Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Special Agent Putnam’s departure has left a real void, which will be hard to replace. You have gained a topflight agent in Miami in Mark Putnam, one who exemplifies the dedication and professionalism of a fine Special Agent. Please convey to him our devout appreciation for his service to eastern Kentucky and to our office.

  Not long afterward, in August, Mark had another scare when he answered his beeper on the street and got a message to contact his supervisor immediately.

  Feeling sick, he found a pay phone and called the office.

  But his immediate boss, the supervisor of his squad, an agent named Roy Tubergen, came on the line laughing. “Hey, you know two good old boys named Hatfield and McCoy?”

  “Yeah, I know them.”

  “That really their names?”

  Mark sighed with great relief. “Yeah. Like the feud. Why? What did they do?”

  “Well, they stopped by here to see you. I’ll tell them you’re on your way in.”

  Paul Hatfield and Fred McCoy, eyes wide with sleeplessness, had driven all night to get to Florida. For months, they’d been working together to expose corruption in the Pike County sheriff’s office, which they knew was an issue Mark had planned to press hard on before the transfer out of Pikeville. As part of their investigation, they said they had had spent days at work wearing hidden recorders, taping literally everything that was said. For good measure, they had also videotaped each other reading long statements about county funds being misused to buy campaign hats and badges.

  In Pikeville, with their evidence stacked up like the Watergate transcripts, they had called a press conference to denounce the sheriff’s department as “a small Mafia” and the sheriff himself, a man named Fuzzee Kessee, as “the godfather.” A few days later, Hatfield and McCoy were summarily fired. Announcing that they feared for their lives, the two then boxed up their tapes and drove straight through to Miami, where they had never been before.

  “You’re the only one we can trust with this material, Mark,” said Hatfield, pulling at a long beard.

  “Wait a minute,” Mark said, not wanting even temporary custody of their cache of evidence. “I don’t have responsibility for that stuff anymore!”

  While they waited, their eyes darting anxiously around the bustling Miami FBI office, Mark called Tom Self in Lexington to ask for advice.

  “Tom, you’re not going to believe this. Paul Hatfield and Fred McCoy—”

  “Tell me they’re not down there,” Self groaned.

  “They’re here. With a suitcase full of tapes that I don’t want to listen to and I don’t even want to touch.”

  Self told him to send the material to Lexington.

  Hatfield and McCoy drove back home immediately to follow up.

  Mark’s fellow agents hooted and razzed him about the episode, and the following day, when he came in to work, one of them had on a big straw hat with a corncob pipe between his teeth. Mark chuckled in a good-natured way, but it bothered him. He had worked hard to fit in in eastern Kentucky, and he had succeeded. Hatfield and McCoy and the others were more than caricatures to him; even hillbilly had an ugly sting to it, like dago or spic.

  In September, Mark and a colleague from Miami were sent to New York City for a few days to trade information on an undercover case with agents in the Manhattan office. After going to a Yankees game with a group of agents after work one night, Mark returned to his hotel and found an urgent message to call Lou DeFalaise at home “no matter what the time.” Figuring that this was it, with a shaking finger Mark tapped out the phone number for the US Attorney in eastern Kentucky. As he heard the phone ringing, he steeled himself, it’s all over. He wants to tell me as a courtesy that I’m about to be arrested.

  DeFalaise was plainly agitated. “Mark, what the hell is going on? All hell is breaking loose here.”

  Mark felt tears well in his eyes, until he realized that the federal prosecutor wasn’t talking about Susan Smith. He was talking about the antics of Hatfield and McCoy, who had called another press conference—this time to accuse the US attorney’s office of seeking to cover up their investigation.

  Still shaking, Mark gave DeFalaise his assessment of the situation, which was that as diligent as Hatfield and McCoy were in tape-recording everything spoken, they really didn’t have a case. And authorities apparently concurred because no action was taken against the sheriff. DeFalaise thanked him cordially. Mark put the phone down and slumped in his chair.

  While there was a new camaraderie in Mark’s work life, there were no close friendships. He declined invitations to dinner, cookouts, and drinks after work. He was afraid to make friends. His time was running out, and he did not want to embarrass any other agent who might have the misfortune to be close to him when the end came. As a consequence, some of his new colleagues in Miami saw him as aloof. To others, he was quiet, diligent, careful, and dependable—a good team player, a man who could be trusted in all circumstances, but still, a hard man to get to know.

  One of the agents who worked with him on a five-person undercover operation against a ring of property thieves tried to get close and failed. In fact, Mark liked this agent enormously—for his honesty, tenacity, and sense of humor. On several occasions, most notably on an all-night surveillance job when he relaxed enough to regale his companion with stories of Kentucky law and order, Mark had to restrain the impulse to confide in him about Susan. Bitterly, he withdrew from the incipient friendship, thinking, Can I put him in that position, being a friend to the guy who’s about to be a pariah? Do I even have the right to have a friend?

