by Paul Heald
“Good question!” James ignored the comment and addressed Randolph. “We’re here to get an explanation why our investigation of the disappearance of Diana Cavendish put us on someone’s hit list.”
The senator’s patience finally ran out. “Well, you can get the hell out of here, then, because I have no goddamn clue.” Stanley found him hard to read. If Randolph was being disingenuous, then his anger effectively masked it.
“Perhaps you don’t,” James conceded, “but we’re quite sure that Ms. Williams does.”
The senator turned to his aide and gave her a dangerous look.
“They’re lying,” she spit out. “I have no idea what they’re talking about.”
“Senator,” Melanie’s firm and commanding voice drew all attention to her, “we have in our possession the cell phone owned by the man who tried to kill us. It is a cheap burner that’s been used to call only two numbers. The first connects to a phone bought in Sabines, Mexico, the home of a massive textile factory run by a particularly nasty fellow named Moro Zingales, who turns out to be very close to your buddy Cameron Swinton.”
“He’s not my buddy,” Randolph responded with a snort. “We might belong to the same country club and, hell yeah, I see the bastard all the time, but he’s been a pain in my ass ever since he struck out with the bases loaded and lost us the conference baseball championship our junior year in high school!”
Melanie acknowledged his tirade with a polite nod and pulled the cell phone out of her pocket. When the senator’s eyes finally fixed on it, she continued in deliberate fashion. “The second number in his phone goes to Sharon Williams.” She pressed her thumb down on the phone pad and a moment later a muffled ring could be heard coming from a purse on the floor next to the chief of staff.
The senator’s aide turned white. “It’s a trick,” she exclaimed, “they’ve gotten my number and programmed it into that phone. We don’t even know where that phone came from!”
Stanley watched Randolph closely out of the corner of his eye. The senator got up from the sofa and made his way over to his desk. He sat on it with a casual air but made sure that his right hand was resting on its edge. The longest finger on his hand snaked around to the underside of the overhang and appeared to caress something textured. A panic button? Was he preparing to summon security?
“Sharon,” Randolph eventually said in an even voice, “why would a prosecutor, a journalist, and a professor band together to appropriate your cell number and try to frame you?”
Williams had a wild look in her eye, like a child cornered by a large and unfriendly dog. Her lower lip quivered, but no sound passed over it.
“And, by the way,” he added with a malevolent nonchalance, “did you start dating Cameron before or after he divorced Sally?”
“How did …?” Williams’s voice trailed off.
“Darlin’,” the senator responded with a shake of his head, “you know how small this state is.” He dipped his head toward Melanie. “I think you need to tell the nice prosecutor lady what you know and assure her that I’m not part of whatever you and Cameron have been cooking up.”
Stanley watched Williams give her boss a panicked look while he continued to finger the button under his desk. If the aide threw Randolph under the bus, then Stanley had no doubt that a squad of security guards would be rushing in to carry her away. The look on his face was an undisguised threat.
“Yes, Senator,” she said in a small defeated voice. “I’ll explain to them.”
Over the next hour, Melanie and James peppered Williams with questions, and slowly a story emerged, although it was clear that the aide was obfuscating her role in any violence. She admitted to knowing about the WTO bribe, claiming that Swinton had bragged to her about the plan and his ability to distance himself from the attempt by calling on Zingales, the sole buyer of his cotton and a tough guy who knew how to make things happen. The plot had spun out of control when Zingales told Swinton that one of his men had killed a girl in Geneva and also a photographer and his girlfriend in Georgia. Apart from requesting a price renegotiation for his efforts, Zingales’s thug claimed that there was nothing to worry about, but Swinton panicked and asked Williams to contact the FBI to check on the events in Clarkeston. Pretending to act on the senator’s authority, she requested a note be put in the FBI file to keep the legislator’s office in the loop on any developments. It was Williams who answered the phone when Melanie made her initial call to Arkansas six weeks earlier. Williams had been getting updates from the FBI, but denied authorizing the burglary at James’s house or putting the tracker on Melanie’s car.
