House Rivals

by Mike Lawson

  “I realize that,” DeMarco said. “But I talked to Dawkins and Logan, and I told them that you were going to find some proof.”

  “You what! Goddamnit, DeMarco! If by some remote chance we—and by we, I mean the FBI—can actually build a criminal case against these people, you could screw things up by talking to them. I told you before: you are not law enforcement.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” DeMarco said, then went on to tell her about his conversation with Bill and Marjorie. He didn’t tell her that he’d referred to her as a pit bull with a badge. He concluded by saying that Logan and Dawkins naturally denied being anything more than innocent political consultants, but Logan had looked particularly nervous, like he was about ready to come out of his skin.

  “So in other words,” Westerberg said, “all you did was forewarn them that they’re being investigated.”

  “What have you got?” DeMarco said to change the subject. “Do the Bismarck cops have anything on Sarah’s murder?”

  “No. There was no incriminating evidence at the crime scene. One thing that was a bit unusual was that the shooter didn’t leave any brass behind. I mean, it’s possible he used a .22 revolver, but folks don’t usually buy .22 revolvers. And what this means is that whoever killed Sarah had the presence of mind to pick up the shell casings before he left, which is not what you’d expect if the shooter was some hopped-up meth addict. The other thing is, I thought we might be able to find Sarah’s phone. What I’m saying is, if a tweeker stole her phone he would have started using it or sold it to somebody and that person would have used it. But we couldn’t locate the phone so whoever stole it disabled or destroyed it, which again, isn’t typical meth-head behavior. So this shooting has the earmarks of a professional hit but there’s no evidence leading to the shooter.”

  “Okay, but that’s not exactly big news,” DeMarco said. “I never did think she was a victim of a random home invasion. Did you get anything else?”

  “Yeah, two things. The first is that Logan took a trip to Denver a few days before Sarah was killed.”

  “What made you look at his travel records?” DeMarco asked.

  “I was just checking him out after you gave me his name, looking at credit card records, tax returns, criminal records, whatever I could look at.”

  “So what about this trip to Denver? Why’s that significant?”

  “Because in looking at Logan’s travel history, he doesn’t usually go to Denver. In fact, until last week, the last time he’d been in Denver was six years ago. Normally he flies to Houston, where Curtis has his headquarters, a PR firm in LA, and Washington D.C.”

  “Could you figure out what he was doing in Denver?”

  “No. He checked into a hotel, spent one night there, and flew out the next day. His credit card charges were just for normal things like dinner and booze and snacks. If I had to guess, I’d say he went there for a quick meeting.”

  “By any chance, was anybody connected to Curtis killed right after Logan went to Denver the last time?”

  “Not that I could find,” Westerberg said.

  “Huh,” DeMarco said. He sat there for a moment, turning his ice tea glass in his hands. “Can you get a warrant to tap Logan’s phones?”

  “Are you crazy? No judge is going to give me a warrant because the man flew to Denver. I have nothing to indicate that Logan has committed a crime. And what good would tapping his phones do anyway?”

  “I’ll tell you what good it would do,” DeMarco said. “I think if you lean on Logan, you’ll scare the shit out of him. You handcuff him, drag him into an interrogation room, read him his rights, then you tell him that Janet Tyler is willing to testify against him and . . .”

  “Testify to what?”

  “That Logan said he could keep her son from going to jail if she dropped the lawsuit against Curtis. In other words, she can testify that Logan admitted to her that he could influence her son’s prosecutor.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Then you start lying. You lie like a son of a bitch. You say that the prosecutor who Logan paid off to make sure Tyler’s son didn’t go to jail, confessed. You say he confessed because you nailed him on some other bullshit and he gave up Logan for a reduced sentence. You say that you’ve also got two or three politicians—people named in Sarah’s blog—who’ve admitted that they took bribes from Logan. They admitted this because you’re a badass federal agent and scared them.”

