBI with our names and see whether we’re on their radar screen or we’re just the victims of information leaked to some other source.”

  She pulled her phone out of her handbag and saw that it was still separated from the battery. She looked at Miriam. “I don’t want to take a chance that someone might track my phone’s GPS. You could do us a huge favor if you’d make a call on your phone and tell a little white lie for us.”

  Miriam fished for her phone. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “First, call Keefe and tell him that you’re his old friend Ernest’s daughter. Tell him you know that he was contacted by your father about five years ago, and that it turns out that your dad was right about Jacob. He was innocent, and a local reporter claims to have evidence of him and Diana being murdered. That’ll make him feel better, if he actually intervened for Jacob. You might even suggest that he was your fiancé.”

  Stanley saw Thor wince.

  “Tell him,” Melanie continued, “that you’ve been contacted by two people who are asking you about the case, but you don’t trust them: Melanie Wilkerson from Atlanta and James Murphy from Clarkeston. They seem a little sketchy. Could he check the FBI and Homeland Security databases? There’s no way that he’ll share any confidential information, but if he really was a good friend of your father, then he should be willing to warn you off us if he sees any red flags. If he tells you to stay away from us, then we’ll know that we’re currently under suspicion.”

  “Why don’t you just call him?” Miriam asked.

  “Why would a US attorney call him instead of contacting the FBI directly?” Melanie explained. “And why would a US attorney be wondering whether the FBI was on her tail? Red flags would go up all over the place.”

  “I see,” she said slowly. “Do you want me to try now?”

  When Melanie nodded, Miriam disappeared into the bedroom to make the call in private. The attorney shrugged and offered a doubtful look to her friends, as if to indicate that it was a shot in the dark. While they waited for Miriam to return, the three visitors helped Thor clear off the breakfast dishes and wipe down the table. Stanley thanked him for the hospitality and offer to help. Thor laughed when Stanley assured him that the humorless pastor in his childhood Presbyterian church would never have allowed himself to get mixed up in abduction and murder. Thor had a brand of evangelism that he could get behind.

  When Miriam returned, she sat down on the sofa and waited for the others to gather round. “That was interesting,” she said softly.

  “You were right,” Miriam continued. “Keefe wasn’t willing to give me any specific information about anyone, but he said he’d check out your names and give me a general thumbs-up or down. He’s not even supposed to do that, but he feels obligated to my dad. He said he’d get back to me in an hour or so.” She shook her head. “I think there’s still a whole bunch of stuff that my mom’s not telling me.”

  “Did he say anything about intervening for Jacob five years ago?”

  “Yeah, he made it really clear that he didn’t do much of anything.” She took a deep breath and retained her composure. “My dad wanted the FBI to stay out of Jacob’s case, but Keefe had no power to prevent that and he wasn’t willing, anyway. All he could do was promise to let the FBI know that Jacob should be treated with care, that he wasn’t some maniac on the loose …”

  Melanie spoke as the young woman’s voice trailed off. “Sort of the opposite of ‘shoot first, ask questions later.’”

  “That was all he could do.” She slumped against Thor, who had once again taken the seat beside her. “Not that it mattered in the end.”

  When the call from Keefe came two hours later, Melanie was resting in the bedroom, James was furiously tapping on a computer, and Stanley, at the urging of his host, had stretched out for a nap on the sofa. Almost as soon as his head hit the cushion, a wave of exhaustion washed over him and he fell fast asleep. The buzz of Miriam’s phone woke him with a start, and it took a moment to process where he was and why he was there.

  Miriam answered the call and listened intently, occasionally murmuring her understanding of the brief message from her father’s old friend in Washington. A wisp of a smile crossed her face as she said good-bye and swiped the screen of her phone. “He was very careful about what he said.” She cocked her head and spoke in thoughtful recognition of how the communication h
ad been packaged. “He said that he’d done a Google search and had discovered that Melanie Wilkerson was a highly regarded federal prosecutor and that James Murphy was a well-respected journalist from Clarkeston.”

  “That was it?” Stanley asked, nonplussed. “No mention of the FBI?”

  “That was it.”

