by David Archer
Pete stared at Chance, and Josie turned around in her wheelchair.
“Wait a minute,” Pete said. “You know who it was?”
“About ninety percent sure,” Chance said. “Pete, I'm fairly certain it was Darrell Johnson.”
Pete’s eyes were suddenly as wide as they could be, and Josie’s mouth had flown open.
“Our Darrell Johnson?” Pete asked. “The one we were just hired to look into?”
“One and the same,” Chance said. “I got a very good look at him this morning, and there’s something about that wild blond hair that’s just easily recognizable. The guy who tossed Whittington out the window was the right size and shape, he was wearing the same kind of hoodie that I saw Johnson wearing this morning, and there’s a tangle of blond hair that’s visible in the picture Jensen showed me that matches perfectly with Johnson’s. Look at this.” He turned on the video he had taken at the airport, showing Johnson walking toward and around the plane. “I'm telling you, I would bet a hundred bucks it’s the same guy.”
“But you didn’t tell Bobby? Chance, we could get some really good free publicity out of this.”
“We still will,” Chance said. “I just think we need to get a little more evidence before we hand this over. Besides, we still have two clients to report to, right? I’d hate to point the finger at him as a murderer and then have it turn out he has an evil twin somewhere, and I don’t want Mrs. Whittington to think we went off half cocked. Johnson flew off this morning, but he’ll be back. We need to try to figure out where he went, and why.”
“I'm already working on that,” Josie said. “It turns out Mr. Johnson is a pilot, had his license since he was a teenager. I was able to find out that the airplane he used this morning is a Cirrus Vision Jet, the smallest private jet airplane you can buy. It’s not his, though; it belongs to a flying club that keeps it down there, and he’s a member. I guess they all use it at different times. And he did file a flight plan, apparently from his phone. According to the flight plan, he’s on his way to Denver. It also says he’s scheduled to return this afternoon.”
“But we have no idea what he’s doing there?” Chance asked.
“Huh-uh,” Josie said. “They don’t ask for that kind of information, and there’s no way I can think of to get it. I could probably ping his phone and find out where he goes up there, but it still won’t tell me anything about why he went.”
“Okay,” Pete said. “Then what we need to look at is how he might have known Walter Whittington, and what kind of motive he might’ve had to kill the guy. Any ideas on that, brainiac?”
Josie stuck her tongue out at him. “That shouldn’t be too hard,” she said. “I’ve got Darrell Johnson’s cell number, and I can hack the sheriff’s office to find Mr. Whittington’s.” She turned back to her computer and began tapping on the keyboard. Pete turned to Chance.
“You are really that sure that it’s him?” Pete asked. “I mean, down in your gut sure?”
“Like I said, about ninety percent. The picture they showed me of the perpetrator, the build was right, the hoodie was just like the one he put on this morning, and he had that same shock of blond hair sticking out the front. We had any luck with that USB thing?”
“Getting there,” Josie said over her shoulder. “It isn’t something that happens in a few minutes, but the program is running. On the other hand, I just found Whittington’s phone number. I'm running through it now, to see if he and Mr. Johnson had any communication.”
“And?” Chance asked. “Any hits?”
“Gimme a minute, okay? I just got into his phone records.” She sat with her back to the two men for a couple of minutes, but suddenly her shoulders stiffened and she turned her chair to face them. “Um, guys? There are no calls between Whittington and Johnson, but...”
Pete squinted as he looked at her. “But what, honey?”
“There was another number that Whittington called a lot the last two weeks, so I checked it out. Guys, Doctor Whittington has been calling the U.S. Marshals’ office here in Vegas, which is part of the DOJ, and that’s where Johnson works, right?”
“So maybe they did know each other,” Chance said. “Maybe Whittington knew something he wasn’t supposed to know, and Johnson shut him up?”
Pete was chewing a toothpick, and it was moving from one side of his mouth to the other rather quickly.
