by Brad Parks
He looked up, faked a smile.
“Hey,” he said. “Did I hear my phone ring?”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “Telemarketer.”
CHAPTER 10
My mother dealt with her peevishness toward me in typical fashion: giving me the iceberg treatment that night, then melting all over me when we went to leave the next morning.
Single moms and their sons. Don’t try to figure us out.
We continued our journey south, crossing into the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, then dropping down on Interstate 81 through a narrow slice of Maryland, then into West Virginia’s verdant panhandle.
I followed Danny and Rick to exit 13, which offered the weary highway traveler a rich assortment of franchised restaurants and chain hotels. We passed by lesser accommodations on our way to the pinnacle of near-highway lodging, a Holiday Inn.
As I got out and stretched, Danny greeted me with: “Welcome to Martinsburg, West Virginia. This is home for the next month or so.”
I scrutinized the hotel with renewed interest. It was newish. The plantings were fresh and cheerful. I had definitely stayed in worse.
Gilmartin went inside, dealt with the paperwork, was soon handing me a key card.
“We’ll let you freshen up a bit, and then we’re going to come see you, if that’s okay,” Danny said. “We need to talk a little strategy before the prosecutor drops by.”
“The prosecutor,” I repeated.
“Yeah. He’s the one guy who’s in on this whole thing, remember?”
Oh. Right.
“Don’t worry. He’ll be discreet,” Danny said in response to what must have been a questioning look on my face. “That’s why we’re meeting at the hotel, not his office. The last thing we want is for one of your future fellow inmates to see you palling around with an assistant US Attorney.”
I nodded like I fully understood and approved of this decision. Then I grabbed as many bags as I could carry and took the elevator to the second floor.
We unpacked, then Amanda spent a little time in the bathroom. She was making noises about taking a nap.
For some reason, she hadn’t slept well the night before.
The knock on our door came about half an hour later. Gilmartin was carrying the ubiquitous metal briefcase. Danny had a manila folder under his arm.
“This is your Mitchell Dupree briefing,” he said, handing me the folder. “It’s everything we have in our dossier on him, condensed and with the boring parts taken out. We had to let the interns do something.”
“If there’s anything you feel is missing, just ask and we’ll see what we can do,” Gilmartin added.
I went over to the small desk against the wall and took a seat. The folder had a sticker attached that informed me the contents were TOP SECRET and that if I wasn’t the intended recipient I could be punished by up to ten years in prison and a five-hundred-thousand-dollar fine.
Before I opened it, I looked up and said, “I am the intended recipient, right?”
“That stupid sticker,” Danny said. “I swear, the bureau puts it on toilet paper.”
Taking that as permission to proceed, I was soon looking at a series of eight-by-ten glossies of Mitchell Dupree. It started with that hangdog mug shot, but there were others: Mitchell Dupree, in a dark suit, getting out of a gray Lexus sedan; Mitchell Dupree mowing the lawn outside a boxy McMansion; Mitchell Dupree walking through a parking lot with two kids and an adult I assumed was his wife, a petite woman with highlighted blond hair, tasteful clothing, and Pilates-toned legs.
And so on. And so on. They were shot from a distance, with the use of a zoom lens, capturing the subject unawares. And they created a different impression of the man than I had anticipated.
I thought Mitchell Dupree would be more of an evil-genius, master-manipulator type. But he looked ordinary. Or, perhaps more accurately, unextraordinary: the average-height, pudgy, goateed, balding white guy you’ve passed in the bread aisle of the grocery store a thousand times. It made it difficult to cast him as the unconscionable sociopath who did the bidding of the ruthless cartel, unconcerned about the human wreckage he might be helping to create. He struck me as a guy who had gotten in over his head.
Or maybe that was what I needed to tell myself if I was ever going to be able to stomach being near him.
“We had quite a surveillance operation, as you can see,” Gilmartin said.
I nodded, then started reading. Mitchell Dupree was born in the suburbs of Atlanta, the son of a stay-at-home mom and an IBM-executive dad. He went to Georgia Tech, where he double-majored in international relations and Spanish. He worked for Coca-Cola’s South American operation for a few years, then returned to school, earning his MBA in finance and accounting from Emory.
From there, he hooked on at Union South Bank, earning promotions as the bank made its own rapid rise during the wild, lightly regulated days of the early 2000s. Dupree’s language skills, education, and professional background eventually made it a natural fit that he should join the bank’s Latin America division. I didn’t really understand any of his job titles and couldn’t fathom what those people—those men and women who hid behind the tinted glass of big-city skyscrapers—actually did all day long. Maybe someday he’d explain it to me.
I got into the criminal part of the story next, though that wasn’t much more transparent to me than the banking part had been. The jargon of the federal judiciary was just elliptical enough that even when you thought you understood the individual strands—indictment, arraignment, sentencing—it was difficult for the uninitiated to weave it into whole cloth. The short version is he went to prison.
Just like what was about to happen to me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll study this more later.”
“No, you won’t. You don’t have the security clearance to possess these,” Gilmartin said. “The only way you can review these materials is if we’re with you.”
