House Blood - JD 7

by Mike Lawson

  The good news was that he had his wallet and it was stuffed with cash. The bad news was he didn’t have a passport. His passports—his real one and the one made out in the name of Shaw—had been in his knapsack and the knapsack had been in the Explorer, which was now a pile of scrap metal balanced precariously on a steep hillside hundreds of feet below the road. If his left arm had been functional, he would have paid someone to drive him back to the crash site and would have then rappelled down and retrieved his passports. With a broken arm and a dislocated shoulder, that was problematic. He could probably find some young guy willing to risk his life for money and get the guy to retrieve his knapsack for him. That could create another issue, however. If the guy saw the rifle in the Explorer and discovered that Kelly had two passports with the same photo but different names, he might decide to involve the Peruvian cops. Right now everyone assumed he was just a bad driver who had driven off the road, and he thought it best to leave things standing the way they were.

  He paid a man to drive him to Arequipa and called Fiona, telling her what had happened and to get him a passport so he could fly out of the country. He suggested that Hobson throw money at the right bureaucrat and maybe somebody at the U.S. Consulate in Lima would be able to help. When he asked Fiona about Nelson’s condition, she said that she didn’t know any more than she’d told him the last time they talked: that Nelson had been shot and was recovering in a hospital. Kelly suspected she was lying and keeping things from him, and if she was, he was gonna bitch-slap her the next time he saw her. He only needed one arm to do that.

  “I finally heard from Kelly,” Fiona said. “He didn’t contact me earlier because he was in a hospital.”

  “In a hospital?” Orson said.

  “Yeah. Emma almost killed him.”

  Orson was astounded. “She almost killed him?” he said. “How in the world …”

  “He said she ran him over with her car.”

  “How did he allow that to happen?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Orson shook his head, still amazed that a woman had almost killed Kelly. “So what did she do in Peru? What did she learn?”

  “I don’t know. She took Kelly out before he could question her, and all Kelly knows is she stayed overnight at the care center.”

  “Is she back from Peru?”

  “Yes. I pulled that private detective off DeMarco like you told me, and he’s been watching her house.”

  Fiona started to say something else, but Orson raised a hand to silence her as he mulled over everything she had told him. Finally, he said, “I suppose the worst-case scenario is she figured out that we’re doing clinical trials in Peru. That’s regrettable, but at this point, not truly harmful.”

  “You don’t know that,” Fiona said.

  “Yes I do,” Orson said. “But when Kelly gets back I want him to watch her instead of that detective. And I mean watch her, Fiona, not kill her.”

  “I don’t think Kelly’s going to be much help. The only thing he cares about right now is Nelson.”

  “Did you talk to that man you mentioned, that fellow Lee?”

  “Not yet. He’s flying back from Uganda today. I’ll see him tonight.”

  28

  Emma slept for twelve hours after she returned home from Peru. When she woke up, Christine said that DeMarco had called while she was sleeping and wanted her to call him back as soon as possible.

  “Bobby found something at my place,” DeMarco said.

  That meant that Neil’s man Bobby had found a bug either in DeMarco’s house or connected to his landline.

  “He’ll be at your place this morning,” DeMarco added.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Emma said.

  While waiting for Bobby, Emma ate a breakfast consisting of black coffee and plain yogurt mixed with strawberries and chatted briefly with Christine before Christine left for work. Emma was glad she was going to work; she wanted her out of the house when Bobby arrived to look for listening devices.

  Bobby was a slim, intense young black man who wore his hair in dreadlocks; he was smart as a whip and he rarely spoke. He spent an hour walking through Emma’s house with a couple of electronic gizmos and finally declared it bug-free. He told her DeMarco had a voice-activated recorder connected to his landline.

  “Is his cell phone being monitored?” Emma asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Bobby said. “I had him make a long call on his cell so I could see if anybody intercepted the call, and nobody did. So either his cell’s not being monitored or it’s not being monitored on a full-time basis.”

  “What did you do with the recorder connected to his landline?” Emma asked him.

  “Joe told me to leave it where it was.”

  “Good,” Emma said. They might want to say something on ­DeMarco’s phone to intentionally mislead whoever was bugging it. For once, DeMarco was using his head.

  She thanked Bobby, and after he left, she sent a text message to DeMarco’s cell phone saying: See U at N’s.

  As she backed her car out of the garage, she noticed a gray sedan parked on her street, half a block away. A block later, she saw the same sedan in her rearview mirror. She made a couple of unnecessary turns to confirm the sedan was following her and then spent the next ten minutes losing whoever was shadowing her. She still arrived at Neil’s place before DeMarco, even though he lived closer to Neil’s than she did.

  “Did anyone follow you here?” she asked DeMarco when he arrived.

  “No. That’s what took me so long. I drove around for quite a while to make sure I wasn’t being tailed.”

  “Well, somebody was following me,” Emma said.

  “Ah, shit,” Neil said. “Did they follow you here?”

  “Of course not,” Emma said.

  “Well, that’s good,” Neil said. “I don’t need—”

  “Just get on with it, Neil,” Emma said. “Tell us what you’ve learned.”