  Before Westerberg could interrupt him, DeMarco continued. “Then you hit Logan between the eyes with his Denver trip. You say you know he went to Denver and he hired somebody to kill Sarah. You say that you’re about ready to arrest the killer, who you can prove was in Denver at the same time as Logan. In other words, you lie some more and say you found evidence at the crime scene or a picture on a surveillance camera. Whatever you can think of. I mean, you’re going to need a pretty good script before you interrogate Logan, but I think you can write one and maybe he’ll fall for it.”

  “And you think if I tell him all these lies, he’ll confess?”

  “Probably not. His lawyer will tell him to keep his mouth shut. But after you interrogate him and tell him the lies, Logan might panic and call somebody and say something that will incriminate himself or Curtis. So. Let me ask again: do you think there’s any way you might be able to get a warrant to tap Logan’s phones?”

  “Forget it. No judge will give me one unless I lie to the judge, which I’m not about to do.”

  “Well, then—and I mean hypothetically—could you tap his phones without a warrant?”

  “DeMarco, there is no way in hell that I am going to break the law, no matter who you work for.”

  “Okay, be that way,” DeMarco said. “But I’m curious about something. Didn’t you need a warrant to find out that Logan flew to Denver?”

  Westerberg looked away—and she looked sheepish. She cleared her throat before she said, “There are a lot of databases out there, databases that legally collect information on people who purchase things—like airline tickets. I just happen to know somebody who has access to the right database.”

  “All right, Agent! I’m proud of you.”

  “Shut up, DeMarco.”

  “You said you learned two things. The first was Logan’s trip to Denver. What was the second?”

  “When Sarah was assaulted by those three men in April, she called the cops and I talked to the two cops who responded to the call. They told me that Sarah couldn’t positively identify her attackers because they wore ski masks, but she said one of the men had full sleeves.”

  “Full sleeves?”

  “Tattoos covering his arms, from shoulder to wrist. She couldn’t see his face but she could see the tattoos because he was wearing a T-shirt. And his arms were right in her face because he sat on her chest, holding his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream. The problem is that she couldn’t remember anything distinctive about the tattoos: no image of a screaming eagle or a skull and crossbones or anything like that. The other thing was, this same guy was wearing beat-up old cowboy boots and the boots had silver caps on the toes.”

  The image of Sarah being pushed to the ground and three goons in ski masks, standing over her and threatening her, made DeMarco want to kill somebody. “So how are the tattoos and the boots important if Sarah couldn’t ID her attackers?”

  “Bismarck isn’t a big city, and this means that the local cops know most the local assholes. As soon as Sarah said full sleeves and silver-tipped cowboy boots they thought of a guy named Roy Patterson.”

  “Did they question Patterson?”

  “Of course. Patterson’s alibi for the time Sarah was attacked was another asshole named Mark Jenkins. Jenkins and Patterson said they were sitting in Patterson’s double-wide watching a ball game when Sarah was attacked. And the cops couldn’t break Patterson’s alibi and you can’t arrest somebody f
or having tattoos and cowboy boots. The other thing was their attitude. Patterson and Jenkins both acted smug when the cops questioned them, like they knew they were getting away with something. But you can’t arrest anyone for attitude, either. At any rate, based totally on cop instinct and a couple of tattooed arms, the Bismarck cops think that Patterson and Jenkins may have been two of the men who attacked Sarah but they can’t do anything about it.”

  “Are there any surveillance cameras you can look at to see if Jenkins and Patterson were running around town during the time they were supposedly watching this ball game? You know, maybe a red-light camera that might have taken their picture.”

  “There aren’t all that many public surveillance cameras in Bismarck. This isn’t London. And the cops here aren’t complete idiots. They actually did check out places between Patterson’s trailer and the parking lot where Sarah was attacked. You know, a couple convenience stores and bars where these mutts might have stopped for a beer after they did the job—but they couldn’t find anybody who saw them and the surveillance cameras in those places didn’t show anything.”