“If you had no clue what was going on,” the prosecutor asked, “then why was your number on his speed dial? And how did Zingales know we were investigating the Cavendish case? The FBI sure as hell didn’t call up Zingales and tell him.”
The room was silent. The beleaguered chief of staff was so obviously scrambling that Stanley doubted the truth of what she said next. “Cameron got really paranoid when I told him that I got a call from a prosecutor in Georgia, one who was talking to a journalist. He must have given the names to Zingales.”
“That still doesn’t explain your phone number in the cell.”
“I already told you! Cam was paranoid and made me be the go-between. He didn’t want anything traceable back to him. He gave me the phone and said that someone would be watching you guys and keeping me informed of anything that happened.” She reached into her purse and pulled out her phone. “Here, take it! Check the call history—I’ve never used the thing.”
Melanie took the phone and scrolled to the outgoing-call memory. Such histories were easily erased, but Stanley didn’t want to blurt it out and put Williams on the defensive. The prosecutor handed the phone back without comment and gathered herself to make a closing argument. First, she caught Stanley’s eye and then nodded her head subtly at the senator. Once Williams had begun her story, and it was clear that she was not going to implicate the senator, he had relaxed and moved his hand to a more natural position on his desk. Stanley concluded that the senator knew something, but Williams’s loyalty, whether earned by fear or respect, had given them no evidence of his guilt. Melanie had predicted precisely this the evening before, when they had sketched out their strategy.
“Senator Randolph,” she now turned her full attention to her host, “I’m sure that you’re deeply disturbed by everything that you’ve heard here today, most of all your colleague’s admitted knowledge of wrongdoing, even murder, and her participation in a shameful attempt to cover it up.” She waited for him to acknowledge the seriousness of her statement. “I’m also sure that you understand our personal dilemma. Swinton’s friend Zingales has already tried to kill us, and we currently see no reason why he won’t try again to shut us up.”
The senator nodded slowly in response.
“There is no point, however, in shutting us up if the story is already out,” Melanie explained. “So, that presents us with two choices. First, we could go to the Justice Department with everything that we know and let nature take its course. Once we’ve talked to the FBI, there’d be no further point in anyone threatening us.”
The senator sat very still, unable to move his eyes away from the force of nature sitting across from him.
“Or,” she continued, “Mr. Murphy could write a story for his paper instead, a story that omits your name and even the names of Ms. Williams and Mr. Swinton, not to mention avoiding my name and Mr. Hopkins’s too. His story would describe the bribery attempt and how Zingales’s thugs killed three innocent people and tried to kill three more to cover it up.
“This is probably better treatment than your chief of staff deserves, but we are willing to proceed in this fashion if you will encourage her to sign an affidavit swearing to what she has told us here today.”
Williams started to protest, but James interrupted her. “This is not an affidavit for the purposes of starting a prosecution. You can sign it Jane Doe, and then I can a
ppend my own affidavit swearing that Jane Doe is personally known to me and has sworn to the truthfulness of its contents in my presence. It can’t be used in court, but it’s more than sufficient for my editor to run the story. The risk to you is minimal.”
Williams seemed to shrink in her chair, but her boss had no mercy as his voice drilled into her. This was a good deal, and he knew it. “Of course, she’ll sign it. In fact, it will be her last official act in my office before I kick her ass out the door.” His aide now looked both miserable and frightened. “She’ll never work again, anywhere, if she doesn’t cooperate with you.”
“Are you on board, Ms. Williams?” Melanie asked.
The aide’s shoulders sagged and she nodded her head.
“Good!” The senator said as he suddenly stood up. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a drink.” Everyone declined except Melanie. He walked to the credenza behind his desk, poured two generous tumblers of whiskey, and handed one to the prosecutor. “I greatly admire your discretion in this case, ma’am. I won’t forget it.”
