Judas Kiss

by J. T. Ellison

  So she let him talk. She didn’t listen so much to what he was saying. She wondered, though, why he felt he needed to create such an elaborate fabrication to cover his true intent. After fifteen minutes of his bullshit, she yawned and stretched.

  “Well, that is absolutely fascinating stuff, Mr. Gorman.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “And it was all crap. If you’d like to get out of these handcuffs, get out of this room, I suggest you start telling me the truth about Selectnet.com.”

  He sputtered, and she let him go through his denials. Taylor stared at her nails, and nodded. Then she tried again. She only hesitated a moment. Desperate times called for desperate measures. She sat back in the chair, casually draping her arm over the back.

  “Tell me the truth now, Mr. Gorman. You’ll notice that you haven’t been booked. You’ve just been brought in for questioning in a very informal environment. No one knows you’re here. I haven’t turned on the cameras. I can do whatever I want to you, and no one will ever be the wiser.” As she spoke, she used her right hand to slip her Glock out of its holster and set it on the table between them. Gorman’s eyes popped open.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “No. I’m giving you options. You can talk to me now. Or you and I can slip out the back door, without a single person knowing where you are.” She ran her fingers playfully along the slide of the weapon. “I’d sure hate to have any accidents with you, you know. We’d have to go on the news and explain your role in today’s little charade, explain how we picked you up for…hmmm…child pornography sounds good.” She raised an eyebrow at him, smiled.

  “I bet we could make that stick, too. You look like the type that might just get curious every once in a while. Am I starting to make myself clear, Mr. Gorman? I hold the reins here. You start telling me the truth about this little club you belong to, or things can go very badly for you this afternoon. Got it?”

  He got it. In typical bully fashion, the moment Gorman was presented with real strength from the opposition, he caved. The story he told Taylor made the fury rise in her stomach all over again.

  Twenty

  The conference room was warming under the mid-afternoon sun despite the dark curtains that covered the windows. Baldwin sat at the rectangular table, Garrett Woods by his side. Atlantic’s round moon face was superimposed on the wall, the plasma screen that they used for secure video feeds connected to Berlin, his home base for that day.

  Baldwin was bleary-eyed. He needed sleep. Soon. He ran his hand through his hair and yawned, then rubbed his eyes for a second before he continued.

  “Sorry about that. Just a little tired. Didn’t get the whole story put together until breakfast.”

  “Not a problem, Baldwin,” Atlantic assured him.

  “Okay, let me continue. The first name I flagged was Ali Fatima, traveling from Lisbon to Paris three weeks ago. He stayed there for a week, we’ve got hotel records for him under the alias Andre Guigernon. He flew under the Guigernon name from Paris to Montreal, where he also stayed for a week. It’s going to take more extensive searching to determine what he was up to, but we can revisit that. You may want to notify the French and Canadian authorities, see if they have any unsolved murders from those two weeks that our boy might be responsible for.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Garrett said.

  “Okay. In Montreal, he became Alexandre Cadoc, flew to Seattle. We had a bit of luck there, SeaTac has a convenience corridor for international passengers which allows people to move more quickly through customs. The cameras in the corridor got a beautiful shot of him. He exited to baggage claim, left the building, and returned two hours later, checked in as Arthur Bleheris, flew to Denver. We have him renting a car there, and that’s it. BOLOs are out on the rental, but there’s been no trace of him since he started out from Denver. The rental agency has GPS in their cars standard, he specifically requested one without the device. The clerk remembers him saying he preferred to get lost, that was the only way to truly see the country.

  “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I don’t know where he is, what he plans to do. There’s still no word on who’s contracted a hit in the States.” He slumped in his chair, stared Atlantic dead in his cold eyes. “Where was his tracker? How could Aiden have engineered all of this so quickly without our knowledge?”

  “The tracker is dead.”

  Baldwin narrowed his eyes. “When?”

  “Florence, four weeks ago.”

