He did as I said and stood holding the gun before him with two fingers like a smelly diaper.
“Shut up,” I said again, just in case. “Now gently put the gun on the floor, and then kick it over here.”
He did, but not far enough. It stopped midway between us. He stepped forward, but I gestured for him to stay where he was.
I said, “You were following me. But you knew I was staying here. How is that?”
“When I saw your erratic route, I figured you spotted me and were just trying to give me the slip. I figured you’d be here sooner or later.”
“How did you know I was staying here?”
“I followed you here yesterday. When—”
I said, “You’re not the kind of person who works for himself. Who sent you?”
“I’ve come from Manuel Gutierrez,” he said, sounding a little sheepish that we had come to this pass without him being able to identify himself.
I remained on alert, but silent. That encouraged him to go on.
“He’d like to see you. Now, if you’re free.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Glen Slipher.”
“You’re not very good at the task you’re currently performing. This makes me suspicious, because I would think Manny Gutierrez would be able to afford better. What kind of work do you usually do for him, Mr. Slipher?”
“I’m Mr. Gutierrez’s accountant,” he said, and repeated, “He’d like to talk to you.”
“You’re a very large accountant. Why didn’t you say that sooner?”
“You didn’t give me a chance.” He inadvertently glanced at the sound of tires that had a heavier squeech than my shoes had made.
“Terrific. You bring another accountant for backup?” I asked, not daring to avert my eyes from him and the gun on the ground, which was closer to him than I’d like.
“No. I’m alone.”
The door belonging to the car that must have pulled in to a spot somewhere behind me opened and closed, making no attempt at secrecy. Or wanting to make me think it was making no attempt at secrecy. I’m suspicious that way.
I cocked my head slightly to the right as hyperawareness rippled over my skin. “Swivel around me so we’re facing the guy coming this way.” As we did this I stayed conscious of his gun on the floor. Maybe he was paying a visit from Manny Gutierrez, and maybe he wasn’t. We waited.
A youngish man, in twentysomething uniform of shabby jeans and a vintage rock band T-shirt, clearly lost in his own thoughts, got all the way past Glen the accountant before he saw me and the gun. He slowed despite his best intentions.
“Evening,” I said.
“Evening,” said the accountant.
Youngish man didn’t answer, just picked up the pace and headed on. I figured he thought, little woman with a gun, looked like she had things under control without his interference. This was South Florida, after all.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said.
He nodded. “Mr. Gutierrez told me to anticipate that possibility. He said you’d prefer to follow in your own car.”
“He remembers me.”
“He said you’ve had a long association.”
I stepped forward to bend down and pick up Glen’s weapon. “I didn’t like the way Manny disrespected me when I stopped by. I’ll see him another time, and I’ll give this back to you when I do.”
“I might have a second one in my car,” he advised helpfully.
“I may be paranoid, but I’m not ridiculous,” I said. “What else did Gutierrez say?”
“He called you a tough cookie. He said that with great respect, of course. That you were little. Very small in stature, but nonetheless dangerous, he said, and I should use every caution or you’d likely kill me before I had a chance to speak.”
“Why didn’t he just let us in the last time we were at his place? That’s no way to treat an old friend.”
“He only wants to see you, not your associate.”
“And why not just call me and invite me over?”
“Mr. Gutierrez doesn’t like to use phones. Anytime, anywhere, any way.”
“Yup, that’s Manny. Tell him he should suck it up, buy a phone, and call me on it. Then when he’s not using it he can stick it up his ass.”
Now you might be saying Why stop by his place and then tell him to go to hell? This is how you do it with Manny Gutierrez. I wanted him to know I was in town, but couldn’t make it look like I needed him. I would go on my terms, in my time.
Nineteen
Next morning I told Laura I’d meet her at the recording studio and planned to get there after Will went on the air, but I showed up a little too soon. I identified myself and was directed toward the control booth, and ran into him coming out of the greenroom, followed by Laura. He gripped my arm and steered me out of earshot of Alison Samuels, who followed close behind with a remarkably large German shepherd by her side. The dog wore one of those service animal please-don’t-touch-me-when-I’m-working jackets.
“Did you get the physical evidence released?” he asked. “Can I say we have it?”
“Yeah, I did. You can. You go out there and give her hell, Will.”
He looked at me doubtfully, but he was being nudged into place, waiting his turn to go on. We were ushered into a tech booth, where two aggressively ungroomed guys sat in front of a board with a thousand identical levers that moved up and down. A window that reminded me of the execution chamber looked onto the filming area. Low platform, high table. Bright lights, two cameras. The host, a warmth-exuding woman who introduced herself as Joy Ferenz, appeared on a screen in our booth and also in the room where Will Hench and Alison Samuels sat at the high table.
Laura’s phone rang, and she answered it despite frowns from the person who had herded us into the booth. She hung up without explaining who it was, but I knew it was Marcus because of the way she reassured him. Telling him to stick in there, that Will was getting the stay of execution. From the sound of her voice it was hard to tell whether she was lying more to herself or to him.
“I hope they don’t start yelling,” I said, about Hench and Samuels.