  “First,” Neil said, “the lab in Delaware—Biomed Futures, Inc.—is owned by Mulray Pharma. I got that from property tax records but I don’t have a clue what they do inside the place.

  “I could find no connection between Mulray Pharma and the Warwick Foundation other than the fact that Mulray is one of several pharmaceutical companies that donates to Warwick. Nor did I learn anything about Lizzie Warwick to make me think she is anything other than what she appears to be. I did, however, discover a number of interesting things about the people who work for Lizzie.”

  Neil opened a file folder lying on his desk. “Let’s start with the man who tried to rob the liquor store. He isn’t your average crackhead stickup guy. His name is Randal Nelson and he’s an ex-army Ranger. He’s also ex-Delta.”

  “Delta?” Emma said.

  “Yeah. Then he got out of the army and turned merc and went to work for a private security outfit called Romar-Slade. He made the news a few years ago when he was arrested in Afghanistan for killing some kids while he was protecting an Afghani politician, then all the charges against him were dismissed and he resigned from the security company. But that’s not the big news. Before he decided to start robbing liquor stores, he was working for Lizzie Warwick. He and his partner, a guy named Kelly—”

  “Kelly? Is he the man …”

  “Yep,” Neil said. “The guy you killed in Peru. His real name is James Kelly. Shaw must be an alias he uses. Anyway, Kelly and Nelson have a security company and provide security for Warwick. That’s all aboveboard. Their company’s legitimate, they pay their taxes, and they have half a dozen employees on their payroll, all involved in security work for Warwick. What’s not aboveboard is that these two guys have a hundred- and-fifty-acre spread in Montana worth one point eight million. They bought it about the same time they signed on with Warwick and they don’t have a mortgage on the p
lace. Now, I suppose these two ex–army sergeants could have saved their pennies and invested wisely and that’s how they were able to afford the property. A more likely scenario is somebody gave them a shopping bag full of greenbacks about the time they went to work for Saint Lizzie. Whatever the case, Nelson is not a guy who should have been robbing a liquor store, and he’s definitely connected to Warwick and the guy you met in Peru.”

  “Excellent, Neil,” Emma said—and DeMarco thought that sounded like Good dog.

  “Next we have Monsieur René Lambert. By the way, it wasn’t easy for me to get this information. Fortunately, I have a … What would you call it? A reciprocal arrangement with a gentleman in Marseille. He and I—”

  “Get to the point, Neil,” Emma said.

  Bad dog.

  “Six years ago, Dr. Lambert was in dire financial straits. He was forced to sell his chalet in Grenoble to pay down some of his debt, but that only covered about a third of what he owed. Now, I don’t know how bankruptcy works in France, but it appears to me that he was headed in that direction. Then, voila, the same year he teams up with Lizzie Warwick, he’s able to pay off all his creditors, buy back the place in Grenoble, and purchase a number of pricey things for his wife and daughters.”

  “So where’s the money coming from?” Emma asked.

  “An account in the French Antilles, but neither I nor my friend in Marseille could figure out who owns the Antilles account. Whoever’s funding Dr. Lambert is very skillful at covering up the money trail—and to cover it up from moi … Well, they’re good.”

  “Then there’s Mr. Hobson,” Neil said. “Well, Mr. Hobson is actually ex-Colonel Hobson. Eleven years ago, he was incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth for trying to steal approximately half a million dollars from the United States Army, but less than a month after he’s released from prison, he’s managing the Warwick Foundation for Lizzie Warwick.”

  “Lizzie hired an ex-con?” DeMarco said.

  Neil nodded. “I don’t know if she knew he was an ex-con but, yes, she did. I would have assumed that she would have done some sort of background check on the man that’s handling all the money passing through her foundation, but maybe not. Or maybe she figured Hobson had paid his debt to society and she was willing to give him another chance. I don’t know. But, as in the case of Dr. Lambert, I can’t figure out where Hobson’s money is coming from. He gets no salary from Warwick—he apparently donates his time—yet this man, who has no pension from the army, lives in a respectable apartment building and drives a respectable car. He’s not filthy rich like Lambert, but he has some source of income and he’s not paying taxes on it. You could sic the IRS on him if you wanted to.”

  DeMarco wondered if he should sic the IRS on Neil; he was fairly certain a large portion of his income wasn’t reported to the taxman, either.

  “What about Congressman Talbot?” Emma asked. “Could you link him to Mulray Pharma?”

  “In a way,” Neil said. “You remember a few years ago when everybody was making a big stink about how you could get drugs cheaper in Canada than in the U.S.? When that issue arose, drug companies, including Mulray Pharma, began throwing money at politicians to maintain the status quo, and Congressman Talbot was one of those politicians. Talbot is not only on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but he’s also on the health subcommittee. Talbot wasn’t singled out, however. The pharmaceutical companies were throwing money at everyone, Republicans and Democrats, and Talbot was just one of them. What this means is that if somebody wanted Talbot’s chief of staff to participate in a conference call related to something Mulray Pharma cared about, Talbot might agree to do a favor for a generous contributor—but I didn’t find anything that tied Talbot to Mulray Pharma doing clinical trials in Peru, or anything else that makes me think he conspired in Downing’s death.”