  Florence? Baldwin and Taylor had been in Florence four weeks ago. He’d bought her a new ring, they’d giggled like teenagers. And then it hit him. Aiden. Taylor. Both in the same city, with Baldwin as the common denominator. He exploded out of his chair.

  “You knew. Damn it, you knew. Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “We don’t know his intentions.” That was all Atlantic would say.

  “We don’t know them,” Baldwin said. “Right. He may be on a job, a hit that no one has a record of? Come on. A few weeks ago, he just so happens to be in the same town where my fiancée and I are on vacation. His tracker is found dead, and he comes to the States. What the hell do you think his intentions are? He’s after me. He vowed to take me down after the debacle with his family. And here I am, in Quantico, insulated as hell, when I should be back in Nashville making sure he doesn’t blow up my life like I blew up his.”

  Atlantic merely tipped his chin down and said, “We need you to find him, Baldwin.”

  Baldwin was too tired to fight. Arguing with Atlantic was fruitless, he’d learned that long ago. He turned to Garrett. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this. You know that I need every ounce of information to find this fool. You held back the most important piece of the puzzle. Jesus, Garrett. I thought I could trust you.”

  Atlantic cleared his throat. “He was acting on my instructions. We didn’t want your judgment clouded. If you thought he was targeting you, you wouldn’t have been of any use to us.”

  “Of course. Because that’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? That I give you what you need. Screw you.”

  Baldwin stormed out of the room, went back to his makeshift office. Damn them all. They were going to get people killed, and for what? To preserve their gravy train of illicit activities? It hardly seemed worth it.

  He put it aside for now. Somewhere out there, Aiden was driving a car toward a certain destiny, and Baldwin could only pray that he’d find him in time.

  Twenty-One

  Using the information Tony Gorman gave her, Taylor set Lincoln to verify his story. Gorman didn’t realize just how valuable the information he’d provided was. Taylor immediately recognized the makings of a massive federal case, and knew she didn’t have much time.

  She’d let Gorman go; Marcus escorted him to the front doors and found him a cab. She didn’t think he’d be back for more any time soon. He wasn’t a player in this operation, just a willing voyeur. As long as they were of age, there was nothing blatantly illegal about watching other people have sex. He’d be a good boy and stay quiet, Taylor was sure of that. The child porn threat had been a good guess, he looked like a man ready to get home and erase his hard drive as soon as humanly possible. Score one for her talent of reading people. If he got caught up in arrests later, she wouldn’t mourn for him.

  Drumming her fingers on the desk, she thought about her next steps. She needed to get to the cabin. The scene of this humiliation. She’d kept it as a rental property—her first home, there was no way she was going to sell it to a stranger. Instead, she’d rented it to two girls from Belmont University. Which meant that one of them had a camera pointed at her bed.

  Baldwin. She knew she needed to tell him what was going down. Knowing she was just stalling, she promised herself that she’d call as soon as there was more time to actually talk. She couldn’t just call him in the middle of the day to cry on his shoulder about what was turning into the most colossal bad day she’d ever had. Worse than havin
g her throat slashed by a suspect. Worse than being kidnapped on her wedding day. Worse than having to arrest her own fucking father, for the sweet love of Christ.

  Stop that, she commanded herself. She bottled up her own emotions, tossed in a liberal dose of the thought of Baldwin’s disappointment in her and put in the cork. There was work to be done.

  Despite everything happening, her number one priority right now had to be the Todd Wolff case. It felt like she’d been divorced from the process for years instead of an hour. Not trusting herself to make the walk down to central booking to see how things were coming along, she called Fitz’s cell phone.

  “Heya,” he answered. Blessed man. He knew nothing of the craziness that had just ensued upstairs. If Taylor couldn’t face Baldwin’s disenchantment with her, how was she going to handle things when Fitz found out? She swallowed hard at the thought and put on her brave face.

  “Heya back. How’s the processing going?”