“I hate it when they yell over each other,” Laura said.
“Are we live?” a woman’s voice said, and then Joy Ferenz’s smile expanded across the whole screen. “Welcome back to our program,” she said. “Next up we have Alison Samuels, Florida spokesperson for the Haven, a national organization for missing and exploited children, and William Hench, attorney for Marcus Creighton, who, in three short days from now, will be executed for the murder of his family in 1999.”
She quickly described the Creighton case, the dead wife, the three children never found. Then the camera panned out to show Will and Alison sitting very straight and looking like they did this all the time. Either that or they were both so passionate about their missions, they neglected to realize anything but those missions. No interviewer, no cameras, no world beyond themselves. Or more precisely, no world beyond the people they were trying to save.
I had the opportunity to observe Alison Samuels from this vantage point. She looked taller than me, so she was either as tall as Will or long-waisted. She had her hair at that length where you can’t tell if she needed a haircut or not. She was unattractively tan, as if she spent a lot of time outdoors without sunscreen. She seemed like the kind of person who would benefit from a makeover if you could talk her into submitting to one. Everything was in her eyes, which somehow shifted to convey her affirmation, her anger, or her contempt. A lot of contempt.
“She doesn’t look all that bad,” I whispered.
“That’s because you can’t tell her baseline emotion is Pissed Off,” Laura whispered back.
Joy Ferenz didn’t focus directly on Hench and Samuels to start. First she ran a couple of clips that were intended to show them at their best, starting with Hench. He walked beside a black man dressed in denim pants and a denim shirt buttoned up to his throat. A voice-over told how
Brent Ford had been in prison for thirty-five years, convicted of the brutal (like when is it not brutal?) rape and murder of an elderly white woman in Palatka, Florida. DNA tests not only exonerated Ford but connected the murder to another man already serving time for a similar crime in Alachua County.
Cut to Alison Samuels. I half expected her film clip to show her leading some sleazy pedophile into the same door from which Brent Ford had exited, but the producers avoided the obvious and went for the heart-warming human interest angle instead. She was shown sitting on the floor in what looked like a playroom with that monstrous German shepherd and a small person whose face was obscured.
Then back to the real Will Hench. “As you say, the execution of Marcus Creighton is scheduled for three days from today. But we’re convinced he’s an innocent man. We have two pieces of evidence that we feel are sufficient to get him a stay of execution.” Without waiting for a question from Ferenz, Will briefly explained the cell phone records and the fraudulent (he was going full bore here) fingerprint interpretation.
Whether it meant she was unimpressed, it was hard to tell, but while he spoke Samuels ducked down behind the counter as if she was hardly paying attention.
“We need to get a look at her face while Hench is talking. Can you get her to look up? Show a little reaction? Something that will look like reaction to what he was saying?”
“She just keeps bending over to pet her dog.”
“Well, somebody get her to look up at least once so we can edit it in later.”
Will couldn’t hear the conversation in the control booth and kept on. “We’re convinced the forensic examiner who testified regarding Creighton’s fingerprints on the hair dryer lied. And we have evidence that one of the key witnesses perjured herself. All we’re asking for is a stay of execution until we can look at the dryer for other prints that will definitively exclude Creighton.”
Joy Ferenz’s face was inserted in the screen. “How would you respond to Mr. Hench’s request, Ms. Samuels?”
Alison looked up casually from her dog. She gave a smile that was only gentle, and at odds with her words. “Forty-five thousand children under the age of eighteen run away every year,” she said. “One in seven runaways falls prey to sex traffickers. The market is large.”
Even a professional like Joy Ferenz had a glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes. “And how does this—”
“Operation Cross Country. This was a national sweep in which the Haven joined with the FBI in trying to locate some of the three million children, male and female, who have been pressed into service as prostitutes. We retrieved more than one hundred and fifty children and arrested nearly three hundred pimps.” Her smile failed, and her next words were tinged with not triumph but sarcasm. “The operation was considered a great success.”
“What does this have to do with Marcus Creighton?” Will finished the host’s question, failing at any attempt to disguise his indignation.
Samuels’s voice stayed noncombative. “It has to do with missing children. Marcus Creighton knows all about missing children, doesn’t he? And he may actually know where three of them have been for the past sixteen years. I’m simply establishing who the real victims are and who the criminals.”
“What the hell. Get a shot of the dog.”
“This is offensive,” Will said, shifting in his chair as if he wanted to leave but knew that leaving meant losing.
Turning her face to look in his direction, but other than that still not reacting, she said, “Offensive.” She smiled at the word. “Did you hear that yesterday a fifty-six-year-old man in Dania was indicted for buying another man’s twelve-year-old daughter for twenty dollars and a bag of dope?”
Alison turned back to the camera rather than looking at him. “Did you know that girls who have been forced into prostitution often can’t get a legal job because they have a criminal record? I find this offensive. I find it so offensive that I’m giving my life to fighting against it. And I have a story to tell you. No, it’s not about my own life spent as a child prostitute. It’s not about Marcus Creighton’s children or the other three million children who are missing today. It has to do with a man who was walking the beach one morning and saw an elderly gentleman picking up starfish that had come onto shore with the high tide and been left there as the tide receded.”
