Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “Why didn’t you just use your new identity to get here? Why the big deal about an escort?”

  “I couldn’t use that identity. I didn’t want it compromised. I’d built that for years, and I needed it for my getaway plan. I couldn’t take the chance of somebody figuring it out. And I was truthful about a mole of some sort at Homeland Security. They know all my aliases.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “When I got to the safe house in the Georgia Mountains, three bad guys showed up. I got the drop on them, killed two and wounded one, and got the hell out of there. Somebody knew where I was, somebody other than my agency colleagues. I used another one of the agency aliases to fly from Tampa to Houston, and used a credit card with that alias to check into a hotel. Another bad guy showed up that night. I saw him in the lobby when I left the restaurant after dinner. I recognized him. He was part of a ring I’d busted several years before. He’d been sent to prison. I guess he got out on parole. I went straight out the front door, grabbed a cab, and disappeared. Moved some cash around from the Caymans, lived off the cash, and never left a digital footprint anywhere.”

  We were traveling north on Gulf of Mexico Drive, approaching the Longboat Pass Bridge, when we came to a line of stopped cars. “Bridge must be up,” I said. We stopped and sat for a couple of minutes. A Longboat police cruiser passed us in the southbound lanes, traveling at about thirty miles per hour, never slowing, the officer paying no attention to us. Another five minutes passed. “Must be a bridge malfunction,” I said. “That seems to happen a lot.”

  The passenger door’s window blew inward, spewing fragments of glass into the front seats. A hand holding a nine-millimeter Glock pistol came through the opening, the muzzle pressing against the right side of Favereaux’s neck. “Drop the gun, podna,” Jock said. “I don’t want your blood messing up my buddy’s car.”

  Favereaux laid the gun in his lap and raised his hands, a look of resignation on his face. “Hello, Jock,” he said. “Good play.”

  I took the pistol from Favereaux’s lap. “There’s always a fourth option, Jim.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  “I want a lawyer,” Mark Erickson said. “Now.”

  J.D., Harry Robson, and Homeland Security Agent Devlin Michel were sitting at a table in an interview room at the Sarasota County jail, across from a handcuffed and very irritated Erickson.

  “We’ve got a good case against you, Professor Erickson,” J.D. said. “Wes Lucas has told us that you ordered him to kill Bannister and Linda Favereaux and that you’re the guy who controls the drug operations along this coast. He also told us you report to the governor’s chief of staff, Fulton Hancock. How long do you think it’ll take for Hancock to drop the hammer on you?”

  “I want a lawyer,” Erickson said.

  “You can probably make a better deal right now,” J.D. said. “A lawyer will complicate things beyond belief, but in the end, you’re going down for the murders of Nate Bannister and Linda Favereaux and a lot of drug charges.”

  “Four little words, Detective. I – want – a – lawyer.”

  J.D. looked at Michel and shrugged. He smiled. “It doesn’t work that way, Mr. Erickson. You don’t get a lawyer.”

  “Bullshit. I know my rights.”

  “Those rights have gone out the window. You’re being charged as a terrorist.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’m an agent of Homeland Security,” Michel said, shoving his credentials case across the table. “Now you’re a smart man. Got a PhD. and a tenured professorship and all that stuff. Surely you know that if you don’t cooperate, your next stop is Cuba.”

  “Bullshit. The courts have put a stop to that.”

  “The courts don’t always know what we’re doing. We’re a security agency, after all.”

  “Then send me to Cuba. I’m not saying a word.”

  “Is that what you want me to tell your wife, Julie?”

  “Leave her alone. She’s not part of this.”

  “We’ll find out about that very shortly,” Michel said.

  “Where is she? Have you arrested her?”

  “She’s at a private terminal at Sarasota-Bradenton Airport, waiting for one of our planes. She’ll be at Guantánamo Bay in time for breakfast.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  “It’s done, Dr. Erickson,” Michel said. “The plane has to come down from D.C., so it’ll be a while before Julie leaves. You can stop that by telling us what we need to know. But you don’t have a whole lot of time.”