  “Wolff isn’t a happy camper. But that’s to be expected. It’s Miles Rose we need to watch out for right now. He marched out of here about ten minutes ago, swearing high and low that he was going to call a press conference and let the world know how his client is being railroaded.”

  “Funny, Miles doesn’t strike me as the press conference type.”

  “Me either. But he and Wolff had their time to confer after we did the DNA swab. They both came out of it looking like the cat who ate the canary.”

  “He doesn’t know we have his wife’s blood in his truck. He won’t be feeling too great when we clue him in about that. What else is going on?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t give us anything different, no new alibi, nothing like that. He’s making all the right noises about being booked. But I got a feeling something’s up.”

  “When’s the press conference supposed to be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Thanks for handling this. I’ll talk to you later. If you hear anything, and vice versa.”

  “Sure thing. Later.”

  They hung up. Taylor blew her breath out hard. Lawyers. They could always find a way to get into the fray.

  She started to get up but her telephone rang again. The D.A.’s office. Uh-oh.

  “This is Lieutenant Jackson.”

  “Hey, it’s Julia Page. I see that we’re filing against Todd Wolff as we speak. The general sessions warrant was issued already and the judge is going to set the date for a preliminary hearing, see if there’s enough to take it to the grand jury. We’ll go for a quick hearing date. Do you have any more new evidence?”

  Taylor resisted smacking herself in the forehead. Oh man, the videos. She completely forgot the five discs she’d brought back to the office.

  “I might. We’ve got some new evidence to run. I think you’re moving a bit too quickly, don’t you? We don’t have this case sewn up by a long shot. It’s definitely not ready to get to the grand jury.”

  “It’s a piece of cake. He’s accused of murdering his pregnant wife. You know how low the threshold for probable cause is in a preliminary hearing. They’ll bind him over to the grand jury in a heartbeat.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather have all your ducks in a row first?”

  “Slam dunk, Lieutenant. Complete slam dunk. Trust me. We’ll get him arraigned and you guys can present the rest of your evidence as it comes in.”

  “Will he get bond?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know who’s up today. If it’s Judge Harrison, no way, no how. But if it’s that new chick, Bottelli, she might just spring him. Either way, it’ll cost him an arm and a leg.”

  “Fine. Whatever you want, Page. You’re the legal eagle here, not me. Just make sure it all sticks. I don’t want to be answering questions on the news about how we fucked this one up. I will drop the blame squarely in your lap.”

  Page laughed, and not in an entirely unfriendly way. “I know you will. I never doubted that for a minute. Bye.” She was gone before Taylor could say goodbye herself.

  God, Page sounded like a tiger with a juicy hunk of steak. She could almost hear the girl growling in territorial fervor. Even the most jaded lawyers could get caught up in the glitz of a big murder case.

  Too much to do, too little time. The cabin, her feelings, the violation of knowing her naked body was on display for any stranger willing to pony up the cash would have to wait for a little bit. She needed to do some movie analysis.

  “Marcus!” she yelled. He came to the door of her office. His dark hair was mussed, making her long for Baldwin. She stowed her feelings.

  “Nothing yet, LT. We’re—”

  “It’s not about that, puppy. I’ve got five items I took from the Wolff crime scene that need to be looked at. In the mood for some more movie screening?”

  The look on his face actually made her laugh, which poured from her mouth like a waterfall. Oh, that felt better. She had a brief moment of peace, knowing it was all going to be okay. She wasn’t quite sure how, but she’d make it through. It wasn’t like she’d been responsible, or willing, for that matter.

  “Don’t worry, they aren’t of me. I don’t think. The Wolffs have a rather sophisticated movie studio hidden in their basement, and I believe this is the by-product. Since we’re overwhelmed with smut today, let’s go see what they’ve been up to.”

  Marcus had the good taste to look chagrined. “Okay.”

  “Hey, do me a favor? Order a pizza or something, I’m starving.”

  “Sure thing. Pizza sounds good. I’ll meet you in the conference room in a minute.”