“Besides, you don’t want to get too familiar with this stuff,” Danny said. “I think it’s valuable for you to get some sense of his background, because we want you to be able to prepare for this role. But you’re not supposed to actually know any of it, remember? When you meet him, he’s just another stranger in prison.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Now, would you like to meet the new you?”
“Sure,” I said.
Danny nodded at Gilmartin, who went to his metal briefcase, which he had set on one of the two queen beds in our room. Amanda was sitting on the other one, an introvert in full observation mode.
Gilmartin extracted an envelope and was soon pulling out a birth certificate, passport, and driver’s license, which he handed to me.
“Here you are,” Gilmartin said. “This is everything you need to be a new man. If you think they’re excellent forgeries, you’re wrong. These are the real deal.”
“Right,” I said, looking at the driver’s license. The FBI had taken one of my headshots and digitally altered the background so it looked like a DMV photo.
“Peter Lenfest Goodrich,” I said. “What kind of a name is Lenfest?”
“It’s a family name,” Gilmartin said. “Our experience indicates the key to a good fake name is to have two common names and one unusual one that you can then talk about. It’s always good to have a conversation piece.”
“People call you Pete,” Danny said. “Pete Goodrich. A good name for a good guy. You were a high school history teacher. Everyone liked you. You had a beautiful wife named Kelly and three lovely kids: Louisa, Gus, and Ellis.”
“We ran a number of possibilities past the profiling unit in Quantico,” Gilmartin said. “They thought it was vital you have a white-collar background, like Dupree, and that you have children. Dupree has two kids. According to the psychologist’s report at FCI Morgantown, being away from his children is the greatest
hardship of his incarceration. This will give you something to bond over.”
“Will it be a problem when my wife and kids never visit me?” I asked.
The agents looked at each other uncertainly. This was something they hadn’t considered.
Danny started with, “Well, Amanda could pretend to be Kelly and—”
“No way,” I said immediately. “You’re hiring me, not her. Leave her out of it.”
I knew I had Amanda’s support in this. The room fell into uncomfortable silence.
Then it came to me: “While I’m in jail, Kelly and the kids had to move back in with her parents, and they live in California. It’ll probably be at least a year until they’re able to visit.”
Danny cracked the kind of mischievous smile I hadn’t seen since his Danny Danger days and looked at his partner. “See? Told you my boy was good.”
Gilmartin nodded and continued his briefing. “As you can read on your license, you lived in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, not far from here. It’s a nice town, upscale for West Virginia, a tourist destination—”
“Yeah, I actually appeared in a theater festival there once,” I said. “At Shepherd University.”
“Perfect. We don’t think Dupree has ever been there, so you can take some liberties with your story. But we still suggest you spend some time there over the next few weeks and refamiliarize yourself with it. Visit the school where you worked. Imagine the life you had there.”
“West Virginia. So I’d have a touch of a southern accent,” I said, already trying one out. Not like I was auditioning for Porgy and Bess. Just a little mountain lilt.
Danny picked up the narrative: “Like we told you before, your crime has to be federal. What we were thinking is that you had a mortgage that was a bit of a stretch and then your wife got hurt on the job but was screwed out of her disability. You were a schoolteacher in West Virginia, so you didn’t make much to start with. You fell behind on your payments. You got a second job. Then a third. It still wasn’t enough. You got even further in the hole until the bank decided to foreclose. You pleaded with them to give you another chance. Couldn’t they work with you a little? But the bank took a hard line.
“So there you were. You were going to lose the house you worked so hard for. You were angry. You were humiliated. You were desperate. So one day you lost your mind and decided to show that bank who was boss. You told them you had a gun and demanded they give you everything in the vault. You were going to make yourself right financially and get your revenge against the bank, all at once.”
“I just snapped,” I said. “I blamed the bank for everything.”
Gilmartin took back over. “This will be another point of cohesion for you and Dupree. The profilers tell us Dupree likely had antipathy toward the bank he worked for. They theorize he had been denied an important promotion. They think it explains how he could have gotten into money laundering in the first place. He wanted the extra money he would have gotten from the promotion, and he wanted to stick it to the bank. Just like Pete Goodrich.”
“How did I get caught?” I asked.
“Because you were an amateur,” Danny said. “You didn’t know the FBI gives banks tracking devices to throw in with the money. You were just getting down to counting the cash when suddenly you had a dozen agents swarming your hideout.”
I nodded, my imagination already starting to fill in the gaps of my new story. I was Pete Goodrich. Noble husband. Trying hard as a father. Louisa was my little darling. Gus was a bit of a mama’s boy. Ellis, while only a baby, was showing signs of being a complete hellion.
At school, I gave my everything for my students, even though the damn state tests were ruining education. My second job was tutoring. My third job was tending bar at an Applebee’s by the highway.
That meant I closed down the restaurant at twelve thirty A.M., crawled into bed around one. Too amped to sleep, I tossed and turned until at least two. And then at six thirty, the alarm clock jerked me awake, at which point I rushed myself into the shower so I didn’t smell like stale Budweiser at school.
