by David Archer
Roberts’ eyes and nostrils both flared, and she was around the desk in a split second, nose to nose with Chance. “I'm not obsessed, you prick,” she said. “I'm determined. You may have every other cop in the world fooled, but I can see right through you.”
Chance burst out laughing. “Are you serious? Good grief, I’m beginning to think you really are a little bit out of your mind. This is getting ridiculous, Agent Roberts. Maybe you don’t see it, but you are definitely acting obsessed.”
“Sure looks like it to me,” Pete said, coming through the door with Josie. “In fact, you’re starting to sound a little bit nutso. McCord, is she always like this?”
“Shut your mouth, Dixon,” McCord said. “She’s doing her job.”
“No, what she’s doing is known as harassment. Threatening and bullying someone, even a suspect, is called harassment these days. Chance, you ought to call a lawyer. I'm pretty sure you can get a restraining order against her.”
Roberts continued to stare into Chance’s eyes, but she responded to Pete. “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” she said. “A drunk giving legal advice.” She stepped back a couple of paces, then turned to face Pete. “You’ve been sober, what? Three months? Or have you been sneaking the occasional drink now and then?”
“Folks, since you don’t have any legitimate business in my office, I'm afraid I'm going to ask you to leave. Now, that is perfectly within my rights as the owner of this business, and it makes you trespassers if you don’t leave right now. I will be more than happy to call the local police and press charges, if you like.”
“Come on, Sherry,” McCord said. “Let’s go, before this gets stupid.”
“Oh, Mr. Reddick is far from stupid,” she replied. She started toward the door, but stopped as she reached it and turned to look at Chance again. “Like I said, Reddick,” she said. “I will be there.” She went out the door and McCord followed.
Pete went directly to his desk and opened a drawer, taking out a small, silver case. He opened it and removed a device with knobs and dials on it and powered it on, then walked around the office with it. After a moment, he turned it off and put it away. “Okay, we’re clean,” he said. “I don’t trust her not to try to plant a bug in here, and I don’t want her hearing anything about our current cases.”
“And speaking of those,” Chance said, “what are we going to do about them?”
“Been thinking about that,” Pete said. “Our first client is Mrs. Johnson, who hired us to find out what her husband is doing. The trouble is, I’d say there’s a pretty good possibility that what he’s doing might be top secret, classified information. We don’t have the kind of security clearance necessary to even know about some of the things we already know, so this is really a pretty dangerous situation for us to be in. I'm thinking that maybe we should simply refund her money and tell her we can’t help her.”
“Don’t you dare,” Josie said. “We still don’t know for certain whether Darrell Johnson is a killer or not, and that means that his wife could be in danger. You can’t just cut her off like that, it could cause her to confront him, and that could conceivably get her killed.”
“I understand that,” Pete said, “but we also can’t be sticking our nose into the witness protection program. If the U.S. Marshals’ Service found out we had that flash drive, they could make all three of us disappear into some loony bin somewhere, or lock us up on bogus charges until they could get everybody moved again. I'm not real fond of either of those ideas.”
Chance sat in one of the chairs in front of the desk. “I'm with Josie on this one. I think I need to stay on Johnson until we know for sure what’s going on. If these suspicious deaths that are occurring around him are real, then he’s got to be dealt with. If you are right and he’s just making people disappear in order to keep them safe, then we might need to let him know that he was spotted on that video.”
“Oh, geez,” Pete said. “That’s exactly what I'm talking about. If he finds out we even know what he’s doing, it could ruin us forever. The government will go to incredible lengths to keep its secrets, Chance, and they can even disregard due process of law when they do it.”
“I think you’ve been reading too many conspiracy theories,” Chance said. “Things aren’t really all that bad, Pete. In fact…”
The sound of the door opening caught their attention, and the three of them turned to see Christina Johnson stepping through the door. She squinted into the office, then walked toward them.
“Mr. Dixon,” she said, “I'm sorry to bother you again, but—my husband seems to have disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Pete asked. “Please, Mrs. Johnson, have a seat. When did this happen?”
Christina sat in the chair beside Chance and he noticed that she had been crying. “Yesterday, I guess,” she said. “He left for work and said he would be home around the usual time, but he never came back. I called his office to see if maybe he had been sent out of town, and they said he hadn’t been in for the last three days, that he had called in the other day saying he was sick and needed some personal days. An hour later, a couple of U.S. Marshals showed up at the house, asking if I had any idea where he might’ve gone. They wouldn’t tell me anything, just kept saying they needed to find him as soon as possible, and that I'm supposed to call them if I hear from him.” A couple of tears started down her cheeks. “The way they were talking, it made it sound like he’s in a lot of trouble. Mr. Dixon, have you been able to find out anything about what is happening?”
Pete reached into his pocket for a toothpick and put it into his mouth. “Mrs. Johnson, we have been working on this case, but I can’t say we’ve come to any conclusions. What I can tell you is that your husband might not be who he seems to be. It’s very possible that the work he does for the government has more to do with the Marshals than it does with the accounting office at the Department of Justice. The flash drive you gave us actually contains some top secret information, and we are trying to find out how it connects to what your husband has been doing.”