“Maybe,” he said. “Is the Marshals’ office in the same place as where Johnson works?”
“Not exactly,” Josie said. “It’s in the building right across the street, though. I know the Marshals work with DOJ a lot, though, so there could be a connection.”
“There has to be one,” Pete said. “Why else would a DOJ employee be meeting up with him? But that leaves us not knowing why Johnson would want to kill the guy.” He shook his head and focused on Josie again. “We need to know what’s on that flash drive.”
“I'm still working on it,” Josie said. “I think we’re getting close, but we’re not in yet.”
“Well, the sooner, the better,” Chance said. “For all we know, Johnson could be on a killing spree.”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “Or he could be doing something much worse.”
Chance looked at him and raised his eyebrows. “Worse?” he asked.
“Yeah, maybe,” Pete said. “The U.S. Marshals run the witness protection program. Josie, what can you find out about Doctor Whittington’s background?”
Chapter 6
Josie spun back to her computer and began typing. “Okay, Doctor Walter J. Whittington was thirty-six years old, from Topeka, Kansas. Married with two children, he was a surgeon at Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka for the past four years. Before that, he was in the ER at the same hospital, trauma surgeon. He didn’t have a particular specialty, I guess. Widow is Joyce Whittington, also thirty-six. Huh. Neither of them has a social media profile. That’s odd, nowadays.”
“Yeah, it is,” Pete said. “What about school, medical school? Where did he go?”
“According to the hospital website, he went to school in Chicago, University of Illinois. When I check the school for him, though, there’s only a mention of his medical degree, though, no other records. There’s no picture of him in any of their yearbooks, and it’s the same with Evanston High School, where he supposedly got his diploma.” She turned to Pete. “Sounds like maybe Doctor Whittington wasn’t always Doctor Whittington?”
“If he was in WitSec, that would explain him calling the Marshals. That’s who they’re supposed to call if they have a problem.”
“And there’s no way to find out who he might have actually been,” Chance said, “because they scrub all the records when you go into the program. The thing is, he’s been known as Whittington for years. Why would anyone want him dead now?”
“Could be several reasons,” Pete said. “If he was a witness against the mob, they don’t ever stop looking for vengeance, or maybe there was something else he was supposed to testify about in the future.”
Josie was tapping away on her keyboard. “Like, maybe, a mob boss who disappeared about ten years ago and was just found hiding in Argentina? Lorenzo Martinelli is being extradited back to the U.S. to face multiple murder charges in about two weeks, and one of the main witnesses against him was his nephew, who was fresh out of medical school at the time. The nephew was taken into protective custody and has not been seen since then. I can’t even find a picture of the guy.”
“Until now, I’d bet. Chance, we may be onto something big. If Johnson has found a way to get into the WitSec database, he could be giving up protected witnesses all over the...”
“Bingo! ” Josie cried suddenly. “We’re in, I cracked the password on the flash drive.”
Pete and Chance were up instantly and looking over Josie’s shoulder. She was looking through the files stored on the device, which were displayed as a series of folders. One by one, she was opening them up, and each one contained both photographs and documents related
to particular individuals.
“Oh, damn,” Josie said as she opened the first photo in the fifth folder. “That’s Whittington, Pete.”
“Are you sure?” Chance asked. “To be honest, the guy wasn’t too recognizable after he hit the sidewalk.”
“That’s him,” she said. She opened another window and called up a news story about Whittington’s death. When she put the two pictures side by side, it was obvious that they were of the same man, though the one in the folder showed a man who was quite a bit younger.
“Okay, yeah,” Pete said. “Now, where did all this information come from? Is this out of witness protection?”
“I'm looking.” Josie opened some of the documents in the folder related to Whittington. The first was a simple informational file regarding his name, address and occupation. The second contained information about his wife and children, but the third bore the letterhead of the U.S. Department of Justice, and was an order inserting a person named Raymond Martinelli into the Witness Security program of the United States.