But even though I was working myself beyond exhaustion, I still couldn’t appease that damn bank. So, sleep deprived and in the darkest place of my thirty-three years, I pulled pantyhose over my head, walked into the lobby, and made like Jesse James, whom I used to teach a unit on in my US history classes.
There was more to come. A lot more. But, yes, I could sink my teeth into this role.
* * *
• • •
Just as I was beginning to inhabit Pete Goodrich’s world, there were three sharp raps on the door.
“That must be Drayer,” Gilmartin said.
After a brief check of the peephole, Gilmartin welcomed an older man with fine white hair that he combed forward in an attempt to cover more forehead. He wore rimless glasses, wrinkle-free cotton khakis, a blue blazer, and a tie that hadn’t been fashionable since the nineties. That was probably the last time he had worried about trying to impress anyone.
I rose to greet him. So did Amanda.
“Pete Goodrich, meet David Drayer, assistant US Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia,” Gilmartin said. “And this is Pete’s wife, Kelly.”
Without smiling, Drayer stuck out a hand, which I shook. He did the same with Amanda, adding a polite “ma’am” when he did so. I got the sense he didn’t want to be there.
“Hi, Pete Goodrich,” I said, practicing both the name and the slight accent. “Nice to meet you.”
Drayer nodded. Amanda returned to the bed. I remained standing.
“We wanted you two to have the chance to get acquainted,” Danny said, like he was setting us up on a date. “Maybe you can tell Pete here how everything is going to work, set his mind at ease a little bit?”
“Sure,” Drayer said. “My office has you scheduled to go before the magistrate at one o’clock tomorrow. You should probably arrive at the courthouse around eleven or so. When you get to the metal detectors up front, tell the court security officers you’re a self-surrender. They’ll call the marshals, who will take you downstairs and get you fingerprinted. Then they’ll bring you in front of the magistrate. He’ll ask you questions about whether you understand what you’re doing and whether you’re doing it willingly and without coercion. All you have to do is say yes. You’ll have an attorney present. He’s a member of the local defense bar who doesn’t know anything about your, uh, your circumstances. He’ll be told you’re taking a sweetheart of a deal and that there’s nothing he has to do and that he can bill whatever he thinks is reasonable and it will be taken care of.”
Drayer glanced toward the agents like he was checking to see if he had gotten it right. Neither said anything.
“Will there be any evidence presented or anything like that?” I asked.
“No,” Drayer said. “Tomorrow is just the arraignment, where you’re formally answering the charge against you. Once that’s settled, the magistrate will decide whether you need a bond. Because you’re a self-surrender and because my office will be recommending you be released without bond, you should be in good shape there. You’ll be released on personal recognizance. Really, everything that’s going to happen to you is pretty routine. We do it all day, every day, and no one is going to kick up too much of a fuss about someone who wants to save us time by pleading guilty. Does that make sense?”
I found myself doing the same thing: Looking at Gilmartin and Danny, like they could tell me whether I had any questions. They stared back, offering no guidance.
Finally, I just shrugged. “Yes, sounds pretty straightforward.”
“Good,” Drayer said. “Well, then, unless you need me for anything else . . .”
Drayer was already leaning toward the door.
“Actually, there is one more thing. It’s something I wanted to show both of you,” Danny said. Then he turned to Amanda.
“What I’m about to show these guys is highly, highly classified. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave for just a few minutes, Mrs. Goodrich.”
“Sure,” Amanda said, hoisting herself off the bed.
Danny waited until she was out of the room to resume: “This is a reminder of . . . of what this is all about. At least for me it is. Take a seat, if you don’t mind.”
He nodded toward the queen bed Amanda was no longer occupying. Drayer and I sat on the end of it.
“There can be this belief that money laundering is a victimless crime, because there’s no blood involved,” he said, as he went to the seemingly bottomless metal briefcase and sifted through its contents. “In this day and age, it’s just some guy in a tie, sitting in an office, fiddling with his computer keyboard. What’s the big deal, right?”
Danny had found the envelope he was looking for and withdrew its contents.
“But the fact is, the money is the whole point of this thing. It’s why the cartels do what they do in the first place: to make lots and lots of money. And they can only use that money for the things they want if they can clean it. So what Mitchell Dupree was doing was an absolutely essential part of the whole operation. The cartel wouldn’t bother selling all those drugs, killing all those people, or ruining all those lives if they didn’t have the Mitchell Duprees of the world to make it worthwhile for them.”
He handed me another eight-by-ten glossy. It was an official-looking portrait of a husky man smiling in front of a United States flag. He had a poof of reddish hair atop his head and a wide, freckled face. He looked like a fraternity brother who excelled at keg stands.
“This is Kris Langetieg,” Danny said, then corrected himself: “Was Kris Langetieg. He was a good man. Had a wife. Two boys. He was dedicated to the cause of justice. Very, very dedicated. I’m saying this for your benefit, Pete. David knew him. He can tell you: Kris Langetieg was the best kind of person, am I right?”
I looked over toward Drayer. His face had gone hard. He was staring down at the floor.