Her eyes narrowed and her mouth was hanging open. “Darrell? He actually works for the Marshals? I'm sorry, that’s just so hard for me to believe.”
“Is it really? Mrs. Johnson, I can’t think of very much about being an accounting clerk that would be secret information, but you said he told you when you first got married that he was some sort of problem solver for the government, and that you could not ask about his work. I'm pretty sure the accounting clerk designation was just a cover.”
“A cover? You mean he’s, like, some kind of secret agent or something?”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far. Let’s just say that the work he does might involve helping the government to keep secret things that need to be kept secret. That’s what it looks like from the things we learned from the memory stick, and we’re going to have to turn it back over to the government at some point. Right now, we’re just trying to figure out exactly how this thing works so that we know who to turn it over to.”
Chance cleared his throat. “Mrs. Johnson, did you know that your husband has a jet airplane that he uses to travel in?”
She turned to look at him, her eyes wide. “A jet airplane? No, I’d never heard anything about that. I know that he can fly, he’s got his pilot’s license, but the only airplane I know about is an old one he and his father bought and fixed up when he was in high school. He’s taken me flying in it a couple of times, but that’s all.”
“Let’s get back to the disappearance,” Pete said. “You said he never came home yesterday? What time did you expect him?”
“He usually comes in between five thirty and six,” she replied. “I had dinner waiting, like I always do, but he just never showed up. When I called his office, the secretary said he hadn’t been in for the last three days, and I said she must be crazy. He’s gotten up every day and gone to work, just like always.”
Pete narrowed his eyes. “You have a number to call for his office? To be honest,
we haven’t even been able to find it. According to the DOJ employee roster, he’s supposed to be an accountant, but there’s not even an accounting office in the area.”
“But there is, there must be some mistake. Darrell works in an office with somebody named Rico, because that’s how the secretary answers the phone. She just says Rico, and I ask for Darrell and she puts me through to him.”
Chapter 10
“RICO?” Pete asked, his eyes suddenly going wide. “Mrs. Johnson, RICO is the Organized Crime unit.”
Christina’s eyes were just as wide as Pete’s. “It is? I—I always thought Rico was his boss. He says things like, ‘Rico wants me to go somewhere,’ or ‘Rico wants me to work late tonight,’ things like that. I thought Rico was just somebody’s name.”
“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations,” Pete said. “Now it’s starting to make more sense, what you said about him being a forensic accountant. In organized crime, it’s always about the money.” His eyes narrowed and he looked at Chance. “Still doesn’t explain what he’s been up to lately, though.”
Chance shook his head. “Not really, no.”
Pete turned back to Christina. “Mrs. Johnson, I think we might have some answers for you sometime in the next day or two. In the meantime, if you hear from your husband, I’d appreciate it if you’d call us first. I don’t know what kind of trouble he might be in, but I suspect we might be able to help more than the Marshals can.”
She looked at him nervously for a moment, then nodded her head. “All right,” she said. “I’ll call you if I hear anything.” She got up and walked out the door, and Pete, Chance and Josie all looked at one another.
“If the marshals are hunting him,” Josie said, “then maybe he really has gone bad.”
Pete shook his head. “I don’t know what he’s up to,” he said, “but it isn’t murder. If he was killing off these witnesses for the people they could testify against, he’d want it to be very obvious that he got the right ones. Since all of them have been completely unrecognizable and not one of them has had an autopsy, I'm pretty sure he’s using cadavers. Combine that with the fact that you saw him stash somebody in what is supposed to be an empty house, and I think he’s making them disappear in order to keep them safe.”
“Then why would the marshals be looking for him?” Chance asked. “He’d be working for them if that was the case.”
“It’s a mystery, I admit,” Pete said. “I think maybe it’s time we find out more about that empty house. Can you check it out?”
Chance shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Maybe I can get a confirmation, one way or the other.”
“That’s what I'm hoping. Meanwhile, Josie and I will be working on another angle. Honey, can you call up all of those cases where the witnesses died suddenly for the last five years?”
Chance got up and headed toward the door as Josie started tapping on her keyboard. He climbed into the new Charger and started it up, then headed toward the house where he had last seen the man Johnson appeared to have brought back from Denver.
There were no cars around the house, and it looked just as empty as ever. Chance parked in its driveway and walked up onto the porch again. He didn’t bother with the doorbell, but knocked loudly.
There was no response from inside, so Chance turned to leave the porch. That was when he spotted Darrell Johnson, standing at the bottom of the steps with a pistol pointed directly at him.
“You’ve been following me around,” Johnson said. “You’ve got about twenty seconds to tell me why.”
The gun in Johnson’s hand looked huge, but Chance knew that the barrel end always looked bigger than it really was. He forced his eyes to leave the gun and meet Johnson’s gaze head on as he raised his own hands to show they were empty.