  The year was full of painful irony. Once, he and Kathy invited a young agent from the office who was having personal difficulties to dinner at their house. Warmed by the glow of affection and security he had felt in the Putnam household, unaware of just how fragile it was, the agent told everybody he saw in the office the next day what a wonderful time he’d had.

  “This guy has everything—a beautiful wife, good looks, two beautiful kids, a great job,” he told a group of colleagues, clapping a hand on Mark’s shoulder when he came by. “What more could a man want?”

  Mark’s heart sank. “Everybody has their problems, John,” he said, smiling wanly.

  If only they knew, he thought. He had lost fifteen pounds since the summer. Nearly every day he had diarrhea. Nights were worse. He was afraid to go to sleep He did not know if or when he would confess. He always assumed they would find Susan and arrest him, and he was bewildered that so much time was passing without any indication that an end was in sight. Again and again, he replayed the scenario until he was convinced that he believed it. They would come to him and ask, “Did you do this?” In his mind, he always gave them the same reply, without hesitation: “Yes.”

  In the winter of 1990, Kathy’s younger sister, Chris, who had been living near Miami, came to stay with the Putnams temporarily while she was going through a divorce. Chris, as easygoing and laconic as Kathy was intense and expressive, admired Mark very much. He had helped her to find a job as an officer with the Florida Marine Patrol. She regarded him as an ideal husband and father who had become almost a big brother to her. When she’d visited Mark and Kathy in Pikeville, she had known that their life was difficult and stressful. In Florida, she didn’t notice anything alarming about the way Mark was behaving.

  As she later recalled, “Mark was kind of hyper anyway, not in an odd sense, but just a real active guy. He ran every night without fail. If he was watching television, he was also reading a book at the same time. When he and my sister first got together, he always had two jobs. All the time I knew him, he was always working. The only thing unusual in Florida was he had developed this nervous habit, this scratching at his chest. I thought he was like anxious to get back to work.”

  One other thing she noticed was that he bought several newspapers a day and flipped through them methodically, as if looking for somethin
g small—always first checking the pages that had state-by-state news items in USA Today.

  “Why’s he read all those papers?” Chris asked Kathy once with a laugh. “Don’t they all have the same news in them?”

  Passing time burnished Mark’s nerve. He wondered how long he could wait. He still heard from Poole often, but Poole had his own anxieties about Susan, who had told people that she slept with him, too. Baffled as to what had happened to Susan, perhaps suspecting that Mark knew more than he let on, Poole told Mark of Richard Ray’s request, unsuccessful so far, that the two of them be given polygraph tests.

  “Ron, I don’t care,” Mark said boldly. “I’ll take their polygraph.”

  Poole replied, “I’ll take one, too. I don’t give a shit what these hillbillies do.” And he added, “Well, buddy, you and I got to stick together on this thing.”

  What thing? Mark thought contemptuously. What did his ex-partner feel he had to hide? It was almost amusing to think that Poole was worried. For the first time, Mark felt that he had the advantage in these verbal jousts. If Susan turned up dead, whose problem was it going to be?

  Still, Mark resisted the urge to probe for information on the investigation that he knew was going on in Pikeville. He did not know much about it and didn’t ask, preferring to be seen not as disinterested but as disengaged. With Myra Chico he remained circumspect, afraid that if he gave any indication that he was worried, that anxiety would be conveyed to the state police.

  Had they found the body? That was the main thing he didn’t know. Stubbornly, he didn’t ask. Still, how could it not have been found, lying there just out of sight in a place where people came by on horses and trucks, where kids ran their dirt bikes up and down the ridge? Maybe they had found the body and were keeping it quiet, building their case. Every time the phone rang, he jumped.

  He did not expect any respite from the obsession. Susan was the first thing he thought of every day: she flashed into his mind as if a switch were thrown the moment he awoke, and she stayed there until he managed to fail asleep at night. To live with himself, he had settled on a term to describe what had happened, as if supplying the kicker to a headline: tragic accident.

  There were frequent reminders of what he had already lost. The most painful came when Tubergen took him aside one afternoon to ask if he would consider a transfer to a smaller office elsewhere in Florida, where he would be promoted to a supervisory rank. It was an invitation onto the management track. But what would have been fabulous news to the man who had dreamed about a career in the FBI since high school now had a bitter sting. Mark mentioned the overture to Kathy, but told her that he had turned it down because they had just gotten settled and the kids were thriving in their new home. He said he didn’t want to see his family uprooted again so soon. In his mind, he knew that he was protecting the bureau from the further public disgrace of having a supervisor led away in cuffs.

  While he waited for time to pass, he thought often of the father he had revered. The man had exuded dignity, even during a tragic and prolonged death from cancer in middle age. In a way that he could not quite articulate, Mark had believed it was his responsibility to ratify his father’s memory. But, instead, as he had always secretly feared he would, he had disgraced it forever.