  They had him. Erickson was the image of defeat. It was like the air had all gone out of him, leaving only a deflated remnant of the man he’d been moments earlier. “Okay,” he said, “if I tell you everything I know, what happens?”

  Michel looked at Robson. “Can you get Dobbyn in here?”

  Harry made a call and a couple of minutes later, the state attorney walked into the room. “I’m John Dobbyn,” he said. “People call me Jack. I’m the state attorney for this circuit. As such, it’s my prerogative to bring charges for criminal offenses as I see fit. In other words, I have complete discretion to decide what charges my office should bring.”

  “I want to know what happens if I tell you everything I know,” Erickson said.

  “If you tell us the absolute truth,” Dobbyn said, “leaving nothing out, and agree to testify against everybody in your network, including the top people, the federal government will drop the terrorism charges and turn you over to the state. We’ll prosecute you for a number of drug offenses and murder. If you’ll cop to the charges and confess, you’ll be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, but we’ll take the death penalty off the table.”

  “What about my wife?” Erickson asked.

  “You will not be compelled to testify against her, and if we don’t find any evidence of her involvement in your crimes, she won’t be charged.”

  “That’s it? You’ll just let her go?” Erickson asked.

  “That’s it,” Dobbyn said, “but understand, if you don’t cooperate completely, if you ever lie, or refuse to tell us truthfully anything we want to know, the deal is off. Your confession will stand, but the death penalty goes back on the table, and your wife will be subject to an investigation by Homeland Security.”

  Erickson sat quietly, turning it over in his mind. His life had changed irrevocably in a matter of minutes. “I understand. I’ll take the deal.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Detective Brad Corbin is in custody in New Orleans,” Jock said. “Homeland Security picked him up this afternoon.”

  It was almost nine o’clock in the evening. J.D., Jock, Agent Devlin Michel, and I were sitting in my living room eating pizza we’d ordered from Oma’s in Bradenton Beach, the little town just over the bridge on Anna Maria Island. I had given my statement to Longboat Key Deputy Chief Martin Sharkey, describing what had happened in my car on the way home from the courthouse. Favereaux was sitting in a holding cell at the Longboat Key police station, waiting for Michel to take him into custody. J.D. and Michel had finished up with Erickson and left Harry Robson to deal with the paperwork. They stopped by the Longboat police station and spent an hour talking with Favereaux. Jock and I hadn’t discussed the events of the day before everybody arrived at my front door. It was a complex web, and we decided that it would be best to tell the whole story one time and let everybody add what they knew.

  “Before we get into Corbin,” J.D. said, “I want to know what happened with Matt and Favereaux.”

  I told her.

  “How did Jock know you were in trouble?” she asked.

  Jock laughed. “Secret word,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” J.D. said.

  “A long time ago,” I said, “back in junior high, we decided we needed a secret word to let each other know if the other was in trouble. I think we’d just seen a spy movie where the protagonist had a ‘safe’ word that he could use if he needed his buddies t
o get him out of a sticky situation. It was a kid’s game that we gave up within a couple of months. I think that was about the time we discovered girls. We never used the word again, other than in conversation, I guess. I wondered if Jock would remember it. He did.”

  “What was the word?” J.D. asked.

  “Quirky,” Jock said. “Matt told me he’d gotten a quirky call from the judge about coming back to the courthouse. I knew he was in trouble. He also told me exactly where he was, the south firehouse. I called Sharkey and he got the bridges up on both ends of the island, and we had patrol cars drive along the stopped cars. When one of the patrols recognized Matt’s car in line at the Longboat Pass Bridge, I happened to be the closest one to him. I’d been hiding out at the curve there, back in the bushes. I thought there was a good chance they would continue north. If they’d turned around and gone south, one of the cops would have gotten them at that end of the key.”

  “You guys are full of surprises,” J.D. said. “Tell us about Corbin in New Orleans.”

