by Mike Lawson
DeMarco assumed Mahoney was talking to his chief of staff, a man named Perry Wallace. Wallace—unlike DeMarco or Mahoney—was a genius. He also had the same ethical DNA as Mahoney, which meant that he would lie, cheat, and steal to do his boss’s bidding.
Mahoney listened to Wallace for a couple minutes, grunted a few times in some code that only Wallace could understand, and said, “Yeah, that might work. Get back to me by the end of the day.”
Mahoney put the phone down and finally focused his watery, red-veined blue eyes on DeMarco. Mahoney’s eyes may or may not have been the gateway to his soul, but they provided sure evidence of the amount of bourbon he consumed on a daily basis. Mahoney was the only high-functioning alcoholic DeMarco knew.
“A couple years ago,” Mahoney said, “a lobbyist named Brian Kincaid was arrested for killing his partner, another lobbyist named Downing. You remember that?”
“No,” DeMarco said. One lobbyist killing another may not have been a typical D.C. crime, but he didn’t recall the event.
“Anyway,” Mahoney said, “the evidence against Kincaid was overwhelming and he was convicted and given twenty-five to life.”
DeMarco just stood there, waiting for Mahoney to get to the point.
“Well, Kincaid’s mother went to school with Mary Pat.”
Aw shit. DeMarco could now see where this was going. Mary Pat was Mahoney’s wife—and possibly the nicest person on planet Earth—and she probably wanted to help her friend’s son. And sure enough …
“Kincaid, of course, claims he’s innocent,” Mahoney said. “He appealed the verdict and just lost his appeal, and since this ain’t the kind of case that’s gonna go to the Supreme Court, his ass is cooked. He also spent every dime he had on lawyers and private detectives, and at this point there isn’t anybody willing to help him. So his mother, who doesn’t have any money either, came over to the house the other day, bawling her eyes out, and asked if there was anything I could do. Mary Pat explained to the dimwit that I can’t overturn a verdict in a criminal case, but she said that she knew a guy who could do some investigating on her son’s behalf, free of charge. Meaning you.”
“But what in the hell am I supposed to do?” DeMarco whined. “I mean, especially if this guy has already had private detectives on the case?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Mahoney responded. “All I want is Mary Pat off my back. Go see Kincaid, spend a few days dinking around, then call up his mom and tell her that in spite of your herculean efforts, her son’s gonna spend the rest of his life making license plates—or whatever the hell they make in prisons these days.”
“But—”
“Mavis will tell you where they’re keeping Kincaid, give you his mother’s phone number, all that shit.”
“Yeah, but—”
Mahoney picked up his phone again and called another politician —somebody whose opinion he actually cared about.
7
The District of Columbia—having no desire to have a large, unsightly penitentiary situated within its historic borders—exports its homegrown felons to various prisons around the country. Fortunately for DeMarco, Brian Kincaid was incarcerated at the maximum-security prison in Hazelton, West Virginia, only a three-hour drive from Washington.
Kincaid was forty-six years old, of medium height, and slightly built. A former lobbyist who once dressed in nice suits and ties, he now wore a soiled white T-shirt and baggy blue jeans that were too long. On his feet were flip-flops. His unwashed, dark hair was rapidly turning gray and there were charcoal-colored half-moons staining the pale skin beneath his eyes. Brian Kincaid looked like a man who had had the rug pulled out from under his feet—and it seemed doubtful that he would ever fully recover from the hard landing.
DeMarco lied to the authorities at Hazelton, claiming to be Kincaid’s lawyer. Since DeMarco actually was a lawyer, it wasn’t much of a lie. The lie, however, earned him the privilege of meeting Kincaid in a small conference room instead of having to talk to him on a phone while looking at him through a scarred sheet of bullet-proof glass. The room they were in contained two metal chairs and a small metal table; all the furniture was bolted firmly to the floor. So was Kincaid—he was connected by a chain that went from a wide leather belt on his waist to an eyebolt anchored in concrete.
When Kincaid met DeMarco, he grasped DeMarco’s hand like a drowning man clutching a life preserver. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” he said. “When my mother told me you were a lawyer who worked for Congress … Well, I’m not embarrassed to tell you I cried.”
Aw geez, DeMarco thought. That was the last thing he wanted to hear.
“I was thinking that maybe you could start with the appeal my last lawyer filed. I don’t think he—”
DeMarco held up a hand to silence Kincaid. “Brian,” DeMarco said, “let me explain a couple things to you. I’m a lawyer, but I don’t practice law.”
“What? What do you do?”
“I normally …”
DeMarco realized that he couldn’t tell Kincaid what he normally did for Mahoney. He started over.
“I’m sort of an odd-jobs guy,” he said. “If a congressman needs a little help with something—some sort of investigative work, some legwork his staff is too busy to handle—I sometimes get the job. So …”
When DeMarco was among strangers—and particularly if one of the strangers was a good-looking woman he wanted to impress—he’d say that he was a political troubleshooter, that job description sounding more glamorous than odd-jobs guy. But he didn’t want to impress Brian Kincaid. He didn’t want to give him any reason to get his hopes up.
