by David Archer
He opened the door and looked quickly around the yard before motioning for the man to step inside.
“You want to tell me just what the hell is going on?” Chance hissed. “Your wife has been arrested for murdering you.”
Johnson nodded. “It was the only thing I could come up with to keep her safe,” he said. “I’ve been working on it as a backup plan for a couple of weeks, and an opportunity came up last night to put it into operation. Christina will probably never forgive me, but it’s the only way I could protect her while this is going on.”
“So you staged your own death?” Chance asked. “Don’t you think they’re going to figure out pretty quickly that you are not dead?”
Johnson grinned. “Not that quickly. Fingerprints on the corpse will come back as me, and it will take them better than two weeks to run a DNA profile. By the time they do, I’ve got to have this situation settled.”
Chance shook his head as Johnson poured himself a cup of coffee. “So how the hell did you pull this off?”
“The body was fresh, a John Doe from the hospital morgue who was actually gunned down around midnight. The guy on night duty at the morgue is somebody I trust, and he called me on a burner phone as soon as he saw the corpse. The police had tried to run the fingerprints but they came back empty, so all I had to do was find their entry in AFIS and redirect them to me.” He grinned. “It pays to have a backdoor into the system; I stole the login and password for the guy who alters fingerprints for WitSec about a month ago. Comes in handy.”
“But won’t they be able to tell the body was dead longer than they expected?” Chance asked.
“My friend at the morgue took care of that,” Johnson said. “He put the guy into a hot bath until I got there, so his body temperature was probably higher than normal when I picked him up. With all the extra blood I poured around his head, they won’t have trouble believing it’s a fresh kill.”
“Okay,” Chance said, “so everybody thinks you are dead for the next couple of weeks. How does that protect your wife?”
“I'm dead, and she is in jail accused of murdering me. That removes any possible hostage value she might have, because even if the Marshals wanted to, they can’t get to her now. My kid will go and live with my parents for the time being, they have guardianship if anything happens to me and Christina. As long as Garrett and whoever is behind him thinks I'm dead, neither one of them is in any danger.” He looked at Chance in the eye. “If you and Dixon are serious about helping me, then we’ve got no more than two weeks to figure out how to settle this whole thing. And that means finding out who’s behind Garrett so that we can put them all in prison, where they deserve to be.”
Chance nodded. “Okay, well… I suppose it takes a little bit of pressure off of us for the moment. How did you manage this? From what I was told, your wife actually thinks she saw you get murdered.”
“I took the body in quietly, before I made enough noise to wake her up. I made sure the lights stayed off, then stood where she couldn’t see the body. At the right moment, I fired off a blank and then ducked out of sight. When she started to scream, I crawled across the floor and jumped up, shoved the gun into her hand and ran out the door while she was still in shock. I called the police as I hurried to where I had left the car I had borrowed, then stayed out of sight until the cops got done. I dumped the car and then had to walk back here, cutting through alleys and yards so that nobody would see me.”
Chance stared at him for a long moment. “Well, you must’ve pulled it off. Pete went down to talk to the detective in charge of the investigation, and then he was going to go see your wife in the jail. I haven’t heard from him yet, but he’s going to be pretty surprised to find out you are alive.”
As if it had been waiting for that cue, Chance’s phone rang.
Chapter 14
Pete arrived thirty-five minutes later after stopping to pick up Josie, and Chance and Darrell brought them up to speed. Only Janine Porter was awake of the witnesses, and she had simply gotten a cup of coffee and then gone back to her room. All four of the men were still sleeping, so they could talk freely.
“It’s a pretty brilliant plan,” Pete said. “I agree, as long as they think you are dead, your wife and kid will be okay. The trouble is that she might make bail this afternoon. Is that going to change anything?”
“She won’t make bail,” Johnson said. “Even if the prosecutor doesn’t think he has a solid case, he’s going to want bail set pretty high. With her accused of killing me, it’s a safe bet my parents will be doing everything they can to freeze her assets before noon. My dad has some pretty powerful lawyers, I had already considered this when I planned it all out. As much as I hate it, Christina is safer sitting in that jail cell than if she managed to get out.”
“When she does get out,” Josie said, “you’re probably going to wish you really were dead.”
“That’s quite possible, but it doesn’t change the fact that this was necessary. I love my wife and son, and there is no price I won’t pay to keep them safe. That’s why it was absolutely necessary to make sure they couldn’t use them against me. I believe in what I'm doing, but I'm not sure I could continue to protect these people if it meant Christina and little Darrell getting hurt. I know this is going to be rough on him, thinking I’m dead, but there was just no choice. Poor kid will probably be in counseling for years.”
“No, you did exactly the right thing,” Pete said. “Took some balls, but you did it.” He chewed his toothpick for a moment. “Now, where do we go from here? How do we find out who Garrett is reporting to?”
Johnson ran his hands through his hair. “I wish I knew,” he said. “I can’t think of any way to find out. To be honest, I'm hoping you can come up with an idea.”