  “Jock made the connection,” Michel said. “After they found the Cayman bank accounts that Favereaux set up, they found a regular monthly deposit made to another Cayman account. There were fairly large sums of money that had been going into that account for fifteen years. Turns out the account holder was Brad Corbin, and the only deposits into that account were those from Favereaux.”

  “Can you make that stick?” I asked.

  “Well,” Michel said, “there’s more. Our people searched Corbin’s house and found a pistol. The ballistics shows that it’s the same pistol that killed Connie Pelletier and the record room cop, Tatum. That seemed to have broken the dam. Corbin is talking non-stop.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “He had me completely fooled. What was that all about?”

  “It seems that when Favereaux was in New Orleans years ago, he was paying off a pretty highly placed detective. That detective was Corbin’s mentor, and when the detective retired, he passed the deal onto Corbin.”

  “I don’t understand why Favereaux needed a New Orleans cop,” I said. “He’d moved out of that city years ago.”

  “There were a lot of loose ends there,” Michel said. “Actually, J.D. got us interested earlier this week when she ran some more DNA tests and figured out that Favereaux and Linda were not related by blood. She was not his daughter. When J.D. first told me about that, I sent it up the chain, but the consensus was that Jim had made a mistake and he truly thought Linda was his daughter. Since we couldn’t find Jim, and Linda was dead, it didn’t make much difference to us at the time. When he popped back up earlier this week, and Jock called me about his agency’s finding the bank account Favereaux had set up in the Caymans, everything started to fall into place.”

  “How did Favereaux manage to amass a fortune?” I asked. “I thought you guys had a tight rein on the money he made from drug deals.”

  Michel looked a little embarrassed. “We thought so, too. It seems that he was investing agency money and giving it back, plus the profits to the agency he was working for. What we didn’t know was that he was investing other money he made from side deals with the gunrunners, drug dealers, or whoever else he was dealing with and keeping those profits and the principal. It was so simple, nobody in the agencies thought to check on it. Maybe there was no way to figure it out. The bad guys he dealt with weren’t keeping books of account; or at least none that we found. Sometimes simple is best.”

  “Tell me about the loose ends in New Orleans,” I said.

  “The first problem was Linda,” J.D. said. “Favereaux told us he never had an affair with Connie, but he was obsessed with Linda. He knew she wasn’t his daughter. He started having sex with her when she was fifteen and had come to live with Connie and Bobby Pelletier. Connie knew about their affair and also knew about Favereaux’s side deals with the drug people. As long as Linda was involved, Connie would keep quiet, but when Linda died, Favereaux was afraid that Connie would talk. When he heard that Matt and I had visited her, he decided he had to take action to silence her. Permanently.”

  “So, Linda and Jim were sleeping together,” I said.

  “Michel shrugged. “Regularly since Linda was fifteen.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “Was there really a mole in your organization, Devlin?” J.D. asked.

  “Mole may be too strong a word,” Michel said. “We had a low-level guy working for a contractor we’d hired to work on our computers. He came across some files on Favereaux and sold the information to somebody he knew in the drug business. He was told to keep an eye on Favereaux’s activities, and when Jim went to the safe house in Georgia, the contractor passed it on to some bad guys and they tried to take Jim out.”

  “You found the guy?”

  “The D.C. police found his body in Rock Creek Park. They think it was just a random killing.”

  “Was it?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” Michel said, with a leer.

  “What was Tatum’s part in all this?” I asked.

  “Tatum’s job was to protect several files that Favereaux didn’t want to end up in the hands of other agencies,” Michel said. “They were files that Favereaux was afraid might implicate him in the crimes of others if somebody dug too deeply. The man who preceded Tatum on Corbin’s, or Favereaux’s, payroll had destroyed the files years ago. Tatum was the trip wire. If somebody came looking for one of the files, he’d let Corbin know. It was a way to let Favereaux know that somebody might be on his trail. When I called about the file on Linda, or Darlene Pelletier, as she was known, Corbin got spooked and let Favereaux know about it. Favereaux ordered Corbin to kill Tatum. When Corbin told Favereaux that you and J.D. had been to see Connie, he sent Corbin to take care of her.”