“… so the best thing I can do for you,” DeMarco said, “is go back over the evidence they used to convict you and see if maybe I can find something the police overlooked.”
Kincaid shook his head. “I don’t think—”
“But the first thing I need is for you to just tell me what happened.”
DeMarco needed Kincaid to tell him because he’d been too lazy to wade through two years’ worth of court documents, depositions, pretrial motions, and appeals before coming to the prison.
Kincaid closed his eyes, inhaled, then slowly exhaled, like a man about to start down a path he’d been down too many times before. He opened his eyes and looked directly into DeMarco’s and said, “I was framed.”
“Okay,” DeMarco said, but he wondered how often those three words were spoken by Hazelton’s inmates. “Tell my why you think that.”
“First, I need to give you a little background on Phil and me.”
“Phil is Downing? Your ex-partner?”
“Yeah. When we met, we were both working for one of the big K Street outfits. We spent a little time on the Hill schmoozing junior staffers, but mostly we did research on upcoming bills, crunched numbers to see how much the bills would hurt or help a client, wrote position papers, that sort of thing. We weren’t major players and we could tell if we stayed with this firm, we were never gonna be. But Phil and I were never friends. We didn’t hang out together, we didn’t socialize after work. One day, though, and I don’t know why, we got to talking and I told him I wanted to start my own firm but I couldn’t afford the overhead. You know, the money to lease an office, hire a secretary, that sort of thing. What I didn’t tell him was that I had an opportunity to steal a client away from the outfit we were currently working for. Well, it turned out that Phil wanted to do the same thing. He had managed to convince a client with money that she needed a lobbyist and he wanted to go out on his own, but he couldn’t afford an office either.”
Kincaid lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nose. “Two years ago the only thing I smoked was the occasional cigar, but now I’m a pack-a-day man. Cancer, at this point, would almost be a blessing. Anyway, we started Downing and Kincaid. I took out a second mortgage
on my house and Phil borrowed some money from his dad. We leased an office, rented some furniture, and hired a secretary. We each had one client. As time went on, I managed to get four more and Phil did the same, but when the economy tanked, Phil lost all his clients except for the one he started with. He was barely able to pay his share of the rent.”
“Who were your clients?”
Kincaid waved the question away. “It doesn’t matter. What you need to understand is Phil and I hated each other. We were like two teenagers who get married before they really get to know each other, and we fought over everything. We fought about the kind of furniture to lease for the office because Phil was a cheap son of a bitch and didn’t understand that appearances mattered. We fought over the goddamn secretary and how much time she spent working for each of us. And if I liked a secretary, Phil hated her, but if I wanted to fire one, Phil loved the bitch. We fought over the fucking Internet provider, our cell phone plan, the answering service we used. There didn’t seem to be anything we could agree on.”
“So why didn’t you split up?”
“We couldn’t afford to. To pay the overhead, we needed each other. Plus, we were lobbyists; it wasn’t like we worked as a team. He did his thing and I did mine. The only time we talked to each other was when there was some pissant issue we had to deal with, which was almost always something related to expenses or the secretary. We became this old married couple that sticks together because they can’t afford to get divorced.”
“Okay,” DeMarco said, “but what does this have to do with Downing’s murder?”
“It has to do with motive. The prosecutor had all kinds of evidence against me, but the weakest part of his case was motive. Why would I kill Phil? Well, they get our last secretary on the stand—a gal Phil was poking, by the way—and she testifies that Phil and I fought like cats and dogs. And she wasn’t lying. There were times when we stood in front of her desk just screaming at each other. We never actually came to blows, but a couple of times it got close to that. And they got one of our previous secretaries to say the same thing. So the prosecutor argued that the night Phil was killed, we had some big blowup that pushed me over the edge and I shot him. He couldn’t prove this, of course, but it didn’t matter because of the evidence he had.”
“Like what?”
“Phil was shot with my gun. To make matters worse, the cops found the gun hidden beneath the spare tire in my car. I always kept the gun in my house, in the nightstand next to my bed, and I couldn’t explain how the gun got into the trunk of my car.”
“So how did it get there?”
“I told you: I was framed. But the worst thing about the case was the timing.”
“The timing?”
“I lobbied for foreign companies, companies that wanted to make sure that laws didn’t get passed that would screw them selling stuff in the U.S. One of my clients was an association of four small businesses in Hong Kong, and because of the time difference, and because these particular clients were a complete pain in the ass, every Wednesday night I’d have a short conference call with them. They wanted to know what I’d done that week to earn my money, and since I couldn’t afford to lose them, I called them every fucking Wednesday at nine P.M., which meant it was ten A.M. on Thursday in Hong Kong. And I’d been doing this for over a year. No matter where I was, I’d call these Chinese shits, and if I was in D.C. I’d call them from my office so if I had to refer to something, I’d have the paperwork available. The point I’m making is that if somebody wanted to frame me for Phil’s murder, they’d know right where I was going to be every Wednesday night.”
“I see,” DeMarco said, but he really had no idea what Kincaid was talking about.