“What the fuck?”
“What do we do with this?”
“Beats me. Keep it rolling and we’ll figure out what to edit later.”
Like Will, Alison couldn’t hear the conversation in the control booth and had kept going. “As the younger man watched, the gentleman took each starfish and threw it as far into the waves as he could. When asked what he was doing, the man explained that unless they made it back into the water, the starfish would surely die.
“‘Have you looked down the beach?’ the young man asked. ‘There are starfish as far as I can see. You can’t save them.’
“The old man picked up another starfish, looking a little weary now, but summoned his vigor and threw it far into the water. He said, ‘I saved that one.’
“I saved that one,” Alison Samuels whispered again.
“Whoa. She’s crying. Get a close-up.”
The host couldn’t stop the story in the middle, so she had let it play out before finishing, with her voice breaking on a sympathetic “Yes, you did. Thank you both for joining us this evening.”
Ferenz was doing her wrap-up while the techs messed with the board and said things like “We’ll cross-cut.” Then Ferenz turned off-camera and said so we could hear in the control booth, “Is this weird? I don’t think we’ll get any better from these two. Let me know if it hangs together in some logical way. Otherwise, what else we got?”
Samuels was already up and on her way out, her dog striding beside her, until she saw Laura and me in the control booth. Ignoring Laura, she said, “I know you.” She studied my face. I felt like a photograph that couldn’t look back.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said. I put out my hand, and the dog’s eyes flickered, his nose twitching in my direction.
“Friend, Larry,” she said.
“Brigid Quinn,” I finished.
“Oh my God,” she said, turning within a second into a fangirl sort, taking my hand and pumping it longer than typically advised. “Now I know, I’ve seen your picture.” In another second she had the presence of mind to let go of me. “At the Haven they still talk about that massive kidnapping-for-hire ring that you cracked. I heard so much about you, but you left the area, moved to—”
“Tucson,” I said.
Samuels glanced now at Laura, who was, if possible, more tense than before and wanted us to move along already. Samuels said, “But why are you here. With—”
“Agent Quinn is assisting with the Marcus Creighton case,” Laura said. “And if you’ll excuse us, we have a few things to do.”
Alison Samuels turned her attention to Laura with something like anger that morphed into something like satisfaction. The wildly disparate expressions on her face were those of a young person, flitting from emotion to emotion, all equally intense.
When she had gone I said, with undisguised admiration, “The woman is a pro. Samuels had the last word, and ran out the clock like a basketball team two points up and fifteen seconds left.”
Laura said, “Did you see what she did? She didn’t give a shit about Creighton. She dismissed Will like he wasn’t there. All she was interested in was the value of the program in promoting her organization.”
“You’re right, I saw the tactic,” I said. “By going after the bigger story of child exploitation, she made Creighton’s case for one man seem insignificant. Excuse me a second.”
I wandered out of the booth and into the hall, where I called Derek Evers. “Last chance,” I said when he picked up. Silence on both ends, and I wasn’t going to be the one to break it. When he finally told me he had all the evidence I wanted, I said, “You’re not jerking me around this time. You g
ot the dryer? I’m talking the dryer. Good. What about that address I gave you, you still have it? Repeat it. Okay. And listen, Derek, that fucking thing goes missing at any step along the way, you’re finished. Chain of custody, got it?”
Will came up behind me and was either too angry to notice I was on the phone or didn’t care. “They’ll probably scrap the whole segment. The bitch sabotaged me.”
I gave him a thumbs-up, for what he didn’t know.
Twenty
I called to let Mom know I was running late but would be there shortly. She didn’t pick up her cell, so I tried her apartment number. She was there. She said she forgot the cell phone at the hospital.
“Go visit Dad if you want. Not me. I’m tired and I came home.”
Her voice was so thin and airy I had to strain to hear her. We always took care not to put pressure on Mom, and the effort of her having to take care of Dad this way, running back and forth to the hospital, was beginning to tell. I told her I would go sit with him instead.
No one would have known if I hadn’t, but I played it on the square and visited Dad. He was sleeping, though, so when Laura called to tell me Frank Puccio hadn’t yet received the hair dryer, I called Derek from the visitor waiting area down the hall.
He didn’t answer; no one did. I left a message and waited. I waited for three hours, with Laura calling back approximately once every twenty minutes. Did I mention that doing nothing but waiting wasn’t my favorite thing?
On the last call, I was able to tell her: Derek had indeed sent the evidence, but not overnight. Probably by sailboat heading south against the Gulf Stream. God damn that little weasel, he got me.
Laura yelled that I should do something.
“What can I do, drive up to Indian River and scream at him?” I asked. “Find the package in transit and rob the shipment?”
“We’re running out of time,” she yelled. “We have to have that evidence.”
I felt for her, believe me; it felt like my gut was being smashed between frenzy and despair, but what good would it have done to share this? I said, “Calm down. The phone records, remember? I think that’s more important.”
A Twist of the Knife Page 12