  There had been times during the year when he had edged toward confession and pulled back. As early as September, he had told Tubergen about the rumors in Kentucky that he had been sexually involved with an informant who was now listed as missing. Mark asked Tubergen if he would contact OPR, the Office of Professional Responsibility, the Justice Department’s internal affairs unit with supervision over the FBI, and request them to investigate the disappearance of Susan Smith to “clear up” the ambiguities associated with his relationship to the missing woman.

  Literally, he was told not to make a federal case out of it. A missing persons case was a state police matter. The rumors had already filtered down to Miami through the FBI grapevine, where discreet inquiries had been made to assure supervisors that Susan Smith was the sort of woman who ran with a dangerous crowd and had gone off before. Mark was seen as naïve and excessively punctilious, a young man who had been through a tough tour of duty in a rough place and had acquitted himself with honor and distinction, even if he had stupidly become involved with an informant. He was a man above suspicion.

  Besides, Mark was told, he was due for a promotion in grade, which would mean a higher salary. An open OPR investigation, no matter how pro forma, would put that on hold.

  Once, while leaving for work, Mark looked up to see his daughter gazing at him from her bedroom window. She met his eyes and held them in her gaze, and he thought then that she knew something was very wrong.

  He thought, How can I face her day after day, year after year, knowing what I know? What kind of a father can I be to her?

  Sometimes, he would pretend that it had not happened. He would place himself ten or fifteen years into the future. He would still be in Florida, a good, solid, low-profile agent who knew all the ropes. He would be at his desk reading a case file, the family portrait propped beside the phone. Danielle, a young woman now, as pretty and smart as her mother, would pop in unexpectedly to ask him to lunch as his colleagues watched with envy.

  Or he’d spend the day with little Mark, an adolescent now allowing him to play hooky from high school on the opening day of spring training. In the bleachers, they would feel the hot sun on their necks as they argued about the new crop of pitchers.

  Or he thought of himself with Kathy, middle-aged and still in love, strolling south Miami Beach. In a gentle ocean breeze they would hold hands and look at the lights strung along the low-roofed art deco hotels on the strand. He would guide her body toward his. They’d mold perfectly, as they always had. Their lips would meet, their tongues touch. He’d feel her breasts against his chest. She’d arch her long back slightly in his arms as they looked for a deserted place on the beach.

  Relentlessly, he supervised these three daydreams like a movie director who is never satisfied with the take. Again and again he replayed the same scenes in his head, varying the nuance and inflection, as if he needed to get them perfect before fixing them in his mind.

  Running was a way to pass through time without thinking. For a while, he hadn’t been able to do even that. “When I got back to Florida after Susan’s death, I stopped running for a while,” Mark would later recall. “I was afraid to go out, to be alone. Especially at night. I was even afraid of a dark room.”

  In time, he forced himself to overcome his fear and go out to run every night. The wind blew away everything but the churning of the legs, the pumping of the arms and lungs. His regular nightly route took him along a remote stretch of road, beyond a canal at the edge of swampland. On that stretch one night, he tripped and fell. Scraped and bruised, he sat on the ground, arms clenching his knees, and cried.

  “The day of reckoning is coming, Susan,” he said aloud to the black sky. “It is. I promise.”

  By the winter, he reached the point where he realized his guilt was diminishing his effectiveness as an agent:

  He had been investigating a major organized theft ring operating out of the Port of Miami, a bazaar of criminal activity. Laboriously working informants and poring over insurance records, he made inroads until finally he had a suspect in a major insurance-fraud case, a businessman named Tito who was as arrogant as he was crafty. If he broke, Tito would lead to bigger fish, Mark knew.

  Mark stopped at Tito’s computer-parts business in Miami one day and told him, “Listen, pal, I’m on to your sorry ass, and I’m going to see you again.”

  “No problem,” Tito said in his singsong voice.

  Finally Mark had enough evidence to nail the man, who was just arrogant enough to try to bluff his way through a polygraph and take questions afterward.

  “Listen, I’ve got you by the short hairs on this thing, man,” Mark
said as they sat alone at a conference table in the office. “I’ve got documents here, with your fingerprints on the documents. You took a lie detector test and flunked it. That’s not admissible, I’ll give you that, but it’s important because it confirms to me that you are lying. The people who receive my report will know that you did it, and continuing to lie to me will only make it worse.”

  Insulted, Tito insisted that he had not lied. The machine may have lied, but he never did.

  Assuming the frown of a suspicious tax auditor, Mark opened his thick folder and turned pages slowly, occasionally grunting at something he pretended to read. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Tito was unconsciously telegraphing the classic signs of a worried man—clearing his throat, squirming, brushing imaginary dust from the table, swinging his feet slightly but hastily, as if they would propel him right out the door if they touched the rug.

  Mark heard the telltale sound of a sniffle and looked up expectantly. Tito met his eyes and said, arrogance now gone, “I got a business, man. I got a wife and kid. You know how those guys down the Port are. They can lean on you pretty good.”