“Raymond Martinelli is the nephew of Lorenzo Martinelli,” Josie said. “He was apparently being forced to provide medical services under the table for his uncle’s people, but he didn’t want any part of it. A few of his patients talked a lot under anesthesia and he learned enough information to make him a valuable witness. He gave a statement, but then his uncle vanished and Raymond went into witness protection. That was ten years ago, and he met his wife and got married after that.”
“Well, crap,” Pete said. “Check some of the others, see if they are also protected witnesses.”
Josie closed out the folder and opened another, then began reviewing the documents within it. Within three minutes, they were convinced that what they were looking at was likely a complete list of everyone currently under federal witness protection.
“Mrs. Johnson had a reason to be worried,” Pete said. “Josie, can you find out if any of these people—under their new identities, I mean—if they’ve been killed lately?”
“Yeah. It’ll take me a little time.” She closed the folders out and opened another program. “This is the search program. I'm having it go through the flash drive and pull out names, then run a comparison against news stories over the past couple of months. This will be a lot faster than trying to do it myself manually.”
Pete nodded and motioned for Chance to come back to his desk. Chance pulled his chair closer to Pete’s, and the two of them looked into each other’s eyes.
“Tell me,” he said softly, “exactly what you saw on that video Bobby showed you.”
“Started out with some girl dancing and singing,” Chance said just as quietly, “but in the background, you could see Whittington, standing on his balcony and talking to somebody who wasn’t in sight. Minute or so later, the guy I think was Johnson steps out into view, they seem to be arguing for a minute, then they went back inside the room. A few seconds later, the big guy comes out with Whittington in his arms. Whittington was sagging, like he was either dead or unconscious. Johnson, or whoever, carried him over to the railing and threw him over, watched for a second and then walked away. The girl turned around and looked down when Whittington screamed, and the video cut off after that, but then Jensen showed me the security video picture, and that’s when I was pretty sure I actually recognized Johnson.”
Pete just looked at him for a moment. “Whittington looked like he was unconscious?”
Chance shrugged. “His head and arms were hanging, the way somebody does when they’re out cold or dead. He wasn’t moving around at all.”
“But you heard him scream,” Pete said. “If he was unconscious or dead, how could he have screamed?”
Chance’s eyes widened slightly. “I thought of that when I saw the video. He probably didn’t. It was probably Johnson who did the screaming. Why would he have done that, though?”
“Only reason I can imagine would be if he was hoping somebody would look up and see the body falling. Whittington hit the ground face down. Was Johnson holding him face down or face up?”
“Face up,” Chance said. “Johnson must’ve flipped him over as he tossed him over the railing.”
The toothpick made its journey across Pete’s mouth again. “Something ain’t right,” he said. “Something about this sounds fishy. Hang on a minute.” He picked up his cell phone and quickly dialed a number, then put it to his ear. “Hey, Freddie,” he said a moment later. “Pete Dixon. You guys do the autopsy on that guy who fell out the hotel window yesterday, yet?” He waited for a moment, then nodded. “Well, don’t that beat all? No, I'm just curious. I was wondering if he was drunk or something. No problem, talk to you later.”
He ended the call and laid the phone on his desk, then looked at Chance. “Freddie is a friend of mine, works at the Medical Examiner’s office. Turns out Whittington didn’t get an autopsy. Orders came down from somewhere up high to just let it go. All they did was a superficial examination of the body. Cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma as a result of homicide.”
“But he might’ve been dead before he ever went out the window,” Chance said. “Isn’t there a way to find out?”
“Not without an autopsy. Of course, he might’ve been drugged, or Johnson could have knocked him out with a sleeper hold, just to keep him from putting up a fight. Those are definite possibilities, but there’s one other thing that’s bothering me. Something you said.”
“Me? What did I say?”
“It was what you said about him not being recognizable. He fell that far and landed face down on concrete. Probably pretty hard to be certain just from looking at the body that it’s the same guy.”