“Look, man,” he said. “I'm just looking for a house to buy. I have been running all over the area the last few days looking at places that are up for sale, and this one looks pretty nice.”
“Yesterday, you were driving a sixty-seven Chevy pickup truck, painted satin black. Sorry, pal, but there aren’t a lot of those around anymore. I saw you sitting near my house a couple nights ago. Yesterday morning you followed me all the way to the airport, and then you pulled in behind me when I got back. I saw you leave this house yesterday, and now you’re back, in a different car. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out I'm being tailed. You want to get honest with me now, or should I just turn you over to the police?”
Police? Chance thought. If this guy really was a cold-blooded killer like I thought he was, he wouldn’t be talking about calling the police. He’d probably be telling me to get into his car or mine, and he probably would make me drive. Plenty of places in the desert to get rid of a body. Maybe Pete’s right about him.
“Mr. Johnson, I think maybe we should talk,” Chance said. “You see, I happen to know you were present when Doctor Whittington did his swan dive from the tenth floor.”
Johnson’s eyes widened for a split second, and Chance could see that he was thinking fast. He was probably trying to figure out how Chance could have connected him to Whittington, but the expression on his face wasn’t one of fear or worry; it was curiosity.
“Okay,” Johnson said. “So, why are you following me around? Did you know him?”
“No, sir, but I work for a private investigator, and Mr. Whittington’s widow has hired us to look into his death. Yesterday morning, I got called into the sheriff’s office to look at a cell phone video that shows somebody tossing him over the railing of his balcony. I recognized you in that video, but I didn’t tell them that. I'm Chance Reddick, by the way.”
Johnson stared at him another moment, then nodded slowly. “Ah. So, you decided to try to shake me down a bit?”
Without meaning to, Chance laughed. “No,” he said. “To be honest, I wasn’t a hundred percent certain that it was you at first, and I wanted to be sure before I said anything. Like I said, though, I work for a private eye, and you’ve been acting strangely enough lately that we were also hired to try to find out why.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Chance regretted them. They still didn’t know whether Johnson was a killer or not, and it probably wouldn’t be too hard for him to figure out that it was his wife who hired private detectives to follow him. Chance kept talking, hoping his slip wouldn’t be noticed.
“That’s why I recognized you, but once we started checking you out, it started to look like you might be connected to a certain government program, one that helps keep people safe. I'm not a hundred percent certain what I saw on that video, but there are a lot of things that don’t necessarily add up to cold blooded murder.” He slowly lowered his hands. “My boss thinks you might be faking people’s deaths, that you do it to keep them safe. He sent me out to follow you so we could figure out whether he was right or not before we said anything to the police about what happened to Whittington.”
Johnson looked him in the eye for a long moment, then slowly lowered the gun. “You’re a private detective? Who hired you?”
Damn, Chance thought. “I'm afraid I can’t say,” Chance said. “The important thing is, right now, the U.S. Marshals are looking for you, and the police have video that makes it look like you committed a murder. I don’t know what’s going on, Darrell, but I get the feeling you could really use some help right about now.”
Keeping his eyes on Chance, Johnson put the gun into the back of his waistband. “It was my wife who hired you,” he said. It was a statement, not a question. “I knew she was getting worried, but I didn’t think she’d go that far. Look, you are right about me needing help, but you don’t have a security clearance. Hell, for that matter, I don’t even have enough of a clearance for what I have gotten into. How did you figure out what I'm doing?”
“Again, I'm not at liberty to give you details. Let’s just say we found a connection between you and several people who were in the witness protection program, except they’ve recently ended up dead.
The funny thing was that none of them were recognizable, and none of them were autopsied. That makes us wonder if the dead folks were really who they were supposed to be.”
Johnson looked at him for a moment, then started up the porch steps and motioned for Chance to follow. “Come on inside,” he said. “I need you to understand that what you are about to learn is highly classified, and just knowing about it could cause you a lot of problems. You’re right, though, I need help. If you’re all I’ve got, then I'm gonna have to take you up on it.”
Chance took a deep breath, then followed Johnson to the door. He used a key to open it, and then the two of them walked inside. Johnson closed and locked the door, then led Chance upstairs and into a bedroom.
Two men were sitting on the bed, and looked up nervously when they entered. “Who’s that?” asked one of them.
“Chance Reddick, meet Michael Cambisi and Raymond Martinelli. Both of these gentlemen are scheduled to testify against Lorenzo Martinelli, the mob boss. Unfortunately, I happened to stumble across information recently telling me that a lot of the people in the program have been compromised. Somebody inside the Marshals’ Service has been selling the whole list of protected witnesses, and somebody who got hold of it has been offering big money to anybody who was willing to eliminate them. I’ve been getting to each of them as quickly as I could, arranging it to look like they were killed and then hiding them here.”
“Here? I knew about these two, but there are a couple of others, aren’t there?”
Johnson nodded. “Giovanni Risotti, Eric Wallace and Janine Porter. They’re here, just hiding up in the attic. The people they were set to testify against want them dead, too. Risotti is another Martinelli witness.”