  “This is a goddamn mess,” DeMarco said. “We need to get somebody official investigating. Justice, FDA, FBI—somebody who can unravel all this shit.”

  “And what would we tell them?” Emma snapped. “That the Warwick Foundation and Mulray Pharma are giving a few poor people drugs that appear to be keeping them healthy and, by the way, we have no proof they’re doing anything illegal?”

  “So what do you wanna do?”

  No one followed Emma home from Neil’s office, and there was no gray sedan parked on her block.

  Emma decided to make a tour of her yard. She was fanatical about her yard. She hired gardeners, consulted with experts whenever her lawn and plants appeared unhealthy, and spent a lot of time on her hands and knees pulling noxious weeds. Most people looking at her yard considered it a botanical marvel; Emma’s opinion was quite the opposite. Due to her illness, she hadn’t been able to give her plants the attention they deserved the last six months, and she saw signs of neglect everywhere she looked.

  As she walked about, turning over the occasional leaf to inspect for plant-nibbling pests, she made mental notes about all the work that needed to be done. She also thought about everything she had learned in Peru and what Neil had told her. She didn’t know what it all meant, but one thing she knew for sure: she and DeMarco were lucky to be alive. But what should they do next? DeMarco, for once, was right. They needed to get some law enforcement agency engaged in this, somebody who could unsnarl the legal issues associated with doing clinical trials in foreign countries and who had the means to determine if murder had occurred in Peru as she believed. But how could she get a law enforcement agency involved?

  She made a second tour of her yard as she pondered this question.

  My God! Was that moss in her lawn?

  She went back inside the house and called the gardening service she used and rattled off a list of things she wanted accomplished in the next week. Then she made a second call.

  “Unger called me,” Hobson said.

  “Who the hell’s Unger?” Fiona said. She was in no mood for Hobson.

  “He’s the private detective Kelly made me hire to watch DeMarco. And he was following Emma, like you told me to have him do. Anyway, Emma made him.”

  “Made him? What does that mean?”

  “It means he was following her and she figured out he was following her, and then she lost him. But now she knows that somebody’s watching her.”

  Fiona squeezed the phone so hard she was surprised she didn’t leave indentations in the plastic. It seemed like everything she did lately turned to shit.

  “What do you want me to do?” Hobson asked.

  “I want you to shut up so I can think.”

  She really wanted to know what Emma was doing, but if she was capable of almost killing Kelly, she was probably good enough to catch the PI and make him tell her who he was working for. So what should she do? Hire somebody else to follow Emma? She could wait until Earl Lee arrived from Africa and have him start following Emma, but Lee hadn’t agreed to work for her yet and she had no idea how capable he was. Maybe it was time to back off on Emma and DeMarco. Orson had said that Emma couldn’t have learned anything in Peru that would disrupt their plans at this point. She wasn’t sure why he was so confident; all she could do was hope that he was right.

  “Tell Unger his services are no longer required,” Fiona said. “Give him a fat bonus and then tell him if he ever talks about what he did for us, something bad will happen to him. Oh, and tell him to take the tap off DeMarco’s phone, and to make sure he’s not caught when he does.”

  29

  Celia Montoya worked for the Washington Post, and six months ago she published a series of articles that shined a harsh light on government mismanagement and corporate greed.

  The Department of Veterans Affairs had awarded a lucrative contract to a company that ran assisted living facilities for veterans throughout the country. Montoya discovered that while the company and its shareholders were making record profits, the ­veteran
s —most of whom had devastating, permanent injuries incurred in the line of duty—were receiving substandard care and living in abysmal conditions in understaffed facilities. The company claimed Montoya grossly exaggerated conditions in their facilities—although the veterans and their families backed up the reporter—and the VA was more interested in covering up its own incompetence than in correcting the situation. And then Congress did what it always did: the politicians held a few televised hearings so they could show how outraged they all were, but didn’t pass new laws to prevent future abuses, as new laws might adversely affect the economy—­meaning the income of those folks who contributed most heavily to the politicians’ campaigns. In the end, the only thing that happened was that conditions in the facilities temporarily improved and a few low-level scapegoats lost their jobs, but had it not been for Montoya, not even that would have happened.

  Celia Montoya jousted at windmills—and that’s what Emma liked about her.

  Emma called Montoya, but the reporter wasn’t in her office so she left a message on her voice mail. “How would you like to earn a Pulitzer?” Emma said.

  Emma met Celia Montoya at an umbrella-covered table on the grounds of the U.S. Botanic Garden. The garden is adjacent to the U.S. Capitol and has a magnificent Lord and Burnham greenhouse containing over twenty thousand plants. The garden’s Web site says it’s operated and maintained by Congress—which, of course, it isn’t. Congress couldn’t operate and maintain a hot dog stand. The architect of the Capitol is actually the person responsible for the garden, and although Emma didn’t know who the current architect was, she assumed this person was not a politician and therefore capable of performing some useful function. After she talked to the reporter, Emma planned to walk through the conservatory and see what new things were growing.