  Melanie smiled and clapped her hands together. “We’re cool! He’s not supposed to make Homeland queries to the FBI for personal reasons. I’ll bet people do it all the time, checking out their daughter’s new boyfriend and stuff like that, but Keefe wanted to send the message without revealing he’d made the official query. He wanted to let you know that we’re okay, without admitting that he had broken any rules. If the FBI were hunting us down, he never would have given you the green light like that. I like this guy!”

  “What next, then?” James asked. “Can we go back home? Can we start using our cell phones again?”

  Melanie paused for a moment. “Until word of the our attacker’s death gets back to his boss--whoever he is--we’ve got some breathing room, but I still think that you and Stanley should avoid your house and spend the nights at Mrs. Rodgers’s.” She looked at Miriam. “As long as that’s still okay with you?”

  Miriam nodded and the attorney continued. “I’ll go into Atlanta today and start tracking down the two numbers we found in the cell phone. I’m going to be very surprised if they go anywhere other than Arkansas or Mexico. In the meantime, I want you guys to do some more research for me.” She looked in Stanley’s direction. “I want to know, apart from Senator Randolph, what other politicos in Arkansas are part of the cotton mafia? What about the other senator? Which Arkansans in the House of Representatives are owned by the cotton lobby?”

  She turned her attention to James. “And you could track down landowners in Arkansas who benefit the most from the subsidies. Who has so much at risk that they might be willing to kill? And most importantly, which of them sell directly to the Mexican clothing maquiladoras? Scour the Internet and drive over to UGA library in Athens if you have to, but I want as complete a picture as possible of the connections between these folks. When we know more, we’ll meet back here.” She looked at Thor. “As long as the priest is still willing to offer sanctuary.”

  “Absolutely,” he replied with a grin. “I’ll keep the coffee on.”

  XXIX.

  BURROWS

  When she walked into the federal building in Atlanta, Melanie felt like she had been gone for twenty days instead of twenty hours, and despite the assurance of Giles Keefe’s phone call, a paranoid corner of her mind expected an FBI SWAT team to rappel down the walls of the atrium and bundle her into custody. Instead, she got friendly banter from the marshals as she walked through the metal detector and a broad smile from the lobby receptionist, who used to work on her floor. When she arrived at her office, her assistant expressed surprise that she had missed a bond hearing that morning, but assured her that the judge had delayed the motion until someone else filled in.

  “You should always call when you can’t come in!”

  “Sorry, Vonda,” Melanie lied, “but I was sick as a dog and couldn’t drag myself out of the bathroom.” She patted her stomach. “Must have been some bad chicken, ’cuz I’m feeling fine now.”

  “I told you before not to go to Paschal’s.” The Atlanta native shook her head. “If you want fried food, then you stick to Mary Mac’s Kitchen.”

  “Amen,” agreed the attorney, her accent making an especially sweet appearance as she stretched out each syllable.

  Melanie asked Vonda to hold her calls, walked into her office, and looked around with a keen eye. Everything seemed in its proper place. She never really thought that the FBI had sent an assassin from south of the border to stop the investigation of the Cavendish case, but you never knew if someone had been corrupted by a slice, even a small slice, of the billions of dollars at stake over cotton. She would take no chances and decided to request a US marshal to watch her townhouse until she felt safer.

  But when would that be? And just what was the endgame? She had gotten sucked into Murphy’s obsession with a cold case and managed to increase spectacularly the excitement level of her job, but the next move was unclear. So far, she hadn’t broken any major rules. She had pursued a case on her own, to be sure, but apart from asking Sammy to check on a phone number and convincing Miriam to bend the truth a bit in her conversation with Keefe, she had not abused her official position. She hadn’t yet put her career in jeopardy.

  Well, there was the matter of the broken man sprawled at the bottom of the falls. He had been killed in self-defense, of course, but she and her friends had failed to report the death, failed to report their own attempted murder, in fact. A regular citizen would have no obligation to inform the authorities about the incident, but she was a federal law-enforcement official. Not to mention that she had taken his money clip, cell phone, and driver’s license. And she still had his keys in her purse.