Chance lowered his eyebrows and shook his head. “Pete, why would it not be the same guy? I mean, who else could it be?”
“You see? You are learning. You are starting to ask the right kind of questions.”
“Okay, you got me completely confused. Why in the world would it not be Whittington?”
“You ever see the movie Eraser ? Arnold Schwarzenegger played a guy who made people disappear, particularly people who were going into witness protection. In some cases, he used already dead bodies to make it look like the people he was erasing had been murdered. That way, they could disappear and not worry that someone was trying to find them. All Arnie had to do was change the fingerprints in the databases so they matched the bodies he left behind, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know, Pete,” Chance said. “That sounds a little farfetched, to me. Besides, if it was a dead ringer that Johnson threw out the window, where did Whittington go? He never showed up on any of the security cameras, or Jensen would’ve spotted him.”
“Maybe not, but how long did the video last? Johnson might have given him some kind of disguise to wear. Even if he showed up on video later, if it didn’t look like him…”
Chance sat and thought about it for a moment, but then shook his head. “I'm not buying it,” he said. “People were screaming and going nuts, and security guards were running all over the place. If he was hiding out there in that hotel room or whatever, somebody would’ve spotted him. If he tried to walk out, even in disguise, he would’ve shown up on the security cameras. Don’t you think somebody coming out of there at that moment would’ve looked suspicious? The cops would be questioning everyone who was near the place at the time.”
“Good point, good point,” Pete said. “On the other hand, he could have been sitting pretty in another room on a different floor. If he had a disguise, nobody would think twice about him.”
Chance closed his eyes and tried to remember what he’d seen on the video, but the computer screen makes everything look small. “I suppose that’s possible, but…”
“Of course it’s possible,” Pete said. “Whittington could have waited until this morning, then checked out under a different name and disappeared. That would be completely feasible, given this scenario.” Pete looked him in the eye. “Look, it’s farfetched, I admit that. All
I'm saying is that the facts we have so far are not enough to decide whether Johnson is a murderer, or if maybe he’s some kind of eraser.”
“I'm not buying it, Pete. If they needed to make the guy disappear again, wouldn’t they have taken his family along with him?”
“Not necessarily. If Martinelli had put the word out that he wanted Whittington dead, for example, and Whittington turns up dead, then his family is probably not in any danger. They might even let them believe he’s dead for a while, and reunite them later. That would explain the widow wanting to hire us to find the truth, right?”
“Hey, guys?” Josie called out. “Got a few hits. You might want to see this.”
Both men got up and walked back over by her desk, then looked over her shoulder again. There were two faces on the screen.
“The guy on the left is Lawrence Valentine. He was apparently put into the program almost ten years ago, but a month ago, he and his family died when their house burned down. Real name is Giovanni Risotti, and he’s another Martinelli witness. The guy on the right is Matthew Cooper, formerly known as Eric Wallace. He was a witness against another mob figure who’s going to trial soon. He was only in the program for two years, died six weeks ago when his little fishing boat was hit by a barge on the Mississippi River. He was dragged along the river bottom, apparently, I guess it tore him to shreds.”
Pete’s toothpick was moving again. “Bodies weren’t identifiable, then, in both cases. Interesting.”
“Yeah, those are interesting,” Josie said, “and then we have this one.” A new picture appeared on the screen, and this time it was a young woman. “This is Valerie Hankins. She was found in a ladies’ room stall at a highway rest area in Texas. She’d been beaten to death, so badly her face was just about ripped away.” Josie looked up at Pete. “This one was just a little over a week ago, about the time Johnson came home with a bloody shirt.”
“And she was in the program?” Chance asked.
Josie nodded. “Her real name is Janine Porter. She went into the program a year ago, after she discovered that her boyfriend was an MS 13 gang enforcer who killed people. She went to the cops, they called in the feds and she was put into the program when her boyfriend went on the lam.”