  “Did Connie know enough about Favereaux’s operation to cause him trouble?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” said Michel. “But the fact is that Favereaux thought she did, and that was enough to get her killed. She and her husband, Bobby, had tried to squeeze Favereaux about ten years ago, and he killed Bobby. Connie got the message, but with Linda gone, Favereaux was afraid that Connie might go to the authorities.”

  “Was Linda aware of the dirty side of Jim Favereaux?” I asked.

  “She was,” said Michel. “In fact she was part of it. She also had a Cayman account. It was in the name of Darlene Pelletier.”

  “What did you get from Lucas?” I asked.

  “He’s dirtier than we thought,” J.D. said. She told us at length what Lucas had admitted to concerning the murders and his other dealing with the Hancock group.

  “What about Erickson?” I asked.

  “He gave us enough to hang Fulton Hancock. FDLE arrested him about an hour ago at his home in Tampa. I don’t think either one of them, Erickson or Hancock, will ever see the outside of a prison again.”

  “Did Erickson tell you why he put the hit out on Bannister?” I asked.

  “Yes,” J.D. said. “It seems that Bannister was trying to renege on the deal he’d made about the property in Lakeland, the one that is written up in the documents Bob Crites showed you. He threatened to go to the police unless some accommodation was made. He was afraid he was going to be cut completely out of the deal.”

  “Then why try to frame Abby?” I asked.

  J.D. shook her head. “Erickson didn’t know why. Tori Madison was in charge of that. Erickson didn’t want it to look like a hit. He was afraid there would be too many questions if a prominent man like Bannister was found shot to death without any apparent reason. He thought it was all set up until Lucas called him after he’d killed Bannister. Nobody expected Linda to be in the condo. They were kind of making it up as they went from that point. It was important to get Lucas assigned to the case, but he screwed up by jumping the gun and asking his boss for the assignment before law enforcement even knew Bannister was dead.”

  “Where’s Tori now?” I asked.

  “Harry Robson was going to pick her up at h
er house in Sarasota as soon as he finished with the paperwork on Lucas and Erickson,” J.D. said. “She’s probably in custody by now.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  I was standing under a hot shower, letting the warmth work through the kinks I’d developed in my shoulders during four days in the courtroom. It was almost six-thirty on Friday morning, the day that should be the last day of trial. Abby’s fate would be decided before dinner. I would put Abby, my last witness, on the stand and then rest my case. I wondered what Swann had to put on in rebuttal, but I wasn’t too worried about it. He’d made the decision not to cross-examine either Lucas or Favereaux, so he couldn’t bring them back to use in rebuttal. I couldn’t imagine who else he could put on the stand. He would probably cross-examine Abby, but given the testimony from Lucas and Favereaux, I thought he might rest his case right after I rested mine. If that happened, we would go on to closing arguments.

  I heard the insistent sound of a cell phone ringing. I could see J.D. through the steam and the condensation on shower door. She was standing at the sink brushing out her hair. I wasn’t sure how much good that would do given the humidity level of the room. She walked into the bedroom, and I heard her answer the phone. She was back in a few minutes, just as I turned the shower off.

  “Matt,” she said, “That was Harry Robson. Wes Lucas is dead.”

  “What?” I was shocked.

  “He was found in his cell early this morning. He hanged himself with a bed sheet.”

  “Crap. Didn’t they have some kind of watch on him?”

  “Apparently not. Harry said they had no reason to think he was suicidal.”

  “I’m sorry he’s dead. He was a real bad guy, but still, dead is forever. Maybe there was some little part of him, some spark of goodness, that we’ll never see. Oh well, no big loss. I might have been able to call him back to the witness stand to admit that he killed Bannister, but I would have had a fight on my hands from Swann, and Lucas could have taken the Fifth again, regardless of what he told you and Harry. It wouldn’t have been worth taking a chance.”