  With the incident less than twenty-four hours old, she still had time to come clean to her boss. She’d get a dressing-down, but she’d been shot at and spent the night on a rocky ledge next to a waterfall in the-middle-of-nowhere North Carolina. That kind of shock affects people’s judgment, and she would be excused. On the other hand, no one in the world was going to connect her to the body unless she was stupid enough to identify herself when she made her upcoming inquiry to the dead man’s rental-car agency.

  She sat down in her chair and laid the dead man’s effects in front of her. It was all the hard evidence that she had, not enough to put anyone in jail or even start a prosecution. Stanley had made some convincing guesses about who was behind the deaths of Diana and Jacob—not to mention the poor girl in Geneva—but they had no hard evidence that the man chasing them had been some henchman of a cotton magnate or textile-factory owner with Arkansas political connections. She couldn’t even produce the bodies of Diana or Jacob. If she told her story and turned over the cell phone and keys, someone else would decide whether the leads were worth pursuing. As an interested party, a victim, in fact, she would be put on the sidelines and the case might even be dropped. She wasn’t paranoid about the FBI, but given the ephemeral and speculative nature of the evidence, politics might influence the intensity of the investigation. Hell, she’d already been warned off the case by Sammy and his unnamed superior.

  She picked up her phone and asked Vonda to bring a list of all telephone-record subpoenas to be filed that afternoon with the federal magistrate. She wasn’t going to give up the Cavendish case to someone who might view it as a wild-goose chase, at least not until she knew more about the numbers in the cell phone. If they went straight to some politician’s office, then she would tell her story to the US attorney and let nature take its course. But if the hard evidence led nowhere, then she couldn’t trust anyone else to keep up the pursuit. She would be relegated to serving as a witness with a crazy story to tell about a cold case, a globe-trotting sociology professor, and a bikini-trolling journalist. And her relationship with James was especially damning: federal prosecutors never worked hand in hand with journalists, even nice-looking ones with eye-crinkley smiles.

  Vonda brought in the day’s stack of motions, and Melanie soon found one that suited her purposes nicely. An ongoing investigation into a Colombian drug cartel smuggling brown heroin into remote Georgia airstrips required Magistrate Durbin to consider several dozen requests for search warrants and telephone records. She could easily alter the motion to include the two numbers in the cell phone, and if the magistrate moved with his usual speed, she’d be able to contact the cell phone service provider by the afternoon. The result of that call would determine her next move.

  She accessed the relevant document on the office shared drive, added the two numbers, printed it out, and then substituted it for the original motion. Buried in the midst of dozens of other numbers, her minor alteration would escape detection, and even if someone noticed, her signature as overall supervising
attorney was already on all the motions in the stack anyway. No one would see a special connection to her.

  While she waited for the requests to be processed and the magistrate’s order to issue, she took out the keys to the dead man’s rental car, which was presumably still parked on the Forest Service road leading to the hidden falls. She didn’t dare request a court order for the records of the car-rental company. The cops who found the car would undoubtedly ask for a subpoena, and they would wonder why she had made the same query to the rental agency first. No one could know that she had any interest in the car, or questions would be asked that she did not want to answer. Nonetheless, she could make a call to the rental-car number on the key chain and ask some careful and anonymous questions.

  Using the phone in an empty conference room above her office, she dialed the number and pretended to be the wife of Jose Morales, the name on the driver’s license found on the body. Sure enough, the car was rented under that name.

  “Hi,” the prosecutor said brightly, “my idiot husband has lost all the rental documentation on our car and can’t remember which day we’re supposed to bring it back.”

  “Next Friday,” replied a man with a strong Asian accent. “It must be into the Atlanta Airport office by six o’clock in the evening.”

  “Hmm … ,” she murmured contemplatively into the phone, “we might want to extend the rental, then. What credit card did we put it on, anyway? I told him to put it on the Amex so we’d get our SkyMiles.”

  “No, madam,” the man answered, “it’s on a Visa card.”

  “I knew he’d screw up!” she exclaimed. “Which Visa, anyway? Hopefully not the Chase card! We’re at our limit on that one.”

  “Let me check.” She heard a flurry of keystrokes and then a struggle to pronounce the issuer’s name. “No, the deposit record says it’s a Visa issued by the … Banco de Sabines.”