“The night it happened, I went to my office like I always did. I made my nine o’clock call to Hong Kong, which took about fifteen minutes, and then I spent a couple minutes after the call jotting down things I had to do before I talked to the Chinese guys again. And phone records confirmed I was on the phone to Hong Kong from nine until nine-fifteen.
“But that night, Phil shows up. He was never in the office at that time of night. Never. So when I finished my conference call, I asked him what he was doing there and, because we had such a warm relationship, all he told me was that he was waiting for a call. We talked for maybe two minutes, then I left. But the relevant thing here is that between nine-fifteen and about nine-thirty, I was in the office with Phil, and the cops could prove it.”
“How?”
“For one thing, I admitted it when they first questioned me. I didn’t have any reason to lie. But the other thing is our building has a night security guy and a camera in the lobby, and the timer on the camera showed when I arrived and when I left and when Phil got there. So there was no question that I was in the building with Phil between about nine-ten and nine-thirty, which means that Phil had to have been killed after I left, but the cops didn’t believe me.”
“Why not?”
“Because the security guy found his body only twenty minutes after I left. Phil’s client called the guard, told him Phil was supposed to be in his office for an important conference call and that he wasn’t answering either his cell or the phone in his office. The client told the guard that he needed to go check on Phil and make sure he hadn’t had a heart attack or something, and the guard did and he finds Phil dead. And, according to the security guard and the camera, nobody entered the building after seven P.M., and when the cops talked to all the other tenants in the building, everybody said they left before seven P.M.”
“So maybe one of the other tenants lied.”
“Even if another tenant had been in the building, it wouldn’t have mattered to the cops, because he was shot with my gun and I was the only tenant in the building who supposedly had any reason to kill him.
“At my trial we argued that somebody stole my gun from my house, snuck into the building without going through the lobby, shot Phil in the twenty-minute window between when I left and when the guard found his body, and then hid the gun in my car.
“It took the jury half an hour to find me guilty.”
8
Kelly was in the first vehicle at the head of a convoy that consisted of Kelly’s open-topped jeep, six two-and-a-half-ton cargo trucks, and Nelson’s jeep bringing up the rear. The temperature was over a hundred degrees, Kelly’s Ugandan driver smelled as if he hadn’t bathed since the day he was born, and the road they were on was pockmarked with potholes—and artillery shell holes—and the ride was bone-jarring.
Conditions were even worse for Nelson. Being in the last vehicle in the convoy, he had been eating the dust churned up by the other seven vehicles for the last four hours and would be coated with grime by the time they reached the refugee camp. Poor Nelson, Kelly thought, and laughed. They had flipped a coin to see who would ride in the lead vehicle—the most dangerous position—and Nelson had lost.
The government of Uganda had been fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army since 1987. The LRA—led by a madman with a Messiah complex named Joseph Kony—was so ruthless the international community had declared it a terrorist organization. Kony’s soldiers had slaughtered entire villages, killing the old and helpless with machetes, bashing the heads of babies against trees, taking girls for sex slaves, and forcing boys as young as nine to become soldiers in their army. And when the Ugandan government wasn’t fighting against Ugandans, it found reasons to fight the Sudanese and the Congolese. It seemed there was always somebody to fight, and this was the second time Lizzie Warwick had come to the country to aid people displaced by war.
The first time had been three years ago when the LRA overran a number of villages in northern Uganda and refugees fled to a camp near Ogur, a township in central Uganda. And while Lizzie was tending to the needs of several thousand refugees at Ogur, René Lambert found people suitable for Mulray Pharma’s clinical trials and relocated them to a facil
ity near Lake Victoria, which was safer as it was farther to the south than where the LRA typically roamed. The Ugandan army eventually pushed the LRA back into Sudan, and the refugees—except those Lambert relocated—returned to what remained of their homes. But war had broken out once again, and once again Lizzie had come to aid the refugees.
This time the refugee camp was near Moroto, about three hundred and fifty hard miles north of Kampala. Kelly and Nelson’s mission, as far as Lizzie Warwick was concerned, was to make sure the convoy reached the camp with its lifesaving supplies. Their real mission was to deliver a cooler packed with dry ice and containing a single small box to René Lambert. Almost anyplace else in the world, the contents of the cooler could have been shipped to Lambert—but not even FedEx could guarantee delivery to this part of Uganda.
The good news was that Kelly and Nelson would leave the refugee camp in a helicopter. The chopper—which was secretly being paid for by Mulray Pharma—was at the camp so Lambert could commute safely between the camp and the care center near Lake Victoria, and so Lambert and Lizzie could be evacuated if the LRA overran the camp. In other words, the helicopter was there primarily to protect Mulray Pharma’s investments, and Kelly and Nelson would be airlifted out of this particular corner of hell after they’d safely escorted the convoy to the camp.
The bad news was that they had to reach the refugee camp without being killed.
It was very likely that someplace along the dusty road to Moroto, the convoy would be attacked by LRA soldiers. The majority of the soldiers would be teenagers armed with machetes and old Russian AK-47s, and they were fearless and incredibly ruthless. Consequently, every person in the convoy was armed, although none of the others were armed as well as Kelly and Nelson. They would never allow themselves to be captured alive by these savage adolescents.