Melanie nodded and took a sip. “There is one more thing. It’s critically important to both James’s story and the peace of mind of the parents of Diana Cavendish and Jacob Granville that we know where their bodies are buried. We were hoping, Senator, that Ms. Williams could make a discreet inquiry in that direction and include the answer in her affidavit.”
“I don’t know anything about that!” she protested. “I found out way after it happened!”
Melanie turned and faced her. “I really hope for your sake that’s true, but you do know who to ask. You must find out the location of the bodies, and as soon as we know, we’ll confirm their location.” The prosecutor then suggested that Williams contact Zingales and tell the story she had fabricated the night before, that the Mexican assassin was in custody and ready to sing. Williams could claim that an anxious Swinton was willing to move the bodies in a hurry before Zingales’s assassin confessed and they were discovered.
“Is he really in custody?” the senator asked anxiously. One talkative thug could destroy the delicate compromise he had reached with the prosecutor.
“No,” Melanie replied, “that’s a convenient lie, I’m afraid.”
“But what happens when he finally shows up?” Williams looked first to the senator and then to Melanie for help. For the first time, she looked almost pitiable.
Melanie stood up and motioned to James and Stanley. The two men joined her by the office door. “One of us will come back tomorrow morning and pick up your affidavit. And as for our Mexican friend, you don’t have to worry about him showing up again.” She smiled sweetly before she opened the door. “Ever.”
XXXIII.
GRAVES
By noon the next day, Melanie, Stanley, and James were streaking over the Mississippi border and into Alabama on the way back to Georgia. Earlier in the morning, Stanley had returned to the federal building to fetch Williams’s Jane Doe affidavit. The receptionist had been expecting him and handed over a sealed envelope as soon as he announced himself. Neither the senator nor his aide were present, and Stanley spent ten minutes in the foyer of the office reading the document and assuring himself that Williams had kept her promises. The affidavit told a decently complete story of the attempted WTO bribe and the deaths of Cavendish and Granville without mentioning the senator or his chief of staff or Cameron Swinton by name. When Stanley finally walked out of the building, he gave a thumbs-up to his friends waiting in the rental car while he walked across the street to a Kinko’s, made a copy of the affidavit, and mailed it to Thorsten Carter in Clarkeston. Ten minutes later, the trio was cruising out of town at seventy miles an hour, laughing and carrying on like bank robbers who had just pulled off the heist of the century.
Once the relief of their escape from Little Rock began to subside, Melanie looked over her companions. James was driving, and Stanley rode shotgun, trying in vain to find something other than country or Christian on the radio. They made an interesting pair. Each was good-looking in his own way: The handsome professor carried some extra pounds he could do without, but he looked fit enough to climb the nearest mountain and burn them off. The journalist was wiry and ruddy, with a kind and expressive face. The two men seemed to get along well together, and that added to their attractiveness, as did the absence of huge sprays of testosterone marking their respective territories. If she were asked to choose between the two, she had to lean toward James. They shared something that she could not quite put her finger on.
“I hate to remind you guys, but we have to make a stop on the way back to Clarkeston.” Stanley turned in his seat and James glanced in the rearview mirror as she spoke. “We need to make sure that Williams isn’t lying to us about where to find Diana and Jacob.”
Stanley groaned. “You don’t mean that we should open …?” He turned down the radio and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“No,” she said, equally disturbed by the image of five years of decomposition, “but we should check and see if the container is there.”
The affidavit described the location of the bodies with some precision and revealed the cold-blooded efficiency of the hit men who had killed Diana Cavendish and Jacob Granville. The two killers had followed Jacob to Diana’s apartment and shot her in the process of abducting them. Melanie guessed that one man forced Jacob to drive them in his own car away from town on the narrow road to Toccoa and then back behind an abandoned textile mill on the Oconee River. His partner must have followed in the killers’ vehicle.