“I'm working on it,” Pete said. He turned to his fiancée. “Any ideas, there, genius?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I could try to clone his phone. That way, we’d know about any calls he makes or receives. It isn’t legal, so I don’t know about using anything we learn as evidence, but it might give us a way to find out something we could use.”
“Okay. How do we go about that?”
Josie just looked at him for a moment before she answered. “I have a phone that’s set up for it. All it needs to do is get within about thirty feet of his phone, and it can trigger his Bluetooth. Once it does, it can install software on his phone without him even knowing it. From that moment on, every call he gets or makes will be recorded on my phone, and we can even listen in while it’s happening. Same for text messages, we would get a duplicate of every single one. The whole operation takes about ninety seconds, and then it’s done.”
“What if the Bluetooth isn’t activated on his phone?” Pete asked. “A lot of people never turn it on.”
She shook her head. “Wouldn’t matter. Every phone has a backdoor built into it, despite all the things you hear about how the feds can’t get into them. That backdoor allows access to certain features of the phone, and Bluetooth is one of them. You get my phone close to his, and it will find it and turn on his Bluetooth long enough to install the software, then shut it off again.”
“What about other phones nearby?” Chance asked. “Will it get those, too?”
“It’ll try. When you turn it on, it will scan for phones nearby and display a list of them that shows exactly how far away each one is. You have to choose the ones you want from that list. If there are two phones the same distance away, and you know that at least one of them is his, you just use them both. Once we know which is the right one, we can disconnect the other one remotely.”
“That might be good,” Johnson said. “Garrett is likely to have more than one phone on him. I can’t imagine he’s using his official phone for this, can you?”
“Probably not,” Pete agreed. “He’s bound to have a second phone, a burner. Still, it might be good to be able to listen to all his calls, even on his official phone.”
“Okay,” Chance said. �
�Then the only question is how to get close enough to him. What if I were to take that phone with me and go to see him? Can we come up with a reason for me to pay him a visit?”
“That might be tricky,” Johnson said. “I didn’t work for him, and there’s nothing that would connect him to me, even if you were investigating my death or something.”
“What if we were investigating you? We work for your wife, right? We can say she overheard you complaining to someone on the phone about Garrett. That would give me a reason to ask him at least a few questions, like whether you were doing any kind of special work for him, or if there was some sort of problem between the two of you.”
Johnson chewed his bottom lip while he looked at Chance for a moment. “That could put Christina back on his radar,” he said. “I’d like to leave her out of it. What if you said you confronted me, and I said something about Garrett being the one you should be investigating? He’d believe it, especially if you mention the fact that I really did point a gun at you.”
“I think that might work,” Pete said. “Chance? You up for this? You know exactly how dangerous these people can be.”
“I know,” Chance said, “but if I play it right, I sound like I don’t really know much of anything. All I need to do is act like I'm convinced Johnson was just trying to throw me off his trail, and I should be able to get in and out without a problem.”
Pete nodded. “Okay, then. Josie, where’s that phone?”
“Get my purse,” she said, and Pete got out of his chair. He went out to his car and came back a moment later with her large handbag. Josie dug in it for a moment, then handed the phone to Chance. “See that little icon that looks like a flower? Just tap that when you get close to him, and then it’ll vibrate once it has a list of nearby phones. You choose any and all of them that are exactly as far away from you as he is, and it will do the rest. Like I said, it takes about a minute and a half, and then it will vibrate again to tell you it’s done.”
“Okay. Now, what happens if he gets a call while I'm sitting there? Might look funny if I got a call at the exact same time.”
“That’s easy. Turn off your ringer and the phone won’t ring, it’ll only vibrate. If you are holding it, he won’t hear anything. As long as you don’t tap the answer button, it won’t make a sound, but it will record every call he gets on my server back at the office.”
“Okay, then,” he said. He got to his feet and dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. “Do I need an appointment to see him?”
Johnson shook his head. “He should be in his office until twelve thirty, so you’ve got a couple of hours. Just say you are investigating me and that you need to ask him a couple of questions. I think they’ll take you straight to him, to be honest. He’s going to want to know whether you know anything about his involvement or not, so I'm sure he’ll be willing to talk to you.”
“I’ll call you when I'm done,” Chance said. He walked out the door and Pete followed him.
“You be careful, Chance,” Pete said. “We know this guy’s dangerous.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Chance said. “I'm going to do my best Columbo impersonation. I will act confused about why Johnson would’ve mentioned him, then laugh it off when he gives me whatever bullshit explanation he comes up with. All I need is that minute and a half, and then I will be out of there. I leave him thinking he’s in the clear, and then we can listen to everything he says on the phone.”
Pete opened the gate to let him out and Chance walked to his own house. He went inside for a moment to let Gabriella know he was leaving, but didn’t mention that Darrell Johnson was alive after all. It occurred to him that this was another case in which she was better off not knowing all the details.
He got into his car and headed toward downtown Vegas. It dawned on him that he hadn’t had anything for breakfast, so he pulled through a fast food drive up window and got a breakfast sandwich and a cup of coffee, then ate quickly as he drove on toward the U.S. Marshals’ office.