  “But the cops are sure these guys were involved?”

  Westerberg shrugged. “Are they sure? Well, they’d tell you that they’re sure but as Denzel said in that movie: It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” DeMarco said, as if he agreed with Westerberg—which he didn’t. But rather than argue with her—and maybe tip his hand—he decided to change the subject. “Did you find anything in Sarah’s blog you might be able to pursue?”

  Westerberg laughed. “Let me tell you about the last thing I read in Sarah’s blog. There was a North Dakota state senator who changed his vote on a bill related to disposal of wastewater from fracking. This got Sarah’s attention because the guy had always been on the right side of environmental issues in the past and his vote was inconsistent with his voting pattern. So Sarah . . .. She was really good, DeMarco. I wished she’d applied for a job at the Bureau. Anyway, Sarah somehow found out that the sewer line from the senator’s house got clogged up by tree roots, and the sewer backed up and flooded his basement. Well, the senator’s insurance company, being a typical insurance company, refused to pay for the water damage, which amounted to eight thousand bucks. Then, low and behold, this insurance company—who coincidentally provides insurance for a whole shitload of things connected to Leonard Curtis—has a change of heart.

  “Sarah concluded, of course, that somebody paid the senator a visit and said they might be able to get his insurance company to pay his claim if he quit being such a pill about this wastewater legislation. Then this person—who we now suspect was Logan or Dawkins—made a call to the insurance company, telling them that Curtis was going to find somebody else to insure his many homes and businesses, and the insurance company decided to pay the claim.

  “I mean, everything in her damn blog is like that, DeMarco! Like in this case: An insurance company paid off on a claim they probably should have paid in the first place, and a politician simply changed his mind. There’s no way to prove the guy was bribed. You remember that congressman in Louisiana we busted with ninety thousand bucks in cash in his freezer? Now you can do something with ninety grand in a freezer. You can’t do anything with an insurance company that just decides to do the right thing for once.”

  Westerberg stood up. “I gotta go, DeMarco. I have work to do.” She turned to walk away, then turned back to face him. “I don’t like the situation I’m in right now. I don’t like it at all. Mahoney’s got his boot on my boss’s neck and my boss won’t assign me to another case until I can convince him that there’s nothing I can legally do to catch Sarah’s killer. The operative word there being legally. And then my boss will have to convince Mahoney and Mahoney will probably ask you if I’ve done everything I can. So I want you to know that I’m busting my ass on this case, but at some point you and Mahoney may have to accept the fact that I can’t find the evidence needed to convict someone. I also want you to know it really pisses me off that I have to satisfy you that I’m doing my job.”

  “Sorry, Agent,” DeMarco said, not sounding sorry at all. “By the way, are you ever going to tell me your first name so I don’t have to keep calling you Agent? With all this clout you seem to think I have, I can probably find out on my own if you won’t tell me.”

  “My name is Bertha. Okay? Are you satisfied? And if you ever call me Bertha, I’ll shoot you.”

  “So what do your friends call you?”

  “You’re not my friend, DeMarco.”

  19

  Mark Jenkins and Roy Patterson.

  Westerberg had finally given him something he could use. And in this case, Denzel was wrong: DeMarco didn’t need proof, he just needed to know he was right.

  The question was: Was he willing to accept the consequences if he failed? It took him about two seconds to decide that yes, he was. Twenty-two-year-old Sarah Johnson, a woman with her whole life ahead of her, had been willing to risk her life to get Leonard Curtis—and DeMarco was willing to risk the possibility of going to jail.

  So he didn’t spend much time agonizing over whether he would do it. He spent the time instead thinking about how to do it, and concluded he needed some help and some equipment he didn’t have. If he’d been near New York, he could have called up a couple of mafia-connected lowlifes—guys who used to work with his father—and paid them to do the job for him—but he was sixteen hundred miles from New York.

  He thought about logistics for another minute, then called Doug Thorpe.