  Taylor went into the conference room, popped the first of the five discs into the DVD player. She used the remote to fast forward to the first scene. Marcus came in, seated himself and nodded. She hit play.

  Unlike the grainy feed from the Selectnet.com Internet site, the television screen filled with a warm, soft light, the camera clearly focused on a bed. Taylor recognized the setting. It was the Wolffs’ basement, no doubt. The movie was certainly homemade, but the quality was fine and the camera operator obviously had some training. A music track, new age jazz, played unobtrusively in the background.

  The camera panned in. There were two women on the bed, passionately kissing, writhing together. They were mostly naked, though one was wearing a bra without cups so her full breasts showed, jutting up at an absurd angle. The other had a jeweled belt around her waist and nothing else. Taylor started to look away, then saw a man enter the picture. Todd Wolff came to the bed. The women greeted him, taking off his clothes, begging him to join them.

  “This is just plain old homemade porn.” Marcus was shaking his head

  “With our murder suspect doing…jeez, what is he doing? Oh.” Wolff’s back was to the camera and he spanked one of the women with the palm of his hand, a loud slap. Taylor hit pause, swallowing her distaste. By God, she wasn’t a prude, but she was tired of watching people have sex.

  Marcus took the remote from her hand, hit play, then fast forward. Wolff became a comic figure parroting the act of love, bucking and rolling around the bed with the two women. Marcus left the DVD running and turned to Taylor.

  “It’s a nice setup. We need to find out if they’re distributing it, or using it for their own entertainment.”

  “I assume we can arrest them if they’re distributing it?”

  “Well, that depends. If it’s done without the knowledge of the participants, of course. But they look rather willing, and from your description of the scene, it would be hard for them to pretend they didn’t know exactly what they were doing. No, they might be making legitimate movies.” Now he turned red, but plowed ahead. “Have you ever been to the Hustler store on Church Street?”

  She gave him the most sardonic of grins. “I take this to mean you have?”

  He gave her the same smile. “You’re telling me you haven’t?”

  Taylor shook her head. “No. I’ve driven by it a million times, of course, but I’ve never had occasion to go in.”

&n
bsp; “Well, I think a field trip might be in order. There’s a whole section of this kind of homemade stuff. Naughty Neighbors, Slutty Soccer Moms, that kind of material. There’s a big trade for it. Wolff might have been trying to break into the market.”

  “I think I’ll let you do the background for this one.” She looked at the screen again. “Maybe he’s just a sicko who likes to tape himself having sex with women other than his wife. No wonder she was having panic attacks. I would be too.”

  She turned back to the television, and Marcus started to hand her the remote. Something caught his eye and he hit play, ending the fast forward.

  “I will be damned,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think we know who was operating the camera.”

  “Back it up.” Taylor sat back in her chair heavily, watching. Marcus obliged her, hitting rewind, then play at the moment that caught his attention.

  Corinne Wolff danced around the lens of the camera. Her hair was done up in pigtails. She wore a Catholic schoolgirl plaid skirt and a lacy pink bra with the nipples cut out. Sucking suggestively on a lollipop, she danced in front of the camera, her husband and the two women watching appreciatively from the confines of the bed. Corinne did a slow striptease, easing out of the skirt, unhooking the bra, then worked her way to the edge of the bed. Todd reached for her, pulling her to the center, where mouths and hands surrounded her body until she disappeared beneath them. The shot faded to black, the music ended, and Corinne’s moans of ecstasy lingered until the credits rolled. After a brief fade to black, another scene queued and started running. This one was similar to the earlier shots.

  “So much for panic attacks.” Taylor didn’t know what to make of this new information. Corinne wasn’t visibly pregnant in the video, so chances were it had been shot several months earlier.

  There was a knock at the door. Marcus opened it; their pizza had arrived. He smiled at the young receptionist who’d been kind enough to bring it to them. When she blushed and backed away, Taylor realized the sound from the video was still on. As she hit the stop button, she made a mental note to explain later.