Chuck Garrett was busy when Chance arrived, so he showed his ID to the receptionist and said he needed to speak with Garrett for only a minute or two, regarding an investigation into Darrell Johnson’s recent activities. She told him to have a seat, and he had to sit and wait for about ten minutes before Garrett came out to get him. “Sorry about that, Mr. Reddick,” he said. “I was in a department meeting, we've got a number of situations that we’re dealing with at the moment. Come on back and tell me what I can do for you.”
Chance followed him back to his office, where he shut the door behind them. “Have a seat,” Garrett said. Chance sat in the chair in front of his desk, and Garrett took the one behind it. “Now, you said you had some questions about Darrell Johnson?”
“Yes,” Chance said. “I'm sorry to be bothering you with all this, I know you must be a pretty busy man.” He suddenly put a startled expression on his face. “Excuse me just one moment,” he said, and then he took the phone out of his jacket pocket and looked at it. After a second, he shook his head and tapped the flower icon, then lowered the phone and held it as he looked back up at Garrett. “Sorry, I'm expecting an important call, but that wasn’t it.”
Garrett grinned. “No problem,” he said. “Everybody thinks all the new technology is great, but I have come to the conclusion that it was designed to enslave us.”
“Isn’t that the truth? Anyway, this may be absolutely nothing, but our office was hired by Mr. Johnson’s wife to look into some strange things he was doing. We thought at first he was just stepping out on her, you know how that goes, but now we think he might’ve been into something more sinister. I ran into him yesterday, and the guy actually pointed a gun at me. I tried to asked him what was going on, but he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but he actually told me that I should be looking into you, rather than him. Did he have some sort of grudge against you that you know about?”
Garrett chuckled. “I guess you could say that,” he said. “Darrell Johnson works over in the RICO division, but he always seemed to think of himself as some kind of secret agent wannabe. Over the past few months, he’s tried to transfer into different divisions, including mine. I interviewed him a while back, and I'm afraid I was a little bit blunt about the fact that he was nowhere near the caliber of man I like to have working under me.” He shrugged. “I got the impression he was pretty pissed when he left, because he slammed my door hard enough to rattle the glass.”
The phone in Chance’s hand vibrated and he glanced at it. There were three phones listed on the screen, and all of them were less than seven feet away. He ticked each one and hit the accept button, then looked up at Garrett again.
“Yeah, I kind of got the impression he might be a little bit crazy. You heard his wife killed him last night, right?”
“Yes, I did,” Garrett said, shaking his head. “Are you working on that case?”
“I guess we are. Personally, with the way the guy was acting lately, I think it might turn out it was self defense. I mean, she hired us because she was a little bit scared of the way he’d been acting. She was even talking about leaving him. We just never managed to find out what it was he was really doing, but I guess that’s a moot point, now. My boss just wanted me to follow up on this and get it out of the way, so we can concentrate on trying to figure out whether we can help her on this murder charge.”
The phone vibrated again, telling Chance that its work was done.
“Well, I wish I could be of more help,” Garrett said. “You know, Darrell wasn’t always like this. I first met him when he started working at RICO a few years ago, and he seemed like a pretty great guy. It’s only been in the last few months that he started acting unhappy and trying to transfer out.” He leaned forward, conspiratorially. “I understand he also got angry when he was turned down for prisoner escort duty, he said he was the best man they could ever find for the job and they were idiots not to hire him.”
Chance grinned. �
��I can believe it,” he said. “When I ran into him, he acted like he was a little bit crazy, kinda paranoid. He came up behind me and when I turned around, he had a gun pointed right at my face. When he found out I was working for his wife, I thought for a moment he was going to shoot me, but then he just started ranting about you, put his gun away and walked off.” He bit his bottom lip for a second. “Who’s the guy in charge of the prisoner escort thing? There was another name he mentioned, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“Oh, that’s Joe Ramsey,” Garrett said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was complaining about him, too.”
Chance shook his head. “No, I don’t think that was the name. Oh, well, I doubt if it really matters now. Listen, I really am sorry to have bothered you.” He got to his feet.
Garrett stood and reached out to shake his hand, and Chance dropped the phone into his pocket.
“No problem, Mr. Reddick,” Garrett said. “And good luck with Mrs. Johnson. Pity she has to go through something like this.”
“Yes, it is. You have a good day, sir.”
Chance turned and walked out of the office without looking back. Something told him the man was staring holes through him, but he wasn’t about to turn around to check.
Chapter 15
Chance had just gotten out the door and into the parking lot when the phone vibrated again. He took it out, looked at the screen, and saw that it was a call going out from one of the phones it had just connected to. He tapped the answer button and put the phone up to his ear.
“What’s up?” asked a woman’s voice.
“It’s Darrell Johnson,” Garrett said. “I just had a private investigator come to see me. Seems Mr. Johnson’s wife hired PIs to find out why he was acting strangely, and he told them they ought to be investigating me.”
“Did he say why?” the woman asked.
“Apparently not. I gave the guy a story about Johnson being pissed at me over not hiring him in my section. I'm pretty sure he bought it.”