  “Mr. Thorpe, it’s Joe DeMarco.”

  “What do you want, DeMarco?”

  “Do you have any guns?”

  “What? Yeah, of course.”

  “I don’t mean rifles or shotguns. Handguns.”

  “Yeah, I got a couple. Why are you asking?”

  DeMarco told him, and then told him what he planned to do. He concluded by saying, “You understand you could end up in jail if you help me.”

  “I couldn’t care less about jail,” Thorpe said.

  “Okay, as long as you understand.” Then he hesitated and asked, “When’s Sarah’s funeral?”

  “Friday,” Thorpe said.

  After speaking to Thorpe, DeMarco called Mahoney and told him that he needed Roy Patterson’s address. He said that Patterson was a tattooed thug who might have a criminal record and that he lived in a double-wide, but that’s all he knew. DeMarco might have been able find Patterson’s address using the Internet and without Mahoney’s help, but he didn’t feel like spending hours on a computer. And Mahoney had the sort of connections in D.C. that could find the guy if he lived in a cave.

  After speaking to his boss, DeMarco got into his rental car and drove slowly through the streets of downtown Bismarck, checking his rearview mirror to see if he could spot whoever was following him.

  When DeMarco met Dawkins and Logan in their office yesterday, it became apparent to him then that they’d been having him followed. If they hadn’t had someone tailing him how else would Dawkins have known that he’d been following Logan? He didn’t buy that you’re-playing-in-our-ballpark crap that Dawkins tried to feed him.

  The more startling conclusion he came to was that maybe Logan and Dawkins had someone start following him the day he arrived in Bismarck or, more likely, they’d been following Sarah, and when Sarah met with him he was identified. This also meant that maybe they knew he and Sarah were seeing people like Janet Tyler, trying to get evidence to use against Curtis. DeMarco also remembered Doug Thorpe telling him that Sarah had been concerned that her phone calls were being monitored, something Thorpe had chalked up to paranoia—and a possibility DeMarco had completely ignored. So it was even possible that Dawkins and Logan, in addition to having him followed, had listened in on calls Sarah and DeMarco had made to each other. And what all this meant was that DeMarco felt more convinc
ed—and more guilty than ever—that he could have been the catalyst for Sarah getting killed.

  After driving for about fifteen minutes, DeMarco was pretty sure he was being followed by a man in a gray Honda sedan. He got on the I-94 interstate, in the middle lane, and the Honda got in the same lane, staying two cars behind him. At the next exit he came to, DeMarco waited until he was almost past the exit, then turned the wheel hard to the right, cutting in front of a sixteen-wheeler, almost clipping the semi’s front bumper, and took the exit. Whoever was driving the gray Honda was blocked by the semi and didn’t stand a chance of following him off the highway.

  Satisfied that he’d lost the guy, DeMarco consulted his phone for directions to the nearest Walmart. He’d picked the Walmart for one reason: he was sure it would have self-checkout and, therefore, no one would witness his purchases. He found two black ski masks in the sporting goods section, paid in cash at the self-checkout machine, dumped the ski masks into a plastic bag, and never had contact with another human being.

  As he was driving out of the Walmart parking lot, a man called, didn’t give his name, but gave DeMarco Roy Patterson’s address. DeMarco’s last stop was a RadioShack, after which he returned to his motel to wait for Doug Thorpe. He didn’t see the gray Honda.

  Thorpe knocked on DeMarco’s motel room door just before sunset. The expression on Thorpe’s gaunt face was grim and determined.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” DeMarco asked him again.

  “If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t be here,” Thorpe said.

  “Okay. We’ll take my rental car. I don’t want to take the risk of someone getting your license plate number.”

  Thorpe just shrugged.

  “You got the guns?” DeMarco asked.

  “Yeah. They’re in a sack in my truck. A .45 auto and an old .38 revolver. I haven’t fired the .38 in thirty years. The last time I fired the .45 was five years ago when I had to put down a deer that got hit by a car.”