Melanie could imagine the two men coaxing the young couple out into the secluded parking lot and executing them in the quiet of the Georgia countryside. In a dilapidated shed built against the river side of the old mill, she would find a large oil barrel. The killers had lined it with a plastic bag and squeezed both bodies into the cylindrical metal coffin before sealing the bag and the barrel top.
Melanie had seen dozens of abandoned mills in Georgia, and she was not surprised that the bodies had gone undetected for five years. Around Atlanta, such buildings were turned into condominiums, but out in the country they lined old waterways, unused and crumbling after American textile jobs had moved to Asia. Having taken precautions to prevent the odor of decay from alerting the occasional trespasser, the killers had ensured that discovery of their victims would likely take years. Once the task was completed, they could have driven eighteen hours straight through the night and reached the Mexican border. She bet that Granville’s car was being chopped for parts before Cavendish’s barking dog alerted her landlord that something was wrong in her apartment.
“I think it’s a good idea to check it out,” James agreed. “Once I get a draft of the story ready to go, I can tell the cops that I’ve got a tip where the bodies are. The publicity generated by the discovery will be the perfect moment to publish the whole story. I’m going to look pretty stupid if I publish and there’s nothing there! And quite frankly, if she’s lied about this, how can we trust anything else that’s in the affidavit? I need to be able to tell my publisher she’s accurately identified the location of the bodies. Only someone with truly inside knowledge could know that, so he’ll green-light me.”
“Makes sense,” Stanley said, “but we need to be careful when we get to the mill. I wouldn’t put it past those douche bags to organize a welcoming committee.”
The men were silent for a while once the decision was made, and Melanie watched as each contemplated visiting the site of the murder that had propelled one from California to Europe to Georgia while offering the other a chance to write the story of his life.
“The affidavit is silent about a couple of things that I wish we knew,” the professor added thoughtfully. “How did the pictures get on the Internet and who sent the emails to Diana and Jacob’s parents?”
“I’ve been thinking about that too,” James replied as Melanie eavesdropped from the backseat. “Jacob obviously took the pictures sometime during the week before the murder. He must
have had the camera with him the night they were abducted, and I’ll bet you a million bucks that the killer couldn’t bring himself to toss it away. Jacob bragged about that Nikon to me a couple of times, and it cost $2,000 if it cost a dime. Why not take it across the border and sell it? Collect a little bonus for the job? Who the hell in Nuevo Laredo or Sabines is going to connect the camera to two deaths in Georgia?”
“But what about the pictures?”
“Either the guy sold them on the Internet or whoever bought the camera sold them. Didn’t your nudist friend in Mallorca say that they had probably been floating around for years?” Stanley seemed satisfied with the explanation and nodded while his friend continued. “And I think that we can put the emails down to Zingales trying to divert the investigation, even though it didn’t turn out to be necessary.”
Stanley puzzled this out for himself. “Yeah, it wouldn’t be too hard to find the parents’ names in the media reports of the crime, and you can usually track down email addresses if you’re patient enough.” He laughed. “I once found the email of a famous porn director buried in an online church committee mailing list.”
Melanie and James had never heard the full story of the professor’s role in apprehending the killer of the world’s most famous porn star, and they were almost in Georgia before he got to the end of his tale. When he finished, Melanie told him that most public radio stations were located at the bottom end of the dial in Georgia, and he finally found a news broadcast without too much fizz and crackle.
“They might be interviewing you next week, James,” Stanley teased the reporter. “I hope you won’t forget the little people when you’re a star.”
“Shhh!” Melanie hissed, as the host of an hourly news show detailed an aborted terrorist attack in the mountains of western North Carolina.
A man, in his early thirties and likely of Middle Eastern origin, was found dead last Wednesday at the base of a waterfall outside of Highlands, North Carolina. One source indicates that he was in the area plotting to destroy a local dam or poison its reservoir. He apparently died in a climbing accident, possibly as he surveyed upstream sources of the town’s water supply. A cell of Al-Qaeda operating out of Mexico has been implicated in the alleged plot. Federal authorities have opened a full investigation.